"Captain Phillips" 2013 Tom Hanks. Why This Excellent Action Adventure Film Is Not A Ten - How Film Handled Clash of Civilizations

"Captain Phillips" is an excellent action-adventure film. It is riveting, suspenseful, exciting, and very well-made. There are no off moments; no built-in "bathroom breaks." Somali pirates capturing an American ship off the Horn of Africa is a timely and fraught topic.

The film's verisimilitude is so powerful at times I really did drift into thinking that I was watching a documentary. There's a lot of money up on the screen: cargo vessels, beat-up pirate skiffs, ports, open ocean, Navy warships. Even so it was the performances and the pacing that kept my eyes glued to the screen. I found every last character so well played and gripping, right down to the medic who appears toward the end, that I wondered if Director Paul Greenglass had not hired real corpsmen, or real pirates.

Sound is used masterfully. Loud, pulsing music suddenly stops at key moments. Yeah, it's an old trick, but it works especially well here.

This is the kind of film I am grateful to have seen in a theater, and I am eager to recommend to friends. Even though action-adventure is not my genre, I'd re-watch this film, and that is high praise.

This film is so consistently excellent that one must ask why it doesn't raise to the level of a ten-out-of-ten star film. "Captain Phillips" touches on some of the biggest issues of our times: the collision between the First World and the Third World, poverty in Africa, jihad. "Captain Phillips" assiduously avoids addressing any of these issues.

From this film, viewers would never know that the millions of dollars in ship ransom that pirates claim goes to al-Shabaab, the terrorist group that attacked a mall in Kenya. Muse (Barkhad Abdi) offers rationalizations for piracy: Western nations stole Somalia's fish, and piracy is the "tax" for that. Pirates made millions of dollars through piracy. Those millions were not pocketed by the pirates themselves, who work for others. No reference is made to Somalis, in 1993, dragging an American soldier through Mogadishu's streets. Americans were attempting to help Somalis after a famine.

Phillips does mention that his ship, waylaid by pirates, was carrying food aid for hungry Africans.

None of this is gone into in any detail in the script, and it could have been.

Rather, the First World - Third World clash, and the clash of civilizations and religions is communicated solely through images, and, in the absence of a complex script, the images speak very loudly.

Somalia is depicted as a dusty, dry, hellhole. Somalis are depicted as chaotic, unproductive, violent, angry, greedy, and lawless. Somalis are dressed in discarded Western clothing and plastic sandals, or simply barefoot. They live in huts. They only things they possess that give them any power is the guns that they got from Westerners. Somalis hold life cheaply and are ready to kill and die.

Americans are depicted as orderly, disciplined, skilled, courageous, and productive. Americans devote massive amounts of money to saving one life.

When the Somali pirates manage to get their ladder against the Maersk Alabama, the image suggests the pirates as invasive parasites attempting to assault a larger, more successful organism. Whereas the Westerners have built a civilization that creates ships and commerce, the Somalis have created only violence, chaos and greed. They must take guns that they themselves can't manufacture and invade more productive peoples in order to survive. It's an ugly picture, and I can completely understand if Somalis are enraged by this film.

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon's film critic, apparently was enraged by the film, and he lambasted it. It was distressing to O'Hehir to watch "corn-fed, gym-toned" Americans struggle against "malnourished" Africans. That the thin Africans were holding guns to the heads of the Americans did not disturb him. O'Hehir calls the film "unpleasant and uncomfortable." He hated watching American military rescue an American hostage. What a sick dude, you want to say. But his view is all too common.

I greatly enjoyed this movie. It could have been an all-time classic if the script had offered some insight into the issues the images depicted.

Malala Yousafzai

"Walking South" in The Apple Valley Review

Walking South

by Danusha V. Goska

Walking south rapidly on Alameda

avenue of rainbow windsocks and money

enjoying the sweep of the lawns and the houses

I walk to my cheap and noisy apartment

commuting on foot like any peasant.

Like a leopard’s pelt in a swift running river

my body’s a palette, recipient of light shifts

shadows and chill that weren’t here yesterday

when the sun was high at this very same time.

Flanking the avenue, sycamores, like poodles

clipped to survive Berkeley’s stingy dry summers

are shedding new east-leaning shadows upon me.

Undulant splotches swing with my arms.

And suddenly my mood, and the day, are quite different;

suddenly burrow like Persephone or turnips.

Nothing is flippant; three ivy leaves, scarlet;

I’m smelling the mothballs and planning Thanksgiving.

This light is so rich, I must savor, not squander it.

Rescue, a post card, this gold street I scoff at.

My body’s a calendar; the earth charts turns on it.

Winter is stalking this hot August street.

I’m ready to learn to obey winter’s dictates

turn to roots, eat amber fruits, baking and buttering

steaming on silver, studded with spice;

to view naked limbs claw like seasonal hunger

networks of twigs raking brief pewter light

as teachers of clarity, gratitude, and vigor.

When the year has sunk to its cold, dark aphelion

like icicles serrating down from the gables

it snaps, turns back, swings round into spring.

Sometimes I feel young just cause I’m alive, still.

And this street, goddammit, reminds me of someone

who on solstice wore black and a bright cloud

of white hair and spoke of a bitter disdain for winter

though he looked the God of it, I swear.

I wanted to take him into my home, then,

glowing with candles, red velvet, and soup,

and feed him some pumpkin, some cloves, some cinnamon

and tell him old stories and buck him up.

I wanted to make him a lover of winter

which never happened you know, these things go with the seasons

and the houses one lives in,

and how one commutes.

Walking south rapidly on Alameda

to my cheap bright apartment, hot from the sun.

***

My poem "Walking South" appears in the fall issue of the Apple Valley Review, here.

"Save Send Delete" is Perfect for Book Discussion Groups says Wendy Your Librarian

Wendy Your Librarian reviews "Save Send Delete" at Amazon. Wendy's review is visible here.

I am a New Jersey Public Librarian and moderate a monthly book discussion hour. Last month I chose "Save Send Delete" by Danusha V. Goska and by far it produced one of the very best hours we ever shared together. The "I" letter adjectives describing the impact of the book on the group were flying: insightful, informative, intelligent, intimate, interesting, intense, and yes, important. The hour ran into overtime.

I adore the book and have so many pages tabbed with post-its that I could be the book's indexer. Now two months since I have read it I still have it on my nightstand. It is my new "go to" book for when I am having *moments*. Like, pages 102-104 are my reality checks, and, pages 139-141 are there for when I hurt.

Please get your hands on a copy of "Save Send Delete" and let Ms. Goska's profoundly personal treasure benefit you too.

The Definitive List of the Top Ten Films of All Time, Part Two

Below is part two of the definitive list of the ten best films of all time.

Part one is here.

If you disagree with any of my choices of the top ten films of all time, uniformed personnel will arrive at your place shortly with enhanced appreciation techniques to convince you of the right path.

The Definitive List of the Top Ten Films of All Time, Part Two

"The Haunting" 1963 Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn

Directed and produced by Robert Wise. Screenplay by Nelson Gidding based on a book by Shirley Jackson.

"The Haunting" is regularly named as one of the scariest films ever made, but I've never seen anyone class it among the greatest films ever made. That's an oversight. Pound for pound, "The Haunting" is a better depiction of evil than "Schindler's List."

I saw "The Haunting" as a little kid. I saw it on a small, black-and-white television, in a house full of people. My viewing of it was interrupted by commercials, by family members passing between me and the television screen, and by static when the rooftop antennae shifted in the wind.

For decades, after that one viewing, no matter how old I got, no matter where I was, if I walked into a room and "The Haunting" was playing on TV, or if, while changing channels on a television I accidentally stumbled across a screening of "The Haunting," I would rapidly leave the room and walk outside. I had to get outside, as if the contact with the film was a sticky web that had ensnared me, something sick and palpable that I had to scrape off my person lest it suck me down into something foul.

"The Haunting" didn't just scare me. It invited me to the dark side and I had no life-jacket or rappelling ropes to ensure that I'd get back if I tipped over the edge.

When I was well into adulthood, and I had faced many of life's evils head-on – this was when I was in grad school, my most malevolent exposure to the dark side – I decided it was time to take the bull by the horns. I had to re-watch "The Haunting" and figure out what this film had done that had scared me so much.

It scared me yet again. Suddenly I realized why.

On the surface, "The Haunting" is a by-the-numbers scary movie. You have a big, old house. You have a defenseless, blonde female. You have ghosts. But that is just the surface. It's what's beneath the surface that makes this movie one of the best ever made.

SPOILERS! I'm going to reveal, here, the ending of "The Haunting" and what I think "The Haunting" is all about, and it *isn't* about ghosts.

"The Haunting" is based on a novel by Shirley Jackson. Jackson is the brilliant author who gave us "The Lottery," a classic short story. If you haven't already read it, you can read it here. "The Haunting of Hill House" is a very well regarded novel. Here's the opening paragraph:

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

Of this opening, Stephen King wrote, "I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend the sum of the parts." Paula Guran wrote, "The genius of Jackson's fiction is primarily rooted in this discovery of the quiet evil that pervades ordinary life. Her fictional darkness stems from the seemingly mundane."

Robert Wise, who directed and produced "The Haunting," respected the source material and worked hard to honor it.

The plot is simple. Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), who looks like a poor man's Clark Gable, is a paranormal investigator. He recruits a psychic, Theo (Claire Boom) and Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), a woman to whom odd things happen, to help him investigate Hill House, which is said to be haunted. Eleanor develops a crush on Dr. Markway, but he is married. His wife, Grace, shows up, and Eleanor is crushed.

Weird occurrences at the house ratchet up. These weird events could be evidence of ghosts, or they could be evidence that Eleanor is losing her mind. Eleanor runs out of the house, gets into a car, and drives. She nearly collides with Grace. She swerves, hits a tree, and is killed. Eleanor may have lost her mind, or she may have been taken over by malevolent, supernatural forces.

It's Eleanor's characterization and story arch that make "The Haunting" an irreplaceable classic.

Eleanor is a woman without a place. She's not a bad person. She's just a bit odd. She doesn't fit in. She isn't ugly, merely mousy. She's in her thirties, but she has the long, straight hair of a schoolgirl. She isn't cruel, merely awkward. She's never had her own life. She shuttered herself up to take care of her invalid mother. In spite of her self-sacrifice, her mother died.

People are supposed to see what others see. Eleanor sees things that no one else sees. She has paranormal experiences. She doesn't want to have them; they just happen to her.

People don't like Eleanor. They want her to disappear. They do not invite her into their communities. She is kept apart, sleeping on the couch in her married sister's apartment. Eleanor has no friends, no husband, no career.

Eleanor is not a sentimentalist's version of an outsider. She's no saint. Early in the film she's shown being cranky and a bit weird. Her one endearing quality is her insistence on soldiering on in spite of her crappy life, and her hope that her life could get better. Being invited to the investigation of Hill House is a promising adventure for her. Your heart breaks for her as she dreams of new horizons that cloud up and betray her.

Eleanor is especially pathetic as a woman alone. Women are supposed to be beautiful, and Eleanor is klutzy and mousy. Women are supposed to be nurturers of new life and Eleanor nurtured a dying old woman, whom she let die. Women are supposed to be loved by men, but no man has ever loved Eleanor. She is constantly contrasted with women who have a place in the world: her sister, who has a husband; Grace, the wife of the man she develops a crush on; Theo, a chic and independent lesbian.

At first, Eleanor bravely resists the house's seductive evil. One of the film's most famous and most terrifying scenes depicts Eleanor, alone in bed, suddenly beset by supernatural sounds. Eleanor is terrified. Her face breaks out in a sweat. She begs Theo to hold her hand.

She hears a child crying. She knows the house is the ultimate evil – a force that abuses children. Eleanor wants to resist this sickeningly evil force. We hear her inner monologue. She vows that she will stop this abuse of children. She condemns "this filthy house" and says she is putting up with it only for the sake of Dr. Markway. She struggles, she struggles so hard, this shy and reclusive woman says to herself, "I will open my mouth. I will yell." She does yell. She rises up and yells, "Stop it!" – Stop abusing that child!

Her shout wakens Theo. Theo is across the room. Eleanor had not been holding Theo's hand after all. Eleanor had been holding the hand of the evil house she can never escape, no matter how hard she tries.

"The Haunting"'s most famous effect is a loud banging on doors. This banging is the opposite of the knocking that Jesus describes. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock," Jesus says. The knocking in "The Haunting" is not coming from Jesus, but from the dark side.

Why can't Eleanor escape evil Hill House? Why can't she just walk away from the darkness banging on that door?

Eleanor's loneliness and awkwardness make her easy pickings for the dark side. She is flattered that Hill House so persistently invites her. She surrenders because evil is the only thing that has ever paid any attention to her at all. Evil gains its strength from Eleanor's surrender. Without Eleanor willing herself to the dark side, willing herself there with despair at her difference and loneliness, evil has no power. It's just a bunch of scary sounds and ominous shadows. When Eleanor gives in to evil, she gives evil her skin, muscles, and breath. Evil gains power from Eleanor's despair.

Evil does not keep its promise. The film ends with the line, "We who walk here, walk alone." Eleanor is still alone.

To me, that is gut-churningly terrifying. Eleanor's story could be the story of some loser joining the Hitler Youth, or Judas, or an overwhelmed mother who gives in to her sense of overwhelm and kills her own kids, or any number of other real-world horrors. Shirley Jackson tells this age-old story of the banality of evil as a ghost story, and the lessons about evil reach an audience who would never pick up Hannah Arendt.

We tend to think of evil as a word that is written only in capital letters, as an entity encountered only in exotic and dramatic locales like the Nuremberg Rally. Evil is found in small things, like feeling left out, like our tendency to marginalize odd people, like loneliness. Evil is found in our surrender to despair when we feel sad and alone.

There's a little bit of author Shirley Jackson in her fictional character, Eleanor. Jackson was a tremendously gifted writer, but, after her early death, her husband, Edgar Hyman, complained that she had not received the recognition she so deserved. It was hard for Jackson to be different. She drank, smoked, overate, and took drugs. She was agoraphobic, once not leaving her house for almost three months. She died of a heart attack at age 48. Edgar Hyman wrote:

"If the source of her images was personal or neurotic, she transformed those images into meaningful general symbols; if she used the resources of supernatural terror, it was to provide metaphors for the all-too-real terrors of the natural...

For all her popularity, Shirley Jackson won surprisingly little recognition. She received no awards or prizes, grants or fellowships; her name was often omitted from lists on which it clearly belonged, or which it should have led. She saw those honors go to inferior writers, without bitterness...I think that the future will find her powerful visions of suffering and inhumanity increasingly significant and meaningful."

There's a fine essay about Shirley Jackson by Paula Guran here.

There's more about the house that was used as Hill House here and here. 

***

"The Bitter Tea of General Yen" 1933. Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Walter Connolly, Toshia Mori. Directed by Frank Capra. Based on a book by Grace Zaring Stone.

No. "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" is NOT one of the ten best films ever made.

Why am I listing it?

Because, it me, TBToGY epitomizes the magic of movies.

I was living in Berkeley, California. The UC Theater on University Avenue was a vintage movie house, built in 1917. Werner Herzog ate his shoe in that theater. The UC Theater was a favorite site of audience-participation showings of "Rocky Horror."

One cloudy fall day they were showing "The Bitter Tea of General Yen." I was excited because it was a Golden Era Hollywood film that I'd never heard of. When you watch as many Golden Age movies as I do, it's hard to find worthy films you've never heard of.

I went to the matinee.

I was entranced.

Before I left the theater, I had the usher stamp my hand. The UC Theater had a rubber stamp they would use. If you wanted to leave the theater and get some Thai food at the restaurant next door and come back to catch the second of a double feature, you could do so.

I walked the two miles back to my rented room and told my housemates about this fabulous film I had just seen, an unknown classic, "The Bitter Tea of General Yen." I said I couldn't wait to re-watch it at the evening showing. I said I really wanted to see, again, the sparkly red dress that Barbara Stanwyck wore when she finally succumbed to her illicit passion for General Yen. I was careful not to wash my hands.

When I got back to the theater and sat down to re-watch the film, I realized that Barbara Stanwyck could not have been wearing a red dress; the film was in black-and-white. That's movie magic.

There's a reason I'd never heard of "The Bitter Tea of General Yen." "Yen" is one of those transgressive works of art that steps on everybody's toes, right and left, American and Asian, libertine and prude. It is a perverse film. That's part of why I love it.

"Bitter Tea" opens, as all perverse films should, at a missionary party. It's the Chinese Civil War. A bunch of white Americans are celebrating in an American-style living room. China looms outside, in the dark. There are a couple of blank-faced Chinese domestic servants; Capra uses their faces to full effect.

The missionaries are celebrating the anticipated arrival of Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck), the fiancée of Dr. Robert Strike. She's from a fine, old Puritan family and she has never been to China before.

Megan Davis arrives, but her paths cross with a callous Chinese warlord, General Yen (Nils Asther). In a crowd, Megan is hit on the head by a disgruntled coolie. She passes out. Yen kidnaps Megan as his sexual hostage. He drugs her and transports her via his own troop train. His stated goal is to "convert a missionary."

Yen never uses force on Megan; in fact he never touches her until a relatively chaste embrace toward the end of the film. Yen wants to convert Megan to loving him, and to respecting his culture, for which she had expressed some contempt. He attempts to seduce her with kind words, poetry, cherry blossoms, costly jade, and his luxurious mansion, where he offers her servants, silks, jewels, cosmetics, perfume, and fine food. Yen says to Megan, "You have the true missionary spirit. There are times when I would like to laugh at you, but there are also times when I find you admirable."

Megan resists. She is a captive. She wants to escape. She's afraid of being raped. She is horrified that even as Yen is attempting to seduce her, executions of his enemies continue apace in another portion of his compound, shootings Megan can hear. Megan, full of hate, says, "You yellow swine."

She protests, "It's pretty hard to become acquainted with a man who ruthlessly slaughters helpless prisoners in one move, and in the next shows such a tender reverence for the beauty of the moon. The subtlety of you Orientals is very much overestimated."

Megan attempts to teach General Yen Christian ways. She beseeches him to show kindness to his concubine, Mah-Li (Toshia Mori). He does so. After he gives Mah-Li a little leeway, Mah-Li uses that leeway to sabotage him. Mah-Li's actions tear the rug out from under Yen. His troops rebel; his wealth and power evaporate.

Only after she has, inadvertently, destroyed Yen does Megan realize that she can no longer resist her attraction to him. She dresses in the silks Yen had given her, Asian costume she had previously spurned. She goes to his side and plumps his pillows as she had seen Mah-Li do. She embraces Yen.

It's too late. Yen, ruined by his love for a Christian woman, has planned his suicide. Yen is about to consume the bitter tea that will kill him.

"Silk. China gave the world silk," he says, enigmatically. Yen slumps on his throne, dead, even as Megan kneels at his feet and presses his lifeless hand to her lips.

Later, Megan is seen escaping on a boat. Jones (Walter Connolly), an American businessman in China, tells her that she may encounter Yen in another life. "Maybe he's the wind that's pushing that sail. Maybe he's the wind that's playing around in your hair."

How did this movie so entrance me?

I have no interest in China. Nils Asther is an aloof, not very erotic presence. The make-up used to alter the appearance of his eyes is obvious and grotesque. Yen is a perverse, sadistic figure.

Barbara Stanwyck is not a favorite star. I don't have sexual fantasies of being kidnapped and seduced by a warlord. The plot here is pure fantasy, weak and silly. I can never believe that one move by Mah-Li could reduce a warlord to suicide.

What gets me is the filmmaker's craft that turned a flimsy, ridiculous rape and miscegenation fantasy into a walk into someone else's dream, a dream that becomes your own.

"The Bitter Tea of General Yen" takes place in China, but it is the product of a Hollywood studio. No scenes were shot in China and a Swede and a Japanese play the two main Chinese characters, Yen and Mah-Li.

Yet TBToGY evokes China with a sharp poignancy. It's a China brought to life through will and hocus pocus, Joseph Walker's exquisite cinematography, and magical suggestion. It's a sleeping child's dream of China. The film is a sparkler that goes off in your imagination. I feel that if Frank Capra directed, and Joseph Walker did the cinematography, they could use flashlights and bedsheets to turn my apartment into China.

There's a relatively unimportant scene at the opening missionary party. One of the missionaries announces that he's been in China for fifty years. He tells a horrifying story of Mongolian bandits crucifying members of a caravan. Capra's filming of this throwaway scene exemplifies why I worship this movie. Capra uses his camera to make me, or you – the viewer – a celebrant at the party, and a listener to the story.

He could have handled that scene the way a hundred other directors would have – just flatfootedly slapped the images up on the screen the way a baker slaps icing on a cake with a spatula. Just let the images provide the kind of boring exposition the story requiers to get going, but that viewers feel no need or desire to pay much attention to after they've assimilated the necessary background.

But Capra uses his camera the way Rembrandt used a brush. He doesn't just create explanatory images that provide atmosphere and exposition. He lavishes as much of his art on a throwaway scene as on a heavy plot point. He finds the unique beauty and life in the common. He sucks you in. Every time I watch "Bitter Tea," I pay as much attention to this scene as to more important ones, and I derive as much delight.

In one scene, Megan is shown waking up from being drugged. She looks around and slowly realizes that she is in a train compartment with General Yen and his concubine. General Yen is seated across from her. Beyond a door with a window in it, troops carouse. The sound from the troops is muffled. Lighting is provided by visible lamps that cast realistic shadows.

Megan is lying down, too sleepy to stand. She sees Yen, a man she had crossed paths with, seated across from her. She doesn't yet know what's going on, but she sees him staring at her intently. Megan watches as Mah-Li plumps Yen's pillows, puts out his cigarette, and puts his feet up. Megan's hand travels down her body, and she grabs a blanket and pulls it over herself.

This scene is quiet – almost nothing is said – and yet it evokes much. It is one of the most erotic scenes I've ever seen in a film, and yet everyone is fully clothed and there is virtually no touching. Capra uses light, shadow, the muffled sound of the troops, the "movement" of the "train" to create sensations in the viewer.

The scene in "Bitter Tea of General Yen" that anyone who talks about the movie talks about is the scene where Megan dreams of General Yen raping her.

Megan is sleeping in the elaborate bedroom in which Yen has ensconced her. She dreams that her door is forced open. General Yen approaches her to rape her. But he doesn't look as he looks in real life. His Chinese features are exaggerated. He moves in a creepy, cringing fashion. His fingernails are long and pointed. He fondles her breasts.

A new man breaks into her room. He is dressed as Dr. Strike, her American fiancee. Megan is happy. She will be rescued! The man in Strike's clothing punches Yen. The man then embraces Megan. He reveals himself to be … not her fiancee, Strike, at all, but General Yen. Megan is ecstatic. She melts into bliss. The camera follows her face through her slack-jawed, smokey-eyed orgasm.

But the scene that really throws me is when Megan attempts to convert Yen to Christianity. Megan's voice deepens and flutters. She is throwing all her passion into this attempt. It's obvious that her religiosity is sublimated sexuality. She wants Yen and she knows it's wrong – he's a sadist, cold, her sexual kidnapper, and Chinese. So rather than seduce him, or succumb to his seduction, she tries to convert him.

Yen asks her why she should care about a Chinese person.

She says that all humans are the same.

He asks if she really believes that and he touches her hand.

She recoils. The touch of a "yellow swine" is disgusting to her.

He sees through her hypocrisy and denounces her for it.

Yes, "Bitter Tea" is pure pulpy fantasy, but I've never seen a better depiction of desperate, caged human emotions.

You can see why "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" upsets everybody. It was the first film shown at Radio City Music Hall. It was quickly withdrawn.

Scientific Racism dominated thought and culture in the US at the time that "Bitter Tea" was released. American scientists, journalists, and indeed politicians and law declared not only Chinese people to be an inferior race apart, but also Italians like Capra (and Bohunks like me).

It simply was not acceptable to depict a white girl even imagining intimate contact with a Chinese man, even if that Chinese man were played by Nils Asther, a Swede. The suggestion was so abhorrent that the Chinese man who provided imaginary satisfaction to Megan had to die at the end of the movie.

Today, "Bitter Tea" offends the Politically Correct. The film certainly depicts "Orientals" as other – as different than whites. General Yen callously kills his enemies. He kidnaps a woman he wants, though he never touches her without her permission. He mistreats Mah-Li. Mah-Li is a conniver. The missionary tells the story of the Mongolian bandits crucifying merchants. The Politically Correct will not allow you to watch "Bitter Tea" without their warning labels attached.

In addition to the heart, imagination, and craft onscreen, it is the quiet, harmless perversity and transgression of "Bitter Tea" that make me love it as much as I do. 

***

"It Happened One Night" 1934 Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, directed by Frank Capra, produced by Frank Capra and Harry Cohn, Screenplay by Robert Riskin

Was there anything anything like "It Happened One Night" before "It Happened One Night"?

No.

A thousand films since "It Happened One Night" have tried to recreate its magic. Has any superseded it?

No.

"It Happened One Night" was sui generis when it first appeared. It sprang fully grown from Frank Capra's divine Sicilian head. Hollywood had produced nothing else quite like it.

Before "It Happened One Night" there were glamorous romances involving Garbo and Gilbert, Valentino and Swanson, coarser, pratfall comedies, and stylized depictions of average Joes, like Chaplin's Little Tramp and the Gish sisters doe-eyed waifs. There was never a naturalistic combination of the cozily every day, sophisticated wit, the sublime, and the genuinely human before Capra.

You see working class women in their intimate garments lining up outside to use a communal shower; you see an heiress in a form-fitting lamé gown; you get a lesson in dunking donuts, road thieves and hitchhiking.

Frank Capra managed to take the lumpen stuff of day-to-day Depression-era life in the US and make it dance a ballet that's laugh-out-loud funny, black-tie-sophisticated, and straight-from-the-heart real. With all that, "It Happened One Night" is never anything but highly intelligent, and very loving. "It Happened One Night" is as fresh today as rain on your face. There are moments of pathos – when the jobless single mother passes out and her son tries to revive her – and moments of deep, romantic eroticism – when Peter describes the island he wants to share with his beloved. This all happens, believably, in roadside hotels and on night buses. The miracle is it all feels real. You totally believe that a woman could get on a night bus and meet a dynamic hunk of charmed masculinity like Clark Gable.

The sets are shaky and drab, when they are not open roads, streams and fields. Columbia was not a rich studio. Claudette Colbert wears the same unadorned, working-girl's dress through much of the film. Out of so much nothing – nothing but his stars' tremendous charisma and his own God given heart, wit and smarts – Capra created a deathless classic and the role model for an entire genre, the romantic comedy.

***

"The Apartment" 1960 Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray. Directed and produced by Billy Wilder; written by Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond.

I wrote about "The Apartment" in my book "Bieganski." You can read that portion of the book here.

***

"All About Eve" 1950 Bette Davis, Celeste Holm, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill, George Sanders, Hugh Marlowe. Directed and written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck.

Literate script, literate script, literate script. Sample lines from "All About Eve":

"What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end."

"You're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent!"

"The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!"

"The bed looks like a dead animal act."

"You can always put that award where your heart ought to be."

"I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind."

"Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass."

"You're too short for that gesture."

"When we get home you're going to get into one of those girdles and act for two and a half hours."

"I couldn't get into the girdle in two and a half hours."

"Outside of a bee hive Margo, your behavior would not be considered either queenly or motherly."

"There isn't a playwright in the world who could make me believe this would happen between two adult people."

"You won't bore him long; you won't get a chance to talk."

"Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke."

"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"

"***
No, this isn't really my list of my own personal favorite films of all time. If it were, it would have included "Jane Eyre" 1944, "Airplane," "North and South" 2004, "My Dinner with Andre," "300" 2006, "Charade" 1963, "Man of Marble" and "Man of Iron," and "Besieged" 1998. 

***

Why are most of the films on my list old? Where are the newer films that deserve to be on an all-time ten best list?

Hey, you tell me.

For this list I stuck with American films. If I had included foreign films, I would have included Oliver Hirschbigel's masterpiece "Downfall." My review of that film is here.

Another recent, amazing film is the 2007 Turkish film "Bliss" review here.

"The Apartment" 1960 Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine

I'm blogging the definitive list of the top ten films ever made. One of those films is Billy Wilder's 1960 film "The Apartment." I wrote about "The Apartment" in my book "Bieganski." I'll repost those comments here. For the purposes of the book, I focused on the treatment of Fran Kubelik, the Bohunk character in "The Apartment."

The Apartment

The Apartment won the best picture Oscar of 1960; Oscars also went to Billy Wilder for his direction and Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for their screenplay. Bosley Crowther called it a " ... gleeful, tender, and even sentimental film," and praised its "ingenious" direction, "splendid" performances, and "action and dialogue tumbling with wit" (Crowther 1960). The New York Times named it one of the year's top ten.

The Apartment opens with a crisp aerial view of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In a voice-over, Jack Lemmon, as the movie's hero, C. C. Baxter, recites statistics: if all the citizens of New York were laid end to end they would reach Karachi. The narrator knows things like this because he crunches numbers for an insurance company. The camera cuts to Baxter's desk, one of hundreds in a starkly lit office, beehive-like in its uniformity and buzz. We soon discover what sets Baxter apart in this dizzying series of images of an imperial, dehumanizing, gray flannel America: he allows higher-ups to conduct illicit sexual liaisons in his one-bedroom bachelor apartment. This boy is going places.

In exchange for his compliance, Baxter's superiors put in a good word for him with the powerful Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). Sheldrake, when promoting Baxter, puts an end to the other men's shenanigans, only to reserve Baxter's apartment for his affair with Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine; "Kubelik" is a Czech name) an elevator operator. A series of alternately melancholy, comic, and near tragic scenes follow, centering on Baxter's brokering of his apartment for professional advancement, and the erosive effect this has on his humanity. Fran, depressed by her affair with Sheldrake, attempts suicide in the apartment; Baxter nurses her. A neighbor, Dr. Dreyfus, helps Baxter rescue Fran. Cabby Karl Matushka, Fran's brother-in-law, arrives to punch Baxter out. Eventually Fran and Baxter come to understand that they love each other, and unite, happily, leaving Sheldrake and the rat race behind them.

Fran Kubelik and Karl Matushka bear certain superficial similarities to the Bohunks described so far. They do blue-collar work; they abjure socially coded displays meant to impress as intelligence. Their physicality, in the form of Fran's sexual surrender and Matushka's violence, is essential to their characters. There is a world of difference, though, between the Bohunks of The Apartment and of the three previously discussed films.

Many Bohunks did work with their bodies, live in poverty, lack education, and sense that they were different and despised. That sense contributed to a discomfort that outsiders often read as irrational hostility or anti-cultural clannishness (Novak Guns xv, xvi). As we have seen, writers, producers and directors may, in getting these surface ethnographic details right, get the inner men and women wrong. Fran Kubelik and Karl Matushka, however, communicate to the attentive viewer that the circumstances of their lives do not define them, and that their manifest traits are their best option for dealing with the world as it has been presented to them, rather than evidence of inferior blood. Further, Fran, Matushka, and the Jewish Doctor Dreyfus are allowed eyes and mouths. They are allowed subjectivity. They are allowed to see and comment on the others who see and comment on them; they are allowed to implicate those they see and those who see them. Thus, they are as human as the viewer; it is possible to identify with them. Matushka, Fran and Dr. Dreyfus are allowed to present the very qualities Baxter's slice of America needs to save its own soul.

Fran disparages her own intelligence. She announces that she wanted to be a typist, but, "I flunked the typing test. I can't spell." Fran, though, is not as dumb as she protests, and one suspects that she is presenting the face that she needs to in order to survive her fate. In working her miserable job she shows a graciousness and dignity the white-collar workers lack; Baxter crosses hierarchical lines in order to point this out to her. While dealing with the wandering hands of executive Mr. Kirkibee in no uncertain terms, Fran brandishes a rapier wit that defuses what might otherwise be a precarious situation for a woman in her relatively powerless position. She identifies herself as a "happy idiot" to Sheldrake during a painful moment, communicating that she knows more about what's really going on than he does, but that she is powerless to make Sheldrake, the powerful one, understand; therefore, it is to her temporary strategic advantage to play the role assigned her. When she has finally gained the insight she needs to break free from Sheldrake's power, she tells him, "I'd spell it out for you, only I can't spell." With this sentence she rejects the cold profit-and-loss logic of Sheldrake's world and acknowledges the superiority of her kind of Bohunk logic, in which an unemployed shnook like Baxter is a better match for her than a wealthy and newly divorced executive like Sheldrake.

Matushka advertises his low intellectual status through his job: cabby, and his non-standard speech: "My sister-in-law she runs", and, "on account of", flat vowels and dropping of "R's." Matushka's broad shoulders, athletic stance, and slight stoop offer an obvious visual contrast when he enters a glass-walled office of unmuscled, suited executives. He wears a hip-length leather jacket and leather gloves; other than his rugged, angry face, no humanizing flesh is revealed. That Matushka's personality is no one-dimensional stereotype, but that it is Slavic, multi-layered, potentially confusing to Westerners, and possessed of gender-crossing maternal, as well as stereotypically macho qualities, is hinted at in his last name. "Matushka," or "little mother" is of course, one name of the traditional Russian doll, aka "matryoshka," that stacks one within the other. In any case, Baxter's fellow executives immediately size Matushka up as a threat and sic him on Baxter to avenge Baxter's revoking of their apartment privileges.

When he arrives at the apartment, Matushka's mere presence agitates Baxter into a comic tailspin of faux macho, expressed in the only form available to him: self-incriminatory verbosity. He, in shirt and tie, prattles on and on, while Matushka glares at him, arms crossed, silent, his sheer physicality statement enough. When he doesn't like what he thinks he sees, Matushka punches Baxter to the ground. As he watches Baxter silently, menacingly, he radiates the presence not of a man who can't speak, but who disdains the feeble verbal efforts at self-aggrandizement and female-disparaging male bonding that Baxter produces as if they were Madison Avenue jingles. Matushka looks like a working man who's been lied to before, who knows when he's being lied to, and who will use what power he has, his body, to articulately and efficiently say what needs to be said when he needs to say it. His aware and communicative silence, apparently, says much to the better-educated, white-collar Baxter; it is what drives Baxter into his verbal tailspin. Unlike Stanley Kowalski, who affects elite speech when trying to coax ownership of Belle Reve, Matushka is too intelligent, dignified and self-satisfied to ape the vocabulary of another class. Rather, Matushka's very silence and physicality present the world through hiseyes, and his class superiors as they look to him – that is, inferior.

The sexual exploitation of Fran's working class, Bohunk body by an upper class WASP, and her own self-deprecation of her mind, could render a woman who is only her physicality. We are told in so many words, however, that Fran is the decent one. While higher ups carouse at a Christmas party, Fran is shown sober, dignified, and apart. Fran resists the rush and anonymity of elevator traffic to take note of Baxter's elevator courtesies. She gives him a flower for his lapel on an important day; she gently requests that Baxter not speak indiscreetly of her to other men in the office. Fran's body is sturdy like Stanley Kowalski's and other Bohunks: "I never catch colds." But she is self-aware and witty about this: "If the average New Yorker catches two and a half colds a year and I don't catch any, some poor slob is getting five!" Her genuine love for Sheldrake, combined with the disempowered's wistful, wishful ability to see the reality she needs rather than the harsh, hopeless truth that confronts her, are what make the affair possible for her. Even so, she is never seen unclothed while with her married lover; she never kisses or embraces him; she attempts to end the affair and only continues because of his calculated seduction. Like Baxter, she temporarily trades the commodity over which she has power to a cold, powerful WASP's empty promises. Fran feels deep grief and disgust when her fantasy weakens and reality becomes evident. She persists in using a mirror broken during a fight with Sheldrake. "It makes me look the way I feel."

Even Fran and Matushka's relative poverty are positively valued. Baxter moves and lives in a frigid, amoral vacuum, where he can do what he wants because nobody cares. The poorer Fran, by contrast, must live in the same domestic arrangement as Blanche du Bois: with her sister and brother-in-law. This domestic setting is not a prelude to degradation and rape but to caring and protection of honor. Matushka goes to Fran's workplace to check on her when she doesn't come home; he travels to Baxter's apartment, collects her, and punishes the man whom he believes hurt her.

In fact, it is Baxter's world, a WASP one of hypocrisy, anomie, and pointless dog-eat-dog competition, which must change. It is in the eyes of Bohunks and Jews that Baxter is informed that there is something wrong with his life. Protesting suspicious goings on in Baxter's apartment, Jewish neighbor Dr. Dreyfus warns Baxter that he won't live long, and exhorts him to become a "mensch." (The uncommon name "Dreyfus," of course, because of the historical Alfred Dreyfus, will always be associated with the outraged society-correcting cry, "I accuse!") In Fran's broken mirror, Baxter sees the painful ridiculousness of his splintered reflection, as he models his newly-purchased bowler, the power hat he had bought to celebrate his hard-earned promotion. It is at that moment that he confronts the compromises he and others make to achieve "success." Baxter's moment of truth, when he finally takes a stand for himself and for what he is discovering he believes, is made clear by Fran's irrational Bohunk sentiment and inspired by love for Fran. For the first time in nearly two hours of acting like a compromised doormat, Baxter says a firm "No" to a demand for his apartment. He takes this stand because he knows that Sheldrake wants to bring Fran there. When Sheldrake threatens to fire him for this, Baxter says, "I'm just following Doctor's orders. I've decided to become a mensch. The old payola won't work anymore." The necessary ingredients for Baxter's redemption, and, by extension, his glass-and-steel America, are Ashkenazi philosophy and Bohunk love. In a baton-passing gesture, Baxter pauses in his escape to place his power hat atop the head of an African American janitor.

This is a complex and sympathetic portrayal of Bohunks; how did it come about? Billy Wilder was a Jew from Sucha, Poland. Fran Kubelik's cinematic older sister is Sugar Kowalczyk, the sweet, sexy, conniving but self-advertised dumb blonde played by Marilyn Monroe in Wilder's 1959 hit, "Some Like it Hot." Wilder's depiction of loving Bohunk women brings to mind Noble Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, through whose works parade a series of such Bohunk heroines: Wanda in The Slave, Jadwiga in Enemies, a Love Story, and Tekla, in Shosha of whom Singer wrote:

These are the real people, the ones who keep the world going, I thought. They serve as proof that the cabalists are right ... An indifferent God, a mad God, couldn't have created Tekla ... .Her cheeks were the color of ripe apples. She gave forth a vigor rooted in the earth, in the sun, in the whole universe. She didn't want to better the world as did Dora; she didn't require roles and reviews as did Betty; she didn't seek thrills as did Celia. She wanted to give, not take. If the Polish people had produced even one Tekla, they had surely accomplished their mission. (Singer 1982, 325)

The Definitive List of the Top Ten Films of All Time

Below is the definitive list of the ten best films of all time.

This list abrogates any preceding list.

If you disagree with any of my choices for the ten best films of all time, you are wrong, and I am right. Further, you are unintelligent, and you have no taste. In fact, you are probably both a child molester and a cannibal.

Nah, not really. To be honest, I don't believe in top ten lists. We can say what movies we love and why, but there is no objective measure to determine which is better than another. I'm tired of writing about, and dealing with, heavy stuff, so I decided to focus on something I love: movies.

The Definitive List of the Top Ten Films of All Time

"Gone with the Wind" 1939 Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland. Directed by Victor Fleming. Produced by David O Selznick.

Nothing compares.

Nothing.

Whenever I watch a new movie, part of me thinks, will this affect me the way GWTW did the first time I saw it?

Making this movie almost killed David O Selznick. If it had, he would have died for a good cause.

Human effort to create lasting art is slathered over every inch of the screen. There is no way you could take in everything this movie offers you on just one viewing. Amphetamine-stoked Selznick obsessed over details that viewers would never see. GWTW is a one-of-a-kind well-oiled machine.

One of the many times I've seen GWTW in a theater was in Poland. It was a spiritual experience, as it always is. I could feel the audience's reaction. I knew they never saw the Old South. They saw Poland up on that screen. When the lights came up, people glowed, eyes full of tears, chins resolute.

GWTW has fans all over the world, in every color. Everyone who loves it see herself in it.

GWTW is only superficially about the antebellum South. GWTW is about that moment when you drop from the sheltered innocence and infinite possibility of youth into the Darwinian mixed martial arts arena that is real life. You come out punching, frantically and cluelessly – you see things coming at you, but you can't differentiate between enemies and allies, and you don't know the rules of the game. You see sensitive people you love fall by the wayside. You realize that sensitivity and decency are more like birth defects than gifts. You see that ruthless competition is the only asset. You have to betray values your mother taught you. Winning is the only thing. You win by betraying your best self and your most sacred dreams, and your victory tastes like lead in your mouth. You realize that that recurring nightmare that haunts you, the one about chasing some elusive, mysterious, yearned-for phantom, was really all about losing yourself. You frantically run to catch up to what you suddenly realize really matters, and you realize it is too late. *That's* what GWTW is about.

People get all worked up about the white supremacy in the book, and the inaccurate depiction of slavery in the film. They are so missing the point. The book is monstrously racist. It is racist in every way, not just white supremacy. Everyone is who they are because of their race or their genetics. Ashley, Scarlett's crush, is weak because of inbreeding. Ellen Robillard, Scarlett's mother, is sensitive because of aristocratic, coastal French ancestry. Gerald is a dumb, blunt Irishman; Gerald and Scarlett both love Tara because of Irish genes. Scarlett's children by her weak first two husbands are wimps, genetic failures no amount of proper parenting could fix. Bonnie is a lovable child because she carries Rhett's genes. In short, Margaret Mitchell was poisoned by the Scientific Racism, aka Eugenics, so popular in the US in the early twentieth century.

You could take a pair of scissors and snip all that racism out of GWTW and still have one of the best novels ever written.

Critics think they are saying something pointed when they say, "I could not stand Scarlett O'Hara."

Oh, come on. Scarlett spectacularly screws over every human being she is close to, including her own children, including herself. No one likes Scarlett O'Hara, including people like me who have read the book several times and seen the film more times than we can count.

What makes "Gone with the Wind" hypnotic, mesmerizing, impossible to put down, and, adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing film ever made, is that Margaret Mitchell wrote the entire book on the edge of that razor writers respect and fear – the razor's edge of keeping a character true, and keeping a character lovable. In short, keeping a character human.

Scarlett spends the entire book on that razor's edge between doing what she must do to survive, doing what her outsize, Darwinian lizard brain tells her to do, and being a mensch. She wants to be a mensch like her mother, but she never manages it fully. Our hearts ache for her. Scarlett, we scream, Scarlett, do the right thing here! But we know she can't. If she did the right thing, she'd lose her love, she'd lose Tara, she'd watch her family starve. As many times as I've read the book, as many times as I've seen the film (I have honestly lost count on both), right up until the last page, I feel that tension, that ache, that desire to see Scarlett do the right thing.

GWTW's notorious open-ended ending is genius. Maybe she finally does, and maybe it finally pays off. I cannot tell you how many times – maybe hundreds, maybe thousands – I have put myself to sleep by rewriting the ending to GWTW so that it all works out and Scarlett finally gets to be her best self, the woman her mother Ellen wanted her to be.

I saw GWTW the first time when I was around nine. I was with my mother and her friend, and my friend.

My mother and her friend admired Scarlett O'Hara. My friend and I hated her, couldn't stand her.

"Wait till you grow up," the older women told us. "You will understand."

I had a crush on kind, sensitive, poetic Ashley. I could see nothing desirable about Rhett, a scoundrel. I wanted to be like Melanie. (I still do.) Again, "Wait till you grow up."

They were right.

"Lawrence of Arabia" 1962 Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif. Directed by David Lean. Produced by Sam Spiegel. Screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson.

No one is qualified to say that this or that film is the best film ever made. No film is the best film ever made.

One can certainly say that there is no better film than "Lawrence of Arabia."

I spend a good deal of my online time at the discussion boards of the International Movie Database. I've never seen a discussion page for a film quite like the page for "Lawrence of Arabia." On the discussion pages for most films, we fans talk about just about any given aspect of a movie, from "I met the star of this film in a coffee shop" to "Is this character meant to be gay?" to "You can see a boom mike in this scene of this movie."

On the discussion board for "Lawrence of Arabia," topic after topic is devoted to one thing: movie fans expressing awe for "Lawrence of Arabia." People show up on the discussion board just to type something that's been said a hundred times before, "This is the best film ever made." It's as if, on this board, you get snapshots of hardcore movie fans with their eyes wide open and their mouths agape.

What was the filmmakers' secret? They were intelligent, and they treated their audience as if the audience members were intelligent. That's the secret of "Lawrence of Arabia." Sure, it's heartbreakingly beautiful, and the marriage of image with music is sublime. Sure, the true story the film tells is deep and important. But there are lots of beautiful films with great soundtracks. There are lots of deep and important stories. What propels LoA into the stratosphere is its brains, and its assumption of smarts in the viewer.

I saw "Lawrence" as a kid, with my sister Antoinette, who was older, smarter, and more sophisticated. I think she was able intellectually to understand the film in a way that I could not. I didn't know nuthin about colonialism, or homosexuality, or male rape, or masochism, or what it means to be different, or a different person's craving to be normal, or Islam, or power politics, or how power corrupts: the film's themes. I was a kid. And yet, somehow, LoA communicated to me. I felt its themes as if they were a deep spiritual burden, an inescapable human legacy passed down to me in some tribal rite. In fact, they were. When I later saw the film as an adult, it's as if these sketchy, ghostlike outlines I'd been storing for decades were suddenly fleshed out.

"Lawrence of Arabia" is not just a perfect work of art. It is also a necessary lesson. Thanks to petroleum, we are in deep in the Arab world. If we could internalize the lessons LoA teaches about that involvement, we'd all be better off.

"The Best Years of Our Lives" 1946 Frederic March, Teresa Wright, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Russell, Virginia Mayo. Directed by William Wyler. Produced by Sam Goldwyn. Screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood.

"The Best Years of Our Lives" doesn't show up on many ten best lists. It is relatively little known. This is a shame. TBYOOL is a masterpiece. The late film critic Roger Ebert, God bless him, placed TBYOOL on his list of "Great Movies."

I love "The Best Years of Our Lives" so much I have to ration how much I watch it. If I check out the DVD from the library, or start watching the entire film on youtube, I will watch nothing else for the next ten days. I just watch, and rewatch, TBYOOL over and over. There are a couple of scenes I cannot watch just once.

I remember seeing this film as a kid on TV. There was a scene that deeply scandalized me. Fred Derry is a traumatized WW II vet. He is sleeping at the home of his new best-friend-forever, Al Stephenson. Actually Fred just met Al. They got drunk together as a way of dealing with the trauma of returning home from war to family and friends who had no idea what they went through, and to lives they no longer understand or fit into. Al brought Fred home, and Peggy, Al's beautiful daughter, helped put Fred to bed.

In the night, Fred has a nightmare about losing his war buddy in a battle. His buddy was burned alive, though Fred tried to save him. He wakes up thrashing and screaming. Peggy wakens and rushes into the bedroom. She grasps Fred firmly and orders him, first, to wake up, and then to go back to sleep. The contrary orders seem weirdly fitting to what the vets are required to do to save their sanity. They must "wake up" – realize that the war is over – and "go back to sleep" – not think about what they've seen.

This scene deeply scandalized me as a child. To see a young woman enter the bedroom of a man she does not know. To see an adult man, a WW II vet like my dad, reduced to crying and shouting for help. To see a woman take charge of a man, comfort him, heal him. It blew my mind.

There's a scene I watch over and over. Fred and Peggy are walking through a parking lot full of vintage 1946 model cars, bloated and boat-like. A water tower rises behind them. As Fred reaches for the car door, he suddenly kisses Peggy. I have no idea why that scene moves me so much. I've replied it repeatedly trying to figure it out. Perhaps the scene is built around Fibonacci numbers. Or perhaps it is something about the water tower.

The scene where Fred's father and stepmother read Fred's commendation letter tears my heart right out of my chest. Fred is a roughneck and a bit of a loser. He just doesn't fit in any more. He was a working class guy from the wrong side of the tracks. His only pre-war work experience was as a soda jerk. He had been a fighter pilot in World War II. Now, post-war, he is, again, a non-entity. A failure in his postwar life, he is hitchhiking out of town. After he leaves, his father and stepmother read his commendation letter. The text of the letter attests to Fred's bravery and heroism. I've never seen hidden heroism so well depicted.

The film accurately recreates the feel of a working class home on the wrong side of the tracks. Walls look flimsy; the interior is unkempt. If I remember correctly, laundry hangs in the background.

Roman Bohnen and Gladys George are perfectly cast as Fred's parents. They have a beat-up, made-mistakes, been around the block and maybe been in jail feel to them. You could take these two actors, in the clothes they are wearing in this film, and slip them down in the working class town I grew up in, and they would fit right in.

That's what gets me about TBYOOL. I feel, when I am watching it, as if I have been plunked down into real people's real lives.

"The Best Years of Our Lives" is an exquisitely beautiful film. Gregg Toland's black and white, deep focus cinematography is crisp and hyper-real. If you've ever wanted to live in the late 1940s, watch TBYOOL. You will feel as if you have.

"The Searchers" 1956 starring John Wayne, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, Jeffrey Hunter. Directed by John Ford. Frank Nugent screenplay.

I am a serious movie fan so I sometimes watch movies I don't want to see. I watch them as homework: "Oh, this movie gets a lot of attention, so I really ought to watch it."

"The Searchers" was one of those movies.

I don't like Westerns. I really dislike John Wayne. He's the kind of large, bland, none-too-bright, undifferentiated slab of male that was popular in midcentury America.

The library at the campus where I work had a VHS tape so one afternoon when I had some free time I popped it in to the campus machine and sat down, thinking I'd watch the first five minutes, fast forward to a few key scenes, and then take off. I'd give "The Searchers" fifteen minutes of my life.

Two hours of sitting in that uncomfortable university library chair later, my jaw was on the floor, there were tears in my eyes, and I decided that "The Searchers" really is all that.

"The Searchers" is one of those movies that worms its way into your lizard brain, far beyond the reach of language. But it also taunts and flirts with your cerebral language centers. "The Searchers" is a slam-bang adventure yarn told in widescreen, Technicolor images, and it is a morality tale as complex as any Russian novel. It begs to be written about. At any given second on the clock, there are at least one thousand film fans, somewhere on planet earth, struggling to say something new and intriguing about "The Searchers." I wish them luck. I can't do it. I can't say something newer or more authoritative than what Martin Scorcese or Steven Spielberg have already said.

I can say this much. Recently I showed "The Searchers" to Tasha Samkough, a young Circassian American writer. Tasha writes about Circassian women in the US and cross-cultural encounters. I thought it would be provocative for her to take in some art about WASP Americans' encounters with the original others, Native Americans. "The Searchers" centers around a veritable honor killing. This is the punishment for a homegirl who goes native.

Tasha totally grokked "The Searchers." Good to know because some insist that young people today can't understand any art created before 1985 – too slow and complex for their technology-addled brains and stimulation-addicted palates. Young people today require explosions, quick cuts, and at least one Miley Cyrus atrocity against sex and aesthetics. But as we watched the "The Searchers" together, young Tasha gasped in all the right places, which pleased me.

Before showing the film to Tasha I did some research. It all began with an innocent google search: "Native Americans Captives."

I've published a scholarly book about the Holocaust. I'm no stranger to atrocity. What I read about Native American torture brought me close to vomiting, and kept me awake at night. The Native Americans did some things to their captives that I'd never read about even the Nazis doing. (Tasha, I read it for you! I hope you are grateful!)

John Ford does not graphically depict these Native American tortures of captives in "The Searchers." He did what filmmakers did under The Hays Production Code. He looked away. He had his characters see, and then look away. Ethan sees what the Indians did to Martha and to Lucy. He is driven all but mad by what he sees. We never learn in words what Ethan saw. He refuses to tell us, "What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture? Spell it out? Don't ever ask me! Long as you live, don't ever ask me more."

We witness Ethan's obsessive hate. We register the torture in our guts, not in our minds. Between 1930 and 1968, The Hays Production Code directed what Hollywood films could, and could not depict onscreen. Counterintuitively, the Hays Code's prudish demands made for powerful filmmaking. It was a more powerful movie-watching experience for me to imagine what Ethan saw, rather than to have the filmmaker spell it out for me.

Ethan hates the Comanche. His hate is very real. Like real hate, it is intimate. He knows the Comanche. He uses what he knows about them to hurt them. 

Ethan and his party find a dead Comanche. Ethan shoots out the corpse's eyes. The Reverend traveling with Ethan asks why he bothered to shoot out the eyes of a corpse.

Reverend Clayton: What good did that do ya?

Ethan: By what you preach, none. But what that Comanche believes, ain't got no eyes, he can't enter the spirit-land. Has to wander forever between the winds. You get it, Reverend.

I never thought I'd see a depiction of obsessive hate so sharp and so accurate in a blockbuster American film made in the 1950s.

"Racist." Film critics label Ethan "racist." By extension, all Americans who fought Indians are labeled "Racist."

Racist? If someone did to my family what the Comanche did to their captives? I'd nuke the bastards. I'd resurrect them and then torture them and then nuke them again. At least in my imagination.

Here's the second creepy thing I encountered while researching Native American torture practices.

The websites providing this key information were often white supremacist websites. The information was accurate; their sources were often university press books one could access and crosscheck via google books.

But it's creepy that conventional websites, not run by crazed hate mongers, were not the ones providing this info.

It's important information. No ethnicity is free from atrocity. No ethnicity should be demonized, and no ethnicity should be romanticized. And we shouldn't have to get American history from white supremacist websites.

I was haunted for days by the accounts of Native American torture practices. Finally I got it – the Comanche were nomads. They did not have stable institutions. They did not have courts of law or prisons. They did not have public relations or modern communications. They could not build a Great Wall around their territory – the hunting grounds where they pursued the buffalo that provided their every need. Hideously torturing captives was their method of announcing in a way certain to be heard: "Stay off our hunting grounds." Alas, it did not work. The Comanches surrendered in 1875. Their leader was Quanah Parker, son of Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive whose saga inspired "The Searchers." By 1890, there were 750 buffalo left. There had been sixty million.

"The Son of the Sheik" 1926 Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Banky. Directed and Produced by George Fitzmaurice. Inspired by Edith Hull.

Sex. Period. That's it.

A big part of the appeal of movies is sex. Usually that sex is for men. The other day a facebook friend posted a picture of Brigitte Bardot. One of his woman friends wrote, "I am focusing on my deficiencies." Of course she was. All women do. That's what we get from Marilyn Monroe, Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johanson: A chance to think about everything men don't like about us.

Rudolph Valentino was unique. He was candy for us. Valentino was the one male star whose entire career was built around his ability to erotically satisfy women.

And satisfy he did. Sex drips from Valentino's every pore.

"The Son of the Sheik" is not a great movie. But Valentino is in it, and he is great, and unique. TSOTS is a rape fantasy. It's inspired by the book by Edith Hull. Hull wrote the original "The Sheik," also a rape fantasy. Published in 1919, it is still in print. I've read experts of the book online and it does nothing for me. I find it kind of sad, but who am I to judge.

For me, it's Valentino, the irreplaceable Valentino, who makes "Son of the Sheik" an essential film.

***

The next five films in my top ten will appear soon.