STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN IN FORT McCOY
In 1909, Fort McCoy was established as an army training base. In 1942, due to a roundup after Pearl Harbor, about 300 aliens of German, and Italian, and Japanese origin were temporarily interned and then sent to other camps to make room in 1943 for the training of some 4,000 Japanese Americans from Hawai‛i who had volunteered to fight in the newly organized 100th Regiment. After the Japanese Americans soldiers were transferred to Fort Shelby, Mississippi, and on onward to North Africa, the fort became a prisoner-of-war camp for Germans and Japanese captured during the war. In May 1944, on the eve of the Normandy Invasion, the Stirn family entered the compound. Frank Stirn (played by Eric Stoltz), a barber who was classified 4F for a heart murmur, is assigned to cut hair of those at the camp, while his wife Ruby (Kate Connor) serves as a telephone operator, leaving their 9-year-old daughter (Gara Lonning) and 6-year-old son (Marty Backstrand) to enjoy the adventure. Ruby’s 18-year-old sister Anna Gertie (Lyndsy Fonseca) comes along and is assigned desk work. Although the nonfiction book Stalag Wisconsin (2002) recounts how the Germans impressed the local population, Fort McCoy is not that story. Instead, each member of the family copes in a different way. Mr. Stirn regrets that he could not fight. Mrs. Stirn regrets her marriage. Anna courts and then marries Sam, a Jewish American soldier (Andy Hirsch, the film’s co-director). Gertie tries to befriend Heinrich (Josh Zabel), a German POW of the same age. Lester tries to have fun in other ways. However, the most fascinating element is how well the prisoners were treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions despite rumors of mistreatment of Americans in German and Japanese POW camps and presence of an unrepentant Nazi at Fort McCoy. If the film was made to shame Americans over the nearly 100 Geneva Convention violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, then Fort McCoy could have done more to achieve its goal. But, due to mostly stilted acting and a lackluster screenplay, the film’s purpose is elusive except as a simple biopic co-directed and written by the Kate Connor, granddaughter of Gertie Stirn. MH
BLOOD RUNS IN COLDWATER
Titles at the end of the fictional Coldwater inform that there is no federal law regulating camps for delinquents, and state law enforcement is lax. When the film begins, macho Brad Lunders (played by B. J. Boudousqué) is arrested and taken to Coldwater, a camp in Colorado (actually filmed in the Ventura County mountains) for delinquent boys run by sadistic ex-Marine Sergeant Frank Reichert (James C. Burns). Upon Brad’s arrival, Reichert lectures that his role is transforming boys into responsible citizens. But the only boys who have been transformed are now guards who are just as sadistic as the commander. At the end of the film, there is a massacre and murder, but anti-spoiler ethics prevent any disclosure of who is killed and by whom. The purpose of the film is to explain why that happened, as the discipline is so severe that filmviewers see graphic descriptions of torture and other fatal and near-fatal indignities. Brad, who is sent to the camp for drug dealing and murdering his sweetheart according to flashbacks and a former buddy who is assigned to the camp, is the most intelligent of the delinquents. During his second year at the camp, from which there is no escape, he figures out a way to beat the system, becoming an orderly with power over the other boys, obtaining a master key, and purloining key documents. Vincent Grashaw, the film’s director and co-screenwriter, has a definite reform in mind during post-screening Q&As, as one of his classmates was sent to such a facility when they were in Granada Hills High, San Fernando Valley. The Political Film Society agrees, nominating Coldwater for best film exposé and best film on human rights of 2014. MH