“Psychotic Individualism”

Tom, Hollywood left-wing cinematic attacks on “psychotic individualism” are nothing new. This Wednesday, February 20 at 8:30 AM EST, Turner Classic Movies will air the granddaddy of the genre, the 1941 Ernst Lubitsch comedy, That Uncertain Feeling. Actor Burgess Meredith superbly portrays Alexander Sebastian, a quirky egocentric “individualist” who hates all “isms” and his fellow inferior human beings. His boastful misanthropic contempt for humanity knows no bounds. At one point in the film husband Melvyn Douglas spews out the most disgusting and loathsome epithet at Meredith, his rival for the romantic affection of the movie’s leading lady Merle Oberon. He calls him an “isolationist.” The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had just ended with the German invasion of the Soviet motherland so Academy Award winning Stalinist screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart pulled out all stops to create one of the most disagreeable and unsympathetic characters on celluloid. Comrade Stewart followed up next year with his Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn agitprop drama on domestic fascism in the USA, Keeper of the Flame.

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1:21 pm on February 16, 2013