BRITISH FILM ACTING is historically superior to American. This is due to Britain’s remarkable stage tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Many British actors went from stage to film and though the two required different skills, they were able to transfer their stage talents to the movie set.

Between the early 1940s to 1960s some outstanding movies with great acting were made and I would like to recommend one: Cash on Demand, a 1961, black-and-white crime thriller, based on a television play, which you can watch on Youtube for free.

This is a thriller with no violence. It’s more a tense, and sometimes comic, psychological play about an extremely clever crime and one man’s personal failings.

The story takes place in a small bank outside London. The late Peter Cushing, who started in repertory theater and performed in Hollywood before continuing his film career in England, plays Harry Fordyce, the fastidious bank manager.

An insurance inspector arrives at the bank one day, and from that moment an attempted robbery unfolds. The entire action occurs just in a few hours and most of it in the bank manager’s office. Please do not read the Wikipedia entry. It gives the plot entirely away and will spoil it for you.

The acting in this small movie, which aired in American theaters for a few months, is truly memorable. André Morrell plays the insurance inspector and Richard Vernon appears as Pearson, the head clerk at the bank. One of the best characteristics of British movies of that era is that they are realistic. The characters are not glamorized in the way American movie characters so often are and the actors are highly believable in their roles. To me the point of a good movie or play or novel is reality. While we are entertained, we learn how to live.

The main theme here is the obnoxious boss. In that sense, it is very relevant. Do not many people work under difficult managers? Will that ever change? Fordyce is an exacting boss who is somewhat unforgiving of his imperfect employees. In the course of the attempted robbery, he must lower his standards dramatically.

One more thing about the plot: This movie somewhat painfully reminds me of a day when I was nine months pregnant and a strange man called me at home shortly after my husband left for work. He told me that he was holding my husband hostage and that if I did not do exactly what he said he would harm my husband. Of course, I immediately became … unhinged and it took me at least ten to fifteen minutes to realize that it was a scam and hang up the phone. I will never, ever forget that day or the man’s voice. Fortunately, all was well in the end though my husband’s office did receive a phone call from one hysterical, pregnant woman. The sadistic creep who called me was eventually arrested for doing the same thing to many women.

Something similar takes place in Cash on Demand so I guess I identify with the main character’s reaction.

I hope you enjoy this little film and that it offers you a brief escape into reality. (more…)

 PATRICK O'BRIEN writes: I read your commentary on Stephen Foster. He was a wonderful composer -- words and music, a rare combination. And I remember hearing Terri Gross's comment about Stephen Foster from years ago: "How could there be so much hate in one man," and this about the song, "Old Black Joe," which is a very sympathetic look at an old slave missing the people he has grown up with, and looking forward to seeing them in Heaven. I teach music, and my students love "Old Black Joe," even the couple of Black students. And we sing several Foster songs, and "Dixie," and the Southern national anthem...and abolitionist songs, too. I am equal opportunity. Here is the Southern national anthem, the "Bonnie Blue Flag."   

    

"FOR the Jews who insist that their behavior has nothing to do with 'antisemitism,' they need look no further than this story out of France — where a wealthy Jewish socialite wants to use some of her own wealth — along with taxpayers’ money, of course — to relocate 70 migrant families — amounting to hundreds of people — to a small town in Brittany to allegedly help revitalize the local economy..." Read more. (Not a blanket endorsement of CFT.) Notice that the French town of Callac is "aging." That's because the French stopped having children.  

 WHEN my husband and I were on a trail in the White Mountains last week, we heard a group of teenaged campers descending the mountain behind us. They were singing at the very top of their voices that old Commie folk tune, "If I Had a Hammer," performed back in the day by the self-admitted fan of Joseph Stalin, Pete Seeger. It's nice tune, when not overplayed, and I have nothing against the basic sentiments of brotherhood it expresses. It sounded very uplifting in the woods, seemingly far away from the forces of universal propaganda. Honestly to see young people out on the trail, with no anti-social distancing or masks, was so thrilling, I almost wanted to cry. I'd be happy if they were wearing mariner's caps and singing the U.S.S.R. anthem. If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land! As they began to pass, one of the group yelled out, "High Five!" So we held out our hands. Each sweaty, grimy, unwashed, adolescent hand came in full contact with ours. Slap, slap, slap, slap .... There were at least 25 in all. I realized then we were participating in a spontaneous and unintended medical experiment. "If we don't come down with 'COVID' now, we never will!" I said to my husband. Since our contact with these germ carriers, we've never felt better. Not a sniffle, not a single…

THIS SUMMER’S just getting started, but it’s going to take a whole lot of talent to match the outstanding performance of Zoe Pawelczak, who was reportedly present at an alleged mass shooting in the suburban Chicago city of Highland Park on July Fourth and described her experience on national news. She doesn’t appear in the least traumatized in this interview. In fact, she’s smiling, no doubt tickled to be on a national stage.

Yet gun shot wounds are extremely disturbing. An ordinary person would be so affected he would not be capable of coherent statements. As a newspaper reporter years ago, I saw photos of people who had been shot, stabbed and hit by cars and I saw people moments after they had been fatally injured. Believe me, it was very hard and it was not possible to smile when discussing these scenes. These things are not like they are in the movies.

But leave this interesting interview aside. The fact is, multiple gun-shot deaths happen very often on weekends in Chicago. They do not receive the round-the-clock coverage that this alleged event received.

Was it political theater? How can you tell whether a shooting is state-sponsored psychological terrorism for political objectives?

The list below is from a post I wrote last year (with a few edits). With this list, you can easily identify whether a shooting is naturally occurring or staged. Seriously, this isn’t rocket science though it does take a bit of intuition. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 made it legal for the U.S. government to conduct state-sponsored propaganda events domestically and abroad. These events, ostensibly to protect Americans, are carried out with less benign objectives, such as unconstitutional gun control, increased surveillance, distraction of the public, division and glorification of governmental authority. [Russ Winter has added the creation of a new national police force to the list.] Private contractors (such as manufacturers of body scanners) potentially reap big rewards too. Participants are obviously well compensated (beyond their wildest dreams) and face serious harm if they disclose details. Here’s an account of one person’s awakening to a staged mass shooting.

I strongly believe no one is ever killed in these events, but that is not something I can prove. These events are becoming ever bolder, with national TV reporters and alleged witnesses making immediate and explicit political statements about the need for new gun laws. The signs of fakery:

** Initial release of blurry, jerky, confusing video imagery suggestive of chaos at the scene

** Immediate, pervasive, non-stop media coverage

** No clear imagery of the attack as it occurred or convincing, bloody carnage despite the presence of dozens or hundreds of cell phones at scene

** Active shooter drills conducted in vicinity same day or not long before

** Racial sub-narrative, usually “white supremacy,” but may be angry nonwhite perp

** Lack of normal emergency response; victims sometimes not taken (or reported to be taken) to the hospital

** Police or ambulance staff seen standing around or milling about; flashing police and ambulance lights convey chaos and emergency scenario

** Immediate identification and arrest of alleged perpetrator or immediate death of perpetrator

** Implausible marksmanship by a perpetrator who could never have received military-level training

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ALAN writes: English professor Calvin Linton wrote in 1962: “We live in the best educated age in human history.  It also may well be the most gullible.   ….. There is evidence that certain tendencies in modern education are more likely to increase rather than decrease human gullibility…..” (“What Happened to Common Sense?,” Saturday Evening Post, April 28, 1962, p. 10.) Wayne C. Booth, also a professor of English, agreed: “I don’t know whether we are a more credulous  generation than our fathers, but it surely must be true that in proportion to the amount of time and money we spend ostensibly educating each other, we are the most credulous, gullible, superstitious people of all time….” (Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 64.) Similar thoughts were expressed in a letter to the editor way back in 1983: “No wonder we have difficulty solving problems, what with a nation of robots waiting to be told what to do, what movies to see, music to listen to, clothes to wear.  Of course, the robots don’t know they’re robots.  They think they are ‘in’, which makes for an interesting situation:  While advertisers are conning them, they are conning themselves.  It’s tough to tell who is doing the better job.  The clear winner, though, is the advertiser; he ends up with the cash, while robots wind up with the junk.” (William O’Connell, Letter to…

MOWING    --- By Robert Frost There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.  

[Reposted from August 8, 2020]

Those who vilify Kate Smith could not create one one-thousandth of the happiness that she imparted to her audiences. They can only destroy. Their goal is pure destruction: Of America and Christendom.

Orwell could not have dreamed of a better example of Thought Crime than the “racism” today’s arrogant young know-it-alls imagine they have “discovered” in songs composed decades before they were born.  Fools, all of them.  They play the role of useful idiots for Communist-trained agitators and provocateurs.  Do not underestimate such people or their sponsors. They mean to destroy every vestige of American identity, heritage, and achievement.

***

ALAN writes:

It must have been in 1953 or ’54 that I first became aware of Kate Smith when my grandmother watched “The Kate Smith Hour” on afternoon television.  I was four years old. Doubtless my grandmother remembered Kate Smith from her radio programs in the 1930s-‘40s.

The name Kate Smith never occurred in conversations in my family or among friends. There was no reason why it should.  Throughout all the years when I grew up and afterwards, Kate Smith was “just there:” A part of American radio history, a frequent guest on television variety shows, a wonderful singer who came to be known as the “Songbird of the South,” an all-American patriot, and the woman whose 1938 recording of “God Bless America” was an inspiration for countless Americans.

It went without saying in my family that Kate Smith was all those things.

On many Sunday nights in the 1960s-‘70s, I listened to KXOK Radio in St. Louis because they played “oldies but goodies”.  Kate Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” was played at the close of that program, which was also the end of their broadcast day.  That is when and where I came fully to appreciate it.  I remember the uplift I felt upon hearing that recording in the darkness of night, followed by silence when the station went off the air.  It was a most effective setting for the recording to linger in my awareness for moments afterward and for me to think about it, as I did.  I imagine my father and his Army Air Corps colleagues in the South Pacific during World War II must have been equally impressed if they were lucky enough to hear Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on an Armed Forces Radio broadcast.

On hearing that recording in 1983, librarian Efrem Sepulveda wrote:

           “I thought about how soaring it was to the spirit….and that it was something to remind us of the beauty we have lost…..”

        [“Killing Kate Smith,” The Imaginative Conservative, May 20, 2019]

I agree, except for the word “lost.” I suggest Americans did not lose it but gave it away, through their gullibility, moral cowardice, and boundless capacity for self-immolation. (more…)

AN OLD woman in the mining region of Central Pennsylvania describes her troubles in this ballad by Felix O’Hare, The Shoofly colliery failed to offer miners work in the 1870s, and already in debt to her neighbors the woman foresees the worst.  This is from the George Korson Recordings of Pennsylvania Coal Miners Collection at the Library of Congress. Daniel Walsh sings beautifully in this recording of 1946.

This ballad articulates the thoughts of the miners in the depression of the early ’70’s. In 1871 the little mine patch of Valley Furnace received a blow from which it never recovered: the mine gave out. Normally the miners might have found jobs at the Shoofly, a nearby colliery. There, however, a bad seam had been struck and men were being laid off. The only alternative to starvation was to gather meager belongings, leave old associations, and trek across the Broad Mountain in to the Mahanoy Valley then being opened to mining. [Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miners, Recorded and Edited by George Korson, 1947 ]

THE SHOOFLY

As I went a-walking one fine summer’s morning,
It was down by the Furnace I chanced for to stroll.
I espied an old lady, I’ll swear she was eighty,
At the foot of the dirt banks a-rooting for coal;
And when I drew nigh her she sat on her hunkers
For to fill up her scuttle she just had begin
And to herself she was singing a ditty,
And these are the words the old lady did sing: (more…)

 STEPHEN FOSTER'S "Old Folks at Home," also known as "Way Down upon the Swanee River," is a famous American song that was written in 1851 for a minstrel show. The words to the original were about a slave yearning for "de old plantation." They were altered, lest anyone think a slave could be momentarily happy. Here is the shocking, unexpurgated version: Way down upon de Swanee Ribber, Far, far away, Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber, Dere's wha de old folks stay. All up and down de whole creation Sadly I roam, Still longing for de old plantation, And for de old folks at home. Chorus All de world am sad and dreary, Eb-rywhere I roam; Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary, Far from de old folks at home! All round de little farm I wandered When I was young, Den many happy days I squandered, Many de songs I sung. When I was playing wid my brudder Happy was I; Oh, take me to my kind old mudder! Dere let me live and die. One little hut among de bushes, One dat I love Still sadly to my memory rushes, No matter where I rove. When will I see de bees a-humming All round de comb? When will I hear de banjo strumming, Down in my good old home? Foster was born on July Fourth in 1826 in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. According to the Library of Congress, "Foster…

BASED on a poem by George P. Morris which appeared in the New York Mirror magazine in 1830, “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” composed by Henry P. Russell, expresses a simple, patriotic love and gratitude. It was sung here by Derek P. Scott in 1980.

Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now.
‘Twas my forefather’s hand
That placed it near his cot:
There, woodman, let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not!

(more…)

  LATE FILMMAKER Aaron Russo described a conversation with David Rockefeller in this clip from a famous video made before his death in 2007.  

"THE people is the same everywhere. At times it seems to show extreme generosity without understanding a thing, while at other times it behaves ferociously for no apparent reason; sensitive to the point of silliness at times, even when there is no reason to be moved, at other times it remains impassive or even acts cynically when it ought to react or even become enraged so as not to be shamed. The people is what certain elements would like it to be. Such elements crown the people, as they know full well that sovereignty will always rest in their own hands." --- Leon de Poncins, Emmanuel Malynski, The Occult War  

Also of interest by Baldwin: "Is Israel Planning to Relocate to Ukraine?"