violence

John Wayne’s The Green Berets

As you probably know–those of you, that is, who have not been sleeping under a rock recently–there’s a new version of John Wayne’s Oscar-winning True Grit opening this week, here in 2010.  It’s directed by the Cohen Brothers, and stars Jeff Bridges as eye-patched Rooster Cogburn, and, like the 1969 original, is based on the 1968 novel by Charles Portis.

In spite of my political leanings, I am an unrepentant John Wayne fan, and although True Grit is far from his greatest movie, or even the greatest “late-Wayne” movie (The Shootist takes that honor), it’s still enjoyable, especially when the (bad) child-actress protagonist is off-screen.  True Grit was a real western, and so were most (not all, unfortunately) of Wayne’s last movies; he died in 1979.

But in 1968, Wayne was not fighting any Far West personal vendettas; he was fighting the Commies in Vietnam.  John Wayne felt so strongly about filming the story of “The Green Berets” (based on a popular, violent 1965 book by Robin Moore, and Barry Sadler’s pop anthem of the same name, a huge hit from 1966) that he chose to produce, direct, and star in his version.  Wayne had been fuming for years about the leftward tilt of American opinion about the Vietnam War, and was determined to throw his enormous Hollywood resources into telling “the other side” of the story–the one about vicious, sub-human Vietcong, about the domino effect, about the need for America to be in Vietnam to save the world.

The movie (available for Instant Viewing on Netflix, by the way) begins delivering these messages in the first few minutes.  Skeptical newspaper reporter, played by the huge TV star (”The Fugitive”) David Janssen, along with dozens of other newsfolks and visitors, are taking a tour of the Special Forces (i.e., Greet Berets) base in Georgia.  At a demonstration of Beret capabilities, Janssen and others ask tough questions:  ”Why is the United States waging this ruthless war?”  and “Do you mean you do what you’re told to do, without any personal feelings or opinions?”  and “Terrible things happen in war; that doesn’t mean the South Vietnamese need us, or even want us.”  ”How do you know we should be fighting for this present government? They’ve had no free elections, no constitution. . . . There are a lot of people believe that this is simply a war between the Vietnamese people; it’s their war, let them handle it.”  And the answer from the Green Berets officer: “What’s involved here is Communist domination of the world.”

Janssen tells the men’s colonel:  ”Your brainwashed sergeant didn’t sell me . . . on the idea that we should be involved in Southeast Asia.”  Predictably, the journalist ends up going with Wayne’s bunch to Vietnam, and ends up seeing the light.   The truth, as revealed in the rest of the movie (filmed in Georgia), is about the animal-like viciousness of the Vietcong, their hideous traps and tortures and atrocities.  South Vietnamese people (played by a boatload of mixed-Asian actors, none of them actually Vietnamese) are innocent and timid and immensely grateful for the chocolate and health care provided by the Americans.  There’s a cute orphan-mascot subplot.   There are many scenes with helicopters (the U.S. military gave an enormous amount of free assistance to Wayne and his “Batjac” film company.)  There are borrowings from hardened-commando movies (The Dirty Dozen, released a year earlier), hopeless assault movies, clever caper movies, even a little musical number thrown in (a sexy Vietnamese singer in a nightclub).  There’s a little comedy (Jim Hutton as a wacky misfit, doomed to die a hideous death by the end), some gruesome struggles (with some odd neon-red blood), a bit of the Tet Offensive, and the chance to see two Asian-American actors better known for TV roles–Star Trek’s George Takei and Barney Miller’s Jack Soo (both Japanese) on the big screen.

For Vietnam-movie “completists,” The Green Berets is a must-see, because of its stridently conservative, “patriotic” point of view, and because of the all-consuming involvement of John Wayne (though he gives an oddly detached, if self-directed, walkthrough of a performance).  It’s also useful for historians of the 1960s because it was released on the 4th of July, 1968–just a few weeks before the two presidential nominating conventions, and dead-center in the single worst year for American casualties in the Vietnam War, the year that public opinion on the homefront was turning decisively away from support for the war.

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AN UNCONVENTIONAL APPROACH

Exactly 42 years ago, the nation was on state of high alert and dreaded anticipation over “what was going to happen in Chicago”–by which everyone meant the Democratic National Convention, slated to begin on August 26th.  Violent confrontations with civil authorities– read:  Chicago’s notoriously hard-bitten police–were all but promised by the thousands of antiwar demonstrators descending on the Second City.  The Republicans had, as predicted, already nominated Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in Miami, without a lot of enthusiasm.  The focus now turned to Chicago.

The nation’s magazines were filled with political news throughout the summer:  Nixon and Wallace graced LIFE covers, Agnew and Nixon raised their hands triumphantly on the cover of Time. The editors at Harper’s, however, took a more “unconventional” approach.   The left-leaning general interest magazine used their August issue to highlight “The New Mayor and the Old,” John Lindsay of New York City, and Richard J. Daley of Chicago.

While the profiles of these men may not have helped readers understand the upcoming presidential elections, they did shed light on the political climate of 1968. In many ways, Lindsay and Daley embodied much of the polarizing nature of the year’s politics.   In Harper’s, David Halberstam paints Richard Daley as a powerful, hard-hitting politician:  “The poor of his city were afraid of him and the powerful of the nation deferred to him.” John Lindsay, on the other hand, is described by Larry L. King (not THAT Larry King) as hard-working and approachable, if somewhat naïve:  ”He has gone into the streets to seek out his constituency.” Lindsay was widely portrayed as having the “soft” approach to rioters and disturbers of the peace, in contrast with Daley, whose widely known aggressive approach landed him in hot water when he was accused of espousing “shoot first, ask questions later” rhetoric to his police force.

Just as race played into the larger political picture, so did it in Daley and Lindsay’s careers. Halberstam finds Daley’s politics heavily influenced by race discrimination, Daley being the “product of a time when the American ethic was to succeed…He does not like poverty programs in part because they represent a threat to his power—federal money going directly to black neighborhoods.” Lindsay comes out on the other side of the race coin, fighting for improved race relations, responding to politicians who have downplayed America’s shift towards “two societies, one black, and one white—separate and unequal” by remarking, “Well, by God, it is so.”

Of perhaps even greater interest here, however, is  historian Arthur Schlesinger’s “America 1968: The Politics of Violence,” published here as an essay, and first delivered as a commencement address in New York on June 6, 1968, when Senator Kennedy was in a California hospital, brain-dead.  Schlesinger’s words are bleak:  Americans, he said, “are today the most frightening people on the planet,” because of assassinations, urban violence, and the Vietnam War.   The “evil is in us. . . . We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.”

With thanks to guest blogger Katie Bates

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At 4:51 PM on this day 42 years ago, the pop artist Andy Warhol was declared clinically dead.

He had been shot a few hours earlier in the studio/offices known as “the Factory” in lower Manhattan.  The shooter was Valerie Solanas, an unhinged radical feminist who had written a pornographic play that she wanted Warhol– then at the peak of his notoriety–to produce as a film.  (A virtually minute-by-minute chronology of the incident has been compiled, and is available on the Warholstars website.)  In spite of severe injuries to multiple organs, Warhol somehow survived, though he never completely recovered.  He died after gall-bladder surgery in 1987 at the age of 58.

Valerie Solanas was arrested some hours after the shooting, after turning herself in to a policeman on a beat.  She was later quoted as saying that the reason she shot Warhol was that she “just wanted him to pay attention to me. Talking to him was like talking to a chair.”  A movie based on the incident, with a terrific performance by Lili Taylor as Solanas, was released in 1996.

Besides the 1966 play that Warhol turned down, the only other literary product of Valerie Solanas that survives is the virulently anti-male “SCUM Manifesto,” written in 1967 and then mimeographed and distributed by Solanas in 1968 on the streets of New York.   A portion of the single-spaced document (with obscenities removed) is reproduced here (courtesy of Cabinet magazine,

Summer 2005).   SCUM may (or may not) stand for the “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the manifesto lists a “few examples of the most obnoxious and harmful types [of men]:  rapists, politicians . . . ; lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Musak . . . . ; cops; tycoons; scientists . . . ; liars and phonies . . . ; all men in the advertising industry . . .; all members of the armed forces. . . .”

After the shooting and conviction, Solanas served a three-year prison term.  In the 1970s, she was hailed by some leading feminists as a victim and martyr, and as “an outstanding champion of women’s rights.”  She died in 1988 at the age of 52.

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Night of the Living Dead

I recently discovered that you can watch Night of the Living Dead– invariably described as a “cult classic” — online.  It’s one of the many free films you can get to through OpenCulture.com.

The director of this famously low-budget horror movie– the famous low budget being about $114,000– was George Romero.  For the recent special section of the New York Times on the 2010 summer movie season, Romero was asked to write about his favorite summer movie.  Now 70 and still making “Dead” movies (the sixth is set for US release on May 28, 2010), Romero chose the movie he and his buddies had made in 1968:

Summer, to me, means “drive-in.” I grew up in the Bronx. There was only one drive-in that was anywhere close, the Whitestone, out there near the bridge of the same name. I loved going there, usually taken by my Uncle Monroe, who was the only guy in the family with enough money to have bought a car.

So, a few years later, I go off to college in Pittsburgh. At that time, in the ’50s, don’t ask me why, Pittsburgh had maybe more drive-ins than any American city except Los Angeles. I used to go a lot. Always in the Plymouth that belonged to my buddy Rudy. I would sit in the front seat, munch-ing popcorn that cost way too much, while Rudy, in the back, sought validation as a male by doing smoochies with whatever girlfriend he was squeezing at the time.

I never saw a wonderful film at a drive-in (usually, they showed garbage, or scratched-up prints of movies you’d seen weeks ago downtown). Then, one day in 1968, some friends and I drove out to the Ardmore. It was showing a not-so-wonderful film that those same friends had helped me make: Night of the Living Dead. We couldn’t believe we had made a flick that was actually being distributed by a legitimate company. We couldn’t believe that it was actually playing locally. So we popped the corks out of a few jugs of Ripple and sat and watched, God’s truth, basically to convince ourselves that we weren’t dreaming.

I didn’t get any smoochies in the back seat of Karl Hardman’s Lincoln that night, but I felt 100 percent validated. And so I honestly have to say that my favorite summer movie was one that was made by me.

Romero’s memory may be a little faulty:  Night of the Living Dead wasn’t released until October 1, 1968, so it could not have been a “summer” movie that year.  Still, it fits one model of what a summer movie should be, or at least what they used to be: cheap and scary, good for the drive-ins.  George and his friends probably didn’t imagine that one day their little shocker would be called “the defining moment in modern horror cinema.”  Or that the film would be studied by film scholars and historians for its nightmarish reflection of the violence and social upheavals of the 1960s.  Or that it would one day (in 1999, actually) be selected for preservation by the Library of Congress as part of its National Film Registry of films that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Watch it now.  And watch out.

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Forty-two years ago today, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, America was convulsed by grief and outrage, as well as violent rioting in more than 100 cities.  American newspapers and magazines brought out special issues in honor of Dr. King.  JET–the small-format magazine that was a fixture in African-American homes in the 1960s–published this commemorative issue on April 18.  Today, it’s a collector’s item.

The Weekly Negro News Magazine

JET was founded in 1951 as the “Weekly Negro News Magazine” and is still published today by the Johnson Publishing Company of Chicago, which is also behind Ebony, the glossier, LIFE-sized black magazine.  JET is tiny:  just 4×5 inches, smaller even than Readers’ Digest, to which it is sometimes compared.  It was meant to provide bite-sized news and entertainment.  There were always news items from the civil rights front, gossip columns, sports news, book reviews, and entertainment features–all focusing on black subjects.

The killing of a prince

This commemorative issue is filled with photographs, including an open-coffin photo of Dr. King, which was less widely published in white-owned magazines.  The two-week lag between the killing and this issue also allowed JET to cover the many riots in American cities– a “mutiny of Negro citizens,” as Simeon Booker, the story’s writer, called it:  ”No single crime had enraged black men and women as the wanton killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the black prince of peace.”  Booker noted that the “intensity and fury of rioters and looters . . . eluded the Negro middle class.”

The Easter connection

JET noted that “among the strange coincidences of Dr. King’s death is the fact that, like the Saviour Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln, he was killed at Eastertime.”

(Easter Sunday in 1968 was on April 14.)   As the photo caption of Jesus, Lincoln, and King said:  ”all died for a better world.”

“We are pointing a gun at our own heads”

King himself is quoted liberally throughout the issue– the “Dream” speech, and the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”   But among the longest pieces in the issue is a reprint of a column by Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko.  He notes that the FBI would certainly catch up eventually to the killer (James Earl Ray eluded capture for two months), but that “it doesn’t matter if they do or if they don’t.”  Because, as Royko bitterly wrote:  ”Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions. They took part, from all over the country, pouring words of hate into the ear of the assassin. . . . So we killed him.  Just as we killed Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.  No other country kills so many of its best people. . . . We have pointed a gun at own head and we are squeezing the trigger.”

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Name one thing you know about Bullitt

Mention Bullitt to anyone who knows even just a little about movies, and I bet within 10 seconds the words “car chase” will be uttered.  And indeed, the car chase in this quintessentially 1968 film–vaulting through the (unusually quiet) streets of San Francisco and out into the northern California hills–is in some ways the granddaddy of them all.  Actually, the chase– police detective Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) in a now-iconic green “fastback” Mustang pursuing a couple of shotgun-shooting bad guys in a Dodge Charger– was inspired by a chase in Robbery, the previous film directed by Bullitt’s director, Peter Yates.  (This fact comes from Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies in his intro to Bullitt a few nights ago.)

The Bullitt car chase is, however, anything but derivative or tame.  Anyone who saw this movie when it first came out remembers being blown away by the stomach-churning drops and turns of the chase, which starts about an hour in and goes on for nearly 10 minutes.  There is not a word of dialogue, and the jazz score is only there at the beginning–otherwise, it’s all screeching tires and revving motors.   Amazingly, even on television the chase still works on a gut-punch level.

More than just a car chase.

But Bullitt is a lot more than just a car chase, classic though it is.  Saturday Review in its year-end 1968 issue, put Steve McQueen at dead center of its cover-story photo montage of “The NOW Movie” (see earlier post in Covering 1968).  It’s not exactly an “art film”–it’s still essentially a police procedural–but something about its affect and daring makes it feel different, edgy, smart. (Yates is British, after all, part of England’s astoundingly inventive 1960s film scene).  Take the credit sequence–so dark it’s nearly black-and-white, with some groovy graphics matched by some cool jazz–lots of horns and brushed cymbals–by Lalo Schifrin. Shattering glass, gunplay and screaming car action start right away.   The camera does a lot of tracking, and not just of moving vehicles; everything seems to be in motion, jittery.  There’s an extended, Hitchcockian chase — on foot– across an airport runway filled with taxiing jets. An emergency room surgeon is African American. Frank Bullitt has that cool disregard for the rules that came to be a standard trope of movie cops. As he says to the unctuous, corrupt politican played by Robert Vaughan, in what became the movie’s most-quoted lines:  ”You believe what you want. You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.”   The movie ends abruptly, wordlessly, ambiguously.

The look of 1968

Of course, one of the pleasures of movies set in the here-and-now of 1968 is being able reimagine that world:  If a gangster needs to make a call, he asks the cabbie to pull over at a pay phone.  Everyone in the boarding line at a very crowded airport is dressed up–men in suits and ties, women in dresses, hats, and stockings. “High-tech” police equipment–shown in close detail–is a copy-transmitting machine that’s hooked up to a phone receiver.  There’s still an Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco–it was torn down in 1991–and there are still airlines named PanAm and TWA.  Bullitt heats up his instant coffee with a little immersion heating coil.   ER nurses wear crisp little hats.  (Oddly, however, there’s little or no drinking or cigarette smoking–it’s not Mad Men.)

Violence as a way of life

But it’s not just the amusing period details that tell us this is 1968:  There is a lot of violence in Bullitt–not street violence, or racial violence–but it’s still intensely public.  There’s always a crowd witnessing the violence or the victims, and the director pans across the craning necks, the milling around, the murmuring.   And late in the movie, after Bullitt’s girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) sees Bullittt dealing with a gruesome murder scene, she confronts him with some harsh words, and suddenly Bullitt starts to seem like less like the maverick anti-hero and something closer to the Everyman of 1968:  ”With you, living with violence is a way of life, living with violence and death.  How can you be part of it, without becoming more and more callous?  What will happen to us in time?”  Bullitt’s answer:  ”Time starts now.”

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