Week that Was

Hanoi Jane

This week in 1972, Jane Fonda began her infamous trip to Vietnam which would lead her to be dubbed "Hanoi Jane." Fonda had long been vocally opposed to the Vietnam War, but she caused a massive brouhaha when she visited Hanoi, the country's capital. She was given a tour of the city, shown its schools, hospitals and cultural life and made a number of radio broadcasts sponsored by the Communist government describing her impressions of the country with which America was at war. However, the incident that led to widespread outrage was the release of photos of a smiling Fonda, leaning against an anti-aircraft gun while surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers. In the eyes of most Americans, it was not only anti-patriotic but downright traitorous. In her 2005 autobiography, Fonda says that she was unaware of the image she was presenting when the photos were taken, and explained that her aims at the time had been to prove that U.S. forces were intentionally blowing up the North Vietnamese's dikes rather than show any support for the shooting down of her countrymen's planes. Fonda ultimately said that she "learned that a picture does not capture what was actually in your heart," calling the ill-fated photo op the "largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine."

Hard to Resist

In the months preceding Die Hard's opening on July 15, 1988, it was fair to say that expectations for the movie were not running particularly high. Much of the industry scoffed when the producers decided to pay a TV actor who had never starred in a film the huge sum of $5 million to play a scruffy N.Y. cop who defeats a group of terrorists planning to rob a highrise office building. But the film, which was modestly budgeted at just under $30 million, turned out to be a huge hit, and a lot of the credit goes to that TV actor — Bruce Willis. In Willis' hands, the character of John McClane became an appealingly sympathetic everyman, a regular guy just trying to connect with his ex-wife despite a fusillade of bullets and a few kilos of C4 thrown in his way. The film grossed over $220 million worldwide and became the template for the '90s action film, where impervious heroes played by the likes of Stallone and Schwarzenegger were replaced by ordinary guys like Speed's Keanu Reeves, who accidentally stumble into dangerous situations rather than seek them out.

Resurrection Man

A violent and prescient vision of future law enforcement lurched into theaters on July 17, 1987 when Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop opened. The Dutch director's dystopian cop movie stared Peter Weller as a slain police officer whose brain and face are grafted into the body of a cyborg set to patrol the streets of Detroit. The film has been read as everything from a vicious satire of Reaganomics to a parable about the crucifixion of Christ. The former take comes from many of the critics, who saw the film's depiction of privatized future law enforcement and its satire of consumer society as clever riffs on changes occurring in America at the time. And it was the director, Verhoeven, who, in a talk justifying the film's violence, dubbed the death of police officer Murphy and his resurrection as RoboCop as being a religious metaphor. Today, however, we might simply see the film as a precursor to one of this summer's biggest hits, Iron Man. Both are stories about men battling the world's ills while encased in very bulky metal suits, and the former tips its hat to the latter by including the original Marvel comic book as set dressing during one of its pivotal scenes.

More on RoboCop: To mark the 21st anniversary of the release of RoboCop, we once again delve into the Faber archives to revisit the making of the film as chronicled in Rob Van Scheers' Paul Verhoeven: The Authorised Biography.

Disneyland's "Black Sunday"

Fifty three years ago this week in Anaheim, California, the "happiest place in the world" was officially opened. On the afternoon of Sunday 17 July 1955, Walt Disney opened the gates to Disneyland with the words, "To all who come to this happy place — welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America… with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world. Thank you." Disney, whose father had built the ground for Chicago's World Fair, had conceived the idea of a park that could be enjoyed by both young and old and bought 160 acres of orange groves in Orange County, California, to build his "Mickey Mouse Park." The opening ceremony of the $17 million dollar attraction was screened on TV (co-anchored by none other than Ronald Reagan), however things did not go smoothly in the "happy land": it was a scorching hot day, a plumbers' strike meant there was no water in the fountains, a gas leak necessitated that several sections of the park be shut down, the food ran out, the recently laid cement started melting, and numerous people entered the private event with fake tickets. It was referred to as "Black Sunday" by staff and for years July 18, when the gates were first opened to the public, was given as the Park's inaugural day. It was, however, 2 a.m. on that Monday morning that crowds began queuing to be let in and since then it's fair to say that the park's phenomenal success has made "Black Sunday" a distant and almost forgotten memory.

Getting Down with the Staircase

Two days after Newark experienced six days of the worst race riots in its history, resulting in six deaths, over 700 injured, and property loss exceeding $10 million, Warner Brothers released Robert Mulligan's Up The Down Staircase, a lighthearted look at class and racial strife in New York's inner city schools. Based on an autobiographical novel by Bel Kaufman, a Russian-American professor who lived the story firsthand, it was first brought to stage before arriving as a film. Set at Calvin Coolidge High School, a no-nonsense institutional building designed to push 3000 students through a failing education system, the story follows a new teacher (played with perfect awkwardness by Sandy Dennis) in her attempts to show her low-income students the virtues of Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. However, her well-intentioned lesson plan in this little patch of hell never really succeeds. Bosley Crowther in his New York Times review noted that Dennis gives "a vivid performance of emotional range and depth (that) sincerely acquaints us with a genuine loving person we can believe wants to find her pupils' wounds and, what's more, try to heal them — which she can't." Unfortunately the film's recognition of society's institutional failure in remedying class and race divisions could also be understood by reading the headlines on the Times's front-page that week.

Time Ends its March

Long before we got our news from talking heads on television, people learned of the world through newsreels like March of Time, which ended today in 1951. Although the The March of Time was not the only newsreel — William Randolph Hearst started the "News Pictorial" in 1914 — it grew through its connection with Time, Inc. to become one of the most influential. Started by Roy Edward Larsen, a rising executive at Time, and filmmaker Louis de Rochmont, The March of Time leveraged the publication's journalistic and corporate contacts to place the monthly newsreels in over 500 theaters at their start in 1935. (Larsen had already created a "March of Time" radio newsreel in 1931). As a monthly film magazine, the The March of Time combined five different stories in 20-30 minute film. Besides sending out crews to bring back actual footage, De Rochmont hired actors to create re-enactments to fill in a story's gaps. And forceful narrators, like Westbrook Van Coorhis, gave each story a sense of narrative authority. In fact the format was so distinct that Orson Welles parodied the The March of Time for his own faux news reel "News on the March" in the 1941 Citizen Kane. By 1951, television and rising production costs put a stop to this historic March.