At a time when we citizens of the U.S. are still scratching our heads over former Secretary of State Colin Powell's pre-Iraq war intelligence presentation to the United Nations in 2003, all of which was wrong, wrong, wrong and for which he is embarrassed today, a new film strikes a rather heartsick humorous chord.
Military Intelligence and You! is a unique satirical film that I had the opportunity to recently preview. It's a war spoof by Dale Kutzera, who has worked as a screenwriter for the past six years, first co-creating and producing the VH-1 series "Strange Frequency" and later on staff at the CBS series "Without a Trace." The film not only looks and feels like a World War Two-era training film, but is comprised of actual scenes from the era's propaganda/training films.
It takes place during WWII at a place called Central Command where the daunting task of gathering and analyzing accurate military intelligence is dealt with on a minute-by-minute basis. There's a secret German military base somewhere out there whose fighters -- the evil Ghost Squadron -- is attacking U.S. bombers. It must be located and destroyed. The film parodies the importance of knowing what we're attacking before we attack it. Done completely in black and white to maintain an air of authenticity, it begins with a white-scripted message on a silent screen explaining that the film was declassified by the Freedom of Information act that was enacted on January 19, 2006. Indeed, these vintage sequences have gone unseen for over 50 years.
Throughout the film, you see actors such as Ronald Reagan, William Holden, and Elisha Cook Jr. playing out their actual roles from black and white military films, their performances shedding new light on human intelligence failures with the help of Writer and Director Dale Kutzera's modern additions. Cook plays the guiding army pal to a small town rookie named Jimmy Ryan (Russell Arms), a soft-hearted young man who at first has a despairing and confused attitude about his place in the war, but eventually learns to be a proud killing machine for America. Holden plays Lt. Packard Cumming, an Army intelligence recon pilot. Scenes from the old films are blended seamlessly in both a physical and artistic sense, in that you never feel the scenes played by the modern actors are contrived or forced into their predecessors' scenes.
There are five major characters at Central Command. Major Nick Reed is a hotshot military analyst determined to locate the hidden Nazi base in time for the 4th Amoured to attack. Lt. Monica Tasty is an ex-cigarette girl turned Central Command lieutenant whose current beau is Major Mitch Dunning, who is a conscientious and responsible Central Command major. General Jake Tasker, as we learn from the narrator, answers to "the man" himself - the leader of the free world - the Vice President of the United States. And Corporal Skip Andrews who is the radio operator at Central Command rounds out the main characters.
In the beginning of the film, you hear the narrator (Clive Van Owen) say, in that typical 40s-era narrator's voice: "It is intelligence that distinguishes dangerous enemies from merely annoying foreigners." An amusing yarn of cultural detachment and deliberate estrangement from anyone that Americans might consider "foreign" is woven through the film along with a hyperbolic love of the Red, White, and Blue which was typical of the films of the era. There is a "big fat World War" going on. "The coalition of America (and company) is softly raining down bombs of liberty so our enemy can breathe the sulfur-scented air of freedom." There is no shortage of satirical wit in this film. The narrator says, at one point,
"There are no guarantees in Intelligence. In a perfect world we'd know everything about the enemy before we went into battle. More than that, we'd know how they think; what they feel. Maybe if we knew those things there'd be no need for us to fight at all. For if we could only strip away their language, culture, and religion, foreigners wouldn't be so foreign anymore. They'd be more like Canada - big friendly harmless Canada."
According to the tongue-in-cheek narrator, the flow of intelligence becomes more uncertain as it races up the chain of command, from the "hot news" issued by mission commanders to mid-level managers who misfile them to regional coordinators who fail to appreciate their significance. After its debilitating trip up the ranks, the intelligence finally reaches Central Command, "the nerve center of our war on evil and the entire axis of generalities."
After one mission, which has been woefully unsuccessful because of bad intelligence, a sarcastic Major Mitch Dunning (Mackenzie Astin) tells Major Nick Reed (Patrick Muldoon), "Try not to think of this as a humiliating failure." Dunning reminds Major Reed that we cannot attack based on hunches or second-hand gossip.
The war-loving and all-around tough guy General Tasker (John Rixey Moore) is a Rumsfeld-type character who is all too often swayed by Major Reed's overconfidence in what turns out to be shaky or tragically insufficient intelligence. General Tasker gives "rush to war" its true meaning, and reminds us of recent sprints to war by the Bush Administration that would rival Jesse Owens in a 50-yard dash. After an embarrassing intelligence failure, he asks the rhetorical question, "What sort of nation would we be if we sent in troops just because something might be there? What we need is rock-solid roof." Major Reed desperately apologizes, "I'm sorry I couldn't manufacture any for you!"
This deftly contrasts the stubborn and sometimes venomous defenses we've heard from the likes of our current Vice President and his band of neoconservative "yes-men" who publicly swear -- to this day -- that evil terrorists lunched in Prague, plotted with, and had connection to Saddam Hussein. All of this in the absence of credible evidence from any serious journalistic source and an actual recent acknowledgement of no connection made by the President himself. As unfortunate as the current real-life situation in Iraq is, the Bush Administration's reliance upon such extremely horrible intelligence in a rush to war in Iraq has provided a wonderful -- albeit unspoken -- backdrop to Mr. Kutzera's witty spoof.
A love interest for Major Reed spices up the instruction film. She goes by the name of Lt. Monica Tasty (Elizabeth Bennett), currently the girlfriend of Major Dunning, who'd had a heated affair with Nick Reed before he changed and took on the cold, hard job as a Central Command Major. (Reed's self-description: "I'm am an empty hollow shell devoid of emotion.") Lt. Tasty had joined the Army when she'd begun to feel shopping wasn't quite enough to satisfy her prescribed patriotic duty to her country. Major Reed delivers an unforgettable line, "If we stop buying things, then ... well ... then I guess they really have won."
Lt. Tasty is the little angel on Major Reed's shoulder he generally ignores while he lusts for her womanly form. She's a patriotic lady, as we can see in the conversation with Major Dunning when Lt. Tasty questions how anyone can hate Americans, the good guys. Major Dunning has a bit of patriotic myopia himself and has resigned himself to go against his own better nature; accepting, by rationalization, what he feels in his heart is wrong.
Captain Jack Smith is an expert intelligence photography analyst who knows that any speculation on his part could lead the U.S. to attack a harmless target - "and we wouldn't want that, would we?" asks the narrator.
A running gag in the film features Major Reed waxing poetic about the many ways war affects a man and just as he gets to the core of the emotional message, he is cut off by his radio operator Corporal Skip Andrews (Eric Jungmann) who breaks in to announce some major development. Major Reed expresses a bit of self-centered regret for having sacrificed the capability of being "warm and cuddly" because he's had to send soldiers to what all too often turns out to be their unfortunate deaths because of bad intelligence.
In the spirit of films such as Zucker and Abrahams' Airplane! we see the "national threat level" go from Orange to Tangerine, from Tangerine to Butterscotch, and from Butterscotch to Autumn Harvest.
References to torture abound in the film, showcased by scenes from an older training film that, for the sake of the current story, takes place at a German prison camp called Dulag Luft (aka "the place where Germans question you"). Major Van Behn and Captains Ruening and Gruenich cajole, torture, and steal information from American GIs. Showing GIs being tortured in their cells, the narrator says, "As German evildoers turn up the heat on American GIs, Americans never treat prisoners this way. Our torture chambers are always kept at a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit."
By the end of the film, we see something that generally only happens in the movies -- particularly in instructional and propaganda films of the 40s and 50s. Thanks to the effort and skill of Captain Jack Smith (the photo analyst), we get a perfect big fat world war win where the winner gets the girl and America is exalted for the hidebound giant that she is. I won't be a spoiler and tell you how it all happens, but a conversation toward the end of the film shows that it's only Lt. Monica Tasty at Central Command who seems to be at least partially immune to America-itis, regardless of the fact that we win or we lose our wars. You're left to wonder how she could be such a fool to have dumped sweet Major Dunning and fallen for this merely lucky 'hollow shell.' Some girls are just a sucker for a pretty face. From Tasty's final facetious love scene with Major Reed:
REED: "If we can't go back to being myopic and self-centered, they really have won!"
TASTY: "But maybe if we thought about the rest of the world every day, we wouldn't have to 'come to its rescue' every twenty years!"
I think it's fairly obvious this relationship won't last beyond the physical; just as it's likely that intelligence will once again be cherry-picked or exaggerated to support a pre-conceived agenda.
Come next war, I was left with a distinct impression we could expect the same mistakes would likely be made all over again. Although General Tasker proclaims "Maybe attacking a convenient target doesn't make us manly or decisive. Maybe waiting for real intelligence does," we still get a sense the hasty Major Reed and the callous General Tasker are nature-bound to make more of the same mistakes in future wars because of their innate nationalistic shortsightedness, their overall character, and the human fallibility factor in analyzing intelligence.
One statement in this film bordered on the prophetic. The narrator says, "War only takes what we let go of." Coupled with a wry statement made earlier in the film, "Soldiers risk their lives defending the civil rights we've already given up to protect ourselves," you can sense the futility in trying to rationally reconcile or correlate the defense of freedom and democracy (especially in Iraq today) with the protection of civil liberties back home.
Many will soon have an opportunity to see this film. Completed in July of 2006, the 80-minute, black and white production is now being submitted to festivals and seeking distribution. It has been accepted into the FAIF Festival (Foundation for the Advancement of Independent Films) in Los Angeles, and the Austin Film Festival in mid-October. A Pax Americana Pictures LLC production, the film was written and directed by Dale Kutzera. Greg Reeves, P. James Keitel, and Dale Kutzera produced the film photographed by Mark Parry and edited by Joseph Butler.