MEN IN WAR

Film noir. Westerns. Biopics. War movies. Historical epics. Mid century American filmmaker Anthony Mann was a master of all of these genres and more. Even when not delivering tough and uncompromising genre fare, Mann consistently delivered compelling, interesting and highly watchable films. 

Mann's 1957 grim and gritty war film MEN IN WAR, takes place during the Korean War. September, 1950, to be exact. Robert Ryan stars as Lt. Benson, an officer in charge of a group of 17 enlisted men who are cut off from main American forces and find themselves trapped behind enemy lines. Benson doesn't care about winning the war, he just wants to save as many of his men as possible, even if it's just one soldier. To accomplish that goal, he drives his men to a hill held by North Korean forces, a hill upon which many men will die. 

Along the way Benson and his men encounter cynical, kill-or-be-killed Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray), driving a jeep transporting a shell shocked Colonel (Robert Keith). Montana has an unswerving devotion to his devastated former commander and he refuses to leave the broken man behind. Benson commandeers the jeep to transport his squad's gear and commands Montana to join his group and do as he says. 

Montana will have none of that. He constantly disobeys orders, killing enemy would-be prisoners and doing whatever it takes to survive. Benson struggles to maintain some semblance of order and command but soon comes to realize that if the war is going to be won, it will be because of men like Montana. 

Benson's squad is composed of a shell shocked infantry man (Vic Morrow, who would go on to star in the long running COMBAT! series on ABC-TV), Nehemiah Persoff as Sgt. Lewis, Philip Pine as Sgt. Riordan, U.T. ex (and one of my all time favorite actors) L.Q. Jones as Sgt. Davis and Victor Sen Yung (Hop Sing on BONANZA) as a captured North Korean prisoner of war.

Benson and his men make a valiant effort to capture the hill in a well staged combat sequence that climaxes the film. Shot in Bronson Canyon, Mann and cinematographer Ernest Haller, get the most out of the location through well placed camera angles that give the relatively small location (I know, I visited the place in January, 1994 with my buddy Kelly Greene), the feeling of a much larger landscape. 

With a terrific score by Elmer Bernstein and a tough, unflinching screenplay by Philip Yordan, MEN IN WAR eschews flag waving and refuses to paint the desperate soldiers in a glorified position. They are simply men trying to survive a war they want nothing to do with. 

MEN IN  WAR is a bold and daring war film by an American filmmaker at the top of his game, a director who refused to follow the accepted formulae for genre films. Mann was constantly challenging the boundaries of genre, pushing the forms into new and unexpected directions. MEN IN WAR is like an unpinned hand grenade coming right at you. You'll be tempted to duck but keep your head up and your eyes on the screen and prepare to be dazzled. 

Highly recommended.

THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE

THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE (2007) is the first novel I've ever read by Nebula and Hugo award winning science fiction author Joe Haldeman. It won't be my last.

Haldeman, of course, is best known for THE FOREVER WAR (1974), the modern classic that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel of the year. I have a copy of FOREVER sitting in my "to-be-read" stack next to my reading chair. I hope to get around to it sometime this summer.

I'm a sucker for a good time travel story and when I ran across a copy of ACCIDENTAL at a library sale for a buck, I figured I couldn't go wrong. It's a fast paced, breezy tale about a young man, Matt Fuller, a grad student at MIT, who accidentally discovers that a device he has built for a specific scientific purpose turns out to be a time machine. Trouble is, the machine only works in one direction, forward and further into a variety of future times on Earth. He knows that at some point, he'll be able to go back in time, thanks to an appearance of one of his future selves in one of his stops along the way but until then, it's a one way trip. 

Matt eventually gains a couple of traveling companions, Martha, a beautiful young girl from the theocracy put in place on the East Coast after the "Second Coming of Jesus Christ" (an event which turns out to be a cruel hoax) and LA, a vast artificial intelligence that rules most of the West Coast in yet another future. Matt, Martha and LA (who assumes the form of a beautiful woman), eventually encounter a group of humans who function as a living time machine. The group sends LA further into the future, while returning Matt and Martha to Boston/Cambridge in the late 1800s, where they marry, raise a family and live out their lives. 

ACCIDENTAL isn't a bad little book. The journey through time is vividly described with each future earth becoming more and more unlike the time period from which the trip began. The problem is, there's nothing at stake. Nothing is really at risk here, because we know Matt will eventually return. There's no time paradox to fix, no broken timeline to repair. ACCIDENTAL serves as a guidebook to several extremely different future eras and nothing else. 

In short, THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE is a good, but far from great science fiction novel. I suspect FOREVER WAR will more completely deliver the goods. 

Recommended for genre fans.

FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

I've watched a lot horror, science fiction and fantasy films over the years.

A lot. 

But no matter how many films I've seen there still remain many films yet to be viewed by these eyes. Working my way through these films can sometimes yield unexpected pleasures, while some deliver bitter disappointment.

Sometimes you get the diamond.

Sometimes you get the rough.

Making the case for the rough is the previously unseen FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1958). What can I say about this truly awful film? The screenplay by Robert Blees and James Leicester is all talk, talk, talk. For a film about a trip to the moon, it's a good hour into the movie before said voyage is undertaken. Byron Haskin's direction is equally uninspired. The cast, headlined by the usually reliable Joseph Cotten and George Sanders aren't given much to work with and they both look like they wish they were in some other movie, anything other than this abomination. Co-star Debra Paget is attractive enough but, again, she's given very little to do other than serve as the token female/love interest. Even a guest appearance by genre icon Morris Ankrum as President Ulysses S. Grant can't save this turkey. 

The trip to the moon by Cotten, Sanders, Paget and Don Dubbins, is a total bore. As they approach the lunar surface, Sanders triggers a device that splits the rocket into four separate components. Cotten and Sanders land on the moon in one of the compartments (NOTE: no footage of this event is seen), while Paget and Dubbins are left in space in another component, presumably to make their way back to earth, although, again, what happens to them is never shown. 

For a film about a trip to the moon, FROM has only a modicum of special effects none of them effective. If the story requires launching a space capsule from a gigantic cannon, you damn well better show us said cannon. The film does not. Hell, even the musical score by Louis Forbes steals from the infinitely superior FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956).

Filmed in Mexico at the tail end of RKO's days as a major Hollywood studio, FROM is unbelievably cheap looking. The Technicolor cinematography by Edwin B. DuPar looks like it was shot on already exposed film with everything having a slightly hazy, out-of-focus look. It's hard to imagine a film based on a novel by one of the giants of science fiction (Jules Verne appears as a character in the film!) displaying such an utter lack of imagination. It is completely devoid of even the slightest whiff of a sense of wonder, an ingredient which is imperative for a film like this to have to have any hope of succeeding. 

Hollywood has done much better by Verne in a variety of films. There's Walt Disney's classic 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954), AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956) (which received 8 Oscar nominations, winning 5 including Best Picture of the Year), JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1959), Ray Harryhausen's magnificent MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961) and IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS (1962) (another Disney production).

Director Byron Haskin delivered far superior work in such genre classics as THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), CONQUEST OF SPACE (1955), ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS (1964) and several episodes of THE OUTER LIMITS ABC-TV series. 

Move along kids. There's nothing to see here. 

NIGHT OF CAMP DAVID

When I first started this blog, when dinosaurs ruled the earth way back in 2012, I had several unwritten rules that I have tried to follow when posting here. First, no religion. Second, no politics. Third, no griping about my job. And fourth, I have always tried to never say anything bad about someone who is still alive. 

This post marks the first time I've deliberately broken any of those rules but because of the subject matter at hand, I'm afraid a departure from the norm is necessary. 

So if rules are going to be broken, it's in for a penny, in for a pound. I'm still not going to gripe about my job (I'll post plenty after I retire) but it's time to go on the record about a few things. First, I am a Christian. Judy and I are proud members of First Presbyterian Church in Elgin, Texas. Judy has been a member for many years. I didn't officially join until 2017 and I'm currently in the middle of a three year term as a church elder. Second, I'm a registered Democrat who voted for Barack Obama twice, Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and Hilary Clinton in the last presidential election. 

Your mileage on these things my vary and if this confession causes any one to cease reading this blog, so be it. I'm not going to preach or try to convert anyone to my point of view but I am going to state for the record that I believe our country is in the hands of a madman. 

That belief is held by others, including some of the fine folks at Knopf Doubleday who reprinted Fletcher Knebel's 1965 political thriller NIGHT OF CAMP DAVID last fall. After all, the central conceit of the book is plainly stated on the cover: "What would happen if the President of the U.S.A went stark-raving mad?" What was the stuff of fantasy, fodder for a paperback thriller in 1965, is now, in the minds of many, myself included, a cold hard fact in 2019. 

When Donald Trump was sworn in, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, to give him a chance to see what he could do because, after all, he was the duly elected president. That chance totally evaporated the very next day when he spouted lies about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, lies he forced poor Sean Spicer to reiterate in his first press conference. 

And it's been downhill ever since. 

NIGHT OF CAMP DAVID is a book that caught my eye when I was a young and adventurous reader in junior high school in the early '70s. I bought a copy, started reading it and quickly lost interest in it. Why? Because it was simply too "adult" for my reading abilities at the time. Oh, it wasn't a dirty book in the least. It just dealt with characters and situations that were slightly more mature than the usual pulp fiction that I was reading at the time. My literary eyes were bigger than my literary stomach, if I can mix metaphors. NIGHT became one of those books, like Martin Caidin's MAROONED (which was published in paperback by Bantam at roughly the same time), that I would have to wait many, many years to finally read and appreciate. 

Turns out that Fletcher Knebel was remarkably prescient way back in 1965. First, he gives us a president that is suffering from paranoid delusions ("they" and "them" are out to get him), has grandiose plans for restructuring global alliances (he wants to form a union between the U.S, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland with himself at the head and vows to use force to make the rest of Europe join in), sees no problem with ordering the F.B.I. to illegally wiretap and record every phone call in the United States and, to top it off, has a meeting scheduled with the Russian president in which he could spill the beans about his mad plans.  

SPOILER ALERT Second, he gives us a president that resigns the office. Remember, this was almost a decade before Richard Nixon was forced to resign. And third, just for good measure, he uncannily has a Supreme Court Justice named Cavanaugh as one of the supporting players. 

The story centers around Senator Jim MacVeagh of Iowa who is picked by President Mark Hollenbach to be his running mate when he runs for re-election. The current vice president became involved in a real estate scandal and is going to be removed from the ticket. Mac Veagh is thrilled at first but as Hollenbach takes the young lawmaker into his confidence, the cracks in the presidential facade begin to show. 

MacVeagh desperately tries to find corroborating evidence to prove his theory that Hollenbach has gone mad. His investigation draws the attention of the F.B,I and the Secret Service who suspect MacVeagh poses a threat to the president. MacVeagh is even thought to be unbalanced himself. But eventually he finds a consortium of allies including the Secretary of Defense, the Speaker of the House, the chairman of the Democratic Committee, a powerful Washington attorney, the aforementioned Supreme Court Justice, the president's personal physician and others. But the trouble is, even if Hollenbach is crazy, what can they do about it? As their late night meeting continues to spiral towards the unthinkable, enter President Hollenbach for a final chapter showdown. 

NIGHT OF CAMP DAVID is, of course, fiction. But it's a compelling story well told and offers plenty of food for thought about the current state of our nation and the Constitutional crisis that we find ourselves in. Knebel offers a solution to the problem in the pages of his book.

 Alas, no such solution appears to be at hand in the real world. 

Recommended.