Cover of The Onion Field

Based on a true story chronicled by Joseph Wambaugh in a book, The Onion Field (1979) is a very good Law and Order episode.

Sensibly directed by Harold Becker, it concerns two thieving criminals, Greg Powell and Jimmy Smith, who unintentionally encounter two plainclothes policemen who are suspicious of them.  To get them out of the way, the crooks kidnap the officers—Hettinger (John Savage) and Campbell (Ted Danson)—with Powell soon thinking they will have to be killed because, mistakenly, he deems the kidnapping of cops a death-penalty offense.  Consequently, out in an onion field, Powell shoots Campbell (does Smith do so?), but Hettinger frantically escapes.

By and by the criminals are caught, and exhausting trials get underway.  Officer Campbell is dead, and Hettinger eventually starts wishing he was too:  The precinct holds that he was wrong to surrender his gun to the culprits, and tormenting memories of the homicide keep afflicting him.  Finally he resigns from the force.

A fascinating narrative is served up here (script by Wambaugh), and it effectively makes a sensitive person think.  Protesting that he has never killed anyone, Smith claims he is only a thief.  To my mind, here the film imparts that a man is a fool to commit a felonious crime because it is too highly possible he will sooner or later commit an even worse one.  Franklyn Seales plays Smith with tautness, with sympathy-inducing verity.  James Woods is an evil but human Powell, a man of evident wits and dementedness.  These men and honor among thieves are not exactly simpatico.  Although the film has its defects, I myself am pretty simpatico with The Onion Field. 

In the first-person narrative of the novel Loner (2016), by Teddy Wayne, David Federman does not seem like a true loner, even a sexually deprived one. An 18-year-old Harvard student, he seems conventional and straight-thinking until . . . his preoccupation with beautiful Veronica, a fellow student, is all that concerns him; and, yes, his friends appear no longer to be around. Tenuously involved with two other guys, Veronica is all but dismissive of the “beta” David while also giving him mild encouragement. David plans and schemes, sometimes repulsively.

Craving the girl, our hero never says he loves her. Veronica, for her part, objectifies David. Both are probably too young to know better (or not), albeit the loner proves capable of a serious offense—and doesn’t care about it.

Loner is like Alissa Nutting’s Tampa: a relatively short, serious novel that is not very profound but is a page-turner. And it’s intelligently written. I recommend it.

Dinesh D’Souza‘s Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, which dates from 2016, doesn’t strike me as a perfectly incisive or sophisticated documentary. D’Souza opposes (opposed) Hillary Clinton becoming President, something that will never happen, because she is flatly greedy and deceptive. Exactly right, notwithstanding D’Souza knows there is far more to it than that. (There is policy.)

The film is informative enough, though, that I’m glad I saw it. That the “secret history” of the Democratic party is fraught with hypocrisy and heinousness I have not doubted for decades—because of its fear of losing power and its heartless impracticality. For example, the Dem Left wants convicted men who, transgenderly, identify as women to be in women’s prisons if they choose, regardless of the sexual assaults which are taking place. If this isn’t heartless and impractical, what is?

The reckless, vulgar party behavior of teenagers in the Australian film Blackrock (1997) precedes a horrifying rape and murder of one of the party participants, a 15-year-old girl.

Recalling a real-life 1991 incident of which I know nothing, it is a searing and necessary minor achievement directed by Steven Vidler and based on a play by Nick Enright.  The main character, Jared (Laurence Bruels), is the one who throws the well-attended wild party and who, alone, witnesses the rape (though not the murder) of the girl.  But he does nothing for her; he just watches, astonished.  He allows his friends to perpetrate sheer evil.  Hard truths pile up and do a number on Jared’s nerves.  He rebels against his divorced mother but pulls back from that rebellion too; he becomes distant toward his girlfriend.  He is confused, shocked at himself, isolated.

The film is a part-time study of adolescence, and also of a Western world not without its inevitable moral ignorance, inexperience and paralysis.  The ignorance of the teenage rapists is so strong it leads them to commit this particular crime.  The inexperience of Jared is so strong it results in the paralysis.  He is so dissociated from anything providing a moral ballast that he cannot act against wickedness done to another.  In contrast, his best friend Ricko acts, but psychopathically, as when he clobbers a boy who takes a swing at Jared.  Like the rapists, Ricko is a brute.

Blackrock would have better had it not been melodramatic, but as it is, it is engrossing cinematic drama.  And you won’t find a more expert collection of teenage actors than the one here, for amid all the verve and passion there is little overacting, which means little exaggeration.  Granted, some of the adults do a trifle better (more depth and nuance) but on the other hand, among them there are overactors.  Vidler should have restrained them a bit.

A German industrialist, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), becomes virtuous enough to start saving the lives of captured Jews in Steven Spielberg‘s Schindler’s List, from 1993. The man who, in response to the film, observed that the Holocaust was not about salvation but rather annihilation was right. Also true, however, is that the film effectively shows people—the Jews—being sucked into a sphere of nonstop human destructiveness; the obliteration of lives, yes.

Schindler’s List has its flaws but, too, it offers some staggering scenes. Spielberg is a true and disturbing artist here, as when a gunshot is heard before the tracking camera exposes the dead body of a Jewish boy whom, shocked, we believe had been pardoned by the monstrous Nazi, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes). Such scenes of Auschwitz as that of the gathering of women at a site where they might be gassed and a melee involving children of these women are hair-raising and dramatically momentous.

Neeson was displeased with his performance as Schindler, claiming he failed to own the role. Spielberg’s and screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s material owns the movie.