Jimmy Stewart was at times morose and insecure as filming began on the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Since he went off to serve, Hollywood had found new leading men, such as Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck, who both were seven years younger than he was. Some of “Life’s” early scenes called for the now graying Stewart to be just a few years out of high school. He felt ridiculous and considered plastic surgery, then thought better of it. But Jim was helped greatly by his co-star Donna Reed (Jean Arthur, Olivia de Havilland, and Ginger Rogers were among several actresses considered for the role of Mary Baily).

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Before the romantic scene where George and Mary tearfully and sensuously declare their love for each other, Reed encouraged her leading man to do it in only one unrehearsed take. Capra later joked that Stewart was so nervous during the tender sequence he was forced to wrap a phone chord around the celluloid couple so Jim wouldn’t run away.

“The nice part about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.” — German Philosopher Immanuel Kant

Stewart was also helped by the actor who played the film’s villain, the wheelchair-bound Lionel Barrymore, who reminded him that movies had the power to make people happy around the world. The old man’s pep talks helped Jim regain his confidence in his acting chops, and Capra gave the Indiana, Pennsylvania-born Stewart great latitude in playing the role of the small town resident whose big dreams would never be fulfilled. Just before filming the sequence where the Bailey’s Bedford Falls neighbors came to take their money out of the building and loan, Capra advised the future grandma on TV’s “The Waltons,” Ellen Corby, to ask Stewart for $17.50, half the amount that the script called for. The leading man responded by staying in character and impulsively kissing Corby on the cheek.

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 –“EVERY NETWORK AIMING TO HAVE ‘MAD MEN’ CLONE THIS FALL”–

The only thing I can add to Ed Driscoll’s coverage is a question: Why? Why would every network look to clone “Mad Men” — a television show that only draws a few million viewers? Listen, I love “Mad Men.” It’s one of the finest shows ever produced, in my opinion. But if I was a network exec interested in capturing the widest audience possible and the largest profits for my stockholders, I would not be copy-catting a low-rated television show, I would be copying “NCIS,” a show that captures five and six times the audience “Mad Men” does. 

Hollywood is copy-catting “Mad Men” because Hollywood likes “Mad Men.” This has nothing to do with the audience or making money. This is nothing more than Hollywood indulging itself, which they do when it comes to whatever the latest insider fad is — which they do to shape our culture and politics.

Boys with toys.

–THIRD “BRIDGET JONES” MOVIE GREENLIT?–

The first one was a gem, the second a complete embarrassment, and the luster has long won off star Rene Zellweger.

But both films were huge hits worldwide, though, so why not? Also, Colin Firth is an Oscar-winner now.

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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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I’ve written several articles skewering HBO for producing political projects destined to air immediately prior to the 2012 election, where the vast majority of the cast and crew are passionate Barack Obama supporters, and where the content is aimed at the Democrat’s two favorite Republican villains: Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. So, when I sat down to watch HBO’s Too Big to Fail, I prepared myself for the worst. What I didn’t expect was the big surprise awaiting me.

Too Big to Fail, which premieres on HBO on May 23, 2011, features a star studded cast recounting the events that led to the financial crisis and bailouts by the U.S. government in 2008. It is a mini-series packed into a 98-minute made-for-television movie where several essential characters are quickly introduced and where finance and economics are casually discussed. It may help if one has a baseline of knowledge about the crisis before watching the movie. If one doesn’t know who Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner are or what Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and AIG are, it may prove slightly difficult to follow.

Although the Director, Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile), was limited to telling a very long and complicated story in a very short amount of time, he was able to skillfully pull it off. Perhaps this is because the screenwriter, Peter Gould (Breaking Bad), deftly adapted Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 prize winning New York Times Bestseller, Too Big to Fail. (more…)

One of the touchstone traits of manliness is that the true man is what he seems.  There is no deceit about him: no hidden agendas, no artificial props, no “image” or “cover” designed to suit the public’s imagined wants and hide the actual man’s real character.  It is undeniable that such an uncalculated manliness often offends: in its lack of political correctness and its plainspoken confidence.  “Why does he always think he is so right?  Hasn’t he read the latest opinion poll?”  We used to call this manly virtue integrity: literally, of being whole and undivided, of being the same throughout.  What you see is what you get.  Integrity enables another virtue: frankness or candor, that is, saying what you believe and is on your mind without dissimulation or contrivance.  For this reason one of the Founding Fathers’ most lauded virtues was candor.  After all, these great men proclaimed their Independence by submitting facts to a “candid world.”  This virtue of integrity, which now goes by the opaque moniker “transparency,” was better understood in the age of the Western hero.  The characters played by John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and, for that matter, Ronald Reagan, did not say much.  But what they said they meant, and they would back up what they said with their very lives.

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.  (more…)

This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more.

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. (more…)

In the 1953 movie “Thunder Bay,” Jimmy Stewart plays the complicated protagonist, Steve Martin, the hard-bitten, ex-navy oil engineer who built the first offshore oil platform off Louisiana in 1947. “The brawling, mauling story of the biggest bonanza of them all!” reads the Universal ad for the studio’s first wide-screen movie.

Much of the brawling by Stewart and his henchmen was against the local Cajuns who fished for a living. Their livelihood, it seemed obvious at the time, would soon vanish amidst a hellbroth of irreversible pollution. The movie covers a time period of barely one year yet ends on a happy note of conciliation as the fishermen reaped a bonanza almost as big as Jimmy’s itself. The oil structures had kicked in as artificial reefs and made possible a bigger haul of seafood than anything in these fishermen’s lifetimes.

Alas, brawling by the real life Jimmy Stewart characters later cranked up to a level that dwarfed anything in the movie—but against a much more fanatical, underhanded and devious foe: environmentalists. (more…)

There aren’t many films that transcend their art and time and generations. A box-office disappointment when released, It’s A Wonderful Life was so forgotten its copyright lapsed causing it to be looped endlessly on small independent television stations everywhere desperate for free programming. Inevitably this forgotten classic was rediscovered by a new generation. A generation under siege by a film industry that now scoffs at such simplistic ideas as reminding us of the rich benefits that can be reaped by our own simple human decency. 

Fifteen-years ago it was all the rage to worship It’s A Wonderful Life, and then the inevitable backlash began by the contrary-is-cool crowd and those offended by spiritualism and sentiment. Whatever. All I know is that after dozens of viewings each new one is like the first and without fail the story stays with me for days. 

And who are we to argue with time? Like Beethoven and Sinatra, the story of a good man blinded by disappointment, driven to suicide, and saved by God’s grace will live for as long as there’s a civilization. Because the message is about the simplest and yet most important of things — it’s about why when things are at their worst that’s the most important time to step outside the hurly burly of life’s setbacks and inventory our blessings. 

It’s A Wonderful Life is about perspective.  (more…)

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday.  Sure, Canada and a couple other nations have adopted their own weird versions of it too, but the notion of a nation setting aside a day to give thanks for its blessings could only arise in a nation that has been so abundantly blessed.  In its land, its people and its animating spirit, America has much to be thankful for even in a time of war, economic blight, and a government that too often seems to see its blessings as curses and its greatest strengths as flaws.

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But America’s abundance does not apply to movies about Thanksgiving.  Certainly some exist, but if you review a list of movies about Thanksgiving, the sad fact is that there are very few good ones.  Many are PC retellings of the original Thanksgiving story – one guess as to who the villains are (Hint:  It’s the dudes with buckles on their hats).  Others are tiresome melodramas about “quirky” families that reaffirm their bonds over plates of turkey, with “quirky” — meaning “annoying.”  (more…)

The casting of Robert Montgomery (1904–1981) in They Were Expendable was uncommonly appropriate. The suave, handsome actor made his name in debonair romantic comedies throughout the 1930s, but like John Ford he didn’t wait until America was dragged into war before enlisting. In 1940, fired up by the life-and-death struggles raging in Europe, he abandoned his M-G-M contract, went to France, and volunteered as an ambulance driver. Only a few weeks went by before he had it shot out from under him — one film magazine of the era reported (or perhaps exaggerated) that he narrowly avoided capture with the help of a French priest, and escaped the country mere hours before it fell to the Germans.

Back in the states he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and over the next three years served in many capacities before finding his way to the Pacific theater, where he met John Bulkeley and became his executive officer. Montgomery commanded a PT boat in many battles, and eventually headed up to Normandy as an operations officer for a destroyer squadron. While preparing for D-Day, he remembered later, “I saw Bulkeley on his PT Boat and waved to him. There was another man on the bridge with him. I had no idea then it was Jack Ford.” (more…)

Only a tiresome poseur like Quentin Tarantino could think that the Hollywood pretty boys he cast in his soon-to-be released opus The Inglorious Basterds are convincing movie tough guys. Where is Lee Marvin when we need him?

You’ve probably experienced the Basterds publicity blitz.  Brad Pitt looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Folks I know who have been around him say he really is a pleasant and laid-back guy, and these are hardly the characteristics of a beady-eyed killer.  Creepy Eli Roth, taking some time off from directing his degenerate torture movies, is just a leering clown – he looks like he should be squatting in the back of his Ford panel van offering Tootsie Rolls to passing tweens.  And B.J. Novak?  The guy is a hilarious writer and is really funny in The Office , but I’m not buying this cat as the scourge of the Third Reich.

In contrast, Lee Marvin’s tough guy legacy lives on despite the fact that his body rests with thousands of other heroes in Arlington National Cemetery. He earned that right when he was wounded fighting the Imperial Japanese Army in the Pacific as a Marine private. His Purple Heart is 100% USDA certified proof positive of his prime badassary. Who is the Hollywood tough guy of today who can dare step up to the Lee Marvin plate and take a swing?

Nobody. (more…)

Betrayed by Liberal Hollywood

Psychologists say that a parent’s grief over the death of a child is “the most difficult loss to endure and surely among the most difficult to integrate into one’s life” because our children are an enormous part of our legacy, and “in their deaths, a large part of our own future dies.”  The natural order of our lives has been turned upside down, bringing on an emotional chaos.

For the parents of military men and women who have died after volunteering to serve their country and walking into the face of death in the 21^st century’s war on terror, this grief and chaos has been exponentially multiplied by liberal Hollywood.  But one has to actually walk this path to understand it.  The anti-war sentiment and films that have spewed from liberal actors, producers, and directors have burdened our hearts unspeakably as they have served only to aide the greatest enemy our country has ever faced and to deface and demoralize the greatest ambassadors our country has: the men and women who wear the uniforms of the United States military. (more…)

During this Memorial Day Weekend Big Hollywood pays tribute those who have fallen, and those who sacrifice so much in the cause of freedom.

Remember when Hollywood celebrities flocked across the globe to entertain and support American troops? Remember when Hollywood—as a community—denounced tyrants, Jew-haters, and mass murderers?

Joan Crawford as Miss Liberty

My father was a Rabbi, a Chaplain in the 42nd Division during World War II and the Korean War. He often told me just how much the troops loved and respected their Hollywood supporters.

Here’s just a brief sampler of what Hollywood patriotism once looked like.

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It takes a big man to admit he screwed up and take a principled stand. It takes a phony liberal elitist to apologize for the sake of protecting his television ratings.

Jon Stewart makes Arlen Specter look principled.

Like Pee Wee Herman, Jon Stewart launched his intercontinental ballistic missile, and he could not put the missile back on the launching pad. In his case, the only thing that seeped out was stupidity.

Jon Stewart, for those who are not “trendy,” “hip,” or “cool” (brie-cheese-eating-elitist-snobs according to the Tygrrrr Express dictionary), has a nightly political television show where he presents the news with all the accuracy and fairness of the Jayson Blair Times. (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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