The Jack Reacher Cases (The Man Behind The Gun)

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The images of women in WWI posters reveal the tension between the need for women to work “like men” during the war and the desire for them to remain true to the Victorian ideal of a feminine woman. The poignant slogan (used by the Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Corps among others) “The Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun” pointed to the importance of women during the First World War but who that girl really was, or should have been, remained ambivalent. (C) John Johnson Collection These morale programmes reveal a striking hybrid between control and liberation, which suggests a lot more continuity between the two periods, as well as between experiences of constraint and the pursuit of pleasure.” The study reveals that the morale planners became masters of the propaganda directed at soldiers and that in newspapers, lectures and films, they made repeated use of alluring female imagery and voices.

Some posters, such the famous “Women of Britain say GO!” depict women as timid, frightened and almost trapped in the home while their husbands went off to the front line. The young boy clutching on to the skirt of his elder sister who in turn embraces her mother for support, drives home the message that women and children could be taken together as helpless victims of the war who needed to be protected by men. No doubt this was a successful persuasive tactic from the propaganda poster companies for encouraging men to fight but it proved to be an unsustainable way of depicting women as their position in society changed throughout the war. As Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard note in their book Working for Victory: Images of Women in the First World War, the war presented an opportunity for women to go beyond the traditional feminine role and to gradually immerse themselves in the public sphere. However the prospect that women could now do the same jobs as men posed problems for the idea that women were powerless and in need of protection from the war. How could a woman be both helpless and helpful for the war at the same time? It would seem that as the war progressed, posters were asking women to do both, arguably an impossible combination. The idea that America’s progressive era reached its crescendo in the First World War, and then was followed by an entirely different period of sexual liberalism in the 1920s is far too simplistic,” Rogers says. Randolph Scott is Maj. Ransome Callicut, sent on an undercover mission to California to head off a possible revolt in the state.

I'm a Randolf Scott fan but I didn't like this one because the plot was too complicated. First of all the movie starts with Randolf in a stagecoach going to California. He is pretending to be a school teacher in the stagecoach but when a bad guy riding in the stagecoach tries to shoot everyone he reveals he's really a sharp shooting bad guy. When they arrive at a small town saloon Randolf hooks up with two bad guys & they talk about making some money illegally & he tells them to call him by a different name because he's pretending to be a schoolteacher. Then you find out he's not a bad guy or a school teacher he's really an undercover Marshall with the army or something I don't know. There were so many bad guys pretending to be good guys and good guys who were really bad guys and to make it even further complicated good ladies who were secretly involved with bad guys that I couldn't figure out who was what & what was going on. I didn't understand what everyone was trying to do. All I know is Randolf was pretending to be a school teacher who was pretending to be a bad guy who was actually an undercover army marshall who is in love with a Spanish Salon girl who pretends to be interested in him but she's really in cohoots with some bad guys. Randolf is also in love with a lady who wants to be a school teacher but she is involved with another army marshall who tries to arrest Randolf but Randolf shows him papers that say he is undercover army marshall too just like he is & so they become friends which is awkward because they both love the same girl until she tells the guy it's not working out & kisses Randolf. I can't recommend this one. Watch another one. At the heart of this experiment was the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), a War Department-directed umbrella agency. Previous studies have demonstrated that the CTCA sought to control soldiers’ and women’s sex lives to prevent venereal infection and protect social morality in the US. When Sen. Mark Sheldon is assassinated, Callicut figures his suspects include pretty saloon owner Chona Degnon (Lina Romay), outlaw Vic Sutro (Anthony Caruso) and Southern sympathiser Bram Creegan (Morris Ankrum).

Bit worrying. I sat down to watch this film and it took a while for me to realise I'd seen it, and less than two years ago. This time I did persevere and watched it all the way through, and still wasn't impressed. It's a bit like a stew into which everything has been thrown, with an unappetising result. Robert Cabal, the young actor who plays Joaquin Murietta here, is best known as Hey Soos from the “Rawhide” TV series (1959-1965) The war didn’t feel relevant to young American men in the way it did to European men,” Rogers says. I had to resume this film from the beginning at the fifty minute mark because I was getting so confused with the plot strands. There seemed so many! Who were the good guys, who were the bad guys all that kind of thing because it was so confusing. To me anyway! It's a good job the film had only a modest running time to allow this to be practicable. It's definitely a film that has to be watched if you are going to seriously explore the Randolph Scott movies because he had such a filmography.

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This involved enforcing sexual abstinence while simultaneously exposing soldiers to carefully controlled forms of sexual stimulation. Believing that sexually satisfied men could not be easily motivated, the aim of this teasing was to generate unmet sexual desire, which the War Department could leverage as motivation to fight, especially through appeals to chivalry and heroism. It is good action entertainment for those who like their westerns action filled. An Easy-Going Gent with Deadly Guns...and a Reputation to Match!

In a study published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Eric Wycoff Rogers argues that the US Government and military took drastic action to use sexuality to motivate its conscripted soldiers to embrace their roles in the war. The explosion of TV channels must be eternally grateful to the Randolph Scott Western production line, because any any moment there must be one of what seems like a hundred Randolph Scott movies playing on at least one no-budget station. There’s a startling contradiction in the way Mikhail Kalashnikov has been portrayed by the media since his death less than a decade ago. On the one hand, according to the Associated Press, the inventor of the AK-47 automatic rifle apparently lost no sleep due to ‘the havoc wrought with his invention.’ On the other, Reuters says Kalashnikov decried and objected to the ‘criminal use of his rifles.’ The BBC claims that towards the end of his life, the Russian military engineer feared he ‘was to blame’ for, and was suffering ‘spiritual pain’ over, the deaths his Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947 (hence AK-47) had caused, while news agency AFP ran a story on how he had found peace in his nineties and had died a ‘happy man’.

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In this context, the War Department actively exploited sexuality to psychologically manipulate American soldiers to fight.” The United States Government sought to sexually stimulate then frustrate its soldiers to prepare them for an unpopular conflict in Europe, a Cambridge historian argues. Major Rance Callicut (Scott) poses as a disgraced army officer who is sent to work undercover to foil secession threats which would take Southern California out of the Union. The time is the 1850s. On the stagecoach to Los Angeles he meets Lora Roberts (Patrice Wymore) who is on her way to LA to marry army Captain Roy Giles (Philip Carey). Also on board is bandit Vic Sutro (Anthony Carouso) whose holdup attempt is foiled by Callicut. The exact lineage of the weapon is debated, with some commentators taking the position that the AK-47 is best described as a hybrid of previous rifle technology innovations, with Kalashnikov creating an automatic rifle combining the best features of the American M1 and the German StG 44. There are also claims that Kalashnikov copied other designs, such as Bulkin’s TKB-415 or Simonov’s AVS-31. In his 1995 book The History of Soviet Small-arms and Ammunition David Boltin says that because Kalashnikov had access to these weapons there was no need to ‘reinvent the wheel.’ He goes on to quote Kalashnikov as observing: “A lot of Russian Army soldiers ask me how one can become a constructor, and how new weaponry is designed. These are very difficult questions. Each designer seems to have his own paths, his own successes and failures. But one thing is clear: before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field. I myself have had many experiences confirming this to be so.”