A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros:  Gripping story, excellent performances from cast, great directing from Lumet Cons:  Too stark and depressing for some viewers, dated, claustrophobic at times Imagine, if you will, that you are Col. Jack Grady, USAF, the commanding officer of a squadron of "Vindicator" bombers on routine patrol somewhere over Alaska. It's the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union still exists, and the Cold War is still being waged. Your plane, along with several others from your squadron, is nearing its Fail-Safe point -- a spot on the map where you will "orbit" for a specific amount of time before either returning to base or, if worse comes to worst, a coded attack signal orders you to head to your target inside Russia. This is part of your routine as an Air Force pilot, and thus far every time you've gone up on patrol you've reached the Fail-Safe point and returned home without incident. That is....until today. Today, your "routine patrol" will be ...

The Cold War, that bizarre state of war-in-peace between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet-led East which began in 1945 and ended in 1991, was, until the post-9/11 War on Terror, the most dominant geopolitical conflict in my lifetime. For the first 28 years of my life, I knew that somewhere in the Soviet Union, an intercontinental missile lay in a concrete-and-steel silo with a nuclear warhead targeted on my home town of Miami, and that a single miscalculation by either an American President or a Soviet General Secretary could lead to the annihilation of the entire human race. Having grown up with the nightmarish fear of mushroom-shaped clouds rising over blasted cities and with an almost atavistic dislike of Soviet-style Communism, I developed a strange fascination for movies and books that dealt with the Cold War, particularly those that extrapolated from reality and explored the ultimate nightmare scenario of either a conventional or nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union/W...

(C) Warner Home Video The McConnell Story (1955)       Originally titled  Tiger in the Sky, The McConnell Story  is a standard issue biopic about U.S. Air Force Capt. Joseph C. McConnell, Jr. (Alan Ladd), the top American ace of the Korean War (with 16 credited kills of Soviet-made MiG-15s) and of the entire jet era (as of this writing).  Written by Sam Rolfe ( The Naked Spur ) and Ted Sherdeman ( Them! ),  The McConnell Story  also starred June Allyson as Capt. McConnell’s wife Pearl “Butch” Brown and character actor James Whitmore as Col. Ty “Dad” Wyman, a former enlisted man who is Mac’s friend and Korean War commanding officer.  Directed by Gordon Douglas ( Robin and the Seven Hoods, Them! )  The McConnell Story  is a typical pro-Air Force movie of the 1950s.  Made in part to enhance the new service branch’s public reputation after it was split off from the Army in 1947,  Tiger in the Sky  began prod...

Heartbreak Ridge,  the 13th film directed by Clint Eastwood, is a strange war movie that takes  very  familiar stock characters and situations and attempts to give them some contemporary (at least in 1980s terms) twists to a story about the training of a Marine platoon and its eventual baptism by fire in battle.  Eastwood, who also produced  Heartbreak Ridge,  plays Gunnery Sergeant (GySgt) Tom “Gunny” Highway, a 30-plus year veteran and holder of the Medal of Honor who is facing retirement after seeing combat in Korea, the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic and – of course – Vietnam.  Because he has been in the Corps since he enlisted as a young adolescent, Highway is not too thrilled at the prospect of mustering out and feels he still has some role to play in the service.  Naturally, since the Marine Corps is one of the smallest branches of the military and “Gunny” is well-connected within the network of noncommissioned officers, he...