Guy Ritchie Re-Examined: The Genius of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Oh how do we love him? Well, let us count the ways...
Tom Wilson.
We used to cap on Tom Wilson so aggressively that you’d have thought that we actually knew Tom Wilson. Tom Wilson, a golfer. All it took was seeing him once for the narrative to unspool: Tom Wilson was a master spy who managed to be so masterful simply on the strength of his total forget-ability. The second you met him, you forgot you had met him.
Neither shaken, nor stirred this Wilson was a giant in the spy trade. In our minds. In reality? Tom was just a guy who liked to golf who we had found remarkably unremarkable. But having met him once was all it took to make a legend out of a man who hadn’t done anything especially legendary.
The same thought that those of us who gave a shit thought when we were in a position to contemplate who it was that Madonna, the singer, was planning to marry.
Guy Ritchie…wha? Or better yet, who?
Well, he made films, films at the time that none of us had seen, but we could see Madonna working it. Trying to gain a foothold in film, and largely failing, Madonna had managed a workaround.
Ritchie was maybe the first to know what many of us Madonna stans had already figured out: love her as we might, film would never yield its secrets to her. With a remake of the widely acclaimed 1974 Lina Wertmüller film Swept Away, Ritchie had managed to do that which had previously eluded him. He made a shitty movie. Out of a great one no less.
Ritchie moved me. Not so much for the rat-a-tat writing. Or his Black Belt in BJJ. Or the real genius of casting his films well but by something so simple I felt stupid for not having seen it…
Now we don’t know that these were causally connected but soon after that they divorced and Ritchie, free to make Madonna-free movies, made movie after movie, each exceeding the previous one in scope and craft. And Ritchie himself having earned our attention, now had our interest.
A two-step that was not being made by us alone. The box office backed our play here and still, if pressed, to describe what Ritchie even looked like? Not the easiest thing. Which may have suited him just fine.
Then weird coincidences. Make that “coincidences”.
Bits and pieces of martial arts arcana had worked their way into his movies. Which made sense since it seems Ritchie studied Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. My book Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass Kicking But Were Afraid to Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking? A partial tribute to my self-same obsession with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, as well as my journey to Black Belt.
Ritchie was also astrologically bound to me as well. We’re both Virgos. So there’s that as well which, at this point, has me seeing what I think is obvious: his fortune and mine are somehow inextricably woven together. A perfectly sane thought by an imperfectly sane man? Or the other way around.
In any case having seen all of his movies something else had started to hit as well. Ritchie had moved beyond the Tarantino-esque descriptors that had graced his earlier work. In the wonderfully transformative way that Brits have had since forever, the student had exceeded the master.
In the same way that America had created punk rock while the Brits had managed to commodify it and sell it back to us. Or how Radiohead were an early stage Nirvana cover band before ascending to non-Nirvana heights. Or how The Rolling Stones had reimagined American Blues. (And, oh yeah, House music? US.) It’s not just thievery. Much less that and much more that America, and by extension Americans, doesn’t/don’t see themselves as clearly as our nearest and dearest global neighbors do.
With a certain amount of wonder and morbid fascination, Brits have been reconstituting us for us for so long we don’t see it and in our blindness and our certainty that anything old country is better anyway we’ve let it pass without comment.
This caused in me an inherent distrust of Brit art endeavors. But Ritchie moved me. Not so much for the rat-a-tat writing. Or his Black Belt in BJJ. Or the real genius of casting his films well but by something so simple I felt stupid for not having seen it, and didn’t realize it until seeing his newest The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare last night.
It was a World War 2 action thriller with Black folks in the cast.
Now this might not be an issue for you but for a Black actor like me (even if my main claim to fame was the execrable Bill Cosby flick Leonard Part 6), it’s been paranoia fuel. Specifically, that America’s cinematic love affair with World War 1 and 2 movies was something that was really embraced because you didn’t have to cast Black actors to get the movies made. The military was segregated back then, structured along the idea that Black folks would make bad soldiers, and films about the period could just completely excise Black folks from public spaces.
Making America Great Again, indeed.
Ritchie, unlike Tarantino, manages his wokeness by hewing to the historical record which, as always, involves plenty of unheralded Black faces.
Ritchie’s flicks in a way that can only be described as subtly subversive always have Black actors/characters in them, people whose participation in his filmic narrative is noteworthy not because they are Black. They just happen to be so.
Tarantino’s flicks have Black characters as well, but their Blackness is always framed by an American narrative that’s as sick about race as America is. Ritchie’s characters? Black people.
Sort of like walking down the street anywhere in America where your passage with Black skin, if Black skin is what you have, is often noted with a certain amount of low-grade anxiety. Regardless of every extant fact that might allay concerns.
In the United Kingdom, though I’ve heard Black Brits complain and I have also read their Prime Minister once describe them as “pickaninnies”, the street racial politic, at least as observed by me, is just low-grade. Sans any anxiety issues. And this from a country with a massive past as colonizers and race riots in the 1970s.
So that Ritchie’s films are filthy rich with Black characters, none maybe more so than the World War 2 potboiler The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, while a surprise, isn’t that surprising. He’s got a Black son. But Steven Spielberg has two Black kids and while he made The Color Purple, he also made Amistad where Barbara Chase-Riboud, a very Black Kafka Award and Carl Sandburg-award winning sculptor, poet, and author, had to sue him for plagiarism.
Again: American schizophrenia v British, dare we say, balance?
And all of this before we even start lambasting every single history teacher we’ve ever had for totally whiffing by making history much more boring than Ritchie’s take on the early days of the OSS, the British secret service.
Like Inglorious Bastards, the Tarantino flick, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare puts the comedic slaughter of Nazis front and center, but Ritchie, unlike Tarantino, manages his wokeness by hewing to the historical record which, as always, involves plenty of unheralded Black faces.
This is not so much a knock against Tarantino, who I love as well, but a doff of the cap to the toff guy at the helm of Toff Guy films, Ritchie himself. Noteworthy because he didn’t have to, but he did, while others don’t have to and don’t. And Ritchie did so without much fanfare. It was what it was and what it was, was enough for me to do a film review about The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
And so here it is: a fantastic flick. Five stars, two thumbs up, one no-Madonna. Go and see it and extra pats on the back for figuring out that the vast majority of knifing scenes in the movie must have been drawn from real SAS manuals, as I’ve come to recognize them.
So get your popcorn, your seats and drinks: a great movie is about to start.
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Maybe.