Nathan Bedford Forrest Hits For The Racist Cycle

Title: Down Along With That Devil’s Bones

Rating: 4 Stars

This is a book about Confederate monuments and what to do with them. Should we tear them down? By tearing them down, are we somehow ignoring history? What does it feel like to walk by a statue in your home town every day knowing that the person being glorified treated your ancestors as animals?

O’Neill concentrates on four specific monuments. They are all devoted to that great son of the South, Nathan Bedford Forrest. One is located in Selma. Another is located in Murfreesboro, The third is in Nashville and the fourth is in Memphis.

Those who want to memorialize the Confederate legacy really do love Forrest. He was a man of humble beginnings who rose from private to Lieutenant General. His cavalry consistently, until the end of the war, bested the Union army. He was undoubtedly a man of great courage and possessed a great military strategic mind. Unlike that other Confederate icon, Robert E Lee, he does not have the stink of surrender about him. He seems purpose made to be a perfect figure for the Lost Cause congregation to worship.

Let’s not beat around the bush. Forrest was a horrible person. He was indeed born in great poverty. He made his fortune (earning the equivalent of a million dollars a year) in slave trading. This was during the so-called second middle passage era. International slave trade was forbidden. However, there was great profit to be made in breeding slaves in the upper southern states and then selling them down the river to die in misery on cotton plantations in the deep south. Forrest made his money here. In Memphis, he had a slave lot that was quite literally next door to a church that still stands and is in use today. He held auctions. He sold men, women, and children.

He made so much money that when the Civil War came, he was able to raise and command his own cavalry regiment. Without a doubt he was a great and courageous soldier. He also led a brutal massacre. Attacking Fort Pillow, he met a Union force of white and black soldiers. No mercy was given. Despite black soldiers going up to Confederate soldiers on their hands and knees to surrender, they were butchered. There were stories of men being burned to death and hacked apart with sabers. 

After the war, Southern leaders were able to keep the practice of slavery under a different name. This involved arresting and convicting a black person of some trivial crime. Not being able to pay the fine, they would be incarcerated. Once incarcerated, the county would lease the prisoners to work under slave like conditions with no pay, where they were constantly chained, and under which they could be whipped if they did not meet their daily quota. In his post Civil War activities, Forrest made use of leased convicts, personally keeping the practice of slavery alive. 

Let’s not forget his coup de grace. As the Grand Wizard, Forrest was the first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan. With his heroic fame, he had no trouble at all growing the Klan. 

There you have it, Nathan Bedford Forest: slave trader, war criminal, convict leaser, and KKK leader. What’s not to love?

Of course, there are people who try to explain all of this. Slave trading was legal when he did it. Convict leasing was legal when he did it, The Fort Pillow commander should have surrendered, and the original KKK was just a response to Northern oppression. Still, it is a lot to explain and what does it say about your legacy if you have to explain all of that away?

So, it’s bad enough that there are monuments to such a man. Some of their locations and timing are atrocious.

Take Selma as an example. This is a sacred place for the Civil Rights movement. This is where so many were attacked and beaten as they tried to peacefully cross over the Edmund Pettis Bridge. In the year 2000, after decades of struggle, a black man was elected mayor. One of the last acts of the previous mayor was authorizing the placement of a Forrest statue. Less than a week after the mayor’s inauguration, Forrest’s statue was erected. How can anyone take that other than as a provocative statement that, even if there’s a black mayor, the racial hierarchy is still preserved?

Another example is Murfreesboro. Here it is an ROTC building on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). On the surface, given Forrest’s military experience, it doesn’t seem to be a totally crazy choice. However, it’s not like the building was built in 1865. The building was built in 1958. If you know your history, then you’ll know that this was at the height of desegregation struggles. Naming a building after a slave owning / slave trading Confederate general in 1958 is, like Selma, a statement about maintaining the current racial hierarchy. What makes it even worse is that the MTSU student body is about one third people of color. Every day they have to walk past a building named for someone that enslaved, sold, and massacred their ancestors.

The common thread running through Confederate monuments is that, despite all of the fancy words, that they in fact are not celebrating some long faded Confederate honor or way of life. If you actually look at when a monument was built, you will notice that nearly all of them were placed during a time when Jim Crow was getting started, or when desegregation was beginning to gain momentum, or a major civil rights act was passed. The now ubiquitous stars and bars Confederate flag wasn’t even a symbol until Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign, which was in opposition to Harry Truman’s civil rights actions and whose platform was basically all about segregation.

It doesn’t matter if your ancestors didn’t own slaves. It doesn’t matter if your ancestors immigrated here long after the war was over. These monuments stain all of us. We must all acknowledge our shared American past and how that past has systemically affected our present and will affect our future. 

Growing Up By Covering For A Murderer

Title: Rebecca

Rating: 4 Stars

I first decided that I wanted to read the novel due to the Hitchcock film phase that I find myself lurching in and out of. Rebecca is considered one of his best films. I figured that I’d read the novel and watch the film. Much to my chagrin, it turns out that the stream gods have not made Hitchcock’s Rebecca available. Therefore, I was only able to read the novel.

Let’s just start with the plot. In case you can’t tell by the blog title, spoilers will abound in this post. I usually try to avoid major spoilers, but here it is so intrinsic to the plot that I couldn’t see how I could avoid it. Also, the novel is about eighty years old. However, if you want to read Rebecca and not be surprised, consider yourself forewarned.

The novel is, amazingly enough, not about Rebecca. The novel is told from the perspective of a very young woman. Neither her name nor her age are given. From hints in the text, I’d guess that she’s about nineteen or twenty. Reduced in circumstances, she serving as a companion / near servant to a brassy, obnoxious, wealthy American woman named Mrs Van Hopper.

While in Monte Carlo, Mrs Van Hopper forces herself upon a British man traveling alone named Maxim de Winter. Although de Winter avoids Van Hopper, he seems attracted to the young woman. When Van Hopper falls ill, de Winter seizes the opportunity to romance the young woman in a whirlwind manner. After two weeks, he proposes to her and they get married. After a several month honeymoon, he and his wife return home to his grand English manor, Manderley.

There the inexperience of the woman is exposed. The head housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, clearly disapproves of her. Every minor change and request that the woman makes is met with the retort that the previous Mrs de Winter did not do it that way and would not approve. Rebecca is the previous Mrs de Winter. She died about a year ago in a boating accident under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

Convinced that Rebecca is an incredibly sophisticated and beautiful woman that Maxim must have been madly in love with, the woman becomes convinced that the marriage is a mistake. Maxim must be regretting his rash decision to marry her. Mrs Danvers continues to prey on her vulnerability, nearly leading to her committing suicide.

At the height of that melodrama, Rebecca’s sunken boat, previously missing, is found at the bottom of the bay. Inside the boat is found Rebecca’s body. Maxim confesses to the young woman that, immediately upon marriage, he discovered that Rebecca was a horrible woman. The entire marriage was a sham. On the night of her death, Rebecca told him that she was pregnant, that he wasn’t the father, but to keep up appearances he must raise the child as his own and have him inherit his sizable estate. Driven mad, Maxim shot Rebecca dead. He took her body onto her boat and then intentionally sunk it to hide the corpse.

After this confession, Maxim tells the young woman that she was the only woman that he has ever loved. This confession brings about a change in the young woman and she nearly instantly matures into a sophisticated woman. 

Right at the point where it looks dimmest for Maxim, it turns out that Rebecca was dying of cancer and could not be pregnant. She goaded Maxim into killing her because she did not want to die a lingering death.

All is saved. However, as they head back to Manderley, they find it engulfed in flames.

So, a lot is going on here. It is a fine example of Gothic melodrama. If you have previously read and enjoyed Jane Eyre, then this will probably be right up your alley.

The 4 star rating is actually a big comeback for the novel. For at least the first half, it was a borderline 2 star read. Frankly, the young woman is insufferable in the first half of the book. She is painfully naive, insecure, and incompetent. She knows nothing and seemingly is unable to learn. Even worse, especially in the year 2021, Maxim, somewhere in his 40s, treats her like a child. Not only that, her childishness seems to be the number one attribute that attracts him to her. He corrects her. He chides her. When he’s upset with her, I nearly expected him to put her over his knee and spank her. It was discomfiting. 

Her transition from naivety to worldly is wholly unbelievable. In that same interval, she nearly becomes maternal in her relation to Maxim. These are two people that just don’t seem comfortable existing in an equal relationship.

Even so, the plot saves it. Once Rebecca’s body is found, the story moves at a blistering pace. In true potboiler melodramatic fashion, I found myself getting increasingly involved in the story and compelled to finish it.

Now I just have to wait for Hitchcock’s film to become available to stream.

A Kakistocracy Of Dunces

Some time ago, I came across the interesting word kakistocracy. According to Wikipedia, the word means government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous people.

Here is a word that, on the one hand, you’d hope would never need be invented. On the other hand, is there a more appropriate word that can be used to describe the Trump administration? I’m not even talking about politics. There have been conservative governments that have been run by competent, qualified, and dedicated public servants. For example, even though he was only a one term president, I’d submit that, by and large, the George H.W. Bush administration met all of these criteria. I certainly disagreed with its politics. However, it was well run. I didn’t wake up every morning and wonder if he might have broken the world while I was asleep.

Now that we are some months removed from the Trump administration and we’re no longer bombarded by illiterate five in the morning tweets, we have a little distance to look back. For just a moment, feast your eyes upon some of the most prominent members of the Trump administration, categorized by their most significant kakistocratic attribute. I had trouble pigeonholing some of the individuals. Many belong to more than one category. I used my best judgment.

Worst

Larry Kudrow, Director of the National Economic Council: He is famous among economists for an unparalleled record of wrong predictions. If I heard him say that it was going to be sunny, I would pack an umbrella. He went above and beyond economics and proved equally incompetent at Corona-virus epidemiology.

Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education: She managed to undermine both public schools and, by advocating for for-profit colleges, higher education.

Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary: As press secretary, the job is that you can spin all you want but you must never lie. Spicer lied on his first day on the job and everyday thereafter. He set the pattern for all to follow.

Bill Barr, Attorney General: The Attorney General is supposed to execute our nation’s laws with no thought of political consequences. Instead, he changed the ethos of the Justice Department to protect Trump at all costs.

Wilbur Ross, Commerce Secretary: Even before he was named secretary, he was involved in a number of financial scandals. As secretary, he was most famous for dozing off in meetings. His most notorious act during the Trump Administration was ordering NOAA to falsify weather reports to support Trump’s bizarre insistence that a hurricane was heading to Alabama (you all remember Sharpiegate, don’t you?).

Least Qualified

Alex Acosta, Labor Secretary: It turned out that his primary qualification for the job was his experience as a Jeffrey Epstein enabler.

Ben Carson, HUD Secretary: As great as a brain surgeon as he might have once been, even he admitted that he was not qualified to be head of HUD. He also would make the list of unscrupulous for his apparently illegal office renovation work.

Scott Atlas, Advisor to the President: Let’s put a doctor who knows nothing about infectious disease epidemiology in a position where he can pontificate nonsense at length.

Unscrupulous

Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator: Caught up in travel scandals, living with a lobbyist, unauthorized office expenses (hello Ben Carson!), using staff for personal reasons, and for so many other reasons, he resigned in disgrace.

Ryan Zinke, Interior Secretary: Caught up in scandals that included Halliburton, he resigned in disgrace.

Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services: Caught up in a private jet abuse scandal, he resigned in disgrace (sensing a pattern?).

Michael Flynn, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs: Before he even took office, he was negotiating with the Russians.

General Pieces Of Shit (enough said)

Steve Bannon, White House Senior Counselor

Stephen Miller, White House Senior Adviser

Kellyanne Conway, White House Senior Counselor

I could have kept going, but I’m now getting depressed. There’s a whole separate nepotism category that I could have started, but I’m tired and it’s pretty obvious.

I totally get if Biden’s politics aren’t your cup of tea. Go ahead and call the 80+ year old career middle of the road politician a radical socialist leftist atheist bent upon destroying our way of life.

Even so, at least give him the credit of placing people in position that actually care about the domain that they’ll manage, that they have the expertise to manage it, and aren’t looking to jump on every grift opportunity that passes their way.

I don’t know how Biden’s Administration will ultimately be measured, but I’m pretty sure that it won’t be considered a kakistocracy. In all likelihood, at the end of his Presidency, he won’t be handing over a pile of ashes to his successor.

All Work And No Play Makes Jake A Dull Boy

Title: I’m Thinking Of Ending Things

Rating: 5 Stars

I was brought to this novel via the film that was based upon it. The film was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. It was a typical Kaufman adventure, in that most of the time you’re just sitting there thinking WTF.

I was interested to see how far Kaufman was going to stray from the source material. Was it going to be like Adaptation, which started off as being a adaptation of The Orchid Thief but it ended up being very meta about writer’s block and with the The Orchid Thief’s author, Susan Orlean, being taken off for murder?

This time, for the most part, Kaufman stayed pretty true to the material.

The story is told from the perspective of a woman (unnamed in the novel). Fairly recently, some six weeks ago or so, she met a man named Jake. He seems to be some kind of scientist that works in a lab. They’ve started dated and have become close. Jake takes her on a long car trip so that she can meet his parents. On the long trip, they discuss several topics and the woman has many interior thoughts. The most significant one is that she really doesn’t see a future with Jake. She’s at the point where she wants a long term relationship, so although she likes Jake and enjoys being with him, she is thinking that the relationship has about run its course and that she wants to end things with him. This is making the whole hours long trip to his parents uncomfortable for her.

Her discomfort continues when she meets Jake’s parents. Both parents seem inordinately happy to see her. In fact, his mother has an unnatural plastic smile plastered on her face at all times. When the woman leaves the room, she can hear the parents arguing. They seem to be worried about Jake. They’re worried because he doesn’t have a job and has no relationships. Understandably, since she knows that he works in a lab and that she is actually at their house as his girlfriend, this confuses her.

Later, they drive home. It is now snowing heavily. For some reason, it becomes important for Jake to go to the very remote high school. There they begin kissing. Jake sees the school janitor peeping in on them. Outraged, he leaps out of the car to have a word with him. The woman, cold and abandoned, sits and waits. Finally, she can’t take it anymore and leaves the car and goes into the high school to find Jake. Instead, she becomes convinced that the janitor has done something to Jake and that she is now in danger. She resorts to hiding in various places in the school as the janitor seemingly closes in on her. 

Interspersed in all of this is another narrative. Some horrible thing has happened to the school that has shocked and horrified everyone. Everything is centered around the janitor and how he once had a very promising career but ended up a veritable hermit loner working as a janitor at the school for the last 30 years.

How are these two narratives aligned? Why is it that when the woman looks at a childhood picture of Jake, she thinks that it’s a picture of herself? Why is she regularly getting anonymous phone calls that just leave one threatening question? How is it possible that those anonymous phone calls seem to be coming from her own phone?

Both Reid’s novel and Kaufman’s film live pretty much in this same plot space. The main difference is tone. Kaufman’s film, especially at the end, takes a much more surreal approach. There are fantasy dance sequences. There’s a whole semi dream sequence where Jake receives a Nobel Prize.

Reid’s approach is more along the lines of psychological horror. Especially when the woman believes that she’s trapped at the school, the novel is full of dread. No matter where she goes, she can feel the presence of the janitor. She has unexplained paint on her hands that she can’t get off. The song “Hey, Good Lookin'” plays endlessly over the intercom.

Slowly the woman comes to the realization of what is happening and madness begins to creep into her writing. At one point, much like Jack Torrance in The Shining, she starts just compulsively writing one single phrase: What are you waiting for? The book’s title begins to take on a more ominous meaning.

Although I enjoyed Kaufman’s film, I enjoyed the novel more. The psychological horror had a more visceral impact upon me than the surrealism.

Snowpiercer Meets World War Z

Title: Train to Busan

Rating: 4 Stars

I’ve been on a South Korean film kick lately. Also, I’ve been watching Hitchcock films. These two threads seemed to have converged on a train theme. A day or two ago, I watched Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Today, I watched the South Korean Train to Busan. It’s fair to say that they are two quite different films.

Seok-woo is an amoral, workaholic fund manager. Separated from his wife, his young daughter Su-an wants to visit her mother in Busan. After initially refusing her, he eventually acquiesces. Unbeknownst to them, just as the train is pulling out, a seriously ill woman manages to stumble onto the train. The woman dies and then reanimates. I think that you can imagine what’s going to happen next. She turns feral and starts attacking the train riders. It becomes a desperate car by car struggle to survive. At the same time, the entire South Korean country seems to be devolving into zombie chaos. So, even if they can get off of the train, where would they go?

As my title says, Snowpiercer meets World War Z.

The zombies certainly owe a debt to World War Z (I”m talking the film, not the novel). These are the incredibly fast moving breed of zombie. They run at full sprint, running so fast that sometimes they end up piling on top of each other. They throw themselves violently at everything, but lack the cognitive abilities to even be able to so much as turn a door knob.

At its most basic, it’s just another zombie film. How can they manage to escape from their increasingly impossible situations? Who will live? Who will heroically and valiantly sacrifice themselves for the greater good of their crew? Will the sniveling coward only looking out for himself get his just desserts?

It does have a couple of wrinkles from more typical fare. First of all, although admittedly I have limited experience, but at least the South Korean films that have earned enough exposure to rise to my attention are intensely dialed up. I’m thinking of films like Night In Paradise, which brings the whole gangster revenge genre to a whole new incredibly dark and violent level. Or The Handmaiden with all kinds of incredible plot twists. Not to mention a film like Oldboy, which is just a whole lot of everything. As in those other films, Train to Pusan is very intense. You can pretty much count on everyone dying. Bad guys are going to be very bad. The zombies are going to be frantic and horrifying. The plot will move at a fever pitch.

The second wrinkle is the introduction of class. Considering himself among the elite, Seok-woo holds others in contempt. At one point, looking to save his own skin, to his daughter’s horror, he tries to trap healthy people with the zombies. Su-an condemns him for his actions, which puts him on his own path to redemption. Another character, the COO of a company, is even more selfish. He is only interested in saving himself and wields his authority like a cudgel to get his way. It’s the working class man and the homeless man that willingly tries to save others.

Similarly, one car has established itself as a safe zone. Seok-woo and several others manage to fight their way through several zombie filled cars to reach the safe car. Having reached this safe haven, the people that were already occupying it treat them with fear and contempt and condemn them to a wholly separate annex. They look upon the interlopers in a similar manner to how citizens of a country look at recent immigrants.

Speaking of immigration, the mass, mindless, nihilistic, destruction wrought by the zombies seems to be a pretty precise metaphor for how some people imagine immigration. Everything is well run and perfect until the zombies come along and destroy all of it. They are the proverbial ‘other’ that a society can in no way enjoin. They can only be destroyed. It’d be interesting to understand if immigration has a similar hold on the South Korean psyche, or in their case, if this is somehow a representation of their fears of a North Korean invasion.

I’m certainly not an expert on South Korean culture. Judging from this film, it would appear to be patriarchical. The three main female characters are a little girl, a very pregnant wife, and a young woman infatuated with her boyfriend. The men do all of the fighting. They make all of the decisions. They willingly sacrifice themselves to save the women. The women are pretty helpless and are in a near constant state of peril.

All in all, it was pretty standard fast moving zombie fare. I’m not a huge fan of the genre, but they put enough interesting nuances to it to make it enjoyable to watch.

Let’s Just Leave The Rich White Guys In Charge

Title: How The South Won The Civil War

Rating: 4 Stars

If you want a one sentence summary of the book regarding what’s wrong with our country, the blog title pretty much says it all.

Despite all of the talk about our creator endowing everyone with rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for most of our history this has been taken to mean rich white men. If you’ve done any critical reading of US history, this isn’t exactly headline news. If anything sets this book apart, it’s that the argument is made cogently and concisely over a spare 200 pages.

In the beginning of our country’s history, there were two main philosophies. In the northern colonies, there was a sense of democracy. There were town halls. People were expected to have a voice in their government. The government was generally open to all (when all, I do mean men at this time of course).

In the South, it was different. Even in the days of tobacco growing but especially once cotton became king (and king it truly was, as a crop it absolutely dwarfed all other economic products or services), egalitarian notions were nonsensical. The South needed an army of low paid, low skilled, low educated, and expendable workers to successfully farm cotton. Once it became clear that indentured servants wasn’t going to be a working model, slavery became the obvious solution.

They built a social model that they prided was based upon the Greeks. Sure, there were tons of workers that had no life, no liberty, and certainly no pursuit of happiness, but at the top there were the chosen few. They were the elite. They were the ones chosen by God. They deserved all that they had through the divine birthright. In the South, out of a population of six million, there were about 350,000 slave owners. Of those, 1,800 of them had more than 100 slaves. It was to these 1,800 that all of the wonders of liberty and freedom were assigned.

As the North continued to grow in size due to immigration, the South began to worry about its position. Since crops like cotton did not grow in the North, slavery petered out and in its stead, with the Second Great Awakening in the Northeast, religious fervor brought new urgency to extinguishing the sins of slavery. As the country continued to expand westward to regions that all seemed not conducive to slavery, the Southerners feared for the future of their oligarchy.

This was brought to a head with The Civil War. In the aftermath, it seemed that our founding fathers’ promise of equality for all would come to fruition. Unfortunately, this did not come to pass after Lincoln’s assassination. His successor, Andrew Johnson, was sympathetic to the established elite of the South while so-called radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens tried to change the fabric of the South. The election of Rutherford Hayes marked the end of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of the Southern white male elite. With Black Codes, Jim Crow, and voting restrictions, their power was unchallenged.

After The Civil War, the migration to the West quickened. The West was a desolate place that was generally inhospitable. The federal government cleared the land of the indigenous Native Americans and Mexicans. The federal government handed out property for white men to farm. In some cases, large ranches owned by prosperous Mexicans were taken from them and handed to white men. Over time, the federal government stepped in even more to provide largesse to the white population. Despite its mythic lore of rugged individualism, the West was heavily subsidized via large water management projects, silver mine support, and access to large ranching plains. Later, billions of dollars of federal military contracts poured into the Western states.

Within a couple of decades, the social structure of the West had begun to mirror the South. There were a few white men at the top of the pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid were the poor whites, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, and freed Blacks struggling to exist. Not even assigned a position on the pyramid were women, whose roles were limited to wife, mother, and prostitute.

After the shared sacrifice of World War II, there was once again the looming threat of equality. The liberal Warren Supreme Court was passing out civil rights like they were candy. Tax rates were outrageously progressive. Previously invisible minority groups and women began to strive for equal rights.

Into this rode the Movement Conservatives. With the intellectual heft of William F Buckley and the political might of Barry Goldwater, they fought to stem the tide. Considering that they were both all about espousing the virtues of rugged individualism, hard work, and earning your way, the fact that both were children of privilege is more than just slightly ironic. Ronald Reagan brought it all home.

So, here we are now. 150 years ago, there were white people saying black people are lazy, ignorant, and want everything handed to them. In the year 2021 we hear the exact same nonsense. With the advent of Trump, people are now emboldened to say the quiet parts out loud. Republicans are openly trying to suppress voter turnout. Republican candidates are openly saying that they think universal suffrage is undesirable.

Apparently only certain types of people should be allowed to vote. I can only wonder who they mean when they say that. It’s not exactly dog whistle subtle.

Will the social unrest that we’ve experienced the past year or so change our trajectory? Like after The Civil War and after World War II, can we find the collective will and strength to fight again for equality for all? I’d never thought so when Biden won the Democratic nomination, but at least so far, he’s been far more progressive than I expected.

Perhaps it’s time for the pendulum to swing a bit again.

Crisscross! Crisscross!

Title: Strangers On A Train

It’s been a while since I’ve read a book and then seen its film adaption nearly simultaneously. As I was wrapping up Highsmith’s novel, I decided to give Hitchcock’s film a shot.

I’d done it once before with a Hitchcock adaption. Specifically, I read the novel, Hitchcock’s version, and Von Sant’s version of Psycho (posted here). One thing that I found interesting was how closely Hitchcock’s film hued to the novel. I was curious to see if it’d be the same here.

The film and the novel start off similarly. Two men bump into each on a train. Our protagonist is Guy Haines. In the novel he’s an up and coming soon to be famous architect. In the film, he’s a tennis player. On the train, he meets Bruno Antony. Antony is a dissolute, alcoholic, ne’er-do-well of wealthy parents.

They fall into conversation. We learn that Guy is on his way to meet his hopefully soon to be ex-wife, now pregnant by another man, to arrange a divorce so that he can marry his true love. We also learn that Bruno hates his stepfather (in the film it’s actually his father).

As the conversation progresses and the two men become drunker, Bruno confides that he has thought of the perfect way to commit murder. Two people accidentally meet on the train. They both want someone dead. The idea is that each would kill the other person’s victim while that person has an airtight alibi. They would never see each again. Since there is no way to connect the murderer to the victim, there would be no way to solve the crime.

Guy, not wishing to be impolite, kind of just laughs it off and leaves Bruno. A short while later, much to Guy’s shock and dismay, Bruno murders Guy’s wife. Now having done his part of the crime, Bruno begins to pressure Guy to kill his father. Despite the basic premise that there should be no connection between the two, Bruno increasingly inserts himself into Guy’s life to pressure him into the murder.

Will Guy bend to the pressure? Will Bruno through his carelessness expose them both? Will they both get away with murder?

Up to that point, everything is broadly consistent between the film and the novel. Beyond that, they take dramatically different turns.

In Highsmith’s novel, Guy is very high strung. Wanting to turn Bruno into the police but knowing that he’d probably get implicated himself, he dithers. Bruno pressures him to the point that he feels that he has no choice. One night, he sneaks into Bruno’s parents’ mansion and he kills the father. Now consumed by the guilt of the murder, he becomes even more high strung. Believing that there is now some inextricable bond between them, Bruno cannot leave Guy alone. A detective is on both of their scent. Bruno falls overboard a boat. Despite Guy nearly dying himself in his attempt to rescue him, Bruno dies. Even though the secret truly is now safe, Guy feels the compulsion to confess to the man who impregnated his wife. The man doesn’t even pretend to care. However, his confession is overheard by the detective. At the end of the novel, Guy is led away by the police, seemingly relieved to finally be free of his burden of guilt.

Nothing even close to that occurs in Hitchcock’s film. Bruno does pressure Guy to kill his father, but Guy doesn’t even give a hint of actually going through with it. His only concern is the scandal that might come out (his love is the daughter of a US senator) if Bruno is uncovered. Guy even unsuccessfully goes to Bruno’s father to warn him. Bruno, now convinced that Guy will never kill his dad, decides to implicate him in the murder of his wife by leaving evidence behind at the scene. Meeting at a carnival, the two violently struggle on a carousel that is spinning out of control. When the fight is over, Bruno is dead and the incriminating evidence is found on his body, thus clearing Guy. Guy can now return to his storybook life of tennis and imminent marriage to the senator’s daughter.

As you can see, the two unfold quite differently. Highsmith’s novel is much more of a psychological study exploring the alcoholic madness of Bruno and the agitated susceptibility of Guy. In fact, as Guy was experiencing all of his anguish, I couldn’t help but think of Raskilnokov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskilnokov and Guy are both high strung geniuses whose minds end up tormenting them. They both can only find relief in confessing their sins. The actual act of murder was used to bring out the psychological disorders of both men.

Hitchcock, on the other hand, was all about the plot. At about an hour and forty minutes, the film moves along briskly. Guy experiences no apparent internal conflict. Guy is presented purely as a victim in Bruno’s web. Bruno is your basic psychopath. While the novel ends with a quiet confession, the film ends with a very dramatic fight to the end on a runaway carousel.

There is a homoerotic component to both. Although much clearer in the novel, there remain traces of Bruno’s unrequited love of Guy in the film. From the novel, it is clear that Bruno is obsessed with Guy.

In the novel, Bruno has a neurotic relationship with his domineering, sexually promiscuous mother. You also see a trace of that in the film. As I just mentioned in my last post about The Manchurian Candidate, overbearing mothers and their impact upon their sons seems to be a well used trope during this time.

There is one scene in the film that I found to be unintentionally hilarious. At the carnival, the police still suspect that Guy is the killer. They spot him and give chase. He runs into a crowd getting onto the carousel. Without even a thought, a policeman pretty much just randomly shoots into the crowd full of people. His shot hits and kills the carny running the carousel, causing it to run amok. Firing his gun in this manner is just a reckless ridiculous act.

So, which did I prefer? I guess that I was in the mood for a straightforward thriller. I found myself more entertained by the film than the novel. There was just a little too much anguished, troubled navel gazing taking place in the novel for my liking.

Mind Control – Commie Style

Title: The Manchurian Candidate

Rating: 3 Stars

Having worked my way through the 2008 edition of the AFI 100 best films list last year, I now, on occasion, watch films that were on the previous list but fell off with the 2008 update. These are films like A Place in the Sun and Rebel Without a Cause. For most of them, I understand why they made the list in the first place and also understand why they didn’t make the 2008 cut. I say that even though it does make me a little sad that actors like James Dean and Montgomery Clift end up unrepresented on the latest list.

The Manchurian Candidate is another film that was on the original list but later fell off.

It stars Lawrence Harvey as Sergeant Raymond Shaw and Frank Sinatra as Captain Bennett Marco. They were soldiers in the Korean War. They were captured by the Communists. When they make it back to UN lines, Captain Marco wrote up Shaw’s heroic actions that saved the company. Shaw became a war hero awarded with the Medal of Honor.

However, unbeknownst to both of them, Marco’s company was actually captured and all were brainwashed. Shaw, being the stepson of a US senator was particularly prized and was so brainwashed that he killed two of his fellow soldiers while they were all captive without compunction.

Back in the states, there are communist plans afoot. Shaw’s step father, Senator Iselin (James Gregory) who he despises, is a red baiting senator in the McCarthy mold. His mother (Jessica Lansbury) is the real power behind the throne, pushing and manipulating the senator. It turns out that she is actually a very deep communist agent and is the control for Shaw. The plan is to get Senator Iselin onto the Presidential ticket as Vice President. Shaw will then assassinate the presidential candidate, Senaton Iselin will heroically step in to replace the martyred leader, get elected, and then turn the United States into an authoritarian state. And then, step 4, profit? I’m not clear what’s supposed to happen after that.

Anyway, can Shaw be deprogrammed before he gets his final orders? Will his mother be able to execute her diabolical plan?

It’s understandable why it made the list in the first place. Made in 1962, it is a pretty good summary of the state of paranoia that our country was in at that time. It was released in October of 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It appeared that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was imminent and, in fact, if it wasn’t for Vasily Arkhipov, it might have very well happened (I wrote about it here).

Worries about Soviet mind control were running rampant.  It was feared that there were sleeper agents in the US that were perfect assassins such as Shaw. Perfect because they didn’t even know they were assassins. They would be given a code word, would commit some heinous act, and then would forget all about it. It was concerns that the Soviets had such plans already in work that led the CIA into its horrible mind control programs like MK-ULTRA (which I had the questionable pleasure of writing about here). A film like this would have fed right into that paranoia.

Senator Iselin is obviously modeled on McCarthy, up to and including his inability to remember the actual number of known communists in his list. 1962 wasn’t that long after McCarthy’s censure in the Senate. His wild attacks must have still been fresh in everyone’s mind.

Unlike films made today, there are classic literary references that the film didn’t spoon feed to its audience. In Greek mythology, Orestes kills his mother Clytemnestra and is then pursued by the Furies for this act. By making that reference and then later having Shaw kill his mother before killing himself, the film basically assumes that the audience is literate enough to make that connection.

Also, what was it about the early 1960s and overbearing, possibly incestuous mothers? First there was Norman Bates and his mother in Psycho in 1960. Here we are in 1962 with Raymond Shaw and his mother. I read the book a long time ago, so I don’t remember it, but apparently the incest is explicit in the text. Here, we’re still under Hays Code rules, so no way that’s going to be shown, but it is implied by the somewhat passionate kiss on the mouth that his mother gives to Shaw.

However, the film is not without flaws.

First of all, there’s the casting. On the one hand, much kudos to being the first film to cast a black actor in a role that was not explicitly identified as being black (although amazing that it took until 1962 for that to happen). Having said that, they certainly did not cast Korean actors for Korean characters. The main Korean character, Chunjin, was played by Henry Silva, who was…checks notes…born in Brooklyn and is of Sicilian and Spanish ancestry. It’s not quite as bad as the Mexican Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, but still it’s a pretty bad if typical example of casting during that time. The fact that Chunjin becomes Shaw’s ‘house boy’ is problematic. Shaw’s mother is played by Angela Lansbury, who is a scant three years older than Lawrence Harvey, the actor playing her son. This is typical of Hollywood aging actresses into maternal roles while actors continue playing leading roles much longer.

The love affair between Captain Marco and Eugenie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is unbelievable. Marco is basically having a nervous breakdown on a train and Cheyney instantaneously falls in love with him. Even after he is arrested she steadfastly stands by him. It doesn’t really make any sense. Leigh claimed that she had trouble acting the part because of the unbelievable nature of her role. The virtuous woman falling for the broken tortured man was a tired trope even in 1962.

The fight scene between Marco and Chunjin is pretty hilarious. No stunt doubles were used and it’s apparent. It’s a pretty clumsy action sequence. The ‘martial arts’ that the actors use are bizarre. An argument can be made that it makes it more realistic, but in a film it just looks kind of amateurish.

Just as a side note, in my research on The Manchurian Candidate, I discovered an interesting fact about Richard Condon’s novel. Apparently significant parts of the novel plagiarized, of all things, I Claudius. How an author managed to steal sentences from a novel about Roman emperors and decide to insert them into a Cold War paranoia novel has to be an interesting story.

So, it was an interesting film that I enjoyed watching, but I’d have to agree with the decision not to include it in the latest AFI best films list.