Author Archives: disinterested spectator

The Next Voice You Hear… (1950)

In the movie The Next Voice You Hear…, a mysterious voice interrupts the normal broadcast on the radio, claiming to be God.  This happens in Los Angeles every night at 8:30 for six straight days.  People also hear the voice all over the world in whatever language they speak.  Of course, it is a little more convenient for people in Los Angeles to listen to the broadcast, whereas for people in the other parts of the world, not so much.  Those in London must have had to get their butts out of bed at 4:30 in the morning if they wanted to hear what God had to say.  Those of us watching the movie don’t get to hear what God says at all.  We only hear what others say he said.  But that’s all right.  I’ve only heard what others say God said for years.

The effect that God’s voice on the radio has on people is mainly illustrated by the Smith family.  That would be Joe Smith (James Whitmore), his wife Mary (Nancy Davis), their son Johnny, and Aunt Ethel, who visits occasionally to help out because Mary is about to have a baby.  Of course, “Joe” suggests the name “Joseph,” so I guess we are supposed to see some connection with the parents of Jesus, but I have no idea why.

Family life in the Smith household is a bit irritating, primarily because Joe is bossy and thinks he knows what is best for everyone.  We are supposed to believe they basically all love one another, but watching the way they interact is an overall unpleasant experience.  In fact, Joe is no better when he leaves the house.  He is rude to others on the road, and the way he drives gets him a couple of tickets from a policeman.  At work he always seems to be at odds with the foreman, Fred Brannan (Art Smith).

On the first night that God speaks, Joe is the only one in the family to hear him.  He tells Mary and Johnny about it.  Johnny suggests it might be his friend Eddie Boyle, who has a ham radio, and that maybe he figured out a way to cut in as a prank. Joe says that is ridiculous.  “Would Eddie Boyle’s voice sound like God?”  Johnny answers, “I don’t know.  I never heard God.”  Mary turns to Johnny and says, “That isn’t nice.”

Just before that, Mary had suggested that the voice claiming to be God was part of a mystery contest or maybe an Orson Welles thing, alluding, of course, to that infamous War of the Worlds broadcast that made people believe the Martians had landed.  In other words, it was all right for her to question whether the voice was actually God, but not for Johnny to say, “I never heard God.”  And we do sense there is a difference.  Mary is only questioning whether someone claiming to be God actually is God.  But Johnny’s saying, “I never heard God,” is a little like saying, “I never saw God,” which is just one step removed from saying, “What evidence do we have that there is a God?”  Therefore, it is important for Mom to snuff out little Johnny’s tendency to think critically before it grows into full-fledged atheism.

And that does seem to be what God is worried about.  He is concerned that some people do not believe he exists or that it is really God’s voice they are hearing on the radio.  They want him to perform some miracles as proof.  God says he’ll have to think about that.

This second broadcast begins to make the members of the Smith household fearful.  Johnny even starts worrying about his mother dying while giving birth on account of overhearing Mary talking to Aunt Ethel about the difficulties in having a second child, after which Mary starts crying.  This is an artificial fear, one completely made up for this movie.  Except in special cases where there are complications, a second pregnancy is not more dangerous than the first.  The purpose of this phony danger is to give the Smith family something to be fearful of without making the audience fearful.  No one has ever watched this movie and worried that Mary was going to die.

In addition to that fear, one of the men Joe works with is worried about the miracles that God was talking about.  Also, Johnny accidentally ruins the plug on the radio cord and is afraid to tell his father.  Mary expresses surprise, saying that Johnny was never afraid to tell them about stuff like that before.  Exactly what the connection is supposed to be between all this fear and the voice of God is not made clear.  Maybe it is that people often believe in God because they are afraid, and then they end up being afraid of the very God they turned to on account of their fears.  So, fear is both the cause and the effect of believing in God, the one reinforcing the other.

On the third night, Joe and his family miss the broadcast because of the broken plug, but once the plug is fixed, the radio announcer says they were unable to record the voice.  However, they read a transcript of what God had to say.  God is not only still bothered by all the doubt and skepticism about him, but also all the fear that people are feeling.  Maybe, God muses, people are afraid there will be another forty days and nights of rain.  Minutes later, it starts to rain, accompanied by lightning and thunder.  Johnny says he is afraid, Mary screams, and a fearful Joe tries to reassure them that it is just a coincidence as they huddle in terror.  But it only rains that night, and everyone wakes up relieved to see that God didn’t keep it going for the remaining forty days and thirty-nine nights.

At work, Joe marvels that he didn’t have trouble starting his car that morning, almost suggesting that it is some kind of miracle.  But one of his coworkers tells him that maybe he has been flooding his engine every morning on account of being so uptight, and when he woke up in a good mood that morning, he was easier on the gas and didn’t flood the engine.  Joe has a revelation.  Maybe that’s what God is trying to tell everyone, to just take it easy.

Just as the next night’s broadcast is starting, Mary goes into a false labor, so they miss God.  But the radio announcer reads the transcript later, in which God claims that when he made it rain the previous night, that was a miracle.  In fact, every drop of rain, every snowflake, blade of grass, the sun, the moon, and so forth is a miracle.  Then God enjoins people to perform miracles of their own through understanding, peace, and loving kindness.

Let’s pause here to see what all this is about.  Essentially, the focus of this movie is the discord and anxieties that plague the typical American family, both within, the way they get on one another’s nerves, and without, the way they yell at other people on the road as they drive to work, and the way they grumble about their boss when they are on the job.  You might think God would be telling people to quit fighting wars and to help the starving people of Africa, but this movie is not concerned with people in war-torn countries or people who don’t have enough to eat.  Those people aren’t going to be able to buy movie tickets anyway.  No, this movie is directed at the typical theater patron, the person who lives in a peaceful community where everyone has plenty to eat.  And thus, save for the possibility of death, exemplified by the risk involved when Mary has the baby, all the evils besetting these people are the little frustrations and apprehensions of a domestic life in middle-class America.

Anyway, Aunt Ethel becomes hysterical.  Notwithstanding the benign message from the voice on the radio, she fears the wrath of an angry God bent on punishing all of us sinners.  She says her mother and her sister (i.e., Mary’s grandmother and mother) both died when they had their second baby, and now God will see to it that Mary dies when she goes into labor as well.  Joe becomes angry and starts shaking Aunt Ethel violently, causing Mary to start yelling at Joe.

The next morning, with Mary still seething over Joe’s physical abuse of Ethel, Joe leaves the house for some cigarettes.  He walks by Brannan’s house and asks him what he thinks of the voice on the radio.  Brannan says, “People silly enough to believe in God are silly enough to believe God’s talking on the radio.”  Joe tells him he has no right to say that, and Brannan reminds him it’s a free country.  Joe tells Brannan he is a mean, miserable, old man.  Brannan says that Joe is the one who is miserable:  “Posing as a God fearing man.  You’re just hanging around, praying that I’ll die so you can get my job.”  Joe pretty much admits that is true.  Brannan then says that if God wants to answer Joe’s prayers and cause him to die, he can do it right now.  Joe stares at him, almost wondering if a bolt of lightning will strike any minute.  But of course it doesn’t.  Brannan is a typical movie atheist.  Not only is he cynical, but he is grumpy and something of a misanthrope as well.  At the time this movie was made, it was commonly believed that without God a person would naturally be selfish and mean.

Joe continues on his way to the local bar to get his pack of cigarettes.  When he gets there, he is spotted by his old Navy buddy, Mitch.  Mitch is still a bachelor and is on shore leave with a big wad of cash to spend, in contrast to Joe, who complains that he struggles to make ends meet and that his son Johnny has to have a paper route to buy his own bicycle because Joe can’t afford to buy him one himself.  Mitch is a hedonist.  He tells Joe about all the pleasures of visiting far off places, especially the ones in the tropics.  Unlike Brannan, the grumpy atheist, Mitch is just having too much fun living to worry about God one way or the other.  He laughs at the way people are afraid of living and scared of dying, at the way they are afraid when God speaks to them, and they are afraid when he doesn’t.  It’s because they are afraid that they fight with each other.  “As for me,” he says, “I don’t fight with nobody.  I’m just a hundred and ninety-five pounds of true love for my fellow man.”  They sit at a table getting drunk, with Mitch more than happy to pay for all the drinks.  At one point, when he orders another round, a woman sitting at the bar catches his eye, and he orders a drink for her too, after which she sits down at their table.  She flirts with Joe, but he keeps being rude to her, even though he keeps saying, “No offense.”  Finally, he tells Mitch that he is the voice of evil and that he never wants to see him again, threatening to squash his face if he does.

It might seem a little much for Joe to say that Mitch is the voice of evil and to express his hatred for him.  After all, it is not as though Mitch has ever done anything truly evil, like kill a man or rape a woman.  He’s just a good-time Charley who wants to see everyone get drunk and get laid.  But Mitch’s role as someone who is evil is relative to the focus of this movie, which is the ordinary life of middle-class America.  Just as God is mostly addressing his remarks to families dealing with the miseries of domesticity, so too is Mitch, as the Devil’s spokesman, being evil in making Joe discontented with having a family and a boring job.

Joe comes home drunk.  Mary reads him what God said while he was out, something about not doing what he told them, about not creating miracles through love and understanding, much in the way schoolchildren fail to do their homework.  Everyone makes up, even Joe and Aunt Ethel, except for Johnny, who was so upset by what Joe did that he ran away from home.  Joe goes out looking for him and finally finds him at Brannan’s house, where it turns out that Brannan and Johnny have been friends for some time.

It cannot go without mentioning that times have changed.  For a child to have been spending time in an old man’s house without his parents knowing about it would be a matter of concern today.  But no one worried about such things in 1950 when this movie was made.  Anyway, what is strange is that we are now finding out that Brannan is a really nice man.  This contradicts the impression we had of him before as the stereotypical atheist who only cares about himself.  Furthermore, when Joe gets ready to take Johnny home, he says, “God bless you,” to Brannan, who in turn says, “God bless you, Joe.”  This is the movie’s way of saying that Brannan really does believe in God deep in his heart, which is why he is also a nice guy deep down.

As we learned from Ludwig Feuerbach, talking about God is an indirect way of talking about man.  The God on the radio is worried about all the skepticism concerning his existence.  In Feuerbachian terms, this means that the people who made this movie, as well as much of the audience for whom it was intended, were worried about all the doubts concerning God’s existence, which in turn caused them to have doubts as well.  The movie wishes to reassure us that such doubts are not real, that skepticism is just a pose, because there really is no such thing as an atheist.  Therefore, notwithstanding the appearances, everyone really believes in God.

Joe brings Johnny home, the family is all together again, and they all love one another.  Ethel has written down what God said, which is that he is pleased.  Joe even decides to say grace, which has not been a custom in that house for some time.  The next day, everyone is in church to hear the night’s broadcast, but there is only silence.  The preacher turns off the radio, saying that God has spoken for six days straight, and that since this is the seventh day, God is resting.

Interestingly, this seventh day is a Monday.  So, God rests on Monday now?  Did he take an extra day off somewhere along the way since the Creation?  No, of course not.  Making Monday the seventh day is a way of finessing the question as to which religion God belongs to.  In other words, if the seventh day had been Sunday, the implication would have been that Christianity is the true religion; if the seventh day had been on a Saturday, that would have implied that the true religion is Judaism; and while I doubt that anyone was thinking about Muslims at the time, their Day of Prayer, a Sabbath of sorts, falls on a Friday.  On the other hand, the movie begins with a quotation from the Old Testament about how the word of God had not yet been heard, and it ends with a quotation from the New Testament about how the word of God had been heard, so there does seem to be a bias toward Christianity anyway.

Right there in church, Mary goes into labor.  They get her to the hospital, and in the waiting room where Joe and Johnny sit, we see a picture of a stork on the wall, with the words at the bottom saying, “I’ve never lost a father yet.”  That’s an old joke, of course, and its purpose has always been to make light of a father’s worries and concerns about his wife’s pregnancy.  Indeed, we never really did believe that Mary was in danger of dying while giving birth, that bit about the danger of a second pregnancy notwithstanding.

Had this been a different kind of movie, Mary would have died, and we would have heard that her death is a test of our faith or that we just cannot understand the mysterious ways of God.  But the moral of this movie is that middle-class Americans should not be fearful, for there is nothing to be afraid of, which absolutely precluded the death of Mary or her baby.

The Wall Is Dead

I have been wanting a wall built along the Mexican border for twenty years.  I never really had much hope for it.  Now I have none at all.

There are basically two arguments against building that wall:  the first is that it won’t work; the second is that it will.  And I have even heard some people advance both reasons without any sense of inconsistency.  One minute we hear that people will just use ladders to get over the wall, and the next minute we hear that it is cruel and inhumane to keep people out.

My view is that a wall, properly manned and monitored, would work, and that while I feel sorry for the people trying to get into this country, I still don’t want to let them in for the same reason that I don’t want a homeless person sleeping on my couch.  I am just not that good.

I am willing to concede that I may be mistaken as to the effectiveness of a wall in stopping illegal immigration.  And if someone wants to accuse me of being selfish and heartless for wanting a wall, I will concede that point as well.  The question that concerns me at the moment is not whether my desire to have a wall built along the southern border proves either that I am a fool or a knave, possibly both, but whether it proves that I am a racist.

It’s all Donald Trump’s fault, of course.  In the commentary of late about Donald Trump’s racism, several examples are typically put forward as evidence.  First, there was his remark that most of the people coming here from Mexico are rapists, drug dealers, and assorted criminals.  Second, there is his advocacy of a ban on Muslims.  Third, there is his claim that the judge presiding over his case is prejudiced against him on account of his Mexican heritage.

One might quibble over whether these things are racism or some other kind of prejudice.  For example, the ban on Muslims I would call religious discrimination, because Muslims do not constitute a race.  On the other hand, since it is now fashionable to say that race is just a social construct, I suppose we could socially construct Muslims as a race if we wanted to.  For that matter, we might even simplify things by socially constructing the race of illegal immigrants, regardless of their national origin, skin color, or physiognomy.  People sneaking into this country from Mexico, Syria, Thailand, and Nigeria would all be of the same race, the race of illegal immigrants.  Then, anyone opposing illegal immigration would be a racist.  But we all know that race is more than just a social construct, and that socially constructing a race of illegal immigrants as outlined above would be just plain silly.

Therefore, I do not wish to quibble about whether Trump’s remarks are racist or just some other kind of prejudice or discrimination.  Let us, for the sake of simplicity, stipulate that Trump’s remarks are racist and that Donald Trump says these things because he is a racist.  What bothers me is that in addition to the examples mentioned above as proof of Trump’s racism, his desire to build a wall is listed right along with them.  Now, it is one thing to say that Donald Trump wants to build a wall because he is a racist.  It is quite another thing to say that someone is a racist because he wants to build a wall.  Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain have all supported the idea of building a wall at one time or another.  Are they racists?  Or rather, were they racists at the time but no longer?

Whatever their reasons were for a change of heart, or at least a change of position, I can guarantee they will never be in support of a wall again.  There probably never was much chance for a wall before Trump declared his desire to become president.  Now there is no chance at all.  The idea of a wall will forever have the Donald Trump taint, and no future politician with aspirations to become president will want to have anything to do with it.

Somewhere in Time (1980)

In just about any time travel movie you have ever seen, science and technology are involved somehow.  Never mind exactly what that scientific explanation is for time travel or what the technological gadget is that makes it possible, because it’s all a bunch of hooey anyway.  We go along with it not because we believe for one second that such a thing is possible, but because we are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story.  So we know we are in for a different kind of time travel movie when the man that advises Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) about traveling through time is a philosophy professor.

According to the philosophy professor, if you want to go back in time, you have to think really hard about the period of time to which you wish to go, while making sure there is nothing in the room that will remind you of the present, such as a recently minted coin.  In particular, if Collier wants to go back to August, 1912, he must think August, 1912.  It reminded me of Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man (1962) telling the students who just got their new musical instruments that they don’t need to learn how to read music or the technique of playing the instruments they now own.  They just need to “Think the Minuet.”

Collier wants to go back to 1912 because that is when a woman lived with whom he fell in love while looking at her picture.  Now, if you can’t find a woman to fall in love with in the time period in which you exist, you have problems that a time machine can’t solve.  But that aside, it all started when that woman, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), now very old, gave him a watch and said, “Come back to me,” and then walked away.  Why she didn’t stick around and tell him to read the professor’s book on time travel and to “think 1912,” we do not know.  And what is going on between them in general, we do not know.  Of course, there is some kind of meant-for-each-other destiny involved, maybe with a little reincarnation thrown in, but it’s hard to tell, because the movie never makes that clear.

I know what it is like to be in love, but if I managed to travel back in time just by thinking about it, I would not be able to contain myself.  I would have to sit in a chair and contemplate the implications of something I had heretofore thought impossible.  Love would just have to wait.  On the other hand, if I did catch up with the woman in question, I would have to blurt out, “I fell in love with your picture, so I came back from the future to be with you.  If you don’t believe me, just take a look at this penny.  Oops!”

Finally, because Collier fell asleep while he was thinking 1912, we are never sure whether he just dreamed it or not.  In fact, at the end of the movie, he seems to be in a catatonic trance.  So, maybe what we just watched was the hallucination of a loony.  In fact, that really is the only way to make any sense out of this movie.

Martyrs of the Alamo (1915)

As we know, The Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D.W. Griffith, justifies the institution of slavery and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction as the need to protect white women from Negro lust.  Later that year, Griffith also produced Martyrs of the Alamo, which reveals that the war in which Texas declared and won its independence from Mexico was brought about by Mexican lust for white women.  So many white women were being accosted by the Mexican soldiers, it seems, that the white men finally had to take up arms to protect them.  When Santa Anna and his troops come in to put down the rebellion, the Texians took refuge in the Alamo, and we all know what happened next.

As an example of how cruel and ruthless the Mexican soldiers are, we see a scene in which a little boy is bayonetted, his body picked up and flung out of the way.  And when the battle is over, Santa Anna has anyone that survived the massacre executed, except for good-looking white women, of course.  We see an old woman being taken away for execution, while a young, pretty blonde is spared.  The intertitle notes that Santa Anna is an inveterate drug fiend known for his shameless orgies.  Right after that, we see him grabbing the pretty blonde, but she slaps him and gets away from him.  By the way, Santa Anna is played by Walter Long, the same man that played Gus in The Birth of a Nation, the black man that tried to rape Flora.

We have all heard how the Mexican soldiers were caught off guard when Sam Houston attacked at San Jacinto because they were taking their siesta.  But in addition to that, according to this movie, Santa Anna, appearing somewhat stoned, is busy having women dance for him, while a Mexican guard watches the show himself instead of watching for such things as an advancing army of Texians.  So, Mexican lust not only was the cause of the Texas revolution, it was also the cause of Mexico’s defeat as well.

The Lies That No One Believes

The main purpose of a lie is to deceive.  And thus it is only natural to suppose that a lie will fail to accomplish its purpose if the person being lied to does not believe it.  There is a certain species of lie, however, that manages to be successful even though it is not believed and the liar has no expectation that it will be.  A good example would be that in which a husband emphatically insists to his wife that he has not been cheating on her even though she knows he has.  Another would be the man who declares under oath that he does not remember something he could not possibly have forgotten.   And an excellent example was provided recently by President Obama when he stated, “We are determined to realize a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Now, by way of contrast, just imagine if Obama had said, in a very different context, “We are determined to realize a nation free of handguns.”  Such a remark would have caused a frenzy of political backlash by defenders of gun ownership, and that for two reasons:  First, they would believe that Obama really meant it had he said such a thing; and second, they would believe that he might actually take steps to try to bring it about.  After all, we have been reading for some time in the right-wing hysterical press that Obama is coming for our guns, causing gun sales to skyrocket.  If the Republicans really believed Obama when he said he wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons, the uproar would be overwhelming.  Donald Trump is presently accusing Hillary Clinton of wanting to abolish the Second Amendment.  But we don’t hear him saying that Hillary, like President Obama, wants to get rid of nuclear weapons. Trump believes a lot of crazy things, but he is not crazy enough to believe that.

Obama does not believe there will ever be a world free of nuclear weapons.  Furthermore, he knows that we do not believe him when he says that we need to rid the world of nuclear weapons.  In fact, it is because this lie is told with no expectation of its being taken seriously that it is bipartisan.  Ronald Reagan said pretty much the same thing in his 1985 inaugural address, and no one believed him either, nor did he expect them to.

The truth is, the world is a better place with nuclear weapons, but no politician dares to say so.  Without nuclear weapons, the world have undoubtedly fought a major war sometime in the last seventy years on a par with World Wars I and II.  “World War III” has always been understood to mean a war where America’s and Russia’s hydrogen bombs are unleashed.  But a conventional World War III would have undoubtedly been fought by now, possibly on American soil with widespread devastation, had not the existence of nuclear weapons kept such hostilities in check.  Who knows?  We might even have lost that war and our whole way of life with it.

Let’s face it.  To utter the truth, which is that we have no intention of ever giving up our arsenal, but we want to keep other countries from enjoying all the benefits of possessing nuclear weapons, would be a crude assertion of the will to power.  Instead, presidents are obliged to say that all nuclear weapons are bad, even ours, and that we look forward to the day when there are no more nuclear weapons in this world.  No one believes us, of course.  But this lie must be functional in some way, or presidents would not keep saying it.

A similar kind of lie was told by the Bush administration regarding plans to build a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic to protect them from an attack from Iran.  You see, if Iran is ever able to develop long-range missiles with nuclear warheads, they will send those missiles flying right over Israel and hit the countries of Eastern Europe, because Poles and Czechs are the ones they really want to destroy.  Needless to say, the Russians did not believe this lie.  Putin knew that plans for the missile shield were being made with Russia in mind.  The American people did not believe that lie.  Our allies did not believe it.  And the Iranians just snorted.  Moreover, George W. Bush had no expectation that anyone would believe it.  I mean, our opinion of Bush’s intellect may be pretty low, but we know he was not stupid enough to expect anyone to swallow that whopper.  And yet, the lie must have been functional in some way or else his administration would not have bothered to insist on telling it.

In part, the functionality of such lies is akin to religious utterances like “He’s gone to a better place” and polite expressions such as “We’ll have to get together sometime.”  We know they are baloney, but somehow they make us feel better anyway.  But another function of the lie no one believes is that it stops things from proceeding to the next step.  If you insist on a lie, no one can make you confront the truth and all its implications.

“Of All the Gin Joints….”

You know what the problem with this universe is?

It has too much synchronicity in it.

First, had any other Republican won the nomination, he or she would probably have stayed away from Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.  Instead, we have Donald Trump, who is willing to bring up every scandal connected with the Clintons, especially the ones involving sex.

Second, Bill Cosby has just been told he will have to stand trial for raping a woman by drugging her first, which naturally reminds people about the sexual assault charges made against Bill Clinton, as underscored by Steve Kornacki.

Third, we now have this scandal concerning Ken Starr for his failure to handle sexual assault cases properly as president of Baylor University.  Ken Starr, of course, was the man that investigated Bill Clinton during his presidency.

The occurrence of these three things all about the same time is too significant to be just a coincidence.  It must be synchronicity, that mysterious, meaningful connection between causally unrelated events.

Now, we also have the State Department’s report on Hillary’s improper use of emails, but that doesn’t count, not because sex is not involved, but because there is a causal process that led to this report’s being released at this time.  It’s a problem for Hillary, of course, but we cannot call it a coincidence.

Nor does the documentary Weiner count either.  It will remind us of how Anthony Weiner took pictures of his genitals and sent them to adoring women, which reminds us of his wife, Huma Abedin, the assistant to Hillary Clinton, but a causal analysis can explain why this documentary is being released at this time, so there is no need to invoke synchronicity.

Some might argue that Donald Trump’s attempt to smear Hillary with the scandals of the past will not work, especially the one about Vince Foster.  In fact, it might be argued that by bringing up Vince Foster, the one scandal most people, left and right, are willing to dismiss as a crazy conspiracy theory, Trump is actually undermining the other charges he has leveled against her and her husband.  And others might argue that the scandal concerning Ken Starr undermines his credibility as an investigator of various Clinton scandals.

But just as synchronicity is coincidence between meaningful events not causally connected, so too is the association of ideas a meaningful connection between thoughts not connected by logic.  Logic and causation don’t matter.  True, false, justified, unjustified, fair or foul—it doesn’t matter.  It all adds up to that queasy feeling we get when we think about the Clintons being back in the White House.

I am not given to spooky theories like those involving Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity or to similar notions of luck or fate, but there are times when it seems that events not causally connected come together in a way that mere coincidence could not possibly support.  And right now, Hillary must be wondering how Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, and Ken Starr have all managed to come together by mere chance, just months away from the presidential election.

To the Last Man (1933)

In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the point is made that revenge is never ending, whereas justice can bring things to a final resolution.  To the Last Man turns that idea on its head.  In this movie, which is about a feud between two families, whose principal names are the Haydens and the Colbys, the head of the Hayden clan, Mark Hayden, decides to end the feud by bringing in the law, which Granny Spelvin objects to as not honorable, because blood will not be spilled for blood.  Nevertheless, Mark goes to the sheriff and charges Jed Colby (Noah Berry) with the murder of Granpa Spelvin.  Even the sheriff thinks it is a bad idea to let the law interfere with a feud, but he arrests Jed, who is tried and sentenced to fifteen years in jail.  To get away from Kentucky, Mark takes his family out to Nevada.  But when Jed’s fifteen years are up, he and what is left of his family follow the Haydens to Nevada, along with a gang of criminals, headed by Jim Daggs (Jack La Rue), whom Jed met while in jail.

While things are heating up between the two families, Lynn Hayden (Randolph Scott) and Ellen Colby (Esther Ralston) accidentally meet and fall in love.  They plan to marry as the feud swirls around them.  And so, this is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story, except that this too is turned on its head.  Whereas Romeo and Juliet died, leaving their families to regret the feud that led to their deaths, this “Romeo” and “Juliet” survive, get married, and live happily ever after, while everyone else in the two families dies (except for a few women and children on the Hayden side).  Moreover, unlike justice, which ended nothing, revenge carried out to its ultimate conclusion, when there is only one man left, is the only thing that finally puts an end the feud.

The Mark of Zorro (1920, 1940) et al.

We all know who Zorro is, along with his secret identity, Don Diego Vega, his character having been featured in movies going back to the days of silent films.  And so it comes as a surprise when we find out that he was not specifically mentioned in the title of the serialized novel in which he was introduced in 1919, that title being The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley.  Another surprise that comes from reading this novel is the depiction of Diego’s native servant Bernardo, who is said to be deaf and dumb.  And if you think that expression is politically incorrect, the portrayal of Bernardo is vastly more so, because Bernardo is dumb in both senses of the word.  His value to Diego is such that we wonder why he didn’t just get a dog:

“Bernardo, you are a gem,” Don Diego said: “You cannot speak or hear, cannot write or read, and have not sense enough to make your wants known by the sign language. You are the one man in the world to whom I can speak without having my ears talked off in reply. You do not ‘Ha!’ me at every turn.”

Bernardo bobbed his head as if he understood. He always bobbed his head in that fashion when Don Diego’s lips ceased to move.

While visiting his father, Diego has Bernardo sleep on the floor just outside the door of his bedroom.

The first movie version of this story wisely changed the title to The Mark of Zorro (1920).  The mark in question refers to the scar that Zorro (Douglas Fairbanks) sometimes leaves on the face of an enemy.  As in the serialized novel, the movie begins with Zorro already in existence, and we see a man with a “Z” permanently etched as a scar on his face.  Later on in the movie, he carves a “Z” on the neck of Captain Ramón during a sword fight, and in a subsequent fight at the end, carves a “Z” on his forehead.  The first fight occurs because Ramón was sexually assaulting Lolita, with whom Zorro is in love.

We are used to seeing more consumption of tobacco in old movies than in modern ones, but I admit to being taken aback by its presentation in this movie.  It is one thing to see Don Diego taking a pinch of snuff as part of his routine of being a fop, along with his listlessly performing magic tricks and saying he is fatigued, but it is quite another thing to see Zorro himself smoking a cigarette.  But there he is, wearing cape and mask, taking a big drags on his cigarette, while confronting enemies, smiling broadly as he exhales large plumes of smoke.

The above-mentioned expressions of fatigue, by the way, are an essential attribute of Don Diego, beginning with the novel, where he proposes to Lolita and then says he finds the whole business fatiguing.  Speaking of Lolita, I have to wonder what her marriage with Diego will be like, considering that he thinks Bernardo is an ideal companion.

It’s hard to know what to say about silent films.  It’s almost as if they have to be rated against one another rather than compared to other movies in general.  As for this one, it is a bit corny.  When Sergeant Gonzales (Noah Berry) enters what appears to be a saloon, he is rude and offensive to a degree that is preposterous.  However, the movie does have its moments.  In any event, it made a major improvement on the character of Bernardo.  In the movie, he only lacks the capacity for speech, and he is intelligent enough to help Diego conceal the fact that he is Zorro.

There is one more difference deserving special attention.  In The Curse of Capistrano, the climactic duel is between Captain Ramón and Zorro, whereas in The Mark of Zorro, the duel is fought between Ramón and Diego.  More about that later.

My introduction to the character Zorro was in an old serial they showed on television in the early 1950s when I just a kid, to wit, Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939).  As serials go, this is one of the better ones, though I suppose that is not saying much.  Set in 1810, Juarez has led a successful revolution in Mexico, which is quite an accomplishment, since he was born in 1806.  Anyway, the United States of Mexico needs gold from the mines, but a mysterious figure, Don del Oro, controls the Yaquis who work the mines, and who is one of the corrupt counselors who want to keep the gold themselves, but….  Oh, it’s all too confusing to go on with the plot.  There is no Bernardo character, by the way.

It was made with a juvenile audience in mind, and so it might seem inappropriate to take it seriously enough to criticize it, but having watched it again recently, I just have to make a brief comment.  Zorro (Reed Hadley) rides a white horse, the only white horse apparently in the entire area.  And so, I found myself wondering where he stabled it.  You can almost hear people saying to themselves, “Gee, Don Diego and Zorro are the only two people that have a white horse.”  Actually, Diego never rides the white horse, riding a black one instead.  Nor does he keep it in his stable.  When something comes up needing Zorro’s attention, Diego rides out to the hills where his white horse is standing there by himself, saddled and ready.   Needless to say, you can’t treat a horse that way.  That aside, it occurred to me that it would have made more sense if Diego rode the white horse, since it would go with his pretense of being a fop, while riding a black horse when he donned his Zorro rig.  Clearly, this juvenile serial wanted Zorro to have the pizzazz that goes with riding a white horse, instead of doing it the way I suggest, which might appeal to a more mature audience.  But I was just a kid when I first watched it, and so the white horse for Zorro was just what I wanted.  Furthermore, I was fascinated by the parts where Zorro was all decked out in his black outfit, complete with cape, sword, pistols, and whip, though it now strikes me that this panoply would be rather cumbersome.

The television station followed up by presenting an earlier serial, Zorro Rides Again (1937), and though I didn’t care for his mask, I still paid more attention to the parts where he was in costume and not so much to the parts where he was in ordinary dress pretending to be weak and lazy.  And I was thrilled when the Walt Disney Studios produced a television series entitled simply Zorro (1957-1959).  As before, it was the parts where I got to see Zorro (Guy Williams) gallivanting about that I was interested in, not so much the parts where he was Don Diego de la Vega.  Bernardo reappears, playing the role of a man who cannot speak and only pretends to be deaf.

Whether I preferred the parts where Zorro was doing stuff was because I was a child, or it was because these two serials and the television series were juvenile in nature, I cannot say.  But it was quite a surprise for me when, as a college student, I saw The Mark of Zorro (1940) for the first time.  Of course, it had the star quality of such actors as Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone, as well as the production values of a major studio, all of which were bound to make it much better than what I had seen previously.  But what really struck me was the fact that the parts of the movie featuring Zorro constituted a relatively small amount of screen time, which was greatly exceeded by the amount of time devoted to Don Diego.  The emphasis on Diego in this movie even went so far as to have him fight the climactic duel as Diego and not as Zorro, as in the 1920 version.  Most movies do not do this, choosing instead to have any climactic sword fight fought by Zorro in his outfit, just as in the novel.  Notably,  in the 1974 made-for-television production starring Frank Langella, the movie is basically a remake of the version with Tyrone Power, even using the same music.  The major difference between the two, aside from the inferior quality of the 1974 version, is the way the story was altered just enough to allow Langella to be in full Zorro regalia in the final showdown.

The amount of screen time given to Zorro versus Diego determines the kind of movie it is.  A costumed character is exciting to watch, but he is all action and external appearance.  He must be in constant motion, running, riding, and fighting.  If he stands still for too long, he begins to look silly, especially if he is wearing a cape.  In fact, one of the ways the television show Batman (1966-1968) would amuse us was by having Batman and Robin doing just that, standing around and talking in their costumes.  On the other hand, it is with his secret identity, Diego in the case of Zorro movies, that we get to know the man, to learn what he thinks and feels.  Moreover, we get to watch him acting a part in order to keep people from suspecting that he is the one who wears the mask.  In this case, the part is that of a fop.  It is a pretense also used in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), starring Leslie Howard as the title character and as Sir Percy Blakeney, but Howard’s performance in that role was over the top.  Diego’s foppery as performed by Tyrone Power, on the other hand, is so good that we find ourselves impatiently waiting for the Zorro scenes to end so that we can have more Diego.

There is no Bernardo in the 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, although there is a gesture in his direction.  When the movie starts, Diego is enjoying himself as a military man in Spain, where his only problem is having his love life interrupted by the need to fight duels with men that are trying to prove themselves with a sword.  He gets called home by his father, who Diego believes is still the alcalde of a town in California.  Before he finds out otherwise, everyone recoils in fear of him when he says his father is the alcalde, including a coachman who says nothing when Diego speaks to him.  Angry, Diego threatens to cut out his tongue if he doesn’t answer him, but he is told that his father already had that done when the man spoke out against the taxes at a meeting, after which the coachman makes unintelligible sounds with his mouth.  At the time, I thought he would be the Bernardo of this movie, but we never see him again.

Perhaps the reason for this also has to do with the maturity of the intended audience.  The function that Bernardo serves in The Curse of Capistrano is that of allowing Diego to reveal his thoughts.  He has someone to talk to who isn’t able to say anything in reply, which Diego would have found irritating, because he doesn’t care for what most of us would call a conversation.  He prefers to be the only one to do the talking.  I suppose we’ve all had the misfortune of knowing someone like that.  In any event, this allows us to know what Diego is thinking.  Of course, McCulley could have told us what Diego was thinking, but that is an inferior solution.  It is better if we learn what someone is thinking by seeing or hearing what we would if we were in the room:  observing his body language and facial expressions; listening to his dialogue with others.  In the case of the novel, it is not so much a dialogue that Diego has with Bernardo, but a monologue in the presence of a dimwit.  But in any event, a mature audience will have no trouble understanding what Diego is up to without someone like Bernardo for him to talk to, and he is certainly not missed in this 1940 remake.

In addition to allowing Diego to reveal his thoughts, Bernardo also seems to exist to provide for some silly humor.  We no longer laugh at people that are mentally impaired, but I suspect that a hundred years ago, those that read The Curse of Capistrano thought Bernardo was funny.  In the 1920 version of The Mark of Zorro, Diego uses a fake mustache as part of his Zorro disguise.  At one point in the movie, he puts the mustache on Bernardo while he is sleeping.  And his character in the Disney production of Zorro was just the sort that would amuse children.  Therefore, such a character is not really suited for a movie intended for a mature audience.  Hence his absence in the 1940 remake.

The 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, then, is the only serious Zorro movie intended for an adult audience, and it is the best Zorro movie of them all.  Of course, Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981) is intended for an adult audience too, but it is a parody.  With that qualification, however, I would rate it as the second best Zorro movie ever made.  A Bernardo character belongs there, of course, though under the name “Paco.”  Early in the movie, while Diego (George Hamilton) is sword fighting with a woman’s cuckolded husband and his five brothers, Paco hand-signals what is in a letter that just arrived ordering Diego to return to California.

Other than that, it is standard for Zorro movies to appeal to juveniles.  The Mask of Zorro (1998), however, takes this to the next level.  Not only is it intended for children, it has children playing roles in the movie as well.  This is in keeping with the unfortunate trend, beginning in the 1980s, of thrusting children into movies that would once of have been made with adults only.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

In Eyes Without a Face, mad scientist Docteur Génessier, whose specialty is transplanting tissue from one person to another, is working to overcome the tendency of the recipient to reject the foreign tissue.  He also has a practical purpose, which is grafting a new face on his daughter, Christiane, who was disfigured in an automobile accident that was his fault.  His Igor is Louise, played by Alida Valli, whose disfigured face was restored by Génessier, for which reason she is extremely loyal to him and willing to aid him in his evil doings.  In particular, Louise picks up young women who look the way Christiane did before her disfigurement, takes them to Génessier’s house so he can remove their faces and transplant them onto Christiane.  Unfortunately, he has thus far been unsuccessful, the result of which is that a bunch of dead women’s bodies without faces keep turning up, all of whom seem to be of the same physical type.  In fact, we see Louise dump one such woman into a river at the beginning of the movie.  One way in which all the women are similar is that they all have blue eyes.  Now, this makes no sense, because Christiane’s eyes are fine, hence the title:  she has the eyes; what she needs is a face.  So why the women whose faces are being removed have to have blue eyes is a mystery.

Génessier identifies the woman found in the river as his daughter so that people, including her boyfriend Jacques, a doctor who works in Génessier’s clinic, will think she is dead and not wonder where she is, for only Génessier, Louise, and Christiane know of her horribly burned face.  In the meantime, Christiane wears a mask around the house so as not to gross everyone out including herself.  The mask is an immobile version of what she used to look like.  One of the amazing things about this mask, which allows us a clear view of her eyes, is how expressive her “face” is.  We have all heard the expression, “The eyes are a window to the soul.”  This movie really demonstrates it.  We get a good sense of what Christiane is feeling and thinking as she walks around the house owing only to the expressiveness of her eyes.

Louise’s next victim is Edna.  She tricks her into getting into the car with her, and the next thing you know, Edna is strapped to the operating table having her face lifted, so to speak.  We actually get a glimpse of her face after the skin has been removed, squarely placing this film into the category of Grand Guignol.  At first the transplant seems to be a success, but eventually it becomes necrotic and has to be removed again.  Back on goes the mask.  For some reason, Génessier keeps Edna alive, as if he is doing her a favor, but she leaps to her death.  Adding to the creepiness of this movie are all the big, howling dogs Génessier has locked up in small cages to be used for his transplant experiments.

One of Edna’s friends reports her missing.  She tells the police about the woman that Edna said she was going somewhere with, but all she can say by way of identification is that Edna said the woman wore a pearl choker (Louise wears a choker to hide the scar on her neck).  Later, Jacques receives a strange phone call from Christiane, who misses him terribly.  She only utters his name, but he recognizes her voice.  He goes to the police, and when Inspector Parot mentions the pearl choker in passing, Jacques thinks of Louise.  As a result, she and Dr. Génessier become suspects.

A woman named Paulette, who fits the profile of missing girls, blue eyes and all, is picked up by the police for shoplifting.  Parot and another inspector threaten her with prosecution unless she acts as a decoy.  She agrees to go to Génessier’s clinic and fake an illness.  And here is the point in the movie where police incompetence becomes so absurd that it is laughable.  Do they have a plainsclothes officer watching the clinic to see what happens to her when she is discharged?  No.  And so, when Paulette is released late at night and walks down the street to get a bus, she is offered a ride by Louise and accepts.  Too bad nobody is around to see her get in the car.

Jacques calls Inspector Parot to let him know Paulette has left the clinic.  Parot concludes that this puts Génessier and Louise in the clear, since they obviously did not kidnap Paulette, but let her leave the clinic instead.  However, Parot decides to make sure she got home all right.  Gosh!  She never got home.  So the two inspectors drive out to Génessier’s clinic just to be sure.  They ask Génessier if Paulette was released from clinic.  Yes she was, he tells them.  The inspectors shrug and go home, concluding it was just a false trail and the choker was just one big coincidence.

Before Paulette’s face can be peeled off, Christiane releases her from the table, stabs Louise in the neck right through the choker, and releases the dogs, who then go after Génessier, ripping half his face off.  Christiane wanders off into the woods with one of the doves she also released perched on her hand, just to give the movie a little symbolism.  You see, this is a French film, so you can’t expect it to make sense the way a Hollywood production would.

Defending Your Life (1991)

Defending Your Life is a new-age reincarnation movie, which means it has a sappy premise that only someone that has led a pampered existence could possibly relate to.  Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) is an advertising executive who buys himself a BMW as a birthday present to himself.  Then, when trying to pick up a bunch of CDs that have fallen on the floor while driving, he runs head on into a bus, dying instantly.  When he wakes up, he finds himself in Judgment City, where a tribunal will decide whether he will be able to “move forward” (presumably to some higher plane of existence), go back to Earth to be reincarnated so he can try to do better next time, or be discarded as so utterly worthless that he is not worth saving.

Now, you may think this tribunal would be concerned with Miller’s self-centered attitude or his thoughtlessness.  Or possibly it would be concerned with some darker sins, like being mean and selfish.  No, the only thing the tribunal cares about is fear.  According to prosecuting attorney Lena Foster (Lee Grant), Miller cannot be allowed to move forward, because he never overcame his fears.

Let’s stop right there.  Fear is a normal, healthy reaction to danger.  It is the emotion that makes you take precautions to avoid dangerous situations, and when that is not possible, to hide or run away.  The absurd premise of this movie, that fear is something that must always be overcome, makes sense only in a world where one is sheltered from danger.  This is a movie for people who live in the nice part of town, not in the bad part where gangs terrorize the neighborhoods.  It is a movie for people who have never been to war, who never had to fear having their legs blown off by an IED.  It is basically for people who have lived relatively healthy lives in middle-class America.

During the trial, we see scenes from Miller’s life of which every second has been recorded.  We see, for example, a scene in which he is being harassed by a bully when he is in grade school.  This is presented by prosecuting attorney Foster as evidence that Miller has not overcome his fears.  The idea, presumably, is that he should have fought that bully instead of backing down and being humiliated.  Fine.  But what I want to know is, When the bully died, did he get to move forward?  One would think so, because the bully sure wasn’t afraid.  And as I noted above, the tribunal in Judgment City seems to care nothing about moral worth, only whether one has overcome fear.

This is not addressed in the movie, no doubt because of the self-satisfying myth that so many people cling to, which is that bullies are cowards.  But this is just an imaginary revenge against bullies.  I knew a few bullies when I was young, and none of them were cowards.  Sure, they often picked on kids who were smaller and weaker, but they were just as likely to take on someone twice their size and even beat the crap out of him.  So, from what I could tell, these bullies would definitely have been allowed to “move forward,” because they had undeniably overcome their fears.

In contrast to Miller, there is Julia (Meryl Streep), who breezes through her trial, during which we see her getting her children safely out of a burning house and then rushing back in to save the cat.  Needless to say, she gets to move forward.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle.  That is, Miller and Julia go to a place where they can see what they were in their past lives.  Miller sees himself as a black African primitive who is running through the jungle from a lion.  I guess that is why Miller had to be reincarnated instead of being allowed to move forward, because when he was that primitive man in Africa, he was unable to overcome his fear of lions.  He should have stood his ground and kicked its ass.

Foster presents more evidence against Miller.  A friend of his once gave him some inside information about a new watch company, telling him to invest $10,000 in the company, which is all the money Miller had at that time.  We won’t quibble about the fact that it is illegal to profit from inside information, because most people don’t really regard that as a crime, especially when they stand a chance to take advantage of such information.  More to the point, when someone gives you some “inside information” about a company and tells you to invest all you have in it, that is a damn good time to be afraid.  Sure, the company turned out to be Casio, so with hindsight we can see he would have made 37 million dollars on the deal, but most of the time such information turns out to be worthless.  Nevertheless, Miller is accused of letting his fear keep him from making a killing in the stock market.

It gets worse.  It is pointed out that Miller subsequently invested the $10,000 in cattle and lost it all.  But does he get credit for having the courage to invest the money in cattle?  No.  Apparently, you only get credit for having the courage to make good investments, not for having the courage to make bad investments.  Well, I’m glad they cleared that up.  Now we all know how we should invest our money.

As the pièce de résistance, Foster presents a scene from what Miller did while in Judgment City.  In particular, on the previous evening, Julia and Miller confessed their love for each other.  She invited him to spend the night with her.  But he didn’t want to, because he believed their relationship was just perfect the way it was, and he was afraid that sex would spoil it.  Once again, Foster points out, Miller has failed to overcome his fears and he does not deserve to move forward.  Well, all I can say is that I have known several women who did not want to have sex with me because they said it would spoil our friendship, so I guess they will not be moving forward either.  I, on the other, was fearless in the matter, more than willing to risk the friendship to satisfy my lust, so I guess I will be moving forward.