A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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Deplorable Duke
In 1979, as John Wayne was dying, his friend and costar in five movies, Maureen O’Hara, went to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to issue a medal honoring Wayne. She told Congress that, “To the people of the world, John Wayne is not just an actor—and a very fine actor—John Wayne is the United States...
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John Wayne and World War II
Ever since I can remember, John Wayne has been the actor the left most loves to hate. While the left’s criticisms of him are many, the one that seemed to have the most validity was his failure to serve his country during World War II. “He’s a big phony,” I was told by leftist classmates...
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Print the Legend
At the Alamo, Davy Crockett either: A. Died while swinging old Betsy; B. Came radically disconnected when he torched the powder magazine; C. Surrendered to the Mexicans, who tortured, then killed him, along with six other Anglo survivors of the siege. Does it matter immensely which of these versions of Crockett’s death commends itself to...
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Cowboy Heroes
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the Statler Brothers in their 1974 country hit. ...
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Cowboy Heroes
From the July 2005 issue of Chronicles. Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the...
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The Glory and the Myth of John Ford
A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably...
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In Praise of Sex and Violence
All the best authorities agree: there is too much sex and violence in America. Social critics say that pop culture is reinforcing a cult of violence, which they trace back to the savage days of the American frontier; preachers launch jeremiads at the explicit eroticism of MTV, and Planned Parenthood pretends to have the jumps...
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Duking It Out
Bravo to Roger D. McGrath for his perceptive defense of John Wayne against liberal snipers (“John Wayne and World War II,” Sins of Omission, December). As Sergeant Stryker said to Pfc. Benny Ragazzi after he called up a Sherman tank to blast a Japanese pillbox in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), “Ya did all right.”...
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Still In Saigon—In My Mind
“The earth outside is covered with snow and I am covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me a killer and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veteran appears in a popular song recorded a few years back by Charlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam War is over, but the...
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The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
“In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men….And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.” The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy. As Chesterton points out,...
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Bats and Weasels
The Dark Knight Rises Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Hope Springs Produced by Escape Artists and Mandate Pictures Directed by David Frankel Written by Vanessa Taylor Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Christopher Nolan doesn’t do things by halves. His third Batman movie, The Dark Knight...
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Flickers of Resistance
“In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. . . . And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.” The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy. ...
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Westerns: America’s Homeric Era on the Silver Screen
Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests. The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal. Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization. We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era. While the...
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The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
“In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men….And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.” The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy. As Chesterton points out,...
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Evolving the Sensitive Soldier
World War II cast an enormous cultural shadow over American life. It provided a backdrop for novels, television shows, and—especially—movies. Like many boys who grew up in the decades after the war, I read about the conflict, traced my fingers across maps illustrating the U.S. island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, watched and rewatched war movies,...
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The ‘John Wayne Moment’ We’re In
Cinematically, as well as politically, we are sort of in a John Wayne moment: which is where Ted Cruz comes in. Things in this town of ours ain’t a-going real good right now. Everything, in fact, seems to be falling apart, save in the eyes of folk who wish America would either drop into the...
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Forerunners
Brideshead Revisited Produced by BBC Films and Ecosse Films Directed by Julian Jarrold Screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock from the Evelyn Waugh novel Distributed by Miramax Films The Dark Knight Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is not...
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The Yellow Brick Road to Jobs and Stability
“Let the Yankees Freeze in the Dark” read the bumper stickers in Texas in February 1982, the month I flew back from West Germany, mustered out of the U.S. Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and returned to my hometown of Wayne, Michigan. Oil had soared from $3.60 per barrel in 1972 to $37.42 in...
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NR’s Jihad Against Trump—and America
National Review’s jihad against Donald Trump turned against Americans themselves with Kevin Williamson’s screed, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction.” He writes about such working-class cities as Wayne, Mich., where I grew up after I was born in 1955. To this day, one-sixth of the city is the...
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One Civilian Casualty
In 1942, I had never met my Aunt Ann or my four first cousins. They’d moved in the 30’s from Jacksonville to Los Angeles, where Uncle Stuart worked for Walt Disney. Among other things, he provided the voice for the hunter in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Every so often, Aunt Ann would send...
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Bond and Betrayal
Goldeneye Produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein Released by United Artists In the best of the James Bond films derived directly from the novels of Ian Fleming—Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball—Sean Connery was able to evoke the gentlemanly,...
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Making War
Wake Island (1942) Directed by John Farrow B&W, 88 Minutes Go Tell the Spartans (1978) Directed by Ted Post Color, IH Minutes Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983) Directed by Stephen Frears Color, 106 Minutes Americans learn their wars primarily through the movies. Who, except for the few who were actually there, can imagine World...
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See the USA in Your Chevrolet in 1964
Pop pulled the sky-blue 1963 Chevy Impala out of the driveway in Wayne, Michigan. With Mom and three kids along for what our family would call our 9,000-mile trip, he jogged a block to Michigan Avenue, which, as US 12, always beckoned West to Chicago and, beyond that, to California. The kids: Johnny, nine; Caroline,...
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Child Abuse, the State, and the Russian Family
It was another episode in a series of shocking crimes against children. Little Sasha, just three years old, was pulled from the frigid waters of the Pekhorka River in January 2009. He was bound to a car battery with adhesive tape, his body battered and bearing the marks ...
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One Moment in Time
“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?” “Over a hell, conceivably. There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation. Most of them are private.” Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building. Turner School, built in 1898, is...
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A Moviegoer Reflects
I had the good fortune to talk regularly about movies with my good friend and conservative thinker Sam Francis. With intellectual heft, he generously shared what he had learned from his own moviegoing. What follows is offered in the same spirit: a list of 10 movies I have repeatedly enjoyed and unhesitatingly recommend. The Searchers (1956):...
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Beam Us Out
On a morning in April 1990, practitioners of the journalistic craft received in their mail a communication from one Jack Lichtenstein, at that time the director of public affairs for the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency then embroiled in a desperate onslaught by an army of Philistines, voters, and taxpayers who imagined that...
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Image Is Everything
For at least a year now—ever since the evidence became intellectually irrefutable while yet being emotionally deniable—every second sentence written or spoken about Bill Clinton by the dominant media has begun with the word “if.” Reduced to its essence, the two-sentence refrain goes like this: Americans do not believe Bill Clinton. If Bill Clinton can...
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Anglo Magic
Field of Blood is one of the best new novels I have read in many a year, a superbly written book by a Russian scholar and analyst who is also a careful artist, a stylist, and a poet in prose and in form who has accomplished what few essayists and nonfiction authors ever succeed at:...
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Clip Clop, Bang Bang
The manipulative sensationalism regarding any display of the Confederate battle flag continues unabated. The New York Times gets hot and bothered, or sexually aroused—or whatever it is that the New York Times becomes—whenever that banner appears over the capitol of South Carolina or on a vanity tag in Maryland, indeed anywhere. The shibboleths of liberalism...
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Everything Is Jake
My old man did not think much of writers; he had known too many of them. He did not like what little he had seen of Hemingway, and regarded his obsession with virility as unmanly. Hemingway, at least as a younger man, must have had few illusions about himself and his generation, and his first...
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The Forgotten Fire
“I am on the one hand a kind of New York State Republican, conservative. On the other hand, I am a kind of a Bohemian type. I really don’t obey the laws. I mean to, but if I am in a hurry and there is no parking here, I park.” —John Gardner Batavia’s wandering native...
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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Strange as it may seem today, once upon a time, Hollywood respected Christianity. Many movies had biblical themes—some were box-office blockbusters—but, more importantly, many others had scenes depicting religion as an integral part of American culture. The public demanded it. The silver screen was full of families saying grace before a meal or attending religious...
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Saintly Thugs
Reservoir Dogs Produced by Lawrence Bender Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino Released by Miramax Films The Bad Lieutenant Produced by Edward Pressman Written by Abel Ferrara and Zoe Lund Directed by Abel Ferrara Released by Aries Films The way the camera turns an actor’s body into an objet d’art is wonderful. Some faces—Bogart’s, for...
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Remembering the Alamo
The Alamo Produced by Todd Hallowell and Philip Steuer Written by John Lee Hancock, Leslie Bohem, and Stephen Gaghan Directed by John Lee Hancock Distributed by Touchstone Pictures The familiar mythic image of the Alamo was burned into my mind at an early age, augmented by legends told by my grandfather; pictures of my namesake,...
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Hang ’Em High
I was recently watching Westward Ho, one of the many dozens of B Westerns I have in my collection, and it struck me that until the 1940’s vigilantes were most often portrayed in the movies as the good guys. Following the credits at the beginning of Westward Ho we read, “This picture is dedicated to...
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Making War
Wake Island (1942)Directed by John Farrow, B&W, 88 Minutes Go Tell the Spartans (1978)Directed by Ted Post, Color, 114 Minutes Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983)Directed by Stephen Frears, Color, 106 Minutes Americans learn their wars primarily through the movies. Who, except for the few who were actually there, can imagine World War II without...
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The Well-Holstered Gun
Open Range Screenplay by Craig Storper from a novel by Lauran Paine Produced and directed by Kevin Costner The Western film genre has often been criticized for celebrating gun violence. But mainstream oateaters often have more in common with the peace-loving Jane Austen than with the blood-besotted Sam Peckinpah. My Darling Clementine, Shane, The Fastest...
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Suicide State
“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families. No custody battles. No brawls over alimony and child support. No kids shuttled back and forth...
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Low Blows, Dark Vengeance
Cinderella Man Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman Batman Begins Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by David S. Goyer Boxing has always been a favorite subject for screenwriters. No other sport accommodates their mythomaniacal instincts...
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One More From the Ace
Roger McGrath’s excellent account of the career of movie actor/naval aviator Wayne Morris (“Hollywood’s Lone Ace,” Sins of Omission, April) is not quite complete, in that Morris’s service to the Navy and the nation did not end with his discharge in 1945. A movie in which he played an important part helped save the important...
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THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRE: March 2007
PERSPECTIVE If Pigs Could Flyby Thomas Fleming Admitting defeat. VIEWS Iraq as “Intelligence Failure”by Wayne Allensworth We told you so. Exiting Iraqby Srdja Trifkovic The least undesirable end. The War on Terror Endedby Leon Hadar And the winner was not the United States. Reject False Prophetsby Ted Galen Carpenter The first step in mitigating the...
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On Nationalism
Though current discussions of nationalism are incredibly confused and Wayne Allensworth in “The Nationalist Imperative” (February 1996) does a pretty good job in showing the fragility of the modernist version, what he proposes as the “primordial” counterpart is ridiculous. Let me register a few objections. The Bowie anecdote is amusing but highly misleading. What follows...
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Maybe Forever
Is the current wave of immigration to America, mainly from the Third World, an invasion? Wayne Lutton and John Tanton maintain that it is. The authors effectively argue that our unprecedented level of immigration, forced on the country by selfish interests, is remaking America in many negative ways, especially by eroding our national culture. But...
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Hollywood’s Lone Ace
He is virtually unknown to Americans today, though he appeared in 65 movies and was the only actor to become an ace during World War II. Born in Los Angeles in 1914 to Nebraskan Bert DeWayne Morris and Texan Anna Fitzgerald, he would be christened with his father’s name but go by Wayne Morris. While...
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They All Laughed
Farewell (L’affaire Farewell) Produced by Christophe Rossignon and Pathe Films Directed by Christian Carion Screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Raynaud Distributed by Neoclassics Films After 20 years, we finally have a film that dramatizes how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Needless to say, it’s not an American production. In the land of...
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In the National News
Rockford doesn’t often make the national news, but when it does, you can be certain it’s not because of any good that’s happening here. Our latest brush with fame came on the last day of September, when a 32-year-old Catholic priest from a parish just south of Rockford rammed his car into the local abortuary....