Scintillating Saturday

Normally I wouldn’t write my blog two days in a row, mainly because, well I often don’t have anything erudite to talk about or even write about. I wanted to write about this in my last blog but since I hadn’t written for ages I thought it best that I just talk about everything that’s sort of been bothering me in one way or another during Lockdown and even before.

I have been watching an awful lot of films, both during Lockdown and even before, but the one thing that is really starting to drive me nuts about a lot of these films – particularly Westerns are the plot holes. These are plot holes you could drive a ten ton truck through. Now I appreciate that not everybody will see what I’m seeing – I rather suspect it’s from being a Writer but I will attempt to explain even in this short Blog.

7th cavalry: this film centres around the plight of Captain Tom Benson who is ordered away from Fort Abraham by General Custer to bring his fiancée back. When Benson returns to the Fort it’s to find the Fort seemingly deserted and the fork garrisoned by misfits. When Benson enters the Fort he is confronted by the widows of those men who had died with Custer at The Battle of Little Bighorn and who blame him for deserting his post; Benson’s previous career as a gambler and Custer’s favouritism of him. The plot hole is this: Captain Benson is reviled by most of the post and when the President of the United States requests the return of the bodies from the battlefield Captain Benson volunteers to go. Meanwhile his fiancée, Martha, is left at the Fort. A friend of both General Custer and Captain Benson arrives at the Fort and upon greeting Martha tells her that he knows that General Custer ordered Captain Benson to go and fetch her because he was there when General Custer told him to. This man then leaves Martha to go and inform both the camp commander and then to fetch a horse to go and liaise with Captain Benson. On the way to this liaison he is attacked by a lone Sioux and shot from the horse (and is presumably dead.) The horse arrives at the battlefield, the Sioux Indians assume that it is the spirit of General Custer and allow the men to leave in peace. The plot hole is this: There is no mention of this man ever again in the course of the film, he is supposed to be a friend of Captain Benson and yet he simply vanishes from the film. He is not even mentioned when Martha’s father, Colonel Kellogg, Captain Benson and her gathered together at the end of the film to confirm that Captain Benson can marry Colonel Kellogg’s daughter. As they say in TV Tropes land, ‘What Happened to the Mouse’?

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I see these things more clearly now, but it really, all it would take would be a couple of lines to acknowledge this person, but there’s nothing. The second plot hole, if you can call it a plot hole although it’s still annoying and quite bizarrely baffling even from the perspective of someone like me. But here goes, I’m bound to irritate someone.

Killers of Kilimanjaro: A stylish 1950s flick set in darkest Africa. Robert Taylor is the lone adventurer à la Alan Quartermain who is heading off into the interior to check on the progress of a railroad, the man he sent ahead of him has mysteriously vanished. A woman approaches him and asks if she can come with him to find her father (the man that Robert Taylor sent ahead of him.) Reluctantly (of course it’s always reluctantly) he agrees to bring with him to find a father. They find her father. He is very ill and he’s so ill that he doesn’t recognise her. Robert Taylor says that he should be sent back to get well, but he refuses on the grounds that the natives have treated him well. The next scene is Robert Taylor and this woman and all I could think was: First: screw him wanting to stay in the interior, he’s dangerously ill and should be sent back to the West to a nice clean, sterile hospital where he can be treated properly with drugs that they simply won’t have in the interior of darkest Africa. Second: she came here to find her father – why is she still staying with the Robert Taylor character? She should be returning with her and making sure that he’s all right.

I know I know, it’s me being pedantic. As I wrote before it’s probably the writer in me who doesn’t like loose ends that can’t be easily tied up or solved. And, certainly in 7th Cavalry the small plot hole could be easily remedied if people – well think Writer – had made little more effort. And as for the second – Killers of Kilimanjaro? Having seen the film a couple of times, I think the best thing to do with this would be the trash every version of the film and rewrite it from the ground up. It isn’t just the portrayal of Africa that makes one win’s, it’s all so the complete disregard for logic (or some logic) within the film itself. Anyway now that I’ve had my rant – and this is one thing that does infuriate me to the point where I could quite happily bite through leather, I think I shall close today’s blog and hope you will forgive me for it not being terribly philosophical, or erudite, or even thoughtful.