Movies about conservatives

Timothy A. writes:

Oh joy! I went to the cinema last night and among the trailers were not one, but two upcoming hit-pieces on “conservative” figures. A Margaret Thatcher biography starring Meryl Streep, and a J. Edgar Hoover bio starring Leonardo DiCaprio (directed by Clint Eastwood, no less!).

LA replies:

It’s not definite in my mind that the Thatcher movie will be a hit job. Remember the genre of movies we’ve discussed that are made by liberals and conceived with a liberal intent, but end up being somewhat conservative or at least non-liberal, because the material moves the filmmakers in that direction, despite their conscious intention. “The Queen” is an example. The movie starts out by putting down Elizabeth as stuffy, unalive, and the rest of the usual catalogue of deadly sins according to the Gospel of Liberalism, yet it ends up treating her admiringly.

However, I doubt very much that the same will be true of the Eastwood movie about Hoover.

Timothy A. replies:

I’ve got to think that the brief trailer image of Hoover and Clyde Tolson holding hands in the back seat of a limousine is a bad sign.

I’ll reserve judgement on the Thatcher movie since there was nothing blatant in the trailer.

LA replies:

Of course the liberal culture lionizes homosexuality. But when a conservative person is allegedly homosexual, the same liberal culture treats homosexuality as disgusting and discrediting.

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

On the forthcoming J. Edgar Hoover film, Hoover would seem to me to offer Hollywood liberals nothing but a painful bout of cognitive dissonance. The FBI director was, on good evidence, a cross-dressing homosexual, which ought to make him fit to be celebrated; he was also, however, as close to Soviet-style secret-police chief as the country has ever experienced. Maybe a Soviet-style secret-police chief who worked for FDR is “good” in the liberal view; but then he also worked for, among other presidents, Richard Nixon, who is “bad” (a major-league “bad guy”) in the liberal view because of his early anti-Communism.

I would expect that the movie, with Eastwood as director, will be another exercise in “pop-nihilism,” like the fairly recent biopic of Howard Hughes, also starring Leonardo DiCaprio, in which the point was to give the actor the opportunity to show his stuff in playing an upwardly mobile social misfit whose life-path is a descent from eccentricity and serendipity into the pathology of paranoia.

Daniel L. writes:

I take issue with what Thomas Bertonneau wrote:

“The FBI director was, on good evidence, a cross-dressing homosexual … “

That “good evidence” consists of rumors and insinuations. In particular, the cross-dressing allegation originated with socialite Susan L. Rosenstiel, a woman who hated Hoover, and who later served time in prison for perjury. It has never been corroborated.

Here and here are articles debunking the cross-dressing claim.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 15, 2011 10:01 AM | Send