Mr. Freedom

If you’re an American leftist filmmaker and you’re looking to make a film denigrating your homeland, France is probably the best place to film or so thought Jewish-American photographer-turned-filmmaker and super cynical Semite William Klein when he decided to direct his second feature Mr. Freedom (1969), as well as virtually every other film he ever directed. Described by veteran American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as being, “conceivably the most anti-American movie ever made,” Mr. Freedom is the sort of highly predictable Levite leftist revisionist view of history where the shadowy evil doers are determinedly depicted as banal, boorish, and barbaric waspy white Americans, but as history has proven since the over four decades since the film’s initial release, the color, creed, and culture of the United States has changed for the discernibly darker, thus one of the many reasons why this would-be-sharply-sardonic cinematic work seems absurdly anachronistic and even asinine, at least to those people who do not borrow their sense of history and politics from The Daily Show, MTV, and/or mischling multiculturalist Tim Wise. Centering around a pseudo-superhero named “Mr. Freedom” who goes on a mission to France to save freedom-hating frogs from a commie takeover from Switzerland, Mr. Freedom attempts to go further in its aesthetic absurdism and flagrant farce of the Cold War than Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and for about the first 30-minutes of the film, I was willing to give auteur Klein’s work some serious consideration in attempting this rather respectable feat, but his film inevitably collapses faster than the USSR did in 1991. Offending Marxist-Leninist groups during its premiere at the 1968 Avignon Festival due to its racially-charged caricatures of the Soviet Union (depicted as a sneaky and sadistic swarthy Stalinist Cossack/Slav named “Moujik Man”) and Maoist Red China (a gigantic inflatable dragon with chinky, sneaky eyes named “Red China Man”), Mr. Freedom never really developed a following in France and is virtually unknown in the United States, which is probably for a good reason as faux-Frenchman William Klein is certainly no Dušan Makavejev, but more like the slightly more sophisticated Godfather of horrendous Hebraic hacks Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, except occasionally funny and marginally culturally astute. Starring French Feminist superstar Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, Freak Orlando) and featuring cameos from monkey-man musician Serge Gainsbourg, as well as semi-popular actors like Donald Pleasence and Philippe Noiret, Mr. Freedom is, at best, an exceedingly uneven footnote from film history, and, at worst, just another example of the intellectually bankrupt left, especially the post-Talmudic kosher cosmopolitan sort. 

 A work of low-camp comic book cinema of the completely cynical and contrived ‘crazy’ sort directed by a curiously cliche member of the "culture of critique," Mr. Freedom uses established stereotypes to an exceedingly exaggerated extreme to both simultaneously discredit and validate them, depending on the race and persuasion of the stereotype. Of course, those individuals of the white conservative Southerner sort, like the ostensible ‘protagonist’ Mr. Freedom (played by American John Abbey, whose only other notable role was as a supporting character in Jacques Tati's 1967 film Playtime), are those that confirm an unflattering stereotype in Klein’s cinematic tribute to everything he hates about Amerikkka, with the satirized faux-superhero acting as an allegorical composite of all his dislikes.  A rough and tough sheriff by day and a commie, gook, and Negro-smashing, misogynistic superhero whenever he is vehemently vying for freedom under the the guidance of Dr. Freedom (Donald Pleasence) so as to annihilate the red, black, yellow, and brown menace around the world, Mr. Freedom sports an innately idiotic uniform that characterizes everything that is moronic about America, American football – a sport that promotes an impenetrable dichotomous/dualistic “sports mentality,” capitalism, worship of moronic and mundane meatheads, blind allegiance to “teams,” boorishness and anti-intellectualism, and, most of all, “Americanism.” During the beginning of Mr. Freedom, the hero crashes through the apartment window of a large family of JFK-loving Negroes and like a true old school confederate calls them “boys” and shoots one for shoplifting (but gunning down the rest on his way out of the window), but ultimately more stressing matters concern Mr. Freedom as he is called by Dr. Freedom from “Central Freedom,” which is symbolically featured at the top floor of a building featuring big corporate floors like Texaco, Shell, General Motors, Standard Oil, etc., in concern to the very possible red invasion of France. As Dr. Freedom tells his political soldier, “We have trouble in France. The Red commies are infiltrating from Switzerland…Let me tell you about the French. They are 50 million…mixed-up, sniveling crybabies who haven’t stood on their two feet since Napoleon. And that wasn’t yesterday. And Napoleon wasn’t even French…So the French are the white man’s burden. Our burden. We’ve had to carry them through two world wars already and we’re damn well gonna have to carry them through the next,” which is a sentiment I can generally concur with, but as Mr. Freedom learns himself, there is no hope for the hopeless. 

 Naturally, Mr. Freedom goes to Frogland and attempts to battle the commies with his crude and crass charisma, but the first thing he conquers (or so he thinks) is the heart, soul, and mind of a femme fatale named Marie-Madeleine (played by a decadently dolled-up and whored-out Delphine Seyrig), and he puts the busty broad in her place by aggressively remarking regarding her belief about the political futility of the Vietnam war with, “Listen, baby, there’s us and there’s them. We are Freedom, the real America. They are Red-ass, black-ass, Jew-ass farts who can’t even spell America.” Seeing as director William Klein is a ‘Jew-ass fart,’ he clearly establishes what “America” he identifies with and the intrinsically imaginary white Christian he hates and thinks is in control of the U.S., as symbolized by the super duper dumbass superhero Mr. Freedom. Not long after arriving in France, Mr. Freedom is honored by his French compatriots, “Friends of Freedom,” at a sort of fratboy sports party featuring his self-described “white guards,” including pink klu klux klaners, cheap dimestore whore cheerleaders, effeminate frog fascists, and a piano-playing Serge Gainsbourg who proudly proclaims, “I love freedom.” Of course, not everyone enjoying a sabbatical in France loves freedom, as a number of commie assassins attempt to exterminate Mr. Freedom and his one-man counter-revolution against radical red rodents. Mr. Freedom also has John Wayne-style verbal showdowns with Stalinist Moujik Man, Maoist Red China Man, and a new growing threat, the anti-freedom FAF. Mr. Freedom also gives “Super Frenchman” – the ruler of France – an ultimatum of “us or them,” which will also prove to be a source of his demise. Unfortunately, for him “Freedom” has lost a lot of credibility since its victory during the Second World War and Mr. Freedom is not winning any allies by mirthfully machine-gunning down French citizens for fun. Upon learning that his mistress Marie-Madeleine is a femme fatale and spy and that the FAF refuses to negotiate, Mr. Freedom declares an end to the Cold War and enacts a bomb-based blitzkrieg of offensive escalation (destroying at least half of France in the process). Of course, with France being full of pansy communist protestors, but especially a growing number of FAF anti-freedom terrorists, Mr. Freedom faces retaliation via the execution of all his French “Friends of Freedom,” and inevitably goes out in a blaze a glory that is less than appreciated by the country he dedicated his life to. 

 Featuring real stock-footage of American race riots, the commie student uprising in May 1968 in France, white Americans backing the war in Vietnam, and other socio-politically relative material from that time (as a full-time photographer and sometimes filmmaker, Klein was foremost a documentarian, hence his incompetency with narrative cinema), Mr. Freedom is as blatantly out-of-date as it is embarrassingly comedically contrived, thus making for a film that is virtually the arthouse Team America: World Police (2004) of its time, albeit less iconoclastic and coherent. Essentially, William Klein took what was an interesting enough idea for a film and drowned it with his hysterical, Hebraic arrogance and, not unlike his own kinsman in Hollywood, portrayed the American majority (i.e. white Christian of European descent) as barbaric goy philistines who enjoy nefarious activities like family cookouts, golden retrievers, coca cola, and a good fight. Some 40+ years later since the films release, France is now the leftist utopia Klein long ago dreamed of as a culturally and racially mongrelized virtual corpse being fed on by hostile aliens from the Global South of mostly the Arab/African Islamic persuasion (who are quite keen on crushing that 'cultivated' cosmopolitan culture) and where a sort of virus of nihilism or ‘mental AIDS’ occupies the minds of its indigenous population and emasculated elite, including xenophilia, ethnomasochism, and spiritual castration where the effete archetypical homosexual male is looked at as the height of ideal ‘manhood,’ while ideals like honor, loyalty, family, patriotism, and well, the actual will to survive, are looked at as outmoded ideals from a bygone misogynistic time. As for contemporary America and the spread of ‘democracy’ (aka pro-American regime) or New American imperialism, it is certainly not of the traditional ‘white man’s’ (aka European) creed as expressed in its patent Pro-Zionist Philo-semitism and its war against Europe, including attempting to neutralize Russia (thus destroying any tangible relationship between Europe, which is the Pentagon’s worse nightmare) and promotion of nonwhite/Islamic immigration (including promotion of historically hostile/non-white Turkey into the EU) despite the fact that towelheads are supposedly terrorists, not to mention how American leaders (both of the ostensible “right” and “left”) promote the mongrelization of the nation via pro-illegal immigration of solely nonwhite peoples to replace the existing population of whites from every class level, including the growing under-classes (filled with Mexicans and other Indios and Mestizos, as well as virtually every other Third World 'immigrants' from around the world) and the upper-classes (with Indians and East Asians taking over technical fields). That being said, if William Klein wanted to update his Mr. Freedom character, it would need to be a racially dubious character of a brownish complexion (preferably a fellow who claims to be of the Hebraic faith, but of Kenyan, Irish and Ashkenazi heritage) who still sports the football uniform, but of blue and white coloring (in tribute to America’s “greatest ally” Israel) and who advocates a hodgepodge of so-called ‘Judeo-Christianity,’ humanism, multiculturalism (which, would be better described as racial/cultural chaos at the benefit of multinational corporations), Noahide laws, Hollywoodism, corporatism, LGBT extremism, and seemingly inexplicable ‘anti-Americanism’ (of the traditional anti-Euro-American sort) and then maybe the director would be approaching something resembling actual reality as opposed to a hysterical Hebrew Weltanschauung. 

-Ty E