Three Films I'm Looking forward to Seeing

On 9 December John la Carre's 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes to the big screen in the US. I recently re-read the novel in preparation. This has got to be one of the most classic spy novels of all time.


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Then on 21 December The Adventures of Tintin hits the US. If you are not familiar with these comic books by Hergé, you should be. They are beautifully drawn, with compelling plot lines, often inspired by historical events such as South America's Chaco War, the Japanese invasion of China, and the Anschluss. Sadly, the film draws on some of the non-historical strips, but it should be good fun anyway.


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And finally, next spring, opening on 9 March, we have John Carter, a film adaptation of The Princess of Mars (1917), by famed pulp fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (best known for creating Tarzan). I intend to read this one before watching the film.


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And if that's not enough cinematic anticipation for you, don't forget that The Hobbit and the Red Dawn remake are coming in 2012, and there are rumors of a District 10.

One of Those Days!

I'm fidgety. It's one of those days: the weather is beautiful and I should be somewhere other than in a computer lab entering exam grades. Even if my body cannot be out doing other things, at least my mind should be, right?

Have you ever noticed how items can lump themselves together in our minds? The weather has immediately conjured up the following constellation of diversions:

Musically, it is a day for Beirut, DeVotchKa, the Decemberists and Andrew Bird.

It is a day for Indiana Jones, The Life Aquatic, Tombstone or Apollo 13.

It is a day for Mickey Mouse and Tintin, The Twenty One Balloons and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.

It is days like these that make me want to join the Explorers Club, the CIA or Mission Aviation Fellowship.

In a word: it's a day for adventures!


Alas, I'll get back to my exams now...

Ten Films to Get You in the Mood for Pulps Gaming!

I have a confession to make: I play miniature war games. Many years ago I got my start with these guys, though I never owned more than a handful. But now I've acquired an army of crusaders for this game, an army which is only slowly getting painted and assembled, but should take the field some time in the spring. However, there is yet a third genre of war gaming which has caught my fancy... Pulps. Yes, like the sleazy dime store novels. Well, sort of. Let me share the description of miniatures craftsman Bob Murch, whose figures you can see below and left:

Pulp Figures and Rugged Adventures are primarily designed for a fictionalized historical setting we call the 'Pulp Era'. The pulps were entertainment magazines of the early 20th century and reached their peak of popularity in the period between the first and second world wars. The pulp magazine venue introduced tough guy detective stories with famed characters like Sam Spade and Philip Marlow, occult action/adventure stories from authors such as Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan or Sax Rohmer of Dr. Fu Manchu fame. They also introduced the jungle fantasy adventures of Tarzan of the Apes. Within the pages of the pulps you might join an expedition into distant lands in search of a lost city. You might sail an airship through a polar gateway to a pre-historic world at the center of the earth. It was an action packed world of brave heroes standing alone against sinister villains plotting world conquest, tough dames, spies and even the occasional brilliant scientist with a newly invented rocket ship. It was a brightly coloured world of action packed, spine tingling adventure.

Is it any wonder that folks want to game this stuff? To get in the mood, I've assembled a few films:

Zulu (1964). Too late for the golden age of pulps, this classic film nevertheless has a lot of the key elements: Europeans in nifty uniforms, exotic setting, guns, danger, heroism... The Battle of Rorke's Drift was a tad early, but there are plenty of figures from slightly later decades of the British Empire.


The adventures of Indiana Jones (1981, 1984, 1989, 2008). This fedora wearing, whip wielding, Nazi (and Communist) fighting archaeologist is probably the most iconic pulp hero known to contemporary audiences. He's also the reason any game worth its salt had better include at least a smattering of these.


The Rocketeer (1991). Though this movie came out in 1991, I have never seen it. But clearly the film (and the comic books) were the inspiration for these guys.

Michael Collins (1996). Not exactly a pulp action film, this historical biopic is nevertheless set in a real conflict featuring soldiers and policemen, spies, guerrillas and gun-runners, and a real-life hero.

The Mummy and sequels (1999, 2001, 2008). High cinema? Probably but. But they feature archaeological adventurers. And a librarian. I don't know; maybe I just have a thing for librarians...

The Aviator (2004). It's a movie about Howard Hughes. Featuring a lot of amazing airplanes. Need I say more? Incidentally, this film references a film Hughes made about World War I: Hell's Angels (1930). Which might open the door to these guys. Alternatively, one could envision a scenario built around Hell's Angels involving these folks.

First on the Moon / Первые на Луне (2005). This fictional documentary of a Soviet lunar landing in the 1930s could be quite interesting, if one could get one's hands on a copy (which might not be easy). Space travel? you ask. Sure: mad scientists are a classic part of the genre. Soviets? Well, true, the Nazis are the totalitarians of choice, but sometimes they're so overused they get a bit out of hand.

The White Countess (2005). This is not really a pulp film; it's more of a historical drama. But it's set in one of the wildest cities of the 1930s: Shanghai. I think the film does a superb job depicting that world of American businessmen, Chinese warlords, Japanese spies, Jewish refugees and White Russian exiles that it deserves inclusion here.


Public Enemies (2009). There are plenty of gangster movies from which to choose. Indeed, Bonnie & Clyde (1967) might be a better film, but a gamer's interested in shootouts more than cinematography. Likewise, The Untouchables (1987) also deserves mention.

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn (2011). Nevermind that this film has not yet been released. The three comic books upon which it's based are quite fun and Tintin has more than enough pulp hero qualities: intelligence, bravado, world-wide travels and a faithful sidekick (even if he is just a dog).

Some people might worry that the pulp fiction genre - along with the movies and games it has spawned - is violent, racist, sexist and jingoistic. This is all probably true. I would, however, note two things. (1) Modern pulps tend to exaggerate, even caricature, these vices, reducing the danger that we might notice them, even while imbibing them. (2) Modern pulps knock-offs often caricature these vices to the point of mocking them. And it's rather hard to accept ideas you don't even take seriously.

The Virtues (and Vices?) of Tintin

I was recently reading an Economist article, "A Very European Hero", which pointed out that a 1949 French law - still in force - prohibits children's books from showing cowardice, laziness, lying, crime, hatred or debauchery in a positive light. Luckily for Tintin, the intrepid Belgian cartoon character and one of my childhood heroes, this is not a problem. "An overgrown boy scout, whose adventures involve pluck, fair play, restrained violence and no sex," Tintin can be counted upon to "seek the truth, protect the weak and stand up to bullies.... He defends monarchs against revolutionaries (earning a knighthood in one book). His first instinct on catching a villain is to hand him over to the nearest police chief. He does not carry his own gun, though he shoots like an ace. Though slight, he has a very gentlemanly set of fighting skills: he knows how to box, how to sail, to drive racing cars, pilot planes and ride horses. He... is quick to defend small boys from unearned beatings. His quick wits compensate for his lack of brawn."

What's not to love about such a hero? Well, some critics are skeptical of Tintin and his creator Hergé, whose real name was Georges Remi. (Just reverse the initials and you get his nom de plum.) For starters, there is the first comic, "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets". It portrays Russia's Marxist rulers as deceivers and cold-blooded killers. This depiction has upset some academics, but seeing as how it is historically quite accurate (ignoring, of course, Tintin's many slapstick escapes), this is no real grounds for criticism.

Then there is the somewhat infamous "Tintin in the Congo", first published in 1930. "Its Africans are crude caricatures: child-men with wide eyes and bloated lips who prostrate themselves before Tintin (as well as Snowy his dog), after he shows off such magic as an electromagnet, or quinine pills for malaria.... It is a work of propaganda—not for “colonialism”, as is often said—but more narrowly for Belgian missionaries, one of whom keeps saving Tintin’s life in evermore ludicrous ways: first dispatching a half dozen crocodiles with a rifle then rescuing him from a roaring waterfall, seemingly unhindered by his advanced age and ankle-length soutane."

Unfortunate, to be sure, but it seems Hergé was more of an unwitting propagandist for the Belgian Congo than a committed racist. In "The Blue Lotus" we find our hero explaining to a young Chinese friend, "All white men aren't wicked. You see, different peoples don't know enough about each other. Lots of Europeans still believe that all Chinese are cunning and cruel and wear pigtails, are always inventing tortures and eating rotten eggs and swallows' nests." This hardly sounds like rampant racism to me.

Philippe Goddin, in his 2007 biography, raises other questions. In the Economist' words, he points out that "Hergé spent the war working for Le Soir, a Belgian newspaper seized by the German occupiers and turned into a propaganda organ.... [In] 'The Shooting Star', and its initial newspaper serialisation... [there is a] panic unleashed when it seemed a giant meteorite would hit the earth. In one frame... Hergé drew two Jews rejoicing that if the world ended, they would not have to pay back their creditors. At that same moment in Belgium, Mr Goddin notes, Jews were being ordered to move to the country’s largest cities and remove their children from ordinary schools. They were also banned from owning radios, and were subject to a curfew. In the news pages of Le Soir, these measures were described as indispensable preparations for an orderly 'emigration' of Jews." "The Shooting Star" first appeared in the newspaper in 1941; when it was released as an album in 1942, Hergé deleted the drawing of the Jews, of his own accord.

Again, "The Blue Lotus" seems to tell another story. First published in 1934, the story is unambiguous about the perfidious nature of the Japanese occupation of northern China and the fraudulent Chinese 'attack' on the South Manchurian Railway, which had been the pretext for aggression in 1931. The reader's sympathies clearly lie with the Chinese, both within and outside the International Settlement in Shanghai, whose European and American masters come off better than the Japanese, but hardly without criticism. (Though Hergé does not reference the fact, it is interesting to note that Shanghai became a haven for Jews escaping the Third Reich during the 1930s, as seen, for example, in the film The White Countess.) Hergé's actions during the Second World War deserve scrutiny, perhaps even condemnation, but readers would be remiss to simply discount his creation for this reason; indeed, Tintin himself would never approve of the sort of compromises his creator seems to have committed.

With this in mind, I was pleased to read that "filming is supposed to begin in earnest [in 2009] on a trilogy of Tintin films to be directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, using digital 'performance capture' technology to create a hybrid between animation and live action.... He said a film-maker like Mr Spielberg should be given free rein, and told his wife: 'This Tintin will doubtless be different, but it will be a good Tintin.'" Should you need further inducement to look forward to this trilogy, the Economist writes, "Any child reared on 'King Ottokar’s Sceptre', a Balkan thriller; or 'The Calculus Affair', about a scientist’s kidnap, will later feel a shock of familiarity when watching Hitchcock films or reading Graham Greene. It is all there: the dangerous glamour of cities at night; the terror of a forced drive into the forest; a world of tapped hotel telephones and chain-smoking killers in the lobby downstairs."

If "all societies reveal themselves through their children’s books," as the Economist contends, one that reads the adventures of Tintin is probably doing all right.


Special thanks to Santiago Ramos for bringing this article to my attention.