Man of his Century

"I apologize...  I apologize for not being entirely honest with you.  I apologize for not revealing my true feelings.  I apologize for not telling you sooner that you're a degenerate, sadistic old man.  And YOU CAN GO TO HELL BEFORE I APOLOGIZE TO YOU NOW OR EVER AGAIN!"
—Paths Of Glory (1958)



"I'd rather be here, a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard fight, than to be the richest citizen of Rome.  Fat with food he didn't work for and surrounded by slaves.

We've traveled a long ways together.  We've fought many battles and won great victories.  Now, instead of taking ship for our homes across the sea, we must fight again.  Maybe there's no peace in this world, for us or for anyone else.  I don't know.  But I do know that as long as we live, we must stay true to ourselves.  I do know that we're brothers, and I know that we're free!"
—Spartacus (1960)

Kirk Douglas is 100 years old this day, December 9, 2016.  One of the most extraordinary and dynamic actors ever to grace the silver screen and an icon of everything Hollywood once was.  Douglas could transform from genial sophisticate to vengeful brute in less than a second, and he spoke with a voice which commanded your attention even when he talked softly.  Such was the strength of his personality.

The passages quoted above are from just two of the many significant films in this man's long career.  But I believe that if you had to pick one movie which encapsulates every quality which makes Kirk Douglas such an outstanding figure, it would have to be 1956's Lust For Life.  Not only does Kirk Douglas bear a quite reasonable resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh, the master impressionist artist of any time, but he brings to the part an intensity and passion which transcends the screen.  You actually feel, through Douglas, Vincent's struggle to touch the Infinite, to capture on canvas the beauty of the world he drinks in with his every sense, and the agony arising from that flood of perception and his own sense of unworthiness and failure to fully transcribe it to the canvas.  More than a mere acting performance, it is almost as if Kirk Douglas actually becomes Vincent Van Gogh.  He is completely compelling in the role, even down to the moment after Vincent cuts off his own ear.  Son Michael once said in an interview that, as a child watching the premier showing of the film, he cried out because he believed his father had actually cut off his ear for real, and no doubt there were more than a few adults in the audience who had that same impression.

That is Kirk Douglas.  A man of his century and an actor for all time.  Truly one of a kind.

If they knew you, they would be ashamed.

For myself, there is one scene in the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 which stands out as the most tragic in the entire movie.  It is the moment when a kid is destroyed by his own father.

The time is 1947, Robinson's turbulent first year in the Majors, when he was subjected to the worst abuse of all his time in baseball, with stadiums full of people filled with hate at the very sight of him, jeering and praying for his downfall.  The Dodgers are in Cincinnati for a series against the Reds.  Up in the stands, a father and son are seated together, and sharing in the joy of the upcoming game.  It is a scene which has played out with American fathers and sons on countless occasions, and one I have had the distinct pleasure of enacting with my own son several times over the years.  The boy asks his dad eagerly how many times Pee Wee Reese will score.  The father replies he doesn't know but recalls in fond memory how he once saw Honus Wagner score three times in one game and that maybe they'll see the same thing in this contest.  "That would be great!" the boy replies.  The beginning of what should be a perfect day...

But in an instant, as soon as the Dodgers take the field and Robinson steps out of the dugout and into the full view of the Cincinnati fans, everything changes.

The innocent boy suddenly finds himself totally alone in a sea of hatred; abandoned by the very man who should be his protector and guide, with the happiness in his heart extinguished in the span of a few seconds.  The poor kid has no one to show him right from wrong — particularly not his own father.

In one moment, innocence is shattered.  The boy then he gets swept up in the tide of hatred just like the rest of the crowd surrounding him, just like the father sitting next to him.

Inevitably, the boy joins the racists.

This entire sequence is horrifying for the truth it reveals: that racism is a disease of exposure which rapidly infects an innocent mind and perverts it within the blink of an eye.  And that very often, racists are created by their own parents, by family, their closest friends, at young ages.

Something dies inside a person when they are subjected to this kind of group pressure and lack the capacities to resist it.  This scene shows the process within a minute of screen time.  Even if the boy eventually manages to grow out of the hatred he had just learned to parrot, as many such individuals are fortunate enough to achieve when circumstance intervenes to show them a better way, the shadow of that moment in which he became a hater will haunt him forever.  So too will the memory of his own father's hatred for another human being simply because of a difference in pigmentation and how it destroyed what should have been a beautiful time for the two of them.

I write of this scene from this movie at this time instead of at the beginning of baseball season, as might be expected, because the issues of the movie transcend any one particular season and especially seem to speak to this very uncertain time in American history.  The moral balance of the republic is now hanging on a knife-edge with the election to the presidency of a man who rode into office partly upon a campaign of not-so-subtle race hatred and prejudice, built upon eight years of white rage against the nation's first non-white president.  At this time, America is very much like that lost boy at Crosley Field in 1947, immersed in a sea of hatred and perhaps not strong enough to resist the floodtide.  And whether America can find within itself the strength to resist or to recover from the hatred which has been unleashed within the culture and the body politic is an open question, with a disturbingly uncertain answer.

One of the ironies of this scene is that the father's favorite player, the great Pittsburgh shortstop Honus Wagner, was once compared to Negro League shortstop John Henry "Pop" Lloyd, one of the greatest ballplayers ever to come into the game and barred from the Major Leagues because of the "Gentleman's Agreement" which kept baseball segregated.  When told of the comparison, Wagner replied that he was honored by it.

No doubt the father didn't know that.

The Definition Of Insanity

If Dr. Frankenstein taught us anything over the years, it's the value of persistence in the bold pursuit of a vision.

So remember, kids:

If At First

You Don't Succeed

Try

Try

Try Again

There Is Still Time..Brother

So what causes me to revisit the subject of cinematic nuclear war so soon?  This was, after all, a topic I had delved into back in February, in some considerable detail, when discussing the landmark 1983 television drama The Day After ("There ain't no Sedalia").  Inevitably, I would have ended up posting another entry about Atomic Cinema, of course.  I suppose, however, that having woken up one night from a dream in which I was on a stretch of highway where I presently live and looking up at large mushroom clouds looming over the horizon in every direction prodded me towards this entry.  Funny that I should have such a nightmare years after the end of the Cold War.  But as a child of that era, you never entirely escape its mark.  Especially in the light of recent political developments opening up some frankly horrifying possibilities should the wrong person wind up in the White House. Or perhaps it was merely something more mundane such as the effect of rewatching a lot of those films depicting the end of the world by atomic hellfire this year that brought that little dream bubbling up from the depths of the unconscious.  Who can say?  Immaterial, really; the subject remains relevant even today, whether from a political or artistic standpoint, and now is as good a time as any for a renewed examination.

Atomic war was branded upon the consciousness of millions worldwide with sudden and brutal clarity 71 years ago this month.  In the years that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the wake of atomic testing and the inevitable arms race that began when the Soviet Union acquired the Bomb in 1949, the prospect of devastation on a scale previously unimagined became an inescapable reality.  Naturally, atomic war became good cinematic fodder through the 1950s.  But just about all those movies of the period treated the propect of atomic destruction either as outright propaganda to scare the citizenry, or as the plot-driver for a number of fairly forgettable B-grade sci-fi potboilers.  The H-Bomb, which represented a whole qualitative and quantitative leap in the scope of possible annihilation, became metaphorically embodied in the form of the radioactive mutant Godzilla in 1954: a creature which was an indirect product of nuclear testing, particularly that of the Castle Bravo shot which dusted the inhabited island of Rongelap and the crew of the Japanese fishing trawler Lucky Dragon with dangerous levels of fallout when the winds took an unexpected shift in direction.  But even this "serious" metaphorical statement of the dangers of atomic war was woven into the fabric of a giant monster movie.  There still was a lack of any truly serious discussion about the potential catastrophe of a real nuclear conflict.  What was often the case in the newsreels, radio news programs, and some of the early television panel discussion programs of the time, those dangers were glossed over by U.S. and state authorities who diverted the topic onto either the danger of the Soviet threat or the civil defense planning which was supposed to protect the balance of the citizenry but in actuality would have been only marginally effective at best.  These spokespeople loved to present a picture to the public of a nation that, if properly prepared, could absorb a nuclear attack and eventually rise from the ashes again. Much of the media of the period was designed to lull the public into a false sense of security and squelch any serious questioning of the policies behind the production of nuclear weapons and their potential usage in a war.  The last thing anybody in officialdom wanted was public exposure to any message that contradicted this party line.  So when one little film came out in 1959 which did exactly that, the response of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the United States Information Agency, and the Department of Defense was close to panic, prompting a campaign against the movie which was predictably negative and dishonest.

In 1958, director Stanley Kramer got the green light to begin production of the film version of Nevil Shute's doomsday novel On The Beach.  Kramer had previously had rather good relations with both the United States Navy and the Pentagon, who were quite eager to cooperate with him during the production of The Caine Mutiny only three years earlier and had allowed filming aboard U.S. destroyers as well as offering up lots of technical advice to help the movie attain a good degree of accuracy where necessary.  But Kramer's pipelines to both the Navy and the Pentagon suddenly dried up when he approached them for access and cooperation on this project.  This was because this particular story would violently contradict the entire official public stance of the U.S. government that a nuclear war was survivable.  In point of fact, On The Beach would be the first movie to state flatly to mass movie audiences that the only likely outcome of a nuclear war was human extinction, which was the thrust of Shute's novel.

The movie opens at an unspecified time after a massive global atomic war has resulted in the annihilation of most human and animal life on the Earth, either directly from the attacks on cities and military targets or from the fallout from the weapons used.  The fallout clouds are drifting southward towards the last bastion of surviving humanity in Australia, who now have only months at best before deadly radiation dooms them to a lingering and painful death.  The last operational United States Navy vessel, the nuclear submarine USS Sawfish, docks in Williamsport, near the city of Melbourne.  Placed at the disposal of the Royal Australian Navy, the Sawfish under the command of Capt. Dwight Lionel Towers (Gregory Peck) is to set off after a fitting-out with special equipment on a reconnaissance mission towards Point Barrow, Alaska.  The object of the mission is to verify the validity of a theory put out by a Prof. Jorgensen which offers a thin sliver of hope that survival might be possible if the rains northward have somehow washed fallout out of the sky, reducing the radiation levels down to a much safer margin.  Capt. Towers is to be accompanied on his mission by a young RAN liason officer, Lt. Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins), and atomic scientist Dr. Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire, in his first non-dancing dramatic performance at age 60) of the CSIR agency, who will perform the actual scientific tests at Point Barrow from instrumentation within the submerged submarine.  The thin prospect of a future for humanity is very much bolstered when just days into the preparations for the mission, a strange and largely incoherent Morse code message is received from the vicinity of San Diego, California.  Continually transmitting despite the impossibility of there being any survivors in North America, Adm. Bridie (John Tate) asks Capt. Towers to check out the source of the transmission since it appears a human agency must be the sender, even if it is gibberish.  During the mission preparations, Towers is invited to stay at the home of Lt. Holmes and his somewhat childish wife Mary (Donna Anderson).  With a new baby in their lives, Mary cannot bring herself to face the terrible reality of their inevitable doom and is easily upset by "negative" talk of any kind.  This is seen the night of a party at the Holmes residence in which a drunken Julian is engaged in a furious argument with another party guest about who was to blame for the war and how necessary it had been to fight it:

"You scientists are the likely ones as far as I see!  You built the bomb, you experimented with it, tested it, and exploded it!"

"Just a moment, Morgan—"

"Thanks to you chaps, a moment is about all we have!"

"Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen!  The scientists signed petition after petition. But nobody listened.  There was a choice.  It was build the bombs and use them, or risk the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living."

"That's wishful thinking if ever I heard it."

"I'm not against wishful thinking.  Not now."

"They pushed us too far!  They didn't think we'd fight no matter what they did!"

"And they were wrong.  We fought.  We expunged them.  We didn't do such a bad job on ourselves.  With the interesting result that the background level of radiation in this room is nine times what it was a year ago. Don't you know that?  Nine times!  We're all doomed, you know.  The whole, silly, pathetic drunken lot of us!  Doomed by the air we're about to breathe.  We haven't got a chance!"

At this, Mary furiously cuts off the discussion, saying she won't have it.  "There's is hope.  There has to be hope!  There's always hope!  We just can't go on like this.  We can't!  We... we..." she insists before leaving the room in tears.  Peter tries to comfort his heartsick wife, already dreading the prospect of months without him at her side and the possibility of something happening to him on the mission.  For Holmes, the situation is even worse.  Knowing that he might not make it back before the fallout arrives, he sets about obtaining in advance one of the suicide kits the government is preparing to distribute to the general population so that they can spare themselves and their children from death by radiation poisoning.  He manages to get one of the kits, takes it home, and tries explaining to Mary what will happen with radiation sickness and how the kit will help end it.  He then has to tell her that there's a dose for their baby as well, which horrifies Mary.

She refuses to hear any more of what Peter has to say on the matter and babbles about how a neighbor of theirs insists the radiation isn't coming to Australia after all.  When Peter dismisses the neighbor as "a damn fool", Mary rushes from the room weeping.  Meanwhile, Capt. Towers has made the acquaintance of youngish Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), a friend of the Holmeses and of Julian as well.  Matched up with the captain by Holmes as a well-intentioned diversion, the two become friends and Moira, who has been coping with her impending doom through drink and meaningless sexual liasons with other men, becomes strongly attracted to Towers.  And while he likes Moira, he cannot respond to her advances.  Because while intellectually he knows that his wife and kids back in New London, Connecticut are surely dead, he cannot accept it emotionally.  He still speaks of them as if they were alive and well, and at one point accidentally calls Moira by his wife's name during some shenanigans at a beach resort after losing a boat race they were both entered in.  It is after a night on the town when Moira fails again to seduce Dwight that he feels compelled to explain himself; a task which strains his self-control to the breaking point:

"You see... in the Navy, during the war, I got used to the idea that something might happen to me, I might not make it.  I also got used to the idea... of my wife and children... safe at home.  They'd be all right no matter what.  What I didn't reckon with was that in this... this kind of a monstrous war... something might happen to them... and not to me.  Well, it did...  And I can't... I can't cope with it!   My kids... all the planning since the day they were born.  Sharon... Sharon and I, we... well, see, we were the sort of people who... we would have been happy to grow old together.  I-I can't accept it.  I can't!  Does that make any sense?  Do you understand?"

The Sawfish proceeds upon her mission.  Reaching Point Barrow weeks later, the sub takes atmospheric readings.  The geiger counter shows radiation levels "thirty points into the red", which scotches the hopeful theory of Prof. Jorgenson but still leaves the anomaly of the Morse signal, which is still transmitting.  Stopping first at San Francisco, somehow still intact after the war (the city had been destroyed in the novel) but deserted, the crew one by one look through the periscope at the dead city.  One of them, Yeoman Swain, a native, deserts the ship.  San Francisco is his home, and that is where he chooses to meet his own end, likely within a week.

Heading down to San Diego, to the site of a large oil refinery with hydroelectric power now pinpointed as the source of the strange Morse signal, the officers ask Julian who he thinks was responsible for the war which destroyed the human race.  But Julian's answer is not one which any of them anticipated:

"The trouble with you is that you want a simple answer.  There isn't any.  The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use without committing suicide.  Everybody had an atomic bomb, and counter-bombs, and counter-counter-bombs.  The devices outgrew us.  We couldn't control them.  I know.  I helped build them, god help me...  Somwhere, some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something. He knew that if he hesitated for a hundredth of a second that his own country would be wiped off the map.  So he pushed a button.  And... and the world went... crazy."

Surfacing in the harbor, Capt. Towers sends a volunteer, Sundstrom, ashore in full protective clothing, to find the sender of the Morse message.  Sundstrom makes his way through the refinery complex, past the generators still humming away, producing plenty of electrical power, and finally finds the radio room.  There, he discovers the "sender": a Coke bottle laying against the key of the telegraph, weighing it down while it's being tugged at by the cord of a window shade that snagged onto it.  Sundstrom frees the telegraph key and sends a message to the Sawfish, which Capt. Towers receives with a definite black amusement.  Sundstrom then shuts down the power generators and returns to the ship, thus putting an end to the last ever message from the Northern Hemisphere.

Returning to Melbourne, the officers and crew partake of what personal diversions and pleasures they have available to them in the time they have left.  Peter goes home to his wife and child.  Julian competes in the last Australian Grand Prix in his modified Ferrari racer, in a furious race in which the drivers throw all caution to the wind and are killed in multiple crashes.  Julian wins the Grand Prix, a point of pride he will be able to take with him into oblivion.  And Dwight, who has finally accepted the deaths of his family back home, and Moira, who has genuinely fallen in love with the captain, consummate their relationship during a fishing weekend in the mountains.  It is a final happy time for the surviving remnant of the human race and one which is all too brief.  Returning to Williamsport, Towers is called to the sickbay aboard the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne.  Ackerman, one of the Sawfish's crew, is down with the first symptoms of radiation sickness.  Their doom is now upon them.  Brisbane, on the northern coast, has ceased sending messages.  The government now begins distributing suicide kits, as per the plan.  Some Melbourne residents gather at a Salvation Army revival held under a giant banner proclaiming "There Is Still Time, Brother" to pray and seek understanding of the fate that has befallen them.  Others queue up at the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital for their suicide kits.  Capt. Towers returns to the Sawfish.  Gathering his crew together, he leaves it up to them to vote on whether or not to remain in Australia for the end or to try to make the now perilous and uncertain voyage back to New London to meet their deaths.  The crew votes to return home to America.  Back in their home, Peter administers the child's dose to the baby, and he and his wife, now resigned to their fate but still deeply in love, share a final cup of tea together.  Dwight is met at the dock by Moira after he has phoned her.  He tells her that the men have decided to return home and, being their captain, he cannot desert them.  It is goodbye forever, but he tells Moira that he loves her.  As the Sawfish is heading out to sea, Moira has driven out to a point above the beach overlooking the bay, where she watches as the sub submerges for the last time.  The movie ends with scenes of a now deserted Melbourne, with the final shot being of the banner waving in the wind, still proclaiming its message of hope even though there is now no one to ever see it again.

On The Beach was and is a powerful and bleak movie.  No room for a hopeful outcome was reserved.  The world ends, period.  No one is left.  The final message was inserted by Kramer during one of his fleeting attempts to cooperate with the Pentagon but it had no impact upon their decision to completely freeze him out of all access or their subsequent decisions after the movie was ready for distribution.

When writing his novel, Nevil Shute projected a war (occurring five years into the future from the time of writing) which followed years of unchecked proliferation of atomic weapons to the point where even nations like Egypt had bombs.  Worse, the atomic arsenals in Shute's world were thermonuclear weapons salted with cobalt.  Cobalt laced bombs as radiological weapons designed to produce particularly "dirty" long-lived fallout to contaminate enemy nations were discussed as early as 1950 by physicist Leo Szilard and were a feature discussion point of the seminal paper "On Thermonuclear War" commissioned by the RAND corporation for the DoD and formulated by Dr. Herman Kahn.  Cobalt bombs had made their way into the popular media through the 1950s and were central to the doomsday scenario projected in Stanley Kubrick's nightmare nuclear comedy film Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964).  Briefly: Cobalt 59, when bombarded by fast neutrons produced in a thermonuclear chain reaction, is transmuted into the unstable isotope Cobalt 60, a heavy gamma emitter with a half-life of 5.75 years.  This means it takes 5.75 years for a given amount of Cobalt 60 to lose half of its radioactivity.  The radiation dosage from this isotope is several thousand times the lethal dosage for human and animal life, and even after the first half-life is expended remains "hot".  Calculating upon that rate of decay, it would take about twenty half-lives, or more than one hundred years, for the radiation to fall to safe enough levels to permit habitation by unexposed human beings for long periods of time.  But this means that an area contaminated by Cobalt 60 fallout would remain unsafe for a century, which negates all sheltering strategies based upon a two-week interval to emergence to the outside.  Survivors would be forced to endure a mole-like existence in shelters for the remainder of their lives and their descendants for a substantial portion of theirs.  No sheltering scheme in that time period which was practicable envisioned such a timeframe, and there would have been huge difficulties in preparing what would have to be whole underground communities to which the surviving population would retreat and remain within for a whole century.  Shute, a weaponeer from the Second World War and therefore a man with some degree of scientific knowledge, did his own rough calculations to back up the premise of his novel, predicated upon the use of hundreds if not thousands of cobalt-laced weapons by more than a dozen combatant nations to produce the lethal fallout levels depicted in the plot.  These scientific details go unmentioned in the movie screenplay, but as the possibility of cobalt bombs was being publicly discussed at the time of production, it was safely assumed that audiences would make the connection readily enough.

As outlined in Mick Broderick's excellent research article "Fallout On The Beach", a secret study conducted by the Office of Naval Research to advise the Eisenhower Administration during the process of formulating the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) which would serve as the basis for nuclear warfare strategy, did not include the possibility of cobalt bombs in the arsenals of the two superpowers.  However, it did project that, even with the existing weaponry in said arsenals, there was enough megatonage to destroy over 80 percent of the populations of both superpowers in a "saturation" attack by each, either directly from blast and immediate effects, or by fallout contamination.  This despite any sheltering plan then in place.  The figure rose to 95 percent if 20,000 weapons were used in such attacks. The two superpowers had already built to a force level of 31,000 warheads, many of which were in the megaton range, which was alluded to in the original novel for the fictional war, depicted as taking place five years into the future.

However, this grim projection of the outcome of a nuclear war, which according to Eisenhower himself made such a conflict "preposterous" and certainly unsurvivable, did not prevent the organs of the military establishment from jumping all over Stanley Kramer's nuclear doomsday drama in an attempt to blunt or discredit it entirely.  Because On The Beach not only depicted doomsday for humanity but did so in a way which directly contradicted the logic both of the U.S. government's civil defense program and more importantly that of nuclear deterrence and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).  During the 1950s, the U.S. and state governments conducted periodic civil defense drills in several of the largest cities in the United States, which required the populations to evacuate to shelters located within the urban areas and to remain there for hours at a stretch, leaving those cities effectively deserted during the practice alerts (much like San Francisco as depicted in the movie).  And there was growing popular resistance to these drills, despite threatened jail sentences for refusing to obey orders to retreat to shelter for the duration of the exercise.  And a nascent popular resistance to continuing nuclear buildup was beginning to take root.  Furthermore, like the novel, the movie refused to state that the Soviet Union was the agent responsible for starting the war.  The Eisenhower Administration, even despite the knowledge given to it by its own internal studies, felt the necessity to neutralize anti-nuclear dissent before it could take root in the popular culture and the body politic.  While the USIA prepared a propaganda campaign to dismiss the film as "mere" science fiction (since it was projected as an occurrence in the "future") or to co-opt the movie into official propaganda campaigns advocating "safeguarded disarmament", and the State Department tried to prevent foreign diplomats from taking an interest in the movie and refused to cooperate with foreign screenings especially in the Soviet Union (which happened anyway when Kramer had already circumvented State to arrange a special premier screening in Moscow attended by a closed audience of 1200 Communist Party apparatchiks), the AEC prepared reports for Congressional special subcommittees dismissing the nuclear war projections of On The Beach by arguing issues which were completely irrelevant to both the book and the movie.  Intended fully for public consumption, these baldly dishonest arguments were based upon the usage of a fraction of the weaponry in existing arsenals and the premise of the quick decay of Strontium 90 fallout, which "burned" down to safe levels after only two weeks and permitted the existing sheltering schemes to work, and therefore supposedly negated the scenario of the movie.  Neither argument had anything to do with the premises of both the novel and the movie.  The report also took issue with the projection of "hopelessness" and the premise of a human remnant who would elect to commit suicide rather than shelter for the two weeks it would take for Strontium 90 fallout to decay to safe levels.  Again, this argument ignored the far deadlier and longer lasting Cobalt 60 fallout at much greater concentrations produced by the use of thousands of cobalt bombs, which made long-term survival an impossibility and lingering death from radiation sickness a certainty and therefore made the scenario of On The Beach a quite logical one.  In tone if not in actual text, that part of the report nearly mimicked the confident projections of Dr. Strangelove in dismissing as "inconceivable" that survivors of a nuclear war would lack the spirit to undertake all measures to ensure their own self-preservation.  The problem is that the novel and movie made this projection quite conceivable, and that was what sent the Administration into such a panic over the possible public reaction both domestically and internationally.

In the end, the movie On The Beach did prove a commercial failure, losing $700,000 short of its capital costs for production, though the original book continued to succeed as an international best-seller.  But it did have an indirect impact which the Eisenhower Administration's propaganda failed to blunt.  And it paved the way for media which openly questioned the logic and inevitability of nuclear war, presenting it as a catastrophe which had to be averted if man was to survive on this planet.  Five years later, Dr. Strangelove would make the same point as black comedy, while the grimmer Sidney Lumet drama Fail-Safe parodied pro-MAD thinkers in the form of the sinister Walter Matthau character Prof. Grotechele.  Through the 1960s, a Ban the Bomb movement arose in multiple cities both in the United States and worldwide and the public did challenge the rationale of both civil defense and nuclear war preparation.

Fortunately, nobody was actually stupid enough to build cobalt bombs.  Though no formal agreement banning the things was ever negotiated, they were deemed impractical as weapons.  But since then, scientific studies modeling the possible climatic damage wrought from a large-scale nuclear exchange still makes a worldwide nuclear doomsday scenario quite feasible, with the culprit being famine from agricultural destruction rather than worldwide dirty fallout.  And the questions posed by On The Beach remain relevant today as much as they were in 1959.  The chief one of these questions being whether or not human beings, in the face of doomsday, would cling to their humanity, their civility, and a basic decency, and meet their fate with dignity, or if they would succumb to their own inner demons and become no better than mindless beasts at the end.  Nevil Shute believed in the former possibility, perhaps a bit optimistically, but perhaps not without some reason.  Because indulging one's worst instincts would be totally pointless in a situation in which there is zero chance of escaping doom.  So would people become beasts and end what remained of their lives in pointless violence, or would they find some nobility with which to meet the end, living each remaining moment to the fullest?  There is ample precedent for both possibilities unfolding.  And if the possibility of dignity is the more likely one, then also the possibility of finding the way to avoid doomsday also exists, by tapping into those qualities which make human beings civilized in the first place.  In the end, that perhaps is the far deeper message presented by On The Beach which still has resonance in our present day: There Is Still Time, Brother.

Still time.

If I live to be a hundred...

Well, she has.  Tomorrow, July 1st, 2016, the incomparable Olivia deHavilland will celebrate her 100th birthday.  She has outlived all her former co-stars, nearly every person she acted with in movies, and her younger sister Joan Fontaine, who died in December of 2013.

Everyone has their favorite Olivia deHavilland role from her long and storied career.  Mine shall always be Olivia as Maid Marian in the fun, freewheeling version of the timeless legend: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).  Maybe Maureen O'Hara might have made a good paring with Errol Flynn in the role, as she was with him in 1952's Against All Flags.  But Olivia's verve, her soft femininity, her sparkling personality and strength as an actress matched against both Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone makes it impossible for me to imagine anyone else paired with Errol in the depths of Sherwood Forest.  She is simply dazzling in this picture, in a role she seems to be having such fun playing.  And that's what makes her light up the screen for me whenever I watch this film, as much so now as the I first time I ever sat down to watch the movie years ago.  She has reached her century, and will always be timeless, beautiful, and magnetic.

Happy 100th Birthday.

This... This IS history.

One of the brightest moments in Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) is one little scene.  In this whole thrilling action-adventure chase for the prize of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, contested over between Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and his friends, and the Nazis seeking to capture the Ark for the Fuhrer and tap its power to guarantee the Nazi conquest of the world, one of the best scenes of the movie is the moment when Indy is tested as to what sort of man he really is.

Indy had managed to stow away aboard a German U-boat, whose crew had just hijacked the Ark from the tramp steamer carrying it, Indy, Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and his beloved Marion (Karen Allen) back to America.  Reaching the secret Nazi island base in the Atlantic where the treacherous rival to Indiana Jones, Belloq (Paul Freeman), is to perform the ancient rite that will open the Ark, Indy grabs a Nazi uniform and a bazooka and trails the shore party.  Belloq and Jones have contended over other relics; the former to sell them to the highest bidder, the latter to preserve the past.

The test of Indy's character comes when he confronts the Nazis, with the Ark and Marion in their custody.  Indy threatens to blow up the Ark, destroying it utterly.  Hauptmann Dietrich (Wolf Kahler) is unable to believe Indy would destroy the Ark but cannot dismiss the possibility that he might.  At that moment, it is Belloq who steps forward and challenges Indy to go ahead and "blow the Ark back to God".  Belloq has no weapon but his own words and knowledge of his longtime foe:



"All your life has been spent in pursuit of archaeological relics.  Inside the Ark are treasures beyond your wildest aspirations.  You want to see it opened as well as I.  Indiana, we are simply passing through history.  This... this IS history."

And from that moment, it is impossible for Indy to pull the trigger.  Belloq knew exactly how to call Indy's bluff, and Indy showed himself for the academic he really is before adventurer or mercenary or anything else.

It would, of course, have been easy to employ any cheap plot twist to stop Indy from carrying out his threat.  But this one turned on the whole developed character of Indiana Jones in the movie and that is why this one little scene has such power.  Belloq disarms Indy simply by playing upon his own curiosity and passion to preserve the past.  It is a natural outgrowth of the plot and the character design in Lawrence Kasdan's script and it meshes wonderfully in all its elements.  It also sets up how Indy and Marion survive at the end, because the academic Jones pays attention to the lore behind ancient relics which the mercenary Belloq dismisses as mere superstition.

That is filmmaking done the right way.

I now think it is OK to be Patty Duke

The 16-year old Patty Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962) for which she would become
the youngest actress to win the Oscar, here seen with Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan.

Patty Duke in the 1979 television production of The Miracle Worker, this time as Annie Sullivan with
Melissa Gilbert as Helen.  Patty won the Emmy for her portrayal in this version.

He can appear as mist, vapor, the fog, and vanish at will.

“Versatility is a dangerous thing. It's very satisfying to portray many types of roles, but often your own identity gets lost. Seldom does a producer say, "This is an Eddie O'Brien part." On the other hand, while the rewards may be great in fame and financially for stars, the work becomes monotonous. No actor who plays himself is a happy person.”

—Edmond O'Brien

Such are the pitfalls and rewards of being a character actor instead of a star. Stars always get the top biling, the big money, the fame and adulation. But character actors are the ones who really help make a film, with that eccentric jailbird, or alcoholic frontier doctor, or the ranger deputy with the funny voice; adding color and providing depths to a movie which the leads cannot do because they are more or less locked into the roles they're playing, and in a past era of moviemaking were effectively stereotyped. John Wayne was always expected to be John Wayne in every picture. Cary Grant could never play a villain because he was always the romantic/light comedic hero and was expected to be that in every picture he appeared in. But character actors can just about get away with anything in the roles they fill in a picture because they aren't confined to playing a "typical" character or constantly playing the same personality type from movie to movie. They morph from one personality to the next, sometimes even within the same movie. Of course, even that truism is not strictly true as some character actors are always the go-to psychopath or swindler or kind-hearted loser, used in those roles by directors multiple times. But even when confined to playing a "type", the good character actor can find some nuance to exploit, some variation to act out, and thereby turn what otherwise is a stereotype into a standout even for a paltry few minutes of screen time. And then there are those performers who appear as just about every personality type you could imagine and are so good that at times they steal the picture from the leads. Stars in their own right, even if they never got higher than third or fourth billing because they were sought after by directors and producers time after time after time. These people earn their stars through the course of hundreds of roles stretching across decades.

In what is considered the single greatest year for movies, 1939, one character actor proved to be the single greatest of his type of movie performer in that singular year. Thomas Mitchell, the doughy-faced, thick-brouged Irishman most famous for his roles in Gone With The Wind and It's A Wonderful Life, appeared in five of 1939's greatest movies, including GWTW as well as Stagecoach, Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. Quite a tour-de-force in just that one year. Mitchell won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Doc Josiah Boone in Stagecoach, and established the alcoholic frontier doctor type for every Western picture thereafter. But in my view, he should have gotten that award for GWTW because in effect Mitchell played two characters in that film —the Blarney filled, puffed-up antebellum plantation aristocrat Gerald O'Hara and post-Civil War mad idiot Gerald O'Hara; a tragic, broken man overwhelmed by the South's defeat, the ruination of his estate, and the loss of his wife. The man who opens the door for Scarlett (Vivian Leigh) after her harrowing flight with Melanie (Olivia DeHaviland) and her baby, and Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), to get back to Tara is a very different man from the peacock-proud Lord of the South who was so casually enjoying his brandy and cigars while dripping with arrogance over the prospective Confederate victory over the Yankees that last perfect day at Twelve Oaks. You see his whole story written in the face of that disheveled, slack-jawed wreck with five-o'clock shadow and vacant million-year stare.

Even before he starts babbling "We'll ask Mrs. O'Hara. Yes, she will know what to do" to his shocked daughter we already know he's mentally gone in just that first minute when he's staring through Scarlett at the door. But that isn't enough for Mitchell. The truly stellar moment of his performance is when he's sitting at his desk, picking over a collection of buttons as if they were gold dollars, and Mitchell puts this wonderfully crazed expression on his face with eyes bulging, the twisted smile, the little birdlike twitches of the head; mining that scene for all it is worth. It is wonderful to watch the man at that moment when he is out-acting just about everybody else in the movie in five minutes of its four hour running time.

Character actors are never out of work because of how useful they can be to fill in this or that particular niche in a wide variety of movies. John Carradine spent nearly the whole of his fifty-eight year career in character parts. Only a handful of his record three-hundred fifty appearances in movies and television could be classified as leading roles, and even in those he was essentially a character actor, as he was in the role of suspected psychotic murderer Gaston Morel in 1944's Bluebeard (Carradine's own personal favorite). An unabashed ham and proud of it, no role was too small or too eccentric for him to tackle, and he could chew scenery to his heart's content. He played Dracula in three different films including the bizarre cross-genre howler Billy The Kid v. Dracula (1966). It was impossible not to recognize John Carradine in a picture with his stentorian barritone, tall lanky frame and face to match. But he would take any role and make it his own, and if a director needed someone to lend a patina of sham dignity to a production, Carradine was the go-to guy. "Directors don't direct me, they just turn me loose", he once said in an interview and it proved a true enough statement especially in his over-the-top performance as Maj. Cassius Starbuckle in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

But Carradine could also deliver very sensitive performances, though after the 1940s directors seemed to just let him ham it up as he saw fit, as witnessed in my favorite of all his characters, the defrocked preacher Casy in 1940's The Grapes Of Wrath. Casy is a man who can no longer preach the word of God because he is not sure of anything in the wake of the Depression and Dust Bowl, and has gone out into the world to find out for himself its bitter truths:

"Tom, you gotta learn like I'm learnin'. I don't know it right yet myself. That's why I can't ever be a preacher again. Preachers gotta know. I don't know. I gotta ask."

The other asset Carradine had going for him, of course, was his face. The high cheekbones, long flat planes, sunken eye-sockets, high forehead and long prominent nose formed one of the most artistically interesting faces in Hollywood. Ideal subject for any cinematographer, that face only became more interesting the more it was sculpted by age.

Often times, more than studio executives would care to admit, character actors provide the only good moments in dull, flat, or just outright awful pictures. Other times, they prove far more essential to advancing the narrative beyond the necessary function of backing up the leads, and become far more important than the stars of the film. A perfect example of the latter is in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939) in which one of the most crucial scenes is played out between Edmond O'Brien as the poet-turned-thief Gringoire, and the eminent Thomas Mitchell as Clopin, king of the Beggars Guild. As they witness the cruel whipping of Quasimodo at the pillory outside of Notre Dame cathedral, they ruminate upon the injustice of the world in which they are trapped:

"End it, Clopin!"

"Well, if you've been whipped once..."

"Have you?"

"Twice. Now I buy protection."

"From whom?"

"The nobility."

"The guardians of the old and holy tradition!"

"The very same. They buy it from the King and sell it to those beneath. It's quite all right. You see, after the War —and don't forget it lasted a hundred years— thousands of us went from door to door asking for honest work. And we were whipped for begging! The ruling class didn't say "Work or starve", they said "Starve, for you shall not work"."

"And I starved."

"Thousands did, until I organized the Beggars Guild."

"Of which I am number seven-thousand four-hundred and nineteen."

"You needn't be ashamed. True, we're not great thieves like the nobles. Our robberies are petty compared with the wholesale plunder of the nation.

"I wonder if the moral difference isn't in our favor."

"Right! And someday, you and I will write a book on the truth of beggary."

This scene, owned by O'Brien and Mitchell, sets up the political themes of the movie which are not only key to the eventual rescue of Esmerelda (Maureen O'Hare) but also display the same questions underpinning the struggle in the modern world for justice and simple human dignity for the examination of the audience. Gringoire begins the fight for his beloved by composing pamphlets to sway the public and appeal to the King. When the wicked Chief Justice Frollo (Cedric Hardwick) dispatches soldiers to destroy the printing press and they set themselves to their tyrannical work before Gringoire's first pamphlet can be published, O'Brien performs a dramatic turn as he declares "You may destroy the form, but not the spirit!" His passionate delivery and sincerity, over-the-top in a lesser picture, serves here to dignify his cause. Later, with the nobles attempting to force the King to suspend Sanctuary so they can drag Esmerelda out of Notre Dame for her execution, from which she was rescued earlier by Quasimodo, O'Brien and Mitchell again take center stage as desperation drives the two men in different directions in their effort to save the girl:

"Gringoire! Gringoire! Every man in the Court of Miracles is ready to fight for Esmerelda! (lays down an arquebus on the table) Look, I've got your weapon. With this, we'll see! We'll not let those nobles take away our right of Sanctuary!"

"Don't bother me now. I've got to finish this appeal to the King, the people... The printer is waiting."

"Words won't save her. I've a better way: force!"

"I don't believe in force."

"My friend, you're a dreamer, a scribbler, a poet! What do you want? To prove your point or save Esmerelda?...... Shall they hang Esmerelda? Gringoire, my army of beggars, thieves and cuthroats is ready to march!"

"No no no, Clopin! You must wait—"

"What for?"

"For the effect of my pamphlet on the population of Paris!"

"But you forget the power of the nobility!"

"You forget that the King will read this too!" (and rushes out)

"He failed before when they destroyed that printing press! I can't depend on pamphlets. We'll march! Get ready!"

Again, it is Mitchell and O'Brien who drive the picture in one of its most riveting scenes and sets up both the triumph and tragedy at the climax. Their final moment together is one of the most moving death scenes in cinematic history:

"Clopin! Why didn't you wait? I told you I could save her without using force."

"I thought... that was just a poet's dream."

For all the sensitivity in the magnificent performance of Charles Laughton in this movie as Quasimodo, it is in O'Brien's and Mitchell's scenes that opens Hunchback into depths beyond even those already supplied by Laughton, Maureen O'Hara and Cedric Hardwick.

Edmond O'Brien seemed the perfect leading-man type in waiting when he made his debut in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, just twenty-five, trim and handsome. He apparently learned performance craft first as a stage magician at age ten from none other than Harry Houdini, then a neighbor, and later would cross paths with another stage magician, Orson Welles, when he assayed the role of Mark Antony in Welles' famous 1937 Mercury Theater Broadway production of Julius Caesar depicting Rome as a fascist state and the characters all in modern contemporary dress. Endeavoring to get his career back on track after Army Air Force service in World War II, O'Brien began struggling with his weight and got a bit hefty; also appearing older than his actual physical age. He possessed a deep and rich but rougher voice than it had been in 1939, so leading roles came few and far between. One was in an utterly forgettable 1956 film adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The other was one of the roles for which O'Brien is immortal in the spectacular, genre-defining crime noir thriller D.O.A. (1950) as Frank Bigelow, a man fatally poisoned with a slow-acting toxin which gives him only forty-eight hours to solve his own murder.  Only the previous year, he had performed in the key supporting role in another classic crime noir film, White Heat (1949) with James Cagney as the semi-psychotic but fiendishly clever gangster Cody Jarret. O'Brien is undercover cop Hank Fallon, who is put in the same penitentiary with Jarret to get close to and trap him in the next crime he's already planning, a payroll robbery from a refinery. For this, Fallon must become Jarret's friend, almost like a brother, to lull suspicion, and plays on Jarret's grief over the death of the mother he was emotionally dependent upon to gain that trust, all while trying to find some way to keep the police alerted and ready to spring the trap. O'Brien's character must tread a very fine line between the two worlds of cop and criminal.

O'Brien was often the reliable cop, reporter, or military officer in quite a few of the hundred-ten different film and television roles he played in the course of his career, and also took his turn through the world of Shakespearian cinema as Casca in the 1953 production of Julius Caesar (starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, the role O'Brien played in the Orson Welles Broadway production sixteen years earlier). But where Edmond O'Brien really shines, in my view, is as Dutton Peabody, the alcoholic editor of the Shinbone Star newspaper in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. O'Brien's Peabody is seen through much of the film as the drunken comedy-relief figure. But watch him in the scene when Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart) borrows a copy of the Star to use in his schoolroom class about government as the perfect example of the importance of newspapers to democracy. Wordlessly, a whole gamut of emotions play across O'Brien's face as he listens in from the half-open door to Rance's lesson to his students. You can see just from O'Brien's expressions, the cast of his eyes, how Peabody is being reminded of how vital a role he plays in his community, which nearly moves him to tears, and how for the first time in perhaps years he realizes that he matters. You see a man recovering his dignity in the space of a minute, and also his courage.

When Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) tells Peabody and Stoddard how printing any further stories about the cattle barons' efforts to intimidate the farmers and sheep ranchers to voting against statehood will lead to their hired goons coming to Shinbone to shoot up the town, Peabody's voice is dead-level when he replies "That's news, isn't it? And I'm a newspaperman". The facade of the town drunk drops away to reveal a serious and determined man ready to do his job even at the risk of his own life and fully understanding the possible consequences of doing so. It was a transformative moment in the audience's perception of Dutton Peabody and the danger he had placed himself into in the moment he rediscovers himself because of Rance.

The character actor, the supporting performer, is the specialist of the acting world. Without the S.Z. Sakals, the John Qualens, the Ward Bonds, the Alan Hales, the Brad Douriffs, the Jack Elams, the W. Morgan Sheppards and dozens of other names I could easily reel off, a movie is left lacking for the vital personalities which counterbalance or compliment the stars of the picture and provide the necessary drivers to move the plot along and add qualities the main cast cannot do by the limitations of their own star images and the character types they are playing. Without these specialists who can play ranges rather than to leading-man or -woman types, structure collapses. Especially if a movie requires an ensemble cast rather than two or three big stars to tell its story, such as Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men (1957). The one real "star" in that production was Henry Fonda. The rest were some of the best and most powerful character performers of the day: Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Robert Webber, John Fiedler, Edward Binns, Martin Balsam, George Voskovec, Joseph Sweeney (memorable as the Old Man, Juror n. 9).

In recent years, of course, there has been a blurring between the lines of star and character actor, as in the cases of Johnny Depp and the changeling-like Gary Oldman. Also, since the end of the studio system, there are no longer stables of contract players as in the old days so you don't have quite the guaranteed presence of the same familiar faces from movie to movie as was customary back then. But somewhere you will find these cinematic chameleons in the background, filling in as this or that colorful figure or villain or victim or psychotic or doctor, cop, fireman, et-al. Appearing as whatever the script requires and vanishing again like mist in the night.