TV programs worth watching
Sun March 28 — Sat April 3

One of the sources of real pride for my colleague Edmund 
Allison and I, when at Quality Films in Sydney, was the breadth 
of our collection of films by the outstanding Japanese filmmaker 
Akira Kurosawa.

For Kurosawa was truly one of the greats of cinema. A progressive 
humanist, he stands up there with Renoir, Rosselini, Eisenstein, 
Dovzhenko, Satyajit Ray, Ichikawa and others of that ilk.

We were the first to obtain the full length Seven Samurai  
outside Japan. Beside the original, the Hollywood remake The 
Magnificent Seven pales into insignificance.

Many of his films were remade by Hollywood, usually by directors 
interested in the explosions of action or violence in the films. 
Kurosawa's attitude, the ideology of his films, was ignored or 
simply not understood.

Thought of in Japan as "Western influenced", his films are in 
fact quintessentially Japanese.

Kurosawa (ABC 2.00pm Sunday) attempts to show what an 
important filmmaker Kurosawa was by quoting various Hollywood 
filmmakers claiming to have been influenced by him.

And it's true, George Lucas for example did lift part of the plot 
for Star Wars from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. But 
Lucas also largely missed the point of the original film.

Henry VIII was a king who kept changing wives. Everyone knows 
that.

But he was also the king who consolidated the power of the 
central monarchy over the nobles, work his father had begun 
following the Wars of the Roses, and effectively ended feudalism 
in Britain.

He removed Britain from under the thumb of the Catholic Church, 
thus freeing it to eventually make war on His Most Catholic 
Majesty the King of Spain, for the gold that was flooding into 
Europe from the Americas and the East.

That gold, plus the wealth appropriated by the suppression of the 
monasteries, was essential for the development of capitalism.

Henry's reign saw the extension of English power over Ireland and 
Scotland as well as the rise and culmination of the Reformation 
in England.

The new two-part drama series Henry VIII (ABC 8.30pm 
Sundays) is a well acted, well scripted and well dressed 
production about a king who kept changing wives.

According to the four part "observational documentary" series 
Selling Success!, screening in the Reality Bites 
slot (ABC 8.00pm Tuesdays), "success seminars have become one 
of the 21st century's growth industries.

"Many Australians now feel that a much better life could be just 
a seminar away — and they are willing to pay big money to be put 
on the fast track to success. It is estimated that more than 
250,000 Australians have attended wealth creation events alone."

The lesson of this week's episode, Brad Sugars: Building 
Billionaires, seems to be that the way to wealth (which here 
equates to success) is to start a series of success seminars!

In 1964, Soviet director Mikhail Romm made a brilliant film about 
the Nazis called Ordinary Fascism. Near the end of it he 
showed footage of the US army training young recruits to be as 
unthinkingly brutal as the young Nazi soldiers.

"They are at it again", said Romm, "turning boys into beasts". In 
Army Of One — Life In The US Army, on Cutting Edge 
this week (SBS 8.30pm Tuesday), they not only don't deny it, 
they actually celebrate the fact in a marching song!

We are beasts. You have made us beasts. With cold hard steel we 
will stab between the second and third riband twist.

The only difference is that now they are turning boys and girls 
into beasts. This sad program follows three recruits with very 
different results.

Bedtime (ABC 10.00pm Tuesdays) concludes this week, but 
fans of Andy Hamilton's splendid little series need not despair: 
a new series, retaining Sheila Hancock and Timothy West but sadly 
not Stephen Tompkinson and Claire Skinner, starts next week.

In this week's final episode for the current series, Sheila 
Hancock reveals a hitherto unsuspected talent for head butting, 
which her husband finds useful but a little daunting.

The ABC's publicity for the new three-part series The Big 
Picture: Rommel (ABC 8.30pm Wednesdays) refers to Rommel as 
"an exemplary general". But this European-made series shows that 
in fact he was anything but exemplary.

A died-in-the-wool militarist, cold and aloof — even callous — 
towards his men, he was a poseur who lapped up Goebbels' 
publicity about him. No great shakes as a military strategist, he 
threw his troops against the fortress of Tobruk without even 
properly reconnoitering the battle site. The result was a 
massacre.

One of his aides comments that the German army had plenty of 
other generals who were as good as or better than Rommel. 
Another, a former foe, comments that Rommel was fortunate in that 
he made his reputation in Libya and Tunisia, a comparatively easy 
theatre, unlike the meat-grinder of the Eastern front, for 
example.

The program makes the extraordinary claim that the German army 
was "non political" and therefore was neither for nor against 
Hitler. But "no politics", as Lenin pointed out, means "bourgeois 
politics", and the German High Command had very definite ideas 
about the conditions on which they would support Hitler.

Only when Hitler had eliminated the leaders of the radical 
"Brown-shirts" who still railed against the banks and the 
"bloated capitalists" would the military give Hitler its support. 
So he had his former bully boys assassinated in the "Night of the 
Long Knives", and the rest of the Brown-shirts conscripted into 
the regular army, thus ensuring the military's full support.

But Rommel was an enthusiastic supporter from early on, entranced 
by Hitler's promise of guns, tanks and planes. A few years later 
Rommell wrote to his wife "Isn't it wonderful that I am able to 
serve the Fuhrer, the people and the new idea?" The new idea was 
Nazism, of course.

I have no doubt that by the end of the three episodes they will 
have transmogrified Rommel into an anti-Nazi saint, but the first 
episode at least is largely free of this.