Funny how we are attracted to movies where we know the ending. Funny, too, how we have no qualms about attending a movie with terrible suffering or bloodshed.
A movie with an obvious ending can still be entertaining if we wonder how the various characters with their issues will turn out. Movies about the Titanic have survivors but also some likeable characters that meet their end, horribly. The unpleasantness occurs with the ship hurtling downward below the surface of the water.
People didn't just die, their bodies got badly damaged. I read about this in a book about the disaster that came out shortly after the James Cameron movie. It was quite the blockbuster movie, remember?
The book also informed me that in the months after the sinking, seafaring folks would advise their passengers of a "seagull" in the water not far away: it was actually the body of a Titanic victim. Passengers were guided against observing further. You'll recall from the movie that the bodies were white from being frozen.
Are you surprised we pay to see such dismal movie fare? A part of us is obviously intrigued. Likewise, we enthusiastically consumed the D-Day movie "Saving Private Ryan." Hollywood figured it was about time that a movie showed the whole bloody thing with pinpoint accuracy. But why? We could have easily surmised from earlier movies that the actual unpleasantness was greater than the likes of John Wayne would want us to see. Wayne was in the 1962 movie "The Longest Day." Strange that it was in black and white.
I'm not sure D-Day was as successful as American history seeks to portray. It was inhuman in a way, as it gave the U.S. service boys no choice but to charge forward, as they were coming from the sea. Some of the boys drowned because of being weighted down. We won the war but at what cost? We failed to give the Russians i.e. the Red Army enough credit. The Germans feared the Red Army more than us.
General Patton's family was set to sue when the George C. Scott movie came out. I guess the facts of the general's career pointed to a possible expose but instead, Hollywood simply gave us a movie about winning! It was the U.S. nature to simply win. Patton's survivors liked the movie.
Revisionist? Isn't historical revision rather ubiquitous? Hollywood gives us the kind of messages we want to consume. If the Vietnam-based movies weren't exactly patriotic, it was because Americans had concluded en masse, finally, that the war was unconscionable. We needed reinforcement.
Even if D-Day went awry in some ways - too many casualties - one could argue we simply had to wipe out the Axis menace. Andy Rooney had been in the theater of WWII and felt much of it was a "mess," not so orderly as movies (or retired generals) might suggest.
Long before the James Cameron movie about the Titanic, we had the major motion picture from 1953 starring Barbara Stanwyck. Let's put aside the tragedy of the story and conclude that it is an engaging movie with interesting characters. It has a "film noir" tone, common at the time.
Many of us remember Basehart best for his role in the 1960s TV series "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." The Mad Magazine satire was "Voyage to See What's on The Bottom" in which Basehart as the top commander spends his idle time playing with boats in the bathtub!
The 1953 "Titanic" movie took liberties with many facts. Dramatic license, I guess, such as with Titanic's musical group having horns. In fact it was just strings. Such liberties are taken to make the movie more interesting. One can watch the 1953 "Titanic" and still come away with an appreciation of the historical facts.
The ship goes down. The Allies storm the beaches of Normandy and move on. Pearl Harbor gets bombed. "King Kong" dies on top of a tall building at the end. We know all these things, the gist of the conclusion, but we flock to the movies anyway.
The 1953 "Titanic" won the academy award for Best Original Screenplay. It was nominated for Best Art Direction. Should we care that the hairdos and outfits were typical of 1950s America and not of the year of the sinking, 1912? Crew members on the real Titanic did not wear British Navy uniforms. There was no shuffleboard on the real Titanic. Seems to fit with our conception, though. (Mad Magazine imagined commemoration of Richard Nixon's life with a "Richard M. Nixon National Weasel Refuge" and the illustration was of weasels playing shuffleboard.)
Interesting fact about the lifeboats which I learned just recently: the lifeboats were never intended to provide escape for all the ship's passengers! Lifeboats were in fact planned as a means for ferrying passengers from the ship in distress to a rescue ship. Many on the Titanic thought the big boat would stay afloat long enough for rescue - they thought it dangerous for the women to go out on the blackness of the ocean waters.
Will another Titanic movie ever be made? Or another D-Day movie? Or a re-telling of the King Kong story? Seems Hollywood has pulled out all stops to give us the ultimate of all three, hasn't it? I'll take "The Longest Day" as a D-Day movie, as it presents the story with basic accuracy and without the most stomach-turning violence. We can surmise the latter - I always have.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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