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

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by 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."