Poster for the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein
film, "Battleship Potemkin"
There was no television in the houses I lived in until I was 15. When I watched television before then, it was always at a neighbor's or friend's house, usually just one or two shows in a row once or twice week. Thus, I didn't see most episodes of any of the shows that had a strong cultural impact on most other people my age.
But every movie I could see I did, good and bad, thanks to the poor security that theaters of my youth installed at their exit doors. Buy one ticket and let five buddies in for free when nobody in authority was looking. Just for the record, I don't do that anymore since I got old enough for my senior discount. Actually, I gave it up about the same time the first little low-resolution, black-and-white TV arrived in my parents' house in 1963 just six months before we all spent a three-day weekend watching the televised aftermath of the assassination of JFK.
I've since gone for long stretches without a television, years at a time, but never long without seeing a movie in a theater, a multiplex or one of the dwindling numbers of art houses. And while I'm utterly eclectic in my taste, I've always been attracted to political films. That presents some difficulties. Because, compared with the number of films that could be made about politics in America, damn few have been. And some topics are simply ignored. No great films have been about the struggles for abolition, women's suffrage, Indian removal, the Mexican-American War, draft resisters in various wars. The list is endless, each subject just begging for the right script and the money to produce it. We know how that goes.
I take the broadest view of the political category but here I am sticking almost exclusively to commercial films, although some of these didn't do so well commercially. Trying to narrow down my list of "favorites" is tough because I usually find something worthwhile even in mediocre films. So, I tried to condense. But I wound up with a baker's dozen ... times four. If you are so inclined, that's one movie a week for the next year in the unlikely event you haven't seen any of these or want to see some of them again. I've included some foreign films if they're available in English or with subtitles. It is not a list of all my favorites.
First there are the documentaries, like Michael Moore's Sicko (his best work for my money), Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, Robert Greenwald's Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers and Koch Brothers Exposed, Errol Morris's The Fog of War, Barbara Kopple's American Dream and Harlan County, USA, David Weiss's No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger, Stuart Townsend's Battle in Seattle, Spike Lee's 4 Little Girls, Uli Edel's The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Fernando Solanas's Memoria del Saqueo (Social Genocide).
Then there are the hard-core dramatic films like Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (a stunning film after all these years), Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, Howard Biberman's Salt of the Earth, Oliver Hirschbiegel's astonishingly engrossing Downfall (about Hitler's last days), Costa-Gavras’s Z, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Luiz Puenzo's The Official Story, and Jose Luis Cuerda's Butterfly.
In the more cinematic/dramatic arena, "Hollywood" films, if you will, there's plenty that is about politics—Michael Ritchie's The Candidate, Warren Beatty's Bulworth, Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog, Robert Rossen's All the King's Men (the 1949 version, not the mediocre remake)—but not so much in the activist category. Norma Rae, Mike Nichols's Silkwood, Steven Zaillian's A Civil Action, Ken Loach's Bread and Roses.
Then there are Alan J. Pakula's disturbing, conspiracy-laden The Parallax View, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (original 1962 version), Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (in which Andy Griffith's character gets a comeuppance that would wash off his back today), Oliver Stone's Salvador and Born on the Fourth of July, Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, Gus Van Sant's Milk, Spike Lee's Malcolm X and Bamboozled, Richard Shepard's The Hunting Party, Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, Costa Gavras's Missing, Hal Ashby's Being There, Edward Zwick's Glory and Steven Spielberg's Amistad.
All those movies I've seen more than once because I found them each compelling in its own way. Not that any of them is without its flaws.
Of all the political films I've seen, however, I am most enamored of John Sayles's brilliant collection of movies where politics are always the undercurrent but played out in a manner which recognizes that even political junkies aren't political 24/7: Return of the Secaucus 7, Lone Star, Men with Guns, Amigo and Matewan.
The last has special resonance for me. The lead character, Joe Kenehan, played by Chris Cooper, organizes coal miners, the same work that my grandfather did for the United Mine Workers from 1927 to 1949, with a brief period in the early '30s spent organizing for a rebel UMW splinter, the Progressive Miners. That work took him all over mining country, from the southern Appalachians to Pennsylvania and southern Illinois, and all the way to the iron mines of Minnesota and Wisconsin when the UMW briefly sought unsuccessfully to organize outside its usual bailiwick.
Matewan depicts the 1920 real-life Battle of Matewan, part of a coal-mining strike in West Virginia in which 12 people on both sides ended up being killed in a shoot-out. Like all John Sayles's movies, it's filled with natural dialog and actors whose characters feel completely real, together with a good story line that does not damage the historical record.
Okay. It's your turn now. What are your favorite political movies?
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