Movies, Novels, and the Death of Classics: Listeners' Questions

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I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but you're here to listen to the star and namesake, Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, best-selling author.

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And this is one of several episodes that are listener question.

episodes.

We thank our listeners for sending these in.

We are going to be running these while Victor is away on the Hillsdale Cruise.

So we have some questions.

We're going to have three questions here, Victor, maybe four if we get time.

And we're going to start off with

what many people have requested frequently, your favorite movies.

And we'll get

your opinions, Victor, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I do want to inject first, Victor,

a little bit of current news, which I think is timeless.

I mean, we are recording in the aftermath of the Trump-Biden debate.

And just one thing I'd like to bring up quickly before we get to the question about favorite movies is

today

some

Gold Star parents came out with some really sharp criticisms of Joe Biden, who during the debate, you may remember, said that nobody died, no one in the military died while he was president, totally,

I don't know, forgetting callously or out of dementia.

The 13 soldiers who,

service members who were killed in Afghanistan, more recently, a few Navy SEALs were killed.

Some members of the Army were killed in Jordan earlier this year.

They all seem to be forgotten.

But the Gold Star parents were critical not only of this omission, but also of the callous treatment they've received from the administration since the death of

their children.

So

anyway, Victor, any quick thoughts on that before we move on?

Well,

you know,

he didn't know

the Moran family, the woman with five children.

He had no, didn't call her.

He did the same thing with the East Palestine.

So

the common denominator with Biden in particular in the left is

in general is the concept of collateral damage.

And their way of thinking, what they do is for the greater good.

So we pulled out of a...

Remember why he chose to pull out like that?

He wanted to tell the people that on the 30th anniversary of

the deployment to Afghanistan in 2001 and on the 20th anniversary, particularly to the day of September 11th, it was he, Joe Biden, who, contrary to supposedly the recommendations of the military and the prior Trump policy of keeping Bagram Air Force Base secure with 3,500 stationary troops with the largest air base in Central Asia, he was going to pull them all out.

And when

that was for the greater grandeur and power of the left.

And so when he did, that was considered a success.

The 50 billion in weapons was collateral damage, and so were the 13 people who were killed.

He didn't care.

I mean,

maybe he didn't care, but

the same time he said that, he snarled at Trump, and

he's not a nice person, Jack.

He said, sucker, sucker, suckers.

And I guess he was trying to quote John Kelly.

But almost everybody in the room said that Trump didn't say that.

And then he kept saying that he did.

He called Trump a liar.

And then he said, how dare you?

My son was not a sucker who died in Iraq.

And I thought to myself, how dare you, Joe?

Your son did not die in Iraq.

He died at Walter Reed tragically of a brain tumor.

He served in Iraq, but you keep telling that lie again and again and again.

And that, too, is an insult to all the people who did die in Iraq.

Your son did not die in Iraq, Joe.

And don't try to gain sympathy in a debate and call someone a liar when you were flat out lying to the American people.

That was just atrocious.

Same thing with the people who die

on these awful criminals that are coming into the country.

They're collateral damage.

He doesn't really care, but East Palestine is collateral damage.

By that, I mean these are the people who represent constituencies that don't matter to Joe Biden.

I know that he, everybody, oh, Victor, well, he's old Joe Biden from scratch.

No, he's not.

That's a fake.

That's a fake.

And so

if these were LGBTQ, if there was, if LGBTQ people had been murdered by illegal aliens or blacks or Latinos, or bicostal wealthy white elites, he would say, he would get upset.

But not these people.

They're just the little people.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

we'll get on here now to some of the listener questions, by the way.

Thanks for

that take.

We'll start off with Bruce,

who is a self-admitted George C.

Scott fan.

So

there may be two great military movies related to George C.

Scott.

Bruce writes, from time to time while listening to the VDH podcast, I hear Victor mention some of his favorite favorite Western and war movies.

Perhaps some good material for his upcoming hiatus would be a ranking of his top five in each genre as well.

Victor, I don't know if you want to rank them or if you want to give five of each,

but

what are some of your favorite war movies and some of your favorite movies?

I'll start with the Westerns.

I am prejudicial because

every time Shane came to the Dainuba, it's a rural town 12 miles east of me, my dad would take us over there to watch it.

And then George Stevens, I think that was his best movie.

And he wasn't a director who did Westerns.

Alan Ladd was really good.

People had always said he was a mediocre actor.

He was too short.

I think that was Gene Arthur's last movie.

I think she was in her...

Was she in her late 40s, I think?

She looked great.

And that tension between Shane and her was,

and the idea that they they each had character and didn't develop that obvious attraction further is a good subtext.

The people who played the Cattle Barons are very good.

Jack Palance's first major movie,

that was really good.

One of the themes, too, is

we don't realize that Hollywood...

until very recently, looked at Southerners on these Westerners as kind of the oppressed or the underdog.

So in most of these movies, the noble southerner, Alan Ladd made another movie about being a southerner.

And in this movie, Shane is the good guy from the South, and Jack Palance is a Yankee and a bully and a killer and a psychopath.

But

the idea that

it's the R-Excellence film of the tragic hero, that he's a good person, but he's killed people in the past, people that needed killing according to the code of the West.

He just happens to come down the Grand Tetons into Jackson Hole.

It's completely beautifully filmed.

They've got great actors.

I think Ben Johnson, the supporting actor, was

great.

And

everything about the movie was tragic because he has the skills and only he has the skills to to use a level of force that's going to free them from the tyranny of the cattle barons.

But it's not a black and white Western.

They give some good soloquies about they tamed the West, they were there first, they got rid of all of the

marauding Indian parties, etc.

And then the settlers took advantage of their sacrifice and moved in.

True, but not true enough to cancel out the bad that they're doing.

And then finally, Shane realizes that he tried to

renounce his past, but he was a killer.

And people need a killer sometimes, and they need him.

So

it's a question of,

well, if you stay here, it's going to get tense with your host wife.

And you're probably a more...

And Joey looks up to

Van Heflin less, his own father, less than he does to Shane the Intruder.

So Shane realizes that he likes this.

this place.

He's good at what he does.

He likes the peaceful life.

but he understands that if he stays there, Gene Arthur is going to be more attracted to him than

to her husband, and maybe Joey will be more attached to Shane.

And then there's always going to be the idea that he's the big man because he's the ex-gunfighter.

But on the other hand, if he goes in and he has to shoot three of these people, and there's a

One of them is supposedly the best gun around with two guns, then he A, might be killed, or B, if he does kill them all, he might be wounded, or

whether he's wounded or not, he's not going to be able to come back because he has stayed, he's committed a murder, and therefore the townspeople who have taken advantage of his utility as a gunfighter will turn around once the danger is passed and then treat him like an Ajax.

And that's a great movie.

That theme is in all these great wars.

I think just as good, I don't want to rate one to five as The Searchers.

That was John Wayne's best movie.

John Wayne was a great actor.

I think John Ford watched

Red River, and he said, oh, my, gee whiz, that son of a blank who really can't act.

That was another great movie, Red River,

that I would include with Montgomery Clift and John Wayne.

But his best was The Searchers, because he's just like Shane.

He has these skills.

They need him.

Only he can find the

renegade Native Americans who did the foul deed.

Only he has enough hatred and fury to

sustain this crazy hunt year after year.

And he does.

He brings back Natalie Wood, and they kill the bad guys.

And then he has to walk out of that door with that famous John Ford shot where he goes out through the door.

And nobody notices he's gone.

He was the one that saved everybody.

But again, he has a murky past like Shane.

He was probably with some type of Quantuel raiders or somebody like that on the Confederate side, another Confederate.

And there's no place for him after things are settled.

So he leaves.

There's the same tension, Jack.

He has some strange relationship with his brother's wife.

You don't know whether they had something going or what, but it's...

And then she's killed, but it was better that he just get out after he did that.

And that's a great scene when they're all rejoicing, he carrying Nelly Wood, and then he just drifts off.

So that was my another favorite of modern, you can't really say that you enjoy every moment, but it's absolutely a brilliant Western is the wild bunch.

And it's got the same tragic,

the same tragic themes to it.

The wild bunch are thugs, they're killers, but there's some good in them.

And they finally

find spiritual redemption.

When they've made a deal with Mapache,

they have,

according to their own code, which is amoral, they've made a good deal.

They've given stolen U.S.

arms and given them to the federales for gold.

But on the other hand, they have a moral code as gunmen that are in the wrong time at the wrong place.

All of these movies take place not in the high point of the 1840s, 50s, and 60s, but the 1870s, 80s, 90s as the West is ending.

And that accentuates all the tragic hero that there's no place for him within the plot of the movie and there's no place

for him in a general time.

And

so anyway,

in the wild bunch, I think that was pretty clear that

they have to redeem themselves according to their codes.

So after they visit the prostitutes, they can ride off with the money, Jack.

They can ride off to a good life.

But they have to get Angel back, and they know that if they don't go back there, they're going to torture and kill him if he isn't already killed.

So then Ernest Borgnine and Warnotes,

Ben Johnson, and Bill Holden, I think that was one of his greatest roles since The Bridge on the River Kwai.

It was just great.

Stellag 17, yeah.

He was a great actor.

He had a tragic end to his life, but he was a great actor.

And they go back and they just, that was the most bloody 15 minutes in film history.

They just wipe out and they get killed.

And then,

you know, Robert Ryan is kind of redeemed and they go help

the insurgents.

So it was a great movie, everything about it.

But again, it's the Western code.

I like the, I know people have thought that this Magnificent Seven is dimmed a little bit.

It's kind of long and there's some quirky little scenes in it.

But that first scene

with Eul Brenner and Steve McQueen, when they volunteer to bury

that Native American in the cemetery

and they go against the whole town and they have that famous theme song.

That's just a wonderful scene.

Yeah.

I love that movie.

And the Japanese movie that it was.

Yeah, it was Seven Samurai.

Finally, it's not a movie, but I thought Lumps and Dub was great.

That was Robert Duvall's greatest role.

I think it was the greatest role of a lot of people.

You know, that evil guy that played Blue Duck, Frederick Forrest, he was kind of washed up, but that was a brilliant role.

The way he was playing a Native American, but his face and his contortions, that last scene when he jumps out of the jail window, he has his shirt off and he's got that kind of gut.

And then he's a psychopath.

I think he was kind of the model for that later Western taken

arm with

Kate Vanchett.

A guy played a similar role.

Robert Ehrlich, I had always liked him, but he was another tragic guy in that movie.

He played a great role as one of the original Rangers.

It was absolutely no good, in fact.

So there was great

Tommy Lee Jones.

I thought that was his best role, but it had everything a Western needed.

It had the accent, Larry McMurdy's novel, and he helped on the screen.

That was a great movie.

Very quickly, as far as war movies.

I won't rate them either, but I have been watching The Longest Day, and I've got a renewed appreciation for it.

It was really a, you know, it was a the way they portrayed Germans in there was very well done.

I know that Saving Private Ryan is more realistic, it's got better cinematography, but there was something about the longest day I thought was very well done.

I like

Saving Private Ryan, especially

I was surprised that Steven Spielberg, that theme where the German who they did not execute, They just shot him in the leg or done anything, but they treated him very well, as you expect.

And then he comes back and slits one of the heroes' throats and leads the attack that ultimately kills the last few of the team.

And then that character shoots him.

That was a really good, that was very well done.

I really liked,

I don't say I liked it, but Apocalypse Now was well done.

Really?

Yeah, it was.

It was an anti-war movie, and there was a lot of hokey things.

It's kind of a modern version of Heart of Darkness going up the river.

And Marlon Brando is sort of this obese, ball-headed guru.

I guess he's supposed to be Kurtz in the Conrad short story.

It was well done.

That made Robert Duvall famous, that scene where he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, and they play Raid of the Valkyries when he comes into the airborne

helicopter attack.

Those were good.

That was

really good.

There was Windy Surfboarding also during that scene, part of it.

Yes,

That was like really wild.

My favorite.

Before I get to that, I think also there was two movies that Lawrence of Arabia, if that's a war movie, that was brilliant by David Lean.

Yeah.

That was Peter O'Toole's inaugural, really major role.

It was just wonderful.

So was

it not only that Australian movie, Breaker Moround, did you ever see that?

Oh, yeah, a long time ago.

That was a really good movie.

Right.

And the Equalizer guy was on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I forget his name.

Richard Woodford or Robert Woodford.

I forgot his name.

But now I will rate one movie.

I think the best war movie of all time was Wolfgang Peterson's Dasput, especially if you see the long version with subtitles in German.

And Jürgen Proctel was a...

He was in the original Dune, but man, that was a great movie.

That one scene where they're all at the bottom of the Mediterranean, they're going to die.

And then

the engineer that he was supposed to discipline for being asleep on the job, or

he gives them a second chance and he engineers

a method to get ballast and get back up.

And then when they open that hatch and

he said, you know, we're not yet, not yet.

And then they play, but it's a long way to tipperary.

And then he turns around and he says, you have to have good men.

You have to have good men.

And then the way that ends, when they do all that crazy suicide mission, they survive.

They get back.

I guess it's at Le Harve at the Reve.

I didn't know whether it was Le Harve or St.

Marvitz or whatever it was.

But anyway,

they get home and then some typhoon fighters kill them, most of them.

Right.

That's one of the most brilliant Westerns.

So those are Westerns.

And I mean, excuse me, that's one of the best military history movies I've ever seen.

It was very accurate.

40,000 Germans died on U-Boat Patrol, about 75% of the crews that went out.

It was a death, suicide mission, especially after 1942.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, it sounds like maybe it's comparable to being

a B-6, you know, a bomber.

B-17 B-17 bomber crew.

A couple of things, Victor, if I could just say, one is you mentioned David Lean, and

of course, Lawrence Herbert Arabia, and you mentioned Dr.

Bridge on the River Kwai, I'm sorry.

Oh, yeah, terrific.

But also his first movie as a director was Noel Coward's In Which We Serve,

which was,

I think I've seen it 50 times.

It is just a very full

patriotic war movie, British movie.

I want to recommend folks.

They can find it free on the internet

anywhere.

Go ahead.

Bridge of the River Kawai, we just saw it the other night again.

Yep.

David Lean was a weird guy, as I remember.

He claimed he'd slept with a thousand women.

I think he was married six times.

And then after he

bombed, I liked it, but Ryan's daughter was a bomb.

You know, he'd done Lawrence of Arabia, Bridget Riverquai, Dr.

Javago, and then that bombed.

And he kind of went into a depression until he did Passage of India.

He was a complete womanizer, completely reckless guy.

But that movie is very strange because

that is the most most vicious attack on the British upper class.

Because if you look at the two representations, Alec Guinness,

who's a complete madman and gets everybody killed in a way.

And then Jack Hawkins, this Oxford Don, who's absolutely callous and ruthless, and tricks William Holden to go back in.

And there was no need, as it turned out, because the pathway that he escaped was not the one they used to go back in.

So the whole thing was nihilistic.

And if they had just blown up the bridge before their train got there, they would all have got out alive.

So everything about it was kind of tragic.

But that was another great war movie.

But we can move on.

I've spoken.

Yeah, John Ford said Jack Hawkins was the best actor of all, of all.

He was great in Ben Heard, you remember?

Oh, he was.

And also in Zulu, where he was

the preacher.

You're all going to die.

He was

excellent in that.

He was brilliant in that, too.

Yeah.

I just want want to say one thing quickly, Victor.

We can move on about

the Westerns.

And I know we've talked about Shane before, but my gosh, the cinematography there was just phenomenal.

And that's that scene where

the guys are fighting and Stevens shoots it through the legs of these horses that are in a panic.

And it just is so powerful and beautiful.

And he does a few other close-ups in the movie

where Van Heflin is entering the bar where they're having the fight, and he's grabbing an axe handle and about to attack folks.

A real hard close-up, but just

beautiful movie.

Terrific.

I mentioned Zulu.

I should have mentioned that as a great war movie because

that was.

I really liked Stanley Baker.

I think he was in it with Jack Collins.

And Michael Caine was wonderful.

But that,

when I wrote Carnage and Culture, I have a chapter on Rourke's Drift.

And I watched that movie four or five times.

That movie is amazingly accurate historically.

It really sticks to what actually happened at Rourke's Drift, how that tiny garrison held off 4,000 Zulu warriors.

It was really

something.

It was a good movie.

Yeah, loved it.

Hey, Bruce,

who asked the question,

I'm sure Victor loves Patton and Doctor Strangelove, which would be a strange war movie.

But

thanks for the question.

Victor, we're going to talk about a military novel, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

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Victor, we have Will

writing a question.

Have you read a novel titled Once an Eagle by Anton Meyer?

A few years ago, when General Milley was shooting off his mouth about white supremacism in the military, Newt Gingrich recommended this book during a Fox News interview as an example of the two different kinds of military men in the U.S.

Army, the political soldier and the combat soldier.

You also talk about this difference frequently on your podcast.

I read the book on Newt's recommendation, and it is a great story worthy of your mention sometime.

I would love to hear you discuss it.

Victor, I'm not sure if you've read it, but I'm sure you know about it.

At least tell us about the book and about the difference that

the comparison it makes between the political soldier and the combat soldier.

Well,

I could just make a footnote to that.

We are very lucky to have, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Eric Carrilla.

I don't even remember, but

he was in the first Gulf War, but there was a long article written by an embedded reporter about him.

I think it was in 2005 or 6.

He was in Mosul.

and they were surrounded and he was shot three times and he got everybody out.

And

he was, I think, a lieutenant colonel.

He was a genuine military hero.

And

he's a wonderful officer, and he's now chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

So that was, I don't know.

I mean, it's really something

to

think about.

I hadn't read Once in Eagle, but this is what was strange about it.

It's about two

contemporaries, and one takes the,

you know, the sympathetic role.

He cares about his men.

He

has these hazardous duties.

And the other is what you said, is an inside-the-belt way careerist.

I think it ends, as I remember, and the reason I'm saying this is because I...

In 1989,

my mother was dying of a brain tumor, and my dad was kind of going crazy.

And I would take her to chemo and radiation, and we would sit there we watched lumps and dub at night

my mom really liked it I would go to their house and then spell my dad off and he was reading once an Eagle and he was just blued to it and then he would tell me exactly what was going on so I felt like I read it but it's it was I think it was on the New York Times bestseller list for months.

It was a big popular thing in the 60s and then it had a second wind in the 80s and 90s.

Okay, well, thanks,

Victor, and we thank Will

for the question.

And, Victor, since we're talking about

novels,

we have a question about historical fiction novels.

And maybe I'll even ask you, as an author of historical fiction,

a question or two related to that.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show again.

This is one of the Victor's Gonna Be Away shows that we refuse to let any time lapse, Victor.

There's gonna be no vacations, et cetera.

So we've asked our listeners, you dear listeners, for questions, and many of you have sent them in.

We thank you for that.

And here's one from Kevin.

A couple of questions here from Kevin.

Could Victor provide his thoughts on historical fiction novels?

Is historical fiction a good way to learn history?

Does he have any recommendations for good historical fiction authors?

And Victor, after you address

Kevin's questions, you yourself have written a piece of historical fiction, The End of Sparta.

Maybe you can talk about that book and your writing process for that.

But Victor, Kevin has some questions there.

Have a take at them.

Well, I wrote a book called The End of Sparta, and it traces the career of the great Theban general Apaminondas and how he enlists some Theban farmers, true, and they march down, free the Messenian Helots.

They have emasculated the Spartan army at the Battle of Leuctra in 371,

and they get into the, almost cross the Eurotus River, and then they turn around, go over Mount Tyegetus, free the Helots and come back.

I think it was a little bit too historically accurate.

So even in the dialogue, I tried to write it in Greek first and then translate it into English.

I tried to get the dialect.

It's hard to find Greek dialect, you know, what people actually sound like.

What would they sound like in English, like a Tokyan level or a Shaik?

Who knows?

But we do have some dialogue in Euripides' plays and Aristophanes comedies I looked at and of course it's in the they spoke in a Boeotian dialect and the Spartans had a Laconian dialect but I think it's actually factually it's actually a history but it's presented as a novel it's sold pretty well there were criticisms that it was too detailed or too historical and not

I have a long description of a trireme and how you get in it and fight and things like that.

But

it's very accurate, I think.

I only have experience really in the ancient world, and there's two giants in the ancient world of historical fiction.

One was Robert Graves.

I think everybody remembers the series on PBS I Claudius about the Julian-Claudian family all the way from the beginning with Augustus himself and then

Tiberius, Caligula,

Nero.

I mean,

yeah, Nero,

Claudius and Nero.

That's a great novel, and that is very accurate.

It's based on Tacitus's Annals and Suetonius's history.

Mary Vinnal,

she was a wonderful novelist.

She wrote three or four sequential

biography-novels about Alexander the Great.

And if you read them, they're not only true to the text of Arian, Plutarch, Diodorus,

but

they're really fascinating.

And

she has a lot about his ambiguous sexuality, his drinking.

So it's a ribald novel for the time.

So those are two great novelists.

Peter Green wrote a couple of novels about the ancient world.

He wasn't a big,

he didn't like me, put it that way.

He's attacked me in print a lot for writing Who Killed Homer.

But

he was a good novelist.

Why did he attack you?

The theme of Who Killed Homer, written in 1997, published in 90, excuse me, 95, published in 96.

So, you know, now it's almost getting close to 30 years ago.

We said that

the formal discipline of classics was going to die.

Right.

And it was being killed in two directions.

One, of course, was the predecessors to the woke DI people.

In those days, it was the politically correct, and they were

emphasizing things that were not important.

And in those days, it was gender, gender, gender, not so much race.

But, you know, they were writing dissertations like the sexual ambiguity of the cult of Dionysus and Didyma or something like that.

I'm just making it up.

or

the oppression of Penelope, Homebow, things like that, or the sexual liberation liberation of Calypso.

And they wrote in that postmodern, post-structuralist, Foucaultian,

Derrida, Lacan style.

They were emulative of a bunch of French, I think, frauds.

And so nobody could read what they were writing, and they were not teaching the main interests, Greek history, Greek philosophy, Greek literature.

And they weren't very, well,

they being the academic world of the left.

And they were the people who founded and taught the people who are now destroyed classics.

And then, on the other side, we said the philologists were essential.

These are the people who translate new text.

They go back over old texts, the manuscript tradition,

and give us very valuable emendations.

They're conversant with papyrus and

metrics, epigraphy.

We don't really, they never get credit for all the hard work they do.

But the problem with it was that when they got into these departments, they usually were attached to schools that had graduate programs.

And because they felt their work was so important, it was important.

They were teaching maybe one or two classes a year, three classes a year, three or four students, mostly graduate students, rather than using that expertise to teach beginning Greek or beginning Latin, because they were wonderful philologists.

In other words, they were avoiding teaching and they were doing great work within the March of Progress in Classical Studies, but they weren't advocates for classics.

By that, I mean they weren't the type of people that were teaching 200 people in mythology or an introductory general education in the Greeks class.

And they kind of looked down on that.

It was always a joke that if you got the Outstanding Teaching Award

in the United States for being an undergraduate teacher of Greek Greek and Latin.

And my co-author, John Heath, got that award, and so did I in another year.

Then that was kind of a mark of death career-wise, because that

branded you as a popularizer, that you weren't a serious scholar.

And

so

he felt, and the irony was Peter Green had been a renegade.

I don't think he'd been an actual professor until he was in his 40s.

He was part of the London 1950s Libertines

scene.

He was a great stylist.

He wrote a really good book.

I have praised it on the Hellenistic World.

It was really good.

He wrote a ribald but accurate.

It has some mistakes in it, but it was a good biography of Alexander the Great.

So he wrote a lot of really good books.

He tended at the end to just compile his essays and republish them and republish them in Compendia.

But when he reviewed it, he didn't look at us as rebels as he had been,

but as traitors to classics by attacking the establishment, of which he was now a full-endowed professor at Texas.

So when we replied to him, it was pretty easy to reply to him because he was saying that we were bomb throwers and we were reckless and we were attacking.

And then we just quoted what he had written 30 years ago about famous classicists of the establishment.

And he was much more critical of them in very cruel ways than we had been.

And he got very furious and he kept writing about that.

But I had no animus toward him because I thought he did a lot of good things, both as a rebel in his 20s, 30s, and 40s, and then as a member of the classics faculty at Texas.

I think he's still alive, but he must be in his late 90s.

I may be mistaken.

People listening can correct me.

But

he was a poet, and he wrote historical novels, as I said.

And Gorbadal, I think, praised a lot of them.

I want to make one correction.

I said that Eric, I just remember I said Eric Carrilla was chair of the Joint Chief.

What I meant was he was the chairman of the Central Command.

Eric Carrilla is the head of CENTCOM.

I misspoke when I said he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is Charles Brown.

I think he was connected with the Air Force Academy.

He might have been commandant there.

And I think he's more in the tradition of Mark Milley than Eric Carrillo.

And I think what it was his projection, Jack, I hope that one day Eric Carrillo is chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Maybe Donald Trump is listening, then he can make Eric Carrilla chairman of the Joint Chiefs one day.

Your lips to God's ears.

Hey, Victor, on historical fiction, I do want to remind you, once a couple of years ago, we talked about

The Cain Mutiny, the book, and I read it at your recommendation.

It is terrific, terrific novel.

And then

mentioning Jack Hawkins before,

and he was in the movie The Cruel Sea, which is based on the novel by Montserrat, which is also, I read that a long time ago.

That's just terrific fiction.

So,

Jack Hawkins was a great actor.

He had a really tragic life.

I think he died in his early 60s from lung cancer, maybe.

Lung cancer, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, you mentioned the Cane Mutiny.

I was in a group that meets, and in that group was Herman Wuk, the author.

And I think, I don't know how old he was at the time, but Herman Wuk lived to be over 100, and he was alert.

And I just happened to go over to his area where he was once, and I asked him about that.

I talked to him for 30 minutes about the novel.

and

the movie.

He was a fascinating character.

He wrote wrote a lot of fiction, military history fiction.

Winds of War, I think Robert Mitchum was on that 80s or 70s TV that he wrote.

Right.

He was.

He lived till 104.

Holy mackerel.

Wow, yeah.

He wrote that Winds of War, Warren Remembrance, I think.

Anyway, I met him.

He was a very wonderful guy.

I've been really lucky in my life to have met people who have taken the time to talk to somebody.

At the time, no one knew who he was and was very nice.

He was one of them.

Another one was John Keegan.

And we didn't really talk about books about war, but

that was one of my favorite, The Face of Battle.

It wasn't a bestseller, but it had the greatest description of the Battle of Agincourt.

and Waterloo and the Battle of the Somme, I think.

It just redid military history from the ground up about what it was like to be in those battles.

Right.

And that was his breakout book, and it was probably his best book.

Well, Victor, one last note

as we conclude this episode.

You know, for a few.

For a few recent episodes, we had a sponsor, Horizon, an American saga, a new movie, which has just come out.

I have not seen it.

I intend to go see it.

But I just want to make note that there's a gentleman, Giancarlo Sopo, who reviewed it the other day

for the National Review website.

He writes, evaluating an un because,

excuse me, this is two

parts so far.

I'm sure there'll be more parts.

So one part has just come out, another part's coming out in August of

this series.

Evaluating an unfinished work of art is always a challenge, if not impossible.

But if the first installment of Kevin Costner's four-part Horizon in American Saga is any indication, A fascinating cinematic triumph is riding into view, graced with some of the most breathtaking cinematography the Western genre has seen this century.

And a stirring score, Costner's initial brushstrokes on this ambitious canvas are undeniably bold and magnificent.

That's pretty positive take on.

We've talked about Kevin Costner before.

I think his first major role was Silverado.

And

he wasn't, he had a, he definitely has a screen presence, but he was never really, I thought, a great actor.

But the more he continues, I really admire him because he's, God, he's got to be close to 70 or in his late 60s.

And he could have just rested and he made a lot of money in a lot of those movies.

But he really has turned out to be an advocate of the Western and trying to resurrect it in so many different ways.

And I really admire him for doing that.

Yeah.

Well, I intend to go

see Horizon.

I assume maybe you will when you get back from

your trip.

Anyway, Victor, you've been terrific as ever.

We thank our listeners.

I think I have lost my memory a little bit because I'm still dealing with this long COVID.

Well,

you're dealing with it, but still proving.

that you are indestructible.

And maybe you don't want, maybe a goal in life is not to be indestructible, but

you're a champion of it.

But you've been terrific, Victor, as ever.

Thanks.

Thanks for our listeners for

providing questions and listening.

And those who rate the show, thank you.

You can do that on

Apple.

And I thank those who have gone to civilthoughts.com to sign up for the free weekly email newsletter.

I Jack Fowlerite.

So thanks all.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.