High Noon at the Red River

by Michael Moriarty

Before 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.

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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.

If, for instance, I have been inaccurate about where Laszlo and Ilsa might have ended up, whether in South America or the United States, the message this hero of the Czechoslovakian Resistance brings will be the same in either continent: continue the work of the International Communist Party.

The hopefully final fruit of such labors is now the radically Left, Obama Presidency.

Given the proven endurance of Communist tenacity for over one hundred years, this American, hybrid version of Marxism called Progressivism, with its added commitment to the eugenics of abortion and the absolute omnipotence of pseudo-Science, yes, this blend of Communism and Nazism, not to mention the hovering lunacy of Islamic terrorism being labeled a “man-made disaster” by the Obama administration, all of this explosive evil in high office demands an explanation.

For those not interested in the war between good and evil but obsessed with where Laszlo and Ilsa finally ended up – in South America or the United States – such a question will, of course, be the solid grounds upon which they can try to discredit the messenger with charges of poor scholarship in the message.

My claims and supporting evidence for the communist infiltration of the performing arts in America can, indeed, be traced even beyond the 100-year-old beginnings of Progressivism in America.

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The French Revolution and, as Voltaire described them, its “enlightened despots” or, in this case, the Obama Nation’s Elitists, began, with its communes, the Communist Revolution and its desire to literally tear the French Monarchy to pieces, starting with their royal heads first.

We now have the Obama Czars trampling all over the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, transforming the words “all men are created equal” into “all men are gestated as possible candidates for abortion”.

As a former Liberal myself, I’ll leave it to a supportive voice among the responses to my editorial, Deconstructing “Casablanca,” to state my case for me:

“George Orwell joined the International Brigades as a Communist, but he left Spain as a fervent anti-Communist. He even made a now infamous – infamous for the left, that is – list of people he suspected of being pro-Communist, just like McCarthy did. He saw commies under every bed, too. Later he wrote Animal Farm and 1984.

“As for the movie – during the early 40s only very few people, like Orwell, saw the reality behind the romantic illusions that Stalin’s genius for propaganda had created for the West. Hemingway didn’t see it. Most Hollywood writers didn’t see it. They created a romantic hero with a Communist background (the International Brigades) while Stalin was sending hundreds of thousands of his people to the GULAG and killing a few million Ukranians during the Holodomor.

“In the 1950s Simone Signoret and Yves Montand met Kruschev during a much publicized tour through Russia. This was shortly before or after the invasion of Hungary and a big victory for Communist propaganda. Decades later, both of them apologized publicly. They hadn’t realized that their romantic leftism had been used by the Communists. How about that – honesty and self-reflection, instead of attacking anybody who threatens your illusions.”

I much prefer this comparison of myself to George Orwell than to Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy had never been a Liberal, as I had, let alone a Communist as Orwell had been.

As for Sherlock Holmes?

I have no doubt the famous detective would now be an ostensibly law-biding Progressive friend of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and President Barack H. Obama and one of the invited guests at the White House.

Onward to High Noon at the Red River… 

In regard to criticisms of the subtitle for one of my editorials for Big Hollywood, Riding the Rhone, I’m sticking – for the sake of a questionable posterity – with my original spelling of Rhone instead of roan because with closer analysis there are profounder inferences for an increasingly Marxist America within the Rhone River than the name of a horse which may or may not be red.

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Arriving on earth out of the record-breaking neutrality of Switzerland, the Rhone enters France, where – as I’ve pointed out in my series, America’s French Revolution, the idyllic dreams of communes and Communism began. With a similarly and seemingly harmless idealism within the Obama campaign, our President arose to transform the White House into a Marxist and Maoist Czardom, a totalitarian oxymoron … Communist Czars?! … that actually marries a trinity of Isms, one of which veiled the horrors of eugenics. The other two, Communism and Fascism … well, please read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.

Reading a relatively long series of replies to one comment on my editorial, The Christmas of ‘09, I smelled a propaganda rat. The thoughts contained were gruesome and violent … and I said to myself … hmmmm …. sounds like a kind of sabotaging propaganda move, an effort to make conservatives sound bloodthirsty and … well … exactly like the infamous Madame Lafarge of French Revolutionary History.

Hmmm, indeed.

This might be out of the very book that George Soros contributed to: What George Orwell Didn’t Know. The Obama/Soros’ yearly half-a-billion-dollar contribution created very little that Orwell could not anticipate. I love the presumptuous title, though, the Marxist one-ups-man-ship of What George Orwell Didn’t Know … “about us Marxists”.

Regardless of the Sorosian backwash, Riding the Rhone is not only equestrian in its inference but aquatic as well … Riding the Red River … with all of the John Wayne implications and his battles with a new generation of Left-Leaning Americans that title might imply.

This inevitably brings me to the famous Hollywood political differences between John Wayne and Gary Cooper.

There are two films that involved these two great Hollywood stars that clearly defined not only their self-image but their politics as well, Red River and High Noon. 

Gary Cooper turned down the role of Thomas Dunson in Red River because he thought the role too ruthless for his own screen image. John Wayne took the role with apparently little hesitation.

As for High Noon and the conflicting stories about a growing feud over it between Wayne and Cooper, the facts are fairly clear. The screenwriter, Carl Foreman, had always thought of himself as living the very showdown which Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) faced. High Noon was intended as an allegory in Hollywood for the failure of Hollywood people to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red-baiting era of Senator McCarthy.

Wayne, in his typically combative fashion, helped produce and starred in Rio Bravo as a direct answer to what he saw as High Noon’s indictment of America in general.

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The battles of John Wayne with an increasingly Leftist Hollywood are, without a doubt, on a counter-revolutionary level. He never, however, let his political feelings interfere with what is essentially the very Capitalist adventure that Hollywood has always been. Had he done so, he would never have agreed to appear and accept the Academy Award for High Noon.

Needless to say, the mounting successes of the Hollywood Left have reached their zenith (at this point) with President Barack Obama.

However, none of this could have happened without the Far Left subtext of the Clintons with their fiercely pro-abortion stance and William Clinton’s admitted love for Carl Foreman’s High Noon and his equal admiration for Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station. Wilson’s rather ill-considered and romantic view of Vladimir Ilytch Lenin is, I’m grateful to say, pointed out in Professor Louis Menand’s introduction to the most recent edition of To The Finland Station.

Vladimir Nabokov, with whom Wilson eventually feuded, described Lenin as “a pail of the milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom.”

Ahhh, the American Left!

They’re all so brilliant and … Ivy League … and replete with Pulitzers and Rhodes Scholarships and Harvard/Yale degrees and … yes, Nobel Prizes!

They write mesmerizing films and inspire politically active stars … and they never realize how deeply Joseph Stalin is laughing in his grave, knowing full well what I have shared with many of my readers.

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Now we have America hanging precipitously on the lip of a bottomless and deceptively tyrannical well called the Progressive New World Order.

The Soros/Obama/MSM/Hollywood/Chicago/New York/Far Left coalition would prefer that the Tea Partiers and 9/12ers and Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s Counter-Revolutionary Empire sit silently by while the virtually Marxist New World Order is built!

Hmmmm, again!!

The Blue Dogs, however, those Democrats whose knees shake increasingly before they vote Obama Care into a fait accompli?

Blue Dogs have predecessors in Hollywood such as Gary Cooper, legendary stars who had discovered some of the political nightmares they were caught in … increasingly dark.

The first and most publicly challenged of the Hollywood Blue Dogs was Humphrey Bogart.

These Blue Dog Legends, seemingly poised in a kind of Swiss neutrality, were indeed carried by the Rhone River and frequently against their will, into the communes of legendary French Communism … now better known as the Objectives of the American Progressive New World Order.


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Posted Jan 12th 2010 at 1:27 pm in Culture, Featured Story, Film, Political Humor | 96 Comments