The carnage is worth keeping in mind when viewing the neat and formal imagery of the ceremony that brought an end to the fighting in the Pacific, and thus the second World War.
“World War II formally ended at 9:08 on a Sunday morning, Sept. 2, 1945, in a knot of varicolored uniforms on the slate-gray veranda deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay,” LIFE reported. “When the last signature had been affixed to Japan’s unconditional surrender, Douglas MacArthur declared with the accent of history, `These proceedings are closed.’”
MacArthur was featured on the cover of LIFE in the Sept. 17, 1945 issue, which included coverage of the surrender ceremony. The cover identified him as “Commander of Japan,” a role he assumed during the American occupation. LIFE devoted nine pages to the ceremony, and four more to a story on the ruin left by the atomic bombs, headlined “What Ended the War.”
The ceremony took 23 minutes and was broadcast on television. LIFE’s account, while largely factual, had its undercurrents of sadness—the story noted that General Douglas MacArthur‘s hand trembled as he spoke.
MacArthur had not bothered with a necktie. He read his preliminary remarks sonorously from a sheet of paper. He called on those present to rise above hatred “to that higher dignity which alone benefits the sacred purposes we are about to serve…” He stood stiffly erect, but the hands that held the paper trembled. Then, amid a silence that was almost palpable, the signing began, losers first.
The verbal punch thrown at the end of that paragraph betrayed the bitterness of the four years of fighting, truly a long and brutal journey. It’s fitting that the USS Missouri now resides in Pearl Harbor, available for tours as visitors learn the history of the war in the Pacific.
But on Sept. 2, 1945, everyone signed the documents, a big-boy version of the schoolyard scene in which fighting kids agree to shake hands and go on their way, theoretically having learned something from what their hostilities cost them.
From left to right: an unidentified aide, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Adm. Chester Nimitz and Adm. William F. Bull Halsey arrived on deck for the signing of the official surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A vessel carrying Japanese envoys pulled up alongside the American battleship USS Missouri for the official signing of the unconditional surrender of Japan held in Tokyo Bay, Japan on Sept. 2, 1945
John Florea/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Japanese delegation surrendering in front of Allied officers on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Japan, September 2, 1945.
John Florea/Life PicturesShutterstock
The Japanese delegation awaited the signing of the articles of surrender ending World War II aboard the USS Missouri, Sept. 2, 1945.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Mamoru Shigemitsu (center), Japan’s foreign minister, stood next to his aide, Imperial Army General Yoshijiro Umezu, waiting to sign official surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Allied officers and crew crowded the decks of the USS Missouri as senior Japanese delegate Mamoru Shigemitsu signed official surrender documents ending World War II, Sept. 2, 1945.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Soldiers on the USS Missouri watched the signing of the official documents ending World War II, Sept. 2, 1945.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Soldiers on the USS Missouri for the signing of official documents ending World War II, Sept. 2, 1945.
John Florea/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Soldiers aboard the USS Missouri for the signing of the official documents ending World War II, Sept. 2, 1945.
John Florea/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American officers abd enlisted men saluted during the playing of the US National Anthem prior to the signing of the official surrender of Japan aboard USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945.
Carl Mydans/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The Japanese delegation, including Mamoru Shigemitsu (top hat, cane) and Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu (immediately to the left of Shigemitsu), faced Gen. Douglas MacArthur (at mic) and Allied officers during the official, unconditional surrender of Japan, held aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
J.R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Gen. Douglas MacArthur signed the official surrender of Japan, as Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and British Gen. Arthur E. Percival looked on aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Sept. 2, 1945.
J.R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
British Adm. Bruce Fraser signed the official surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri, Sept. 2, 1945.
J.R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Russia’s representative, Gen. Kuzma Derevyanko signed the official surrender of Japan aboard battleship USS Missouri, ending what was for Russia only a 25-day involvement in the Pacific war.
J.R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
The procession of signatories on the surrender documents including Canadiean Col. L. Moore Musgrave, Sept. 2, 1945.
J.R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
New Zealand, represented by Vice Marshal Leonard Monk Isitt, was the last of the many signatories of the documents ending World War II during the ceremony on the battleship USS Missouri, Sept. 2, 1945.
J.R. Eyerman/Life Photos/Shutterstock
Japanese signatories looked on as U.S. General Richard Sutherland checked over official documents mistakenly signed in the wrong place by several Allied officers during the surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945; he fixed the problem with his fountain pen.
The one-room school house was once a defining aspect of life in rural America, with nearly 200,000 of them dotting a landscape, but now only a few hundred such schools persist. The schools were already being viewed as a relic in 1941, when LIFE went to document one in Ryegate, Montana.
The school was, in the modern parlance, off the grid. LIFE described it as a “clapboard building” standing in a “stark and lonely” stretch in Golden Valley County. It had no running water or electricity, no telephone or telegraph. But in 1941 it was a place of learning for 17 boys and girls between the ages of six and 16.
“From farms as far as four miles away, they come to school on horseback, in cars, on foot,” LIFE wrote in its May 12, 1941 issue, which featured a U.S. Army parachutist on its cover. “They wear blue jeans, checked shirts, cotton dresses, and stockings. Their talk is of the chores they do at home when school is over: milking cows, splitting kindling, gathering eggs, running tractors, putting up preserves.”
Their teacher was Dorothy Albrecht, a 24-year-old from Billings, Montana who had come to Ryegate for her first teaching job. In a school day of 330 minutes, she taught 32 “classes,” four per day for each of the eight grades. Her pay was $90 a month—which today would be about roughly $1,660. LIFE said that pay rate was better than the national average for teachers in 1941. Albrecht was also given a place to live—a two-room cottage next to the school.
The images of kids arriving at school on horseback, taking spins on the merry-go-round and playing baseball out front certainly conjure a sort of nostalgia for a simpler life.
But the photos also capture what was hard about the situation, particularly for young Ms. Albrecht. According to the story she bathed once a week, sitting in a washtub with a scrub brush, cleaning herself in water that she had to collect from a cistern, haul 100 yards and then heat on the stovetop. LIFE’s photographer, Hansel Mieth, also photographed her sitting at her desk at night, writing letters by the glow of a kerosene lamp—surely not the ideal way for a 24-year-old to spend her evenings.
Note that 80 years later, the town of Ryegate remains quite small, with the 2010 census putting the town population at 245. The website for the Ryegate Public School, home of the Blue Demons, shows a building that, while not huge, has multiple rooms, and the school claims a 100 percent graduation rate and a 2:1 student-teacher ratio. The high school has 39 students in pre-K to 8th grade and 14 students in grades 9-12 . Education, in short, remains an intimate experience.
The one-room schoolhouse, teacher’s cottage and outhouse in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A student raised the American flag at a one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Children raised the flag outside of a one-room country school in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Clem and Frances Shaff rode to school on their pony, Shortie, in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Some students came to school on horseback in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dorothy Albrecht, 24, taught at the one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, in 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Students ranged from ages 6 to 16 at the one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Wayne Sillivan (standing), a 16-year-old eighth grader, was the oldest student at the one-room school in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Clem Schaff, who arrived at school on horseback, did battle with a history book at one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A student took a water break at the one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ms. Albrecht and the students at the one-room schoolhouse had lunch while listening to radio reports about the war, April 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Children played outside of a one-room country school in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Ms. Albrecht took a turn at bat during a baseball game outside the one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dorothy Albrecht, the 24-year-old teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dorothy Albrecht, who lived in a two-room cottage by the one-room schoolhouse, hauled coals, Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Bathing was a complicated process for 24-year-old schoolteacher Dorothy Albrecht in rural Montana; first she needed to haul water from a cistern 100 yards away from her cottage and heat in on the stove before climbing into the washtub, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Dorothy Albrecht, teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, stretched out on her sagging iron bed and prepared for the next day’s lessons, 1941.
Hansel Mieth/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At night Dorothy Albrecht wrote letters by a kerosene lamp in the two-room cottage provided to the teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in Ryegate, Montana, 1941.
Co Rentmeester, the man behind so many renowned photographs, began shooting for LIFE as a side job.
Rentmeester was born in Amsterdam, and as a rower he represented the Dutch in double scull at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. He then came to America and eventually enrolled as a student at the ArtCenter School of Design in Los Angeles. While taking classes he connected with the Time Inc. bureau there, accepting whatever assignments they had, because at $125 a pop, the photography gigs paid better than his previous side job, pumping gas for a dollar an hour.
“As I drove on Imperial Avenue, the whole thing was breaking right in front of me,” he recalled recently. “Stores were going up in flames, looting was going on.” He would jump out of his car to shoot a few frames and then duck back in and drive away before the crowd could zero in on him. “That’s how I worked for 48 hours,” he says.
His Watts photos landed on the cover of LIFE, and he began shooting more for the magazine. Then LIFE came to him with a proposition: going to Vietnam for three months to document the war. Rentmeester said yes, and within 48 hours of arrival in Vietnam, he went from getting set up with credentials and a uniform to being thrown into battle. Suddenly he was in foxholes with soldiers, machine guns were firing, and he could smell the dead bodies around him. “I will never forget the shock of going from the reality of life on the outside to suddenly being in the middle of death,” he says.
But after his three months were up, he came back for more. In 1967 he took a photo which was named Photo of the Year by the World Press Organization. He was working on a story about how American tanks were having a hard time navigating the marshy Vietnamese landscape, and during one bogdown he went inside a tank with a gunner and snapped a picture that captured life inside: a glimmer of light coming through the tank’s optical aiming device and illuminating the eye of a gunner covered in sweat and grease. “To get down to the bottom of the tank, with no room to crawl around and no light, it was really very tricky,” Rentmeester says. The soldier in the photo, PFC Kerry Nelson, would in subsequent battles go on to win a silver star for a display of bravery that included continuing to fight after sustaining a wound in which he lost his sight. Years later Rentmeester spoke to Nelson’s wife, who said that he never knew about the acclaim the photo of him had achieved.
In May 1968 Rentmeester sustained his own Vietnam battle wound. He was near the airport in Saigon when he was caught in a firefight. He jumped in a three-foot-deep gully to protect himself but a bullet hit him in his left hand and shattered the lens of his camera.
Rentmeester, who is ambidextrous, returned to the United States for hand surgery. After that he took his camera out into less violent terrains, including several assignments photographing wildlife. One such assignment led to one of the more beloved LIFE covers.
He went to Japan to photograph a study being done of snow monkeys on Mt. Shiga, of interest not just for their rarity and appearance but for their intensely structured societies. The snow monkeys’ rituals included bathing together in the hot springs. “I just spend four and five days waiting for the snow monkeys to come out of mountains,” he says, and his patience was rewarded as the monkeys eased themselves into the hot springs, creating a memorable cover shot.
The 1972 Olympics led to more memorable photos—some of athletes, and another of a hideous tragedy. In the leadup to the ’72 games he captured swimmer Mark Spitz in the water with what he called a “dragging shutter” which made it seem as if the water was in motion while Spitz’s head was in perfect focus. The innovative shot was named the World Press sports photo of the year.
Then at the Olympics in Munich, Rentmeester was in his rental car, driving to the athlete’s village when he heard a radio report—In German, which the Dutch native understood well enough—that Israeli athletes had been taken hostage. After being turned away from the village itself, Rentmeester found a spot of a hillside in which he had a narrow view of the Israeli compound 300 meters away. From that vantage point he snapped photos that showed members of the Black September group that was staging the assault “I set up there with a long lens all by myself for about a half hour with a tripod trying to pick out little things,” he recalls. “Then twenty other photographers were in the same spot. You couldn’t go anywhere else.”
During the run-up to another Olympics, Rentmeester shot what is arguably the most seen photo of his career—and arguably is the all-too-correct word here, because Rentmeester has gone to the Supreme Court over the photo, which inspired the “jumpman” logo for Nike’s Michael Jordan clothing brand.
The year was 1984, and Rentmeester went to Chapel Hill, N.C., to photograph basketball star Michael Jordan. He set up on a hillside that would give him a clean skyline, and while he was waiting for Jordan to appear, Rentmeester’s team mowed the hillside and bought a portable basketball hoop from a toy store that they set up on the hill. When Jordan arrived on the set, Rentmeester asked Jordan to jump straight up while holding a basketball aloft. And instead doing a regular basketball jump, Rentmeester asked Jordan to splay his legs in the manner of a ballet dancer. With the way the hoop had been positioned, it appeared as if Jordan was sailing in for a gravity-defying dunk. “It worked beautifully,” Rentmeester says.
The image ran across two pages in LIFE. But then six months later Rentmeester was in a meeting in Chicago with a corporate client and saw an image of Jordan doing the same jump on a Nike billboard, except that this time Jordan, who played for the Bulls, appeared to be sailing across a Chicago skyline. Nike then began to use a silhouette of the pose as the “jumpman” logo.
Rentmeester, who was a freelancer at that point, eventually sued Nike for appropriating his image—they had paid his $150 for a research copy, but they did not have permission for the public usage, he says. Nike argued that the logo was made from a version of the picture they staged themselves. You can read about the years-long legal battle here, but the end result is that the judges sided with Nike, despite the undeniable similarities with the pose that Rentmeester conceived. Rentmeester says, “To this day, I feel I was entitled to have my case heard in front of a jury.”
This collection of Rentmeester’s work shows the broad scope of the subject matters he tackled, giving a feel of what it was like to be a LIFE photographer—shooting the Amazin’ 1969 Mets baseball team one day, actor Donald Sutherland and his family, including young Kiefer the next, maybe popping in on the wedding of the president’s daughter. Look here, and there’s only one verdict to be reached, which is this this is an amazing body of work.
This man was driven from his home during the 1965 Watts riots, which lasted five days. The photo made the cover of LIFE’s issue of August 27, 1965.
Courtesy of Co Rentmeester
Firemen attempted to deal with one of the many fires set during the 1965 Watts riots, which lasted five days.
Courtesy of Co Rentmeester
PFC Kerry Nelson, his eye illuminated by light coming through his aiming sight, squinted to line up his 90-mm cannon; the photo was named 1967’s World Press photo of the year.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American tanks often struggled to move through the swampy terrain in Vietnam, 1967.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American B-52 dropped a payload of bombs onto Viet Cong positions during the Vietnam War, 1968.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Soldiers of the Second Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade saluted 98 pairs of boots arranged to commemorate each man who died in the fighting in and around Hill 875; the monthlong battle of Dak To cost 280 Americans and 1,641 North Vietnamese their lives.
Co Rentmeester/Life PIctures/Shutterstock
Soldiers of the Second Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade prepared to honor fallen comrades represented by 98 pairs of boots arranged to commemorate each man who died in the fighting in and around Hill 875; the monthlong battle of Dak To cost 280 Americans and 1,641 North Vietnamese their lives.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE photographer Co Rentmeester near the DMZ in Vietnam.
Life Pictures/Shutterstock
LIFE photographer Co Rentmeester, 1968.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An orangutan swinging from a vine in the jungles of North Borneo, 1968.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A group of Japanese macaques sat in hot spring in the Shiga mountains in Japan, 1969.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Snow monkeys n a tree branch in the Shiga mountains, Japan, 1969
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Japanese macaque or snow monkey sat in a hot spring in the Shiga mountains during a snowfall, 1969.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
January 30, 1970 LIFE Magazine cover
Photo by Co Rentmeester
Polar bears in Hudson Bay, Canada, 1969.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/1969
Tom Seaver dominated for the Miracle Mets in 1969, going 25-7 and winning the first of his three Cy Young awards.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tom Seaver won 25 games, the most in the majors, as the leader of the Miracle Mets in 1969.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans cheered on the 1969 Mets as the team drove toward its first World Series title.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
O’Hare Airport, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Donald Sutherland and his son, Kiefer, in New York, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock
Near Malibu, California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
California, 1970.
Co Rentmeester / LIFE Picture Collection via Shutterstock
In the enema room of the Bronx VA hospital, spinal injury patients waited up to four hours to be treated by a single aide, 1970.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
President Richard Nixon escorted his daughter Tricia down the aisle at her wedding to Nixon aide Edward Cox in the Rose Garden of the White House, Washington DC, June 12, 1971.
Co Rentmeester/LIfe Pictures/Shutterstock
US swimmer Mark Spitz trained for 1972 Munich Olympics.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/1970
Al Feuerbach, 1972 U.S. Olympian.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
US wrestler eventual gold medal winner Wayne Wells (top) overpowered West German Adolf Seger in freestyle welterweight elimination match at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.
Co Rentmeester The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
US swimmer Mark Spitz held a big lead in the 200-meter butterfly at the 1972 Olympics; he set a world record in the event while winning one of his seven gold medals at the Games.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A stocking-masked Black September terrorist looked out from balcony in the Olympic village where his group was holding nine Israeli athletes hostage after killing two others; all the Israeli athletes died in the incident, along with five of the eight hostage takers and a West German police officer.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/1972
A German policeman leaned against a wall outside an apartment where nine Israeli hostages were held in the Olympic village in Munich, September 1972.
Co Rentmeester/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
In 1984 Michael Jordan jumped straight up while doing a ballet split on a hillside in Chapel Hill, N.C., with a toy basket staged cannily in front of him, in 1984; the image led to a lawsuit between its photographer, Co Rentmeester, and NIke over the company’s “jumpman” logo.
Before we ever see Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, we hear about his character’s legend.
The reclusive candymaker Willy Wonka—a figure shrouded in mystery, whose immense wealth shields him from members of the public to whom he hasn’t granted a “golden ticket”—looms large in the imagination of each character in the film. There’s no telling what he might be like, and the characters, awaiting a rare Wonka appearance, are eager to find out. His entrance is all the more uncomfortable, then, as he slowly and grimly limps out of his factory. He seems pained, grievously unhappy. The scene stretches on as we see him dragging his right leg, slowly moving toward his fans, until, in a dreadful development, he falls forward—and at the last moment breaks into a brilliantly athletic forward roll.
Wilder knew how to make an entrance, both on-screen and in the lives of fans too young to have seen The Producers. Their first glimpse of the actor, an impression that would last through the movie and throughout his career, showed he was incredibly serious about being funny, a performer who reached the laugh only by pushing through intense discomfort. Any comic can do a funny walk. Wilder found humor through catharsis. It was a somewhat mean-spirited trick, but the light of Wonka’s soul shone brighter for the dark impulses that sometimes occluded it.
The Roald Dahl novel on which the movie is based is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but the retitling of the movie, which was first released 50 years ago this summer, was the smart thing to do, especially in light of Wilder’s performance. The eyes gravitate to Wonka every moment he’s on-screen. There is something malevolent about this man. His smile comes rarely, and, Cheshire Cat–like, it seems to be informed by something other than pure joy.
He also takes an unusual amount of pleasure in tricking, disciplining, and tormenting his young fans. The familiar story of Willy Wonka shouldn’t work on-screen, so oddly sadistic are its undertones: Of the five children who find one of Wonka’s golden tickets for a tour of the factory, four do not complete the trip. Whatever actor plays Wonka has to be not just calm but the engineer of the mayhem. Seeing justice served for causing disorder must be more important than keeping his visitors safe. Wonka is a madman, and that we can’t stop watching him is proof of just how well Wilder could hold the screen.
Wonka’s particular mania is visible from the tour’s start. His song “Pure Imagination,” performed as he leads his charges through his personal Neverland, is punctuated with sharp shuffle steps backward and whips of his walking stick as he attempts to stop them from taking a step ahead of him. When he eventually allows them to run free, they take the opportunity to sample all his wares, and he’s left alone, singing to himself. The song downshifts to a dirge, as Wilder’s face collapses slightly. “There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination,” Wilder sings, drinking, ever more deeply from a teacup made of a flower. “Living there, you’ll be free, if you truly wish to be.”
It’s a moment fraught with double meaning. Wilder’s Wonka is many things, but he’s far from free. In fact, as we see throughout the film, his seeming liberty to create absolutely anything he might desire (contrary to physics or good sense) has kept him imprisoned. If anything is possible, nothing brings joy. Each new magnificent or strange invention we see is, to him, old hat. The only thing that Wonka is able to focus on is his obsessive insistence on rule-following. He may want to be free, but his genius binds him to a need for order. As a way to build a world in which he would be comfortable, Wonka has shut out the possibility for serendipity or real joy. It’s quite a sophisticated message for children!
The film’s didactic lessons about avoiding greed, narrated by the Oompa-Loompas, go down easier. Wilder finds in Wonka something more complex than an impresario in top hat and purple vest. As with his best work in films intended for adults, he’s conducting a high-wire act, paradoxically allowing the character’s bone-deep desire for order to give rise to madness, and finding comedy in between.
Consider a scene near the film’s end, when Wonka lashes out at Charlie, the last child left standing. Charlie has done admirably, showing that he’s nowhere near as greedy as the other tour-goers. Yet he did sample a drink he wasn’t supposed to during the tour. Wonka, who simply sat by bemused when, say, poor Violet Beauregarde blew up into a blueberry, is outraged, raising his voice in a way he hasn’t before. “You lose!” he says to Charlie and the boy’s elderly grandfather, practically vibrating with rage, betrayed and broken. “Good day, sir!” This, too, is a test. By returning a magical candy he has received rather than giving it to one of Wonka’s rivals, Charlie proves his honesty. The entire exchange exists somewhere between reality—we believe Wonka is angry about the theft—and elaborate ruse. The genius of Wilder’s portrayal is that both exist at once, and the film’s finale allows Wonka to repeat the trick he played at the film’s beginning. Once more, he turns a display of pathos into a soaring trick, taking Charlie up in his “Wonkavator” to survey the entire town, his face breaking into a devious grin. For Wilder in this role, the world is at its most fun when colored with pathos, like a chocolate bar ground out of bitter beans. Many could have played the role (indeed, Johnny Depp did in a later adaptation, going more fey and icy), but only Wilder was able to bring to it an energy that comes from marrying threat and reward, order and chaos. It is a performance so unusual that it could only have come from, well, pure imagination.
The cast of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory on set at Bavaria Studios, located in a suburb of Munich, Germany.
Steve Schapiro/Getty
An Oompa-Loompa entertained Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie, while Willy Wonka portrayer Gene Wilder looked on.
Steve Schapiro/Getty
The Oompa-Loompas were the life of the party on the set of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Steve Schapiro/Getty
The dream team: author Roald Dahl visited with actors Gene Wilder and Peter Ostrum, who were bringing his literary creations Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket to life.
Steve Schapiro/Getty
Gene Wilder showed his soft touch on the set of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory; to the right of Wilder is director Mel Stuart.
Steve Schapiro/Getty
Peter Ostrum and an Oompa-Loompa made the most of their down time on the set of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Steve Schapiro/Getty
Johnny Depp (left) took on the role of Willy Wonka in Tim Burton’s 2005 movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which also featured Freddie Highmore as Charlie Bucket (center) and David Kelly as Grandpa Joe (right).
The night after Glenn Frey died, in January 2016, Bruce Springsteen played the United Center in Chicago. He opened his encore with the Eagles’ first hit. Forty-four years after “Take It Easy” debuted on the radio, with Frey on lead vocals, 20,000 Springsteen fans who didn’t know what was coming sang along to every indelible word. Like so many of the Eagles’ songs, “Take It Easy” is burned into the national memory and instantly evocative of sunny Southern California—to say nothing of Winslow, Arizona—in a distant decade that the Eagles made their own. “His songs, those sounds, perfectly captured those days,” as Bette Midler said of Frey and the band he cofounded. “ ’70s L.A.”
Frey was from Michigan. His bandmates came from Texas, Nebraska, Ohio, and Florida. The Eagles recorded most of their hits in London and Miami. And yet they somehow became the quintessential California band, their music navigating dark desert highways, tequila sunrises, and young women holed up in houses with rich old men. Take it easy? The Eagles failed to follow their own advice. They had glorious harmonies on records that concealed chronic disharmony on tours. Those tours left in their wake a trail of splintered hotel furniture and bathtubs full of Budweiser.
And yet with those songs, and on those tours, the Eagles conquered the world. Fifty years after the band formed, there is a Hotel California on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, a Hotel California on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, and an Otel’ Kaliforniya on a less glamorous thoroughfare in Moscow. Their checkout policies are less inflexible than the one in the song, whose mirrored ceilings and pink champagne on ice are repeated on the radio every hour somewhere in America. But their allure is undimmed by age.
The Eagles are nearly as ubiquitous now, in the streaming era, as they were a half-century ago. Frey’s writing partner and Eagles cofounder Don Henley was raised in Texas on country and western. Frey, from Detroit, grew up on Motown, with a twist of bar-rock anthems courtesy of his early mentor, Bob Seger. That alchemy—a country-rock alloy—became the Eagles’ sound when Frey and Henley met in Southern California, starting a partnership that would dominate the 1970s the way two other singer-songwriters had done the previous decade. “[Frey] and Henley were America’s answer to Lennon and McCartney,” the country singer Clint Black said, and McCartney himself remains a fan, pumping his fists for the Eagles at their last concert at Madison Square Garden in 2020, just before the pandemic shut down live events.
Another fan, Jimmy Buffett, calls the Eagles the best American band of his generation, and they are certainly the most popular, with their first greatest-hits album selling 38 million copies and Hotel California selling 26 million copies in the United States, an absurd feat for any band—but for the Eagles, that was just 1976, when both LPs were released. In America’s bicentennial year, the Eagles were unquestionably America’s band, named for America’s national emblem, with songs that played into the American impulse to move west, to a promised land, ideally in a muscle car with an eagle-like bird emblazoned on the hood.
The Eagles were (and remain) the sound of Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when Billy Joel moved there from New York. “The Eagles pretty much represented that Southern California thing, like the Beach Boys used to do, and then I found out later you were from Texas,” Joel once said to Henley, who—like almost all of his bandmates—had moved to the Golden State from somewhere else, making the band at once quintessentially Californian and quintessentially American.
“It’s the sound of not just a California band but one of America’s signature bands,” as President Barack Obama put it when honoring the Eagles at the White House in 2016. The band—like the sound and songs they created—endures 50 years after it formed. Their songs issue from taxicabs in Auckland and karaoke bars in Tokyo and tribute bands in London. But Bette Midler pinpointed where and when the Eagles’ story began, and where it reached its fullest expression: in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
At the Grammys in February 15, 2016, the Eagles (joined by Jackson Browne, center) performed “Take it Easy” in tribute to Glenn Frey, who had died on January 18 at age 67 of complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis, and pneumonia.
Photo by Cliff Lipson/CBS via Getty Images
Deacon Frey, son of Glenn Frey, performed during the Eagles’ first-ever concert at the Grand Ole Opry House on October 29, 2017 in Nashville.
From that first stunning address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the speech that launched him into national consciousness, Barack Obama made clear his yearning for a new kind of politics that would galvanize a fresh generation of voters. His white American mother and Black African father had “shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation,” he told the crowd to rousing response. They passed that faith on to him, and it stuck.
Between that speech and now, as America’s 44th president turns 60 and cultivates a post–White House life, Obama changed the United States, and the world. His legacy evolves, along with the evolving vantage point of history.
Obama’s election to the presidency “would mean . . . that the America I believed in was possible, that the democracy I believed in was within reach,” he wrote in his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land, “ . . . that I wasn’t alone in believing that the world didn’t have to be a cold, unforgiving place, where the strong preyed on the weak and we inevitably fell back into clans and tribes.”
In terms of his character and temperament, there are points on which nearly everyone can agree. Obama was intelligent, restrained, dignified. An idealist, to be sure. A loving husband and father. Certainly, someone deeply dedicated to the mission he had been called to serve.
As he was the first African American president this country has seen, his presence and power in the White House were symbolic as well as actual, his identity embodying a part of our national identity that was messy and not easily defined. “Because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled,” Obama wrote, “I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast.”
That so many Americans embraced this man with a Muslim-sounding name, with all of his unknowns and aspirations, said something profound. His complicated background and experiences reminded us that America is full of contradiction and disappointment, but also hope. He was nothing if not the collective mirror we held up to remind ourselves not to succumb to cynicism.
Barack Obama never believed that his presidency would lead to a post-racial America. After all, this was a man who was placed under round-the-clock security by the Secret Service earlier in the campaign than any presidential candidate before him. Obama was not naive about racism. He simply refused to give in to it.
His tenure in the White House mattered not only in figurative terms but in concrete policy measures. He appointed the country’s first two Black attorneys general and instituted criminal justice reforms to address racial disparities impacting Black and brown people. He added more than 100 federal judges of color to the bench and nominated Sonia Sotomayor as Supreme Court justice, the first Latina to serve in that capacity.
Still, he refused to cast himself as only a “Black president” and was intent on being a bridge that could unite us all. In many ways, he did just that. Obama consistently won white voters, claiming nine states in 2008 that had voted Republican in 2004. His presidential campaigns registered thousands of young people and people of color—new voters who previously had been disengaged. Many white citizens of traditionally red rural districts cast their ballots for him. His open-arms approach to the electorate was a stance for which he received some criticism from African Americans, but not enough to dent his Gallup poll approval rating among Black voters, which remained in the 80-90 percent range throughout his eight years in office.
Politically, Obama’s accomplishments were numerous and varied, the most significant of them arguably being the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It provided health coverage to 20 million people, including 4 million Hispanic people and 3 million African Americans. As Thomas Holt, a University of Chicago professor emeritus of American and African American history, has described it, passage of the ACA placed Obama in the same historical ranks as Franklin D. Roosevelt for instituting Social Security and Lyndon B. Johnson for Medicare.
With that one victory, Obama achieved what generations of Democratic presidents had tried and failed to do. That such a feat was grounded in mostly moderate measures—such as allowing adult children to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26 and not denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions—often gets lost in translation.
Obama will also be remembered for rescuing the country from the brink of financial disaster, as the economic meltdown he inherited upon taking office was the worst America had faced since the Great Depression—with an unemployment rate that had reached 10 percent and thousands of foreclosures forced by the collapse of the housing market. Almost immediately as president, Obama put in place the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package containing $787 billion in tax cuts and spending. The legislation, ultimately credited with saving some 2.5 million American jobs, was passed without a single Republican vote in the House.
Among Obama’s environmental actions, the Paris Agreement often gets top billing, but there is more to his record on climate change, according to political journalist Jonathan Darman, who in a New York magazine Q&A cited “tough EPA constraints on coal, a meaningful accord with China to cut emissions, serious stimulus spending on clean energy, new emissions standards for cars and trucks.” Darman added, “History may well reveal that Obama showed more personal courage on this issue than any other.”
In his final speech in office, Obama included other accomplishments in his tally, reminding us that his administration saw the dawn of a new era with Cuba after 55 years of discord, that under his leadership military forces took out Osama bin Laden, that he succeeded in bringing marriage equality to LGBTQ couples, and that he was responsible for shutting down Iran’s nuclear weapons program “without firing a shot.”
Despite these many successes, a cloud loomed over his presidency. Obama watched a rising tide of right-wing extremism take hold across the country, a trend with roots in economic insecurity, fear of demographic shifts, and resentment over immigration—and in the election of Obama. The President seemed helpless to stem the tide. Hate crimes rose, and between 2010 and 2016 right-wing domestic terrorism skyrocketed from 6 percent to 35 percent of domestic terror attacks, according to the Center for American Progress. The most notorious racial incident during Obama’s presidency happened in June 2015, when a 21-year-old white supremacist murdered nine Black people, including pastors, at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel church.
It was while the country was led by a Black president that the Black Lives Matter movement exploded—incited by the August 2014 fatal shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, by a white police officer, as well as the death a month earlier of a Black man in New York City named Eric Garner, who was put in a choke hold by a NYPD officer. There would be further outrage over subsequent incidents of police involvement in the deaths of other African Americans. (Black Lives Matter would be reinvigorated after Obama’s presidency, with protesters of all races taking to the streets in the spring and summer of 2020 following the George Floyd killing.)
The United States’ first Black president had been elected by an overwhelming margin, with the support of the largest congressional majority in years. And yet during his second term in particular, the country was roiled by racial unrest. How was it possible that these two realities existed at once? Many, including Obama, would wonder about this seeming contradiction.
“It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic,” Obama wrote in A Promised Land, “a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.” His presidency, not to mention his progressive policies, threatened the traditional power structure in the U.S., which had long been headed by white men. Furthermore, Obama sought to make America less bullying and bellicose. Kinder, more egalitarian.
He paid a price for such lofty ambitions. From the start of his first term, Republican congressional leadership created a wall of “all-out obstruction”—as Obama labeled it in A Promised Land—“a refusal to work with me or members of my administration, regardless of the circumstances, the issue, or the consequences for the country.” Politico’s Michael Grunwald wrote in late 2016, “This [GOP] strategy of . . . treating him not just as a president from the opposing party but an extreme threat to the American way of life, has been a remarkable political success.” Grunwald quoted Republican operative Ed Rogers as saying, “A lot of us woke up every morning thinking about how to kick Obama, who could say the harshest thing about Obama on the air.” Obama himself had to admit, in A Promised Land, that the Republicans’ battle plan was deployed “with impressive discipline” the entirety of his time in office.
His opponents could not, however, negate the profound impact Obama had emotionally and psychically on many people in this country. Who can forget the charming image of him in the Oval Office bending down so a 5-year-old Black boy could touch his head, amazed that they had the same kind of hair? Wasn’t there something cool about a guy who blasted Jay-Z and Eminem in his headphones before a campaign debate? How could we not be moved by a commander-in-chief whose sorrow was so deep following the Charleston church massacre that, having no words left to give at a victim’s funeral, he broke into a heartfelt a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace”?
Obama recognized—was even motivated by—his own symbolic power. As he recounted in A Promised Land, one day in December 2006, not long before announcing his candidacy for president, Obama sat across from his wife, Michelle, at a table as a handful of campaign strategists went back and forth on staffing and logistics. The discussion had dragged on for an hour when Michelle (who made no secret of her distaste for Washington electoral politicking) posed a question: “Why you, Barack? Why do you need to be president?”
The future president thought long and hard before answering. He thought about how much he loved his wife, about how they had met. He thought about what he was about to do. Then finally he answered.
“Here’s one thing I know for sure. . . .I know that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be president of the United States, the world will start looking at America differently.” And that “kids all around this country—Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids who don’t fit in—they’ll . . . see their horizons lifted, their possibilities expanded.”
“And that alone,” he added, “would be worth it.”
Here are a selection of photos from Barack Obama: His Life, His Work, His Living Legacy, available at newsstands and on Amazon.
Cover image by Pari Dukovic/Trunk Archive
In 2004 Barack Obama, his wife Michelle and their daughters Sasha (left) and Malia (right) were in Chicago awaiting election returns in his successful bid for the U.S. Senate against Republican Alan Keyes.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
In 2007 Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, walked the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala., in commemoration with a group that included fellow candidate Hillary Clinton, her husband and former President Bill Clinton, and U.S. congressman John Lewis, who was part of the 1965 voting rights march that ended in a clash with police on the bridge during what became known as Bloody Sunday.
Scott Olson/Getty
The Obamas enjoyed cheers from supporters at Grant Park in Chicago after he was elected President of the United States, November 4, 2008.
Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/Getty
President Obama bent over so that the son of a staff member could touch his hair, May 8, 2009.
Pete Souza/The White House/Getty
Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, applauded as the House of Representatives passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
Pete Souza/The White House/Getty
President Obama was briefed by John Brennan on the Sandy Hook school shooting on December 14, 2012.
Pete Souza/The White House/Getty
President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for South Carolina state senator and Rev. Clementa Pinckney on June 26, 2015 in Charleston; Pinckney was one of nine African-Americans killed during a mass shooting at the church in which he was a pastor.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Obama took kite-surfing lessons on a vacation in the British Virgin Islands in 2017.
Jack Brockway/Getty
Barack Obama, Graca Machel (left), widow of former South African president Nelson Mandela, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (right) danced as South African singer Thandiswa Mazwai (second from right) performed during the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the Wanderers cricket stadium in Johannesburg on July 17, 2018.
Marco Longari/AFP/Getty
Barack and Michelle Obama arrived at the U.S. Capitol for the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, January 20, 2021.
