Over the past few weeks I’ve been catching up with the Turner Classic Movies’ original documentary “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood,” which aired in seven one-hour installments and reportedly took two-and-a-half-years to produce. Which is a shame, because it was uniformly awful. Trying to cover the history of Hollywood from Thomas Edison to “Bonnie and Clyde” in just seven hours is a recipe for disaster to begin with, more or less guaranteeing that your Hollywood history lesson will be as surface and shallow as a middle school film strip about the American Revolution. In those seven hours, there was nothing new to be learned for anyone who’s ever taken Film 101 at a community college, much less someone who’s enough of a TCM fan to dedicate that kind of time to one of their original productions.

There were also a number of eye-rolling moments. The series found it impossible to mention John Wayne without also mentioning he didn’t serve in WWII and went so far as to remind us that while Ronald Reagan served in the Reserves during the war he never left American soil. Naturally, they failed to mention that much to the future President’s frustration, he was disqualified for combat due to extreme near-sightedness.

Furthermore, as though there isn’t one today, the documentary covered the political blacklist of the 1950s and spent an inordinate amount of time arguing against the dreaded Hollywood Production Code, a set of self-imposed guidelines created by industry moguls that spelled out what was and wasn’t acceptable content in motion pictures. According to TCM, any film ”brave” enough to buck up against the dreaded Code was to be celebrated as some sort of moral victory. If you didn’t know any better, you would think the arrival “Bonnie and Clyde” — the film that pretty much marked the end of the Production Code — was as important and liberating as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hollywood has finally arrived, the documentary seems to say.

Really? (more…)

Dead 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…)

There is a public service announcement that runs on TV from time to time, I can’t remember what organization it is for, but it goes like this:

A man sits in his easy chair reading the paper. His tween-age daughter comes downstairs in a skimpy outfit and tries to walk out the door. The father says sternly, “Young lady–you’re not going out dressed like that. Get back upstairs and change your clothes.” (more…)