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

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Spencer Warren

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.