Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 2/1/2014)

Also unmentioned on screen are René Clément, who served as Cocteau's technical adviser, and an elderly Parisian perruquier named Pontet, who fashioned the mask that enabled Jean Marais to convey the inner anguish of the Beast, who lives in a castle on the edge of the town where Belle (Josette Day) lives with her father (Marcel André) and siblings Félicie (Mila Parély), Adélaïde (Nane Germon) and Ludovic (Michel Auclair). Once a wealthy merchant with his own fleet, Belle's father had been ruined when his ships were lost at sea. However, just as Ludovic contracts a ruinous deal with a usurious moneylender (Raoul Marco), the merchant learns that he has been bequeathed a large sum of money. But, when he goes to collect it, he finds that it has already been confiscated to settle his debts and, having lost his way in the forest, he wanders into the the Beast's lair.

Encouraged to enter by gates and doors that seem to open by themselves, the hapless fellow is guided by an enchanted candelabra and falls asleep at a table groaning with delicacies. Waking to a load roar, he beats a hasty retreat through the garden. Remembering that Belle had asked him to bring her a rose, he picks one from a bush, only for the Beast (Jean Marais) to appear and threaten to kill him unless he can persuade one of his daughters to take his place. Reaching home with a heavy heart, the father explains his predicament and Belle, ignoring the protests of her suitor, Avenant (also Marais), volunteers to go to the castle.

Dismounting from the Beast's white horse, Magnificent, Belle faints on seeing her new master and is carried to her room. She discovers a magic mirror that has the power to show her anything she wishes to see and she manages to make it through supper, as the Beast explains that she is his partner not his prisoner. He also explains that he will propose to her on a daily basis. But, while she becomes increasingly fond of the Beast, Belle continues to refuse his entreaties, as she hopes to be able to return to her family.

One day, she sees in the mirror that her father is ailing and the Beast gives her permission to nurse him for seven days. He also gives her a glove that can take her anywhere she wishes to go and a golden key that opens the Pavilion of Diana, where he keeps his most precious riches. Belle's father revives the moment he sets eyes upon her, although he is penniless because the moneylender has called in his deal with Ludovic. Moeover, jealous of their sister's new affluence, Félicie and Adélaïde steal the golden key, dupe Belle into breaching her curfew and convince Ludovic and Avenant that it is their duty to slay the Beast.

Thus, when he sends Magnificent to fetch Belle, the duo intercept the horse and ride to the castle and seek a way inside. However, Belle has seen the heartbroken Beast in the magic mirror and rushes back to find him close to death in the courtyard. As Avenant scales the glass roof of the pavilion, however, he is struck by an arrow fired by a statue of Diana and is transformed into a beast to break the spell on Prince Ardent (also Marais), who takes Belle to his kingdom, where she becomes his queen and her sisters are forced to become her ladies in waiting, while their father is welcomed as an honoured guest.

Coaxed into making the picture by lover Jean Marais, Cocteau had to overcome serious difficulties to realise his painterly, poetic vision. France was still recovering from the Second World War and Gaumont could only offer a modest budget and Alekan was forced to operate with antiquated cameras, flawed lenses and poor quality film stock. Electricity shortages limited working hours, while rain disrupted the shooting of the exteriors at the Château de Raray near Senlis and low-flying aircraft ruined many a take at the manor in Tours that was used for the interiors of the Beast's castle. Exacerbating matters, Cocteau was also suffering from disfiguring eczema and the production briefly shut down when he contracted jaundice and had to be hospitalised at the Institut Pasteur. Yet, such was the spirit of camaraderie on set that Cocteau confided in his diary that this was one of the happiest times of his life and the pleasure and pride of the cast and crew is evident in every frame.

Time hangs a little heavily during some of the scenes in the real world. But, once the action switches to the castle, it is invariably as captivating as it is charming. Younger viewers reared on the 1991 Disney animation will delight in recognising details borrowed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, while older onlookers may detect allegorical allusions to the recent Nazi Occupation in the discussion of isolation, imprisonment, fear and the bestial nature of humanity. But, while the Freudian subtext is intriguing, the indelible aspects of this mesmerising feature involve the use of body parts as décor and the subtle physical and psychological transitions that Belle experiences inside the Beast's domain. Yet it is the creature himself who leaves the deepest impression and one is tempted to share Marlene Dietrich's disappointed judgement as she watched the first screening for technicians at the Joinville Studio that the photogenic Marais is nowhere near as appealing as a devoted swain or a dashing prince as he is buried beneath layers of padding and fake fur.

Another much-loved book provides the inspiration for Stephan Schesch's Moon Man. However, while Irish animators Fabian Erlinghauser, Sean McCarron and Marie Thorhauge wisely stick closely to the graphic style conceived back in 1966 by Tomi Ungerer, Schesch and co-scenarist Ralph Martin overload the story in expanding upon the original text without lacing it with the satirical wit that might have appealed to older children and grown-ups.

Fed up with being alone in space, the Moon Man (Katharina Thalbach) hitches a lift on the tail of a shooting star and lands on Earth. He was hoping to make some new friends, but the President (Míchael McElhatton) is convinced he is the advance party of an alien invasion force and orders sidekick Conquista (Helen Mooney) to send his soldiers to capture him. In fact, the President is a cruel, arrogant dictator and has plans to attack the Moon and has inventor Bunsen van der Dunkel (Pat Laffan) working on a rocketship. But he doesn't care that the children can no longer sleep at night without the Moon Man's reassuring presence in the sky.

One young girl (Taylor Mooney) and her father (Paul McLoone) are concerned, however, and they cruise around in a flash car searching for the Moon Man so he can return home before the troops find him. But he is having far too nice a time to make any hasty decisions. He loves the colours and sounds of his new surroundings and even gets on well with the smaller Earthlings, after he mingles with the guests at a Halloween party. But, when he also wanders into the seafront castle of Van der Dunkel (who has been asleep for a century because he had nothing better to do), he strikes up a friendship that is far more valuable to `the Inventor of Everything' than the riches the President can offer him.

With Ungerer acting as narrator, Schesch (who also produced Hayo Freitag's 2007 adaptation of the same author's The Three Robbers) ably contrasts the worldviews of the Moon Man and the President. Having only just vanquished the last opposition to his regime, the latter detects threats everywhere, while the former sees only beauty in the flora and fauna. The sequence in which he is enchanted by a lake to the strains of Louis Armstrong's version of `Moon River' is utterly beguiling and who could resist the double act of a moose and an owl who shines a torch while perched on his antlers? Indeed, purely on the visual front, this is one of the best advertisements for traditional 2-D graphics in a while (keep an eye out for the endless sight gags, the best of which is the presidential flag). Moreover, Schesch resists the breakneck pace and contrived set-pieces that are now as much a part of European animation as they are Pixar and Disney's high-concept romps. But the sense of peril isn't always palpable, while the underlying messages about trust, co-existence and friendship might have been stated a little more trenchantly.

Completing this week's Gallic triptych is Arnaud des Pallières's Age of Uprising, an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas, which was filmed under its original title by Volker Schlöndorff in 1969. Drawing on the story of a 16th-century horse trader whose resistance of tyranny sparked a rebellion, Von Kleist sought to urge the neighbouring German states to rally against the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte. But, while it can be argued that Schlöndorff incorporated footage of the recent student protests to make a connection between the political situations in Reformation and modern Europe, it's harder to see exactly what Des Pallières is protesting about. He may well be demonstrating his support for the Occupy movement in its battle against fat cat capitalism. But this dramatically wayward saga largely seems to be echoing Marlon Brando in Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One (1954), as, when asked what he is rebelling against, he sneeringly replies `whaddya got?'.

Life is not easy in the 16th-century Cévannes for horse trader Michael Kohlhaas (Mads Mikkelsen), his wife Judith (Delphine Chuillot) and their daughter, Lisbeth (Mélusine Mayance). He is dismayed, therefore, when the local baron (Swann Arlaud) places a toll gate on the path he usually takes to market and orders his manager (Christian Chaussex) to take two of Kohlhaas's best steeds as a fine for not having the necessary paperwork to move or sell them. Eventually arriving in the town, Kohlhaas discovers that the levy is a scam and is furious when he learns that the baron has mistreated his horses and set his dogs upon the groom guarding them, César (David Bennent).

Placing his faith in the legal system, Kohlhaas hires a lawyer (Jacques Nolot), only for the court to reject his plea on three separate occasions. He vows to petition Marguerite, Princess d'Angoulême (Roxane Duran), but Judith persuades him to entrust the appeal to her so she can address the princess woman to woman. But Judith dies shortly after she is ambushed on the road and Kohlhass delivers Lisbet into the safe keeping of a preacher (David Kross) before selling up and raising a force to strike against the baron. Aided by a one-armed donkey-riding Catalan (Sergi López) and a gigantic accomplice (Guillaume Delaunay), Kohlhass sacks the castle and kills the few servants left behind after the baron flees into sanctuary with a nearby abbess (Amira Casar). Yet, while they back his cause, Kohlhaas's neighbours dislike the idea of him leading a rebel army and he rebrands his crusade an agrarian uprising.

Keen to restore order after the convent is attacked and the governor (Bruno Ganz) refuses to intervene because he remembers the fate of his father in the Great Peasant Revolt, Marguerite summons a Lutheran theologian (Denis Lavant) to show the devout Kohlhaas passages in the Bible in the hope of convincing him to let God adjudicate in the matter. But he remains unconvinced and only agrees to lay down his arms when the princess sends a letter promising to conduct a full inquiry and comes to pay her respects at Judith's grave. His followers are more sceptical, however, and many continue to pillage after the army is disbanded. Kohlhaas is arrested for failing to control his men. Shortly afterwards, the governor delivers a verdict that the baron is to make amends for the theft and mistreatment of the horses. He is even sentenced to two years behind bars. But Kohlhaas is condemned to death for insurrection and Lisbeth is granted a final visit before he is beheaded.

While there's no doubting the quality of Jeanne Lapoirie's photography, Yan Arlaud's production design and Anina Diener's costumes, this often feels more like an exercise in period fidelity than a fully fledged historical drama. Indeed, in the spirit of Werner Herzog, Des Pallières often seems more interested in the muddy landscape than he is in the murky truth about social injustice in a predominantly feudal country being fissured by reformist religious doctrine. Thus, one is left longing for the kind of educated dialogue that made Patrice Chereau's La Reine Margot (1994) so engrossingly effective, especially as the phonetic Dane in the title role is so seemingly uncomfortable with having to alternate between French and German.

Mads Mikkelsen is a fine actor, who proved himself capable of adapting to period playing in Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair (2012). But Des Pallières is so determined to present him as a chiselled Robin Hood figure (with a dash of Clint Eastwood-like taciturnity thrown in for good measure) that he often seems far more self-conscious than his more insouciant co-stars - although Swann Arlaud is allowed to get away with some gauchely pantomimic villainy. The combination of Jean-Pierre Duret's sound design and Martin Wheeler's boomingly portentous score is similarly misjudged. Yet, while it too frequently mistakes ponderousness for solemnity, this visually striking film avoids lapsing into Game of Thrones sword-and-sorcery and, as a consequence, manages to hold the attention without ever quite convincing or compelling.

A very different version of the past is presented by Rithy Panh in The Missing Picture. Although he has been acclaimed for such fictional works as Rice People (1994) and The Sea Wall (2008), Panh is best known for unflinching documentaries about the Cambodian genocide. But, while S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011) made powerful use of personal testimony, this deeply personal adaptation of his own book, The Elimination, combines archive material with claymation to recreate lost scenes from Panh's past and reclaim his own history from the propagandist depictions fabricated by Pol Pot and his Khmer henchmen. Aesthetically, this is a bold approach that occasionally runs the risk of trivialising a age of atrocity. However, the blend of naiveté and nostalgia is entirely intentional, as Panh seeks both to expose the fallacies contained in footage designed to seduce the Kampuchean Revolution's Communist allies and to warn against the ease with which flawed humanity can succumb to its worst instincts.

Panh was 13 when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. As he recalls in a commentary co-scripted by Christophe Bataille and read by Randal Douc, the regime quickly exploited the tensions between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes to impose a programme of re-education that saw thousands of city dwellers dispatched to agricultural labour camps, where stubborn resistance was systematically weakened and eradicated by increasingly pitiless corporal and capital punishment. The killing fields were secretive places, however, and no cameras were allowed to record the barbarism they witnessed. Consequently, Panh stages their crimes in a series of dioramas populated by clay figurines that restore the missing pictures and memorialise the family members, friends and strangers who perished at the hands of `brothers' and `sisters' who acted as much out of envy as fear before falling victim themselves to the suspicion and paranoia that became the norm under Brother No.1, as he sought to impose an ideology comprising concepts borrowed from Jean-Jacquess Rousseau and Mao Zedong.

In the opening sequence, Panh shows a stack of film canisters and reveals that the monochrome imagery they preserve was faked to show the glorious triumph of the people over misrule. But, while he makes poignant use of this footage, he rather overdoes the metaphor of the crashing sea unleashing a tidal wave of memories that the Khmer Rouge were unable to hold back. Similarly, Marc Marder's score is frustratingly insistent in its eagerness to convey the simple decency of the models sculpted with laudable attention to detail by Sarith Mang and photographed with subtle sensitivity by Prum Mesa to enhance their personality as they immobily endure back-breaking labour, cramped living conditions, state-orchestrated malnutrition and brutal executions.

Brightly coloured and presented in tableau that manage simultaneously to suggest authenticity and artifice, the figures convey the terror and helplessness of the population, while also distancing the viewer from the full horror of the traumas that accounted for over two million souls in four years. Panh is too shrewd not to recognise that it might be a mercy that such barbarism was never filmed and he and editor Marie-Christine Rougerie frequently juxtapose intimations of happier times with evocations of cruelty to force the audience into realising the full hideousness of the new normality, in which dying of starvation (as Panh's father did) becomes an act of heroic resistance. But, while it contains many moments of excruciating poignancy and chilling depravity, it's the totality of the enterprise that is most significant, as it stands as a testament to Panh's own survival and his eloquent ability to commemorate and condemn long after his tormentors have been confounded.

Despite the comparisons with Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), The Missing Picture has more in common with Camp 14: Total Control Zone, Marc Wiese's harrowing account of the suffering that Shin Dong-Huyk witnessed over 23 years after being born in a North Korean labour camp in 1983. And there is no escaping the similarity between Matthew Cooke's How to Make Money Selling Drugs and Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In. The former actually premiered first, but it arrives on British screens a full year after the latter and its self-consciously subversive analysis of the War on Drugs in the United States often leaves it sounding glibly smug rather than trenchantly significant.

Cooke divides his diatribe into eight levels (one of which is secret) and quickly establishes an irreverent tone that too frequently feels snide instead of satirical. `Level One - Getting Started' introduces dealer Bobby Carlton and retired cop Neil Franklin, who explain how kids can begin pushing and graduate on to growing their own weed before moving on to cocaine. As is revealed in `Level Two - The Pawn', breaking into this market is tricky, as it is controlled by Latin American drug barons who front rigorously controlled operations. Thus, Curtis ’50 Cent' Jackson (who lost his mother at eight and was a self-sufficient dealer by the age of 12) and John E. Harriel, Jr. (who was making $100 an hour selling crack in South Central LA at 15) agree with lawyer Eric Sterling that it is important to have a weapon and/or back-up if you are going to fend off the inevitable attempts to rob or remove you.

Recognising the difficulty of staking a claim to your own patch, Franklin advises budding dealers to join a gang. But he also warns that drugs are getting cheaper and the chances of making a killing as a street hustler are dwindling by the day. Some manage to thrive, however, and `Level Three - Private Retailer' outlines how Detroit phone pusher Mr X can make $70 with a single call and around $1000 a day without leaving his HQ. He urges wannabes against keeping their stash or cash at home and recommends making a quick buck and retiring young. Mike Walzman would echo these sentiments, as, despite being expelled for failing a drug test, he carved himself a niche supplying all of Los Angeles's private schools. He craved popularity as much as wealth and revelled in the party lifestyle his trading allowed. But, as Harriel and 50 Cent complain, Walzman had the distinct advantage of being Caucasian, as, even though whites deal and consume far more drugs, they only do a fraction of the jail time handed out to Hispanics and African-Americans, who account for 90% of annual drug charges.

Business magnate Russell Simmons campaigned against New York's Rockefeller drug laws, which imposed sentences on relatively minor dealers comparable to those handed out for murder. Moreover, as DEA agent Keith Crossgal describes in `Level Four - Domestic Distributor, law enforcement agencies were actively encouraged to target petty offenders to make it look as though federal and state administrations were getting tough on crime. Yet, even though the chances of arrest increased, the likes of Skipp Townsend couldn't resist the prospect of making big bucks. Starting out as a member of the Blood Gang in LA, Townsend went into business for himself and soon had lucrative connections in Las Vegas, whom he supplied using a network of pretty girls driving battered cars designed not to attract police attention. One dealer, named Pepe, crows that is was possible to make between four and five thousand dollars for a single shipment, providing you drove safely.

However, as Carlton concedes in `Level Five - International Smuggler', it doesn't take long before neighbourhood cogs decide to become big wheels. By the age of 18, he had cottoned on to the voracious appetites of those in the upper echelons of society who were prepared to pay top dollar for quality merchandise. Thus, he started running boats from Bimini Island to Miami and Fort Lauderdale and was soon making $50,000 a day. He also devised ways of using his flotilla to outsmart the coastguard. But not every successful racket is as ostentation, as Brian O'Dea made his first purchase in Colombia with his last $500 and, having smuggled his consignment through customs in a cigarette box, he began hiding cocaine in the fibres of imported ponchos.

O'Dea made his first million inside two months and largely avoided the risks attendant on transporting drugs in swallowed condoms. DEA special agent Joe Gilbride outlines the perils of being a mule, but admits many are still enticed by the potential earning power, even though it pales besides the sums commanded by bigwigs like Freeway Rick Ross, whose career is chronicled in `Level Six - Kingpin'. Impressed by the vast sums earned with such little effort in films like William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), Ross made his mint by introducing crack to the West Coast and, by the time he was 30, he was earning one to two million dollars per day through `ready rocks'.

Like many kingpins, he channelled money back into his community and was seen as something of a local hero. According to California judge Jim Gray, this status makes them almost impossible to bust, as everyone has a stake in their continued success. Ex-cop Howard Wooldridge admits that a lack of evidence means that many kingpins are framed and convicted on the testimony of underlings plea-bargaining for lighter sentences. But, sometimes, the heavyweights can also squeal on associates and rivals and Townsend makes no bones about the fact that he cut a deal after being detained in Vegas in order to avoid significant jail time.

Law professor Alexandra Natapoff claims police forces are less likely to go after ringleaders as they are harder to convict. As resources are tied to results, they prefer to nab lots of small-timers to make it look as though the War on Drugs is going well. Many of these underlings are duped into stings designed to weed out those higher up the chain of command and Cooke cites the cases of Texan crack dealer Derek Nigress and Rachel Hoffmann, a Florida college graduate who was murdered by suspicious colleagues and blamed for her own death by cops insisting that she had not followed the grass's protocol.

O'Dea reckons that the smart kingpins have a DEA agent on the payroll and recalls how such a snoop once informed him about a duplicitous partner and enabled him to make a $200 million profit from a deal he was trying to sabotage. Former Texan cop Barry Cooper went one better. Having developed a taste for confiscated dope, he quit the force, married a dealer named Candy and started producing a series of videos entitled `Never Get Busted' that taught aspirants the tricks of the trade. He then realised there was even bigger money to be made by exposing crooked cops and he became a national celebrity when Raymond Madden hired him to prove that his daughter and mother of two Yolanda had been set up by officers in Odessa, Texas.

At this juncture, Cooke pauses to insert `Secret Level - New Player US Government', in which he explains how Washington started its drug war in the early 1930s when Harry Enslinger, the first commissioner of the US Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics drew up a list of banned substances and realised there was easy political capital to be gained by prosecuting the blacks, Latinos, gays and entertainers who were the principal users. After the failure of Prohibition, the government decided to focus its attention on drugs. But it wasn't until Richard Nixon gave the DEA a $65 million annual budget that the crusade became a fundamental policy for every campaigning politician. Ronald Reagan increased the figure to $1.8 billion and David Simon (the creator of The Wire) insists that First Lady Nancy's `Just Say No' strategy alerted avaricious opportunists everywhere to the largesse to be made from banging away those whose only option was to say `yes'.

DEA funding had risen to $2.9 billion by the time college basketball star Len Bias had the 1986 heart attack that was attributed to excessive cocaine use. The Democrats seized upon the tragedy to place drugs on the election agenda and the Republicans responded with draconian legislation that makes ruinous sentences mandatory for petty dealers upwards. Sterling is not proud of the fact he was part of the legal team that advanced them and Susan Sarandon recalls campaigning against them and taking up the case of 25 year-old pregnant woman who was in a house during a raid and received a 27-year sentence, even though she had nothing to do with the crime.

In 1992, George Bush increased the DEA budget to $11.9 billion. Yet, he still enlisted the help of the Contras in Nicaragua to set up American dealers and bankrolled an illegal war to assist them. He also exploited the forfeiture laws to seize dealer assets without particularly high levels of proof. Reporter Radley Balko states that police departments no longer bother to investigate certain kinds of crimes as they are difficult to solve and are deemed a waste of time and money that could be invested in making budget-boosting drug hauls. According to Balko and Simon, over 50,000 SWAT raids are launched annually and many result in fatalities that are deemed worthwhile in light of the results. By 2012, the DEA budget had hit $25.2 billion and, yet, street prices are lower than ever, more kids are addicted than ever before and American jails are bursting with small fry while the big fish remain at large.

The latter come under scrutiny in `Level Seven - Master of the Game Cartel Lord'. But Cooke is keen to indicate that ridiculous wealth and power come at a cost, as you will be in permanent danger of betrayal and will need to become inured to ordering executions. Over 50,000 have been killed in Mexico since 2006 and only a fraction of the culprits have ever been caught. Those who do go down find themselves going to drug university rather than prison. According to Sterling, incarceration levels remained constant at around 250,000 from 1930 to the Nixon era, when it leapt to over two million. Now, while only 5% of the global population is American, it can claim 25% of the world's prisoners and Simon and Ariana Huffington declare that this is a conscious policy designed to remove the poor and marginalised from polite society. Woody Harrelson insists drug use is a freedom issue and Sarandon admits that some of them are fun. At least half of American adults has tried an illegal drug and Sterling says supporting the current laws is folly. Yet, while the majority accept that the system is broken, no one knows how to fix it and this suits the prison industry and its ancillaries down to the ground. Meanwhile, the focus on the illegal trade means that little or nothing is done to counteract the country's growing dependency on prescription drugs. Marshall `Eminem' Mathers admits to popping pills, as do O'Dea, Carlton and Walzman, who ended up on heroin as a consequence. But rehab facilities are only available to the rich.

Equally overlooked are America's alcohol and smoking problems. Over 47,000 suffer drink-related deaths each year, while tobacco heir Patrick Reynolds laments the fact that cigarettes are the nation's biggest killer. He urges Washington to follow the lead taken by Portugal in making drugs look uncool to youngsters and suggests that this may be the secret antidote to the problem. But, having pointed out that all the dealers included in his film have gone straight and are doing their bit to put right any damage their activities may have caused, Cooke uses his closing narration to call for the decriminalisation of drugs, as this would free cash to battle addiction, abuse and poverty. However, as he rightly states, the establishment has too much to lose by abandoning the War on Drugs, even though it is impossible to win and can only claim more casualties.

In many ways, this documentary recalls one of Cecil B. DeMille's moralising melodramas, as it wants to wallow in as much sin as possible before it has to denounce it in the final reel. Cooke and producer Adrian Grenier make a convincing case against existing anti-drug tactics, but present it in such a slick manner that it often feels more promotional than informational. The duo clearly recognise the pros of dealing and the hypocrisy underpinning the attempts to eradicate it. But they skate over the harsher facts about who uses and why and what damage addiction can do to those hooked and their loved ones. Moreover, the shift in tone, as it becomes evident that this is anything but a pusher's handbook, seems a touch too abrupt, with the result that a tutting preachiness comes to replace the knowing gallows humour in the final third. However, Cooke never seems as furious as Jarecki that kids with the potential to become entrepreneurs in legitimate businesses are throwing their lives away with the connivance of cynics who have too much to lose by admitting an incredibly inconvenient truth.