And as you know, carbon is evil. Like me, but in chemical form.

So, here we are, sitting atop the nexus of lefty journalism, where the writer has managed to slap together two tasty slabs of PC red meat: feminism and environmentalism.

Yes, men are pigs, but not just to women. They’re pigs to the planet too. In an amazingly clever move, Time used a picture of Homer Simpson to illustrate the piece!

The caption: “A typical man.”

Which makes me wonder: what kind of picture would you need to illustrate a writer for Time?

My guess is, it would be the long gone Cathy, from the comic strip… Cathy.

She and her stringy-haired neuroticism will be missed. I loved her fearless take on lip gloss.

Or maybe it was her bumbling husband, Irving Hillman. Boy does he love gadgets -even if he didn’t know how to work them!

Ack indeed.

Anyway, I digress – the reason why men emit more carbon is because we eat more meat, and travel a lot. Women eat more leafy crap- and they’re less likely to fly all over the place, for work.

So is this where environmentalism takes you?

For women climbing that career ladder, and doing what men do – they must stop all that because their behavior can only harm the planet. To save the earth, they should stay home, wash dishes with non-phosphate detergent and change the baby’s recyclable diapers. Probably barefoot.

At least Time has the courage to point this out.

But I wonder if their female employees will take heed and go home.

After all, the planet is more important than their progress.

And if you disagree with me, you’re worse than Hitler.

Tonight:

Rick Leventhal

Kimberly Guilfoyle

FNC.com’s Chris Kensler

Towering above all, though, was (and still is) my unabashed obsession with the two titanic literary talents chiefly responsible for birthing the entire shebang: J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) and Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). I consider each the complete equal of the other, two flat-out geniuses destined to be remembered and reread hundreds of years after the Pulitzer-winning authors praised by most mainstream critics are forgotten.

But it was only recently, after decades of ever-increasing reading disappointment, that I grudgingly began to admit the truth: I don’t particularly care for fantasy per se. What I actually cherish is something far more rare: the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.

This realization eliminates, at a stroke, virtually everything written under the banner of fantasy today.

The mere trappings of the genre do nothing for me when wedded to the now-ubiquitous interminable soap-opera plots (a conservative friend of mine once accurately derided “fat fantasy” cycles such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as “Lord of the Rings 90210”). Nor do they impress me in the least when placed into the hands of writers clearly bored with the classic mythic undertones of the genre, and who try to shake things up with what can best be described as postmodern blasphemies against our mythic heritage.

Take the latest novel by popular Brit author Joe Abercrombie (b. 1974), who regularly hits the UK bestseller lists with his self-described “edgy yet humorous un-heroic fantasy.” Titled The Heroes, the tome is guaranteed, given the scribe’s past work, to feature the exact opposite of what it advertises. “Abercrombie takes the grand tradition of high fantasy, and drags it down into the gutter, in the best possible way,” gushed Time magazine about Best Served Cold, his previous book.

Alas, I haven’t read it — Abercrombie’s freshman effort, the massive First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Were Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings) was more than enough for me. Endless scenes of torture, treachery and bloodshed drenched in scatology and profanity concluded with a resolution worthy of M. Night Shyamalan at his worst, one that did its best to hurt, disappoint, and dishearten any lover of myths and their timeless truths. Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth, and you have some idea of what to expect should you descend into Abercrombie’s jaded literary sewer.

On various blogs you can find critics raving about this mythic bait-and-switch. “Gritty, violent, morally ambiguous and darkly funny fantasy with a streak of intelligent cynicism,” says Adam Whitehead of The Wertzone. “Dark, almost nihilistic, yet shot through with black humour,” writes Simon Appleby at Book Geeks, adding approvingly that, “[Abercrombie] writes about ordinary people thrust in to extraordinary situations who seldom, if ever, acquit themselves heroically.”

Troll the Amazon reviews of many of the latest books hailed as among the great mold-breaking fantasies of the last few decades, and you’ll see similar memes cropping up again and again. One fan reviewing Matthew Woodring Stover’s otherwise ingeniously plotted Caine books bemoans, as I did when trudging through them, the main character’s continuous “bitter, cynical and almost self-hating monologue.” Most of the second book in the series has Caine paralyzed and gracing the reader with detailed descriptions like, “I am — right now, lying naked in a pool of a dead woman’s shit, chained to stone, gangrene eating my dead-meat legs….”

The latest entry in Steven Erikson’s ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen, a series running many thousands of pages, is described by one exhausted fan as “pointlessly depressing. . . a lot of death that seems purely random and serving no purpose at all.” “Despair and fatalism dominate,” confirms another reader. (For those who haven’t gotten enough, Erikson recently announced that, with the help of another writer, he will now be expanding his opus from ten volumes to twenty-two — assuming both he and his fans live that long.)

Michael Swanwick’s subversive 1993 novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter sported a title that lured in many young girls thinking they were getting a standard Young Adult fantasy. According to Publisher’s Weekly (and confirmed by my torturous slog through it a few years ago), it was actually a “nihilistic tale features a human changeling who tries to make her way in a cutthroat society that mirrors contemporary life. . . a powerful, yet dark and hopeless fantasy that should forever shatter charming illusions of Faerie and its folk.” Scenes of teenybopper elf sex and coke-snorting pile one atop the other until the book becomes to fantasy literature what the films of Larry Clark (Kids, Bully) are to cinema.

To be sure, people have every right to publish such books, and in so doing express their frustration or boredom with what can loosely be called the classic Tolkien/Howard mode. Such blowback against the grandmasters of fantasy is nothing new — it stretches back at least to 1934, when a teenaged Robert Bloch (who later went on to write Psycho) wrote in the letter column of the pulp magazine Weird Tales that:

I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girlfriend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her a place of honor, either on the cover or on the inner illustration. Such has been Conan’s history, and from the realms of the Kushites to the lands of Aquilonia, from the shores of the Shemites to the palaces of Dyme-Novell-Bolonia, I cry: “Enough of this brute and his iron-thewed sword-thrusts — may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls.”

But, to quote Tolkien’s famous rejoinder to his critics from his introduction to the revised edition of The Lord of the Rings, “Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.” The other side thinks that their stuff is, at long last, turning the genre into something more original, thoughtful, and ultimately palatable to intelligent, mature audiences. They and their fans are welcome to that opinion. For my part — and I think Tolkien and Howard would have heartily agreed — I think they’ve done little more than become cheap purveyors of civilizational graffiti.

Soiling the building blocks and well-known tropes of our treasured modern myths is no different than other artists taking a crucifix and dipping it in urine, covering it in ants, or smearing it with feces. In the end, it’s just another small, pathetic chapter in the decades-long slide of Western civilization into suicidal self-loathing. It’s a well-worn road: bored middle-class creatives (almost all of them college-educated liberals) living lives devoid of any greater purpose inevitably reach out for anything deemed sacred by the conservatives populating any artistic field. They co-opt the language, the plots, the characters, the cliches, the marketing, and proceed to deconstruct it all like a mad doctor performing an autopsy. Then, using cynicism, profanity, scatology, dark humor, and nihilism, they put it back together into a Frankenstein’s monster designed to shock, outrage, offend, and dishearten.

In the case of the fantasy genre, the result is a mockery and defilement of the mythopoeic splendor that true artists like Tolkien and Howard willed into being with their life’s blood. Honor is replaced with debasement, romance with filth, glory with defeat, and hope with despair. Edgy? Nah, just punk kids farting in class and getting some giggles from the other mouth-breathers.

It’s quite rich to see many of the guys writing fantasy today being praised for (to once again quote Publisher’s Weekly talking about Joe Abercrombie) successfully exposing the “madness, passion, and horror of war.” How soon we forget that some of the early work of J.R.R. Tolkien — the man who pioneered the selfsame High Fantasy now being dragged “down into the gutter” to make it suitably “edgy” — was penned while he sat in the trenches of World War I, even while most his closest friends were being killed. Tolkien later wrote the a sizable amount of The Lord of the Rings during the Second World War, while worrying about two of his sons as they headed off to do their part.

Call me humorless, call me old-fashioned, but I daresay the good professor had a much better idea of war and heroes than the nihilistic jokesters writing modern fantasy.

To be continued. . . . .

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz.

At the same time, 3-D movies were another innovation being used to lure your grandparents and parents away from their televisions. Nineteen Fifty-Two, the year before Shane, saw the first flurry of attempts to do for depth what This Is Cinerama did for height and width. By 1955, audiences had seen Vincent Price (eventually christened “The King of 3-D!”) appear in House of Wax and several other horror titles. John Wayne used 3-D for Hondo. The now-famous cult classic Creature from the Black Lagoon crawled off the screen and toward audiences who didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. The great Alfred Hitchcock even toyed with the third dimension in Dial M for Murder.

While the two potential TV killers, widescreen and 3-D, warred with each other for supremacy (one contemporary ad for Cinerama proclaimed “NO GLASSES NEEDED,” reminding audiences of the eye fatigue and uncomfortable headgear necessitated by its rival), these fads spurred frenzied discussions among filmmakers and studio heads. The 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain was then in theaters, mocking the shortsightedness of many 1920s Hollywoodites caught in the bedlam of the transition from silents to sound. Everyone in modern Hollywood, therefore, was wary of catastrophically missing out on what, for all they knew, could snowball into the 1950s equivalent of that epochal transition.

That is, almost everyone. George Stevens, for his part, looked on these developments with wry amusement. His Shane was in the can, having been filmed a year earlier in the summer and fall of 1951. And he seemed perfectly comfortable knowing that his plain ol’ 2-D picture would be debuting in the midst of all this hoopla. “I’m interested in all the new ideas, such as 3-D and widescreen,” he told one reporter at the time, “but I don’t believe the technical method of presentation is the real important thing. Only the picture matters. It’s what goes on the screen that counts.”

Perhaps that is why, when Stevens was choosing a cinematographer to shoot Shane, he zeroed in on a man named Loyal Griggs. Griggs was a Paramount fixture. Born in 1906, raised in Los Angeles, and graduated from Los Angeles High in 1924, he immediately scored a grunt job at Paramount in their effects department. Beginning at a paltry $80 a month and often logging hundred-hour work weeks with no overtime pay, he persevered for nearly three decades, slaving his way up the Paramount food chain towards the coveted rank of Director of Photography. Finally, in 1950, he became head lensman on a trio of mediocre flicks (a gangster pic and two westerns) for producers Bill Pine and Bill Thomas.

At the comparatively late age of 44, he was at long last a full-fledged Hollywood cinematographer.

Stevens had employed Griggs for some process photography on his last film, the popular and well-regarded A Place in the Sun (1951), and during pre-production on Shane it was becoming increasingly apparent that he needed a cameraman who not only could film pretty pictures, but who could use color, lenses, and composition to manipulate images for serious dramatic effect. The director, you see, had chosen Wyoming’s Teton Range over a slew of other locations (Utah, Idaho, Colorado) after sending a camera crew on an exhaustive 4,500-mile trek around the American West, filming test footage in glorious Technicolor (itself an expensive concession made by the studio only after pressure from Stevens).

But while the awe-inspiring, snow-capped peaks and grand desolation west of Jackson Hole looked perfect, there was also a problem — the scenery filmed too well. New York Times writer Jack Goodman, who visited the Wyoming location while Shane was being shot, laid out the essential challenge in a September 9, 1951 article for that newspaper: “The Teton Range west of the Hole has been widely photographed before this and has become associated with tourism and dude ranching through hundreds of travel-magazine articles. . . Further, as Stevens now explains it, Technicolor ‘tends to glamorize and romanticize,’ its basic weakness being ‘the rainbow quality’ it lends to scenic shots.”

So the question was how to get rid of what Stevens once derided in another interview as the, “Oh, what a beautiful morning!’ Technicolor musical look.” How could one make rich, saturated Technicolor images bend to the will of a director who foresaw his story’s need not only for beauty and majesty, but doom and gloom?

Enter Loyal Griggs. He had worked in the various process, front-projection, and special effects departments of Paramount for three decades. There wasn’t a trick in the book he hadn’t seen. And he brought his full array of talents to bear on making Shane one of the most variegated Technicolor films in Hollywood history.

The goal was to achieve the filmic version of what in art circles is called “Rembrandt Lighting,” a classic, shadowy style filled with dramatic possibilities. To that end, Stevens and Griggs studied the famous photographs and drawings of the Teton Range made by William Henry Jackson, as well as the paintings of famed western artist Charles Marion Russell. Most Technicolor cinematographers were afraid to lose exposure and saturation, but Griggs ruthlessly degraded both when necessary. Early each morning weather stations were consulted, and if rain or clouds were on the way the filmmakers would rush out to take advantage. Many times the sun appearing through the gray expanse would ruin the effect, and so Griggs had such shots backprinted (made artificially darker) in the lab to preserve the shadow-laden, brooding atmosphere.

Back in the Fifties, film stocks weren’t “fast” enough (i.e. sensitive enough to light) to pick up anything during a nighttime shoot. So Griggs used a trick called “day-for-night” — first filming in bright sunlight, then adjusting the exposure in the lab to make it look as if it had been filmed in the evening — to capture some of the most important scenes in the movie, complete with visible mountains and vast plains in the distance.

This particular technique was itself common enough, but Griggs took it to the next level, using optical printing to single out characters in the frame and boost their exposure while leaving the rest of the image alone, giving the actors an eldritch, almost supernatural glow of the kind moonlight makes on Halloween. For the very last shots of the picture, he filmed a graveyard bathed in a severe darkness, then used optical printing to insert Alan Ladd’s character as a ghostly silhouette.

Jack Goodman, viewing the rushes while visiting for his New York Times article, came away most impressed: “[By] not hesitating to shoot portions of Shane on days when clouds race across nearby lakes, Stevens has managed to make this most beautiful of western vistas positively forbidding.”

Careful use of lenses also played a role. Stevens and Griggs show here some of the earliest examples of filming vast outdoor spaces with telephoto lenses normally used for facial closeups. The result was a flattening of the depth in an image, which made the distant mountains in the background seem far closer and more imposing. This is nowhere more effective than in the justifiably famous funeral scene of Shane. “There was the funeral on the hilltop,” Stevens explained, describing the master shot for this key sequence, “and there was the dis­tance where cattle grazed, and then there was the town at the crossing, a western town like western towns were. There were the great moun­tains that rose behind it. This was all arranged in one camera view, one camera view that had to do with a man being put away in his grave with the synthesis of the whole story wrapped around it.”

Stevens wanted to connect 1950s families with a time when “death was a very large part of living.” His inspiration for the scene came while visiting a tiny pioneer hamlet in California:

Bridgeport, on the way to the Sierra Nevadas, is. . . a poor little town. . . About three miles away, in the foothills, there is a graveyard. . . A man comes in his front door from a funeral and perhaps goes out the back door to bring in the pail of milk before he goes to bed that night. If he has just buried his mother, he can look up to where she is on that hillside. While he was at the cemetery, he could look back to those beautiful mountains. This is what the pioneers came for, this vast country, and a little cemetery with a fence around it. It’s there waiting. Mother, all those who have gone before, are there. It will be throughout his time, and the man can look down to the town and see the house where mother came as a bride, and where he was born and where he was raised. There is a convenience in being able to visually associate all of these essential aspects of life in a frontier world; some of it isn’t around the corner or on the other side of town, it’s all right there and it’s all true. I see that, I know what it means.

As Shane was nearing its release, Paramount ran a test of the film on one of the big new screens being developed, to see how it would look blown up to that size. To make the square-ish image fit onto a rectangular screen, they unceremoniously chopped off a portion of the top and bottom of Griggs’ lovingly composed compositions. Some critics noticed this right off and grumbled. (Lord knows what expletives emerged from Griggs’ own mouth!) But most thought it was a decent enough compromise for the treat of getting magnified, IMAX-like versions of Shane’s Wyoming vistas.

On April 15, 1953, the industry trade paper Variety ran an article stating that

Shane was previewed in a process stage on Paramount’s experimental widescreen, to an audience perched on makeshift seating. Despite these abnormal viewing conditions, the picture’s worth was not lessened, and the widescreen projection did contribute, in some measure, to a sense of bigness, although, again for the record, Shane would be a big picture on any size screen. Theaters equipped for widescreen showings should find the extra ballyhoo angle of this gimmick adding to the dollars taken at the box office.

The efforts of the cinematographer were especially singled out for distinction: “Pictorially, the picture has been beautifully photographed in color by Loyal Griggs. Wyoming’s scenic splendors against which the story is filmed are breathtaking. Sunlight, the shadow of rainstorms and the eerie lights of night, play a realistic part in making the film a visual treat.” The Hollywood Reporter chimed in as well, praising the use of “long shots and lovely Technicolor hues to establish mood, some of the scenes emerging like exquisite paintings.”

Soon after that test, Paramount debuted the film in New York at Radio City Music Hall, which had just installed one of the first widescreens in the country. On April 24, 1953, The Hollywood Reporter gushed to an industry town holding its collective breath: “New York Critics Enthusiastic About Shane, Wide Screen.” Frank Quinn of The New York Daily Mirror conveyed the almost futuristic, game-changing aspect of the event: “A thrilling new visual concept of motion pictures unfolds with the debut of Shane on the panoramic screen. The screen is wide, more oblong like a picture postcard.”

In Los Angeles, the movie’s star-studded premiere was equally rapturous. Celebrities like Cary Grant, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Irene Dunne, Charles Coburn, Mitzi Gaynor, Rory Calhoun, Anita Ekberg, Shelly Winters, and Claire Trevor poured into Grauman’s Chinese Theater as hundreds of fans cheered. “Shane Premiere Gala Fete: Hollywood Turns Out in Panoramic Pandemonium,” was the headline in the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express.

Philip K. Scheuer, longtime film critic for the Los Angeles Times (who had begun his career covering the silents), penned in his own newspaper a thoughtful review of both film and presentation:

When, in the good old days, we called a picture an epic we must have had some reason for it. Later, through misuse and repetition, the word fell into disrepute and we put quotation marks around it to indicate we didn’t really believe an “epic” was an epic any more. With Shane one is tempted to leave the quote marks off. . . .

At the Chinese, where it premiered last night, it is being projected onto what is, by a slight margin, the largest screen in town (about 50 x 25 feet). Shane was not made for magnification, but its detail “blows up” very well in Technicolor, with not too much of the picture cut off at top and bottom. Directional sound, from three speakers, is used sparingly but effectively. . . However, I am quite sure Shane would hold you even on a 17-inch screen.

It wasn’t long before the trades were reporting that — much like today’s twenty-first-century theaters rushing to install 3-D capability — dozens of 1953 theaters were hurriedly converting to widescreen in a frenzied attempt to take advantage of Shane’s theatrical run. Reviewers and audiences alike were almost unanimously hailing it as an instant classic. The Saturday Review honed in on exactly the things that we’ve been discussing here, noting “Loyal Griggs’ handsome Technicolor photography. . . his cameras point insistently to the physical beauties of the place — the play of light on the distant mountains, the golden skies after a shower, the vast expanse of green and coppery fields. But none of this is merely travelogue prettiness. Nature enters dynamically into the development of the story, its moods matching and underlining the dramatic action.”

Conservative Henry Luce’s Time magazine made the distinction between gimmickry and artistry: “Without recourse to tricky 3-D photography and Polaroid glasses, Stevens, with ordinary Technicolor camera and sound track, has given his flat old story a real third dimension of believability.” A grandstanding Democratic politician from Wyoming, Lester C. Hunt, even went so far as to stand on the floor of the Senate and laud the picture’s stunning portrayal of the beauties of his home state.

So although Shane wasn’t a real widescreen Hollywood movie (the first real one was The Robe, a Christian tale shot in Twentieth-Century Fox’s Cinemascope format, which hit theaters later that fall and quickly became one of the all-time box-office champions), it was the first to be presented with much fanfare on a widescreen, and its marvelous cinematography did much to warm audiences to the new format. Meanwhile 3-D, hampered by a variety of technical limitations, would die out by the end of the decade, experiencing only intermittent spurts of life thereafter (time will tell how this latest 2010 revival pans out.)

Loyal Griggs won his first and only Oscar for Shane (the only Shane nominee to take home a gold statue that night), and went on to a distinguished career as a Director of Photography. A few years later, when Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a combined Technicolor/special effects/VistaVision expert, he turned to Griggs, and the result was another classic of gargantuan proportions, The Ten Commandments. That film netted Griggs another Oscar nomination, and in 1975 he received a special U.S. Bicentennial award for his photography on the picture. He died in 1978 at the age of 71, with two great Technicolor spectaculars forever linked to his name.

If I had to turn to one person to sum up the impact of Shane’s visuals, I’d pick the words of Hollywood writer/critic Ruth Waterbury, who’s own review appeared on Friday, June 5, 1953 in the pages of The Los Angeles Examiner. “The glory that God gave to the American West has been captured by it,” she said of the photography. “The strength, the fidelity, the weakness, the insecurity, that God gave man is reflected in it. . . Shane is on wide screen with stereophonic sound, all very fine. But it would still be magnificent if it were the size of a postage stamp. You’ll remember it long, long after you see it. In fact, I think I will personally remember it always.”

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

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The development of VistaVision: Here’s an informative overview of Paramount Pictures’ own 1950s widescreen format, which debuted a bit too late to be used in Shane. In my humble opinion, it was perhaps the most impressive of all the various permutations of widescreen created during that era. Loyal Griggs used VistaVision for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), John Ford used it for The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock for To Catch a Thief among others.

And check out the rest of The American Widescreen Museum website for even more history on widescreen photography in general.

Order a nifty CD-ROM book on The Making of Shane. Wish I had known about this before starting in on these articles. Compiled by Walt Farmer, it reportedly has a full tour of all of the film’s Wyoming locations, including detailed directions and GPS coordinates in case you want to hunt them down yourself (I love reading about — or performing myself — that kind of historical detective work). He reveals that the only structure still standing from the movie is Ernie Wright’s homestead (the sodbuster played by Edgar Buchanan, whom the Ryker Gang intimidates by running their cattle through his farm and crops). Apparently, the Cemetery Hill still sports a faint depression where Torrey’s grave was dug. Alas, save for a few fence posts and ruins, everything else is gone.

The cost is $20 plus $5 S&H, but if you are a hardcore Shane fan, or simply someone who’d like to poke around the film’s locations the next time you are out Wyoming way, it sounds like an invaluable purchase.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

***

Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for “political reasons.” Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.

It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.

Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list…

…Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.

“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

***

Read the full article at the Daily Caller.

Two of the world’s greatest theater directors, Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Elia Kazan, seemed almost simultaneously drawn to the Bible in their own personal and/or artistic quests for some meaning to late 1950’s, early 1960’s Man.

Both productions were compared to one another in Time not in the Arts Section but the U.S. Section … hmmm … and with no name attached to it.

Therefore not merely a review but a Time Magazine pronouncement!

The anonymous editor had this to say in conclusion:

“This flawed ending (of Chayefsky’s Gideon) echoes the flawed conclusion in Broadway’s (and MacLeish’s) J.B. of three years ago; both Playwrights MacLeish and Chayefsky assume that man has somehow outgrown God and must evolve a higher morality. They deny that the end of man is to glorify God and seem to agree that man must express, sanction, and glorify himself.”

This, of course, sets a prophetically New World Order and decidedly Marxist tone for America’s future.

The great surprise for me comes in Time Magazine’s own warning:

Paradoxically, the denial and doubt of God have led not to the affirmation of man but to his greater despair. For it is despair from which such questing morality plays as J.B. and Gideon seem to spring.

Hmmm … Man’s “greater despair” … prompted by his “denial and doubt of God”.

Well?!

Sounds possibly like the fruit of an oil rig disaster to me!

Setting the disputations of Theater’s and Literature’s greater lights aside, I find Time Magazine’s very avuncular cautioning of America, its flashing red lights about “denial and doubt” … utterly unexpected.

Refreshing, actually.

But then again, that was Time almost fifty years ago.

After roughly 100 years of maneuverings by the Progressive Movement, drawing-board-strategies cooked up in Progressivism’s various and sundry fraternities around the world, its indisputable culmination in the radical “transformations of America” by the Obama Nation is now at hand!

And, by God and Henry Kissinger … and/or George Soros … the great divide is finally in our laps!

A virtual Red Sea parts the Enlightened Despots from the Tea Partiers.

Abortion defines the divide most profoundly … but faith in God, as even Time pointed out over forty years ago, is unquestionably the other troublesome matter at hand.

A few, vitally important leaders in the Progressive camp – the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi and Joseph Biden – have repeatedly trotted out their Christian and Catholic credentials.

Unfortunately for them, these declarations of faith grow as spiritually empty and ominous as President Obama’s reluctant estrangement from the likes of Rev. Wright and his legendary damnation of America.

Pro-abortion Catholics?!

Pro-abortion, Progressive Baptists and Presbyterians?!

It takes the patience of Job, indeed, to put up with such shamelessly brazen hypocrisy.

Nothing defies the Golden Rule more profanely than Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortion.

“Do unto gestating infants what you would not want done unto your own gestating infancy.”

That is why what is left of America, after the Progressive Thieves in the Broad Light of Day have virtually used the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution for toilet paper – not only in the commodes of the Supreme Court but the Obama Nation’s Justice Department as well – our response to this Progressive Theft is basically the Tea Partiers … and most of Fox News.

Now we must call upon the patience of Job!

Remember the mocking “friends” of Job, rather like Bill Maher, urging our now very American Tea Party heroes and heroines to “curse God and die”?

In the end, of course, Job wins and the Devil loses.

It’s fun now … almost Biblically prescient … to keep a scorecard on Bill Maher.

His increasingly numerous appearances occasionally have a George Will at the table to embarrass the Devil’s barrister about certain realities, such as oil rigs off the shores of George Soros’ much beloved Brazil.

George Soros?!

More than the Devil’s Advocate, I tell you.

America as Job now, the Tea Partiers as Job’s best symbol … and Sarah Palin, I must say, as their Joan of Arc and Maggie Thatcher?

I don’t think the Progressive Movement’s Devils, not any of them, have a chance!

It’s all gone to their heads.

Rather like the Presidency has almost predictably deranged the President.

Reality has him now trying to read signs in the sand.

God abandoned the Progressives 37 years ago.

When the bipartisan Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade.

Now all the Progressives seem able to do is to lead Bill Clinton back into temptation.

With the patience of Job, America will be delivered from the Obama Nation.

Not even Nero fiddled more deviously than our President doodling in the sand, while actually enjoying the fact that America’s economic future is burning away like an oil rig.

I’ll bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you GOP’ers?

In response to my recent column on James Cameron, somebody wrote me:

Who cares about James Cameron? … If people spent half the time reading about their local politicians and congressional reps as they do about the Hollywood elite, this country would be a thousand times better off.

Both unfortunately and importantly, the man speaks the truth. Even more sadly however, is the response that he would receive from most of mainstream America; “So what?”

Would the world be better off if Americans cared more about their local government? Probably? Do they? No.

Having faced that reality, Conservatives need to stop trying to force people to take part in a world for which they have no interest. Conservatives should instead focus on firmly planting their flag in the territory that is the American cultural landscape.

The fact of the matter is that most Americans don’t care about their local representatives nor the 48th district race of Michigan. Most would sooner read Lady Gaga’s opinions concerning seal-clubbing in the Yukon Territories or listen to Justin Bieber extol the virtues of Invisalign.

The fact of the matter is that to most Americans, politicians (particularly the “hackish” variety) are boring. Everything about the whole line of work is dull. The policy talk is boring, the banquets are boring, the Men’s Wearhouse suits are boring and even the sex scandals have slowed to a lull.

On the flip-side, even if a celebrity is inarticulate and unlikable (basically, Sean Penn), they still have a trump card seated firmly in their back-pocket in being a celebrity.

It’s not a fact that we’re proud of as Americans, but we have a strange fascination with Tinseltown. Perhaps it’s due to years of glamorization and shiny packaging or maybe it’s just because Americans want to live vicariously through Lohan’s latest coke-bender. The fact remains, that the industry as a whole maintains a huge influence over the American people, and it’s an industry that Conservatives have ignored for far too long.

Let me put it for you this way; Robert Downey Jr., with one Tweet could hold more influence over the culture than the Karl Rove/Newt Gingrich/Dick Morris superfriends combined.

Barack Obama understands this all too well. Obama “the politician” was never elected. Obama “the celebrity” was. He gets it… When will conservatives?

During the same period, various Leftist writers began penning spy stories of their own in reaction to Fleming’s potent brew of unapologetic clubhouse masculinity (smoking, drinking, gambling, golfing, seducing) and unqualified patriotism, favoring a more, shall we say, morally nuanced look at the Cold War. Author John “The United States of America has gone mad” le Carré, then finding fame with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 — good guys die, bad guys win, yay!), considered Fleming’s books “cultural pornography,” and mused that in the real world Bond’s “misty, patriotic ideas” would hardly prevent him from betraying his country at the first opportunity. “Because if the money was better,” le Carré snickered with certainty, “the booze freer, and women easier in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot.”

Into this maelstrom of anti-Fleming derision came a little volume called The James Bond Dossier (1965), penned by a more notorious member of the English literati, academic-cum-novelist Kingsley Amis. A savagely witty writer, a world-class drunkard, and a conflicted serial adulterer (all qualities shared, you may recall from our previous installment, with Bond’s creator), the overarching critical statement of his book was simple enough: “Inside that conservative dark-blue worsted suit and under the same skin as a bearer of the hard-earned double-o prefix there lurks an intruder from another age,” a “Byronic hero,” who “is lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique, which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret.”

James Bond “enigmatic”?  Mrs. Fleming and her writer pals, secure in their superiority over Fleming’s simplistic nonsense, found that laughable. To them Bond was predictable and formulaic, about as enigmatic as the flashing neon sign outside of a gambling den or whorehouse. Yet against these prevailing critical winds Amis used The James Bond Dossier to build a countervailing case, one that posits that 007’s adventures “were more than simple cloak-and-dagger stories with a bit of fashionable affluence and sex thrown in.”

Guided by a close reading of the novels, Amis notes a number of startling truths about the character. Contrary to so many other fictional detectives, Bond “has no perceptible interest in the arts. . . his library is small. . . his mind is a completely utilitarian organ.” He argues convincingly that “this is an enormous refreshment after the dozens of adventure and thriller (and straight) heroes whom their authors load with learning or arty accomplishment as a reassurance, I suppose, to the more obdurately highbrow reader that he needn’t be ashamed of enjoying the stuff.”

Amis also revels in the way Bond “unreflectingly enjoys what we can no longer feel quite comfortable about” — drinking, smoking, womanizing, driving fast — but then astutely mentions the scene in Thunderball where Bond’s doctor reports the damage hard living is doing to his body and psyche. Fleming here hints at the ultimate, off-page end for his hero — a dark fate forged not by prepubescent wish-fulfillment, but by the same sense of dissolution and melancholy that haunted the author’s own final years. Such details, each deftly highlighted by Amis, give James Bond true depth.

In answer to feminazi critics decrying the (in one female reviewer’s words) “adolescent inferiority feelings compensated for” by Bond’s caveman misogyny, Amis corrects the record with aplomb. A thorough study of Bond’s varied dalliances leads to the inescapable conclusion that “However much amateur lip-curling toward women in general Bond may go in for, he never uses an individual woman unkindly, never hits one, seldom so much as raises his voice. (Rosa Klebb and Irma Blunt are admissible exceptions). . . Bond’s habitual attitude to a girl is protective, not dominant or combative. . . Women take to him because he likes them and knows how to be kind to them.” And then, Amis’ wickedly sly coup de grace: “Critical horror at Bond’s sexual victories, I feel, can have its own element of ‘compensation’.”

I’ve always found Judi Dench’s weirdly passive-aggressive, ball-busting, feminist-fantasy M of the recent Pierce Brosnan/Daniel Craig movies a nauseating false-note of a character (and one echoed by Joan Allen’s equally implausible attempt at grizzled gravitas in the Bourne films). But it wasn’t until reading Amis’ forty-five year old book that I figured out why. He points out that the M of the books is an old-school, world-weary, bridgeclub-and-cigar father-figure, one who engenders, in Fleming’s words, “a great deal of [Bond's] affection and all of his loyalty and obedience,” and is happily “loved and obeyed” by our hero throughout the series.

M’s masculinity, you see, is a crucial element to the series: a valuable link between the cold and cynical modern world and the old, towering, Kipling-esque England of war and empire, a place of great civilizational confidence. “What (if anything) holds [Bond’s] elementary moral system together,” writes Amis, “is belief in England, or at any rate a series of ideas about her.” It’s remarkable to see a writer who built his name on withering sarcasm praise Bond’s bedrock patriotism as “more sympathetic than the anguished cynicism and the torpid cynicism respectively of Messrs le Carré and [Len] Deighton.”

Amis realized early on that “Politically, Bond’s England is substantially right of center,” a world (Amis takes the quote from Dr. No) “of tennis courts and lily ponds and kings and queens. . . .”:

The England for which Bond is prepared to die, like the reasons why he’s prepared to die for it, is largely taken for granted. This differentiates it, to its advantage, from the England of most Englishman of Bond’s age group. Negative virtues are even more important in escapist than in enlightening literature, and not the least of the blessings enjoyed by Mr. Fleming’s reader is his absolute confidence that whatever any given new Bond may contain, it will not contain bitter protests or biting satire or even witty commentary about the state of the nation. We can get all that at home.

All of this met with the approval of our literary tour-guide — after an early flirtation with Communism, Amis had grown ever more disenchanted with the Left. He began to hate the overweening stupidity of the “permanent revolution,” cloaked as it was in faux intellectualism by zealots “who think student freedom is impaired when a college applies its statutes; who buy unexamined the abortion-divorce-homosexuality-censorship-racialism-marijuana package.” Or to put it another way: it was one thing for conservative women to occasionally frustrate the lecherous Amis by politely rejecting his advances, and quite another for an entire phalanx of glowering feminists to shriek “All sex is rape!” while spouting pithy inanities about fish and bicycles. By 1967, he was disgusted enough to publicly state “I think a half an hour with a convinced lefty is enough to make even the most progressive person wonder a bit whether Conservatism might not have a little more to offer.”

Shocked at his apostasy, the Left condemned much of Amis’ later work as misogynistic, racist, imperialist, homophobic — all their usual show-trial charges. Amis remained unbowed, supporting Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s while continuing to detest the loony fellow traveling of many of his friends. I particularly like how he challenged his late-in-life pal Christopher Hitchens on the younger writer’s asinine idolization of Lenin (a toxic infatuation which continues to this very day — the next time Hitchens grandstands about arresting the Pope and putting him on trial, everyone should keep in mind exactly whose century-old tactics the writer is emulating).

Amis died in 1995, his end hastened by a lifetime of prodigious drinking. Between benders he had managed to write three well-regarded, affectionate books on boozing, even as alcoholism slowly killed him. Oh well — some people overeat and keel over from heart attacks, others choose hooch. There’s worse ways to live and worse ways to die, as both Fleming and Bond well knew.

During one high point of The James Bond Dossier, the agnostic Amis laments the number of critics, both liberal and conservative, who accuse the Bond books of a “total lack of any ethical frame of reference,” and who see the character and his exploits as “both anti-human and anti-Christian.” To the contrary, he retorts:

I should have thought that a fairly orthodox moral system, vague perhaps but none the less recognizable through accumulation, pervades all Bond’s adventures. Some things are regarded as good: loyalty, fortitude, a sense of responsibility, a readiness to regard one’s safety, even one’s life, as less important than the major interests of one’s organization and one’s country. Other things are regarded as bad: tyranny, readiness to inflict pain on the weak or helpless, the unscrupulous pursuit of money and power. These distinctions aren’t excitingly novel, but they are important, and as humanist/Christian as the average reader would want.

Amen. This goes for the films, Goldfinger chief among them, as well as for the novels. Perhaps Fleming’s imaginary, pulp-fiction England — colorfully decorated as it is with outrageous villains, enormous breasts, bracing drinks, good smokes, and all the rest of it — isn’t quite the elegant “precious stone set in the silver sea” of Shakespeare’s fancy. But in a fallen, “progressive” world veering ever closer to the stuff of Orwell, we’ll take it.

James Bond — that magnificent battler of Communism and preserver of the old order — remains a blessed salve to conservatives, an antidote to the anti-Western fulminations of so many lauded writers of the modern era. Amis ends his wonderful book on an unembarrassed, heartfelt note, the sneering Malcolm Muggeridges of the world be damned:

Most of the above had already been written when Ian Fleming died. I hope I’ve sufficiently conveyed my admiration for what I think he did best. When a few Easters have gone by without a new Bond adventure, regret at the passing of his creator may well help to bring about an assessment of his proper place in literature. This, as I see it, is with those demi-giants of an earlier day: Jules Verne, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle. Ian Fleming has set his stamp on the story of action and intrigue, bringing to it a sense of our time, a power and a flair that will win him readers when all the protests about his supposed deficiencies have been forgotten. He leaves no heirs.

Ian Fleming’s spy fiction was pulp. Bond is pulp. And yet I agree with Amis: beneath all of the “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism” of a book (or a movie) like Goldfinger lies more honest humanity, morality, and existential truth than has been mustered up by most of the “nuanced” and “complex” novelists of our time over their entire award-winningly wretched careers.

This concludes our look at Ian Fleming’s rousing James Bond adventure Goldfinger starring Sean Connery. Come back next week for the beginning of an all-new For Conservative Movie Lovers series, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Goldfinger is available in a special edition chock-full of extras both on Blu-ray and on regular DVD. You can also rent the flick from Netflix, of course. If you’ve seen it before, revisit the film armed with everything you’ve learned in this series. If you were deprived as a child and this is your first time seeing it, you’re in for a real treat. From the moment Connery sends his Miami hotel masseuse on her way with a stereophonic smack on the behind, you’ll know this isn’t the Bond pre-approved by the gelded metrosexuals who run modern-day Hollywood.

In an interview long after Goldfinger’s release, the actress Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore) fondly remembered that, “[producer Harry Saltzman] used to say that women came out of a Bond film dreaming of Bond, and men came out walking tall.” Check out this forty-five-year-old film, with its hero trapped in the amber of the culture of your parents and grandparents, and see if it still possesses the power to inspire those feelings in modern viewers.

The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis. Amis wrote another Bond overview called The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (1965) along with the first Bond pastiche, Colonel Sun (1967). But it is his first foray into the field that remains closest to my own heart. The various ways he skewers the tired, politically correct arguments of the “better Red than dead” critics of the Bond series are priceless.

Ultimately, the book does for Fleming’s hero much of what the great bookman Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933) once did for that classic detective — it makes him deeper, more complex, more real, and thus more satisfying a fictional creation. Great fun all around, and most enlightening.

And for those who missed it, check out an old article from Big Hollywood’s Russ Dvonch, wherein he dissects the script of Goldfinger and used it to demonstrate how to structure and write a good movie screenplay. Interesting stuff.

Andrew Breitbart sits in an Aeron chair at an iMac computer gazing out the sliding glass door of his Los Angeles home office. On the patio, a hula hoop and a portable basketball rim await his children’s return from school. Breitbart, 41, dressed on this late-winter day in his standard work uniform of a dirty oxford-cloth shirt and grungy khaki shorts, looks more like a surf bum than one of the most divisive figures in America’s political and culture wars. Then his BlackBerry rings.

The woman at the other end of the line, conservative fulminator Ann Coulter, is among Breitbart’s staunchest allies, and they soon are engaged in a spirited attack on liberals. “Their entire structure is writhing in diseased agony on the side of the road, and they don’t even realize it,” Breitbart says. But the left isn’t the only object of disdain. “I’m sick of this effete GOP nothing sandwich,” he adds, growing more animated. “As long as everyone is so pristine and socially registered, we’re going to lose.” Shortly before signing off, Breitbart says, “The second I realized I liked being hated more than I liked being liked — that’s when the game began.”

It’s a game he plays extraordinarily well. Breitbart has become the Web’s most combative conservative impresario — part new-media mogul, part Barnumesque scamp. Last fall, he launched Big Government, the flagship of his wickedly right-of-center sites, which also include Big Hollywood, Big Journalism — which described the House’s March 21 passage of the health care reform bill as a “socialist putsch” — and the news aggregators Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv. On its first day of business, Big Government produced a scoop: undercover filmmakers James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles — the would-be Borats of the right — had shot videos that appeared to show workers at ACORN, a liberal organization that lobbies for affordable housing, offering tips on how to open a brothel. For Breitbart, the videos proved to be a gold mine, putting the left on the defensive and Big Government on the map. That the filmmakers were accused of entrapping their subjects and editing in footage of O’Keefe dressed as a pimp seemed almost beside the point.

The stunt gave Breitbart — who like many online scribes had spent much of his professional life toiling in anonymity — a public persona. In January, O’Keefe was arrested in New Orleans on charges of entering the offices of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu under false pretenses while preparing another undercover video. That only boosted Breitbart’s profile. At the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville in February, Breitbart introduced the star speaker, Sarah Palin, and delivered a rousing jeremiad of his own. Assailing national reporters for portraying the movement as “racist and homophobic,” he used the dais at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel to speak his version of truth to mainstream media power: “It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that sucks.”

Read the full article here.

Hanks does seem to be a genuinely nice man and the work he’s done to bring American history to life on film is impressive, especially during a time when the singling out of America’s exceptionalism is more and more frowned upon in artistic and academic circles. ”From the Earth to the Moon,” “Band of Brothers,” and “John Adams” are not only artistic achievements, but in this MTV-addled culture, might be the best hope of teaching America’s youth about the unique history and greatness of this nation. And I suspect ”The Pacific,” the 10-part miniseries premiering this Sunday on HBO (which Big Hollywood’s Michael Broderick will cover extensively) will be a worthy addition to what came before.

But when it comes to leftist Hollywood, whenever Tinseltown and America meet, you have to brace yourself for it — and by “it” I mean the leftist sucker punch. Throughout, Hanks sounds perfectly reasonable, intelligent and even patriotic for a couple of thousand words. But of course that’s just the lure to get us on his side before we’re walloped with this left cross: [emphasis mine]

[Hanks] doesn’t see the series as simply eye-opening history. He hopes it offers Americans a chance to ponder the sacrifices of our current soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “From the outset, we wanted to make people wonder how our troops can re-enter society in the first place,” Hanks says. “How could they just pick up their lives and get on with the rest of us? Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

There’s no such thing as a definitive history. But what was once a passing interest for Hanks has become an obsession. He’s a man on a mission to make our back pages come alive, to keep overhauling the history we know and, in the process, get us to understand not just the past but the choices we make today.

No matter how many times you read this passage the context is clear. By “different” Hanks is clearly referring to race, culture and religion, not ideology.

Really, we wanted to annihilate the Japanese because they were different, because we saw them as “yellow, slant-eyed dogs that believed in different gods?” I thought it was due to the fact that “we viewed them” as barbaric imperialists who had attacked us first and wanted to enslave the world.

But there’s no reason to speculate about America’s motivations during WWII because history has proven Hanks wrong. We had every opportunity to annihilate these “different” people. Instead we chose, at great expense, to rebuild Japan and return the sovereignty of that nation over to the “yellow, slant-eyed dogs who believed in different gods.” Or, as most people prefer to call them: our newly liberated allies.

And to answer Hanks’s question: No — annihilating people who are different sounds NOTHING like what’s going on today.

This country spends billions and billions of dollars on weapons designed to target the enemy and save the lives of  people who are “different” — those who are not our enemy but still manage to look different, speak languages we don’t and worship in ways unfamiliar to us. The irony is that as Hanks spoke those slanderous words, the American Military remains in the middle of two conflicts that have cost us thousands of precious lives and hundreds of billions of dollars all towards the noble goal of liberating 50 million “different” people in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we all know that had we practiced a more selfish and barbaric form of war the enemy would’ve been destroyed faster, American lives would’ve been saved, and the financial cost would not have been nearly as high. 

But that’s not who we are.

Whether they’re “yellow, slanty-eyed dogs that worship different gods” or the people of the Middle East who share the same language and religion as those pledged to murder us, America selflessly protects the innocent who are “different” and as humanely as possible seeks to “annihilate” only those — even if they’re not “different” (like, say, Germans and Italians) – who practice an ideology that actually does believe in annihilating those who are different.

You almost get the sense that Hanks suddenly felt uncomfortable talking about America so extensively without throwing a bone to his MSNBC fanbase. Or maybe he misspoke, or maybe he really does believe it. Douglas Brinkley, the man who wrote the Time profile, sure found those words important. Important enough that the excerpt above is what closes the piece – the thought Brinkley chose to leave us with.

Cooper delivers his one-liners in a Preston Sturges staccato that helps give the 1970s film a pleasant 1930s gloss, bridging the gap between comic book and movie. But if, like me, you were just a kid when you saw Superman, you may not have known that here was an actor who, fifty years earlier, was one of the most popular and recognizable in the world, courtesy of a little picture called The Champ.

Cooper’s rise to childhood stardom was all-too typical — born in 1922, the unhappy progeny of a broken home, he was first dragged to the studios by his grandmother. “For most of the ladies in that poor neighborhood,” Cooper wrote in his autobiography, “it became common practice to walk to the studio gate in the morning and see if any of the directors needed extras. . .if you were picked, you got $2 and a box lunch. . . [my grandmother] was picked often because she had a little towheaded kid with her — me.”

A host of small roles eventually led to a job as one of Hal Roach’s Little Rascals, which after a few years resulted in a breakout, Oscar-nominated role playing the titular moppet in the Hollywood adaptation of the famous comic strip Skippy. Directed by his uncle (who won a Best Directing Oscar for the film), it made a name for Cooper as the movie kid who could cry better than any other (Cooper claims that his uncle once got him to cry on cue by threatening to shoot his dog), and its popularity quickly led to a lucrative M-G-M contract and the chance to star in The Champ.

Then as now, child stars were held in something akin to contempt by many filmgoers. The New York Herald-Tribune said in its review of The Champ that “This department, it is only right to tell you, has little sympathy for the child performers. Ordinarily they play with the clumsiness you might expect of their youth, while invariably providing in their personal qualities all of the more deplorable instincts of maturity. In a word, they act like children while seeming immature adults.” That description sounds like Dakota Fanning and any number of modern child actors. But Jackie Cooper, according to the same review,

proves by one of the finest and knowingly sensitive portrayals of the recent cinema that he is an actor of genuine distinction: a child who performs with all of the intelligence and mature emotional power supposed to belong to an adult, without losing anything of the youthful appeal to be expected of his years.

Time magazine was much less charitable to Cooper’s Champ performance, chortling that, “every time Beery gets drunk, gambles away the racehorse which he has presented to his son, or is taken to jail for disturbing the peace, there is a shot of little Cooper sticking out his underlip and wrinkling his eyes.” That pat criticism, simplistic and snide, fails to account for any number of great scenes where Cooper isn’t sniffling in close-up.

Cooper played the role not just with amazing naturalness, but also with an eye toward the dramatic arc of his character. Like in his real life, in The Champ he’s a kid forced to leave behind his innocence and become an adult before his time.

The studio put out press releases saying how wonderfully Beery and eight-year-old Cooper got along, and anecdotal evidence contemporary to the period supports that assertion, despite the barrage of negative things Cooper said about Beery fifty years after the fact in his autobiography. News reporters visiting M-G-M claimed that, far from being afraid or angry at Beery, Cooper called him “Uncle Wally,” and happily followed him around the set. Beery himself recounted in an interview how he would help the director talk the eight-year-old through the emotional spectrum of each scene until he figured out how to play it. (One breakthrough came when little Dink undresses his drunk Dad and puts him to bed — after having it explained to him several times, Cooper suddenly brightened and exclaimed to the crew, “I get it! I’m the father and Wally’s the kid!”)

Later in life, Beery would say that “. . .[one of the few times] in my life I felt that maybe I was a pretty decent guy. . .was when little Jackie Cooper said he liked Wally Beery better than any other man he knew.” Cooper would star in several more movies with Beery, most notably Treasure Island (1934) and together they became one of Hollywood’s most popular screen pairs of the 1930s.

The tone of his autobiography hints that the real thing Cooper was missing was a father figure, and when someone like Beery failed to assume that role for him off-screen it hurt. The truth was that he was a lonely, friendless kid caught in the vast machinery of Hollywood, seeming to have everything in the world but empty and directionless inside. Judging from all of the extant pictures from that era, as well as newspaper accounts of press junkets, public appearances, and other films, Cooper’s childhood was one long series of meetings, movies, and promotions. For instance, in the month following the November 1931 release of The Champ, period newspapers tell of Cooper coming to Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a joint promotion with Santa Claus, first pressing his hands and feet into the cement forecourt and then introducing The Champ to 2000 kids in the theater. He was (in the words of Sid Grauman) “America’s Boy,” and a countrywide superstar. And he fulfilled that role at the expense of his childhood.

Like most prepubescent stars, his fame largely disappeared when he grew up. Cooper would later dismiss his entire childhood as a bad nightmare, aghast at the pressures he was put under when so young and lamenting the normal life he lost in the process. By the end of his teens he had slept with stars as varied as Judy Garland and Joan Crawford (the latter when he was seventeen and Crawford thirty-four), smoked dope and taken pills while hanging out with big-band musicians like Gene Krupa (Cooper learned the drums and often sat in with them), and spent virtually all the money he had made in Hollywood on fancy clothes, cars and women.

He credits the service with finally shaping him up and making a man out of him. When World War II hit, his handlers were ready and willing to pull the strings necessary to keep him out, but he bucked their advice and insisted on joining the Navy. He was twenty years old, and his childhood career was already just a memory. Although he says he was mercilessly hazed by fellow servicemen who held his movie-star status against him, Cooper maintained that, “I wouldn’t have wanted to be anyplace else. It would have been worse outside, getting the sneers from women wondering why you weren’t in uniform. Besides, there was that patriotic consideration — my country was in a desperate war, and I wanted to do my part, corny as that might sound, so we would win.”

Jackie Cooper spent the war playing the drums in a USO band, and after he was discharged had some tough years. He went through three marriages — with the last wife, twenty-five years into the marriage he had an affair with a younger woman and briefly left the house, only to come to his senses and patch things up before it was too late (the incident forms a moving chapter of his autobiography). He found work wherever he could, first in New York on the stage, then on ’50s TV shows, then as a studio executive in the ’60s, and finally as a Emmy Award-winning director of television throughout the ’70s, most notably on the now-classic show M*A*S*H.

Over the decades he remained active in the Navy Reserve, which eventually caused a problem on the M*A*S*H set. As Captain William S. Graves relates in Cooper’s book:

I came over to the set because I wanted to make some Christmas tapes [to send to the troops in Vietnam]. . . Some were thirty seconds, some were twenty seconds. . .and they’d say, “It’s Christmas, and we miss all you guys, and you’re doing a good job for your country, and we appreciate what you’re doing, and come home safe and Merry Christmas.”

. . . when I got there, Alan Alda had said he would make no Christmas greetings for the armed forces. So, of course, people sort of followed his lead, and Loretta Swit wouldn’t do it, Gary whatever-his-name wouldn’t do it. . .

Jack had done his best to try to get these guys all to do it because he believed in it, and he was doing it. . . the only people that did it were Wayne Rogers, who was a Navy lieutenant at one point in his life, and McLean Stevenson, who was a Navy pharmacist’s mate during the Korean War. And they did a nice job. But nobody else on that show would do it.

Imagine that: a group of Hollywood people, who had made their fortunes playing in arguably the most beloved military-themed TV show of all time, refusing to offer a kind word for the troops fighting in Vietnam. Jackie Cooper had a lot of problems throughout his life, and he regretted his movie-star childhood. But at least he got into the Navy, and came out with a lifelong dedication to our armed forces that does him credit.

Cooper regularly derides his childhood acting as shallow, but at the time of The Champ hordes of moviegoers disagreed with him. The review for Variety on November 11, 1931 was typical of the euphoric reaction Cooper got from most critics and audiences:

A good picture, almost entirely by virtue of an inspired performance by a boy, Jackie Cooper. There is none of the usual hammy quality of the average child actor in this kid. He goes beyond, simply acting natural in natural situations. He has the power to square the broadest plot exaggerations that a Hollywood scenarist can devise, merely with wistful boyishness and a manner that never gets scrambled with thespian mechanics. . . The director and his meg are not mirrored in Jackie Cooper’s phiz. There is no suggestion of orders from and training under an anxious parent or tutor in a single gesture, expression, or intonation. Here is the perfect child player, chiefly because he isn’t typical.

The boy, as is customary with boys in pictures, says some strange things for a boy his age; his thinking has far more scope and depth than is good for a boy his age. There are many chances for character to become unbelievable and lose its grip, but this boy doesn’t let it get away from him.

Instead of waiting to grow up and tell his grandchildren about it, the Cooper boy can tell his grandfather right now that this is his picture. Youth isn’t wasted on children when there are kids like this. It will be talkers’ heavy loss when Jackie Cooper grows up.

And it was — to this day, Cooper is the youngest actor ever to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. The early superstar career ended all too soon, but then there was the Navy, and some classic M*A*S*H episodes, and of course even that wonderful late-career turn in Superman. Most other child actors turned out far worse, that’s for sure. In an age category normally dominated by Lindsay Lohans, Jackie Cooper stands out as something special.

Cooper is eighty-seven years old now, and retired from the business. His wife just died last year after over fifty years of marriage. He has several grown children (two daughters have predeceased him) and a whole bunch of memories. I hope that he’s mellowed since writing his autobiography, and that these days he’s a lot more proud of his accomplishments. He certainly deserves to be.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the gifted director of The Champ, and how he brought script, camera, and actors together to make an instant classic.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Please Don’t Shoot My Dog: The Autobiography of Jackie Cooper. An honest attempt by Cooper to evaluate his life as a Hollywood star, faults and all. He often comes across as whiny and ungrateful, but he also doesn’t pull any punches, going so far as to let his detractors tell their side of the story whenever possible in their own words.

Hordes of internet websites, including Wikipedia, make the claim that in this book Cooper calls Wallace Beery, “the most sadistic person I have ever known,” and says he was a “violent, foul-mouthed drunkard,” among other things. Actually Cooper says nothing of the sort. Beery is described, fairly mildly as these things go, as a sort of Little Napoleon petty tyrant on the set: making people wait inordinately for him, demanding little favors of special treatment from directors and producers, whining over small things, and trying to upstage his fellow actors whenever possible. Among Cooper’s charges against Beery are that he didn’t tip at the commissary, never gave Cooper a ride on his speedboat, and (my personal favorite) never bought poor lil’ Coop an ice cream cone. Hardly the stuff of sadism, despite what the Internet gossips would have you believe. In the final analysis Cooper says: “I never did actually hate him, although I never liked him. . . I really don’t think he was a swell guy at all. When I first started with him, I wanted him to be. He was a big disappointment.” Not a glowing endorsement by any means, but a far cry from “the most sadistic person I have ever known.”

“Jackie Cooper Has All Aversions of the Average Youngster For Studies” by Wood Soanes. This is a reprint of a magazine exposé from 1932, soon after The Champ was released. Like many other articles, it shows Cooper at the time getting along fine with Beery. Although one might chalk that up to studio propaganda, the variety and number of sources all telling the same tale makes me think that Cooper’s opinion of Beery might have been higher as a child, only to deteriorate over the course of fifty years as an adult. (Fifty years, it should be remembered, of people constantly asking, “So what was it like working with Wallace Beery?” long after his own stardom had dimmed.)

Jackie Cooper on The Milton Berle Show (1953): A clip from this classic show showing an adult Cooper showing off his drumming skills in a musical number with sexy 1950s singer Dagmar.

Jackie Cooper’s Birthday Party and Jackie Cooper’s Christmas Party (both 1931): These M-G-M shorts are a lot of fun, showing Jackie Cooper in his Champ heyday, having massive parties with legions of kids while being feted by all the studio’s great stars of the era, including Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Durante, and of course Wallace Beery. Keep your eyes peeled for these on TCM, where they sometimes appear.