The critics are remarkably predictable.  It’s not that the real audience agrees or disagrees with them.  The real audience agrees with them on serious dramas with a good story.  But when it comes to funny films or happy films, the critics are trying to gag it up in a toilet while the real audience is laughing in the aisles, partying down, and going home with stardust in their eyes. 

This week was no exception.  The attack of the critics on spoof Scary Movie 3 was merciless.  If they would have had using teeth instead of pens, the cast would have shown up for the premiere without pant seats and cuffs.  But the real audience fell all over themselves charging to the box offices, giving the film the biggest October opening in film history!!!! 

Critics still have value, though.  You can read their critical remarks to get a feel for the movie.  And because they’re so predictable, you can use their opinions to judge the film.  When they call it a comedy or a feel-good movie then start telling you how bad it is, you know you’ve found the film you want to see next.  

This isn’t really a comment on Scary Movie 3.  I haven’t seen it.  But I’ll bet I would at least be entertained.  I can tell by how much the critics didn’t like it.

Madame Chiang Kai Shek passed away in New York yesterday, Friday, October 24, 2003 at the age of 106.  After a long convalescence and a previous period of semi-seclusion on her New York estate, her death was little-noted, in comparison to her fame in the mid 1900s and the effect she created on the world.  She was one of the most influential women in the 20^th Century.  In her honor, I am republishing an essay I did earlier on Chinese history and the recent Chinese movie The Soong Sisters.  Madame Kai Shek was the youngest of the three Soong Sisters.

Recently, we watched the 1997 Chinese movie, The Soong Sisters.  
 

I have a weak spot for good recounting of historical events on film.  This movie is apparently a rather faithful accounting (with some exceptions for political reasons – more later) of the lives of these remarkable ladies, and the times in which they lived. 

The movie is made in China, but it crosses into English a lot, so the movie is permanently made with both Chinese and English subtitles, so either group can understand the other language when it’s spoken.

The movie is breathtaking.  It’s very well made.  It is from the Hong Kong film industry, after the “handover” of Hong Kong to China, and as a result there was some unfortunate censorship – but the base story shines through, and the adjustment is easy to make by simply reading a bit about Madam Chiang Kai Shek, who was an intellectual giant and courageous leader in the 20^th Century.  Because she represents the sister who married anti-communist Chiang Kai Shek, she is played down a bit, relative to the other two sisters 

The film is more than educational.  It’s truly inspiring.

As the movie was really made for Chinese audiences, a little history will help an Anglo-Saxon or other non-Chinese get up to speed with the events as they unfold.

China in the 1800s was ruled by the Qing dynasty.  The Qings had been in control for a few hundred years, and they were well entrenched.  They had a real personality conflict with the emerging Western powers that were emerging in the Far East by that time.  They were terribly traditional and hidebound, and had little interest in technology or commerce. 

The Brits, on the other hand, were a commercial powerhouse.  The British Empire, in the beginning especially, was a structure created for commercial reasons, not political reasons.  By that, I mean the British, as a group, cared less about the beliefs and welfare of the inhabitants of other lands, than they did about developing these other lands as markets.

It didn’t take the British long to figure out they could sell all the tea and silk they could cart away in their clipper ships – but they had a cash flow problem working it out with the Chinese.  The isolationist Qing dynasty refused to allow the British to sell anything to China.  So the British merchants had to buy silk and tea with silver, and weren’t able to recover the drain by selling anything back.  This was an unworkable situation, so the Brits hit upon a rather suppressive solution.  They began black-marketing opium, loaded in India, to Chinese smugglers for cash, then sauntering into port with the cash to buy tea and silk for delivery to England.  By then loading British products, such as cotton cloth, and trading it in India for the opium, they were able to optimize the great circle of trade, and carried a profitable cargo on all three legs.  (If you want to read a gripping story of this period, including the genesis of Hong Kong in the early 1840s, read James Clavell’s book Tai Pan.)

The Chinese took exception to this, and tried to force the British out of their port footholds.  The Royal Navy responded very effectively, and in a series of “Opium Wars” severely thrashed the poorly equipped Chinese military and wound up controlling a large part of China by the end of the 19^th Century.  Other Western nations, including France, the United States, Japan and Russia, were quick to seize upon the weakness of the Chinese government and military, and large sections of China were subsequently taken over by outside forces, rendering China and the Qing dynasty to a subservient status.  China became a slave to Western commerce. 

In the late 1800s a Qing emperor ascended to the throne as a minor and the government was run by his mother as a regent.  She is known as the “Dowager Empress”.  She was as conservative and non-technological as the rest of the Qings had been.  But when her son grew older and took over the government, he saw the error of eschewing Western technologies and he began to move China into the future at a rapid rate in an attempt to bring it up to speed and put it on a footing to defend itself and bring its head out of the sand.  However, the Empress and her conservatives in the Chinese government saw the emperor’s moves as a further capitulation to the Western invaders (by adopting Western methods and technologies) and in a coup organized by the Dowager Empress, the emperor was kidnapped.  She then backed an insurgence known as the “Boxer Rebellion” (so-called because the warriors who fought were known to Westerners as the “Boxers” as a joke on their real name, "The Society Of Harmonious Fists") to drive the foreigners out.  The result was a war in the early 1900s in which a military force made up of American, British, French and Australians swept through China, wiping out the rebellion and essentially completing the end game, wiping out any hope China may have had of being rid of the foreigners and foreign control. 

This stupid move by the Dowager Empress cost the Qings their dynasty and spelled the end of China as it had existed for millennia as a system of warlords and medieval tyrants. 

That sets the stage for the beginning of the movie The Soong Sisters.  These sisters really did exist, and their story is remarkable.

Their father had spent time in America.  He had gone there as a sailor.  He fell into a friendship with a wealthy American, who helped him to get an American education.  He went back to China with his knowledge of the West, and became very rich and powerful as a merchant, first by printing up Christian Bibles, then establishing China’s first Western-style banking system. 

When the three girls were approximately at the age of puberty, a revolution began to develop in China.  It became a dangerous environment for Mr. Soong and his family.  Partly for their safety, and partly because he believed in a Western education, he sent the three girls off to school in America.  They spent their adolescent lives in American schools and colleges, and were very much westernized. 

The revolution finally occurred in China, in 1911.  The new leader of China was a visionary named Sun Yat Sen.  Sun Yat Sen’s primary military general was Chiang Kai Shek.  Sun Yat Sen was the leader of the “Nationalist Party” and the competing party in the early years was the Communist Party.  Sun Yat Sen tried to build these two parties into an American-style two party system in the new China, but he died early on and within a short time after his death, these two parties went at each other hammer and tong, and they were so engrossed with eliminating one another they continued to fight even beyond the beginning of the Japanese invasion of China in the beginning of WW II. 

One of the Soong sisters married a Chinese Harvard graduate, who was the scion of another very rich banking family in China, thus marrying her own father’s considerable fortune to that of her husband’s family.  He inherited the leadership of the Chinese banking industry.  He and his family fled, with their money and power, to Hong Kong during WW II. 

Another sister married Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the revolution, and the last married Chiang Kai Shek. 

Their stories are incredible.  The unfolding of events is powerfully and touchingly recounted in this film.  They helped each other and their historical husbands immeasurably – and they put an indelible stamp on history. 

As a footnote, Chiang Kai Shek was eventually pushed off the Chinese mainland by the Communists after WW II, and retreated to the Island of Taiwan, forming the pro-Western government there.  Although his autocratic bullheadedness and refusal to compromise is probably responsible more than anything else for the failure of China to develop as a democratic system in which the Communists would have played merely a role, he was seen as a hero by the West because of his anti-Communism during the late 1940s and early 1950s when anti-Communism was the driving force behind American foreign policy. 

Not shown in the film was a famous address, made by Madam Chiang Kai Shek (the third Soong sister) to the American congress in 1943, imploring the U.S. to help drive the Japanese out of China.  Her oration was so compelling she became an American hero.  From that year until the late 1960s, she was annually polled among the ten most respected women in America.  Her intellectual brilliance continued to make her a major player on the world stage, even beyond the death of Chiang Kai Shek in 1975.  She lived to the age of 106 years and to the end, she was always known for her quick wit and incisive views.  After 1975, she moved to New York City, and continued to write and speak to a rapt American and Chinese audience for the rest of her life. 

You won’t fail to be swept up in this fascinating slice of Chinese history if you see this film. 

If you fall in love with the Soong sisters, you will also love this link to a web page about them, posted by the school in Georgia where they got their early education.  It includes very good photos of them in their early years. 

http://www.wesleyancollege.edu/firstforwomen/soong/

Jack Black is rockin’ the box office with his new hit, School of Rock.  This incredible off-the-wall actor has been working his way into the film consciousness for a number of years. 

Although he has been appearing in films on a regular basis since 1992, I didn’t really take note until his incredible role in John Cusack’s little treasure, High Fidelity.  This film is so witty it’s like a monologue by the old New York actor/critic/bon vivant Monte Woolley (see The Man Who Came To Dinner – 1942). 

A sequence in the movie can disagree with everything you believe or it can be dealing with real human suffering, or it can be numbingly trite – but you can’t help laughing.  It’s like the first half of one of those Neal Simon scripts that is a pure joy until he decides the story has to get serious for some reason.  The quality of the dialogue bypasses its literal meaning and becomes art.

I remembered the film this way and showed it some people I invited in.  I realized when I did that that the film has a lot of randy scenes and dialogue as well.  So don’t bring it home to your kids.  But the interesting part of that is I remembered the film as one I liked very much, and yet I had no attention on that feature of it (the sexy talk) in fact hardly even recalled it.  It’s just more word candy, not the point of the film.

John Cusack plays a 30-something owner of a run-down record store in the inner city – probably Chicago.  I don’t remember for sure.  The women in his life range from sexy but vacuous Catherine Zeta-Jones to down-and-dirty but degenerated Lisa Bonet to man-hungry Lili Taylor.  All this time, the real love of his life, played by Iben Hjejle (pronounce that one, will ya’) has left him and hooked up with eminently hateable yuppie Tim Robbins. 

In his misery, his only real retreat is his quaint record shop and the two eccentric employees who he doesn’t really like but doesn’t really want to throw out.  (“I can't fire them. I hired these guys for three days a week and they just started showing up every day. That was four years ago.”)

Cusack and his two employees are all eminently snobbish record and tape know-it-alls, and they spend their time in the usually empty record store arguing about whether a certain vinyl album was the first or the second by some obscure group, spouting facts about what year it was produced, and by whom, and with what players… you get the picture. 

As one of the two miscreant employees, Jack Black steals the show.  He makes an already very good movie incredible with his antics.  As I was watching him oil around the floor, chauvinistically asserting his views, I was thinking you couldn’t simply write that part and cast somebody.  You would have to know you could get Jack Black to play the role, and write it for him.  I don’t think anyone else could have done it. 

His lines were great – but his delivery gave them that extra punch – the delivery of someone who puts his life and his honor into every utterance.  His reputation and his uncompromising albeit misguided sense of right and wrong were wrapped around every event in his life.

A middle-aged man with a suit wanders into the record store.  Barry, played by Jack Black, waits on him. 

Barry's Customer: Hi, do you have the song "I Just Called To Say I Love You?" It's for my daughter's birthday.

Barry: Yea we have it.

Barry's Customer: Well, can I have it?

Barry:. No, actually, you can't.

Barry's Customer: Why not?!

Barry: God! Do you even know your daughter? There's no way she likes that song! Oop, is she in a coma?

If you read that with Jack Black’s in-your-face style, you’ll begin to get the idea. 

Another sequence is when Jack Black arranges for a minor female star to come into the store.  Rob takes offense, because the artificiality and circus atmosphere don’t agree with his moping misery regarding the loss of his girlfriend:

Rob: Why'd you have to tell her about the store?

Barry: Oh, I'm sorry; I didn't know it was classified information. I mean, I know we don't have any customers, but I thought that was a bad thing, not like, a business strategy

[smacks Rob]

You can’t dislike this fast, witty movie.  It’s a piece of work.  You can argue about the philosophies and criticize the characters for their flaws, but you can’t not like the film.

All dialogue sequences from Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) – the best site on the net about film.  If the Department of Defense had their weapons systems and military personnel as well catalogued as IMDB has film, we could all sleep better.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but when I do, it is often the History Channel.  This channel broadcasts voluminous material about the Second World War, but that’s probably somewhat understandable because it was the first war that was filmed well.  Making a TV presentation about earlier wars amounts to a lot of still photos or paintings interspersed with talking heads who discuss the events. 

Of course their other option is to discuss history that doesn’t have to do with war.  But that probably doesn’t sell as well – in spite of the fact that most of the real pivotal points in history weren’t directly related to wars.  In fact most wars were the aftermath of bad decisions in peacetime that are never analyzed enough.

But the material can still be fascinating.  One recent broadcast caught my imagination.  It’s a story about a heroic decision made by Japanese Emperor Hirohito to end the fighting following the nuclear attack on Japan by the U.S., and his courage in standing up to others who didn’t agree.

The date was August 14, 1945.

Many historians have asserted that Hirohito had grave misgivings about war with the United States and was opposed to Japan's alliance with Germany and Italy but that he was powerless to resist the militarists who dominated the armed forces and the government. After the atom bombs were dropped, Japan was close to defeat.  Opinion among the country's leaders was divided between those favoring surrender and those insisting on a desperate defense of the home islands against an anticipated invasion by the Allies.  Hirohito settled the dispute in favor of those urging peace.

That much is widely known fact.  But the back-story is not so widely known and is a fascinating story of danger and intrigue.

The Emperor of Japan was a god-like figure.  His origin was believed to be divine.  He was revered by his people.

Very few people had ever heard the emperor speak.  He had never done so in public.  Radio as a medium was still fairly new, and Hirohito had never spoken on the radio.  Most people had never seen him either.  Only his inner circle knew him other than by reputation and photographs. 

He was actually a young and good-looking guy.  He wasn't the military leader and had very little to do with military decisions.  He was more of a spiritual leader.  Nevertheless, he was revered, and officially he was the supreme boss of everybody. 

The Japanese fixation regarding “face” and honor was a real problem.  It was actually illegal to surrender.  It was illegal even to discuss it -- a crime punishable by death.  It was a very controversial decision, even in his inner circle.  But Hirohito prevailed.

Hirohito decided to record a speech for a radio program, scheduled for the following day, letting the people know about his decision.  He wanted to do that, because he knew that if it didn't come straight from him, the soldiers would probably fight to the death regardless of what anybody else told them to do.  That is how they were all trained and it is what they all believed in.  But Hirohito had seen enough bloodshed and decided the people had suffered enough.

That evening a recording facility was set up at the palace, and duplicate recordings were made.  In those days the originals were wax.  They were approximately 12" in diameter -- looked like vinyl records but were more brittle and fragile.  This was before tape.  There was so much protocol surrounding the event that the sound people from the radio station weren't even in the same room with the emperor. They were in the next room. 

After he recorded the message, the two recordings were a bit of a hot potato.  Nobody wanted to take responsibility for them.  Finally, one of the loyal chamberlains (a sort of servant) for the emperor said he would take responsibility for them.  After all the outsiders left, the chamberlain hid the disks.

Hirohito’s decision wasn't universally popular in the military.  One army major, with tacit approval from some higher ups, decided it was time for a palace coup, to get control of the recording before it could be played on the radio -- then to broadcast the opposite message on the radio in the "name" of the emperor.  This would have been more normal actually, because everything was actually done in the "name" of the emperor.  The major and his cohorts decided to do this whilst holding the emperor hostage in the royal palace.

Based on the data in the History Channel program, this major was quite insane.

He sneaked onto the grounds of the palace with 1000 men that evening.  He had arranged cooperation in the palace guard.  The idea was to capture the emperor and get the two recordings.  However, the idea of capturing the emperor was a little off-center – the soldiers had so much reverence for him, they really only cut the phone lines then watched to make sure he didn't leave his living area.  The emperor watched the activity from his window and was powerless to act.

Just as they were getting set up on the palace grounds, an interesting thing happened.  Another wave of American B-29 bombers flew over.  This particular group was loaded with conventional bombs and it was headed for some oil fields in the north, on one of the longest bombing runs that had ever been attempted, going from the American base in Guam to the north of Japan and back -- about a 24 hour flight.  The previous two waves of B-29s had delivered atomic bombs and no one knew but what this group was carrying the same weapon.  So the effect was paralyzing.  The power to the city was shut off completely in a pre-planned operation to douse the lights.  The men in the bombers saw it.  They said they saw Tokyo on the horizon, and then suddenly it disappeared, as if someone had turned off the switch. 

Once the power was out, it wasn't restored until sometime the next day, for reasons that weren't explained in the History Channel program.  This left our traitorous major outdoors, in the vast compound of the imperial palace (many acres, 800 rooms) completely in the dark.  It was an overcast night, and nobody could see anything.  This was a real crimp in his plans.  It wasn't even guaranteed they would see the emperor if he tried to escape because there were several ways out and nobody could see anything.

The major set out to find the recordings.  With flashlights his men began ransacking the 800 -- repeat, 800 -- rooms of the imperial palace.  They also began trying to find all the chamberlains, of which there were many.  They had already captured a radio station guy who had been there for the recording session, and they had him along to identify the right chamberlain. 

After many hours of this, the men became desperate in their actions.  They did what they would have allowed no foreigner to do -- completely ransacking the palace, breaking cupboards and desks, tearing apart furniture, and so forth, while the emperor sat alone in the dark in his room. 

As they captured the chamberlains, the major interrogated them very roughly, one by one, even threatening them with death and pointing a pistol at their heads.  He always asked the radio guy if he recognized the chamberlain. 

Unbeknownst to him, the radio guy was a patriot, secretly supporting the emperor’s cause.  He convincingly said, "No" when he saw the right chamberlain.  At this point the major was getting very frustrated.  He pistol whipped that particular chamberlain and kicked him when he was down till he was unconscious.  Others then spirited him to safety.  Interestingly the major almost killed the only guy who had any idea where the disks were! 

The major went into the office of an important general who lived and worked on the palace ground to get his support.  He wanted the general to agree to the coup and sign a paper saying so.  He knew if he did that he could go to lesser generals and colonels and get their support.  The general listened, then said he would go in the back and pray and think about it and give his decision after he had done so.  The major would have none of this so he shot the general, and forged the general’s signature on the paper. 

He then had the paper carried to the largest nearby army installation and delivered to the head of that division.  The paper was essentially forged orders from the general to come to the palace and support the coup.  At this point, however, the major was starting to alienate his own people, and the messenger, an officer who had decided to join the coup as an alternative to hari kari following the Emperor’s decision to surrender, may have said some things to the head of the military division that weren't in the message itself.  In any case, the head of the military division sent word back via this messenger telling the major to cease and desist -- to stand down.  All of this communication was done by messenger – the power was out.  (This messenger was still alive at the time of the History Channel production and was interviewed as an old man – very interesting.)

The major had no intention of standing down.  It was daylight at this point, and time for the radio broadcast, so the major went to the radio station to take it over by force and put out his own false message. 

The man he ran into at the radio station was also patriotic, and aware of the emperor's wishes.  He insisted that he couldn't operate the radio station because the power was out.  In truth, they did have backup power, and were prepared to go on the air.  After brandishing his pistol some more and issuing additional threats, the major reached a stalemate with the radio station man. 

Then the power came on.  When it did, the phone rang.  It was a very high-ranking general telling the major to stand down and placing him under arrest.  The military was on its way to the radio station to get him, and had already taken the palace back from the rebels.  The actual recording disks were on their way to the radio station, under military guard.  Apparently the chamberlain had regained consciousness and had recalled where he hid them. 

The major realized the jig was up, so he did what any good Japanese soldier did under the circumstances in those days -- he shot himself. 

Above his level, there was a wave of higher-up military officers committing hari kari.  Some of them were involved in the attempted coup and some were not.  The common denominator was they were unable to live with the infamy of surrender. 

But the emperor's message got out and it was historic.  Most Japanese listened to their radios.  Those that heard it never forgot it – like Americans who know where they were when they heard about the murder of John F. Kennedy.  It was apparently well written and convincing, and the people got behind it.  Within hours the war was over.  The bombing crew that had forced the blackout heard a radio report on their way home that the war was over.  They cheered as they landed their B-29s on Guam.   They were the last bombing run in WW II.

In a second historic broadcast, made on Jan. 1, 1946, Hirohito repudiated the traditional quasi-divine status of Japan's emperors.

The following paragraph is lifted from an Encyclopedia Britannica article and makes a good post-script:

Under the nation's new constitution, drafted by U.S. occupation authorities, Japan became a constitutional monarchy. Sovereignty resided in the people, not in the emperor, whose powers were severely curtailed. In an effort to bring the imperial family closer to the people, Hirohito began to make numerous public appearances and permitted publication of pictures and stories of his personal and family life. In 1959 his oldest son, Crown Prince Akihito , married a commoner, Shoda Michiko, breaking a 1,500-year tradition. In 1971 Hirohito broke another tradition when he toured Europe and became the first reigning Japanese monarch to visit abroad. In 1975 he made a state visit to the United States. Upon his death in 1989, Hirohito was succeeded as emperor by Akihito.  "Hirohito." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2003.  Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service.
22 Oct, 2003  <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=41436>.

I’ve always had a weakness for good-quality song-and-dance movies.  I’ve seen everything with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers several times, and I enjoyed Singing In The Rain yet again a couple of weeks ago.  But my favorite modern musica II will see 25 times: Chicago. 

Sandy and I saw the production on stage at the Schubert once, and I liked it.  But it didn’t send me like the movie did.  The unique capabilities of film were used to the fullest.  The cutting was out of this world.  And the two lead actresses both deserve their Academy Award nominations.  They should both win. 

Chicago is a musical with an edge.  It was probably the late Bob Fosse’s greatest vehicle as a choreographer – although his credits are legion.  The play is old.  A version of the story was set to film starring Ginger Rogers in 1942.  It was remade in its current incarnation by Fosse in the 70s, when the late great Gwen Verdon, once Fosse’s wife, played the part of Roxy on Broadway for years.  It has been resuscitated many times.  Fosse’s choreographic moves are simultaneously elegant and wildly avant-garde. 

I’ve never seen anything like this film production of Chicago.  During the dance numbers the film environment was filled with dozens of jazzy dancers creating a tapestry as colorful and intricate as Vedic art, insinuated with continuous seductive movement, punctuated with the sharp staccatos, jutting hips and rolling shoulders that were Fosse trademarks. 

Renee Zellwegger and Catherine Zeta-Jones jumped into this stew feet first and turned in once-in-a-lifetime performances as the two murderous flappers, Velma Kelly and Roxy Hart.  Their acting was Oscar-quality before they even began to dance.  But the dancing knocked my socks off.  The dance performances in this movie, especially by these two, are why I will see this film 24 more times. 

Other good performances were turned in by Richard Gere, Queen Latifah, Lucy Liu, John C. Reilly, and all of the other players.  There wasn’t a dead weight in the entire cast.  The supporting cast dancers and all of the dances are exhilarating.  I was ready to simply rewind and start the whole thing over again.  I could watch a different chorus dancer each time through.  This dance crew ain’t the rockettes.  These people cranked. 

Filmically, the cutting made a new story out of the original stage production.  Many of the scenes in the film are simultaneously acted in real-life situations and dramatized in stage productions, with very well timed cuts back and forth that simply carry the production to a fine aesthetic wavelength, where it transcends the storyline and becomes pure art.  Notably, the sequence where Richard Gere as the sleazy lawyer, caught in a courtroom jam, decides to “tap dance” carried the technique to an extraordinary level.  The cuts back and forth between his courtroom histrionics and the stage production of the tap dance, with full chorus and orchestra backup, are so smooth and bright I couldn’t help being carried away.  I only hope I didn’t disturb too many people around me with my repeated “wows”.  The scene where Roxy’s husband is taking the rap for her, then begins to waffle, is similarly enrapturing.  The interwoven stage production is Roxy’s daydream as he sticks to the agreed-upon story with the cops, then becomes her nightmare as he begins to blow it.

The stage production of the women on murderer’s row doing the number Cell Block Tango (“He asked for it, he deserved it…”) is out of this world. 

I was completely taken with the opening number – All That Jazz, performed by Catherine Zeta-Jones, and the movie never let up after that.  The closing number, with Zeta-Jones and Zellwegger, is spectacular.  The two of them look like they had spent the last 20 years of their life in a Las Vegas chorus line instead of romping through non-terpsichorean film vehicles.  Their dancing was not only completely professional – it was some of the best I have ever seen anywhere by anybody. 

The movie has 13 Academy Award nominations, including Zellwegger for best actress and Zeta-Jones for best supporting actress.  I hope they win all 13 statues.

I saw it again last night. 

I see it again when I find someone who hasn’t seen it.  It’s always a thrill to introduce people to this movie.

The American Film Institute rates Casablanca as the number two movie of all time – second place in the top 100, after Orson Welles’ incredible Citizen Kane.  It also rates Casablance number one on the all-time list of love stories, beating out Gone With The Wind, Dr. Zhivago, even Love Story. 

This kind of ranking would probably align closely with the opinions of most film buffs.  After we saw it again last night, my wife said, “It’s perfect!  That’s what sets it apart.  It’s perfect!” 

In spite of the fact it was filmed 62 years ago, it is still new, still dramatic, still beautiful.  The new DVD that is out has a wealth of additional material that any real Casablanca fan will love. 

It probably has more famous quotes than any other film.  Gone With The Wind has, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  The Terminator has “I’ll be back!”  But Casablanca generated a list of expressions that made their way into the language, either as special phrases or as phrases with special meaning. 

Humphrey Bogart’s “Rick” utters most of them.  “I don’t stick my neck out for nobody.”  And the famous, usually misquoted line, asking the piano player Sam to play it again.  Although the exact phrase, “Play it again, Sam,” was never actually spoken in the film, there were two sequences where he was asked to “play it again” in so many words. 

There is Humphrey Bogart’s speech to Ingrid Bergman at the end:  “If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it.  Maybe not today.  Maybe not tomorrow.  But soon and for the rest of your life.”  Or later in the same speech when he says: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.  Someday you’ll understand that.” 

And finally, he repeats for the third or fourth or fifth time in the movie the phrase he reserves especially for her:  “Here’s looking at you kid.”

Earlier in the movie when Bergman walks into his restaurant, reentering his life for the first time in years, there is some poignant banter for the benefit of her husband about where they last met.  “Do you remember, Rick?” she says, “It was the day the Germans marched into Paris!” 

“I remember it well,” Rick says, “The Germans wore gray.  You wore blue.” 

Bogart is at a table with evil Nazi Major Strasser when this conversation takes place.  “One of these days we will march into New York the same way!” says Strasser. 

“There are some parts of New York I would recommend you stay out of!” says Bogie.

Claude Raines plays the morally deficient French chief of police, who is cooperating with local representatives of the German Third Reich (the film was shot in 1942, and WW II was well underway).  Bogie is forcing him to make a phone call with a gun pointed at him.  “Remember,” says Bogie, “This gun is pointed right at your heart.” 

“That is my least vulnerable place,” replies Raines. 

Raines is always willing to make a production of the police work when a crime has been committed.  “Round up the usual suspects!”  He tells his policemen.  When a German courier is murdered, he tries to impress the Germans by telling his men to, “Round up twice the usual number of suspects!”.

At the end of the movie, when Bogie has shot the evil German Major Strasser with Claude Raines looking on, a police car screeches round the corner with a number of Raines’ keystone cops inside.  “Major Strasser has been shot!” shouts Raines to his men as they run up.  There is a pregnant pause as Bogie looks at him, wondering what he is going to do.  Raines’ heart turns out to be in the right place after all.  “Round up the usual suspects!” he tells his men. 

Not long after that, Bogie spits out yet another memorable phrase, to Raines, who has realized that like Bogart, he cannot return to the city and the life he had, in the shadow of the German command.  He tells Bogart that wherever he goes, he’ll go too.  “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!” says Bogie.  One of the revelations in the additional material on the DVD is that this phrase was not part of the original script, and that producer Hal Wallace thought of it after filming was complete.  Bogie was called back to say it as a voiceover on a shot of him with Police Chief Louie, walking away from camera into the fog. 

This could go on forever.  By the time I got through with the part about the quotes, I would have delivered the entire script.  There’s no chaff in it.  Then I would have to get into the incredible lighting, and staging and acting.  (Although my sharp-eyed wife found a continuity flaw in the film last night!)  But you can find out everything you need to know about Casablanca at one of many web sites that are devoted to it or to Humphrey Bogart, or at one of the very good film-oriented sites like the Internet Movie Database (http://imdb.com). 

Better yet, rent it yourself.  Play It Again – One More Time! 

I watched a good movie the other night.  One of the best things about it was the music.  As soon as the movie was over, I wanted that music.  I jumped on the Net, and in minutes I had it on my computer.  Legally.  I'm listening to it as I write this. 

I’ve gotten used to that now.  It’s surprising how much fun it is to be able to hear any song at all any time at all.  What is an old favorite song of yours that you haven’t heard for a while?  Something by the Beatles?  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young?  Or maybe the March from Prokofiev’s Love For Three Oranges?  Wouldn’t it be fun to listen to that song right this minute? 

It started on the Internet in the mid-1990s, with the advent and wide use of the “mp3” file.  A song in this format plays on a computer with roughly the same quality as a CD.  You can send them around as attachments like a Word file or an Excel file, or you can download them from anyplace that will let you.  Mp3 files have other advantages too.  You can get many more of them on a CD than you can songs that are in the standard CD format.  You can put them on little machines the size of cell phones or smaller, and use them like a Walkman – but they are solid state, they’re lighter, the music doesn’t “jiggle” when you hit a bump or jog, and the devices hold more music than several CDs.  Last but not least, the mp3 file carries data.  So on your computer you can see the name of the song and the artist, how long it is, even sometimes data about the song, even in some cases a picture of the album cover on your computer screen when the song is playing.  You can move them around, or delete them.  You can buy that album you love that has one song you hate.  You can delete the song you hate and listen the rest of the album.  The list of advantages goes on and on.

Computer geeks who also loved music quickly figured out what a new world the mp3 file created.  Web sites popped up, such as mp3.com, where an artist looking for exposure could place his music to be downloaded by others.  It was fun to go in to sites like this a see what was available.  I had a close friend who posted some music up on a site like this for a while. 

One time I found a female artist on mp3.com that had a hot little Latin salsa band (Cecelia Noel).  I liked the music so much I looked up her web site, and found out she performs regularly on the Sunset Strip.  So I went to hear her band, and liked it so much I took friends back.  I finally heard her group three times and bought two of her albums.  All because I first was able to download those little mp3 files and find out what she was like.  As far as I know she is not “signed” by a record company, even today.

As young people began to understand this medium the phenomenon snowballed.  The demand for availability of mp3 files went through the roof.  But the record industry was afraid of the phenomenon, or ignored it, or something.  There was no legitimate way to get an mp3 file of any well-known popular artist. 

For people who had discovered how convenient these files are and how much fun it is to pick up individual songs that you like, the record industry’s attitude was a brick wall.  Enter Napster. 

Napster was a controversial software that created a community of people who wanted to share mp3 files.  Napster was soon shot down by the record industry in court, for promoting copyright violations, but the horse was out of the barn.  Other companies began to proliferate, with slightly altered systems that skirted the legal decision that killed Napster.  A user downloaded a copy of one of these softwares, then he could do a search for a song, and if it was on somebody else’s computer who was on line, he could download it directly from their computer.  At the same time, the mp3 files on his computer were visible to others, and they could download from him.

People created mp3 files by using computer programs to transform their CD tracks into mp3 tracks and putting them on their computers.  One might “rip” his Beatles CD into mp3 files on his computer, and another could “rip” his Chili Peppers CD, then both could go online, and could get each other’s songs – even if they lived in different countries or continents and didn’t even know one another. 

When this started happening, I was perplexed that there was no place to do this legally.  If I wanted to listen to an old Frank Sinatra song, like New York, New York, why couldn’t I put in a credit card, pay 99 cents, or something, and download the tune?  (One of the advantages of this mp3 system is you don’t have to buy a whole album to get that one song you want to hear.)

A few years ago I read an article about singer Shania Twain, then saw her picture on about five magazine covers the same week.  I’m not much of a fan of Country and Western music generally, but I like some of it.  This girl obviously created quite an effect.  I was curious.  I had four choices:  1) Live with being curious and hope I found out more someday; 2) Order one of her many albums, groping in the dark, and pay about $17.00 for the privilege of seeing whether I like the music or not – and wait for it to come via Amazon.com, or drive to a store and buy it (I don’t hang around music stores much); 3) Listen to a C&W music station in my car until I heard her (Not!); or 4) download a couple of tunes from the net in a few minutes and check her out.  I did the latter.  I found her music cheerful and pleasing, but it wasn’t my thing.  I deleted the files.  I did that with other artists.  When I found one I liked, I made a point of buying the albums, otherwise I deleted the files.  I actually wound up buying a lot more music than I had been in previous years because I could learn about the artists and the tunes this way.  I would have happily paid some fee per tune or some subscription to get those tunes.  But it wasn’t an option.  There was no official way to get those tunes on the net.  But there was a well established, well grooved-in method for getting them through these various softwares. 

The recording industry staunchly resisted.  They have been on the attack ever since the practice began, but they have never offered an alternative.  I sincerely sympathize with their concern over copyright violations.  But they are missing the point.  They should be leading the world into the computer-music era not trying to stop it.  They aren’t going to be able to stop it.

The demand for a legal and ethical product is there.  Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, started a service called iTunes where users can buy and download music legally.  He made deals with record producers, and got the rights to publish music and sell it song by song.  Others such services have popped up.  I now subscribe to two of them.  I have my credit card registered and I am billed a few bucks per month, or sometimes many bucks if I do a lot of it.  It works great and it feels good to be tapping into this ethically.  But the choices are still somewhat limited.  Not all labels and artists are playing the game.

But the music industry, who stonewalled the inevitable for a decade, then begrudgingly began to allow it little by little in sites such as iTunes is not so bashful about attacking people who go around them.  Instead of seeing the handwriting on the wall, and making the switch from buggies to automobiles, they continue to try to sue the newer technology out of business. 

204 more people were sued on Friday and Monday by the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) for stealing downloaded music files using software designed for the purpose.  This is the second round.  Several hundred were sued weeks ago by the RIAA for the same reason.  

In one case an elderly woman from Boston convinced a judge she had no idea how to download music on the Internet and someone must have stolen her electronic identity to do it.  She dodged the bullet.  In many other cases, typical moms and pops around the U.S. are suddenly being sued for large sums of money, and are finding out for the first time that their sons and daughters have indeed been doing this in their bedrooms.  It’s hard for them to defend and the practice of suing these people is making a bitter public.  It doesn’t help when they find out that what their son or daughter was doing is also being done by most or all of their friends at school.

In his Policy Letter “The Responsibilities of Leaders”, L. Ron Hubbard said, “Life is lived by lots of people.  And if you lead, you must either let them get on with it or lead them on with it actively.”  In the same Policy Letter, he said, “When the game or the show is over, there must be a new game or a new show.  If there isn’t, somebody else is jolly well going to start one, and if you won’t let anyone do it, the game will become “getting you”.

The recording industry is right about the sanctity of their copyrights.  But they need to be fiercely ambitious about building a way for people to enjoy this new superior technology instead of refusing to allow it, then attacking anyone who comes up with an alternative.  At this point, the industry is complaining that CD sales are significantly down, and they’re blaming it on theft of mp3 files on the Internet.  I’ve heard some of what is being passed off as music these days, and I’m not sure that’s the only reason they aren’t selling CDs.  But they do have a point. 

I for one will happily drop my coin in the slot for my mp3 song.  Just give me a way to do it.

I hope the RIAA develops a concomitant program to develop legal and easy-to-use methods of enjoying mp3 files on a pay-per-download basis.  That would solve the situation.  Most people don’t really want to cheat.

Witty banter, incredible sight gags and fantastic musical dance productions make this 1934 movie a must-see if you’re sick of the “news”, tired of suicide bombers, strikes and kids on psychiatric drugs carrying guns to school and drilling their classmates.  It was a more innocent America, and the imprimatur of the age was that series of instant classics, the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. 

Hollywood’s most famous singing and dancing couple only made 9 movies together.  With two exceptions, these are among the happiest and most charming films ever made in Tinseltown. 

The Gay Divorcee was number two.  The country had fallen in love with the couple in number one, Flying Down To Rio, a song and dance spectacular that won an Oscar for its musical production, and started a national dance craze, the “carioca”. 

But The Gay Divorcee was more professional and better put together.  It established a sleek style they would carry through many of their following films, like Top Hat, Swing Time, and Follow The Fleet.  The sets were art deco [a style of architecture, interior design, and jewelry most popular in the 1930s that used geometrical designs and bold colors and outlines Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved] the clothes were exquisite, and couldn’t have been modeled better than by graceful platinum blonde Ginger and the most elegant male dancer in Hollywood history, Fred Astaire. 

Ginger:  “Please don’t ask me to stay!”

Fred:  “Okay I won’t.  Please don’t go!”

Assisted by their standby comic supporting actors Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore, and employing in this film the incredible gift of a little-known actor from Oklahoma named Erik Rhodes, who made a career out of playing comic Italians, they fashioned a movie that will alternately have you on the floor with it’s comic situations, and breathless at the apparently effortless dance sequences, choreographed by Fred.

Fred is in England on a tour as a dancer.  He runs into Ginger by chance, and instantly falls in love.  She responds and both of them begin to glow with the banked fires of a budding romance

Unbeknownst to Fred, Ginger is trying to get a divorce from her British husband.  The laws in Britain in those days left the option of divorce up to the husband only, so the only way a wife could fashion a divorce was to embarrass her husband into it.  Hence there was a cottage industry in “correspondents”, or hired lover-boys who would arrange to be caught in compromising situations with hopeful wives, splashing about in such a craven way their husbands would have to divorce to save face. 

Ginger is off to a seaside resort to meet her “correspondent”, with whom she expects to share a room for the weekend, to establish the apparent extra-marital relationship her husband will not be able to live with.  She has a password – a special greeting by which she will know who he is.

Fred goes to the same resort for other reasons, runs into Ginger, and unwittingly utters the passphrase Ginger is expecting from her sleazy lothario.  After getting sweet but demure treatment from Ginger until this point in the movie, Fred is completely puzzled by her transformation.  She turns cold as ice and matter-of-factly invites him to her room for the night. 

The movie never falters. 

Room service waiter, discussing geology:  “That’s an igneous intrusion.”

Fred:  “You’re an igneous intrusion yourself.” 

The scenes with the real correspondent, an English-challenged Italian dandy, are a scream.  He makes his way around the resort looking for his client, mispronouncing the passphrase, butchering English expressions in such a way they come out suggestive or insulting, and coming on to woman sitting alone, getting his face slapped, his ego deflated and generally having a very bad time of it. 

The movie was the film debut of a young dancer named Betty Grable, who would become the number one pin-up girl of WW II only a decade later. 

The huge signature dance scene, “the Continental”, started another dance craze and is mesmerizing. 

The movie was named when the word “gay” was still in common use as dictionary definition number one, happy and carefree.  Fred’s only love interest was Ginger, and Ginger only wanted Fred.  We’re not sure about the waiter, though. 

Cary Grant is walking down the stairs, half-carrying semi-conscious Ingrid Bergman, one step at a time, mumbling something about taking her to the hospital.  Six or eight Nazis are looking on, trying to make sense of the scene.  Classic evil guy Claude Raines is the only Nazi that knows.  He knows that Ingrid Bergman, his wife, is an American spy.  He knows Cary Grant is her CIA handler/lover.  But he doesn’t dare speak.  He’d be shot by the others if they knew. 

Cary Grant knows Raines can’t tell the other Nazis.  That’s his only chance to get the two of them out alive. 

That’s the reason Raines has been poisoning her – slowly – trying to make it look like disease; trying to get rid of her before the others found out she was a spy.

By this time, you’re near the climax of one of the best Hitchcock thrillers made; which is saying a lot.  Hitchcock was the undisputed master of the genre. 

This particular film, Notorious, was made in, and set in, the late 1940s after World War II.  A nest of wealthy and highly placed Nazi spies and ex-patriots has set up a group in Rio De Janeiro.  Their activities are suspicious.  American spy Cary Grant has to find a way to get inside.  He recruits Bergman, an American-born young woman whose German father has been executed as a Nazi spy in the U.S.  Grant knows Bergman is not a Nazi, but her infamous father should give her the credentials she needs to get in with the Brazilian heel-clickers.  But it’s not as easy as all that.  To accomplish it, she finally marries the leader of the pack.  That may not be what military people describe as the “ultimate sacrifice”, but it comes close.  It’s such an extreme measure that Cary Grant’s superiors begin to doubt her as a source.  They begin to wonder if she is in fact a double agent.

I could go on and on about this story.  Every paragraph would drip with the same breathless suspense imbued into this entire film.  The first time I saw it I never quite touched the seat of the chair.  I just crouched, frozen, half sitting, with a death grip on the armrests.  It’s no harm telling anyone what happened.  You can’t spoil this story.  It’s so well told, you’ll want to watch it again.  And when you do, you’ll have the same reaction. 

This film was the second to last made by Hitchcock under his contract with famous producer David O. Selznick.  Selznick was a bit of a shooting star, who became a golden boy in the mid-1940s, only to drop like a meteor the next decade by micromanaging his crews and running hobby-horse big-budget box office bombs until he fell off the edge, fading from view. 

Hitchcock’s contract with Selznick got him out of England and into Hollywood.  His films benefited immediately from the bigger budgets and better technology of Hollywood films.  If nothing else, you can understand the sound tracks.  His earlier English films use low-grade recording techniques and with heavy British accents, you wind up watching them with your head at a 45-degree angle to the screen as you try to pick up the dialogue.  They are still good films, and I love them all.  But the jump to Hollywood puts Hitch at a new level. 

Selznick, however, was a different story.  Hitchcock had a three-movie deal with Selznick.  By the end of the first one, Hitch was ready to take the next boat back to Southampton.  During the second one, Notorious, Selznick was off in the desert, shooting a high-budget Western that would eventually flop at the box office.  Hitchcock was left alone, and produced this, one of his greatest gems.  Selznick then came back and started kibitzing on Hitchcock’s next film, The Paradine Case with Gregory Peck.  Hitchcock’s solution to the contest of wills was to back off and let Selznick do whatever he wanted.  After this film he would be free from his contract, and he would have not trouble getting the backing he needed to continue directing in Hollywood.  He sometimes didn’t even come to the set.  When he did come, he would fall asleep in the director’s chair and let the film run itself.  It’s widely considered to be one of the worst films with Hitchcock’s name on it.  After that the two men went their separate ways:  Selznick to divorce, financial ruin and obscurity, Hitchcock to become arguably Hollywoods greatest and most durable success – a director that put out one hit after another until he finally ran out of steam in the late 1970s.  The Internet Movie Database has 67 titles attributed to Hitchcock as a director.  That’s an enormous amount of production for a director, especially one that also ran a hit TV series throughout much of the 1950s.  By comparison, Steven Spielberg has directed 47 movies.  Hitchcock’s films were consistently successful.  His specialty was keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. 

Back to Notorious.  There is a love scene in this movie in which Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss on a balcony, fully clothed.  It is a long kiss and it’s done so well, it’s a turn-on.  The censors thought it was a turn-on too, and there was a widely publicized attempt to force Hitch to edit the scene to something a little less steamy.  Hitch refused, and won the day.  As a result, part of the box office impetus was this controversy, and a lot of people either did or didn’t go to the movie based on their reaction to this highly publicized sexy scene.  Today it’s very interesting that a kiss between two fully clothed actors on a balcony would prompt this kind of reaction.  It’s a credit to Hitchcock, who knew, more than most directors before or since, how to tell a story.  It wasn’t exposed body parts or deviated sex that made the scene provocative – it was the story. 

In my opinion, this particular story is one of his best.  And the movie is in my all-time top ten.