At the Movies with Mike

-- Mike Morgan

Santa Fe Trail (1940)

Whenever Hollywood attempts to portray history, especially American history, and doubly especially American history that deals with racism, it’s like taking a ride on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. Every now and again you get a glimpse of the real world at some ridiculous speed, except you’re not too sure what you saw because your entire focus is on not throwing up your lunch all over your shoes. Such is the experience of watching Santa Fe Trail, which aspires to tell the story of John Brown, the infamous anti-slavery activist and revolutionary. John Brown, played by Raymond Massey, fits the usual bill, a bearded, wild-eyed, gun-running, bible-quoting terrorist, but he’s not the main character. Unh-unh, Errol Flynn is, and he portrays Jeb Stuart, the notorious Confederate cavalry leader. It all begins at West Point a few years before the Civil War (the American one), where Van Heflin, a fifth column abolitionist, is among the class of Plebes that includes the old Swashbuckler Flynn himself, and none other than Ronald Reagan as George Armstrong Custer. The major domo at the academy is Robert E. Lee, so the class of 1858 is full of war criminals of some description or another. Well, Van Heflin starts yanking Jeb Stuart’s chain by making all of these derogatory statements about slave-owners to which the standard response is “the South will sort out its own problems.” Reagan meanwhile, true to form, is confused by the whole debate and peppers the discussions with such classic comments such as “I dunno” or “It’s all too complicated for me,” making the screen writers seers of what was to come forty years later in non-movie life. Everything moves out to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where both Errol and Ron vie for the hand of the Oberstumfurher’s daughter Olivia De Havilland, and Raymond Massey is burning down barns, transporting runaways through the underground railroad, and smuggling rifles in crates marked “Bibles - Do Not Touch.” There are actual black people playing black people, and naturally there’s tons of eye-rolling and a solid dose of “lawdy mamas” all over the place. But Jeb prevails, and when posted back East, he leads the army column to bushwhack and capture John Brown at the botched Harper’s Ferry arsenal raid, saving the day for the slavers. The film ends with John Brown swaying from the gallows, and some Hallmark Card pronouncement about fire engulfing the land. Hard to swallow you might surmise, but then if you saw Mel Gibson’s happy North Carolina slaves in the diabolical “Patriot,” then you’d realize how far it’s all regressed in the last sixty years. Not since Victor Mature played the Sioux chief Crazy Horse have we been treated to such a history lesson.



The Good Shepherd (2006)

The moral of the story here is that it’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it. The job, being a founding mover and shaker in the OSS and later the CIA. The somebody is Matt Damon, surrounded by fellow Skull and Boners from Yale, and an aging Wild Bill Donovan type played by the director, Robert De Niro, a diabetic fast losing his extremities, but unfortunately not his mind. Now the CIA has wrecked havoc around the world for the latter half of the last century and will do so well into this one, but one wouldn’t think so in this ponderous no-risk tell-all or rather tell-what-you-already-know-very-slowly saga of American intelligence cloak and dagger work. Not since Mahatma Gandhi shuffled off the screen into the Ganges and the good books of Lord Mountbatten, has such ponderousness prevailed. Skipping back and forth from the Bay of Pigs debacle to WWII, cold war carrying-ons, and banana republic CIA-induced coups, this film takes forever (it’s three fucking hours long) to hit you with the bleeding obvious. Why is it so long? Because this a serious topic boyo, you better believe it. It’s so serious that the script writers did not insert one humorous line, nor one ironic utterance in the entire one hundred and eighty minutes. It’s so serious that we need to have a serious classical music soundtrack. Kind of an endurance test, you might think, but you’ll stay in your seat and not slip out for a fag to catch the plot twist, which becomes apparent way too long before it’s revealed, although you’re not quite sure, so your suffering is prolonged. Angelina Jolie plays the Matt Damon wife, a blue-blooded sot-artist named Clover, who is wronged by the Company, to whom Matt Damon is really married. John Tuturro is his stooge, Alex Baldwin is some big-shot G-Man, and the only one worth any kudos is Michael Gambon, the former Singing Detective, who gets snuffed too early on. Matt Damon soldiers on, he’s a real decent chap you know. He doesn’t take advantage of deaf girls, he marries his wife cos he knocked her up before she was his wife, and he cares about his son, even changing the brat’s pants when he pees on Santa’s leg at a CIA Christmas party. But the toll of being a dirty tricks maven grinds him down, as we witness the obligatory torture session over which he presides, and see him sacrifice his family for the greater good. It’s hard to swallow if you know anything about the ruthlessness of the CIA. In 2006, with the war on terror, Iraq, homeland security, Guantanamo, renditions and all of the other deadly atrocities that this lot is up to at full throttle Aristotle, you’d think that Robert De Niro might come up with something a wee bit more challenging and critical than this somnolent tale. George Clooney certainly does. De Niro should stick to what he seems to do best these days, namely spending his American Express card downtown and advertising so. What I ultimately got out of this movie is that my back hurt and my bladder ain’t as strong as it used to be, especially when I yawn.