Hollywood and Isolationism

When Tojo flattened Pearl Harbor, he didn't just sink the USS Arizona and awaken a sleeping giant. He sent isolationism to the bottom of the bay and woke up the film industry.

Hollywood not only zealously propagandized for the Great Crusade of its own accord, but also gleefully manufactured government propaganda. In 1941, Hollywood went to war with America, and it has stayed on the front ever since. John Wayne, the best friend conservatives ever had in Hollywood, greased more "Krauts" and "Nips" than the 101st Airborne and Jimmy Doolittle's bombers combined.

But two of Hollywood's finest pro-war cinematic achievements never showed Americans smiting the Axis in battle. The heroes fired their salvos not at the enemy abroad, but at the enemy at home: the isolationists, also known as America Firsters after the America First Committee, which disbanded four days after Pearl Harbor was left a smoldering ruin.

One was "Casablanca," and the other, "The Best Years Of Our Lives."

u2018Casablanca'

Everyone who loves movies knows the first. It may boast as many memorable lines as a Shakespeare play, and was, of course, a bald piece of get-in-the-war propaganda. That's odd, given that it debuted in 1942 after the United States entered the war, so maybe it was ex-post-facto justification. Whatever, the film contains a few subtle and not-so-subtle anti-isolationist lines.

"Casablanca" is the story of Rick Blaine's (Humphrey Bogart) fateful reunion with a former paramour, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), who has come to the French colony with her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Heinreid). Laszlo, who escaped a concentration camp, hopes to procure official Vichy exit visas to slip by the Nazis and rejoin the resistance. An oily midget named Ugarte (Peter Lorre) murdered two German "couriers" and stole two exit visas from them. He gives them to Rick for safekeeping, Rick's Cafe Americain being neutral territory unmolested by the Vichy French. Thus, Rick has the two exit visas Laszlo and his wife desperately need.

The first slap at isolationism is direct, occurring when Senor Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) offers to buy Rick's cafe. Rick brusquely refuses Ferrari's offer for the cafe and another for Sam, his pianist.

Rick: Suppose you run your business and let me run mine.

Ferrari: Suppose we ask Sam. Maybe he'd like to make a change?

Rick: Suppose we do.

Ferrari: My dear Rick, when will you realize that in this world, today, isolationism is no longer a practical policy?

Later on, when Capt. Renault (Claude Rains) informs Rick he will arrest the suspected murderer of the couriers at the cafe-gambling house, Rick reassures the French Quisling of his own Golden Rule: "I stick my neck out for nobody," he says famously. Renault calls that a "wise foreign policy," and later, Rick reiterates this wisdom when Renault's goons collar Ugarte.

"But Rick, hide me," Ugarte memorably pleads in Lorre's unmistakable unctuous voice, "do something, you must help me, Rick!"

"I stick my neck out for nobody," Rick says.

The scene, and Ugarte's eventual murder, make Rick's pitiless indifference look all the crueler.

It is precisely this appearance of cruelty that today's interventionists exploit when they propose another foreign war for democracy. There's always another Ugarte for America to hide or to save. America must always "do something."

Anyhow, another exchange with a visiting Nazi, Maj. Strasser and his deputy, Heinze, reveals Rick's churlish neutrality:

Strasser: What is your nationality?

Rick: I'm a drunkard.

Renault: And that makes Rick a citizen of the world.

Rick: I was born in New York City if that’ll help you any.

Strasser: I understand that you came here from Paris at the time of the occupation.

Rick: Well, there seems to be no secret about that.

Strasser: Are you one of those people who cannot imagine the Germans in their beloved Paris?

Rick: Not particularly my beloved Paris.

Heinze: Can you imagine us in London?

Rick: When you get there, ask me.

Renault: Diplomatist.

Strasser: Well, how about New York?

Rick: Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.

Strasser: Uh, huh. Who do you think will win the war?

Rick: I haven't the slightest idea.

Renault: Rick is completely neutral about everything.

Throughout the film, Ilsa works on Rick's conscience, stirring dim memories of romantic derring-do for the Commies during the Spanish Civil War. This, their rekindled but ultimately inutile romance, and her anti-Nazi speech converts Rick. He gives Ilsa and Laszlo the exit papers. In telling her she must go with Laszlo, Rick says, "I've got a job to do too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of."

You know what that means: The newly magnamimous convert, formerly a bitter, sad isolationist, has joined the Crusade. What wonders a little love from a sultry Swede can do!

The Best Years

Unlike "Casablanca," "The Best Years Of Our Lives" is not a thrilling romance, but a sober, touching portrait of three returning veterans who meet on the plane back to fictive Boone City. In some way, all the men are tragically wounded, but only one bears the external scars of war: Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), whose hands burned off aboard a besieged Navy ship that eventually sunk.

Made in 1946, the film honors the men who, with their families, sacrificed so dearly. Some sacrificed their lives, others their physical health, still others their sanity. Another of the three men, Army Air Corps Capt. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), suffers battle fatigue and nightmares.

Whatever the costs, expressing doubt about the Crusade is forbidden, something we learn in Homer's exchange with a disgruntled America Firster. Sitting at the lunch counter in a drug store where Derry has reluctantly resumed his old job as a clerk, the America Firster (Ray Teal) asks the Homer what happened to his hands.

Homer: I know what it is. How did I get these hooks and how do they work? That’s what everybody says when they start off with ‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’ Well, I'll tell ya. I got sick and tired of that old pair of hands I had. You know, an awful lot of trouble washing them and manicuring my nails. So I traded them in for a pair of these latest models. They work by radar. Look. Pretty cute, eh?

America Firster: You got plenty of guts. It's terrible when you see a guy like you that had to sacrifice himself – and for what?

Homer: And for what? I don't getcha Mister?

America Firster: We let ourselves get sold down the river. We were pushed into war.

Homer: Sure, by the Japs and the Nazis so we had…

America Firster: No, the Germans and the Japs had nothing against us. They just wanted to fight the Limies and the Reds. And they would have whipped 'em too if we didn’t get deceived into it by a bunch of radicals in Washington.

Homer: What are you talkin' about?

America Firster: We fought the wrong people, that's all. Just read the facts, my friend [The America Firster points to his newspaper, which bears the headline: "Senator Warns Of New War"]. Find out for yourself why you had to lose your hands. And then go out and do something about it.

Overhearing the callous insult, Fred Derry interrupts and tells the isolationist to pay his check and shove off. Homer follows the man to the cash register to continue the argument.

Homer: Look here, Mister, what are you sellin' anyway?

America Firster: I'm not selling anything but plain, old-fashioned Americanism.

Homer: Some Americanism. So we're a bunch of suckers, eh? So we shoulda been on the side of the Japs and Nazis, eh?

America Firster: Again, I say, just look at the facts.

Homer: I've seen a couple of facts. I've seen a ship go down and over 400 of my shipmates go with it. Were those guys suckers?

America Firster: That's the unpleasant truth.

At the cash register, an enraged Homer rips an American flag lapel pin off the isolationist's suit coat and a struggle ensues. Derry heroically intervenes to save his pal. Strong, young and handsome, a bombardier with the Distinguished Flying Cross, Derry roughs up the aging, skeptical isolationist. Poignantly, and adroitly using his hook, Homer picks up the lapel flag off the floor and drops it in his breast pocket. It's the symbolic death of isolationism.

The scene rightly leaves the viewer rooting for the scarred vet over the "unpatriotic" man, who obviously didn’t serve in the war and seemingly sides with the Axis. You can't side with an insensitive dope who would tell a boy barely out of adolescence he lost his hands for nothing.

Having been fired and walking outside the drug store with Homer, Derry puts the final touch on the ugly episode: "You read about guys like that, but you don't often see 'em." No you didn't often see "guys like that" after 1941. Or should one say you didn't often hear from them? My father, who served in the Army during World War II, was one of them, although he expressed his view of it to me only once.

By 1946, when "Best Years" was made, isolationism was dead. And today, principled opposition to any war, or any discussion of World War II that does not follow the Hollywood script, can be the occasion for exactly the reaction to the American Firster in "Best Years."

Recall the Smear Bund's reaction to Pat Buchanan's offering in 1999, A Republic Not An Empire. Buchanan really "wanted Hitler to win," the bund lied.

The difference between 1946 and 1999 is this: You can understand the fictive Homer's gut reaction; his hands were destroyed. And you would understand a real Homer's reaction, not from reason but from emotion. If anyone ever deserved say, one of Pugnacious Pat's patented sucker punches, it was the America Firster in "Best Years."

But Buchanan's book came out a half-century later, and the reaction was quite the same. Outrageously, much of the most defamatory flak came from neocon eggheads who pound the drums for wars in which neither they nor their kin will shed a drop of blood.

America Changed

Where "Casablanca" represents the proximate shift in American opinion toward joining the Crusade in Europe, with Rick representing the United States joining the war after years of isolationism, "Best Years," with the defeat of the America Firster, demonstrates the ultimate shift toward entering foreign wars generally. Before World War II, most Americans wanted to steer clear of another European war, and Franklin Roosevelt was elected partly because of his disingenuous promises to stay out of it.

After that, government got all the public support for wars it needed, and Hollywood was only too happy to cash in. Hollywood produced one war film after another and – go ahead and admit it – even some of us killjoy America Firsters treasure them. Maybe they our are our pornography. We oppose intervention, but we take jubilant pride in the valor of American fighting men portrayed in film. You can't help but love it when John Wayne, playing the 82nd Airborne's Col. Benjamin Vandervoort in "The Longest Day," exhorts his paratroopers: "Send 'em to hell." Any red-blooded American's eyes mist over when the Duke's Sgt. Stryker takes a fatal sniper's bullet in the final scene of "The Sands of Iwo Jima," and the Marine Corps hymn softly begins.

The left conquered Hollywood in the 1960s, and it eventually began producing anti-war movies such as "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter," as well as offerings like Oliver Stone’s trilogy about Vietnam. The problem with many of the anti-war films, however, wasn't that they were anti-war, but that they were hatefully anti-American, particularly Stone's silly, paranoid and mendacious fantasies. "Platoon" was so politically correct, liberal scribe Michael Kinsley noted at the time, the good sergeant smoked pot and the bad one drank Jack Daniels.

Today, Hollywood has come full circle. The generation that trashed their "establishment" parents and burned flags in the 1960s produces pro-war films. In 1998, Steven Spielberg released "Saving Private Ryan," an earnest if fanciful hymn to the men who helped bring down the Third Reich. After that, he and Tom Hanks, who starred in "Ryan," produced the gripping, inspiring miniseries, "Band of Brothers."

In 2001, "Behind Enemy Lines" told the story of a Naval aviator skeptical about the service and the American peacekeeping mission in a nation resembling Bosnia. He is shot down, and while escaping a detachment of thinly-disguised Serbian militiamen, he has his epiphany hiding face down in what appears to mud. Instead, it is a shallow, open pit of human offal, a mass grave. When American forces show up for the rescue, he risks his life to recover the photographic evidence of the crime from the wreckage of his jet.

As for a sympathetic cinematic rendition of old-right, anti-war isolationism, one example comes to mind, 1965’s "Shenandoah." Ironically featuring World War II hero Jimmy Stewart, who held the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak leaf clusters, it tells the story of a farmer in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley who wants no part of The War of Northern Aggression. And you won't likely see any more. The left-wing kooks who control Hollywood aren't sophisticated enough to produce a film featuring sympathetic anti-war roles of the right. If they tried, the anti-war characters likely would be anti-Semites, or cursed with some other obnoxious ideological flaw.

But all is not lost. Also in 2001, Director Ridley Scott offered "Black Hawk Down," the story of America's ill-considered, ill-fated mission in Somalia. The film demonstrates the fabled valor of the American fighting man, and the folly of sending him into combat for no reason, with no defined objective, and sinfully, without the support to win.

It expresses no isolationist sentiment, but is anti-war in its raw depiction of urban combat. It is anti-war, but pro-American.

They should all be that way.

April 25, 2003

Syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood [send him mail] is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va.