Make Hollywood Great Again? NOT!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I often post episodes of The Anchor Team, produced by Michael Hichborn and the Lepanto Institute.  Those podcasts happen on Friday evenings so I will post them on Fridays or maybe the following Saturdays.  I for one have found them to be quite informative and helpful.

This evening Hichborn himself was away on family business.  This evening's episode can only be described as ok, but somewhat odd.  The title of the podcast is "Make Hollywood Great Again".  Right off the bat we see a problem.  Hollywood never was great.  Much of what was produced was full of filth, having the effect of corrupting morals.  That effect may well have been deliberated by freemasons who seem to seize any opportunity to bring about their new world order ends.

It had two characteristics that seemed to appeal to the populace at large.  With some notable exceptions, the people who starred in their movies were physically attractive people who were often the objects of fantasies by their audiences.  The second characteristic is that the watching of the films provided their audiences an escape from reality.  Both these characteristics tended to render their audiences passive recipients of any message they may have wished to present.  Much of the populace of western civilization were all too eager to lap up whatever Hollywood concocted for their consumption.

Not all were oblivious to the dangers of Hollywood.  Good Christians of various stripes, mostly evangelical, preached against the movies and often forbade their congregations from attending.  Perhaps the greatest moral force that succeeded in at least restraining Hollywood partially was the Catholic Church, through its Legion of Decency.  At that time, the Church still held moral credibility.  The Hollywood moguls knew that if the Legion declared a film to be objectionable, that Catholics would boycott it and revenues would take a tumble.  

This was during the so-called "golden age of Hollywood".  The fact that there was a need for the Legion of Decency to even exist should point to the evil that lurked in Hollywood.  There were those films that didn't make the Legion's grade but were still released.  But even the movies that were somewhat friendly to the Church misrepresented the Church.  Those shortcomings might have been barely noticeable, but that made the errors even more likely to be introduced into audiences' minds.  I believe they were deliberately insinuated to slowly introduce error into common thinking.  The errors increased in frequency and intensity as the movie producers sensed that they would suffer no backlash from passive audiences.

It's some of those movies that were lauded in tonight's episode of the Anchor Team.  I'll now post the video and below that will comment on some of the films

I won't remember them all, but here are a few.

• Angels With Dirty Faces about two boyhood friends, one now a gangster and the other a priest.  The gangster is idolized by some boys whom the priest is trying to keep from lives of crime.  When the gangster is sentenced to the electric chair, the priest pays him one last visit.  He asks the gangster to pretend that he's afraid to die, so that the boys will think him a coward not with emulating.  Note two things. First, the priest asks him to lie, to sin against the Eighth Commandment.  Maybe the reason was noble, but the ends don't justify the means. Second, and more egregiously, the priest doesn't even offer to hear the gangster's final confession.  So the gangster goes to the chair with mortal sin on his soul.  How well was the Church portrayed by that?
• The Scarlet And The Black is based on the doings of Msgr Hugh O'Flaherty, a priest in the Vatican who hid thousands of Jews during the World War II holocaust.  It directly feeds into the lie that Pope Pius XII was a coward when it came to assisting Jews.  That lie was refuted by the Chief Rabbi of Rome who himself converted to Catholicism.
• The Sound of Music supposedly based on the adventures of the Von Trapp family during World War II was so fictionalized that it aroused the ire of Maria Von Trapp.  The Von Trapp family was not invited to the opening performance of the musical on Broadway.

I now realize when I described some characteristics of "golden age Hollywood" that I didn't touch upon the opulent and decadent lifestyles of the various stars.  It was they who made divorce and remarriage seem quite normal.  Their "parties" were often drunken orgies, some of it quite scandalous.  We now know that abortion was quite rampant in that crowd; recall this was before Roe v Wade, when child murder was still considered a criminal act.  They got away with all this because they had money.

So to that we should get back???  I should hope not!!!  So many people want to step back fifty years in the past, failing to acknowledge that if such were possible, fifty years into that future we'd have the mess in which we currently find ourselves.

I highly recommend a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.  He talks of the perils of passive reception of visual stimuli such as movies and television, even if the content is truly wholesome.  At best, the viewer should always be cautioned to watch with his mind engaged and to never allow him/herself to be emotionally affected by the content.  Saint Peter, in one of his epistles, exhorts us all to "watch always for the devil seeks to devour".

The present situation is rather unpleasant.  But let's not romanticize the past that led us into our current mess.