Gay with laughter, happy as can be

It being Groundhog Day today, what better earworm than Frankie Yankovic playing “The Pennsylvania Polka”? Because if you’ve ever seen Groundhog Day, you’ll immediately associate the music with Bill Murray’s karmic transformation over (and over) the eponymous day in Punxsutawney, Penn.

Here’s a bonus: the chase sequence from the film. This never grows old.

 

 

Leaping fungus

Saw some mushrooms popping up along the W&OD trail the other day. I liked the pattern they made, so of course I took a photo.

But I cannot see mushrooms on the hoof without thinking of the dancing ones in the Nutcracker Suite part of Fantasia. So I went to YouTube to watch them again and was startled by the racist trope. (It’s been decades since I last saw the film.)

However, it turns out that this particular segment is “The Chinese Dance”; here’s what it looks like as choreographed by the Mariinsky Ballet:

So I’ll stand down.

 

 

 

An immodest proposal

Had a convo with a friend at the weekend. He asked my opinion about Scarlet Johansson suing Marvel-Disney over their decision to release the Spider Woman blockbuster to Disney’s streaming channel concurrently with its theatrical opening. Well, I haven’t read beyond the headlines on the story, but of course that doesn’t preclude me from having an opinion.

Which is: if Johansson gets screwed out of any income to which she’s contractually entitled, I’m all for her sticking it to the production company. It’s the same issue over which writers, directors and performers have gone on strike since about the 80s; content creators are entitled to full proceeds of their labor.

Well, my friend said, but Johansson is getting millions already…

So? Twenty thousand or twenty million, she’s entitled to get all the proceeds which her contract permits.

But she’s not even all that talented…

Well, she’s what Disney/Marvel figured would be box-office draw; they hired her and she delivered. They owe her.

Then the argument pivoted. My friend has an issue with people making mega millions and not sharing with the greater community. He hasn’t heard of Johansson being any kind of philanthropist…

Well, okay—different complaint. And while I agree that the obscenely wealthy have a moral obligation to give back to the communities that enabled their wealth (see yesterday’s post about labor), there’s currently no legal mechanism for encouraging them to do so.

Oh, but wait—what if the über wealthy got taxed? I mean, if they really got taxed on those squillions of dollars? At the federal and state levels? And the government(s) used that tax income to do things like training people for better jobs, educating their children, providing universal healthcare, building affordable housing and like that? What if Johansson and Disney paid equitable taxes on the bazillions they make on Spider Woman and all the other blockbuster mind-drivel they produce? They can still live la vita dolce on what they have left, and the folks who pay to see the movies (in theatres or in their homes) could benefit, too.

I have a feeling there’s some kind of glitch in my theory, but I’ll think about it. And I’ll bring it up the next time my friend and I chat.

 

 

Let's face it

I was signing up for a webinar yesterday and came to a standstill at the CAPTCHA step:

Because suddenly it made me think of Lili von Shtüpp in Blazing Saddles.

For you youngs, here’s my point:

 

 

 

 

Allons!

It’s Quatorze Juillet, the 231^st anniversary of the start of the French Revolution. AKA Bastille Day.

Sadly, the normal celebrations are off—no French waiter champagne races, no champagne-fueled conga lines, probably a lot fewer and smaller champagne-and-fireworks parties.

(I myself shall be cracking a bottle of bubbly and attempting to make Chicken Cordon Rouge for the first time. But I’m socially-distanced.)

So let’s have a clip of Hollywoodized French patriotism. As in, the sequence in Casablanca where Major Strasser and his boys, full of caviar and Veuve Cliquot ’26, have commandeered Sam’s piano and are belting out “Die Wacht am Rhein”, and Victor Laszlo demands that the house band play the French national anthem.

Now, Die Wacht am Rhein is a fine piece, but La Marseilleise is probably the best national anthem on the planet—truly fit for leading armies or parades. For a few moments, there’s this amazing quodlibet going on between the master race and the conquered, but you know who prevails.

Vive la revolution!

My brush with stardom

I wasn’t much of a fan of the 1950s Hollywood movie stars. I think it’s because in those movies (which I mostly saw on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movies) they seemed so far removed from any reality that touched me. There was no way that I could connect with them.

So when a Navy videographer friend of mine came into town one summer with his team for a project with Kirk Douglas, I though the invitation to shoot the production stills as more of a lark than anything else. (I love shooting those.)

The spot was part of what was called “Sitrep 30”—a half-hour of essentially newsreel-type news that was broadcast at Navy installations and on ships. The film The Final Countdown (about the supercarrier USS Nimitz being thrown back in time to December 1940 near the Hawaiian Islands; Douglas played the captain) had just been released, and the team’s commander had managed to wangle the star into a pro bono voiceover narration, with stand-ups for the beginning and the end.

I helped edit the script the night before, and on the day, we converged on the Helmsman statue at a small park in Marina Del Rey. We got set up and Douglas showed with his lawyer/manager—he was apparently on his way to evict a tenant from one of the condos he owned in the area.

Well, it was not a felicitous experience—Douglas kept flubbing his lines for the standups, so the commander had to quickly write up gigantic cue cards. Then the soundman kept having to re-record, what with the air horns from boats in the marina and take-offs and landings at nearby LAX. The actor was impatient with it all, so we did a bit of scrambling.

But eventually we got enough to go with, and I got to shoot about a gazillion frames. (I was loaded with two Nikons, one for black-and-white and one for color.) Here are a couple:

His obits said that he was active in the community, and a major factor in ending the Hollywood blacklist. Maybe he was just having a bad day. And so may his memory be a blessing.

Gojira returns

Someone on Twitter posted that adding Godzilla to any movie would make it a better movie. Now, maybe it’s because the tweet had footage from an Avengers film, but the entire thread was extremely shortsighted, IMO, because everyone was focused on Marvel-related stuff. But I expanded my horizons into rom-coms, viz:

When Harry Met Sally and Godzilla

Sixteen Candles for Godzilla

Godzilla’s Best Friend’s Wedding

Godzilla Jones’s Diary

You’ve Got Mail, Godzilla

And one I’d possibly even pay to see in a theatre: Godzilla Swallows Love, Actually

Seriously—this idea has legs. Scaly ones, but legs.

Dots to cuckoos

That clip I gave you yesterday from The Third Man moves on to another choice line from Harry Lime.

Lime actually gets all the best lines; for being a pulp western writer, Holly Martins does not have much of a way with words. Joseph Cotton is exactly the guy to deliver the background noise; he’s always struck me as unprepossessing in the extreme.

Anyway, Lime here encapsulates European history in a couple of sentences:

The way Orson Welles spits out “cuckoo clock” has always cracked me up.

Speaking of romance

In case you’ve been hanging out in a cave without any media access and only just now woke up to check the blogosphere, let me point out that today is Saint Valentine’s Day, the “you-vill-be-romantic-und-you-vill-enchoy-it” vortex of chocolate, jewelry and other forms of conspicuous consumption.

For something a little off the beaten rose-path, you could settle in with a bottle of bubbly and an elegant, witty romantic comedy.

To get a film with those two particular modifiers, you’re going to have to go back several decades, either chronologically or stylistically. Films like Friends with Benefits and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before may have some persons who are quite a treat to the eye, but it’s hard to really give a toss about them and their predicaments.

Go back to My Man Godfrey (1936; although the 1957 version with David Niven is acceptable), with William Powell and Carole Lombard. The premise may be far-fetched, but you just can’t get enough of the dialogue. (The underlying premise of the absurdly wealthy living cheek-by-jowl with the "forgotten men" laid low by the (last) Big Depression lends some bite to the fluff.)

Ditto The Thin Man (1934); Powell again and Myrna Loy. Plus—Nick and Nora drink like they just got out of Prohibition. Oh, wait...

Still on a Powell-Loy roll, Libeled Lady (1936) also includes Spencer Tracy and a very young and extremely funny Jean Harlow. Powell trying to bluff his way through fly-fishing is a treat; and the chemistry between him and Loy is electric.

Then there’s His Girl Friday (1940), in which Rosalind Russell shoots out some of the best and fastest dialogue in film history as she tries to fend off Cary Grant and get a scoop on an escaped death-row prisoner.

Ninotchka (1940) sees Greta Garbo, a dour Russian functionary sent to Paris to bring some discipline to the sale of tsarist jewels on behalf of the Soviet government, come under the spell of the City of Light (and that sly Melvyn Douglas). Garbo laughs.

Perhaps slightly off the rom-com beat is Topper (1937). I’m not talking the part about Cary Grant and Constance Bennett being a sexy and witty couple. It’s how they help the middle-aged Mr. and Mrs. Topper (Roland Young and a delicious Billie Burke) recapture romance in their marriage. Or—more likely—capture it for the first time.

And, here’s the thing: anyone can make a romance about 20-somethings who are drop-dead gorgeous and wear $850 designer shirts. (You can make a romance, but it’s not necessarily engaging.) But building a film around a woman d’un âge certain (not just a middle aged guy; because how many movies have we seen where Mel Gibson or Harrison Ford get it on with chicks 30 years their junior, in between cortisone shots or DUI arrests?), who has more history and more riding on the outcome of the romance… Now, there’s a story.

That’s the attraction of any Katharine Hepburn movie—Philadelphia Story, Pat and Mike, and my personal favorite: Desk Set. The scene where Hepburn gets looped at the office Christmas party and riffs on Spencer Tracy’s logic questions and then faces down the mainframe computer he’s installed in her research department is worth the price of admission on its own.

Everyone knows An Affair to Remember (1958)—largely because of the homage in Sleepless in Seattle (cute, but no cigar). Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant are the embodiment of class and style in the story of two people who’ve set themselves up with wealthy partners because they’ve been around the block a few times and opted for security over love. They meet on an ocean liner (courtesy of their partners’ money) and decide to take a chance—wagering everything they have against the possibility of love.

Now that’s romance. Really: the crapshoot of love.

Indiscreet (1958) pairs Grant with Ingrid Bergman, a combination it’s hard to top. The premise—Grant claims to be a married man unable to get a divorce as a defense against any woman’s aspirations to matrimony. When he falls for Bergman, a leading lady in all senses of the term, there’s a series of farcical events. Frankly, the plot’s a bit hard to swallow, but you don’t really care because the packaging is super.

Within the past 30 years, I rate Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) very high on the truly romantic scale. First of all: Alan Rickman. You don’t really need more, but the story is about a deceased cellist (Rickman) returning from beyond to ease his lover (Juliet Stevenson) through her overpowering grief. The scene where he appears, playing his cello while she’s playing the piano, and she sobs—that’s one of the most affecting lovers’ reunions ever filmed.

Enchanted April (1992) has a fantastical (as in “imbued with fantasy”) air to it. Four Englishwomen (strangers to one another—already an anomaly in English society) pool resources to rent a villa in Italy for the month of April. The setting is the 1920s, not my favorite era, but it turns out to fit together absolutely perfectly. The magic of Italy takes hold, healing the wounds of each of the women. The ending is a bit pat—but not out of order in a romance.

Not a comedy, The Last of the Mohicans (1992) is still one of the best love stories going. Lyrically shot by Michael Mann (of all directors), it’s visually stunning and emotionally compelling. When Daniel Day-Lewis abjures Madeleine Stowe (Hawkeye/Cora Munro), about to be taken by the Huron, to “No matter whatever happens, stay alive. I will find you no matter what”—well, it’s utterly heart-melting. There can’t be a woman alive who wouldn’t want her man to give that sort of adoration.

Playing against the trend of no witty and engaging rom-coms in recent years is 2008’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. It’s charming and blessed with superior characters and dialogue. (Okay, Frances McDormand can do no wrong; simply by a narrowing or widening of an eye she can communicate utter despair or puppy-wriggling pleasure.) Again, it’s that last-chance-at-love hook that I find much more appealing than the usual ho-hum Drew Barrymore-Matthew McConaughey fluff.

I think my all-time favorite romance, however, is I Know Where I’m Going (1945). Yes, it’s a bit contrived, and you know what the “twist” is going to be. But Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey have such chemistry in their clash of wits, it just knocks you out. Hiller is the strong-willed city girl on her way to marry her wealthy, older industrialist fiancé (see the money-security options in An Affair to Remember), who has rented an island off the Scottish coast. The weather intervenes and puts her in the path of Torquil McNeil, who (it turns out) actually owns that island, but is land-rich and cash-poor.

Well, you know what’s going to happen, but getting there is just charming and well worth the time.

Any of these is worlds better than what any of the Lifetime/Hallmark channels are running for Valentine’s Day—which are all the same exact plot, many times with the same exact actors, filmed on the cheap in Vancouver simulating various US locales. Every once in a while I catch part of one of these; they are to the classics as Cold Duck is to Cordon Rouge.

From a galaxy far, far away

Here’s something you may find amusing. I did, although I’m easily amused, tbh.

You don't need to be a weatherman...

On Groundhog Day, I think we all know that winter is here, and that it’ll be here for a good long time. Possibly until the by-elections in 2018.

So let’s just have a clip from one of my favorite films:

In case you don’t know Groundhog Day, it’s a karmic tale about how a real asshole is doomed to repeat history until he finally learns from it and becomes a real mensch.

Unlike the ones we have in the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government.

I've built my dreams around you

When it comes to classic Christmas films, there are plenty: Miracle on 34^th Street, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, about 235 versions of A Christmas Carol… But last year I stumbled upon one that’s become one of my holiday favorites: A Very Murray Christmas.

Yeah, it’s not for everyone, but I’ll pretty much watch Bill Murray in anything. Plus: Christmas.

The schtick is that on Christmas Eve, Murray’s in his hotel in Manhattan, waiting to broadcast a live show (hello? Scrooged?), which he needs to do for the money. But a blizzard of Biblical proportions strikes, screwing everything up. He can’t cancel, but…well, a whole lot happens (including a power failure) and he, his crew, a wedding party, and miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam end up in the hotel bar, doing what you might expect in a Manhattan bar during a blizzard on Christmas Eve.

There’s drinking, crying, fighting and singing. All the usual elements of holiday festivities.

The piece I truly love is the ensemble’s cover of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York”. There’s something about this collection odds and sods, primed by either tequila or slivovitz (or both), coming together to sing about broken dreams, lost opportunities and old drunks that just speaks to me.

Whaddaya think?

Truly, sadly, deeply

If I could figure out how to put this post inside a black border, I would do it, because Alan Rickman has died, and my world truly seems diminished.

I want to say that the first thing you noticed about Rickman was his voice; if ever the use of “velvet” as a descriptor was apt, it was for his voice. Mellow, soft, resonant; you wanted to stroke it. But the velvet covered a core of steel, which came through in a number of ways.

He also had the most expressive face, he  conveyed madness, menace, mystery, disdain, longing, tenderness, brutality—everything came from his voice and his face. He was amazing.

I suspect it’s primarily because of Rickman (not Bruce Willis) that 1988’s Die Hard has become enshrined on a lot of people’s traditional must-watch Christmas movie lists. It was his first Hollywood role (although I recall him six years before as the slimy Obadiah Slope in the mini-series of The Barchester Chronicles). There was such relish in Rickman’s portrayal of villains—Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Slope in Barchester, Marston in Quigley Down Under, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. They were all borderline OTT (okay, some of them went about 50 miles past the border), but utterly individual. He brought something new to each character.

Which brings me to another point, related to the voice, but much more. Rickman had a unique enunciation (which made him such a good target for the celebrity impersonators) that added layers of depth and deliciousness to the portrayal. I don’t know whether he was given the best lines in his films or he just made them the best, but in movie after movie it’s Rickman’s character who’s quoted over others.

In fact, there’s a cottage industry for celebrities imitating him, viz. my favorite, John Sessions on the panel show QI:

Moreover, he could turn a small or mediocre film into something special. The Costner Robin Hood, for example. It was splashy, but dreadful, except for Rickman’s Sheriff. Bottle Shock was thin, with a plot that drifted all over the place, but watching him made it worthwhile. Same for The January Man—even early in his career, he could add interest to a dog of a movie.

I don’t need to tell you about the Harry Potter movies (but you should read Daniel Radcliffe’s beautiful tribute to Rickman as the actor, the colleague and the human being). It was like the guy invented evil. But I loved him in the smaller productions: Truly, Madly, Deeply is one of my all-time favorite love stories, and Rickman as the dead cellist whose spirit returns to help his lover over her grief is just stunning.

And then there’s Dogma, a quirky, profane essay into religion, morality, gynecology, the destruction of the universe, and Rufus, the 13^th apostle. Rickman played Metatron, the Voice of God. Here he is, in a completely different version of the Annunciation.

He held his own in an all-star production like Love Actually, and (in my opinion) totally owned Sense and Sensibility.

And if you haven’t noticed from this very short list, his range was enormous, and I’ve not even got to his stage work. Or his personal integrity, generosity and kindness (which Radcliffe and others who knew him well have discussed).

At 69, Rickman’s loss is huge; he should have had at least a couple more decades to give us. It seems completely inadequate to say that I’m deeply saddened by his death, but that’s all I got. To quote his android in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “I told you this would all end in tears.”

Star Slugs

I was coming back from walking a labyrinth yesterday when I noticed the license plate on the BMW convertible in front of me:

The car and its driver looked to have been down a few roads, so it’s not related to the imminent release of Chapter VII of the saga. And I thought it passing clever.

(You'll also note the frame from UC Santa Cruz. Yes, their mascot is Sammy the Slug. Santa Cruz is on the coast.)

So, well done, old yuppie; well done.

Gratitude Monday: Feral parrots

Sometimes a girl just needs to step away from the mean streets and take a walk in the clouds. I did that recently when I got a film from the library that my BFF recommended, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

As you know, I tend to treat TV as a talking lamp—I’m usually multi-tasking when there’s something on, and I just connect the dots however I feel like it. If the plot isn’t gripping, I’m not sticking.

But Wild Parrots kept me glued to the screen the entire time. My friend really appreciated the colors—and they’re indeed brilliant. What reached out to me was the gentleness: a guy finds purpose in life from being a neighbor to a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco.

Mark Bittner does not anthropomorphize the birds, or make them his pets. Yes—he gives them all names, he feeds them, and he looks after the ones that are ill. But otherwise he appreciates them and respects them. It’s just beautiful.

Even when it’s time for him to move away from them (and I have to say that the thought of the market rent of that house he was living in is enough to lay me flat), he advocates for them to the City Council. Let them live as they are—don’t exterminate them, don’t put them in the zoo for their own protection, just let them carry on.

I felt so much better about the world after watching this documentary, so I recommend it highly to you. And on Gratitude Monday, I’m very grateful that I got a couple of hours of beautiful enchantment in my life.

The passing year

Oh, what a year 2014 was—quite the blogging rollercoaster, really. so many comentworthy events, so little time…

Well, first of all, 2014 saw so many deaths in the arts, leaving massive gaps in the talent pool for those of us to whom they brought such enjoyment.

(Oh—there was one different death of note this year, nowhere near the arts. Or even the humanities. Inveterate sectarian-hate monger Ian Paisley finally is face-to-face with his maker, and I hope she gives him what-for. Paisley sadly lived much too long and has left a legacy of inhumanity that will doubtless carry on for years. But I’ve got him out of the way.)

Among those lost: the extraordinarily gifted Robin Williams, comedic pioneer Joan Rivers, caustically brilliant Elaine Stritch and all-round genius Sid Caesar.

Shirley Temple Black, the child star who made hundreds of thousands of Americans forget how dreary life was during the Great Depression, and whose box office bankability saved 20^th Century-Fox Studios from bankruptcy—she’s gone, too. As is poet, writer, activist Maya Angelou and P.D. James, acclaimed writer of psychologically dense detective novels.

Lauren Bacall, one of the sultriest women to ever saunter across a screen, died aged 89. But no one who ever saw her on the silver screen—when it was truly silver—or heard her husky voice is ever going to get her out of his/her cortex.

Pete Seeger was pretty much an institution—so much more than a performer. If you go anywhere near the Hudson River without protective gear, you can thank Seeger. And if you listen to any pop music from the last half of the 20^th Century, chances are it was influenced somehow by Seeger.

If you’re not a fan of NPR, you may not know Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the Tappet Brothers. Their call-in car repair advice show ran for decades, and was beloved by hundreds of thousands; maybe millions. Every one of us felt like we’d lost a family member when it was announced that Tom (who was either Click or Clack; I never quite figured that out) died last month. Thankfully, a lot of stations are rerunning their shows, because they were never really about the cars.

I deeply felt the loss of two Brits—Bob Hoskins and Richard Attenborough. Both were spectacularly good actors, delivering an amazing range of characters, from sociopaths to Santa Claus and storybook pirate. Attenborough was also a brilliant director—think Gandhi, Shadowlands and A Chorus Line. But Hoskins famously held his own against a cast of ‘toons, which has to be the ultimate test of an actor.

I did not post here about the death of James Garner, primarily because I said what I had to say in a Facebook post: “Yeah, yeah, yeah—Maverick, Rockford, blah, blah, blah. For me Garner will always be Hendley the Scrounger in The Great Escape” (which also starred Attenborough). And the seminal Yank sequence for me was the Fourth of July celebration:

(It occurs to me that David McCallum and John Leyton might the last featured players in that scene still alive. Bronson, McQueen, Pleasence, Coburn, Garner, Attenborough, James Donald, Gordon Jackson, Jud Taylor and Angus Lennie are all gone now.)

Two more I’ll miss are Warren Clarke and Eli Wallach. Clarke will forever be associated in my mind with the TV series based on Reginald Hill’s detective novels; there is but one Andy Dalziel, and Clarke is he. And Wallach—again, what a range of characters he gave us.

The good thing about such giants crossing the bar is that they were almost all quite advanced in years. Williams definitely died too soon, but he and the rest had extraordinary careers lasting decades, and they gave us all laughter, tears and food for thought. It’s a good legacy.

When you have to shoot, shoot--don't talk

Oh—I am so sorry to hear of the death of Eli Wallach, age 98. One of the best character actors ever.

I first saw him in The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges’ reworking of The Seven Samurai. He was such a deliciously arrogant bandito, preying on villagers year after year until they called in, well, hit men.

Wallach once told an interviewer, "The big secret in acting is listening to people." Well, that's pretty much the big secret to being a human, and yet so few seem to grasp that notion, much less implement it. Wallach was a great role model in this regard; you definitely saw it on the screen.

In every film, he imbued his character with that deep-seated passion—spaghetti westerns, gangster flicks, comedies: well, I think the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle pretty much says it all, so read his appreciation.

But here’s how good he was: every time some cable channel shows The Holiday, a really awful, treacly rom-com, I record it. Then I fast-forward through all the crap and just enjoy the scenes with Wallach.

What a mensch!

Let it a lone. Please

Dear sweet baby Jesus—I just watched last year’s The Lone Ranger on cable TV.

Thirty years ago a friend of mine described 1981’s The Legend of the Lone Ranger thusly: “In which Klinton Spilsbury proves that Clayton Moore was not the world’s worst actor.”

Well, I can say with absolute confidence that Armie Hammer proves that Klinton Spilsbury was not the world’s worst actor.

And Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio prove that Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts, Michael Kane and William Roberts weren’t the world’s worst screenwriters.

And it was hard to tell whether Johnny Depp did a worse job of acting than the dead crow on his head.

I absolutely stand in shock and awe at the unremitting dreadfulness of this endeavor. And I hope to God that no one attempts another reboot of this franchise in my lifetime.

Zulu plus 50

It has come to my attention that it is the 50^th anniversary of Zulu, the iconic film made about the battle of Rorke’s Drift in 1879. They are celebrating the event by issuing a digitally remastered, wide-screen version, which premiered Tuesday evening raising money for charities focused on helping wounded soldiers and African children.

Prince Harry, a career soldier, was there, along with several people connected with the original, including Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Buthelezi, a colleague of Nelson Mandela in the fight against Apartheid, is the great-grandson of the Zulu leader Cetshwayo, whom he played in the movie.

(The film actually turned 50 in January, having premiered 85 years to the day after the actual battle.)

If you’ve not yet seen Zulu yet—step away from the blog now and stream it from somewhere. Seriously. Do not wait for the new version, just watch it.

It portrays the defense of a small outpost in South Africa by 140 British soldiers against a force of more than 4000 Zulu warriors, fresh from a major victory against a British army at Islandlhwana. Yes, the war was provoked by boneheaded, arrogant and imperialist British politicians, but the destruction of the 1300 well-armed troops at Islandlhwana was shocking to the British public and the repulse at Rorke’s Drift was a massive sop to national and imperial pride.

Plus—you know, a pretty amazing military feat.

As for the movie, Zulu has, without question, the single best battle scene ever filmed. It is all filth, blood, fury, fear, chaos, luck and some degree of strategy and tactics. The camera focuses in on the three lines of riflemen formed by the two commanders as they alternate firing—front rank, fire; second rank, fire; third rank, fire. Then fire, fire, fire, fire. Close-ups on the faces and the gunpowder smoke. When the shooting finally stops, the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the pile of twitching bodies mere steps from the firing lines.

During the aftermath, Colour-Sergeant Bourne whispers, “It’s a miracle!” To which one of the commanders replies, “If it's a miracle, Colour-Sergeant, it's a short-chamber Boxer Henry point 45 caliber miracle.”

(Something I discovered only recently was that Colour-Sergeant Frank Bourne, the actual Colour-Sergeant Bourne, was 25 at the time of the battle. Gesu.)

There are those who pooh-pooh the valor of Rorke’s Drift—because it was an imperialist action, and the British had no business being there. As I’ve said before, soldiers pretty much never vote on where they’re going to be deployed, so you only show your own pathetic pig-ignorance by declaring that Battalion X fighting to the last man was somehow less noble performing the same feats than Battalion Y because of the intentions of their political masters.

Mash-up

Yesterday I talked about how music can set the stage for me when I’m trying to understand a historical period. And, specifically, of course, when I’m trying to pull together the elements of a war.

For the last century, another medium of pop culture that can capture a society’s attitudes or experiences with a war has been film. I’ve written about this before, and shared some of the movies I think give particularly good pictures of various conflicts.

I was thinking about this, and then again thinking about the music from the Vietnam era, and Woodstock, and trying to remember whereI first saw the film about the rock festival—was it in Korea or in Virginia?

Must have been Virginia, at Fort Lee. The one I saw in the Quonset hut movie theatre at Camp Coiner (part of Yongsan Army Base in Seoul) was M*A*S*H. As I mentioned in my post about war movies, M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War, but it was really about Vietnam.

Anyhow, the thing I remember about that particular showing was that there was a joint passing from one direction in any given row, and a bottle passing from the other.

It was the 70s, man. You had to be there.