The film tells the story  of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first all African-American flight unit in the United States military. The men and women–yes, there were female “Tuskegee Airmen”–who served in this unit were incredible individuals who overcame racism and the brutal intensity of war to become heroes during World War II.  Their story and the obstacles they overcame to become legendary figures in history, however, isn’t captured well in this patriotic but ultimately unremarkable film.

Directed by Anthony Hemingway, the story focuses on the group of young warriors eager for their chance to fight. Ambitious pilots like Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker), Joe “Lightning” Litte (David Oyelowo) and Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wilds) compose this energetic and idealistic unit. These soldiers don’t focus on the racism that has held them back. They spend their time training and dreaming about getting their chance to shine. They want an opportunity to serve their country in epic battles but are repeatedly passed over for major assignments.

Their supervisors aren’t satisfied with their missions, either. Played by Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr., Colonel A.J. Bullard and Major Emanuelle Stance want their unit to have a chance to prove itself. While Stance is their overseas commanding officer, Bullard is their D.C. liaison and must continually battle against the racist sensibilities of the scowling and perpetually displeased Colonel William Mortamus (“Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston).

In one well-done scene, the two argue about the unit, and Bullard tells the Colonel that he respects Mortamus’ uniform and rank but nothing more. That speaks volumes about the racism that these airmen encountered. They were asked to serve military leaders who often looked down on them and disrespected them. But the airmen served them knowing that they were serving their country above everything else.

Both Howard and Gooding Jr. bring gravitas to their roles and when they speak to their young underlings, it’s like watching them teaching the young actors about the craft. These actors have been here before—they both portrayed Tuskegee Airmen in earlier films—and they show that they have something to teach the young ones, both onscreen and off with their strong grasp of their roles.

What’s most unfortunate about this movie are the missions themselves, which are anti-climactic and underwhelming. Considering the fact that George Lucas—the visionary behind “Star Wars”—served as an executive producer on this project, one would expect exciting scenes of air combat. We get glimpses of that here but nothing remarkable. The battles are often too short and too easily won. The Tuskegee Airmen fought and prevailed through difficult battles, but “Red Tails” never offers the true urgency of such aerial assaults.

I only wish that the movie would have captured their heroism more eloquently. “Red Tails” is undoubtedly patriotic in its appreciation for the military–something that audiences don’t often see at the cineplex–but the film never captures the imagination of viewers in the same way that other war movies have done with well-executed battle sequences and strong visual effects.

Movies like this should be thrilling for the audience, but “Tails” settles for something less. It tells a inspiring true story but never captures the magnitude of what these brave pilots accomplished.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) began as a short story called “The Greatest Gift.” Pennsylvania-born writer Philip Van Doren Stern, who said that the heartwarming tale had come to him in a dream, was unable to sell it to a publisher, so he sent the story out as a long Christmas card to friends. His agent subsequently sold the fable to RKO pictures, where it went through several transformations.

—–

In one version a losing political candidate contemplated suicide, only to have an angel convince him to stick around and do good works. Finally it fell into the hands of director Frank Capra, who said it was the story he had been looking for all his life. He purchased it to be the first project for his new venture, Liberty Films (started by Capra in 1945 along with Producer Samuel J. Briskin, and directors William Wyler and George Stevens). With movie attendance booming during the Second World War II, a new independent film company for big name directors seemed like a can’t-miss idea.

Capra had long been an admirer of Amadeo Pietro Giannini, the founder of the Bank of Italy in 1904, renamed the Bank of America in 1928. Giannini earned a reputation for lending money to people other financial institutions had considered bad risks, including immigrants whose property had been destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A.P. only required a handshake and was proud to say later that he was always paid back. Giannini also believed strongly in the hopes and dreams of some of the street merchants who gravitated into the fledgling film industry, and put his bank’s money behind their ventures.

Based on Giannini, Capra’s 1932 drama, “American Madness,” told the story of a bank president (Walter Huston) who makes lending decisions based more on character than collateral, which causes his board of directors to try and ruin him. The money man is bailed by his less well-to-do friends,who personally benefited from his past generosity. A movie about a bank run had proved too topical to be a big hit in 1932; now, fourteen years later, “It’s a Wonderful Life” would allow Capra to once again tackle a similar theme.

To play the unassuming savings and loan clerk in “Wonderful Life,” Capra wanted Jimmy Stewart, who had previously worked with him in “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938) and “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” (1939). Coming back from World War II, the 37-year-old Stewart was no longer the easy going man-about-town he had been in the thirties. The former Academy Award winner for “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) had led a thousand men on bombing missions in the European theater in hard-to-maneuver B-24s. The loud plane engines damaged Jim’s hearing; in later years when people would greet him in public he would sometimes fail to respond. Some would mistake his partial deafness for a cold personality.

Stewart had displayed a great sense of humor when he’d first been inducted into the army; his salary had dropped from the hefty $1,500 a week he was being paid by MGM Studios to twenty-one dollars a month, and he earned his keep as a Buck Private whose duties included peeling potatoes. Upon receiving his first payment Jim immediately sent a check for $2.10 to his agent.

The actor was uncertain after five years away from the screen whether he still wanted to be in the movies; his life in the military at times made him feel like his old profession was insignificant. In 1943, when Stewart had tried to stay in one the best hotels in Madrid, he was turned away because he was an actor. Jim returned back to the military base, changed into his Lieutenant Colonel’s uniform, returned to the resort and was allowed to stay.

“Frank called me one day and said, ‘I have an idea for a movie, why don’t you come over and I’ll tell you?’ So I went over and we sat down and he said, ‘This picture starts in heaven’. That shook me.” James Stewart

When he returned to Southern California in 1945, Stewart took things easily. He refused to re-sign with MGM, despite tearful requests to do so from Metro’s hammy head honcho Louis B. Mayer. Like many World War II veterans, Jim had trouble sleeping and would instinctively duck down whenever a plane would fly overhead. He was content to spend time flying kites, building model planes and going bobcat hunting with Henry Fonda. Fonda had also been up for the George Bailey role; the two war veterans remained lifelong friends despite political differences which had once caused a fistfight between them in 1947. The liberal Fonda and conservative Stewart had promised, and kept their word, never to discuss politics again.

When Frank Capra made his pitch Stewart looked bored, out of it, which caused the director to lose confidence. “Well Jim, it’s about a savings and loan clerk who wants to commit suicide. There’s an angel named Clarence who shows him what life would have been like without him… aw forget it, it’s a stupid idea.” Capra was turning to leave when Stewart put his hand on his shoulder. “Frank, if you want me, I’m your man.” At least that’s how the film’s publicists told it.

“I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn’t care what he believed.” –Lionel Barrymore

In Part 2 (which publishes tomorrow), we learn why “It’s a Wonderful Life” star Jimmy Stewart fought a bad case of nerves while shooting the film and how director Frank Capra got along with his dictatorial studio boss.

Take a look at his 1942 New Year’s Resolution and see if it doesn’t bring a smile to your face, with cute cartoons and common sense goals. Seems to me that almost all his goals are really things that seem almost – dare I say it? – conservative in today’s world.

Keep clean. Save money. Work hard. Take care of your kids. Love your parents. Help the country win the war.

It’s really the opposite of how the Occupy movement thinks and acts, isn’t it?

h/t Boing Boing

Since 9-11, Hollywood filmmakers have had, within free-market parameters, the choice to make any type of picture they wish. No one in government prohibited director Steven Spielberg, in the 2005 drama “Munich,” from implying, in the minds of some critics, that Mossad agents and Palestinian terrorists were morally equivalent and that both sides were equally responsible with their shared intransigence for the Twin Towers coming down (Gabriel Schoenfeld, in the February 2006 issue of Commentary Magazine stated that Munich,” deserves an Oscar in one category only: most hypocritical film of the year.”)

Spielberg, who previously produced “An American Tail” (1986), which depicted Jewish immigrants as mice, seemed to be conflicted with the whole notion of Israelis fighting back against those who wished them not to exist. “”I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine,” Spielberg told Time Magazine. “There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?”

Another post-9/11 cinema trait was that Muslim villains became mostly taboo on the screen. The 2002 thriller “The Sum of All Fears,” adapted from the Tom Clancy novel of same name, featured Aryan villains trying to bomb Baltimore rather than the Arab destroyers depicted in the book. Director Phil Alden Robinson claimed the ethnic change was because Middle East terrorists would not be able to accomplish the mayhem that took place in the story, not mentioning that he had been lobbied hard by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) not to show Muslims in a bad light.Writer Clancy later jokingly referred to himself as “the author of the book Phil Robinson ignored.”

The political correctness which was already present in the film industry, and that just seemed to grow after the World Trade Center was struck down, was a stark contrast to events following America’s entry into World War II. Shortly after December 7, 1941, Washington’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMI) made their objectives clear: every director, producer and writer needed to ask whether their current picture would help win the war. The implication by the Roosevelt administration was clear; if the major studios failed to cooperate, their industry would be nationalized.

For the most part, such threats were not needed.

With Stalin’s Russia and the United States on the same side against the Nazis, an uneasy alliance formed in Hollywood between the more traditional patriotic right and the Communist-leaning left. Up until 1942, the Hollywood Studios, similar to today, largely depended on foreign markets. When Greer Garson accepted the title role in the drama “Mrs. Miniver” (1942) in late 1941, she felt the German soldier that menaced her in the movie was too sympathetic.

With her country under attack, the thirty-three-year-old Londoner wanted to give up Hollywood stardom, return home, and drive
ambulances. The only reason Greer agreed to do the picture was that the British government felt that it would be great propaganda; however, the nice Nazi would undermine any hawkish message. Garson’s cautious bosses at MGM pointed out that America was neutral; they couldn’t take sides. Their attitude changed when Germany declared war on the US in December; Greer’s on-screen antagonist was allowed to become evil. Years later, Garson lamented that Mrs. Miniver trapped her into being typecast as sacrificing British mothers. But her Oscar winning performance in Miniver helped convince many Americans to support England’s war effort.

An obvious difference between the World War II and contemporary Hollywood is that in the 1940’s there were no twenty-four-hour cable TV news cycles. Despite being well-received by critics, “United 93″ (2006), a mostly factual account of the fatal San Francisco-bound flight that was hijacked by four al–Qaeda terrorists and ended up crashing into a field in Pennsylvania after some of the heroic passengers tried to retake control of the plane, grossed a paltry (by Hollywood standards) $31.4 million in the United States.

Whether modern movie goers distrusted liberal Hollywood to do the subject justice, were too burned out by the news to be sufficiently entertained, or were mostly just too young to appreciate a heavy realistic drama without comic book superheroes in it was hard to say; whatever the reason, “United” did not appeal as escapist fare.

In contrast, audiences during World War II, with far less access to information, often enjoyed movies with real life elements. One factor that helped cinema attendance was that female factory workers, often lonely on the home front, and having disposable income for the first time in years, became rabid filmgoers; unlike other products at that time, movies were not rationed. Also, servicemen stationed in many American cities with no hotel vacancies were welcomed to stay the night and sleep in movie theaters.

And sometimes a little light-hearted fantasy mixed with realism didn’t hurt; in “Tarzan Triumphs” (1943), Tarzan and Cheetah teamed up to help win World War II on the screen. After the Ape Man dispatched some very dangerous Nazis in the jungle, his furry pal got on the radio and broadcasted a message to Berlin. The soldiers on the receiving end mistook the chimp’s chattering for Hitler and saluted their imagined Fuhrer while goose-stepping.

Many modern Hollywood stars, including Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Jack Black, Mark Wahlberg, Scarlett Johansson, and most notably Gary Sinise, have done their country proud by entertaining US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in USO shows, but it would be hard to match the overall patriotism displayed by the movie industry during World War II. Amongst the public spirited leading ladies, there was Bette Davis dancing with servicemen at the famed Hollywood Canteen, Ingrid Bergman joyously grabbing a random soldier and kissing him hard on the mouth in France right after Germany surrendered, Carole Lombard feverishly selling war bonds on the last day of her life just before she embarked on a military transport plane that would fatally crash near Las Vegas, and Ginger Rogers, who told of a letter she received from an American soldier who had been incarcerated in a Japanese POW camp. His guards had screened Rogers’ romantic comedy “Tom, Dick and Harry” (1941) and were so enthralled by it that he was able to escape.

With today’s volunteer army, no one really expects stars like Justin Timberlake or Matt Damon to give up the fame and fortune of
Hollywood for military service, yet that is exactly what happened during the Second World War with a number of prominent leading
men. The icons of the past could have easily used their connections to be exempt from service; many people, including General Dwight Eisenhower, felt that the best thing the Hollywood leading men could do for soldiers often bored and in need of entertainment between battles, was to make more movies.

Victor Mature, Tyrone Power, James Stewart, Clark Gable and Henry Fonda were some of the better-known celebrities who were willing to go fight the enemy in an arena where there is no one around to yell, ”cut!” Conversely, actors with ailments such as Gregory Peck, saddled with a bad back, or Van Johnson, who after a near fatal car accident ended up with a metal plate in his head, were able to stay behind and fill the onscreen void.

One possibly apocryphal story while the war was still raging involved an agent who had a meeting with a mogul about a potential new
discovery. “You’ll love him! He’s handsome, he’s talented, and best of all, he has a double hernia!”

Correction: Shortly after this article went to press I was contacted by Phil Robinson who informed me that the ethnicity of the terrorists in his film “The Sum of All Fears” was changed a year before he came on the project; it was not his decision. Robinson’s only contact with CAIR came through a fax he received a month before the shoot asking that “Sum’s” villains not be Arab, the director assured CAIR’s representative that was already the case. I apologize for the error and thank Mr. Robinson for being an absolute gentleman when he informed me of my mistake.

There’s no question, for example, that ‘Tintin in the Congo’ is rather embarrassingly racist by modern standards, but recently critics have begun to attack the new, as yet unreleased ‘Tintin’ movie, complaining that Hergé was a horrible person and that watching the new Steven Spielberg motion capture film ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ is like “being raped” (in the words of the Guardian’s literary critic Nicholas Lezard). That’s a bit much.

In fact, as Contact Music reports in that piece, there are people complaining about the racist and antisemitic overtones of some of Hergé’s works and bringing up the issue of whether he was a Nazi collaborator during World War II, as if it makes any difference to how we’ll react and appreciate (or dislike) the newest film to star the young boy reporter.

Allow me to explain: Hergé was Belgian, Belgium was occupied by the Germans during World War II, and he wanted to continue his work, so while he did assent to getting approval from the Nazi censors for his work (since he would obviously have had no choice) a close examination of the stories he released during this time show a distinct anti-totalitarian bias that suggests to this fan that he was hardly a “collaborator” in any sense. Though, to be fair, there are some troubling images in ‘The Shooting Star,’ which were later revised post-German occupation.

We live in a time of heightened awareness of bias and discrimination, which is a very good thing. What we can’t do, however, is go back and change history, nor does this particular critic believe we should ban, censor or re-edit older works because they don’t reflect our current values. You know what I’m talking about, these are the people picketing screenings of the brilliant ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ because Mickey Rooney plays a racist Asian character, the people who have caused Disney to permanently withdraw the awkward but still entertaining ‘Song of the South’ due to its portrayal of blacks, the people who think that we should either ban or edit classic novels like ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ because of their use of the N-word.

Yes, they’re painful, but they’re all part of our collective history for better or worse. How much smarter to live in a society where we see these racist, antisemitic, sexist characterizations and discuss them rather than sweep them under the proverbial rug.

As a Jewish man, I’m definitely sensitive to antisemitism, and I can attest that having read every single ‘Tintin’ story there’s nothing I’ve come across that makes me feel that Hergé was any more or less antisemitic than anyone else working during the decades he produced the ‘Tintin’ tales.

Which certainly leaves open the question of remakes and prequels/sequels. A remake that’s completely true to the source material should doubtless have a similar tone. Then again, shot-for-shot remakes like the pointless 1998 version of ‘Psycho’ bring nothing new to the screen and while they might be consistent with the values and perspectives of the original film (in this case Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant 1960 original) they are hardly to be considered art or even original storytelling.

And so I have to come down on the side of remakes and subsequent films in a narrative history being updated to match the current mood, sentiment and values. Sometimes it works, other times it completely misses the mark (I’m thinking of the non-Commie-scare 1978 remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ a pointless exercise).

And so it goes with ‘Tintin’ and his first big screen adventure (sort of. Turns out that the entire series has been animated by a collaboration of animation houses Ellipse (France), and Nelvana (Canada), but somehow that didn’t engender any complaints). The ‘Tintin’ franchise is extraordinarily successful, with the stories available in more than 50 different languages, ‘Tintin’-themed gift stores throughout the world and continued interest globally.

You might have a completely different response – in which case I encourage you to add a comment below. My hope is that we can side step the controversy and instead help thousands of people become new fans of the boy reporter ‘Tintin,’ his dog Snowy and the colorful cast of characters that make the adventures so delightful.

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“Captain America: The First Avenger” is set in the latter half of World War II.  The action begins with a scrawny Steve Rogers (a digitally depreciated Chris Evans) doing everything he can to enlist in the U.S. Army.  Rogers has all kinds of heart, but he’s gaunt and is thus 4-F.  The plot turns when an impassioned speech to a friend (“There are men laying down their lives.  I have no right to do any less than them.”) catches the ear of Dr. Abraham Erskine (a very Stanley Tucci Stanley Tucci).  Erskine is a German scientist who is working with the U.S. Army to develop a Super Solider Serum–the ultimate performance enhancing drug–and is on the lookout for a test subject.  The serum amplifies what’s inside of you, so someone of Rogers’ size and character makes him the perfect candidate for this breakthrough procedure.  Erskine and engineer Howard Stark (father of Tony) put Rogers in what looks like a retro-50s refrigerator, crank up the dials until all the power in the building short-circuits, and out comes this guy:

So what does the Army do with the most-badass solider ever to exist on earth?  They use him as a propaganda tool, of course!  Rogers goes state to state shilling war bonds in elaborate stage productions as the character Captain America.  At first, Captain America is played for laughs; the stage shows are absurd and Rogers is no more than a jingo indoctrinating the public.  The show is an acid-trip of brightly colored American flags that are starkly contrasted with an otherwise dimly-lit movie.  Not content to profiteer for the war industry, Rogers ultimate breaks away and goes off to fight his future nemesis, Johann Schmidt, aka Red Skull (played with typically villainy awesomeness by Hugo Weaving).

There are a handful of legitimately patriotic moments that were a treat to watch.  One such scene is when the under-sized yet hopeful Rogers longingly watches a recruiting video with a perfect balance of pride and jealousy; the scene will make not a few of you want to enlist on the spot.  Another moment that should give conservative viewers the warm-and-fuzzies is when one character exclaims that the success of the procedure that turned a normal young man into a Super Solider is the “first step on the path to peace.”  Imagine if that was said every-time the real military developed a new type of bomb or unmanned drone?

But, predictably, these moments are offset by a smattering of mini-sucker punches.  Clichéd racist, sexist, and stupid American soldiers abound and are constantly being outsmarted or needing their asses saved by Captain America and his personal motley crew of multi-colored troops (including a French drunk guy) you’d think he plucked out of a United Colors of Benetton ad (joke hat tip: Mr. Breitbart).  When the War is won, we see a celebration scene in the streets of the United… Kingdom.  Rogers’ love interest is sexy-feminist (not an oxymoron after-all) Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), who is an American in the comics but is British in the film.

A credits sequence that’s pure Americana leaves you with a good taste in your mouth, but I can’t help but wonder if the same one will appear in the cut of the film that is seen overseas.

The movie is typical of Hollywood in the 2011: What it lacks in deep, compelling storytelling, it makes up for with excellent production quality.  There were many appealing performances (along with a handful of caricatures), and the film has a nostalgic look that captures the era with just the right amount of modern flair.  Evans is solid as our hero; strong, charismatic, yet vulnerable, and I didn’t catch him Blue Steeling even once.  A scene where Captain America chases a car… by foot… is pure fun and the movie’s payoff sets up “The Avengers” (due out next summer) quite nicely.  Stick around until the very end for a teaser for “The Avengers,” and do take note of how Captain America’s suit has all of a sudden gone from the dull coloration that inspired our ire a few months ago to a brighter, more authentic blue.

Still, in the well-paced two hours, I can’t think of one bold decision when it comes to the plotting or the characters.

It’s also worth drawing attention to a bizarre story-line that Captain America isn’t fighting the Nazis as much as he’s fighting Schmidt/Red Skull’s extra-nasty fringe sect.  It seems unnecessary to have nuance when it comes to the Nazis in this case, considering the bad guys are supposed to be pure evil.  The Nazis were the ones that carried out the Holocaust and sought to dominate the world, and that’s who Captain America fought in the comics!  Lou Loumenick over at the New York Post thinks Paramount may have made this call so as not to piss off any German movie-goers.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to complain about how patently distracting and unnecessary this 3D experiment has been.  (Social liberals like to argue that one day we’ll look back on this time and think we all supported same-sex marriage; I think we’ll look back on it and remember hating 3D movies.)

The line that best encapsulates “Captain America: The First Avenger” came early on in the film when Dr. Erskine asks Steve Rogers, “Do you want to kill Nazis?”  Rogers replies, “I don’t want to kill anyone.  I don’t like bullies.”  I hate bullies, and all of you on the Bigs Team know that we strive to fight them every chance we get, and it was good on Hollywood to give us a hero dedicated to standing up to them.  Yet, standing up to bullies is not specifically American (think the British who fought along side us in World War II or the Iraqis who fight with us now, just to name a couple), and I think Captain America would want to kill Nazis.  It’s a decent line, it’s a decent film, it just doesn’t soar in that magical way we all hope something called “Captain America” will when the lights go down in the theater.

The IMDB description of the film states that Captain America is “a superhero dedicated to defending America’s ideals.”  Dennis Prager is keen to note that American values are best summed up on your coin: e pluribis unum (“out of many, one”), in God we trust, and liberty.  None of these ideals are seriously touched upon in Joe “Jumanji” Johnston’s film.  This Captain America is a hero of unquestioned bravery, but he’s more interested in the general and unspecific “doing the right thing” and having his friends’ backs.  That’s all well and good and makes for a very likeable lead character, but it’s just not uniquely America, and you can bet that’s by design.

Lennon plays a bit part as a soldier under the command of British lieutenant Earnest Goodbody (Michael Crawford), whose incompetence continually dwindles his troops as they fight the Axis in North Africa and Europe.

Director Richard Lester, the man behind Beatles films “Help!” and “A Hard Day’s Night,” splices grainy, tinted documentary footage into his film, but detracts from the weight of this footage through gag comedy and an apparent lack of direction throughout.

Charles Wood wrote the screenplay, though it’s hard to understand what he wrote exactly. The dialogue is spoken so fast that with the British accents it’s nearly impossible to understand. And the storyline is mashed and incoherent, seemingly without a purpose or end-point in sight.

I think the acting is good, I think, but I couldn’t really tell since I didn’t know what the actors were saying. Lennon’s pretty funny, but his character is a prankster, whose gags are immature and childish.

The film’s interesting camerawork and editing keep it from being an entire waste of time, but ultimately “How I Won the War” is only half as entertaining as its critiques, as average films sometimes are.

Ebert attacked the film’s advertising campaign, which asserted the movie as a work of art simply because it “starred” an artist. He wrote of the film: “Simply by appearing in this film, Lennon has cloaked it in his personal immunity. We know Lennon isn’t phony. Therefore, the movie can’t be phony, right? Wrong.”

Ebert’s critiques of the film rightly include the film’s highly accented (and thus, barely intelligible) dialogue, British in-jokes, and, more importantly, general carelessness of subject. He concludes his review saying, “I got no impression from this film that Lester really, personally, cares very strongly one way or the other about war. It was only a currently fashionable subject, a good excuse to make a movie. Especially if John Lennon would be in it.”

Crowther doesn’t hold back either, criticizing the film’s handling of the cruelty of war, and the offensive way that a Nazi officer passes over the “inconsequentials” of the holocaust. He concludes, “I am afraid Mr. Lester has not added a single discouragement of war, but simply a little discouragement toward patronizing too-pretentious films.”

The lesson from this: Story is everything. Being politically correct counts for next to nothing at the box office.

These were filmed in 2006 and 2007 with young high school history teachers and combat veterans who served respectively in Belgium (Battle of the Bulge) and in France (D-Day, Normandy Invasion).

This new “career” that started at age eighty-one and has been ongoing for five years, is for the purpose of fulfilling my mission to reach young students with the message of the importance of freedom and the consequences of losing one’s freedom.

I am now seeking funding to distribute these films at no cost, which are in DVD format, primarily into the high schools in California where I live.

Now, a third documentary is planned. It is a film about the Eighth Air Force operations from England on daring daylight raids on German targets. Twenty-six thousand men were killed, more than the Marines in the Pacific.

Stories from survivors of the “Mighty Eighth,” as they were known, will be told. It will also relate experiences from relatives of perished crew-members who were hosted by a Frenchman who did arduous research of crash sites in France. The families visited these sites of loved ones who were killed when they crashed in France.

American Airlines is a participant, but additional funding is needed for a “bare bones budget.” Bare bones because I do not do these films for profit.

***

Recently a film has been made and was screened on National Geographic Channel called Caught by the SS: The Wereth Eleven. It tells the story of eleven black Americans who were brutalized and murdered** during WWII as a consequence of the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium on December 17, 1945.  It is a very worthwhile film, but it was claimed in this film that “their story has never been told.” This is untrue.

The following sets the record straight:

In July 2006, while filming Let Freedom Ring: The Lesson Is Priceless, we told the story of “The Wereth Eleven” as a part of our documentary, I believe for the first time on film. Wereth is a tiny hamlet in Eastern Belgium near the German border. The Wereth Eleven refers to the eleven black American soldiers who were separated from their 333rd Field Artillery unit when overrun by the Germans and fled on foot in freezing cold weather finally taking refuge, at the willingness of the Langer family, in a tiny hamlet farm house sheltering them from the cold and feeding them.

Trina Langer, who was one of ten children, and lived in the home at the time of the capture and brutalized killing of these eleven soldiers, told the entire story to us during filming.  She told to us in the living room of the same home where the soldiers briefly took shelter before being captured and killed by a Nazi SS patrol.

Additionally, Adda Rittkin, who was the president of an organization that raised funds to build a monument in memory of these men, told us how and why this was done. Standing in front of the monument, she was very emotional, recalling the sacrifices of these young black American soldiers. (Adda Rittken passed away in January 2010.)

I bring this to your attention because of the fact that the film states that, “their story has never been told.”

Not only did we tell their story before National Georgraphic, but the parties involved told it without rehearsal or prompting of any kind.

***

**Those bodies of the eleven soldiers were recovered by our company and buried in the temporary Henri Chapelle cemetery in Belgium. After the war, seven of them were reburied in the permanent Henri Chapelle cemetery several hundred yards from the temporary one and four were repatriated back to their families in the U.S.

Bodies of the many American soldiers who were massacred in the Malmedy, Belgium slaughter, after being taken prisoner around the same time as the Wereth Eleven, were also recovered by us and buried in the Henri Chapelle Cemetery in Belgium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued. . . . .

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5. Johnny Mathis (b. 1935)

A host of other crooners fought tooth and nail for this fifth slot — Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Jim Reeves, Gene Autry, Nat King Cole — but Mathis wins the day via an impressive five Christmas-themed albums, the best of which are immeasurably improved by the melodic mastery of maestro Percy Faith (1908-1976), whose inventive yet unashamedly unambiguous orchestrations make him my favorite instrumental interpreter of Christmas tunes.

The only one of our Top 5 who is still alive, Mathis made his Xmas bones by singing what is, for my money, the single most beautiful rendition of “Ave Maria” ever recorded — a feat accomplished when he was just twenty-two. Fifty years on, no one has matched the infectious, jingling energy Mathis and Faith brought to “Sleigh Ride.” And despite a good showing by Andy Williams, I daresay he takes the prize for “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and “Winter Wonderland” as well.

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4. Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)

A national treasure and one of the twentieth-century’s premier musical icons, Pops’ affinity for Christmas stemmed from the fact that his poverty-stricken youth was utterly bereft of holiday cheer (his grandparents were slaves). Armstrong’s fourth wife once told of the childlike delight he expressed when she presented him, at the ripe old age of forty, with his first decorated tree. In the following decades, his many Xmas performances never failed to capture the singular joys of the season.

Many singers try to out-cool Satchmo in this arena — Dino, Elvis, Frank, et al. — but all of their “red-beaked reindeer” and “big black Cadillac” stuff, fun as it is, can’t match the authentic jazzy hipness of tunes like “Christmas in New Orleans,” “Christmas Night in Harlem,” “Cool Yule,” and “’Zat You, Santa Claus?” His live nightclub take on “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” accompanied by a game Velma Middleton, captures the humorous ribaldry at the heart of the song better than anyone else, making it the only “essential” variant to the classic Margaret Whiting/Johnny Mercer duet.

Even at the end of his life, wracked by failing health, Armstrong knocked several more Christmas standards out of the park, virtually whispering his way through “White Christmas” and “Winter Wonderland.” The way his weak, perilously quivering voice evinces holiday enthusiasm despite his palpable pain is quite moving. And in February, 1971 he gave us one last bit of holiday gold: a tender, intimate performance of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (a.k.a. “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”) captured on tape at his home just a few months before his death.

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3. Burl Ives (1909-1995)

A young Boy Scout turned wandering itinerant folk-singer during the Great Depression, a veteran of World War II, a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (who ticked off his commie folk-singing friends by cooperating with the investigation), and a powerful Academy Award-winning actor in the 1950s, Burl Ives had already led an eventful life before appearing in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1964. That stop-motion animated special singlehandedly cemented both his visage and voice in the Christmas pantheon, and his renditions of “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Silver and Gold,” and the show’s title tune are unlikely ever to be surpassed.

While not as prolific a Christmas crooner as some others, Ives followed up Rudolph with some wonderful songs both standard and new. His longstanding love of Christian-themed folk anthems served him in good stead, lending unparalleled emotional authenticity to pieces like “Christmas Child” (“Loo, loo, loo….”), “Christmas is a Birthday,” and “Happy Birthday Jesus,” all of which would have sounded hopelessly corny in other hands. “Snow for Johnny” is one of those songs that should be a popular standard but isn’t, and his “Christmas Can’t Be Far Away” is in my opinion the most underrated song in the entire holiday canon, deserving of a fame comparable to “White Christmas” and “Silver Bells.”

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2. Bing Crosby (1903-1977)

When we think of the classic Christmas sound, the one that conjures up thoughts of our grandparents decorating a tree by firelight in the wake of the Second World War while listening to the crackling radio, we think of Bing and his seemingly effortless warm and inviting baritone.

Whether solo or accompanied by the Andrews Sisters, from the staggeringly successful “White Christmas,” to holiday staples like “The Christmas Song (“Chestnuts Roasting….”), “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “A Marshmallow World,” and “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” to unheralded gems like “The First Snowfall” “Little Jack Frost Get Lost,” and “The Secret of Christmas,” he’s one of those guys who couldn’t screw up a Christmas song if he tried. Add to that the respectful and reverent Father O’Malley aura gracing his readings of the overtly Christian lyrics of “Silent Night,” “The First Noel,” “Away in a Manger,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “Faith of Our Fathers,” and you have the quintessential sound of the season.

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1. Perry Como (1912-2001)

If you’re under forty, you likely don’t have a full appreciation of how central Perry Como is to Christmas. A baritone so influenced by Bing Crosby that the two are often confused, he nevertheless became immensely popular in his own right. Known far and wide as a devout family man (whose marriage lasted sixty-five years), he was also that precious rarity: one of the genuine class acts in show business. The rich, simple, honest voice that powers such perennial favorites as “O Holy Night,” “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, “Bless This House,” and “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” resonates with the same eternal vibration that courses through our shared recollections of the holiday itself.

But it was his decades of televised Christmas specials that secured his place in the hearts of our parents and grandparents. From 1948 until 1994 — a span of almost fifty years! — he routinely warmed the wintry living rooms of America with his music and personality. That makes him the Iron Man of holiday crooning, hands down, the one singer who can purr “There is No Christmas Like a Home Christmas” and mean it.

I still remember the sparkle that would fill my late grandmother’s eyes whenever a Como tune would play. His was the voice of an era, her era. Her brood of youngsters were long grown and scattered across the country, her husband was dead and gone. But thanks to the miracle of sound recording, Perry Como’s voice remained as vibrant as ever, and his dulcet tones never failed to imbue ol’ Grandma with a deep comfort and satisfaction borne by memories of a life — and many, many Christmases — well-lived.