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RobertEdwardJ25
Reviews
Atlas Shrugged: Part III (2014)
Despite Hollyweird, the most widely read novel in world history is finally completed in movie form
Even this morning, I'm still left on Cloud Nine by the completion of the Atlas Shrugged series. Still, in viewing the third installment of Atlas Shrugged, I think the usual criticism - that this is just too big a novel to turn into a six hour series of three movies, and that a longer TV miniseries would have been better - was obviously potent in many ways.
I wish (in the first of the three installments) we'd seen the childhood scene between Eddie Willers and Dagny Taggart, where he says he wants to do heroic things instead of "just making money" etc. That scene, when I read it over 38 years ago, spoke volumes to me as a young libertarian who wanted to have a free society, but was less concerned about personal competence. I knew from the moment I read that scene in the first 20 pages that this entire novel was, despite my "good" views on political economy, an indictment of my life, and I ended up beginning the novel after breakfast and didn't even hear the lunch bell and only stopped reading after the first 300 pages when I heard the dinner bell and also heard my stomach growling. I also wish for the same reason in the third installment last night that we'd seen one of the final scenes of the novel, in which Eddie Willers was trying to fix a broken train, which was very much an A is A Objectivist final critique of my life up to that point. Since I read Atlas Shrugged 38 years ago, I still doubt I'll ever be John Galt, but it's been a long time since I've "only" been Eddie Willers.
However, when you turn over 1000 pages into six hours, something has to get cut, and if you want a PG-13 rating instead of an R, you're going to have to have Dagny's "rape by engraved invitation" on the railroad tracks instead become a sort of furtive "she ran to an office area NEXT to the railroad tracks, and 'ran away from him' until she 'caught' him" (a game between the sexes often called pull-push-YANK) engagement. I guess the "Project X becoming Project F" and a torture device instead of a sound wave that ends up killing Dr. Robert Stadler was another such example of killing two birds with one stone - shortening the movie and having fewer violent scenes.
Other than that overall critique, I thought this final installment was even more moving in some ways than the first two, and seeing this series through to its completion after waiting for it to come out for 35 years was an aesthetic apex for my life. It was hilarious to see Grover Norquist, a big libertarian at Harvard at the same time I was at Princeton and the guy who gave us Americans for Tax Reform and the Contract with America, as one of the "bad guys" plotting the doom of both Minnesota's harvest and the East Coast's survival (in favor of grapefruit?!). It was gratifying to see the actor Stephen Tobolowsky playing a HEROIC role in Dr. Hugh Akston. He usually plays pathetic characters (the insurance salesman in Groundhog Day), so it was great to seem him evolving into a more heroic figure, and if that's what he wants for his future, I hope he continues to take it!
While I severely disagree with Hannity and Beck on foreign policy and civil liberties, they're usually good folks on economics, so it was entertaining to see them do 'bits' in the movie, as well as former Young Americans for Freedom (which is where I met my first libertarians in 1973, met my first Objectivists, and heard of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged) chief Deroy Murdock (an immigrant from Costa Rica), and the heartening appearance by Ron Paul was uplifting as well. Certain 'modernizing' updates to the novel such as topics on medical care and home schooling were probably how Rand herself would rewrite it these days.
One of the many maligned aspects of Rand's novels is that a speech, whether the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead or the longer-winded Galt's Speech, can instantly sway people. Certainly there's some truth to that, but let's face it - in a way, the reaction of crowds after Galt's Speech isn't that far from what happened in 1980, 1984, 1994, and 2010. When Reagan asked during the debate with Carter "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" my ex-wife (married only a few months at the time) and I both looked at each other and realized he was going to defeat Carter, and he did. When the "morning in America" ads appeared and asked, why would we want to return to the way things were four years ago, you knew it was going to be a landslide, and it was (Mondale only won one state, his home state of Minnesota, and even THAT was by barely 60,000 votes, and most of the state - county-by-county - was red, not blue). In 1994 the efforts of Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and others resulted in the first Republican House in my lifetime and since it was an unexpected win, the Dow immediately started rising EVEN before the new members were seated, and kept going through 4000 to 7000 and even quintuple digits. In 2009, once the Dow had plunged over 3000 points after the election, ALL of it due to Obama's election, the Dow only started rising in March 2009 on the expectation that the Tea Party would probably result in a GOP House, and that's exactly what happened in 2010.
As I pondered all of this while watching the film, I couldn't help but cry tears of joy by the end of the movie. Perhaps there IS hope for our country, and our world.
The North Star (1943)
Varlaam's North Star review was, if anything, too kind
Yesterday on TCM I came into the middle of a movie where I immediately recognized one of my favorite actors, Dana Andrews, and recognized the unmistakable voice of Walter Brennan even when his face was covered with the beard of a Slavic Patriarch. Looking them both up along with IMDb on my cell phone internet connection led me to North Star (1943). I followed the movie to its conclusion and discovered that although I found it to be a likely bit of war propaganda, that such rah-rah-whatever-side-the-USA-happens-to-support-at-the-time films probably resonate with me, even when they're sort of corny and propagandistic. Some of the charges made in the movie against the Wehrmacht were so seemingly outrageous that I decided to do further research, and eventually came to your website again and read Varlaam's review and more thoroughly looked at the credits and so forth and discovered that the scriptwriter was - uh oh - Lillian Hellman.
Varlaam was correct to point out that when the Germans invaded Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, they were greeted as liberators, indeed I have personally seen film footage of Ukrainian women throwing roses in the paths of German soldiers. This was because the Ukrainians were starving (over 7 million of them by that point), which fact was caused by Soviet Collective Farming. Malcolm Muggeridge of course exposed the Ukrainian starvation, while the New York Times' Walter Duranty covered it up. This then begs the question: why WOULD Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, etc. lend their names to a film of this sort? Moreover, who would write it? The answer is that Lillian Hellman wrote it. Lillian Hellman was such an unrepentant Communist that she actually praised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The really sad part is that an important feature of the movie, the use of Russian children by the Wehrmacht as human blood banks, appears potentially to be true. Yet there were only two hits on the first page of google hits that are NOT false positives when you type in Nazis used children as blood banks, and only one of those two (the top two) was a serious historical journal article, the other merely a chat board discussion. It's mentioned in the historical article that the Soviets mentioned this charge at Nuremburg, and it's the one charge that got dropped. Is it possible that, given Hellman's reputation, that she was seen as a biased boy crying wolf? Who knows? I'd be curious to know if there are others who, like me, tend to like the really mushy "mainstream of American 'thought'" (or perhaps I should say, 'feelings') movies of the 1940s (perhaps the influence of my parents) but who, having become older and wiser, wonder how much of what they "know" about reality is influenced by films with a fairly biased perspective. The sad part of Hellman's movie is that the most shocking part of her movie may be true, but unfortunately has largely gone into the dustbin of history due to the fact that her perhaps justified charge against the Wehrmacht has been thrown out with the bathwater of her Communist ideology.