Tagged: Combat Boots
Mark Frechette’s Revolutionary Rags in Zabriskie Point
Mark Frechette and Daria Halpern in Zabriskie Point (1970)
Vitals
Mark Frechette as Mark, revolutionary college dropout and forklift driver
Los Angeles to Death Valley, California, Summer 1968
Film: Zabriskie Point
Release Date: February 5, 1970
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Costume Designer: Ray Summers
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Michelangelo Antonioni refocused his existential “Antoni-ennui” lens onto the American campus counterculture for the offbeat drama Zabriskie Point, which premiered 56 years ago today on February 5, 1970, four days before its wider release. Poorly received by critics and audiences upon its release, Zabriskie Point earned a cult following in the decades to follow as newer audiences appreciate the raw style and performances, the deeply human story photographed by cinematographer Alfio Contini against the vast California desert, and a contemporary rock soundtrack featuring Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia, The Rolling Stones, and The Youngbloods.
“Who the hell is he?” someone asks of our protagonist in the opening scene. Indeed, the moviegoing public may have wondered the same thing. After directing the likes of Alain Delon, Richard Harris, David Hemmings, Marcello Mastroianni, and Monica Vitti, Antonioni anchored Zabriskie Point with non-professional actors Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin in its leading roles. Casting director Sally Dennison discovered Frechette at a bus stop during the 20-year-old carpenter’s shouting match with a man leaning out of a window three stories above them. “He’s twenty, and he hates,” Dennison tersely explained in her recommendation to Antonioni. Continue reading
Twin Peaks: Dale Cooper’s FBI Raid Jacket
Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks (Episode 1.06: “Episode 5”, aka “Cooper’s Dreams”)
Vitals
Kyle MacLachlan as Dale Cooper, FBI agent
Twin Peaks, Washington, March 1989
Series: Twin Peaks
Episodes:
– “Cooper’s Dreams” (Episode 1.06, dir. Lesli Linka Glatter, aired 5/10/1990)
– “Realization Time” (Episode 1.07, dir. Caleb Deschanel, aired 5/17/1990)
– “Variations on Relations” (Episode 2.19, dir. Jonathan Sanger, aired 4/11/1991)
Created by: Mark Frost & David Lynch
Costume Design: Sara Markowitz
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Following what would have been series co-creator David Lynch’s 80th birthday on Tuesday, I decided to make this Twin Peaks week on BAMF Style to give Lynch and Mark Frost’s surreal mystery series some long overdue attention. If you don’t like that, fix your hearts or die.
Twin Peaks centered around the arrival of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to the fictional titular small town in upper Washington state, where he joins Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean) to investigate the murder of local teen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Even after the murder is ostensibly solved, Coop hangs around in Twin Peaks, lured by its colorful townsfolk and growing lore around the mysterious Black Lodge. Continue reading
Blood Diamond: Leo’s Khaki Bush Shirt, Breitling, and Field Jacket
Leonardo DiCaprio as Danny Archer in Blood Diamond (2006)
Vitals
Leonardo DiCaprio as Danny Archer, arms dealer and diamond smuggler
Freetown, Sierra Leone to Cape Town, South Africa, January 1999
Film: Blood Diamond
Release Date: December 8, 2006
Director: Edward Zwick
Costume Designer: Ngila Dickson
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Blood Diamond has been requested by several BAMF Style readers through the years. The movie is set during the brutal Sierra Leonean Civil War, which began 34 years ago tomorrow on March 23, 1991, when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebelled against Joseph Momoh’s government.
In his third Oscar-nominated performance, Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Rhodesian gun runner and diamond smuggler Danny Archer has been cited among his appearances in The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006) as a breakthrough into more mature roles for the actor. Continue reading
The Wind That Shakes the Barley: Cillian Murphy’s Olive Irish Tweed Jacket
Cillian Murphy in The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)
Vitals
Cillian Murphy as Damien O’Donovan, Irish Republican Army soldier
County Cork, Ireland, 1920 through 1921
Film: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Release Date: June 23, 2006
Director: Ken Loach
Costume Designer: Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
Last year on March 17, I commemorated St. Patrick’s Day by watching The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a fictional chronicle of two brothers from County Cork during the Irish conflicts of the early 1920s. Cork native Cillian Murphy stars as Damien O’Donovan, who joins a local Irish Republican Army flying column led by his brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney).
The brothers fight alongside each other during the Irish War of Independence, but the circumstances of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and Irish Free State deepen the divide between the increasingly radical Damien and more pragmatic Teddy as the two find themselves on opposing sides of the subsequent Irish Civil War. Continue reading
A Bridge Too Far: Sean Connery in British Battledress and Denison Smock as Roy Urquhart
Sean Connery in A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Vitals
Sean Connery as Major General Roy Urquhart, courageous British Army officer
Holland, Fall 1944
Film: A Bridge Too Far
Release Date: June 15, 1977
Director: Richard Attenborough
Costume Designer: Anthony Mendleson
Background
Operation Market Garden commenced eighty years ago this week through late September 1944, a daring yet ultimately ill-fated Allied attempt to secure key bridges throughout the Netherlands and advance into Germany. This major World War II operation was immortalized in the star-studded 1977 war epic A Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough and adapted by William Goldman from Cornelius Ryan’s nonfiction volume of the same name.
Among the film’s ensemble cast, Sean Connery’s charisma commands the screen as Major General Roy Urquhart, the British officer tasked with leading the 1st Airborne Division (“Red Devils”) during the operation. Despite Connery’s star power, the real General Urquhart had no idea who Connery was, though his daughters were thrilled at the casting. Attenborough chose Connery not only for his acting chops but also for his striking resemblance to a younger Urquhart.
In a memorable scene before the airborne assault, Connery’s Urquhart reveals to General Browning that he’s never actually jumped out of a plane—an amusing confession for the man leading an airborne division. The moment becomes even more ironic as they spot asylum escapees laughing at them from the roadside, prompting Urquhart to quip, “Do you think they know something we don’t?” Continue reading
Apocalypse Now: Martin Sheen’s Tiger Stripe Camouflage as Captain Willard
Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now (1979). Photo by Steve Schapiro/Corbis.
Vitals
Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard, U.S. Army Special Forces officer
South Vietnam to Cambodia, Summer 1969
Film: Apocalypse Now
Release Date: August 15, 1979
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Costume Supervisor: Charles E. James
Costumers: Luster Bayless, Norman A. Burza, Dennis Fill, and George L. Little
Background
Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial war epic Apocalypse Now was first released 45 years ago today on August 15, 1979.
Shooting had started more than three years earlier in March 1976 with an initial plan to release on Coppola’s 38th birthday, April 7, 1977, but the production was delayed by logistics problems, unpredictable weather, and personnel issues ranging from Marlon Brando’s mercurial temperament and Martin Sheen’s stress-induced heart attack to grave-robbers attempting to sell actual human corpses to the production.
“We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane,” Coppola recalled in an interview used to begin the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse that chronicled the film’s troubled production.
After filming wrapped in May 1977 (more than one month after the original intended release date), Coppola busied himself on editing over a million feet of film as the already bloated budget continued to swell and the released date was pushed farther ahead. Coppola debuted the work-in-progress at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it was met with prolonged applause and was awarded the Palme d’Or.
Three months later, the freshly completed Apocalypse Now finally landed in North American theaters, albeit only three at first—the Ziegield in New York City, the Cinerama Dome in L.A., and the University Theatre in Toronto—until it would be released in over 300 more theaters by October. The $9 million spent on advertising increased the final total budget to $45 million… considerably higher than the $2 million that Coppola, John Milius, and George Lucas had estimated to spend on it back in 1971.
The project had dated back even four years before that to 1967, when Lucas and Steven Spielberg had told Coppola’s then-assistant Milius to write a film about the ongoing war in Vietnam. Following Coppola’s direction to “write every scene you ever wanted to go into that movie,” Milius ultimately wrote ten drafts that blended contemporary anecdotes around the Vietnam War with allegorical inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Once Coppola took over directorial control from Lucas, he also incorporated elements from Werner Herzog’s 1972 epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the legend of the Fisher King.
The story that emerged on screen centered around U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen), a troubled but talented paratrooper dispatched by the Studies and Operations Group (MACV-SOG) to assassinate the renegade Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a power-mad colonel ruthlessly commanding a rogue force of American, Montagnard, and local Khmer militia troops who view him as a demigod. Without the four-person crew being aware of his classified mission, Captain Willard joins a U.S. Navy patrol boat that takes him up the Nùng River to Kurtz’s outpost at a Khmer temple in Cambodia, where he has been ordered to “terminate the Colonel’s command… with extreme prejudice.” Continue reading
MASH: Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye
Donald Sutherland as Captain “Hawkeye” Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970)
Vitals
Donald Sutherland as Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, U.S. Army surgeon
Korea, Summer 1951 through Winter 1952
Film: M*A*S*H
Release Date: January 25, 1970
Director: Robert Altman
Background
Today would have been the 89th birthday of Donald Sutherland, the prolific and versatile Canadian actor who died last month at the age of 88. Born July 17, 1935 in New Brunswick, Sutherland rose to prominence as a steady supporting player through the ’60s—perhaps most notably in The Dirty Dozen (1967)—before his first major starring role in yet another war film, M*A*S*H (1970), adapted by screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. from Richard Hooker’s novel MASH: A Novel of Three Army Doctors. (The popularity of the film resulted in the eventual development of a TV show—starring Alan Alda as Hawkeye—that ran for nearly four times as long as Korean War hostilities.)
Set during the Korean War, M*A*S*H centered around around the irreverent Army doctor Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce during his tenure at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. He’s assisted in his hard-drinking hijinks by fellow surgeons “Trapper John” McIntyre (Elliott Gould), Duke Forrest (Tom Skeritt), dentist “The Painless Pole” Waldowski (John Schuck), and former football star “Spearchucker” Jones (Fred Williamson), all while battling the uptight majors Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).
At one point, Major Houlihan asks the compound chaplain Father “Dago Red” Mulcahy (René Auberjonois) how “a degenerated person like [Hawkeye] could have reached a position of responsibility in the Army Medical Corps!” to which Mulcahy simply responds, “He was drafted.”
Sutherland’s Golden Globe-nominated performance established him as a star as his career ascended through the ’70s with starring roles in Klute (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and Ordinary People (1980) while also continuing to provide memorable supporting appearances in movies like Little Murders (1971), 1900 (1976), and Animal House (1978).
What’d He Wear?
Apropos his rebellious attitude, Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye never presents himself in a perfect example of a U.S. Army uniform, instead mixing regulation gear with personal accoutrements that craft a distinctively irreverent look. Continue reading
Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition
Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition (2002)
Vitals
Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan, recently widowed Irish mob enforcer and dedicated father
The Midwest, Winter 1931
Film: Road to Perdition
Release Date: July 12, 2002
Director: Sam Mendes
Costume Designer: Albert Wolsky
Tailor: John David Ridge
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
“Natural law… sons were put on this earth to trouble their fathers,” avuncular mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman) advises his top enforcer Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) at a time that both men are facing crises with their respective sons.
Father’s Day feels like the appropriate time to celebrate the style from this unorthodox role for America’s Dad. Tom Hanks pivoted from a career built on playing affable heroes and everymen to a dangerous Depression-era mob hitman in Road to Perdition, Sam Mendes’ 2002 drama adapted by screenwriter David Self from a graphic novel series of the same name by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner. Continue reading
The Longest Day: John Wayne’s M1942 Jump Uniform as Benjamin Vandervoort
John Wayne as Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort in The Longest Day (1962)
Vitals
John Wayne as Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin H. Vandervoort, commanding officer of 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, U.S. Army
England to France, June 1944
Film: The Longest Day
Release Date: September 25, 1962
Directed by: Ken Annakin (British & French sequences), Andrew Marton (American sequences), and Bernhard Wicki (German sequences)
Wardrobe: John McCorry (uncredited)
Background
Eighty years ago today on June 6, 1944—a date immortalized as “D-Day”—the Allies began landing hundreds of thousands of troops in Nazi-occupied France, laying the foundation for liberating the continent and ending the European theater of World War II within the year.
D-Day often conjures images of daring Allied troops storming the beaches at Normandy under heavy German gunfire, but there were many other elements within Operation Neptune, from aerial and naval bombardments and local resistance operations to the airborne invasion preceding the famous amphibious assault.
Irish-born war correspondent Cornelius Ryan captured all of these aspects when he published The Longest Day, his definitive chronicle of D-Day pulled from his firsthand experience during World War II and his own exhaustive research to follow. Three years after the book was published in 1959, Ryan co-adapted his volume into an epic film that would pull together a wide international cast and crew, with Ken Annakin directing the sequences among the British and French, Andrew Marton directing the American sequences, and Bernhard Wicki directing the sequences from a German perspective. Actual D-Day participants from both the Allied and Axis powers served as consultants for the film, which also starred a number of World War II veterans like Eddie Albert, Henry Fonda, Kenneth More, Rod Steiger, and Richard Todd.
The Longest Day was a commercial and critical success, garnering five Academy Award nominations and setting a then-record as the highest-grossing black-and-white film to date. Among its star-studded cast was John Wayne, portraying the real-life 82nd Airborne parartooper Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin H. “Vandy” Vandervoort (1917-1990). Though Duke was nearly 30 years older than the real Vandervoort, his ruggedly macho screen persona instantly communicated Vandy’s reputation among no less than General Matthew B. Ridgway, who described the officer as “one of the bravest, toughest battle commanders I ever knew.”
The real Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort during Operation Overlord in June 1944, with the broken left ankle that didn’t stop him from leading his battalion in defending Ste.-Mère-Église.
A Bridge Too Far: James Caan’s M-1943 Combat Uniform as Staff Sergeant Dohun
James Caan in A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Vitals
James Caan as Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun, determined U.S. Army paratrooper
Holland, Fall 1944
Film: A Bridge Too Far
Release Date: June 15, 1977
Director: Richard Attenborough
Costume Designer: Anthony Mendleson
Background
Established in the United States after the Civil War, Memorial Day honors the memory of American military personnel who died during their service. This year takes on additional poignancy as the 80th anniversary of many pivotal World War II campaigns that cost American lives, from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge.
My great-uncle, Sergeant Joe Kordas, was among these fallen troops when he was killed in action on October 4, 1944 while serving in Holland with the 82nd Airborne. As I was born 45 years later, I naturally never had the opportunity to meet my uncle, but his memory is among those I honor on Memorial Day.
My understanding is that Uncle Joe was part of the 82nd Airborne Division’s fourth and final combat jump, parachuting into Holland in September 1944 as part of Operation Market Garden. This Allied offensive was designed to create an invasion route into the Netherlands as a combined force of American and British airborne forces (“Market”) would seize nine bridges, which British land forces (“Garden”) would then follow over. The largest airborne operation of the war to that point, Operation Market Garden was not an Allied victory and criticized by one of its planners as attempting to take “a bridge too far,” a phrase borrowed by historian Cornelius Ryan for his 1974 volume of the operation that was subsequently adapted for the screen by William Goldman.
More than a decade after he starred in his own star-studded World War II screen epic, The Great Escape, Richard Attenborough was again behind the camera for A Bridge Too Far, his third directorial feature. Chronicling the operation from the American, British, Polish, Dutch, and German points of view, A Bridge Too Far boasted a talented international cast including—but certainly not limited to—Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell, and Liv Ullmann.
Most of this cast played real-life figures or composites of them, with one of my favorite performances being James Caan’s portrayal of Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun, a noncommissioned officer in the 101st Airborne based on the real-life Sergeant Charles J. Dohun, to the extent that A Bridge Too Far was the first of Caan’s films I chose to rewatch after learning of the actor’s death in July 2022. Continue reading
You must be logged in to post a comment.