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“Attack the Block” is an interplanetary turf war between street toughs and aliens in the dregs of South London. It opens on a group of hoodlums led by a punk named Moses (John Boyega) as they mug a nurse, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), on her way home from work. Then aliens crash-land on their block. The riff-raff soon become Sam’s best hope as they are forced to join together in their fight for survival. 

Everything about the film is refreshing. First, it takes a group of very authentic kids (played by some stellar young actors) whose interaction, lingo and brotherhood are all authentic to London’s street thugs. Next, it puts them at home in a dingy apartment complex where instead of gaping in awe at the alien threat and wondering how or why the creatures came to earth, the group reacts like media-saturated young gangsters would and defend their hood. Instead of guns blazing, they fight with a baseball bat and a collector samurai sword. Thanks to excellent writing and directing from Joe Cornish (who came up with the concept after being mugged by a similar group of young thugs), the kids are believable punks on an individual and group level. They’re the bad kids, not your typical heroes, and their transformation makes them memorable. 

Cornish keeps the movie funny with a lot of situational humor and excellent dialogue – the boys’ girlfriends hang up on their frantic calls, telling them to call back when they aren’t playing videogames; the potty-mouthed guys rag on Sam for swearing too much. The thick accents and foreign slang (“believe, brev” and “allow it” color the film) do beg for subtitles at first, but as the film goes on it gets easier to understand. Additionally, Nick Frost of “Shaun of the Dead” and most recently “Paul” fame supports as a drugged-up pot grower, and his stoned take on the action keeps everything from getting too serious. 

Not that the aliens aren’t scary. Cornish’s invaders break the modern trend of CGI-heavy, visually overwhelming monsters. His are grounded in reality. The low-budget creatures are actually guys in costumes (among them, Terry Notary, who ran Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” movement school), and are jet black with glowing teeth. The kids describe them as “big, alien, gorilla-wolf mother—ers,” and it’s their similarity to bears and ferocious dogs that make them terrifying. They are filmed to maximum effect. Early on, Cornish suggests them, couching their movements in shadow. Later, when the gang sees a dead one up close, they realize that’s essentially what the aliens are – jet black shag carpets with razor sharp teeth. But it’s not a comforting feeling. 

Cornish also avoids zooming too close as the kids bike up cement ramps, run through hallways and fight their way through the block, letting viewers actually watch what’s going on. His choice in aliens and camerawork are both refreshing when so many filmmakers today opt for CGI and hand-held camerawork, and his strong story and actors make it a must-watch film. Believe, brev.

As for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.”

Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. . . no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. . . I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.”

That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age.  Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp — at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. Late in life, Keaton remembered…

…a night away back in 1920 when Charlie and I were drinking beer in my kitchen. He was going on at a great rate about something new called communism which he had just heard about. He said that communism was going to change everything, abolish poverty. The well would help the sick, the rich would help the poor. . . .

I myself have gone through life almost unaware of politics, and I only wish my old friend had done the same. He must know by now that communism, wherever it has been practiced, bears not the slightest resemblance to the benign system he described to me forty years ago.

That sort of ordinary common sense shines through in Buster Keaton movies like The Cameraman. Meanwhile, as communism became a faddish preoccupation of liberals in the 1920s and ’30s, Chaplin’s movies became increasingly politicized and culturally rebellious, culminating in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a subversive serial-killer comedy that Chaplin considered “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career” even as ordinary Americans fled from it in droves, leaving it to flop catastrophically at the box office. Based off a script by Orson Welles and championed by critics like the selfsame James Agee who praised the work of Keaton’s silents, it nevertheless repulsed American theatergoers. The elderly serial killers of Arsenic and Old Lace at least were portrayed as crazy — Chaplin’s sardonic wife-murderer justifies himself by pooh-poohing his comparatively meager killings when set against the much greater casualties of war.

By the end, the guy who had started by wagging a cane and walking funny fancied himself one of the greatest artistes of the age, whereas Keaton judged his own career far more humbly, seeing himself as a mere gag man and entertainer. With feet (and ego) firmly on the ground, he was thus able to see Chaplin’s preening leftism for what it was: “I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do, Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers. Neither of us had time while growing up to study anything but show business.” It’s to Keaton’s credit that he realized this, and wasn’t seduced by the pretty lies being sprinkled throughout Hollywood by commies in those decades.

Keaton saw the core difference between Chaplin’s artistry and his own as a moral one. “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philosophy,” he wrote. “Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman and honest.” During The Cameraman, for instance, we see Buster’s character celebrating America’s favorite pastime, working hard to get ahead, courting his girl in a decent way, and continually acting honorably whenever a moral choice presents itself. By the picture’s conclusion, he’s become more than the butt of jokes, more than a thinly veiled political message, and more than a pouting beggar soliciting other people’s pity. He’s become a hero, by virtue of his actions being grounded in the same basic morality of the country in which he grew up and found fame. This came easy and natural for Keaton, with no guru or faddish ideology necessary — after all, he spent decades entertaining average Americans sitting a few feet away from the stage, and he served honorably with our troops in France during World War I.

If Buster Keaton has a single artistic disciple in modern times, it’s the Hong Kong martial artist Jackie Chan (another guy we’ll be studying in more detail later on in FCML). Like the elder comedian, Chan found himself entertaining on the stage from a young age as an acrobat, and later parlayed the skills gained in that endeavor into the most inventive and astounding physical comedy of his era. Eschewing the herd of stars attempting to ape Bruce Lee, he chose instead to embrace the style of the American silent comedians of old, particularly Keaton. It’s a perfect example of someone in our day taking an art form declared dead for fifty years and finding a way to make it relevant again.

It’s no mistake that, like Keaton before him, Jackie Chan became one of the most popular movie stars of his time. Like James Agee wrote those many years ago, we haven’t lost or outgrown our craving for “laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall,” the kind that only true physical comedy induces. Even in this age of special effects and CGI fight scenes, when geniuses like Jackie Chan bring it alive again au naturel, audiences respond.

I think it’s a tragedy that Buster Keaton died of cancer at the age of seventy in 1966, and hence didn’t live long enough to view movies like Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985). If he did, he would have seen in Jackie Chan a true kindred spirit rekindling fires that seemingly died out for good with The Cameraman in 1928. When asked about his influences, Chan routinely puts Keaton at the top of the list, going so far as to say, “I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster.”

If The Great Stone Face were still with us, even he would have to crack a smile upon hearing that.

This concludes our look at silent comedy great Buster Keaton and his final masterpiece, The Cameraman (1928).

Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

As we learned in Part 1 of this series, we’re lucky in that over just the past few decades enough film has been discovered in various places to piece together a pretty fine quality copy of The Cameraman for DVD. Thus here in 2010 we are privy to a far better presentation of the picture than any previous generation save for the one that saw it fresh at the theater in 1928.

There are various versions floating around on the internet (if you don’t mind the terrible image, for instance, you can watch the entire movie on YouTube if you wish), but your best option is to either buy or rent the TCM Buster Keaton Collection. (here’s the same set for rent at Netflix — choose Disc 1 to watch The Cameraman.)

And remember what I said when we were discussing D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms — for the best silent movie experience, try watching it completely silent without the cheesy organ tracks that the DVDs include, and if your player/computer permits it try slowing down the playback by 5-10% to eliminate the herky-jerky too-fast motion that plagues so many films of the era. The movies come across much better when you do.

Review of TCM’s Buster Keaton Collection DVD set: Here’s a nice review of the TCM DVD set containing The Cameraman, with some background on the making of the film, the recovery of the best version, et cetera.

Jackie Chan’s homage to Buster Keaton: From his classic movie Project A, a series of gags on a bicycle that instantly beg comparison to the great physicality and boffo laughs of The Great Stone Face.

With that in mind, here are five drool-worthy stocking stuffers for the cinemaphiles in your family, all of them due to be released in the next few weeks.

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1. Frank Sinatra: Concert Collection (November 2, 2010, $54.99 at Amazon)

Get hep to this, man: seven discs containing fourteen hours of TV specials and filmed concerts, with Ol’ Blue Eyes joined by Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Gene Kelly, Antonio Carlos Jobim, John Denver, Bing Crosby, and of course Dino. Four of the specials have never been released, and a host of isolated TV clips are thrown in for good measure. Top it all off with a 44-page booklet chock full of rare photos and scholarly commentary, and the Chairman of the Board is truly back in all his scotch-soaked glory.

The seventh “Bonus Disc” sounds like the perfect thing to have playing in the background while you are decorating your tree: a “Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank” color TV special.

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2. The Goonies: 25th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition (November 2, 2010, $34.99 at Amazon)

A story by a pre-pretentious Steven Spielberg, a script by Chris Columbus, and a typically satisfying directing job by Richard Donner in between his work on classics like Superman (1978) and Lethal Weapon (1987). The Goonies is one of those movies that instantly time-warps guys and gals of my generation back to 1985. Nestled among other films like Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, The Breakfast Club, Real Genius, Cocoon, Rocky 4, Pale Rider, and Witness, it helped make that summer magical.

I remember first catching it on a triple-bill with Gremlins and some now-forgotten horror movie. This is one of those movies that, in hindsight, is seen to have assembled a particularly deep cast. Young Sean Astin (later to play Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings films) Josh Brolin, Eighties staple Corey Feldman, Ke Huey Quan (whose performance had been the best thing in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the year before) the always fun Joe Pantoliano, Eighties cuties Kerri Green and Martha Plimpton, and even one of Big Hollywood’s own, The Mighty Robert Davi! I’m not sure how they managed to fit so much awesome onto only fifty gigs of Blu-ray, but that’s technology for you.

Whereas so many special DVD sets have extras that don’t impress, I dig the inclusion of a new board game in this Goonies Ultimate Edition — given the treasure hunt motif, it’s something that your kids will likely have fun playing after experiencing the movie for the first time. There’s also the requisite documentary, outtakes, Cyndi Lauper video, souvenir booklets, and even a rare commentary track that manages to reassemble all seven main actors along with the director twenty-five years later.

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3. The Night of the Hunter (The Criterion Collection) (November 16, 2010, $36.49 at Amazon)

The great actor Charles Laughton is already being represented on Blu-ray this winter via 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty, but you’ll also want to pick up this, his sole directorial effort. François Truffaut once wrote that Laughton’s strange film feels “like a horrifying news item retold by small children,” and noted that “it makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers.” What did he mean by that, you ask? Buy this new edition on Blu-ray and find out.

One of the things that attracted me to this new release is the massive 2.5 hours of outtakes included in this two-disc set. It’s a rarity to be privy to so much detritus where an old classic film is concerned, and I’m wondering what sort of illumination it will cast on Laughton’s directing methods.

Another boon is a video interview with actor Simon Callow, who in addition to being a fine thespian in his own right wrote a well-received biography of Laughton some years ago. Those of you who, like me, have been patiently waiting for Callow to finish the final tome in his magisterial three-volume biographical treatment of Orson Welles can content yourselves in the meantime with hunting down his Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (1988).

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4. The World at War (November 16, 2010, $112.49 at Amazon)

This ranks with Ken Burns’ The Civil War as one of the all-time great documentaries. Sprawling over nine discs and containing some thirty-five hours of material, it’s a must-see for all World War II buffs (and, in a better world, would be required viewing for schoolchildren). Narrated by the great Laurence Olivier and fully restored both visually (in 1080p HD) and aurally (in surround sound), each of the twenty-six episodes has never looked or sounded better — with one enormous caveat.

If you click over to this article on restoring the series for Blu-ray, you’ll note that the producers made the controversial decision to crop each disc’s image in order to make them fit comfortably onto the rectangular widescreen TVs which are commonplace in today’s living rooms. This has caused an uproar among cinema purists, who have damned the set with such ferocity that it now sports a paltry one-star ranking at Amazon despite its otherwise stellar production values.

Whether you mind losing 25% of the image in order to have it fit on your screen without black bars is an open question — I know plenty of people who hit the “zoom” button on their TVs as a matter of course, which effectively crops old movies the same way, so perhaps it’s not a big deal to many of you. But if it is, and you want the full image presented in the OAR (original aspect ratio), you’ll want to skip the Blu-ray entirely and buy the 30th anniversary DVD set released in 2009.

Either way, you’ll want to see this epic series if you haven’t yet been exposed to it.

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5. True Grit (December 11, 2010, $17.99 at Amazon)

As one commenter said on the Blu-ray.com forums when this title was announced, “Nothing makes a format viable like a large selection of John Wayne films.” Amen, brother.

This is, of course, a play at marketing synergy by Paramount, who is releasing John Wayne’s 1969 original on Blu-ray in order to coincide with the release this Christmas of the (admittedly promising) Coen Brothers remake starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and The Goonies’ Josh Brolin. But who cares about the excuse? It’s enough that Wayne’s Oscar-winning performance will be shining on your TV screen in high-def, with Elmer Bernstein’s wonderful score thundering through your speakers.

Don’t make ol’ Rooster Cogburn tell you twice to “Fill yer hands!” with this one.

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Is there anything else coming out on Blu-ray this Christmas that you’re particularly excited about? If so, share it with us in the comments below.

I am very proud to say that he had been the first and unquestionably finest “representative” within my entire career.

I hesitate to use the title of his profession … lawyer … since, indeed, its implications are, and just by mentioning the word, not what I’m here to convey.

Since I’m in retirement from the theatrical, film and television careers I did have, I can speak quite categorically and with my own, aging and well-earned crankiness.

I am known as “Grumpy Grampy” to my grandchildren.

There aren’t really many things in my professional life that were ever quite as clear as Arnold Weissberger’s nobility.

At his memorial service, with shining new lights of talent and legendary mountains of genius such as Meryl Streep and Orson Welles in attendance, I had the opportunity to quietly “stick it” to some of the superstars there by saying that I had met many great artists in my life but very few great men and women.

Undoubtedly, L. Arnold Weissberger was one of those few great men I have known.

This classic barrister hovered over the flock of artists he represented like the American Eagle he was, defending them fiercely, both publicly and privately, from verbal assassins such as John Simon, Manhattan journalism’s grandest scion of sadists.

Arnold’s letters to the New York Times, again both public and private, commenting forcefully upon its many theater critics and all the News On The Rialto, remain indelible memories of both his eloquence and his courage.

He would gather his international clientele from all over the English-speaking world in a monthly soiree on Sutton Place, that neighborhood for numerous lions and lionesses of the privileged set.

Was there a major name of any sort within the performing, literary and, if you’ll oblige me, history-laden arts – meaning not-so-well-known members of legendarily history-making families – that was not in attendance? Nor did not appear eventually in Arnold’s book of Famous Faces? 

The only giant I met elsewhere, Leonard Bernstein, had, of course, been in attendance at some time, since Arnold had a photo of him in his collection.

I personally owned a Weissberger photo of myself, my son Matthew and one of the English Theater’s greatest servants of the spoken word, Sir John Gielgud.

On the main stage of Arnold’s living room were the giantess of Progressive Dance, Martha Graham and that angriest of Progressive playwrights, John Osborne.

Where do these Beacons of Progress, these well-known cheerleaders to the Progressive Dive of English-speaking Decline into Maoist, World Imperialism … where do they think they’re going now … if, indeed, they’re still alive to enjoy the America-hating, New World Order they’ve waited so long for?

To that “best of all possible, worlds.”

The Obama Nation.

A pipe dream that even Bernstein helped ridicule in his brilliant setting of Voltaire’s Candide.

For an all-too-brief brief yet very contemporary overview of Voltaire’s prophetic worries about the revolutionary fervor within France, that search for Utopia, and the monster it might ultimately lead to, please read.

If we suddenly jump, from staring out at the East River from Arnold’s apartment, over all of Manhattan’s brief Island, we could well be with all of Arnold’s guests, on the deck of the Titanic, looking out at the New Jersey shore, bon voyage cocktails in hand!

Yes, a virtual ship of fools singing Bernstein’s “Make your garden grow!”

The essential cover photo for Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic!

The great floating contradiction-in-terms!!

Life-loving death merchants.

Arnold was, I say with all joyous recollection, a cut above most of them, including Orson Welles.

He was like the anonymous, string quartet on the deck of Cameron’s Titanic.

His business was not in combat but in counseling and he did so in the finest tradition of his craft.

Arnold was one of the few lawyers, in my understanding of that horrid profession, that made an art and, yes, a music of that normally discordant shell game profession.

“Michael,” he would sing over lunch at Le Chantilly, drawing the vowels out in an intense commitment to putting forth a decidedly unpopular opinion among his more elite friends and clients, “I do not understand what the world sees …. in Pa-blo Pi-cas-so!”

Legends of any size were not the least bit intimidating to my late and greatest of consiglieres.

Arnold was the man who had, at one time, sat quite patiently, a carnation always well placed in his svelte jacket’s button hole, while the impresario Billy Rose tried to sell one of Arnold’s clients on writing the Rose idea of a great musical.

That hopeful new inhabitant of Tin Pan Alley, had he taken the job, would have been Igor Stravinsky.

True.

Every unwritten note of Goldiggers ’73 … or some such title … songs by Broadway’s new Gershwin brothers: Billy Rose and Igor Stravinsky!

I recall Arnold telling me, while we were both in attendance at the White House for the Presidential awards to artistic legends … in this case, Tennessee Williams for whom I was there as part of the tribute … that someday I would also be honored.

With Al Gore now owning a Nobel Peace Prize, who would want an award from anyone connected to the Progressive New World Order?!

I’m not sure I want my own name in the company of this Third Millennium’s versions of Leni Riefenstahl.

I might end this look back in nostalgic anger with one of the first tribute articles I have done here, that to Elia Kazan and his On The Waterfront.

No, Arnold and Mr. Kazan, though I’m certain they crossed paths, would not have been drinking partners, nor shared lunch at Le Chantilly.

However, each had their own, individual integrity which they both adhered to fiercely.

Both arise within my memories of them as great men.

Great at what they did for a living … but, more importantly, they were simply great men of extraordinary integrity.

For a major American lawyer of the 20th Century, that is a major achievement.

Almost as courageous as a great film director’s decision to testify against the largely Communist backbone within many of Manhattan’s most legendarily and radically chic Lords and Ladies Who Lunch.

1. Command Decision (1948) – Made just after WWII, this Air Force drama set in 1943 when the outcome of the war was still in doubt, is one of the most intelligent examinations of the burden of command ever put on film. Clark Gable is absolutely outstanding as Casey, a Brigadier General forced to give orders that on their face appear cold and even monstrous, but in truth are just the opposite. Caught between the Washington brass who have a war to sell and the men under him who see only a General ordering their comrades to certain death, Casey is a leader willing to be hated and even lose his command in order to do the greater good. What Casey cares about before anything is saving American lives. That means winning the war as quickly as possible, something which can only be accomplished if unspeakable sacrifices are made in the here and now.  

The film’s real strength lies in a refusal to demonize the different points of view represented. Walter Pidgeon plays Major General Kane, Casey’s superior and the man who has to worry about the political considerations of how Casey’s heavy losses will affect public opinion, which is just upstream from the financial decisions made in Congress. In a less intelligent, lazier film (translation: a modern one) Kane would be portrayed as a bureaucratic boob only worried about his own upward mobility, but not here. Ultimately, we may not like the way Kane’s forced to think but we’re made to understand the idea of competing goods.

Representing the men is Van Johnson who steals every scene oozing a contempt, and at times, an outright hatred for Casey. The moment when he comes to finally understand the bigger picture is both touching and understated – one of Johnson’s finest.

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2. Desperate Journey (1942) – Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Raymond Massey and Alan Hale had such memorable chemistry together in Michael Curtiz’s “Santa Fe Trail” (1940) that the four of them were rounded up two years later for Raoul Walsh’s rousing WWII action/adventure set behind German lines. Shot down on a bombing run, Flynn, Reagan, Hale and Arthur Kennedy are captured by Massey’s Nazi Major who makes a career-mistake in thinking he can convince Reagan to give up secrets [great Reagan video]. What follows is a rollicking actioner very much in the spirit of “Gunga Din” with one of my all-time favorite closing lines delivered by Flynn with the gusto and panache that made him an immortal: “Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs!”

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3. Tomorrow is Forever (1946) – At first it’s easy to confuse this complicated look at a mother’s sacrifice as a soapy melodrama, even a gimmicky one, but that’s because the film doesn’t tell you what it’s really about until a very satisfying climax when the theme plays out fully and comes together. Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles are Elizabeth and John, just married and with their whole lives ahead of them. But it’s 1918, WWI rages and John goes off to do his duty. Alone with a young son, Elizabeth receives a telegram informing her John’s been killed in action. It takes years, but after some time she remarries and watches her boy grow into a man just as WWII begins. After losing her beloved first husband to one war, Elizabeth can’t bear the thought of losing her son to another. This changes when a visitor from war-torn Europe, who may or may not be a much older and nearly crippled John, helps her to understand that what’s at stake in this war is bigger than any mother’s love.

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4. Happy Land (1943) – A horrible title can’t diminish the emotional power of this 20th Century-Fox oddity – a mixture of “A Christmas Carol” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” — about Lew Marsh (Don Ameche-in his finest performance), a pharmacist living in picture-perfect small town America whose life is shattered after he loses his only son to WWII. The ghost of Gramps (the wonderful Harry Carey) snaps Lew out of a clinical depression by taking him on a tour of the past where Lew is allowed to discover things about his beloved son he never knew. This was a generous, selfless boy — a young man to be proud of and mature beyond his years who died for a higher cause he believed in.

“Happy Land” doesn’t simplify a father’s grief or pretend to have all the answers.  When the credits roll, Lew’s still devastated and even a bit bitter. We’ve only been allowed to see the beginning of  a healing process … and that this process will never end is made touchingly clear.

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5. The Fighting Seabees (1944) – One of John Wayne’s lesser known WWII-era films, and one that deserves better recognition. The seabees are C.B.’s as in “Construction Brigade Battalion.” These are the men who build the bridges and airstrips in battle zones. But once upon a time, according to the movie, they were unarmed civilians, not allowed to fight back and frequently picked off by enemy snipers. Enter Wedge Donovan (Wayne), the head of Donovan Construction, who has watched too many of his men die helplessly and so he sets out to allow them to become armed enlisted men – The Fighting Seebees.

What sets this apart from other Wayne films, besides the opportunity to witness Duke dance a jitterbug, is that Wayne plays the role he’s usually up against. Donovan is a not a wise, seasoned pro. He’s an immature hot head whose arrogance and stupidity ends up getting a lot of men killed. Seeing Wayne in this kind of role takes some getting used to, but it adds a memorable emotional stake to what could have been a rote programmer. Of course, Wayne’s character redeems himself – and it’s a spectacular redemption – but that’s all you’re getting from me.

I’ll get to that somewhat nervy assertion in a bit, but first a little background.

Among the cinematic slew released during those years of cold, are two of my favorite films, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Both dealt with strikingly similar themes, unintentional nuclear holocaust, yet in entirely different tones.  But cold war themes weren’t that varied by their very nature, since inevitably the worst case scenario was the best case plot device and nothing brings down the house like bringing down the house.

With that said, still, there’s so much similarity between the two stories that law suits were indeed filed and production schedules slowed. This worked out to Stanley Kubrick’s advantage as his Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released almost a year ahead of Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe. In my opinion Kubrick’s is a better film than Lumet’s and not due to slowed schedules, either. But both are magnificent, and because of their approaches to the topic, very different  and essential part of the genre.

Based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert, Dr. Strangelove is, if there’s anyone alive out there who still hasn’t seen it yet, a comedy. The novel, however, is not satire and does not even contain a Strangelove at all, since Terry Southern who worked on the script with Kubrick and George, added that character during pre-production.

Fail-Safe, based on a novel by the same name, was written by two gents who do not have the same name, namely Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. When George Clooney re-enacted this story in LIVE television format, which I personally think was a marvelous idea, he enlisted the help of veteran broadcaster and news legend Walter Kronkite to introduce the landmark teleplay. Kronkite brought weight and nostalgia to the production, he also brought a big flub. As he concluded his up to then flawless introduction of ‘what you are about to see’, he awkwardly stumbled and stammered with the authors’ names. Well, that’s LIVE television, warts and all. Nobody’s perfect, least of all television icons. And it didn’t harm the presentation at all. It probably even made it more enjoyable, if one can use that term with a story about nuclear holocaust. Judging by Dr. Strangelove, that’s exactly what Kubrick wanted us to do.

By a strange coincidence both of these films were foolishly screened one after the other at Harvard Square’s famous Brattle Theater. I had seen them both before several times each, so I knew them backwards and forwards. I also knew one was a comedy and one was decidedly not, though the endings were not all that different, in fact, the comedy turned out a whole lot worse in the end.

The folks that work at the Brattle, probably still to this day, are a smug lot. Using the current vernacular, snarky might even be a way to describe them. Naturally, most are students at Harvard and quite confident in making profound statements they’ve overheard (that one I borrowed from Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, if anyone’s checking). When I saw the lineup with Dr. Strangelove scheduled first, I knew then what many of you who know these films are thinking now, that the staff at Brattle either hadn’t yet seen the films, or they had and were just smug and snarky enough to think it would be cool in this order. For either error, they deserved to be gingerly removed from their employment with the finesse of a General Ripper or a ‘Bat’ Guano, warts and all.

Now, there are very few times when I’ve felt the need to walk out of a movie before the credits finished. Much fewer times due to reasons other than the quality of the film. Well, one such occasion happened here in Japan. At approximately the same time that the quite serious staff of the Tokyo International Film Festival scheduled a screening of Lawrence of Arabia an earthquake was scheduled by the even more serious staff of mother nature. Colonel Lawrence, having just seen the horrors left by the Turks at Tafas was about to echo his famous “No prisoners!” yawp, when the screen went black, then white, then the chandeliers in the theater started swaying like we were on an ocean liner in the wrong part of town. All I could think of was The Poseidon Adventure.  I knew, prisoners or no, it was time to get out of that cavalcade of stars. The last person I would want to be was that guy hanging from an upside down dining room table who ended up in the stained glass. That was one time I left a screening early. The other was at the Brattle. It was during Fail-Safe after Dr. Stranglove had already played.  Their clever lineup. No, there was no earthquake and only one prisoner. Me.  I opted to stay and slog it out. Maybe the overly snarky crowd, I thought, which had laughed way too loudly in classic ‘look at me, I get it’ fashion with the subtle humor of Kubrick’s  would settle down a bit with Lumet. Well, so much for that idea. What followed was constant, again, much-too-loud snickering and feigned muffled laughter by the Ivy proud crowd. I couldn’t take it, so I left. The fools, the mad fools let the comic tone of Dr. Strangelove poison the same serious message that Fail-Safe emitted with fatal solemnity. The horror was negated by the association. I was pissed. And I’m pretty darn sure Henry Fonda – as the President – would’ve been, too.

Dr. Strangelove, enjoyable masterpiece that is it, was of course not intended to frighten. Well, not really. You could say it was intended to frighten about as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the most expensive movie about religion ever made, was intended to evoke prayer. The story goes that Kubrick was making Dr. Strangelove as a serious narrative when he felt that it was just so absurd and yet so very possible, that he had to make it a comedy, the irony of it was just too funny.

Fail-Safe was another matter, though. Not filled to the brim with over the top characters with clever names, it very clearly laid out the ease with which a nuclear war could be started, not by purposeful insanity, nor tampering with bodily fluids, but by accident, and even with the best intentions and correct safe guards in place. To human eyes, working flawlessly, by the numbers.

The U.S. Air Force had a disclaimer on the film stating that what you have seen could not happen.  Dr. Strangelove had a similar disclaimer that Kubrick was all too happy to include feeling it lent even more gallows humor to his already hilarious film. He was right. It did.

Well, let me stop for a second. I have a confession to make. I lied. There’s another cold war film that I was fully planning on mentioning and is of particular interest here. In fact, it’s the reason for the whole darn thing. So, I apologize with the sincerity of a Merkin Muffley. This film is not a comedy, nor a drama but rather a TV documentary. It’s called The War Game.  It was made by Peter Watkins and originally scheduled to be released in 1966 on the BBC. It’s what could be described as a docudrama or dramatization. But, we’ll call it a documentary because if [Ray Bradbury's Stolen Title] 9/11 is called a documentary, then this certainly is. And like all documentaries, it’s meant to sway.

For those who haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it. But I will say, what happens to us, to England specifically, isn’t pretty.

In documentary fashion, and using an omnipresent “voice-of-God” narration the film shows what precautions and procedures are in place in the event of a nuclear emergency, in this case, an exchange of hostilities with tactical nuclear weapons between NATO and those forces of communist Soviet Union and China. It interweaves man-in-the-street bits, creating a very realistic portrayal of then contemporary English urban and suburban life as only a Richard Lester could appreciate. These go on to show what the average person was thinking in terms of perceived threat.  Experts are interviewed – civil defense and emergency services workers, politicians and theologians. Many of the ‘expert’ interviews, particularly the ones that keenly show the message of disparity between wishful thinking and reality, do not provide us with real names, but rather titles to match their out-of-place statements such as ‘the war of the just’  by ‘an Anglican Bishop’ or the American nuclear strategist’s belief that both sides in a war would refrain from destroying cities. These staid interviews are contrasted effectively with the fire, flying debris and screams as well as with the narration that shares information with us such as, ‘in this car a family is burning alive’ or ‘these men are dying’, as if we didn’t know already.

There’s a wide range of citizenry shown, rich and poor, educated and not. A lot of opinions are expressed, some sound, others not, and none of them are from experience. The film then goes on to graphically provide that.

The ensuing chaos and horror is remarkably realistic in its incoherence. When Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove, he wanted the defensive missile strike on Major Kong’s B-52 to be incomprehensible, chaotic, out of focus and over modulated. Going against conventional filmmaking, Kubrick didn’t want us to know what was happening. He wanted real.

With exception to the narration, much of The War Game mirrors Kubrick’s approach and philosophy as if he had been lobbing grenades at the cameraman himself.

The film was met with tremendous resistance from within BBC, a thoroughly more responsible outfit in those days, and from the British government itself, keen not to highlight the fact that nuclear war is not something that can be mopped up quickly and that no nation can adequately prepare for war, conventional or nuclear.

The director Watkins resigned over this resistance and the film was not shown on that network until 1985. It is noteworthy that it is during the Reagan and Thatcher years, not the liberal and labour party administrations of the 1960s and 1970s of Britain and the U.S., that the ban was lifted on this harshly critical-of -government, distinctly anti-nuclear film and finally allowed to be shown to the public. However, it did get limited private exposure during the banned years of Liberal party administrations by making the college circuit rounds and being shown to film critics by prints provided by Watkins himself. His work would go on to receive not only accolades but awards by these same critics, most likely enjoying the privilege of seeing something banned by the government and the BBC.

From the outset, the film, like all film, is designed to influence thinking. That it was scheduled for the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima makes this fact no secret at all.

The film’s fictional deadline of when the festivities were to occur if we didn’t disarm in 1966 came and went. So did ‘76, ‘86, ‘96 and 2006. A lot of years has passed since this warning of imminent extinction if we didn’t act immediately to disarm. 43 years in fact, have passed. So have a few other things like the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with those. A very big heaping ‘a lot’, if you ask me.  But whether you want to debate that or not, like the end of the world, it’ll have to be postponed for another doomsday. What’s important, to paraphrase Reagan himself, is not who takes the credit for preventing nuclear holocaust, but that it was prevented. The super power nuclear exchange did not happen. The film’s message was a misfire. We all know, however, that the new threats we face today are just as possible and just as destructive as the previous ones that The War Game effectively addressed. I’m afraid, as horrible as The War Game suggests, in reality, it will be a whole lot worse.

There is a lot of emotion connected with any discussion of a war more nuclear than conventional. And that’s as it should be, I suppose. Because unlike any other weapon system, nuclear weapons have lingering effects that are unparalleled in our history.

As long as such arsenals exist, the horrors of Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe and The War Game could become reality. Will they? Who knows? No one certainly wants it to happen. No sane person anyway. But the sane aren’t always calling the shots, both government and freelance.

We’ve all seen what much smaller atom bombs were capable of. The fission bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in essence the detonators for the awesome fission/fusion thermonuclear devices in most stockpiles now. We’ve all watched the grainy footage from New Mexico, Bikini atoll, and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We’ve watched with passing car wreck fascination the horrors of the children maimed, the shadows burned on the walls and the few remaining structures that withstood hell. It’s all unforgettable and very emotional.

But there are some points that get misplaced in all this emotion. Many people are aware of them, but many more are not, it seems. Anyway, let’s see if we can touch on a few right now.

1. The U.S. using atomic weapons targeted two Japanese civilian cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not entirely correct. Certainly the U.S. dropped atom bombs on those two cities, practically destroying them entirely and killing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. But, a point often overlooked is that neither city was strictly ‘civilian’ as we know it. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial, armament, military producing centers that contained both residential and industrial components, often side by side.

Japan was a cottage industry culture at that time. Businesses that you or I might think of as ‘war industry’ firms, such as Ford, GM, Boeing, etc, were unheard of in Japan. Small shops built everything. Well, almost everything. Some large conglomerates, powerful family samurai shogunate holdovers, called Zaibatsu, did exist, welding tremendous influence in shipping, construction, manufacture and practically all of the large scale design and development of war industry business. Mitsubishi, yes, the same one as the car maker, produced the A6M Zero-Sen , Zero or Zeke as it was referred to by many American fighting men who crossed swords with the formidable aircraft. Mitsubishi made many of their aircraft in Hiroshima. From the start of the war, the Mitsubishi shipyards in Nagasaki were heavily involved in contracts for the Imperial Navy. The Japanese military relied on Hiroshima for the supply of its aircraft and on Nagasaki for its ships. The region was used as a center for other industrial construction as well, by other smaller Zaibatsu and the aforementioned cottage industry houses. In other words, both cities could be considered military targets.

2. Only Japanese were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Wrong again. There were tens to hundreds of thousands of P.O.W.s and foreign slaves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many of the slaves were Koreans and Chinese used as labor in these war industry factories. None of those who perished in the atomic bombings are mentioned in the casualty lists for that city, nor on any plaque within Hiroshima Peace Park where all other honored names are displayed. The city and governor consistently refused to permit it. Those killed are considered unmentionables. Like the ‘comfort women’, sex slaves conscripted from other nations such as Korea, China, Philippines, Singapore, to service Japanese military, they simply never existed. Not even in death. Recently, there has been acknowledgment and changes to this official stance, but it has come very slowly and with a long fight.

3. The United States was eager to test the atom bomb on a population.

Still wrong. The use of the then-new atomic bomb on a city, was an absolute last resort for the Americans. To have to use it on two cities was beyond last resort. There is no one living or dead who wished to use it on anything but a weathered steel tower if there was any chance in not having to. Unfortunately, the last resort became an option after the Battle of Okinawa demonstrated that the Japanese would not only fail to surrender, but would execute the civilian population as well, as they did with impunity on Okinawa. It’s worth considering that to this day, the only military the people of Okinawa despise more than the still occupying forces of the U.S. is the Japanese military, and that’s after several high profile rape incidents involving American military against local Okinawan children. Even with that, the Japanese of Okinawa still despise the Japanese military more.

The Battle of Okinawa displayed in stark relief what Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima had earlier hinted at. That it would take Operation Olympic, a total land invasion by Allied forces, planned and readied by hundreds of thousands to millions of veteran and new troops in staging areas across the Pacific, to stop the Asian nation. The astronomical amount of logistics and enormous cost, financial and human, in support and training alone would not have been expelled had the U.S. always intended to use the atomic bombs as many critics suggest.

The total deaths at the Battle of Okinawa have never fully been studied. But estimates show that more died there than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, including those who died after the initial blast from radiation related illnesses. The figures that are often associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki are almost always those in the most upper range of the estimates. In any case, many, many people died in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and places like Okinawa. No one can deny that. Yet, do we cringe at the mention of the Battle of Okinawa? No, we do not. Why not? Because it’s conventional war and conventional death. But more importantly, I believe, the primary reason is because there are very few images to evoke our emotion. So, it becomes a mere statistic. Numbers not images. Math not art. Faces move us far more than figures.

4. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved Japanese lives.

It is a sad and strange truth that in the end the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually saved Japanese lives.  This is not an unsupportable claim. For if Operation Olympic was to proceed there is no denying that millions of Japanese would have died, along with millions of Allied soldiers all in the name of getting the Emperor to sign a piece of paper.

Number 4 is a hard pill to swallow. Because of the images of nuclear war, and the effects of it, we tend to regard such an event as the complete and utter end of the world.

But it did not end the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, leveled, incinerated. Yet, combined, they don’t add up to the casualties suffered in Okinawa. But many might argue that Okinawa was not leveled, it’s towns were not stamped flat. No, they were not. But this discussion is about life, not things. People, not buildings. Humanity not machinery. So, we must not veer off our humanitarian quest only to pick up broken shields and count structures razed. This is about loss of life, human life. It is the heart targeted message of The War Game and all other anti-nuclear statements that life is what we are fighting for.

In previous wars, whole populations were decimated, entire nations were removed from existence, wiped off the map. In relative terms of populations, it would be like the earth opening up and swallowing all of North America, or Africa, or Europe in one single messy gulp. We’re talking mind numbingly large scale destruction. But the difference is, there were no cameras to record such horrors, no witnesses to give any heart wrenching accounts. No screaming children, no frustrated doctors applying salves to blackened, shiny skin. None of that. Because nothing lived.

Years ago, I had the good fortune to meet one of the last remaining members of the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Force and the American in charge of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey which went in days after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations to record and film what was left of those former cities. Any footage you have seen is most likely the footage that group and their Japanese counterparts took. He remarked that they had a few armed soldiers with them as they drove into the flattened city. He and his colleagues were scared to death about going in. Not because of the radiation. They were certain that they were going to be torn limb from limb by whatever survivors were remaining and with whatever strength those poor souls had left in them.

But they were not. They were saluted.

Those cities were sacrificed, perhaps we can look at it this way, to save the world from further and almost certain nuclear death. It is their example in the pictures and film which were taken, also with sacrifice, which can remind us what horrors are possible in our own time if we allow them. Images.

Thanks to those men who went in after the bombs, we have that visual legacy to consult. But think for a moment of those images of nuclear war, in footage and in films like The War Game and the power it commands. Certainly, the horror deters us, makes us think. So consider this. Isn’t it possible that we might have had another tragedy like the Nazi Holocaust, for example, if there were no pictures or film of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald to shock us, to remind us what we as humans are capable of? Films like The War Game were made for just this purpose. To remind. To fill in what is missing in our visual library of real horrors. Yes, let them be reminders, but not propaganda.

The image is a remarkable thing. None of us would be sharing our thoughts here if images didn’t move us, didn’t sway us. Places like this site exist because images affect us. But we must remind ourselves that there are many horrors, different, but perhaps equally horrible and inconceivable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the events depicted in The War Game, but which we have no image to relate to, to recoil from, to get sick looking upon.

If you have seen someone’s head explode from pressure applied into the ears, or an armless woman stumbling down the street with her forced-birth child dangling behind her legs, still attached by its umbilical chord and dragging on the road looking like a dirty, old shoe, except it’s screaming – or a naked man, standing in sub zero temperatures, having water poured on his arm, freezing it, and then having it intentionally smashed off like delicate glass with the blow of a hammer – or children hung on poles in the sun, being flayed alive, their skin peeled off them slowly as they try to scream but cannot because their vocal chords were cut out – or seen animal limbs sewn onto humans in place of the perfectly healthy ones that were chopped off – or the insertion of germs and disease into patients wide awake during operations – or the cannibalism of prisoners of war, the beheading for amusement, or any of the other myriad of tortures that went far beyond what the Nazis ever did, then you have seen war BEFORE the atom bomb, before the nuclear age. You have seen the Japanese in China.

War is horrible. All forms of it. Whether it is nuclear or non nuclear. It is horrible. Human beings can be the most – let me correct that – are the most horrible creatures on the planet. We have proven this time and again. We are the most dangerous creatures, because, as the Orson Welles’ Zaroff confesses in The Most Dangerous Game, we can reason.

If you ask an older Chinese, Indonesian, Southeast Asian, Singaporean or Filipino about whether or not the A-bomb was necessary to stop the Japanese, you will get a very different answer than the one usually given by most western college students. Very different, indeed. I’ve been to Hiroshima several times. On more than one occasion as a a teacher on a class trip. Visiting the Peace Park Memorial during one of these occasions,  I was accompanied not only by fellow Japanese teachers who were old enough to remember World War II, but by a survivor of the Hiroshima blast, an old Japanese gentleman, who was a small boy when that B-29 made its run, and who has seen things, horrors, none of us could dream up in our worst nightmares. Many of the people who come to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park and other places like it are Japanese school children taken there by their schools. This makes me wonder how many schools in America conduct similar visits to places where Americans perished in war. I can only hope that they do, because I think it would be more worthwhile for them than Disney Land or the Philadelphia Zoo. Foreigners, many of them from the United States, Canada, Europe also visit the memorial in great number. Many of them leave without understanding why the bombs were dropped, though. They see evidence of the horror and destruction, but very little in terms of explanation of what led up to that day. Images. Emotion. Ironically, it is the Japanese school children who are taught in school at least a small measure of the horrors of Nanking, about the gas and germ weapons tested on civilians, about the flaying in Burma and the beheading and torture at Bataan. Westerners are generally not taught this. And yet westerners are the biggest critics of the U.S. for the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aside from those who lived through them of course. But even there, such as my elderly friend pointed out to me, ‘we Japanese brought it upon ourselves’.

Even a single warhead in today’s nuclear arsenal dwarfs the initial three detonations (including Trinity) as a Howitzer would a spitball made and spit by an ant. I think most people agree that total disarmament would be an ideal situation, but, like gun ownership, only if it was unilateral and guaranteed. But neither of those two conditions can be met with the degree of certainty needed for the stakes at hand. Today, it would only take one bullet, so to speak, to stop the world.

So, where does it leave us? Stuck in M.A.D. status until a clever person develops something that can disable nuclear warheads remotely, making them obsolete.

In The War Game man-in-the-street interviews it was quite clear that the filmmaker intended to show exactly how uninformed both the citizenry and experts were. The gap between what they thought they knew and what they actually knew was so great once the chaos started, like the absurdity of Dr. Strangelove, it would have been humorous if it wasn’t so tragic. Looking back on 1965 when The War Game was made, we think we are not uninformed as they were. We look at those people with skeptical eyes, marveling at their naivety. We think our parents and grandparents generations were so gullible, so foolish to think the way they did. Now, we’re certain we’re different. We think we have tons of data because of the internet, because we read this article or that book, follow this podcast or that blog, we think we have reams of inside information. We’re informed. We’re in the know. Like the Brattle audience, we’re savvy, sophisticated and knowledgeable. Nothing can harm us that we’re not prepared for, neither comedy nor horror.  We’ve smugly laughed the danger away. We’ve whistled past the graveyard and we’re fine.

But the reality is it won’t matter if we’re laughing or not. Because relatively speaking, we are those same people who were depicted in The War Game, those foolish folk, bumbling around in the dark, with simpleton plans and childish things. We distance ourselves from that lot.  We think we know as much as is knowable minus only a small fraction, a negligible amount. This is fantasy. It is the inverse that is true. We know very little compared with what can happen. And very few of us have experience beyond the images or emotion, neither of which can prepare us.

But what can happen? We’re making friends around the world, aren’t we? We’re beloved again, right? We’re on the right track, are we not? There’s no U.S.S.R. and no Berlin Wall. The missiles have been out of Cuba for a long time and all is well.

I sincerely hope so. But, in the warm and sometimes wet blanket of good relations we can also misplace other kinds of things, like the historical fact that we were friends, good friends with Japan in the years preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor, that we were allies with the Soviets, even war buddies just prior to the outset of the Cold war, and that we had agreements with China prior to the Korean war.

Only the foolish don’t hope for peace while remaining prepared for war. Even organisms in nature, from bacteria to orangutans, are linked to the concept that the defenseless perish. Period. Except those in captivity, that is.  But of course, as human beings, we believe we have evolved to a stage where ruthlessness and barbarity are no longer useful, no longer needed, and no longer effective. Yet, how many times has Captain Kirk had to confront that issue with powers greater than his Enterprise? Plenty.

In the magnificent film Ben Hur, Hugh Griffith’s character Ilderim disagrees with Balthasar’s plea for pacifism. He voices it to Judah Ben Hur, who will soon fight his nemesis in the arena of the chariots:

ILDERIM: Balthasar is a good man. But until all men are like him, we must keep our swords bright!

JUDAH BEN HUR: And our intentions true!

ILDERIM: One last thought… there is no law in the arena. Many are killed. I hope to see you again, Judah Ben-Hur.

Films like The War Game, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe were made to sway us, to warn us, not of the Soviets nor the Chinese, but of ourselves, each of us. Of what we are capable of and what we can’t control. They may look antiquated and evoke surly chuckles in all the savvy places but each, in its own way, is no less real now than when they were made.

Though anachronistic, they are also timeless because they speak about our fears, and that never goes out of style. The dangers, now different, do exist and have always existed. Facing the different horrors of war, cold or hot, conventional or nuclear should be done equally and indiscriminately with the same even and steady hand that we choose to hold a candle by.

The atom and hydrogen bombs are not the most powerful weapons ever devised by man. The image is.

Aside from the many frustrating projects making demands on his time Schizoid Mann has begun work on a thriller about the cold war.

The War Game at Google Video.

Fail-Safe at Google Video.

Daniel A. McGovern at IMDB.

“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval.

In California, a cute little R2-D2 of a machine called the Apple Macintosh had been introduced, heralding the beginnings of a technological tsunami that has yet to abate. Meanwhile, across the world, the latest in the Soviet Union’s grotesque chorus line of cadaverous leaders had croaked, presaging the collapse of the whole miserable works in just a few short years. There was still a world-full of the usual problems, failures, and challenges, yes. But for those of us who spent that summer in gloriously air-conditioned, velvet-dark theaters — and sometimes, when we were lucky, in massive outdoor parking lots flanked by titanic movie screens glowing mystically in the dying light of the setting sun — times were good in America.

There’s much to say about that year from a film perspective, and in the coming months I’m sure those of us at Big Hollywood who had our minds permanently warped by ectoplasmic entities, unstoppable crane kicks, phased-plasma rifles in the forty-watt range, and the dreaded Black Sleep of Kali Ma will be saying it. I’d like to kick things off, however, with a short shout-out to a picture that didn’t rake in blockbuster profits, or fuel a billion-dollar toy industry, or get its characters immortalized on collectible Burger King cups, or spawn an assembly line of sequels and prequels. No, this film penetrated the cultural zeitgeist through an unassuming former editor of National Lampoon, directing his first movie on a shoestring budget, from a script filled with deathless lines like:

“Whatsa happenin’, hot stuff?”

“By night’s end, I predict: me and her will interface.”

“Chronologically, you’re sixteen today. Physically? You’re still fifteen.”

“What the hell are you bitchin’ about? I’ve gotta sleep underneath some Chinaman named after a duck’s dork.”

“I can’t believe my grandmother actually felt me up!”

“I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek.”

“Sophomore, dude, sophomore! Fully aged sophomore meat.”

“Relax, would you? We have seventy dollars and a pair of girls’ underpants. We’re safe as kittens.”

“No more yankie my wankie! The Donger need food.”

“This information cannot leave this room — it would devastate my reputation as a dude.”

“C’mon, I don’t want to see it!”

“Fresh breath is the priority of my life.”

“I’m kinda like the leader, you know? Kinda like the King of the Dipshits.”

If you got through that list without some serious laughing accompanied by a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia, then in all likelihood you were a criminally sheltered child who was locked in a closet somewhere the day a small movie called Sixteen Candles (1984) debuted in theaters twenty-five years ago. The man who etched “They f***ing forgot my birthday!” into the permanent memory banks of a whole generation of teens was John Hughes, who had cut his comedy teeth writing thousands of jokes on spec, sending them to comedy club veterans like Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers and getting the princely sum of $7 whenever they condescended to buy one. He later weaseled his way onto the staff of Harvard’s National Lampoon, which left him well positioned when Hollywood eventually began looting that talent pool. His scripts for two successful pictures, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom (both 1983) netted him his first chance to direct.

Using a motley assortment of green unknowns, Hughes proceeded to invent an attractive new subgenre, the “teen comedy-drama,” defined by its clever whipsaws between silliness and seriousness until the audience is hard-pressed to decide whether they are supposed to be laughing or crying. And if that sounds like the perfect description of a typical teenager’s emotions, then you’re getting close to figuring out what made Hughes’ films so successful. “I’m not interested in psychotics,” he once said in a New York Times interview, “I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Mr. Everyman.” In Sixteen Candles, we get not only an Everyman in the form of The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, who out-auditioned a young Jim Carrey to land the role), but also an Everywoman in Sam, played by Molly Ringwald with the sort of effortless, winning, subdued charisma that would soon become a Hughes trademark. The kids in his films just plain acted better than the ones in other pictures, and it’s hard not to chalk that up to the instincts and human insight of Hughes, a guy who avoided the pitfalls of the Hollyweird lifestyle and stays safely secluded in the Midwest with his wife and kids, living a comparatively normal life.

The film is in many ways the closest thing that my generation has to an American Graffiti (1973). Spandau Ballet’s “True,” playing at the school dance in Candles, has since become a perennial staple on wedding and prom playlists. Little details like the Heather Thomas bikini poster seen briefly on a bedroom door will bring back memories for any man of a certain age. And like Graffiti, Sixteen Candles jump-started the careers of a number of young actors, among the most prominent the brother-sister tandem of John and Joan Cusack. It was hardly a big hit (it ended up only the 44th top-grossing film of 1984), but the budget had been small, and its relative profitability allowed Hughes to continue directing. The films that followed, and that with Sixteen Candles constitute Hughes’ entire output as a director, were The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), She’s Having a Baby (1988), Uncle Buck (1989), and Curly Sue (1991). That last stumbled at the box office in a way that none of the previous ones ever did, after which Hughes abandoned directing and stuck to producing and writing. His notable producing successes include Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and by far the most profitable movie of his career in any capacity was the enormously popular Home Alone (1990). By all accounts that film and its sequels left Hughes the Writer and Producer at the very peak of his fame, power, and influence.

And then, without explanation, John Hughes retreated into an inexplicable, baffling virtual retirement, where he remains to this day. No one knows exactly what sent him into seclusion. Perhaps, like so many artists, he had burned himself out with his decade of non-stop production (over twenty scripts flowed from his imagination during those years, not counting all of the directing and producing he was doing). Maybe the death of his close friend John Candy in 1994 sent him into an emotional/artistic tailspin from which he never truly recovered. Maybe age robbed him of the connection he used to feel to teens and their particular fears, hopes, and dreams. Or maybe he sensed that the world had changed, and that films like Sixteen Candles (which was PG, with the barest smattering of obligatory nudity and swearing) were becoming relics in the face of far seamier fare like the American Pie series (1999-present) and non-stop raunch-fests like Superbad (2007).

That last film is as good a benchmark as any to use. Its producer, Judd Apatow, is widely seen in Hollywood circles as the heir to the John Hughes teen mantle. It would be more accurate to say that a movie like Superbad is to Hughes what a wannabe snuff-film like Hostel (2005) is to classic, elegant horror like The Exorcist (1973) or The Shining (1980). Hughes could certainly be fantastically juvenile when looking for that all-important next laugh (Sixteen Candles, in its blasé treatment of Asians and the disabled, is in many ways a time capsule of political incorrectness), but nothing he ever foisted on audiences comes close to the wall-to-wall, one-note crassness and vulgarity of a film like Superbad. The problem with taking the lazy way out — using mere shock value to elicit Pavlovian, knee-jerk laughter — is that next time you always need something just a little more outrageous or cruel or perverse or shocking, until eventually you’ve hit bottom with nowhere else to go. To the hardcore, open-minded filmgoer, the affront isn’t so much moral as artistic — it’s bad storytelling, bad comedy, bad filmmaking. Super-bad, you might say. And the few times that Superbad tries to be clever (see the incongruous jokes the otherwise brain-dead youngsters are able to make about such non-teenybopper cultural touchstones as Orson Welles and Waylon Jennings) it only succeeds in sounding spectacularly phony, just a Hollywood comedy writer’s uninformed view of how teens talk and how much pop culture history they would reasonably know.

I get the feeling that when John Hughes wrote his movies, he had in mind the truth that all teen films eventually become cobwebbed and dated relics of a bygone age. The cool becomes cheese and the style old-fashioned. In the real world, both the stars and the target audience get old and balding and baggy-eyed and wrinkled and gray. When that happens, all that’s left of an old movie is what is universal and timeless. The question becomes: did it truly hit the zeitgeist of a generation, or did it just fake it?

By that criterion, I’m guessing that the Apatow and American Pie films are destined to someday be filed on a dusty back shelf along with mostly forgotten movies like The Last American Virgin (1982) and Private School (1983). Along with the cream of Hughes’ output, the modern teen comedies that I think have the best chance of surviving include House Party (1990), Swingers (1996) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), all films that earn their laughs with far more than scatology and Tourette syndrome. In any case, no matter how it all shakes out, Sixteen Candles has assured itself a place at the head of the class, by blazing the way toward a more meaningful style of teen comedy that takes the emotions of kids seriously even in those spots when it doesn’t take itself seriously at all.

“I can’t believe this — they f***ing forgot my birthday!”

Well, we here at Big Hollywood didn’t. Happy Birthday, hot stuff. Chronologically you’re twenty-five now, but at the sunswept drive-ins of our imagination you’ll always be sweet sixteen.

3pm PST - Trial, The (1963) – In this adaptation of Kafka’s classic, a man in a nameless country stands trial for an unnamed crime. Cast: Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli Dir: Orson Welles BW-120 mins, TV-14

You can decide if you want to see it again, but everyone should see Welles impressive adaptation of Franz Kafka’s classic nightmare at least once, if only for the film’s stunning look and atmosphere. “The Trial” is a challenging film. There’s no real story, a whole lot of slow spots and an overall pace with little respect for the audience. But it is a wonder to look at and fans of the novel are likely to appreciate how close Welles came to filming what was widely believed to be un-filmable (or they might stand by that opinion).

The production was typically chaotic for a Welles picture, much of it self-inflicted by the director himself (which was also typical), but like most of his later films there’s always some genius shining through what you might consider a mess.

Anthony Perkins is Joseph K, an everyday man (that’s the point) who awakes to find himself under arrest and falsely accused for a crime no one can, or will, explain. His dizzying trip through a hellish bureaucracy and judicial system, all set in vast, empty, colorless interiors and exteriors, is photographed to disorient the viewer and create a constant sense of claustrophobia and hostility.

Long takes, gorgeous black and white cinematography, brilliantly conceived sets and locations, and a strong central performance from Perkins make “The Trial” a completely unique experience. Some say it’s a masterpiece, others a self-indulgent disaster. For my money, it’s most certainly flawed, but also unforgettable.