On this date in 1955, Great Britain hanged Ruth Ellis, who became the last woman executed in the United Kingdom. Ellis was convicted of murdering race-car driver David Blakely. Ellis and Blakely had an affair that sometimes became violent, including one time when Blakely hit Ellis in the stomach causing her to miscarriage. Ellis, a married night club hostess, was found guilty of shooting Blakely to death outside a pub in North London. She emptied the bullets in her revolver into his body and then asked someone to call the police. She immediately gave a full confession.
After the jury convicted the 28-year-old Ellis of intentional murder, she automatically received the death penalty. She was hanged at Holloway Prison. As in the modern United States, executions of women often seem to highlight for some the barbarity of the death penalty. In Ellis’s case, thousands of people protested the planned execution.
Although more men were hanged after Ellis, she was the last woman hanged in Great Britain. The last men were hanged in 1964, as England, Scotland, and Wales banned the death penalty for murder in 1965. In 1973, Northern Ireland banned capital punishment, and in 1998 Great Britain banned executions for all crimes, including treason.
I just learned there is a movie about the case, Dance With A Stranger (1985). It does not appear to be available on Netflix, but is available other places. Dance With A Stranger stars Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett, and Ian Holm. If you have seen the movie, leave a comment. It seems to have received pretty good reviews by critics. Ellis is also portrayed in the movie Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman(2006). Below is the trailer for Dance With A Stranger.
The murder of Blakely and the hanging of Ellis led to other tragedies. According to a detailed Wikipedia article, Ellis’s husband, George Ellis, hanged himself a few years later. Ruth Ellis’s son by another man, who was 10 when his mother was hanged, suffered psychological problems after the execution and eventually killed himself in 1982. Ruth’s sister Muriel Jakubait has worked unsuccessfully to clear her sister’s name, although many have argued that Ellis suffered from battered spouse syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Albert Pierrepoint, the official hangman of Great Britain who hanged Ellis, wrote in 1974 “that executions solve nothing.” The United Kingdom eventually agreed, but it was too late for Ruth Ellis. More details on the case are available on the TruTV website.
Have you seen Dance with a Stranger? Leave a comment.
On July 7 in 1900, Warren Earp — the youngest of the Earp brothers — was killed in a saloon in Wilcox, Arizona. Warren’s most famous brother, Wyatt Earp, lived until 1929. On the day he died, Warren was drinking and confronting other customers when John Boyett killed him in a gunfight. In a later trial, Boyett was found not guilty because he was acting in self-defense.
Warren Earp did not participate in the famous 1881 gunfight at OK Corral with his brothers and Doc Holliday. But he was in the town at the time. And later he helped Wyatt with the revenge killings after the gunfight. All of those events surrounding the gunfight are portrayed in the movie Wyatt Earp (1994), a decent movie with an odd ending.
The Ending of “Wyatt Earp” . . . on a Ship?
“You ended a movie about me with a luxury cruise?”
Wyatt Earp is an enjoyable movie and in some ways superior to the more popular Tombstone from the same year. But there is one major problem with it. The movie has a poor ending. Had director Lawrence Kasden given the movie a memorable ending, the movie would be more highly regarded than it is. (Spoiler Alert: This entry discusses the film’s ending, although it is not a twist or surprise ending.)
In Wyatt Earp, the movie follows Earp’s life from his time as a child to adulthood. The film, of course, focuses largely on Earp’s western exploits. And much of the movie centers on Earp’s time in Tombstone, Arizona. It is in Tombstone where Earp and his brothers participated in the Gunfight at OK Corral.
The movie provides a realistic portrayal of that famous fight. Then, the movie shows subsequent events and the anger among the survivors. As the movie nears the end, we see Kevin Costner’s Earp exacting revenge on other characters who participated in the Tombstone gunfight.
Then, the movie cuts to many years in the future. Earp and his wife Josie Marcus are on a ship near Alaska.
They are approached by a young man who recounts a story, by aid of a flashback, of how Earp saved his uncle, Tommy “Behind the Deuce” O’Rourke (based on real-life Michael “Johnny-Behind-the Deuce” O’Rourke). Tommy’s nephew describes how Earp had intervened to protect Tommy from an angry mob many years earlier in Tombstone.
Then, after Tommy’s nephew leaves, Earp says to Josie, “Some say it did not happen that way.” She responds to the effect, “Don’t worry Wyatt, it happened that way.” End of movie.
The video below includes most of the movie’s conclusion, although it omits the comments by Wyatt and Josie at the end of the scene.
Why the Ending of “Wyatt Earp” Does not Work
This coda to the movie does not work for a number of reasons. First, the scene includes a distracting flashback after a short jump to the future.
We are thrown into a big jump in the future, which could work if the future showed us something meaningful about the movie we have been watching for three-plus hours. But the purpose of this flash-forward is to show a flashback to Earp’s lawman days — a time period the movie already covered.
Further, the ship ending — especially along with the flashback — makes it appear that the Tommy-Behind-the-Deuce character has some big significance for summarizing Earp’s life. But what happened with Tommy does not really seem that significant. It is not any more important than the rest of the movie that already focused on Earp’s lawman. But by ending with a discussion of the flashback, the movie makes the viewer think they should see something important that just is not there.
On the IMDb website, one astute viewer notes that earlier in the movie Josie had mentioned having heard the Tommy-Behind-the-Deuce story when she first met Wyatt. But, even assuming viewers will remember one passing mention of Tommy early in the three-hour movie, viewers may not remember at the end. And even if they remember and make the connection at the end, it is still confusing about why the movie ends on the Tommy-Behind-the-Deuce note.
What Was the Director Thinking?
There does not seem to be much discussion of the ending on the web. But there are a few brief critiques (“muddled,” “neutered climax,” etc.). And Roger Ebert calls the ending sequence “pointless.”
One might concede there is an argument for what Director Lawrence Kasden was trying to accomplish. The scene does reflect on the myth of the Western and how events may be remembered differently than how they really happened.
The flashback does show Earp as a pure hero. When we watch Earp in the real-time of the movie, we see many flaws in the man. But when we see him in the memory, Earp does his job as a lawman perfectly. So, perhaps Kasden wanted viewers to see that contrast to show how Earp became remembered as a hero and his flaws forgotten in that memory.
That interpretation of the ending makes some sense. But if that interpretation was Kasden’s goal, the contrast should have been clearer for the viewer disoriented by the sudden jump to the future on a boat. Maybe the scene needed to be longer.
Perhaps Kasden was trying to invoke another famous movie scene from To Kill a Mockingbird. In that movie, lawyer Atticus Finch protected a man from a lynch mob, and the viewer saw him as a courageous hero.
That all being said, with the exception of the ending, Director Lawrence Kasden created a very good Western epic biopic with Wyatt Earp. The film does a decent job of trying to convey much of a long adventurous life.
I even prefer Wyatt Earp to the less realistic Tombstone. Kevin Costner does a good job in the lead role, portraying the hero as a dark and troubled character. And Dennis Quaid gives one of his best performances ever as Doc Holliday. One of the best things about both Wyatt Earp and Tombstone are the portrayals of Doc Holiday by Quaid and Val Kilmer, respectively.
If you do not mind the awkward ending and the length of the film, and if you appreciate character-studies and Westerns, you might want to spend a lazy weekend afternoon watching Wyatt Earp.
This trailer has a better ending than the movie, withe Gene Hackman’s lines summarizing the theme of the movie better than the lines that actually ended the movie.
How much you like Super 8 (2011) will be dictated by your expectations. If you know it is directed and written by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg and you compare it to movies like E.T. and Stand By Me, you will be disappointed and disgruntled. But if you are looking for a decent summer action movie that is a fun ride, and you do not care that you might forget about it the next day, then you will enjoy Super 8.
The film follows a group of kids in a small town in Ohio in 1979 who are making a movie about zombies on a super 8 home movie camera. While they are shooting one scene, they see a train crash that creates a dark mystery. As the story progresses, the town is thrown into chaos, and the adventurous kids try to put together the pieces of the puzzle. The young actors, including Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney in his first feature, are excellent. Courtney’s performance has to work for the film to work, and it does.
I will not ruin the story, but the film features themes of parent-child relationships, issues about losing a loved one, an apparent supernatural mystery, and a bad guy military officer. One might argue that the movie tries to do so much that it does not do any one thing exceptionally well, but the sum of the parts make for a fun light-hearted ride.
If you do go see the movie, make sure to hang around after the credits start to see the film the kids were making throughout Super 8.
Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind was published on June 30, 1936. Mitchell spent about ten years writing the book, using her own imagination, her research, and her childhood memories of family gatherings where relatives “refought the Civil War.” Her work over such a long time period paid off. More than 30 million copies of the book are in print around the world, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 movie version of the novel is considered the biggest earning film of all time if you adjust for inflation.
Like movies such as Star Wars and The Big Lebowski, the book and film Gone With the Wind has rabid fans, calling themselves “Windies.” There is a museum devoted to the book and movie in Marietta, Georgia, which I recently visited. The movie, which deviates from the novel in some ways, has detractors who note the movie’s glorification of the South’s cause and that the film ignores slavery’s inhumanity. On the other hand, some note that the movie and the book have a strong feminist theme, with an unusually strong portrayal of a female lead role for 1939. Is it okay to love and hate a movie at the same time?
Gone With the Wind leaves us with a similar problem presented by Birth of a Nation and other movies. One must ponder how to deal with a work of art that is tainted by ignorant beliefs and stereotypes from a prior time period. A lot of movies have confused messages about important topics. Like anything, the solution is education as opposed to censorship. We might still learn from films, even if what we learn is not the producer’s intended lesson. But it is also possible that the mixed messages may ruin the entertainment value.
Gone With the Wind is a great artistic achievement, but its legacy might be something more if it is used as a starting point for discussion and education about the Civil War and our country’s legacy of slavery. Everything about America and race is complicated, and so is the movie’s legacy. Gone With the Wind features stereotypical African-American characters like Mammy, but then the wonderful Hattie McDaniel broke through a barrier and became the first African-American to win an Academy Award (as Best Supporting Actress) because of her portrayal of the character.
One thing about Margarett Mitchell’s book, though, is certain. There are few twentieth-century novels that have been as popular, or had such an impact around the world, or which still may provoke such controversy, as her 1936 novel about Katie Scarlett O’Hara.
Above is an interesting clip of screen tests for the movie, leaving one to wonder how different the film might have been without the performances we know by Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Hattie McDaniel, and others.
Photos by Chimesfreedom.
What do you think about Gone With the Wind? Leave a comment.
Viewer 1: “What the hell?” Viewer 2: “Shut up.” — Overheard during showing of Tree of Life
Since I watched Days of Heaven(1978) in a college movie theater, I have been a fan of director Terrence Malick. Seeing that beautiful and poetic movie was a unique cinema experience that changed my expectations and aspirations for movies. Little did I know then, though, that twenty years would pass between the time Malick made that movie and his next one, The Thin Red Line (1998), but I would love that movie too. Although he only has made five movies in a span of thirty-eight years, they are all unique and beautiful. So I was eagerly anticipating Tree of Life (2011), and its ruminations on life and death set around a suburban 1950s family, starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain.
I give that background to disclose my expectations for Tree of Life. As has been noted in other Chimesfreedom posts, sometimes high expectations may doom your enjoyment of a movie. Either way, I was disappointed by Tree of Life. Maybe I will change my mind after repeated viewings and further reflection, as there is a lot to think about from the film.
Tree of Life is an ambitious movie, attempting to tie together creation, the meaning of life, memory, and maybe even the afterlife. There are beautiful scenes and big questions, as the movie ponders the age-old question of why the world was formed just to result in human pain and suffering. There is not much of a plot, but you do not go to a Malick movie looking for a story; you go looking for poetry. The film focuses on one boy and his interactions with two brothers and a loving mother and a frustrated disciplinarian father (Pitt). The movie gives you glimpses of their daily lives with occasional whispering voice-overs, but the narrating boy never whispers anything as literal as “I see dead people.”
The acting is good throughout. The child actors, including Hunter McCracken, do an excellent job, and Pitt gives a standout performance. If you go to the movie because you are a fan of Sean Penn, you should know that he only appears in the film about fifteen minutes more than the dinosaurs do.
Conclusion? I was not engaged for most of the first half hour and the ending, but the middle of the movie drew me into it. Overall, I wish more movies were as ambitious as this one, but I also wish this one reached its lofty goals a little more than it did. Most critics are getting this one right by saying it is an unusual movie that some people will love and others will hate, although I fell in the middle. So you should check it out for yourself if you think you might like a movie with high aspirations that may be more challenging than entertaining.
If you want to check out some other views, Rotten Tomatoes currently has a score of 86% by critics and 66% by viewers. Also, Bill Goodykoontz at the Arizona Republic has a very good positive review of Tree of Life (“Beautiful, baffling, poetic, pretentious, it’s one big ball of moviedom”), and Roger Moore at the Orlando Sentinel has a very good negative review (“this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that ‘Tree’ grow”).
What did you think of Tree of Life? Leave a comment.
On this date in 1955, Great Britain hanged Ruth Ellis, who became the last woman executed in the United Kingdom. Ellis was convicted of murdering race-car driver David Blakely. Ellis and Blakely had an affair that sometimes became violent, including one time when Blakely hit Ellis in the stomach causing her to miscarriage. Ellis, a married night club hostess, was found guilty of shooting Blakely to death outside a pub in North London. She emptied the bullets in her revolver into his body and then asked someone to call the police. She immediately gave a full confession.
would add more to explain the confusing ending, but unfortunately 
