I just thought of something. One of my favorite film directors is Billy Wilder, and the main reason for this is that he is so versatile. He could do drama. He could do comedy. He could do could do film noir. He could do a courtroom drama or a war movie, but more importantly he could move freely between these genres and mix and match as the story demands. Often what makes a Billy Wilder movie great is they way it touches on many genres. Some Like It Hot is not just a comedy, it's also a drama and a gangster movie all rolled into one. And it probably says more about sex and gender roles than many films would for years to come. If you asked me about the quintessential film noir, I would have to say The Maltese Falcon, but running a close second would have to be Double Indemnity. Both are great examples of films noir. In a way, I think I prefer, Double Indemnity. Edward G. Robinson lends a level of humanity that is somewhat lacking in The Maltese Falcon, but at the same time Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson are every bit as corrupt or corrupted as anyone in any film noir ever. But let's look at some of his other films, ones that you may not think of as film noir.
*** Warning Spoilers Ahead *** Sunset Boulevard is a drama about a down and out screenwriter, not really a film noir or is it? William Holden is no criminal unless you count trying to keep his car from getting repossessed, but there are lies and betrayal, done, not out of greed or avarice, but out of love or at least empathy. Oh yeah, and you do have Holden face-down in the pool at the end. Ace in the Hole is newspaper story about a reporter who will do anything to get back on top and the media circus that erupts around a trapped miner in a cave-in. The miner doesn't do very well, not as the result of lust or greed but for a byline. The end result is the same. No film noir there. Right? Stalag 17 is a war movie about a scammer/borderline con man POW, who is framed for something he didn't do. The real traitor is a trusted member of the team flourishing in the midst of the other POWs. It's a war movie, right. Film noir is something totally different. Witness for the Prosecution is a courtroom drama, but what happens. A man on the fringes of society kills a woman for her money and uses his wife as an alibi. Then ultimately he betrays his wife for another woman and gets his just desserts. Okay, that one sounds a bit more like film noir, but you don't really think about it because of the distraction of the trial. Billy Wilder films are rarely just one thing. They take comedy and turns it into a drama. They take the elements of film noir and throw them into a drama or newspaper movie or a war movie or courtroom drama. And the end result is often much more than the sum of the parts.
We have a lot of problems in this country. I'm going to look at one of them, but before I start I want to look at problems in general and how they get solved. Let's say your problem is you want to lose 50 pounds, a problem that I'm sure a lot of people can relate to. First, I want to look at how you do not solve this problem. You do not solve the problem by doing nothing. The only makes most problems get worse. You do not decide that it is too soon to start solving the problem, that there needs to be a grieving period for the 50 pounds you want to lose. You do not solve the problem by blaming it on something else, like the NFL, players taking a knee are disrespecting your desire to lose weight. To solve the problem of 50 extra pounds, you need to take steps. Say the first step is taking a 15 minute walk everyday. You do that for six months, and you lose 15 pounds and feel a lot better, but you still want to get rid of the other 35 pounds. The second step might be to stop eating fried food and eat more fruits and vegetables. Maybe that gets you there. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you need a third step or a fourth and so on to get to where you want to be. The point is you need to start somewhere. With the massacre in Las Vegas, let's look at the problem of assault rifles. We've seen how much death and devastation that can be caused by one person with these weapons. In the 1930s, there was a similar problem with machine guns, which were legal at the time. The machine gun was the weapon of choice for high-profile criminals, like Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson. Police often armed with only pistols were completely outgunned. How did America address this problem? Did they make sure that every law enforcement officer in the nation was issued a machine gun? No. Did they decide that the best way to stop a bad guy with a machine gun was a good guy with a machine gun, so that Old Man Johnson and Miss Simpson could take on the Bonnie and Clydes of this world. No. Congress passed the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. Though not entirely banning the weapons, the NFA regulated certain types of weapons, requiring extensive background checks including fingerprints and photographs, and regulated how they were sold, transferred, and transported. In addition, these weapons were taxed at a prohibitively high rate of $200 (over $3600 in 2017 dollars). The NFA covered machine guns (guns that can fire more than once with a single trigger pull), short-barreled rifles, short barreled shotguns, silencers, destructive devices, such as hand grenades and explosive missiles, and non-shotgun firearms with bores larger than 0.5 inches, and certain other weapons such as cane guns and umbrella guns. I'm sure that machine guns did not disappear after the NFA was passed, but in time, law enforcement in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s didn't have to worry about criminals wielding machine guns like they had in the early 1930s. Fast forward to now, the AR-15 assault rifle is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle. The AR-15 is equipped with a 30-round clip and is semiautomatic, meaning you can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. This comes out to about three rounds a second, though most people will not be able to maintain three trigger pulls per second for an extended period of time. Assuming two trigger pulls per second and 5 seconds to change 30-round clips, an average person could fire 90 rounds per second from an AR-15 without any modifications. Think about someone shooting 90 times a minute in a crowded shopping mall or at a sporting event. How many people could be killed and injured in that one minute with those 90 shots? The M16 military version is fully automatic and fires 700-950 rounds per minute. With modifications, an AR-15 can be made to fire at much higher rates. In addition to things like 100-round clips, which would save the time reloading, devices such as hand cranks and bump fire stocks, can easily make an AR-15 fire similar to a machine gun. These are fully legal aftermarket accessories that almost anyone could install. You don't need to be a gunsmith to do it. According to The Washington Post, at least, a dozen of the 23 guns that were recovered from Stephen Paddock's Las Vegas hotel room were modified to fire like a machine gun. Here are two of these devices that can do this: Bump fire stock (this was specifically mentioned): Hand crank (not mentioned, but I included it because it is a very cheap and simple device that can make an AR-15 fire like a machine gun): According to CNN, the Las Vegas shooting lasted 9 to 11 minutes. In that time 58 people were killed and over 500 injured by gunfire and trying to escape the scene. Now, I'm not a gun person, but my older brother is. I can understand that if you like shooting guns, things like a bump fire stock would make it a whole lot more fun to do so, but these devices effectively make machine guns legal and allowed a psycho to unleash this much carnage in roughly 10 minutes. I live in California, where assault rifles were banned in 1989. My brother is kind of a redneck, and he bought an assault rifle before the ban went into effect. He has never committed a crime with his guns. He always kept his guns locked up, mostly because he didn't want his kids shooting the neighbor kids or vice versa but also because his guns were worth a lot of money. My brother retired to Maui about three years ago. He now spends most of his time paddle boarding, roller skating, and taking pictures of the sunset (he posts them on Facebook all the time). I honestly don't know whether he still has his guns. I'm guessing he still has at least some of them. That's right. My red-neck gun-toting brother now spends most of his time paddle boarding and taking pictures of the sunset. He's also pro-union. Ain't America grand? Now, if we banned assault rifles and things like bump stocks tomorrow. Not gonna happen, but let's say we did. That doesn't do anything to prevent more mass shootings with assault weapons already out there, but like the 15-minute walk, it's a start. Maybe 20 years from now, things would be safer. Banning assault rifles also does nothing to prevent shootings with other types of weapons. Again, it's a start. The first step of many. I honestly don't see anything happening. The government has its head so far up the NRA's butt, they can tell whether they need to floss more often. As far as I know, my brother and I don't agree on gun control. I can't imagine he's done an about-face on the issue in the last few years, though the sunset thing does give me pause. We do agree on a lot of things. My brother is not a fan of the government. I'm not either. For both of us, it's because the government does not care about ordinary people. They care about big corporations, the very rich, and special interest groups like the NRA. My brother is always talking about how he can't believe people don't take to the streets with pitchforks and torches. This is something else that my brother and I disagree on. It wouldn't surprise me if people took to the streets, but it won't be with pitchforks and torches. It will be with guns, lots and lots of guns. Maybe, the government should think about whether it's a good idea to ignore the needs of the vast majority people while giving them almost complete unfettered access to guns. It just doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy to me.
