I’ve bottled this up for a couple of months but goddam I’ve now got to let it out – the History channel’s big budget Templar drama Knightfall needs to pack a bigger punch in season 2. So, may I be so bold as to suggest where it could be a whole lot better?
Petty quibble at the outset. King Philip of France resembles Lord Farquaad in Shrek. It’s offputting. Possibly a costume change and rethink on the hair could improve matters. The flustering temper tantrums might have to be rethought. Other reviewers have likened Knightfall to Game of Thrones – but Shrek kept coming to my mind. Not just Philip but one of the female characters as well – but I’m too gallant and polite to mention who.
Please scuff up the king’s castle and the Paris temple! Everything is way too neat. It’s reminiscent of all medieval cartoons Disney churned out. Idealised castles with pointy towers and pristine stonework. Not a rat or a cockroach in sight. Where’s the hay on the floor and the dung in the stables?
De Nogaret could be a great villain – so why not give him some clever lines? Baddies always get the smart dialogue but I’d be hard pressed to remember a single bon mot that De Nogaret has delivered. That said, I quite liked “Good Christians are spies you don’t have to pay”. But I searched for it on a quotes website to use in this blog post. For some reason, the few good lines De Nogaret gets aren’t registering.
Pope Boniface is the leader of medieval Christendom. In one scene, he wanders into a banquet at the palace and nobody acknowledges or genuflects to him. There is little sense of the pontiff as all-powerful medieval prelate. He just seems to drift around. Plus – that white mitre looks way too 20th century for my liking. Have a word with the costume department.
The plot twists are workmanlike. There’s no element of surprise or shock as Pope Boniface does a 180 degree about turn with regards to Landry in the final two episodes. We don’t know why – and to be honest, I’m not sure we care that much. Season one often felt very rushed and anxious to please. So much so that plot twists were chucked at us with such rapidity that they lacked credibility and authenticity. Just take the frenetic pace of plotting down a notch.
Does the Holy Grail always have to be left around screaming “steal me” in every episode? And let’s be honest – this dusty goblet is a little underwhelming as cosmically significant sacred relics go. I know it’s supposed to be a modest vessel. But where’s the sense of awe? Just a weather beaten old beaker from where I’m sitting.
Queen Joan – gosh, glad she’s gone. Those endless grimaces! Please don’t use the Grail to bring Parsifal back to life. He’s not missed. However, I look forward to Mark Hamill entering the fray in season 2.
I want Knightfall to work – I really do. But friends must speak plainly and it just needs some tightening up. Please. I beg you!
I’ve watched some terrible historical dramas on TV of late – awful scripting, casting and plotting. So, discovering the Spanish TV six part drama La Peste(The Plague) has given me hope for the genre!
La Peste transports you back in time!
Set in 16th century Spain, the action takes place in the city of Seville. Though now resolutely Catholic, the city still reveals traces of its previous Moorish, Muslim rulers. Casting a shadow over the lives of its inhabitants is the Inquisition. Otherwise known as the Holy Office, this arm of the Catholic church sets out to identify Protestants and to eliminate them.
Our hero, Mateo, has fallen foul of the heretic hunters but is given a chance to save his life if he can find out who is behind a series of grisly killings in Seville. He is accompanied in his investigations by the illegitimate son of a dead friend he swore to protect. But this street urchin, Valerio, has grown up in the truly ghastly slums of Seville and is a ruthless, emotionally stunted individual.
Spain at the time it was colonising the world
What I loved about La Peste was the way it conveyed the filth and degradation of Seville at a time when the Spanish empire encompassed much of Latin America, Europe and even had a foothold in Asia – the Philippines. The wealth of empire trickled upwards leaving most Spaniards living in bestial conditions.
La Peste uses CGI intelligently and effectively. We see some familiar landmarks that still exist today in Seville but set among shanty towns, shabby markets and tiny dwellings. The last episode ends with an auto-da-fe – a public burning of heretics. I’ll admit it was one of the most unpleasant scenes I’ve seen on TV for a long time but, very much in keeping with the atmosphere of the series.
I recommend! The YouTube video below shows the making of the last episode of La Peste – spoiler alert and some of you may find the scenes of the Inquisition punishing heretics upsetting.
The Man in the High Castle – does it tell us anything about the real American Nazis of the past?
2018 will see the return of the grim dystopian TV series The Man in the High Castle – an imagining of the United States conquered by both the Nazis and Japanese at the end of World War II. Several years after the conquest, the east coast is depicted as firmly part of the Third Reich. Americans in SS uniforms enforce Nazi race codes dictated to them by their masters in Berlin.
The real American Nazis
You might wonder what kind of American in real life would ever salute the swastika? Though since the 2016 riot in Charlottesville and the proliferation of extreme right wing accounts on Twitter – it’s getting sadly easier to imagine such a terrible thing.
The truth is that there has been a long history of Americans flirting with Nazism.
Just months before President Franklin Roosevelt took the country into World War II, American Nazis held a huge rally at Madison Square Gardens. The German American Bund, an organisation aspiring to be the Nazi party of the United States, was led by a naturalised American, born and educated in Germany, called Fritz Julius Kuhn.
A rally of American Nazis in the 1930s
Some of the footage of that rally has only recently been re-discovered and turned into an excellent film short by Marshall Curry. It’s truly chilling to watch:
Throughout the 1930s, he rallied a large number of German Americans and fans of Hitler. Click HERE to see some startling copyright images of Nazis marching in America at that time. You almost have to rub your eyes to believe what you’re seeing.
Although Kuhn staged some disturbingly well attended spectacles, he met opposition from other German Americans opposed to Hitler, the Jewish community and both federal and state authorities.
But in spite of protests by anti-Nazis, the fascists continued to openly recruit. For example, supporters of the German American Settlement League, another Nazi front organisation, organised a youth camp in Yaphank, New York state in 1938.
On that occasion, the assistant district attorney moved fast to arrest some of those involved on the grounds they were working for a foreign power….Germany.
He could not tolerate young people saluting the Nazi flag and pledging allegiance to the Fuhrer instead of the US President. Here is the assistant DA explaining why he had to take action against the youth camp:
Kuhn met Hitler in 1936 – the year Germany hosted the Olympics. But he got a cool reception. Most likely, Hitler didn’t want to provoke Washington when he was planning his various invasions of Europe.
Kuhn was eventually imprisoned in late 1939 for embezzling funds from the Bund. In 1943, he was stripped of his US citizenship. Then he was deported to Germany. Unfortunately for him, Hitler and the Nazis had been wiped off the face of the earth. Kuhn was put on trial and sentenced to ten years in prison. Here is a news report from the time where he tries to plead his innocence.
In the years after World War II, you’d have thought that being a Nazi would have been beyond the pale. Scenes from liberated concentration camps showing emaciated survivors disgusted millions of decent people across the world. But not one man: George Lincoln Rockwell.
Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazis of the 1950s
Rockwell formed the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists in 1959 – shortened a year later to the American Nazi Party. He is widely regarded as the founder of today’s white supremacist movement in the US.
Speaking with his trademark and rather cartoonish pipe stuck in his mouth, Rockwell opined that black people should be returned to Africa and unbelievably, advocated exterminating Jewish people. Unlike other Nazis, he didn’t attempt to deny the holocaust so much as embrace it.
Rockwell meets the Nation of Islam in 1961
He also exhibited another common trait of the extreme right – rank opportunism. Convinced he could get elected US president, Rockwell decided to swallow his hatred of Latino and Slav-heritage Americans to build an anti-Jewish and anti-African American white power coalition. But more incredibly, Rockwell flirted with the Nation of Islam (NOI) and Malcolm X.
In 1961, he and a group of fellow American Nazi Party members attended a Nation of Islam rally – with permission from the organisers – in the belief that they held a shared hatred of Jews.
It’s an uncomfortable fact that Malcolm X was present, though not NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. The Nazi leader fantasised about a grand alliance with the NOI:
Can you imagine a rally of the American Nazis in Union Square protected from Jewish hecklers by a solid phalanx of Elijah Muhammad’s stalwart black stormtroopers?”
Mercifully, this alliance never materialised. But it’s a stain on the history of the NOI. In the end, Rockwell’s hatred of African-Americans trumped his ability to negotiate with Elijah Muhammad’s racialised version of Islam. Malcom X later split with the NOI’s black separatist ideology and sent Rockwell a threatening telegram in 1965.
This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans….you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation…
Rockwell was assassinated in his car while on a launderette run. He’d apparently forgotten the soap powder and returned to his vehicle when he was gunned down in 1967. His assassin was John Patler, a member of Rockwell’s own party.
Patler’s real name was Yanacki Patsalos but he changed it to Patler in the belief that sounded a bit like Hitler! A social misfit from a Greek family that had migrated to the US. As a young man, he had fallen into gang activity as well as being discharged from the Marines for his Nazi activity. He got twenty years for the killing.
Today’s American Nazis
Anti-semitism and white supremacism are on the rise today in the United States. A recent media report highlighted the growth of hate crime against the dwindling Jewish population in Yaphank – the New York state town that planned to have a Nazi youth camp in 1938. Incredibly, the German-American Settlement League still operates in that town and only recently has a ban on non-German descent people buying property been lifted.
The 2016 riot at Charlottesville evidenced that the extreme right is still able to dragoon disaffected white males into action. Many of them dream of an America run by the jackbooted racially pure.
But that nightmarish vision is highly unlikely – even allowing for Donald Trump! Nevertheless, those of us who value democracy and harmony in our society must remain vigilant against a resurgence of fascist hate politics.
Here is the trailer for the forthcoming season 3 of The Man in the High Castle
