rape | Heroic Times

Click The Image Above to Purchase your copy today. Any purchases through the above link earn this Blog much appreciated pennies.

Something Wild (1961 — not the two decade later Melanie Griffith comedy vehicle)- Is a Criterion film I have heard virtually no one mention or talk about, Which is odd given it stars Carroll Baker and Ralph Meeker (one of my favorite actors) , and sporting some of the legendary Saul Bass’ best and most effective title credits.

Indeed the title sequence alone sells me on the film, and I’m worried once its over the film will not live up to the succinct but powerful storytelling in that credit sequence, as it tells wordlessly the fast paced, regimented, almost automaton like, lacking real connection, breakneck race on a rat wheel… that industrialized life has been broken down to.

It infers, the title sequence, of the individual being lost in the unending grinding of the wheels of industry and progress and the masses.

So I’m worried the film will falter from the title sequence.

Thankfully it doesn’t.

The opening sequence is as effective, and giving the time period, as groundbreaking and striking and shocking a bit of film-making as you can think of.

So to wrap up the non-spoiler section, I highly recommend seeing this film. Carroll Baker gives a raw, game changing performance, in a convoluted, messy, masterfully directed tale.

Special Features are limited but are excellent.

A rich, vibrant, informative, moving 2016 interview with Director Jack Garfein conducted by film critic Kimberly Morgan.

“I programmed it in 2010 on Turner Classic Movies, and never have I received so much email from viewers. And then we showed it in Telluride, and I spoke to you at Telluride and the audiences there were really taken aback, really, in fact, shocked by the film in many ways.” Kim Morgan

‘So was I, you remember?” Jack Garfein

“Yes, I do remember.” Kim Morgan

“I was sitting next to you, and almost had a breakdown. Because, I suddenly… I looked at that film… I made that film, but any kind of real creation is a subconscious process. The artist himself doesn’t quite understand. I didn’t realize that this film… is me. This character of the girl… is me.

When I arrived here in Manhattan I feel the same pain, the complete isolation, in the sense I tried to connect but it was very difficult to connect. I had to keep everything in myself and go on. When I was liberated in Bergen-Belsen I weighed 48 lbs, I couldn’t walk. I was 14 years old.”

A riveting, must watch interview, about a Director I was unfamiliar with, and unfortunately he would not do another film after SOMEWHERE WILD failed to make an impact at the theater.

The loss is cinema’s.

And then a wonderful, deeply entertaining and humorous 2016 audio interview with star, the effervescent and lovely Carroll Baker. I am now on the lookout for all her films.

And lastly a video interview with Historian Foster Hirsch who breaks down the history of the Actor’;s Studio and Roots of Method Acting.

Watch the Blu-ray then come back and read the rest of this review.

You’re back… good.

Minor spoilers follow.

It’s a film about assault, about a rape. And you have to understand the time period this film was made against, for the protagonist behavior to be… properly framed. In an age where rape was something that happened to other people, not good girls from a good upbringing, was not talked about in polite company, much less admitted to or shared or confronted or reported, SOMETHING WILD tackles the assault in a frank, and in your face way, that no film before and very few since, have really captured.

Again, wordlessly, like the title sequence, in Baker’s performance, we see someone having been robbed of their own sense of their body… as their own; portrayed in the way she lays down and is afraid to even touch herself.

It is a striking bit of direction and an even more striking performance, of a woman in a world where there was no concept of ptsd, or believed avenue for redress for such a violation, that this was something to be hidden and buried, and you see the effects of this unrelenting trauma, like a fissure running through her, breaking everything apart.

The subway scene, again a master class in direction, and performance, as it imbues in the viewer a sense of that press of human bodies, the rising panic, the nausea. It is really powerful film-making. And then at about the hour mark or so, it deviates from where I thought the film was going (I do not read descriptions when blind buying a movie, just so I can walk into surprises like this film had for me), and becomes something different.

Something unexpected,

Something strange.

And something that just keeps getting stranger. It’s a deeply morally problematic film, especially viewed from a modern lens, I can see this film being… taken to task for its choices. They are not admirable or sensible choices, and arguably that is the point. Trauma breeds trauma, and damaged people make imperfect choices.

It’s a deeply troubling film, but I have to say, while I watched the latter half of the film slack jawed and disbelieving, not agreeing with any of the choices made, I found it a captivating, daring, incredibly strange, movingly performed and strikingly filmed movie about broken people caught in regimented, grinding wheels from within and from without.

I can understand, particularly if you are a victim of trauma, not jibing with this film. It does not give us the resolution we want, all of the people in this film have feet of clay, but maybe that is why I do, appreciate it. It shows us people in the way we seldom see them, or ourselves, as victims of our unfaced traumas.

It is a horror film of a sort. But it is the horror of real life.

A deeply interesting film, that I am very glad I have viewed.

The Invisible War

From Oscar(R)- and Emmy(R)-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated; Twist of Faith) comes The Invisible War, a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of America’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military. The film paints a startling picture of the extent of the problem–today, a female soldier in combat zones is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. The Department of Defense estimates there were a staggering 19,000 violent sex crimes in the military in 2010. Twenty percent of all active-duty female soldiers are sexually assaulted. The Invisible War exposes the epidemic, breaking open one of the most under-reported stories of our generation, to the nation and the world.–from the filmmakers

Well that… troubles me, to put it lightly.

It does not however surprise me.

Unfortunately given the rash of atrocities associated with our military, particularly in the last dozen years, the tale THE INVISIBLE WAR has to tell while infuriating, is not surprising.

I have to think it has a lot to do with that rash of news stories about the military being in dire need of soldiers, and filling their ranks by any and all methods; some extremely suspect.

Here’s the thing, for every person who is in the military for the right reason and to do the right thing, you have three people who… in no manner, no way, and for no reason, should have passed the screening process and been given a gun, and put in a position to control others, much less in a position to end lives.

At the best of times, and to the best of people, such responsibility… is to be watched.

But seemingly, no one is watching anymore. So we end up with a rash of incidents about people who cannot even control themselves, being given a gun and sent all over the globe to control people and cultures that were old when America was but a dream. And doing it badly.

Again not all our soldiers, hopefully not the majority, but enough. Enough bad apples to spoil the pie.

And this isn’t just about our military over there. This is about our police force, and our prison guards here. This is about a culture of oppression and the cost we all pay for turning a blind eye to a police/slave state… it is about rule by terror. And the thing about terror, it doesn’t respect boundaries real well.

There’s no way to sow terror and horror, without reaping it. Without breathing it in. And when the mandate from the top, to this immature and often volatile young world police force is to, still, spread shock and awe… the results as we have seen, are not pretty.

When in our name, soldiers are given authority to terrorize and devalue the other with impunity, you get American torture prisons, you get American concentration camps, and eventually you get that behavior coming home to roost. You get the abhorrent methods used to pacify the resistance of those we disagree with abroad, brought home… to be used against those we disagree with here.

It becomes our method for relating to everything, and everyone. Even our own. Barbarism as national policy.

And maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe it’s an American male population that instead of being raised on movies about saving damsels in distress and opening doors for ladies, finds entertainment in movies and video games about women getting raped and tortured and killed. The truth is… we do not rise above our fictions, we become them. The fifties dreamt of space and the sixties saw us achieve it. In the last two decades the mass media of America has been about fear and terror and torture and mistrust, and we are living up… to those dreams.

Maybe in the mad rush to devalue the other, all we have done is learned to laughingly… devalue ourselves.

I don’t have the answers. But we better damn sure start looking for them. And it begins with asking the hard questions. Is our military doing right? If so, how? And if not, how? And what can we do, to make our soldiers not victims nor puppets nor fall-guys for an administration of madmen?

These are questions, especially as yet another election devoid of any real choice (you can pick corporate meat puppet 1 or corporate meat puppet 2) approaches, that we have to ask and answer.

Because the security and rights of anyone in this country, any soldier, any woman, any person, is tied directly to the amount of security we give even the least of us.

Our liberties as citizens are only as secure as the liberties of those we disagree with. is tied to how we treat enemy combatants, prisoners, foes (which as history teaches us, will be our governments friends tomorrow. Never hate for your government, because to your government it is all just a game of dollars and cents). Because the lines we cross cannot be easily uncrossed, and the human rights we ultimately eradicate when we violate the other… are our own.

Go see the trailer here, and see what questions and what answers you come up with.