Change Your Image
Rumjal
Reviews
Longstreet (1971)
Longstreet and Ironside
I enjoyed Longstreet, which followed in the steps of Raymond Burr's successful Ironside TV series and was intended to give it competition. But this show was canceled after one season because it was decided--I believe wrongly--that Longstreet was not able to compete with Mr. Burr's Ironside.
I may add that the pilot for this show was especially well done and very memorable. I hope that a box set of Longstreet will appear.
Writers should note that this story idea was only briefly explored here and that much more could and should be done to show the play and interplay of disabilities on TV.
Gotcha! (1985)
Only for the true gamester
This film has been unfairly condemned by those who are not fans of this type of game. Real gamesmen love this type of film, as much as they love the game itself. I note that this film was based upon the college game of Assassin which used paint-ball guns, and that there is now a successor to this game called StreetWars created in 2004 which uses water pistols and which has been held in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Paris. It is to be hoped that this latest installment of the game will yield a another movie. A Shadowy, Wet World of Squirt-Gun Assassins By MICHAEL Wilson www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/nyregion/27wars.html
Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939)
Ahead of its time
Those who would comment upon the film "Confessions of a Nazi Spy"--and many other Warner Brothers films--would do well to see director Richard Schickel's five-hour film "You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story" and the book that accompanies the film, both of which were created as the centerpiece of a celebration of the studio's 85th anniversary (more information on this series is available on the PBS website under the series American Masters).
While "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" is seen as mild in its view of the Third Reich today, it was the first anti-Nazi film produced by any studio and was so controversial in its day that the studio was to be prosecuted for making the film and would have been prosecuted had the Empire of Japan not attacked Pearl Harbor two weeks before the prosecution was to begin.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
Alpha Omega bomb is real
In "Dr. Strangelove" and in "On the Beach," Hollywood tried to make audiences understand that we had at last got the means to destroy the Earth, but audiences continued to confuse a nuclear war with dooms day, the end of the Earth. In this film, Hollywood did a fine job of making that confusion impossible by clearing showing telepathic survivors of a nuclear war running a society amidst a planet of apes while worshiping a bomb on the altar with Alpha Omega in Greek on its left fin referred to a bomb which could end the Earth.
This film is NOT about a nuclear war: it is about a nuclear war in which a nuclear doomsday machine has been detonated, hence the end of the world depicted in which "the planet is burned to a cinder," to quote Mr. Heston playing Astronaut Taylor. Still, it is clear from other comments that IMDb readers do not realize this distinction and do not realize that the world can be destroyed: I quote: Times Online August 08, 2007 Dr Strangelove and the real Dooms day machine by Christopher Coker P. D. Smith DOOMSDAY MEN The real Dr Strangelove and the dream of the super weapon 552pp. Allen Lane. £20. 9 78 071 399815 3 ...Smith's study is the gripping, untold story of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, which first came to public attention in 1950 when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on radio: science was on the verge of creating a Doomsday Bomb. For the first time in history, mankind would soon have the ability to destroy all life on the planet. The shock wave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond.
What Szilard had in mind was the third of the "alphabet bombs" that came to characterize an entire age. The first, the A-bomb, had been used to incinerate two Japanese cities. Teller's H-bomb blasted its way into public consciousness a few years later. Finally, there was the ultimate weapon: the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb that could "transmute" an element such as cobalt into a radioactive element about 320 times as powerful as radium. A deadly radioactive cloud could be released into the atmosphere and carried by the westerly winds across the surface of the earth. Every living thing inhaling it, or even touched by it, would be doomed to certain death. In the autumn of 1950, Szilard's fears were given independent validation by Dr James R. Arnold of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago. Arnold, slide-rule in hand, had started out to debunk Szilard's arguments. He finished by publishing a set of calculations that showed that a Doomsday device, perhaps two-and-a-half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri, could indeed be built...
The Cobalt bomb was largely forgotten after the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went. So too disappeared the fear of a Doomsday machine that could not be overridden by human intervention. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and the ice of the Cold War had begun to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is "yes" then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system.
Bruce Blair has speculated that President Bush's September 2001 proposal for a new generation of weapons, including the robust nuclear earth penetrator, or "bunker-buster", might be intended to knock out the underground command post that controls the system. The Bush administration withdrew its request for funding for the program at the end of 2005, after facing fierce domestic opposition. Some military analysts, nevertheless, believe that research is continuing into these weapons. We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s. Those of us who think Dr Strangelove to be the most telling commentary on the nuclear age should not be surprised. To paraphrase the novelist J. G. Ballard, old or not, the system remains a vivid demonstration, arranged for our benefit by the machine, of our own as a species. http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2648363,00.html See also http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/#page_start In addition to this, there is the problem recounted in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that when scientists created the atomic bomb, they calculated the odds at about one chance in a million that such an explosion would end the world by starting a chain reaction in which sea water would separate into hydrogen and oxygen and ignite, turning our planet into a star and our solar system into a binary star system. But those calculations are now old and should be redone with a modern computer.
These details need to be included in a special features section of the DVD so that viewers will not assume that this film is a mere cold war relic with no modern relevance.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Dooms day machine is not a joke
I saw this movie when it was in the theaters as the opening show to the main feature which was "From Russia with Love." At the time, I did not realize that its characters were describing a real dooms day device that could be and perhaps has been made. I see from the comments that your readers do not realize this either. Mankind now has the knowledge to build a device to destroy the Earth forever.
This film is NOT about a nuclear war: it is about a nuclear war in which a nuclear doomsday machine has been detonated, hence the end of the world. Further, it is clear from other comments that IMDb readers do not realize this distinction and do not realize that the world can be destroyed: I quote: Times Online August 08, 2007 Dr Strangelove and the real Dooms day machine by Christopher Coker P. D. Smith DOOMSDAY MEN The real Dr Strangelove and the dream of the super weapon 552pp. Allen Lane. £20. 9 78 071 399815 3 ...Smith's study is the gripping, untold story of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, which first came to public attention in 1950 when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on radio: science was on the verge of creating a Doomsday Bomb. For the first time in history, mankind would soon have the ability to destroy all life on the planet. The shock wave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond.
What Szilard had in mind was the third of the "alphabet bombs" that came to characterize an entire age. The first, the A-bomb, had been used to incinerate two Japanese cities. Teller's H-bomb blasted its way into public consciousness a few years later. Finally, there was the ultimate weapon: the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb that could "transmute" an element such as cobalt into a radioactive element about 320 times as powerful as radium. A deadly radioactive cloud could be released into the atmosphere and carried by the westerly winds across the surface of the earth. Every living thing inhaling it, or even touched by it, would be doomed to certain death. In the autumn of 1950, Szilard's fears were given independent validation by Dr James R. Arnold of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago. Arnold, slide-rule in hand, had started out to debunk Szilard's arguments. He finished by publishing a set of calculations that showed that a Doomsday device, perhaps two-and-a-half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri, could indeed be built...
The Cobalt bomb was largely forgotten after the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went. So too disappeared the fear of a Doomsday machine that could not be overridden by human intervention. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and the ice of the Cold War had begun to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is "yes" then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system.
Bruce Blair has speculated that President Bush's September 2001 proposal for a new generation of weapons, including the robust nuclear earth penetrator, or "bunker-buster", might be intended to knock out the underground command post that controls the system. The Bush administration withdrew its request for funding for the program at the end of 2005, after facing fierce domestic opposition. Some military analysts, nevertheless, believe that research is continuing into these weapons. We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s. Those of us who think Dr Strangelove to be the most telling commentary on the nuclear age should not be surprised. To paraphrase the novelist J. G. Ballard, old or not, the system remains a vivid demonstration, arranged for our benefit by the machine, of our own as a species. http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2648363,00.html See also http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/#page_start In addition to this, there is the problem recounted in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that when scientists created the atomic bomb, they calculated the odds at about one chance in a million that such an explosion would end the world by starting a chain reaction in which sea water would separate into hydrogen and oxygen and ignite, turning our planet into a star and our solar system into a binary star system. But those calculations are now old and should be redone with a modern computer.
These details need to be included in a special features section of the DVD so that viewers will not assume that this film is a mere cold war relic with no modern relevance.
On the Beach (1959)
nuclear doomsday machine not mentioned
I write because this 1959 movie contains no mention of a dooms day machine--not even in Fred Astaire's nuclear physicist soliloquy--and there is no Special Features section which explains that this film is NOT about a nuclear war: it is about a nuclear war in which a nuclear doomsday machine has been detonated, hence the end of the world. Further, it is clear from other comments that IMDb readers do not realize this distinction and do not realize that the world can be destroyed: I quote:
Times Online August 08, 2007 Dr Strangelove and the real Dooms day machine by Christopher Coker P. D. Smith
DOOMSDAY MEN The real Dr Strangelove and the dream of the super weapon 552pp. Allen Lane. £20. 9 78 071 399815 3
...Smith's study is the gripping, untold story of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, which first came to public attention in 1950 when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on radio: science was on the verge of creating a Doomsday Bomb. For the first time in history, mankind would soon have the ability to destroy all life on the planet. The shock wave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond.
What Szilard had in mind was the third of the "alphabet bombs" that came to characterize an entire age. The first, the A-bomb, had been used to incinerate two Japanese cities. Teller's H-bomb blasted its way into public consciousness a few years later. Finally, there was the ultimate weapon: the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb that could "transmute" an element such as cobalt into a radioactive element about 320 times as powerful as radium. A deadly radioactive cloud could be released into the atmosphere and carried by the westerly winds across the surface of the earth. Every living thing inhaling it, or even touched by it, would be doomed to certain death. In the autumn of 1950, Szilard's fears were given independent validation by Dr James R. Arnold of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago. Arnold, slide-rule in hand, had started out to debunk Szilard's arguments. He finished by publishing a set of calculations that showed that a Doomsday device, perhaps two-and-a-half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri, could indeed be built...
The Cobalt bomb was largely forgotten after the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went. So too disappeared the fear of a Doomsday machine that could not be overridden by human intervention. Only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and the ice of the Cold War had begun to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is "yes" then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system.
Bruce Blair has speculated that President Bush's September 2001 proposal for a new generation of weapons, including the robust nuclear earth penetrator, or "bunker-buster", might be intended to knock out the underground command post that controls the system. The Bush administration withdrew its request for funding for the program at the end of 2005, after facing fierce domestic opposition. Some military analysts, nevertheless, believe that research is continuing into these weapons. We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s. Those of us who think Dr Strangelove to be the most telling commentary on the nuclear age should not be surprised. To paraphrase the novelist J. G. Ballard, old or not, the system remains a vivid demonstration, arranged for our benefit by the machine, of our own as a species. http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2648363,00.html
See also http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/#page_start
In addition to this, there is the problem recounted in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that when scientists created the atomic bomb, they calculated the odds at about one chance in a million that such an explosion would end the world by starting a chain reaction in which sea water would separate into hydrogen and oxygen and ignite, turning our planet into a star and our solar system into a binary star system. But those calculations are now old and should be redone with a modern computer.
These details need to be included in a special features section of the DVD so that viewers will not assume that On the Beach is a mere cold war relic with no modern relevance.
Destination Tokyo (1943)
Divers Find wreck USS Wahoo, Most Famous WW2 US Sub
News accounts of the discovery of the wreck of the USS Wahoo on the floor of the Sea of Japan in November 2006 included an interview with the deceased skipper's younger brother (now 79) and with Capt. Morton's son. Because USN Capt. Dudley W. "Mush" Morton was so successful at sinking Japanese shipping (Capt. Morton sank 19 Japanese ships in his first year and a half--more than any other US sub at the time), the US Navy decided to break its rules on secrecy and allow news accounts of the USS Wahoo's patrols. As a result of intense public interest in these stories, a decision was made to make a movie fictionalizing the Wahoo and its successes. That movie is "Destination Tokyo" and it is said that Cary Grant met Capt. Morton and used him as the basis for his character in this film.
To call this film "propaganda" as other reviewers have, is to belittle the USS Wahoo and the fantastic successes of its captain and crew who died in action after this film was released, and can only be excused on the basis of ignorance of the history behind the making of "Destination Tokyo."
This film is important then both because it is based upon the success of a real US sub in action and because it was one of the early submarine films of the second World War.
I regret that the news account: "A WWII Submarine Finally Comes Home Divers Find the USS Wahoo, the Most Storied of U.S. Subs By NED POTTER" which contains the interview and appeared at www.sungazette.com/News/articles.asp?articleID=11380 is no longer on the web so the above URL will not work.
The Rapture (1991)
Operator 134
Hollywood has been making films critical of the workplace since its silent film era. This film opens in a telephone boiler room where the heroine leads a boring dehumanized existence as Operator 134 who is expected to spend no more than 15 seconds per call. Complaining of emptiness, we watch Operator 134 become a sex addict, but she finds that sex is also empty. Operator 134 then becomes a religion addict.
Although religion does lead to her finally becoming Sharon, a person, at work, either work or religion drive her crazy. We see Operator 134 twice point a pistol at her head (a classic workplace joke). She is told to see a therapist, but does not. She is told to see a deprogrammer, but does not. Operator 134 continues her descent into madness and finally murders her child, and appears to wish to murder God.
The movie ends with Operator 134 in jail turning over to sleep while asking "Who forgives God?" (presumably for creating the boiler room and for killing her little girl). The rest of the movie is her dream or nightmare.
While the "crisis in floss" scene is too funny, the scene where the Horseman of the Apocalypse is chasing Operator 134 on a motorcycle is inspired. This film deserved many awards and one hopes that all who see it will be kinder to Information Operators.