Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Merchants of peace

Good Times, Wonderful Times 1966 England/U.S. (70 minutes) produced, co-written and directed by Lionel Rogosin, with James Vaughan and Tadeusz Makarczynski; restored from original negatives at the British Film Institute by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna.
This classic anti-war documentary gets it punch from slapping up cocktail party banter against archival footage and images of the First and Second World Wars.
Although Michael Moore may have run this technique into the ground for many, it was fresh when Lionel Rogosin and James Vaughan made this film in the early 1960s. Rogosin said that they had had to make the film abroad because their anti-war views were considered ‘anti-American’ at the time. 
The cocktail party is a little like the reception in A Hard Day’s Night released two years earlier—the same kind of attendees, but here without the Beatles. The usual mating rituals and small talk swing to the sound of surfer guitar music, but revolve around young professionals’ views on war, anti-fascism and nuclear disarmament.
Ironic talk about nuclear weapons—Well, what is one going to do if they decide to press the button?—leads to victim footage from post-atomic-strike Japan.
The young men tend to patronize women who are much more passive than they since have become. The Buñuelesque part is that Rogosin’s relentless message builds throughout the film and the archival footage gets starker, while his live subjects become more inebriated as the evening wears on, the men trying harder to impress each other and hit on the women. 
Charming Freddy, much more interested in the girls than people’s political views, probably won’t go home alone.
Another partygoer informs Molly Parkin, whom Rogosin hired to help draw out the others at the party, mostly non-actors, that during the Second World War, ‘the average soldier probably saw six hours of action in the whole of his career… probably for a tiny, an infinitesimal fraction of his time he was actually engaged in the sordid business of killing.’
If that were so, Parkin asks him, how does it explain ‘that during those six hours so many people managed to get killed?’
Rogosin inserts more footage of First World War trench warfare, which leads him to a group of elderly veterans, one of whom gave him the film’s title. 
‘Good times?’ said a robust British Army pensioner in the dining hall at Chelsea Hospital with sergeant’s stripes on his dress blue jacket. ‘Wonderful times! In more ways than one. They didn’t just look after the men; they looked after the horses.’
The dining hall is filled with elderly military pensioners, non-commissioned officers and lower ranks in dress blue military jackets, surrounded by the names inscribed on the walls of the British Army’s campaigns across its vast empire from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
‘What age would you be when the First World War broke out?’ the sergeant asked his interviewer.
‘I wasn’t even born yet.’
‘Oh, you missed all the glories! I’m only sorry that you missed it,’ the sergeant said, to the nodding approval of his military pensioner table mates. 
The documentary cuts to British and German footage of the casualties of trench warfare in the First World War—‘all the glories’.
‘Now with that boy of yours, the finest thing you could do is put him in the army and make a man of him!’ the sergeant tells the interviewer.
This comment leads to the heart of the film: societies that make wars do so by indoctrinating their youth. Rogosin shows viewers how this happens, from a pint-sized Nazi storm trooper to doughty military Boy Scouts to battle-ready front line troops.  
Two partygoers said that they had served in the military, but that they had been too young for the Second World War. A Brit said that he had served in the United Nations intervention in the Congo (1960-64), and an American had been a junior officer in a parachute infantry unit during the Korean War (1951-53). 
Neither former soldier embraced ‘all the glories’ like the old sergeant in Chelsea Hospital. They justified their service as jobs that their countries needed done.
The Brit admitted to the ‘terrific sense of power’ he had had sighting an enemy with his rifle. And he noted that ‘war is one way of keeping the population down’—both ideas apparent premises to the savagery of Adolf Hitler’s war on the non-German civilian populations unfortunate enough to live in the area that he decided would be Germany’s ‘Lebensraum’ between Germany and the Ural Mountains.
When pressed, the American, who said that he simply had done a job civilians had shown themselves incapable of handling on their own, conceded that he probably had killed people, though by calling in firepower on map locations.
‘You have pride in what you’re doing. You never see it in the context of killing people. This doesn’t come into your calculations at all,’ he said. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (1961-68) could not have said it better.
However, there was resistance in the world. In Britain, there was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (the originators of the iconic chicken-footed ‘peace sign’), and in Japan, demonstrations against U.S. airbases. In the United States, there was the civil rights movement: protests against racism in Birmingham, Alabama, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington.
In the end, Rogosin appeals to ‘the people who let these things happen’ by just going along with the majority view to become the resistors ‘who stop these things’ by their active involvement against them.
Included with this DVD set is Man’s Peril (2008), a 24-minute documentary directed by Michael Rogosin and Lloyd Ross on the making of Good Times, Wonderful Times. The filmmakers interview editor Brian Smedley-Aston and actress Molly Parkin, the British woman seen drawing out others at the party. Dr. David Blitz gives context as a talking head, and there also are clips of earlier interviews with Lionel Rogosin and Bertrand Russell.


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