Word: frenchmens
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...that reprisals are called for. Anxious to please, the government, working through the Justice Department, sets up a kangaroo court which is known by the grimly evasive title "special section." The ministers of justice even supply their own reason for complying with the German edict - who knows how many Frenchmen will die at German hands otherwise...
...instead, Frenchmen die at the hands of their countrymen. The judges appointed to the special section are ambitious, amoral and untroubled by legal niceties. Dissidents are rounded up and tried according to a new law that makes it simple to expunge alleged enemies of the state. That law is also retroactive. A man who received a light sentence for pasting up a radical poster just weeks before finds himself in the dock again, this time condemned to death...
Indians were not Lamy's most formidable opponents. He and Machebeuf had come to Santa Fe in the wake of the Mexican War, only a few years after the U.S. Army. To the Mexicans of the new territory, the Frenchmen were simply invaders in different uniforms. When Lamy suspended Padre Gallegos of Albuquerque for insubordination, the popular priest stood for election to the U.S. Congress. There he ceaselessly pilloried his enemy. Padre Martinez, a pastor who ruled Taos like a prairie king, refused to be tithed by the new bishop. After an agonized power struggle, Lamy excommunicated his adversary...
...treatment of ethical problems, however, Black Thursday is much less satisfactory. It is questionable whether the director could say anything meaningful about the occupation by treating the attempt of one well-intentioned individual to intervene. Does he want to argue that if all Frenchmen had behaved like Paul, then the deportation could never have taken place? Or does he want to show that Paul's failure to save anyone indicates the futility of his action? Both positions are implied in the film and both, perhaps, are partially valid, but to consider the issue in these terms is misleading. The sources...
...color and present as black and white functions as a sort of Brechtian alienation effect, distancing the viewer from the action in order to make him consider its implications. The black and white sequences, both in form and content, pose the question of the occupation's meaning for Frenchmen today. The dull crowds of people, the dark buildings, the depressing film studio--mundane scenes from the present--undercut the exquisite nostalgia of the color sequences and reveal the director's consciousness of the limitations of his self-exploration...