The 100 best conservative movies - includes list of 20 best liberal movies - Cover Story

Spencer Warren

MOVIES are the leading art form of our popular culture, with a unique ability to move and enlighten a mass audience. As we near the end of the twentieth century, it is time to honor the great conservative movies of yesterday and today movies about God and country tradition and family, freedom and resistance to tyranny, individual achievement and the American Dream., movies that celebrate the creativity of business achievement, depict the evils of Communism and collectivism, and reveal the true nature of revolution.

Movies mirror society. Many of the great conservative films were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age of the Thirties and Forties, when the ideals of Western civilization were almost universally accepted. By the Seventies, alas, the counterculture was being reflected in the new Hollywood's nihilistic themes and chaotic styles.

The trend began with Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider in 1969, and reached its nadir in 1973 with Marlon Brando's pornographic sexual epic of alienation, Last Tango in Paris. Pauline Kael, voluble critic of The New Yorker, cried out with joy: "The movie breakthrough has finally come." (Indeed, and the social wreckage from such breakthroughs against traditional restraint is everywhere to be seen.) Today the film is as dated as any Shirley Temple movie, though without the charm.

The recovery began with Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, The Empire

Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) whose simple truths about heroism and the triumph of good over evil (not to mention space defense) were harbingers of the Reagan Eighties. The Reagan years saw quite a number of conservative films - not to mention destruction of the real-life Evil Empire. Hence our honorees include many recent films as well as classics of the Thirties and Forties.

The envelopes, please.

Best Pictures Celebrating Religion and Faith: A Man for All Seasons (winner of the 1966 Oscar for Best Picture) Chariots of Fire (Best Picture of 1981) Therese (France, 1986), a dramatization of monastic life through the story of St. Therese de Lisieux, who joined the Carmelites when she was 15; and Cecil B. De Mille's King of Kings (1927), Then Ten Commandments (1956), and The Sign of the Cross (1932). (For a persuasive case that De Mille should be ranked with the great historians of the ancient world, and that movies generally make very good history, see George MacDonald Fraser's revelatory book The Hollywood History of the World.)

Honorable Mention: The Next Voice You Hear (1950), Nancy Reagan,s best role; Going My Way (Best Picture of 1944, directed by Leo McCarey); One Foot in Heaven (1941); and The Song of Bernadette (1943), about the miracle of Lourdes (Jennifer Jones won the Oscar for Best Actress, and there's a great score by Alfred Newman - Parsifal as if composed by Bruckner rather than Wagner).

Best Scenes Dramatizing Faith: In Johnny Belinda (1948) Jane Wyman (the first Mrs. Reagan) richly earned her Best Actress Oscar as a deaf-mute farm girl who blossoms from helpless waif into self-respecting young woman. Her father is murdered when he discovers the man who raped her, the father of her child, and in a deeply moving scene she recites the Lord's Prayer in sign language before his body.

In Quo Vadis? (1950), one of the most gorgeous color films ever made, St. Peter preaches the Gospel before a huge congregation of believers by candlelight beneath a Roman aqueduct.

Best Pictures Indicting the Spiritual Barrenness of Hedonistic Yuppieism: Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Ten (1979). No, Bo Derek is not the end of the rainbow.

Best Picture Indicting the Sixties Counterculture: Forrest Gump (1994). Innocence and the eternal verities triumph over the counter-culture.

Best Picture Dramatizing Individual Conscience. On the Water-front (Best Picture of 1954). Change the names and accents, and this outstanding film about the revolt of a "go along, get along" longshoreman against his corrupt union would be the story of Solidarity's struggle. Directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, with a score by Leonard Bernstein, On the Waterfront dramatizes tyranny's moral corrosion and the individual spiritual renewal and redemption that bring its downfall. Notably, for our secular times, it is a priest (Karl Malden) who urges the men to throw off their chains and a Christian conscience that ignites Marlon ("I coulda been a contender") Brando,s revolt.

Honorable Mention: High Noon (1952); A Man for All Seasons (1966); and The Angry Silence (UK, 1960), in which one worker defies his union local's wildcat strike, for which he and his family endure ostracism and mob terror.

Special Mention. The Fountainhead directed by King Vidor, screen-play by Ayn Rand from her novel). Rand's atheism and materialism are not on the conservative track, but the speech by Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) to the jury is an eloquent statement for the individual over the collective. One of the most dramatic scores by the granddaddy of film composers, Max Steiner.

Best Pictures about Personal Redemption: In Tender Mercies (1983), Robert Duvall (Oscar for Best Actor) rises from downcast drunk to husband and loving stepfather with the help of a devout young mother and her son. Two of the best scenes are the baptism of Duvall and the boy, and the last scene, where the wife contentedly looks out on Duvall and her son playing catch with a football, to the lyrics, "You are the best it could ever be / You are what love means to me."

In Three Godfathers (1948) John Wayne and his outlaw trio (the Three Wise Men) rescue a baby they find in the desert. Through their suffering they win redemption. Directed with powerful religious imagery by the immortal John Ford.

Best Picture about the Relation of Property to the Human Soul: The Bicycle Thief (Italy, 1949). A humble man searches for his bicycle and the part of his soul that was stolen with it.

Best Picture about Personal Achievement against Heavy Odds: My Left Foot (1989) The drama of an extraordinary Irishman, Christy Brown (Daniel Day-lewis's Oscar-winning role), who, afflicted with cerebral palsy, has the use of only one limb, yet becomes a respected artist and author. The hero's talent and will-power are formidable, but another theme is the indispensable role of Christy's strong and united family.

Best Pictures about Iner-City Youth Overcoming Heavy Odds: Stand and Deliver (1988) and Lean on Me (1989). The first is the amazing story Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles teacher who inspired his students to climb the heights of mathematics. The second is a romanticized account of the battle by Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) against drug pushers, hoodlums, and politicians to clean up Eastside High in Patterson, New Jersey. For success in life, he tells his kids, "the responsibility is yours." And in a line that echoes Steve Dangos, the all-American immigrant hero of An American Romance (see below), he declares, "You are here to work for what you want."

Best Pictures Celebrating Family Life. Today, when the traditional family has come under fierce assault, these films have a special poignance with their un-self-conscious embrace of bedrock values. In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), directed by Vincente Minnelli), Judy Garland comforts little Margaret O'Brien, distraught at the prospect of moving away from her beloved home, with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

Little Women (1933, with Katharine Hepburn as Jo March, directed by George Cukor). Dont patronize it; this film glows with feeling. "A beautiful movie, the kind they dont and couldn't make any more," wrote one critic.

Honorable Mennon. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945); I Remember Mama (1948, directed by George Stevens); Cheaper by the Dozen (1950); Father of the Bride (1950) and Fathers Little Dividend (1951), both directed by Minnelli; Sounder (1972), in which a black sharecropper family faces the Depression; and Baby Boom (1987), in which yuppie Diane Keaton finds true happiness the old-fashioned way.

Best Scene Celebrating Family life: David O. Selznick's Since You Went Away (1944). The opening credits, accompanied by Max Steiners Oscar-winning score, unfold against a background of a burning hearth; they close with the legend, "This is a story of the Unconquerable Fortress: the American Home... 1943." The camera then focuses on the only one at home in the Hilton household, the bulldog. The camera lovingly tracks past the family album, a pair of bronzed baby shoes, and other mementoes. We follow the dog to the front window, through which we see Claudette Colbert and her daughters, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple, trudging up the walk in the rain. They are just returning from the train station, where they saw their husband and father off to war.

Best Baby Scene. Family friend teaches mother (Irene Dunne, leading Hollywood Republican) and father (Cary Grant, in one of his best performances) how to bathe their just-adopted infant in Penny Serenade (1941, directed by George Stevens).

Best Pictures Commemorating Tradition and Community: This too has been a rich theme in movie history, above all in the films of John Ford (1894-1973): see How Green Was My Valley (1941, Best Picture); the cavalry trilogy with John Wayne, Fort Apache (1947), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1948), and Rio Grande (1950); and The Quiet Man (1952)

The British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made three especially moving wartime films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), the peak of British romanticism A Canterbury Tale (1944), with a mighty climax as wartime pilgrims enter the bomb-ravaged town for a service at the ancient cathedral: and I Know Where I'm Going (1945)

Honorable Mention. Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) and two Will Rogers films celebrating rural America, Judge Priest (1934, directed by Ford) and State Fair (1933). In the latter, the Rogers family is driving home after an exciting week at the county fair. Daughter Janet Gaynor is sitting in the back of the pickup truck, dreaming of the man she met at the fair. "It's such a long time for a year to pass till the next fair," she sighs, to which Rogers replies, "When you're old enough to pay taxes, you won't think a year takes too long to pass."

Best Conservative Animal Pictures: Dumbo (1941) and The Yearling (1946). Dumbo is the Walt Disney classic in which the tiny elephant surmounts daunting obstacles and, in the most terrifying scene for many a child viewer, dives through the burning hoop and flies at last.

The Yearling, directed by Clarence Brown, is the beautifully rendered story of a backwoods boys coming of age, guided by his devout father.

Special Lifetime Achievement: The theme of individual liberty and social justice lies at the heart of the work of one of the great directors, Frank Capra (1987-1991). In populist movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Cant Take It with You (Best Picture of 1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and his masterpiece, It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Capra treats issues such as the primacy of society and human relations over politics and government; individual imagination versus mass conformity, private charity and personal virtue versus government dependency; individual entrepreneur ship and humane capitalism over the corporate greed of financiers and lawyers; and small-town community versus big-city alienation.

Capra's ideal community is Bedford Falls in Wonderful Life. Housing needs are met by pooling modest private resources in the Bailey Savings and Loan. In a touching scene, an Italian immigrant family (Capra himself came here from Sicily at the age of four) moves into its new house with the help of friends and James Stewart and Donna Reed, who consecrates the home with bread and wine.

In Mr. Deeds, Gary Cooper, greeting-card poet and best tuba player in Mandrake Falls, Vermont, gives away his inherited $20 million to purchase ten-acre farms for the unemployed, who will gain ownership provided they work their farms for a specified number of years. He triumphs in the end over an avaricious Wall Street lawyer (played by Douglas Dumbrille, a Lawrence Walsh look-alike!), who tries to have him declared insane.

Capra recognized that some people, as Mr. Deeds says, need help "getting up the hill," but he believes personal virtue produces social compassion, while government produces dependency. In Meet John Doe, local community clubs assist the destitute directly, prompting the head of New Deal relief to complain in the film that no one will be left on relief.

In Mr. Smith, the idealistic senator, played by James Stewart, introduces a bill to promote a "Boy Ranger" camp for needy kids, who are to pay back the cost with their earnings of "nickles, dimes, and quarters."

Capra had a jaundiced view of politics and government. His critical depiction of the U.S. Senate ganging up against Stewart to protect one of its own does not seem so far off the mark as it may have in 1939, when an enraged Washington establishment ran Capra out of town following the film's premiere in Constitution Hall. (Many in the gala audience walked out during the film.)

Capra's films are not only about economics and politics, though. At the climax of Wonderful Life, a distraught James Stewart asks God to "show me the way." And He does, in the form of Clarence the Angel. (Capra always uses humor to convey his serious themes.) In the film's finale, which rises in a crescendo like a Bach chorale, the community unites in love and mutual support.

From Frank Capra, whose life exemplified the American Dream: let us turn to:

Best Picture Celebrating the American Dream: An American Romance (1944) This unsung film follows its immigrant hero, Steve Dangos, from processing at Ellis Island to his rise from miner to foreman to entrepreneur, and from bachelor to husband and proud father of the high-school valedictorian. Among the film's many moving scenes are Steve's trek on foot across the industrial heartland and the vast farm belt to join his cousin working in the iron mines of Minnesota. "I want to work," he proclaims.

Director King Vidor paints some charming vignettes of Americana: nineteenth-century Fourth of July picnic, Steve's first, where he attends his first baseball game and hears the local orator hail "America, the land of unbounded opportunity," where anyone's son might someday be President. Steve quietly asks, in his halting English, "He say my son can be President of United States. Is that true?" Another lovely scene is his eldest son's high-school graduation and valedictorian address on the school's front steps. When Steve offers his graduation gift, his son answers that the best gift would be for Dad to become an American citizen - which he does, proudly reciting at the ceremony, with his heart in every word, the Pledge of Allegiance. In striking contrast to today's multiculturalist heresy, this film exemplifies the assimilationist truth of American society. The true star of the movie is Steel, a metaphor for the determination, endurance, and belief that have made America. Laboring as a digger in the Mesabi pit, Steve is driven by a curiosity and ambition his cousin lacks. He has "iron in him" and proclaims he'll "make steel." In a magnificent montage, Steve, penniless, runs off his job and accompanies the iron ore by rail to Duluth, then via freighter to a great industrial city, where he sneaks into a mill to get work. The iron has been torn from the earth, we are told, "all to add strength to a mighty nation, growing mightier." In An American Romance, capitalism spells not greed but opportunity and achievement.

Steve continues his rise and eventually founds his own automobile company, using his knowledge of steel to produce a safer, full-frame car. At the film's end, he is called out of retirement to mass-produce bombers. In the final shot he looks skyward at a phalanx of the mighty machines filling the screen, flying off to the far corners of the Earth to make men free. Directed (in Technicolor) with unaffected simplicity, Vidor's film stands as a monument to the faith of earlier generations and powerfully reminds us how some people in our society (including a lot in Hollywood) have turned their backs on the American Idea.

Best Picture Commemorating the Settling of America. My Darling Clementine (1946), John Ford's classic account of Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), and their confrontation early one morning with the Clanton clan at Tombstone's OK Corral. Ford's evocation of the church dance, accompanied by "Shall We Gather at the River?," s a beautiful metaphor of civilization settling the wilderness. His panoramic shots suggest a virgin land beckoning America's advance westward.

Honorble Mention Shane (1953, directed by George Stevens), in which the mysterious gunslinger, Alan Ladd, defends the young homesteading family against the cattlemen (and their hired hand, the inimitable Jack City Slickers Palance); and Drums along the Mohawk (1939), another John Ford picture, with Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert safeguarding their frontier settlement during the Revolutionary War.

Best Scene of the American Idea: In Since You Went Away (see above), Claudette Colbert has gone to work in a shipyard plant as a welder. She writes to her husband at the front about a woman she has met, "who has a name we never would have heard at the club." We then see Colbert in the plant cafeteria with the woman, a refugee from the Nazis, who recounts her trip to the Statue of Liberty and fervently recites the Emma Lazarus inscription. "You are what I thought America was," she says, "when I prayed with my little son that God would let us go to the fairyland across the sea." (This was unfortunately an example of Hollywood romanticism; in fact, resistance from the State Department and from Congress, and President Roosevelt's failure to take stronger action, sharply limited immigration into the U.S. before and during the war.)

Honorable Mention: Charles Laughton as a British butler in the Old West, reciting the Gettysburg Address in a saloon to a crowd of astonished customers in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), directed by Leo McCarey.

Best Picture about Defending America: Sergeant York (1941, directed by Howard Hawks). Gary Cooper won his first Oscar in this stirring saga of the Tennessee backwoodsman awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for single-handedly killing 25 Germans and capturing 132 during the Meus-Argonne offensive in 1918.

This is also a movie about personal redemption. Cooper is a brawling, hard-drinking no-account until one stormy night, on his way to do murder, he is felled by lightning and wanders into lay preacher Walter Brennan's Bible meeting, where he finds faith, joining in the congregation's ecstatic singing of "Give Me That Old Time Religion." Drafted in 1917, he is denied conscientious-objector status. Thanks to his experience hunting game, he is the best shot in his regiment, but he doesn't want to kill, and his commanding officer grants him leave to go home and think things over.

In a great scene, Cooper rests on his favorite mountaintop back home, his dog beside him, as voice-overs recite competing Bible verses and the words of his commander's American history text. "I'll go," he tells his commander, and the rest is history. At the end, returning to a New York ticker-tape parade, all Alvin York wants is a piece of bottom land where he can settle down with his girl and raise a family. And that's what he gets.

Best Fourth of July Movie: Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, directed by Michael Curtiz). James Cagney as George M. Cohan sings and dances "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Over There," and other favorites amid more Stars and Stripes than ever filled the silver screen before or since.

Pictures to Make the Patriotic Blood Boil: The Hanoi Hilton (1987), in which U.S. POWs endure North Vietnamese savagery; Heartbreak Ridge (1986), in which Clint Eastwood liberates Grenada; Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); The Deer Hunter (1979), with Robert De Niro playing Russian roulette; Red Dawn (1984); Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944); and Wake Island (1942).

Winston Churchill's Favorite Movie: Churchill loved That Hamilton Woman (1941), which he reportedly saw 11 times. Starring the ultimate romantic couple, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, this is a stirring dramatization of the life of Admiral Nelson and his mistress. Since the U.S. was still officially neutral, isolationists in Congress were enraged by the Hollywood-made, British-produced film's clear parallel between Napoleon and Hitler. "You cannot compromise with dictators," Nelson urges the cabinet. "You must wipe them out." The climactic Battle of Trafalgar, very well done, brought Churchill to tears. Inspiring score by Miklos Rosza.

Ronald Reagan's Greatest Movies: King's Row (1942), "Where's the rest of me?"; and Knute Rockne-All American (1940), "Win one for the Gipper."

Best Pictures Depicting the Evils of Communism. Repentance (1987), a Russian film about Mayor Varlam (sporting Stalin boots, Hitler mustache, and Mussolini blackshirt) and the human carnage he wreaks as "friend of the people." A rich allegory of Stalinism.

The Inner Circle (1992), a close-up view of Stalin and his henchmen from the viewpoint of his private projectionist. Both films detail the evils of Communism on the personal as well as the national level.

Honorable Mention: To Kill a Priest (1989), a dramatization of the Communists' murder of Solidarity's Father Jerzy Popieluszko; White Nights (1985); Man of Marble (Poland, 1976, directed by Andrzej Wajda); One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1971, starring Tom Courtenay); and Animal Farm (1954). Also Eleni (1985), Red brutality in the Greek Civil War, Doctor Zhivago (1965); 1984 (1955 and inferior 1984 remake); and Man on a Tightrope (1953), circus troupe flees Iron Curtain. Especially noteworthy are the two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The first (1956) is a science-fiction allegory of Communist tyranny; the remake (1979) changes the emphasis to the dangers of mass conformity and tyranny posed by "beneficent" government.

Best Picture Predicting the Collapse of Communism: Ninotchka (1939, directed by Ernst Lubitsch). Greta Garbo, dour agent sent to Paris to check up on emissaries who have succumbed to the charms of Paris, learns that she too would rather laugh and love in the West than suffer and endure in the East. Human nature triumphs over Communism. The film further foretells the rampant corruption that accompanied Communism: the three comrades quickly rationalize taking the Royal Suite in their Paris hotel on the ground that "we must uphold the prestige of the Bolsheviks."

Best Portrait of a Communist Bureaucrat. George Tobias, as the Soviet visa official in Paris, in Ninotchka. (To Garbo's lover: "If you ever want to get into Russia, take my advice ... confess!")

Best Portrait of a U.S. Government Bureaucrat: William Atherton, as the EPA official in Ghostbusters (1984), whose mindless enforcement of the "rules" allows the fearsome phantoms to escape, wreaking havoc on New York.

Best Pictures Depicting, the Inhumanity of Mass Revolution: Marie Antoinette (1938) - no gateau here: note the chilling prison in which her son is seized from her arms; A Tale of Two Cities (1935), with Blanche Yurka as Madame Defarge, an early study in bl00d-lusting, radical fanaticism; Viva Villa! (1934), about the degeneration of Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution; and Knight without Armor (1937).

Best Pictures on the Limits of Good Intentions: There Was a Crooked Man (1971), in which a liberal prison warden (Henry Fonda) learns some truths from Western desperado Kirk Douglas and puts his learning to good use. Cynically directed (as always) by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

In Heavens Above (1963), based on a story by Malcolm Muggeridge, Peter Sellers learns some truths about human nature as he turns his parish ministry into a soup kitchen.

Forbidden Planet (1956) depicts the dangers of rationalist utopias.

Best Movie Critiques of Journalism. Ace in the Hole (1951), a/k/a The Big Carnival, directed by Billy Wilder. Top reporter Kirk Douglas prolongs agony of a mine cave-in victim to juice up his story.

Honorable Mention: Absence of Malice (1981), in which Paul Newman experiences the consequences of press absolutism; and Too Hot to Handle (1938), crackerjack comedy-adventure and prototypical Clark Gable film, in which he stages newsreels in war-torn China.

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