Pajama Pundits

After reading this early review, I put off seeing The Great Raid. I had originally intended to go last week, but procrastinated because I feared being disappointed.

I wasn't.

The weakness of this film is that the story it tries to tell is too big for one film. In trying to condense three intriguing stories into one film, it ends up portraying them all a bit shallowly. (Or four stories, there's more to the contribution of the Alamo Scouts too.) It’s still a good film, not at all a waste of time or money. You won’t leave the theatre disappointed, but you might leave wanting more.

The film would have to be really horrible for it not to be a somewhat emotional experience for me. My uncle was one of the 11 survivors of the massacre at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp on Palawan that is briefly depicted at the beginning of this film.

This scene left the impression there were no survivors. Perhaps a third of the prisoners escaped the fire, many making it to the beach where they were shot, and eleven managed to survive. They were rescued by Filipino civilians and guerillas. It was their report that added urgency to the rescue of the prisoners at Cabanatuan.

Given director John Dahl also has a personal connection with the subject of the film, it's not surprising that its overall effect is satisfying:

“My father was in World War II. He was in the Philippines, and so for me it was kind of a great opportunity to learn more about what my father had gone through and what he had experienced.

“My Dad would always tell me, ‘That's Ben Steele. He was in the Bataan Death March.’ As a kid I didn't really know what that was. Once I started working on the film and realized what Ben had gone through, it took on a little bit different meaning for me. I've shown it to Ben several times and ultimately we wanted to get as many things right as we could.” ...

“I guess that one of the things that I'm pleased with is that most of the veterans who've watched it are pleased with the way the Japanese are represented in the movie. We really didn't sugarcoat it too much.”

Complaints about the story being difficult to follow or the characters not being well-developed didn't appear warranted to me, except for the POW Major Gibson. That is perhaps because I had also read Ghost Soldiers, one of the two books on which the film is based. Since I already knew something of the characters’ backgrounds, I probably just didn’t notice. (I plan to read the other book, The Great Raid, which also provided material for the movie, though it got lousy reviews on Amazon.)

The initial scene of the Palawan massacre is not well-developed, though it is visually horrifying. I caught only one line of dialogue from those POWs - why are they making us get in the air raid shelters - or something to that effect. Audience members that missed that line did not understand the significance of the Cabanatuan prisoners being made to dig air raid shelters.

The POW's and their situation were not portrayed as well as they could have been in the movie. Though the brief portrayal of the Palawan massacre, the field of crosses outside Cabanatuan and POWs digging new graves certainly conveys how dire their situation was, what was lacking was the spirit and humanity of the men.

It was a poor choice, I think, to make the lead POW a fictional character when almost all the rest were real people. Trying to capture the the poignant combination of hopelessness and hopefulness, bravery, and humanity of the prisoners in one character resulted in a one-dimensional and sappy portrayal. Reviewers more knowledgeable than I of acting and film making say this is at least partly due to a mismatch of actor and role.

My disappointment in the lack of depth in the portrayal of the POWs may also be due to my familiarity with their story. They did not resemble the men portrayed in Ghost Soldiers. Nor did they resemble the men in Last Man Out, the story of one survivor of the Palawan massacre.

And while the story of Margaret Utinsky and the Filipino underground smuggling medicine into the camp is also an amazing one, the relationship between her and the fictional Major Gibson was simply a distraction. The time spent on the romance would have been better used portraying Claire Phillips, lounge singer and spy. She had a correspondence with a POW (a chaplain) at Cabanatuan, and this may be where the idea of a romance came from.

The movie gets a good grade on historical accuracy - except for the fictional and annoying romance angle and the overly opulent prison quarters and wardrobes.

Though one of the few films to accurately portray the Filipino guerrillas, it didn't really do them justice. Captain Pajota's feat in holding back a 1000 Japanese soldiers with a small force should have had a few more feet of film.

The understated, almost too subtle, dialogue didn't quite make clear that the raid would have been an utter failure without the tactical brilliance of Captain Pajota and the participation of his men. Captain Joson - who might be missed entirely in the film if you're not paying close attention - was indeed overshadowed by Pajota, but still essential to the success of the operation.

The best performances in this film are by the Filipino actors. Cesar Montano portrays Captain Pajota with quiet strength and Natalie Mendoza as Mina, who helped smuggle medicine into the camp, is beautiful as well as talented.

The neatest bit of trivia about the actors is that Ebong Joson thought it merely coincidence that he shared the same name as his character. He did not find out until after accepting the role, that he would be portraying his grandfather.

Others on The Great Raid: Instapundit

Big Ten Extra - Great Raid, Great Movie?

Hoystory.com - The Great Raid

Power Line - Mass Murder One Atrocity at a Time

The Manifest - The "Great" Raid. Partially in English, enough to understand this Phillippine blogger thinks the Filipino role was understated too.

elpeezee - Bringin It Back- Randomly Thinking. Notes that the Japanese killed villagers as punishment for the raid.

Cindyfilms - Skip It

blackshama's blog - The Great Raid and War Movies in general

Nate's Daily News - The Weekend Movie Review. He gives it 8.5 out of 10.

marygraceguerra - guerra means war

ThoughtsOnline

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! (This makes MY day!)

UPDATE: Gaze Theory relates then to now.

UPDATE: Dave at Garfield Ridge thinks Fiennes' was the best performance in the film.

Yet another UPDATE: Professor Froward says "It's a movie, not a seminar."

"A man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food."

Perhaps he needs a digestive?

After celebrating our independence from the British yesterday, today I feel compelled to defend them.

For breakfast this morning, I think I'll have beans on toast.

UPDATE: London's bid for Olympics looking good.

Ankle Biting Pundits thinks Hillary may have a Wal-Mart problem in the 2008 primaries. Could be, who knows?

My "AHA! moment comes from the parenthetical mention of the 1992 Democrat primary:

Hillary has never really had to compete in a primary setting (one could argue she was a major figure in the 1992 Democrat primary, which is true, but she was not a combatant in that race and successfully morphed into the role of victim.)

That's it. That's why I cringe when she's mentioned as presidential material. I do not someone who "morphed into the role of victim" for the purpose of political survival to occupy the oval office.

Victor Davis Hanson

Reverence for those who came before us ensures humility about our own limitations. It restores confidence that far worse crises than our own — slavery, the great flu epidemic, or World War II — were endured with far less resources.

By pondering those now dead, we create a certain pact: We, too, will do our part for another generation not yet born to enjoy the same privilege of America, which at such great cost was given to us by others whom we have now all but forgotten.

I don't have HBO, so I was spared Jane Fonda's appearance on Bill Maher's HBO show last week. Judging from what Ann Althouse has written about it, I saved myself not only the monthly cost of HBO, but also an unhealthy spike in blood pressure.

Maher has just said that since a veteran spat on her at a reading, she can say that's "penance enough." Fonda says "hundreds" of Vietnam vets have come to her readings in the last few weeks "and they've been fabulous... They have forgiven me. So there are some who are stuck back there. But most are not." Then Maher has this:

Yeah, it really is on them at this point, isn't it? If somebody can't get over something in 35 years.

Somebody? Something? Maher didn't go to Vietnam. Who is he to say get over it? Sure, there are "things" that if you're still stewing about them 35 years later, you've got a problem, but if you haven't gone to war, have the decency to refrain from telling people who have that they need to get over it.

Who is Fonda to tsk at people who are "stuck back there"? She does a big shrug and says, "Well, you know the problem is, we've never really come to terms with the war," (emphasis mine)...

Fonda means Vietnam, but it's more than that. Both the Civil War and the Vietnam War drove wedges in the ideological split that continues today from the time "when the first Scots-Irish parcels from Ulster — turned away from the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts — headed for the hills of New Hampshire", but began around the time Hadrian was building a wall.

James Webb, in Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, explains how today's "most visible fault line between the people of this [Scots-Irish] culture and those who so adamantly shape modern America's intellectual and political agenda began during the turmoil of the civil rights issue":

One does not need to defend the conduct of those who opposed racial integration in order to understand it, and one does not need to condemn the actions of those who pushed for integration in order to call into question some of their long-term motives. After a hundred years this issue was balled up in a Gordian knot that was almost impossible to untie. One could never question the motives, or even the tactics, of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose equanimity was Lincolnesque in its breadth of vision. But others, white and black alike, were bent on using the issue to foment a larger revolution. (emphasis mine)

The Students for a Democratic Society - the SDS - a major player in the Vietnam anti-war movement, formed in 1962 to bring 'revolution' to America, using race as the primary issue... "the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry" was one of these 'others'. (Tom Hayden, a key leader of the SDS, with Jane Fonda ran the Indochina Peace Coalition.) These were the 60's core of the cultural Marxists and activist Left radicals whose influence and power had been growing for decades in academia.

Who was the enemy "poster child" of the civil rights movement? The Southern Redneck, the cultural descendant of the Ulster Scot and the iconic Confederate Soldier, whose only visible advantage over Southern blacks was not being excluded from the front of the bus and the "Whites Only" bathrooms and lunch counters. As Webb puts it:

...if these were the people who took something away from black America, where did they hide it — inside their corn-shuck mattresses?

And who are the Vietnam veterans that Fonda wants to forgive her? According to Webb, the South had a 32% higher casualty rate in Vietnam than the Northeast, with West Virginia's higher than any other state.

...these casualities, were occurring at a time when the draft laws gave liberal exceptions to those who remained in college, and when the more advantaged members of the age group were actively counseled on how to avoid military service. Only 11 percent of the draft-eligible males ... actually went to Vietnam, and only 33% served in the military at all.

Vietnam Veterans, as the military of this country has always been, are more often than not, Jacksonian populists -- the natural enemy of and greatest obstacle to the activist Left, of which Jane Fonda is still a member in good standing. While one motto of the Jacksonian populist might be "No Surrender" another might be "Never Forget". This doesn't mean Jane Fonda can't or won't be forgiven. Yet, is the forgiveness asked for because she has seen the error of her ways, or because... damn, it's been 35 years!

Or is this forgiveness being sought because, as Mead says, "...Jacksonian political allegiance will be one of the keys to the politics of the twenty-first century."

I expect we will see a lot more not-so-humble pleas for forgiveness before the 2008 elections.

Sissy Willis posted this morning on Thomas Sowell's Opinion Journal article, "Crippled by Their Culture", on a theme further developed in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Intrigued, I headed to the bookstore only to find out it won't be there until Thursday. Remembering the recommendation from a commenter, The Proprietor of Coffeegrounds, I picked up Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb and How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. (They were right next to each other... how could I not?), also quoted by Sisu.

I was immediately hooked by the first paragraph of Born Fighting. Webb describes a drive I made a time or two on the way back to Shreveport from visits to the youngest while she was at William & Mary. It's similar to the routes I travel in my head when I'm working on our family history.

The mountains are beautiful, smoky from the haze that the sun makes when it burns into the pine. My mind plays tricks. I tell myself that I've been right over there, once upon a time, or at least my blood has, taking water straight from a stream and staring out into the wild unknown, dreaming of the majestic deliverance that must be just over the next horizon, hiding in a valley that no white man has ever seen before. Or maybe the next horizon, or the next one, or the next one after that. Which is why my people kept on going, some of them getting hung up, staying behind in the cul-de-sacs of Appalachian hollows while the more adventurous worked their way, ratlike, through the maze until it broke out into Kentucky and then Missouri, Texas, and Colorado, and one day even hit the palm-lined beaches of California.

That's the lure of genealogy for me. I find myself drawn to the stories, imagining as best I can what my ancestor's lives were like, what drove them to pack up and leave land they'd just years before cleared and cultivated to go further west to clear and cultivate more. And... what motivated them to fight?

An example of the Scots-Irish stubbornness and loyalty is Winston County, Alabama and parts of eastern Tennessee during the Civil War.

The people of Winston County, Alabama, hill farmers of modest means, were typical of southern unionists. In 1860, Winston County was the poorest county in Alabama. The per capita value of property was $168 and the county ranked last in cotton production and slaveholding, with only 2 percent of the families owning slaves.

They were largely an isolated mountain people who had little influence on state government. They knew full well that the aristocracy viewed them as socially inferior and saw the impending conflict as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

The leaders of Winston County held a meeting at Looney's Tavern, with attendance in the thousands. There they passed this resolution:

We agree with Jackson that no state can legally get out of the Union; but if we are mistaken in this, and a state can lawfully and legally secede or withdraw, being only a part of the Union, then a county, any county, being a part of the state, by the same process of reasoning, could cease to be a part of the state.

The Looney Tavern group also pled for neutrality, to be left alone by the Confederacy and the Union. They were not. They were branded as traitors and and tories by the Confederacy and persecuted, driving as many as 5,000 Alabamians to serve with various Union regiments, over 2,000 of them in the 1st Alabama Cavalry. Two of these were my great-great-great grandfather, Mordecai M. Cox and his brother-in-law, John Dodd.