Reviews

The story takes place in West Germany in the 1970s, a time of great public fear caused by the Red Army Faction's terror campaign of bombing and murder. Katharina Blum is seen going home one night with a suspected terrorist after a party, and she is subsequently arrested and interrogated. The police give her some fairly aggressive treatment and the tabloid newspapers smear her name. As you would expect in a left-wing political film, Ms Blum plays the innocent martyr in all of this, an apparently wrongfully accused woman whose rights are abused by both police investigators and the media. The cops and reporters are made to be caricatures of meanness and evil. The film-makers try every manipulative trick in the book to make us sympathize with her, and think ill of her accusers. When she refuses to cooperate in their investigation, she is portrayed as legitimately defending her dignity.

The problem with all of this of course is that to many politically moderate viewers, the woman thoroughly deserved everything that she got! [Some SPOILERS ahead] It is revealed at the end of the film that she did in fact aid and abet the terrorist, and in fact knew where he was hiding. She could easily have avoided all the negative newspaper coverage and police brusqueness by cooperating. Indeed she had a clear moral obligation to do so. That she felt a romantic attraction to the fugitive, is an incredibly selfish reason for her not to help the police. Only in the upside-down moral universe of the lunatic left does the anti-police and anti-media blame game in this film make any sense at all. Katharina Blum has only herself to blame for her loss of honor.

As a fan of fantastical and surreal cinema from the silent era, I really expected to like La Jetee, a tale of time-travel and memory told through narrated photographs. However, I found the movie to be more interesting as a concept on paper than on the screen. The idea of using a montage of photos is a rather good one. Unfortunately the photos that Marker actually uses turn out to be pretty bland, and he repeats them far too often, and cuts between images too quickly and regularly. Particularly irritating were the constantly reappearing shots of the prisoner/time-traveller with electrodes over his eyes as he undergoes experiments. It is not a bad image when it first appears, but it gets a little boring by its 50th appearance. I wish more thought had gone into the photography and more variation had been introduced into the editing.

While I know that the film is intended to be somewhat open-ended, one loose end in the narrative bothered me. Why did the scientists go to all the bother of killing the time-traveller at the end? Under the hypothesis that the time-travel was real, it was surely a costly waste of time for the scientists to chase the time-traveller down and shoot him. Under the alternative hypothesis that the time-travel was imagined or else purely a mental phenomenon, the scientists would then have killed the time-traveller relatively simply and costlessly by giving him, say, an injection of poison, so the shooting at the airport would be merely the time-traveller's imagination at work before he dies. However, if this latter explanation is the case, then the final airport scene is robbed of all its pathos, since the time-traveller-as-a-young-boy at the airport does not in fact witness his own adult death. Under this explanation, the shooting is imaginary and the presence of the boy is imaginary. I'm not sure there exists a satisfactory way to explain or motivate the ending of the film. But maybe future viewer comments can enlighten me.

This is my favourite Peckinpah film, and it is possibly the best thriller ever made, period. The tension (sexual and violent) is built up and sustained through incredible editing (eg. the inter-cutting of flashbacks of Susan George's rape into the village Christmas party skits). This movie is not just a must see, it is a must own.

One of the funniest and darkest "hero rides off" movie endings I've seen: Hoffmann drives off triumphantly into the night with the retarded child-molester he is protecting, leaving his wife at home with a house full of dead bodies.

Being (almost) right on the issues doesn't make this a good movie. Okay, okay I get the point that suppressing free thought in defense of orthodoxy is bad, just stop beating me over the head with it. Inherit the Wind is neither subtle nor complex - it is essentially a propaganda film (as others have noted), albeit one whose point of view most people would agree with.

With the exception of the enjoyably smarmy Gene Kelly as journalist EK Hornbeck, I found the over-acting by the lead players tiresome. The writing too seemed quite poor. As an exposition of the issues at stake, the court room arguments were completely garbled. Either attorney would be hard-pressed to win a high school debate, let alone a high profile court case.

Defense attorney Henry Drummond's private reasons for supporting his client (and the moral of the story) are particularly wishy-washy. Rather than supporting the teaching of evolution on the grounds that it is the best-substantiated hypothesis while creationism is demonstrably false, he instead defends it on the basis that minority thoughts and viewpoints should be freely expressed. Unfortunately, the logical implication of this line of argument is that, in the current day and age, when evolutionary theory is universally accepted, any biology teacher who wanted to teach the minority view of creationism should be allowed to do so.

The film's biggest sin, however, is its lack of courage towards the end. [Possible spoiler ahead] Rather than fully developing the idea of the moral culpability of the citizens of Hillsboro, this film ends up focusing all the blame on the intellectual arrogance of a single man, the prosecuting attorney, Matthew Brady. What a cop out! This movie just didn't have the guts to come out explicitly with the conclusion that the biggest villains were the southern voters who elected those supporting this silly legislation.