Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Bridge at Remagen (1969)
Recommended by PN patron. George Segal emotes, does nice job as Army leiutenant leading a squad spearheading US advance across the Rhine. Ben Gazzara does good job as a cynical soldier who is, nevertheless, a crack shot and fearless. Robert Vaughn slightly overplays role as German major sent to hold the last standing bridge crossing the Rhine. Hitler has ordered the bridge to be blown up, even though that will strand 75,000 German soldiers. Despite efforts to hold bridge, an unofficial order given to vaughn's character by his commanding general, he finally decides to blow it up, only to hVe the dynamite he was sent for the jon turn out to ne defective. In next to last scene, Vaughn's major is shot by firing squad. Film tried to show war was more than just shooting, anticipating "Saving Private Ryan" by three decades. Very good war movie.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
The Debt
Anthony Lane (not David Denby, as I mistakenly misremembered) reviewed this film in the New Yorker 21 September 2011 issue.
As with Spielberg’s “Munich,” there is an awkward, irresoluble tension between the movie’s urge to thrill and the weighty pull of the historical obligations that it seeks to assume. How much, to be blunt, should we be enjoying ourselves? What do we owe to “The Debt”? Whatever the sum, it is more than the film itself, gloomy with unease, seems able to repay.
It received a 6.9 rating in IMDb.com, and a 76% - 67% rating in RottenTomatoes. I have a calendar entry on 26 August 2011, moved up from earlier. I finally got it yesterday, and watched it last night. I rather liked it.
I liked it quite a bit. The three less renowned, younger, actors do much better work than the older, more renowned actors. All six rather botch the Israeli accent, but, again, the three younger ones do better with it.
A.O. Scott in the Times: The labors of the cast help to make “The Debt” a compact, reasonably clever and sometimes piquant entertainment, but they also make you aware that it could have been more.
As with Spielberg’s “Munich,” there is an awkward, irresoluble tension between the movie’s urge to thrill and the weighty pull of the historical obligations that it seeks to assume. How much, to be blunt, should we be enjoying ourselves? What do we owe to “The Debt”? Whatever the sum, it is more than the film itself, gloomy with unease, seems able to repay.
It received a 6.9 rating in IMDb.com, and a 76% - 67% rating in RottenTomatoes. I have a calendar entry on 26 August 2011, moved up from earlier. I finally got it yesterday, and watched it last night. I rather liked it.
I liked it quite a bit. The three less renowned, younger, actors do much better work than the older, more renowned actors. All six rather botch the Israeli accent, but, again, the three younger ones do better with it.
A.O. Scott in the Times: The labors of the cast help to make “The Debt” a compact, reasonably clever and sometimes piquant entertainment, but they also make you aware that it could have been more.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
A bridge too far
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Curious George
A Monkey Born of Trials and Tribulations: interesting article about the husband-and-wife team of Margret and H.A. Rey, who created Curious George, the little monkey hero of our most famous books," Margret once said, referring to those sacred texts of childhood "Curious George" (since its publication in 1941, it has sold 27 million copies in more than a dozen languages), "Curious George Rides a Bike," "Curious George Flies a Kite" and "Curious George Takes a Job," among others.
A look at some of the drawings by H.A. Rey.
Show will be at The Jewish Museum through Aug. 1
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Defiance
Based on the real-life Bielski brothers. A Hollywood version of a real life group of Jews who did not submit to Nazi oppression, but fought back. Of course there has been criticism of it, yet it, for me, was very moving.
Daniel Craig and Leiv Schreiber do magnificent work.
Allan Corduner plays Shamon Haretz, the old school teacher of the brothers. He played Monty Woolley in DeLovely.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A Collision of Church and State
This book review appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Bookshelf column on 30 January 2010. I suggested purchasing it for the library. It sounds fascinating, the historical period. The review was written by Michel Gurfinkiel. (Yes, that is how it is spelled; Monsieur Gurfinkiel is French.) A website called www.neoconeurope.eu describes him as a regular contributor to several neoconservative publications. His writings usually are a combination of the 'New Antisemitism' campaign with a mix of Islamophobia. That in itself is not surprising, for the article appeared in the Journal. Yet the book review lies outside that sphere.
A Collision of Church and State: War, revolution, Dreyfus and an era of religious and political turmoil
Two monuments in Paris are so prominent that they're hard to miss. One is the Eiffel Tower, of course, the all-iron tour de force of engineering, standing by the Seine amid the city's spacious and supremely elegant West End. Then to the north, atop Montmartre, there is the Sacré-Cœur: a tall, immaculately white Catholic basilica that looks like a digitized pre-Raphaelite set from "Lord of the Rings." What most visitors—and in fact most Parisians— don't realize is that both monuments were designed and their construction begun at about the same time, in the 1870s and 1880s. Even more surprising: The tower and the church were intended as antagonistic national symbols during times of cultural, religious and political conflict that roiled France for decades.
Frederick Brown tells the story of that tumultuous era in "For the Soul of France." From 1830, the historical moment he starts with, to 1905, his final station, France passed through no less than four different constitutions; three dynasties (the Bourbons, the Orléans and the Bonapartes); two republics; three revolutions (1830, 1848 and 1870); one coup that worked (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's in 1851) and two that were either merely attempted (in 1877) or fantasized (in 1889); two civil wars (the June crisis in 1848 and the Commune in 1871); one disastrous
A depiction of members of the Paris Commune in 1871 battling
government troops sent to quash their insurrection.
defeat to a nascent Germany (1870) that led to the momentary occupation of more than one-third of the country; two major financial scandals, in 1873 and 1892, that swept away most upper- and middle-class savings; and, finally, a turn-of-the-century judicial scandal (the Dreyfus Affair) that prompted a far-reaching law in 1905 mandating the separation of church and state.
Mr. Brown does not omit a single episode in this narrative, nor does he stint on the vignettes and human angles that bring the story to life. He is the author of noted biographies of Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, and "For the Soul of France" clearly benefits from his long immersion in the lives and works of these two great novelists, who flourished during the era he describes. Mr. Brown's storytelling is vivacious and fluid, but he also keeps a firm hand on his chronicle, bringing order and perspective to these often chaotic times. (Historian Theodore Zeldin, by contrast, allotted himself five volumes to cover the period 1848-1945 and still ended up concentrating on broad themes and dispensing altogether with chronology.)
Then again, Mr. Brown simplifies his task by operating with a single organizing principle: Most of the turmoil in France during this period stemmed from battles over the restoration of the Catholic Church as France's main societal institution. Under the ancien régime, the country was deemed the church's "elder daughter," and the French king's legitimacy was derived from being anointed at Reims Cathedral in a ceremony with biblical overtones. The Revolution in the late 18th century negated both royalty and the church. In the early 1800s, Napoleon fused the ancien régime and the Revolution, in both political and religious terms: He founded a new monarchy compatible with civic equality and representative government, and he re-established Catholicism as the national religion even as he made provisions for religious freedom.
Napoleon's arrangement more or less held firm for several decades, although tensions mounted between the clerical and secular camps. French Catholics generally were not averse to democracy and Enlightenment ideas, so long as the church's special status was recognized. But with the election in 1848 of Pope Pius IX, a dogmatic theocrat (he decreed papal infallibility in 1869), traditionalists in the church began agitating for a restoration of the ancien régime's power. In reaction, secular militancy increased.
For the Soul of France.
Frederick Brown. Knopf, 304 pages, $28.95
The two camps failed to reconcile when France itself was threatened by war with (Protestant) Prussia in 1870, but dire events soon followed: defeat, the partial occupation of France by the newly minted German Empire and the short-lived rule of Paris in spring 1871 by the left-wing Commune, followed by the slaughter of the communards by government troops. "Thousands had been given summary justice and brought before execution squads," Mr. Brown writes. "Blood ran down the gutters, coloring the Seine red."
Catholics took the disastrous events of 1870 and 1871 as an omen that France had strayed too far from its religious roots. "An observant tourist would have found ample evidence to support the view that God seemed happier in France during the early 1870s than He had been for some time," Mr. Brown says, noting that "many young people took holy orders after the war." Secularists insisted that France would betray the best of herself if she did not remain loyal to the Enlightenment thinkers who had fathered the Republic, but the die-hard clericals believed that France could be restored only through the divine grace that would be granted if she atoned for her sins.
Read an excerpt from 'For the Soul of France'
For a while, it looked as if the ultra-conservatives would win by democratic means: Though they were largely royalists, they won a majority in the National Assembly, which in 1873 authorized the construction of the Sacré-Cœur shrine as a national symbol of repentance. A reactionary regime known as L'Ordre Moral ("The Moral Order") was introduced. Then things turned sour for the clerical crowd. There were too many pretenders to the French throne, and the most legitimate of them, Count de Chambord, a Bourbon, was out of touch with the country's mood. He proposed, for instance, to replace the national tricolor flag with the ancien régime's white one. Perhaps not surprisingly, secular republicans came to power in two successive national elections in 1877. They soon ordered up a riposte to the Sacré-Cœur on the Parisian skyline: a tower designed by engineer Gustave Eiffel that would be a symbol of modernity and progress for the centennial of the 1789 Revolution.
With the tide of history against them, the clerically minded resorted to outlandish bids for power and influence. A misbegotten coup in 1889 ended before it began when its putative leader, the reactionary French general Georges Boulanger, fled to Belgium. In the mid-1890s, the clericals, hoping to rally the public's support for the church, launched an anti-Semitic campaign. Mr. Brown ably describes how a genteel theological and social contempt for Judaism was transformed into an unbridled hatred for Jews.
The crusade culminated in what came to be called the Dreyfus Affair. A French military officer named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted in 1894 of treason for passing secrets to Germany, though his only crime was being Jewish in late 19th-century France. The affair dragged on for years, with a retrial, in 1899, thanks largely to Zola's support for Dreyfus— who was eventually restored as a French officer in 1906. The sorry episode certainly didn't result in the abandonment of French anti-Semitism, but its clerical proponents—and their broader hope for the restoration of a royalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-republican France—were discredited.
Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), the French army officer whose treason conviction in 1894 stirred a national soul-searching about anti-Semitism.
At times, it is true, one wishes that Mr. Brown had provided a wider comparative context. He might have contrasted the eruptions of reactionary French Catholicism during the 19th century with, for instance, the more progressive politics of Catholics in Belgium, Germany and Italy. And what about the faction within the French church that denounced its antiliberalism and anti-Semitism? Dissidents did exist—and were gradually to dominate French Catholicism in the 20th century. Still, "The Soul of France" offers a great deal of instruction and many narrative pleasures (even for a French reader). After reading it, visitors to the City of Light, and Parisians themselves, may never look at the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré-Cœur quite the same way again.
—Mr. Gurfinkiel, the president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, lives in Paris.
A Collision of Church and State: War, revolution, Dreyfus and an era of religious and political turmoil
Two monuments in Paris are so prominent that they're hard to miss. One is the Eiffel Tower, of course, the all-iron tour de force of engineering, standing by the Seine amid the city's spacious and supremely elegant West End. Then to the north, atop Montmartre, there is the Sacré-Cœur: a tall, immaculately white Catholic basilica that looks like a digitized pre-Raphaelite set from "Lord of the Rings." What most visitors—and in fact most Parisians— don't realize is that both monuments were designed and their construction begun at about the same time, in the 1870s and 1880s. Even more surprising: The tower and the church were intended as antagonistic national symbols during times of cultural, religious and political conflict that roiled France for decades.
A depiction of members of the Paris Commune in 1871 battling
government troops sent to quash their insurrection.
defeat to a nascent Germany (1870) that led to the momentary occupation of more than one-third of the country; two major financial scandals, in 1873 and 1892, that swept away most upper- and middle-class savings; and, finally, a turn-of-the-century judicial scandal (the Dreyfus Affair) that prompted a far-reaching law in 1905 mandating the separation of church and state.
Mr. Brown does not omit a single episode in this narrative, nor does he stint on the vignettes and human angles that bring the story to life. He is the author of noted biographies of Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert, and "For the Soul of France" clearly benefits from his long immersion in the lives and works of these two great novelists, who flourished during the era he describes. Mr. Brown's storytelling is vivacious and fluid, but he also keeps a firm hand on his chronicle, bringing order and perspective to these often chaotic times. (Historian Theodore Zeldin, by contrast, allotted himself five volumes to cover the period 1848-1945 and still ended up concentrating on broad themes and dispensing altogether with chronology.)
Then again, Mr. Brown simplifies his task by operating with a single organizing principle: Most of the turmoil in France during this period stemmed from battles over the restoration of the Catholic Church as France's main societal institution. Under the ancien régime, the country was deemed the church's "elder daughter," and the French king's legitimacy was derived from being anointed at Reims Cathedral in a ceremony with biblical overtones. The Revolution in the late 18th century negated both royalty and the church. In the early 1800s, Napoleon fused the ancien régime and the Revolution, in both political and religious terms: He founded a new monarchy compatible with civic equality and representative government, and he re-established Catholicism as the national religion even as he made provisions for religious freedom.
Napoleon's arrangement more or less held firm for several decades, although tensions mounted between the clerical and secular camps. French Catholics generally were not averse to democracy and Enlightenment ideas, so long as the church's special status was recognized. But with the election in 1848 of Pope Pius IX, a dogmatic theocrat (he decreed papal infallibility in 1869), traditionalists in the church began agitating for a restoration of the ancien régime's power. In reaction, secular militancy increased.
For the Soul of France.
Frederick Brown. Knopf, 304 pages, $28.95
Catholics took the disastrous events of 1870 and 1871 as an omen that France had strayed too far from its religious roots. "An observant tourist would have found ample evidence to support the view that God seemed happier in France during the early 1870s than He had been for some time," Mr. Brown says, noting that "many young people took holy orders after the war." Secularists insisted that France would betray the best of herself if she did not remain loyal to the Enlightenment thinkers who had fathered the Republic, but the die-hard clericals believed that France could be restored only through the divine grace that would be granted if she atoned for her sins.
Read an excerpt from 'For the Soul of France'
For a while, it looked as if the ultra-conservatives would win by democratic means: Though they were largely royalists, they won a majority in the National Assembly, which in 1873 authorized the construction of the Sacré-Cœur shrine as a national symbol of repentance. A reactionary regime known as L'Ordre Moral ("The Moral Order") was introduced. Then things turned sour for the clerical crowd. There were too many pretenders to the French throne, and the most legitimate of them, Count de Chambord, a Bourbon, was out of touch with the country's mood. He proposed, for instance, to replace the national tricolor flag with the ancien régime's white one. Perhaps not surprisingly, secular republicans came to power in two successive national elections in 1877. They soon ordered up a riposte to the Sacré-Cœur on the Parisian skyline: a tower designed by engineer Gustave Eiffel that would be a symbol of modernity and progress for the centennial of the 1789 Revolution.
The crusade culminated in what came to be called the Dreyfus Affair. A French military officer named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted in 1894 of treason for passing secrets to Germany, though his only crime was being Jewish in late 19th-century France. The affair dragged on for years, with a retrial, in 1899, thanks largely to Zola's support for Dreyfus— who was eventually restored as a French officer in 1906. The sorry episode certainly didn't result in the abandonment of French anti-Semitism, but its clerical proponents—and their broader hope for the restoration of a royalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-republican France—were discredited.
Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), the French army officer whose treason conviction in 1894 stirred a national soul-searching about anti-Semitism.
At times, it is true, one wishes that Mr. Brown had provided a wider comparative context. He might have contrasted the eruptions of reactionary French Catholicism during the 19th century with, for instance, the more progressive politics of Catholics in Belgium, Germany and Italy. And what about the faction within the French church that denounced its antiliberalism and anti-Semitism? Dissidents did exist—and were gradually to dominate French Catholicism in the 20th century. Still, "The Soul of France" offers a great deal of instruction and many narrative pleasures (even for a French reader). After reading it, visitors to the City of Light, and Parisians themselves, may never look at the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré-Cœur quite the same way again.
—Mr. Gurfinkiel, the president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, lives in Paris.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
The man who never was
Clifton Webb plays the role of Ewen Montagu, the British operative that masterminds the deception of the Germans, an operation to make them think that Sicily will not be the main objective of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1943. A body is sent as an emissary, his pockets filled with the every-day objects that any man would have; an attached briefcase contains documents that make it seem that Greece will be the main objective of the Allied invasion.
I became aware of the story in reading David Ignatius's Body of Lies. I have the book, written by Ewen Montagu, who was portrayed by Clifton Webb in the film.
Webb was born in Indiana, yet his English accent was quite good. His career was rather interesting: he did not make many films, yet had a handful of very good roles, including this one, Laura and Razor's Edge (nominated for awards for the latter two).
Gloria Grahame plays the role of a woman looking for romance, an American who every so often has something approaching an accent I judged to have been English. She shares a flat with Pam, who is secretary to Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu. When the plan is underway, implementing it requires credible details and items. One is judged to be a love letter from the dead man's sweetheart. Lucy (who refers to herself early in the film as a librarian) is falling in love with a pilot. Pam is assigned the task of writing a love letter, but has trouble with it (being somewhat sexless herself, she remarks to Lucy, after warning her not to fall in love with a pilot, that if she were to fall in love, she would allow it to happen during the war, to avoid pain and to save her full effort and strength for the war effort). Pining for her pilot lover, Lucy dictates a letter full of longing, pathos, unfulfilled love, fear, and passion.
The body is released from a submarine, wearing a Mae West (also called so in the book), his briefcase attached to a chain that wraps around his waist and down and out of his sleeve. It is found by Spanish in Huelva. That is described in the book: Huelva is far enough away from Gibraltar that it is trusted the body will not be delivered to the British there. It is also known by the British that there is a German operative in the Huelva region who is likely to get documents from the washed-up British man.
The Germans (called Jerry by the British officers) are impressed, but need confirmation that the dead man (Michael Martin) was really whom he seemed to be. An operative is dispatched to ascertain the truth; he is played by Stephen Boyd. He lets a room in a boarding house, using an Irish brogue to charm the landlady. Once inside, he sets up his telegraph machine, communicates with his people, and sets out to find proof.
He goes to a tailor shop and inquires about his "friend" having bought shirts there. That is inconclusive. He winds up in the flat of the two women, and waits. Pam comes home, and he speaks with her, not knowing her role or job. Eventually Lucy shows up, after having received a phone call from her Joe's pilot mate, telling her of his demise.
In the flat Patrick O'Reilly asks questions, including some about Michael Martin. In her grief Lucy speaks of the pain of romance and of loss, and O'Reilly is convinced that Michael martin was a real man. Before leaving he gives the women his address. He goes back to his flat and telegraphs his contacts including saying that if they do not hear back from him in an hour then they can assume that Michael Martin wasn't real.
The Brits go after O'Reilly, but before actually arresting him Montagu calls the commander and reasons with him: O'Reilly wants to be arrested, so let us not do so. When they do not arrest him, O'Reilly telegraphs his contacts that martin was real.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
A Terrible Splendor
"A Terrible Splendor"By Marshall Jon Fisher
Crown, 321 pages, $25
Fisher, M., (2009). A Terrible Splendor. New York: Crown
Tennis is not my game, but this seems a wonderful book about much more than tennis.The case for the greatest match or game or championship ever played – that staple of bar arguments – inevitably has to be based on something more than simple drama on the field, court, course or ice. The confrontation between two opponents should also speak in a larger way about the world at that moment. A lot of tennis has been played since 1937 – and for pure athletic drama, nothing could top the 1980 Wimbledon final between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe – but in Marshall Jon Fisher's rich and rewarding "A Terrible Splendor," he makes a strong claim to greatest-ever status for Budge vs. Cramm in the Davis Cup.
on July 20, the players who had faced each other in the final there [of Wimbledon] were back again. Don Budge, a 22-year-old American, and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, 28, were scheduled to meet in the sport's premiere team competition, the Davis Cup.
The English were rooting for Cramm: it'd be easier for England to defeat Germany than the US.
Cramm had other supporters that July day, but their backing sent a chill through him: Nazi officials sitting in the royal box expected him to win for the glory of the fatherland. A victory would also reassure them about his patriotism. The German star had refused to join the Nazi Party, and in April he had been interrogated by the Gestapo regarding allegations of homosexual activity – a crime in Nazi Germany. The handsome, aristocratic Baron von Cramm desperately needed to redeem himself against the homely young American who had learned to play tennis on public courts in California. Cramm's prospects were not encouraging: In the Wimbledon final, Budge had beaten him easily in straight sets.
Cramm's story provides the emotional ballast of "A Terrible Splendor." In contrast to Budge, whose father was a truck driver, Cramm was a dashing blond member of the German aristocracy, single-mindedly pursuing the game on the court of the family's summer castle and later at Berlin's exclusive Rot-Weiss Club. "Every year that von Cramm steps onto the Centre Court at Wimbledon," reported one observer, "a few hundred young women sit a little straighter and forget about their escorts."
In addition to the two on-court competitors, a third player looms large in "A Terrible Splendor": Bill Tilden, a tennis superstar of the 1920s who had done much to popularize the sport in America but who had also long feuded with the tennis bureaucracy in the U.S. The American tennis establishment, Mr. Fisher says, was leery of Tilden's off-court flamboyance and rumors about his sexual tendencies. (In the 1940s, Tilden was jailed twice on morals charges involving teenage boys.) In 1937, Tilden was unofficially coaching the German team, having been rebuffed by the Americans.
I know the name of Bill Tilden, but nothing more; his coaching Germany is a surprise.
In the stadium, the largely British crowd chants "Deutschland! Deutschland!" as Cramm takes a 3-1 lead in the fifth – but then Budge storms back. A reporter for the New York Herald Tribune will write that the players were hitting winners "off balls that themselves appeared to be certain winners." James Thurber called the display by both players "physical genius." But someone had to win, and, in the end, Budge prevailed.
"A year later," Mr. Fisher writes in the long final chapter, "Gottfried Cramm was in prison." Here we learn about the postmatch fates of the characters we've met, and as many intriguing storylines emerge as in what has gone before. This is especially true of Cramm: He was imprisoned for "deviant" behavior, released after a few months, drafted into military service and eventually sent to the Russian front after war breaks out. Remarkably, he survives – and, perhaps even more remarkably, goes on in the 1950s to marry the American heiress to the Woolworth fortune, Barbara Hutton. Troubled by addiction and depression, Hutton had also long nursed an obsession with the dashing German. A friend observed that Cramm "didn't really want to marry her but thought that he could help her."
On the evidence of "A Terrible Splendor," that appraisal is entirely believable. In a life filled with glory and hardship, Cramm seems to have conducted himself unfailingly with honor and sportsmanship. His depiction by Mr. Fisher is a fitting tribute.
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