BOT's Top 50 Historical Fiction Films - The Countdown

[Cap]

Apoc at 32? First swerve of the list. Hmmmmm 🤔

[Plain Old Tele]

1 hour ago, Cap said:

Another film from 2010s?

 

IKR

 

btw @4815162342 @Jake Gittes I watched Harakiri tonight. ‘Twas indeed rad.

Edited May 9, 2020 by Plain Old Tele

[The Panda]

@Cap prepare for more ground to be broke

 

 

 

"It was in the silence that I heard Your voice."

 

Historical Setting: Tokugawa Shogunate, Nagasaki, Japan

 

Source from the Period

 

"1. Japan is the country of gods, but has been receiving false teachings from Christian
countries. This cannot be tolerated any further.

2. The [missionaries] approach people in provinces and districts to make them their
followers, and let them destroy shrines and temples. This is an unheard of outrage. When a
vassal receives a province, a district, a village, or another form of a fief, he must consider it as a
property entrusted to him on a temporary basis. He must follow the laws of this country, and
abide by their intent. However, some vassals illegally [commend part of their fiefs to the
church]. This is a culpable offense.

3. The padres, by their special knowledge [in the sciences and medicine], feel that they can
at will entice people to become their believers. In doing so they commit the illegal act of
destroying the teachings of Buddha prevailing in Japan. These padres cannot be permitted to
remain in Japan. They must prepare to leave the country within twenty days of the issuance of
this notice.

4. The black [Portuguese and Spanish] ships come to Japan to engage in trade. Thus the
matter is a separate one. They can continue to engage in trade."

- The Edicts of Toyotomi Hideyoshi:
Excerpts from Expulsion of Missionaries, 1587

 

Historical Context

 

"Early bereft of their foreign clergy and deprived of all Christian books,3 including the Bible itself, the kakure kirishitan evolved ac- cording to their own indigenous systems. Originally this was probably tactical: Christianity was outlawed in 1614 and the rite of ebumi , (trampling on a Christian plaque) was introduced in 1629,4 leaving the faithful with only four choices: martyrdom, conversion to Buddhism, self-imposed exile, or going underground.

 

Going underground requires a strategy and the kakure kirishitan, surround- ed by a dominant Buddhist culture, attempted to absorb, imitate, but redeploy its symbols. This was not only necessary to survive, but also an attempt to preserve their own religious identity by paradoxically imitating that of their adversary. Such a strategy is indeed risky because what begins as a superficial adoption sometimes proves overwhelming and ends up subverting the very values its adoption strove to protect. One may start out by trying to convert foreign symbols to one's own system, but end up instead being converted by them. In the early days of Christianity in Japan, Christian symbols had been immensely popular: elegant ladies wore hairpins with gold crosses painted on them, while warriors' helmets and stirrups were sometimes similarly decorated. But when anti-Christian persecution commenced, a new relation to these symbols emerged which could be called forced or artificial syncretism with the dominant element being Buddhist. Kakure kirishitan made use of Bud- dhist objects but added some Christian symbol to convert them, as it were, to their own beliefs. Particularly prevalent were the household altar statues of Kannon, who in some cases can be found wearing a nearly undetectable cross around her neck; in other instances she bears a cross on the back of her head.

… 

 

Symbols are indeed powerful, as also are the social forces that kept the kakure kirishitan hiding for so long that concealment became an all-encom-passing end in itself. Some hope of change and adaptation had been raised, but the faithful could not recover what they had hidden only too well even from themselves. In the end petty and insignificant differences kept them divided and left them vulnerable. The kakure kirishitan initially began by hiding their religious faith out of necessity, but they become so accustomed to concealing both their faith and their shame that the two became enmeshed. To be a kakure kirishitan on Goto was also to be a hirakimon, an itsukimon, a poor and despised human being. But once they reached a semblance of economic equality with the jigemon, the kakure kirishitan would seem to have nothing left to hide. But hiding and concealment have always been the mainstay, the very core of their religious and social identity, and it is truly ironic that religious freedom and economic stability pose a threat to the continued existence of the kakure kirishitan."

- Religion Concealed: The Kakure Kirishitan on Narushima

Christal Whelan

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"The history of Christian missionaries—in Japan and elsewhere—is a complicated one. Remember that when speaking about “Christian missionaries” we are talking about a 2,000-year history that begins with St. Paul and took place in almost every country in the world. Add to that the variety of the originating countries of the missionaries, and you get an idea of the complexity of the history. Even if we consider simply the era in which the film is set, the 17th century, almost every European country, was sending Christian missionaries abroad. Also, we must take into account the wide variety of approaches among the many Catholic religious orders active in the missionary field: Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and so on. In some instances, missionary priests, brothers and sisters traveled with representatives of the colonial powers and were seen, rightly or wrongly, as adjuncts of these political actors.

 

But the missionaries came to these new lands to bring what they considered a gift of inestimable value to the people they would meet: the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Let us look at the case of Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe. Both have come to Japan to spread the Gospel. (We can reasonably presume their being sent from Portugal not simply to find Father Ferreira but later to remain in Japan.) They are bringing what they consider to be the most precious thing that they know to a new people: Jesus. Is it arrogant to say that they are bringing a gift? Others may think so, but not to my mind. Think of it as a physician wanting to bring medicine to someone he or she knows is in need. And doing so at peril to his or her own life.

 

In reality, Jesuit missionaries poured themselves out selflessly for the peoples among whom they ministered—enduring extraordinary physical hardships, mastering the local languages (even writing dictionaries for those languages, which are still in use), eating unfamiliar foods and working as hard as any of the people with whom they ministered. (Read the diaries of St. Jean de Brébeuf, one of the North American Martyrs, and his admonitions to his brother Jesuits that they needed to paddle their canoes as hard as the Hurons did, so as not to be seen as lazy.) This is called “inculturation,” a loving insertion of oneself into the local culture.

 

Jesuits both fictional and real did  this out of love. Out of love for God and love for the peoples with whom they were ministering. If you doubt their motivation I would ask this: Would you leave behind all that you knew—your country, your language, your family, your friends, your food, your culture, your traditions—to travel across the globe at immense risk, in order to give a gift to a group of people whom you’d never met, a group of people whom many in your home country think are unworthy of being given that gift—knowing that you might be tortured and killed? To me that is an immense act of love." 

- Fr. James Martin answers 5 common questions about 'Silence'

The American Jesuit Review

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"Intent on investigating the truth behind Father Cristovão Ferreira's abrupt end of correspondence, the devout Portuguese Catholic priests, Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe, set off to Japan, in 1633. In great disbelief, as the rumours of Ferreira's apostasy still echo in their minds, the zealous Jesuit missionaries try to locate their mentor, amid the bloodshed of the violent anti-Christian purges. Under those circumstances, the two men and the Japanese guide, Kichijiro, arrive in Japan, only to witness firsthand the unbearable burden of those who have a different belief in a land founded on tradition. Now--as the powerful Grand Inquisitor, Inoue, performs hideous tortures on the brave Japanese Christians--Father Rodrigues will soon have to put his faith to the ultimate test: renounce it in exchange for the prisoners' lives. There, in the ends of the world, a subtle change has begun; however, why is God's silence so deafening?"

 

Critic Opinion

 

"This is a direct challenge to Rodrigues’s perception of what it means to minister and have faith, one forged in a European context. That the image of Christ calls him to drop his preconceptions rends his heart and challenges him. He must not just repudiate his religious beliefs externally, but also relinquish his own idea of how he’ll serve God, which in turn causes him to wonder whether he is fit to do so at all.  The agony of Rodrigues’s choice to trample the fumie, then, is the agony of letting go of his self-image of faith for another one, an ignominious one in which he will always be the priest who apostatized, no longer the agent of grace and the sacraments to the Japanese. The movie (and the novel) flip to another point of view after Rodrigues’s apostatization, and now we can only see his actions from the outside, rather than experiencing them through the voiceover of his thoughts, agonies, and prayers that we heard before. Rodrigues’s faith, as it were, has become silent. His suffering for Christ isn’t physical, but spiritual: He is questioning whether his faith is faith at all, and whether God is with him even when he seems to be so far away.

 

But the fumie is an image of the Christ he is meant to imitate, and it is covered in mud, stepped upon by feet, nothing compared to the glorious image he holds in his mind. It’s more in keeping with the Bible’s depiction of Christ (as lowly, crucified in the manner of a thief), but its very kindness in the face of his impending betrayal is enough to break Rodrigues’s heart.

During the film’s telling, climactic moment — when Rodrigues finally tramples on the fumie — you can hear a rooster crow somewhere in the distance. That, of course, is the same thing that happened in the Gospels, when Peter denied Christ before the crucifixion.

 

 

Since seeing Silence, I’ve been eager to know how others will react to the film. I am a Christian, and Endō’s Silence has been widely read and studied in my community for decades. Even though I’m familiar with the story, I found the film unsettling: The tendency for any religious person is to seek definitive answers for the greatest, most troubling existential questions, and I was confronted with the suffering that can happen on the path to faith, and the doubt that has to be part of that.  But it’s been remarkable to discover that Silence is a challenging film for many critics and early viewers, including those who aren’t interested in religion at all, or who don’t identify with a particular faith. The genius of Endō’s story and Scorsese’s adaptation is that it won’t characterize anyone as a saint, nor will it either fully condone or reject the colonialist impulses, the religious oppression, the apostasy, or the faltering faith of its characters. There is space within the story for every broken attempt to fix the world. Endō’s answer still lies in Christ, but his perception of Christ is radically different from what most people are familiar with — and even those who don’t identify with Christianity will find the film unnerving and haunting.

 

 

 

Silence is the kind of film that cuts at everyone’s self-perceptions, including my own. I haven’t been able to shake it, because I need to remember — now, frankly, more than ever — that I am not able nor responsible to save the world, let alone myself. How the world changes is a giant, cosmic mystery. To grow too far from that and become hardened in my own belief is a danger: I grow complacent and deaf, too willing to push others away.  In Silence, nobody is Christ but Christ himself. Everyone else is a Peter or a Judas, a faltering rejecter, for whom there may be hope anyway. What Scorsese has accomplished in adapting Endō’s novel is a close reminder that the path to redemption lies through suffering, and that it may not be I who must save the world so much as I am the one who needs saving."

- Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

 

BOT User Opinion

 

"Not only is Silence the best movie of the decade, and the most overlooked one (which is shocking given it's Scorsese's career long passion project), not only do I find it to be the best film of Scorsese's career, it has just about moved its way into one of my top 5 films of all time.  One of the most powerful movies I have ever watched.  Silence is certainly not an easy watch, and one that you'll certainly leave gaps of time before you come back and re-watch it, but that does not diminish the immense power of the movie.  It is not an easy, glowing endorsement of the faithful, nor is it a glorification of martyrdom, and it's also not a skeptical critique on religion.  Silence is a layered and nuanced look at faith, to what extent a person will go to hold onto it (to what extent the faithful should hold onto it), a question about suffering and how it can be allowed, and ultimately a work that is affirming to the spirit and rewarding to the faithful.  There's movies you never forget, there's movies that stick with you, there's movies that challenge you, but Silence is one of the few that goes beyond all of that.  If you're willing and of the right state of mind, it just might etch its way in your soul.  It's a movie with ideas and imagery that I'm still meditating over three years later, but ideas and imagery that were always there within my personal spiritual theology, it just provided the clarity to allow me to look and see them." - @The Panda

 

Factoids

 

Silence was directed by Martin Scorsese.  It received 38 points, 6 votes and won over Apocalypse Now by having 2 Top 3 Placements to Apocalypse Now's 1 Top 3 Placement.

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (1), England (1), France (1), Israel (1), Korea (1), Japan (3), Spain (1), United States (9), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (1), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (1), 19th Century (2), 1930s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (4), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (1), Middle Ages (1), World War 1/1910s (1), World War 2/1940s (3)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - United States (2), 21st Century - United States (2), 1930s - Korea (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1960s - United States (3), 1960s - Vietnam (1), Classical Period - Israel (1), Middle Ages - England (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (1), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), David Fincher (2), Anthoney Harvey (1), Terry Jones (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Oliver Stone (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Robert Wise (1)

 

Decades Represented: 60s (4), 70s (2), 80s (2), 90s (2), 00s (2), 10s (8)

 

 

[The Panda]

The next batch of honorable mentions

 

 

76.    The Wind Rises 
77.    The Shawshank Redemption
78.    Letters from Iwo Jima 
79.    Casino 
80.    MASH 
81.    Roma 
82.    The King’s Speech 
83.    Unforgiven 
84.    The Last Samurai 
85.    Alexander Nevsky
86.    Aguirre, The Wrath of God 
87.    Spotlight 
88.    Platoon 
89.    (Tie for 88) L.A. Confidential 
90.    1776  
91.    The Godfather Part II
92.    Persepolis
93.    A Man for All Seasons
94.    Blood Diamond
95.    Becket 
96.    Barry Lyndon 
97.    First Man
98.    Ugetsu 
99.    The Searchers 
100.    Cinema Paradiso 
 

[MrGamer]

Michael Mann to Tele every time a Blackhat joke comes up:

 

[The Panda]

 

 

"Sextus, you ask how to fight an idea. Well I'll tell you how... with another idea!"

 

Historical Setting: 1st Century Roman Occupied Judea

 

Source from the Period

 

"But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.

 

Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed."

- The Annals, Tacitus Roman Historian and Senator

 

Historical Context

 

"Chariot races took place in the Circus Maximus, a huge, oval shaped stadium that could seat nearly 200,000 spectators. The stadium had two long parallel sides and one rounded end with seating all around. The other end was filled with stables and starting boxes.  Down the center of the racecourse ran a low wall, or spina, which contained decorative sculptures that would be tilted to let spectators know how many laps had been completed.

 

Races were rough and raucous – they lasted seven laps and would include as many as 12 chariots at any one time. To be as fast as possible, the chariots had to be very light, which made them very dangerous for their drivers, who were usually slaves or freedmen.  Many drivers were thrown from a broken or overturned chariot. They could then be trampled and killed by the charging horses, or get caught in the reins and dragged to their deaths.  Given the dangerous nature of the sport, chariot racing was very expensive. However, its popularity meant that it was also very profitable, and over time, it became highly organized into an early form of show business.

 

Chariots were organized in four main teams – Red, White, Blue and Green. Each team had its own scouts for finding talented riders and horses, and each team was passionately supported. Like sports fans throughout history, a team’s fans were fiercely partisan and would hope for rival teams to fail. This became so common that curse tablets were made to spook the opposing teams.  But not everyone was such a fan. Like the gladiators, chariot races were popular sports for the Roman masses, not the social elites, who disliked the mob behavior of the fans and found the sport unremarkable and childish.

 

One exception was the Emperor Nero. He was passionate about horses and even drove his own chariot. Nero’s enthusiasm for such a lowly sport scandalized Rome's elite, but endeared him to the masses. The historian, Tacitus, sneered at the mob for this: "For such is a crowd — eager for excitement and thrilled if the emperor shares their tastes." However, like gladiators, it would take more than disapproval from educated elites to put an end to the sport and chariot races survived for centuries to come."

- The Roman Empire in the 1st Century, PBS

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a fictional Jewish prince living in Jerusalem. He was a childhood friend of Messala (Stephen Boyd), the new Roman tribune. It all goes wrong when Messala tries to persuade Ben-Hur to inform on anti-Roman Jews. "I would do anything for you except betray my own people," Ben-Hur replies. Historically, it's true that there were tensions between Romans and Jews, but the two most interesting things going on in this scene (which doesn't appear in the novel) are about the 1950s, not the first century. First, the talk of informing is a swipe at McCarthyism, which had menaced Hollywood through much of the decade. Second, it's kind of gay. Gore Vidal, who wrote a draft of the screenplay, claimed to have envisaged a backstory in which Ben-Hur and Messala were lovers. This, then, is their breakup. "You're either for me or against me," Messala tells Ben-Hur. "Then I am against you," says Ben-Hur. Messala just about resists the urge to press himself literally against him. According to Vidal, Boyd duly acted this as a love scene. Heston, less cosmopolitan, was none the wiser.

 

When Ben-Hur is falsely accused of throwing a roof tile at Valerius Gratus, he is sentenced to slavery in the galleys. This is one of the film's (and the book's) biggest blunders. Galley slavery was hardly known in the Roman empire, and there are no records of it being used as a punishment. Not least, this was because most Roman galleys – including the triremes shown in the film – required skilled rowers. The only substantial Roman use of galley slaves was recorded in the second Punic war, more than 200 years before the period depicted in the movie. During that conflict, the Romans deployed the quinquereme, which had five men to an oar. Only one had to be a professional; the rest merely added muscle. Roman general Sextus Pompey and Emperor Augustus recruited slaves for their ships in the first century BC, but these men were freed first, then took the job by choice. Chained convicts enslaved as rowers are a modern phenomenon, first reliably recorded in 1443, when King Charles VII of France licensed a shipping magnate to pressgang vagabonds into his private fleet.

 

Ben-Hur is still spectacular to watch, though it would be more fun at half the length. As a historical recreation of first-century Judaea, it gets the names and places mostly right – but not much else." 

- William Wyler, The Guardian

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"Judah Ben-Hur lives as a rich Jewish prince and merchant in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1st century. Together with the new governor his old friend Messala arrives as commanding officer of the Roman legions. At first they are happy to meet after a long time but their different politic views separate them. During the welcome parade a roof tile falls down from Judah's house and injures the governor. Although Messala knows they are not guilty, he sends Judah to the galleys and throws his mother and sister into prison. But Judah swears to come back and take revenge."

 

Critic Opinion

 

"An extraordinary motion picture, greater in dimension and significance than any similar film of our time, Ben-Hur is more spectacular than any of the previous spectacles. More importantly, it is at the same time a highly rewarding dramatic experience, rich and complex in human values: a great adventure, full of excitement, visual beauty, thrills and unsurpassed cinema artistry. 

 

This is high praise but this work deserves it, for it enriches the screen, will enrich the lives of audiences all over the world and should reap a rich harvest in goodwill and financial returns for the entire film industry. The story of Ben-Hur and his feud with Messala is fictional, but the authors and director of this film have presented this fiction in the best realistic tradition. Through a close study and revelation of character they have given meaning and understanding to a period and a society in which many peoples were alienated from each other. The implications of the story, the relationships of the characters and the feuding forces within the society of the time have many parallels in life today. The film speaks out with the full force of inspired conviction and passionate concern for the doings and destiny of man."

- Jack Harrison, The Hollywood Report

 

BOT User Opinion

 

"When they say they don't make em like they used to, this is the type of film they talk about. Truly an epic film and for 3 and half hours the time just flies. One note always watch this in widescreen." - @DAR

 

Factoids

 

Ben-Hur (1959) was directed by William Wyler.  It received 39 points and 6 votes.

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (1), England (1), France (1), Israel (2), Korea (1), Japan (3), Spain (1), United States (9), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (1), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (1), 19th Century (2), 1930s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (4), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (2), Middle Ages (1), World War 1/1910s (1), World War 2/1940s (3)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - United States (2), 21st Century - United States (2), 1930s - Korea (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1960s - United States (3), 1960s - Vietnam (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Middle Ages - England (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (1), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), David Fincher (2), Anthoney Harvey (1), Terry Jones (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Oliver Stone (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 50s (1), 60s (4), 70s (2), 80s (2), 90s (2), 00s (2), 10s (8)

 

 

 

[Plain Old Tele]

I’m not really a huge fan of BEN-HUR, though the chariot race is certainly impressive.

[MrGamer]

Ben Hur 1959 is great and all but it didn’t have Morgan Freeman rocking a Bob Marley wig.

 

[CoolioD1]

well this is certainly a list of films.

[misafeco]

2 hours ago, Plain Old Tele said:

I’m not really a huge fan of BEN-HUR, though the chariot race is certainly impressive.

I always thought the chariot race is way overhyped. It was an impressive feat for the 1950's, but it wouldn't work without the rest of the story flowing so well. Take away everything else and you get the 2016 version - one scene with amazing visuals and not much else to offer.

Edited May 9, 2020 by misafeco

[Cap]

2 hours ago, Plain Old Tele said:

I’m not really a huge fan of BEN-HUR, though the chariot race is certainly impressive.

Well. Yeah. Someone died.

 

Omg mash did not crack the top 50 omg. 

[Plain Old Tele]

54 minutes ago, misafeco said:

I always thought the chariot race is way overhyped. It was an impressive feat for the 1950's, but it wouldn't work without the rest of the story flowing so well. Take away everything else and you get the 2016 version - one scene with amazing visuals and not much else to offer.

I guess I wasn’t really that into the story. 😂

[The Panda]

 

 

"Oh, that was beautiful. The mouse, he churned that cream into butter."

 

Historical Setting: 1960s New Rochelle, New York 

 

Source from this Period

 

"When my prison term was up in Sweden, US federal authorities took custody of me and returned me to the United States. Eventually, United States federal judge in Atlanta, Georgia, which sentenced me to 12 years in federal prison. I served 4 of the 12 years at a federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia. When I was 26 years old, the government offered to take me out of prison on the condition I go to work with an agency of the federal government for the remainder of my sentence until my parole had been satisfactorily completed. I agreed and was released.

 

This year, I’m celebrating 41 years at the FBI. I’ve been at the Bureau for more than four decades. I work out of Washington DC. I actually make my home in Charleston, South Carolina. So every Monday, I fly up to Washington, about an hour flight, and I go home on Thursday evenings.  I live in Charleston with my one and only wife of 40 plus years and my three sons. My youngest boy graduated from the University of Beijing in China. He went on to get his master’s degree there. He reads, writes, and speaks Chinese fluently. He works for a San Francisco gaming company called Glu Mobile.

 

He designs games for the Chinese market. All of his games are in Chinese, and they’re in their fourth generation as mobile games and devices. My middle son graduated from University of Nevada in Las Vegas. His degree was in business. He and his wife graduated together. And he and her own a business in South Carolina, and they manage that business together.  My oldest son graduated from University of Kansas at KU. We went on to Loyola School of Law in Chicago to get his law degree. Passed the bar in Illinois, and went on to make his dad very, very proud. He’s an FBI agent. He’s been in the Bureau about 12 years. He supervises a team that deals with American citizens kidnapped overseas. So they’re a response team that operates out of Quantico, Virginia. As many of you know, I had very little to do with the film. I would have preferred not to had a movie made about my life.

 

I actually raised my three boys in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the same house for 25 years. My neighbors had no idea who I was. And I would have preferred it stayed that way. But Steven Spielberg told Barbara Walters he felt compelled to tell the world the story not because of what I did, but because of what I’d done my life after that. He loved the redemption side of the story, wanted the world to know the story." - Frank Abagnale talks at Google

 

Historical Context

 

"As a teenager, Abagnale got caught up in petty crimes, including shoplifting. He soon grew tired of these practices, though, and decided to move into more sophisticated forms of burglary. Specifically, Abagnale began using his father's gas credit card to make a tidy profit. Abagnale convinced gas station attendants to give him a portion of his sale back in cash and allowed them to pocket a portion of the proceeds. The scam fell apart, though, when his father got the credit card bill, which added up to thousands of dollars. Unbeknownst to Abagnale, his father was struggling financially.

 

Dismayed over her son's delinquency, Abagnale's mother sent him to a school for wayward boys. Undone by his father's newfound circumstances and caught between his parents' tensions, Abagnale reportedly left home at 16 years old. Abagnale had little in his bank account and no formal education. Abagnale altered his driver’s license to make himself 10 years older than he was and exaggerated his education. This helped him get better-paying jobs, but he still barely made ends meet.

 

Abagnale decided to quit working and wrote bad checks to support himself. Before long, Abagnale had written hundreds of bad checks and overdrawn his account by thousands of dollars. Knowing that he would eventually be caught, he went into hiding." - Biography.com

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"The real Carl Hanratty is a composite of a number of FBI agents who worked to catch Abagnale, most notably FBI Agent Joseph Shea. Special Agent Shea was the head of the FBI investigative team chasing after Frank and had spent several years looking for him. Agent Joe Shea also acted as his main contact at the Bureau, similar to Hanratty (Tom Hanks) in the movie. For some time, Shea had believed that Frank was an experienced criminal in his mid-thirties, not realizing that his suspect was only a teenager.

 

*about escaping from the airliner*

 

The event is in Frank's 1981 memoir, but airline experts say it is impossible. "The entire system is sealed," says Skip Jones of the Aerospace Industries Association. "No matter what happens in there, you can't get into the rest of the airplane." Payload systems engineer Alan Anderson explains that the toilets are mounted on top of tanks that weigh over 100 pounds, and even if he manage to undo the toilet, he would have to crawl through a pipe four inches in diameter. "A person would have to be pretty small, and it would be messy," says Anderson."

- Hollywood vs History

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"New Rochelle, the 1960s. High schooler Frank Abagnale Jr. idolizes his father, who's in trouble with the IRS. When his parents separate, Frank runs away to Manhattan with $25 in his checking account, vowing to regain dad's losses and get his parents back together. Just a few years later, the FBI tracks him down in France; he's extradited, tried, and jailed for passing more than $4,000,000 in bad checks. Along the way, he's posed as a Pan Am pilot, a pediatrician, and an attorney. And, from nearly the beginning of this life of crime, he's been pursued by a dour FBI agent, Carl Hanratty. What starts as cat and mouse becomes something akin to father and son."

 

Critic Opinion

 

"While in different hands Abagnale's adventures would have lingered far more on the hedonistic aspects of what, let's face it, must have been one damn fine foray into manhood (picture for just a second an Oliver Stone version of the stewardess sequence), for Spielberg the focus is elsewhere. In fact, his obsession with the themes of fatherhood has arguably never been more heartbreakingly realised than in Catch Me If You Can's telling incidentals: Frank watching Mr. and Mrs. Strong do the washing up, Franks Jr. and Sr.'s lunch meeting: these are powerful touches that will stay with you long after the end credits roll.

 

Considerably darker than anticipated - abortion and infidelity simmer under a deceptively glossy sheen - the film requires the highest calibre of acting talent, and in his casting Spielberg delivers an unprecedented ensemble. For DiCaprio fans, this is the best reason to go to the cinema since he went down on the Titanic - he is back at his blistering, finest-of-his-generation standard. Hanks devotees, meanwhile, will rejoice at yet another subtly distinct variation on the Everyman; and obsessives of TV series Alias will be positively cock-a-hoop at Jennifer Garner's erotically supercharged cameo. As for Walken, well, if you make it through his performance without shedding a tear, then there's a fiver here with your name on it."

- Mark Dinning, Empire

 

BOT User Opinion

 

"Classic. No wonder they made a huge Broadway hit out of this. Leo is a bone fide movie star and the whole star shone particulary Christopher Walken. Abignale`s cons were hilarious and only show that crazy can work when you don`t see it coming." - @fishstick

 

Factoids

 

Catch Me if You Can was directed by Steven Spielberg.  It received 39 points and 7 votes

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (1), England (1), France (1), Israel (2), Korea (1), Japan (3), Spain (1), United States (10), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (1), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (1), 19th Century (2), 1930s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (5), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (2), Middle Ages (1), World War 1/1910s (1), World War 2/1940s (3)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - United States (2), 21st Century - United States (2), 1930s - Korea (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1960s - United States (4), 1960s - Vietnam (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Middle Ages - England (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (1), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), David Fincher (2), Anthoney Harvey (1), Terry Jones (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Steven Spielberg (2), Oliver Stone (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 50s (1), 60s (4), 70s (2), 80s (2), 90s (2), 00s (3), 10s (8)

 

 

[Jake Gittes]

Ben-Hur was a VHS staple when I was a kid but I never felt the slightest urge to rewatch it since about the age of 12. Tbh I found the overtly religious stuff a chore even then. 

[The Panda]

I've got yet another 2010s movie for you @Cap

 

 

 

"The name of the game, moving the money from the client's pocket to your pocket."

 

The Historical Setting: 1990s Wall Street

 

Source from the Period

 

"I took a deep breath and decided to say no more; there was no winning with her right now. If only I had stuck with my first wife! Would Denise be saying now that she didn't love me anymore? Fucking second wives; they were a mixed bag, especially those of the trophy variety. For better or worse? Yeah, right! They only said that for the sake of the wedding video. In reality, they were only there for the better.

 

This was payback for leaving my kind first wife, Denise, for the blond-headed scoundrel seated across from me. The Duchess had been my mistress once, an innocent fling that spiraled way out of control. Before I knew it, we were madly in love and couldn't live without each other, couldn't breathe without each other. Of course, I had rationalized my actions at the time—telling myself that Wall Street was a very tough place for first wives, so it wasn't really my fault. After all, when a man became a true power broker, these things were expected to happen.These things, however, cut both ways—because if the Master of the Universe took a financial nosedive, then the second wife would quickly move on to more-fertile pastures. In essence, the gold digger, aware that the gold mine had ceased to yield the precious ore, would move on to a more productive mine, where she could continue to extract ore, undisturbed. Indeed, it was one of life's most ruthless equations, and right now I was on the ass end of it.

 

With a sinking heart, I shifted my gaze back to the Duchess. She was still staring out the window—a beautiful, malevolent ice sculpture. At that moment I felt many things for her, but mostly I felt sad—sad for both of us, and even sadder for our children. Up until now they had lived a charmed life in Old Brookville, secure in the fact that things were just as they should be and that they would always stay that way. How very sad, I thought, how very fucking sad."

- Jordan Belfort, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

 

Historical Context

 

"Oakmont Stratton had huge success through the 1990s, enabling Jordan Belfort to finance the founding of two other brokerage firms: Monroe Parker Securities and Biltmore Securities. Founding these firms further increased his ability to control stock prices and earn huge profits. Oakmont Stratton was responsible for the initial public offering (IPO) of 35 companies, including Steve Madden Shoes. It was reported that Steve Madden Shoes earned Belfort $23 million in less than 3 minutes. By the age of 34, Belfort had earned a fortune, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. This wealth amplified his partying, globetrotting lifestyle and he developed an addiction to cocaine and Quaaludes. His drug-infused way of life contributed to the sinking of his yacht in the Mediterranean and crashing his helicopter.

 

Despite his drug use, the firm continued to grow and Belfort decided that it was in his best interest to hide his illegal profits from the government by opening a Swiss bank account. Belfort’s friends and family members would strap money to their backs in order to smuggle the money from the U.S. into Switzerland.

 

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) became suspicious of the firm and investigated their trading practices. In 1994, after a lengthy investigation, Stratton Oakmont paid $2.5 million in the civil securities fraud case the SEC brought against them. The settlement also banned Belfort from running a firm and as a result he sold his share of Stratton. Belfort soon became aware that not only was the SEC investigating him, but the FBI was also investigating him under suspicion of money laundering. Belfort then realized that many people from his inner circle were working against him and giving information to the FBI. This chain of events further increased his drug use. Police were called to his house after he reportedly kicked his wife down the stairs and then drove the car through the garage with his children inside the vehicle. Belfort was arrested, spent a few weeks in rehab, and returned home; however, a few months later, the FBI arrested him for money laundering and securities fraud.

It is known that Stratton Oakmont withheld $200 million from more than 1,500 individual investors. Belfort ultimately was sentenced to four years in prison and required to pay $110.4 million in fines. Choosing to work with the authorities and inform on his colleagues, Belfort’s prison term was reduced to less than two years."

- Crime Museum, The Wolf of Wall Street

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"The memoir, also titled The Wolf Of Wall Street, as you can imagine, is filled with wild and crazy stories told by the convicted con artist that loves to promote himself. So again, he's the epitome of an unreliable narrator. It makes for an amazing read, but it’s also obvious that you can’t trust everything.  The book is not so much a warning of the perils of excess; it actually sets a new standard in the perils. It's also incredibly hard to verify how much of the debauchery is true. The incredible yarns Jordan Belfort spins of the insane office parties, the Quaaludes, the cocaine, booze, head shaving and dirty sex are enough to make Motley Crue blush. One fact that does appear to be true is the scene in the movie with Matthew McConaughey’s character, based a real life mentor to Belfort named Mark Hanna. He really did tell Belfort that the key to success was “masturbation, cocaine and hookers.” The chest thumping was not real though, that was all McConaughey.

 

Some of the most outlandish and unbelievable stories – like Jordan Belfort crashing his helicopter while wasted, or crashing his Lambo… while wasted, or having to get rescued by the Italian Navy for forcing his captain to navigate rough seas… while wasted, are all, incredibly, verified and true events. So if the craziest stories in a book full of wild stories are true, what does it say about the stuff that is hard to verify? Again, it’s a tangled web that is really hard to fact check.

 

One of the more offensive moments in the film is the “dwarf tossing” scene. The event, held at the Stratton Oakmont office, shows the brokers and traders at the company competing in a contest that involves throwing little people at a target and other shocking behavior. While “dwarf tossing” was (and sadly still is) an actual thing, it probably didn't happen at Stratton Oakmont.  People that were at the party, including Danny Porush, dispute that the tossing happened. They acknowledge that there were little people hired as entertainment for the party, and likely were subject to some inhumane and nasty actions, but they weren’t actually “tossed.” There are no pictures or any other way to verify which version of the story is true, but frankly, it’s kind of hard to believe that it isn’t true, given how terrible some of these people were at the time. Porush also disputes that there was ever a chimpanzee in the office, as there is in the movie."

- Hugh Scott, Cinemablend

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"Jordan Belfort is a Long Island penny stockbroker who served 22 months in prison for defrauding investors in a massive 1990s securities scam that involved widespread corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate banking world, including shoe designer Steve Madden."

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Anyone who needs “The Wolf of Wall Street” to explain that the stock-market fraud and personal irresponsibility it depicts are morally wrong is dead from the neck up; but anyone who can’t take vast pleasure in its depiction of delinquent behavior is dead from the neck down. Martin Scorsese’s new film, based on the autobiography of Jordan Belfort, a broker who made a fortune on shady sales of penny stocks—and spent a fortune on drugs, sex, and other self-indulgences—in the nineties, before going to jail for his financial crimes, is an exuberant, hyper-energized riot. It’s like mainlining cinema for three hours, and I wouldn’t have wanted it a minute shorter.

 

The jangled story line sticks close to Belfort’s perspective; his voice guides the action, and Scorsese’s freewheeling direction captures the autobiographer’s raunchy, discursive vigor. Scorsese unleashes a furious, yet exquisitely controlled, kinetic energy, complete with a plunging and soaring camera, mercurial and conspicuous special effects, counterfactual scenes, subjective fantasies, and swirling choreography on a grand scale. He also introduces a great device to impose the protagonist’s point of view: Belfort narrates the action even while he’s in the midst of living it, addressing the camera with monologues that show him to be both inside and outside the events, converging on-screen his present and former selves.

 

Its furious cinematic inventions are no mere flourishes; they’re essential to Scorsese’s vision of Belfort’s story, and to the disturbing moral ideas that he extracts from it. “The Wolf of Wall Street” may be Scorsese’s most fully realized movie, with its elaboration of a world view that, without endorsing Belfort’s predatory manipulations and reckless adventures, acknowledges the essential vitality at their core."

- Richard Brody, New Yorker

 

BOT User Opinion

 

"One of those movies that the longer you watch, it becomes more of an intangible experience, than a movie. Even though you dont snort the coke, have the sex, or swear your lungs out, you feel as if youre standing right next to it all. Jordan Belfort is a character you dont want to root for, lets face it he's slimy, but hes a character that you end up rooting for anyway. Scorsese built a world we dont ever see. When we think of Wall Street, we think of boring, same old yelling at the phone, dealing with numbers 9-5 lifestyle, not marching bands, strippers, and confetti. Could it have been anymore unorthodox? Yes. More offensive? Sure, if it ever was (does pervasive cocaine use offend you?). Could you ask for more? Scorsese already gave us an pervasive Bud Light commercial, what more do we deserve? It was outrageous, vulgar, profane, corse, tough, lewd, unorthodox, dark, off the wall, off color, off key, and maybe even off putting, but thats what made it a movie experience you will mostly appreciate. The movie grows darker and mores serious, but its for good reason. Action vs consequence does battle and Belfort gets caught in-between. We asked to go 2nd-base and see the nipples of Wall Street, what we got was the full on privates parts. Scorsese made a film that by content sounds like pure filth, but a finished product that shows why that filth was really only "F". Take out the -ilth, and add in -ucking fun. Give Leo Dio his Oscar please! But no more coke. The message and urgency felt flat, language was excessive, and some scenes, like the lunch, couldve been shortened, and its not a life to glorify, but Wolf is the PERFECT definition of a phrase of my generation that goes "TURN DOWN FOR WHAT?!", and they never do. " - @Jandrew

 

Factoids

 

The Wolf of Wall Street was directed by Martin Scorsese.  It received 39 points and 8 votes.

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (1), England (1), France (1), Israel (2), Korea (1), Japan (3), Spain (1), United States (11), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (1), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (1), 19th Century (2), 1930s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (5), 1990s (1), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (2), Middle Ages (1), World War 1/1910s (1), World War 2/1940s (3)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - United States (2), 21st Century - United States (2), 1930s - Korea (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1960s - United States (4), 1960s - Vietnam (1), 1990s - United States (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Middle Ages - England (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (1), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), David Fincher (2), Anthoney Harvey (1), Terry Jones (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (2), Steven Spielberg (2), Oliver Stone (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 50s (1), 60s (4), 70s (2), 80s (2), 90s (2), 00s (3), 10s (9)

 

Edited May 10, 2020 by The Panda

[The Panda]

 

 

"Herr Janning, it "came to that" the *first time* you sentenced a man to death you *knew* to be innocent."

 

Historical Setting: The Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946

 

Source from the Period

 

"These organizations had a calculated and decisive part in the barbaric extremes of the Nazi movement. They served cleverly to exploit mob psychology and to nianipulate the mob. Multiply-ing the numbers of persons in a common enterprise tends to di- minish each individual's sense of moral responsibility and to in- crease his sense of security. The Nazi leaders were masters of this technique. They manipulated these organizations to make before the German populace impressive exhibitions of numbers and of power. These were used to incite a mob spirit and then riotously to gratify the popular hates they had inflamed and the Germanic ambition they had inflated.

These organizations indoctrinated and practiced violence and terrorism. They provided the systematized, aggressive, and dis- ciplined execution throughout Germany and the occupied coun- tries of the whole catalogue of crimes we have proven. The flower- ing of the system is represented in the fanatical SS General Ohlendorf, who told this Tribunal without shame or trace of pity how he personally directed the putting to death of 90,000 men, women, and children. No tribunal ever listened to a recital of such wholesale murder as this Tribunal heard from him and from Wisliceny, a fellow officer of the SS. Their own testimony shows the responsibility of the SS for the extermination program which took the lives of five million Jews, a responsibility the organiza- tion welcomed and discharged methodically, remorselessly, and thoroughly. These crimes are unprecedented ones because of the shocking numbers of victims. They are even more shocking and unprecedented because of the large number of persons who united to perpetrate them. All scruple or conscience of a very large seg- ment of the German people was committed to Nazi keeping, and its devotees felt no personal sense of guilt as they went from one extreme measure to another. 

On the other hand, they developed a contest in cruelty and a competition in crime. Ohlendorf from the witness stand accused other SS commanders, whose killings exceeded his, of "exaggerating" their figures. There could be no justice and no wisdom in an occupation policy which imposed upon passive and unorganized and inarticu- late Germans the same burdens as it placed upon those who volun- tarily banded themselves together in these powerful and notorious gangs. One of the basic requirements, both of justice and of successful administration of the occhpation responsibility of the victors, is a segregation of these organized elements from the masses of Germans for separate treatment."

- Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression

Office of the United States Chief of Counsel For Prosecution of Axis Criminality

 

Historical Context

 

"During World War II, the Allies and representatives of the exiled governments of occupied Europe met several times to discuss post-war treatment of Nazi leadership. In February 1945 Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta, and agreed to prosecute the Axis leaders after the conclusion of World War II. In August the Allies signed the London Agreement that enabled an International Military Tribunal to prosecute war criminals.  The tribunal of American, Soviet, British and French judges and prosecutors met in Nuremberg and put on trial senior Nazis accused of three charges: crimes against peace, war crimes (including murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor of civilian populations, killing of hostages, plunder of property) and crimes against humanity, namely, murder, extermination, enslavement and deportation of civilian populations.

 

In October 19, 1945, the accused individuals were indicted and a year later on October 1, 1946 the verdicts against them were given. Twelve of the twenty-two defendants were sentenced to death.  Eleven subsequent trials were held in Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949. In these the Allies tried Nazi physicians, commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice, judges of the Special Nazi Courts and other senior members of the Nazi party. The prosecution provided many examples of the unprecedented inhumane conduct of Nazi Germany. In November 1945 the Americans screened a film shot by Allied photographers in liberated areas, and in February 1946 the Russian prosecutors offered as evidence a 45-minute film, which included footage from captured German films. Both films provided graphic detail of Nazi atrocities. In addition, during the French phase of the prosecution, the French journalist Marie Claude Vaillant-Courturier provided eyewitness testimony of the brutality in Auschwitz.

 

The tribunal discussed Nazi Germany’s antisemitic policy on different occasions. Over 800 documents and more than 30 witnesses referred to the persecution of the Jews. Among them Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever testified on Jewish suffering in the Vilna ghetto. In addition, SS officer Dieter Wisliceny and the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss testified on the origins of the Final Solution. The crimes against the Jews, however, were not separated from other crimes, and Nazi antisemitic policy was seen as motivated by utilitarian considerations: to achieve political control of German society and to drive a wedge between the government and the population of the Allied countries."

- The Nuremberg Trials

Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"Yet even as these viewers criticized the film, they still participated in “a timebound network of discussions,” as Hughes-Warrington puts it, “on what history is and what it is for.” Most important, the film initiated public discus-sions and personal reflections on the meaning and significance of the most catastrophic events in recent history. “But don’t let’s carp too much,” cautioned W. J. Weatherby in the Guardian, “we have a rare and timely debate.”101 “It was a powerful and moving picture,” wrote one member of the preview audience, “which swept you into all kinds of emotion and made you think!” “I can’t say I enjoyed the movie as far as entertainment is concerned,” noted another.

 “But I feel that it was a very enlightening and thought-provoking experience.” Judgment at Nuremberg’s presentation of both the particularistic and universal aspects of the Holocaust pointed toward a multifaceted, and more meaningful, interpretation of the causes and consequences of Nazi crimes and challenged viewers “to think about how the events being portrayed can be interpreted.” 102 The film’s attention to the “dialectical element within the interpretation of the Holocaust,” as Tobias Ebbrecht suggests, set it apart from most popular representations of its era.103 So too did the filmmakers’ refusal to simplify or sanitize this history to satisfy the audience. The film’s avoidance of the typical Hollywood “happy ending” reinforces this fact. Instead of finishing with Spencer Tracy’s Judge Haywood giving his impassioned speech about American values, which would be consistent with those films exemplifying “the Americanization of the Holocaust,” the film ends with this pessimistic title: “On July 14, 1949, judgment was rendered in the last of the Nuremberg Trials. Of ninety-nine sentenced to prison, no one is still serving his sentence.” Two historical figures, Judge Brand and Justice Musmanno, strongly contested this final statement as undermining the significance of the initial guilty verdicts, even “if some of the defendants were later released.”104 Yet for Kramer and Mann, as for many in the American Jewish community, the commutation of death sentences against Nazi criminals and pardons for others serving jail sentences that occurred in the early 1950s was devastating. They conveyed “an irrevocable truth,” as Mann wrote, “that justice was tempered in the treatment of the Nazis” to foster better U.S.–West German diplomatic relations.105 Deborah Lipstadt and Hasia Diner have paid attention to the dilemma this international situation created for American Jews. “Despite American Jewish concerns that Germany had failed to truly confront its unprecedented acts of brutality,” Lipstadt argues, “there was little that could be done.” “Their country,” according to Diner, “now consorted with and celebrated Germany, the place that in their lexicon embodied the deepest evil.”106 This disturbing dilemma was reflected in Kramer and Mann’s film.

Judgment at Nuremberg’s story and message meant that viewers did not leave the theater solely buoyed by a comforting message about human nature or absolved from responsibility. Instead the film “keeps pounding away at your emotions with the force of a sledgehammer,” one critic admitted. “Again and again you get the feeling of self-guilt.”107 Members of the preview audience reported similar sentiments. “This is one picture that conveys a message and a feeling which I can’t explain. For the present it is a bombshell in a deserted brickyard.” As a consequence, even if members of the preview audience rated the film “excellent” or “very good,” they believed it would not succeed at the box office: “A noble attempt. Will be hard to sell to the public and critics.” “Won’t make a dime for producer. Will not be popular.” They were correct. “I was depressed, of course, to see so many near-empty theaters, and I felt like a failure,” Kramer recalled of the film’s lack of box office success.108 In crafting a historical film within the U.S. motion picture industry some fifty years ago, Stanley Kramer, Abby Mann, and their colleagues necessarily negotiated between the priorities of Hollywood and history. Their film did not greatly appeal to mass audiences or make a big profit; in short, it did not successfully “Hollywoodize” the Holocaust. But this outcome should not compromise their endeavor to tell the truth about history."

- Challenging the "Hollywoodization" of the Holocaust: Reconsidering Judgement at Nuremberg

Jennifer Frost, Jewish Film & New Media

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"It has been three years since the most important Nazi leaders had already been tried. This trial is about 4 judges who used their offices to conduct Nazi sterilization and cleansing policies. Retired American judge, Dan Haywood has a daunting task ahead of him. The Cold War is heating up and no one wants any more trials as Germany, and Allied governments, want to forget the past. But is that the right thing to do is the question that the tribunal must decide."

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Judgment at Nuremberg is twice the size of the concise, stirring and rewarding production on television’s Playhouse 90 early in 1959. A faster tempo by producer-director Stanley Kramer and more trenchant script editing would have punched up picture.  Abby Mann’s drama is set in Nuremberg in 1948, the time of the Nazi war crimes trials. It deals not with the trials of the more well-known Nazi leaders, but with members of the German judiciary who served under the Nazi regime.

 

The intense courtroom drama centers on two men: the presiding judge (Spencer Tracy) who must render a monumental decision, and the principal defendant (Burt Lancaster), at first a silent, brooding figure, but ultimately the one who rises to pinpoint the real issue and admit his guilt.  Where the stars enjoy greater latitude and length of characterization, such as in the cases of Tracy, Maximilian Schell and Richard Widmark (latter two as defense counsel and prosecutor, respectively), the element of personal identity does not interfere. But in the cases of those who are playing brief roles, such as Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift, the spectator has insufficient time to divorce actor from character."

- Variety

 

Factoids

 

Judgement at Nuremberg was directed by Stanley Kramer.  It received 40 points and 7 votes.

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (1), England (1), France (1), Germany (1), Israel (2), Korea (1), Japan (3), Spain (1), United States (11), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (1), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (1), 19th Century (2), 1930s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (5), 1990s (1), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (2), Middle Ages (1), World War 1/1910s (1), World War 2/1940s (4)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - United States (2), 21st Century - United States (2), 1930s - Korea (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1960s - United States (4), 1960s - Vietnam (1), 1990s - United States (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Middle Ages - England (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (1), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Germany (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), David Fincher (2), Anthoney Harvey (1), Terry Jones (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Stanley Kramer (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (2), Steven Spielberg (2), Oliver Stone (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 50s (1), 60s (5), 70s (2), 80s (2), 90s (2), 00s (3), 10s (9)

 

Edited May 10, 2020 by The Panda

[MrPink]

The history of the Rucker Basketball Classic is some of the richest stuff of the past century tbh, I support BOT on this entry

[The Panda]

 

 

"Our Germans are better than their Germans."

 

Historical Setting: 1947-1963, United States

 

Source from the Period

 

"Yeah, well I was John’s backup; and part of that job was to be in the blockhouse during the count, and that’s where I was. And I was taking care of all of the communications from the launch people and the launch complex to John. And I was, so I was told, the only one who would be able to communicate with John in that period from T-minus 18 seconds to liftoff. That’s when it occurred to me that this fellow named John Glenn, in order to have a successful flight, was going to have to put under his belt more speed than we had ever given a human before. Speed was the essence. If he could get the speed and if it were in the right direction, he had orbital flight licked. You know, “Godspeed” is something you hear all the time; but speed was very, very important to John. And it just came to me, “Godspeed, John Glenn;” and I think the fact that his name is two short syllables made it ring a little better. But anyway, somewhere in the count between 10 and zero I said, “Godspeed, John Glenn.” And it was a salute to him, but there was a feeling, I think, in me at the time that it could be viewed as a plea to whatever Higher Power to, you know, make this flight a success. And I would suggest that nobody can tell me that that plea didn’t work, because the flight did.

 

...

 

I named it Aurora because I saw it as a celestial event, and the Aurora borealis is a celestial event. I liked the sound of it and the celestial significance. First of all, let’s go into 7. Al Shepard started that with Freedom 7, and the Press caught that and said, “Isn’t that nice of Al to name his capsule Something 7 in honor of the seven astronauts, his buddies?” And everybody believed that. The fact of that matter is that he named it “7” because it was capsule number 7 off the line. But the people didn’t know that! But since everybody wanted to match Al’s largesse, Gus had Liberty Bell 7 and John had Friendship 7, so I had to do something with “7,” and it was Aurora 7. But the people back home in Boulder, down on the front range, thought, “Wasn’t that nice of Scott to name his capsule Aurora 7 for the fact that he was born and raised in a house in Boulder on the corner of Aurora and Seven Street?” So I give you the real reason behind Aurora, but people from Boulder don’t believe it." 

- M. Scott Carpenter interviewed by Roy Neal

 

Historical Context

 

"In the late 1950s, the United States was worried about the Soviet Union's supremacy in space exploration. The Soviet Union unexpectedly sent Sputnik, the first satellite into space, on Oct. 4, 1957. The U.S. Congress urged action immediately to deal with the problem, with some politicians saying the Soviet coup might be a threat to national security.   There were some calls to create a military astronaut space program, building on the high-altitude flights that test pilots were already conducting. President Dwight Eisenhower initially agreed, but upon speaking with some advisors, he ultimately backed a proposal for a non-military space agency called NASA that would send the first astronauts into space. NASA was formed in 1958 from the former National Advisory Committee on Astronautics (NACA), and several other centers.  In 1959, the new agency selected seven astronauts from a pool of military test pilots to simplify the astronaut selection procedure, according to NASA. The first astronauts had to meet several stringent requirements: be under 40 years old; be less than 5 feet, 11 inches tall; be in excellent physical condition; have extensive engineering experience; be a test pilot school graduate; and have a minimum of 1,500 hours of flying time. Since most military test pilots were white males at the time, this meant that the first astronauts were also of that demographic group.

 

...

 

While the Mercury missions were technological feats for NASA and its contractors, they were quite short — only 15-minute arcs between Florida and the Atlantic Ocean. The Soviets, meanwhile, had already done orbital missions that circled the Earth several times – including Gagarin's historic first human spaceflight. Getting the Americans to orbit would require a more powerful rocket, among other mission changes.  So when John Glenn blasted off to circle Earth three times, his Friendship 7 spacecraft did it aboard a more powerful Mercury-Atlas rocket combination. Glenn's Feb. 20, 1962, mission was another checkout of the spacecraft, and how a human would react to several hours in space. During his five-hour mission, he also saw strange "fireflies" that were appearing to follow his spacecraft, a phenomenon later explained as ice crystals coming off the hull.

 

Controllers on the ground saw an indication that his landing bag had prematurely deployed. They waited to tell Glenn, then close to re-entry instructed Glenn to keep his retrorocket package strapped on to his spacecraft as a precaution. The indication turned out to be false, and Glenn was upset that he had not been told as soon as the problem arose. Glenn became a public hero following his flight; he wanted to return to space, but then-U.S. president John F. Kennedy (among others) considered him too valuable, according to the New York Times. (Glenn eventually became a senator for Ohio, then returned to space at age 77 aboard shuttle mission STS-95 in 1998.)  The next Mercury mission, Aurora 7, again ran into splashdown problems on May 24, 1962. Pilot Scott Carpenter landed about 250 miles (400 kilometers) off course after about five hours in space. Some space program officials, notably flight director Chris Kraft, blamed the problem on Carpenter's inattention during the mission."

 

While Mercury is not always well-remembered in space history, it was the foundation for all space missions in the American program. Mercury's surviving astronauts continued to popularize space even after leaving NASA, including writing autobiographies and making public appearances. Its last living astronaut, John Glenn, died of natural causes in December 2016, at age 95."

- Elizabeth Howell, Space.com

 

Historical Accuracy

 

"After the second world war, the US ran a testing programme for high-speed, rocket-powered aircraft at Muroc field, later Edwards air force base, in southern California. The era also saw the early days of the space programme and the selection of the US's first astronauts, known as the Mercury Seven.  Philip Kaufman's epic yet gripping film begins with test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) going for a drink in a local bar, and casually signing up to break the sound barrier. "If you ask me, I think the damn thing doesn't exist," he says gruffly. Then he falls off his horse while riding it around the desert in a daring competition with his firecracker wife Glennis (Barbara Hershey). He breaks two ribs, but pretends to be fine so they won't take him off the mission – and then successfully pilots the Bell X-1, becoming the first man to go faster than the speed of sound. Yeager appears to have sprung straight from the Big Book of American Heroes – strong jaw, cowboy hat, horse sense, stoic manner – but he really was like this, and doubtless still is. He last broke the sound barrier in 2012, aged 89, in an F-15. Total badass.

 

Meanwhile, in Washington DC, President Dwight D Eisenhower (Robert Beer) and Senator Lyndon B Johnson (Donald Moffat) are upset that the Soviets have gone and launched Sputnik-1 into outer space before they got their act together. "How the hell did they ever get ahead of us?" Johnson bellows. The answer is swiftly and amusingly illustrated when his aides cannot find the plug socket to get the meeting-room projector working. The chief scientist is unflustered. "Our Germans are better than their Germans," he says, alluding to the fact that both the Soviet and US rocket and space programmes after the war owed a great deal to former Nazi scientists.

 

...

 

There are moments of dramatic licence, but overall The Right Stuff is a terrific historical film about the space race: accurately reflective of a complex reality, beautifully filmed, and done with wit, energy and an impressive sense of balance. Top marks."

- Tom Wolfe, The Guardian

 

 

The Film Itself

 

The Story

 

"Tom Wolfe's book on the history of the U.S. Space program reads like a novel, and the film has that same fictional quality. It covers the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager to the Mercury 7 astronauts, showing that no one had a clue how to run a space program or how to select people to be in it. Thrilling, funny, charming and electrifying all at once."

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Philip Kaufman has had a strange career, encompassing revisionist Westerns (The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid), sci-fi horror (Invasion Of The Body Snatchers), potboiler thrillers (Rising Sun) and a few stabs at high-brow Euro-erotica (Henry And June, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Quills).  It should come as no surprise, then, that his best, and certainly best-loved, film - The Right Stuff - seems to lack a clear directorial voice.  The story of unheralded supersonic test pilot Chuck Yeager could have been condensed into a pre-credit sequence, yet Kaufman spends nearly 40 minutes lovingly photographing Sam Shepard. When the main story of the Mercury Space Programme kicks in, the director seems unsure if he's celebrating the astronauts as new pioneers, or condemning them as willing dupes of a government propaganda machine.

 

This moral ambiguity is faithful to the book and only adds to the film's tension, which has the audience holding it's breath on more than one occasion. We are given a variety of viewpoints to sympathise with and instead of disappating the attention, you actually find yourself rooting for everyone.  And still the film holds together admirably as a piece of fact-based entertainment. Maybe it's the inherent drama of the missions themselves, maybe it's Caleb Deschanel's glorious photography (evoking John Fordís Technicolor Westerns), Bill Conti's rousing, Oscar-winning score, or simply the excellent selection of crew-cut hairdos. The Right Stuff is occasionally infuriating, but it's also consistently compelling." - Rob Fraser, Empire

 

Factoids

 

The Right Stuff was directed by Philip Kaufman.  It received 40 points, 7 votes and won in a tiebreaker with Judgement at Nuremberg by having 2 top 5 placements to Nuremberg's one.

 

 

Countries Represented: Algeria (1), Austria (1), England (1), France (1), Germany (1), Israel (2), Korea (1), Japan (3), Spain (1), United States (12), Vietnam (1)

 

Time Periods Represented: 16th Century (1), 17th Century (2), 18th Century (1), 19th Century (2), 1930s (1), 1950s (2), 1960s (5), 1990s (1), 21st Century (2), Classical Period (2), Middle Ages (1), World War 1/1910s (1), World War 2/1940s (4)

 

Cross Section of Times and Countries: 18th Century - United States (1), 19th Century - United States (2), 21st Century - United States (2), 1930s - Korea (1), 1950s - Algeria (1), 1950s - United States (1), 1960s - United States (4), 1960s - Vietnam (1), 1990s - United States (1), Classical Period - Israel (2), Middle Ages - England (1), Sengoku Period - Japan (1), Tokugawa Shogunate - Japan (2), World War 1 - France (1), World War 2/1940s - Germany (1), World War 2/1940s - Spain (1), World War 2 - Austria (1), World War 2 - United States (1)

 

Directors Represented: Park Chan-Wook (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), David Fincher (2), Anthoney Harvey (1), Terry Jones (1), Philip Kaufman (1), Masaki Kobayashi (1), Stanley Kramer (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), Michael Mann (1), Penny Marshall (1), Adam McKay (1), Steve McQueen (1), Theodore Melfi (1), Sam Mendes (1), Gillo Pontecorvo (1), Martin Scorsese (2), Steven Spielberg (2), Oliver Stone (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Robert Wise (1), William Wyler (1)

 

Decades Represented: 50s (1), 60s (5), 70s (2), 80s (3), 90s (2), 00s (3), 10s (9)

 

 

 

[The Panda]

And some honorable mentions to close out today's films

 

 

71.    Inherit the Wind
72.    Fiddler on the Roof 
73.    The Thin Red Line 
74.    Little Women (2019)
75.    BlacKkKlansman 
76.    The Wind Rises
77.    The Shawshank Redemption 
78.    Letters from Iwo Jima 
79.    Casino
80.    MASH 
81.    Roma 
82.    The King’s Speech 
83.    Unforgiven 
84.    The Last Samurai 
85.    Alexander Nevsky 
86.    Aguirre, The Wrath of God 
87.    Spotlight 
88.    Platoon 
88.    L.A. Confidential 
90.    1776  
91.    The Godfather 2
92.    Persepolis 
93.    A Man for All Seasons 
94.    Blood Diamond 
95.    Becket 
96.    Barry Lyndon 
97.    First Man
98.    Ugetsu 
99.    The Searchers 
100.    Cinema Paradiso 
 

 

[Cap]

40 minutes ago, The Panda said:

71.    Inherit the Wind
72.    Fiddler on the Roof