“You could tell by the way that he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.” —A Confederacy of Dunces
“For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break.”
From Chesterton's great book Orthodoxy, on the addition, through Jesus, of courage to the traits of the creator God, but a pretty broadly applicable definition.
Brian Cox as Sir Winston Churchill in Churchill
My wife, who has shepherded eighth graders through more than her share of national parks and historical sites, jokes that someone, somewhere sells "historical-site-in-a-box" kits. Lower end state parks, with only enough funding for the cheap package, get split-rail fences, a cannon or two, and maybe a trail. The pricier kits come with cornhusk doll making and musket demonstrations, and perhaps a reconstructed building or two. The gold package includes a whole fort, and the platinum package comes with year-round reenactors and specialty items like period ships (she's been to Jamestown in the summer one too many times).
I joke about a simliar concept I call "Abe Lincoln's beard." I noticed some years ago that commercials, when they need an Abraham Lincoln, can grab virtually any tall, skinny, and/or old guy—regardless of appearance as long as he fits these criteria—put a beard and a stovepipe hat on him, and they have a Lincoln. (I call as witnesses Honda, Diet Mountain Dew, Apples to Apples, and whatever this insomnia drug was.) I think one of the reasons Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Lincoln was so astonishing was because he turned this cardboard cutout into a fully realized human being.
Which brings me to Churchill.
Churchill is 2017's other Winston Churchill movie. It stars the great Brian Cox as Churchill, with Miranda Richardson as Clemmie and John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) as Dwight Eisenhower. It's a disaster. It certainly suffers in comparison to the superbly acted and cinematic Darkest Hour, but even if the latter had never come out, Churchill would stand as a bad historical film.
Brian Cox as Churchill and Danny Webb as Field Marshal Alan Brooke in Churchill
I want to say, first off, that Brian Cox is not the problem. I actually felt bad for him; he's a magnificent actor and he's acting his heart out, putting his all into this performance, but he's been given nothing by the script, which is repetitive, cliched, and riddled with serious historical problems. (Andrew Roberts, so persnickety in his Dunkirk review, is on target about Churchill.) Cox elevates what would have been an otherwise unwatchable movie, and for that he deserves credit.
The movie is miscast (John Slattery is too elegant and charismatic a figure to play Eisenhower, an unprepossessing, nose to the grindstone administrator), supremely careless (a 50-star US flag gets a long closeup), and obviously cheap (when General Bernard Montgomery gives as speech to his "army," about twenty men shuffle over and try to look like a larger crowd). There's nothing wrong with low budget films—there have been plenty of great ones—but this film is not artful enough to conceal that or make up for its constraints with an interesting and energetic story.
The biggest problem is the script. This is a film trying desperately, but in vain, to humanize a heroic figure by showing him in a moment of darkness and failure. Unfortunately, as Roberts notes in the detailed takedown linked above, it sets out to do this through distortion and invention, and the writer's inventions are cliches of the worst variety. Churchill and Clemmie have the following exchange:
Clemmie [sulking over Churchill's neglect of her]: General Eisenhower writes his wife long letters every weekend.
Churchill: Well then why don't you marry General Eisenhower?
Churchill had many faults, but slinging middle school comebacks wasn't among them.
So what are we left with, if the Churchill of Churchill is not the real thing? The film tries repeatedly to sell us on the authenticity of its portrait of the man through soft-focus, backlit closeups of whisky glasses, watch chains, cigars, and so forth, but all we're really getting is a collection of things meant to signal Look! This is Winston Churchill. It's an Abe Lincoln's beard of Churchill. A Churchill-in-a-box kit.
I went in with an open mind, wanting, if anything, to see a fine performance by Cox. I'm glad to say he did his best with what was given him—he's a professional—but it wasn't enough to save the movie. Otherwise I had to entertain myself, through this film's interminable 90 minutes, by filling out the contents of the Churchill-in-a-box kit for any aspiring filmmakers who want the trappings but not the spirit of the man.
Each Churchill-in-a-box kit contains:
Black three-piece suit with bowtie
Hat
Cane
Endless cigars
Gold watch chain
Introduction in bed or in bathtub (with bathrobe, or perhaps "a state of nature")
Scotch, champagne, etc.
Poor posture in the backseat of a limousine
Gruff speech
V-for-victory
Churchill losing his temper
Churchill being wrong about something (India, Ireland, Gallipoli, etc.)
Churchill being right about something else (Hitler)
Churchill quoting the classics
Churchill saying something surprisingly off-color
Churchill being rude to a secretary
Clemmie telling the secretary what a beast he can be and making him apologize
You get the idea. Churchill is an unfortunate object lesson: characters are more than traits, especially real, important historical figures with easily recognizable ("iconic") traits. Darkest Hour understood this; Churchill did not. And that's too bad.
“No real Southerner has ever been able to consider very seriously the highly touted ancestor worship of the Chinese. It is watery by comparison.”
In the last days of Christmas break I had the pleasure of reading David Ferry's new translation of The Aeneid, published by Chicago University Press. It won't supplant Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles' two classic translations in my imagination, but it's a very good new version that manages to convey the spirit of Virgil's epic in contemporary English, and I recommend it.
I picked up The Aeneid during the break for a couple of reasons. First, I hadn't read it since college, and it's an old favorite, so I was long overdue to revisit it. Second, I'm always interested in new translations of classics, and I had read good things about Ferry's Aeneid. Finally, since last reading it, a lot has changed in my life: I've married and become a father, and, more immediately, my 90-year old grandfather died just before Christmas.
The reason these circumstances sent me to Virgil was because of his poem's depiction of fathers and the authority and responsibility they bear. Rome was a patriarchal society (I use the term descriptively and not, as is now common, as a pejorative) and The Aeneid both dramatizes Roman society's concerns with fatherhood and holds up examples to the reader of what good and bad fatherhood and manly leadership look like. In addition to being a compelling story, it's a guide. And now that I've become a father myself, and have lost one of the most important men in my life, its guidance is more welcome than ever.
CS Lewis, in his examination of epic poetry in A Preface to Paradise Lost, writes that "with Virgil European poetry grows up." To illustrate what he means, he draws a striking contrast between the heroism of Homer's protagonist and that of Virgil's:
I have read that his Aeneas, so guided by dreams and omens, is hardly the shadow of a man beside Homer's Achilles. But a man, an adult, is precisely what he is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy. You may, of course, prefer the poetry of spontaneous passion to the poetry of passion at war with vocation, and finally reconciled. Every man to his taste. But we must not blame the second for not being the first.
He goes on to note that through Aeneas, Virgil introduces something new to epic poetry, which is the war between duty and desire and the struggle to master emotion, passion, or mere appetite in the face of what is right to do, the struggle that defines "most human life as it is experienced by any one who has not yet risen to holiness or sunk to animality." The Aeneid is poetry of maturity and responsibility.
Achilles, as Lewis implies, is a creature of appetite: he is defined—and defines the entire course of The Iliad from its first word—by his rage, and has a lust for conquest, military and sexual, and honor that drive him. Even the more cerebral Odysseus (one of my favorite characters in literature) is prone to characteristically juvenile weaknesses: recklessness, carelessness, distrust.
Aeneas, by contrast, is driven onward by prophecies it is his responsibility to fulfill. Like Achilles, his honor is at stake, and like Odysseus, so are the fates of his family and people, but Aeneas, as an example of Roman virtue, approaches threats with deliberation, with deference to custom and the gods, and—always—to his duty as the leader of his people. He cannot merely enjoy authority without reckoning with the responsibilities his position entails.
In a recent episode of John J. Miller's Great Books podcast, Miller talks with Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University about The Aeneid. Markos offers two apparently silly but insightful analogies to illustrate the differences between a few of these heroes.
Aeneas : Achilles :: Beowulf : King Arthur
Or, in a more popular vein:
Aeneas : Odysseus :: Jean-Luc Picard : Captain Kirk
Beowulf and Picard may be less flashy, less sexy than the brash and machismo driven Kirk or the honor-driven cuckold Arthur, but they're also more stable, more obviously concerned with their followers and less like to get them killed in misadventures. Markos points out that Picard seldom leaves the Enterprise in contrast to Kirk, who frequently does, and gets redshirts needlessly killed. By the same token, Beowulf, we are told again and again, cares for and looks after his people well, in contrast to King Arthur, who has to sacrifice himself in a bloody final comeback in order to repair years of damage due to his luxurious inactivity.
Aeneas carrying his father and leading his son by the hand as they escape Troy
What makes the difference between Achilles and Aeneas is pietas, the Roman virtue that runs through The Aeneid as its hero's guiding principle. Pietas, after twisting its way to us through twenty centuries, give us the modern English piety, but is far richer in meaning. It's piety, but more than mere piety. It's respect, but more than mere respect. Pietas is a bone-deep, self-sacrificial love of the things that have made you who you are. It is a religiously imperative duty toward continuity. Foremost among these continuities, for the Romans, was the family.
Aeneas embodies pietas throughout the Aeneid. His struggle to live up to the standard of pietas required of him by his pietas—this is a virtue that, like all real virtues, demands itself—is the real conflict of the story. The battles and fights to the death are incidental to this larger and more eternally important conflict. The most famous case is probably Aeneas's idyll in Carthage with the beautiful Dido, who seems to offer him a new future, a new continuity to pursue in a new place, where he can, at last, rest from his struggles and wanderings. But the gods, via pietas, demand more of him, and as a man he must answer to his duty and move on.
But there is another, neater, and more homely image of Aeneas that illustrates the heart of pietas, an image often recreated in the Roman world and invoked over and over again in Western literature. As his city fell, Aeneas, directed by his love of family, left the battle and returned to his home to save his father, wife, and son. His wife—walking separately from him—was lost in the chaos, but Aeneas bodily carried his aged father Anchises from the city and led his son Iulus out by the hand. Three generations—past, present, and future—bound and saved from ruin by a father's pietas.
I can't lecture on Roman culture, pietas, and the figure of the paterfamilias without thinking of my grandfather, Ed Poss.
Four generations of Poss men, October of last year
He died December 23 at the age of 90. As a boy, he survived polio. Doctors told his mother that he'd never walk again, but he went on to become the captain of the Athens High football team and played for Auburn before joining the Navy. He and my grandmother—who just turned 90 herself on Saturday—were married for over seventy years, had three children, and lived to see over a dozen great-grandchildren. He was a respected and successful businessman who was involved in a host of local organizations as well as the Rotary Club. Even as a kid I could always remember what day of the week it was by what civic organization’s meeting he was heading to.
While he never would have put it into these terms, and probably wouldn’t have expressly said so in any terms, in all of these things he was moved by pietas. He modeled it through action, through his life, and not with mere lipservice. His devotion to his literal family as a beloved patriarch and to his “work family”—those are his words—as well as church and community were deep, true, and lifelong.
Modern people are, sometimes justifiably, wary of patriarchy, and the patria potestas—the power of the father—exercised by Roman men makes them leery. While this kind of authority has certainly been abused by baser men, I think this suspicion is more a custom or habit of mind among modern people born of postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion and obsessions with power and privilege—who has it, how did they get it, and, above all, why don’t I have it?
“Manliness without ostentation I learnt from . . . my father.”
These attitudes are essentially opposed to Aeneas’s pietas. For one thing, they’re expressed; like my grandfather, pietas must be so integral a part of one’s character it’s simply a mode of living, not an abstraction to be picked apart. Second, the moderns’ obsession with power inverts the relationship embodied by pietas. Relationship is a key idea, as are others I’ve already invoked: piety, respect, responsibility, duty. Pietas endows the individual with a sense of duty and the relationship of oneself to the whole, two concepts that must be inseparably interlocked to prevent the breakdown of continuity, of the family, of society. Power isn't just power; it's responsibility. It's a sacred duty.
This attitude, based on Patrick Deneen's diagnosis, is lost today. Is there any more alien sentiment to modern people than the idea—falsely attributed to Robert E. Lee, but no less true—that “duty is the sublimest word in any language”?
My grandfather embraced his responsibilities and modeled that duty, that respect, and left the world richer for it.
I’m posting this on the day that, twenty years ago, my other grandfather, J.L. McKay, died of cancer.
Watching TV with my grandfather, J.L. McKay, late 1980s
He was a different man from my dad’s dad in many respects—he was a plumber-electrician, a high school graduate, a man whose most extensive travel was to Korea with the Air Force, whose favorite pasttimes were fishing or relaxing on the front porch with his grandchildren, sharing popsicles. But in the most important things he was an exact match—he valued education and athletics, was actively involved in his community and seemed to know everyone, and, most importantly, was totally devoted to his family. He modeled hard work, faith, dedication, and respect—in a word, pietas—for his family.
The article about Dark Full of Enemies in the latest Georgia Mountain Laurel is the first public announcement I’ve made about my forthcoming Civil War novel Griswoldville. I hope to have it out by summer; this week is my spring break, and I'm spending a lot of time in revision. Well before my grandfather died in December I had planned to dedicate the book to both of my grandfathers, two great but humble Georgia natives who have helped make me who I am. It's a small, grateful act of pietas on my part.
I’m thankful to have had two such role models in my life and am fully aware not everyone is so fortunate. But, thankfully, pietas is a virtue that can be learned if you haven’t inherited it. It’s not easy, but then, as I learned from my grandfathers, neither is anything worth doing—whether beating polio, wiring a house, teaching a grandchild to fish, putting in time at the office, or founding a city.
This week, Historical Movie Monday is pinin’ for the fjords. The film is The Vikings, a 1958 bigscreen epic starring Kirk Douglas, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, and Janet Leigh.
“I drink to your safe return in English ale. I wish that it were English blood!”
AD 793—like 476, 1066, or 1914—is one of European history's ineradicable points of periodization. Historians debate how important the date is, point to this or that precedent that proves its relative unimportance as one part of a long process, while opponents note how much demonstrably changed after it, and little by little its importance is further cemented. In this case, the year marks the traditional beginning of “the Viking Age.”
While western, Christian Europe—the world of Charlemagne—had prior contact with heathen Scandinavia through trade and travel, 793 is the year raiders attacked the undefended monastery of St. Cuthbert at Lindisfarne on the northern English coast. In a lightning strike from the sea, a small band of Norse raiders surprised, assaulted, plundered, and escaped from the monastery with a huge haul of valuables—including especially human property.
While there are arguably slightly earlier Viking attacks, the raid on Lindisfarne, with its indiscriminate violence, shocked Christendom. The great English scholar Alcuin of York, in a contemporary letter, described how “the pagans have desecrated God's sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street.”
Despite prehistorical ties of ancestry, culture, and custom, by 793 the Norse were utterly alien to their victims in Christendom. They were still polytheists who honored heathen gods like Oðinn, Þorr, and the grotesquely endowed Freyr, sometimes with gruesome human sacrifice reenacting Oðinn’s sacrifice of himself to himself, enthusiastically practiced slavery and concubinage, and recognized no limits or boundaries to their aggression. Might made right, a point made abundantly clear in the legends and myths they told about themselves. Heroes like Volsung, Sigurð, and Ragnar Loðbrok took what they could, where they could, showed no mercy—not even to their own children if they proved weak—and all died violent deaths.
Over the 250 years after Lindisfarne, raiders from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—the “Northmen”—repeatedly attacked along the entire coastline of western Europe and struck deep into modern-day Russia along the Volga and the Don, all the way to the Black Sea, where they were hired as mercenary bodyguards to the Roman emperor in Constantinople. Within a century of Lindisfarne they had reached Iceland, and by the year 1000 had landed in a region they called Vinland before cutting their losses in the face of repeated attacks by the native inhabitants, frightening dark-eyed people they called the skrælings—the Native Americans of northwest Canada.
Due to their proximity to Scandinavia—just a few days’ sailing across the North Sea—the British Isles were the most frequently attacked of the Vikings’ targets. Ireland’s first city, Dublin, was founded as a trading post by Vikings, and of the numerous small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms dividing Britain in 793, all but one, Wessex, fell to Viking attack and settlement, and Wessex only survived thanks to the vision of king Alfred the Great and a complete reordering of its society to defend itself against the invaders.
But like their ancient cousins who had overwhelmed the Roman Empire, the Norse were gradually absorbed from underneath by their victims. One of the most successful Viking warlords, Hrolf (Latinized as Rollo), successfully maneuvered the king of France into offering him a duchy that became known as Normandy. By the time his descendent, William the Conqueror, invaded England, the Norse influence on Normandy remained only in placenames and the big, rugged physiques of its nobility.
Christianization is directly related to the petering out of the Viking Age: whatever the motivations of Norse lords for their conversions, as Christianity took root, the random violence and pragmatic theft dwindled, and Scandinavia began to look more and more like France, Germany, and England—three regions the Vikings, a seemingly existential threat, had once challenged and changed, only to be changed in turn.
Kirk Douglas produced and starred in The Vikings, which came out in 1958. He had done the same for Paths of Glory the year before and would do so again for Spartacus two years later. Like those two films, The Vikings was based on a novel and was packed to the gills with action. Like those two films, Douglas reserved the juiciest part for himself. And like those two films, he excelled in it. One might call these films “vanity projects” if they weren’t so good.
But of these three, The Vikings is probably the film most about the action for its own sake. It doesn’t have the cerebral, meditative quality of the Kubrick-directed Paths of Glory or the ideological passion of Spartacus. But what The Vikings does well, it does very well indeed.
Ernest Borgnine as Ragnar, Janet Leigh as Morgana, and Kirk Douglas as Einar in The Vikings
The film tells a convoluted story worthy, if not quite up to the standard, of Shakespeare. After a brief prologue with wonderful titles based on the Bayeux Tapestry (and narration by Orson Welles), we meet the rampaging Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine), who, within ten seconds of his introduction, kills an English king and—it is heavily implied—rapes the freshly widowed queen. We then see her at the coronation of her late husband's brother Aella as king of Northumbria, a petty tyrant played with arch, greedy effeminacy by Frank Thring (Ben-Hur’s Pontius Pilate). During the ceremony, the queen reveals to a priest that she is pregnant with Ragnar’s child. She hides this fact and, when the child is born, ships him off to a continental monastery for his own safety.
Years later, Aella, perched in his magnificent castle (about which more below), is consumed with defeating the Viking menace, embodied in the still vigorous Ragnar and his son Einar (Douglas). We meet them through Egbert (James Donald, The Bridge on the River Kwai’s Major Clipton) after Aella rather pointedly asks why it is that Egbert’s lands never get raided by the Vikings. Egbert, it turns out, is a traitor, who has sold out his lord and the rest of the kingdom for peace with the Vikings. He escapes to Norway and arrives at Ragnar's home in the first of several stunning sequences of longships sailing into the fjords.
James Donald gives a perfectly awkward fish-out-of-water performance as Egbert when he arrives in Norway, where he settles in with the Vikings and gives the viewer a window into their world. Ragnar spends the time between his raids on Britain partying in his hall, which is created in magnificent and authentic detail, and pestering Einar to be more worthy of him by fighting and plundering more. Einar is vain of his appearance—“He scrapes his face like an Englishman,” Ragnar tells Egbert to explain to us why Douglas didn’t grow a beard for the role—and proud of his conquests and feats, physically and sexually (though always in a 1958-appropriate manner).
Later, while out hawking, Egbert and Einar have a run-in with a slave, Eric. Eric sics his hawk on Einar, who loses an eye in the attack, which is genuinely violent and disturbing. The disfigured Einar is only prevented from murdering Eric on the spot by the old lady who casts runes in Ragnar’s hall. The two will be rivals for the rest of the film.
Also thrown into the mix is Morgana (Janet Leigh, two years before Psycho), a Welsh princess betrothed to the ageing Aella. Ragnar sends a longship to intercept Morgana on her voyage to Aella’s castle and abducts her as a bargaining chip, but Einar—being portrayed by a lusty Kirk Douglas—decides he has to have her and won’t take no as an answer. Eventually, Eric is able to effect an escape from Ragnar with Morgana’s help, and it is to Morgana that he tells his tragic story—he was sold into slavery as a baby, when the ship he was on was captured by the Vikings. No bonus points for guessing whose son he turns out to be.
I rewatched The Vikings last week to prepare for this post and can’t be sure if I’m remembering these story elements and plot devices in the right order—and it doesn’t really matter. The Vikings is high melodrama of the kind Shakespeare delighted to construct, with secret identities revealed, love triangles, tortures and mutilations, violent duels, and a high body count by the end. Ragnar meets his grisly end in a pit full of ravening wolves, there’s a great high-seas chase that ends in a fogbank, and a brutal climactic battle in Aella’s coastal stronghold that ends with a duel to the death. It’s all immensely entertaining.
The film was a major international production, with a budget over $3 million and location shooting in Norway, Brittany, and—of all places—Yugoslavia. Douglas hired Richard Fleischer, with whom he had previously worked on Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, as the director, and Fleischer’s work here is excellent. The scenery, especially the sequences filmed in the Norwegian fjords, is stunning, and the sets are great. The film’s score, by Mario Nascimbene, is rousingly bombastic even if the main theme gets a bit repetitive after a while.
Tony Curtis's gams, front and center for an unfortunate amount of screentime
The performances are good, not great, but again, they’re not really the point. Tony Curtis seems miscast for the first two-thirds of the film until he looks sufficiently roughed up and bearded at the end, when he has to be taken seriously as a warrior. Until then, his prettiness—which I think was only ever an asset as The Great Leslie—and the horrible shorts he’s forced to wear just don’t work. Frank Thring is hamming it up, to good effect. Janet Leigh is passable as the beautiful princess.
Where the actors don’t excel, I think the writing is to blame. The story is fun, but the dialogue is often really obvious. Witness that early scene in which Aella is crowned king of Northumbria. As Aella, enthroned, is presented with a ceremonial sword, part of its hilt falls off and the entire court reacts with stunned silence. Egbert steps forward, picks it up, hands it back to the bishop, glances at Aella, and says, “A bad omen.” Okay. Got it.
The two best performances are those of Kirk Douglas—naturally, since the film is basically constructed for him to show off his charisma and physicality—and, surprisingly, Ernest Borgnine, who is fully believable as a bluff, hearty Viking warlord. His final scene before being chucked into the wolfpit, a scene in which he briefly believes he will be killed in a manner that will keep him out of Valhalla, is excellent.
Ernest Borgnine as Ragnar in his hall in The VIkings
The Vikings is based on pulp novelist Edison Marshall’s novel The Viking, which is itself loosely based on elements of Ragnars saga Loðbrokar or The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, which describes the life of Ragnar, who married the long-lost daughter of Sigurð the Dragonslayer, and his eventual capture and death in a pit of snakes at the hands of the devious English king Ella. Ella—Ælla in Anglo-Saxon and Aella in the film—is a real person, having ruled Northumbria for a few years in the 860s before dying in battle with the Vikings at York in 867. This is how fuzzy and incomplete our sources for this place and period are.
Ragnar Loðbrok (literally Ragnar Shaggypants) exists at the hazy edges of history and legend; I’m personally inclined to believe him entirely legendary, like Robin Hood, but we can’t really know for certain.
The rest of the story and its character are fiction but, as George MacDonald Fraser writes in his Hollywood History of the World, it is “fiction against a carefully researched historical background, shot wherever possible in the proper locations, and presented with feeling for its subject.” The film “is what a historical epic should be: an excellent film in its own right, and a striking evocation of period.” Fraser also praises
the film’s atmospheric quality: it is the North on film, rough and cold and raw and beautiful to see, the longships gliding in sunlit triumph up magnificent fjords or slipping away into clammy mist, the gangers carousing in the coarse splendour of their hall, the minute detail of costume and weapon and custom, the triskelion shields advancing over dune and promontory.
“The North on film” is exactly right. The great strength of The Vikings is its evocation of a time and place, a different world. It gets the tone exactly right, and the details—the costumes, sets, props, and customs—almost exactly right.
The clothing, weapons, and other bits of material culture are just about right for the era—the mid-9th century—and Ragnar’s hall in all its beer-swilling chaos is great. The production team took special care to recreate the longships, the signature vessel of the Norse, and the many sequences in which they appear take full advantage of them.
Seen here: not 9th-century fashion
The Vikings themselves are depicted with respect but not blind admiration. Ragnar is a rapist, probably many times over; Einar would be if he got the chance. They like to have a good time and they’re incredibly violent. Neither of these traits is muted or blunted. Viking religion also gets a good depiction, I think, with the myths—the thing most modern people focus on—taking a backseat to ritual, custom, sacrifice, and divination. I struggle to get students to understand that extinct religions were more—much, much more—than the neatly catalogued mythologies they get from Edith Hamilton, Neil Gaiman, or Rick Riordan. The Vikings understands this and enacts its drama accordingly.
Of course the film isn’t perfect, historically speaking. While the combat is mostly good, the realistic shield-wall (skjaldborg) fighting gives way to an Errol Flynn-style mano-a-mano sword-on-sword fight, something that just didn't happen in that era and with those weapons. The Anglo-Saxons also never built stone castles, making the entire showdown at Aella’s fortress (actually a 13th-century castle in France) an impossibility. It’s unclear whether—or, if so, how—runes were used for divination, and the handfuls of Viking funerals for which we have evidence, including the famous Rus funeral witnessed by Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, didn’t happen like the one in this film, which is singlehandedly responsible for the way Viking funerals are usually imagined now. And, perhaps most obviously, in the dead giveaway of all historical films made in the 1950s, 9th century women didn’t wear those pointy underwire bras.
But despite some non-fatal shortcomings The Vikings is a fun historical adventure, an engaging swashbuckler with authentic Viking trappings, and succeeds better than any other film I’ve seen at—to borrow Fraser’s words—evoking an atmosphere of what C.S. Lewis called Northerness: “like a voice from distant regions . . . something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote).”
Jackson Crawford, whom I've mentioned here before, is a specialist in Old Norse language, literature, and culture. He published a new translation of the Saga of the Volsungs with the Saga of Ragnar Loðbrok last year. It’s excellent. Check it out if you want a literary immersion course in the world of the Vikings and of Ragnar Loðbrok specifically.
Among the many, many books on Norse history and culture that I recommend are A History of the Vikings, by Gwyn Jones; The Age of the Vikings, by Anders Winroth, who gives a charming and informative one-hour talk on this book here; The Vikings, by Robert Ferguson; The Vikings, by Else Roesdahl, now in a third English edition; and Viking Age Iceland, by Jesse Byock.
And I always recommend going to the earliest sources we have, in this case The Sagas of Icelanders, a great selection of Icelandic sagas, oral stories passed down from the Viking Age that dramatically depict life in that violent era; and, for the opposite side, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which can be just as dramatic with its spare, dire record of Viking attack year after year.
Medieval March will continue! Thanks for reading.
Today marks the anniversary of the last full day of the siege of the Alamo in San Antonio de Béxar, Texas. In the predawn hours of March 6, 1836, the centralistas of General Antonio López de Santa Anna stormed the fortified mission and killed every defender inside. The Battle of the Alamo has been the subject of films since the silent era—the first Alamo movie appeared in 1911—and there have been a number of well known, large-scale productions, including 1960's epic starring John Wayne. Today, I want to look at what I think is an underrated, overlooked classic: 2004's film directed by John Lee Hancock, The Alamo.
“No, I only wear [the coonskin cap] when it’s extra cold. The truth is, I only started wearing that thing because of that fella in that play they did about me. People expect things.”
Texas, originally a Spanish-controlled region of New Spain, remained sparsely populated for a long time. By the early nineteenth century, first the Spanish and then the independent Mexican government tried to encourage migration to Texas to create a buffer zone between the heart of Mexican territory and French- and then American-controlled Louisiana. These efforts only began to show significant results with the recruitment of American empresarios—literally "entrepreneurs," men granted rights to settle land and recruit people to emigrate there.
Jason Patric as Jim Bowie and Jordi Mollà as Juan Seguin in The Alamo
In 1822 Stephen F. Austin brought 300 "Anglo" families from the United States to Texas and settled them along the Brazos River. The Anglos quickly grew to outnumber the original Spanish-descended inhabitants, the Tejanos; by 1830, there were over 30,000 Anglo Texians as against the 4,000 or so Tejano natives. Immigration continued, predominantly from the United States—which was in the grip of a series of economic panics and the burgeoning but as yet unnamed concept of Manifest Destiny—but from Europe as well. Immigrants had to swear loyalty to the government of Mexico, practice Catholicism, learn Spanish, and settle lawfully. These policies were widely ignored. Anglo settlers entered Texas illegally and squatted on land they claimed illegally. The Mexican government worked to slow what appeared to be a de facto Anglo takeover of Texas. In 1829, Mexico outlawed slavery, which Anglo slaveowners skirted by having their slaves sign lifetime indentures; in 1830, the Mexican government attempted to restrict immigration. It did not work. Anglo settlers, who now felt entitled to land in Texas, felt affronted, convened to protest the new restrictions, and viewed the Mexican government with distrust.
The Texians' suspicions were only heightened with the ascension of Santa Anna as president of Mexico. Santa Anna, who revealingly styled himself "the Napoleon of the West," was a centralista. He repealed the Constitution of 1824 and moved forward with a program to centralize Mexico's formerly decentralized federalist government. Among his goals was the abolition of local militias in favor of a regular Mexican army on the Napoleonic model. Texians, both Anglo and Tejano, with a robust tradition of self-defense borne of living on the frontier, refused to comply.
The final assault on the alamo, from Texian Iliad, by Stephen Hardin
The revolution began on October 2, 1835 with the Battle of Gonzalez, where a squadron of centralista cavalry attempted to confiscate a small cannon used by the Gonzalez militia. Under the "Come and Take It" flag (a classical allusion, by the way), the Gonzalez militia put the centralistas to flight with two cavalrymen killed.
What would otherwise have been a skirmish between 250 men had large effects: the emboldened Texians met in congress to discuss the situation, with some already arguing for independence from a foreign government that would not respect its prior constitutional arrangements with them, and Santa Anna prepared to march into Texas to subdue the rebels. Suspicious that the rebellion was backed by the notoriously acquisitive United States, Santa Anna decreed that any foreign-born people aiding the rebels would be considered pirates and summarily executed.
The Texians assumed Santa Anna would have to wait for the harsh winter of northern Mexico to pass before he could move his main force against them. They were wrong. Santa Anna, again consciously modeling himself on Napoleon, force-marched his starving, ragged men into Texas and surprised the rebels. Their first great confrontation would come in San Antonio de Béxar, where the Texians had fortified a long-abandoned mission with the largest concentration of artillery pieces west of the Mississippi. Santa Anna laid siege for thirteen days before storming the mission and slaughtering the defenders.
As I mentioned above, 2004's Alamo is by no means the first film to depict the events of the Texas Revolution or the Battle of the Alamo. But it is the most detailed, accurate, well-acted, and well-produced.
Billy Bob Thornton as David Crockett and Patrick Wilson as William Travis
The film's director and co-writer, John Lee Hancock, is a native Texan, and brought a deep love of the state to the production. While proud of the story of the Alamo and its heroic defense, Hancock wanted a scrupulously fair and accurate film, unlike, for instance, the 1960 John Wayne version, which was really a thinly disguised anti-Communist parable. Furthermore, Hancock doesn't just tell the story of the Alamo; he elected to follow up the ill-fated siege and massacre with the Texians' victory over Santa Anna at San Jacinto, showing the audience that the deaths of the Alamo's defenders were not in vain.
The film follows three major narrative tracks: Sam Houston and the political side of the Texian struggle; Santa Anna and the centralista side; and the Alamo's defenders, the most prominent of which are William Barret Travis (Patrick Wilson), militia commander Jim Bowie (Jason Patric), and recent arrival from the United States Congress, Tennessean David Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton). The three narratives converge on the Alamo and, once the mission has fallen and its defenders wiped out, conclude with Houston facing Santa Anna and defeating him. Astonishingly for a film that lasts just over two hours, all three of these tracks have enough time to breathe.
The film was exorbitantly expensive, with a budget of around $100 million. Hancock's production team built a full-sized recreation of the Alamo mission and the town of San Antonio on a 51-acre set in a climatically accurate tract of land near Austin. Every known defender of the Alamo was specifically cast rather than relying on batches of background extras, and uniforms, equipment, civilian clothing, and anything else that might appear onscreen was created for the production with precise period accuracy.
The film is technically brilliant. Dean Semler, the cinematographer, filmed The Alamo as a gorgeous western period piece, with beautiful sunsets and location scenery. This film is also one of the earliest Hollywood uses of the Spydercam system; watch in particular for a virtuoso shot in which the viewer is fired from one of Santa Anna's cannon, soars over the siege lines and the outskirts of San Antonio, and over the walls of the Alamo. Carter Burwell, the Coen brothers' go-to composer, wrote the score, a beautiful assortment of Spanish- and Scots-Irish-inflected theme music. The action scenes are well-executed, make visual sense, and accurately reflect the period. And what is more, even though we know what the outcome must be, they're exciting.
The acting is excellent across the board. The stars acquit themselves well, especially Thornton as a Crockett living in the shadow of his own legend after a failed congressional career, and Wilson as a young officer—26 at the time—with something to prove. (Compare Laurence Harvey's sneering middle-aged martinet in the John Wayne version; there's no contest over which is the more believable, fully realized human being.) Even the small parts, such as Edwin Hodge as Travis's slave Joe, get little moments of their own. A handful of scenes in which Joe and Bowie's slave Sam (Afemo Omilami) talk with each other about their servitude are particularly good.
In his review, the late Roger Ebert summed up the film's dramatic strengths well:
Conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that any movie named "The Alamo" must be simplistic and rousing, despite the fact that we already know all the defenders got killed. . . . Here is a movie that captures the loneliness and dread of men waiting for two weeks for what they expect to be certain death, and it somehow succeeds in taking those pop-culture brand names like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and giving them human form.
Unfortunately, The Alamo flopped at the box office. It received widespread negative buzz before it opened, and had the misfortune of opening against The Passion of the Christ, which retook the number one spot for Easter weekend. The Alamo ultimately made back about a quarter of its budget, and it still hasn't been released on Blu-ray.
Even fourteen years later, I talk to people who hate—or seem to remember hating—The Alamo, and I honestly can't understand why. Perhaps some of its was the Bush-era media hostility to anything even remotely patriotic, even if the patriotism in question was to the Republic of Texas. But to return to Roger Ebert, he opened his print review with this: "The advance buzz on 'The Alamo' was negative, and now I know why: This is a good movie." I'm with Ebert.
The Alamo is, with a handful of others, my beau idéal for historical films. It's engaging, well-written, well-acted, the costumes, props, and sets all look great, and the filmmakers obviously cared about the history for its own sake, not for the purposes of a presentist political or social agenda (cf. Ridley Scott's "historical" films).
Billy Bob Thornton as David Crockett, carrying his rifle and wearing a reproduction of a waistcoat now on display at the alamo shrine
I've found repeated viewings of The Alamo immensely rewarding. The film is packed with detail, much of which isn't even given direct attention. The result is a density of period detail that sells its authenticity without drawing attention to itself. It's confident but not flashy. Among numerous historical tidbits are the discovery among the slain of the body of Grigorio Esparza, a Tejano defender of the Alamo, by his brother, a soldier in Santa Anna's army, David Crockett's bloodcurdling reminiscence of a massacre from Jackson's Indian wars, small items of Cherokee design carried by Sam Houston, and one brief shot of a bagpiper playing in the Alamo during the siege. All of these details are factually supported.
But while the movie gets a lot of nice, small details right, its depiction of larger themes is what gives it its value as a historical film. American expansion, American political ideals grounded in federalism and representation, slavery and the legal fiction of indentured servitude, the relationship between and among Anglos and Tejanos, Santa Anna's grandiosity and tyranny, Southern codes of honor and dueling (watch every interaction between Travis and Bowie), and especially the fragile new society arising on the edges of civilization in Texas are all well depicted in The Alamo and enrich the drama of the story playing out in the siege. The film also gives good attention to the Tejanos, who are almost entirely omitted in other versions, and hints at the interesting relationships between Anglos and Tejanos (Bowie's dead Tejana wife plays a crucial role as his health fails, and Tejano hero Juan Seguin is given plenty of screentime with Houston). I find that a class of average students, properly primed by the lectures up to this point in American history, not only enjoy the story but get a lot out of this movie.
There are inaccuracies and liberties. The most prominent is the Alamo itself, which the production designer, in an otherwise 99% accurate set, scooted forward so the iconic facade would be visible from anywhere else in the compound. Others are minor and don't harm the film's value: the actor playing Santa Anna, for instance, is about twenty years too old, but his performance is wonderful, a detestable mixture of charm, bravado, and towering rage. But most of the film's inaccuracies arise from mere condensation and streamlining to fit the story into about two and a half hours. For example, repeated meetings between the Alamo's defenders and Mexican messengers are condensed to one initial meeting, and Santa Anna's Easter Sunday massacre of prisoners at Goliad is omitted entirely.
At least some of the negativity the film attracted stemmed from its treatment of Davy Crockett ("He prefers David," we are reminded in the film). Crockett is depicted as captured and murdered in cold blood on Santa Anna's orders rather than going down in a blaze of glory in a stack of Mexican corpses a la John Wayne. Stephen Hardin, one of the film's historical advisers (see below), thinks that some viewers misinterpreted the scene as showing Crockett having surrendered. If he's correct, that's a problem with the viewers, since our penultimate glimpse of Crockett shows him and a handful of his surviving American volunteers fighting hand-to-hand in the Alamo chapel.
Furthermore, Crockett is only depicted wearing his iconic Fess Parker garb once, in what amounts to a PR appearance. (See the quotation above.) Thornton's Crockett is a wonderful character, and offers a window into a world in which public image already matters and can be used by aspiring politicians thanks to the democratic turn of American politics. The film opens with him attending a play based on the exaggerated stories of his early life on the frontier, and follows him as he encounters and tries not to let down fans who have heard those stories. I think the character of Crockett offers a case study of the film itself, an example of the ways legend informs fact, and the ways audiences are sometimes disappointed with the truth, no matter how heroic the truth is.
Like a lot of the other topics we've explored as part of Historical Movie Monday, the historical literature on the Alamo is huge. What makes it interesting is the extremely narrow focus of the subject and the massive contributions by amateurs, who have both helped clarify the historical record and muddied the waters. There is a lot of stellar research and a lot of folklore. I'm going to recommend three books with an excellent standard of historical research.
The first, and my favorite, is Texian Iliad, by Stephen L. Hardin. This is an excellent military history of the Texas Revolution, from Gonzalez to San Jacinto, that covers both the Texian and Mexican sides well and includes excellent maps and illustrations of uniforms, clothing, and gear based on solid research and evidence. It's also well-written. Hardin served as one of the film's historical advisers and his commentary track on the DVD is well worth listening to.
More novelistic in its approach is The Blood of Heroes, by James Donovan, which focuses on the Battle of the Alamo specifically. H.W. Brands, prolific author and biographer and professor of history at UT Austin, has a readable history of the Texas Revolution called Lone Star Nation, which begins with Stephen Austin's Anglo settlement of Texas and provides a great deal of context for the events of the Revolution and the creation of the Republic of Texas.
Finally, William C. Davis, another prolific author and a familiar face for anyone who watched the History Channel when it still showed historical programming, has Three Roads to the Alamo, a massive triple-biography of Crockett, Bowie, and Travis. Davis's work is always well-written, carefully researched, and balanced, so Three Roads offers an arresting and detailed picture of the world from which these three figures emerged to die together at the Alamo.
Next week I'm beginning Medieval March in this series with the 1958 Kirk Douglas romp The Vikings. Stay tuned!
I'm grateful to Tracy, editor of the Georgia Mountain Laurel, a great little hometown magazine that I wrote a few pieces for about six years ago, and her writer John for profiling Dark Full of Enemies in the March 2018 issue. The article includes a brief summary and review of the book, a bit about myself, and a few details about my forthcoming Civil War novel Griswoldville. Check it out!
This week I read a little collection of Lord Peter Wimsey stories I picked up at Mr. K's in Asheville, Striding Folly. This book includes only three stories, but its still appealing for two reasons: Lord Peter is always fun, and these are the last three Lord Peter stories Sayers wrote. One of them, "Talboys," was not even published during her lifetime.
The title story, "Striding Folly," is an odd little puzzle. An elderly chess enthusiast, tormented by a strange dream about the folly on a nearby hillside, has a mysterious foreign-sounding visitor on the night he usually expects to play chess with the local landowner. Later that night, the old man, guided by his dream, wanders up to the tower and finds the landowner murdered. The crime scene has been arranged to cast suspicion on him, and no one will believe his alibi. Lord Peter shows up in, quite literally, the last two pages to sort things out.
"Striding Folly" is a strange story but has some wonderfully gothic, apocalyptic atmosphere, and that will (almost) always win me over.
The second story, "The Haunted Policeman," begins with Lord Peter and his wife Harriet welcoming their first baby, a son named Bredon, into the world. Peter is then shooed away, after the fashion of that era, and finds himself lounging around outside their London flat, where he meets a policeman who has just had a strange experience that, like the elderly chess player, no one will believe.
The solution to this mystery is a bit pat for my taste, but the increasing intoxication of both Lord Peter and the policeman as the latter recounts his story is immensely entertaining.
The last story, "Talboys," written in 1942 but not published until the 1970s, was my favorite. The mystery is minor—a farmer near Lord Peter's country seat complaining about stolen peaches—but the story is a lot of fun. Lord Peter, Harriet, and their now three boys are hosting Miss Quirk, a guest sent to them by relatives. Miss Quirk and Harriet have a number of humorous exchanges about childrearing and corporal punishment, Miss Quirk being a childless expert on children thanks to her reading about all the latest theories. You know the type.
A lot of the story consists of Lord Peter trying to investigate the peach incident and corral his oldest son, who loves peaches and has been behaving suspiciously, without provoking know-it-all commentary from Miss Quirk. The ending brings these plot threads together in a hilarious and satisfying punchline.
Definitely check out Striding Folly if you enjoy short mysteries of the more genteel variety, especially if you like them with a good dash of wry humor. It may help if you're already familiar with other Wimsey stories (I've listened to Gaudy Night on a roadtrip, which is my sole past experience with Lord Peter and Harriet's relationship), but if not they should still be thoroughly enjoyable.
Last week I finally got around to Reading Dante, by Prue Shaw. I've had it on my shelf for years, ever since it came out in paperback. I'm glad I finally took it down and read it. Significantly, I read this nearly 300-page work of expert literary criticism in five days. It's great.
Rather than give a full, detailed review, I want to point out two things that I appreciated about Shaw's book.
First, she largely lets Dante's own work speak for itself, in its own terms, in the context of its own era. She mines his works, those of his contemporaries, and the commentaries of early Dantisti (like one of Dante's own sons) rather than trying to squeeze Dante into modern literary-critical theoretical molds. Dante is a medieval man, after all, and a medieval Florentine in particular, and while his work never lets you forget that, it's easy, with modern theory, to sand off the angles and edges and make Dante into anything you like. Here's C.S. Lewis, in conversation with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss, on just this sort of thing:
Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it’s taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred text is always exposed to the most monstrous exegesis; hence we have the spectacle of some wretched scholar taking a pure divertissement written in the seventeenth century and getting the most profound ambiguities and social criticisms out of it, which of course, aren’t there at all. . . . It’s the discovery of the mare’s nest by the pursuit of the red herring. This is going to go on long after my lifetime. You may be able to see the end of it, I shan’t.
Indeed, a lot of modern literary chatters seems primarily interested in turning a given text (always a "text," per postmodernism) into a profoundly political critique or subversion of this or that. It shouldn't take a lot of imagination to conjure up parodies: King Solomon's Mines as critique of imperialism and Victorian masculinity, etc. You can generate that kind of gobbledygook with a bot.
But Shaw gets out of Dante's way and lets him speak to his own times in his own clear and very specific way, and shows how this most topical of poets created a work of universal meaning. It's refreshing.
That's a high, theoretical problem with reading and talking about Dante. There's also a lower interpretive problem, one that affects first-time readers or uninformed discussion, and this is the second thing I appreciate about Shaw's book.
It's easy to read Inferno alone, as many students unfortunately do, thus getting only a third of the picture. Such readers often come away talking about Inferno as if the whole Commedia is nothing but a revenge fantasy fueled by Dante's rage at being removed from power and sent into exile. Couple that with the generally condescending attitude modern people feel toward the medievals ("chronological snobbery" in Lewis's term), whom they view as crudely literal-minded, superstitious, and morbidly religious, and you get a fairly widespread view of Dante as a particularly artful version of those middle school loners who keep enemies lists.
Here's Shaw, in a passage I read several times:
Dante is certainly not, as one sometimes hears said, vindictive, spiteful, sadistic. He is not merely engaged in score settling with old adversaries by assigning them to hell. The punishments in hell are horribly cruel, but the world in which he lived was horribly cruel. He had been sentenced to death both by burning and decapitation. Such sentences were almost routine. We think of the modern world as more civilised than his, but who could seriously argue that this is so, bearing in mind events on the world stage in the twentieth century?
In one elegant paragraph, Shaw not only cuts down the simplified autobiographical reading of Dante and the condescending view of him as a medieval oaf, but also turns those stereotypes back on the reader for some much-needed perspective.
Reading Dante is one of the best books I've ever read about my favorite poet. Pick it up if you have ever enjoyed or would like to know more about Dante's Commedia. I recommend at least a passing familiarity with the poem's content, since Shaw organizes the book topically—Dante's life, friendships, political beliefs, poetic career and technique, and so forth—and moves at will through Dante's life, influences, and work. It's effortless on her part, but a reader should probably go in prepared.
Cicero Denounces Catiline, Cesare Maccari
In De Inventione (literally, On Invention), a handbook on oratory that Cicero wrote while still a young lawyer, he recorded this thought on good speech without wisdom and wisdom without good speech:
“Wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of communities, but eloquence without wisdom is, in most instances, extremely harmful and never beneficial.”
It's worth considering both aspects of any proposals or arguments we make politically, and one has to wonder what Cicero would make of a world in which neither wisdom nor eloquence play a role in our public discourse.
We're a week away from the Oscars, so while I'm trying to avoid back-to-back posts on the same historical periods, I wanted to write a little about one of my favorite films of the last year, a nominee for eight Oscars, and a stunning World War II film—Dunkirk.
“He’s shell-shocked, George. He’s not himself. He might never be himself again.”
World War II began with German invasion of Poland in September 1939. On April 9, 1940, after months of "phoney war" in which Germany and Britain—which had guaranteed Polish sovereignty—were at war but not actively fighting, the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. The British committed to the defense of Norway, with off-and-on land and sea combat around Narvik. A month later, on May 10, with Nazi and Allied troops still tied down in Norway, the Germans invaded the Low Countries. Their ultimate target was France.
A German tank just before the surrender of France in June 1940.
The Germans inverted part of the previous war's opening moves by attacking through the Ardennes Forest (the site, four and a half years later, of the Battle of the Bulge) but, instead of striking for Paris as they did in 1914, they swung to the right in a carefully planned Sichelschnitt—"sickle-cut"—to the English Channel. This lightning stroke would split the Allied forces defending France and entrap them in defenseless pockets, which would then surrender or be reduced.
With the benefit of hindsight, the much-vaunted German "Blitzkrieg"—a term almost never used by the Germans themselves, who spoke of Bewegungskrieg, maneuver or movement war—was a costly gamble. Because of Germany's geographically vulnerable strategic position, Hitler and his armies had to strike hard and fast or be overwhelmed from multiple directions. The rapid invasions and conquests of 1939 and '40, while impressive and calculated for maximum psychological impact, resulted in heavy losses of infantry, armor, and—perhaps the most critical new branch of a modern arm—air power.
British troops awaiting rescue on the beach at Dunkirk.
Nevertheless, the Germans did succeed. They broke through in northern France, severed the British Expeditionary Force and some French and Belgian units from the main body of the Allies, and drove them back against the Channel. There, the British and their allies were trapped in a rapidly shrinking pocket of French and Belgian coastline. By May 20, only ten days after the initial invasion, the British were planning an evacuation by sea.
Dunkirk, a small port city on this stretch of French coast, became the focus of the evacuation efforts, codenamed Operation Dynamo. Dunkirk had good port facilities and spacious beaches. Unfortunately, the German air force bombed the port into uselessness, leaving the beach and an artificial breakwater—"the mole"—as the only points of departure. Furthermore, the beaches sloped so gently into the channel that Royal Navy destroyers could not approach closer than a mile to shore without danger of running aground. This left the mole as the only practical embarkation point, loading one or two boats at a time with men queuing along its length, exposed to enemy air power. Fewer than 8,000 men out of 400,000 were evacuated on the first day.
At this point, the famous "little ships" came through. Either through volunteers or commandeering by the Royal Navy, about 850 private boats ranging from pleasure yachts to barges and fishing boats made the hazardous crossing from Kent to Dunkirk. For over a week, they ferried batches of troops from the shore to the waiting destroyers, or even all the way back across the Channel to Ramsgate. By June 4, nearly 340,000 men had been rescued, preserving a nucleus that would allow the Allies to carry on resistance and, if Hitler waited long enough, rebuild.
Christopher Nolan first conceived Dunkirk during a cross-Channel trip to the town aboard a sailboat. He had known the story of the little ships since childhood, but only by making the crossing himself did he come to realize how hazardous the voyage was.
Christopher Nolan directs Kenneth Branagh
Dunkirk, as scripted by Nolan, is not a traditional war movie—to the great annoyance of some reviewers. In the publicity campaign leading up to the film's release, Nolan emphasized that Dunkirk was a survival film, and that he had constructed it as such. Where a traditional war movie would focus on the risks of combat, with generals or other officers framing the battle in terms of strategic aims and geography and possibly even giving time to both sides, Dunkirk focuses on the attempts of ordinary British soldiers to escape.
I won't spend much time on the film's structure—there's plenty about that elsewhere, and the high-concept structure of Nolan's films may prove to be a detriment in the long run, since they offer so much distraction from the story to internet pedants. It's the story I want to focus on.
Dunkirk follows three major characters: a private in the infantry (appropriately named Tommy), a Spitfire pilot, and the captain of a sailboat making the crossing from Ramsgate. While their stories interweave in creative ways, and eventually tie together at the end, they offer three perspectives on the crisis and the evacuations—one might almost say three dimensions, with one character trying to get away from Dunkirk, another crossing to Dunkirk, and the third flying above Dunkirk.
Offering commentary and a minimum of exposition are Kenneth Branagh as a Royal Navy officer and James D'Arcy as an infantry officer coordinating the evacuations at the mole. The film occasionally pulls back to these two in order to explain the crisis; otherwise, the film—by intention—is an exercise in almost exclusively visual storytelling, operating much like a silent film. Tommy's story specifically has almost no dialogue; we understand what is happening to him, what he wants, and how he means to escape through looks and actions. It's masterfully done.
Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy in Dunkirk
Despite the film being an ensemble piece with no characters significantly more prominent than the others, the performances are excellent. The heart of the film is Mark Rylance as Mr. Dawson, the captain of the sailboat Moonstone. Mr. Dawson sums up the film in two moments: when, after being told to turn back by a shellshocked evacuee, he replies "We've a job to do," and at the end when, the job done, he quietly puts on his hat and disappears into the crowd. Dunkirk honors quiet heroism and duty in terrible circumstances.
The film is also technically brilliant. The majority was shot on IMAX film, with the rest—mostly the sequences aboard the Moonstone—on 65mm. Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography is beautiful, and the aerial sequences in particular capitalize on the immersion that IMAX offers. (One of my first memories of seeing an IMAX film was watching a movie about flight and space travel as the Kennedy Space Center.) The sound effects are brutal—the gunshots at the beginning of the film are a shock, actually violent, and the sound of the divebombing Stukas is terrifying. The special effects are almost entirely in-camera as opposed to CGI, and are excellent. The film feels real because most of it is—a vanishingly rare quality in modern cinema.
The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, June 1940, by Charles Ernest Cundall
The filmmakers went to extraordinary lengths to do things practically and as authentically as possible. Over a dozen of the real "little ships" that helped in the evacuations were used in filming for added authenticity, for instance. But they did have to reckon with the limitations of their medium and the method they had chosen to tell the story. To provide just one example, the German Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter planes have a distinctive yellow paint scheme on their nose, despite that not being introduced until several months later in 1940. Furthermore, the Messerschmitts are, in fact, Hispano HA-1112s, licensed copies produced by Franco's government.
But there are three reasons for this "inaccuracy" (which I would classify as a nitpick). First, the yellow nose was a concession to the visual nature of cinema as a medium. The filmmakers knew that the audience had to be able to distinguish the German planes from the British immediately, and a bright yellow nose, despite being early by a few months, was the solution. Second, there are very few operational Bf-109s left in the world, and, third, Nolan wanted real planes, really chasing each other on camera. These are completely justifiable reasons related closely to the medium of the story; they're choices by master craftsmen, not errors.
But despite the best efforts of the filmmakers, critical praise, and audience approval, Dunkirk took some flak from historians, including a number I respect. Victor Davis Hanson, after praising the film's many strengths, criticized its lack of strategic context. James Holland nitpicked the film, saying that there wasn't enough smoke and apparently even bringing a stopwatch into the theater to time the Spitfires' machine gun fire. Andrew Roberts, in addition to criticizing the film's "tin ear for the Anglo-French relations of the time," savaged Dunkirk for its
clichéd characterization, almost total lack of dialogue, complete lack of historical context (not even a cameo role for Winston Churchill), a ludicrous subplot in which a company of British soldiers stuck on a sinking boat do not use their Bren guns to defend themselves, problems with continuity (sunny days turn immediately into misty ones as the movie jumps confusingly through time), and Germans breaking into central Dunkirk whereas in fact they were kept outside the perimeter throughout the evacuation.
All three of these historians misread the purpose and the form of Dunkirk.
Again, Nolan conceived of Dunkirk as a survival film, and one that focused on the panic of entrapment. That panic, that claustrophobia, would disappear with the introduction of top-down strategic map-room scenes like those Hanson wishes for and, at worst, reduce the ordinary soldiers of the story to bit players. Compare the soldiers in Dunkirk with the cannon fodder of The Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far if you want to see what I'm talking about. Dunkirk belongs more to the tradition of Saving Private Ryan, a narrowly focused film which, lest we forget, thrusts the viewer immediately into D-day with no opening explanation or context.
Holland, who also praises the movie before getting down to his nitpicks, seems to be bothered by the film's limited scope as well. But this is a limitation of the medium—there just isn't room in one film for 200 destroyers.
Roberts, on the other hand, is difficult to answer. I can only assume he wasn't paying attention to the film and went into it blithely uncurious about its purpose, technique, or artistry. The continuity errors are caused not by carelessness, but by shifts in time across days and hours. The trapped British soldiers don't shoot back because they're hiding and don't want to give away their position. And, in a criticism from later in his review, the little boats aren't evacuating all of the 330,000+ soldiers from Dunkirk, but taking them out to the destroyers to be evacuated. All of this is made abundantly clear by the characters themselves—especially Branagh and D'Arcy's officers on the mole—or by just paying a little attention and taking the film on its own terms.
Dunkirk is a movie, and, as a result, gets some things wrong. But it's a strong film that does perhaps the most difficult job a historical film takes upon itself—putting the viewers into a world that has long since vanished and making them feel what actual people at one time felt. Nolan and his team worked at the peak of their skills in their medium and produced an excellent movie.
An important book if you're interested in both the film and the history is Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture, by the film's historical adviser, Joshua Levine. Levine offers not just a good short summary of the events leading up to and following Operation Dynamo, but also gives good coverage to the making of the film and Nolan's approach.
Walter Lord, most famous for A Night to Remember, a book about the sinking of the Titanic, published The Miracle of Dunkirk: The True Story of Operation Dynamo in 1981. The books has been reissued for the film's release. I haven't read this one, but Lord's work is pretty highly regarded popular history and it has some good photographs and illustrations.
For a fuller strategic and historical picture than the film provides, there are a lot of places to look. I'm just going to list a few.
Alistair Horne's To Lose a Battle: France 1940, is a readable, well-researched, but slightly dated (published in 1969) history of the German invasion of France and the Low Countries in 1940. This is the final volume of a trilogy on French military history; I recommend it. The Duel, by John Lukacs, is a book I've mentioned before, and I recommend it again.
James Holland, who was critical—bordering on pedantic—about the film, has a couple of good books. For a lavishly illustrated, very short narrative of the invasion of France and the following Battle of Britain, his Ladybird book The Battle of Britain is an excellent read. For more detail, his Battle of Britain: Five Months that Changed History is a comprehensively and exhaustively researched book that includes the fall of France and the evacuations from Dunkirk. The Rise of Germany, the first volume of his ongoing trilogy The War in the West, covers the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk in detail, with a great deal of up-to-date research.
Finally, Sir Max Hasting's book Winston's War, which narrates World War II from the point of view of Churchill, begins with Churchill becoming PM during the fall of France and covers the evacuations from Dunkirk—as well as Narvik and elsewhere—in good detail from a top-down strategic perspective, knowing what Churchill knew when he knew it.
Despite saying that I'm trying to avoid back-to-back posts from the same period, next month I'll dedicate Historical Movie Mondays to the Middle Ages. Call it "Medieval March." But first, I want to honor an important anniversary that will fall next Monday, and consider the 2004 film The Alamo.
Last week I got Bernard Cornwell's latest novel, Fools and Mortals, from the library and blitzed through it. It's an immensely enjoyable book and a quick read.
Cornwell made his reputation with historical action adventures like the Sharpe series, following an English soldier in the Napoleonic wars, an the Uhtred series, set in Anglo-Saxon England during and after Alfred the Great's reign. He's also written standalone novels like Agincourt and Redcoat, set in crucial times and featuring lots of thrilling, well-executed action. His heroes are typically amoral badasses who are tough bordering on sociopathic but always do the right thing in a pinch.
Fools and Mortals is vintage Cornwell is some ways and a departure in others. The characters are masculine tough talkers and there's plenty of grit to be found, and there is more than one fistfight and plenty of casual wench-ogling. But, as Cornwell himself has pointed out in interviews, not a single person dies in this novel, and the heroes aren't soldiers, but actors. And the protagonist dresses like a girl.
Fools and Mortals takes place over the course of a few days in 1595. The narrator is Richard Shakespeare, baby brother to the Bard. Richard is ageing out of the female roles he has been playing and longs to have a man's part in one of his brother's plays. His brother is, in fact, working on two, which he believes to be among his best work. In the meantime, the brothers and the rest of their company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, keep up a tedious schedule of rehearsals and performances and try to keep the Puritans from shutting them down.
There are multiple subplots and threads of conflict running through Fools and Mortals (not unlike one of Shakespeare's plays), and Cornwell paces it all masterfully. Rival companies are trying to steal Shakespeare's new material so they can stage it first. The Puritans are looking for ways to shut down the theaters that have been built outside their jurisdiction in the City of London. The government's Catholic hunters are harassing everyone. Richard wants better roles, a permanent position with his tetchy brother's company of players, another chance to meet the fetching servant girl who works for the Lord Chamberlain's wife, and, in the meantime, he's barely paying his rent.
Like A Midsummer Night's Dream, which Shakespeare and his company perform at the end, all these loose plots come together in the staging of a play to celebrate a wedding. A book with lots of subplots ending in a play with lots of subplots ending in a play—it's wonderfully meta in a way modern pop culture can't rival.
Cornwell being Cornwell, there is no shortage of sneering religious hypocrites (an actual line from the villain: "In the name of the Lord, bend over.") and sniveling cowards as bad guys, but he keeps things pretty restrained. And there is a surprisingly sympathetic and moving portrait of an elderly Jesuit missionary living out the end of his life in the house where Richard rents a room. The book is full of period detail, especially when it comes to the staging of Shakespeare's plays themselves.
And the theatrical aspect proved the most enjoyable and interesting part of the book to me. Cornwell got the idea for Fools and Mortals from summers he's spent acting with the Monomoy Theatre (you can see him as Prospero here), and his experience as an actor shows. The performances in the book are peppered with unexpected but vivid touches clearly drawn from life—for example, the different ways each player handles the stress backstage before a performance begins, the panic and irritation that come when someone forgets their lines, the way the actors feed on the energy of a bored, indifferent, or excited audience. It made me want to find the nearest theater performing Shakespeare and go sit down for a play as soon as possible.
Fools and Mortals was a great read, a real labor of love for Shakespeare, and a treat for people who love Shakespeare's work. I recommend it.
And, by the way, the two plays in the novel are A Midsummer Night's Dream, from which Cornwell gets the novel's title ("Lord, what fools these mortals be") and Romeo and Juliet. I won't reveal whether Richard finally gets his man's role onstage.
By sheer coincidence, as I read Fools and Mortals for myself I also finished reading a young adult series I've been reading to my wife before bed each night. They're The Shakespeare Stealer, Shakespeare's Scribe, and Shakespeare's Spy, by Gary L. Blackwood.
The series follows Widge, an orphan from the north of England, as he is first enlisted to steal from and then joins Shakespeare's players. The series takes place across about two years, from 1501-3, ending with the accession of James I. Along the way, Widge survives plague, works directly under Shakespeare, and becomes no mean player himself. He also develops a crush on Shakespeare's daughter Judith, who proves to be a high-maintenance tease, and rivalries with other boys in the company.
Many of the same Elizabethan themes crop up in the series as in Cornwell's more recent book—acting, boys playing female roles, Puritanism and Catholic hunters, the cutthroat rivalries between acting companies, and more—but usually in a more kid-friendly way. The plots are more diffuse and not as tight, but Widge is an amiable narrator and good company to have on the journey. The series incorporates a lot of nice period detail and you get a really good sense of what London was like at the time.
We really enjoyed Blackwood's trilogy and recommend it for your own reading, or if you have kids who enjoy a good historical story and might want to learn a little about Shakespeare, too.
Charles Portis is one of my favorite authors. He's most famous for True Grit, which is a magnificent novel, but he's also written four other less well-known and appreciated novels. The most recent (published in 1991) is Gringos.
Gringos has a lot in common with Portis's other novels. Like True Grit and The Dog of the South, it's the story of an Arkansas native in exile. Like Norwood, the protagonist finds himself falling in with all kinds of colorful characters and a certain amount of danger he's not really prepared for. Like Masters of Atlantis, the esoteric and occult figure prominently.
The main character is an American living in the Yucatan, where he gives guided tours of the jungle and Mayan ruins and occasionally traffics in a little illicit Mayan antiquities. His life is upended by a couple of changes to his circumstances, including love (kind of ?) and the arrival of a band of dangerous hippies who may have something to do with a recent kidnapping in the United States.
To describe more of the plot would be both giving away too much and pointless. Because in any Portis novel the real joy is the narrative voice, the dialogue, the ramshackle collection of eccentric characters, and the preposterous set pieces that the plot meanders between. Also enlivening every one of his novels are marvelous little observations and asides like the two below, both from Gringos:
Simcoe read a book. It was all right to do that here. In the States it was acceptable to read newspapers and magazines in public, but not books, unless you wanted to be taken for a student or a bum or a lunatic or all three. Here you could read books in cafes without giving much offense, and even write them.
A passage that should make anyone who has ever read or written along in a restaurant grin.
Also, for a taste of the "Unsolved Mysteries"-like esoterica that drifts into Gringos:
Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren't nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.
Do check out Portis's books; not just True Grit, which is a masterpiece and well worth your time, but his others as well. They're all great, and precious few.
The official site of historian and novelist Jordan M. Poss.
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