Especially combat movies have large casts and very often the director and producers see this as a good opportunity to make it an all-star cast. I have said in another post which is my favourite existing all-star cast. But what if I could choose the cast? I would choose actors who are not already in many war movies but some that I like in general and therefore should be in it. Some of you are going to argue that Russel Crowe and Mads Mikkelsen are in war movies, yes, but I am talking modern-day warfare (I’m cheating, I known and, yes, Sean Bean has to be in it.). Anyhow, I like my cast but somehow I have a feeling I picked a few too many with super large egos… There might be potential for a lot of behind the scenes warfare…
I don’t take sides, I take pictures (Nick Nolte as Russel Price in Under Fire)
The least you can say about Under Fire is that is an extremely interesting movie with four fascinating character portraits played by four outstanding actors.
The movie opens in Tchad. The photographer Russel Price (Nick Nolte) and the mercenary Oates (Ed Harris) meet and discuss their work. Oates points out that Price isn’t much better. He is profiting as much from every war there is as Oates is. None of them is more interested in politics than the other. When they part we know that they will meet again.
Before Price departs to the latest war zone, Nicaragua, we are introduced to two other journalists, Claire (Joanna Cassidy) and Alex Gazier (Gene Hackman). Claire and Alex are a couple but she breaks up with him before leaving to Nicaragua and we already sense she will be romantically involved with Russell.
At first when arriving in Nicaragua, Price isn’t interested in background information. He wants to know if the beer is good and what the food is like. Fortunately the movie nevertheless fills us in on the basics. We hear that the revolutionaries, headed by a guy named Rafael, fight the government of president Somoza who is supported by the US and a few other details. Claire and Price meet the French agent Jazy (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a dubious character, that seems to be in favour of the rebels, they also meet the president and his press officer.
While they are in Nicaragua – falling in love, getting to know the country – something happens to Price. He meets Oates again and sees him kill one of the revolutionaries in cold blood. This makes Price understand his own actions and how cynical they are. He becomes aware that he cannot stay out of this anymore. It bdawns on him, that the Sandinistas are right, that the government is corrupt and supported by the US who are afraid of a communist Nicaragua. In order to support the revolution, he takes a fake picture. He serves the rebels but triggers a flood of violence during which Alex is killed by the president’s soldiers (this is based on a true story). He takes a picture of this as well and triggers a reaction in the US…
What I really liked about this movie is how subtle it portrays the different people. Nolte, Hackman and Harris are very convincing, each takes another position, stays for another point of view. The cynic mercenary Oates is probably the most stringent character, the one who will make you the most uneasy, although Jazy isn’t a bad example of double standards either. Claire was the least convincing character, she rather served as a enhancer for the others.
Apparently the movie has been considered to be problematic in the US because it openly takes position for the Nicaraguan revolution. I think this is great and daring. It is an ugly chapter in US politics and many efforts have been made to forget about it as soon as possible (Noam Chomsky has written quite eloquently about this).
The movie is visually extremely convincing. John Alcott, Kubrick’s cameraman, has filmed it documentary-style.
The topic of War and Journalism always makes me uneasy. I think we should be informed but I cannot understand how people can take pictures like vultures of dying and dead people and stay uninvolved. Maybe it is not so much journalism as photo journalism that I find problematic. I am really glad for movies like Under Fire. They are valuable and important and illustrate how everything is linked, how one deed leads to another.
There is a trailer on iMDB.
Here is just a video with scenes from the movie and the original soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith.
When Gretchen Rubin started to work on her biography on Winston Churchill, she first read extensively everything that was available. Every biographer would do the same, especially when the person he wants to write about is already dead and the possibility for an interview non-existent.
This isn’t really remarkable as such, remarkable is what she came up with after having read so much about Churchill. She realized she couldn’t write the type of biography you would normally write and decided to call her book 4o Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life instead. In her book she names 40 elements of Churchill’s life and has a look at them. She also shows contradictions in naming Churchill’s positive aspects in one chapter followed by the negative ones in the next. For every character trait one biographer came up with, another one named the exact opposite. If you want to really understand Churchill and the range of his complexity you have to take into account all the contradictions as well. Rubin doesn’t say her approach is a definite one (although she used the same approach again in her biography of Kennedy) but it is certainly clever and thought-provoking.
The Biopic The Gathering Storm goes a completely different way. It shows Churchill just before WWII, during a very difficult period in his life and focuses on his depression and his marriage. We see a very private Churchill, one that not many got to see. I enjoyed The Gathering Storm a lot but I know it isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. The two actors Vanessa Redgrave and Albert Finney are fantastic. The title of the movie is taken from Churchill’s book on WWII called The Gathering Storm.
If you like great acting, are interested in the private side of one of history’s most important men, enjoy character portraits and biopics and a beautifully filmed movie, then you shouldn’t miss this.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a trailer so I posted part one of the movie here. You will notice that Ridley Scott was one of the executive producers.
There are numerous ways to tell a story. Numerous point of views to choose. Sometimes choices are convincing. Often they are not. Attack on Leningrad belongs to the second category. The choices the film director and his team made to tell this story were absolutely not convincing. I am very disappointed. This is very sad as this movie had incredible potential. Told another way this could have been one of the very great. As it is now it’s just an average movie on a shocking theme. How sad this is, became fully clear to me after I watched the interview with film director Aleksandr Buravsky on the DVD. He had the chance to create something great, why didn’t he do it?
The Siege of Leningrad is one of the unspeakable atrocities that the Germans committed during WWII. Hitler had the idea to starve the people of Leningrad within a few weeks, maximum two months in order to gain superiority on the Eastern Front. The siege lasted 872 days. Leningrad was a big city of almost 5 million people at the time. At least 1.5 million died during the siege. I was interested in this topic since I had read Helen Dunmore’s excellent novel The Siege. It’s a daring book from a master storyteller. I had hoped for an equally good movie (the movie is NOT based on Dunmore’s book).
In 1941 a young ambitious British journalist is flown to Leningrad, together with a whole group of foreign correspondents, to cover a story on Leningrad. While the journalists are there, Leningrad is attacked by the Germans and cut off from the rest of the world. She is believed to be dead and left behind while some of the other journalists manage to escape to Moscow. A young female Russian police officer helps her. Those two extremely different women form a bond that becomes a friendship. The two women fight for their life and the lives of a few others, almost until the end of the siege. The circumstances are horrible. It is extremely cold, people are famished and die in the streets, they cut open animals that are still alive, they eat dead humans, lick glue from paper hangings. It’s all very drastic and well shown. Still the movie didn’t work because of the invention of this English journalist. It’s a tacky, pretty unbelievable and unnecessary story. The movie has Russian and English parts and whenever we see Russian parts it is strong and convincing and as soon as it moves to the English parts it is just sadly arbitrary.
Why invent a story like that when there was such a lot of material at hand? Accounts of eye witnesses, for example. In the interview Buravsky mentions the famous Russian composer Shostakovich who was in Leningrad during the siege where he composed his 7th symphony. Wouldn’t that have been a great story? Or what he said about Stalin… Apparently he could have freed Leningrad much earlier but decided against it. He deliberately let them starve as Leningrad, the former St.Petersburg, the home of the Tsars was the center of the intelligentsia and the arts. In doing so he could get rid of people who were undesirable in his regime… A dictator like Stalin was certainly not fond of intellectuals and artists or other people who were used to thinking for themselves. That would have been a great story as well.
Since it is a Russian/UK co-production I suspect the choices had something to do with funding. Too bad.
Still, for people who have never heard or are not very familiar with the siege of Leningrad this movie is a good opportunity to learn something about it. And it is watchable. The Russian cast is very good, the pictures are very nice but all in all it’s a lost opportunity for something that could have been better than average. 3.5/5
Paths of Glory was forbidden in the UK and in Switzerland until the 70s. French troops disturbed the opening in West Berlin. The movie was forbidden in American cinemas for soldiers. It was forbidden in France during the war in Algeria. It was shown in Paris for the first time in 1975. What’s that telling us? That this is a radical anti-war statement that openly criticizes high command. It is powerful and thought-provoking and absolutely unambiguous as to its goal. I felt a bit uneasy that Kubrick chose to criticize French command. Didn’t he have plenty of opportunities to criticize American command? Be it as it may, Paths of Glory, which is based on a true account, is a great achievement.
The movie opens with the Marseillaise and a voice telling the horrors of WWI, the numbers of soldiers that get killed daily to no avail. The incident on which the movie centers took place in 1916 in France. The movie moves back and forth between the trenches and the high command residing in an elegant Château.
An ambitious general asks of the equally ambitious general Mireau to take a hill, held by German troops, the so-called “Ant Hill”. A highly symbolical name if there ever was one as people are treated no better than ants and wiped out with one simple gesture. When general Mireau informs colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) of the order to attack the ant-hill, he is met with incredulity. Dax tells him that it is impossible and will cost an incredible amount of lives. The answer is a sarcastic calculation. 65% of the men will not survive and the outcome is not even sure. Dax wants to refuse the order but is threatened to be replaced.
The futility of the attack becomes obvious right away. Dax fights in the front line with his men who die one after the other. He and many others retreat after seeing that they can’t make it. Many stayed in the trenches, knowing damn well they would be killed and nothing could be won. Seeing the men’s reluctance to run into certain death, general Mireau orders to open fire on them but the officer who receives the order refuses.
The frustrated general then orders a court-martial. Three men are chosen in lieu of all the others and accused of cowardice. Colonel Dax, a lawyer in civilian life, takes up their defence. Like the court-martial in Breaker Morant, this is a pure sham.
Kubrick’s movie has a lot of interesting elements. Colonel Dax is one of the great war movie characters. A officer of high moral standards, free of carrerism and ambition, a just and human being. Kirk Douglas was very well-chosen for this role. He is very believable and gives a great performance.
The contrasts between the high command who is far from the action and thinks they can mock simple soldiers who are afraid, slap those who show signs of shell-shock and judge others that refuse to run into certain death, is fantastic. Paths of Glory is one of those movies that has scenes that will stay with you forever because they are emotionally true and powerful. The utter cynicism of the high command, the way they calculate losses without giving further thought to the fact that each number equals a human being, will make you cringe.
Apparently there is a more recent French TV film Le Pantalon (1996) that quotes Paths of Glory in its major parts.
As much good as I may have said, I had my reservations. I did not understand the use of black and white. The movie doesn’t work so well from a cinematographic point of view. There are not so many contrasts and shadows as there normally are in black and white movies. Even Pork Chop Hill (far less good as a whole) looks much better. Kubrick is famous for the use of colours in his movies… I don’t see it as entirely logical that he didn’t shoot this in color. But that is the only flaw I could find. It still deserves a solid 4.5/5.
All About War Movies 