Posts Tagged ‘WW II’

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The Arch of Triumph: Love in Paris, 1938 — A Short Take

Friday, November 18th, 2011

Ingrid Bergman looks her fabled, youthful best and Charles Boyer dark and dashing as her handsome, older lover in The Arch of Triumph a forgotten minor gem of WW II movies.  Set in Paris from August of 1938 to the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept 1, 1939, in wonderful blacks and whites, pouring rain, sodden trench coats, dripping fedoras,  with immigrants from all over Europe jamming the International Hotel, a wretched Joan Madou –Ingrid Bergman —  is rescued from disabling despair after the death of her lover by an unflappable Dr. Ravic — Charles Boyer.   Though the inevitability of their love is apparent to us, he is of a different mind.  He is illegally in Paris, fled from Austria after being tortured by the Gestapo in 1933.  His life is uncertain; he has been deported many times; Ravic is his third identity.  He deposits her in a hotel room not near his own, despite her obvious  need to be closely watched, and held.  Despite his precautions their ill-fated love affair begins, set against the secrets he can’t tell her, and her need to be secure in love.

If the approach of the war, certain to our history worn eyes, is not enough tension, Ravic’s sighting of his former torturer — Charles Laughton as Ivon Haake– in the crowds along the Champs Elysees will bring it to the twisting point.  A terrifying night ride through the Bois de Boulogne with Haake first drunk and then alert to his danger may force a few eyes closed until its over — even with the more violent scenes left on the cutting room floor as required by the 1948 Motion Picture Association production code.

Bergman is given some pretty ragged lines, and a change of character improbable enough to let us fall out of love with her, so despite the promise it doesn’t rise to the level of Casablanca, though certainly a worthy companion piece.  There is also a 1985 remake of Arch of Triumph, with Anthony Hopkins and Lesley-Anne Downey.  I haven’t seen it but Hopkins would make it a good bet.

The script is based on a novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, known world wide for All Quiet on the Western Front.  The novel of course has more time than the film to deepen the sense of Paris in 1938-39 — as the world is falling apart.  Ravic is an expert surgeon but must operate clandestinely, as he does in the film, but on more people.  We meet his patients and feel Ravic’s humanity as he repairs a botched abortion, and amputates a leg of a young boy.  He runs a weekly health check for high-class prostitutes; we see the consequences for those to do not pass.

Remarque handles the affairs of the heart in the swirling fear of approaching war well; the approach and retreat, the hope appearing and hiding, the indecision then recognition of feelings unexpected and true.  As with the movie — a good, if not superior creation.

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Army of Crime — Immigrants Who Fought for France, A Film

Saturday, March 26th, 2011

My dear Melinée, my beloved little orphan,

In a few hours I will no longer be of this world. We are going to be executed today at 3:00. This is happening to me like an accident in my life; I don’t believe it, but I nevertheless know that I will never see you again. What can I write you? Everything inside me is confused, yet clear at the same time.

Thus began the last letter Missak Manouchian, an Armenian-French resistance fighter in Paris under the Nazis, wrote to his wife.  He had been tortured by The French Special Brigades and, along with 21 other members of his resistance cell, given a public trial and execution by firing squad.  The cell, made up almost entirely of foreigners on French soil, had run operations from shortly after the Nazi invasion of Paris, June 1940 until November 1943,  derailing trains, assassinating German and French officials and military officers, including most spectacularly, in September 1943, General Julius Ritter, the assistant in France to Fritz Sauckel, who  was responsible for the mobilization and deportation of labor under the German STO (the Obligatory Work Service) in Nazi-occupied Europe.

An Army of Crime was the designation the Nazis and their French collaborators gave this cell, plastering the countryside with broadsides trying to convince the populace that thugs and criminals were responsible for the disruption of order and good government.  Army of Crime is also the name of the very good 2009 film by Robert Guediguian about Manouchian and his small band.

In a perfect mix of normalcy and tension the film centers on a group of young friends in a heavily Jewish and immigrant neighborhood of Paris as they move from individual acts of resistance to the Germans and French Vichy officials into more organized actions, and more lethal retribution. Several of the youngsters are still living at home.  Adolescent rebelliousness is not simply staying out too late, or resisting a father’s orders; it involves guns and makeshift bombs, raids and interrogations.  The pacing of the story is pitch perfect, as is the soundtrack, including Mozart, Bach and Brahms amplifying the emotions of quiet conversations, staring at the dead or covering up the sounds of a mimeograph churning out leaflets. Festive scenes in dimly lit rooms are interrupted by knocks on the door.  No one knows who it is; someone has to answer.  Interludes in the park are intruded on by Germans playing soccer.  Every moment is fraught.

Most of Paris carries on as normal under the occupation.  Pretty girls laugh with German officers; chickens scratch in small yards; people jostle at the market place, kids play soccer in the street.  Even in the families involved  reactions to the days they are living through are mixed.  Some believe nothing bad will come to them. ”This is France! Nothing can happen to us here!”  A father says he will go in with his papers, as ordered.  His son shouts, “What if it’s a plot!”  The father smiles, and says “You see plots everywhere.”

It is a perfect film to bring us to reflect:  what sort of person would I be in a situation such as this?  Or, as the film maker signs off at the end, “to help us live today.” (more…)

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Garbo: The Spy — A Documentary, WW II

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

Sort of by accident, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, we went to see Garbo: The Spy, a 2009 documentary and got the kind of surprise you hope for from movies and books.  I’d scanned the ads available and knew enough to know the movie involved a Catalan/Spaniard, an area of the world close to my heart, D-Day in WW II, and spying.  Why not? we thought.  It’s too wet to go walking and it’s only playing once.

What a good idea!

Juan Pujols Garcia was born in 1914 to a moderately well-off family in Barcelona.  When the Spanish Civil War arrived Juan escaped being drafted by the Republicans for a while, hiding under very strenuous circumstances. Half starving he finally joined the Republicans with the plan of crossing the lines to join the Nationalists (read Fascists), but he got his directions crossed up and walked back into Republican lines shouting “I’m leaving the Republicans to join you!”  Naturally, they fired on him.  Escaping again, he passed through Madrid and the Nazi headquarters, volunteering to spy for the Germans.  They told him to beat it.

Winding up in Lisbon, he solicited employment by mail from both the British and the Germans and began sending reports to the Nazis about what he was seeing in London, although he was working it out from periodicals in the Lisbon library.

The story gets wilder.  Seeing that the Germans were acting on some of his made-up reports the British finally hired him and brought him to London where, with his handlers, he continued to send false and misleading reports to the Germans for years.  His most crucial contribution was to convince the Germans that the Allied invasion in June 1944 was to take place across the narrowest part of the Channel, to Calais, and that activity at Normandy was simply a diversion.  The film makes pretty clear how the ruse worked, not once but twice and allowed the invasion to be successful, thus ending the war 9 months later.

It’s really quite a marvellous story, not least because Pujol Garcia — with the code name Garbo, because he was the best actor his handlers had ever seen– wanted no part of fame and glory.  As the war ended he faked his death and disappeared, not surfacing until 1984 when author Nigel West tracked him down.  Quiet, mild mannered, not a dashing James Bond at all.  For all his confused politics early in life, he apparently had his moment of clarity.  He is quoted at the end of the film as saying “I only wanted to fight against inequity and injustice with the only tools I had.”

The film itself is oddly constructed, with talking heads in color intercut with black and white documentary footage.  They don’t tell us who they are until well into the movie.  Cuts of old spy movies appear through out, recognizable by film buffs, and somewhat related to the story line, but sometimes just humorous.  The sound track is quirky as well.  But it all works together to tell a story with several surprises about a key moment in history and a quirky man who perhaps saved thousands of lives by his ability to tell whopping big lies and hold all the parts together over years.  At one time he had some 27 “agents” reporting to him — all invented!

I don’t see where else the film is playing and it’s not yet at Netflix, but keep an eye out for it.  It’s really entertaining history, winning several documentary awards in Europe in 2009.  The film site has more information.   You can find Nigel West’s book about him at used book stores and libraries. Another has been written by Tomas Harris, based on the M15 files kept of Garbo’s activities  And of course an on-line search will turn up details about his life and exploits

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Hiroshima Joe – A Novel

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

Seeing the smoking wasteland of Hiroshima, particularly the blasted home and shredded family of a friend  immediately after the Bomb lit up the morning sky  would send many people to the borderlands of madness.  If  this seeing followed 4 years of being a prisoner in Japanese prison camps, starved, frozen and beaten,  perhaps all of us would find ourselves so wrapped in trauma and remembering we could no longer recognize normality.  So it is with Martin Booth’s  fictional character, Hiroshima Joe,  in his novel of the same name, published in 1985.

Scrapping out a beggar’s life in post war Hong Kong, addicted to opium, Joe  Sandingham swings between memories of his imprisonment, the death of two of his companions, the brutal need for opium erasure and the slight and perverse reappearance of desire.  He can barely masquerade as another well-off westerner as he tries to get close enough to steal whatever is at hand from tourists coming to Hong Kong 6 or 7 years after the end of the war.  The bonds of friendship he had with a Chinese laborer under Japanese occupation, while he himself was in a labor camp, have gotten cold and thin.  The laborer is now the wealthy godfather of the opium trade in the city, to whom Joe is in debt and in need.

Booth is a British poet and the author of A Very Private Gentleman, from which the 2010 movie The American, with George Clooney, was created.  I grew curious about Booth as I tried to figure out what drew him, and others, to create such villains.  Was Clooney merely morally neutral — killing people for “business, nothing personal” as memorably explained by Tom Hagen, the consigliere, in The Godfather?  Was he an aging and now reforming sociopath? Was he a gun for hire – to anyone, anywhere? Or, a patriot whose life was spent in the honorable shadows….

And who were those buying his weapon, and those flitting through the churchly shadows of the little Italian town? Were they meant to be CIA or were they Russian mobsters?  Were they old opponents bent on revenge or old friends bent on his silence?

Who, for Booth, were the bad guys?   What means enough to an author to spend months or years in the writing? What view of life is projected through the book?  What  is he about?  Does he have right wing love of violence [and justice], or left wing love of justice [and violence?] Why does an author chose to bring American/British style high powered weaponry to ‘exotic,’ peaceful, rural places — mirroring the real onslaught of weapons across the border from the US into Mexico.  The movie only raised the questions; didn’t answer them.  The book, which I sped read on my way to Joe, was somewhat better. The gunner’s past [and he's a Brit, not an American] is not a very pleasant one…  It’s appropriate, from a moral point of view, that his new recognition of desire and love is not allowed to bear fruit.

In looking over Booth’s book list for a clue as to his concerns I came upon some intriguing titles: Opium: A History; Islands of Silence — about a young pacifist Brit shipped off to the the infamous battle of Gallipoli, and most interesting,  Hiroshima Joe.  The blurb made me even more curious:

Left behind in Hong Kong after WW II, too broken to return to England and too brave to give up hope, he is called Hiroshima Joe by the local Chinese, who regard him with a mixture of contempt and pity.  Debilitated by opium and shattered by his wartime experience in a Japanese POW camp and as a witness to the bombing of Hiroshima, Joe Sandingham survives … a powerful war novel and a lacerating story about the way war goes on forever for those who have seen its worst.

Clearly Booth has an interest in the difficult edges of the human experience — opium, prisoner of war camps, hired killers, the bombing of Hiroshima.  What is is take on these lives?  How does his fiction inform us?

I can’t recall ever reading a novel about the bombing of Hiroshima, much less about POWs in Japanese camps.  John Hersey’s famous book, Hiroshima, is reporting, with novel like pacing and structure. It is brilliant and upsetting in the way few novels ever achieve.   A  few films, like Hiroshima Mon Amour put the Bomb devastation on the screen.  Various documentaries (and here, here)  have shown it’s aftermath.  The appalling Japanese behavior in their POW camps has been written of much in histories and war memoirs, not too much in fiction.  James Clavell’s King Rat, and the movie that came from it, is about British and a few US POWs in the infamous Changi camp in Singapore.  Pierre Bulle’s  The Bridge Over the River Kwai,  turned into the famous movie in 1957, was about British POWs of the Japanese in Burma.    War Trash by Ha Jian is a recent powerful novel of  POW life but in the Korean War and so, not of American prisoners of the Japanese, but of  Chinese prisoners of the U.S.  No Japanese present.  The entire list tagged as POW at LibraryThing.com is fewer than 30 books.  So I thought I’d read Hiroshima Joe, [Atlantic Books, 1985; Penguin, 1987] both for the story and to understand Martin Booth’s preoccupations.

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Chabrol’s Eye on the Eye of Vichy

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Claude Chabrol (and here and here,) one of the founders of French New Wave Cinema and director of some 50 films, died last week at the age of 80. He left a legacy of filmic inquiries into the French middle-class, their good manners, polite exchanges, well furnished homes and the injury burbling just below the surface, seeping out or erupting in violence, plots undertaken, deeds done, family ties revealed as nooses. Many had fine, tight plots of mystery and tension bringing to Chabrol the title “The French Hitchcock.”

“Thanks for the Chocolate, (2002)” is a delicious little gem of such a film, available on DVD and worth an evening. Two families are brought together when the 18 year old daughter (Anna Mouglalis as Jeanne) of a divorced chemist (Isabelle Huppert as “Mika”) hears that on the morning after her birth a momentary confusion between herself and a baby boy had occurred. According to the story, told by a Chabrol favorite, the compulsively informative middle aged woman, it all worked out properly and the two infants went home with their proper parents. Jeanne is curious though and boldly introduces herself to the other couple — actually to the father (Jacques Dutronc as Andre), since the mother had died 8 years earlier and he has remarried. That he is a famous pianist and she herself is about to play in an important competition, which he begins to prepare her for, adds to everyone’s suspicions that something is being hidden. And then there’s the new wife. As the tension gets wound up it is quite marvelous how the piano practices of the “father” and “daughter” act as the sound track. We learn to hear Franz Liszt’s Marche funèbre while doors opening and closing, cars driving through the night, become more freighted and ominous.

But it is not his mysteries or family skeletons which brought me to notice Chabrol here. Instead it is his 1993 documentary, “The Eye of Vichy,” a compilation, almost without commentary, of newsreels — in chronological order– and other propagandistic films prepared and watched in Vichy France during the Nazi Occupation and Marshal Pétain’s “National Revolution. For those of us who know more or less that the Vichy government was that which acquiesced to German occupation and handled most of the administrative matters, the extent of participation and fervor for the Nazis –army and ideology– by government functionaries but also by wide sectors of the population will be eye opening.

Film clips of French voices explaining why Jews must be rounded up, as images of swarming rats are shown, are truly unsettling. Pictures of enthusiastic young French summer campers wearing Nazi insignia, of the swooning adoration shown to Frenchmen volunteering to fight on Germany’s eastern front, of the frequent speeches and fervent belief in proudly joining Germany to fight the “Bolshevik scourge,” may not be entirely new to us but seeing them as the French saw them from June of 1940 to May of 1945 is quite a history –and human–  lesson.

As soon as it had been established, Pétain’s government took measures against the so-called “undesirables”: Jews, métèques (immigrants), Freemasons, Communists – inspired by Charles Maurras‘ conception of the “Anti-France”, or “internal foreigners”, which Maurras defined as the “four confederate states of Protestants, Jews, Freemasons and foreigners” — but also Gypsies, homosexuals, and, in a general way, any left-wing activist. Vichy imitated the racial policies of the Third Reich and also engaged in natalist policies aimed at reviving the “French race”… (Wikipedia)

The Sorrow and The Pity, Marcel Ophuls 1972 epic, is of course the touchstone for all films about Vichy France. It broke the post-war false pride in nationwide resistance to the Nazis and invited people to consider what had really happened. It asked all of us young non-French viewers, after the turmoil and fervor of the 60′s, to consider how we each might have reacted and lived our lives in the face of real, cruel and overwhelming military force.

Other interesting French Resistance/Occupation films are Chabrol’s Story of Women (Actually, better translated as Women’s Work,) Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, and The Silence of the Sea.

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Tongue of War: Some Poems

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Beach Landing, Iwo Jima

They didn’t shoot at us.  A silent scene
until we clogged the beach, and then–all hell,
potato masher hand grenades, machine
gun fire, artillery.  I swear each shell
passed close enough you could reach up and catch
it like a ball.  I crawled across black sand,
and used each corpse for cover.  Don’t attach
yourself, is what I learned.  Push it down and
crawl in a hole.  Go numb, and you’ll survive,
maybe, as I survived.  I didn’t hate
the man who charged at me with his bayonet.
I crouched and shot him dead so I could live.
But the photo in his helmet cut my heart.
A child smiling at me.  And then I wept.

U.S. Marine, Iwo Jima, 1945

from Tongue of War, Tony Barnstone  Tony is a friend of mine through our translation association [ALTA].  These are original to him, not translations. The are constructed from the journals, diaries, news accounts and oral histories of the (mostly) men who fought, or were caught,  in the Pacific in WW II

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Katyn: A Film

Friday, September 11th, 2009

I was just on the cusp of realizing that “foreign” films existed and were a real alternative to what 1950s Hollywood was serving up when Andrzej Wajda‘s first films began appearing.   Art houses were far and few between in Falls Church, Virginia. DVDs and streaming video weren’t yet conceptualized.  Tape was something we used for music, if at all.  For movies we went to theaters and we watched what the theater was showing.  War movies ran to The Sands of Iwo Jima [that would be John Wayne], or Run Silent, Run Deep [Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster] .  The heroes were inevitably templates for what was held to be the way American men comported themselves as soldiers –stoic, silent and brave, true to their loved ones and noble to those they rescued –in battles which, despite losses and setback, Americans always won.  If there were deaths the bodies twisted and fell in the middle distances allowing us to stay wrapped in the same safety we were in our own backyard games.  Not known, much less seen, were “A Generation,” [1955] “Kanal,” [1957] or “Ashes and Diamonds,” [1958]  Wajda’s famous war trilogy that announced him to Polish and serious European audiences, war films that had a different take on heroism and the glories of war.

Even as I began to appreciate the Italian neo-realists, French noir and then New Wave, Wajda’s name only floated in that distant sphere of film auteurs with unpronounceable names we must one day see — Russians, Japanese, Poles.  Somehow I never sat in the dark and absorbed his immense, dark vision. Too bad for me.  I’ve been able to begin making up the absence now that technology lets us locate and see films we have long wondered about, have heard or read mentioned of. We can see a short series by a particular director, or follow a theme that interests us, or watch an actor in various roles at various ages. Sitting in a dark room with a big screen in the company of others is still the best way to see a movie, but putting yourself to school in your living room is not a bad second choice.

Katyn is the 85 year old director’s latest film, released in Poland in 2007 and in the U.S in early 2009.  It’s available on DVD already.

katyn_swit_na_stacji_400Katyn for the Poles is a one-word tolling-bell of meaning, as 9/11 is for Americans.  Katyn is a place. It’s a town and a forest near Smolensk in Russia.  It is a massacre of Polish officers, intellectuals, priests and students by the Soviet NKVD.  It is a German propaganda campaign carried out against the Soviets.  It is a Soviet propaganda campaign carried out against the Nazis.  It is the exhumation of bodies, forensic analysis of bullet holes, pieces of cloth, hidden journals. It is the insistence of the truth of the massacre against denial, punishment, imprisonment and torture. It is, the revelation in secret papers between Stalin and Beria, of what was planned, when and who was to carry it out. And it is, finally, Poland the nation becoming Poland a country and able to stand for its own people and the truths they have had torn from their history. All these things are Katyn.
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