The Hooverville Hexagon: Saturday at the Movies

 

We'll get back to Bulgaria – but today, let's talk about moving pictures and what they tell us.

But First, a Barn Owl

by Paigetheoracle

Paige's neighbours have a barn owl in residence now. No word on the backstory here, but isn't it a stunner?

 

And Another Big Bird

FWR saw this magnificent eagle at Keswick Wildlife Centre in 2019.

 

Short-Short Story

This video tells a story, just like a movie. They don't have to be long or in technicolour. Or involve human actors.

Serial Popcorn

Everybody's gone to the movies
Everybody's gone and it's groovy
They went to the one about the big war
I didn't, I'd seen it before…

Patti Griffin

 

I have written about Reacher before: the first season, which was about the peach pie. Well, no, it wasn't, but the only things I remember are that the guy is a stand-in for the ancient hero Herakles and that Canadians have no idea what a peach pie looks like.

 

We boycotted Reacher after that. After all, a series with plots unworthy of Varney the Vampire and acting to match aren't fun for anybody but the stunt crew. But this year, we got drawn back in due to the setting. I mean, Canada couldn't get Georgia right but could they manage Philadelphia?

 

The answer: sort of.  The eponymous hero tosses stunt players right, left, up and down while wearing an increasingly-bloodstained t-shirt that says, 'Get cracked in Philadelphia.' This is not a drug reference: there's a picture of the Liberty Bell. This time, instead of a peach pie, he's jonesing for a cheesesteak hoagie. Somebody actually pronounces 'Schuylkill' correctly.

 

The rest is the usual dreary, immoral mess: some bad guys do some bad things. Since two of them are beautiful women, they have to be really, really bad, so the audience won't mind when these tiny acrobats are killed in messy ways by a giant muscle-man. There's lots of collateral damage, as usual: enough to fill an episode of the 1950s Untouchables series, which is my personal yardstick for unnecessary civilian deaths.

 

Riley from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is still heroic: he dives into the Delaware holding a fully-armed suicide bomber. We are supposed to believe that the river survives although the bomber was carrying enough lethal toxin to wipe out a charity do's worth of rich pretend-do-gooders. Sigh. I was kind of sorry the terrorists didn't follow through on their threat to attack the Schuylkill Expressway during rush hour. Filming the Sure-Kill's bumper-to-bumper-at-70-miles-an-hour plus Reacher-style violence would have been quite an undertaking.

 

Anyway, episode 8 has come and gone, and so has Reacher, off on his next picaresque adventure, no doubt. Please, please go to the Yukon next. I want to see him down a whole can of sweetened condensed milk.

And Now, a Serious Movie Review:

Consciences and Kings

by Awix

Awix's reviews can be read online - he has a wide selection.

 

Editor's Note: This is a classy review, not like mine. I recently watched A Man for All Seasons on the small screen myself, and echo the sentiments that it's a good movie and I enjoyed the scenery. Back in the Dark Ages, I played The Common Man on stage myself. The actor who played Sir Thomas More was a fellow academic whom I thoroughly enjoyed beheading.

 

Written back at the end of June, hence the references to this year's omni-heatwave.

 

It's been a case of 'any way to get out of the sun and into a dark and preferably air-conditioned room' this last week or so, and so I am not inclined to question why Fred Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons is receiving a revival currently. It may be because the film is currently on the cusp of its 60th anniversary, having been released in December 1966 and going on to do rather well at the following Oscars.

 

Now, as you have surely noticed, I will go and see… well, not quite anything, but my tastes are more Catholic than most. But I was perhaps edged towards deciding to see A Man for All Seasons not just because of the film's reputation and the infernal current temperatures, but because it's one of the tiny handful of films my father loves and will abandon pretty much anything else to watch: other members of this select group are High Noon (also directed by Zinnemann), To Kill a Mockingbird, and… well, maybe Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, but I'd have to check. What links these films, except for the Davy Crockett one, is that they are all about men sticking to their principles regardless of the great personal risk or cost this presents them with. Without going into too much detail this is very on-brand for my dad, who beneath a self-effacing and soft-spoken exterior has a moral core like unto adamantium.

 

This is also quite on-brand for the movie, which opens in England in 1529. The political situation in the country is at the heart of the film, so forgive me for recapping the history so far: Henry VIII is king of England and needs an heir, but his older wife is unable to provide him with one. As they are both Catholics, they need special dispensation from the Pope to get a divorce, but this the Pope is unwilling to grant. What follows makes up the backdrop for the film.

 

At the very start of the film, the Chancellor (Orson Welles) summons Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield), a lawyer from a relatively humble background, and asks for his assistance in changing the Pope's mind. More refuses, mainly because he feels the Pope is right and the laws of God cannot be put aside to suit the preferences of kings. This is a brave and potentially lethal position to adopt in Tudor England.

 

The Chancellor fails in his mission and dies in disgrace, and the poisoned chalice of his office passes to More, who is famous throughout England for his intelligence, wisdom, principles, and moral authority. Henry (a barnstorming cameo from Robert Shaw) drops in for tea with More and makes clear what will happen next – Henry is going to have himself made head of the Church in England, thus acquiring the power to grant himself a divorce and legally marry again. Henry initially makes it clear that he doesn't expect More to help with this – but any opposition to it will have serious consequences.

 

Well, the great pageant of English history moves on, and – as generally happens – the walls move closer together. With the Reformation in full swing, Henry decides that all men of consequence in England must take an oath recognising him as head of the Church and the legality of what he has done. Taking the oath is, of course, relatively simple, but also utterly impossible for any dissenters who want to retain their integrity.

 

The script does a good job of explaining the film's toxic mixture of politics, theology and history, but when you get down to it, the crisis at the heart of the film is very simple – what should a man choose, when doing the wrong thing will bring him great rewards, and doing the right thing will get him killed? The brilliance of the script and Scofield's performance is that you are never in doubt that More is in the right, despite the fact that his inflexibility causes immense suffering not just to him but also his family – also, he never comes across as stuffy or a prig, just a man who treats the serious matters of life with due gravity.

 

It's Scofield's movie, obviously – as a classical stage actor, there aren't a huge number of films where he plays a prominent role (he was going to be in the 80s adaptation of Nineteen Eighty Four but a broken leg meant the part went to Richard Burton), so it is great to have this as a testament to what was clearly an immense talent (Mel Gibson, who performed with him in Hamlet, compared the experience to boxing with Mike Tyson). But the list of big talents in A Man for All Seasons is formidable – Shaw, Welles, Wendy Hiller, Susannah York, Leo McKern, the actor Corin Redgrave, Nigel Davenport (playing, if family legend is to be believed, one of my own distant ancestors), and John Hurt (not quite making his film debut, but still very early days for him). There is not a weak link to be found anywhere, either in the cast or the rest of the production – just solid, measured quality all the way down.

 

The film dispenses with some of the theatrical devices of the play on which it is based, for example the identification of many minor roles with the character of 'the Common Man', and Zinnemann manages to find some proper cinematic flourishes to replace them with – for example, the scene where the sycophants of the court sprint across a mudflat and hurl themselves into a river in order to stay close to the King. Some of the points made by this film have barely aged at all – powerful men can be capricious, self-regarding, spiteful and childish, and the question of how one should deal with this bears careful thought.

 

Theology doesn't play quite the role in day to day life it once did, but there are always going to be issues of right and wrong and these will always carry consequences. A Man for All Seasons dramatises this as well as it could be done. This is a film of the highest quality.

  

See you at the Bijou, Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor