We had two civil wars. The first, a shooting war, we won; the second we lost. Because it was a secret war.
You likely didn’t even notice. The only way to tell is if you look back at the America that was. That can best be done in film. My family and I DVR dozens of movies from TCM, the vintage movie network. It is one of the last repositories of true American Culture, preserved in film. Watching those movies is like having your nose pressed against the glass of a window on a bygone age.
In a typical film of that time, “That Touch of Mink}” Cary Grant tries to maneuver Doris Day into sharing a Bermuda hotel room with him, while she parries his advances. Finally, he is compelled to marry her. No sex scene, no flaming car chase, no foul language no gratuitous violence.
Why would moviegoers flock to see such a film? Well, quite a few did: the movie was the first to generate over a million dollars at Radio City Music Hall and wound up breaking records there, taking in nearly $2 million. The total take was $14,628,923, in a time when a movie ticket was 70 cents. That represents nearly 21 million moviegoers.
At today’s ticket prices, that’s nearly $168 million, for a film that was far from unique in the times—there were many popular films with similar plots.
Gone With the Wind grossed $189,523,031 in its 1939 release. Tickets cost 23 cents then. Do the math! And remember: Gone With the Wind became popular as a book—a long one—selling well over a million copies.
Yes, Virginia; they read books in those days.
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In terms of adjusted gross, the film has taken in $1,808,299,403—making it the number one grossing film of all time. [Source: boxofficemojo.com]
The question is begged: where is the American Culture that loved these movies? Answer: it’s gone with the wind, just as surely as the “land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South,” depicted in the film. Our culture has been overthrown by a secret civil war raging since the 1950s, bloodless, relentless and cruel.
Gorgeous movies like GWTW; The Ten Commandments; Ben Hur, a Tale of the Christ; My Fair Lady and many others are rarely seen and new ones are never produced—not because there’s no demand (A GWTW post on my FB page came with 1.2 million Likes), but because the Hollywood mindbenders want it so. And they know that nothing influences culture like movies.
What’s the sexiest scene in movies? It was Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up those stairs.
Hollywood now has a different artistic device to portray the same thing: an explicit sex scene, with someone’s bare buttocks bouncing up and down. Other Tinsel town devices include: a plethora of gratuitous and bloody violence, especially gunplay; a car chase with plenty of pyrotechnics.
Then there’s the ever-present indoctrination: a theme portraying either America, its government, or a giant corporation as villain; the deliberate blurring of the line between the sexes, with women boxing, shooting people or slashing them with swords (as if women have no admirable traits of their own); kids being infinitely smarter than their parents; rewriting of history to bring out political points; crime-does-pay themes; and Hollywood’s most popular theme: post-apocalyptic America (IMDb lists 98 such films, but I’m sure there are more).
That last one is doubtless the fondest dream of the Left put on film.
A byproduct of all this is most of today’s movies stink. When movies are made to advance ideology, art is lost.
Gone forever are movies showing couples in formal dress for dinner, couples ballroom dancing, having sex AFTER marriage; say farewell to masculine (but not violent) men and feminine women, farewell to biblical movies and lush musicals with real music: Andy Williams’s album The Great Songs from “My Fair Lady” and Other Broadway Hits appeared on Billboard’s Top LP list in 1964 (the year “My Fair Lady” was released) and stayed there 33 weeks. When “Lady” was only on the stage in 1956, Vic Damone’s recording of “On the Street Where You Live” was #4 on the Billboard magazine charts and Eddie Fisher had a top 20 hit of the same song that year.
Thanks to today’s “filmmakers” and other shapers of American culture, if you want to visit a society containing such things, as the lines said that scroll down the screen at the opening of GWTW: you must “Look for it only in books [and DVDs], for it is no more than a dream remembered, a civilization gone with the wind.”
