This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, as he continues to share snippets from his latest 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 a veritable buffet of never-before-published morsels on the American left. Fred Barnes calls Dupes “an enormously important book.” Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer calls it the “21^st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.

Bogart was duped

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, last week you shared examples of how American communists, from the very start of their party’s founding in Chicago in 1919, exploited the language of the American Founding to advance their goals and philosophy in the United States. They also did so in order to dupe American liberals/progressives. Among others, you gave the stunning example of Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer from the Scopes Monkey Trials. This week you have more examples.

Kengor: I have examples from Hollywood in its golden age and also from Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.

Big Peace: Let’s start with Hollywood. Tell us about the Committee for the First Amendment, a major focus of your book.

Kengor: That was the biggest group of duped liberals/progressives ever to appear in Hollywood, so much so that the Committee for the First Amendment would later be officially classified as a communist front-group—that’s how badly the liberals in this group were suckered by the Reds. Here’s what happened:

By October 1947, our Congress had learned the obvious: There were influential communists trying to infiltrate the motion-picture industry, particularly among screenwriters. The accused communists, men like John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Alvah Bessie, Albert Maltz, told their liberal friends that they weren’t guilty, and that these mean congressmen investigating their blatant loyalties to Stalin’s Russia were a bunch of “fascists.” Naturally, the liberals believed them, as liberals reflexively take the side not of anti-communists but pro-communists.

Rub a dub, dub, Dalton Trumbo

So, the accused communist screenwriters rallied the liberals to their side in a PR campaign to frame the congressmen as Nazi storm-troopers and the accused communists as the embodiment of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

Big Peace: You’re not exaggerating. In the book you give example after example.

Kengor: That’s right. Madison and Hamilton, incidentally, would have been put up against a wall in Bolshevik Russia and shot in the head without hesitation.

Big Peace: You write, “And so, Hollywood’s communists looked to liberals in the movie industry for support. They would do so in the name of good old-fashioned American civil liberties, wrapping themselves in the American flag.”

Kengor: Specifically, in October 1947, a group of high-profile actors, writers, and producers planned a major public-relations trip to Washington to defend their accused leftist friends, who were being summoned to testify to Congress for their clandestine work for the Soviet cause. After consulting on tactics with the accused communists, they changed the group’s name from the confrontational “Hollywood Fights Back” to the commendable “Committee for the First Amendment.”

This was a savvy PR move, signifying the high road to be taken: the communists’ case would be based on the American Constitution and venerable First Amendment; in other words, on the antithesis of the USSR that the comrades secretly saluted. The Constitution lovers at the Daily Worker were happy to join in, headlining the campaign as a “Bill-of-Rights Tour.”

Big Peace: Tell us some of the suckers among the celebrities.

Kengor: The liberal stars enlisted in the cause ran into the hundreds, including Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Myrna Loy. From the committee, a group of roughly two dozen lent more than their signatures; they actually set sail for Washington. That troupe included some huge faces: Danny Kaye, Ira Gershwin, Judy Garland, John Garfield, Sterling Hayden, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, John Huston, Philip Dunne, Billy Wilder, and, of course, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

The two dozen huddled with Dunne and Huston, their leaders, to coordinate and ensure they spoke from the same script. There was an agreed-upon understanding that Congress’s questions did not merit the dignity of a response.

Frank Marshall Davis

Of course, the liberals assumed that their accused friends were not communists. Their friends assured them they weren’t. The liberals had convinced themselves—or allowed themselves to be convinced—that the deceivers were sitting in Washington, not Hollywood. Remember, for liberals/progressives, it’s always the anti-communists who are the bad guys. As the great James Burnham unforgettably put it, for the left, the preferred enemy is always to the right.

Big Peace: And when the liberals got there to Washington, they got quite a surprise.

Kengor: Yes, contrary to the false narrative you learned from your scandalously expensive university education—where you paid outrageous amounts of money to be brainwashed by leftist nonsense—the accused were unmistakably, unequivocally guilty. Congress had literal stacks of evidence it publicly presented: Communist Party registration rolls, news clips, Daily Worker articles, New Masses’ bylines, front-group memberships, party applications, party forms, party cards, party, and even numbers. In Dupes, I list the five-digit Communist Party registration card numbers of all of them.

And as the congressmen presented this irrefutable evidence, the left did what it always does when it has nowhere else to go. They called the Congressmen “fascists.”

“Hitler Germany!” yelped John Howard Lawson, also known as “Hollywood’s commissar,” when presented with irrefutable evidence, “Hitler tactics!” He had to be escorted out of the room he was so out-of-control.

Big Peace: What was the reaction by the liberals in the Committee for the First Amendment?

Kengor: They were stunned and betrayed, especially Humphrey Bogart, who snapped: “You f—ers sold me out!”

The Committee for the First Amendment fell silent, withered, and died.

Needless to say, these American communists weren’t apostles of the U.S. Constitution. No, they exploited the language of the Constitution to advance the principles and aims of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which, of course, was the utter antithesis of the American Founders’ constitutional republic.

Big Peace: There’s one more example you’d like to share—the best for last. This concerns Frank Marshall Davis, Hawaii mentor to a young man named Barack Obama in the 1970s. In Dupes, you show at length that this man was a communist, a party member even, and quote dozens of his columns.

Kengor: That’s Frank Marshall Davis, CPUSA no. 47544—see page 507 of Dupes for the page from his FBI file that lists that party number.

A common tactic of Davis was to invoke the Founders. Here I’ll give just one example from one column he published in March 1950, where he claimed to be indentifying his own politics. He disingenuously referred to his politics as “left of center in the best American tradition.” He identified with Thomas Jefferson in particular. He quoted Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure…. I hold that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world, as storms in the physical.”

Well, that’s a bunch of manure.

Again, we saw this in our Q&A last week, where I noted this common communist tactic of identifying with the revolutionary spirit of our American revolutionaries of 1776. Of course, that was a phony identification, but it was the kind of deceptive thing American communists did all the time to try to win naïve liberals/progressives to their side, which they did with stunning success.

Big Peace: And this gets even worse. If Davis and these other Communist Party members were the self-anointed modern incarnations of Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton and Jay, then who were the enemies?

Kengor: That’s key. The enemies, the “un-Americans” as the communists ludicrously portrayed them, were the anti-communists in groups like the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was allegedly smearing and defaming great modern patriots like Davis, Lawson, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, and other closet communists.

As Frank Marshall Davis put it in his column, “[W]e have descended to such a low level in our history that a person becomes cannon fodder for the un-American committees merely by repeating the words of Lincoln and Jefferson.”

Now, this would be just fine if Davis’s comrades were battling for the ideas of Federalist 10, but, quite the contrary, they were battling for the ideas of Marx. They had other revolutionaries in mind—Bolshevik ones rather than those of 1776.

Big Peace: Needless to say, Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson had nothing in common.

Kengor: That’s right. For years, I’ve heard people mutter, “If you read the Communist Manifesto, you’ll see it’s not a bad book. It talks about sharing, caring.” What nonsense. When I hear that, I know they haven’t actually read the Communist Manifesto, where Marx states flatly: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

That’s the essence of communism.

Of course, on this point alone, a first grader—let alone a grown adult—ought to immediately recognize that Marxism can’t work. Abolishing private property is completely contrary to human nature, violating the most innate precepts of all peoples, from the cave to the courthouse. Only a fool would not instantly, intuitively realize that implementing this vision generates mass bloodshed.

It’s obviously completely contrary to the vision of our American Founders.

There was no greater mass murderer of civil liberties than communism. And to imagine that the communists and their dupes would invoke these same Founders? It’s obscene. But, again, they did it all the time.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for the history lesson this week.

Kengor: You’re welcome. To learn more about this sordid but crucial history of our country, click here to buy Dupes. I also have a website for the book, www.thedupesbook.com.

Politics make strange bedfellows and movies can make strange politics…

They might not necessarily further the political ideology of the filmmakers because, when good filmmakers do their jobs and serve their story, agendas you wouldn’t anticipate crop up. How else to explain The Dark Knight’s alleged defense of Bush II era terror fighting tactics or what appeared to be a subtle stay-the-course-in-Iraq-so-we-don’t-duplicate-our-past-mistake-in-Afghanistan epilogue in Charlie Wilson’s War?

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But no example (even the ol’ “The Yellow Brick Road” in The Wizard of Oz is a metaphor for the gold standard!) is more bizarre and unexpected than the politics of Rango, opening this weekend.

Yes, I’m talking about the computer animated flick from Paramount and Nickelodeon about a domesticated chameleon who gets lost in the wild wild west of the Mojave Desert, directed by Gore Verbinski (the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) and featuring the voice of Johnny Depp.

Much of the plot is unabashedly borrowed from Chinatown, from the pipe mysteriously dumping water in the middle of nowhere, to the character found dead from drowning out in the desert, to the seemingly innocuous old man in a wheelchair (in this case, a turtle voiced by Ned Beatty, channeling John Huston) who is clearly up to no good. If you want to know what he’s up to, well, just see Chinatown.

This is a wonderfully entertaining and spectacularly well-made movie. The sophistication of the animation, the character modeling, their textures, the cinematography, Hans Zimmer’s marvelous Morricone pastiche score (with lively contributions by Los Lobos), everything is first rate. It amuses children while dealing with mature themes that engage adults. In fact, remove the animals and produce this script as a live action feature and you’d have a badass western.

It also contains genuine laughs and some of the most thrilling and blissfully coherent action I’ve seen at the movies in years. It is well choreographed, flawlessly “shot” and edited, the stakes are high, characters are in legitimate danger, and every punch, bullet, and bat-mounted mole (you’ll have to see the movie) lands.

The story pays homage to classic films other than Chinatown, including It’s A Wonderful Life and countless westerns, while the politics at work are distinctly Eastwoodian. The film flagrantly flouts big government, corruption, and cronyism, while still championing law and order and heralding the power of one; celebrating an individual with the courage to stand up to corruption and evil, even in the face of societal cowardice.

It also overtly riffs on modern political and economic calamities, complete with a devastating recession, a foreclosure crisis, a credit freeze, a run on the bank, et al.

The film’s climax, in fact, features a hallucinatory vision of “The Spirit of the West,” who appears in the guise of Hollywood’s most famous libertarian, garbed in his iconic “Man with No Name” wardrobe (Timothy Olyphant, doing a flawless Clint Eastwood impression).

After falling out of his owners’ car and onto the highway, the eponymous character (energetically voiced by Depp) finds his way to the archetypal western movie town, where the people (actually insects, reptiles, amphibians, and rodents) live in Dirt — literally, as they’re suffering from a severe drought, and because that’s the name of the town. As a chameleon in constant search of his own identity and place in the world, Rango seizes the opportunity as the new “stranger in town,” to invent a back-story that casts himself as a hotshot gunslinger who once killed seven men with a single bullet. Immediately sensing Rango’s ruse, Dirt’s all-powerful Mayor (the aforementioned John Huston-inspired turtle) pins a star on Rango’s colorful Hunter S. Thompson shirt and declares him Sheriff.

This is the first appearance of another (familiar) recurring theme: Hope. More to the point, how the powerful exploit hope and faith. The Mayor growls: “They believe it’s going to get better, against all odds and all evidence that tomorrow will be better than today. They have to believe in something… And right now, Mr. Rango, they believe in you.” He can barely hide his disdain for his hopeful, praying flock.

Despite a scene in which a character tells Rango, “Many years ago, this entire valley was covered in agua [water],” the movie somehow avoids turning into a predictable Hollywood alarmist tale, warning of the imminent disappearance of our precious limited natural resources. You see, in Rango, there is plenty of water, but it is being diverted and hoarded in an effort to manipulate, oppress and ultimately control the proletariat.

This is not an environmental film, it is a political film.

In fact, the Mayor is actually using a trumped-up environmental crisis (the drought) to panic the populace and, while an aquatic “cap and trade” policy is never suggested, shades of global warming hysteria are inescapable.

As a result of the supposed drought, land values are plummeting and the Mayor is buying up property from despondent landowners — who are packing up and leaving for bluer pastures — for pennies on the dollar.

The scene in which the townspeople desperately engage in their Wednesday high noon ritual of a zombie-like choreographed line dance for The Mayor — which includes their slapping each other in the face — in exchange for access to a natural resource that should be freely available to all, is chill-inducing.

When the faucet yields nothing but a dollop of mud, the Mayor addresses the distressed townsfolk, who he refers to as his “acolytes”:

These are difficult times, he tells them. “Sacrifices will have to be made,” echoing President Obama’s familiar refrain, repeated most recently this week.

And then the Mayor eats cake (proverbially), as he and his cronies take to the golf course, enjoying an endless supply of water and chuckling at the naivete of his constituents.

Meanwhile, the town bank’s vault contains a plastic water jug and, when it is revealed that only a 5-day supply remains in “the reserves,” there is a (literal) run on the bank. The Mayor is able to avert the town’s fears, insisting, “As long as we’ve got this water, we’ve got hope.”

All that changes the next morning when it’s discovered that the bank has been robbed — the entire water bottle, snatched by a thieving gang of moles.

The Mayor and his cronies insist that a posse be formed to chase the evildoers, which is little more than sleight of hand on the part of the Mayor, who is sending them on wild goose (mole) chase as a pure distraction, while his diabolical scheme forges ahead unabated.

When Rango and the posse catch up to the culprits, they discover that the water bottle was already empty when the moles stole it.

One astute mole observes: “Someone done robbed that bank before we robbed it.”

It reminded me of the Warren Buffett line: “It is only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” And we learned that we were being robbed all along.

When Rango and his dejected crew return to town, this dialogue exchange occurs:

“Where’s the water?”

“There weren’t no water.”

Much like, after the real world financial meltdown, befuddled Americans asked our leaders, regulator and Wall Street: “Where’s our economy?”

The answer, of course: “There weren’t no economy.”

Unlike the actual financial crisis, however, in Rango there is accountability and justice is done. If only life were like a Clint Eastwood movie.

Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco helping his parents learn lines, doing backstage work, and even acting when the occasion demanded. “I was fascinated by all of it,” Stevens said. “The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly. . . When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.”

In 1921 his parents moved the family to Los Angeles to find work in the silent movie industry, and for Stevens it was a wonderful change. He leveraged a job his cousin had at Hal Roach studios to begin visiting the lot.

“I was really a kid at the time,” Stevens said, “and I had been interested in photography as a kid, as a hobby. . . I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later I was one. The first day or two it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.”

Soon Stevens quit high school — at sixteen, he was a full-time Hollywood cameraman.

Most of the early films he shot were westerns, and he quickly developed an affinity for the genre and the cowboys who brought it to life on screen. “The old western boys were pretty fine fellows,” he said. “It wasn’t that they didn’t kiss the girl and only kissed their horse and didn’t smoke: they were good men and the tradition was such that they wanted to be rugged, responsible. They had an integrity.”

He dreamed of soon directing a western of his own, putting all of these feelings onto the screen, but it was not to be:

Nothing is more pleasant for me than to be on location in the country that I love, in any of our western land­scapes, being out there with a camp outfit and a film company. I had done some work when I was starting in with photography on westerns, and photographing them was the greatest pleasure I had. If I was ever qualified for anything, it would have had to do with making westerns. But as I started working on pictures with people like Katharine Hepburn, I got further away from the thing I really liked to do.

As he developed his skills and through the 1920s and ’30s, slowly graduating from assistant cameraman to cameraman proper and then to director, he found that the western work of his apprenticeship gave way to another genre immensely popular and ubiquitous at the time: comedies. He worked on Laurel and Hardy pictures, and eventually an assortment of (for the most part) rather lighthearted dramas starring the likes of Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

It was a successful career in terms of fame and box office, but it came at a hidden artistic cost that he would only fathom decades later. “I remember a whole period in my life where everything was a gag,” is how he summed up the essential dilemma later in life. “We found ourselves always wanting to play out everything as a joke — a very dangerous thing to do, because we looked at everything frivolously.” What, he wondered, had happened to that sense of communion he had felt when watching audiences under the spell of the plays put on by his parents?

When America finally found itself dragged into the maelstrom of World War II, Stevens’ long, idyllic Hollywood party was over. “I quit the film business to go into the army,” he explained. “I wanted to be in the war — I really didn’t want to make films at that time. . . My agent Charles Feldman told me, ‘You go in this war, it’ll last seven years, and you’re finished as far as films are concerned, if nothing worse happens to you.’ Well, I went in the latter part of 1942. . . ”

The war would become the defining event of his life, utterly changing the way he looked at his art. He commanded a troupe of cameramen who filmed in color throughout Africa and Europe, culminating in the nightmare world they found upon reaching Dachau at the close of the war.

“Beyond descrip­tion,” he said with a shiver later. “Like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions. . . everybody’s pleading for water and laying there, three guys in a bunk, dying. . . we went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people.” The George Stevens who once filmed clever comedies in between behind-the-scenes flings with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers was no more. “It causes a most profound adjustment in your thinking,” he said. “I don’t suppose I was ever too hilarious again.”

Back in America, the desire to direct again came slowly, and the films became more serious, the work of a auteur surrounded by the ghosts of his past. “I kept feeling I should do a picture about the war — all the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their war experiences, Ford, Huston, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the subject. Until I found Shane — it was a western, but it was really my war picture. The cattlemen against the ranchers, the gunfighter, the wide-eyed little boy, it was pretty clear to me what it was about.”

Ever since the war, he had become acutely aware of the depiction of violence on screen, and the gaping difference between Hollywood violence and what he had seen at Dachau. “At the time we made this picture there was a great vogue of kids with cowboy hats and cap pistols going bang, bang, bang. . . In the popular movies we saw western guys with guitars, not six-shooters.” Stevens now knew better. “A gunshot. . . is a holocaust. It’s not a gesture of bravado, it’s death.”

So that was the guy who decided to film Shane: a man whose long-standing admiration for America’s popular conception of the mythic west was now haunted by war. It would be his first (and, as it turned out, his only) western as a director, and he was determined to do the job right, infusing the audience with deep emotions reminiscent of those quiet moments of communion achieved long ago in his parents’ theater.

“What I wanted this film to do,” Stevens said, “was catch something of how people looked and lived, their home ways, their manners and ways of doing things, and most importantly the violent character of the six-shooter. . . I wanted to show that a .45, if you pull directly in a man’s direction, you destroy an upright figure. I wanted to make that one point.” How he went about doing all of that — the directorial decisions, the editing, the clever cinematic tricks — would change the way westerns were made forever after.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Two books about George Stevens. Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film by Marilyn Ann Moss and George Stevens: Interviews edited by Paul Cronin (the same guy who did that great book Herzog on Herzog, which I referenced in our Grizzly Man series) are both worthwhile. Unlike guys like John Ford, Stevens enjoyed articulating the decisions underlying his art, and these books are chock full of his thoughts on his films, Hollywood, and much else.

George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. This excellent, illuminating documentary was produced, directed and narrated by Stevens’ own son, George Jr. You can Netflix it, or purchase it at the usual places. Well worth your time.

Martin Scorsese on George Stevens. The renowned director of our time explains what he admires about one of the greats of the Golden Age of filmmaking in this article written for TCM.

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections:

(1) Rebecca and Suspicion are the same film, not Notorious and Rebecca; (2) the Orlando Bloom reference was to Black Hawk Down, not G.I. Jane, and I apologize for the obvious mix-up. 

Now, to the real question: the top-ten greatest directors of all time.  This is truly a rough decision – there are at least two score great directors who could make this list.  Here is my one basic criteria: directors who provide me the most viewing pleasure over the course of their career.  That means telling a great story in the best possible way.  Subjective?  Sure.  Deal with it.  I’ll admit that this list skews toward older directors, not because older movies are generally better than newer movies (though I think they are), but because directors in the period 1920-1960 generally made more movies, which means more opportunities for directors to shine. 

I’ll start by explaining why certain directors are not in the top ten. 

Francis Ford Coppola:  He had a period of unbelievable creative magic.  Within a ten year period, he made Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a charming musical; The Godfather (1972), which requires no commentary; The Conversation (1974), perhaps the creepiest movie ever made; The Godfather: Part II (1974), which matches its predecessor in quality; and Apocalypse Now (1979), a mad journey into the heart of darkness.  Then he was done.  How this talented filmmaker went from The Godfather to the atrocity that was Jack (1996) is utterly bewildering.  It was tough to keep him off the top ten list. It was even harder to boot someone from that list to make room for him. 

Peter Jackson:  I believe Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to be the finest directorial effort of all time, surpassing even Citizen Kane.  That said, Jackson hasn’t done anything else.  King Kong was overlong and CGI-obsessed.  He has shown that he can produce with the best of them – District 9 is brilliant – but he needs to direct more great movies before he belongs in the top ten. 

Christopher Nolan: I believe Nolan will one day make the top-ten list.  He’s that talented.  Watch one of his early efforts, Following (1998) if you don’t believe me – on a budget of $6,000, he creates a taut thriller.  His last five movies have all been terrific: Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight. He is one of the few modern directors for whom I check the IMDB calendar to see when his next movie comes out.  I look forward to Inception with bated breath.  For now, however, it’s too early to chart his trajectory with certainty. 

Orson Welles:  Citizen Kane requires no explication – it is justifiably seen by many as the greatest directorial job ever.  His Othello is similarly creative and inspired.  The Magnificent Ambersons follows the pattern.  But Welles destroyed himself and his career, and the fates should never forgive him for wasting his unparalleled talent. 

Peter Weir:  I love Weir.  He is always creative and interesting.  Although I didn’t enjoy Master and Commander as much as others, The Truman Show, Fearless, and Gallipoli are all minor masterpieces.  As far as the top ten, my heart says maybe, my brain says no. 

Stanley Kubrick:  Overrated.  Yes, he directed the wonderful Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Dr. Strangelove, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is an abomination, A Clockwork Orange doesn’t hold up, The Shining is made a parody by Jack Nicholson’s scenery-chewing. He’s inconsistent, and that’s what knocks him off the list, as it should. 

Vincente Minnelli:  The best director of musicals of all time came close to making the list, too.  Meet Me in St. Louis is delightful.  An American in Paris is a joy for the senses. The Band Wagon is the best parody of Broadway ever made; Brigadoon is pretty if unfaithful to the source material (they cut a couple of the best songs from the Broadway version); Gigi is gorgeous; Lust for Life is well-done.  Few directors have Minneli’s grasp of the music that film can be, the vibrancy that film can create.  Again, this is just a case of ten being too few to fit him. 

Fritz Lang:  M is the best foreign language film ever made.  Period.  It is tight and tense and incredibly driving.  Metropolis is fantastic too.  Perhaps if I’d seen more Lang, I’d put him up in the top ten (the only other films I’ve seen of his are Fury and The Big Heat), so I’ll claim ignorance here. 

Fred Zinneman: Perhaps the best conventional director of all time – a man who simply puts on camera what needs to be there.  He’s not the artist that any of the top ten are, but he did create The Day of the Jackal, A Man for All Seasons, Oklahoma!, From Here to Eternity, and High Noon, a list to be reckoned with. 

Victor Fleming:  How hard was it to come up with this list?  I had to leave off the guy who directed Captains Courageous, The Good Earth, The Wizard of Oz, some of Gone with the Wind, A Guy Named Joe, and Treasure Island.  He also directed lots of films that ain’t quite as great, so his percentage is what keeps him off the list. 

Stanley Donen: Stylistically, Donen was tops.  He directed On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Charade, Damn Yankees!, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Two for the Road.  The pure fun that is Seven Brides could put him on the top ten list.  But Donen just can’t knock anyone else off. 

Robert Rossen: His resume is simply too short.  Three fantastic movies: Body and Soul, All the King’s Men, The Hustler.  A great career.  Not a top ten one. 

John Huston: The best adventure director of all time, responsible for The Man Who Would Be King, Moby Dick, The African Queen, and The Maltese Falcon.  Again, not enough versatility to put him over the top. 

George Stevens:  Tough to keep off the list, tough to make room.  The Diary of Anne Frank, Shane, A Place in the Sun, I Remember Mama, Gunga Din – versatility, certainly, brilliance, certainly, sweetness, certainly.  Off the list?  Hesitantly, yes. 

The Top Ten Greatest Directors of All Time

10.  Steven Spielberg:  This will be the most controversial pick on the list, to be sure.  He’s got big hits, and he’s got big misses.  His hits are clearly terrific – Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan.  His misses are pure awfulness – A.I., 1941, The Terminal, and the misery that was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Of late, far more misses than hits.  Still, that early canon of films, plus Schindler’s and Saving Private Ryan puts him over the top.  No better popcorn filmmaker has ever been born.  Yes, I hate his politics.  But his artistry, when he’s at the top of his game and when he’s comfortable with the script, is unmistakable.  Watch this scene again: 

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Nobody – nobody – directs action better.  And Schindler’s List proved he can do drama, too.  Is he the deepest guy on the list?  Nope.  Does he belong here?  I say, yes.  

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9.  Michael Curtiz:  How can I possibly put the man who directed the monstrous farce that is Mission to Moscow on this list?  Because he also directed Casablanca, the best movie of all time; White Christmas and Yankee Doodle Dandy, two of the best musicals; The Adventures of Robin Hood, one of the best adventure movies; Mildred Pierce, one of the best melodramas.  Other films: The Sea Wolf, Angels with Dirty Faces, and Captain Blood.  Renting his film canon, Mission to Moscow aside, is almost entirely wonderful. 

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8.  Ingmar Bergman:  No one made images like Bergman.  The Seventh Seal is easily the darkest movie ever made, and it’s got some of the most stirring pictures ever put on screen.  His version of The Magic Flute is a delight.  Then there are his others, like Fanny and Alexander, Through a Glass Darkly, The Virgin Spring.  Do you watch Bergman for a laugh?  Not unless by laughter you mean suicidal depression.  But no finer image-maker has ever stood behind a camera. 

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7.  Billy Wilder: Nobody ever mixed drama and comedy like Wilder.  And he was a master at getting great performances from his actors.  Jack Lemmon was his muse, and he used him to the fullest: he made the ultimate Matthau/Lemmon comedy in The Fortune Cookie, the ultimate Lemmon comedy, Some Like It Hot, and the beautifully understated The Apartment.  If Lemmon wasn’t his muse, William Holden was – and he’s got masterpieces like Sunset Blvd. and Stalag 17 to prove it.  Or maybe it was Audrey Hepburn – Sabrina, and Love in the Afternoon.  And that isn’t even looking at Witness for the Prosecution and Double Indemnity. The guy was a classics factory.  And all of them are fast-moving and fun to watch. 

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6.  Charlie Chaplin:  It would be a crime to leave Chaplin off this list.  Watch him toss around the globe as Hitler in The Great Dictator and tell me who you’d put in his place.  The Kid is as affecting as any movie ever made.  Modern Times is chock full of amazing sequences, and so are Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and many of his others.  The silent movie era was never so magnificent. 

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5.  Frank Capra:  In my review of the top ten most overrated directors of all time, I wrote this about Martin Scorsese: “In the musical Damn Yankees, a group of hapless baseball players sing the following lyric: ‘You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart!’  Martin Scorsese never saw that musical.  His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.  They are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring.”  If Scorsese is the epitome of the heartless director, Capra is the embodiment of heart on screen.  It’s a Wonderful Life is simply the most heartfelt movie ever made (and it’s Jimmy Stewart’s best performance).  From It Happened One Night to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Meet John Doe to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, nobody made movie magic like Capra.  If you can sit through all his films without crying and smiling simultaneously, I’m betting there’s something wrong with your tear ducts or your cheek muscles. 

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4.  Elia Kazan:  Reviled by the Hollywood left, Kazan was also one of Hollywood’s greatest directors.  His IMDB reads like a top ten list of films: A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata!, A Streetcar Named Desire, Gentleman’s Agreement, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  The performances Kazan elicited from his actors are groundbreaking and astonishing.  Unlike some others on this list, Kazan’s films do not date (other than Gentleman’s Agreement, perhaps) – they remain timely and prescient.  And they’re quick-moving and entertaining, which is tough to do with heavy drama.  He does it with ease. 

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3.  John Ford:  The man revolutionized movie making, and is worshipped widely for all the right reasons.  First off, the Western is the American genre, and Ford was the best.  Name the best Westerns of all time, and you’ll be sure to come up with Stagecoach, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The Informer is an early masterpiece, and there’s no movie more fun than The Quiet Man (plus, the cinematography is enough to bring a tear to your eye).  Mister Roberts is a chock full of great performances (Lemmon and Cagney stand out, of course).  How Green Was My Valley is a beautiful film.  The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln are rightly credited with making Henry Fonda the quintessential American actor. 

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2.  Akira Kurosawa:  Nobody plumbed the depths of human emotion like Kurosawa.  Ikiru is known by few outside the film buff community, but it is a masterful expression of human hope and tragedy.  Ran is exciting and thrilling and brilliant.  Throne of Blood is a wonderful adaptation of Macbeth.  The Seven Samurai is tremendous, an adventurous expose of the best and worst mankind has to offer.  Rashomon is a groundbreaking exploration of perspective.  I could keep going, but there’s no point – few will argue with Kurosawa’s placement on this list.

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1.  William Wyler:  Underrated beyond all rationality, Wyler was a master of all genres.  He covered gothic romance (Wuthering Heights), period pieces (Jezebel) light comedy (How to Steal a Million and Roman Holiday), film noir (The Desperate Hours and Detective Story), epic (Ben Hur), morality tale (Friendly Persuasion), horror (The Collector), western (The Westerner) and wartime drama (Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives).  His first tier films are unmatched (Dodsworth, Ben Hur, and The Best Years of Our Lives deserve to make anyone’s top ten list), and his second tier films (The Big Country, The Heiress) are better than most first-rate directors’ first-tier films.  If you don’t believe Wyler’s range, watch these three scenes back to back:

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That’s not even the best scene from The Best Years of Our Lives (the movie contains perhaps the most beautiful love scene in screen history, between Harold Russell and Cathy O’Donnell – and, in a lesson to Aronofsky and Lynch, he didn’t need to show T&A to do it).

Whom would you put on the list?

And all the while TCM played in the background, like an old friend.

I’ve since reflected on how Turner Classic Movies has grown over the years into one of the most universally admired cultural forums in America. It’s a familiar presence in households of all political persuasions. If you like old movies, you like TCM, period.

That’s why the mini-uproar here at Big Hollywood last week was so disheartening. For those of you who missed it: during an on-air introduction to the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz gave legions of conservative viewers a collective poke in the eye, by way of a not-so-veiled sneer at talk-show host Glenn Beck. You can see the sad spectacle for yourself by clicking over to the TCM website, but here are the money quotes:

My top pick this January, A Face in the Crowd, is admittedly a little cheap. . . But, in an era where the political commentators who shout the loudest — or (dramatic pause and sly smile) cry the most — generate the biggest ratings, the prophetic nature of this 1957 classic enhances its remarkable timeliness today. . . Fifty years later, there’s a new generation of men armed with the phony authenticity of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes.

Beck, of course, has long been mocked on liberal websites for shedding tears in the midst of emotional monologues. And comparing him to Crowd character “Lonesome” Rhodes is a favorite gag of MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann.

This is hardly the first time that Mankiewicz has overstepped the bounds of good taste to take a swipe at conservatives. Big Hollywood readers have called him onto the carpet before for inserting needless political commentary into his TCM introductions for films like The Fighting Seabees (1944) and Capricorn One (1977).

As a former co-host of the liberal radio talk show The Young Turks, he frequently unloaded on ideological enemies with stunning vitriol. In one episode, he scoffed at a video of conservative journalist Michelle Malkin pointing out that most terrorists are “young Muslim males” with a rejoinder about “dumb Asian bitches.” (his radio partner, Cenk Uygur, promptly dipped even further into rank misogyny, dismissing Malkin as a “racist whore.”) In another public appearance, the same duo graced their audience with the following banter:

Cenk Uygur: “This is non-partisan, so when I say that Republicans suck c***, I just mean that literally.”

Ben Mankiewicz (laughing): “Name a Republican who’s not gay. Can that be done?”

All of this is par for the course among Lexus liberals, who ever luxuriate in their reputation for tolerance in between rants filled with the worst sorts of racism, sexism, and class warfare. I still remember laughing out loud earlier this year when, in a Los Angeles Times article bemoaning the hardships of well-heeled, fashion-conscious women, Mankiewicz’s wife spoke of feeling

guilty about flashing her finds in front of the housekeeper who cleans the Westside town house she shares with her husband. “I have racks for shoes and boxes. I will turn around the boxes that are particularly expensive when she comes,” she said, explaining that she turns the side marked with the price toward the wall of the closet so it doesn’t show. “I know she’s having a tough time — she told me. You can’t have an $800 box of shoes showing.”

That is what passes for good manners, charitable action, and noble sacrifice in today’s Hollywood.

Mankiewicz was recently fired from a disastrous year-long stint co-helming the former Siskel & Ebert show At the Movies, and has since taken up blogging at The Huffington Post in addition to his TCM duties. “Growing up in Washington, D.C.,” he says, “politics and sports were always a lot more important than movies. They still are, for that matter.” When pressed to name a film that has changed his life, he answers, “Hey, I love movies, but let’s not get carried away! I don’t think one has changed my life.” These comments alone should have disqualified him from ever being hired as a featured host at TCM.

With every snide put-down and sneaky swipe against movie-loving conservatives, a universally admired television treasure becomes a little less so. Ben Mankiewicz seems destined to continue to alienate a full half of the channel’s audience, one needless insult at a time, until they quit the whole business in disgust and retreat to their Netflix queues. The TCM brass, presumably a bit more concerned with gauche ratings than the hired help, would be wise to heed the warning of the literary critic Francis Jeffrey, who wrote almost two centuries ago that, “Goodwill, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one.”

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).

#1 – JAWS
I saw this all-time classic as a 9-year-old on opening day, and saw it a second time at the Saturday matinee. To this day, I am afraid to swim in the ocean. That shark is always there in my imagination. The poster is literal, but haunting.

#2 – CHINATOWN
This is truly a work of art. The smoke shrouding the ultimate mystery of Evelyn Mulwray, and the stylized version of Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson), the hard-boiled detective who unravels it all.

#3 – THE DARK KNIGHT
Impossible to separate Heath Ledger’s death from his remarkable interpretation of The Joker. This is an amazing image. In 30 years, I will look at this poster and immediately feel the impact of Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece.

#4 – BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
You can almost hear Audrey Hepburn warbling “Moon River” at the sight of this iconic poster. Every woman wanted to be her and every man wanted to be with her.

#5 – SECRETARY
The 2002 cult classic about a sadomasochistic relationship between a demanding lawyer (James Spader) and a submissive secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The movie is an under-appreciated gem. The poster may be even better.

#6 – UNFORGIVEN
This is my favorite poster made for Clint Eastwood’s masterful revisionist Western. Simple. Classic. Tells you everything you need to know about Clint’s Bill Munny character.

#7 – AMERICAN BEAUTY
A beautiful image that suggests the perversity that lies just beneath the surface of the suburban neighborhood created by screenwriter Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes.

#8 – SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
“You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won’t you?” You can almost hear Dr. Hannibal Lecter say it. The Death’s-head moth “lodged” in Clarice Starling’s throat. Brilliant image.

#9 – VERTIGO
An ode to acrophobia as Detective Scottie Ferguson (as played by Jimmy Stewart) battles his fear of heights while becoming obsessed with Madeleine Elster (the stunning Kim Novak). This kaleidoscopic design immediately brings the strains of Bernard Hermann’s amazing score into my head.

#10 – PULP FICTION
Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in all her swagger. Yes, she does wind up with a sharpie circle on her chest and a shot of adrenaline, but the whole gritty movie is captured with this image.

HONORABLE MENTION
- in no particular order -
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
SWEENEY TODD
MEAN STREETS
AMADEUS
GONE WITH THE WIND
METROPOLIS
KING KONG (1939 Fay Wray version)
CLOVERFIELD
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter@LAMase.