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5) THE PAWNBROKER / Again we have
here a superb performance by actor Rod Steiger. He plays the role of a tortured soul, a man whose psyche has been shattered
beyond repair. The pawnbroker, who runs a little pawn shop in an American city, cannot run or hide from the experience of
having been incarcerated in Auschwitz during the Nazi Holocaust. It eats away at his soul day and night, like rats gnawing
on his very bones, and he is so emotionally imprisoned by the experience that he can no longer relate to other human beings
on a common day-to-day level. When he meets a woman who describes the pain of her own life, such as the loss of her husband,
he sits tensely in a chair until she begins to say in summary of her tale of woe "What happened to me......." at which point
he interrupts and says with matter-of-fact bluntness, "Was nothing." And in a way he is right, because he has seen so much
more horror than she can ever imagine, what she has suffered is comparatively trivial. At the climactic scene at the end of
the film when he witnesses the death of a young store employee he struggles in desperation to focus his own emotions in a
physical, less painful way than the mental torment that afflicts him, and deliberately forces his hand down upon a metal spike
used for holding paper receipts. As he pushes the spike completely through his own hand his mouth is a gaping wide chasm of
despair from which emerges a silent scream. No sound is emitted from his mouth but the horror is there, written clearly on
his face; an inner agony that is beyond comprehension. This film does not have the broad scope of Spielberg's later great
epic, 'Schindler's List,' but it came out years ahead of its time and was a film of rare power addressing a subject that was
seldom looked upon in film when it was made. In 'The Pawnbroker' you didn't have to see the concentration camps in order to
sense the pain and horror that they inflicted upon other human beings.
4) LAWRENCE OF
ARABIA / For those who don't recall David Lean's magnificent film about the late Thomas Edward Lawrence, or
who have simply never seen it, this film is a classic epic that not only tells the great story of one of the most charismatic,
eccentric, mysterious and strange characters in history, but it contains some of the most amazing visual sequences ever filmed.
Peter O'Toole starred in this epic in his very first film appearance at the age of 27. For those who don't know anything about
T.E. Lawrence, here is a short background sketch. An illegitimate child in Victorian England, Lawrence grew up with the stigma
of "bastard" attached to him. A brilliant fellow, he became fluent in several Arabic dialects while studying at Oxford University
and was an accomplished archaelogist in his mid-twenties at the start of what they called 'the Great War' in 1914. Painfully
shy, small of stature, and wanting nothing more than to dig around ancient ruins for bits and pieces of broken pottery, he
was drafted by the British Army and utilized as a translator in what was known as the "Turkish sector" of the war, meaning
the Middle East. It wasn't long before he had ingratiated himself into the highest circles of Bedouin Sheikdom. And he also
became consumed by an idea, the idea of rallying these Bedouin peoples into a unified force, not only to serve as warriors
for the British, but to ultimately assume more control over their own affairs. By sheer force of personality he became revered
as an almost godlike figure by the Bedouins and this was no doubt due in part to an essential masochism on his own part. He
enjoyed pain and he could push himself to limits that were beyond the capacity of even the most stoical of Arabs. Before long
he was wearing Bedouin clothing, living in the desert among the tribal nomads, and proved himself to be a tactical genius
in warfare who specialized in blowing up trains and routing the Germans whenever possible. He rose to the rank of full colonel
but refused the British Army's repeated attempts to promote him to the general ranks. When he left Damascus at the end of
the war at the age of 29 and already a living legend the numerous medals he had been given were found discarded in a waste
paper basket. He went back to England and was summoned to meet the royal family, shocking everyone when he arrived at Buckingham
Palace dressed in Arab clothing. He then briefly re-enlisted in the tank corps as a private under an assumed name until the
Army discovered who he was and kicked him out, informing him that as a legendary British officer he had to accept officers
rank, which he refused. Lawrence then settled down and wrote his memoires in a small cottage in the countryside and at the
age of 47 was killed in a motorcycle accident. One memorable scene from David Lean's film was watching the sun rise over the
horizon in the Sahara Desert. An enormous orange orb slowly rises above the dunes like the open door of a huge and violent
furnace. You almost begin to sweat just watching it and it helps to remember that temperatures as high as 181 degrees Fahrenheit
have been recorded in the Sahara. This film is a
must see for anyone who likes their history told in terms of great characters
and great stories.
3) RAGING BULL / Martin Scorcese's masterpiece about
the life and times of middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta is one of the most hard-edged and powerful films I've ever seen. This
was filmed when Robert DeNiro was setting new boundaries for what film acting was all about. Fanatical about his performances,
it has now entered the realm of film legend that he insisted they shut down the set for a couple of months while he deliberately
gained sixty pounds in body weight in order to convincingly play the middle-aged, washed-up LaMotta as a pathetic lounge performer
after his fighting career was over. With supporting roles played by Kathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci and even Nicholas Colosanto
as a very convincing mafia boss, the entire cast was superb. Colosanto, who later went on to play "Coach" on the television
comedy 'Cheers,' has a memorable line in the film where, after watching LaMotta make mincemeat out of another young good-looking
fighter who had been described as being "pretty," he stands up and says, "He ain't pretty no more." The depiction of physical
violence in this film is jarring and intense, with the sounds of rumbling New York subway trains used as background during
the fight scenes. But the real violence is found within the tormented soul of Jake LaMotta himself, a ferocious raging bull
trapped inside a human body who struggles to find a place within a complex society that he cannot cope with. In one powerful
scene he finds himself locked all alone inside a small jail cell and leans his head against the wall. Slowly his fists begin
to beat the wall as he repeats the word "why? why? why? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?" until he is screaming the word louder and louder
and ferociously hammering the wall with his fists in a primal frustration and rage that is at once both frightening and pitiful
to watch. 'Raging Bull' is filmed in stark black and white tones except for a few softly colorized flashback scenes that represent
the warmer memories of the young Jake LaMotta, as if to evoke a sense of beauty and life that has long since left him behind.
2) SOPHIE'S CHOICE / Based upon the great novel of the same name written
by William Styron, this film is similar in some ways to the story told by The Pawnbroker. Sophie, a young Polish immigrant,
has suffered the fate of millions of others during the Nazi era---incarceration in a concentration camp. Her character is
a tormented soul based loosely upon a young woman whom Styron had himself once briefly known as a young man, a Polish woman
whom he later described as physically healthy but "destroyed, shattered beyond repair." With a young Kevin Kline playing the
delusional and charismatic young man who becomes romantically involved with Sophie, Sophie's story unfolds in a series of
flashbacks of intense power and her "choice" is the stuff of every parent's worst nightmare. Having also read the novel I
can tell you that this film, directed by the late Alan Pakula, is a masterpiece of adaptation. Where few great novels are
accurately transformed into great films, this film does it with sheer brilliance and flawless accuracy. [Personal Note: the
wonderful director, Alan Pakula, died on November 19, 1998 in a freak accident on the Long Island Expressway just a few hundred
feet away from a gas station where I bought gas for my car as recently as yesterday. A metal pipe lying in the roadway was
kicked up into the air by the vehicle in front of him and then smashed through the windshield of his car, causing fatal injuries.]
1) SCHINDLER'S LIST / Perhaps the greatest film ever made, and certainly
Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, there is little that can be said about this film that hasn't been said already. Although set
in the Europe of World War II and a story about the Nazi occupation of Poland it is not technically a "war story" but rather
the story of how the Nazi regime operated its killing factories, the concentration camps. Filmed in stark black and white,
that when seen on the big screen actually has a grainy texture to it reminiscent of old 1940's news reels, there is a sense
of authenticity to this film that almost gives it the feel of a documentary. The film is long, running more than three hours
in length, and the first forty minutes or so begins slowly, almost benignly, as the character of Oscar Schindler, a Nazi Party
member with a conscience, is introduced and shown going about his business. But then there is introduced the character identified
in small print on the screen as Untersturmfuhrer Amon Goeth (pronounced Aye-mon Girt) and from that moment on the story becomes
a descent into Hell. This story is real, there really was an Oskar Schindler and there really was an Aemon Goett, and they
really did the things shown in this film. Goeth, a psychopathic young officer played brilliantly by British actor Ralph Fiennes,
frequently amused himself by randomly shooting inmates at the camp with his hunting rifle from the balcony of his villa. In
one such scene a young woman is shown bending over to tie a shoelace. As she stands we hear the crack of the rifle simultaneous
to a small puff of dust kicked up on the ground some ten yards behind her as she jerks suddenly and collapses to the ground,
a grace-note of authenticity to those who understand that a high-powered bullet would pass completely through a human body
and at that angle hit the ground thirty feet behind its target. And there is the eerie moment during the purging of a Jewish
ghetto as we watch German soldiers stealthily and silently creeping through a building while listening to the walls with a
stethoscope, searching for sounds of people hiding. Goeth, who was later captured by General Patton's troops and eventually
put on trial and executed by hanging, had been the camp commandant of Plaszow from February 11, 1943 until September 13, 1944
during which time he had caused the death of some 8,000 prisoners. Some of the scenes in this film were actually shot on location
at the infamous Auschwitz-Birkinau prison camp and the night time scene of a steam locomotive entering through its awesome
and forboding gates to deliver its cargo of lost souls is an image that I'll never forget. Spielberg spilled his heart and
guts into this movie just as Oskar Schindler risked his own life and spent all of his wealth to save some thirteen hundred
of those lost souls. Schindler is the
only member of the Nazi Party to be buried with honors in Israel, a nation to which
he eventually emigrated after World War II.
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(C) 2004, Redmond News Service
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