Last weekend I watched Richard Attenborugh, William Goldman and Joseph E. Levine‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), which I hadn’t seen since it opened 43 years ago. I was surprised to discover that despite its somewhat lackluster reputation (certainly among the critics of the day) that it plays half decently.

As ambitious in its attempt to capture the failure of Operation Market Garden as the 1944 Allied military campaign itself, A Bridge Too Far was an all-star WWII epic in the tradition of The Longest Day. Both are based on books by Cornelius Ryan.

The difference is that ABTF explores a downish note of defeat and disillusion and mismanagement rather than hard-won victory, and as such can be seen as the first military fuckup movie in a long series of such films, the kind in which the good guys (i.e., our side) get their asses flanked and kicked and shot all to hell, and are left wondering “what the hell happened?”

The Outpost, Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers — all of these films owe a debt to A Bridge Too Far, just as Attenborough’s film owes a debt in return to Lewis Milestone‘s somewhat glum and bitter Pork Chop Hill and you tell-me-what-else.

American forces engage the enemy for shaky or questionable or dubious reasons and the troops involved get pounded all to hell and nearly wiped out. Those who survive are left shattered, exhausted, gutted. “Well, we fucked up but at least we learned something…or did we?”

There are so many famous faces in A Bridge Too Far — James Caan, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, a cigar-chomping Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Maximilian Schell (as a thoughtful and humane German officer), Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, a baby-faced Ryan O’Neal, Liv Ullmann, etc. There’s no escaping a presumption that these performances are entirely about the paycheck, and so it’s hard if not impossible to invest in the various stories and vignettes.

And yet I was taken by Redford’s action cameo as Maj. Julian Cook, famed for leading a crazy military crossing of the Waal river during Operation Market Garden. And I related to Connery’s Major General Roy Urquhart, and Caan’s Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun (based on Charles Dohun). And two or three others.

You have to give Attenborough credit for managing such a vast army of actors and extras along with hundreds of planes, tanks, trucks, jeeps…no miniatures and obviously no CG. Not a bad film. It doesn’t meet anyone’s definition of “great” but is certainly approvable.

The moment has come for Get Out champion Bob Strauss to weigh in on the recent Kanye West fruit-loop thing. This is a dire situation, and as far as I can discern Strauss is the only man in Hollywood who can speak to it with any authority. The night before last Kanye referenced Get Out when he claimed that wife Kim Kardashian was en route to Wyoming to “lock me up” on Monday night. (This was a day after the South Carolina Harriet Tubman meltdown…right?) Quote: “Kim was trying to fly to Wyoming with a doctor to lock me up like on the movie Get Out because I cried about saving my daughter’s life yesterday. Everybody knows the movie Get Out is about me.”

Politically speaking the great Charlie Chaplin was a left-leaning humanitarian and a self-described peacemonger who became entangled in the raw end of the anti-Communist fervor of the late 1940s, and out of this conflict he eventually left this country for Switzerland — an exile given the boot.

In ’47 Chaplin angrily denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in response Representative John E. Rankin, who helped establish HUAC, declared in June 1947 that Chaplin’s “very life in Hollywood is detrimental to the moral fabric of America…[if he is deported] his loathsome pictures can be kept from before the eyes of the American youth…he should be deported and gotten rid of at once.”

Chaplin’s delivery of the final speech in The Great Dictator (’40) is too agitated, too shrill. He should have dialed it down a couple of notches. And yet portions of the speech are a close match with a certain John Lennon song that some are saying should replace Francis Scott Key‘s “The Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem.

Rick Worley‘s “The Rise and Fail of Ronan Farrow“, posted on 7.20.20 and introduced by Robert Weide, punctures several holes in the obstinate Farrow narrative that insists Woody Allen is guilty of having molested Dylan Farrow in August 1992.

Worley’s conclusion: Ronan Farrow’s first column about Allen (THR, 5.11.16) was called “My Father, Woody Allen, and the Danger of Questions Unasked”, and he spends much of it chiding the media for refusing to ask Allen the ‘tough questions.’

“The truth, of course is that Allen has been asked these tough questions endlessly for 28 years. Reporters still ask them constantly, and now he’s written a memoir, including a section that provides his answer in forensic detail.

“Ironically, when Allen made this attempt in his memoir to thoroughly respond to these tough questions, it was Farrow who unsuccessfully worked to have the book canceled.

“Ronan Farrow, on the other hand, has been very careful to never put himself in situations where he would be asked questions he didn’t want to answer, and until recently, nobody wanted to ask them. I’m wondering how long it will be until Ronan gets asked some ‘tough questions’ where his usual vague answers won’t cut it.

“Once people see that much of the animosity toward Woody Allen is built on this very same house of cards and shoddy reporting, will they maybe start to ask themselves the tough question of why they were so willing to assume Allen was guilty when all the evidence pointed to the contrary?”

Why would I want to watch Outpost in Malaya (aka The Planter’s Wife)? Because I mentioned it 12 and 1/2 years ago, sight unseen, after finding a color photo of the old Leows’ State marquee while this 1952 Ken Annakin film was playing there. In the back of my mind I’ve always wanted to at least sample parts of it.

Posted on 12.6.07: “I accept that I’ll probably never see Outpost in Malaya, a Jack Hawkins-Claudette Colbert adventure flick with rubber plants, Communist insurgents, elephants, a cobra and a mongoose. It’s not on DVD, was never issued on VHS and hasn’t even aired on TCM or TNT. But if I hadn’t wandered across this shot of 1952 Times Square, I never would have even heard of this Ken Annakin film. And to think that people lined up to see it, bought popcorn and everything.”

That was then, this is now. A year or two ago a 480p version began streaming on Amazon, and about two weeks ago it appeared for free on YouTube. I watched the very beginning this morning and was shocked to discover it’s in black and white.

All this time I’d presumed it had been shot in glorious color. The exotic backdrop obviously required it. A year earlier John Huston‘s The African Queen had been location-filmed in Technicolor, and in ’52 John Ford‘s Mogambo (which opened on 10.9.53) was captured in Kenya the same way. Alas, the Outpost in Malaya producers (Pinnacle Productions) couldn’t manage the cost. Here’s Bosley Crowther’s 11.27.52 review.

By the way: Malaysia was subject to the British Empire from the 18th Century onward. Peninsular Malaysia was unified as the Malayan Union in 1946. Malaya was restructured as the Federation of Malaya in 1948 and achieved independence on 8.31.57. Malaya united with North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore on 16 September 1963 to become Malaysia. In 1965, Singapore was expelled from the federation.”

The trailer strongly suggests that Marjane Satrapi‘s Radioactive (Amazon Prime, 7.24) is an instructive sanctification thang, the subject being twice-Nobel Prize-winning radiation pioneer Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike). You can smell the determination to pay tribute to a great, independent-minded woman who wasn’t sufficiently respected by the male establishment, etc. And if that doesn’t scare you off, the fact that Radioactive was written by the guy who wrote the depressingly on-the-nose screenplay for The Aeronauts should at least give you pause.

Not to mention the 68% and 54% ratings from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

Consider Charles Bramesco’s Guardian review:

“Radioactive gives the by-the-numbers biopic treatment to the great Marie Curie (Rosamund Pike). The film flits through the defining moments in her life: meeting her husband and lifelong research partner Pierre (Sam Riley), discovering the elements polonium and radium, two children and two Nobel prizes, the tragic loss of her spouse to a trampling horse, and her scandalous affair with her other colleague Paul Langevin (Aneurin Barnard)

“All the while, both Curie and the film remain firmly committed to the cause of scientific advancement, which we know because she says so several times over the course of the script. It’s as if a string hangs off of the back of Pike’s spine, and when a key grip offscreen pulls it, she recites one of a handful of inspirational catchphrases.

“Satrapi, a thrilling talent when she brought her graphic novel Persepolis to the screen, explicitly and aggressively champions the virtue of being smart, then treats her audience like they haven’t got two functioning brain cells to rub together.

“This is a film that, in Dewey Cox-ian fashion, believes the audience can’t identify a historical figure until somebody says their complete name out loud. This is a film that decides we must actually watch a random child create an atomic model to understand that Curie left a lasting legacy. This is a film that forces Curie to make hilariously foreboding statements about the possibility of her advances in radiation being co-opted for unsavory ends, then flashes forward to the atomic bomb melting the happy citizens of Hiroshima to make sure everyone gets the point.

“Is Satrapi worried that the viewer isn’t aware of the devastation in the Japanese theater, or just that they don’t realize that it was sad? Either way, the admiration for a woman who knew so much about so much clashes with the unspoken assumption that the audience knows absolutely nothing about anything.”