The ultimate guy movie


PETER HOWELL
MOVIE CRITIC

Steve McQueen. Charles Bronson. James Coburn. James Garner.

Faces of defiance, all, and you wouldn't want to be sitting across a poker table from them. Only Mount Rushmore has stonier countenances.

But for young lads growing up in the 1960s, and their World War II veteran fathers, these hard gents were the four aces of The Great Escape, the ultimate guy movie.

Who writes this crud?

OK, I'm sorry, pardon my little outburst there, but, come on guys. Surely at least one of you realizes that there is another half to the species? For young lads and their fathers, eh? You don't think that maybe this movie had an impact on any of the girls or their moms, do you? When this movie first appeared on the big screen, I was a young student, sitting there in the theatre, one of a group of GIRLS who had gone to see the movie. We talked about it for days afterward, and went about whistling the theme for weeks. It became my idea of the best movie ever made. It has stayed with me all through the years since, as the one that no other quite measures up to. As a teacher, I have shown this movie to my class, year after year. I love it, every year (and it never fails) when I hear one or more of my students out in the schoolyard whistling the movie's theme, sometimes months after we have viewed it. I feel good that it has had an impact on them, and that there are members of a new generation who know about "the 50". We have used it as the basis of study for so much. It has helped the students to explore both the depths to which the human spirit can sink, and the heights to which it can aspire. The bonds of friendship formed between various of the POW's have fostered hour after hour of discussion, and I hope, learning. Character sketches and studies were all made much more interesting a study topic when it was Hilts the cooler king, or Danny the tunnel king we were writing about.And, by the way Mr. Howell, how did you come to leave out David Attenborough in your list of faces to avoid at the poker table? His character, Big X, had so much to teach the students about duty and sacrifice.
God, this movie is an incredible piece of cinematography! Given the reality on which it was based, how could it fail? Have you read the book, or for that matter, any of the others by Paul Brickhill? I have devoured everything the man wrote, and I know other females who can state the same.You know what? Maybe Howell was just running off at the mouth, so to speak, when he titled this article. He really needed to delete three letters ... G-U-Y. Or maybe the Star needs to hire a movie critic from the other half of the species!

Get a Grip on Reality, Mr. Ombudsman

Don Sellar seems to suffer from delusions of grandeur. As ombudsman for the Toronto Daily Star, he is still after all, just a pen pusher.
"The image of a hopping prisoner was still fresh Wednesday night when mouthy Don Cherry switched from the Flames-Sharks hockey game to the killing of Const. Garrett. After displaying a family photo, Cherry adopted the Hollywood rhetoric of a hanging judge: "Chris, the little creep killed you."
He said "little creep" twice.
No presumption of innocence. No sign of CBC's vaunted seven-second tape delay. No public uproar. How does Cherry get away with it?"
This excerpt is taken from Sellar's self-righteously indignant rant that appeared in the Saturday Star. Get a grip on reality, Sellar! Cherry had it exactly right when he referred to "the little creep". You can carry on all you want to about protecting the dignity of the accused, but tell me, who is going to ensure the dignity of the deceased? At only 39 years of age, the police officer was far too young to face death. At 18, the 'man' charged with his murder has already gone a long way toward calling into question how worthwhile it might be for him to live to see even one more birthday. Explosives found in his home? Oh yeah, here's a really great citizen, a good, contributing member of society! We need more like him around, don't we, Sellar? How about a few like him moving into your neighbourhood, Sellar? We don't need any seven second delay on Cherry. Let him say what he wants, when he wants. At least it's worth listening to. What we do need is a permanent delay on the garbage you come out with, Mr. Sellar. I wonder how concerned you could manage to be about "presumed innocence" if the tables turned on you? Would you still be all worried about the dignity of the accused if you were the one some day who had to answer the knock on your door to see a police officer standing there, waiting to give you the kind of news that would turn your comfy little, self-righteous world upside down forever?
Stop pushing those pencils around, Sellar. It's just a waste of good graphite!

Could there be anything more wonderful? (Well, yes, if it were the Leafs instead, but, oh well.) For the first time since '94, Canada's going to the Stanley Cup Finals. Calgary beat San Jose 3 to 1. An empty net goal ended it all off, and it was a shot actually sent down the ice by the one of the Sharks! They gave the credit to the Flame who was nearest to it when it was launched on its last fatal slide down the rink. Tuesday night, here we come!
The whole game was great, right from the beginning. When the anthem was sung, there was audible singing from the crowd. Why don't we ever get that here at the ACC? No matter, we had it there tonight, and things just kept getting more and more wonderful.

Stanley, here we come!

Went yesterday to see a presentation of propraganda films made by the National Film Board during world war ii. Some of the lines of narration ... some of the scenes ... some of the dodos in the audience ... any and all of them could just about break your heart.
One of the films dealt with the children of Britain who were sent here to Canada to escape the Blitzkrieg the Germans were waging against the Brits. Such innocent little faces staring at the camera. The narrator spends the entire film emphasizing how wonderful, how safe was their sojourn here. He begins by telling the audience that their first step to safety was to "sail away" to Canada, but as you watch a whole flock of the little ones boarding a vessel, you are told that some of them "sailed away to their death". That's all, just that one line, and your imagination can fill in, if you caught that line, or if you know about the ships being sunk in the Atlantic. The horrors of war...
In another film, you are spoken to by a skull, whose eyesockets are intermittently filled with swastikas that glow red, and flash on and off at you. The skull is thanking the Canadian audience for any line of info inadvertently dropped by a casual speaker, to not-so-innocent listeners. You listen to the supposed dialogue in a bar somewhere and you hear a man saying that his son's battalion is not going to be posted where they first thought, but is going instead to an unnamed town. Then you see a clip of archival film showing soldiers on the receiving end of a deadly salvo. The implication is clear as to the "intelligence" and the skull appears again to thank the father. I sit there thinkging about the atmosphere of general mistrust, and "neighbour turning on neighbour" that could result, while several audience members laugh. Although we were told beforehand to keep in mind the times in which these films would have been viewed, the laughers must have been in vacant-brain-space mode at that moment. Perhaps they are viewing the film with a 'critical eye' as to its special effects and finding it lacking for their sophisticated tastes. Perhaps they are just insensitive to everyone but themselves.
One after another scene flashes in front of us, scenes from the archives, scenes that resulted in death feasting on the results of humankind's inhumanity to its own. So much death should have bloated the grim spectre, but you know that its skeletal form can never be filled, that no amount of gore could ever stop up the gaping holes between the ribs.
The last film shown exhorts the audience to unification in their fight against the fascists. It calls on them, each and every one of them. to search within themselves for the courage to fight on, and the heart to remember those who are suffering on and near the front lines. Thye narrator tells the audience that the human spirit is a weapon against which the fascists will sooner or later find themselves powerless. It all ends with a final scene showing a crowd of people in some asian locale, pushing forward to an unknown site, on the far side of some railroad tracks. The crowd is made up of all ages and both genders, all walking with varying degrees of ability, but the crowd is flowing around one of its members who struggles on alone. Not a soul reaches down to help her. She is an indeterminate age, perhaps older, but also perhaps a younger woman beaten down and rendered old before her time by the horrors she must have seen. She is crawling painfully forward on her knees. By now, the whole audience, even the former snickerers, are silent, and when the lights flash on, we all file out, in silence. The horrors of war ...