[lit-ideas] Herman Wouk's mini-series
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:40:24 -0800
I watched War and Remembrance the other day. It is the 1988 12-part
mini-series based on Herman Wouk's book about World War II. Commander Pug
Henry is played by Robert Mitchum and his wife Rhoda by Polly Bergan.
Steven Berkoff did a chillingly realistic rendition of Adolf Hitler, much
better, I thought, than that done by Gunter Meisner in the 1983 6-part
mini-series Winds of War which I just started watching.
There is a tremendous difference between Mitchum's physical appearance in
the two series. He is overweight and doesn't look well in War and
Remembrance. Someone else should have gotten that part. The director knew
it and said he looked but couldn't find anyone else that seemed plausible as
Pug Henry.
There was much too much about the Holocaust in War and Remembrance - far too
much detail, but the director, Dan Curtus said there had been too much
glossing over the event. He wanted a pictorial record so no one would ever
again be able to say it didn't happen - or that it wasn't as bad as some
people said.
Ali MacGraw plays Natalie Jastrow in Winds of War, and Jean Seymour plays
her in War and Remembrance. MacGraw is feisty and believable as someone who
would drag Byron Henry off to Warsaw shortly before Hitler invades Poland,
and Seymour is believable as the Natalie who is dragged closer and closer to
Auschwitz. Seymour's Natalie will do anything necessary to get back to her
son. She will bend as far as necessary. I can't imagine MacGraw bending
like that. Also, Seymour was so beautiful in that role that it was
unbearable to think of here becoming one of those emaciated inmates at
Auschwitz. McGraw wasn't that beautiful. Also, McGraw would hae been too
old to play Natalie in War and Remembrance. She was supposed to be a girl
but would have found that difficult at age 48. Seymour at 37 could pull
it off.
I kept wondering what was wrong with Seymour's eyes. I learned that her
eyes are different colors; so they probably made her wear a contact lens in
one of them.
I've been reading, off and on, what some consider the definitive work on
Hitler, Ian Kershaw's Hitler in two volumes. I finished the first volume
and am 150 pages into the second. Also, I've read other books about Hitler
in the past. It is impossible for me to take him in, that is, to understand
him. He is too monstrous for that, and should only be destroyed, even
though I keep trying to understand him. I tried once again during War and
Remembrance. He obviously did believe the Jews were to blame for all sorts
of absurd evils, and one shouldn't be too quick to say that prejudice was
unique to him because it wasn't. Also, it is revitalizing itself in Europe
today - thanks to the Arabs but there was a core hatred of the Jews that
wasn't turned to love just because Hitler and Eva Braun took cyanide pills
in a bunker.
At one point the Germans line up large group of Czechs, one of whom is
taking care of Natalie's four-year-old son, Louis. The care-taker shields
Louis with his own body and so you know that under this huge heap of dead
bodies is one little four-year-old boy who still lives.
Did the Greeks ever do anything like that? [from Hanson, A War like no
other, pp 183-185]
"Lining up and murdering the surrendered adult Greek male population was
still rare before the Peloponnesian War, and such slaughter became habitual
only after the siege of Plataea. Then a discernible pattern emerged: free
exit without one's property was offered to the besieged before the fighting
started. After that window of choice close, it was assumed that all
guarantees were off, and death and enslavement loomed respectively for
captured men and women. . . ."
". . . the Spartans had initiated the cycle of executing surrendering
citizens at the very outset of the war, and had continued that policy
throughout the first decade of the fighting. In the winter 424, for
example, at the small outpost at Lecythus, Brasidas, who had none of the
aristocratic restraint of Archidamus, had executed all the Athenian
defenders who could not escape. The Spartans would go on to repeat such
slaughter at Hysiae in 417 by killing all the free males of the doomed
town."
The Nazis went beyond what the Spartans did here. The Spartans wanted to
kill the potential soldiers, but thanks to their pseudo-science and bizarre
beliefs about the Jews, the Nazis wanted to destroy a genetic entity, men,
women and children.
At one point in War and Remembrance Americans are shown doing something like
the Spartans did. A submarine captain (played by Barry Bostwick) torpedoes
a Japanese troop ship. He then surfaces and has his men machine gun the
Japanese survivors in the water because, he tells his appalled XO, Byron
Henry, if they let them live, they would only kill more Americans; so it was
his duty to kill them. When the XO still isn't convinced, he says, don't
forget, they attacked us. We didn't attack them.
One might, like the XO, disapprove of slaughtering soldiers in the water,
but one can understand the thinking of the Submarine commander, but one
can't . . . or can one understand the Nazis? That is if one believes in a
pseudo-science, if one believes in conspiracy theories about the Jews, then
. . .
To say you believed in a pseudo-science or a conspiracy theory and that is
your excuse for killing Jews is not acceptable. Neither is it acceptable to
believe conspiracy theories about America today, but at least no one is
slaughtering huge groups of Americans , other than the Islamists, and then
not very often, but just as in Europe there is a huge core of hatred of the
Jews, so is there in this post-Communist world a huge core of hatred for
Capitalisms flag-ship America.
Understanding Naziism, Islamism, and Post-Communist Anti-Americanism may not
be possible for those of us in possession of western sanity, but it is
possible to recognize the enemy, to oppose him, and if in a war with him, to
kill him. Democratic Athens waited far too long to see what Sparta would
do. They were too hesitant, too half-hearted, too seemingly weak, and that
encouraged Sparta to move against them. The pacifists among us will always
prefer the Athenian approach, and the enemy will always see that as a sign
of weakness, and the death toll will always be much much too large as a
result.
Lawrence Helm
San Jacinto
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