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Mirage, me aunt
I have seen a fair number of pre-Code war pictures, but I've never seen one like The Lost Patrol (1934). Directed by John Ford and adapted by Dudley Nichols and Garrett Fort from Philip MacDonald's Patrol (1927), it turns colonial action into existential parable with the surreal minimalism of Werner Herzog, mad dogs and Englishmen in the key of survival horror. The title tells you what you're in for, even before the characters know it themselves. Let's just say nobody ends this thing shouting, "Θάλαττα! Θάλαττα!"
Like so much of the best horror, it starts like no such thing. A bugle summons the roll call of the credits as snake-charmer music whirls over shots of waving palms and trudging dunes. With the Arizona desert standing in for the equally hundred and ten in the shade south of the Tigris, a title card sets the apparent tone: "Mesopotamia 1917. While the World War raged in Europe, British troops were fighting in a far corner of the world. Small solitary patrols moved over the vast Mesopotamian desert, that seemed on fire with the sun. The molten sky gloated over them. The endless desert wore the blank look of death. Yet these men marched on without a murmur, fighting an unseen Arab enemy who always struck in the dark—like a relentless ghost!" We are primed for an adventure at the edges of empire, the thin khaki line leading on the red ink of the map. And then with an unimportant little squiff of a sound out of the rolling emptiness of sand and sky, the lieutenant who kept all his instructions in his head pitches to the ground, sniper-drilled clean by daylight, and just like that the eleven survivors of this little detachment of the King's Own Hussars are adrift in the desert with no direction, lit. or fig. "A fine thing, ain't it? A patrol patrolling and not knowing where they're at! And the orders locked up in that dead kid back there." The problem of water is solved by a lucky stumble onto an oasis where dates can stand in for rations as long as the men can stomach them, but ammunition doesn't grow on trees and the loss of the horse-lines overnight establishes the logistics of their position with brutal simplicity. So long as the soldiers stick to the shelter of the small, crumbling mosque and its immediate perimeter, they're safe, but beyond the cordon of the palms—or above it—they can be picked off with impunity by an unknown number of irregulars waiting just out of sight of the shallow bowl of the dunes. They have no means of calling for help or even estimating the strength of their enemy. All they can do is hold out as long as they can; all the movie can do is observe how they behave as they're whittled down from the numbers of discipline and camaraderie to that bone of a question, how you face your dying. Who by sentiment and who by irony, who by glory and who by faith, who by compassion and who by defiance, who by hatred and who by damned bad luck. So many by empire, which always seems to be calling.
Part of the difference of The Lost Patrol is that while I recognize its absurdity, futility, and anger from other war movies of its generation, I have never seen another one set during the Mesopotamian campaign, which has the dubiously timeless distinction of being the most commercial theater of its war. The soldiers of the lost patrol haven't just been sent to die for the honor of king and country, though it never does to let the side down where the subcontinent might see. They are protecting British oil interests in the Middle East. The Ottomans didn't even consider the region strategically significant enough to map fully and here charges in the groundwork for the Cairo Conference and all those land wars in Asia that worked out as far back as Carrhae, classically where they shouldn't be and trying not to suspect it. It opens the film up to question not just the war but the imperial mechanisms behind it, and however these misgivings ghost around the edges of the men's awareness, the audience gets their drift. Gentleman-ranker Brown (Reginald Denny) calls, "Selamat tinggal!" when he wants his companions to lay off and reminisces about the golden-skinned girls of Malaya with a tropical nostalgia that wouldn't be out of place in "Mandalay," but a love of Kipling is explicitly the death of green recruit Pearson (Douglas Walton), chasing the colonial romance of adventuring in exotic climes until it catches him with a knife on sentry-go. Old sweats like MacKay (Paul Hanson) and Quincannon (J.M. Kerrigan) are no more armored by their cynical service—reminded of the time he was broken in Poona for "being drunk and disorderly, setting fire to your tent, and appearing on the parade ground with nothing on but your drawers and your topi," the latter reproves the former, "That's a dirty lie. I did not set fire to me tent"—than new Tommies by their escapism or patriotism, such as sends homesick Hale (Billy Bevan) scrambling up a palm tree from which he'll gain just enough vantage to spot the barrel-glint of the rifle that will kill him. The stiff upper lip receives the script's finest and most awful moment of black comedy when a reconnaissance pilot (Howard Wilson) alights at the edge of the oasis as if straight off a recruitment poster, impossibly fresh-faced and waving cheerily in the face of shouted warnings, Biggles to the life. He gets five steps from his crate with his swagger stick under his arm and crumples, shot straight through the silly ass: "I say—" His clever flying machine bakes uselessly in the sun, the symbol of science and civilization and a war that fielded cavalry charges against chemical weapons. Even the hard-bitten Sergeant (Victor McLaglen, in real life a veteran of the Mesopotamian campaign) finds himself reviling their unseen enemies in one breath and wondering with the next, "What's the war mean to them? Might just as well be friendly. Some are. Some ain't." His question goes unanswered, but into its silence rushes the terrible genius of the possibility that we aren't watching a war story, really, at all. Maybe the snipers are in the employ of the Central Powers. Maybe they just don't like the British off their own bat. We never find out and it doesn't change the feeling that simply by entering the desert, these soldiers have drawn their deaths to themselves, like sun-dazed Abelson (Sammy Stein) shooting at something never shown us in the stretch and shimmer of the dunes and receiving in answer the bullet of the sniper who took a fix on him from the sound. Like the men scared and second-guessing, you find yourself tracing the many-worlds of this clusterfire farther and farther back, trying to find a point where the patrol might not have been doomed. Once you've passed Jacky Fisher, the Industrial Revolution, and the East India Company, you might as well head for the stratigraphy of the Cretaceous. Too late. "Gwendolyn is napoo."
I admire this film for ending neither of the ways I was expecting and thereby upsetting me more. By the last act, the patrol has been reduced to the peculiar core of its ensemble cast: the Sergeant and the two men least suited to be left alive with one another, the cracking music-hall jokester Morelli (Wallace Ford) and the somberly religious, never altogether stable Sanders (Boris Karloff). They do not represent the microcosm of their community. They are its stripped-down extremes. For all his irrepressible air of the class clown, Morelli has proved himself no lightweight; he greeted the oasis with a chorus of "Mother, May I Go Out to Swim," claimed a bunk in their sand-drifted bivouac with a flourish on his harmonica and a pratfall from the trouping days of "Morel and Moree—Acrobatic Dancers," and ran out under fire to rescue a wounded comrade, even when all he brought back was a corpse. He unravels so quickly and miserably, it's like a slap in the face until the audience understands how each of the patrol's deaths has ground itself into the high-wire tragedy that washed up his civilian life. "We wasn't exactly married, but if ever a guy got a wife that was too good for him, that's what happened to me when I hooked up with Jessie . . . She wasn't killed," he finishes the bitter little irony, "—'cause I'm a Jonah." Far more than dying, he's afraid of living on when everyone else around him has paid the price of his bad luck. He goes candidly to pieces at the thought of being alone. In the meantime, Sanders has already achieved the solitude of a private reality, a febrile amalgamation of history and psychogeography and PTSD in which he's not wrong to call the Fertile Crescent "the actual Garden of Eden," but then it's onward, Christian scarecrow, a Crusader in braces and puttees, to reclaim it in his Savior's name. With his drawn face and his voice that catches like a sob even when he's smiling, he makes a piteous, half-poetic figure, derided by the other soldiers as "Brother Sanders" and "Soapy," but he really looks like a man who left his sanity on the battlefield and brought away only his faith. It doesn't make his escalating zeal any less exasperating or frightening, but his fellows clung to their own palliatives—their ideals, their illusions—just as hard and vainly; except that it crystallizes the subtext of foreign wars in holy lands, we don't need to see his singled out. What's difficult is that he once vowed to save Morelli's soul and Morelli with Lee–Enfield in hand swore he'd kill him first. The viewer can't help but wonder if that's the whimper their world will end with, if their damage will get the Sergeant collaterally killed. If we are observing the codes of the Western which The Lost Patrol resembles on more levels than its desert plain, then perhaps the cavalry will ride in at the last minute; after all, before it was pinned down in the oasis, the patrol was trying to return to its brigade. If we pursue the disintegration of hope and purpose to its logical war-horror conclusion, however, even if the Sergeant's gambit of torching the plane into a distress signal pays off, by the time help arrives there'll be nobody left to save.
Fair and square and devastating, the film has it both ways. Sanders meets his end with Christian self-destruction, striding into the dunes like John the Baptist in a sackcloth of Witney blanket, aiding his steps with a cross of dry branches until the bullets drive him to his knees and leave it sticking meaninglessly in the crest of the sand. A mensch to the last for a man he didn't even like, Morelli once again runs into the line of fire to save a comrade, but this time he's a Jonah to no one but himself, cut down in helpless view of the Sergeant still calling his name. The last man standing after all, the Sergeant is left a figure of ferocious impotence, bare-chested except for his bandolier, hefting Rambo-like the machine gun he took off the plane and roaring at the impassive, waiting desert, "Come and get me! Come on! Come on!" Nothing answers him, not even the courtesy of a potshot. A comparatively idyllic day ago, we heard this square-shouldered bruiser of a man confess that his sole reason for soldiering was to take care of his son, the child whom he had hated at first for the death of his mother and then loved desperately for his own sake: "That's what I've been fighting for. What'll happen to him now without me?" Now we watch him dig his own grave in the midst of his men's, dress for his own funeral in the stifling white uniform none of them wore in full past their first day under siege, ready to go to his God like—Kipling said it, who else—a soldier. It does not feel like a reclamation any more than the sight of the Arab snipers coming at last over the rim of the oasis is alarming or the Sergeant's convulsive machine-gunning of them is triumphant. They are half a dozen at most and the automatic's chatter shears them down before they can get off more than a wild shot or two of their own; they lie in the same ragged heaps as the British they killed and still the Sergeant keeps the Lewis chewing away, unstoppable as his own sobbing laughter, calling on his catalogue of dead men to witness what he's done. "Quincannon! Brown! There they are! I got them! Morelli! Pearson! Pearson! Morelli! MacKay! Look—" And then he's silent as if there are no more words in him, holding the rifle he seized to kill the last sniper as if he's forgotten the use of his hands, and that's how the relief column finds him, having followed the smoldering pyre of the plane: he can credit their crisp, trim, jingling reality far less than all the nightmare of the last few days. Even Sanders never looked so unmoored. Asked about his men, he can only stare a thousand yards at the makeshift graveyard of cavalry sabres glinting cruelly in the sun. The column rides away into the evening; the palms wave over the last post. The Sergeant's grave is still empty, but did any of them survive?
I would love to know the antecedents of this film beyond its source novel and whether it really is such a species of one, because right now it looks to me like the taproot text for everything from The Flight of the Phoenix (1956) to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972) to Predator (1987) to Neither Heaven nor Earth (Ni le ciel ni la terre, 2015) to Dunkirk (2017) to The Terror (2018). If it reminds me of any other John Ford, it's my beloved, equally intimate and elemental The Long Voyage Home (1940), but structurally, tonally, so much of it feels decades later. I suppose once again it is not that the pre-Codes were so prescient, but that the Code itself retarded the emotional growth of the movies for so long. This one's for the grown-ups, and not because of the body count. I had thought there was nothing notable about the cinematography by Harold Wenstrom, but he manages to make the vast spaces of a desert look panickily claustrophobic. The score by Max Steiner is interwoven with traditional tunes and motifs that sound like them, as might be running through the men's heads as they tell their stories and die. The Lost Patrol doesn't go as far as some of its descendants and I wouldn't expect it to, but it does care about the myth-making and limits of empires and men; it cares palpably about the small human gestures which mean so much and so little at the same time. Early on we hear the warning, "Stop looking at the moon or you'll be seeing ghosts," but in the end that's all we're left with, late-daylit. A shame that dying in someone else's desert hasn't gone out of fashion in the last hundred years. This garden brought to you by my actual backers at Patreon.
Like so much of the best horror, it starts like no such thing. A bugle summons the roll call of the credits as snake-charmer music whirls over shots of waving palms and trudging dunes. With the Arizona desert standing in for the equally hundred and ten in the shade south of the Tigris, a title card sets the apparent tone: "Mesopotamia 1917. While the World War raged in Europe, British troops were fighting in a far corner of the world. Small solitary patrols moved over the vast Mesopotamian desert, that seemed on fire with the sun. The molten sky gloated over them. The endless desert wore the blank look of death. Yet these men marched on without a murmur, fighting an unseen Arab enemy who always struck in the dark—like a relentless ghost!" We are primed for an adventure at the edges of empire, the thin khaki line leading on the red ink of the map. And then with an unimportant little squiff of a sound out of the rolling emptiness of sand and sky, the lieutenant who kept all his instructions in his head pitches to the ground, sniper-drilled clean by daylight, and just like that the eleven survivors of this little detachment of the King's Own Hussars are adrift in the desert with no direction, lit. or fig. "A fine thing, ain't it? A patrol patrolling and not knowing where they're at! And the orders locked up in that dead kid back there." The problem of water is solved by a lucky stumble onto an oasis where dates can stand in for rations as long as the men can stomach them, but ammunition doesn't grow on trees and the loss of the horse-lines overnight establishes the logistics of their position with brutal simplicity. So long as the soldiers stick to the shelter of the small, crumbling mosque and its immediate perimeter, they're safe, but beyond the cordon of the palms—or above it—they can be picked off with impunity by an unknown number of irregulars waiting just out of sight of the shallow bowl of the dunes. They have no means of calling for help or even estimating the strength of their enemy. All they can do is hold out as long as they can; all the movie can do is observe how they behave as they're whittled down from the numbers of discipline and camaraderie to that bone of a question, how you face your dying. Who by sentiment and who by irony, who by glory and who by faith, who by compassion and who by defiance, who by hatred and who by damned bad luck. So many by empire, which always seems to be calling.
Part of the difference of The Lost Patrol is that while I recognize its absurdity, futility, and anger from other war movies of its generation, I have never seen another one set during the Mesopotamian campaign, which has the dubiously timeless distinction of being the most commercial theater of its war. The soldiers of the lost patrol haven't just been sent to die for the honor of king and country, though it never does to let the side down where the subcontinent might see. They are protecting British oil interests in the Middle East. The Ottomans didn't even consider the region strategically significant enough to map fully and here charges in the groundwork for the Cairo Conference and all those land wars in Asia that worked out as far back as Carrhae, classically where they shouldn't be and trying not to suspect it. It opens the film up to question not just the war but the imperial mechanisms behind it, and however these misgivings ghost around the edges of the men's awareness, the audience gets their drift. Gentleman-ranker Brown (Reginald Denny) calls, "Selamat tinggal!" when he wants his companions to lay off and reminisces about the golden-skinned girls of Malaya with a tropical nostalgia that wouldn't be out of place in "Mandalay," but a love of Kipling is explicitly the death of green recruit Pearson (Douglas Walton), chasing the colonial romance of adventuring in exotic climes until it catches him with a knife on sentry-go. Old sweats like MacKay (Paul Hanson) and Quincannon (J.M. Kerrigan) are no more armored by their cynical service—reminded of the time he was broken in Poona for "being drunk and disorderly, setting fire to your tent, and appearing on the parade ground with nothing on but your drawers and your topi," the latter reproves the former, "That's a dirty lie. I did not set fire to me tent"—than new Tommies by their escapism or patriotism, such as sends homesick Hale (Billy Bevan) scrambling up a palm tree from which he'll gain just enough vantage to spot the barrel-glint of the rifle that will kill him. The stiff upper lip receives the script's finest and most awful moment of black comedy when a reconnaissance pilot (Howard Wilson) alights at the edge of the oasis as if straight off a recruitment poster, impossibly fresh-faced and waving cheerily in the face of shouted warnings, Biggles to the life. He gets five steps from his crate with his swagger stick under his arm and crumples, shot straight through the silly ass: "I say—" His clever flying machine bakes uselessly in the sun, the symbol of science and civilization and a war that fielded cavalry charges against chemical weapons. Even the hard-bitten Sergeant (Victor McLaglen, in real life a veteran of the Mesopotamian campaign) finds himself reviling their unseen enemies in one breath and wondering with the next, "What's the war mean to them? Might just as well be friendly. Some are. Some ain't." His question goes unanswered, but into its silence rushes the terrible genius of the possibility that we aren't watching a war story, really, at all. Maybe the snipers are in the employ of the Central Powers. Maybe they just don't like the British off their own bat. We never find out and it doesn't change the feeling that simply by entering the desert, these soldiers have drawn their deaths to themselves, like sun-dazed Abelson (Sammy Stein) shooting at something never shown us in the stretch and shimmer of the dunes and receiving in answer the bullet of the sniper who took a fix on him from the sound. Like the men scared and second-guessing, you find yourself tracing the many-worlds of this clusterfire farther and farther back, trying to find a point where the patrol might not have been doomed. Once you've passed Jacky Fisher, the Industrial Revolution, and the East India Company, you might as well head for the stratigraphy of the Cretaceous. Too late. "Gwendolyn is napoo."
I admire this film for ending neither of the ways I was expecting and thereby upsetting me more. By the last act, the patrol has been reduced to the peculiar core of its ensemble cast: the Sergeant and the two men least suited to be left alive with one another, the cracking music-hall jokester Morelli (Wallace Ford) and the somberly religious, never altogether stable Sanders (Boris Karloff). They do not represent the microcosm of their community. They are its stripped-down extremes. For all his irrepressible air of the class clown, Morelli has proved himself no lightweight; he greeted the oasis with a chorus of "Mother, May I Go Out to Swim," claimed a bunk in their sand-drifted bivouac with a flourish on his harmonica and a pratfall from the trouping days of "Morel and Moree—Acrobatic Dancers," and ran out under fire to rescue a wounded comrade, even when all he brought back was a corpse. He unravels so quickly and miserably, it's like a slap in the face until the audience understands how each of the patrol's deaths has ground itself into the high-wire tragedy that washed up his civilian life. "We wasn't exactly married, but if ever a guy got a wife that was too good for him, that's what happened to me when I hooked up with Jessie . . . She wasn't killed," he finishes the bitter little irony, "—'cause I'm a Jonah." Far more than dying, he's afraid of living on when everyone else around him has paid the price of his bad luck. He goes candidly to pieces at the thought of being alone. In the meantime, Sanders has already achieved the solitude of a private reality, a febrile amalgamation of history and psychogeography and PTSD in which he's not wrong to call the Fertile Crescent "the actual Garden of Eden," but then it's onward, Christian scarecrow, a Crusader in braces and puttees, to reclaim it in his Savior's name. With his drawn face and his voice that catches like a sob even when he's smiling, he makes a piteous, half-poetic figure, derided by the other soldiers as "Brother Sanders" and "Soapy," but he really looks like a man who left his sanity on the battlefield and brought away only his faith. It doesn't make his escalating zeal any less exasperating or frightening, but his fellows clung to their own palliatives—their ideals, their illusions—just as hard and vainly; except that it crystallizes the subtext of foreign wars in holy lands, we don't need to see his singled out. What's difficult is that he once vowed to save Morelli's soul and Morelli with Lee–Enfield in hand swore he'd kill him first. The viewer can't help but wonder if that's the whimper their world will end with, if their damage will get the Sergeant collaterally killed. If we are observing the codes of the Western which The Lost Patrol resembles on more levels than its desert plain, then perhaps the cavalry will ride in at the last minute; after all, before it was pinned down in the oasis, the patrol was trying to return to its brigade. If we pursue the disintegration of hope and purpose to its logical war-horror conclusion, however, even if the Sergeant's gambit of torching the plane into a distress signal pays off, by the time help arrives there'll be nobody left to save.
Fair and square and devastating, the film has it both ways. Sanders meets his end with Christian self-destruction, striding into the dunes like John the Baptist in a sackcloth of Witney blanket, aiding his steps with a cross of dry branches until the bullets drive him to his knees and leave it sticking meaninglessly in the crest of the sand. A mensch to the last for a man he didn't even like, Morelli once again runs into the line of fire to save a comrade, but this time he's a Jonah to no one but himself, cut down in helpless view of the Sergeant still calling his name. The last man standing after all, the Sergeant is left a figure of ferocious impotence, bare-chested except for his bandolier, hefting Rambo-like the machine gun he took off the plane and roaring at the impassive, waiting desert, "Come and get me! Come on! Come on!" Nothing answers him, not even the courtesy of a potshot. A comparatively idyllic day ago, we heard this square-shouldered bruiser of a man confess that his sole reason for soldiering was to take care of his son, the child whom he had hated at first for the death of his mother and then loved desperately for his own sake: "That's what I've been fighting for. What'll happen to him now without me?" Now we watch him dig his own grave in the midst of his men's, dress for his own funeral in the stifling white uniform none of them wore in full past their first day under siege, ready to go to his God like—Kipling said it, who else—a soldier. It does not feel like a reclamation any more than the sight of the Arab snipers coming at last over the rim of the oasis is alarming or the Sergeant's convulsive machine-gunning of them is triumphant. They are half a dozen at most and the automatic's chatter shears them down before they can get off more than a wild shot or two of their own; they lie in the same ragged heaps as the British they killed and still the Sergeant keeps the Lewis chewing away, unstoppable as his own sobbing laughter, calling on his catalogue of dead men to witness what he's done. "Quincannon! Brown! There they are! I got them! Morelli! Pearson! Pearson! Morelli! MacKay! Look—" And then he's silent as if there are no more words in him, holding the rifle he seized to kill the last sniper as if he's forgotten the use of his hands, and that's how the relief column finds him, having followed the smoldering pyre of the plane: he can credit their crisp, trim, jingling reality far less than all the nightmare of the last few days. Even Sanders never looked so unmoored. Asked about his men, he can only stare a thousand yards at the makeshift graveyard of cavalry sabres glinting cruelly in the sun. The column rides away into the evening; the palms wave over the last post. The Sergeant's grave is still empty, but did any of them survive?
I would love to know the antecedents of this film beyond its source novel and whether it really is such a species of one, because right now it looks to me like the taproot text for everything from The Flight of the Phoenix (1956) to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972) to Predator (1987) to Neither Heaven nor Earth (Ni le ciel ni la terre, 2015) to Dunkirk (2017) to The Terror (2018). If it reminds me of any other John Ford, it's my beloved, equally intimate and elemental The Long Voyage Home (1940), but structurally, tonally, so much of it feels decades later. I suppose once again it is not that the pre-Codes were so prescient, but that the Code itself retarded the emotional growth of the movies for so long. This one's for the grown-ups, and not because of the body count. I had thought there was nothing notable about the cinematography by Harold Wenstrom, but he manages to make the vast spaces of a desert look panickily claustrophobic. The score by Max Steiner is interwoven with traditional tunes and motifs that sound like them, as might be running through the men's heads as they tell their stories and die. The Lost Patrol doesn't go as far as some of its descendants and I wouldn't expect it to, but it does care about the myth-making and limits of empires and men; it cares palpably about the small human gestures which mean so much and so little at the same time. Early on we hear the warning, "Stop looking at the moon or you'll be seeing ghosts," but in the end that's all we're left with, late-daylit. A shame that dying in someone else's desert hasn't gone out of fashion in the last hundred years. This garden brought to you by my actual backers at Patreon.
no subject
no subject
Thank you! It fascinated me.
Of John Ford's work, I've only seen a few Westerns, and his whole filmography is intimidatingly large.
I've seen almost none of his Westerns! Counting early second-unit directing and once being replaced, it looks as though the films of his I've seen are What Price Glory? (1926), Upstream (1927), Arrowsmith (1931), The Lost Patrol (1934), The Hurricane (1937), Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), They Were Expendable (1945), The Quiet Man (1952), Mister Roberts (1955), and Sergeant Rutledge (1960), which is comparatively little, more than I thought, and exactly two Westerns; he's so strongly identified with the genre, however, that I had confused two films by Howard Hawks and one by William Wellman into his filmography until I made this list. Which ones have you seen and would you recommend them?
no subject
My Darling Clementine (1946)
The Searchers (1956)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962)
parts of How The West Was Won (1962)
And I would definitely recommend The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.
My Darling Clementine was charming though I don't remember it well, and of The Searchers the only parts I found enjoyable were the first half hour and the last five minutes (though those bits are magnificent).
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I take that compliment seriously. Thank you. For what it's worth, I am always trying to describe what the films were able to show me.
no subject
Who by sentiment and who by irony, who by glory and who by faith, who by compassion and who by defiance, who by hatred and who by damned bad luck. So many by empire, which always seems to be calling. --Beautiful. Love the Leonard Cohen you're nodding to; love where you take it.
holding the rifle he seized to kill the last sniper as if he's forgotten the use of his hands --there is a poem in that. It, in itself, is a poem. Your (and by "your," I really do mean YOUR, in this case) eyes see things, and then your mind finds the words for them, and I just reel.
he manages to make the vast spaces of a desert look panickily claustrophobic --I can feel how this would feel.
it cares palpably about the small human gestures which mean so much and so little at the same time. --FINE I'll go off and collapse in a corner and weep. But really. This is what gets me. This is it.
This garden brought to you by my actual backers at Patreon. If I could, I'd get you a MacArthur.
no subject
I think that's why the word poignant exists. Also empathy.
--Beautiful. Love the Leonard Cohen you're nodding to; love where you take it.
Thank you. It's such a powerful litany. Cohen himself was inspired by the Unetanah Tokef, the central prayer of Yom Kippur. And this story is a kind of judgment, except it would be easier to take if it were divine.
--FINE I'll go off and collapse in a corner and weep. But really. This is what gets me. This is it.
It's the important thing.
There's a scene in the first act where the men are settling into the mosque; Morelli is playing "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag," reminding Hale of the band that played as his wife saw him off to the war. "Here was I, standing on the deck, and there was Molly in a red hat, a-waving from the dock." He was married and shipped out on the same day. Proudly, he shows the picture of his son included with her last letter to Cairo—his two-month-old son—and the jaunty underscoring of Morelli's harmonica breaks off like a hiccup as he and Brown simultaneously realize that whoever the child's father is, mathematically it can't be Hale. A moment ago, Brown was baiting Sanders for his religion; will he do the same to Hale for his cuckoldry? A wistful, orchestral version of the song comes in under his next words, said firmly without a trace of mockery: "Splendid fellow, Herbert. Nothing like a family." Morelli runs the numbers again in his head and, too, keeps shtum. It's none of their business. If he makes it back to Blighty, Hale can take it up with his wife. If they're all going to die out here, what's the point of making him miserable? It goes by fast, but it's in the script and it's real. The Sergeant buries every one of his men.
If I could, I'd get you a MacArthur.
*hugs*
I believe you. Thank you.
no subject
;_;
To co-opt a famous Bible passage, The compassion of humankind is greater than the compassion of God. [Because the compassion of humankind can operate in powerlessness and misery, and as the Bible elsewhere observes, it's a different thing entirely to give from your own need than from your excess.]
no subject
no subject
Thank you. That's a wonderful programming idea. I almost certainly heard of the film when the Harvard Film Archive did its three-part John Ford retrospective in 2010—it's where I saw several of the entries mentioned above—but they must not have written about it in a way that sounded unmissable, because I never tracked it down on my own time. Ian McDowell posted some stills last week and I decided to give it a try and whammo. I hope it's well-known.
no subject
no subject
Mow. Thank you.
The ending feels like something thirty years ahead of its time, but perhaps that's because for a period in between there was never talk of such bleakness. I don't know.
I don't know for certain, but I lean strongly in the direction that there wasn't. Even Battleground (1949), which I consider the closest a Code-era Hollywood film got to presenting the realities of war—Jody calls and the "Battered Bastards of Bastogne" and all—doesn't end so hard. Then again, it wasn't the war to. The Lost Patrol feels like it channeled straight into Vietnam. And then back into Iraq, and Afghanistan.