Spies have inspired numerous novelists, with Ian Fleming being one of the most famous for his creation of the James Bond character. But espionage is a serious business with long-term goals. As Donald Trump's fanboy obsession with Vladimir Putin has continued to cause alarm, the following three articles offer valuable insights into how various figures on the Republican landscape might have been cultivated and compromised by the FSB.
- How Do Russia’s Spies Recruit American Assets? Then and Now by Christopher Burgess.
- This Is How the Russians Recruit You by Naveed Jamali.
- Russia Recruited Me as a Spy. Here’s What They Wanted by Naveed Jamali.
November of 1978 was a tough time for many San Franciscans. After moving his congregation in the People's Temple from San Francisco to Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18 cult leader Jim Jones led a mass murder-suicide of 918 followers. The shock waves that hit friends and family in San Francisco were amplified nine days later when Supervisor Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in City Hall.
While Milk posthumously achieved the status of a martyred hero, the following year headlines were ablaze with the murder of Sharon Tate by followers of Charles Manson. Since then, many people have become more wary of cults like Scientology. Unfortunately, a toxic combination of dirty politics, espionage, and cult-like behavior can lead people to commit ruthless acts of violence. In the time since Trump began his Presidential campaign, many cinema fans have wondered if America is now being led by a Manchurian candidate.
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One of the most famous spies from the World War I era was a Dutch woman who worked as an exotic dancer and courtesan. Before she was convicted of being a German spy and executed by a French firing squad, Margaretha Geertruida "Margreet" MacLeod (better known to the world as Mata Hari) performed as a circus horse rider. The inspiration for numerous films and five stage musicals (the notorious 1967 flop produced by David Merrick and directed by Vincente Minnelli closed out of town), Mata Hari's licentious behavior is still sung about during performances of Rick Besoyan's 1959 musical, Little Mary Sunshine.With musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius, the 2018 San Francisco Silent Film Festival presented a rare screening of Rex Ingram's 1926 spy film, Mare Nostrum. Starring Ingram's wife, Alice Terry, as the seductive Freya Talberg, and Antonio Moreno as Ulysses Ferragut (the handsome sea captain who falls in love with her), this movie was based on the popular 1919 novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez entitled Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). The film's butch villainess is Dr. Fedelmann (Mme. Paquerette), a stern strategist with a curious passion for archaeology and potent poisons.
From the time he was a young boy, Ulysses saw a painting of Poseidon's wife, the sea goddess Amphitrite, hanging in his uncle's home. Upon meeting Freya, he is haunted by her beauty and thinks he might have known her at some time in his past. She, of course, knows exactly when and where that happened but isn't about to tell him.
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| Alice Terry appears as the sea goddess, Amphitrite, in Mare Nostrum |
Mare Nostrum revolves around Ferragut's growing ardor for Freya and his complete cluelessness about her relationship with Dr. Fedelmann, an Austrian spy with important contacts in the German navy. After the two women work their wiles on Ferragut, he agrees to transport their friend, Count Kaledine, to a secret rendezvous somewhere in the Mediterranean. Only when a German submarine (the U-35) surfaces and takes fuel that was stored on board Ferragut's ship, does Ulysses begin to realize that something strange might be happening.
Meanwhile, Ferragut's son, Esteban (who has been searching for his father in Naples), books passage on a British ship in order to return home to Barcelona. When the Californian is torpedoed by the U-35, Esteban drowns and Ferragut realizes his complicity in Fedelmann's plans. Ulysses eventually meets a watery death as well, his body descending into the arms of his beloved sea goddess as Amphitrite rises up from the depths to catch him. In his program essay, film historian Kevin Brownlow writes:
“In 1924, Ingram emigrated to the south of France, where he took over a rundown former Gaumont studio built on the estate of Napoleon’s famous General Massena. Using MGM money, Ingram re-equipped it, building extra stages and a water tank. Shot in picturesque locations such as Barcelona, Naples, Paestum, Marseille, and Pompeii, Ingram chose Spanish-born romantic lead Antonio Moreno to play David Glasgow Farragut, named after the American Civil War admiral whose order ‘Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead’ passed into legend.”
“Making everything more difficult, Ingram took multiple takes of each scene. When it came to the symbolic love scene with an octopus in a tank, Alice Terry balked, saying ‘You’d better get rid of me now. I can’t look at anyone amorously, let alone a fish.’ In fact, Ingram did one take, the quickest scene she ever had to do (the scene is missing from this print but it influenced Orson Welles to try something similar in Lady from Shanghai). Perhaps the finest sequence Ingram ever shot was the execution of Freya. For the sake of atmosphere, he hired the same bugle band that had attended the execution of Mata Hari. The 24th Battalion de Chasseurs Alpins (the Blue Devils) also appeared in the sequence, photographed at Vincennes near the Pathé factory where such executions had so frequently been carried out.”
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| Poster art for Mare Nostrum |
Mare Nostrum includes some of the earliest work using miniatures to depict ships sinking at sea. As a life-long ocean liner fan, I got an unexpected laugh from the scene in which the Californian is torpedoed and sinks. Why? On the cold April night in 1912 when the Titanic sank to the bottom of the sea, there was another ship barely five miles away whose 20-year-old wireless operator, Cyril Evans, had turned off its wireless radio at 11:35 p.m. (just ten minutes before the Titanic hit the iceberg). The name of that ship? The SS Californian.
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| Mme. Paquerette (Dr. Fedelmann), Antonio Moreno (Ulysses Ferragut), and Alice Terry (Freya Talberg) in a scene from 1926's Mare Nostrum |
I found Mare Nostrum to be a fascinating spy tale with a subplot involving a love story between an innocent sailor and a sea goddess/spy. While the simulated sinkings were great fun for me to watch, special mention should be made of Hughie Mack's touching performance as Caragol, the timid seagoing cook and friend of Ferragut's family who has always been loyal to Ulysses and his uncle Triton (Apollon Uni).
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| John George, Rosita Ramirez, Hughie Mack (Caragol), and Shorty Ben Mairech in a scene from 1926's Mare Nostrum |
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As part of its Sandbox Series for New Works, the San Francisco Playhouse is presenting the world premiere of In Braunau, a challenging drama by Dipika Guha that needs more work but does a splendid job of making its audience uncomfortable. Directed by Susannah Martin, the play starts on an artificial high as two insanely misguided but unrelentingly idealistic Americans embark on their personal mission to make the world a better place.Sarah (Sango Tajima) is a young Asian American who recently inherited a small fortune from a beloved relative. When she and her husband, Justin (Joshua Schell), learned that the tenant living in Hitler's birthplace in Braunau, Austria, had died, they saw the building's vacancy as a unique entrepreneurial opportunity. Disgusted with the results of the 2016 Presidential election, why not use their creativity and [questionable] business skills to lease Hitler's childhood home and transform it into an all-inclusive, safe "rainbow" venue for consciousness raising?
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| Josh Schell (Justin), Sam Jackson (Soha), Mohammad Shehata (Jai), and Sango Tajima (Sarah) in a scene from In Braunau (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Instead of opting to go the traditional bed-and-breakfast route, their goal is to use the property as a bed-and-dinner destination where all kinds of people can learn from each other while sitting around a dinner table and talking about the past. With the self-assured zeal of Millennials launching a startup business, they arrive in town eager to please while trying to be as politically correct as possible. Convinced that the boldness of their vision and its inevitable success will allow them to operate as a nonprofit, neither has much (if any) experience in the hospitality industry. Instead, what they have in abundance is a dangerous mix of ingenuousness, good intentions, and cluelessness about the nervous behavior of the locals they have met.
Add in an astonishing lack of knowledge about how social media works (together with a dash of the good old American "Great White Father" complex) and it doesn't take long for the situation to deteriorate. When an intense local blogger named P (Sam Jackson) shows up to interview Justin and Sarah, her concern for their welfare fails to pierce their self-congratulatory cloud of unbridled optimism. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
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| Josh Schell (Justin), Sango Tajima (Sarah), and Sam Jackson (P) in a scene from In Braunau (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
While the realtor, Gerta (Elissa Beth Stebbins) and her husband, Fritz (Timothy Roy Redmond), worry about how successful Justin and Sarah's project could be, they offer to let the couple spend their first night on the property for free before signing a lease. On successive nights, Sarah keeps hearing the beautiful voices of a children's choir, which seem to be coming from the local church. No one else hears the music because, as the locals know all too well, there is no choir. Having spent a night terrified by an aura of death, the couple's first guests, Soha (Sam Jackson) and Jai (Mohammad Shehata), can't wait to leave the premises the following morning.
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| Sango Tajima (Sarah) and Sam Jackson (Soha) in a scene from In Braunau (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Things seem to change for the better when Justin meets Alfred (Timothy Roy Redmond), an eager Austrian with a hidden agenda who quickly helps Justin build a Facebook page for his new business. Overnight, Justin acquires a large following of "friends" (many of whom seem surprisingly eager to stay at his bed-and-dinner inn). Unfortunately, the "friends" and the mysterious beer hall where they host "parties" have much more ominous plans than Justin and Sarah could ever imagine. However, having gotten drunk on beer the night before and still high on his friendship with a new "brother," Justin is totally unprepared for the sobering news that Sarah is pregnant.
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| Timothy Roy Redmond (Alfred) and Josh Schell (Justin) bond over beer in a scene from In Braunau (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Justin's exhilaration over his male bonding leaves him deaf to Sarah's urgent concerns about where their child will be born and the fact that he seems to have forgotten that she is of Asian heritage. While Justin still believes that their karma can transform the "birthplace of evil" that gave rise to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, it soon becomes obvious that their new "friends" have a much deeper investment in making sure that Sarah's baby is born on the premises.
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| Josh Schell (Justin), Sango Tajima (Sarah), and Elissa Beth Stebbins (Gerta) in a scene from In Braunau (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Guha's 90-minute drama (which accelerates like a horror story inspired by Rosemary's Baby and the rise of white supremacists in both the United States and Europe) is filled with enough magical realism and blatant misogyny to creep out its audience. Yet it also offers a stern warning about the inherent naiveté of spoiled Americans who wrongly assume that they have the all answers. In his program note, the company's artistic director, Bill English, writes:
"Our world is so bedeviled with nationalistic and religious extremism. It is everywhere we look. We shake our heads with incomprehension for the 'whys' behind racist and sectarian hatred. Is evil a real force at work in the world? Is it a disease one can catch? Are there seeds lying dormant in all of us that, when watered, could turn any of us toward our darkest sides? I think we suspect that these things are true, but we don’t want to admit it (we, who have never faced millions of deaths in our country from war or been ripped from our homes and turned into stateless outcasts)."
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| Sarah (Sango Tajima) has a terrifying dream starring a mysterious visitor (Mohammad Shehata) a scene from In Braunau (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
"We find it nearly impossible to put ourselves in the shoes of people who turn to the security of absolute power, to the comfort of belonging by excluding others, to the seductive head rush of hate. We swear we could never be swayed by such forces, yet safe in our liberal Bay area bubble, we feel free to hate the haters who we can’t understand. Though we congratulate ourselves that we are better than they, Dipika Guha forces us to face the inconvenient truth that evil sneaks up on the unsuspecting and, masquerading as national pride or a sense of belonging, takes over unsuspecting hearts and minds."In Braunau has been staged in The Rueff (a black box space atop the Strand Theatre) using a handsome unit set designed by Angrette McCloskey with lighting and video designed by Wolfgang Wachalovsky and sound design by James Ard. The six-actor ensemble keeps the suspense level high, with Sam Jackson doubling as Soha and P; Mohammad Shehata doubling as Jai and Deedee; Timothy Roy Redmond doubling as Fritz and Alfred; and Elissa Beth Stebbins doing triple duty as Gerta, Rose, and Alfred's wife, Katrine.
The most intense moments belong to Sango Tajima and Josh Schell, two actors whose work I have consistently admired and who once again demonstrate their versatility and total dramatic commitment to character. In Braunau screams out a timely warning about the dark and deepening moral crisis currently festering within the United States, but it also reinforces the concept that any straight man can have his head turned with a few friendly (and free) beers. In Guha's drama, the unfortunate price to be paid for the privilege of white men bonding is far more disturbing than merely questioning one's sexual orientation when the booze wears off the following morning.
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