Not Eurovision

Another year, another Eurovision Song Contest avoided.  I'm sorry, but I've never grasped the appeal of the thing.  Besides, this year there really wasn't any point as everybody knew that Ukraine was going to get the sympathy vote and win.  Something which seemed to enrage a lot of people on Twitter. Apparently it 'devalues' the competition when entrants win on the basis of having been invaded by a hostile power rather than their artistic merits.  Whereas, of course, the usual situation of entrants winning on the basis of purely politically motivated voting was presumably OK?  I mean, since when has anybody won the Eurovision Song Contest on the basis of artistic merit?  Of course, a lot of those decrying Ukraine's win were Russia's foreign legion of Putin supporters who tirelessly peddle the Kremlin line that Ukraine's government are a bunch of Nazis and that all the atrocities committed by Russian troops are just Western propaganda.  While a lot of the accounts putting this stuff out are undoubtedly Russian bots, there are still a disturbing number of actual people who are happily following the official Russian line - the sort who boast about how, while their neighbours were putting up Ukrainian flags, they had 'bravely' put a Russian flag up on their house.  One is left wondering just why they are doing this?  Are they deluded?  Do they actually believe it, in the face of all evidence?  Maybe they are just hardcore conspiracy freaks and/or committed contrarians, who just have to take a different line to everyone else in order to 'prove' their intellectual superiority.

Whatever their motivation, begrudging Ukraine's victory in something as trivial as Eurovision has surely to represent a nadir for the pro-Putin brigade.  But, as I said, I avoided Eurovision altogether, taking the opportunity to instead catch up with some old movies I've had on hold for a while now.  Just for a change, I avoided the usual exploitation in favour of more mainstream fare.  I've been meaning to rewatch The FBI Story (1959), with James Stewart, for years now.  The last time I saw it, I must have been in my teens - even then I knew that it was a highly fictionalised account of the FBI's formation and work.  Seeing it again brought home just how whitewashed Mervyn LeRoy's film was.  Literally whitewashed, in fact, with regard to its account of the Ku Klux Klan - their only victims in the film are white journalists and Jewish families.  Black people, apparently, didn't exist in this version of America, not even to be victimised and persecuted.  It couldn't even get its timelines straight in its accounts of its involvement in bringing down some of most notorious criminals of the thirties: Machine Gun Kelly was one of the first, not the last, of them to be caught and Ma Barker was unarmed, rather than toting a Tommy Gun, when she was mown down in a hail of bullets.  But hey, J Edgar Hoover himself was a 'special adviser' on the film, (in reality he dictated most of what was shown on screen, in order to ensure an entirely favourable impression of the FBI under his directorship), even appearing as himself, at one point arresting Alvin Karpas in person, (he didn't in reality).  Overall, The FBI Story is a fascinating piece of period propaganda from an era when wanted to believe the fiction that we really were being policed by infallible, whiter-than-white, good guys.

The other movie I caught was the George Peppard-starring 1968 thrill House of Cards.  Directed by John Guillerman this was another variation of the classic Thirty Nine Steps plot of an innocent man going on the run from both police and villains, having been framed for murder.  In this case, the protagonist has been engaged as a tutor to the eight year old son of the widow of a prominent French General, who discovers that his employer's in laws are a bunch of fascists planning a coup.  While it might not be hugely original in plot terms, the film is very well made and engaging while it is running.  It features some excellent location shooting in Paris and Rome, with the action climaxing at the Colosseum.  In one of those curious Hollywood conventions, the French characters are mainly played by  British actors, (well, they were all foreign to US audiences), with the exception of the chief villain, who was played by Orson Welles.  Despite getting third billing, Welles, in common with many of his latter day film appearances-for-hire, is only in a few scenes, although he, as ever, makes his presence felt.  Despite being a pretty decent film and coming from a major studio - Universal - House of Cards seems to be one of those films which has slipped into obscurity.  A curiouNot Eurovisions situation, as its production values and cast suggest that it was seen as something of a prestige production back in 1968.  Ah well, with Eurovision over, it was back to seventies sleaze today: a double bill of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) and The Playbirds (1978).