NEERJA (2016)

Watched cold, with no knowledge of Indian history, Ram Madhvani's film is an intense thriller with a highly sympathetic heroine and vicious villains, but for Indians, presumably, Neerja is no thriller at all. Its outcome would be known to everyone but those ignorant of their own history. Neerja Bhanot is a national heroine, a 22 year old model and stewardess who died rescuing hundreds of hostages from her hijacked jetliner in 1986. Inevitably, Neerja will be a different experience depending on whether you know the title character's story or not. If not, as was my case, the climax comes as a gut punch. But I imagine it was still a gut punch for Indian audiences earlier this year, since Sonam Kapoor gives such a vibrant and appealing performance in the title role that people probably were rooting for her to make it even when they knew better.

For Indian moviegoers there had to be great pathos every time Neerja's father asks, "Who's my brave girl?" and one of the ironies of the story, on film at least, is that she hardly feels brave before the crisis comes. In a flashback subplot, we learn that she ran away from the husband her parents arranged for her to marry. Hubby was quite the jerk, apparently, verbally and perhaps physically abusive, and Neerja's doting parents have the good sense to tell her she made the right decision. The film finds her in a happy place, the life of the party before she boards her final flight, though her mother would rather she stuck to modeling than fly in planes that could crash -- or who knows what else might happen?

Neerja's flight stops in Karachi, Pakistan, on the way to Frankfurt. In Karachi, a terrorist cell in fake uniforms storms the plane. These are oldschool terrorists from the good old days, Palestinian nationalists (and quite secular for all I know) loyal to Abu Nidal. Their object is to force the release of comrades held in a Cypriot prison. They're not the best-trained or best-briefed hijackers. They don't know that the cockpit is in an upper compartment of the plane, and in the initial confusion Neerja is able to warn the pilots that a hijack is under way, enabling them to escape through a hatch in the cockpit ceiling.

A waiting game begins. The terrorists demand that the pilots return to the plane, or that new pilots be sent. When a young Hindu man makes the mistake of identifying himself as an American citizen, the hijackers kill him right in front of Neerja to show negotiators on the tarmac that they mean business. Ordered to collect the passengers' passports, Neerja tells her crew to hide all the American passports, kicking them under the seats when necessary when their captors aren't looking. The hijackers rightly find it hard to believe that there are no other Americans on the plane, but Neerja's best intentions only move the British passengers to the front of the peril line.

We and Neerja can see that the terrorists are starting to crack. They're confused and frustrated, having expected to fly where they wanted, but their anger and anxiety only make them more dangerous. All it takes is for the lights to go out for hell to break loose. While all the terrorists are heinous villains, Neerja's writers and actors do a fine job individualizing them, making some more hateful or simply more crazy than others. Madhvani effectively creates a claustrophobic, impatient atmosphere of constantly ratcheting tension as the terrorists lose control and Neerja plans an exit strategy for the passengers. The climax is exhilarating terror as all the minor characters we've been introduced to Airport-style seem equally in mortal peril, while some make a stand against their tormentors United 93-style and Neerja shepherds as many people as possible out the emergency exits. From what little I've read the filmmakers have made Neerja's sacrifice even more heroic than the impressive reality, but I can understand the artistic need for dramatic license to keep the audience guessing when the end will come, or hoping against reason that she might escape. What comes after inevitably seems anticlimactic, but given how strongly the film has emphasized Neerja's bond with her parents, I suppose it's only right that they, and particularly her mother (Shabana Azmi), have the final words. My final word is that Neerja is a strong Indian contribution to the modern terrorist genre anchored by Sonam Kapoor's charismatic performance, and a sad reminder that this sort of thing has been going on longer than Americans may suppose.

HORSES OF GOD (2012)

After the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. people were quick to argue that the attackers in no way represented the downtrodden, as if to preempt anyone thinking of saying they must have had some sincere personal grievance, grounded in poverty, in order to do what they did. Not quite two years later a wave of suicide bombings swept Casablanca, the legendary city in the Kingdom of Morocco. Adapting a novel based on those attacks, French director Nabil Ayouch tells us that these terrorists were the downtrodden, products of progressive impoverishment in the no-hope environment of a metastasizing shantytown. With every jump of time in his story he shows us dauntingly how the shantytown has grown. His protagonists are virtual dead end kids and his story is something like the original Dead End Kids of 1930s Hollywood getting recruited into the German-American Bund or the Ku Klux Klan with Pat O'Brien egging them on and no one to show them the error of their ways.

Our main focus is on a trio of shantytown kids who age from boys to men: Hamid, the bicycle-chain swinging leader of the band, his younger brother Tarek, nicknamed "Yachine" after a famous Soviet soccer goalie, and Tarek's weakling buddy Nabil. In ancient kid-gang fashion they and the rest of their team are chased back to their own neighborhood by the other team, the skins to their shirts, after a game falls apart. From the beginning Nabil and Tarek are accused of being gay for each other -- in a horrific scene a drunken Hamid actually rapes Nabil as Tarek and their other pals watch stupefied --  and a certain panic about masculinity amid a greater physical intimacy than men share in the west informs the decisions they make as young men. They work as mechanics for a boorish garage owner while Hamid, who'd become a drug dealer, stews in stir for throwing a rock through a cop's car window on a dare. Hamid returns from prison apparently reformed, but now he's too neat looking and there's something sinister about his new seeming serenity. It soon becomes apparent that he's been "radicalized," to use the current buzzword, but to Ayouch it looks more like plain old brainwashing by a cult.

 

The evolution (or devolution?) of Hamid (Abdelilah Rachid)

Still, while Hamid has grown a little aloof from his family -- including an alcoholic dad, a trashy mom and another brother who's a little crazy about his radio -- he and his new buddies come in handy when Tarek and Nabil need to cover up Tarek's killing of their boss for having out-of-nowhere started fondling Nabil. Tarek feels obliged to these devout dudes, who are also kind of cool for knowing karate, but he also finds their disciplined activity filling a void in his life. His promises to become a life of action rather than mere being, action becoming more important than life, even if he does still pine a little for Ghislaine, the pretty girl from the embroidery school. Suddenly he seems even more radicalized than Hamid, and Hamid notices this to his dismay. 

 

What elevates Horses of God above a simple expose on the making of terrorists is Hamid's wavering development. It's a surprising twist if you were expecting Tarek, the good brother and our point-of-view character, to observe and/or oppose Hamid's radicalization. As Hamid, Abdelilah Rachid undergoes multiple transformations, from thug to true believer to something more ambivalent. It's not so much that he comes to doubt jihad as that he can't stand to see Tarek traveling this path. It's as if some older-brother protectiveness overrides his radicalization. For all we know he could die readily himself, but eventually he can't bear even to think about Tarek martyring himself. At the brink of doom he tries to dissuade Tarek from carrying out a bombing of a niteclub, only to have Tarek at long last step out of older brother's shadow by shoving him to the ground. The dynamics of their whole sad family make Horses something more than a political film. Because the characters are convincingly human, the stakes seem more real for the audience, especially as we see harmless-seeming people denounced for sin and apostasy and targeted for death for no good strategic reason.

The film closes on a despairingly Bruegelian note as a consummating explosion is seen only from a tremendous distance -- from one of the soccer fields where Hamid and Tarek played as boys, where the next generation of shantytown boys watches with short-lived fascination, little suspecting what the filmmakers suspect is their own dark destiny. The subject matter alone makes Horses of God necessary viewing in our time, but fortunately there's more than necessity to justify seeing it.

On the Big Screen: ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

The Academy gets to nominate up to ten movies for Best Picture under its new rules, but there are still only five Best Director nominees. For that reason, the Best Picture nominees are divided by many Oscar-watchers into two tiers, with only those whose directors were nominated assumed to have a real chance for the big prize. Not since 1989's Driving Miss Daisy has the director of the Academy's Best Picture not even been nominated in his own category. Kathryn Bieglow's Zero Dark Thirty was considered one of the Best Picture front runners until the Oscar nominations were announced on January 10. The film received a Best Picture nomination but Bigelow herself, whose previous effort, 2009's The Hurt Locker, earned her the first Best Director award won by a woman, did not get nominated in her own right. It's been rumored that Bigelow was being punished personally, just as Paul Thomas Anderson was presumably punished for offending Scientology, for appearing to endorse torture in her new film about the pursuit and killing of Osama bin Laden. The way I saw it, Zero Dark Thirty portrays torture as an arguably necessary but certainly not sufficient ingredient in bagging the world's most wanted terrorist. The torture shown in the movie was not enough to nail Osama's location in Pakistan, and it should be borne in mind that Mark Boal's screenplay was first written while bin Laden was still at large. Were he still at large now, many viewers might well assume from a different version of Zero Dark Thirty that torture accomplishes nothing. Now that Boal and Bigelow have caught up with events, many people can't help inferring that writer and director consider torture to be necessary, effective and right. Bigelow's tone makes the film a rorschach blot that draws out each viewer's preconceptions. The director herself aims for a naturalistically neutral tone, neither handwringing nor triumphant. We may still be too close to events for some people to tolerate or even understand such a presentation. Many of us still want to know what side Bigelow's on, and many of those can't accept that she may not choose to take a side. A case might be made that she had to take a side, and that if torture isn't explicitly condemned the film has endorsed it. Whether that case would convince everyone is unlikely, but enough people are angered by what they see -- or fail to see -- that Zero Dark Thirty may not be appraised in purely cinematic terms for some time.

It's possible that the film's political critics focus so much on what Boal and Bigelow say or don't say about torture that they miss what the creators seem to be saying about their overall subject, the hunt for bin Laden. The broader view, however, is less neutral than deeply ambivalent. This is not a cheerleading movie unless the viewer assumes that Maya, Jessica Chastain's composite character at the film's center, is meant as an unconditional hero. Chastain gives a heroic performance, climaxing both 2012 as a year of aggressive female characters in cinema and her own meteoric rise since first earning notice in Terence Malick's Tree of Life a year earlier. But the heroism seems exaggerated in a deliberate way, as if writer, director and actress all want us to think twice about the way Maya curses and blusters and vows to "kill" bin Laden or "smoke" other terrorists, or is called a "killer" by colleagues. Unlike her cinematic peers of 2012, Maya is not an action heroine. She never fires a shot in the picture; when terrorists fire on her car in Pakistan she can do nothing than crouch below her bulletproof windshield and reverse the vehicle back into her compound. She may be the mastermind, but it takes the muscle of Navy SEALS, who may as well be her puppets, to actually kill her target, though she gets to declare victory by identifying Osama's corpse. Interestingly, we never get a full shot of the man; all we see is a beard and a nose, as if we as well as the whole world has to take Maya's word that the SEALS have hit what they call the "jackpot." I don't mean that Bigelow is somehow implying that the dead man isn't bin Laden, but she is reinforcing the way this has become Maya's personal quest and vendetta, at a potential expense invoked by the sort of character we're usually programmed to dislike, a male superior who questions Maya's priorities. This character asks a fair question: with new threats to the "homeland" from apparent freelance terrorists, how important was it by 2010 -- how much was it worth in resources -- to get the apparently isolated bin Laden? It would be easy to say that Maya must be right because she's the protagonist, but we know what a film where Maya is unambiguously right would look and sound like, and Zero Dark Thirty doesn't look or sound like that. This questioning attitude toward the hunt for Osama persists as a theme even after it could no longer be underscored by his survival despite all efforts. But some observers clearly believe that the film doesn't do enough questioning about the overall War on Terror, and their attitude is best expressed by one of the movie's own interrogators: an incomplete truth will be treated as a lie. That could be said about any film allegedly based on fact, but some facts will always matter more, and their omission offend more, than others, depending on the observer. Eventually these things will matter less and the film will be judged on something closer to its own terms.

Zero Dark Thirty is an epic procedural told in a restrained pictorial style that might strike some aesthetic critics as cold if not for Chastain's fervor. The procedural format takes us away from the film's early focus on torture as Maya and her colleagues must weigh clues and make guesses that bring them closer to the compound in Abbotabad. Even early on trickery seems to matter more than torture; the prisoner whose torture is portrayed most extensively finally opens up after the interrogators tell him (untruthfully) that he had already begun talking the day before but can't remember because he'd suffered from sleep deprivation. "Tradecraft" rather than torture is the film's real subject, the latter shown as part of the former. The dry procedural material is supplemented by some pure suspense scenes -- the kind when you can tell something bad is going to happen but you're not sure what. We also get short snippets of the Khobar Towers and London terror attacks to remind us that the bad guys remain an active threat. Some will feel that such scenes stack the deck in favor of Maya and her way of doing things, especially after it becomes a matter of personal revenge for her, but the questions Boal and Bigelow mean to raise about whether Maya's mission really solves the problem should persist for anyone who watches the film thoughtfully. Zero Dark Thirty respects its audiences' intelligence -- whether it respects history remains subject to fierce debate -- and the response to it suggests that many viewers aren't used to such a film. It'd be a shame if such a response cost Bigelow a chance at another Oscar, but while this is a compelling picture it may not endure as memorably as some of her previous films, apart from Chastain's performance, because of its relative lack of the action that had been her strong suit. It's neither Bigelow's best film nor the best film I've seen from 2012, but it's a strong picture just the same, and history rather than contemporary perceptions or prejudices will determine its ultimate worth.

THE 7TH DAWN (1964)

According to author Patrick Macias, Tetsuro Tamba basically conned his way into his first English-language movie by exaggerating his knowledge of the language. The Japanese star reportedly served as an interpreter during the Allied occupation of his country, but Macias says that his real service was as a tout pointing the hottest niteclubs, etc. If Macias's account in Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion can be credited, Tamba, knowing his limitations once cast by director Lewis Gilbert, seduced an English woman into becoming an informal tutor. However it happened, Gilbert was impressed enough to cast Tamba in his most famous English language role as the "modern ninja" Tiger Tanaka in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Watching The 7th Dawn, you can see why Gilbert was impressed. Tamba's English is stiff but he invests it with personality and he makes a charismatic villain in Gilbert's tragedy, adapted by Karl Tunberg from an Australian novel, of the last throes of English imperialism.

Tamba opens the film fighting his own people. He plays Ng, a Malayan resistance fighter against the Japanese occupation of his British-ruled country. Fighting alongside Ng are a schoolteacher, Dhana (Capucine), and an American adventurer, Ferris (William Holden). The film begins with the end of World War II, as our trio of heroes celebrate and separate. Ferris intends to buy up rubber plantations and wants Ng as his partner, but Ng is going to college in Russia. The alarm bells obviously started ringing right there for 1964 audiences, but despite Ng's transformation into a ruthless revolutionary, the film never becomes anti-communist propaganda. I can't even recall the word "communist" being used, though everyone will assume that Ng has become one.

We jump forward to 1953, by which time Ferris has largely realized his dreams of land and wealth, Ng has become a guerrilla leader fighting the British, and Dhana heads a teachers' union while leading nonviolent protests against repressive British measures like a ban on bicycles. Our trio remains bonded in subtle ways. Dhana is Ferris's mistress but pines for Ng, while Ng has exempted Ferris's property from guerrilla attacks and is happy to see Ferris when the American finds his way to Ng's base in a vain attempt to discourage violence. Ferris takes Americans' preferred position in the middle, questioning the sincerity of Britain's desire for a peaceful withdrawal while deploring Ng's increasingly terrorist tactics. There's plenty to deplore on the British side. In reprisal for a grenade attack on a party for the new Resident, the army burns down a village. Failing to prevent this atrocity -- admittedly, the Brits evacuate the residents first -- Dhana briefly takes refuge in Ng's arms, and thus seals her own fate.

 

Dhana is soon arrested for carrying grenades in her bicycle pack, despite her protestations of innocence. Knowing her relationship with Ng, the Brits pressure her to reveal his whereabouts -- Ferris won't tell them -- to save herself from the death penalty. For a while it's possible to believe that the British framed her, but whatever the truth is -- we'll find out eventually -- Ferris decides chivalrously that he'll personally capture Ng in order to save Dhana. Complicating the story is Candace, the Resident's daughter (Susannah York), who's crushing on Ferris but feels sorry for Dhana, the mistress she's supplanting. After the arrest, Candace seeks out Ng, proposing to make herself a hostage to force her father to order Dhana's release. Ng is willing to play along, of course, but makes the conditions clear: if Dhana dies, so will Candace.

It seems that anyone can find Ng if they really want to, and before long his camp is hit with an air strike and invaded by paratroopers. Ng barely manages to escape, keeping Candace as a personal hostage, only to run into a gun-toting Ferris. A race against time begins as the trio must hack their way through the jungle and deliver Ng to the authorities before Dhana is executed. I won't spoil any more, but remember that I did call the movie a tragedy earlier.

The 7th Dawn could be a generic William Holden movie, merging Holden the self-interested cynic with Holden the Asiaphile. The pulpy political context makes Holden almost Bogart-like here, Ferris being torn between an instinct for prosperous neutrality and the need to take a side, if only for one person's sake. The best thing about the movie, in story terms, is how the main characters never reduce to types, but remain more defined by their relationships with each other than by anything else. Ng is probably the most enigmatic character of the group. No matter how ruthless he's shown to be, he still seems to want Ferris's friendship almost to the end and to play fair with him, to an extent. You could get the impression that he cares more for Ferris than for Dhana, but I don't think the movie actually means to go there. What makes Ng a tragic villain is that he wants to be friends (or more) with his old comrades-in-arms even as he stands ready to use or sacrifice them for his revolutionary ends. His sin isn't Communism as such -- he has no plans we hear of for after the British leave -- but the ruthlessness that Cold War propaganda identified as an essential Communist trait. His fate doesn't discredit the anti-colonial cause, which has Dhana as a more positive model, but the film ends with a pessimistic prophecy, perhaps more relevant to other countries than modern Malaysia, that things will get worse rather than better. Fortunately, an American like Ferris can just walk away this time.

Gilbert proves himself an able wrangler of masses of people and munitions in exotic settings, 7th Dawn no doubt serving as a kind of audition for his Bond gig. It has that authentic feel that few modern adventure films can manage in our CGI-ridden era, and Freddie Young's cinematography highlights the diversity of locations, from the imperial swank of the Resident's party to the green prison of the jungle. Riz Ortolani contributes a characteristically lush score, its romanticism a constant counterpoint to all the violence and tragedy. The 7th Dawn is no classic, but its narrative clarity and conviction are enviable compared to many more pretentious or supposedly more psychologically sophisticated movies made today.

THE DEMOCRATIC TERRORIST (Den demokratiske terroristen, 1992)

Pound for pound, or proportionate to its size, Sweden may be the world's superpower of mystery fiction. In the U.S. we see countless translations of Swedish mystery and crime novels, with the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" series just the tip of the iceberg. My impression is that we don't see so much of Swedish spy fiction. Maybe the Swedes don't write so much in that genre, or maybe their attitude toward the Cold War made their stories untranslatable in the U.S. Nevertheless, Sweden has its own pop spy fiction, and if not the Swedish James Bond, Jan Guillou's Carl Hamilton seems to be one of the country's most popular fictional spies, adapted often into TV and film. Per Berglund's film is the second adaptation of the second novel in Guillou's series, and you can see why, despite the effort to film as much of this movie in English as possible, Carl Hamilton might not appeal to Americans. Democratic Terrorist has a familiar enough story: the spy must infiltrate a leftist terror cell of the German Red Army Faction to prevent an attack on the American embassy in Stockholm. But Hamilton himself (Stellan Skarsgard) has a reputation as a leftist, and one of his greatest exploits before this was to wipe out an Israeli hit team that had attacked a Swedish office of the Palestine Liberation Organization. While this makes him an ideal infiltrator, it raises the risk that he might go native, if you will.

Democratic Terrorist nevertheless seems aimed at a U.S. audience, if only because English is spoken more than Swedish or German. In story terms, that's because Hamilton knows only "ein bisschen" of German, and the Germans know even less Swedish. English thus becomes a kind of lingua franca of Europe, since it seems to be everyone's second language. Skarsgard handles the task easily enough; the future Dr. Selvig of Avengers fame had already made inroads in Hollywood by this time, and it's fun to see him kicking ass in his prime here. The other cast members may all be dubbed, for all I know.

Whatever Guillou's novel was like, Berglund's movie offers a campy caricature of Germany, from the sleaze and grunge of Hamburg's red-light district to the dilletante fanaticism of the young guerrillas Hamilton seeks out. Knowing that they're looking for a Swede to aid them in setting up their plan, he takes a room in a no-tell motel and lurks the mean streets while the director observes the freaks and slobs around him. After Hamilton picks a fight over a pinball machine and shows off his fighting prowess and his Swedishness, he's approached by the RAF people and taken to their spacious pad. After promptly taking charge and chiding them all for their amateurishness, he solidifies his credentials by leading them in a bank robbery. Before long, he's falling in love with one of the pretty young terrorists who has a wealthy background. He's also entrusted to accompany two of the gang on a weapons-buying trip to Syria (played here by the Kingdom of Morocco) that goes sour when the PLO gets wind of what the Germans are up to. The Palestinians feel, as Hamilton does, that the attack on the Americans in Stockholm will only damage the international anti-imperialist cause. Worse, it'll probably be blamed on them. Their solution is to kill the Germans, but to save himself Hamilton blows his cover, explaining that only he can thwart the attack at this point. The Palestinians check his references and respect his way with Israelis, but insist that he prove his sincerity on this occasion by killing his German companions. As they curse him as a traitor, he cuts the Germans' throats; Berglund illustrates this with a suggestively gruesome shot from Hamilton's hip as blood suddenly gushes from above. But that's not the end of his Syrian sojourn. To convince his marks back in Germany that he'd been tortured but escaped, he has to let the Palestinians shoot him and otherwise mess him up.

What follows is fairly predictable as far as both the spy and romance plots are concerned, but the film's main point has been made. All institutions, even ostensibly revolutionary entities, act according to self-interest first before considering principles. The Palestinians readily sell-out their German sympathizers and justify that betrayal of solidarity with appeals to realpolitik. Individuals are expendable, as Hamilton will learn when he tries to spare one from the retribution the German police are planning. This is espionage as tragedy rather than romance. Nations may win, individuals may not. Beyond that, Berglund's movie is nothing special. The plot is by the numbers except for that PLO twist, and the script has too many terrorists to deal with to develop many of them adequately as personalities. But I found it worth watching if only for the different perspective it provided on terror wars back. The Hamburg scenes are amusing in a way that may not have been intended, but Skarsgard gives just the performance the material demands. He does enough to get you empathizing with him despite the film's faults, and you can see why Hollywood grabbed him. And if the novel's in English somewhere, I might even read it someday.

On the Big Screen: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

"S AFETY NOT GUARANTEED" read the marquee of the Spectrum Theater, but the exhibitors were only advertising the indie time-travel picture that was playing alongside the venue's typical arthouse fare and the new Christopher Nolan film. For one night, at least, those lines might give a moviegoer pause, for not since The Warriors, I suppose, has a motion picture seemed to drive a nation mad, from the hysterical threats made to critics, through Rush Limbaugh's baroque interpretations of it, to the horror of Friday morning in Aurora CO. You could almost believe that the film was evil, that something about the idea of it -- its own apocalyptic agenda and the corporate hype of an ultimate movie event -- was exerting a malignant influence on people. My screening didn't live up to those implications. The Spectrum is an old neighborhood theater far from the malls where most people went to see this picture. A 9:40 p.m. screening last night was about one-third full, though many more probably turned out for the 8:00 show on another screen. I don't know if you're better off watching it with a bigger crowd, though you probably are better off paying extra for the IMAX show at Crossgates Mall, but the picture can be judged separately -- it has to be, eventually -- from this disturbing week in pop-culture history in which it premiered. So here's what we'll do. The next paragraph will be a spoiler-free summary of my opinion, after which, in order to explain myself better, I must give things away.

As a comic-book fan and Batman fan, I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises, but it probably has the worst writing of Nolan's trilogy. Most of the script's faults are inherent in Nolan's self-assigned task to complete a cohesive trilogy of movies; he could have told the same basic story much more effectively without most of the continuity baggage. On the other hand, Rises easily has the best action of the three films, and Batman's two principal antagonists in this picture are at least equal, combined, to Heath Ledger's already-legendary turn as the Joker in the previous film. Two other new characters, however, are anchors dragging the show down. The ending reinforces a major difference between Nolan's vision and the fundamental Batman concept that ultimately prevents Nolan's films, despite their many virtues, from ever being the definitive Batman movies. For now, however, they stand quantitatively, at least, as the most consistently well done series of superhero films from one director.

 And with that said...

WELCOME

TO

THE SPOILERDOME!

"Let the games begin!..."

We last left Batman fleeing from the police and taking the rap for Harvey Dent's brief crime spree at the end of The Dark Knight, and the first surprise of the new picture is that he apparently did not continue fighting crime after that escape. Bruce Wayne was apparently more injured, physically and spiritually, than we realized, and has made himself a limping recluse in the eight ensuing years. He has grown so out of touch that he seems bemused rather than indignant when a cat-burglar in a maid's costume raids his private rooms at Wayne Manor, steals his martyred mother's pearl necklace, and kicks his cane out from under him before backflipping out a window. He's still smart enough to notice something unusual: the cat-burglar, whom research quickly identifies as Selina "The Cat" Kyle, had dusted his safe for fingerprints -- his. Intrigued if not aroused, and also alerted by rumors of a mysterious masked man building an army in the sewers, he decides to don his costume once more despite the entreaties of a panicky Alfred, who fears for his master's life and will take any measure to deter what he sees as a pointless death wish. The cat-burglar and the masked man seem to be working for the same person, John Daggett -- a sinister businessman pursuing a hostile takeover of Wayne's financial empire. Bruce's only ally is Miranda Tate, an investment partner in a massive, money-losing clean-energy project, to whom Bruce turns over control of his empire to keep it, and especially Lucius Fox's arsenal of weapons and vehicles, out of Daggett's hands. Realizing that Daggett isn't dealing square with Selina, Batman tries to flip her to his side but his plan backfires when she delivers him to the masked man, Bane, who's been waiting for an opportunity to break him. Still, her increasing revulsion at the way Bane brutalizes the outmatched Batman leads us to think our hero's gut feeling about her isn't entirely wrong. For now, Bane dumps Bruce Wayne in a deep hole far away while he perpetrates a hostile takeover of Daggetts's scheme, converting it to a hostile takeover of Gotham City, enforced by his possession of a mobile, undisarmable nuclear bomb. Inevitably, however, the Dark Knight rises, joined by an eclectic assortment of allies, to take the city back -- but at what cost?

I hope I've described at least a potentially compelling story, and as filmed it is compelling much of the time. But if the plot seems labored even in my minimal description, bear in mind that I haven't told you everything. On its own, this has the makings of a good third Batman movie. The problem is, Nolan wants to make the last Batman movie. He wants to complete a trilogy by filling his third film with references to the first. That means we're reintroduced to the League of Shadows and to Ra's al Ghul -- Liam Neeson returns for some flashback and hallucination scenes -- when we might have thought that we'd never have to think of them again after Batman Begins. But to reinforce the trilogy nature of his story, Nolan drops two heavy shoes. First, he ties Bane to the League, in a bald burst of exposition from Michael Caine -- since Alfred somehow knows this -- that Bane is an ex-member of the League expelled for being somehow too mean. And the moment the League is invoked, the comics fans in the audience can start waiting for the other shoe, the one many had expected all along, to drop. Boy, does it drop. This plot twist is a dud in three ways. First, Nolan makes a tease of it as fellow prisoners tell Bruce a legend of the one person who escaped from their hole. From these accounts, Bruce assumes that the person was Bane and that he was an unwanted child of Ra's al-Ghul. He is, of course, wrong, and he has to get the correct facts explained to him by someone who's just literally stabbed him in the back back in Gotham. Worse, this backstabbing involves the revelation of a major figure in the Batman legend, but Nolan has actually done nothing to make the naming of this character the tremendous moment he seems to want it to be. The name is spat out, almost as an afterthought or a sop to comics fans who are presumed to be thrilled to hear it -- though they're not supposed to care if Selina Kyle is never called "Catwoman." Worst of all, the abrupt nature of this revelation, contrived so Nolan can have a late plot twist, instantly turns Bane into a stooge. This could have been avoided. If Bane had made clear all along that he answered to somebody, or did what he did in tribute to some mystery person, than there'd be some buildup toward that person finally taking a bow. But the better course would have been to skip the League of Shadows stuff altogether. Nolan's trilogy would be no less complete and cohesive; the films, after all, are about Bruce Wayne, not the League.

What is the story of Bruce Wayne, anyway? For all that The Dark Knight Rises ends with Batman once more revered as a hero, Bruce has spent the last two pictures struggling to squirm his way out of the costume. For him, to live a real life means to be rid of Batman. This was the tragic core of The Dark Knight. In that picture, Wayne selfishly tried to shift the burden of heroism onto other shoulders so he could get the girl, and get her from the very man he appointed Gotham's white knight. The results were disastrous on every level. In the new movie, he can be reckless about re-donning the cowl because, with Rachel Dawes dead, he feels he has nothing to live for. Yet we've already noticed that he's become Batman again at least in part to pursue a woman, one with whom he's also willing to flirt as Bruce Wayne before snatching that necklace off her neck. This woman is also the only person on Earth who dresses in any way like himself -- though Nolan is at pains to deny that Selina's work clothes, if you will, are a superhero costume. A soulmate, perhaps? An ideal woman who would not force a choice between love and crimefighting on him? Not quite, because Nolan's Selina Kyle is also looking for a way out of the life. She expects payment from Daggett in the form of a "Clean Slate" program that would obliterate her criminal record and allow her to make a fresh start -- doing what, exactly? Later, Bruce Wayne (and his "powerful friend") dangle the same enticement before her. If Bruce and Selina are soulmates in this picture, it is not so much because they both enjoy romping on rooftops in hot costumes but because they both want the clean break and the fresh start. This only reinforces Nolan's message that a happy ending for Bruce Wayne is when he is no longer Batman. A comics fans can't be blamed for balking at that idea, though on the alternate-universe level it is well-executed here, thanks largely to the chemistry between Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway and the Nolan Brothers' efforts to condense the classic long arc of redemption that has left Catwoman no worse than an antihero in the comics. That may be strange to say given that Nolan's Selina is an unrepentant killer, but the movies have never been as big on the code-against-killing thing as the comics. Batman snatches a gun from her hand in one scene, but I think he grows more forgiving after she saves his life with extreme prejudice later in the picture. Well, I know he grows more forgiving because I saw the end of the movie, and let's leave it at that. But while a happily-ever-after finish for these two is many fans' dream, it can be said that it also misses the point of Batman, and Bruce Wayne, for whom the pursuit of justice is his life -- a fact that Selina Kyle, paradoxically enough, may be the one woman capable of appreciating.

As Nolan's Catwoman picture, Rises is a success. It also succeeds as an action movie, from the bludgeoning brawls between Batman and Bane to the epic chase scenes through the streets and skies of Gotham in the final act. Visually the film's as fine as the others, though there's some choppiness in the editing, especially early on, that creates the bizarre impression of a 165-minute movie that feels truncated -- I wouldn't be surprised to see a considerably extended edition at some point. Rises is worst in its writing, both in bad dialogue and bad ideas. Sadly, much of the bad stuff focuses on Michael Caine's underutilized Alfred, who's burdened with explaining Bane to the world and with an awful, mawkish scene in which he tells Bruce the truth about the Rachel Dawes breakup letter he burned at the end of Dark Knight. That's part of this film's confused attitude toward lies, the big lie being the legend of the martyred Harvey Dent. Nolan seems to want to deplore a resort to "noble" lies yet also to affirm their occasional necessity, the need for someone to dirty his hands so another's can stay clean. Certain lies are among the film's necessary evils, but they also give occasion for the film's more sanctimonious characters, including Bruce Wayne himself, to throw snit-fits. The worst offender in this regard, and nearly the worst major character in the movie, is its most mysterious, the much-speculated-upon policeman John Blake. Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Blake reminds me of the sort of character fan-fictioneers call a "Mary Sue," a too-good-to-be-true personality with privileged access to legendary personalities. All you need to know about Blake is that in his youth, as an angry orphan, he pegged Bruce Wayne as Batman because he recognized a certain look in his eyes. Yes, indeed. But Blake has only just begun to be insufferable, and the end of his arc seems supremely unmerited. The film could have done without him quite nicely, just as it could have done without many things. Rises is overstuffed and rushed at the same time, which is more likely than it sounds because that simply means it's doubly flawed -- too much of the bad and not enough of the good, or the good done too quickly or abruptly. Someone who isn't a comic-book fan or an action-movie fan could easily and understandably dismiss it as a bloated trifle; they certainly have a right to do so without facing threats of bodily harm.

Even if Rises seems bloated, Nolan still manages his neat trick of not having the epic scale of the action dwarf his strong personalities. Bale has been consistently good, Hathaway and Hardy are terrific, and even the more mundane characters portrayed by Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman often shine. I can't close without defending Hardy from both the "you're not Heath Ledger" and the "I can't understand what you're saying" critics. His Bane is a tremendous physical presence as well as a classic pompous ass of a villain; he's like Goldfinger and Oddjob rolled into one. I didn't mind the muffler effect of his muzzle, because Bane is so self-absorbed (except when he's ultimately revealed as a loyal puppy) that I felt that he didn't really care whether anyone understood him or not. I found his brutal nihilism not much inferior to the Joker's lethal anarchy -- though I must add that the vaunted political subtext of the new movie isn't all it's cracked up to be. That may be a good thing, since it'll make Bane a more timeless villain down the line, and it'll be in the future, when the madness of this sick week is long past, and perhaps after there are more Batman films for comparison, that Nolan's achievement will get the fair appraisal it deserves.

DVR Diary: SIMBA (1955)

Recent histories of the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya emphasize the unsavory tactics employed by the British colonial government to keep a restive population under control while suppressing an anti-colonial revolt. In light of the current historical consensus, the 1955 film by Brian Desmond Hurst, best known for the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, can't help but seem, on a first judgmental glance, like a racist rationalization of atrocities against a "savage" enemy. That the Mau Mau fighters committed atrocities of their own isn't disputed, but the Hurst film, and still more the advertising for it, sensationalizes Mau Mau violence in a way that can't help triggering politically correct reflexes today, just as many Hollywood tales of Native American uprisings do. Yet while Simba probably couldn't be expected to come out against British rule, it does take a critical stand against widespread racism among the British in Africa. When one white farmer makes the usual arguments describing Africans as "children," the audience isn't meant to approve. We know better because the film shows us proof to the contrary, the heroic Dr. Karanja (Earl Cameron), who struggles to overcome both the condescension of whites and the pressures of family loyalty to make a stand against the often-senseless Mau Mau violence. Yet the film also tempts us to suspect him of secret sympathy, possibly even leadership of the uprising; the nature of the genre probably makes such suspicion inevitable. That suspicion is part of the personal drama of our white protagonist, Alan Howard (Dirk Bogarde), who comes to Kenya to learn that his brother, one of the farmers, has died at Mau Mau hands -- we see his demise in a pre-credit shock sequence. Despite his own loss, Alan initially seems to disapprove of the white settlers' attitude toward the "Cukes," the native Kikuyu people. But as the conflict intensifies and more whites die, he seems adopt an angry racism of his own. A macho subtext to it may be his jealousy of Karanja's close working relationship with Alan's girlfriend Mary (Virgina McKenna), a volunteer nurse. The tragedy of the picture is that Karanja can only seem to prove his bona fides through sacrifice, even after Alan acts to save his life. If Africans like Karanja are as rare as this picture makes them seem, the future won't be very bright -- Simba was released while the uprising was still in progress -- for the Kikuyu child whose pensive face, in massive close-up, is the last thing we see. A lesser tragedy is that Simba is mostly a predictably pedestrian affair. There's something generic in the worst sense in its violence and its earnestness, and the obvious fact that Bogarde did all his acting in a studio, not in Africa, takes most of the life out of the project. Simba will most likely disappoint both action fans and anyone expecting a more critical or questioning account of British colonization. There's a movie to be made about the Mau Mau uprising and the settler experience in the last generation of British rule -- Kenya became independent in 1963 -- but Simba is only a draft of that picture, and probably too close to events to see them as clearly as posterity would like.

SEPTEMBER 11 (11'9"01, 2002)

Has it been nine years already? Was it that long ago that Alain Brigand's portmanteau production premiered around the world. Maybe it doesn't seem that long ago to me, as an American, because it didn't premiere in my country until the summer of 2003. I remember that there was some concern that certain episodes might offend overly sensitive Americans, or that some were downright anti-American. I've had the DVD for awhile but haven't gotten around to watching it until this oppressively commemorative weekend. The anthology's reputation promised an antidote to the monotony of mood prevailing during the extended observance of what the vulgar call the "ten year anniversary" of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. I dimly remembered what the various segments were about from the reviews I read, but I wasn't sure what attitude I might encounter. I ended up being surprised at the prevalence of irreverence over solemnity or stridency. Brigand promised his eleven directors "complete freedom of expression" as long as their segments wrapped up in eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame of film. It wasn't nine minutes, eleven seconds and one frame because this was a European project and they put the day before the month, sensibly enough, and that gave the directors more time to work with. As for complete freedom of expression, judge for yourselves.

Brigand opens provocatively with a segment by an Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf, which sets the irreverent tone that keeps creeping into the proceedings. Her episode is a kind of thematic sequel to her movie Blackboards, since it focuses on a teacher desperate to impart knowledge to people mainly concerned with survival. It takes place in an Iranian refugee camp for Afghans where the children help make bricks in biblical fashion until a teacher lures them into a makeshift classroom. The day, of course, is September 11, 2001, and the teacher wants to tell her students that something of global importance has happened. But they know already: two people fell down a deep well, and one or both may be dead. She's clearly freaked out and expecting nuclear war ("You can't stop atom bombs with bricks," she tells the workers) but her explanation of what's happened in New York, and her insistence on a moment of silence only inspires a childish debate on whether God actually kills people and why he might be crazy enough to do so. Finally, to get them to at least visualize the enormity of the event, she takes them to the base of a tall brick-kiln smokestack and hopes they can imagine it falling. Whether they do remains uncertain.

How many heavyweight French directors turned Brigand down, do you imagine, before he finally recruited Claude Lelouch? He had his moment in the sun with A Man and a Woman back in the Sixties, but I doubt anyone would automatically think of him representing his country in this sort of project. Nor does he do his nation much credit with a gimmicky segment about the stormy romance of two French deaf-mutes living in New York and apparently breaking up on the dread day. In a gambit that makes his episode a bookend to another we'll see later, Lelouch films without sound to emphasize his characters' obliviousness to the awful events playing out on a nearby TV screen. He aims at empathy with the bereaved by teasing a lover's regret at wishing her beloved gone without realizing that he may well be very gone -- but the sooty reappearance of the beloved, who's apparently had a very eventful day, allows for a cheap, happyish ending. This may be the lamest segment of the film.

But it has competition from Egypt's Youssef Chahine, the only director narcissist enough to put himself in his segment. He's just returned from New York as the disaster happens, and is pressed by a female reporter to comment on it at a press conference. He begs off, needing time to think, and goes to Lebanon, where he meets the ghost of an American soldier killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The ghost, who proves to have once been the fiance of the reporter, asks for empathy for his and other Americans' suffering, while the director is torn between his humanist instinct and his desire to reprimand an American for his insensitivity toward the victims of American violence. Still, he finally feels compelled to visit the soldier's grave at Arlington, where he meets the reporter again, as well as the soldier's father and the ghost of a suicide bomber who chides Chahine for showing sympathy to an enemy. Sometimes you try to do the right thing and you just can't win, and that pretty much describes Chahine's segment. But his heart was in the right place.

Bosnian director Denis Tanovic (of No Man's Land fame) contributes a trifle that takes the news from New York to a small town that holds a vigil on the 11th of each month to remember the Srebrenica massacre. It focuses on the friendship of a wheelchair-bound man and a young woman who lost loved ones in the massacre. It's one of several episodes that implicitly deny the centrality of the attacks on America by emphasizing the preoccupations, rational and irrational, of other peoples and nations. In this case, there's a call to cancel the monthly vigil because of the atrocities in America, but the protagonists insist on carrying on as usual to honor both their own losses and those of the Americans. The episode is well-meaning and unobjectionable but is also probably the least memorable of all the segments.

The goofiest segment by a wide margin comes from Burkina Faso and director Idrissa Ouedraogo. It has the naive absurdity of an Our Gang short, as a group of young protagonists become convinced that Osama bin Laden is hiding in their town and hope to collect the $25,000,000 bounty by capturing the terrorist leader. The kids seem to have some visual basis for their suspicion, but their target, whoever he may be, proves slippery, altering his itinerary whenever they plan an ambush. The boys rush about hoping to nab him with spears and machetes, only to see him disappear into an airport, where a guard insists firmly that bin Laden is not in the country. But as far as they're concerned, their chance at fame and fortune is flying away. Hope springs eternal, however, since President Bush may visit the country soon. Surely he'd be worth a large ransom, wouldn't he?... I'm not sure what point Ouedraogo wanted to make with that apparition of bin Laden, but I found this episode charmingly silly and admired its inclusion in the anthology.

A couple of the directors are ringers insofar as they don't actually represent their nation's reaction to or reflections on the terror attacks. One of these is the U.K.'s Ken Loach, who uses his time to commemorate the events of September 11, 1973 -- the day when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Marxist government of Chile. Narrated by a Chilean exile in London, this is a mostly documentary segment with stark, dramatic footage of the Chilean upheaval, perpetrated with American encouragement, climaxing with black and white footage of a burning building, the presidential palace blasted by bombs from a seditious air force. This is the sort of segment Americans were probably expected to bristle at, but Loach's point is not to suggest that the U.S. deserved what it got because of its role in the Chilean coup. Instead, we should take its closing lines at face value; the Chileans will empathize with Americans every September 11, and hope that Americans will someday reciprocate.

If Claude Lelouch can get away with a silent segment, then Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will try to top him with a mostly sightless segment. He confronts us with a black screen as he builds a tower of found sounds from September 11, from the noise of explosions and crashes to the angry words of call-in ranters. Every so often the screen will flicker to life with footage of people jumping from the twin towers, and it will roar to life with footage of the towers falling -- only then the screen goes silent. The screen finally lightens so Inarritu can close with the textual question, in Arabic and English, "Does the light of God guide or blind us?" His is probably the sort of segment most people would have expected from this film. It's the only one that confronts the attacks directly or tries to convey the horror of them without a mediating personal or national perspective. As such, apart from the technical gimmickry, it's one of the least imaginative segments, though it may well have the purest raw power.

Israeli director Amos Gitai takes a "welcome to our world" stance, showing us a car bombing in his own country that gets upstaged by the news from New York to the chagrin of a pushy TV reporter. In a hard-boiled segment shot in a single take, Gitai illustrates the terrible normality of violence in Israel by showing reporters, first responders, police and bystanders all jostling for space and attention in the absence of the awe Americans felt during their own admittedly much larger disaster. The overall effect is blackly comic, though I'm not sure if Gitai really meant it that way.

The other ringer in the picture is Mira Nair, who while officially representing India contributes what's really the first of two American episodes. Based on true events, it follows an Indian Muslim family's trauma as their son goes missing on September 11 and becomes a terror suspect. His family is questioned by the FBI and increasingly shunned by their New York neighbors until the truth is recovered from the Ground Zero wreckage. The son, a onetime police cadet, had volunteered on the spot to aid rescue efforts and had fallen with the towers, dying a hero. This is the one segment I can envision being expanded into a feature film and improved by the expansion. As it is, Nair's segment is no great exercise in style, but the story has a truthful simplicity that's impossible to botch.

The official American episode comes from Sean Penn, who directs arguably the most crassly audacious segment of all. It is likely to offend, not because it makes any provocative political statement of the sort you might expect from Penn, but because it commits a twofold atrocity. It uses the destruction of the towers as a sight gag, and it compels us to look at Ernest Borgnine, admittedly then still a spring chicken of 85 years, in his underwear.  The mighty Borgnine plays a slightly senile widower who talks to his dead wife regularly and seems to live mostly in his own little skyscraper-shadowed world where he can't get a potted plant to grow. In a daringly obscene bit of magical realism, the fall of the first tower allows a strong ray of sunlight to shine into Borgnine's bedroom (the historic pall of smoke notwithstanding) and not only wake him but bring his potted plant to fully blooming life. The old man is overjoyed at the miracle and tries to share his joy with his beloved wife, but in a moment of illumination, if you will, he tearfully acknowledges that she simply isn't there. You may not believe what you've seen -- that is, you may not believe that Penn actually conceived and directed such an outlandish anecdote, but the episode has a primitive power in its preposterous play for pathos like something out of classic silent film.

The elder statesman of the creative team was Japan's Shohei Imamura, and that earns him the chance to top the Penn segment. In his final cinematic work, the great man tops the project with a dollop of "WTF???" in the form of a period piece set at the end of World War II. His protagonist is a demobilized Japanese soldier who's Kafkaesque reaction to the horrors of war is to become a snake. That is, he crawls about on his belly, never uses his hands, swallows rats and tries to bite people. It's all very interesting in a demented way, but its relevance to the overall project is tenuous or tangential at best. The problem isn't that it doesn't refer to the 2001 attacks directly, but that Imamura imposes relevance simply by inserting a sentence in which an officer declares the Japanese aggression a "holy war" and closing his segment, and the film, with the bald statement (pay attention, Muslims!) that "there is no such thing as a holy war." Thanks for clearing that up, Imamura-san!

So did you expect something besides a mixed bag? Had every segment been as sensitive and appropriate as some may yet think correct, had the whole film been about heroism or resilience or whatever the official theme of the decade is, it would have been intolerable. Instead, it's as wild and erratic an anthology film as you'll probably ever see, and that, the faults of individual episodes notwithstanding, is a good thing. Does it do justice to the event? I'm not sure. Does it honor people's losses? That doesn't matter. September 11 succeeds as a cinematic event and a collective, kaleidoscopic portrait of a moment in history, and it should have been part of somebody's television schedule during the commemorative weekend. Of course, you can watch it whenever you want if you can find a copy, and its historical value alone makes it worth your effort.

LOST COMMAND (1966): The other Battle of Algiers

Of the two films released in 1966 about the "Battle of Algiers" -- the terrorist campaign aimed at driving France out of Algeria in the 1950s -- it is the colorful big-budget Hollywood production with an international cast of stars, not the monochrome semi-documentary with a cast of nobodies that has been almost completely forgotten. Yet Mark Robson's film had a head start on Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, being based on an international best-seller and prize-winning French novel, The Centurions, by Jean Larteguy. It starred Anthony Quinn, still fairly fresh from Zorba the Greek, alongside Alain Delon at the height of his stardom. So why has film history ignored Lost Command and exalted Battle of Algiers? For one thing, Pontecorvo's is the better film. It set a new standard for simulated realism and by siding with the insurgents it captured the radical zeitgeist of the late 1960s. By identifying with, if not siding with, the French occupiers, Robson's film could only appear reactionary, a Franco-American counterpart to The Green Berets, by comparison with Pontecorvo's Battle. Lost Command is innovative neither in narrative nor in visual style. But if it's indisputably inferior to Battle, does that make it an objectively bad movie?

Robson's movie probably is some kind of cinematic landmark, if only for being an early portrayal of the west's failure to subdue Vietnam. Lost Command opens during the battle of Dien Bien Phu, as paratroopers arrive to relieve an embattled unit commanded by Lt. Col. Raspeguy (Quinn). The colonel is irked to learn that his superiors have sent him a unit historian, Capt, Esclavier (Delon), but the academic proves a decent soldier -- not that that helps the unit much. They're forced to surrender (to Burt "Kato" Kwouk) and are imprisoned for some time, but under Raspeguy's leadership they largely retain cohesion and morale.

Freed at last, the men return to France, where Raspeguy courts an influential widow (Michele Morgan) who might help him secure a generalship. He can help his own cause with a good showing in Algeria, where the natives are restless. He regathers much of his old unit, including an initially reluctant Esclavier but not Lt. Mahidi (George Segal), who had returned to his native Algeria after their release. In Algeria, they gradually learn that Mahidi, who had been humiliated by racist French settlers and saw a relative killed during a protest, has taken his tactical expertise to the insurgents. While he concentrates on building a guerrila army, his sister (Claudia Cardinale) smuggles bomb-making materials to terrorists in the Casbah, eventually using an infatuated Esclavier -- who doesn't learn of her family ties until later -- as dupe to get her past checkpoints. The French forces, with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm, resort to torture to break the terror network and learn the whereabouts of Mahidi's army-in-the-making. Raspeguy leads the attack to destroy Mahidi's army and earn his generalship, but will he keep his promise to Esclavier to take their old comrade alive?...

As the poster said, they lived and loved and fought:

Anthony Quinn and Michele Morgan (above),
and Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale (below)

What we have here is the age-old conflict between the man of action and the intellectual. Raspeguy is a "beautiful beast of war," so called by the widow because he furiously rejects her first description of him as a "beautiful animal of war." Raspeguy hates being called an "animal" with the passion of one who's been called that frequently. Maybe something didn't translate well from the French, but I'm not clear on why "beast" is any better. The colonel's sensitivity has something to do with his background as a Basque peasant -- and the character's standing as an ethnic outsider among Frenchmen presumably explains Anthony Quinn's casting alongside a mostly French ensemble who speak English in their own well-accented voices -- with the conspicuous exception of Jean Servais as a general who talks in the familiar voice of Paul Frees. One weakness of this picture is the buildup it gives Raspeguy's animus to "animal," which ends up having much less payoff than we might expect.

Alain Delon has more to work with as a more sensitive personality who struggles to avoid the coarsening effect of war. Literally dropped into Quinn's unit at the opening, he's the audience-identification character and the film's political conscience. He isn't unsympathetic to the cause of Algerian independence, and puts up the most resistance not just to the use of torture against the terrorists (novelist Larteguy is credited by Wikipedia with inventing the torture-justifying "ticking bomb" scenario), but also to the French reliance on masked informers. He cracks, however, when he learns how the Cardinale character had duped him. Fresh from his principled protests, he beats her up in a rage that he appears quickly to regret, extracting more gently from her the whereabouts of Mahidi in return for Raspeguy's promise to spare the miliant's life. Esclavier will later have cause to call Raspeguy the "A-word," but while the result finally convinces him to quit the military, the moment is still fairly underwhelming.

What isn't underwhelming at all is the spectacular location work of Robson and cinematographer Robert Surtees in Spain. All the military engagements are engagingly shot, none more so than the climactic raid on Mahidi. Robson establishes the insurgents' location at the ruins of a Roman temple in the hills, and uses that temple as a reference point to make the rival forces' positions perfectly clear in every shot. However retrograde Lost Command may be from a political standpoint, it succeeds quite nicely as a colorful military action film. It may still go down as a curiosity in the Quinn and Delon filmographies, but it certainly doesn't deserve an obscurity that persists despite an official DVD release from Sony some time ago.

I might have suggested that it should endure alongside Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers to represent the other point of view, but that's not really true -- Robson's film does not oppose Pontecorvo's. Lost Command ends with the implication that Algeria's demand for independence is irrepressible, and the film never claims that the Algerians were undeserving of freedom. But it suffers in comparison to Battle because Robson never makes Mahidi the equal antagonist that the character's backstory prepares him to be. Once he turns against the France, however just his cause may be, Mahidi himself becomes little more than a menace. The movie could have used some sort of confrontation, however contrived, between Mahidi and Raspeguy or Esclavier so the insurgent could explain more eloquently or convincingly what drove a soldier who refused preferential treatment, as a presumed victim of colonialism, from his Vietnamese captors, to make war on his erstwhile comrades-in-arms. But the filmmakers may have been playing it safe, since you can stretch the credibility of George Segal as an Algerian only so far. Nevertheless, history has judged Mahidi's real-life counterparts the true protagonists of the Algerian uprising, while cinema history has judged The Battle of Algiers the definitive film version of that event. Those judgments can stand, but Lost Command should retain historical interest for presenting, not the other, but just another point of view in dramatically forceful style.

And here's the US trailer, uploaded to YouTube by SupportingActor.