ANOTHER SLEEPLESS LIST!

5:23AM and the phone’s ringing. I forgot to bring it into the bedroom. I get my glasses on and get up and stumble around in the dark, finally find it and turn on the light to read the numbers to punch in and see who just left a message before I could get to the phone. It’s a “class mother” for my little one’s third grade, no school today due to the mix of snow and sleet and ice and wind.

Now I’m awake. Again. So, lying in bed trying to get back to sleep, after I turn the alarm off since we won’t be needing it, I do another one of the alphabet lists I’m so fond of (people ask me how I remember them the next day, and that’s the point, if you do it with the alphabet it stays in your mind, as opposed to other things I think of writing in the middle of the night and usually can’t remember any of when I wake up), only this time, for some reason, hmmmm, what pops into my mind is a list of movies that impacted me politically. So here’s what I came up with:

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (the 1930 one I watched as a boy on TV; it challenged my budding gung-ho young male’s desire to be a war hero like John Wayne in all those WWII movies I had already been influenced by)
BATTLE OF ALGIERS, THE (the 1965 film a lot of us experienced as a documentary even though it was a scripted fictional rendition of the Algerian rebellion against the French, predicting much of what is happening now in the Middle East, but back then influencing me and many others to rebel against the growing war in Viet Nam)
CASABLANCA (Mostly a romantic flick, but the politics in it influenced my young brain, especially the scene where the free French and the Nazis compete in Rick’s club by trying to sing their national songs louder than the other and of course the French win, my heart still soars when I watch that scene)
DAVID AND LISA (the 1962 “independent” film that made me rethink the little I knew about mental illness and institutions)
EDGE OF THE CITY (1957, I was fifteen when I saw this flick with John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier working on the docks together, Cassavetes character an army deserter, but what hit me the most was their integrated relationship, much like I was encountering and feeling like the only one at the time so the movie confirmed some things I was intuiting from my own experience, and challenged others)
FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (Despite the criticisms, a great indictment of the Bush legacy)
GRADUATE, THE (when everyone else was raving about this film, I reviewed it for the U. of Iowa newspaper, or one of the alternative newspapers I wrote for then, can’t remember which, but caused a stir as I pointed out how Dustin Hoffman’s character, in his pursuit of the upper-class white girl, tries to offend her by taking her to a club which is the only integrated place in the movie, translating as therefore “bad” and in which a working-class girl trying to survive as a stripper is degraded by Hoffman’s character’s pushing her, or whatever dismissive action he takes after the upper-class white girl runs out in tears; I pointed out had the stripper been black it would have been seen as racist, but since she was only lower-class white it didn’t matter)
HELTER SKELTER (Steve Railsbeck was incredible as Charles Manson in a film not as politically revealing as say poet Ed Sanders’ book, called I think THE FAMILY, still impossible to avoid the implications of the whole hippie-thing-gone-wrong as well as the manipulation of some political theories being thrown around in the ‘60s)
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, AN (not as depressing as I suspected, and nothing I didn’t already know but put together beautifully, the connections all made clearly and illustrated simply, the work of director Davis Guggenheim who directed me in that episode of DEADWOOD I did, one of the nicest people I ever worked with in Hollywood)
JACKIE ROBINSON STORY, THE (the 1950 scripted bio, that came off as a documentary when I saw it as a boy, had a major impact on my already budding rebellion against the standard racism of the time; I already loved Robinson and this movie confirmed why)
KILLING FIELDS, THE (Although I usually don’t care for Sam Waterson’s acting, this film was so powerful it worked; I had a Cambodian poet friend who was caught in this mess so it had a personal impact, reliving the powerlessness over that holocaust)
LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (Saw this c. 1962 black and white flick just after I joined the service and was already rebelling against the enforced conformity; Kirk Douglas plays the last of a dying breed of rugged individuals (i.e. “cowboys”) destroyed by the encroachments of modern life, set in the time of the film, it resonated for me as a manifesto of individualism)
MARAT/SADE (the abbreviated title it’s most known as, of this film adaptation of the Peter Weiss play THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM AT CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS de SADE; it had such an impact on me and many others, that at a demonstration at the U. of Iowa not long after it opened in Iowa City in 1967, I started singing a song from it “Marat we’re poor, and the poor stay poor” etc. and others joined in and before long the whole crowd was singing this Kurt Weil style song about class revolution! The cops couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on, but we could)
NOTHING BUT A MAN (one of the first all, or almost all-black flicks I ever saw not made in Hollywood, with none of the usual CABIN IN THE SKY Hollywood black stereotypes, a very powerful flick at the time, though I haven’t seen it since)
ON THE WATERFRONT (even though the politics behind it were a defense of those who gave names to the house UnAmerican Committee in its attempt to destroy the lives of leftists by branding them all communists, one scene in this film really hit me between the eyes as a kid because I instantly got it, when the trial starts going badly for “Johnny Friendly” and a quick cut to the room of an obviously wealthy home as a white-haired rich guy who we only see from behind tells his butler something like “If a Mister Friendly calls tell him I’ve gone out and you don’t know when I’ll be back” and the butler says something like “Yes sir” and even as a kid I got the point: that there are always fat cats behind the scenes pulling the strings and when things don’t go their way they just cut the strings)
PIXOTE (early ‘80s Brazilian flick about homeless street kids who I’d already read about but this fictional story, using real street kids in an almost documentary style, knocked me out so much I saw it several times, bringing friends, and, in my enthusiasm, but poor judgment, even my kids at the time, who were confused and freaked out by the realism, for which I was and am sorry, but we didn’t have VCRs and DVDs back then so I figured this foreign film wouldn’t be around long so if I wanted them to see it…sorry kids)
QUO VADIS? (my first date movie, second grade, eight-years-old, with an Italian-American girl named Lois Mercadante, and the Hollywood spectacle was about a Roman soldier—played by Robert Taylor, about as “Roman” as I am—falling for a Christian—Deborah Kerr—and trying to avoid the consequences; my first encounter with “art” addressing mixed-religion-race-ethnic-group-etc. romance on my first mixed—in this case ethnic group—date!)
REDS (Nothing in the story I didn’t already know, but the interjected interviews with the aged survivors of the early 20th century struggles for freedom for more than just some rich white men I found incredibly poignant and bracing and affirmed my own struggles)
SORROW AND THE PITY, THE (a four-hour documentary that came out in the early 1970s with footage from WWII and interviews with survivors from all sides, unbelievably compelling, especially the old white-haired English gay man who as a young man voluntarily parachuted into enemy territory to spy and to show that gay men could be brave too, as he says in the flick, but everyone in it makes you wish it would go on for days and not just hours)
TO DIE IN MADRID (documentary about the Spanish Civil War I saw in the early 1960s that made me think about people’s loyalties since, as I remember it, it starts out with the crowds in Madrid giving the loyalists the closed fist salute and ends with Madrid crowds giving the conquering Franco forces the fascist salute.
UNMARRIED WOMAN, AN (1978 was a little late for the feminist wave that began in the late ‘60s, but nonetheless, one of the few Hollywood movies to get it almost right, thanks to the acting by Jill Claburgh and Alan Bates etc. and Mazursky’s directing)
VIVA ZAPATA! (Brando and Anthony Quinn in one of the best for each, the perils of revolution)
WILD BUNCH, THE (another movie I reviewed controversially at the time by pointing out that the more scummy and evil and cowardly the character the more redneck his accent, I got a lot of flack for that, but was also hailed as a hero in the “hillbilly” neighborhood of Chicago and others like it, which is not to say I still don’t dig this incredibly well-made movie, despite the “poor white trash” prejudice in it)
X (once again at a loss, any ideas?)
YOUNG SAVAGES, THE (this 1961 flick impressed me at the time as the only Hollywood movie to get the whole 1950s white juvenile delinquent scene right, and some of its causes—still the same for many black gangs today—although the earlier Blackboard Jungle came in a close second for a ‘50s kind of realism that seemed to be busting up the old Hollywood Andy Hardy Date with Judy kind of take on teenagers)
Z (The 1969 film about the Greek generals and the repression and oppression of their regime, backed by the U.S. naturally, in which long hairs like those of us fighting similar militarism in the US were rounded up and beaten and jailed, not unlike what a lot of us were going through, if not always with such drastic or dramatic results)