Asymmetrical Information

There's a short story by Roald Dahl on this theme called "Beware of the Dog." An American aviator is shot down and the Germans do up a hospital room to convince him he's in England, and he almost gives them the information they're asking for, until he looks out the window and sees a house with a sign saying "Gardez au chien" or similar.

An even more confusing question to add is which came first the movie you are referring to or . . .

The Experts

36 Hours

James Garner is the American and Rod Taylor is the clever German trying to trick him.

You can't fool me! That movie hasn't been made yet-- you're just trying to get me to reveal the story so you can sell it to someone else.

Good one, Paul.

There was another movie with the opposite plot called “Wake Me when the War is Over” about a US airman (Ken Berry) who goes into hiding into a German Baroness (Zsa Zsa Gabor) during the latter days of WWII. Every time he tries to leave, she convinces him that the war is still going on even though it had been five years since the German surrender. She even went so far to pay some ex-German soldiers to march through her dining room yelling "Achtung!" while he was hiding nearby.

36 Hours

That plotline was adapted for use in an episode of the rather lame sci-fi series "V" in the mid-1980s (among the fake "proof that a lot of time has gone by" devices used was a newspaper headline reading "Charles and Di Get Divorced!" Well, it *seemed* unlikely at the time. . .).

"Goes into hiding into a German Baronness"? Ahem...

Perhaps if you told me the date of the D-Day invasion I could help you remember the name of the movie, fraulein. I mean 'miss'.

"Goes into hiding into a German Baronness"? Ahem...

"Erections that last more than five years can be a sign of a serious medical condition--consult your physician." ]:-)

I don't think even Zsa Zsa could have managed this feat of concealment.

This reminds me of one of the truly great Mission Impossibles: They set up a mock submarine in a warehouse and fake the rescue of a spy who won't reveal a critical piece of information. They drug him and he wakes up inside the (fake) submarine. They then fake an attack and convince the spy the sub is sinking. He gives them the info so they can radio it back to the spies country before the sub sinks. Then the MI team leaves the spy in the fake sub and vanish, while the spy thinks he will escape the sub by climbing out. He holds his breath, opens the hatch, and there he is in the warehouse. Ah, magnificent.

"36 Hours" with James Garner
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057809/

In pre-electric times, when it could take months for political information to filter out to far-flung battlefields, it was a common ruse de guerre to tell your enemy the war was over.

Detaching an incarcerated interogatee (viz Guantanamo) from reality in this way is a basic table-setting practice (that's likely what brought the movie to mind).

I suspect what you're looking for is Breaking Point:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0096977/

I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned this, but the movie is 36 Hours starring James Garner.

And the flip side in real life: the Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war ended.

If the War on Terrorism suddenly ended, would we notice?

I hate it when Jane asks for help and then doesn't bother to stop by and thank us or at least tell us if we answered her question.

"Situation Hopeless...But Not Serious" stars Robert Redford and Mike Connors as two US airmen who are trapped behind German lines after they parachute from their planes. Their captor is played by Alec Guinness. At war's end Guinness is afraid of retribution that could ensue were he to turn over his prisoners to the Allies, so he keeps them locked in his basement for YEARS convincing them that the war is still on. Eventually the two escape and after crashing a movie set in which a ww2 battle scene is being filmed, flee to Switzerland.

I am also pulling out my hair. What's the movie where a gigantic nation with well-funded military invades a shitty little desert outhouse of a country, gets mired (so to speak) there without an exit strategy, and where the big nation's president keeps brainwashing the public by telling them that they are winning the war?

Ahem. Is that a drive, or just a short putt?

No, no, the phrase "shitty" is only to be used to describe Israel. You're mixing up your adjectives!

Jane, I don't know if anyone has answered you yet, but I think the movie you are thinking about is 36 Hours and has James Garner in it.

Hi Jane, It's me, James Garner. The movie you are thinking about is 36 Hours. I'm surprised nobody here knew that. Glad to be of assistance.

Since nothing is happening here I will just play around.

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What's the movie where a gigantic nation with well-funded military invades a shitty little desert outhouse of a country, gets mired (so to speak) there without an exit strategy, and where the big nation's president keeps brainwashing the public by telling them that they are winning the war?

I think this is what you're thinking of.

You're welcome.

Yeah, that's the ticket. Bring up the Soviet Union. As if the actions of a no longer extant nation a quarter century ago mitigate US actions now.

"I hate it when Jane asks for help and then doesn't bother to stop by and thank us or at least tell us if we answered her question."

Manners are for little people ...

Jane, I don't know if anybody else got it (I tuned out when the thread started turning into a shitstorm about Iraq), but I think the movie you're thinking about is called "48 Hours". James Remar was in it.

Since "Jane" has apparently taken the week-end off and since this thread has falled into disarray and anarchy, I will bring us back to the usual high standards of this site with some poetry.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
---William Butler Yeats

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.
----Archibald MacLeish

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

-- William Butler Yeats

I Remember, I Remember

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. "I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -
'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

-- Philip Larkin

Sweeney among the Nightingales

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganised upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

---TS Eliot

And I will close with some poems for Memorial Day:

I Have a Rendezvous with Death

I HAVE a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
---Alan Seeger

In Flander Fields

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
---Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
---Wilfred Owen

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky. suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

AE Housman

It is the James Garner movie, and thank y'all so much. I'm sorry I haven't checked in -- my sister has been in town, and just left, and another guest has just arrived, so it's been a tiny bit hectic here at Stately Galt Manor.

OK, how did James Garner finally figure out he was being conned?

How did James Garner figgure out he was conned? He had a paper cut just before he was captured. At a meal, supposedly years later, some salt got into his cut. The pain remined him of how and when the cut had been made....

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