The Nightboy Cometh:
Reflections — In a Jaundiced Eye — on Calder Willingham’s End as a Man & Jack Garfein’s The Strange One
James J. O'Meara
The Strange One
Columbia Pictures, 1957
Screenplay by Calder Willingham, based on his novel, End as a Man (1947)
Directed by Jack Garfein
Editor: Sidney Katz; Music: Kenyon Hopkins; Cinematography: Burnett Guffey; Art Direction: Joseph C. Wright; Sound: Edward J. Johnstone
Cast: Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Peter Mark Richman, Arthur Storch, James Olson, Julie Wilson, George Peppard.
B&W, 100m.
“Could Hollywood bear the eternal burden of a tough fruitcake? No! Anything but that!” — Morrissey
Some time ago, I was reading some classy book that was being packaged as a “racy” read a UK paperback publisher — I think Robert Musil’s Young Torless, in fact — and the cover promised something along the lines of “the heartbreaking beauty of City of Night; the raw power of Last Exit to Brooklyn; the shocking honesty of End as a Man.”[1]
Needless to say, these works of apparently academically legitimate porn made their way onto my teenage reading list. While the first two were — and are — readily available, the last was not, and it wasn’t until the Age of the Internet that I was able to lay my hands on a copy of Calder Willingham’s novel.
My Constant Readers are likely to have never heard of Calder Willingham, or perhaps long ago forgotten,[2] but Wikipedia remembers, and tells us that
During the late ’40s and early ’50s, Willingham was considered at the forefront of the gritty, realistic new breed of postwar novelists: Norman Mailer, James Jones, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and others, many of whom also made up the Greenwich Village literary scene at the time.
While in 1969 Newsweek said his fiction “deserves a place among the dozen or so novels that must be mentioned if one is to speak of greatness in American fiction.”
Not so great as to deserve their own Wikipedia entries, however, including his first novel, End as a Man. The main CW entry does give some idea of what the fuss was about: after dropping out of The Citadel, he moves to New York, where
Willingham’s career began in controversy with End as a Man (1947), a withering indictment of the macho culture of military academies, introducing his first iconic character, sadistic Jocko de Paris. The story included graphic hazing, sex, and suggested homosexuality, which in a period celebrating military victory, led the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to file obscenity charges against its publisher, Vanguard Press. The charges were ultimately dropped, but not before a trial which made the book a cause célèbre, famous writers rallying to its defense. Reviews singled out its savage humor and realistic dialogue.
Wikipedia also tells us that “Before the age of thirty, after just three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker was already describing Willingham as having “fathered modern black comedy,” and the cross-reference to Vanguard Press tells us that Vanguard was
Established with a $100,000 grant from the left wing American Fund for Public Service, better known as the Garland Fund. Throughout the 1920s, Vanguard Press issued an array of books on radical topics, including studies of the Soviet Union, socialist theory, and politically oriented fiction by a range of writers [including] the first books of Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Marshall McLuhan, Joyce Carol Oates and Dr. Seuss.
A verifiable echo-chamber, with a few Shabbos goyim thrown in for cover. So you know what to expect.
And yet, not so. Although End as a Man is supposedly the first in the genre of ripping the lid off the seamy underbelly of military education – another small but spicy part of the Judeo-Marxist “culture of critique” imposed on us by the victors in World War Two, “proving” with monotonous predictability that all “all your sacred institutions are filthy schools for homosexual sadism” — I did not “get that” from the book at all.
By the time I had gotten a copy of End, I had already become fascinated and absorbed in the mysteries of the Männerbund, first by the late Alisdair Clarke,[3] more recently Wulf Grimsson,[4] and of course Jack Donovan. So I was reading it through my own, perhaps distorted, lens of an awareness of the crucial role of male bonding in the creating and sustaining Aryan cultural institutions — a separate but parallel function to the physical procreation handled by the family, as Socrates noted in the Symposium. Since all this is ultimately derived from the warrior band, it is perhaps no surprise that military education should be first on the list targets for postwar subversion.
Whatever Willingham’s intentions, the book leaves the reader — at least, this one — with an admiration for an institution that functions well at its role: turning boys into men.[5] Yes, there’s brutal hazing, but just like the off-campus drinking and gambling that are main interests of the cadets, it’s all clearly against the rules. And while the administration seems a bit obtuse from the start, by the end of the book the school’s crusty old Commandant[6] has ruthlessly ferreted out the truth, delivered harsh but appropriate disciple — including the public disgrace and expulsion of Jocko and the worst of his clique — and delivered a rather stirring speech that explains the book’s curious title:
Gentlemen, I have said this before and I will say it now: No youth can pass through four years of the Academy and not end as a man. We expel the failure; I present our diploma only to a man. Think of that word: listen to it. Man. A simple monosyllable, but it has a great force. Nothing is stronger than this word, for without the quality it signifies, the life of our race, and your own, is rendered utterly futile. Let adversity fall upon you. Fools insult you. Illness strike. Your head will be unbowed and your courage as sure as the turning of the globe — if you are a man.
I guess we’re supposed to giggle, like wise-asses at a high school assembly, but if it weren’t for all the “context” of the book’s history and surrounding trappings, I’d have to say this sounds straight. Good triumphs; Jocko is not a man and is spewed out.
Even the Citadel itself has no hard feelings, proudly listing it as a “famous novel” in its online “Bibliography of the Citadel.”
And speaking of “straight,” most of that history and trappings suggests some kind of homosexual “subtext” throughout.[7] There is one obviously, though of course closeted, “gay” character — a budding novelist, hmmm — and indeed way too much attention is paid to him; even after being expelled, the protagonist, Cadet Marquales, has to journey to visit him at home, a crumbling New Orleans ruin, of course, with dotty relatives and Negro retainers, and the reader has to endure[8] almost a hundred pages of sub-Tennessee Williams pastiche, until one wished Ignatius Reilly would burst in, as he does in Confederacy of Dunces, and teach these cadets how to really handle a sabre.
With all its flaws — it is a “first novel,” after all, overwritten and overly autobiographical — it’s well worth a look, and far more Aryan masculinist than Judeo-subversive than one might expect.
When I learned that there had been a movie, apparently just as forgotten and, in the nature of such things, of course a “classic” of some sort, I looked around for it, but here the Internet failed me; until recently, it was unavailable on DVD, and now only at loan shark prices.
So I leapt at the chance to finally see it when TCM recently programmed it as the first part of a double bill of the only two movie made by Jack Garfein (of whom more anon).
Here’s the blessed IMDB’s rather blunt synopsis:
At a military school in the Deep South, unrepentant sociopath Jocko DeParis engineers events leading to the expulsion of the son of the school’s headmaster and officer-in-charge. DeParis attempts to terrorize, coerce and manipulate his reluctant conspirators in the crime to ensure their silence, but they ultimately turn against him, leading to his peers banding together to deliver their own form of justice.[9]
While only the lamest kind of nerd expects a movie to be “just like the book,” the changes here are remarkable.
Since CW wrote the screenplay, it’s hard to figure out why so much has changed. Why, for instance, are so many hazings packed into one opening scene, in one cadet’s room? Obviously, it’s a hangover from the play (which I haven’t seen or read) but why not open it out as a movie,[10] especially since one location, the off-limits tavern, appears later on anyway?[11]
The weird slang, part military (“Pop to!” for answer me, “Brace!” for stand at attention) and part boy’s school (random words like “morbid” or “gruesome” are valorized and freely used to indicate distaste for anything and everything, like the later “gross” or “icky”) occurs once or twice, jogging the memory of those who’ve read the book but just puzzling moviegoers and failing, as in the book, to gradually weave the texture of this strange environment.[12]
The Academy as a background has almost completely disappeared; if not for an opening shot of the gates of “Southern Military College”[13] and an occasional uniform and a brief parade ground scene, you might as well be at Holden Caulfield’s Pency Prep.
More importantly, the whole emphasis of the work has shifted. I recall reading somewhere a propos The Caine Mutiny that the hero of the book is Ensign Keith, the hero of the Broadway play was the defense attorney, the hero of the TV production was Capt. Queeg, and the hero of the movie was the Navy.
Here the shift of emphasis is signaled by the change in title. The titular oddball is of course Jocko DeParis, and from the first scene the movie revolves around him and his antics.
And oh boy, is he strange. Swanning around during his off hours in some kind of karate coat/Hawaiian shirt thing, and smoking from a cigarette holder Cruella De Ville would reject as ostentatious, the best part is that no one notices; either they’re quite used to it by now, or they’ve been terrified into submission, like the unfortunate family in the contemporaneous Twilight Zone episode, “It’s a Good Life.”[14]
All this is perhaps best symbolized by one small but telling, and certainly puzzling, change. The homosexual novelist character, who’s supposedly writing a book about DeParis, apparently to blackmail him into a relationship, dubs the fictional DeParis “Caesar” in the book, appropriately military yet suggestive of ambisexuality.[15] In the film, he tells DeParis he’s been dubbed “Night Boy.”[16]
What happened here? Just as I had been exposed to the Männerbund literature before reading the book, by the time I saw the film I had been alerted to telltale signs of the “culture of critique.”
Calder Willingham wrote both the play and the screenplay, but as directed, both times, by one Jack Garfein, you could call The Strange One a “Judaized” version of End as a Man.[17]
The first clue is that the play was developed at The Actor’s Studio, the Mecca of Method Acting, and the film was promoted as the first movie with an all-Method cast[18] and director.
“The Method,” of course, was another postwar agent of Judaic subversion, aimed at replacing the dignified performance style of a Laurence Olivier[19] or Noel Coward[20] with the bumptious ethnic mumblings of a Brando or Dean.[21]
In Garfein’s version, SMC is presented as a factory of sadism and authoritarianism. It’s the Frankfurt School’s theory of the authoritarian nature of the family, perversely projected onto the Männerbund, which is traditionally an alternative to the family structure. I guess wherever the goyim go they produce fascism, just as wherever the Jew goes he brings sweetness and light.
And yet . . . Just as the novel, if intended to be subversive of the Citadel, had exactly the opposite effect on me, The Strange One also subverts the filmmakers’ intent. And again, it starts with the title. By choosing to de-emphasize the Academy and focus on Jocko, the filmmakers reluctantly acknowledge that he’s so damned interesting, far more so than anyone else.[22]
As Trevor Lynch has cogently observed, in the modern, PC world, only bad guys and psychopaths, such as the Joker or Hannibal Lecter, are allowed to voice the Traditional truths that Evola, on trial for subverting the youth of Italy, called “the common sense of every educated person before the French Revolution.”
And speaking of the French Revolution,[23] another salient difference from the novel is that in the former, as already pointed out, the Academy itself discovers and roots out the cancer of Jocko ends his reign of terror,[24] in the movie, DeParis is able to easily outwit the Commandant[25] and is only brought down by the cadet body itself, which finally tires of his terror and rises up to mete our vigilante justice after a kangaroo court.
The Academy is bad, because it creates subservient, obedient officers. But it is good when the cadet corps finally turn on Jocko, bring him before an illegal, “kangaroo” court and then beat, (psychologically) torture and “expel” him by dumping him on a train heading north.
The Academy — “Authority” if you will — has failed to suppress the White individualist — after all, authority itself is the main “authoritarian” menace; the group must gather to take care of him.
But isn’t this the Jewish nightmare — the White masses rising up and lynching the Strange One, the Alien? Isn’t Jocko, in fact, right to call them “no better than the KKK”?[26]
Well, yes, but the paradox is easily explained. When the cadets follow orders, they are a disciplined White force that might turn on the Jews. The KKK or a lynch mob is also bad, because it targets Jews. But the corps, when it becomes a vigilante mob, is good, because it targets the Alpha Goy, who might threaten the Jews by providing leadership of the mob. The question of consistency is moot; what counts is, “is it good for the Jews?”[27]
Best for the Jews would be a leaderless mob of “individualists” who have been taught (by you know Who) to despise charismatic leaders (“the Next Hitler!”) like Jocko, but are easily led by some clever Judaic “public intellectual.”[28]
But by this time the Judaic has lost control of the narrative, and, as I said before, Jocko remains the most telling presence onscreen. Jocko before the cadet tribunal, in fact, reminds me of another Judaic misjudgment: Fritz Lang’s M. Here, the bad guy is an obvious psychopath, and is only brought to justice, or at least captured, by the criminal underworld, who despise him as much as the police, but cannot go about their normal criminal acts while the city is on lockdown.
According to Lang, [29] when Goebbels called him into his office, he was afraid that the National Socialists had realized the film — originally called Murderers Among Us — was “really” about them. Instead, Goebbels congratulated Lang on his depiction of the inability of the Weimar Republic to maintain order, necessitating the Party to step in extra-legally, and offered him the directorship of the German film industry. Lang left the country that night.
Garfein has essentially made Goebbels’ film: he and his kind hate the Academy so much that they regard it as too fascistic itself to outwit a super-fascist like Jocko, so the cadets must take the law into their own hands.
The resemblance extends to the final scene. The Judaic mind cannot understand the Aryan, and so projects (that very Judaic notion!) his own pathology onto the goy.[30] Here, we see Jocko break down into hysterics, pleading for mercy; a most unlikely fantasy of the Untermensch that “the bully” is “really” a coward and will run away when confronted — by the tame Gollem.[31]
Jocko’s breakdown resembles Peter Lorre’s final scene in M, and here we see self-subversion again: while intended to evoke sympathy for the child-killer, the scene was later used in The Eternal Jew as an illustration of Judaic hysteria.
Unlike the pitiable Lorre, but as usual with such Aryan villains, Jocko — like, say, Dr. Hannibal Lecter — has the last word, as the train pulls away:
I’ll be back! I’ll get you guys! You can’t do this to Jocko DeParis!
Garfein no doubt intends to warn us about the irrepressible fascist, genocidal spirit of the White race, which, as we have seen in post WWII Europe and America, must be ruthlessly held down and relentlessly policed by our Jewish elites, lest another outbreak of anti-Judaic “madness” occur.[32]
Having come to the end of the film, and (almost) this essay, I have to add here that Morrissey, of all people, devotes a couple pages of his recent Autobiography to The Strange One, and gets the source of Jocko’s appeal. It deserves to be quoted in extenso:[33]
De Paris pathologically infects the entire population of the world with his talent for bully tactics and his persistent offensiveness. Only articulate disdain for humanity saves him, and his rein of terror at a military school in Florida is remarkable solely for lasting as long as it does — even though it seems morally inevitable that he will end up being tied to a tree. His looks and style are far more penetrating than the God-fearing toothsome goofs around him — all of whom he breaks and wounds because they pay him far too much attention (or even because they show him none)
De Paris is star quality and is not short on wit, thus I cannot help thinking that the common evil of his childishly dangerous ploys should be accepted by reason of his magnificent oeuvre alone — which in itself is certainly worth having. I think so, anyway. Ben Gazzara plays de Paris perfectly, relishing the humiliation of others.
De Paris is too cute to be caught, and his contribution to immortality (what?) is suggested by the number of camera shots where the victim cadets are either kneeling before de Paris and looking upwards, or somehow seen from between the breeched legs of de Paris. If it sounds sordid, it isn’t.
There are no lines of cruelty on the de Paris face, but we assume that he is that rare thing: a confident sodomite. . . . Could Hollywood bear the eternal burden of a tough fruitcake? No! Anything but that!
In any case, de Paris must die soon because he is just as real as life, and since he is free of sexual loathing there is slim chance of the obligatory suicide. It takes dominantly handsome Mark Richman, with a civic duty to sexual custom, to turn the nature of suffering back on de Paris, who, yes, is tied to a tree and tortured. For this, we are all purified and we return to the ideal vision of manliness untroubled by that nasty game of thinking. But it is all too late because we already prefer the richer intellect of de Paris to the bullheaded correctness of Mark Richman. But de Paris must perish, because he is neither correct nor dull, and by the closing credits we are left to assume that he is as dead as a pansy from last spring.
But spare a thought for those who rock the boat. They challenge your attention, and even in your rage you find you quite like them for poking at you as if you were a dead mule. Perhaps you are?
Well, so what? Why make anything at all out of such films? Mr Cringle and de Paris — the colorful and exciting disturbers of the peace — are impossible to miss and impossible to overlook as adventurers on thin ice, exhaling a secret stream of inspiration, having far too exciting a message to deliver, and — even worse: not without a sense of humor. The arts translate life into film and literature and music and repeat a deadly poison: the monotonous in life must be protected at all costs. But protected from what? From you and I.
Morrissey has the makings of a fine film critic, perhaps even a paranoiac-critic.[34] He certainly hits the two notes we’ve emphasized: Jocko as the Bad Guy who’s far more charismatic and real than the dullards and Untermenschen offered for our approval, and the concomitant necessity of DeParis’ demise.
But true to his miserablist soul, he somewhat misinterprets the ending. Yes, the “successful sodomite” must die, and being an unlikely suicide, must be murdered. But this is merely an instance of a more broad category that I’ve called a “genre convention”; the bad guy dies to satisfy social conventions, but really only because, more deeply, the author is done with him, he can be developed not further, like Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.
Morrissey seems to imply that Jocko dies tied to a tree. In truth, he is only briefly tied and blindfolded, but Morrissey is right to hear the note of Christ, hated by Jews and Liberals alike for his relatively successful Männerbund; a “successful sodomite” indeed.[35]
Even more profoundly, he dies because he has indeed successfully transcended the material plane and, having slipped the surly bonds of Earth, disappears from view.[36]
Jocko will return, not because, like the others, he is bound to the wheel of recurrence, but precisely because, having transcended that wheel, he returns, like Krishna, to reestablish dharma in the Dark Ages of unrighteousness, ”exhaling a secret stream of inspiration, having far too exciting a message to deliver, and — even worse: not without a sense of humor.[37]
“I’ll be back!”[38]
Notes
1. Paton Oswald — whose movie Big Fan was reviewed as an implicitly White critique of sports culture here on Counter-Currents — has a bit somewhere in which the variables in a breathless Coming Attractions blurb — “From the director of X and the stars of Y comes the heartbreaking brilliance of Z” — are replaced by various flatulent noises, in a perfect simulacrum of Hollywood’s contempt for its audiences.
2. A line from Paul Simon’s version of “Scarborough Fair,” featured in Mike Nichols’ film The Graduate (1967), with which Willingham had a hand, as we shall see.
3. See “MANNERBUND: ASPECTS OF MALE MYSTERY CULTS (published in New Imperium magazine March 2006),” online here at his blog, Aryan Futurism, which see generally.
4. See his Loki’s Way: The Path of the Sorcerer in the Age of Iron (2nd ed.), Lulu.com, 2011, and my review “A Band Apart” here and reprinted in my collection The Homo and the Negro (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).
5. In discussing these works, I felt the same hesitation as I did when reviewing Sam Finlay’s excellent Breakfast with the Dirt Cult — lack of military experience; as well as lack of military school experience (unless attending a boys-only Catholic high school counts). So I reached out to a couple of vets, neither of whom had heard/seen either film or book, or attended a military school; but after the plot was described both recalled similar incidents in the service, and one recalled that after the first two weeks of boot camp, when supervision was slacked off, exactly the same power dynamic had arisen, including the rise to power among them of a diminutive sociopath, who was, in fact, a military school graduate. So there seems some verisimilitude here.
6. I was reminded of the Base Commander in The Starfighters, apparently “not an actor,” whom Tom Servo described as “You know, he’s crusty but . . . unlikeable.” MST3k, Episode 612.
7. Most of the paperback covers seem to take the currently campy “’50s gay pulp” approach.
8. “They endured.” — William Faulkner
9. As I access this page, I find myself confronted with a huge advertising banner promoting the no doubt hagiographic Trumbo; for more on eternal Judaic revenge for “blacklisting” see below.
10. “We could use a flashback here; this is a motion picture!” – MST3k, Episode 603: The Dead Talk Back (filmed the same year as The Strange One, but not “released” until it was sent directly to MST3k in 1993).
11. On the other hand, the new ending equips the cadets, most implausibly, with cars and even features a train. For a brief moment we see Jocko drive up the bar in a bizarre futuristic bubble car, with a pop-open lid and room for a passenger behind the driver; there is no explanation of how or why Jocko obtained such a vehicle, nor does anyone on the street — in 1957 Dixie! — even notice.
12. This is apparently the book reviewers called “realistic” dialogue, which might have suggested some kind of Frank Norris or even gritty, Mickey Spillane, sort of stuff.
13. I could here the MST3k boys shouting “Generic college for generic soldiers; just as good, but cheaper!”
14. A few nights after watching I was reminded of Jocko when Nicky berates his pal Ace in Casino: “Nicky Santoro: [to Ace] I lost control? Look at you, you’re fucking walking around like John Barrymore! A fucking pink robe and a fucking cigarette holder? I lost control?” Are Scorsese or De Niro referencing, perhaps parodying, Gazzara’s “method” performance? (For more on Casino, see my “Essential Films . . . & Others,” here). Late in the film, Jocko is hanging out with some town broad at a cramped table in a tavern, and his cigarette holder almost puts out her eye, and she still doesn’t say “Put that ridiculous thing away,” although the actress herself looks annoyed. Earlier, they arrive in Jocko’s bizarre mini-rocket car, with inline seats like a jet plane and even a bubble top, and again, no one, even among the citizens of “hick Southern town” pays any attention, even though it would have been less noticeable if he’s driven up in a time travelling Delorean. Next year, 1958, The Screaming Skull opens with our protagonists driving up in a gull-wing Mercedes, prompting Tom Servo to quip “Yes, shocking horror arrives in style in your 1953 Mercedes!” (MST3k, Episode 912).
15. Julius Caesar was reputed to be “every woman’s husband and every man’s wife.”
16. Whatever the movie’s intent, this can only remind the modern viewer of The Nightman, the child-molesting night visitor in Charlie’s autistic musical The Nightman Cometh, the fourth season finale of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; hence my title above.
17. Willingham is likely better known today as a screenwriter, but his career was punctuated by numerous disputes over authorship, most notably perhaps suing to have his name alongside Buck Henry for The Graduate (another Jews expose the gentiles tale); in this, he kind of reminds me of Ian Fleming’s nemesis, Kevin McClory; see Jef Costello’s “The Cat is Back! The Spectre Behind S.P.E.C.T.R.E.,” here. I suspect he’s the sort of writer that absorbs influences around him without being able to later sort them out; the discipline of the Citadel having failed him he was likely exceptionally susceptible to the Judaic influences of Strassberg, Garfein, et al.
18. And what a cast, all making their film debuts: Ben Gazara (The Big Lebowski), Pat Hingle (Tim Burton’s Commissioner Gordon), George Peppard (before Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The A Team), and even Mark (later, for “spiritual reasons,” Peter Mark) Richman, later to play the smarmiest of middle-aged, yellow cardigan wearing Bond rip-offs, Agent for H.A.R.M. and, later still, Spock’s father!). Storch’s acting, however, is so broad and “comical” that he might as well have been replaced by Larry Storch.
19. An excellent refutation of “Method” can be found here. While filming Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman (star of Willingham’s The Graduate) arrived on set for the dentistry scene all dirty and unslept, to find Sir Laurence sitting at ease. How can you deliver such great performances and me so relaxed, Hoffman asked. “My boy, it’s called acting.”
20. “In a series of articles for the Sunday Times, ‘Consider the Public’ [Coward] diagnosed and rebuked . . . the bad new actors who use a pretentious and unreliable ‘Method’ to justify an inflated sense of their own intellects as well as a contempt for audiences, actors of the older generation, [reasonably educated people who behave with restraint in emotional crises are necessarily “clipped,” “arid,” “bloodless,” and “unreal”] and the theatre itself, expressed mainly through coprophilic stage business, slovenly dress, and dirty fingernails. Against all this Coward praised simple, unpretentious craft—‘You must have the emotion to know it, then you must learn how to use the emotion without suffering it’—which he had honed the hard way entertaining troops; ‘Noël distrusted every emotion on stage and dealt solely in the illusion’ (Payn, p. 42). And above all, respect for theatrical tradition, and the audience itself, without which there would be no theatre at all.” See my “Sir Noël Coward, 1899–1973, Part 2,” here and reprinted in The Homo and the Negro, op. cit., and in North American New Right, Vol. I (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013).
21. According to Gazarra, Dean was bucking for his role of Jocko in the stage production. Jef Costello might have to revise his low opinion of Robert Vaughn as Napoleon (like Gazara’s Jocko, a diminutive tyrant) Solo (Jocko) — “nice looking . . . but hardly physically imposing.” — when he considers that Vaughn was quite successful as the masterful Jocko in a road company production; see “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.—A Cautionary Tale, Part 2,” here. Actors Studio bumptiousness ultimately backfired, though: “One day, Garfein, who had already learned how to be pushy from his experiences with Lee Strasberg, did exactly that, thus completely poisoning Spiegel against him. Spiegel ended up taking the film away from Garfein before he even had a chance to edit it and add a score. When several pivotal scenes dealing with homosexuality were removed by the censors, Garfein’s original vision had been altered beyond recognition. ‘Sam’s vengeance was long-lasting and far-reaching,’ Gazzara stated in his autobiography. ‘The Strange One was a good movie, very well made, but Jack’s film career was hurt badly by his run-in with Sam. He messed with the wrong man, and it hurt all of us.’” — TCM.com.
22. “What distinguishes The Strange One from other fifties attacks on military abuses is the filmmaker’s decision to force us to see the action significantly from Jocko’s perspective — it’s as if The Caine Mutiny had been told from the viewpoint of Captain Queeg.” — David Lamble at Claudesplace.com, 6/7/09, here. Say, didn’t I already mention Caine?
23. Jocko deParis, get it?
24. Cancer, because Jocko is a diseased form of what the Academy is designed to produce, leaders of men. His clique is what I have called a “bad Männerbund,” imitating the Aryan warrior band but actually run for the benefit of Leader himself; I base this idea on Tony Tanner’s analysis of Capt. Ahab, and I apply it to Brian De Palma’s Al Capone in ““God, I’m with a heathen.” The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, here and reprinted in The Homo and the Negro, op. cit.
25. “Well, sir, it’s got to be one of two things. Either you’re lying, in which case there’d be no whiskey in that tube — or you’re right. I did it all, just as you say. Now, if I was such a Machiavellian, crafty, conniving character as all that, would I be so stupid as to leave whiskey in that tube for you to come along and find it? I don’t think so, sir. It stands to reason that thing would be washed with loving care.”
26. Nicely foreshadowed by the first scene, where Jocko interrogates two freshmen and asks “I suppose you think we all belong to the KKK down here?” Lamble, op. cit., notes that “All through the film Willingham knowingly mocks the dying days of Jim Crow, particularly through a clever use of a lynching motif — first in a joking reference in Jock’s first monologue and finally in an ironic twist of the bully’s fate which is sealed on a segregated railroad car.” In his TCM interview, Garfien says he was inspired by seeing segregated trains while filming in Florida, due to his being (of course) “an Auschwitz survivor.” The studio refused, supposedly because “Southern markets” would be offended, so Garfien snuck in some token, as it were, Negroes literally through the studio back door. I’ve heard this story — that Southern theatres would refuse to book films with “black” actors (Ray Dennis Steckler claims he replaced a black actor in Wild Guitar for that reason, and then proudly adds that he cast that same actor in his next film — Incredibly Strange Creatures [gee, thanks, that must have helped his career]) — and I call bullshit. Negroes in subservient roles were perfectly acceptable — who protested Gone with the Wind? As always, the Jew brings moral enlightenment to the goyim. Columbia Studio head Harry Cohn was rather immune to judeophilia, from sponsoring the goyishe Three Stooges (so unlike the subversively intellectual Marx Brothers) to asking, when solicited for a donation to a society to save the Jews, “How about a society to save me from the Jews?”
27. It’s little known, because little taught, that the “infamous”: anti-American laws and committees of the ’50s were created in the ’30s at the instigation of Jews seeking to suppress the peace movement (smeared as “isolationists” and “German agents”). I suspect McCarthy was a naïve goy “conservative” manipulated by Troyskyites (today’s Neocons) into a purge taking care of their Stalinist rivals.
28. Rather than M, the ending more closely emulates Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Kazan, who “named names,” intended Terry Molloy’s lone stand to be a cinematic justification of his own role as a “friendly” witness (the bad guy, a union leader, is named Friendly). In his interview with Robert Osbourne on TCM, Garfein cites an occasion when he was rehearsing Gazara, James Dean, and others after hours, prompting Kazan to stop in and predict they would all become famous for such dedication. Kazan’s later A Face in the Crowd would again mine the idea of the charismatic hick leader (Andy Griffith, fresh from his military comedy No Time for Sergeants), not so secretly manipulated by rich goys, one of whom is explicitly identified by the horrified Patricia Neal character (no Dominique Francon here) as “the last of the isolationists.”
29. Like most Judaic stories, Lang’s accounts of his pre-exilic activities are hard to verify.
30. I discuss this in my critique, “The Fraud of Miss Jean Brodie,” here and reprinted in my Green Nazis In Space! (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).
31. “Let’s you and him fight” is the Judaic motto, as we see in the Middle East. The current “anti-bullying” hysteria is a symptom of our Judaic culture; the idea of that the bully is “really” something else is the telltale clue to a Judaic, Frankfurt-style analysis.
32. Again, one recalls Kazan’s Face in the Crowd, which ends with Griffiths’ “cornpone fascist” (a favorite term of James Kunstler) shouting from his penthouse “Come back! Come back!” to Patricia Neal’s wised-up character, while smug Vanderbilt liberal Walter Matthau smugly smugs that “I don’t figure him for the suicide type.”
33. Though I’ve added the paragraphing and italics. Published in 2013 as a Penguin Classic, oddly enough. Amazon reviewers say the American edition has been censored, but I haven’t compared the two; there’s no mention of it in the Wikipedia article here. To check the accuracy of my quote, you can read a pdf of the actual two pages from the (presumably UK) Penguin at jack Garfien’s own website here. Yes, Jack’s still around — thus the TCM interview — no longer a Young Turk but as feisty as ever, running his website — Le Studio Jack Garfien — from an apparent French exile. The French, as we know, are very welcoming to immigrants, especially Semites, especially anti-American ones, and though his people make up less than one-sixth of one percent of the population, I’m sure Jack feels right at home.
34. Meaning, he says things I agree with. Is it just me, or does it sound like Morrissey rather identifies with Jocko? Check out the full list of “films under the influence of Morrissey here.
35. To read an actual Christian scripture that portrays Christ as the leader of a warrior Männerbund, see G. Ronald Murphy, The Saxon Saviour: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) and his English translation, The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Why don’t we ever hear about this authentic gospel, and only about lachrymose fabrications about Mary Magdalene and Leonardo Da Vinci? Don’t ask me; ask the Tribe that owns the movie studios and cable “history” channels. As for sodomite, it’s interesting that when Jesus alludes to the “sin of Sodom” it clearly amounts to the failure to offer hospitality to strangers (“Shake the dust from your sandals,” etc.), and when the Roman centurion asks him to heal his sickly “boy” Jesus finds him to have “greater faith than I have found in Judea.”
36. Perhaps even more profoundly, characters like Burroughs’ Wild Boys die or disappear because only thus can they serve ass guides and inspirations; see Timothy Murphy, Wising Up the Marks, and my essay “The Wild Boys Smile: Reflections on Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, Part 3,” here and reprinted in Green Nazis in Space!, op. cit.
37. See, for example, “The Babysitting Bachelor as Aryan Avatar: Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty, Part 2,“ here.
38. But Garfein wouldn’t. Garfein’s next, second, and last film is the misleadingly title Something Wild (which I first saw when I confused it with the Griffin Dunne/Melanie Griffith comedy. It’s a dark, or rather, grey portrait of New York, on which the ungrateful “refugee” projects his own miserablist worldview onto the most prosperous and vibrant society on Earth at the peak of its world importance. Imagine The Honeymooners rewritten by Kafka. It shows Coleman Francis could have achieved with money, talent, and real actors. [38] Fortunately for the world’s sanity, Garfein, like Francis, stopped after an even briefer output of two films, leaving the world in peace.
The%20Nightboy%20Cometh%3A%20Reflections%20and%238212%3B%20In%20a%20Jaundiced%20Eye%20and%238212%3B%20on%20Calder%20Willingham%E2%80%99s%20End%20as%20a%20Man%20and%23038%3B%20Jack%20Garfein%E2%80%99s%20The%20Strange%20One
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5 comments
Wow. Interesting review of the book and movie. I graduated from The Citadel in 1974. I had seen the movie while there; I never read the book. There was a lot of hazing; it was very physical. The one thing you seem to have not understood is the role of honor in bringing Jocko to justice. I don’t think I can explain it to you, because I am not an intellectual, but it is the key concept in how things worked at The Citadel, and other military schools. Honor is about the most dead of all the peculiarly Western ideals that our modern society has killed.
Thanks for providing the perspective of someone on the scene, which, as I noted, I don’t pretend to have. I recommend the book, which I think you’d find the book more interesting than the movie, Citadel-wise, and it would be interesting to have your thoughts on it.
As for honor, I suppose that’s what the Commandant is getting at in his speech: men have honor, those without honor are not men. But just as the honor code has been attacked by the usual SJW’s, the movie does not depend on the honor code. Like Jocko’s wardrobe, no one even mentions it, until the end, and it’s Jocko who brings it up.
I don’t have the movie to hand to re-view but here’s Wikiquote:
Jocko DeParis: Who do you think you are, the Ku Klux Klan? Now, look- if I’ve done something wrong, Corger, why haven’t I been reported to a regular Honor Court?
Laurie Corger: Because an Honor Court couldn’t make you sign this statement. We can.
Jocko DeParis: [Smirking] You guys really do think you’re the Ku Klux Klan, don’t you? Do you realize that what you’re doing is completely illegal?! Every one of you guys could be expelled for this!
Laurie Corger: For what we’re doing to you, we could get a lot worse.
Jocko DeParis: You certainly could. I’ve been abducted in a public restaurant! I think you’re all out of your minds!
Again, the comparison to Caine is apt. The Judaic author, Herman Wouk, makes his hero of the novel the goyishe Willie Keith, who joins the mutiny under the influence of the novelist, Keefer; the hero of the play is the Judaic attorney, Barney Greenstein. But the hero of the traditional Hollywood movie is the Navy itself. Here, the “first all-Method” movie retains the Judaic emphasis on extra-legal ways to deal with the problem of the out of control Leader; the ‘hero’ is not the Academy, or the honor code, but.the mob of individuals with grievances.
Thus, we get the usual Judaic two-for-one: tear down the institution (the honor code) and the charismatic individual (Jocko), promote individual grievances.
I scanned through this article quickly (I’m at the library), it looks like another outstanding essay by Mr. O’Meara. I was looking through your “Mad Men And The Ordeal Of Civility” last night, it is a great little book. I especially liked the term “jewish crypsis” which you invented, it so adequately describes what the jews have been successfully doing to American culture. I want to point out that the jews did the same thing in the field of comic books; up til the invention of Spiderman superheros such as Superman were portrayed as exemplars of Aryan virtues. With Spiderman, the jew Stan Lee began employing jewish crypsis to inculcate jewish culture into young minds. I also want to point out Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and a host of pulp horror magazines, e.t., Voodoo Tales that took jewish crypsis too a whole new degenerate level. If you go through the previews of these publications you will come across a jewish editor (or was he the owner) sporting a sidearm, because he thought he needed constant protection from the Aryan public. I also want to jump to jump forward to 1977’s “Three Company” in which the jews began to insinuate that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle. The jews know full well that comedy is the best way to inculcate new values into an existing culture. Homosexuality is now constantly pushed on the big screen and the small screen, the lifestyle has become such a part of the fabric of the American culture that there was no public protest when homosexual marriages were made legal. Homosexual humor such as that displayed in: “The Interview,” “The Pineapple Express,” and the just released “Vacation;”– these movies were so foul that I was shocked by them! Now we are constantly exposed to two men (one with a baby strapped to his chest) in commercials and on the screen. Every year, we are constantly exposed to athletes wearing pink to support breast cancer research. I know I am straying a little bit in those last two sentences, but you know what I mean–the constant demoralization and emasculation of the American white male. All across America, white christian clerics (WCC) are touching themselves in happiness at the success of their religion.
Thanks for your positive comments, Mr. Quint. In fairness, I must point out that I did not invent the phrase ‘judaic crypsis,” although I do not recall where I first encountered it. I suspect it was someone like Kevin MacDonald or quoted by him. Hmm, perhaps I did invent it, but forgot all about it. Anyway, I’m glad to help get it going in the blogsphere. And don’t let the library cops get you!
When I mentioned Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella, the jew I was referring to was Myron Fass. If you click on the following link you will see him in all his glory (and his pistol); as well as a list of his publications. He published porn too, imagine that; who would of suspected.
http://www.badmags.com/bmmyronfass.html
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