Vietnam in a pig’s year

In the Year of the Pig 1968 (101 minutes) written and directed by Emile de Antonio.

This documentary delivered a strong message against American involvement in Vietnam as the war neared its height and widespread public opposition to it had crested.

The title would play on an allusion to Chinese astrology, which designates each in a cycle of twelve lunar years by animal names. But 1967 was a ‘goat’ year and 1968 a ‘monkey’ year. ‘Pig’ was the choice counter-culture epithet at the time for the police and ‘authority’ in general, and used here to offend those who ‘supported’ the war—itself a vexed issue which presumed ‘supporters’ of those who did not actively and vocally oppose the war.

Like Michael Moore, director Emile de Antonio makes no secret of his bias. However, in addition to ‘bomb-throwing’ gratuitously shocking images to get audiences’ attention, de Antonio’s talking heads are legitimate Vietnam scholars, journalists, and former government and elected officials whose insights make a strong case against a war that from hindsight we know to have been a mistake. 

De Antonio shows American politicians, among whom President Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Secretaries of State John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk, House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and Curtis L. Lemay, and an array of the top military brass—the ‘pigs’—propounding conventional attitudes that reflect American solipsism. Not least among these is the desire to apply massive military technology to fight Asians who do not ‘value life’ as Americans do.

De Antonio does a good job of giving the background that led to United States involvement in the southeast Asia, starting in the pith-helmeted twilight of French Indochina, and ending with the ‘election’ of South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Vice President Nguyễn Cao Kỳ in September 1967.

The United States came to Vietnam with an ambitious political agenda but little grasp or feeling for local conditions. It took over the war from French colonialists and made many of the same mistakes as the French, fighting homegrown nationalists whom Americans had backed fighting Vietnam’s Japanese occupiers during World War II. After bringing its own enormous military, economic and political resources to bear, the U.S. even repeated some its own mistakes, such as attempting forcibly to relocate villagers, with tragic consequences for itself and the whole of that country.

‘I sometimes wonder why we Americans enjoy punishing ourselves so much with our own criticism,’ a frustrated Johnson says at a White House press briefing that serves as a kind of prologue to the piece. This would be the key to film’s message: for all the ‘criticism’ the war occasioned, little seems to have been learned.

Among the film’s numerous talking heads are Roger Hilsman, an academic, former State Department official and Kennedy and Johnson administration advisor who resigned over Johnson’s Vietnam policy; Paul Mus, a Yale University Asia scholar; Col. William R. Colson, a former intelligence officer; David Halberstam of The New York Times; Daniel Berrigan; and U.S. Senators Wayne L. Morse and Ernest Gruening, the only senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to Johnson’s 1965 escalation of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

Hilsman, possibly speaking of his disagreement with Johnson’s Vietnam policy, said that Kennedy had been clear about avoiding two things in Vietnam: making it an American war and ‘internationalizing’ the war by attacking the north.

‘[Kennedy] used to say, “It’s their war, the South Vietnamese. We can give them aid, we can even give them advisors, but they must win it or lose it… He felt that if we put Americans in there, with our white faces, it would drive the nationalists into the arms of the communists,’ Hilsman said.

As for ‘internationalizing’ the war by bombing or attacking the north, Kennedy felt ‘first and foremost it would not work, and thirty months of bombing have shown that his judgment was right,’ Hilsman said in 1967.

The film briefly notes the synchronism of the November 1963 assassinations of the corrupt and ineffective South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm and Ngô Ðình Nhu, his brother and advisor, and the Kennedy assassination three weeks later.

The work was finished before but released after the momentous Tet Offensive of January-March 1968, an all out, nationwide gamble timed to start at the beginning of the Asian lunar new year—Tet—that was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese, but won them a decisive propaganda victory. It turned the tide of American public opinion against the war because the military and politicians had assured Americans that the war was all but won, when the North lit up the whole of the South with this high profile, countrywide military operation in the winter of 1968.

Film footage that de Antonio dug up in American, French and Vietnamese archives, including clips—motion pictures rather than still photographs under a moving camera—from the French colonial and military period, of Hồ Chí Minh and French officials right after the Second World War, and Hồ in North Vietnam, makes this documentary worth seeing.

In one clip, David Halberstam relates an interview between American Vietnam scholar Bernard Fall and North Vietnamese Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng about South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm in 1962.

‘Dong was saying, “Poor Diem, poor Diem. He is unpopular. And because he is unpopular, Americans must give him more aid. And because Americans give him more aid, he becomes less popular and Americans must give him more aid…”

‘Fall interrupted [Đồng]. “That sounds like a vicious circle,” he said. Phạm Văn Đồng paused and said, “No, not a vicious circle, a downward spiral.”’

Fall, a respected academic and author whose books include the Vietnam classics Street without Joy (1961) and Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1966) about the French war, was killed by a landmine while accompanying U.S. troops in the field in February 1967.

Smart flick about intelligence

Page Eight 2011 U.K. Masterpiece Contemporary (103 minutes) directed and written by David Hare

This trim and stylish made-for-television political thriller snipes at British politicians who aggrandize their roles and station at the expense of public credulity over fairy tale threats despite the professional advice and expertise of their own agencies.

Several elements are at play here. There is the age-old friction between political decision makers and their intelligence providers, big egos pursuing agendas versus knowing things and taking action upon that knowledge. There is the issue of freedom jeopardized by actual, imagined, or invented safety and security interests. And, this being Britain, there is class: Queen and country and old school tie patriotism against the ‘new’ men and women who know or have learnt better, particularly from the American cousins.

However, an older American lesson informs the mood.

The story opens with Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) leaving work on foot in the late evening, smoking a cigarette to Lester Young’s tenor saxophone playing Fine & Mellow. Young’s horn tells us in its rich melodic voice that Worricker—an affable middle-aged spook with a good art collection, ‘married less than five times’—is a modern incarnation of one of film noir’s flawed knights on London’s mean streets.

The matter is that Worricker’s boss, Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon), the wily but aging director general of MI-5, Britain’s domestic security service, has a rather large rat by the tail.

A ‘gold standard’ source has informed Baron that Prime Minister Alec Beasley (Ralph Fiennes) not only knows about international American ‘black sites’ where detainees in the ‘War on Terror’ are tortured to extract information, but that the PM himself suppressed specific knowledge thereby obtained that could have prevented a major incident in Britain.  

Baron put this information on ‘page eight’ of a ‘U.K. eyes only’ brief that he discusses at a meeting with Home Secretary Anthea Catcheside (Saskia Reeves), Jill Tankard (Judy Davis), his second-in-command, and Worricker, his longtime colleague and former Cambridge student. The meeting makes for an amusing set piece.

The Home Secretary of course never actually read the brief. It falls on Worricker the analyst to point out the damning detail on page eight. Catcheside, playing Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, immediately grasps the dim light in which this information casts her politically. She threatens Baron that she will take the report to a rival agency ‘across the river,’ exclaiming with peremptory glee that he will be ‘royally fucked!’

‘The service has been fucked many times,’ Baron reassures her with a twinkle in his eye, ‘usually by your government jumping on us like Rover with a hard-on, and we’ve always survived the experience.’ The purpose for sharing this information with her, Baron explains, is not that she do something, but that she know everything.

A-ha! Calmer heads prevail; or, at least, one is convinced that it might be better to lie low for the moment rather than to risk looking like the idiot she may well be... But after the meeting, Baron tells Worricker with the same twinkle that he ‘put a bomb in the water, and I’m waiting to see where the dead fish lead.’

All of a sudden, people start taking an inordinate interest in the self-deprecating Worricker, from the PM to Nancy Pierpan (Rachel Weisz), the lovely neighbor he has never met with whom he shares a landing. The Lebanese-born Pierpan is an editor and activist whose activist brother Jake evidently came to a violent, quickly covered-up end in the West Bank at the hands of Israeli military personnel.

Pierpan appears to be friends with Ralph Wilson (Tom Hughes), who starts turning up places Worricker goes, as well as other people Worricker cannot see but knows are there—and whom we see him use old tradecraft effectively to evade.

It turns out that Baron’s dead fish lead all over the place—and naturally these include red herring. When Baron drops dead of a heart attack, it falls on Worricker to go to his sources, including the ever dependable Rollo Maverley (Ewen Bremner), to sort, clean, dress, and prepare them.

A worried Beasley buttonholes Worricker after a dinner at their former Cambridge college. The idea is to call a royal commission to reorganize the intelligence services and set up a ‘Department of Homeland Security,’ Beasley says, in which there could well be room for great advancement for Worricker—‘Or it’s opposite,’ Worricker says.  

He tells the PM that he is well aware that circumstances have forced him ‘into an area closer to politics than it is to security.’

‘In times of national emergency,’ Beasley counsels him, ‘the two are the same. Nothing is more dangerous than when people make mischief trying to separate them.’

The drama lies in how skilfully Worricker engages in what he said Baron always referred to as ‘dishonorable work you could do in an honorable way,’ making dangerous ‘mischief’ as he navigates family, office, intergovernmental, national and international politics to find where Baron’s dead fish lead.

Worricker’s character and circumstances determine how he leverages this information in the end, and leave an intriguing opening for a promising sequel. 

Life in the land of the Yankees III: Yonderland

La ciudad (The City) 1998 United States (88 minutes) directed by David Riker.

The ‘ciudad’ of the title is New York, but it is an immigrant’s outerborough New York: famous, glamorous Manhattan is always in the distance, a skyline on the other side of the river with far-away subway trains running in and out of it.

This four-part dramatic feature was shot in a six-year period in the mid-1990s in New York’s Latin American communities using nonprofessional actors. It contrasts immigrant fantasies of living in the United States with the simple realities that each character faces trying to survive and find work in huge, impersonal, foreign New York City, far from the rural areas of Mexico and Central America they know.

Each of the four parts tells a different story, beginning with its main character or characters having a portrait taken in a storefront photography studio facing an elevated subway line. The portraits’ subjects are shot in studio-provided ‘nice clothes’, such as a jacket and tie for the men, against a fanciful painted backdrop of a northern lake or western mountains, not unlike nineteenth century portrait photography. In one instance, a man who wants to enroll his young daughter in school in order to learn to read has her portrait made with her holding a pencil over two open books.

In ‘Bricks,’ the first story, the protagonist is one of ten men picked from a gaggle on an outerborough street corner, each of whom an unnamed ‘Italian’ promises $50 a day to do manual work. The story unfolds after ‘The Italian’ transports the group in a windowless panel truck to clean and stack bricks from the rubble of a demolished industrial site on the Hudson River in New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan.

In ‘Home,’ a young Mexican new to the city, trying to find his uncle, ends up at a wedding reception that feels like home and meets a girl from his village.

In ‘The Puppeteer,’ a man with tuberculosis lives in a car with his daughter in a desolate waterfront area in Brooklyn and puts on puppet shows to raise money from fellow immigrants; he wants to get his daughter enrolled in a city school to learn to read.

And in ‘Seamstress,’ a Salvadoran woman working as a seamstress in a Korean-owned sweat shop finds out that her daughter back home is ill and needs $400 to pay for her medical expenses. The Korean owners stop paying their workers, who stay on the job for weeks without pay for fear of losing their places.

The film gives human faces to the issues and rhetoric of immigration. By putting the characters in situations familiar to viewers, or at least not hard to imagine, it finds a common humanity in the artless plainness and homeliness of these faces and suggests that when we look beyond cultural assumptions and stereotypes we can begin to see ourselves.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 2011 U.K. (127 minutes) directed by Tomas Alfredson, based on the John le Carré novel, screenplay by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy does a good job of reliving a moment of the Cold War, and an even better job of capturing novelist John le Carré’s atmosphere and tone, with few bangs of any description.

It is everything but Bond and the Mission Impossible franchise. Rather, like Michael Clayton (2007), this story is about how an institution that preys upon human weakness and is seduced by its self conception is struck a killing blow from within and must rely on one of its own flawed but unseduced members to fix things.

Control (John Hurt), the aging, ailing head man of British Intelligence, had been obsessed by the thought that one of his most senior officials was a double agent working for Soviet Intelligence. He assigned them codenames from a nursery rhyme and taped their photographs to chess pieces.

There is Tinker, Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), who outmaneuvered Control and his rival colleagues when he replaced Control as agency head after a crowning operational disaster in Budapest; Tailor, the ever-charming Bill Haydon (Colin Firth); Soldier, Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds) and Poor Man, Toby Esterhase (David Dencik).

George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is Spy. Smiley is a patient, bookish man, forced into retirement after Control’s departure. Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), a senior civil servant, on instructions from the Minister (Stuart Graham), brings Smiley back to work with a small, handpicked staff operating secretly within British Intelligence against British Intelligence to find Control’s purported ‘rotten apple.’

Smiley and his staff operate in the half-light; they sift through the institutional memory of the half-forgotten and half-believed for half-facts and half-truths that will flush their quarry. The process is like watching skilled players at chess: what two men in coats and ties are doing at a table is nowhere near as interesting as their movements on the board.

It helps to know the game and the moves each piece can make, though the logic of this game defies easy labels and rules. Pieces on the board are moved and traded; pieces that don’t belong are easily relieved of their liberty, limbs, or lives. But on this chessboard, the dots connect: the secret world is too small for them not to.

The dots look something like this:

The nursery rhyme cabal has a highly-placed source inside the Kremlin: something to impress the ever-impatient, ever-distrustful American cousins. Almost as though on cue, this source provides exactly what they want to know.

Control smelled a rat. The game does not work this way. Like Control’s real life contemporary counterpart at CIA, James Jesus Angleton, Control was convinced that a highly-placed mole was giving away the store. 

Elsewhere, a ‘scalp hunter’ talent-scouting a high-living Russian KGB thug in Istanbul finds that the thug’s abused female partner has a tale to tell about a high placed double agent. Ah, this is the way the game works; but no one at the home office seems interested. Then chess pieces start zipping around the board like nobody’s business.

Control gets word that a Hungarian general wants to give information relating to the double agent, and he sends Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), a trusted lieutenant, to meet him. Only one other person knows: Prideaux’s best friend and secret colleague.

All the pieces are now in play. The Devil sits laughing with the secret somewhere in the jumble of God’s details.

In a telling shot sequence after Smiley is put on the case, Control dies, and Smiley is fitted with new bifocals with a look on his face leaving the shop as though to say, ‘the better to see you with, my dears.’ Yet, despite these ‘clarities,’ half-ness is the key. Most of the film is shot in half-light, the colors are half-tones, and much of the dialog is spoken or mumbled in likewise half-tones. As Control ranted, ‘Nothing is genuine anymore!’

At the same time, the camera puts a viewer in the shoes of a spy, hyperattentive and aware of his surroundings. We see this from the start, when the hapless Prideaux walks into a deadly set-up at a sidewalk café in Budapest. Everyone seems to be watching him, including a mother nursing an infant. More than simply self-absorbed paranoia, the preternaturally wary Prideaux senses something is wrong right away. The viewer sees just how wrong it is.

The sudden, shocking outcome in this instance of what turns out to have been a cynically pitiless ruse echoes Le Carré the novelist’s obdurate incredulity that the security of Western democracies is in the hands of people whom elsewhere he has written that a proper religion should have burnt at the stake.

The novel is a masterpiece of the genre, and the 1979 five-hour, seven-episode BBC mini-series, memorably starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, Ian Richardson as Haydon, Michael Aldridge as Alleline, Bernard Hepton as Esterhase, Ian Bannen as Prideaux and Alexander Knox as Control, among many others, is outstanding.

The older movie focused on the personalities of the story’s components, driven by Guinness, with a respectful nod in the direction of Cold War proprieties for who were the good and bad guys. The new version, which bears more than one viewing, would follow Le Carré’s more equivocal assessment of the character of the institution these people made and the role it played in shaping—or disfiguring—the Cold War. 

Great day for a picture

Lovers and Lollipops 1955 U.S. (82 minutes) written, produced, and directed by Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, photographed by Morris Engel, edited by Ruth Orkin; music by Eddy Manson.

It is summer in glorious mid-twentieth century Manhattan and there is a lot of picture-taking going on, starting with a man and a little girl at the Bronx Zoo.

Rather than a ‘moving picture’, this second of three feature films made in the 1950s by photographers Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, his wife and collaborator, has the look and feel of well made still photographs in continuous motion.

Ann (Lori March), a young widow with a seven-year-old daughter, Peggy (Cathy Dunn), starts seeing Larry (Gerald O’Loughlin), an old friend back in New York after he had spent several years working as an engineer in South America.

Engel is known for his pioneering use of nonprofessional actors, but what make the magic in this picture are carefully cast and expertly coached photographer’s models at home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in classic New York City locations.

The film is in a sense a ballet of Larry’s courtship of Ann and Peggy, filled with eloquently expressive moments observed in the manner of Maeve Brennan’s ‘Long-Winded Lady’ in The New Yorker magazine of the day.

Engel and Orkin balance and embellish their story with details of New York street life through the eyes of photographers who love the city and know it well: hearts with lovers’ names in Chinese and English inscribed in chalk on a Chinatown sidewalk, two small children running along the outline of the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, and interactions with bystanders, among other things. Peggy has a great city accent.

The story opens with Peter (William Ward), a professional photographer and friend of Ann’s who is making a children’s picture book, photographing Peggy as she explores the zoo. Peter and Peggy visit both the Bronx and Central Park Zoos. Peter, who gave Peggy the Slinky toy that she plays with throughout the movie, also gives Peggy her first camera.

Larry has a month off in New York to think about his professional—and emotional—future. Ann, a professional model, has a flexible schedule that allows her to spend time sightseeing New York with Larry and Peggy. Peggy will go to summer camp when Peter finishes shooting her for his book.

Larry snaps pictures of the photogenic Ann; a tourist on the Observation Roof of Rockefeller Center asks Larry to use the tourist’s camera to take a picture of him and his wife with Central Park in the background. They switch places and the tourist snaps Ann and Larry using Larry’s camera. And Peggy takes pictures of her mother and Larry.

Among the best scenes is a visit to the Museum of Modern Art. Larry has just given Peggy a large toy sailboat that she takes with her because she wants to sail it in Central Park after they go to the museum. Peggy dawdles at the entrance, and then slips past the guard with her boat, skipping blithely ahead through a Jacques Lipchitz exhibit.

No one seems to pay any attention to the small child with a boat; Ann and Larry are engrossed in each other. And then Peggy spots the reflecting pool in the museum’s sculpture garden, an ideal place for her sailboat’s maiden voyage…

After he and Ann are engaged, Larry buys Peggy a doll, but she tells him she doesn’t like it. He suggests to Ann that he take Peggy to a toy store and let her pick something out. This would be a good way for him to spend some time alone with Peggy, Larry says.

‘You don’t know what it’s like taking a kid to a toy store,’ Ann says—and anyone with kids knows. ‘They don’t know what they want, and you can’t get them out of the place.’

‘I don’t see why it would be such a job to take a kid to a store,’ the bachelor says.

‘Try it,’ Ann says.

The next scene cuts to Peggy in the toy department at Macy’s at a time when it was a true child’s world of wonder filled with marvelous and inventive toys, larger than life and mercifully free of ‘brands’ and ‘tie-ins’ as we now know them. Peggy is lost in wonderland to Larry’s pique in a porkpie.

These are just two of many such scenes and adventures these characters share in and around the city through the naturalistic lenses of Engel and Orkin.

Kino International issued this film on DVD in 2008 paired with Engel’s 1958 classic Weddings and Babies, two of three films Engels made in that decade.

For those in the New York metropolitan area, from now through March 25 [2012] the Jewish Museum is featuring A Radical Camera, a large exhibit of the photographs of the Photo League (1936-1951) which includes the work of Engel and Orkin as well as many other New York photographers of the time.

What's so important, Al?

Weddings and Babies 1958 U.S. (81 minutes) written, photographed, directed and produced by Morris Engel; music by Eddy Manson.

It’s a classic story.

Al Capetti (John Myhers), a photographer in his thirties, lives in his Greenwich Village storefront studio that advertises ‘Weddings and Babies’ and dreams of shooting more than the wedding and baby pictures that pay the bills.

The best argument challenging Al’s vision of a creative life and his splendid isolation is Bea (Viveca Lindfors), his Swedish girlfriend and assistant of three years, who is turning 30 years old. After helping Al shoot their one hundredth wedding together, Bea reminds Al that she is ready for the wedding and babies of their own that they have talked about.

Al has every intention of marrying Bea, really and truly. He tells her so. He wants to get married and go on the vacation she wants. He keeps telling Bea that they shall as soon as he has saved enough money because he does not want to spend his life shooting weddings and babies. And then he buys a $1400 movie camera…

In this tale of a couple teetering on the brink of marriage, Morris Engel’s movie camera finds the magic of small moments in midcentury New York City as Robert Doisneau’s still photography did in postwar Paris. Less known now but closer to home, photographer Ruth Orkin, Engel’s wife and collaborator in his two earlier films, The Little Fugitive (1953) and Lovers and Lollipops (1955), did similar work in New York.

Engel’s camera loves Lindfors and looks steadily at Myhers. Al’s proposal to Bea in silhouette in an entryway in Little Italy brings Doisneau to mind, no less than Engel's work with four-and-a-half-year-old Tony (identified in the credits only as ‘Chris’), the son of Al and Bea’s overbearing friend Ken (Leonard Elliott), and with Mamma Capetti (Chiarina Barile), Al’s elderly Old World mother.

Al loses patience trying to photograph the little boy who cannot sit still: Tony takes Al’s directions as part of a game they are playing. Mamma, preoccupied with preparing for her own death (Barile did not live to see the finished film), speaks little English; she seems to see the camera as an inanimate object, muttering to herself and looking at rather than into its watchful and sensitive eye.

Mamma’s odyssey around the city, from her retirement home to a Social Security bureau, to a grave memorial business in the old neighborhood and then to her husband’s gravesite, is memorable.

One of the charms of the film is that Engel’s frames are big enough to accommodate the young boy and the old woman, allowing non-actors to move naturally in the spaces he chooses as professional actors such as Myhers and Lindfors interact with them and with each other, trying to capture ordinary life as it looks, sounds and is lived.

John Myhers, Chiarina Barile and Viveca Lindfors in Morris Engel's Weddings and Babies

Engel also employs unconventional framing and tight focus effectively to convey awkward emotional space.

Most of the action takes place in Al’s studio or as he films the annual San Gennaro Festival along Mulberry Street in Little Italy, with trips to a Roman Catholic retirement home in the Bronx where he and Bea take Mamma, and to the large cemetery in Queens where Mamma plans to be buried next to her husband.

This film is the least tight of Engel’s three efforts in the 1950s. Long moments in which actors miscommunicate sometimes can seem overlong. Like the later work of John Cassavetes, on whom Engel is considered an important influence, this can feel like an attempt to show the false steps people make in failing to express themselves to each other, or saying things one wishes had not been said: all too common yet ordinarily stylized out of movie scripts.

Kino International issued this film on DVD in 2008 paired with Engel’s 1955 classic Lovers and Lollipops, two of three films Engel made in that decade.

            For those in the New York metropolitan area, from now through March 25 [2012] the Jewish Museum is featuring A Radical Camera, a large exhibition of the photographs of the Photo League (1936-1951) which includes the work of Engel and Orkin as well as many other New York photographers of the time.