October 2, 2017

Actors, Dogs & Other Critters

Recently, I shared my list of favorite actors and actresses. Only two people let me know they took exception to my selections.

Recently, I shared my list of favorite actors and actresses. Only two people let me know they took exception to my selections. One guy made a case for Jimmy Cagney, whom I had left off my list. I let him know that I enjoyed Cagney’s boundless energy, but I didn’t include him because I had never really liked any of his movies very much. Considering what a long career he had, you would think that would be a near impossibility.

When the fan brought up the Oscar that Cagney had won for “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” I pointed out the movie was no better than the standard hokum about vaudeville that Hollywood used to churn out whenever they wanted to use a bunch of songs that were in the public domain. No doubt part of the reason for the Oscar was the patriotic fervor during WW II, plus Hollywood’s shock that the town’s favorite movie gangster could dance, even though Cagney had broken into the business as a New York chorus boy.

The other quibble about my list came from someone who was shocked that I had Meryl Streep on my list, although to be fair, I had explained that I was limiting her participation, as I had with Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, to her comedic roles (“Postcards from the Edge,” “Defending Your Life,” “Florence Foster Jenkins”). I acknowledged that although I don’t care for her in dramas and, furthermore, despise Streep’s public persona, I wouldn’t allow that to distort my critical judgment.

I pointed out that I had cast Ed Asner in my movie “Angels on Tap” (which remains in the limbo of post-production, in case you’re curious). Although I take my politics seriously, I believe in occasionally boycotting companies, not people.


Speaking of blacklists, a third party asked me to compare two of the Hollywood 10, Dalton Trumbo and Albert Maltz, both of whom had gone to jail in the early 1950s because they’d stonewalled a congressional committee investigating communist influence in the motion picture industry.

When I asked him why he was asking the question, he wrote: “Supposedly, when Otto Preminger found out that Trumbo’s name would appear in the credits of ‘Spartacus,’ he fired Maltz and hired Trumbo to write ‘Exodus.’”

I replied: “I doubt if that’s true. For one thing, I had never heard such a rumor, although I have studied the blacklist for the past several decades. I suppose the reason for that is that it took place at a very impressionable time for me. I was in grade school, and it seemed like every day some actor or actress I liked was being called in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and being asked if they were or ever had been members of the Communist Party, and their response would determine if they would continue appearing in movies or on TV.”

It was the biggest show in America, with a cast that included Gary Cooper, Lucille Ball, Larry Parks, John Garfield, Adolph Menjou, Marsha Hunt, Ginger Rogers, Walt Disney, Lee J. Cobb, Lionel Stander, Humphrey Bogart, Elia Kazan, Elmer Bernstein, Budd Schulberg and Ronald Reagan. Some were friendly witnesses, others refused to cooperate and paid the price.

But, getting back to Trumbo and Maltz, it made no sense that Otto Preminger, who was both extremely liberal and very publicity-conscious, would have fired Maltz in order to hire Trumbo. For one thing, Trumbo had always been a bigger name and was in fact the highest-paid screenwriter in town until the blacklist turned him from a guy pulling down $4,000 a week working at MGM into someone who was suddenly persona non-grata, getting $1,500-$2,000 per script for churning out the likes of “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave One” anonymously.

Preminger must have known that Kirk Douglas was going to get most of the attention for having broken the blacklist with Trumbo. Therefore, it would have made more sense for him to have grabbed the spotlight by hiring Maltz, who would never again work in Hollywood.


Several veteran groups have taken exception to the multi-part PBS documentary about Vietnam cobbled together by Ken Burns. I can’t critique it because I have no intention of tuning in. Normally, I would have watched it, but the combination of PBS and Mr. Burns was enough to let me know that in the end, it would be neither fair nor balanced. I had no doubt that it would be well-produced and that the young and stupid would be convinced they were watching a factual recounting of the war.

But, then, there are those who take the word of the NY Times and The Washington Post that Donald Trump, in spite of being married to a foreigner and having a daughter who is a Jewish convert, is both xenophobic and a religious bigot.

Ken Burns is one of those cinematic propagandists who is always hailed as a great filmmaker, as if the biased content of his work matters less than his technical expertise, when in fact it is the biased content that generates their rapturous praise.

He is merely the most recent in a tawdry line that includes Leni Riefenstahl, Oliver Stone and Michael Moore.

Some might balk at the inclusion of Ms. Riefenstahl, but I’ll point out that she labored on behalf of Adolf Hitler, a Jew-hating socialist, which would place him in the mainstream of current European politics if he were still alive.


It seems that Jonah Goldberg, whom I had only previously known as a political writer and occasional guest panelist on Fox, is also a dog lover. For that, I am almost, although not quite, willing to forgive him for his overly harsh comments about Donald Trump.

In a recent article, Mr. Goldberg wrote about the findings by Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the author of “What It’s Like to Be a Dog,” who used magnetic imaging to discover how dogs think and what it is they think about. As it turns out, they are usually thinking about us.

According to his research, Dr. Berns is confident that dogs really do love us. He even debunked the notion that they only love us because we feed them. As any dog owner can tell you, we feed them and give them treats because we respond to their loving us by loving them and wanting them to be happy.

They are not, as some cynics would insist, four-legged gold-diggers, and we are not their sugar-daddies and sugar-mommies.

As my wife Yvonne and I can attest, when one of us leaves the house, Angel is unhappy, and it’s certainly not because we’ve carted her treats off with us. It’s as if someone had turned off the sunshine. Furthermore, when we return, she reacts as if we had just returned safely from a prolonged visit to a war zone.

Some people who simply refuse to recognize the truth will even insist that dogs lick our hands not out of affection but for the salt content. I always wonder if they also believe that’s why people kiss each other or their children. And are they equally convinced there is more kissing taking place in the summertime when we’re all sweating more than usual?

Although I can usually take Indian lore or leave it alone, I did hear one piece of lore years ago that I took to heart. Legend has it that the god of the Indians separated men from all the other animals by cleaving a hole in the earth, but at the last possible second, a dog leapt across the crevice to take its place at our side.

I believe it and, what’s more, I will continue to believe it until Angel tells me otherwise.

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