His mind was a museum of uncatalogued exhibits.
–John Steinbeck on Hazel, Cannery Row.

Yup. Guilty.

I can’t always “access” Wes Anderson films, but there are two I’ve loved: The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom. My oddly working mind (SEE: James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed) moves laterally rather than straight ahead, so sometimes I make odd connections, in this case, between disparate directors, Terence Malick and Wes Anderson.

Maybe three directors, if you count the Andersenesque Jojo Rabbit.

All of them, by the way, make liberal use of one of my favorite actors, Sam Rockwell, whom I’ve loved ever since Galaxy Quest. Someone wisely put together all the Rockwell scenes in Jojo. I won’t show the last one, but here are a few. The film’s director, New Zealander Taika Wititi, did a brilliant turn as Hitler, who appears periodically in little Jojo’s dream dialogues.

But today’s date in history came thirteen years after the Reich collapsed. In January 1958, two teens, Charlie Starkweather and Carl Fugate went on what was called a “murder” spree” from Nebraska to Wyoming. There were eleven killings in all. Charlie got The Chair. Springsteen wrote “Nebraska” about the pair. Here, from what might be my favorite Springsteen album, the artist sings the film:

The teenaged criminals had confirmed what we all knew about teenagers anyway: They were damned dangerous. James Dean and Natalie Wood, Elvis and “Jailhouse Rock,” (Pat Boone was the Elvis antidote) Ed Byrnes (“Kookie”) and his comb, pointy sweaters (Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe), Rockand/or Roll, including Little Richard and Chuck Berry, in a time when Black people were to be invisible except for pancake mix Jemimas and Central Pacific porters. When they became visible, they often died. It was that way in the the abject horror paranoia generated when a Black youth (Emmett Till) from up north wolf-whistling at a pretty White woman down in Mississippi, a story that was probably fabricated.

So Charlie and Caril had an enormous impact, far, far beyond the Badlands. (So, thankfully, did Emmett Till, or rather, Mamie, his mother.)

So it suddenly occurred to me, because of today’s date in history, that Moonrise was an homage to Terence Malick’s Badlands, about the two teen killers, and I am fond of Malick. I once wrote a big essay about his Days of Heaven, with Richard Gere, of whom I am not fond.

Just one similarity involves goofy dances.

When I realized the connections, I had to share it with my wife.

Elizabeth looked at me oddly. Heck, I looked at me oddly. Then I did a Google and found six or seven other people, some of them film critics, who’d already made that connection.

Two mixed-up and misunderstood kids, kind of vaguely in love but clearly devoted to each other, some random violence (a stabbing with scissors in Moonrise) police pursuit (Bruce Willis is endearing as the cop in the Anderson film) and final standoff, on the prairie in the older film and on a rooftop in a driving rainstorm on the newer. Even writing this pains me, but a dog is killed, to no purpose and for no purpose, in each film.

Badlands, thanks to its succession of cars, is a picaresque film, moving in not very much time but through an immense amount of space, in a genre invented by Cervantes, but, thanks to our vastness, perfected in America–Huck Finn, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, True Grit and The Good Lord Bird are just a few examples

So maybe I’m not exactly Hazel after all (he was among many children and his Mom was tired the day she named him).

Maybe almost best of all, Badlands was the film whose introductory music, “Gassenhauer” (“Street Song”) enchanted me. So here it is, in the YouTube link below. There are a couple shootings in the video montage, so be advised. But this film remains indelible in my memory. So are Malick’s images of the American countryside. And, just one more point? Without all that blood dripping down her (Carrie), Sissy Spacek is luminous.

Thomas and I were among many guests at the Palm Theater for a screening last night, courtesy of the theater owners and also David and Naomi Blakely, because David’s father, Everett, is among the fliers featured in this Apple TV Spielberg/Hanks miniseries.

David was a warm and generous host and, best of all, his Mom, now 101, joined us along with other heroes of mine, including Dan and Liz Krieger, writer Tom Fulks, fellow historian and fellow TR fan John Ashbaugh, military historians Erik Brun and Preston King, the Central Coast Veterans Museum’s Bart Topham and world traveler/radio correspondent extraordinaire Tom Wilmer.

Thank you, David and Naomi.

As to the miniseries—we saw the first two episodes—it was excellent, beautifully photographed, by turns harrowing, inspirational and funny, and it was all about men who in their late teens or early- to mid-twenties who fought a war that was unbelievably dangerous. We saw airmen wounded—including from frostbite— in last night’s screening. I was reminded that for every American infantryman killed in World War II, three were wounded. For every American airman wounded, three were killed.

Two friends are at the heart of the first two episodes. Major Bucky Egan (Collum Turner) is mercurial, a grand and extravagant drinker, whose anger comes explosively. His friend, Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler, Academy Award winner for Elvis) is stoic, reserved, unbelievably cool under fire. It’s the same kind of dynamic that made Kirk and Spock and many years later (the film based on O’Brian’s novels, Master and Commander) Aubrey and Maturin work so well.

And, even though he was hidden behind his oxygen mask, there was Ev Blakely, the kind of man who, in later years, worked in the shop in the garage of his San Luis Obispo home to help Boy Scouts finish their Eagle projects or boys and girls build Christmas gifts for their parents. He was a warrior with a heart called to service, including to children.

There were many things that struck me about the showing, and I was profoundly touched by them. In no particular order:

Grommet: The wire that gave an officer’s hat its stiffness was removed in the Army Air Forces. You couldn’t get your headphones around a grommetted hat, but the unintended side effect was a kind of rakish look that, I guess, charmed young women, and U.S. Army officers in World War II already wore uniforms that were so handsome that the Army has recently brought them back.

The B-17F’s weakness: Masters is set early on in the American air war, in 1943, and Ev Blakely and his fellow pilots flew the B-17F, a superb airplane with a fatal weakness: Only one machine gun in the plexiglas nose. So German fighter pilots learned quickly to attack B-17s head-on, and one of our county’s first air casualties, Clair Abbott Tyler, was a co-pilot killed in precisely this kind of attack, from a Focke-Wulf 190 that came out of the sun.

Dogs: Meatball, a gorgeous Siberian Husky, makes an appearance in the first episode. Airmen were devoted to their dogs—one of the most famous, the Scottie named Stuka, was Capt. James Verinis’ dog and the mascot of the B-17 Memphis Belle. She was in a London pet shop window and for Verinis, it was love at first sight. Stuka became a Yank after the war.

The historian for one bomb group told me that dogs not only heard the B-17s coming home first, but ground crews knew an aircrew was safe when a dog became noticeably excited. She’d recognized the individual pitch of her human’s engines. No greater love.

Losing the B-17: Maj. Blakely’s 100th Bomb Group suffered appalling losses—they were the “Bloody 100th”—and as many airmen were killed in World War II as Marines were killed in their deadly march across the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. It’s hard to watch a ship carrying ten young men, all between sixteen (some gunners were also liars in their enlistments) and twenty-two, burst into flames or come apart in midair, even in computer-generated images. On one mission, Henry Hall of Cayucos, saw the following: a shot-up B-17 lazily dropped one of its wheels before beginning its fatal plunge. On the way down, it clipped two more B-17’s and they went in, too. Another bomb wing, off-course and late, came in behind Hall’s and they were pummeled. Ev Blakely’s 100th Bomb Group sent in sixteen B-17s on that mission. Only one came home.

The Target: Two of the 100th’s missions in the first episodes are attacks on German U-boat pens, one near Bremen and another in Norway. The impact of the U-boat on transatlantic shipping was such that in a story that stayed with my father, he gifted a British family with a bag of oranges in 1944. The mother of the family burst into tears. They hadn’t seen oranges, thanks to the U-boats, since 1939.

Clair Tyler was killed after an attack on the sub pens at Lorient, France. Below is a strike photo from his last mission and next to it are the sub pens. Today. They were indestructible—in fact, the Lorient pens were the base for French submarines four decades after World War II had ended.

Loving the B-17: Its partner among heavy bombers, the B-24, was a little faster, carried a bigger payload and had a longer range, and there were more of them. But the B-24 lacked the B-17’s graceful Art Deco lines and it was a beast to fly—an analogy might be that the B-24 lacked the B-17’s “power steering,” and pilots of the former sometimes lost five to ten pounds on a typical mission. But the B-17’s most admirable trait may have been its ability to absorb punishment. Maj. Cleven is stunned by the damage German explosive shells (flak) have done to his ship on his return to the airfield at Thorpe Abbots. These planes returned home, too.

Green eggs and Spam: One of the funniest lines in the first episode is a speculative comment on the age of the powdered eggs airmen ate. This passage from Central Coast Aviators also comments on the food airmen ate:

...[E]en in the AAF, the green-hued powdered eggs, along with the ubiquitous Spam, were breakfast standards, and creamed chipped beef on toast—referred to as “shit on a shingle”—followed airmen across the Atlantic from the air bases stateside where they’d first encountered what seemed to be, to the military, a perverse culinary masterpiece.

British children: David made one of the best points of the night in his introduction. The series pays attention to the ground crews who kept the B-17s flying. While the aircrews slept—fitfully—before a mission, the ground crews were up all night arming, fueling, tuning engines, fine-tuning electrical and hydraulic systems. The most prized crew chief in the episode is a nineteen-year-old corporal who’s struck up a friendship with two British kids. In truth, while other Brits may have resented the Yanks, who could sometimes be obnoxious (“Overfed, overpaid, oversexed and over here”), children adored them. And their Hershey bars. If takeoff came at a decent morning hour, the perimeter fence around an airfield would’ve been lined with schoolchildren, there to wave goodbye to “their” Yanks.

In 2019, the city of Sheffield commemorated the crew of a crippled B-17G returning from a mission in 1944. As the pilot began to bring his plane down, he pulled up to avoid a park crowded with children. The bomber came down somewhere else. There were no survivors.

I am sorry, “Moon River” and “The Days of Wine and Roses” and “The Theme from Shaft” AND the Lawrence of Arabia theme. It’s this one, and it can’t even settle on a name. Is it “The Kiss” (it was a humdinger, in the movie) or “The Gael” or is it “Promontory” or is it simply “The Theme from Last of the Mohicans?” I don’t know and it doesn’t matter The melody comes from a Scots songwriter, Dougie McLean, and it was adopted for the 1993 Daniel Day-Lewis film, ever so much better than Fenimore Cooper’s, book by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman. It brought out both the Irish and the Lowland Scots in me.

There have been so many treatments. Let’s start with a lone piper:

But, heck, why settle for ONE piper when a BUNCH will do? Here are the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, and you get views of breathtakingly beautiful Scotland. You should not be overly fond of trees, you understand. Cliffs and gorse and heather and the occasional stag the size of an Indian elephant and seaside towns with doorways painted bright red and the smell of beached kelp. That’s more what Scotland’s like. And, if you feel the need to punch out Edward Longshanks, the second, shorter video features pipers at the William Wallace memorial at Bannockburn.

Here we go:

Jenny O’Connor is also called “The Hot Violinist,” which makes me sad, because she is also gifted, and the film’s theme is ideal for the violin

But, true, the same principle goes for violins as it does for bagpipes. Why not a bunch of violins?

Wait! We need more strings! Maybe a cello? The Noricum Group:

A Native American flute. Lovely:

WAIT! Where are the flippin’ DRUMS? Well, for a semi-terrifying take on the theme, here’s Clanadonia:

Whoa. I think I need to chill a little after this version. Let’s try the Prague Film Orchestra:

You may disagree with me on the theme, but the fact remains that the film is far better than the book could ever be. If you doubt that, let me quote from Mark Twain’s delightfully wicked essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses:”

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.

2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove.

7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated.

In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

Here’s the final scene from the film. The big mace is wielded by Russell Means (above), an Oglala Sioux activist who led the occupation of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee to make his people visible again.

The theme is also featured in the stunning opening scene. The animal’s death is heart-breaking, but the foot chase, and the tribute Means delivers at the hunt’s conclusion, ring true.

The “bad guy,” Magua, is played by the Cherokee actor Wes Studi, a favorite of mine. After this film came out, I saw Studi on PBS’s Reading Rainbow. He was reading a Native American version of “Cinderella,” a story that in different forms in many cultures. The children were transported by Studi’s skill and looked at him in utter and silent admiration. And affection.

Good stories live in children’s minds, and sometimes in adults’ as well, no matter how much damage the writer might do them. Good songs, I think, have that same immortality.