The Talkies/Message Parlor

...Jhabvala claimed in interviews that the story was "completely" true (though she quietly raised Sally's age to 15...

...Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) of the Army Medical Corps and his trusty sidekick, Major Salt (Cuba Gooding, Jr...

...No reputable historian believes the hoary legend of a romantic relationship between Jefferson (Nick Nolte in the film) and the 13-year-old slave girl Sally Hemmings (Thandie Newton...

...t was Stone's JFK, after all, that set the standard for both American cinema's paranoid style and its treatment of history...

...As in the best fairy tales, everything apart from the magical centerpiece is quite realistic, though there is an admixture of satirical hyperbole in the portrayal of the "Business High School" where the hero, Nikolai Tchiyov (Sergei Dontsov), teaches music...

...Hoffman is the Peter Pan of the American cinema...

...This wonderful, beautiful, glorious Russian film, which I enjoyed more than anything I have seen at the cinema for a long time, is a retelling of the Pied Piper legend—but one whose Message is far from simple-minded...

...Do not try to ride a tornado at home...

...It is illegal to use large blue oxen to break people out of jail...

...What do you think...

...Duel's old man's belief that "Justbecause it's a tall tale don't mean it's not true" is in error...

...But the children, whom he leads about with his piccolo and to whom he has taught an ensemble dance of great charm and even greater energy, adore him...

...one who speaks some French asks Nikolai, gesturing to two diners in a posh restaurant...

...The world does not sort itself out so neatly, but people will go on behaving as if it could...

...When he tells his severe superiors that from their hands the builders of communism and the builders of capitalism come out exactly the same—"Predators and ignorant crooks"—he is fired...

...They're talking about the food they're shoving into their mouths...

...That is just what it does mean...

...Not Wolfgang Petersen and the gang that brings us Outbreak...

...Will the brave and ingenious Dr...

...They became an annoyance in the sixties, a pain in the seventies, a disease in the eighties, and look like becoming a plague in the nineties...

...Do you know what they're talking about...

...You or I might think, for example, James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Here the Message is a mindlessly Luddite version of naïve environmentalism reflexively opposed to all development...

...Daniels avoid arrest by the general's goons long enough to track down the host monkey—on the loose in a California forest—bring it in, find the cure, manufacture a serum so as to save the life of his ex-wife (whom he still loves), and still have time left over singlehandedly to abort Operation Clean Sweep just as it is about to annihilate the town...

...Back in St...

...Why do Merchant-Ivory hate aristocrats...

...CI The American Spectator May 1995 63...

...More likely, it is just the need of the makers of designer movies to go after easy targets...

...Petersburg, which opens on Paris...

...Such concern with hygiene ought to have produced a disclaimer: Warning to children...

...Designer movies need a Message too, but it has to be utterly anodyne and non-controversial—such as that, for example, racism and class-snobbery are bad, and personal authenticity good...

...You were born into a miserable, crooked, bankrupt country," he tells them, "but it is still your home," and he himself gives up a love affair with a French taxidermist (Agnes Soral) in order to return...

...The fantasy of the window is not obtrusive...

...Moving trains will not always stop when you stand in front of them...

...Now that's my kind of Message...

...At 50 he is still the boy scout Graduate, sickened by the corruption of his elders, and the idealistic cub reporter who saves the world from wicked, Watergate-style national leaders...

...The slogan "You only have to believe" is not necessarily to be taken literally...

...The only trouble is that none of it is true...

...After The Remains of the Day grossed five times what it cost to make, aristocrat-bashing must have looked like a paying proposition...

...The real drama lies—see if you can guess—in a deadly military plot to cover up the fact that the virus was the subject of its experimentation with biological warfare...

...They have to make the most of their opportunity because the magic window is due to close in a few days, according to the markings on the wall nearby, not to open again for twenty years...

...In twenty years we shall be too old for Paris," Gorokhov says mournfully...

...Was either Mr...

...m eanwhile, the people from the piano factory with whom Nikolai boards, especially Gorokhov (Viktor Mikhailov) and his shrewish wife, Vera (Nina Oussatova), are going back and forth through the window, taking back as much as they can carry, including a motorcycle and, finally, a Citroen 2CV...

...Message movies started to make their appearance with the breakdown of the studio system that had created benevolent dictators like Goldwyn...

...T hat kind of crude message is really more appropriate to a Disney-style fairy tale like Tall Tale, by Jeremiah Chechik...

...In a way the least noxious of the message movies are those simple, sharply drawn morality tales with a hint of paranoia that are typical of the work of black filmmakers like Preston Whitmore H. His Walking Dead tells of a detachment of black Marines in Vietnam who have been betrayed by their superiors...

...But there is a world of difference between Shakespeare's overlooking the human flaws of Henry V in order to portray him as a great national hero and Mrs...

...The misogyny of so many young black males has become as much a part of the message for them as their fantasy of sticking it to The Man...

...Thank God for noble characters like Col...

...N o, if you are going to update a fairy tale, do it as Yuri Mamin has done in the Movie of the Month, Window to Paris...

...I would not want to be accused of condemning all dramatizations of history that are less than scrupulously accurate...

...Finding a cure for the horrible disease turns out to be a piece of cake...

...Interestingly, all four of Whitmore's main characters have become Marines not out of patriotism but because of entanglements with treacherous or demanding women...

...The traditional western has here been sanitized...

...Together they form a politically correct triumvirate of traditional folk heroes who help 12-year-old Dan'l (Nick Stahl) drive away an evil developer (Scott Glenn) who wants to stuff his daddy's pockets with money in exchange for his worthless farm...

...After all, they held back the Mongol Tartars for 200 years while the French were enriching themselves in safety...

...This seems to me a scandalous point of view, and one that vitiates the film's messages—both the subtle and interesting one about the connection between political and personal liberty, and the boring and obvious one about how frightful it is for uncaring aristocrats to oppress the poor...

...At first Mrs...

...His precedent has unfortunately been followed in Jefferson in Paris, a product of the Merchant-IvoryJhabvala team, the Laura Ashley of designer movies...

...These folk superheroes shoot up bad guys without killing them, are not afraid to express their feelings, and adopt a "Code of the West" that reads: "Respect the land, protect the defenseless, and don't spit in front of women and children...

...Along the corridors there is a continuous ribbon of inscriptions, in foot-high lettering in four languages, of such capitalist maxims as "Time is money" or "Money has no smell," and in the classrooms there are framed blowups of all the major international currencies...

...In this breeding ground of the next generation's capitalists, Tchiyov and his music are regarded as a dispensable frivolity...

...This one is played by Donald Sutherland, and we know he's the bad guy because he speaks well of people who do their duty and ill of sentimentalism...

...Ivory (or, perhaps, both...

...Yet even they are ambivalent about life in the West...

...This is another in the long line of cinematic intrigues based on the assumption that mad generals fully prepared to wipe out whole towns full of American citizens in order to cover up their wrongdoings are as plentiful as corridors at the Pentagon...

...Shooting of handguns in confined spaces can be dangerous...

...It is deeply depressing to me that the movie-houses are packed with peopleapparently unoffended by a Message so simple-minded that it would make Oliver Stone blush...

...A group of poor, down-at-heel Russians have only to step through it to find themselves in a paradise of capitalist wealth that they soon learn to exploit through a combination of honest and dishonest means—on the grounds that France owes them something...

...who are soon on to him...

...Their fight to accomplish their mission and then get out of enemy territory becomes a metaphor for their struggles against racism (told in flashback) in civilian life...

...Merchant or Mr...

...So, too, perhaps, life does not send messages, though people will go on behaving as if it did...

...Paul Bunyan (Oliver Platt), conceived as a proto-environmentalist ("In my day we didn't kill the land, we just borrowed from it," he says), teams up with Pecos Bill (Patrick Swayze) and John Henry (Roger Aaron Brown...

...that the escape of a deadly virus that liquefies human tissue and kills its victims, horribly, in a matter of about eight hours is a pretty promisingly scary subject for a movie...

...The idealistic theorist of political equality may find it quite easy to behave in his private life like the arbitrary tyrant he has made his career out of opposing...

...then she took to issuing the formulaic statement that "the whole Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemmings liaison, if there was one, is, after nearly 200 years, a romantic legend...

...Yet having taken the children away from their grasping and unworthy elders to a happy land on the other side of the mountain, this Pied Piper decides to take them back...

...It is the baleful effects of The Message which, along with the demands of the money men for lowest-common-denominator entertainment, have turned Hollywood into an artistic disaster area...

...Do not try to destroy a railway tunnel while you are still inside it...

...It posits a magic window, hidden by a wardrobe in a run-down apartment in St...

...Petersburg, they had sat around the kitchen table in the communal apartment with nothing but a pickle and a bottle of vodka, but they had talked about "the fine arts, the fate of Russia, God...

...What they really want is the window: a way to enjoy the riches of the West at will, but then and always to return to dreary mother Russia...

...Jhabvala's overlooking Jefferson's greatness in order to portray him as a child molester...

...But films like Whitmore's also draw on a more general Hollywood paranoia about government that is the most common element in films with a political message...

...62 The American Spectator May 1995 In other words, after a certain amount of time elapses, it doesn't matter anymore if what you say about a historical character is true or not...

...They go on strike because of his dismissal (and because they want doughnuts brought back in the cafeteria), and he leads them through the window into Paris and the fantasy land of the West, from which they have no desire to return...

...beaten up at a tender age by some boy baron...

...Merchant-Ivory specialize in such messages, but in Jefferson they actually get close to saying something interesting about the connection between love and power...