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andym108
Reviews
Angi Vera (1978)
Simply the finest film I've ever seen (limited spoiler)
All I can say about Angi Vera is that it has everything one can ask for in a film of this sort: vividly portrayed characters, historical accuracy and moral seriousness.
While the nascent Soviet-imposed regime is shown in all of its horror, its characters are shown in full, without simplistic caricature, especially Angi Vera's apparatchik patron, whose background in the resistance to the Nazis just a few years earlier is given full expression. The period details are perfect, right down to the music on the gramophone. The lines spoken by the training school leaders consistently mimic the jargon to perfection: "If you are not going forward, you are going backward," etc., etc.
The climactic scene where Angi Vera faces her former lover in one of those infamous self-criticism sessions is a scene that I'll take with me forever---the look on her face when she is reminded of the truth of their relationship, followed by the immediate recognition of the reality of the cross-examination she is undergoing, the hardening of the lines on her face, and the subsequent (and instant) abandonment of her better self---precisely the purpose of the session. All done within a few minutes, but those few minutes capture to perfection the essence of every "People's Democracy" in Eastern and Central Europe. As does the entire film.
And the ending---understated but utterly horrifying in its implications. That this film could have been made in Hungary in the late 1970's was one of the surest signs that Communism was soon to be on the way out. I couldn't possibly recommend a movie more strongly than Angi Vera.
My Son John (1952)
So bad it's sublime
I actually owned a bootleg 16mm copy of "My Son John" about 35 years ago and showed it as part of a "Sex, Drugs and Treason" festival on college campuses, along with "Pecker Island" and "Reefer Madness." "My Son John" is a movie which is almost comically awful, with Robert Walker swearing on the Bible that he's not a Communist; Dean Jagger singing "If you don't like your Uncle Sammy;" the Communists tapping the FBI's phones rather than vice versa; Robert Walker dying from a blast of a Commie machine gun after a geographically impossible chase through downtown Washington; the taped posthumous speech to a collection of frozen-faced graduates with warnings of "stimulants" leading to "narcotics;" and finally, Dean Jagger more or less telling Helen Hayes that their late son got what he deserved.
So bad, though, that it's absolutely sublime, sort of like a "Reefer Madness" of politics, with its stereotyped, one-dimensional characters and its glorification of authority figures. I must have shown this movie several dozen times within the course of two years, but I could never once refrain from watching it again. There is no other movie which quite captures the spirit of blind conformity to the ethos of the witch-hunt as does "My Son John." Finding this site by accident makes me want to track down my copy (I lent it to a friend 15 years ago and never got it back) and see if I can get it transferred onto a DVD. Seeing this movie is better than reading almost any conventional political history of this period. Easily an 8 on a 10 scale, even acknowledging that it's one of those Bizarroworld scales.