Academy Award time: What's the most liberal movie of all time?

[cincinnati65]

Which movie (past or present) embodies the most liberal message?

[Savage Beast]

LarryLied wins first prize. Triumph of the Will--Triumph des Willins--presents the Liberal agenda very well and reveals Liberals for exactly what they are! Congratulations, Larry!

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

But hey, at least the villain (Angela Landsbury) was a Country Club Communist.

And it featured Leslie Parrish! OK, she couldn't act, who cares!

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

Spartacus

Actually the writer (Howard Fast) was a communist, at least when he wrote it. But don't knock it, I love it when the villain (Laurence Olivier as Crassus) wants to point to a really bad guy, he points to the late Lucius Cornelius Sulla!

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

When the jury foreman transforms into an attorney for the defense during deliberation, that's where I draw the line.

I pretty much agree, except that Martin Balsam was the foreman, Fonda was just a member of the jury.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

yep. It also riddiculed the military, praised the enemy, and portrayed homosexuality as a humorous thing

just so, but in the movie Frank Burns's (Robert Duvall) worst trait was that he was seriously and earnestly religious!

[lentulusgracchus]

I agree with Gordian, Seven Days in May was a real Commie propaganda piece. Starring Burt Lancaster, who did an awful lot of films like that (and whose track record as a citizen and actor therefore is barely redeemed by his performance in Field of Dreams), particularly films written by the infamously blacklisted Communist screedmonger, Dalton Trumbo, Seven Days in May deliberately libels and vilifies American military officers as a group. Trumbo and other Communists, working from operational imperatives, attacked American military people with black propaganda repeatedly and absolutely vilely with films like this.

Another example of Trumbo excreta, which also featured not just Lancaster, in the lead role, but the blacklisted actor Will Geer as an "eeeeeevil" Texas oilman, was the dungheap called Executive Action, which lied about the assassination of John Kennedy. Robert Ryan was also in it, but I don't think he made such a career as Lancaster or Geer out of hate-America propaganda doglegs.

Worth a dishonorable mention in this parade of "I hate America and people who swear to serve her" motion-sickness-flicks is the recent emetic, The General's Daughter, which I believe justiciably blood-libeled the United States Military Academy and the United States Army. The execrable Togo West, as a Klintoon flack, would never have done anything about something that awful, but I would love to see President Bush's solicitor general go after the people who made it in civil court -- just drag them in there and break down their "political speech" defenses by showing that nothing of the kind they describe has ever happened, and that their saying it did arises out of a depraved intent to vilify and slander United States military institutions and personnel. They might win the case -- but I would by-God make them win it! Sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose: Lillian Hellman, the Stalinist playwright and agitator (very much in the mold of Trumbo), once sued authoress Mary McCarthy (The Group) for saying, on Johnny Carson's Tonight show, that Hellman, as a propaganda agitatrix, "lies when she uses words like 'and' and 'the'" (which about nailed it) and drove her into personal bankruptcy with a long discovery process -- then dropped the suit when McCarthy filed bankruptcy papers. Well, guess what? "Payback is a bitch."

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

"Advise & Consent."

Another winner for Clemenza! (I notice no one has been stupid enough to nominate The Godfather, at least so far.) Considering that the book was a conservative classic, and its many fine performances, Preminger distorted every character and subplot in it.

[lentulusgracchus]

it's probably similar to the leftist garbage I got taught in Social Justice earlier this year.

What sort of messages exactly were the payload of your "Social Justice" class? Usually, "s.j." is a term of art for anything that cuts conservatives, or social groups that liberals consider morally "one down": businessmen, Caucasians, United States citizens, men, Protestants (especially fundies and Pentecostals), military men, policemen, moralists, anyone who's well off. The usual list of liberal bugbears.

[lentulusgracchus]

Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix was reprobated because he met and crushed the constitutional challenge of the populares and got right down in the dirt with them and beat them. He violated the Roman constitution by bringing a standing army inside the walls of the city -- of course, Gaius Marius's followers were merely slaughtering people in the streets, so I guess we are supposed, even at a distance of 2100 years, not to notice the provocation. The Marians had killed a number of senators, as well as the elderly jurist Scaevola, Cicero's law-teacher and a scholar of great repute, and were dragging people out of their houses and beating them to death.

Sulla's reforms and reconstitution of the state lasted 20 years beyond his death, until the soldier-adventurers rose again (Marius had been one, as had Sulla himself) and formed the First Triumvirate.

Sources: Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution; Who Was Who in the Roman World, ed. Diana Bowder.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

See my homepage! By the way, how is Charles Laughton these days (I know, not getting any older!)

[lentulusgracchus]

Pleasantville is a good choice for a classically liberal movie, and you've listed all its moral claims for liberalism over Ozzie-and-Harriet "retro" America. The film would have us believe that, before liberalism arrived, the country had never had a generous impulse. It also slips a punch, in that the Ozzies and Harriets the film vilifies......also voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times. How do you square that with what Pleasantville says about America in the Fifties?

For nastiness, though, Pleasantville is far outstripped by the contemporary Arlington Road, which is just vile and slanders straight, conservative America as a bunch of car-bombers. Tim Robbins has done a number of portrayals like this, and rivals Gary Oldman (The Contender, JFK) as an enthusiastic portrayer of bad guys generally, but never with more relish than when they are played as "conservatives" or authority figures (The Player).

[PJ-Comix]

Dr. Strangelove, or any propaganda which the libertarians and communists both laud.

I wouldn't count Dr. Strangelove as a liberal movie. It pointed out in a satirical way that there would have been no real winners in an all-out nuclear war. This doesn't necessarily make it liberal. I thought Dr. Strangelove was actually quite funny.

[PJ-Comix]

IMO, Dr. Strangelove makes fun of everybody.

Including the ineffective liberal American President Merkin whom I believe was based on Adlai Stevenson.

[3catsanadog]

By the way, Spielberg has PC adjusted his re-release of ET. The police in the film will not carry guns anymore. The guns are being replaced with walkie-talkies.

[3catsanadog]

And incredibly boring.

[marajade]

The Contender

[Wrigley]

I'll second that.

[TexanAmerican]

Canadian Bacon! Or any other piece of Michael Moore crap!

[Jimmy Valentine]

"Grapes of Wrath" - Steinbeck. You can practically fill out your Communist Party membership card after you see that one.

Regards,

[estrogen]

Dances With Wolves, I liked the idea of the movie but it showed the Army as a bunch of fools. Unfortunately for your argument , during the settling of the west the army was a bunch of fools