Stubs - The Cat's Meow

The Cat’s Meow (2002) Starring Kirsten Dunst, Cary Elwes, Edward Herrmann, Eddie Izzard, Joanna Lumley. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Screenplay by Steven Peros. Based on a play by Steven Peros. Produced by Kim Bieber, Carol Lewis, Dieter Meyer, Julie Baines. Run time: 112 Minutes. Color. United States, Germany, United Kingdom Mystery, Comedy, Drama, Historical

It almost sounds like a movie, film pioneer Thomas Ince, actress Marion Davies, fellow filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, British writer Elinor Glyn, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, and actress Margaret Livingston take a weekend cruise aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht Oneida to celebrate Ince’s birthday. However, the guest of honor dies onboard or soon afterward, depending on who’s story you believe. How did Ince die?

Stubs - The Sign of the Cross

The Sign of the Cross (1932) Starring: Fredric March, Elissa Landi, Claudette Colbert, Charles Laughton Directed by Cecile B. DeMille. Screenplay by Waldemar Young, Sidney Buchman. Based on the play The Sign of the Cross by Wilson Barrett (London, 27 May 1895). Cecil B. De Mille's Production. Run time: 126 minutes. USA Black and White. Melodrama, Historical, Religious. Pre-Code.

Feature filmmaking in Hollywood owes a lot to Cecile B. DeMille. Along with Jesse Lasky, Sam Goldfish (later Samuel Goldwyn), and a group of East Coast businessmen created the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1913, one of the companies that would eventually become Paramount Pictures. DeMille became director-general of the company. He would also co-direct the first full-length film shot In Hollywood with The Squaw Man (1914).

Stubs - Mank

Mank (2020) Starring: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Tom Pelphrey, Charles Dance. Directed by David Fincher Screenplay by Jack Fincher. Produced by Ceán Chaffin, Eric Roth, Douglas Urbanski. USA Black and White Run time: 131 minutes. Biography, Historical.

Hollywood films about Hollywood always run the risk of being too inside baseball for the average viewer. It gets more so when the subject matter is 80 years old, as it is with Mank, a biographical film about Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldham) a screenwriter on Citizen Kane (1941), or as the film purports, the writer on the film. Based on a claim, and some would say discredited one, by Pauline Kael in her 1971 New Yorker article Raising Kane that Welles did not deserve screenwriting credit, the screenplay was written by Jack Fincher, a little-known screenwriter, whose son turned out to be film director David Fincher.

Stubs - The Trial of the Chicago 7

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) Starring: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Sacha Baron Cohen, Daniel Flaherty, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, John Carroll Lynch, Eddie Redmayne, Noah Robbins, Mark Rylance, Alex Sharp, Jeremy Strong. Directed by Aaron Sorkin. Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Produced by Stuart M. Besser, Matt Jackson, Marc Platt, Tyler Thompson. Run Time: 130 minutes. Color. USA Political, Historical, Drama.

This has been a year like no other when it comes to films in theaters. The bottom line is that there hasn’t been any worth risking one’s life to see. Not that there haven’t been good movies released but 2020 will be remembered as the year when a big release would go straight to streaming more often than not. Case in point, The Trial of the Chicago 7. Originally conceived as a theatrical release with none other than Steven Spielberg at the helm, Paramount Pictures would sell all distribution rights to Netflix when a profitable theatrical release seemed out of the question (it did get a short theatrical release before disappearing behind Netflix's paywall). Say what you will but putting a film on a streaming service does limit who can see the film, especially since downstream release windows are pretty much broken.

Stubs – Titanic (1943)

Titanic (1943) Starring: Ernst.F. Fürbringer, Kirsten Heiberg, Karl Schönböck, Sybille Schmitz, Otto Wernicke, Hans Nielsen. Directed by Werner Klinger, Herbert Selpin. Produced by Willy Reiber. Screenplay by Herbert Selpin, Walter Zerlett-Olfenius. Run Time: 85 minutes. Germany  Black and White  Drama, Historical, German Propaganda

So the title seems right, but the year seems wrong. It might surprise some, but James Cameron’s film was not the first depiction of the sinking of that ocean liner on its maiden voyage. But while Cameron made his movie to make money, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels commissioned the German’s movie to discredit the English and the Americans, blaming the tragedy on English capitalist greed, rather than human judgment.

Bruce Ismay (E.F. Furbringer), Captain Smith (Otto Wernicke) and First
Officer Petersen (Hans Nielsen) discuss the running of the Titanic.

This film shares more than just a title with Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. Like the latter film, this also tells the story of the Titanic sinking in 1912, mixing both real life people with fictional characters. Chief among these additions is German First Officer Herr Petersen (Hans Nielsen). No surprise, but the German officer is the hero of this picture. It is Petersen who is concerned about the ship’s speed and begs the rich owner Sir Bruce Ismay (E.F. Fürbringer) to slow the liner down.

First class was shown to be opulent, but its passengers as cowards.

But Ismay is driven by the stock market. Because of the ship’s cost overruns, the stock price for White Star Line has plummeted. And this, for Ismay and the board of the White Star Line, is a good thing. They want to drive the stock price down, even selling their own shares, so that they can swoop in and buy back the stock at bargain basement prices. They plan to buy the stock back just before announcing that the Titanic had set a speed record for an Atlantic crossing, a feat they’re convinced will drive the stock price to new heights. Ismay, who is onboard the maiden voyage, promises Captain Edward J. Smith (Otto Wernicke) a $5000 bonus for arriving on time and an extra $1000 for every hour he’s early. Smith, feeling trapped by the confrontational president of the company he works for, has no choice but to comply with Ismay’s orders.

The Germans from steerage prove to be courageous, what a surprise!

However, when it is apparent that the boat is sinking, Ismay demands that Smith get him on a lifeboat. When Smith refuses, Ismay, sounding very much like a Nazi officer, commands his subordinate to make it so. While Smith is ineffectual, Petersen promises to get Ismay on a lifeboat, if only so Ismay can stand in judgment for the tragedy his greed has caused.

The iceberg rips a hole in the side of the boat, flooding it with sea water.

Like Ismay, when push comes to shove, the first class passengers, mostly British and American rich, become cowardly, while the Germans in steerage, as well as Petersen and his ex-lover Sigrid Olinsky (Sybille Schmitz), are shown to be courageous. Sybille, a recently impoverished Russian aristocrat, helps Petersen save other passengers before Petersen orders her onto one of the last lifeboats. As an officer, he tells her, he has to stay with the ship. And after Sybille’s gone, Petersen hears the cries for help from a young girl, left to die in her cabin by her British capitalist parents. With the ship about to go under, Petersen leaps from the deck with the girl in his arms. He swims out to a lifeboat, the same one Sybille is on, and the two are pulled aboard.

Those who managed to get to the lifeboats survive, including Ismay.

Petersen and Sybille watch as the Titanic finally goes down, albeit in one piece, as opposed to breaking in two as we have been taught is what actually happened.

In this version, the Titanic sinks in one piece.

The film ends with the British maritime inquiry into the tragedy, where Petersen appears to be the only witness against Ismay. Despite Petersen’s condemnation of Ismay’s actions, the inquiry finds Captain Smith to be responsible for what happened to the ship under his command. Ismay is cleared and not held responsible. But as the epilogue text points out “the deaths of 1,500 people remain unatoned, forever a testament to Britain’s endless quest for profits.”

Part of the problem with viewing this film as effective propaganda is that I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think Bruce Ismay was a villain. Maybe no previous film about the Titanic sinking, and there had been several by the time this one was made, concentrated as much on the business side of the tragedy. Certainly, Cameron’s version of the story, which is the one everyone is most familiar with, did not make Ismay out to be a hero. He pushes Captain Smith to go faster, though I don’t remember the stock market shenanigans of the White Star board getting as much screen time as it gets in this film. In both films, Ismay, unlike most of the male passengers, survives the sinking by getting aboard a lifeboat reserved for women and children. Certainly, this is not the actions of a heroic man.

Titanic seems like an odd film to make, given Germany’s situation at the point in the war it was being made. The tide was already turning against them, so why spend the time and money on a film like this? The goal of such an endeavor seems to have failure written all over it from the get-go. What could Goebbels have expected would happen after someone watched the film? The Germans weren’t fighting the Allies to end corporate greed.

In the end, Goebbels banned the film from being shown in Germany, since by then the Allies were already bombing almost nightly and the German people weren’t in the mood for a film about mass death and panic. Further, undercutting the film’s effectiveness was that seeing steerage separated from the rest of the passengers by locked gates was similar to the situation going on in Germany’s many concentration camps at the time. Desperation to survive against all odds was nothing new and not escapist fare.

The movie did get released in German-occupied Europe, but at the end of the war was considered lost. Found in 1949, the film was almost immediately banned in most of Western-Europe, but dubbed in Russian by the Soviets and screened across the Eastern-bloc as a sort of “trophy” film from the war.

It’s hard to view a Nazi propaganda film with an attitude better than detached disinterest. Obviously, I don’t condone Nazi atrocities or their goals and aims. But when I heard this film existed, I had to admit I was curious about it. I can’t really comment on the film’s production values without sounding like this is a film I would take seriously. However, footage from this Titanic did find its way into 1958’s A Night to Remember, including two clips of the engine room flooding.

I would say that this is not a film you need to watch. I’m not sure which, if any, Titanic-based films I would really recommend. The ones I’ve seen, and I’ve not seen them all, have their pluses and minuses. While one may have way better special effects (Cameron’s Titanic), another may do a much better job concentrating on the actual events and the people involved. 1514 people perished when the RMS Titanic sank on April 15, 1912. There is no need, in my opinion, to mix in fictional characters with real people in order to show the breadth of the tragedy.

Stubs - Braveheart

Braveheart (1995) Starring Mel Gibson, Sophie Marceau, Patrick McGoohan, Catherine McCormack. Directed by Mel Gibson. Produced by Mel Gibson, Alan Ladd. Jr., and Bruce Davey  Screenplay by Randall Wallace. Run Time: 177 minutes. U.S.  Color. Historical, Biography.

The fact that a film wins an Academy Award for best picture is not a guarantee that the film is great. A great film is one that has all the usual qualities: directing, acting, writing and production values that come together to create a film of quality, but also one that people will want to view over and over again. What films can be called great is very subjective. Scope, scale and running time do not necessarily make a film great, neither is box office an indicator.

As you can tell by the setup, that despite its winning best picture for 1995, I don’t consider Braveheart to be a great film. That is not to take away from the size and scope of the movie, on that scale this is a great, as in big, film.

Braveheart is long by any standard. Only a few minutes under three hours the run time is epic length for sure. But despite being billed as an action movie, the first hour seems to drag, which only seems to make the film seem longer.

Braveheart is long by any standard. And a little frustrating, too.

Historical films can be tricky. There are certain expectations the audience has with the genre. First we don’t want the film to assume we know too much about the subject so that events occur and we’re just supposed to know what they are without any explanation or exposition. Secondly, we want the historical events to be shown in a realistic and fascinating way. We didn’t come to the movies for history class, we came to be entertained.

I believe Braveheart unfortunately fails to really do a good job of teaching us the history it’s depicting. There appears to be an assumption that telling us a battlefield, say Falkirk, is supposed to spark a shared remembrance, say along the lines of Gettysburg. The history of Scotland is not something most Americans learn in school. And while the film is epic and a spectacle, it seems really thin on historical accuracy.

To begin with, the intricacies of Medieval Scottish politics is not something many of us have ever been exposed to and Braveheart could have done a better job explaining the players. I did get the overall “Nobility bad” message, but I will admit the nobility of England and of Scotland seemed to be mushed together and I’m not sure if that was true across the board and, if so, how could Scotland also have a king, Robert the Bruce?

There is little known about William Wallace, which presents a problem for the filmmakers. However, this film not only makes up historical events, but it also makes changes to history that don’t really make sense. The Battle of Stirling Bridge, a real battle, is fought in the film without the bridge. Wallace’s wife name isn’t Murron, but Marian, like in Robin Hood, but it was changed. In the film, the English noblemen claim the right of Prima Nocta, the hideous idea that the lord of the estate has first right to take the bride’s virginity on her wedding night, but that is something that never happened in England. And the list goes on and on.

While I usually don’t want to pick apart a historical film for its poetic license, this one really takes license to a new level. The relationship between William Wallace (Mel Gibson) and Princess Isabella of France (Sophia Marceau) is beautifully told. The Princess is stuck in a loveless, but politically astute marrage, with Prince Edward (Peter Hanly). When her lady in waiting relates to the Princess Wallace’s love for his wife Murron MacClannough (Catherine McCormack) and how he is revenging her death at the hands of an English sheriff, the princess is driven to tears.

William Wallace and Murron MacClannough in happier times.

The Princess and William meet when she is sent as an envoy of King Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) to negotiate with him. The heat between the two is noticeable and later explodes into a night of passion that ends with the Princess pregnant with Wallace’s son. 

All of this is beautifully told, but it’s really a load of BS. In reality, Princess Isabella was only 10 years old and still living in France when Wallace dies. So the subplot that runs throughout and which helps humanize Wallace, couldn’t have happened. That’s sort of a big error when the film is supposed to be historically based.

As is, the depiction of Edward II has a grain of truth to it, but while it was rumored he had affairs with men, he did in fact have five children with two separate wives. He’s not the effeminate Gibson portrays him to be. But while the film depicts King Edward throwing his son’s lover, Phillip (Stephen Billington), out a window, Piers Gaveston, the real person the character Phillip represents, survived into Edward II’s reign. Again dramatic effect shouldn’t trump history if you’re trying to be realistic.

I would blame a lot of this on the screenplay by Randall Wallace, since much of this misguided fleshing out lies at his feet. Just because there isn’t that much biographical information available doesn’t give you carte blanche to make things up and still pretend you’re telling someone’s real story.

There are a lot of great production values in the film. The assemblage of the armies and their pitch battles is something to behold. The outfit the Princess wears when she first meets Wallace is really exquisite and the multitude of costumes, armor and make up must have been a Herculean task to pull off. And like any widescreen film shooting a gorgeous landscape, the film looks really good.

Princess Isabella of France (Sophia Marceau) 

But there is a real reason why this film is rated R. The battles are grisly and brutal. After having watched 300 recently, these battles reminded me of them, with the stabbings, arrows flying, limbs being cut off and heads being decapitated. If I don’t see another intense battle scene for a while, that will be fine with me.

Let the bludgeoning begin.

While Braveheart is certainly an epic film, the historical inaccuracies (of which I’ve only mentioned a few) detract from the film. Part of the blame falls on the script, but should also be shared by the director (Mel Gibson) and the producers (Gibson, Alan Ladd Jr. and Bruce Davey) who jettisoned showing real events for the sake of epic entertainment disguised as telling real events.

Sometimes, you wonder why the Academy votes the way it does. In the case of this being that year’s best film, you wonder why this one got picked. The Academy can get it wrong and it appears they did in this case.

Having seen Braveheart once, I don’t anticipate a situation wherein I want to watch it again. I wouldn’t recommend this film. In fact, if you’re ginning for a film from 1995 to watch, I’d recommend Babe over this.