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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor Davis-Hanson, is Martin and Elyan Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is a special episode, a little bit complicated.

It's about movies.

Now, those of you who are fans of this podcast will have recently heard a movie podcast where Victor and I discuss his favorite films along with his favorite books and other things.

Well, that episode was to be used while Victor was away in Israel, which has not happened yet.

We're recording in May 10th.

But as you've heard in other podcasts, there are illnesses, technical difficulties.

So we had to use that movie podcast as a fill-in.

But there was such an exceptional response to that podcast that we figured maybe we should try another one for the replacement for the fill-in.

And let me just normally we read these comments at the end of our podcast, but here's one that spoke for a lot of people.

This is from iTunes.

It's by Burton B-I-T-C.

And he wrote: More BDH film reviews.

The missing piece in a million clue has been discovered for added enjoyment.

What a treat.

Thank you.

I had to listen twice to make sure I didn't miss any movies.

Of course, I named my son Shane.

What a country.

So that was very cool, you Burtons.

So we found out, of course, we're both kind of junkies about...

Turner classic movies.

And one great thing that Turner does is it hosts, and it hasn't stopped, it hasn't canceled it yet.

It hosts a Memorial Day marathon, military movies.

And we're going to talk about some of Victor's favorites from what will be aired forthcoming at the end of May, and some that aren't in that listing.

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

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, this special episode while Victor is away in Israel on this long delayed and canceled rescheduled trip.

And we're very much intent on not letting any time pass or let any dead air happen while Victor is away.

So we're recording yet another special episode on movies and Victor's views on them.

So Victor, this Turner classic movie, first of all, Turner meets the tip of the hat that it keeps this annual tradition alive.

I think it really is one of the great ways in American culture that military is recognized, and particularly those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

So, Victor, I gave you a little assignment.

There was an article about this on Turner's website and a listing of the 30 or so.

I think actually it's closer to 40 films that are going to be offered.

Would you tell us some of your favorite movies that will be coming up?

And then we can talk about movies not on the list.

And then I want to ask you about some popular recent

military movies and your thoughts on them.

So Victor, what are some of your favorite movies that Turner will be airing coming up?

One of my favorite was, there's a director.

I know all the listeners, a lot of you have heard of him, and Henry King.

He's kind of a B plus director.

He did some great movies.

You remember the snows of Kilmanjaro, that Hemingway novel with Gregory Peck?

Right.

And And he's dying.

You think he has all these flashbacks of his earlier life, and they find out they can take the poisonous thorn out, and he lives the very end.

It's one of Hemingway's best novels, but he worked with Gregory Peck a lot.

My favorite was 12 o'clock high.

And the title comes from, you know, when people would yell out.

the position of fighters that were coming down on the B-17s.

And it's kind of a fictionalized version of the Schweinfort, probably the second raid.

I wrote about it in Second World Wars, the one where, you know, this

crazy theory that if you knocked out all the ball-bearing plants, then Germany would come to a halt.

Not true.

And they sent basically un-escorted daylight B-17s over Schweinfurt, Germany, and they were wiped out.

In the second raid, 60 of them, 60 out of 290-something were shot down and more were wounded.

And this movie takes up the idea that the Americans arrived there and the British have been bombing Germany from 40 and 41 and now it's in 42.

And the Americans have the secret weapon that's called the D-17, the Flying Fortress, and it's so much better than all of these supposed backward British planes.

And the British have told us, look, you can't go in at daylight in formation.

They'll just blow you apart.

They've got 88 meteor flat guns.

They've got 109 pilots.

They're coming out with F.

Fockwolf 190.

They're the best pilots in the world.

You got to go in small groups at night and you've got to do certain things and, you know, fire rage.

What they called area bombing.

We called it carpet bombing.

But we said, oh, you can't do that.

That's amoral.

We have precision.

We have the Nordon Biden site.

And this movie is about that, the confidence it has.

And of course, the commander is not getting results.

He's losing more than the sustainable 3 or 4% permission.

They bring in his commander, Gregory Peck, who's going to do it just right.

He does everything just right.

And

then Schweinfort, and he goes into a catatonic state at the end.

And the movie ends with him sort of staring at the wall.

And remember, he was born the calm and collective guy that wouldn't be broken or wouldn't get too attached to the soldiers and make strategically incorrect decisions.

And he ends up being destroyed by the losses.

He gets too tied up with the men.

And kind of the really great thing about the movie is: you know, he was, Dean Jagger was always a great actor, but he becomes sort of this World War I veteran, and he's a lawyer, and he's an old guy, and he's

very underplayed.

And he's underplayed.

He's like Oscar for this.

Yeah, he did.

He won the supporting role.

And they have actual footage.

And I have such memories because my father would watch that with us all the time.

And then we.

Yeah, what did he think about it?

He thought it was a great movie.

He trained on B-17s.

The B-29 crews were taught before they could get onto B-29, they had to go on B-17s.

Of course, the B-17 was a much more reliable and safe plane.

So he had nothing but admiration for B-17s.

And B-17s were our version of German U-boaters, you know, where 75% of them were killed.

20,000 of them got killed.

And same thing with 20,000 British.

So 40,000

flyers died.

It was a flawed concept that you could go over to Europe in a high-performance 230-mile-an-hour bomber with four or five tons of bombs and drop on a Norden Weimsleit over a windy, cloudy Germany and not have control of France or the channel.

So the moment you took off and you got over the channel, you were met by fighters and then you were handed off from fighter group to fighter group to fighter group.

So we have memoirs from German Luftwaffe pilots in 42 and 43.

They're told that the B-17s are getting near the French coast.

They fly up from their French thing.

They have a smoke.

They get on their planes.

They shoot them.

They shoot down a couple of them.

They cause havoc.

Then they radio the

next 15.

And then they go back and they have a beer.

They hang out.

They laugh.

They play soccer.

And then they're told they're on their way back now and they're going to be handed off in a couple hours.

And then they go up again and kill more Americans.

And the idea that they had some brilliant people there, Spatz and

squadron leaders like Curtis LeMay, who really figured out the best way to stack guns, but it was a flawed concept.

And so it was a disaster.

It was a death sentence to be in a B-17 before 1944.

And then all of a sudden, June of 44, guess what?

All of a sudden, the Americans figured out they had drop tanks and the Thunderbird seated was good, but not as good as a P-51 as an escort fighter.

And

they started to, under Jimmy Doolittle, let the P-51s divert from their escort duties and become hunter-killers.

And they went after airfields.

They got in dogfights.

And they single-handedly destroyed the Luftwaffe.

And then the less and less fuel they had, the fewer and fewer training missions, the worse and worse the pilots became.

And then the better Americans got, the more planes they got.

And suddenly we took France and all of a sudden we had fields.

When they took off in England, they were completely safe as they flew over half of Europe.

And everything.

Was anti-aircraft gun just really negligible?

No, no, not at all.

One of the things, if I may, like, how many, what percentage of American planes were shot down?

So I think the majority were shot down by flat guns.

Oh, really?

Okay.

I think at least at the end of the war, the later years, they destroyed the Luftwaffe as a viable force somewhere around July of 1944, But they still lost planes.

One of the things that the Soviets, among the many crimes against us, is they never acknowledged that once we started bombing Europe, the Germans found that their 88-millimeter anti-tank weapon, which was a brilliant gun, it was the most accurate medium artillery piece in World War II.

And it was very versatile, but they could, you know, shoot it up 10, 15,000 feet higher, four miles, and it was very accurate.

And it became a wonderful flak gun.

So, what they did is Hitler and Goering pulled them all out of Eastern Front and Central Russia, and they came in and started blowing up B-17s.

And when they didn't have them, the Red Army was free to really be far more aggressive with their tank tactics because the Germans were short 88 millimeter field artillery and anti-tank weapons, as well as they took away Fw 190s and also BE-109s.

And so that's something that we don't talk about in World War II because of the disasters of the B-17 and B-24 up until 44.

And then everything, as I posed in Second World Wars, it's kind of a dilemma to say, well, did we learn all of that misery that's outlined in the mute, all that tragedy?

Was that necessary to be so superbly efficient in late 44 and up until May 1945?

Because if you looked at a raid in January of 45, it was absolutely devastating on German industry.

But it took a lot of dead Americans to get that expertise or shoot down enough German planes or bomb enough plants.

The expert on that, I think, is really Williamson Murray, the American historian of World War II aviation.

Richard Olvery wrote a book and then he sort of wrote another one, How the Allies Won, but he kind of flipped.

He first said that bombing was very efficient, then he said it wasn't.

But But I think it was.

But this movie was very tragic.

I wasn't a great fan of Gregory Peck, but this movie, something about him, I think it's his best performance.

And, you know, there's other actors.

I think Gary Merrill was in it.

He was really good.

He's the earlier commander that got too close to truth.

So I really like the movie.

I recommend it.

It's a great movie.

It's over two hours long.

It's so well done.

Gary Merrill, I agree.

He's Mr.

Betty Davis.

But yeah, he was Mr.

Betty Davis.

Was it real?

Yeah, it was Betty Davis.

I remember that.

Yeah.

Another woman, too.

He married somebody else who's an actress.

Yeah.

He ended up towards the end of his career.

He was promoting the men's fashion as skirts.

Kind of weird.

We'll get another time.

Hey, Victor, there's so many.

There are about 39 movies, Attack, From Here to Eternity, Pork Chop Hill, which growing up, if that movie was on, you watched Pork Chop Hill again.

That's, you know, Gregory, Gregory Peck Battleground, which is one of my favorite war movies with Ban Johnson and cast of many, many great actors.

They were expendable.

One of John Ford's.

That was great.

Yeah, tell me, what do you like about They Were Expendable?

Well, I want to be careful because I haven't seen it lately, but he did a movie too about Pearl Harbor, didn't he?

He did.

Yeah, there was a movie.

He did shorten them, but both movies had the same reaction.

The American military was all in on it because he was this conservative, crusty guy.

And he wrote a very,

Pearl Harbor was very sympathetic to Japanese Americans,

which it should be.

And they were expendable with sort of the, what would be the word, the stupidity?

Because the title gives it away.

Not that they were heroic.

They were, but he's trying to suggest that people, to win the war, there had to be X number of PT boat people that had to be killed almost.

John Wayne was Rusty Ryan or whatever his name was.

And I think when you look back at the PT program,

I don't think we should have undergone it.

I mean, it's famous because of JFK and all that, but when you look at the actual damage that was done versus

the losses that were inflicted, I don't think it was a cost effect.

Really?

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, it's part of it was when it started, we did not have reliable torpedoes.

And part of it was it was a romantic idea that a bunch of young people, you're going to turn over a bunch of 19-year-olds with speed boats, right?

And they're going to zoom in before the Japanese know what they are.

And they're going to have these torpedoes and they're going to take out much more expensive.

destroyers or light cruisers and they're going to zoom off.

But the truth was that they never had the firepower and they didn't quite have the speed and they didn't have the bases to be that effective and they got killed in droves.

Wow.

Well, of the actual filming of the movie, which is John Ford's eye for the screen, I mean, it is a visual art after all, but he was kind of

unmatched.

But when two PT boats in the movie were taking on a Japanese battleship.

I mean, you really didn't think you were watching an actual attack on an actual ship, Just

refilming.

Absolutely.

And he was on Midway Island.

He almost got killed, John Ford, filming the Battle of Midway.

So he was a very heroic guy.

And

no, he's very misunderstood as a director because he got, at the end of his life, he became part of the John Wayne Ward Bond.

group of people who fought, I think correctly, the communist infiltration of Hollywood.

So they just said he's a crusty old right-winger.

But when you look at what a lot of his issues were, like take Woody Strode, who he championed and the man who shot Liberty Ballots and then Sergeant Rutledge, which in my COVID stupor, I confused with Peckenthal.

But he was actually, if you look at his films, he was actually very sympathetic to Native Americans.

He had a lot of Hispanics in them.

He was just a very complex

director with a lot of range.

Even the things when you think he's corny, there's a little bit of irony there every time.

It's not quite what you seem.

And that trilogy, I always thought, you know, that she wore a yellow ribbon, Fort Apache

were kind of weak, but I've watched them this year again.

They're both brilliant movies again.

Yeah.

Well, he finds it important to have in most of his movies a sense of community.

So how do you do that in a war movie?

And he has those dances at the base or other things.

I get it.

And, you know, they make the movies better.

I did say last time it was a little much overdone, i thought in in the searchers

that whole wedding scene and the fight outside was with festus yeah yeah it was too and ken curtis was in there yeah quen curtis was a brilliant singer as you remember he was and yeah but you'd never and that accent was

well i think he actually was yeah i think he was in they were expendable i think he was one of the yeah he was in every john ward he's in every he was part of the john ford cattle company or whatever they called it that group of people that played in you know almost every ward bond and et cetera, et cetera.

And

another movie, though, that I really liked of the ones that you recommended, I was just looking at them and that was that 1962 movie, The Longest Day.

That was kind of a weird movie where they divided up, you remember the chores among what it was, a British, American, and German director.

And then they each collaborated on it.

But they had great soundtrack

and they had some actual footage.

and

they had every star it's just it kind of got ridiculous because every single star in hollywood had a cameo appearance i mean they even got into edmund o'brien and rod steiger and and richard todd and but uh

i thought it was it worked i think robert mitcham was norman caught of the the famous thing you know there's only two types of people who are going to get off this beach those are going to die or those are going to you there's only two ways you're going to end up either going to be dead or you're going to get off the beach.

And he was very famous for that.

Right.

The brigadier general, one star.

And it was very well done.

And I remember that I had a mom who was really idealistic.

And so she wanted us to have, and she said, we're all going to go to Fresno every Saturday when the movies come out.

We're going to see the eight 1962.

finalists for the Academy Award.

And we're all five of us going to vote.

So we went and saw that.

We saw A Thousand Clowns.

We saw all those great 1962 films.

And then we voted.

And

my dad and I and my two brothers voted for, I think, the longest day.

And my mom was more sophisticated, I guess she was.

And she had, I mean, there was.

I don't know.

I'm trying to remember what they were, but they were Kill a Mockingbird was one of them.

That was her favorite.

And there was,

gosh, there was another couple.

It was one of the best years the music i didn't like the music man as much you know how can you get a nine-year-old to watch the music man that's tough it was dr no and it was

still the music man it grow it can grow on you later in life and robert press yeah we went and saw my one of the iconic roles she put up a fight because she said We went and saw Man Who Shot Liberty Balance, which was a great movie.

And that was such a weird generation of parents.

It came out of the Depression, and then they were sold on the idea of going to college, that they had to do that.

And then

they linked up during World War II and they were very ideal, and they defeated fascism, and they were going to come back.

And it was a period of the great books, the World Book Encyclopedia of the Craftsman.

Books, do-it-yourself, you know, teach yourself home wiring, self-improvements, learn how to speak, get your own home, get a sub.

And it was a very idealistic, you know, JFK was the embodiment of that.

Right.

And those films sort of

kind of embody that.

That was, but everything got blown away by Lawrence of Arabia that year, as I remember.

And I was

great war.

Wow, that was a great war movie itself.

But hey, Victor, I'd like to throw something at you about the red badge of courage.

I want to do that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

This is a special edition.

We are discussing Memorial Day movie marathon that Turner Classic Movies is going to be hosting from Friday, May 27th through Monday, May 30th, and some of the 39 movies, some of Victor's favorites.

Victor, I don't know if Fred Badge of Courage is one of your favorites.

I personally, I really love the movie.

I think it's quite well done.

There's a lot of controversy to it and how it was hacked up and shortened and much of the original film destroyed.

But, you know, something at the very end of the movie, there's this beautiful scene where the Union has prevailed in this attack.

And Audi Murphy is the star of this movie.

And I think it's his best role, great war hero.

just one of the greatest Americans ever.

I love Audi Murphy, but he's the flag bearer.

And he captures the flag of a dying Confederate flag bearer who he's very tender to.

And the flags are held in a certain way.

It's almost religious and beautiful.

It was.

And the conversations that happened at the time show this sense of forgiveness transcending this,

which would never be, you know,

never be shot today.

Anyway, your thoughts about that?

No, I mean, it was one of

John Euston had that ability to

have flashes of brilliance in films that were otherwise they had problems with the studio or actors.

But that was a good film.

And that scene was the best scene of the movie.

And I agree with Audi Murphy.

You know, he was killed in a plane crash, wasn't he?

As I remember, it was died very young.

He was, yeah.

I think Texas.

And he was very small, like.

five, seven or five, eight.

And then when you read what he did in Italy, it was just amazing.

I mean, it was just superhuman in World War II.

But he was a great actor.

That was what I'm getting at.

And those cowboy, I've been watching them and everybody thought, you know, he's just another Audi Murphy movies of the 1950s, but they're all well acted.

He was a very good actor.

And that was too.

When you bring up the Civil War, I mean, it's not tragedy anymore.

It has to be melodrama.

It has to be 100% bad or 100%

good.

I think I remarked to the filmmaker Ken Burns once when I was talking to him, because I think we disagreed politically, but we were having a very civil conversation.

And I said to him, you know, your Civil War movie was brilliant with Shelby Foote as a narrator, but you would never be able to make that movie today, even though you had a lot of prominent African-American narrators.

But one of the powers of that film that kind of revolutionized or energized Civil War studies was the sense of tragedy that there were good people in the South,

excellent people.

And 97% of the, I mean, we argue whether you gauge that by households or population, but 97% of the white population did not own slaves.

I don't know if it's the same ratio as far as households.

And yet they died for an institution that was really injurious, not just to their state, but also to the economy.

And it destroyed the middle class.

It retarded economic growth, slavery.

And yet they were willing to die for a cause that was beneath them.

And they, you know, it was their sovereign territory, et cetera, et cetera.

But the point I'm making, I said, you would never be able to make that movie.

That's sad.

And if you had to make it according to today's taste, nobody would want to watch it, not because they're racist, but because it would be so predictably politically correct.

And that's what did your whiny friend say in response?

He agreed with me.

I don't know if I'm disclosing something I shouldn't, but he was very reasoned and sober.

And he said, yes, things have changed.

And I wanted, I thought Shelby Foote should be able to give a story.

And

remember the Chestnut Diarrhea at Mary Chestnut?

Yeah,

they kept reading from that.

And then I don't know who played.

Same thing with the Gettysburg movies.

They wouldn't be able to be made, you know, Gettysburg wouldn't be able to be made today.

Yeah, but let's, we don't have much time left, but I want to talk about two movies that were not in the lineup.

And the last one will be one of your favorite military movies.

But another one is Seven Days in May.

And I'm thinking, of course, it's not a war movie, but it's a military movie.

And I remember first watching that about 20 years ago, thinking,

look, we're talking about military movies.

It's still this latent, conservative, patriotic affection.

for men and women who've sacrificed.

And yet our current military politically is doing everything it can to smother our inherent love for this institution but anyway i remember seven days in may is this conspiracy movie somewhere our favorite frederick march

or lane lancaster

right beautiful avra gardner the most stunning stunning woman around oh gosh she was just what a when i was in high school once this will show you how creat

somebody was in a I knew a girl who was in a fashion class.

You know, I used to have girls to make sure they knew how to make their dress where we took shop.

and she had pictures one picture of elizabeth taylor and one of ava gardner and i said let's compare them and we start at the hair the face the neck everything

i think ava gardner won she yeah she actually read buckley who was bill buckley's brother who wrote for national review on time i think one of the greatest pieces national review ever published was his remembrance of ava gardner because he lived in in spain and she she lived to the end of her life there.

But anyway, back to the movie.

It's a plot where kind of watching the first time angry like well you know they're putting the military in a bad light but today

that kind of movie seems more i don't know not plausible you know

it was a good it was john frankenheimer's and he's was a very good accomplished director and it was in that climate right after the cuban missile crisis the death of jfk and then curtis lemay was talking about being political and there were talk that the military thought the left was too weak and they were losing the Cold War, which they probably were.

And so

I think it was, maybe you can check, I think it was Rob Serling, who was very hard leftist.

I met him once.

He came to my dad's forum, brilliant guy, but he was just, one thing I remember about Rod Serling, Twilight Zone guy, was he smoked nonstop.

Every, I mean, he was in our house, it's a little tiny farmhouse.

My dad ran, I mentioned before, this forum series.

Oh, yeah.

Another, that's another huge name.

Yeah, it was.

And he came over to our little house.

We had one bedroom and a little, we had no money.

We built a little shack next to it.

Not a shack, but a little addition, but it was separate.

You had to walk out in the rain between the two.

And he was really blown away by the farm, how basic it was, but very polite, smoking, and

very left-wing.

But one of the, what I'm getting at is we were talking about this movie.

I think this was like 1968 or something, 67.

And he was explaining how he was scared of Curtis LeMay because Curtis May ran, remember as George Wallace's vice president.

Right.

And my dad

had mixed emotions about LeMay because he took the B-29s from 30,000 down to 6,000 on May 9th and 10th in the Great Fire Raid.

And then he turned them into basically

I mean, firebombers that were not what they were supposed to.

And it was a, it was amazingly brilliant, but a lot of people objected that it was very costly.

But it turned out to be less costly in the long run.

But nevertheless, he wrote the screenplay.

And what I'm getting at, it was kind of a leftist idea that kind of hyper-patriotic.

And it was also a veiled reference, I think, to Douglas MacArthur and Truman and that big fight, civil versus military authority.

And Burt Lancaster,

as I remember, remember Frederick March is a really great president, but he's a little bit naive.

And they have this coup to take over.

And then Kirk Douglas is a colonel and he's willing to get ava gardner to admit that they had an affair with she had an affair with lancaster but the coup is foiled and democracy triumphs and it was kind of an eerie movie kind of spooky because you're right it made the military look like it was bad evil yeah evil i mean the chief of staff was trying to you know host a coup well anyway victor we have a few minutes left and i want to encourage our listeners to listen to these important messages and then be ready for you to discuss one of your favorite military movies.

We'll be back right after these messages.

We're back.

Victor Davis-Hansen show around the home stretch.

So, Victor, I'm not on this list.

Of course, this TCM list can't be comprehensive, but I know Das Boot is one of your favorite military films.

Am I right?

Am I recollecting correctly?

And if so,

tell us about why you like it.

I've watched, I think I own both the English and the German with the subtitles.

Yeah, it was a brilliant movie.

I mean, it really took off too.

And so, if you had said to somebody 1981, if you'd said, we're going to make a movie about a German U-boat that, you know, almost starved to death.

that U-boat campaign by Dernitz almost won the war by 1941 until various things happened, cracked their code, ultra, etc.

But you're going to be sympathetic to the crew, not the Nazis who are come off as horrible people, but especially one of my favorite actors, Jürgen Proctow.

I mean, he was just, I can't even Prochnau, I should say.

I can't even, I run out of superlatives describing that performance.

He's the old man.

He's the captain.

He hates the Nazis, but he's a professional and he understands that this tide of war is going against the U-boats.

They don't have sonar.

Their codes are being cracked.

And there are more and more British destroyers and they have to go into the Mediterranean, which is a death sentence.

And yet he knows he can bring out the best.

And so against all odds, they're hit.

They go down to the bottom of the mediterranean.

They should be killed.

and they figure ways to refloat the submarine and get back up.

And then that best period in that entire movie, maybe in film history is when they open up and they get fresh air and they start singing.

You remember it's a long way to tipperary, yeah.

And one of them says, Not yet, not you.

And they're yelling to the British, not yet.

And they make it back to the fortified submarine pens, which you know that were never destroyed by the American bombers on the coast of France, occupied France.

And just as they get in, mosquito bombers come in and kill all of the heroes, machine gun them after going through all of that.

And it's very tragic to see how such brilliant people were used by such an evil regime to do such damage in the cause of evil.

And that's kind of the Wolfgang Peterson, who, you know, he went on to be kind of a mainstream action movie guy, but I think that was one of his first or second movies.

And it was absolutely brilliant, flawless.

And I think it's probably one of the best war movies.

I saw that the same year as Breaker Morant, about

that, was another great war movie it was very tra another tragic movie about genius and talent put under mediocrities for misplaced purposes but finally you were going to talk to me about yeah you had some films that yeah yeah some more modern movies 1917 dunkirk darkest hour churchill the church but 1917 Dunkirk darkest hour did you see any of those i saw them all and

i'll start with the one that i i thought Darkest Hour was excellent.

I'm a big, I'm prejudiced because I'm a Gary Oldman fan.

I always like everything he does.

Going back to when he played in the vampire movie, you know,

I don't know how he does it.

He becomes, he melts into the role.

I know he's got a trouble with life.

But that was pretty much based.

on fact, except, and Andrew Roberts, our friend at Hoover, wonderful person as well as a great historian.

I think he commented on that.

I had reviewed that movie.

I really liked it, except I didn't understand the subway where he has a momentary loss of confidence.

So he goes into the subway and he meets real people.

That didn't happen.

And I'm not so sure that he was willing to okay talks to the degree that he seems to be at one.

right moment of failing but pretty much it gets the i think everybody has to understand one thing and and that movie tried to convey it, that when the war broke out or was ready to break out, there was the indomitable French army.

It was huge.

It was three and a half million people.

It had beat the Germans in World War I.

It collapsed in six weeks in France.

And when it collapsed, there was nothing left of Western Europe.

I mean that literally.

Norway had been gone.

Denmark was gone.

Belgium went with it.

Luxembourg, of course, was gone.

The Netherlands were gone.

Greece was gone.

It was going to be gone.

The Balkan countries were gone.

There was nothing there left.

And America was not in the war.

And the Soviet Union was on the side of Germany.

And there was this little Britain and the British Empire.

And so this was the only country that declared war for a reason other than being attacked.

Think about that, or attacking another country.

It declared war for the territorial inviolability of Poland.

The second thing to remember, it was the only country in World War War II that fought on that first day of the war, on September 1st, 1939, and on the last day, September 2nd, 1945, the whole time, continuously.

So, and that captured that.

They should not have won.

They had one asset.

politically at least, and that was this huge figure of Churchill, who was born to play that role.

So it was very well done.

And I didn't think that they needed to, you know, spice it up as they did with the, there's a couple of other things.

And the director, you know, I'm not right, I think his name was.

I liked the Pride and Prejudice he did.

And there was a movie I did not watch.

It was supposedly excellent called Atonement, but he was a very careful director and didn't do a lot of movies.

But excellent movie.

And you know what, Jack?

It was one of those things where Hollywood tells us.

or the film industry says you can't make money on World War II or World War I movies.

And it made, what, $150 million or $200 million.

It was very successful.

And it won Gary Oldman righteously so the Academy Award, even though they were trying to block it with something he had said that was politically incorrect or illiberal.

Yeah.

I love the movie.

I watched it in a movie theater with my sons in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

And it was the day

it was zero out.

And the movie theater was...

35 degrees.

So we watched it.

All, you know, hoods, jackets, scarves, mittens on.

But it was.

The second one you mentioned was the guy who did Batman, right?

Christopher Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk.

Dunkirk.

Yeah.

I kind of feel bad.

I wrote a review of that as I remember, and I said that

there was just snapshots.

There was no real dialogue.

There was no real information.

I mean, directors have all these tools.

They can have, you know, a guy have a map scene, here's what we're up against.

You know, you think that a British commander would say, okay, here's our forces.

How are we going to do this?

Or you can have a guy writing a letter to a family member.

They had none of that.

So there there was no longest day you even had like a pseudo documentary style so you didn't know what was going on at dunkirk from the movie there was no real dialogue in it but i tried to do something i didn't i wasn't influenced by it but similar in the second world wars with just land sea air and that's what they did it was air and they showed you the air fighting and then the sea they showed you all of these attacks on these ships in the harbor and out sea and then the collapse of the circle and retreat to Dunkirk on land.

And then there were these vignettes about people, and they were all had one thing in common, and they were bewildered.

It was so early in the war.

Nobody believed the British Expeditionary Force would collapse.

Nobody believed the French army would collapse.

And here, nobody believed they could get home.

And so Dunkirk

was one of the most brilliant evacuations.

It was a military defeat, but my God, it wasn't in Afghanistan, I can tell you that.

They got the entire 300,000-plus British army and 100,000 Frenchmen off the coast of France with very few by the enlistment of literally thousands of private boat owners.

And

there's a lot of tragedy in that movie about the young kid that gets killed by the flyer who's confused, and the people who go in that boat, and they are suddenly the object of target practice.

And you get on one ship thinking they get sunk.

I thought it was really well done.

And it too was a success, a big success.

I don't know what it was at 500.

It was more than even Darkest Hour, which is, you know, it's.

The visuals in that movie, some of those Spitfires attacking were just terrific bits of filming.

And that last scene when the Spitfire saves them from the German bomber, then it runs out of fuel and it can't land in their perimeter.

It kind of lands beyond and he torches it and he's going to be captured.

And I don't know.

There was just everything about that movie for Christopher Nolan, as a bit, is, you know, he's not a dialogue guy.

He's an image guy, but it was really excellent.

There was something about Kenneth Brannag, he was the last guy to leave, wasn't he?

The British?

I don't remember.

Was he?

Okay.

Yeah, I think he was a Shakespeare guy.

Yeah.

And that was really moving in that movie.

And he was, he had that's right.

He was on, he was on the

dock.

He was.

And he was the whole time, anytime things were chaotic and hopeless, you showed the picture of him and he would be slowly walking up and down the dock, pointing to this, get done that.

And he was completely unshakable.

And he had complete confidence that they were going to pull it off.

I mean, 1917 was another good one that you mentioned.

And it was a little bit strange for me because at one time I thought about writing a book on World War I.

I read a lot and read it and

I didn't quite figure out how he was translating a German retreat back to the Hindenburg line into something that was believable.

So you were to suspect that an advance contingent was going to take off at a particular hour because they thought that the Germans had retreated, but actually the Germans had had a fake retreat, which happens a lot.

And they were waiting for them with artillery to blast them apart unless these two soldiers can can reach them.

And they do.

One of them dies and the other one reaches them in time.

But it's a little contrived.

Yeah, you know, I don't know how the line was pretty much linear, if I could redund it.

There wasn't like we're way out here and we can't be reached because we're not connected anymore and we're going to, we're out and we're going to attack.

And then, you know, when you attack, you usually have artillery support.

So it wasn't like they're just going to go out there and be slaughtered.

The point was that wasn't part of the movie.

And the movie was, in a way, tragic, but also kind of conservative in the way that that German flyer is down.

They rush to help him.

And the younger, the less experienced of the two rescue, people are going to save this

battalion or brigade from going out there.

They try to give him water.

He turns his back.

His friend gets stabbed.

And the message is he's an enemy.

And he's just tried to kill one of your own people in the air.

and he crashed and you don't let down your guard if at all and we have a mission why are we worrying about this guy because he turned out he killed you right you know he's a german and that was kind of the message i was very shocked to see that message well don't let your guard down and uh as we discussed on some other podcasts recorded today when it comes to november of uh beyond uh uh if republicans take control i hope they'll remember who their the enemies were in america America.

A good lesson from that scene.

When you watch these movies, just in conclusion, I think this is really important that younger people, and this is what gets me angriest at the woke movement.

It really does.

When they say, this is a racist country, it's all the 16, 19 or Hannah Nicole Jones and this and this.

I understand that there was racism, especially in the South and all of that, but they have no idea that the country that they live in and they meaning everybody

they the young people was handed down to them by people who they don't even know who where they were they have no idea what it was like to get slaughtered at okinawa or to the degree they're even mentioning it they talk about racism as if it was our fault or they have no idea what it would be like in 1942 to fight 43 in the philippines or they have no idea what it would be like in 42 to fly in a b-17 they have no idea and this gets me so angry or they have no idea what it would be to be on the first wave at omaha beach and say you know what that door is opening and somebody's screwed up and we should have never been at this beach at this time in this situation and we're going to die and there's no way out of it yet they all went out and they died and so when i hear all this This is an evil country.

And I see LeBron James, I think, first of all, you're of an age that grew up in an affluent America.

When I see Colin Kaepernick, who was adopted by a very affluent family,

upper middle class, or I see LeBron James, I say to myself, you were a child of the post, not the civil rights movement, the post-civil rights movement, the age of affirmative action, where a country tried to make some type of atonement for the sins of slavery, you know, 150 years earlier.

But you're also a product of a society in which people died and they did courageous things because they believed that america was amendable and was always on a trajectory for something better and yet you have no appreciation these people are just white devils or they're white races they weren't they were young kids that had nothing right you know when i started farming uh i went down to look where my father lived on a little farm in kingsburg and

he was laughing and he never talked about they had a one-room little farmhouse with an extra one for his sister, about 900 square feet.

They had no money.

His father, my grandfather, was disabled from World War I.

And he pointed to something.

I said, Well, did you put extra pigs and sheep in there?

It was kind of like a corral with a little roof on it.

And it had a door, you know, and I thought it was like a birthing area and a wood floor and then a little john, like an outhouse.

It was really gross.

He said, No, that was my house.

Sleeping in your house.

He said, Well, I had to move out because my sister needed the bedroom.

It was so small.

So

I built myself a little house between the corral and the barn.

Oh, wow.

I said, why didn't you sleep in the barn?

He said, because the eight cows lived there and two horses and two mules.

So I wanted something where there wasn't, you know, manure in my face.

And he lived there for like eight years.

And then I'm thinking, you know, with a father who, you know, spoke pretty heavily accented English and had come, had it rough in World War I.

And I'm thinking.

And

my grandfather really had helped African-American Teamsters in World War I.

And my father never had a prejudiced bone in his body.

And even though his first cousin, adopted brother, had been killed in Okinawa by the Japanese, he and my mom were really

big anti-internment and were very, they spent most of their, opposing the Japanese internment.

which was, by the way, an Earl Warren liberal Republican and Democratic governor and FDR project, all fueled by the McClatchy papers.

So anybody wants to know who was behind the Japanese internment, it was liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal.

We forget about that.

But it was a liberal project that was actualized by Democratic politicians with the help of Earl Wong.

And so

I don't know.

I just get when I look at these movies and I think, wow.

Who were all these people that died?

And what did they die for?

Do they know what we're doing?

How little consideration or even thought we give to them?

And we preen about our morality.

And I'm just thinking to myself, gosh, all these guys that die in Vietnam or they die in Iraq or they died in Afghanistan, or we don't even give them any attention.

And they do it for a particular view of America.

And they're not anything other than quite heroic.

And so I think that that's what I don't like about the wolf movement.

It puts everybody in these rigid categories of race.

And certain people are good or certain people are bad.

But remember, all of us, all of us, unless you're 70 or 80 or 90, you grew up in the most affluent, privileged country in the world.

And if you're in your 40s and this is 1980, you were born or 1982 and you were 15,

excuse me, 65, 75.

Yeah, you were 15, 16 years into affirmative action.

So this country had made efforts.

And this idea that it was all racist and everybody who's not of this particular color, this particular group is a victim, that guy's a victimizer

the people who were victims were the people who were slaughtered right in wars right and and we don't we don't pay them proper obeyance right and who risked their lives and then as with the civil war forgave or put the healing of the nation as a priority and yet they're to be aoc knows better than the man that survived Gettysburg.

It's kind of AOC should ask herself, and maybe Ilyan Omar, since she wanted to come to this country she might have asked herself why some scandinavian farmer in central minnesota her state around 1863 or four decided that even though they had never seen a african-american in their entire life

and even though they opposed every the lutheran church at that time in minnesota opposed slavery and even though african americans had rights to vote, equally immensely, he volunteered to join the Army of the West and went 500 miles down into the bowels of Georgia, Tennessee, then into Georgia, then burned Atlanta, then went all the way to the sea, and then turned around from Savannah and went right through the mud and muck of the Carolinas

to behind Lee's army.

And what do they do?

They freed slaves and burned down the plantations of white racists, plantationists, and killed other white people for the idea of setting people free who had been enslaved i'm not trying to say they were you know godlike but i'm just saying that when you omit that from this narrative it's pretty callous

why did they do that where do you get examples do you get examples from somalia from sudan of people doing that do you get examples from communist china doing that you get examples where do you get examples of that i don't think you do you you named some nations that that were still selling slaves.

Still are.

I can tell you that when I was in Libya, the first thing that struck me was there was a lot of African-American women with little children, and they were huddled on street corners.

And I kept asking my Libyan minders what it was about.

And he said, oh, these are women that you got $10,000 to marry if you were a Libyan and part of Qaddafi's pan-Africanism.

And I said, well, why are they out there?

He said, well, you could

marry them for a certain amount and get the money, then throw them out in the street.

And I said, well, what happens to him?

Well, somebody sells them.

So this is a Marxist.

I can't think about it.

I get that.

All right.

Let's not, let's not, let's talk about movies again and finish on a happy movie.

Well, we'll do that.

We've run out of time.

This is excellent, as usual.

Thank you.

I'm glad our listeners appreciate hearing about your.

your views on movies and the culture.

And we'll find another reason in the future to talk about movies again.

So thanks, Victor, for sharing your thoughts.

Thank our listeners.

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Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.