Earlier this week I talked about the benefits and/or wisdom of having all your favorite movies on DVD, against the possibility that they could be “canceled” (i.e. censored or maybe worse, bowdlerized) by The Usual Suspects.
So here’s the first part of a list of movies I think one should have in one’s video library, or the stars / directors thereof, just on case they appear on some lefty’s Enemy Of The People list.
Actors:
Clint Eastwood — pretty much any or all his movies (even Bridges Of Madison County , but not Paint Your Wagon ) because a) Clinty and b) the Left hates him for being a conservative.
John Wayne — ditto, except for the appalling The Conqueror (Genghis Wayne? No.)
Lee Marvin — ditto, except for Paint Your Wagon as noted above, and especially The Dirty Dozen.
Steve McQueen — yeah, he was a wife-beater. So he’ll be on someone’s list sooner or later.
Paul Newman — as an Eastern liberal, he’s probably not going to be “canceled” anytime soon, but everyone should have The Sting, Butch Cassidy, Hud and The Hustler on their shelf anyway.
Directors:
John Frankenheimer — just about all his movies, but especially The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman Of Alcatraz, Grand Prix and Ronin. Quite possibly the best action-movie director ever.
John Milius — we all know him from Red Dawn, of course, but there’s also Conan and Flight Of The Intruder.
Clint Eastwood — he’s already up as an actor, but his solo (non-acting) directing shouldn’t be ignored, either. Think of Bird, Sully and American Sniper.
We’ll talk about specific must-have movies in the next part of the series.
Feel free to add your favorite “bodies of work” in Comments. Leave specific movies till next time.
Not to forget that John Milius penned and directed The Wind and The Lion. Great movie with a number of terrific scenes.
The Wind and The Lion is a great movie, and Mr. Milius also wrote and directed the TV series The Rough Riders.
Let’s do a couple to get the discussion started.
Actors
Charleton Heston – for his reverent portrayal of Biblical characters like Moses and Judah Ben Hur ( yeah I know Ben Hur isn’t in the Bible but it’s set in the time and place and ultimately honors things like faith that the left hates. ) Heston also played Andy By God Jackson – a historical figure who makes leftists break out in hives.
Charles Bronson – too many bad ass tough guy roles to mention so let’s just say Magnificent Seven, the Great Escape, and Death Wish.
Directors
We have to remember the Great John Ford. They Were Expendble, Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, the Cavalry trilogy, and to prove that it wasn’t just John Wayne – How Green was My Valley.
Where is John Ford’s “The Searchers” – probably the finest Western ever made?
Mel Brooks. While not everything he did will raise cancel-ist hackles like Blazing Saddles, it’s all hilarious. One thing we know is that wokesters are the opposite of funny.
I “second” this vote !!!
I’d like to add the gang who made “Airplane !!” – having June Cleaver offer her services to translate “jive” has got to be one of the most under-appreciated moments in American cinema.
Mel Brooks is on my list as well. Blazing Saddles on cable TV is unwatchable.
“It’s twue! It’s twue!”
I have to agree that Mel Brooks needs to be on there. His ability to find funny in damn near anything will surely offend somebody. I just bought a 9 movie compilation of his for just these reasons.
Charleton Heston also for his support of the NRA and his “Cold Dead Hands” quote.
For the truly unPC experience:
D. W. Griffith and “Birth of a Nation.”
Disney and “Song of the South.”
Hey, I have a soft spot for Paint Your Wagon. I did Combat Engineer OCS at Ft. Belvoir, VA. At eighteen or nineteen weeks in they let us have a Sunday off. Most of us went in to DC. Some overindulged in food and alcohol. A buddy and I went to see the movie which was in theaters at the time. Of course they took us out for a boonie run when we returned. After graduation that same buddy and I went to see Easy Rider. In the scene where they rode through a parade, he leaned over and whispered: “That’s my home town, and that’s my high school band.” The town was Las Vegas, NM.
Movies have punctuated several important times in my life. I saw West Side Story on the SS United States while going to Europe after High School in 1963 with a group of my classmates for a mini-Grand Tour. On the way back we had an audience with former President Eisenhower who had traveled there to shoot some scenes for the upcoming 20th Anniversary of D-Day. My wife, then girlfriend, and I saw As Good as it Gets with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt as our first movie together.
Others have mentioned parts of his oeuvre, but please add Gene Wilder to your list.
Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel in “The Producers” – I dare you not to laugh your ass off.
Off the top of my head in no particular order–
Gregory Peck– ‘Twelve O’Clock High’. Plus ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and many others.
Jimmy Stewart– ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” because pre-war Stewart
and post-war Stewart. The transformation is striking. Plus anything else he was in.
Paul Newman and Richard Boone in ‘Hombre’. “Heeey! Hombre! You have put a hole in me! …”
Richard Boone– Use 4K Video Downloader to snag all of ‘Have Gun Will Travel’ from YouTube.
Cary Grant– ‘Father Goose’. “Miss Goodie Two-Shoes” and “The Filthy Beast”.
‘In Harm’s Way’– From Wiki–“…directed by Otto Preminger and starring John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Tom Tryon, Paula Prentiss, Stanley Holloway, Burgess Meredith, Brandon deWilde, Jill Haworth, Dana Andrews, Franchot Tone, and Henry Fonda.
‘The Best Years of Our Lives’.
Add in Anatomy of a Murder for Jimmy.
Some of my favorite movies were a result of the right actors in the right movie and like good old Susan Sarandon who was excellent in one of my favorite movies ‘Bull Durham’ she is not work a bucket of warm spit in real life. Kevin Costner peaked about that time in the mid 1980’s too.
When it comes to stupid comedy my favorite is ‘Animal House’ because it was kind of a biography for my freshman year in an animal house frat in the same time period. Some of the coming of age silly stuff like ‘Porky’s’ were great and could never be made again, lot’s of fun stuff in the 1980’s before folks started getting sensitive and the men became much more pretty.
Audie Murphy
Yes I know, not the greatest but not too bad either.
And even if some of the great one did serve none else got himself a MOH.
The Coen Bros. The whole gamut.
The Thin Man series with Nick and Nora.
Orson Welles, particularly Citizen Kane (it started so much that it reminds me of Yoga Berra on Hamlet — “It was just a bunch of people saying quotes to each other”) and The Third Man.
Holy Crap, ‘FARGO’ by the Coen Bros. with Sheriff Margie ranks way up there for fantastic dark humor. We used to say black humor but maybe we should say dark humor now so they don’t burn Fargo down, or something.
Directors:
Michael Curtiz
Ernst Lubitsch
And, in spite of the fact he’s a terrible human being, Rob Reiner.
Actors:
William Powell
Myrna Loy
Carole Lombard
Jimmy Stewart
Henry Fonda
And, most importantly, Rosalind Russell.
I’ll add favorite movies in your part II comments.
Alistair MacLean movies: The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra, Breakheart Pass are my favorites, ones I’ll sit and watch even though I can pretty much quote them line for line.
With the aforementioned Clint Eastwood, Gregory Peck, and Charles Bronson adding Patrick McGoohan.
As a side note, I showed Ice Station Zebra to a couple of my Bubble Head (submariner) friends and they were impressed with the attention to detail of the dialog and procedures in the submarine scenes.
The Man who Shot Liberty Valence. All of the main characters were played by actors previously mentioned as subject to cancellation. And Jimmy Stewart was an actual general in the Air Force which makes him triple plus ungood. This is already covered by the categories of All John Wayne and All Lee Marvin but Stewart shouldn’t be forgotten.
And the movie with the best battle scenes ever- Zulu. If the Left ever sees this, all Michael Caine movies are risk. They will probably even cancel Buthelezi.
What, no mention of the Bond movies? The good, the bad, and the indifferent. And speaking of Bond, there’s Connery’s assorted movies, like The Hunt for Red October. Can’t have anyone criticising socialism, you know.
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and The Battle of the Bulge!
“A Bridge Too Far”
Several of Stanley Kubrick’s movies should be on the list, as far as directors go. For actors, Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers also deserve a look.
Conservative? Clint backed Bloomberg. I think he’s gone senile.
I suppose as a class of movies, any war movie showing members of the military, the military or government in any positive sense risk the chopping block. Even the ones that suck.
Patton & Midway are two of my all-time favorite war movies.
Tom Selleck and Sam Elliot. I remember when Tom got lambasted about guns on some lame talk show. It was lame enough, somebody else will have to provide the suspect. I’m kinda thinking it was Rosie O’Fatso, but not sure. Didn’t see Mel Gibson in there either. Most of Hollyweird hates him even though he makes a lot of people a lot of money.