Deep in a complex that is hidden away in the Rocky Mountains, Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) has put together and programmed a computer called Colossus. A super computer, Colossus has been designed to control the nuclear arsenal of the United States and its allies. Colossus will not only keep America safe but it was also remove the chance of human error or human hesitation. No longer will two men sitting in a silo with a key have to make the decision whether to obey the orders coming from the commander in chief. No longer will people have to make the split-second decision that could plunge the world into war.
To Forbin’s surprise, the Soviet Union has developed their own super computer, called Guardian. Colossus asks to be “linked” to Guardian and the Russians agree to allow it as a gesture of good will. What no one realizes is that both computer systems have become sentient and that they soon decide that humans cannot be trusted to not destroy themselves and the planet. To Forbin’s horror, Colossus starts to take over the world.
Based on a novel by Dennis Feltham Jones, Colossus was originally filmed in 1968 but it wasn’t released until 1970. The film looks dated with its gigantic computer but it feels prophetic with its storyline about an AI taking over the world and deciding that it knows better than its makers. Director Joseph Sargent adroitly mixes science fiction with Bond-style intrigue as Charles Forbin tries to reason with his creation and both the CIA and the KGB try to take down the computers. The film even tosses a bit of 70s-style paranoia, with both the American and the Soviet governments trying to keep the public from discovering that the supercomputers are trying to take over the world.
Colossus: TheForbinProject is an intelligently written and thought-provoking science fiction film. Eric Braeden does a great job as Charles Forbin, the engineer who goes from being arrogant and cocky to desperate to finally defiant as his creation slips out of his control. William Schallert, so often cast as a nice father figure, turns in a good performance as the head of the CIA as does Susan Clark, cast as a colleague who has to pretend to be Forbin’s mistress just so she and Forbin can talk and plot without being monitored by Colossus.
Colossus is a smart sci-fi film that is more relevant than ever.
In the 1981 film Reds, Warren Beatty plays Jack Reed, the radical journalist who, at the turn of the century, wrote one of the first non-fiction books about Russia’s communist revolution and then went on to work as a propagandist for the communists before becoming disillusioned with the new Russian government and then promptly dying at the age of 32.
Diane Keaton plays Louise Bryant, the feminist writer who became Reed’s lover and eventually his wife. Louise found fame as one of the first female war correspondents but then she also found infamy when she was called before a Congressional committee and accused of being a subversive.
Jack Nicholson plays Eugene O’Neill, the playwright who was a friend of both Reed and Bryant’s and who had a brief affair with Bryant while Reed was off covering labor strikes and the 1916 Democratic Convention.
Lastly, Maureen Stapleton plays Emma Goldman, the anarchist leader who was kicked out of the country after one of her stupid little dumbass followers assassinated President McKinley. (Seriously, don’t get me started on that little jerk Leon Czolgosz.)
Together …. well, I was going to say that they solve crimes but that joke is perhaps a bit too flippant for a review of Reds. Reds is a big serious film about the left-wing activists at the turn of the century, one in which the characters move from one labor riot to another and generally live the life of wealthy bohemians. Reed spends the film promoting communism, just to be terribly disillusioned when the communists actually come to power in Russia. For a history nerd like me, the film is interesting. For those who are not quite as obsessed with history, the film is extremely long and the scenes of Reed and Bryant’s domestic dramas often feel a bit predictable, especially when they’re taking place against such a large international tableaux. At its best, the film is almost a Rorschach test for how the viewer feels about political and labor activists. Do you look at Jack Reed and Louise Bryant and see two inspiring warriors for the cause or do you see two wealthy people playing at being revolutionaries?
Reds was a film that Warren Beatty spent close to 20 years trying to make, despite the fact that the heads of the Hollywood studios all told him that audiences would never show up for an epic film about a bunch of wealthy communists. (The heads of the studio turned out to be correct, as the film was critically acclaimed but hardly a success at the box office.) It was only after the success of the 1978, Beatty-directed best picture nominee Heaven Can Wait that Beatty was finally able to get financing for his dream project. He ended up directing, producing, and writing the film himself and he cast his friend Jack Nicholson as O’Neill and his then-romantic partner Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant. (Gene Hackman, Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde co-star, shows up briefly as one of Reed’s editors.) One left-wing generation’s tribute to an early left-wing generation, Reds is fully a Warren Beatty production and, for his efforts, Beatty was honored with the Oscar for Best Director. That said, the Reds lost the award for Best Picture to another historical epic, Chariots of Fire. Chariots of Fire featured no communists and did quite well at the box office.
The film is good but a bit uneven, especially towards the end when we suddenly get scenes of Louise Bryant trudging through Finland as she attempts to make it to Russia to be reunited with Reed. The film actually works best when it features interviews with people who were actual contemporaries of Reed and Bryant and who share their own memoires of the time. In fact, the interviews work almost too well. The “witnesses,” as the film refers to them, paint such a vivid picture of the Reed, Bryant, and turn of the century America that Beatty’s attempt to cinematically recreate history often can’t compete. One can’t help but feel that Beatty perhaps should have just made a documentary instead of a narrative film.
(Interestingly enough, many of the witnesses were people who were sympathetic to Reed’s politics in at the start of the century but then moved much more to the right as the years passed. Reed’s friend and college roommate, Hamilton Fish, went on to become a prominent Republican congressman and a prominent critics of FDR.)
That said, Jack Nicholson gives a fantastic performance as Eugene O’Neill, adding some much needed cynicism to the film’s portrayal of Reed and Bryant’s idealism. Keaton and Beatty sometime both seem to be struggling to escape their own well-worn personas as Bryant and Reed but Beatty does really sell Reed’s eventually disillusionment with Russia and the scene where he finally tells off his Russian handler made me want to cheer. Fans of great character acting will want to keep an eye out for everyone from Paul Sorvino to William Daniels to Edward Herrmann to M. Emmet Walsh and IanWolfe, all popping up in small roles.
Reds is not a perfect film but, as a lover of history, I enjoyed it.
One of the best films ever made about Vietnam is also one of the least known.
Go Tell The Spartans takes place in 1964, during the early days of the Vietnam War. Though the Americans at home may not know just how hopeless the situation is in South Vietnam, Major Barker (Burt Lancaster, in one of his best performances) does. Barker is a career military man. He served in World War II and Korea and now he’s ending his career in Vietnam, taking orders from younger superiors who have no idea what they are talking about. Barker has been ordered to occupy a deserted village, Muc Wa. Barker knows that occupying Muc Wa will not make any difference but he is in the army and he follows orders.
Barker sends a small group to Muc Wa. Led by the incompetent Lt. Hamilton (Joe Unger), the group also includes a drug-addicted medic (Dennis Howard), a sadistic South Vietnamese interrogator (Evan C. Kim) who claims that every civilian that the men meet is actually VC, a sergeant (Jonathan Goldsmith) who is so burned out that he would rather commit suicide than take command, and Cpl. Courcey (Craig Wasson). Courcey is a college-educated idealist, who joined the army to do the right thing and is now about to discover how complicated that can be in South Vietnam. At Muc Wa, the soldiers find a cemetery containing the graves of French soldiers who died defending the hamlet during the First Indochina War. The inscription as the cemetery reads, “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
Because the film strives for realism over easy drama, Go Tell The Spartans has never gotten the same attention as some other Vietnam films. Unlike The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Coming Home, and Born on the 4th of July, Go Tell The Spartans received no Oscar nominations. It is still a brilliantly acted and powerful anti-war (but never anti-soldier) film. It starts out as deceptively low-key but the tension quickly builds as the soldier arrive at Muc Wa and discover that their orders are both futile and impossible to carry out. Vastly outnumbered, the Americans also find themselves dealing with a land and a culture that is so unlike their own that they are often not even sure who they are fighting. Military discipline, as represented by Lt. Hamilton, is no match for the guerilla tactics of the VC. By the film’s end, Vietnam is revealed to be a war that not even Burt Lancaster can win.
The 1968 film The Swimmer opens with Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) emerging from the woods that surround an affluent Connecticut suburb. He’s a tanned, middle-aged man and, because he spends the entire film wearing only a bathing suit, we can tell that he’s still in good shape for a man in his 50s. When Ned speaks, it’s with the nonstop optimism of a man who has found and claimed his part of the American Dream. In short, Ned appears to be ideal American male, living in the ideal American community.
However, it gradually starts to become apparent that all is not well with Ned. When he mysteriously shows up at a pool party being held by a group of his friends, they all seem to be shocked to see him, commenting that it’s been a while since Ned has been around. Ned, however, acts as if there’s nothing wrong and instead talks about how beautiful the day is and says that he’s heading back to his home. He’s figured out that all of his neighbor’s swimming pools form a “river” to his house and Ned’s plan is to swim home.
And that’s exactly what Ned proceeds to do, going from neighbor to neighbor and swimming through their pools. As he does so, he meets and talk to his neighbors and it becomes more and more obvious that there are secrets hidden behind his constant smile and friendly manner. As Ned gets closer and closer to his actual home, the neighbors are far less happy to see him.
At one house, he runs into Julie (Janet Landgard) who used to babysit for his daughter. Julie agrees to swim with Ned and eventually confesses that she once had a crush on him. When Ned reacts by promising to always protect and love her, Julie gets scared and runs away.
At another house, Ned comes across another pool party. A woman named Joan (played by a youngish Joan Rivers) talks to him before a friend of her warns her to stay away from Ned.
When Ned reaches the house of actress Shirley (Janice Rule), it becomes obvious that Shirley was once Ned’s mistress. They discuss their relationship and it quickly becomes apparent that Ned’s memories are totally different from Shirley’s.
And, through it all, Ned keeps swimming. Even when he’s offered a ride to his house, Ned replies that he has to swim home.
The Swimmer is a film that I had wanted to see ever since I first saw the trailer on the DVD for I Drink Your Blood. (That’s an interesting combination, no? I Drink Your Blood and The Swimmer.) I finally saw the film when it showed up on TCM one night and, when I first watched it, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed. Stylistically, the film itself is such a product of the 1960s that, even though suburban ennui and financial instability are still very relevant topics, The Swimmer felt rather dated. I mean, I love a good zoom shot as much as anyone but, often times during the 60s, they seemed to be used more for the sake of technique than the sake of story telling.
However, the second time I sat through The Swimmer, I appreciated the film a bit more. I was able to look past the stylistic flourishes of the direction and I could focus more on Burt Lancaster’s excellent lead performance. Lancaster plays Ned as the epitome of the American ideal and, as a result, his eventual collapse also mirror the collapse of that same ideal. The Swimmer is based on a short story by John Cheever and, quite honestly, the film’s story is a bit too much of a literary conceit to really work on film. That said, The Swimmer — much like the character of Ned Merrill — is an interesting failure, which is certainly more than can be said of most failures.
One of the best films ever made about Vietnam is also one of the least known.
Through the Shattered Lens 