Sherry Chandler

From Steve Fainaru in the Washington Post:

Blackwater USA, the private security company involved in a Baghdad shootout last weekend, operated under State Department authority that exempted the company from U.S. military regulations governing other security firms, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives.

In recent months, the State Department’s oversight of Blackwater became a central issue as Iraqi authorities repeatedly clashed with the company over its aggressive street tactics. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives said they came to see Blackwater as untouchable, protected by State Department officials who defended the company at every turn. Blackwater employees protect the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats in Iraq.

…

The State Department allowed Blackwater’s heavily armed teams to operate without an Interior Ministry license, even after the requirement became standard language in Defense Department security contracts. The company was not subject to the military’s restrictions on the use of offensive weapons, its procedures for reporting shooting incidents or a central tracking system that allows commanders to monitor the movements of security companies on the battlefield.

“The Iraqis despised them, because they were untouchable,” said Matthew Degn, who recently returned from Baghdad after serving as senior American adviser to the Interior Ministry. “They were above the law.” Degn said Blackwater’s armed Little Bird helicopters often buzzed the Interior Ministry’s roof, “almost like they were saying, ‘Look, we can fly anywhere we want.’ ”

Please notice that these guys have air support. I was a bit taken aback by that fact.

Meanwhile, a representative of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq also advises the Pentagon on security. And the connections between Blackwater, the CIA, and the State Department’s Inspector General are, well, interesting. It’s lobbying group is called the International Peace Operations Association. I see some irony in that.

Something seems to have put Errol Flynn off his stride in the royal soap opera that is The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Maybe it was the fact that Bette Davis despised him. But I think it’s all the talk. Poppysmatus said the sentences are too long for him.

I thought at first that was a cruel remark but upon reflection I think it may be true. Based on the Maxwell Anderson play Elizabeth the Queen, the movie is all (often brilliant) talk, with quite a bit of pageantry thrown in, but blessed little real action. All the fencing is with words. And Flynn was a very physical actor.

But then that is part of the point about Essex. He is a warrior, not a courtier.

Davis had wanted Laurence Olivier as her foil, and no doubt he would have been easier with the speeches, though he didn’t have the same insouciance that made Flynn so irresistible. Olivier’s was often a brooding presence, too thinky, like Hamlet. Anyway, Olivier’s only dimple was in his chin.

In her later years, Davis recanted and proclaimed Flynn’s performance brilliant.

All performances seem a little fraught to my modern eye. Davis, perhaps hampered by the farthingales and corsets of her utterly gorgeous costumes, opens, closes, shakes, and drums her fingers so frenetically that my son asked me whether Elizabeth I had a palsy. Her hands were about all that she could or was allowed to move. And Alan Hale, as the Irish rebel Tyrone, is a wonderful example of how not to do an Irish accent. It is fun to see Vincent Price in pink tights as Sir Walter Raleigh and Nannette Fabray makes her debut performance as a lady in waiting.

Donald Crisp is fine as an ambiguous Sir Francis Bacon. What exacty, asked my son, did Francis Bacon do when he wasn’t writing Shakespeare? In fact, it is amazing what all these courtiers did accomplish in a lifetime. Maybe it was because they didn’t have television.

The technicolor is gorgeous, especially compared to something like The Black Pirate (1926), which was done in a very early two-color Technicolor. The amazing thing about that is that the process worked at all. Elizabeth and Essex is eye candy. One of its five Oscar nominations was for cinematography. Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s satisfyingly bombastic score was also nominated.

For all my praising with faint damns, I don’t want to leave the impression that this is a negligible movie. The script is wonderful, the characters fully realized, and the performances better than I may have led you to believe.