I have never seen the David Mamet play, Oleanna, on stage, but surely the next best thing is watching Mamet’s 1994 film of it.  William H. Macy is true and affecting as a college professor accused of sexual harassment, and Debra Eisenstadt is mesmerizing as the girl who has accused him.  Mamet’s directing is satisfyingly competent.

Carol, the girl, understands nothing but believes she understands everything—except the lessons presented in John’s—Macy’s—class.  She is academically sinking there, almost frantic about it.  But she starts to think she can read her professor, and to discern oppression.  John’s easy cynicism about higher education only makes matters worse.  Carol resents that John possesses power of a sort, and goes so far as to deem him a rapist (!)

Mamet’s achievement is disturbing as it concentrates on the utter failure of human communion and on Carol’s use of radical sentiment, or political correctness, to defeat John.  (But is she really a radical?)  Near pleadingly at one point she tells him, “I’m bad!”  The utopia that Oleanna‘s title refers to is not exactly beckoning in the university.  This is a sadly dark opus.

I rather enjoyed the 1954 A Kiss Before Dying, by Gerd Oswald, except that much of the acting needs to be more grounded and the plot is mediocre. Re the former, for example, Robert Wagner seems to care little about his part. Re the latter, for example, apparently no one saw Wagner (as Bud) and Joanne Woodward (as Dorothy) together as they ambled up to the roof of a tall building where Bud murders Dorothy. Everybody but everybody thinks she committed suicide.

There is sapid suspense, though.

The main character in Bernard Malamud‘s short story “The Jewbird,” a bird that calls himself a Jewbird flies through the open window of a Jewish family’s apartment and never willingly leaves there. He is fleeing certain culprits, enemies, especially anti-Semites. The bird represents the Jewish race.

He cannot pay back the Cohen family for his food and shelter, but can only do them the favor of necessarily helping son Maurie with his schoolwork. The father is suspicious of and then hostile to the bird (“whoever heard of a Jewbird?”) Yes, he is a surreal creature, but the bird brings into relief the family’s failure to really understand the threat of anti-Jewish hate, and of human brutality in general. It is the bird who understands as he begins to live as though he were in a chamber or a prison camp of terror. This is before the story’s horrific ending when it becomes clear how indistinguishable violent anti-Semites are from predatory animals.

Revolving around life in the notorious Hoa Le Prison in 1960s Vietnam, Lionel Chetwynd‘s The Hanoi Hilton (1987) launches a strong assault on Communists and the New Left’s anti-anti-Communism of yesteryear. It pays homage to American POWs, tortured until they “broke,” in the prison.

The film’s characters are not fully convincing and sometimes they are viewed sentimentally, but there is never a dull moment and THH can be moving. It is slightly puzzling when Lt. Cmdr. Williamson (Michael Moriarty) asserts to the prison major (Aki Aleong) that the POWs not only survived the prison, admirably, but also “won” against their captors. Weren’t the POWs forced to provide the North Vietnamese with useful information every time they broke under torture? Is this really winning? In any case, I like Chetwynd’s film. Though flawed, it is inspired and conservative.

Walkabout (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Nicolas Roeg‘s Walkabout (1971), an English teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her younger brother (Lucien John) must make their way out of the Australian outback, and are helped by a virile, humane Aboriginal boy (David Gumpilil).  Here, civilization and primitive culture have so much in common they are nearly one and the same, except, as it happens, primitive culture has a moral nobility that civilization will simply never manifest.  Screenwriter Edward Bond does the film no favors by arguing such a theme and by making the theme damnably obvious.  In other words, there’s no subtlety.

Although the film is remarkable-looking—and not always pleasant-looking—Roeg is a would-be artist ignorant of how to avoid pretentiousness.  Hence we see everything from pointless freeze frames to white tree branches which resemble sexy human legs, and we hear ill-fitting choral music.  Walkabout, not surprisingly, is sometimes uncomfortably weird.

Jenny Agutter’s acting is fairly successful, but rather too cold.  Gumpilil, on the other hand, is lively.  Kids are the major characters in Walkabout but, believe me, it’s an  adults-only picture—except, well, I can’t imagine anyone but a callow adolescent REALLY enjoying it.  Roeg has seen the enemy and it is us Civilizers.