BOX OFFICE ANALYSIS 

1. Dolphin Tale: $14.3M – Family films rule. Shallow nihilism and conformity posing as “edginess” do not. Yet Hollywood keeps right on making them. Yes, someone somewhere is currently squandering millions of dollars on “Margot At the Wedding 2: Narcissism Is a Virtue.” They might not call it that, but you get the idea.

2. Moneyball: $12.5M – More proof the adult drama is not dead, just a certain kind of adult drama — like, say, “Margot At the Wedding 3: I Hate the parents Who Gave Me Everything.”

3. The Lion King: $11M – Never in a million years did I expect this kind of haul and I’m sure the studio would’ve been happy with half this. In fact, they probably chose to go with a re-release mainly as a way to gin up publicity and anticipation for tomorrow’s Blu-ray release.  But this is a fantastic film released late enough so that many of those who enjoyed the experience with their parents can now pass it on to their own children. Disney = magic.

4. 50/50 $8.9M – One of those neither fish nor fowl flicks people probably had a hard time grasping. Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? Is it a drama? I think the casting of Seth Rogen really threw people off. He’s only been associated with raunch-fests and junk like “Green Hornet,” so the fit was odd and the whole “cancer” thing certainly would’ve turned off his following to whatever degree he has one.

5. Courageous $8.8M – Well, well, well… An openly Christian film with no stars — not even Kirk Cameron, and based on what I’ve been told about the production and marketing budget, it’s already in the black. This comes from the makers of “Fireproof” (which I liked)  and “Facing the Giants” (which I loathed) and what you have here is a filmmaker learning his craft, building an audience, and showing others the way. Someone stopped complaining, went out and did it and succeeded. Can hardly express how much respect I have for that.  

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN IS WB’S FRONTRUNNER TO DIRECT NEW ‘TWILIGHT ZONE’ MOVIE

Apparently the idea behind this new adaptation is to avoid the four-story approach the 1983 film used and focus on a single storyline that touches on familiar “themes” from Rod Serling’s original series.

Oddly enough Warners is also looking at Michael Bay and Alfonso Cuaron. In other words, Warners has no idea what kind of movie they want to make because those two directors are as different from each other as the Obama administration is from “success.”

The original “Twilight Zone” is one of my favorite television shows and I hated the 1983 film which essentially remade a bunch of episodes in a way that added nothing to them. Rod Serling’s creation just isn’t the stuff of tent poles. It’s meant for the small screen, meant to be told in short morality plays with a twist.

You can call it “The Twilight Zone,” or if Bay ends up directing “The TZ,” but it won’t be “the Twilight Zone.” 

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CLASSIC PICK FOR TUESDAY,  OCTOBER 4

TCM:

10pm EST: In a Lonely Place (1950)  –  An aspiring actress begins to suspect that her temperamental boyfriend is a murderer. Dir: Nicholas Ray Cast:  Humphrey Bogart,  Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. BW-93 mins, TV-PG, CC.

Bogart, Grahame, black and white, and directed by Nicholas Ray equal pitch-perfect noir.

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--Please send tips/suggestions/requests/complaints to jnolte@breitbart.com

Artists as diverse as Bing Crosby, Willie Nelson, and John Coltrane have recorded “Stardust.” The haunting, jazz-tinged melody is rightly regarded as one of the high water marks of American popular song. It’s been said that one sign of a truly great song is that it can be successfully interpreted in a variety of styles, and while there is certainly no need to prove that “Stardust” is one of the all-time great popular tunes, I’d like to invite you to check out a couple of examples. Here are links to snippets of two of my favorite versions of this tune, one by Louis Armstrong from 1931, and the other, from 1957, by Nat “King” Cole. The two arrangements are wildly different, and the performers themselves, of course, formidable, yet Hoagy’s melody is the real star of both versions.

It will be of interest to Big Hollywood readers to know that in addition to being a genius songwriter, Hoagy Carmichael was also politically lucid. He was, from the time of his Indiana upbringing, a conservative Republican. Carmichael’s son Hoagy Bix once said of his father’s political views:

“To Dad…FDR was a guy from a wealthy family who took other people’s money — particularly his — and just gave it away.”

Carmichael friend Helen Meinardi was even more blunt: “He hated Roosevelt.” After Hoagy’s raw-boned looks (Ian Fleming originally envisioned James Bond as resembling Hoagy) and endearing personality began to land him acting gigs in movies, Carmichael famously played his classic “Hong Kong Blues” in “To Have and Have Not” alongside Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall:

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At a party, after the reliably left-wing Bogart had shouted a “tirade of abuse” at Hoagy for Hoagy’s Republican politics, Hoagy heatedly invited Bogart, who Carmichael later wrote “was a bit confused politically” to step outside for a fight. According to Hoagy, Bogart had “A tendency…to be on the pink side in those days when it seemed fashionable to follow the far left line in Hollywood society.” (how little has changed…) Fortunately Hoagy’s wife, Ruth, broke up the fight.

During World War II the 40-something Carmichael, realizing that “there was little I could do but give the world something to hum,” went to work performing for the troops in over one hundred USO appearances at military installations. Hoagy was grateful to America, and to the troops, for giving him the chance to let his considerable talents blossom. This week, in honor of Hoagy’s birthday, we can take a moment to be grateful to Hoagy for giving America, and the world, something to hum.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

I know, Bogey himself defended most of Hollywood by telling the world in his Photoplay article of March, 1948:

“We have a minute percentage of Communists,  but they are under control.”

So surely Bogey’s “Rick” would never have let his Ingrid’s “Ilsa” fly off with a Commie to a very “uncontrollable” South America.

“You’re certain, Mr. Moriarty, that Victor Laszlo is a Communist?”

Positive.

“Well, his politics had nothing to do with why he gets Ingrid Bergman in the end. He’s married to her, Moriarty! At that time, the Hollywood production code forbade women to run off with men other than their husbands!”

Oh, well … then the holier-than-thou Film Code unwittingly aided and abetted a Communist! My sequel to Casablanca would have Ilsa running around the world to find Rick … after discovering the ruthlessly Red reality beneath Lazlo’s smooth and worldly veneer.

In Casablanca, Paul Henreid’s Laszlo is not yet a Soviet … but he is Czech … and Stalin had all the Slavs in his Communist rifle sights … certainly by Casablanca’s date of release, January 23, 1943 … and the only publicized monster by then was Hitler.

Operation Barbarossa, the Third Reich’s invasion of Russia … and Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin … began on June 22, 1941.

That invasion, of course, ended the brief love affair between the two monsters, Der Fuhrer and Big brother Joe – a liason during which both Poland and Finland were raped respectively by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

By 1943, at least according to FDR’s “Protocol” with the Soviets, Stalin’s Russia was by then a closer friend of America than even England.

Under Roosevelt’s command, “Whatever Uncle Joe wants? Uncle Joe gets!”

And, of course, in the eyes of Casablancans and the Film Code, whatever Victor Laszlo wanted, Victor Laszlo got! Even if it happened to be Ingrid Bergman!!

If I’m right and Laszlo is a Communist – all Hollywood films being forever in the present moment of the beholder – then that explains the depth and breadth of this underground hero’s legendary reputation: the still existing, Worldwide Communist Intelligence Network. A machine that can help whisk its operatives anywhere in the world … even into the White House!

It is in not only this respect but many others as well that Humphrey Bogart’s Rick just … kind of … gets in the Communist’s way.

If we replace the symbolic meaning of Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa with the American Feminist Movement and its indisputable allegiance to the Left … the increasingly Far and Obamatized Left these days … then, of course, Bogey was prophetic … and … if indeed Bogey was also a Lefty … an organically inevitable Progressive … Rick just had to send Ilsa off with Laszlo to “continue their work.”

However, the only thing that Bogey’s “Rick” admits to is that he’s a “drunk”.

Furthermore, Rick’s “Bogey” declared himself, in the title of that Photoplay article of 1948:

“I’m no Communist!”

In Casablanca, Rick’s best and most trusted friend is a black piano player, impeccably performed by Dooley Wilson, and that, I must say, was the best and only battle cry worth celebrating in the French Revolution’s version of Liberty. If you look closely, Delacroix’s painting has a multiracial selection in his painting. Les enfants de la Patrie!

Or is it Les Enfants du Paradis?

Oh, well … that’s another film … that I may have to re-examine.

But is the obvious Francophile Rick also an automatically fashionable, nouveau-French Red?

I don’t think so.

“I stick my neck out for nobody!”

In the end, of course, Rick The Romantic sticks his neck out for Ilsa who would be safest in South America … with … yes … The Red!

Yet he also sticks his neck out for the victims of the House of Un-American Activities Committee … for which he must clarify his political position:

“On the left, in America, we have the Communists, not many but tightly organized. On the right, we have the bulk of our population, who believe with me, that cures can be effected within the framework of democracy … let’s realize that these liberals (like himself) are devoted to our democracy.”

I’m particularly looking forward to the comments and commentary on this editorial of mine. So much of human history arises out of our almost subconscious views of people and stories and subjects like those contained in one of Hollywood’s greatest semi-fictions, Casablanca.

Was Rick a fellow Red?

Or was he an apolitical American whose understanding of politics would not even begin until he, like Humphrey Bogart himself, could walk in the rain with Claude Rains … or … invite himself to testify on behalf of the accused before the House of Un-American Activities Committee?

That’s when America started calling Bogey a “Commie” and the great star had to defend himself in print.

“So long as we are completely opposed to Communism and do not let ourselves be used as dupes by Commie organizations, we can still function as thoughtful American citizens.”

Yet I have no doubt that Bogey would have voted for Obama.

Yet, Humphrey Bogart was no Commie. He was just admittedly a well-intentioned liberal like most of Hollywood was in those days.

In these days, however, he could be a Democratic Congressman that … well … just doesn’t want to vote for the “Public Option”. He’s just a bit nervous about too much power being in too few hands. Otherwise, he votes along party lines.

Or he could be Charlton Heston!

No.

Being Charlton Heston in a Progressivized Hollywood might even be worse than being Michael Moriarty in New York … after, of course, Ben Stone left Law and Order.

Hmmm …

From my personal experience with American politics, I don’t think you can be just “a little bit impregnated by Karl Marx”.

However, Bogey thought we could:

“In the final analysis, this House on Un-American Activities Committee has had one salutary effect. It cleared the air by indicating what a minute number of Commies there really are in the film industry.”

If Bogey says, “It ain’t so” … It ain’t so!!

“Though headlines may have screamed of the Red menace in movies, all the wind and fury has actually proved that there’s no Communism injected on America’s movie screens.” 

Despite Mr. Bogart’s confidence, I believe we are now way beyond being a “little bit pregnant.”

The actual baby, an American Communist State, is being born!

From the very “minute” number of Communists in Humphrey Bogart’s Hollywood sprang the anti-Capitalism within such films as those of Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, Spike Lee … and their film-making admirers.

Then, of course, pre-dating all of these American enfants terribles, there is the quintessential Hollywood tribute to American Communists, Warren Beatty’s Reds.

From Bogey’s era till now, it is “Change” which the Declaration of Independence tried to warn us about!!!

“You mean there are limits to American freedom, Mr. Moriarty?!”

Apparently so. You just can’t include a tyranny as part of your alternative plans for America. Those Communist plans. By no means can you call your tyranny-loving souls a defining ingredient to the United States of America.

“What are you screaming about, Moriarty?! We no longer want your national sovereignty ideas! We are building The New World Order!!”

Yeah, right … but that’s another movie entirely … possibly Casablanca II.

Unfortunately, Hollywood welcomes the Communist Collective Dream as an antidote to their guilt over how much money its stars have all made.

Therefore is it strange that many of those stars who make the most money appear to feel the greatest guilt … and, of course, applaud the New World Order with the loudest cries?

I hardly think it’s strange.

In light of that Hollywood gestalt, what would a sequel to Casablanca contain?

A blissfully happy reunion of all the stars of Casablanca at the Second Inaugural Ball for President Barack Hussein Obama.

Then Morocco here we come!!

And the poor Jewish refugees escaping Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

They’re all in Casablanca … waiting for Rick to show up.

Today, we’re living in the age of the “bromance,” where guys are no longer squinty-eyed, deep-voiced bastions of macho attitude like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne or Bogart were. Now, we’ve got dudes who wear pastels and have feelings, sharing how much they care for each other, even waking up together instead of with the girl they were lusting after in “Superbad.” 

Don’t get me wrong, these are mostly hilarious movies in which men are encouraged to be just a bit more sensitive. But one’s gotta wonder how far things are gonna go with the release of the new movie “Humpday,” which is now playing in “selected theaters” and is likely to stay that way no matter how “open minded” our society gets. 

The premise of “Humpday” isn’t focused on a workplace slogging through the midweek boredom of a Wednesday in Cubicle Land. No, it’s about two straight guys – one married, one single – who are really great, old friends – so great, in fact, that one of them dares the other to make a porno together for an amateur porn contest where the goal is to break creative boundaries. 

Yep, you read right. Two straight guys agree to see if they can team up for a porno in which they “do” each other. It’s definitely boundary-pushing, but what they don’t take into account is how it’ll affect the married guy’s marriage and how it’ll affect both their friendships when the big shoot is over. 

“Humpday” actually deals with these topics head-on, and shows how all the confused messages in our anything-goes modern society could conceivably cause two guys who would normally never think about having gay sex to cross the “ultimate line,” Gov. Mark Sanford might say. The movie isn’t really about being gay or straight, but about how does one break out of the boredom of a square suburban life or conversely stave off the sadness of a life wasted in the pursuit of pure vagabond hedonism? 

Yet it comes less than six months after the release of this spring’s hit comedy “I Love You Man,” in which a milquetoast yuppie played by go-to comedy prettyboy Paul Rudd has to find a best man after realizing he has no genuine guy friends. He’s set up on a series of de facto “man dates” to try and find the perfect best bud, only to find him in an alpha-male oddball played by Jason Segal. 

By the end of the movie, the two are sharing the wedding, with Rudd and Segal telling each other “I love you, man” more than Rudd tells his own woman – the bride! – he loves her. It’s still a fun movie, exploring what it means to be a “real” man in today’s society, but it’s still hard to imagine The Duke or Dirty Harry ever climaxing a movie with a moment like that. 

There’s a place for all these films, if you’re not unduly queasy by the underlying will-they-or-won’t-they premise of “Humpday.” But in an age where the modern action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme are mostly pursuing more artistic movies or consigned to direct-to-video movie hell, a movie buff might wonder when they’re gonna be able to see a guy simply kick ass again. 

Then again, maybe Bogey’s to blame for letting the girl go and telling the guy their friendship was beautiful. Perhaps that flinty exterior was hiding a sensitive heart all along.

Should the Motion Picture Association of America retroactively slap an “R” rating upon To Have and Have Not (1944)? After all, the classic film famously depicts silver-screen debutante Lauren Bacall and future husband Humphrey Bogart–gasp!–smoking. The American Medical Association Alliance demands that films featuring smoking characters be given an “R” rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA already takes into consideration the tobacco habits of celluloid characters in determining a film’s rating. The AMAA’s demand would take that consideration from the MPAA, automatically assigning an “R” to any film depicting an ordinary, everyday activity normally conducted in the open when the cameras aren’t rolling. The ACLU hasn’t voiced objection, but what about Margot Tenenbaum? The Smoking Man? The Man with No Name?

In Doug TenNapel’s look at how politics undermine the enjoyment of modern day films, he writes:

…when a new trailer is released that takes place during the Iraq War[,] I turn to my wife and whisper, “Don’t tell me; it’s about a gung-ho soldier who wants to fight for the good cause of America then sees enough friendly fire and slaughtered children to gain a conscience that the whole war is a lie for oil.”

Don’t we all.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, it was just the opposite. When we meet Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine he’s selfishly all about Rick and using a shattered heart as an excuse to stay cynically neutral in a war against evil.

Then Ingrid Bergman walks in.

But the love story in “Casablanca” is a head feint. At heart, Julius and Philip Epstein’s masterful script isn’t about Rick and Ilsa, it’s about a man getting over himself and realizing there’s something happening in the world more important than him – more important than “the problems of three little people.” Before the fade, Rick loses his cynicism and gives up the thing he loves most to re-join the fight.

In our current war against evil, Big Hollywood has embraced the Reverse-Rick-Arc which strives for an effect much more insidious than just a tired, lazy cliché that gives away most of the plot before it begins. Over the last few years, in most every film involving sand and a firearm, the goal has been to put the audience on the side of the protagonist and as his or her belief in country and the war is undermined so too (Big Hollywood hopes) is ours. The end result has been at least a dozen embarrassingly bad films with a 100% flop rate.

William Wellman’s timeless “Battleground” (1949) is another example of how Classic Hollywood handled themes of country and self-sacrifice in both a much more complicated and creatively interesting way (not to mention, morally defensible).

Set during WWII’s Battle of Bugle, “Battleground” follows a small patrol of soldiers lost in the literal and figurative fog of war. As conditions worsen, food runs out, and the enemy closes in, the men become increasingly bitter and disillusioned. They start to question what it’s all about and accuse the military of abandoning them.

Big Hollywood would close on this note, leaving our heroes angry at their country and cannon fodder for a worthless fight for an America no better than the enemy. Just before the climax, however, “Battleground” handles its characters growing (and realistic) cynicism with this:

Hollywood used to be great.