We Choose the Cooler

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2001)

Spoilers herein.
Films are like people in the respect that some are leaders but most followers. That's because most movies are not about life, but about previous movies. This film established not only a genre (I chose to resee it after `Chicken Run') but played a role in inventing a society. I'm of the belief that culture invents some art that in turn reinvents the culture. More about that in a minute.
What's so special about this is that it places the American rebel (with his motorcycle) in mainstream American society. Before, the beatnik or `bohemian' was unamerican, nonmainstream. This film invents memories of the war for the generation after the war -- it takes an essentially British story and uses it as background to establish a new vision of the American rebel. This rebel is centrally American, heroic even. Independent of sex.
There are four forces in this film. The evil Gestapo (with the majority of Germans, but the film glosses that); the two forces of the British and German Air Force stuck in a duel of gallantry from a prior generation; and then the McQueen force. All at once, we have the cockiness and independence of Brando and Dean transformed into a patriotic center, into something directed, seemingly casually, against intrinsic evil.
I saw an advance screening of this in most peculiar circumstances. I was a cadet in a midwestern military academy whose commandant was the senior American officer at the POW camp during the planning of the escape. (Americans were moved shortly before, and the reason is an interesting story in itself.) We 850 mostly sons of republicans mostly hawks, all white were given a vision of necessary disturbance, of a strange patriot that we couldn't internalize. Only a couple months later JFK was murdered. The Cooler King was one key image we used with our brethren nationwide to reinvent ourselves. Check it out. This contributed to a national identity that actually lived for a while. Never plan to win, just make your own statement.
Attenborough knows something about manipulating the British image for American consumption. His `Ghandi' is a masterpiece of posture. Talent. Sturges' camera is quiet, still, non-modern, so that you lose awareness that this is a film. This stance is dated -- wouldn't work today, and makes things feel as of a different era. Attenborough's camera sweeps (see his short episode -- the Indian sequence -- in `Close Encounters.') Attenborough's acting style here (indeed his role too) mirrors that. It is a fulcrum of everything, a subliminal sweep under Sturges' stillness.
Check out the score by Bernstein. If you take out just a little of the march tempo, you have Williams' copy for Indiana Jones. Indy echoed the tone for a by that time narcissistic notion of rebellion: mystical forces of evil accommodated by selfish acquisition and pathetic self-deprecation -- the Reagan American. Williams intended to quote Bernstein to make this point, I think.
If you haven't seen it yet, look for the Cooler guard. His hesitation at the end is priceless, indicating that every soul is malleable. It is why the film wasn't made for eight years, bombed when it came out, but is now in the IMDB top 100.