DVR Diary: REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966)

Jan Nemec's Kafkaesque allegory was a bit much even for the vaunted Czech New Wave. Czech cinema grew more ambitious during the 1960s before the political Prague Spring promised a more welcoming environment, and Report on the Party was banned by the Communist government.  Maybe they shouldn't have been so sensitive; Nemec's film isn't a report on the Communist Party, after all, unless you choose to interpret it that way. It's a wedding party put on by the bride's father, a powerful man who's whimsically invited a group of picnickers who'd been walking through a park on their way home. I could empathize with them. Many years ago some friends and I walked through Washington Park in Albany and encountered a mildly menacing group of guys who identified themselves as homeless veterans who "sort of protected the park." One of my friends made peace with them, as I recall, by giving them a pack of cigarettes. It's not so easy with the goons who accost our little band in the Czech park. They hustle our group -- three women, four men -- to a point where they set up a table. There soon appears Rudolf (Jan Klusak), an officious looking idiot if not an idiotic looking official. At least he seems determined to play official, making his victims stand inside arbitrary lines while he prepares to examine them. One member of our original group, a gruff burly guy, gets sick of it and decides to leave, knocking Rudolf down when the idiot tries to stop him. Rudolf's goons rough the guy up a bit -- it's more teasing than torture as they toss him in the air repeatedly -- until Rudolf's own master shows up to apologize for the confusion. This is the master of the revels, a dinner party with several dozen guests. While Rudolf sits down and seems to be eating grapes with a knife and fork, one of our three women breaks down in tears; her husband has slipped away, leaving her behind. Interestingly, this isn't the burly fellow who'd been complaining about everything, but someone who had made no impression on me earlier. His disappearance makes a bad impression on the host, who goes into a sulk, briefly losing his appetite. He chides Rudolf anew: how was he supposed to have realized that someone had left when he can't even see an empty chair? As Rudolf painstakingly counts chairs, further confusion ensues as first one, than many guests realize they've been sitting in the wrong chairs. They've barely rearranged themselves when the host decides they should all go find their runaway guest, except for our original protagonists, who are instructed to wait at the party site and fire a rifle should their friend return. That's pretty much how things stand at the end.

The subject isn't Communism specifically, obviously, but arbitrary power in its many faces, bullying one moment, embarrassing and suffocating in its embrace in the next. Rudolf and the host are two faces of the same force, the irony of it being that the more violent of the two is the more comic and ultimately less menacing, even if he represents revolutionary terror, while the host seems more sinister in his demand that everyone be happy in his presence. These two characters end up dominating the film, and Klusak, a classical composer in real life, does the most to entertain us, but Nemec's real subject is the petty complacency of his picnickers, their desperate reasonableness that ultimately becomes collaboration as all seem poised to betray a friend (or husband) should he, transformed by an enigmatic refusal, reappear amongst them. It's interesting to observe how the one initially contentious character, the guy who throws Rudolf down, ends up hardly less accommodating, if still complaining, than his more passive pals. The other man's withdrawal becomes all the more mysterious and all the more unreasonable to the rest of his party, not to mention the larger party. It adds up to a mildly bleak satire, and it tells us a lot about Marxist-Leninism in those days that the Czech leadership took such offense at the thing. Their hurt feelings give Report on the Party a historical value beyond what entertainment value it has. It's worth a look -- and it's only 71 minutes long -- if you have an urge for the absurd and any curiosity about how easy it was for artists to get into trouble during the Cold War.

Pierre Brice (1929 - 2015)

What Clint Eastwood was for the rest of the world in the 1960s, Pierre Brice (left in the picture above) was for West Germany. The Frenchman, who died on June 6, was Germany's peculiar embodiment of an idealized American West, one more idealistic than the West Eastwood inhabited in Italian and American westerns. After toiling in peplum and horror films (most notably 1960's Mill of the Stone Women), Brice found a life-defining role in Harald Reinl's Treasure of Silver Lake in 1962. That was his first portrayal of Winnetou, the noble Indian of Karl May's German western novels. It was a prelude to an official Winnetou series begun by Reinl and continued by others. In these, Brice is seconded by an American or English actor, most notably Lex Barker and Stewart Granger, who usually played a good gunfighter named Old Shatterhand, Old Surehand or something along those lines. These co-stars were the selling point when adventurous U.S. distributors tried to import dubbed versions of the German films here, usually with new and utterly generic titles. I've seen and reviewed the first two films in the Winnetou series, which show Reinl a creative action director blessed with incredible Yugoslavian locations. Despite their pictorial virtues, they seem old-fashioned compared with contemporary Italian and American westerns by virtue of their unambiguous morality, if not their odd reliance on comedy-relief Englishmen. Winnetou didn't travel as well as The Man With No Name, and that must have had a lot to do with the fact that the noble Indian is a goody-good at a time when audiences were feeling more cynical or more bloodthirsty. Also, for some reason global audiences in the 1960s were less inclined to identify with Native Americans as symbols for downtrodden militancy than they were with Mexican peasants, and while American audiences would embrace Indians anew in the 1970s, their idealized Natives were more spiritual and trippy than the relatively stodgy Winnetou.

Still, Winnetou struck a chord with Germans that the character had struck often (with a readership including Adolf Hitler) since he first appeared in print in the late 19th century. If Brice wasn't exactly typed -- he and Barker tried a more spaghetti-esque western, A Place Called Glory, but it isn't very good --  he could still always return to his most beloved role, the last time on TV in the late 1990s. After that, he appeared regularly at Karl May festivals to be adored anew by aging generations of fans. Brice was a singular phenomenon in the wild world of cinema: the particular western star of a single nation and the center of a kind of alternate universe I've found interesting to visit and where many Germans have lingered long -- and now return with nostalgic sadness for a West that never was, but is missed just the same.

DVR Diary: A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (1966)

Unlike most films reviewed here, I've seen Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winner before, but I suspected that after seeing the Wolf Hall miniseries, which is to A Man For All Seasons as Wicked is to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I could not see the 1966 film the same way again. Robert Bolt's screenplay and original stage play and Hilary Mantel's novel and its stage and TV adaptations offer nearly diametrically opposed portrayals of Thomas More, Bolt's protagonist, and Mantel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, and Mantel's work, if some remarks in the teleplay represent the novel accurately, is intended in part as a debunking of Bolt. What, then, is there to debunk. Above all, there is a notion of More (Paul Scofield created the role on stage and won an Oscar for his work on film) as a patron saint of liberal dissent, a martyr in defiance of absolute power. Wolf Hall's More is little more than a fanatic, driven by his fanaticism to defy the King as he was to persecute Protestants earlier, while he had the King's favor. Wolf Hall is at pains to show More no saint, but is sainthood what Bolt and Zinnemann were selling?

After seeing Wolf Hall, A Man For All Seasons may look like a whitewash of More, but many scholars challenge Mantel's indictment, disputing, for instance, whether More supervised the torture of heretics or had it done in his own home.  But if Bolt's More is a relatively wartless hero, he is also a tragic one. His tragic flaw is his belief that his wit and prudence will allow him to dissent in peace, in private if need be, from the demands of Henry VIII. More believes he can reason his way to a point of safety where he can live with his conscience in a state of public neutrality, expressed in silence. He does not reckon on absolute power's need for absolute affirmation, and this shortcoming made More a perfect tragic hero for the Cold War era. Part of the terror of the totalitarian phenomenon was the fear that you could not opt out of the ritual praise that cults of personality demanded. In liberal democracies we excuse (and sometimes encourage) apathy with the argument that silence equals consent. Totalitarianism, as fearful liberals understood the concept, did not seem to accept that premise. For the Great and Dear Leaders of the 20th century silence only made one suspicious; a short leap of paranoid logic equated silence with treason. Such is Henry's thinking when More tries to opt out of signing an oath recognizing Henry as head of the Church of England, supplanting the Pope, and recognizing Anne Boleyn (a virtual nonentity in this film despite being played by Vanessa Redgrave) as Henry's rightful queen. More hopes that he can get away with it without explaining himself, thinking that reasons might offend the King when it's the refusal itself that seals More's fate. More's fate is tragic but it becomes heroic when the issue is forced and, having nothing to lose, he speaks truth (or faith, or doctrine) to power, albeit to Parliament rather than the King himself. If he must die for not saying Yes, More may as well tell the world why he says No. And if all of this seems to matter little to Hilary Mantel, that may be because, once our side won the Cold War, we could see more clearly that there was no struggle there between Power and Liberty, but only, as ever, a battle of Power against Power in which all the players have it coming and none are heroes. Mantel may not be as sure, either, as More (or Bolt) of any higher law justifying the hero's obdurance.

But what of Mantel's own hero, Thomas Cromwell? In A Man For All Seasons Cromwell (Leo McKern) has no private or inner life. He is shown gradually maneuvering More into traps, but from what motive? There's no hint of the indignation over More's cruelties and stubbornness that Mantel has Cromwell express. It may be that Bolt's Cromwell has no personal opinion of More or anyone else. He seems to exist only to serve the King, and in the worst way from the anti-totalitarian perspective. Cromwell rises from Cardinal Wolsey's flunky to attorney-general of England because he is, above all, an informer, always seeking to catch rivals or betters in "treason" and eager to denounce them to his master. In totalitarian states people like this were thought to flourish in times of terror and purges, and with the totalitarian model in mind Bolt and Zinnemann emphasize Cromwell's role in what they see as a show trial of More, while Mantel and her interpreters in other media seem to minimize his role. For instance: once More begins to assert himself at the trial he is told that his viciousness now stands revealed. In Bolt the words are Cromwell's; in Mantel they're spoken by the Duke of Norfolk, an aristocratic thug who for Bolt and Zinnemann (played by Nigel Davenport) is a sometimes blustering but ultimately ineffectual former buddy of More. Here we should note a possibly more important reassignment of dialogue. In Seasons More's learned daughter (Susannah York) tries to argue with him, in his cell, that the mere words of the oath can't harm his soul as much as he fears. In Wolf Hall Cromwell makes that argument and by inference wants More to live. Bolt's Cromwell either couldn't care less or definitely wants More out of the way. A friend who watched Seasons with me this time described McKern's Cromwell as a moustache-twirling villain, and given McKern's bombast, practically his Cromwell's only character trait, I get the point. Was Mantel reacting to this? Does Wolf Hall begin with a feeling that McKern is too bad to be true, even more than Scofield's More is too good? If Mantel has commented on the film I haven't seen it, but I haven't searched that hard, either.

As a movie, A Man For All Seasons is a ponderous thing. Scofield is still impeccable, but speaking of bombast, Robert Shaw's Henry made me appreciate Damian Lewis's relative underplaying in Wolf Hall even more. Was Peter O'Toole unavailable, or would his presence on the throne made the play's resemblances to Becket perhaps too obvious? In any event, Scofield has to carry a visually unimpressive film, opened up a bit, presumably, from a stage production described as "Brechtian" with some hopefully epic scenes of royal riverboats. The most shocking thing now about the Zinnemann film is that cinematographer Ted Moore won an Oscar, apparently for overlighting everything to get just the right soundstage look to every interior scene. Wolf Hall's frequent chiaroscuro perhaps was not in Moore's power back then, but makes the Oscar-winner's work look instantly unconvincing. A number of people, including Zinnemann, won Oscars riding on Scofield's coattails, but the truth is that the star and the script are just about the only reasons to watch A Man For All Seasons. These stand the test of time and Wolf Hall, challenged but not refuted. Bolt's and Mantel's are alternate universes and can coexist quite well unless you have some stake in the reputation of Thomas More that most of us don't. If Wolf Hall makes Seasons look more like a work defined by its own time, that doesn't render the film irrelevant just yet.

Hardboiled Ozu: DRAGNET GIRL (1933)

For half the 1930s Yasujiro Ozu was reluctant to switch from silent film to talkies. It's hard to see why, since sound made Ozu. It made him into the director idolized globally for his preference for humane conversation over purely visual spectacle. His reluctance to switch -- Japan had been making talkies since 1931 -- is especially strange given how often characters in his films talk about the importance of talking. Even in Dragnet Girl, a self-indulgent spectacle by his later standard, the film's good girl chastises her aspiring-hoodlum brother for not spending more time talking to her. "When was the last time we had a nice chat?" she laments. Maybe this film finds its director at a point of uncertainty where he's questioning his own practices. That'd make sense in a film that is, to say the least, ambivalent about the influence of western popular culture, of which movies are obviously a part, on Japanese civilization.

Here is a Japanese picture in which the criminals appear not to be yakuza but American-style gangsters whose favorite martial art isn't karate but boxing. These are "crooks," as American silents would call gangsters whose primary activity seems to be robbery, and the type of men (and women) who carry guns while the police carry swords. Americans themselves were worried about such people, and often saw them as foreign implants, meaning by that Irish or Italian. Above all, Ozu sees them as western. The signage at the Toa Boxing Club and at the pool hall where the hoods hang out is all conspicuously in English. Since in many ways the director is already the Ozu many love and others loathe, he's fascinated by the decor and bric-a-brac. Nipper the RCA dog dominates scenes set in a record store almost to the point of product placement. Often Ozu gives us close-ups of objects. More unexpectedly, if you're used to later Ozu, he gives us smooth tracking shots of the front rank of a jazz band playing in a dance hall, or secretaries pounding on typewriters, or even a row of hats on hooks, just as one is falling off. Some of this may not be style as much as showing-off in imitation of F. W. Murnau and all the Hollywood filmmakers influenced by him in the late 1920s. But there's also style that would stick with Ozu all his career. It's not just the montages of objects but also the way he stages shots, not just in early versions of his typical T-grid -- characters moving toward or away from the camera with a perpendicular plane of action in the background -- but also the layers of windows and objects and words on posters that make some shots reminiscent of Picasso's or Braque's collages. Dragnet Girl may be a self-conscious genre piece but it's also still a work of art in many ways.

 

Pick on a helpless plastic dog, will you? Where I live in Albany NY we have a Nipper it'd take Godzilla to punch that way.

Ozu's gangster film more closely resembles the silent Hollywood gangster films of a few years earlier than contemporary talking crime films. By Pre-Code standards the story might well seem sappy. To be brief, it tells how that good girl's effort to save her brother from a life of crime ends up saving two seeming hardened criminals as well. The girl is Kazuko (Sumiko Mizikubo), the clerk at the record store. Her brother is Hiroshi (Koji Mitsui), who idolizes Joji (Joji Oka) as both a boxer and a gangster. Joji's moll is Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), who works one of those typewriters when her boss isn't trying to hit on her. Just as Joji agrees to accept Hiroshi into his little gang, Kazuko appeals to Joji to send Hiroshi away and let him (or order him to) go straight. To his own apparent surprise, Joji agrees, punctuating his decision with a sock to Hiroshi's jaw. For a while Joji seems interested in Kazuko, hanging out at her store and sampling the records. Word of this gets to Tokiko, who borrows Joji's gun for a confrontation with the good girl. Ozu pointedly emphasizes their different dress -- Kazuko's traditional footwear and Tokiko's overall sleek chic -- as they walk to a point where Tokiko turns and points the gun at Kazuko. To her own surprise, and probably even more to the audience's surprise, even Tokiko is moved by Kazuko's courage and goodness. Rather than eliminate a potential rival, she now hopes to emulate her, vowing to go straight and take Joji with her.

 

"I'm very extravagant." Japanese cinematic legend Kinuyo Tanaka in Dragnet Girl

Tokiko is one confused dame. She finally convinces Joji that they should quit the big city, but not until they do one more robbery, mainly so they can give something to the struggling Kazuko and Hiroshi. Her criminal spirit seems to surge once more when she gleefully pulls a gun on her obnoxious boss, but no sooner have she and Joji made their exit that she starts thinking that they ought to turn themselves in. That way they can have a real fresh start after they pay their debts to society. Hollywood had this same idea a lot of the time and it's hokey wherever it plays out. To his credit, Ozu plays it out to an extreme. Joji's having none of this idea at first, and their arguing nearly gets them caught when the cops raid their apartment. After an escape via the window ledge, Joji would rather split up than surrender with her. Tokiko's answer to this is to shoot him in the leg. After that, he may as well give up, and in symbolism Hollywood would love the cops cuff our antiheroes together, even if they'll be spending the next few months? -- years? -- apart.

Like many an American film of the period, Dragnet Girl is dumb fun enlivened by a sense of style. It sort of reinforces your respect for what Ozu would become when you see that he could do all the tricks he later denied himself back when he felt like it. Beyond style, there's a playfulness here that we'd get less of later. There's some self-consciousness of this being a silent film, and a clever "who needs sound?" argument in a scene where tensions build up to a fight between Joji and three men. Just as the action's about to start, Ozu cuts away to different groups of people lounging around the club. Suddenly they start; they're responding to something and we know exactly what it is. By the time they get to where the action is the action's over and Joji casually dusts himself off. At first I thought it might be an Ozu thing that he doesn't show the fight, but he does give us a little bit of a later pool-hall tussle, though he makes a point of putting a crowd in our way before it's done. For a film that implicitly decries corrupting western influences Dragnet Girl is rather derivative of Hollywood product, but to be fair Ozu never directly denounces the west. That'd be too much of a downer for a film meant above all to entertain. In time Ozu would march to his own beat, but here he's practically in the Pre-Code Parade, and we're glad to have him with us.

DVR Diary: MISS PACIFIC FLEET (1935)

The Pre-Code Parade was over by 1935 but Warner Bros.' "Gimme Girls," Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell, soldiered on a while. This Ray Enright film was their last film as a starred team and a certain demoralization has set in. Under the Production Code, our heroines could not be the sort of gold-diggers they played so well so recently, despite what the poetic ad above tries to tell you. Instead, they run a struggling ring-toss concession on a San Pedro, California, amusement pier, and are less worried about landing rich husbands than about paying the $60 monthly rent on their apartment.They ought to make a killing when the Pacific fleet arrives in town, but their best customer proves to be their worst: "Kewpie" Wiggins (Allen Jenkins) of the USS Arizona, the middleweight boxing champion of the fleet and an uncanny ring tosser who spends his first day ashore cleaning our girls out of prizes. Jenkins either was skilled enough to do some of his own "stunts" here or else Enright figured out ways to fake his skill convincingly. If he comes back tomorrow he'll ruin them, so since he's staying conveniently across the street from their pad they contrive a scheme to lure him over only to get him arrested for harassment. Enter J. August Freytag (Hugh Herbert), the local business booster, a compulsive self-applauder and drinker who even keeps booze in plastic cigar containers. His latest big idea is to hold a "Miss Pacific Fleet" beauty contest, the idea being that people who buy from participating businesses will get votes to cast to choose the winner. To further drum up publicity, he recruits Kewpie to fight a local champ, the winner to get several thousand voting tickets. Having gotten the call from the girls, Kewpie invites the married Fretyag to go over with him, and when Kewpie makes a store run for cracked ice Freytag enters alone and falls into the trap. But as a business leader he has pull with the police, so it's Blondell who gets arrested. She can't pay the fine but a forgiving Freytag gets her sprung, on the condition that she raise the money in a certain time or go back to jail. Now the girls have that fine and the rent to worry about. Farrell's solution is to run Blondell for Miss Pacific Fleet, since the winner gets a big cash prize. Since Kewpie has a crush on Blondell, Farrell figures that once he wins that fight and those votes, victory will be a cinch.

But of course it's not a cinch. The big complication is that Blondell falls hard for a handsome, bland Marine (Warren Hull) and is dumb enough to show up with him for the big fight. Perhaps the most unconvincing boxing champ in cinema history, Kewpie is getting his ass beat until he sees Blondell snuggling with the Marine in the stands. Going into a poor excuse for a berserker rage, he kayoes his man with a series of devastating punches to the arm, claims his tickets, and gives them to a scatterbrained girl (Marie Wilson) who's been stalking him through most of the picture. That puts Blondell behind in the voting, but she still has chance enough to distress Freytag's wife (Minna Gombell), who suspects her of having an affair with her husband. Desperate to prevent her victory, she recruits an ex-con she just happens to know (Guinn Williams) to have Blondell kidnapped, to prevent her from soliciting any more votes. Big Boy's boys make their move in the midst of the confusion generated by a random catfight. Learning of the crime, Kewpie embarks on a seaborne rescue operation that looks like an inferior do-over of the water chase in the last Blondell-Farrell vehicle, We're in the Money. There's further confusion to clear up, but rest assured of a happy ending for everyone but Freytag, who exits pursued by his spouse.

You can see the demoralization on the co-stars' faces. They look tired and beaten and compared to We're in the Money, where they play process servers with some of their old aggression, they really have very little to do here. They seem a little like their old selves when they're bickering with each other, but otherwise the Production Code has tamed them, though Farrell would soon emerge re-energized as Torchy Blaine in a series of B pictures. Here, however, whatever the billing says this may as well be an Allen Jenkins movie. He and Herbert (later reteamed in the immortal Sh! The Octopus) get all the physical comedy and actually have good chemistry together, particularly in the running gag that has Herbert always beating him to the loose change in pay phones. Herbert is one of those oddities who always leave you wondering how his absolutely dysfunctional characters end up in positions of responsibility in the first place, but I suppose you're not supposed to ask such questions of comedies. I find him a guilty pleasure, while I admire Jenkins with fewer reservations. It's up to them to make Miss Pacific Fleet entertaining in the virtual absence of the stars, and they just about manage it. But you can't help feeling sadness and defeat in sympathy with the once-mighty Gimme Girls at the end of their tether as a team. This film may have been released at the end of 1935, but to look at Blondell and Farrell you'd think a depression was just getting started.

THE LIBERATOR (Libertador, 2013)

Alberto Alvero's biopic may not be the first film about Simon Bolivar, but it may be the first Bolivarian Bolivar movie. This aspiring epic in many ways reflects the viewpoint of the "Bolivarian Revolution" that has dominated Venezuela since the advent of Hugo Chavez, who may well have seen himself as a modern-day Bolivar but didn't live to see this film. Aimed at the global market, Liberator was written by Timothy J. Sexton, a co-writer of Children of Men and otherwise a mostly political filmmaker, and is performed partly in English to accommodate guest American Danny Huston and the actors playing Bolivar's Irish brigade. Its major asset, indisputably, is Edgar Ramirez in the title role. Ramirez exploded on the global film scene as the star terrorist of Olivier Assayas's epic miniseries Carlos, but had not done anything on a similar scale until this picture, for which he gets an Executive Producer credit. His charisma is necessary to carry us through a film that often seems, at just under two hours, like a digest (or perhaps digestible) version of a necessarily more detailed and complex life story. Experts can debate the picture's historical accuracy; I was fascinated by its alternate vision of revolution, in often stark contrast to Bolivar's own American model.

In typical modern fashion, the movie opens in medias res, showing the mature Bolivar as an embattled revolutionary racing to escape a conspiratorial trap. It then takes us back to his beginnings as just another son of South American wealth taking the Grand Tour of Europe and bringing home a bride who proves too vulnerable to his homeland's harsh environment. Broken in spirit by her early death, he returns to Europe and lives a wastrel's life until an old teacher reminds him of the need to liberate the continent from Spanish rule. Simon puts himself at the service of a General Miranda, but finds his tactics too conservative. Relegated to a backwater, he finally finds something worth fighting for passionately when someone steals his boots. He chases the culprit to a swampland shanty, where an abject mother begs him to spare her boy's life. Bolivar seems to notice poverty in all its wretchedness for the first time. As a plantation owner he had seen slavery but had considered it none of his business when another planter treated slaves badly. Now he realizes that if the revolution is to be worth anything it must be for the good of the poor. The scene may remind American viewers that their own revolution is never portrayed this way, and for good reason. Our revolution was all about middle-class aspirations frustrated by imperial trade policy, and the revolutions in Latin America were probably similarly motivated to a great extent, but the added imperative to improve the lives of poor people whose poverty is blamed directly on oppression, and who this film's Bolivar believes should get something from the revolution, makes for a very different history and a very different sort of film.

From this point forward, Bolivar is pitted constantly against ostensible allies who are ultimately only out for themselves, or whose interests are purely parochial. They resist his vision of a united continent liberated by people's war. Liberator credits Bolivar's victories to the leader's vision and the people's will. It shows a ragtag army of all races and both sexes, including foreign friends like the anti-colonial Irishmen, on a long march through the Andes, explicitly compared to Hannibal in the Alps but also implicitly comparable to Mao in China, culminating in a human-wave attack, with our hero in the lead, that proves successful against the odds. Alvero shifts from godlike views of the armies from directly above to close-up mayhem as Bolivar's host forces the Spaniards onto a bridge and the battle becomes a kind of rugby scrum with bayonets.

 

Bolivar makes the professional soldiers uncomfortable,

and feels most at home at the head of an inclusive people's army

Triumph turns to tragedy as Bolivar's allies mostly reject his vision of a united continent. The way he and his opponents talk past each other is telling. They fear that his united republic will give too much power to one man, namely Bolivar, and protest that they didn't fight the King of Spain only to have a dictator take over. Bolivar never bothers to refute the dictator charge. What matters to him is that the revolution and the republic are for the people, and that vested interests and local powers have no place in the new order. It appears to be an irreconcilable clash of priorities, and the Liberator's morale briefly falters before his most loyal friends urge him to stand firm and preserve his vision of union by force if necessary. In a historically questionable climax, the film implies that Bolivar was murdered by his enemies, thus thwarting the people's destiny of unity and republican equality for generations to come. But it hints that the torch will be carried on when Bolivar, before his final betrayal, meets a poor young fisherman who happens to share his name.

If Carlos the Jackal was a classic Scorsesean antihero, Ramirez's Simon Bolivar is a classic epic hero, and the actor delivers the charismatic bombast necessary for the role. Alvero and Sexton would have us see Bolivar as an epic lover as well, often draping their hero with glamorous if not gratuitous female nudity; we rarely see that sort of thing in American Revolution films, either. Maybe it comes with the territory. If it sometimes seems like a vanity project for Ramirez, that's probably because no other character in the film is developed extensively. We get to know them enough to know whether they're for or against the Liberator, or we know them until they turn against him. That tends to make Bolivar's debates with his various antagonists rather one-sided. While the film is willing to show Bolivar in moments of weakness or self-doubt, it refuses to consider that he may want too much power, and it takes for granted that those who oppose him are selfish, greedy, and indifferent to the poor. The failure of his vision is in no way his fault in this version of his story. As a film this version is interesting to the extent that its story is novel to audiences, and the filmmaking is effective without being really visionary. As history, it will be most successful if it inspires or provokes us to find out more about Bolivar on our own. As it happens, I have a biography on the shelf that I intend to pull out now, so on that level The Liberator is a success. If it wanted to be all you needed to know, or all someone wanted you to know about Simon Bolivar, that's another story.

Too Much TV: THE FLASH (2014-present)

With the debut of Arrow in 2012, DC Comics stole a march on Marvel Comics in the kingdom of TV. DC held its ground in 2013 when Marvel launched Agents of SHIELD, a show handicapped in its first months by storylines dependent on a movie not yet released and a dull cast, while Arrow topped itself on the strength of Slade Wilson's mirakuru-enhanced villainy. While Marvel surprisingly stumbled out of the gate, DC expanded rapidly in 2014, with mixed results. Gotham only seemed to get worse as the season wore on, but remained a ratings success, while Constantine, better than just about anyone expected, withered on the vine of Friday night. Most importantly, Greg Berlanti, the creator of Arrow, expanded his domain in every sense with The Flash, a success with both the crucial target demographics and many TV critics. Berlanti has his own universe within DC's multimedia universe; it will expand in the coming season, definitely with Legends of Tomorrow, on CW along with his other shows, and possibly with Supergirl on CBS. For Berlanti, Flash was a crucial evolutionary step from the relatively grim grit of Arrow -- now imitated with greater self-importance to greater acclaim by Marvel on Netflix -- to a full-scale comic-book superhero universe. While Marvel TV has seemed minor-league in its initial focus on spies, though SHIELD has been world-building aggressively more recently, with Flash DC has introduced all the potential of superpowers to the small screen while nearly perfecting the CW formula of heroism complicated by relationships, which is basically the Marvel Comics formula of "super heroes with problems" from fifty years ago.

As Flash acknowledges in its stunt-casting of John Wesley Shipp as its hero's father, the current show is TV's second try at DC's Scarlet Speedster. Shipp played Barry Allen in 1990's one-season series, a disappointment following the phenomenal success of Tim Burton's Batman movie the year before. The new show has honored the old show in other ways, from recasting Mark Hamill as a new version of his Trickster villain to the nearly mind-boggling casting of Amanda Pays as virtually the same character, down to the name, from1990. The modern Flash emulates the old show by giving Barry Allen a motivating personal issue that comic-book Barry Allen didn't need back in 1956. The founding character of the "Silver Age" of superhero comics, Barry Allen was a model of disinterested benevolence of the sort that modern readers and viewers are bored by or distrust. In more recent comics, Allen's origin was retconned to motivate him with a murdered mother, and so it is here. We first saw the new Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) on two second-season episodes of Arrow, in which the young Central City police scientist came to Oliver Queen's Starling City to investigate possible "metahuman" activity. This was an obsession of Barry's because he remembered something, or someone, superhuman involved in the crime for which his father was convicted. Nothing came of the lead, though Barry flirted a little with Felicity Smoak and designed an adhesive mask for Ollie before returning home to be fried in his lab by the explosion of STAR Labs' particle accelerator. His own show began with Barry waking from a months-long coma, reuniting with his surrogate family, discovering his speed, and making new scientist friends. A rump operation at STAR is being conducted by Dr. Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanaugh), assisted by young prodigies Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) and Caitlyn Snow (Danielle Panabaker). These last two aroused instant interest among comics fans because their names suggested that they were destined to become superheroes or villains themselves, while Wells was initially more mysterious. On the personal front, Barry returned home to police detective Joe West (Jesse L. Martin) and his daughter Iris (Candice Patton), on whom Barry has an understandable longterm crush, but who has hooked up during his coma with Joe's protege Eddie Thawne (Rick Cosnett). Eddie's last name also rang bells with comics readers. It marked him as an ancestor of Eobard Thawne, the "Reverse Flash" of the future and an arch-enemy of Barry Allen, if not the man himself.

The particle-accelerator explosion affected others besides Barry, giving them powers that mostly were used for evil. The STAR staff helped Barry fight these new menaces while learning to use his speed to maximum effect. At an early point Joe West learned Barry's secret and began collaborating with the STAR team, notwithstanding their extra-legal confinement of super-powered villains in containment cells at the facility, but in classic CW fashion he ordered Barry not to tell Iris, an aspiring journalist already interested in the "streak," about his powers and activities. In time Eddie Thawne, sometimes resentful of Barry as an enduring rival for Iris, was let in on the secret and became a reliable collaborator, if also a more reluctant keeper of the great secret from Iris. The CW lives on these secrets and their consequences, but Flash handled this storyline with more understated credibility than Arrow, where this season everyone had to keep Detective Quentin Lance from learning that his daughter Sara had been murdered, out of fear that the shock would stop his weak heart. While that seemed like archaic melodrama, Flash's dilemma seemed more plausible and its resolution was taken care of quickly with a relative minimum of sturm und drang. The show got enough of that elsewhere.

From episode to episode, Flash's model was Smallville, where Kryptonian radiation created a generation of "meteor freaks" for young Clark Kent to deal with. Strangely, it was on Arrow where we first encountered an authentic metahuman whose origin could not be traced to the Central City particle accelerator incident -- a necessary event if Berlanti's universe is to be worth exploring beyond its two principal cities. Some of Flash's own antagonists weren't dependent on the explosion, from the old incarcerated Trickster and his modern imitator to the malevolent tech whiz Leonard "Captain Cold" Snart (Wentworth Miller) and his firebug sidekick "Heat Wave" (Dominic Purcell). The names usually aren't the villains' own ideas; genre geek Cisco gets to dub them in a weekly ritual. In comics, Flash has a rogues' gallery to rival Batman's or Spider-Man's, and after one season the show still has plenty to try out. They are a fantastic lot, from a man who can turn himself into a poison mist to the gorilla Grodd, experimented upon to develop near-human intelligence and super-human telepathy. All finally were overshadowed by the slowly revealed villainy of Harrison Wells, who became the show's most intriguing character. We knew something was up with him early on when he went into a secret chamber and consulted a hologram that appeared to be a newspaper from the year 2024, reporting the disappearance of the famous hero The Flash during some mysterious crisis (a Pavlovian trigger word for DC fans). Wells checked the paper frequently, apparently to confirm that history was still on a track that led to this crisis and disappearance, while mentoring Barry. Was it his job to train Barry for a necessary role in that crisis? Or was he the Reverse Flash from the future -- but if so, why encourage and help Barry? Since CW is taking the now-unusual step of repeating the entire season this summer, I won't spoil every detail, but Tom Cavanagh deserves a ton of credit here and now for crafting one of the best, most subtle supervillains in live-action media. Suffice it to say that he is a man from the future who has to stay in his past, our present, for a long time to carry out a longterm agenda that is ultimately selfish and ruthless. Yet he cannot live his life among us on this day to day, year by year basis without  living largely according to the needs of the day. The remarkable thing about Wells is how he can engage, objectively if not disinterestedly, in each episode's problem-solving, even occasionally sacrificing his own agenda for the greater good of the moment. Whether he wanted to or not, he can't help but be a man of the present, and arguably to a great extent a good man, even as he furthers a longterm evil agenda. The show's writers deserve much of the credit for conceiving this character, but Cavanagh really sells it with a great poker face and an overall smooth demeanor befitting a man who's always working on several levels of strategy at once.

Cavanagh may have been Best in Show this season, but Flash has been blessed with a strong ensemble cast, all of whom succeeded in deepening and enriching their characters over the course of the year. Grant Gustin is younger than the classic Barry Allen and sometimes seems more like a Peter Parker type, but he handles the material with easy conviction and does probably the best job possible within the modern "I'm learning this as I go along" paradigm. Carlos Valdes brightens the show with comedy relief that doesn't require him to be an idiot, since in fact he's a genius inventor with a possible metahuman destiny of his own, darkened by a vision of his own death that actually happened, only to be relegated to an alternate timeline. Jesse L. Martin's Joe West puts all the cops on Gotham to shame, and that's before he really gets good as Barry's primary father figure and Iris's overprotective parent. As Iris, Candace Patton could have been a hated character as the show's mundane focus for shipping, but the character developed agency of her own as a reporter and now that she (like just about everyone else!) knows Barry's secret she'll be more team player than token romantic interest next season. As the third figure in the standard CW triangle, Rick Cosnett really took off in the later episodes once Eddie became a trusted part of Team Flash and had to deal with what was supposed to be his destiny, unless he had something to say about it. Some of the weekly villains were weaker than others, but there really was no weak link in the main cast. Add to the mix nearly unprecedented special effects for television and Flash has just about realized what comics fans had hoped for over generations: a superhero show with an authentic comic book feel within a rapidly expanding comic book universe in all its dimensions of potential. The one real risk it faces moving forward is that Berlanti's creative team may overstretch itself as more shows go into production. The overall weakness of Arrow's third season may be a warning sign, but to have produced Arrow in the first place and now Flash after the debacle of the Green Lantern movie proves that Greg Berlanti learns from his mistakes. In any event, Flash is the kind of show that inspires optimism, in bright contrast to the gloomy perspective of other shows, so I leave behind season one confident if not impatient for season two.