Archive Listing
November 28, 2009 - November 21, 2009

Thursday, January 22, 2009

JUST A BAD DREAM. Everybody copes in his own way. IP decided to think about other stuff and so generated his list of 25 movies about America. I chose another route, opting to find what media I could that was not all about the Second Coming of Abraham Lincoln. No cable news. No newspapers. No newsweekly magazines. No women's magazines (They're just The View on slick paperstock if you want to know.). In fact, I thought, here was a golden opportunity to catch up on the specialized periodicals that couldn't possibly have anything to do with a change in the political leadership in the United States. Was I right? Judge for yourselves.

For example, everyone who reads this blog knows that I'm a motorhead. Years ago, I was a huge fan of Car and Driver Magazine, which once scandalized the automotive world by  conducting a performance test of the Ferrari GTO and the Pontiac GTO -- and preferring the Pontiac. I lost contact with C&D for a few years during a sojourn in the midwest. When I left the east coast, they were vociferous opponents of airbags. When I returned, they were among the most fervent advocates of same. Apparently, the possibility that airbags could flat-out kill small women and children by functioning normally had ceased to bother them. But let bygones be begones, I thought. Maybe they'd be a palliative in the new age of messianic politics.


There had to be some safety somewhere. After all, what could anybody do to the Honeymooners?


And so, before I even looked, I knew that the gush had reached I Love Lucy too. Which I never even liked in the first place.


By then I knew. The TOON channel:


And HGTV.


And even the Food Channel.


Drudge says the Obama inauguration got 35 times the worldwide coverage of the Bush inaugural. I'm pretty sure he's misunderstimated the total by a bunch.

But I don't mind. There's only one icon that will send a chill to my bones. And we may be months and months away from that.


How does the line go? "Build it and they will come."

Like gangbusters.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

THE LINCOLN LOG. Just a quick update on inauguration details, in case you're one of the estimated 50 million people who will be squeezing into Washington, DC, for the festivities. You'll need to park your car in Poughkeepsie, Scranton, or Raleigh and walk the rest of the way to the ceremony, so wear comfortable shoes like these.

Part V:

NEXT LOT. I know I promised Baby Boomers, but that's not completely accurate, any more than the things which Baby Boomers are anxious to take credit for are really their accomplishments. For example, neither the Beatles nor the Stones were Baby Boomers, even though they became the soundtrack of that entire generation of self-obsessed jerks. The miserably sad truth is that Baby Boomers have produced almost nothing memorable, significant, or new in their whole time on earth. With that disclaimer delivered, here's the final set of my list of 25.

21. Walk the Line

Consider this one a kind of book end to Bird (No. 19). It's popular among American intellectuals to celebrate black contributions to music, which originated with uneducated folk among the rural poor, and to laugh out loud at country music, which originated with uneducated folk among the rural poor. No wonder they're so convinced we're a racist nation. This movie fills a couple of holes in our movie picture of America. It shines a light on the other distinctively American contribution to our nation's hold on the world's music (quit chortling: the Stones owe as much to country as they do to Motown), and it also acknowledges, as Hollywood almost never does, the powerful cultural impact of our agrarian population -- you know, the people who drive pickup trucks, wear cowboy boots, and grow the food we and a big chunk of the rest of the world eat. Like Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash (not a boomer) became a transcendant figure, beyond genre and beyond the reach of critcs. But unlike the other two, his persona was not a manufactured or gimmicky invention. He was exactly what he looked like on stage -- a barely contained force of nature who intertwined rage, love, lust, violence, and tenderness so tightly into his voice that the contradictions produced the permanent bass quaver which made every song sound like the five minutes of roller-coaster tension before a prison riot. This movie is the story of his life, the good and the awful both, and it's one a huge percentage of Americans can relate to. The first terrible thing happens on the farm, and it never stops resonating through all the subsequent ups and downs of Cash's life. Which is exactly how life can be. Even in the pampered place The New York Times sums up as white America. With stunning performances by Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, and the busiest actor in show business, Robert Patrick. This is about country. Our country. (clip) (and a bonus) [DO watch the last clip. It's IP's theme song, too.]

22. The Deer Hunter

For this choice I have to give a nod to Ed Morrissey at Hotair. He named it as one of the worst movies of the past 25 years, which finally decided the debate I'd been having with myself between The Deer Hunter and We Were Soldiers as the necessary Vietnam movie to include here. [Singling out The Deer Hunter as a 'worst' on any list that also includes Forrest Gump, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Born on the Fourth of July, and Platoon, {a.k.a. the Oliver Stone Poor Poor Pitiful Me Story} is about as outrageous as it gets... but enough about Morrissey.] I happen to know the part of Pennsylvania where the characters in The Deer Hunter lived, and I can assure you the rendition of their lives -- in the wild, on the road, and in the bars -- is pitch perfect. The performances by John Savage, Meryl Streep, and most of all the amazing Christopher Walken are astonishing. The movie shows what other Vietnam movies don't, the wrenching dislocation of lives effected by a war in which the role of soldier was changed from winning battles and territory to mere killing . It has more impact because it is long and slow, because it shows us the lives of the men before their service, and the amplifying effects of memory after the fact, when memory cannot coexist with the life that would have been lived without a soul-destroying derailment onto a hell nothing in their previous lives could have prepared them for. It's not a Hollywood movie in any traditional sense. It's a journey to the heart of darkness Coppola could never have filmed because he had read the book, and the characters in this movie never did. They just lived it. (clip) (and another) Between these two clips, there's a brief, exploding lifetime of unbearable pain. Was the movie long? Not as long as the distance between a western Pennsylvania bar and a bloodsport gambling den in Southeast Asia. We're still living that distance down today.

23. Apollo 13

One of my all-time favorite movies about men. No, not the Clint Eastwood/John Wayne sort of men. The real kind. Smart, creative, focused, perseverant to the last second of the last gasp of the last chance. And they wear plastic pocket protectors the whole time. This is the movie where you can see the real pioneering spirit that probably won the west during the age of Manifest Destiny. The careful planners who packed exactly the right combination of food and water and ammunition and spare parts for the conestoga wagon, plus a few handy tools to fix things if the worst happened. "Houston, we have a problem." And such a problem. Unprecedented and wholly unanticipated. Bringing our men home from a certainly fatal disaster in space that they then passed off as a routine "doing what we're paid to do" example of ordinary competence. (See Slasha and CP's response in the Comments section of this post.) It's a perfect mix of both kinds of American hero -- the ostentatiously risk-taking hero-type heroes that have always been part of out national story, who live up to their own highest expectations even as the awkward, shy, too-smart-to-fit-in antihero-type heroes put their minds and their faith on the line to do the impossible. THIS is what Americans can do, and it's all BIG. The budget, the technology, the objective, the calamity, the eventual triumph against prohibitive odds. And the wives. God, women are wonderful. If Obama has seen any movie on this list, I hope the most that he has seen this one. (clip)

24. All the President's Men

You'll note that the press has played a part throughout this list, usually in their historical role as buzzard opportunists feeding on the travails of real people doing real things while the parasites prosper. I have looked, but it's almost impossible to find a movie that treats the press without scorn, satire, or wry cynicism (including especially this, 7:40 in) until All the President's Men. Which is the story of the Washington Post doing everything it can to bring down a president of the United States (who, quite coincidentally, they had hated since his first appearance in public life.) More than any other movie on the list, this one served as a recruiting tool that brought armies of young people into a trade for reasons precisely opposite the stated principles of the (so-called) profession. They watched this piece of fiction and signed up as journalists to "make a difference," "save the world," and "speak truth to power." None of which has anything whatever to do with reporting the facts, without fear or favor or emotion or bias or slanted diction, to the people who buy newspapers. If 'On the Waterfront' is the best American movie, this is the most important American movie, and its message to its audience was, and is, absolutely corrupting. Why are The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune, and The LA Times dying with withered claws outstretched for a federal bailout from what used to be their sacred target? This movie. That's why. Anyone who saw this movie and joined the press afterwards is the journalistic equivalent of a crack whore. Fact. These are the people who are the source of Bush Derangement Syndrome. But you can't understand America without seeing this monstrosity of a movie. And, God, how they LOVE this image of themselves. If they only knew what a sickness they've infected us with... (clip)

25. The Guys

So far, the best 9/11 movie. A small production, a small budget, a small focus. A freelance writer (Sigourney Weaver) helping a New York Fire Department captain (Anthony LaPaglia) write last words about his men who died in the terror attack on the Twin Towers. It's our new reality. Still. No politics. No hysterics and no bathos. No speculation (why United 93 isn't on the list). No special effects. Just people. Americans. Which is who we are. And hopefully will remain, no matter how high-flown the oratory from the bully pulpit of The One. See it. (clip)

There you have it. And now I have to admit I've failed. There are still holes. This is too big a country to be understood in just 25 movies, no matter how carefully chosen. I have another ten Honorable Mentions that are actually cheating. Because they're as important as the first 25. What an amazng country we live in. Stay tuned for the Tacked-On Ten, as well as some observations about interesting patterns I've observed in my selections.

Still. Go ahead and sharpshoot. The ones that didn't make the 25 didn't make the 25 and I'm accountable for what I've chosen. It's just that there's more, and we're more than what I've picked out.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Part IV:

NEXT LOT. Well, we've reached the fifties, that decade in America where nothing interesting whatever happened because the Baby Boomers were in cribs and all the people who know everything now share the same smeared memory of conformist idiots doing exactly what they were told, unless they were energized by Elvis and other Top Forty acts to kick authority in the balls. You know, reacting against the moron clowns who raised them and getting ready for the inspired and enlightened sixties. It's possible something interesting might have happened if it weren't for the same old Republican problem -- an old white man as president, who didn't know anything about anything, which doomed the fifties to a kind of cartoonish timeout in which people didn't live their lives (didn't even know they had genitals) and America almost imploded from boredom.

16. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

Exhibit A. Unless it's really Exhibit Z. I love this movie. Just as many men who deplore the anger and hostility of feminism love women individually for all the marvelous capabilities that redeem the worst of their chosen mates. In fact, this is the movie I would prescribe for all those men who act baffled at how long their wives and girlfriends spend shopping for the right card for every occasion, including their own sorry-ass birthdays and anniversaries. READ THE CARDS. This is a movie about the lives so many women lead, even today, and what's distinctively American about it is the entrepreneurial possibility our great nation offers to those who are determined to keep fighting as individuals for what matters most in their lives. What is schlock in critical terms can be high art in life terms, and this is the story of a life of artistic genius in a purely fifties American context. If you can watch this movie and NOT fall in love all over again with the whole idea of the women in our lives, you are probably a serial killer. Watch it and you will never again feel a moment's impatience with her meticulous wrapping of gifts that will be torn open in a moment by children or shunted aside by embittered oldsters. You will just love her -- and all the seemingly silly rituals and courtesies she so faithfully executes while caring for everyone more than she does for herself. If she wears your team's football jersey and assembles the tailgate feast while raising your kids on the side, she's not your subordinate. She's the blessing that redeems all the disgusting low points of your life. Back in the fifties, she held the whole country together. Thanks to her, there were two-parent families and homes to go back to. She had the Christian gift of forgiveness. Now that we've worked so hard to turn her into us, and she's just another struggling, narcissistic single-mother household, what are we? Better? Freer? Maybe you and she should talk about it. (clip)

17. The Godfather

Yeah, we've dissed this one, too. But it's still part of who we are as a nation. Not the mob, but the mafia, whose sick code of silence has infected every organization that cultivates a sense of its own specialness. Including the government. All organizations are prey to the accumulated conviction that they are too important to obey anyone else's rules. Show me any large, old organization, and I will show you a mafia. In fact, that why I have always hated this movie so much. The sense of belonging to a privileged, elite group which can thumb its nose at more universal affiliations is what I have always despised about investment bankers and corporate executives quoting lines from The Godfather as life lessons or Rules of Engagement. To an obsolete WASP like me, it teaches all the wrong lessons -- weakness where you should be strong and reactive wrong where you should seek out the hard right thing to do. But here's the irony. All of you who turn your noses up at the fifties, who think that realistic, pragmatic life began in the post-superstitious age of the enlightened, "progressive" sixties -- why do you still hearken back to the "offer that can't be refused"? Because for all your supposed education and rationality, you are trapped in the anti-romanticism of Michael Corleone, the raw display of Machiavellian power that enables you to perpetrate the hoax of global warming, the myth of salvation by a new elitely chosen Godfather, and the lie that a chosen iconic boss can somehow make everything right, no matter how ruthless and hypocritical his methods. Why American intellectuals who have always been free still idolize Castro. They worship the fucking drama of a life-and-death overlord, given how dull life is if you're just an Irish consigliere played by Robert Duvall. Why do the freest people on earth still want (anti)royalty to rule them? Maybe Obama will explain. Whatever the answer is, there is a uniquely American answer. Which, in this case, is headquartered in the boring fifties. I hate it. But it's still part of who we are and have become. (clip)

18. Malcolm X

Never cared for Spike Lee either. But this is a great  movie. Quite free of some of his other, more self-indulgent peaeans to the moral imperviousness of blackness. The subject made him honest. Malcolm X began as a thug. One can understand the extremity of his escape route. In fact, one -- meaning I -- can understand why he became so radicalized. Does this mean that he was right for all black men for all time? No. But it's the American Way that you get to choose. Malcolm X chose. Decidedly. Intellectually. Morally. And he chose wrong. Not Spike Lee's point, I suppose. I think he was after an alternative Christ for African-Americans who sort-of-thought MLK had failed kind of thing. The last-refuge-ofanger kind of thing.

But here's the irony. I admire this movie as a testament of real honesty. I thought Spike Lee created a masterpiece. I thought he was telling black people that the way out of the abyss was education. Which it is. Malcolm X learned how to read and write and speak. Eloquently. That was the lesson. Not the particular politics he advocated. Which are completely at odds with everything I have experienced in the African-American community. His attraction to Islam was an attraction to discipline. Control everything. He realized what made black people a stereotype in the white world and he stood all that on its ear. Except that he was wrong. About everything. He had a bigger dream than MLK. He dared to believe that black people could transcend their heritage and history and be better than the white folk at having families, being faithful to their wives, and being fathers to their children. He was wrong. They killed him for it. In a hail of bullets.

Black people in America remain for the most part slaves, governed by an outlaw, slave mentality. Malcolm X is proof that this is an unnecessary mentality. But the extremity of his philosophy and his sacrifice are a huge part of the burden we all bear. We prefer the much much dumber vision of MLK. Who fantasized that his own people might one day give up the resentments of their past and rely on their own gifts instead. Malcolm X knew better. That blacks had to exceed whites in morality, accomplishment and discipline to win their separate peace, because self-respect was more important than the flattery of debtors.

Idiotic. A fifties delusion. Right? (clip)

19. Bird

Remember how nobody in this country ever even noticed black people before the sixties and the dawn of the Civil Rights era? I mean, like Malcolm X was wrong, and oh go to hell. Except for Jazz. Americans have loved black musicians for several centuries, but they've also cited them as the bad moral examples they've always been. Because Americans prefer delivering sermons over the doomed dead to being energized and enlightened by the brilliant live performances of their social inferiors. (Like none of your friends ever dance, do they? Racist sticks...) Another instance. (clip -- dubbed in Italian, but it doesn't matter)

20. On the Waterfront

Probably the greatest American move ever. The greatest acting performance. The greatest screenplay. The greatest director. The greatest irony between the story told and the story implied. The greatest cultural vindication demonstrated by the greatest industry insult. The movie is great art by itself, and it's also history, and its after-effects are the QED of its point. No artist can ever hope for more than Elia Kazan achieved with On the Waterfront. And no artist can ever recover from the insults deliverately heaped on Eia Kazan for having made this movie. I could explain all this. But I also have the sense that our readers who lionize Reservoir Dogs and Saw IV need to step up and ask what the big deal is. It's a VERY BIG DEAL. Here is the movie that analogizes history, encapsulates history, is history, critiques history, and stands as a personal tragedy that is also one of the sorriest instances of American history you can expect to find in a supposedly free country. Elia Kazan did the right thing. Just like Terry Malloy. He got beaten mostly to death for it the same fashion. That's also part of the American Way.

So, without apologies, here's the final scene of the greatest American movie ever made:


Next up, the Baby Boomers.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Part III:

SMIRKS AHOY. It always makes me nervous when people start tossing around the term "miracle." Not because I don't believe they ever happen, but because I can feel the insipid grin of the disbelievers, waiting for any opportunity to restate for the umpty-umpth time the threadbare objection, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" Every purported miracle is, to them, a reminder of all the miracles that somehow didn't occur somewhere else at some other time.

I hate that grin and all the arrogant banality which congratulates itself on knowing the physics of a universe honest physicists know they don't, and maybe can't, fully comprehend. So I'm going to risk the scorn and ridicule of the sophists by proposing an analogy that may help others consider a new way of thinking about the "bad things happen to good people" objection.

In the grand scheme of things, miracles are pretty rare. That is, the kinds of events which even people who believe in them might call miracles are rare. When you think about it, rarity is built into the definition. If every bad thing that threatened to occur were somehow prevented or reversed after the fact (like sudden total remissions from terminal cancer), the outcomes wouldn't be considered miracles. They'd just be the way things work. Miracles are an exception. OR they are subject to particular conditions which are hard to bring about, especially since we don't have much of an idea about what those conditions might be. For example, winning the Powerball lottery is an incredible long shot that nevertheless does occur; however, it does have an unavoidable pre-condition. You must first purchase a Powerball ticket.

On to my analogy. From time immemorial divinity has been closely associated with lightning. Zeus, Jove, Jupiter, and even the Bible's Yahweh have been associated with lightning bolts, and there's no mystery about why. It's an ipso facto perfect symbol of a power from above visibly impacting the earth (and its inhabitants) below. Lightning strikes are pretty common events. Fatal lightning strikes on individual people are less so. That power from above is more or less always there. Its direct connection with human beings is limited by certain pre-conditions. People who know better than to wander around out in the open during a thunderstorm are not likely to be struck. And, generally speaking, lightning is more likely to strike big tall things like trees and church steeples rather than little things like people. But why does lightning strike tall things? Repeatedly. Which it does. Does it know that the tall things are there? And if it doesn't, why wouldn't it just strike randomly all over the place until it happened to connect with something it can light up? Why does it strike the tree more often than the outstandingly conductive bronze lawn ornament 24 inches off the ground?

Why? Because a lightning strike is a two-way process. The lightning bolt reaches down from the sky, and prospective targets on the ground reach up. They send out what are called streamers, which meet up with the lightning bolt and establish a connection. Here are two photos of streamers.


The streamer is, in our analogy, a pre-condition. It's the act of buying the Powerball ticket. And it helps to be a tall tree or a church steeple or a steel water tower at the center of town when a thunderstorm is in the air.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that miracles may, in fact, be precipitated by their recipients. Not through goodness or virtue alone but because they are also associated with preparedness, mass of some sort, and the kind of sharp focus we see in the streamer photographs.

That's what's so cool about the so-called Miracle of the Hudson. We can actually see a confluence of circumstances that apparently, luckily, resulted in -- but just possibly catalyzed -- an incredibly unlikely outcome. A variety of fortunate circumstances cannot explain away the improbability of the outcome, however much we want to play games with odds and statistics. The fact is, commercial airliners without engines "fly" with as much lift as a falling boulder, and they, well, effectively never land with wings straight and level on the water.

But in this case there were streamers. A pilot who was not only skilled but learned in the split-second differentials of commercial air disasters, who had made a long academic and practical study of air safety under emergency conditions, and who (to be frivolous for a moment) bears a striking resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.


He was sending up a streamer. As were the ferry crews and FDNY personnel who responded so swiftly, as well as the passengers who quelled their impulse to panic and responded to the ancient call, "women and children first." Preparation, determination, and cool heads with a fervent desire to do the right thing are all streamers, and there was mass behind the entire effort. The lightning bolt that could have remained in the clouds reached down to make a connection, and the incredibly (impossibly?) unlikely outcome occurred.

Just an analogy. Not even a theory. But if we follow the analogy, we can also glimpse the possibility that just as lightning bolts are chaotic things, so might be miracles. In my own mind, the collapse of the Twin Towers was a miracle for its relatively low loss of life. It could have been upwards of 20,000, as many surmised it was in the darkest hours of 9/11. But how many brilliantly bright streamers went up that day, from firefighters and policemen and gravely unselfish civilians, to connect with the lightning that brought so many thousands of people to safety? I know the grinners would cite that day as a miracle that didn't happen. But you have to remember that they live in an irretrievably drab world of actuarial tables and lottery tickets that win nothing but heartache and ruin.

But when their turn in the storm comes, they too will pray for a miracle. And they might even receive it -- if they're prepared, focused, and united in unselfish resolve.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

MAKING NICE FUN. Back in October 2008, we looked into our crystal ball and saw the usual idiocy coming out of Hollywood:


Guess who we picked. Well, actually you don't have to guess. It's not a prediction any more; it's news:

Part II:

NEXT LOT. For the record, my little experiment predates what's going on right now at The Corner:


I'd also like to draw a distinction between what John J. Miller is doing and what I'm trying to do. The term "conservative movies" argues a message of some kind. That's not what I'm after. I'm after a fair, as I've said, understanding of the American experience, warts and all. It's a tougher job than picking out a handful of movies that seem to emphasize only those values to which I, or we, or any select set of people, subscribe. In short, I'm trying to be inclusive and fair, not exclusive and partisan. I may fail because I am a partisan, but I'm trying to honor the incredible variety of experience of my countrymen. If you want to see what Miller's call to arms evokes, you can find it at Hotair.com, but I'm not linking to it because I don't want to taint my own selections.

Now. On with what I started yesterday.

6. Gangs of New York. I've had many quarrels with Martin Scorsese's choice of movies to make over the years, but there's no doubt he's a gifted and brilliant director. This is the one "mob" movie I'm glad he made. It illuminates a heretofore invisible part of America's history, the life of urban immigrants at the very beginning of the American industrial revolution. It's ugly, violent, and repellent, but so was life for the millions of Irish Catholics who came here fleeing the potato famine. New York was not always the glittering Manhattan of our self-mythologizing media. What the immigrants of that time eventually acquired they earned with multiple lifetimes of toil and sacrifice. They weren't all good, either. But enough of them were. Now "Irish" is a happy badge worn on St. Patrick's Day. It wasn't always so. And when you've watched the draft riots, how happy are you that Obama chooses to regard Lincoln as the saint who complements his own divinity? (clip)

7. Bite the Bullet

A leap forward in time, even though we're still in the Wild West. Funny how that works. There are still sixguns, but there are also automobiles, and this story of a horse race that resembles the Tour de France includes an astonishing scene describing Teddy Roosevelt at the battle of San Juan Hill. It's not a great movie because it includes, among other things, an "emancipated" Candace Bergen in a paid acting role, but it also highlights a typically American love of animals and the kind of individualism that flies in the face of easy stereotypes. And a dental scene that will chill your bones and remind you of how much we moderns have to be thankful for -- if we can let go of our nostalgia for the, um, wild west. The press is here too, in all its inveterate scummy rapaciousness. Regardless of its nods to old movie western traditions, this movie is a turn-of-the-century slice of life that balances the American competitive spirit with our many better qualities. (clip)

8. The Greatest Game Ever Played

About golf. Frivolous? Hardly. The year was 1913, one of the great turning points in American history. It was the year before the beginning of World War I, the year in which the federal income tax was ratified as a constitutional amendment, and the year of the Triangle Factory Fire which exposed the horrid working conditions of so many sweat shops that exploited immigrant workers. It was also the year in which Francis Ouimet, a blue collar American amateur, upset the best golfers in Britain in the U.S. Open, permanently changing the history of the sport and igniting a huge popular following for what had once been a game chiefly for aristocrats. The movie highlights the class issues as well as the qualities it takes to win against great odds, which is perhaps the most uniquely American trait of all. Guaranteed: You will tear up when Dad, in his hellish job in the tunnels, sees his son on the front page of the newspaper and when Mom impulsively breaches the class barrier to crash the U.S. Open golf course across the street from her home. Sentimental? Yes. True? Probably not far off. (clip -- star interview only)

[YET ANOTHER HUGE HOLE: Hollywood has never done a searching movie about the American participation in World War I, which was unquestionably the most traumatic experience the world has undergone in the last 150 years. So there's no entry here. This pains me particularly because my own grandfather fought with the Rainbow Division in France and never recovered from the ailments he incurred in the trenches during months of vicious fighting. I mean, yeah, I know there was Sergeant York, who was indeed a great hero, but the movie made it look as if you could beat the Kaiser's troops bloodlessly by surprising them at the right angle. The only treatment by an American film director that did some justice to the subject was Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, which was about, uh, the French. In 1930, Howard Hughes also released Hell's Angels, which is probably a masterpiece on a par with Citizen Kane about World War I aerial combat, but the air war was always a sidebar to the horrific experience of the infantry, where 99 percent of the casualties occurred. As with the American Revolution, the only movie that deals with the reality was made for TV. If you're interested, see The Lost  Battalion.]

9.  Reds

I never liked this movie, but it's still an important part of the American experience. Most people don't know just how early Communism became a serious fixation of the American intellectual class.  Once again we're back to the year 1913 when a radical journalist named John Reed becomes enamored of Marx and the budding revolutionary movement in Russia. The movie is long (very), talky, and annoying, but it fills in a gap in our consensus history that tends to obscure the causes of American reaction to FDR's New Deal and the red scares of the late forties and fifties. To the extent that Warren Beatty is charming in this  cri de coeur of his filmmaking career,  you can see the attraction of the naive and hyper-intellectualized philosophy that annihilated Russia and came close to paralyzing the United States of America. (clip)

10. The Great Gatsby

No, it's not actually a good movie and it doesn't do anything like justice to the book, but the book is so good and important that even a sincere attempt to render it on film is nevertheless worth looking at. What were the rich people doing in the wake of World War I and international communism and the travails of labor, race, marxists, and global nihilism? They were simply being their vast, careless selves. Which is probably the source of today's liberal guilt. It would be easy to recast the whole movie today -- we'd never go for Mia Farrow as Daisy and probably not Robert Redford as Gatsby, but all the lesser roles were spot on, including Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan, Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway, Karen Black as Mabel, Edward Hermann as FDR before the polio or some such thing, and Scott Wilson as George Wilson, the man who shot Gatsby because his wife was sleeping with Tom Buchanan. As I said, not a good movie, but it reminds us of the book:


Which brings us, in American movie history, to the time of the Great Crash.

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