The Jack Reacher Cases (The Man Behind The Gun)

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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’.

The ostensibly YMCA-run Trench and Camp featured letters written by a fictional wife to her enlisted husband. In one of the Letters from a Soldier’s Wife, the wife says: Here women are grouped with children as defenceless victims of German evils and the poster resonates visually as well by depicting a young girl holding a baby. It is clear that posters from this era expected two very different things from contemporary women; on the one hand they had to be weak, guardians of the home, the very thing that men were fighting to protect and on the other hand they had to play their part in the war, to do the jobs men had left behind even if it meant abandoning their traditional “feminine” role. The Man Behind the Gun is a 1953 American Western film about the establishment of the city of Los Angeles. It was directed by Felix Feist and stars Randolph Scott. [2] Plot [ edit ] According to historian Alexander Boot, the young Mikhail succeeded in life ‘against the odds.’ In 1930, with the Soviet Union under the grip of General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin, “the Kalashnikovs, along with millions of others, were dispossessed and deported to Siberia. Most of Mikhail’s siblings didn’t survive the trip, and his father died shortly after”. This displacement had a profound effect on his education, and it is thought that Mikhail managed to complete just seven years of school before turning to the land, driving a tractor for a living, first in Siberia and then in a village near Moscow to which he escaped by forging his identity papers. By 1938 Kalashnikov had been conscripted into the Red Army, and by the time Russia entered the Second World War on 22 nd June 1941, Sergeant Kalashnikov was a tank driver and engineer. Blame the Nazis for making me a gun designer, he’d say in later life: “I always wanted to construct agriculture machinery.”

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Oh dear! What a disappointment. I've been watching old Westerns on British TV for decades, and I wasn't aware of this one until its showing yesterday - most other Scott Westerns come around every few years or so and are usually worth watching again.

The campaigns to police women’s sexual behaviours – labelled the ‘American Plan’– continued for over two decades, with police detaining thousands of women accused of being infected with STDs. The war didn’t feel relevant to young American men in the way it did to European men,” Rogers says. The Man Behind The Gun is a Randolph Scott western with Randy on a most serious mission. He's going undercover in southern California just before the Civil War to prevent a secessionist plot from taking California out of the union or at a very least splitting off southern California as a separate state for the southern Confederacy to be. 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.”School teacher Lora Roberts, another passenger, has made the trip to marry Giles, but she becomes ensnared in Senator Mark Sheldon's nefarious schemes and also discovers Giles has been seeing Chona Degnon, a singer. This poster claims that to join the QMAAC was “the Supreme test of British Womanhood”, a decidedly different take on womanhood than can be seen in a contemporary poster depicting the horrors of the bombing of Scarborough. This marked the final Western film for Patrice Wymore, who had become the last Mrs. Errol Flynn three years earlier. It was the final film for Lina Romay, who got her start in Hollywood in the early 1940s. The sudden end of the war did not mark the end of morale or sexualized motivation. After the war, Munson and some of his fellow morale planners published their theories as part of a new focus on human resources management which sought to boost morale and motivation in commercial industries. Particularly after President Wilson’s sudden U-turn on American belligerency, the government had to work hard to convince civilians to support the war, and this was doubly true for soldiers, many of whom were drafted against their will.

The Man Behind the Gun" is another of a series of 80 minute little westerns churned out by Randolph Scott during the 1950s. As with most of these films, there's plenty of action and a stellar supporting cast. 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.Robert Cabal, the young actor who plays Joaquin Murietta here, is best known as Hey Soos from the “Rawhide” TV series (1959-1965) 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. Even Capt. Roy Giles, commander of the local army garrison, isn’t above suspicion. After all, he’s from Virginia and has pro-South leanings of his own. Maj. Callicut: “I was told when a man got this far West, nobody asks him questions. Just ride along with me and you’ll meet up with some interesting answers.”

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. Randolph Scott is Maj. Ransome Callicut, sent on an undercover mission to California to head off a possible revolt in the state. 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 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.” Patrice Wymore was the last official Mrs. Errol Flynn. She would interrupt her rather short Flynn-promoted film career to tend her ailing husband, whom she eventually divorced. Unfortunately, her daughter by Flynn turned out to have Flynn's addiction to drugs and died a beach bum cocaine and rum addict, reduced to stealing coconuts to support her habit. Lina Romay was primarily known as a Latin singer. She should not be confused with the younger actress of mostly horror and pornographic films, with the same name.The rich colour and outdoor sets were good, but that's all I can say about this film. I have to agree with most of the other negative comments already made. Several times I felt like turning it off, and finally I did, halfway through, something I hardly ever do. 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. The YMCA, one of the CTCA’s core welfare organizations, strategically recruited attractive female canteen workers to serve troops on both sides of the Atlantic. The selected women, usually in their thirties (and all white), were selected because they were considered to be young enough to be alluring but old enough to resist so-called ‘khaki fever’ and refrain from sexual relations with soldiers. The criminals are ostensibly attempting to make Southern California a slave state area. But this is only a blind for the true goal of cornering water rights and undiscovered oil land. I know you are out on the front, pressing ahead, steadily, grimly … at night when my eyes are closed I have a vision of you, tall and proud, rushing forward.”