A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

As the White House, the Pentagon and the various intelligence-gathering agencies of the United States focus their attention on such threats as Al Qaeda and other Islamic jihadist groups, the rise of China as an emerging Asian superpower, the growing instability in the Middle East as a result of last year’s Arab Spring popular revolts and Russia’s apparent turn toward autocratic rule by Vladimir Putin, it is important to remain vigilant to national security threats from within the Western Hemisphere. Even as President Barack Obama’s national security team seeks to reduce the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan after more than a decade of fighting the extremist Islamic group known as the Taliban – a struggle complicated by Pakistan’s less-than-enthusiastic attitudes toward U.S. objectives in the region – and American defense budgets undergo cutbacks, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other left-leaning Latin American leaders are forging alliances with Iran and other anti-American

Although Richard Rodgers will always be remembered for his brilliant musical theater collaborations with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, particularly with the latter (South Pacific, The Sound of Music), he also had a successful career as a composer of incidental music, and Victory at Sea is perhaps his best-known orchestral score.  Rodgers composed 13 hours' worth of music for  Victory at Sea,  NBC-TV's 26-episode documentary which premiered in 1952 and was a staple of the pre-cable late night hours on independent televisions such as WCIX-TV in Miami. Each episode ran for 30 minutes and focused primarily on the U.S. Navy's participation in the then-still recent Second World War, from the fight against German U-boats in the North Atlantic to the fierce struggle for domination of the Pacific between American and Japanese fleets.  Renowned conductor and arranger Robert Russell Bennett's name has forever been linked with Rodgers' Victory at Sea score, for i

An Odd Couple For most of his life, Washington was in love with a woman named Sally Fairfax, wife of George William Fairfax -- Washington's neighbor and best friend. Although his passions for the worldly and beautiful Sally probably never waned, Washington settled for a much more practical match: the widow Martha Custis, whose considerable holdings made him the wealthy gentleman he longed to be. The two were married in January 1759 and made an odd couple indeed -- George, a giant for his time at about 6' 2", towered over his portly bride, whose head didn't make it to his shoulders.   -- Cormac O'Brien,  Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents: What Your Teachers Never Told You About the Men of the White House   Do you remember your American History classes in high school or college? Remember having to take notes full of dry facts and statistics about such topics as the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Smoot-Hawley Act,

Just as Cornelius Ryan’s three major works about World War II (The Longest Day, The Last Battle, and A Bridge Too Far) focus on the last 11 months of the conflict in Europe, the late Gordon W. Prange and his collaborators Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon zeroed in on the Pearl Harbor saga and its aftermath. No less than five major books by Prange and Co. deal with the series of events that occurred before, during, and after. Of these, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor is the first and most important volume.  At Dawn We Slept covers nearly the entire 12-month period leading up to the “day of infamy” that marked America’s entry into World War II. It provides amazing insights into both the Japanese and American mindsets, and, most important, explodes the revisionists’ myth that Japan’s attack succeeded because President Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld critical information from Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii.  Prange researched the Pearl Harbor affair for 37 y

The Bottom Line  The battle of Okinawa is briskly, briefly discussed in this episode of  Victory at Sea   Since 1952, when NBC first aired its 26-part  Victory at Sea  series of 30-minute documentaries about the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, it has been a staple of both broadcast and cable channels. Millions of viewers in the U.S. and elsewhere have seen at least a few episodes of writer-producer Henry Salomon's ode to the sailors and Marines who fought and often died fighting their German, Italian, and Japanese counterparts for control of the world's oceans. Because battles on the air, land, and sea aren't scripted for the cinematographers as if for a Hollywood production, any major documentary about World War II is, in essence, a montage of shots and snippets of 35-mm film photographed by combat photographers stationed on different ships, aircraft, and military installations. There is actually precious little continuous footage of entire single naval battles

War, despite being one of humanity's worst innovations, nevertheless exerts a strange fascination for most people, hence its enduring appeal as a subject in both the printed page and movies. Great drama, or so we were told in high school English class, is based on some type of conflict (man vs. nature, man vs. fate, man vs. himself, and man vs. man), and war is, after all, the ultimate expression of conflict. No other human endeavor exhibits so many contrasting extremes; on the one hand, the bonding and comradeship born out of the shared dangers and miseries is unrivaled by anything in civilian life, and this is one of the themes many of the best war movies explore in varying degrees. Men and women often exhibit their finest traits under the strains of war: courage, loyalty, determination, inventiveness, and self-sacrifice. At the other extreme, war brings out the worst in people: cowardice, selfishness, cruelty, amorality, treachery, and avarice.  There is also no awe-inspiring

I first saw Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Western”  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  when it was broadcast by the ABC television network as a Sunday Night Movie feature back in the day when the home video revolution was still a decade away and the Big Three TV networks devoted some of their prime time schedule to air not-quite-new-but-not-quite-old theatrical movies.   Because I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time and wasn’t educated about movies or the film industry, I was not aware that  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  was the third chapter of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” (which also included A Fistful of Dollars  and  For a Few Dollars More ) or that it was originally an Italian-made flick (shot on locations in Spain and southern Italy) titled  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo  (literally, “The good, the ugly, the bad").  Of course, because I was so young I didn’t quite understand all the nuances – visual and thematic – of Leone’s epic story about three anti-heroic charact