January 28 movie: The Americanization of Emily. One of the things I love best about Turner Classic Movies is the opportunity to see great movies I'd never heard of. To be precise, it's the combination of TCM and a DVR. Every week I review the info guide for TCM and set the DVR to record everything that sounds vaguely interesting. I probably end up deleting half the movies after ten minutes, but the other half yields some true gems.
Like The Americanization of Emily. I just finished watching it, and I'm sitting here wondering how I could never have heard of a movie so brilliant. It's an anti-war black comedy written by Paddy Chayevsky. [major spoilers follow:] James Garner stars as a self-avowed coward with a cushy job in London procuring cognac and women for a loony admiral (Melvyn Douglas). Garner meets and falls in love with Julie Andrews, an idealist who finds his pragmatism as contemptible as he finds her sentiment.
Douglas' only concern about the war is its PR value for the Navy, and he becomes obsessed with filming a movie of the first American to die on Omaha Beach, who naturally must be a sailor. When Douglas goes off the deep end, Garner's best friend James Coburn takes the movie idea and runs with it. Coburn forces Garner not just to participate in the D-Day invasion, not just to be first on the beach, but to be the first casualty, the star of his own pointless movie.
The movie loses its intestinal fortitude at the very end, wrapping everything up with a happy ending [major, major spoiler: he's not really dead] and way too much speechifying. But if you turn it off after the Omaha Beach scene it's an incredible satiric statement of the insanity of war. I'd rank it with Dr. Strangelove. Scratch that; it would be better than Strangelove. If for no other reason, because of the cast. Peter Sellers annoys me, while I adore Garner, Douglas and especially Coburn.
Georg commented that this 1964 movie was made about as early as it could possibly have been made. By which he meant, before the Kennedy assassination America was just not cynical enough for a movie like this. Some of Garner's speeches are amazing. At one point he even turns his scathing contempt on war widows, for promoting the false idea that death in war is noble and virtuous. This is the hero of the movie -- and he's talking to two war widows at the time! One of the best lines is said by Julie Andrews, when Coburn suggests that Garner is a hero: "Whatever for? All he did was die. Next we'll be putting up monuments to cancer and automobile accidents."
I don't remember much about it, but I know we watched this on TV in the 60s or very early 70s. They used to have real movies on TV, and now the only way to see them is the Turner Movie Monopoly channel, and we'd have to pay double what we pay now just to get it (along with a bungload of worthless stuff we don't want, of course).
I'm so glad I was nuts for taping stuff on VHS. Those tapes are gold to me now.