Play It Again, Sam?
If you own virtually the whole of the
known world, you have to be on constant watch on every front all the time to
keep possession of it. Thus the greater in extent the Roman Empire became, the
more permanent its military crisis – whether on the German, Dacian or Parthian
fronts. Roman emperors (‘emperor’ = ‘imperator’ or military leader) were little
more than military commanders, moving from one end of the empire to the other
in the cause of ceaseless defence. It was this, linked to economic decay through
the ever-more extensive importation of slaves, that brought Rome down in the end. Late
capitalism is in somewhat an analogous situation. Now entirely global, its
leaders in both politics and the economy must be ever-vigilant for any sign of any trouble anywhere,
prepared for a quick heading-off/pre-empting of ‘trouble’ by
disembowelling before it gets out of
hand. Thus the guardians of the long and impregnable-seeming dike that in fact
is very leaky and becoming more so.
In the case of the ‘serious’ threat of
Jeremy Corbyn and the possibility that Conservatives will lose political
control over the UK to him and his Labour Party, we are experiencing, in the
run-up to the local elections in May, wave upon wave of media-co-ordinated
‘fake news’ about JC: anything will do and it requires no proof: first, his
apparent secret relations with a Czech ‘spy’ in the 1980s, and after that
fizzled out a focus on his failure to condemn Russia immediately for an
apparent poisoning in Salisbury until the facts were such as to substantiate a
prima facie case: needless to say, no such facts have come to light as yet (so
far as we know) and indeed the whole thing is very mysterious, but none of that
bothered Mrs May and her otherwise beleaguered government from getting an international
bandwagon rolling to condemn Russia on
all sorts of grounds but based on Salisbury, with the mass withdrawal of
diplomats (‘intelligence agents’) from various embassies. And then we have had
a return of the anti-Semitism-rife-within-Labour canard (though the vast
majority of anti-Semites dwell in the Tory Party and UKIP) all down to Corbyn
and a ridiculous insinuated anti-Semitism of his own. No distinction is made
between anti-Semitism and Corbyn’s lifelong disavowal of support for an
ultra-Right Israeli government illegally seizing Palestinian lands to which it
holds no right. You are either for Netanyahu and Likudism or you are
anti-Jewish per se. All this is now
being increasingly denounced in articles and letters to editors by an
increasingly sceptical public. All it remains for me (and for the rest of us)
is to await the bringing of criminal charges for anti-Semitic incitement against
various members of the Labour Party, though this seems unlikely even if such
charges have recently been successfully prosecuted against two British
fascists. Let’s see the accusers put their money where their mouth is. Then to
see if Corbyn can continue to be reviled for ‘failures of leadership’ in
refusing to condemn Russia for the Salisbury poisoning; my latest news is that
the head scientist of the relevant division at Porton Down says that (at least
from a scientific perspective) it is not possible to name Russia as the
culprit. This does not stop No. 10 Downing Street from insisting that Russia is
to blame: the Tories have gone so far in all this as not to be able to go back
on it for mere lack of evidence. It seems obvious, doesn’t it?, that Putin would launch such foreign assassinations
on the eve of the Moscow World Cup just so various nations would boycott it.
Interesting to note that the British government is careful to allow the British
Team to go: imagine the furore if
England players were refused entry to the World Cup by their own
government! (But everybody else should stay home, thus rendering
terrific support for their team from the Moscow stands.) And finally I look
forward to seeing the evidence that Corbyn passed ‘secrets’ to a former Czech
agent back in the 1980s (no matter that he had protested as long before as 1968
when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to regain their control over the
country). And now I find that Corbyn has been celebrating Seder with
Marxist-socialist Jews in his constituency, and been widely denounced even by some
Labour MPs – out to get him anyhow – for mixing with the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. Apparently
there are ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’ and you are ‘anti-Semitic’ if you like the
bad ones. Aren’t these accusers displaying no end of stupid anti-Semitism
themselves? After all, even the Nazis had their ‘good’ Jews: one or two, like
General Milch, former head of Lufthansa, in high positions of military power. As
someone recently said: there is no Pope in Judaism, no ultimate unitary
authority over the whole faith. Indeed the Jews are about as herd-like and
conformist, said this writer, as a herd of cats.
But
never mind: all the JC ‘fake news’ will go rolling on and on, courtesy of the
Daily Mail etc., at least until after the local elections in May.
I can’t be doing with this anymore
just now: so I turn to what for me is some welcome light relief:
A ‘great line’ is the characteristic or
otherwise wholly appropriate emblem and theme of the whole movie.
So-called ‘great lines’ from movies
are not noted for their literary or philosophical depth. They are not even
witty bon-mots. So why are they remembered and cherished? It is because of what
they stand for: the whole movie they are in. ‘Great lines’ are rare and seem to
be a matter of chance. Even if they are often no more in themselves than
hand-me-down shop-worn phrases, their genius lies in their compression of a
whole story into a single line.
(NB: As I
cite from memory I hope am at least 90% accurate!)
‘You
weren’t supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’
Essence of a plot in which a caper so exquisitely planned falls apart
due to unforeseen circumstances. Not the bloody doors, but the line foreshadows
the kind of mishap that may be just around the corner…
‘Make my
day, Punk!’ sums up Dirty Harry’s frustration with a corrupt, crime-ridden
society and his violent gut-instinct – likely futile if not complicit – to do
something about it.
‘Play it,
Sam, play it!’ The grip of nostalgia for a thwarted love must be loosened.
Casablanca is suffused in great lines: ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ ‘The Germans
wore grey; you wore blue.’ Captain Renault’s shifty ‘I’m shocked, shocked…’ and
Bogart’s ‘This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!’
‘Top of
the world Ma!’ The last ringing words of a mother-obsessed psycho mobster as he
bestrides a gasometer about to blow him up. The film in a phrase.
‘Either
this man is dead or my watch has stopped.’ Groucho here epitomises Marxist
surrealism at its purest. Note the comedic inversion: ‘Either my watch has
stopped or this man is dead’ would
have been about as funny as a funeral.
‘I’ll be
back.’ The inexorable robot is as good as his word. And true to Arnie’s form,
for in real life Arnie has been coming back ever since.
‘You’re
gonna have to get a bigger boat.’ Man’s puny pretensions in combatting a
demonic natural force. (Mind you, they didn’t need the bigger boat in the end.)
‘Well,
nobody’s perfect!’ A cheerful response to male cross-dressing and an advocacy
of more live-and-let-live in a world of freedom. Ushers in the 1960s.
‘Who is that guy?’ Film chiefly about
inscrutable Nemesis and how she stalks our two happy-go-lucky robbers
relentlessly, and perhaps the rest of us, for everything we’ve ever done wrong.
‘Frankly
my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ (Line taken from the original novel.) The
response to a woman who cannot tell real from histrionic emotion, linked to the
futility of the Old South as an ideal that now can never be.
‘You
ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’ Al Jolson’s ad lib at the beginning of the Talkies may
have been meant ironically: what he was really saying was: ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’
‘Where’s
the rest of me?’ What you say when you wake up legless after a double
amputation. Since this is hardly a comedy (King’s Row); the banality is breath taking, but deeply
honest at the same time: what else could Ronald Reagan say? (He went on to become the US chief executive
lampooned with ‘the president’s brain is missing!’ – Spitting Images.)
‘Rosebud.’
The single word (uttered by the dying Citizen Kane at the beginning of the
film) that sums up the plot and the drive behind it. And tells us that we will
view the whole thing unfolding in retrospect. A word repeated in the
penultimate shot as a burning image on a child’s sled whose natural element was
snow.
‘The
stuff dreams are made of.’ Last line of the film about the plaster of a fake
bird-object everyone was chasing after thinking it was priceless.
‘Last
night I dreamt I was at Manderley again.’ Also the opening line of the du
Maurier novel on which the film is based: not a great novel (or film) but
surely the greatest opening line in English-language fiction? Devotees of
Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities may be inclined to differ.
Some notable lines are in fact both
pseudo-deep and misleading. ‘This is the story of a man who could not make up
his mind’ (Olivier’s Hamlet, 1948) degrades both the film and the play, an
embarrassment in an otherwise outstanding picture. Like those portentous
narrators at the beginnings of (sometimes) quite spectacular sword-and-sandal
epics: ‘Rome! Empire of triumph and tragedy, of magnificence and mayhem…’ and
so on. It would have been more seriously impressive if he had just shut up and
let the clanking legionaries march past us dragging their slaves and exotic
booty behind them. A composer like Miklos Rozsa could easily do the rest…
Some great lines never even got said: ‘You
dirty rat!’ (Cagney) and, of course, ‘Play it again, Sam.’
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