Propaganda

Rating: 1/10 (20 April 2010)

This is the sort of thing that you expect during a war and in America we have one every few years so there are plenty of them to compare this dog of a film to.
This is, above all, a propaganda film made, apparently, to demonstrate that all cruelty and savagery is permitted as long as it is in the interest of the Hollywood master race, the American. We are treated to psychopathic war criminals who extract their arbitrary vengeance on anyone they see as inferior and subhuman. This is supposed to be inspiring or amusing because the chosen villains are Nazis. This appears to be the the gist of the action.
There are a couple of obvious problems with this. First, of course, is the nature of evil. St. Ignatius in his spiritual exercises suggested imagining the army of good lined up against the army of evil so that one might contemplate the differences. This exercise has some problems as Thomas Merton pointed out, saying that he couldn't do it because it became much too much like Cecil B. Demille's Hollywood epics. Here, however, the legions of the good are apparently headed by a fellow playing a Cherokee descended country bumpkin who wants nothing more than to kill Nazis and who has, as a right hand man, a deranged Bostonian Jew who beats people to death while babbling about the Red Sox, for reasons I was never clear about. Clearly this is not what St. Ignatius had in mind and does not seem to partake of any essence of the good.
Second, having been raised by German Nazis in post war America I am in a position to point out that while Nazi ideology is fairly hideous, the Nazis themselves were, like other people, real people with faults and virtues. It was, I believe, Brownowski who said that the horror of the death camps was not that people were led to their deaths by Germans, but that they were led to their deaths by people whistling Mozart.
In the beginning of this film the countryside is being scoured by a German officer in a well pressed uniform looking for Jews using a small notebook. We know that, in fact, the "final solution" was implemented by means of an IBM machine leased from the company in America. All very modern and civilized. The Nazis were not Neanderthals who dined on the blood of babies every evening, they were among the most civilized people that the world had to offer at the time.
The lunatics in this film are, in large part, Americans and, in particular, Jewish Americans. We are presented with a gallery of Jewish criminals being given a last chance at redemption by the country boy who wants to have them scalp Nazis. Scalping is credited in the movie to the Apaches, a tribe of native Americans who lived in the hills of western Arizona and who did not practice scalping, at least not until they learned it from the inventors of the practice, the English. So the scalp hunting Jews are portrayed as sympathetic because of what they or their kin suffered from the Germans. This is a familiar type reminiscent of some of Leon Uris' characters who survived the war to become terrorists for the yet unfounded state of Israel in Exodus.
All of this and much more, is just the sort of thing one expects in wartime. It is called propaganda. The enemy, in this case the Nazi, is portrayed as less than human or as a defective human who can be killed in amusing ways by any form of cruelty or savagery because it is clothed in the armor of rightness. It's all OK, because it's just a country boy's attempt, to distribute a little justice in a confused and possibly mad world and if the Bear Jew and some of the others get a little carried away, well, it's all in a good cause.
Of course, it is all in the past and in Europe. No Iraqi's, Afghanis, or Palestinians are killed by the glorious bastards, and no reference oblique or direct is made that I noticed, although I admit my attention wandered rather badly in the second half. Still, with those wars under way this is the move that is offered to us as a paean to the rightness of the American and for that it is should be clearly labeled as propaganda.
I find all this to be a far more than I care to spend an hour and a half watching and I do not recommend it to you.