This movie was on disc one of a five DVD set, which Dave saw on eBay for like $51 including shipping, however my copy was rented, from Movie Madness (moving to newer digs next year). Last night we watched The Trial (disc four), which Orson wrote and directed (1962, starring Anthony Perkins, Kafkaesque).
This noir is a throwback to when hunting a specific brand of ideologue was understood in light of the WW2 experience. Orson plays an embedded eugenicist, a college professor, but in the past he was a concentration camp supporter, even main organizer.
Edward G. Robinson (the actor, playing an undercover detective) is hot on his trail, and shows up in Harper Connecticut right when Orson is getting married to his target, the daughter of a high level United States authority figure.
Later, the eugenicists would manage to redirect all this paranoia, about embedded spies, towards the Russians, a former ally, evidence these earlier worries (about a former foe) were justified. In fact, many during WW2 were more interested in defeating the Slavs than the Goths (the Hun), not that such internal programming (wiring) makes any sense in the grand scheme of things; reflex-conditioning leads to a lot of nonsensical violence, and thinking in racial terms is clearly “buggy” (a euphemism for “demented” in this case).
Orson, being from a clock-fixated culture, like these big clocks in town squares, atop towers, can’t keep himself away from fixing the town clock, making a racket with the bells and drawing attention to himself.
It’s almost as if he has a thick German accent and can’t stop doing that arm gesture from the movies, but that’s not his problem. He speaks American, and acts the part of a New England based college professor just fine. His problem is they can’t keep him away from the clock tower, where he’s obsessed with the broken clock.
The other telling giveaway that Robinson detects comes up in conversation. Orson is going on and on about what losers those Germans are (even though many Americans shared the same ideology and do to this day) but then he spits out “Marx was no German, he was a Jew”. Robinson woke up latter, in the middle of the night, realizing only an embedded eugenicist would say such a knee-jerk thing, and he called Washington DC, reversing his not guilty verdict (or hunch).
Orson meets his end in that clocktower, skewered by his own clock (it has pointy bits), a metaphor for how mechanical men, unable to reprogram themselves, end up: as victims of their own machinery. Debugging a monstrous mindset doesn’t equate to unlocking high level social skills i.e. what’s actually required if one expects to make significant headway on this planet (as an ideologue or otherwise).
