Summer of '42
LEVIN, MARTIN
Summer of '42 Richard Schickel revisits the great movies of his childhood. by MARTIN LEVIN In his memoir Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip, Richard Schickel confesses that he became a "cinemaddict"...
...The script by Howard Koch (of Casablanca fame) was faithful to the book by, for instance, praising the judicial fairness of the Soviet show trials that sentenced Stalin's former comrades to death...
...And I've had to catch up with reruns, to which this book is a dependable guide...
...At the top of the author's "Must See" list is A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, "a near-to-great movie...
...The local picture palaces offered an escape, he says, from the mind-numbing serenity of growing up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, outside of Milwaukee...
...Rogers faces a framed picture of Ryan with their baby and "introduces" them to each other: "Little Guy, this is your father...
...Schickel's attention-grabbing title, Good Morning, Mr...
...And undoubtedly there is the element of racism...
...Schickel cites one damning statistic: "Only one in twenty-five Allied soldiers died in German prison camps...
...Why is it that movies set in the Pacific theater of the war emphasize enemy brutality more than movies set in the European theater...
...In the spy and Resistance dramas, the enemy directed his villainy not at Yanks, but at the defeated Europeans...
...The Nuremberg trials covered only ten months...
...The war's major turning points were the battles of Midway, Stalingrad, and the Atlantic...
...Mission to Moscow, says Schickel, is an arresting example of "awful screenwriting...
...In an understandable reaction to war-movie heroics of that time and the "greatest-generation" hype of our own, Schickel relies on the common wisdom that the war was won by our "infinite superiority in numbers and productive capacity and the safety of the North American continent as a staging area...
...But there's at least one such history: The Other Nuremberg, by Arnold Brackman, who covered the Tokyo war crimes trials for the United Press...
...Zip Zip Zip, comes from a ditty that the author's father used to sing to him at bedtime...
...Wartime movies were punctuated with obligatory goodbye scenes, of which the masterpiece is that between Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bo-gart in Casablanca...
...But the scales are tipped by "the routine sadism of the Japanese military" as documented in Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking...
...The effect was to marginalize the us-versus-them aspect of the Nazi war machine...
...I can't forget those air crews leaving their Nissen huts on chilly mornings, day after day, to fly into the heaviest flak the world had ever seen...
...Along with it is My Friend Flicka (called by Pauline Martin Levin is a writer living in New York...
...In spite of the ubiquitous Hollywood left, little Soviet propaganda found its way into wartime movies...
...Kael "one of the rare children's movies that doesn't make you choke up with rage...
...In 1944, I was in France with an Air Force Service Group charged with maintaining a fleet of Martin B-26 bombers (known to their pilots as "flying coffins...
...In the convoy pictures, the enemy was an "abstraction...
...And he never refers to it again...
...Call it a postmodern disconnect...
...Sometimes the farewell sequence is followed by an "imagined conversation between the ghostly fallen hero and the son he has never seen...
...The Tokyo war crimes trials lasted two and a half years...
...The most lunatic" of these encounters, says Schickel, occurs between Ginger Rogers and a deceased Robert Ryan in Tender Comrade...
...One notorious exception was Mission to Moscow, based on a memoir by Joseph Davies, a sometime ambassador to the USSR...
...In 1944, Schickel was in the sixth grade...
...So I missed the first run of the films that gilded Schickel's youth...
...We engaged the Japanese "face-to-face, hand-to-hand" almost a year before we were similarly involved with the Germans...
...A film critic for Time and the author of thirty-one books, mostly about movies, Schickel has now turned back to look at the period he grew up in—with special attention to the movies made during and about World War II...
...Schickel closes by perceiving a postmodern decline of traditional narrative in every form of expression, from politics to motion pictures: "The aim of this art is the striking image, not the stirring thought...
...This was the postwar world the wartime movies could not imagine...
...Zip Zip Zip, Richard Schickel confesses that he became a "cinemaddict" at age five, when he was taken to a neighborhood theater to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs...
...This puts a human face on the movie credits for such directors as Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz, and Raoul Walsh, and such writers as Dal-ton Trumbo, Dudley Nichols, and Howard Koch...
...His reminiscences fill a gap in my experience...
...Here he cites John W. Dower's book, War Without Mercy...
...Along the way, Schickel fine-tunes the movies made about World War II...
...Schickel's movie critiques are admirably comprehensive...
...one in three died in the Japanese camps...
...He also regrets that "there is no serious, systematic history of Japan's wartime conduct...
...Davies, played in the movie by Walter Huston, also approved of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland...
...Partly this is a matter of timing...
...And let's not ignore the human factor...
...He admits that it's more of a wakeup call than a lullaby...
...Movies about land combat between Americans and Germans weren't released until after the war was over...
...And as Richard Overy reminds us in Why the Allies Won, all of these were won well before America's industrial potential kicked in...
...He goes beyond the surface analysis of action to nuances of cinematography and production...
...Instead, the hostilities were represented by pictures featuring the Resistance, espionage, and naval convoys in the North Atlantic...
...He didn't much care for the movie, but he was enchanted by the rite of moviegoing...
...They really were a regiment of heroes...
...But this isn't entirely true...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 39
