Does a Forgotten Movie Hold Lessons for Our Time?
I have sometimes commented on a few movies that I thought had some memorable lines. You probably won't see in these pages any comment on current releases, however--mostly because most of them are not worth the celluloid they got printed on.
But in searching through the archives of the Internet Movie Database, I found that some of the most dedicated foes of President Bush had found an incredibly obscure title--so obcure that its studio never released it to tape or disk--as a vehicle for expressing some of their so-called fears. I only remembered this title because it was such a shocking and jarring tale when I saw it the couple of times it was on.
The movie--actually a made-for-TV effort and a failed pilot--is titled Shadow on the Land--directed by Richard C. Sarafian, with Jackie Cooper, Marc Strange, John Forsythe, Gene Hackman, Carol Lynley, and others (Screen Gems, Inc., 1968). When ABC-TV first aired it, I was just an eleven-year-old kid and was told to march off to bed, as the movie would run too long on a "school night"--but the film's first half hour stuck with me. A few years later, I saw the film in its entirety one summer on one of those "Early Show" programs that used to show movies at 3:00 p.m. on weekdays. (With the expanded soap-opera schedule, that is clearly obsolete.)
The "shadow" of the title is of a Nazi-like dictatorship that somehow takes over the United States. The movie takes less than a minute to set the scene, saying nothing at all about the kind of threat that would make the American people vote away their freedom. But it does a chillingly good job of setting up what a United States of America under a National Socialist American Workers' Party would look like. The Nazi Schutzstaffel, central to the story, is here called the "Internal Security Forces" (ISF). The head of the government is called The Leader (Der Fuehrer), who has published a number of propaganda works that are the only works permitted for sale in bookstores. Their titles: Our Struggle (Mein Kampf) and Handbook for Children. These titles, furthermore, come from the ISF Press, which is why, when I first saw them, I thought I was looking at some macabre gift shop window at ISF headquarters.
The essence of the plot is this: A light colonel in the US Army named Andrew Davis (played by Jackie Cooper) discovers that The Leader is planning to order the ISF to don civilian clothes and blow up a power plant, triggering a blackout of the entire Southwest, in order to discredit the very real resistance, which calls itself The Society of Man. The ISF arrests him, but the SOM breaks him out of the detention camp to which the ISF has taken him. Major Shepherd McCloud (Marc Strange) gets the order, straight from General Wendell Bruce (John Forsythe), the commandant of the ISF, to find Col. Davis and bring him in.
But what Gen. Bruce does not realize is that Maj. McCloud himself is an SOM sympathizer.
Well, the ISF recaptures Col. Davis, but Major McCloud shames an ISF interrogator, Col. Everett (one of the earliest roles of an actress named Janice Rule), into sharing with him Davis' last words, which describe the power plant operation. General Bruce, still totally unsuspecting, briefs McCloud on "Operation Hammer" and its details. Whereupon McCloud tips the SOM and--get this--tells them to wear ISF uniforms as they go to the power plant and prepare for a firefight. Now surreal scenarios don't get better than this: The ISF, disguised as resistance men, are there to blow something up, and the actual resistance, disguised as the ISF, are there to protect it!
You needn't worry about spoilers, because I'm not sure who even owns the rights to Shadow today, or whether they'll ever transfer it to tape or press it to disk. The SOM manages to protect the power plant, and Major McCloud goes back to ISF headquarters and still manages to carry on! This is the most serious flaw in the film: why wouldn't General Bruce fire Major McCloud, just for reporting mission failure, even if Bruce didn't suspect that McCloud was a resistance mole? After all, that's what the commandants of the SS would have done. But, you see, Screen Gems wanted to make a regular action-adventure series out of the concept. Unfortunately, for them, it flopped. ABC was not willing to produce, even in the era of the great anti-Vietnam demonstrations, a regular series suggesting that the United States government would be the bad guys. Remember what else ABC had in its line-up at the time: The FBI, with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as a dedicated and thoroughly sympathetic FBI Inspector.
So what is the relevance of an old movie title today? It lies in the User Comments that it received on the IMDb, nine in all. The first two comments were about two years apart--July 1999 and December 2001. (Note that the second comment was after September Eleventh.) The next few comments, beginning in the summer of 2002, all start making the snide and totally unfounded allegation that the Bush administration is guilty of staging false terrorist attacks and establishing a totalitarian regime. This, then, is more of the same "Bush is Hitler" trash. (To be fair, however, one comment does not make that comparison.) One commentator even suggests that the reason you never see it running on TV anymore is government censorship! (Hah! If that were true, then Michael Moore would have been arrested by now and his film would never have seen the light of day.) And those who cite the climactic power-plant scene forget one thing: you would not see any Al-Qaida fighters, wearing Federal Protective Services uniforms, guarding any power plant that the real FPS had been ordered to destroy--not to mention that you won't see this administration issuing any such appalling order.
With all that said, Shadow on the Land is a parallel to an event that we know is in the future of the world: the coming of the Beast from the Sea (Revelation 13). This Beast will be a military hero and leader, about whom the world will say, in effect, "Have you ever seen anything like this guy? How can you win a war against him?" And very likely this Beast will have a foil--which is the very real Al-Qaida organization. The trouble is that the Christians will be lumped in with the Muslims when this Beast comes to power.
But in searching through the archives of the Internet Movie Database, I found that some of the most dedicated foes of President Bush had found an incredibly obscure title--so obcure that its studio never released it to tape or disk--as a vehicle for expressing some of their so-called fears. I only remembered this title because it was such a shocking and jarring tale when I saw it the couple of times it was on.
The movie--actually a made-for-TV effort and a failed pilot--is titled Shadow on the Land--directed by Richard C. Sarafian, with Jackie Cooper, Marc Strange, John Forsythe, Gene Hackman, Carol Lynley, and others (Screen Gems, Inc., 1968). When ABC-TV first aired it, I was just an eleven-year-old kid and was told to march off to bed, as the movie would run too long on a "school night"--but the film's first half hour stuck with me. A few years later, I saw the film in its entirety one summer on one of those "Early Show" programs that used to show movies at 3:00 p.m. on weekdays. (With the expanded soap-opera schedule, that is clearly obsolete.)
The "shadow" of the title is of a Nazi-like dictatorship that somehow takes over the United States. The movie takes less than a minute to set the scene, saying nothing at all about the kind of threat that would make the American people vote away their freedom. But it does a chillingly good job of setting up what a United States of America under a National Socialist American Workers' Party would look like. The Nazi Schutzstaffel, central to the story, is here called the "Internal Security Forces" (ISF). The head of the government is called The Leader (Der Fuehrer), who has published a number of propaganda works that are the only works permitted for sale in bookstores. Their titles: Our Struggle (Mein Kampf) and Handbook for Children. These titles, furthermore, come from the ISF Press, which is why, when I first saw them, I thought I was looking at some macabre gift shop window at ISF headquarters.
The essence of the plot is this: A light colonel in the US Army named Andrew Davis (played by Jackie Cooper) discovers that The Leader is planning to order the ISF to don civilian clothes and blow up a power plant, triggering a blackout of the entire Southwest, in order to discredit the very real resistance, which calls itself The Society of Man. The ISF arrests him, but the SOM breaks him out of the detention camp to which the ISF has taken him. Major Shepherd McCloud (Marc Strange) gets the order, straight from General Wendell Bruce (John Forsythe), the commandant of the ISF, to find Col. Davis and bring him in.
But what Gen. Bruce does not realize is that Maj. McCloud himself is an SOM sympathizer.
Well, the ISF recaptures Col. Davis, but Major McCloud shames an ISF interrogator, Col. Everett (one of the earliest roles of an actress named Janice Rule), into sharing with him Davis' last words, which describe the power plant operation. General Bruce, still totally unsuspecting, briefs McCloud on "Operation Hammer" and its details. Whereupon McCloud tips the SOM and--get this--tells them to wear ISF uniforms as they go to the power plant and prepare for a firefight. Now surreal scenarios don't get better than this: The ISF, disguised as resistance men, are there to blow something up, and the actual resistance, disguised as the ISF, are there to protect it!
You needn't worry about spoilers, because I'm not sure who even owns the rights to Shadow today, or whether they'll ever transfer it to tape or press it to disk. The SOM manages to protect the power plant, and Major McCloud goes back to ISF headquarters and still manages to carry on! This is the most serious flaw in the film: why wouldn't General Bruce fire Major McCloud, just for reporting mission failure, even if Bruce didn't suspect that McCloud was a resistance mole? After all, that's what the commandants of the SS would have done. But, you see, Screen Gems wanted to make a regular action-adventure series out of the concept. Unfortunately, for them, it flopped. ABC was not willing to produce, even in the era of the great anti-Vietnam demonstrations, a regular series suggesting that the United States government would be the bad guys. Remember what else ABC had in its line-up at the time: The FBI, with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as a dedicated and thoroughly sympathetic FBI Inspector.
So what is the relevance of an old movie title today? It lies in the User Comments that it received on the IMDb, nine in all. The first two comments were about two years apart--July 1999 and December 2001. (Note that the second comment was after September Eleventh.) The next few comments, beginning in the summer of 2002, all start making the snide and totally unfounded allegation that the Bush administration is guilty of staging false terrorist attacks and establishing a totalitarian regime. This, then, is more of the same "Bush is Hitler" trash. (To be fair, however, one comment does not make that comparison.) One commentator even suggests that the reason you never see it running on TV anymore is government censorship! (Hah! If that were true, then Michael Moore would have been arrested by now and his film would never have seen the light of day.) And those who cite the climactic power-plant scene forget one thing: you would not see any Al-Qaida fighters, wearing Federal Protective Services uniforms, guarding any power plant that the real FPS had been ordered to destroy--not to mention that you won't see this administration issuing any such appalling order.
With all that said, Shadow on the Land is a parallel to an event that we know is in the future of the world: the coming of the Beast from the Sea (Revelation 13). This Beast will be a military hero and leader, about whom the world will say, in effect, "Have you ever seen anything like this guy? How can you win a war against him?" And very likely this Beast will have a foil--which is the very real Al-Qaida organization. The trouble is that the Christians will be lumped in with the Muslims when this Beast comes to power.
posted by Temlakos at 12:51 PM
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