On Mizzou, and Yale, and Claremont Mckenna, Too

A passage from Joan Didion's seminal essay, "The White Album."  She does not answer many questions, much less provide solutions, but I suspect that many of her observations here would resonate significantly with events and figures of the current campus unrest.

. . . .

9.

At San Francisco State College on that particular morning the wind was blowing the cold rain in squalls across the muddied lawns and against the lighted windows of empty classrooms.  In the days before there had been fires set and classes invaded and finally confrontation with the San Francisco Police Tactical Unit, and in the weeks to come the campus would become what many people on it were pleased to call “a battlefield.”  The police and the Mace and the noon arrests would become the routine of life on the campus, and every night the combatants would review their day on television: the waves of students advancing, the commotion at the edge of the frame, the riot stick flashing, the instant of jerky camera that served to suggest at what risk the film was being obtained; then a cut to the weather map.  In the beginning there had been the necessary “issue,” the suspension of a 22-year-old instructor who happened as well to be Minister of Education for the Black Panther Party, but that issue, like most, had soon ceased to be the point in the minds of even the most dense participants.  Disorder was its own point.

I had never been on a campus in disorder, had missed even Berkeley and Columbia, and I suppose I went to San Francisco State expecting something other than what I found there.  In some not at all trivial sense, the set was wrong.  The very architecture of California state colleges tends to deny radical notions, to reflect instead a modest and hopeful vision of progressive welfare bureaucracy, and as I walked across the campus that day and on later days the entire San Francisco State dilemma--the gradual politicization, the “issues” here and there, the obligatory “Fifteen Demands,” the continual arousal of the police and the outraged citizenry--seemed increasingly off-key, an instance of the enfants terribles and the Board of Trustees unconsciously collaborating on a wishful fantasy (Revolution on Campus) and playing it out in time for the six o’clock news.  “Adjet-prop committee meeting in the Redwood Room,” read a scrawled note on the cafeteria door one morning; only someone who needed very badly to be alarmed could respond with force to a guerrilla band that not only announced its meetings on the enemy’s bulletin board but seemed innocent of the spelling, and so the meaning, of the words it used.  “Hitler Hayakawa,” some of the faculty had begun calling S. I. Hayakawa, the semanticist who had become the college’s third president in a year and had incurred considerable displeasure by trying to keep the campus open.  “Eichmann,” Kay Boyle had screamed at him at a rally.  In just such broad strokes was the picture being painted in the fall of 1968 on the pastel campus at San Francisco State.

The place simply never seemed serious.  The headlines were dark that first day, the college had been closed “indefinitely,” both Ronald Reagan and Jesse Unruh were threatening reprisals; still, the climate inside the Administration Building was that of a musical comedy about college life.  “No chance we’ll be open tomorrow,” secretaries informed callers.  “Go skiing, have a good time.”  Striking black militants dropped in to chat with the deans; striking white radical exchanged gossip in the corridors.  “No interviews, no press,” announced a student strike leader who happened into a dean’s office where I was sitting; in the next moment he was piqued because no one had told him that a Huntley-Brinkley camera crew was on campus.  “We can still plug into that,” the dean said soothingly.  Everyone seemed joined in a rather festive camaraderie, a shared jargon, a shared sense of moment: the future was no longer arduous and indefinite but immediate and programmatic, aglow with the prospect of problems to be “addressed,” plans to be “implemented.”  It was agreed all around that the confrontations could be “a very healthy development,” that maybe it took a shutdown “to get something done.”  The mood, like the architecture, was 1948 functional, a model of pragmatic optimism.

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh could have gotten it down exactly right.  Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people absorbed in odd games.  Here at San Francisco State only the black militants could be construed as serious: they were at any rate picking the games, dictating the rules, and taking what they could from what seemed for everyone else just an amiable evasion of routine, of institutional anxiety, of the tedium of the academic calendar.  Meanwhile the administrators could talk about programs.  Meanwhile the white radicals could see themselves, on an investment of virtually nothing, as urban guerrillas.  It was working out well for everyone, this game at San Francisco State, and its peculiar virtues had never been so clear to me as they became one afternoon when I sat in on a meeting of fifty or sixty SDS members.  They had called a press conference for later that day, and now they were discussing “just what the format of the press conference should be.”

“This has to be on our terms,” someone warned.  “Because they’ll ask very elading questions, they’ll ask questions.”

“Make them submit any questions in writing,” someone else suggested.  “The Black Student Union does that very successfully, then they just don’t answer anything they don’t want to answer.”

“That’s it, don’t fall into their trap.”

“Something we should stress at this press conference is who owns the media.”

“You don’t think it’s common knowledge that the papers represent corporate interests?” a realist among them interjected doubtfully.

“I don’t think it’s understood.”

Two hours and several dozen hand votes later, the group had selected four members to tell the press who owned the media, had decided to appear en masse at an opposition press conference, and had debated various slogans for the next day’s demonstrations.  “Let’s see, first we have ‘Hearst Tells It Like It Ain’t’, then ‘Stop Press Distortion’--that’s the one there was some political controversy about . . .”

And, before they broke up, they had listened to a student who had driven up for the day from the College of San Mateo, a junior college down the peninsula from San Francisco.  “I cam up here today with some Third World students to tell you that we’re with you, and we hope you’ll be with us when we try to pull off a strike next week, because we’re really into it, we carry our motorcycle helmets all the time, can’t think, can’t go to class.”

He had paused.  He was a nice-looking boy, and fired with his task.  I considered the tender melancholy of life in San Mateo, which is one of the richest counties per capita in the United States of America, and I considered whether or not the Wichita Lineman and the petals on the wet black bough represented the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie, and I considered the illusion of aim to be gained by holding a press conference, the only problem with press conferences being that the press asked questions.  “I’m here to tell you that at College of San Mateo we’re living like revolutionaries,” the boy said then.

. . . . 

Mad Max: Fury Road

Second viewing, this time in re-released IMAX 3D. On first viewing I thought it was terrific, though not as overwhelming as I'd been led to believe. Four months later, this viewing confirms it as a masterpiece.

Some observations:

•The scope and volume and intensity of the action are obviously next level, but what makes it so enjoyable and engaging to watch is the intelligence on display in both the construction of the sequences and the actions of the characters. Watching Max and Furiosa interact is to see a chess match played out through glances and sudden movements. They are constantly alert to threats and opportunities, they recognize the same quality in each other, and therefore communicate with a minimum of words.

•The subtlety and depth of Tom Hardy's performance came through much better this second time--the amount of feeling that he carefully keeps out of his face. Mel Gibson was hardened and cocky; Hardy has gone beyond that, so dead inside he can barely make himself intelligible to others.

•In the Mad Max films, George Miller uses the grotesque to first demonstrate the perversion from the norm of his dystopian society, but then, in a maneuver going back to Tod Browning's Freaks, he moves past grotesquerie to find a deeper humanity underneath. The various deformities of his characters are functions of the deformity of civilization, caused variously by malnutrition, lack of healthcare, inbreeding, and radiation poisoning. But lumbering giants who at first present as violent monsters turn out to be as innocent as babes in both Mad Max and Beyond Thunderdome, and the terminally ill Nux in Fury Road has a change of heart. Both society and people are diseased, but the fact of disease is no reliable guide to good and evil individuals. This goes some way to divining how Miller manages to plunge his audience into a world of horror and nihilism and somehow emerge with hopeful assertions of human compassion, connection, and dignity that ring genuine and true.

•I caught more of the brides' dialogue this time, and realized they each do have a distinct personality. You can sense that they were given backstories by the writers and were thought through by their actresses, even if the material didn't make it on screen. And as nice as it would be to get to know them better, there's simply no time. The movie is better-served by maintaining its breakneck pace than it would be by adding in scenes where the women could introduce themselves and display their personalities for us.

•What we can make out from the brides' conversations is the way they have reacted against the totalitarian war religion of Immortan Joe by developing their own principles of how things ought to be. Exposed to Joe's sexual slavery (and pillow talk?) and hence hypocrisy, and well-kept in their apartments, they can see everything wrong with their society and long for a better world. But their non-violent ideals have to come down to reality, which is more vicious and complicated than they imagined.

Each of these paragraphs could probably be taken a lot further, there are so many details to unpack. What a movie.

David Fincher and Gone Girl

David Fincher is an expert director in technical terms, but he’s often at the mercy of his scripts.  He’s capable of making a weak script formally interesting, but not profound.  He also has a cynical sensibility that tends to cheapen and bog down his projects, keeping them from achieving genuine masterpiece status--Se7en being the prime example.  (Zodiac and The Social Network come the closest to greatness.)  If he’s one of our great directors, his understanding of human nature is limited.

Gone Girl does nothing to dissuade me from this judgment--it’s not a masterpiece, it’s characters are profoundly awful human beings--but it’s still a heckuva movie, and worth revisiting and discussing.  And since I listed it as one of the best movies of lat year, but never got around to writing about it on the blog, let's do just that.

Fincher’s technical precision is evident from the opening credits, a montage of buildings in a sleepy midwestern town: words are pressed down in surprising corners and shots end an instant before you expect them to.  It perfectly sets the scene and establishes tension, and we haven’t even been given any narrative information yet.  The whole film proceeds in this utterly precise, clean, rigorous fashion, like a well-oiled handgun.  

The film doesn’t really have much to say about actual marriage, though apparently the feelings of drifting apart and the concerns about disappearing jobs, judgmental in-laws, costly mortgages, etc. hit home with a lot of people.  I suspect, though, that the large number of think-pieces inspired by this aspect of the film were at least somewhat due to the writers’ inability to discuss the second half of the film for fear of spoilers--even though the second half completely undermines everything those pieces said about the film’s economic topicality.  In terms of gender politics--such a flashpoint at the time of the film’s release, with accusations flying about the film’s misogyny left and right--I actually found it to be more of a misandrist revenge fantasy gleefully skewering worthless entitled lugs and playing back and forth with power relationships and the battle of the sexes.

But maybe the best way to look at it is as a second-coming of Hitchcock à la Brian De Palma.  After all, the influence on Gone Girl of Psycho, Vertigo, and Suspicion is deep and obvious.  Suspicion is about the possibility that a spouse could be a murderer, Psycho unfolds with a similar structure of twists and reveals, and Vertigo is also a mesmerizing investigation of one particular woman who is not what she seems.  More than that, we can read Gone Girl as drawing on Hitchcockian imagery in surprising and evocative ways, deriving meaning from these images where more topical themes seem insufficient.  Amy is in fact a Hitchcock blonde who decides to reject the role imposed on her, take over the story and become a protagonist.  Rather than be trapped in the gaze of her husband and her neighbors like Kim Novak trapped by James Stewart, an idealized image of beauty and womanhood doomed to crack and drown, she executes an elaborate plan to control the nature of her own image and write a new ending for herself.  Her image is her power, and the more she resembles a Hitchcock heroine the more power she has.  She loses her blondness when she goes undercover, and consequently loses her power and is robbed and humiliated.  When she goes to Neil Patrick Harris’s house she regains her blondness and then her power, seducing and murdering him like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, another Vertigo riff.  As her madness is exposed her power paradoxically grows, until she has rebuilt her life with herself in control.  Ironically, that new life is simply a renegotiated version of the role already predestined for her, a rebuilt image of perfected beauty and womanhood.  The difference is she’s now in control of it, she defines the limits and manipulates the media’s gaze to strengthen.  In fact, she is now in control of every element of the image, including her “perfect” husband.  In a sick joke representative of Fincher, Ben Affleck ends the movie as an abused spouse still hopelessly attracted to his abuser, forced to stay in the relationship for the good of the child.  There’s a situation you don’t see many leading men get into in movies.

___

If I could return to that De Palma comparison, though, I must say I find the juxtaposition intriguing.  Both Fincher and De Palma love manipulating their audiences.  Both have been influenced by Hitchcock--De Palma more so, but De Palma loves Hitchcock more than anybody; half his movies seem to be tributes.  Fincher gets that formal perfectionist streak from both Hitchcock and Kubrick; he tends to be more socially relevant than Hitch, but not as cosmically authoritative as Kubrick.  All four directors get a perverse satisfaction from punishing their audiences, though not all for the same reasons.  All four have been accused of misogyny.

Both Fincher and De Palma have been heavily influenced by the Zapruder film.  Paranoia, surveillance, and conspiracies are recurring themes across both of the oeuvres.  Lisbeth Salander’s hunt through digital photos on a computer in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo finds its analogue (heh) in John Travolta’s reconstruction of magazine photographs and sound recordings in Blow Out.  De Palma’s style is generally more wild, featuring baroque camera movements and a love of excess.  Fincher is more locked down, occasionally even stately--the exception is Panic Room, where he employs digital effects to make his camera execute impossible movements even De Palma couldn’t have managed before.   Interestingly, it’s the elder director who likes to live in Movie-Movie Land, while the younger wants to seem like he’s in the real world most of the time.  But Fincher likes games and manipulations, too--see The Game and Fight Club.

In Gone Girl, many tropes that De Palma employs are evident: a bifurcated narrative, replays, cameras, ruses hinging on what people see or don’t see, a blonde woman of mystery, lust and consequences, the flipping of gender roles, femme fatales, and shocking sexual violence.  It’s a slow burn rather than De Palma’s usual florid emotionality, but by the end Fincher has left reality behind.  The violence achieves a certain Gothic grandeur appropriate to the director of Alien³ and Se7en.

In the end, perhaps the most important distinction between them is this: Brian De Palma is a filmmaker of the 20^th century; David Fincher belongs to the 21^st.

On the Road (2012)

Some old (2012) notes, half-formed and messy:

-I saw this film in a special advance screening at the IU Cinema with Walter Salles in attendance. The audience gave the movie a standing ovation, and he answered questions for a while afterwards.

-The film is obviously the result of a great deal of research and thought and discussion about the book. Salles said he started working on it in 2004, stalled by financial crisis, used the original typewritten scroll and interviews with actual participants/friends/family members to find out exactly what happened in reality to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady, etc.
-But this, to my mind, is missing the point: The book is not inspiring and beloved because people just like reading about people getting drunk and taking drugs, but because of the way it is written --if you can't capture the energy of the book in your cinematic style, why even adapt it? You might as well go for a biopic of Kerouac or a historical study of the Beats if you're just gonna strip things away.

-What really happened only matters because the book found the poetry and spirituality and beauty in the events.

-The novel doesn't have traditional scenes, plot, etc., instead all about language, texture, flow. Movie keeps trying to make traditional scenes, plots, and gets sucked into doldrums of "real" life.

-The movie's journey across America should have had more visual creativity and interest. Something like Into the Wild was far more vibrant and alive. If film was really going to take the challenge of the prose seriously, it probably should have gone for a more Malick-like aesthetic--flowing, but with few real scenes, and emphasis on fragmentary cutting. To my mind, the Levi's commercials that quote Whitman or show Braddock, PA, have caught more of the best spirit of the book than anything in this film.

-Salles said that adapting the book was difficult and never going to satisfy everyone because the novel is so "polyphonic." He's probably right. Some of the themes/interpretations he could have gone with: the search for the American dream, the last of the pioneer/cowboy spirit, the search for spiritual meaning, the story of the sons of immigrants looking for a place of their own, the rebellion against postwar cultural complacency, a radical call for a new social order, etc.
-Instead, Salles entirely ignored these and went for a coming-of-age story, with the focus on a friendship that ends.
-Apparently he lacked the inclination (and I would say the ability) to make this story genuinely American, or say anything about America at all. Sure he said he had read it and been deeply affected as a young man, and noted that the book had had impact around the world, but I'm going to come right out and say that a Brazilian filmmaker was probably the wrong choice to adapt a book so quintessentially and inescapably American.

-Where the book reveled in larger-than-life characters and outrageous exploits, the movie paradoxically seems to tone everything down, avoid any hint of exaggeration, and consequently it is dull.

-Riley quite good as Sal, Sturridge good as Carlo, Viggo Mortenson strange and perfect--too bad he's only there for a few minutes, Stewart=meh.
-Hedlund isn't bad exactly, Salles says he put his all into the role, was awed by his commitment.--But he isn't Dean. He isn't part Gene Autry, part Harpo Marx. He isn't a motormouth, not constantly going wild and exciting you into going along. He seems too often depressed, and he goes for a more modern idea of cool which Dean doesn't fit.

-These characters have noting admirable and little exciting about them. Why should we care?

-For some reason, after stripping out so many interesting incidents, the movie includes almost every sex scene from the book, plus ones that weren't mentioned, plus gay sex scenes and fights between Dean and Camille which the book slides over. If this was some sort of critical expose on what the Beats were *really* like, this might make sense, but it's not.

-The whole film seems slowed down, ignoring the weird rhythms of event and human speech that gives the book momentum. Focused on the quiet nights after the party rather than the excitement during it. It all adds up to a more pervasive feeling of loneliness, alienation, exhaustion.
-For Kerouac, "beat" meant down and out but full of intense conviction, beatific. But here when Sal suggests there might be something holy about Dean, Bull shoots it down angrily and the film seems to agree.

-For this movie, "beat" just means lost. But the novel has moments that reach higher, moments when they're found.

The Great Dictator, Rumble Fish

The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940) Rating: 9/10 stars.

I'm just gonna quote Jonathan Rosenbaum here:

"As a friend has pointed out, Chaplin doesn't really belong to the history of cinema; he belongs to history.  What for another artist might only come across as misjudgment, naivete, or bad taste often registers in a Chaplin film as personal-historical testimony of the most candid and searing sort.  Thus the total inadequacy of his impassioned speech at the end of The Great Dictator--as art, as thought, as action, as anything--becomes the key experience that the film has to offer, revealing the limitations of human utterance in the face of the unspeakable.  For roughly two hours, Chaplin has been trying to defeat Hitler by using every trick he knows; finally exhausting his capacities for comedy and ridicule, and realizing that neither is enough, he turns to us in his own person and tries even harder, making a direct plea for hope.  But although he effectively annihilates the Tramp before our eyes, he simultaneously re-creates him in a much more profound way, exposing the brutal fact of his own helplessness. Seen with historical hindsight, there are few moments in film as raw and convulsive as this desperate coda.  Being foolish enough to believe that he can save the world, Chaplin winds up breaking our hearts in a way that no mere artist ever could."

Rumble Fish (Coppola, 1983) Rating: 9/10 stars.

Those romantic young boys, all they ever want to do is fight.

This is a movie where the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. There's an opera out on the Turnpike, and there really is a ballet being fought out in the alley, where kids flash switchblades just like guitars hustling for the record machine.

Matt Dillon thinks he can walk like Brando right into the sun and dance just like a Casanova, but he runs into a 10th Avenue freeze-out, and his pretty dreams get torn. He thinks he really loves a girl because he's too loose to fake, but she like a late Juliet knew he'd never be true, and unfortunately she does mind.

Mickey Rourke is a ragamuffin gunner returning home like a hungry runaway; he might as well be Jimmy the Saint. With his blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet, he's the prince of the paupers crowned downtown at the beggars' bash, the pimp's main prophet, he keeps everything cool. When the two brothers are together laughing and drinking, nothing feels better than blood on blood, but Rourke keeps staring off into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born . . . until he sees a hand he knows even the cops can't beat. While he used to ride headfirst into a hurricane and disappear into a point, this time he lets the Maximum Lawman run him down, and there's nothing left where his body fell, that is, nothing that you could sell. Was he just lost in the flood? In any case, it's hard to be a saint in the city.

By the end, the one poet down here can't write nothing at all, he just has to stand back and let it all be. And young Matt Dillon's left to ride to the sea and wash these sins off his hands.

Down in Rumble-land.

(Rumble Fish poster from here.)

The Most Dangerous Game, The Getaway, Dressed to Kill, Gunga Din

The Most Dangerous Game (Schoedsack, Pichel, 1932) Rating: 7/10.

A classic piece of pulp adventure that still retains some power to thrill despite its low budget and visible seams.

It stars a young Joel McCrea, who, bless him, hasn’t really figured out how to act yet--Fay Wray acts rings around him with a glance and a few words.  Leslie Banks as the villain Count Zaroff is pretty effective without being quite great.  There’s no doubt the film would be elevated significantly by a different lead, and if you changed out a couple of the sportsmen at the beginning, Fay’s obnoxious brother, and maybe replaced Banks with Karloff or Lugosi, you might have something like a masterpiece on your hands.  Because that chase finale is really gangbusters, with evocative sets (used for King Kong weeks later) and thrilling POV shots and some pretty intense violence courtesy of the pre-Code release date.  Schoedsack knew how to get some atmosphere and fear with his camera.  McCrea’s strategy during the chase is pretty weak from today’s perspective, but I’m sure at the time it must have thrilled 10-year-old boys no end.  And isn’t that the objective they were going for?

Anyway, my point is the thing is influential and worth watching.  The themes of civilized man vs. barbarian and human vs. animal are eternally rich, if barely tapped here.  Beneath the cardboard sets and even-more-cardboard people there is something primordial bubbling; an underground spring of pulp-myth that has trickled in all directions and has yet to dry up.

The Getaway (Peckinpah, 1972) Rating: 5/10.

You'd think a movie based on a Jim Thompson novel, adapted for the screen by Walter Hill, starring Steve McQueen, and directed by Sam Peckinpah would be more tight and thrilling than this. Unfortunately (with that lineup, tragically), you'd be wrong.

The characters are admirably ruthless, the opening sequence is atemporally edited with brilliance, and there are several strong scenes, but none of that can obscure the fact that I was ready for this to be over long before it was. Peckinpah's shaggy qualities get the best of his storytelling here.

Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1980) Rating: 6/10.

I got interested in De Palma after watching Blow Out last year on a whim, and realizing I’d seen a masterpiece.  (I’d seen Mission: Impossible and The Untouchables long before, of course, but neither led me on to his other work.)  I’ve since seen Obsession and this movie, and I confess I’m a bit flummoxed.  If Obsession is practically a remake of Vertigo, then Dressed to Kill is something like a fan fiction retelling of Psycho.  (Think 50 Shades of Grey’s famous relation to Twilight made explicit.)  Neither seem to exist on their own, but at least Obsession feels like an actual plot with actual characters, even if they’re (intentionally) unbelievable.

Dressed to Kill opens with a sequence of pure softcore porn, and tosses in a couple more as it goes along.  But of course no porn director, not even in the ‘70s, ever moved his camera or cut his footage the way De Palma does; the movie is always visually interesting, often virtuosic.  And along the way, he scores points for (and against) seemingly every single team in the sex and gender debates.  (If you think watching Angie Dickinson soaping herself and moaning is offensive and objectifying, De Palma can respond that we’re watching her dream, after all, so he’s really just being frank about the sexual desires and needs of the middle-aged housewife.  Right??)  The first act is impossible to take seriously (you either have to use it like porn or laugh defensively), but then it turns into a genuinely exciting thriller for a while, and turns a hooker and a nerdy kid into pretty lovable protagonists--before diving back into ridiculous sleaze at the end.  That sequence in the museum is mesmerizing!  That chase on the subway is terrifying!  That fake-out ending is stupid!

I just don’t know.  I can’t take it seriously, like I said, but then it’s probably all a big meta joke anyway.

Gunga Din (Stevens, 1939) Rating: 8/10.

Here is a movie that would have instantly become a favorite, if it weren’t so racist.  There’s an argument to be made that over the course of the narrative, the English fun and games are gradually invaded and taken over by the Indians--Din moves from dumb lackey to sacrificial hero, and the Thuggee Guru from freakish pagan priest to eloquent critic and honorable/brave adversary--but the ethics of representation surrounding them are too compromised from the beginning (they’re both white actors in brownface, after all) for me to embrace such a reading.  And the way our heroes treat all Indians they encounter is so filled with contempt and suspicion (though Din is eventually tolerated/patronized like a child), so clearly evident of colonialist cruelty, that it’s disturbing the movie never takes the time (even at the end) to punish them for it, or suggest a change of heart.  Indeed, their attitude is fully justified by the Thuggee activities.  (Again, you could make an argument that this is just reflecting the way the soldier acts in Kipling’s poem, and change of heart is implicit in the final shots, but this is undercut too strongly by the trio’s practical joking in the middle of the battle--after Din is already dead.)

All that aside, the rest of the movie is still pretty swell.  The darker elements are all smoothed over by the slick swashbuckling surface, surely among the most joyous and entertaining of such swashbucklers made in classic Hollywood.  The Adventures of Robin Hood is what most comes to mind in comparison, and while Gunga Din lacks the Flynn-de Havilland romance, the team of Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. is considerably funnier than anything Robin’s Merry Men get up to.  This was clearly an important movie for a lot of directors who saw it young; it’s immediately apparent as a primary source for Indiana Jones, The Lord of the Rings, and probably Star Wars as well.  There are a couple action scenes here that must be among the finest in history to that point, and the climax especially appears to be a model for the Battle of Five Armies.

It’s basically a perfect movie for a 10-year-old boy: girls are icky, fist- and swordfights are cool, elephants are funny, and heroes can walk into the swarming enemy’s camp alone and come out alive.

(Gunga Din poster from Doctor Macro.)