We’d quote the big Gary Cooper courtroom speech, transferred form the book verbatim,  as a Money Quote but someone else has already posted it here, as a life lesson, with which we would heartily agree. I’ll just pluck out some good parts :

  “The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

***

 “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!
     “Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at he results. Look into your own conscience.”

***

     ”I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
     “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
     “It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

The pilot of this plane was the indiividual with his hand on the controls and the throttle. He decided the pitch of the nose and where in the river to steer to. There was nothing collective about the saving of these lives. And yet they were saved. Would they have been of the choices he made were made buy a committee?

It is people like thi spilot to whom the writer referred with the speech spoken by Gary Cooper’s Howard Roark. And he has a name right out of one of Rand’s books, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger.

This one deserves the honor of the label “film” as the word might be defined by film snobs, as opposed to “movie,” and not just because it’s not the usual Hollywood product. Bourne There’s plenty of German trash out there, we’re sure. (We just watched something called Stalingrad– “by the producers of Das Boot.What a mess.)

The Lives of Others, though, ranks right up there as one of the top two in the surveillance genre with The Conversation. There’s not a single wasted frame. The tension is palpable and the plot subtle, both drawing you in to the multiple dilemmas of the multiple characters. The mood is perfectly set with a simple sound track and the spare austere settings befit the desolate time and place, the East German police state just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The imminent changes about to befall all in the film may be the overriding dramatic irony at  work, but it is just one of many, an event that none of the characters would  never venture to predict from their viewpoint; and the filmmakers do well to resist any kind of easy hindsight along these lines. Subtlety is the by-word and they abound, even down to the background sounds of the final scenes. 

We wouldn’t want to spoil it for you though, just get it, rent it, NetFlix it.  Watch it with someone you love who doesn’t undervalue freedom. You won’t be sorry.

Final note: And it was nice, for once, to see the “Bohemian” types in opposition to an actual oppresive regime.