I just finished reading Coup de Chance.  It’s a movie, of course, but I spent so much time reading the subtitles that it is with much reluctance that I can bring myself to say that I watched this movie. Apparently, Woody Allen was so enamored of foreign filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and several others, with whom you are doubtless familiar, that he just had to make a foreign film of his own.  To that end, the movie is set in France, and everyone in the movie speaks French.

The difference, of course, is that whereas Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, et al. were simply making movies in their own language for domestic consumption, Allen is an American for whom English is his natural language. Furthermore, there is no reason that the story could not have been set in America.  In short, his French foreign filmed is forced.

Let me make some distinctions.  There are three kinds of foreign films. First, there are those made in countries where English is spoken naturally, like England and Canada; second, there are the movies where English is dubbed in; and third, there are the movies with subtitles.  Back in the day when there were video stores, it was only movies in this last category that were grouped together as Foreign Films.

And for good reason.  I don’t believe I am alone in saying that it is this third category that really tries one’s patience.  It’s not too bad when there are only occasional subtitles or when they are limited to certain sections of the movie, as in Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), where he satirizes Italian foreign films in one segment. But when the entire movie is subtitled, that is a bit much.

This is especially so when the movie is talkative as is Coup de Chance.  It wasn’t too bad in scenes with just one man and one woman, where I would know when it was the man who was saying what was written at the bottom of the screen and when it was the woman, although I still could not see their facial expressions or see what they were doing.  But when there was a group of people all talking to one another, I had to keep rewinding the tape, so to speak, to see who had said what to whom.  Had I seen this movie in a theater, that option would not have been available.

A long time ago, after forcing myself to watch movies by the likes of Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut, I decided that I had read my last movie. But since I have been a fan of Woody Allen since the 1960s, I decided to make an exception in his case. I’m glad I did because notwithstanding all the subtitles, it is a pretty good murder mystery, throughout which there are competing philosophies: one emphasizing the importance of chance or luck, as indicated by the title; the other, the role of the will in determining the course of one’s life.

I announced that this review would have spoilers, but I will not go so far as to give away the ending. In fact, part of what makes this movie so suspenseful is that while some of Allen’s murder mysteries have the bad guy get caught or killed in the end, like Scoop (2006) or Irrational Man (2015), he sometimes lets a major character get away with murder and live happily ever after, as in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) or Match Point (2005).  So even toward the end, we are not sure whether the bad guy will get away with it.

Of course, I still say it would have been a better movie had it been in English and set in America.

The theme of On the Waterfront (1954) is the morality of testifying against others. When the movie starts, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brandon), a longshoreman, is given an order by union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) to trick Joey Doyle, a friend of Terry, into going up on the roof to get one of his pigeons back.  Joey is hesitant because he plans on testifying against the union before the Waterfront Crime Commission, and he knows that his life is in danger.  Nevertheless, he goes up on the roof where two mobsters are waiting for him.  They push him off the roof.

Terry is devastated.  He says he thought they were just going to lean on him a little.  Problem is, Joey was standing right near the edge of the roof when they leaned on him.  Anyway, Terry now knows that Friendly ordered that murder. He also becomes aware that several other hoodlums knew what would happen, including his brother Charley (Rod Steiger).  Of course, Terry cannot say anything to anyone about the murder because that would be stooling.

Later, Charley tells Terry to attend a meeting at a church where Father Barry (Karl Malden) is trying to help longshoremen who are being exploited by Friendly.  That way Terry can report back on who was there.  Terry says, “Why me, Charley? I feel funny going down there.  I’d just be stooling for you.”

But that’s different, Charley explains.  “Let me tell you what stooling is. Stooling is when you rat on your friends, the guys you’re with.”

Of course, these so-called friends have just been using Terry.  He is especially irked when Charley has conveniently forgotten that he was the one that told Terry to throw a fight because Friendly and other mobsters had placed big bets against him.  And so, whereas Terry might have gone on to become a champion, his boxing career was over.

In the end, Terry decides he has been ratting on himself all these years, and he testifies before the commission.

Elia Kazan is said to have made this movie as a way of justifying his testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, admitting that he had been a member of the Communist Party and naming fellow members of the Party.  Those on the right have long associated unions with communism, so when Terry finally testifies against the union before the Waterfront Crime Commission, it corresponds nicely to Kazan’s own testimony before HUAC.

I read that while the particular story was written by Budd Schulberg, much of it was inspired by a series of articles about union corruption, “Crime on the Waterfront,” by Malcolm Johnson.  So, I thought I would look into that background. In so doing, I came across an article by Sean Murphy, “‘An Underworld Syndicate’:  Malcolm Johnson’s ‘On the Waterfront’ Articles.”  According to Murphy, Johnson’s articles led to the formation of the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, whose hearings were dramatized in The Godfather Part II (1974).

This naturally suggested a comparison between On the Waterfront and The Godfather Part II, not only in regard to testifying before a committee, but also in regard to the relationship between brothers.

In The Godfather Part II, Frankie Pentangeli agrees to cooperate with the FBI to avoid prosecution. He is assured that Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) will probably refuse to testify, pleading the fifth, in which case Frankie will not have to publicly testify either.  Unfortunately for him, Michael does testify in his own behalf, proclaiming his innocence, denying that he is involved in organized crime.  Much to his chagrin, Frankie knows he will have to testify as a result.

Michael thought that Pentangeli had been killed by the Rosato brothers. From what is said during the hearing, Michael figures out that Pentangeli is actually alive and will be testifying against him. On the day Frankie sits before the committee, he sees Michael enter the room with Frankie’s brother, who is a Mafia boss in Sicily.  This makes Frankie feel ashamed. The idea of violating the law of omertà in front of his brother is too much for him.  He recants what he told the FBI previously, saying he just went along with whatever they said, and none of it was true.

In On the Waterfront, Johnny Friendly sends Terry’s brother Charley to talk Terry out of testifying. Failing that, Charley is to set Terry up to be killed by one of Friendly’s hitmen, essentially asking a man to participate in the murder of his own brother.

Instead, Friendly should have just told Charley to try to persuade Terry not to talk. When Charley reported back, saying he was unable to do so, Friendly could say, “Thanks for trying, Charley.  You did the best you could.”  After Charley leaves the room, Friendly could then give orders for a hit on Terry.

If his goons are unable to find Terry, Friendly could tell Charley, “Plan on sitting in the committee room Friday morning so that Terry will have to look you in the eye while he testifies.”

The guilt Terry would feel would be even stronger than that felt by Frankie. Frankie would know that even if he testified, his brother would simply go back to Sicily, whereas Terry would know that in testifying, he would be sending Charley to prison right along with Friendly and several other hoodlums.

Finally, the last thing Friendly should have done is to kill Charley and display his corpse on a hook in an alley for Terry to see.  At that point, Terry knows that by testifying, he won’t be sending his own brother to prison, thereby removing that motive for being silent.  Furthermore, the murder instills in Terry a desire for revenge strong enough for him to disregard his own safety. He is completely freed up to testify, physically and morally.

Well, Johnny Friendly is no Michael Corleone, so I guess it’s believable that he would be as stupid as the movie makes him out to be.

To say a lot of people, including critics, dislike the movie Shoot is an understatement. Many of them detest it.  Leonard Maltin rated it BOMB.  There are some people, like me, who really liked this movie as a satire on gun enthusiasts. However, there are not enough of us for this movie even to achieve cult status. As a result, it is pretty much unavailable, except for a version of poor quality on YouTube.

At the beginning of Shoot, Rex (Cliff Robertson) wakes up, not gradually with sleepy eyes, but suddenly, as if he willed himself to wake up early that morning. He looks at his watch, the face of which is black.  He presses the button on the side, causing red numerals to light up.  We are used to seeing outdated technology while watching old movies, but when we do so, it generally strikes us as incidental.  In the 1970s, however, featuring an LED watch in a movie was supposed to impress us as being the latest thing, but it looks so out of date now that it provokes derision.

Anyway, the time is 4:02.  He gets out of bed, his wife still sleeping, and starts getting ready.  After performing his daily ablutions, he straps on a .45 automatic. But that is not the only gun he has, for we see a full display of rifles against the wall, including a submachinegun.

He selects a hunting rifle with a scope from his collection and then proceeds to clean and oil it in a manner that is unmistakably sensual.  Holding a rod with a patch secured at the end, he penetrates the barrel, inserting it all the way. After that, he squirts oil on a cloth, which he firmly squeezes. Still holding the cloth, he encircles the barrel with his hand and slowly slides it all the way down. Then he oils the other parts of the rifle, gently caressing them.

He is obviously a veteran of World War II, for as he does all this, we see pictures on the wall that were taken while he was deployed overseas, and we see a photograph of a saluting General Eisenhower.  Ah, those were the days!  At the present time, he is the leader of the local National Guard Unit. Somewhere in the midst of all the pictures is one of his wife.

Speaking of his wife, she is a miserable alcoholic, whom he neglects.  He cheats on her, but his affairs with other women are only a minor form of infidelity.  His true love is for his guns.

Rex leaves in a camouflage outfit, suitable for winter weather.  He arrives at a parking lot where he picks up his four friends, among them Lou (Ernest Borgnine) and Zeke (Henry Silva).  He drives them to his hunting lodge out in the woods. They are all having a good time as they walk through the woods, getting back to nature.

As a hopeful sign that there may be deer close by, one of them says that he saw some “deer shit.”  Zeke says it was “hippie shit.”  When asked how he knows that it was hippie shit, Zeke replies, “It had hair in it.”

Now, that’s not much of a joke, but it reminds us of the title character in Joe (1970), who is also a veteran of World War II, a gun nut, and someone that hates hippies and blacks.

Anyway, after hours of walking, they become frustrated because they haven’t come across any animals. It’s hard to appreciate the beauties of nature if you can’t find anything to kill.  As they reach the bank of a river, they decide to give up, but then they hear something from the other side of that river.  It is another group of hunters, who apparently have not had any luck finding something to kill either. The two groups stare at each other for a long time. Then a hunter from the other side aims his rifle and fires, grazing one of the men with Rex.  In return, Zeke shoots back, hitting the hunter that shot at them right between the eyes.  Both sides take cover and begin shooting at each other, until the hunters on the other side disappear back into the woods.

Of course, this reminds us of The Most Dangerous Game (1932).  In that movie, Count Zaroff has discovered that hunting men is the only challenge left that still excites him.  However, Zaroff never gave his human prey a rifle and ammunition to shoot back with.  I guess he knew that would be too exciting.  This movie, however, takes things to that next step.

Rex and his friends argue about whether to call the police.  Zeke especially does not want to do that since he is the one who killed the hunter on the other side.  But Lou thinks calling the police would be the right thing to do. Finally, they decide to hold off and see what happens. At first, they are relieved when the other hunting party does not report it to the police. Instead, there is only an obituary notice of a man from a nearby town, Ed Graham, that might be the hunter that was killed.

Rex decides to check it out, calling Graham’s widow, pretending to be an old friend and wanting to pay his respects.  Like Rex’s wife, Mrs. Graham is an alcoholic, and she is just as miserable, expressing contempt for the way hunters are so close to one another, closer than they are to their wives.

But then she sympathizes with the way her husband had to put up with all that “bleeding heart gump from his own son.”  She says her son became an assemblyman, adding that he was elected by “the hippies and the junkies and the jigs, not to mention the ecology nuts and the anti-gun nuts.” When her son expressed his dislike for the way his father willfully hurt the wildlife, she told him he should move to India where they worship cows, letting them shit right in the street.

However, she goes on to say that it’s not really about protecting the wildlife:

It’s all part of great plot to disarm the American household so the hippies and the junkies and the jigs can come in whenever they like and beat you half to death and rape you, while their buddies downstairs are taking out the TV sets so they can sell them and buy more heroin.

She tells Rex she has her own .357 Smith & Wesson in her bedroom to shoot any of those hippies, junkies, or jigs that try that stuff with her.  She also tells Rex that she isn’t wearing any bra or panties under her robe, having earlier told him she was “stark naked” when he called her on the phone.  Well, everyone grieves in his own way.

She mention’s her husband’s best friend from college, Marshall Flynn, who was said to be a one-man army against the Japs.  When Rex leaves, we see a man sitting in a car watching him, presumably the friend she was telling him about. Soon after, we see Flynn in Rex’s town in various places, checking things out.

Rex comes to the conclusion that because the other hunters did not report it to the police, that means they prefer to get revenge their own way.  He calls a meeting of those who were involved. Speaking of the hunters on the other side, Rex says, “They know where we hunt. They know when we hunt….  I think those bastards are going to be waiting for us Saturday, and this time, we’re going to be prepared.”

But since they figure the other hunters will bring more men with them on Saturday, Rex says they will have to get more men they can trust too.  One of the extra men suggested is John, a security guard who works in Rex’s store and who is African American.  Zeke doesn’t like the idea of including “that black guy,” but Rex says he is someone they can trust, and that is what matters.  We see Rex talking to John, who apparently agrees to go along, but we really don’t see much of him after that.

However, he does serve an important moral function.  Zeke already expressed his disdain for hippies, and now we see that he is prejudiced against blacks as well.  To that extent, he is like Mrs. Graham, who gave us insight into the attitude held by her late husband, his friend Marshall Flynn, and all the other hunters that were on the other side of the river.  This is the movie’s way of disparaging gun nuts in general.  On the other hand, it is important that we recognize that Rex and his friends are the good guys, relatively speaking, and that is the point of having Rex include John as a man they can trust.  As opposed to this, the men they are going up against would never dream of including anyone in their group who wasn’t white.

In addition to the extra men Rex says they will need, they intend to arm themselves with automatic weapons, along with 100,000 rounds of ammunition, a B.A.R, camouflage helmets with netting, and hand grenades.  These guys miss the war, and they feel good about being real soldiers again.

When Saturday arrives, snow has fallen on the ground, something they seem unprepared for as they keep slipping and sliding while they move down a slope. When they get to the same spot as the previous week, there is no one on the other side.  One of the soldiers, who was not part of the original group, starts talking in a loud voice, saying it’s all ridiculous because there is no one there. In fact, we have been wondering all along if this would happen, that no one would be there, and they would end up looking silly.

Suddenly, the other side of the river comes alive.   Men in white camouflage rise up out of their foxholes after tossing aside the corrugated metal sheets that had covered them, on which the snow had accumulated.  They all start firing their submachine guns and tossing grenades, slaughtering everyone in Rex’s company. Only Rex survives, sort of.  We see him holding his hands over his face as a bloody gob of brain goo oozes out between his fingers.

There is a transition to a nursing home, where Rex has been for a long time, unable to move, barely aware of the light, which reminds him of snow.  He is filled with regret as he thinks of the friends he lost:

God, I wish I had them back.  If only we could go back together and do it right.  If only we’d gotten there first.  Then we could have cut them to pieces, the bastards.

At the beginning of the movie Coma, Dr. Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) arrives at Boston Memorial Hospital where she and other doctors talk medicalese all day, which impresses us because we don’t understand it.  She and another doctor at the hospital, Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas), finally finish their day and arrive at his apartment where they live together.

It doesn’t take long for them to start squabbling about who gets to take a shower first, who fixes dinner, and who brings whom a beer.  Susan becomes fed up and leaves. She leaves him on a regular basis, but then she always goes back to him. She is able to do this because she never gave up her apartment. Later in the movie, we hear Susan telling a psychiatrist, “Mark’s whining about how I can’t make a commitment, and I’m cold, and I’m afraid of intimacy.”

Mark tells her she doesn’t want a lover; she wants a wife.  Of course, it’s also true that he wants a wife. And since, as long as they remain a couple, they can’t both have a wife, it would be best if they split up. We wish they would. We know they won’t.

Susan’s best friend Nancy needs an abortion.  It is referred to as a therapeutic abortion, presumably because if Nancy’s husband found out she was pregnant, it would be bad for her health.  We are not told how her husband would know that the baby is not his, but several possibilities are available:  military deployment has kept him away from home for the past six months; he had a vasectomy five years ago; Nancy has been having an affair with a man of a distinctly different ethnicity.

Whatever the reason, the doctor performing the abortion seems to know all about it, commenting on her situation to others in the operating room, saying that she is in “a hell of a mess,” but that what she has done is none of his business.  “I’m just her surgeon.  I don’t run her life.”  Because he feels the need to justify doing this abortion, he seems to regard the procedure as morally dubious.  Moreover, in the very act of congratulating himself for not being judgmental, he is implying that she has done something shameful.  His attitude appears to be that of the movie itself, that she is guilty of committing one sin in order to cover up another.

In that case, movie karma says that she should be punished.  And so, she is. During the procedure, she goes into a coma and never recovers. When another young patient has a minor operation and goes into a coma too, Susan becomes suspicious.  When she decides to investigate to see how many young, otherwise healthy patients have inexplicably gone into a coma during surgery, she is thwarted by Dr. George, Chief of Anesthesiology.  He won’t let her look as the files. Worse yet, Dr. George is played by Rip Torn, who often plays unsavory characters.

Susan finally gets a sneak peek at the files, and she discovers that all the patients have something in common:  Operating Room 8.  Further investigation on her part reveals that a device allows certain patients being operated on in that room to be fed carbon monoxide instead of oxygen.  Then their bodies are sent to the Jefferson Institute where their organs can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It is while she is snooping around there that she overhears a conversation indicating that “George” is behind it all.

Because Susan’s investigation may jeopardize all the money that the Jefferson Institute is raking in, an assassin is assigned to her case. He chases her into the amphitheater and then into a room where she sprays him with a fire extinguisher. At that point, he pulls out his pistol and chases her into a room full of cadavers, which is kept really cold so that they don’t rot.  While he is trying to find her in that room, she pushes a bunch of cadavers onto him and runs out of the room, locking it behind her.

The lock is a barrel slide bolt.  Such a lock does not prevent anyone from entering the cadaver room, but it does keep the cadavers from getting out.  Well, you never know.  What if Herbert West is a doctor at this hospital?  In any event, the assassin is locked in with the cadavers.

At this point, the most natural thing in the world is for her to call the police and tell them a man just tried to kill her, and that she has him locked in the cadaver room. Instead, we next see her in Mark’s apartment, crying hysterically about Operating Room 8, while he strokes her hair in a patronizing way, telling her she needs a Valium.

I suppose we should have known it would turn out like this when the movie condemned Nancy for trying to conceal an adulterous affair by having an abortion.  The movie is faux feminist.  It starts out by letting us think of Susan as being intelligent and resourceful, and indeed she is.  But then the movie does this!

Can you imagine the roles being reversed?  That is to say, imagine it was Mark who began to suspect something strange going on with these comas.  And then, after almost being killed by the assassin, whom he locked up in the cadaver room, he fails to call the police and instead runs to Susan, sobbing and blubbering, while Susan strokes his hair and humors him as if he were a child.

But that’s just it.  This movie plays into sexual stereotypes so vividly that their roles cannot be reversed.  Susan may be a doctor and able to hold her own in that profession, but she is still a woman, and Mark is still a man.  So, according to this movie, that means she is weak, and he is strong.

Anyway, while she is resting, she hears Mark talking suspiciously to someone on the phone.  Perhaps Mark is in cahoots with Dr. George? She sneaks out of the apartment.

You might think that having had a chance to regain her composure, she would now go to the police and tell them that a man tried to kill her, and that he is locked in the cadaver room. Instead, she goes to see Dr. Harris (Richard Widmark), Chief of Surgery, and tells him all she knows.  Like Rip Torn, however, Richard Widmark is also known for playing unsavory characters.  And it turns out that Dr. Harris’s first name is “George.”  He slips her a drug that not only makes her drowsy, but also causes her to have symptoms of appendicitis.  He gets her prepped for immediate surgery.  Of course, there haven’t been any lab tests, and she hasn’t signed all the necessary forms agreeing to have an appendectomy, but no one is willing to question Dr. Harris.

However, Mark hears Dr. Harris insisting on using Operating Room 8, reminding him of Susan’s theory.  He manages to stop the carbon monoxide from being fed into her breathing apparatus in the nick of time, thereby becoming the hero of the story. Then, because Mark is a man, he knows to call the police.  Dr. Harris sees the two policemen waiting for him outside Operating Room 8, and he realizes he is going to be arrested.  As for that guy who is locked up in the cadaver room, he probably froze to death by now.

Given the way the way this movie subverts its superficial feminism, we may guess how things will be for Mark and Susan going forward.  She will make a commitment, quit being cold, and quit being afraid of intimacy.  She will give up her apartment and become Mark’s wife.  And that means she will be the one to fix dinner and bring him a beer.

A lot of critics do not care much for The Manchurian Candidate.  When it was first released in 1962, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times began his review of the movie as follows:

With the air full of international tension, the film “The Manchurian Candidate” pops up with a rash supposition that could serve to scare some viewers half to death—that is, if they should be dupes enough to believe it, which we solemnly trust they won’t.

But if critics like Crowther did not like this movie, neither, it would seem, did the public.  In 1988, Aljean Harmetz, also writing for the New York Times, refers to it in his review as an “old failure,” and is surprised that so many people seemed to be lining up to see it when it was rereleased.  “Although the film was based on Richard Condon’s best-selling 1959 novel,” he goes on to say, “it failed to live up to expectations at the box office and was written off as unprofitable by the studio.”  In addition, Harmetz disposes of one of the stories often heard about this movie:

There is a common misperception that “The Manchurian Candidate” was withdrawn because of the assassination of President Kennedy. But the President was killed a year after the movie failed to make a dent at the box office.

He quotes Peter Rainer, chief film critic of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, as saying the movie is “a black comedy that mixed melodrama and slapstick.”  Slapstick.  Well, I’ve never experienced it that way.  I saw it as a teenager in 1962, and I found it grim and suspenseful, as I do to this day.

That is not to say that the movie does not have its moments of comic relief.  In fact, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), of the Pavlov Institute, is quite witty at times. It was he who conceived of the idea of putting a Soviet agent into the White House as president.  The movie begins in 1952 in Korea, where a platoon of American soldiers is led into a trap.  They are taken north into Manchuria, a region that has at times belonged, at least in part, to Russia, and at times belonged, at least in part, to China, a fitting place for the initiation of a plan that is a joint operation of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

Though Dr. Yen is himself a member of the Communist Party, yet his character is completely different from that of the stereotypical communist, as promoted on television and in the movies in the 1950s.  That is to say, the communist was typically portrayed as utterly mirthless, so serious about his devotion to the cause of world communism as to preclude a sense of humor.  It is an indication of just how high-ranking Dr. Yen must be in the Communist Party that he can get away with ironic observations and wry comments, whereas someone further down in the Party would probably have been executed for being insufficiently dedicated to the ideals of communism.

For example, later in the movie, when Comrade Zilkov takes pride in the fact that his rest-home, which is just a front, is one of the few Soviet operations in America that “showed a profit at the end of the last fiscal year,” Dr. Yen admonishes him:  “Profit? Fiscal year?  Beware, my dear Zilkov. The virus of capitalism is highly infectious.  Soon, you’ll be lending money out at interest!”

When Zilkov looks fearful at the thought that he will be reported to his superiors in Moscow for not being faithful to the cause of communism, Dr. Yen smiles, saying, “You must try, Comrade Zilkov, to cultivate a sense of humor.  There’s nothing like a good laugh now and then to lighten the burdens of the day.”

He subsequently remarks that he would like to spend the afternoon at Macy’s, saying, “Madam Yen has given me the most appalling list,” even though he knows full well that communists are supposed regard American consumerism with disdain.

Frank Sinatra, on the other hand, in the role of Major Bennet Marco, is always serious.  And yet, there is something amusing about his role as an intellectual. When the movie opens, then Captain Marco is riding in a truck driven by Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey).  They stop at a nightclub/whorehouse to pick up the rest of the platoon to go on a combat mission.  While Raymond goes in to get the men, Marco continues reading a book.  Later in the movie, after Marco is on the verge of a mental collapse, owing to the nightmare he has been having repeatedly about what happened in Korea, a friend of his has been sending him books of various sorts to help him keep his mind on other things, books that he has actually been reading. One of them is James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Whew!  Finally, when Raymond starts talking about what a terrible woman his mother (Angela Lansbury) is, he apologizes for going on about her. Marco replies that he is interested.  He is interested, of course, because by this time he realizes that Raymond is critical to understanding his nightmare.  To encourage him to keep talking, he says, “It’s rather like listening to Orestes gripe about Clytemnestra.”

“Who?” Raymond asks.

“Greeks.  A couple of Greeks in a play,” Marco responds dryly. Being a bookworm is totally at odds with Sinatra’s screen persona, but he manages to pull it off.

The nightmare that Marco has been having begins with his platoon sitting in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey, waiting out a storm.  In that lobby, a woman is lecturing a lot of other women about hydrangeas.  But suddenly, the women turn into Russian and Chinese men, listening to Dr. Yen tell how he has “conditioned” the American soldiers.  “Or brainwashed them,” he adds, “which I understand is the new American word.”  Presumably, he is speaking English as the second language common to both Russians and Chinese.

Practical joker that he is, Dr. Yen is letting the American soldiers smoke cigarettes made out of yak dung. “Tastes good, like a cigarette should,” he says, citing a well-known line used back when television commercials for cigarettes were still permitted.  He laughs heartily at his own joke, while the Russian and Chinese men in his audience sit there in cold silence.

The soldiers have been hypnotized, and Dr. Yen dismisses as nonsense the “old wives’ tale” that a hypnotized subject cannot be forced to do that which is repellent to his moral nature, “whatever that is,” he adds, showing contempt for such a notion.  Since communists were atheists, they were believed by most Americans to be completely amoral, since without the fear of God, there would be nothing to restrain their behavior.

As we later learn, the hypnosis is more than the kind usually seen in a movie, where someone lets a watch swing back and forth while saying, you are getting sleepy, very sleepy.  Instead, it involved the use of light and drugs to deepen the level of the hypnotic state.  That is why Dr. Yen says, “His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it has been dry-cleaned.”

To prove the point, he orders Raymond to strangle one of his fellow soldiers. As he does so, the other men appear bored.  Marco is so bored that he is even seen opening his mouth to yawn, when suddenly that open mouth emits a scream as he is jolted out of his nightmare.

At another point in the movie, a different soldier also starts having the same dream.  Of course, the dream cannot be exactly the same, and to underscore that point, the soldier in question is Corporal Allen Melvin, played by James Edwards.  Since he is black, the women in his dream are likewise black. But he later sees the same Russian and Chinese men, which helps verify Marco’s story, which no one believed at first. Melvin’s dream picks up after the strangulation and ends with Raymond using a pistol to shoot a baby-faced soldier in the head, his blood and brains splattering onto a large picture of Joseph Stalin hanging on the wall.

Basically, Raymond Shaw has been conditioned to be a cold-blooded killer, and the murder of two of his fellow soldiers is evidence of that.  He and the remaining soldiers are made to believe that Raymond saved the platoon through his heroic actions, getting him the Medal of Honor.  The soldiers have been programmed to say, when asked, “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known.”

But as Raymond himself was the first to admit later on, the men hated him, and he hated them.  In that first scene in the movie, when Raymond gets out of the truck, Marco shakes his head, as if to say, that guy is really uptight, before returning to his book.  Inside the nightclub/whorehouse, the remarks of the other soldiers reveal that they have complete contempt for Sergeant Shaw, as being something of a prude.

The point of having Raymond be awarded the Medal of Honor is to help his stepfather, Senator Johnny Iselin (James Gregory), secure the nomination for vice-president at the national convention. Then, after Raymond assassinates the presidential candidate at the convention, Iselin is supposed to hold the dead body while delivering a rousing speech.  It is a speech that has been worked on here in the United States and in Moscow off and on for eight years, intended to propel Iselin into the White House as president by an hysterical electorate, “with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.”  In short, Iselin is the Manchurian candidate.

Iselin is based on the character of Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy claimed that the State Department was full of communists, but in the movie, it is the Defense Department that Iselin says has communists working there.  How ironic it would be, therefore, if a Soviet agent could become president by pretending to be fiercely anti-communist.

But Mrs. Iselin, Raymond’s mother, or simply “Mother,” is the brains of the operation and will be the one who is really in charge, far exceeding Dr. Yen as the villain of the piece.  She never wanted her son Raymond to be the assassin she needed, but those communists in Russia just didn’t understand such things as a mother’s love.  But that’s all right.  She uses Raymond for the purpose anyway, giving him a wet, warm, open-mouthed kiss on the lips just before sending her hypnotized son off to his final mission.

A mother’s love is not the only emotion that communists did not understand. In the 1950s they were portrayed as affectless, driven only by an ideal of world communism.  Dr. Yen, when speaking of Raymond in his capacity as a killer while under hypnotic command, says that he will not remember killing anyone. As a result, Dr. Yen says, “Having been relieved of those uniquely American symptoms, guilt and fear, he cannot possibly give himself away.”

That guilt and fear should be “uniquely American symptoms” is, of course, preposterous.  Not only are they natural human emotions, but even a dog can experience fear, and some say guilt as well, as when we see a dog’s ears lay back, and its tail go between its legs, after having pooped on the carpet.  But communists were thought to be so lacking in emotion that they could easily suppose that guilt and fear were unnatural, an idiosyncratic result of American capitalism.

While under hypnosis, Raymond is given the command to kill several people in the course of this movie.  In each case, he has no emotion while doing so, driven only by an order to kill.  This is just an extreme example of how communists were thought to behave back then, driven by the goal of having communism dominate the world, but experiencing no emotions while trying to achieve that end.

I was only nine years old when I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In that movie, the people whose bodies have been replaced by plant-like, pod substitutes have no emotions, driven only by the goal of replacing everyone on the planet in the same way.  I had already seen several television dramas, showing us what communists were supposed to be like, warning us to be on guard against such people.  In those dramas, the communists seemed to be without any human feeling.  So, when I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I immediately saw the connection.  I did not, of course, say to myself, “Why, these pod people are just like communists,” but I sensed the resemblance.

Because communists were thought to be amoral and without feeling, it was believed that they could kill one another without a qualm, should it be expedient to do so.  When Zilkov insists that Raymond needs to be tested by killing someone, since it has been over two years since he killed those two fellow soldiers in Manchuria, Dr. Yen thinks that is unnecessary.  But Zilkov is adamant.  Dr. Yen shrugs and tells Zilkov to have him kill one of his own people that work in his rest-home.  Zilkov says he would do so gladly, but he is understaffed as it is.  When it appears that Dr. Yen has agreed to have Raymond kill some nonproductive person, Zilkov asks, “Whom do you think he should kill?”

Dr. Yen slowly turns his head, looking straight as Zilkov.  Zilkov shows fear at the idea that he might be sacrificed to that end.  “With humor, my dear Zilkov!” Dr. Yen says, now smiling.  “Always with a little humor.”  Instead, he suggests that Holborn Gaines be the one who is killed, possibly allowing Raymond to be promoted at the newspaper to take his place.

When Raymond first returned from Korea, he told Mother that he intended to go to work for a newspaper as a research assistant to Holborn Gaines. “Holborn Gaines?” she said with horror. “That communist?!”

“He’s not a communist, Mother,” Raymond replied.  “As a matter of fact, he’s a Republican.”

That this was supposed to reassure Mother implies that she and Senator Iselin are themselves Republicans, which would go with their anti-communist pretense.

Mother’s greatest political foe is Senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver).  She once referred to Jordan as a communist on a radio program, so he successfully sued her for defamation of character and slander.  He then donated the money to the American Civil Liberties Union, just to spite her.  Republicans regard this organization as being so far to the left as to be almost communist.  George H.W. Bush once referred to Michael Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” which brought to mind the phrase “card-carrying member of the Communist Party,” used by Josephy McCarthy, and also used by Iselin in the movie.

At a costume party held at the Iselin’s residence, Mother tells Jordan that she is hoping her husband can be nominated for vice-president at the convention, and she asks if Jordan will try to block him, which he could do only if he too were of the same party.  In other words, though Jordan and Gaines are both Republicans, yet they are insufficiently anti-communist as far as Mother is concerned.  As for Democrats, don’t even get her started on them.

Jordan says, “I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do more harm to this country than he’s doing now,” little realizing the irony in his supposition.  He says he will do everything he can to keep Iselin from getting that nomination.  So, this looks like another job for Raymond.  Prior to all this, Raymond had fallen in love with Jordan’s daughter, Jocelyn.  Mother convinced Raymond that Jocelyn was just a communist tart and got him to break off their engagement.  However, at the party where Mother tries to get Jordan not to block Iselin for the nomination, Jocelyn shows up and manages to make Raymond fall in love with her all over again.

You see, Dr. Yen programmed Raymond with a key sentence:  “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”  Upon hearing this, Raymond would pick up a deck of cards and start playing.  As soon as he turned up the queen of diamonds, he would stop and wait for orders.  Dr. Yen said that the queen of diamonds had been selected as the card that would induce a hypnotic trance because it was “reminiscent in many ways of Raymond’s dearly loved and hated mother.”

In other words, the fact that Raymond would be looking at the card that was symbolic of Mother would further instill his obedience.  It is said that during World War II, soldiers were told that they were fighting for “Mom and apple pie,” so having Mother be the one who is behind the plot to have a Soviet agent become president of the United States is a slap in the face to that notion.

It is at the costume party that we find out that Mother is Raymond’s American operator when she gets him alone in a room and has him play a little solitaire.  They are interrupted, and she has to leave for a little while, so she picks up the queen of diamonds and takes it with her to prevent mischief.  But when Jocelyn shows up at the at the costume party and finds Raymond in that room, she just happens to be dressed as a great, big queen of diamonds, an image of that card covering her torso. Raymond does a doubletake.  The woman he has always loved has become fused with the idea of Mother, and right while he is in a hypnotic trance.  Needless to say, Jocelyn has no trouble getting Raymond to marry her.

Dr. Yen said on a previous occasion that whenever Raymond is assigned to kill someone, he must also be told to kill whoever else happens to be there at the time.  So, when Mother sends Raymond off to kill Jordan, he is under that additional command.  Using a pistol with a silencer, which always makes a killing seem more cold-blooded, he shoots his now father-in-law right through the carton of milk he was holding and into his chest, the milk pouring out much in the way we imagine his blood doing the same.  As Raymond puts a second bullet into Jordan, who is now lying on the kitchen floor, Jocelyn comes running in to stop him.  In what is the most chilling scene in the movie, he turns and shoots her without hesitation.  Then, as he leaves, he steps over her body as one would a pile of laundry that happened to be lying on the floor.

Prior to all this, however, Marco has been having a hard time of it.  His superiors think he is suffering from combat fatigue.  He shows up to visit Raymond.  Raymond is not at home, but his servant opens the door, the very guide that led them into the trap in North Korea, Chunjin (Henry Silva). Marco remembers him from his nightmare.  He punches him hard, and they begin fighting.  It is refreshing to see men in a movie employ the martial arts in a way that is realistic.

Anyway, that proves to be a turning point in the movie.  Once Marco has been supported by Corporal Melvin, the Army believes his story and assigns him to find out what Raymond has been programmed to do. Marco gets himself a deck of cards with nothing but queens of diamonds and does what he can to deprogram Raymond.  At the national convention, however, it appears that, from the vantage point of a spotlight booth, Raymond will still assassinate the nominee for president, as ordered to do so by Mother. But at the last second, he assassinates Senator Iselin and Mother.  Then he puts on his Medal of Honor. Marco comes into the booth just as Raymond does so.  Raymond says it was the only way to stop them. He then turns the rifle around and shoots himself.

In the final scene, Marco is with a woman who has helped him through his difficulties, Eugenie Rose (Janet Leigh), and whom he plans to marry.  He reads out loud from a book citing the heroism of other men that have been awarded the Medal of Honor.  Then he closes the book and says what will be written in the future:

Made to commit acts too unspeakable to be cited here by an enemy who had captured his mind and his soul, he freed himself at last, and in the end, heroically and unhesitatingly, gave his life to save his country.  Raymond Shaw.

Of course, the fact that the acts are too unspeakable to be mentioned in a book of citations like the one Marco is reading from does not mean they cannot be vividly depicted in a movie.  And that’s a good thing too, since this movie is one of my favorites.  And yet, the American Film Institute did not include it in their list of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time.  Nor did IMDb (Internet Movie Database) include it in their list of the Top 250 Movies of all time.  And in Guide for the Film Fanatic, published in 1986, where Danny Peary reviewed “1600 must see” movies, The Manchurian Candidate was not one of them.  Were Bosley Crowther alive today, he would be pleased to see that plenty of people have not been duped into liking this movie.

It adds to our interest in a movie to learn that it is based on a true story. It would be a mistake, however, to infer from this that movies are better when they are based on something that really happened rather than based on nothing more than a writer’s imagination.  And this is because whereas a work of fiction can be structured so that everything is developed smoothly and is satisfactorily resolved by the end, reality is often messy and incomplete.

Boomerang! is a good example of that.  It was made during a period in which a lot of filmmakers were on a realism kick, wanting to make movies based on true stories and filmed on location.  It begins with a Reed Hadley, semi-documentary, Louis de Rochemont style of narration, with “America, the Beautiful” playing in the background to put us in the proper, patriotic mood: “The basic facts of our story actually occurred in a Connecticut community much like this one.”  It seems quaint now when we hear him say that, for location filming is not something we care about today. The prologue tells us that many “actual characters” were used in filming this movie, whatever that means, since the crime on which this movie is based occurred in 1924, twenty-three years earlier.

Hadley’s narration accompanies us through the murder of Father Lambert and the outrage on the part of the citizens of the community.  This community, Hadley informs us, had recently benefitted from a reform movement, which ousted the machine politicians that had run things in the past. Throughout the movie, there are several references to the way the Reform Party has brought decency to this town.  In a flashback, we see Lambert sitting next to Madge Harvey (Jane Wyatt), chairman of the committee in charge of city-improvement projects, like parks and playgrounds.  She and Lambert are in complete agreement as to the worthwhile nature of the latest project, a recreation center, which is being promoted by Paul Harris (Ed Begley), who believes his bank may be able to arrange for the purchase of the land needed for that project. As we later find out, Madge is married to State’s Attorney Henry Harvey (Dana Andrews).

But then we have another flashback, in which we see Father Lambert dealing with two different men, as narrated by Hadley: “Since he was a man of God, his labors sometimes led him into the strange and secret places of men’s souls. He was just and forgiving, but he was also a man and a stern and uncompromising judge of character.” The first man, we later find out, is John Waldron, played by Arthur Kennedy.  We see Lambert give him something, smile, and pat him on the shoulder.  But Waldron angrily turns away, wadding up the piece of paper he was handed and throwing it away. From what we find out subsequently, Waldron was presumably asking for a handout, but all he was given instead was “a lecture and a pamphlet.”

This is followed by a conversation Lambert has with a second man, Jim Crossman, who is around forty years old, judging by the actor, Philip Coolidge, who plays this role. Lambert tells him that he is sick and needs to be institutionalized:  “This time, fortunately, no great harm has been done. But the next time…. No, I can’t let you go any longer. It’s got to be a sanitarium.”  It would be reasonable to assume that Jim works for the church in some capacity in order for Lambert to know him well enough to have him in his office.  Lambert asks Jim if he has spoken to his mother about his problem, at which point Jim becomes frantic at the thought she might find out.  From the remarks by Father Lambert, we had already accepted the fact that Jim was mentally ill and needed to be institutionalized.  So, why this reference to his mother?

In the movies, a mother can be an ominous character, suggesting some kind of emotional problem on the part of her son, especially if he still lives with her.  This is not invariably the case, however.  In the movie Marty (1955), we never conclude that there is anything mentally unbalanced about the title character, played by Ernest Borgnine, even though he is in his thirties and lives with his mother. It appears that he supports his mother, now widowed, and that goes a long way in reassuring us. And we find out that he is unmarried, not because he is too attached to his mother, but simply because, as he puts it, he is a “fat, ugly man.”

But in other movies, a close relationship between mother and son is a bad sign.  In The Organization Man, William H. Whyte, Jr. says that the kind of man a major corporation wants for upper management is one who loves both his father and his mother, but his father a little bit more.  As in real life, so too in the movies, a man who is more attached to his mother than his father is thought to be a “mama’s boy,” as in Home from the Hill (1960).  Another example of this was dramatized in The Caine Mutiny (1954).

For some reason that escapes me now, I once happened to be watching the Lifetime Channel, where two women were talking about how much they liked that channel because it has stories about communication and feelings.  As one of the women noted with regret, men don’t like to talk about their feelings.  In response, the other woman expressed exasperation, saying, “And why is it when you do find a guy that’s really nice, they all have these strange relationships with their mothers!”  As she says this, we see a grey-haired, bespectacled woman, sitting on a couch with a contented smile on her face, while her adult son lies there with his head in her lap, sucking on a baby bottle.

In His Girl Friday (1940), Cary Grant does not want his ex-wife, Rosalind Russell, to marry Ralph Bellamy.  As soon as Grant finds out that Bellamy lives with his mother, and that Bellamy is planning on him and Russell living with his mother for the first year of their marriage, Grant knows that those marriage plans don’t have a prayer.  After all, Grant went through the same thing in The Awful Truth (1937), when his wife, played by Irene Dunne, planned on marrying Bellamy right after her divorce from Grant became finalized.  And there too, Bellamy lived with his mother.  In the end, he broke off his engagement with Dunne, and he and his mother moved back to Oklahoma.

It is not just the son’s attachment to his mother that causes problems.  Maternal jealousy can be a factor as well.  In The Awful Truth, Bellamy’s mother despises Dunne before she has even met her, and she tells her son she wants him to keep his mind off women.  Even in Marty, when Borgnine does find someone, Betsy Blair, who might be willing to marry him, his mother tries to sabotage their relationship so she can to maintain sole possession of him, saying Blair is too old for him, and that she is just “one step away from the streets.”  His mother concludes by saying she doesn’t want him to bring Blair to the house anymore.

Near the end of The Awful Truth, when Bellamy decides to break off his engagement to Dunne, he says, “I guess a man’s best friend is his mother.”  Or, as Anthony Perkins would later say in Psycho (1960), “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”  This takes us beyond the situation where a man may have difficulty establishing a normal relationship with a woman on account of his attachment to his mother, and moves us into the area where a man’s relationship with his mother is an aspect of his insanity.  Other examples are Strangers on a Train (1951) and While the City Sleeps (1956).

And so, since Jim presumably still lives with his mother, even though he is forty years old, we gather that his mental problems must have something to do with his relationship with her and the sexual distortion that implies.  We never learn exactly what Jim has done, but everything points to his being a child molester. The remark about no great harm having been done this time suggests that he was caught fondling a little girl, and Lambert is afraid that the next time Jim will go further.

As for Waldron, we know that anger can be a motive for murder, but killing a priest because he gave Waldron a pamphlet instead of some money is a bit of a stretch.  On the other hand, a child molester who is afraid his mother will find out and that he will be put in a sanitarium definitely has a motive for murder. So, why would the movie let us know who Lambert’s killer was right in the beginning? Sometimes murder mysteries do that.  In the television series Columbo, we always found out in the beginning who the murderer was, and the fun was watching the cat-and-mouse game played between him and the title detective.  So, I settled in with that assumption and continued to watch the movie.

The Morning Record is the local newspaper, whose star reporter is Dave Woods (Sam Levene).  We know he’s hardboiled because we repeatedly see him typing with just his two index fingers.  The Record is owned by a man who preferred the previous administration rather than the Reform Party, and so his paper is playing up the story of Lambert’s murder, making a political issue out of it, putting pressure on Chief Harold Robinson (Lee J. Cobb), State’s Attorney Henry Harvey, and the politicians at City Hall. The pressure is intensified by the fact that an election is coming up soon, and failure to find the killer may lead to a loss for the Reform Party.

When Harvey gets home, he and Madge discuss the case, and then she talks about the recreation center, saying they may even be able to have a swimming pool.  Harvey says, “Well, you can’t ever say you haven’t any kids to fool with.  You’ll have hundreds hanging around….”  Her face falls, and he realizes he made a mistake in referring to the fact that they haven’t been able to have any children.  We gather that this is the reason she has immersed herself in projects that children would benefit from.

Eventually, Waldron is arrested by the police in Ohio for carrying a .32 revolver, like the one that was used to kill Lambert.  Witnesses that were present the night Lambert was shot pick him out of the lineup, and the ballistics confirms that his gun is the murder weapon.  Waldron says he wants a lawyer, but Chief Robinson says, “You’ll get one later.”  A uniformed cop, an older man that has been on the force for a long time, wants to beat a confession out of Waldron, complaining that they are wasting time and losing a lot of sleep.  Robinson refuses to go along with that.  I suppose that is a reflection of the decency brought about by the Reform Party.

But in one sense, the uniformed cop is right:  giving a man the third degree is a tough job when you can’t just beat it out of him. After an eight-hour shift, the detectives who have been grilling Waldron are exhausted, heading for home, while another shift takes their place, working hard to keep Waldron awake while they badger him with questions.  After two days of keeping Waldron from getting any sleep while they continue the nonstop interrogation, the detectives wonder how much longer they can keep it up.  But finally, Waldron gives in and just signs whatever confession they stick in front of him.  Worn out from it all, Robinson says, “What a way to make a living!”

At this point, I figured that the time had come when a clue would be found indicating that Jim might be the actual murderer.  And so it began to seem, at first.  Though Harvey is to be the prosecuting attorney, he shocks the court on the first day of the trial by announcing that he intends to prove that Waldron is innocent.  Pretty much everyone is upset by this, but none more so than Jim, whom we see in the audience with a scared look on his face.  I guess he figures that only if Waldron is convicted will he be safe from suspicion.  The judge calls Harvey into his chambers and threatens him with prosecution. Chief Robinson is angry, but he does break up a lynch mob outside the courthouse.  Even Waldron’s lawyer is upset with this intrusion on his role as defense attorney.  But it turns out that Harvey’s doubts are not brought about by any clue regarding Jim.  He tells one of his politician acquaintances that he just believes that Waldron is innocent.

When Harvey gets home, Paul Harris, the banker played by Ed Begley, is waiting for him.  He admits that he owns the land the bank is supposed to buy for the recreation center, and if they lose the election on account of Harvey’s refusal to prosecute, there will be no recreation center, and he will be ruined. Furthermore, he tells Harvey that Madge gave him $2,500 to help him buy that land, and that wouldn’t look good if that came out.

I doubt this is one of the facts of the true story on which this movie is based, for I found no hint of it in researching it.  Instead, it appears to be an expression of attitude on that part of Richard Murphy, who wrote the screenplay, and Elia Kazan, who directed this movie.  In particular, they are saying, “See what happens when a woman tries to compensate for not having children by getting involved in do-gooder activities. She ends up making foolish decisions, causing problems for her levelheaded husband.”

The next day, Harvey presents evidence that Waldron did not commit the murder, despite all the political pressure and even blackmail brought against him.  He gives reasons to doubt the eyewitness testimony, the ballistics report, and the validity of the confession.  There is a preposterous scene in which Harvey has an assistant point Waldron’s loaded revolver at his head and pull the trigger in order the prove that the firing pin was faulty, and thus the gun could not have been the murder weapon.  That could have been demonstrated without such theatrics.  Following this, Dave, the reporter played by Sam Levene, passes a note to Harris, letting him know that he has found out about his land deal. As a result, Harris commits suicide by shooting himself right there in the courtroom.  Somehow, I doubt seriously that these are some of the “basic facts” of this “true story.” But the main thing is that Harvey did not present any evidence that the murder was actually committed by Jim in an effort to conceal the fact that he is a pedophile.

Anyway, Waldron’s innocence having been established, he is released.  We see Jim leave the courtroom, while Dave happens to glance at him over his shoulder.  Later, Dave learns that Jim was killed in an automobile crash.  He was fleeing from police for speeding, when he suddenly swerved, presumably intending to kill himself.  Dave has a look that indicates he has put it all together and knows that Jim is the killer.  But the only reason we believe he knows the truth is that we know the truth, and we project our knowledge into this character.  At the same time, Reed Hadley, the narrator, tells us that the case was never solved, again accompanied by “America, the Beautiful.”

In other words, there was no pedophile.  It was a total fabrication.  In its confused way, the movie is admitting that no one ever found out who killed Father Lambert, while assuring us that justice was served by the death of this fictional character Jim.  The reason for this is easy to understand.  If the movie had stuck to the facts, if all the made-up stuff with Jim had been edited out, then the movie would have ended with the unsatisfactory conclusion that while an innocent man was cleared, the guilty man, whoever he was and whatever his motive, was never caught.

This movie cheats, trying to have it both ways.  It presents its story as based on actual events and filmed on location to give it an aura of authenticity, and then it concocts an imaginary child molester to be the villain so he can be killed off at the end, giving the movie the kind of resolution that we typically have in a work of fiction.

The 1974 original version of Death Wish proved to be so successful at the box office that it spawned four sequels and the remake of 2018.  When the original starts out, Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) and his wife Joanna (Hope Lange) are at the beach on vacation.  It’s a deserted beach, so Paul suggests making love right there in the open, but Joanna says they are “too civilized” for that, so they go back to the hotel.  When they return from their vacation, Paul finds out from his coworker, Sam, that the murder rate in New York City is getting worse, saying that decent people will have to work in the city and live somewhere else.  Paul notes that by “decent people,” Sam means those who can afford to live somewhere else.  His coworker accuses him of being a bleeding-heart liberal in his concern for the underprivileged, saying that they should all be put into a concentration camp.

Meanwhile, Joanna and the Kersey’s daughter, Carol, are at the grocery store where three hooligans are so behaving so obnoxiously that we don’t even need to see the rape and murder that come later.  We are ready for someone start wasting these characters right now.  As they follow Joanna and Carol to their apartment, we see some nuns crossing the street just as the two women pass by, but before the three men do.  Literally, the nuns come between the men and the women, but figuratively, they do not, as if to make it clear that we live in a godless universe where faith is folly.  Pretending to be the delivery boy with the groceries, the bad guys get in.  What follows is a nightmare of cruelty and horror, as Carol is brutally raped and Joanna is murdered.  The funeral, where words are spoken over Joanna’s grave by a priest, acts as a bookend to the nuns, further driving home the pathetic impotence of faith in the face of so much evil in the world.  Had Carol died as well, there might have been a period of grieving and then moving on.  But Carol degenerates into a catatonic state, thereby acting as a continual reminder of what happened to her and her mother.

If this had happened to Sam’s family, and he got out his gun and started blowing away the city scum, that would have been all wrong, for two reasons.  First, since he is already a fascist, there would be little dramatic value in seeing him put his beliefs into action.  Second, as he is played by William Redfield, we would know that someone who looked like that in a movie would never be able to do what someone who looks like Charles Bronson can do.  Of course, speaking of looks, we had a hard time accepting that Bronson’s character was a bleeding-heart liberal in the first place, but we knew that we were just being prepared for a reluctant-hero situation, so that made it all right.

Paul puts some roles of quarters in a sock to act as a makeshift blackjack, which he gets to use in short order when someone tries to hold him up.  But as he re-enacts the scene at home, elated at the discovery that he is not powerless and does not have to be a victim, the roles of quarters burst apart, so we know that something a little more dependable will be needed.

As an architect, Paul is sent to Arizona to have a look at the real estate project proposed by Aimes Jainchill (Stuart Margolin).  Never mind that places out West like Texas and Arizona are just as modern and urban as the rest of the country, the movies still like to play up the idea that cowboy culture is alive and well.  And this movie really lays it on thick.  As Paul is arriving at the airport, we see Aimes pushing open a couple of swinging saloon doors underneath a sign that reads “Last Chance Cocktails.”  He is dressed in full Western regalia.  Except it’s modern Western clothes, and he is wearing glasses, so he’s kind of a cowboy wannabe.

They go out to where Aimes wants to build his houses, and while they are looking around, we see a real cowboy named Judd herding cattle through the area.  Aimes says he doesn’t want to bulldoze the hills.  Paul says the hills take up a lot of space.  Aimes replies that the open spaces are what this part of the country is all about, saying we need space for life, for people like Judd, for horses and cows.  That sounds nice, but once the houses start being built, won’t Judd and the horses and cows find themselves in the same situation we have seen in Westerns many times, where the free-range cattlemen find themselves shut out by homesteaders?  You can’t herd cattle through the middle of a suburban neighborhood, even if the hills do remain in place.  There won’t be any range war, of course, but it just shows how silly the whole Western nostalgia business is, something Aimes seems to be oblivious to, and which we are supposed to overlook.

Speaking of Western nostalgia, they next find themselves in “Old Tucson,” a movie lot for Westerns and a tourist attraction where scenes are acted out in which a sheriff takes on the bad guys.  These were the good old days, when outlaws met with swift justice.  Subsequently, Aimes takes Paul to his gun club, where we find out that Paul was a conscientious objector during the war.  It seems his father was killed in a hunting accident, and so his mother turned Paul into a pacifist, but not before his father had first taught Paul how to use a gun, so he is a crack shot.  After solving the real estate problem he was sent to fix, Paul heads back home.  Before he leaves, Aimes puts a present in his suitcase.  When Paul gets home, he discovers that the present is a thirty-two revolver.

Now, wait a minute!  Did some city slicker write this script?  No self-respecting, macho, urban cowboy would buy someone a thirty-two, unless it was for his wife, and even then she’d have to be petite.  Nothing less than a forty-five would be the thing for Charles Bronson, even if his character is a bleeding-heart, conscientious-objecting, momma’s boy.  Whatever the caliber, though, it had to be a revolver.  A semi-automatic lacks the cowboy juju that is needed to bring Western justice to the big city.

In any event, it is important that someone gave Paul this gun.  It is standard in the movies that if a civilian buys a gun, he is just going to get himself killed.  But if he acquires the gun in some other way, then he will be able to use it effectively.  And that he does.  Not only does he successfully kill hoodlums right and left, but he causes the crime rate to go down as well:  in part, because the bad guys are afraid they might run into the vigilante; in part, because other law-abiding citizens start fighting back too.

At the beginning of the movie, “civilized” just meant not having sex on the beach.  Later in the movie, it acquires a more pejorative connotation.  Jack, Paul’s son-in-law, says they should have moved to the country, out of the city, where Joanna and Carol would have been safe, recalling Sam’s remark about what decent people would soon need to do.  Paul is contemptuous of this idea, of running away, suggesting that if the police cannot protect people, they should do it themselves.  Jack says, “We’re not pioneers anymore, Dad.”  Paul asks, if we are not pioneers, what are we then?  “I mean, if we’re not pioneers, what have we become?  What do you call people who, when faced with a condition of fear, do nothing about it?  They just run and hide.”  Jack answers, tentatively, “Civilized?”

As we get toward the end of the movie, more Western tropes start piling up right along with the bodies.  Paul tells one bandit to “fill his hand,” to “draw.”  Later, when a police lieutenant (Vincent Gardenia) tells him to leave town, because the higher-ups don’t want him arrested for political reasons, Paul says, “By sundown?”

Paul does move to another city.  Chicago, of course.  And when some punks in the station harass a woman, Paul helps her with her packages, and then uses his thumb and forefinger to suggest a gun, pointing it at them, allowing us to enjoy the thought that this vigilante’s job is not done, that he will soon be cleaning up the streets of Chicago.

So, what can we say about the 2018 remake starring Bruce Willis as Paul Kersey?  Let us consider a few of the differences.  First, in the 1974 original, what happens to Paul’s wife and daughter is much worse than in the 2018 remake.  The daughter is brutally raped in the original, while her mother watches helplessly.  It is pathetic and horrifying.  In the remake, rape is only threatened, and the women are able to fight back:  the daughter slicing a man’s face; the mother throwing boiling water in the face of another.  The daughter never recovers psychologically in the original; she makes a full recovery in the remake.

Second, whereas Paul was an architect in the original, in the remake he is a doctor who works in the emergency room of a hospital.  At first, I thought this was for the sake of irony.  I could almost imagine a tagline:  “He removes bullets from bodies by day.  He puts them back into bodies by night.”  However, the purpose of his being a doctor was really to provide him with a way of finding out who the perpetrators were, which begins when one of them is brought into the emergency room.  Paul of the original never even imagines that he will encounter the men that killed his wife and raped his daughter.  All the men he kills are just bad guys, none of whom he has any personal connection with.  He just walks the streets at night as bait, luring them to their doom.  Paul of the remake does kill a few bad guys unrelated to the assault on his family, but then the rest of the movie is about tracking down all the men that had anything to do with killing his wife and assaulting his daughter.  Actually, even the killing of one of the men who had nothing to do with the assault on his family is an act of revenge in behalf of a boy who came into the emergency room with a gunshot wound.  Presumably, the producers of the remake thought this would make the movie better.  It doesn’t, and not simply because the original is more realistic in this regard.  Between getting revenge on the men that attacked his family and having his daughter make a full recovery, Paul of the remake gets closure.  The situation for Paul of the original remains forever unresolved, for those men are still out there somewhere, and his daughter will never be the same.

Third, there is no Western theme in the remake.  Though the Western comparisons in the original were a little corny, yet they kept the film upbeat.  Paul is at one with himself in his new role as vigilante.  And when he talks to his son-in-law about whether it is better to fight back or to hide, he is reflective and philosophical.  In the remake, Paul is conflicted.  When his brother (Vincent D’Onofrio) confronts him about what he is doing, his attempt to justify himself comes across as whiny and moralistic.  Moreover, at the end of the original, when Paul forms his forefinger and thumb into a gun, we believe he will continue to be a vigilante after his move to Chicago.  When Paul does that in the remake, we don’t believe him.  Having killed the men connected to his family’s tragedy, there no longer seems to be sufficient motive for him to continue in that vein.

There is one similarity worth noting.  As I mentioned above, it was important that Paul be given a gun as a gift, because normal, law-abiding citizens that buy guns in movies usually end up getting killed.  In the remake, Paul starts to buy a gun, but changes his mind when confronted with the regulations.  He later sees a gun drop from a victim in the operating room, and he opportunistically secretes it on his person to be used later, thereby avoiding the jinx of buying it.  He does buy a gun later, a machine gun no less, but that is after he has already done a lot of killing.

All in all, the Death Wish of 1974 is by far the better movie.  The remake is just another revenge movie.  The original is existential.