August is usually a limbo month, and this year is on par. The news is an unwatchable bore, wavering from charges against Trump to possible charges against Biden, to the latest premature polls, to moronic attacks on DeSantis as a pro-slaver — witness Kamala Harris — with no Tucker Carlson to mock them. Hollywoke continues its attempted mutation of children into progressive pod people, depriving boys of heroes, girls of heroines, and both of their sexual innocence. Read two fine new articles on this site — “Barbie, or How to Create Millions of Victims” by Itxu Diaz, “Rachel Zegler’s Contempt for Snow White Reflects a Culture That’s Forgotten Fairy Tales” by Faith Moore — to glimpse the depth of the depravity.
Fortunately, old Hollywood provided the tonic for the August doldrums, as well as forbidden role models for boys and girls, even though new Hollywood tried to destroy the venue for it — Turner Classic Movies. It took active veteran Hollywood artists like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Ellen Burstyn, and many others — plus outraged journalists like me — to save TCM from the corporate maelstrom. (READ MORE: Turner Classics Massacre)
The victory prize is the network’s annual August film feast, Summer Under the Stars. Every day this month, TCM showcases a different classic movie star for 24 hours of his or her films. Consequently, boys and girls and older folks can once more enjoy protagonists and screen artistry beyond the ken, competence, and will of those ruining the screen trade.
For instance, boys now solely dependent on the increasingly female-driven superhero genre (see —or better yet don’t see — the upcoming The Marvels, Wonder Woman 3, Madame Web) for the faintest glimmer of male bravado can discover the movie genre Hollywoke buried for this very reason — the Western. On Alan Ladd Day (August 11th), they can savor one of the best, Shane (1953), and satisfy their true masculine nature, no matter how desperately Hollywoke seeks to suppress or “gender reassign it. They will grasp how a tenuous civilization, surrounded by wilderness and beset by savages, must depend on a strong yet moral man of the wilderness to rescue it from oblivion. (RELATED: Sound of Freedom — Ringing Ticket Sales)
And his weapon is the very thing leftists in and out of Hollywoke most decry, a gun. In a sublime scene out of their worst nightmare, Shane not only expertly wields his revolver, he teaches a young boy, Joey — the stand-in for every boy — how to use it. When Shane fires his gun, it thunders like Thor’s hammer. Because director George Stevens — working from the wonderful novel by Jack Schaefer — understood the ultimate American mythology he was invoking, unlike Woke Disney’s utter ignorance of fairy tales.
Consequently, boys and girls and older folks can once more enjoy protagonists and screen artistry beyond the ken, competence, and will of those ruining the screen trade.
After Joey’s mother complains, Shane responds, “A gun is a tool, Marian, no better and no worse than any other tool — an axe, a shovel, or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.” If liberals could erase this scene and the entire movie as easily as they have the Western genre, they would.
On the same day, both men and women can appreciate Film-Noir Ladd’s masculine and romantic appreciation for his most famous leading lady, Veronica Lake, in The Blue Dahlia (1946). Written by the incomparable Raymond Chandler, the picture features this unforgettable exchange between Johnny Morrison (Ladd) and Joyce Harwood (Lake):
JOYCE: Don’t you ever say good night?
JOHNNY: It’s goodbye. And it’s tough to say goodbye.
JOYCE: Why is it? You’ve never seen me before.
JOHNNY: Every guy’s seen you before, somewhere. The trick is to find you.
They not only don’t write scenes like that anymore, they can’t. And wouldn’t if they could. Nor could they cast it. Because it belies every fantasy they try to force on the audience, about the uniformity of males and females — that one can become the other — while also stressing their incompatibility. Ladd stood five feet, six inches, but he embodied the masculine ideal, and still does. You cannot imagine him prancing around the screen like the metrosexual Ryan Gosling does in Barbie. In the real world as well as classic cinema, men want to be Ladd and want Lake, another archetype since erased by Hollywoke — the femme-fatale.
For ladies — a term anathema to feminists though still a feminine ideal — there’s Greer Garson Day (August 14th). Garson played two iconic female roles no longer tolerated by Hollywoke. One was Mrs. Miniver (1942), a strong — of fortitude not absurd physical prowess — English housewife preserving her nuclear family during the Battle of Britain, while her husband (Walter Pigeon) fights the Germans. Garson won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance.
Her other memorable role is Elizabeth Bennett in the 1940 adaption of Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice. Her role could conceivably be recast today — with the obligatory actress of color or “transgender” actor. She/he might describe “their” story thus: “It’s no longer 1813. My Elizabeth Bennett doesn’t waste her time moping about rich male supremacist Darcy or patriarchal rules of conduct. She has to fight for the rights of women denied an inheritance because of the absence of a man in their family.”
And long after the movie bombs, viewers will still be relishing the Austen book and Garson movie. They can start this August in Summer Under the Stars, along with many heroes and heroines, cowboys and comics, beauties and bad girls that Hollywoke could never recreate or destroy as it fades to darkness.
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