ARTS & FILM

THE REGIME OF Muammar Gaddafi is fighting to crush a popular uprising that has taken control over much of Libya; it appears the Gaddafi government rules only in the capital of Tripoli.

As of this writing it is alleged that some 1,000 Libyans have been killed by Gaddafi’s soldiers who have used tanks, aircraft, and mercenary troops in their attempt to quash the rebellion.

But this article is not about the violence now sweeping the North African country, nor is it about the reign of Gaddafi, rather, it is about those who have helped sustain him. As world leaders and the international press rush to condemn Gaddafi, few mention the support his government has received from Western oil companies since 2004, when the U.S. and the United Kingdom lifted commercial sanctions against Libya. One oil giant that invested heavily in Gaddafi’s Libya was BP (British Petroleum).

FILM REVIEWS

Rallying round the flag: The King’s Speech

By Paul Bond  | 3 February 2011  

Directed by Tom Hooper, written by David Seidler

[print_link]

A filmmaker addressing historical events faces certain tasks. Their work need not be a verbatim or literal retelling of events to be successful, but it must have an underlying historical truth and an element of critical engagement. The King’s Speech, despite the praise and awards heaped upon it, largely fails in this regard.

The King’s Speech displays certain strengths—above all it is well acted. Moreover, it centres relatively sensitively on the portrayal of a man struggling to overcome his stammer through an unexpected and unlikely friendship. What warmth and charm the film has come from this theme. Colin Firth gives an impressive performance as Bertie (short for Albert), Duke of York and later King George VI of England (1895-1952), battling a speech impediment he has had since childhood.

Nevertheless, that story rests on an essentially uncritical, and often reverential view of the British monarchy and its role in the 1930s and more generally. The two themes do not sit comfortably together.

Bertie is the younger son of the stern and bullying George V (Michael Gambon). Because of his stammer he finds public speaking difficult. The film charts his reluctant trips to a failed actor turned speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who teaches him techniques to try and compensate for his stammer. In an engaging performance, Rush plays Logue as a decent and generous man, trying to do his best to help those afflicted.

The scenes with Logue offer some critical swipes at royal conceit, but disrespect never goes too far. There is only gentle teasing of Bertie and his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter). The attraction for actors of a film about qualities of speech is evident. The film has an extremely talented cast and is heavy with impressive voices. Bertie’s speech difficulties are emphasised by the surrounding rich voices of Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Claire Bloom, and others. This is not, however, My Left Foot with crowns.

Overcoming Bertie’s stammer is portrayed as a directed political act, as indeed it was. But this portrayal is where the problems lie. The film’s presentation of events is essentially in line with propaganda constructed during the war and faithfully reiterated ever since—as part of the depiction of wartime national unity against the enemy as “Britain’s finest hour”.

Even with regard to Bertie’s stammering, the film presents a second-hand and false account of the results of his speech work. Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill in fact issued instructions to the BBC to edit the stammers out of George’s speeches.

At the heart of the film’s weaknesses is its somewhat shallow and sanitised account of the constitutional crisis that followed the death of George V in January 1936. George’s eldest son David (an outstanding performance by Guy Pearce) acceded to the throne as Edward VIII. His relationship with the once-divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson (Eve Best) and declared intention to marry her on taking the throne, while she was still married to her second husband, was considered unacceptable.

With Simpson divorced and the couple’s affair made public by the US press (the British press had abided by an official injunction against such reporting), frantic preparations were made to safeguard the reputation of the monarchy from moral censure given the position of the monarch as head of the Church of England. Within a year he abdicated, making way for Bertie to become George VI.

This is how the abdication crisis has generally gone into history. But beneath the surface of events were other, far more politically dangerous concerns over the close relations of Simpson and Edward to Hitler’s Nazi party.

Simpson had many close ties with leading Nazis, including Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, with whom she had had an affair. Shortly after the abdication, the couple stayed as Hitler’s guests in Bavaria. Papers have since revealed the couple’s willingness to be reinstalled on the throne by an invading Nazi force.

Open royal support for fascism would have been difficult politically. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would have resigned. US President Roosevelt, too, was concerned about Edward’s fascist sympathies. In the words of Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s Peerage, Roosevelt regarded Simpson as “the best thing” that could have happened, as she “stopped him having to deal with a pro-Nazi king.”

In 2003, FBI files compiled in the 1940s were released stating that the British government had refused to permit Edward to marry her because of her Nazi sympathies and that the FBI had even sent agents to spy on the Royal couple to see if they were passing official secrets to the Nazis.

The film acknowledges their sympathies, as it must. Warned of a revolutionary movement across Europe, Edward insists, “Herr Hitler will take care of them.” This echoes the New York Daily News article Edward wrote in 1966, in which he declared that “it was in Britain’s interest and in Europe’s too, that Germany be encouraged to strike east and smash Communism forever”.

In contrast, The King’s Speech still echoes the sanitised portrayal of the rest of the Royal family, including Bertie and Elizabeth. Overcoming the crisis is portrayed as having enabled the monarchy to stand at the head of popular opposition to the growth of fascism in Germany, under the leadership of a good and personally courageous king.

Churchill (a waste of Timothy Spall here) is seen as George’s great supporter because of his concerns about Hitler. Baldwin (Anthony Andrews) offers his resignation in 1937 saying, “Churchill was right all along” about Hitler. The film fuels the wartime propaganda of Churchill as the great farsighted anti-Nazi leader. In reality, Churchill’s concerns over the threat to Britain’s interests posed by Nazi Germany did not extend to support for Edward’s abdication. Rather, he worked so hard to keep him on the throne that there were rumours of his heading a “King’s Party”.

Following his accession, George and his wife both supported appeasement with a view to protecting the British Empire. In 1939, learning that Jewish refugees were “surreptitiously getting into Palestine,” George wrote to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that he was “glad to think that steps are being taken to prevent these people leaving their country of origin.”

Halifax telegraphed the British ambassador in Berlin to encourage the Nazis “to check the unauthorised emigration” of Jews. Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, was close to Halifax, a longstanding advocate of appeasement. Some of her papers, believed to show her close agreement with him, remain embargoed to this day.

There is a fascinating story here. But director Tom Hooper and writer David Seidler repeatedly pull their punches. This is a film largely uncritical towards official myth-making. Hooper dedicates The King’s Speech to his grandfather, killed in the Royal Air Force during the war. He has described this as “an unnecessary death”. His plane was returning from a mission, but was denied permission to land at the nearest airport and crashed.

For him, the film is about George VI emerging as a figurehead who “inspires his people and unites them in battle,” to quote the production notes. It culminates in George’s first wartime Christmas address of 1939. Backed by swelling music, we repeatedly cut from the radio studio to the rapt faces of listeners in homes and factories across the land. These are almost the only ordinary crowds seen throughout the film. When he finishes, George and Elizabeth go onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace, to be greeted by a crowd won over to him at last.

There are occasional hints at the real concerns involved. Prior to George V’s death, Bertie and his father discuss three options. “Who will stand between us, the jackboots, and the proletarian abyss?”

Later, Bertie discusses the unfolding political situation with the newly acceded Edward VIII, warning him of the revolutionary threats that have faced the royal families of Europe. Edward says that he has been busy “Kinging.” “Kinging,” replies Bertie, “is a precarious business.”

Such oblique references to the danger of social revolution are as far as the film goes. This does not compensate for its conformist message. George sums up the film’s argument in an extraordinary speech:

“If I am a King, where is my power? Can I declare war? Form a government? Levy a tax? No! And yet I am the seat of all authority because they think that when I speak, I speak for them.”

The King’s Speech is only the latest of a series of fairly trite and largely sympathetic films about the monarchy, which stands at the apex of the British state and is in turn shaped by its political concerns, portraying them as a family subject to the same emotional traumas as everyone else—only made more difficult by their status as heads of state. Before Logue knows the identity of his guest, he unwittingly compares membership of the royal family with indentured servitude. Elizabeth agrees that it is “Something like that.” There is little of value in such an approach.

____________

FIGHTING WORDS

Churchill Didn’t Say That

The King’s Speech is riddled with gross falsifications of history.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, Jan. 24, 2011, at 12:20 PM ET

The King’s Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer and the latent Anglophile. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history. One of the very few miscast actors—Timothy Spall as a woefully thin pastiche of Winston Churchill—is the exemplar of this bizarre rewriting. He is shown as a consistent friend of the stuttering prince and his loyal princess and as a man generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication.

In point of fact, Churchill was—for as long as he dared—a consistent friend of conceited, spoiled, Hitler-sympathizing Edward VIII. And he allowed his romantic attachment to this gargoyle to do great damage to the very dearly bought coalition of forces that was evolving to oppose Nazism and appeasement. Churchill probably has no more hagiographic chronicler than William Manchester, but if you look up the relevant pages of The Last Lion, you will find that the historian virtually gives up on his hero for an entire chapter.

By dint of swallowing his differences with some senior left and liberal politicians, Churchill had helped build a lobby, with strong grass-roots support, against Neville Chamberlain’s collusion with European fascism. The group had the resonant name of Arms and the Covenant. Yet, as the crisis deepened in 1936, Churchill diverted himself from this essential work—to the horror of his colleagues—in order to involve himself in keeping a pro-Nazi playboy on the throne. He threw away his political capital in handfuls by turning up at the House of Commons—almost certainly heavily intoxicated, according to Manchester—and making an incoherent speech in defense of “loyalty” to a man who did not understand the concept. In one speech—not cited by Manchester—he spluttered that Edward VIII would “shine in history as the bravest and best-loved of all sovereigns who have worn the island crown.” (You can see there how empty and bombastic Churchill’s style can sound when he’s barking up the wrong tree; never forget that he once described himself as the lone voice warning the British people against the twin menaces of Hitler and Gandhi!)

In the end, Edward VIII proved so stupid and so selfish and so vain that he was beyond salvage, so the moment passed. Or the worst of it did. He remained what is only lightly hinted in the film: a firm admirer of the Third Reich who took his honeymoon there with Mrs. Simpson and was photographed both receiving and giving the Hitler salute. Of his few friends and cronies, the majority were Blackshirt activists like the odious “Fruity” Metcalfe. (Royal biographer Philip Ziegler tried his best to clean up this squalid story a few years ago but eventually gave up.) During his sojourns on the European mainland after his abdication, the Duke of Windsor never ceased to maintain highly irresponsible contacts with Hitler and his puppets and seemed to be advertising his readiness to become a puppet or “regent” if the tide went the other way. This is why Churchill eventually had him removed from Europe and given the sinecure of a colonial governorship in the Bahamas, where he could be well-supervised.

All other considerations to one side, would the true story not have been fractionally more interesting for the audience? But it seems that we shall never reach a time when the Churchill cult is open for honest inspection. And so the film drifts on, with ever more Vaseline being applied to the lens. It is suggested that, once some political road bumps have been surmounted and some impediments in the new young monarch’s psyche have been likewise overcome, Britain is herself again, with Churchill and the king at Buckingham Palace and a speech of unity and resistance being readied for delivery.

Here again, the airbrush and the Vaseline are partners. When Neville Chamberlain managed to outpoint the coalition of the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, and the Churchillian Tories and to hand to his friend Hitler the majority of the Czechoslovak people, along with all that country’s vast munitions factories, he received an unheard-of political favor. Landing at Heston Airport on his return from Munich, he was greeted by a royal escort in full uniform and invited to drive straight to Buckingham Palace. A written message from King George VI urged his attendance, “so that I can express to you personally my most heartfelt congratulations. … [T]his letter brings the warmest of welcomes to one who, by his patience and determination, has earned the lasting gratitude of his fellow countrymen throughout the Empire.” Chamberlain was then paraded on the palace balcony, saluted by royalty in front of cheering crowds. Thus the Munich sell-out had received the royal assent before the prime minister was obliged to go to Parliament and justify what he had done. The opposition forces were checkmated before the game had begun. Britain does not have a written Constitution, but by ancient custom the royal assent is given to measures after they have passed through both houses of Parliament. So Tory historian Andrew Roberts, in his definitively damning essay “The House of Windsor and the Politics of Appeasement,” is quite correct to cite fellow scholar John Grigg in support of his view that by acting as they did to grant pre-emptive favor to Chamberlain, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter to you) “committed the most unconstitutional act by a British Sovereign in the present century.”

The private letters and diaries of the royal family demonstrate a continued, consistent allegiance to the policy of appeasement and to the personality of Chamberlain. King George’s forbidding mother wrote to him, exasperated that more people in the House of Commons had not cheered the sellout. The king himself, even after the Nazi armies had struck deep north into Scandinavia and clear across the low countries to France, did not wish to accept Chamberlain’s resignation. He “told him how grossly unfairly he had been treated, and that I was genuinely sorry.” Discussing a successor, the king wrote that “I, of course, suggested [Lord] Halifax.” It was explained to him that this arch-appeaser would not do and that anyway a wartime coalition could hardly be led by an unelected member of the House of Lords. Unimpressed, the king told his diary that he couldn’t get used to the idea of Churchill as prime minister and had greeted the defeated Halifax to tell him that he wished he had been chosen instead. All this can easily be known by anybody willing to do some elementary research.

In a few months, the British royal family will be yet again rebranded and relaunched in the panoply of a wedding. Terms like “national unity” and “people’s monarchy” will be freely flung around. Almost the entire moral capital of this rather odd little German dynasty is invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in “Britain’s finest hour.” In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place. So this is not a detail but a major desecration of the historical record—now apparently gliding unopposed toward a baptism by Oscar.

Like Slate on Facebook. Follow Slate and the Slate Foreign Desk on Twitter.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution. 

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2282194/

The Eagle: a Roman centurion travels beyond “the end of the world”

By David Walsh
16 February 2011  [print_link]

Directed by Kevin Macdonald, screenplay by Jeremy Brock, based on the novel by Rosemary Sutcliff

HUMAN BEINGS are insatiably curious. All things being equal, they’re eager to know about other places, times and people—and not simply the official version either. Who wouldn’t like to know what people were like a thousand or two thousand years ago, how they acted and thought, what they felt deeply about, how they both resembled and differed from us?

With its visual and dramatic capabilities, film offers the possibility of bringing the dead back to life, or at least some semblance of them. Spectators tend to be willing to suspend disbelief if a movie is engaging and intriguing (and, somewhere behind that, truthful) enough.

Some historical moments are more appealing than others, one of them being the Roman occupation of Britain (which lasted, more or less, from 40 to 400 AD). Ancient Rome retains its fascination, and the notion of this seemingly sober, stoical, well-disciplined society attempting to subdue the primitive Britons (who much later turned into a seemingly sober, stoical, well-disciplined people themselves) holds a special interest.

We know or we think we know something about the modern Italians and British, and, in terms of “national characteristics,” for whatever that classification is worth, they seem very unlike one another as peoples. So the notion of the Romans having conquered and inhabited Britain for hundreds of years seems odd and improbable, and that is a good starting point for attracting an audience.

Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, The Last King of Scotland) has directed The Eagle, from Jeremy Brock’s screenplay based on the 1954 novel by Rosemary Sutcliff. The story is this: in 140 AD or so, a young Roman centurion, Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum), newly arrived in Britain, sets about solving the mystery of what happened to the Roman legion commanded by his father two decades earlier. This Ninth Legion (composed of 5,000 soldiers) was supposedly slaughtered by tribes in Caledonia (modern-day Scotland), north of Hadrian’s Wall, and the unit’s eagle standard seized.

After an engagement with bloodthirsty local Britons in which Marcus proves his valor as a commander and receives serious injuries, he is rewarded by Rome with medals and, much to his dismay, given an honorable discharge. When Marcus helps save the life of a slave, Esca (Jamie Bell), he takes advantage of having a companion who knows the language and territory and, once the Roman has healed somewhat, the two set off north of the Wall alone to recover the eagle (and restore his father’s reputation).

Having undergone various hardships, including an attack by “rogue warriors,” the pair are directed toward a deserter from the Ninth who tells them part of the story. Soon afterward, they are captured by the savage “seal people,” to whom Esca presents himself as the master and Marcus the slave. The seal tribe, who live by the sea in northern Scotland, turn out to possess the eagle, which they now venerate as a religious icon.

The Eagle is not a disaster, but it’s not especially successful either. It is worth noting, first of all, that Sutcliff’s original novel was intended for children, for better or worse, and the characterizations are not terribly complex.

Marcus acts bull-headedly and exclusively out of a sense of personal, family and civic pride from beginning to end. “Can you imagine anything more magnificent than to be a soldier of Rome,” he asks his uncle (Donald Sutherland), “to serve with courage and honor?” This is never seriously challenged. The American-born Channing is effective within the narrow limits set him.

Esca, the slave and companion, is also lacking in dimension. He swears an oath of allegiance to Marcus and never deviates, although he appears to at one point. Jamie Bell strains in the role.

The reconstructed “seal people” tribe veers close to stereotype on more than one occasion. The treatment here of the indigenous population is not as complex as in many of the better American Westerns of the 1950s.

Is the film intended as something of a warning about the pitfalls of empire and imperialism, meant perhaps to shed light on current events? We think so at one point, when one of the warrior-Britons presides over the beheading of a Roman soldier, and screams in the direction of the occupiers’ encampment, “You have stolen our land and killed our sons!”

Various parallels between the past and the present continue to be drawn, including descriptions of the atrocities carried out by the foreign army. When Marcus asserts to Esca that “The eagle [standard] is Rome,” the latter recounts how his family died at the hands of the Romans and declares, “Rome also did that.”

The slave suggests that the Romans who lost their lives in Caledonia 20 years before essentially died for nothing, exclaiming at one point: “Why did they [the lost legion] have to come north?… There’s nothing here worth taking. Why couldn’t they be satisfied with what they had?” Furthermore, the Roman politicians at home are portrayed as wealthy and arrogant.

However, these hints and suggestions of contemporary relevance are largely forgotten in the heat of the adventure, and we seem meant to conclude, in the end, that the pursuit of the eagle has been worthwhile after all, from a number of points of view. The film ends with a ceremony dedicated to honoring the martial dead, in which Marcus’s viewpoint, that there is nothing more “sweet and fitting” than dying for one’s country, seems restored to its place of pride.

As a right-wing website correctly points out, “If there’s a cautionary subtext here about the vulnerability of a modern superpower, however, it’s not something Macdonald seems determined to beat audiences over the head with. Instead, I suspect what people will remember most about The Eagle is the film’s unapologetic commitment to honor and integrity.”

Marcus has more of a “multi-cultural” perspective by the end of the film; he has come to see that bravery and honor are not exclusively Roman property. He also recognizes that the local population is at least as convinced of the rightness of its cause as the Romans.

All right, but aside from that?

There are interesting aspects to the film. It is coherently done. It is not gratuitously bloody and sadistic in the manner of Braveheart and Gladiator, although it leans in their direction from time to time. The Scottish landscape is often breathtaking; the reconstruction of Roman military tactics is apparently accurate, at least in places. We learn a few things, we think about a different world and time.

Even if the legend of the annihilated Roman legion is not true (as modern scholarship apparently has concluded), the idea of a quest north of Hadrian’s Wall (built 122-128 AD), beyond “the end of the world,” from the Roman point of view, is a fascinating one.

Still, the results are weak.…

Macdonald asserts that the filmmakers attempted to take “a very naturalistic, realistic approach in the film, in the way we shot it.… I come from documentaries and come from more realist tradition, I wanted to take that approach.”

It may very well be that The Eagle is shot in a more naturalistic way, but that is no guarantee of truthfulness or depth. As is often the case today, the capturing of detail comes at the expense of a broader grasp of things.

No one need pine for the Hollywood epics of the past (much less the Italian “sword and sandal” quasi-industry). The epic genre (set in ancient Rome and Egypt, biblical times, etc.) flourished in the 1950s. One thinks of Samson and Delilah, Quo Vadis, Salome, Barabbas, The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Sign of the Pagan, The Silver Chalice, The Egyptian, Land of the Pharaohs, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Esther and the King, King of Kings, Sodom and Gomorrah, Cleopatra, The Fall of the Roman Empire, The Greatest Story Ever Told…and more.

One historian of the film industry comments bluntly: “By the mid-1950s, the blacklist and new technologies led Hollywood to concentrate on apolitical, spectacular films such as biblical epics, westerns, and musicals.” A considerable flight from examining contemporary American reality in the wake of the purges of left-wing artists no doubt occurred, and an officially conformist and stagnant culture could have done no better than search for subjects consecrated by church and state. (Westerns and low-budget science fiction films perhaps lent themselves more easily to social criticism and self-criticism.)

Nonetheless, those epics, foolish and turgid as they often were, managed to convey more of a sense of the sweep of history than a film such as The Eagle. They dwelt, perhaps excessively and bloatedly, on “titanic,” collective issues in a panoramic fashion: the collapse of empires, wars and uprisings, the emergence of Christianity as a mass, oppositional movement to the Roman Empire and so forth. In that sense, they were far more “historically conscious” than present-day films.

And no wonder. The anti-communist purges did enormous damage, but it could not erase memory and consciousness as a whole. The writers and directors had been alive during great, traumatic events in the middle of the twentieth century. Many of the European filmmakers had experienced first-hand the end of dynasties, revolutionary crises, the rise of dictators. In that sense, their vision was more “realistic.”

On the other hand, what have Macdonald and his generation—born in the late 1960s and early 1970s—of younger British writers, directors (Tom Hooper, Christopher Nolan, Sam Mendes, Shane Meadows, Guy Ritchie, Joe Wright, etc.) and performers experienced? They grew up under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, then a decade of Tony Blair. A right-wing consensus prevailed. The working class was largely suppressed, its socialist heritage under relentless attack. History and the study of history were devalued by various ideological trends.

A good deal of money was to be made in film and television, often in Hollywood directly. In place of a fierceness about life and reality, which had characterized a previous generation of British writers and directors, concerns about image and career prevailed.

One had to be sensible. Making big waves never did anyone any good. Of course, one was still opposed to the ugliest side of capitalism; one was tolerant…and in favor of tolerance; one was opposed in principle to war; one was still vaguely concerned about social questions, but the personal was the political now, anyway, wasn’t it?

The amorphous liberalism, the weakened awareness of and orientation to the class struggle, the imprecision about historical matters—the overall vagueness—all this inevitably helps produce weak artistic results.

DAVID WALSH, the resident cinema and arts critic of the World Socialist Web Site, is legendary for his insightful and always didactic reviews.