Sunset on Elliott Bay

Every once in a while the clouds do part on a Seattle winter and we get a stunning sunset. Yesterday evening was one of those times.

I'm going to miss a great many things after the P-I is gone, and this view from our offices is one of them.

The post-election New Yorker cover

The New Yorker is known for their arty covers, but every once in a while they produce something special. This week's issue, which I haven't received yet, is one such time. It's an elegant homage to the president-elect, Barack Obama. 

Perfect!

The president-elect: What comes to mind

Ever since the presidential election was called on Tuesday, I've been thinking of a piece of poetry by Seamus Heaney. The lines occur in "The Cure at Troy," Heaney's translation and adaptation of Sophocles' "Philoctetes," a play about the Trojan War, and they are much quoted (they're a favorite of Bill Clinton's): 

History says, Don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

This seems like one of those times. Truly an amazing moment, one filled with hope and possibility. Congratulations, President-elect Obama.

Planet Money

The current economic meltdown is scary and confusing. A good source for information and understandable explanations is NRP's Planet Money blog and podcast. 

Four of NPR's best reporters are asking good questions and explaining what's going on in uncomplicated terms. Last week, Planet Money broke the story that the Congressional bailout bill would allow the government to purchase stock in troubled banks ("stock injections" ... see what I've learned already?). That's a big deal because Republicans in the House made a big stink over just such a move last week.

How things have changed!

Planet Money also helped produce last week's excellent edition of This American Life: "Another Frightening Show About the Economy." If you're wondering what "credit default swaps" are, this is the primer you've been looking for. This episode is free right now but will cost you $.95 after Sunday, I believe.

One silver lining to this disaster is that we're all going to know a hell of a lot more about the economy and Wall Street than we ever thought we would.

God hates fangs

Stephen Moyer as vampire Bill Compton in "True Blood."

Photo courtesy HBO

Vampires don't usually do too much for me, but I have to admit that I've gotten a bit hooked on HBO's new series, "True Blood." It's funny, creepy and unsettling and it's set in the South, so it pretty much hits the grand slam of oddball horror and cracked behavior.

The show (by "Six Feet Under" creator Alan Ball) is based on a series of Southern vampire novels by Charlaine Harris. The premise: A Japanese company has developed synthetic blood that provides all the vampires' basic nutritional needs, allowing them to make themselves known and to ask for the same rights that humans have.

Ball said in a radio interview that he sold this to HBO as "popcorn TV," which it mostly is. There's some subtle comment on anti-vampire discrimination and religious intolerance that has parallels to anti-gay sentiment, but mostly it's just weird and fascinating and bloody.

The best part of the show is the opening credits (below). Newsweek notes that opening credits are sort of a dying art, but Ball uses them to great effect to open "True Blood" with a sense of doom. Shot on film at various speeds and printed with some colors overly saturated and others muted, the credits are like a Southern Gothic fever dream brought to life, gators and religious hysterics included. And on the soundtrack, Jace Everett growls, "I wanna do bad things to you." Oh, yeah!

Too bad they didn't borrow this look for the series itself:

Thomas Friedman is damned angry

And for once, I agree with him. 

Friedman was on Fresh Air the other night, talking about his new book, "Hot, Flat and Crowded." In the book, Friedman challenges the conventional wisdom that the best way to break our dependence on foreign oil is to "Drill, baby, drill!" What we need to do, he says, is break free of oil altogether by developing new, eco-friendly and sustainable energy technologies.

As Friedman notes, the three people grinning at the chants of "Drill, drill, drill!" at the Republican National Convention were the observers from Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. They want us to stay hooked up to the oil company. They make billions off of it. And alot of that money is funneled to terrorism and despotic regimes.

What brought down the Soviet Union? Friedman argues convincingly it was $80 a barrel oil, which caused the Soviets to over-extend themselves, followed by $10 a barrel oil, which ruined their economy. Iran, he says, is a country in a similarly precarious spot. It funnels billions in oil revenue to radical causes. Should oil prices drop again, Iran would be in trouble.

We had a shot at developing alternative energy technologies, but the Reagan Administration cut off subsidies in the 1980s. Now, all the technology we developed has moved to other countries and all we have left is our dependence on oil. Friedman says, if we would use government regulations to shape the economy to make it favorable to green energy, we could create technology that would lead the world.

Friedman says the notion of drilling our way out of our dependence on foreign oil is "crazy." He's angry that the opportunity to get free of foreign oil has been squandered and that we keep digging ourselves in deeper and deeper to the oil economy.

He's right. We should all be angry. Check out the Fresh Air interview.

The real story about oil

On the Media is one of the best shows on NPR (and you can listen to it on a podcast if you can't catch it on the radio). The show asks tough questions about the media and shows how we often get played for suckers by politicians and big business.

On last week's show David Fiderer, a writer for the Huffington Post and a banker in the energy industry for 20 years, was the subject of a segment. Fiderer is ticked that reporters are so easily taken in by the energy industry and that they lack a basic understanding of how it works. Will drilling offshore lower gas prices? Nope, says Fiderer. Nuclear power as a way to energy independence and lower gas prices? It won't make a difference at the pump, he says.

Bob Garfield, reporter for the segment, asks about the possibility of energy independence:

GARFIELD: Like given the way petroleum deposits are distributed on Earth, is it reasonable to imagine the U.S. being fully independent of foreign oil, ever?

FIDERER: Not if we consume oil at anything close to the rate we have for the last 50 years. If we consumed oil at the rate we did in 1965, we would still be importing 40 percent of our oil.

Reporters shouldn't let politicians and energy industry leaders control the debate, Fiderer says. Amen.

Check it out. You can listen to the segment here:

'Generation Kill:' The view from inside the Humvee

"Gentlemen, from now on we're going to have to earn our stories."

                                              -- Sgt. Brad "Iceman" Colbert, "Generation Kill"

The best movie of the summer isn't on the screens of your local multiplex, it's on HBO. And it ends this Sunday.

"Generation Kill" is a miniseries based on Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright's non-fiction account of his ride with a Marine reconnaissance patrol during the first 40 days of the Iraq war (produced by David Simon and Ed Burns, the guys behind "The Wire"). It's funny, profane and scary. It's at its best when it captures the simple tedium of war as the Marines drive and wait and drive some more and wonder if they will ever see action.

When I've tried to describe the series to friends, I tell them that the thing it does best is to put you inside that Humvee with those Marines. You listen to them talk and boast and chatter endlessly. The radio spits out bulletins and orders. The Marines talk about their fears and frustrations. They stop to take a shit beside the road (no flush toilets for these guys). And, every once in a while, bullets slash through the night or an explosion rips the calm of a village.

When Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" came out, William Arnold, our film critic at the Seattle P-I, said that he thought it was a new way of presenting a war, that the film simply put you in the middle of of the battle and let you experience it as the soldiers did. "Generation Kill" owes much to Spielberg (the first 20 minutes of "Private Ryan," I think, may be the most significant contribution to film he has made). No John Wayne heroics or plot lines here, just guys trying to do their job and stay alive (and sane) in a very bad place.

The episodes start quietly and move through the mundane until the fight begins. Handheld cameras put you in the middle of the action. It's confusing, just as I imagine a real battlefield is. And sometimes, mistakes are made, just as on a real battlefield. At the end, you're shaken and confused and profoundly moved.

The director Sam Fuller once said that the best way to make a war movie would be to take shots at the audience every once in a while to make them feel what it's like to be in the middle of the real thing (but he admitted that might be bad for business). "Generation Kill" comes surprisingly close to doing that. In the end, the guys in the Humvee are heroes not because they are Rambo or super patriots, but because they simply survive this badly managed invasion, are there for their buddies, and come out with their dignity intact.

It's an amazing series and I'm sad to see it end. If you don't have HBO, look for it on DVD in a few months.

Elvis Mitchell's radio show, The Treatment, has a great interview with Susanna White, the Brit who directed the first three episodes and the last one. 

UPDATE: The last episode just finished airing. I may write more about it later. Among the many things that struck me, one was that, like another great anti-war film, "M*A*S*H," "Generation Kill" ends with a football game. But where Robert Altman played that scene for laughs, the game in "Generation Kill" becomes a reflection of the Marines' anger and frustration with the war and with each other. Fists fly and finally someone says, "Maybe we shouldn't play football anymore." Amen.

And then the episode ends with a video (some of it actually shot by Marines in Iraq) set to Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around." As Star-Ledger blogger Alan Sepinwall notes, it's almost a cliche but you have to give "Generation Kill" a pass because the song is such a perfect fit.

Stay frosty.

Warmth, Giant Black Toobs

Seattle artist Susan Robb installed her artwork, "Warmth, Giant Black Toobs," at Volunteer Park today. She uses 50-foot polypropylene tubes that heat in the sun until they become buoyant and float.

The effect is amazing and, at first, a little unnerving. The tubes seem to come alive, moving and bumping in to each other, rising on the heat of the sun and a light breeze. When the sun goes behind a cloud, the tubes lay down on the grass but continue to move, nuzzling each other and competing for space.

At times, they reminded me of giant strands of hair; at others, like the water creature from "The Abyss." In the end, they are really their own thing, changing the space they inhabit and making us stop and look at the familiar in a new way. Everyone who came by, especially kids, loved them.

I produced a video of the piece for seattlepi.com.

Fading flowers

Saw my buddy Kim Carney yesterday. She does such cool flower photography on her blog. She inspired me to take a walk today and see what's growing (or starting to fade) in the neighborhood. More photos on my Flickr feed.

100 years: David Lean and Bette Davis

David Lean on the set.

The centenaries of two of the giants of the movies -- David Lean and Bette Davis -- are being marked this month. Reflecting on the careers of both serves to remind us of how small the movies have gotten these days.

Anthony Lane's piece in the New Yorker, "Master and Commander," gives a good, quick overview of Lean's career. He started as a film editor, learning his craft on "quota quickies," films made quickly to satisfy British law requiring a certain amount of English-produced content be shown on the nation's movie screens. He also worked on newsreels, rapidly trimming film as it came in to the studio so it could be shown in theaters when events were still fresh.

In a sense, Lean remained a cutter all his professional career. As Lane says, Lean didn't believe in editing just to be flashy. A good cut had to move the story forward (case in point: his "Lawrence of Arabia" cut from Peter O'Toole blowing out a match to a red-orange scene of sunrise over the desert is one of the most famous in movie history ... and it serves to thrust you directly into the heart of the story).

Lean's name became synonymous, in later years, with the epic film. "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dr. Zhivago:" All were huge hits and took years to make. Then, tastes changed, Lean created a huge flop (his first box office dud) in "Ryan's Daughter" and didn't make another movie for 14 years ("A Passage to India").

In the end, the restoration of "Lawrence" also helped to restore his reputation as one of the great filmmakers.

Recommended: Just about anything he ever directed, including the epics mentioned above but also earlier, smaller films like "Brief Encounter."

In the New York Times today, Terrence Rafferty writes about Bette Davis. Davis is probably remembered by younger viewers for her later work (mock horror films like "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?") or her loud appearances on David Letterman.

But, in her prime, in the 1930s and '40s, she was a major star and a force both on-screen and off. She confronted studio bosses, demanding better parts and, for the most part won, setting a precedent that has benefited all actors, particularly women, to this day. In the 1950s, with her career on the wane, she pushed again and landed one of her greatest roles, as aging Broadway star Margot Channing in "All About Eve."

Rafferty writes about her role in "Eve" and also her starring role in "Jezebel." Davis, he says, was never afraid to take on a tough role that might not be popular with an audience. He notes that her power on screen was so great, and her skill as an actor so keen, that even when she wasn't in closeup, all eyes would be on her. And that she could convey her characters' moods even in a wide shot.

My favorite Davis entrance is the opening of "The Letter," one of three brilliant films she made with director William Wyler (the others are "Jezebel" and "The Little Foxes"). The sleepy evening at a Singapore rubber plantation is broken when Davis charges onto the veranda, following her lover and emptying a pistol into him. She stands over him, firing the gun until the bullets are gone and all you hear is the click of an empty chamber.

"All About Eve" is an acting tour de force, but so, in their way, are her earlier three-hanky weepers like "Dark Victory" and "Now, Voyager." Only Davis could take such potentially sentimental roles (a dying, spoiled rich girl in the first; an emotionally destroyed rich girl in the second) and make them believable. And sexy: No one ever looked better sharing a cigarette than Bette Davis did with Paul Henreid in "Now, Voyager."

Recommended: "Dark Victory," "Jezebel," "Now, Voyager," "All About Eve," "The Little Foxes" and "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

'Ace in the Hole'

One of Billy Wilder's greatest movies -- and one of his rare flops -- is on home video at last. "Ace in the Hole" is a tough, cynical noir tale about the news business. It stars Kirk Douglas as a success-at-any-price newspaperman.

The film was a box-office failure when first released in 1951 and has never been available on home video. A Criterion two-disk set in a beautiful DVD transfer was issued earlier this month.

Go buy or rent this and watch it. Yes, it's good. Yes, you'll love it.

We'll gather back here in a couple of days to discuss.

'Wonder Boys:' Making choices

Hannah Green: Grady, you know how in class you're always telling us that writers make choices?
Grady Tripp: Yeah.
Hannah Green: And even though your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's ... it's at times ... it's ... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And ... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices.

"Wonder Boys" (2000) is a movie about failing to make choices and, finally, growing up and making them. It's a funny, nuanced comedy, directed by Curtis Hanson of "L.A. Confidential" fame, with one of Michael Douglas' best performances ever. I watched it again last night and fell in love with it all over.

Based on Michael Chabon's novel, it's the story of a writer, Grady Tripp (played by Douglas), who is stuck writing his second novel. His first was a critical success and he's been working for seven years on his second. It's not that he's blocked (he doesn't believe in being blocked). It's that he can't stop. When he sits down to write, he rolls a blank sheet of paper into his typewriter and types a page number: 261. A pause, then he adds another 1 to make it 2611. As more than one person in the film notes, that's a lot of book.

Grady hasn't made any choices and now he's facing too many: his girlfriend (the chancellor of the university where he teaches, played by Frances McDormand) has announced she's pregnant (and she's also married to the head of the English department), his wife has left him and wants a divorce, his editor (Robert Downey Jr.) is in town and wants his book, and a prized student (James Leer, played by Tobey Maguire) wants his guidance (and can't seem to tell where life ends and his writing begins). And there's a matter of the chancellor's husband's dog, which Leer has shot when it attacked Tripp.

"Wonder Boys" is subtly funny and knowing of its subject: writers talking about, bragging about, complaining about and, occasionally, actually doing some writing. When Leer is carried out of a lecture, stoned and on the edge of vomiting, he narrates the whole event out loud ("They were going to the restroom. But would they make it in time?"). The university's WordFest event is a stinging send-up of pretentious literary confabs (Rip Torn stars as a wildly successful author who announces, at the start of his WordFest speech: "I ... am a writer.").

Michael Douglas gives what I think is the best performance of his career. He's unexpectedly funny and sad, shuffling around in a pink, chenile bathrobe, limping from a dog bite and taking the occasional hit off a joint. His life is a mess and, unlike a novel, there are no easy choices, no simple path to the final page. When his girlfriend asks what he wants to do about the baby, he hesitates. "I can't wait for you," she says. "I'm going to have to make this decision on my own."

Steve Kloves adapted Chabon's novel. He crafted a script that is funny and oddly moving. Tripp narrates the story, a device that is frowned on in modern films, but here it works, giving the film a writerly quality that is pretty much perfect. Such as this, after Torn and Downey roar off in Tripp's car:

So there it was. Somewhere in the night, a Manhattan book editor was prowling the streets of Pittsburgh; best-selling author at his side, dead dog in his trunk.

The ending is a touch too pat, but I was willing to forgive it because the rest of the movie is so great. Worth checking out.

The story behind the photo

There was a steam pipe explosion on Lexington Avenue in New York yesterday. One person died and thousands thought it was an act of terrorism. It wasn't.

The photo above (by Brendan McDermid of Reuters) was displayed on numerous web sites and in many newspapers today. In it, a police officer and a man who was nearby help a victim of the blast to get away and get medical help.

It's one of those iconic images that grabs your attention and makes you look and then look again. The woman has been injured and is bloody. She looks to be older than the two people helping her.

Who is she, you wonder? What's her story? That could have been someone I know. I hope she's all right.

The photo shows why, in this age of instantaneous moving images, a still photo can still be so powerful. Unlike a moving image, it gives us a chance to look and look again, to absorb the detail of a moment, and really stop to think. It's a reason why I don't think still photographs will ever go out of fashion.

The New York Times has the story of the photo, written by the man on the left, Kieran Beer.

Things you can learn from The New Yorker

I was reading Ian Frazier's article about meteorites in the current issue of The New Yorker when this word caught my attention in the lede:

horripilate

Frazier uses it in describing our reaction to things that fall from the sky: "... we horripilate at the uncanny scent of our beginnings, or end."

I looked it up. "Horripilation" (the noun) is the name for what happens when your hair stands on end and you get goosebumps. "Horripilate" is the verb.

Just think of how you can add this to your vocabulary: "That movie was so scary I horripilated." People will think you are either very sophisticated and erudite, or very weird.

'Rear Window:' Watching the neighbors

I was sitting out on my deck a few minutes ago, watching the sun set and escaping the heat. It's been hot in Seattle the last couple of days. The apartment building across the alley shows all the signs of a heat wave: windows and blinds open, someone installing an air conditioner, people wearing less than their usual amount of clothing, curtains blowing slowly in the tiny breeze.

Looking at those windows, I was struck by their resemblance to movie screens: rectangular, wider than they are tall, perfect frames to the little films going on inside. That I noticed that resemblance at all is a testament to Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window," a perfect summer movie that appeals to the voyeur in all of us.

Hitchcock's film is set in the apartment of a New York news photographer (Jimmy Stewart) who is laid up with broken leg (notice how Hitchcock sets up that part of the story during the opening credits without a word of dialog). While Stewart waits for his leg to heal, he spies on his neighbors around the courtyard. Their windows are the shape of movie screens, each one framing a story, with Stewart and the audience filling in the details: the lusty newlyweds, a composer stuck writing a song, a lonely woman who may be pondering suicide, another young woman with too many men on her mind. And, of course, the battling couple across the way, the wife an invalid, the husband who may be planning a murder.

It's a great set up and a terrific film, one of Hitchcock's best. There's romance (Grace Kelly as Stewart's girlfriend who refuses to believe that murder may be afoot), comedy (Thelma Ritter as the visiting nurse who may be more suspicious than Stewart), suspense and sheer terror. Hitchcock's direction, the set (at the time, one of the largest ever built) and the superb sound design capture the lazy, over-heated feeling of a humid summer night. Music and conversation drift in to Stewart's window ... and images, too. What is really going on in each apartment? What's the story? Did the man across the way really murder his wife? And, is it wrong to watch someone's life like this? When we go to the movies, are we watching art or just being high-class voyeurs?

The last time I saw "Rear Window" with an audience was several years ago at the Fremont Outdoor Cinema here in Seattle. Many people in the crowd hadn't seen the film before and it was great fun watching them watch the movie and be amused and scared by it for the first time. The climax had people squirming in their seats with suspense and applauding the ending with delight.

Hitchcock would have loved it.

At the end, Hitchcock tweaks our voyeurism just a bit: Most of the stories we thought we knew turn out differently than we expected. After all: We're just the audience, but it's his movie.

P-I Battle of the Bands

Gad! Haven't posted here in over a month. Lame!

The Seattle P-I, where I work, had a Battle of the Bands earlier this week. The groups had to be made up predominately of P-I employees. The bands were great. Who knew there was so much talent at the newspaper?

This last week was supposed to have been the deadline for the arbitrator to rule on the P-I's lawsuit against our JOA partners, The Seattle Times. Thumbs up, we would stay in business. Thumbs down, we would close. The Battle of the Bands was originally intended to be a bright spot in what was expected to be a tense week.

Instead, the suit was settled in the P-I's favor on April 16 (check out the post-settlement party pix here). The P-I lives!!! Whew!

Enjoy the video of the winning band, Force Majeure, doing a simple, sedate version of "Close to You."

Databases in the news

The New York Times has two interesting articles about online databases being used to track campaign financing and Iraq war casualties. The web has made it possible to access information like this with a depth not possible before.

The first item, pictured above, is a graphical and interactive map of how the presidential candidates are doing in the campaign fund-raising race. Click on a candidate's name in the list and the map is redrawn to show where their money support is coming from (the bigger the circle, the more money raised). You can also see who donated and how much they gave from individual zip codes. For instance, my zip code has no Clinton donors but several for Obama.

Turning data into a graphical format like this reminds me of the work of Hans Rosling (see a previous blog entry here) who mines U.N. data in a similar way. Rosling's work shows how our notions of the world are frequently wrong.

The second item is a story about how people are using databases and web sites to track military deaths in the Iraq war and honor the dead. There are links to the sites in the story. Several of the sites attempt to connect a photo and a story to each military death in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York Times stories are typically available free for only a week so look fast).

The use of these types of databases was a big topic at the Society of News Design's annual conference last summer. Offering access to databases like these allows readers to dig up information that is most interesting and relevant to them. The question is whether people will take the time to dig through these sites and whether they will be able to make sense of the data once they've found it.

Amazing stuff.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead

Kurt Vonnegut has died at age 84. He suffered brain damage after a fall several weeks ago and never recovered.

This is all incredibly sad. Vonnegut was one of those people I think should be granted immortality (although he would have turned that gift down flat).

I read my first Vonnegut novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five," when I was in high school. The movie was coming out and I was going to see it with friends. It was a revelation to read, with its giddy time travel structure and its sharp moral outrage over war and the stupidity of much of what humans do on this planet. Plus, it was funny as hell.

Vonnegut was instantly the great, crazy uncle every high school and college kid wished he had. I gobbled up a bunch of his early novels and stories but, sad to admit, haven't read him in the years since. He had done his job for me and countless others, making us aware of the insanity and sheer daffiness of much of modern life. You really do look at things through a Vonnegut lens after reading him.

Maybe it's time to catch up with him. Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut. And so it goes.

The New York Times has a long obit here. There's also a collection of Times' reviews of his books plus articles he wrote for the Times.

Salon offers a clip of Vonnegut reading from "Slaughterhouse-Five" here.

NPR has a bunch of clips of past interviews.

Fort Apache

I've been slowly working my way through the excellent DVD boxed set of John Wayne/John Ford movies that came out last summer. Ford was the director and Wayne was the star of these films, which range from Ford's classic Westerns ("She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," "The Searchers," "Stagecoach") to military films ("The Wings of Eagles," "They Were Expendable") and even a piece by Eugene O'Neill ("The Long Voyage Home").

Last night, I watched one of the Westerns, "Fort Apache," for the first time. Although it's not the best of Ford's Westerns, it's still quite good with an unexpectedly serious message about the arrogance and corruption of power and the importance of tradition and loyalty. Like Ford's last Western, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," it focuses on the truth behind the legend and how that truth is often at odds with how history records events.

"This is the West, sir," says the newspaper man in "Liberty Valance. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

In "Fort Apache," the legend in the making is Lt. Col. Owen Thursday, a stiff, by-the-book West Point graduate, played coldly against type by Henry Fonda (pictured above). Thursday has been posted to remote Fort Apache much against his wishes. He's determined to return to prominence by turning what he sees as a sloppy post into a model of obedience and regulation.

Fonda is brilliant and frightening as the isolated and arrogant Thursday. He clashes repeatedly with Wayne's Capt. Kirby York, a realist who understands the Army's complex relationship with the Apache Indians in a way Thursday never will. When York attempts to broker a truce with Cochise, the Apache chief, Thursday uses the trust between the two men to lay a trap and lure the tribe back to U.S. soil where it will be forced to return to its reservation.

When Wayne protests that he gave Cochise his word that he would be unharmed, Thursday brushes his concerns aside: "Your word to a breech-clouted savage? An illiterate, uncivilized murderer and treaty-breaker? There's no question of honor, sir, between an American officer and Cochise."

Later, when York tries to warn Thursday that he is leading the troop into a trap laid by Cochise, Thursday won't hear it. He relieves York of his command for being unwilling to lead the charge. "There's no room in this regiment for a coward," Thursday says. Thursday's charge turns in to a slaughter. But the Army, and history, unwilling to accept such blundering, turns Thursday into a hero. And York has to go along with it. How can you argue with a legend?

As he did in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," Ford ends with a salute to the average soldiers who suffer and die not for glory or fame but because it's their job (Wayne gets the following speech):

"The pay is thirteen dollars a month; their diet: beans and hay. Maybe horsemeat before this campaign is over. Fight over cards or rotgut whiskey, but share the last drop in their canteens. The faces may change ... the names ... but they're there: they're the regiment ... the regular army ... now and fifty years from now."

A year later, in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," Ford directed a similar speech (that time spoken by the narrator):

"So here they are: the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals ... riding the outposts of a nation. From Fort Reno to Fort Apache -- from Sheridan to Startle -- they were all the same: men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode -- and whatever they fought for -- that place became the United States."

No doubt, Ford's World War II service in the Navy informed his view of the "dog soldiers" who suffered, sweat, bled and died while their superiors got fame and honors.

"Fort Apache" shows Ford maturing in to a serious filmmaker able to take a popular genre and populate it with complex themes. Its portrait of a commander insulated from reality who blunders into a military disaster is even more relevant today than when the film was made in 1948.

Maybe it's time for a remake.