Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series "Law and Order" from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include "The Yellow Wallpaper," "12 Hours to Live," "Santa Baby" and "Deadly Skies." Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.
Michael Moriarty
Marlon’s Mao: Part Three
by Michael MoriartyHmmm …
As Hamlet says, mortality “must give us pause”.
Therefore, “Hmmmm ….. “
On what must be my tenth viewing of that American masterpiece, I realized how tragically prophetic it has proven to be.
What inspired Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg to collaborate in recording what is still The Great American Tragedy?
On The Waterfront is clearly a heroic drama, not a tragedy, with a thrillingly courageous victory for its hero in the end.
What makes it a possible tragedy now?
The testimony Kazan gave to the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming members of the American Communist Party with which he had participated in meetings, not only branded him as a “stool pigeon”, stigmatized him like Brando’s Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, but, in addition, has grown over the years to carry a tragic foresight within it. (more…)
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President Sarah Palin
by Michael Moriarty
Today, with the help of Big Hollywood’s Leigh Scott, I begin my tribute series to Governor Sarah Palin.
Scott Leigh, a horror film-maker reminiscent of my not-always-so-hard-times spent with Larry Cohen, had this to say about what the Left fears about Sarah Palin:
What they fear is that Palin would actually stick to fiscally conservative principles. She would reform the tax laws to make them fair and rational. She would clip the influence of labor unions. She would end the unholy alliance of Big Government and Big Business. She may actually extend women’s rights to choose to include how they spend their money, where they send their kids to school, and what caliber handgun they want to buy.
In short, Sarah Palin is the essence of American identity: individual freedom married to individual responsibility and, dare I say, the sacredly unique individuality vested within all of us upon conception, an American signature more indelible than that of John Hancock.
In light of the Liberally Dark Warnings about conservative homophobia, Sarah’s appearance on Greg Gutfeld’s increasingly irresistible RED EYE is de rigueur.
Right now, and unless I’m informed otherwise, the adorable Mike Huckabee is therefore “one-up” on Sarah. (more…)
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Marlon’s Mao: Part Two
by Michael MoriartyI was a mere teenager in the fifties when it was broadcast widely that the Chinese “don’t really have the same love of life that we do.”
Apparently the Americans at Jonestown were part Chinese, eh?
Here is the Last Will and Testament of Jonestown:
Dear Comrade Timofeyev,
“The following is a letter of instructions regarding all of our assets that we want to leave to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Enclosed in this letter are letters which instruct the banks to send the cashiers checks to you. I am doing this on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit.
The letters included listed accounts with balances totaling in excess of $7.3 million to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Hmmm …. Communism. (more…)
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Marlon’s Mao: Part One
by Michael MoriartyOur President’s favorite movie is The Godfather.
“You disrespected me …” says Don Corleone to a favor-seeker.
That’s one of President Obama’s favorite phrases from Marlon Brando’s Godfather.
The, by now very boring, Judeo-Christian civilization has raised us to “disrespect” criminals, bullies who rule the world by force and force alone and cold-blooded killers such as the Islamic Jihad.
Somehow our President is willing to give a pass to Don Corleone because … well … “The Don” is performed by the same actor who portrayed John McCain’s favorite movie hero, Emiliano Zapata.
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Sidney Poitier: To Sir, With Love
by Michael MoriartyI met Sidney Poitier for the first time in the summer of 1994. He was starring in the television film, Children of the Dust. I played a supporting role in that project, a character who just happened to be married to Sidney’s co-star, Farrah Fawcett.
As some say, there are times when acting beats working for a living.
In company like that, filming in the foothills of Alberta and staying at one of the best hotels in Canada, Calgary’s Palliser, it could only have gotten better if I’d been on my honeymoon.
In spite of the fact that I had the extreme pleasure of having a bedroom scene with Farrah Fawcett as my wife in the film, Ms. Fawcett’s character in Children of the Dust, though a bit “round the bend” … like some North American, pioneer Ophelia … had the profoundly healthy instinct of falling in love with Sidney Poitier.
Who could blame anybody for falling in love with Sidney Poitier?!
At that time in my life, however, I was not in love but seriously in trouble with a lot of things, mainly New York City itself … and I was seriously considering my eventual move to Canada. (more…)
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High Noon at the Red River
by Michael MoriartyBefore we begin…
Perhaps it’s genetic and, because I’m Irish-American, I’m sounding like Joseph McCarthy when he railed against Communism with his Un-American Activities Committee. Plus, with a name like Moriarty, given that’s the “handle” for the major villain in the World of Sherlock Holmes, I’m doubly cursed.
My sometimes awkward efforts to trace the growth of communism in the American performing arts does not have the substantive weight of an historical scholar, but it does have my over-forty years of personal experience behind it.
In an almost childlike way but with plenty of time to ponder my past in film and theater, I offer up a truth that, for me, has only been glimpsed in depth by Glenn Beck. (more…)
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Deconstructing ‘Casablanca’: Waiting for Rick…
by Michael MoriartyRather than proceed with the more obvious examples of Hollywood Left … as I had promised, films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Reds and Inside Man, I’m drawn to a much subtler message in the great classic Casablanca.
Perhaps every movie buff has tried to write – if only in his or her own imagination – a sequel to that great film classic, Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Rick’s advice to Ilsa in the last scene of the film, that the problems of two little people don’t amount to much during World War II?
How could true love be defeated by an obviously Communist father-figure such as Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo?
“That’s a hefty charge, Mr. Moriarty.” (more…)
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Miracle Workers: Julie Harris and Patty Duke
by Michael MoriartyThe fearless yearning of the human soul!
That is what I’d like to talk about in this editorial.
Amidst the urgency of combating the Obama Nation’s disgusting ambitions for shrinking the United States of America into a docile and obedient fixture in the profoundly Marxist vision of a New World Order, I have recently rediscovered a veritably cinematic hymn to what drives the human soul.
Julie Harris “Member of the Wedding”
We humans harbor an insatiable desire to know the entire universe. That, at least, is what I’ve concluded while watching the incredibly powerful performances of Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker.
This experience, as an audience member, of Helen Keller’s ferocious journey from an animal ignorance to human enlightenment captures with blissfully overwhelming density the same feeling I had experienced with my first and now repeated viewings of the film, Member of the Wedding. (more…)
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The Christmas of ’09: Riding The Rhone
by Michael MoriartyDespite the darkening clouds of increasingly Marxist/Islamic sympathies in the White House (“This is no longer just a Christian nation …”, said the President) and regardless of the Obama Nation’s success at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into the Obama Nation … Americans are still celebrating both Christmas and Hanukkah.
Such a time of profoundly important Judeo-Christian sacredness, with our pride in its significance increasingly muzzled by “Progressively political correctness”, should and, I believe, will be honored more deeply because of the inferential shame our New World Order leadership would like to immerse it in.
Apparently, and for the entire history of America, its Judeo-Christian roots have been, in the eyes of Progressives, one of our nation’s incessant problems, and the main reason the United States has found it impossible to join the … uh … “community of nations”.
“Is this another diatribe, another imbecilic slap at the United Nations, Mr. Moriarty?!”
Yes … among other shots at the Progressive certainty over the apparently incontestable New World Order. (more…)
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The Increasingly Left ‘Law and Order’
by Michael MoriartyWell, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of Law and Order for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one. Out of sight, out of mind. Law and Order has, for years, been just a press of the remote away from non-existence.
However, recent events have Law and Order just begging for my reassessment. I hardly expected my old television series to be the clown act that leads the American viewing audience into an increasingly predictable pile of hard left propaganda.
Why?
Dick Wolf
Dick Wolf is basically a follower of usually high-level talents such as Joe Stern, Robert Nathan and Ed Sherin.
Those men, I believe, are no longer regulars on Law and Order.
The guy who apparently wears the pants in that family is now Rene Balcer.
That’s clearly the hypnotist in whose deep pink trance Dick Wolf is irretrievably drowning. (more…)
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Dead End America
by Michael MoriartyDead End?
The film with Joel McCrea and what finally became known of as The Dead End Kids?
Saw it … in its entirety … for the first time, two nights ago.
The authors, of course, Sidney Kingsley and Lillian Hellman had been, at the time of writing and production at any rate (mid 1930’s), the early radical Leftists of Hollywood. John Steinbeck’s successful but highly controversial Grapes of Wrath was yet to come.
Dead End (1937)
It dawned on me how Dead End might be the best starting point for a history of Hollywood film that eventually ended up producing an unashamed love song to American Communists in Warren Beatty’s Reds.
If you haven’t seen Dead End or don’t recall the story instantly, it’s a tribute to the Marxist theory that what creates crime is poverty.
The Latin American drug cartels and the Mafia … they are not comprised of poor people. (more…)
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Hello Big Hollywood
by Michael MoriartyTo begin with, writing this first editorial for Big Hollywood feels as threatening as the moment I entered California to do my first big film-role in Glory Boy, originally and more comprehensively titled, My Old Man’s Place.
“Do I really want that face I see in the rushes … the one that looks an awful lot like me … do I want it running around the movie houses of the world?”
By then, of course, it was too late. I’d already signed a contract.
Director Elia Kazan accepts an honorary Oscar (1999)
I’ve already said yes to Andrew Breitbart … and though I’ve been writing editorials on enterstageright.com for more than a few years … this actual return to Hollywood … uh … Big Hollywood, no less … is as disturbing as those memories of My Old Man’s Place.
What does Big Hollywood mean?
Is it a tribute or in-house sarcasm? (more…)
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