FILM REVIEW: JACK RYAN SHADOW RECRUIT

A scene from Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Communist Hollywood

By Ed Rampell

Reactionary espionage novelist Tom Clancy may have died last year, but his heroic CIA agent, Jack Ryan, lives on, as does the rightwing pro-CIA Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Entertainment Complex’s agitprop. To be sure, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Paramount’s reboot of the Clancy-derived, highly lucrative Ryan film franchise, is a slickly made, entertaining piece of moviemaking full of the usual suspects usually found in spy movies: motorcycle and car chases galore, assassins, gunfire, dastardly villains hellbent on world domination, a little romance and all those other endless spy movie clichés. Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit is also a sophisticated cinematic piece of propaganda masquerading under the guise of mass entertainment.

In this latest installment of the Ryan franchise (definition of a Hollywood franchise -- beating a dead horse into the ground until viewers wise up and quit buying tickets to see these sequels and remakes) Jumping Jack Smash is tepidly played by 33-year-old Chris Pine, who previously played Captain Kirk in another profitable motion picture franchise, Star Trek. In the 2014 chapter of the spy series Jack is an Afghan War veteran -- never mind that Alec Baldwin played Ryan in 1990's The Hunt for Red October and Harrison Ford started portraying Ryan in 1992's Patriot Games, when Pine was a mere wisp of a lad presumably pining after super stardom in empty headed action flicks.

The actor may be new but the premise is tired and old, reviving Cold War tensions between Washington and Moscow, as America's enemy is the same in Jack Ryan Shadow Recruitas it was almost a quarter century ago in The Hunt for Red October. There may be much that’s objectionable in Vladimir Putin’s Russia -- from the repression of gays, Ukrainians, Pussy Riot, Greenpeace and so on -- but none of that is alluded to in this simpleminded yarn with a convoluted plot harkening back to the deepest, darkest days of the Cold War between the USA and USSR.

In a bit of clever central casting real life Soviet defector/ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov plays a Kremlin killer in a cameo. Kenneth Branagh, who also directs, portrays dastardly oligarch Viktor Cherevin, a stereotypical Ruskie out to stage terrorist attacks on the good ol’ USA and to topple our economy. It doesn't matter that the Ruskies have traded corporatist ideology in for communism -- they're still the bad guys in this hackneyed plot extolling the virtues of the CIA, as latter day Cold Warriors battle it out from Moscow to Manhattan. It doesn’t matter that as America’s ally during World War II 20 million Soviets died, and then their approximation of socialism failed and the Russians “embraced” the private enterprise system: They remain our implacable enemy. I mean, who does a Ruskie have to fuck to catch a break from Hollywood?!

Speaking of which, the extremely gifted Keira Knightley squanders her talents playing Cathy Muller, Jack’s nurse-cum-live-in-lover-cum-damsel-in-distress. She was far superior in the 2011 Freud-versus-Jung film A Dangerous Method, but I suppose there’s a method to her career madness. The cast includes Kevin Costner as the CIA covert ops agent Thomas Harper. (BTW, the characters’ globetrotting from Manhattan to Moscow and beyond via commercial airliners in what seems to be mere hours is inherently incredible, as is the fact that these jetsetters never get jet lag.)

In between munching popcorn auds should be aware of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’s real shadowy message: The CIA are heroic good guys who are also technical whiz kids -- their supposed high-tech prowess is intended to impress and intimidate opponents -- saving the world from the baddies. Jack Ryan; Shadow Recruit is the latest recruit in what I called the intelligence community’s “Operation Image Control” in my May 2013 cover story for CounterPunch Magazine called “Hollywood’s Year of Living Clandestinely.” Jack Ryan has enlisted to fight to make the world safe for U.S. imperialism, along with: The ABC mini-series The Assets, about real life CIA double agent/traitor Aldrich Ames; the just launched Intelligence TV series about a bionic agent; plus The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Blacklist series that premiered on network TV in the fall. On the big screen the FBI prominently features in American Hustle about the 1970s AbScam scandal.

Make no mistake about: With the possible exception of American Hustle, which is critical of the FBI, these big and small screen productions appear to be intended to project positive images of the CIA, NSA, etc., as part of the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Entertainment Complex’s never ending campaign to win hearts, minds and viewers. This propaganda barrage aims to hoodwink taxpayers and, in particular, are a counter-offensive aimed against the revelations of the super-surveillance state by whistleblowers.

 

In particular, The Assets may be intended as an attack on Edward Snowden, who is rather stupidly (or perhaps, I should say, quite cleverly) likened to Ames by feckless pundits/dopes/dupes, although Ames traded CIA secrets for rubles, while Snowden does not appear to have cashed in on his revelations about the Orwellian NSA hyper-surveillance state he is, rather patriotically and at great risk to himself, warning us all about. Snowden, of course, is ensconced in icy exile in Mother Russia -- and isn’t it hilarious how the imperialists and their media lackeys use this against Snowden, while conveniently forgetting that Washington revoked his passport and even forced Bolivian President Evo Morales’ jet down in an effort to prevent Snowden from possibly leaving Russia.

 

The Central Intelligence Agency definitely does have an entertainment liaison officer and actively seeks to influence movie and TV productions for propagandistic purposes. I asked Paramount if the CIA was involved in any way with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit but, as to be expected when dealing with the shadowy world of cloak and dagger, got no response. While they want to know everything about you, they don’t want you to know anything about them and how they operate behind the scenes. Hollywood will tell us.

 

But consider what former CIA officer Bob Baer (George Clooney played Baer in 2005’s Syriana, which was based on his exploits) said in my CounterPunch expose about an earlier Jack Ryan iteration: “I’m pretty sure Ben Affleck was able to get meetings with those in the CIA… He was in The Sum of All Fears, a heavily assisted text by the CIA. They were involved in everything from set design to script review to meeting with the actors, director, writers… to shape their image of that Agency. [Tom Clancy’s] Jack Ryan series has always been more positive in terms of its depiction of the CIA than other film franchises, but… Sum of All Fears of all Jack Ryan films is the most positive in its depiction.” Affleck, of course, went on to star in and direct 2012’s pro-CIA Argo, which -- for the first time in Academy Award history -- had its Best Picture Oscar winner announced by a sitting First Lady, Michelle “Support the Troops” Obama, live at the White House, surrounded by military personnel.

 

Viewer beware!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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FILM REVIEW: THE MAN NOBODY KNEW

William Colby in The Man Nobody Knew.

The sins of my father

By Ed Rampell

The Man Nobody Knew is a conventionally made, 104 minute-long documentary about former Central Intelligence Agency Director William Colby. There is the usual use of archival footage, plus a collection of talking heads, which includes a who’s who of the usual scumbags from government, military and top secret circles. However, while its technique is straightforward, what makes this doc -- subtitled In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby -- different is the fact that it’s directed by the subject’s son, Carl Colby. In this sense, The Man Nobody Knew is like Tell Them Who You Are, Mark Wexler’s 2004 documentary exploration of his dad, cinematographer Haskell Wexler – albeit from the opposite side of the political aisle.

History buffs and espionage aficionados will probably be interested in much of the terrain The Man Nobody Knew covers, starting with Colby’s derring-do in the fabled OSS, the World War II precursor of the CIA. Following WWII Colby was recruited by the Agency, and he was posted at Rome along with his family, under the cover of being a U.S. embassy staffer. There, his wife and children enjoyed a privileged existence as Colby helped orchestrate an unofficial version of the Marshall Plan, subverting Italian democracy with massive infusions of dollars to corrupt voting to ensure that the popular Communist Party didn’t win elections and join a coalition government. (Here the doc treads on similar ground as the 2006 feature, Fade to Black, with Danny Huston playing a beleaguered Orson Welles acting in a costume pic in Huston’s birthplace, postwar Rome, and it’s intriguing to see a nonfiction treatment of the same subject matter.)

After sabotaging Italy’s elections, in the late 1950s this not so quiet American was reassigned to wreak similar havoc in Vietnam, where -- as in Italy – the U.S. made sure the masses could not elect the very popular Ho Chi Minh president. In Saigon Colby and his well-heeled kin hobnobbed with South Vietnamese Pres. Ngo Din Diem and other U.S. puppets, such as his despicable sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, who is seen in a news clip haughtily dismissing a Buddhist Monk’s self immolation as “barbecuing.” After Colby left Indochina to become the CIA’s Chief of its Far East Division, Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were liquidated in a U.S.-backed coup – just a few weeks before Pres. Kennedy himself succumbed to the Cold War era violence that would also claim his brother Bobby five years later.

When America was waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool said to push on, Colby was re-posted to Vietnam, where he ran a pacification program, including the extremely controversial Phoenix Program, which resulted in the killing of up to 40,994 Viet Cong -- according to the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John Marks. 

(It’s interesting to revisit this counterinsurgency strategy as President Obama once again deploys targeted assassination as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. In any case, the extreme prejudice of Colby’s desperate measures were all for naught as Vietnam was liberated from scourges like Colby in 1975.)

Meanwhile, the sleazeball-in-chief – uh, I mean Richard Milhous Nixon – appointed Colby Director of Central Intelligence in 1973. But like King Rat Nixon himself, as DCI Colby became embroiled in scandals that made the Watergate break-in look like a frat house prank in comparison, the Catholic Colby’s sins and covert actions, and those of his Agency, caught up to him by 1974, as the Church Committee launched a nine month-long investigation of dirty tricks, dirtier tricks and dirtiest tricks (can you say “Allende”?) by the CIA, which LBJ had pithily summed up as “Murder, Inc.” Colby dutifully appeared before Congress 32 times in one year, and the doc features choice footage of Congressmembers Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug grilling the spymaster on the hot seat, as the people’s elected Representatives confronted America’s shadowy secret government.

Suspected mass murderer William Colby got his comeuppance when Pres. Gerald Ford rewarded him for his decades of loyal service by summarily firing him in October 1975. Twenty-one years later, Colby rather appropriately died as he had lived: Mysteriously. His filmmaker/ son suspects his dad’s death was somehow self-inflicted. Who knows?

Throughout the rest of the doc director Carl Colby tries to fathom his enigmatic father and come to terms with the parent who led a cloak and dagger life that inextricably cut him off from his own family. Along the way, his rogues’ gallery of interviewees include Zbigniew Brezinski (the foreign policy whiz who helped give us Osama and Al Qaeda), ex-CIA Director James Schlesinger, Iran-Contra co-conspirator Lt. Col. Robert “Bud” McFarlane, former Ford NSA adviser and Bush toady Brent Scowcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld, who had been Ford’s chief of staff (infections).

Also interviewed are investigative reporters Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward, and the helmer’s mother, Barbara Colby, a faithful wife whom William dumped after 38 years of marriage. She, like Carl, try to make sense of it all; who really was this bowtied 007? The doc appears to make an attempt to exculpate and justify Colby’s decades of wreaking mayhem around the globe, as nonfiction threatens to turn into fiction. But it’s more delusional than those humans unwittingly subjected to psychotropic drugs by the CIA were to fantasize that Colby, the grand subverter of democracy from Europe to Asia, was an honorable man simply serving his country. It’s no secret that this most private of public servants was, in reality, an agent of imperialism whose claws were as blood drenched as his masters’. 

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