Apocalypse: World War One (2013)

   
  Apocalypse: World War One (2013) A series of one hour documentaries made by cobbling together contemporary movie footage to illustrate the story of the Great War. The footage has been digitally enhanced as much as possible, including adding colour and sound. The result is a pretty good account of the war as it unfolded, with emphasis on the mistakes that guaranteed both horrifically stupid slaughter and a continuation of the conflicts in another Great War a generation later, as well as the many local and not so local horrors that still bedevil international politics in our own time. A good introduction to the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, in other words. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it in a middle- or high-school history class.
     The story overall is depressing: 8 million civilians and 4 million soldiers died, as best as can be estimated. Worse, it’s clear that the war began and was continued because a bunch of mostly old men thought they could realise their dreams of empire. Or more accurately, so that they could validate the illusions of their own importance. When people justified their actions by referring to their country's “legitimate” interests, or its “rightful” place among the nations, they were really talking about their egos. Schoolyard politics is all it really was: boys play these games and grow out of them, but the emperors and others of their class did not.
     Worst of these was Kaiser Wilhelm II, a classic example of the Paranoid Ineffectual Male, who believes that everyone is out to diss him, and compensates by trying blow them all up. The glory and honour that these wimps were pursuing was at bottom their fear that others in their circle of idjits would not “respect” them, ie, acknowledge that they were superior. Which of course they weren’t, and they knew it, so they tried to prove their superiority by going to war. The same insane value set underlies calling murderous Alexander of Macedonia “the Great”.

      It’s significant that these people were either incapable of doing real productive work, or unwilling to do it. So they had no real purpose in life. If you neither make stuff that other people want, nor provide services that other people need, you are useless. Many are unable, and suffer terribly. But too many of the so-called ruling class were and are unwilling, and glory in their importantly non-productive life. That whole class of bully boys were useless.
     Unfortunately, too many of the rest of us buy into their insanity and agree to go kill each other to prop up those fragile egos. We also have fragile egos, a terrible need to validate our self image by seeing it reflected back to us in the fear and loathing of those whom we would oppress. It’s also significant that these people need to have fancy uniforms and “decorations” to prove that they are important. Anyone who needs that kind of crap needs psychiatric help.
     A good series, useful as a reminder of what humans are capable of when they surrender to a delusion. **½

Ian Stewart. Nature’s Numbers (1995)

     Ian Stewart. Nature’s Numbers (1995) A guide into the uses of mathematics, and a glance at how mathematics has changed as our understanding of the world around us has changed. Stewart doesn’t like the divide between applied and pure math, he points out that each prods the other into ever new insights. His exemplar is the calculus, a mathematics invented in order to deal with rates of change of rates of change, prompted by Newton’s insights into how things move. Newton’s model of motion was a new way of thinking about it. To formalise that he needed more math than was available to him, so he invented it. Leibniz invented it, too, using a different notation. Newton’s notation has won out, barely, because it’s somewhat easier to use.
     We now can’t get along without the calculus, which informs all our technology. I learned how to integrate and differentiate years ago, and can’t do it any more, But the way of thinking it taught me is with me still. That’s the enduring legacy of learning math that you won’t use: it changes the way you think, more precisely, it increases the ways you can think about the world. Since then, more new math has been developed.
     The book is also an attempt to change the average person’s notion that math is calculation, but that it’s about patterns. The kinds of patterns that math can deal with now may be called patterns of patterns. We can’t calculate the weather accurately beyond a few days, but we can say a good deal about what kind of patterns to expect. These patterns are the climate (Stewart doesn’t say this, I’m building on his insights). It’s the changing patterns of the weather that’s meant by “climate change”. And although we experience only weather, we also have an uneasy sense that the patterns of weather are changing. The climate models put numbers to these changes, telling us that while we may not have more rain, for example, the rain will fall less frequently and in smaller areas, so we will see more flooding. Thinking in terms of patterns of patterns is a way of dealing with many more variables than we can handle by thinking merely about patterns.
     A good book, but it lacks pictures. Stewart is a poet, he thinks in images, but many people (most?) need actual pictures to understand metaphors. Like some other popular science books, this requires some background. You have to be able to think mathematically, not merely arithmetically, in order to fully get Stewart’s theses. Nevertheless, I recommend it. **½

John Cunningham. The Tin Star (Collier’s, December 4, 1947)

John Cunningham.  The Tin Star (Collier’s, December 4, 1947) The short story adapted for High Noon. As often happens, the movie retains very little of the original. In this case only three pieces remain:  a) the basic situation, in which Jordan, a released murderer returns to revenge himself on Doane, the marshal who arrested him; b) the marshal’s fatalistic acceptance of the coming fight; and c) Jordan’s arrival on the train. The rest is different.

     Toby, the deputy, wants Doane to leave. Doane is a widower, and his first encounter with Jordan occurs at the cemetery. Toby kills Jordan’s brother before the final fight, and kills Jordan while Doane is dying. Doane does not look for a posse. There’s no back story beyond the fact that Doane arrested Jordan, and Jordan wasn’t hanged. Doane tells Toby that being a lawman is a thankless job, a plot and  character point that’s given to the retired marshal in High Noon. But the theme remains: A man cannot run away from a fight, and must risk his life in order to destroy evil. That’s the essence of chivalric romance.

     The story itself is little more than a sketch, focussing almost entirely on Doane, his arthritis, his age, his fatalism, written in the usual pulp style. It’s quite effective, a good example of the quick-bite type of short story that magazines published before TV began to provide this type of light-weight entertainment. That Zinneman and his writers were able to extract its essence, add plausible variations and additions, and create a classic Western, demonstrates that Hollywood craft could rise to the level of art.  **½

The story is no longer available online.

High Noon (1952)

     High Noon (1952) [D:Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Thomas Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, et al] This was the fourth or fifth time I’ve watched this movie, it gets better every time. The story is well known: Marshall Will Kane turns in his badge on his wedding day, but Frank Miller, whom he arrested for murder some years ago, has been pardoned, and is arriving on the noon train to get even with him. Kane takes back his badge, tries to assemble a posse, fails, and takes on Miller and his henchmen alone. His wife Amy opposes the violence, but returns instead of abandoning Kane, and kills one of the thugs. In the last scene, Will and Amy ride off on their buggy, with no farewell or other talk with the townspeople who have refused to help them. A stereotypical plot, but done so well that it feels fresh.
     Photography, pacing, acting, sound, are all excellent. Zinneman had a clear vision of what he wanted. Matching screen time to story time may seem like a trick, but it works: Kane has about an hour and a half to do his job. The set-up scenes are run under the titles, a method that was much imitated, but rarely so well done. The movie is near-perfect example of the genre. ****

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

     The Philadelphia Story (1940) [D: George Cukor. Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart et al] Tracy Lord (Hepburn) is about to remarry, this time to George Kittredge (John Howard), a stuffy up-from-the-ranks mid-level executive. Her ex C. K Haven (Grant)  arranges for Macaulay Connor (Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussy) of Spy magazine to pose as friends of Junior Lord and so get the story and the photos that will boost Spy’s circulation. The perfect mix of characters and situation for a successful rom-com, with elements of coming-of-age, social comedy, and satire of the tabloid business, which was beginning to morph into the rapacious sludge-dwellers that we love to detest.
     The movie is beautifully photographed (Joseph Ruttenberg). The editing is well done (Frank Sullivan), but the pace seems slow compared to current practice. The acting is near-perfect, a lovely mix of stereotype and playing against type. Stars have a difficult task: to provide what the audience expects without become mere cartoons. Grant, Hepburn, and Stewart deliver. The script is based on a play, which accounts for the throw-away one-liners, and the complex dialogue. This is one of the few movies that you have to listen to as well as watch.
     The character actors show why Hollywood could churn out well-crafted movies week after week: they supply the base on which the stars are built. A director who knows how to use them will make a better movie. Cukor knows how to use all his cast. The movie is usually classed as comedy of manners, but it’s more than that. Cukor is sometimes under-rated because he specialised in these movies designed for a primarily female audience. I like them, perhaps because I read a lot of women’s fiction in my mother’s magazines, so I can recognise an above average example when I see it. This is definitely above average. Recommended. ***½

Margaret MacMillan. The War that Ended Peace (2013)

      Margaret MacMillan. The War that Ended Peace (2013) Wow! A massive book, yet it reads easily, and at the end I felt I had both a good overview of how the First World War happened, and why. Individual choices and decisions, or refusal to make decisions, were a major factor in triggering the slide into war. And it was slide: a few key decisions changed circumstances so that it became nearly impossible to stop.
     My take-aways:
     The Tsar, Wilhelm II, and Franz-Josef were unfit to govern. They were weak men, who because of the autocratic, absolutist governance perforce had to rely on their advisers. None of them had much of sense of how the world works. All three allowed petulance and vanity to interfere with their appointments of those advisers and their acceptance of the advice. The governance of their states meant that they had the final word, which guaranteed that rivalries between advisers could and did result in a choice of extremes. Hence the impossible ultimatum sent to Serbia, which essentially demanded that a sovereign state give up its independence and become a mere province of another state.
     Worse, these men’s sense of their own life’s purpose appears to have amounted to little more than to maintain their roles, roles that were defined in terms of their socio-political status and the honour and glory of their realms. They were playing a game of status as boys do, as street gangs do, with their desperate focus on reputation. Reputation is what you think other people think of you, so it’s always more or less of a delusion. To someone who values reputation over-much, appearance is more important than reality.  One consequence is that these men tended to see compromise as a diminution of their cred. Diplomacy became more and more a game of bluff and counterbluff.
     The British were no better. George V was a constitutional monarch, so he could not decide. But all that meant was that the decisions devolved on the members of the Cabinet, which in practice meant that the strongest personalities carried the day. These men also saw their role as maintaining the status of Great Britain, of upholding the glory and honour of the Empire. They shied away from direct involvement in Europe, and so did not urge the kind of conference that might have let everyone come out of the mess with their “honour” more or less intact.
     Another factor was mutual suspicion. It seems crazy, but the rulers and governors of the European powers thought in terms of stealing each others resources. That’s not the language they used of course, but theft is what demands for “compensation”, threats of acquiring chunks of border lands, and the deal-making around “spheres of influence” and colonies amounted to. The sense of entitlement behind this attitude is gobsmackingly awful. The arms race of the time reflected this suspicion: if you couldn’t defend yourself, you might lose land, people, resources, colonies.
     Public opinion, which had been mobilised to support government aims in the 1800s (most notably in the Franco-Prussian war), became ever more important. Notions of national prestige mattered even more to ordinary folk than to their masters, who were members of a highly intermarried, culturally integrated, and international class. For them, their personal status and reputation mattered. For the people they ruled "national honour" was invoked. Governments discovered that once they had used national prestige as a means of unifying their realms, they could not turn it off.
      If a general conclusion is possible, it comes to this: Human beings are rarely capable of transcending their times. All the players made the same assumptions about politics and power, about international relations, about status, rank, and entitlement. Their language shows that few of the players ever questioned or analysed those assumptions; most were not even aware of them. Personal ambitions and vanities floated on these implicit ideas like froth on the sea. Very few had sufficient imagination to grasp what a catastrophe a modern war would be, and they were minor figures with little influence, precisely because they had the sense and sensibility to reflect on the consequences of their actions. Most of the planners simply took for granted that war was a natural condition of humankind (some preachers even thought of it as imposed by God), and therefore that their work of planning for it and using it to back up diplomacy was merely their duty. Then as now, lack of imagination was a recommendation for promotion.
      A very good book. Highly recommended. ****

The Taming of the Shrew. At Freewill Shakespeare, Edmonton.

 

     The Taming of the Shrew. At Freewill Shakespeare, Edmonton. [D: Marianne Copithorne. With Mary Hulbert, James MacDonald et al] Ah, TTotS, a play that will annoy some part of the audience no matter how it’s done. The Freewill Shakespeare Company opted for farce, irony, modernising the mise en scene, and a hefty reminder of the Commedia dell’Arte heritage of the play. This worked quite well, although the visuals were sometimes overdone.
     The crucial question about this play is how to imagine Katherine the Shrew and Petruchio the fortune hunter. It’s clear enough that she behaves as she does because she thinks she’s unlovable. Her sister, who could a keep a pound of butter cooling in her mouth, is Daddy’s Darling, and a manipulative little bitch. How can Katherine compete with that? She can’t, so she overacts the reputation imposed on her.
     Petruchio, who decides that the rich dowry that comes with Katherine is worth working for, discovers almost immediately that Katherine’s unwillingness to conform to social expectations matches his own. All he has to do is to tame her, and convince her that he loves her despite her rage. There are enough hints in the text for an imaginative director to emphasise these aspects of character and plot, and Copithorne IMO succeeds. She has a clear vision of what she wants, both in the staging of the play as a farce, and in the subtext about courtship, love and marriage that informs the rather silly plot.
     The actors bring out the subtext nicely. We see from the first kiss that Katherine and Petruchio are attracted to each other almost despite themselves. By the time we see Katherine address the old man on the road as a fair young damsel, we intuit that she is playing a game, and furthermore that Petruchio knows it. In the final speech, where she describes the proper relationship between husband and wife, we see that she understands her own words doubly. On the one hand, given the social and economic realities of the time, a wife was utterly dependent on her husband. On the other hand, she has come to respect Petruchio as her equal, which he acknowledges by kneeling before her. We know that the practicalities of household and estate management will not interfere with their enjoyment of each other.
     Set changes were nicely done, music was well chosen, incidental business was both suitable and well-done, the company displayed excellent ensemble acting, all in all a very pleasant evening at the theatre. Recommended. ***½