Sex, Sadism And The Junior Senator From Wisconsin… January 29, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, Drama / Romance , trackbackAll work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And I’ve been very dull of late, no time to stand and stare, never mind blogging. Janus may look backwards and forwards, but he also looks like a month in which two important deadlines always collide, and there is only one of me. As I’ve yet to perfect a method of binary fission, it will be ever thus.
Still, there’s always cloning.
I’m playing catchup, blog-wise, so the next couple of posts will have to précis what’s been going on movie-wise chez ‘aitch in between dodging the bullets work-wise. Wise guy, huh..?
‘…Some Gratuitous Sex and Violence…’
…was Q’s fervent wish in Sir Sean of Connery’s last outing as 007, Never Say Never Again, and, of course, he got his wish. Bond just would not be Bond without a cocktail (shaken not stirred) mixing both. Apt then, since my piece on Her Majesty’s least secret agent - titled ‘Bond-age’ - search engine reports show that I’ve brought visitors here in a futile quest for a little S&M. See? I just did it again…
I finally caught up with Casino Royale and was more than pleasantly surprised that, for once, all the hype was so. Bond ‘rebooted’ was all they claimed and more, Daniel Craig more than comfortable in, and out, of the Turnbull & Asser dinner jacket, more than believable as everyone’s favourite cold-eyed killer.
Believable. Well, yes, Bond is cartoon violence taken to the very margins of the definition. So in a world where a Saturday night smack across the chops can lead, in one drunken, stupid, moment of madness to the mortuary, Bond is virtually indestructible, impervious to the most bone-rattling blows. And incredibly sexy. And dangerous. Assured, suave, brave, strong, skilled and blessed with a searing intelligence. Safe to say, all your basic tools to save Britain (and the world) in the name of Her Majesty.
He’s everything we aren’t - everything spies are not in reality. Real spies are now recruited from the official MI5 website, real spies are drunken ex-Cambridge graduates or some broadsheet Foreign Correspondents in over their heads in a ‘Great Game’ they, or possibly anybody else, can’t hope to make any real sense of. Real spies even seek to destabalise their own governments, or write the memoirs of their seedy exploits for hard cash. Or both. Real spies aren’t James Bond at all, which is one of the reasons why we want to be him. Huzzah for macho posturing!
And in a world being eaten alive by American culture, he’s British. Even if the latest outing underscores the ’special relationship’ to be along the lines of ‘lease lend’, the product placement - my God, if there was an Oscar for it Casino Royale would be a shooin - for items not from these shores. The Aston Martin might still be built here, but we’re a long, long way from the gorgeous to look at (less so to drive) ‘64 DB4. Gone are the days of David Brown; Henry Ford’s descendants pocket the profits today.
Anyhoo, like most everyone else, I’m sold. It’s a very decent piece of film-making, founded on a sharp script that had much to offer fan boys and newcomers alike, built with all the precision and care we’ve come to expect from the multi-million dollar franchise, that has gone back to it’s roots in great style. Bravo.
However, what I did find disturbing was watching all this mayhem sitting in a cinema filled with young children. The 12A certificate mean that kids under the age of 12 have to be accompanied by an adult. But what on earth possessed any parent to take along children that appeared to be as young as six or seven? The cinema was filled with them.
It’s been a while since I sat down to watch any children’s TV, but I’m fairly sure that CBeebies doesn’t broadcast homo-erotic tinctured torture scenes? Bob The Builder doesn’t feature any characters getting their skulls blown apart by 9mm machine gun fire does it? The small girls behind me - bored to tears by the time Bond was having his bollocks bashed, and laughing among themselves - were actually told to be quiet by what I presumed to be father. I was aghast. He told them to be quiet and watch the film - ‘pay attention to the torture’ he might as well have put it. But I was even more aghast that no-one - not one child - appeared unsettled by what they were seeing on screen.
The BBFC certification amazes me. But the ‘parenting in action’ left me pondering, grumpy old man connotations and all, that if Casino Royale and it’s ilk are now considered fit for a family outing to the cinema then there really isn’t much hope for us at all is there?
Won’t somebody think of the children? Apart from those piggybank raiders Sony that is…
Good Night and Good Luck.
“[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and then denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Hermann Goering, the Nuremberg Trials.
If you aim to get your history from any movie, then you’re in big trouble. Movies tell stories, they don’t relate history. Simple narrative necessities dictate that they have to screw around with character, dialogue and timeframe in order to tell their tale in one simple, easy to digest, bitesized chunk.
And I’m not simply talking some specious piece of junk - not naming names here, but they are usually the films that begin ‘based on a true story’ - even movies that go to the greatest lengths for accuracy, must, by dint of the medium, only give one a spectral echo of the actualite. It’s not a criticism, it is simply a matter of fact. So, you want history? I suggest, first stop, a library (and an open mind).
But should you want a flavour, the merest hint of what it was like living under the fear, the nostril flaring terror of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (referred to commonly as HUAC) and the separate but equally corrosive communist witch hunt conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950’s, then look no further than George Clooney’s remarkable Good Night and Good Luck.
The story of how America’s most famous and respected broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow, decided to unmask McCarthy as an ego-maniacal, superannuated playground bully is perhaps not the real heart of Clooney’s film. It’s the fact that McCarthy’s communist showtrials took place at all, that this puffed-up charlatan held a nation in his thrall, destroyed both livelihoods and lives, turned whole communities in on themselves and astonishingly continues, to this day, to divide opinion in a nation that appears still to be largely introspective and distrustful of those beyond its borders. Indeed, sometimes, those within those borders.
In making that vain but valiant attempt to stick to the facts, Good Night and Good Luck relies heavily on contemporary footage of McCarthy in action both at the hearings - steamrolling witnesses, bulldozing truths into smelly heaps of great steaming lies - and during Murrow’s pivotal TV confrontation with him on his See It Now news programme. Much as in reality, the man makes a noose for his own neck, and America gets a smack across the side of the head, finally waking up from the torpor to what is really going on.
As we know, the senator returned to being a background noise in the parade of history, just another ordinary self-opinionated commie-baiting bar-room ‘Joe’. But he was, perhaps, a whisker away from an even greater all-engulfing tragedy; it beggars belief to think what may have happened had he not been exposed, and, on a groundswell that combined popular opinion with ignorance and fear, run for President.
McCarthy’s sweaty, painful appearance trying to justify himself to Murrow and the American people was followed by the Army lead Senate hearings - the big dogs tearing at the wounded animal - during which lawyer Joseph N. Welch skewered McCarthy even more deliberately, seen in one of the contemporary clips used in Clooney’s film. Welch’s reward from a ravaged but grateful Hollywood was the part of the trial judge in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.
It’s a relatively short, thoroughly enthralling film with a literate and intelligent script (co-written with Grant Heslov by director Clooney) and some fine performances. David Strathairn as Murrow is spell-binding; a patriotic American who knows the difference between what is right and what is wrong, and who is prepared to make his stand, to draw his line in the sand. Make no doubt. It was an act of great courage, not only by Murrow but by all his See It Now team, especially Fred W. Friendly (Clooney) and, maybe above all, CBS chairman William Paley (Frank Langella).
With Clooney currently the bête noire of the American right, and targeted by right wing commentators in a mirror image, I suppose, of the way Murrow zeroed in on McCarthy, gorgeous George has several points to make and all of them in commendably large letters. First and foremost, it is that no matter how much more sophisticated we think we are than those that cowered before McCarthy, or Goebbels or Robespierre, the lessons of history are there for all of us to see. And learn from (or not - we simply live in hope. Eternally).
The second is written into the speech that Murrow gave to the 1958 Radio-Television News Directors Association convention, scenes which bookend Clooney’s film. Murrow rails against television being used as a means of vacuous entertainment rather than for education. The words are taken almost verbatim from his actual speech and point an accusatory finger down the decades at all of us:
‘To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. Good night, and good luck.’
In a world of pathetic soundbites, carpet bombings - ’Live! From Eye-raq’ - reality TV, Big Brother, shopping channels, Derek Acorah, Channel 5, Jack Osbourne and Vernon bloody Kay, the struggle may already be over.
The R2 DVD of Good Night and Good Luck boasts a quite beautiful black and white transfer with Robert Elswit’s gorgeous cinematography evoking perfectly the smoke-filled editorial offices of CBS and the up-close and personal style that was all Murrow’s own, stiffened by Strathairn’s imperious impersonation. It’s the type of film that I thought had gone out of fashion, one that relies on a good script and demands a modicum of intelligence from the viewer.
By the by, this may be an apochryphal tale (I prefer to believe not), but some members of preview audiences, unaware that the footage of McCarthy was real, said that they felt that whoever was portraying the Junior Senator from Wisconsin was clearly overacting. Good call. He was.
George Clooney just a pretty face? Not a bit of it…
Comments»
It’s an essentially selfish act to drag kids along to adult films, even if the classification allows for it. It’s about the parents or carers gratifying their own needs rather than the disturbance that might be caused by - shock! - having to wait for it to come out on DVD or - heavens forbid - hire a babysitter!
It struck me most at the last STAR WARS film, where parents had brought toddlers to witness the charred and crisped Anakin Skywalker hauling himself out of the fiery pit. It just made me sorry for the kids and angry at their carers.
“Real horror show …”
Good to see you back John.