Washington Post: The 34 best political movies ever made

[Ron Ecker]

3 minutes ago, Ron Ecker said:

 

dupe

Edited February 3, 2020 by Ron Ecker

[W. Niederhut]

       I wasn't familiar with the grim backstory about Carl Foreman, Stanley Kramer, and High Noon until this week, when I read the history in Hoberman's book, Army of Phantoms.

      Foreman described his High Noon screenplay as an allegory of his experiences with Hollywood and HUAC in the early 50s-- which resulted in his bitter break with Stanley Kramer, and exile to the U.K.

      John Wayne hated the film, and was openly sarcastic in awarding the Oscar for Best Actor to Gary Cooper at the Academy Awards ceremony.

      Yet, withal, Foreman's allegorical film became a favorite of several U.S. Presidents, including Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bill Clinton.

[David Andrews]

Wayne had been offered the High Noon script and turned it down.  While Gary Cooper was shooting the film, Wayne ran into him and confronted him, demanding to know how Cooper could participate in anti-American propaganda.

Edited February 3, 2020 by David Andrews

[James DiEugenio]

Its even worse than that.  Fruitcake Wayne made three movies to counter the theme of High Noon.

 

Edited February 4, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[Ron Ecker]

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

 Fruitcake Wayne made three movies to counter the theme of High Noon.

 

Did one of them include the (anti-Tex Ritter) theme song "Leave Me, Little Darling, I Don't Mind"? (Columbus Stockade)

 

 

[David Andrews]

8 hours ago, Ron Ecker said:

Did one of them include the (anti-Tex Ritter) theme song "Leave Me, Little Darling, I Don't Mind"? (Columbus Stockade)

 

 

The first one was Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, which pointedly presses the theme of loyalty against High Noon's metaphor of the abandoned hero.  The casting co-opts not only two pop music idols (Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson) in place of Frankie Laine, but also two future Kennedy admin hangers-on (Martin and Angie Dickinson).  The underwhelming Dino-Ricky ballad heard in the trailer didn't exactly tear up the charts:

El Dorado, the follow-up, pairs Wayne with Robert Mitchum as the drunk, in a retread of the Rio Bravo plot.  By the time Hawks made Rio Lobo, one of the worst lousiest westerns ever, there was no enthusiasm for budgeting a big-name co-star for Wayne.

In the 1970s, when HBO was a smaller outfit, National Lampoon published a parody of the monthly guidebook the cable company used to mail to subscribers.  Rio Lobo was on four times a day, which wasn't far from the truth.

Nonetheless, you can make a case for Rio Bravo as a political film, and also as an influential film, since its town jail besieged by outlaws went on to appear in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and other standoff movies, keeping it more current than Wayne's own The Alamo.  The best parts belong to Dean Martin, though Wayne plays off him well, and with generosity, in and out of character.

Edited February 4, 2020 by David Andrews

[W. Niederhut]

Wow.  You guys really have an encyclopedic knowledge of film history.

Have you heard this one?

I just read Hoberman's account of John Wayne and the cast of the 1954 movie The Conquerors being covered with radioactive ash and dust from some nuclear detonations in Nevada during the filming in Escalante Canyon (in Utah.)

Wayne played Ghengis Khan in the film, and reportedly looked like a "Mongolian idiot."

Tragically, there was a statistically unusual rate of cancer-related deaths for the cast and crew at the Escalante site.

[Ron Ecker]

There's actually a connection between the movie Rio Bravo and JFK. He was rumored to have an affair with Angie Dickinson. (To which I have to say, "Who wouldn't?")

 

 

[David Andrews]

7 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Wow.  You guys really have an encyclopedic knowledge of film history.

Watching Hawks's Rio trilogy is like being on a desert island -- you get to know every grain of sand personally.

Good Oscars quiz:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/04/quiz-how-much-do-you-really-know-about-the-oscars

Edited February 4, 2020 by David Andrews

[Cliff Varnell]

Judgment At Nuremberg 

Good Night, And Good Luck

American Made

The Weather Underground 

Birth Of A Nation

[Joseph McBride]

I much prefer RIO BRAVO to HIGH NOON, but EL DORADO is my favorite Hawks film.  Hawks

and I discussed all this extensively in my interview book HAWKS ON HAWKS.

[David Andrews]

3 hours ago, Joseph McBride said:

I much prefer RIO BRAVO to HIGH NOON, but EL DORADO is my favorite Hawks film.  Hawks

and I discussed all this extensively in my interview book HAWKS ON HAWKS.

If those kids in The Last Picture Show had hung around town longer, Bogdanovich could have had them graduate from watching Red River to snoozing through Rio Bravo, and shot the ending in color.

I'll reserve judgment on El Dorado until I see it again -- it's been a couple decades.  I'm an Only Angel Have Wings man, myself -- real seat-of-the-pants filmmaking, if only in the editing. 

One of Hawks's underappreciated "political films" is Air Force, which may have invented the trope seen in so many films afterward, in which Americans have to do battle among themselves before they can triumph over a common foe.  In the final combat, even the most contentious American (here, john Garfield) proves up to the challenge of the fight and the ability to make the supreme sacrifice.  The theme would later appear in John Ford's The Horse Soldiers and Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee, among many other films, including some in the Star Wars series.  It's a sentimental trope, even in Hawks's hands, but it reflects certain American issues of political diversity and economic class.

I'm fond of Dean Martin's multiple embarrassments as the recovering drunk in Rio Bravo, which he plays with the right blend of humility and wounded pride.  Check out also the sad look The Duke gives him when Dino pours himself a shot in this set of clips.  I don't have as many exaggerated complaints about Wayne's acting as other people work up for themselves:

If every American could sit back and watch a Howard Hawks film tonight, we'd be a better people in the morning.  Unless it's Rio Lobo.

Edited February 5, 2020 by David Andrews

[Douglas Caddy]

I saw 1917 today and wish that it wins best picture award at the Oscars. Truly a movie you will never forget. I know this posting is not entirely appropriate for this topic but wanted to call the movie to your attention while it can still be seen on the big screen as it is a big film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2eudCCVe0M

 

[David Andrews]

Kirk Douglas deceased today at age 103.

Yet Douglas was also shrewd enough to avoid the pitfalls of typecasting. In 1956 he attracted rave reviews for his impersonation of anguished Vincent Van Gogh in Vicente Minnelli’s Lust For Life. John Wayne, for his part, was horrified. “Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that?” he reportedly demanded. "We got to play strong, tough characters, not these weak queers.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/06/kirk-douglas-hollywood-legend-and-star-of-spartacus-dies-aged-103

Is Spartacus a political film?  Or is the whole slave revolt thing "window dressing" for an action extravaganza that gives the common man an illusion that freedom is possible?  I wonder how Dalton Trumbo felt about that.

Edited February 6, 2020 by David Andrews

[Joseph McBride]

On the day JFK died, the back page of the New York Times was

taken up with an ad for the upcoming SEVEN DAYS IN MAY,

which mentioned a government coup. That film and DR. STRANGELOVE

were to have been released in late 1963, but both were delayed

into early 1964 because of the assassination. A press preview of STRANGELOVE

in New York on the night of the assassination was canceled.