bobquasit | Shadow On The Land

I just wrote this letter to Salon as a follow-up to a clip of Gene Hackman in an old Civil Defense film.

It's also worth noting that another early Hackman role was in a 1968 TV movie that was remarkably prescient: Shadow On The Land. In it, a near-future America has become a brutal dictatorship, and a very American-flavored type of Nazism is the order of the day (there was no reference to actual, historical Nazism in the movie). State control is nearly absolute, with the excuse that it is necessary to defend against "terrorists".

The "terrorists", of course, are the heroes, who are actually underground freedom-fighters. And a major plot point is an attempt by the government to stage an atrocity and blame it on the heroes, as an excuse for still more repression.

The movie starts with a close-up shot of the Bill of Rights. A giant stamp comes down and marks it "VOID" in huge red letters.

The use of twisted versions of classic American symbols was particularly effective. The new American flag, as I recall, was a two-headed American eagle, with each claw clutching a brace not of arrows, but of nuclear missiles. It was a highly effective movie, and the relevance to current events is remarkable.

Unfortunately Sony Pictures Television, who currently own the rights to the movie, do not intend to release it on DVD. It is almost never rebroadcast. A remake could be something really special, but apparently that's not likely to happen.

John Forsyth and Jackie Cooper also starred, by the way.

Here's the IMDB entry for the movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063589/

The message, of course, was that it can happen here.