Twilight's Last Gleaming - 1977 - Aldrich

Robert Aldrich is certainly a Hollywood director worthy of a second look. Among the diverse types of films he directed were: Vera Cruz, Kiss Me Deadly, Attack!, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Dirty Dozen and Ulzana's Raid.

Toward the end of his career, in 1977, he directed Twilight's Last Gleaming.

This is a film in which a renegade Air Force general takes over a missile silo complex and threatens to launch 9 nuclear missiles at Russia unless the President of the US makes a secret document concerning the origins of the Vietnam War known to the American people.

What's amazing to me is that people believed, in 1977, that a disclosure of information to the American people might change anything. Indeed, information has been disclosed about the origins of the Vietnam War and barely a ripple was ever made due to it. Wikileaks has disclosed damning information about a major political candidate, and she will probably become the next president.

Lesson to be learned: information disclosure, in itself, changes nothing.

It is now part of the historical record that Lyndon Baines Johnson used a minor skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext to begin a major war against a technologically under-developed country of Buddhist farmers, in which over 50,000 Americans were killed as well as over 2 million Vietnamese (and other SE Asians).

So not only did/do Americans know of this, but Americans knew about Agent Orange and napalm as well as the Mai Lai Massacre. After photos of that massacre were released, over 50% of Americans still supported the war and objected to the prosecution of an officer involved in the killing of innocent Vietnamese civilians.

If the president, in this film, had disclosed the secret documents at the end of this film, America would have greeted these materials with a vast, collective yawn.

The very ending seemed the most interesting to me in which characters begin to speculate that there is a source of power even greater than the US President and that the president is considered expendable to this source of power. I am not convinced there is one organized source, but there certainly are enough folks with shared interests to sway things if they want to.

An adventure/thriller worth watching from the ever thoughtful perspective of Robert Aldrich.

You can watch the film by clicking on this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAmr-WBCRes

By a Man's Face Shall You Know Him - 1966 - Tai Kato

Interesting movie about conflict between the Korean community in Japan and native Japanese after World War 2.

Voice without a Shadow Directed by Seijun Suzuki - 1958

I think this Japanese mystery owes a lot to American film noir - especially in regard to its reliance on bizarre coincidences to drive the story-line.

I'm posting this film because I really loved the performance of Yoko Minimida, who was also in the film The Crucified Lovers. She is great as the compassionate and trusting wife who helps a journalist determine who the real murderer of a low-life criminal is, thus freeing her husband.

Basically, as a telephone receptionist, the heroine of this film hears, by accident, the voice of a person who has committed murder while she is on the phone at her job, and recognizes the voice three years later as the voice of the new 'business' associate of her husband. Stuff starts rolling from there.

Watch the film here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPwX8KW5nMU

Land of Sorrows - Đất Khổ - 1973 - Directed by Thúc Can Hà

Amazing Vietnamese film which was actually filmed during the war and which starred one of Vietnam's most famous 'folk'/anti-war singers.

The White Silk Dress - 2006 - Luu Huynh

See this epic Vietnamese movie by clicking the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3twvSiZWxo

North Korean War Movie: Order No. 27 Directed by Ki Mo Jung, Eung Suk Kim 1986

It looks as if there are some North Korean films on youtube.

This war movie was the first North Korean film I had ever seen - essentially a group of North Korean commandos has to infiltrate South Korea during the war, posing as injured soldiers traveling to a South Korean hospital. One of the soldiers has to break his cover, however, when he sees a South Korean guy physically abusing a child on the train. This is despite his awareness that "...the mission is everything."  Breaking his cover thus means that the mission has to be attempted in a much more difficult fashion since the enemy is now aware that a group of commandos is on some type of mission in their territory.

So this is not an unsophisticated plot twist. After the soldier breaks his cover, he is told that he is too emotional, yet, one has to question whether or not saving the mission was worth allowing an innocent child to be abused. Probably the higher or better response was to potentially abandon the mission in order to protect the child, or was it? So the film has its thought-provoking element.

Also, this type of moral conflict is relevant to a story which was in the news last year in NY City. A police officer was working undercover within a motorcycle gang that was suspected of drug dealing and various other crimes. He felt that he had been told not to break his cover - his mission was to determine where this gang was getting its drugs. So when the motorcycle gang began beating an innocent man on a street in Manhattan, he did not attempt to stop this nor did he call the police to stop the beating. He was then arrested and recently sentenced to prison for not breaking his cover. So in our society it would seem that breaking one's cover is mandatory if one might become involved in some type of crime.

There's a lot of patriotism and martial arts and North Korean comradery in this film.

Utage by Heinosuke Gosho - 1967