Intro by Ben Harrison
Peter Weir directed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the only film in the history of Friendly Fire to get a perfect 10 nose-stitches from all three hosts when we rated the film. It is therefore one of the giants of the genre. But way before his masterpiece / second-to-last movie Peter Weir made a name for himself as one of the leaders of the Australian New Wave, a movement that saw the Cinema of Australia surge in popularity among international audiences.
If you have seen films like Walk About, Mad Max, or Crocodile Dundee, you have seen some Australian New Wave, which spanned the late 1970s up until the end of the 1980s. Today's film is from right in the middle of that movement and was a big part of how Peter Weir was able to get jobs directing big American and international productions later in his career.
Gallipoli is a war film that takes its sweet time getting to the war. It is a film about a pair of talented foot racers that is not in a particular hurry to tell how they went from being a couple of country bumpkins to enlisted men in the Light Horse, a division of the Anzac troops being mustered in Australia, sent to Cairo for training, and then on to Turkey where they serve as cannon fodder to take some of the heat off of the British troops that are trying to take control of the Dardanelles from the Ottomans amidst some of the bloodiest fighting of World War I.
The Gallipoli campaign was a hugely important aspect of the First World War, having accounted for a quarter million casualties on (clears throat) both sides. It was a great victory for the Ottomans and a devastating defeat for the Entente generally and Winston Churchill personally. There is a big story to be told about how and why this campaign happened, but that is not the perspective of this film. Rather, this film is doggedly interested in what motivates young men to join a war that couldn't possibly be more remote to their lives and where they live.
Mark Lee's Archy and Mel Gibson's Frank don't need to go to war and in fact: They could be world class athletes instead, but they are drawn to the adventure of war. That adventure is not what it seems, though. The film isn't a coming-of-age-story because it ends brutally and abruptly when Mel Gibson is unable to reach the frontlines in time to call off an ill-conceived advance. Archy is killed in one of the all-time bummer freeze-frames to end a movie.
Frank is fast on his feet, but not fast enough. "If we don't stop them there, they could end up here!" Today on Friendly Fire: Gallipoli.
Opening
B: Welcome to Friendly Fire, the war movie show with the hosts that are crude, undisciplined, and the most ill-mannered podcasters you have ever encountered. I am Ben Harrison,…
A: … I am Adam Pranica, …
J: …and I am John Roderick.
Moment of pedantry about the Australian accent
B: I was going to do that in the Australian accent in which it is uttered in the movie, and then I found this goof. I am going to get the goof out right away!
A: Earliest goof!
J: Go!
B: ”The distinctive ’Australian’ accent actually didn't emerge until after World War I.”
J: What? No!
B: This is something I have been trying to corroborate through Internet research, and I am not totally sure I can.
A: That seems impossible!
J: They are saying they just had British accents and then after they developed an identity in the 20th century, they started talking like that?
B: Yeah. There was something distinctive about the way Australians spoke because it was prisoners from all over the British Isles that were sent there, and there must have been an averaging effect, but whatever this commenter is saying, the ”G’day mate!”, that thing didn't happen until after World War I and that is amazing to think about.
A: You know, one person had to have started that, right? The Chet Haze of Australia started doing it and everyone else is like: ”What are you…? Why are you talking like that?”
J: Before that, they were just like: ”… put all the shrimp on the Barbie!”
A: This is how we speak now!
J: Listen to all of our Australian and Anzac listeners…
B: We don’t know if Australia is still going to be there by the time this comes out, because the country is currently ablaze.
J: But we do have a lot of listeners there and of course we mean you no more disrespect than we normally direct at you, just the standard amount, but please, if you have additional information about the Australian accent, just email us at xes.nietsneknufmumixam|flesruoykcufog#xes.nietsneknufmumixam|flesruoykcufog. In America Australians are fetishized and we have a pantheon of the ten great Australians. There is the guy from Midnight Oil, (A: There is Crocodile Dundee) That's right! There is Mel Gibson, there is the band INXS and of course, AC/DC, the greatest of all ambassadors for Australia.
B: True!
R: Producer’s not: We forgot Steve Irwin, the best Australian of them all!
J: … and then we have a lot of actors who are Australian.
B: It is a shame that all those Australian actors are generally suppressing their accent.
J: Yeah, they do! They try to talk like…
A: We got Nicole Kidman!
J: That's right, but…
A: We got Hugh Jackman.
J: Keep going!
A: We got Heath Ledger.
J: Oh, I didn't know that. Heath Ledger is Australian?
A: I just typed in ”Australian actors” into Google and this is what has come up.
J: Heath Ledger? I thought he was from Brokeback Mountain.
B: I feel like a lot of those male actors that you are like: ”Why is this guy the star of a huge Hollywood movie?”…
A: The Hemsworths you never asked that question. All Australian!
B: Yeah, very clear why those guys are the stars of huge Hollywood movies, but… Mel Gibson is technically an American. I think he was born in New York and then moved to Australia at a young age.
J: Oh, interesting, or interdasting as we say. The greatest Australian actor of course is Russell Crowe.
A: Sure!
B: Yeah, of Master and Commander, directed by Peter Weir of Gallipoli!
Are you blokes all want to go and get yourself a shot? Go ahead!
This movie was surprising
J: I had never seen this movie, and this movie came out at a time when I should have seen it. This was the type of movie I went to see with my dad in 1981, and for whatever reason I didn't and I don't know why. I don't know why I didn't rent it on VHS in the many years that I should have rented it between 1981 and 2000, or whenever people stopped renting videos. I never saw it and so I was surprised at the way the film was paced, I was surprised at the story it told / tried to tell…
B: Wooo, sick burn!
J: There is a lot to take in here and I found over the course of the movie not sure how I was supposed to be moved or what… because it is basically a movie about a walkabout for most of it.
A: Yeah, it is kind of a buddy film.
J: Yeah, it feels like an Australian college summer picture, and then it becomes incredibly moving in its final act. I didn't expect it to be what it was.
A: I feel like you could grab the slider of where the war started in this film and I kept on waiting for the war to begin every 15 minutes. I don't know how I have been trained as a film viewer to expect things at certain times, but eventually an hour went by and we are still not in war. I am like: ”Are we ever going to get there?”
B: The story is really different, but structurally, it has actually got a lot in common with Hacksaw Ridge, where it is about life before the war, the process of enlisting, the process of training, and then you get to the war and it is one mission, one little adventure at the end that all of that was leading up to.
A: A lot like Hacksaw Ridge is our main character being unfit or unqualified in some way to participate in the war that they want to. That is a really great comp that I didn't consider.
J: There were a lot of spots in the movie where I expected a jump cut because there could have been any number of: ”They won the race!” and then: ”Boom, they are in the war!” The only thing that was left out of this story was however long it took them to go by ship from Perth to Egypt (B: to Cairo!), but we saw every other thing. We saw every time they went to the bathroom from 1910 to the present.
A: An interesting thing happens in this film because it is not just our main characters incidentally not finding themselves in the war. Our main character gets bloody feet, well of course he is not going to be able to go to the war. Our other main character can't ride a horse, well he is not going to war. They are actual examples of reasons why they can't or shouldn't participate all along the way.
J: Our main character is arguably either a coward or a narcissist for almost the entire war, an opportunist certainly, never really heroic.
A: I found those scenes pretty touching when he is in that circle with his friends and everyone wants to go to war and he is being peer pressured into it. I was really struck by those moments and I didn't feel like Mel Gibson's reasons for not wanting to join… I thought that they were totally valid. I didn't think that was an example of cowardice.
J: Not cowardice, but we see that character in a lot of films. The guy that is dubious about signing up. It is not his war. He is not there to fight for the corporations or the British or whoever, and we always find that character eventually gets convinced by his friends to go, to sign up, and…
B: It is the scariest character in any war film for me!
J: … is the guy that is like: ”I don't need your stupid war!”
B: … and then winds up in it.
J: But we were set up in this movie to think that Gibson had either some kind of cool callowness that wasn't so easy to shape, or that he actually was a wheeler-dealer and was going to find a way to exploit it to make money or something.
A: Yeah, it did feel like he had an angle, but he was utterly just like everyone else.
J: He just had zero angle. What was crazy was that there was this plot in the middle that was very much about class and one of the characters, our nominal lead character in the form of Archy Hamilton, gets into the Light Horse, he gets to wear the fancy hat, but Archy lives on an outpost out in the middle of the outback. He is not a rich guy, he is not a fancy guy, but somehow…
B: It seems like he comes from a fancy family that is for some reason out there, farming dirt.
J: Yeah, he is slightly more fancy because his family has photographs of themselves.
B: My uncles read three books!
The role of running in this movie
A: Did you guys get Star Wars vibes from the beginning of this film and with how much Mark Lee looked like Luke Skywalker?
J: … and you felt like they were on Tatooine?
A: Yeah, and the war is coming, he wants to participate, he got a special power, which is the running.
B: They ride those weird beasts, what are they called? Horses?
J: Horses! He can hit a womp rat at 40 kopeks. That setting and the whole lead-up to the foot race is all this foreshadowing that you wait the whole movie to see it pay off.
B: These guys being good at running will be totally key to the climax of this film!
J: … and it definitely is there, but in an incredibly unsatisfying buying way. The running is a major plot moment, a tent pole.
B: The first third of the film is about how great these two guys are at running, and then it does not really serve them in any significant way.
A: It is the reason for their friendship, but it is not a moment in the battle that comes later.
J: We are set up to believe that running will help, and all it does is help Archy…
B: He misses getting that message to the captain or whatever by 35 seconds.
J: Right, he can hear the whistle and he goes: ”No!”
A: Would Archy have done it faster?
J: Yeah, That is the thing! Archy was the better runner. Maybe Archy would have saved all those men?
B: No kidding… Really?
A: Archy is fast, but I don't think he is 30 seconds faster.
J: The only person that Archy saves is Mel Gibson.
A: Wow!
B: Wow!
J: Is that who we wanted saved in this movie? Mel Gibson? What is he going to go do? Archy at least would have gone back and farmed more dirt.
B: Their friendship is also… they take to each other almost instantly, and then Mel Gibson is ready to just leave his other buddies hanging in the infantry when he gets a chance to be Light Horse buddies with Archy.
J: Let me just say…
A: His other friends are jerks, and I don't think they are friends at all!
J: No, they are totally friends. Those guys were great!
A: They don't have running in common!
Archy and Frank being romantic interests
J: Let me say, we should just get this right out on the table: The incredible homo-eroticism of this movie. Basically these two dudes, Archy and Frank, fall in love at first sight and their relationship is 100% romantic throughout the film, they gaze into each other's eyes, Mel Gibson abandons his other friends just to wear a fancy hat with Archy, and they do all kinds of naked swimming and piggyback rides.
A: Yeah, but they are also banging farmer's daughters and Moroccan's left and right.
J: Not really. Not really. We don't see that.
A: There is some implied Moroccan-banging!
J: That farmer's daughter was just a girl to come between them to intensify their hot competition they have with each other, but it is not for the girl, it is between them.
A: I don't know man, I am reading this paper and I am just shaking my head.
J: There was no Moroccan because it was in Egypt unless all the prostitutes in Egypt are Moroccans, which I doubt, and there were two prostitutes, so you can imagine Mel Gibson probably just sat in a chair and smoked a cigarette.
B: Can you just check and see which tabs John has open on his computer at this point?
J: I watched this movie and wondered whether Peter Weir was making a little bit of a soft core here. It is pretty close to a…
A: I enjoy the take, but I think a big part of that take comes from just how angelic Mark Lee is in this film. He is a beautiful person, he is impossibly beautiful and blonde and cherubic, like is just perfectly innocent.
J: Part of what makes him beautiful is the way he looks at Mel Gibson with tremendous longing, his eyes filled with dew, not tears, but literal morning dew.
A: I don't think there is anything attractive about Mel Gibson in this movie. I think he is greasy and gross.
J: Well, it is because you are not someone who is liable to fall in love with Mel Gibson, whereas…
A: I mean, I am an Archy-man, I am just going to say it right now! If I had to choose….
J: Yeah? He is prettier!
B: I was watching this movie on my iPad on the airplane and my wife, a Jewess, leaned over to me to express how beautiful she thought Mel Gibson was in this movie. I was shocked!
J: He is awful pretty!
A: Okay, this is going to sound like a cut and I don't mean it, but did she know it was Mel Gibson?
B: Yeah! Of course she knew it was. What?
A: He looks very young.
J: He is visibly Mel Gibson!
B: She was saying he is beautiful in spite of what a dirtbag he is.
J: How far are we into the show before Ben got in that Mel Gibson is a dirtbag? 17 minutes of recording time!
A: Cash your ticket if you had ”under 20 minutes"!
J: I really felt like there was a lot in this film. This movie has more male nudity in the third of four acts than you see in most war movie.
A: That was not an element in the version of the film I saw in middle school.
J: No, no, no, no. They cut out all the butts, but there are a lot of butts. That is more Mel Gibson butt than you are going to get in most films.
B: It is just like taint in this movie.
A: Yeah, when they carried that guy out of the water who had been shot, I was like: ”Where are your hands? Guys?” and then the wider shot reveals just where the hands are.
B: I don't think that is a take you could use in a contemporary film.
J: No, I don't think so either. It was pretty rough trade, is what it was.
A: You know whether or not that guy has hemorrhoids or not.
J: Yeah, you do.
The movie containing a lot of backstory about Australia
J: I can see why this movie is important to Australians because it gives this really broad picture. It tells the story of Australia coming into its own and so it has elements where it feels like they are compressing the whole story of Australia into one series of gut punches where it is like: ”This is the legend! This is how we went from being a colony, a territory, to a nation!” and there is a lot of information that needs to get in there that is extraneous to the actual story of the ANZAC and Gallipoli and war, and some of that stuff may be because we didn't go into this film expecting it to be a nation building movie. I was watching it feeling like: ”Oh, there is an awful lot of backstory that feels maybe like a lesser Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!” The walk across the salt pan is super interesting. From my standpoint I was like: ”Would I have walked across that pan? I probably would have! What would I have done when I ran out of compass? I would have hoped to have met the man on the camel!”, but that was 40 minutes.
A: Has there ever been a film with feet in worse condition than Archy’s in this film? Because he does that race in the beginning and they get all chopped up and then he almost immediately walks across the desert. His feet are never well!
J: Well, think about Platoon when that guy sprays the insect-repellent on his feet and the skin all falls off and then Sergeant Barnes isn't fooled by it and he is like: ”Get your boots on!”
B: I bet the feet have time to heal on the boat to Cairo, though. That is a long boat ride?
J: It is a long boat ride! The interesting thing about the Gallipoli campaign is that it took a year. The Australian, the New Zealanders, the Brits and the French were there, trying over and over and over again to seize the peninsula and to seize that waterway, and at the beginning of this movie we see people in Australia reading the newspaper saying: ”Our brave boys at Gallipoli!” and there is time for our heroes to read about it in the newspaper, hear about it everywhere they go, decide to enlist, enlist, ship out, train, and then be sent to the front and it still the same campaign the entire time. What we are watching is a movie that spans basically an entire year and when we arrive at Gallipoli they literally are still on the beachhead, nine months into this campaign, and they haven't moved 100 yards up the hill.
Soldiers not reacting to bombs falling
A: Very early on when we are on that beachhead, when Mel Gibson throws open the flap of his tent and go out the tent with him and we see that wide territorial shot, it is one of the best shots I have ever seen in any movie. There are some great, great looks here, and that is one of them. It is a weird vibe when we are on that beach, right? Everyone is camping, hanging out. Eventually you may get shot in the water if you go skinny dipping, but it is fine.
B: The mortars landing everywhere does not kill the mood at all. Everybody is enjoying themselves, it is a fun adventure vacation.
A: You don't see anyone flinch in those scenes, and I think that is a big, big part of it in that vibe.
B: It is an entire nation of Duvals.
J: It is definitely an example of how you could be a soldier in World War I and experience tremendous trauma and have a lifetime of post-traumatic stress disorder that you never acknowledged and that no one acknowledged. To be camping on a beach and be expected by your friends, for the standard to be like: ”More Barbies!” or whatever it is that they say to one another. ”Foster's! That's beer!”, or whatever, but bombs going off all around you, that is going to fry your brain and your emotions, you are going to be broken forever, and you are never going to hear a book fall on the floor or a door slam or a car backfire for the rest of your life.
A: ”My aunt has been in a butt!”
J: … and yet in World War I terms like men were not allowed to flinch or show that that was having any effect on them at all. It is in such studied contrast to the way we see the effect of shelling portrayed certainly in Vietnam movies, but even in World War II movies that have been made since the 1990s where we watch characters break in response to shelling…
B: Nobody has a shaky hand.
J: Yeah, but nobody has got to shaky hand in this movie. They are just like: ”Yeah, bombs are falling all around us and that is just how God intended!”
B: They are still winning foot races despite severe foot trauma. It is just stiff-upper-everything.
J: In terms of historical accuracy: I don't think that the timeline is very historically accurate, but the frustration of almost every trooper that landed on that beach and was led so poorly through those campaigns, they really never did, for the most part, make it off those beaches because the Turks just held them to the ridge and like most of World War I you would make an advance and then for whatever reason they couldn't or didn't hold that ground and they got pushed back the next day.
B: God, that going over the top thing also really reminds me of that Hacksaw Ridge, now that I think of it.
J: Hacksaw Ridge…
B: Yeah, this movie really must have made a big impression on Mel Gibson.
AD-BREAK
B: The case that is made in these combat scenes is that the British officers thought of the Anzac troops as being quite a bit more expendable than the home island troops. We are going to do this offensive, but we need to send you guys into the meat grinder to distract the Turks while we do the real thing that we are trying to do.
J: I mean, this is the super-duper era of British Empire and in the actual campaigns the Gurkha troops W ent into battle as unified squads. It was the first Gurkha and the second Gurkha, whatever, they fought together as a team, and the Gurkhas made a huge impact on this war. They were instrumental to some of the battles where the allied troops actually made an advance and held it. The ANZAC troops were thought of as unruly and from the provinces, but they played an important strategic role. The British leadership had unearned contempt for everyone and they got their asses handed them over and over because of it. They had nothing but contempt for the Turks and they thought that this was going to be… It is a classic, they way they thought it was going to be a three week campaign or a 10 day campaign.
A: ”They will greet us as liberators!”
J: Yeah, right! At one point they said: ”The Turk when they surrender will waive any garment in the air. If you see a white flag, be very suspicious because the Turks don't have access to white fabric!”
A: Wow!
B: They just believed their own racism hype?
J: They just thought that they were going to roll over them and of course the Turks at this point were supplied by the German army and Navy, but although the Ottoman Empire was shrinking it was an enormous and formerly powerful empire, but it still had some teeth.
Moment of pedantry from turkfan69
A: Guys, I have a moment of pedantry here: ”None of this happened!” from our old friend turkfan69.
J: Oh, no. Really? Not turkfan69!
A: He has commented on the Gallipoli page!
B: Turkfan69 doesn't believe that these troops were killed by the Turkish?
A: No, turkfan69 doesn't believe any of this!
J: Wow!
B: What does turkfan69 believe?
A: I don't know!
J: The thing is that: I don't know how much you guys know about Ataturk, but the founder of modern Turkey…
B: That is when you are slapping your Turkish friend on the back: ”Ataturk!”
J: Ataturk, who became the founder of modern Turkey, the first president of Turkey, the man that made all the reforms…
A: the man they named the country after!
J: That's right! Well, yeah, they named him after the country. He was…
B: Like Jomo Kenyatta, it is just like: ”Man, you are destined to lead your people with a name like that!”
J: No, it actually is an appellation that they gave him later. Mustafa Kemal was his name. He was a lieutenant colonel, commanding the Turkish side of one of the wings of this defense and he became the hero of the Ottomans so much so that he wrote that into the revolution that toppled the last Pasha, that ended the caliphate that begat modern Turkey. These are the things that are commemorated in Turkey, these are the birth throes.
B: Yeah, but turkfan69 denies it. That is wo weird!
A: Well, turkfan69 denies any other view of this moment in history besides one from Turkey. There is no Turkish perspective here, and that is what turkfan69 hates.
J: We get to see them from behind their machine guns, mowing Australians down.
A: Yeah, I mean that is the turkfan69 cut of Gallipoli, just that two minute clip of behind the Turkish machine guns and then Archy gets cut down, roll credits. It won best short film at the Turkish International Film Festival in 1981.
B: Turkfan69 is like: ”This is my original work!” - ”Wow, good job!”
J: How did you get Mel Gibson?
The Major Barton character
J: I spent most of the movie bumbling along in a buddy picture mode, never really knowing where the emotional center was, never really knowing how much to care about anybody, not super invested in the character arc of anybody, but when we landed on that beach, there is a scene where you just hear that machine gun and the sound design of it, which is maybe a slow rate of fire relative to some more modern Gatling gun, you hear each bullet, and the bark of it gave me chills. That sound more than anything really put me in that trench at that moment and made me realize how much was at stake, how dangerous it was. It was a sound effect that stirred fear in me and that fear stayed with me for the rest of the picture. The last quarter of the film is really harrowing and a big part of it is that the commander of the Australians… you look at the casting and think we were getting your typical fat, sallow,…
A: We get a couple of authority figures here, we get Major Barton who is in the trench. Are you talking about him?
J: I am talking about Major Barton because we meet him all the way back in Australia.
A: He is great!
B: Yeah! He brings the bottle of champagne to celebrate his anniversary!
A: … and he tells Frank and Archie to go have a drink after they sneak into that fancy dinner, right?
J: Yeah, and he is there at the very start when they are sorting people and he seems like maybe he is going to be part of the problem. He is the one that recognizes that last name Archy as a pseudonym, but lets it slide. We really figure out his humanity at that moment on the quay when his wife is putting him on board the ship and they have clearly so much love for one another that all of a sudden the movie is telegraphing to us: ”Hey, Major Barton, although he looks like a fat officer, is really a whole person!”
B: He is very well characterized, too, because he is quite capable as a commander, but also in this impossible position you really feel the emotions of that as he deals with it, his fear and the senselessness of it.
A: The part of the film that affected me most wasn't Archy's death, it was Major Barton choosing to go over the top with his men, knowing what it would mean for him. This was the greater sacrifice because Archy doesn't know he is going to die as much as Major Barton does.
J: Barton ends up being the hero of the film in a way. You feel the weight of the responsibility on him. When we see Mel Gibson at the end fall to his knees and go: ”No!” in slow motion he gives his Wilhelm Scream…
A: … and then he falls off the top of a building…
J: … you feel how awful that moment was, but even though you have spent this whole movie with Mel Gibson, you are left with: ”So what? What was the point of all that?” Mel Gibson survives it, presumably, or maybe he dies later, but if he survives he goes back to Australia and loses his money in a series of bad deals.
A: He has taken his fiercest rival off the track board. He is going to go make a lot of money on this whole running for cash circuit.
J: He might go to the Olympics or Australia for all we know.
B: He goes to the dirt farm, hires Archy's uncle to be his coach.
J: It is a World War I story condensed into this hard point that is directed at this one guy that we have grown to really respect and admire. That is what makes the ending so effective, as you say, Adam, him turning around and saying: ”I can't ask these men to do something that I am not prepared to do myself!”
A: And it comes on the heels of true evil for me. When Robinson knows the score and stays firm on the order, knowing that he is asking everyone to go to their deaths, to that be immediately followed by the gracenote of Major Barton's willingness to die with his men, the men that he has brought up into this moment, who he has taken a personal investment in. Their proximity, those two scenes are what make the film great to me. Until now it doesn't sound like you guys have a great amount of affection for Gallipoli, but that sequence of events was profound!
J: Do we see Barton die?
A: I don't think we do. I think he just goes over and then we cut back to Mel running.
B: Yeah, I don't think you can avoid the conclusion that he dies, though.
J: No, we cut back to Mel Wilhelm-screaming. He stops running at that point, he recognizes the futility.
The movie being about a bad plan
A: So much of this film in its war-fighting pirates are the insanity of a bad plan being bolted on to the end of a failed plan, and on and on, and they are waiting for the ships to soften up the machine guns and three artillery shells qualify as the softening, and it doesn't happen.
J: This is actually a true historical thing, and in the movie it is portrayed as they hadn't synchronized their watches.
B: Or their watches were broken in some way.
J: Right, but in actual fact, in the campaign that is being portrayed here, the shelling stopped 7 minutes early and the Turks were like: ”Huh? Seems like they were shelling us for a reason, probably an assault is coming!” and they all ran back in their trenches and picked their machine guns up. That actually happened, which is one of 50 stories like that during World War i.
A: We talk about it over and over again on this show, how vital communications are in the success or failure of a war or a battle.
J: Right!
Australian identity, why do we fight this war?
B: What does this mean to a 1981 Australian audience? Is it a ”the horrors of war” film or is it a ”I don't trust the Empire” film because they are an independent nation, but they are still in the Commonwealth, they still have the queen and stuff, right?
J: Well, but it began their sense of: ”Wait a minute, we are actually a people here and not a not just British people that live somewhere else!” and it is credited with inspiring the independence movement. That happened a lot during World War I.
B: You mean these events, not the film?
J: These events? I think the film is there to commemorate it and the film has power in Australia. This was their Revolutionary War in a way. This happened in Newfoundland and Labrador, too, in Canada. World War I really sowed the seeds of the destruction of the British Empire, all across the empire. Going into World War I the empire was rock solid and coming out the other side it was a shambles.
B: That is so interesting because those early conversations with Mel Gibson and his ”I've been working on the railroad” buddies are really about to what extent you can hold the idea of national identity being linked to this island that is on the other side of the planet from where you live, and some of them can get there and some of them can't and to Mel Gibson it almost seems absurd.
A: Yeah, I really like the case that he makes in that scene: ”This is my identity! It is us, sitting here working on the railroad. What else do you need?”
B: I wish I could remember whose Twitter thread this was.
A: It was drill!
B: I don't know who that is.
A: Some people will get that.
J: I liked that!
B: It was about: You can think of the nation of France as the territory that Paris conquered and similarly you can think of the nation of Spain as the territory that Madrid conquered. The idea of a nation in Europe to some extent is… weirdly the English were somewhat less effective at that, the borders of Great Britain… there is a version of history where they more thoroughly conquered Wales and Scotland and Ireland and stuff. The identity of that place becomes: ”This is all English!” or whatever. There are still remnants of that in France and Spain, like the Basques, the Catalans and the Occidents (?) and stuff, and it made me think a lot about colonialism. This movie I must have watched right after reading that because there is one Aboriginal character in this film, a very minor character at the beginning of the film who is the running buddy, but we see some anti-Aboriginal racism, but…
A: He is the other guy in the train station who says it takes two weeks to walk across the sand, was he not of that descend also?
J: Yeah, he worked for the railroad!
A: I liked that guy because he is just laughing at them how stupid their decision is.
J: ”You are going to die!”
A: ”Hey, why don't you leave me your shit because I don't want to walk out there to get it!”
B: The idea that this is all just England in the nationalist way of thinking of it and that is an idea that is easy to criticise when you are ”I've been working on the railroad” guy somewhere in the outback somewhere. The idea that they could raise an army to go fight this war that… nobody makes the case of why an Australian should give a shit about what happens at Gallipoli.
J: You remember when they are talking to the camel guy out in the middle of the salt pan and they say: ”Oh yeah, we are going off to war!” and he is like: ”There is a war? Why?” and they say: ”Well, we are fighting the Germans!” and he is like: ”Really? Why?”and Mel Gibson keeps pointing over at Archy and saying: ”Ask him!”…
A: ”That guy gets it!”
J: … and Archy is like: ”Because the Germans are…” Probably if you asked anybody right now: ”Why are we threatening Iran? Why did we bomb that guy?” 98% of Americans would go: ”Ehhh, he is bad?” and then the other 2% of Americans that have read all up on it would say: ”Well, we don't know either! Because? Because of the wonderful things he does?”
The identity of parts of the United States
B: About a month after 9/11 I heard an NPR interview with a lady that they found who had not heard about 9/11. She just was a farm worker in Ohio somewhere and news had not reached her. It was amazing!
J: But when you think about how an identity forms: The people that live in the South in the United States who are our Southern friends and brothers have grown up with a very strong regional identity. The South for the entire history of the United States has a sense of itself as a separate component of the United States and one that is antagonistic sometimes to the rest of the US, but here where we live on the Pacific Coast, our identity is much less completely formed and we don't think of ourselves normally as antagonistic toward the rest of the United States. We think of ourselves as a region, the Pacific and the Northwest in particular, but we don't think of ourselves as allied against the Yankees or against the people of the rural Southwest, but what would it take for the Pacific Coast to say: ”You know what? We are our own place now! We are going to start thinking of ourselves as Cascadia!” During the Trump administration, when they started to really crack down on immigration, the Western state governors all defied Washington and made the Western states asylum states, and it was the beginning of a sense of the West being a place apart, that the governments were going to start asserting a different identity. Now what it would take to see ourselves as so separate that we started saying things like: ”G’day!” or ”Putting shrimps on the Barbie!” or whatever it is that they do, it would take a lot more, but…
B: There are definitely elements of the far left in the Bush administration years that talked about a California secession movement and I haven't really heard that as much in the Trump years, but I don't know.
J: Yeah, well the rest of us were like: ”Good riddance!”
B: Is it just because I am not in college and therefore not hearing about that stuff?
J: I think that is what it is. You stopped following those people on Twitter and started following some grown-ups. But there has been a West Coast secession movement my whole life from the from the early 1970s, the Ecotopia and Cascadia movements.
A: Alaska never wanted this, right?
J: Oh, Alaska would love to be their own country!
A: Wouldn't they?
J: Yeah, but they effectively are!
A: Would anyone miss them?
J: Oh, you would! You would miss us!
What do you think you are doing?
The ending and the choice of music
J: I am not sure that I felt the tragedy of Mel Gibson losing his best friend in that last scene as much as I felt the tragedy of other people. It felt like Archy dying in that moment wasn't the real point or the heart of that scene, and that is not because the filmmakers didn't try to make the death of Archy into a tragedy that grabbed us all. I think maybe the Major Barton story and the story of just the bad architecture of the moment ended up being the heart of the movie and maybe that happened in the editing room because it seems like the way the script was laid out, the death of Archy was supposed to be the thing… Archy is the one person we see throughout the whole film, but the death of Archie didn't register to me as much of a tragedy is that maybe should have. I was confused as to whether or not the film felt like the tragedy was that Mel Gibson hadn't made it up the hill in time. What was the…?
B: Maybe it is a mistake to end on that freeze frame of him catching the bullets. I don't know why ending on a freeze frame was so popular for a little while there in the 1970s and 1980s, but it feels not as impactful as something else that they could have done.
A: Yeah, and then they go into Eye of the Tiger when the credits roll.
J: The music is the thing that really puts this movie in 1981, the strange Michael Mann synth and it is really out of place because it only appears a couple of times.
A: You are making didgeridoo-esque sounds, but you don't get native music orchestration here in that way. It is synth-y and 1980s.
J: It is Miami Vice-y!
A: And I thought for sure we would get a little bit of that, unfortunately, at least in the parts that depict Aboriginals.
J: Right, but in the scenes where he is running down the side of the mountain, all of a sudden we are taken out of the variety of machine gun and we are put into this bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu bu, which is like: ”Whoa! Stop that!” Weird choice!
A: But in its time…
J: … would have been a weird choice, I think! There were plenty of movies getting made in 1981 that didn't go bu bu bu bu!
A: I think every movie in 1981 has that!
J: Because all the movies you watched in 1981 were Rocky V, Rocky VI, Rocky VII.
B: If you can think of a movie that didn't have that, write in to…
A: I mean on the early 1980s, to the extent that you could call Gallipoli a sports film, which many elements of it are, I that is a hand in glove thing that a film of the early 1980s has.
J: It does have a Chariots of Fire angle to it, I just wish that they had used the same score. If Mel Gibson had been running down the hill in slow motion and it would be like: ”Dun dun dun dun dun dun!” it would have been way better! That weird soundtrack just feels like what you hear when coke dealers are running from the Coast Guard.
A: I would have liked to see it with no score at all and just the breathing and the footfalls and the report of the machine gun in the distance.
B: Is making a movie about Gallipoli like making a movie about the Titanic, where everybody knows what happened. if you live in Australia?
J: Right, everybody in Australia knows, but I don't think anyone in America in 1981 knew what happened at Gallipoli, any more than they do now.
A: The story of this film ends with Archy's death, but is the legend of Gallipoli so much more? What happens after Archy dies at Gallipoli?
J: They spend another four months there and then Bulgaria enters the war and all of a sudden the Germans have direct access to resupply Turkey and so Turkey starts getting all these armaments from Germany, because one of the big problems for both sides was that they kept running out of ammunition. The British couldn't resupply their ammo and the Turks couldn't either.
A: I mean, the Turks slowed down their machine guns as slow as possible to conserve…
J: … but the Brits and the French started to direct more of their energy elsewhere and so they staged this dramatic retreat where little by little they pulled out onto the beaches and at one point… There is a guy from Australia who invented a mechanism where they could leave their guns on the trench line, pointed at the Turks, and he built these little boxes where water would drip into a little pan and when the pan filled up with water it would sink down and pull the trigger on the gun, so they set these little basically sardine tins that would fill up with water and shoot the guns to make the Turks think that there were still people in the trenches, so these guns are like: ”Bang, bang, bang!” and he got an award, a medal, and ended up as an officer because he had invented this ruse that allowed the Australians to retreat back and get on the ships and get out of there, leaving all their guns like: ”Bang, bang!” As they were retreating there were 1000 horses that they had to just mow down on the docks in order to prevent the Turks from getting their horses. They just had to kill 500 or 1000 horses!
A: Oh, my God! I can see why this film ends where it does!
J: The whole thing was a disaster, and this affected the career of Churchill, this event was a real black mark of shame on the Brits!
B: … because Churchill was going to be king, but then he had to settle for prime minister?
J: You can't keep a guy like Churchill down for long, but he was Lord of the Admiralty!
A: You can’t keep him clothed forever!
J: That's right! He got demoted. He definitely spent a few years in the doghouse before he rehabilitated himself.
A: I mean, this is just conjecture, but when Australians think of Gallipoli, do they think of the beachhead of dead horses? Do they do they think of the lost cause? Do they think of the retreat? Did they think of this movie?
J: I think what they think is that this is an example of how the Australians performed valiantly and their English masters screwed everything up and this was the moment that they realised they needed to go on their own.
A: Right, this is the inflection point.
J: And New Zealand, too! When they say Anzac it is Australia and New Zealand and troops from both places. They were brave, they were intrepid, and they were just mismanaged and the pooch was screwed not by them. That is part of what makes those scenes so awful when they keep reporting down to Colonel Robinson and Robinson is just steadfast in his: ”Into the breach, boys!”
A: It is not just about a failure of strategy. This film has baked in this feeling of cultural difference and cultural condescension from the start, right? We get the suggestion of tea-drinking Brits on a beachhead and the idea that our fun Australians are riding donkeys, making fun of the stiff upper lipped Brits that control them throughout. These differences are made apparent right away and they are mockable until it pivots into such a lack of respect for an Australian that you would just order them up over a trench to their death, right?
J: Right, although the British troops didn't fare any better.
A: No, you don't see that in this movie.
J: In this scene it is definitely portrayed as: ”In order to protect the British landing, we are going to send the Australians into the meat grinder!
A: That perspective is something I am trying to interrogate here because if you watch this thinking that it is just a failure of strategy, you could go: ”Well, shit happens and that sucks!”, but if you are looking at it as though a British colonizer doesn't have a sense of an Australian's worth as a human being, you are looking at murder, and then you feel very different about this movie and what it is trying to say. Again, we are just guessing, but what do you think what an Australian thinks?
J: If you are in a position where an Australian officer orders you into the machine guns, you just walk away with a very different experience than being ordered into the machine guns by a British officer and that has got to be the key to it.
B: Right! And he is also so British, he got the RP accent, he is the upper crust type of guy.
A: And he is in comfort and at a great remove from everything.
J: That is the whole story of the disintegration of an empire: When you look at the disintegration of the British Empire you don’t necessarily feel like all of the newly independent colonies put an end to war, right? They just go into war from that point on under their own flag and that is the human experience. You do believe you can govern yourself better than a colonial master, but no new colony has ever perfected an utopian government that they always knew they could do if it weren't for the cracking whip of their overlord.
A: It is not for a lack of our effort, huh?
J: Yeah, right. You just end up having the same human mistakes, you know! We all have the same foibles, it is just that you would much prefer to do it under the leadership of people that speak your own language, which in this case is Australian, which it turns out isn't actually a thing. They basically invented it after this, like: ”Shit, we need our own dialect! Fuck! Hey, start talking funny!” - ”Okay!”
A: ”Hey, do that weird voice you do!”
B: Isn't that the story behind why we have different spellings for a bunch of words, like we dropped the ”u”’s out of a lot of words that have ”u”’s in them in the Commonwealth? Is is because the American revolutionaries were like: ”We are going to be such a different country that we are going to spell things even slightly differently!”
J: It certainly was part of what was considered an economical and more modern efficient way of spelling things. It was part of the attempt to modernize…
A: If you are writing things out longhand you want to take out as many letters as you can.
J: After World War I, one of the things that Ataturk did in modernizing and forming a modern Turkey was he changed the alphabet from what had been the Ottoman script, which was a form of Arabic script, and he put Latin alphabet, so Turkish now is spelled with Latin alphabet, although every single letter has some kind of accent aigu or some sort of modifier, so that if you look at the Turkish language as it is written and try to pronounce it using your Latin pronunciations, I am afraid you will fail, sir!
A: That is real power!
J: It is incredible! If you go to a cemetery in Turkey, all the gravestones have Arabic writing or old Ottoman writing. It is only after 1922 that all of a sudden the entire country… can you imagine that? As of tomorrow you are going to start using Latin writing, which starts on the left and goes to the right instead of… it is the ultimate version of: ”We are going to change which side of the street we drive on!”
A: There is a bookstore owner that is just throwing his hands up!
J: All the people that were like: ”Well, I never learned to read before, why bother starting?” Iimagine…
B: It really makes it seem pathetic that we can't get on the metric system in this country when you think about something like that!
J: Think of all the things that we cannot manage to do! ”Oh, it is impossible to keep racism off of Facebook!” - ”Well, the Turks changed their alphabet, my friends!” It would be like somebody saying: ”Oh, actually, we are going to continue to speak English, but we are going to spell it in Kanji!”, so: ”Good luck!”
That is a hell of a combination!
AD-BREAK
Reviewing the movie
A: It is review time on Friendly Fire, and that means we / I need to come up with a custom rating system based on an object from the film. No shortage of those in this film, but when I think of an object that is closely related to its theme, my mind rests on the stopwatch. It is the device that made you realize that Archie was great early on. It is also the device that - used improperly for whatever reason - causes a great amount of death at the end. It is depended on for a lot of things and it results in a lot of success and abject failure, depending on how it is read. I really liked Gallipoli a lot, and I liked it for what it was and not what it wasn't. I enjoyed the long run out of a buddy film, I enjoyed getting to know Frank and Archy and their friendship as it went on. It sets you up the way a lot of movies do for the fall. It gives you people to like and then it takes them away, and that is not a feeling unique to war films, that is just an effective film thing to get a viewer to feel something at the end, and I certainly did when Archy was killed by virtue of Frank’s slowness, Frank is just too slow, I think we know that. Archy is the superior runner! Besides the relationship I think this film was beautifully shot throughout. Those wide territorial shots of Egypt during the war game especially I thought were beautiful, that four-shot with the three characters and the swing set in the back I got a real kick out of when they were resting below the Sphinx and you see those foreheads, that flap scene was one of my favorites, and then finally at the end before the climax of the film that pan passed all of the knives in the trench walls holding the letters Home I found super affecting and beautiful. I don't know what it is about a desert that inspires that kind of beauty with composition, but I think we have seen a lot of war film set in these parts of the world that are just really, really beautiful and I don't think I would think that initially, like: ”What is there out in the desert but nothing?”, but this film does a great job in making those places look great. It is also a film that shows you what evil is: Evil is a man with power making decisions based on either insufficient information or just ignoring the information he has, and ordering people to their deaths, and that was true ugly in that moment after experiencing the beauty of a friendship that you get for the first hour and a half. It hurt to see the deaths of people that we like at the end, and it is what good films do, it is what good war films do: It gives you people to love and care about and it kills them at the end, and the message at its conclusion is how awful war is and how it takes away the things and people that we love. In that way, I think Gallipoli is a good to great war film, I think it is a 4.5 stopwatch film. I really, really liked it!
B: I also really liked it. It is not really trying to do the same thing as a lot of the films we watch for this project, and it does feel very much like the early work of a director: Everybody's favorite movie is or should be Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World!
A: On a scale of 1 to 5 Masters and Commanders is what the rating system should have been!
B: It is hard to see how the attar of something like this gets there because this is such a stripped down, simple story by comparison. Despite that, it is really lovely and evocative of all of these ideas about patriotism, identity, friendship, sacrifice, all of that stuff is very well drawn in this movie and I will give it 4 stopwatches. Also: Rupert Murdoch is bad!
J: … and Mel Gibson is anti-semitic. I am not sure! I like your description of a war movie as a thing where we are given people to care about and then we watch them die and and that is meant a certain way. That is certainly what an anti-war war movie tries to do. There are a lot of war movies that try to show us that war is necessary or that war is unavoidable or that war has a larger purpose.
A: You can still feel those things in those films when their characters die, though.
J: Yeah, but a lot of times we get to know someone and love them and then they die, but we feel like their death, although a tragedy, is a necessary one. I think that in general the three of us are, if you could say whether or not we were anti or pro-war, I think the three of us are anti-war….
A: Don’t put words in my mouth, John!
J: …, but there are plenty of films we have seen where we feel like: ”Oh, the larger story of this war was necessary!” and when Private Ryan is saved, my feeling was: ”Look, if Private Ryan needs to die, then Private Ryan needs to die! We have to stop the German war machine!” In this film part of the story is that what happened at Gallipoli and really what happened in World War I often felt completely futile. Millions died in this war and at the end of the war a lot had changed, but none of the things that changed were what anyone intended to change. The Germans didn't accomplish what they wanted, the British and the French didn't accomplish what they wanted, no one got what they wanted, and yet the world was forever altered. Only the Americans got out of World War I what they wanted, which was a Great Depression that followed only a decade later.
B: We went in there hoping to get some roaring 20s and we got them.
J: That is what happened! We made a lot of money on World War I, let's just put it that way.
B: It was great for the bottom line.
J: But in terms of this movie showing us what Australia was like before and giving us a sense of what Australia was like after, it didn't! It gave us a glimpse of the bush, it gave us a sense of a kind of pre-war innocence…
B: Usually that gets you an R-rating.
J: Oh my God!
A: Ooof!
J: …, but it didn't give us any real sense of like: ”Well, what was Australia like after this?” Because we end on Archy dying in freeze frame, we don't see a modern Australia rise from the ashes, all we can picture is Archy's family out in the Bush getting this telegram and being sad. But we never really even see Perth, we don't we don't have the full picture here, and ultimately the friendship between the two guys isn't enough to carry the weight of Gallipoli, of Anzac, of the foundation of a modern Australia. It is a sports movie and the war scenes are harrowing and if you have World War I already built in your mind and you can put this in as another scene, another setting and go: ”Oh God! The same story was being repeated all across the globe! Same futility!”, but this movie doesn't give you even the whole setting of Gallipoli, so I found it, although there is a lot of beauty in it, and although I kind of liked the sports movie, I found the whole movie fell short of my expectations, and maybe it was because I heard of Gallipoli the movie since 1981. I have heard it is a great movie and Mel Gibson is great in it, which he inarguably is, but I feel like it is a 3.5 stop watch movie, not as essential a watch as I expected it to be, and it is because I felt like the friendship between the guys could have delivered a lot more at the end in terms of making us understand some larger thing other than just that Mel Gibson should have been a better runner.
A: I feel like the senselessness is the message.
J: I feel like that is true of this show!
Who is your guy?
A: What sense can you make out of your guy, Ben?
B: My guy is on screen only briefly. He is in the scene where they are getting on the ship to head out. They have enlisted and the major is kissing his wife goodbye and everybody is going up the gangplank and the camera pans over and there is a guy that has crawled up one of the mooring lines just to hand a bottle of wine to someone on the ship (A: That's nice!) and I just thought that that was a really cool move, man! Yeah, send them off in style, give this guy a bottle of wine!
J: But also he is showing off to all the ladies on the dock that are waving goodbye to their sweethearts. This guy is like: ”I am sticking around! Look what I can do!”
B: Well, he is in uniform, too. He has got a feather hat. He might be in the Light Horse, even!
A: John is Friendly Fire’s famous not-impressionist, and he is all over this episode doing impressions!
J: But I can't! My Australian accent has evaded me my whole life, even at my best I can only do three words before I fall completely apart. I love the Australian accent, I have so many friends in Australia, and I just can't do it justice. I need to go there and spend two straight weeks just working on it!
A: Let’s go there!
B: Immersion!
J: You know, the Australian people and the New Zealanders love podcasts. They love our podcast. They have podcast festivals, and they write us and say: ”Come to Australia!”, and yet!
B: My answer is to fly us out!
J: Yeah! My answer is the same, too! Send us the booking information for the festival appearances that you set up for us, Australian fans!
B: Josh Lindgren is waiting for your email!
J: You got your independence. Now let’s see where the rubber meets the road.
B: Yeah, we will review some other Australian war film for you. I am sure there is one more!
J: Yeah, there are all those Nicole Kidman war movies!
B: Mad Max Fury Road is kind of a war film. Road war…
A: My guys is the train station guy I just call them Two Weeks. Two Weeks the train station guy is my guy in this film. I think when your two above-the-title-characters are shiny and bright the way they are, and then you outshine them in a single scene with your two-weeks-ness. He blows them off the screen with how crazy he is. I love him! I love that he knows the insanity that they are embarking on. He is out there alone. He doesn't expect visitors at all.
B: ”By the way, while you are walking through the desert, surely to your death, would you mind taking the mail with you?”
A: Yeah, that last request is awesome. I love it so much. I love everything about him. He doesn't care. He doesn't care about these fucking assholes. Go out to the desert! He is great. He is my guy, he really stood out to me, too.
J: He did! As soon as he was on the screen, you were like: ”Let's have this movie refocus itself on this guy!”
A: He is the type of character that I love in any kind of movie. The guy that takes over his one scene and is acting across the main characters and just blows them away. Big fan! How about you, John?
J: Well, we start this movie out at Dry Pan Station where Archy lives.
A: You know, kids love that showon PBS!
J: Dry Pan Station? Out at Penn Station where Archy lives with his mom and his dad and his brothers and sisters and his uncle and their farm and dirt and they have got cows and they are doing their thing out there and we spend enough time with them at the start that it feels like this is where the movie is going to set its terms and we are going to meet the people that we are going to know for the rest of the film. It is weird because we have an antagonist in the form of the mustachioed cowboy that defies Archy and is generally a bad actor. He is a racist guy, he is everything that we don't like in a character. He does reappear in the film at the very end, but the movie gives him to us as like: ”Here is our antagonist!” and then the movie takes him away. He disappears. We see him at the enlistment station when he calls Archy out as being under age, again suggesting that we are going to see him over and over and he is the bad guy, but he is not. At the end when we see him it just gives us a taste of: ”Even the bad guys die in this movie!”, but he doesn't end up being bad. But the hero of the beginning of this movie is the uncle who apparently had the world record for the 100 yard dash or something, and he is training Archy, he seems like maybe he is cruel at the start, but it turns out he is just strict and actually he loves Archy even more than his mom and dad. He is like Archiy’s father figure, he got a stiff upper lip, he is a badass, he is the Bill Bowerman of the film, and he was my guy from the moment he appeared, just a great guy, a guy I wanted to come back to at the end of the movie, I wanted to see him suffer the loss of Archy, I wanted to see him play some role in the making of a modern Australia, and I had to imagine that, but his characterization was good enough that I was able to imagine it and I thought he did a really great job, he got a great mustache, he had all the things that I like in a character: Grit, moxy, mustache.
A: What did you think of Archy's beard? The glue-on job?
J: Actually one time at Bumbershoot I hosted a talk where the science fiction writer Isaac Marion was there with the Internet phenomenon and producer of The Bachelor, Elan Gale as part of this panel and Elan actually cut some of my beard off with a pair of scissors and glued it to Isaac Marion's face.
A: That is very intimate!
J: It was and it was for Isaac especially extremely repulsive.
A: Did he glue it into a Hitler mustache?
J: No, he tried to do the same thing, make a beard on Isaac's face. When that scene happened in this movie, I was like: ”I lived there!”
A: Did it take seat? Is your beard so strong that you could just replant it on another person's face and it would grow? Because if that is the case, John, I would take you up on that!
J: I know. There you are, right across from me! I could put a mustache on you in a second!
A: I really felt seen when Archy had to get a fake beard going. I would need to do that. I couldn't enlist right now.
J: I think Isaac struggled to get that beard off, so in that sense it did take root…
A: We never see the aftermath of him waking up the next morning and his pillow is just a fucking atrocity and it glued itself to the rest of his face, like the Wolfman.
J: We will work on your mustache, Adam, that can be something that we do on stage live at the…
B: On stage in Australia at the podcast festival!
J: Thank you!
B: I wanted to give honorable guy mentioned to Sergeant Sayers who is the sergeant that gives them the talk about don't get an STD from the local prostitutes in Cairo speech.
J: Pretty great!
A: I love that sign. The sign was also something that did not appear in the middle school version of this film, just a big drawing of junk.
B: Fun! He knows that they are not going to take this seriously. He knows he has to do it. He is just going to get through it.
A: Ask anyone who is made to give a presentation. You want good visuals to capture a person's attention and the drawing of a penis and testicles will often do that. I used to do that all the time in my previous life as an office worker. It really kicks the meeting off right! ”It is not a penis, this is a penis!”
Choosing the next movie
A: What is our next film going to be, John?
J: Oh, you want me to roll…
A: Only you and the die can decide!
J: … the magical die. Oh look, I have the die here, but I also have some hand therapy squeezy ball. I don't know where it came from. Let me roll this die right now! 62!
B: 62 is a World War II film, Battle of the Atlantic being the subject, directed by Mervyn Leroy in 1943, a during the war war film. It is Action in the North Atlantic!
A: I like movie titles that just do what they say on the tin. You know where you are. You know what it is going to have.
J: Action in the North Atlantic!
B: Humphrey Bogart, guys. Humphrey Bogart! Is this the second time we have seen him? We saw him in the African Queen.
A: I thought we would have more Bogart films in this project. I am shocked that this is the second one!
J: What happened to this project was that it got a lot bigger than our initial idea. and it got a lot bigger right away when we realized that unless we are going to confine ourselves to war movies that star Humphrey Bogart, we are going to have to include a lot more and that becomes a bigger project, and I am so glad that that is what happened. There are a lot of Bogy movies waiting for us out there.
Outro
B: Yeah, God bless him! Well, that will be next week on Friendly Fire. We will leave it with Robs from here. In the meantime, for John Roderick and Adam Pranica, I have been Ben Harrison. To the victor go the spoiler alerts!
R: Friendly Fire is a Maximum Fun podcast, hosted by Ben Harrison, Adam Pranica and John Roderick. The show is produced and edited by me, Rob Schulte (Mehrabad Shelties). Our theme music is War by Edwin Starr and it is courtesy of Stone Agate Music and our logo Art is by Nick Ditmore. Friendly Fire is a podcast that is made possible by the support of our listeners like you. To make sure that Friendly Fire continues, visit maximumfun.org/join and pledge your support. By doing so, you will gain access to our monthly porkchop episodes as well as all the other MaxFun bonus content. If you want to chat about our podcast on various forms of social media, just search for our discussion groups or use the hashtag #friendlyfire! You can find Ben on Twitter @benjaminahr, Adam is found @cutfortime, John is @johnroderick, and you can find me @robkschulte (Rob Casualty). Thanks a lot!
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