Old Hollywood versus New Hollywood

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The Academy Awards are next weekend, and undoubtedly a dwindling audience will watch, if declining movie profits are any indication. Old Hollywood, though liberal, once celebrated America's virtues. Now new Hollywood obsesses over and celebrates its vices. Old Hollywood was patriotic. New Hollywood sees America as villainous. Old Hollywood celebrated family life. New Hollywood primarily honors autonomous individuals. Old Hollywood, though not itself religious, respected faith. Its iconic representative was perhaps director Cecil B. DeMille, renowned for its biblical epics, who did not attend worship services but liked to sit quietly in church buildings. Old Hollywood portrayed struggles between good and evil, often with nuance, in which Providence gave victory to the former. New Hollywood often likens life to a casino. Old Hollywood privately misbehaved but publicly was glamorous and classy. New Hollywood is proudly trashy.

Hollywood became cynical and trashy partly thanks to the Vietnam War and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Fortunately, my father took me to several movies over 40 years ago, when I was only age 5 or 6 or so, that reflected the nobility of old Hollywood and that were deeply impressionable to me. The most celebrated of those movies we saw was Patton, starring George C. Scott as the flamboyant World War II commander. Scott himself won an academy award, though eccentrically declined to accept it. It was Scott's greatest role, though he was actually much younger than the general he portrayed, and his voice was much deeper. Patton's grandson recalled in his family memoir that his father, himself a general who served in Vietnam, quietly taking the family to a theater to see the portrayal of his father. The son quietly whispered to the grandson that his own father's voice was much higher pitched than Scott's. But the son also wept during the movie's portrayal of the Battle of the Bulge, one of Patton's supreme moments. Appropriately, Scott dominates the film. His chief military aide is a slightly prissy actor who later appeared in television soap operas. Patton's superior, Eisenhower, is felt but never shown on screen. His favorite enemy, German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, is barely shown. Karl Malden's General Omar Bradley is accurately stolid and bland. The not well-known British actor portraying British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery comes close to challenging Scott's dramatic dominance, which is true to life. Montgomery was Patton's chief nemesis. He is portrayed as prickly and arrogant, partly thanks to the real life Omar Bradley, who shared Patton's disdain for their ally, and who served as a film advisor.