Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation has been a regular in all known forms of media. From the Strand magazine where Holmes got his start, through radio and television and on to the big screen, the great detective has spanned the generations. He is considered the most played character in all of media, with at least 75 different actors taking on the role.

While American audiences have most recently been treated to Robert Downey Jr.’s performance on the big screen, the real gem of modern mystery is the BBC’s mini-series Sherlock. Now entering its second season, it is a luscious masterpiece.

The most fantastic part of the series is that it isn’t new. Each episode works with an existing Holmes story but takes it to another level. Each episode is more of a movie, running for ninety minutes, allowing the plot to build and the characters to gain more depth.

The first season had episodes based loosely on “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Five Dancing Men.” The sophomore outing begins with “A Scandal in Belgravia,”obviously a new take on “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

The brilliance of the series is on full display once more as it delves into the relationship between Watson and Holmes, Holmes and Irene Adler, Holmes and his brother Mycroft, as well as Watson’s own failed romantic interests. The intrigue and tension is palpable throughout, while managing to break it with surprisingly humorous interludes along the way. Even the cutesy little special effects used to show Holmes’s thought process add a layer to the proceedings, where similar tricks in other shows tend to come across as heavy-handed and rather stupid.

The plot, like the original story, is based around a royal personage who has been compromised by a romantic liaison with the inimitable Miss Adler. While the story diverges wildly from there, hardcore fans of Holmes will catch a myriad of small details that harken back to the original. As a quick example, when trying to get in to visit Adler, Holmes disguises himself as an injured priest. This is not unlike the scene from the book where he, also dressed as a clergyman, inserts himself into a staged altercation and is struck, prompting Miss Adler to invite him into her house.

One of the most fascinating bits of this reboot is how it has been adapted for the 21^st century. Watson, instead of writing up the escapades for publication, keeps a blog of his friend’s adventures. The photograph from “The Scandal” has become a smart phone filled with digital pictures and other incriminating information.

The whole episode is perfectly paced, each scene building to a spectacular crescendo. One is left feeling that it cannot improve on the previous 20 minutes and left reeling as it goes and does so, from start to finish. Benedict Cumberbatch portrays Holmes to a tee–brilliant, acerbic and dealing with Asperger’s, while Martin Freeman’s Dr. Watson, veteran of Afghanistan, is the perfect foil–earnest, slightly nebbish, and loyal to a fault. Lara Pulver (Claudine Crane from “True Blood”) does a wonderful job as Irene Adler, at once unflappable and calculating while exuding a calm sensuality, hitting the right notes of unstoppable confidence and shocked fear with the slightest change of facial expression.

This might be the best bit of television I’ve seen in a decade. I eagerly await the next two installments of the year. The show airs on BBC1 in the UK and appears on PBS in the US about three months later. The first season is available on Blu-ray as well as Netflix streaming. Highly recommended.

The BBC:

Influential American broadcaster Katie Couric has suggested a way to change attitudes to Muslims in the US.

Pointing to the success in the 1980s and 90s of TV sitcom The Cosby Show in improving relations between African-Americans and whites, she argues that a Muslim version of the show may counter some Americans’ negative perceptions of the community.

But just across the border, in Canada, this “Muslim Cosby Show” already exists. Little Mosque on the Prairie, made in Toronto, is recording its sixth and final series. 

However…

Judging by the Left’s “eliminationist” rhetoric when it comes to we “sons of bitches” and their obvious need to fulfill violent fantasies through video games, what this country might need is something more along the lines of ”Little Tea Party On the Prairie.”

Coogan has built a rabid cult following in the U.S. to go with his more noticeable British stardom by alternately immersing himself in characters and impersonations so thoroughly he’s compared to the legendary Peter Sellers. Yet he’s also wildly popular back home for letting himself play the fool, Larry David-style, in a series of awkward and embarrassing filmed misadventures. And now he’s put both approaches together quite winningly in the new comedy “The Trip,” which has been doing strong and growing business at arthouses nationwide for the past couple of weeks.

In “The Trip,” which is actually a tightly edited mix of highlights from a BBC mockumentary series of the same name, Coogan teams up with his friendly rival and fellow comic Rob Brydon for a tour of Northern England’s finest restaurants. The idea is to combine humorous insights with genuine culinary opinions for a TV series, but while their stops at gourmet restaurants and deluxe bed and breakfasts offer up plenty of delicious  imagery, the actual focus of the film and their journey within it is to create a framework for the two leads’ non-stop and hilarious banter.

Coogan and Brydon are genuine friends and fantastic at one-upping each other here on screen. While director Michael Winterbottom – who previously directed Coogan as a wild British concert promoter in the cult classic “24 Hour Party People” – is at the helm, he knows that these two are at their best when they’re cutting loose with an endless string of hilarious impersonations, climaxing in a tour de force battle royale of who can do the best Sean Connery.

Yet “The Trip” does offer some surprising detours as well. In its rare quiet moments it serves as a thoughtful meditation on the price people like Coogan pay for putting so much of their personalities out into the public. Wherever he wanders on his own seeking a moment of peace and quiet, someone – even in the most remote of villages – is ready to jump out from a corner and scare the daylights out of him with impersonations of his comedy bits.

The film also manages to draw a subtle portrait of the differences that grow between even the best of friends when one takes on the commitment of marriage and family while the other continues trying to live the immature life of a playboy. Brydon is the family man and gradually shows the emotional strain of being away from his loved ones, while Coogan engages in emotionally empty one-night stands that are unseen yet end with the women sneaking out on him in the morning.

Adding the icing of genuine emotions to the rich cake of their zesty performances, Coogan and Brydon have created a film in which longtime fans and those who are new to their charms will all be amply rewarded with 90 minutes of laughter.

Unfortunately for the Americanized version of the long running BBC hit Top Gear, it is trending into the third category. The show is lacking three elements: originality, chemistry among the hosts, and humor. That’s a shame because it has a lot going for it. The best asset of the show, after the cars, is comedian Adam Ferrara. I will readily admit that I have a bias towards my fellow comics doing well but the problem is that the producers of the show seem to lack the humor gene. In the six episodes I have seen thus far they haven’t let Adam loose. The closest they came was when he got a ticket for speeding on the causeway to Key West.  After watching the rest of the episode I wasn’t sure if this was an actual event or staged for the camera.

More on that in just a few minutes. Let me back up and admit I am a huge fan of the British version or the show. The three “presenters,” as they are called in the U.K., seem to have a real friendship and mutual respect even though they constantly “slag” on each other.  I realize that relationship has been built over the years but even when I go back and look at older seasons of Top Gear on DVD that chemistry is still there. The two other hosts of the American show, Tanner Foust and Rutledge Wood, seem to be a little out of their element as hosts, despite the fact that Mr. Wood has experience as a reporter for NASCAR and Speed Network.  I don’t want to be too negative about Mr. Wood. He has a “good old boy” hominess that I think could work to his and the show’s advantage, but it seems that the producers haven’t figured that out just yet.  Secondly the British version is anchored by Jeremy Clarkson; though one of  three hosts, he’s obviously the boss and the center of the show.  I believe having a “boss” on screen would help give the American show some definition and Mr. Ferrara would be a natural fit.

The problems with Top Gear USA are greater that the hosting duties. Thus far every “challenge” given to the hosts is a direct rip-off from the BBC version. Car vs. skiers, seen it! Boat, car, and plane race to a destination, been there. Many of the shots seem way too staged to have been just captured by the roving camera. It the episode where the guys race from Miami to Key West, there is a beautiful shot of all three modes of transportation in the same frame as they head South. What are the odds?  This is the scene which called Mr. Ferrara’s traffic citation into question. Call me crazy but I think a realty show should be realistic!

They also use the “Star in A Reasonably Priced Car” segment from the original series. This features a celebrity driving an underpowered car around a European style formula one track.  This feature of the show could have been easily “Americanized” by using a typical “NASCAR” banked loop track (perhaps the producers failed to notice just how popular NASCAR actually is).  They could have also used a drag strip, the most American form of racing.

Despite its faults, I still set Top Gear USA on my DVR. I am hoping the show matures and finds its stride because like millions of Americans, I love cars! When the host gets behind the wheel of a Bugatti-Veyron, McLaren, or some other supercar I will never own, I can’t help but think how cool that would be. When they take a challenge in a “beater” I can identify with, that feeling of hoping my car makes the next exit after driving several of the POS I have owned in my life.  I hope the show runs long enough for them to get so far down the list that I might get invited to take the reasonably priced car around the track because I know I could leave Jay Leno in the dust!

Here’s a surprise. He, and his hair, agree.

Listen up, up-listeners.

So there you have it, a venerable old-fogey harkening back to the good old days when no one had cell phones or breast implants -and all the news came from three boxes – NBC, CBS, and ABC – or more to the point: old fogeys like Ted Koppel. As the world changed, Ted became less important. No wonder he’s grumpy. I want to give him a big hug.

Now I’m 45, and I remember those good old days. Those good old days sucked. We had three networks, all pumping out the same crap, day in, and day out. Was it all factual, like Koppel remembers? I don’t know – since there was no choice – it didn’t matter.

All I remember, as a young teen in my Partridge Family foot pajamas, was the sameness of everything, and how it trumpeted the suckiness of America. It was all driven by a media who concluded that Vietnam and Watergate made us the bad guys.

And the media – the good guys.

So in 1976, if you turned on the set, here’s what you got:

-homelessness, homelessness, homelessness. At one point you couldn’t tell the difference between the news and a Dead show.

-the evils of nuclear power. Koppel forgets that much of the “facts” were presented by folks who cried during Silkwood.

-evil corporations. This common theme, put to great use on 60 Minutes, often overlooked the fact that corporations are made of people, and they pay all the taxes. But they also made guns, cigarettes and guns that look like cigarettes. So they were bad.

-Gerald Ford falling.

Sadly, according to Koppel, the real evil now is competition via cable and the web. Because of Fox News, you’ll now find other stories the old media thought unimportant.

I think this is good news – which is something Koppel probably wishes I wouldn’t report.

And if you disagree with me, you probably hate unicorns.

Tonight we’ve got Rick Folbaum, Imogen Lloyd Webber, and comedian Mark Douglas!

Plus, other stuff.

It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

“The whole damn thing took over,” said his then-wife, the Academy-Award nominated actress Diane Cilento. “He really didn’t know who he was. People would call over to him things like, ‘Hey, Bondy, where’re you off to next?’ or ‘See any Soviet agents lately?’ It became impossible to have any sort of life. . . .It got madder and madder with each film.”

Every time it looked as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they did. In Tokyo (where they greeted him with screams of  “Bondo!”) Connery was using a bathroom urinal when he heard a quiet click. Startled, he glanced up to see a Japanese photographer peeking around his shoulder with a Nikon. On another occasion, after graciously signing his name for an elderly lady at the airport, she reacted with a look of horror. “No, no!” she said, “I wanted James Bond.” Director Terence Young, who was with Connery, remembers that “Sean sort of crumpled. It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being, he was a symbol.”

For a painfully private and unassuming family man like Connery, this insane superstardom — Bond-age, you might call it — was intolerable. And so even as Goldfinger was smashing box-office records across the world, the actor responsible for playing the hero was counting down the days until his contract expired.

Tommy Connery was born in 1930 on the wrong side of the tracks of Edinburgh, Scotland, arriving just in time to grow up amidst the poverty of the Great Depression (his crib was a dresser drawer). At age eight he was already finding whatever odd jobs he could to help support Mom, Dad, and a younger brother: delivering milk and newspapers, working for the local butcher. By fourteen he was working three different jobs.

What little spare time he had was spent bodybuilding, and he soon transformed himself into a formidable, well-muscled bruiser. “There was nothing of the long-haired poet about schoolboy Connery,” recalls one of his classmates. “He was big, and he was as hard as nails in an easygoing way, and anyone at school who messed him about got a thick ear and a black eye.” After opening up a can of whoop-ass on a gang of local bullies one day, kids on the street started respectfully calling him “Big Tam.” Later “Shane” became an alternate moniker, inspired by the 1953 film. According to one version of the story, years of neighborhood use eventually corrupted Shane into Sean, and thus Tommy Connery’s reputation for toughness earned him the name that would one day adorn theater marquees around the world.

From early on, Sean found himself looking for some way to escape the claustrophobic slums of postwar Edinburgh, where generations of lower-class workers slaved away in quiet toil only to have sons and grandsons repeat the whole business ad infinitum. At sixteen he abandoned school and joined the Merchant Navy (a pair of tattoos stenciled on his right forearm — “Mum and Dad” and “Scotland Forever” — gave him the requisite Popeye look), but a year later he was mustered out on medical grounds from an ulcer. He spent the rest of his teens bumming around town as an “odd-job man”: steelworker, road worker, coal delivery man, cement-mixer, lifeguard, artist’s model, newspaper press-room worker, and bouncer at the local Big Band dance hall.

It was while serving as a polisher of tables and coffins that a co-worker introduced him to stagehand work at King’s Theater, and the exposure gave Connery the acting bug. When he and a friend later went to London to compete in the Mr. Universe contest on a lark (Connery says he placed third in the tall men’s class, others insist he didn’t make the cut), his ears perked up when someone mentioned that the touring show for South Pacific was on the lookout for burly actors who could sing. Connery crashed the audition, won a job, and was soon traveling all around the British Isles performing six evenings a week as a grunt in the chorus.

Mingling with professional actors for the first time prompted the high-school dropout to begin educating himself with Ibsen, Proust, Tolstoy, Stanislavski, and Thomas Wolfe. At a party he met another young actor named Maurice Micklewhite, and soon the two blue-collar thespians were commiserating about their troublesome accents (a Scottish brogue in Connery’s case, a Cockney twang for Micklewhite). This new pal would eventually change his name too, inspired by a 1954 Bogart movie poster, and thereafter Sean Connery and Michael Caine would remain lifelong friends.

Connery’s athletic prowess was such that, after a soccer match between the cast of South Pacific and a local team, he was offered a professional contract with Manchester United. After thinking over his options, however, he turned it down, choosing instead to keep hammering away at the frustrating but ultimately fulfilling acting game. “One of my more intelligent moves,” Connery later quipped.

A lucky break came when Jack Palance suddenly pulled out of a BBC production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, causing the director to take a wild chance on a physically imposing but still largely untested Scotsman. Connery put in countless hours of practice learning his lines and molding a serviceable American accent, and when the play appeared on TV reviews were good. In the wake of this success, Twentieth-Century Fox’s British office signed the twenty-seven-year-old to a studio contract. which Connery would later say was akin to “walking through a swamp in a bad dream.” Over a period of years Fox didn’t use him in a single project, choosing instead to occasionally loan him out to other studios for a quick buck.

Terence Young, who would direct three early Bond films (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball), remembers working with the young Connery on an early movie shoot. “He came to me and said in that very Scots accent of his, ‘Sir, am I going to be a success in this?’” Touched by this display of hopeful innocence, and impressed by his raw if unfinished talent, the director leveled with the struggling actor: “No — but keep on swimming. Just keep at it, and I’ll make it up to you.”

And that’s exactly what Connery did, acting in whatever films Fox loaned him out for. One day, on the set of Another Time, Another Place (1958) co-starring Lana Turner, her notorious hoodlum boyfriend Johnny Stompanato stormed the set and began waving a gun at the Scotsman, threatening to pump Connery full of holes if he should touch the legendary beauty. In an instant the Big Tam of old roared to life, leaping out of his chair like a panther, twisting the gun away, and sending the gangster flying with a wallop to his nose. Still later Connery would star in the one high-point of his Fox contract: Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), a performance made possible by a timely loan-out of the actor to Disney. The film was the usual Magic Kingdom success (Connery’s rendition of “Pretty Irish Girl” was even released on the radio as a single), and ultimately it would become an instrumental stepping stone to Bond.

Throughout the Fifties various parties had optioned the rights to James Bond, but all of those efforts resulted in nothing more than a single, mediocre 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale. It wasn’t until the early Sixties that a pair of aging, on-the-rocks movie producers named Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman made the whole thing work. Crucially, after negotiating the rights, they hired Terence Young as their director. Soon after getting the gig, Young attended a play in England and noticed that one of the muscular figures up on stage looked familiar. It was that kid — Sean what’s-his-name — who had so impressed him years earlier. Remembering his old promise to give him a boost someday, the wheels started turning: could this fellow possibly handle the Bond assignment?

He mentioned Connery to Broccoli, who did his own research by taking his wife to see a reissue screening of Darby O’Gill. When she began panting over the actor’s raw sex appeal, the producer’s interest was piqued. One meeting later and Connery had the job. “He bounced across the street like he was Superman,” marveled Broccoli about their first encounter. “He moved like a cat. That did it for us. Harry and I both said, ‘This is the guy.’”

“We’d never seen a surer guy,” Saltzman added. “Or a more arrogant sonofabitch!” Connery later explained that he deliberately gave off that impression during their initial confrontation. “My strength as an actor, I think, is that I’ve stayed close to the core of myself, which has something to do with a voice, a music, a tune that’s very much tied up with my background experience.” That voice, that music, harkens back to the mean streets of the Edinburgh slums, when a muscled kid named Big Tam once faced down gangsters and gained the respect of the neighborhood.

The execs at United Artists weren’t convinced by Broccoli and Saltzman’s enthusiasm, cabling them back from America with a curt request to “See if you can do better.” But the minds of the two producing partners were all made up. “Put a bit of veneer on that tough Scottish hide,” Broccoli promised, “and you’ve got Fleming’s Bond instead of all the mincing poofs we had apply for the job.”

The “bit of veneer” was provided by director Young, a man of fine tastes and manners who took Big Tam under his wing and taught him how to act sophisticated. Young decked Connery out in the finest clothes from Savile Row using his own tailor, and continually coached the actor in the nuances of creating a polished performance (“Sean, do keep your mouth shut while chewing your food!” “Tone down that bloody Scottish brogue!”). Soon Connery was looking and acting the part, to the point where movie critic Pauline Kael would gush that, “Connery looks absolutely confident in himself as a man. Women want to meet him and men want to be him. I don’t know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much.”

Although the transformation sent the movie’s producers over the moon, the character’s creator took a bit more convincing. “I don’t think [Ian Fleming] approved of me terribly,” Connery later said. “But he did have casting rights over the film, so I guess he must have come round to the idea.” Fleming initially dismissed Connery as “that laborer playing Bond,” but once the first few films were successful he changed his tune, going so far as to adopt Connery’s Scottish background for the Bond of the books.

For those of us who wish Connery could have played Bond all the way up to the present day, the way his participation in the series ended was unfortunate. Compared to what Broccoli and Saltzman were making, Connery’s share of the burgeoning 007 pie was small, with only a fixed salary and a bit of profit participation to offset all the hell that Bond’s fame was playing with his life. Meanwhile, his image was being used on all manner of merchandise (toys, cars, aftershave — hundreds of products in all) without him getting so much as a cent for it:

I was paying 98% tax. I was making all this money and making movies and I had nothing. . . . Basically I’m a private person, and the Bond producers wouldn’t let me be that. I’d work six days a week, all day, with much of the work physical, then have to spend every free moment answering stupid questions like, “Do you like to beat people up? Slap women around?”

As the character’s popularity reached insane levels with the release of Goldfinger, Terence Young (slated to direct Bond’s next adventure, Thunderball) sensed Connery’s dismay with his stardom, and advised the producers that they would be wise to take the actor on as a full partner. “He’s a Scotsman,” Young argued. “He likes the sound of gold coins clinking together. He likes that lovely soft rustle of paper. He’ll stay with you if he’s a partner, but not if you use him as a hired employee.” Broccoli and Saltzman rejected the idea out of hand. In their opinion, Connery was getting more than enough for his trouble, and could be replaced fairly easily if needed. “All I ever did to Sean Connery,” Broccoli later said, “was make him an international star and a very, very wealthy man.”

Insulted by their stinginess and tired of the demands put on his time and life, Connery would grudgingly finish out his contract with Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967), then after a one-film hiatus commit to a final movie, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), so that he could donate his million-dollar paycheck to charity. But even as he appreciated what 007 did for his career, he left the fold with bitter feelings towards the two producers who, in his judgment, got filthy rich while he did most of the heavy lifting. “I’ve been screwed by more people than a hooker,” he said in disgust at the end of his run with the Broccoli outfit. “Bond’s been good to me, but I’ve done my bit. I’m out.”

And except for thumbing his nose at his erstwhile employers with the non-Broccoli-produced Never Say Never Again (1982), he’s stayed out. Like another veteran actor, Gene Hackman, Connery retired almost a decade ago and hasn’t looked back. He now spends his days enjoying “golf, food and drink,” that first item being a passion developed in 1964 while training for Bond’s epic match against The Man With The Midas Touch in Goldfinger.

Decades after his own stint, Connery was asked whether he had any advice to offer the then-new Bond, Timothy Dalton. His answer was only half-joking: “I hope he has a good lawyer.”

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at (and a listen to) the iconic music of Goldfinger.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Sean Connery: Neither Shaken nor Stirred by Andrew Yule. (Also published as Sean Connery: From 007 to Hollywood Icon.) The world is chock-full of Sean Connery biographies, even though he’s kept pretty mum about his personal life in the decades since he gave up being Bond. I found this one to stand out above the rest by virtue of its anecdotes fueled by superior research and original interviews.

Sean Connery singing “Pretty Irish Girl” in Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959). This great live-action movie is of a kind that Disney gave up making long ago. Judge for yourself whether Cubby Broccoli’s wife was right when she thought that ol’ Big Tam displayed here the requisite sex appeal for his future role as James Bond.

Barbara Walters vs. Sean Connery! Watch Walters ambush Connery in typical leftist sneak-attack fashion, pitting her practiced feminist high dudgeon against his relaxed masculinity. Will he crack under the withering disapproval of this liberal-news-network Lady Macbeth? Or will he end up, in typical Bond fashion, “Neither Shaken Nor Stirred”?

Sean Connery — AFI Award Tribute. A nice 2006 career-capping speech from a class act.

That question was posed to Werner Herzog a few weeks ago in an interview with the German broadsheet Die Zeit (The Time). Those of you who tuned in last week know that ecstatic truth is Herzog’s way of describing the poetic, transcendent heights of illumination to which his films aspire. “Yes, there is something of that there,” Herzog replied, “something of late medieval mysticism.”

However, he immediately provided a caveat, one that should warm the cockles of conservative hearts everywhere: “But I want to get away from the religious, from the mystical,” he stressed, “because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm.” And then, the coup de grace: “And this is something you see in a film like Avatar, by the way.”

Whoops — guess Herzog didn’t get his marching orders this awards season!

“It is basically a New Age fairytale film,” the Die Zeit interviewer mused airily, at which point Herzog could no longer restrain himself: “What annoys me is the way the film romanticizes and idolizes nature,” the director of Grizzly Man said. “It’s celebrating a new form of paganism, and it gives me knots in my intestines just thinking about it.”

Thus Herzog rebuked the mindless praise lavished on Avatar by the tonsured acolytes of Tinseltown, aligning himself instead with those of us at Big Hollywood who understand that the luxurious three-dimensionality of Avatar’s visuals was fatally offset by the plodding one-dimensionality of its puerile eco-worship. In another interview, he once admonished that, “Nightmares and dreams do not follow the rules of political correctness.” After decades of rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s motley array of ex-hippies, pseudo-reactionaries, and eviro-cultists, Herzog’s on record as concluding that, “I believe, among the entire scene of filmmakers here in Los Angeles, I’m the only clinically sane one. Period.”

He first encountered the rage of what he regularly dismisses as “the dogmatic Left” quite early in his career. “At the end of the Sixties,” Herzog remembers, “German film saw itself solely as an instrument of world revolution. People were also babbling on about how we should join forces with the proletariat. And I was thinking: which one of you is from the proletariat? I had actually worked as a welder in a steel factory to fund my first film. So at least I knew something about what factory work meant.”

In 1970 Herzog made Even Dwarfs Started Small, a darkly funny movie about the midgets populating a remote island institution and their failed anarchistic revolt. Meant to echo Tod Browning’s absurdist classic Freaks (1932), it was widely banned as politically incorrect, and the young maverick director was spat on by Leftists at film festivals. “I was basically accused of ridiculing the world revolution,” he remembers, then adds with wry humor, “Actually, that is probably the only thing they might have been right about. . . They insisted that when you portray a revolution you have to show a successful revolution, and as Even Dwarfs does not do this, for them it was clearly made by a fascist.” Fascism, of course, was a loaded term in postwar Germany, the equivalent of calling someone racist in today’s America — an appellation with the power to ruin a career and a life.

During the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982), activists from what Herzog teasingly calls “The Diaspora of Shattered Illusions. . . doctrinaire zealots of the failed 1968 revolution” accused him of abusing the Peruvian natives and despoiling their pristine Pandora. Some even came to the jungle and showed the Peruvians “photos of Auschwitz victims, piles of skeletons and corpses,” telling them that “this is how the Germans treat everyone.” A few months after the release of the film, Herzog was walking down a street in Munich when a Leftist protester (the same sort that throws pies at Republican speakers on university campuses and disrupts government hearings) ran at him, kicked him in the gut, and yelled, “That’s what you deserve, you pig!”

Ah, the Peace and Love emanating from the Left — I never tire of their tolerance for diversity.

In 1984 Herzog made Ballad of the Little Soldier, a short documentary on the tribulations of children conscripted into the civil wars of Nicaragua. It was the height of the Reagan era, and the socialist Sandinista movement was the current sacred cow of the Left. “For some people,” he says, “showing nine-year-old kids fighting against the Sandinistas meant I was clearly an American imperialist. . . the film does not mince its words and when it was released I was immediately labeled as being in the pay of the CIA. . . The intellectuals were simply unable to understand that politically dogmatic cinema is not something I practice, and they didn’t bother to look at what the film is really about.”

All of these things stem from the “turn on, tune in, drop out” crowd and their infatuation with revolution, socialism, and a hatred of Western Civilization. When once asked “Why were you resistant to late 1960s politics?”, Herzog’s answer was telling, and worth quoting in full:

The ideas and actions sweeping the world in 1968 were not for me because at that time, contrary to most of my peers, I had already been much further out into the world. I had traveled, I had made films, I had already taken on responsibilities that very few people my age had. For me, this rather rudimentary analysis that Germany was a fascist and repressive prison state, which had to be overpowered by a socialist Utopian revolution, seemed quite wrong. I knew the revolution would not succeed because it was rooted in such an inadequate analysis of what was really going on, so I did not participate. And because I have never been into using the medium of film as a political tool, my attitude really put me apart from most other filmmakers. As there were very few reviewers and journalists who were not wildly into revolutionary jargon at the time and who did not put ridiculous political demands on filmmakers, my films suffered at the hands of many of the critics.

He has little use for film analysis (one notable exception being Roger Ebert, an early champion of Herzog’s work — in appreciation, the director dedicated his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World to the now-ailing Pulitzer-Prize winner). “The audience reactions have always been much more important,” he says. “The opinion of the public is sacred.” When critics learn that Herzog routinely throws all of his unused footage in the trash, original negatives and all, they frequently recoil in horror — all of that potential fodder for study, gone forever! The director himself remains nonplussed by their anguish. “A carpenter does not sit on his shavings,” he says with a shrug.

Over his long career, in interview after interview, Herzog has stressed his blue-collar views on his craft: “Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. . . For me [filmmaking] is much more about real life than about philosophy. . . Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind . . . Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.” These thoughts frequently set him against film snobs who think that, in Herzog’s words, “If you do not make a black-and-white political statement you are on the side of the devils, a point of view that is clearly overly simplistic and stupid.”

Although he’s made many documentaries for the small screen, television has long been a bête noire of Herzog’s (among Hollywoodists, only Michael Medved is as public about his disdain for the medium). “Those who read own the world,” he states emphatically, “and those who watch television lose it.” Herzog thinks the boob tube, “ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. . . .television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

A big part of why TV is so sterile and predictable is that its content is dominated by the left-wing, and thus by political correctness and ideological purity of all kinds. Herzog treats Big Media with grudging equanimity, answering banal questions and posing for sinister “madman director” photographs, but occasionally Life presents him with a chance to laugh at it all. When a few years ago the BBC was interviewing him outdoors in Los Angeles for Grizzly Man, a hidden assailant shot an air rifle at Herzog from some nearby woods and hit him in the stomach with a pellet, leaving a bloody wound in his abdomen. “I was not injured badly,” he says, “But the people from the BBC were shitting themselves. That was pretty funny.”

In recent years the German director has lived in LA, a city he likes although he decries its superabundance of “idiocies like hippies and New Age.” He also despises the left-dominated structures that cast endless reams of red tape between a filmmaker and his vision:

I remember one time I was shooting in New York and showed up with my rental van at the place where I wanted to rent some equipment. The man said, “You cannot pick it up yourself, a union truck has to deliver it.” I said, “But my van is ten feet from your door here.” There was an endless debate until I just picked up the cameras and carried them to my van. An absolute waste of time. In Hollywood there are too many rituals and hierarchies, and to be independent means to be free of things like this. I have always known that true independence is a state of mind, nothing more. I am self-reliant.

Seeing first-hand Hollywood’s ravenous perversions and vices has made Herzog wary of falling into all the usual traps of fame. “This life can easily turn you into a clown,” he admits. “My way of dealing with the inevitable is to step out of filmmaking whenever I can. I travel on foot, I direct operas, I raise children, I am learning to cook professionally, I write. Things that give me independence outside the world of cinema.” Unlike many Hollywood jet-setters, he is totally at home in, and appreciative of, rural America. “I truly love places like the Midwest,” he says. “For me it is the very heart of America. You still see the self-reliance and camaraderie our there, the warm open hearts, the down-to-earth people, whereas so much of America has abandoned these wonderful and basic virtues.”

When he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) — a documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot who was shot down and tortured during the Vietnam War, only to stage an amazing escape — the Left noticed that the usual anti-American propaganda was nowhere to be found. “The film was generally very well received by American audiences,” Herzog says, but adds that “Inevitably I was asked why I did not denounce American aggression in the Vietnam War and why the film made no political statement.” Herzog’s reply to this pressure was to double down, raise more money outside of the system, and make Rescue Dawn (2007), a fictional treatment of the exact same story starring Christian Bale as Dengler.

Werner Herzog, you see, is no slave to political correctness, no lap-dog for the media, and not at all on board with the hippy-dippy attitudes of the Hollywood Left. He saw in Dieter Dengler a man who, in his words, “had all the qualities that make America so wonderful: self-reliance and courage, a kind of frontier spirit.” That was what counted, and no amount of disparagement was about to deter him from portraying Americans at their best.

This, ladies and gentlemen, was the brand of rock-solid intellectual honesty brought to bear on Grizzly Man.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Werner Herzog and Timothy Treadwell by delving into how Herzog used his unique blend of deep spirituality and down-to-earth rationality to make Grizzly Man such a memorable and compelling film.

Previous posts in the series “Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and Grizzly Man“

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Werner Herzog DVD Collection: Documentaries and Shorts. At Herzog’s personal website you can purchase a 6-DVD set containing most of his non-feature directorial efforts. It will set you back a pretty penny (15o Euros, or around $230 U.S. dollars), but it’s worth it if you find yourself wanting to collect the director’s work. Many can also be found on Netflix if you’re interested.

THE INFAMOUS SNIPER INTERVIEW: Watch the now-legendary video of Herzog getting shot by a hidden sniper while doing an interview in Los Angeles. He completes the interview (it’s about Grizzly Man, so give it a listen) before condescending to show the BBC reporter the bloody hole under his beltline. “You’re bleeding!” gasps the interviewer. “Somebody shot at you and created a wound in your abdomen!” Shitting himself, just like Herzog said. But for a director who’s been kicked, spat on, and shot at during his filmmaking adventures, getting pinged by a pellet gun is just another ordinary day on the mean streets. I love how he deadpans to the interviewer: “It’s not a significant bullet.”

INEVITABLY, ANOTHER SOLDIER SNAPS

Distraught pacifist conscientious objector tormented by horrors of war, as far as you know

Newsroom experts: stress, violence, stupidity, tragedy a way of life for GIs

Former M*A*S*H stars say it’s finally time to disarm the military

Hollywood insiders: Sean Penn early favorite for lead in planned Oliver Stone biopic

Nidal Hassan – not a fan of taxes Fort Hood: Another Black Eye For Teabagger Movement Connecting the dots: 2006-8 Tax returns show anti-government extremist carefully itemized deductions Like many Town Hall protesters, Hassan motivated by rage, pattern baldness Phone records: suspect tried to join Hair Club for Men Tearful Pelosi pushes Congress for new Tea Party regulations: “our lives are at stake”

Closet Dittohead? Investigation: Ft. Hood Killer Had Access to Fox, Talk Radio, Right-Wing Blogs Receipts show killer’s apartment had cable ‘03 Nissan registered to Hassan had AM radio Napolitano: “I told you so” Sources: Despite 17 citations as Countdown’s ‘Worst Person In The World,’ FBI failed to detain Limbaugh Defiant Palin rejects calls to apologize

Hassan: NRA poster boy GUN GOES ON RAMPAGE IN TEXAS Experts say shootings could have easily been prevented if guns did not exist; others argue bullets must share blame Gun facts: scary, loud, shoot people

Reverend Nidal Hassan say Gimme that Old Time Religion Fundamentalist Religion Seen As Motive in Ft. Hood Massacre Devout churchgoer evangelized conservative views Shooter’s former Virginia home was mere hours from Jerry Falwell compound What did Tilton, Swaggert, Osteen know?

Billy Ray Hassan – average American Southerner Another Typical Day in Dixieland U.S.A. In the land of cotton, some hear echoes of Civil War in latest violent redneck rampage American-born killer was son of the Jim Crow South NASCAR may have been involved Britons warned: limit U.S. travel to safe areas such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles

Hassan: owned GameStop member card Did Violent Video Games, Rap Lyrics Drive Killing Spree? Video: Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario Cart remain on shelf at Fort Hood PX Lil’ Wayne goes One-on-One with Wolf Blitzer Larry King Live Special tragedy coverage with panelists Nancy Grace, David Hasselhoff, Joan Collins

Tailgater of Terror Caught in the Middle of an NFC East Rivalry Sports psychologists: strain of being a Redskins fan in Cowboy country may have led to breakdown for former DC resident Jurgenson, Staubach team up for NFL sportsmanship pitch Skins fans fear backlash Special “Outside the Lines” interview with NFL Commissioner Goodell: “this is precisely why we banned Limbaugh”

Nidal “Ozriel” Hassan: tormented by popular kids ‘Ozriel’: Portrait of a Bullies’ Target Another Columbine? Sensitive, artistic outsider said ostracized by Army jocks, “in crowd” Found solace in poetry, music, MySpace Weekend “EmoAid” benefit concert to raise awareness about at-risk youth, reunite CSN&Y

Junk food junkie? Twinkies Claim Another 13 Victims Hostess corporate spokesman defends controversial creme-filled sponge cake, but mounting scientific evidence links mass murder to unregulated transfats Witness: Hassan yelled “I want a candy bar” during spree Kraft, Kelloggs, Hersheys bracing for lawsuits Are you raising a potential Cereal Killer? Nutritionists show you how to cut your kids’ sugar intake to prevent another bloodbath

No Country For Old Men From Fort Hood to Waco to Dealey Plaza to Bush Compound, death is a way of life in the Lone Star State Statistic: Texas still lags in access to public broadcasting Download Morning Edition’s exclusive in-depth podcast, complete with mournful banjo dirge interlude

Lessons of Ft. Hood: Military Bases Need More Mental Health Professionals

The latest episode of PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery includes a surprise: criticism of communism.

The U.S. TV network PBS and the British Broadcasting Corporation, both government-owned, tend to soft-pedal the evils of communism while placing every imperfection of life in the United States under a microscope. Hence it’s rather noteworthy when those organizations air a program in which the central problems are traceable to communism. That’s what happened in last week’s episode of Masterpiece Mystery.

[Mild plot spoiler warning--'mild' because it won't fully identify the murderer.]

In “Music to Die For,” the latest episode of the smart and interesting British mystery series Inspector Lewis, coproduced by PBS and BBC, the killer turns out to have been an informer for the East German secret police, the Stasi, two decades earlier, who is trying to keep that past hidden.

Moreover, that is not merely an incidental aspect of the episode but in fact central to it. The evils of the Communist system, including the scarcity of material goods, the dreariness of life without hope of personal advancement and opportunities to use one’s talents to their fullest, and, in particular, the paranoia and personal corruption induced by the police-state government’s cultivation of a huge network of informers to identify alleged subversives are made quite clear and in fact set in motion the plot element that drives the entire story forward.

In addition to all of that, the episode, like the show in general, is intelligent, sophisticated, and morally sound, and it has an excellent plot and story line and strong central and supporting characters alike. Mixing Wagner, boxing, politics, boating, murder, and a police investigation, “Music to Die For” is entertaining while informing viewers about a subject not sufficiently often considered on U.S. television.

Inspector Lewis continues on Sunday nights through October 19, and is well worth watching.

It won’t make up for years of political bias, of course, but it’s a start.

Inspector Lewis: Recommended.

Gerd Leipold

In an attempt to “astroturf” (create a false impression of a grassroots response to an issue), Greenpeace urged online followers to spread its cover-up “clarification” via social media tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook.

Environmental and left-wing organizations often accuse conservative groups of astroturfing on contentious issues.

 Since the story was broken on Big Hollywood yesterday dozens of blogs and media outlets including Instapundit, Hot Air and Power Line, have linked to the story about Greenpeace’s admission, and embedded the key video clips from the BBC segment. In the interview, Leipold said his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.” “I don’t think it will be melting by 2030,” he said.
 
BBC reporter Stephen Sackur accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism,” but Leipold defended the group’s tactics as a necessity to convince people of its views on global warming.