IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 25 minutes, rated 6.0 by 244 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Finland.
Verdict: Ambitious.
Tagline: Vertigo.
It is set in the future of 2011 and anticipates cell phones, the internet, and the pestilential persistence of flared trousers. It features transparent inflated furniture used in one noteworthy scene as a prism.
Fictional Finland 2011 is all glass and steel modern where all social and economic problems have been solved. Everything is state owned and our protagonist is a film maker assigned to make a documentary tracing the evolution of this idyllic state from its origins in the dark days of 1968.
He has a Twiggy assistant with spider eye make up and hot pants who follows/leads him around. With her subtle nudging, protagonist decides to use the life of an individual to narrate the transformation, a particular individual for in visiting an art exhibition, as arranged by Twiggy, he sees a 1968 photomontage of model that captivates him, and just by chance, again arranged by Twiggy, he comes across the photograph of a contemporary woman who is the doppelgänger of the 1968 model, he decides to recruit her to act out the story in mockumentry style.
What the sap doesn’t realise is …. SPOILER ALERT…that the doppelgänger has her own agenda and Twiggy is in on it.
The look-alike is an engineer in a nuclear power plant where the workers are about to strike! With Twiggy’s assistance, this engineer wants to use the documentary to get across their story and demands which are never articulated.
Love confuses everyone and everything and it does not go well for any of them. By the way, the title is explained in the dialogue and it is not the obvious but refers to an idyllic time, a time of roses. No, not under the sign of the rose, sub rosa, I.e., a secret.
The doppelgänger reminds me of Vertigo (1958), and the cinematography of Alphaville in the daylight.
Perhaps because of the poor subtitles, or my inattention, I could not fathom the climax.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour 25 minutes, rated 6.5 by 253 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: France.
Verdict: Effective.
Tagline: Who is calling, please?
A library rat whose speciality is very dead, very obscure languages from Meso-America neglects his girlfriend and ignores his only friend as he toils away in Paris. Then he starts hearing things. At first it just static on radios in the apartment or car but it slowly come into tune though only briefly. It is an androgynous voice speaking a very ancient obscure dead language which he has lately been studying for he is one of the few in the world familiar with this tongue.
These messages in Mayan, let’s call it that to keep it simple, come on a car radio, a stereo, a telephone answering machine, a Walkman and so on always when only he can hear them. He begins to think he is going mad and is unable to tell anyone for fear of ridicule or worse. The messages tell him to do this or that with the threat that if he does not a catastrophe will occur. Escalation ensues. When he hesitates a catastrophe does occur, so he then complies to avert another.
By the way the Mayan dialogue has French subtitles and English ones overlaid on top of them. The result is by Georges Braque.
The atmosphere of confusion, dread, and paranoia is nicely done without any gimmicks. Bruce Campbell does not leap from the shadows. Is it really happening or is he going nuts? Or both.
Moreover, there is a resolution of sorts at end. Think Tron.
IMDb meta-data has a bladder-challenging runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes, rated 5.7 by 661 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy (sort of).
DNA: Russia.
Tagline: An Eternal Putin!
Verdict: The elephant brought forth the mouse.
The fraternity brothers advise that it includes sex and violence, and violent sex, for those who like that.
In distant 2020 a small group of ageing, ultra-rich Moscow oligarchs find a fountain of youth and are…rejuvenated. The magic elixir collects in an abandoned facility of the Soviet space program called Target. Only lately have its properties been understood, but it was too late for Ponce de Leon.
These plutocrats are none too nice, and rejuvenation does not improve them. Does the astral mineral stop ageing or slow it, the subtitles weren’t sure. Whatever, bathing in radiation after Chernobyl did not seem very attractive but they do it.
Billy Wilder once said he started screenplays with the last scene and then worked back to how it all got there. He made that explicit in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and then topped it with another. Too often screenwriters and directors have no end in mind, no resolution, no summation, no direction on which to conclude, and this movie is an example of that. Like a student writing a thesis without a purpose who stops when the word limit is reached, it ends when they ran out of film not when the story concluded because it didn’t, perhaps, because it couldn’t, having no conclusion.
The science fiction trigger of the magic substance and some futuristic gadgets are minor accoutrements, not central to the story of what a few people would do if eternal youth were possible. Pretty much the same old stuff as they do now. Egads, more unbearable budget committee meetings!
The cinematography is superb both of the future in urban Moscow and in the wilderness near Mongolia where Target was located. It is a treat for the eyes, and the acting is fine. The whole, however, is less than these parts. Nor is it diverting. The film is as shallow and self-indulgent as the characters it portrays, rather like the remakes of The Great Gatsby (1974 and 2013). There is much emphasis on China and Chinese but it adds nothing to plot or character. And, why would such a future world continue to rely on semi-trailer road transportation that looks just like the 1950s.
Curiously one of the leads is a bilingual Anglo among all those Russkie names in the credits.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 23 minutes, rated 6.1 by 46234 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy fy; Subspecies: krimi.
Tag: Seeing isn’t believing, Dagwood!
DNA: Anglo-Atlantic.
Verdict: Nice trip, no arrival.
World weary flick passes a stranger in the street who puzzles him. Later he begins to investigate a series of murders. It is a real whodunnit. The first in a century…because in this world there is no privacy — our mind-eyes are open books to the authorities. Everything we see and do is recorded in this dreamworld of a Big Brother McKinsey manager. All of this is deftly conveyed in the first act.
In Act II someone has hacked into this hive mind with a private agenda. Bang! The falling bodies belong to the social elite and that pressures Weary Cop to use himself as bait by going undercover. It seems to work but there are wheels within wheels.
Spoiler alert.
Act III: An even more-super hacker is the puppet master though quite what the motivation was remains a mystery to me, despite a garbled explanation near the denouncement.
Nice touches: close your eyes and the hacker too is now in the dark. Though it is labeled a thriller, much of the action is a group of men, yes all men, sitting around a table, often in silence. That is punctuated by the actors staring into space to access the mental net. Daring that is in these days when the audience is pimply boys wanting blow-em ups in this genre, although they get comprehension in gratuitous sex.
If all records are digital and they are altered then there is no external evidence, no baseline of veracity, like those libraries that microfiched back-runs of newspapers to save space and then pulped them only to discover twenty years later that microfiche has quietly degraded to fly specks just as the data stored on CDs is doing now. Those newspapers, many of them unique local records are gone forever.
This film conjures more effectively than Dark City (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) a world where we cannot believe what we see with our own eyes. However, in common with many other films, since it has no resolution it just goes on and on. It’s too long and then dribbles away in an unresolved ending where there is a promising reference to personal autonomy that comes from and goes nowhere.
Worst of all the schoolboy villain is neither convincing nor comprehensible. Nor is the intermediate hacker’s response to him credible, she of the nickel-plated revolver, goes to water too fast. But the acting is nonetheless noteworthy all around. These stereotypes are vividly rendered, one-dimensional though they be.
The Library: A Fragile History (2021) by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree
Good Reads meta-data is 518 pages rated 3.84 by 987 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: The new is old.
Tagline: Where’s Melville?
A comprehensive survey of book collections from Alexandria – both ancient and contemporary – to digital. Along the way is papyrus, vellum, linen, paper, and pixels.
Books have always sparked conflicts by those looking for a fight. Romans were one of the few conquerors who preserved the books of the vanquished for a time. Of course, these books were scrolls on papyrus, which is very durable, but burns easily and most of what they saved was in fact later lost in the convulsions of Roman history.
There is always someone who opposes change. When Greeks began writing plays on papyrus, Socrates decried it. By writing things down, we no longer have to remember them and that will weaken our brains. Ergo the smartest people had an oral culture. Aborigines know that.
When Gutenberg’s printed books began to appear alongside handwritten manuscripts, Erasmus, among others, decried it. Printed books were not invested with the effort, the grace, or the artistry of manuscripts.
Priests and kings decried printing because it put books, including Bibles, into the hands of too many people without religious, social, or political censorship. That undermined both theological and political authority. Books are like that.
When e-Readers came along in the 1990s it was the same story, and still is. (We got our Rocket e-Books long ago when Bill Clinton was president.) Many today refuse to use a Kindle or any of its cousins because… [some reason or other].
Then there were the wars over what is in the books. When Martin Luther kicked-off the Reformation, he also toppled many a library. Catholics purged monastery libraries (these being the main book collections) of Protestant-sympathetic items, and commanded their faithful among the book-owning aristocrats to do the same. That was the first shot.
Protestants replied in kind. When Henry VIII closed monasteries their libraries were purged, i.e., most books were burned. Henry also sent scrutineers around the countryside to find books in the private homes of the wealthy reading class and purge them. Closet Catholics hid offending volumes in priest holes.
This went on for a hundred or more years. More than one reader, more than one printer was murdered (executed) for possessing forbidden books by Catholic and by Protestant authorities doing God’s will. Sure. Happy in their work.
Another skirmish concerned books (printed or manuscript) versus pamphlets, posters, coffee house sheets, newspapers, cahiers, and other ephemera. One of Christopher Columbus’s sons became an omnivorous book collector and he gathered everything on paper and then bound the leaves like books. The result is a social record still used by researchers today. Whereas when Thomas Bodley put up an enormous fund to build a library for Oxford University he forbid it ever to hold such trivialities. Sniff. Sniff.
In the Nineteenth Century as literacy increased and the cost of making books decreased, then another front was opened in this culture war. It concerned the printing, distribution, and availability of books as the public library slowly emerged. The first fault line was non-fiction versus fiction. Political authorities, social influencers, respectable investors wanted only pious, practical, uplifting books to be printed and to be available. No Tom Jones or Moll Flanders, thank you. A benevolent coal mine owner might establish a library in a colliery town and stock it with books like, How to be a Good Employee, Coal Mining for Beginners, The Joys of Being a Child Miner, Taking Care of Tools, How to Survive on Gruel, Pray don’t Strike, Church not Union, and other such titles. Few locals visited such a library more than once. They wanted light, escapist fiction to divert them for a time from the realities of their lives or literature that promoted a better future in the here and now, not in the afterlife.
This demand led book printers and sellers to form subscription reading libraries to cater for this taste. This struggle went on for a long time, and in the early Twentieth Century Mr Mills and Mr Boon came along and supplied one part of this market, and still do.
In the Cold War libraries were again in the firing line. Demands were made to purge the shelves, but to warehouse the books to keep them out of circulation not to destroy them. The Bolsheviks of 1917, after the initial thrill of victory, realised they could sell the seized libraries, much of which were in Latin, French, or German, of the aristocrats to the West and did so. But in the USA the goal was to silence the books period, but it was too close to the end of World War II to license Nazi book burning, however tempting that was. Below are some of the books recently banned in Florida.
The story in France is distinctive. After the Revolution of 1789 in the heady days of victory the winners declared all libraries public, the first and biggest of these is the Mazarin Library (which I have used), but they soon realised the stock of books was very Catholic, very aristocratic, and very reactionary. They then banned just about everything and devised a censorship system that was so complex not even René Descartes would have been able to navigate it. When Catholicism made its periodic rebounds, those forces wanted psalters, hymnals, books of days, and little else. When Jean Jaurès’s (1859-1914) socialists rose, they decided to make the local school room with its few dictionaries and primers the public library in the charge of an overworked and underpaid teacher. Thus a public library system was created without the expense of a building, staff, or funds to buy books. It was zero-budget policy hailed as genius.
It was only in the 1970s that the French government funded a huge initiative to create médiathèques, several thousand of them to accompany the Minitel revolution. (Who remembers Minitel?) These were multi-media cultural, community centres and quite by accident have become the model that underlies a great many public libraries today like the one I visited the other day. On now entering a library no longer does one feel like one is entering a memorial tomb where all is hushed, if not quiet. Originally intended as a site for public access to Minitel and its adjuncts, the médiathèques have endured by adapting.
Andrew Carnegie paid for the library building in which I did my early reading; it was one of 5000 he paid for in the USA and UK which then included Ireland. The deal was, he would pay for a building, if the local town council would supply the land and commit to spend a sum equal to 10% of the building cost to stock and staff the library every year thereafter. He offered six or seven types of building that might be selected, and if a town want to embellish or add to one of those at its expense, fine, but all had to include a Children’s Room. I am sure a shade of Herbert Marcuse can explain why this is an example of repression.
Recounted is the hubris of the San Francisco Library that anticipated a future library without books, and so built at great expense a new public library with space for only a third of the existing book stock, and there being no budget leftover for storage, pulped much of the remainder or sold it (perhaps legally). According to these authors no records were kept because the card catalogue was the first thing to go and with it all the meta-data.
There is a lot more in the book, but there is also a lot that isn’t there. It seems to me to be more about book collections than libraries. By that I mean there is nothing but a few asides about how the collections would be organised for retrieval, stored against degradation, restored after damage, the professionalism of librarians, the gender balance among librarians, and so on.
While closed versus open stacks are mentioned, that question is not connected to shelving. For open stacks to work there has to be some order based on content, whereas for closed stacks a shelf mark will do. That is in open stacks all the books by and about Aristotle will be proximate, not so for closed stacks.
Nor do they mention that marvellous short story by Juan Luis Borges, The Library of Babel with its Purifiers patrolling the shelves on search and destroy missions like those now occurring in Florida. Nor does this book mention Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and the ineradicable quality of the ideas in books. Nor the German librarians who secreted books from Nazis.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 8 minutes rated 6.0 by 6067 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA: England.
Verdict: Compelling.
Tagline: It’s really happening!
Three young men sit in a Volvo station wagon and talk. The result is a far better movie than Blade Runner (1982), Avatar (2009), The Arrival (2016), and much else.
These three are amateur astronomers, an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and a radio telescope technician who together drive to a hill top in Sherwood Forest away from light and other interference one night a month to star gaze each in his own way with the gear crammed into the car. These are the self-styled Astro-Nuts.
Though cold, it promises to be an especially good night with no atmospheric disturbances. The weather inside the car is chilly, too, because there are tensions among them that (very) slowly emerge. The pace is deliberate, leisurely even, but that makes a nice change from Hollywood harm scarum tempo used to conceal shallow characters and plot holes.
As they banter, doze, take leg-stretching and bladder-emptying breaks and drink more tea, amid the static the radio technician is scanning appears an anomaly. Well that happens and he tries to correct it while being teased about his past mistakes. Earlier a routine image of a weather satellite disappeared for a minute or two and then returned. That had never happened before. Later there is shadow detected by the (barely) portable telescope they have set up. One, two, three something is up the tree!
When scrubbed the radio signal persists. Huh? How can that be? Good question, Galileo. The satellite image loss recurs. Using infrared settings on the telescope the shadow look like…. [no one says it but we all think it].
Is ET calling? Just maybe. Better to be sure than sorry, so they pick up…. It ends on an upward positive note!
A recent Brit film I watched had a big name cast, location shooting in Wales, sex, and some flashy special effects with kindergarten science. Only a brave person or a fool watched to the end as I did. Hmmm.
This film has none of those things but it has a script and the car interior, two first-time film actors, and no special effects apart the grandeur of the night sky. The result is a far, far better thing than most I watch. The film school graduates who produced it could not find anyone to fund it, so they did it themselves. Chapeaux!
It is too long. The car chase at the end seemed needlessly attenuated, and there was just too much of the bromance. A producer not emotionally invested in it would have cut it by 30 minutes and improved it to get focus on the really big picture. Really BIG.
I shudder to think what Pox News would make of a first contact. The movies Contact (1997) and Arrival (2016) got the reception right – Madness times N. Panic, denial, fear, nukes would be round one though the image of a President Trump meeting an alien to sell state secrets sprang to mind.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 7.5 by 131 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: UFO.
DNA: West Germany.
Verdict: Imaginative.
Tagline: Move over Orson Wells.
In this mockumentary Intrepid, a television journalist, during a routine story gets drawn into a tale of UFOs. Shifting through the nutcases he finds some of the witnesses credible, the real evidence, though sparse, is intriguing. He follows the threads around the world, losing his job but not his camera and sound man, in so doing. The visas in his passport are many: Canada (where it started), USA, Peru, Italy, and so many more I lost track.
Intrepid tries everything to disprove the evidence he keeps finding, to no avail. He has one Canadian witness tested by psychologists, brain scans, and hypnosis but she continues to offer a low key but consistent account of meeting the titular delegation. He follows asides and descriptions in her recitations to find other clues. Project Blue Book gets a look-in. One clue leads to another, and so on. He is Indiana Jones in a suit and tie with a microphone.
Intrepid is dead when the story starts, that is disappeared and presumed dead, incinerated in a car crash. The movie is pieced together from the footage he had shot on his investigations. Much of it is cinéma vérité style from the field, because there are the mandatory crop circles.
It is all played dead straight, none of the nods and winks so unnecessary and so common in Hollywood productions. The commitment of the players to their parts is complete, and there are a lot of them. Ergo this was not a cheap production. Moreover, the travelogue must have been pricey.
It is steadfastly measured with cross cuts to the journalist sitting at a desk who found Intrepid’s footage and has assembled it. He is matter of fact about it all and leaves it to the viewer to decide. There is no world-ending hysteria. (I was reminded of the way German television reported on the 1999 East Timor crisis: cool and methodical, in vivid contrast to the feverish, panicked, judgemental reporting of the ABC.)
Some German viewers mistakenly thought this TV film was a factual report, hence the reference to the Wunderkind above, and not a drama. Today many viewers make the same mistake in taking Pox News for factual.
By the way the Canadian encounter took place near Sudbury, which is where I had my first teaching appointment with a college of Laurentian University.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 5.2 by 712 generous cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: UK (Wales).
Verdict: Oh Hum.
Tagline: B for boring.
We know they are scientists by their white coats which protect their clothes from stains while monitoring a radio telescope. Photons leave such a mess. These astronomers are bullied by a cartoon paymaster general who never wears a uniform and has uniformed military police (Red Caps) to open doors for him.
They get an SMS from Andromeda (and none of them has seen The Andromeda Strain [1971]) so they click on the link which gives them the directions to build, evidently from materials lying around, a super deluxe super computer in return for their banking passwords. (No they haven’t seen The Forbin Project [1970] either.) Even as this Lego project is going on the number of white coats is being reduced by deaths. Get it!
The computer they have built wants company and before you can say STUPID these astronomers have cultivated a humanoid in a bento box who looks just one of them, now dead.
Enough! It gets worse without getting better. There is a gratuitous side plot about the evil CIA. What would screenwriters do without this straw villain.
Just as the scriptwriters and director know nothing about armies they seem to know even less about science. Surprisingly, that is common after a hundred and fifty years of free public education.
I longed for some convoluted but amusing AI subtitles as relief from the pompous but trivial dialogue. The solution was to turn the sound down…a lot. Some of the photography of Wales is good but has nothing to do with the plot. Yes, I know the plot puts it in the Yorkshire Dales, but shooting location credits says Wales, so there!
Otherwise the camera work is monotonous with one headshot after another, so close up that one sees inverted hairs, acne spots galore, cocaine spots, and some pores that need purgation. At other times it is cinéma vérité jerky or even freeze frame, very distracting in many cases. Most film-school projects have better camera work.
Apart from so many unnatural deaths there is some ambiguity about what is going on, but that is obliterated by the persistent cartoonish representation of the mufti general. And of course the male lead is a high school stereotype: so brilliant that others abide his adolescent irresponsibility, so unorthodox that no one knows what he is doing, so handsome beneath the designer (get a new designer!) peach fuzz all the women fall before his myopic gaze, and so underwritten as to be a cipher.
The best thing about it is that it does not have Stephen Seagal in it. Admittedly, that is always a major plus. Sorry Fred, but that’s the truth. The 1961 television series was far more interesting. but does not now seem available. The reconstruction is, well, a poor thing.
IMDB meta-data is 1 hour and 17 minutes of runtime, rated 5.6 by 315 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Soviet
Verdict: Melancholy.
Tagline: TMI or TLI.*
A craft on a deep space mission is trapped in the gravitational field of an iron star and cannot escape. Since they are stuck the elderly captain decides to answer a distress signal that comes from a planet in the iron star system, where they find one (or is it two other ships, it being hard to tell in the murk) and they are set upon by a cannibal cloud, suffering casualties, including the captain’s squeeze. Remember the cloud from The Wall (1967), this is its evil twin.
Meanwhile, back at HQ chaps with big chins dressed for Greco-Roman wrestling babble about compressing time. They watch a girly dance, sad to think those babes were long since dead before the video traversed space to reach them. Huh? The sun shines, the waters lap, everyone smiles all the time. It is exhausting to watch all this good humour. They seem only sightly interested in the fate of captain and crew.
Meanwhile, back at the Iron Star the crew finds fuel on the downed ships and pirate it to power their way out of the gravity grip and return. Hooray! Aged captain decides he has to live with the painful memories of this expedition, despite the suggestion of the on-board medic (who wears a crash hemet!) that she erase his memory.
The design, art work, and sets are marvellous. It looks like a considerable investment for what then seems to be a truncated movie. Was it intended to be the first episode of a series? Some reviewers entertain that speculation. Certainly there are many unexplained references like the Great Ring, Station 57, that medical helmet, and what’s for dinner? None of this is helped by the AI generated subtitles.
Those sets and designs would have attracted that film cutter-extraordinaire Roger Corman, but he seems to have missed this one.
What traps me is an iron sofa. A near approach and I am pulled into its gravitational field with little chance of escape for the next hour. Best to stretch out and accept my fate.
Of Beards and Men (2015) by Christopher Oldstone-Moore
Goodreads meta-data is 352 pages rated 3.65 by 165 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Occam did not do it!
Tagline: Male-Patterned History.
To beard or not to beard, that has often been the question. Whether it is nobler, sexier, scarier, holier, smarter, easier on the skin and chin to have a beard or not to have a beard. Or just more manly to be bearded.
In answering these momentous questions, men have turned to god, to science, to politics, and to women. They have also cast sidelong glances at each other.
If god gave us beards, then we are meant to have them, that is one recurrent school of hirsute thought. Another is that shaving is an act of obeisance to god. Is the beard natural, or a penalty for the fall from Eden? And so it goes. Priests have promoted conflict over this divide for millennia. Even the peace-loving Amish have fought over this question though the most persistent and violent these days seem to be the rabbis and imams.
The science is no less mystical. The beard has been related to – sit down and brace reader – sperm, muscles, and brains by hundreds of savants. Autodidacts like Caesar reasoned that when he was going bald on top, if he pulled out all the other hair on his body starting with his face, the hair would grow back on his head, so he plucked away, including [use your imaginations]. Dopey, yes but no dopier than many scientific explanations, see the reference to sperm above.
Just when scientists settled on one explanation or another for face hair, an adventurer would find nearly hairless indigenous men in the New World or apes with hair everywhere except faces to say nothing of bearded ladies. The wheel of explanation had to be spun once again, and again. Hygiene came into the question in the Twentieth Century. Did the beard harbour germs, parasites, or illegal immigrants?
Adolf Hitler, an exponent of the moustache, experimented with several different looks early in his career. The walrus moustache of a Bismarck was out, identified with the long-ago past. The spiky moustache of Kaiser Wilhelm was out, being identified with defeat. To be clean shaven was a sign of modernity, discipline, and the future to be sure, but the moustache yet retained a certain martial quality that he wished to evoke. Advised by his lifelong bromance and sycophant Joseph Göbbels, Hitler settled on the toothbrush mo. That toothbrush moustache more or less died with him. No one else wants to recall him, evidently, for not even dedicated Neo-Nazis can be seen with one. His mo is now identified with failure, too.
Although he was moustachioed, Hitler decreed his followers, including the army, be clean shaven modernists. Face hair was regarded as Jewish, Bolshevik, Slavic, or Gypsy. Not good. After the Night of the Long Knives, no other Nasty sported a mo. That shave was final.
Those Bolsheviks grew and shaved sideburns, goatees, beards, mono-brows, and moustachioes to elude Czarist police. No disguise could protect them from each other.
Stimulated by some primal memory of ferocious cavemen, generals have sometimes concluded that a bearded soldier is more frightening than a shaven man, and ordered the troops to grow a beard. Regiments of Napoleon’s cavalry were so ordered, with the further specification that the beard be long, glossy, and black. Not every horse-soldier could meet this standard and the entrepreneurs descended with black wax, false beards, and beard extensions that could be stuck on for parades and inspections. One regiment of the French Foreign Legion continues that tradition.
Later, shaving became a sign of military conformity and discipline. It was also an indication that the soldier had been near soap and water to keep clean. Though even then generals themselves often kept at least a moustache to evoke the primitive warrior.
Side Bar: In many creature feature films the monster is usually hairy. Are there any smooth-faced monsters on film? Submit answers below.
When King (1824-1830) Charles X in the French restoration turned the clock back to before the Revolution, the resurgent Catholic hierarchy, thrilled to be back bossing others around, ruled that shaving was god’s law. This edict was largely a reaction to all those bearded Protestants in the North. Chas X was hard to take seriously and soon on the Rive Gauche, in the student quarter (where I once lived for six months), it became an act of defiance to let it grow. Royal police arrived to fine the hairy, who then appealed to the courts. One case turned on the definition of a beard, for the defendant claimed he had forgotten to shave, been too busy to shave, had broken his razor and that stubble was not a beard when it came to paying a fine. In the modus vivendi that followed moustaches were accepted. They sprouted all over the Left Bank, and have recurred with each new generation of self-styled protestors. A similar story played out in the 1960s Stateside, during the Vietnam War. Hair everywhere was the norm for many against the army buzz cut and sub-dermal shave.
The last U.S. Presidential candidate to sprout face hair was…? New York Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948. He had a pencil moustache that was much discussed, especially by women. His wife proved exceptional in that she liked his mo but most others, as questioned by pollsters seeking the big news, did not. His mo was subjected to the intense and trivial attention that journalist still reserve for women, as when it was international news that the leader of the French Socialist Party appeared at reception in D.C. in flat shoes. Quelle horreur! Both French and American media had a feeding frenzy on that.
The last president to be furry? Go on, guess! Howard Taft (1908-1912) and his immediate predecessor Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1908). If a moustachioed Clark Gable had run for office, well he might overcome the hair barrier.
Mrs Dewey is not the only woman to rule on beards. Psychologists, social and not, have conducted endless experiments to see if a beard makes a man more or less attractive to women. As with much such research, the permutations of method are ingenious and meaningless. Our tax dollars at work. As with all social science the results are yes, no, and maybe.
There are also a few words on the carefully curated, meticulously cultivated Hollywood stubble look. It is a kind of a peach-fuzz version of the aforementioned Clarke Gable. (Gable, by the way, shaved his moustache and joined the Air Force in 1942 where he flew combat missions. He had no need to prove anything with a mo.)
The high priests of the gay fashionistas have ruled and misruled on face hair ad nauseam.This is followed by the rabbis and imams ruling on beards which is told in piteous detail. Like Hotspur they summon, but….who cares?
The book ends where I began. The return of the cheek fuzz today is an effort to assert manhood in an age when gender roles have been questioned, changed, made fluid, or otherwise challenged. The one thing a man has left to mark and make him a man is a beard. Pathetic I know, but that makes sense to me.
I had hoped for something about the evolution of shaving from dry blade to the micro-electrics today.
I wondered if Montesquieu had anything to say about beards and climate, but not enough to look for myself. Likewise the effect of the mass armies of 20th Century, setting the norm to shave in the name of hygiene.
In the French Army a grunt is called a ‘poilou,’ a hairy one. Explanations for its origin are vexed. One is that the mass conscription of World War I cleared the countryside of men who sported bushy mo’s as a token of masculinity like the stubble of today. The printing presses of the era spread the image and word far and wide. Another takes it back to Napoleon’s hussars who were as hairy as Twentieth Century hippies. Think Abbie Hoffman on horseback with a sabre. Scary, right?
Occam’s razor suggests that there was little shaving in the trenches. Whatever its figurative origin it became literal there.
I read this in the hope of finding out something about beards in Renaissance Italy of Machiavelli’s time. There is a reference that I will follow up but nothing in this book bears on my interest.
