Book: "Hellhound On HIs Trail"

The old saying about truth being more remarkable than fiction is proven once again in this 2010 book by Hampton Sides that follows James Earl Ray as he stalked and killed Martin Luther King in 1968, and then went on the lam for over 50 days before he was finally captured in London, England.


I remember the assassination of Martin Luther King, but I had forgotten the trauma that was unleashed upon the nation in the aftermath of the killing, and I had no recollection of the merry chase that Ray led the forces of the FBI and other international law enforcement agencies until he was brought to justice.  Author Sides paints the picture of life in 1968 America, and his paralleling the movements of both King and Ray leading up to the fateful night at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968 is true edge-of-your-seat stuff that very few fictional books, movies, or TV shows can match.


Other "characters" that come alive once again include President Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace, Robert Kennedy, a much younger Jesse Jackson, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.  Speaking of Hoover, we are reminded once again that for all he did in establishing the FBI as the top notch organization it is, Hoover truly was one of the more loathsome and evil guys in our history.


As with most crimes of this nature, conspiracy theories abounded at the time of King's death, and still do, but I was struck by this quote from Ramsey Clark in an interview with the author:


"Some Americans don't want to believe that one miserable person can bring such tragedy on our country and impact so powerfully on the destiny of us all."


My thanks go out to my neighbor Tom Frankart for introducing me to and lending me this terrific book.

Movie Review: "J. Edgar"

The new Clint Eastwood directed and Leonardo DiCaprio starring movie, "J. Edgar", was heavily advertised during the baseball playoffs, and those ubiquitous commercials had me convinced that this was a movie to see. It had so much going for it....a great director in Eastwood, perhaps the best actor of his generation in DiCaprio, and a subject, J. Edgar Hoover, that was ripe for controversy and, perhaps, some rousing action.

Sorry to say, the whole was not as good as the sum of its parts.

While Hoover certainly deserves credit for building the FBI into the elite crime fighting organization it is today, a case could also be made that Hoover was also one of the more evil figures in our history. Personally, I was interested to see how Eastwood, whose personal politics are somewhat right of center, might portray Hoover. Would he emphasize the crime-busting anti-Communist passion of Hoover? Would he gloss over the Hoover who wiretapped seemingly everybody and use those findings to blackmail several Presidents and Attorneys General into keeping him at his post as FBI director until the day he died?

Well, the movie does show Hoover, warts and all, and it also plays up Hoover's long term relationship with his #2 man at the Bureau, Clyde Tolson. Unfortunately, the movie, which is told in flashbacks as Hoover dictates his memoirs to a present day Agent, is somewhat disjointed, which makes it somewhat hard to follow. The colors in the movie also are washed out through much of the movie. Sometimes that works well, but I don't think it did here. As a fellow viewer said to me as we exited the theater, "I expected more."

One thing that did not disappoint was DiCaprio's performance. He is really a great actor. I haven't seen everything he's done, but I've never seen him be anything less than excellent in anything that I have seen him in. I also like Armie Hammer, despite some ridiculous make-up, as Tolson. Very good performance there.

One of the historical figures portrayed in this movie was Robert Kennedy, and this leads me to a pet peeve. Whenever the Kennedys are portrayed in movies or on TV, why must the actors speak with such obviously phony New England accents? Is it really necessary to use accents when portraying historical figures? Would it make the movie any less valid if Jack or Bobby Kennedy just, you know, spoke their lines without making you think you are watching a bad version of Rich Little on the screen? Don't know who the actor was who played RFK in this movie, but the "pahk-the-cah" affectations were distracting in the extreme. Maybe they should have had him wearing a Red Sox hat, too.