The script of the upcoming remake of the infamous America-conquered-by-Commies movie Red Dawn (1984) raises an intriguing question – can Hollywood actually still produce a movie where it takes America’s side?  The answer is “Sort of.” 

“Wolverines!”

There are some welcome ideological surprises lurking within the script’s 104 pages.  Shockingly, Hollywood actually seems to accept the premise that if the Chinese and Russkies invade the United States we are justified in fighting back with hot lead instead of teach-ins and choruses of Kumbayah.  But the script also displays a bit of the moral illiteracy we’ve come to expect from the Hollywoodoids – naturally, the script has to imply that we kinda brought the invasion on ourselves and that resisting tyranny somehow means becoming just as bad as the tyrants.

The re-imagining of Red Dawn will be released later this year and does very little actual re-imagining of the original’s simple plot.  We first meet some all-American teenagers.  They play high school football, party, and talk and look like CW series cast members – not real bright, but pretty (the pretty part in the script).  For some reason, the Soviets (replaced here by the Chinese with a Russian assist) invade America and seize their hometown.  Their town’s tactical significance appears to be that invading it advances the plot.  Anyway, the teenagers go up into the mountains, score some of the firearms our prescient Founders ensured we’d always have the right to keep and bear despite the best efforts of those gun control-loving wusses, and launch a bloody guerrilla war against the invaders.  (more…)

The name was Fleming, Valentine Fleming. But to his four young boys, Bond creator Ian Fleming among them, he was “Mokie” — a baby-talk bastardization of “Smokie,” so called because he always had a pipe dangling from his lips, the same way Sean Connery would one day sport a cigarette in his debut appearance as James Bond in Dr. No. Curiously, no one in turn-of-the-century England thought to arrest Mr. Fleming for smoking in the presence of his children, nor did social services batter down his door to cart the poor cancer-threatened kids away. He was their Pop, and they adored him, smoke and all.

Child-abusing barbarians, I know.

They were rich, the Flemings. Grandfather made his fortune pioneering investment trusts, and when Valentine came of age he inherited hundreds of thousands of pounds. Thus it was that his second son Ian, born in 1908, grew up in a world of wealth and privilege. Mother was a typical socialite, a lover of status and all the good things that money could buy, but Father was different. He ran for government office as a conservative, and was by all accounts a thorough patriot of crown and country much admired by everyone who met him. When war became imminent, there was never any question whether he would use his money and influence to weasel out of the fight. Valentine joined the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars of his own volition and trained for combat, counting among his friends a fellow officer named Winston Churchill.

Ian and his family watched with dread as their Dad headed off to the front in 1914, and for the next three years they saw him but seldom. Valentine sent his family cheery letters to lift their spirits, but his missives to Churchill laid bare the truth: (more…)

In November 1974, Werner Herzog received a most distressing phone call. Lotte Eisner, the beloved doyenne of German cinema, was dying. Part film historian, part published critic, part heroic preservationist, and part muse to the filmmakers struggling to piece together the broken shards of German culture left in the wake of the Nazis, Eisner was a legendary figure in Herzog’s eyes, and had inspired him to persevere through a decade of near-poverty as a struggling director. Now, at seventy-eight years old, she was deathly ill and not expected to survive.

Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died. (more…)

Rather than proceed with the more obvious examples of Hollywood Left … as I had promised, films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Reds and Inside Man, I’m drawn to a much subtler message in the great classic Casablanca.

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.” (more…)

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“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.” (more…)

“This class struggle plays hell with your poetry,” John Reed, celebrated in Warren Beatty’s Reds, confessed to friends after jumping from the lighthearted literary Left of Greenwich Village into the world of hardcore Communists. Bono may be thinking the same thing about saving the world. U2’s much-hyped No Line on the Horizon, the band’s first album in nearly five years, might be interpreted by celebrities as a cautionary tale against mixing activism with their art. As I write in my American Spectator review of No Line on the Horizon, the album represents the transformation of U2 from relevant it band to greatest hits act. It is uninspired, leaving diehard fans to wonder if meetings with popes, presidents, and queens, fundraising for debt relief, human rights activists, and AIDS, and writing columns for The New York Times makes U2 an afterthought for Bono.