Washington DC -
Something special happened 30 years ago this month. Turner Classic Movies was born. It’s been a life-enriching if not life-changing experience for many of us.
I became a movie buff because of TCM and its founding host, the late film historian Robert Osborne. What a delight to see a replay recently of the 2013 introduction by Osborne and TCM film noir host Eddie Muller to the Michael Curtiz film, “The Breaking Point” (1950).
TCM’s remarkable mid-20th-century library provides a window on many challenges we’ve long confronted as a society and continue to face today. Yes, there were ridiculous censors with heavy hands at work back then. Nonetheless, many classic movies emerged that speak to controversial subjects and, therein, some truly hideous people.
Con artists and grifters playing on people’s fears and resentments, destructive megalomaniacs, deceitful sociopaths, fascists, racists, and haters using religion as a front? They were all there, brining in a real-world, mid-century stew of European butcher-dictators, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Father Coughlin, George Lincoln Rockwell, and a sad litany of too many others. They and their camp followers have always lurked among us.
And these films - countless books, essays, news reports, poems, photographs, paintings, and human experiences over the years, too - should have warned us about one U.S. political party’s presumptive presidential nominee, a loathsome individual who remains a clear and present danger to this nation.
Were there warnings in classic movies about this shameless sociopath who is once again polluting presidential politics? Well, let me count the ways. Just witness Andy Griffith’s chilling portrayal of Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd” (1957). Rhodes is a stupid, cunning conman driven by media manipulation and lust for power. There he is.
Or how about the coup-plotting, power-mad, narcissist General James Mattoon Scott in John Frankenheimer’s “Seven Days in May” (1964). There he is.
And then there’s the right-wing, “everyone who hates my sick ideas is a Commie” example of a deceitful power-monger in Angela Lansbury’s Eleanor Shaw Iselin in Frankenheimer’s “Manchurian Candidate” (1962). There he is. And let’s recall her moron husband, James Gregory’s Senator John Iselin. There he is.
Who can forget Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell, a malicious, conman posing as a minister in Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955)? There he is.
And remember Robert Ryan’s angry, antisemitic disgrace in Edward Dmytryk‘s “Crossfire” (1947)? Yes, there he is again.
These movies can be viewed almost as documentaries about a disgraced, damaged individual running for president who continues to threaten civilizational norms.
As the adage goes, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Too bad. We seem never to learn how to avoid these kind of villainous hucksters. Hey, even Tinseltown tried to warn us!
Image courtesy of Amazon.com