Rogue Male - 1976 - Clive Donner

Fritz Lang used the novel by Geoffrey Householder called Rogue Male to make his amazing film "Manhunt."

Rogue Male is a BBC production based on the same very entertaining and thoughtful suspense novel. If you can get a cheap copy from amazon, it would be fun to read.

An English big-game hunter wants to see whether it might be possible for him to kill Hitler. This is in 1939, as people are beginning to realize that Hitler is having a malevolent effect throughout the world.

What I liked about the Lang film and the novel is that the hero of this story comes from the upper class in England and was never taught how to be a real 'moral' actor in the world. Everything is a game to him (and his class). So at first he does not perceive killing Hitler as a moral act - it is a game. This is one reason why he fails.

However, he undergoes a moral transformation as the story unfolds and by the end of the novel he is ready to truly kill Hitler.

I have to be honest - I'll watch this BBC version soon - I don't know how good this film is. I hope you enjoy it though.

See the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMtGmGa8KZ0

The Glass Menagerie - Anthony Harvey - 1973

The Tennessee Williams classic -

See the movie version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pddUuIaUbf0

Zulu Dawn - 1979 - Douglas Hickox

Interesting film about the Battle of Islandlwana - the greatest military defeat of a 'modern' army by an indigenous people in history.

The English initiate a war against the Zulu people because they claim that the Zulus are being 'unjustly oppressed' by their king.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Please watch this pretty cool film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sr409Qd6GU

Sergeant York - 1941 - Howard Hawks

This was the highest grossing film of 1941.

It's the story of a man who is a pacifist due to his religious convictions. However, the military does not recognize the legitimacy of his religious organization and forces him into the army. (He attempts to avoid miitary duty through claiming conscientious objector status.)

He becomes the greatest American hero of World War I partly because he attempts to fight for his country without inflicting any unnecessary casualties against the enemy. Basically, he helps to capture about 135 German soldiers in one battle because he tries everything he can to win a battle without resorting to killing other humans.

An amazing film, starring an amazing actor about one of America's most amazing heroes.

So if you have seen Hacksaw Ridge (about another American conscientious objector who becomes a hero) you may enjoy comparing and contrasting it with Sergeant York.

Please watch the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60rq9YsdxWM

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