I said something in my September 25th entry into this blog about THE WEIGHT. Specifically, I spoke about the movie's back-story, and the underlying reality of FDR's confiscation of privately held gold in a determined demonetization of the historically value-measuring metal. And I said that I enjoyed the movie. But I didn't say much more about what happens in the movie, or what I liked about it (other than the subject matter). Here are some further points. First, the back story didn't really matter all that much to the action. A gaggle of sympathetic convicts had to get gold from point A to point B in order to win their freedom. Without knowing or caring about the history you can 'get' that. The distance between A and B was in rugged terrain, in the mountains of Oregon. Our heroes encounter and overcome obstacles to their success, both natural and human, and the movie's style is half-way between prison break on the one hand and heist movi...
The newly released movie THE WEIGHT, starring Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe and Julia Jones looks at an aspect of the Depression in 1933 now largely lost to history --the off book and sometimes violent machinations over gold as the Roosevelt administration both de-monetized and confiscated the stuff. What usually IS remembered is that the administration de-monetized gold. The shiny stuff would no longer back the Federal Reserve notes. (Eleven years later, the Bretton Woods Accord introduced some backdoor re-monetization -- but that is another story.) More to the movie's point, or at least to its backstory and a couple of expository speeches, Roosevelt figured he could not allow a lot of gold to remain in private hands. Had it stayed there, it could have been freely exchanged and it could well have become a de facto money, or at least a dangerous competitive risk to the fiat paper money by which it was supposed to have been replaced. So, private persons were ordered to tu...