Roving Exegesis

[Secret Forts] The Greatest Film Never Made: Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon”

Taschen’s opus chronicling Stanley Kubrik’s exhaustively researched yet never realized masterpiece.

LIFE Archive | Marlon Brando in The Men

There is a great photo set (by Edward Clark) in the LIFE archive of Marlon Brando preparing for his 1950 film debut The Men. The story was based on a group of returning WWII vets that had to cope with the mental and physical injuries of war. After coming off of his role in Broadway’s Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando spent a lot of time at a VA hospital preparing for movie.

Below is an excerpt from a great synopsis of the film.

Few members of the staff or patients knew who Brando was, so for a while he was able to blend in with the amputees, a cross section of America: blue-collar workers, farmers, enlisted men. He shared their physiotherapy, spending hours tumbling out of bed and into his wheelchair. He watched the paraplegics reach for their hand exercisers, and so did he. He learned to lift himself out of bed using only his arms. Eventually he was racing down the hall with the amputees in their wheelchairs.

By the end of the third week in the hospital, Brando had been completely accepted by the vets, some of whom played roles in The Men. He told them why he was there: He was going to act in a movie about them, and he just wanted to do it right. The vets began confiding in Brando. They told him that they were disappointments to their wives because they would never be able to make love again. Brando became especially close to one vet who had struggled for a year to learn how to light a cigarette, since he no longer had the use of his arms. (Later this man committed suicide.)

At night Brando accompanied the vets to the Pump Room, a popular bar in the San Fernando Valley where they all went to drink. Drink was their only solace. Like the vets, Brando was in a wheelchair, lined up with the others, ordering beer and talking and joking. Once a little old lady, slightly tipsy, staggered over to them and began ranting about the healing powers of Jesus and how if they kept on believing, they might really walk again.

Brando studied her for a long time, and then with a gigantic effort, he hoisted himself up. A few people gasped, and the room fell silent as he took a few halting steps unaided. Everyone else lounging at the bar assumed he was a paraplegic, and waiters stood by to catch him if he fell. The woman stared at him bug-eyed when he burst out laughing and began to perform a softshoe dance up and down the length of the barroom floor before crying out, “I can walk! I can walk!” to the wild applause of the vets as he disappeared into the night.

When the movie came out in 1950 the Korean War was going on and sentiments had shifted toward this type of story and The Men ended up as a failure at the box office. The LIFE photos however are a big success.

Russia’s Market Reform Architect Dies:

From the New York Times. December 16, 2009

MOSCOW — Yegor T. Gaidar, the economist who oversaw the largest-ever transition from Communism to capitalism as the first finance minister of post-Soviet Russia, only to be vilified by his countrymen for the decade of poverty that followed, died on Wednesday, Russian news agencies reported. He was 53 years old.

The cause was likely a blood clot, Interfax reported. The news agency quoted police officials who said Mr. Gaidar had died at his country home in the Odintsovo region outside of Moscow early Wednesday.

Rising to power in a generation that first strove to reform the Soviet Union from within but instead wound up presiding over its collapse, Mr. Gaidar began his career in a branch of the Soviet planning bureaucracy studying possible reforms for the creaking command economy.

But, as finance minister in charge of one of the great blank slates of economic history after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Gaidar decided to rapidly liberalize prices and begin privatizing state industry, rather than continue gradual reforms of the type he had been studying.

It was a decision he said he never regretted. The changes pushed millions of Russian into a life of penury but also laid the foundation for Russia’s economic boom during the past decade.

Until the end, Mr. Gaidar remained unapologetic for his role in laying to rest the Communist economic system.

In later academic writing he attributed the collapse not only to the rigidity of the command economy but also to something more prosaic — a cyclical downturn in global oil prices in the late 1980s that created an unsustainably large trade deficit for the Soviet Union by crimping revenues from its principal export commodity, crude oil.

“Generally, economic history of the last 200 years at least shows that private property is better, if it doesn’t touch essential problems of security of the state,” Mr. Gaidar said in an interview last year. “Nothing in Russian recent economic history demonstrates that this is wrong.”

A man of the Russian elite — Mr. Gaidar’s great-grandfather and grandfather were both famous authors of fairy tales and children’s stories — Mr. Gaidar became minister of economy and finance in November 1991, two months before the Soviet Union collapsed.

His tenure was brief, lasting until February, 1992, two months into the new Russia.

But it was long enough to set in motion the economic reforms that dominated the following two decades.

Relying partly on Western advisers, Mr. Gaidar decided on so-called “shock therapy” methods then in vogue for overhauling state-dominated economies, first tested in Latin America.

Mr. Gaidar later served as an acting prime minister before he was dismissed by President Boris N. Yeltsin in late 1992.

By then, it was already clear that austerity measures needed to balance the disastrous late Soviet trade deficits and service the public sector debt were having a huge political impact.

The extreme hardships recalled those of the Great Depression in the United States and wound up thwarting the expectations of rapid improvement in people’s lives with the introduction of capitalism.

The fallout lingers, darkening many Russians’ perception of both capitalism and democracy and, in turn, easing the consolidation of state power under Vladimir V. Putin, who succeeded Mr. Yeltsin as president and is now prime minister.

After retiring from government, Mr. Gaidar headed a Moscow think tank, the Institute of Economy in Transition, until his death.

The interplay of economic and political change remained an overarching theme of his academic work.

In his book “Collapse of an Empire,” Mr. Gaidar argued that the Soviet government turned to West European bank lending in the mid-1980s as the value of crude oil exports plunged. That set in play a dynamic that undermined the country even before pro-democracy uprisings began in the former satellite states of eastern Europe.

The Soviets’ lack of a hard currency reserve led to dependence on Western lending and limited the Kremlin’s options when nationalist movements broke out. Any forceful response would surely have prompted Western banks and governments to call in their credit lines, which were propping up the Soviet government by allowing food imports.

This balance-of-payments shock also prompted the sweeping privatizations, liberalization of consumer prices and introduction of a convertible currency in the early 1990s — measures that ultimately put the Russian economy on a modern footing.

The reforms implemented by Mr. Gaidar, and a later wave of changes he advocated in the wake of the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, prepared Russia for the oil price collapse last autumn, when strong state reserves cushioned the impact on the balance of payments and propped up the budget.

Mr. Gaidar is survived by a daughter, Maria Gaidar, who works as an aide to a liberal-leaning provincial governor.