Yeah, No Question War Is
Hell-With Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” (1981) In Mind
By Film Critic Emeritus
Sam Lowell
As the readers of this
site may know I recently have retired, maybe semi-retired is a better way to
put it, from the day to day, week to week grind of reviewing film old and young
as I just hit my sixty-fifth year. That stepping aside to let Sandy Salmon take
his paces on a regular basis did not mean that I would be going completely
silent as I intended to, and told the current site administrator Greg Green who
I knew slightly from the film festival circuit, mainly Sundance and Augusta
when he worked at American Film Gazette,
as much, to do an occasional film review and general commentary. This is one of
those general commentary times. What has me exercised is Sandy’s recent review
of Australian director Peter Weir’s World War I classic Gallipoli starring Mark Lee and Mel Gibson. I take no issue with
Sandy since he did a fine job. What caught my attention was Sandy’s comment
about Archie’s, the role played by Mark Lee, fervent desire to join his fellow
Aussies on Gallipoli peninsula as a patriotic duty and a manly adventure. When
I did my own review of the film back in 1981 when the film first came out I
make a number of comments about my own military experiences and those of some
of the guys I hung around with in high school who had to make some decisions
about what to do about the war of our generation, the Vietnam War of the decade
of the 1960s.
While the action of the Australian
young men itching to get into the “action” of World War I (which by the way we have
just finished commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armistice
that end it 2018) preceded us by fifty years a lot of the same ideas were
hanging our old-time working- class neighborhood in Vietnam War times. More
than a few guys like Jim Leary and Freddie Lewis were like Archie ready,
willing and able to go fight the “red menace,” tip the dominoes our way, do
their patriotic duty take your pick of reasons. Maybe in Freddie’s case to get
out of the hostile household that he grew up in and maybe Jim like Archie a
little for the adventure, to prove something about the questions he had about
his manhood. I did not pick those two names out accidently for those names now
are permanently etched on that hallowed black granite wall down in Washington
that brings tears to my eyes old as I am every time I go there.
Then there were guys
like me and Jack Callahan, Pete Markin who didn’t want to go into the military,
didn’t want to enlist like Jim and Freddie but who having no real reason not to
go when our local draft boards sent “the letter” requesting our services did go
and survived. The main reason that we did not want to go, at least at the time,
not later when he got a serious idea of what war was about, was it kind of
cramped our style, would put a crimp in our drinking, doping, and grabbing
every girl who was not nailed down. Later Pete and I got religion, realized
that the other options like draft refusal which might have meant jail or
fleeing to Canada were probably better options. But we were like Archie and
Frank in Gallipoli working class kids
even though we had all been college students as well. When in our past was
there even a notion of not going when the military called, of abandoning the
old life in America for who knows what in Canada. We did what we did with what
made sense to us at the time even if we were dead-ass wrong.
And then of course there
is a story like Frank Jackman’s who grew up in a neighborhood even down lower
on the social scale than ours, grew up in “the projects,” the notorious
projects which our parents would threaten us with if we didn’t stop being a
serious drain on the family’s resources. Frank somehow was a college guy too
and like us “accepted” induction although he had more qualms about what the
heck was going on in Vietnam and about being a soldier. But like us he also
accepted induction because he could see no other road out. This is where the
story changes up though. Frank almost immediately upon getting to basic
training knew that he had made a mistake-had no business in a uniform. And by
hook or by crook he did something about it, especially once he got orders for
Vietnam. The “hook” part was that through a serious of actions which I don’t
need to detail here he wound up doing a little over a year in an Army stockade
for refusing to go to Vietnam. Brave man.
The “crook” part was also through a series of actions which need not detain
us now, mostly through the civilian courts, he was discharged, discharged from
the stockade, honorably discharged as a conscientious objector.
Archie, Frank and their
Aussie comrades only started to get an idea, a real idea about the horrors of
war when they were in the trenches in front of the Turks also entrenched on
Gallipoli peninsula and being mowed down like so many blades of grass. Archie
and most of the crew that joined up with him were among those blades of grass.
It was at the point where Archie was steeling himself to go over the top of the
trenches after two previous waved had been mowed down and then himself being cut down by the Turkish machine-gun
firing that I realized how brave Frank Jackman’s actions were in retrospect.
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