Quick Movie Review
Posted by Socrates in Chile, movie reviews, movies, Pinochet, Socrates at 4:46 pm | 
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Missing (1982; starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek).
This is a political movie based on a true story. It’s about a young, left-wing journalist (a New Yorker named Charles Horman), who moves down to Chile to support, uhh, “socialism.” He vanishes during the 1973 military coup which brought Augusto Pinochet to power. (A lot of people vanished during and after the coup, the vast majority of them Marxists. Trivia: the U.S. government aided the coup).
“Missing” is a reasonably good movie. You feel sorry for Horman’s confused, grieving father, who just wants to find his missing son. But it’s also full of the usual “left-wing good, right-wing bad” political propaganda. The 1973 coup is portrayed as a bad thing, when in fact it saved Chile from being fully communized and Sovietized (it was already partly communized under Salvador Allende’s leadership. Allende was elected as a “socialist” in 1970, but he soon abandoned democracy).
26 June, 2014 at 8:38 am
Whose eyes are those at the top of the poster? Looks like Elliot Gould. He was once married to Barbara Streisand, you know. That must have been lots of fun.
I don’t like the fact that Henry Kissinger and the CIA were behind the coup to get rid of Allende but I guess that was done in order to keep Fidel Castro and the Soviets from establishing a permanent foothold in South America. At any rate it’s always better for a country to be ruled by a right-wing nationalist dictator than by some left-wing globalist sell-out. Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Brazil were all better off under military rule than they are now under “democracy”.
26 June, 2014 at 8:39 am
Whose eyes are those at the top of the poster? Looks like Elliot Gould. He was once married to Barbara Streisand, you know. That must have been lots of fun.
I don’t like the fact that Henry Kissinger and the CIA were behind the coup to get rid of Allende but I guess that was done in order to keep Fidel Castro and the Soviets from establishing a permanent foothold in South America. At any rate it’s always better for a country to be ruled by a right-wing nationalist dictator than by some left-wing globalist sell-out. Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Brazil were all better off under conservative military rule than they are now under liberal “democracy”.
26 June, 2014 at 1:51 pm
The 1973 coup against Allende is still a bit of a mystery for us mere mortals. We would think that Kissinger and his fellow tribesmen in the State Dept. would have been secretly overjoyed that a leftist was in power in Chile. Why didn’t they pull all the strings to prevent Pinocet and the Chilean army from ousting Allende?
My guess is that Allende was for some reason not in favor with the self-chosen ones. Perhaps he was too independent and even anti-jewish.
26 June, 2014 at 2:57 pm
I’ll make sure I miss it.