I’m not sure why Jerzy Skolimowski’s great film about four Poles doing illegal construction work in London isn’t better known. Perhaps it’s because the smirking, vapid TV series with Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd had the same name. Perhaps it’s because the vogue for Eastern European culture in the West disappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s too bad. Moonlighting hasn’t aged at all. It not only stars a young Jeremy Irons at his very best. It’s a rare film that sees the world through the eyes of the working class, from the point of view of the most alienated, marginalized, casual laborers. Rewrite Skolimowski’s Poles as Mexicans. Move the setting to Los Angeles. Cast a good Latino actor who could play the role as well as Irons did in 1982, and the movie would be a major hit today.

Moonlighting is a deceptively simple movie. At the end of 1981, just before General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law on December 13, four Polish construction workers, Banaszak, Kudaj, Wolski, and Nowak fly from Warsaw to London on a tourist visa to renovate a town house for a man referred to only as “the boss.” By hiring Poles and paying them in Zloties, Nowak explains, the boss can get his house in London for a quarter of what it would have cost to hire English workers and pay them in pounds. On the surface, it looks like a good deal for the four men. They get a trip to London. They get paid above the rate they would be getting paid back in Poland. They each get a 20 pound bonus. But the devil is in the details. “The Boss” has given Nowak 1250 pounds for expenses. It sounds like a lot of money. Nowak remarks that it’s more than he’d earn in 25 years in Poland. The problem is that the 1250 pounds must cover not only building supplies, but food, clothing, entertainment, and the 80 pounds Nowak will need to pay the four 20 pound bonuses. Technically it should be enough, but there’s no margin for error. The slightest mistake means they come up short.

Nowak, the only one of the four men who speaks English, is not only the foreman, but a baby sitter, almost a dictator. He has control of the money. The other men – whom he chose because he sees them as dumb, easily manipulated rubes – can’t read the local newspapers, find their way through the labyrinthine metropolis, or communicate with their temporary neighbors. Their only contact with the Polish community, services at the local Polish church, is cut off when Nowak decides that the 20 pounds allotted for “entertainment” would be better spent on a used color TV than on bus fare and the collection plate. The TV breaks 5 minutes after they get it inside. It’s just as well, Nowak decides. They don’t have time to watch TV anyway. Now he can drive the men even harder. Nowak does the shopping. He buys all the building materials. He determines how many hours they’ll all work each day. That they have to finish the job in under a month, the time they’re allowed in the United Kingdom under a tourist visa, means a tight schedule and very little sleep. Nowak is also convinced that “the boss” is fucking with his wife back in Warsaw, and the month long tourist visa. The more stressed out he becomes, the more of a petty tyrant he becomes. Kudaj, Banaszak, and Wolski become virtual prisoners in the town house.

On December 13, when Nowak tries to call his wife in Warsaw, he discovers that all the lines to Poland have been cut off. Jaruzelski has crushed Solidarity and declared martial law. If Kudaj, Banaszak, and Wolski had been virtual prisoners in the boss’s town house, they now become actual prisoners. Nowak decides that if his three companions find out about the declaration of martial law, they won’t be able to finish the renovations on time, that it will be too much of a distraction. He confiscates both keys, and locks them inside on his trips to the local supermarket and the local building supply store. After work on the plumbing goes wrong – they overheat the joints of the pipes and flood the house – there’s no longer enough money to buy food along with the new joints. Even if Nowak could call home to Poland to have “the boss” wire more money, there’s no guarantee he would. So he takes the money for the new joints out of the food budget, eventually developing an elaborate scheme to defraud the local supermarket to make up the difference.

Jerzy Skolimowski understands shoplifting and petty scamming. For the lower working class, shoplifting and petty scamming aren’t the perverse challenge they occasionally are for the bourgeoisie. They’re a way to survive, to supplement a shoestring budget that has no room for error. Nowak the Pole has already noticed that almost everybody in London, a rich, first world city many times as wealthy as his native Warsaw, seems to be shoplifting. The assistant manager at the local supermarket, who bears no small resemblance to Margaret Thatcher, is a petty fascist who lives to humiliate people who steal food. It happens all the time, a young cashier remarks as the police drag off an old woman who gets caught stealing a bottle of gin. But Nowak is a clever shoplifter. He realizes that he can comb through the garbage can, grab a discarded receipt, and steal anything listed on the receipt without putting himself in any danger of arrest. Soon we begin to suspect that he steals, not only to supplement the food budget, but out of some compulsive desire to “beat the system” that’s beating him.

Nowak also begins to steal from his three companions, but not for himself. Indeed, what makes Moonlighting such a penetrating inquiry into the lives of the lower working classes, both under communism and under capitalism, is how clearly it demonstrates that it’s not capitalists or even communist party bosses who oppress workers. It’s other workers. At the beginning of the film when a customs agent casually asks Nowak if he’s a member of Solidarity, he says that no. He’s not. He then remarks to himself that it was the only truthful answer he gave. He’s right. Nowak has no understanding of the concept of “solidarity.”. He’s a complete stooge, utterly committed to his boss, to getting the job done at all costs, eventually trying to steal the 60 pounds set aside for the bonuses of Kudaj, Banaszak, and Wolski to pay for a machine they need to resurface the floors of the townhouse. That finally, at long last, proves to be too much for Kudaj, Banaszak, and Wolski, and they rebel, locking him out of the town house to sleep outside in the cold, forcing him to give them back the money, then beating the ever living shit out of him on the way back to the airport after he tells them about the declaration of martial law back home.

Nowak thoroughly deserves the beating he gets at the hands of his three companions. That we actually feel sorry for him is testament to the brilliant acting of Jeremy Irons. By the end of the film, he’s made us so completely identify with his character that we’ve come to look at Kudaj, Banaszak, and Wolski similar to the way he looks at them, as simpletons who need to be managed by a superior intelligence. I’ve sometimes noticed that English actors make lousy East Europeans. Irons is the exception. He’s not only utterly believable as a Pole. He’s utterly believable as an illegal immigrant. Irons had his breakthrough role as the Oxford student Charles Ryder in the BBC production of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Here he plays a man who jumps at every stray noise, who seems to expect that at any moment he might be arrested and hauled off to jail, who’s embarrassed by his very existence. I don’t even know if he gets the accent right but it doesn’t matter. He’s built the character of Nowak into a complete whole, a man who can represent any illegal immigrant, anywhere, the living embodiment of what Lenin meant when he said “the proletariat has no country.” Moonlighting is a film that understands what capitalism does to the human soul. Find a copy and watch it.

In his review Executive Action, Dalton Trumbo’s masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination, the reliably clueless Roger Ebert compares it unfavorably to another 1973 film about the attempted assassination of another world leader. “There’s something exploitative and unseemly in the way this movie takes the real blood and anguish and fits it neatly into a semi-documentary thriller,” he says. “That wasn’t the case with Fred Zinnemann’s movie about a plot against De Gaulle, “The Day of the Jackal” (which has finally made it to the Loop after months in the neighborhoods). We knew that was fiction from the beginning; it was well-paced, the characters were brilliantly drawn and we were entertained. But “Executive Action” doesn’t seem much to want to entertain.”

While there’s no conscious intent, either by Ebert, or by Zinnemann, to bury the tenth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in an avalanche of mindless entertainment, Robert Ebert had a sensibility that was exquisitely attuned to the needs of the corporate establishment. It was inevitable that Hollywood would try to come to terms with the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X. It was also inevitable that the kind of writer who would eventually become rich and famous marketing a dumbed down version of film criticism for network TV would try to steer people away from a painful confrontation with recent American history towards a big budget European dream vacation disguised as a political thriller. That’s all well and good. The Day of the Jackal is a well-made, entertaining movie that quite skilfully transforms the narrative sensibilities of the novel into the language of cinema. But it’s also a chilling, authoritarian argument for statism, a clever pitch for what would later become known as the “war on terror.”

On the surface, The Day of the Jackal is a leftist, or at least a liberal film. The bad guys are the OAS, a conspiracy of right-wing extremists inside the French Army, and a cold, sociopathic, professional assassin from the United Kingdom played by Edward Fox, the “Jackal.” Charles de Gaulle was an authoritarian, and probably a conservative, but that’s not why the Organisation de l’armée secrète wanted to kill him. In 1962, he did what no previous government had dared. He granted Algeria its independence, something that immediately made him public enemy number one among the 3 million French citizens still in Algeria, and among a large faction of die hard French nationalists inside the army. The Day of the Jackal opens up with a fictionalized account of a real assassination attempt the OAS had made on de Gaulle on August 22, 1962. As he was travelling to Orly Airport, 12 OAS gunmen opened fire with machine guns, and riddled his Citroen DS 19 with 140 bullets. Fortunately for de Gaulle he had something John F. Kennedy lacked, a crack security team determined to save his life. Even though all four tires had been shot out, his driver hit the gas and managed to speed away to safety. The ring-leader of the conspiracy Jean Bastien-Thiry was shot for treason the next year.

The Day of the Jackal then leaves the semi-fiction for the just plain fictional. After the OAS realizes that de Gaulle’s secret service has them riddled with informers and provocateurs, their top leaders decide to go to an outsider, a blond, blue-eyed professional killer we know only by his code name “The Jackal.” They agree to pay him 500,000 Francs to kill de Gaulle, a price he rightfully points out, is a bargain. Each of the assassins in Executive Action got 125,000 dollars in a Swiss bank account and 25,000 dollars a year for life. The OAS is getting a lot for its money. Indeed, if the Warren Commission decided that John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a “lone nut,” the Jackal would more accurately be described as “a lone superman.” Roger Ebert argues that The Day of the Jackal is “put together like a fine watch” and “unfolds in almost documentary starkness.” That’s nonsense. The film is pure fantasy, enjoyable fantasy to be sure, but fantasy nonetheless. Where in Executive Action Dalton Trumbo shows us how much planning goes into a conspiracy to kill a head of state, and how many things could have gone wrong, The Day of the Jackal surrenders any logic its plot may have had to whatever emotions drive The Jackal to want to kill the President of France, even after his cover is blown, and he could easily walk away scot free with a quarter of a million Francs. The Jackal, like Osama Bin Laden, or ISIS, is the malevolent terrorist of our worst nightmares. He kills for the sake of killing. He has seemingly unlimited resources. He’s everywhere and nowhere. The only thing that can stop him is the powerful French state.

The character of the Jackal’s nemesis, Detective Claude Lebel, is as deceptive as the character of The Jackal himself. A rumpled middle-aged man played by Michael Londsale, Lebel appears to be a quiet, unassuming, even ineffectual little nebbish, but he’s actually a one-man Patriot Act, Dirty Harry with a pot belly. After de Gaulle’s secret service learns of the plot by kidnapping and torturing an OAS courier – the film is an unambiguous argument for the effectiveness of torture – Lebel is given “special powers” to do whatever he has to do to stop the assassination. He roots out an informer by wire tapping the entire high command of the French police. He establishes a network of mass surveillance, confiscating the guest registers of all the hotels in Paris and in the south of France, held back only by the technology available in 1973. Lebel would have loved 2016’s NSA. We hear “papers please” so many times in so many beautiful French cities that after awhile it just begins to feel more chic and European than fascist. In fact, we want those French police officers to stop acting like democratic sissies and do more than just ask for The Jackal’s papers. We want them to shoot the bastard in the head. Finally, at a Liberation Day ceremony, where the grandeur of the French state is put on full display – the final sequence of The Day of the Jackal was filmed at a real Liberation Day Parade – Lebel manages to kill The Jackal, who up until then had stayed one perilous step head of the police. They never find out his real name.

“Who was he?” a British police official wonders out loud, not answering his own question but leaving no doubt in the viewer’s mind what he stood for, the abstract principle of “terrorism,” something we’ll be at war with, forever.

Final Note: Wolfgang Petersen’s 1993 film In the Line of Fire — with Clint Eastwood in the Claude Lebel role and John Malcovich as an Americanized Jackal — is an obvious rip off of The Day of the Jackal right down to the nifty home-made gun.  Malcovich is a much better villain than Edward Fox. “I want some goddamned respect!” Eastwood is pretty lame.

Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted communist screenwriter recently portrayed by Bryan Cranston in the film Trumbo, had such a long and varied career in film that it’s hard to keep track of all the screenplays he wrote. His last film was also the very first Kennedy assassination conspiracy film. A low-budget dramatization of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement, and starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, Executive Action was released in 1973 on the tenth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and quickly pulled from theaters because of bad reviews. While it would probably be an exaggeration to say that Trumbo’s film was “suppressed,” there’s no question that many of the critics let their outrage over the subject matter get the better of their love of cinema. Dalton Trumbo couldn’t write a bad film if he tried. Executive Action is a masterpiece.

It’s not so much that Executive Action’s tightly knit conspiracy of Texas oil millionaires, mercenaries, and professional killers is true to history, or even plausible. It’s certainly plausible – whether or not it’s true to history only history can ultimately decide – but in many ways it doesn’t really matter. The Kennedy assassination is almost a McGuffin. What gives Executive Action its punch is the way Dalton Trumbo dramatizes the banality of evil. Except for one shocking and genocidal outburst against the people of the global south, James Farrington and Robert Foster never express any personal hatred of John F. Kennedy, or of the liberalism he represented. What makes Executive Action so shocking, and what probably motivated all those film critics to campaign for its suppression, is not just that the villains are square-jawed, white Anglo Saxon Protestants. It’s that they’re so obviously not villains. Like the Navy pilots who dropped napalm on civilians in Vietnam, or the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, they are cool, competent professionals “just doing their job.” We follow Foster and Farrington through the motions of training two kill teams exactly the way we’d follow a corporate training video at GM designed to teach us how to manufacture a new type of car. We develop an emotional interest in the job. We admire the thoroughness of the planning, the methodical way they try to isolate and neutralize possible mistakes. We want to see them succeed. After they do succeed in blowing John F. Kennedy’s brains out, we want to see them get away.

Then we remember who they killed.

Executive Action was made for under a million dollars, and director David Miller made extensive use of newsreels and archival photographs. In many ways, it’s a cut and paste job. Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster, who had previously played a fascist, anti-Kennedy general in the earlier Seven Days in May, acted in the film out of love, not the love of money. The bargain basement quality of the sets, in fact, add to the movie’s impact. David Miller and Dalton Trumbo know how to do a lot with a little. Executive Action doesn’t look like a cheaply made movie so much as a movie that has managed to get under the glossy illusion of American life that Hollywood, and indeed the Kennedys, represented. We see the world that Lee Harvey Oswald, who’s portrayed as a government patsy Foster and Farrington snatched out from under the CIA to be their own patsy, lived in. Robert Foster’s angry rant about how the people of the global south, blacks, Asians and Hispanics, were all “determined to love,” to breed and swamp Europe and North Americans with their dark skinned offspring seemingly comes out of nowhere, but once it’s past we realize it’s the angry rage for control and domination that’s always lurking under the polite facade of the American ruling class. Lee Harvey Oswald, an insignificant little communist, is carefully set up to be the fall guy for the murder of John F. Kennedy, but even if there were no Texas oil millionaire conspiracy, no well-trained mercenaries, the film conveys the way a nobody like Oswald quite possibly could have committed the assassination. The double that Farrington and Foster tap to poison the well, to travel through Texas and Louisiana picking fights and making a fool of himself in order to make it believable that Oswald could have been a murderer, is the dark shadow that lurks inside every frustated little American nebbish, the Dylan and Klebold, the Elliot Rodger, the Adam Lanza inside all of us.

Final Note: During Executive Action’s short run in American movie theaters – it was pulled in 1973, banned from television, and not seen again until the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK – people who bought tickets were also given a handout that not only summarized Mark Lane’s criticism of the Warren Commission, but pointed out the near statistical impossibility that so many witnesses to John F. Kennedy’s assassination could have died so shortly afterwards. I have no idea how accurate the handout was, and I don’t know very much about statistics, but the film itself is at its weakest when it tries to fit every little detail about the Kennedy assassination into an all embracing conspiracy theory. Lee Harvey Oswald lives. Farrington and Foster are dismayed and send one of their employees to tie up the “loose end,” to try convince Jack Ruby to kill Oswald in prison. Ruby does the deed, but it’s not convincing. Trumbo and Miller could have just as easily left the role of Jack Ruby to the viewer’s imagination. It’s not the role of the artist to determine whether something is true to history, or even if it was plausible, but to create an independent world that mirrors and reflects back upon and critiques reality. In Executive Action, Dalton Trumbo and David Miller largely succeed. The handout would have been an independent production that would have succeeded, or failed, on its own.

The main problem with The Good Shepherd is its director. Robert De Niro is a great actor, and he had the money to hire a professional cast and crew, but he doesn’t have a good sense of how to edit or how to pace a movie. The Good Shepherd, which stars Matt Damon as Edward Wilson, a loosely fictionalized version of the CIA’s legendary counter intelligence director James Jesus Angleton, runs close to 3 hours. Robert De Niro, to quote William Faulkner, needs to learn how to “kill his darlings.” He casts Joe Pesci as Joseph Palmi, an Italian American mob boss based on Sam Giancana, simply to cast Joe Pesci. Palmi’s character does nothing to develop the plot, and is dropped almost as quickly as he’s introduced. De Niro’s two brief cameos as a thinly fictionalized Wild Bill Donovan — the Army Air Force hero who founded the OSS — are equally forgettable. De Niro, and screenwriter Eric Roth attempt to stuff the entire history of the CIA from 1945 to the Bay of Pigs into one feature length movie. The unfortunate result is that unless you already know the entire history of the CIA from 1945 to the Bay of Pigs, The Good Shepherd will often be confusing, frustrating, and at times downright incomprehensible. A good screenwriter can tell a complex story in a two hour movie — The Big Short is an excellent example of one that does — but that’s not what The Good Shepherd does. If it were anybody other than Robert De Niro, the critics would have simply called it “bad writing.”

So should you watch it?

The answer is “yes and no,” yes if you know something about James Jesus Angleton, Alan Dulles, Kim Philby, and the Bay of Pigs, but no if you don’t. If you can follow the plot, The Good Shepherd is an often fascinating study of the people the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “the power elite,” the unelected class of Wall Street bankers, lawyers, Pentagon warlords, chief executives, and intelligence officers who manipulate politics from behind the scenes. There is revealing moment, for example, in the brief exchange between Edward Wilson and Joseph Palmi. Wilson, who has discovered that Palmi had actually been born in Italy, and that he had never been naturalized as a United States citizen, has come to strong arm him into doing an favor for the CIA. We don’t learn exactly what Wilson, who goes by the name of “Mr. Carlson,” wants from Palmi. It’s probably part of a plot to kill Castro, but their conversation never spells out the details. De Niro is far more concerned with the cultural conflict between two very different members of two very different criminal gangs.

“Let me ask you something,” Palmi says. “We Italians, we got our families and we got the church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their tradition. Even the niggers. They’ve got their music. What about you people, Mr. Carlson? What do you have?”

“The United States of America,” Wilson responds. “The rest of you are just visiting.”

Joseph Palmi and Edward Wilson are talking right past each other. By “you people” Palmi means WASPs, white Anglo Saxon Protestants, but Wilson would never acknowledge a poor Appalachian coal miner or a Midwestern farmer as one of “his people.” Throughout The Good Shepherd, Wilson, and his colleagues at the CIA overthrow sovereign governments, have their political opponents murdered, drug and waterboard suspected enemy agents, and even spy on and betray one another, all for the good of their country. But what is their country? As the movie unfolds, we begin to see that what Wilson calls The United States of America is really the top one percent of the United States of America, the owners of the plantation, not their guests, or their slaves. How much did it benefit the American people, for example, to overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala or Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran? The answer would be “not at all,” but it certainly benefited British Petroleum and the United Fruit Company. De Niro and Eric Roth, sadly, don’t have much of a class analysis. The Good Shepherd is a liberal morality tale about how power corrupts members of the elites. What’s more, it’s also something of a whitewash. Nowhere do we see Edward Wilson, or Philip Alan, a loosely fictionalized Allen Dulles, help launder the assets of Nazi industrialists or arrange for the safe passage of suspected war criminals to South America, both of which the CIA did in the 1930s and the 1940s.

Nevertheless, almost in spite of himself, The Good Shepherd gives Joe Palmi, a character who has all of 2 minutes of screen time, the last word. Robert De Niro, a veteran of two Godfather movies, Goodfellas and Casino, finds something deeply cold and sinister, something downright unsettling, in Edward Wilson and the WASP gangsters who get “tapped” at Yale to join Skull and Bones, the elite secret fraternity which also counts George W. Bush and John Kerry as members, and end up running the CIA and the State Department. “We Italians, we got our families and we got the church,” Palmi says, and indeed, as bad as Michael Corleone and “the family” were, they were, at least, recognizably human. They were motivated by lust, greed, the love of power, rage, jealousy, but never a cold, robotic, unquestioning sense of duty to a an elite masquerading as the United States of America. “What about you people Mr. Carlson. What do you have?” In truth, and deep down inside Edward Wilson knows it, he and his people have nothing. To be more accurate, he throws everything way. First he abandons Laura, his true love, to marry Margaret, the daughter of a United States Senator played by Angelina Jolie. Then he abandons her too, first to fight the war in Europe, and then after that war is over to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Then he destroys his own bloodline

At the beginning of The Good Shepherd, after the failure of The Bay of Pigs operation, Wilson begins to suspect that someone inside the CIA had leaked the plans to the Soviet Union. He has one clue, a blurry film of a man and woman making love, and garbled soundtrack. As the movie flashes back and fourth between the past to the present, as it tells the story of Wilson’s rise from poetry student at Yale through Skull and Bones, the OSS, and finally the CIA, Wilson and his team of counter intelligence experts analyze the film. Eventually they trace it back to a hotel in Kinshasa, in the Republic of Congo, the same country, not incidentally, where the CIA arranged for the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected President of the troubled Central African country. To his horror, Wilson realizes that the leak came from his own 23-year-old son, Edward Wilson, Jr., an emotionally unstable young man who, against his mother’s wishes, had followed his father’s path through Skull and Bones into the CIA.

The younger Wilson, who might as well be called the “Fredo” of The Good Shepherd, had carelessly let slip the plans for the Bay of Pigs Operation to his African fiancée, who, unknown to himself, is also a Soviet agent. “Ulysses,” a Soviet master spy, had managed to infiltrate Wilson’s inner-circle at the CIA, identify, and target his family members. He gives Edward Wilson Sr. a choice, his country or his family, agree to become a double agent for the Soviet Union inside the CIA, or watch his son be exposed as the dupe who destroyed the American effort to launch a successful coup against Fidel Castro. Edward Wilson, of course, chooses his country. He assures his son, who genuinely believes that his Soviet handler loves him, that he will accept the young woman into the family. He rolls up Ulysses’ network inside the United States. He plants his own mole inside the KGB. Finally we watch in horror as he orders his son’s fiancée thrown out of an airplane, Argentinian dirty war style, several thousand feet to her death. As in The Godfather, all the family’s business has been settled, but with a difference. After the younger Wilson tells his father his fiancée had been pregnant, and we see the empty look in the older man’s eyes, we realize that the Wilson family is no more.

Edward Wilson has murdered his own grandchild.