The Patriot Post® · Hollywood's Fountain of Youth

I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I liked the films of the 30s and 40s much more than the stuff being churned out today. I actually reviewed movies, first at UCLA and then for Los Angeles magazine, from 1959 to 1971. Even then, I was hard-pressed to come up with even half a dozen movies a year I could in good conscience recommend. Half of the movies I squirmed through were very dumb comedies starring either Jerry Lewis or Peter Sellers. Many of the others were designed as tributes to the beatnik generation, directed by young no-talents straining to appear cool. Those are definitely years I wish I could get back.

One of the things I enjoyed the most about the old movies was that even the lesser efforts often included character actors and actresses it was a delight to watch. The ones who come quickly to mind include Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, Fay Bainter, Beulah Bondi, William Demarest, Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, Helen Broderick, Edmund Gwenn, Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Bickford, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Oscar Homolka, Clifton Webb, Eve Arden, Raymond Walburn, Thelma Ritter, William Bendix, Frank Morgan, James Gleason, Edward Arnold, Spring Byington, Sydney Greenstreet, Thomas Mitchell, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Jack Carson, Robert Benchley, Al Bridge, Harry Davenport, Una Merkel, Gene Lockhart and Felix Bressart.

Another important way the earlier movies differed from the modern product was that it was only the exceptions that ran over two hours; today, the exceptions are those that don’t.

An even greater distinction is that male movie stars seemed like adults. I realize that at the age I first saw their movies, I was very young and even people in their twenties seemed quite grown up. But I have seen a lot of these movies again in my 60s and 70s and guys like John Wayne, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Spencer Tracy, Alan Ladd, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Joel McCrea, Eddie G. Robinson, John Garfield, Fred Astaire, Burt Lancaster and William Powell, still seem all grown up.

That’s not to say there weren’t children and ingénues on screen back then. The likes of Margaret O'Brien, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Butch Jenkins, Jane Powell, Deanna Durbin, Dean Stockwell, Bonita Granville, Roddy McDowell, Natalie Wood, Freddie Bartholomew and young Elizabeth Taylor, were all making their mark, but it was understood by all that they were children.

Today, male leads all seem to have extended their adolescence by two or three decades. Matt Damon, Will Ferrell, David Spade and Adam Sandler, are all well up in their 40s. Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp are both 50. Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey are both 51. Even Leonardo DiCaprio is 39. Do any of them strike you as having hair on their chests? Half of them don’t even look like they have to shave. Would any of them be convincing if they were cast as the father of, say, a teenager, even though in real life most of them are old enough to be the fathers of 25-year-olds and the grandfathers of young children? The truth is John Wayne would have had them all for lunch and burped up Johnny Depp before dinner.

All things considered, I suppose it makes sense that we have a president who also seems to be the result of bad casting. It’s a job, after all, that calls for someone wise and mature, someone seasoned by the vagaries of life; instead we have a typical teenager whose name, considering the way he loves to skip up stairs to planes and podiums, should be Skippy. Like most other 15-year-olds, he’s egocentric, narcissistic and unbelievably lazy. He’s never happier then when he’s putting off till tomorrow what he hopes someone else will do for him today.

Until Obama’s South African sign language interpreter, Thamsanqa Jantjie, confessed that he suffers from schizophrenia and often experiences hallucinations, I naturally assumed that as usual Obama was solely responsible for the gibberish.

Perhaps Obama should have employed Mr. Jantjie to constantly assure us that, if we liked them, we could keep our doctors and health insurance. That way, he could blame the guy’s fingers for lying to us over these past four years.

Finally, as Don Imus said, “Nelson Mandela is a leader that Barack Obama should try to emulate. He could start by spending 27 years in prison.”