‘When the shooting stops, and the dead are buried….’
So you try to take a break from the grim realties of the summer of 2006 by watching an old Western, and you end up — well, somewhere on the border between Israel and Lebanon.
On Sunday, Turner Classic Movies broadcast The Professionals, a 1966 film starring Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster and directed by Richard Brooks. Its crisp opening credits set up the situation in a few deft strokes: Army veteran Marvin is asked by a rich Texan (Ralph Bellamy) to assemble a crack team of mercenaries to travel deep into the Mexican desert and rescue the rich man’s wife from a ruthless bandit named Raza.
Bellamy lays out the challenge, saying that Raza has a force of 150 elite and heavily armed fighters who know every inch of their desert landscape. Marvin is skeptical that his ground force, even if they make contact with the kidnapped wife, can make it out alive without an “equalizer,” in this case an expert in explosives played by Lancaster.
Starting to sound familiar?
Marvin goes ahead and puts together his team, which, in the spirit of The Magnificent Seven and every superhero team assembled since, is made up of guys with discreet and complementary talents: a weapons expert, a master horseman, a skilled archer, and Lancaster with his load of dynamite.
The movie unfolds like a Western of the golden era, but there are hints — a flash of nudity, a leading character played by a black man — that the film is very much a product of the mid-1960s. It’s not stretching things to sense a Vietnam theme being played out, especially when the mission turns out to be not quite what it seems, and the men engage in terse dialogue about right and wrong and a man’s commitment to following orders at the expense of justice.
What drew me back to the war in Lebanon, however, was the film’s counter-fantasy of an elite military unit able to infiltrate and root out a ruthless insurgent force. It’s a myth of professionalism — that a highly trained invasion force on the side of Good is all you need to defeat a deadly but morally inferior native insurgency on the side of Evil. That was a myth that animated America’s military in Vietnam and was beginning to die a painful death the year The Professionals was released.
That was also the very myth that seemed to have been punctured in the last month — a myth that Israel and those who love it should have abandoned long ago. The myth was fed by the victory in the War of Independence and reached its zenith after the Six-Day War. It was kept alive in the cinematic raid on Entebbe and the bombing of the nuclear reactor at Osirak.
Israel responded to Hizbullah’s attacks with a confidence that these swift military triumphs could be repeated. One month later, the country’s citizens are demanding to know why their politicians and military commanders did not anticipate the limits of a bombing campaign on a militia that hides among civilians, nor the psychological victory Hizbullah would reap by merely surviving the Israeli onslaught.
Like the “revisionist” Westerns that would follow The Professionals, the war has subverted our expectations and undermined our certainties. After years of murky conflict with Palestinian rioters and suicide bombers, we yearned for a decisive victory over a military force. Instead, we’re back in the murk.
If there is comfort to be taken in these dark weeks, it is that this doesn’t have to be the end of the movie, and that the death of a myth is sometimes for the better. The war in Hizbullah is already being compared to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, another conflict that led to political and military recriminations in Israel and deep national soul-searching on the part of Israel and its supporters. The near defeat was a humbling comedown from the euphoria of the Six-Day War, and yet from the very doubts over Israel’s invincibility grew a process that led four years later to a peace treaty with Egypt, at the time Israel’s most formidable enemy. The United States helped impose a cease-fire that allowed Egypt to claim a “victory” despite strong evidence to the contrary and enabled the Americans and Soviets to drag Israel, Egypt, and Jordan to a decidedly unpeaceful “peace” conference in Geneva. As J.J. Goldberg puts it in his book Jewish Power, “The Geneva Conference of 1973 opened the door to peace through which Egypt and Israel walked.”
Clearly, Sheik Nasrallah is no Anwar Sadat, and it is every bit a myth to think that Hizbullah and Hamas are ready to sit down and talk about their differences with Israel. And yet for all of their boasting, Nasrallah and his banditos have suffered at least one setback, with the Lebanese government’s agreement to assert its authority in the country’s South. Without the help of a robust international force, that’s a small victory, to be sure, but great changes in the Middle East, like hurricanes, often begin with tiny gusts of activity.
The Professionals is an inexact metaphor for the war on Hizbullah, to say the least, especially when the actors start to philosophize and ask if, “when the shooting stops, and the dead are buried,” there is any such thing as Good and Evil. In Israel’s battle with those who would destroy it, there is no such ambiguity. Instead, Israelis are asking what they can learn from this war’s setbacks and how they can turn them to their advantage.
P.S. One year after making The Professionals, Brooks wrote the screenplay for In Cold Blood.
His next movie was The Happy Ending.
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