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Thursday, September 29, 2005


Sit Down and STFU
 I think movies capture the soul of the era they were made in. I was first struck by this while watching Frank Capra's 1946 movie It's a Wonderful Life  (I've mentioned this before, but bear with me). One scene in particular, where Clarence the angel gives George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) an opportunity to see what Bedford Falls would look like if he committed the suicide he was contemplating. Remember when Baily goes into the tavern, and is shocked when nobody knows him?  He becomes agitated, and tussles with the bouncer who tries to eject him.  When the town cop arrives and tries to subdue him, George skedaddles out the door.  What does the cop do?  He pulls his revolver and fires at  our fleeing hero, naturally.

Because I never saw It's a Wonderful Life until sometime in the 1980s,  I felt the  jolt of this, by now,  anachronistic behavior by Officer Muldoon (or whoever).  But, it wasn't viewed as odd by audiences in 1946.  We had obviously changed our collective minds about what was acceptable behavior in the intervening years.

From that point I became more attuned to the social content of the old movies.  With cable channels like TNT, and AMC, I was able to watch them non stop.  It became sort of a hobby  to  find the oldest movie example of blatent hostility to the Republican Party.   For awhile the winner was 1959's It Happened to Jane, starring Doris Day. I wrote in IMDB's comments:
"This unmemorable trifle caught my attention with a contrived sub plot. The town curmudgeon is a Republican Mayor who must be defeated by the kinder and wiser Democrat. Why is the Republican so mean? He resists spending public funds on a social engineering project."
Later that same year I watched  She Had To Say Yes  starring Lotetta Young. In my IMDB comments I wrote:
"This 1933 film is surprisingly frank about the practice of using "customer girls" to promote commerce. A throw away line in this film is an early indication of Hollywood's leftist think that now dominates the industry.

"Flo (Loretta Young) explains to Maizee (Winnie Lightner) why she once loved a two-timing salesman:

"Flo: He was different once.
"Maizee
: Yeah, and so was the Republican Party."
Today, it is damned near impossible to find any film that does not, somewhere, take a jab at a conservative icon or idea.  The message is subtle, but an effective marketing tool by our Progressive friends in Movieville. I once asked Snopes.com to run down the quote, usually attributed to Joseph Stalin.  "Give me Hollywood, and I will control the world."  I never heard back, but never mind.  We know that Uncle Joe did, in fact, have influence over several Hollywood writers dating back to the 1930s (including the *sob* Hollywood Ten"), and that culture remains, if anything, stronger today.

In today's American Spectator, James Bowman reviews the new film,  A History of Violence, and offers this bit of introspection:
"The whole concept of "violence" is flawed from the get-go, for it makes no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate force. The use of the word in this generic sense implies that the "violence" of the criminal is no different from the "violence" of the policeman who subdues him. Originally a Marxist idea, this worked its way into the mainstream beginning about 50 or 60 years ago, when people began to think it very clever and sophisticated to act as if there were no difference between the two things, or that the difference was only a matter of how "society" had distributed power between them. Since then, the idea of "violence" as generic and not in its original sense -- related to "violate" -- of criminal and illegitimate violence has steadily gained ground until it is now a commonplace of moral debate, in America as it is everywhere else in the Western world.
<snip>
"It's a hilarious illustration of the sort of hypocrisies that naturally arise from the film's view of "violence" -- which is also that of the therapeutic culture that increasingly dominates our educational and legal systems. "
Hey, you on the left.  Sit down and STFU.
| E-MAIL Real King of France at 9/29/2005 04:34:00 PM PERMLINK (1) | HOME


Comments:

"I did not vote for Obama but he is remarkable. In less than three weeks in office he has collected more than $150,000 in back taxes."
Gayle Miller
Today, movies do not reflect society.

They reflect the twisted views of guys who could never get a date in high school or college.
 
~

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