Das Boot

Top of the line–the 1981 version, that is. You got your sturm. You got your drang. You got beards like the Hatfields and McCoys by the film’s end. The grief comes, alas, becaue of the Americans and their air atttacks on the sub pens. You get the thrill of a high-speed run in heavy seas through the Straits of Gibraltar and an impish junior officer with a red beard. AND you have the Nazi “political officer” everyone despises. He doesn’t care for the crew’s taste in music, either. Maybe the best sub film of all time.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Yeah, it’s a Disney movie from 1954, but where ELSE are you going to get to see Kirk Douglas sing to a sea lion? And where else can you see James Mason, a vengeful 19th century version of Elon Musk or Richard Branson, bust up warships AND—the scene that initiated my fondness for calamari–you get Douglas in a fight to the death again a giant squid!

U-571

Any boarding party led by Pulp Fiction’s Harvey Keitel is the boarding party for me, yo-ho! Lots of good male grunting and bonding and killing and stuff, and Matthew McConaghey is the most clean-shaven sub sailor in history. Keitel’s knit cap with the little dingleball on top is a definitive fashion statement, and this depth-charge scene, from the 2000 film, nearly equals Das Boot’s. Nearly.

The Enemy Below (1957)

This is as much a psychological thriller as it is a war movie and, as many critics like to note on Mr. Google, the Germans, led by (too old) captain Kurt Jurgens, are NOT cartoonish. His counterpart is Robert Mitchum as the American destroyer captain and the two ships look for an opening—any opening—so that they can kill the other guy. It’s like a Frazier-Ali 15-rounder, but in the middle of the South Atlantic. And Mitchum? I could watch that man butter his toast and get a kick out of it. I can do without the trailer intro/narration by Dick Powell, he of 1935’s Lullaby of Broadway. Lullabye-bye, Powell.

K-19: The Widowmaker

In this 2002 thriller, Harrison Ford is the Russian commander whose accent periodically disappears; Liam Neeson’s is far more reliable. Since Vikings invaded both Russia and Ireland, good on Neeson, whose accent might come from some Viking who invaded both places, too. Maybe Ford can be forgiven, since he was born in Chicago and very few longships were seen on 9th-Century Lake Michigan. But, there you go. When a reactor begins to melt down, the last 2/3 of the film is tragic, of course . Doom doom doom. Collective society may suck, but the film at least shows Soviet sailors willing to give everything to save their crewmates and their submarine. No one can save Ford’s Russian accent; it evidently fell overboard.

Runners Up

The Hunt for Red October: While I am fond of Sean Connery’s spiky hairpiece, the movie goes downhill after he murders Red October‘s political officer, a moment of sudden violence that’s kind of fun. After that. It’s as if the defecting Soviet sub is plowing through maple syrup. And I detest Tom Clancy’s writing. I remain sad that Sean Connery is dead but content because Clancy is. He won’t inflict anymore of his technobabble on us. Red October has a magnetohydrodynamic “caterpillar drive” ANNNNND she’s

Just a little deuce coupe with a flathead mill
But she’ll walk a Thunderbird like she’s standing still
She’s ported and relieved, and she’s stroked and bored
She’ll do a hundred and forty with the top end floored

The only other compelling character is the American sub commander Scott Glenn, who has Balls the Size of Church Bells, a mystery after the tight Wranglers and mechanical bull rides he endured in Urban Cowboy.

Run Silent, Run Deep is based on a pretty good novel I read when I was about thirteen, but since it revolves around a personality clash between one of my favorite actors, Burt Lancaster, as the exec, and his captain, Clark Gable, I am unimpressed. If I want personality clashes, I’ll watch Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Just stay there. Cool sub, though, but the ones at Disneyland have windows too and you can see mermaids from them. Barbara Eden’s in this film, but she’s in the sub, alas, and not outside combing her mermaid hair with a golden brush while perched on rock, which I would pay good money to see.

Ice Station Zebra: Ice Station Zero.

Operation Petticoat. What a great idea! Let’s trivialize submariners!

BEST RUNNER-UP: Twilight Zone, “The Thirty-Fathom Grave.” Rod Serling was such a talented writer, but I much prefer his ghostie stuff to his Serious Social Stuff. He wrote the script for this episode. An American destroyer’s sonar, in our time (that would be about 1960 in TV time) picks up what sounds like a hammer pounding against metal beneath the surface. Alas, it’s a sunken submarine, and a destroyer sailor and World War II submarine vet, played by an excellent actor, Mike Kellin, suddenly realizes that that was his sub and the pounding comes from his lost crewmates, calling for him to come join them. The ship’s captain, played by Simon Oakland, is quite good, as is John Considine, who explores the wreck (for you Boomer types, Considine brother, Tim, was in My Three Sons. He left the show to college and never returned. I suspect he was crushed to death while telephone-booth* stuffing, popular among college students before they began occupying adminsitration buildings a few years later.

(*Younger people: Use Google Image Search for the term “telephone booth.”)

I borrowed four spectacular scenes from two earlier films—the fantasy Inception remains one of the most amazing films I’ve ever seen, and the two air-attack scenes from Dunkirk are terrifying— but the ending of the war film is moving, too. The soldier, evacuated from the beach, is headed home on a train. Grateful Brits have reached through the train window to gift him and his mate with newspapers and then with beers ( Bass ales) and the soldiers read Churchill’s speech aloud from the papers. Here, Nolan is both spectacular and intimate.

He intercuts the train scene with the counterattack from Tom Hardy’s Spitfire. His character, Farrier, has stayed too long over the beach. His job is to protect the soldiers below him, and in doing his duty, he runs out of fuel. Farrier sets his Spit afire and awaits the Germans who will make him a prisoner of war, if he survives, for the next five years. Again, both spectacular and intimate.

David Lean, one of my favorite directors, could do that, could get you close to his characters. The developing relationship between Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia and is one example; William Holden’s coward who becomes a tragic hero in Bridge on the River Kwai is another. It’s one of Holden’s finest performances, and he’s one of my favorite actors.

But Nolan’s characters seem even more real to me than Lean’s.

Now, with Oppenheimer, we have two master history teachers in David Lean and Christopher Nolan.

I wish that Nolan somehow could’ve had a chance at directing Gettysburg, a dreadful film based on a marvelous Michael Shaara novel. But we have, thank the Lord, Glory.

And, thanks to Nolan, we can enjoy once again big movies with heart.

This day means so much to me because Tony Bennett was our American Corrective.

Where there is division, he reached across divides.

Where there is rudeness, he said “thank you” at the end of his duets.

Where some among us live misshapen lives, crushed by the weight of privilege, he was born the son of a grocer and a seamstress from Calabria, in southern Italy.

Where there is mean-spiritedness, he was unfailingly kind.

Where there is crudity, he was class.

Where there is despair, he radiated happiness.

Where there is misogyny, he welcomed women—Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse, Faith Hill, Aretha Franklin, KD Lang— as his equals. Look at the expression on his face here:

Where there is selfishness and self-absorption, he was generous and open-hearted.

Where there is ugliness, he was Grace.

Where the the notion of “duty” is dismissed, he sang “San Francisco” every time as if it were the first time.

Where there is falsity and deceit, he sang that song with an honesty that would’ve embarrassed performers less sure of themselves and their gifts.

Where there is failure, he failed, too.

He came back from drug addiction to us. He came back FOR us.

It took a 96-year-old man to show us what we’re capable of in our future, if only we’re willing to listen to voices that call us to higher places, where cable cars climb halfway to the stars.

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I’m a little obsessed with this song, but I’m not the only one. The Los Angeles Times reported that the original video has reached one billion views on You Tube, and why not? The video was creative, compelling, told a story, and, let’s face it—how fun it would be to be pulled into a fantasy world when you’re idling in a restaurant whose specialty is cold milk?

And the song is charming. It’s been covered by so many bands, but let’s start with the opening of the the original video:

My friend and former student Kristin introduced me to the Mariachi Sound Machine version a few years ago, and I still love it. My favorite part is the trumpeter and his little boy. But I love all of it.

First to Eleven is a band from Erie, Pennsylvania. I love the grunge touch (the drummer is cool); the lead singer, Audra Miller is—let’s face it—kinda sexy. Jeez! Is it okay that I said that? Here’s that version in its entirety:

I always love to find songs I know covered by the high-school-aged School of Rock kids. Look at how happy they are!

But of all the A-Ha variations, there’s none quite like the unplugged MTV performance by Morten Harket (the band was Norwegian), which is elegant. And it’s almost as much fun to watch the women in the audience react to a pop song which still has such power almost forty years later.

For some reason, for three days now, I’ve been obsessing about the 1985-89 ABC series Moonlighting, with Cybill Shepherd, once “just” a model, and Bruce Willis, who was kind of shiny and new, and with his hairline pretty much intact. I’ve been obsessing about him especially, but the two were brilliant together. Shepherd proved herself a deft comedienne, and I later became a big Willis movie fan. My favorites aren’t the Die Hards but the two films he made with M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, where his performances were nuanced and, to me, deeply moving.

But this show was charming and innovative. Breaking the Fourth Wall in this season opener, for example:

And sometimes it had the audacity to get philosophical:

Or Shakespeare. In “Atomic Shakespeare,” the show took on Taming of the Shrew. Hit it, Bruce:

Shepherd’s Maddie could sing, too. This is lovely:

https://videopress.com/v/kRf4lp38?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

And sometimes they danced. Willis was surprisingly good. And Shepherd was at least game.

The show lasted four seasons but probably should have ended at two and a half or three. It burned out its stars, who couldn’t sustain the high bar it had set or the toll it had taken on their professional relationship. It burned out its writers, too, who lapsed into cutesiness and destroyed the sexual tension between David and Maddie by having them give into it.

But it was a grand ride; when it was good, Moonlighting was very good.

As was Willis, an actor I enjoy immensely.

What probably brought on this Moonlighting musing is his struggle with aphasia. God has graced him with a supportive and loving family. Willis has graced me with a host of memorable characters—including Moonlighting’s David Addison, Jr.

Thank you, Bruce Willis.

Many years ago, we went rowing on the Cherwell River, which joins the Thames near Oxford University. Well, Elizabeth rowed. I was attending to our picnic lunch, which needed attending to.

So, for some reason this morning, I was thinking of movies filmed on the Thames, and here they are some that I found.

My favorite remains Henry VIII’s arrival via royal barge in A Man for All Seasons. The music is magnificent, too, and the way the crews raise their oars and glide into shore is elegant. Okay, I like the James Bond boat chase, too.

1. The World Is Not Enough. Bond films are always good for chase scenes, but this one, with a soggy Pierce Brosnan, has to be one of the best.

2. Let’s tone it down a bit. How about Ringo’s disconsolate walk in A Hard Day’s Night?

3. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, we get an aerial view.

4. We use the Thames to assassinate model Kate Moss in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.

5. And, speaking of assassination, Elizabeth I’s narrow escape in 1998’s Elizabeth:

6. Joseph Fiennes woos again, trying to chase down his muse, Gwyneth Paltrow, in Shakespeare in Love.

7. Alex pulls off a coup among his group of droogs alongside the river in what remains such a disturbing film, Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971).

8. Ah, but here’s the masterpiece: Henry VIII arrives for dinner at Thomas More’s home in Fred Zinneman’s A Man for All Seasons (1966). The music. by Georges Delerue, is glorious, as is the cinematography.