Overlooked Classic Movies: Ninotchka (1939)

 

 

By the time I was fourteen I had reached the conclusion that the greatest creative force in the history of Hollywood was Billy Wilder.

This might seem a remarkable realization for someone that young at that time but at that point in my life due to regular visits to Blockbuster Video and constant viewing of channels like TNT (then known for showing almost exclusively black and white films) I had seen an overwhelming majority of Wilder’s film, many of them multiple times.

The first was Some Like it Hot, which even an eleven year old was capable of realizing was one of the funniest movies ever made. Over the next three years I saw almost every single film of Wilder’s that was either nominated or won Oscars multiple times and considering that Wilder was at one point the most nominated writer-director in Hollywood history that covers a huge amount of movies. The Academy Awards has many mistakes with whom it nominates and excludes; in the case of Wilder it’s hard to find a film he was nominated for in some form that he didn’t deserve it.

Almost all of Wilder’s movies were on VHS by the early 1990s and by the time I turned sixteen I had seen several times almost every single major film in his long career. Four of Wilder’s films are listed among Roger Ebert’s first book of Great Movies: The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot and Sunset Blvd. A large part of the reason I think Wilder will always be the greatest filmmaker of all time, no matter how many great talents have come since, is that I can’t think of a single filmmaker who could make four masterpieces that are entirely different genres: Some Like It Hot is an out and out screwball comedy, Double Indemnity one of the greatest film noirs of all time; The Apartment is a comedy of manners and Sunset Blvd is a combination of tragedy and satire of Hollywood. None of the titans of cinema  -Coppola, Scorsese or Spielberg – have only occasionally been able to move among genres as well as Wilder did with ease and even the masters of this era – Christopher Nolan –  does not have the deep ability for dialogue that Wilder does. Aaron Sorkin is Wilder’s equal when it comes to writing but he will never be capable of the feats that Wilder was when it comes to directing, no matter how many films he makes.

And while those four movies are masterpieces Wilder made twice as many films that are classics by any definition. The Lost Weekend the first film for which he won Oscars is one of the darkest portrayals of alcoholism in the history of medium and even its (barely) happy ending doesn’t hide that it’s one of the bleakest films during the 1940s. Witness for The Prosecution was Agatha Christie’s favorite adaption of one of her own works and while many filmmakers and television writers have done superb versions over the years Wilder may have been the only one where the mystery mattered far less than the character development. (I will get to that specific film in a later entry.) Ace in The Hole was a film so cynical for its time that not only was it not screened after its release but it wasn’t released on DVD until 2008 where it’s now clear just how far ahead of the curve Wilder was when it came to the idea of the media circus. Stalag 17 was no doubt the inspiration for Hogan’s Heroes but watching it you see the darkness to it that makes it clear how insane the adaptation of it was even a decade later.

All of this demonstrates Wilder’s potential as a director. He didn’t start directing until 1942. Before that he had been credited with nearly two dozen films which he had written in is home country of Austria before he emigrated to America in 1937 with the rise of the Nazis becoming quickly apparent. (That his mother was left behind and disappeared was a burden he never recovered from to his dying day.) Much of his early career as a screenwriter – indeed, many of the movies he made throughout his entire career – dealt with either subtly or directly the influence of the Nazis on Europe. The first film he received an Oscar nomination for screenwriting (shared with his then writing partner Charles Brackett) was released in 1939 just before the Second World War began. This is clear the prologue in which it is stated: “This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette and not an alarm – and if a Frenchman turned out the light is was not on account of an air raid.”  It’s very telling that in the movie that officially became Wilder’s arrival on Hollywood he and Brackett decided to distract the viewing public about the threat of fascism by telling a movie about how ridiculous he finds communism -  and considering the membership status of so many of his new colleagues, that might have been a more deliberate poke in the ribs.

Ninotchka was directed by Ernest Lubitsch one of the greatest comic directors from the 1930s and 1940s known for ‘the Lubitsch Touch’ a term that every cinema fan knows of but can’t adequately put into words what it means for anyone who doesn’t know. What it seems to be in Ninotchka is his wondrous ability to take what was already turning out to be the greatest clash of ideologies of the 20^th century – capitalism versus communism – and make a delightful comedy about it while subtly acknowledging all of the dark moments of it throughout:

 

This can be seen in so many of the lines that Greta Garbo in the title role delivers throughout the movie. One of them has to be one of the darkest lines ever delivered in the history of comedies, particularly because it comes right at the time it was most prominent in everyone’s minds:

 

“How are things in Moscow?”

Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.

Who could possibly mention the purges of Stalin’s as a joke and just keep moving? Well, the same director who made To Be Or Not To Be and dealt with Nazis discussing a horrible actor: “What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland.”

Another line said by a Russian official to an unseen caller:

“Comrade Kasabian? No I am sorry. He hasn’t been with us for six months. He was called back to Russia and was investigated. You can get further details from his widow.”

None of the other exchanges have this level of darkness but Ninotchka delivers them with a straight face. Consider one of the more famous comic lines in the film by Leon:

“I love Russians! Comrade, I’ve been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last fifteen years.

Ninotchka replies: “Your type will soon be extinct.”

Perhaps the clearest definition of the Lubitsch touch is that he uses the dialogue of Wilder and Brackett in a way that he was superb at: none of the characters know they’re in a comedy. This may seem like an elementary distinction but its worth remembering film was only a decade out from the era of silent pictures where it was almost all ways clear what kind of movie you were watching within thirty seconds. Comedy itself was still being divided between movies made by comedy teams (The Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy) or low budget pictures. Many directors were already finding their feet in this genre – Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, for example but few were willing to go as far as Lubitsch was.

The plot to Ninotchka is somewhat more substantial then, say, My Man Godfrey or His Girl Friday because Wilder and Brackett did not believe in making their movies simply excuses for gags. This was their first unquestioned masterpiece as a team (they would win Oscars for Lost Weekend and Sunset Blvd before the partnership ended) and while it is remains a comedy you can see the dark edges throughout. The film involves three Russian attaches (we can’t help but thing of them as the Three Bears in a literal sense) who are on a diplomatic visit to sell the jewels of a former Russian princess. They are passing by a luxury hotel and each in term goes through the revolving door. They have a hotel to go to but none of them like it. Iranoff, played by that wonderful actor Sig Ruman implores Kopalski:

How can you want to stay at a place when where you turn on the hot water and cold water comes out? And when you turn on the cold water, nothing comes out at all.

The threat of Siberia is momentarily problematic but they overcome it. Their mission is significant as the man who comes to purchase their jewel makes clear. The Russians are in desperate need of money and they are basically selling the country off to get it. But interference comes when a waiter at the hotel they are staying at recognizes the jewels and reports to the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire)

Swana is relatively speaking one of the lucky ones; most of her family and friends have no doubt been executed. But in keeping with screwball comedies she’s the (slight) villain of the piece even though she’s technically on the right side of this. However it’s very hard to stay on her side when the two women face off and I have to say, this may be the one time we are on the side of Ninotchka’s cause:

 

Swana: Isn’t it amazing? One gets the wrong impression of the new Russia. It must be charming. I assume this is what the factory workers wear at their dances.

Ninotchka: Exactly! You see, it would have been very embarrassing for people of my sort to wear local gowns in the old Russia. The lashes of the Cossacks across our backs were not very becoming. And you know how vain women are.

Swana: Yes. You’re quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake when we let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns.

 

You kind of want Swana to end up on the chopping block for more than the fact she’s the romantic obstacle between the love story.

Count D’Algout or as he prefers to be knowns Leon is played by Melvyn Douglas one of the greatest character actors in the history of Hollywood.  Most of his best work was done when he passed middle age: he won two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor (Hud in 1963; Being There in 1979). There’s an argument that Douglas’s performance is the weak link in the entire film and that’s possible but I’m not sure another contemporary actor could have done the job any better. I read in Wilder’s biography that Cary Grant was under consideration but I don’t think that would have helped. Even at that point in his career Grant was always known as a great leading man and an authentic charmer. I’ve seen the majority of his best work and I’ve never seen a performance where he didn’t seem authentic. D’Algout, by contrast, is basically a gigolo in all but name: he’s essentially leeching off Swana in order to make his living and its clear he loves her money as much as he loves her.  Everything about Leon for the first half of the film is a complete act; it’s only when he meets Ninotchka that he becomes his true self. Woman chase after Cary Grant; Leon ends up chasing after Ninotchka.

Leon’s involvement becomes part of the film when he becomes the principal road block to the sale of the jewels. He does so in the grand capitalist tradition of getting the representatives drunk so that they can’t concentrate on the way he’s manipulating them. At a certain point it’s clear how much of that charm is a bluff. When one of the representatives is afraid of going to Siberia, he dismissively says: “I’ll send you a muff.” This may be the darkest line Leon says in the entire film; the fact that the three Russians then proceed to embrace him saying: “Comrade, why are you so good to us?” and begin to embrace and kiss him basically covers that.

That telegram ends up with Ninotchka being dispatched to handle the negotiations. She is made of far sterner stuff then the three of them are and among the funniest scenes in the film (honestly every seen with her is hysterical) comes from her arrival in Paris. Consider when the porter comes to carry her bags:

Ninotchka: Why should you carry other people’s bags?

Porter: Well, that’s my business, Madame.

Ninotchka: That’s no business. That’s social injustice.

Porter: That depends on the tip.

Or when she learns the cost of the room is 2000 francs a day.

Ninotchka: Do you know how much a cow costs…2000 Francs. If I stay here a week, it will cost the Russian people seven cows. Who am I to cost the Russian people seven cows?

Then she sends for the cigarette girl (a 1930s thing) and three cigarette girls who are now ‘friends’ of the delegation show up. Ninotchka knows exactly what’s happening and says: “Comrades you must have been smoking a lot.”

Greta Garbo had her misgivings about appearing in a comedy and was particularly nervous about the scene where she has to appear drunk. She thought it was vulgar. If anything Ninotchka demonstrates what clearly would have been the next phase of her career had she not long after decided to quit the business altogether not long after. As I mentioned Ninotchka has no idea she’s in a comedy which makes Garbo’s perfect deadpan delivery, already world famous since she’d entered the talkies, absolutely perfect for this entire film. I don’t know if the term ‘android’ has yet been coined in 1939 but it’s impossible not to watch Garbo’s work in the entire first half of the movie and not wonder if the Soviet Union has successfully completed one.

Because the moment Ninotchka and Leon meet Leon’s clearly fascinated by her because this is a woman completely immune to his charm. Their meeting on the Eiffel Tower is hysterical from beginning to end as well as their first romantic encounter. The scene where Leon is trying to seduce her and Ninotchka responds to him by saying: “Love is a romantic designation for a most ordinary biological or, shall we say, chemical process” is hysterical. Leon knows he’s making progress when she tells him: “Chemically, we’re already quite sympathetic.” And after he gives one of the most purple descriptions of love, Garbo responds deadpan: “You are very talkative.”

Then they kiss for the first time.

Leon: Was that talkative?

Ninotchka: No that was restful. Again.

(after the next kiss)

Ninotchka: Thank you.

Naturally it takes a while for Ninotchka to be won around to the idea of capitalism but strangely enough nature does so.

“I always felt a little hurt when our swallows deserted us in the winter for capitalistic countries. Now I know why. We have the high ideals. But they have the climate.”

Wilder calls back to that joke when Ninotchka returns to Russia and sees the swallows return. She wonders if it’s from Paris and she is assured so:

“You can see it in his whole attitude. He just picked up a crumb of our black bread, shook his head, and dropped it.”

That a movie this miraculous was made right on the brink of the outbreak of World War II is remarkable. There’s only one direct reference to what’s about to come. The three Russians are looking for their representatives and see a man who has Russian appearance. He walks up to a woman and they exchange a ‘Sieg Heil’. You can see their quiet disgust. (I suspect that it might have been a reference from Lubitsch in particular though Wilder could have put it in as well.) And the film goes out of its way not to think very highly of either communism, capitalism or the aristocracy finding all of them thoroughly ridiculous when viewed from the outside and inside.

It is highly unlikely that, even had this film been released in a year that wasn’t one of the greatest for films in history, Ninotchka would have done well at the Oscars. (The film was nominated for Best Picture, Actress, Original Story and Original Screenplay). It is possible that had the movie been released either in 1938 or 1940, Greta Garbo would have finally won the Academy Award she never received in her life. She received the Best Actress prize from the National Board of Review that year and finished in second place for the New York Film Critics. One could easily see her emerging victorious the following year over Ginger Rogers for the melodrama Kitty Foyle. In any case she was basically done with movies she made just one more film and then retired from acting forever.

But Wilder would spend the rest of his career poking hard at the values of both fascism and communism. The last two films he did before he became a director Arise, My Love and Hold Back The Dawn both dealt with the fallout Of America’s impending involvement in World War II. His second film as a director Five Graves to Cairo dealt with a British waiter trying to assassination Edwin Rommel right as the North African Campaign was going on. A Foreign Affair dealt with Germany in the aftermath of World War II and we all know about Stalag 17.

But he always knew Communism and Nazism were two sides of the same coin and he kept quietly reminded us how well one would throw over the other. In his minor classic One, Two, Three James Cagney plays the manager of the West Berlin Coca Cola plant and has to deal with a Communist falling in love with his bosses daughter. One of his critical aides is a man named Schlemmer who every time he accepts an order clicks his heels together. “Just out of curiosity, what did you doing the war?” he needles him. “I was underground. Subway. I didn’t even know there was a war going on.”  And he always remember the long history and how it never changes. At one point he’s asked where the Grand Hotel Potemkin is. He’s told it used to be the Great Hotel Goring and before that the Great Hotel Bismarck.

Wilder was a cynic but he was also a romantic. One of the last lines of the film has Leon saying: “Don’t take things so seriously. Nothing’s worth it really.” That line might as well have served as the credo for both Wilder’s film and how he handled his entire career and his life. That’s why he was named the greatest screenwriter of all time. He didn’t take any part of it seriously, even in his most serious films.

How Truman Didn't Start The Cold War, Part 3: Truman's Early Days In Office

 

 

Diplomatic historians and leftists alike seem to view the conditions for history from an academic perspective and as a result frequently remove the human element from the circumstances of their stories. This is particularly true in the case of both Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman.

In the eyes of those who want to shape a narrative the foreign policy failures of both men are entirely due to their own blindness and are absent domestic realities. Truman doesn’t have the burdens of either illegitimacy or conspiracy that surround LBJ’s approach to foreign policy but there is a similar sense of detachment. Harry Truman was, after all, ascending to the Presidency after twelve years when the sole occupant had been FDR a man who many considered inseparable from the job. He had led the nation through the Great Depression and through the Second World War and on the verge of victory in Europe he had died shockingly (though less so to the people around him).

In addition to the understandable pressure any man who have under those circumstances Truman was coming to the White House having only met with the President once since the election. He knew as much about FDR’s negotiations with Stalin and Churchill, his plans for a post-war world and the global situation as the average member of Congress – which is to say, almost nothing. He was not privy to any of the decisions that FDR had been since he had been named Vice President, and there’s an argument his predecessor Henry Wallace knew more about what was going on during the War than the current one. (Wallace had been named Secretary of Commerce as a consolation prize for being denied the Vice Presidency in 1944.) And as a reminder of just how in the dark Truman was about global plans, it wasn’t until after he was sworn in that he learned about the Manhattan Project.

Harry Truman not only had the immense burden of having to learn on the job it wasn’t until he was sworn in that he began to learn the nature of the thicket he was in. Truman’s first decision was to retain FDR’s cabinet and to keep on almost every adviser FDR had entrusted over the past several years when it came to World War II.  That many of these people had different opinions, many of them based on what FDR had told them, and that many of them would, like so many other Americans, judge Truman poorly for the simple fact of not being FDR, does not seem to factor in to many historians when it comes to judging Truman’s policy going forward. The fact that FDR had left no clear guideline behind for a post-war world and had, as has been mentioned, seemed determined to base his entire foreign policy entirely on his false judgment of the nature of Stalin, is absent from this consideration as well.

Indeed much of the blame on Truman by historians seems to hold him in contempt for the same reason many Americans and his contemporaries did: Truman was not FDR. They seem to have taken the same view that FDR did regard to the White House: that he was indispensable and no one else could follow in his footsteps. On a personal level, I now consider much of FDR’s behavior during his final year in office as something very close to a grievous dereliction of duty. He was aware of the state of his health and yet seemed to have no interest at all in the process of naming a vice president who would succeed him when he died. Furthermore, he made no effort to prepare his likely successor for what was going to lie ahead of him, nor give any impression up until the very end of what his plans were for a post-war Europe. That so much of his foreign policy seemed to be built more on personal relationships then defined policy – something that would not survive him – doesn’t seem to have entered his mind at all.

The kindest defense of FDR’s actions are that he was so focused on the end of the war and the peace that he neglected everything else. In that case, the burden must be shared by his inner circle who knew all too well the condition ‘the boss’ was in and did nothing to try and prepare for a day when he was gone. That is most likely because his own people were in awe of FDR and refused to believe he was mortal or fallible. (Bess Truman, it should be noted, was less inclined to be understanding in later years she made it clear she regarded Roosevelt’s isolation of her husband and his concealment of his health in the exact words I have: “a serious dereliction of duty.’)

So when Truman was sworn in, he knew that many of FDR’s inner circle already judged him harshly. After he was sworn in  David Forrestal, murmured: “Poor little fellow, poor little fellow.” Truman was unprepared, bewildered and frightened as his biographers have stated. One is reminded of the burden on Andrew Johnson after he was sworn in after Lincoln was assassinated. Most of FDR’s inner circle had a low opinion of Truman. They no doubt would have had a similar low opinion of Wallace, Jimmy Byrnes, William O. Douglas or any of the men who were considered for the Vice Presidency.

Truman had, as has been reported, the hallmarks of the everyman: he had a distaste for complexity and a preference for clear and fixed standards, along with a hesitation to engage in creative or conceptual thinking. He had  a very straight-forward approach to policy making. He never acted precipitously or erratically on major matters of policy, foreign or domestic. Despite the appearance of quick decision making, he was slow and cautious on important things. And he would lean more on his advisers than FDR ever did. He believed in the importance of keeping your word.

All of these, it should be noted, are things that at least theoretically the left and academics admire  and none of them were traits that FDR had. Yet the left tends to prefer FDR’s nebulous thinking towards policy rather than Truman’s decisiveness. This is ironic because particularly in his first weeks in office and much beyond that Truman made it clear he was going to try and handle the course FDR had set. He told press secretary Steve Early that he intended to follow through with the San Francisco conference on April 25^th. Before he went to sleep that night, he issued a statement assuring the public: “The world may be sure that we will prosecute the war on both fronts, east and west, with all the vigor we possess to a successful conclusion.”

On his first full day on  the job he familiarized himself with Roosevelt’s objectives and while he embraced the goals of his predecessor, by necessity of his near ignorance he was forced to alter the manner of their being implemented. He turned to his diplomatic advisers for guidance, and without knowing it altered the course of foreign policy decisions forever. Until Roosevelt, the President had personally determined the direction of American diplomacy and then told the State Department how to react. Truman reversed the practice and made policy after consultation with his foreign affairs experts.

He would meet with Secretaries Stettinius, Stimson and Forrestal, General George Marshall and Admirals King and Leahy. While the Eastern front looked to be brought to an end with six months, they believed Japanese surrender could not be expected for another year and a half. It was Japan that was his bigger problem. They were still engaged in fierce resistance despite the fire bombing of the cities. The only way to end the war there was an invasion of the home island which was certain to result in huge numbers of American casualties.

Truman would go to lunch with Congressional leaders for an informal luncheon. One of his goals was continued bipartisan support for the conduct of the war and the peace that would follow. He secured endorsement of his plan to address a joint session of Congress and informed Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan that he would not go to personally open the UN conference. He also sought assistance from men he believed had greater knowledge of his predecessors plans. One of them was Jim Byrnes, who in their meeting he made clear he wanted him to serve in his new administration, perhaps as Secretary of State. (Byrnes would indeed ascend to that office in the weeks to come.) Stettinius was clearly nervous about the tenuous nature of his position but in the initial weeks following Truman’s ascension to the Presidency he was critical in the early process of decision making.

Stettinius and Charles Bohlen spent much of Truman’s first full day in office briefing him on the ‘deterioration of relations with the Soviet Union’. Stettinius’s weaknesses were critical as he considered that not only Stalin was under influences within his own country and the victim of anti-Western forces within his own regime. He went out of his way to sing the praises of Harry Hopkins as the most critical men to explain his predecessors relationship with the other two members of the Big Three.

Truman sent two telegrams to Churchill in which he expressed the pressing problems of both Poland the negotiations involving Moscow. He claimed knowledge of FDR’s plans going forward (he didn’t) but he urged Churchill caution about making anti-Stalin statements on the floor of the House of Commons. The fact that Stalin had decided to send Molotov to San Fransico seemed to be a sign of hope. In preparation Averill Harriman was recalled to the United States.

Stettinius presented Truman with two lengthy memoranda, the first on the conference in San Francisco to develop what would be the United Nations parliamentary makeup. The second responded to Truman’s request as to principal foreign policy problems facing America. Truman took that one back home and spent the night reading it. It dealt with Churchill’s policy being in accord with America and its interpretations and his (apparently) rigid attitude towards Stalin. Truman also learned of how Stalin had already begun to chip away at the agreements in Yalta. What the new President’s private reactions are unknown. But he had other issues, many of which would be major strains on Soviet-American relations in the weeks and months to come. These included, but were not limited to, the composition of the Polish government, the occupation policy for Germany and Austria, and the new threat of Yugoslavia on Trieste.

The next day was FDR’s funeral. With his wife and daughter unable to join him, his companions to meet the train bearing FDR’s body back to DC were Henry Wallace and James Byrnes the former vice President and the man who had been the leading contender for Truman’s position. Afterwards Truman met with a seriously ill Harry Hopkins and asked for as much of a briefing on his experiences with FDR at all of the meetings involving the leaders. Hopkins’s description of Stalin was very telling. He referred to him as a ‘forthright, rough tough Russian…who could be talked too frankly.” Hopkins compared him to a tough political boss along the lines of Tom Pendergast, assured him of FDR and Stalin’s good relations and to do his best to maintain them. There is no sign, either then or later on, that Truman ever did anything but treat Hopkins’s opinion with total respect or that he had any intention of discounting them.

Later that day he received his first communique from Churchill in which the PM went out of his way to agree with Truman’s message as well as make it very clear that the ‘Lublin Government was resolved in independence’ and was opposed to the Stalin’s version.

On April 16^th just before he was about to address Congress for the first time as President, he met with Anthony Eden, foreign secretary. Both Eden and Churchill were hoping to use Molotov’s visit to break the logjam on Poland and they were less optimistic than the American government that this was a sign that the Soviets were more inclined to see reason. When Eden and Truman met they agreed easily upon a joint telegram to Stalin contesting the Soviet implementation of the Yalta agreement on Poland. While this was happening Harriman was meeting with Stalin and the Russian leader was brassily suggesting that Poland could be solved by the ‘Yugoslav formula” which was essentially a Marxist government. Harriman rejected it outright and the ambassador made it clear that to Stettinius that Molotov’s deputy was preparing a Soviet-Polish treaty of mutual assistance – completely counter to what had been discussed at Yalta. Truman would later claim this was an impetus for him to harden his attitude towards Molotov but at the time he gave no sign of immediate protest.

By the time Harriman returned to DC he was determined to challenge the policy of accommodation towards the Soviet Union that had been in effect to that point. He had none of the illusions that many of FDR’s chief advisers as well as the former President himself had about Stalin, making it clear:

“…the basic and irreconcilable difference of objective between the Soviet Union and the United States was (the Soviet Unions) urge for its own security to see Soviet concepts extend to as large an area of the world as possible.”

Much of this had happened during the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin already and was already well underway by the time of FDR’s death. Harriman informed Truman (who he barely knew) that American generosity had been ‘misinterpreted’ and that the United States ‘had nothing to lose by standing firm on issues that were of real importance to us.” Unlike his predecessor Truman, he was receptive to Harriman’s ideas, heard him out on what Soviet control of a foreign country was like and that he had to take a firm stance in negotiations. Truman admitted that he was not up on all details of foreign affairs and he would rely on his advisers for help. Harriman took Truman aside and told him he’d rushed back to make sure he understood – “as I had seen Roosevelt understand that Stalin is breaking his agreements. “

It was with this new insight Truman would have his first meeting with Molotov on April 22^nd. Truman met with Molotov warmly and tried to encourage him firmly to hold to existing agreements. He assured him that he stood behind everything FDR stood for and that would so everything he could to follow along that path. His approach was that of trying to facilitate relations between the three foreign secretaries – Molotov, Eden and Stettinius – going forward. The meeting was perfectly polite and their was no sign of discord. Truman walked away genuinely believing that he had fulfilled that firm approach. That he might have done so ineffectively is less important then the fact that he did so.

For the next two days there was no progress in any part of the negotiations between the three governments. Molotov absolutely refused to budge on any point that either the British or American teams might bring up. With the fate of the San Francisco conference in jeopardy, Eden wired Churchill and said that if there was no progress at the next day’s meeting the President should send for the three of them and himself speak plainly with Molotov. Eden expected Truman to send for the three foreign secretaries but Stettinius and Truman decided to see Molotov alone. They hoped that this proposed conversation would lead to a more reasonable attitude by the Russians. Regardless of it, the Polish talks should continue in San Fransisco. Truman had a meeting with his senior diplomatic and military advisors before this. All of the people he met with were FDR’s own people. He then asked for their opinions.

Admiral Leahy reported that the consensus made it clear the time had arrived to take a strong American attitude towards the Soviet Union and that no political harm could be done to our war prospects. The only dissenters from this were Henry Stimson and George Marshall, who had reservations. Truman had received independent confirmation from a military point of view that there was no reason to fail to stand up to the agreement at Yalta. His task was to make this clear to Molotov. He was not going to depart from FDR’s policy; his issue was whether he could hold the Soviets to agree to.

At 5:30 Truman received Molotov. Immediately he zeroed in on the Polish matter, emphasizing the United States government could not agree wot be a party to the formation of a Polish government which was not representative to Polish Democratic elements. He warned that if their was a failure of the allies to agree with the Yalta accord on Poland it was cast doubt on their unity in the post-war world. American policy needed public support and this was especially true in economic collaboration. When Molotov spoke in vague terms and attempted repeatedly to blame Poland for working against the Red Army, Truman interjected three separate times to the effect that all the Americans were asking was that the Soviet government agree to the decision on Poland. Despite this Truman continued to insist on his desire for the friendship of the Soviet government but observed this could only be on the basis of mutual observation of agreements and not on the basis of a one way street.

According to Truman’s memoir Year of Decision the meeting ended with an acrimonious exchange between Molotov and Truman. Molotov protested that: “I have never been talked to like that in my life” and Truman responded: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get to talked like that.” In the years that have followed many historians have ceased on that exchange as the critical moment of a shift in policy between FDR’s conciliatory approach during the War and the breakdown between communications that would lead to the Cold War.  There are several flaws with this idea.

The first is it may very well have been added by Truman for the purpose of spicing up his memoirs. Charles Bohlen, who was present at the meeting, has no record of it in his official minutes and it is only after Truman left office that he added it to his memoirs and there is no record of it in either the American minutes or Soviet minutes of the meeting. There is a strong possibility that future historians chose to cease on this exchange as the clearest example of events as there is little evidence in the historical record that follows of such a change.

The second argument is that does much to diminish what we know of the Soviet Union, not just in the case of Stalin but Molotov. It is hard to imagine either man being such shrinking violets that they would take this single insult as enough to decide to immediate reverse a policy in which they had been getting everything that they had wanted from the previous administration. It also ignores the fact that this initial meeting would not like have happened at all had FDR not passed away as well as the fact that for months previous to this, the early path towards building Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

And it goes against the immediate reaction of Molotov who left seeming unperturbed and apparently with the position the talks were going in a positive direction, Considering his position as Stalin’s righthand, he expected hostility – open or veiled – from leaders he considered imperialist. In his memoirs, he mocked Truman’s attempt to talk tough as ‘rather stupid.”

The American reaction at the time was mixed, depending on those involved. Stettinius thought Truman had done well and that had taken a step forward. When he reported this to Vandenberg, the influential Republican was thrilled and confided in his diary that F.D.R’s appeasement of Russia was over. Harriman was slightly surprised about how hard Truman had gone at Molotov but that may have been due to his not being present for the discussion between Eden and Stettinius that led to the initial meeting.

The major difficulty  - and what gives what little credence to historians about the exchange – was that it changed nothing afterwards. The meeting ended with Molotov remaining as inflexible about Poland as before, something that Eden telegraphed London with at the end of negotiations that night.

And finally, for all the effort to consider this some kind of major reversal, is belied by Truman’s determination to fulfill the pledges FDR had made before. While it is highly unlikely the more urbane Roosevelt would have been more diplomatic in his language Bohlen himself would say that Truman was ‘simply saying what Roosevelt would have said had he been alive. In any case the following day Stalin bluntly rejected the joint telegram sent by Truman and then accused America and Britain as ‘colluding to dictate terms to the Soviet Union.” When the meeting at UN did occur American objected but only verbally. After his initial response Truman backed away from further confrontation with Stalin. He avoided Churchill’s pressing for an early meeting of the Big Three, having no desire to engage in summit diplomacy while he was still obtaining a grasp of American policy. That approach remained firmly in effect as the War in Europe began to reach its inevitable end.

In the next part of this series I will cover the next two months of Truman’s  term,  how diplomacy began to shift after the war in Europe ended and how all of that changed in the leadup to the conference at Potsdam.

Last Meeting Between The Democratic Party And Hollywood

 

 

Hi. I know the timing is bad for you guys, particularly after what happened last Tuesday.  Although it wasn’t fun for us either, you know. Kind of why we’re here in the first place.

God, this is harder than I thought it would be.  Look, we’ve just got to pull the Band-Aid off.

This hasn’t been working for either of us for a long time. No I need to be completely honest. I don’t think this relationship has ever been healthy. Not for us and probably not the country.

Look I know why its always been awkward. The whole HUAC- Red Scare thing. I know that everybody and his uncle was trying Communism back then and we didn’t deal with it well with you guys.  Honestly you were relatively young, we’d been around for more than a century and I guess we should have been more understanding. But honestly? You guys call us being blind. You were fine with what Stalin was doing. You don’t get to say you’re sorry more than a century later; you guys were all cool with it well past the expiration point. Was what Joe and Dick did you guys pretty horrible? Absolutely. But we didn’t exactly get away with our reputations intact either; they pretty much tarred us with it ever since. Maybe that’s the only reason we hooked up in the first place, the whole common enemy thing.

And you were young and cool and famous and we gravitated towards that because we wanted to be cool too.  We let Jack hang around with the Rat Pack and we thought it got us the White House. We were blind to his flaws too for a long time; honestly the older ones still are. But we did some pretty ugly things as a result of him and you guys kind of acted as go-betweens.

And we never really did learn from those early days.  I mean, actors and politicians have a lot in common, I know.  And we bonded over certain things? You hated Vietnam? We hated Vietnam., though honestly some of your other friends never truly bought that.  We did some crazy shit in the 1970s, basically let you guys hang out with us at the DNC.  Warren and Shirley basically had the ear of the McGovern campaign all the way through. You’d think we’d have learned something from that after losing 49 of 50 states but like I said, we’re slow learners.

And you did say all the right things about Reagan. In hindsight we should have realized that was a problem. He was, for better or worse, one of your own and you turned on him the moment he changed parties.  You said he forgot what he brought him here. Thing is that you guys always had more in common with Reagan than you wanted to admit.  Sure he really did do a lot of things to wreck the government for the rest of us but…you didn’t exactly turn away those tax breaks he gave you. Or really all the other ones that the Republicans administrations have all these years. You say he didn’t share you values and maybe that’s true socially.

This is going to get awkward but we’ve got to tell the truth. I know you and your friends have spent the last twenty years saying all the right things. About the War on Terror, about Occupy Wall Street, defunding the police, all of the right social causes and we are grateful about that. But the thing is…honestly, you have more in common with everybody you’ve been preaching against the last twenty years.

It's not that were grateful for everything you’ve tried to do for us ever since but I think it’s really been a problem of the messengers.  We’ve spent so much of the last twenty years rallying against corporations and the ‘top one percent’ which we should be doing and need to do. The problem is, it never helps when it comes from Mark Ruffalo or Oprah Winfrey or Billy Porter.

Because you guys do have more in common with Elon and the Koch Brothers and yes Trump then the people you claim to be speaking for.  This should be framed as a war between the billionaires and the working class. And you guys, well, you’re not even the upper middle class. You guys are multi-millionaires and some of you, like George and Taylor, are billionaires. You can’t in good conscious claim to speak for the common man when the closest you get to it is playing them in a Netflix series.

And the thing is, the voters do get that. They’ve gotten it for a while, actually and we’ve been pretending it isn’t a problem. We all know the reason why, of course, and that’s money.  We can rage as much as you want about money ruining politics but your problem isn’t with Citizens United, it’s with capitalism.  And since we can’t find an alternate way to exchange goods for services, we have to face the fact that money isn’t going anywhere. Some people will always have more than others. It’s not fair and we need to do something to fix that. But having you guys as the spokesman for it does tend to make us look like hypocrites.

Now I have no doubt you guys do care about all the things you claim to and they are worth fighting for. But the problem is… you guys can afford to think about them and the majority of Americans can’t. To be fair, this is part of our own internal messaging problem and we’re obviously going to have to look at that going forward. But if last Tuesday taught us anything, it taught us that the majority of Americans really don’t care about everything you in particular care about.

They don’t care about climate change. They don’t care about abortion. They don’t care about the rights for the LGBTQ+ community. They don’t care about what’s going on in Gaza or the Supreme Court. They don’t care about what Trump didn’t during in his first term and might very well do in his second. That’s not fair, they do care – but not as much as you or I want them do.

What they care about is the economy. That’s the thing we keep getting into fights with your heroes Bernie and AOC about really, and honestly we should have had that argument with them six years ago. I grant you the platform they thought up was bold and each individual issue alone of their bills would be worth addressing. Some of their other major issues are really extreme and really we shouldn’t be surprised very few of them got elected.

What none of their proposals had seven years ago and still don’t are things to help the blue-collar, working class voter.  Taxing the one percent is something to be done but there’s nothing about how that money gets in to their pockets. Cancelling student loan debts doesn’t help the Americans who’ve never graduated college. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t help if you haven’t been working in awhile or if your job is becoming redundant.  And all of the voting and civil rights in the world do nothing to help them decide whether to pay the electric gas bill or groceries next month.

I admit some of our more extreme members will admit that we have failed these people but their problem is that they don’t seem to think there’s anything they can do – or in fact, should do – to help them.  In their minds, they made their beds when they chose to be born in a red state, couldn’t afford to move to go to college or decided to vote Republican in the first place. And while that is their problem, the fact remains over the last decade its increasingly become clear that you have that exact same attitude. I’m looking at you Bradley Whitford. You may have starred on The West Wing but right now Jed Bartlet would have canned your ass and he would be right too.

Because let’s face it: much as you might advocate for these issues, you’ve been able to afford to do so. That’s something the working class voter knows every time you choose to give a speech at an awards show or tweet something anti-Trump.  You can claim that the Republicans don’t have America’s best interest at heart but it’s not clear you care much about people who aren’t Democrats. And they know that and it’s been a problem.

And it doesn’t help matters when people like Eva Longoria and Laverne Cox talk about leaving the country after election day. I understand you’re scared and upset – hell, we all are – but as people who have such carefully crafted images do you get what a bad look that is? Sorry for all you Latinos are going to be deported, maybe I’ll see you in Mexico on my next shoot. It’s going to be tough for African-American and transgenders in this country, so I’m going to either keep as much estrogen as I can for myself or go to another country where it will be easier to procure. The voters sent a message on Election Day. You don’t like the message they sent, so you’re running away. Understandable to be sure, but it’s incredibly hypocritical and considering how much time and energy we spend accusing Republicans of beating out of touch with the average American that really shows how out of touch you guys have been.

But to be fair, this is at least partially on us. We got so caught up in the Hollywood whirl and the certainty that somehow your aura would get us what we needed that not only have we missed that it hasn’t, we haven’t registered what we were losing. And that is the working class vote. We once managed to get 60 to 65 percent of it in an election. Biden won in 2020 but only managed to get 38 percent. I don’t want to think what the numbers going to be this time but considering that there are always going to be more working class Americans then there will ever be famous people, we have to start trying to convince them to come back to us.

And that means we have to end this. I know this might be painful but let’s not kid ourselves; you guys have gotten a lot more out of it than we have.  You get to appear on political shows, talk to the UN, speak at Democratic fundraisers, even write op-eds for the Times and talk about subjects that, if we’re being honest, you don’t know the first thing about.  Hell George when you started to push Biden out, the first paragraph of the op-ed you admitted your only qualification was that you’d raised a lot of money for Democrats. Robert Reich called you out on that and he was right too.  When they do the autopsy on the campaign, your little act will be a big part of it.

I think the best thing for all of us is for the foreseeable future you keep supporting us in the style we have become accustomed to. The difference is you don’t get to mention our names for the next three years at least. Talk about yourselves, it’s what you’ve always done best; you were really doing that when you claim to be talking about politics.  And it’s not like your business is in any danger yet – and honestly, if it is, the proletariat kind of have a point.

Of course you can always leave the country as you’ve been planning but I have to tell that’s going to be a worse look for you. The next few years are going to be tough for a lot of people who don’t have the options of their own private jet or their own endorsement deals. You’ve said you wanted to stay behind the scenes and fight. Now’s your chance to do just that. Just keep your mouths shut and your checkbooks open.

 

Honestly we’ve been making a mistake even having you sign fundraising emails for the last twenty years.  The only people we’ve convinced are those who are already converted and as we keep finding out, that’s not who we have to win back. I don’t know how we do it actually, but having Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert doing so isn’t help.

Now for the record you guys can still keep talking about what  a shitshow the country’s turning into on your late-night comedy shows or podcasts. The difference is, we’re not going to appear on them either. From now on all Democrats will only appear on news networks  rather than late show, only talk to political media and never appear on another late night comedy show again. And we’re going to start actually campaigning in places that wouldn’t watch your shows to begin with.  Let’s not kid ourselves, many of you may not be around in a few years and we need to find new ways to get the word out.

And by all means make your films and TV shows about the situation, either directly or in thinly veiled metaphor. We do actually like most of your films and TV shows. But I think the best thing for both us and America is that we all stay in our own lane. You guys promote your movies, we’ll promote our agenda for the people.  Yours might be easier to sell, but let’s be honest we have to make ours more palatable.

Before you go, we’d appreciate it if all of you gave us your keys to the DNC offices across the country and turned off all social media feeds tied to us. You’ll just have to post about your next film instead from here on. And if that’s a hardship for you…well, then this clearly was the right decision.

Movies I Found While Looking For Porn: Chloe (2010)

 

In a review of Mary & George this past year I mentioned that there are few actresses who bare themselves emotionally as well as physically as Julianne Moore has in my lifetime. I originally rented Chloe to see Moore to do the former and was rewarded by that. I wasn’t expected her to spend far more time doing the latter and doing it brilliantly.

Moore was very busy between 2009 and 2010; that same year she got just as naked for comic purposes in the sublime comedy The Kids are All Right a movie which earned Oscar nominations for everyone except, no surprise, Moore. As I’ve mentioned in the previous article for a woman whose received five Oscar nominations and one Academy Award to date she still seems ridiculously underrecognized by, well, everyone. She is one of the few actresses to be nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the same year (2002 for Far From Heaven and The Hours) and in all honesty it should have happened in 1999 as well. And in keeping with the Oscars nominating performers for the wrong film she was nominated for Best Actress in the overblown The End of The Affair and ignored for her incredible work in Magnolia, a film that has entered the world of classic far longer. Moore bares her flesh in Affair but she’s restrained in everything else. In Magnolia she lays everything all out on the table and nobody listens to her. And in keeping with how the Oscars get it wrong more often than not, the Oscar she won was for Still Alice, which is frankly the least surprising work of her career.

Moore spends as much of her career in roles where the emotions are always just beneath the surface and she honestly does that nearly as well as any other actress working in my lifetime. She did so perfectly in both Far From Heaven and The Hours playing two very different 1950s housewives burdened by their era; Charley the friend of Colin Firth’s A Single Man who is his soulmate despite his sexual preference; Emily is Crazy, Stupid, Love who deals with the burden of her life by having an affair. She was already fifty when Chloe was being made but age cannot wither nor can she scale her divinity. When she suspects her husband of infidelity you do question why anyone would push Moore aside for a younger model.

Moore plays Catherine Stewart, a gynecologist living in Toronto, apparently a successful one. (Like all professionals in the movies, she lives in a house that looks straight out of Architectural Digest.) One day she looks down from her office window and sees a woman who behaves very much like a high-priced call-girl. Catherine is not the kind of person who would judge this; the two have a line of work which must involve a frequent crossover. Then her husband David comes back late from his flight from Toronto and she finds a disturbing photo on his iPhone.

The next day she goes back to the hotel where she saw the girl in question, makes eye contact with her in the bar and arranges for the two of them to talk in the powder room. That girl is Chloe who with perfect calm tells her that single women are not usually her clients. Couples, sometimes.

The moment that I first saw Amanda Seyfried on Season 1 of Big Love I knew by the time Season 1 was over that I was looking at the next great actress. I had missed Mean Girls somehow as well as her work on Veronica Mars but even if I had seen either I knew that playing Sarah, the oldest daughter of the Hendrickson clan I was looking at one of the most accomplished actresses of my generation and she wasn’t even 21 when the first season ended. This is only slight hyperbole on my part. I’ve always considered Big Love one of the most underrated shows of the 2000s (look for an article in that series down the road) and while this was a show filled with some of the best performers working at the time, among them Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin – all of whom were doing by far some of the best work they ever did in any medium – that I never took my eyes off Seyfried the moment she appeared on screen. Sarah was the only character who knew from the beginning of the series just how potentially poisonous her family was and had the clearest moral compass. Like Sydney Sweeney a decade later she had the face of a doe-eyed innocent, but there was always something lurking beneath the surface, something on the verge of complete breakdown. She was by far the character I cared about the most on that series and while I was sad she left the series before the final season aired, I knew great things were ahead of her, things that Mamma Mia!  hadn’t even come close to tapping.

In the title role we get what is the first great performance of Seyfried as an adult actress. She may be half Catherine’s age but its clear from the moment they meet  that she’s wiser and more experienced than the older woman. Moore is almost always the wiser woman in so many of the films she does;  here we see her mixing being both emotionally raw as well as easily manipulated. Catherine tells Chloe she suspects her husband is having an affair and she wants to test to see if he would pick up another woman. She tells Chloe where her husband has lunch every day.

For a movie that is about sex in so many ways much of the sex is discussed graphically rather than performed. There are several meetings that follow where Chloe meets with Catherine and, in the manner of someone discussing a grocery list, tells her about their meetings. She describes their encounters in such detail and so unemotionally that the viewer, like Catherine, has no reason to doubt her.

Just as Seyfried was superb at holding the screen with performers twice her age on Big Love, she is just as impressive in her scenes with Moore. We’ve seen Chloe lay herself bare, both in scenes professional and clinical. She tells Catherine that she’s good at what she does because its clear she’s clever enough to know what the client desires – really desires, as opposed to what they say they do. With each meeting she begins to talk in more graphic details about her encounters. You would expect Catherine to be jealous or dissolute. But with each encounter we read Moore’s face just well enough to know there’s something going on that she herself may not be aware of.

Eventually she breaks off the arrangement. Then she ends up going to the same hotel where Chloe is. What follows is the scene that I was expecting but what makes it erotic – not pornographic – is that watching it you can tell very clear that even though Catherine supposedly initiated the encounter Chloe put the idea in her head. When it ends, she finally seems dissolute that has nothing to do with the encounter – or even the fact that she’s just had one with the same woman her husband did.

It seems I’ve told you too much. I’ve actually only scratched the surface. It might make sense if you knew of Egoyan’s work. Many if not most of his films are set in Canada and seem to be about things they actually aren’t. In Exotica, a movie that Roger Ebert listed as one of the greatest films ever made, he sets a film around a strip club which is hands down the least sexy one you’ll ever go to. Most people question their life choices when they end up at a strip club; when the performers are dressed as schoolgirls, dancing to Leonard Cohen you actually question to creator. The Sweet Hereafter, for which Egoyan was nominated for directing and writing is based on a Russell Banks story that tells the story of how a bush crash in a small town led to lawyers defending the families and finds a community unable to heal. Felicia’s Journey tells the story of an Irish teenager who travels to England to find the boyfriend who is the father of her child and ends up in a bizarre relationship with a catering manager and son of TV chef, played by the late Bob Hoskins. Ararat is the story of how a young man recounts how his life was changed during the making of a film about the Armenian genocide. Even when Egoyan makes films that are theoretically sexual there are always disturbing undertones, such as with Exotica and Where The True Lies: sex for Egoyan is just something that is a cover for deeper insecurities.

Chloe is wiser and more experienced that Catherine and its clear as to what she wants from this from the moment this gets started. She is so clear and unemotional in every aspect of her life that when in the final third of the movie her lies become unraveled  - by Catherine, not by Chloe -  that we find ourselves questioning what’s happening. So much of what we see in the film is the kind of material you would expect from a 1970s porn film and I imagine there very well may be some with similar plots. The reason it’s clearly not porn is that we’re asking questions even after the film ends.

At one point she asked how she can relate to her clients, who might seem unattractive or repugnant. She makes it clear she has rules and they include gratifying the client’s desires if he can pay and she doesn’t feel in danger. How does she endure it? “I try to find something I can love.” So the question is what does Chloe want from this? We’re no more sure of it at the end of the film than we are at the beginning. We know nothing about her backstory during the movie and that’s clearly a deliberate choice by Egoyan. In his review of the film Ebert says Egoyan “never reveals all of the motives, especially to his characters.”  Is Chloe acting out a fantasy of her own? Is this wish fulfillment on her part? Is what happens in the final act of the film a role play she’s wanted to do her whole life but never got the courage to until now? Is all of this her a case of her wanted to be the client for once?

The movie comes to a conclusion that may appear arbitrary to some and unsatisfying to others. That’s keeping with how Egoyan tells this story. Despite the fact that Chloe gives the opening narration she’s the only character at the end of the film we don’t understand. I think that’s the right decision by Egoyan.

This is where I should tell you that the husband David is played by Liam Neeson. While this movie was being made his wife Natasha Richardson was hospitalized with a skiing accident that led to the brain injury that killed her a few days later. Neeson returned to the set not long after, the filmmakers changed the script accordingly and two days later he left the set. I don’t know whether this means anything or not but there’s a direct change between the kind of work Neeson did before and after Chloe. Most of the movies Neeson did were, as you might know, period dramas not just Schindler’s List but the title roles in Ethan Frome, Michael Collins and Kinsey. He was making action films among this, of course, even before Taken he’d played Henri Ducard in Batman Begins and Qui-Gon in Phantom Menace. After he finished Chloe he essentially has leaned full-force into the action hero level of his career and only occasionally (Widows, Mark Felt) have we even got hints of the great actor he once was.

It's a pity because even in his small role in Chloe you get a sense of the everyman he was. Neeson was close to 60 but still remarkably goodlooking even then and he plays the kind of husband and father. David is the kind of professor who teaches classical music and you can believe he’s a good teacher as well as possibly unfaithful. The scene where David and Catherine have it all out on the table is one of the best in the film because its as much about Catherine’s insecurities rather than David’s and both Neeson and Moore handle it perfectly. There’s a critical scene where Chloe is in the same room with Catherine and David and he has to tell us everything with his expression and tone. He does so perfectly.

Seyfried spent much of the next decade, perhaps inevitably, being caught in the kind of foolish rom-coms that Hollywood only seems capable of producing for women her age or comedies that were beneath her (her work with Seth McFarlane is the obvious example) Every so often, with a movie like First Reformed or A Mouthful of Air would we get a hint of what was beneath the surface that openly  warm look. As you might expect she had to go back to TV to find the work that was worthy of her, first in  a small but critical role in Twin Peaks: The Return, her incredible role as Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout and then as an investigator trying to get the truth of the mattered in The Crowded Room.  I expect greater roles for her on television in the years to come and that the Oscar nomination she got for Mank is far from her last.

This film is about Chloe and yet she remains as much a cipher at the beginning as the end. That’s the right decision. Egoyan, as Ebert says, is more interested in voyeurism that the sexual experience and that is the nature of the filmgoer. And we know were just looking at the surface that is not what appears to be. It’s a tangled web he weaves and it is not the thing you’d expect from a film that got the description as a -knockoff of a straight to video film from the 1990s’ even by some prominent critics. That’s what Chloe looks like on the surface. There’s a lot more beneath.

 

Sweetpea Shows The Advantages of Not Being Seen

 

 

Spoiler Warning for Season 1 of Sweetpea:

 

My memory is not what it used to be  but I believe one of the first Monty Python sketches I saw was one from Season 2: “How Not To Be Seen”. It’s a filmed segment set in the woody sections of London and it features John Cleese as his unctuous narrator telling us that ‘in this picture’ so and so ‘can not be seen’. The first two times someone stands up when they are called, they are shot. They eventually learn not to stand up but then the places they hide behind explode and, well, it escalates from there.

Considering that one of the catchphrases for the just completed Sweetpea is “People don’t really see me” and that the action in the series takes place in one of those small Yorkshire villages that the Pythonites peopled with salt-of-the earth idiots and who, apart from having iPhones and social media, don’t seem to have gained much intellect in the half century since, one could look at Rhiannon Lewis, played to dark and hysterical perfection by Ella Purnell, as by saying the advantage of not being seen is that you can get away with murder. But as the series approached its final episodes we learned something that Rhiannon seems incapable of learning she’s thought she’s been invisible for so long that she hasn’t really been paying attention to other people.

She spent most of Season 1 obsessed with abducting and murdering Julia Blankenship, the middle school bully who we have thought made her life miserable and has forced to be the kind of person she is her whole life. In that mindset, the two murders she had committed to that point – both of horrible men who were themselves bullies – justified the brutal killings she committed. The problem is, and the writers do a brilliant job of making it clear in the episodes that follow, it is that Rhiannon is so convinced in her image as a milquetoast that she wants to draw attention to herself.

The death of her father is supposedly the impetus that leads her down this path and its something we want to believe far longer than the series lets us. But by the end of the series, we’re getting a very clear picture of Rhiannon, one that turns from a mostly sympathetic character until we realize, reluctantly, that she’s really closer to Walter White than we hoped. What’s happened to her has brought about the person she really was all along.

The problem is, for one thing, she’s not nearly as clever as Walter and certainly not a good judge of human nature. This becomes very clear when she manages to abduct Julia at the halfway point of the series but before she can kill her she eludes Rhiannon’s grasp and she spends the next two episodes tied up. To this point Julia has seemed like the bully and monster in every observation of her and there are clearly flaws in her character. When Rhiannon tries to convince her to confess to being a bitch Julia goes out of her way to act as if Rhiannon’s crazy. We want to believe that Julia’s so genuinely sociopathic that she’s determine to gaslight Rhiannon all the way to the end or that she’s going to push Rhiannon so far that she’ll kill her to shut up. The problem is Rhiannon goes to see Julia’s fiancée Marcus as part of an interview, mainly to find out just how horrible Julia is.

By this point Rhiannon is taking on the nature of the classic serial killer: she’s now listing Julia as the third potential victim and reported her as missing. The fact that she hasn’t killed Julia yet does show that she’s becoming reckless as well as arrogant: she wants to have the scoop ahead of the other reporters and by this point she genuinely thinks the staff isn’t smart enough to know she could get away with it. When she goes to his house she steals wine and makes a mess in secret and she also wants to find out dirt on Julia. When she ends up learning that Marcus is a monster – and has in fact been regularly emotionally and physically abusing Julia for years – it changes things immensely.

By the penultimate episode she’s determined to ‘rescue’ Julia from Marcus and it doesn’t occur to her by this point that Julia may have realized this is the only way out of both predicaments she’s in. The series is clever enough to make it unclear whether this is out of the dual traumas or whether or not Julia genuinely might see a way to use Rhiannon after all this – and in either case, it’s worth noting she’d still have the clearer moral compass. By this point Julia has made it clear that Rhiannon may be using Julia as a scapegoat for her  own shit life – and that Rhiannon doesn’t seem to have realized it.

Marcus, it’s worth noting, does deserve to die;  when he comes to ‘rescue’ Julia, he immediately becomes the kind of emotional terror he’s clearly been during their whole relationship. He blames her for being kidnapped and is sure she’s been raped  - and that she asked for it. He takes on a pattern in his final moments of both being an incel and a misogynist and the fact that Rhiannon just walks out of the shadow and pushes him over the balcony – in front of Julia – shows that she’s reached a new level of her psychosis.

In the season finale Rhiannon is face-to-face with Marina (Leah Harvey) the one cop on the entire force who has figured out that she is the killer that has been stalking the town. Fittingly the teaser begins with both women using the line ‘People I’d love to kill’ and saying ‘this bitch’ to each other in the voiceover.

Marina should be the sympathetic character: like Rhiannon she is clearly bullied at her job, overlooked by her bosses and is the only cop who knows who they’re looking for. But the writers go out of their way to show that Marina is, in many ways, the other side of the coin as Rhiannon including the fact that she’s defying her superiors, following hunches instead of orders and perhaps most importantly violating the rules of evidence. These are the kind of things that would have made characters like her a hero even a few years earlier in procedurals so the fact that her boss chews her out for violating every rule possible – and the fact she acts like a dick to her superiors – is a funny sort of progress.

Rhiannon wants to move on with her life during the final episode but even before the final minutes its clear she’s in the midst of a semi-deluded state. Julia spends the night hanging out with her getting drunk and celebrating her freedom but the fact that Rhiannon really thinks that the two can be friends – just hours after she was prepared to kill her – shows that Julia has a clearer perception of things than she does. When the two go into the newsroom in the final scene with them together, Julia describes her captivity and hostage situation in terms vague enough that could refer to her life with Marcus but which Rhiannon knows very well could refer to the last two days. Julia disappears at the end of the episode and its not clear what will happen next between them.

By this point the edges of Rhiannon’s veneer have begun to flake. When she finds Marina in her home (the DI broke into her house the previous night) Marina tells her in no uncertain terms she knows the truth. She might not be able to use it evidence but she’s on to Rhiannon’s little game now. She knows, perhaps before Rhiannon does, that she will kill again. In their final scene Rhiannon starts taking on the veneer of the bullies she’s spent the series claiming she was fighting against.

Then comes her confrontation with Craig, who’s been nothing but warm and sweet to her the whole series even as he’s been trying to buy her father’s business from her. When she tells him “she just wants to be friends” he’s clearly hurt and pivots demanding that he sell the business. This would seem like a callous act but Craig’s already provided her with an alibi, so her treatment of him is very cold. She agrees to sell him the busy and tries to regain the moral high ground. He cuts her off and tells her flatly he doesn’t like the new her one bit.

That night AJ, the junior reporter who she’s been flirting with all season, comes to her home. The two of them have sex for the first time and it seems like a great things to come – and then AJ gets a text of the murder weapon, which he knows is Rhiannon’s.

The final scenes of the episodes are heartbreaking; we’ve seen versions of them before in countless movies and procedurals but never with the genders reversed and never with the man being so shocked. AJ has been one of the only moral forces of good in all of Sweetpea which no doubt meant he had to die. But the fact that Rhiannon kills him so brutally and without a second thought is one of the most daring things I’ve seen any TV series do. We’ve seen countless antiheroes commit countless murders over the last quarter of a century and we have seen quite a few women do the same in recent years. I didn’t think I had the capacity to be shocked by these kinds of killings any more.

So it says something for the writers that they manage to do so in the final episode with Rhiannon’s butchering of AJ. Any possibility of her being a sympathetic character may well have gone out the window: she’s violated the code of Dexter Morgan – never kill an innocent – in Season 1. And she may be exposed almost immediately: the last moment of the episode shows the front door of her home being opened and her sister – whose calls she’s been avoiding for the rest of the series – walking in the front door.

Sweetpea is one of the most imaginative, darkest and funniest – yes funniest – series I’ve seen in 2024. Ella Purnell has had a hell of 2024 and I suspect this performance, along with her work in Fallout,  will make her a favorite for awards nominations by both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards, depending on the category. I could see this series being categorized as a comedy and not have the same dispute I might with, say The White Lotus being called a drama.  Yes this is one of the bloodiest series of 2024 but it’s hard not to enjoy this in a way you might not be able to, say, 3-Body Problem or even The Bear. Rhiannon is honestly more likeable and relatable than so many of the other protagonists we’ve seen on dramas in recent years and Purnell lends a fair amount of comedy to her work along with the bloodlust. Many of the other performers, particularly Harvey and Jeremy Swift, show comic chops throughout and there is a very relatable tone throughout. I mean, who doesn’t want to kill the cashier when they’re talking on the phone instead of ringing up your groceries?

It's clear given the ending the show has the setup for a Season 2 and as I mentioned in my original review, it is based on a series of novels so its not like there isn’t enough material for quite a few season. The question, of course, will be not only the schedule of the writers but the cast. Purnell is going to need to film Season 2 of Fallout soon; Jeremy Swift might be returning to Ted Lasso and considering how many people didn’t survive season 1, they’re going to find new regulars. But I know there will no doubt be people – myself included – who would gladly wait the usual two to three years between seasons of British TV to watch Rhiannon make yet another list and see her face off against Maxine. In the meantime, always remember to be polite to the little waifs of the women of the world out there. They can clearly hold a grudge – and in Rhiannon’s case, a knife  as well.

My score: 4.5 stars.