Sherry Chandler

For some reason, I had not seen the 1961 release of A Raisin in the Sun. I’m not sure why but I’d guess it was because I was sixteen years old when it was released, living in deep country a two-hour drive from any walk-in theater, and focussed on the burning issues that preoccupy most sixteen-year-olds.

And somehow, over the years, I did not go back and pick it up.

My loss.

The film has not dated. For good or ill, the issues it raises are still relevant. Some of them are timeless and applicable to those of any race who live in poverty.

The performances are gripping. Sidney Poitier’s is surprisingly athletic. For some reason I hadn’t thought of him as an athletic performer. In part, I think that’s because he belongs to an older generation of actors for whom physicality was more subtle.

For the most part, the film keeps to the single room set that the play uses but it really doesn’t seem like a filmed play. In part, I think this comes from the vitality of the performers and in part from smart camera work. But also, as my son observes, it is necessary that the play stay in the single room of the Chicago tenement apartment so that we can get the feel of just how cramped and hemmed in the Younger family is.

A plot synopsis here.

I have to tell you that I cried like a baby watching it, and I think there were some male eyes in the room that weren’t quite dry.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play out of some very bitter experiences in her own childhood:

“25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation’s ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German [L]uger [pistol], doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”

All of this is in the future for the play’s Younger family. The play ends with their decision to move into the all-white neighborhood in spite of the offer to buy them out and in the full knowledge that they won’t be welcomes. I am impressed by Hansberry’s ability to work out of this personal bitterness to produce a play that is at base positive and expansive.

In a comment to Rebecca about the Betty Boop Minnie the Moocher cartoon with Cab Calloway, I quoted this aricle

When the animation begins, Betty and her father, a Jew from Austria, perhaps based upon the Fleischers’ own father, are arguing. He insists that she must follow the family tradition and eat a traditional dish. Betty tearfully refuses. The scene is a thinly disguised parody of “The Jazz Singer.” Like Jakie Rabinowitz, Betty decides to run away. Like Jakie, she too runs toward jazz music. But, unlike Jakie, Betty runs toward the real thing. No “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” for her. With her boyfriend, the dog Bimbo, she runs off to the strains of “Minnie, the Moocher.”

…

These cartoons were the first opportunity many viewers had of seeing Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway perform. For some in the audience it was the first time they heard real jazz rather than the “jazzy” songs of Jolson.

“The Broadway Melody,” released by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer in February 1929, is another example of a movie with “jazzy” songs, though without the blackface. Advertised with the tagline “all singing, all dancing, all talking,” it was the first talkie to win the Oscar for Best Motion Picture. Although it retained certain features of the silent pictures, like flash cards to explain the scene, it included a very early technicolor sequence (now lost). It was the top grosser of its year, according to Wikipedia.

An impressive list. But beyond that, I see nothing to make me disagree with the consensus review at Rotten Tomatoes:

…interesting as an example of an early Hollywood musical, but otherwise, it’s essentially bereft of appeal for modern audiences.

It’s almost as though sound made these guys forget everything they knew about making a movie, or even putting on a show. See this review I found at Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Broadway Melody won the Academy Award for the best picture of 1929, but I am at a total loss to explain how or why. Looking at some of the other nominees—Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and In Old Arizona—all films otherwise forgotten, I am tempted to imagine that 1929 must have been a shitty, shitty year for motion pictures. I suppose I should make concessions to the fact that the coming of sound changed, from top to bottom, back to front, the way films were made, but this cannot possibly be an excuse for all of the flaws in this film. I will allow that it explains why, when actors move out of frame, the camera seems unable or unwilling to follow them, and I will allow that it explains why, even in scenes taking place in hotel rooms or backstage dressing rooms, the camera sits at an aloof remove from the action, threatening to reveal a theatrical proscenium arch at any moment. It does not explain, however, why the screenplay requires the actors to repeat the same conversations over and over or why the musical numbers feel so flat and forced. Surely centuries of theatrical tradition would have alerted the filmmakers to what would be acceptable in what is, in essence, a filmed version of a Broadway revue.

That last’s the thing. I mean, you don’t really expect a musical to have much of a plot, but this one doesn’t have much of a show either. There are some really impressive stage sets, but the chorus line is out of sync and the camera doesn’t ever seem to be in the right place. Sometimes it seems to be in the orchestra, where it cuts the dancers off at the ankle. Particularly egregious for the woman who did the tap dance en pointe. The novelty of that wore off well before her sequence ended. Even tapping en pointe should be interesting. IMDb reviewer lugonian describes her “constantly waving her arms as if she were prepared to fly away after getting the go-ahead for takeoff.” Would have been more fun if she had.

There is one extravagant production number (the one that was done in technicolor), “The Wedding of a Painted Doll,” in which some amazing stuff is going on, but the stage is chaos, more like a three-ring circus than the precision choreography of Busby Berkeley that will hit it big in just four years.

The sister act at the center of the film is pathetic (no dubbed vocals and Anita Page apparently couldn’t dance at all), and speaking of jazzy music, “Truthful Parson Brown” as performed by the guitar quartet Earl Burnett and his Baltimore Orchestra is twelve-bar blues as Presbyterian hymn.

Add to that, the leading man’s a jerk who leaves the older brunette sister for the younger taller blonde on the basis of one decidedly unsexy kiss, the sisters’ agent stutters, a schtick that seems to relieve him of the need for any funny lines, the costume designer is campier than Dom DeLuis doing “The French Mistake” (without the irony), and the sisters, whose love for each other is the real emotional center of the pic, are so busy sacrificing themselves for one another that they forget to put any tension into the plot. One evil, self-centered thought would have been welcome.

But then I never think the Oscar winner for any year is the best film. I’m seldom all that enthusiastic about any of the nominated ones.

P.S. The blackface may come in with The Duncan Sisters, famous for their performance of “Topsy and Eva in the 1920s. “The Broadway Melody” is said to be loosely based on their lives and they were originally slated to play the lead roles. “Topsy and Eva,” a musical play based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was made into a film in 1927, just missing its opportunity to be a talkie. D. W. Griffith was involved and

It has been said that Griffith’s reputation as a racist is actually based on this film and not The Birth of a Nation

Spoiler warning.

The first part of this Netflix adventure lay in actually getting the right movie. When we pulled the sleeve out of our pretty red Netflix envelope last week, the DVD sleeve said 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and mentioned Glenn Ford and Van Heflin but when we popped it into the player what we got was Russell Crow and Christian Bale. It seemed almost as though the small gods of Netflix couldn’t believe anybody would really want to see a 30-year-old western shot in black & white when they could have a no-doubt faster paced, grittier, more colorful modern remake.

But that was precisely the version we did want to see. So we bunged the DVD back in the envelope unwatched and sent a message to Netflix that we wanted the movie we wanted. To their credit, they got the right one back out to us almost the next day (it was the weekend).

It was worth the wait. The worst part of the movie was the song, “3:10 to Yuma,” sung by Frankie Laine (of course). It was derivative in both words and music and a perfect example why Laine didn’t realize he was parodying himself when he sang the Blazing Saddles theme.

Once the bombast of the theme is done, however, 3:10 to Yuma is a fairly slow and quiet film that gives the tension time to build and Glenn Ford, with his slow crooked smile, time to charm the pants off stolid Van Heflin. Well, let me rephrase that. Time to charm the sawed-off shotgun out of Heflin’s hands.

He does charm the pants off Felicia Farr’s saloon girl, though all we have of that scene are the two of them coming out of the back room through a beaded curtain, putting their clothes in order just ever so subtly. That’s enough. I know how all the parts go together.

Heflin reprises his long-suffering sodbuster role from Shane (1953), with even echoes of the gunfighter’s seduction of the rancher’s wife and son(s). In this case, he’s Dan Evans, a small-time rancher and American everyman who made the mistake of setting up business on land without a water supply sufficient to stand up to drought. He takes the job of guarding Ford’s Ben Wade for the $200 he needs to buy water rights from a neighboring rancher. You can see how this part of the plot echoes.

In this film, however, Heflin isn’t castrated by a gun butt to the head, which allows for overtones of High Noon (1952) as we watch that big hand moving along, nearing 3:10. (Tex Ritter much more believable in the music department here.) And just like they did Gary Cooper, the townspeople desert Heflin, leaving him to make a lone stand for truth, justice, and the American way.

But the center of the film focusses on the drama between the two men as they sit in a hotel room waiting for the train that will take Ben Wade to prison in Yuma. And/or the arrival of Wade’s gang to rescue him. Ford charms, Heflin resists and the two men develop a tense camaraderie, sharing cigarettes, parrying with words. (Though most of Heflin’s parrying consists of telling the irrepressible Ford to shut up.) Also a familiar American movie trope, but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone topping Ford’s performance here. To quote Dave Kehr in the NYTimes, Glenn Ford could be a bland hero but never an uninteresting villain. Much of the joy in this film is in watching Glenn Ford with his perfect equanimity and his tip-tilted stetson.

The film is unrealistically free of brutality, blood and guts. I’m sure the modern remake corrects those errors, which is precisely why I don’t really care to see it. I know how all those parts fit together, too.

And to be honest, I don’t really believe Van Heflin made it out of town alive. Ben Wade was boss to an amazingly inept gang of brigands. Or that a Ben Wade ruthless enough to shoot one of his own men rather than be caught would not have taken advantage of Dan Evans any number of times.

But it wasn’t part of the world created here for either of these men to be brutally shot down. Evans is not a murderer and Wade is not without some twisted sense of fair play. It was, I suppose, a more innocent time.

3:10 to Yuma is based on an Elmore Leonard short story of the same name.

Watch at YouTube.

P.S. I didn’t say anything about the black & white cinematography because I’m really not very smart about that stuff. But it’s beautifully filmed, as most black and white film is, to use light and shadow to enhance the tension.

Some beautiful horses and horsemanship, too.

Let’s see. Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. It was just a thing he said. I don’t know what it means.

I was born politically incorrect: white, southern, female, daughter of Southern Baptist tobacco farmers. On top of that, my forefathers fought for the Confederacy. As far as I know, no one in my family ever owned a slave but that’s a technicality. It’s still a demographic that puts me way out on the fringe of my social peers of choice.

What is more, I am somewhat unrepentant, unwilling to repudiate my family. Though I would not do now what they did then, I have no wish, through the wisdom of my hindsight, to call them evil, to shake the dust of their sins from my righteous sandals. To do so would seem like apologizing for who I am and that’s not an easy thing to do.

Which may explain why I identify so strongly with Quoyle, the protagonist of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (Scribner, 1993). He found redemption not by denying his past, because he didn’t know he had one, but by discovering and immersing himself in it.

When the novel opens, Quoyle, a fat and shambling man with a huge chin and no-color eyes, lives in Mockingburg, New York. He’s spent a lifetime being bullied by his father and his hateful older brother. He’s underemployed as a newswriter for The Mockingburg Record and miserably married. A man almost completely ineffectual, he is compared in the chapter head note to the Flemish Flake (see photo), described in the Ashley Book of Knots as

a spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary.

Quoyle is not just passive, he’s also self-deluded. A sort of shadow Walter Mitty, he creates fantasies in which his demon lover of a whoring wife, Petal, loves him and he has some sort of family life with her and his two daughters, Bunny and Sunshine.

All of this misery comes crashing to a cataclysmic halt with, in quick succession, the joint suicide of Quoyle’s parents and his wife’s accidental death in a car crash. Oh yes, and he gets fired. Again. Quoyle is flattened completely.

Enter deus ex machina in the form of his long-lost and stout-hearted aunt Agnis. Having dropped by to pick up her brother’s ashes, she invites him to come along with her to the family homeplace in Killick-Claw, Newfoundland.

In this place of harsh weather and harsher history, Quoyle slowly discovers his roots, a family whose sins included shipwrecking (by placing false beacon lights), rape, incest, and child molestation. His family was so bad that their neighbors drove them out of their home on Gaze Island, so that they put their house on skids and pulled it across the bay on winter ice. They re-established it on Quoyle’s Point, a promontory so rocky and wind-blown that they had to anchor the house down with huge cables.

Quoyle tries to help the aunt reclaim this house that has been standing empty for 40 years and in doing so overcomes a lifetime of fears and develops a certain competence. He gets a job writing the shipping news for the Killick-Claw weekly The Gammy Bird and meets “the tall and quiet” woman, Wavey Prowse, whom he desires but with whom he can’t quite connect. He acts as the catalyst to heal the past of his aunt and the future of his daughters.

That Quoyle’s redemption comes as a result of embracing and taming his inner brigand is made clear in the film of The Shipping News. In it, Quoyle takes part in the bacchanalian destruction of his friend Nutbeem’s boat, an event that echoes the wrecking practiced by his ancestors.

Nutbeem is a fellow reporter who has built a Chinese junk himself and plans to sail it to South America and a warm and easy life. It is at his farewell stag party that the locals work themselves into a drunken frenzy and, claiming they want to make Nutbeem stay, take axes to his boat and sink it. Still crazy from this destruction, Quoyle staggers drunkenly to Wavey’s house and assaults her.

Wavey repulses Quoyle easily enough and he sleeps it off on her couch.

The next night Quoyle goes out through a great storm, a storm that washes him clean, and approaches Wavey in gentleness. She accepts him and, in the night, the storm breaks the heavy cables of the past and blows the unhappy Quoyle house away.

Things are not quite so neatly symbolic in the novel. In it, Quoyle doesn’t participate actively in the boat’s destruction and, wandering away from the melee, he only peers somewhat wistfully through Wavey’s window into her warm and lighted kitchen.

In the novel, what happens to Quoyle the next day is that he discovers his cousin Nolan, the last of the old-time Quoyles, living in squalor in a hut near the Quoyle house. Nolan turns out to be the ghost who has haunted Quoyle’s daughter Bunny, perhaps the maid in the meadow, and who has been leaving witch-knots on their doorstep to drive them away. Quoyle has traced Nolan to his lair to confront him, have it out. Instead

In the man before him, in the hut, crammed with the poverty of another century, Quoyle saw what he had sprung from. For the old man was mad, the gears of his mind stripped long ago to clashing discs edged with the stubs of broken cogs. Mad with loneliness or lovelessness, or from some genetic chemical jumble, or the flooding betrayal that all hermits suffer. …Quoyle could not shout at him, even for the witch-knots in his daughters’ footsteps, even for the white dog that had terrified Bunny. Said, “You don’t need to do this.” Which meant nothing. And he left.

Shortly thereafter, Quoyle sees that Nolan is taken care of in a clean and warm modern nursing home and the cousin supplies him with the last key to unlock his past.

I like this ending better because, when the cleansing storm comes and the cables of the past are broken, the old unhappy house is blown away by an act of compassion. It is not in turning away from his past that Quoyle is healed of its wounds, wounds he didn’t even know he had, but by discovering first that he needs a little bit of that wildness and then by looking at the sins of the past with unflinching but gentle and forgiving eyes.

Thus the knots of the past are unraveled but, as head note to the final chapter, taken from The Ashley Book on Knots, reminds us:

There are still old knots that are unrecorded, and so long as there are new purposes for rope, there will always be new knots to discover.

I’ve gone on long and totally failed to capture the charm and humor of this book. The old house may be tied down with cable but the prose is light, the characters quirky and funny. I haven’t mentioned the way the villagers reach out to their returned prodigal. Or how Quoyle sums up his life in headlines: Reporter Licks Editor’s Boot, Man Sounds Like Fatuous Fool.

Being a comedy, the novel ends with all snarls unsnarled and couples coupled with the mooring hitch, of which The Ashley Book of Knots says:

The merit of the hitch is that, when snugly applied, it will not slip…

At Salon, Stephanie Zacharek picks the Movies that Mattered in 2007. I don’t always agree with her picks, though I agree that by and large the American public no longer watches “movies that matter.” What I want to enlarge on here, however, is this statement:

I recently met a young writer who, having decided he didn’t know as much about movies as he wanted to, put together a film course for himself via his Netflix queue, a way to work through the likes of Godard and Chaplin, Fellini and Hawks, Hitchcock and Renoir. We talked about Netflix queues not just as lists of titles but as dream outlines of the people we’d like to be — you, or I, might be a person who watched “Masculine Feminine” three times before returning it; who had every intention of getting through “Hiroshima Mon Amour” but ultimately sent it off in the pouch, unwatched; who is glad to have seen “The Passion of Joan of Arc” but also relieved at the prospect of never having to watch it again. Through movies, we collect bits of ourselves, and sometimes we reject parts of ourselves, too.

So what is the shape of my Netflix queue? Nothing, I’m glad to say, quite so earnest as a course in film history, though I do have an interest in historically significant films. It doesn’t seem to reach as far as Robert Mitchum’s fifties noir, however. In the last two years we’ve watched two highly touted Mitchum films: 1947’s Out of the Past and 1952’s Angel Face. We found both of them a little silly.

But I love Mitchum in films like Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter. Even Thunder Road.

Looking at my (our, really) rental history, I see that we’ve rented 90 films since November 29, 2005. That comes out at not quite one a week, so I suppose we don’t really qualify as cinamatophiles.

Social conscience caused us to rent some earnest documentaries like Shakespeare Behind Bars and Gunner Palace.

But mostly I think it’s a fan list: a lot of Kurosawa and Terry Gilliam, several Johnny Depp films, a bunch of Shakespeare, behind bars and otherwise. We did some comparative Hamlets, including Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead.

We went on an Erroll Flynn kick for a while. And we enjoyed old silent comedies with Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

At one time I set out to see every movie for which Ry Cooder had done the sound track, which led us to a lot of Walter Hill movies we wouldn’t ordinarily have watched. But also to Wim Winders’s Paris, Texas, which I loved.

I haven’t achieved that goal yet, though. Not all of these movies seem to be available on Netflix.

The list is maybe a little bit snobbish, as you might expect from a houseful of writers and classics scholars. But not really film buff snobbish.

Mostly we just follow our noses. One film leads to another. Like The Seven Samurai leads to The Magnificent Seven. Like Yojimbo leads to A Fistful of Dollars leads to Last Man Standing. A terrible film, that one, but we’ve made a circle back to Walter Hill.

Thus it’s all a great wheel: life, time, and my Netflix queue.

Some miscellaneous observations about Drunken Angel that didn’t seem to fit into the post below.

In one of the bonus films on the DVD, Kurosawa remarked that he tried to style Drunken Angel like a silent film. Our subtitles weren’t working real well on this piece but I think that remark explains a great deal about the acting style of Kurosawa’s films, and it’s one thing that makes the films easy to watch even with subtitles. The action is almost choreographed. A sort of hyperserious West Side Story.

It is much more stylized visually than an American film of the period, and they were stylized enough. Though Kurosawa was much influenced by American film-making, especially John Ford’s westerns, this is not an American film. The stills below give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

Toshirô Mifune was a great find for this style of film-making. He was wonderfully strong, graceful, and quick. Kurosawa has been quoted as saying

Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness, he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.

The first time I remember seeing him was in Roshomon and I had never seen anything like him.

You get the full sense of that grace and quickness in the jitterbug scene of Drunken Angel. Matsunaga is on the skids, the gang boss has just taken his woman, he’s drunk and emaciated with tuberculosis when he does this dance, which comes on like a wild dance with death itself. It’s decadent. And yet there’s great joy in watching Mifune’s sheer physical grace.

He had just come out of the Japanese air force, where he worked as a reconnaissance photographer, and was emaciated enough to look like some one half-dead with tuberculosis. So you get a sense of a man near death but with tremendous vitality.

David Kehr, reviewing the DVD in the New York Times, opines that Drunken Angel is not really a noir film:

… thematically “Drunken Angel” hails back to an earlier genre, the tenement dramas of the 1920s and ’30s (“Symphony of Six Million,” “One Third of a Nation”) with their principled heroes and calls for social reform. For every virtuoso sequence — like the Mifune character’s climactic knife fight with his former gang boss, which ends with the two squirming in a pool of white paint — there is a bluntly didactic scene in which the doctor rails against feudal traditions and demands better hygiene.

That’s true to some extent but the doctor, though he is the moral center of the film, also partakes of the degradation. He lives in the slums because he wants to do good but also because he’s a drunk.

One last little thing. Wikipedia makes an unverified assertion that George Lucas considered casting Toshirô Mifune as Obi Wan Kanobe.

What a different Star Wars that might have been.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 film, Drunken Angel, is remarkable for a number of reasons.

For the first time, Kurosawa had full artistic control of a film (unless you count the U.S. occupation censors who enforced some fairly significant changes). The film marks Toshiro Mifune’s debut in a starring role. And it gives us a look at the ruin that was postwar Tokyo.

Unlike the other Kurosawa films I’ve seen, this one is set in contemporary times and in western dress. It could pass for an ordinary noir film about a young gangster (Mifune) on the way down and a drunken doctor (Takashi Shimura) who tries to save his body and his soul.

Except for the great open sewer around which the film revolves. The film circles round and round this cesspool. We get close-up shots of methane bubbling up and trash floating, an umbrella, a shoe, in one shot a doll floating face down like the photograph of the Buddhist monk discussed by Robert Hariman. Innocence fouled.

Great Performances describes Kurosawa’s work, especially Drunken Angel this way:

In the period following World War II, Kurosawa’s work matured and deepened in response to the conditions of national catastrophe and collapse in Japan. The war had ruined the nation, and Kurosawa spoke through film as an artist addressing this devastation and seeking a path beyond it.

In 1948, Japan was an occupied country and essentially under martial law. Kurosawa was not permitted to show bombed-out Tokyo in his films nor was he permitted to show signs of occupation. The occupation forces encouraged western dress and habits. They stressed individualism, especially for the women. They enforced freedom as the emperors had enforced servitude. One example, the occupation encouraged behaviors like public kissing, something the Japanese found shameful. I was sort of amazed at an example at once so trivial and so insensitive. I suppose, for the West, public displays of affection are signs of freedom.

The DVD we rented had a short film on Kurosawa and the censors. In it, we learned that they made him change his ending because they thought it glorified Matsunaga, Mifune’s gangster character, too much. (Matsunaga achieves a sort of redemption in death.) Kurosawa had wanted to use “Mack the Knife” as a musical theme for the gang boss, but the censors wouldn’t let him use German music because Japan and Germany were allied in the war.

These incidents strike me as considerable artistic meddling. Still, Kurosawa found ways to work around the censors, showing us a diseased population (tuberculosis, typhus, VD, alcoholism), using images like the cess pool to show us the ruin he could not depict directly.

In a time when the occupations of Japan and Germany are being held up to us as models of what we can do in Iraq, it is edifying to get a little glimpse of what we actually did in Japan. And Kurosawa manages to show us how it affected the people. One nightclub scene of jazz and jitterbug is both compelling and appalling.

Japan was not innocent of this decline and the Allied occupation was comparatively benign. Drunken Angel is a critique of Japanese society and of the ways in which Westernization exacerbated faults already there. It is also a compelling movie, one of the best I’ve seen out of that time. Mifune alone makes the film worth seeing. His struggle is not just with his own disease but also against the strong man culture that kowtows to power, legitimate or not.

I’m not enough of a film critic or a historian to put this stuff in much context. Still, we are usually not all that forthcoming about the negatives of our WWII effort and, for me, it was enlightening to get a glimpse of what the defeat meant for the Japanese people.

In the end, we had very limited success in imposing individualism on the Japanese. In the early years of our Iraq adventure, if you remember, a group of Japanese individuals went to Iraq against government orders. They were trying to help but when they were taken hostage, they were treated as traitors because they went against government orders and brought shame. The lesson may be that you can’t impose values from the top.

I don’t have anything particularly brilliant to say about Kinky Boots, except that it’s a feel-good movie with some great performances. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. And along the way to the feel-good ending, you may have an insight or two about what it means to be a man.

The film was released in 2005 by Miramax; it was nominated for a Golden Globe. It tells a story loosely based on Divine, the Kinky Boot factory in Northampton.

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance as Lola is just flat-out charming. Now I’m going to have to watch Talk to Me. And maybe even American Gangster.

Henry V’s “band of brothers” seems to be everywhere in my life these days.

Having watched the Olivier version last week, last night we sampled the Branagh take and then I went to the computer to find that Georgia Stamper had sent me a link to an article in Newsweek, “We Band of Brothers,” that begins like this:

When 1st Lt. Max Adams was deployed to Iraq in 2002, he took with him a 20-pound hardback edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes he would read from it to his soldiers—speeches from “Henry V” were always crowd-pleasers. “The one about ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’ they always liked that one,” Adams says. The rest of the time the book rode around on the floor of his Humvee “as an additional plate” providing one more layer of protection from potential IEDs. Adams, who left the Army last year, still has the book, “beaten to hell, with bootprints all over it.”

Writer Elizabeth Samet would be pleased to hear that Adams found both philosophical and practical use for the text, which she assigned him for a literature class at West Point. “Books are weapons,” she writes in her new memoir, “Soldier’s Heart,” an account of her 10 years of teaching the sole required literature course, English 102, to first-year “plebes” at the military academy known as Sparta.

Read the whole article.

Branagh’s Henry V is, to quote Poppysmatus, “not very comfortable in his skin.”

“It is,” Poppysmatus continued, “fascinating how a few different choices of lines and speeches can completely change the meaning.” By which he is referring to the different ways Olivier and Branagh chose to use Shakespeare’s material. The former working in 1944 to bolster the British spirit, the latter working in the period of post-Vietnam cynicism.

But I think you must also take performance into consideration. [Added: here, from Lance Mannion's discussion of Brando's best role, may be the key: "But movie stars act with their eyes. Stage actors use their whole bodies..." Which may be another way of saying that Branagh favored the close up while Olivier liked the wide shot.]

Olivier’s Henry is a bright and shining knight on his white charger, stalwart, engaging in single combat with the Constable of France. Branagh’s gets down and gets muddy and bloody with his men.

Olivier gives much time to the rush of the French cavalry charge. Branagh gives much time to carrying the dead off the battle field.

He lets the character get muddy, too, for example by choosing not to cut a scene in which Harry approves the hanging of one of his old carousing buddies or by letting his pre-battle prayer run a few lines longer, so that you see that his conscience is troubled by his role in deposing Richard II so his father could have the throne.

Still it is a jingoistic play and the St. Crispin’s Day speech will always be popular with soldiers who don’t necessarily see its manipulative intent.

Here is a bit from Robert Pinsky’s review of Samet’s book in the NYTimes:

Honor is a reality: people have been known to live by it and die for it. As Samet points out, it has been invoked as a reason to continue sending troops to Iraq. It has also led some of her students, former students and colleagues to question the nature and conduct of that war. Normally, honor and loyalty re-enforce each other; in bad times, they can come suddenly into conflict.

Like love and art, honor comes from the imagination as a force that determines the fate of individuals and nations. And like love and art, honor has also attracted a thick enveloping tonnage of baloney, an encrustation of lies and exploitations.

…

Falsehood, in one form or another, has its appeal. Truth is honorable.

Samet’s version of that principle, as she applies it to her students, should be heeded by journalists and politicians:

“Our national fondness for celebrating the physical heroism of soldiers — the apparent readiness with which they sacrifice their lives to larger causes — eclipses the far less romantic displays of moral and intellectual fortitude that also distinguish so many of them. In turning them all into heroes, we have lost a sense of the individuality they also fight to preserve.”

This straightforward observation by a teacher belongs next to a passage — about the art of fiction, all fiction, though a historical anger couches it in terms of war writing — that she quotes from Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried”:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

Heartening then to know that Samet’s students read Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” in the combat zone, that one thinks Virginia Woolf’s Orlando should be required reading for every cadet. Unfortunately, I fear that the citizen soldiers of West Point make up only a small proportion of our current professional army.

The Pinsky review should be read in its entirely for its more sober consideration of the place of literature in the West Point tradition and for its contrast to the Newsweek article, which dealt more on the sort of Bible-over-the-heart-that-took-the-bullet picturesque.

The Samet book is going on my must-read list.

And I highly recommend that you watch both the Olivier and the Branagh films of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

It took us two weeks to watch Olivier’s Henry V (otherwise known as The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France), not because it was dull — it’s a very interesting production linguistically (of course) and visually — but because we’ve been so busy running here and there and it is over two hours of very stylized Shakespeare.

I am also counting time to watch the commentary track.

We finished last night, on St. Crispin’s Day, which seems appropriate. [Added: St. Crispin's Day, October 25, was the date of the Battle of Agincourt.]

Released in 1944 with the intent to be a propaganda film, to raise the British hopes before the inevitable invasion of France, the film expurgates much of that which is negative about Shakespeare’s Henry (most of which Branaugh retained in his 1989 version, called the post-Viet Nam Henry V). Nevertheless, it retained enough of Shakespeare’s ambivalence about kings who go adventuring, ambivalence on the part of the infantryman and the archer, to suit me.

Though James Agee didn’t see it that way in 1946:

The film was given its U. S. premiere this week (in Boston’s Esquire Theater). … At last there had been brought to the screen, with such sweetness, vigor, insight and beauty that it seemed to have been written yesterday, a play by the greatest dramatic poet who ever lived. It had never been done before. For Laurence Olivier, 38 (who plays Henry and directed and produced the picture), the event meant new stature. For Shakespeare, it meant a new splendor in a new, viral medium. Exciting as was the artistic development of Laurence Olivier, last seen by U. S. cinemaddicts in films like Rebecca and Wuthering Heights, for his production of Henry V was even more exciting.

As Shakespeare wrote it, The Chronicle History of Henry the Fifth is an intensely masculine, simple, sanguine drama of kinghood and war. It’s more eloquent theme is a young king’s coming of age. Once an endearingly wild Prince of Wales, Henry V (at 28) had to prove his worthiness for the scepter by leading his army in war.

Olivier gave this production a very definite fairy tale feeling, first by setting it as a “play within a film” at the Globe Theater and then by dissolving into sets that were deliberately designed to have the look of Medieval paintings, with obviously painted backdrops and a flat perspective. Even the fabrics and dyes used to make the costumes were from the right period and, the film being in technicolor, it is gorgeous to behold. The actual battle scenes are totally realistic, however.

If you have any interest at all in the history of cinema (this production was very innovative) or in Shakespeare, this film is well worth 2 hours of your time. Or even two week.