Mel Brooks's History of the World, Part I (Brooksfilms, 20th Century-Fix, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10 p.m. on February 17 my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie from 1981 called Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I. This was made when Brooks was coming off a run of brilliantly funny, anarchic movies like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie and High Anxiety, all of them successful both artistically (if one can use that word in connection with Mel Brooks!) and commercially. History of the World was a box-office disappointment and it’s easy to see why, even though much of it is as funny as its predecessors in the Brooks canon. It was narrated by Orson Welles (of all people) and dealt with four eras in human history: the caveman era, the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution. The prehistoric segment is an obvious parody of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, even though at least Brooks avoided showing a monolith. All the other elements are there, though, including the opening of Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” booming out on the soundtrack as we get picturesque long-shots of ape-men silhouetted against a blood-red sky. We also get some of the predictable gags, including BRooks indulging his obsession with scatology; when one of his caveman charaqcters paints a picture of a buffalo on a cave wall and Welles tells us he is the first artist, he then says that almost as soon as the first artist emerged there came the first critic – a full-bearded man in a black fur coat who pees on the painting.

Brooks used most of his “regulars” in the cast, including Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero, Madeline Kahn as Empress Nympho (and her role is a rehash of her famous Dietrich parody “Lily von Shtupp” in Blazing Saddles), Harvey Korman as “Count de Monay” in the French revolution sequence (and he too repeats a Blazing Saddles schtick when he constantly has to correct people who mispronounce his name as “Count de Money”), Cloris Leachman (screamingly funny as Madame Defarge), and Ron Carey (as “Swiftus Lazarus,” agent of Brooks’s “stand-up philosopher” in the Roman Empire sequence – the name is a pun on real-life super-agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar,so named because he was famous for grabbing deals for clients or properties before anyone else knew they were even available), as well as an uncredited by readily recognizable Bea Arthur as an unemployment insurance clerk in ancient Rome. (Of course Brooks can’t resist making fun of the Roman alphabet’s use of “V” to represent “U”: the window from which Arthur works is labeled, “VNEMPLOYMENT INSVRANCE.”) There's also an “Introducing” credit for Mary-Margaret Hughes as Miriam, a Vestal Virgin in ancient Rome, and guest appearances by Sid Caesar (as a caveman – in the 1950’s Sid Caesar starred in one of the funniest TV shows ever made and Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen and Neil Simon were in his writers’ room!), Shecky Greene (as a Roman general) and Gregory Hines (as Black tap-dancer Josephus).

The film is typical Brooks looniness, alternating scenes of almost savage brilliance with other scenes that make you (made me, anyway) groan in their tastelessness. One sequence that works brilliantly is the Spanish Inquisition, with Brooks as Torquemada and a group of nuns who doff their habits to reveal silver bathing suits underneath. The nuns do a synchronized dive into a swimming pool in obvious imitation of Busby Berkeley’s great water ballets, set to a song about the immortality of the Inquisition written by Brooks and Ronny Graham n a sequence choreographed by Alan Johnson. Johnson would take over as director on Brooks’ next production, a 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 anti-Nazi masterpiece To Be or Not to Be, and Graham played a key supporting role in that film. (I remember showing Charles a tape of the original To Be or Not to Be early in our relationship and he was astonished, coming to it from the Brooks remake, that the two were so close. The only significant difference was the addition of Tim Matheson’s Gay character, put in to dramatize the Nazis’ persecution of Queer people.)

The French Revolution sequence seems quite likely to have been a deliberate knock-off of Monsieur Beaucaire – the 1946 spoof version with Bob Hope in the lead. In both films a nobleman (in History of the World it’s the King himself) fearing for his life finds a milquetoast nobody who looks like him to impersonate him so he doesn’t get killed. Brooks cast himself as both Louis XVI (whom he made considerably sexually randier than the real one; unlike his father and grandfather, Louis XVI was neither particularly interested in sex nor good at it) and the court’s so-called “piss boy,” whose job it is to carry around the royal chamberpot and make it available to anyone who might need it. I give Brooks credit for at least resisting the obvious temptation to have the pot break and spill its noxious contents all over everyone, but even so the gag isn’t that funny and it’s nowhere near the laff-riot the famous bean-eating scene (which launched a thousand fart jokes in later and much less funny movies) in Blazing Saddles. There’s also a deus ex machina in the form of a white horse named Miracle, whose super-powers apparently include the ability to travel through time, since it somehow leaps through the centuries from its initial appearance in the Roman empire sequence to spirit Louis XVI (or his “piss boy,” since by this time even I was pretty unsure as to who was who) and his three friends away from the guillotine and out of France.

I could think of at least one way History of the World could have been even funnier than it was: if Mel Brooks had turned it into a parody of Irwon Allen’s bizarre 1957 filmization of Henric Willem van Loon’s 1922 pop history The Story of Mankind. In that film Allen set up a heavenly “trial” between the “Spirit of Man” (Ronald Colman in his last film role before his death) and the Devil (Vincent Price – who else?). The gimmick is that God is getting so annoyed at the sinfulness of the human species he’s considering sending another flood or a similar apocalypse to destroy the human race, and Colman’s and Price’s characters go back and forth, citing incidents of either good or bad in human history to convince God either to destroy humanity or to spare it. One could readily imagine what Mel Brooks could have done with that premise instead of just doing what amounts to a film of sketches about various epochs! He might even have cast himself as both the “Spirit of Mankind” and the Devil, with Orson Welles as God. In actual fact, History of the World, Part 1 was a financial flop, as was To Be or Not to Be, and 20th Century-Fox let Brooks go and he didn’t direct another movie until his screamingly funny Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs, for MGM in 1987. (That film was helped by the fact that the Star Wars mythos was already so silly Brooks didn’t need to do much to it to make it hilarious.)

Today Mel Brooks is considered an elder statesman of comedy and he’s redeemed himself commercially with his reworking of his first film, The Producers, into a Broadway musical. And in case you were wondering whether there ever was a History of the World, Part II, the closing credits for Part ! include mock clips from it – “Hitler on Ice,””Viking Funeral” and “Jews in Space” (the last being a science-fiction romp in which Jewish astronauts fly spaceships that look like Stars of David; one wonders whether these craft are armed with the Jewish space lasers on which loony-tunes Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene said in all seriousness caused the big California wildfires of a couple of years ago),and a Brooks Wikipedia page lists History of the World, Part II as in production as an animated TV series in 2023 – though I’ll believe that when I see it!

Law and Order: "Heroes" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Te;levision, NBC-TV, aired February 16, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (February 16) I watched the usual three episodes of Law and Order and its spinoffs, including a quite good episode of the flagship Law and Order program called “Heroes.” It begins with what appears to be a mass shooting in a New York nightclub called Red Envy, in which a young man wearing a blue watch cap, blue jeans and red shoes walks into the club with a shiny metal gun and starts shooting people. At first I thought Dick Wolf’s production crew had decided to do another “ripped from the headlines” special about the spate of recent mass shootings (of which there had already been between 67 and 71 in the U.S. just during the first 45 days of 2023!), but it soon develops that the shooter and the victim were both known to each other and she was deliberately targeted. She was up-and-coming model who was there with her current boyfriend, rapper “King Matisse” (though why an urban hip-hop artist would take his stage name from a legendary but long-deceased French painter was never explained in the script) and the hiller was Bishop Bell (Shemar Jones), a rising basketball star in high school until he tore his knee out and could no longer play. He was bitter that the model dumped him for a rapper who could offer her the good life that had been once within his reach until his injury – though when the lead detectives, Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), finally arrest Bell they’re surprised at how fast someone with a bad knee could flee from them.

When the case ends up before the show’s usual prosecutors, Nolan Price (British actor Hugh Dancy, who does a remarkably good job of suppressing his normal accent and talking like an American) abd Samantha Maroun (Israeli actress Odelya Halevi, playing an Arab-American), they realize that without a gun, surveillance footage (the club’s cameras were actually working, but King Matisse personally deleted the footage because it wouldn’t have accorded with his image as a fearless street thug that he ran away from the shooting) or a clear eyewitness description of the killer, they can’t successfully convict Bell. Their only hope is an on-duty uniformed officer, Nick Riley (Shawn Hatosy), who said he didn’t arrive at the scene until six minutes after the shooter fled the club. In fact he arrived three minutes later, enough time to encounter the shooter, only he froze and allowed the gunman to walk past his patrol car. Though the shooter had already done the deed and therefore Riley at least didn’t have any more lives on his conscience, and though he’d previously received commendations for his bravery, the fact that he froze that one time leads to his undoing.

He’s put on the witness stand and remorselessly cross-examined by Bell’s lawyer, who calls him a coward, and though Bell is ultimately convicted, as Price and Maroun are leaving the courtroom after the verdict Price is punched in the face by another officer and told, “You destroyed a good cop.” He asks Maroun what that was about, and Maroun tells him, “Haven’t you heard? Officer Riley committed suicide.” “Heroes” is a fascinating meditation on the nature of both courage and cowardice – the only real hero was the initial victim, who, thinking the assailant was a typical mass shooter (it’s a sign of the times that I can write the words “typical mass shooter” and not mean it as a description of a science-fiction hellscape), shielded one of the barbacks and gave him time to flee. It’s one of those remarkable shows from the Dick Wolf stable in which his writers manage to make comments on society and human nature within the confines of a cop show.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Dutch Tears" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Te;levision, NBC-TV, aired February 16, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followe was called “Dutch Tears” and was given a thoroughly misleading promo in which Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T_ os beomg thrown a party to celebrate his 20th anniversary as a member of the Special Victims Unit. Fin gets so drunk at the party, which naturally is held in a bar, that Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) drives him home – where he’s confronted by a man he arrested over two decades before. He’s Ivan “Dutch” Hernandez, and when Fin arrested him Dutch was 17 and had just been accepted (Richard Cabral) to college – only he didn’t have the money to go and was trying to raise it by dealing illegally obtained prescription pills. From the promos it looked like Dutch was going to hold Fin hostage and torture him – maybe psychologicaly, maybe physically, maybe both – for the show’s hour-long running time until BEnson and his fellow SVU officers would somehow find out what was going on and rescue him. Instead Dutch turns out to have a real grievance: once he was thrown into New York’s notorious Tombs city jail, the first night he was there he was raped by a man he identified only as “Cream Cheese” because that’swhat his hair looked like. Dutch complained to the corrections officer on duty but from the man’s totally disinterested response sooin realized that the C.O. had deliberately let his rapist into his cell. Despite the lateness of the hour and Fin’s inebriated condition, he decides to launch an investigation and solicit the help of Benson and the other SVU detectives.

They track down the corrections officer, Pete Ryan (Mark Borkowski), who in the meantime is still working as a C.O. He’s now working at the almost as notorious Riker’s Island and he’s been promoted to captain. When the cops visit Ryan his wife makes a bee-line for a local sober-living center and the cops realize it’s gto give a heads-up warning to Virgil Hatton (Marc Basil), Dutch’s rapist and a man Ryan used to rely on in his old days at the Tombs as an unofficial discipline agent to prisoners he thought were getting out of line. It’s unclear why he sic’ced Hatton on Dutch, who was arrested for a nonviolent crime and didn’t pose a threat to anybody, but Hatton not only went to town on Dutch back then, he branded him with an “H” on his chest to indicate he was Hatton’s property and then loaned him out to other prisoners at his whim. Eventually both Hatton and Ryan are arrested for their crimes of over two decades before, though I wondered how they were going to be prosecuted. Granted, when Dutch was imprisoned and raped he was only 17 and New York may be one of those states that has eliminated the statute of limitations for sex crimes against underage victims, but still it doesn’t seem like that strong a case and this is one time I missed the dual structure of the original Law and Order in which the second half of the show depicts jow the crime is prosecuted and how the assistant district attorneys win (or sometimes don’t win) convictions against the accused.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "All in the Game" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Te;levision, NBC-TV, aired February 16, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed was one of the best of this problematic show, problematic not only because of Dick Wolf’s and his writers’ obeisance to the Great God SERIAL but also because of the virtually unlimited power of the super-villains. In case you forgot, the immediately previous episode shown two weeks before ended with Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger) being kidnapped and thrown in the trunk of the car belonging to Irish-American gangster Seamus O’Meara (Michael Malarkey), whom she’d been romancing either out of genuine affection, part of her job requirement or both. She tried to arrest him and he overpowered her and threw her in his trunk, then drove her out to the grave he had dug to accommodate Italian-American gangster Michael Amato (Don DiPetta). Seamus’s boss in the Irish Mafia, Eamonn Murphy (Timothy V. Murphy), had assigned him to kill Amato but J(et had talked him out of it, with the result that Amato brought a gun into the club where Murphy had made his headquarters and shot up the place. The cops eventually trace down O’Meara and there’s a shoot-out in which he’s badly wounded, and he’s taken to a hospital – only some of Murphy’s crooks slip past the police guards by disguising themselves as officers and ultimately cut O’Meara to pieces with knives, then the authorities pass it off as O’Meara losing a knife fight with fellow inmates.

The cops actually arrest the seemingly untouchable Murphy but he gets out of it because the FBI is actually protecting him. I have seen reports of the FBI going this far out of their way to protect gangsters on the ground that they were informants and whatever information they were giving the FBI was so important it didn’t matter to the feds that they were still killing peolpe and committing other crimes. I remember reading a book about one such case – the name I remember was “Pete Evans” but he may have been the author of the book rather than the man the FBI was protecting, and there’s also the well-reported case of Whitey Bulger. The head of the New York Police Department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau, sergeant Aywanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), is so ticked off at the way the FBI agents sweep into her office and confiscate all the files on Murphy – especially since she’s been able definitively to establish that Murphy murdered her police partner and mentor 10 years previously, then bribed another man to take the fall for it and had him killed when he tried to renege on the deal – that Bell goes gunning for Murphy herself,

She’s interrupted when Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) tracks them down and talks her out of shooting the bastard – thereby sparing her career and Murphy’s life, so he can continue to terrorize people and carry on his murders and depredations under the FBI’s protection. There’s also a subplot in which Teddy Silas (Gus Halper) bribes a car repair shop owner to cut his ankle bracelet so he can flee the country and escape, though he too is caught and the hapless fellow who accepted his bribe because Silas had taken his expensive cars to the shop for years ends up being arrested himself for helping a fugitive from justice. This Law and Order: Organized Crime episode ends ambiguously, with the promos hinting that Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners have decided that the Eamonn Murphy storyline has run its course and they plan to do a new one, though it would not surprise me at all if they bring him back. They certainly need to deo something to give this horrible man his comeuppance!

Mr. Moto's Last Warning (20th Century-Fox, filmed 1938 ,released 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 15) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I screened two movies from the Mill Creek Entertainment “Crime Wave” 50-film DVD box, Mr. Moto’s Last Warning and Detour. I’d already seen Detour fairly recently (December 26, 2020) on the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” Saturday night time slot hosted by Eddie Muller – though Charles hadn’t because he’d had to work that night – and I have little to add to what I wrote back then on a moviemagg blog post, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/12/detour-prc-1946.html. According to the Wikipedia page on Mr. Moto, the character was created by John P. Marquand in 1935 after the death of Earl Derr Biggers, creator of Charlie Chan, led the Saturday Evening Post to solicit other writers to come up with Asian detective characters. His full name is Kentaro Moto and starting in 1937 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights and used Moto in a series of eight movies starring Peter Lorre as Moto. (So Fox, which had previously given us Swedish actor Warner Oland as Charlie Chan, now gave us a Hungarian actor who’d first achieved stardom in Germany to play a Japanese detective.) Fortunately they didn’t do much to make Peter Lorre’s eyes look Asian – the results probably would have looked ghastly if they had. Lorre also didn’t affect any attempt at a Japanese accent; the familiar Peter Lorre whine worked well enough to make the character believable.

Five of the eight Mr. Moto films for Fox were helmed by actor-turned-director Norman Foster – who was aloso assigned to the Chan series after 20th Century-Fox resumed it with Sidney Toler following Warner Oland’s death in 1938. In the meantime a script originally intended for Oland as Chan was rewritten as Mr. Moto’s Gamble, a.k.a. Mr. Moto’s Diary, third film in the series. Mr. Moto’s Last Warning was the sixth film in the series and the fourth directed by Norman Foster, who also co-write the script with Philip MacDonald, and int contains an unexpectedly gruesome scene that was the one piece of the film I’d actually remembered. The film takes place in Port Said, Egypt, a location which because of its proximity to the Suez Canal has attracted a gang of no-goodniks led by Fabian (Ricardo Cortez). It takes a while for MacDonald and Foster to tell us just what they’re up to, but we know from the get-go that it involves naval maneuvers being conducted jointly by the British and French governments. This film was shot in late 1938 and released January 20, 1939, before the official start of World War II but while what Winston Churchill later called “the gathering storm” was already visible, and one of the ironies of this film is that it posits an alliance between Britain and France that will ensure the world’s peace as long as it is never broken. That’s a pretty dramatic departure from the way the actual war went – the Nazis swiftly conquered France and occupied much of it, while Britain continued to resist the Nazis alone until the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese naval and air arms gave Churchill the boost he’d long begged for: the U.S.’s entry into the war on his side.

The film centers around a vaudeville theatre called the Sultana in Port Said and the antiques shop of “Mr. Kuroki” across the street from it. Kuroki is, of cou9rse, Moto in disguise. The baddest of the bad guys, Fabian, holds forth as a ventriloquist and, like so many movie ventriloquist both before (The Great Gabbo) and since (Magic), he relates to his dummy as if it were a fellow human being in whom he could confide. Of course this irritates his girlfriend Connie (a marvelous hard-bitten performance by Virginia Field), especially when he uses the dummy to make wisecracks about her, but she stays loyal to him until the very end of the movie. It turns out the plot is to mine the Suez Canal just before the big joint British-French naval exercise, sinking the French flagship and creating an international incident that will break the alliance and lead to war. One of the conspirators is a French naval official named Eric Norvel (George Sanders, visually recognizable but handicapped by a ridiculous attempt at a French accent that comes and goes – in one scene he spoke with his normal voice and I thought the payoff was he was going to be an impostor posing as a French officer, but later he reverted to his phony “French” voice even inn the company of his fellow crooks). We never learn much about this character, including the all-important motive for his treachery.

Also part of the gang os a man named Danforth (John Carradine, who much to my husband Charles’s surprise was actually billed ahead of Sanders), who’s really an undercover British agent named Blake who has infiltrated the gang to find out what they’re up to. Only Blake a.k.a. Danforth makes a mistake: scared by Fabian’s announcement that he has a little book with names and photos of all the international police officers that might be after them, he spots his own picture (he’s grown a beard to effect his imposture but the picture in Fabian’s book is a clean-shaven portrait that was probably Caarradine’s official head shot)( and he starts to tear the page out of Fabian’s notebook before Moto warns him not to give himself away by doing that. Only Fabian spots the tears in the page, draws a beard on the photo to confirm that “Danforth” is really Blake, and [spoiler alert!] hatches a truly diabolical plot to get rid of him. He invites him to visit the Vulcan, the tramp steamer they’re using to lay the mones along the Canal, and locks Blake in a diving bell and sends it to the bottom without oxygen. So we get some truly horrifying shots of Carradine frantically pawing for air in a scene that’s a lot scarier than the supposed “fright” footage in Carradine’s intentional horror films.

The climax takes place along the Port Said waterfront, when Connie confronts Fabian – earlier he’s told her that he’s really a smuggler, which she was O.K. with, but when she learns that his real plan is to blow up the French fleet and precipitate a world war, she gets angry and ultimately shoots him dead. Mr. Moto’s Last Warning – by far the most frequently shown of the Motos because it slipped into the public domain ≠ has a fair amount to offer, including the casting of former Sam Spade Ricardo Cortez in a movie with future Joel Cairo Peter Lorre – with Lorre as the good guy and Cortez as the bad guy, no less! Despite the annoying complexity of the plot and the fact that Virginia Field’s character is the only one with any depth – the others are either all good or all bad – it’s still a capable and entertaining film.

Frontline: "Uktraine: Life Under Russia's Attack" (WGBH, PBS, August 2022-February 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (February 14) I wanted to watch the PBS Frontline documentary “Ukraine: Life Under Russia’s Attack,” which turned out to be an episode from August 2022 with an additional final section updating the story. The show took place in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city and one just 25 miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia. Of course this made it a prime target for Russia’s assault when it started in February 2022. The residents of Kharkiv were startled by the sheer ferocity of the attack and its indiscriminate nature, targeting apartment buildings and other civilian targets (which seems to be the way Russia makes war these days, though they’ve done it before and so have other countries: the concept of so-called “strategic bombing” of civilian populations via aircraft was invented by the British in Iraq right after World War I and was extensively used by both sides in World War II). What especially surprised the inhabitants of Kharkiv about the Russian attack was they’d always considered themselves Russians: many of them spoke Russian as thei first language and had relatives across the border in Russia whom they visited frequently until the war started. (The distinction between Russian and Ukrainian seems to me to be much like the difference between Spanish and Portuguese; though they’re separate enough they’re distinct languages and not just dialects, they have an awful lot of words in common and they clearly have similar roots.)

The documentary had a very retro feel about it; except for the fact that it was in color and clearly shot with modern video equipment, it could have been a newsreel film from World War II. I was especially struck by the way Kharkiv’s residents moved into the subway tunnels to shelter themselves from the Russian attacks, much the way Londoners had during World War II to shelter themselves from the German Blitz. The films profiled several Ukrainians from Kharkiv, of whom the most moving story was that of Roman, a Kharkiv firefighter who in the opening scene is shown trying to teach his daughter Violetta to speak English. “I don’t like English,” she says, making it clear she’d rather be doing just about anything else than studying a foreign language with her dad as her teacher. Roman lived in Kharkiv with his wife Marina and their daughter Violetta, and of the four Ukrainians the show profiled he was the only one who could speak English, albeit with a thick enough accent his comments were subtitled just like the others, who according to the official PBS transcript for the show, were speaking Russian (not Ukrainian). The others included Sergiy (the official transcript gives the Ukrainian spelling of his first name,though he almost certainly uses the Russian “Sergei,” or whatever its equivalent is in Cyrillic letters), whose apartment was destroyed in a direct hit from a Russian bomb and was thereby rendered homeless; Vika,who told the filmmakers, “Being in the Metro is safer than staying at home”; and Tatjana,hwo lost her father to a Russian bomb.

Vika’s account of her family’s flight is all too typical of what modern-day war does to innocent civilian victims: “At 3 o’clock we heard explosions. We knew it was not thunder and lightning. There was firing. We got into the car, but then the whole car jumped. My mother was panicking because it was scary. The planes were flying above. We were afraid. We were shaking. We understand that there is a war, but we don’t understand why it has started.” (Neither does anybody else, with the possible exception of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hasn’t given his own people a coherent explanation of what he insists be called a “special military operation” is about or what it’s meant to accomplish.)

Training for Freedom (Ohio Public Television, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next PBS show was actually more interesting, even though it’s at best a skirmish in a battle as yet unfinished. It was called Training for Freedom, and it was a vest-pocket 22-minute documentary produced by Ohio public television about the training volunteers for the Mississippi Freedom Summer project went through in June 1964 at the campus of Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. (By coincidence, there is a city called Oxford, Mississippi too, and it’s the location of the University of Mississippi, site of a previous battle over civil rights in October 1962, when James Meredith became the school’s first African-American student.) This was a history I actually lived at least vicariously; my mother was a volunteer with the so-called “Friends of SNCC,” SNCC being the acronym of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The group had formed in 1960 to coordinate the spontaneous demonstrations young Black activists were holding at lunch counters in South Carolina and Georgia, where they would sit down and get themselves arrested for violating the segregation laws. When SNCC sent organizers to Mississippi, the Black people there told them that demonstrating at lunch counters would be meaningless since most Black people in Mississippi didn’t have the money to eat there. Instead the local Black residents told SNCC’s staff that they should concentrate on winning the right to vote, because once Black people could vote in Mississippi they could elect their own to public office and start the unraveling of segregation once and for all.

As part of the orientation of the Freedom Summer volunteers, SNCC obtained a print of a CBS-TV documentary called Mississippi and the Fifteenth Amendment – the one that supposedly guaranteed all Americans, regardless of race, the right to vote – and one of the clips they showed that was included in Training for Freedom was of a Mississippi registrar of voters named Theron Lynd. Dripping with condescension and sarcasm, Lynd was shown telling one would-be Black voter that his application was rejected because he had left some blank spaces on the form. Most of the Freedom Summer volunteers were white (only about 10 percent were Black), and many of them had come from elite colleges and universities. Though many of them came from families with conservative political views, they’d been radicalized by the news coverage of the AFrican-American civil rights movement and had come to the conclusion that segregation was evil and they needed to do something to end it. The leader of the Mississippi Freedom Summer project was a young Black activist named Robert Moses – though he was embarrassed by the literally messianic connotations of his last name, so much that when he did a similar project the next year in Alabama he changed his name to “Robert Parris” – and he warned the white volunteers, “We don’t want any John Browns here.”

What he meant was he didn’t want people coming into the project with the idea that they could save Black Mississippians from racism or die in the process, even though the threat of death was real and was vividly brought home early in the training when three young Freedom Summer volunteers ,James Chaney (Black) and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman (white), were murdered just as the training sessions were in progress. At first Chaney, Goodman and Shcwerner were just reported as “missing,” and a bulletin board containing the latest news about their disappearance was put up in the training center. Then federal authorities found the car the three men had been traveling in and dredged it out of the river in an image that has itself become iconic, and subsequently it turned out that a local sheriff and his principal deputy had been directly involved in murdering the three men. What’s fascinating about this documentary now is the sheer weight of racism, including unconscious racism, the trainers had to cope with; almost none of the white volunteers had ever worked under the supervision of Black people before. They also had to be trained in nonviolence as a technique and strategy, including resisting the instinctive fight or flight” tendency of human beings to respond to violence against them either by hitting back or by running away. (One of the most common misconceptions about nonviolent resistance is the idea that it’s “easy.” It takes as much, if not more, skill and training as being a soldier in a conventional military does.)

One of the most interesting parts of the film is the footage of the actual June 1964 training sessions, in which white volunteers were assigned to pose as a racist mob, yell insults like “Nigger!” (or “Nigger-lover!”) and “Commie” at the volunteers – and some of the white volunteers playing racists got all too much into the role. The other sad thing about this program is how abruptly the hope of the so-called “Beloved Community” of Black and white Americans working together to end racism ended – and it was the Blacks who ended it. In 1966 a new generation of activists like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown were elected to lead SNCC, and they disbanded the white auxiliary organization FOSNCC (“Friends of SNCC”) my mom had worked for. They took to heart Frantz Fanon’s famous dictum that “the liberation of oppressed people must be the work of oppressed people themselves,” and interpreted that to mean it must be the work only of oppressed people themselves. Acting under the slogan “Black Power!,” they brusquely drove away the white allies earlier civil-rights leaders cultivated and told whites to get lost.

Meanwhile, the racists regrouped and, under the leadership of President Richard Nixon and racist Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), they essentially took over the Republican Party and shifted the so-called “solid South” from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. When successive Republican Presidents packed the U.S. Supreme Court with Right-wing justices, the Court started gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act and, among other things, eliminated the so-called “pre-clearance” requirement that states with a history of discriminatory voting laws get approval from the federal government to enact any changes in their elections laws. The result has been the systematic undoing of the Voting Rights Act and its protections for voters of color, leading to drastic cutbacks in the number of polling places available for people of color to vote, long lines and preposterous laws like the one in Georgia that makes it illegal to provide water to people waiting in line to vote. Just as the racists running the South took advantage of the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to strip Blacks and other people of color of their right to vote, so the unreconstructed racists of today’s South are once again looking for inventive ways to stop African-Americans from voting. It seems like there are no permanent victories against racial prejudice and hatred; just temporary wins that are all too easily reversed and turned into losses.