predone Reviews

McKeever and the Colonel (1962–1963)

TV successor to *The Private War of Major Benson*?

[7/10 · 27 March 2009]

*McKeever and the Colonel* almost certainly got greenlighted in 1961 as the result of a favorable reception for the television broadcast of Charlton Heston's *The Private War of Major Benson* (1955).

The antics of McKeever, his allies and his enemies among the military school student body, made for harmless entertainment even by the standards of the early '60s. I came to think of it as a boys' version of *The Phil Silvers Show* (1955-1959), made memorable by the rapscallion character of MSgt. Earnie Bilco, then pounding away in re-runs on NBC.

Those who are only familiar with the absolutely godawful 1995 Damon Wayans knock-off of Heston's movie (*Major Payne*) owe themselves a look at the much, much better original, and would certainly enjoy seeing *McKeever* if someone had the sense to issue the series in re-runs or on DVD. --

A Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)

Theatrically re-released in the '70s

[7/10 · 13 April 2006]

While I also remember having seen this film broadcast on television in the '60s, I recall it having been theatrically re-released - on a small scale, as Saturday matinée fare - in the early '70s.

I was in college back then, and looking through the paper I noticed an advertisement for a film titled *Journey to the Beginning of Time* showing in several of the suburban theaters around Philadelphia. Curious as to whether it was the same film I'd caught on TV about a decade before, I gave up a Saturday morning's worth of sleep - precious to a college student! - and SEPTA'd to the nearest movie house named in the advertisement.

My suspicions proved correct. Rather badly dubbed and obviously edited in a fairly clunky fashion, with cruddy sound and picture, it was nevertheless the same interesting flick with a novel science fantasy premise and good pacing. Surprisingly, it had pretty good "sense of hazard" elements (including the river petering out in a carboniferous-era swamp too shallow to float the Central Park rental boat through) to keep the audience's attention.

Given my grandkids' present fixation upon all things dinosaurian (they've worn out every *Land Before Time* VHS tape we'd bought for them, and my youngest grandson - five years old - is presently pestering us to buy them anew in DVD), I've got two questions about this old Czech film.

(1) Why the heck hasn't a somewhat cleaned-up version been released for home viewing? There's obviously a market for it, antique stop-motion animation notwithstanding.

(2) Why has there been no apparent interest in the entertainment industry regarding a modern-day remake of the film? Given current advances in CGI - and the lower costs of more mature special effects technologies - it could be done for a much lower budget than something like *Jurassic Park* (1993; approximately $62,000,000).

Considering the staying power of the *Land Before Time* franchise (one released theatrically and nine more direct-to-video, if memory serves), both the original Czech movie and a well-devised remake could find sales as "safe" viewing fodder for pre-teens like my grandkids.

The video sales would be just as much an evergreen, too, as I've found to my continuing sorrow as I've had to buy a copy of each *Land Before Time* movie for each of my kids' families as the grandchildren grow into an interest in Littlefoot & Co.

Battleground (1949)

Historically unimpeachable

[10/10 · 13 April 2006]

I have always considered *Battleground* to be one of the best examples of what can be done by a good, conscientious production team with a minimum of money and the scrupulous application of intelligence, truthfulness, and ingenuity.

Take special note of the fact that the actions in which the glider infantry companies depicted in *Battleground* participated (while typical of the hard fighting and harder conditions these troops endured) could not be disputed by any of the veterans who were present at that battle because those companies *DID NOT EXIST*.

Writer/producer Robert Pirosh obviously knew that the glider infantry regiments of U.S. Airborne divisions were originally constituted with only two battalions each ("A" through "D" companies in the first battalion, "E" through "H" companies in the second).

In order to prevent this 1949 movie from drawing the jeers of veterans who could justifiably say "That was my outfit, and it wasn't like that at all!" Pirosh designated the companies considered in this movie as if their regiment had an organic *third* battalion (companies "I" through "M").

By this stage in the war, it had been found that glider infantry regiments were too "thin" with only two battalions, and the decision was made to increase each glider infantry regiment's establishment to three battalions. This was not done by raising a third battalion intrinsic to the regiment, but by "cannibalizing" one regiment to attach one of its battalions to each of two other glider infantry regiments. Thus the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment came to contain its two organic 1st and 2nd Battalions and the "temporarily attached" 1st Battalion of the 401st GIR.

No companies "I," "K," "L," or "M" ever existed in the glider infantry contingent of the 101st Airborne Division during the Ardennes Offensive.

Where every minute of the ghodawful recent movie *Pearl Harbor* is laden with historical idiocies discernible by any twelve-year-old boy who'd read THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO (Lawson, 1943), *Battleground* offers the viewer an exercise in the cinematic presentation of factual reality cleverly overlaid with those elements of fiction required to attain dramatic coherence. In one sequence, for example, there can even be seen a shoulder-stocked bipod-mounted Browning M1919-A4 "light" machine gun, which was designed for (and issued almost exclusively to) the airborne divisions in World War II. This is the sort of understated but painstaking attention to detail that Pirosh could have expected would only be appreciated by the very small number of former paratroopers and glider infantrymen in his 1949 audiences, but he paid them that tribute without stinting.

A very good script, excellent production values, fine acting, and a genuine respect for the men who held the Bastogne perimeter against everything the enemy could send.

The House of God (1984)

Like most doctors, I *have* read the book...

[3/10 · 4 April 2006]

...which I discovered immediately after finishing my own internship. As a reflection of what the medical training experience was like in the '70s (before the concept of diagnosis-related groups - DRGs - changed the way in which we hospitalize patients, particularly GOMER'd Medicare clients), the novel was the absolute truth, up to and including the rutting behavior of 'terns and residents trying to compensate for too much stress by going after too much sex.

Remember, it was not only pre-DRG (which first began testing in New Jersey in 1980 before going nationwide in 1983) but also pre-AIDS (which first began to manifest with epidemiological significance in 1981). By 1984, however - when this movie is considered to have been released, even though it had been finished in 1979 - its subject matter (and the novel's approach to it) simply wasn't topical any longer.

With the DRG system rammed down their collective throat by HCFA, hospitals no longer got revenue by performing all sorts of procedures and hanging onto patients for weeks on end (charging by the day). Instead, they began to be paid a set amount by third-party "health insurance" carriers according to the diagnosis-related group into which the particular patient fell. Explanations of DRG are available all over the 'Net, and I suppose Wikipedia's entry is good enough for most folks' purposes.

The whole thrust of the DRG system can be summed up as discharging each patient "quicker and sicker." A nasty situation for the admitting physician, who has to balance his/her best appreciation of the patient's needs against the hospital administration's pestering to do as little as possible as rapidly as possible to get the patient stable enough to wheel the critter out the door.

As for the matter of sexual promiscuity.... Well, that all went bye-bye when we discovered a sexually transmitted disease that transcended the status of "treatable inconvenience" to become a death sentence. If there's substance to *The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS* premise so beloved of the conservatives, have you ever wondered why the hell all us heterosexual doctors (most of us classifiable as "Hard Right" political conservatives even as college students) have practically welded our zippers shut over the past twenty years and more?

None of this, however, fully explains the failure to make the movie commercially available except on cable TV. There are certainly enough potential purchasers worldwide who are interested in the novel and would like to own a copy of the movie adaptation on home video, no matter how badly produced it might have been. So why is this film so spectacularly unavailable?

Lilies of the Field (1963)

More than faith in this movie

[10/10 · 18 February 2006]

Having first seen this film in theatrical release (from the back seat of my parents' '57 Chevvie in the local drive-in) at the pointed encouragement of the Archdiocese of Camden and the Mother Superior of the convent running our parochial school - I'm entitled to speak on the context in which this film appeared.

First, this is not a peculiarly Roman Catholic film. Yes, there was reason for the Church to like the way in which the Sisters were portrayed, but it was for their courage overall and not the strength of their faith that they were admirable.

Second, it is primarily a voice for tolerance that speaks here. Sidney Poitier's character is a competent, confident, well-assimilated American, comfortable in his own country in spite of the prevailing prejudices against Negroes. He is portrayed - as in the novel - as a capable man with a true sense of honor and genuine noblesse oblige (see Luke 12:48 to understand what the nuns used to pound into us in school) toward a flock of poor, isolated, and unacculturated foreign refugees in a bewildering land of size and desolation utterly alien to everything they had ever known.

Third, that the tolerance is extended by a member of a racial minority group for whom tolerance was being demanded at that time, with all the "Civil Rights movement" baggage that makes a mockery of civil rights as a concept.... Well, that was remarkable.

Sidney Poitier's characterization of Homer Smith served not only as a model of how my generation of mainstream White kids grew up to look upon what a Black man could be - strong and shrewd, practical and yet considerate of people in need - but also of what *we* should be as men. It gave us cause to think seriously about what would be demanded of us in our lives, and how we would respond to those demands, not for the good of other people, but for the sake of our own sense of honor and manhood.

And I suppose that the lesson of this film is that the mark of manhood is not in crazed bravery or blind faith or passion or outrage, but in the strength of your promises and the commitment required to see them through.