CULLODEN (Peter Watkins, 1964)

Peter Watkins was not yet thirty when he revolutionized the genre of historical documentary, thus becoming one of the most influential serious filmmakers, with Culloden, whose form expands the creative and expressive possibilities of the genre, for example, by its interviews/testimonies of participants in the 1746 battle at Culloden between rag-tag Highland Scots, French-supported Jacobites attempting to restore the House of Stuart to the British throne, and the well-heeled Hanoverian English army and Lowland accomplices. We are there; we see for ourselves and keenly feel the horrible suffering that war, that armed confrontation, entails. Equally vivid, gut-wrenching in fact, is the post-battle slaughter of Highland families, including women and children.
     Impoverished clansmen have been forced into, for them, the “suicidal” Battle of Culloden with threats by landowners of losing their rented homes and other meager property. Some leaders, though, are motivated by the fact that Charles Edward Stuart is, like them, Catholic; they hope he replaces Britain’s Protestant king. (“God is on our side,” Stuart insists, thus believing he will prevail despite the fact that his army is outnumbered, out-armed.) After his defeat, we are told, Stuart abandoned his cause and those who had fought for it, numbers of whom awaited his return indefinitely, creating a glowing legend around “Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
     Voiceover—Watkins?—provides a wealth of factual detail. Soldiers and their outcomes—deaths; maimings—are identified. We discover for ourselves how the winning general, the Duke of Cumberland, King George II’s son, acquired the nickname “Butcher.”
     Surely this black-and-white film owes something to John Huston’s on-the-spot World War II documentary, San Pietro (1945), but, set in the past with unknown actors in the roles of combatants and other victims of the English massacre, Culloden is also unlike any film I know of before it.

SECONDHAND LIONS (Tim McCanlies, 2003)

Films in which a loveable animal eventually bites the dust tend to be lugubrious, and Secondhand Lions is no exception. Even apart from Jasmine the lion, who clumsily symbolizes its aging owners, this may be the mother—or do I mean uncle?—of all tearjerkers.
     Hub and Garth (well played by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine) are two unmarried bachelor brothers in their seventies who live together on their Texas ranch, supported by wealth the indeterminate origin of which recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Their mendacious niece Mae (Kyra Sedgwick, a hoot), who like other relatives is after the loot, dumps her 12-year-son, Walter, on the men’s doorstep while she pursues a sexual interest during the Depression. The boy is painfully shy, really, frightened of life, perhaps from years of abuse from Mae’s boyfriends (we see one pummel him), but under the tutelage of his uncs, especially Hub, he matures into a confident gait and attitude. On the basis of Garth’s tall tales of the brothers’ past, which includes Foreign Legion warfare and Arabian escapades, Walter learns to convert fantasy into art, becoming a comic-strip cartoonist.
     Fitzgerald suggests the truth about Jay Gatsby: he made his money the same way that Joseph P. Kennedy did. But writer-director Tim McCanlies so painlessly resolves his material’s question mark as to endorse one’s fantastic beliefs, which are encouraged in the boy, at the expense of reason, possibility and moral complexity. This is, moreover, stylistically deceptive since the adventurous flashbacks—easily the film’s best parts—have a delightful air about them of “Once upon a time . . . .”
     That Hub and Garth have been made brothers suggests how inoffensive McCanlies means to be; but he is offensive. He raises a big question for which he has no honest answer.