ESFS Movie of the Week - "Closely Watched Trains", Part I

We come to the end of our series of Academy Award winners for Best Foreign Film in the 1960's with Jiri Menzel's 1967 "Closely Watched Trains". Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly" displayed the Academy's tendency (at the time) to value stagy works higher than purely cinematic works, and also a (somewhat) valuable tendency to reward The Masters. "A Man and a Woman" displayed the Academy's significantly less valuable tendency to reward popular choices, especially since it bested fellow nominees "Battle of Algiers" and "Loves of a Blonde". "Closely Watched Trains" fulfills a third category that is irresistible to Academy voters - glib movies about Nazis.

Hollywood loves Nazis. Let's just say it - they fucking love Nazis. Always have. They make the perfect bad guys, because they're pure evil, they look sharp, they're REAL, and their snootiness is built right into the practice and rhetoric of their villainy. If you include the stipulation "and/or fascists", here is a sample of relevant Best Foreign Film winners and nominees in the last decade or so: "Life is Beautiful" (heroically, they continued to give out the Best Foreign Film award even after Roberto Benigni's win), "The Counterfeiters", "Sophie Scholl", "Joyeux Noel", "Divided We Fall", and "The Chorus". To say nothing of movies about Fascism, post-Fascism, and proto-Fascism like "Pan's Labyrinth", 1993 winner "Belle Epoque", "The Lives of Others", and this year's nominee "The White Ribbon".

By coincidence, I recently read Mark Harris' "Pictures of a Revolution", an extremely smart and well-researched book about the five films that were nominated for the 1967 Academy Awards, and how they represented the shift that was about to occur in American film. The "New Hollywood" was represented by "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate", the fading "Old Hollywood" by "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (whose star Spencer Tracy died just after shooting completed) and the mega-bomb "Doctor Doolittle". The difference-splitter (and thus, winner) was Norman Jewison's "In the Heat of the Night", an old-school genre film elevated by superior acting and a slightly revisionist racial attitude.

In many respects, I feel like "Closely Watched Trains" is also a difference-splitter - it has the anti-establishment absurdity and sexual curiosity of the hippies, but it's also coy and cute. Menzel giggles at sex and clucks his tongue at Nazis (and jerks) - nothing too difficult there.

It's hard to imagine that the film wasn't an influence on Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" - both movies follow similar groups of horny, ideologically withdrawn slackers forced into semi-service during wartime (in this case, it's uniformed train station workers in Nazi-occupied Czechslovakia) and the lockstep prigs they take joy in deflating.

That's Part 1 of my review - I'll have more on "Closely Watched Trains" later this week. Don't forget that the Sam Fuller Goes to War program starts next Monday with "The Steel Helmet".