Some Other Movies From 1971 (2)

For further background on the year in film, please refer to the Some Other Movies From 1971 entry.

The following things happened in 1971:

• The world population experienced its highest increase (in terms of percentage of previous population) in history.
• All in the Family aired for the first time on TV.
• The Aswan High Dam opened in Egypt.
• Charles Manson and 3 members of his "family" were found guilty of the Tate-LaBianca murders.
• The Nasdaq Composite stock market index debuted in the U.S.
• The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for the bombing of the United States Capitol.
• East Pakistan (now known as Bangladesh), Qatar, Oman and Bahrain declared independence.
• The My Lai Massacre took place in Vietnam.
• The first Starbucks opened in Seattle, Washington.
• Jim Morrison died.
• Gloria Steinem addressed the women of America.
• President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system, which fixed the value of the dollar to a certain amount of gold.
• A riot occurred at Attica Prison in New York.
• Greenpeace was founded in Canada.
• The first microprocessor was released by Intel.
• The Khmer Rouge began their assault on Cambodian government positions.

Linked entries can be viewed in their entirety on YouTube.

Excellent

1. Wake in Fright

A schoolteacher on his way to Sydney is detained in the Outback.  Wake in Fright is definitely not a film for animal lovers, but keep in mind that the scenes involving animal deaths were filmed separate from the movie itself, and involved local hunters.  The director, Ted Kotcheff, would go on to do First Blood and Weekend at Bernie's in the 80s.

2. Two-Lane Blacktop

The Fast and the Furious: 1971 Edition.  James Taylor (yes, that James Taylor!) and Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys!) star as two guys driving across American in a souped up car.  And weirdly enough, the car racing that happens in-between conversations is beside the point.  It's a movie that feels like it could have happened yesterday, and moreover a movie full of unorthodox choices.

Fun Fact: The director, Monte Hellman, was second unit director on the original Robocop.

3. Death in Venice

A very lonely, very closeted man journeys to Venice and falls in love.  This Italian adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella manages to communicate all the melancholy and mortal terror present in the original story, while at the same time lavishly recreating the time period.  The star, Dirk Bogarde, threw himself into the role.

4. Vanishing Point

A man in a white Challenger, armed with an envelope full of uppers, is on his way to San Francisco.  It's a masterpiece of minimalistic storytelling, perhaps even more so than the above-mentioned Two-Lane Blacktop.  These two movies would make a great double feature.

Fun Fact 1: The director wanted Gene Hackman for the lead role, but the studio insisted on relative unknown Barry Newman.

Fun Fact 2: The stunt coordinator also put together the car chase in The French Connection.

Fun Fact 3: Cleavon Little would go on to play a DJ a second time in 1978's far inferior FM.  Three years after Vanishing Point he'd star in Blazing Saddles.

5. Harold and Maude

Long before Wes Anderson there was Hal Ashby, that oft-forgotten of 70s auteur directors.  In Harold and Maude a morbid young man and a much older woman fall in love.  It's a movie in which people react in a manner opposite to what's expected, and the ending will stay with you for a long time.

Haunting

1. Johnny Got His Gun

NOW THAT THE WAR IS THROUGH WITH ME

I'M WAKING UP I CANNOT SEE

THAT THERE'S NOT MUCH LEFT OF ME

NOTHING IS REAL BUT PAIN NOW

Man, I've been wanting to see this movie since 1988.  In the late 80s I couldn't find a copy, life happened, and I thought about watching it off and on ever since.  I'm happy to say that now I've finally seen it, and that in many ways this movie surpassed my expectations.  Not only is this story of a maimed and mutilated war casualty more gruesome than the Metallica song it inspired, but it's also an exceptionally well put together film seething with anti-war sentiment.  I'm only sorry it took me so long to finally make this movie's acquaintance.

Fun Fact 1: Dalton Trumbo wrote and directed this in collaboration with Luis Bunuel.  It was based on Trumbo's novel of the same name.

Fun Fact 2: Metallica owns the rights to this film.  They purchased these rights so that they could keep the video of One in rotation.

Fun Fact 3: This was Timothy Bottoms' first movie.  He'd star in The Last Picture Show the same year, and two years after that he'd star in The Paper Chase.

Fun Fact 4: "The Swede" having a conversation with Jesus is actor David Soul, who'd go on to star in the TV show Starsky and Hutch.

2. The Devils

The second I saw director Ken Russell's name I expected quite a ride.  I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed.

The Devils is around two hours of religious and sexual hysteria.  And Oliver Reed doesn't just star in this movie, he commands it.  Is his Catholic priest a moral or immoral man?  An enlightened or ignorant one?  I suppose that depends entirely on whether you're viewing his actions through the morality of the past or the present, or his sentiments through the popular opinion of his time or ours.  Whichever way you cut it, this is a movie full of brilliant sets, even better acting, and an ending that comes down like a hammer.  Like Johnny Got His Gun it's not a happy film, but it's still very much worth seeing.

Fun Fact 1: This movie was partly adapted from a book by Aldous Huxley.

Fun Fact 2: This movie was rated X and banned in several countries upon its release.

Fun Fact 3: There's a documentary on the making of this movie.  It's often referred to as "one of the most controversial films ever made."

Some Good Ones

1. Red Sun

I'd seen it before, but it was good to see it again.

Charles Bronson stars as a morally ambiguous bank robber, with the great Toshiro Mifune as a samurai on his way to Washington D.C. to deliver a sword.  It's a very concise Western, the characters are well drawn and the plot is the direct product of personal conflicts laid out within the script.

Fun Fact 1: This movie wasn't just a hit in Japan because of Toshiro Mifune.  Charles Bronson was also well known in Japan by that time.  He'd appeared in The Magnificent Seven not long before, which was based on The Seven Samurai, starring Toshiro Mifune.

Fun Fact 2: Ursula Andress, arguably the first Bond girl, is in this film, but that's not the only 007 connection.  The director, Terence Young, also helmed Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball.

2. Get Carter

Michael Caine puts it on a slow boil as a London gangster looking to avenge his brother's death.  Caine was in his share of bad 70s films, but this isn't one of them.  If the name sounds familiar, it's because there was a 2000 remake with Sylvester Stallone in the lead.

Fun Fact 1: The director, Mike Hodges, would go on to helm Flash Gordon in 1980.

Fun Fact 2: The 1972 blaxploitation film Hit Man, which starred Bernie Casey, was based on the same novel.

3. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

I know this movie has its champions but I found it a little boring.  It takes FOREVER for the kids to get to the chocolate factory, and by the time they do Willy Wonka interrupts what might have been fun little scenes with a lot of talking.  I'd take Tim Burton's remake any day of the week.  

By no means is the original bad, but I think Burton's Wonka-by-way-of-Bowie worked a lot better.

4. Daughters of Darkness

A stylish exercise in erotic horror, even though the deaths that occur in the course of the film are very improbable.  The director, Harry Kumel, didn't do many films, but some of what he did sounds interesting.

5. Shaft

A Harlem crime boss hires hard boiled detective John Shaft to find his kidnapped daughter.  Shaft is, like Super Fly and Foxy Brown, one of the pillars of the blaxploitation genre, and certainly its most popular film.  It's far from flawless, but it's definitely entertaining and it's aged very well.

Good?  Bad?  Not Sure...

1. Duck, You Sucker! (a.k.a. A Fistful of Dynamite or Once Upon a Time... the Revolution)

Rod Steiger and James Coburn enter the sweaty, dusty world of Sergio Leone.  You can tell the director was swinging for the cheap seats here, perhaps even attempting the Western to end all Westerns, but the results are decidedly mixed.  On the one hand this movie features excellent performances by the two leads, on the other it goes on way too long.  Ending it just after the massacre in the cave would have resulted in a movie that made a more lasting impression.  As it is there's a whole other part after the massacre, which to me felt like little more than the scriptwriter checking off all the remaining boxes.  Traitor?  Dead.  President?  Dead.  Evil general?  Dead.  And I'm not even spoiling the plot by listing those deaths.  After a certain point those deaths are a foregone conclusion.

Certain shots in this film are a wonder to behold.  Unfortunately many of these shots look more like Spain, where this movie was shot, than like Mexico, where the story's supposed to be set.

Some Bad Ones

1. The Organization

A detective (Sidney Poitier) finds himself caught between an idealistic group of young people and a less idealistic group of drug smugglers.  This movie isn't terrible; it's just too convoluted for its own good.  The ending is also rather unsatisfying.

Fun Fact: Raul Julia is in this.  The Organization was his third movie.

2. Please Sir!

The late 60s called and they want their movie back.

I was missing the humor in this film.  The plot has something to do with a particularly difficult secondary school class going on an outdoor excursion.  It was hugely popular in Britain at the time, being a spinoff of a popular TV show. 

So Bad It's Good

1. The Big Boss (a.k.a. Fists of Fury)

You're in Thailand, you've got Bruce Lee on tap, a few pretty girls and around 100 Hong Kong dollars.  Make a movie!  Go!

How's the whole "drug smuggling via blocks of ice" scheme supposed to work, anyway?  Wouldn't it be a lot of trouble to freeze the drugs inside the ice?  Especially in Southeast Asia?  And wouldn't the drugs be easily visible inside the ice?  And it's not like drugs were that hard to transport through Thailand back then.  Why not just pay the cops to look the other way?

Fun Fact 1: Don't get confused.  The U.S. title of this film was FISTS of Fury, not to be confused with the 1972 sequel FIST of Fury.  This movie was Lee's first as leading man.

Fun Fact 2: A lot of the prostitutes in the brothel scene were actual prostitutes.  They filmed some of those scenes in a nearby brothel.

2. Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Had I the wherewithal, I'd compose a black metal album based on this movie.  The last song would be called "Witch in the Sky," and it would be HEAVY AS FUCK.

I got myself pretty drunk while watching this Disney "classic."  Angela "Murder, She Wrote" Lansbury stars as an apprentice witch, with a trio of Disney-mandated British street urchins under her wing.  It's Mary Poppins, in other words, but not nearly as good.

The plot is also pretty random.  Lansbury needs the words to a spell, and the words to the spell are in a book, or they might be on an island ruled by animals, or they might be in another book entirely.  However we get there stuff ends up getting animated by sinister powers ("Asteroth" I think not, "Azathoth" it be...) and then the animated (as in the Latin animus) stuff kicks a bunch of Nazis the fuck off British soul.  Rule Brittania, says I.  

Or something.  I'm not sure.  Again, I was drunk.

Fun Fact 1: Angela Lansbury is STILL ALIVE.  Really.  At the time of writing she's 97 years old.

Fun Fact 2: This movie was shot using yellowscreen, not bluescreen.  The yellowscreen process, also known as the sodium vapor process, involves the use of sodium vapor lights against a white background.  The sodium vapor lights narrow the color spectrum to the point where the special effects can be added to the live action shots.

Related Entries:

Some Other Movies From 1971

Some Other Movies From 1972 (2)

Some Other Movies From 1972

Some Other Movies From 1973 (2)

"IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black (2001)

First of all, thanks to William D. Finn, of 939 Homer Street, (#3003) in Vancouver, British Columbia.  I don't know how his book found its way to Taiwan, but I thank him just the same.  Feel free to write him a letter if you ever read IBM and the Holocaust.

But I digress.  Yet again.  Here's a quote:

"Interior Ministry officials reviewed one fanciful proposal for a twenty-five-floor circular tower of data to centralize all personal information.  The proposal was rejected because it would take years to build and stock.  But the futuristic concept opened the eyes of Reich planners.  Each of the twenty five floors in the imagined tower would be composed of 12 circular rooms representing one birth year.  Every circular room would contain 31 cabinets, one for each day of the month.  Each cabinet in turn would contain 7,000 names.  Registrations and updates would feed in from census bureaus.  All 60 million Germans would then be organized and cross-indexed in a single location regardless of changes in residence.  Data could be removed by some 1,500 couriers running from room to room like so many magnetic impulses fetching files."

Edwin Black is an investigative journalist and author of several books.  He's the child of Polish Holocaust survivors, and has written often on Nazism, anti-Semitism and human rights.

IBM and the Holocaust is a very detailed, very carefully argued book, and I'll do my best to synopsize its contents.  In the late 1800s an American invented a new form of punch card technology which improved the quality and speed with which the U.S. Census was produced.  The centerpiece of this technology was the Hollerith machine, named after its inventor, Herman Hollerith.

By various twists and turns a business predicated upon this punch card technology became International Business Machines, or IBM, which under new leadership sought to expand outward into international markets.  By that time the company was under the direction of Thomas J. Watson, a cutthroat individual who transformed the company into both an industrial powerhouse and a cult of personality centered around himself.

Somewhere in the middle of all that World War I happened, and IBM, casting a hopeful eye toward postwar Germany, expanded into that country without considering the cost of doing business with the German government.  As part of this process IBM came to set up a subsidiary in Germany by the name of Dehomag, which was completely subservient to IBM's main office in New York.

Hitler happened, and what was his stated goal from the outset?  The extermination of the Jews of course.  And what was the first step in achieving that goal?  Compiling a census, a task with which IBM Germany (i.e. Dehomag) was intimately familiar.

This compiling of a German census involved a lot of collaboration with IBM executives, and as the book makes clear the IBM New York office was kept informed every step of the way.  IBM was there when the Nazis were searching for better ways to profile "social undesirables," and IBM was there when the Nazis were looking for better ways to catalogue people, places and modes of transportation.

And what was the result of all this cataloguing and census-taking?  The Holocaust.  Without IBM's Hollerith machines the trains in Germany wouldn't have run on time, the Jews wouldn't have been so effectively herded into concentration camps, and the tallies of deaths and the specifics of slave labor wouldn't have been so efficiently compiled.  The Holocaust was undoubtedly accomplished with IBM collaboration, and if they managed not to see certain details of it it was only because they were too busy squeezing the Third Reich for its last pfennig.

What were the consequences of IBM's collaboration?  For the Jews, in countless cases, it was death.  For those serving the company in Germany the consequences were also death, sometimes imprisonment, and still other times relocation into IBM's new corporate hierarchy after the war.  The company as a whole prospered, and many of those directly responsible for IBM's actions in Germany escaped relatively unscathed.

It's a story that has been repeated many times.  We might even be seeing it now, with different actors, in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.  Company A, resident in Country A, wants to do business in Country B.  Yet at some point Country A and Country B go to war, and Company A has to decide how involved it wants to be in Country B's economy, and how much profit offsets how much risk.  Often Company A overextends itself, compromising its position to where tracks must be covered, and associations must be minimized.  

You also see this story repeated in China, wherein the designs of the Chinese Communist Party conflict with the expressed ideals of non-Chinese companies doing business there.

And the book?  Is it good?  Well, if you're asking me if it's entertaining I'd have to say no.  The corporate maneuvers detailed in this book make for excruciating reading, even if the author lays out a compelling case for IBM's dishonesty during World War II.  Did IBM create the Holocaust?  Certainly not, but they knew what was going on in Germany, and it couldn't have been accomplished on the same scale without their assistance.

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