Ahoy, Proletarian Masses!

Film: Bronenosets Potyomkin (The Battleship Potemkin)
Format: DVD from Bettendorf Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.


Sometimes, you can tell the where and when of a film within the first few moments of footage. I commented earlier, for instance, that Amelie could only be a French movie, and I stand by that assessment. In this case, Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potyomkin is undeniably Russian, and undeniably filmed within a decade of the Russian Revolution.

The movie begins with a battleship heading home after defeat in the Sino-Russian War. What we discover immediately is that the ship is at war with itself. The officers of the ship are brutal, petty, angry, and lord their power over the enlisted men. This happens immediately in the film when an officer beats a young sailor for hanging partway out of his hammock. The next day, the men complain about the quality of the meat they are being forced to eat.

We’re given a close-up of the meat through the pince-nez of the medical officer, and the meat is crawling with worms. The officer, however, states that the meat isn’t rotten, but merely infested with maggots, which can be rinsed out with brine. Based on the quality of the meat, some of the men refused to eat the borscht. Based on this, a sailor named Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) believes that the men are being treated worse than Russian POWs in Japanese camps. Insurrection is mounting.

Soon, all hands are called to the deck, and the captain calls out anyone who refused to eat the borscht. A small group is left standing alone, and, due to their insubordination at the refusal of food, they are going to be executed by firing squad. A group of guards are brought on deck and the condemned are covered in canvas to make the shooting of them easier for the troops. Additionally, a Russian Orthodox cleric tells the men under the canvas to repent.

This is where the action changes abruptly—the troops don’t want to shoot their shipmates. Vakulinchuk tells the men with the guns to ignore their orders, and they do. Mutiny takes hold of the men on the ship, and they rebel, tossing officers into the sea and taking control of the ship. While this takes place, the priest is knocked down a staircase and pretends to be dead, and an officer gets hold of a gun and shoots Vakulinchuk in the back of the head, making the man who started the revolt its first martyr.

Now under the control of the rank-and-file, the Potyomkin sails into Odessa. Vakulinchuk’s body is placed in a tent on the docks under a sign that says (depending on the translation) either “for a spoonful of borscht” or “for a bowl of soup.” The tragic death of the rebel leader infects the people of Odessa, who now wish to support the men of the rebellious battleship. This leads to a classic confrontation between the citizens of Odessa and the Cossacks, who attack down the Odessa steps with guns blazing. The Potyomkin sails off, leading to another confrontation, this time with the bulk of the Russian Navy.

Potyomkin is thought of as Eisenstein’s masterpiece. I can’t as yet speak to that, since my Eisenstein vocabulary is extremely limited. It is, like most silent films, highly stylized. There are great moments throughout, but it is the scene on the Odessa steps that is rightfully the most famous. What is fascinating to me is not the staging or the action here, but the evidence that the film vocabulary has changed dramatically since Eisenstein filmed this. For a modern audience, it’s evident that this scene could not have happened as filmed unless the steps in question are about a mile high. People run down the stairs en masse over and over, and yet there are still people at the top, far above the Cossacks chasing them.

This isn’t a complaint, but an observation. When Eisenstein made Potyomkin, his audience was not nearly as versed in film as a modern audience and expectations were dramatically different. What a modern audience notices about a sequence like this is not what an audience in the 1920s would have seen.

The emotional center of the film is its firm belief in the proletarian sailors and people of Odessa. The officers on the ship are uniformly cruel, stupid, arrogant, and sadistic. The same is true of the Cossacks, who shoot children and stomp on the bodies of the fallen. The sailors themselves are downtrodden, but filled with revolutionary spirit. In short, Bronenosets Potyomkin is a victory of the proletarian masses over their bourgeoisie masters. The impotence of the church (Marx's opiate of the masses) as represented by the cleric is pure communist dogma. Looked at in this light, it comes as no shock that the film was made a year or so after the death of Vladimir Lenin.

Worth watching? Yep, if only for the cinematic history wrapped up in its short running time. This is not a movie to watch for the compelling story, no matter how compelling you find the story. This is a film that has been copied and studied for years—you’ll see pieces of its composition, design, and full scenes in other films everywhere you look.

Why to watch Bronenosets Potyomkin: A large chunk of cinematic style started here.
Why not to watch: Hooray for communism!

Not-So-Mellow Melodrama

Film: The Night of the Hunter
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.


Charles Laughton only directed a single film in his career, and was so disappointed with the critical and commercial response to it that he decided to never direct another one. His one movie was The Night of the Hunter, a movie that, since its initial poor reception has been thought of as one of the greatest American films of any decade, let alone of the 1950s.

The film concerns the person of Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a man who at least claims to be a preacher, but he is very much unlike any other. Powell is a particular type of Bluebeard—he finds widows with a little bit of money, kills them off, takes the cash, and moves on to the next town. It’s after one of these incidents that Powell is detained by the police for driving in a stolen car and thrown into the pen.

While in jail, Powell is put into the same cell as Ben Harper (Peter Graves), a man who stole $10,000 and killed two men so that his own children wouldn’t starve. Harper is going to hang for his crime, and Powell, who does appear to believe that he’s preaching some word of the Lord, thinks that he’s been lead to this place for a purpose--$10,000 missing and, as he says, a widow in the making.

Released from prison, Powell makes his way to Harper’s hometown, chats up Harper’s widow Willa (Shelley Winters), eventually marrying her, always with an eye toward finding the money. Powell has it in his head that the children, John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), know where the money is, and he’ll stop at nothing to find it. So, while he convinces the townspeople of his own piety, he plots for his own devious and nefarious ends.

Eventually, pushed to desperation, Harry takes his trusty switchblade to Willa, pushing her and her car into the nearby river, a scene that is still effective in its combination of horror and beauty. Willa, sitting in the car under the water, her hair streaming in the current, looks as if she could be driving down a country lane, aside from the waving water weeds. The children run, taking a boat down river, and finding shelter with Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish, who came out of semi-retirement for the role). Powell follows, leading to a culminating confrontation between preacher, kindly old woman, and the running children.

The Night of the Hunter is a melodrama in the truest sense. The children, and especially Rachel Cooper, represent goodness while Harry Powell in the guise of a church man is the embodiment of evil. Like a classic melodrama, there are musical interludes as well. The most interesting is the song Pearl sings as the children float down river, but the more frequent and more malevolent is the one Powell sings as the he chases the children. It is also melodrama in that the movie has a surreal quality to it--we are dealing with an idealized world rather than anything based in reality. There is a dream-like quality to many of the scenes, which often act as visual set-pieces more than they do movie scenes.

Melodrama, of course, has a negative connotation, which is unfortunate here. This is an effective melodrama, one with real menace and real evil. A typical melodramatic villain is something to boo and hiss at; Harry Powell is a true evil presence, a malevolent force with which to be contended. Powell’s most distinguishing characteristic, aside from his deep and resonant voice and preacher’s hat, are the tattoos on his fingers. On his left hand is the word “HATE”; the right holds “LOVE.”

The movie is held together by the performance of Mitchum, who is one of the great screen villains in cinematic history. Lillian Gish is equally memorable as the resolute Rachel Cooper who refuses to let anything happen to the children in her charge.

Where the movie fails is in the performance of the two children as well as Ruby (Gloria Castillo), the oldest of Rachel’s charges. While John’s performance has some skill, he often has an odd smile on his face that doesn’t always seem appropriate for the moment. Pearl is a completely different story. She, quite frankly, looks like a kewpie doll mated with a newt, and is as wooden as they come.

I also have issues with some of the action of the film. Despite the way he treats the kids, despite everything she knows, Pearl still clings to Powell throughout, as does Ruby. He buys her an ice cream, and suddenly, the girl is infatuated with Powell and, despite the fact that he’s threatening her family with a knife, she still walks around mooning over him—until he leaves the scene and she acts like she never met the man. The film falls apart on me at the end—a number of things happen with the angry mob, the group of Rachel’s children, and the movement of Powell that just feel odd to me, like that part of the script was filmed in the middle of a rewrite, or was two halves of two different edits.

I like The Night of the Hunter, but I like it based not on the story as a whole, but on the role that Mitchum was given and the incredible strength of his performance. It almost makes me wish that the film could have been rewritten to remove the children and pit him instead against Shelley Winters for the length of the film.

Why to watch The Night of the Hunter: Robert Mitchum is a scary mo-fo.
Why not to watch: Pearl is out-acted by her rag doll.

Silent Evil

Film: Haxan
Format: Internet video on laptop.


So far, while writing these blog entries, I have not referred to the book(s) that list the films in any respect except for the list of the films themselves. Today, however, I find myself completely nonplussed by the film I have selected to watch. I’m certain this will happen again as I make my way through this list, but I was hoping that I might make it a little further than the middle of the second full week to be so completely stumped by a cinematic offering.

Haxan (there should be an umlaut over the first “a,” but I’m not that handy with HTML coding) is a film from the silent era, and was, I’m certain, viewed because of its dark subject matter. The film concerns itself with witches and with the devil, and there are frequent appearances throughout of a man in devil’s garb—pretty effective costuming for the time in which the film was made. The film posits that so strong was the belief in the devil during the Middle Ages that Ol’ Splitfoot became real, and showed up to menace people and turn them to evil. Housewives engage in the silent-era equivalent of mashing with the devil while husbands sleep on blissfully.

Not just the subject matter is dark here—the film itself is frequently dyed various colors, usually sepia or blue, to give it something of an otherworldly feel. The film also uses a number of primitive, rudimentary camera tricks—superimposing one image with another, having a figure float or vanish through camera trickery—which were no doubt innovative for their time.

It’s actually difficult to pin down what Haxan is. The film begins as a documentary, with information on what may have caused people to believe in witches in the first place. A significant amount of the movie contains no live action, but stills, often with the “narrator” in the form of printed words lecturing on various aspects of ancient belief. Frequently, enhancing the lecture-like quality of the film, a pointer is used to highlight specific aspects of the stills. From there, it turns into more of a horror film, with people being taken possession of by Old Nick, stealing corpses, and being victims of the Inquisition.

In short, Haxan comes across very much like the silent equivalent of the modern “torture porn” films like Saw and Hostel. It obviously, because of when it was made, doesn’t go nearly as far as those films, but that’s the direction the film wants to head. It’s filled with prurience, hints of sex and lots and lots of torture and pain. Of all these scenes, the most interesting is the part where one monk flogs another--I leave you to make your own S&M monk commentary; mine is better left unsaid.

I can’t say I love this movie. While it undoubtedly caused a lot of tongues to wag back in the day, I dare say it has lost its power to shock, frighten or otherwise do much more than serve as a historical piece to see where not only documentaries, but horror movies came from. That said, the scene of the old woman giving birth to demons is pretty interesting. It’s also worth seeing for the at-the-time groundbreaking effects of witches flying through the air over houses. Sure, we can see the equivalent of the wires today, but imagine the fear in the average viewer 90 years ago. Watched in that context, Haxan is something special.

Why to watch Haxan: You can lord it over people that you’ve seen one of the weirdest silent movies ever made.
Why not to watch: It’s less interesting than its premise.

Something is Wrong in Santa Mira

Film: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.


There are stories out there that have become such a part of the consciousness of the country or the world that it’s difficult to tell where they started. For instance, the current rage with zombies would not have started without the help of George Romero in the late 1960s. Before Night of the Living Dead, a zombie was something created by a voodoo priest, not a ghoul that wants to eat people. Romero rewrote that bit of the culture, and nevermore will it switch back.

Such a story is Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I probably hear a reference to “pod people” at least once a month, and every one of those references stem from this one point. If you haven’t seen this movie, you likely still know what is meant by that particular reference, so strong is the basic story embedded in the culture.

The story involves the small town of Santa Mira, California, and a disturbing visitor from outer space. Doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) has been recalled from a medical convention by his nurse. It appears that there is a rash of strange occurrences in Santa Mira; a number of people believe that their relatives are actually imposters.

Bennell is also reacquainted with an old flame, Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter). The two of them visit Becky’s cousin, who is convinced that her Uncle Ira is not really himself. A quick examination later, and Miles and Becky are convinced this is merely a passing thing. The two of them, both recently divorced from marriages gone bad, decide to have dinner together, but are interrupted almost immediately by an emergency phone call. Jack (King Donovan), a local writer, needs Miles’s help.

Jack shows Miles and Becky a body that Jack found in his house. The body, while dead, looks unlike any other body they have ever seen—it looks unused, essentially, and when Miles tries to take fingerprints, they discover the body has none. While the body has no real character, it looks vaguely like Jack, and it is roughly his height and weight.

That night, Jack’s wife Theodora (Carolyn Jones) discovers that the body looks more than a little like her husband, down to a fresh cut on the hand. The pair race to find Miles, who investigates Becky’s house, discovering another partially-formed body, this one looking like Becky.

What has happened, they discover, is that alien pods have landed in a local farmer’s field. These pods can take on the likeness of people, essentially becoming them in all but emotions. They have the same memories as the people they duplicate, they have the same speech patterns, the same scars, and all, but they are essentially emotionless. The changeover happens when the victim goes to sleep; upon waking up, the newly awakened pod person is established as the old identity, while the original human being simply vanishes.

Fun stuff. It becomes even more fun with the group of four discover new pods in the back of Miles’s house, and they slowly come to realize that the entire town has been podified before them.

It’s easy to compare this movie to the McCarthy era (the Joe McCarthy era, not the Kevin McCarthy one) and find parallels. The pod people look like us, but are emotionless and cold, and every one of them is essentially exactly the same (just like Commies!). Or, the pod people allow no deviation of thought and can have no one thinking against them (just like McCarthy!). The author of the original Collier’s serial, Jack Finney, claims that there was no intent to comment on McCarthy in either way, a comment echoed by director Don Siegel. Still, it’s impossible not to see it in the film.

I’ve read the book the movie was based on, and while the film is fairly accurate, it’s also considerably different in places. For one thing, oddly, the film has much more of a downer ending than the book, a rarity in Hollywood. The ending here is in many ways more effective. The original ending consisted of Dr. Bennell running down the middle of the highway screaming “They’re here! You’re next!” and the revamped ending is not much brighter. In the book, things are considerably happier when the equivalent of the curtain closes.

I remember watching this as a kid. It’s probably the first time I was ever aware of being frightened from watching a movie, and it’s still a film that has the ability to be unnerving. It’s a worthy watch, and the first remake (the one from the 1970s) is worth watching as well. Skip the 90s and 00s versions of it, though, and stick with the ones that actually have something to say.

Why to watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers: It’s the first version of a classic societal trope, and it’s damn good.
Why not to watch: You freak out easily.

Is Perfection Possible?

Film: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain (Amelie)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library collection on laptop.
















Is it possible to love a character in a film? Or to at least love the idea of a character? I ask, and it’s a question anyone who has ever seen Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amelie Poulain would understand immediately, and would know immediately that I’m asking about the title character.

This film is unlike anything I’ve seen before, a creation of joy, heart, and magic unlike anything else that’s out there. It’s French, making it mildly exotic but not out of reach, deals frankly and entertainingly with sex, but also, to use the French term, has such an unmistakable joie de vivre that it is impossible not to smile and not to enjoy it.

Amelie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is a young girl born in Paris in the early 1970s. Her father is a doctor, and is cold and distant. While little Amelie only wants a hug from her daddy, he refuses physical contact except for once a month when he gives her an examination. This physical contact excites her so much that her heart races, convincing her father that she has a heart condition. Amelie’s mother is a neurotic and is killed one day while walking out of Notre Dame cathedral when a suicide falls on her from the church roof.

Amelie eventually moves away from home and gets a job in a little café called The Two Windmills. Rather than running after romantic attachments, she is solitary, and takes pleasure in the simple things in life, like cracking the surface of a crème brulee with a teaspoon and skipping flat stones. Her neighbors and coworkers are arguably as neurotic as her mother was. The woman at the tobacco counter, for instance, is a hypochondriac; her boss is an ex horse rider in a circus; another coworker is haunted by her ex, who sits in the café and mutters into a tape recorder every time he believes another man shows interest in her; a man in her building has exceedingly brittle bones, and paints a copy of the same Renoir painting every year.

On the day Princess Diana is killed, Amelie drops the top to a bottle in her bathroom. It dislodges a tile in the wall, and when she pulls the tile away, she discovers a small box filled with little toys, a hidden treasure trove of a young boy who lived in the apartment years before. Amelie decides to track him down and return the box to him, determining that if he is touched by the gesture, she’ll devote herself to making other people happy.

The man, of course, has mixed feelings, discovering his childhood again, but reveals that he has lost contact with his daughter, who recently had a son. Rediscovering his treasures makes him realize what his life is missing, and he determines to reconnect with his family.

From this, Amelie determines to do what she can to make the lives of other people better. She fixes up the ex-boyfriend with the hypochondriac, for instance. She steals her father’s garden gnome and has her flight attendant friend take pictures of it in front of places around the world (a classic urban legend…and possibly where Travelocity got their “Roaming Gnome” idea). When she sees a young man attempt to return a missing bag to a traveler and loses a photo album in the process, she becomes enamored of the young man, in part because the album is filled with photos taken from Photomat booths and discarded by others.

Not everything Amelie does is nice. Her local grocer is a jerk, particularly to the young man who works for him. Amelie makes a key of the man’s apartment, breaks in periodically, and does things like switch his footcream for his toothpaste, and replace his light bulbs with dimmer versions.

Ultimately, the question that Amelie the character and Amelie the film ask is whether or not fulfilling the lives of other people is enough? Does she have the ability, or even the right, to make herself happy in the same way that she enriches the lives of other people? The old brittle painter compares her with a woman in his picture who looks like she is not really a part of the group—there, but not really there.

Throughout the film, it becomes evident that Amelie lives in her own dream world, a place where what she does is only for the good and where she cannot be hurt. She sometimes faces the camera and makes comments, all of which are odd and yet strangely beautiful. At the movies, for instance, she says she likes to turn around and see the faces of the people behind her watching the screen. It is a moment of beauty in a film filled with them. One of my favorite parts of the film is the fact that we are introduced to many of the characters by being told what they particularly like and dislike. The man Amelie tracks down to return the box to, for instance, makes a chicken once a week, and loves nothin more than pulling apart the carcass with his fingers and eating the hot chicken off the bone.

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain is a special film, arguably the best new-to-me film I’ve seen in more than a year. It is utterly charming, endearing, and fun, filled with sweetness and joy. It’s good enough that I’m rethinking my favorite five films of all time, and it’s damn near perfect.

Watch it. If you don’t fall madly in love with Amelie, if you don’t love this film as much as I do, consider this: there’s not something wrong with the movie or with me. There’s something wrong with you.

Why to watch Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain: It’s magical.
Why not to watch: You no longer have a pulse.

Remakes Suck!

Films: The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Wicker Man
Format: DVDs from personal collection on laptop.

First of all, I apologize for being a bit late for this post.

I realize that it’s dismissive to say straight off that all remakes suck. There are a number of remakes that are as good or better than the original versions. For instance, the 1980s versions of The Fly and The Thing are far more interesting than their original versions made in the 1950s. However, in the main, remakes don’t have the same power or the same impact as the original versions of a given story. I’ve had a number of students tell me how much they loved the film Disturbia. Good film, but I liked it better when it was directed by Hitchcock and called Rear Window.


With that in mind, I selected today’s films carefully. Both have had remakes done within the last couple of years. Both of them, in their original forms, are classics worthy of watching and rewatching, and both of them have remakes that have ranked as massive jokes. The Day the Earth Stood Still began life as a hopeful prayer for world peace and turned into a trendy environmental message with a ridiculously oversized killer robot. The Wicker Man, once a disturbing little mystery with religious overtones turned into a badly realized treatise on militant feminism.

No matter, since both of the originals are readily available. In fact, one of the only reasons to buy the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that at least one edition of the movie comes with the original on the disk as well.

TDTESS (sorry, the acronym is easier) begins with the landing of a flying saucer on a baseball field in Washington D.C. A stranger (Michael Rennie) emerges and claims to be coming in peace, but when he pulls out a strange device from his suit, an overzealous soldier shoots him in the shoulder. This brings forth Gort, a massive robot with the ability to melt anything it looks at, an effect that still works pretty well today. The wounded spaceman is taken to a hospital and patched up, where we learn a number of interesting things about him.

For one thing, he is considerably older than he looks, heals faster than he should, and is refreshingly naïve about Earth realities. He wants to meet with all of the leaders of all of the countries of the Earth, a reality that almost certainly couldn’t have happened in the 1950s, and wouldn’t happen today. Rather than wait around, the spaceman (his name is Klaatu, but he goes by Mr. Carpenter), escapes the hospital and takes a room at a local boarding house.

It’s here that I start to understand the desire of some filmmakers to redo classic stories like this one. TDTESS is hopelessly a product of its time. At the boarding house, Klaatu/Carpenter meets two people of interest: Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her son, Bobby (Billy Gray). Klaatu/Carpenter spends a day with Bobby while Helen spends time with the man looking to marry her, a reporter named Tom Stevens (Hugh Marlowe). On their walk around Washington, Bobby and Carpenter pay a visit on Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), a thinly-veiled Albert Einstein.

As Carpenter learns about the world, he eventually confesses his identity to Helen, who works with him to help attempt to bring peace to the world.

There are also things made funny simply because of what we know now as opposed to what we knew then. Watching doctors talk about the advanced medicine of Klaatu’s planet while lighting up cigarettes—normal back then—is hysterically funny now. Klaatu claims to have come from 250,000,000 miles away, which translates as to a location within our own solar system. And that kid…he’s easily the dumbest human being ever filmed. Given perfectly flawless diamonds by Klaatu, diamonds the quality of which have never been seen before on Earth, the kid can’t figure out that he’s dealing with the spaceman, but is convinced that Klaatu/Carpenter is a jewel thief. He doesn’t even ferret this nugget of information out when he sees Carpenter walk to the spaceship and signal Gort the robot (Lock Martin) and then walk into the spaceship. Seriously, this is a very stupid kid. Professor Barnhardt is not specifically a professor of anything but SCIENCE!, and he seems to know everything about everything. Finally, any mother who left her kid with a guy she’d known for one day is just asking for her kid to be abused. The wires holding Patricia Neal when Gort carriers her are especially evident as well.

Still, this is a powerful and moving film, and far superior to its most recent incarnation. If nothing else, it’s a marvelous vision of human behavior, particularly how quickly public opinion changes and alters based on what happens with Klaatu.


Like TDTESS, The Wicker Man is also very much a product of the year in which it was made and also had a vastly substandard remake made recently. Also like TDTESS, The Wicker Man features a man desperately out of his element and trying to make sense of a strange and incomprehensible situation. A police sergeant named Howie (Edward Woodward) is sent to a small island off the coast of England. A young girl named Rowan Morrison has been reported missing.

However, when Sergeant Howie gets to the island, he discovers that no one has heard of the girl or recognizes her picture. He also discovers that the island itself is home to a number of very strange people. At the inn, before being shown to his room, Howie endures a song from the villagers about the innkeeper’s daughter (Britt Ekland). The song paints her as the town slut, although she doesn’t seem to mind it. Outside, Howie sees a group of people copulating on the lawn. That night the landlord’s daughter, Willow, attempts to seduce Howie.

Stranger for Howie, as he investigates the next morning, he discovers that the people on Summerisle no longer worship the Christian God, a terrible thing for Howie, who is a devout Christian. He sees a group of young women dancing naked around a fire, again something far beyond his ken. He finally discovers that Rowan Morrison has died, but can find no record of a death certificate, and the people of the island are convinced that the girl has been reincarnated as a march hare.

Eventually, he tracks down Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), who appears to be as insane as everyone else on the island. From Summerisle, he discovers the source of the religion. Summerisle’s grandfather brought back the ancient religion to the island as a way to give the people of the island something that would make them happier and to have a greater connection to nature.

As Howie continues his investigation, fueled mostly by the discovery of a march hare’s body in Rowan Morrison’s casket, things become stranger and stranger, eventually leading to a staggering climax, one of the true great endings ever filmed.

The Wicker Man is unquestionably a product of the time in which it was made. There’s plenty of folk music and nudity as befits a bizarre little film at the beginning of the 1970s. It’s a heck of a thriller as well as an interesting commentary on the nature of belief and the power of the same. Skip the ridiculous remake, but don’t miss this one.

Why to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still: A grand commentary on human nature and the desire for peace.
Why not to watch: As good as it is, it’s very dated.

Why to watch The Wicker Man: One of the greatest endings ever, and probably the most pro-Pagan film ever made.
Why not to watch: You’re easily offended by non-Christian material.

Fighting in the War Room

Film: Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.



















It’s perhaps impossible to deny that Stanley Kubrick was a great director. I believe it’s correct that 10 of his movies are on this list, his final 10 movies, and he only made a total of 16 in his career. I’ve seen one of his films not on the list (The Killing), and I think an argument could be made for including it here as well.

One of his better known and better loved films is Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. There probably isn’t a reputable Top-100 list of films that it doesn’t appear on, and virtually anyone who has seen it will sing its praises.

That said, it’s also the sort of movie that critics love and that ordinary film viewers may find interminable. The reason for this is simple: Dr. Strangelove is desperately funny, but is presented in general with such a completely straight face that it can be difficult at times to determine. In short, while I think the film is incredibly funny, I can also see how someone could entirely miss the humor, because the humor is as black as it can get.

I think the humor is obvious, if only from the names of the characters, most of which are funny. Peter Sellers plays three of the characters: the eponymous Dr. Strangelove, Colonel Mandrake, and President Merkin Muffley (a merkin is, for lack of a better way to put it, a pubic toupee). We also have Russian Premiere Dmitri Kissov (not actually in the film), Ambassador de Sadesky (Peter Bull), Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), Colonel Bat Guano (Keenan Wynn), and General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden).

General Ripper has lost his mind. Convinced that the Russians are going to take over by force of infiltrating American through the use of fluoridation (he speaks frequently of the purity of his own bodily fluids), Ripper gives the order to send his bomber wing into Russia to attack with nuclear bombs. He then cuts off all communication with everyone outside of his own base.

What follows are the extensive efforts to get the planes recalled. This involves bringing the Russian Ambassador into the War Room, where General Turgidson balks because “he’ll see the big board!” President Muffley talks to the drunken Russian leader on the phone. He is upset because the President no longer calls just to chat. Ripper’s Burpleson Air Force Base is overrun, and the fate of contacting Washington lies in the destruction of a Coke machine. And then there’s Dr. Strangelove himself—a former Nazi scientist, confined to a wheelchair, and endlessly battling with his own right hand.

If there is a problem with Dr. Strangelove, it’s that the film is simply too highbrow for a lot of people. It’s the sort of film that makes its mark by being extraordinarily clever, and it would be easy for someone who didn’t want to put any thought into watching a movie to quickly become bored by it.

Personally, I love this movie, and I think it’s worth watching. However, I also understand why someone might dislike it. It does require the viewer to watch actively and pay attention to it. If jokes are missed, there’s not much here to enjoy.

Why to watch Dr. Strangelove: Kubrick doing comedy, and biting satire.
Why not to watch: You have a short attention sp—Oh! Something shiny!