Saw two movies today. Fell asleep for a bit in the middle of each. Dont feel I missed anything. In Storm Center, Bette Davis plays a librarian who loses her job for refusing to remove a book about communism from the shelves. Made three years after the publication of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the ending of the film echoes some of the novel’s themes, but without the benefit of an intriging story.
Ther was one bit in which the librarian defended Hitler’s Mein Kampf, on the grounds that reading the book helped define and condemn the enemy, and she believed this book had a similar value in undoing its own propagandistic intent. When I was a pre-teen, I saw two documentaries that primed my young mind against the Nazis and the Reds. Mein Kampf was not based on Hitler’s books, but focused on the atrocities of his regime. I was eight years old, and the film led me to read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I condensed into a 60 page essay that so astounded my teacher that the school had me read the whole thing into a tape recorder for their archives. It was my first work of virtual plagiarism, which I followed with several science fiction and horror stories derived from the movies of the period, and four years later I won a national essay writing contest with a piece on Helen Keller. That was the same year that I played the lead in the school play, Make Room for Rodney, a part I got primarily because I played the trumpet. Three years later. I would write and direct the school Christmas play.
The other movie I saw was the anti-communist documentary, We’ll Bury You. This one didnt have the visceral impact of the other, but since fear of the Russians and the impending doomsday was a cloud we kids lived under for what should have been our childhoods, the title itself was frightening. I only now realize how misleading the interpretation of Khrushchevs threat was.
I was watching a movie in whiich a woman mentioned that she had buried her husband. She did not mean to infer that she had killed him. She had simply outlived him. I do not believe that Khrushchev was threatening to blast the United States to rubble, but that he was boasting that Communism would outlive Capitalism. It was not a military challenge, but a proclamation of ideological superiority.
Reading Khrushchevs memoirs, I was intrigued by his claim that the Cuban missle stand off was a charade he and Kennedy devised together as a show of Kennedys strength to his own military, which considered him weak and indecisive. Whether this was true or not we may never know, but it is surely a possibiliy, and if true, was not the entire Cold War some kind of devious joke on both countries by their leaders. And how does that relate to the horrendous reopening of hostilities between the two countries, nearly thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union? Furthermore, when will the nation at large wake up to the fact that the Russians had virtually defeated the Germans before the Americans became fully involved in the battle, having delayed action against the Nazis until ten years after Hitler had taken power and four years since his invasion of Poland? It seems to me that the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union had more to do with the dividing of the spoils of WW2 than a conflict of ideologies. And what is re-emerging today is the rivalry between empires that shall determine who calls the shots when all governments become subserviant to one ruling force.
The other movie that had a weak middle was the cute Korean comedy, The Beautiful Vampire.
Cinema Afterlife 