The Talkies/Going Down in History

...She replies, "Whom do you love better, me or Comrade Stalin...

...His naïveté is indeed of Candidean proportions, but it is not his alone...

...Despite protests in the American press, Kurosawa is not being anti-American—except perhaps in one brief sequence where he shows the monuments to the victims of the second atom bomb, most of them donated by former members of the Communist bloc, and has a child ask: "Why is there no American monument...

...We can live with that...

...This film could actually use a little post-modern whimsy in order to make its audience feel more welcome in the world it attempts to create...

...S terling VanWagenen's Alan and Naomi stands at the opposite end of the war–movie scale as a very late entry in the category of those that dare to take themselves seriously...

...When Ivan finds out about it he is paralyzed with fear...

...One of the most moving moments in this moving film is when he tells her that her being Jewish shouldn't prevent her from getting a good job and she replies, gently, "Oh, Uncle Ivan, you are so naive...

...Hulce's character, Ivan Sanshin, is the sort of open-mouthed dolt that Hulce plays so well...

...You don't need to have surveyed the grassy knoll with the Warren Report in your hand to know that Stone's thesis—that a wicked and corrupt power elite of which Kennedy was somehow not a part was prepared to stop at nothing in order to drag America into the disaster of Vietnam against his will—is ridiculous in its falsity...

...Here the history is accurate but inert, a mere backdrop for the sort of therapy movie that always takes itself so seriously that we non-victims tend to feel somewhat excluded...

...Not the least of Kurosawa's achievements is almost to have succeeded in saying something fresh about World War II, a patch of history the movies have raked over more thoroughly than any other...

...In fact, I wonder if the film's odd historical inaccuracies—like having the news of Pearl Harbor reach New York on Sunday morning or having the battle for Bataan (here called an "island") and Corregidor still going on six months after Pearl Harbor—were not deliberate, part of a general effort to create the impression that its events are taking place in some world similar to but different from this one...

...In Medicine Man, only Lorraine Bracco and Sean Connery swinging in the treetops in rappelling harness is satisfying without being ideological, and in JFK nothing is: Stone's continual rerunning of the grainy Zapruder film of the Dallas motorcade becomes a metaphor for his own ideological obsessiveness, not to say madness...

...It goes on to tell the story of Stalin's film projectionist (again an opportunity for self-referential jokes that is not taken), played by Tom Hulce, from 1939 until Stalin's death in 1953...

...At least Kurosawa has the sense not to be like Stone and McTiernan and populate his film with a shadowy cast of evil men whom we are seldom or never allowed to see...

...The answer: "The Americans dropped the bomb...

...Yet a lot of people are going to see this picture because they simply like to see the old clichés revived...

...In James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...That's the point of them...

...But Anastasia continues to see Katya inthe state orphanage to which she is taken...

...Naomi's isolation from everybody is the inner ring of concentric circles that exclude the wider audience, successively, from her trauma, her experience in the war, her friendship with Alan, her middle-class Jewish milieu, and her time and place, which is so emphatically 1940s Brooklyn as to call the universality of all the characters' experience even further into doubt...

...He knows enough to be terrified of Stalin even as he adores him...

...We have always loved the movie world because it is not real...

...All there was to make the movie worthwhile was the rather interesting music, a sort of mixture of Latin rhythms, Andean panpipe modalities and Caribbean steel-band instrumentation (thank you, Jerry Goldsmith), and the pretty scenery (ditto Donald McAlpine...

...But I find some of my childish impatience coming back to me in response to historical fiction and fictionalized history...

...We owe a bit more to the director in Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August, even though it too is part propaganda...

...Thus it is only natural for Miss Griffith and her co-star, Michael Douglas, to triumph over cliché Nazis by a mastery of spy-film clichés...

...Oliver Stone has taken the same line about JFK, a film about which it seems that there can be nothing left to say except that its "higher truth" is not true...

...So much so, indeed, that the Hollywood clichés about it are inseparable from our sense of its real history, just as the cowboy-and-Indian cliches are now inseparable from what we know about the Old West...

...You don't have to agree with what the guy has to say to be impressed by the cinematic skill with which he says it...

...Of course they have...

...1 van is a simple man who never under- stands his own relationship with the historical forces at work around him...

...But when Anastasia looks in the wardrobe, she finds a bust of Stalin that Ivan has rescued from a bombed-out school...

...In spite of her confident and independent appearance (Beria is looking after her), she is slowly going mad and eventually hangs herself...

...How can it be that it doesn't matter that things didn't really happen this way...

...Kurosawa, by contrast, supplements his simplistic characters and story and his puerile ideology with truly sumptuous imagery: the hauntingly repeated motif of "the eye of the flash" is as unforgettable to us as the Bomb's explosion itself is to the old woman (Sachiko Murase) whose life it has forever changed...

...John McTiernan's Medicine Man, for example, I kept hoping that at least Lorraine Bracco would take off her shirt, as all the native chicks were persuaded to do, as some small compensation to me for having to sit through the idiot-prop which holds that wicked developers who build roads through rain forests will not stop even for the sake of a cure for cancer...

...The answer is usually that the fiction serves a higher truth, which it sometimes does...

...The setting provides an excuse for another nostalgia wallow, too, with loving recreations of the accoutrements of 1940s boyhood: stickball under the washing hanging across the street, Saturday movies, balsawood model airplanes, and knickerbockers...

...It is only when Katya, now 17, reappears coincidentally with the death of Stalin, that he finds something really worth living for...

...If you saw the film without sound it would be even more clear that this man needs help...

...Of course, the only way you can get away with that is to make the movie not really about the war itself but about growing up, overcoming racial and religious prejudice, and, above all, recovery...

...As a convenient shorthand expression for the forces of evil that it is always so nice to have your hero and heroine overcome, these blockheaded, cardboard Nazis serve as a screen between us and the real world where such things as happen in the movies don't happen...

...But most of the propaganda here is directed at war itself—a meaningless ideological trope—leaving us free to read Kurosawa's fascinating succession of visual images almost without reference to ideology...

...In fact, there are no evil people here at all: just a pervasive sense of sorrow for the Japanese who were in and around Nagasaki on August 9, 1945...

...He used to hide me in the wardrobe, now he hides Stalin...

...Seltzer figures to get rich catering to the they-don' t-make- ' em - like-that-anymore crowd while having a little post-modernist joke at their expense...

...T o see what can be done to convert history, into art we must turn to our Film of the Month, Andrei Konchalovsky's Inner Circle...

...The feeling is similar, actually, after most propaganda films, even when they are wholly fictional...

...If you can't believe in the propaganda then all the liberties with historical accuracy become more rather than less irksome...

...The world works like that only in the delirium tremens stage of left-wing dementia...

...David Seltzer's Shining Through tries to make The American Spectator April 1992 63 use of our familiarity with this imagery in a thoroughly post-modern way: by making his heroine (Melanie Griffith) movie-mad, by quoting from Casablanca and other famous war films, and by using as framework a BBC interview, he deliberately obscures the boundaries between movies and real life before we can complain that his nasty Nazis have been done to death, and then some, in the movies...

...English medieval history was certainly improved upon by Shakespeare...

...A young Jewish girl (Vanessa Zaoui) rendered speechless by having seen her father murdered by the Nazis is healedby the at first reluctant friendship of a young Jewish boy (Lukas Haas) ashamed of his Jewishness in 1940s Brooklyn...

...It was only when I got to be about 17 that I began to realize that the fiction could be truer than the history, which was just some advocate's version of what happened anyway...

...S he went native in other ways—face painting, totemic earring—but never did take off her shirt...

...He looks at her as if she is crazy and replies, "Comrade Stalin, of course...

...Their usefulness depends on their being clichés, as in the Indiana Jones films or Disney's Rocketeer, which are Shining Through's post-modern predecessors...

...He worships Comrade Stalin (brilliantly played by Alexandre Zbruev) and is credulous enough to believe in all the plots supposedly concocted by enemies of the people against him...

...No post-modernist nudges and winks here...

...But when the KGB come for Gubelmann's wife, he prevents his own wife, Anastasia (Lolita Davidovich), from offering to adopt Katya, the threeyear-old daughter of these enemies of the motherland...

...When his neighbor, Gubelmann, is arrested by the KGB, he is at first convinced that there is some mistake and offers to intervene with Beria, whom he has seen once...

...No other filmmaker is so inspired as Kurosawa in finding visual analogues for emotional experience, as he does here too in images of a storm, a water imp, and two dead trees in the forest, all of which reinforce the "eye" imagery's suggestion of a mysterious and rather scary sympathy between the actions of man and the reactions of nature...

...There is a wonderful scene when he takes Anastasia into a wardrobe in the flat they have taken over from the Gubelmanns, so that the neighbors won't hear, and asks her: "Whom do you love better, me or Katya Gubelmann...

...He is devastated by his wife's death but even then is unable to make the connection between the leader he so admires and the ruin of his own private life...

...She says sadly, "He doesn't love me anymore...

...It begins with a notice: "This film is based on a true story," which could be just another post-modernist tease, like Melanie Griffith's BBC interview, but is not...

...Here is history beautifully and brilliantly rendered into drama whose relationship to the events it portrays really is that of a higher truth: one that enables us to understand better both history and the human heart...

...When she reappears, pregnant, a year later, he is prepared to take her back—in effect, it seems, to answer the question posed in the wardrobe differently...

...n 64 The American Spectator April 1992...

...Even Katya shares in the popular hysteria of grief at Stalin's death and has to be rescued from the crush of people by Ivan, who at last leaves his idol behind, honors his dead wife's wish, and offers to be a father to the orphan girl...

...During the war, the Sanshins are evacuated from Moscow along with the Soviet leadership, but Ivan is sent back when Stalin decides to stay while Anastasia becomes the mistress of Beria (Bob Hoskins...

...Did you really have nothing better to do with that three hours and eight minutes of your life...