Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

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By now, everyone should know that the new film, GI Joe: Rise of Cobra, is a despicable excuse for a movie. It was harshly panned by Big Hollywood as well as by me. For an action film, it is horrible, but for an American film, it is a disgrace.

Director Stephen Sommers said, “this is not a George Bush movie — it’s an Obama world.” Sounds to me that since Bush is no longer president it is supposed to legitimize the disintegration of patriotism for our armed forces. That would explain why the Joe’s are no longer the all American heroes they once were. Instead, they are a multinational task force that picks up the pieces after the USA fails.

This film represents everything President Obama worshipers stand for, which explains the lack of Americanism.GI Joe has always been a vehicle of unapologetic patriotism. What happened? Obama happened. For some reason, it now feels like multiculturalism was not acceptable until Obama was elected into office?

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