Walking the Berkshires

Of Quagmires and Hollywood Endings

What was the last significant American movie about the Viet Nam era?  Stuck?  Let me rephrase the question.  Have there been any this decade?  Here are your choices:

We Were Soldiers (March, 2002) : Mel Gibson

The Quiet American (February, 2003) Michael Caine

Word of Honor (December 2003) Don Johnson

Faith of my Fathers (May 2005) TV movie about POW John McCain

Rescue Dawn (July 2007) Christian Bale

American Gangster (November 2007) Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe

1968 Tunnel Rats (March 2009) Independent film

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that since the Gulf War, the Viet Nam war movie has been in a state of arrested development.

Forrest Gump and Dead Presidents were the decade's most notable offerings in the 1990's, and I do not mean to imply that a film had to be highbrow or highly political to be notable.  Forrest Gump's importance is not what it has to say about history but as an early, high profile use of digital manipulation of historic film footage. Dead Presidents is just classic Blacksploitation revisited. Not a Deerhunter or Full Metal Jacket among them,nor yet a Rambo.

Since 9/11, the genre continues to be impoverished.  Gibson's movie, filmed in 2001, is a continuation of the redemptive, heroic depiction of the service and sacrifice of American soldiers in Viet Nam - and their families at home - that arose in American society in the late 1980s and continues to this day.  The Quiet American is based on a novel from an earlier era and is more notable for the Oscar nominated performance of Michael Caine than what the story itself has to say about American involvement in Southeast Asia.  The rest are throwbacks of varying quality, but do nothing to carry the conversation about how we interpret the events of the fast receding past and that heavily value laden conflict.

Mainstream American films - aside for those that go direct to video - quite naturally tend to track with the tastes of contemporary American audiences.  American films about Viet Nam will indicate how contemporary politics and society grapple with the memory of what amounts to a period of national trauma. A gung ho film like John Wayne's Green Berets gives way to the nihilism of Apocalypse Now, the morality play of Platoon, the revenge fantasy of Rambo.  Depictions of the Viet Nam veteran progress from hero to outcast to perpetrator to victim and back to hero, and that is where we are left as a new generation of veterans emerges from a new series of conflicts.

Maybe there is nothing new for Hollywood to say about Viet Nam because we have come full circle, or perhaps we are stalled by contemporary events.   Maybe when the first President Bush declared during the Gulf War that we have put Viet Nam behind us, it foreshadowed the second''s declaration of "mission accomplished".  And maybe in another ten years, the memory of our current wars will inform how Hollywood revisits Viet Nam. 

Either that, or we will get another pulpy Quentin Tarantino gorefest along the lines of Inglorious Bastards.  

Really Bad History Movies

There are plenty of instances where anachronisms creep into historical films, or screenplays play a bit fast and loose with the facts for the sake of a good story.  The massacre of Colonel Munro's column by Indians in the woods beyond Fort William Henry made for stirring drama in the most recent version of The Last of the Mohicans, even if it didn't happen quite that way in 1757. 

We are not concerned about the occasional wristwatch on a Viking or a misplaced chronology here or there.  Even films that scrupulously strive for historical accuracy can slip up from time to time.  No, what this post intends to expose to much deserved scorn are other sorts of movie altogether - the counter-factual "docudrama" with pretensions to truth, and the faux historical epic with hardly a minute of actual fact in an otherwise sloppy sea of melodrama.

The difference between the two may be a matter of sins of commission and sins of omission.  Ollie Stone's JFK and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation are both slickly produced revisionist fantasies masquerading as history, as sumptuous and seductive as propaganda as they are devoid of historic merit.  Much can be learned from both, but not what the directors intended.  These films tell us a great deal about the political sensibilities of their creators and their times, but far less about the actual events they purport to depict.

The wall of shame would need to be long, indeed, to account for the many travesties passed off on film as history, though in fairness it must be said that Hollywood gets much of it right far more often than not.  I am loathe to suggest a "top ten" list for the very worst, but the following films should be avoided by any seeking to learn something of the history they make such hash of for our entertainment:

-  Pearl Harbor:  I am told that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and indeed this happens in the movie.  The rest is absolute rubbish as far as history goes.  One gets the impression that the producers figured if James Cameron could get audiences to believe in Leonardo and Kate's characters, Ben Afleck ought to be able to get them swooning past a movie so cavalier with history that it, too, will live in infamy.

- The Patriot:  Amazingly, the loyal farm workers on the plantation were all freemen!  Nosiree, no slaves in the revolutionary South (they were all off fighting for their freedom with the British, presumably).  Apparently you can't have a redcoat in green, even if Tarleton's (oh, right, Tavington's) Legion were green coated loyalists, but you can have Abraham Lincoln's face on a greenback that Gibson's character passes off on a shopkeeper.  About the only things that are accurate in this movie are the flintlock pistols fired at the gallop - and they shouldn't be!

- Braveheart: The noble Lowland Scot recast as a dyed-in-the-woad Highlander who raises an army of mullet headed savages, this movie is among the least deserving ever to win the best picture Oscar.  Biggest howler: William Wallace impregnates the future queen of England, even though the real Isabella of France was 2 years old at the time.  About right for a Mel Gibson movie, however.  The man makes Tom Cruise look completely rational.

- Gods and Generals: A Lost Cause fantasy with an army of overfed, middle aged actors and reenactors that is utterly unwatchable and grinds on for an interminable three hours and thirty-nine minutes, or so I am told because I switched it off long before the end. Ted Turner blows $60 million financing this fiasco of clean limbed, mawkish sentimentality.

- Revolution: I am certain Al Pacino wishes this film would vanish from his filmography.  I swear, it would have been  better history if they had included legions of zombies, and certainly more entertaining.  The final confrontation amid the towering cliffs of Yorktown bears no resemblance whatsoever to tidewater, Virginia, but by they you are passed caring.  Donald Sutherland was in this film and in Kelly's Heroes, which is the more historically accurate movie.  But then, so is Hogan's Heroes.

- Every film ever made about Robin Hood, but especially the most recent BBC series, with Guy of Gisborne wearing what looks like a Drizabone Aussie raincoat, Maid Marion moonlighting as The Green Arrow, and a female Saracen garbed as one of the lads among Robin's handful of Merry Men.  Modern dialog and moralizing about how muslims and christians need to understand each other better must have Mallory turning in his grave.  They killed off Marion in Season II, but Robin has a new wench in Season III, and Holy Shogun, Batman, she fights with a Katana!  Look for Richard the Lion Heart to come riding back on a mastodon.

I am sure you can suggest some other candidates for the pillory.

Companion Pieces: Paired Up History Films

Sometimes an historical epic or period piece that can stand perfectly well on its own takes on added meaning when paired with another film.  Certain movies with cult followings actually received double billings - think Harold and Maude and King of Hearts - while others offer complementary perspectives on significant events and personages when viewed together.  Here are some suggestions for some history films that go rather well together.

Paths of Glory (1957) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930):  Stanley Kubrick's film underscores the horrors of trench warfare in stark black and white, and the demands of the French high command to make scapegoats of innocent men driven beyond the limits of human endurance.  It parallels the more familiar story told from the German perspective in the classic All Quiet on the Western Front. 

Das Boot (1981) and The Cruel Sea (1953)   I grew up reading The Cruel Sea, and am aware of no other book that so successfully evokes the desperate years of convoy escorts and U-boat warfare during the Battle of the Atlantic.  The movie version is excellent, with Jack Hawkins as the grizzled commander of the doomed HMS Compass Rose.  Das Boot, on the other hand, manages to depict the claustrophopia, desperate fear and vulnerability of the U-boat crews so hauntingly that even one such as I who was weaned on stories of blackout shades and U-boats just off our coast could appreciate that those below the surface might well have felt like the underdogs, especially as the war progressed.

Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968)  Peter O'toole stars as King Henry II in both films, and manages to bring a fresh interpretation in each performance.  The cast of The Lion in Winter is especially fine, with Anthony Hopkins and Katherine Hepburn in fine fettle.

Breaker Morant (1979) and Gallipoli (1981)  Aussie films that are as much about British notions of class and colonial prejudices as they are about the havoc and moral ambiguity of modern war.  One takes place during the Boer War, and includes one of the most dramatic trial sequences in film (others in this post also share that distinction, including Paths of Glory and especially To Kill a Mockingbird).  The other is about wasted potential and the futility of trying to outrun death in frontal assaults made obsolete by machine guns.

The Vikings (1958) and The War Lord (1965)  These obscure films deserve wider exposure, particularly for their attention to period detail.  Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine sail up the fjords in longboats straight from the Osberg ship burials or the Bayeaux tapestry.  As for The War Lord, it is the tapestry itself come to life, kite shields and all, and stars Charlton Heston.

The African Queen (1951) and King Solomon's Mines (1950) Both were filmed in Africa within a year of each other, and both are a feast for the eye.  The trek into the unknown parts of interior East Africa by Quartermain and company takes advantage of the extraordinary scenery, wildlife and cultures of the region, while Bogart's battle with the leeches and running past the guns of the German Askaris and over the falls are epic moments in cinematic history.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)  and To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)  Both of these films captures different aspects of the American experience around the time of the Depression so cdonvincingly that they have become cultural benchmarks for those times and places.  Whether it is Tom Joad and family's desperate oddysey or the crippling weight of racial and class predjudice that oppresses black and white alike where even an honest man like Atticus cannot make justice prevail, the films take us to some of the hardest places in our past without crushing the faint hope of redemption.

Which other history films go well together?

Top Ten Historical Subjects In Dire Need of 1st Class Treatment on Film

Any Top Ten List is inherently biased from the start, and this one is loaded with assumptions even before I toss out my candidates for your review.  There are certainly films which treat complex and significant historical subject matter well: that is, with attention to period detail, historical context, well-crafted dialog, compelling characters, skillful direction and a plot that deftly carries the story. 

Those that get full marks in all of these dimensions are rare, indeed, while those that bungle them are simply unwatchable.  Some - Dances With Wolves, say - succeed in many respects yet fall victim to presentism and the intrusion of the politics and social attitudes of the present day.  This can make for a moving theatrical experience, but falls short of a faithful depiction of the sensibilities of the past.

Given that the interests of modern audiences have to dovetail with the interests of Hollywood film producers, there are some historical periods and subjects which, for better or worse, make their way to the large and small screens, and others which do not.  It helps if the screenplay is an adaptation from a wildly successful novel set in a period setting, or a noted work of popular history, but even then you may end up with something like the overwrought Gods and Generals or a brilliant production of one of Jane Austen's novels which critics and scholars adore yet nobody else watches.

There are many moments in history and fascinating individuals who deserve 1st class treatment on film but, so far as I am aware, have yet to receive it. Your list is bound to be different than mine, but here is what I would love to see done well on film:

• Anything set in the American Southwest prior to the Texas Republic.  We remember the Alamo, but seem to ignore the centuries of history that came before.  De Soto, Coronado, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, all would be marvelous subjects.  Such movies do not get made, I suspect, because they are painful reminders of the conquest and suppression of indigenous peoples and are prone to oversimplification by screenwriters.

• King Philip's War.  More than half the towns in New England were attacked, more than 15% of all the native peoples in the region were killed in the bloodiest conflict of the 17th century in English North America.  There have been some excellent scholarly treatments in recent years, but nothing by Hollywood.

• There are several figures from our Revolutionary history who would make excellent movie subjects.   Nathaniel Greene, or Benjamen Tallmadge and his whaleboat raiders, come first to mind.  It would also be refreshing to see the Saratoga Campaign, complete with Jenny McCrea and Benedict Arnold and Gentleman Johny Burgoyne, given its due on film.

• The wreck of the whaleship Essex.  The Heart of the Seawould be a superb starting place.  Moby Dick ends with Ishmael clinging to Queequeeg's coffin.  The crew of the Essex had far more horrors ahead of them after their ship, which was Melville's inspiration, was rammed by the whale.

• Cheng I Sao "Wife of Cheng", the most successful pirate of all time, was a chinese woman who commanded a fleet of more than 1,500 ships and 80,000 men in the early 1800s.

• Germany's Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, the Lt. Colonel whose East Africa command remained undefeated throughout WWI and managed to divert British forces from the western front while fighting a guerrilla campaign across numerous colonies.  Along those same lines, a grand film could be made of Count Felix von Luckner's wooden, three masted bark that became the WWI commerce raider the Seeadlerthat captures 16 vessels before the end.  Lowell Thomas wrote "Count Felix Von Luckner - The Sea Devil", which could be the basis for the screenplay.

• A film centered around the careers and conflicts of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster.  They were the most important American politicians of their generation, and the strongest voices for their respective regions during the first half of the 19th century.

• Edith Wilson, the first lady who acted for her husband Woodrow after his debilitating stroke.

• Harry Truman.  But not based solely on the superb book by McCullough.  I would love to see it draw heavily from Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure; the True Story of a Great American Road Trip. 

• The Morro Castle disaster.  A Depression-era booze cruise gone horribly wrong with the captain dead, a raging storm and the ship afire off New Jersey.

Those would be my suggestions for Hollywood to do and do right.  What about yours?

Impressions of John (and Abigail) Adams

Our family made the choice years ago to have nothing to do with television stations.  We own a monitor and a dvd player and with the rarest of exceptions - watching a world changing event or the Red Sox in the World Series - have no regrets.  This does mean that we get to watching some of the very few examples of quality programming when they become available on disc, which is why I am providing my reactions to HBO's 2008 miniseries John Adams a year after it aired.

I doubt HBO would have ever attempted such an epic treatment of Adams, although he is certainly in the front rank of our fascinating and flawed patriot founders, had not David McCullough written his engaging and sympathetic popular biography of our 2nd President.  What is more remarkable is the relative paucity of films - good, bad or indifferent - dealing with the birth of our nation.  The Bicentennial, for pity sake, did not prompt a single effort on the big screen, though the musical 1776 did come out a few years before.  We endured the risible Revolution in 1985 and the hatchet job which The Patriot did to revolutionary history in 2000, and precious little else until now.  Even 1992's romanticized The Last of the Mohicans which deals with the French and Indian War period is preferable to the history and screenwriting offered by either of these films.  None of them truly animates the historical people at the center of these extraordinary events or brings us any closer to connecting with them as human beings as well as actors in the great drama of their time.

Given how low the bar has been set, HBO's John Adams clears it with ease, and on more than one occasion even soars like the French hot air balloon that John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson watch as humanity cuts the umbilical with earth and sails above the enthralled onlookers.  For a film that must span more than half a century in seven episodes, it manages for the most part to keep to the spirit and flavor of those times quite convincingly.  Liberties are taken with minor characters and time lines, and there are plenty of places where a shrewd and knowledgeable viewer will observe such inaccuracies as the misnamed "bloody pox" or the impossibility of viewing the shelling of Bunker Hill or the passage of Knox's guns from the Adams' farm in Braintree.  Even Jonathan Trumbull, the "artist of the Revolution" who makes an appearance as well in the film, meant his paintings to be allegories as well as historical representations, and for the most part where license is taken it does not significantly detract from the overall history.

The very best part about the film - indeed, the part that makes its insufferably stuffy protagonist bearable - is the relationship between John Adams (ably played by Paul Giamatti) and his wife Abigail, played absolutely brilliantly by Laura Linney.  I could not take my eyes from her whenever she appeared in a scene, even if she remained silent.  She is as much the center of the film as her husband, whether compelled to make the agonizing choice herself to inoculate her family with smallpox while her husband is away at Congress or confiding to Jefferson as they stroll amid chateau topiary that there is much that women might offer the world if men would let them.  She is hard as pins without being consumed with bitterness, soft and passionate while better able to govern her emotions than her easily outraged husband.  The partnership of these best of friends is borne out in their correspondence and is the key to the success of the series.

The rest of the founders who appear in the film are intriguing, but for the most part less well developed.  The sybaritic Dr. Franklin played by Tom Wilkinson is a cagey old fox and skilled in the art of compromise, to whom Adams plays an unwilling straight man in Paris.  Stephen Dillane's Thomas Jefferson first appears as almost painfully withdrawn and that weariness never leaves him even as he becomes a force in American politics in his feuds with the Federalists.  George Washington as played by David Morse maintains a reserve that is likely true to his character but sometimes feels as wooden as the proverbial false teeth.  Others are merely footnotes, although I did find the exchange when Adams is presented to King George III as the first American ambassador to be quite memorizing.

The end result is a very good series, but not a great one.  Something still eludes Hollywood and America as a whole about the story of our origins and how best to bring the people and events of those times to life in ways that we moderns can appreciate.  It is a bit like the artificial snow that HBO sprayed on the cobbled streets of its Boston set; it leaves us sliding along the surface without truly grasping the moment.  We are a bit like John Adams, dashing outside with his leather fire bucket at the first cries of fire, not realizing that it is really the mob, taunting the redcoats to bring on the Revolution.

Waterloo Movie Revisited

Sometimes an historical epic overwhelms you with its cast of thousands - CG makes this sensation absolutely commonplace - and sometimes it condenses all the action to the quiver of an eye.  Last night I watched Waterloo, the 1970 film directed by Sergei Bondarchuk and produced by Dino De Laurentiis, with its 15,000 soviet soldiers and a brigade of cossack cavalry as extras standing in for Napoleon's Old Guard and Wellington's  "scum of England", and it managed to do both.

Rod Steiger gives a riveting performance as Bonaparte, whose magnetic presence even in brooding silence fills up even the most cavernous palace or the space between armies.  George C Scott won the best actor Oscar that year for Patton and Waterloo was passed over for any of the top nominations, which says more about the sensibilities of the motion picture academy than the worthiness of Steiger's acting.  A foreign war picture, filmed largely in the Ukraine about an event which meant little to Americans, wasn't going to stand up to the likes of the disaster film Airport with its ten academy award nominations that year. 

Nevertheless the film is magnificent and stands the test of time far better than many of its contemporaries.  Christopher Plummer plays the Duke of Wellington with understated urbanity and gets most of the best lines, including the classic exchange near the close of the battle with Lord Uxbridge in which the latter reels on his horse and says "By God, Sir, I've lost my leg" and Wellington replies softly, "By God, Sir, so you have."  Like our Gettysburg, there are classic moments like these that every scholar of Waterloo knows by heart that find their way into the film. 

True, there is very little made of the fact that the bulk of Wellington's army was comprised of Germans and Dutch-Belgians, or that his nominal second-in-command was the incompetent Dutch Prince of Orange.  Those Scot's Greys riding hell for leather, somersaulting over their stricken mounts at the gallop, and the ragged British squares blunting the tide of the French Cuirrassiers, are part of Waterloo mythology. So, too, is the destruction of the Old Guard, after their commander is said to have replied to an offer to accept their surrender with a defiant "Merde!", but this was not accomplished by surrounding them with cannon as the movie depicts it.  I am sure it had a moving effect on the French audiences at its Paris debut, and besides, even the participants in the battle got it wrong on numerous occasions.  Maitland's Foot Guards were subsequently called the Grenadier Guards because it was though that they had defeated Napoleon's Grenadiers of the Old Guard instead of the similarly attired 3rd Chasseurs.  No matter: the Chasseur Guards just doesn't have the same ring to it.

There is a Russian release of the DVD available from Amazon and dubbed in English that I highly recommend.  I believe this is also the version you get if you order it from Netflix.

From Shakespeare to Schaffer: Switched at Birth

In another installment of our " Switched at Birth" feature here at Walking the Berkshires, we feel compelled to point out the uncanny resemblance between the Bard of Late Night and the Bard of the English Stage.  Schaffer, meet Shakespeare.

I believe our 14th President and the actor who starred in The 5th Element have more in common than loose locks and craggy brows.  Gary Oldman is unlikely to appear anytime soon as Franklin Pierce, however, unless they do a presdiential series on the History Channel called "The Worst and the Dullest".

Then we have Napoleon's Marshal Ney and William Schatner's Captain Kirk.   

 As for red toques and Gallic profiles... 

Afterlife in Reruns

"Mom", said my son Elias when he came downstairs this morning, "How good is your magic?"  My wife paused to consider that he posed the question quite seriously.  Elias sleeps better at night if his Mom dispels any monsters that may be lurking and wards away nightmares with strongly worded notices slipped beneath the pillow than none but good dreams will be tolerated.

"Well, I don't know, Elias, what sort of magic were you looking for?"

"Can you bring back dead people?"

Her heart sank as one of life's great unknowns guaranteed disappointment.  "No, buddy", she said with a sad smile, "No magic is strong enough to do that."  His eyes grew bright with unblinked tears and his dear face worked to keep from crying with that brave little quavering lip that melts us every time.  Viv thought maybe he was missing his Great Gran, or had heard her talk about other aged relatives who were in failing health, and was marshaling her words of comfort when my tender-hearted son said;

"It's not fair, Mom.  It's not fair that death is forever, because that means I don't ever get to meet Madeline Kahn and I love her!"

Thank you, 30-year-old episodes of The Muppet Show.  Wait 'til he sees her as Lili Von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles.

The Sound of My Own Voice: Whose Monologue is it, Anyway?

It is not often that Walking the Berkshires ventures into feminist critique, though as a living example of that all-but-extirpated (and still somewhat suspect) subspecies of the human male, the Bryn Man, I had more than a little exposure to it, back in the day.  But as the late U. Utah Phillips memorably describes the California mindset in his first collaboration with Ani DiFranco; "If you live in California you gotta be open to all kinds of things.  If you're not open, they'll pry you open."  The same was true of my college years, and while two decades further down the line have offered a considerable leavening of life experience to go with all that theoretical knowledge, that academic perspective still has its contemporary uses.

Which is why I find myself following up the previous post - a light hearted Sunday morning invitation to collectively build a Top Ten list of Movie Monologues - with one that observes a decided gender imbalance, here and in other similar lists, and wonders what that might signify. Guess who invariably gets the monologue, or gets remembered for it?  This is not a trick question so I'll give you a hint.  Maybe Rosie the Riveter is giving an Italian Salute...

Caveat Time:  I am not suggesting that those of us, myself included, who remember and enjoy movie monologues by men are inherently sexist, nor that no one else has developed a list of great movie monologues by women - I have, in fact, found one.  This is not my Ph.D. thesis; but rather a highly speculative inquiry based on a limited dataset.  Oh, yeah, and it's a blog post, meant to frame and stimulate discussion. Caveat lector, baby.  'Nuff said.

I am curious about the role of "the big speech" in cinema and whether or not these parts are routinely written for one gender over another.  I am interested in whether there is a statistically relevant gender trend over time and across film genres.  I would like to know about marketing research and the preferences of screenwriters and movie producers and theater goers and whether gender is a factor in any of that, and I don't have these data so one of you has the opportunity for a nice dissertation topic, compliments of the house.  Let us know how it turns out.

I will offer a hypothesis, which you may feel free to test and critique against the available data.  I believe I detect a trend of these speeches predominantly being written for men to deliver.  I suspect that - surprise - monologues routinely become manologues because...wait for it...that is what is expected in the industry and by society at large and the best evidence for this is what works at the box office.

Try this experiment.  Name the greatest living female film actor.  90% of you, along with me, said Meryl Streep.  Alright, think of her greatest performances.  I'll give you Sophie Zawistowski in Sophie's Choice and just for kicks I'll also throw in an early role as Linda in The Deer Hunter.  Streep has a great comedic range too, and a brace of Oscars for Best Actress (Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie's Choice), so here is the question...  Does she have in all her body of work a truly memorable monologue, or are the parts she plays so brilliantly really about something other than soliloquies.  In Sophie's Choice, her anguished "Take my little girl!" is among the most devastating moments in film and haunts me to this day, but monologue has nothing to do with it.  As Linda in The Deer Hunter, it is her unacknowledged, unspoken interior self that comes through, in a film where the men are larger than life yet part of her own.  As a homefront casualty, she is the one who tries to pull the shattered pieces together in that quavering delivery of "America the Beautiful" at the end of the film.  Stunning stuff.  But not monologues.  I wonder if it matters.

There are some interior monologues delivered in film by women as voice overs.  Susan Sarandon's Annie Savoy has a beauty in Bull Durham, yet it is Kevin Costner's statement of his beliefs that most folks remember - and its R-rated and testosterone-laden imagery includes the statement that "the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap".  It is still a great movie moment and it works.  Why?

Is it that monologues, even the ennobling ones, are essentially onanistic? (I threw that one in there for one of my old English professors, who saw masturbation images everywhere).  They are absolutely intimate, commanding attention, demanding to be heard, all about the self and how it wishes to be seen.  They are profoundly gratifying, climactic moments.  There is a great deal of emphasis on "the big speech" in films that have them, and if it falls flat it can spoil more than the moment. Talk about performance anxiety!

Now some of you, well versed in stage as well as screen, will say to me; "Hogwash!  What about Linda Loman's "Respect must be paid" speech, invariably a show stopper?  What about All About Eve?, or A Streetcar Named Desire?  Dramatic theater does allow more latitude than film, I think, for narrowing the focus to a solitary female voice, so film adaptations may retain some big speeches by women.  But for all her memorable one-liners, visceral collapse and violation, it is not Blanche Dubois but Stanley Kowalski who speaks in monologues.  And the odds are long that The Vagina Monologues will soon be coming to a multiplex near you.

Perhaps in earlier times dialog was more literate - or more wordy - and there were more great female soliloquies, although sticking to certain conventions.  Examples of these would be most welcome.  Quite possibly my own movie preferences represent an unduly biased sample.  So bring it on!

Until new evidence to contrary is revealed - and I am counting on you, dear readers, to chime in - I am left to conclude that either American film and film goers favor the masculine monologue, making it something of a celluloid ceiling for women, or maybe that it is not the best measure of dramatic performance and attention must be paid elsewhere.  It would be a grave mistake, after all, to say that Meryl Streep is a fine actress: too bad she never had a grand soliloquy.

Quint-Essential Monologues: Top Ten Movie Solioquies

I re-watched Jaws yesterday, and once again was struck by the brilliance of Robert Shaw's delivery of Captain Quint's Indianapolis Soliloquy.  "Eleven hundred men went into the water..." It is a defining moment, made even more remarkable for its human interest in a film whose star is a killer shark.  Quint is no longer a caricature of Captain Ahab, all crust and color, but distilled to his human core.  It is the best part of the movie, and if there were an Old Timer's Committee in the Academy of Motion Pictures like baseball has, Shaw would have had his Oscar for that performance. 

This got me thinking about memorable monologues in other films, and which of these had the qualities of Quint's lines and Shaw's acting.  Of course there are lines that people remember - iconic, even, like Dirty Harry saying "you gotta ask yourself, 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?"  It is on some people's Top Ten Monologues List, but I don't believe it would make it on mine.  On the other hand, I probably would include the Meg Ryan fake orgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally."  It's all in the delivery.

So rather than give you my complete list, let's build one together.  Quint makes the list.  What about the other nine?

More (July 23, 2008): Exceptional discussion in the comments, for which many thanks.  It has prompted a subsequent post on monologues and which gender tends to get remembered for them.  Feel free to confirm or refute as experience dictates.