Markdc’s Retrospective Movie Reviews

The Grey Zone (2001)

Lookback/Review by Markdc


Without doubt, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is the most beloved Holocaust film ever made. The movie, which tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German manufacturer and Nazi Party member who saved the lives of his Jewish workers during the Second World War, received widespread critical acclaim upon its release in December 1993 and went on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Spielberg. Schindler’s List was also a massive commercial success. It earned over $300 million at the global box office—an impressive feat for a three-hour, black-and-white cinematic drama that deals with one of the darkest chapters in human history. And in the three decades since Schindler’s List’s release, its popularity among film experts and average viewers has only grown. The movie took the No. 9 spot on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years…100 Movies” list in 1998 and actually improved its standing by placing No. 8 on that list’s 10th anniversary edition in 2007. Look up the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDB) list of Top 250 Movies at any given moment, and you’ll usually see Schindler’s List ranked in the top ten.

Of course, no film, no matter how well-regarded, can entirely escape criticism, and Schindler’s List is no exception. Apparently, one of the movie’s naysayers was the late great director Stanley Kubrick. According to the 1999 book Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick by Frederic Raphael, Kubrick’s co-screenwriter on his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, the cinematic genius behind classics such as Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey said of Spielberg’s award-winning historical epic: “Think that was about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t.” This harsh put-down has always struck me as a bit hypocritical since Kubrick himself spent a number of years developing a Holocaust movie that he called The Aryan Papers, which was based on a novel about a Polish-Jewish boy and his aunt who survive the war by posing as Christians; Kubrick ultimately abandoned the project, in part because of the success of Schindler’s List. (Trivia note: For the role of the boy in The Aryan Papers, Kubrick cast Joseph Mazzello, who played Timmy in Jurassic Park, the film Spielberg released just six months before Schindler’s List.)

Now I should note here that when Eyes Wide Open was released, Spielberg, who had been a personal friend of Kubrick’s for many years, expressed doubt about the veracity of the late director’s alleged quote concerning Schindler’s List. But regardless of whether or not the quote was genuine, it contains an essential truth about Holocaust movies. Most cinematic portrayals of history’s greatest crime deal with the miniscule number of Jews who, often with the help of Good Gentile Samaritans, prevailed against tremendous odds and survived. In doing so, these movies get to feature two things that Hollywood loves most, underdogs and happy endings, while avoiding the central fact of the Shoah—the premeditated, systematic murder of 6 million Jewish men, women, and children. Of course, this is understandable. After all, Hollywood is a business, studios want to earn lots of money, and you’re just not going to do that by making people feel like crap. If you’re going to tackle an inherently depressing subject like the Holocaust and you want audiences to come to your movie, and the studio execs financing and distributing said movie want to rake in the green, then it’s best to give viewers a likable and relatable protagonist(s), a satisfactory outcome, and an uplifting message that provides reassurance in the essential goodness of humankind and hope for a brighter tomorrow. Schindler’s List fulfills all of these requirements, as does another popular Holocaust movie, the fictional—and silly—Life is Beautiful. Other films, such as The Pianist, Europa, Europa, and Defiance may not enjoy the kind of popularity that the two aforementioned films do, but they generally follow the same basic narrative template which favors survivors over victims. In purely cinematic terms, Schindler’s List is the greatest Holocaust movie ever made. But of all the feature films that I’ve seen which deal with the Shoah, only one can claim to truly represent the essence of this historic tragedy—The Grey Zone.

The plot to The Grey Zone, written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson and adapted from Nelson’s play of the same name, revolves around a doomed prisoner uprising that took place on October 7, 1944 at Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest concentration camp in German-occupied Poland which served as a center for both extermination and forced labor, and was carried out by members of several Sonderkommando units. The Sonderkommandos were Jewish camp inmates who were made to assist German SS personnel in carrying out the mass murder of their fellow Jews. The duties of the Sonderkommandos mainly consisted of herding Jewish men, women, and children into the gas chambers while telling them they were merely taking a “shower,” extracting gold teeth from their corpses and cutting off their hair, collecting and cataloging their belongings, transporting the corpses to the crematoria and pushing them into ovens to burn, and cleaning the gas chambers for the next batch of Jews. In exchange for their work, the Sonderkommandos were granted special privileges. For example, they had their own living quarters and were allowed to keep medicines, valuables, food, and cigarettes that had once belonged to the murdered victims. However, since the Sonderkommandos knew the worst secrets of the Germans’ mass killing operation, their life expectancy upon arriving at Auschwitz was short. After a period usually lasting around three to four months, they were murdered by the SS and replaced with other Sonderkommandos.

The Grey Zone opens just a few days before the uprising and focuses on four Hungarian Jews who are part of Sonderkommando XII—Max Rosenthal, Hoffman, Simon Schlermer, and “Hesch” Abramowics. They and the other Sonderkommandos have been secretly receiving guns and explosives from Polish partisan units from outside the camp and packages of gunpowder from Jewish female prisoners who work as slave laborers in the Weischel Union Metallwerke munitions factory, which was located inside Auschwitz and popularly known as the Union. However, four of the women—Tsipora, Rosa, Dina, and Anja—are found out by the Germans and taken in for interrogation. Meanwhile, Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian-Jewish doctor who assists the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in performing horrific experiments on dead and living concentration camp prisoners, including children, uses his unusually chummy relationship with Erich Muhsfeldt, an SS officer who supervises the Sonderkommandos, to ensure the safety of his wife and daughter. (Nyiszli and Muhsfeldt were actual people. However, the other characters in the movie are fictional but inspired by real-life persons. Both the play and film versions of The Grey Zone were primarily based on a memoir Nyiszli wrote after the war titled Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account.)

On the day before the uprising begins, a group of Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz and are immediately taken to a gas chamber. Afterward, Hoffman discovers a teenaged Jewish girl who somehow survived the gassing and takes her to a storage room. He notifies Rosenthal, Schlermer, and Nyiszli, who revives the girl. A short time later, Hesch arrives to tell them that he and the Polish Jews in his Sonderkommando unit will start the uprising the next day. Then Muhsfeldt comes in and, upon seeing that Hesch is in the wrong area, shoots him. This causes the girl to scream, and the SS officer discovers her presence. While Rosenthal and Schlermer dispose of Hesch’s body, Nyiszli, who has learned about the uprising from Schlermer sans any details about the scheduled time or exact location, informs Muhsfeldt of it in exchange for a promise from him to spare the girl and put her in the children’s camp once the uprising has been put down. Meanwhile, Tsipora, Rosa, Dina, and Anja are tortured and killed, and a number of the women in their barracks are shot, but the Germans are unable to get any useful information out of them.

The uprising takes place the following morning, and Rosenthal, Hoffman, Schlermer, and other members of Sonderkommando XII use guns and explosives to kill three SS officers, wound a dozen others, and destroy the ovens of Crematorium IV while Dr. Nyiszli cowers in his office. However, it doesn’t take long for the Germans to suppress this rebellion. Schlermer is killed in the explosion of the crematorium while Rosenthal and Hoffman are among those Sonderkommandos taken alive and executed. After these executions are carried out, Muhsfeldt reneges on his promise to Nyiszli and shoots the girl. Her corpse and those of the Sonderkommandos are pushed into ovens and cremated. A caption informs the viewer that the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 and Nyiszli, along with his wife and daughter, survived the war while Muhsfeldt was put on trial for war crimes, found guilty, and hanged.

The Grey Zone premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2001, just two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but didn’t get a wide release in the U.S. until October 18, 2002. When it did hit theaters, the movie made barely half a million dollars at the box office—a tenth of its $5 million budget. The reception from professional critics was generally positive, with many praising the film’s grim realism and moral complexity. For example, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert awarded The Grey Zone a perfect four-star rating and said of it: “I have seen a lot of films about the Holocaust, but I have never seen one so immediate, unblinking and painful in its materials.” Elsewhere in the same review, Ebert wrote: “’The Grey Zone’ is pitiless, bleak and despairing. There cannot be a happy ending, except that the war eventually ended. That is no consolation for its victims. It is a film about making choices that seem to make no difference, about attempting to act with honor in a closed system where honor lies dead.” (In 2009, Ebert included The Grey Zone in his “Great Movies” series.) However, several members of America’s film cognoscenti criticized the dialogue, which they compared to the work of the filmmaker and playwright David Mamet. For instance, Desson Howe of the Washington Post wrote: “The characters speak with a clipped, poetic snap, as if David Mamet had a hand in the writing. There's a stagy poetry to everything -- sometimes it works and sometimes it screams of artifice.” When the Oscars rolled around, The Grey Zone was completely ignored—a rarity for a movie about the Holocaust—and, as of this writing, it has a lackluster 69 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

While I wouldn’t necessarily say The Grey Zone is totally obscure, since its release barely two decades ago, it certainly hasn’t received the kind of visibility that other Holocaust movies, such as Schindler’s List and The Pianist, have enjoyed. This is a travesty. Tim Blake Nelson’s film deserves far more attention and views because, as I indicated above, it’s the most truthful cinematic depiction of the Shoah that we are ever likely to get. The Grey Zone was one of the best films of 2001 and deserved a boatload of Oscars, but I’m not surprised that it didn’t get nominated for any; a lot of other cinematic masterpieces, such as Dark City and Menace II Society, have been ignored by the Academy Awards. In my opinion, The Grey Zone was far better than any of the five movies that were nominated for the 2001 Best Picture Oscar, especially A Beautiful Mind, which won that year.

Nelson’s film should be shown in every college in America. Normally, I’d say The Grey Zone should also be shown in every high school, too, but I doubt most students could stomach it. Those teenagers are probably better off watching Schindler’s List. That movie may have its harrowing moments, but Spielberg’s masterpiece looks like Happy Feet compared to The Grey Zone. There’s a scene in Schindler’s List that perfectly illustrates a fundamental difference between it and Nelson’s film. During its journey to a factory that Oskar Schindler owns in Czechoslovakia, the train carrying his female workers gets re-routed to Auschwitz by mistake. Upon arrival, these Jews are herded into a shower after being stripped and shaved. Believing they’ve been put inside a gas chamber, the woman scream and cry. However, to their great relief, real water comes out of the sprinklers instead of gas. Suffice to say, the Jews in The Grey Zone aren’t nearly so lucky.

If this movie had portrayed all its Jewish characters as innocent victims who are swallowed up by the Nazis’ killing machine, that would have been distressing enough, but it’s Nelson’s decision to put much of his focus upon Jews who take part in the killing—albeit against their will—that elevates The Grey Zone to a higher philosophical, intellectual, and artistic level than most Holocaust films. The title was taken from The Drowned and the Saved, a memoir by Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who spent nearly a year in Auschwitz. I love this title because it has a double meaning. On the one hand, the “grey zone” refers to the psychological space that lay between victims and perpetrators which the Sonderkommandos inhabited on a daily basis; on the other hand, it refers to the physical area where the Sonderkommandos labored in which the ashes of the dead covered everything. Whenever I watch The Grey Zone, I’m constantly reminded of what the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism. According to Arendt, one of the worst things the Nazis did was make some of their victims complicit in their crimes. This was certainly true in the case of the Sonderkommandos in the concentration camps. The Nazis may have murdered them after a period of time, but long before then, the souls of many of these Jews had drowned in moral quicksand.

The overwhelming majority of Sonderkommandos died during the war, but those few who were “lucky” enough to survive spent the rest of their lives dealing with guilt over what they had done in order to avoid being killed in addition to the trauma and sorrow that plagued all concentration camp survivors. There’s a scene early in the film where the Hungarian Sonderkommandos are discussing the upcoming rebellion and Hesch says he and Polish Sonderkommandos from another part of the camp want to try to escape after the gas chambers and crematoria have been blown up, and Rosenthal replies, “Suppose even you do. Do you want to look anyone in the face, if anyone if your family’s even alive, and tell them what you’ve done for a little more life…for vodka and bed linens?” The Sonderkommandos also try to lessen their guilt by taking comfort in the knowledge that it’s the Germans, not them, who do the actual killing. During an argument between Rosenthal and Hesch, Rosenthal says, “We don't kill people.” “We don't?” Hesch shoots back. “We put them in the rooms. Walk them in and strip them, look them in the face and say it's safe. What the hell is that?”, to which Rosenthal says, “It's not pulling the trigger!” And Dr. Nyiszli deals with the guilt he feels over his horrifying work by rationalizing it away. During a conversation with Schlermer late in the movie, he says, “I never asked to be doing what I do.” Schlermer points out that Nyiszli volunteered to help Dr. Mengele—who was known throughout Auschwitz as the “Angel of Death”—knowing full well what kind of work his duties would entail and says, “You give killing purpose.” Nyiszli replies, “We’re all just trying to make it to the next day. That’s all any of us is doing.” (It was a wise decision on Nelson’s part not to show any scenes depicting the sinister medical experiments that took place at the camp; if he had done this, the movie would have been virtually unwatchable.) Of course, it’s easy for us to view The Grey Zone from the comfort and safety of our homes and judge the actions of the Sonderkommandos who assisted the Nazis in carrying out the mass murder of fellow Jews or of Dr. Nyiszli, who knowingly participated in the excruciating torture of prisoners, including small children, in order to save himself and his family, but such judgment is inherently unfair. These people were operating in an environment that we could never possibly imagine ourselves in. As Hoffman says: “We can't know what we're capable of, any of us. How can you know what you'd do to stay alive, until you're really asked? I know this now. For most of us, the answer... is anything.”

The only real criticism I have of The Grey Zone is that some of the dialogue makes me feel as though I’m watching a play instead of a film, but I don’t see this as a significant problem in what is an otherwise outstanding production. The cast is excellent. Harvey Keitel, one of my favorite actors, is brilliant as Erich Muhsfeldt, a cruel man who shoots prisoners without remorse while treating Dr. Nyiszli as a sort of “pet” Jew. He is both impressed and repelled by the Sonderkommando, and at one point, he says to Nyiszli, “I never fully despised the Jews until I experienced how easily they could be persuaded to do the work here. To do it so well. And to their own people! They'll be dead by week's end, every soul. And we'll replace them with others no different.” The actresses portraying the female prisoners who smuggle gunpowder to the Sonderkommando are great, but I especially liked the wonderful Mira Sorvino as Dina. Allan Corduner plays Nyiszli as a dispassionate medical professional who buries his trauma underneath a mountain of scientific work. The actors who portray the Sonderkommandos do fine work, but two of them stand out in particular. Steve Buscemi, another favorite, plays Hesch as the one member of this group who lives for himself and has no guilt or conscience to speak of. But it’s David Arquette who gives the best performance in the movie as Hoffman. Arquette usually plays in comedies and is arguably most famous for his role as the Barney Fife-esque sheriff’s deputy Dewey Riley in the Scream series. But in The Grey Zone, there’s nothing to laugh at. More than any other character, Hoffman captures the moral complexity of The Grey Zone. During the movie’s most disturbing scene, he falsely assures a group of Jews who have been condemned to die that they will take a “shower” and everything will be okay. (“Cleanliness brings freedom! The sooner you shower, the sooner you'll be fed and reunited with your families. There'll be a bowl of hot soup waiting for all of you!”) But a Jewish man calls Hoffman a “filthy liar” and tries to tell his fellow victims what’s really about to happen. A frustrated and enraged Hoffman savagely beats this man to death to get him to shut up. When the Jews are put into the gas chamber, an anguished Hoffman listens as they scream and pound on the doors in a futile attempt to get out. Afterward, he discovers the teenaged girl who survived and saves her from being burned alive in the crematorium by taking her to the storage room. Given the type of films he normally appears in, Arquette’s work here is incredible and deserved an Oscar nomination.

To portray Auschwitz, Tim Blake Nelson and his team used the original blueprints of the camp to construct a partial replica. The architecturally accurate production design contributes greatly to The Grey Zone’s realism. The wide shots of the crematoria and the Union munitions factory as well as the low humming, churning, and whirring sounds that are heard throughout much of the film provide a sense of the industrial nature of the Nazis’ genocidal enterprise. Nelson’s frequent use of handheld camera also gives The Grey Zone the feel of a documentary. This is especially true during one scene where a group of naked Jews are being herded into a gas chamber; the camera makes you feel as though you’re going along with them. One unique aspect of The Grey Zone is how Nelson uses music. Jeff Danna, the composer, employed a Klezmer ensemble, but his score consists of a very brief clarinet solo that plays during the opening credits and a seven-minute piece featuring a haunting violin solo that plays over the end credits; there’s no score during the film itself. Here, Nelson uses two pieces of classical music. In a truly macabre scene near the beginning of The Grey Zone, an orchestra made up of Jewish prisoners perform “Roses from the South,” a waltz by Johann Strauss, as hundreds of men, women, and children march to the gas chambers. And near the end of the film, Johannes Brahms’ “Alto Rhapsody,” which features a beautiful female soloist, accompanies the Sonderkommandos’ doomed uprising. This use of classical music by composers from Germany and Austria, where most of the Nazis hailed from, serves to bitterly mock the Germans for wrapping themselves in the cloak of cultural refinement while engaging in a campaign of savagery that far surpassed the barbarity of the most primitive humans.

Given everything I’ve just written, the reader won’t be surprised to learn that The Grey Zone is the most depressing Holocaust movie I have ever seen. However, it may come as a surprise to learn that I also consider The Grey Zone to be the most uplifting Holocaust movie I’ve ever seen. This is because, despite all the evil they were forced to witness and take part in as well as the agonizing moral compromises they made, the Sonderkommandos in the film attempt to stop the Nazis’ killing machine and save the life of a teenaged girl. These Jews didn’t have kindhearted Gentiles to rescue them, like in Schindler’s List and The Pianist. They didn’t have a forest in which to hide, like in Defiance. They didn’t have a comedian to trick them into thinking their plight was just one big, fun game, like in Life is Beautiful. Nor did they have dumb luck on their side, like in Europa, Europa. The Sonderkommandos in The Grey Zone were in the belly of the beast and stared death in the face every single day. Their efforts to rescue the girl from a horrible fate reminds me of the tagline of Schindler’s List: “Whoever saves a single life saves the world entire.” Unfortunately, they don’t get to save the world because the girl is killed at the end, but the fact that they tried, even at great personal risk, shows that they hadn’t completely lost their ability to show compassion toward others. Shortly before the uprising is launched, Hoffman informs Rosenthal that he told the girl about their plans. Angered, Rosenthal berates him and says, “What did it do for her?”, and Hoffman replies, “Maybe it did something for me. She’ll know who we were.” And speaking of the uprising, a caption at the end of the film informs the viewer that the ovens the Sonderkommandos managed to destroy were never rebuilt. As Rosenthal tells Hoffman moments before they are executed by the SS, “We did something.” In the grand scheme of things, the rebellion and the rescue attempt by the Sonderkommandos may not have made much of a difference insofar as they and the girl all died at the end and the mass murder at the camp continued unabated. But these actions demonstrate the capacity of human beings to cling to their humanity and fight evil even under the worst conditions imaginable and when all hope appears lost, and in the final analysis, that’s as uplifting a message as you’ll ever see in any movie.

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945)

Lookback/Review by Markdc


In the cinematic universe, there exists a black hole full of films that have been lost to time and memory. Some of these films were financially and/or critically successful upon their initial release but drifted into obscurity over the years; others bombed with critics and/or audiences from the outset, disappeared quickly, and never received a re-evaluation. Many films in this black hole are the celluloid version of compost and deserve their obscurity; others, however, are hidden gems that desperately need to see the light of day. Among the latter group is Roy Rowland’s Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. Released on September 6, 1945, the movie is based on a 1940 novel by George Victor Martin and tells a wonderful coming of age story of a seven-year-old girl named Selma Jacobson.

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is set entirely in the small, fictional town of Fuller Junction, Wisconsin, which is populated by people who either immigrated to the U.S. from Norway or are first- and second-generation Norwegian-Americans. Martinius and Bruna Jacobson, Selma’s father and mother, are the living, breathing definition of “salt of the earth.” Martinius is a farmer and Bruna a homemaker, and they both work hard every day in order to provide for themselves and their young daughter. Selma is especially close to her father, who dotes on her but doesn’t shy away from meting out stern discipline when the situation warrants it. The movie takes place over the course of a year during the Second World War—from the end of one summer to the beginning of another. Selma spends most of her time with her cousin Arnold Hanson, two years her junior, who’s a constant playmate as well as a nuisance. In addition to these four people, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is populated with other memorable characters, such as Nels Halverson, the editor of the town’s newspaper, Viola Johnson, the new schoolteacher, and Ingeborg Jensen, a lonely, mentally troubled young woman who lives with her harsh and abusive father. Throughout the film, which doesn’t have an overarching plot but, rather, unfolds in a series of episodes, Selma experiences a number of priceless childhood moments: she takes a ride on the trunk of a circus elephant, recites the nativity story during a school Christmas pageant, and sails with Arnold in a bathtub through flooded waters and winds up in the middle of a turbulent river. Our protagonist also encounters tragedy, such as the untimely death of Ingeborg and a terrible fire that destroys a large barn belonging to a neighbor named Bjorn Bjornson.

While doing research for this retrospective review, I could find no box office numbers for Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, and the only contemporary review I was able to unearth was by the New York Times’ Thomas M. Pryor, who, barring a few minor caveats, lauded the film, writing, “It would indeed be a cold and distant heart that failed to respond to the homey philosophy and the tenderly sentimental vignettes of family life which are sketched with loving care and understanding by a knowing group of players in this beautifully made Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production.” In a 2011 interview, Margaret O’Brien, who portrayed Selma Jacobson, said theaters refused show the movie because it allegedly contained subversive elements due to the script by Dalton Trumbo, a fervent Communist and Soviet sympathizer. In 1947, Trumbo, along with nine other screenwriters and directors (or the Hollywood Ten, as they were known), refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was investigating Communist infiltration in the movie industry, and served nearly a year in federal prison as a result of his actions. Following his release, Trumbo spent a little more than a decade writing screenplays under different names due to his being put on a Hollywood blacklist, which prohibited Communists or sympathizers from working in the movies. He didn’t emerge from the blacklist until 1960 when he received credit for his work on two major films, Otto Preminger’s Exodus and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. A casualty of the blacklist, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes was shoved down the aforementioned black hole. The movie was almost certainly a box office flop, and it received no Academy Award nominations. In the decades since its release, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes has largely gone unnoticed by American audiences, and the only sign of recognition from industry professionals that I could dig up was a nomination for the American Film Institute’s “100 Years...100 Cheers” list, which came out in 2006. When I looked up articles about Our Vines Have Tender Grapes on Google, all I could find were that contemporary review from the New York Times, a couple of more recent reviews of some DVD versions, and one article about the movie’s Christmas scene. That’s it.

I grew up watching Our Vines Have Tender Grapes; my parents owned a VHS copy that looked as though it had been taped off another VHS copy that had been taped off another VHS copy. I loved this movie when I was a kid and have only grown to appreciate it even more as an adult. In addition to being a childhood favorite, Roy Rowland’s film is a lost cinematic treasure that should be as seen and beloved as much as popular classics like The Wizard of Oz and The Sound of Music. Nearly everything about this movie is fantastic, and it deserved to earn gobs of green at the box office. It also deserved lots of Academy Award nominations, especially for Best Picture; as a matter of fact, in the opinion of this writer, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is better than Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, which actually won the Best Picture Oscar in 1945.

The cast is sublime, starting with Margaret O’Brien as the lively and precocious Selma. O’Brien was one of Hollywood’s biggest child stars during the Golden Age of American cinema, and just six months before the release of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (the second of three films that she made with Rowland), she won a special Juvenile Academy Award for her performance as Judy Garland’s younger sister in Meet Me in St. Louis. One of the joys of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is seeing Selma mature over the course of a single year. Like all children, she sometimes gives in to meanness and selfishness, but she is, ultimately, a decent, kindhearted person who learns important lessons about life and loss. And at the end of the movie, she commits a touching act of selflessness that would have been unthinkable to herself (and the audience) at the movie’s beginning. Jackie “Butch” Jenkins is also wonderful as Selma’s cousin Arnold, and I suppose it’s not his fault that his character is frequently annoying. Agnus Moorehead plays Bruna Jacobson, the matriarch of the family, with a subtle, dignified grace. The best performance is by Edward G. Robinson as Martinius Jacobson. The actor was arguably the movie’s biggest star and was known best for his portrayals of ruthless gangsters in mob classics like Little Caesar. But in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Robinson’s Martinius is the wise and loving patriarch of the Jacobson family—the polar opposite of the actor’s famous gangster persona—and is my favorite role of his. Throughout Robinson’s long and illustrious career, he was never nominated for an acting Oscar, which is a travesty. He should have received nods for a number of his movies, including Little Caesar, Double Indemnity, and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes.

One of the things that I love about Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is that it’s sentimental but down-to-earth and celebrates traditional, American small town values. The wonder and beauty of these values is revealed to the character of Viola Johnson, who goes through her own psychological journey. At the beginning of the film, Johnson arrives in Fuller Junction to take up her post as the schoolteacher. A native of Milwaukee, she finds her new home dull and provincial and looks forward to the end of the school term when she can return to the big city. Viola also looks down on the townspeople, whom she views as intolerant and simple-minded. However, Nels Halverson, with whom she shares a romantic attraction, vigorously defends Fuller Junction and its inhabitants. When Kurt Jensen, Ingeborg’s father, refuses to allow his daughter to attend the school despite Viola’s efforts to enroll her, Viola ascribes his behavior to rural life, but Nels points out that Kurt Jensens live in big cities as well as in the country. Later in the movie, after Ingeborg’s death, Viola excoriates the town’s residents for treating the poor woman like a pariah, but Nels replies that inhumanity can be found anywhere and gently chides Viola for always demanding tolerance from others while showing none for those who were incapable of understanding Ingeborg when she was alive. At the end of the film, when she sees all the townspeople pitch in to help Brjorn Bjornson after his barn is razed to the ground, Viola changes her mind about Fuller Junction and its citizens and decides to remain as the school’s teacher, and she and Nels become engaged.

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is one of the most patriotic American films I’ve ever seen, but its patriotism is beautiful and dignified, as opposed to the jingoistic, rah-rah variety. The residents of Fuller Junction are part of the great American melting pot. They maintain some traces of the old country (for instance, Martinius calls Selma “jenta mi,” which is Norwegian for “my girl”) but have embraced American culture and wholeheartedly believe in family, God, and country. They labor and sacrifice to create a good life for themselves and their children, attend church on Sundays, and come to the defense of their nation when asked to do so. Most of the young men of the town are away serving in World War II; later in the film, Nels, who had been rejected by the Army earlier in the war because of a back injury incurred while playing football, prepares to join them after he gets fixed up and is accepted for enlistment. When she learns about this, Selma, who’s fond of Nels (or “Editor,” as he is known), is deeply distraught by the news and informs her father that she doesn’t believe in ‘peace on earth, goodwill toward men’ if it means that Nels may be wounded or killed in battle. In reply, Martinius patiently sets down the two pails of milk that he is carrying and uses them as an analogy to explain to his daughter that ‘peace on earth, goodwill toward men,’ like milk, is good for everyone, but it isn’t free; people have to work for it, and if somebody tries to take it away from them, they’ll have to fight for it. This memorable quote would resonate with many Americans today, but it contains an added layer of meaning when you consider that Norway, the ancestral home of the Jacobsons and the rest of Fuller Junction’s residents, spent most of the Second World War under Nazi occupation—a reality that they would have surely been aware of.

Like every film ever made, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes is not without its flaws. The romance between Nels and Viola is nice, but I feel that it wasn’t developed as well as it should have been. And Viola’s change of heart regarding the town and its inhabitants at the end of the movie feels a bit sudden and contrived. As I indicated above, I’ve always found Arnold to be incredibly irritating, and it’s a wonder that Selma manages to restrain herself from picking up her younger cousin and hurling him into the river. Also, some of the scenes feel a mite too sappy, and I’ve always preferred movies with an overarching narrative as opposed to an episodic structure. But these are minor quibbles with what is essentially a terrific film, which deserves the same glorious fate as It’s a Wonderful Life, released barely a year after Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. The two share a number of striking similarities: Both are black-and-white films that take place in small towns during World War II and celebrate core American values, such as hard work, selfless compassion, patriotism, and religious faith; both were suspected by the government of containing subversive Communist messages (coincidentally, Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, also did uncredited work on the script for It’s a Wonderful Life); both end with a scene in which the entire community comes to the aid of one of its members, who has fallen on hard times. Although nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, It’s a Wonderful Life was not commercially successful upon its initial release and languished in obscurity for decades until it was discovered by American audiences thanks to repeated airings on television. As a result, Frank Capra’s 1946 classic is now one of the most beloved and respected movies of all time. It’s my great hope and wish that, in the coming years, movie-lovers—regardless of what nation they come from—discover Our Vines Have Tender Grapes and give it the love and affection it deserves. This rich cinematic fruit should no longer be allowed to wither on the vine.

Uprising (2001)

Lookback/Review by Markdc


One of the most peculiar ironies of the Second World War lies in the fact that the conflict witnessed the greatest display of Jewish military activity in history and yet has, more than any other event, cemented in the minds of many people the ultimate image of Jewish weakness and passivity. This is because of the wildly erroneous belief that during the Holocaust, six million Jews allowed themselves to be exterminated without offering any resistance to their murderers. Unfortunately, this pernicious belief has been perpetuated over the years by Jews as well as Gentiles and promoted in popular Holocaust films such as Schindler’s List. Although it’s true that most of the Nazis’ Jewish victims didn’t resist, it’s also true that most of the Nazis’ non-Jewish victims didn’t resist either. (The latter group includes three million Soviet prisoners of war, who possessed military training and combat experience.) But it’s important to know that many Jews did, in fact, resist the Nazis in different ways, including by force of arms. For example, Jews in German-occupied Europe attacked Wehrmacht units in the countryside as partisans or launched revolts in the ghettos and even the death camps. And these acts of martial courage against hopeless odds was just the tip of the iceberg. Well over a million Jews served in the militaries of Allied nations, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union. And Jewish scientists, a number of them refugees from Europe such as Albert Einstein, were crucial in the creation of the atomic bomb—though this devastating weapon ended up being used against Japan instead of Germany. In recent decades, scholars of the Holocaust have done much work to eradicate the myth of Jewish passivity, but it still persists to a frustrating degree. For example, after the Polish parliament passed a law in 2018 which criminalized statements that suggested any responsibility on the part of Poland for Nazi crimes during World War II, many Jews in Israel reacted with anger, for they viewed such legislation as an attempt to whitewash Polish complicity in the Holocaust. In response, Andrzej Zybertowicz, an adviser to Polish president Andrzej Duda, claimed the outcry from Israelis was rooted in a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust.”

One person who sought to dispel this stubborn myth was Jewish-American filmmaker Jon Avnet, who has written, produced, or directed several successful movies, including Risky Business and Fried Green Tomatoes. In 2001, Avnet made a television film called Uprising, which focused on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The revolt, which lasted from April 19-May 16, 1943, was the first major act of resistance to take place in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War and the largest to be carried out by Jews. For nearly a month, an army of around a thousand Jewish fighters, most of them with little training and no combat experience, held off a highly-trained and lavishly equipped German force that was several times larger and became a symbol of righteous courage and fortitude for Jews and Gentiles alike. Avnet talked about Uprising during a 2018 interview he gave to Cindy Grosz of The Forward, a Jewish media outlet. In Grosz’s piece, which ran on April 19 (the 75th anniversary of the uprising), the director spoke of his deep pride in the film, saying, “It is my first project relating to my own identity. I was taught that Jews went to their deaths ‘like a lamb to its slaughter.’”

Uprising begins with Nazi Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland, which falls after several weeks of fighting. Almost as soon as German troops march into the Polish capital of Warsaw, the city’s Jews, like the rest of their coreligionists in the areas of the country under Nazi domination, experience acts of humiliation, discrimination, and violence at the hands of the conquerors as well as Polish Gentiles. (Note: the Soviet Union also invaded Poland, but the movie makes no mention of this.) In the fall of 1940, the 350,000 Jews living in Warsaw are forced to reside in a confined area comprising just 3.5 square miles that becomes known as the Warsaw Ghetto. Also, Jews from other parts of Poland and Nazi-occupied Europe are moved into the ghetto, whose population eventually swells to well over 400,000. A formidable brick wall is soon built around the ghetto, and because so many people are forced to live in such a tiny space and subsist on a meager food allowance, thousands begin dying of starvation, disease, and maltreatment.

The Germans set up the Judenrat (Jewish Council)—led by Adam Czerniakow—and the Jewish Police—led by Captain Josef Szerynski—to carry out their orders, which include requiring Jews over a certain age to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on it, rounding up Jews for forced labor, and ensuring that no Jews leave the ghetto and go into the “Aryan” (Gentile) section of Warsaw without special permission. Szerynski and his officers perform their duties with gusto and are frequently brutal in their treatment of fellow Jews. However, Czerniakow sincerely cares about the people under his authority and tries to help them under terrible conditions that only grow worse over time.

After a failed attempt to transport themselves and a group of young Jews to the British Mandate of Palestine, Zionist leaders Mordechai Anielewicz, Mira Fruchner, Yitzhak Zuckerman, and Zivia Lubetkin join forces with anti-Zionist leaders like Marek Edelman to form a resistance organization called the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa in Polish, or ZOB). ZOB couriers, such as Simcha Rotem, Frania Beatus, and Arie Wilner, sneak into the “Aryan” side to establish contact with the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK), the main Polish resistance organization, and acquire weapons, ammunition, and explosives. Anielewicz and Zuckerman attempt to enlist the support of the Judenrat, but Czerniakow refuses, fearing that the existence of an underground group will cause the Germans to mete out harsh collective punishment on the entire ghetto population. Meanwhile, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels sends Dr. Fritz Hippler to Warsaw to make an anti-Semitic propaganda film called The Eternal Jew.

In 1942, Czerniakow’s German superior, SS Commissar Heinz Auerswald, informs him that Jews will soon be transported to work camps in the east, so the Judenrat must deliver a daily quota of evacuees. Guessing their fate and unable to continue doing the bidding of the Germans, Czerniakow kills himself by ingesting cyanide. The mass deportations, which are filmed by Hippler and his crew, take place in July-September and involve the transport of nearly 300,000 of Warsaw’s Jews. The deportees include all the children from a school and orphanage run by Janusz Korczak, a famous Jewish pediatrician and author. Zuckerman orders a ZOB member named Zygmunt to follow the trains in order to discern their true destination.

Shortly after the deportations have concluded, a distraught Zygmunt returns to the ghetto and tells ZOB leaders that the Jews were taken to the Treblinka death camp, and, upon arrival, most of them were murdered in gas chambers disguised as showers. Around this time, the ZOB gains some new members, including Calel Wasser, a Jewish policeman who defects to the resistance out of guilt and shame over his collaboration with the Nazis, and Tosia Altman, a woman who has recently lost her entire family. Because of her Polish appearance, Altman becomes a courier, and Wasser, whom Anielewicz initially distrusts, proves his allegiance to the ZOB by helping her out of a sticky situation and executing his former boss, Captain Szerynski. Over the next few months, the ZOB continues acquiring weapons and launches small attacks against the Germans and their collaborators (both Jewish and Gentile).

On January 18, 1943, acting on the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Colonel Ferdinand von Sammern, the SS and Police Leader of Warsaw, carries out another mass deportation in the ghetto. However, the ZOB offers armed resistance for the first time, and around two dozen Germans are killed or wounded. Although many ZOB fighters fall in battle, the Jewish underground receives a huge boost in confidence after the SS are forced to halt the deportation and begin constructing bunkers and digging tunnels in preparation for the ultimate showdown with the Germans. Impressed by this show of resistance, the Poles in the AK begin sending the ZOB arms and ammunition. However, these shipments are jeopardized after Arie Wilner, one of ZOB’s chief couriers, is arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. Because of his Polish appearance, Zuckerman leaves the ghetto and takes Wilner’s place on the “Aryan” side. Rotem and Wasser secure Wilner’s release by bribing the Gestapo, and he’s taken to ZOB headquarters, where he tells Anielewicz that he didn’t give the Germans any useful information.

On April 19, 1943, the SS under von Sammern’s command return to the Warsaw Ghetto in force to deport the remaining Jews, but ZOB fighters attack the Germans with rifles, machine guns, pistols, and Molotov cocktails and force them to withdraw while Hippler and his crew document the whole thing on film. On the first night of the uprising, the Jews celebrate their (brief) victory by hoisting the Zionist and Polish flags atop the roof of a building. Shortly afterward, Himmler sacks von Sammern and replaces him with Major-General Jurgen Stroop. On the following morning, SS troops re-enter the ghetto, but Jewish fighters drive them back once more, and Stroop orders his men to raze the ghetto block-by-block and destroy bunkers and sewers.

On Easter Sunday, in the “Aryan” side, Yitzhak Zuckerman receives terrible news: the Germans have intercepted a shipment of weapons intended for the ZOB and discovered an important tunnel that they had dug under Muranowski Street. He orders Tosia Altman to take a batch of explosives to Anielewicz. She puts the explosives in an Easter basket and, posing as a Polish Catholic, attends Mass at a church near the ghetto wall while waiting for nightfall. Meanwhile, in the ghetto, Anielewicz and other ZOB fighters are trapped in a building but manage to escape after Wasser sacrifices himself by rushing out and diverting the Germans’ attention. Anielewicz and his group of fighters go to a spacious bunker owned by a Jewish underworld kingpin at 18 Mila Street (“Mila 18”) and set up a new command center there. Later that night, Altman arrives and delivers the basket of explosives. Anielewicz sends Rotem and Zygmunt to go to Zuckerman and see if he has managed to acquire any more weapons from the Poles. He also orders Zivia Lubetkin and Marek Edelman to find an escape route through the sewer system. Rotem and Zygmunt reach a safe house on the “Aryan” side and meet Frania Beatus and Zuckerman there. They hire the services of a Polish sewage worker, and he and Rotem enter the sewers to get the fighters out of the ghetto safely.

The Germans find the bunker at Mila 18 and, after being ambushed by a group of Jewish fighters, block all the exits and pump poison gas inside. Anielewicz orders Altman and some other fighters to find a way into the sewers. After much effort, they succeed in this endeavor, and Altman goes back to inform Anielewicz but can’t find him. She and a group of ZOB fighters and civilians manage to escape through the sewer system, but others, including Anielewicz, Fruchner, and Wilner, die inside the bunker. Later that evening, Rotem re-enters the ghetto and finds nothing but fire and rubble. Believing all the Jews have died, he collapses in sorrow, but Altman finds him, and they have a joyful reunion. Rotem leads Altman and her group through the sewers, and, to their surprise and joy, they run into Lubetkin and Edelman.

Jurgen Stroop’s superior, General Krueger, tells him he has learned from an SS informant that some ZOB leaders survived the fighting in the ghetto and plan to use the sewers to escape to the “Aryan” side and join up with Polish partisans. Stroop has his men flood the sewers with water and weld the grates shut. The fighters in the sewers manage to find an opening at Prosta Street but no one is waiting for them aboveground. Rotem leaves the sewers and meets up with Zuckerman and Beatus, who hire trucks to come and transport everybody to safety. But the trucks don’t arrive, so Zuckerman hires another truck under false pretenses. When that truck arrives, he takes the driver hostage and forces him to go to the opening at Prosta Street. Altman, Lubetkin, Edelman, and 37 other Jews emerge from the sewer landing and board the truck, but because there are SS close by, they are forced to abandon a dozen Jews at another landing. The group of 40 Jews are driven to the forest, where the ZOB will continue to fight the Germans as partisans.

Uprising, which runs approximately three hours without commercial breaks, aired on NBC over the course of two consecutive nights, November 4-5, 2001. The reaction from professional critics was generally positive. For example, Julie Salamon of the New York Times called Uprising, a “careful, intelligent account of the Jewish guerrilla fighters in Warsaw.” She went on to praise the movie’s style and structure: “Mr. Avnet and his co-screenwriter, Paul Brickman, have designed their film as a quasi-documentary, with written information periodically appearing on-screen to situate viewers. Step by step, they lay out the scenario showing the swift transformation of a middle-class Jewish society in Warsaw into a society of quarantined outcasts. The film vividly shows the process by which the Germans prepared the city's Jews for death, first by crowding them into one isolated section of the city, where many would die of starvation and beatings.” Variety’s Steven Oxman wrote, “An accomplished, highly realistic docudrama, ‘Uprising’ lands viewers in the Warsaw Ghetto of World War II, where a small group of Jewish resistance fighters took arms against the Nazis. It is a Holocaust story from a different angle and it unquestionably succeeds in documenting the heroism of those involved.” Jon Carman of the San Francisco Chronicle called Uprising “a solid network effort about heroism in a most immoral world.” Uprising won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Coordination. The film also received Primetime Emmy nominations in the cinematography, supporting actor, and sound editing categories but failed to win any of them. In addition, Leelee Sobieski, who plays Tosia Altman, was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Miniseries or a Motion Picture Made for Television but Judy Davis won that year for Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. Though not as popular as other Holocaust films, such as Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, Uprising appears to be highly regarded; for example, it enjoys a perfect 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Were it not for one significant problem, Uprising would easily rank as one of the finest movies ever made about the Holocaust. But before I tackle that problem though, allow me to first discuss the things that I like about Avnet’s movie—and, make no mistake about it, there is much to like here. For starters, it was a brilliant move on Avnet’s part to film Uprising as a docudrama, complete with captions providing character and place names, dates, and brief but informative paragraphs to accompany the historical events unfolding onscreen. This filmmaking technique turns the Warsaw Ghetto into a microcosm for the entire Holocaust and allows the viewer to understand how, step-by-step, the Nazis carried out the “Final Solution”, which began with discrimination and ended in extermination. The production design is outstanding. To recreate the Warsaw Ghetto, Avnet and his crew built a gigantic, four-story set the size of three football fields in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia and gave attention and care to the minutest detail; as a result, one feels as though he or she has been placed directly in this hell on Earth as it existed circa 1943.

The cast, which consists of veteran Hollywood actors and a variety of lesser-knowns, is excellent. Hank Azaria and David Schwimmer, arguably best known for starring in sitcoms such as The Simpsons and Friends, play Mordechai Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman respectively, and they do a great job of presenting the contrasting characters of the two ZOB commanders. Azaria plays Anielewicz as a loud, impetuous hothead who possesses great courage and daring but whose recklessness sometimes needlessly endangers his life as well as the lives of others. Zuckerman, on the other hand, is someone whose quiet, cautious nature allows him to focus on the bigger picture. Not surprisingly, this difference in personalities sometimes causes the two men to clash. For example, early in the film, Anielewicz kills a group of German soldiers after one of them murders a Jewish violinist purely for sadistic pleasure and is on the verge of murdering another. Afterward, Zuckerman berates Anielewicz for acting impulsively and says all actions by the resistance movement must be carefully coordinated. When Anielewicz replies that he’s sick and tired of being “passive,” Zuckerman corrects him by pointing out that they’re not being passive, but “prudent.”

Donald Sutherland, who turned in memorable performances in films such as M*A*S*H and Ordinary People and is probably best known for portraying President Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games series, plays Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Judenrat, as a man who uses every ounce of his inner strength to help his fellow Jews while meeting the impossible demands of the SS until he finally reaches a point where he can no longer do so. One of the things I love most about Uprising is how it shows the conflict between people like the elderly Czerniakow, who represent the older generation of Jews, and Anielewicz and Zuckerman, who represent the younger generation. Near the beginning of the movie, Anielewicz waylays the Judenrat chairman on the street and asks that he and the other council members provide the resistance with funds. Czerniakow adamantly denies this request and argues that any act of armed resistance will bring about harsh German reprisals on all the Jews of the ghetto. After Anielewicz chastises him for negotiating with the Germans, Czerniakow justifies his actions by saying, “I try to minimize the harm.” A few scenes later, Anielewicz and Zuckerman confront Czerniakow and make another request for financial assistance so that the ZOB can purchase arms. When the Judenrat leader asks what they will do with those arms, Anielewicz boldly replies, “Jewish honor.” A disgusted Czerniakow says, “Jewish honor. Father who is hiding his son, he is not honorable. Rabbi who is teaching a child his lessons is not honorable. A mother who is taking care of her children and many more! She is not honorable either! No! For you, honor can only come out of a barrel of a gun. You talk about Jewish honor. I talk about Jewish responsibility.” After Zuckerman tells Czerniakow about the gassing of Jews, including his parents, the Jewish elder argues that if the greatest armies in the world couldn’t defeat the Wehrmacht, then a bunch of untrained Jews with pistols don’t have a prayer. Czerniakow and his colleagues in the Judenrat represent the “old” Jew of Europe while Anielewicz and Zuckerman represent the “new” Jew of Israel. Although the word “Zionist” is never uttered in Uprising, the film has Zionist undertones. Most of the leaders of the resistance, including Anielewicz, Zuckerman, Fruchner, and Lubetkin, are Zionists. And in one of several speeches Anielewicz gives to fire up the troops, he alludes to the future state of Israel: “The spirit of our deaths will shape the soul of a new generation...a new nation of Jews.”

Jon Voight, the only member of the cast who has ever won an acting Oscar, is terrific as SS Major-General Jurgen Stroop, a truly monstrous human being who enjoys drinking Jewish wine almost as much as he enjoys murdering Jewish people. His German accent is terrible (and the same goes for Azaria and Schwimmer’s Polish accents), but I’ve known of only a few American actors who can do foreign accents convincingly. Throughout his career, Voight has appeared in movies that deal with social justice issues, such as Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, and Rosewood, and Uprising is a particularly fine jewel in his cinematic crown. Cary Elwes plays Dr. Fritz Hippler as a skilled propagandist who strives to be the Frank Capra of the German film industry. When SS soldiers are being attacked by Jewish fighters in the ghetto during one of the movie’s exhilarating battle scenes, Hippler arrives with his crew. Stroop asks him what he’s doing, and Hippler replies that Goebbels has ordered him to film the operation for posterity. “Victory will outlast us,” he says. After Stroop protests, “This is not victory!”, Hippler delivers my favorite line of the movie: “It depends where you put the camera.”

My favorite performance in Uprising is by Leelee Sobieski, who plays Tosia Altman as someone who has lost everyone dear to her and carries out her work as a courier for the resistance with a grim fatalism. There’s a scene that takes place when she and Arie Wilner, a fellow courier, are on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw. Several Polish Gentiles are walking toward them, so Wilner kisses Altman on the cheek so that the pair will appear as a loving Polish couple as opposed to two Jews conspiring to resist the Germans. Afterward, Wilner apologizes, saying he was “just being protective,” but Altman replies, “If you'd like to be my boyfriend, that's all right with me. I'll be going on these missions, and if I don't come back, I'd like somebody to know that I didn't come back.” This scene is especially poignant when you consider that Wilner perishes in the Mila 18 bunker and a caption at the end of the film informs the viewer that Altman was captured by the Germans a week after the uprising ended and died while in Gestapo custody.

In his review for Uprising, David Nussair of Reel Film Reviews ever-so-gently criticizes the movie’s “one-sided nature,” writing, “While there's no doubt that the Nazis were awful people, isn't it at least possible that even a fraction of those fascist soldiers were just following orders? Every Nazi here is portrayed as evil incarnate.” I feel the need to note here that not every Nazi was depicted in this fashion; the movie does show one act of compassion from a German. During the first mass deportation, Tosia Altman unsuccessfully tries to join her mother, who’s bound for Treblinka, and an SS soldier aims his rifle at the back of her head and slowly squeezes the trigger. But before he can get a shot off, a second SS soldier lowers the rifle and offers his comrade a cup of coffee. The Poles in Uprising don’t come off looking much better than the Germans. The movie does a good job of depicting the anti-Semitism that pervaded Polish society before and during World War II. For example, there’s a scene that takes place in the “Aryan” section of Warsaw where a group of Jews are riding in the back of a German Army truck on their way to perform forced labor, and a Polish child taunts them, saying, “Hey Jew, what are you selling today?” The film also shows the constant danger that ZOB couriers faced on the “Aryan” side from Polish blackmailers who sought to extort money and valuables from Jews under threat of handing them over to the Gestapo. Although the AK sells weapons, ammunition, and explosives to the ZOB, these shipments cease after a time because the leaders of the Polish resistance place the needs of their people above those of the Jews, whom they look down upon. And the Polish sewer workers and truck drivers whom the ZOB pay for their services either perform badly or not at all. Furthermore, when the Jewish fighters discuss their plans, they always have to take into account the very real possibility that members of the Polish underground, who are often as anti-Semitic as the Nazis, will betray them to the SS.

In his review, Nusair also writes, “Still, the folks that comprise the Warsaw ghetto are awfully decent, free of flaws, which forces us to identify with them not as people but as victims-turned-fighters.” This is also not entirely accurate. The Jewish policemen are generally depicted as harsh enforcers who are more than willing to beat fellow Jews for failing to comply with Nazi orders. Also, Josef Szerynski, their captain, commits a truly despicable act. Near the beginning of the film, the Nazis take 23 Jewish men, women, and children hostage and hold them at a nearby prison in response to the roughing up of a Polish policeman. The SS demand that the Judenrat pay the exorbitant sum of 230,000 zlotys by a specified time, or the hostages will be executed. Czerniakow tells Szerynski and his men to collect the ransom money from the family members of the hostages. The police captain orders Calel Wasser to get a beautiful ring from a woman whose young son is being held at the prison. The woman willingly hands over her ring, a treasured family heirloom, to Wasser out of the belief that it will be used to help pay for the ransom. But Wasser instead hands over the jewelry to Szerynski, who gives it to his daughter as a birthday present. This particularly shameful act looks even worse when you consider that all the hostages, including the woman’s son, are killed by the Germans, even though Czerniakow manages to collect the ransom money by the appointed deadline.

Uprising has many memorable characters, and I especially liked the Jewish fighters; these people are true badasses, and you can’t help but root for them. Three fighters in particular stand out: Tosia Altman, Calel Wasser, and Simcha Rotem. I admire Altman’s toughness and ability to think quickly on her feet. In one of my favorite scenes, she’s acting as a courier on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw when two Polish men come up to her and threaten to report her to the Gestapo if she doesn’t give them 3,000 zlotys. Instead of surrendering to fear and submitting to the blackmailers’ demand, Altman bursts out laughing and says, “Let's go. I want to see the little room.” When one of the blackmailers asks, “What little room?”, Altman replies, “The room the Gestapo reserves for pathetic crooks who waste their time turning in fellow Poles. I understand those thugs are given the full treatment.” (The blackmailers back down.) I love how Calel Wasser makes the journey from hateful Jewish policeman to heroic ghetto fighter; he’s the only character in the entire movie who undergoes a complete transformation. And Simcha Rotem provides Uprising with some much-needed comic relief. For example, during a scene where the ZOB leaders are debating the best way to resist, he suggests taking the SS hostage and forcing them “to listen to German folk music really loud until they lose their minds and give up.” (On second thought, having heard German folk music myself, I think Rotem’s idea might have worked.) In another scene, he bursts into the bunker that serves as ZOB headquarters while dressed in an SS uniform and, in a humorously high-pitched German voice, shouts, “You are all under arrest! Put down your bombs and return immediately to the Umschlagplatz [collection point]!” Then he raises his arm in a Nazi salute and proclaims, “Heil Shitler!” (Rotem’s conduct here is funny but also unwise. If he actually did that in real life, then he was awfully lucky somebody didn’t mistake him for a real SS officer and shoot him.)

One of the things I love most about Uprising is how it shows that heroism doesn’t always have to involved armed resistance. Two of the most heroic acts shown in the movie don’t feature a single firearm or explosive. The first is performed by Adam Czerniakow. Early in the film, the Gestapo offers him a certificate that will allow him to leave the ghetto and travel to Palestine, but he refuses. It’s worth noting that Anielewicz, Zuckerman, and other ZOB leaders decide to form a resistance group after they are unsuccessful in their attempt to get themselves and a group of young Zionists to Palestine. Although this doesn’t take anything away from the courage these fighters show in the uprising later in the film, Czerniakow’s decision to turn down a chance to get to Palestine and instead perform a thankless job that will win him no praise is truly remarkable. The second act of unarmed heroism is performed by Janusz Korczak, the famous pediatrician and author who runs the children’s orphanage and school in the Warsaw Ghetto. During the first mass deportation, all the children under Korczak’s care are ordered to board the train for Treblinka. Since he can’t prevent this from happening, the pediatrician decides to accompany them to the death camp. And when an SS officer tries to stop him, he replies, “Then kill me here and now in front of the children.” The officer relents, and Korczak boards a boxcar with his charges. Korczak could have saved his own life, and his decision to sacrifice it in order to be with “his” children in their final moments is profoundly touching and noble.

And now we come to the movie’s significant problem—namely, it perpetuates a grave historical crime, which is rooted in the politics of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. To understand this crime, a quick history lesson is warranted.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Poland, with its 3.3 million Jews, possessed the second largest Jewish community in the world after the United States, and Warsaw had more Jews than any other urban center except for New York City. Polish Jewry was incredibly diverse, and its members carried on raging ideological battles—Left versus Right, Zionist versus anti-Zionist, nationalist versus assimilationist, religious versus secular. Within the Zionist camp, the Socialist Zionists, who believed in waging “class struggle” on behalf of the proletariat and looked to the Soviet Union of Communist dictator Joseph Stalin for inspiration and guidance, fought bitterly with the Zionist Revisionists, who supported free market capitalism, advocated for a militant nationalism, and modeled themselves after Rightwing authoritarian regimes that were relatively free of anti-Semitism, such as the Polish government of Josef Pilsudski and the Italian Fascist government of Benito Mussolini before the latter forged an alliance with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. The acrimony between the Leftwing and Rightwing factions of Zionism reached a boiling point after the 1933 assassination of Chaim Arlozoroff, a prominent Socialist Zionist leader, in Palestine. The British arrested two Zionist Revisionists for the crime and put them on trial, but although they were acquitted, the Socialist Zionists blamed the Zionist Revisionists for Arlozoroff’s murder while the latter accused the former of perpetrating a blood libel.

During the Holocaust, many Jews of various ideological worldviews managed to set aside their differences in order to fight the common German enemy, who marked all of them for extermination regardless of their political beliefs. For example, in the Vilna Ghetto, Jewish fighters formed a resistance group called the United Partisan Organization, which included everybody from Zionist Revisionists on the Right to Socialist Zionists and Communists on the Left. But the bitter ideological battles of the prewar years prevented this type of unity from forming in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a result, two resistance organizations were founded. The first was the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which was made up of Socialist Zionists, anti-Zionist Socialists of the Bund, and Communists. The second was the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, or ZZW), made up of Zionist Revisionists and Jewish fighters who weren’t affiliated with any group. Led by a man named Pawel Frenkel, the ZZW was better armed and trained than the ZOB. This is because, unlike their Leftwing counterparts, the Zionist Revisionists had sought and received weapons and military instruction from the Polish army during the prewar period, and after the German invasion and the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, they began preparing for armed resistance at a much earlier date.

Before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, Frenkel established ZZW headquarters at a tall apartment building at 7 Muranowski Street, and he and his fighters dug a tunnel connecting the cellar of that building to the cellar of another apartment building at 6 Muranowski Street, which was on the other side of the ghetto wall in “Aryan” Warsaw. The ZZW, not the ZOB, fought what was arguably the greatest battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which took place at Muranowski Square. On the first and second days of the uprising, ZZW fighters raised the Zionist and Polish flags on the roof of the tallest building in the area, and to many Jews and Gentiles alike, they served as a powerful symbol of anti-Nazi resistance. Heinrich Himmler called Jurgen Stroop and told him to “bring down those two flags at all costs.” The “battle for the flags” lasted for four bloody days, and during the uprising, Stroop referred to the ZZW as the “main Jewish combat group.” After the uprising was over, Stroop created an album consisting of his daily reports, his summary report from May 16, 1943, photos of the SS military operation in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the names of German casualties that he titled The Jewish Quarter in Warsaw No Longer Exists; this album has served as the main primary source for information on the uprising. After the war, Stroop was tried and hanged for crimes against humanity, and during his trial, he wrote, “Muranowski Square was the place that the ghetto fighters defended with the greatest stubbornness.”

During the uprising, Yitzhak Zuckerman and another Zionist leader named Adolf Berman (not mentioned in Avnet’s film), who were on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, issued communiques describing the fighting in the ghetto. These communiques served as the basis for a number of broadcasts by Polish underground radio as well as news pieces by Western media outlets such as the New York Times. In them, Zuckerman and Berman presented the ZOB as the sole Jewish resistance organization in the uprising and ignored the role of ZZW. They even credited ZOB fighters with raising the flags over Muranowski Square; this was a blatant case of stolen valor, for Zuckerman and Berman knew full well that only ZZW fighters could have performed this heroic feat since the anti-Zionist Bund, a vital part of ZOB, would never have allowed the Zionist flag to be hoisted above any building. Unfortunately for the members of ZZW, they had no representatives in “Aryan” Warsaw and thus had no way of telling their side of the story. This problem was compounded by the fact that Frenkel and all the other ZZW commanders were killed in combat with the Germans. After the war was over, Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin, and other ZOB leaders settled in Palestine and created a history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that gave their resistance organization the central role in the fighting while minimizing the role played by the ZZW or omitting it altogether. Because Socialist Zionists enjoyed political dominance in the State of Israel during its first three decades of existence, this distorted version of events became the widely accepted history of the uprising. (In postwar Poland, this false narrative was promoted by Marek Edelman, a leader of the Bund, and the country’s Communist rulers, who favored the Leftwing ZOB.) As if that weren’t bad enough, when, decades after the uprising, the role of ZZW gained greater attention, Poles and Jews alike exploited the heroic deeds and sacrifices of that organization’s members for their own personal gain. Jews falsely claimed to have been involved in the fighting at Muranowski Square while Poles falsely claimed to have provided crucial assistance to the ZZW before and during the uprising. One of the latter group, a man named Henryk Iwanski, was even awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

When he made Uprising, Jon Avnet perpetuated the historical crime discussed above by focusing on the ZOB and leaving out any reference to the ZZW. As a result, the heroic deeds that the ZZW performed, such as hoisting the Zionist and Polish flags over Muranowski Square and digging the tunnel that connected the building at Muranowski 7 to the one at Muranowski 6, are falsely attributed to the ZOB. While I have no proof that the omission of the ZZW from the movie was a deliberate choice on Avnet’s part, circumstantial evidence seemingly points in this direction. In the 2018 Forward article on Uprising and its director, which was mentioned above, Cindy Grosz writes this of Avnet: “He wanted the project to be as accurate as possible. He researched for over five years, spoke with over 250 survivors and read thousands of pages of diaries, essays and books. He also worked with some of the survivors, including Marek Edelman, whose stories were shared in the film.” Given the mountain of evidence—which include books, eyewitness accounts, and the daily reports from Jurgen Stroop’s album—that confirms the presence of ZZW fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, there is virtually no way Avnet could have done all the research that Grosz details in her piece and not learned about the crucial role played by ZZW members. Whatever Avnet’s motivations, the absence of the ZZW from Uprising is a disgraceful travesty that severely undermines the movie’s credibility as well as Avnet’s stated desire to “give voice to those who no longer have voices.” Given the essential contribution that the ZZW made to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, making a movie about the revolt and leaving out this organization is akin to making a documentary about the Beatles and leaving out Paul McCartney. Midway through Uprising, during a scene in which Mordechai Anielewicz is giving one of his inspirational speeches, he says, “With all the Jewish groups [emphasis mine] finally under one banner, with one purpose, perhaps we can save some lives or remove a few Germans from the face of the Earth. But this much I promise you, we will live with honor. And we will die with honor. Jewish honor.” To anyone who knows the true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this otherwise thrilling statement rings hollow and false.

However, despite what I have just written, I’m going to recommend Uprising because of its laudable depiction of Jews resisting Nazi evil. But I’m also recommending this film for another reason: My hope is that people will watch it and be inspired to read about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; then, perhaps, they will learn about the ZZW and its heroism and thus obtain a fuller, more accurate picture of this incredible true event. Whether they fought under the banner of the ZZW or the ZOB, all the Jews who bled and sacrificed for honor and dignity deserve admiration and respect, because in the final analysis, though they lost the battle for the Warsaw Ghetto, they won the battle for history.

The Remains of the Day (1993)

Lookback/Review by Markdc


I just love good, intelligent romantic movies and prefer to have the man and woman be together at the end and live happily ever after. I always cry out of happiness whenever I watch films like An Officer and a Gentleman, It Could Happen to You, and You’ve Got Mail. And I cry out of sadness when the man or woman dies at the end, like in Titanic, or when both of them die, as happens in Atonement. (Well, usually it’s a man and a woman we’re talking about here. However, I gather that cinematic romances featuring two men or two women are becoming more prevalent now. Admittedly, I haven’t seen many of these, but I thought Brokeback Mountain and Monster were terrific, though they weren’t exactly feel-good movies.) But even in these tragic cases, at least the protagonists found love, however brief that turned out to be. Because after all, it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. And speaking of which, the saddest romantic movie I have ever seen has got to be The Remains of the Day.

The Remains of the Day, directed by James Ivory and based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro, is set in England both before and after the Second World War. The movie opens in the year 1958 when Mr. James Stevens, who has worked as the butler of a large, opulent manor home called Darlington Hall for the last several decades, travels to the western part of the country to see Mrs. Sarah “Sally” Benn. Benn served as the housekeeper at Darlington Hall in the 1930’s, and her and Stevens’ employer was the Earl of Darlington, better known as Lord Darlington, who supported Nazi Germany and died after the war. Darlington Hall now belongs to Jack Lewis, a retired American congressman. Lewis graciously lends Stevens one of his luxurious automobiles so that the latter can go and meet Benn. Benn, who at the time of their service together was called Miss Kenton, has recently sent Stevens a letter saying she might divorce her husband and yearns to return to her life as a housekeeper. Stevens, who’s been dealing with a staff shortage problem, hopes to persuade Been to accept her former post at Darlington Hall. Most of the movie consists of flashbacks interspersed with scenes of Stevens’ journey to the West Country.

Shortly after Miss Kenton’s arrival at Lord Darlington’s manor house in the 1930’s, a mutual romantic attraction between her and Mr. Stevens begins to develop. However, Mr. Stevens, a shy, reserved man who’s been reared in a life of service, focuses all his energies into carrying out the duties of a butler and buries his feelings for Miss Kenton in a place where nobody—including himself—can reach them. For her part, Miss Kenton is also devoted to her work, but throughout the several years she spends with Mr. Stevens at Darlington Hall, she makes a number of attempts to get close to the butler but is rebuffed at every turn. Around this time, events of international significance are taking place within the walls of the house. Lord Darlington hosts a peace conference and invites politicians and aristocrats from Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States—most of whom are Nazis or Nazi sympathizers like Darlington himself. Later on, he convenes a secret meeting between Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the ambassador of Germany. Reginald Cardinal, Lord Darlington’s godson and a budding journalist, sees all this and grows alarmed. He confides to Mr. Stevens his belief that the Nazis are using his godfather as a pawn and tries to enlist the butler in his effort to put a stop to it. However, Mr. Stevens refuses the younger man’s entreaties out of a sense of duty to his master. Meanwhile, Miss Kenton, frustrated by her futile attempts to penetrate Mr. Stevens’ wall of cold professionalism, hooks up with a former co-worker named James Benn. He persuades her to marry him, and she leaves Darlington Hall shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

Flash forward to 1958. Stevens meets Miss Kenton, now Mrs. Benn, at a seaside hotel. They discuss the late Lord Darlington, who died of a broken heart after his godson was killed in the war and his reputation was ruined following an unsuccessful libel suit against a newspaper that publicly accused him of treason. But when Stevens brings up the issue of future employment at Darlington Hall, Benn tells him that she has decided to remain in the West Country and return to her husband because their daughter is expecting a baby. This is a crushing disappointment for Stevens, and it becomes clear that he didn’t want Benn to come back to Darlington Hall in order to alleviate his staff problems; in truth, he loved her, just as she loved him. He also regretted pushing her away all those years ago and had hoped to correct this mistake. After the two of them have an amicable but unhappy parting, Stevens drives back to Darlington Hall to continue carrying out his butler duties for Mr. Lewis.

When The Remains of the Day was released on November 5, 1993, it received a rapturous reception from professional critics, who praised almost all aspects of the production, especially the directing, acting, and writing. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert, for example, awarded the movie 3.5 out of 4 stars and called The Remains of the Day “quiet, introspective, thoughtful,” and his sparring partner Gene Siskel thought it was a “magnificent film.” Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter’s David Hunter wrote, “The Remains of the Day packs enough passion and emotional resonance to appeal to a wide variety of audiences” and predicted—correctly—that the movie was “bound for glory.” At the box office, The Remains of the Day was a commercial success, grossing nearly $64 million on a $15 million budget, and when the Academy Awards rolled around, the film received eight nominations, including Best Picture, though it failed to win any of them. In a different year, this movie would surely have nabbed a treasure trove of Oscar gold, but 1993 was, of course, the year of Schindler’s List, which captured most of the awards that The Remains of the Day was nominated for. However, The Remains of the Day remains a beloved film with critics and audiences alike; it currently enjoys an incredible 95 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an A- grade on CinemaScore.

Personally, I’m just crazy about this movie. The Remains of the Day may be the saddest cinematic romance that I’ve ever seen, but it’s also one of the best. (I also enjoy movies that take place in large English country houses.) Almost everything about this film is perfect, starting with the cast. The Remains of the Day is one of many films that demonstrates why British actors are among the finest in the world. The indomitable Anthony Hopkins plays Mr. Stevens as a taciturn, hidebound man whose dedication to his lord serves as a suit of armor to guard his thoughts and feelings and protect himself from the threat of intimacy. Throughout his career, Hopkins has given a number of incredible performances in movies such as The Silence of the Lambs and Nixon, and his work in The Remains of the Day surely ranks among his best. Emma Thompson, another cinematic godsend, is no less brilliant as Miss Kenton, a woman who’s the equal of Stevens in terms of her professionalism but, unlike the butler, isn’t afraid to express her feelings. The supporting players are uniformly excellent. James Fox portrays Lord Darlington as the quintessential English gentleman aristocrat, a man whose naivete, highborn prejudices, and sense of fair play blinds him to evil and causes him to make a series of decisions that ultimately results in his demise. I enjoyed watching Christopher Reeve, most famous for playing Superman, as Congressman Lewis. In addition to appearing at the beginning and end of the film, Lewis is in several flashback scenes, for he was a participant in the international conference held at Darlington Hall, and at one point, he gives a captivating speech about the perils of “gentlemen” diplomacy. And a young Hugh Grant is a delight as Reginald Cardinal, Lord Darlington’s godson. (Grant’s performance in The Remains of the Day came just four months before his breakout role in the hit romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral.)

The Remains of the Day was truly a high point for the longtime partnership of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Over many years, the three of them gained widespread popularity and critical recognition for their sumptuous literary adaptations, which were made under the banner of their film company, Merchant Ivory Productions. In addition to The Remains of the Day, two other films from Merchant Ivory, Howard’s End (which also starred Hopkins and Thompson) and A Room with a View, received nominations for the Best Picture Oscar. All three of these movies are cinematic classics, but The Remains of the Day is my favorite of the bunch. In my opinion, the best thing about this movie is Jhabvala’s script. Translating the novel’s first-person narrative to the screen couldn’t have been easy, but she pulls it off with flying colors. Jhabvala received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and if Schindler’s List—which boasted an even better screenplay adaptation by Steven Zaillian that ended up winning the Oscar—hadn’t also come out in 1993, I would have said she deserved the award for The Remains of the Day. However, one aspect of this otherwise magnificent production that I find underwhelming is the score by composer Richard Robbins. The music isn’t terrible, it’s just dull and forgettable. Of the eight Academy Award nominations that the movie nabbed, the one for Best Original Score was undeserved in my opinion. If it had been up to me, I would have given Robbins’ nomination to John Williams for his sublime score to Jurassic Park. Still, I’m not complaining since the Maestro won the Oscar that year for Schindler’s List.

Because of Mr. Stevens’ personality and the fact that The Remains of the Day is told almost entirely from his point of view, we usually don’t learn what he’s really thinking, and this mystery is the movie’s most fascinating aspect. He serves Lord Darlington to the best of his abilities despite the morally dubious things the latter says and does, and we never know whether Stevens actually agrees with his employer; this is because, in Stevens’ view, it’s not his place to question his master’s judgment. He doesn’t even seem to mind when Lord Darlington summons him to the sitting room so that one of the earl’s guests can embarrass the butler in front of the other guests in order to prove a point he is making. Stevens’ unstinting loyalty to Lord Darlington renders him blind to the international peril around him, but there are other factors at work here. For example, throughout the movie, it’s clear that Stevens is dazzled by his involvement, however peripheral, in major political events; they give him a sense of outsized importance. In a scene that takes place in the postwar period, he stays at a hotel during his journey to the West Country and regales the other guests with tales of meeting famous Britons, such as Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. When Stevens does this, he speaks as though he rubbed shoulders with these men as an equal as opposed to doing so merely as a servant.

I admire how the movie reveals Mr. Stevens’ feelings for Miss Kenton in rare, subtle moments—usually just a look or a few words. It’s clear that he loves her but is scared to death of personal intimacy. The reason for this can’t just be his reserved nature or his devotion to duty. There’s a scene where Stevens’ father William, whom he has brought to Darlington Hall to serve as the underbutler, is lying on his deathbed, and at one point, William informs his son that “I fell out of love with your mother.” This has always made me wonder if the younger Stevens grew up in an unhappy household with two parents who didn’t care for each other; if true, perhaps that would explain why he’s afraid to fall in love. Regardless of the reason, his acts of resistance to Miss Kenton’s efforts to get close to him are almost painful to watch. For instance, early in the film, she brings flowers into Stevens’ personal quarters to brighten them up, but when she offers to get more flowers, he calls them a “distraction” and instructs her to refer to his father as “Mr. Stevens” or “Mr. Stevens Sr.” instead of “William,” despite the fact that, as the housekeeper, she outranks the elder Stevens. In another scene, after Miss Kenton discovers, to her shock, that Mr. Stevens is reading a romance novel, he comes up with a super-lame excuse about wanting to “improve” his vocabulary and asks her not to disturb his alone time. And near the end of The Remains of the Day, in what must surely be the movie’s most difficult scene, Mr. Stevens walks by Miss Kenton’s quarters and hears the sound of weeping. Her tears are a result of her frustrated attempts to breach the butler’s formal, rigid personality and touch him emotionally, though whether or not he discerns this is never made clear. Stevens goes into Miss Kenton’s room, and for a brief, hopeful moment, it appears as if he might finally bare out his soul and express his true feelings for her. However, he can’t bring himself to do this, and instead he stiffly requests that she look into a domestic matter.

The Remains of the Day is also fascinating from a historical perspective in that the international conferences and meetings held at Darlington Hall are a perfect microcosm of Great Britain’s policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler in the years leading up to the Second World War. Lord Darlington is emblematic of the many British government officials and aristocrats who sympathized with or outright supported Nazi Germany. And the movie does a good job of portraying the genteel anti-Semitism that was rife among Britain’s ruling classes during this period. There are several scenes where Lord Darlington and his peers enthusiastically praise the supposed virtues of Nazi authoritarianism and denigrate their own nation’s democratic traditions while expressing no concern over the increasingly alarming plight of Germany’s Jews. About midway through the movie, two German-Jewish refugee girls join the domestic staff at Darlington Hall. Lord Darlington welcomes them with open arms, but sometime later, after being exposed to Nazi propaganda, he orders Stevens to let them go and doesn’t seem to care at all that they might be deported back to the Third Reich—an action that would have amounted to a virtual death sentence. Although he eventually comes to regret this and unsuccessfully tries to rehire the girls, Lord Darlington’s initial decision to fire them as well as the pro-Nazi views that he and his fellow aristocrats express shows that, while they may not have been beating up Jews, vandalizing Jewish shops, or torching synagogues, their anti-Semitism was no less cruel in its cold indifference.

The only criticism that I have of The Remains of the Day comes not from what’s in the movie but, rather, what was left out. For me, the most crucial scene in the book comes at the end when Mr. Stevens is meeting with Mrs. Benn, and she tells him that she sometimes imagines the life the two of them could have made together. Then Stevens, the book’s narrator, tells the reader, “Why should I not admit it? In that moment, my heart was breaking.” This scene was filmed but left out of the final cut; it’s available in the “Special Features” section of the DVD. I believe this was a mistake because of the scene’s importance and the fact that Stevens’ heartbreak is perfectly captured onscreen by the look on Hopkins’ face and the sound of his voice when he replies.

The Remains of the Day presents a perfect example of the inner conflict I sometimes feel between what I want a movie to do and what I know a movie should do. Whenever I watch this film, I have to resist the urge to shout at Mr. Stevens to stop being such a blockhead and take Miss Kenton in his arms and kiss her. I yearn so much for the two of them to express their love for one another and go away together, whether in the movie’s 1930’s section or the one set in the 1950’s. However, I’m also aware that if the movie had ended this way, it wouldn’t be nearly as good. As I mentioned above, romantic flicks like Titanic and Atonement may have sad endings, but at least the protagonists had each other for a time. However, love cannot be expressed or enjoyed in The Remains of the Day. The movie’s conclusion is heartbreaking but necessary because it shows what happens when you choose service to others over personal happiness. For whatever reason, Mr. Stevens felt the need to place duty over desire, and now duty is all he has left—well, that and the knowledge he has made a terrible mistake and one he will have to live with for the remainder of his days.

How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Lookback/Review by Markdc


When I was younger, I was a huge fan of the Oscars and would follow the pre-awards buzz and watch every telecast with an almost religious devotion, but, alas, they have long since devolved into a boring, predictable affair. Oh sure, there have been some unexpected moments in recent years, like when the wrong Best Picture winner was announced at the 89th Academy Awards; however, these rare surprises are but a few sparkling drops in an ocean of banality. Near as I can tell, unless sitting through these interminable vanity shows is part of your job, the only reason to undergo such an ordeal is if you’re suffering from a bad case of insomnia. After the latest ceremony has taken place and the winners announced, it will be time for cinephiles everywhere to indulge in a sacred Oscar tradition—griping. You hear it all the time: “Such-and-such should’ve won that award!” or “I can’t believe so-and-so was nominated for this award!”, etc., etc., etc. And over no other Oscar category have the complaints been loudest or more vociferous than the one for Best Picture. It has long been a widely held belief among movie-lovers that when it comes to the Big One, the Oscars rarely—if ever—get it right.

Of course, any movie is incredibly fortunate to be deemed worthy of the top prize by Academy voters, but the verdict of history is something else entirely. Of the 96 films that have won Best Picture since the Academy Awards were first established nearly a century ago, I would guestimate that at least a third of them are widely considered to have been the “wrong” choice. It’s bad enough for a Best Picture winner’s legacy to be cursed with such a damning judgment in the glaring light of hindsight, but this unenviable situation is even worse when popular consensus also favors one of that winner’s (losing) competitors. For example, the 1990 epic western Dances with Wolves, made by actor and first-time director Kevin Costner, may have been an unexpected smash hit and reaped a treasure trove of awards gold, including the Best Picture Oscar, but time has judged Martin Scorsese’s gangster classic Goodfellas to be the “better” film. Sometimes, a consensus against a certain Best Picture winner materializes immediately after the awards ceremony—or even before that. For instance, The King’s Speech may have taken home the top prize at the 2011 Oscars, but its win was widely criticized at the time by many people who felt that The Social Network was far more deserving; and it doesn’t look like that sentiment has changed in the years since—quite the opposite, in fact. However, it appears that Tom Hooper’s British drama has been fortunate enough not to engender the widespread, visceral hatred that Crash has received for committing the unforgivable sin of defeating the much-loved Brokeback Mountain at the 2006 Oscars. Over the years, I have watched all but three of the Best Picture winners, and while the vast majority of these films wouldn’t have been my first choice for the top prize, with one notable exception, I still thought they were fantastic cinematic works. For this retrospective review, I’m revisiting what must surely be the most notorious Best Picture winner in movie history: How Green Was My Valley.

Directed by the legendary John Ford, How Green Was My Valley is based on an award-winning novel of the same name by Richard Llewellyn. Both book and movie take place around the end of the Victorian era and tell a classic coming of age story of Huw Morgan, a young boy who lives with his large family of nine in a coal mining village located in a picturesque valley in Wales. The film opens with an adult Huw preparing to leave his home forever and then turns to his childhood. Huw is the youngest in his family, and his father Gwilym and five older brothers labor in the coal mine, which serves as the heart of the village, while his mother Beth and Angharad, his sister, tend to household affairs.

At the wedding of Ivor, one of Huw’s brothers, and his fiancée Bronwyn, Angharad develops romantic feelings for Mr. Gruffydd, the new minister, and he reciprocates them. The Morgan family thrives at first, but things take a bad turn when the owner of the mine lowers wages—an action that causes most of his employees to go on strike. Gwilym attempts to mediate the dispute, but this puts him in direct conflict with Huw’s brothers, who leave his home in protest. One cold winter night, after Beth has an acrimonious meeting with the strikers, she and Huw are making their way home when they fall into a freezing river and have to be rescued by the strikers. For a long time, they are both bedridden but gradually make a full recovery. The striking miners and the mine owner reach a deal, and Huw’s brothers make peace with their father and return to his house.

Then Iestyn Evans, the mine owner’s son, seeks Angharad’s hand in marriage. Angharad wants to be the wife of Gruffydd, but he refuses marriage because he doesn’t wish to subject her to the hardscrabble life of a clergyman, so she reluctantly consents to wed Evans. Huw’s family has high hopes for him because they believe he’s the one Morgan who possesses the intelligence to break free from their impoverished world and eventually enter into a lucrative and prestigious profession, such as medicine or the law. To this end, they send him to a public school, which is located a few miles away. When he arrives, Huw is chastised and ridiculed in front of the entire class by Mr. Jonas, the schoolmaster, who scorns the boy’s coal mining roots.

The Morgan family endures tragedy when Ivor is killed in a mining accident, causing a pregnant Bronwyn to give birth prematurely. Then two of Huw’s other brothers are laid off from their mining jobs and replaced by men who possess less experience but will work for lower wages. Huw is offered a scholarship to attend college but disappoints his parents when he decides instead to work in the mine. Meanwhile, Angharad returns to the village sans her husband, and the rumor mill churns furiously with talk of divorce. Scandalized, the elders of the local church hastily convene a meeting to decide her fate. When he realizes that they are about to excommunicate the woman he loves, Gruffydd berates them and prepares to leave town. However, he changes his mind after another accident at the coal mine occurs and Gwilym and several of his fellow miners are trapped inside. Huw goes with Gruffydd and another man to help, and all of the miners are rescued. Unfortunately, Gwilym was terribly injured in the accident, and he dies in Huw’s arms shortly before the two of them reach the surface. However, the adult Huw tells the audience that his father isn’t really dead, for he will live on in the memory of the son who loved him so. (Note: Llewellyn claimed his novel was semi-autobiographical, but it was discovered after his death that the book was actually non-autobiographical. Although he was of Welsh ancestry, the author was born in England and had no experience with coal mining while growing up.)

As was often the case with John Ford’s pictures, How Green Was My Valley received a rapturous reception from professional critics when it was released on October 28, 1941. For example, the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “outstanding” and “a stunning masterpiece.” Variety called How Green Was My Valley “one of the year’s better films, a sure-fire critic’s picture.” The movie was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won five, including Best Picture. Also, Ford became one of only three persons in movie history to win back-to-back directing Oscars. (He had won the previous year for The Grapes of Wrath.) Earlier in this piece, I said How Green Was My Valley was the most notorious Best Picture winner in Oscar history, and if you, dear reader, possess even a modicum of Academy Awards knowledge, you know why this is so. How Green Was My Valley is, of course, the film that beat Citizen Kane. When you consider the legacies of these two movies, the decision by Academy voters to award the top prize to Ford’s picture hasn’t aged very well. To be sure, the film is still highly regarded; it enjoys a stellar 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for the American Film Institute’s (AFI) “100 Years…100 Movies” list as well as its 10th anniversary edition. However, How Green Was My Valley isn’t nearly as popular as other films from Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as The Wizard of Oz or It’s a Wonderful Life. In contrast, Citizen Kane has been routinely named by cinema experts everywhere as the greatest movie ever made going back at least the last half-century, and it topped both editions of the AFI’s “100 Years…100 Movies” list.

Before I share my assessment of How Green Was My Valley, let me first get the obligatory statement out of the way: yes, Citizen Kane should have won the Best Picture Oscar for 1941. Although I disagree with the consensus that this movie is the “greatest” of all time (my personal choice for that honor would be D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance), Welles’ groundbreaking masterpiece is certainly one of the very best. Also, How Green Was My Valley doesn’t rank among Ford’s greatest works, such as The Grapes of Wrath or The Searchers. With that being said, How Green Was My Valley is a fantastic piece of cinematic art that captures the nostalgic beauty of Llewellyn’s pseudo-memoir. The cast is superb. Roddy McDowall, who plays Huw Morgan, is a joy to watch; McDowall was a fine child actor who grew up to be a fine adult actor. Donald Crisp and Sara Allgood received well-deserved acting nominations for their performances as Huw’s father and mother, and Crisp ended up winning an Oscar. I also think Walter Pidgeon should have been nominated for his dignified, understated portrayal of Mr. Gruffydd.

Arthur Miller’s cinematography, which also won an Oscar, is gorgeous, and whenever I watch How Green Was My Valley, it really feels as though I’m seeing the Welsh countryside—as opposed to, say, Southern California. However, I had a problem with the cinematography being in black-and-white. Don’t get me wrong, I normally love seeing black-and-white films, be they old classics, such as Sunset Boulevard, or more modern ones like Schindler’s List. However, in this case, I think Technicolor would have really made the picture pop; after all, the movie is called How Green Was My Valley, and it’s awfully hard to tell just how green that valley is when it’s in black-and-white. My biggest criticism of How Green Was My Valley is the same one I had about another classic coming of age movie that I reviewed and which was also about a child growing up in a rural community—Roy Rowland’s Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. I love both films, but they contain an episodic plot structure, whereas I prefer a coming of age movie that has an overarching narrative structure, such as The Yearling. With that being said, this isn’t a significant problem, and How Green Was Valley has some truly wonderful moments. My favorite one was the scene where Huw is beaten up by a bigger boy at the public school, so a pair of local boxers named Dai Bando and Cyfartha teach him how to fight. The next day, he beats his tormentor in a boxing match, but Mr. Jonas sees this and mercilessly whips Huw with his heavy wooden pointer. After Dai Bando and Cyfartha learn of this harsh and unfair punishment, they go to the school and give Mr. Jonas a thorough boxing “lesson” in front of Huw and the other students.

Films that capture the Best Picture Oscar are fascinating time capsules that tell us a lot about the cinematic and cultural context in which they won. Maybe it often turns out to be the case that a given “best picture” wasn’t the real best picture, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, for Oscar voters—or anyone else for that matter—to know what a winner’s (or loser’s) legacy will ultimately be. As I said at the beginning of this retrospective review, even if many Best Picture winners didn’t necessarily deserve the top award, they are nonetheless great movies with many cinematic virtues, and How Green Was My Valley is no exception. To be sure, this movie is no Citizen Kane, but it’s still a classic that deserves to be loved. If you have never seen this reel gem, then watch it now, for I promise that once you enter John Ford’s Valley, you’ll never want to leave.

The Hunt (2020)

Lookback/Review by Markdc


As an avid reader, I’ve always preferred novels to short stories. However, several short stories are among my favorite works of literature. For example, I love Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as well as the irony-laden stories of O. Henry, especially the touching “The Gift of the Magi” and the hilarious “The Ransom of Red Chief.” But the best short story I have ever read is Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” Many of the people reading this retrospective review, especially the Americans, are going to be familiar with this story, which first appeared in Collier’s Weekly just over a century ago, and were likely introduced to it in school. (I myself first read “The Most Dangerous Game” in ninth grade English class.) However, in case you’ve never read or heard about this literary masterpiece, here's the plot:

While traveling on a ship in the Caribbean, Sanger Rainsford, a big game hunter, accidentally goes overboard and soon finds himself on an island owned by a Russian Cossack named General Zaroff, whose only companion is Ivan, a deaf and mute Cossack who serves him. Zaroff gives Rainsford a sumptuous dinner at his chateau and tells him that he is also a big game hunter. The former Russian officer then says he uses lights to entice ships to the island, which he calls Ship-Trap, so they can strike the jagged rocks that surround it and founder. Zaroff then captures the surviving sailors and hunts them for sport. He does this, Zaroff informs Rainsford, because hunting animals had become too easy and boring for him, whereas humans make far more interesting prey due to their ability to reason. Zaroff gives Rainsford food, clothing, a knife, and a head start before he, Ivan, and his dogs begin hunting him. But Rainsford uses his own experience and knowledge as a hunter to elude capture and build several traps that end up killing Ivan and one of Zaroff’s dogs. He then jumps into the sea to fake a suicide and avoid the surviving canines and eventually makes his way into Zaroff’s chateau. When Zaroff discovers him in his bedroom, the two men fight to the death, and Rainsford wins.

Given “The Most Dangerous Game’s” status as “the most popular short story ever written in English,” it should come as no surprise that this literary classic has been adapted many times for film, television, and radio—beginning with the 1932 movie The Most Dangerous Game, which Ernest B. Schoedsack directed for RKO Pictures. The story has also served as an influence for various other books and movies, including The Hunger Games series. I’ve seen five different film adaptations of “The Most Dangerous Game,” and my favorite one is The Hunt, which was directed by Craig Zobel, who updated Connell’s original story and turned it into a political satire for the Trump era.

At the beginning of the movie, a group of rich Liberal Elites have a conversation via text message and engage in one of their favorite pastimes—bashing supporters of President Donald Trump, whom they contemptuously refer to as the “Ratf***er-in-Chief.” (Although Trump’s name is never mentioned directly in the film, his supporters are called “Deplorables,” the name that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2016 presidential election, infamously gave them.) At one point, one of the Elites, a corporate executive named Athena Stone, sends a text in which she discusses the idea of hunting Deplorables for sport. The message, which is intended as a joke, somehow gets leaked and is splashed all over the internet, and Conservative podcasters and bloggers use it to create and spread a Rightwing conspiracy theory called “Manorgate.” As a result, Athena and the other Elites who participated in the text conversation are canned from their jobs, and their careers and reputations are ruined. Furious and itching for revenge, the Elites decide to do “the hunt” for real.

Under Athena’s leadership, they spend a year training and preparing, and when everything is ready, the Elites abduct 12 of the Deplorables responsible for Manorgate and fly them to a secluded area in Croatia. When they wake up, the Deplorables are given weapons but are picked off by their hunters with considerable ease. However, the Elites made a mistake when they tracked down their intended targets. One of the people kidnapped is a woman from Mississippi named Crystal May Creasey, whom the Elites mistook for a fiery Conservative blogger named Crystal Mae Creasey, who’s also from the Magnolia State and is best known by her online nom de plume “Justice4Yall.” This proves a fatal error because the other Crystal is tough, intelligent, cunning, and an Afghan War veteran to boot. Once she gets her hands on some firearms, Crystal turns the tables on the hunters and kills them one at a time until only Athena is left. When Crystal reaches Athena’s opulent house, the two of them engage in mortal combat and Crystal prevails, proving once again that man—or, in this case, woman—is the most dangerous animal of all.

Universal Pictures, the studio behind The Hunt, had planned to release the film on September 27, 2019. However, the execs decided to cancel the release date in the wake of two horrific mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. This decision was also influenced by a torrent of criticism from Conservative commentators and President Trump, who took to Twitter to write: “Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves ‘Elite,’ but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!” The Hunt was finally released on Friday, March 13, 2020, but this proved unfortunate timing because the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters all over the United States to shutter operations just a week later. Although Universal released the movie on digital formats, it ended up bombing financially, grossing just $12.4 million on a modest $14 million budget. Unsurprisingly, The Hunt wasn’t nominated for any Oscars, but it did snag a nomination for a Chainsaw Award—a fitting nod, given the movie’s pervasive, gory violence. Professional critics greeted The Hunt with a lukewarm reception. David Ehrlich of IndieWire spoke for many when he wrote of the film: “Combining the droll self-satisfaction of a New Yorker cartoon with the wet gore of an Eli Roth movie, Zobel’s tense, well-crafted, and deviant grindhouse take on the national temperature has no trouble caricaturing what ails us, but even that fun combo lacks the killer instinct required to see us more clearly than we see each other.” Similarly, Monica Castillo wrote on RogerEbert.com that The Hunt was “more of a molehill than a mountain.”

Considering that it’s nothing more than a cheap action thriller, The Hunt is a fun ride, though I warn any prospective viewer that the killings presented in this movie are incredibly gruesome. One thing that makes this film unique is that it slams both the Left and Right in equal measure. (Hollywood, which has long been dominated by people with Leftist political views, tends to portray Leftwingers in a positive light and Rightwingers in a negative one.) On the one hand, the Trump-loving Conservatives—or the Deplorables, if you will—are portrayed as ignorant, paranoid bigots. For example, there’s a scene where Crystal and a Deplorable named Gary hop onto a boxcar of a moving train and find a group of refugees, including a crying infant, whom Gary dismisses as “crisis actors.” In another scene, a Deplorable named Don refers to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who broke the Watergate story, as “Jewboys.” (Trivia note: Only Bernstein was Jewish.) On the other hand, the Liberal Elites who abduct and hunt the Deplorables are portrayed as entitled, smug, arrogant, insanely politically correct, and intolerant of people who don’t share their beliefs while viewing themselves as tolerant. For example, when Athena’s soon-to-be ex-boss chides her for calling Conservative Trump supporters “Deplorable” and says the word is too “charged,” she shoots back, “What would you prefer I call them, Paul? ‘F***ing rednecks’? ‘Gun-clutching homophobes’? ‘Academically challenged racists’? What about ‘tooth-deprived bigots’?” With one exception, all the Elites are White. But these White Liberals are ashamed of their racial “privilege.” For instance, one of them says, “White people, we’re the f***in’ worst,” and during one scene when the Elites are choosing their victims from a list of candidates, they reject a Black Trump supporter and decide to abduct only White Conservatives because, as a woman named Miranda puts it, “We need to lean into the stereotype.” However, these Elites don’t seem to mind their economic privilege and make full use of their money, private jets, and fancy homes.

In a fun, silly B-movie like The Hunt, none of the actors can be expected to turn in an Oscar-caliber performance, but two members of the cast really stand out here. My favorite performance is by Betty Gilpin as Crystal May Creasey. I’ve never seen Gilpin in anything else, but she is best known for her role as Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan in the Netflix television comedy show GLOW. Gilpin was the only actor in The Hunt to receive any real praise from critics, and from what I understand, her character in that movie is vastly different from the one she plays in GLOW. As was mentioned in the plot summary above, Crystal isn’t the Deplorable that the Elites thought she was, but since she’s a White working-class woman from Mississippi and a military veteran, some viewers might be inclined to ASSume that she’s a Conservative Trump supporter anyway—but, of course, such an ASSumption could only emanate from rank prejudice. I think it’s wise for Zobel not to reveal what Crystal’s political beliefs are—or if she has any to speak of. Crystal is a smart woman who—contrary to the stereotype that the Elites have of people like her—is familiar with the music of Beethoven and has read (and understood) George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Also, Crystal is a skilled fighter, whether with a gun or with her bare hands; in short, she’s a total badass. The other notable performance in The Hunt is by Hilary Swank as the swanky Athena Jones. Athena, like Crystal, is highly intelligent and skilled in shooting and martial arts and makes a great foil for our heroine. Given the fact that Swank has won acting Oscars for her work in award-winning films such as Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby and is also a Liberal Democrat who supported the Biden-Harris ticket in the 2020 presidential election, I’m surprised she played a character like Athena Jones in a movie like The Hunt. Obviously, her performance here isn’t going to go down as one of her finest, but kudos to her for being willing to poke some fun at Liberal Elites like herself. I love the scene at the end where Athena and Crystal engage in hand-to-hand combat while a Beethoven piece plays on the soundtrack. Classical music usually doesn’t accompany fight scenes in movies, which is a crying shame because they can go so well together, as is demonstrated in The Hunt.

The only real criticism that I have of The Hunt is the way it ends. After Crystal defeats and kills Athena, she cauterizes a serious wound that the latter gave her with a blowtorch, puts on one of Athena’s lavish gowns, and boards her private jet. As the aircraft takes off, Crystal eats some of the Elites’ caviar and shares it with the stewardess, who has never enjoyed the luxury of such expensive food. I think it would have been far more interesting if, instead of flying back to Mississippi, Crystal had taken possession of Athena’s house, clothes, money, and jet and become the very Elite that she just fought against. In my view, such a conclusion would have provided some real insight into human nature. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to be content with the ending Zobel gave us.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note here that The Hunt does contain one insightful scene. About halfway into the film, Crystal tells the Deplorable Don a story that her mother used to tell her when she was a little girl. This story is called “The Jackrabbit and the Box Turtle,” a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare”—but with a twist. Everyone who has read or heard “The Tortoise and the Hare” knows the moral of that Aesop fable: Slow and steady wins the race. In Crystal’s version, the jackrabbit is the fastest animal in the forest, and—suffice to say—he ain’t exactly humble about that fact. He’s always boasting that he can beat any other animal in a contest of speed. Finally, the box turtle has had enough of this, so he challenges the jackrabbit to a footrace. The jackrabbit gladly accepts because he already knows what the outcome will be, because the jackrabbit always wins. When the contest begins, the jackrabbit leaves his slow-moving opponent in the dust—just as everyone anticipates. But, not content to win such a quick and easy victory, he decides to make the race closer than anyone expected. He’ll still win, of course, because the jackrabbit always wins, but he wants to make things a bit more interesting. So the jackrabbit lies down and takes a nap. When he wakes up, he hears the crowd of animals cheering and realizes that he slept much longer than he intended. The jackrabbit flies toward the finish line but arrives one second after the box turtle lumbers across it. The rest of the animals go wild, and the jackrabbit feels angry and humiliated as he watches the unlikely victor bask in the cheers and applause. Later that night, the box turtle is eating supper with his family and excitedly telling them how he won his great victory when the jackrabbit suddenly bursts through the door with a hammer in his hand. The box turtle watches in shock and horror as the jackrabbit kills his wife and children with the hammer before he himself is dispatched. Then the jackrabbit calmly sits down at the table and helps himself to his victims’ supper. Moral of the story: The jackrabbit ALWAYS wins. And that, in my opinion, is a perfect metaphor for politics.