Man, Economy, and Liberty

25

A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum or the
Reviews of “Mr. First Nighter”

Justus D. Doenecke

Though Murray Rothbard has been the subject of countless articles and book chapters, there has been little, if anything, written on Rothbard as “cultural critic.” Yet Rothbard does not simply write profusely on economics and public policy. He offers many comments on American culture in general and brings to this a verve seldom seen since H. L. Mencken or Dwight Macdonald. He is unequivocally on the side of what he calls the “Old Culture,”something symbolized by the likes of Noel Coward performances (“elegant wit and romance”), classic jazz (“an exciting blend of European melody and harmony with African rhythm”), and The Maltese Falcon (“that superb movie”). Particularly this is true in the case of cinema, a topic to which Rothbard devoted much space in his own monthly, The Libertarian Forum.

Rothbard cannot help but compare modern comedy with its counterpart of the 1930s, an era graced by “the scintillating wit, the high style, the sophisticated intelligence of hero and heroine.” His models were the films of Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. Oscar Wilde’s spoof, The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), Rothbard said in 1973, was perhaps the greatest film ever made. The fifties too, he claimed, had fine comedy, and here his models were such Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn films as Pat and Mike and Adam’s Rib.

In commenting on the newer genres, Rothbard praised such spoofs of Jewish culture as Bye, Bye Braverman (1968) and The Heartbreak Kid (1972). He found A Touch of Class (1973) uneven, claiming that George Segal was out of his depth in attempting classic comedy. As far as efforts to recreate the “madcap” comedies of the thirties goes, Rothbard gave high marks to The Hot Rock (1972) and SOB (1981), lower ones to Arthur (1981) and Continental Divide (1981). Rothbard enjoys the conman film, as seen by his endorsements of The Sting (1973) and Bad News Bears (1976). Also heralded were the Pink Panther series. Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau, Rothbard wrote in 1977, “has now taken on an almost mythical status.” But Rothbard is not afraid to pan what most critics acclaim. Tootsie (1982), which featured Dustin Hoffman impersonating a female, was simply “a one-joke movie carried on too long.”

If Rothbard has a contemporary comic hero, one as outstanding in his particular acting style as Carole Lombard and W. C. Fields were in theirs, it is Woody Allen. In 1974, Rothbard called Allen the outstanding film comic of our time. In Sleeper (1973), the story of a man who suddenly woke up in the year 2173, Allen was hearkening back to the great days of the silent film comedians of the 1920s, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Annie Hall (1977), Rothbard said, was a superb satire on phony Hollywood values, rock music, the fashionable snorting of cocaine, and excessive reliance on the automobile. The bittersweet Manhattan (1979) spoofed art criticism, avant-guarde movies, and the new, swinging, “humanist” therapists. However, Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) was “one of the worst movies ever made,”the results of his “serioso and pretentious flirtations with the Bergmans and the Fellinis.”

Rothbard usually enjoys Mel Brooks films. Except for the genre made popular by the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, Brooks’s are the funniest pictures yet filmed. In 1974, Rothbard called Blazing Saddles, a spoof on Westerns, unquestionably the most humorous movie of the past several years. Before that, it was The Producers (1968). This mockery of Broadway hucksters Rothbard found the most hilarious movie of the previous two decades. Also recommended was Young Frankenstein (1974), “a sweet, affectionate tribute to the horror film”; Silent Movie (1976), a spoof on the old “silents”; and High Anxiety (1977), a mockery of psychiatry and of Alfred Hitchcock films as well. However, when Brooks came out with History of the World: Part I (1981), Rothbard assailed him for his obsession with scatology, that is human excrement. Brooks only redeemed himself by producing My Favorite Year, a comedy set in the fifties and one that Rothbard called the best picture of 1982.

Rothbard takes pride in attending, reviewing, and sometimes even praising what high-brows avoid. In doing so, he sees himself as the voice of an intelligent middle-class public that refuses to be cowed by lofty and arrogant critics. As far as musicals are concerned, Rothbard lauded Gigi! (1958), found Mary Poppins (1964) banal, and—while enjoying My Fair Lady (1964)—preferred the old Wendy Hiller-Leslie Howard version of Pygmalion (1938). Turning to disaster films, he claimed that The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was gripping, though marred by “phony philosophy” and “even more phony theology.” Jaws (1975) was better than The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1974), a “turkey,”as Jaws avoided their “phony moralism.” However, he saw the acting poor and the ending idiotic.

When it comes to Westerns, Rothbard is an unabashed fan of the Duke. “There is no such thing as a bad John Wayne picture,”he wrote in 1974. He called The Wild Bunch (1969) “one of the great Westerns of all time.” Directed by Sam Peckinpah, whom Rothbard greatly admires, it dealt with a rather violent outlaw band, circa 1913, who undertook one last fling by working for a Mexican general. Yet another Peckinpah film, The Getaway (1972), was full of disastrous acting, with AH McGraw performing particularly abysmally. Rothbard was upset when Clint Eastwood, another Rothbard favorite, directed and starred in High Plains Drifter (1973), a film he found far too pretentious.

Then there is science fiction. Rothbard called the much-touted Star Wars “such a silly, cartoony, comic-strip movie that no one can possibly take it seriously… . No one, that is, over the age of 8.” A “pretentious, mystical, boring, plotless piece of claptrap,”it could not be compared with such “science fiction greats” as The Thing (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Night of the Living Dead (1968), and “the incomparable” Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Occasionally Rothbard will endorse a horror film, provided that is it is done in the classic tradition. Nostalgic for a vanishing breed of movies, he plugged Theatre of Blood (1973), a Vincent Price film in which a hammy Shakespearean actor killed each of his critics in a most gory manner.

Rothbard also praises what few critics do, the “blaxploitation” film, movies where black private eyes and white gunmen chase each other in ruthless pursuit. Here he grants kudos to Shaft (1971), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), and Trouble Man (1972). While panning Shaft in Harlem (1972), he praised Shaft in Africa (1973) for “adding an international espionage flavor to the Harlem dude.” These were all “fun pictures,”where “the audience identifies with the characters, shouts at the screen, applauds and hisses.” Only “insufferably serioso left-critics” opposed them, preferring—in a most patronizing manner—to depriving black Americans of real entertainment while promoting such depressing and boring pictures as Sounder (1972). However, sagas of black sharecroppers can never substitute for “street-private eye-police” culture.

Rothbard continually shows his love of “rough action” films. He praises what he calls “the defender-of-justice theme, in which a tough, smart, decisive, laconic hero defends right and justice against villainy and evil.” This kind of detective, invented by Dashiell Hammett in the late 1920s, became corrupted, wrote Rothbard in 1984, by “the cynicism and implicit psychobabble of Raymond Chandler and his numerous followers, including Ross McDonald and his California variant (the Lew Archer series).”

Yet Rothbard rejoices that the “tough cop” still lives, as proven by McQ (1974), Death Wish (1974), and Death Wish II, the latter two Charles Bronson features. He found The French Connection (1971) both brilliantly directed and suspenseful, far better than its sequel Badge 373 (1973). In praising Shamus (1973), in which Burt Reynolds is beaten to a pulp, Rothbard wrote, “It is true that the plot tends to be incoherent at times, but in a movie like this, who cares?”

Almost anything starring Clint Eastwood gets Rothbard’s commendation, for as he wrote in 1974, “Eastwood is the polar opposite of the whining modern anti-hero beloved by the avant-guarde.” Particularly lauded are Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1974,) and The Enforcer (1976). One exception was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), an action-suspense movie marred by witless horseplay, interspersed with much moping and “tragedy.”

The Godfather (1972) was definitely Rothbard’s kind of picture. He wrote, “It is gloriously arriere-garde. … It is a picture with heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys; there is not a trace of the recently fashionable concern with the ‘alienation’ of schnooks and cretins searching endlessly for a purpose in life.” Though The Godfather-Part 11 (1974) lacked “the tightly wrought magnificence” of Part I, it was good enough to deserve an Academy Award. “On to Part III,”wrote Rothbard in 1975.

Commenting on the critics’ attitude towards violence, Rothbard noted that critics loved A Clockwork Orange (1971), with its random and meaningless violence, but deplored films where violence was used as an instrument of justice and defense against crime. “In short,”wrote in 1973, “they hate Dirty Harry or such great John Wayne films as Chisum or Rio Bravo, and they have the gall to denounce such Sam Peckinpah masterpieces as The Wild Bunch.”

It would hardly be surprising to find Rothbard an ardent adventurespy fan. He loves what he calls “the pre-World War II originals,”John Buchan and Eric Ambler, the faster paced post-war Helen MacInnes, and the modern tough-guy genre, as revealed through Ian Fleming, Donald Hamilton, and Robert Ludlum. If there are negative models, they lie in Graham Greene and John LeCarre, who take an “all-sides-are-bad” attitude. Writes Rothbard, “The main problem with the Greene-LeCarre works is that they become deadly boring, since if the spies on all sides are bored time-servers and they don’t care about the outcome of the lot, why in hell should we care?” (Rothbard did make an exception for the BBC series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).

High on Rothbard’s list were The Guns of Navarone (1961), an Allied commando adventure; Frenzy (1972), the story of a London strangler; Fear is the Key (1972), an Alistair McLean yarn about international drug trafficking; Puppet on a Chain (1970), another McLean thriller; and The Day of the Jackal (973), which centered on an attempt to assassinate President de Gaulle. As far as more orthodox “mystery” goes, Rothbard endorsed Masters (1972), a gentle detective drama; Sleuth (1972), a lighthearted tour de force of changing identities; and Family Plot (1976), a Hitchcock effort at a tongue-in-cheek thriller. In lauding The Tamarind Seed (1974), an espionage-romance film, he noted that it flouted current convention to such an extent that Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif did not “hop into bed at the first opportunity.” Surprisingly, Rothbard panned Murder on the Orient Express (1974). An Alfred Hitchcock could have built suspense out of small details; director Sidney Lumet dragged the movie pointlessly.

Among Rothbard’s favorites are the James Bond series, the “quintessence of the Old Culture: marvelous plot, exciting action, hero vs. villains, spy plots, crisp dialogue and the frank enjoyment of bourgeois luxury and fascinating technological gadgets.” He called From Russia With Love (1963) a great film classic. Live and Let Die (1973), despite the substitution of the “too slight and debonair” Roger Moore for Sean Connery, is one of the best of the series. The fact that all the villains wore black and that the film was unabashedly sexist, with Bond converting the female villains to the path of righteousness by sheer macho virility, caused Rothbard to praise the film for its fidelity to the novel and for bringing back “the delightful old clichés of the action pictures of the 1930s and 1940s.”

In the Forum, Rothbard continually expresses his nostalgia for the “Old” or “Movie-Movie,”marked by a strong plot and central characters with whom the audience could identify. The plot emerged logically and step-by-step from purposive action, and from the conflicts that this action engineered. Rothbard’s criteria for good cinema lies in the thirties and forties, an era he calls a golden age. “It was then,”he writes, “that we could delight in Gone With the Wind, in Snow White, and The Lady Vanishes.” The Thin Man series were the most delightful films ever made, he claimed at one point.

Rothbard makes no secret of his dislike for what he called the “nonlinear” movie, that is a production in which “very little of the film makes any sense at all, either in philosophy, plot, continuity, or camera work.” The New Movie assumes that individuals have no aim. Rather they respond mechanically and haphazardly to equally random events.

But if there is no purpose, there can be no plot. Moreover, as Rothbard noted in 1976, “it is impossible for the audience to identify with them or give a damn what happens to them. Who cares about random response mechanisms?” As Rothbard commented in 1973, “The Enemy on the movie front is not the California porn king; our war to the metaphorical knife is not with the maker of Deep Throat but with the Bergmans, the Bunuels, the Antonionis, the Fellinis, the Godards. The truly obscene is not the happy, fun-loving School Girl, but such monstrosities as Juliet of the Spirits and Last Year at Marienbad.”

Little wonder Rothbard is quick at discovering pretentiousness. In dealing with Deliverance (1972), the film based on James Dickey’s novel of the same title, Rothbard accused director John Boorman of adopting “the oldest trick in the business: if you want a movie to seem Profound when you have nothing much to say, then draw out the action, make the camera dwell endlessly on each scene, and focus on the face of each actor as he struggles painfully to emit some inarticulate banality. In other words, if you make the film dull enough, it will trail clouds of Profundity for our gullible moviegoers—especially the gullible critics.” The fact that none of the four intrepid canoeists described in the film ever charted a dangerous river in advance caused Rothbard to ask, “What sort of schlemiels are these?”

An Unmarried Woman (1978) was another such disaster. It was a feminist film centering on one Erica, who must “cope” when her husband moves out on her. Wrote Rothbard, “Ye gods, there were hundreds of films of the Old Culture that portrayed women who were ten times as independent and a hundred times as intelligent as the drip Erica, portrayed by Jill Clayburgh. Think of all the movies with Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, etc!”

Other New Movies received the same debunking. Rothbard saw Morgan (1966), which dealt with a jilted husband and his eccentric escapades, and The Ruling Class (1972), a comedy about a British heir who confuses himself with Jesus, as examples of this mindlessness. The Paper Chase (1973), a film about the pressure of Harvard Law School, suffered from “diffusion, meandering, lack of organization.” Daisy Miler (1974) was simply typical of Henry James’s “endless, quibbling, and plotless stories.” The epitome of this genre was Nashville (1975), a plotless attack on the right-wing ideology and country music that permeates much of the American heartland.

The sexual revolution made little impact on Mr. First Nighter. Shampoo (1975), far from being a “profound” statement about our time, lacked even the wit of a Restoration play by Molière. The movie was a muddy satire of southern California, centering on a restless hairdresser, played by Warren Beatty, and his demanding female customers. Rothbard found Julie Christie mindlessly bellowing four-letter words on film in a dialogue that “generally gravitates between the banal and the inchoate.” In his review of Rich, and Famous (1981), Rothbard saw the story of two “sexually liberated” women a vapid one, the dialogue non-existent. “At least a lesbian scene would have relieved a bit of the monotony,”he wrote.

Rothbard usually does not like message movies. The Way We Were (1973) was a throwback to the left-wing films of the 1940s. In this romance between Jewish political activist Barbra Streisand and her waspish Joe College boyfriend Robert Redford, the Communist Party was shown as “basically right as rain, though perhaps a wee bit strident.”

Rothbard also panned The Front (1976), doing so on basically the same grounds. Though it featured the comedian he admired most, Woody Allen, Rothbard found it “tendentious, crude, hokey, oversimplified, pretentious and sententious to the point where it must be, for any sensible observer, counterproductive.” Communists were portrayed so favorably that “God forgive that the Communists were ever out of power.”

Julia (1977), the story of playwright Lillian Hellman’s resistance activities in Europe in the mid-30s, drew some of Rothbard’s most scathing comments. “Strip away the current Hellman cult, strip away the fuzzy leftism and the fact that Hellman was a Stalinist when it counted, and Julia would have never left the studio.”

Rothbard is no narrow ideologue, for he will endorse a left-wing picture if he finds it cinematically sound. He conceded that Citizen Kane (1941) was “a left-liberal message picture,”but one “done with brilliance and with power, with highly charged and purposeful, conflicting characters on a grand scale.” Similarly, Z (1969) and The Battle of Algiers (1966) show that being left wing does not disqualify a movie from being a superior picture.

Of course, Rothbard does cheer films with libertarian themes. He called Sometimes a Great Notion (1941) “a rugged, heroic, explicitly individualist piece,”for it featured Henry Fonda tackling union goon squads. Also hailed was Walking Tall (1973), which dealt with “an authentic hero,”the citizen-farmer-turned-sheriff Buford Pusser, who battled moonshiners and crooked gamblers in rural Tennessee. He found The Man Who Would Be King (1975) the best movie John Huston had directed in years. More important, it had a libertarian moral to it: the conqueror of Kafiristan was ruined by the hubris of power.

Of course, Rothbard loved films with overt anti-state themes. He praised All the President’s Men (1976), the exposé of Watergate, as it identified “the prime evil as resting in government” and did so with “excitement and panache.” So too did The Omen (1976), showing how a family unwittingly adopted a baby anti-Christ. Rothbard loved the confirmation of the theological prediction that the anti-Christ would in some way stem from government, something he saw fulfilled when “evil kid” wound up in the bosom of a Kennedyesque president of the United States.

The eighties saw more libertarian films. Absence of Malice (1981) was a “rough, trenchant movie” that was “outspokenly pro-civil libertarian, anti-FBI, anti-muckraking press, and at least mildly pro-Mafia.” The Verdict (1982) too struck a responsive chord, for it dealt with a lawyer who fights “the legal flimflam and technicalities which the Establishment habitually uses to betray the interests of truth and justice.” Rothbard found libertarian themes in Red Dawn (1984), a movie dealing with a Communist invasion of the central United States. The movie was “an enjoyable teen-age saga,”glorifying not interstate strife but “guerilla conflict that the great radical libertarian military analyst, General Charles Lee, labelled ‘people’s war’ two centuries before Mao and Che.”

But to Rothbard, heavy-handed message films were inevitably flawed. The strength of True Confessions (1981), the story of two Irish-Catholic brothers caught in a web of general and church corruption, lay in the fact that it lacked overt polemicism. Just plain good in Rothbard’s eyes was Chariots of Fire (1981), the story of two British Olympic runners, though he could not help but note that it celebrated the such traditional values as dedication and individual integrity against a bigoted Establishment and the British state.

As far as acting is concerned, Rothbard is sparse in his praise. Among the few he admires are Diana Rigg (“who always projects a fascinating blend of beauty and high competence”), Gary Cooper, and Sylvester Stallone, who in Rocky (1976) played a “hero with a touching vulnerability and sensitivity.”

But Rothbard’s comments on actors can be damning. In 1972, he called Peter O’Toole “one of the most overrated actors in the last two decades.” “Given anything like his head,”wrote Rothbard, “he will twitch, shake, and generally chew any and all of the available scenery.

…Even in that superb film, Lawrence of Arabia, that twitching and quivering augured badly for the future.” Steve McQueen “has always been one of our poorest: actors: his expression ranges from surly-and-quizzical to surly-and-quizzical.” Sir Lawrence Olivier “always tends to overact and chew the scenery, especially in productions that he obviously feels are beneath him.”

The same holds true for certain actresses. Wrote Rothbard in 1973 of Ali McGraw, “Miss McGraw has never been able to act.” And in 1975 of Goldie Hawn, “Miss Hawn comes over as a nitwit even when she is not trying.” (Rothbard did praise her performance in Swing Shift (1984), the story of two women workers on the home front in World War II. He called the film itself “the picture of the year—a lovely valentine to a lost world.”) Judy Garland was “one of Hollywood’s all-time worst singers and actresses”; her daughter, Liza Minelli, “impossibly awkward and pseudo-elfin.”

Rothbard’s strength lies in his irreverence. He refuses to suffer fools gladly. He does not obtrusively make a pitch for libertarianism, his political philosophy, but uses aesthetic criteria to appraise most of the films he watches. There are few forms of writing in which Rothbard’s superb humor is more revealed. Indeed, as far as style is concerned, one can find some of his best writing in these reviews.

One is only sorry Mr. First Nighter did not comment more often, and one yearns for a renewal of a monthly Libertarian Forum. Would his love of adventure have extended to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? Would his aversion to leftist films have extended to Reds (1981), Ragtime (1981), and Daniel (1983)? What would he have said about Meryl Streep’s performance in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), or in Sophie’s Choice (1982)? Would his anti-war attitudes have created empathy with Gallipoli (1981), Breaker Morant (1981), and Gandhi (1982)? Would he share the same opinion of the sequels to Star Wars and Rocky that he thought of the originals? How about the new James Bond films? Would he have seen Being There (1979) as Peter Sellers’s most brilliant film?

In his film reviews, Rothbard shows himself to be one of America’s most perceptive—and humorous—social commentators. The world of cinema needs far more of his criticism.