Dishonored Lady (1947)

     Dishonored Lady (1947) [D: Robert Stevenson. Hedy Lamarr, Dennis O’Keefe, John Loder] A soaper, as these movies came to be known. Lamarr plays a playgirl fashion magazine art-editor whose empty life leads to a nervous breakdown. A psychiatrist suggests complete withdrawal from the glitzy life in order to rediscover her true womanhood (although it’s not put as bluntly as that). She does so, takes up painting again, meets a young post-doc (O’Keefe) doing research on blood, does the illustrations for him, and of course they fall in love.
     A lecherous old flame (Loder) picks her up when she returns to New York to help out her successor, and takes her to his place. But before any further compromising behavior can occur, the lecher’s associate arrives, there’s a dispute about missing jewelry, and Loder is murdered. But Lamarr has already left. Of course she is wrongfully arrested and tried, which puts the kibosh on her romance with O’Keefe, but he figures out the truth and gets the bad guy. Lamarr, still feeling guilty over her hoydenish past, flees, but O’Keefe catches up to her at the airport, clinch, and fade-out to happily ever after.
     The plot is not quite as ludicrous as this summary might imply, both the writing and the acting make the characters plausible enough, and with the exception of the murderer, they are nice enough. What 70-odd years have done is change the both the psychological theory and the mores that explain and govern our lives. It’s in the light of those explicit and implicit assumptions about human nature that we read this as a thoroughly dated movie. But we’d better not feel too superior about it. In every age popular fiction rests on the world-view of the day, and the 2010s will no doubt seem just as ludicrous to our descendants as the 1940s seem to us.
     A workmanlike piece of film making, worth a look, especially if you like Lamarr.  **

Simon Schama. History of Britain II: The Wars of the British 1603-1776 (2001)

     Simon Schama. History of Britain II: The Wars of the British 1603-1776 (2001) A shorter time-span, a fatter book. Schama has lots more sources to work with than for Volume I, and here and there yields to the temptation to pile on the details. This makes the arc of the plot harder to follow. Schama shows that the civil wars of the 1600s led fairly directly to the constitutional reforms that gave us a monarch subject to law, and a sovereign Parliament.
     The British Parliamentary system separates the roles and powers of Head of State and the Head of Government. It took three centuries for that system to reach its present form, Schama interrupts his story at the beginning of the American Revolution, when Americans still insisted that they were British, and so were entitled to all the rights and privileges of the British in the home-country. It was this demand for political and economic equality with Britain that was refused by Westminster (with a strong support from the King, who still had an active role in government). It’s interesting to speculate on the consequences of that equality being recognised. Would we now have a Queen residing in Baltimore, perhaps?
     As in Volume 1, Schama shows that whatever the social and economic pressures on the decision makers, they did have decisions to make, and those decisions did determine the next round of problems to solve. I think he could have contrasted the paths taken more strongly with the alternatives and analysed why they weren’t taken. We do, after all, make choices according to the values we take for granted. It’s those values, and even more the assumptions about human (and non-human) nature that guide the evaluation of choices, and it’s in that sense that “historical currents” determine history. But the results always include the unpredictable. Understanding where decisions went wrong comes slowly, sometimes two or three generations later, by which time a new set of unconscious assumptions guide the new decision makers.
     In short, we can’t win. But we can muddle through, as Schama’s tale shows. The Cromwellian revolution, the Stuart Restoration, the installation of  the houses of Orange and Hanover, were reactions to immediate problems seen in the light (or rather, shadows) cast by the past, made more complex and contingent by the personal desires and feuds of the actors. They were not actions taken as part of a long-range program of liberalisation, although that was, in the end, their main effect. The Whigs’ reading of British history as steady progress towards personal and economic freedom was right after all, albeit as often despite the actors' explicit wishes as because of them.
     A good read. ***

Gordon Snell & Aislin. Yes! Even More Canadians (2000)

     Gordon Snell & Aislin. Yes! Even More Canadians (2000) Snell writes the verse, Aislin does the portraits, the result is a mildly amusing collection.  I nibbled at it over a couple of days, recommended for anyone who wants a painless intro the list of the good, great and scoundrels of our history. But this is a “gift book”, the kind of confection put together for Christmas and birthdays. What do you give to the one  who, you know well enough to give gift, but not well enough? This is book is safe, it’s educational, patriotic, amusing, and doesn’t give offense to anyone. It’s nicely made, too. **

Der Untergang (Downfall) (2004)

    Der Untergang (Downfall) (2004) [D: Oliver Hirschbiegel. Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara]

       A docudrama recreating the last days of Hitler in the bunker under the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, focussing on and based on the memoirs of Traudl Jung, his last secretary, but also using all available documentary evidence to present life within the bunker and in Berlin. The movie has the ring of truth.
      What is clear enough is that people act within the roles and structures they inhabit. The staff follow and obey Hitler partly from habit, partly from personal loyalty, partly because of ideological conviction, and even from a kind of fascinated pity. The reaction to the impending doom varies with these motivations. As one might expect, there is no shortage of rats leaving a sinking ship, of people realising that there is no post-war role for them, and of people continuing to live in the fantasies of war and conquest.
      None was more in the grip of fantasy than Hitler himself, who according to the record rarely showed awareness of what was actually happening, or gave signs that he understood his responsibility for the catastrophe. It is in this denial of reality, of clinging to his crazy vision, that Hitler is paradoxically most human, and that is how Ganz plays him. This has caused criticism of Hitler being presented as too human, as weak and fragile and deserving of pity. I think this criticism is misplaced, or rather, that it comes from a desire to deny that Hitler is well within the range of human possibilities, and to see him instead as some kind demonic aberration. But he was merely a man who tried to make his fantasies real, and in failing to do so he caused the death of 50,000,000 people.
      Hitler was not merely fundamentally too stupid to achieve his ambitions, he was unable to accept his own incompetence. Many people believe Hitler had a monstrous ego, but I think he suffered from a pathetically weak one. He needed the fantasies of supreme power and competence in order to survive. His rage at what he saw as personal betrayals was at bottom fear that others saw that he was an empty shell, a null. His skill consisted in convincing other people that he indeed could wield supreme power, and that conviction reflected back to him was what sustained him.
    

Ganz as Hitler

When objective evidence showed up his incompetence, Hitler scrabbled all the more desperately to maintain his fantasy. For too long he succeeded, and the puzzle is why. I think that a large part was his followers’ distrust of each other. They weren’t so much afraid of what Hitler could or would do if they asserted independence, but of what their colleagues might do, if only to eliminate rivals for power. And all of them were afraid of the lower cadres, the ordinary soldiers who were in the habit of following orders. Some could see no way out, and stumbled towards the end, doing their work as best they could. Put that stew of feelings, fears, beliefs, attitudes and habits together, and we can see how the power structure in the bunker lasted until Hitler put a bullet through his head. That’s what the movie shows, and in showing this, it reminds us that character and personality always make a difference .
     This is a depressing movie in many ways, but I think it’s essential viewing. Well done in all respects. ****

Update 2020 05 05: According to the German news bulletin announcing Hitler's death, he "fell" while fighting to protect the German people from Bolshevism. Another fantasy, designed to hide the truth of Hitler's cowardly suicide.

Ladies of the Chorus (1948)

    Ladies of the Chorus (1948) [D: Phil Karlson. Adele Jergens, Marilyn Monroe, Rand Brooks] A mother (Jergens) and daughter (Monroe) are both members of a chorus line. A wealthy young man sees the daughter, falls in love, and offers marriage. The mother objects on grounds of class, but a weekend at the young man’s home, where his mother reveals herself as a thoroughgoing democrat and romantic, clears up all obstacles, and everything comes up roses, as they say.

    The acting is competent, the movie-making also. This is the kind of double-bill filler that Hollywood churned out by the thousands, or so it seems. Later, the movie-makers would apply the same techniques for making content for TV from sitcoms to dramas. A pleasant hour of entertainment, a cut or two above the average for this genre. **½

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004)

     Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004) [D: Simon Cellan Jones. Rupert Everett, Ian Hart] Written by Allan Cubitt, “based on” a story by Doyle, this is a good entry in the Holmes adaptations. The Doyle connection is the use of twins, but other than that, the story is original, and like many extensions of the Doyle canon, goes its own way. The test of its success is not faithfulness to the originals but plausibility of characters and setting. I think this aspect was well done.
     After the series with Simon Brett, it was difficult to create a plausible variation on Holmes. This one is softer and moodier, with hints of unfulfilled desires and deeper neuroses than Doyle’s character. The story itself, set in Edwardian England, uses new psychological insights to construct both Holmes’s character and the crime, which is serial killing. As a crime puzzle, the plot is so-so, relying on finger-printing and the insights of Watson’s fiancée, an American psychiatrist. Lestrade (played by Neil Dudgeon) is an up-to-date copper, his only failing is his bafflement when faced by perverse motivations for crime. Watson is more assertive and skilled as Holmes’s sidekick and assistant, and Holmes’s addiction both slows him down and puts him in a dream state that enables access to his subconscious insights. He’s not the cold, clear logic engine that Doyle’s admirers profess to see, and makes an almost lethal mistake.
     The online reviews are generally either positive or negative. Look on IMDb if you want to see the range of opinions.
     Overall, I liked this movie. It lacks the nervous energy of the Simon Brett versions, and the pace and complexity of the Cumberbatch ones. But it’s worth a look by anyone who likes Holmes. I give it **½.

Stephen W. Hawking. The Theory of Everything (2002)

     Stephen W. Hawking. The Theory of Everything (2002) Originally published as The Cambridge Lectures: Life Works in 1996. The title is a sly joke: Hawking is not offering a grand unified theory, but an  account of “The Origin and Fate of the Universe”.
     There have been a few advances or improvements in that account since he wrote it. There’s now definite evidence of the Higgs boson, which will add to the detail of the first few femtoseconds of the Universe’s existence. Some progress has been made in deducing the state of the universe while it was still a dense opaque soup of elementary particles and energy quanta, before it became transparent. The notion of a singularity at the inception of time as we know it is being modified: it may be sensible to talk of a time before our universe’s expansion from almost nothing, but any information from that time is inaccessible. But these are details: the grand picture is the same now as it has been for a couple of decades: our universe (or our bit of it) began in an unimaginably dense region which expanded very rapidly in a few seconds, and has been expanding much more slowly ever since. It will likely continue to expand “forever”,  which makes one think about what that term may mean.
      Hawking writes concisely, his disability forces him to choose his words carefully. He has a lovely sly sense of humour, noticing sideways and loopy connections between what he’s saying about abstract models and the actual life we live. It feels good to think that he’s managed to remain cheerful despite the ravages of ALS.
     Cosmology is an iffy science. It’s essentially speculative. Models are proposed, they are massaged until they produce some prediction, and the experimentalists and observers look for matches. Matches winnow the number of candidates, and may suggest new ones. Since sometime around the 1970s, cosmologists have included quantum physics (QP) in their models, Hawking chief among them. (He’s very careful to give credit where it’s due, and to admit his errors and oversights). Including QP raises some questions.
     There is a temptation to interpret models as pictures of reality, to use them as justifications of claims about what reality is. But QP is notorious for prompting incompatible or metaphysically absurd interpretations. Is our universe one among hugely many in a multiverse? Is the number of universes increasing because random bubbles in space-time appear and expand, or do human choices have something to do with it? There is no way, absent more complete models, to arbitrate between the answers. But I doubt that more complete models will do away with such interpretations. The reason is the way physicists talk about reality.
      What many physicists say about what QP tells us about “reality” suggests to me that they forget that they are talking about models. A scientific theory is a model of reality, it’s not reality. The experimenter tries to simplify the interaction as much as possible, on the assumption is that simplification will reveal some essential properties of the observed object. And that is certainly the case. But there is an additional assumption: that an object is some kind of stable combination of its properties. I think this is a misleading assumption. All we can know of any object is our interactions with it. The uncertainties intrinsic to QP are uncertainties about what we are able to know about those interactions. To put it bluntly: Observations are interactions. An object is the history of our interactions with it.
     For example, I don’t think it makes sense to say that photons are somehow both waves and particles, some weird combination of what we see on the surface of a pond and what we see on the surface of a billiard table. It does make sense to say that their behavior is like that of a wave or that of a particle, depending on how we interact with them. They may even exhibit both behaviours in some situations.  Someone has even invented the term “wavicle”, kinda cute. It’s that dual behaviour which persuades some people that photons are somehow both wave and particle.
     But it doesn’t persuade me. I’d rather say that we can’t imagine an object that is both wave and particle, the best we can do is use wave and particle mathematics to describe and predict the behaviour of photons. Just what a photon is in and of itself is a meaningless question.  “Wavicle” is a gap-filling belief.
     The same can be said of our theories of the universe. Mathematics is a wonderfully precise language for describing and predicting our interactions with the world. But to think that these descriptions are anything more than that is I think a  delusion.
     Read Hawking’s book. It’s a bit outdated, but it’s an easy read for anyone who’s kept up with cosmology, and a not too difficult introduction for the newcomer. It lacks diagrams, a minor fault. ***½