The General

The Generalⁱ is an excellent film, principally for managing to seamlessly avoid the utterly misstated "moral questions" and such quagmires of contemporary idiocy. Released (though not filmed) in black-and-white despite coming out in the middle of the television ageⁱⁱ, it manages to re-create in the evanescent medium of celluloid flicker the quaint, calm, deeply peaceful environment of the stoic man's lifeⁱⁱⁱ. It is impossible to watch and not pointedly prefer the opposition, whoever it may be, wither and fall away, to leave behind a Martin Cahill less impeded by their odorous, ultimately unwelcome, in any case pointlessly tedious presence ; but then again the film's far from accurate in numerous crucial^iv details.

The score's almost Scorsese-level terrible, the cinematography tidily unremarkable. The scene where the likable gangster spitefully breaks a "gold record" in half to reveal its pewter composition's actually the director directly speaking : it was his "gold record" the genuine Cahill stole in reality. Why would anyone accept this sort of fake in this sort of circumstance but then pretend to go about all "law abiding" and shit is anyone's guess. What makes government fraud so appealing to the innately criminal element posing for "civillians", anyways ? The unanswerable question aside, the instance may well be the most accomplished example of breaking the third wall in history (though I'm more than willing to consider your own preferred occurences).

I recommend watching this film in bed, with nude women by your side who nevertheless aren't sisters, sexually intimate or otherwise. Alternatively I suppose you might have popcorn.

1. 1998, by John Boorman, with Brendan Gleeson, Maria Doyle, Angeline Ball. Also starring Jon Voight. [↩]
2. For some reason television decided not to show black-and-white at some point in the 70s ; their unreasonable not to mention scandalously disproportionate over-representation in the socialist misperception of The Market made it pretty much impossible for anyone to make black-and-white films after that point (unless, of course, they were both well known already, like Boorman was, and also willing to mortgage their own house to do it, like he did). [↩]
3. As reported by a girl named for her polymother, the man's wordview went something like

   Whatever it is you say I am, I am not. Whatever it is you want from me, I will give. Whatever it is you take from me, you can take. What is it you can do to me? The worst thing you can do is kill me, after that I won't care, I am still free.

   making him one of the very few notable habitants of the sad island complex in memory. [↩]

4. For one thing, young Cahill was in fact turned down by the Navy (imagine that wonder, quite a ways they've come towards inutility since the days of impressment). For another thing, the girl and he were never neighbours ; that deeply, rumbling Ozarks ring of inbred familiarity's entirely the author's creation, unsupported by actual events. For yet another, the heroin-dealing brother Peter's wisely omitted in the film, as well as the prostitution interests of the ad-hoc criminal gang. All this'd muddy up the story, and make the color scheme quite inadequate -- which isn't an objection to the piece of art (hence "wisely"), but it is a good reason not to mistake art for life. On in this vein, the event where the isolated Guards found themselves driven out of gas may or may not have occured (it is a trivial enough fait d'armes of the 90s, I have it in my own panoply as I personally know dozens others in the same situation, it really was not hard to do), but actual Cahill's actual car was a Mercedes like I favoured, and not the tin can depicted (and this matters visually, doesn't it) ; moreover the scene where he had two hundred cars' tyres slashed like any random soccer hooligan (about half police, half neighbours') is again wisely avoided, as is the weird scene of kidnapping the head of the National Irish Bank along with his family. Trying to get over the screen the incomprehensible situation where a guy living with two women in perfect harmony and otherwise running whores out of massage parlours (state of the art for the period) couldn't come up with anyone better to be the softening agent than some inept dude (inept enough to draw child support while "kidnapped") is, I believe, beyond the ken of anyone, this author or any other. It just can't be done, which is why life can never count as art raw, there's always needed some selection at the very least, if not outright creative intervention. [↩]