I watched Miracle at St. Anna the other night on a friend’s recommendation. They recommended it over a year ago but I just got around to it. This is easily Spike Lee’s best film outside of Malcom X, but like Spike’s other work, it is laden with over-the-top racial anecdotes. This is too bad because many of the Buffalo soldiers probably have real over-the-top anecdotes that are a little more believable. You know, the kind that aren’t social justice pornography.

Aside from near shootouts over Nazi sympathizer, negro hating ice cream shops, the film is good, until we get to the St. Anna massacre. The massacre itself was filmed well, but Lee introduced a justification for the event. I suppose that the book’s author, James McBride provided this closet defense, but Lee should not have included it. The film portrays the Nazi’s as wanting information on a Italian guerrilla who is attacking the invading Nazis. When the people don’t comply, the Germans gun them down.

Now, this is a monstrous revisionism. For average Americans, it doesn’t seem too bad, but if you are Italian, you cringe at the mention of Spike Lee because you know he hates you.

When the Nazi’s came to Italy, they were not the friends of Mussolini, they came to take over and they slaughtered thousands of people. It was a program of subjugation. Any “reasons” Nazis gave for reprisals against the Italian people, who were dark ages poor, were largely excuses for PR purposes. They wanted to break any independent spirit the people had in holding back resources from the Nazi regime. End of story. The nearly six-hundred massacred women, children and old men at St. Anna were woefully misrepresented as a small crowd of collaborators.

So far it doesn’t sound to bad, but then we see two of the films heroic figures are Nazis themselves, whereas the Italians are portrayed as backbiting, filthy and untrustworthy peasants, in the greatest tradition of anti-Israeli cartoons so frequently publish in the middle east these days. It’s as if Hitler’s propaganda programs against Jews were strictly interpreted by Lee and filtered through his Italian characters, who are usually loud mouth dago goombahs and guidos of the first order.

That was the most offensive to me, that the two Nazi’s had to be the heroes who moved the plot line along. (Never mind that American officers were racist villains) He used a statue head as a MacGuffin, how about an Italian resistance fighter? Nah. One Nazi saves a child from a massacre while the Italian betrays his own people and another SS officer gives one of the Buffalo Soldiers his sidearm so he can defend himself from… other Nazis? It’s not really clear, but I was so tuned in to this idiotic undertone late in the film, I even questioned that.

Now, seeing that Spike Lee has always let his contempt for Italians seep through, I would also have ignored this film’s biases as well, as I know what I am getting with Spike Lee. But there was point in the beginning of this film where he takes a swipe at John Wayne and that era of war films. It’s something Lee has always done from his first films. He loves to declare “John Wayne is Dead” and his doing so in this film was direct swipe at Clint Eastwood, and therein lies the ultimate hypocrisy.

Spike Lee attacked Clint Eastwood for not showing any black soldiers in Flags of our Fathers. This is a false flag attack by Lee. While it’s true that black troops served at Iwo Jima, Lee leads us to believe that if Eastwood showed a black cook, ammo supplier or any combat support role, that he would be shouting “Yeah, that’s my black troops there. I can go home and sleep now.” Nope. Lee would have just adjusted his complaint that the black characters didn’t get to do enough. Regardless, he never, EVER would have praised Eastwood’s work.

While there were black troops engaged in heavy fighting, and even some who aided in the first flag raised at Iwo Jima, that was not the subject of the film. Spike Lee has a point in that detail, a black man contributed by handing a pipe to another dude, who raised the first flag that most people don’t know about and that the Rosenthal photograph was not about. I will concede he is right that those troops may not have a film celebrating what they did. So why didn’t Lee make one?

Because Lee was too busy making Italians look like conniving miscreants, dirty unkempt peasants and tight knit conspiratorial partisans. Meanwhile two Nazi’s saved the day and black troops fought for an ungrateful nation who serves Nazi’s ice cream. He even showed how the Nazi’s were hungry while their supply lines dwindled. Seriously. He seemed to forget how hungry the Italians were when the Nazi’s stole all of their food!

It seems for all of the extra length of his film that people complained about, Lee couldn’t include the very elements he demands of other directors. If Clint Eastwood agreed to do a directors cut and add in a scene that said “Meanwhile, the black troops kicked some Jap ass over here…” would Lee fix the obvious deliberate misrepresentations of his film? He might, but I assure you Eastwood would be the only director who didn’t hate correcting the record.

Spike Lee and author James MacBride were taken to task over their gross misrepresentations and Lee said:

• “I am not apologising.” He told Italians there was “a lot about your history you have yet to come to grips with. This film is our interpretation, and I stand behind it.”
• .

Perhaps these things are the reasons why Eastwood said Lee should “shut his face.” Too bad for Lee, he almost had a great film here. Not everyone is a popcorn munching zombie. Some of us see what you directors are saying, and we aren’t afraid to do the right thing.

Filed under: Wisdom of the Ages by admin