Only now does it occur to me... BRASS TARGET (1978)

Only now does it occur to me... that when it comes to speculative historical revisionism, you can hardly get nuttier than the gloriously banal BRASS TARGET (based on the novel, THE ALGONQUIN PROJECT). It's a movie that boldly asks––what if?––General George S. Patton (George Kennedy)

was not, in fact, killed after a car crash, but was murdered by a hitman (Max von Sydow)


who made it look like an accident and was working on behalf of corrupt Allied military officers––including THE PRISONER's Patrick McGoohan,

PATRICK MCGOOHAN WILL NOT SAVE YOU A SEAT

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.'s Robert Vaughn,

Weirdo post-coital Robert Vaughn

and OVERBOARD's Edward Herrmann,

Flustered post-coital Edward Herrmann

the latter two of whom are playing a couple!––who have stolen $250 million in Nazi gold. And what if some noble hero (John Cassavetes) almost stopped it... and then sought revenge on Patton's behalf?

John Cassavetes is here to chew bubblegum and look creepy, and he's all out of bubblegum

John Cassavetes: even when he's trying to be wholesome, he can't not be creepy

Also playing out in the background is a romantic subplot between Cassavetes and Sophia Loren, which, given the prioritization of the XY chromosomes on display, has received zero creative energy and flops like a dead fish. 

Loren, despite her top billing, couldn't be more of an afterthought. She and Cassavetes may have the least amount of chemistry out of any Hollywood coupling I've ever seen, and I've seen STAR WARS––EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES. Robert Vaughn has more chemistry with the viewer and all he does is stare at us like a walleyed lunatic.

I mean, really, though.

Nothing can spark their interest––not even the thought of the eventual paycheck; not even the idea that when the shooting stops they never need to see each other again

The whole thing sort of plays like a movie directed by a sentient stack of WWII paperback novels and testosterone-doused hand grenade-paperweights whose favorite part of any war film is the part when a bunch of generals stand around a nondescript industrial space and talk about maps. If BRASS TARGET were a person, it'd be a guy whose favorite Peckinpah film is THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND. His favorite Alec Guinness movie is THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM. His favorite Clint Eastwood is THE EIGER SANCTION. His second-favorite is FIREFOX. I could go on.

Only now does it occur to me... FIREFOX (1982)

Only now does it occur to me.... that Clint Eastwood basically outsourced the villains of his Cold War caper FIREFOX to the Lucas/Spielberg industrial complex.

The Russian villains you see before you are: Kenneth Colley (Ken Russell veteran and "Admiral Piett" from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK),

Ronald Lacey ("Toht" from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK),

and Wolf Kahler ("Sgt. Gobler" from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK):

To balance things out, we have John Ratzenberger (CHEERS, "Major Derlin" from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK), essentially reprising his role from EMPIRE (Rebel on an ice planet) as an American soldier fighting the Evil Empire from the North Pole.

Because I have to tip my hat to the outliers, another of the Russian villains is Klaus Löwitsch, a legitimately Great Actor who may bear some resemblance to Corbin Bernsen, but is in fact one of the most talented players to come out of the New German Cinema and a veteran of no less than five Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. It's probably not too much of a stretch for you to understand that he is completely wasted here.

Apologies, Mr. Löwitsch.

The film itself was a box office smash at the time, but today it plays like a second-tier, phoned in cold war thriller, á la Eastwood's own THE EIGER SANCTION or Peckinpah's THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND. Author Howard Hughes (AIM FOR THE HEART: THE FILMS OF CLINT EASTWOOD) probably sums it up best with, "Less a 'Firefox', it's more of a damp squib, or at best a smoldering turkey."

The opening is kind of a proto-COMMANDO, with shirtless Eastwood as a veteran in pastoral environs trying to enjoy his retirement when he's pulled out to do "one last job." In this case, the Last Job is stealing a top-secret Soviet fighter plane.

I guess there's an understated sci-fi aspect to the film with a "mind-control helmet" that pilots the Soviet plane via telepathy, but that's not even important, so you don't have to worry about it.

Also, for a Cold War actioner, there's not a lot of action. In fact, the entire plot could likely be reduced to about three scenes––therefore, I'm not sure why it runs 2 hours and 15 minutes. Ah, well.


It's also perhaps worth mentioning that the 'thrilling' dogfight is simplistic enough so as to prep us for the eventual Atari game tie-in; and despite using a superior "Reverse Blue-Screen" technology, it still looks inferior to the Battle of Hoth in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Out of the 39 completed films Clint Eastwood has directed, I have now seen 37 of them (for the curious, my only gaps are HEREAFTER and THE 15:17 TO PARIS). Only THE EIGER SANCTION, SULLY, and INVICTUS are as boring as this one. I prefer BREEZY, for godssakes. BREEZY.

Only now does it occur to me... ALEXANDER (2004)

Only now does it occur to me: let us briefly talk about how, in Oliver Stone's sprawling sword-and-sandal biopic ALEXANDER, at a pivotal moment during the Battle of Gaugamela, Stone has one of his commanders scream, "Back and to the left!  Back and to the left!,"

arguably the most famous and oft-repeated line from Stone's JFK. Somehow, it simultaneously trivializes both JFK and ALEXANDER, though the latter does not require much assistance in this department.

ALEXANDER is faintly better than its reputation, though its essential elements are incest, snakes, CGI birds, and chubby Val Kilmer.

 

Remember when this was considered chubby Val Kilmer?

I suppose we don't need to question why the Macedonians all have Irish brogues, nor why Molossian barbarian queen Angelina Jolie has a modern Eastern European accent. We definitely shouldn't question why Angelina Jolie––who is less than one year older than Colin Farrell––is playing his mother.

I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that she is a serpent-worshipping cultist who is draped in more snakes than Alice Cooper.

She also has ample opportunity to flex her acting muscles, á la James Earl Jones in REVENGE OF THE SITH:

Finally, I must mention––simply to walk it back into the darkness––that the less said about Jared Leto here, the better. 

That's all!

Only now does it occur to me... LEGIONNAIRE (1998)

Only now does it occur to me... that when Jean-Claude Van Damme makes a $35 million prestige picture and it ends up going straight-to-video... there's a reason for that.

Written by JCVD himself in collaboration with Sheldon Lettich (LIONHEART, DOUBLE IMPACT) and Rebecca Morrison (SCORCHER) and directed by Peter MacDonald (RAMBO III, THE NEVER ENDING STORY III), LEGIONNAIRE sees Van Damme playing "Alain Lefevre," a 1920s French boxer with a level of moral righteousness that is usually only seen in movies where the star is also the executive producer. Did I mention that this film is produced by (among others) Jean-Claude Van Damme and Edward R. Pressman (BADLANDS, WALL STREET, AMERICAN PSYCHO)?

Anyway, the film begins promisingly enough, with punching and grunting


and the bursting of flashbulbs, and you can tell from the styling that they think they're making RAGING BULL. When JCVD is told to throw the fight, he refuses and winds up on the run in a lavishly produced chase scene on the streets of Marseille,

complete with a weepy damsel waiting at a fog-machine-drenched train platform.

However, JCVD never makes his train, and, while on the lam from French gangsters and sorrowfully hiding on a cart of discarded vegetables,

he spies a poster for the French Foreign Legion,

which luckily has a late-nite drive-thru recruitment station.

Next thing you know, JCVD's wandering the desert with a rifle, and the movie has transformed into a kind of tedious '90s variant of GUNGA DIN or Von Sternberg's MOROCCO. And it's here that the movie begins to really drag.

It's trying very hard for poignancy the entire time, too, which makes it all the more painful, even if the filmmaking is technically more competent than his Cannon work.

You can tell it is a Serious Picture because of JCVD's patented pathos-face.

Anyway, there's lots of men and dust and guns and horses
 
and men with guns on dusty horses

and some Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

and I can't decide if it's more or less homoerotic than LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

I mean, maybe it's technically more homoerotic,

in practice, if not in spirit.

In comparison, JCVD's THE QUEST (which he directed and co-wrote) was also an earnest attempt at Oscar bait, but it brought a certain joie de vivre (Joie-Claude Van Vivre?) to the proceedings. It, too, was a period piece with tear-jerkin' pretensions, but it was at least centered around a martial arts tournament, and sort of felt like BLOODSPORT mixed with a '40s swashbuckler (and maybe a Dickens novel?)

In LEGIONNAIRE, JCVD still has the amazing newsie cap from THE QUEST, though it seems to have shrunk a bit.


Alas, his clown makeup from THE QUEST does not make a reappearance.

In any event, perhaps all you really need to know is that there are no splits in LEGIONNAIRE, at least not on-screen.

Only now does it occur to me... THE TIN DRUM (1979)

Only now does it occur to me... that Günther Grass, who was once a brainwashed, teenage SS member, was capable of growth and wisdom and change, and after the war went on to pen the 1959 novel THE TIN DRUM, which is one of the ugliest and most complex and most potent indictments of fascism ever written, an achievement which, among others, won him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1979, the director Volker Schlöndorff adapted the first two-thirds of the novel in his Palm d'or-winning film of the same name, and it illustrates many shocking and indelible symbols of the national schizophrenia induced by fascist identities––from a mother's suicide-by-binge-eating-raw-fish to a Nazi father choking on his own party pin.

One of the film's most powerful scenes is a symbolic testament to disrupting totalitarianism. Our protagonist Oskar (a boy whose own stunted growth seems to mirror his nation's) infiltrates a Nazi rally with his beloved tin drum. He takes up position beneath the grandstand, and, as the Nazi orchestra heralds the arrival of party officials,

Oskar literally plays to the beat of his own drum

confounding and throwing off their fascist lockstep,

and inspiring flourishes of individuality among the players.

Oskar's childlike persistence leads the entire orchestra to abandon its martial pageantry and to begin playing Strauss' "Blue Danube,"

which leads the majority of those assembled to forget about the hateful pomp and circumstance and to simply break ranks, dancing along to the waltz.

This infuriates the Nazi leadership, who actually make up the smallest percentage of the rally––

 

(with the majority being confused and under-educated citizens looking for simple solutions and a source of community)

––which reveals that the Nazis' control over the situation is entirely conditional on the illusion of control.

Adding well-deserved insult to injury, it begins to rain,

and the Nazis flee like drowned rats

leaving behind 

very little.

While the sequence traffics in a similar kind of wish fulfillment as when our heroes squash an Illinois Neo-Nazi rally in THE BLUES BROTHERS, it still persists as a wonderful symbol: the power of a free-thinking individual against the would-be forces of authoritarianism. As a book like ORDINARY MEN shows, the transformation of "working dad" into "Nazi murderer" is not natural––it relies upon an intricate system of peer pressures and the illusion of control. Anything, however minor, the individual can do to combat the normalization of totalitarian conventions is useful in stemming fascist tides, and this scene is a vivid illustration.

Now, to another, less important, but emblematic point. I uploaded this particular scene to YouTube in a clip called "The Tin Drum: Disrupting Totalitarianism." I rely upon standards of Fair Use to analyze film clips on this blog––occasionally, the copyright holder takes exception, and the clip is taken down. Usually, they monetize it and the studio makes a small amount of ad revenue off the clips. Neither was the case in this instance––instead, I received a strike against my account for promoting "hate speech" and am currently on a form of probation. Naturally, I appealed the strike, assuming that images of Nazi flags had alerted an automated system, and that an individual had not actually viewed the clip. In my appeal, I explained not only the film's established pedigree (it is widely considered an important anti-fascist tract, and its association with the Nobel Prize and the Palm d'or certainly back that assertion) but also the purpose of the clip, which vividly illustrates the power of the individual against oppressive power structures. I received a reply this morning, informing me that my probation and their original ruling still stand, not on "copyright," but on "Community Guidelines" standards. I don't know what is more troubling: that they would censor a clip without judging the content (films ranging in importance from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to THE SORROW AND THE PITY contain swastika imagery), or that they did judge the content and simply disagreed with the anti-authoritarian message. In any event, I'll sit out my probation; there are far more important issues to get worked up about.  [Even more interesting is that a somewhat longer version of the clip seems to already exist on YouTube (you can easily find it, I imagine, but I won't link to it in the hopes that they, too, will not accused of hate speech).]