Fact-Checking: Olrik and Film part 2: Bookending

One of the things oral traditions never do is say "this is important". Instead, they tell multiple tales about an issue important to the culture.

Torah does this at least twice. One set has to do with stealing wives. There are three (!) narratives, each with a different emphasis and outcome. The textual location and sequence of the narratives have to do with genetic relationships between the characters.

The other set has to do with slander. The three (!) narratives happened at different times, and two of them happened at Sinai while the other happened on the borders of the Holy Land. These narratives show the associative principle at work; slander is such a killer transgression that the tradition put all three stories in the same place to really pound the lesson into people's heads. It also teaches that nobody is above the law, and it illustrates Olrik's Law of Ascents as each opponent to Mosheh is more important or numerous.

While studying Burt Lancaster's movies, I felt that his life of reading taught him how narratives work, and that he copied oral narratives features in his work, consciously or not. A number of his film pair up as studies of the same issue from different angles; I call these films bookends. There was also room for two movies he never made, that would have been bookends to films he did release.

• ·         Eternity and Run Silent both deal with genuine issues in the military, but Eternity is more about the destruction of people while Run Silent has more to do with the tension between human concerns and the norms of behavior in the service.
• ·         Scalphunters and Nuremberg which show that just because you don’t hate doesn’t mean you won’t engage in hateful behavior.
• ·         Lawman and OK Corral show how a sheriff may want young criminals to turn from their way and live.
• ·         Mister 880 and Young Savages about compassion for criminals.
• ·         The Train and Cassandra Gorge about how resistance is not futile.
• ·         Rainmaker and Elmer Gantry, about miracles.
• ·         Cattle Annie and Tough Guys about a younger generation venerating criminals of the past.

I think that All My Sons should have been followed in the 1970s with a film about the Apollo 1 disaster of 1967, with John Glenn's quote about "two million parts" shown above the credits. Lancaster had an excellent opportunity to hire Noriyuki "Pat" Morita as technical advisor, since Morita was an aerospace manager in the 1960s. Didn't happen. If a studio ever considered it, probably NASA refused to cooperate and the studio wasn't willing to film it with a disclaimer.

I also think that if Lancaster had played General Gordon in Khartoum, it would have been on condition of making it anti-imperialist in sentiment. The studio wouldn't do that, the schedule slipped, and Lancaster headed to Italy to film The Leopard. It would have been a bookend with Zulu Dawn, which hit on a number of themes that probably made Lancaster hot to do it as soon as he read the script:

• ·         Racism sits at the top of the bill, and Lancaster gets a great line about whether relegation to a place at the rear has something to do with the Basuto troops that his character, Dumford, raised, trained, and commanded.
• ·         You see classic British prejudice against the Irish, which Lancaster’s character is, and he even managed an Irish brogue. (He was tone-deaf about accents: this is the only time in 45 years when he tried one but it was a natural due to his being of Belfast stock.) This anti-Irish sentiment becomes explicit when Chelmsford sneers at Colonel Brown for being Irish, as much as for his concern over his troops’ lack of provision.
• ·         Assimilation. Simon Ward’s character enthusiastically shakes the hand of a black man who attends a garden party, but Ward’s character only has one function: killing blacks. The black guest has assimilated to the imperialists, but those who will not assimilate must be destroyed. Bishop Colenso’s “there should be room for all of us” is disingenuous; the empire may have geographic room for all, but not cultural room for all.
• ·         At minute 29 we get a chilling “let us hope that this will be the final solution to the Zulu problem.” I would not doubt that Lancaster took this role in part to get that statement in front of audiences who had learned in school about the Holocaust, especially after his role in Nuremberg.
• ·         Chelmsford comes across as a British Custer: “my only fear is that the Zulu will avoid engagement.” When the empire lost the battle, he blamed Dumford, who was dead, and whose advice the film pointedly shows the general dismissing. This was Lancaster’s chance to do a version of 1970’s Little Big Man.

Colenso was an avid missionary and that means he was an assimilationist, though he tried to get blacks treated equally under the law. He also rejected a common origin for all human races. He knew there was not cultural room for all when the Anglican church attacked his Hexateuchal commentary and filed suit to deprive him of his salary. If Lancaster came across this information while studying the script, it would have made him even hotter to do the film because it illustrates how religious institutions hang on to power by suppressing inconvenient unconventionalities. And in a sense that makes Zulu Dawn a bookend to Elmer Gantry for the hat trick.

If you have seen Lancaster's films, look again with this in mind and let me know if you find other sets. Also let me know if your favorite thespian does things like this. Lancaster was one of the few in Hollywood who gained control of his career early on, so he may be one of the few if not the only one to do this kind of thing. 

But it's not the same as doing one sequel after another, or doing films that follow on from a TV series, or making films about comic book characters. Those are just the studios trying to ensure an audience instead of daring to reach beyond the tried and true, the familiar and possibly tired. Reaching beyond is what Lancaster always tried to do, one reason his reputation has grown over the years.