Films Recently Viewed

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A fine film, worth seeing. I’ve spied a few Blimps-in-training at the Mess in Wyvern. Also, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff is a heck of a good name for a character.

Directed by Jean Renoir. I enjoyed this film greatly. It made me wish I had been a WWI pilot shot down by the Huns just so I could be invited to luncheon with the German officers. Everyone comported themselves well in those days (or at least in the cinema version of those days). According to IMDB, the Viennese Erich von Stroheim had spent so much time in America that he could barely speak German when the film was made.

Directed by D.W. Griffith. Disturbing. The film’s basic premise that the United States was forged as a nation by the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan is balderdash, pure and simple. Still, a powerful and remarkable propaganda film. “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true,” said Woodrow Wilson, whose Southern racism most modern liberals like to ignore.

Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein, score by Sergei Prokofiev. More brilliant propaganda, this time for the USSR, not the KKK. Beautifully shot, but the battle scene is a tad too long. Though very nationalistic, it is not hard to see the communism behind the film in a number of scenes. Found the only slightly veiled swastikas on the mitre of the Teutonic bishop rather droll.

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, score by Ennio Morricone. My second viewing of this splendid film. Colonel Mathieu: “There are 80,000 Arabs in the Casbah. Are they all against us? We know they’re not. In reality, it’s only a small minority that dominates with terror and violence. That minority is our adversary; we must isolate it and destroy it.” And they did. Still managed to lose Algeria though – which was a damn shame for the Algerians.