Lee also says he
has seen firsthand that relationships between Italian-Americans and
African-Americans have been kind of volatile. However, Lee in his
films "Do the Right
Thing" and
"Jungle Fever" Negatively
Portrays the Italians, as stubborn and insensitive, and the Blacks as
righteously riotous.
The scene that
sticks out in my mind, and is representative is when certain black thugs DEMAND
that the Proprietor of the Pizza Store (Danny Aiello) take down the pictures of
Frank Sinatra, and other Italian American Greats, and replace them with Black
Icons. When Danny refuses, they assault him and burn down the store, and Lee portrays
this as justice.
If the Blacks didn't like Danny's
decor, just take your business elsewhere.. And while
you are at it, go over to KFC, and demand that the Colonel be depicted as
Black, or that Wendys be depicted as Black, or
that all the KFC, McDonalds, Taco Bells in Black neighborhood's have interior/exterior decor that is
African American.
Spike, you are
Not only a Physical Midget, but a Mental one as well!!!!
The
cinema icon talks about reshaping American mythology with his WWII epic,
"Miracle at St. Anna," and what Hollywood
would look like if he were in charge.
Salon Magazine
By James Hannaham
September 25, 2008
Do you remember the moment you gave up on Spike Lee? You might want to
reverse your decision, because his new WWII epic, "Miracle at St.
Anna," is the joint you've
prayed he had in him all this time.
I gave up in 1992, during the overhyped and merely OK "Malcolm
X," when Denzel Washington's
voice-over describes the young Malcolm X's
outrage at the way his teachers attempted to keep him in his place. He says
something to the effect that he's
been treated like a horse. As the speech concludes, Spike cuts to a horse. I
was insulted -- this guy doesn't
think I know what a horse looks like? I told myself I'd
wait for some positive word-of-mouth before I dropped dollars on another Spike
feature.
So I sat out duds like "Bamboozled" and "She Hate Me." Documentaries like
the Oscar-nominated "4 Little Girls" suggested that his true
talent lay there. But then came 2006's "Inside Man," Lee's ambitious effort to redefine the Hollywood blockbuster. Right, I thought, a staunchly independent
cinema icon with an offbeat, cantankerous sensibility is going to pull that
off. But to my surprise, Lee took a competent, clever bank heist film, infused
it with his heterogeneous New York
gestalt, and transformed it not only into a memorable examination of racism and
sleazy post-9/11 politics but, above all, a sharp psychological thriller. The
movie, a critical hit, took in $186 million worldwide. Instead of the customary
"joint," Lee called it a "film."
It might all have ended there, or with several more bank robbery thrillers,
had Lee not picked up James McBride's
2003 novel "Miracle at St. Anna." Intrigued by the story's compelling and fresh take on WWII, he has
brought to the screen a complex fictional account of the real 92nd
Infantry Division, a corps of black American soldiers (also called
"Buffalo Soldiers"). The film follows four enlisted men who become
trapped in a Tuscan village after a botched sortie. One of them, Train, is a
simple-minded hulk who befriends a charmingly daft Italian kid, Angelo, who
turns out to have survived a mass killing. McBride was inspired by a
real mass murder that took place in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna
di Stazzema in 1944. Lee got into a tiff with Clint Eastwood recently when the
diminutive Brooklynite pointed out that Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" misrepresented
the African-American presence in WWII....
Intrigued by the Spike renaissance, I grabbed some phone time with Lee as he
began a Normandy
of publicity for the film's opening
weekend. (Listen to the interview here.)
How did you come across the book "Miracle at St. Anna"?
...I was in my wife's office,
looking at her bookshelf.... I pulled a book out
I saw the cover with a black soldier and a young Italian boy and I said,
What is this? And I read it, said I want to make it into a movie...
In some respects "Miracle at St. Anna" is meant to be a
corrective for Hollywood World War II films
that have omitted people of color.
Well, No. 1, that's not what I'm saying. I'm
not going to make a movie just to correct something. I mean it's there, but that's
not the reason I made the film. The reason I made the film is 'cause it's
a great story. This is a piece of history that happened. You know,
African-Americans have fought for this country, and have always been very
patriotic --...But a lot of times history is made into mythology. So we address
some of that mythology at the beginning of "Miracle at St. Anna" with
the film "The Longest Day" [playing on the main character's TV in the present day]. That's a film about the invasion of Normandy with the icon of all American
icons, John Wayne. You can't get
more American than that. It will take more than one movie, with all the war
films Hollywood
has done without African-Americans, to set the record straight.
The 92nd was an actual infantry, but McBride's
book is fiction.
It's not a historical
text. When he was a young kid growing up in Brooklyn, about 10
years old, he'd go over to his uncle's house and his uncle would play cards and drink
and get drunk and start telling war stories about himself and other black
soldiers fighting the Nazis in Italy.
That's how James got the inspiration
for the book....
You've always had a kind of
subtle affinity for Italians and Italian-Americans.
I don't think it's subtle; I think it's
very overt. I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn,
Cobble Hill. From early on a lot of my friends were Italian-American. That's not subtle. Also, I've
seen firsthand that relationships between Italian-Americans and
African-Americans have been kind of volatile over the years, and that was
reflected in the films "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle
Fever." "Miracle at St. Anna" really goes backward
in time, where you had this relationship between black soldiers and Italians in
WWII. These individuals saw the Buffalo Soldiers as their liberators, not as
thugs or whatever. They were a part of the U.S. Army, which they'd been waiting on to liberate them from the tyranny
of the Nazis and the last dregs of disaster under Mussolini.
It's interesting that the film
not only shows us a part of black history that we haven't
seen too often but also corrects the image of Europeans at the same time.
Definitely, yes, I'm glad you
said that. Even the Italian actors talked about that; they were glad the
Italians were not portrayed as stereotypical -- playing mandolins, drinking
wine, singing, dancing and whatnot. {RAA: Yes much better the
Italians be Massacred] Also, I wanted to show the
Nazis in a different light, too -- not to make them heroes, but we felt there
had to be a different way to portray Nazis than the one-note way I've seen in the films that come out of the Hollywood
studios dealing with WWII...
But what "Miracle" is saying is that there aren't these villains, there are just people and
situations.
There are villains; I was not trying to pretty up that massacre scene. On
Aug. 12, 1944, the 16th division of the SS massacred 500 innocent
people [at Sant'Anna
di Stazzema]: old men and women
and children. That is a monstrous, barbaric act,
so you can't get around that.
The film seems to suggest that while this was an evil act, a whole
group of people were not necessarily villains for having done it.
That's one of the bad things
about soldiers. They know they must, when their commanders demand it, commit
inhumane acts, and most of the time they're
going to follow orders. Then when they go up on war charges, what do they say?
I was just following orders. [RAA: Not Villans???
What, Heroes ?? Are you galactically
stupid?]
None of the lead characters in "Miracle" is a hero in the
strictest sense. I was surprised by that.
What do you mean? Train, Bishop, Hector Negron -- I think they're very heroic. These are young black men that
volunteered to fight for this country at a time when America was still considering them
second-class citizens. That's
definitely heroic. [RAA: Then everyone's
a hero, and the term has lost it's
meaning, and everyone that follows the law, even though it is
against their core principles is a HERO !!!!!] ....
But you know what I'm saying
-- their story is more complicated than "they went over and kicked
ass." It's more like, they're lucky any of them got back alive.
Well, we're being truthful. They
were not put in the position to perform to the best of their abilities. The
policy of the Army brass was that only white Southern commanders should command
the Buffalo Soldiers because white men from the South supposedly knew how to
deal with black folks, and consequently, when that was put in place, there was
a terrible rapport between the black soldiers and their white deep-Southern
officers... [RAA: Sorta like in the Civil War when
Officers recieved their Commissions based on
political influence, and had no Training, were from wealthy families, and these
Elitists were in charge of farmboys who they treated
badly, and were resented by the "grunts".]