The Talkies: Be a Man

...Real soldiers fight for what real soldiers have always fought for: to earn the respect of their enemies and the admiration and trust of their friends—that which used to be called the "honor" of a soldier...

...This is not the end of the picture...

...More sinister is the introduction, with the fictional character of Lieutenant Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller), of the alleged class-dimension of the war that the upper-and middle-class Sassoon and Owen could not provide...

...asks an exasperated Rivers...

...The secret, he tells Sanya, is to scare people...

...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...Soon, however, Tolya is apprehended by the authorities and hauled off to prison...

...Since the days of John Wayne, the only good soldier to make it to the silver screen has been the one who, like Spiel-berg's Captain Miller, spends most of his time showing off his "sensitivity" and nursing his secret sorrow about the horrible things he has to do and see...

...As the hero of the medieval French epic The Song of Roland puts it in JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement explaining why he has volunteered for a suicide mission: "So that they won't sing a bad song about me back in France...

...When some neighbor boys beat Sanya up, Tolya gives him lessons in self defense—not only by precept but by example...

...In fact, the war was a serious business...

...77 handsome, charming man who seems to offer all that the former hopes for in a husband, the latter in a father...

...To little Sanya the meaning of the fact that they must gather their things, plus some unfamiliar bundles, and leave their home in the middle of the night is still obscure, and as the sad truth of what this seeming paragon of a patriarch really is slowly dawns on us, it interferes not at all with his continuing instruction of Sanya inthe secrets of what it means to be a man—even when such lessons in manhood are placed in the service of an apprenticeship in thievery...

...Soon the three of them get off the train and settle down as a family in a Russian tenement...

...When Tolya takes his turn, Katya shouts, "Tolya, don't leave us...

...None of them has seen his loved ones in a long time, and relatives try to shout, as the prisoners are made to run a gauntlet of barking police dogs to the waiting trucks, bits of news from home...

...Tolya tells the landlady that his passport and pay have been held up at headquarters—you know how the Army is—and he will settle with her in a few days...

...His father having died of wounds shortly after the end of the Second World War, Sanya was born in a field as his itinerant and apparently family-less and friendless mother wandered in search of a place to settle...

...It doesn't really matter what either one of them actually does, whether they are brave or pusillanimous, so long as they both feel really bad about it afterwards...

...The most memorable scene of the movie comes as prisoners are being moved from the local prison to exile in the Gulag...

...I did not mean in what I wrote to imply that it would have been more realistic of the movie to have represented combat troops as having a discussion of the politics and geostrategy of America's "war aims" — only that, in the unlikely event that the subject of the "one decent thing" they hoped to accomplish in the war had ever come up, they would have been more likely than Mr...

...Damn his delicate sensibilities...

...If you scare people, they respect you...

...What do you want...

...Here it is in pristine form, the patently absurd notion that it was all the generals' fault...

...That honor would have to go to the gallant "soldier-poets" of the First World War, and fortuitously we were given a chance to inspect them and the pernicious myth they gave rise to this month in Regeneration, directed by Gillies Mackinnon...

...He cuts a dashing figure and takes advantage of an uproar in an adjoining car over someone's claiming to have been robbed to begin romancing the lonely Katya and ingratiating himself with her son...

...Or, at least if Katya is going somewhere in particular the fact has not lodged in the memory of the six-year-old Sanya...

...Satisfied that he has made his impression, the god-like Tolya tells him, simply: "I forgive you...

...Thus it is that we must turn to a Russian for a fairer, saner view of the masculine and military ethos—and for the Movie of the Month...

...Poor babies...

...He himself has a leopard tattooed on his shoulder to scare people, but even more scary is the tattoo of Stalin on his breast...

...To the film's credit, the note of childish petulance is undiluted...

...If few historians continue to believe in this myth, most literary types and fashionable intellectuals in both Britain and America still do...

...Does making such a parade of his anguish at the discovery that war is hell make war any the less hellish...

...Spielberg thinks to have mentioned stopping Hitler and the Nazis from dominating the world and less likely to have chosen their own rather quixotic mission to save Private Ryan...

...74 October 19 9 8 • The American Spectator I n one scene the sympathetic and understanding Dr...

...Yet the two gradually draw closer...

...After so many years of peace and the androgynous culture it has given rise to, it is getting more and more difficult to remember the time, not so very long ago, when being called a coward was the worst thing that could happen to a man...

...He tells the awed Sanya that Stalin is his father...

...Does he think he is the only one who has feelings...

...It was fought for the leadership of Europe and the world, and both Europe and the world would be vastly different places today if the Germans had won it...

...To be fair to Steven Spielberg, he did not invent this kind of quasi-pacifist humbug...

...How can a thief be more honorable than Private Ryan...

...Surely I cannot be alone in regarding such a man—or the man by whom he is presented for our admiration—as an insufferable prig...

...It is at this point where we learn that Tolya is a thief...

...Not surprisingly, the myth as presented by Mackinnon and his screenwriter, Allan Scott (working from Pat Barker's novel), is completely unsullied by the taint of political or moral reality...

...For nothing but pride...

...Hollywood, since its takeover by the counterculture in the early 1.970's (see my review of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls in last month's TAS), has done its best to promote the idea that the military ethos, based on this conception of what it means to be a man, is little more than a cover for brutality, corruption, and criminality...

...Only later do we learn that Tolya was, most probably, the thief...

...But Sanya wriggles through the crush of grownup bodies to run after the truck as it pulls away, calling out after it, for the first time, "Daddy...

...Half the seed of Europe," to use Wilfred Owen's angry poetic formulation, were sacrificed unnecessarily...

...The American Spectator • October 1998 75...

...Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), brought in to "cure" Sassoon of his heterodox political views, asks him what he hopes to accomplish by his protest, which had included hurling his Military Cross, the second highest British decoration for bravery, into the River Mersey...

...E-mail him at JVBowman@compuserve.com...

...More seriously, Captain Miller's tortured utilitarianism in arguing that his sacrificing the lives of some of his men could only be justified by saving the lives of others of his men (by this logic, the only moral course would be not to go to war at all) smelled to me of having been concocted in the high-tech kitchens of pacifist Hollywood and not on the front lines, by real soldiers...

...And at a level much more elemental than that of even the most basic morality, boys first learn to become men by standing up to and earning the respect of the world in both war and peace...

...If the Anglo-Saxon world hegemons have forgotten this, all their high-tech weaponry will not long continue their imperium...

...Sanya is terrified and admiring at the same time...

...Like Katya and Sanya, we are swept off our feet by this44 Thus we must turn to a Russian for a fairer, saner view of the masculine and military ethos...

...The Thief, directed by Pavel Chukhrai, is a deeply moving meditation on family and fatherhood told from the point of view of Sanya (Misha Philipchuk), the six-year-old son of the beautiful Katya (Yekaterina Rednikova...

...What comes afterwards is in many ways even more moving in its depiction of the meaning of fatherhood and the nature of the psychological attachment between fathers and sons...

...Their common membership in this elite is what links the Captain with the coward, played by Jeremy Davies, in Saving Private Ryan...

...Billy is a working-class boy with nothing but contempt for the "public school fools" and "noodle brained dimwits" who, he can take it for granted, are running the war...

...Tolya tells Sanya to call him "Dad," but the boy, more cautious than his mother, will only call him Uncle Tolya...

...Or is the annoying demonstration of his sensitive nature rather an attempt to arrogate to himself the peculiar kind of pseudo-honor that accrues, in our feminized, "feelings"-oriented culture, to those who can claim to belong to the emotional elite of deep feelers...

...Yet he is also capable of gentleness...

...As the story opens in 1952, Sanya and Katya are on a train, going they know not where...

...Or "the old lie" (to quote Owen once again) that dulce et decorum pro patria mori est...

...Worse, indeed, than death itself for most of those who risked their lives in our country's wars...

...And Sassoon—echoing one of his most famous poems—says, "I want it to stop...

...When the boy gets the whole family in trouble with the other residents by leaving the water running and flooding the apartment house, Tolya instructs him to bring him his military belt, which he proceeds to wind around one fist while playing with a razor blade in his mouth...

...But the prevailing popular view of the conflict has come down to us through those that Pat Barker and her cinematic collaborators here memorialize: the overgrown, self-pitying adolescents Siegfried Sassoon (James Wilby) and Wilfred Owen (Stuart Bunce), who met at the Craiglockhart hospital for shell-shock victims (Sassoon, a war-hero, having been sent there because of a political protest against the war), decided that it was evil old men who designed the thing out of mere spite, just because they hated young and beautiful youths like themselves...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site—http://www.spectator.org...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Be a Man T he e-mail that I received last month about my review of Saving Private Ryan, together with the scolding in the national press received by some of those who, like me, had reservations about the film, leads me to beg the reader's indulgence for a brief return to the subject...

...Into their compartment comes Tolya (Vladimir Mashkov), a captain in the Red Army...

...First, you must be a man...

...But part of the point, surely, is that heroism—and in particular the kind of heroism that small boys habitually confer upon their fathers—is not dependent upon being, in the sappy words attributed to Private Ryan, "a good man...