Ethan Hawke in A Midnight Clear (1992)
Posted on 12/23/2018 3:27:25 PM PST by Rummyfan
For almost the entirety of this century, I've been touched by the emails I receive this time of year from US, UK, Canadian, Australian and other troops spending Christmas in such unfestive climes as the Hindu Kush and the sands of Araby. Seasonal soldiering is tough on the warriors, and on their families back home - as Linda Purl notes on our Christmas Show just before her beautiful rendition of "I'll Be Home for Christmas". For our pre-Yuletide edition of Mark at the Movies, here are a few seasonal movie moments with a military theme:
The best "White Christmas":
The quintessential Hollywood Christmas image is homesick young GIs in their fox holes, chins on rifle butts, thinking of family and friends and girls next door thousands of miles away. It's in a hundred pictures, but we might as well salute the song that says it best in White Christmas (1954). Irving Berlin had written "White Christmas" for the earlier film Holiday Inn (1942), which had no military content whatsoever. But it was the boys shipped out to the Pacific who fell in love with it, and twelve years later Berlin, in building a movie round the song, wanted to pay tribute to the men who made it a hit, and the biggest-selling record of all time. In a film with some very loud and vulgar stagings, the title song gets the simple treatment — Captain Bing Crosby singing it in the rubble of a burnt- out building as part of a Christmas Eve entertainment for the troops, accompanied only by Private Danny Kaye winding up a music box. Very poignant.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Ethan Hawke in A Midnight Clear (1992)
A Midnight Clear is a very good but truly depressing film that embodies the message that we are helpless pawns of circumstance. Not a film I want to watch at this time of the year.
Two awesome links for Christmas!
Celtic Thunder - Christmas 1915
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG3l-OBdcPI
Battle of the Bulge - Silent Night 1944
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8MgmFtH-EM
I am listening to the Mark Steyn audio on the story behind Silent Night.
Friday morning at 5:45 I saw a stunning thing on the way to work with my old submarine buddy, A winter solstice moon that was HUGE! And it dropped like a rock over the horizon in perhaps 2 mins at most.
I am a sky watcher and had never seen this before, later that night over a pitcher of beer at the VFW, I commented on it again.
My friend said “one of the most stunning things that ever occurred in mylife, is the captain surfaced the boat and ordered the crew topside in dead of night, in the middle of no where, the moon was huge, and danced across the sea”
I did not ask him where this miracle occurred.
Merry Christmas to all.
Hacksaw Ridge isn’t exactly a Christmas movie but it exemplifies Christian values when combined with bravery.
Fabulous movie.
Pay attention America, Canada used to be a Free Dominion, Connie and Free Dominion are gone.
Mexico is more like us than Canada now, and who are we fighting?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GndE0LQ7qxo
Steyn is “snowmazing”
The 1000 yard stare...
Mark reminds me of Rudyard Kipling, he has a knack to seeing the human condition
I actually had to take a break from that movie because it was so intense, just watching exhausted me
I couldn’t imagine Steyn sending his son off to die in a pointless war as Kipling did; look up “My Boy Jack”. After his son was rejected for poor eyesight, and he was terrified of being sent to the trenches, Kipling pulled strings to get him into the war - and his body was never found. I think more of Steyn than that.
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