Movie Reviews Archives

Flyboys: A Review

I’ve been working an exceptional amount of hours lately and I haven’t had much time off, but this Saturday night I managed to get enough time to go out with my wife and see a movie.

So we had to choose between “The Black Dahlia” and “Flyboys”. I’m a big James Ellroy fan, and I loved the book, so that was probably going to be the one but then I caught Michael Medveds show on Friday and he had the Director of “Flyboys” Tony Bill on for an interview.

Michael Medved, whose movie reviews I usually agree with and is someone of whom I personally admire; spoke admirably about the movie which was a big point in its favor over “The Black Dahlia”. What’s more important is that this is a film where the central subject matter involves flying and the director Tony Bill is a pilot himself, so I was intrigued. Michael Medved was very enthusiastic about the film, and since he is a historian, his view on the film meant more than a simple nod towards “that’s entertainment”.

Tony Bill made a big point about playing up not just the films historical accuracy but that pilots and aviation enthusiasts would appreciate the attention to detail that was put into the film.

Now this means a lot to me, because as a pilot I can honestly say that in my opinion, only two movies in the whole of film history have ever managed to capture the thrill of flight. Most movies that have aircraft as a plot device or involve flying in any way are usually so laughably bad I can’t stand to watch them. Don’t even get me started talking about the last abomination in this category called “Pearl Harbor”. oh good god... Even Kate Beckinsale and a real live Zero Fighter couldn’t save that horrid movie from celluloid embarrassment. And the new ‘Flight of the Phoenix’? All I have to say is; “Motorcycle riding mongolian desert dwelling drug runners” and you know everything you need to know about how to make a really great movie suck like a lamprey eel.

So off we went my wife and I, on our first in six months “Saturday Night Date”. Off to see a World War One flying epic made by pilots and Michael Medved said he just loooooved it.

“What could go wrong?” I said to my wife.

Oh how I wish I had gone to see “The Black Dahlia” instead. Boy, did I hate this movie. I mean, not since “Aces: Iron Eagle III” have I hated a movie that involved flying so much. This is one completely and genuinely bad movie in almost every respect.

Accurate? Did I hear Tony Bill say that pilots will appreciate the accuracy?

Bah!

According to the makers of this film, the Imperial German Air Forces were made up entirely of Fokker Triplanes, all of which were painted bright red.

Not just one Red Triplane, but every single one.

Every.Single.Fighter.

Except one of course and that one belongs to “The Black Falcon”

bwhahahahahhaha. The mysterious “Black Falcon”, who strafes men mercilessly on the ground for no chivalrous reason at all. I know what you’re thinking; “Hey! Didn’t I see that on an episode of Johnny Quest”?

Oh yeah. And it gets worse from there.

Much,much worse...

The movie starts with the words “inspired by a true story”. If you ever see these words at the start of a movie, get up and leave. These are Hollywood’s “weasel words” to say to the audience “nothing like this even remotely happened in the history of mankind, but if we told you this was the case, you wouldn’t watch any of it because this is just total made up crap”.

Look, it’s either a true story, or its not. This movie doesn’t even say its “based on a true story” which is their way of saying that some of the characters have been changed but the basic facts and figures are pretty much the way it happened. “Inspired” means that the movie is so far from what actually happened that the people who really lived through it wouldn’t even recognize it as something they were involved in, even if the film used their real names.

There is nothing about this film that is inspired by anything. I’ve seen better graphics on a Sega Genesis and more realistic portrayals of life in “The Sims”.

Here’s the core of my complaints about movies like “Pearl Harbor” and now “Flyboys”. Back in the past, you had to forgive a great deal of material mistakes because they didn’t have CGI and matte paintings and airplane models can only go so far. If you wanted to have a squadron of Me-109's in your movie, you either had to get very bad models hanging on all too visible strings or you had to get a group of war surplus P-51 Mustangs painted up to look like ME-109’s. You as an audience member knew this and you forgave the filmmaker for his sins. You knew there were no MIG’s for Hollywood to use in the 1950’s, so when they used F-84’s in “The Hunters”, you were ok with it, you just let it go. You knew that the “Zero” was really just a modified T-6, and you knew the Corsairs in “Baa Baa Black Sheep” were doing one hell of a job just to keep from stalling out of the sky as they try tried to go as slow as the T-6/Zeros to make it look like combat, but you let it go anyway. What choice did you have?

But this is the “Age of CGI”. If you can make me believe that “dinosaurs are real” and the “Titanic is still afloat”, then you can sure as hell make a realistic looking aircraft in the sky. You can even make a historically accurate one, that is, if you choose to. Showing the World War I German Air force as made up of nothing but Red Fokker Triplanes; then all you have done is make the decision to treat a good portion of your audience with total contempt.

“Oh they’ll never know” they must’ve said this to each other when they reviewed the CGI for the final cut of the film.

Sorry boys, we do know and we don’t like what we see.

Listen, there are people I know who get upset if you use the wrong canteen on troops in Civil War movies. I know people who freak out at tedious details in Star Trek movies, but that’s nothing compared to what pilots do when they see movie scenes like this:

Oh look, that’s a Nieuport and he’s trying to turn inside a Fokker Triplane.

Sheeesh!

Allow me to explain to the non-flying public "a pilots revulsion" to this scene. A Fokker Triplane is the single most maneuverable aircraft in the history of warfare; it could virtually turn in the length of its own fuselage. And frankly, it couldn’t do much else BUT maneuver. The Nieuport? well it regularly sheared its own wings off in high Gee tight turn maneuvers; which is why the French gave them to us to fly. You didn’t dogfight the Fokker Triplane, you dived on it and you ran away as fast as you could. The Fokker Triplane in the hands of a skilled pilot wasn’t a fair fight. I don’t even want to point out that the Lafayette mostly flew SPAD’s anyway; for that would be the least of the films sins.

To my knowledge, there was only one “Red Triplane” and it belonged to a certain Baron with a colorful moniker. They were never deployed in squadron strength, and they were usually the ‘prized mount’ of only a few pilots. Werner Voss and Baron Von Ritchofen are two names of Fokker DRI pilots that pop into my head.

Since the CGI scenes are all ‘made up’ anyway, why not make the CGI into Fokker DVII’s or Albatross’ which were plentiful and were a much more even match for the Nieuport? Why not at least change the color of the aircraft now and then? It’s just not like the old days where you worked with whatever you had. This is CGI, you can make anything appear on screen. They could have made a squadron of pterodactyls if they wanted to. They should have, it would have been more entertaining. You could have asked people who said they went to see the movie "hey did you see the pterodactyls?" as a test to see if they managed to stay awake, and frankly, most people would have failed the test.

The errors in this film are not limited to simply the amateurish mistakes in the use of CGI aircraft. There are some real whoppers of “bad plot concepts” on display here as well. There is a scene where a pilot flies his biplane behind enemy lines and rescues his girlfriend and her three nieces and nephews - At night!

That’s right, an unlit biplane, a unlit grassy landing field, in a war zone, at night.

Really!

Landing at night on grass is tough, even with lights and instruments. Without either, its not really called a "landing" anymore; it’s a called a “crash”.

And he performs this feat not once, but twice! For just a second I honestly thought he was going to try to fly his french girlfriend and her three nieces and nephews out on one flight, but in a nod to the realities of “weight and balance” and the desperate need to pad the story out for 10 more minutes, the pilot has to come back for a second trip to get his girlfriend, whom is then promptly shot as payment for her sins. And where is she shot? The same place everyone is shot in the movies, in the upper shoulder of course. I guess that’s the body’s “catchers mitt” because everyone who is shot in Hollywood always gets hit up there.

And the fun doesn’t end there. Later in the film the pilot tries to rescue another downed pilot from his squadron who has crashed into “no mans land” and pinned under his aircraft. So what does he do? Sure enough, he decides to land his plane in "no mans land" and then run across “no mans land” in broad daylight to rescue the downed pilot. Its not like the lines are separated by miles and miles of empty land, in this film the French and the Germans are probably within about 50 yards of each other, yet this is where our downed pilot is crashed and the “daring young friend” decides its best to help by landing his aircraft right in the middle and then running over to rescue his downed comrade.

Let the French hang the expense of the loss of the aircraft. Hey, just put it on my tab, eh Frenchy! Forget the fact that landing in an aircraft with no brakes in the middle of a place called “no mans land” that is both full of land mines and is covered by machine guns is going to be both damned hard and dammed silly, what’s really important to the filmmakers is that the asinine plot gets extended for another 10 ridiculous minutes.

There are more clichés than you can shake your finger at(crap!, theres one now...). There are the makings of a good college drinking game in this film (Take one drink for every hackneyed war movie cliché you catch). The only thing missing from this film is one character that says; “ You can’t send a kid up in a crate like that!”

Well, maybe it will make it on the “directors cut” DVD. That is something to look forward to. I cant wait to see what didn't make the cut of this film.

The reason you see these bad choices on film is because the filmmaker decided to get sloppy. You have to understand this fact. This film, the final output of which you paid 10 bucks a shot to see, was a conscious decision; everything you see on film is a result of an actual decision being made. Keep this scene, cut that one, keep that take and lose that one. There are no accidents in movies, and there weren’t any in this film. What you see on the screen is exactly what they wanted you to see, or what they had to settle for inorder to tell you the story.

In the case of this film, the filmmakers just held you and I in contempt as an audience, no more, no less.

The makers of the film might as well have saved their CGI money and filmed the entire movie with DC-3‘s for all the “accuracy” this movie managed to provide for us, the "flying" audience. This was like making a movie about Gettysburg and with both sides using M-16’s and throwing hand grenades. The makers of the film simply didn’t care to make a good film that was slightly inaccurate, or to make a very accurate film that was good or a great film that was both.

They chose instead to make a bad film that was inaccurate. They chose to do this.

Yet, this films greatest crime isn’t the childish plot or the ham-handed historical inaccuracies or the technical incompetence; it’s that it is simply not entertaining to the audience. I’m in the key demographic for historical flying movies, Im a Pilot, Im a history freak and I could barely contain my boredom with this treacle. I should have been on this movie like a Chihuahua in Zsa-Zsa Gabors lap but I really hated this movie. Frankly, it bored me. My wife drifted off in the first 20 minutes. You can forget what type of plane the Germans are flying and whether or not thats what they did in the war, to her it was just dull.

For the record, aviation is rarely captured very well on film. Most screenwriters, directors, actors and most of the money people involved with a film only know about what the cockpit is like from what they see through the door while they sit in their seats in “first class”. But the makers of this film are pilots, real live pilots with thousands of hours in their log books and pilot ratings that go on forever; so there is simply no excuse for the kind of technical incompetence that ultimately serves as the core of the film. It’s not like the old days where you had to work with whatever ‘war surplus’ there was around the airport. Now you can make whatever aircraft you like appear on film in whatever angle you choose. To make these kinds of fundamental mistakes in film today is nothing but a total shame and there is simply no excuse for it.

Flying and the emotions that a pilot feels while flying have rarely been seen in film and you wont find any emotions in this film at all, except tedium and boredom. After watching this film you know no more about what it feels like to be a World War One pilot than you know about what its like to be a dog.

If you want to see a great movie that shows what a pilot actually feels like inside while flying, then watch “The Great Waldo Pepper”. If you want to see a great yet historically inaccurate “B” movie about World War I flying, watch “ The Blue Max” instead of this crap. Oh, it’s a crock as well, but its at least entertaining. You just can’t go wrong with James Mason and Ursula Andress. Watch 1948’s ‘Fighter Squadron’ if you want to see a really god awful bad flying war movie, worse even than “Flyboys”. Sure I watched it more than once, but hey, its got P-47’s in it (in living color!) so I looked the other way when all the “acting” was going on. It’s the same thing I did when watching ‘Strategic Air Command’. People tell me that June Allyson is in it, but I never noticed her. All I saw were the B-36’s and you don’t see those every day. An actress is an actress but after all a B-36 is a B-36!(A mans got to have priorities!)

A great flying movie makes you want to go get your pilots license the next day. All this movie makes you want to do is to ‘tar and feather’ the projectionist.

For the record, most movies about war are really awful movies. I’m not sure why this is, but its true. I think its fair to say that I’ve watched just about every war movie ever made silent and talking, from ‘black and white’ to color, and out of all of them I can’t name more than five that were any good and even less than that I consider to be ‘great’. Most of them are just awful, some are even worse than this one. My own theory about why nearly every “war movie” is bad, despite the fact that as a rich source of human emotions and stories, is that the people who have lived through wars rarely want to relive the experience by contributing screenplays or acting in them and those that haven’t lived through it, cant begin to capture the horrors accurately enough to make it true and honest. This is why most ‘war movies’ are 80% about love stories and 20% about shooting people as the writers and directors all understand what it is to love a woman and haven’t a clue what its like to be shot at or live through an artillery barrage, so they “go with what they know”.

What annoys me most about this film is the way it fails to deliver the most important thing besides entertainment. It utterly fails to educate the audience about the Lafayette Escadrille. In this film, the members of the squadron are made up of the usual group of American scoundrels and mountebanks right out of central casting. Sure, there were some that were scoundrels and mountebanks, but there were also far more who were the kind of ‘east coast snots’ I tend to make fun of. These are men who volunteered to come over to France long before we came into the war, to the French Foreign Legion as infantrymen, as ambulance drivers and then as pilots for the Lafayette Escadrille. They were men; real men and they deserve to be remembered for what they did and not just as the caricatures that Hollywood has made them out to be. They deserve more for their sacrifices than to have their memory denigrated by a poorly executed cartoon of a movie.

Eugene Bullard certainly deserves better.

People today more than ever need to be inspired by the people of the past who gave their all for the cause of freedom, not bored out of their mind by a poorly made, cliché laden movie that is destined only to lose money for its investors and to sit next to “Ernest Goes to Jail” at the bottom of the discount DVD bin at Wal-Mart.

Posted @ September 23, 2006 11:59 PM | Movie Reviews | Comments (10)

Weekend Movie Club

Play Dirty(1968)

Directed by
André De Toth

Cast
Michael Caine .... Capt. Douglas
Nigel Davenport .... Capt. Cyril Leech
Nigel Green .... Col. Masters
Harry Andrews .... Brig. Blore
Patrick Jordan .... Maj. Alan Watkins

“War is a criminal enterprise, I fight it with criminals”.
Nigel Green as Col. Masters

Every move made by the characters in this movie and every line of dialog uttered by the actors is in support of an act of betrayal. At every turn, characters in this movie shoot each other in the back and betray each other with such rapidity that you quickly can lose your way in this plot. It’s set in a war, but its not about war. This is not a history lesson, it’s a visit to the therapist.

Set in the World War II North African campaign, Nigel Green and his band of irregulars, who are made up almost exclusively of prisoners seconded from a backwater hell hole prison behind the British lines. They are made up from stone cold killers, Mutinous ship captains, homosexual Arabs they are men so bad the men of the “dirty dozen” would have sat at another table in the cafeteria. Following the pattern of the British Long Range Desert Group, this team wears enemy uniforms and equipment to sow chaos behind the lines of the enemy. At least that’s the idea.

But who is the enemy? In this movie, it’s hard to tell. The opening scene sets the tone as Nigel Davenport is driving along the desert with a small armored Jeep with a mix of weapons both allied and axis, with his radio tuned to a German Army radio station belting out “Lili Marlene” as they did often in those days. At his side sits another soldier, though clearly he is dead. You wonder what are you watching, a German about to be bumped off in an ambush? As he approaches a desert road checkpoint, He switches his service cap to that of a British officer, and switches the radio station, to a more appropriate English tune and the transformation is complete. Now he’s on our side.

Or is he?

Is he a German pretending to be English or is he an English who was pretending to be German? At each step in the movie, it becomes clear that the only side anyone is on is the side of their own survival.

Michael Caine, plays his comfortable role as a young British officer, who is seconded to the British Army from his civilian role as a petroleum engineer for British Petroleum in pre-war Libya. He is seconded to this team as a way for the British Army to try to take control of this band of miscreants and bandits. He and his team are betrayed and sacrificed by the British as a decoy for another more officially sanctioned British team. They are all in pursuit of a German fuel depot. Watch and listen closely, there is a surprise behind every line and every twist is twisted back on itself. Is it murder or is it killing? What is betrayal or loyalty? What is Humanity or Inhumanity, it’s all investigated in this tight little “B” movie from 1968.

I liked this movie a lot, its rarely seen on Cable Channels and I don’t think there is a DVD, but it is in rotation this week on Showtime. Catch it if you can, you won’t be disappointed.

Ice Cold at Alex(1958)

Directed by
J. Lee Thompson

John Mills .... Capt. Anson
Sylvia Syms .... Sister Diana Murdoch
Anthony Quayle .... Capt. van der Poel/Hauptman Otto Lutz
Harry Andrews .... MSM Tom Pugh

Following a theme for this weekend, this film is also set in World War II North Africa. In this film, a doctor and two nurses are separated from the allies and find themselves far behind German lines. Much like Lawrence of Arabia, a main character in this film is the desert itself, however this film is in black and white it does not have the impact it would in full Cinerama color.

This is a quiet film, with barely any musical background soundtrack, something I found added greatly to the film itself. They don’t do that very much anymore, you are always given music to help you along in the story. The result is the stories offered are often weak, and the soundtrack is used as a way to cover that up.

What makes this film fun to watch is how the characters survive two of the very worst situations, War and deprivation. While they can cope with the hazards of war, it’s the desert that gives the more menacing challenge. John Mills plays the captain of this medical team, but he is a flawed man on the way down. It falls to him to keep this group together but he is doing everything to keep himself together. Mills portrays an alcoholic at a time when alcoholism is rarely discussed. More importantly, He uses the promise of a beer in Alexandria as a way to keep his fading team motivated to do what they need to do to survive. This is the basis of the title, and when the beer is revealed, you will be amazed at your reaction, and it is at point that you realize how deep into the story you have gone. Filmed In Black and white, with hardly any soundtrack it’s simply character study that is done with great expertise.

One scene that sticks in my mind even today is when at one point they are required to haul their ambulance up the side of a wall of sand. It’s handled quietly, and with great care by the director and it is a tribute to what a great director can do without special effects to add to the emotional basis of the story.

This movie is a classic. I absolutely loved this movie when I first saw it in the 1970's, I went through a great deal of trouble to get it on DVD, but it is out there and if you can get a copy, I highly recommend this film.

Posted @ February 04, 2005 03:29 PM | Movie Reviews | Comments (0)

The Third Man: Review and Analysis

I checked The National Review's Corner Blog this evening and found that one of the writers there (Cliff May) had recently seen "The Third Man", and came away not liking it.

As some of you may know, I'm a sucker for 'Noir' Films. I’m also a sucker for war movies, even though as a rule war movies are usually really, really bad movies. "The Third Man" is a great movie for many reasons, first it is the very definition of a “Noir Film” and it is also not just a war movie, but a post-war movie. There aren’t many of them; this film and “The Big Lift” are two that come to mind. When you see burned out buildings in the backdrop of these films, its not stagecraft, it’s the detritus of the war that has killed 52 million people. In this film the residents of post-war Vienna play many of the extras and minor parts of the film. You can see the war reflected in their faces in ways that cannot be captured in the backlot at paramount or in Lucasfilms CGI. It's not makeup or acting that gives a person the ‘100 yard stare’, that’s life baby and its right there reflected in the eyes of folks who just a few years before the film was made were being bombed in their homes by their enemies and beaten in the streets by their neighbors friends.

"Film Noir" is a way of saying that the movie is about a dark subject. In my little group of fellow movie addicts its also a way of saying the film was shot "out of focus" by a drunk and decrepit film director. "Film noir" is often a shorthand for "crappy foreign film that only has artistic appeal and can barely keep a narrative going but youre supposed to like it anyway because everyone says so".

But "The Third Man" is not crappy or out of focus. It’s crystal clear. When pushed, men and women will do anything to survive and if you don’t think so, you’ve never been really, really hungry or desperate. All the characters of this movie are either in dangerous waters or resting by the shore of the river styx on their personal journey to purgatory.

"The Third Man" is a cold film. This first thing you notice is everyone wears greatcoats and hats all the time, even indoors. Post war Vienna is a decayed corpse of its former self. This is not a Capitol City of a once great empire, a place of commerce and art of factories and buildings. It’s a collection of debris too large to wash away with the rain. People live their life in post-war Vienna out of habit rather than choice.

It’s in this setting that four characters arrive. Our viewpoint is played by Holly Martins an American writer of dime novels that are based in a place he’s never been and life he’s never been a part of, the old west of the gunslingers. Holly has fallen into hard times, and a lifeline has been tossed to him from an old school friend, Harry Lime.

Harry has gone to some expense to send his friend a ticket to come to Vienna for a job. It’s not clear in the story what the job might be or what Harry intends. Holly doesn’t care, it’s a chance at something and to a desparate man, that beats nothing any day of the week. To the post-war, post-depression generation, this emotion would ring like a dinner bell.

On his arrival to Vienna, Holly discovers that his friend and benefactor is dead bringing his hopeful spring in his step to a lurching halt. Holly may be 12,000 miles from home, but he's right back where he started, nowhere. The film essentially begins in a graveside burial for Harry Lime. At this scene the other two significant characters are introduced. Inspector Calloway, a British police officer who is very curious as to the sudden arrival of an American civilian into the life of his criminal nemesis, Harry Lime.

And then there’s Anna. Anna is the pivot on which this movie turns. Anna is one of the women of post-war Europe who, if she is good at anything at all, she is good a survival. Anna has the unfortunate luck of being a Czech citizen. Unfortunate, because this in the Russian sphere of influence. If you want to know what that means, just look into her eyes. She will tell you everything you need to know about what totalitarian regimes mean to real people.

It’s at this point in the story that our protagonist Holly Martins begins to ask some questions about his friend’s death. How did it happen? Why the inconsistencies between the accounts of his death? Why is the Inspector taking such an interest in his friend, but seems unmoved and almost callous at his death. Holly decides to use his time in Vienna to discover the truth about his friend and how he died.

Each of us lives in a world that is not bound only by rational truth. Most of what we see in the world is what we want to see and not necessarily what is. Holly enters into his investigation to find the real story behind Harry’s death, and that’s just what happens, only not the way Holly had intended. The result is that Holly discovers more about his friend than he thought possible, and in the end more about himself than he ever wanted to know.

In his piece, Chris May asked several questions and I will attempt to answer them here:

It makes no sense that Anna and Holly would have such affection for Harry Lime, and that it then turns out that yes, Major Calloway is right: Harry Lime is indeed a baby killer who steals penicillin and then waters it down so that it turns from medicine to poison.

Each has their own reason for their affection for Harry. Harry is an enabler, a fixer, a scrounge. Harry is the guy you go to make things happen. In school, it was Harry that provided Holly with what he needed to survive, a stolen test here, a bully bought off there, Harry was able to make Hollys life livable ( for a price of course) It's not brought out in detail but its clear from some of the things they say that the school they refer to is a boarding school.

For a post-war woman, Harry is a dream come true. Harry not only has the material good she desires, but Harry has the one thing that makes all the difference, access to people to make the papers she needs to get out of the Soviet controlled areas. Anna also has affection for Harry in the same way that women continue to send marriage proposals to men on death row; the irresistible desire to “fix” men drives women to do some very weird things. Anna and Harry’s relationship is no different than hundreds of women I have observed over the years. It’s clear to all what Harry has been getting out of the relationship, but its unclear to most what Anna gets (besides a forged passport). Talk to any therapist dealing with abused women and they will tell you about women like Anna. There’s a tremendous amount of shame in Anna and by rehabilitating Harry she will be rehabilitating herself. Redemption to be found in the arms of a reformed bad boy, you see it all the time.

On the charge of baby killer, let’s also remember that Harry is an amoral fixer. I don’t believe it was his intent to cause the damage that he did, but I also don’t think it cost Harry any sleep. Those who are addicted to him, Like Anna will rationalize his crime away by saying that he meant well or that he didn’t really understand the consequences or whatever is convenient. Some people don’t want to see a monster for what they are even when it is self-evident.

Remember one other item, Holly himself has a hand in the death of an innocent. Due to Hollys ham handed approach to the Porter, who witnessed Harry's "Death", the Porter ends up being killed by Harry's associates. Graham Greene is sending that message the the audeince by having the little boy accuse Holly of killing the Porter to the crowd gathered outside the Hotel Sacher.

Did Holly kill the Porter? Holly didnt use his hands to kill him, but the Porter is dead all the same, and Holly could have kept this from happening just by thinking and taking a smater path. The Porter is dead due to Hollys incompetency. Is Holly guilty of the Porters death? By law, no, but by most moral sensibilities, he most certainly is.

Did Harry kill the kids with menengitis himself and with that purpose in mind? How much does ones intentions go in removing guilt in a crime? It is this debate that Graham Greene, a man who understood the nature, character and often the result of espionage, wants us to think about.

(Anna keeps saying to the Major: “You’ve got it all upside down.” And I kept trying to see how to turn it right, how to solve the mystery. But there is no mystery. The surprise is there is no surprise.)

Again, watch any episode of “Cops” and you’ll see this same reaction in women who are beaten within an inch of their lives by their husbands, yet scream and punch the police for taking their monster husbands to jail. “You just don’t understand officer I made him hit me”

What kind of scheme did Harry cook up? If you’re going to sell bogus penicillin why bother stealing real penicillin? And how many kids have to get sick before the hospital staff figures it out?

Harry’s scheme was to steal drugs in general and penicillin specifically out of the Army hospital and sell it to the civilian hospitals. His “inside man” Harbin did a reasonably good job, but he got pinched by the authorities (Calloway), and began to work as a double agent to get into Harry’s nefarious network. Harry discovered this, and this is why he was removed, in fact taking the place of Harry at his funeral. Demand for penicillin outstretched Harry’s ability to supply, so like all drug dealers, Harry cut the batch to make it go further to satisfy the demand. The buyers went to Harry because before he began to cut the drug, it worked and worked well. Remember two things, first this is a world of desperation and second, penicillin is a new and wondrous miracle drug, it is not the common pharmacological remedy that it is today.

Also: Why would Harry have a job for Holly, a writer of Western fiction, in his penicillin-stealing-and-watering-down-and-selling-it-to-hospitals-to-give-to-kids scheme? What use could he have been to Harry? He didn’t even speak German.

Maybe Harry intended Holly to be his substitute in the grave before a more convenient soul came along. It could also be that Harry intended to co-opt Holly and use him as a mule to move drugs across the border. Holly is about as straight laced a person as they come, no one would look twice at him.

And why would Harry bring him over to Vienna just when he was planning to fake his own death?

My interpretation is the revelation of Harbin as the double agent occurred while Holly was in transit. So the whole plan of the faking of his death was impromptu thing.

And why would Harry think Holly would be so depraved as to help him kill kids for cash anyway?

I don’t think there was any intent for that to happen. I also don’t think that it was Harrys intent to kill kids, it was “ just one of those things”.

And since that scheme was finally blown, how is Harry making a buck now?

For people like Harry, as long as there are people with desires, there’s a way to make a buck. My guess is that if he got Penicillin, morphine was probably not too far behind. Its also mentioned that Harry seems to be working with the Soviets.

Shouldn’t Anna be at least a tad shocked when she finds out what her lover was doing? Shouldn’t she have an opinion on it?

She is and she does, but she rationalizes it away.

And shouldn’t she be upset that he staged his death, didn’t tell her, and ditched her instead? Wouldn’t that at least be something she’d discuss with Holly?

She’s got a lot to deal with. She’s happy as hell that he’s alive and by the time she finds out all the details, he’s dead for real. In the mean time, she’s trying to stay out of the hands of the Soviets. Her relationship with Holly is not substantial, he can do very little for her and she knows it. She reveals nothing to Holly of any value about anything.

When Holly first sees Harry in the doorway, why does Harry run? What was he doing in that doorway anyhow? Who was he waiting for if not Holly or Anna?

He runs because he needs to remain in control of the situation (Maybe he didn’t see me, I still don’t know if my friend is on my side, or if he’s working for Calloway, if I run it will just be one drunk man who thought he saw a dead one).

In my opinion, he was waiting for Anna, and was intercepted by Holly. It was not in Harrys plan to be revealed, but once done, it could not be undone.

The cat? Why does the cat love Harry? Seriously, in films animals love people because they sense those people have a good heart. Harry doesn’t have a good heart. He’s a heartless murderer who would sell a cat to an all-you-can-eat restaurant.

It’s a device. We need the cat to give away Harry’s position in the scene. I would have looked odd for a random cat to just walk up and start nuzzling Harry's leg. so a cat 'pre-story' was created.

If Harry doesn’t want to see Holly – he runs away after being spotted in the doorway --why does he change his mind the next day and meet with him?

Because the risk is there that Holly will go to Calloway and tell him what he saw. Harry doesn’t know that holly has already done this. He’s still hoping to co-opt his friend, and he’s also trying to find out what he knows, as a back door way of finding out how close Calloway is to him and his network.

Whatever else Harry may be, he’s a smart cookie. Surely he knows he hasn’t sold Holly on the logic of killing kids for cash based on his soliloquy on the Ferris wheel, when he explains the Camus-lite view of the world that he’s now adopted. Surely, he knows that Holly doesn’t agree that children are just black dots lacking any meaning and value, so killing them is no biggie. So why does Harry go to meet with Holly again? What would be the upside? And how could he not see the downside risk?

To Harry, Holly is not a person as much as an asset or a liability. Harry’s whole life has been based on making sure that assets are used and liabilities eliminated. He goes to meet Holly to eliminate him as he has become a liability. Harry’s contempt for Holly as the underclassmen from their school days keeps him from seeing that Holly has betrayed him to Calloway until its too late.

Was Harry the third man who helped carry the dead body – which I suppose was really Harbin – across the street?
Yes.

Did no one see the body before it was put into the coffin?
No. Yes this is a problem, but relax its just a movie. There’s no CSI Vienna in the 1940’s

At the start of the movie, we hear from a narrator – a cynical Brit in some way involved in the black market. He seems like an interesting character. Who is he? Why do we never hear from him again?

The device of the voiceover is to give an entrance to the story, its quite common in films of the era. If you turn down the sound, it doesn’t change the nature of the story at all, but to 1940s audiences it helps them get in tune with the film. This is a pretty shocking film for that audience, today we live with realism in our films as something we expect and desire, but in that time, it is expected for films to not be “too real” as the viewing audience of that time found it distasteful to have a film presented as so close to reality. Movie audiences of that era are going to the movies to get away from reality, not get a close up view of what they just stepped out of.

Posted @ October 16, 2004 08:58 PM | Movie Reviews | Comments (2)