This Land is Mine (1943)
"They make a desert and they call it peace.” (Tacitus)
It is morning. A little boy runs out of a building onto a deserted street. Suddenly German tanks roll by; the woman runs out and scoops up her son and stuffs him into the house — safe at last. Charles Laughton is a schoolteacher in a small town somewhere in Europe under German occupation. He lives with his mother; the irrepressible Una O’Connor, a force of nature. She bangs on the ceiling to wake him up, coddles him, feeds him milk, tells him how helpless he is. He laps it up. Charles Laughton’s face does not simply offer the possibility of being inexpressibly ugly; he is the only actor I have ever seen who actually seems to relish the opportunity. His face is like a naked human body suddenly exposed in a well-lit room on a Wednesday afternoon — ugly shriveled genitals exposed to a harsh, glaring light. One can read every unpleasant emotion a human being might imagine on his fleshy lips, his flabby cheeks, his sweaty, quivering eyes. You just want to cover up the car accident that is is face, and not look. Well, anyway, the plot is very complicated. Let’s just say Laughton is in love with the transcendently beautiful Maureen O’Hara, but he has no chance with her, because he is actually not only ugly, slimy, and fat, but openly a coward. Maureen O’Hara’s brother is a member of the resistance, addicted to sabotage. By the end of the film, through a series of complex incidents (that there is no need to go into here) Laughton is transformed from a cringing piece of frightened raw meat, into an eloquent speechifying hero of the resistance. And Laughton makes us believe the transformation has really happened, and that such an impossible metamorphosis is entirely possible. Of course I don’t mean to compare legally mandated Coronavirus ‘social distancing’— to the German Occupation. And I certainly wouldn’t mean to compare my writing here to writings banned by the Nazi government —because no one will bother to ban my plague diaries, because no one will read them anyway, and these words will have no effect. No. In This Land is Mine teachers in the German-occupied town actually spend the morning lesson demanding students tear pages out of books. There is no comparison. We certainly don’t do that. After all, we don’t really read books anymore. If we’re bored and want something to occupy our mind, Netflix will recommend Greenhouse Academy (the most popular new Netflix show when quarantining!), or Amazon will suggest a Kindle — we are under absolutely no obligation to do buy them. This Land is Mine is just another lousy World War II propaganda film, anyway, only — Jean Renoir just happened to direct it. Because as Wikipedia suggests, This Land is Mine is propaganda somewhat overly ‘nuanced.” James Morrison says “the film blames the bourgeoisie, a few left-wing intellectuals excepted, for letting Hitler into power in 1933, for surrendering France in 1940, and for collaborating actively, or passively.” Far be it from me to blame the bourgeoisie (as I am one). Or perhaps I am one of those left wing intellectuals to whom Renoir would have given a pass (though my lefty credentials are getting shakier by the syllable). Of course I would never suggest that ‘social distancing’ is a middle class notion. Why wouldn’t the working classes be all for it? Certainly they can ‘social distance’ as well as anybody? Can’t the working classes do yoga? I’ve never heard of such an idea. And wouldn’t it be insulting to working class people to suggest they could not social distance as well as anybody? Doug Ford — our rich, working class premiere — has suggested that construction sites remain open, saying that working men don’t need to labour close to each other, necessarily. Okay, that’s enough for now. I will simply offer you some quotations from This Land is Mine — which is simply a movie that happened to be showing on TCM today. What could be more innocent? (Check the movie listings for Wednesday March 25 — 2 pm. You will find it). These are actual quotations from this dated old movie about Nazism called This Land is Mine that TCM happened to be program: in fact you can read these quotations now, elsewhere, if you go to the film’s IMDB page. Please don’t read any special significance into them:
“The law has the right to forbid only those things that are harmful to society.”
“The truth can’t be allowed to live under the occupation, it’s too dangerous. The occupation lives on lies.”
“We must stop saying that sabotoge is wrong, that it doesn’t pay. Sabotage, though it increases our misery, will shorten our tyranny.”
“The man who resists secretly, is a coward.”
“These ideas are a contagion.”
I would agree; yes, ideas in general are a contagion.
Oh yes, I forgot to tell you, the quote at the top of this movie review is also a quote from This Land is Mine:
“They make a desert and they call it peace.”