Number Three of Ten Movies that Shook Wanniski Jude Wanniski April 23, 1998

Memo To: Website browsers, fans & clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Ten movies that helped shape my life: #3

One at a time, in the next ten weeks or so, I’ll list here the ten films that most shaped my life. These are not my favorite films. They are the movies I’ve seen that have had the greatest influence on my thinking, my character, my life. Some are favorites that I enjoy watching over and over again, which you can tell as you read each entry. Try to think of your own experiences with films and how they influenced the course of your life. It makes life more interesting to be aware, as you live it, to know how things such as books and films and magazine articles alter your path in significant ways. Sometime last year the Sunday NYTimes “Arts and Leisure” section had a piece on how difficult it is to think of a movie that may have changed history. The only movie they could think of was a silent film by D.W. Griffith, "Birth of a Nation," which had a scene about the KuKluxKlan that the author believes changed national thinking about the KKK. How silly. Each of the ten films listed here changed my history, and if I had not seen them, I would not have helped change history in the ways that I have. Films don’t move masses. They move individuals who move masses.

3. “An American in Paris.” (1951) There is no motion picture I’ve watched more than this MGM classic musical, easily a hundred times without exaggeration. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in a love story that made me dizzy when I first saw it in raging adolescence (15). The music is George Gershwin, my entry point to classical music. If I had to have one movie on a desert island, this would be it. It is flawless. There is no scene in it that is less than the others, no number I can decide is my favorite of all. Oscar Levant is priceless in a supporting role. George Guetary’s “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” stoked my raging adolescence with every step. Gene Kelly plays a GI who stayed in Paris after the war to learn how to paint. When he sees Leslie Caron in a smoky nightclub, he is hit by the old lightning bolt, and pursues her until the movie’s glorious finish. When she asks why, if he says he is such a great artist, he is not famous, he asks her to be patient. “Civilization,” he says, “has a natural resistance to improving itself.” In the years that followed, whenever I’ve been discouraged about my progress in moving the world in the direction I wish it to go, I think of that line and why it must be so.

2. “Rashomon.” (1950) There are several foreign films I saw as a boy that made me think of how different people were in other parts of the world. "Rashomon," from the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, was about the universality of human nature  --  the elusiveness of truth everywhere in the world. There are four people involved in an event that occurs in the middle of a forest in 16th century Japan. There is a nobleman, his beautiful consort, a bandit, and a bystander. There is conflict, a sexual episode between the woman and the bandit, and a murder. The heart of the film consists of the same event played out four different ways, according to the recollections of the four participants. This troubling film taught me that there is no such thing as objective fact or pure objectivity and built upon the lesson of "The Ox-Bow Incident." It made it easy for me to see how Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill told the truth, although their stories were 180 degrees apart. It also enabled me to appreciate the conflicting stories of President Clinton and Kathleen Willey. People sometimes remember what was in their mind at the time of a stressful situation because it really was in their mind.

1. “The Ox-Bow Incident.” (1943) This is the movie that most changed my life, instilling in me a fear of injustice that is produced by  lynch mobs. That came to be one of my distinguishing political characteristics. As you will notice I am attracted to the defense of those who nobody else will defend. My mother took me to see this when I was seven years old and I even remember sitting near the rear of the Borough Park Theater in Brooklyn, N.Y. Henry Fonda is part of a posse chasing men who killed a rancher in the course of stealing some of his cattle. The thieves, including Dana Andrews,  Anthony Quinn and an old man, insist they did nothing wrong, but after a quick tree-stump trial in the woods, they are pronounced guilty -- with Henry Fonda voting “not guilty” -- and hung. On the way back to town, the posse meets a man who tells them the rancher was not killed at all, but was alive and well. The men who had been hung were innocent after all. I cried bitterly, not only in the theater, but for many nights thereafter. For years it came back to me in dreams. I can’t watch it when it shows up on late-night television. I hate lynch mobs.