There was a time when Hollywood and Hollywood stars represented hope and freedom.

Universal’s top star in the 1940s was Deanna Durbin (b.1921 – ) who starred in a series of hugely popular and successful light musical comedies. Durbin, a lyric soprano, was paid $400,000 per film, and she saved the troubled studio from a looming bankruptcy.

Deanna Durbin, Anne Frank’s favorite movie star.

She was, like Judy Garland, a Hollywood creation and a world-wide phenomenon.

Deeply unhappy in the rigid studio system and locked into an image—the cheerful little girl next door—that, increasingly felt alien as she matured, Durbin married producer Charles David, her third marriage, and retired from the movies in 1949.

Deanna Durbin and her family moved to Neauphle-le-Chateau, a small village in rural France, where she continues to fiercely guard her privacy. (more…)

The name was Fleming, Valentine Fleming. But to his four young boys, Bond creator Ian Fleming among them, he was “Mokie” — a baby-talk bastardization of “Smokie,” so called because he always had a pipe dangling from his lips, the same way Sean Connery would one day sport a cigarette in his debut appearance as James Bond in Dr. No. Curiously, no one in turn-of-the-century England thought to arrest Mr. Fleming for smoking in the presence of his children, nor did social services batter down his door to cart the poor cancer-threatened kids away. He was their Pop, and they adored him, smoke and all.

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: (more…)

Boy, did I ever kick a hornet’s nest with my tongue-in-cheek Archie Bunker-on-steroids BH post, “My Secret Life as a Conservative Republican.” Lefties called it Reaffirmation With Senator Smalley, which I expected. But Righties nearly wet their pants in fear, which I did not expect in the least. Where’s the pioneering spirit, self-confidence and gutter-level humor that founded this country?

People, this is OUR Fortress Hollywood! This is OUR sanctuary! Since when the hell do we care about what demagogues like Keith Olbermann think or say? Or any other mental tinfoil hat Lefties like Garofalo for that matter? It’s like Churchill worrying about Hitler calling him a fat cigar-chomping drunk! Who won that fight, and why? And who was in the right, despite all the insipid name-calling?

Time to grow a pair, people. It’s also time to raise the stakes. Now, I’ve heard from some contributors here at BH that it is really bad in Hollywood in places. That people might even lose their jobs if they spoke up like I do here. If true, that’s McCarthyism at its worst. Fortunately, that’s not my experience. I still have great relationships with people in the biz who could care less about politics. All they care about is finding great scripts or literary works to adapt, and telling great stories on film.

And that is where the battle really needs to be fought: on their playing ground. An insurgency of ideas, if you will. Example. Just under the Big Hollywood sign today, I saw the banner “TNT’s ‘The Closer’ Thrives on Strong Moral Foundation.” That PJM-linked article describes how The Closer, a show that portrays the border, the illegals situation, and even the cops themselves in very gritty and realistic fashion, is the top-rated scripted show on ad-supported cable since its inception. (more…)

If you’re a history buff and you’ve got HBO, then have I got a movie for you: Into the Storm. (And if you’re cable-less, add it to your NetFlix queue.) Yes, it’s made-for-HBO, but it’s from the John Adams/Band of Brothers wing, not the Recount/Angels in America department.

It’s a sequel of sorts to The Gathering Storm, known informally around my home as the Greatest Churchill Movie Ever Made. And in answer to the first question on your mind right now, no, the new HBO/BBC co-production is not quite as good as Gathering Storm. (But then, we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that nothing ever will be.)

Partly it’s Albert Finney’s fault. They say nobody’s perfect, but they haven’t seen Finney play Winston Churchill. (He most deservedly won both an Emmy and a BAFTA.) You’ve heard the phrase “tears of joy”? A largely alien experience to me, a pretty stoic, manly guy. Alien to me no more, my friends, once I watched Gathering Storm for the first time.

I regret to report that Brendan Gleeson, who essays the role in the sequel, gives it a yeoman’s try, but can’t quite measure up. There are simply more and richer layers to Finney’s performance, perhaps due to nothing no less unfair than a longer and more experienced life, even (dare I say it, oh what the hell) more talent. Janet McTeer, who plays wife Clemmie in the new movie, fares better, nearly matching Vanessa Redgrave’s marvelous performance in Gathering Storm. (Why, they even look alike.) (more…)

The British government’s decision to ban Michael Savage from entering the UK based on his political viewpoint and opposition to the global domination of Islamic shariah law puts Savage in the same company as Winston Churchill, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the same company as Neville Chamberlain.  Savage, the recipient of the Talkers Magazine 2007 Freedom of Speech Award (Al Franken is a former winner), is an ardent advocate for liberty and freedom and the leading opponent of global Islamofascism.

During the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain pursued a policy of appeasement that brought Europe to its knees before Adolf Hitler.  Even as Hitler planned his domination of the globe, the British Broadcasting Company banned Winston Churchill, Hitler’s leading political opponent, from the radio.  Even after the beginning of World War II, the BBC censored Churchill, considering him too inflammatory in his description of the Germans. (more…)

Big Hollywood:  First off, thank you for doing this. When the opportunity to write “The Last Thing I Remember“ (available April 28th) came along, you told me about the motivation behind what the publisher and you wanted to do with what you’re calling “The Homelanders Series.” It’s a fascinating idea and about time.

Andrew Klavan: Well, to begin with, you know how much I love video games…  I wanted to write a story such that, if a kid had my book in one hand and a video game in the other, he’d choose the book-it’d be that exciting.  And Thomas Nelson publishers and I are offering a guarantee that if you start this story and aren’t completely swept away, John Nolte will personally come to your house and sing the entire screenplay of Hondo to the tune of “Fella with an Umbrella.”  So you can’t lose.  But of course, if you want to tell a story that cool, you can’t preach and you can’t hammer people with your point of view, so I decided, okay, I just want to change the rules of the game, that’s all.  Instead of the usual alienated teen, or the wimpy guy who finds a magical sword, I’m gonna make my hero the kind of hero I like to read about:  a manly guy who loves America, believes in God and is ready to fight for liberty if he has to.  I thought, in the current climate, that alone would be revolutionary. (more…)

For all those critics on the right who find it so fashionable to oppose Rush Limbaugh, they would be hard pressed to challenge his political analysis which, day in and day out, is as sound and thoughtful as any conservative writing today.

In 2005, I had the pleasure of giving Rush Limbaugh the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award. We gave him a bust of Sir Winston Churchill, somewhat more handsome than the one Mr. Obama strangely sent back to the British government recently.

The negative media onslaught Rush is getting right now is almost unprecedented. Thankfully, he is more than up to the task of dealing with the elite media. (more…)

There is probably nothing that people would rather have mentioned in their obituaries than the fact that along the way they had won a Nobel Prize.  And it’s not just the money, either, although 1.3 million smackers is nothing to sneeze at.  No, what makes the Nobel Prize so prized is the prestige it gives the recipients.  If you are lucky enough to win one, you will forever be known as Nobel Prize winner Burt Prelutsky or whatever your own name happens to be, and your words, even those on subjects far removed from the field for which you were honored, will be taken terribly seriously by a very gullible public. 

I mean, you only have to look at some of the folks who have taken home the Prize to recognize its hallowed place in the world.  The list includes the likes of Ivan Pavlov, Sir Alexander Fleming, Marie and Pierre Curie, Harold Urey, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Albert Einstein.  Personally, I have no problem with such honorees.  I mean, even though what I know about chemistry, medicine, physiology and physics, could be inscribed on the head of a very small pin, I am willing to accept that their contributions were remarkable.  And if dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel had left it at that, I’d have no problem with the Prize; I mean aside from my never having won it.   (more…)