Does a person's political beliefs have any effect on your watching his/hers films.~ Ken123
Not really. I think that many of the people who made great movies were probably my polar opposites politically, ethically and personally. Yet such diverse figures from the right and left as
Chaplin, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Sam Wood, Eisenstein,
DeMille, and many others would not be my cup of tea as potential friends nor would we necessarily agree about much politically. Their movies, though? Jeez, I'd hate to have missed them.*
I think Sandy's response to
O.J. Simpson's work is understandable. I can't say that I ever recall him being a particularly effective serious or comic actor, though I've never seen more than a few of his films. Some of the Hollywood figures who almost always make me uncomfortable to watch, given subsequent events, are
Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, (along with poor Sharon Tate), Albert Salmi and Gig Young. Despite this, I can see that they all have some degree of talented despite my visceral reaction. My discomfort is due to their personal lives, not their political views, such as they may have been.
I should mention that while I didn't vote for him, one of my guilty pleasures this afternoon was perusing
Ronald Reagan's movies. Critics, aesthetic and political, may trash them, but there's a naive "golly willikers" quality about the man and his movies. I've been reading Douglas Brinkley's distillation of "Reagan's Diaries" and the same quality jumps out at you from the man's words. Just a little while ago, I paused and watched the preposterously entertaining
Desperate Journey (1942) in time to catch young Mr. R. chiding his less "daring" companions,
Errol Flynn & Arthur Kennedy as they considered whether to try to overwhelm a bunch of stinkin' Nazis about to fly a bomber over Britain. "Heck", said Ron, "there's only 12 of 'em!" I laughed out loud.
Jane Fonda never gave me half so much enjoyment. She seems to have been so unhappy, confused and, frankly, humorless for so many years.
I can't honestly say that I enjoyed a movie anymore or less because someone's political ideas were in any way similar to my own. The only
Jane Fonda movie that holds my attention to this day is
Comes a Horseman.
2 Reasons:
1. The Western land and sky
2. Richard Farnsworth
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*I would like to have been a fly on the wall during alot of movies from the classic and not so classic era. One example might have been
On Dangerous Ground when
Robert Ryan (full-fledged liberal ex-Marine, not afraid to express his mind), and
Ward Bond (right wing nut-job without intellectual pretensions, but a good actor when well-cast), filmed their awkward scenes in the car and galumphing across the snowy landscape under the frenzied, talented direction of a young
Nicholas Ray. I guess sometimes divergent styles--politically and artistically--could produce some truly interesting films.