The Passover Plot

If I read the calendar correctly, yesterday evening was the first night of Passover. With that in mind, I decided to watch a movie that I'd first read about several years ago, but never got around to watching since I didn't really have any streaming options at the old house. That movie is The Passover Plot.

Pretty much any American of whatever Christian denomination will know the basic history of the Holy Land around Jersulam at the time when Jesus (played here by Zalman King) is said to have lived. Judea and Samaria, along with everywhere else around the Mediterranean Sea, had been taken over by the Romans, who were most decidedly not Jewish. The Jews felt subjugated, with the result that there was a rise in messianic, end-of-days fervor among Jews. Part of the belief was that a new King, descended from King David, would return to save the Jewish people. This would obviously be a threat to Roman authority, so when Jesus (called Yeshua here since the movie was filmed in Israel and produced in part by Golan-Globus) arrives and presents himself as a sort of political dissident, it's no wonder the Romans want to deal with him.

The Passover Plot takes these basics and weaves them into a story that deals a lot more with Jesus as he would have affected the political situation and less with the miracles that believers believed he was performing. British biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield did a lot of research into both the Bible and the history of the era, and came up with some conclusions that lead to the plot of this movie and its mildly controversial thesis.

In this telling, there's the obvious debate we've seen over and over among the oppressed over how much to resist peacefully and how much the resistance should be direct and physical. Yeshua has decided that he would be the peaceful resistance, while his brother Yaocov (Dan Hedaya) would foment the more violent resistance. They still need outside help, however, which is where Judah (Scott Wilson), the 13th apostle who would betray Yeshua, comes in.

But in addition to the resistance, there are also always those who collaborate with the authorities. Pontius Pilate (Donald Pleasance), whom the Romans have sent to quell the Israelites, knows this, which is why he works with the Jewish high priests led by Caiaphas (Hugh Griffith). He knows that once Yeshua has entered Jerusalem and declared himself King, that should give the high priests an opening to have Yeshua declared a blasphemer so that Rome doesn't have to crucify him.

But Yeshua here is extremely calculating, which is really the most controversal thesis of Schonfield's book and this movie. Yeshua as presented here isn't the Son of God, and frankly knows it. He is, however, a canny political operator. Indeed, he's timed his whole entrance into Jerusalem and later betrayal so that he'll be crucified on a Friday morning. By Jewish and Roman law, Jews were not allowed to be crucified over Shabbat. Crucifixion wasn't immediately fatal the way that a conscientious, non-sadistic hangman's noose was. Instead, those crucified suffered until they could no longer hold up their heads, suffocating to death when this closed their airway. (They also weren't nailed to the cross through their palms, as there wasn't enough support in the palms to keep them naied to the cross. The nails actually went through their wrists.) Yeshua has planned to have himself drugged so that it will look to everybody like he's died on the cross, only to make a miraculous recovery once one of his connected supporters is able to get him down from the cross.

It's an interesting, if obviously controversial theory. Nobody knows anything close to what really happened because, as the film informs us in a scrolling text at the end, there are no extant sources from the time that Jesus was actually alive. The Gospels were only written 40-80 years after his crucifixion. I do think it highly likely that there was one (or more likely more than one) man who was the real life inspiraton for the Jesus as resistance figure. As for the miracles, well, I'm not going to get into them here.

Having said all that, it's a bit of a shame that the movie doesn't present any of this material fairly well. The acting is mostly wooden, other than of course Donald Pleasance whom you would never expect to be anything less than over the top, bringing a spark every time Pontius Pilate shows up. And I don't think the script helps much. Perhaps this is material that needs to be told in a more academic tone. But even with all those flaws, The Passover Plot is worth watching and probably deserves to be better known.

THX 1138

I don't engage in the "Blind Spot" blogathon that any number of movie bloggers do, mostly because I don't know at the start of the year what movies I'm going to get around to seeing over the course of the year, specifically which classics I haven't seen yet but will over the next 12 months. But a movie that would probably fit the Blind Spot blogathon is George Lucas' first feature film, THX 1138.

Set in the distant future, it's a dystopic future as most Hollywood looks at the future seem to be. As in the much earlier Just Imagine, the people don't have traditional names, but letter and number designations that seem more like license plates. Also to impose conformity on the people, they're all shaved bald and dressed in identical all-white outfits, with an exception for some sort of monks and the cybernetic police.

THX 1138, played by Robert Duvall, works at a factory that produces the android police, and goes home to a windowless cell where he lives with LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie). However, LUH is not THX's wife, as this dystopic future society doesn't have families or sex. (Why anybody even has roommates is not explained.) LUH works at the surveillance center, along with SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasance).

Along with not having any sex and being shaved to all look the same, the people are drugged into conformity so that they don't have any intense emotions. If anything does go wrong, they can step into the nearest confessional, not that it's called this, where they talk to some detached-voice character that might even just be a computer program, filling their heads with platitudes and propaganda about serving the state.

THX obviously has some sort of issues in that he uses one of these confessionals. But he's not the only one. LUH does as well, as she decides to take and switch some of her pills with THX's for whatever reason. This results in the two of them having sex, which is of course highly illegal. SEN figures out that something is going on with THX, and finagles a change in roommates.

Ultimately, however, this results in both THX and SEN getting sent to some sort of prison, where a bunch of non-conformists are kept together (again, why the state wouldn't isolate everybody isn't mentioned). All of these weirdoes are joined by SRT (Don Pedro Colley), a hologram who's suffered from some sort of glitch that's turned him from a programmed hologram into a more or less real human who can interact with everybody else in the environment.

SRT convinces THX and SEN to try to escape, but it's going to be difficult, as none of them have any idea where to escape to. The police are in pursuit, but they have a budget they're not supposed to exceed, which foreshadows how the movie is going to end.

THX 1138 is the sort of futuristic movie where it's probably better not to think about the plot but instead focus on the visual storytelling. That's in no small part because the plot has a whole bunch of holes. How does a society wind up like this in the first place? Even countries that tried to impose communal living on everybody never wound up with something so extreme -- human nature is extremely powerful and fights against this sort of dystopia. And a dystopia this totalitarian isn't powerful enough to capture one little fugitive? Who runs the place and how do they not end up equally conformist?

Because of the plot holes, it can be a bit tough to follow THX 1138. I found myself thinking of A Clockwork Orange, another movie where it was obvious what the movie was trying to do, but which also left me quite cold. There was also Logan's Run, another dystopia in an underground city where people try to escape, winding up with Peter Ustinov in Washington DC.

One other interesting thing with movies about the future is seeing how trapped in the present they are. In the case of THX 1138, that includes surveillance being done with reel-to-reel tape and early 1970s mainframe computers.

Overall, THX 1138 is a visually interesting movie, but one that may not hold up for some people if they think about it too much, not just because of the plot holes, but because what plot there is isn't particularly original, either. It's still absolutely worth a watch, however.

For those who like their Nazis to have impeccable British accents

Another movie I recently watched off my DVR that's available on DVD is The Night of the Generals.

After some very brief exposition, we get sent to the real action of the movie, in Warsaw in December 1942. A man gets back to his apartment building, and as he's walking up the stairs he hears a blood-curdling scream coming from a top-floor apartment. He can hear the steps of a presumptive murderer coming down the stairs, and not wanting to have to face the murderer, he ducks into the lavatory. He looks out a small hole in the door, and sees only the murderer's pants, which are unmistakeably the color and fabric of a Nazi uniform, this being 1942 when the Nazis were busy occupying the country. Even more alarming, there's a red stripe running down the side of the pants, which means that it's the uniform of a Nazi general.

The murder victim was an agent for the Nazis, and was rather brutally hacked to pieces. So German intelligence is called in to investigate, in the form of Major Grau (Omar Sharif). Grau is that rarest of birds, a man who cares about the pursuit of the truth, and doesn't seem to care that if the murderer is a general then there are all sorts of political landmines in investigating the murder. Anyhow, the first thing to do is discreetly investigate the whereabouts of every Nazi general in Warsaw that night. There are three who don't have ironclad alibis: Kahlenberge (Donald Pleasance); Seidlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray), who is usually referred to as just Gabler; and neat-freak Tanz (Peter O'Toole). Apparently the political muckety-mucks in Berlin don't want to deal with the fallout of having one of their generals being a murderer, so somebody kicks Grau upstairs, giving him a promotion and a transfer to Paris.

Fast forward to mid-July, 1944, in Paris. History buffs will know from the dates given that this is a few days before the failed assassination attempt on Hitler's life that resulted in Rommel's (Christopher Plummer in a needless cameo) suicide. Kahlenberge and Gabler are sympathetic to those generals who want to kill Hitler and negotiate an immediate surrender. Tanz gets transferred to Paris, much to the alarm of the other generals, since his presence is liable to scupper the assassination plot. For Grau, however, he's happy to have a chance to renew the investiation into that murder in Warsaw, which he does with the help of French police inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret). And then there's another murder, in the same exact fashion as the one in Warsaw....

The Night of the Generals is one of those movies that has an interesting idea, but one that the moviemakers decided to do too much with, with the result that it's too long, ponderous, and filled with plot twists that seem unnecessary. I haven't mentioned Tom Courtenay yet; he plays Gabler's adjutant who gets assigned to Tanz in Paris, and who is in love with Gabler's daughter Ulrike (Joanna Pettet). His presence in the first two-thirds of the movie comes together in a coda, but for the longest time you wonder what's the point in including this romance against the backdrop of a murder mystery.

I mentioned at the start that there's a brief exposition at the beginning, and that's also part of the problem. Well, not the actual beginning; a lot of movies have a plot device of starting at some point after much of the action in the movie and then telling the story in flashback. But The Night of the Generals makes the mistake of going back to the 1960s a couple of times in the Warsaw and Paris segments. The coda is also a problem in that we learn near the end of the Paris segment who the murderer is, if you didn't already know.

The acting isn't bad, except for the fact that it's very, very British. Granted, a lot of movies make the mistake of having the actors playing Nazis do bad German accents, and not being able to keep a consistent accent throughout. The Night of the Generals goes all the way to the other end, in that the characters are never anything but obviously British. My dad walked into the room halfway through and remarked that these characters aren't German at all.

The Night of the Generals is relatively entertaining despite its numerous flaws. The TCM shop lists it on a standalone DVD, as well as part of a couple of box sets.