We all know of the great slights that Hollywood deals out to the American right. We see them all the time. From the TV shows that casts Republicans as villains, the movies that make Christians out to be hypocrites or even outright evil. Traditional motherhood and fatherhood also find constant ridicule at the hands of Hollywood. The overt examples are everywhere, of course. But the grand swipe isn’t all that Hollywood indulges. There are also these ubiquitous, small, quick, too fast to notice swipes against the right perpetrated by Hollywood. A fine example of the side-swipe approach to denigrating the right came in the April 29 episode of The Mentalist, a CBS detective show starring Australian actor Simon Baker.

Now, at the top here I want to say that The Mentalist is generally an inoffensive, amusing little show fashioned in the Sherlock Holmes mode featuring a detective that sees every little clue and can with ease assemble these disparate facts to solve the crime. Baker turns in a funny performance with just enough underlying darkness to make his character interesting.

But, despite that it is generally a diverting entertainment, the show is just as disposed to slam anything from the right as any other and the April 29 episode gives us a prime example of that.

In the episode titled “Red All Over,” the investigative team tries to solve the murder of a media mogul. One of the plot lines deals with the leader of a Scientology-styled cult played by famed actor Malcolm McDowell. (more…)

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“Close-ups, affectionate or noble, are held at leisure; long shots are sustained long after their narrative role has been performed. A marginal figure is suddenly dwelt on, lovingly enlarged to fill the center of the screen. Informed with heightened emotion, a single shot, unexpectedly interposed — a ragged line of men marching into nowhere, one of them playing a bugle-call on his harmonica — assumes a deeper significance than is given by its function in the story. This is one of the properties of poetry. They Were Expendable is a heroic poem.” – Lindsay Anderson

The wondrous shots about which Mr. Anderson writes were masterminded by John Ford, but they were brought to life on film by Joseph H. August (1890-1947), one of the great cinematographers of the age. It was August who memorably crafted the hauntingly beautiful images of night-fog and shadows for Ford’s The Informer (1935), which won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. He also lensed now-classic movies like Gunga Din and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (both 1939), and during the war served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves. (more…)