I think we’re making a huge mistake when we focus exclusively on Muslim terrorists entering America.
A more serious threat to our way of life are Muslim supremacists; immigrants who do not advocate violence but who wish to live under sharia wherever they settle.
“The only reason they come to see me is that I know life is great — and they know I know it.”
—Clark Gable
Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, 1967
Mike Nichols, on casting the role of Benjamin Braddock:
“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men. Robert [Redford] wanted the part. I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’
And he wasn’t joking.”
Kirk Douglas as a high school senior.
In the beginning of his legendary career, Kirk Douglas (1916 – ) b. Issur Danielovitch, was almost typecast as a well-meaning but ineffectual husband in two fine films, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946, and A Letter to Three Wives, 1949. But his career ascended into mega-stardom when he played cynical heroes motivated by rage: Champion, 1949, Ace in the Hole, 1951, The Bad and the Beautiful, 1952, Paths of Glory, 1957, Spartacus, 1960, and his favorite picture, Lonely Are the Brave, 1962,
Douglas was never a conventional leading man. Though handsome as a fairy tale prince, he wielded his masculine beauty like a weapon. There was none of the gruff, working class charm that made Gable the King. Douglas was not an urbane gentleman like William Powell, nor a witty charmer like Cary Grant.
Kirk Douglas excelled at playing, in his own words, “sons of bitches.”
Greta Garbo on the set of Flesh and the Devil (1926)
“I am always nervous and restless when I am making a picture. I cannot help it. That is why I never want people to see me while I am acting. I do not let people on the set. And I stay by myself all I can while I am making a picture. I sit in one corner alone, or go to my dressing room, or I walk outside by myself while the others are working.
I cannot stand it for someone to come up and say, ‘What did you think of the football game?’ as they do here in America. I cannot get back on the track. I cannot do my best work then. It is the same with every picture – I tremble always, all over.”
—Greta Garbo, in 1928 Photoplay interview
Anna May Wong, 1930s, by Man Ray
A girl dreamed of movie stardom. Literally dreamed, as she told it years later. “There is a man with short sleeves and a big horn in front of his mouth, shouting, ‘Anna May Wong, now you come downstairs and look like the prince was already approaching — we do a closeup of that!’ … and I have an overjoyed face because I feel the great happiness — and the important man says, ‘You did a great job, Anna May Wong — You are a film star!'”
Born in Los Angeles in 1905, five years before the picture people came west from New York and Chicago, Anna May grew up watching movies made on the streets near her home. Her laundryman father tried to beat (literally beat) a dutiful girl’s sense into her, and told her she was disgracing the family, as we learn from Graham Russell Gao Hodges’ thorough biography Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend. But Anna May couldn’t get the dream out of her head. Because she was tall and graceful, and because her big eyes gave her a maturity beyond her years, she found work as an extra by the time she was 14, and played important roles opposite Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks while still in her teens, and was a sensation in German and English films before she was 25.
Her resume would be impressive enough for a Caucasian actress.
It happened that Anna May Wong was Chinese, at a time when East Asians were no more likely to become Hollywood stars than someone from India or Africa.
With great common sense, President Trump has temporarily halted immigration from failed terrorist states until proper vetting can take place in order to protect the citizens of the Unites States.
Predictably, the left and the leftist media are in a collective meltdown.
But six of those countries—Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Yemen—ban all Jewish visitors from Israel.
My friend Bookworm Room says that she is enjoying the Trump presidency. I too have this warm feeling in my gut as I watch Trump do something rather unique in political history: He is fulfilling his campaign promises.
Meanwhile, the usual suspects are protesting—but only in Hillary states. Let’s remember they were protesting even before Trump took office. So their protests are a lot of sound and fury signifying… a childish temper tantrum.
The left wing media have, after eight years of bootlicking Obama, decided to jump into action and defend their turf, the overeducated, overbred coastal elites who have nothing but contempt for those, who in the words of their Dear Leader, “cling to guns and their religion.”
Air travel IslamoNazi style.
I am old enough to remember when air travel was fun and yes, even glamorous. The seats were comfortable, service was gracious, and the stewardesses (remember that word?) were beautiful young women who never stopped smiling.
This all changed because of the IslmaoNazis of the 1960s who hijacked planes, blew up planes, and slaughtered innocent passengers, all in the name of so-called Palestine.
Since then air travel has become torture.
Days of Heaven, 1978
“At [director Terence] Malick’s insistence certain parts of the film were made at what he calls the ‘magic hour’, that is, the time between sunset and nightfall. From the point of view of luminosity, this period lasts about twenty minutes, so that calling it a ‘magic hour’ is an optimistic euphemism.
The light really was very beautiful, but we had little time to film scenes of long duration. All day we would work to get the actors and the camera ready; as soon as the sun had set we had to shoot quickly, not losing a moment. For these few minutes the light is truly magical, because no one knows where it is coming from. The sun is not to be seen, but the sky can be bright, and the blue of the atmosphere undergoes strange mutations.
Malick’s intuition and daring probably made these scenes the most interesting ones visually in the film. And it takes daring to convince the Hollywood old guard that the shooting day should last only twenty minutes. Even though we took advantage of this short space of time with a kind of frenzy, we often had to finish the scene the next day at the same time, because night would fall inexorably. Each day, like Joshua in the Bible, Malick wanted to stop the sun in its imperturbable course so as to go on shooting.”
-excerpted from A Man with a Camera, by Néstor Almendros
Alfred Hitchcock and Janet Leigh on the set of Psycho, 1960
Janet Leigh was a good sport, who got a kick out of [Hitchcock’s] off-color limericks, puns, and pranks. The worst jokes on Leigh seemed to come just moments before her most important scenes—and she found most of them terribly funny.
Dressing up like a vagina and displaying expletive-filled posters only persuades the undecided that Progressives are crude and clueless.
The left wing media just adored the Women’s March on Washington. They saw Democracy in action, resistance against Donald Trump, a mass movement against the Deplorables who elected President Trump.
But most Americans saw a mob of radical, foul mouthed narcissists in a collective temper tantrum.
We tell each other stories in order to make sense of what appears to be a chaotic universe. For thousands of years we huddled around fires and told tales. In this way, families became tribes, tribes became states, and states grew into nations bound together by a common narrative.
In postmodern America, the radical left has dominated the national narrative. From same sex marriage to the pseudo science of climate change, the radical fringe has become the dominant voice of the elite classes who control our universities and media. Thus, Barack Obama’s radical ideology was labeled mainstream and common sense. An Orwellian destruction of language and meaning.
Jennifer Jones with her third husband, Norton Simon
“I met Jennifer Jones when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven I traveled everywhere with her. I spent more time with her than anyone, even Norton … It would take four hours to do her hair and makeup. And it was all for Norton: hair, makeup, beautiful dresses. The point was not to go out and show other people. Everything was for Norton. ‘Norton deserves for me to be beautiful.’ And he was paying. I did her hair and makeup every day, an incredible cost. For the cost of a whole year, you could buy a house in the Valley.
And I did it for more than thirty years, every day, sometimes morning and night. And she didn’t take off her makeup at night. She’d leave it on until I arrived. When she went to bed, she was all made up. Do you know why? This was not for Norton, this was for herself. She said it was ‘in case I get sick at night and have to go to the hospital. Somebody’s going to take a picture of me, and I don’t want to be without makeup.’ She did this every night.”
—Tomoyuki “Yuki” Takei, West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein
The Lodger, Alfred Hitchcock’s third silent film, 1927, (online here)
“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in… In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.
Yesterday, Barack Obama commuted Bradley Manning’s 35 year sentence for disclosing the largest cache of classified military secrets in American history. So serious and far reaching was Manning’s treason that prosecutors were contemplating the death penalty. But Manning pleaded down and death was no longer an option.
Most pundits are baffled by Obama’s commutation of Manning’s sentence.
I think it’s fairly obvious.
I am delighted that so many Democrats have decided to absent themselves from President-elect Trump and Vice-President-elect Pence’s inauguration this coming Friday.
Democrats claim that Trump-Pence are illegitimate because of Russian interference in the election. But let’s not forget that these same people claimed that President George Bush was illegitimate because of, um, hanging chads.
The simple truth is Democrats believe that any elected Republican is illegitimate. Like the Bolsheviks, Democrats believe that any ideology other than their own is a false consciousness that must be purged.
The American left continues to amplify their childish hysteria over Donald Trump’s election. They have finally settled on a reason the election was illegitimate: The Russians swayed the election.
If the Russians rigged the election in Trump’s favor then we have to assume they did a rather shabby job. I mean, Hillary did win the popular vote. Did the Russians rig that outcome? More to the point, did the Russians convince Hillary to set up her own server? Did the Russians make Hillary delete some 30, 000 emails? Did the Russians counsel Hillary to lie about Benghazi? Did the Russians sway the Senate and Congressional elections, the Governorships?—all a Republican majority.
The truth is Obama’s disastrous policies and Hillary’s dishonesty swayed the elections to the Republican column.
The left is outraged about Putin. But when a hot mike caught Obama assuring the Russians that after the election he (Obama) would be more flexible. That was just fine.
Letter from Jennifer Jones to husband David Selznick, March 1959
Dearest:
Hope you are well and the deal goes but most of all that you miss me a little. Betty Bogart [Lauren Bacall] came through from Klosters on her way to London with her two children in hand and she told me I was pushing my luck. That you are a very attractive guy and in her words there are plenty of dames in wait for an attractive guy. I said I was less concerned since she had left California but I realized the danger, only I had to continue this work [psychoanalysis] with Dr. Meier. Her reply was, if you can take it, exactly as follows. “F— the Doctor, go home and get yourself l— and you won’t need doctors or diets. Greatest thing in the world for the complexion.”
The new book
by Robert J. Avrech
Available in All Major Book Stores
Adobe Digital Edition's version is available through the Lulu store!
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
