Fonda shared her trepidation regarding the Republican presidential hopefuls with, who else, CNN’s Piers Morgan.

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“They all scare me frankly,” Fonda said, when asked to comment on the intellectual capacity of each member of the field. “I get depressed and scared when I look at the Republican debates … “I’m worried about anybody getting elected to office who says we have to do away with or privatize social security, we have to reduce medical health insurance, we have to not raise taxes,” she responded. “And, oh, there’s no problem with the environment, this is all made up by the left, the scientists don’t really know what they’re talking about — this worries me.”

Stone’s thesis in a film designed to appeal to middle America is as follows: the military-industrial complex, allowed free reign under Eisenhower, killed Kennedy because he was trying to end the Cold War, especially in Cuba and Vietnam (the latter extremely important to the obsessed Stone).  Their point men were apolitical snipers, vengeful anti-Castroites, and a manipulated Oswald.  Far from being an angry leftist loner, Oswald was in fact a perpetrator for the more dovish elements of the American government’s schemes.  The low-level plotters included Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, and David Ferrie, a member of the Operation Mongoose team, a CIA operation in constant efforts to kill Castro.

Like all history lessons, the yardstick is whether further evidence has proved him correct.  On Shaw being a CIA agent, Stone was on sure footing: CIA Director Richard Helms admitted that the New Orleans defendant was an agent.  On Shaw and Ferrie knowing each other (a charge Shaw denied under oath at his trial in New Orleans), evidence in  the form of a car loan for Ferrie co-signed by Shaw has vindicated Stone.

But other revelations have not been so kind.  Far from being a patsy four  floors down from his supposed sniper perch, Oswald was shown in documents released after the film by the Dallas Police that his fingerprints were on the trigger of his Manlicher Carcano.  Re-created shooting by world-class snipers has shown that the head-shots did in fact come from the Sixth Floor Depository.  Computer analysis applied to the grassy knoll reveals that in order for a shot to have come from there the sniper would  have to have been on a forty-foot ladder (a stance that would have attracted notice).

Stone made much of the hobos rounded up by the DPD as being part of the assassination team (he even has the leader of the plot walking by and signaling them).  His evidence for this was in how they were never booked and were quickly released, but documents released by the DPD after the film revealed that the men in question were, in fact, hobos.

On Kennedy the dove, Stone has been invalidated.  He makes much of the American University speech in which JFK called for a reexamination of American attitudes toward the Soviet Union, but he says nothing about the bellicose anti-communist speech months later  in the “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” address.  Regarding Cuba, Kennedy was following a two track policy in the last days of his life.  On one hand, he was using intermediaries to seek normalization with Castro.  On the other, he had intensified efforts to kill the dictator (one congressman in the loop was shocked at how matter-of-fact Kennedy was when he told him).  And Kennedy had authorized the military to begin preparations for an invasion of the island in December 1963.

Stone, in his effort to hammer home his thesis, omits certain key elements known at the time.  Nowhere in the film is there any mention of Oswald’s efforts to kill the far right military man, General Edwin Walker–odd, because Oswald missing him from a grassy knoll-type perch would have bolstered Stone’s portrait of him as poor shot.  To do so would have shown Oswald’s ability to plan an assassination.  He never shows Kennedy’s complicity in allowing a coup to remove South Vietnam leader N’Go Diem–proof that the president was seeking a more receptive leadership in order to secure the conflict’s key goal–to win popular support.

In a key moment in the film, Stone has a Deep Throat-esque journalist character pose the real questions that should be asked about Kennedy’s death: (1) Why was Kennedy killed? (2)Who benefited? (3)Who has the power to cover it up?

In light of recent evidence, the answers are as follows : (1) Not only the frustrated anti-Castro Cubans, but also target Castro, his sympathizers, including Lee Harvey Oswald;  (2) Beneficiaries were  Castro (especially since the new president, Lyndon Johnson, horrified at Kennedy’s “goddam murder inc. in the Carribean,” turned Mongoose off; (3) The American government, but they could have done so less from their participation in the assassination and more from their participation in using the mob to kill Castro or fears of nuclear war should the truth come out.

Similar questions could have been applied to Stone.  Why did he make this film?  Answer: to continue his cinematic efforts to exorcise his Vietnam demons.  Who benefited?  Answer: The Hollywood Left, with their love affair with Castro and the aged Camelot mythifiers.  Who had the power to cover up alternative theories of the assassination  and ones at political odds with the film?  Answer:  scriptwriter Oliver Stone.

Like most Camelot propaganda merchants, Stone laments what might have been had the assassination failed.  His “American Gorbachev” might have stymied the right-wing madness of the sixties.  But Kennedy’s pattern was to assure the worst of all possible worlds.  Regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, he assured Castro’s position by promising Kruschev that he would never invade and horse-traded away the US missile defense for Turkey.  He then continued assassination efforts, and his plans for a December 1963 invasion would have violated his promise to Kruschev and triggered an even more dire reprise of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  With Vietnam, he allowed a coup to remove Diem in order to continue the doomed US support of the South.    Because of Kennedy’s risk taking, “what might have been” might have been worse than under Johnson.

The trouble with propaganda masquerading as film is that facts keep up with and invalidate it.  The documents keep on coming, says George Orwell.  In the case of JFK they did, but without an equally skilled director, they may never filter into the consciousness of moviegoers.

It’s a long, anguished, intellectually dishonest rationalization from the aging actresses titled: “The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi.” 

Not sure it’s worth a read. Up to you. But the real meat is buried under thousands of words:

That May, I received an invitation from the North Vietnamese in Paris to make the trip to Hanoi. Many had gone before me but perhaps it would take a different sort of celebrity to get people’s attention. Heightened public attention was what was needed to confront the impending crisis with the dikes. I would take a camera and bring back photographic evidence (if such was to be found) of the bomb damage of the dikes we’d been hearing about.

I arranged the trip’s logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace talks, bought myself a round trip ticket and stopped in New York to pick up letters for the POWs.

Frankly, the trip felt like a call to service. It was a humanitarian mission, not a political trip. My goal was to expose and try to halt the bombing of the dikes. (The bombing of the dikes ended a month after my return from Hanoi)

The only problem was that I went alone. Had I been with a more experienced, clear-headed, traveling companion, I would not have allowed myself to get into a situation where I was photographed on an anti-aircraft gun.

Imagine Jane Fonda’s father Henry Fonda (who, by the way, enlisted to fight in WWII)  saying, “In 1942, the Nazis invited me to Berlin where I was photographed on a Tiger II tank but I also did a bunch of other stuff while I was there, so please judge me by the full context of my trip to Berlin.”

Hilariously, to keep the focus off her fraternizing with an enemy desperate to kill American and allied troops and in the process of  subjugating the sovereign nation of South Vietnam into the slavery of Communism, Fonda crybabies about all the lies told about her trip, especially those told on the Internet. This is a semantic ploy meant to distract from her many serious critics who need not make a single thing up or exaggerated in the least to reveal her actions as despicable and outright traitorous.

It’s funny that in the September of her years, Fonda would all of a sudden be so gung-ho about putting this shame to rest. My guess is that she pictured herself at this age as one of those artists who spends their twilight being toasted and honored throughout the world; their controversies forgotten, forgiven, and overshadowed by legend. Jane Fonda has lived to be old enough to be allowed a sneak peek at her legacy and she apparently doesn’t like what she’s seeing.

Unfortunately for Fonda, when it comes to most things, we Americans really are a forgiving bunch. Especially in the arenas of personal, sexual, and bad boyish behavior. Time and again, when someone reaches a certain stage of their life, we tend to realize how little the mistakes of their past (which are usually more tasteless, stupid, boorish and self-destructive than anything else) matters within the context of someone who will soon leave us forever.

Something we’re not as forgiving about, however, is the betrayal of our country or the appeasing of an enemy. Fair or not, this is something that will forever haunt the legacies of Joe Kennedy Sr. and Charles Lindbergh.

And so it will with Jane Fonda. 

What she did was morally appalling and narcissistic and arrogant and undermining to an entire generation of men who risked their lives for their own country and to keep free another.  

No spin, no thousands of words, no Academy Award, no legacy or legend will ever change that.

The author himself was properly repulsed by the hippie movement (and indeed, by what he saw as the entire slovenly depths of American culture in general), and late in life began referring to their nightmare world of antiwar riots and hedonism as “this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped.” But it was not only our side of the pond that gave him grief: he watched aghast as his work became so superficially popular and grossly misunderstood among the hip and the mod in Great Britain that the Beatles expressed a desire to star in a film version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with Stanley Kubrick directing!

It was Gandalf himself who warned Saruman that, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” But that little nugget of common sense, and virtually everything else that made the book special, was passed over by those who were trying to snort, smoke, and screw their way out from under the thumb of The Man and Western Civ. Tolkien considered the free-love drug mob and its associated subgroups “cults of faineance and filth” that mindlessly smashed everything Old and Noble and Sacred while simultaneously embracing everything New, Hip, and Easygoing, all in a foolish, futile attempt to deconstruct and experiment their way to an earthly Utopia. Unlike so many from that crazed era, the man who decades earlier had laboriously penned Frodo’s arduous journey to Mount Doom knew better than to grant hippie pipe-dreams intellectual or spiritual credence.

“The essence of a fallen world,” he once wrote, “is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’ (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.” Catholics will well-recognize this belief, and (in my experience) are laudably well-versed in the truth of its sentiments. “What a dreadful, fear-darkened, sorrow-laden world we live in,” Tolkien groaned in 1969, while the childish, cataclysmic madness was at its height. “. . . Chesterton once said that it is our duty to keep the Flag of This World flying: but it takes now a sturdier and more sublime patriotism than it did then. . . there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydra’s heads.”

The chattering class, as it always does, ham-handedly tried to make sense of it all. In Life magazine for February 24, 1967, Charles Elliot did a good job of embarrassing himself while capturing the elite condescension of that time:

Surely [The Lord of the Rings] is not the stuff of which campus heroes are made, even though it does provide Tolkien aficionados with something to discuss over their pipe-weed, mushrooms and brown ale. What apparently gets the kids square in their post-adolescent sensibilities is not the scholarship top-dressing but the undemanding, comfortable, child-sized story underneath. No symbolism, no sex, no double meanings, no questions about which are the Good Guys and which the Bad, just a good yarn on the level of Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout.

The Lord of the Rings is thoroughly innocent. It is even innocent of ideas, which doubtless helps recommend it to those aggressive searchers for sincerity, the opt-out crowd. . . I am prepared to be generous so long as the whole thing doesn’t get out of hand.

Prepared to be generous. Gee, thank God for that! That’s the kind of pompous cultural gate-keeping that far too many professional critics engage in, and it always makes them look like fools in the long run. I note that, forty-five years later, Tolkien is as popular (and as critically studied) as ever, even while Charles Elliott is forgotten and the magazine he wrote for is defunct.

As the 1960s degenerated into the 1970s Tolkien’s popularity shot into the stratosphere, his book standing as a veritable beacon of light in the darkness of the Age. The counterculture, via Tolkien interviews and exposés featured in magazines and on TV, began to learn a bit more about the man behind the tripped-out novels that had them all abuzz. This was no cool, far-out elderly statesman like Timothy Leary or Pete Seeger, but a devout Catholic war veteran whose every public utterance seemed to shore up the old ways rather than mock them or tear them down. It wasn’t long before the pot-smoking, ’shroom-popping crowd abandoned Tolkien almost as quickly as they had embraced him.

The backlash was presaged as early as 1969, when two miscreant humorists (who soon after would found National Lampoon magazine) released Bored of the Rings, a popular parody penned in what would become the classic Lampoon style. Fun as it was for a few idle laughs, it also foreshadowed Tolkien’s future among the “we are the change we’ve been waiting for” halfwits. They were “Bored of the Rings” because the tale was now mainstreamed, and thus stripped of its counterculture cachet. Previously used by hippies as a literary lava lamp to inspire wild mental imagery suitable for dropping acid, making jejune political points at insane rallies, or freaking out one’s elders, it now possessed all of the utility of a used condom. Within a few years most ripped the Middle-earth posters off their walls, tossed out their Leonard Nimoy “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” records, and moved on to the next fleeting hot thing.

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At the hill’s foot Frodo found Aragorn, standing still and silent as a tree; but in his hand was a small golden bloom of elanor, and a light was in his eyes. He was wrapped in some fair memory: and as Frodo looked at him he knew that he beheld things as they once had been in this same place. For the grim years were removed from the face of Aragorn, and he seemed clothed in white, a young lord tall and fair; and he spoke words in the Elvish tongue to one whom Frodo could not see. Arwen vanimelda, namárië! he said, and then he drew a breath, and returning out of his thought he looked at Frodo and smiled.

“Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,” he said, “and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me!” And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man.

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“I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote again and again over the course of his long life. “. . . I am looking for something I can’t find.” Given the state of literature both before and after The Lord of the Rings, it’s not hard to imagine why. Purpose and Truth is such a rare thing to feel in art of any kind — books, film, painting, dance, song. It’s certainly utterly absent from the tales of modern authors who spend thousands of pages knocking our emotional and spiritual joints out of kilter in an effort to be hard-hitting, funny and edgy.

In so many stories from the “bored with the Good” crowd, readers are continually invited, even cleverly lured, into trusting their higher aspirations and nobler instincts, only to have those precious, delicate things cast back into their faces with a cackle. At base, it’s an attempt to deliberately scramble and pervert your inner compass — your moral and spiritual pole star — beyond all recognition, rearranging the stained glass windows of your mind until all that’s left are meaningless, mad swaths of bright color. To some of us, this is no light matter to be laughed at or ignored.

The work of modern authors like Martin, Abercrombie, Stover, et al. would have surprised Tolkien not a bit — he clearly anticipated the various attempts of today’s fallen fantasists to (d)evolve past The Lord of the Rings by making their stories “self-aware,” “quasi-historical,” “morally complex,” and (most laughably of all) “real.” Such authors, he felt, cultivate and cherish “sneer and cynicism” because it allows them to preen with the false belief that they are “freer from hypocrisy” than past generations, “since it does not ‘do’ to profess holiness or utter high sentiments.” Scaling hills of garbage and then gazing down on humanity as if from artistic or moral high ground didn’t impress Tolkien. “Inverted hypocrisy,” he called it, and deemed it a belief as false as “the widely current inverted snobbery: men profess to be worse than they are.”

In a letter to his son Christopher dated May 6, 1944, Tolkien said that much of his early writing on Middle-earth was conducted “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle-light in bell tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.” He clearly was no stranger to the dank gutters of Life, and despite what lazy critics say his fiction adequately reflects this. Hobbits, Men, Dwarves, Elves, Wizards, and even Angelic Gods all are portrayed as fallible and fully capable of being tempted into great wickedness. “Some critics,” Tolkien sighed, “seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a ‘With-the-flag-to-Pretoria’ spirit, and willfully distort what is said in my tale. I have not that spirit, and it does not appear in the story.”

Yet if, as Tolkien famously stated, “a safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds,” then equally untrue are fairylands devoid of sincere expressions and manifestations of “holiness” and “high sentiments.” Something that (even at this late date) is little known to average Tolkien fans is that soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings he made overtures towards writing a sequel of sorts. The extant pages bear the title “The New Shadow,” and take place “about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor],” long after the death of King Aragorn.

Any hopes for a repeat of achieving a sanity and sanctity comparable to his earlier works were soon dashed by a sobering reality. “It proved both sinister and depressing,” he admitted, explaining that

Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: the quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a “thriller” about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would be just that. Not worth doing.

Upon reading this, I’m sure our fallen fantasists would offer up a whoop of approval, and lament that the old white-bread professor hadn’t gone through with this tentative exploration of his fictional universe’s treacherous underbelly, exposing all of the heroism and holiness of his earlier books as a hypocritical sham. They might even feel a certain justification about their own work, seeing in it a continuation of where Tolkien’s nascent ideas about “The New Shadow” left off, bravely (and perhaps with a smirk, nod and wink) descending into sewers where even the Master feared to tread.

As for myself, I believe that Tolkien stopped work on “The New Shadow” because he knew that a fairyland attuned solely to the “sinister and depressing” would ring false, and that the things he cherished in works of high romance would feel too distant, too pale, in this new Age of Men. He knew in his heart that a fairyland bereft of heroism, nobility, and grace was just as “untrue to all worlds” as the reverse. And yet — like many artists past their prime — he was now too old and weary to seek out the rays of eucatastrophic sunlight which, in tales of Truth and Purpose, always manage to shine through the mass of dark billowing clouds threatening to engulf the world in everlasting gloom.

No, it took another brilliant writer to look deep into that grim, savage epoch of decadence and encroaching evil, and set against it noble men who leapt into battle with “the chants of old heroes singing in their ears.” In so doing, he thunderously proved that — in a true artist’s hands — hard-boiled is very different from nihilistic and morally reprehensible. The writer’s name is Robert E. Howard, and by virtue of his haunting artistry, poetic splendor, and heroic sweep, he serves as Tolkien’s indispensable literary shield-brother in the fight against the vacuous capitulation to wickedness that infests so much of modern fantasy.

To be continued (in two weeks, after a much-needed vacation). . . . .

“Secretariat,” a movie about the horse who won more awards than Al Gore, will not be in the starting gate at the Oscars, February 27. What could be the problem? It opened the weekend after the “Social Network,” so it wasn’t like the Academy of ADHD Artists had time to forget about it. It wasn’t that it didn’t have a good enough campaign team working behind it either. Disney pitched it right alongside “Toy Story 3,” a long-shot which actually made it into the Best Picture category, a rare occurrence for a cartoon.

Diane Lane put in an undeniably Oscar-worthy performance that recalls some of the most glamorous actresses of a Hollywood’s golden age. She played Secretariat’s owner, Penny Tweedy, with the poise of Grace Kelly, the brash of Katherine Hepburn, and the warmth of Donna Reid. John Malkovich should have been a shoe-in, with one of his quirkiest characters to date, as the trainer Lucien Laurin; a role that recalled some of the greater comedic sidekicks from the heyday of Disney like Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and Buddy Hackett

Perhaps the PG rating made it into a film that no one in the Academy bothered to watch. After “The Blind Side” took two nominations last year, the members of the Academy became aware of the disturbing trend of solidly entertaining family pictures that are uplifting and not vulgar. Perhaps a few more jokes about cleaning out the stables could have won a PG-13 rating and a couple seats in the Kodak Theater.

There were other things that the Academy couldn’t overlook. The film opens with a bible quote (which is about as welcome in Hollywood as a silver and garlic crucifix in Transylvania), and top-forty gospel music of the era is predominant throughout. There is also the portrayal of war protesters as children, something that probably got under the craw of Iraq War protesters within the industry. There is a wonderful scene with a group of stern-faced kids dressed up in a coolie costume chanting “War” while flying cardboard planes and carrying “War is Bad for Children” placards around A.J. Michalka singing “Silent Night.” While touching and beautiful it seemed almost condescending to the anti-war movement.

Of course, the Vietnam War was protested by children, but those who look back on those years tend to imagine themselves more mature than they really were. In the film they’re treated as being kind of cute. Penny tells her daughter, “Kate, our political beliefs can change, but our… our need to do what we believe is right… that doesn’t.  I’m proud of you.”

While “Secretariat” was a little corny around the edges, it was a good, solid picture. I found it at least as entertaining as “Inception,” which put me to sleep (I thought it was a special effect of the movie, kind of like 3-D, that you were supposed to nod off during certain intervals of the film, so you would be immersed in the experience–if putting you to sleep weren’t intentional, then Leonardo DiCaprio shouldn’t have been so boring).

Perhaps Hollywood takes issue with a movie where the heroes are upper-middle class white people, and the bad guy is an inheritance tax. Few in Hollywood are concerned with that tax, since legacies there are not always financial, and often squandered by heirs like Charlie Sheen. No one seems to understand the idea of holding on to a father’s memory, so perhaps the central theme of the picture was lost in Hollywood.

I was concerned that I might be thinking conspiratorially, until I read the Salon review by Andrew O’Hehir (that I won’t flatter with a link here, you can google it if you’re interested). In his review, he not only hit all the subjects I just did, but also expressed the danger of upper-middle class white people being portrayed sympathetically. He goes completely hyperbolic and compares it to the films of Leni Riefenstahl.

I think the biggest problem was the happy ending. Movies today are all supposed to end unresolved, in the event of an inexplicable sequel. While looked down upon as trite, a happy ending in 2011 is actually less predictable than the ending of the “Black Swan.”  You would think that Hollywood, who claims to push envelopes and cherish out-of-the-box thinking, would get behind such a revolutionary picture as “Secretariat.”

The first film, released in 1969, sits in the mid-upper tier of movies made by its star, John Wayne (as well as winning him his only Oscar), and as such has achieved a kind of classic status among both Wayne fans and lovers of good westerns. There is a brand of theatergoer who maintains that there is no need to craft fresh takes on successful pictures, any more than we need new painters to dutifully re-imagine a masterwork like Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

On the other side of the debate are those who see good reasons for taking another swing at this piñata. Ever since the appearance of Wayne’s Grit, many fans of the novel — which first appeared forty-two years ago as a Saturday Evening Post serial written by Charles Portis (1933–) — have been keen to see a cinematic version that hews far closer to the plot of the book. Others see remakes as akin to a contemporary orchestra re-recording — and in the process re-interpreting — a famous piece of classical music, imbuing it with their own particular sonic signature. Seen in this light, the announcement of a new True Grit was a welcome one.

So now that the movie is out, who is right? Is the remake ill-advised, or a welcome addition to the western canon? Does the 2010 version have what it takes to make it a classic in its own right, or is it destined to be forever overshadowed by the 1969 original?

For all of the talk by the Coens of keeping their movie closer to the plot of the novel, the differences between it and the 1969 film are fairly minor — so much so that enterprising fans have cut new YouTube trailers to the 1969 version that manage to almost exactly match the trailer for the 2010 one. Both pictures rely heavily on the dialogue penned by Portis (a good thing, as the meticulously crafted and exquisitely well-toned repartee between the characters is the best part of the book, and one only need look to Peter Jackson’s painfully inept adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s equally rarefied Lord of the Rings dialogue to see what happens when one strays too far from the original work of literature).

Both also make some of the same changes to the characters. In the novel, Rooster Cogburn is about forty years of age and sports an openly disfigured and useless eye. In both films, he is played by a sixty-one-year-old actor (Wayne and Bridges were the same age when they undertook their respective attempts at the role), with each wearing an eye patch nowhere to be found in the book. (“I noticed by the lamplight,” Mattie says at one point in Portis’ original, “that his bad left eye was not completely shut. A little crescent of white showed at the bottom and glistened in the light.”) The murderer Tom Cheney, meanwhile, changes from a twenty-five-year-old in the book to a 40-50ish man in both movies.

Neither cinematic version gives the girl, Mattie Ross, the fiery bible-quoting Christianity the novel uses to help explain her perseverance and courage (the Coens make a surface stab at this, including an epigraph card that quotes the first half of Proverbs 28:1, but they still fall far short of Portis’ immersive ideal). In the book, Mattie Ross is constantly quoting scripture with expertise and passion to justify her hardheaded prejudices and decisions, often going so far as to offer extended (and, to the degree they disagree with her own beliefs, humorously acerbic) asides on the differences in the ways Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics interpret the Good Book.

This is the kind of earthy Christianity that anyone who has roamed the South is familiar with. (Once, about ten years ago while in rural Texas, I asked an old lady whether a mutual acquaintance was a Baptist or a Methodist, at which point another old woman overhearing the conversation piped up with, “My momma told me Jesus was a Methodist!”) When writer Charles Taylor wrote in the New York newspaper Newsday that Portis’ Mattie Ross, “springs from the blood and memory of the American past, her every word a hymn to the plain grace of Puritan forbearance” he was referring to that kind of deep faith, leavened by humor. Unfortunately, although the novel is filled with it, little seeped into either film beyond window dressing.

Setting aside the few non-crucial variances in plot between the two movies (things like the result of Mattie’s encounter with rattlesnakes, and the fate of the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf), it’s in other areas that the differences between the two pictures really manifest themselves. Neither can truly claim to have superior acting: I would rate Wayne, Robert Duvall, and Strother Martin in 1969 over Bridges, Barry Pepper, and Dakin Matthews from 2010, while 2010’s Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon take the prize over 1969’s Kim Darby, Jeff Corey, and Glen Campbell. The Coens are far more cinematic and talented directors than the competent but seldom inspired journeyman Henry Hathaway, but their stand-in locations for Arkansas/Oklahoma are far less memorable than the lush Colorado vistas chosen in 1969, and Elmer Bernstein’s musical score from the 1969 movie is light-years ahead of anything Carter Burwell has done here in 2010, or indeed in his entire career.

In the end, the 2010 True Grit is valuable in its own right, but doesn’t seem poised to knock the 1969 film off its pedestal as the definitive go-to version. John Wayne’s centrality to the western genre, and the film’s centrality to his reputation as an actor, guarantees that. Jeff Bridges plays a competent drunken hombre, but Wayne dug deeper into cinematic history by aping the voice and mannerisms of the great Wallace Beery (profiled in Part 2 of last year’s For Conservative Movie Lovers look at 1931’s The Champ). It’s the kind of performance that tells us that the actor is having as much fun with it as we are.

Coming full in the face of the onset of the Vietnam War and the Hippie Era (not to mention Leone’s genre-altering spaghetti westerns and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which was released a mere week after True Grit), this unabashedly entertaining and overblown character study was also a courageous thing to attempt, possessing a resonance extending well beyond the confines of the picture itself. Film critic Richard Schickel captured the full measure of Wayne’s contribution in his June 20, 1969 review of the movie in Life magazine when, talking of the story’s famous climax (capped by the salty declaration, “Fill your hand, you sonofabitch!”), he wrote:

Watching, one shouts, laughs and, unaccountably, feels tears beginning to tingle. For you feel you may be witnessing not just the beginning of a good movie’s climax but a full-throated valedictory for a tradition. Here is Wayne, the last of a great generation of western heroes, committing himself again to an action that at once affectionately parodies and joyously summarizes the hundreds — thousands — of similar moments that have preceded it in film history. And there is a tremendous sense of relief in the way he goes about it.

This “tremendous sense of relief” is extended in a final scene that doesn’t appear in either the book or in the 2010 Coen version, where Mattie Ross is allowed to offer her family’s grave plot to Rooster while he is still alive, cementing their friendship, and Rooster rides off into the sunset, jumping the fence Mattie said he was too old and fat to attempt while shouting, “Come see a fat old man sometime!” Like the young boy in Shane shouting “Come back!” (which likewise wasn’t in the book, but was only added later for the film), it’s a scene so possessive of dramatic satisfaction (what Schickel called his “tremendous sense of relief”) that we walk away from the 2010 version feeling cheated that it has been replaced by the comparatively predictable, bittersweet, and elegiac ending of the novel, the kind of dreariness we’ve long come to expect from “real art.”

Regardless of the gateway to True Grit you choose — 1968 book, 1969 film, or its 2010 cousin — it has once again proven that it is a story good enough to sustain multiple treatments. I recommend taking them on in order: Portis, Wayne, Coens.

What is Fonda’s deal? Doesn’t she know that real Americans have been sick of her since she took North Vietnam’s side during the Vietnam War? Does she really think she can pose for pictures in her workout clothes in 2010 and we’ll somehow forget about her posing for pictures with a North Vietnamese Anti-Aircraft gun in 1972?

Surely she knows we’ll never forget the radio broadcast she made to the North Vietnamese population in August 1972: a broadcast in which she referred to American fighting forces as “U.S. imperialists,” bragged that President Nixon would “never be able to break the spirit of [the North Vietnamese] people,” and then said Nixon “would do well to read…poetry written by Ho Chi Minh.” (It was during this same trip to North Vietnam that Fonda referred to our soldiers as “war criminals” and accused American POWs of lying when they alleged that the North Vietnamese had tortured them.)

Such anti-American sentiment might make Senator John Kerry proud, but it’s no less than stomach turning for salt-of-the-earth Americans whose children enlist in our military because they love this country.

Yes, I’m mad. And I’m sure someone thinks I’ve made a mistake by failing to mention that Fonda apologized for her actions in 1988 and again in 2005. (But let the record show that her apology in 2005 only consisted of being sorry that someone had a camera at the ready to photograph her support of the North Vietnamese.) Nevertheless, neither of these apologizes mean anything when one considers Fonda’s participation in the anti-war movement that reared its ugly head during the Iraq War.

That’s right, Miss “I’m Sorry For Getting Caught Supporting the Enemy During Vietnam” came out in 2005 and 2007 against our military operations in Iraq. In 2005 she promised to take a bus tour around the country to show her commitment to anti-war principles. And in 2007 she stood shoulder to shoulder with stellar intellectuals like Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, and said: “I’m so sad that we still have to [protest this war], that we did not learn the lessons from the Vietnam War.”

For the record, we did learn some lessons from the Vietnam War, and one of those lessons was that Fonda is a traitor.

The above short wouldn’t be so funny if the horrid little things weren’t so ripe for parody. To be fair, the trailers of old were just as bad in their way — if you watch classic film DVDs and take the time to run the special features, you’ll soon grow weary of seeing every film advertised as the GREATEST CINEMATIC TRIUMPH EVER! But we’re supposed to be better than that these days, we’re supposed to have evolved, right? In truth, our stuff’s just as cheesy, and will be revealed as such in a couple decades, when people yet unborn will watch them on some as-yet-unfathomed format and chuckle at how predictable and “of their time” they are.

Every once in awhile, however, a trailer comes along that’s startling in its freshness, that manages to break all the rules and become memorable in its own right. So it was with the two-minute teaser to Aliens, first spied by my then fifteen-year-old self in the spring of 1986. Can’t remember which movie I was at — Cobra probably, or maybe The Karate Kid Part II. But I’ve never forgotten that daring, brilliant bit of marketing:

No gravelly-voiced narrator intoning exhausted platitudes. No giving away the plot of the movie. In fact, no dialogue at all, just chilling music and sound effects overlaying a brooding nightmare, all of it implicitly promising equal parts horror and action. A true teaser trailer, that manages to recapture everything audiences loved about director Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) while clearly marking itself as something much more than a pale retread.

I still remember hearing others in the theater catching sight of Michael Biehn in full futuristic military gear and whispering, “Hey, that’s Reese from The Terminator! Cool!” Blending the original Alien’s carefully measured horror with classic sci-fi author Robert Heinlein’s blistering space-marine concept was a stroke of genius. These days the decision seems obvious and inevitable. But at the time the film was being made, many thought that all the action would dilute and destroy the wonderfully creepy, character-driven atmosphere created for the first picture in the series by Ridley Scott and his talented crew.

Because of this, the movie took more guts than most to make. It was a follow-up to a treasured movie, an “instant classic” from seven years earlier. Director James Cameron recalls power lunches with various executives and agents in the wake of his success with The Terminator, where everyone was warning him away from the project. “Kid, kid, kid, trust me,” they all told him. “Don’t make this Alien II thing. It’s a losing proposition. It’s a no-win for you. If it’s good, it’ll be good because Ridley Scott did such a good first film. And if it’s bad, it’ll be totally your fault.”

When we movie-buff civilians talk about films and how we’d do things different, we often forget the pressure-cooker atmosphere that these people work under, making career-altering decisions with millions of dollars on the line. Could any of us honestly say that we’d have implacably stuck to our guns in the face of all those warnings from people with a lot more experience than us? To his credit, and to the benefit of an entire genre of literature and filmmaking, Cameron did. As he recalls, “My response was, ‘Yeah, but I really like it. I think it’ll be cool. Can’t I just do it?’”

By the time he was finished, he had “done it” all right. Costing only $18 million dollars (anyone who says we aren’t living in a time of immense, catastrophic inflation is nuts), it brought in many times that and became one of the biggest hits of the year. Anyone worried that Cameron would forsake horror in favor of gunplay, or that seeing dozens of the eponymous creatures mowed down would somehow demystify their power to frighten, had their concerns allayed in short order. Gale Anne Hurd, the movie’s producer (and, for a few years, James Cameron’s second wife), remembers one screening where “There was one woman who could not look at the screen, and she was grabbing the side of the seat so hard that she actually pulled it off. And then she started pounding the arm of the seat onto her boyfriend’s leg because she was so terrified by the film. But she couldn’t stop looking.”

Ever since its debut in 1986, it’s also been ranked as one of the best action movies ever made. Unlike the majority of films where the fights become dated, the passage of time has only made Aliens look better. BH’s John Nolte put it well in a previous column: “The one thing Cameron has always done well is to create busy, energetic, brilliantly choreographed action scenes that allow the audience to follow what’s going on. That’s not a small thing because it’s becoming a lost art in Hollywood as more and more filmmakers lazily trade coherence for the artless shaky-cam and hyper edits.” The many adrenaline-pumping fight scenes in Aliens still thrill, and even after a quarter-century they look more visually effective and accomplished than 99% of modern action movies.

“This Time It’s War,” was the tagline Cameron crafted for his own version of the Alien legend. “It’s blaster action rather than Gothic future horror,” said the Los Angeles Times in its review. David Giler, one of the film’s producers, called Aliens a cross between his own Southern Comfort (1981) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Writing in The Futurist, her book on Cameron, Rebecca Keegan adds that, “For Aliens, Cameron envisioned something reminiscent of World War II combat pictures like Sahara or The Dirty Dozen, where a scruffy, ethnically diverse squad of soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and pull together to face an overwhelming foe.”

World War II wasn’t the only influence. At the time Cameron wrote the picture, he was also hard at work on the script for Rambo: First Blood Part II, and the latter’s focus on the pain and betrayal left behind in the wake of the Vietnam War bled over into the sci-fi script. Aliens features spaceships that drop marines off on planets with visuals eerily similar to Hueys landing soldiers in the jungle on 1960s newscasts. “It was a definite parallel to Vietnam,” Cameron admits, “to tell the story of a technologically superior military force which is defeated by a determined, furtive, asymmetric enemy.”

Also like Rambo — and unlike many cinematic stories that reference stories of Vietnam-era defeat and loss — Aliens features not just characters who are jeer-worthy but heroes who are cheer-worthy. To my mind, by far the most interesting Aliens influence is one brought up by Rebecca Keegan in The Futurist: “He also had in mind John Wayne’s film The Alamo, in which Wayne, as Davy Crockett, galvanizes his overmatched, ragtag troops against the advancing Mexican army. As Cameron saw it, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, was John Wayne, the unflappable leader in a hopeless battle.”

Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens character as John Wayne? I like it. I also like the other great characters Aliens introduced to movie audiences: Vasquez, Hudson, Hicks, et. al. It’s amazing that, even after twenty-five years, one need only mention those curt surnames for the fully-formed personalities to come roaring back out of the past. Has there ever been a more memorable assortment of grunt soldiers in movie history?

Aliens, then, is a film that can only have been made by a man bearing a peculiar assortment of influences, talents, and an absolutely incredible amount of mental fortitude. For if Aliens is a war story, so is the tale of its making. . . .

That question was posed to Werner Herzog a few weeks ago in an interview with the German broadsheet Die Zeit (The Time). Those of you who tuned in last week know that ecstatic truth is Herzog’s way of describing the poetic, transcendent heights of illumination to which his films aspire. “Yes, there is something of that there,” Herzog replied, “something of late medieval mysticism.”

However, he immediately provided a caveat, one that should warm the cockles of conservative hearts everywhere: “But I want to get away from the religious, from the mystical,” he stressed, “because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm.” And then, the coup de grace: “And this is something you see in a film like Avatar, by the way.”

Whoops — guess Herzog didn’t get his marching orders this awards season!

“It is basically a New Age fairytale film,” the Die Zeit interviewer mused airily, at which point Herzog could no longer restrain himself: “What annoys me is the way the film romanticizes and idolizes nature,” the director of Grizzly Man said. “It’s celebrating a new form of paganism, and it gives me knots in my intestines just thinking about it.”

Thus Herzog rebuked the mindless praise lavished on Avatar by the tonsured acolytes of Tinseltown, aligning himself instead with those of us at Big Hollywood who understand that the luxurious three-dimensionality of Avatar’s visuals was fatally offset by the plodding one-dimensionality of its puerile eco-worship. In another interview, he once admonished that, “Nightmares and dreams do not follow the rules of political correctness.” After decades of rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s motley array of ex-hippies, pseudo-reactionaries, and eviro-cultists, Herzog’s on record as concluding that, “I believe, among the entire scene of filmmakers here in Los Angeles, I’m the only clinically sane one. Period.”

He first encountered the rage of what he regularly dismisses as “the dogmatic Left” quite early in his career. “At the end of the Sixties,” Herzog remembers, “German film saw itself solely as an instrument of world revolution. People were also babbling on about how we should join forces with the proletariat. And I was thinking: which one of you is from the proletariat? I had actually worked as a welder in a steel factory to fund my first film. So at least I knew something about what factory work meant.”

In 1970 Herzog made Even Dwarfs Started Small, a darkly funny movie about the midgets populating a remote island institution and their failed anarchistic revolt. Meant to echo Tod Browning’s absurdist classic Freaks (1932), it was widely banned as politically incorrect, and the young maverick director was spat on by Leftists at film festivals. “I was basically accused of ridiculing the world revolution,” he remembers, then adds with wry humor, “Actually, that is probably the only thing they might have been right about. . . They insisted that when you portray a revolution you have to show a successful revolution, and as Even Dwarfs does not do this, for them it was clearly made by a fascist.” Fascism, of course, was a loaded term in postwar Germany, the equivalent of calling someone racist in today’s America — an appellation with the power to ruin a career and a life.

During the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982), activists from what Herzog teasingly calls “The Diaspora of Shattered Illusions. . . doctrinaire zealots of the failed 1968 revolution” accused him of abusing the Peruvian natives and despoiling their pristine Pandora. Some even came to the jungle and showed the Peruvians “photos of Auschwitz victims, piles of skeletons and corpses,” telling them that “this is how the Germans treat everyone.” A few months after the release of the film, Herzog was walking down a street in Munich when a Leftist protester (the same sort that throws pies at Republican speakers on university campuses and disrupts government hearings) ran at him, kicked him in the gut, and yelled, “That’s what you deserve, you pig!”

Ah, the Peace and Love emanating from the Left — I never tire of their tolerance for diversity.

In 1984 Herzog made Ballad of the Little Soldier, a short documentary on the tribulations of children conscripted into the civil wars of Nicaragua. It was the height of the Reagan era, and the socialist Sandinista movement was the current sacred cow of the Left. “For some people,” he says, “showing nine-year-old kids fighting against the Sandinistas meant I was clearly an American imperialist. . . the film does not mince its words and when it was released I was immediately labeled as being in the pay of the CIA. . . The intellectuals were simply unable to understand that politically dogmatic cinema is not something I practice, and they didn’t bother to look at what the film is really about.”

All of these things stem from the “turn on, tune in, drop out” crowd and their infatuation with revolution, socialism, and a hatred of Western Civilization. When once asked “Why were you resistant to late 1960s politics?”, Herzog’s answer was telling, and worth quoting in full:

The ideas and actions sweeping the world in 1968 were not for me because at that time, contrary to most of my peers, I had already been much further out into the world. I had traveled, I had made films, I had already taken on responsibilities that very few people my age had. For me, this rather rudimentary analysis that Germany was a fascist and repressive prison state, which had to be overpowered by a socialist Utopian revolution, seemed quite wrong. I knew the revolution would not succeed because it was rooted in such an inadequate analysis of what was really going on, so I did not participate. And because I have never been into using the medium of film as a political tool, my attitude really put me apart from most other filmmakers. As there were very few reviewers and journalists who were not wildly into revolutionary jargon at the time and who did not put ridiculous political demands on filmmakers, my films suffered at the hands of many of the critics.

He has little use for film analysis (one notable exception being Roger Ebert, an early champion of Herzog’s work — in appreciation, the director dedicated his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World to the now-ailing Pulitzer-Prize winner). “The audience reactions have always been much more important,” he says. “The opinion of the public is sacred.” When critics learn that Herzog routinely throws all of his unused footage in the trash, original negatives and all, they frequently recoil in horror — all of that potential fodder for study, gone forever! The director himself remains nonplussed by their anguish. “A carpenter does not sit on his shavings,” he says with a shrug.

Over his long career, in interview after interview, Herzog has stressed his blue-collar views on his craft: “Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. . . For me [filmmaking] is much more about real life than about philosophy. . . Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind . . . Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.” These thoughts frequently set him against film snobs who think that, in Herzog’s words, “If you do not make a black-and-white political statement you are on the side of the devils, a point of view that is clearly overly simplistic and stupid.”

Although he’s made many documentaries for the small screen, television has long been a bête noire of Herzog’s (among Hollywoodists, only Michael Medved is as public about his disdain for the medium). “Those who read own the world,” he states emphatically, “and those who watch television lose it.” Herzog thinks the boob tube, “ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. . . .television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

A big part of why TV is so sterile and predictable is that its content is dominated by the left-wing, and thus by political correctness and ideological purity of all kinds. Herzog treats Big Media with grudging equanimity, answering banal questions and posing for sinister “madman director” photographs, but occasionally Life presents him with a chance to laugh at it all. When a few years ago the BBC was interviewing him outdoors in Los Angeles for Grizzly Man, a hidden assailant shot an air rifle at Herzog from some nearby woods and hit him in the stomach with a pellet, leaving a bloody wound in his abdomen. “I was not injured badly,” he says, “But the people from the BBC were shitting themselves. That was pretty funny.”

In recent years the German director has lived in LA, a city he likes although he decries its superabundance of “idiocies like hippies and New Age.” He also despises the left-dominated structures that cast endless reams of red tape between a filmmaker and his vision:

I remember one time I was shooting in New York and showed up with my rental van at the place where I wanted to rent some equipment. The man said, “You cannot pick it up yourself, a union truck has to deliver it.” I said, “But my van is ten feet from your door here.” There was an endless debate until I just picked up the cameras and carried them to my van. An absolute waste of time. In Hollywood there are too many rituals and hierarchies, and to be independent means to be free of things like this. I have always known that true independence is a state of mind, nothing more. I am self-reliant.

Seeing first-hand Hollywood’s ravenous perversions and vices has made Herzog wary of falling into all the usual traps of fame. “This life can easily turn you into a clown,” he admits. “My way of dealing with the inevitable is to step out of filmmaking whenever I can. I travel on foot, I direct operas, I raise children, I am learning to cook professionally, I write. Things that give me independence outside the world of cinema.” Unlike many Hollywood jet-setters, he is totally at home in, and appreciative of, rural America. “I truly love places like the Midwest,” he says. “For me it is the very heart of America. You still see the self-reliance and camaraderie our there, the warm open hearts, the down-to-earth people, whereas so much of America has abandoned these wonderful and basic virtues.”

When he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) — a documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot who was shot down and tortured during the Vietnam War, only to stage an amazing escape — the Left noticed that the usual anti-American propaganda was nowhere to be found. “The film was generally very well received by American audiences,” Herzog says, but adds that “Inevitably I was asked why I did not denounce American aggression in the Vietnam War and why the film made no political statement.” Herzog’s reply to this pressure was to double down, raise more money outside of the system, and make Rescue Dawn (2007), a fictional treatment of the exact same story starring Christian Bale as Dengler.

Werner Herzog, you see, is no slave to political correctness, no lap-dog for the media, and not at all on board with the hippy-dippy attitudes of the Hollywood Left. He saw in Dieter Dengler a man who, in his words, “had all the qualities that make America so wonderful: self-reliance and courage, a kind of frontier spirit.” That was what counted, and no amount of disparagement was about to deter him from portraying Americans at their best.

This, ladies and gentlemen, was the brand of rock-solid intellectual honesty brought to bear on Grizzly Man.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Werner Herzog and Timothy Treadwell by delving into how Herzog used his unique blend of deep spirituality and down-to-earth rationality to make Grizzly Man such a memorable and compelling film.

Previous posts in the series “Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and Grizzly Man“

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Werner Herzog DVD Collection: Documentaries and Shorts. At Herzog’s personal website you can purchase a 6-DVD set containing most of his non-feature directorial efforts. It will set you back a pretty penny (15o Euros, or around $230 U.S. dollars), but it’s worth it if you find yourself wanting to collect the director’s work. Many can also be found on Netflix if you’re interested.

THE INFAMOUS SNIPER INTERVIEW: Watch the now-legendary video of Herzog getting shot by a hidden sniper while doing an interview in Los Angeles. He completes the interview (it’s about Grizzly Man, so give it a listen) before condescending to show the BBC reporter the bloody hole under his beltline. “You’re bleeding!” gasps the interviewer. “Somebody shot at you and created a wound in your abdomen!” Shitting himself, just like Herzog said. But for a director who’s been kicked, spat on, and shot at during his filmmaking adventures, getting pinged by a pellet gun is just another ordinary day on the mean streets. I love how he deadpans to the interviewer: “It’s not a significant bullet.”

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.