Start the Revolution Without Me: Farewell, Gene Wilder

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18th Century Europe, 18th Century France, Billie Whitelaw, Comedies, Donald Sutherland, Gene Wilder, Hugh Griffith, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Orson Welles, Start the Revolution Without Me, The French Revolution, Victor Spinetti, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Like all right-thinking people, I was deeply saddened to learn that comic actor Gene Wilder had died. The news brought back memories of my childhood in the 70s, watching his movies with my older brothers in Milwaukee, the hometown I share with Wilder. Although Wilder’s film career ran from 1967 to 1991, he did his best work in the 1970s, managing to release two of his most famous works in 1974, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.

Wilder in his most iconic role

But of course, what Wilder will always be best known for is his delightfully charismatic performance as Willy Wonka in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In some ways it’s an unlikely film. Although it was inspired by the great children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, the reason it got made into a movie is that Quaker Oats was looking for a vehicle to promote a new candy bar. Despite having no experience in film-making, Quaker bought the rights to the novel, renamed the new candy bar the Wonka Bar, and filmed the movie as publicity for its launch. That’s right. One of the greatest children’s movies ever was actually a massive exercise in product placement. The Wonka Bar was a bomb; it was released in 1971 and then quickly recalled because of problems with it, and the movie did poorly in the box office, but by the 1980s it had entered the canon of children’s films because of constant showings on television.

Wilder insisted that when Willy Wonka first appears, he seems to be near-invalid, leaning heavily on a cane, until he executes a somersault and reveals that he’s actually in good health. As Wilder realized, that moment would destabilize Wonka as a character, because the audience would never know if he was telling the truth or not. And it works brilliantly, setting up later scenes such as the frightening boat ride he subjects his guests to and even more importantly, the famous “You get nothing!” scene at the end. And the Wonka character plays perfectly to the two halves of Wilder’s screen persona, the calm, gentle, empathetic man and the man teetering on the edge of hysteria and total loss of control. It’s a performance for the ages. It is precisely what the best children’s literature offers, a combination of reassurance and uncertainty.

In contrast, the ill-conceived 2005 remake starring Johnny Depp failed to achieve that same quality because Depp’s Wonka is just weird. The film strips away all of Wonka’s mystery by giving him a complex back-story, father issues, and motives that pulled Wonka down to humanity where Wilder’s Wonka was some sort of supernatural tutelary deity given human form.

But this is a blog about movies and history, and so I want to call your attention to one of Wilder’s earliest films, a little known gem that holds a special place in my heart just beneath Willy Wonka.

 

Fun and Games with the French Revolution

Start the Revolution Without Me (1970, dir. Bud Yorkin) was only Wilder’s third film, and only his second in a leading role. It’s a parody of films and literature set in the Ancien Regime of 18^th century France. It’s only nominally about history, but it’s a glorious romp through a lot of clichés about the French past.

It opens with Orson Welles, that 1970s symbol of high-brow respectability, gazing at a French chateau. “Hello, I’m Orson Wells. It’s lovely, isn’t it? The summer palace of Louis XVI. You know, historians have recently discovered a previously unknown fact concerning this palace, an event that almost changed the entire history of Western Europe. Did you know that the entire French revolution could have been avoided? It’s true. No one knows what took place there. It’s an event of such importance that men of integrity and may I say considerable resources made a film on the subject. It’s a color film, which I am not in.”

The premise of the film is that in the mid-18^th century, a traveling Corsican nobleman and his pregnant wife are forced to stop at a small inn so his wife can give birth. At luck would have it, a peasant woman is also giving birth, and both women produce twin boys. Unable to figure out which boys are which, the harried doctor gives one of each set of twins to each father.

As a result, Wilder and co-star Donald Sutherland each play half of two sets of brothers, the cowardly but well-meaning peasants Claude and Charles Coupe, and the haughty, ruthless noblemen Philippe and Pierre de Sisi, the best swordsmen in all of Corsica. Louis XVI (Hugh Griffith) is a bumbling king dominated by his wife Marie (Billie Whitelaw) and the ruthless Duc d’Escargot (Victor Spinetti). Louis summons the de Sisi brothers to Paris because he wants them to kill Escargot, but Escargot intercepts the message and uses it to persuade the de Sisis to kill Louis instead. He plans to offer the brothers half of France while he marries Marie and rules the other half.

Sutherland and Wilder as the de Sisi brothers

The de Sisis travel to Paris disguised as peasants, not realizing that revolutionaries, including the reluctant Coupe brothers, are planning to attack the boat they’re on because it’s carrying weapons and ammunition that they need for their rebellion. In the confusion of the attack, naturally the rebels mistake the de Sisis for the Coupes and drag them off to their hidden base while Escargot’s men mistake the Coupes for the de Sisis and take them to the palace.

From there, the Coupes stumble their way through the intrigues of Louis’ court, where everyone seems determined to persuade the Coupes to kill someone else. Escargot is planning to marry Princess Christina of Belgium, because that will give him the Belgian army and allow him to kill Louis, marry Marie, and rule France, but only if Louis’ plan to have Pierre kill Escargot, marry Christina, and use the Belgian army to help him get rid of Marie doesn’t happen first. Marie wants Claude to kill Escargot, marry Christina, use the Belgian army to kill Louis, then kill Christina, marry Marie, and help her rule France. You get the idea.

The characters are drawn with broad strokes and make use of all sorts of tropes from French literature. Whitelaw’s Marie is a sex-crazed woman who is juggling multiple lovers simultaneously, including seemingly the entirety of the palace guard, and Louis is too addled to realize it; in one scene he fails to notice Marie and Escargot making out right next to him in his own bed.

Louis is kindly, but utterly incompetent. In one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, he shows up to a formal ball dressed as a chicken, because, as he spends the rest of the scene explaining to people, he thought it was a costume ball.

Whitelaw and Griffith as Marie and Louis

Escargot is a sneering villain, given to absurd extended metaphors such as “The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of an eagle, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.” And that’s one of the simple ones. Here’s a scene where he verbally spars with the Coupes masquerading as the de Sisis.

The film borrows liberally from historical fiction, including Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Alexandre Dumas’ The Corsican Brothers and The Man in the Iron Mask. It doesn’t particularly care that the Man in the Iron Mask belongs to the 17^th century, not the 18^th century.

The twin roles of Claude and Philippe allow Wilder to channel the two halves of his comic persona as well as Willy Wonka does. Claude is simply a decent man trying to survive his unusual circumstances, while Philippe is a leather-clad sadist barely able to control himself. Rosalind Knight has a number of brilliant scenes as his desperate, put-upon wife Helene that tell us more than we want to know about Philippe’s sexual habits. “You said we weren’t going to do the Choir Boy and the Monk any more! You said you wanted to do the Woodchopper and the Shepherdess! How many costumes do you expect me to pack?” (Apparently, that costume required her to pack a small flock of sheep.)

Poor Helene!

Start the Revolution Without Me shares a number of qualities with another comic gem from the same period, 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Both are nominally historic films with the stars playing multiple roles. Both borrow liberally from literature but without much concern for accuracy. Both employ parody of historical documentaries in which the narrator is killed by a character from the documentary he’s narrating, and neither film has a conventional ending. As a result, both wind up using the instability of genre conventions as a key comic tool. It would not surprise me to learn that Revolution helped inspire Holy Grail.

But where Holy Grail is fundamentally absurdist, Revolution is essentially slapstick. There’s a great deal of pratfalling and mistaken identity. The film culminates in a comic chase in which the Coupe brother are trying to flee the palace along with Princess Christina and Claude’s fiancée Mimi (as well as a charter of reform they’ve persuaded Louis to sign), while the de Sisis are trying to sneak into the palace to kill Escargot. At the same time the revolutionaries are trying to storm the palace and Louis and Marie are just trying to survive.

The slapstick element of Revolution hasn’t aged as well as the absurdism of Holy Grail, which is perhaps the reason that the former has faded from the popular mind while Holy Grail has become a classic. But if you’re in the mood to revisit Wilder’s career, you should give it a look; it’s available on iTunes. Even though I’ve seen the film numerous times, re-watching it last night gave me a number of laugh-out-loud moments that reminded me of what a joy Gene Wilder’s best work really is.

Goodbye, Mr. Wilder. Thank you for giving me so many laughs.

If you like this review, please consider donating a buck or two so I can expand the range of films I cover.

 

Want to Know More?

Start the Revolution Without Me is available on Amazon. While you’re at it, pick up Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory too. There’s also his lovely memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger. 

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Chi-Raq: Ancient Athens in Modern Chicago

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20th Century America, Ancient Greece, Chi-Raq, Chicago, Comedies, Jennifer Hudson, John Cusack, Lysistrata, Movies I Love, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Teyonah Parris

Chi-Raq (2015, dir. Spike Lee) is a modernization of the classic Athenian comedy Lysistrata, first performed in 411 BC during the Peloponnesian War. When I heard about Lee’s film, I was intrigued, since it’s not every day a movie based on an ancient play gets produced, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points, including the end of the film.

 

 

Lysistrata

Lysistrata was first performed during a war between the Athenians and the Spartans. The war began in 430 BC, and had continued ever since. By 411, the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Athenians. 4 years previously, they had opened a new front in the war with a disastrous invasion of Sicily; they had lost much of their navy and large numbers of citizen sailors had been captured. The failure of that invasion probably marked the point at which the Athenians should have decided to cut their loses and sue for peace, but the Athenians stubbornly refused to do so.

So in 411, Aristophanes, who was part of the anti-war faction at Athens, staged Lysistrata as a critique of the war. In the play, Lysistrata proposes to bring the war to an end by persuading both the Athenian and Spartan women to go on a sex strike. They vow not to have sex until the men arrange a peace. To advance their cause, Lysistrata’s followers occupy the Acropolis and seize the state treasury, which will hinder the war cause, since the city will not be able to pay its war expenses without it. During a conversation with one of the city’s magistrates, Lysistrata accuses the Athenians (who are literally sitting in the audience watching) of having made disastrous decisions in the war. Eventually a desperately tumescent Spartan herald arrives with news that the Spartans want to negotiate, and the equally desperate magistrate agrees to sit down and discuss terms with him. Lysistrata shows up with a young woman named Reconciliation and uses their lust for her as an incentive to keep the negotiations moving. The peace is celebrated with a feast. Throughout the play, choruses of Old Men and Old Women clash in bawdy ways, dramatizing the struggle between masculine lust and feminine chastity.

The play is often today read as an anti-war play, which is probably reading more into it than Aristophanes intended. The play does not condemn war in general, only this war in particular. By 411, the Athenians were clearly tired of war, but could not seem to find a way to extricate themselves from the conflict without damaging their pride. The play wittily suggests that male military aggression and male sexual desire are somehow combined.

Lysistrata is not an easy play to stage nowadays. In this period, Athenian comedy was extremely topical, and many of the play’s references no long make sense to audiences who don’t know who, for example, Hippias or Cleisthenes were. Many of the jokes are directed at men who were probably sitting in the audience, satirizing them for their personal foibles and reputation. The play also contains a lot of jokes so deeply connected to the exact situation that modern audiences won’t get them any more; during the negotiations, the herald and the magistrate treat Reconciliation’s body as a map of Greece, discussing which parts of it they want to claim, but without understanding the actual geography of the war, the double-entendres lose much of their punch.

Another challenge to staging Athenian comedy is that it is extremely bawdy, far more so than all but the most raunchy of modern comedies. This mixture of political satire and sex jokes is off-putting to most modern audiences. Imagine a Saturday Night Live political sketch crossed with American Pie and you start to get the effect. Athenian comedy is so frankly sexual that one scholar commented, “if you don’t find a dirty joke in a line of text, you’re probably not looking hard enough.” The women of Lysistrata want the war to end because it’s interfering with their ability to get laid and purchase dildoes. The Spartan herald’s erection is given almost an entire page’s worth of attention, as people try to guess what he’s got hidden under his cloak. This is not some genteel Victorian farce; this is comedy all about penises and vaginas.

 

Chi-Raq

Lee has transposed the action of the play to the south side of Chicago, often nicknamed Chi-raq by its inhabitants because there is enough violence for a war zone. The two warring factions are rival gangs, the Spartans, led by the rapper Demetrius ‘Chi-Raq’ Dupree (Nick Cannon), and the Trojans, led by Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). One day, Chi-Raq’s woman, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) stumbles across the scene of a gang shooting in which an 11-year old girl has become an innocent victim. She sees the girl’s mother Irene (Jennifer Hudson) grieve for her daughter and demand that something be done.

Lysistrata (center) persuading the woman to take the oath

Lysistrata gathers a bunch of her friends and arranges a meeting with some of the women who date the Trojans, including Indigo (Michelle Mitchenor), Cyclop’s woman. She persuades them to swear an oath. “I will deny all rights of access or entrance from every husband, lover, or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection. If he should force me to lay on that conjugal couch, I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy!”

From there, the movement grows as even the strippers, prostitutes, and guys on the down low take the oath. Then the women seize control of a National Guard armory, and the movement goes global, much to the frustration of Mayor McCloud (D.B. Sweeney), whose wife takes the oath. From there, the story plays out to its conclusion.

Hudson’s Irene

But as the story progresses, Lee inserts scenes of Father Corridan (John Cusack) performing the funeral for the murdered girl and leading an anti-gun march. Although skeptical of Lysistrata’s tactics, he plays an important role in getting Chi-Raq to come to the negotiating table. He and Irene circulate posters offering a reward for information about who shot the girl. Finally, at the end, when it looks like the negotiations between the Spartans and the Trojans will collapse because of Chi-Raq’s resistance, he tearfully acknowledges that he is the girl’s killer. Accepting the magnitude of his crime, he is led away, calling on all the gang members to admit their guilt in the situation and work to end the violence.

On paper this all sounds heavy-handed and tendentious. But Lee manages to make the material work through a combination of three contrasting elements. The film is every bit as vulgar as the source material. Jokes about dick and pussy and blue balls abound. The Old Men of the film just want to get laid again and are determined to restore their masculine pride, while the Old Women aren’t entirely happy to give up sex but see the greater goal behind the strike.

But the coarseness of the humor is off-set by the fact that most of the dialogue is in rhyming verse. Although some of the verse feels a bit clunky, and can be hard to follow, at its best, it becomes Shakespearean, elevating the vulgarity to the level of high art. Chi-Raq’s speech at the end plays as a morality tale, in which the actor is exhorting the audience to learn from his mistakes. Here’s an example, in which Lysistrata confronts the Old Men:

 

And then there is the profound passion of the film. The film opens with a prologue text informing us that more Americans have been killed in Chicago in the past 15 years than in both the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. “This is an emergency!” a voice declares at both the start and finish of the film. Cusack delivers the funeral sermon with an urgency that grows to fury at “this self-inflicted genocide,” and it’s clear that he is voicing Lee’s own feelings about the situation. Both Lysistrata and her friend Dr. Helen (Angela Bassett) deliver powerful speeches about how they are fighting to save the lives of their community.

Cusack’s Father Corridan, preaching the funeral sermon

Jennifer Hudson’s performance is particularly powerful. Her own personal tragedy, in which her brother-in-law murdered her mother, brother, and nephew in their West Chicago home, hangs over the film, a profound reminder that this is not simply an exercise in entertainment. When Hudson as Irene leads an anti-gun march, she is surrounded by dozens of extras all carrying photos of the actual relatives they lost to gun violence. And the film is not afraid to point fingers. At different moments, it accuses the NRA, the prison-industrial complex, Indiana’s gun shows, the Republican party, the media, the banks, and the adolescent gang-bangers of all playing a role in the slaughter. The mayor is a thinly-veiled satire of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who reportedly opposed the film because it was bad for tourism.

Lee has quite masterfully managed to transpose Lysistrata for a modern audience, capturing the marriage of bawdy humor and serious intent and even much of the original’s structure. Both play and film are in verse, both make use of song and dance, and both have choruses that act to set the stage and keep the action moving; Lee’s chorus is Samuel L. Jackson.

Jackson as Dolmedes, the film’s Greek chorus

Given the challenges of reproducing Classical Athenian comedy for modern audiences, Lee has pulled off an impressive feat. While Chi-Raq is not a perfect film (the verse is not always easy to follow, and a few scenes fall flat, including one where Lysistrata seduces the general of the armory), it’s a worthy effort, both in terms of cinema and in terms of the cause it serves, and you should definitely give it a viewing.

 

Want to Know More?

CHI-RAQ [DVD + Digital]is available on Amazon.

Lysistrata is a classic, and definitely worth reading. The Penguin edition of Lysistrata and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) would be a good place to start.

If you want to know more about the remarkable Leymah Gbowee, she tells her story in her book Mighty Be Our Powers.

Hail, Caesar!: Fun with Hollywood Scandal

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1950s, 20th Century America, Alden Ehrenreich, Channing Tatum, Comedies, Eddie Mannix, Esther Williams, Films about Hollywood, George Clooney, George Reeves, Hedda Hopper, Joel and Ethan Coen, Josh Brolin, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Spencer Tracy, The Robe, Tilda Swinton, Veronica Osorio

Hail, Caesar! (2016, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen) is a rather fluffy film set in 1950s Hollywood. While LA Confidential used the period as the setting for a thriller, the Coen brothers use it as a chance to explore the silliness of the period. The plot, such as it is, involves Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a ‘fixer’ who works for Capital Pictures, covering up scandals before they can get into the media. The studio is in the middle of making a prestige Sword-and-Sandal pic about a Roman general who undergoes a religious conversion when he accidentally meets Jesus at a well. But the star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) gets kidnapped, and Mannix has to scramble to find him. There’s not really much actual history here, other than the general setting, but I figured I’d dig into some of the characters and look at whom they might be based on.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, you may wish to do so before reading this post, since it discusses major plot points.

 

Eddie Mannix

Eddie Mannix was actually a real person, but Brolin’s character bares only a superficial resemblance to the real thing: basically, they’re both married, Catholic, and work as fixers, but that’s about it. The real Eddie Mannix (d.1963) was MGM’s comptroller and general manager, and worked closely with MGM’s head of publicity to control press coverage of the performers who worked for the studio. It was his job to fix the actual scandals by paying off witnesses and victims, getting the police to look the other way, and so on. He is alleged to have covered up a car accident that Clark Gable got into by making John Huston take the blame for it. (In the film, Mannix at one point alludes to covering up a similar incident.) He reportedly arranged for the destruction of a pornographic film that Joan Crawford had made while she was a teenager. When Spencer Tracy went on one of his periodic benders. Mannix had a system for how to deal with the star.

The real Eddie Mannix

And he was largely responsible for destroying the reputation of an unfortunate young dancer and actress named Patricia Douglas, who was hired to provide companionship at a drinking party for 300 of MGM’s salesmen. Douglas was raped during the party, and when she tried to pursue charges, first in criminal court and then in civil court, Mannix used his contacts in the legal system to make the charges go away.

Brolin as Mannix

Mannix also had an ugly set of relationships. He cheated on his first wife, Bernice, with a dancer named Mary Nolan, whom he beat so frequently that she required 15 surgeries. When she tried to sue him, he had the police run her out of town. He may have arranged Bernice’s death in a car accident. His second wife, Toni Lanier, eventually had a long-term affair with Superman star George Reeves, with Mannix’ blessing. When Reeves called off the affair in 1958, Toni was deeply distressed, and Reeves suddenly had a car accident after the brake fluid drained out of his brake line. Not long after that, Reeves committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Connect the dots if you’re so inclined.

 

Baird Whitlock and Hail, Caesar!

Whitlock is an established actor who, like Spencer Tracy, has a tendency to go on long benders from which Mannix has to retrieve him. Some reviews have suggested Whitlock is modeled on Kirk Douglas, apparently because of Douglas’ involvement in Sword-and-Sandal pics like Spartacus, but I think he’s actually based more on Richard Burton, because Hail, Caesar! seems to be a spoof of The Robe. Both films are about a jaded Roman soldier who converts to Christianity after a brief encounter with Jesus; both feature a scene in which the tormented soldier stares up at Jesus as he hangs on the cross, and both films have a strategy of only filming Jesus from behind and focusing instead on the soldier’s face. The bloated speeches that Whitlock gives sound a lot like speeches from The Robe. But Quo Vadis and Ben Hur are other obvious inspirations for Hail, Caesar!

Clooney as Whitlock

 

DeeAnna Moran

Scarlett Johansson plays DeeAnna Moran, who is very obviously modeled on Esther Williams. Like Williams, Moran is a bathing beauty whose water ballet films are a major money-maker in the 50s. (In fact, the Coen brothers arranged for Williams’ tank to be restored so they could film Moran’s mermaid sequence in it.) Moran is on her second divorce, working on a film, and having an affair with director Arne Slessum (Christopher Lambert), when she discovers she’s pregnant. Desperate to protect her wholesome image, Mannix arranges for her to discretely surrender the baby to a third party, with the intention of then adopting the baby as if it weren’t her own. Similarly, Williams discovered that she was pregnant by her second husband while working on Pagan Love Song; she later divorced that husband. While working on Million Dollar Mermaid, she had an affair with Victor Mature. But the detail about Moran giving up the baby and then adopting it back is taken from Loretta Young’s life, when she got pregnant with Clark Gable’s child, reportedly during a train ride.

Johansson as Moran

 

Hobie Doyle and Carlotta Valdez

Alden Ehrenreich plays Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy. He’s an expert trick-rider and good with a lasso, but totally out of his league when he gets cast in a drawing-room romance as a playboy. Some have suggested that Doyle is modeled on Kirby Grant, best known for the tv series Sky King, but while Grant did singing cowboy films, his central shtick seems to have been trick piloting. Doyle’s more likely to be modeled on Gene Autry, who like Doyle is both a singer and an expert rider. Roy Rogers is another possibility.

Ehrenreich as Doyle, trying to act

Doyle gets sent on a studio-manufactured date with Latina dancer Carlotta Valdez (Veronica Osorio), who is pretty obviously Carmen Miranda. She even makes a joke about being able to dance with fruit on her head. But Miranda’s heyday was the 40s (her career went into decline after WWII), and Carlotta is a young woman. The film doesn’t delve into Miranda’s abusive marriage, alcoholism, or drug usage at all.

 

Laurence Laurenz and Burt Gurney

Hobie’s movie is being directed by the stuffy British Laurence Laurenz (Ralph Fiennes), who is appalled at how poorly-cast his leading man is. In one amusing sequence, he finds himself forced to give Doyle elocution lessons so he can say the line “Would that it were so simple” without his Southern accent. Laurenz seems to be a version of Laurence Olivier, especially once it’s revealed that he’s having an affair with Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum).

Gurney is a song-and-dance man. We get to see Gurney perform a classic 50s dance number called “Dames”, which is filled with innuendo (it’s probably the best scene in the whole film). It’s clearly a riff on Gene’s Kelly’s Anchors Aweigh, although the Coens were also reportedly inspired by Fred Astaire and Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain. But I doubt there’s any evidence that Kelly (or Astaire or O’Connor) was gay, or that he was a communist sympathizer. And Tatum’s dance style is much more like Kelly’s working class masculinity than Astaire’s upper-class elegance.(See Update.)

Tatum as Gurney

 

Thora and Thessaly Thacker

Tilda Swinton plays twin sisters Thora and Thessaly, both of whom are gossip columnists in the mold of Hedda Hopper or Luella Parsons. Both women were famous for their ability to ferret out celebrity gossip, and although they had initially been friends, they came to hate each other and feuded for years.Hopper was both feared and despised in the late 30s and 40s for the damage her column could do; Tracy once kicked her in the ass after she revealed his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, while Joseph Cotton pulled a chair out from under her. Joan Bennett once sent her a skunk as a Valentine’s Day gift.

But the angle that Thora and Thessaly are also twin sisters was taken from Esther Lederer and Pauline Philips, better known as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. Landers reportedly became angry when her sister decided to start her own advice column just a few months after Landers had begun hers (without giving her any warning). For much of the rest of their lives, they had a stormy relationship (Van Buren reportedly one tried to persuade a paper to drop her sister’s column and run hers instead) and when Landers died in 2002, they were reportedly not on speaking terms, despite an apparent reconciliation in the 1960s.

Swinton as one of the Thacker sister

 

Update: As a commenter on this blog pointed out, the affair between Laurenz and Gurney probably owes something to the rumors that Olivier and Danny Kaye were lovers. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support the claims, but that doesn’t mean the Coens might not have gotten inspiration from the rumors. And Kaye was suspected by the FBI of being a Communist, which fits Gurney’s character.

 

Want to Know More?

Hail, Caesar! [Blu-ray]is available at Amazon. If you’re in the mood for another look at Hollywood in the 1950s, check out L.A. Confidential [Blu-ray].

Like I said, there isn’t much actual history here, but if you want to read more about Hollywood scandals, you can try The Hollywood Book of Scandals : The Shocking, Often Disgraceful Deeds and Affairs of Over 100 American Movie and TV Idols

The Mummy: You Weren’t Expecting Accuracy, Were You?

Tags

Ancient Egypt, Comedies, The Mummy

The Historian who Goes to the Movies is currently going on his honeymoon, so this post is going to be a fairly quick one. The Mummy (1999, dir. Stephen Sommers) is pretty clearly a fantasy film rather than history, but it does touch on historical topics, so I figured I’d just point out a couple things it gets wrong.

1) At various points, the archaeologist heroes discover two books, the Book of Amun Ra and the Book of the Dead. These are massive metal books purportedly from ancient Egypt. The problem here is that the Egyptians didn’t actually have books in the modern sense of the word. The codex (the technical term for the physical things we call a ‘book’) wasn’t invented until shortly after the birth of Christ, approximately 1200 years after the film’s books were supposed to be produced. Prior to that texts in Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean were written on papyrus scrolls. The Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ is not a literal book in the modern sense, but simply a ‘written text’. I guess a bunch of evil metal scrolls didn’t seem imposing enough.

It looks cool…

2) The plot revolves around an attempt to resurrect the evil princess Anck-Su-Namun. The main villain, Imhotep, is punished by the ancient Egyptians with immortal life and his supporters are mummified alive. There are a lot of problems with this. First, for Egyptians survival into the afterlife is highly sought after, not a bad thing, so punishing Imhotep with immortality seems a lot like punishing a thief by making him a billionaire (evidently, they sent him to Wall Street…) The Egyptian view of the afterlife is that it is much like this world, only much better, so the idea of resurrecting someone would have been foreign to the Egyptians, since it would have involved bringing your loved one back to a less pleasant place. And finally, in the Egyptian system, the afterlife was extremely hard to achieve. It required the preservation of the body, the preservation of the deceased’s name, a whole lot of spells to make sure the deceased survived the journey into the afterlife, regular rituals to feed the deceased’s soul, and so on (and believe me, I’m really simplifying). If any of this goes wrong, the deceased’s soul will probably just cease to exist. So if they wanted to punish Anck-Su-Namun, the Egyptians wouldn’t have bothered burying her. They would have destroyed the body, because that would have guaranteed her oblivion. In essence, the plot only makes sense from a modern Western perspective (and even then, punishing an evil sorcerer by guaranteeing him immortality makes no sense).

3) I probably don’t need to tell you this, but I did have to tell a student of mine years ago, so here goes. Scarab beetles are not the land version of piranhas. They do not swarm people and strip them of their flesh. Scarabs are dung beetles. They eat crap. Literally. They’re pretty much harmless unless you’re a pile of poo. The reason Egyptians liked them is that scarabs roll dung into a small balls and push them around. To the Egyptians that looked like the ball of the sun, rolling across the sky, so they saw scarabs as symbols of Ra, the Sun God.

4) Much of the later action takes place at the fictional Hamunaptra, the city of the dead. The Egyptians associated the western bank of the Nile with the dead (because the sun goes down in the west) therefore most of the major funerary locations are on the west bank. So it’s a fairly safe bet that Hamunaptra is on the west bank. Why does this matter? At the end of the movie, after escaping from Hamunaptra, the hero and heroine climb onto a pair of camels and ride off into the sunset. That means they’re riding off into the uninhabited desert of the west bank of the Nile, where they probably died of thirst.

Want to Know More?

The Mummy (1999) is available on Amazon.