This Memorial Day, the remake of the classic 1977 miniseries, Roots[i], will begin airing on the History Channel. While Roots is not a movie in the traditional sense, I still remember the impact the original had on me – a white, middle-class American who went to high school with less than ten African Americans in a school of over a thousand. Roots showed me how cruel human beings can be to each other solely based on being unfortunate enough to be born with a different skin color in a time and place where slavery was common. But let’s save discrimination for another movie.

The title of this post is a quote from “Chicken” George at the end of the original Roots miniseries. George and his family pull their wagons into a beautiful Tennessee field and George announces, “We is free!” But was Chicken George really free? Are any of us? I don’t mean the political freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. I mean being totally free in the thoughts we harbor, the actions we take, or even in the persons we are or hope to become.

I was raised in a religion where agency, or freedom of choice, is an overarching principle. Whether you are good or bad or something in between is often seen to be purely based on the conscious decisions you make. You choose to be good and receive the promised blessings, or you choose to be bad, and end up in hell. I personally believe it is not quite that simple. No decision we make is made in a vacuum. Decisions are influenced by many factors, most of which are beyond our control.

One of the most gut-wrenching movies I have seen lately is a foreign language film entitled Run Boy Run.[ii]  It is the true story of an eight-year old Jewish boy in Poland during World War II. To protect him from being killed by Nazi soldiers, his dad sends him into the forest where he must learn to survive on his own, with the occasional help from a few sympathetic locals. Throughout the movie I was amazed at the lengths to which the Nazi soldiers would go in attempting to capture or kill this little boy, as if he somehow would make a difference in the outcome of the war. But, of course, the soldiers’ mission was not a military one as much as a social one, with the goal of eliminating an entire race of people. Here is the trailer from the movie:

That same week I saw another foreign language film entitled Labyrinth of Lies[iii], which tells the true story of Johann Radmann, a German prosecutor, who, beginning in 1958, seeks to bring to justice the German SS soldiers who committed grievous atrocities against the Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz. Radmann and his team focused on those who committed such atrocities on their own volition, and not those who were just “following orders.” Radmann and others were successful in convicting hundreds of SS soldiers, but a postscript at the end of the movie reveals that none of those convicted ever showed any real remorse for what they had done. Here is a clip from that movie where Radmann and part of his team learn for the first time the extent of what happened at Auschwitz:

            How could a group of soldiers have such hate against others, including children, to the point they would decide to commit such terrible acts against them? My father-in-law, who happened to have six children, liked to quote John Wilmont, who said, “Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children and no theories.” I have five kids and my wife and I learned, almost from the day our children were born, they came to us preprogramed. All were raised in the same basic environment, with the same family rules, teachings and opportunities, but each came with their own unique personalities, qualities and abilities. As we have learned in connection with a lot of things about life, genetics (our natures) are major keys in how we will turn out. But how we are raised (or how we are nurtured) also plays a major role in the person we become. Our religious and political views, our likes and dislikes, our professions, how we treat others, and even how we speak and act, are more often than not the result of the influence of our ancestors, parents, siblings, friends and associates. When you combine our natures with how we were nurtured, by the time we reach adulthood, can we really say that we are entirely free to choose who we are?

            Please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying a person shouldn’t be held accountable for his or her actions. All of us should be. But perhaps how we treat people who do things that hurt others or themselves should be less about mere punishment and retribution and more about understanding, compassion, rehabilitation and prevention of similar acts in the future. Maybe that prevention should be centered in education and reprogramming. As we learn more and more about how our brains work – how our brains are constantly being rewired – I believe each of us can learn to better understand others and ourselves, and help others to change, along with ourselves. And maybe along the way we will learn a little more patience and understanding of those who aren’t doing anything wrong, but who choose to do things differently than we would.

            I am a big believer in the power of heritage – not just genetics, but understanding our own roots, and how our ancestors, although imperfect like us, accomplished great things. They might be our own direct ancestors or just other members of the human race. But in the final analysis, we are all one family, regardless of race, culture, sexual orientation, or economic standing. Alex Haley became a better person by learning of his roots. Here is a clip from the original Roots where Chicken George and his son, Tom, reflect on their heritage:

I hope all of us will learn from the character of our ancestors, share those heritage stories with our own children and grandchildren, and encourage them to do the same.

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[i] Roots

Production: David L. Wolper Productions; Warner Bros. Television

Directed: Marvin Chomsky; John Erman; David Greene; and Gilbert Moses

Screenplay: William Blinn; M. Charles Cohen; Alex Haley; Ernest Kinoy; and James Lee

Starring: LaVar Burton; John Amos; Leslie Uggams; Ben Vereen (and many others)

[ii] Run Boy Run

Production: Bittersuess Pictures

Directed: Pepe Danquart

Screenplay: Heinrich Hadding, Pepe Danquart

Starring: Andrzej Tkacz; Kamil Tkacz; Elisabeth Duda

[iii] Labyrinth of Lies

Production: Claussen Wőbke Putz Filmproduction; Naked Eye Filmproduction

Directed: Giulio Ricciarelli

Screenplay: Elisabeth Bartel; Giulio Ricciarelli

Starring: Andre Szymanski; Alexander Fehling; Frederike Becht

When it comes to movies, I generally prefer a good drama to a comedy, although I enjoy a good laugh as well as the next person. But sometimes I struggle with what’s really funny. Several years ago my wife and I went to see the musical, The Color Purple. I vaguely remembered seeing the movie several years previously, but I had never seen the stage play. I couldn’t remember much about the movie, other than it was directed by Steven Spielberg, and was a heavy drama. One of the characters in both the stage play and the movie is an African-American named Alphonso, who beats and rapes his daughter, Celie – repeatedly. Although a despicable character to me, the audience at the stage play, which was at least three-fourths African-American, continually burst into laughter at some of the things Alphonso did and said. I didn’t know what to do. Should I laugh along with the audience (although I didn’t find Alphonso the least bit funny)? If I did laugh, would my African-American neighbors find my laughter offensive since I “was not one of them.” And if I didn’t laugh at Alphonso, would those same African-Americans think we were racist? My wife and I left at intermission.  I don’t consider myself racist. It could have been any group regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or political views and I would have felt the same.

I had a similar experience but from the other viewpoint a couple of years ago when I first saw the musical, The Book of Mormon. I happen to be a Mormon, and Mormons, for the most-part, have stayed away from the musical. So I was amazed at how the crowd around me laughed loud and long throughout the entire production. My first thought was, how could they even think this is funny when, being non-Mormons, they probably don’t even get most of the jokes? My second thought was, as non-Mormons, what gave them the right to laugh at me and my fellow Mormons?

I learned a great lesson about laughter from one of my favorite romantic comedies, Roxanne*, a modern take on Cyrano de Bergerac starring Steve Martin. The lesson: learn to laugh at yourself, and encourage others to laugh right along with you. Notice I said laugh along with, not laugh at. In Roxanne, C.D. Bales, our modern-day Cyrano, has the long nose, a gift for prose, and a great ability to laugh at himself. In a barroom confrontation, a man tries to insult C.D., but all he can come up with is “big nose.” C.D. then takes the challenge of coming up with twenty different insults about his nose, all of which far surpass “big nose.” Here is the scene from the movie.

Rather than hold a pity party because of his nose, C.D. Bales embraces his unique physical trait. And that made all the difference. And in the end, Roxanne falls in love with C.D. because of the complete person he is, despite his nose getting in the way – literally.

My father-in-law, Don Harris, was a remarkable man with a story remarkably similar to C.D. Bales. Rather than an extra-large nose, Don was legally deaf, the victim of swine flu when he was about two years old, when he lost about 90 percent of his hearing. Growing up without much hearing was not always easy, but Don always figured out how to get by. But as Don started those awkward years of puberty, his self-esteem, like so many other teenagers, was put to the test. In junior high, with different teachers for each class, Don found himself giving the right answers to the wrong questions. Whenever he did so, everyone thought it was funny. Everyone except Don. One day in gym class the teacher asked each student to repeat back their locker number. Don thought the teacher asked how tall he was. “Four foot eight,” he replied. The class fell apart with laughter. Don got mad. He stomped his foot. He cried. Finally he yelled, “Goodbye! I’m never coming back to this school again.”

Don ran all the way home. Fortunately, his mother was there. “Don, you’re home early.” He explained to her why. “Son, you’re going to have a lot of people laugh at you before you leave this life. We’ll take you to every doctor we know to try to get you some help for your hearing, but I suggest the next time you give the right answer to the wrong question and everyone laughs, you laugh right along with them. I’ll be hard the first time, but from then out, you’ll have it made.”

Don decided to give it a try. The next day at school a teacher asked a question and Don gave the wrong answer. Everyone burst into loud laughter. This time, instead of getting mad, Don laughed along with them. “That sure was a dilly, wasn’t,” he said, and everyone laughed again. And Don spent the rest of his life laughing at life’s hard knocks, and encouraging those around him to join in.

Whether we have a physical deformity, a character flaw, or just do silly things from time to time, being able to laugh at ourselves sometimes takes great courage. But the rewards are worth it, if only in the growth of our own self-esteem. As Ethel Barrymore once said, “You grow up the day you have your first real laugh – at yourself.” So go ahead. Take a look in the mirror, and let the good times roll.

*Roxanne

Production company: Columbia Pictures

Directed by: Fred Schepisi

Screenplay by: Steve Martin

Starring: Steve Martin and Darryl Hannah

I personally don’t like movies about superheroes that have extra-special powers because they came from a different planet, have special clothing or mutated genes. I like my heroes human, with their own set of human strengths and flaws.

Not too long ago I saw a movie entitled, Concussion*, which tells the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic scientist who, after coming to America from Nigeria, helped identify a degenerative brain disease in American football players, starting with “Iron Mike” Webster, the All-Pro center for the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1974 to 1990, whose death at age 50 came after several years of mental disorder and malfunction. Dr. Omalu performed the autopsy on Mr. Webster, and discovered what he describes as killer proteins throughout his brain, a condition that became known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. He (along with other doctors) published the findings in a medical journal, and then fought with the NFL to get the league to recognize the potential large scale, long-term problem it faces: humans are not built to play football. Others have picked up where Dr. Omalu left off in helping players and parents understand the potential danger from repeated contact required in football at every level the game is played.  It is the story of courage to do something great when the world (or at least America’s favorite sport) is against you.

Here is one of my favorite scenes from the movie:

I came out of the movie thinking, why don’t I have the courage, like Dr. Omalu, to do something great? In my professional world, I am a lawyer working for the largest publicly-owned oil company in the world. I consider myself an expert lawyer when it comes to doing deals, but all I have ever done in my career is make a lot of money for the company. No one will look at my professional contributions and say, there goes a courageous man who did something great and noble for his fellow human beings.

But perhaps I am being too hard on myself (as we all have a tendency to do).

One of my all-time favorite movies is Back to the Future**. As you will recall, Marty McFly is the teenaged son of George McFly, who, at the beginning of the film is portrayed as a nerdy loser, pretty much afraid of everyone and everything. George is antagonized in particular by Biff Tannen, who, when in high school with George, is the typical bully, who ultimately becomes George McFly’s supervisor, and who continues to bully George every chance he gets. Here is a link to a YouTube clip from the movie:

Marty McFly goes back in time to when his mother and father are in high school.  Lorraine Baines (later to become Marty’s mother) starts to fall in love with Marty, instead of his father, George, when Marty is accidentally hit by a car. Marty knows, if he doesn’t get Lorraine and George together, he will never be born. In a pivotal scene, Biff starts to force himself on Lorraine, and George somehow gets the courage to face Biff – something he has never been able to do before. He punches Biff, resulting in Lorraine instantly falling in love with George. Watch it here:

But the key is what develops afterword. Marty is finally able to get back to the future (which is really the present), but because of what George was able to do in the past due to Marty’s visit, this George McFly is totally different from the George McFly we saw at the beginning of the movie. He is hip, he is successful, and now Biff works for him. The morale of the story: In the face of a crisis, George McFly was able to stand up to his rival, overcome his fear and do the right thing – and that made all the difference.

Most of us will not have the chance to potentially change the world as Dr. Bennet Omalu and others may have done, but each of us can be like George McFly, willing to do something personally great when faced with our biggest challenges – which might just be having the courage to stand up to the local bully. Doing the “right” thing during a time of crisis, rather than blaming others or sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves, may not seem like a big deal at the time, but the ripple effect of such action may, over time, just change the world – if only our own.

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*Concussion

Directed by: Peter Landesman

Starring: Will Smith, Alec Baldwin

Written by: Peter Landesman and Jeanne Marie Laskas

Distributed by: Village Roadshow Pictures and Columbia Pictures

**Back to the Future

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis

Written by: Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale

Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover

Distributed by: Universal

My favorite movie in high school was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid*. I mean, what was not to like?  Butch and the Kid were handsome, funny and just plain cool.  More importantly, as a teenage boy, I had a huge crush on Katharine Ross, who played Etta Place, Sundance’s girlfriend.  She caught my eye when she costarred in Shenandoah when I was only 12.  Those feelings grew into a crush when I saw her in The Graduate at age 14, and love bloomed after I saw her in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at age 16.  Here is a clip of one of my favorite scenes from the movie to the music of Burt Bacharach,  sung by J.B. Thomas:

After watching this scene, it’s easy to see why I fell in love with the beautiful Katharine Ross. But I digress.

Since I loved Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid so much, my friend and I decided to perform the following scene from the movie in our drama class. I played Butch.

After our performance (we got an A, by the way), I asked my drama teacher, “Didn’t you love that movie? She replied that she had never seen it.  I was shocked.  One of the best movies of all time and my drama teacher had never seen it!  She explained in words that shocked me even more.  “I don’t support immoral movies.”

Immoral? Huh?  She then explained.  “I consider it immoral because it makes the viewer root for men who were robbers and murderers.  Do we really want people like them to be our heroes?”

I had never thought of it in that light before. I did root for Butch and the Kid as they spent their days robbing banks and trains, and even though, in reality, their Wild Bunch Gang was credited with more than a half dozen murders.  And I admit I felt sad when the law finally caught up with them in Bolivia and presumably killed them.

How do we usually decide whether a movie is immoral? We look at movie ratings.  If it’s R rated, we often decide its probably something we shouldn’t see, but a PG-13 rating makes a movie OK, regardless of its content, theme or message.  A great movie might be rated R simply because the “F” word is used a few times, while a PG-13 movie might contain nothing but trash (but no “F” words).   Should we really let faceless people whom we know nothing about set our moral standards for us

Don’t get me wrong. Movie ratings can be helpful when deciding what movies to see.  But our analysis should go deeper than that.  Whenever I finish watching a movie, I try to take at least a few minutes to analyze it.  What did I learn from it?  Do I care about the characters?  Why or why not?  What motivated them to do what they did? Could the characters have handled things differently and for the better? What would I do if I were in a similar situation?  I do this analysis as an adult with no kids left at home.  How much more important would it be to have these types of discussions with our children about the movies they see – hopefully, together with us.

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*Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Directed by: George Roy Hill

Written by: William Goldman

Starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross

Distributed by: 20th Century Fox

Welcome to Life Lessons Through Film or Everything Important in Life I Learned at the Movies. I appreciate your interest, and hope you come back many times.

All of us love good stories, especially those we can relate to. If you’re like me, I am much more moved and motivated by a story I can relate to than a sermon (church or otherwise), regardless of how adept the preacher is at delivering it. There were various times growing up where my parents – who loved me much and only wanted the best for me – would lecture me about something I did or didn’t do, and urged me to change my behavior – or else. Sometimes my parents delivered those lectures with raised voices, and sometimes not, but the result was usually the same. I often changed my behavior, if at all, only to avoid punishment. In short, nothing really changed much.

On the other hand, a good story, especially one on film, gets me thinking and often motivates me to change, whether it’s my behavior, how I feel about other people, or just to think more deeply about something in an attempt to better understand the world. After many years of this process, I came to the conclusion, everything important in life I learned at the movies.

The purpose of this blog is to share with you some things about life I have learned from watching movies. And for good measure, I will sometimes throw in something related to musical theater (my other favorite mode of entertainment). I will try not to get too preachy, but instead, let the movies speak for themselves. My real hope is the movies I talk about will get you to think a little more, maybe help change behavior for the better, or at least increase our understanding about each other. Yes, like John Lennon, you might say I’m a dreamer. But I hope I’m not the only one.

Where possible, I will try to add a movie clip or two from the movie I am talking about, keeping in mind, when it comes to technology, I’m still pretty much a luddite (maybe that’s why I’m named Ludlow).  And copyright laws might prevent me from posting all the clips I would like to, especially from new releases.

My goal is to post something twice a month on average. Since I still have a day job, the timing might be erratic at times, so I urge (and appreciate) your patience. And like all good blogs, please comment with your ideas, thoughts and suggestions, even if it is only to tell me I’m full of it. Even a Siskel and Ebert thumbs up or thumbs down will be appreciated.

See you at the movies!