By day, Leo Grin inhabits the data center of a (very conservative, he’s happy to say) stock research firm. By night, he slaves away at a variety of writing projects and cinematic pipe dreams, most of which revolve around his passion for classic books and films.
To date, he is best known to the public for The Cimmerian, a literary journal about legendary pulp author Robert E. Howard. During the journal’s five-year run (2004–2008) it was twice nominated for the prestigious World Fantasy Award. Grin also has contributed articles on popular culture to National Review Online and other venues.
Born in Chicago and raised in Indiana, Grin earned his B.A. in Cinematography from Columbia College. He currently resides in Los Angeles, tantalizingly close to Big Hollywood yet oh so far….
Leo Grin
For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 6
by Leo GrinThe casting of Robert Montgomery (1904–1981) in They Were Expendable was uncommonly appropriate. The suave, handsome actor made his name in debonair romantic comedies throughout the 1930s, but like John Ford he didn’t wait until America was dragged into war before enlisting. In 1940, fired up by the life-and-death struggles raging in Europe, he abandoned his M-G-M contract, went to France, and volunteered as an ambulance driver. Only a few weeks went by before he had it shot out from under him — one film magazine of the era reported (or perhaps exaggerated) that he narrowly avoided capture with the help of a French priest, and escaped the country mere hours before it fell to the Germans.
Back in the states he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and over the next three years served in many capacities before finding his way to the Pacific theater, where he met John Bulkeley and became his executive officer. Montgomery commanded a PT boat in many battles, and eventually headed up to Normandy as an operations officer for a destroyer squadron. While preparing for D-Day, he remembered later, “I saw Bulkeley on his PT Boat and waved to him. There was another man on the bridge with him. I had no idea then it was Jack Ford.” (more…)
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For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 5
by Leo Grin
“I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks.”
– John Wayne –
John Wayne was still young in 1944, only thirty-eight years old. And yet the major elements of his inimitable style were hardening into place. Perhaps no other actor in history has been so cognizant of using his body to express grand themes and timeless mythological underpinnings. Under Ford’s direction Wayne never just stands there, he poses, in ways and with effects that conjure up famous paintings and sculpture. When he fills the frame as Lieutenant Junior Grade Rusty Ryan in They Were Expendable, he becomes every man who ever fought a losing action in a war, who faced defeat with stoicism, who sacrificed for a greater good. In the history of film, John Wayne remains nonpareil in his use of presence to project subtext.
Little of that came naturally to the Duke — in his early films he’s tall and rangy and handsome, but with little of the gravity, focus, and dramatic weight that would come to typify his prime acting years. Those skills, and they were skills, were consciously learned over fifteen years of working with Ford and his old troupe of veteran actors. He watched the way they walked and carried themselves, studied the way they were directed, and began to divine the level of nuance Ford demanded. There’s a funny story from the making of Stagecoach (1939, John Wayne’s big coming-out party as an actor), where Wayne’s character was supposed to be washing his face after a hard day, and Ford started smacking him around screaming, “Christ Duke, wash you face like a man! You’re daubing it! You’re daubing it!” He was trying to teach Wayne that, when you are an actor in front of a camera, your every movement can and should mean something deeper than what is on the surface. The act of washing one’s face can be pedestrian, or it can be a sweeping gesture that evokes strength of character, or a relaxed demeanor, or a gentleness of heart. And those deft movements will unconsciously fire off all sorts of neurons in the brain of an audience. (more…)
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For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 4
by Leo Grin
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“Close-ups, affectionate or noble, are held at leisure; long shots are sustained long after their narrative role has been performed. A marginal figure is suddenly dwelt on, lovingly enlarged to fill the center of the screen. Informed with heightened emotion, a single shot, unexpectedly interposed — a ragged line of men marching into nowhere, one of them playing a bugle-call on his harmonica — assumes a deeper significance than is given by its function in the story. This is one of the properties of poetry. They Were Expendable is a heroic poem.” – Lindsay Anderson
The wondrous shots about which Mr. Anderson writes were masterminded by John Ford, but they were brought to life on film by Joseph H. August (1890-1947), one of the great cinematographers of the age. It was August who memorably crafted the hauntingly beautiful images of night-fog and shadows for Ford’s The Informer (1935), which won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. He also lensed now-classic movies like Gunga Din and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (both 1939), and during the war served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves. (more…)
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For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 3
by Leo Grin
“That bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes.”
– General Douglas MacArthur, describing his savior John Bulkeley –
In March 1942, facing imminent capture by the Japanese, America’s commander in the Far East was ordered to slip away to safety in Australia. The Empire of the Sun controlled both air and sea, and only a precious few Allied planes and ships remained in-theater, skulking through the night fog like pirates to avoid capture and running on little more than spit and baling wire. “Overhauling those motors without any replacement parts was a terrible job,” one of the few to escape that nightmare later remembered. “For instance. Any tank-town garage which overhauls a flivver back in the States always replaces the gaskets with new ones. Only we didn’t have any. Or any sealing compound. So those old gaskets had to be carefully removed, handled as gently as though they were precious lace, and laid back in place when the motors were reassembled.”
When MacArthur arrived at the dock with his family and key commanders, he found waiting for him a trio of tiny, dilapidated motor torpedo boats crewed by dirty, emaciated men with long, unkempt beards and wild eyes. Their skipper was a thirty-year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant named John Bulkeley, who for months had held his disintegrating squadron together by scrounging like a rat among the islands for gasoline, torpedoes, and other basic supplies. His boats were little more than plywood matchboxes, but Bulkeley had kept them active long after the rest of America’s Navy and Air Force had been destroyed or driven off. He made sneak assaults against transports, cruisers, destroyers, airplanes, landing parties — anything to frustrate the pace of the overwhelming Japanese invasion. Every time he attacked it was a fearsome David-versus-Goliath mismatch, but Bulkeley had done so time and again, sinking many enemy vessels. (more…)
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For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 2
by Leo Grin
“I am really a coward. I know I am, so that’s why I did foolish things. I was decorated eight or nine times, trying to prove that I was not a coward, but after it was all over I still knew, know, that I was a coward.”
– John Ford –
June 4, 1942. The Battle of Midway. John Ford was on his back, covered in debris, unconscious. All around him bombs were dropping, buildings were erupting into monstrous fireballs, and young marines were dodging deadly lines of machine-gun strafing sent down by Japanese fighter planes. Ford and his assistant, young Jack MacKenzie Jr. (whose father was an RKO cinematographer) had been perched on the roof of a power station on Eastern Island, brazenly filming the morning attack by the Japanese and reporting enemy plane positions to headquarters, when a bomb landed a scant twenty feet from their position. The shockwave was so great that MacKenzie later recalled he was “bounced flat on my face by the terrific explosion,” adding, “we almost lost Commander Ford.” (more…)
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For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and ‘They Were Expendable’ Part 1
by Leo Grin
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen HD“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”
– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –
Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.” (more…)
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Introducing ‘For Conservative Movie Lovers’
by Leo Grin
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A thousand years ago in Cairo, surrounded by ancient pyramids and the ghosts of lost civilizations, the great Arab scientist Alhazen conducted a peculiar optical experiment. Building on observations made by Aristotle thirteen centuries earlier, he first constructed a room, one completely shuttered from the light of the outside world, as dark as death. He then cleverly lit the space around the room with an array of bright lamps. Finally, he punched a single pinhole into one wall, just large enough to let a small beam of lamplight bleed in.
Alhazen confirmed that if you entered such a room, and sat in the darkness until your eyes had ample time to adjust, and then followed the beam of light emanating from the pinhole to where it splashed onto the wall opposite, you would be privy to an amazing, almost magical sight. As you watched, shapes and colors would begin to coalesce. Familiar forms would appear. And eventually, when your eyes had acclimated enough, you would be staring at nothing less than an exact upside-down projection of the outside world, perfect in every detail. Alhazen marveled at this, and gave the experiment an evocative name: Al-Bayt al-Muthlim, translated by later scribes into Latin as camera obscura — The Veiled Chamber. (more…)
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Troopathon 2009: Our Boys Are Not Expendable
by Leo GrinTroopathon 2009 is shaping up to be far more than a marvelous day of thanks offered to our brightest, bravest, and best. It’s also turning into a grand culmination of sorts for the first six months of Big Hollywood’s existence.
Click over to our Contributor List, and marvel at how many people from all walks of life have stepped up and made themselves heard in the half-year since Andrew Breitbart unleashed his newest brainchild on a somnolent Hollywood elite. Actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, artists, cartoonists, critics, talk show hosts, documentarians, newspaper columnists, comedians, bloggers, congressmen, authors, military personnel — together they have written thousands of posts thunderously proclaiming the return of a popular culture that unabashedly respects our history and our heritage, our traditions and our troops. Whether it’s the Road to Recovery, the Wounded Warrior Project, the G. I. Film Festival, or today’s magnificent Troopathon, no web site has done more to create a powerful nexus between conservatives of all stripes and the Tinseltown mandarins that for too long have mocked everything good and noble about the country we call home. (more…)
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At 25, ‘The Karate Kid’ Still Packs a Punch
by Leo Grin
Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.
Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.
John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history. (more…)
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NBC: National Broadcasters Against Conservatives
by Leo Grin
Robert Avrech’s lovely paean to the patriotism of Old Hollywood reminds me, by way of contrast, of a blink-and-you-missed-it scandal from seventeen months ago. Even in a cultural arena rife with liberal outrages against military families, it marked a new low. And although it was but one small battle in the culture war, it is worth recalling in the wake of Memorial Day as a reminder of just how far our popular media has fallen from the sterling ideals of our forefathers.
What does NBC stand for again? National Broadcasters against Conservatives? No Blessings for the Corps? On December 7, 2007, as the country solemnly remembered Pearl Harbor and the timeless sacrifices of soldiers long dead, one of our major television networks decided that running ads praising today’s modern armed forces constituted a bridge too far. The two thirty-second spots had been produced by Freedom’s Watch, a now-defunct conservative action group which aspired to be the MoveOn.org of the right, using “grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy” to fight the good fight against the legion of hippy-dippy protesters, nihilists, and ideological bullies that perpetually rage (and increasingly reign) throughout blue-state America. (more…)
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‘Taken’: The World’s Oldest Profession is Father
by Leo GrinHe is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)
Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.
When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)
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Remembering a ‘Sweet’ Little Birthday
by Leo Grin
“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”
It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval. (more…)
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Haunted by the Memory of Her Song: Fifty Years of ‘Rio Bravo’
by Leo GrinThe sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….
Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.
Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.” (more…)
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