Hollywood Then and Now: No Way Out Location

The 1987 thriller No Way Out was filmed in and around the Washington, D.C. area and included both opening and closing helicopter shots that, with the aid of Google maps, make the house where Kevin Costner is questioned easily searchable.

The opening shots move us from the Capitol Building, past the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, across to Virginia and the Pentagon.  Here's where the mapping starts.  From the movie:

The Pentagon and the three sided apartment complexes are easy enough to find instantly on Google maps so we wait until we pull past them and start showing rows of houses.

Just past the house with the three dormers, we see a kidney shaped pool and the Arlington Historical Society Building.  These are matched up on Google maps.

As the camera glides on we can see that the road that will eventually lead to the house runs directly in front of the Arlington Historical Society.

Next, as the camera moves down the road, we see a three way intersection with rounded curbs and a house on the right with a chimney in back and a garage and driveway on the side.  There's a curved walkway leading from the driveway to the house.  On the left is a long house turned sideways in relation to the house across the street. We can match it up here.

Next to this intersection, and seen more clearly in the closing credits, are two distinctive features:  A large driveway with a parking space jutting out and widened entry and a crooked pathway next to it.  Seen below on Google maps.

Also seen is the house diagonally across the street, which is where the camera settles in the opening credits and where it takes us away from in the closing credits.  The house in the movie has either been torn down completely or so renovated it is now unrecognizable.

I prefer the original house, myself.  All of this took about a minute comparing the movie to map on a split screen.  Ah, technology, how easy you make it for the idle mind to do useless things. 

Feel Good Movies (but not that kind)

I just got back from seeing 8 1/2 at the AFI Silver and the audience was made up of dozens and dozens of twenty-something guys with trimmed beards who seemed very happy to be seeing 8 1/2.  I've been to countless movies at the AFI at this point and usually the audience is quite diversified but if it skews any way, it generally skews middle age through sixties.  So I wondered, are there movies that have a reputation that appeals to a younger set, a set that wants to see the "right" films?

Last week I saw La Grande Illusion at the AFI and the week before that I saw Black Narcissus.  A couple of weeks before that I saw The Big Sleep.  At each of those showings was what I would call the average AFI audience, the one described above that skews middle age to sixties.  A while back, at the annual showing of Nosferatu with live, overbearing musical accompaniment, it was again a younger crowd, seemingly there because it was the "right" film to see.  The music pretty much ruined it for me but aside from that, the film itself was as great as ever and I got to wondering, are there films that have that reputation, the kind that attracts younger cinephiles?

The reputation? I would define it as a movie that appeals to a person into classic cinema but only as far as the biggest names in the game go, and wants to see those films they feel are important enough to be seen.  So while La Grande Illusion may have a great reputation, it's not going to come up in classic movie conversation the way a classic Fellini or Bergman might with younger cinephiles, but I don't know.  I experienced something like this myself in college.  I wanted to see everything, and had a couple of friends who did too, but most were only game for the "big" ones, like a showing of Citizen Kane at the old Key Theatre in Washington, DC.  When I wanted to get them together to see Carmen at the same place (d. Carlos Saura, 1983), I got blank stares (who's going to bring that movie up?).

Of course, the gratifying thing about this is that all of them in the theatre for the showing of 8 1/2 seemed truly taken with the film and the applause at the end was both spontaneous and sincere.  And with a movie as big as 8 1/2, why wouldn't a lot of cinephiles want to go see it?  But why didn't Howard Hawks and The Big Sleep attract a younger crowd?  What is it that separates the two?  Or Black Narcissus?  I think there are just some movies, like 8 1/2, that have such an outsized reputation (one I feel is fully deserved, by the way) that they serve as primer films for the canon of film history.

When I first started fulfilling my cinephilia, I started with all the big ones first.  It's only natural I guess and I sorely wish there had been an AFI around where I could have seen those big ones but I'm just happy that it's here now.  And I'm even happier to know that the big movies still attract crowds that don't just skew towards the older set.  It's gratifying to know that great cinema will always produce new generations of fans. 

Hollywood Then and Now: Wilshire and San Vicente Blvds

1958 and now.  Personally, I'll take 1958.  

Peter Cushing: The Man Who Did the Unthinkable. Twice.

By the end of the summer of 1977, I still hadn't seen a single Hammer film.  I had no cable, there were no vcrs (at least none that cost under $2,000 and had more than seven movies available for them) and revival houses in my part of the country were rare (Charleston, South Carolina).  Seeing a Hammer production from the fifties or sixties meant staying up late and catching it on after hours tv, that is, if you even knew it was going to be on in the first place.  So, again, I hadn't seen a single Hammer film.  Not yet.  Star Wars, on the other hand, I'd seen five times.  Like so many movie fans of my generation, this was my introduction to Peter Cushing (and Alec Guinness, for that matter - God, I wish they'd had a scene together) as Grand Moff Tarkin.  It was and is, I submit, a formidable introduction.

I cannot imagine another actor pulling off what Cushing did.  What he did was, essentially, put Darth Vader in his place whenever he damn well pleased.  Now, I know what you're thinking:  The Emperor did the same thing, many times.  Yes, but the Emperor was a Sith Lord, who made Vader his apprentice.  Tarkin was a goddamn imperial pensioner, devoting a lifetime to military service.  No force, no Jedi babble, no ancient religion.  No, Tarkin belongs to the same class of force-choke guinea pigs that Vader has such a fun time with throughout the original trilogy.  He had no physical way to control Vader and yet had no problem saying, in so many words, "All right, Vader, knock it off and sit down, we got work to do."

So that was my introduction to Peter Cushing and it was a great one.  But later, much later, I finally got to see all the Hammer films he did, including all the ones with the great Christopher Lee, and I was justifiably amazed.  I was amazed because Cushing did something I didn't think possible.  First, with The Curse of Frankenstein, he took one of the most well established gothic horror stories in history, one that had been published and republished a thousand times, one that had been adapted to film countless others, and reinvented it as a Cushing original.  I do not exaggerate when I tell you that no matter how many times I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, how many adaptations I watch, or how many parodies I see, there is only one Victor Frankenstein, and it's not the one Shelley created, it's the one Cushing did.

If you've seen The Curse of Frankenstein, you know that Victor Frankenstein as portrayed by Peter Cushing is, quite simply, a son of a bitch.   This is not Colin Clive nor even the obsessed but sympathetic character of the book, cascading the tragedy of his creation with one careless and cowardly error after another.  This Frankenstein has the viewer, almost from the start, rooting for anyone but him.  He is the protagonist of the story and yet, the antagonist as well.  He's the Jake LaMotta of horror, a character you can't turn away from but you can't sympathize with either.  He's a trainwreck of humanity, made worse by the fact that he considers nothing he does wrong because he considers himself so much better than the rest of us from the moment he walks in the room.  He's arrogant, smug and violent.  Christopher Lee's monster is almost superfluous to the story and for good reason:  Cushing's Frankenstein doesn't need to create a monster, he already is one.

A year later, in Horror of Dracula, Cushing did it again.  He took another character, well established from the original source (Bram Stoker's Dracula) and its many adaptations, and made it his own.  Van Helsing, like Victor Frankenstein, is much different on paper and in the many film adaptations than the Van Helsing Cushing created on film.  And once again, like Frankenstein, the Van Helsing Cushing created - younger, leaner, more focused and direct, free from flightiness or extravagance - became the go to Van Helsing for the genre.  After The Brides of Dracula (still my favorite Hammer production of all time) I could never see Van Helsing portrayed by anyone else again without thinking they were doing it wrong.

On this day we celebrate Peter Cushing's 100th birthday but I celebrate something more.  I celebrate an actor so skilled at his craft, and so confident in his abilities, that he could take on long established, completely defined roles like Frankenstein and Van Helsing and make them his own.  And in making them his own, make them the standard for all to follow.  Many actors have had the chance since to create a new standard.  All have failed.  Happy Birthday to Peter Cushing, 100 today, and the standard bearer still.
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This post is part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon, hosted by Pierre Fournier, running from May 25th through May 31st. 

Hollywood Then and Now: Lana Turner's House

After the murder of Johnny Stompanato by Cheryl Crane (protecting her mother, Lana Turner) on April 4, 1955, police show up and ask the obvious, "How many goddamn rooms does this thing have?!"

Today, culling a couple of pics from Google Maps street view, it looks pretty much the same.  I wonder how many people driving by know this is where it happened.

The Story of the Life of Pi: Pay No Attention to that Plan behind the Curtain

In an interview with Life of Pi author Yann Martel, Jenni Renton asks, "Would you say that religion and fiction work in the same way?"

Martel answers,

To the extent that for either to work you have to suspend your disbelief. The subtext of Life of Pi can be summarised in three lines:
1) Life is a story.
2) You can choose your story.
3) A story with God is the better story.

If you've read the book or seen the movie, you recognize this as not only a good summation of both but point three as being the final declaration of Pi to his interviewer, just not using those exact words. (If you have not read the book or seen the movie, you would be best served to do so without reading further as spoilers await)  The problem is, not everyone thinks that way and allegories work best when they're more than an allegory, that is, when they could easily function as something not allegorical.  No Country for Old Men, for example, can work as an allegory for many things or it can be taken at face value.  Because it does not state its message or meaning every few minutes, it can be so much more than an allegory, it can also be a sober and somber tale of treachery and evil.  Life of Pi, on the other hand, states its message with reckless abandon, points out its own symbols, and even identifies its own allegory as such in its final moments so as to let the characters, readers and/or viewers choose for themselves which made the better story (and if you didn't answer the one where a brutal and deranged Gerard Depardieu kills and eats a sailor, we clearly have different outlooks on life).

Of course, that's the point (that we all choose our own story) but it's weighted, heavily, towards the other story, the one with the animals.  We see the tiger story over the course of an hour but we only hear the deranged Depardieu story over a total of about five minutes.  When the choice is given, of which story is better, the deck has been relentlessly stacked.

I take comfort in reality and reason and Martel does not, as he points out thoroughly in this talk to be found here.  That's fine and he's the author telling the story so he should absolutely stack it in his favor.  But when he talks of children dying as a reason to have faith, i.e., to give their death a purpose, I can only think, having encountered such things in life, including a drowning, a fall to death from a bridge and a little girl of five cut up and stuffed in a closet, it is much more comforting to know there is no reason for it at all and no cosmic plan.  If there were, I would be forever depressed, in bed and cursing existence.  When he says, in the talk linked at the top of this paragraph...

And I remember thinking, if you are dying in your bed, you know, if your legs are like two little sticks and you have a mountain of a stomach and you’re rotted by disease, you know, you’re, the flesh on your face is melted away and you’ve lost your hair, what’s the point of being reasonable? Why not believe in whatever? You know, whatever? Jesus, Buddha, any one of these? Why not believe that someone transcendentally loves you? Why not believe that?

... all I can think is, "Because then that means you have to believe that someone in control has chosen this horrible end for you.  And now you have to die knowing that."  Perhaps that is comforting for some but not for me.  To me, that is hopelessly defeating.  I have children and would never do anything to harm them so the thought that there may be a cosmic power that decided it's an important part of the plan to have this child raped and dismembered or that child drowned in the rough surf is one that makes me sick to my stomach.  What evil would ever devise such a plan?

Life of Pi tells its story well but it takes the easy way out by not dealing with the nature of that cosmic plan.  What it does, instead, is say, "Life can be brutal and violent but if you substitute animals for the reality, it's easier to take."  That is, if you substitute a God story, it's easier to digest life.  But that's not true once you introduce the plan where Anne Frank dies of typhus and children are shot dead in a school.  Now the story becomes, "and there's a father figure that made this happen for a reason."

"So, wait," you ask, "you mean someone planned this out, someone who could have stopped it but didn't?"

Yes. And if that doesn't depress you, I don't know what will. I don't want to imagine that kind of evil, that kind of hopeless horror, planning out anything.

For me, the reality is more comforting.  I'd rather know that my friend's cousin, raped and mutilated at five and stuffed in a closet, died because horrible things happen, not because she was playing a part in an all-important plan, a plan so callous and monstrous and without empathy that it, in fact, involved a five year old girl being raped and mutilated and stuffed in a closet.  That plan is morally filthy beyond compare.  I'd rather believe that we are here to make what we will of this world and when we pass, it will not be because some plan pre-destined it but simply because we died.

In the end, I much prefer the philosophy of Will Munny:  "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

Thoughts on "Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel"

I tire of apologists for the racism of the past.  Despite the fact that there were plenty of prominent people who weren't racist in the early twentieth century (John Dewey, Eugene Debbs, Eleanor Roosevelt) much less all the non-prominent ones we know nothing of, we are often asked to believe that, good golly, folks just couldn't help but be racist back then.  Horrible racist attitudes were everywhere, yes, but there were people who didn't buy into it.  Those who did, and they were doubtless the majority, well, let's just be honest and say they were racists instead of saying, "You've got to understand, it was different back then."  And so it goes with Margaret Mitchell.

I recently watched the American Masters episode on Mitchell (Margaret Mitchell: American Rebel) and quickly found myself saddened at how much apologia it contains.  Having been produced in 2012, and knowing that nowadays people can simply look up Mitchell on the internet and read about anything the producers might leave out of the program, they wisely include the bad parts but also tend to rationalize them.  There's positive, too.  In the last ten minutes, they focus on her efforts to pay for scholarships for black students at Morehouse College and donate funds to build the first black hospital in Atlanta.  She gave money to Morehouse College upon the request of its president, Benjamin Mays, and this continuing act of giving scholarship money, throughout the rest of her short life, is to be applauded, certainly.  She obviously changed and grew as a person.  Still, there are episodes from her early life that give one pause.

One such episode occurred at Smith College, where Mitchell attended.  When she learned a black student would be in her history class, she demanded to be moved to another class.  Here's how historian Kathleen Clark explains that episode in the documentary:  "Sitting in a classroom with an African-American student offended her understanding of what was an appropriate context for blacks and whites to relate to one another."  Uh-huh.  Here's another way of explaining it:  She was racist.

When her teacher took offense (and good for the teacher), Mitchell wrote to her mother, "I want to know if the teacher of that class has ever undressed or nursed a negro woman, or shielded a negro man from being shot by the police."  Curious.  The documentary reveals no incidents in Mitchell's life of her heroically using her own body to shield a black man from being shot, nor, apparently, did Mitchell ever bring it up again.  So how exactly is this a defense of her actions?  Because the teacher's never done these things, her attitude is hypocritical? Am I to believe Mitchell would risk her very life to save a black man but found sitting in a classroom with a black girl simply too much to bear?  Do I even need to call bullshit on this one?

Mitchell grew up as a well-to-do white woman in the American South and had black domestic help.  The character of Mammy in Gone with the Wind is said to be based on her maid, Bessie.  Her view of black people tended towards them as simple, obedient children that white people looked out for and to whom they generously gave jobs cleaning up after them.  When she wrote her one and only novel, the aforementioned Gone with the Wind, she populated it with demeaning portraits of black people and was shocked, SHOCKED, that the black press hated the book.  She wrote, "They refer to the book as incendiary and negro-baiting.  I do not know where they get such an idea, for as far as I can see, most of the negro characters were people of worth, dignity and rectitude."  Of course, there's not a single black character who speaks out on slavery or isn't completely enamored of the O'Haras and serving them.  Hell, there's not even a black character who just seems a little pissed off or resentful at his or her station in life. As Elizabeth West, historian, states following the Mitchell quote, "Mitchell's black characters are not characters, they're caricatures.  If Gone with the Wind is the last statement about the experience of slavery in America, it would be a horrendous legacy for blacks to live with."

Later, at the premiere for Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, Hattie McDaniel, who received an Academy Award for her performance as Mammy, was absent since Georgia didn't allow black people to attend movies with white people.  This problem is the biggest of them all because David O. Selznick, Clark Gable and Margaret Mitchell (all in attendance) easily had the power to tell Georgia, "she comes to the premiere or we premiere it in Hollywood."  Does anyone really think everyone in Atlanta would boycott the movie if it had premiered in Hollywood instead, or if McDaniel had attended in Atlanta?  Come on, Gone with the Wind was destined for box office records from the moment the cameras first rolled.  In the great documentary, The Battle over Citizen Kane, Jimmy Breslin says this of the studios that caved when Hearst threatened to pull all advertising for RKO and stop promoting its stars: "You know, and those poor fools out there got scared, didn't understand until years later that the movies were more powerful than any newspaper ever could be. But they didn't understand that."  Hollywood could have told the Governor of Georgia to kiss McDaniel's ass in public and he would have done it to make sure the premiere happened.  And that's what is so sad.  No one had the courage to do the right thing, something that, with their standing and power, would've required little courage in the first place. No one stood up for Hattie. At the Oscars, they wouldn't even let her sit at the cast table.

Margaret Mitchell was not a horrible person, no, and yes, her beliefs and attitudes matured as she got older.  She gained more understanding and was willing to help out with the hospital and the scholarships but without letting anyone know.   What the documentary slyly refers to as "quietly" really means "anonymously."  The president of Morehouse, understandably on Mitchell's side given her good relationship with the school, says that if she had revealed publicly that she was helping black students, she may have been killed.  Well, no.  Racist thugs, coming down on the cowardly side and tend to kill children and civil rights workers with low public profiles, not Margaret Mitchell.  What would have happened is she would have set a powerful example for everyone that promoting higher education for all, no matter the race, was a noble goal.  But she didn't and that matters.

There isn't much to recommend this short (56 minutes) biography of Mitchell, unfortunately.  From the requisite voice-overs (something only Ken Burns seems to be good at) with actors who sound ridiculous in their overly-inflected readings, to the parade of talking heads not willing to say anything too challenging about Mitchell, to a rather rushed section on the biggest event of her life, writing Gone with the Wind, it's a sadly dull affair.  And with its consistent whitewashing of Mitchell's life and rationalizations for her more ignoble attitudes, a little insulting.  American Masters often provides insightful and challenging biographies of American artists.  This time, like Rhett Butler's old south, it appears to be a lost cause.

"This is the girl."

"Don't show me this fucking thing here."

"It's just an actresse's photo resume.  Everybody's got one."

"You got the money?"

"I sure do."

The Dead of Andromeda

The most chilling thing Robert Wise ever filmed, and the most subversive, was the village of dead people in The Andromeda Strain.  Nothing else in the movie can match it and it's a very good movie so that's saying something.  Although Wise had done eerie (The Curse of the Cat People), horrifying (The Body Snatcher), and spooky (The Haunting), he had never done anything as downright creepy as the scene in The Andromeda Strain when two scientists (Arthur Hill and James Olson) show up to investigate a town of dead people.

Wise makes hard choices early on, such as not turning away from children laying dead as well as adults.  Whether it was in the script or not, it was Wise's decision to go with it and go with it he did.  The opening shot, of an older man lying on his back, doesn't shock us because of the man's age and angle of the shot.  But then, without warning, we go to the next shot, two boys who dropped dead in the middle of a basketball game. And it goes on.  And on.  And on.  Another boy.  A dog.  An old woman.  A man in a barber chair and, slyly, the barber's feet lying on the floor next to him.  Blink and you'll miss it.  A younger woman with a peace sign around her neck lays dead, breasts bare.  An older woman in the next shot prominently wears a cross.  Then we see the suicides.  And an entire family, dead at a gas station while the mechanic slumps over the engine.

And the music?  Nowhere to be found.  The whole scene is shot in silence with nothing but the sound of wind behind it.

Coming from the man who gave us The Sound of Music, the scene is positively devious.  Wise seems to revel in showing one shot after another, perfectly staged and imagined.  The gas station scene alone, with a boy who just happened to pull up on his bike, and then die right there, is a beautiful master shot of a scene with close-ups that never follows.

The Andromeda Strain was one of the best science fictions of the seventies and it's suspenseful and thrilling throughout but its visual highpoint comes early when Wise decided to spend some time lingering over the dead.
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See complete stills from the scene at Unexplained Cinema, here and here. 

Django Freeman, Oskar Schindler, and the Atomic Bomb

There are questions in this world that cannot be answered and many times they are raised by art.  Most of the time it is intentional but sometimes the question comes from the devices of the art itself.  Recently, Django Unchained raised the question, quite unintentionally, about what kind of history can be used as backdrop for story.   Django Unchained has been called a revenge fantasy and a spaghetti western and both of those have a little truth to them though, in the end, it is more a love story told through those genre conventions than anything else.  The problem is, or the problem that some people have with the movie is, comes with the historical reality of slavery used as a propellant for the story.  Some notable commentators on the subject, like director Spike Lee, find the idea offensive on the face of it and refuse to even see the movie. It is difficult to engage in a discussion about a movie one hasn't seen but for Lee, I suppose, the offense is too high to risk seeing it.  Tavis Smiley agrees.  On the other hand, how much harm can come to two grown men watching a two hour and forty five minute movie if the end result means they will be taken more seriously in their arguments?  It seems a no-brainer - see the goddamn movie, it won't kill you.  The two questions at the center of it all are simple:  First, how and when can a movie use history as a backdrop without causing offense?  Second, who gives a damn?

Both questions are as important as they are virtually unanswerable.  Let's say a filmmaker decides to use the horrifying event of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as a backdrop to a story of a troubled relationship.  And let's further say that the relationship story is treated with utter solemnity and the subject, of both the relationship and the bombing, are treated with respect.   In that case, you probably have Hiroshima, Mon Amour and won't find too many people taking offense at the use of such a disturbing event in the service of a fictional story.  If, on the other hand, the events of Hiroshima were used in a flippant or callous way, in the service of a tawdry sex comedy, things might be viewed differently.  Audiences might ask, "Couldn't you have come up with a different backdrop for your story than that?"

Or sometimes, the backdrop is so incidental that it seems wrong to use something so important for something so unimportant.  For instance, when I watched Shutter Island a couple of years back, I remember thinking, "Dachua, huh?  You had to use Dachau for a minor story backdrop?  Couldn't just turn it into watching a soldier die in a building after a battle?  Why?"  I wasn't hideously offended but, well, it just seemed a bit off.  That is to say, there are certain events in history that are so overwhelmingly awful that we owe it to them, if we use them at all in our stories, to make the story about them, period.  If I'm going to use the Holocaust in my movie then my movie better goddamn well be about the Holocaust.  It can occur inside the camps or years after (The Pawnbroker, Sophie's Choice) but the end result is, it better be about it and not used as some clever way of giving our lead character some deeper back-story.

The same goes for slavery.  Slavery in the Americas encompasses hundreds of years before the United States existence and nearly a hundred years after and it's in that "after" period that it really gets truly, monumentally awful. The number of men, women and children born into or sold into slavery and worked to death or beaten to death or simply brutalized by the knowledge that they were human property is incalculable.  Unlike the Holocaust, we don't have a condensed period of time, with modern records and census numbers, to make the task easier.  We have instead only the dreadful estimate that over hundreds of years (and given the number of slave ancestors living in the United States today) the numbers must have been in the millions.  And that is, by any measure, irreconcilably terrible.

And so, like the Holocaust, it feels as though a story that includes slavery as an important element of the story better goddamn well be about slavery for the whole story.  It's too serious, too horrible, too revolting an event in human history to be used as a plot device.  

But why?

Upon its release, Schindler's List was greeted with both praise and detraction.  Detractors stated that it was insulting that a movie about the Holocaust wasn't really about it at all but instead a tribute to a non-Jewish, German industrialist.   Why didn't Schindler's List tells Schindler's story through the eyes of Jews suffering instead?  At the same time, supporters asked why was it off-limits to celebrate one man's heroic act.  After all, if Schindler indeed risked himself and his business to save his fellow human beings, why is it a problem to celebrate that?  How else are you supposed to celebrate it without focusing on him?

But, it has also been said (by Terry Gilliam, for instance) that the Holocaust represents one of humanity's greatest failures and Schindler's List focuses on a success story.  Is that a problem?  Why?  Yes, it does focus on a success story but it does not imply that the Holocaust itself wasn't a titanic failure of human morality on almost every conceivable level.  It says only, in effect, yes, we know this larger event was awful but here's one tiny corner of it that provided a brief but meaningful cover from the rain of shit that defined almost all of it.

Django Unchained, of course, has a different set of problems than Schindler's List.  Django Unchained is not based on a true story and is only about slavery to the extent that it works to give our hero, Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), a risk and a challenge in getting his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), back.   But, really, plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) could be a James Bond villain, the plantation a fortress and Django and Schultz (Christoph Waltz) two agents working to free their partner from inside (and Stephen, played by Samuel Jackson, could easily sub as the Bond villain's henchman).

Now it's not that Django Unchained doesn't show the brutalities of slavery in an unflinching way, it does.  It shows it in disturbing and uncomfortable detail.  But, in the end, it's all in the service of the "not without my wife" story and, honestly, I can see how taking hundreds of years of brutality and pure, unadulterated moral filth and making it a backdrop for a spaghetti western love tale might piss more than a few people off.  Just as I can with Schindler's List and even Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  I can imagine, though I have no evidence, that there were a few survivors of Hiroshima who felt fourteen years was a little too soon to start using their personal nightmare to tell a love story.  Survivors of the Titanic might have felt the same way about the countless movies made about the doomed ship but I don't really know.

But, of course, the second questions remains: Who gives a damn?  When I watched The House on Telegraph Hill a couple of months back and wrote it up for a blog post at TCM, I noted that it starts out in Bergen-Belsen and then said no more on the subject.  Here was a movie that was specifically using the Holocaust to set up a goddamn mystery-thriller.  That seems pretty damn offensive and, yet, it wasn't.  Why?  I don't know.   Maybe because it was made so soon after the actual events that I knew everyone involved understood the gravity of the event.  Maybe it was because the Bergen-Belsen scenes were so obviously stage-bound that it seemed harmless.  Maybe I just forgive older movies too much.

The problem here is that I can only assume that everyone involved in Django Unchained also understands the gravity of slavery just as the makers of The House on Telegraph Hill understood the gravity of the Holocaust.   And since Django does an excellent job of showing the horrors of slavery and the horrifyingly callous indifference of the slave owners, I imagine they felt it important enough that flinching away from it would be the bigger insult.

So where does that leave us?  In the case of Django Unchained, it leaves us in the same place that Schindler's List leaves us, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour and, yes, even The House on Telegraph Hill.  It leaves us in a place where it's up to each person who sees it to decide what level of offense they take from it.   I was not personally offended by Django Unchained because it was at least blunt and straightforward on the horrors of slavery.   Something like Gone with the Wind, so cavalier in its disregard for that very thing, so sugarcoating of the true horror of that very nasty, not peculiar, institution, is much more offensive.  No one is beaten or set upon by vicious dogs and everyone leads a happy, peaceful existence until those damn Yankees get all hostile.   Something like Birth of a Nation, coming up on its hundredth year anniversary, is such a nightmare of racial animosity and moral turpitude and so far removed from anything that is betrayed now that it probably belongs in its own discussion.

Those who would argue against Django Unchained or Schindler's List do so on the basis that films are not history but films do teach history to a great many people.  As we get further away from the horrors of slavery and the Holocaust, it's important to remember that plantation owners weren't given their comeuppance by freed slaves and German industrialists didn't work together to end the Holocaust.  Sounds obvious but give it another hundred years and a few more "inspirational" movies and let me know what the consensus is.  Think I'm crazy?  Check out any poll on how much people in this country know about history.  Christ, over a quarter of all Americans don't know we gained our independence from Britain and you're going to tell me we don't have to worry about movies teaching history?  The hell we don't.  Or maybe we can take solace in the fact that 74 percent do know.

Django Unchained, in the end, feels like a cartoon adventure, like that Bond movie scenario I alluded to up top.   I also found it rather dull for long stretches and easily the least of all of Tarantino's works (although I've never seen Death Proof so maybe that's worse, although I can't imagine anything worse than Parker Lewis Can't Lose sound effects being employed every time there's a smash close-up).  But does that preclude it from using slavery as a backdrop?  Is history something to be recited with unfaltering reverence or something to be riffed on and used for commentary?  I don't know.  I don't have a single, concrete answer to one of these questions.  I just hope art keeps forcing us to ask them.  If it does that, surely we can't go too wrong.