The Movies in Paris

 

A year ago on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, I drove southwest of Paris on a cold, cloudy day to visit the Circuit de Sarthe, the site of the annual 24 Hour Race at Lemans, France.  

In a delightful coincidence I had just seen the movie "Ford v Ferrari" ("Lemans 66" was the title outside America) in a Paris theater. It is a great movie that was nominated for Best Picture.

When I arrived at the track, I hoped to walk the 8-mile circuit, but found in another delightful surprise, that there was a 24-hour race nearing it's end and I could watch an amateur competition at Lemans. I visited the museum and saw many laps of the race.   

In another coincidence of timing the movie "Midway" debuted in theaters while I was on the trip.  I saw both movies in their original format with French subtitles.  With "Ford vs Ferrari" this gave me a chance for some French practice and some extra laughs with the translations of Carroll Shelby's Texan English.  

In the movie "Midway" the Japanese sailors spoke in their own language, sometimes in complex speeches. The subtitles were, of course, in French.  My French definitely got a workout trying to follow translated Japanese dialogue.    

It is strange to think how much the world has changed in the past 12 months.  No more movie theaters, the annual race at Lemans was delayed for months and who knows when I will travel across the ocean again.  

But with all that, the memories are wonderful. 

Movies in the Time of Corona: Blue, White, Red--A Trilogy

As part of my personal Corona Film Festival, I watched the trilogy Blue, White, Red:  Three Colours. 

These magnificent stories of love are in French, mostly set in France.  The second movie is set more in Poland and with more Polish than French, but begins in France. They have the same Polish director, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and were released in consecutive years in the mid-90s.  In each of the the three movies, the story is most clear in the face of the star--the three faces you see in the poster above. 

The camera lingers on the faces of Juliette Binoche, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Irene Jacob in each of the three movies.  Each deals with love and loss in ways that surprised me--especially in the second movie, White.

I watched them in order of release but they could be watched separately in any order.  The lead characters express so much with their faces that I am going to watch at least parts of the movies again without subtitles, just to see how much I can understand.  I was surprised as I watched White that I was picking up words and phrases in Polish. I don't know Polish, but it is a Slavic language and when spoken slowly, the sounds of some common words is very like Russian. 

Corona Movie Five: Kelly's Heroes

Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"

My youngest son and I have been watching movies every other day the past week and a half.

The most recent movie, the fifth, was "Kelly's Heroes" a movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  The movie is as funny as I remember it. The movie opens with Clint Eastwood (Kelly) capturing a German intelligence officer in a town with at least a battalion of German troops. Eastwood drives through the town and the all those German soldiers in a Jeep never gets a scratch.  The officer tells Kelly about 14,000 gold bars 30 miles behind enemy lines.

Kelly, along with Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles drive and walk that 30 miles, capture the town and get the gold.  In a gunfight at the OK Corral sequence, they make a deal with a German tank commander guarding the bank and get away with all the gold.

I first saw it in the theater my senior year in high school.  Five years later, after four years in the Air Force, in 1975, I was in Armor School at Fort Knox and served a decade on active duty and in the reserves as a tank commander.  then in 1999, when I had been a bearded civilian for a decade and a half, I got my last tanker nickname.  The company I worked for acquired a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Several of a us flew there to meet the staff.  We got picked up at the airport by a company driver who spoke fluent English he learned from movies.

On the slow trip to the office in Sao Paulo traffic, our CEO told the driver, "Neil used to be a tank commander." At a traffic light he turned around and said, "Oddball! You look just like Oddball.  I love Kellys Heroes."

And that nickname stuck till I changed jobs.

The other movies so far:
Midway (2019)
Ford vs Ferrari
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Wild Bunch

Corona Film Festival Movie Four: The Wild Bunch

My son Nigel and I are having a Corona Film Festival. The most recent and fourth film on our list was "The Wild Bunch."  The movie just before this was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." 

Both movies were made in 1969--the year I got my drivers license.  Both are set at the end of the 19th Century and represent the end of the frontier and "The Old West." They are the farthest extremes of the cowboy movie genre and represent the end of cowboy movies.  Traditional Good Guys and Bad Guys were out of fashion.

In The Wild bunch, three groups are set against each other in this movie.  All of them are bad. All of them end up slaughtered in the final Sam Peckinpah gun fight or shortly after.  There are no good guys.  The group we follow through the movie are bank/train robbers.  They are pursued by a vile, incompetent set of vigilantes led by a former member of the gang, and in Mexico they fight against and ally with a Mexican rebel army led by a bandit general. 

By contrast, in "Butch Cassidy" nobody is bad.  Butch and the kid are robbers, but they are amiable, honorable and kill only when threatened.  The posse that pursues them is relentless, again honorable men upholding the law.  The rest of the Hole in the Wall Gang are decent men. When Butch and Sundance escape to Bolivia, they rob banks and are pursued by Bolivian police and soldiers who are also decent men. No bad guys. 

The final scenes are a stark contrast.  In both the robbers at the center of the drama are killed in a hail of bullets. But Butch and Sundance die off camera.  The gang in the Wild Bunch die on camera surrounded by the bodies of their enemies. At the nearly everyone is dead, except the Mexican villagers oppressed by the rebel general. They come to the scene of the carnage and collect the guns to protect themselves from other bandits.

Neither movie is anywhere close to the white hat hero versus the black hat outlaw of the traditional cowboy genre.  At the end of the 1960s, America was protesting war. There was violence in the streets. The top movies of the following year, 1970, were anti-war war movies.  Nigel and I will be watching these also:  "M*A*S*H,"  "Kelly's Heroes," "Catch-22," "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and "Patton" debuted during the first year of the 1970s.

"Patton" may not seem like an anti-war movie, but the character of General Bradley is a foil to Patton--the General who cares vs. the General who dares--at the expense of his men.

The return of Good Guys and Bad Guys would be the 1977 movie Star Wars--which used every trope of the traditional cowboy movie right down to the bar scene to bring back the Good Guy/Bad Guy Hero/Villain theme to the movies.  The full title of that 1977 movie is "Star Wars--A New Hope" a title more appropriate than ever looking back over almost five decades. 

Movie one of Corona Festival was Midway which I wrote about here. Nigel and I will watch the 1976 version starring Charlton Heston. 

Movie two was Ford vs. Ferrari, which I first saw in Paris in November with the title "LeMans 66." I was so taken with the movie I visited LeMans, France, a few days later and the museum at Circuit de Sarthe where the race is held. 

"Midway" Movie Shows How Great American Leadership Can Be

My son Nigel and I just finished watching the movie "Midway." I first saw it in a theater in Paris in November. I cried three times during the movie at the beginning listening to the voice of President Roosevelt, at end watching the dive bomber pilot Dick Best leave his ship in a wheelchair and in the middle watching the defiant death of gunner Bruno Gaudi.

This time I just teared up at the end.

My initial response to the movie, which begins with the attack on Pearl Harbor, was deep sadness listening to the President we had versus who runs the country now.

Today was the first time I saw the movie since the beginning of the pandemic. From Pearl Harbor to victory, America led the fight against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Now we can't even nationalize the response to the virus, nor the distribution of medical supplies.

It was also more stark this time that the key to victory was the way Admiral Nimitz believed his intelligence officers and listened to evidence--not on idiotic gut feelings and wishes.

The movie has been criticized for using too many speeches both by the Japanese and American leaders. It is the starkest contrast with the movie "Dunkirk" which explains almost nothing and presumes great tactical and strategic knowledge on the part of the viewer.

If you watch the movie at home and don't like spectacular war scenes, fast forward through the fighting and listen to the conversations. It's a brilliant example of leadership at many levels on both sides of the battle.

The distance between President Roosevelt and the current President could be measured in light years.

Politics and Freedom in "Fury"

This morning I was reading Hannah Arendt's "The Promise of Politics" on freedom and leadership.  Politics, Arendt says, should bring freedom into the world.  She wrote this shortly after World War 2.  In a big way, the movie "Fury" could be seen as a movie about men who gave up their freedom to set others free.

But reading Arendt, I thought about one of the early scenes when the column of tanks passes hundreds of German refugees.  Among this group of pathetic people carrying their meager belongs on the muddy road is a woman wearing her wedding dress.  Her head is oddly tipped.  The dress is dragging in the mud.

In any coffee shop, locker room, or restaurant, we hear people saying "Politics doesn't matter--they are all the same."  Or "I don't care about politics."

In America we have the freedom to say those things, because in America we have the Rule of Law and who is in charge does not matter in the same way as in a real dictatorship.  The scene with the refugees portrayed real roads full of German refugees at the end of World War 2.

Those men and women stumbling through the mud, hoping to get food, hoping to stay alive another day, dragging what few belongings they still had would never say politics doesn't matter.  Just 12 years before, many of those refugees voted for Hitler the only time he actually stood for election.  Because of that vote, American tanks were driving down the muddy road to kill more Germans in their country.  And the men in those tanks were making jokes about how many chocolate bars or cigarettes they would need to have sex with any of the women on that road.

We can say politics doesn't matter.  In Sudan, in Egypt, in Palestine, in Iran, North Korea, and Congo, no sane person says politics doesn't matter.


Other posts on Fury:

Fourth time watching Fury

Review

Faith in Fury

Memories

"Fury" for the Fifth Time, Focus on Faith

Shia LaBeouf as "Bible" in "Fury."

Yesterday my son Nigel and I went to see "Fury" for my fifth, his second time.  We went to the 10am showing at the Kendig Square theater in Willow Street, PA.  This is where movies go when they have  run their course in the big chain theaters.  Our tickets were $2.50 each and we were half of the people in the theater.  

Nigel focused on the the "surprise" events in the movie.  The first thing Nigel said after we left was that his brother "Jacari would hate this."  Jacari does not like war movies and really does not like horror movies.  Cartoons and comedies make him happy.  Nigel pointed out several of the times when everything was calm and then someone dies horribly. 

For me, I focused on Shia LeBouef, known in the movie as "Bible."  LeBouef does the best portrayal of a Believer in the Army I have ever seen.  The banter about his faith was perfect.  Wardaddy asks, "Can Jesus save Hitler."  Bible says if Hitler cries out to the Lord in faith and repents of his sins, he will be saved.  Bible gives the serious answer knowing that that Wardaddy, Coon-Ass and Gordo are busting on him.  He says, "You know where I stand." And he means it, but he can also take the jokes and join in.  

So many other Believers are shown as wooden, or vile.  Bible sits apart and reads his tattered Testament when Gordo and Coon-Ass get laid in the tank.  But Bible is angry later when Wardaddy and Norman are off by themselves with two German women.  Bible does not want the pretty German girl as do Gordo and Coon-Ass, but Bible does not want to be left out when they are sharing real food and a clean place.  

Bible tears up and his words catch in his throat when he knows he is going to die, but he remains brave and faithful to the end.  

I love this movie more each time I see it.  

Other posts on Fury:

Fourth time watching Fury

Review

Faith in Fury

Memories

Apache Live Fire

In mid-August I watched AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters fire rockets and cannon at targets on Range 40 at Camp Grayling, Michigan.  The exercise included ground troops, mortars, artillery and US Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack fighters.

Here are the Apaches firing rockets and cannon:

Next post I will show the ground crews loading the rockets and 30mm chain gun.