Her name was Lillian Gish, and she was eight years old.

She was born in Ohio, in 1893, to a pair of seventeen-year-old parents. A little sister, Dorothy, followed four-and-a-half years later. By 1902 their alcoholic father had abandoned the family, and mother turned both herself and her two little girls towards acting to pay the bills. “I learned what it was like to work,” Gish remembered with appreciation. “And. . . to be hungry at times.”

They moved to New York, where the action was. To save on rent, the Gish family shared an apartment with another abandoned mother, Charlotte Smith, and her own three thespian kids. Little Gladys Smith was near to Lillian’s age, and they became fast friends, going so far as to substitute for each other on stage whenever one fell ill.

These prepubescent girls helped support their families by heading off, for months at a time, with one of the hundreds of acting troupes touring turn-of-the-century America. They filled a burning need for dramatic entertainment long before television, video games, the Internet, or even movies hit the scene. More often than not they went alone, while their mothers worked elsewhere, trusting other actors to look after them. “The older troupers guarded me with the most affectionate care,” Lillian would fondly recall of those days.

But that wasn’t good enough for The Gerry Society, a watchdog group charged with rooting out child labor abuses. “Whether or not we or our parents wanted this attention,” Lillian later wrote, “child players were singled out for rescue from gainful employment. No one seemed to care that we were leading busy, productive, and — on the whole — happy lives, or that sometimes our wages helped to keep a family together.” Being harassed and hounded by this nascent manifestation of the modern nanny-state forged the Gish girls into stalwart, lifelong Republicans.

Thankfully, there were no mandated backstage tutors or Head Start laws in 1902, and so the Gish girls received their education wherever they found it. “If we were near Plymouth Rock, we were taken there. If it was Detroit, [Mother] took us to the automobile factories, to see how cars were made. . . It was a beautiful but unique education.” Mom also took her little girls to graveyards for impromptu history lessons, getting them to look for (and often find) the headstones of relatives.

Nevertheless, the life of a stage urchin was often a lonely one for “Old Lil” (so nicknamed because she was a reserved and serious child, in contrast to her impish, spunky younger sister). “It was difficult to maintain friends. I never learned how to play with other children. . . I never met anyone I liked better than mother or sister. I was really never happy away from them.”

Acting on stage also brought with it a modicum of early fame, but their mother quickly disabused them of any prima donna mannerisms:

Early in life Dorothy and I came home to mother and said that people had turned around on Fifth Avenue to look at us, that they seemed to know who we were.

She said, “Well, if you walked down Fifth Avenue with a ring in each of your noses, they’d do the same thing!”

In 1907, attempting to trade in their nomadic lives as stage actors for a more mundane existence, they moved to St. Louis to stay with an uncle. But that change of scenery, and several others, didn’t stick — the lure of performing (and of the accompanying paychecks) was too great. By 1912 Mrs. Gish and her now-teenaged daughters were back in New York, once again hitting up the talent offices. This time, however, there was a difference: cinema had arrived.

Lots of old jobs had vanished as audiences gave up plays and vaudeville in exchange for watching movies. Out-of-work thespians found themselves donning pseudonyms and performing embarrassing pantomime in front of motion picture cameras to make ends meet. This was considered the bottom of the acting food chain, something no self-respecting veteran of the stage would be caught dead doing.

So imagine nineteen-year-old Lillian’s and fourteen-year-old Dorothy’s surprise when they were sitting in a theater one day, watching one of those newfangled “flickers,” when all of a sudden their old childhood roommate Gladys Smith appeared on screen:

Astonished, they rushed home to tell their mom, and soon the family was knocking on the gate of Biograph Studios and asking to see Gladys Smith. At first no one knew who they were talking about, but the girls describing the movie solved the mystery. Their old friend no longer used the name Gladys Smith — she now called herself Mary Pickford, and was fast becoming one of cinema’s first superstars under the tutelage of Biograph’s most successful director.

After their teary-eyed reunion, Pickford promised to get her old friends jobs at Biograph. Mother and daughters waited on a bench while Pickford’s boss was sent for, and soon Lillian Gish saw a tall, imposing figure walking down a flight of stairs, idly singing an Italian aria to himself. “To me, he looked like a giant. He had a large nose and a profile that belonged on a Roman coin. It was an important face, and he carried himself like a king. His gaze was intense. He seemed to be dissecting us.”

His name, she soon learned, was D. W. Griffith, and he was destined to become the most important man in her life.

For his own part, Griffith was impressed as well: “I was going through the dingy old hall of the Biograph studio when suddenly all gloom seemed to disappear. This change in atmosphere was caused by the presence of two young girls sitting side by side on a hall bench. They were blondish and were sitting affectionately close together. I am certain that I have never seen a prettier picture. . . Of the two, Lillian shone with an exquisitely fragile, ethereal beauty. . . when I first saw her sitting there in that dingy old hall, there seemed around her a luminous glow that did not come from the skylight.”

“Where are you from?” he asked Lillian.

“The theater,” she replied shyly. “But we come from Massillon, Ohio.”

“Massillyooooon,” he echoed, gently mocking her accent. “Well, I could tell you were Yankees the minute I saw you.” Then he addressed their mother: “Can they act?”

This proved too much for young Dorothy, who exploded with all of the outrage her sassy, fourteen-year-old mouth could muster: “Sir, we are of the legitimate theater!”

“Oh, I don’t mean just reading lines,” Griffith shot back. “We don’t deal in words here.”

He took them upstairs for a screen test. Burglars are assaulting your house, he told them. “You hear the door breaking! Run in panic — quick! Try to bolt it — ”

“Wh-what door?” Lillian cried.

“Right there in front of you!” Griffith yelled, pointing to the blank space at her feet. When they still didn’t look sufficiently frightened, he took a loaded pistol from his coat pocket and “began to chase us around the room, shooting it. We didn’t know he was aiming at the ceiling.” That did it — terrified, the sisters writhed and screamed and ran until, “Suddenly, everything was quiet. Mr. Griffith lay down his gun. He smiled broadly. . . Our ears still ringing from the pistol shots, Dorothy and I were struck dumb.”

They had just joined the D. W. Griffith repertory company, and their lives would never be the same.

Movie acting, they soon discovered, was weird. The lights were incredibly bright and hot, and gave off a purple hue that made everyone on the set look like the undead. The makeup was heavy and strangely colored to ensure that faces would register properly on film. The voiceless acting and pantomime seemed unnatural. But the money was good, and the atmosphere was fun and creative. “We always took someone on location who could play the piano,” Griffith wrote in his autobiography, “so we could dance in the evening. Nearly the entire company was composed of youngsters, and we worked and played with the buoyant spirit of youth. We were young like the business itself. . . happy-go-lucky, vigorous, vital, crude, lusty.”

The Gishes found themselves competing against a bevy of other young actresses, all rather interchangeable. One of the company’s other ingénues, Miriam Cooper, remembered that “[Griffith] liked his young ladies to be thin, ethereal types. I don’t think there was a big bosom in the bunch. We were all flat as pancakes.” To set themselves apart, Lillian and Dorothy soon developed into convenient stereotypes — the younger sister specialized in humor and sass and fun, and the older frequently epitomized solemnity, grace and dignity.

But while most of the other actresses, Dorothy included, did their bit in front of the camera and then ran off to party into the wee hours with their male costars, Lillian stayed in her room reading Shakespeare, or else stuck around on set to watch Griffith deal with the hundreds of challenges inherent in the making of a motion picture.

It was a time when, seemingly every day, the man perfected some new technique or trick that revolutionized the art form. The visual grammar was hardly developed — if on one day Griffith composed a shot that only showed Lillian from the waist up, a few weeks later he might hear test audiences demanding to know where her feet had run off to. Close-ups, wide shots, tracking shots, fade ins and fade outs, inter-cutting, pacing cuts, stop-motion, tinting, music. With serene authority, sitting on the ordinary kitchen chair he used as a director’s throne, Griffith challenged these mental boundaries and exploded all of the old rules about what viewers would accept on screen.

The countless chummy hours spent in public together prompted rumors to swirl around the pair: was this mutual friendship the surface manifestation of some clandestine romantic affair? In later years Gish did slyly admit to a “love affair” of sorts with both “pictures and the man who created them.” But she was always careful to add that it was “not in the way” that, say, her sister carried on with her own paramours. Lillian loved the cinema, and her consequent affection and respect for Griffith was of a fatherly nature, stemming from his genius in working with celluloid and camera lenses the way other artists worked in oils or clay. In many ways, he became the father she never had.

Anita Loos, who with Frances Marion was one of Hollywood’s pioneering female screenwriters, said late in life that: “Looking back on those early days, I remembered that Lillian had a premonition about the importance of films that few of us shared. It was Lillian alone who took those silent flickers seriously. We others looked on them as a fad that would soon lose public interest.” Gish saw that Griffith willed movies into art almost singlehandedly, and even long after he was dead she would never waver in singing his praises to fans and defending his honor against all detractors. When, a half-century later, she published her book The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (1969) she dedicated it both to her late family and to “D. W. Griffith, who taught me it was more fun to work than to play.” This was not a playful, sexual affair of the heart and body, but a working one of the mind and soul.

In his autobiography, Griffith remembers Lillian Gish as a human sponge, soaking up all of the myriad details of moviemaking and growing into one of the most valuable members of not only his cast but his crew. It got to the point that “Whenever we were making a picture I realized that she knew as much about it as I did — gave me valuable ideas about lights, angles, color, and a hundred other things. She had brains, and used them, and did not lose her head.”

As their years working together progressed, he would consult her for ideas regarding all aspects of his productions: lighting, developing, cutting, set design, even writing titles and ad copy. According to Gish, one of the first times she ever wowed him with an idea was when “we were at a lunch counter eating. I was having a chocolate malted milk and a cheese sandwich, and after that. . . when he was looking for a title or looking for something, he’d say, ‘Go out and get her a cheese sandwich or malted milk. Maybe she’ll think of it.’”

Even as Griffith transformed filmmaking with technically audacious and dramatically overwhelming masterpieces like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), actress after actress bolted from his company. The main reason was money — the director’s films had made them famous, and offers cropped up elsewhere promising fortunes beyond anything the independent Griffith could offer. Another was creative freedom: Pickford later explained her own abandoning of the Griffith nest by saying that “Only a truly great artist who is willing to sacrifice all ego can get along with D. W. Griffith. Lillian could, I couldn’t.”

By 1919 Gish had outlasted the rest. Now twenty-six, she reigned supreme as Griffith’s premier leading lady, accepting $1850 a week even as Mary Pickford raked in hundreds of thousands performing for lesser directors elsewhere. For seven years Lillian had toiled alongside the innovative director/poet, performing in many profitable and famous films. She already suspected that, decades on, she would feel blessed at having been a part of it all, and justified in having stuck by her cinematic mentor. Yet it could be argued that, to date, Griffith had never used her to her full potential, or created a vehicle in which she could show her true chops as an actress.

All of that would change with Broken Blossoms.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, carried over due to length: part II of the Lillian Gish story. . . .

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Two Lillian Gish biographies. Lots of books have been written by and/or about Lillian Gish. I’m highlighting these two because they each collect a lot of information from other sources, as well as provide a fair amount of original interviews and research not to be found anywhere else.

Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life by Charles Affron is a modern attempt at disentangling some of the pretty lies and legends that Gish was more than happy to erect around her life, and that were too often perpetuated in past tomes with little attempt to separate truth from fiction.

Lillian Gish: A Life on Stage and Screen by Stuart Oderman is written by a man who became a personal friend of Gish’s in 1954, and remained so until her death forty years later. His book is fair-minded and doesn’t shirk away from the less flattering portions of her life, and yet the respect and love the author feels for his subject is palpable.

Both books are worth reading for the Gish and/or silent film enthusiast.

Twenty-year-old Lillian Gish in two early Griffith shorts. Here’s a pair of complete silent films on YouTube, The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and The Mothering Heart (1913). Both were filmed in the earliest years of Gish’s employment with the D. W. Griffith repertory company. Each runs about twenty minutes, and is a window into a different world.

At 12:58 of The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), you can see one of Griffith’s most famous shots: three thugs coming toward the camera, each walking forward into a tight close-up, their passing faces filling the screen and oozing menace. It’s a shot that feels thoroughly modern, the kind of in-your-face dramatic perspective that wouldn’t really become commonplace in cinema until Sergio Leone perfected such close-ups in the 1960s:

For The Mothering Heart (1913), one contemporary critic was impressed that Gish’s performance used “No twisting of the mouth to denote strong emotions, but she just stands immobile and looks the emotion. . . A hardening of the eyes and a set, strong modeling of the face, so cameo-like and childlike usually, and one is deeply impressed in a much greater way than any grimacing could possibly impress one. Repression is the keynote of her art.” Take a look for yourself, and see if you agree:

Lillian and Dorothy Gish greet Mary Pickford and her mother, Mrs. Charlotte Smith. Here’s a brief newsreel clip (circa 1925, according to this video — I’ve seen it marked 1927 elsewhere) that gives us a fleeting glimpse into the love and affection shared between the Gishes and the Smith/Pickfords. As you can see, not much changed between their time as roommates in the early 1900s and their reign as silent movie celebrities in the mid-1920s. They would all remain lifelong friends, a rare island of sanity in an industry known for its needless, ego-fueled crackups and feuds.

Their keystone attraction was Broken Blossoms (1919), a then sixty-year-old silent film. The Museum, as it happened, possessed the only “original tinted nitrate print” known to still exist in the world. This precious and brittle jewel would be projected at the Exposition for the last time, before being tucked away into temperature and humidity controlled storage (from then on, future screenings would use copies of the original). For its last hurrah, this ancient print would be accompanied by a full, live orchestra, like in the old days. And to cement the evening as a particularly notable occasion, the movie’s eighty-four-year-old star, Lillian Gish, “would be presented following the screening.”

To average 1978 filmgoers drunk on Star Wars, all this was doubtless of little significance. To others, the announcement carried momentous power. Broken Blossoms had been hailed in its time as a film of startling beauty, a virtual kaleidoscope of color and light and emotional resonance. But in the decades since, the only way to see it had been through degraded 16mm black-and-white dupe prints, with all of the film’s tinted luminance — and thus much of what made it so beautiful — lost. The chance to see the only remaining 35mm print with the original tints intact, accompanied by a full orchestra, and with the film’s sole surviving star in attendance — well, one’s twentieth viewing of Star Wars could wait.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was justifiably proud of bringing this rare print to Los Angeles. Their Department of Film was established in 1935, at a time when movies — powerful and popular as they were — were nevertheless seen as disposable. Most of the original silent studios were long gone, their archives sold off or destroyed. Any copies that remained were left moldering in ill-kept warehouses and collections scattered across the globe. Countless thousands of prints were tossed into the trash. Even those films lovingly collected and preserved by fans degenerated with each viewing until most became pale shadows of their former glory.

Iris Barry, a popular writer and movie critic from Great Britain, became the first curator of MoMA’s film department. It was her assertion that film was much more than entertainment, it was Art — the first utterly new art to come along in centuries. As such, it was important to preserve old motion pictures so that they could be “studied and enjoyed as any other one of the arts.” To that end, she embarked on an ambitious goal of saving as many old films as she could before it was too late.

To jumpstart the MoMA archive, Barry traveled to Hollywood and begged for cooperation from studios and filmmakers in preserving their own heritage. To her delight, most people proved only too happy to help. Silent-era stars, directors, and production wizards were still in town, and many kept old prints of their work squirreled away in garages and storage sheds.

There were setbacks, of course. Early nitrate prints easily decomposed in poor conditions, rotting away like unembalmed bodies, and many times MoMA’s archivists would open a prized film can only to find a rust-like powder caked within. But by the end of Barry’s stint at MoMA in 1951, she had saved thousands of titles, and her department was using new triacetate stock to make copies tough enough to survive into our modern era of computers and digitization.

For most of the movies that made up America’s early cinematic heritage, however, it was too late. Over 80% of all films from the silent era, some of them quite famous and revered in their day, have now vanished forever. We owe it to Iris Barry and the good people at MoMA that Broken Blossoms did not become one of those grim casualties.

Even so, celluloid is more durable than flesh, and by 1978 that fragile print of Broken Blossoms had outlasted almost all of its creators. The picture’s pioneering cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, was felled by a heart attack way back in 1944. Thomas Burke, author of the short story on which the film was based, followed Bitzer into Hades a year later. The movie’s legendary director, D. W. Griffith, succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage in 1948. One of the three stars, actor Richard Barthelmess, died in 1963. Another, Academy Award-winner Donald Crisp, lasted to the ripe old age of 91 in 1974. And between these last two came the death of Hendrik Sartov in 1970, the man whose experiments with diffusion glass popularized glamorous, soft-focus photography in Hollywood fare via Broken Blossoms.

Only the third star of the film, actress Lillian Gish, was left to represent the original filmmakers at the historic 1978 occasion.

On the day of the screening, almost 1400 people showed up. The issue of Variety for May 3, 1978 reports that the aged film only snapped a single time, necessitating a quick-splice repair job, and that at the end Lillian Gish received a standing ovation. “I am deeply moved by your applause,” she said to the assembly. “just as I was deeply moved by this film. It’s as if it had nothing to do with me. This film really had everything to do with a man named D. W. Griffith.” As usual, Gish was the essence of graciousness when thanking her long-dead mentor, a man for whose reputation and legacy she proselytized via books, interviews, and events such as this.

I wonder what that audience was thinking as it viewed that film in the dark, the print covered in scratches and the grime of decades, the actors engaged in a forgotten language of pantomime as frustrating to modern eyes as Shakespeare’s English is to modern ears. Actor James Mason aptly describes the typical silent movie effect in his narration for the epic 1980 documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film: “Jerky, flickering, a little absurd. Moving at the wrong speed, with that tinkling piano.”

Audiences of the distant past, though, saw the best silent movies as the height of entertainment and emotional engagement. Our great-grandparents experienced Broken Blossoms in opulent movie palaces glittering with gold fixtures and crystal chandeliers, and manned by armies of fresh-faced, well-trained ushers. In the best cases, a full orchestra was on hand to play along with the action, giving these pictures a splendorous sonic accompaniment rivaling today’s THX-certified digital systems. It was a major event and spectacle, the equivalent of getting dressed up today and attending the latest Andrew Lloyd Weber musical at a tony Broadway theater.

For most of us today, on the other hand, silent movies are too often chores to be slogged through, distant and old and more than a bit weird. And then there’s the distorting lens of political correctness to consider. A February 2, 2009 piece in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane announced a MoMA screening of Broken Blossoms this way:

D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, which screens at MoMA on Jan. 29, is ninety years old, and in some respects the film is looking its age. . . As for the printed titles, you don’t know whether to snicker at the late-Victorian moralizing or wince at the racial nomenclature. Yet there is something in the tenderness of the telling, and the grace of the compositions, that stills the urge to jeer.

Snicker? Wince? Jeer? Back in 1919, Broken Blossoms was hailed by critics writing for another big-city publication, The New York Tribune, as

The most beautiful motion picture we have ever seen or ever expect to see. . . For the last two years we have seen at least one picture a day, yet with Broken Blossoms we sat on the edge of our seat, one hand grasping the arm, the other crushing a wet handkerchief, and trembled and grew hysterical over what we saw before us.

This was hardly an isolated reaction. Audiences of the time describe being swept away by the cinematography, the music, the tragic Romeo and Juliet cast of the tale, the poetry of the title cards. Even a decade later, movie magazines were still calling it the “highest example of screen realism” the pictures had yet seen.

The disconnect between this view of the film and the one expressed in that 2009 issue of The New Yorker is enormous. Have we really changed so much? Are the overwhelmingly positive and heartfelt emotional reactions elicited by Broken Blossoms in 1919 impossible for us to ever experience or understand today? Is our only recourse to declare it racist/sexist/dated (“painfully dated,” according to Roger Ebert) and join critics in their “snickers,” “winces,” and “jeers”?

To find answers to these questions, we must hop into Big Hollywood’s Hot Tub Time Machine and journey with Lillian Gish way back to the year 1919, when the father of filmmaking was pushing this nascent craft as far as it would go, lifting “flickers” out of the crowded doldrums of cheap Saturday afternoon entertainment and into the realm of true art.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the genesis of Broken Blossoms.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Iris Barry 1895-1969. Some solid biographical information about this unsung hero of early film criticism and preservation.

Iris Barry at the British Film Institute website. A look at not only Barry, but the genesis of film criticism in England.

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.

Child-abusing barbarians, I know.

They were rich, the Flemings. Grandfather made his fortune pioneering investment trusts, and when Valentine came of age he inherited hundreds of thousands of pounds. Thus it was that his second son Ian, born in 1908, grew up in a world of wealth and privilege. Mother was a typical socialite, a lover of status and all the good things that money could buy, but Father was different. He ran for government office as a conservative, and was by all accounts a thorough patriot of crown and country much admired by everyone who met him. When war became imminent, there was never any question whether he would use his money and influence to weasel out of the fight. Valentine joined the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars of his own volition and trained for combat, counting among his friends a fellow officer named Winston Churchill.

Ian and his family watched with dread as their Dad headed off to the front in 1914, and for the next three years they saw him but seldom. Valentine sent his family cheery letters to lift their spirits, but his missives to Churchill laid bare the truth:

Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of the wounded men, by the pitiful calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines of trenches, some 200, some 1000 yards apart, hardly visible except to the aeroplanes which continually hover over them, menacing and uncanny harbingers of fresh showers of destruction. . . . It’s going to be a long, long war in spite of the fact that every single man in it wants it to be stopped at once.

Fleming was a nine-year-old student away in boarding school, his head filled with the stories of H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, and Robert Stevenson, when word came in May 1917 that Dad was dead, killed instantly by a shell while scurrying between trenches. Winston Churchill, by then a rising figure in government, wrote the obituary for the Times. The Fleming boys were left fatherless among their socialite mother and her widow-wealth and elitist friends. From then on, whenever they said their nightly prayers, they would finish with, “And please, dear God, help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.”

The loss of his idealized father would have repercussions for the rest of Ian Fleming’s life. Without his war-hero Dad’s sterling example, his pampered circumstances transformed him from a devastated child into a spoiled teenage Byronic rebel, torn between his father’s laudable memory and his mother’s smothering social ambitions. He became a champion athlete but otherwise struggled with rigid school discipline, drifting through several tony academies as a constant source of upset to the rest of the family. Money and good looks allowed him to pose as a (in hindsight, quite Bondian) romantic loner, seducing young women by the score yet finding little real happiness in the effort. The girls called him “glamour boy,” and fancied him as a moody, handsome, far-eyed dreamer, his personality a potent mix of devil-may-care gaiety and inner sadness.

Spurred on by his mother, now a maven of upper-crust English society, he learned the usual social graces: dancing, food, drink, all things that would later give the fictional world of James Bond its verisimilitude. In Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, biographer Andrew Lycett aptly describes the young rich kids of that era:

Their favorite destinations were the French resorts of Le Touquet and Deauville, where the casinos offered an opportunity to gamble as well as play golf. The young bloods crossed the channel — some in their private planes — for regular weekends of gaming and carousing, interspersed with the odd round of golf to cure hangovers and give the impression they were doing something healthy and good for their constitutions.

Yet in between the fun to be had at boarding schools, finishing schools, mansions, and European vacation homes, Fleming spent his idle hours writing world-weary poetry and short stories. He preferred books and the collecting of first editions to the usual moneyed pursuits of shooting, hunting, and endless soirees. Whereas his compatriots were enjoying the rich life and quickly rising to positions of power in government and business, Lycett describes Fleming as “a charming chancer who, dogged by the memory of an upright father killed on the Western Front in May 1917 and pushed by an ambitious and headstrong mother, had, by the time he was thirty, tried his hand at various careers — army officer, diplomat, journalist, banker and stockbroker — without ever finding his métier.” His was a life defined by a deep ennui.

While working for Reuters in the early Thirties, Fleming went to the U.S.S.R. to report on a Soviet show trial, and the experience gave him an insider’s look into the pure evil of James Bond’s future enemies. Later, as a (terrible, by all accounts) stockbroker, Fleming began rubbing shoulders with bankers and brokers with backgrounds in clandestine intelligence. The attraction to their world of veiled excitement, combined with patriotism and service and purpose, was immense. When WWII broke out, he lost no time in parlaying these contacts into a job as secretary for Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, and with that his life took a most dramatic turn. The boring world of high-society cads and whores gave way to battles, tactics, weapons, cartography, languages, and espionage. A mediocrity at his previous jobs, he excelled at his wartime intelligence exploits, to the point where his superior said, “Ian should have been the D.N.I. and I his naval adviser.”

Matters of escape, sabotage, and subversion consumed his waking thoughts. He developed contacts far and wide throughout Britain’s underground spy apparatus, even visiting with the group charged with developing the exact kind of gadgets that Bond would later receive from Q. He visited America, met President Roosevelt and FBI Chief Hoover, and played an important role in establishing a fruitful intelligence relationship with “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS (the organization under which, you will remember from our first FCML series, film director John Ford also worked.) Three times in England he narrowly survived bombs falling onto the buildings he was in — the last one covered him in debris and plaster. One of his grimmer moments during the war was having to identify the body of one of his favorite former lovers, killed in her bed during a bombing raid.

By the end of the greatest conflict of the twentieth century, Fleming had revealed that under the dilettante exterior and the spoiled rich-kid gloom was a man of, in biographer Andrew Lycett’s memorable phrase, “steely patriotism.” The war energized him in a way nothing else ever had, pointing the way to a life of excitement and adventure and freeing his fertile mind from the chains of stuffy blue-blood mores. By 1944, the man who once flirted with poetry and short stories told a friend in an unguarded moment that he was “going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.” Decades later, after his death, his widow Anne pegged the core of this self-promise: “You must realize that Ian was entirely egocentric. His aim as long as I knew him was to avoid the dull, the humdrum, the everyday demands of life that afflict ordinary people. He stood for working out a way of life that was not boring and he went where that led him. It ended with Bond.”

Visiting Ceylon on an assignment during the war, Fleming discovered that he loved tropical heat and the sea, and vowed never to spend a winter in England again. In the years after the war he built Goldeneye (named after one of his wartime missions) his now-famous idyllic refuge in Jamaica. There, working for three hours a day on an old typewriter, he dashed off Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, at a blistering pace that saw the book finished it little more than a month.

Part of his energy came from finally settling down and wedding his longtime (and, until recently, married) lover that same year –  in his Fleming biography, Lycett jokes that writing Casino Royale was the author’s method for dealing with “the horrific prospect of matrimony.” In between sessions of composing, he would enjoy the lush accoutrements of Goldeneye, his sanctum sanctorum, whiling away the days swimming, fishing, spearing lobsters for dinner, reading in lush gardens, and (according to his wife) spending evenings on the balcony “smoking and wallowing in the melancholy.”

Casino Royale was published in April 1953, and by the end of May the initial print run had sold out. The world had been officially introduced to what Lycett glowingly calls “the sparkling luminescence and darting romanticism of [Fleming’s] original mind.” Spurred on by early success and the need for money (the family fortune was still largely denied him by his aging mother) he wrote a book a year until his death, with sales slowly growing with each new novel’s appearance. Aspiring to be a sort of British Raymond Chandler, he was delighted when that famed American mystery writer (who lived for a time in Britain and who, like Fleming, also began his writing career at an advanced age) sang the praises of Casino Royale and its follow-up, Live and Let Die.

Nevertheless, Fleming was all-too-aware of his limitations as a prose stylist. Later in their correspondence, pressured by Chandler to attempt a higher level of quality in his work, Fleming glumly admitted: “My talents are extended to their absolute limits in writing books like Diamonds Are Forever. I am not short-weighting anybody and I have absolutely nothing more up my sleeve. The way you talk anybody would think I was a lazy Shakespeare or Raymond Chandler. Not so.”

Nevertheless, in his fine book biographer Lycett opines on the hidden depths present in Fleming’s fiction:

Ian skillfully matched this hard-edged delineation of contemporary reality with a more mythical interpretation of events. Bond is taking on the forces of evil, a heroic St. George-figure fighting on the side of virtue (and the free world), saving and bedding the girl, and attempting to slay the dragon. . . Only through such an epic battle, Ian was saying, could the function of good be understood. Bond says in Casino Royale that the villains he fights are “creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist.”

In other words, beneath all the “sex, snobbery, and sadism” titillating readers, Fleming’s old wartime patriotism was once again present, fueling what on the surface seemed shallow and sensationalistic. Throughout his life, the creator of James Bond was an anti-Communist and anti-Nazi, going so far as to once quit a book club when he felt the monthly selections were becoming too left-leaning and fellow-traveling. Izvestia, the long-running Russian newspaper, accused Fleming of being a tool of American interests and dismissed him as “a retired spy turned mediocre writer,” slams which Fleming took as high compliments from the enemy.

A lifetime of seeing (and oftentimes enjoying) the effects of easy living left him with little confidence in human nature, which too often manifested itself in bitterness and rudeness. But in the midst of all the cavalier cruelty his enemies charged him with, simple gestures of humanity would often stand out. One American-based friend remembers fondly that — unlike the other wealthy jet-set acquaintances in their social circle — Fleming alone treated her belief in Catholicism “like hallowed ground,” going so far as to ask, after his health began to fail, if she could light a candle for him in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. When asked about this respect for Christianity, the creator of 007 replied sheepishly that “You can’t grow up in the English school system without it having an effect on you.”

Fleming’s later years, like his earlier ones, were in many ways not happy. Despite some genuine fondness his marriage was always a tenuous proposition, with both parties cheating regularly in between temporary reconciliations and bitter recriminations. A chain smoker and a drinker, his health declined precipitously just as Bond was giving him the income with which to truly enjoy his retiring years. Headaches, back and neck pains, and creeping coronary heart disease all took their grim toll.

Eventually, even the success of his novels became an albatross around his neck, albeit a lucrative one. “What was easy at 40 is very difficult at 50,” he wrote to a friend. “I used to believe — sufficiently — in Bonds & Blonds & Bombs. Now the keys creak as I type & I fear the zest may have gone. Part of the trouble is having a wife and child. They knock the ruthlessness out of one.” To another correspondent he lamented, “I am seriously running out of puff and my inventive streak is very nearly worked out.”

By the time of the fateful Saltzman/Broccoli Dr. No film deal, Fleming had suffered a major heart attack that signaled the beginning of the end. A few years later, just before Goldfinger was released into theaters, he was dead. Doctors long warned him about his inveterate smoking and drinking, but he never listened. If he had, he might have lived longer, true — but then he wouldn’t have been the Ian Fleming who created James Bond.

His wife later insisted that her oft-estranged husband was a “desperate melancholic,” and revealed that many of his last days were spent staring “from his bedroom window at the sea in total misery.” What was he thinking during those bitter times? In the final analysis, had his life meant anything? Had he even begun to live up to the long-cherished image of old “Mokie”?

One friend is on record as remembering her surprise when, while driving him around soon before his death, he asked to stop at a church so that he could pray for the forgiveness of his sins. Some might see that as a typical late-in-life hedging of the bets by a person with far too much to forgive and far too little actual remorse to put down as a down-payment. But I note once again Lycett’s analysis of the mythical “St. George” aspect of Bond’s character, as well as a small but perhaps telling factoid: from the time of his father’s death until the very end of his own days, Ian Fleming kept a copy of his father’s obituary, framed and signed by Winston Churchill, hanging proudly on his wall.

“Please, dear God,” Fleming would pray as a child, “help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.” Whether Fleming the Shiftless Cad believed at the end that his wartime service — and the literature it inspired — accomplished this is anyone’s guess.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers: the man who brought Bond to life on screen, Sean Connery.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond by Andrew Lycett. The best of the many biographies out there, heavily referenced for this article. Other books are valuable for various reasons, but Lycett synthesizes the rest while adding plenty of original research.

Interview of Raymond Chandler, conducted by Ian Fleming. Fleming became friends with the great Los Angeles mystery writer when the latter made one of his trips to London. This BBC Radio interview is not just a meeting between two genre greats, it also features the only known recording of Chandler’s voice.

Ian Fleming/James Bond Exhibition at the War Imperial Museum. A short tour of a great exhibition dedicated to Fleming and his famous creation:

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond by Ben MacIntyre. The print book that served as an accompaniment to the above-mentioned museum exhibition. A great way to see the displays up-close.

Centennial interview with Bond expert Brad Frank. Recorded for a local Tulsa, Oklahoma TV station on the occasion of Fleming’s centennial. Some good basic Fleming information from a knowledgeable fan’s POV:

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

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

Joe August was a twenty-one-year-old wayward cowpuncher from Colorado when he migrated west to work as a ranch hand at Inceville, the vast silent-era movie studio created by film pioneer Thomas Ince on what is now modern-day Santa Monica. But it wasn’t long before he drifted away from horses and lariats and lost himself in the shiny, futuristic world of cameras, lenses, and light. August’s cinematographic mentor was the director Ray Smallwood (1887-1964), who not only taught him the intricacies of camerawork but impressed upon him the need to become an instinctive artist, one capable of using light and chemicals and film emulsion to emotionally transform a film composition the same way a symphonic conductor can transform a well-known piece of music with different orchestrations and the wave of a baton.

Even something as innocuous and seemingly necessary as a light meter (a handheld instrument that allows you to measure the intensity of light at various points in a composition, so that you can be sure you are not over- or under-exposing — and hence potentially ruining — a shot) was verboten on a Smallwood set. Decades later, and now a veteran cinematographer in his own right, Joe August had not forgotten the hard lessons of his apprenticeship. “I am not against meters by any means,” he said in a 1939 interview. “They just don’t fit into my plan of taking pictures. The meters I lean on are my eyes. When I first started in this business twenty-eight years ago, I had a preceptor I then thought sort of tough because he was insistent on my learning what could be accomplished by a pair of eyes, and a man with scant patience for any devices that aimed to make those organs secondary to any human intervention.”

This sort of approach to cinematography often results in images that are, by strict measurable standards, too dark, too light, too grainy, too blurry — in a word, not perfect in the way we’ve come to expect from Hollywood fare. But in August’s determination, rigid standards of slick perfection were beside the point. He felt that the emotional spectrum of a cinematographer’s image counted as much as the physical, just as a painter hardly feels the need to portray everything with strict photographic realism. “Frequently,” he said, “I choose to make an exposure that — well, we will call it an unorthodox exposure, one aimed to produce a certain effect that may be desirable. For instance, the negative might be overexposed and underdeveloped — or the procedure might be reversed.”

The video I posted above is filled with examples of these “unorthodox exposures”: haggard faces swathed in shadow and smoke, men and planes reduced to silhouettes against dim panoramas of swaying palms and setting suns, two figures dancing together in an almost total darkness which serves to enhance the intimacy of the moment. There were no video screens back then to give guys like August instant feedback on their lighting setups. With every shot they guessed, they experimented, they checked the camera’s film gate for stray hairs. And if they were very skilled and a bit lucky, a few days later the film would come back from the lab with something magical burned into it.

There are two recurring visual motifs in They Were Expendable: the long-shot goodbye and the luminous close-up. Throughout the film we see faces swathed in shadow, almost lovingly, with only their eyes aglow in the gloom, like feral ghosts. The quality of light mirrors the content of their souls, flickering and guttering like fragile candles amidst the harsh winds of war. Water, too, is used to great effect. Fearsome waves and bomb-created geysers batter men as they struggle to keep afloat, their tattered battle flag fluttering madly. At one point, the destruction of John Wayne’s beloved boat casts up a mournful veil of artificial rain that falls down upon him like heavenly tears.

August was in his mid-fifties when he shot Expendable, but he frequently pushed himself to the limits of endurance in his efforts to capture the shots Ford wanted:

When Ford and I did They Were Expendable for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the United States Navy, the keynote of the picture was realism. We used regular PT Boats manned by Navy crews off the Florida Coast. Equipped with a handheld 35mm Mitchell camera that weighed fourteen pounds, I reverted to old-time photographic technique, shooting the scenes myself. I was cushioned against a slack service belt attached to a boat by two lines as the craft hit speeds of 42 knots, sometimes taking drops of five feet while speeding across the water. For other action shots, I lay on the bow of a PT Boat shooting backward into the vessel. As in Ford’s The Battle of Midway, the camera often shook while photographing real explosions.

It’s interesting that he stresses realism. M-G-M tried forcing Ford to film a silly ending that would have shown MacArthur’s 1945 invasion force triumphantly returning to the Philippines, topped by Wayne’s character finding Donna Reed in a guerrilla hospital and giving her a glorious Hollywood kiss! To Ford’s everlasting credit, he doggedly fought for his original bittersweet denouement until the studio capitulated. The filmmakers were also hampered by the harsh dictates of the Breen Office, which strictly regulated what could and could not be displayed on screen. “In all of the scenes of wounded men and of men taking machine gun slugs,” one December 1944 letter from Breen warned, “restraint should be exercised to avoid any excessive gruesomeness, which might not be acceptable in the finished picture.” Numerous instances of words like “damn,” “hell,” and even “nuts” were ruthlessly excised from the script again and again, despite Ford’s multiple attempts to sneak them past the censors. We must allow for this artistic meddling before thoughtlessly damning our forefathers for the crime of papering over the true horrors of war.

Today we regularly are treated to heads exploding, blood splattering across the lens, and glistening intestines strewn in full color across the widescreen frame, all accompanied by explosions and screams delivered in ear-splitting surround sound. And yet realism is not the be-all, end-all of art, and oftentimes loses more than it gains. Contrary to popular belief, modern audiences needn’t be subjected to raw butchery and carnage for a war movie to have an impact, any more than they demand pornographic portrayals of sex scenes in romantic films. The relatively sanitary images created by Golden Age Hollywood are no different than a Shakespearean stage actor gamely taking a sword-thrust under the armpit and stiffening up in over-dramatic death-throes capable of being seen by the schlubs in the cheap seats. It’s a simplistic, unimaginative mind that routinely sanctifies realism at the expense of poetic impressionism. The next time you are watching an old movie and find yourself snickering at men reacting painfully to non-existent bullets, consider the possibility that it’s a blessing that your nervous system isn’t being overwhelmed with gore, that you are left with enough emotional distance to think and feel, not just recoil.

Like all of Ford’s best films, Expendable is filled to the brim not with visual horror but with what he called his “grace notes” — shots of spare simplicity and honest emotion that, while not absolutely necessary to the plot, served to powerfully convey his deepest feelings and themes. The cutaway we saw in the opening clip of this series — of a boy toasting his elder with a glass of milk — is a Fordian grace note. In the video above, the shot of the two young seamen praying at their friends’ graves is one, too. I would suggest to you that such images, then and now, are far more important to a movie than seeing yet another man’s guts spilling out.

If I had to pick a favorite grace note among the embarrassment of riches to be found in Expendable, I would chose the one that appears toward the very end. It ranks as perhaps the most subtle in Ford’s entire canon, one that comes and goes so fast you sense it more than see it. Throughout the film, Wayne’s impulsive character has been openly seething at having to retreat rather than take the fight to the enemy. Only now, at the end, does he realize that this brashness and anger has been a luxury denied to his commander, who is ever forced to stoically suppress his own agony so that others can draw strength from his leadership. In most modern films (and, to be sure, many older ones as well), Wayne would have had a good cry and made a pretentious speech about how he’s “changed” and “grown” as a human being. Ford, by contrast, has the Duke convey an entire universe of feeling with a single gesture, one so quiet and understated that most viewers miss it entirely:

One look, one touch. Says It All. Pure visual poetry. That was the genius of men like John Ford and Joseph August. Modern-day Hollywood could learn a lot from their legacy.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we delve into the controversial war years of John Wayne, examine the foundations of his irreplaceable acting talent, and learn of the history and significance of a special song featured in They Were Expendable.

Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable”:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

“The Founding Fathers” by Robert S. Birchard: A fine article on the fifteen cameramen who started the American Society of Cinematographers, including They Were Expendable’s Joe August. Includes a picture of August taken during the very early years of Hollywood silents.

Big Hollywood’s own Schizoid Man wrote a great post a few months back about another movie lensed by cinematographer Joe August, Gunga Din (1939). If you missed it the first time, click here to check it out.

About John Ford by Lindsay Anderson: In an earlier post I mentioned that Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford is the bible among Ford fans. Well, About John Ford is the bible for Ford critics — simply the best book about Ford’s artistry ever written, or likely to be written. Anderson was a British magazine critic in the 1950s when he first met Ford, and later became a revered director in his own right (it was he who jump-started the career of actor Malcolm McDowell, who credits Anderson with much of his growth as an actor). But I feel Anderson deserves to be primarily remembered for this wonderful volume, wherein he absolutely nails the essentials of John Ford’s genius, his patriotism, and his love of family and country. In the key chapter, “Ford and His Critics: Auteur or Poet?”, he thoroughly dismantles the gaggle of clueless academics and pretentious critics that ever hover around Fordian cinema missing the forest for the trees. In the process, the ostensibly liberal Anderson also mounts the most convincing defense of classical (read: conservative) cinematic styles against post-modernism that I’ve ever read. Anderson’s sole blind spot was The Searchers (he found it a stylistically forced and emotionally bitter film, one at odds with Ford at his best), but even there his arguments are fascinating to ponder.

Illustrated with dozens of rare photographs and screenshots, and including interviews and correspondence with key people who worked with Ford (including They Were Expendable’s Robert Montgomery), About John Ford is all tied together with a relaxed erudition that is sheer poetry to read, an emotionally evocative mirroring of Ford’s films themselves. The praise he heaps on the great director — “such smiles, such tears, such restorative energy” — could just as easily apply to his own marvelous book. I can’t recommend it highly enough to conservatives — a masterwork.

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper.

 We are led to believe that if only The View and Oprah could become required therapy for guys, if only there were enough copies of How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger to go around, if only enough Neanderthals were herded into sensitivity/diversity/anger management/sexual harassment/conflict resolution training, then gee, what a wonderful world it would be. In recent years, only Sly Stallone’s lumbering but effective Rambo (2008) (tagline: “Heroes never die. . .they just reload”) has dared to flip a fully unapologetic middle finger at Hollywood’s human potential movement, offering up a wholesome, rejuvenating hero of implacable moral certitude bathed in the blood of his hated enemies.

Director Pierre Morel and writer/producer Luc Besson’s Taken follows in that film’s laudable footsteps, but significantly ups the ante by adding intelligent layers of real-world characterization to its steel-tipped judgments. The overarching villain in Taken is not a cat-stroking, monocled megalomaniac, nor a motley army of interchangeable third-world guerrillas, but an attitude. A NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) policy practiced by an entire assembly-line of well-imagined kidnappers, pimps, concierges, businessmen, cops, and Sydney Greenstreet sheiks — American, French, Albanian, Arab — all of whom are perfectly content to participate in and profit from the great evil of sex slavery as long as it’s not their daughters being fed into the meat grinder.

Social conservatives have long highlighted the very real plight of women and children across the globe being forced into prostitution (see Donna Hughes, Claudia Barlow and Big Hollywood’s Kathryn Lopez, all at National Review Online). But it’s the rare Hollywood action film that eschews absurdly convoluted plots of world domination or mass destruction in favor of a setup utterly chilling in its innate on-the-ground plausibility. In this age of Natalee Holloway-style sensationalism, what parents haven’t worried about their daughter heading off on a trip? Using this potent, universal fear as a linchpin with which to hold together the stunts, fights, and pandemonium was a stroke of genius, and elevates the audience’s emotional investment far above that of any other action film in recent memory.

As the film’s star, Liam Neeson, stalks through Taken’s miserable underworld of murderous degenerates and silky-smooth predator elites, he is continually faced with the gangland version of the same bureaucratic nightmares that so often terrorize our real workaday lives. “I sit behind a desk now,” a French policeman “friend” tells him by way of rejecting his pleas for help, “I take my orders from someone who sits behind a bigger desk. . . .my salary is X, my expenses are Y. As long as my family is provided for, I do not care where the difference comes from.” When at long last Neeson’s Bryan Mills, captured and defenseless, confronts the man capable of freeing his daughter with a nod of his immaculately coiffed head, the exchange is one that, but for the life-and-death stakes, could have occurred at any DMV or post office:

ST-CLAIR: “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

MILLS: “The last girl — I’m her father.”

ST-CLAIR: “Oh my. . . .”

MILLS: “Give her to me.”

ST-CLAIR: “I wish I could — honestly. See, I’m a father myself. I have two sons, and a daughter. But let me tell you something, Mr. whoever-you-are. This is a business. This is a very unique business with a very unique clientele.”

MILLS: “I’ll pay!”

ST-CLAIR: “This business you have no refunds, no returns, no discounts, no buybacks. All sales are final. Besides, discretion is about the only rule we have.” [turning to his henchmen] “Kill him. Quietly — I have guests.”

Translation: you didn’t fill out the right form/pay the proper postage/return the item by the deadline, so your daughter is going to spend the rest of her life as a burqa-wearing blow-up doll. I’m oh-so-sorry — next customer, please. . . .

Set against these smiling, Armani-clad, ever-so-reasonable slave traders is a man with “a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you,” a man of such singular purpose and moral clarity that we believe him when he promises to “tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to” to find his daughter. A lifetime of living far from the sterilized bubble-universes of political correctness and cradle-to-grave pampering has taught him that there is no negotiating with such scum, no possible penance or rehabilitation, no shrugging at or sympathizing with the worldview they represent. They are the enemy, the nemesis of everything he holds dear as a Judeo-Christian, as an American, and as a father. Against that evil, blood is the only disinfectant.

One of the chief joys of the picture is watching how each defeated villain squeals like a stuck pig and falls over himself to appeal to the hero’s mercy — the very sense of decency they never displayed while engaged in their own unfettered cruelties. “We can resolve this,” one pleads, as if trying to calm down an irate customer returning a defective blender. “I know how you feel. We should talk. We could work this out.” Each time, our hero sees these empty entreaties for what they are: the soulless cries of scorpions unexpectedly denied the use of their sting.

The frontier justice meted out is swift, brutal, and thoroughly satisfying — which means, of course, that the resulting carnage was decried by horrified movie critics as “lowest-common-denominator trash,” a “risible male-re-empowerment fantasy,” an “unsavory mix of sentimentality and high-octane seediness,” and a “post-Sept. 11 throwback to the most primitive movie melodramas.” My, my — how nice to see liberals bitching about a film getting an inappropriate PG-13 rating for a change! Meanwhile, those males around the country who remain proudly unreconstructed — and also, based on the audience I saw the film with, the women who love them — cheered as each doom-laden verdict was rendered:

“I believe you — but it won’t save you.” FFFFZZZZZZZZZ.

“You could have made this much less painful if you had been more concerned about my daughter and less concerned with your goddamned desk.” WHAM!

“It wasn’t personal!” “It was all personal to me.” BLAM!BLAM!BLAM!BLAM!

By the end, the hero’s determination reaches such a fever pitch that he doesn’t even spare a moment for the usual Hollywood banter with the arch-villain cowering behind his terrified human shield: “We can nego–” BLAM! A thunderous exclamation applied with diamond-sharp moral certainty, without a single iota of doubt or remorse. As it should be.

(from left: Jon Gries, Leland Orser, and David Warshofsky)

If there ends up being a sequel to this film, I hope they do it right. Leave behind the kidnapping meme and take on another of the many moral outrages to be found in the progressive multikulti worldview. Bring back Neeson’s three CIA buddies — portrayed by character actors Leland Orser (the real-life husband of Jeanne Tripplehorn, the lucky dog), Jon Gries, and David Warshofsky — and this time give them some real things to do and good lines to say. And for Pete’s sake, don’t have them betray each other, and don’t kill them off for cheap thrills — let them be heroes. Above all, keep the emotional core of the film real and honest, and do your best to drive the heterophobes and misandrists nuts.

Every action movie is filled with its share of stupid implausibilities, but there is nothing stupid about a father’s love for his daughter, and nothing implausible about the sex-trafficking nightmare portrayed in Taken. The legalize-prostitution crowd has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting a reasonable, libertarian face on the whole sordid business, reminding us that, after all, it’s “the world’s oldest profession.” Taken answers back with a growl: “No — the world’s oldest profession is father.” And fathers, for those who need reminding, are men. Males. X-Y.

At the end of the day, when all of the sensitivity/diversity/anger management/sexual harassment/conflict resolution training falls away, the male of the species is a killer, the keeper of a bloody heroic ideal that winds through our history and through our myths, back through Snorri Sturluson and Luo Guanzhong, Shakespeare and Malory, Virgil and Homer, and ultimately the Old Testament and beyond. Countless women and children owe their lives and happiness to the men who tread grim paths of death in their defense. Just as many owe their misery to the failure of some men to honor that age-old crimson burden.

The self-loathing ninnies in Hollywood can spend millions of dollars to make Greedo shoot first, or to airbrush shotguns out of scenes. But such pale attempts at enforcing nanny-state ethics amount to little more than spitting into a merciless wind, the harbinger of a hard, isolate, stoic truth that has never yet melted.