After a heated exchanged opened the 1985 Geneva Summit, Ronald Reagan suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that the two leaders take a break and walk together along a nearby lake. Even in this informal setting, Reagan’s unyielding support for the SDI initiative remained a major sticking point. But the conversation assumed a more congenial tone when Gorbachev began to ask Reagan about the president’s movie career.

While it may be difficult to pinpoint a precise moment when Cold War tensions began to ease, it is evident that Gorbachev’s interest in Hollywood helped foster a human connection that advanced negotiations and solidified relations.

By all accounts, Reagan was proud of his Hollywood career, which began on April 20, 1937 the day he signed a contract with Warner Brothers. While political opponents and hostile media personalities have made a sport out of demeaning Reagan’s acting ability, he was actually quite accomplished in his own right and cultivated a strong following.

A good source here is Marc Eliot who authored “Reagan: The Hollywood Years,” a well-researched, highly readable yarn that highlights some of the former president’s best performances on screen and on television. Reagan co-starred alongside some of most talented stars of his era including Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn.

While Reagan may not have achieved lasting fame as a leading man, he did carve out a strong niche as a supporting actor in films that attracted critical attention, as Eliot explained in an interview with Reason TV. He was widely viewed as the reliable “best friend” standing behind
the big names of that time, Eliot notes.

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Here's a perfect illustration of the iconography of freedom. Marilyn Monroe displays a picture of Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, in a sleek convertible with the open road beckoning.

Automobiles represent freedom.

Try and remember when you were a teenager yearning for your driver’s license so you could hop into daddy’s car and go, go, go. It didn’t matter where, you just wanted to burn rubber and escape into the far horizon.

The brilliant, exhilirating and touching American Grafitti, 1973, is the ultimate expression of American car culture. Almost every single scene takes place in a car.

Los Angeles was the first America city built to accomodate the automobile. And the movie stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, most born dirt-poor, expressed delight in their sudden prosperity and fame by purchasing and posing with their dream machines.

Contrast cars with trains.

Trains and subways are an expression of the collective. Individual identity is erased. You are at the mercy of a state run system that turns  the citizen into a small cog manipulated by unmotivated, inefficient government bureaucrats.

That’s why Progressives-Liberals-Leftists are obsessed with high-speeed rail. The freedom of the road is repellent to statists who want to regulate/control diet, education, light bulbs, health care, your very geography.

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Robin Hood is back on the big screen in his umpteenth adaptation and he’s not only fighting social injustice by robbing the rich and giving to the poor, he’s fighting it by forcing English King John the cruel to sign the Magna Carta. More on that later. For now, let’s stick with the redistribution of wealth by banditry.

People love that idea. And because they do, Robin has had a massive influence on popular culture because the implicit anti-establishment message in his story can be used as a device to criticize society or sell almost any social movement, legislation or outright criminal activity in modern societies that have no relation to the brutal feudal times in which his legend originated. The result, the Sherwood Forest outlaw can be anything one wants him to be.

A Robin who “robs the rich to give to the poor” can be that mythical Marxist revolutionary or populist hero righting the wrongs of capitalism for the oppressed proletariat — even if he happens to be nothing more than a mass murderer like Che Guevara: (more…)

The whole “Robin Hood theory” argument has been used by radical leftists (most commonly referred to as “college professors”) for decades across our great country. “Steal from the rich and give to the poor” is the rhetoric they’ll always undoubtedly regurgitate. There’s only one problem… It’s wrong. Dead wrong.
Every time I hear some dumb college know-it-all or stupid self-righteous celebrity use the story of Robin Hood as an argument for socialism, I want to punch them right in their perfectly zoom-whitened teeth. The truth, is that Robin Hood was the quintessential ANTI-Government revolutionary. He’d have more in common with our Founding Fathers or Ronald Reagan than the likes of Stalin, Marx, or Sean Penn.

See the one point that liberals miss when they read the story of Robin Hood was that the man never stole from “the rich.” Leftists like to vilify the wealthy, but the tale of Robin Hood vilifies a corrupt government. Robin Hood was stealing from an oppressive monarchy/administration and giving the wealth back to its rightful owners. He was essentially re-distributing wealth by removing it from the initial re-distributors. Confused? Let’s break down the story of Robin Hood for a second: (more…)

These may not be the best known or most famous of WWII films, but they deserve to be. Keep an eye out. You’ll be glad you did.

1. Command Decision (1948) – Made just after WWII, this Air Force drama set in 1943 when the outcome of the war was still in doubt, is one of the most intelligent examinations of the burden of command ever put on film. Clark Gable is absolutely outstanding as Casey, a Brigadier General forced to give orders that on their face appear cold and even monstrous, but in truth are just the opposite. Caught between the Washington brass who have a war to sell and the men under him who see only a General ordering their comrades to certain death, Casey is a leader willing to be hated and even lose his command in order to do the greater good. What Casey cares about before anything is saving American lives. That means winning the war as quickly as possible, something which can only be accomplished if unspeakable sacrifices are made in the here and now.   (more…)

The clip would be perfect had it ended at the 2:30 mark, but the scene still plays.

The film is Raoul Walsh’s “Desperate Journey” (1942), a patriotic actioner, a sort of “Gunga Din” behind German lines with a terrific cast and Reagan nearly stealing the show as the wiseacre up for any kind of adventure. (more…)

The American Film Institute went a little list-crazy a few years back. Most of their surveys were fun and about the pure pleasure of movie watching (top 100 chills, quotes, songs, laughs… ), but 1999’s “100 Years…100 Stars” definitely caught my eye because it was less about fun, more about creating something defining and just that bad.

For starters, the list was a bit of a cheat. There weren’t 100 stars, there were 50; 25 men and 25 women. But in order to get to the number 100, the AFI counted the 50 stars and celebrities who acted as on-camera hosts and presenters. In other words, the television show produced around the list was more important than creating a serious, comprehensive list. (more…)

My original plan was to do a top five list of today’s actors under thirty-five with more personality than the ShamWow! guy, but you can only tap your chin so long.

To try and explain away the fact that the true movie star is fast becoming extinct, a few apologists over the years have tossed out the excuse that there’s no way today’s celebrities, er, uhm, actors can compete with their historical counterparts because color, unlike black and white, makes them too human and thus brings them down to earth. It would be foolish to completely dismiss that idea, but not as foolish as raising it before, oh, say, a lack of presence, talent, and most of all, class. Of course, if you’re determined to hold that position you must also believe that putting Ashton and the Jessica-of-the-day in a good noir film would change everything. (more…)