The Western is one of America’s unique cultural gifts and no one personified that genre better than John Wayne — not Gary Cooper, not Clint Eastwood. In a career that spanned four decades, Wayne, with the considerable help of directors…
Like most great directors now either dead or slowing down, the late Peter Bogdanovich was a devotee of classic films. His 1973 book, Pieces of Time, features incisive essays on cinema and interviews with screen legends James Stewart, Howard Hawks,…
The most noxious thing about wokeness is not its inability to create great art, but its need to replace it with inferior work. Ayn Rand put it best. “Don’t set out to raze all shrines — you’ll frighten men. Enshrine…
It’s a fabulous day today. Sunny. Hot. Dry. I awakened at about 11 with a terrible stomach ache. But that’s standard and I have meds for them. The world’s most nearly perfect med, Paregoric, apparently has been banned. But I…
Washington — I do not go to the movies. Oh, I go to reruns of the The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, and The Godfather: Part III; there was a Godfather: Part III, was there not? I got a little…
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too … If you can fill…
Tomorrow I will uncork an expensive wine and toast my American friends and readers. When drinking and playing loud music is in the cards, I could celebrate the national day of Ethiopia, but the truth is that after Columbus Day…
I feel sorry for the metrosexual Democrats pushing to rename John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. They’ve probably never seen a John Wayne picture, or, if they have, they doubtless shriveled up before the ultimate icon of American manhood. That…
P, conducting his virtual seminar on American lit in Paris, announces that he is finished with Thoreau and is about to suggest to his students that they read Huckleberry Finn. Whatcha think, he asks me. I think we have not…