Once Again On The Legend-Busting Trail-This Time One Don Juan-With Errol Flynn’s The Adventures Of Don Juan (1948) In Mind-A Film Review-Of Sorts

Once Again On The Legend-Busting Trail-This Time One Don Juan-With Errol Flynn’s The Adventures Of Don Juan (1948) In Mind-A Film Review-Of Sorts  

DVD Review

BY Will Bradley

The Adventures of Don Juan, starring Errol Flynn, Vivica Lindsfor, 1948

[Seth Garth reminded me recently that in this journalism business, this writing for publication, you have to find some niche, some “hook” as he said not only for the piece itself but for you to gain recognition for some particular aspect of the realm of ideas. It seems that as of late I am becoming the “go-to” guy to debunk or clarify various legends that have come down to us and which get accepted fairly easily by those who thrill to legends, myths and religious expressions. Greg Green has given me the “green light” to pursue this work as he believes that this looks like my niche- and my “ticket” to a by-line. So be it. W.B.]      

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Apparently I am the debunker-in chief of various legends and other signs of humankind’s inability to get past legends, myths and other religious expressions for explanation of the ton of stuff even now we don’t know, whether consciously or not, the unknown. At least I hold that position at this publication it seems after having to take fellow writer Lance Lawrence to task for telling the tale about Johnny Cielo, the so-called legendary aviator whom he touted based on the memories of some rum-dum he met in a bar in Miami who led him by the nose maybe for just a few drinks when he was hard-up for a story. You can see my retort in the archives here for September 30, 2018. (Lance was on the bum after busting up on a big drug cartel story when the informants never showed up probably re-thinking their options in the light of their probably fates if they were exposed. In any case Lance was hungry for copy having been on the sidelines for a while with a threat of losing his by-line if he didn’t come up with something. I have been there myself although I don’t have a by-line yet but may get one in this goddam cutthroat business at Lance’s expense.)

I have a certain history on this subject of fake legends having exposed a modern- day so-called Robin Hood from around where I grew up by the name of Pretty James Preston (real name except the “Pretty” since he was very good-looking even in his police mug and had more than one gal swooning over him, and protecting him with hide-outs and alibis) whose claim to fame was that he robbed banks and other places where hard cash was located like department stores in those days in the time-honored tradition except alone and in  broad daylight. Of course it is easy to break the legend of modern day figures since there is a fair amount of paper trail involved. In James’ case he had been touted by his voluntary press agent Scott Allan who worked as a reporter for the North Adamsville Ledger who had known Pretty as a young man, as a schoolboy, and who was also tired of the dead-beat police beat for the newspaper and so got carried away with his reportage. Let Pretty James off the hook and let him become some later day Robin Hood based on what had been his leaving a fifty-cent tip for some sullen waitress who he had an eye on, maybe didn’t jackroll some old guy when cash was tight and who didn’t pistol whip some poor bank clerk. His exploits like paying rent for those who lived in “the projects” where he grew up, sending milk and food to elementary school kids and sending dough along to Sacred Heart parish was all hooey, all made-up bullshit. By the way this has nothing to do with his so-called legend but the real Pretty Boy blew away four bank customers for no good reason except they were in the way on his last caper before going down in a hail of bullets. Even Scott Allan couldn’t pretty up Pretty Boy on that one.   

Like I said modern-day legends are easier to bust than the old hoary ones like Robin Hood and the subject of this piece one Don Juan, or maybe not “one” since my investigations to be detailed below point to multiple sightings-and sighings. Take Lance’s fatal pitch on behalf of Johnny Cielo. He egged on the legend created by a drunken sot met one hard-scrabble night in a gin mill in Miami after falling down on another more important piece when his people didn’t show. His source Billy just unwound on him, probably gaining steam as the evening wore on and they both got drunker. Lance made the cardinal error, strangely not uncommon in this damn cutthroat business and which I had to my own regret did one time as well, of not checking sources, of not seeing what was myth and what was true if anything.       

In a capsule Johnny Cielo’s legend centered on two key points-his “affair” with 1930s and 1940s Hollywood glamour queen and World War II G.I. wet dream pin-up girl Rita Haywood who allegedly in a period when she was not seen around Hollywood for a while before marrying the Aga Khan had followed Johnny down to Central America, to Barranca after he had run out of options in the States (had had a no-no reputation for drug smuggling). Never happened, and Lance should have seen that from minute one, and bells should have rung, rung loudly. What really happened beside Johnny probably like every other red-blooded guy at the time having Rita’s photo in his locker, that is about how close he came to her, was he brought some tramp, some bar girl or whorehouse denizen met who knows where who was beautiful and looked like Rita and Johnny promoted her as the real deal. The other later long after he ditched “Rita” legend was that he had run guns to Fidel and his guys in the Sierra Madres in the late 1950s and had fallen into the deep blue sea in the Caribbean on some mission. Reality: Johnny had ditched his plane and passengers while he was doing his real job of ferrying tourists between Key West and Naples down in Florida. See where things get out of hand.          

As I said previously breaking down old-time legends, here the Robin Hood legend from the12th century is a much tougher matter.  Really a thankless task since even with all kinds of at least circumstantial evidence the vast majority of humankind will still take the legend as good coin. Still if one can one has to set the record as straight as possible. The big storyline on this Robin Hood, or whatever his name was since he worked under many aliases in his business, he “robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.” Pure fantasy both before and after King Richard’s return and grant of land and other goodies which according to church and manor records made him one of the richest and greediest men in England. The records tell it all on the after side and Robin would not be the first to go from decent guy to bum of the month as he aged and grew fatter in many ways but he early side is more problematic. The only official record is Friar Tuck’s monastery record which shows one Robert Woodson, Hood’s real name, giving the equivalent of two buck to the place. Not exactly a big hand out considering he is estimated to have robbed every wealthy traveler who dared to come within twenty miles of his Sherwood Forest base of operations.

Okay on to today’s balloon bursting. The busting of the Don Juan legend. First off try as I might I could find no listing for one Don Juan de la Marca, the name of the person the legend goes under. The Spanish in that period kept excellent records, remember these were the guys who ran the Inquisition and recorded every goddam sound cried out in terror and pain so that made me think that maybe he was working under another name or that there were several Don Juans, not improbable. The story goes, at least the cinematic story, that he was a caddish love them and leave them guy galivanting around Europe, leaving his seed, until his home country queen knocked him for a loop (for a while) and he became something of a Spanish patriot against the likes of the mysterious and sinister Duke of Lorca who had the King’s ear and kept the Queen at bay. Enter Don Juan into the lists in defense of Queen and realm. Don Juan allegedly was a great swordsman (of the steel kind not of the kind the prurient reader might think) and was said to have been permitted to run the academy at court producing young swordsmen defenders of the realm. Through that connection he was able to rouse the better elements and make short work of the Duke and his paid mercenaries. Putting country above self, Don Juan who was supposedly a lover of the Queen, platonic of course, left the court shortly thereafter rather than tempting the Queen in some senseless love affair. Off to other romantic conquests. 

Reality hits one in the face hard on this one since it involved some coerced confessions from young women who were not very world wary or wise. As mentioned earlier there is no record of a Don Juan de la Marca which after exhaustive research now makes sense because the whole legend was a hoax, a figment of the imagination of a bunch of young women who would probably swear to this day they had been ravished by-somebody. Seemingly it all started at the Convent of Saint Mary’s (English translation) in rural Cordoba. The young women there, boarders, were not headed for the nunnery but were being farmed off by their parents for reasons ranging from keeping them out of temptation’s way to getting rid of unwanted witnesses to their debaucheries.

A very curious lot of mainly teenage girls with time on their hands and many dreamy moments. According to the accounts from the investigation team, the Inquisition boys, one girl, Dona Maria, spied a lightly-bearded slender young man crossing a field and called out to him. He answered and went away, only to show up again a day later walking that same field. Same call out, same walk away. Truth: the young man on closer inspection was a lout, a youth with warts and all so as he approached the convent Dona Maria screamed out she had been ravished by the lad. She needed some back-up for her bogus accusations and enlisted some of her convent mates into claiming the young bearded lad had ravished them as well. That was how the rumor got started and the hysterics began as young girls and women in similar isolated desperately hormonal situations, not always in cloistered convents, started clamoring the same set of lies about this long gone and who knows what happened to him youth. The long and short of it was that every Tom, Dick and Harry (English translations) used that bit as his calling card among his friends that they were the Don Juan figures even if they were not from Cordoba, or Spain for that matter. Whoever claimed to be saving the Queen at court from the intrigues of Don Lorca is just another holy goof impostor, a con man. You heard it hear for all the good it will for those many young women today who have their imaginations tweaked by a good-looking guy.

[Postscript: one of my fellow reporters at another publication whose name I will not mention but who is known to take particular pleasure in skewering her fellow reviewers has taken me to task for not checking the Spanish Court Record Almanac where I would find one Don Juan de la Marco’s name prominently described as master of the sword (again of the steel variety) and as having been given various awards for bravery. A look at this ancient dusty book does show such a name but if that hard-pressed fellow reporter had read further to the man’s age of sixty-two she might have saved herself some embarrassment trying to skewer me in this cutthroat business. Moreover, Madame Reviewer might have put her eyeglasses on to find that the person listed was not only sixty-two years of age but the name listed was Don Juan de la Marlo, a very different person, and no threat to that youthful lightly-bearded youth crossing some forlorn field of some young maiden’s sex-starved imagination legend. W.B.] 

The High White Note Blowing Out To The China Seas-The Film Adaptation Of Pearl S. Buck’s “China Sky” (1945)- A Review

The High White Note Blowing Out To The China Seas-The Film Adaptation Of Pearl S. Buck’s “China Sky” (1945)- A Review 

DVD Review

By Josie Davis

China Sky, starring Randolph Scott, Ruth Warrick, Ellen Drew, Anthony Quinn, 1945

Although I am fairly new to the film reviewing business, to journalism in general having just finished up my graduate program at Boston University’s School of Communications I find it hard to believe what the older writers keep telling me as words of advice.  To watch my back, to watch out for fellow reviewers who will skewer my work just to get ahead, just to beat someone in what they have all called a cutthroat, drag down business. The idea behind their cautions seems to center on the notion that nobody really needs to read a film review, everybody has a subjective point of view on the subject matter of a film and the only way to get out from under the rock is to take dead aim at somebody else’s work in order to do what they call “move up the food chain.”

Here is what is ironic about all of what they say. I was assigned this old- time film, China Sky, by the site manager mostly because nobody else wanted to do the review and because if I messed up, the site manager’s words, nobody would notice some raw rookie errors anyway. After viewing the film I was puzzled, could not figure out how to write the review up since the film seemed very dated and weird. Weird since the film, as the title indicated, was about and set in China during World War II, during the time Japan was trying to make all of Asia its feeding grounds. Yet several of the main actors like Anthony Quinn known to me from a cinema class where we watched and critiqued Zorba the Greek who were obviously not Chinese were made up to look that way rather than have real Chinese actors in the roles.

One day at the water cooler I introduced myself to some older writers who were talking about the modern film Black Panther and when I had an opportunity I asked what I should do about the odd film I had been given to review. Most of them, actually all of them except Si Lannon, walked away after basically telling that it was my problem and that if I wanted to get ahead in the profession I had better figure out a way to deal with the film or they would be more than willing to rip it apart to show me how tough this “racket” really was. Si told me not to listen to them because that was all an act. They just didn’t want to be bothered “mentoring” a rookie on a turkey like China Sky. Si gave me some advice which I think is reflected in this review-if all else fails then use the old “slice of life” fall back. By that he meant if I couldn’t figure a “hook” is what he, they call it to just go on and on about the plotline of the film and move on. Thanks, Si who is proof that whatever else some people in this business are not out to cut everybody else’s throat.         

I remember, because I asked my mother, that my grandmother used to have many of Pearl S. Buck’s books on her shelf. I might have glanced through a couple, I remember one The Good Earth I started to read but gave it up because it was hard to follow when I was a teenager, didn’t speak to me about the China I had heard about. I believe that most of Buck’s books were based on China experiences and represented a Western missionary come to help the heathens to the good life way of looking at that then benighted country. China Sky falls into that same category. I have already mentioned the use of Western actors in some roles as Chinese but also that the Chinese people are portrayed as mere props for the in this case Americans to bring into the modern world.  

Si told me to get the “boy meets girl” part out of the way first. I already knew from the tons of films that I had seen in classes and on my own that an extraordinary number of films, especially from Hollywood back in the 1930s and 1940s depended on that theme. Here that theme got a serious work- out in the relationship between the two doctors, one male, Thompson, played by ruggedly handsome Randolph Scott and one female, Durant, played by quietly beautiful Ruth Warrick. From scene one, where he is absent off in America to raise money for medical equipment everybody and their sister and brother knows she loves him. But that love is thwarted first by their professional relationship and secondly when the good doctor does appear he has a brand- new wife, Laura, played by fetching Ellen Drew. Done for. No, through the course of the film as Laura cannot adjust to the wartime deprivations and misery Doc Thompson starts to see the light, starts to see that he had made a mistake and should have taken his fellow doctor will all hands. But brave Doc Durant will just pine away and be the good soldier.

Of course in the end Laura will fall down and the two fated doctors will come together. There is also a secondary love interest between the Chinese guerilla leader, played by Anthony Quinn in Chinese make-up and one of the nurses, also in Chinese make-up, which will also get happily resolved when the treacherous native doctor she is betrothed to is killed after betraying the hospital and town to a “wily” Japanese POW. 

As already foreshadowed this film is a wartime romance set in World War II China when the Japanese were fighting for control of the whole vast country and the town where all the action takes place is near where the Chinese partisans have their supply dumps. Since the Japanese are trying to push through holding that position is a must for them. That however means that the town took a terrible beating from the Japanese air forces bombing the hell out of everything that moved-including the American-sponsored hospital. The wartime action spins around that senior Japanese POW who the guerrillas want to put on trial for war crimes. He, as an officer, tried every way to get information back to his side about the location of the supply dumps. Including playing on the racial and romantic animosities of the chief native doctor (who was actually Korean and whose unknown father was Japanese). Naturally the good guys led by Doc Thompson and the guerrilla chief beat back the bastardly Japanese. You already know the love story part where Doc Thompson’s desperate to leave wife acted as a foil for treachery with the Korean doctor in order to get her and Doc out of the country so that part is done.

Final note, footnote, for the “slice of life” idea from Si. We live in an age more concerned about what we call political correctness than back in the 1940s so some of the stereotypes are pretty raw. The superiority of Americans over mainly prop Asians. The contempt for the average people expressed by Laura. The wily treacherous Japanese and the sullen Korean. But above all that use of Western actors in Chinese make-up reminiscent of whites in blackface tells me that this film is certainly a period piece. That is that for a first review. Hope I survive.

The Answer My Friend Id Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort

The Answer My Friend Id Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort

[An encore of two pieces on this subject and like the Summer of Love, 1967 frenzy at this publication, time to move on and let others give their choices without further prompting. S.G. ]

By Seth Garth

No question this publication both in its former hard copy editions and now more so in the on-line editions as the, ouch, 50^th anniversary of many signature events for the “Generation of ‘68” have come and gone that the whole period of the 1950s and 1960s had gotten a full airing. Has been dissected, deflected, inspected, reflected and even rejected beyond compare. That is not to say that this trend won’t continue if for no other reason that the demographics and actual readership response indicate that people still have a desire to not forget their pasts, their youth.

(Under the new site manager Greg Green, despite what I consider all good sense having worked under taskmaster Allan Jackson, we are encouraged to give this blessed readership some inside dope, no, no that kind, about how things are run these days in an on-line publication. With that okay in mind there was a huge controversy that put the last sentence in the above paragraph in some perspective recently when Greg for whatever ill-begotten reason thought that he would try to draw in younger audiences by catering to their predilections-for comic book character movies, video games, graphic novels and trendy music and got nothing but serious blow-back from those who have supported this publication financially and otherwise both in hard copy times and now on-line. What that means as the target demographic fades is another question and maybe one for a future generation who might take over the operation. Or perhaps like many operations this one will not outlast its creators- and their purposes.)    

Today’s 1960s question, a question that I have asked over the years and so I drew the assignment to address the issue-who was the voice of the 1960s. Who or what. Was it the lunchroom sit-inners and Freedom Riders, what about the hippies (which I counted myself as one for a time), was it SDS, the various Weather configurations, acid, rock, folk rock, folk, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Grace Slick, hell the Three Js-Joplin, Jimi, Jim as in Morrison and the like. Or maybe it was a mood, a mood of disenchantment about a world that seemed out of our control, which seemed to be running without any input from us, without us even being asked. My candidate, and not my only candidate but a recent NPR Morning Edition segment brought the question to mind (see above link), is a song, a song created by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s which was really a clarion call to action on our part, or the best part of our generation-The Times They Are A-Changin’.    

I am not sure if Bob Dylan started out with some oversized desire to be the “voice” of his generation. He certainly blew the whole thing off later after his motorcycle accident and still later when he became a recluse even if he did 200 shows a year, maybe sullen introvert is better, actually maybe his own press agent giving out dribbles is even better but that song, that “anthem” sticks in memory as a decisive summing up of what I was feeling at the time. (And apparently has found resonance with a new generation of activists via the March for Our Lives movement and other youth-driven movements.) As a kid I was antsy to do something, especially once I saw graphic footage on commercial television of young black kids being water-hosed, beaten with police clubs  and bitten by dogs down in the South simply for looking for some rough justice in this wicked old world. Those images, and those of the brave lunch-room sitters and Freedom bus riders were stark and compelling. They and my disquiet over nuclear bombs which were a lot scarier then when there were serious confrontations which put them in play and concern that what bothered me about having no say, about things not being addressed galvanized me.

The song “spoke to me” as it might not have earlier or later. It had the hopeful ring of a promise of a newer world. That didn’t happen or happen in ways that would have helped the mass of humanity but for that moment I flipped out every time I heard it played on the radio or on my old vinyl records record-player. Other songs, events, moods, later would overtake this song’s sentiment but I was there at the creation. Remember that, please.   

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Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the drearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise given where she came from, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked although I only knew her slightly since she was “in” with the social butterfly crowd which we Acre boys avoided like the plague, or they avoided us take your pick). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation here and which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting scared out of their wits with guns running amok and getting  serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

In The Age Of Tweeter Rant-Defend The Enlightenment Like Your Life Depended On-It Does-“A Royal Affair” (2012) Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”-A Film Review

In The Age Of Tweeter Rant-Defend The Enlightenment Like Your Life Depended On-It Does-“A Royal Affair” (2012) Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”-A Film Review

DVD Review

BY Fritz Taylor

   

“A Royal Affair” Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”

I have on more than one occasion mentioned that I am a child of rock and roll, a child of the classic age of rock in the 1950s which was the first jailbreak movement that led my Generation of ’68 “astray” (in the very best sense of the word). I am, as becomes more necessary to declare each day in this crazy world of alternate facts, lies, and low-grade bullshit as my grandfather was fond of saying when he was pissed off at what passed for civil discourse in his time, a child of the Enlightenment. Yes the 18^th century movement of men and women who under great pressure (and maybe the pains of torture and exile) tried to bring some rational discourse to the way people were governed, the way people in civil society dealt with other and some kind of funny idea that equality of person was something humankind could and should aspire to achieve.   

Now being a good old boy growing up from down in Fulton County, Georgia there was no way that I started out life as a child of the Enlightenment unlike the ease which I slipped into being a child of rock and roll. That my friends came courtesy of Uncle Sam, specifically his “request” that I lay down my life for him in the jungles of Vietnam back in1966-1967. (That “request” business really a gag since I volunteered under duress, the duress being directed from a military proud grandfather, the same one fond of saying low-grade bullshit when he was pissed, although subsequently I would come to understand that almost every young man of my Generation of ’68 made decisions under duress under the thunder clouds of a seemingly endless war.)

I was as gung-ho as any previous generation of Taylor male-until-until I got over there, got in -country and came to realize before my eighteen months tour was over (I extended for another six months against the normal year to get an early out they were offering both to get re-ups and to get grunts to stay in country against all good sense) that I had no quarrel with these people and nobody else really did either. That would lead to my post-military service “conversion” to getting on the right side of the angels, getting to understand a whole bunch of stuff like the Enlightenment, a word when I was a kid I had probably never heard of-certainly didn’t act upon any of its ideas. Those lessons though just didn’t come out of the blue but through my involvement with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), you know, the organization ex-Secretary of State John Kerry helped organize in his sunnier days and through coming north to Boston and then west to Frisco. My first “tutor” has a name, the late Peter Paul Markin who I met down in Washington on a G.I. anti-war march and when he fell down of his hubris and what he called “wanting habits” writers here like Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Josh Breslin picked up the slack.           

Now what does all of this talk of Enlightenment have to do with reviewing a Danish film, in English A Royal Affair assigned to me by site manager Greg Green for whatever reason he thought I would be suitable for doing such heavy lifting. Folks that have seen my name here know that I am something of a military and social justice writer and not a damn film reviewer like Sam Lowell who has spent his whole freaking career blasting out pieces about every kind of god-awful film. The “hook” Greg used was that part of the plot-line of the film was an attempt by people at the Danish court, royal or otherwise to bring Enlightenment values to that benighted country out in the boondocks of Europe and others with vested property and proprietary interest to stop them. I accepted the assignment on that basis maybe in the back of my head figuring I could control my ranting about the damn tweeter storms that have racked civil society in America to its core.

Oh yes, I better confess if that is the right word that beside being a child of rock and roll and of the Enlightenment I am a child of republican (small “r” please note) meaning I defend various forms of republican governmental rule against monarchies, constitutional or otherwise, royalty, the nobility and every damn hanger-on who floats to the surface. So why accept the assignment. Simple that republican ideal was not so-widespread in the middle of the 18^th century the time of story-line of this film. At that time Enlightenment ideas were just raising their head in the world and got germinated in the bowels of the old society by certain free-thinking people. So this hatred of the monarchy, remember please King George III all you Jacks and Jills who devour everything coming out of English court-life these days has been an acquired taste for generations coming down to me. The characters here, some of them commoners some royal, don’t question that aspect of governance-that is for later times and larger uprisings than court intrigues.

I have taken a particular slant on this production based on some historical truths around bringing Enlightenment ideas to backwater Denmark. The film itself based on a Danish historical novel about the times-about the sullen reign of mentally disturbed King Christian VII, his English princess wife and a commoner, a doctor goes into another direction and I could if I was Sam Lowell, better, Laura Perkins, have dwelled on the menange between the three chief characters and left it at that. The frame for this one cries out for that treatment since the whole affair, royal or otherwise, is presented from Queen Caroline Matilde’s point of view as she writes to her children on her deathbed about why she has not seen them for a long time.

I have had my say so as Sam always says a little summary is in order. Christian and Caroline, who are cousins, but what else is new with European royal in-breeding. Those interconnections never stopped them from cutting each other to bits. World War I could have just as easily been called the “Cousins’ war” which for its time was the bloodiest conflagration ever seen. A betrothal was arranged and Caroline became the Danish queen having a son by the king. The king who was probably every psychiatrist’s poster child for an assortment of strange mental disturbances was more of a whoremonger and frill than a husband to the well-educated and talented Caroline. That is the predicate for the personal tragedies that follow. Doctor Struensee, a commoner, a German which meant a foreigner then, a low-key man of the Enlightenment was brought in to attend to the king. They became fast friends once the good doctor saw he could have influence over the erratic king in order to push his agenda. Problem, big problem, is that over time Struensee and Caroline become fast friends, very fast indeed, having a child together, a girl who is passed off as the king’s progeny.      

That cuckolded king notion lets the anti-foreign, anti-reform  nobility and another arm of the royal family take the high ground spreading rumors among the common folk that the doctor is running the show and the Queen is egging him on. In the end the threads favoring the Enlightenment were too weak to hold against the old regime and so the doctor and Queen meet bad ends, bad fates. Her losing her children and exile and the Doc having his head taken from him by the executioner’s axe. The only hope is for the future-that the younger generation in the person of the royal prince will do better. And he does. Such are the vagaries of history. Well-done with English subtitles, a tight script and beautiful film work.