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Review: Sony Pictures Classics has distributed this
important documentary (2001) about the terrorist attack on the Israeli
Olympic team at Munich on September
5, 1972, when at first two and then the remaining nine hostages
would be brutally assassinated, after a clumsy attempt at rescue at the
Munich airport. Later the West German
government would hand over Palestinian prisoners after an airline hijacking
that seemed staged deliberately (the enormous effort on airport security
would soon follow). An important point, however (and this does not excuse the
crimes in the film), is that Palestinians really had been displaced and had
property confiscated after the modern state of Israel
was set up. The capitulation of the
Germans to terrorists, and then, in 1985, of Italians on the Achille Lauro incident (where
Leon Klinghoffer was murdered) is often cited as
evidence that one cannot appease or negotiate with terrorists.
I was actually changing jobs that day and preparing to
leave home for my “Second Coming.” I
had just gotten back from West Germany
myself when this incident occurred.
I want to see more of these documentaries, but see
“larger” ones. Michael Douglas is most
effective as a narrator.
Munich (2005, Universal/Dreamworks/Amblin, dir. Steven Spielberg, based on the
book “Vengeance” by George Jonas, music by John Williams) starts with a
grotesque montage reenactment of the Munich tragedy and goes on to tell the
story of a Mossad agent (Eric Bana)
who hunts down up to 9 of the 11 terrorists and picks them off, sometimes
with hotel bombs, sometimes as a sniper. The tactics are pretty generic 60s
thriller genre, and the violence graphic, as Avner
guns down terrorists in cold blood after encountering them. In one scene, he
kills a (female) prostitute on a house boat, and she is shown nude after her
demise. In another a tag team, half of them in drag, land in Beirut
from the Mediterranean. Much of the film was shot in Hungary
and Cyprus.
Much has been made of the viewpoint of the film,
justifying countering terrorism with state supported pseudo-terrorism and violence.
When enlisting Avner, Gold Meir
(Lynn Cohen) admits that sometimes a democracy has to go outside of its own
values. Avner at one point says that he is helping
his people secure their own little place on the planet. Toward the end, Avner becomes super protective of his family, from which
he has been separated, as he goes back to Brooklyn.
There seems to be an insinuation that a “man” should serve the collective
purposes of his own people and family and not decide on his own purposes.
That’s a little surprising at this point in a Spielberg film. The final scene
shows Manhattan from the East River, with the Twin Towers, and particularly
the Waterside Apartments, which I considered renting in 1974 (but wound up in
the Cast Iron Building). Plenty of personal déjà vu.
A companion piece to Spielberg’s film would be the
Discovery Channel’s one hour “Operation X.”
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