F.T.A. (1972)

Before she hawked cosmetics, became a workout queen or married a billionaire media mogul, Jane Fonda was ‘Hanoi Jane’, a Hollywood radical whose heated polemics against the Vietnam war made her a bête noire of the right and propelled her to the upper echelons of Richard Nixon’s ‘enemies’ list, joining Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Gregory Peck and Bill Cosby. She was branded a traitor for visiting Hanoi as the conflict’s endgame was unfolding, resulting in F.T.A. being withdrawn from theatres after just a week.

Keen to escape the dynastic shadow of their famous name, the Fonda siblings actively engaged with the burgeoning counterculture and developed a social conscience which informed the work they did. Such flagrant partisanship was anathema to their venerable father, a small-l liberal who condemned his errant progeny for their extremism. The more they became associated with their activism, the more it was conflated with their onscreen personae.

F.T.A. - standing for Free the Army, or Fuck the Army - is probably the clearest expression of this synthesis. The film follows Fonda, Donald Sutherland et al. on a tour of military bases on the Pacific Rim, performing ‘political vaudeville’ for the dejected GIs fighting a protracted and increasingly unpopular war - sound familiar? Satirical skits and politically charged balladry from the likes of folk singer Len Chandler are interspersed with testimony from the ‘grunts’.

Depending on your political leanings, you’ll either find F.T.A. an inspirational reminder of a time when dissidence was deemed the only moral recourse, or an infuriating example of privileged dilettantes jumping on the bandwagon and feigning solidarity with small sections of the military for career gain. Nevertheless, F.T.A. is a valuable social document, capturing the disenchantment of those soldiers who believed the ‘red menace’ to be a flimsy pretext for an imperialist intervention, and that in their desire to escape poverty and/or serve their country, they had been exploited.

Much of the content of the show relates to the daily lives of the troops, which no doubt articulated their frustrations but obviously mitigates its impact and appeal to those on the outside looking in. Granted, these shows were never intended for a mass audience, but it does feel like listening to a string on in-jokes one isn't privy to. Some of the most affecting moments in F.T.A. are those involving the soldiers themselves, ranging from militant inner city blacks who feel a kinship with the Vietnamese to small-town Southern boys whose eyes have been opened by the grisly realities of war. The film would have been more coherent if it had focused on these interviews, rather than using them as a bridging device for the travelogue segments.

The trip to the US base in Okinawa provides a wider perspective for the political landscape in South-East Asia. Much like Vietnam, the strategically important island is a pawn in a wider struggle, passing from one sphere of influence to the next. The scenes in the Philippines are a powerful allegory for US economic imperialism, capturing slum dwellings in the shadow of a Coca-Cola hoarding and a totemic giant Coke bottle planted by the roadside. F.T.A. is at its best when it is documenting the interaction between the bases and the life surrounding them.

Sutherland is a brooding, ornery presence, highlighting what a perfect fit he was for Hawkeye Pierce in MASH (1970). Reciting passages from Dalton Trumbo’s classic anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939) in his sonorous, lyrical timbre, Sutherland brings a sombre air to the merriment, lending gravitas to the revelry. One of the more paradoxical moments occurs when a group of hecklers interrupts Sutherland - it struck me as bizarre and left a sour taste that rather than engage these dissenting voices, they are swiftly ejected for presenting an opposing viewpoint.

F.T.A. has much to say about the double standards of the military hierarchy and how the prejudices and iniquities of wider society are writ large on the chain of command. There are tales of racist invective being used with impunity, female soldiers being told that they are there solely to provide entertainment for their male counterparts and officers living in conspicuous opulence. This polarity is a microcosm for the upheavals occurring at home, where opposition to the war dovetailed into class, racial and generational tension.

Whatever the intentions of those involved, the F.T.A. tour serves to remind us how timid and cosseted today’s young entertainers are, shying away from using their influence to stand up to injustice. After all, dissent is a bad career move.

Herzog Double Bill

A pioneer of New German Cinema, Werner Herzog has enjoyed creative peaks and overcome commercial troughs to settle on a duel artistic life, operating a ‘one for them, one for me’ strategy that allows him to parlay his work on commercial fare like Rescue Dawn (2006) and Bad Lieutenant (2009) into a slew of personal projects delving into the deepest, darkest recesses of human compulsion. A common thread in Herzog’s work is the exploration of existential, geographical and physical extremes.

From Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) to Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog presents characters driven by inexplicable desires and consumed by implacable urges that place them outside the bounds of conventional behaviour, ignoring the portents to forge ahead to their doom, swathing their folly in divine purpose. His reputation in Hollywood’s portals of power as a feral merchant of ‘chaos, hostility and murder’ has been rehabilitated in the last few years by a series of remarkable films that guided the syntax of cinema into new and strange directions.

The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

Billed as a ‘science fiction fantasy’, The Wild Blue Yonder is a difficult film to place within any accepted parameters, taking a fanciful subject and presenting it with such unerring immediacy and plausibility that it feels like a Von Daniken novel adapted by Errol Morris. Carried with admirable gusto by Brad Dourif’s central performance, Herzog delivers a requiem for a dying planet that is at turns playful and earnest.

Dourif is an unnamed alien, an intergalactic refugee from the ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ of Andromeda whose forebears settled on Earth in an attempt to lead the indigenous population in the right direction, occupying roles of influence in government and intelligence agencies. With the Earth now barely habitable, humanity seeks to escape the planet and colonize Andromeda. The Alien must watch in despair from Earth's desolate husk as his home world is ‘adapted’ to humanity’s rapacious demands, delivering an impassioned monologue on the background to such a development.

The Wild Blue Yonder is a remarkable example of taking footage without any apparent connection and from it assembling a narrative arc, expounding grand theories from the sparsest of starting points and utilizing a charismatic actor to unify the disparate elements. The film casually throws out ideas that could provide material for a number of films - from re-examining the Roswell Incident to positing that breeding pigs marked the beginning of the end for humanity.

Dourif delivers a tour de force as the forlorn ET, narrating the ten chapters into which the film is divided with a barely concealed anger and bitterness, railing against our hubris and lamenting the neglect of our most valuable resource. Herzog slyly plays with the nature of truth, presenting us with a number of phoney experts who present their ideas with a veneer of authenticity and conviction that would lead some to believe they were credible sources if viewed outside the context of the film. 

The Wild Blue Yonder is quite unlike anything that has preceded it. A particular highlight is Henry Kaiser’s footage from the base of the ocean, which is used to replicate the conditions of Andromeda. Kaiser captures the manifold life forms that reside there with stunning clarity, detailing an environment so eerie and otherworldly that it outstrips anything the human mind could create, a world where beauty and brutality have learned to co-exist. Herzog’s intentions are as unclear as ever; but whether consciously or otherwise, The Wild Blue Yonder presents an argument for environmental responsibility more persuasive than all the PowerPoint presentations in the world.

Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

Inspired by Henry Kaiser’s underwater footage in The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog set off to Antarctica at the height of the Austral Summer; keen to understand the sort of person who would live in a place with five months of permanent daylight and determined not to make a mawkish anthropomorphic film about penguins. Herzog travels to the McMurdo research centre, where his romantic notions of Scott and Shackleton are shattered by the base’s prosaic environs, with its modern amenities and resemblance to a construction site. Stifled by the cosy modernity of McMurdo, Herzog sets off into the heart of the planet’s most inhospitable terrain, providing narration in his breathy, mellifluous timbre.

Along the way Herzog encounters all manner of striking scenes that repudiate the Disneyfication of nature and highlight the creeping homogeneity that is eroding our planet’s diversity - the Teutonic fatalist in Herzog comes to the fore as he details the cruel realities of a landscape that is brimming with life above and beneath the surface. The ultimate rebuke to those who seek to dull nature’s sharp edges and manipulate it for their own ideological purposes is the sight of a penguin breaking from its group, heading towards the mountains and certain death without any apparent motive.

‘Everyone who’s not tied down falls to the bottom of the planet,’ says William Jirsa, a linguist at McMurdo. Herzog meets a succession of ‘professional dreamers’, restless, obsessive souls who must keep moving, searching for something in the stillness and silence they failed to find elsewhere. There is the driver who was accused of kidnapping a child in Guatemala, the plumber whose fingers signify he belongs to the Mayan royal bloodline, the Iron Curtain refugee who is always packed to leave at a moment’s notice and the woman who travelled to Peru in a sewage pipe. That such stories are commonplace tells us much about those who are drawn to Antarctica.

Herzog laments the dilution of our adventurous spirit, how our innate curiosity and desire for personal glory has transmuted into fatuous pranks and ludicrous record attempts, using footage of Shackleton performing an unconvincing recreation of his quest on a soundstage to illustrate this adulteration. Encounters at the End of the World is a celebration of those hardy souls who remain on the fringes, enduring the hardship out of a desire to mitigate human damage and gain a deeper understanding of their surroundings.

‘It’s a horribly violent world,’ says Sam Bowser, a biologist studying life beneath the ice. We are treated to the full majesty and menace of the primordial environment that the Tetrapods clambered to the surface to escape. Equally primal is Mount Aribus, whose lava lake sends jets of magma shooting above the crater rim. A dedicated team studies the volcano, risking their health and sanity in an attempt to understand her awesome power and potential impact on humanity.

What is abundantly clear in Encounters at the End of the World is just how precarious our existence is, that if we wish to escape the fate of the dinosaurs or humanity in The Wild Blue Yonder, we must respect nature and fear its capacity to inflict catastrophic damage. Herzog’s ambivalence is unmistakable; he shrinks from the sunlight but marvels at the callous configuration of it all, but even this most lugubrious of voices sees that it isn’t all chaos, hostility and murder.  

The Chase (1966)

‘The Chase's’ journey to the screen was a turbulent one. This infamous misfire was supposed to be an integral part of producer Sam Spiegel’s legacy, a prestige picture to rank alongside his previous landmarks ‘The African Queen’, ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. But it ended up being a protracted battle of wits between Spiegel, its meticulous writer, highly strung director and capricious leading man; fatally compromised by the egos it strove to appease. ‘The Chase’ was a failure from which Speigel would fail to recover, his reputation for efficiently steering high-profile pictures to completion forever ruined. Hoping to rekindle Marlon Brando’s waning enthusiasm for acting, Spiegel tried to shoehorn as much material into the ever-changing screenplay that would appeal to his star’s social conscience, much to the chagrin of its screenwriter, the redoubtable Lillian Hellman.

In ‘The Chase’, a small Southern town is thrown into turmoil when one of its former inhabitants, Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), escapes from prison. In the course of fleeing, Reeves accidentally kills a man whose car he is trying to hijack. Meanwhile, the town’s embattled Sheriff, Calder (Brando), tries to prevent tensions from boiling over between sections of the town’s denizens, all of whom agree that he is nothing more than a puppet for local oil magnate, Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall). Bubber becomes a mythical figure amongst the town’s youth, and his return threatens to blow the lid off an affair between Roger’s son, Jake (Edward Fox), and Reeves’ wife, Anna (Jane Fonda).

It’s difficult not to compare ‘The Chase’ to a film directed by Penn a year later. By going back to the ‘30s, Penn was able to make a much more radical statement about ‘60s ferment with ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ than he ever would have been permitted to under the aegis of the tyrannical Spiegel. There are signs of this bravura in some of the set-pieces, but ‘The Chase’ feels staid by comparison. One of the few areas in which the film does excel is its cinematography; Joseph LaShelle captures a sultry Southern summer with aplomb. Away from the chaos of the shoot, the second unit was given a degree of latitude and captured some striking scenes of Reeves’ escape, injecting some excitement into the largely laborious opening act. In hindsight, many of the film’s other problems could have been ameliorated before the project was set in motion, had all the forces guiding the film been pulling in the same direction.

Redford is wholly unconvincing as the rugged con on the lam. Although his legendary screen persona had yet to be formed, he is just too inherently clean cut and suave a figure to be plausible and elicit sympathy for Bubber; there is no suffering on his face or privation in his voice. Equally, English actor Edward Fox was a strange choice to play the disillusioned scion of an oil empire, a casting blunder that was never reconciled. His on-screen relationship with Fonda is fatally stilted; the pairing come across as two actors with incompatible approaches struggling to make sense of the muddled material given to them. Fonda - whose acting here is as embarrassingly earnest as that of Bree Daniels in ‘Klute’ - gamely strives to invest her character with an inner life, but she wasn’t a gifted enough actor at this stage to overcome the script’s limitations. Brando looks tired and pudgy, his accent alternating wildly - a portent of his unintentionally hilarious, scene-sabotaging turn ten years later in ‘The Missouri Breaks’. His trademark mumble slowly winds down into a barely audible groan, as if  resigned to the fact that he was participating in yet another dud. Angie Dickinson is required to do little more than look pretty and not fall over the scenery as Calder’s wife and Robert Duvall is as reliable as ever as Rogers’ henpecked VP, a man trapped between the strict conservatism and growing permissiveness of opposing generations.

‘The Chase’ is symptomatic of many films that emerged in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, articulating a deeply ingrained mistrust of the South and its culture - the South of ‘The Chase’ and countless other films through the ‘60s is a feral, retrograde place in danger of being overwhelmed by its own reactionary, inflammatory machinations. Reeves is a patsy who is playing for the town’s sins, with only Calder, a man of solid liberal principles, to protect him from the baying mob. ‘The Chase’ was a vehicle for Brando to promulgate his political beliefs - his decision to commit to the film was made on this understanding - but in setting out to encompass as many of Brando’s favoured causes as possible, the film ends up fudging its approach to each.

‘The Chase’ says nothing about race relations that wasn’t said with greater clarity in ‘The Defiant Ones’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and would be dealt with to great acclaim a year later in ‘In The Heat of the Night’. What began as the crux of the narrative is only alluded to, used as a plot device to propel the love triangle that ends up taking precedence over the film’s noble intentions. Who knows, maybe the film would have been a more effective plea for racial tolerance if Bubber Reeves had been played by a black man?