Two Movies, an Iron Man and an Iron Fist

I finally saw “Iron Man,” a diverting, slick, and entertaining piece of escapism that has brought Robert Downey back to prominence as one of our better comic actors. It is pure comic book fantasy brought to the screen with all the requisite CGI magic, gadgetry, explosions per square inch, with a Super-hero who flies to Afghanistan, not on a magic carpet, but in a supersonic iron suit, which gets him there in the wink of an eye, using a fuel source I’d like to put in my truck. Tony Stark, alias Iron Man, starts out as the mere shadow of his father who was a successful weapons inventor and dealer; he is also a man-about-town and a hedonist who chases the ladies. But during his first trip to Afghanistan under the auspices of the Army, some Islamic bad guys capture him. It’s his first experience of bad guys up close and personal, and through the encounter he sees the light and becomes a do-gooder, who, like Batman saved Gotham from the malice of The Joker, he’ll do his part to quell the deadly ambitions of the terrorists. It’s an old formula in the world of comic books and it still works magnetically among the young, who can’t seem to get enough of Super-heroes, Arch-villains, explosions, hi-tech hi-jinxes, and the rest of it. Personally, I enjoyed the droll humor of Downey, and I look forward to seeing more of him as Tony Stark / Iron Man. Next time Tony will be in cahoots with Samuel Jackson, the head of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Two days before seeing “Iron Man” I saw “Nanking,” the story of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, a prelude to the Second World War. I knew something of the savagery of the Japanese when they occupied Nanking, the then capital of Chang Kai-shek government. But this documentary reveals just how extreme and deliberate the killing was. A good deal of the visual material in the film is from grainy footage from the late thirties. The film also explains the part played by some Westerners who witnessed the massacre of tens of thousands by the occupiers; they came up with the idea of a SAFETY ZONE in the international section of the city of 500,000 people that the Japanese were supposed to respect. Citizens crowded into the zone to save their lives. That was no small accomplishment when you understand that 260,000 people were killed between December.8, 1937 and February 3, 1938. Add to that astonishing number the 20,000 women raped and killed because dead women tell no tales. Three of the main Westerners were John Rabe (Jurgen Prochnow), a German administrator who had lived in China for a long time; Dr. Robert Wilson (Woody Harrelson), an American doctor; and Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemmingway), Head Administrator of Ginling College for girls. Other witnesses were several elderly Chinese who had survived the siege and the carnage, and also a handful of Japanese soldiers who were still around that gave their reading of events in a cold, matter-of-fact way. All the witnesses were filmed in color, while the raw footage from the thirties was black and white and rather scratchy. But you could see the beheadings of men thought to be soldiers, bayoneting others, and burying people alive. The brutality was unimaginable, and many people in other countries could not believe the Japanese would do such things. Many scenes looked like a prelude to the German Concentration Camps.

The film is graphic and disturbing, another testimony of man’s inhumanity to man. It relates the same old story: How the Sunni feels about the Shiites, who they describe as “dogs,” and how the Turks could slay 1.5 million innocent Armenians in the early 20^th century. The Japanese were raised to believe that the Chinese were subhuman, so it was no big deal to kill a multitude. Joseph Rabe was Nanking’s equivalent to Oskar Schindler, another German who went out of his way to save many lives. “Nanking” is now available on DVD. I highly recommend it as a tragic chapter in the wars of the 20^th century; it is a powerful glimpse at awful events that actually took place, although I doubt if such events were described in a novel, few would believe them.