Posted on 10/21/2006 4:31:53 PM PDT by Pokey78
MORE than 50 years after he first appeared in Hollywood as a bright young Republican, Clint Eastwood has been attacked by his old allies as a bleeding heart liberal for his latest film, Flags of Our Fathers.
The £40m film, which opened in 1,800 cinemas in America this weekend, focuses not only on the second world war battle of Iwo Jima but also on the fate of a native American soldier who, Eastwood suggests, was maltreated by the military after the Pacific campaign.
Flags of Our Fathers, which stars the Billy Elliot actor Jamie Bell and will be released in Britain in December, tells the grim story of the month-long battle early in 1945 in which nearly 30,000 soldiers died.
Eastwood, 76, follows the six soldiers who raised the Stars and Stripes over the small volcanic island, a moment captured in the famous photograph.
The three soldiers who survived the campaign were regarded as heroes. The US military organised public tours for them, but one, Ira Hayes, was not allowed to stay with the other two because he was a Pima Indian from Arizona. He became an alcoholic and died in mysterious circumstances 10 years later, which relatives attributed to despair at his racist treatment.
In 1993, at a ceremony on Iwo Jima, General Carl Mundy apologised on behalf of soldiers “who might have given the impression that some marines were not as capable as others because of the colour of their skin”.
While most American critics have praised the film, calling it the best war film since Saving Private Ryan, others have protested against a supposedly liberal bias in the script.
Scott Holleran, writing for Box Office Mojo, said: “Flags unfolds as though it discovers something awful about the United States, making the middle classes look idiotic and racist and suggesting the nation that defeated Japan did so purely by accident.”
William Bemister, a radio commentator, said he felt that Eastwood, formerly a close ally of President Ronald Reagan, had turned in recent years from “the Man with No Name to the Man with the Bleeding Heart”.
He said he could not wait for Flag’s forthcoming companion film, Letters from Iwo Jima, which shows the battle from the Japanese point of view, which he is sure “will be stuffed with US atrocities, even those that extreme left-wing historians have failed to unearth”.
Eastwood describes himself as a “libertarian of no party”. Observers suspect his once ruggedly Republican views have mellowed under the influence of his second wife, Dina Ruiz, who works for Mexican immigrant causes.
Eastwood, who built his reputation as a man of few words, has started talking about himself, and recently even spoke about his mother, once a taboo subject.
“My mother used to say, ‘You have a little angel on your shoulder’,” he recalled. “The best I can do is quote a line from my movie Unforgiven, where one character says, ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it’.”
The Houston Chronicle review of it yesterday said it sucked, so I figured it must be good.
I haven't seen this movie, but some of the ads seem a little over the top. "The greatest battle of WW2", for one.
D-Day, Ardennes, Guadalcanal, Okinawa, to name just 4 were all far larger and bloodier battles. Also, there's a quote from some character in the film to the effect that "people think we can win this war now". Iwo was in late '44, right? Did the American people think we were losing WW2 until then? I don't think so. I wasn't there, but nobody I ever knew who was alive at that time ever said they thought we would lose WW2, ever just after Pearl Harbor. They were mostly just mad the war wasn't being won sooner, especially against the Japanese, as FDR directed the main effort to Europe to save Churchill.
That's not surprising. Ask our Vietnam Vets how they've been treated! They, and their wives and widows, have been fighting for our rights and disability benefits for the last 30 years.
I'm reading reviews about how the movie contrasts the heroic soldiers with the big wigs back home who make war and were pushing war bonds on a "beleaguered" public. It was WWII for God's sake, they were heroes, and the bonds were to save Western Civilization.
I'll bet you Ira Hayes did experience racism, but then again he also was brought back from the war and treated as a hero. In the Tony Curtis film, he suffers from guilt because his buddy in the flag raising gets killed when they are called to headquarters, and he feels guilty to have lived.
Rave review in the San Jose Mercury News today. Said it's hard to follow, though, because it does not proceed chronologically.
I knew he had gone over to the dark side as soon as I saw Unforgiven. There isn't a hollywood conservative worth a damn.
I'm not sure how Eastwood supposedly spins it, but the book is great. Yeah, those boys were used for war bonds, but there was some mutual back scratching. Ira was kicked off the bond tour for drinking plain and simple (this article says that Eastwood suggests its because he's an Indian.)
Regardless, those boys were heroes and didn't even know it.
My wife and I just saw the movie today. Good flick.
BTW, there was indeed a lot of institutionalized racism in this country back in those days. Anyone who says different is ignorant of American history.
Ira Hayes was mistreated and disrespected. You can't tell the story without telling that story. It's a sad chapter in our nations history.
Not everything was going well in the Pacific and it was taking too long. Here's one of those "timeline" things to put it all in perspective: http://www.60wwii.mil/Presentation/Timeline/pac_timeline.cfm
I saw a bizarre interview on FOX yesterday with Barry Pepper, the star of this movie, and Oliver North. Barry Pepper said that Eastwood is following up this film with a movie called LETTERS FROM IOWA JIMA, which tells the tale from the Japanese side. The interviewer asked Pepper and North if there were similarities to world events today. North said, definitely because the Japanese leaders told the soldiers, YOU WILL ALL DIE at this battle, your job is to take 10 Americans down with you. The point being we were fighting a foe who didn't value life the same way we do. Pepper said that the similarity is that the letter show that these Japanese soldiers were just kids who didn't want to die, that it's just like today. He had the last word and it just left you shaking your head how completely oblivious these people are to who our enemy is.
Actually, the Battle of Iwo Jima was later, in February, '45.
What was WW2? Or did you mean WWII?
I may be wrong on this but I don't believe there were any black combat soldiers integrated with white units at that time, in either theatre of the war, hence they wouldn't have been at Iwo.
The Korean War was the first war where there was integration in the field of battle, according to my late father, a Korean War veteran.
I saw that interview too, and Pepper's closing comment wierdly suggested that he was disappointed in the human race because (in his view) humans are most creative only when it comes to killing one another.
As if space exploration, refrigerators and books had no place in the annals of human achievement.
That was the major complaint of the Chronicle, but the review was written by a chick, and since it's a liberal newspaper to begin with, I figured she was a hopeless choice to review the movie in any event.
Who the heck knew Clint's politics fifty years ago? Wasn't he playing Rowdy Yates back then?
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