A Coffin for Dimitrios

Having read and reread a lot of John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, and Len Deighton—some of the great names in spy novel and thrillers—I noticed another name that often came up when, between their books, I would read about these authors: Eric Ambler. Ambler, an English novelist with a career stretching from the 1930s to the 90s, is often fitted into a crucial place in the history of the thriller between the more romantic adventure style of a Buchan, the hardened but still exciting sensibility of a Fleming, or the grey workaday espionage of a Le Carré or Deighton. Ambler’s name came up often enough, and with serious enough admiration, that it stuck in my mind, and when I ran across a copy of his 1939 novel A Coffin for Dimitrios I eagerly seized the chance to read it.

A Coffin for Dimitrios begins with Charles Latimer, a former academic now subsisting on his surprisingly successful mystery novels, aimlessly whiling away a trip to Istanbul as he prepares for his next book. When he meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police officer, at a party and Haki expresses admiration for his novels, Latimer is given the chance to look into a real crime, to see the disorder of crime, violence, and death, the incompleteness of real mysteries.

Latimer, intrigued, agrees, and Haki takes him to the morgue. On the slab is the body of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a Greek master of organized crime. The police had fished him out of the Bosporus that morning, stabbed and drowned.

Haki briefs Latimer on Dimitrios’s record: theft, blackmail, murder, espionage on behalf of parties unknown, conspiracy to assassinate the president of a fragile Balkan state, drug smuggling, sex trafficking. Dimitrios’s crimes, Haki makes clear, are not the equivalent of a tidy poisoning in an English country house, and Dimitrios himself was thoroughly nasty. Unredeemable. And terribly powerful.

After Haki’s tour of the morgue and reading of Dimitrios’s file Latimer tries to move on, to return to work on his next book, but Dimitrios’s true story nags at him—especially its incompleteness. Haki’s file had long gaps in it, with Dimitrios disappearing from Izmir or Athens only to appear again in Belgrade or Paris years later, working another racket. Latimer decides to find out the whole story. He tells himself it’s research for a book.

Latimer’s search takes him from Istanbul to Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and finally Paris. At first he doesn’t realize what he’s got himself into. Questions about Dimitrios provoke icy silence or outright hostility. Local authorities obligingly try to help, but it’s clear that they have only the thinnest understanding of Dimitrios’s career. Latimer gets his best information from Dimitrios’s former collaborators—a Bulgarian madam, a Danish smuggler, a Polish spymaster—but he must work to convince them to talk and only slowly realizes that they have angles of their own to play now that Dimitrios is dead.

There is much more to A Coffin for Dimitrios, but to explain more would be to reveal too much. One of the pleasures of Ambler’s sprawling detective tale is the manner in which it unfolds, with Latimer picking up clues, chasing leads, and often stumbling across information that is more meaningful to the criminals he meets than to himself. Simply understanding what he’s uncovered makes up a large part of his work, but his sense that he’s onto something important keeps him searching even as his research grows more dangerous and the surviving members of Dimitrios’s criminal network start to ensnare him in their own schemes.

The novel’s setting proves another of its strengths. This is eastern Europe twenty years after the catastrophe of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the creation of new states like Yugoslavia out of the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Memory of the war and the violence and chaos that, rather than ceasing, grew worse in the aftermath haunt every place Latimer visits and every person he meets. Cops, customs officers, nightclub dancers, and even strangers on trains all have stories to tell. This is the bustling, seedy, multilingual, darkly cosmopolitan world of international crime—imagine Casablanca crossed with The Third Man—and Ambler evokes it brilliantly.

And, like all of the other writers I began this review with, Ambler is an excellent writer. Strong, direct prose and precisely observed descriptions immediately draw the reader in, and, despite the globetrotting plot, Ambler does not waste time on travelogue. In addition to The Third Man, which I enjoy just as much in Graham Greene’s novella as the noir film based on it, A Coffin for Dimitrios reminded me a lot of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, another thriller whose plot bestrides Europe just before the Second World War and one of my favorite reads last year. This is a spare, tense story of obsession and revelation, of an ordinary man drawn by his own curiosity into a dark world standing just out of sight in the streets of Europe’s most important cities.

If A Coffin for Dimitrios has any flaw, it is that the pacing flags somewhat in the middle as several characters in a row retell their stories of falling in with Dimitrios, but these chapters are entertaining and interesting in their own right and set up a suspenseful and satisfying final confrontation between Latimer, one of the many crooks he has met along the way, and a figure he never expected to meet when he began his search.

If you like any of the other authors I’ve mentioned above—and if you follow this blog you must surely like a few of them—or if you simply enjoy solid, well-crafted, fast-paced, and suspenseful thrillers, check out A Coffin for Dimitrios. Having read this one, I’ll certainly read others by Eric Ambler.

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.

Dune: Part Two

This week is my spring break, which means I’m trying to rest, see family, and get caught up on some of the things I’ve wanted to write about for months. And I’m glad to say I started my break off right with a long-anticipated viewing of Dune: Part Two.

When the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation came out two and a half years ago I was glad to admit to being apathetic about seeing it—I had read the book and enjoyed it but wasn’t blown away by it—because that made my surprise and excitement about how excellent the film was all the greater. The first film’s achievement was to take what was best of the sprawling, intricate, often unwieldy novel, keep its complexity while making it comprehensible in a visual medium, and greatly improve the story’s pacing. Dune: Part Two continues in much the same way.

The film picks up more or less where the first Dune left off, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) bereft, Paul’s father the Duke having been murdered in a carefully orchestrated coup by the family’s greatest rivals, the Harkonnen clan. Paul and Jessica now live at the sufferance of a tribe of desert Fremen led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Jessica, pregnant with her dead husband’s second child, must protect herself, her unborn baby, and Paul. Paul simply seeks revenge. To get it, he must not only learn how to live and fight among the Fremen but work his way into a position of leadership among them.

This story arc makes up most of the first hour of the film, with Paul repeatedly tested and slowly rising in the esteem and even worship of the Fremen—some of whom, including Stilgar, believe he is a long-prophesied Mahdi or messiah—and with the Fremen carrying out ever more aggressive attacks on the Harkonnen’s spice harvesting operations in the desert. All of this is thrilling and brilliantly executed, particularly a sequence in which Paul has to pass his final test, one that is administered not by his Fremen mentor but by the sandworms. Paul also falls in love with the Fremen girl Chani (Zendaya), a doubter who sees prophecies of the Mahdi as a cynical ploy either to enslave the credulous or to keep them waiting, biding their time under the status quo. Jessica, as a member of the female cult of the Bene Gesserit, is part of the problem as far as Chani is concerned.

Meanwhile, the Harkonnens, led by the evil and physically repulsive Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), thinking that they have wiped out Paul’s family, have escalated their efforts to destroy the Fremen and reconsolidate control over the desert and the harvesting of spice. The film begins with a glimpse of their brutal and systematic slaughter of the Fremen, and so it comes as an unpleasant surprise that there are Harkonnens out there who are more evil yet—namely Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), a nephew whom the Baron brings in to replace his thick-witted and ineffective older brother Rabban (Dave Bautista). Where the Baron uses brutality and conniving to get what he wants, Feyd-Rautha revels in causing pain and destruction.

Lurking yet further in the background, the Emperor (Christopher Walken), his daughter Irulan (Florence Pugh), and his personal Bene Gesserit advisor (Charlotte Rampling) quietly await the outcome of the Harkonnens’ efforts. The Emperor weighs his options, opining to Irulan with Machiavellian candor, deciding whether and how to respond to each fresh bit of news.

And then there are Paul’s dreams and visions of future famine, mass starvation, and the slaughter of billions, a meeting of the southern Fremen that is fraught with disagreement, the psychedelic poison used to promote Jessica to the rank of Reverend Mother, her unborn baby’s telepathy, Paul’s seeming death and resurrection, and more and more and more.

It’s a lot, and, as in the first film, it is to Dune: Part Two’s great credit that all of this plays out smoothly and understandably—especially as it ventures into some of the book’s weirder territory—building from small beginnings in the desert to a climactic final battle on a massive scale.

One artistic choice that certainly helps is the decision to do little in the way of explaining what happened in the previous film. Notice how, in my summary, I didn’t explain what spice was, or the planet Arrakis, why anyone is fighting for control of both, what a sandworm is, and how any of these things are related to each other? Dune: Part Two doesn’t, either. Rather than get bogged down in “as you know” scenes meant to get a forgetful audience caught up, the film starts in medias res and keeps on moving. People who haven’t seen the first part probably won’t know what’s going on, but this also means that thanks to the excellent pacing and escalating action and dramatic tension in each, Dune and Dune: Part Two work together as one giant film. Back-to-back viewings like those nine-hour Lord of the Rings marathons are bound to become a custom among fans.

Sets, costume design, cinematography, sound, music, and special effects—all are excellent, with expert care and craftsmanship in every detail. As much as I love to examine the technical aspects of a good film, I don’t actually have much to say here. The quality of the filmmaking is impeccable. Like the first movie, Dune: Part Two creates a totally absorbing world for its story to play out in and presents it using the medium of film to its fullest potential.

The performances are mostly good as well, especially among the supporting cast. Javier Bardem as Stilgar and Josh Brolin as Paul’s old trainer and mentor Gurney Halleck stand out especially well as two men who both believe utterly in Paul, albeit in different ways and for dramatically different reasons. Austin Butler makes a chilling entrance as Feyd-Rautha and only becomes more threatening and evil as the film progresses.

As for the leads, I actually liked Timothée Chalamet less in this film than in the first one. I believed his Paul as a callow youth with plenty left to learn, but, once adopted by the Fremen and fully integrated as a fighter, I found him hard to accept as a warlord on the rise. Chalamet conveys Paul’s charisma and leadership mostly by yelling, which is effective for showing how the power Paul assumes in pursuit of revenge slowly corrupts him but less for showing why the Fremen would risk their lives to support him, Mahdi or not. He’s still effective as Paul, but is somewhat outdone by the story and characters surrounding him. Rebecca Ferguson, on the other hand, is still excellent as Lady Jessica. Like Paul, she goes into the desert at the end of the first film a weak and vulnerable refugee and emerges from it at the end of this one a figure of terrifying power, but thanks to Ferguson this transformation is completely convincing.

If I have any complaint whatsoever about the movie, it’s in a handful of supporting roles. Zendaya’s Chani starts off charming, her subtle flirtation and romance with Paul warm and believable, but once Paul embarks on his mission to bring down the Harkonnens and the Emperor she mostly seethes, glowers, and storms out of rooms, and she never completely overcomes the stilted delivery I noted in the first movie. Likewise, Florence Pugh’s Princess Irulan is both underwritten and underperformed, Pugh’s flat affect and monotone speech contrasting badly with older costars like Christopher Walken and Charlotte Rampling, who convey much with great subtlety. But these are small things in a big movie, and if Villeneuve gets his way and makes a third and final Dune film, perhaps we’ll get more, and better, from both characters.

Dune: Part Two is an excellent sequel to one of the best sci-fi adventure films ever made, not only continuing but building on what the first film accomplished. It’s brilliantly made and thoroughly exciting—the final attack on the Emperor’s base by an army of Fremen riding sandworms is one of the gnarliest things I’ve seen in years—and a trip to the movies that was well worth the wait.

The Mysteries

“‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’
‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’”

— CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I feel like the publication of a new book by Bill Watterson, whose “Calvin and Hobbes” ended its run twenty-nine years ago and who has remained almost entirely quiet since, should be more of an event than the release of The Mysteries has proven. But then, given the book’s title and most especially its subject matter, maybe that’s appropriate. Call it a mystery, but not one of the Mysteries.

The story is simple enough. This blog post will probably end up several times longer than the entire book. The Mysteries introduces the reader to a medieval-ish world of castles and half-timber towns in which the people and their king are bounded by dark forest. The forest is the domain of the Mysteries, whom no one has ever seen but everyone knows have terrible powers. At first the people strive not to understand but to protect themselves from the Mysteries, putting huge efforts into building walls and chronicling the long history of their fears in tales and art.

Then one day the king decides to strike back against the Mysteries, dispatching knights into the forest on a quest to capture and bring back a Mystery. After a long stretch of futile searching, one knight succeeds, returning with an iron box chained to a cart.

At last, a Mystery is revealed—and the people discover that there’s not, apparently, very much to them. Their fearful powers turn out to be “mundane.” And capturing one Mystery opens the way to capturing others, to the point that the people not only lose their fear of the Mysteries but come to find them boring. One clever illustration shows a medieval newspaper stall full of headlines like “YAWN.”

Then, the Mysteries understood and no longer feared or the object of much attention at all, the people demolish their walls, cut down the forest, and overspread the land. They mock the old paintings inspired by the Mysteries. They now live in a world of jet aircraft and skyscrapers and the king no longer appears on the balcony of his castle but on TV or behind the wheel of a car on a busy freeway, drinking a Big Gulp. At last, the narrator tells us, they control everything.

Or do they? The sky turns strange colors and, ominously, “things” start “disappearing.” The king assures them that this is normal, wizards study the phenomena, and life continues apace. Then, “too late,” the people realize that they’re in trouble. An indifferent universe wheels on.

In the final pages the viewpoint of the illustrations pulls back farther and farther from the people and their conquered land, into space, beyond the solar system and the Milky Way. “The Mysteries,” the story concludes, “lived happily ever after.”

One notable aspect of The Mysteries is that although Watterson wrote the story, it is illustrated by caricaturist John Kascht. Watterson and Kascht worked on the pictures in close collaboration for several years, experimenting with and abandoning many styles before arriving at an atmospheric, unsettlingly dreamlike aesthetic combining clay figures, cardboard scenery, and painted backdrops. The effect is powerfully eerie, especially as the pace of the story accelerates and the fairytale world at the beginning of the book gives way to one that resembles, disconcertingly, our own.

If the pictures are murky, moody, and ambiguous, often more allusive than concrete, so is the story. This, according to Watterson, is by design. I’m not typically one for deliberate ambiguity, but it works brilliantly here. This “fable for grownups,” as the publisher describes it, achieves a timelessness through its strangely specific soft-focus art and a broad applicability through its theme.

And what is that? The most obvious and easy referent to the consequences the people face in the book’s closing pages is climate change, whether anthropogenic or not. But The Mysteries is not an allegory but a fable. To narrow its message, if it has one, to a policy issue is to cheapen and limit it.

The core theme of The Mysteries is disenchantment. Since the Scientific Revolution uncovered the wheels and levers of the universe and the Enlightenment insisted that the wheels and levers were all there is, was, or ever will be, the mysteries of our own world have retreated further and further from our imaginations and the place we once gave them in our daily lives. The powers that once kept people within their walled towns have been banished—or rather seized and repurposed, put to work for the people’s desires. Fear or, to put it more positively, awe of the world has given place to self-assured technical mastery. We control everything.

Or do we?

The Mysteries is probably not what anyone anticipating the return of Bill Watterson would have expected. I was certainly surprised, but pleasantly. As befits the creator of “Calvin and Hobbes,” a work that prized imagination above all else, The Mysteries treads lightly but surefootedly across deep ideas, and powerfully suggests that whatever Mysteries once lived in the forest, we have not sufficiently understood them to warrant our boredom, apathy, and self-indulgence, and we certainly are not free of them. We are, in fact, in graver danger through our indifference to the Mysteries than we ever were when we feared them.

2023 in movies

After my apathy and complaints at the end of 2022, I was surprised to find myself eagerly looking forward to a few movies in 2023. I was only able to see a handful in theaters, but the quality of what I did see was reassuring enough that I’m no longer as bitterly pessimistic about the movies as I was the last time I wrote a list like this. And the hidden grace of missing several of the films I really wanted to see is that I have those to look forward to on home media in the months ahead.

2024, it’s your game to lose.

For the first time, owing to the slow changes of life, I’m dividing the movies I wanted to highlight into two major categories. The first section below will proceed as normal, with the handful of movies I most appreciated. But the second, new section will highlight the several children’s films I saw that are worth mentioning. Below that are the usual sections on older films I saw for the first time, a few movies ranging from entertaining but flawed to entertaining and bad, and the things I missed that I hope to see soon.

So, in no particular order, my three favorites of 2023:

Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer

The best movie, artistically and dramatically, that I saw this year. Oppenheimer is a brilliantly structured and penetrating look at a complicated and self-deceiving man’s life that neither dumbs down the complicated world he lived in nor softens his destructive character flaws. Well-acted, beautifully shot, and technically brilliant in every way.

Full review here.

Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I

Archvillain, or mere lackey of an artificial intelligence? Esai Morales in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I

If Oppenheimer was certainly the best movie as a movie I saw this year, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I was the one I most enjoyed. Despite some structural hiccups in the first act, this Mission: Impossible had plenty of the inventive action set pieces and great stunts I’ve enjoyed in the last several films of the series, plus some unexpectedly moving character developments and an eerie and thought-provoking antagonist that—not who—created a sense not only of danger but of paranoia throughout.

Apparently Part II has been delayed until the summer of 2025. I’m not sure that long of a gap will do the second half any favors and I wish Paramount would go ahead with it this year, whatever it takes. (An impossible mission?) Nevertheless, looking forward to Part II whenever it comes out.

Full review here.

The Lost King

Being personally interested in the story of Richard III, his posthumous reputation, and the fate of his mortal remains, I was excited to see this movie’s trailer but had to wait a while to catch it on home video here in the US. It was worth the wait, though. The Lost King is a nicely written small drama, with just enough humor and wit to lighten a story that could potentially get grim, whether because of what happened to Richard or because of its main character’s physical and emotional struggles. It’s a well-acted and nicely structured movie of modest ambitions, the kind the big studios don’t make enough of any more.

But, as it happens, it might be a little too nicely structured. As I touched on in my review, The Lost King is a good movie but it is very much a movie version of the events it retells, with the sprawling, complicated true story shortened, tenderized and stuffed into a more Hollywood-shaped mold, and with several real people vilified to provide extra drama and an easy antagonist. A questionable aspect of a good movie. This is a film worth watching, and these questions worth reflecting on.

Full review here.

For the kids

A few years ago I included Paw Patrol: The Movie in one of these year-in-review posts with this introduction: “You know what? I’m thirty-seven years old. I have three kids between the ages of two and six. So yes, I saw this. And I mostly liked it.” Two years and two more kids later I’ve decided to include a kids’ own section here, especially since I saw several genuinely good kids’ movies in 2023. In descending order of enjoyment, they are:

The Super Mario Brothers Movie—A genuinely fun and funny adventure with a refreshingly straightforward story. It’s also really well designed, evoking the video game characters and their world perfectly, and beautifully animated. Both my kids and I greatly enjoyed this and we have rewatched it several times since it came out on Blu-ray. I’ve seen a few people criticize Mario for the simplicity of its plot but I think Hollywood would be better advised to copy it by revisiting basic storytelling techniques.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish—A fun animated action comedy with great voice work, especially by Antonio Banderas as Puss and John Mulaney as the brilliant villain Big Jack Horner, and just enough thematic depth—including reflections on aging, fear, the meaning of courage, and the inevitability of death—to make the film both fun and meaningful for adults.

Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie—A good sequel to the first film, this time focusing on Skye and her tragic backstory (everybody gets a tragic backstory nowadays) and following the team as they develop super powers and use them to save Adventure City. I’ll also add that the filmmakers did a lot to make Liberty more tolerable. Parents familiar with the show will probably wonder, like me, if we have a mer-pup movie in our future.

So-so, ho-hum, and egad!

I try to keep these posts positive, but sometimes there are movies I feel so ambivalently about or that were so strangely entertaining despite their massive flaws that I feel like they’re worthy of comment. Last year I had a category of “near misses,” movies that I wanted to like more than I could, so here are a few that, while not quite good enough to be near misses, I still found entertaining. In descending order of how much I liked them:

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant—A well-intentioned action movie about a Special Forces operator who owes his life to his Afghan interpreter and, when the US government shockingly fails to honor its pledge to relocate the interpreter and his family, goes rogue, traveling to Afghanistan alone to rescue the interpreter from the Taliban. Oddly paced, with some obvious budgetary limitations, dodgy digital effects, and a climactic action scene that goes way over the top, this movie only works because of the excellent performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Dar Salim. While The Covenant wants to be a stunning action drama, the best scenes in the film are easily the moments of subtle bonding between the two stars. This is an important topic and two good performances in search of a better movie.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—A creaky, miscalculated sendoff for Indy that does manage to be entertaining, but only just, and thanks mostly to lonely flashes of the old Indiana Jones mystery and fun. The climactic twist, the most daring and off-the-wall part of the film, was great fun but too little, too late. Full review from the summer here.

Napoleon—Speaking of miscalculation, here’s a whopper of a “historical” film. Bad history, odd writing choices, strange performances that only grow stranger upon reflection, and a clunky, half-baked structure that galumphs from event to event, it was nevertheless well made and entertaining, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Full review here.

New to me

Harry Andrews, Anthony Quayle, Sylvia Syms, and John Mills in Ice Cold in Alex

To return to the purely positive and praiseworthy, here are the best of the older movies that, for whatever reason, I only watched for the first time this year. I’ve included links to my full reviews for the three I wrote about earlier this year. In chronological order:

The Great Locomotive Chase (1956)—A classic Disney adventure set during the Civil War and partially shot in my hometown. Great scenery and stunts and a moving conclusion. I’m cheating a bit here since I saw this film once as a boy, but it had been long enough since then that the chance to watch it again felt like discovering a new movie. Full review here.

Ice Cold in Alex (1958)—A suspenseful small-scale war drama. As the British army is cut off and surrounded by the German Afrika Korps in Tobruk, a handful of units manage to escape and strike east toward Egypt. Among these is a single ambulance driven by Captain Anson (John Mills), a wreck of a man and a barely functional drunk since his escape from German captivity several months before. With him are two nurses and his sergeant major, and they pick up a stranded South African officer (Anthony Quayle) just as the German net closes around the city. This begins an arduous quest to cross the desert and reach Alexandria undetected, a quest marked by ambushes, minefields, mechanical failures, the harsh vicissitudes of the desert, and the growing suspicion that one member of the party may be a spy. Well-acted by a great cast and marked throughout by brilliant desert landscapes, by the time Anson’s crew reaches safety you feel just as parched, weary, and sand-begrimed as they do.

Pork Chop Hill (1959)—A no-nonsense, no-frills, unromantic war movie with an excellent cast and technically accomplished filmmaking. That it tells a story from the Korean War, making it among the rarest of war movie species, also makes it worth watching. Full review here.

City Slickers (1991)—I’ve heard about this movie all my life, and my wife and I finally borrowed it from the library. It’s a hoot, with good comic performances by Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, and Daniel Stern, all of whom play well of the intimidatingly manly and tough Jack Palance, and with a poignant vein of darkness running throughout.

The King’s Choice (2016)—The story of Norway’s King Haakon VII during the first few days of the German invasion of April 1940. A powerful study, both well acted and well made, of a character and a kingdom in crisis. Full review here.

What I missed in 2023

Here are movies that either piqued my interest or that I tried and failed to catch this year (these latter clustering in the fall and winter), listed in roughly descending order of personal interest and/or enthusiasm:

• Godzilla Minus One

• Ferrari

• Killers of the Flower Moon

• The Boys in the Boat

• The Zone of Interest

• Dream Scenario

• Butcher’s Crossing

• Asteroid City

• Sound of Freedom

Here’s to watching at least some of these in 2024!

Looking ahead

In no particular order, the handful of forthcoming films I’m most interested in seeing this year:

• ISS—American and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station are stranded when their respective governments go to (nuclear?) war. A really great hook for a sci-fi thriller.

• Wildcat—Ethan Hawke’s indie drama about Flannery O’Connor. This debuted last year at a film festival but I’m hoping for it to either get wider distribution or become available on home media this year.

• Dune: Part Two—I’m not a huge fan of Herbert’s novel but was impressed by Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation a couple years ago. Been looking forward to the second half.

• Joker: Folie à Deux—Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix made a surprisingly good drama out of a Joker origin story and I’m curious to see where they go in the sequel.

• Civil War—Frankly, this looks idiotic and predictable (Menacing Southerner? Check), but you know I’ll probably watch it out of curiosity.

• Nosferatu—Robert Eggers remaking a silent-era vampire movie? I’ll be there.

Conclusion

2023 was a surprisingly good year for movies, even without the many films I missed factored in. I’d heartily recommend any of those listed above, especially the older ones under “New to me.” If, like me, you struggle with weariness of the new, shiny, loud, and digitally assisted, check out one of those classics for a refreshing taste of another world and lost forms of storytelling. And in the meantime, here’s hoping for at least a few more good films this year.

Thanks as always for reading!

2023 in books

This turned out to be big year for our family. We welcomed twins in the late summer and between that, some travel earlier in the year when my wife was still mobile, and a lot of extra work in the fall, things have only just begun to slow down. Despite it all, there was plenty of good reading to be had, so without further ado, here are my favorites of 2023 in my two usual broad categories:

Favorite fiction of the year

This was an unusually strong year for my fiction reading, especially in the latter half, when I had little time and my concentration was strained. I’d recommend most of the novels I read this year but here, in no particular order, are my dozen favorites, with one singled out—after great difficulty choosing—as my favorite of the year:

The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham—A genuinely creepy slow-burn thriller in which a small English village, not noteworthy for much of anything, plays host to a brood of strange, emotionless, hive-minded children who were all mysteriously conceived on the same night. As the children grow—at twice the rate of normal children, by the way—and they manifest powers of mind-control, the people of Midwich are forced to consider what kind of threat the children pose to the village and the rest of the world. Vividly imagined and populated with interesting characters, this is the kind of sci-fi I think I most enjoy. For more Wyndham, see below.

With a Mind to Kill, by Anthony Horowitz—The last and most Ian Fleming-like of Horowitz’s three James Bond novels, this novel picks up threads from Fleming’s final two, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, and develops them into a compelling new story. Having faked M’s assassination, Bond returns to the Soviet Union in a bid to infiltrate and destroy the Russian network that captured, tortured, and attempted to brainwash him. Briskly paced, atmospheric, and suspenseful, with the interesting twist of Bond having to pretend to be the thing he most hates.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima—A story of romance and disillusionment that is both hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. When an officer in Japan’s merchant marine service meets a young widow with an adolescent son, they fall for each other within a few days. The boy is smitten with the officer, too, admiring him as a man of action, adventure, and lofty independence—until the officer decides to give up a life at sea in favor of settling down and raising a family. When the boy relates his disappointment to the savage, cruel gang of schoolboys to which he belongs, they plot to bring the officer down. Briefly told in sensuously dreamlike prose, with a poignant love story and creepy parallel plot involving the boy, this novel totally absorbed me. I read it in a day, a rare feat for me these days.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A richly written, moving, bleak, and wholly engrossing novel in which a small family group of Neanderthals have a disastrous run-in with a band of Homo sapiens. Full review from late spring here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A tense, relentlessly paced thriller set in interwar Europe. When an English hunter sets himself the challenge of stalking and lining up a shot on an unnamed central European dictator—just to see if he can—he is caught, tortured by the secret police, and left for dead. Despite his injuries he manages to escape, but must elude pursuit by a dogged agent of the (again, unnamed) fascist regime, who trails him all the way to southern England. Relentless pacing, a mood of palpable paranoia, the irony of a claustrophobic final standoff in the idyllic English countryside, and the resourcefulness and toughness of the hero keep this book moving from beginning to end. One of my favorite reads from the spring.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel set in the near future, when England is ruled by a king selected at random. The current ruler, Auberon Quin, decides to make a joke of the institution by reintroducing heraldry, elaborate court etiquette, and the traditional subinfeudated privileges and freedoms of London’s separate neighborhoods. It’s all a lark to him until he meets a true believer, a young man named Adam Wayne, who determines to fight for his neighborhood and its people against the plans of the elite. A high-flying hoot, as much of Chesterton’s fiction tends to be, but deeply moving and meaningful.

Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—One doesn’t often associate the name Agatha Christie with historical fiction, and yet here’s an excellent, evocative mystery set in the country house of an ancient Egyptian mortuary priest. Christie constructs a realistic family drama involving the remarriage of the patriarch to a haughty young concubine who threatens the priest’s grown children with disinheritance. When she winds up dead, there is talk of curses, vengeful ghosts, and murder. The priest’s young widowed daughter and his elderly mother, sensing something is amiss, work together to determine who may be responsible for the disasters visiting their home. I’d guess this is one of Christie’s lesser-known books, but it’s now one of my favorites of hers.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger—An eerie and dreamlike fantasy of a peaceful seaside community thrust into bloodshed and destruction by the Head Forester, a violent warlord from the northern forests. Though Jünger insisted that On the Marble Cliffs, which was published as Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was not an allegory of Hitler and the Third Reich, it is certainly applicable to that situation—and to many others in which civilization declines into a scientistic and neopagan barbarism.

Declare, by Tim Powers—A genuinely one-of-a-kind novel: part espionage thriller in the mold of John le Carré, part cosmic horror, part straight historical fiction, part supernatural fantasy, this novel begins with Andrew Hale, an English sleeper agent, being unexpectedly reactivated as part of Operation Declare. He must flee immediately and seek instructions. As Hale returns to regions of the world he hasn’t seen in years and reflects on his career as a spy in Nazi-occupied Paris and the Berlin and the Middle East of the early Cold War, the reader gradually learns his mysterious history and that of the intelligence network of which he has been a part since childhood. The reader also gets to know Kim Philby, a real-life double agent who defected to the Soviets and who continuously and ominously reappears at crucial moments in Hale’s story. I read this on the strong recommendation of several trusted friends and loved it, though I made the fateful decision to begin reading shortly after the arrival of our twins in the late summer. The result was that it took me far longer to read Declare than it should have, and I do feel like I missed some of its cumulative effect. No problem, though—this is clearly worth a reread. It’s that rich.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog—An arresting short fictional portrait of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign for nearly thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Full review from late summer here.

Berlin Game, by Len Deighton—A close contender for my favorite read of the year, this is the first novel in Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, which follows British intelligence agent Bernard Samson as he tries both to help a valuable but endangered asset escape East Berlin and, when that is complicated by the discovery of a double agent in Samson’s own organization, to root out the traitor, whom he may be closer to than he’d like to think. Moody, atmospheric, suspenseful, and witty. Very much looking forward to Mexico Set and London Match.

Best of the year:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

A man wakes up in a hospital to discover that the world has ended while he was unconscious. I’ve seen at least two zombie versions of this scene—both 28 Days Later and “The Walking Dead” begin this way—but this device originated in the early 1950s in John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic survival story The Day of the Triffids.

Two events give rise to the plot of this novel: first, a massive meteor shower, visible worldwide, that blinds everyone who looks at it and, years earlier, the accidental discovery of triffids, walking carnivorous plants apparently developed in a lab (ahem) in Soviet Russia. Having been dispersed all over the world, scientists find uses for the oils produced by triffids and factory farms arise to cultivate them. Others acquire triffids as exotic garden specimens and remove their lethal stingers for safety. Gradually, triffids become part of the landscape, and Bill Masen, a biologist and the novel’s narrator, is partly responsible for their proliferation. Then the meteor shower comes.

Masen, heavily bandaged as he recovers from eye surgery, is one of a handful of people not to be blinded by the meteor shower, and he emerges from the hospital to find London almost silent and filled with the groping, helpless blind. But what begins merely as a grim survival story takes a turn into horror when the triffids appear, preying on the helpless people roaming the streets.

The rest of the novel follows Masen in his attempts to survive and to join others for greater protection. Different groups pursue different survival strategies—the blindness and the triffids offer many a chance to test out their ideal societies—and Masen bounces from one to the other. And all the while, the triffids are learning.

The Day of the Triffids is low-key sci-fi and its emphasis lies squarely on both the practical considerations of escaping and protecting oneself and one’s group from the triffids and on the ethical dilemmas such a catastrophe would produce. Masen witnesses the organization of many—one based on the guidance of academic experts, another based on charity and altruism, and another, the most menacing, based on autocratic paramilitary rule—as well as their failures. There’s an element of social commentary there, but it’s realistically done, not preachy, and also not the point. The point is the nightmare scenario created by the rapidly proliferating triffids and the question of how to survive, find love, and start over in a world ruled by sentient plants.

The Day of the Triffids totally absorbed me and I read it in just a few days. It’s a brilliantly written, vividly imagined, and engaging adventure that also manages to have satisfying depth.

After reading The Day of the Triffids I moved on quickly to Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (see above) and I have The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes on standby for this year. Wyndham’s fiction is my favorite discovery in quite some time and I look forward to reading these in 2024. If you check any of these out, make it The Day of the Triffids, but definitely seek some of Wyndham’s work out.

Favorite non-fiction

If 2023 was a good year for fiction my non-fiction and history reading flagged somewhat, especially after the twins were born (I read only three of the books below after that point). Nevertheless, there were some clear highlights, and what follows, in no particular order, are my thirteen favorites—a baker’s dozen this time, with one favorite of the year:

Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, trans. by Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, Ed.—A readable new translation of Beowulf by a master scholar of early medieval Germanic literature with a detailed and insightful commentary on everything from word choice and textual problems to characterization and theme. An ideal text for students who want to dig deeper into this great poem.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A very good short biography from Yale UP’s new Ancient Lives series. Crassus is a difficult figure to understand because he is simultaneously involved in seemingly everything going on in the late Republic and is poorly attested in our surviving sources. Even Plutarch focuses primarily on Crassus’s failed campaign against Parthia. A full portrait is probably impossible to reconstruct, but Stothard does an excellent job of piecing together what we can know about him, his career, his wealth, how he used it, and his disastrous end in the Syrian desert.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—An excellent account of the First World War’s mostly forgotten Italian Front, where mountainous terrain, terrible weather, and the politics and mismanagement of the Italian army resulted in protracted and needlessly bloody campaigns. Focuses far more on the Italians than the Austro-Hungarians, but still offers a good overall picture.

The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, by Russell Kirk—Trenchant observations on the American political, cultural, and educational scene from the early 1980s. Owing to its context, some of the examples Kirk uses are quaintly dated (e.g. complaints about the show “Dallas”) but the substance of his arguments is sound and quite prescient.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—Exactly what it says on the cover: a good brief history of a fascinating place and its people. Clements takes the reader from the Finns’ first mentions by the Romans—who were aware they were out there but probably never traveled to Finland—through conversion to Christianity, the Reformation, life under Swedish and Russian hegemony, and finally through both world wars to a hard-won independence and an important place in the modern world. A timely read considering the surprising Finnish decision to join NATO, and I recommend it in conjunction with Clements’s excellent biography of Marshal Mannerheim, which was my favorite non-fiction read of 2021.

The First Total War, by David A Bell—My closest runner-up for my favorite non-fiction read of the year, this is an excellent history of how European warfare changed in the 18th century. From wars fought by small professional armies for limited objectives, often ended through negotiation, and governed by an aristocratic code of honor, the French Revolution—which was partly rationalized, ironically, by the supposed pointless brutality of the old regime—ushered in an age of mass mobilization, unattainable ideological objectives, and an embrace of pragmatic and amoral brutality, especially against fellow citizens who have declined to join the new order. Bell’s chapters on the shockingly violent war in the Vendée and on Napoleon are especially good, and I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in how warfare and its conduct have evolved—or perhaps devolved—in the modern era.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A dual biography of two Georgians whose friendship, despite sometimes major political differences, proved crucial to both their homestate and the Confederacy. Through his portrait of Stephens and Toombs Davis also offers a good glimpse of the inner workings of secession and the dysfunction of the Confederate government as well as the course of the Civil War mostly away from the frontlines.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—A fun little book that works both as a paradoxical self-help guide focusing both on Poe’s strengths and his self-destructive weaknesses and as an approachable mini-biography of a great writer.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—I finally got around to reading this short biography from the Penguin Lives series following Johnson’s death in January. I’m glad I did. This is a bracingly unromantic look at the first great dictator of the modern world, a remedy to longer, more detailed, but worshipful accounts like that of Andrew Roberts. Johnson, a master of the character sketch, the elegant and razor-edged summary, and the telling detail, brings all his skills to bear on Bonaparte and crafts a convincing account of him as an ingenious brute. Not only did I like Johnson’s perspective on Old Boney, this little book was a joy to read. I strongly recommend it if Ridley Scott’s mess of a cinematic portrait got you interested in its subject at all. You can read a memorial post I wrote for Johnson last January here.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another in the Penguin Lives series, this one by an eminent Jacksonian era scholar. Remini does an excellent job not only narrating what we can know of Smith’s life, hedged about as it is by pious Mormon legend, but also contextualizing him in a world of fevered religious emotionalism, private revelations, and even mystical treasure hunting. I was most surprised by the chapters on Nauvoo, having had no idea that Smith had such a powerful private army at his disposal near the end of his life. An excellent read that I’ve already recommended to students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson—The biggest surprise of my reading year, I looked at the first chapter of this book on a table at Barnes & Noble and was hooked. Part naturalist study of a familiar but strange animal, part history, part memoir, Svensson’s account of what we know—and, more intriguingly, all that we don’t know—about the European eel was informative and enjoyable.

Memory Hold-the-Door, by John Buchan—A posthumously published memoir by a great novelist and good man, this book is full of warm remembrances of places Buchan loved and elegies for the many, many men of his generation who were lost in the First World War. Expect a full review for this year’s John Buchan June. In the meantime, here are my extensive Kindle highlights and notes, courtesy of Goodreads.

Best of the year:

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.

This was a tough choice, but in the end I just enjoyed this new volume of Tolkien’s work more than any of the other excellent non-fiction I read this year. Since reading it and blogging about it a few times this summer, I’ve also continued to reflect on it.

The Battle of Maldon is a fragment of several hundred lines of an Old English epic composed to commemorate a disastrous fight against Vikings in the year 991. During the battle, the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, was killed when he allowed the Vikings to come ashore and form for battle, a decision the wisdom of which has been debated ever since. The poem relates the story with great drama and sympathy, and with moving vignettes of Beorhtnoth’s doomed hearth-companions as they commit themselves to avenging their lord or dying in the attempt.

This book collects a large miscellany of Tolkien’s writings on the poem, including his own translation in prose, an alliterative verse dialogue designed as a sequel called The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, multiple earlier drafts of the same showing how the poem evolved both formally and thematically as Tolkien considered and revised it, an essay on Beorhtnoth’s famous pride, and—best of all—extensive notes and commentary from Tolkien that provide a lot of insight into the poem, its context, and broader topics like history, legend, warfare, and human nature.

Anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon England or the literature of the period knows The Battle of Maldon, and it unsurprisingly occupied a large space in Tolkien’s thought and imagination. This book—given my own interest in the poem, the event it describes (which was one case study in my master’s thesis), and Tolkien himself—is a most welcome addition to my Tolkien shelf and my favorite non-fiction read of the year. I highly recommend it.

I posted about this book twice during the summer, first on the topic of tradition and the transmission of poetry and culture, and second on the false modern assumption that anything literary in history is necessarily fictitious.

Kids’ books

Here, in no particular order, are the ten best of the kids’ novels and picture books that we read this year, many of which were excellent family read-alouds:

• The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A novelistic adaptation of legends surrounding Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion, told from the perspective of a lesser-known character from Greek myth: Helen’s young son Nicostratus.

• The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A fun historical kids’ adventure set among the trappers of French Canada and the Great Lakes.

• You Are Special, by Max Lucado—A beautifully illustrated and moving picture book about how it is our creator’s stamp, rather than any aspect of ourselves, that gives us worth.

• The Easter Storybook and The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Two nicely illustrated Bible picture books, one for the Lenten and Easter season and the other based on the Book of Acts.

• Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—Probably my favorite kids’ read of the year, this is a charming simplified adaptation with illustrations showing the characters as anthropomorphic animals. Though simple and kid-friendly, it hit hard—I ended up crying several times while reading it to my kids.

• A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David A Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A good short life of Crockett told accessibly but with commendable attention to the details and complexities of his life.

• The Phantom of the Colosseum and A Lion for the Emperor, by Sophie de Mullenheim—The first two volumes of a fun historical series about three young friends and their adventures in the Roman Empire. My kids adored these and I look forward to reading more.

• War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo—A simply written but powerfully moving look at the First World War from an unusual perspective.

Rereads

Everything I reread this year. My favorites were certainly my revisits with Charles Portis, especially Gringos, which I read for the third time while on a trip to Mexico in the spring. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Gringos, by Charles Portis

• Norwood, by Charles Portis

• Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

• The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz

• The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, by Patrick F McManus*

• Never Sniff a Gift Fish, by Patrick F McManus*

• The Face of Battle, by John Keegan*

• The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

• Beowulf, trans. Tom Shippey (see above)

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

One of my own

Of course, another big event for the year was the publication of a new book of my own, my World War II action novella The Snipers.

Set during the ferocious Battle of Aachen in the fall of 1944, months after D-day and the breakout from Normandy but still long months away from victory over Germany, The Snipers is the story of one bad day in the life of Sergeant JL Justus. A scout and sharpshooter in the 1st Infantry Division, Justus is tasked by his battalion commander with finding and eliminating a German sniper who has bedeviled the division’s advance into the city. Justus thinks finding the sniper will be tough enough, but the men he joins up with to enter the combat zone assure him that there is more than one. Discovering the truth and completing his mission will test Justus and his buddies severely, and give him a shock that will last years after the war’s end.

I wrote The Snipers in a three rapid weeks this spring and revised it in the early summer. The climactic action and its surprising revelation came to me first. After a vivid and disturbing dream of World War II combat, a dream the dark mood of which I couldn’t shake off, I decided to sit down and turn it into a short novel or novella. The rest came together very quickly.

I’ve been pleased with this book’s reception but, most of all, I’m pleased with the book itself. Every time I give a friend a copy I end up sitting down and rereading long sections of it. It’s always satisfying to find enjoyment not only in the work of writing but in the finished product, and The Snipers ranks with Griswoldville in those terms.

I’m grateful to those of y’all who’ve read it, either in draft form or since its publication, and I hope those of y’all who haven’t will check it out and let me know what you think.

Looking ahead

After a busy and chaotic fall things mercifully slowed down, albeit only briefly, for Christmas, and then revved right back up again with surgery and sickness in the family and prep for a new semester at work. But all is well, and I’m hoping for even more good reading in 2024. Right now I’m partway through an excellent study of Eastern Native American warfare and a short biography of Ramesses II, and there are so many novels jostling at the top of my to-read stack I don’t even know how to choose.

Whatever I end up reading, you can count on hearing about it here. And in the meantime, I hope y’all will find something good to read in this list, and that y’all have had a joyful Christmas and a happy New Year. Thanks for reading!

End-of-semester book recommendations

I just wrapped up my last class of this long, busy, exhausting fall semester. On my final exams for this course I asked a final “softball” question of each student: which new historical figure that you learned about most interested you, and why?

Despite the word “new” I got a lot of Abraham Lincolns and Ulysses Grants and Frederick Douglasses in response, but I didn’t mind so much because the students mostly offered good reasons for their piqued interest. I found myself offering a sentence or two of feedback to each with at least one book recommendation based on the figure of their choice.

In addition to several primary source texts—including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia, Brokenburn, the Civil War diary of a young Louisiana girl named Kate Stone, and The Vinland Sagas for the several students impressed with the pregnant Freydis Eiriksdottir’s ferocious response to Native American attack—I came back to several recommendations over and over again. These were books I mentioned to students who named Nat Turner, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S Grant as their most interesting figures. Given that the final unit of the semester covered the secession crisis and the Civil War there’s some obvious recency bias in these answers, but again, that didn’t trouble me too much. If even a fraction of them take those recommendations I’ll be pleased, and I hope they will too.

I thought about these books enough as I wrote that feedback that I decided to offer them as recommendations on the blog as well. So here, in roughly chronological order by subject, are six good books I recommended to my US History I students this fall:

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates

A deeply researched and powerful short narrative of the life and rebellion of Nat Turner. Turner was a slave preacher in quiet, rural Southampton County, Virginia who believed he had received signs from God that it was his mission to rise up and slaughter his oppressors. In the uprising that he eventually led, Turner and his followers killed over sixty whites of all ages, including a dozen school children, a bedridden old woman, and a baby in a cradle. When he briefly eluded capture he became a boogeyman throughout the South, and paranoid fears that Turner might have a coordinated network of slave rebels prepared to rise caused widespread vigilantism.

Oates writes well and smoothly integrates his research with the broader historical context of Turner’s revolt, making this a good look at the overall state of slavery in American at the time of the Second Great Awakening. Oates also doesn’t soft-pedal, excuse, or celebrate Turner’s violence. Here’s a longer Amazon review I wrote when I first read this some years ago.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz

John Brown, like Nat Turner, is an arresting and irresistibly forceful figure, but unlike Turner Brown was much better connected and his life is much more fully documented. This popular history by the late journalist Tony Horwitz, whose most famous book is probably Confederates in the Attic, gives a solid, readable overview of Brown’s life, work, and the evolution of his rigid, fanatical views not just on slavery but on a host of other activist causes. (A favorite example I offer in class: Brown, not only an abolitionist but a teetotaler, once discovered a man working with him on a construction project had brought a bottle of beer along for his lunch. Brown poured it out. Students see the point immediately.)

The bulk of the book covers Brown’s violence in Kansas, beginning with the coldblooded murders of five farmers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, and his magnum opus, the planned rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Brown and a small circle of close followers, including several of his sons and a handful of escaped slaves, plotted to steal stockpiled rifles from an armory at Harpers Ferry and start a local slave revolt that, with plenty of firepower behind it, would snowball into a brutal nationwide purge that would rid the United States of slavery. It didn’t work out that way. Like Turner, Brown was hanged and became a symbol of violent extremism.

I like to recommend Midnight Rising because it offers a short, readable, almost novelistic account without unduly lionizing or condemning Brown. It’s also packed full of good anecdotes and telling, well-chosen details, and its blow-by-blow reconstruction of the disastrous Harpers Ferry raid is excellent.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S Grant in War and Peace, by HW Brands

For students who expressed interest in Ulysses Grant I recommended Brands’s biography. This is a good, readable, cradle-to-the-grave biography that is neither as huge nor as worshipful as more recent Grant biographies like Ron Chernow’s. Brands not only narrates Grant’s life story and the campaigns of his career during the Civil War but also offers clear insight into Grant’s personal character, both for good and bad, as well as his relationships with superiors like Lincoln and Henry Halleck and subordinates like Sherman. Brands also doesn’t explain away or minimize the corruption of Grant’s presidential administration, as is often the habit of Grant fans. The result is admiring but not uncritical, highly readable and accessible, and detailed without being overwhelming.

The Crucible of Command: Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged, by William C Davis

One of the books I most often recommend in class, this is a dual biography of the two most important generals of the war, the protagonists of the final death struggle, and contested symbols of the aftermath. Davis—who has a lot of experience with this kind of work, having previously written multi-track narratives of the lives of Travis, Crockett and Bowie and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs—balances Lee and Grant’s life stories well, structuring them chronologically but still allowing interesting parallels and contrasts to emerge, especially as their careers weave past one another and occasionally overlap. Like the other good biographies in this list, he pays special attention to personal character, and is judicious and fair in his judgments of both men. The chapters bouncing back and forth between Lee and Grant and their dramatically changing fortunes over the course of the Civil War are the best of their kind, and radically reshaped by understanding of how the war unfolded as well as Lee and Grant’s places in the story.

Every time one of our children has been born, I’ve made it a point to read a book about Lee. That tradition started in the spring of 2015 with our first child and this book, and this is still my favorite of the ones I’ve read over the years.

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by SC Gwynne

This is a brilliantly-written, detailed, insightful biography of Jackson focusing primarily on the war years but with good coverage of his early life, too. Gwynne is a gifted writer and he not only capably untangles and narrates the complex, lightning fast campaigns of maneuver that Jackson fought in the two years before his death but also explores the personality of this exceedingly strange man. (Gwynne busts a few myths along the way, too, such as the one about Jackson constantly sucking on lemons. He didn’t. He may have been strange, but not that strange.)

Jackson’s lower-class mountain background, his inflexible Calvinist Presbyterianism, his experiences as an artillery officer in Mexico, his stern and rigid character both as a professor of science at VMI before the war and as an infantry commander—Gwynne explains and integrates all of these aspects of Jackson’s character, giving the reader a solid, understandable portrait of an eccentric, tenacious, fatalistic, but energetic and ferocious soldier whose career was cut short at its height. He also does an excellent job explaining and showing Jackson’s relationship with Lee in action, with the result that this book illuminates not only Jackson but Lee as well.

A book I never hesitate to recommend, and that I wish there were more like.

Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James McPherson

Just one student, impressed with the tone of an excerpted speech that I assigned near the end of the semester, stated some interest in Jefferson Davis, which is not all that surprising—there are far more romantic, heroic figures on both sides of the Civil War than the president of the country that lost. Indeed, the deeper you look, the more inclined you might be to study someone else. Davis was fussy, vain, opinionated, played favorites, and unnecessarily inserted himself into his government’s military policy. James McPherson, an indisputably pro-Union historian of the Civil War era, brings all of this to his study of Davis but also has the intellectual honesty to admit that, after spending time studying the man, he came to admire some aspects of his character, not least the work ethic that kept him going despite the dysfunction of his government (compare his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who got fed up and left Richmond for much of the war) and through severe recurring illnesses. That honesty makes Embattled Rebel a good short study of Davis that, though not wholly sympathetic to its subject, is that rarest of all things nowadays—fair.

Others

Here are two other books I considered recommending but didn’t. Let me recommend them here. Both come from the Penguin Lives series of short biographies by well-known writers.

• Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Thomas Keneally—An engaging, readable, warts-and-all biography of Lincoln that does an excellent job condensing his complex life and personality into a little over one hundred pages without oversimplifying.

• Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—I read this book most recently of all the books on this list, and it was a revelation. Remini’s account of the life of the founder of Mormonism not only narrates his life as clearly as we can know it, but situates him firmly in his broader historical context, showing him and his movement to be very much of their time and place.

Conclusion

This semester has been a blur, but I’m thankful for the work I had, the students I had, and that we can now take a break and focus on more important and long-lasting things. If you’re looking for some American history to read over Christmas and New Year’s, I hope you’ll check one of these out. Thanks for reading!

Napoleon

Scope: Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) invades Egypt in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

Back in the summer I briefly meditated on scope and depth as storytelling principles. Not every novel or film can afford to have scope, the sweeping vision of epic fantasy and high historical drama, but every story should have depth. Should. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon may be the ultimate example of scope without depth.

Beginning with the execution of Marie Antoinette during the Jacobin Terror, Napoleon follows its main character (Joaquin Phoenix) through his first campaigns as a young officer—storming the British-held fortress at the port of Toulon, invading Egypt—and into the political machinations, plotting, and blunt strong-arming that elevated him not only to highest ranks of the French Republic’s army but to the throne as Emperor. During this ten-year segment, he meets, woos, marries, is betrayed by, and himself betrays the older widow Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby), the first act of a tumultuous and unpleasant lifelong relationship.

The second half of the film, covering another eleven years, charts Bonaparte’s greatest triumphs—victory over the Austrians and the Holy Roman Empire, alliance with Russia—as well as his two downfalls: first after the disastrous invasion of Russia and his exile to Elba, second after his return to the throne and “the Hundred Days,” the campaign that ended at Waterloo and with a final exile to the farthest reaches of the South Atlantic. It also dramatizes the collapse of his marriage to Joséphine, his remarriage to an Austrian archduchess, and Joséphine’s loneliness and death. A brief coda on Saint Helena, subtly suggesting the theory that Bonaparte was poisoned, ends the film.

In all, Napoleon covers 27 years in the life of one of the busiest, most important, and most complicated figures in modern history. And with Ridley Scott directing, the film has scope in abundance. From the drawing rooms of Paris and the deserts of Egypt to the battlefields of central Europe and the freezing steppes of Russia, and with energetic, powerful battle scenes featuring hundreds of extras, galloping horses, and thunderous explosions, Napoleon is visually stunning.

What Napoleon does not have, unfortunately, is depth. It can only offer a whirlwind tour of some of the most important moments of Bonaparte’s long and brutal career—Toulon, the Royalist uprising of 13 Vendémiaire, the Egyptian campaign, his coronation, Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo, and negotiations galore—as well as a breathless, simplified account of his tempestuous and unfaithful marriage to Joséphine.

This would not in itself be bad, if it could at least suggest depth, but most of the events of the film have been simplified to the point that they misrepresent what happened. One would think, based on Napoleon, that Bonaparte abandoned the campaign in Egypt just because he was jealous of the cheating Joséphine, or that he was deposed and exiled by his own people immediately after returning from Russia. In fact, he was far from done—the biggest battle ever fought in Europe to that point occurred between his Russian campaign and exile, a battle that doesn’t even make the casualty list in the closing credits.

All of which could, again, be forgivable, since Scott was apparently more interested in crafting a character study punctuated by violent battles, but the characters themselves are presented in the same shallow manner. This is especially evident in the film’s treatment of the central relationship between Bonaparte and Joséphine. Though just as canny, calculating, and amoral a user as Bonaparte, the film presents Joséphine as a doe-eyed victim. Bonaparte, once the naïve puppy dog stage of his obsession with Joséphine has been ended by her infidelity, spends the rest of the film as a randy nerd. (This particular aspect is not inaccurate but it’s hardly the full picture.) These were two nasty, deeply unpleasant characters, and a deeper, more honest portrayal could have made an interesting study of a relationship that genuinely deserves the cliché “toxic.”

Part of the problem may be cuts made to get the film to theatrical length. Scott has, annoyingly, already trumpeted the existence of a theoretically superior director’s cut that is more than two hours longer and that apparently includes more relationship drama. That could well smooth out the choppy middle of the film and allow more time for us to understand these two.

But another part of the problem is Joaquin Phoenix as Bonaparte. To my surprise, I wasn’t bothered by Phoenix’s age (he’s about the age now that the real Bonaparte was when he died, making him more than twice the right age for the siege of Toulon at the beginning of the film), though Kirby’s far more youthful looks obscure the fact that Joséphine was the older and worldlier of the two by six years. What did bother me was that Phoenix’s performance never gelled into a believable portrait of a single individual. In some scenes he’s brilliant, capturing his insight, confidence, and bluff, rough humor, and his scenes with Joséphine are realistically uncomfortable, vacillating as Bonaparte does between childish infatuation, coldness, frat boy lust, and cruelty. But missing from the entire film is any sense of the charisma and drive that united all of these other Napoleons and that unmistakably come through in any book about the man. Napoleon tells you a lot about Bonaparte, but not why anyone would follow him, much less admire him.

Again, perhaps more footage would help, though one wishes the director would just release a coherent film and not lean on the crutch of the after-the-fact director’s cut.

The film’s lack of depth also makes some of the few events it does depict incomprehensible. I am no expert on the Napoleonic era, but I wondered as I watched how well someone without even my limited understanding would be able to follow it. Not well, as it turns out. Two of the three other people I watched it with said they found it “confusing.”

I’ve dwelt on Napoleon’s flaws, but I actually did enjoy it. It’s well-shot, with moody cinematography, and certain sequences are as good as anything else Scott has directed. The scenes at Toulon, the Russian campaign—especially the burning of Moscow, when Bonaparte finally comes up against an enemy he doesn’t understand and can’t intimidate—and the Waterloo scenes are the best in the film. I had also heard that the film was unexpectedly funny; it was, with some authentically Gallic barbs exchanged. I also liked much of the score, including this haunting Kyrie that plays over the (wildly inaccurate and exaggerated) Austerlitz scene, though the film also uses the most recognizable track from Dario Marianelli’s Pride & Prejudice score twice, and in tonally inappropriate ways. As the film belongs strictly to Bonaparte and Joséphine, few other characters get a chance to shine, but Rupert Everett’s Wellington dominates his few scenes late in the film. I would like to have seen more of him. The climactic Waterloo sequence also offers a simple but effective dramatization of how the pressures of time and geography shaped Bonaparte’s choices that day, as well as the outcome.

You’ll notice that I haven’t said much about the film’s accuracy. I don’t see why anyone should bother. Not long after I critiqued some of his remarks on historical accuracy to HistoryHit’s Dan Snow, Scott demonstrated his contempt for history even more clearly in a New Yorker profile. His film deals loosely with the facts, giving Joséphine, in just one obvious example, an extra year of life so that her death coincides with Bonaparte’s return from Elba. Napoleon offers an adequate bullet-list overview of its subject’s career but shouldn’t be trusted on any specifics.

That’s a shame, a missed opportunity, but unfortunately Scott decided at some early point in his career that he need not take pains over story and Napoleon finds him true to form, arrogantly indifferent both to the truth and to the people who care about it.

Despite it all, I found Napoleon entertaining and mostly liked it. If it had depth to match its scope, and if it had a less promiscuous relationship with the facts (taking a cue from its subjects, perhaps?), it might have been great. But as it is, it’s a sometimes rousing entertainment with a few standout action scenes and a curious central performance, but little else—an interesting footnote to a storied career. Not Scott’s Waterloo, but perhaps his Saint Helena.

The King's Choice

King Haakon VII (Jesper Christensen) and the Norwegian government meet while on the run in The King’s Choice

A few weekends ago I coincidentally watched two movies about kings and resolved to review both of them. The first was The Lost King, the story of how Richard III’s grave was found. Here, after a regrettable delay, is the second—The King’s Choice.

The Second World War in Europe began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, but after this initial blaze of violence the war—at least from the Western perspective—settled into months and months of inactive “phoney war.” Britain and France were technically at war with Germany but there was little shooting. That changed dramatically in the spring of 1940.

After protracted diplomatic wangling, Germany invaded both Denmark and Norway on April 9. Infantry and armor attacks as well as history’s first paratrooper assaults overwhelmed the Danish border, and King Christian X chose to capitulate the same morning. But across the Skagerakk, the strait separating Denmark and Norway, his younger brother King Haakon VII reacted differently.

The King’s Choice (Kongens nei) tells Haakon’s story. Opening on the day before the invasion, when word of the sinking of a German ship in Norwegian waters arrives in Oslo, the film follows Haakon (Jesper Christensen) and Olav (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), his son and heir, and the German ambassador Curt Bräuer (Karl Markovics) as Germany launches its invasion and Norway scrambles to respond. Haakon faces difficult choices: Escape to Britain? Evacuate his family but remain behind himself, like his brother in Denmark, and face occupation? Capitulate, and head a German puppet government under the loathsome Vidkun Quisling? Haakon determines early on to resist, but faced with the overwhelming might of the German war machine, how much resistance is appropriate, for how long, and to what end? Simultaneously, Olav struggles to reconcile his duty as the Crown Prince with his strained devotion to his father. Both are burdened with choosing what is best for Norway.

Bräuer’s parallel struggle is especially interesting. An awkward choice as a diplomat, Bräuer speaks little Norwegian but admires Norway and its people and sincerely desires peace. He also believes, naively, that the conflict brewing up between Nazi Germany and Norway can be resolved by men of goodwill, and that if he can present moderate terms to Haakon personally, before it is too late, the war can be halted if not prevented. Where Haakon and Olav’s story is one of finding strength to face an enemy, Bräuer’s, tragically, is one of disillusion.

The film nicely balances these character studies with the events of the opening days of the invasion. As Bräuer’s diplomatic woes play out in the background, Haakon, Olav, the royal family, and the Norwegian parliament flee Oslo. They fall back repeatedly, working their way farther north and ever closer to the Swedish border with the Germans only a few hours behind them. Escape and exile beckon, and death is a constant danger. At one point, Haakon, Olav, and their families narrowly escape German bombing, and at another, only the dedication and bravery of the young reservists manning a roadblock hold back a German paratrooper assault as the royals and government escape to their next hiding place.

These sequences—and a truly brilliant early action scene depicting the defense of Oslofjord and the sinking of the German cruiser Blücher, which looms out of the nighttime murk like some primeval monster—are the only combat in the film. The King’s Choice is a film of hastily called nighttime conferences, ad hoc meetings, and breathless situation reports. But the filmmakers use the sparse action judiciously, punctuating the movements of Haakon, deepening the crisis surrounding Bräuer, and raising the stakes for both—and for the people of Norway. By the time Bräuer finally receives his audience with the king, the potential consequences of the king’s choice are abundantly clear.

It further helps that the central performances are so good. Jesper Christensen will probably be most familiar to viewers in the Anglosphere as Mr White of the Daniel Craig Bond films. He plays Haakon as a strong, principled man keenly aware of his own vulnerability and the longterm ramifications of his choices. His duties toward the people weigh on him—especially since, unlike his older brother, he was not born to the throne but chosen by the people—and as he nears seventy years old he struggles manfully to withstand the bodily pains worsened by the political pressures placed upon him. Repeated scenes in which he tries to stretch and ease his bad back provide a perfectly understated human note.

Markovics (who played the lead in The Counterfeiters, a powerful German film you should watch if you haven’t) offers an excellent counterpart as Bräuer, a principled man who is nonetheless deeply deceived about his position and the forces at play in the conflict. And Christiansen as Crown Prince Olav, who feels pulled in multiple directions by his loyalty to his father, his love of his family, and his duty to the people of Norway, brings both tension and respect to his relationship with Haakon, with past hurts and family troubles only further complicating the king’s position during the invasion.

I was only passingly familiar with the role played by Haakon and the Norwegian government in 1940, so I can’t say whether the film’s interpersonal dramas are accurate or even fair. I will note that both Haakon and Olav, regardless of their differences, real or imagined, are presented respectfully. But like a comparable British film, Darkest Hour, such drama heightens the action and offers a way for the viewer to grasp the personal and emotional stakes of the geopolitical maneuvering. I certainly intend to study Haakon and his family in more detail in the future.

The King’s Choice is a finely dramatized sliver of World War II history, one very often overlooked in the American memory of the war. Like all the best films about the war, it brings the viewer into the uncertainty of the moment and underscores the principled courage of leaders who withstood aggression and guided their people through the darkness. It is well worth seeking out.

More if you’re interested

Two other Norwegian war films that I’ve seen in recent years are Max Manus: Man of War and The 12th Man, both of which concern the Norwegian resistance. I reviewed each briefly on the blog here and here. Haakon briefly appears in the former. And as a good companion film to The King’s Choice I’d recommend 9. April, a Danish movie that follows a company of bicycle infantry from the last midnight hours before the German invasion to the King of Denmark’s capitulation later that day. I gave it a full review here and it is available in its entirety, at least for now, on YouTube here.

The Lost King

Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) with Richard III (Harry Lloyd) at Bosworth Field

Over the weekend I watched two movies that, though quite different in nearly every respect, where both about kings in crisis. My aim is to review both this week. Here’s the first.

Few kings have a worse reputation than Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. His death at the Battle of Bosworth Field after a reign of just two years marked the end of the Plantagenet line, the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. And lest you think death in battle would at least leave Richard to rest in peace, a little over a century later Shakespeare came along and made him the central villain in one of his most intricate and celebrated tragedies, a play that cemented the popular image of Richard right down to the present—a cunning, hunchbacked usurper, coldblooded murderer of kin, and failure on the battlefield.

It’s one thing to have a bad reputation. Pray you never have someone of Shakespeare’s talents turn that gossip into entertainment.

But not everyone has been content with the Richard provided by Tudor drama. The Lost King tells the story of one person whose suspicion that there’s more to Richard than the legend bore unexpected fruit.

The film begins with Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), a divorced mother of two and weary Edinburgh office drone, taking one of her sons to a school performance of the play. Langley, who suffers from ME or chronic fatigue syndrome, finds herself intrigued by the disabled man at the center of all the conniving and bloodshed. Surely he is not evil just because he has a hunchback? Glib assurances of the “everybody knows” variety that Richard was evil—everybody knows he murdered his nephews!—and the potted image of Richard from schoolbooks and Shakespeare don’t convince her. An obsession is born.

Langley buys every book she can find on Richard and pores over them on breaks at work or while waiting up for her ex-husband (Steve Coogan) to bring their sons home. She contacts experts and enthusiasts online and attends meetings of the Edinburgh chapter of the Richard III Society, a group dedicated to rescuing the “real” Richard from his popular image. Not only was Richard not a usurper, she learns, he (probably) didn’t murder his nephews and had used his brief time on the throne to enact serious legal reforms. Far from being a villain, he was admirable.

As Langley’s obsession deepens, she neglects her work, spends all her spare time on studying Richard’s life… and begins seeing Richard everywhere she goes. He takes the form of the actor who had played him onstage (Harry Lloyd) and appears, glum and silent and with soulful eyes, sitting on park benches or standing in alleyways. Langley comes to believe she has a purpose to serve for him.

She finds that purpose when she decides to visit Richard’s grave and learns that he has none. No one knows what became of his body after he was cut down at Bosworth Field. If his body wasn’t disposed of in a river, he was likely buried somewhere in nearby Leicester. She learns that the leading candidate for his burial place is Greyfriars, a Franciscan house—which was dissolved by Henry VIII and demolished. No one even knows where it used to be. But, after a visit to the Leicester neighborhood where it once stood, she has a feeling.

Langley’s mission to find Greyfriars and, possibly, Richard’s grave takes her out of the world of cranks and amateur researchers and bewigged reenactors into that of tenured historians, underfunded archaeologists, and university administrators. The rest of the film chronicles her effort to fund a dig, to convince the powers that be that her feelings are born of solid research and intuition and not wishful thinking. Along the way she wins skeptical allies like the archaeologist in charge of the dig (Mark Addy) and battles dismissive obstructionists in high places, like a University of Leicester registrar (Lee Ingleby) who mocks her feelings, tries to block her project and, later, steals the glory when, against all expert predictions, the dig turns up Richard’s bones.

The Lost King is a fun film that tells its story briskly and engagingly. It boasts an excellent cast, with Hawkins and Coogan bringing a real poignancy to their strange, separated-but-cooperative relationship, and I especially liked Mark Addy as the put-upon archaeologist. The film also does a good job presenting the essentials of the debate over Richard III and his legacy, covering several of its sprawling sub-controversies on the way to focusing on the search for his body. If you like historiography, the art of juggling and judging disparate historical sources, or just a good historical mystery, The Lost King will introduce you to a perennially interesting topic.

But while the object of Langley’s quest is Richard’s bones, the movie is really about Langley. Suffering from ill-health and the misunderstanding or outright hostility of others, she sees herself in Richard, and to find and restore him to a royal tomb is also to find and redeem herself. Once she has done this, her apparition of Richard—clothed, at last, in the royal arms—can depart, and she can accept a humble life of telling others her story.

Despite what could have been a silly conceit—a ghost king following the protagonist around—this is all wonderfully written and movingly executed. As a movie, The Lost King offers wonderful light drama. But I couldn’t avoid asking some questions about its own treatment of the past.

The filmmakers use most of the standard based-on-a-true-story techniques to fit Langley’s story into a movie-shaped narrative. The timeline, for instance, is heavily compressed. Not every step in Langley’s search is dramatized and she was not the first person to posit Greyfriars as Richard’s resting place. I remember my undergrad British History professor suggesting a parking lot as Richard’s grave years before Langley and the team uncovered it. And you might be forgiven for thinking these the events of one busy autumn in Langley’s life when the real Langley’s interest in Richard began fourteen years before the discovery of his grave. Again—these are standard techniques.

But when the movie premiered in the UK last year the University of Leicester protested the way it was misrepresented in the film. Particularly, the administrator played by Lee Ingleby, who helped fund the dig and is thanked by the real Langley in her book, is depicted as a flippant mansplainer who elbows Langley out of the limelight when it comes time to take the credit—and the filmmakers use the man’s real name for this character. The University and the administrator justifiably argue that the filmmakers, in the way they chose to simplify and massage the story for dramatic effect, have streamlined the story into falsehood, crafting a narrative about one plucky outsider woman against a host of stodgy establishment men.

This kicked off a predictable he-said, she-said, with the filmmakers standing by their dramatization, the University countering with documentary and film evidence, and Langley falling back on her “experience.”

None of which necessarily detracts from the film as a film, but it is good for the viewer to be aware of. I’ve been concerned with filmic character assassination for a long time because, as Chesterton once noted, a film’s version of events could “be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had . . . only seen the film.” For a movie about rescuing not only the body but the reputation of a man unfairly maligned and mischaracterized by his enemies to have unfairly maligned and mischaracterized others in its turn is an almost Shakespearean irony.

The Lost King is well worth your time, and Langley’s efforts to exonerate Richard and see him properly buried are laudable, but watch the film remembering more than usual that it is entertainment, and that both feelings and facts matter.

More if you’re interested

You can get the basics of the controversy over the film from this BBC News article. If you’re interested in the investigation into Richard’s life and purported crimes, check out The Daughter of Time, a mystery novel by Josephine Tey about a bedridden detective’s quest to uncover the truth about Richard. Its trajectory of interest and obsession matches Langley’s quite closely. I reviewed it here last year.

The Great Locomotive Chase

Conductor William Fuller (JEffrey Hunter) flags down the locomotive Texas in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). That’s Slim Pickens in the cab of the engine.

Last night for family movie night I got to share a movie with my kids that I had previously seen only once, probably thirty years ago, but wanted to rewatch ever since. It’s an action-packed Civil War story and, best of all, was shot in my home county in northeast Georgia. It’s Walt Disney’s 1956 spy thriller The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a bit of a legend back home. For years the Clayton Cafe on Main Street had a photo of Disney himself, enjoying a post-breakfast cigarette in one of the booths, framed on the wall behind the register. It seemed like everyone I knew growing up had some connection to the film. A cousin of mine claimed a grandfather on his dad’s side was visible on the station platform in one scene. Others who didn’t appear as extras remembered the filming, or seeing Disney and his cast and crew around. There have been plenty of movies shot in Rabun County, but none remembered quite as fondly as this. It certainly doesn’t provoke the shame or hostility that Deliverance still does.

As for me, after years of hearing about it and having developed a powerful interest in the Civil War in elementary school, I finally got to watch it one afternoon when my dad rented a VHS from the now-defunct Movie Time Video next door to the now-defunct Bi-Lo. I watched it eagerly, and we returned it, and I never saw it again. Until this weekend.

I’d forgotten a lot about it. I mostly remembered the standard old Hollywood Confederate uniforms—gray with blue infantry collars, cuffs, and hatbands—that struck me even at the time as unrealistic. And I remembered a railroad tunnel and, at the end, the Yankee spies walking circles in a prison yard. But that was about it. When I ran across an unopened DVD at our local used book store I snapped it up.

I’m glad to say it was an enjoyable adventure, and much better than I even remembered.

The Great Locomotive Chase is based on the true story of the Andrews raid of April 1862, in which twenty Union saboteurs led by civilian spy James Andrews infiltrated north Georgia, boarded a train at Marietta north of Atlanta, and hijacked it. The plan was to steam northward to Chattanooga vandalizing the tracks, cutting telegraph wires, and burning bridges and causing as much destruction as possible to cripple a key link in the Confederacy’s flimsy rail network.

Unfortunately for Andrews and his men, they were held up several times by southbound freight trains. Worse, and fatally for them and their mission, they were doggedly pursued by employees of the railroad, who at first assumed the train had been stolen by deserters. One of the pursuers, a young conductor named William Fuller, chased them for 87 miles, starting on foot before working through three locomotives, the last of which he drove backwards up the tracks.

As for Andrews and his raiders, Fuller’s pursuit cost them the time needed to take on fuel and water. When they ran out of steam they abandoned the locomotive and were swept up by Confederate cavalry. Eventually, eight were executed as spies, including Andrews. But the raiders became the first recipients of the new Congressional Medal of Honor.

Disney’s film tells this story straightforwardly, framing it with the presentation of the Medal of Honor to some of the raid’s survivors. Among them is William Pittenger (John Lupton), who serves as narrator. Parts of the first act feel rushed, as Andrews (Fess Parker) is introduced quickly, briefs a Union general, requests a team, and instantly get it. Only as the group travels south to infiltrate the Confederacy do the raiders get characterization. The most notable after Andrews and Pittenger, who mostly works as an observer for the audience, is Campbell (Jeff York), a nationalist hothead who becomes fed up with the “bowing and scraping” of his spy cover and wants nothing more than to murder Southerners. His temper and desire to fight present a constant danger to the secrecy of Andrews’s mission.

But once the raiders are aboard the train and put their plan into motion, the film is continuously propulsive, suspenseful, and well-paced. The train action, almost all practical, staged aboard real trains on the Tallulah Falls Railroad, is genuinely impressive. Andrews and Fuller (Jeffrey Hunter) engage in a stream-driven game of cat and mouse, with Andrews sabotaging the line ahead of Fuller in numerous creative ways and the tenacious Fuller using his expertise as a railroad man to counteract them and keep up the pursuit. Adding appreciably to the quality of the action, it appears that Hunter did most of his own stunts. The final leg of the chase, in which he shouts orders to the engineer from the back of a locomotive racing along in reverse, is especially exciting.

Based on some of what I’ve read online, people at the time and since have found the film’s final act anticlimactic or even too depressing. I thought it fit the structure of the story perfectly, allowing the action-heavy first parts of the film to conclude on character-driven notes of respect if not reconciliation.

The ending serves Parker especially well, as for most of the movie he is stoic, manly, and brave, but not much else. In this film he lacks the charisma that made him famous as Davy Crockett, and so—without giving too much away—a heartfelt speech in his final scene gives him a belated depth that was very moving. The rest of the cast ranges from mediocre to fine. One confrontation between Campbell and the more patient members of the raiders has some noticeably wooden acting, but I was pleased to see how many locals got bit parts in the film and how well they did. Among the rest of the professional cast, I especially liked seeing Slim Pickens in an early role as one of Fuller’s engineers.

But performance-wise, The Great Locomotive Chase belongs to two secondary characters—Campbell and Fuller. It’s easy to see why. York and Hunter are certainly excellent in their parts, especially Hunter, whose physicality and sympathetic performance make him a worthy adversary but not a bad guy, but the characters themselves are more compelling than the lofty and distant Andrews. Both Campbell and Fuller are tough, tenacious, and physically brave, both are driven by implacable hostility toward their enemies, and both reliably follow through in a crisis. Both also have full character arcs, with their intense aggression transformed into respect in the conclusion—which, again, I don’t want to give away.

Disney put a lot of effort into this movie, which was shot in Technicolor CinemaScope like the more special effects-heavy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had come out two years before, so it’s a shame it wasn’t as financially successful as he had hoped. More to the point for us nowadays, it’s a shame that Disney’s successors haven’t given this film a decent home media release. It’s currently available to rent in HD on Amazon Prime, but as far as I can tell the 20+ year old, non-anamorphic DVD I found a few weeks ago is the sole home video release since the VHS days. A restored Blu-ray would be nice, especially since this film meant as much to Disney—and the people of my county—as it did.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a simple, straightforward film, but a fine example of classic Hollywood filmmaking. If you haven’t seen it before or haven’t even heard of it, I hope you’ll check it out.

More if you’re interested

The Walt Disney Family Museum has a good “making of” article on The Great Locomotive Chase that gives good attention Rabun County and the technical side of filming. For local resources and memories of the film, here’s a Rabun County Historical Society newsletter with behind the scenes photos and detailed captions, and here’s a Foxfire podcast interview with locals who appeared as extras.

If you’re interested in the true story of the Andrews Raiders, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia article above for a good overview. Here’s a short volume from Osprey’s Raid series on the Andrews Raid, and here’s the primary source behind the film: William Pittenger’s memoir Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War, available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Further notes on Indy and Oppie

July was a big movie month here on the blog, with three reviews of movies ranging from “adequate compared to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” to “great.” Two of them I’ve reflected on continually since seeing them and reviewing them here, especially as I’ve read, watched, and listened to more about them.

Here are a few extra thoughts on my summer’s movie highlights cobbled together over the last couple of weeks:

Indiana Jones and the Curse of Woke

When I reviewed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a month and a half ago, I didn’t dwell on the malign influence of woke ideology in its storytelling, only mentioning that I had justifiable suspicions of any Indiana Jones film produced by Disney. I wanted to acknowledge those doubts without going into detail, because after actually watching and, mostly, enjoying the movie, I found that the problems I had with Dial of Destiny weren’t political at all, but artistic. It isn’t woke, it’s just mediocre.

That didn’t stop a certain kind of critic from finding the spectral evidence of wokeness in the film and trumpeting their contempt for it. I’m thinking particularly of a caustic YouTube reviewer I usually enjoy, as well as this review for Law & Liberty, which comes out guns blazing and attacks Dial of Destiny explicitly and at length along political lines.

The problem with these reviews is that in their hypersensitivity and their mission to expose ideological propaganda they do violence to the object of their criticism, not just misinterpreting things but getting some thing completely wrong. Here’s a representative paragraph from that Law & Liberty review:

Next, we cut to 1969, the Moon Landing. Indy is an old tired man, sad, alone, miserable. The camera insists on his ugly, flabby naked body. His young neighbors wake him up with their rock music and despise him. His students don’t care about his anthropological course. His colleagues give him a retirement party and soon enough they’re murdered, by Nazis working secretly in the government, with the complicity of the CIA or some other deep state agency. We see the wife is divorcing him; we later learn, it’s because his son died in war, presumably Vietnam—Indy told the boy not to sign up.

What was remarkable about this paragraph to me is how much it simply gets wrong. Indy’s hippie neighbors wake him up by blasting the Beatles, yes, but they also treat him perfectly amiably. (In fact, it’s Indy who knocks on their door armed with a baseball bat.) It is never clear that Voller’s men have help from the CIA or any other “deep state agency;” I kept waiting for that connection but it never came. And Indy did not try to stop his son from joining the army, a point made so clear in the film—Indy’s one stated wish, were time travel possible, would be to tell him not to join—that it’s staggering to think a critic went to print with this.*

From later in the same review: “But turning from obvious metaphors to ideology, Indy is replaced by a young woman, Helen [sic—her name is Helena], daughter of his old archaeological friend Basil, but the film suggests you should think of her as a goddess to worship.” One of my chief complaints about Dial of Destiny was its failure to deal with Helena’s criminality, giving her a half-baked or even accidental redemptive arc that spares her a face-melting, as befitted all similar characters in Indy’s inscrutable but always moral universe. That bad writing again. But how one could watch her character in action and conclude that the audience is meant to “worship” her is beyond me. This is anti-woke Bulverism.

What these hostile reviewers describe is often the opposite of what is actually happening in the film. I’ve seen multiple critics assert that Helena has “replaced” Indy and “controls” and “belittles” him. The Law & Liberty reviewer describes Indy as just “along for the ride.” Helena certainly intends to use him—she’s a scam artist and he’s a mark. This is all made explicit in the film. But it is also made explicit that Indy does, in fact, keep taking charge and leading them from clue to clue and that he is much a tougher mark than Helena was counting on.

Dial of Destiny’s actual problems are all classic artistic failures—poor pacing, overlong action sequences, plodding exposition, weak or cliched characters,** slipshod writing, and a misapprehension of what matters in an Indiana Jones movie that becomes clearest in the ending, when Indy is reunited (for the third time) with Marion. Here the filmmakers make the same mistake as the team behind No Time to Die by giving Indy, like Bond, romantic continuity and attempting to trade on sentimentality when that is not what the character is about.

Again—these are artistic problems. Helena Shaw isn’t a girlboss or avenging avatar of wokeness; she’s a poorly written villain who doesn’t get her comeuppance. But I saw little such criticism among the fountains of indignation from the reviewers who pursued the “woke Disney” line of criticism.

Perhaps this is the greatest curse of wokeness: that it distorts even its critics’ minds. Once they’ve determined that a movie is woke, they’ll see what they want to see.

Call it woke derangement syndrome and add it to all the other derangement syndromes out there. Woke ideology is real, even if the ordinary person can’t define it with the precision demanded by a Studies professor or Twitter expert, and it is pernicious, and it produces—even demands—bad art. It is a kind of self-imposed blindness, as are all ideologies. But zeroing in on wokeness as the explanation for bad art can blind us to real artistic flaws, and if any good and beautiful art is to survive our age we need a keen, clear, unclouded vision of what makes art work. We need not just a sensitivity to the bad, but an understanding of the good.

Douthat on Oppenheimer

On to better criticism of a better movie. Ross Douthat, a New York Times op-ed columnist who writes film criticism for National Review, has been one of my favorite critics for the last decade. Douthat begins his review of Oppenheimer with an abashed confession that he feels guilty saying “anything especially negative about” it, but that as brilliantly executed as it is, he is “not so sure” that it is “actually a great film.”

Fair enough. What gives Douthat pause, then? For him, the problem is Oppenheimer’s final third, which he sees not as a satisfying denouement but simply a long decline from the height of the Trinity test, a decline complicated by thematic missteps:

There are two problems with this act in the movie. The first is that for much of its running time, Oppenheimer does a good job with the ambiguities of its protagonist’s relationship to the commonplace communism of his intellectual milieu—showing that he was absolutely the right man for the Manhattan Project job but also that he was deeply naïve about the implications of his various friendships and relationships and dismissive about what turned out to be entirely real Soviet infiltration of his project.

On this point I agree. As I wrote in my own review, I thought this was one of the film’s strengths. Douthat continues:

But the ending trades away some of this ambiguity for a more conventional anti-McCarthyite narrative, in which Oppenheimer was simply martyred by know-nothings rather than bringing his political troubles on himself. You can rescue a more ambiguous reading from the scenes of Oppenheimer’s security-clearance hearings alone, but the portions showing Strauss’s Senate-hearing comeuppance have the feeling of a dutiful liberal movie about the 1950s—all obvious heroes and right-wing villains, no political complexity allowed.

The second problem, as Douthat sees it, is that the drama surrounding Oppenheimer’s political destruction and Strauss’s comeuppance is unworthy of the high stakes and technical drama of the middle half of the movie concerning the Manhattan Project: “I care about the bomb and the atomic age; I don’t really care about Lewis Strauss’s confirmation, and ending a movie about the former with a dramatic reenactment of the latter seems like a pointless detour from what made Oppenheimer worth making in the first place.”

There is merit here, but I think Douthat is wrong.

I, too, got the “dutiful liberal” vibe from the final scenes, but strictly from the Alden Ehrenreich character. Ehrenreich is a fine actor unjustly burdened with the guilt of Solo, but his congressional aide character’s smug hostility to Strauss as Strauss is defeated in his confirmation hearing feels too pat, too easy. It’s Robert Downey Jr’s sympathetic and complicated portrayal of Strauss, not to mention the fact that the film demonstrates that, however Strauss acted upon them, his concerns about espionage and Oppenheimer’s naivete were justified, that saves the film from simply being standard anti-McCarthy grandstanding.***

Regarding the seemingly diminished stakes of the final act, I too wondered as I first watched Oppenheimer whether Nolan might have done better to begin in medias res, to limit himself strictly to the story of the bomb. But that story has already been told several times and Oppenheimer is very much a character study; this specific man’s rise and fall are the two necessary parts of a story that invokes Prometheus before it even begins.

The key, I think, is in the post-war scene with Oppenheimer and Einstein talking by the pond at Princeton. Nolan brings us back to this moment repeatedly—it’s therefore worth paying attention to. The final scene reveals Oppenheimer and Einstein’s conversation to us:

Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.

Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?

Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

Cue a vision of the earth engulfed in flames.

A technology that can destroy the entire world is not just the literal danger of Oppenheimer’s project, but a metaphorical one. The Trinity test proves fear of the literal destruction of the world unfounded, but the final act of the film—in which former colleagues tear each other apart over espionage and personal slights and former allies spy and steal and array their weapons against each other and the United States goes questing for yet more powerful bombs, a “chain reaction” all beginning with Oppenheimer’s “gadget”—shows us an unforeseen metaphorical destruction as it’s happening. The bomb doesn’t have to be dropped on anyone to annihilate.

This is a powerful and disturbing dimension of the film that you don’t get without that final act.

Finally, for a wholly positive appraisal of Oppenheimer as visual storytelling—that is, as a film—read this piece by SA Dance at First Things. Dance notes, in passing, the same importance of the film’s final act that I did: “The two threads are necessary to account for the political paradox of not just the a-bomb but of all technology.” A worthwhile read.

Addenda: About half an hour after I posted this, Sebastian Milbank’s review for The Critic went online. It’s insightful well-stated, especially with regard to Oppenheimer’s “refusal to be bound” by anyone or anything, a theme with intense religious significance.

And a couple hours after that, I ran across this excellent Substack review by Bethel McGrew, which includes this line, a better, more incisive critique of the framing narrative than Douthat’s: “This is a weakness of the film, which provides all the reasons why Oppenheimer should never have had security clearance, then demands we root against all the men who want to take it away.”

Tom Cruise does the impossible

The most purely enjoyable filmgoing experience I had this summer was Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I. To be sure, Oppenheimer was great art, the best film qua film of the summer, but this was great entertainment. I enjoyed it so much that, after reviewing it, I haven’t found anything else to say about it except that I liked it and can’t wait for Part II.

Leaving me with one short, clearly expressed opinion—a truly impossible mission, accomplished.

Endnotes

* In fairness, the review has one really interesting observation: in reference to the film’s titular Dial being Greek in origin, unlike the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, “Jews are replaced by Greeks in the Indiana Jones mythology, since our elites are no longer Christian.” The insight here is only partially diminished by the fact that the elites who created Indiana Jones were not Christian, either. Steven Spielberg, Philip Kaufman, and Lawrence Kasdan—key parts of Raiders—are all Jewish.

** Here is where Dial of Destiny drifts closest to woke characterization. The agents working for Voller in the first half include a white guy in shirt and tie with a crew cut and a thick Southern accent and a black female with an afro and the flyest late 1960s fashion. Which do you think turns out to be a devious bad guy and which a principled good guy? But even here, I don’t think this is woke messaging so much as the laziness of cliché. Secondary characters with Southern accents have been doltish rubes or sweaty brutes for decades.

*** A useful point of comparison, also involving a black-and-white Robert Downey Jr, is George Clooney’s engaging but self-important Good Night, and Good Luck. Watch both films and tell me which is “all obvious heroes and right-wing villains.”