Bernard Montgomery, left, and Meyrick Clifton James Source: The Australian

I WAS MONTY’S DOUBLE, a British movie made in 1958 and directed by John Guillermin, is the story of a mostly unsuccessful military actor commissioned to impersonate General Bernard Montgomery during World War II. Meyrick Clifton James, the actor, plays himself in the movie and he is outstanding. It’s a truly remarkable performance. From a 2010 piece in The Australian:

IN 1944 a washed-up Australian actor named Meyrick Clifton James experienced one of the oddest career revivals in history.

James was not a great actor. He could neither sing nor dance, and he had lost a finger in the trenches during World War I. When war broke out again he volunteered to entertain the troops, winding up in Leicester, in the Army Pay Corps Variety Troupe. With his thin face and grey moustache he could do a remarkable impersonation of the top British soldier, Bernard Montgomery.

On the eve of D-Day the failed actor was plucked from obscurity to play the starring role in one of the war’s most melodramatic deception: as Monty’s double.

Here is a clip at Turner Classic Movies. The movie also stars one of the most hardworking British movie actors of all time, John Mills.

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JAMES H. writes:

My father grew up in south St. Louis. He’s 91. These old south St. Louis neighborhoods are exactly as Alan writes. They nurtured the soul and gave sustenance to the individual as part of a community and a people. There was a connectedness that has long since been lost. But then this was by design. For when men realize that they are part of a family, a community, a people and a nation of shared ethnicity, historical experience, values, religion and culture they grow more completely human. They are energized and strengthened by the whole rather than alienated and disconnected. Read More »

DIANA writes:

Would that I had read James Bowman’s perceptive review of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I would have saved myself and a friend $6 a piece, and spent the morning in the beauties of nature rather than the tedium of a witless British “comedy.”

Mr. Bowman nails the movie’s disrespect towards both its British and Indian characters. I will write more to you about this film when my temper has cooled. For now, I feel cheated. A waste of a stellar cast.

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APRIL writes:

I’ve been following the conversations on your site about women dressing immodestly, (here, here, here, and here) and something you’ve repeated throughout these posts gives me pause every time I come across it. In regards to the power women have over men in the way they dress, you insist that women “are ignorant of their own aggressive instincts” and that “most women are clueless about this. They are not consciously aggressive.” Read More »

PAUL writes:

I love your fight against pizza. You might even be right. I love it because it shows you are a normal person. What I’m about to say will be like one of those awful slasher movies to you, but you know I respect your views. Read More »

MUCH HAS been made in history books of the contributions of “Rosie the Riveter,” the female armaments worker who kept the factories going during World War II. Feminists often suggest that women so loved working in factories that they never wanted to return home. Rosie the Riveter is a symbol of female liberation. Anything, even welding sheets of metal, is of course preferable to running a home.

However, look at this charming picture of a female drill operator in 1942. There is nothing masculine about her. She feels no need to dress like a man or — even to hold a drill like a man. (Good grief, I hope she survived the war with two hands.) She looks serious and dedicated — and utterly out of place. Most of all, she is not puffed up with some imaginary inflation of her job. When the war was over, I bet she never picked up a drill again.

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ALAN writes:

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I had the most incredible experience: I sat in a roomful of 50 men and women who had lunch, talked, reminisced, and enjoyed themselves for four hours. The incredible part was that they did all that without cell phones, without liquor, without vulgar language, without loud “music,” without blaring TV screens, and without wrecking the place. All of them are white. All of them are decent and disciplined. They are, therefore, atypical 21st-century Americans. They grew up in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. They are Old School. They are not “cool” or trendy; if they were, I would have known I had walked into the wrong room.

The occasion was a reunion of people who attended schools in the neighborhood in south St. Louis where my father lived as a boy. He organized the first such reunion in 1988. One man was so grateful for the reunions that he sent my father a four-page handwritten letter describing his memories of schoolmates in the 1920s. Read More »

HERE’S a previous thread at VFR on the subject, discussed here many times, of the near-nakedness of women’s fashions. Lawrence Auster wrote in 2008:

The way many women dress today, with half their breasts exposed, is an expression of total disrespect for men. Men are left with three possible responses. To grab the woman, which is illegal; to ogle the woman, which is socially unacceptable; or to affect not to notice the woman at all, which is emasculating. A culture that normalizes such female behavior—i.e. not only not noticing or objecting to it, but prohibiting any objection to it—is extremely sick. Read More »

A READER from Northern Ireland writes:

How much time do you give your readers who wish to comment on your articles, as the comment line seems to close very quickly? Read More »

DIANA writes:

Oscar Wilde was a horrible man, and I always feel bad quoting him.

But as regards fashion, he was dead on target: “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable we must alter it every six months.”

I totally agree that tart fashion is a form of aggression, however unconscious on the part of women – some women. (There are women who are completely aware of this.) A normal guy, being exposed to this provocation, has to ignore the provocation. This is a form of emasculation. The process starts at adolescence. No wonder we have so many messed up young guys. Read More »

JOSEPH S. writes:

Thank you for all the good work you are doing on your blog.

My own Mother stayed at home to raise me and my five siblings. She is highly intelligent and, if she had been so inclined, I am sure that she could have had a career and even achieved what the world considers success. Read More »

BUCK writes:

We  need tart reform.

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I HAVE tirelessly attempted to prove to readers of this site that pizza is the Trojan Horse of Western society. I realize that many readers remain unconvinced, even to the point of consuming Domino’s two or three times a week.

Some people believe I bear some perverse grudge against pizza, which is the staff of life, and that this grudge probably has something to do with a messed-up childhood, failure to succeed or deeply embedded sexual repression.

So be it. I march on. It’s not easy being a pizza prophet — nor should it be.

Here is one more example of how pizza and the downfall of the West are inextricably linked. The Dallas-based chain Pizza Patron is giving free pizza to anyone who orders in Spanish.

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IN the post on Valerie Trierweiler, the live-in girlfriend of French president François Hollande, I referred to the outfit she wore to his swearing in — a dress that allowed full view of her upper thigh — as a form of “sexual aggression.”

This idea that women display aggression by their choice of revealing clothing is foreign and preposterous to most Western women, who believe that clothing expresses merely personal taste and that male psychology can be molded — and should be molded. If they dress like a whore that does not mean for heaven’s sake that they are a whore. Read More »

JANE S. writes:

Priya writes in the discussion on Hindu patriarchy:

“I am not distorting any fact. There is no Christian persecution by Hindu society in general.”

Here is the Wikipedia entry on violence against Christians in India, which includes arson of churches, burning of Bibles, raping of nuns, murder of priests, desecration of Christian cemeteries, among other pleasantries. If this is what you call “no” persecution “in general,” what would they have to do for you to call it “real” persecution? Read More »

DIANA writes:

This article about  British man stabbed to death after he asked a restaurant patron if his crying daughter was okay gives me the opportunity to add my paragraph to John Derbyshire’s now-infamous  “The Talk.”

I would say to white people, never interfere in anything going on between a black parent and child. Steer clear.

[A reader at VFR makes the same point in his own additions to “The Talk.”]

Give a wide berth. This may cause you moral qualms – as it should – but you could get into huge trouble. I have twice inadvertently become involved in black parent-child issues, and both times were extremely disturbing. Read More »

IN THE entry on William Peter Blatty’s suit against Georgetown University, which he claims is no longer a Catholic institution, Vincent C. writes:

The Society of Jesus, aka Jesuits, is in theory responsible for the administration of Georgetown University. When they chose as President of the University a non-Jesuit – and non cleric – for the first time in their history, they were sending a message to all: we’re no longer a Catholic school. In fact, because of such modern theological niceties such as allowing the presence of homosexual clubs on campus, as well as visits by very pro-abortion politicos, if you read the propaganda that the university disseminates it now refers to itself as, “a school in the Jesuit tradition.” Of course, I doubt if St. Ignatius Loyola would agree, but you can’t have everything.

And if I were able to speak directly to Signor Blatty, I’d say this: If you were to examine not only Georgetown, but just about every other Jesuit institution of higher learning in these United States, I suspect that your current headache would turn into a serious migraine.

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A MONTH after the election of Barack Obama, Elizabeth Wright, the black conservative who died last year and who was a commenter at this blog, made some predictions in an entry at her website. The post was titled “The Everlasting Quest: To Transform Whites.” She wrote:

I believe that blacks will take this Obama victory as a mandate, not to straighten out the mess in their own backyards, but to continue the job of “fixing” white folks. This means stepping up the crusade designed to keep whites in the habit of working to exterminate the “guilt” and “shame” that supposedly taints their hearts and souls. And it will not matter how you label these blacks. You may call them “liberal” or “radical” or even “conservative,” but their quest will be the same. If there is one thing that unites blacks across all politics, religious attachments, and classes, it is the desire to control the attitudes and behavior of whites. Read More »