wwii

Went the Day Well? (1942)

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Austin Film Society Cinema is currently programming a series entitled “Nope to Nazis,” consisting of films contemporaneous to Germany’s descent into nationalism and fascism, celebrating “the resilience of spirit deployed in opposition to these monsters” and their “authoritarianism, racism, and fraudulent populism.” The series contains some notable and well-known examples of films of this type, notably 1942’s Casablanca and 1940’s The Great Dictator alongside lesser-known examples, like John Farrow’s 1940 The Hitler Gang, which uses the framing of a gangster picture to show the rise of the titular monster and his ilk. All of these are American productions, but I was most intrigued by a British title that was new to me, Went the Day Well?, from 1942, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. 

The film opens with an introduction and welcome to the quaint British village of Bramley’s End by local Charles Sims (Mervyn Johns), who shows us to a small gravestone in the village’s churchyard, upon which are written several German surnames. They came to claim Bramley’s End, he says, and this small plot of land in which they are buried is all that they managed to hold, with Sims’s narration clearly placing this framing device after the end of the war. From there we go “back” to the film’s contemporary setting of May 1942, which finds the village going about its end-of-week business under all the wartime restrictions, when several lorries (trucks for us on this side of the pond) arrive filled with soldiers who will need to be billeted in the town for exercises. The leader of the soldiers, Major Hammond (Basil Sidney) goes around town and meets the various prominent locals before surreptitiously rendezvousing with Bramley’s End’s local squire, a quisling named Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks, of the original The Man Who Knew Too Much). After all of the men, who are secretly German paratroopers, have been placed in homes about the village, the treachery is exposed, and we learn that they are tasked with using some kind of ultimate weapon which, upon Monday morning, will ensure that Hitler’s invasion of England cannot be repelled. Wilsford, as a double agent, is rounded up with the rest of the villagers in the town’s church while the children are taken to Bramley End’s large manor house to be held separately, under the care of Mrs. Fraser (Marie Lohr). Later, when the town’s vicar refuses to go along with the Nazis, telling them to their faces that they are an evil force and an affront to God, he is killed while attempting to ring the church bell to call for help. His daughter Nora (Valerie Taylor), in her “hysteria,” is sent to the manor house to help mind the captive children.

What follows are two days and nights of the villagers finding ways to resist and attempting to get news to the outside world of what is happening in Bramley’s End, with each moment of hope that arrives, those hopes are dashed. In order to prevent the neighboring towns from growing suspicious, the German soldiers force the village’s phone and telegram operators to remain in place, but at gunpoint. When two women manage to write a message on an egg, they manage to get a half dozen to the paperboy from the next town, but he’s run off of the road and his eggs are smashed when Mrs. Fraser’s cousin comes to the village for tea. Mrs. Fraser manages to entertain her cousin and get her back on the road, without the Germans ever seeing that she slipped a note into the visitor’s pocket, but said cousin merely uses the paper she finds in her pocket to try and stop her car window from rattling, and it blows away before it can ever be read. Courageous postmistress Mrs. Collins (Muriel George) manages to kill the guard assigned to her by throwing pepper in his face before attacking him with her kindling hatchet, but the switchboard operators in the next town over are too busy gossiping and badmouthing her to take the call before she’s caught in the act and shown the sharp end of a German bayonet for her troubles. 

The message throughout (because make no mistake, this is a propaganda film, even if it’s one where the lecture we get—Nazis are bad—is the morally correct one) is about the moral failures of laxity in wartime, even if you think that you’re far from the warfront. The whole thing could have been over more quickly and with far fewer casualties if it weren’t for the carelessness of individual citizens, multiple times over. The switchboard girls, Mrs. Fraser’s careless cousin (twice!), and even the hometown members of the Home Guard who hear the peal of the church’s bell and shrug it off all share their complicity with the treacherous Wilsford. Even Mrs. Fraser herself laughs off Nora’s concerns when she notices that the “British” soldiers were keeping score in their card game with “Continental” numbers, marked by elongated number fives, and she pays for it with her life, as she bravely grabs a German grenade and runs into the hallway with it to protect the children under her command as the Nazis advance on the manor house. Unusually for the time, the violence is rather explicit and shocking, certainly with the intent of driving home the dangers of failed vigilance. Mrs. Fraser does manage to save the village’s children, but the film does not spare us from seeing another boy shot by Nazi soldiers as he attempts to run to the next village for help. Dozens of men, women, and children are felled in this movie. The Home Guard are gunned down in the street; the father of one of the Home Guard boys is attacked from behind by Wilsford, having tagged along on an escape attempt in order to prevent its success; an old poacher is shot while attempting to help the aforementioned shot boy escape to the next town; Wilsford is shot in cold blood by Nora, who has figured him out and manages to stop him from unbarricading an entry point for the encroaching Nazis. It’s in black and white, but it sure is bloody. 

This one was admittedly a bit difficult to get into at first. We’re introduced to what feels like far too many people within the film’s opening minutes: milkmaids and milkmen, constables and vicars, telegraph operators and rabbit hunters. It’s a bit overwhelming, and the sudden appearance of the infiltrating soldiers, some of whom will be important later but who are indistinguishable from the rabble upon first sight, muddies things even further. I assume that there would have been obvious differences to the contemporary viewer between the uniforms of the soldiers needing to be billeted and the Home Guard who were going into the surrounding area for their own exercises, but those differences were lost on me. As a result, we have Germans disguised as British soldiers, all of them coming into Bramley’s End at the same time, while there are also actual British soldiers (technically militiamen), and it confuses some of the early plot points in the film. At the film’s climax, as the Germans attempt to wrest control of the manor house of Bramley’s End back from the locals who have successfully rebelled and holed up there, the cavalry finally arrives in the form of the neighboring villages’ own Home Guard (or maybe they’re proper British soldiers. As we’ve established, my eye is not trained to differentiate between them), but when those two opposing factions are fighting, I couldn’t properly tell you which was which. 

Regardless of those weaknesses, this was a very effective thriller, and that’s coming from someone who’s ultimately pretty apathetic to war films. It’s a kind of proto-Red Dawn, and the film is quite tense throughout as one winces over and over again upon seeing yet another failed attempt to call for help. Worth seeking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

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I was recently in New Orleans for GalaxyCon 2025, so Brandon and I took advantage of being in the same place to go see the new James Gunn Superman and recorded a podcast about both it and M3GAN 2.0. Before we parted ways, he asked if I would be interested in joining him for The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Foreign Correspondent, and I’m glad that I was able to check it out. This isn’t the Master of Suspense at the very top of his game, but it’s damn near it. 

It’s 1939, the final days before WWII, and crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) has been rechristened as “Huntley Haverstock” by the editor of the New York Morning Globe and sent to Europe to report on conditions there as well as interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman). Upon arrival, Jones/Haverstock immediately becomes smitten with the beautiful Carol (Laraine Day), but not before accidentally insulting her and her father Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), the leader of the Universal Peace Party. Carol ultimately steps in as a speaker at the event where Jones planned to interview Van Meer, as the statesman is stated to have taken ill. When Jones meets him again in Amsterdam at the next stop on his tour, Van Meer seems not to recognize him and is gunned down by an assassin posing as a photographer moments later. A chase ensues as the car Jones commandeers to pursue the killer is driven by British reporter Scott ffolliott (George Sanders, of All About Eve) and he is accompanied by none other than Carol Fisher. The car bearing the murderer away seems to suddenly disappear when the group enters a stretch of road that crosses a vast field, unoccupied save for abandoned windmills. Jones decides to search about on foot while Scott and Carol attempt to catch up to the police, and although he discovers the hidden car and that Van Meer has actually been spirited away for interrogation while a duplicate was killed in his stead, by the time the police arrive, all evidence is gone. 

After recently watching the rather dour Frenzy (and following up this screening with a viewing of another dry Hitch picture, Topaz), the comedy in this one is refreshing. There’s a lot of hay made about the spelling of Scott’s last name, which is deliberately left un-capitalized. This is apparently a real English gentry practice, as the lack of consistent usage of capital letters across large swathes of British history meant that some documents utilized a double letter at the beginning of a name to indicate that it was a proper noun. When a more standardized capitalization scheme came about, some families worried that if their names were updated they might lose some deed or other if they were named “Folliott” and not “ffolliott.” Sanders is playing a wonderfully unconcerned dandy of a man who’s having a lot of fun with all of this espionage rigamarole, and although he’s serious when the moment demands it, he brings a light energy to the proceedings that is much appreciated given the subject matter. There’s also a delightful appearance from Edmund Gwenn (who would appear as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street seven years later) as a babbling, inept would-be assassin who’s sicced on Jones by the film’s twist villain. Rowley is theoretically supposed to act as Jones’s bodyguard but instead plans to lead him to his death, in a sequence that culminates in the steeple of a towering church, where Rowley’s attempts to push Jones to his doom are repeatedly interrupted by other sightseers and tourists. Jones and Carol are also quite charming together, even if it takes a while to move them past her initial antipathy toward him and their courtship, once this is surmounted, moves a bit too fast. 

The tension here is excellently done as well. The scene in which Jones sneaks around in the windmill and discovers the real Van Meer is very tautly directed, as is the scene in which Jones must sneak from one upper-story hotel room on an elevated floor to another in order to escape being silenced. Both are spectacular, but nothing can top the film’s climax, when Carol, Scott, Jones, and the apprehended antagonist/instigator are en route back to the United States just as WWII breaks out in Europe. Their commercial airliner is almost immediately shot at by a German U-boat and goes down, and the sequence is utterly marvelous, like something out of Final Destination. One unfortunate woman stands to voice her distress at the situation and her intent to contact the British consulate as soon as the plane lands, only to be shot to death by bullets that pierce the fuselage mid-sentence. Aside from a potentially improbable number of survivors, the plane crash is frighteningly realistic, and it put me slightly on edge given that I had a flight out of MSY that same day. At the film’s climax, Jones delivers an impassioned plea over the radio that resonates just as much now as it did then, even if no one ever uses the word “fascism” outright. 

The romance in this one is decent. It lacks the passion of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or the slow smolder between Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. There are elements of Notorious here in the parallels between Carol here and Ingmar Bergman’s Alicia in that film, but to say more would spoil a major plot point. This one is pretty close in the Hitchcock timeline to his 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes, and the romance here plays out at the same accelerated pace as Lady, with the major difference being that the romantic couple in that film spent most of their screentime together investigating and their natural chemistry was a strong factor in selling the breakneck romance. McCrea is fantastic as a leading man, even if he was Hitchcock’s second choice (after Gary Cooper), and he’s great in all of his scenes, while Laraine Day is absolutely delightful as Carol Fisher, but the two spend just a touch too little time together on screen to sell it completely, and as such they never quite mesh despite each individual actor’s excellence. Sanders’s ffolliott is also very fun here, and is the perfect comedic relief that the film occasionally needs, when that role isn’t being fulfilled by Rowley falling out of a steeple. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Orang Ikan (Monster Island, 2025)

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I can’t remember the last time I saw a rubber-suit monster movie at the theater.  The modern monster movie has fully outsourced its creature effects to animatronics & computer graphics nerds, so that the traditional guy-in-a-suit Roger Corman creature feature is effectively an antique relic (outside the occasional tongue-in-cheek throwback like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!).  There’s something refreshingly sincere about the new straight-to-Shudder monster picture Orang Ikan, then, which recently had its local theatrical premiere at The Overlook Film Festival.  It’s a fully traditional rubber-suit Corman creeper, even padding out its 80-minute runtime with a plot-recapping clip show to help it crawl into feature length — a classic Corman tactic.

The Western-market title Monster Island sets expectations for kaiju-scale creatures here, as does the early-40s WWII setting.  Two soldiers from opposing sides of the Japanese-British divide are shipwrecked together on a mysterious island in the Pacific Ocean, suddenly dependent on each other for survival instead of working towards each other’s destruction.  The search for food, shelter, and dry cigarettes is alone enough to make their time on the island lethally miserable, but then they also have to contend with the island’s native inhabitants: a creature from The Black Lagoon, or at least that famous monster’s distant relative.  In the earliest creature attacks, the monster is obscured in dark shadows, quick edits, and up-close angles that threaten to hide all of the money shots out of embarrassment for the production’s scale & budget.  Thankfully, the creature is soon displayed in a full-body wide shot in beachside daylight, proudly showing off all its classic rubber-suited glory.

If there’s any thematic justification behind importing a rubber-suited monster into what’s effectively a battlefield drama, it’s in how war transforms enemy combatants into The Other.  An international co-production, Orang Ikan is evenly split between Japanese & English dialogue, with its two stranded, chained-together soldiers attempting to find common ground despite the language barrier and their opposing military orders.  Likewise, when the creature first appears on the island, it’s likened to the instinctual violence of a territorial crocodile hunting for its next meal.  Then, the humanoid monster fights that croc to the death in a desperate bid for its own survival, mirroring the soldiers’ struggle with the local elements.  When the soldiers inevitably have to kill the monster anyway, there’s a tinge of sadness to the act, with the camera lingering on the death of the creature’s unborn fetus on a cave-room floor.  War makes monsters of us all, and so on, and so forth.

There seems to be something about aquatic creatures in particular that have made them the last refuge for the practical-effects monster movie.  Between the fish-men of The Shape of Water & Cold Skin, the killer mermaids of The Lure, and the aquatic goofballs of Lake Michigan Monster & Riverbeast!, they’re keeping the humanoid monster dream alive & wet.  In that context, I suppose that if Orang Ikan had gone full kaiju-scale “suitmation” in its rubber-suit monster mayhem, it might have registered as a more daring genre outlier, but I’m happy with the classic Roger Corman creature feature payoffs as delivered.  Funnily enough, the most daring aspect of the film was likely unintentional, as its push for wordless male bonding between its stranded soldiers reads as electrically homoerotic in moments.  It’s not like the soldiers smooch or anything, but they do lovingly call out each other’s names and light each other’s cigarettes. Of course, unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas is its own long-running cinematic tradition; it’s just one that usually doesn’t make room for a crocodile-murdering fish beast in the frame.

-Brandon Ledet

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

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A.I. tech bros’ latest attack on the basic dignity of everyday life targeted Studio Ghibli of all things, proving that absolutely nothing is sacred to these ghouls. There’s a recent software upgrade to the Plagiarism Generator technology that was advertised in the form of “Ghiblifying” pre-existing images with digital filters that adapt them to the visual style of the legendary animation studio. Nevermind the blatant copyright infringement that amalgamates already underpaid artists’ work into digital-age corporate slop. Nevermind that the studio’s broad cultural association with Hayao Miyazaki—and Hayao Miyazaki only—disregards the work of fellow directors & animators under that brand who have their own distinct style. The most insulting insinuation about the “Ghiblified” A.I. image trend is that it reduces decades of finely crafted animation to a few vague visual signifiers that could be summed up in a single word: “Cute.” Like the A.I.-generated Wes Anderson videos before it, this recent dispatch from Tech Bro Hell makes Studio Ghibli’s work look simpler, safer, and more twee than it is in practice, mining its surface aesthetics without engaging with the substance beneath. It’s just as empty & lazy as it is profane.

What would these “Ghiblified” A.I. images look like, for instance, if they pulled their visual cues from Isao Takahata’s work instead of Miyazaki’s? Would it capture the full span of life’s tenderness, cruelty, warmth, and pain, as gorgeously illustrated in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or would it reduce the immensity of that film’s beauty to a few strokes of an algorithmic color-pencil? Would it convey the collectivist environmentalism of Pom Poko‘s radical politics, or just automatically equip all figures pictured with comically large scrotums? The real gotcha example, of course, is what an A.I. “Ghiblified” photo implicates about a film as devastating as Takahata’s WWII drama Grave of the Fireflies. I’m not sure how valuable the cutesy surface aesthetics of the studio’s character designs are in the context of a story about children starving to death during the societal disruption of war. In-film, the contrast between the characters’ classic anime cuteness (which Roger Ebert summarized as “enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity”) and the real-life atrocities those characters suffer makes for horrific emotional impact, perfectly illustrating the inhuman evil of war. Using those visual signifiers out of context to cutesy-up your beach vacation photos is incredibly crass, then, if you take more than a half-second to think about it.

The biggest emotional gut punch of Grave of the Fireflies arrives in the first couple minutes, before you even get to know the children at the center. We’re introduced to our coming-of-age protagonist Seita in his dying minute, actively starving to death in a train station while passersby treat him as an inconvenient obstacle during their daily commute. When he passes, he leaves his body behind to reunite with the spirit of his even younger sister, Setsuko, who has apparently been waiting for him to join her in a firefly-lit afterlife. Both children’s fates are succinctly & poetically spelled out in this one quiet moment, so all the audience can do when the timeline dials back to 1945 is slowly watch it happen with no way to stop it. Seita & Setsuko are orphaned in the final days of WWII by firebombing raids and Naval attacks that leave both their parents dead. They live in a world sandwiched between mass graves below and falling ash from above, but they can at least depend on each other for community. Seita takes on housing & feeding his sister as his sole responsibility, dodging any pressure to join the war effort that would distract from her survival. As the opening warns, he fails, but he does manage to leave her with some joyous memories along the way despite the pain & indignity of starving to death, unhoused. It’s incredibly tough to watch.

Grave of the Fireflies indulges in all the usual youth-nostalgia and hand-drawn natural wonder that typifies Studio Ghibli’s broader approach to 2D animation, but it’s mostly in service of making the emotional tolls of war weigh as heavily on the heart as possible. It turns out that even when gorgeously animated, war is Hell. Worse than Hell, maybe. The most insidious images I saw during last week’s A.I. Ghibli Fest were from the official Twitter account of the Israeli army, cutesifying their real-time, real-world bombing & starvation of Palestinian children en masse as if they regard Grave of the Fireflies as an aspirational roadmap rather than a dire warning of past evils that should not be repeated. Of course, most people using the Ghiblified A.I. generators have much cuter, gentler works from the studio in mind, like My Neighbor Totoro (presuming they have any direct familiarity with the studio at all, beyond walking past advertisements for routine repertory screenings at the local AMC). When Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japan, it was paired with Totoro on a double bill that confused & traumatized unsuspecting children who weren’t prepared for such a heavy night out. That late-80s programming choice underestimated the full scope of what Studio Ghibli offers as a movie studio that produces daring, emotionally complex art decades before the A.I. C.H.U.D.s repeated the same mistake. They’re not in the game to sell twee digital filters and stuffed commemorative plushies; Grave of the Fireflies is alone proof of that.

-Brandon Ledet

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

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At the time of posting, the social media platform TikTok is back online after briefly being banned in the United States over some vague Red Scare surveillance paranoia involving the app’s ownership by a Chinese company. Despite having called for this ban during his first presidency, Trump has found an executive-order workaround for the Supreme Court’s decision against TikTok’s fate in the US, retroactively pinning the unpopular decision to the recently concluded Biden administration. The brief banning of the app inspired US TikTok users to flock to an alternative platform to alleviate their #content addiction (including the Chinese-owned app RedNote, which spiked in American usership), and it also had me reflecting on what TikTok has contributed to Online Film Discourse. Like with all platforms, there are both good & bad data points that color TikTok’s character, from the shameless shilling for corporate media that the app’s Influencer class indulge for red carpet access to the stray surges of interest one out-of-nowhere video could draw to obscure works like Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe. Overall, though, when I think of what “MovieTok” (which I would happily rename “FlikTok” if I had the power) brings to Film Discourse, my mind goes to the trend of slagging art films as purposefully inscrutable puzzles that cinephiles only pretend to appreciate in order to appear smart. Anytime a celebrity lists a European art film during their “Letterboxd Top 4” interviews on the platform, a TikToker mocks their supposed pretention in a parodic video listing fictional titles.  Instead of expressing curiosity in any film outside the bounds of the MCU (or their more recent Major Studio equivalents), they make up a “4-hour black and white film about the Serbian government through the eyes of a pigeon.” It’s a stubbornly ignorant way to approach unfamiliarity with art, and I personally hope it dies with the app.

For any younger audiences doubtful that black & white European art films can be accessible & entertaining, I’d recommend checking out the 1966 Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains, which was accessible enough to American audiences in its initial release that it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Closely Watched Trains is a shockingly light entertainment for a black & white Czechoslovakian art film about making sure the trains run on time under Nazi occupation. Its historical circumstances and its final scene are tragic, but structurally it’s a 90-minute boner comedy packed with prurient goofball schtick. While the MovieTok commentariat would have you to expect a Czech New Wave art film about Nazis to be a non-stop misery parade, Closely Watch Trains mostly plays out like one of those coming-of-age comedies about a teen’s sexual misadventures while working their first summer job … except it’s set at the edge of a frosty, war-torn Prague. There’s even a little “Welcome to my life” narration track at the start, as if you’re watching the original foreign-language version of Ferris Bueller instead of a project that was passed over by Věra Chytilová for seeming too difficult to adapt from page to screen. Sure, its final beat is deadly serious about the violent circumstances of Nazi rule, but its scene-to-scene concerns are refreshingly honest about what a teen working their first job outside the house would be paying most attention to: getting laid. It’s a shame that the MovieTok platform isn’t used to introduce younger viewers to a wilder world of cinema through accessible gateway films like this and instead tends to dismiss the entire concept of European Art Films outright for an easy punchline. Or, more likely, the more dismissive responses are the ones that reach a wider audience thanks to the algorithm’s bottomless love for Rage Bait, which is exactly how it works on my own evil #content app of choice, Twitter.

As a coming-of-age story, Closely Watched Trains keeps things simple. A scrawny sweetheart named Miloš attempts to follow in his father & grandfather’s footsteps by apprenticing as a railroad dispatcher. The circumstances of the job might have become a little more strained now that the trains are under Nazi command, but he’s told that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll get to retire with a pension. At the start of the job, he’s offered a crossroads of three different priorities: work, politics, or women. Unsure of which direction he wants his life to go, he tries his hand at each – flirting with rigid professionalism, flirting with a plot to bomb a Nazi supply train, and flirting with a cute train conductor who’s his age and eager to become his girlfriend. His physical urges overpower his higher mind for most of the runtime, leading to a series of proto-Porky’s sexual escapades that include train car orgies, ink-stamped butt cheeks, and a lot of vulnerable discussion of premature ejaculation. As silly as some of these sexual encounters can be in the moment, Miloš has Big Teenage Feelings about them that occasionally raise the stakes of the story into more traditional War Drama territory, sometimes under Nazi threat, sometimes under threat of self-harm. It would be reductive to present the film purely as a comedy, given its political & historical context, but for the majority of its runtime it’s more adorable than grim. Even its more overt indulgences in the art of the moving image are less challenging that they are cute. Wide-shot frames arrange the actors & trains with dollhouse meticulousness, which combined with the dark irony of the sex & romance recalls the work of Wes Anderson – maybe art cinema’s most widely accessible auteur.

I do not have much at stake in the ultimate fate of TikTok, but I do have something to say to the art-phobic influencers of MovieTok. There is no reason to be intimidated by the Great Works of European Cinema just because they’re initially unfamiliar. No matter how artsy, The Movies are ultimately just as much of a populist medium as TikTok #content; you can handle it.

-Brandon Ledet

Play Dirty (1969)

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I’m not especially interested in War Films as a genre, but André de Toth’s WWII thriller Play Dirty sneaks past those well-guarded genre biases and hits me where I’m vulnerable.  Instead of being guided by the usual narrative maps of WWII stories about the valor of defeating Nazis or the horrors of what those Nazis achieved before defeat, Play Dirty is structured more like a heist picture that happens to be set on the battlefield.  It’s a crime picture first and a war movie second, as explained by a British colonel who declares in an early strategy meeting, “War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals.”  Those criminals are the men under his command: a gang of disaffected mercenaries who wear the British uniform but are more motivated by money & personal survival than they are by the prospect of defeating Hitler’s Germany.  If it were an American film, it might’ve been received as a reaction to our country’s ongoing, pointless involvement in The Vietnam War, but its pervasive Britishness divorces it from such a strict 1:1 reading, extending its commentary to all war everywhere at every time.  In Play Dirty, war is a sprawling, scrappy prison fight wherein you’re just as likely to be shot in the back by your own men as you are to be taken down by the enemy.  It deliberately strips all valor from history’s most noble victory over a warring enemy, with the Head Criminal in Charge advising, “Forget the noble sentiments if you want to live.”

A young Michael Caine provides the most familiar face (and voice) here as a clean-cut military officer who naively takes command of this criminal unit.  He immediately struggles to exert control over the undisciplined brutes, desperately pulling a gun on them whenever they refuse to obey his orders.  Unbeknownst to him, the only reason he survives these altercations is because the most undisciplined brute of all (Nigel Davenport) has been promised a bigger payout for the mission if Caine returns alive, unlike the other officers who’ve preceded him.  Their half-Inglorious Basterds, half- Sorcerer mission is to sneak behind enemy lines disguised as Italian soldiers and explode a critical Nazi fuel depot, expediting Hitler’s defeat.  The rocky path to victory is high in tension and sparse in dialogue, often with a shaky handheld camera jostling the audience with the uneasy feeling that gunfire or explosions could erupt at any moment; they often do.  On a character level, there’s no chance of meeting in the middle for Caine & Davenport, who represent opposing noble & savage philosophies of war.  In order to survive the mission, Caine has to cheat & kill just like the heartless criminals under his command, while Davenport just knowingly smiles and scoffs at the supposed differences between “playing dirty” and “playing safe.”  It’s by no means the only war picture that posits that “War makes monsters of us all,” but it is one of the only ones I’ve seen that frames that monstrous behavior as a lowly, scrappy crime spree.

Even if this gang of British soldiers weren’t sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as Italians, this would still clearly be the kind of cinematic relic Quentin Tarantino raves about through coke sweats at LA house parties to anyone who’ll listen. It’s got the exact haggard, macho hangout vibe he’s always praising in vintage genre cinema, and I’m sure he could rattle off the professional stats of all the various character actors who pad out the rest of the cast like a little kid who obsesses over baseball cards.  The only woman among those macho brutes is a German nurse whose capture raises the tension of the group dynamic for obvious, hideous reasons, which reminded me why I don’t spend much of my personal time perusing this particular video store aisle.  Even so, the rougher, confrontational approach to the genre did pique my interest in André de Toth’s directorial career, of which this was shockingly his final film. It’s got the showy, punchy impact of a much younger man with more to prove professionally, which speaks well to de Toth’s late-career enthusiasm behind the camera.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the horror & thriller titles in his catalog that speak more directly to my personal tastes (House of Wax, Crime Wave, Pitfall, etc.) almost as much as I’m looking forward to never picking up a gun on a battlefield, nor having a one-sided conversation with Quentin Tarantino.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Justice Society – World War II (2021)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Here we go, boys and ghouls, the “Tomorrowverse” is officially on, as we now have our second film in this subfranchise. That title is a little on the silly side, but it is a fair sight better than “DCAMU,” and I’m hoping the number of times I have to type that particular acronym will now be fewer and further between. Justice Society: World War II is a narrative about the current-day Flash, Barry Allen (Matt Bomer), apparently traveling into the past as a result of moving so fast that he breaks the Speed Force barrier. Finding himself in the middle of World War II, the fastest man alive finds himself face-to-face with the Flash of the past, Jay Garrick (Armen Taylor), as well as a team of commandos who are operating on behalf of the Allies. There’s Hourman (Mathew Mercer), who can take a serum of his own invention that provides him with super strength and durability for an hour, but which he cannot take more than once per twenty-four hour cycle; Hawkman (Omid Abtahi), an infinitely reincarnated ancient Egyptian who possesses wings; Black Canary (Elysia Rotaru), a street-level vigilante and occasional scofflaw who harnesses sound as a weapon via her sonic scream; and the group’s leader, the Amazonian Wonder Woman (Stana Katic), as well as her longtime boyfriend and U.S. Army liaison Steve Trevor (Chris Diamantopoulos). Together, they are on a special mission to stop Hitler’s ongoing search for supernatural artifacts that he hopes will give him an edge in the war. 

I’m still not won over by this art style, but it does fit a bit better here, with the thick line animation being more akin to the cartoonery of decades past. It still feels a bit Venture Bros. for something that’s supposed to be taken a bit more seriously, but within the context of this being a story set in a different time it manages to work, more or less. If this were the aesthetic solely of this time period (which, spoiler alert, is actually a different timeline, meaning that they’re going multiversal in only the second film of this new subfranchise—yikes), I’d be more accepting, but I guess for as many of these as I’m going to have to watch (four to eight, depending on how you count things), I’m just going to have to stomach it. For what it’s worth, before starting this project, I had already watched the upcoming-within-this-project Legion of Superheroes of my own volition—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love Supergirl—and found it less distracting there, although it’s entirely possible that I assumed it was a one-off and not the defining visual style of a film series. 

There’s not much to say about this one. It falls right in the middle ranking of these movies: solid, but unremarkable. I guess it’s fun that Matt Bomer and Stana Katic are together again after they previously played Superman and Lois Lane, respectively, all the way back in Superman: Unbound, if you’re into that kind of thing. As far as character work, the Flash/Iris relationship is really thin, but the stuff between Trevor and Wonder Woman, who has promised to marry him “one day” but who rejects each individual proposal, is probably the most interesting thing about this flick. Their ongoing incomplete engagement serves as a kind of good luck charm to get them through the war, and we start to believe in its efficacy just as much as they do, until that luck finally runs out. It’s the emotional crux on which this narrative hangs, and it reads and even elicits a twinge in the heartstrings, even if it never manages to pluck them. It’s also a welcome reprieve to see what may well be the only team-up movie in forty-odd movies that doesn’t feature Batman, especially given that the next few are set to be very Bat-heavy. The perfect place for this movie is on a Saturday afternoon on Cartoon Network ten years ago. Where it belongs now is where it is: near the end of an assembly line that’s starting to wind down (like Cartoon Network now). Not bad, but not special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: Notorious (1946)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon & Britnee watch Notorious (1946).

Boomer: For many years, I’ve been calling Notorious my favorite film of the Hitchcock oeuvre. I’ve recently been filling in some blind spots—most notably The Birds and Dial “M” for Murder, which are pretty big ones in that canon—so I wasn’t sure if I would still hold this one in such high esteem, or if I had simply been trying to be cool as a teenager and cite a lesser known one as my favorite and had been, perhaps, wrong all these years (even if I were, I was still of a feather with Roger Ebert, who named it as his favorite work of the director’s). I still remember the first time I caught this one on TCM when I was in high school, with the requisite intro and outro presented by Robert Osborne. He drew attention to the way that the camera at one point provides a point-of-view shot of Ingmar Bergman’s inebriated driving, her view occluded by her errant hair, and how this was meant to give the viewer a sense of her drunkenness; he talked about how Hitch had received a visit from some men from the state who were curious about why the British director seemed to know so much more about uranium than one would expect for someone not involved in espionage. He praised the arch performance of Madame Konstantin and pointed out the way that the story is bookended with a Nazi’s back to the audience as he faces judgment. And, of course, there was discussion about all that Hayes Code-skirting kissing and nuzzling. 

Notorious is a love story. Girl’s father is imprisoned for treason, girl meets boy, boy recruits her to infiltrate a cabal of expatriated Nazis who are living in Brazil, boy gets inexplicably jealous when she is able to ingratiate herself with the mark, girl and boy are able to solve the mystery of her new husband’s dealings. Tale as old as time. In more specific terms, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is, at the story’s outset, present for the sentencing of her father to a Miami prison for his sedition and espionage, and although we are never made privy to the details, his final statement to the court reveals that he is unrepentant. She has a party at her house to drown her sorrows, and is drawn to a mysterious handsome man named Devlin (Cary Grant). She finds herself both intrigued and infuriated by his calm stoicism, and her attempts to get him to crack escalate to her insisting that the two of them go for a drive, where her reckless speeding catches the attention of a motorcycle cop, who lets them go when he sees Devlin’s identification. The next morning, he reveals to Alicia that he has been sent to recruit her for a job in Brazil. Once there, the two of them fall in love, although their little state-sponsored honeymoon comes to an abrupt end when her mission is revealed; she is to ingratiate herself with one Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a former contact of her father’s who, in the past, was infatuated with her. Devlin has a little pout about this and freezes Alicia out when she begs for some other way she could help, one that wouldn’t tear the two of them apart. It doesn’t work, and Sebastian proves to be an easy mark, and within a short time, he asks her to marry him. Alicia gives Devlin one more chance to speak up and pull her out, but he doesn’t, and she ends up the new Mrs. Sebastian. Her new husband adores her completely, but his hard-nosed mother (Madame Konstantin) is more suspicious of her new daughter-in-law. 

What struck me on this most recent viewing is that this film is unhurried, and while an argument could be made that this is to its detriment, I think that true only insofar as one reads this as a thriller, and that it is to Notorious‘s benefit as a love story. So much of the romance is already raced past in order to establish Devlin and Alicia’s passion for one another, and I think that it might be a disservice to the believability of that love to try and abbreviate it any further. It’s fascinating that, as with the previous collaboration between Bergman and Rains, Casablanca, the things which sever our two lovers are duty and patriotism; except that in that film, released at the height of the war in 1942, our reunited Ilsa and Rick are rent asunder for what can be assumed to be the rest of their lives, while this post-war 1946 picture sees Alicia and Devlin get a happy ending (or at least are implied to have one). Spending this much time with the two of them means that the plot doesn’t really kick in until the midpoint of the movie, after an appropriate amount of time to lull you into forgetting that there’s something inevitably coming to rip the two lovers apart. It lends an air of tragedy and gravitas to their parting that they must continue to see one another but deny their passions, which Devlin does behind a screen of sex shaming while Alicia has a harder time concealing her happiness with his company, even when doing so arouses suspicion. 

I’m not here to question the late master of suspense and the choices that he made, but I do think that there was room for at least one more close call for Alicia in the Sebastian manor. Madame Sebastian regards Alicia with a constant air of appraisal and unspoken but nonetheless present disapproval. The party sequence in which Alicia and Devlin, through some exciting near-misses, manage to enter the wine cellar in which the secret uranium is hidden and abscond with evidence, is a thrilling one, and there’s some truly magnificent camerawork that swoops over the great Sebastian house entryway, with its checkered tile pattern calling to mind a chessboard that Alicia must cross, before it zooms in on the tiny key in her hand. But I do wish that Alicia had almost been caught another time before or after this, to really build up the tension, although that would risk making the Sebastians seem more naive and less threatening, if she were able to get away with too much before they catch on to her. And when they do catch on to her, we get one of the great lines that I think about all the time, stated by Madame Sebastian to her heartbroken son: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity — for a time.” 

It’s interesting that this one comes right on the heels of the war, when the potential for a Nazi resurgence on another continent after a short breather was something that would have been on the minds of every member sitting in that audience. I’m hard pressed to think of a contemporary or even recent analogy for how that plot point must have felt for the people watching the film, for whom the revelations of just how depraved and barbaric the regime had been within its borders were still an unfolding series of horrors. I wonder, Brandon, if you feel that the way contemporary events were folded into the narrative is as effective now as it was then, if the film would function as well without that element (and instead focused on a fictional cabal of more generic evil plotters), and if you have any other thoughts on the matter? 

Brandon: As you’ve already implied, this is a love story first and an espionoir second, with most of the thrills in the first hour generated through the bitter flirtation between Bergman & Grant.  The dialogue walks right up to the line of spilling the details of Bergman’s loose morals every time they bicker, and it’s not hard to imagine Hays Code censors tugging their collars in the screening room.  As for contemporary audiences’ reaction to the secret Nazi cabal in the second hour, it’s also not hard to imagine that feeling like a more immediate, chilling threat in the 1940s that it is all these decades later.  I just don’t think Hitchcock is interested enough in their fascist violence or ideology to make the specifics of their villainy central to the text.  Would the movie be all that different if it were made a few years later and our reluctant couple were spying on Cold War Russians instead of Nazis in exile?  I have my doubts.  Casablanca was specifically about the futility of attempting to remain politically neutral in the face of Nazi fascism, and it was filmed before America joined the war.  Comedies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be parodied the specifics of Hitler’s racism & mannerisms while he was still alive and ascending to power.  Besides the Brazilian setting and the Uranium smuggling plot, there isn’t much specificity to the Nazi presence in Notorious, except as shadowy villains whose suspicion raises the tension of the espionage romance that’s front & center.  The specifics of exactly why that romance is so tense (mostly Grant’s closed-minded frustration with Bergman’s disregard for womanly virtue) also go unstated, but most of the fun of the movie is in watching Hitchcock chip away at the restraints that block him from fully vocalizing them.  Most of his interest is in the fictional, bitter romance he’s created, not in the real-world politics.

The only way I really felt Hitchcock’s disgust with Nazi scum was through the ghoulish specter of Madame Sebastian, who radiates pure hate in every scene while her younger cohorts act like proper gentlemen.  Most of the Nazi cabal’s villainy is hidden behind locked doors, but the matron of the house proudly parades her cruelty out in the open as a voluntary enforcer and a true believer in the cause.  She can’t even crochet in her rocking chair without coming across as a Nazi piece of shit, which is a major credit to Madame Konstantin’s performance.  Britnee, as our resident hagsploitation expert, I have to ask where you think Madame Sebastian’s legacy falls in the cinematic canon of evil old women.  It wouldn’t be for another decade or so that Hitchcock literally put the “Psycho” in “psychobiddy” (speaking of menacing rocking chairs), but it seems he was already interested in the horrors of a hateful, overbearing mother here, assigning most of the onscreen evil to the elderly Madame.  The question is, was she evil enough for the task?  Did she give you the proper psychobiddy tingles?

Britnee: I’m honored to be considered a hagsploitation expert and will immediately add that to my résumé. With such powerful performances from Bergman and Grant, it’s hard to focus on anyone else, but Madame Konstantin earns your attention. I’m always excited to spend time with a mean old lady who wears fancy dresses, so I was riveted during her scenes. Her cold, emotionless tone & face alone gave me the chills, along with her being Nazi trash. The scene where Alexander wakes her up to tell her the news about being married to an American agent was gold. Madame Sebastian is covered in satin sheets and lights up a cigarette with a devious smile before she starts calling the shots in a “Mommy knows best” sort of way. Alexander’s mommy issues were the icing on the cake for this thriller. It created a very eerie atmosphere, especially in the latter half of the film when we’re stuck in the oedipus mansion with a poisoned Alicia. I got goosebumps when Madame Sebastian appeared in that creepy black dress while Devlin was rescuing Alicia from their evil clutches. Once again, this is more evidence that elderly women with horrible hair make wonderful villains, and Hitchcock knew it. He may just be the godfather of hagsploitation. 

Lagniappe

Britnee: Notorious was made into a 5-act opera that premiered in Sweden in 2015. From the clips I’ve stumbled upon, it looks absolutely amazing!

Boomer: I’m embarrassed to admit how late in my life I learned that Isabella Rossellini is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter (this year!). I’ve seen Bergman in a couple of other flicks since learning this, but Notorious is the one in which I see the most direct ties to her daughter. Even though this one comes after Gaslight and Casablanca, both of which I have seen in abundance just as I have Notorious, her accent here is perhaps at its most undisguised. There are moments throughout where I can almost hear Rossellini speaking through her mother, as the more senior actress’s pronunciation here is the most like her daughter’s. 

Brandon: Bergman’s intro in the opening sequence is magnificently badass.  Who could help falling for a cop-hating lush with a death wish and a sparkly top that exposes her midriff?  The fabulously talented pervert that he is, Hathcock puts just as much effort into establishing her character in this opening sequence as he does shooting the espionage payoffs in the final act.  The hair-in-eyes effects shot while she’s drunk-driving is one of his great flourishes of camera trickery, and it’s immediately followed up by extreme, twisty Dutch angles from her POV while she sees the room spinning in bed, failing to sober up.  As far as noir’s great femmes fatales go, I can only think of one ferocious character intro that outpaces Bergman’s here: Ann Savage’s relentless viciousness in Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945).  And even she was meant to be seen as less loveable than she was, uh, savage.

Next month: Britnee presents Babycakes (1989)

-The Swampflix Crew

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

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WW Cinema (formerly Wildwood) is a Wednesday-night screening series at The Broad in which filmmakers and other artists introduce classic repertory titles to an eager film-nerd audience.  These introductions are usually pre-recorded via webcam, but occasionally a low-level celebrity sighting will shake up the weekly routine.  Simpsons & Spinal Tap vet Harry Shearer was the most recent in-person presenter for the series, providing some quick, concise insight about what he thinks makes Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime comedy To Be or Not to Be a great work of art, then sticking around after the film to answer questions about his own comedic career.  Shearer mentioned that he had a personal, professional connection to the film’s star, Jack Benny, working with him briefly in his first role as a child actor.  He also argued that the film stands as proof that if you feel passionately about a topic—in this case the political & moral evils of Nazism—you should make a comedy about it instead of a drama (with Dr. Strangelove & Taking Off presented as examples of similarly effective satire).  WW Cinema’s programming has had a lot of influence on what gets reviewed on this blog since they moved their screenings down the street from my house, but I don’t always mention the pre-film intros because they’re not the reason I consistently go; I go because their film selections are consistently rewarding.  I’m only mentioning Shearer here because he put on a masterclass of how to present a movie to an audience who might not have seen it before.  He made the screening personal without distracting from the film.  He voiced his reverence for the artist behind it he found most essential to the piece (in his case Benny, not Lubitsch, the opposite of my connection to it).  He rooted the film in its historical context, both within the timeline of WWII and within the timeline of Benny’s career.  And, most importantly, he kept it brief.  I got the feeling that Shearer has suffered through so many poorly curated film intros and Q&As over the decades that he knows exactly how to not fuck it up, which I’m quickly learning at these WW Cinema screenings is a practiced skill; he’s a professional.

Of course, To Be or Not to Be should not need an intro at all, given that Lubitsch’s comedies are just as riotously funny now as they have ever been; just the gift of laughing along with a live audience instead of streaming it alone on The Criterion Channel is enough to make a modern screening of a Lubitsch classic feel like a cultural event.  Even so, I found myself confused as to why this film isn’t as ubiquitously referenced & recommended as The Great Dictator as the best contemporary Nazi satire.  Jack Benny may not be as enduringly popular as Charlie Chaplin, but To Be or Not to Be is just as daring as The Great Dictator – and twice as funny.  Benny first appears onscreen in full Hitler drag, roaming the streets of pre-occupation Poland and attracting a crowd as if he were a space alien who crashed a UFO.  That’s because Hitler had not yet arrived in the country, and Benny is instead playing a famous Warsaw actor who’s rehearsing to play the Nazi dictator on stage.  Even with the threat of Nazi invasion looming over their heads, most of the film’s scene-to-scene drama involves the lives & squabbles of Benny’s theatre troupe, mostly revolving around the love-triangle maneuvering of his even more famous wife (Carole Lombard) and her flirt-crush of the week (Robert Stack).  It’s just like any of Lubitsch’s classic adultery comedies, except that things get deadly serious at the top of the second act when the Nazi invasion of Warsaw starts in earnest.  Miraculously, Lubitsch gradually builds back to the playful humor of the first act as the theatre troupe schemes to survive & subvert occupation, eventually weaponizing their acting skills as dissident spies within the Gestapo.  The dramatic tension of the second act is shockingly brutal for a comedy, especially considering that it mirrored real-life atrocities happening in real time outside the theater walls during this film’s initial run.  The release of that tension when Lubitsch decides to get goofy again is much needed and incredibly effective, sometimes earning huge laughs just by repeating exact dialogue from earlier scenes.  It helps that most of the jokes are at the expense of artists’ narcissism instead of Nazi violence, which is handled with appropriate mourning & disgust.

If I were presenting what makes To Be or Not to Be great, I’d probably talk about the art of establishing an in-joke with your audience, so that callbacks to previous snippets of dialogue can become uproarious punchlines.  For instance, the title refers to a recurring bit in which Benny is interrupted while delivering the famous Hamlet soliloquy by an audience member who always leaves the room when he gets started.  It turns out that the line was used as a signal to his wife’s would-be lover to visit her dressing room while her husband is occupied.  Over time, we come to realize that she may have chosen that particular moment in his performance to drive him mad because they have a longstanding professional jealousy that fuels the fires of their marriage; we also come to realize that the husband cares more about the interrupted soliloquy than he cares about the adultery, even if just slightly.  It’s a hilarious bit that only gets funnier in repetition, to the point where the line “To be or not to be” earns instant laughs despite being one of Shakespeare’s most often repeated phrases.  It’s also a bit that would work in basically any theatrical setting, since it has nothing to do with the Nazi occupation.  In contrast, there’s another recurring bit in which a Jewish actor in the troupe (Felix Bressart) is constantly auditioning for bigger roles by delivering the “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which alternates between being incredibly funny as an example of theatre-world narcissism and incredibly poignant as a heartfelt plea against antisemitism.  Listening to these jokes build to increasingly louder laughs and starker silences in the room was like listening to a classical music piece build to an ecstatic crescendo after starting on softly bowed strings.  Lubitsch died nearly eight decades ago, but he can still command an audience like a master conductor leading an orchestra.  I’ve enjoyed each of his classic comedies that I’ve seen, but usually for the transgression of their playful view of sex & adultery.  I’ve never been so impressed with the joke-building structure of one in this way before, possibly because I’ve never seen one take such a harsh dramatic pause midway through and have to rebuild its humor on the rubble of real-life horror.

I did not present To Be or Not to Be, though, because I did not work with Jack Benny when I was a child. In fact, our time on this planet did not overlap at all.  Harry Shearer’s insistence on the film’s greatness as an argument that comedy can be as passionate & effective at addressing real-world political issues as drama was a convincing one.  His insights about his & Benny’s comedy careers did not interest me quite as much, but he did not hold command of the stage long enough for that disconnect to derail the screening.  He did a great job introducing a great film without distracting from it by making it all about himself, which To Be or Not to Be itself will tell you is extremely difficult for an actor to do.  Most actors would make a world war about themselves if they could get away with it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Zone of Interest (2023)

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If you’re a particular kind of self-serious cinephile, every new Jonathan Glazer movie is a Cultural Event, largely because of scarcity.  The director only has four features to his name, stretched across two decades, with half of that time passing since his previous film Under the Skin arrived in 2013.  Glazer has been “a name to watch” since his early 2000s stunners Birth & Sexy Beast (if not since his iconic 1990s music videos like “Virtual Insanity” & “Karma Police”).  Every project is so carefully planned & crafted that there’s always intense anticipation of what shape his career is going to take overall. He makes too few films for anyone to predict the big-picture trajectory of his art; there just isn’t enough data.  So, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed by the announcement of his latest project, The Zone of Interest, because it doesn’t fit the shape I personally wanted for his career.  I would’ve much preferred that Glazer dove deeper into the uncanny surrealism of films like Birth & Under the Skin than where he chose to go: sinking further into ice-cold Hanekean cruelty instead.  Still, The Zone of Interest is a title of interest by default, regardless of subject or approach, and Glazer at least makes the misery meaningful & worthwhile. 

The Zone of Interest is the rare war atrocity drama that doesn’t let its audience off the hook for not being as bad as literal Nazis, but instead prompts us to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor echoes that specific moment in normalized Evil.  Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, Anatomy of a Fall) stars as the doting housewife of the Nazi officer who runs Auschwitz (Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel).  The couple’s idyllic home shares an external wall with the concentration camp, which soundtracks their daily domestic routines with the excruciating sounds of torture & genocide. The wife raises children, hosts parties, and tends to the garden.  The husband works tirelessly to invent more efficient ways to gas & incinerate Jews.  Both are separated from the tactile details of the violence that makes their lovely home possible, except in stark reminders when the busy work of the day is over and all that is left is the quiet of their conscience: lounging in a calm river polluted with the ashes of their victims, struggling to sleep in a house lit by the orange glow of the crematoriums, etc.  It’s a slowly escalating, dehumanizing horror that they’ve deliberately numbed themselves enough to not even notice, but it deeply sickens outsiders who briefly visit their home to smell the flowers or play with the kids.

If Glazer were a lesser artist, he would have firmly anchored his WWII drama to the tools & tones of the past, comforting his audience with the emotional distance of time.  Instead, he shoots The Zone of Interest in the style of a modern reality show, documenting the domestic busyness of his central couple on continuously running security cameras like an especially horrific episode of Big Brother.  There are even night-vision sequences that catch small acts of subversion the cameras aren’t supposed to see – good deeds that eventually go brutally punished.  Later, he interrupts the 1940s timeline with images of concentration camps’ current function as history museums, again finding a way to frame them as sites of heinous banality.  The automated-home modernization of this historical drama might initially register as a formalistic novelty, but the constant reminder that the movie is being made now with today’s technology gradually has a clear thematic purpose.  Anyone with a smartphone should be familiar with the feeling of becoming numb to grand-scale injustice & genocide as background noise while we busy ourselves with the meaningless tasks of the day.  Anyone who’s ever been lucratively employed should recognize the feeling that our jobs & lifestyles are causing active harm to people we cannot see.  We’ve all seen too many Holocaust dramas to truly feel the emotional sting of another one as if it were out first; Glazer does his best to shake us out of that numbness by making one specifically rooted in the doomscroller era.

Everything is tastefully, technically on-point here.  I was initially distracted by the automated security camera editing style, which had me looking for visible cameras in every frame, but the approach eventually proved itself thematically justified.  Mica Levi’s thunderous, minimalist score is maybe their sparsest work to date, but it’s effective in its restraint.  A24 has been well-behaved in their marketing & distribution of the film, refraining from selling boutique Nazi merch or leaning into trite FYC awards campaigning.  Glazer has again taken his time to deliver something thoughtfully crafted but not overfussed, proving himself to be one of our most patient auteurs.  I likely would not have watched The Zone of Interest if his name were not attached, since I’m generally skeptical of what yet another wartime genocide drama could possibly illuminate about history that audiences don’t already know (and have learned to ignore).  Glazer sidesteps that tedium by stating the historical facts of the narrative in plain terms – illuminating the dull, background evils of modern living instead of safely retreating to the past.  It’s not the project I would’ve greenlit if I were signing his checks, but it’s a worthy entry in his small canon of thorny, alienating features.  All I can do now is sit in the tension of what he’ll make next, likely until sometime in the 2030s.

-Brandon Ledet