But we do not live in the age of the Western.  Those of us in our thirties and forties grew up in the age of the action hero.  The action hero is the figure who does not do the merely human things well but performs superhuman deeds that defy the imagination.  He does not simply draw a gun faster than another man.  Instead, he races through explosions on a motorcycle and dives out of planes without a parachute and yet invariably emerges from the ruins unscathed.  Of course, the action hero has half a dozen stunt doubles and computer graphics and millions invested in the movie to pull it all off.  But it’s all worth it: for the illusion, for the moment of suspended disbelief.  When you meet the actual man who plays the part, though, you find him pretty underwhelming. 

If Ronald Reagan is the political figure who stands for the age of the Western, of simple integrity, Arnold Schwarzenegger is most assuredly the political figure who reveals the lie behind the action hero: that he is not what he seems.  Arnold’s whole career has been built around lies.  The first lie is his body.  Yes, he lifted weights.  But what really gave him the absurd title of Mr. Universe were the steroids that changed him from a muscular man into a comic strip.  The second lie is the part he played—for there was really only one part, that of impossibly muscular kick-ass guy.  It was never human.  In his most famous film, Terminator, he did not even pretend to play a human.  Only in the later comedies did Arnold join the ranks of the human.  The problem with the action hero is that he is not really a hero.  A true hero must face death and failure.  He must fight for the good and be capable of losing it.  He must risk being hated for doing the right thing.  John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart played heroes.  The first Rocky movie was about a hero.  Conan and Terminator are essentially video games on screen.  The adolescent audiences do not think for a moment that Arnold will die; they just want to see the cool action scenes.  The third lie was Arnold’s political career.  He came into office as not just a conservative but with the rhetoric of a fiscal libertarian.  Yet when the very first unions stood up to him, he failed to use his fame and considerable political capital.  He caved.  Ronald Reagan, you will remember, stood up to the airline traffic controllers when they threatened a strike.  On the way out of office, Arnold gave silly exit interviews about how everyone expected him to be the “Governator” rather than just an ordinary governor.  The expectations were just too high, he complained.  But our memories aren’t that bad.  We know that the promise of a “Governator” was what got him into office in the first place.

And finally we come to the lie of his marriage.  For years we have had Arnold and Maria, with the help of the press, flaunt this impossible marriage before us: the staunch conservative who marries into the Kennedy clan and maintains his political views, but who just can’t do without the love of this woman.  There were rumors during the first campaign: about inappropriate comments and groping directed at almost any attractive woman he was around.  But he was an actor, after all, a sex symbol.  We should excuse him.  And now the truth be told: a love child with an employee of the house.

The just complaint of Maria Shriver is, interestingly enough, the complaint that countless women in this nation also have right now.  It is the complaint that the Tea Party is fueled by.  “Give us a man who is what he seems,” they say, whether referring to a husband or a political candidate.  “Give us a fellow who is in good shape but not hopped up on steroids.  Give us a political candidate who is not the creature of a slick campaign manager.  Give us a man we can trust.  Give us a man who won’t say one thing to get us to marry him (or to get into office) and do just the opposite when he has gotten what he wants.”  In short, give us a man.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

And in America it is, indeed, approaching High Noon.

Colonel Allen West.

My awareness of him is a little over 48 hours old … but, when a situation such as ours in America has been growing to homicidally insane levels for over thirty-six years – ever since the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision – the cry for a great leader has been rising out of our guts day and night.

Viewing Col. West’s sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, then his lecture on tactics, operations and strategy in Afghanistan and, finally, his relaxed and witty appearance on Fox’s Red Eye?

What ‘s not to shout “hallelujah” about?!

A few of the most important video clips were linked in Dave Reaboi’s introductory column about Col West in BIG PEACE.

Having joined the Breitbart family as a contributor to BIG HOLLYWOOD, I couldn’t help but see the High Noon scenario all over Col. West’s relatively sudden appearance in our lives.

It’s High Noon, Shane or Clint Eastwood’s version of Shane, Pale Rider … however, there’s vastly greater oceans of light poring out of Col. West’s military bearing than ever resided in Clint Eastwood’s darkly menacing version of Shane.

Not only that, the Colonel’s version of a Preacher is far more convincing than the not-so-veiled, political subtext of a Salome in Pale Rider, dancing for the heads of all coal miners.

Little did I know when filming Pale Rider that it was a mere prelude to President Obama’s Cap and Trade round-up of those coal mining varmints.

Now it’s the oil-mining varmints of the Gulf Coast that face the Cap and Trade Drilling Moratorium!

Meanwhile George Soros and his Brazilian connections, with President Obama’s invaluable help, stand to make the American Mammon a mountain of more money over the Obama Nation’s sanctions against American oil.

The President’s energy policy and his mentoring friend, George Soros, sound more like Dick Dysart’s evil Sheriff and posse in Pale Rider than that Fanfare to a Gold-Mining Common Man we see in Clint Eastwood’s homage to a great American classic, Alan Ladd’s Shane.

With all this in mind, into the not-so-dusty-halls of the Youtube Universe, appears Col. Allen West!

Hmmm …

Col. West, like Gary Cooper in High Noon, appears ready to replace the sheriff!

Now … and here’s the rub … are we ready to do what the townspeople in High Noon were not ready to do?!

Back the sheriff up?

And why were the townspeople of High Noon not ready to do that?

They were not ready to do that because a Communist sympathizing screenwriter named Carl Foreman was not about to let them back the Sheriff up!

Why?

To Foreman, the writer and co-producer of High Noon, the townspeople of that story were American, bourgeoisie, regressive and possibly tea-partying cowards.

“Yup”.

That was my last line in Pale Rider, just after I saved the Preacher’s life by blowing Bad Guy, Dick Dysart right through his own front window … just as he’s about to shoot Clint Eastwood right off his horse.

“Yup.”

Where were all the other miners to back us up?

“Michael, don’t ask stupid questions. Just be grateful that you played one of the few characters that got to save the life of a Clint Eastwood character.”

Well, there’s a new Preacher in town and he’s not an actor.

His name is Col. Allen West.

He is not only going to replace an Old Preacher named Rev. Wright, but also a former disciple of Rev. Wright, a certain President Barack Hussein Obama.

The people of a village called Tea Party are not about to let Col. West down in any way.

A military man of the Lord?!

“Yup!!”

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.

The lives of Hollywood stars are frequently tragic and messy tales of absent fathers, cruelly ambitious mothers, and madly dysfunctional families.

Mexican-American actress, Lupe Velez (July 18, 1908 – December 13, 1944) “The Mexican Spitfire” was a beautiful, passionate, emotionally unstable woman best known for a series of 1930’s B movies in which she plays a delightfully scatter-brained character who speaks broken English mixed with streams of rapid fire Spanish.

Her first feature-length film was in the Douglas Fairbanks blockbuster, The Gaucho (1927), where she plays a high spirited Spanish dancing girl. Velez performed in a further eighteen films before settling into comedy—she had a Carol Lombard vibe, a  flair for screwball situations, but her accent limited her appeal—most notably in the seven “Mexican Spitfire” series of films (1939-1943).

Lupe Velez and Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho, 1927.

In private life, Velez carried on a number of highly publicized Hollywood romances. Gary Cooper had an affair with the dark beauty as did the great director—and ladies man—Victor Fleming.

In a 1929 interview with Motion Picture World, Velez said:

“And Victor Fleming! I like him because he is a devil with womens… But I am more than a devil than he is. That is why I never fall in love with him.”

In another interview, Velez said of herself:

“I have flirt with the whole film colony. Why not? I am not serious. What harm is a little flirting? No I do not kiss many mens. But when I kiss them, they stay kissed!”

Lupe’s casual demeanor was a carefully constructed image serving to conceal a troubled and vulnerable personality—possibly bi-polar—a young woman almost continually in the grip of a turbulent and painful love life.

In 1933 she married Olympic athlete turned Hollywood Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. They fought loudly and drunkenly, frequently in nightclubs and restaurants, hurling insults, drinks and punches at each other. The marriage lasted five years. They  divorced in 1938.

Velez’s father, an army officer, was so humiliated by his daughter’s chosen profession that he refused to let her use his last name, Vallalobos. Velez was her mother’s maiden name.

Lupe Velez and Gary Cooper in Wolf Song, 1929.

Esther Ralston, (here’s my three part series about Ralston) a Hollywood star for a few brief years during the silent era, at one point earning as much as $8,000 a week, gives a remarkable insight into Velez’s difficult life in Raltson’s obscure but invaluable autobiography, Some Day We’ll Laugh.

Not too many months later, Gary [Cooper] had transferred his affections [from Clara Bow] to the Mexican bombshell, Lupe Velez. Lupe came to my brand new star dressing room one day to tell me about it. Then she launched into an impassioned recital of the troubles she was having with her mother.

“No matter what I do for her,” she wailed, “I cannot satisfy her.”

“I can’t see what your mother can find to complain about, Lupe,” I tried to comfort her. “You’ve given her a house, a mink coat, clothes, diamond bracelets, everything. What in Heaven’s name is she fussing about?”

“My mother, she say to me,” Lupe explained, “For nine months I carry you in my body. You owe me RENT!”

Velez, in the mid 1940’s, had an affair with a young actor named Harald Maresch, and became pregnant. Unwilling to marry her, Maresch demanded that Velez get an abortion, (Hollywood abortions will be the subject for a future and tragic post here at BH) but Lupe was a faithful Catholic and flatly refused.

The actress, with a weakness for liquor and drugs, spiraled into a clinical depression. Increasingly isolated, the fragile young woman felt unable to bear the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child.

Velez sat down and composed a note:

To Harald, may God forgive you and forgive me too but I prefer to take my life away and our baby’s before I bring him with shame or killing him. Lupe

Lupe Velez took an overdose of Seconal and died in her bed—not with her head in the toilet as the ugly myth contends—on December 13, 1944.

She was 36 years old.

Here’s an absolutely heartbreaking clip from The Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event, 1943.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

Do you have a little time to sit back and examine a classic movie that will absolutely shock you when seen through the prism of now? This is not my typical short article or essay. This is my own argument that what occurs in the 1941 picture “Meet John Doe” is exactly what has come to pass in America today with the Democratic Congress and their Presidential puppet. All the players and plays are clearly represented here and I was lucky enough to find the entire movie available on YouTube in small 7-10 minute scenes. I have selected only the scenes that I feel you must watch. But please, by all means, Netflix this movie before someone bans it.

“Meet John Doe” was released in 1941, written by Robert Riskin and based upon a treatment titled “The Life and Death of John Doe,” written by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell.  The film was directed by Frank Capra. The plot of the movie clearly shows how a media conspiracy could get a President elected and use him to “turn out the lights on freedom.” The similarity between the movie’s plot and today’s political situation is surreal. Add in the fact that Gary Cooper’s “John Doe” is modeled after Jesus Christ and you’ll be even more chilled at how a power hungry, ruthless political party figures out how to use a fake version of Him for their own gain. The claim by liberals that this is the practice of the religious right will be shattered once you’ve watched all the clips posted here.

So let’s go ahead and take a look at the opening sequence where you will see a sign being changed on a newspapers building. The old stone letters “FREE PRESS” are jackhammered away and replaced with a shiny new metal sign boasting a “new era of streamlined news.” It’s important to keep in mind that the movie takes place near the end of the great depression, with layoffs and widespread hardship everywhere, including this fictional newspaper. So in a desperate attempt to save her job, ambitious female reporter Anne Mitchell (played by Barbara Stanwyck), who has been given the pink slip, fakes a sensational news story as her last submission and convinces her boss to run it in order to sell more papers.

–

So just to recap some important highlights, so far we’ve learned that D.B. Norton, an oil tycoon with political ambitions buys a struggling newspaper. An ambitious reporter in a desperate attempt to save her job fakes a sensational story and convinces her boss to run it. Once the John Doe story runs it catches fire and the editor of the newspaper doesn’t learn that the letter was a fake until the end of this sequence.

I wonder if his reaction and Miss Mitchell’s (Stanwyck) sales pitch to keep up the gag for profits’ sake is similar to how things go down in some real world newsrooms?

Pass that Capra-corn please…

The next sequence is the continuation of the opening. The reason I added it is because the process by which they look for just the right fellow to play the part of their imaginary, yet highly relatable “John Doe” is similar to the passive aggressive casting process that happens in the left-leaning media world today. I’ve heard and read arguments that this movie promotes communism and I use scenes like this to counter it. What Long John Willoughby (Cooper) really needed at the time was lower taxes and less government in his life. That way he could have already had and paid for the surgery he needed to fix his throwing arm instead of allowing a newspaper to use him to lie to the public as his best option. The New Deal was a bum deal and today we conservatives know it.

–

Next we’ll jump way ahead because like most of the movies made during Hollywood’s golden era this one is rich with scenes and characters unlike anything the current crop of filmmakers are capable of producing. John Doe has become nothing short of a media sensation with the public being inspired and gripped by his story of pending self-sacrifice in a cruel and unjust world. John Doe represents the common man and now has a weekly article in the newspaper (written by Stanwyck’s character) that has set off a legion of dedicated supporters.

“John Doe” clubs are popping up all across the nation in response to the fake John Doe’s plea for more decency and care for one another. In return for playing the part, the newspaper keeps this formally homeless man in a nice hotel with room service and pressed clothes as they groom him for even more exposure so they can ride this fake story all the way to the bank. His only true friend, still in his hobo outfit, sees through the entire sham from the start and is always tugging at John’s sleeve to break away from the “helots” before they really do him in. Now he’s slated for his first live national radio address which has been timed to coincide with the political convention that will nominate a candidate for president.

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There are two stunning revelations in the scene you just watched. While John Doe reads the speech that was written for him, Henry Connell, the newspaper editor-in-chief, realizes the potential misuse of the John Doe movement while at the same time powerful oil tycoon and newspaper owner D.B. Norton takes a sneak peek at his butlers and maids glued to the radio in their kitchen. Without either actor saying a word, Capra shows how two men in the same situation realize the same exact thing and then go in totally different directions from there. D.B. Norton realizes the power of John Doe for evil purposes, while Connell realizes that he’s allowed a sales gimmick to go to far.

Norton is cunning and realizes that he can form a coalition of votes to win by controlling the “John Doe vote” through mainstream media manipulation, the labor vote through paid off union bosses, and various other voting blocs with the promise of top political jobs. What comes next is one of the single greatest pro-America scenes in all of movies. It’s also where John learns the awful truth about his role in an evil political movement and thinks there’s something he can do about it. Boy is he wrong.

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“Lighthouses in a foggy world.” Indeed.

With the ugly truth now revealed to him, John decides to confront Norton personally and what he finds waiting for him parallels where millions of Americans are finding themselves these days; helpless, manipulated and learning the shocking truth about the sinister relationship between the nations ruling political party and the mainstream media.

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The final clip is the cliffhanger, because even with everything posted here you can still watch this movie as if you’ve never seen it. Anything more that this would ruin it for you.

Meet John Doe is a conservative film made by conservative filmmakers. Mr. Capra and Mr. Cooper were both Republicans who made this movie at the start of the New Deal. Mr. Cooper openly opposed FDR serving three terms, calling it “un-American.”  This is the kind of movie conservative Hollywood used to make. According to Wiki, Edward Arnold, who played D.B. Norton, became involved in Republican politics in the 1940’s and was mentioned as a possible GOP. candidate for the United States Senate. He lost a closely contested election for Alderman and said at the time that perhaps actors were not suited to run for political office. A staunch Conservative, he later took a strong stand against alleged communists in Hollywood while trying to protect actors from the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was also the co-founder of the “I Am An American Foundation.”

This being that anniversary, it’s a good day to recollect how much passion, honor, and gritty philosophy went into those old Westerns, how much they can still teach us today, and how much good the American Western has done not just for America, but for the world: the image of Cooper walking alone down that dusty black and white street is a reminder that sometimes when you do good, you have to do it alone.

So God Bless all those brave Polish souls who twenty years ago dared to defy their communist overlords and do the right thing, setting in motion a chain of events that liberated millions, and will yet liberate millions more. And God Bless America, and God Bless Gary Cooper. And damn, what a great hat.

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.”

In his now-famous 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne recalled his own loathing for the film:

Everyone says High Noon was a great picture because [Dmitri] Tiomkin wrote some great music for it and because Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly were in it. In the picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to church and asks for help and the guys go, “Oh well, oh gee.” And the women stand up and say, “You rats, you rats.” So Cooper goes out alone. It’s the most un-American thing I ever saw in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it.

Some critics like to nitpick and remind us that Cooper doesn’t actually step on his discarded tin star, but Wayne’s then-twenty-year-old memory is plenty close enough for government work. The conclusion of High Noon (former President Bill Clinton’s favorite movie, natch) has marshal Will Kane casting his badge into the dirt with a sneer, his features oozing contempt for the yellow-bellied townsfolk he defended. “That was like belittling a medal of honor,” Wayne seethed privately to his friends. And even as he graciously did his pal Gary Cooper the favor of stepping up at the 1953 Academy Awards and accepting the Best Actor Oscar for High Noon on Cooper’s behalf, the Duke began thinking about how such a role should have been played, and how he might someday use his superstar clout to craft the same basic story according to his own sensibilities. A story where the town didn’t cringe and run, but instead backed the marshal with their guns and their lives against the black-souled gangsters arrayed against them. A story which would ennoble America, flaws and all, instead of soiling her with a revisionist history at odds with how the brave pioneers of the west really acted.

Hawks agreed and, reinvigorated by the prospect of the film, he commissioned a script from the talented pulp writer Leigh Brackett, with whom he had previously collaborated on The Big Sleep (1946). He was re-invoking cinematic first principles, determined to “go back and try to get a little of the spirit we used to make pictures with.” Instead of High Noon’s straitjacket of a script, featuring automatons in the service of a preordained ideological payoff, Hawks strove to create characters that threatened to derail the plot with unpredictable and shamelessly entertaining personalities. In the place of a grim, constipated marshal standing alone and without help, Hawks envisioned a good-natured hero whose bacon is saved at every turn by the intervention of his colorful assortment of friends, in between raucous bouts of drinking, smoking, showering, shaving, shooting, kissing and singing — not necessarily in that order.

A big part of Hollywood’s Golden-Age spirit stemmed from the excellent writing to be found in many movies from the 1930s and ’40s. The best of these had wonderfully witty dialogue, spoken by characters so vibrant and alive that they fairly leaped off the screen and into the audience’s hearts. It’s worth remembering that underneath the gunshots and barroom brawls of Bravo is the clever and mischievous mind that once gave audiences hilarious screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), and Monkey Business (1952). “We used to use comedy whenever we could,” Hawks remembered about his early years in Hollywood, “and then we got too serious about it. So, in Rio Bravo I imagine there are almost as many laughs as if we had started out to make a comedy.”

One of the things modern filmgoers often forget is that movies like Bravo once played on big screens to packed audiences, eliciting massive laughs from scenes that we now watch alone in our living rooms on DVD with scarcely a murmur. Hawks once explained his particular brand of humor thusly:

I like things like — I think it was in Rio Bravo — Wayne went over to a man and said, “So nobody ran in here?” Some man said, “Nobody ran in here.” And Wayne went like this and hit him right across here with a gun so blood was coming all over his face. And Dean Martin said, “Take it easy, Chance.” And Wayne turned and said, “I’m not going to hurt him.” The audience laughed so at that.

Howard Hawks is often cited for his unobtrusive nature, his lack of a palpable style compared to other great directors like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. But this is a gross underestimation of a man that contributed far more to his films than he is given credit for. Rather than use the camera for an assortment of clever movements designed to catch the Academy’s attention come Oscar-time, Hawks used a minimalist compositional palette that refused to pan, crane or dolly ostentatiously. The results are often startlingly unique. Under Hawks’ direction, the first four minutes of Rio Bravo became a near-pantomime without a single word of dialogue, an apparent homage to the silent movies he had cut his teeth on so long ago. The next time you watch Bravo pay close attention to the compositions, most of which are medium-wide shots, with the camera at chest level. There are virtually no close-ups in the picture, a gutsy decision at a time when technique was becoming far more elaborate in Hollywood fare. In hindsight, it was a bold choice that enhanced the languorous, easygoing byplay between the film’s charismatic stars. Director Michael Powell once said that Hawks “had a very deep understanding of people, what was inside people.” The relaxed purposefulness of Rio Bravo’s confident compositions allows a rare richness of character to shine through.

Characters are the most important elements of any Hawks movie. By 1958 he had concluded that “audiences were getting tired of plots….But if you keep them from knowing what the plot is you have a chance of holding their interest…It’s when a character believes in something that a situation happens, not because you write it to happen.” Hawks had an unparalleled flair for consciously using detail to expertly reveal character. All throughout the production of Rio Bravo, he would sit silently as the actors rehearsed their scenes, ever on the lookout for ways to organically grow their motivations cinematically, thereby creating deep wells of subtext without clubbing the audience over the head with a screaming, obvious M-E-S-S-A-G-E. Here’s Hawks describing just one example out of hundreds that he seized on to make the movie what it is:

In Rio Bravo, Dean Martin had a bit in which he was required to roll a cigarette. His fingers weren’t equal to it and Wayne kept passing him cigarettes. All of a sudden you realize that they are awfully good friends or he wouldn’t be doing it. That grew out of Martin’s asking me one day, “Well, if my fingers are shaky, how can I roll this thing?” So Wayne said, “Here, I’ll hand you one,” and suddenly we had something going.

Most crucially, it was director Hawks who crafted John Wayne’s character into a master not only of action but of reaction, in the process establishing an overriding feeling of camaraderie that makes the film endlessly rewatchable. “John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on screen,” Hawks claimed, and yet by dint of directorial will the star of Rio Bravo becomes everyone else’s straight man. During the course of the plot the Duke gets socked by Dean Martin (twice!), is verbally out-dueled by the precocious Ricky Nelson, suffers the outrageous behavior of Walter Brennan, is relentlessly teased by the ever-flirtatious Angie Dickinson, and is continuously rescued by all of the above. “You give everybody else the fireworks,” Wayne grumbled to Hawks at one point, “but I have to carry the damn thing.”

And yet Hawks knew that, with a universe of talents at his disposal, Wayne’s secret weapon was always his generosity and humility as an actor, his penchant for binding himself and his ego to the needs of a picture. He was unparalleled in his ability to lend his potent movie-star glow to others in a scene, holding up the entire business like a grizzled, enduring Atlas. For Rio Bravo, the breakthrough came during one of Dean Martin’s many set-pieces, while Wayne was standing aside and watching glumly as Martin got to once again chew up the scenery with his performance. “What do I do while he’s playing all of these good scenes?” he finally asked Hawks in frustration.

“Well,” Hawks replied, “you look at him as a friend.”

Suddenly everything Hawks had been striving for, the entire emotional spectrum he was meticulously constructing, became clear. And throughout the finished Rio Bravo, you can go to any point and see the spectacular results of Wayne embracing Hawks’ perceptive direction. Watch, for instance, the scene after Walter Brennan’s character Stumpy has almost killed Dean Martin by carelessly shooting at him through the jailhouse door. Wayne stands by as Brennan, one of the all-time great scene-stealing character actors, goes through an entire blabbering monologue of words and emotions that covers denial, mortification, and finally a resigned acceptance of responsibility. It’s all great stuff, hugely entertaining — but look closely at Wayne. Not a word spoken, not a single word. And yet his pitch-perfect reactions to each of Brennan’s lines gives the scene its touching pathos and power.

Wayne spends virtually the entire film loaning his star power to others in this fashion, not acting so much as reacting, and using those reactions to give his co-stars a much brighter spotlight in which to shine. Indisputably, we have Howard Hawks to thank for that. The Duke was known to sometimes distrust and argue with lesser directors, but along with John Ford only Howard Hawks commanded his absolute respect. “Hawks I trust with my life,” he once declared, a sentiment amply proven by the fearless bigheartedness of his performance in Rio Bravo. Both star and director were so happy with the way their collaboration went (only their second time working together after Red River eleven years before) that they more or less remade the same plot twice more in later years, as El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). The relationship was a special one. Long after both Hawks and Wayne had died, Peter Bogdanovich (who knew both) recalled in an interview that “The last times I saw both Cary Grant and John Wayne, they both talked about Howard, about missing him.”

What they missed — the desideratum of Hawks’ personality and artistry — can be sensed within every frame of Rio Bravo. The film features old friends (Bravo marked the twenty-second and final time that John Wayne and Ward Bond — a delightful character actor and Wayne’s best friend — would appear together in a movie), old props (in Bravo, Wayne wears the same, now-rumpled hat he wore twenty years earlier in his breakout role in Stagecoach [1939]), and old music (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” was created by adding new lyrics to a theme previously used in Red River a decade earlier). Surrounding all of this are seemingly endless moments of pure character-driven pleasure. Wayne scooping up a sleeping Angie Dickinson like a kindly father and carrying her to her room. Ricky Nelson taking a nervous drag on his cigarette and a deep breath of courage before brashly heading out the door to kill or be killed. Dean Martin pouring a glass of booze back into the bottle, hands steady as steel, finally conquering his demons. Wayne kissing Brennan on the top of his head and getting his ass swatted by the business end of a broom in return. And above all, that marvelous singing interlude in the jail, a masterstroke that releases the audience’s built-up tension via a sustained sequence of pure fraternal joy.

If there is a single criticism of Rio Bravo that grates above all others, it is the widely-held idea that the jailhouse duet between Martin and Nelson is a major artistic misstep, superfluous and corny. Nonsense. The memorable scene in question occurs almost two hours in. For much of the film, the audience has endured a mournful and threatening Spanish dirge called “El Degüello” (“a throat-slitting”), rumored to have been played by Santa Anna’s troops to the doomed defenders of the Alamo to weaken their resolve. It’s a song the villains play to signify “no quarter,” and as it begins to grate on the heroes’ nerves in Rio Bravo, we the audience worry right along with them. Then, deep in the movie, in a gripping emotional scene, Dean Martin with great agony renounces the bottle and regains his manhood. Finally, at long last, all four men are united in purpose, their doubts behind them. At that exact moment Hawks gives us a much-needed respite via the relaxed singing in the jailhouse. Coming on the heels of all that dramatic strain, it serves as a massive, cathartic release, a musical sunset after the long storms of the first two acts. It is male bonding on a par with the protagonists of Jaws (1975) comparing scars and warbling “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” It is the cementing of an oath-bound brotherhood between friends.

As Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing, we get lingering reaction shots of Brennan and Wayne appreciating the music — the first relaxed, genuine smiles we’ve seen for a long time. We listen as Dude and Colorado effortlessly merge their voices and complement each other, the beginnings of the teamwork that will become so important in the trials ahead. Stumpy asks Colorado to play something that he can sing along with, and Nelson obliges, bringing Brennan into the emotional core that has formed. This is one of the very few scenes without arguing or bickering of any kind — it’s a peek into the true feelings of a pseudo-family newly formed to confront a daunting menace. By the end of two songs, these disparate personalities have gained a much deeper sense of friendship and fidelity. We the audience have seen them at their most human — not as cardboard cutout plot points, but as people with longings and heartaches and dreams beyond the dusty and dangerous present. It’s the kind of scene that couldn’t possibly exist in a film like High Noon, with its relentless cynicism and sense of betrayal. And that, of course, is the point. “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” has become a thematic mirror-image to the sinister “El Degüello,” and it’s no coincidence that, late in the picture, Hawks has the former tune playing on the barroom piano in the hotel, serving as as a subtle, triumphant reminder of which song — and which worldview and moral code — has won the day.

Strangely, Hawks’ potent cinematic iconography seems to be lost on many of Rio Bravo’s most ardent admirers. Director John Carpenter has called Hawks “the greatest American director,” and he not only made Rio Bravo’s plot the template for his Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), he also remade Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951) as The Thing (1982) starring Kurt Russell. Neo-noir director Quentin Tarantino also reveres Rio Bravo, to the point of using it to screen potential girlfriends — if she doesn’t like Bravo, she’s outta there. And yet while the films of Carpenter and Tarantino possess many shallow Hawksian trademarks — groups of men struggling in environments poised on the razor’s edge of danger, conversations so hectic and colorful they threaten to derail the plot — they seem to pay scant attention to the emotional resonance Hawks strove to achieve. Film critic Robin Wood, who wrote what is by far the single best book-length treatment of Hawks and his films, notes that, “Hawks is not really a modern artist…he is a survivor from the past, whose work has never been afflicted with this disease of self-consciousness. An artist like Hawks can only exist within a strong and vital tradition.” Too often, a “disease of self-consciousness” overwhelms the work of directors like Carpenter and Tarantino, as they mimic the techniques and plot elements of Hawks without capturing (or indeed, hardly seeming aware of) the “strong and vital tradition” that makes his best films worth remembering in the first place.

Modern film critics, on the other hand, often recognize Hawks’ heart and soul, but just as often they tend to dismiss them with jaded cynicism. The late Pauline Kael, long the High Priestess of The New Yorker’s film criticism department, once sniffed around the edges of Rio Bravo and approvingly declared it a “semi-satiric western pastiche…silly, but with zest; there are some fine action sequences, and the performers seem to be enjoying their roles.” Satiric was a favored adjective of Miss Kael’s whenever she felt the need to explain away the pesky traditional mores of a film she otherwise liked. She also judged The Right Stuff (1983) to be “often satiric,” and for films that celebrated conservative values too unambiguously to laugh off — think Dirty Harry (1971) — she’d pull out the critical napalm and call it fascist. Liberals struggling to justify their forbidden love for John Wayne westerns often adopt such views. In Rio Bravo’s case, the argument usually goes: It’s a cult film, man. A hip film. It’s satiric, dude. Knowingly silly. So determinedly un-cool as to be super-cool.

I beg to differ. Dr. Strangelove (1964) is satiric. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is satiric. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is satiric.

Rio Bravo, in all of its particulars, is sincere.

A full half-century after its release, Howard Hawks’ masterwork still epitomizes the essential qualities that made Hollywood’s Golden Age glitter. It’s a nostalgic old man’s love song to the “spirit we used to make pictures with,” a movie that loves its characters — and through them its audience — with a sincerity that soothes like a shot of whiskey chased by a mouthful of warm apple pie. For fifty years now audiences have loved it back, with an ardor that is equally unabashed and unadorned. The song that haunts Rio Bravo is a elegiac melody celebrating humanity, friendship, honor, and tradition, all treasured parts of the deep, eternal river of memory that ever rolls through the God-fearing American soul.

By the memory of a song,
While the river Rio Bravo flows along….

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Buy the two-disc special edition DVD of Rio Bravo at Amazon. Rio Bravo is also available on Blu-ray.

Add Rio Bravo to your Netflix queue.

Buy Howard Hawks, a clearly-written, thoughtful critical volume by noted cinéaste Robin Wood.

Buy Howard Hawks: Interviews, a meaty collection of conversations with the master director.

Buy Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, the definitive biography by Todd McCarthy.

If you are ever down Arizona way, visit Old Tucson Studios, where the exteriors for Rio Bravo were shot.

View some great behind-the-scenes pictures from the set of Rio Bravo at Life magazine, The Dino Lounge, and Emulsion Compulsion.

“The Story Behind Rio Bravo: The Greatest Western Ever Made” by Kaleem Omar.

“Rio Bravo Still Popular and Hip at 50″ by Allen Barra at The Wall Street Journal.

“Rio Bravo“ by Jim Monaco at The Dean Martin Collector’s Club.

“Rio Bravo Turns 50″ by Phil Nugent at The Screengrab.

“The Duke and Democracy: On John Wayne” by Charles Taylor at Dissent magazine.

“The Great American Movie: Rio Bravo“ Charles Taylor (again), this time at Salon.

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.

Well, here they are, ten of the most beautiful movie stars ever bestowed on us “brought down to earth” by color. You be the judge.

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For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) – Color, no color, if Ingrid Bergman asked me “where the noses go” I’d pass out from the vapors. It might have been producer David O. Selznick going for publicity, but he said Bergman’s skin was so perfect she didn’t need make-up for the camera. If you know anything different, keep it to yourself, I prefer the legend.

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Dodge City (1939) – Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn on screen together, especially in color, is about as beautiful a sight as you’ll ever see. Director Michael Curtiz (who helmed Flynn’s best films) stages this scene perfectly. He makes us wait for the close-ups, making those ten seconds after 1:27 really hit home. Now we’re all in love right along with our lead characters.

Believe it or not, there’s an even better close-up of de Havilland earlier in the film. One of the greatest ever, but it’s not on YouTube.

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The Quiet Man (1952) – Tell me again how John Wayne can’t act. No, really do, because I don’t believe for a second that he’s now so deeply in love with Maureen O’Hara she has the power to ruin him like Ava did Frank. And Maureen O’Hara in color? Completely ordinary.

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Rear Window (1954) – What was it about the Classic Hollywood in-and-out-of-focus close up that worked so well? Maybe it was Grace Kelly.

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Blood and Sand (1941) – The angel at 1:18 making you want to get to work on that time machine is Linda Darnell. Rita Hayworth is in the film, as well. The movie’s not very good, but the stars keep me coming back.

Even when “brought down to earth” in color.