The five best horror films of all time (Variety)

Diabolique (Les Diaboliques) (1955): Only in France would a man’s wife and mistress team up to do him in. But it’s what happens next that makes Henri-Georges Clouzot’s black-and-white shocker most interesting. Véra Clouzot (who was married to the director at the time) and Simone Signoret drown Paul Meurisse’s character in the tub, then dump his corpse in the school pool. Instead of being discovered there, as they’d planned, the body goes missing—and eerie, impossible things start to happen. Seconds after the twist ending plays out, a warning appears: “Don’t be diabolical,” pleads the message, instructing viewers not to spoil the surprise for others. We wouldn’t dare, other than to say what makes the movie so effective even today is that audiences don’t know what they’re watching. Is it a murder mystery? A ghost story? No wonder Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make the movie himself—but Clouzot beat him to it.

 

Rosemary's Baby (1968): By the end of the 1960s, the idea that the devil was at large in the world didn’t seem like a far-fetched notion. Roman Polanski’s brilliantly disturbing thriller is rooted in a fearful vision of pregnancy but it also winks at a society that’s warming up to court the apocalypse. It’s the most intimate movie about Satan ever made. Mia Farrow, in a Vidal Sassoon haircut that becomes a ghoulish form of death-camp chic, gives a memorable performance as Rosemary, the innocent wife of an ambitious stage actor (John Cassavetes) who supposedly makes a deal with the cult of devil worshippers next door. They will summon Satan to make Rosemary pregnant, and he’ll get the career he wants. Ruth Gordon, as the devil’s noodge who assigns herself to look after Rosemary, personifies the banality of evil, and the film generates such supreme paranoia and suspense that it stands as one of the last great pieces of classical movie-making to emerge from the New Hollywood.

 

Psycho (1960): Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest film is such a landmark of cinematic horror that it’s almost hard to believe how it was greeted in 1960: as an effective but decidedly low-rent affair, a kind of sordid fun house. Sixty-four years later, there’s a reason that every detail and motif of “Psycho”—birds, drains, eyes, windshield wipers, stairway, swamp, madly shrieking violins, not to mention Mrs. Bates’ Victorian-bunned head—is nothing less than iconic. Hitchcock took his TV crew and made a trapdoor Gothic mystery of primal terror that invites us to watch ourselves watching it. In the film’s most famous scene (78 shots of agonizingly protracted living death), he pulled the plastic shower curtain out from under us so profoundly that it’s as if the movie were killing off not just Marion Crane but God himself: the sense, going forward, that anyone’s goodness would be not enough to protect them. The more you watch “Psycho,” the more you see that Anthony Perkins’ performance channels an instrospective terror for the ages.

The Exorcist (1973): William Friedkin’s film is about a twelve-year-old girl who either is suffering from a severe neurological disorder or perhaps has been possessed by an evil spirit. Friedkin has the answers; the problem is that we doubt he believes them. We don’t necessarily believe them ourselves, but that hardly matters during the film’s two hours. If movies are, among other things, opportunities for escapism, then “The Exorcist” is one of the most powerful ever made. Our objections, our questions, occur in an intellectual context after the movie has ended. “The Exorcist” is one of the best movies of its type ever made; it not only transcends the genre of terror, horror, and the supernatural, but it transcends such serious, ambitious artistic efforts in the same direction as Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film contains brutal shocks, almost indescribable obscenities. That it received an R rating and not the X is stupefying. The evil feels extreme to the viewer at times, but also it feels always believable. In this day and age, would you trust the Catholic Church to fix it?

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): Very few horror movies possess the quality of a true nightmare — that transcendently scary bad dream you can’t wake up from, because it feels like it’s really happening. Yet as more and more people have analyzed it, most critics and film buffs agree that “Texas Chain Saw” turned out to be a true masterpiece of terror. Tobe Hooper directed it with a lyrical suspense worthy of an existential grindhouse Hitchcock. He took the story of five post-hippie teenagers driving a van through the Texas wilds and turned it into a plunge into the American abyss. The film’s central image is that of a mentally arrested mute named Leatherface, who wears a mask of human skin and wields a power tool that metes out torture and death. He’s the granddaddy of the slasher genre’s masked killers (Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Kruger), but those all operated out of rage. Leatherface was driven by something else—he was a butcher, going on a rampage that seemed to act out something larger than mere homicide. You could call it the slaughter of human empathy. 

And there’s another reason “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” has cast such a shadow over the last half-century of horror films. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” it created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago. The film channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what “Chain Saw” revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot

Heading out West, Ronald Reagan was joining one of the largest population migrations in American history. Between 1935 and 1938, roughly a quarter of a million people fleeing drought and dust would pack up all their belongings and relocate to California. But, unlike the destitute and desperate Okies, Reagan was joining one of the most influential, fabled industries in the entire country—and one of the few to stage an economic rebound by the late 1930s. The movie studios had been battered by the Great Depression but had recovered faster than most other sectors. By 1936, average weekly attendance was up to eighty-eight million people a week, a new high, as moviegoers flocked to these “dream palaces” to escape the misery of their lives. By 1939, the nation had more theaters (15,115) than banks (14,952), and Hollywood was producing 80 percent of all motion pictures in the world. Louis B. Mayer—head of the most successful studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—was the highest-paid executive in the country, with an annual salary of $1.3 million. This era would later be acclaimed as the Golden Age of Hollywood, with 1939 dubbed the “Greatest Year in Motion Pictures.” Even movies that seemed to have nothing to do with the Depression offered much-needed psychological balm to audiences of the 1930s. As noted by cultural critic Morris Dickstein, The Wizard of Oz included “plaintive longing for something better, that place at the end of the Yellow Brick Road,” while Gone with the Wind reminded viewers that, however much adversity they faced, “tomorrow is another day.” Hollywood’s cultural cachet was immense: Tens of millions of Americans learned how they were supposed to look and behave while watching flickering images in the dark. 

Hortense Powdermaker, the first anthropologist to study the industry, wrote in 1950, “The star is not only an actor, but one of the gods or folk heroes in our society.” Yet the stars, while objects of veneration for the moviegoing masses, were, like millions of Americans in other fields, simply salaried employees. The studio bosses, who would do so much to shape American culture, were themselves outsiders who were looked down upon by the Los Angeles business elite. Because so many of them were either Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe or just one generation removed from the proverbial shtetl, they were denied entry to L.A.’s country clubs and so created their own in the Hillcrest Country Club. As Neal Gabler wrote in his magisterial history An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the Hollywood Jews would help fabricate on the screen an imagined, idealized country “where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.” The Warner brothers were unusual among the Hollywood moguls in backing Franklin D. Roosevelt early on, although they reverted to the Republican fold in 1936 when Alf Landon challenged FDR, and many of their pictures displayed a New Deal sensibility. Warner Brothers would be the first studio to produce an anti-Nazi picture: Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. 

But they also made frothy Busby Berkeley musicals such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, notable for their surrealism and sensuality, and exciting Errol Flynn swashbucklers, such as Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood. In 1940 another demanding star would join the Warner Brothers roster: Bugs Bunny. Overseeing this assembly line of dreams were Harry Warner, the company’s genteel president based in New York, and his younger, more vulgar brother Jack L. Warner, the vice president and production chief in Los Angeles. The two men loathed each other. Harry once chased Jack around the studio lot with a lead pipe, screaming “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch,” and Harry’s widow later accused Jack of driving him to an early grave in 1958 by stealing the studio out from under him. They were, in fairness, very different personalities—Harry was kind and honest, a devout Jew, and a devoted family man. He stayed married to the mother of his three children, and there was never a hint of scandal around his life. Jack, by contrast, was irreligious, foul-mouthed, and hedonistic. He wagered large amounts of money in the casinos of the French Riviera and scandalized Harry by divorcing his first wife and marrying his pregnant mistress. Reagan expected a lot of ribbing because he was the new kid on the set, but he was pleasantly surprised to find what he imagined to be a supportive, small-town-like atmosphere. He wrote that “everyone has been helpful and friendly and I have yet to encounter the slightest trace of ill-will or jealousy among my fellow workers.” 

Dick Powell had wished luck to him on his first day on the Warners lot. Reagan was in awe not just of Hollywood but of the whole city of Los Angeles. It was already the nation’s fifth-largest metropolis, with more than 1.5 million residents, and growing fast. The architecture was a dizzying hodgepodge of styles very different from Dixon, Des Moines, or any other city. Middle-class residents lived in modest stucco bungalows or low-rise apartment houses, while movie stars, noted the journalist Margaret Talbot, built “imitation French chateaux, sprawling Spanish-style haciendas, columned replicas of stately plantation homes, Moorish castles with pointed arches.” Added to the air of unreality—many observers remarked that parts of Los Angeles looked like a movie set—some stores and restaurants were built to resemble the products they were selling. The original Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, for example, was constructed in the shape of a big brown derby. The soundtrack to the city was provided, Talbot observed, by the nonstop “swish-swish of sprinklers” that kept lawns green in this desert-by-the-sea. William Demarest—a fatherly figure who was known for not putting the make on female clients—was just what Jayne Wyman was looking for in an agent. 

Ronald Reagan was just what she was looking for in a husband: a consummate gentleman who would treat her respectfully. As she later said, he was someone she could truly trust. Demarest said that, from Jane’s perspective, Ronnie was “the knight on the white charger. . . the dream of true, perfect manhood.” That Reagan and Wyman were spending time together was mainly her doing. “She did the chasing, and doesn’t give a hoot who knows it,” Modern Screen magazine reported. “She was the aggressor, the intent pursuer, from the start,” Demarest confirmed. Although younger than Reagan, “she was far more worldly and experienced than he was.” They first met when she asked him to sit at her table in the Warner Brothers commissary—reportedly giving him “the full benefit of her big brown eyes.” “I liked Ronnie the first time I ever saw him,” she recalled. “‘He is no fop,’ I thought.” She tried to convince the Warner publicity department to fix them up only to be told that each of them needed to date bigger names. The romance finally blossomed when they were on location in San Diego making their first movie together in July and August 1938. 

The noted film critic Richard Schickel, in an astute appraisal of Reagan’s acting, wrote that he did “his famous line in Kings Row unimprovably—anguish and panic in his voice, in his facial expression, in his thrashing movements under the covers. Hard to ask for anything more from any actor.” Schickel added that Reagan’s shortcomings as an actor were more evident earlier in the movie, before the amputation, when his character was still “a careless womanizer and ne’er-do-well heir to a small fortune.” “At this stage of the movie Drake McHugh is not a nice guy, and Reagan is visibly uncomfortable, straining, in these passages,” Schickel noted. “He does not exhibit the born actor’s relish at playing a heel. Instead, he exhibits the born public figure’s discomfort at being mistaken for one. He has no enough technique to help him get under the character’s skin or to distract us from his own discomfort.” Being a nice guy himself, Reagan was only comfortable playing nice guys on the screen. Reagan’s inability or unwillingness to play parts far removed from his own personality would eventually help bring his Hollywood career to a premature and inglorious end. 

But in 1942 Reagan was still on the ascent in Hollywood. He received the best reviews of his career for Kings Row, and it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Dark Victory also was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture, but, like Kings Row, did not win any. The New Yorker wrote that watching Kings Row “will give you that rare glow that comes from seeing a job done crisply, competently, and with confidence.” Reagan, the magazine added, “capably breezes through the part of the town sport who becomes a victim of Dr. Gordon.” The Des Moines Tribune was even more effusive, pronouncing that “Des Moines’ own Dutch Reagan is swell as the rich kid gone to pot.” Once it was released in 1942, Kings Row catapulted the boy from Dixon onto the Hollywood A list. By the middle of 1941, a Gallup survey ranked Reagan among the top one hundred stars in the movie industry. A 1942 survey found him tied for seventy-fourth place with Laurence Olivier, and he was receiving more fan mail than any Warner Brothers actor except Errol Flynn. Reagan, a Warner executive wrote in an internal evaluation, was “a very talented artist who had started at a meager salary of $200 per week and rapidly developed in artistic ability and box office value until he was assigned to top productions . . . and was undoubtedly a star in his own right.” Those who would in later life denigrate him as merely a B-movie actor—an accusation that would generally be accompanied by a chuckle and a mention of Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)—were not quite being fair. For one brief, shining moment, before America’s entry into the war, Reagan had become an A-list star. Then, on December 7, 1941, came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The world would never be the same again—and neither would Ronald Reagan’s acting career. 

The Reagans had genuine financial concerns, but they were far removed from those of average Americans. They had just built a seven-room, so-called dream house in the Hollywood Hills modeled on one they had seen in This Thing Called Love, a 1940 romantic comedy with Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas: truly a case of life imitating art. It had a magnificent view of the city and cost $15,000—not a lot by movie-industry standards but five times more than the median American home at the time. (In 2022, the extensively remodeled house at 9137 Cordell Drive would sell for $70 million.) Wyman, a free spender in her single days, had been deeply in debt. Now Ron, a stickler for paying bills before they were due, insisted on putting them on saving half of what they earned. Taxes took another big chunk of their income: The top marginal tax rate for couples filing jointly in 1941 with an income between $90,000 and $100,000 was 83 percent. So money was not flowing with typical film-colony abandon even before Ron’s military service would cut his monthly pay from $6,660 to $250. Reagan’s answer to the question of whether the Communist party should be legal was painstakingly noncommittal: "As a citizen I would hesitate, or not like, to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent 170 years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party, and I think the Government is capable of proving that, if the proof is there, then that is another matter. I detest, I abhor the Communists’ philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest, but at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it." 

Reagan’s performance earned rave reviews. “Intelligent Ronald Reagan stole the show from his better known colleagues,” wrote a liberal columnist, Quentin Reynolds, adding, presciently, that the actor might “have a future beyond show business.” Ron was fascinated by politics, Jane bored by it. A glowing, but unintentionally revealing, profile in December 1946 reported Ron coming to the breakfast table eager to share the news of the world. “I’ve got news for you,” Jane pointedly replied. “I’m not interested.” The actress June Allyson, who was married to Reagan’s friend and fellow actor Dick Powell, later wrote that Jane “seemed upset with her husband’s obsession with politics”—and with his long-windedness. Don Siegel, who directed Reagan in Night unto Night, reported an even more scabrous put-down from Jane. One night, while they were all going to dinner together, Ron “spouted off endlessly” until Jane snapped at him: “Hey, ‘diarrhea-of-the-mouth,’ shut up! Maybe we can get in a word edgewise.” But, Siegel wrote, “Ron continued soliloquizing.” Shortly after the dour dinner with Ron on the Sunset Strip, Jane decided to head off for a vacation in New York—by herself. While there, she was tracked down by a gossip columnist. She told him that she was considering a separation from her husband: “There is no use in lying. I am not the happiest girl in the world.” At around the same time, she told a friend, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.” 

And it was true that Jane Wyman had trouble staying married. Having been married twice before, after divorcing Reagan she twice married and twice divorced the same man: a handsome studio composer and bandleader named Frederick Karger. After her second divorce from Karger in 1965, Wyman stayed single for the final forty-two years of her life. “Some women just aren’t the marrying kind—or anyway, not the permanently marrying kind,” she later said, “and I’m one of them.” “What they do to food is what we did to the American Indian,” Reagan wrote in a jocular letter of complaint to Jack Warner during his stay in London filming The Hasty Heart with Patricia Neal. “The average meal should go from ‘kitchen to can’ thus avoiding the use of a middleman.” The actresses he was seen with included Betty Underwood (said by a magazine to have “one of the six best figures in America”), Doris Day, Ann Sothern, Monica Lewis, Adele Jergens, Rhonda Fleming, and Ruth Roman. Edmund Morris later counted “at least sixteen different young and beautiful actresses” that he dated during this period. One of the few non-actresses he went out with was the witty gossip columnist Doris Lilly, who in 1951 published How to Marry a Millionaire, which became a hit movie starring Marilyn Monroe, and who would be cited as the model for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Many years later Lilly described Reagan as “truly the all-American boy, never a lothario,” and not a “come-on-strong type of man.” “He behaved himself beautifully,” she said. 

Piper Laurie: As filming progressed, Ronnie Reagan took an increasing interest in me. He began calling me into his dressing room when I passed the door. I was quite flattered by his attention. He’d invite me to sit down and ask how I was feeling about everything. Was I comfortable? Could he help me with anything? He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time, and sometimes he asked me to just sit there while he did guild work and I studied my script. Occasionally he would step into my dressing room, sit down, and chat. I was very shy at first but gradually our relationship seemed more like one I’d have with someone in my acting class. He was becoming quite a friend and was sympathetic about my frustrations with the script. He drove up the hill on one of the small streets off the Sunset Strip and parked in the carport behind the apartment he’d been living in since his divorce. We went up the back way very discreetly and into his apartment. I made a decision, when I said, “Yes, I’d like that very much,” that this would be my first love affair. When I thought about it later, I knew the reality was, I had picked him. And he gave me a beautiful pearl necklace which looked to have cost a pretty penny. At this moment the fact of my virginity seemed irrelevant, and I didn’t want to be coy. 

I knew I wanted to make love with him. I wanted to be completed by this wonderful man who clearly desired me. He would know what to do. The evening up to that point had been quite romantic. Ronnie was more than competent sexually. He was also a bit of a show-off. He made sure I was aware of the length of time he had been “ardent.” It was forty minutes. And he told me how much the condom pack cost. In all fairness, I suppose that just was to reassure me. The experience was a stunning revelation for me, to be so physically close to someone. So amazing to look up and see the familiar face and that naked expanse of chest above me. But more than a few times during intercourse, he said, “There’s something wrong with you? You should have had many orgasms by now—after all this time. You’ve got to see a doctor about your abnormality.” He used that word. “Maybe a doctor can find out which is your problem. There’s something wrong with you that you should fix.” I was no stranger to orgasms, having discovered this miracle of our bodies when I was a young girl. But it had been a secret activity, and I know now that the uninitiated need a trusting environment to blossom. I suppose I should have spelled out the mortifying fact of my virginity, but even now I still expect people I admire to know more than they really do. 

Ronnie took my hand as we walked through the beautiful tree-lined side streets of Chicago around the Ambassador East Hotel. Our conversation covered a lot of territory, including what I thought about our age difference. Apparently it troubled him that I was only about nine years older than his daughter Maureen. But he said not a word about the evening we had had together. We stopped under a streetlamp. He looked at me with that nice face and those warm flirty eyes, and I let him kiss me. Then he steered the conversation to the possibility of our being together. I told him I couldn’t possibly because I was dating someone else. I had been going to the Chez Paree where I was serenaded by the handsome, glorious-voiced Vic Damone. It was an awkward moment, he looked so disappointed and hurt. I was embarrassed to be turning him down and wanted to say something kind, so when we started walking again, I said truthfully, “I’m very honored that such a respected and admired person was my first lover.” He stopped quite suddenly when I said that, almost did a double take. There was a quizzical look on his face. Was it possible he still didn’t know? Even with the colorful evidence I had left behind? Perhaps at that moment he got it—perhaps. He was very quiet as we walked back to the hotel. I wondered what he was he thinking. Whatever it was seemed impenetrable, and I didn’t try to break through. He saw me to my door and looked at me so strangely as we said goodnight.

Reagan gave amnesty to over 3 million illegal immigrants. He paid reparations to Japanese Americans wrongly interned by FDR. He pulled the US out of a long recession. He laid the groundwork for strategic missile defense. He assisted in driving the Soviet Union to collapse. He publicly called out Gorbachev leading to civil rights reforms in Russia and the Baltics. He reassured our allies and NATO that the US could and would counter the Soviet Threat. He led the charge for nuclear arms control as part of his “nuclear free world” vision. He worked well with democrats in the Congress with most of his actions receiving bipartisan support. If you looked at the data, the number of patients in state mental hospitals had dropped by 90% by 1980, the year Reagan was elected. So that was out of Reagan's responsability. Another false myth is that some historians have attributed the collapse of union jobs to Reagan, but there were 16.45 million union workers in 1995, while it was 19.8 million in 1980. So it had fallen by 220,000 a year since 1980. But it had peaked at 20.2 million in 1978 and fallen to 19.8 million in just two years, meaning it was already falling by 200,000 a year before the 1980 election. In other words, labor unions were already shrinking (and at basically the same rate) before Reagan as after. In 1981, the average mortgage interest rate was 16.63%, and the average home cost $69k. In 1989, the average mortgage interest rate was 10.32% and the median home cost 119k. If you borrowed 60k in 1981, your mortgage payment was $837. If you borrowed 105k in 1989, your mortgage payment was $946. So mortgage payments went up 13%. But the average wage in 1980 was $12,500, while in 1989 it was $20,100. So while mortgages went up 13%, wages went up 60% in the same period. People do like their myths, though, and the data won't change anyone's minds. Back in 1980 there were only 13 billionaires in the USA. As of 1987, that number was 44. In 2024, it exceeds 700 billionaires. 

Reagan had a keen eye on who our actual enemy was and still is. He is probably spinning in his grave learning about how the GOP has turned into a party of Putin's appeasers. Reagan’s policies were right for the time, the problem was subsequent politicians not adjusting it with the times. No economic policy is meant to be kept in place forever. Monroe had an excellent tariff policy for his time; it was changed a few decades later because what worked in the 1820s didn’t make sense in the 1850s, yet that didn’t make Monroe’s tariff policy bad. When Reagan took office the national GDP was under 1 Trillion dollars. When he left, the national GDP was over 8 Trillion dollars. Democracy and capitalism swept the world. Third-world poverty began to disappear. The poverty that existed world-wide at that time no longer exists. The Soviet Union fell as a direct result of his presidency and the United States emerged soon after his time in office as the sole super-power in the world. 

Reagan rejected the notion that AIDS was a gay disease. “I don’t want Americans to think AIDS simply affects only certain groups. AIDS affects all of us. What our citizens must know is this: America faces a disease that is fatal and spreading. And this calls for urgency, not panic. It calls for compassion, not blame. And it calls for understanding, not ignorance.” He similarly rejected the moralistic finger-pointing that had characterized too much of the discussion of the disease. “Final judgment is up to God; our part is to ease the suffering and to find a cure. This is a battle against disease, not against our fellow Americans. We mustn’t allow those with the AIDS virus to suffer discrimination. It’s been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last four years, and including what we have in the budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS. So, this is a top priority with us.” Reagan defended his policy and sent his budget to Congress, including AIDS research as a “high priority” program. In the spring of 1987 Reagan announced the creation of a special commission to study AIDS and seek a cure. “AIDS is clearly one of the most serious health problems facing the world community, and our health care establishment is working overtime to find a cure,” he said. “To think we didn’t even know we had a disease until June of 1981, when five cases appeared in California. The AIDS virus itself was discovered in 1984. The blood test became available in 1985. A treatment drug, AZT, has been brought to market in record time, and others are coming. Work on a vaccine is now underway in many laboratories.” He explained that the federal government continued to expand its budget for AIDS research. “Spending on AIDS has been one of the fastest growing parts of the budget, and, ladies and gentlemen, it deserves to be.” Washington was also removing regulatory barriers to bringing new drugs to the market. 

As both California governor and president, Reagan's overall record was not particularly conservative. California’s state budgets grew as much under Gov. Reagan as they had under his Democratic predecessor, while he also liberalized abortion and no-fault divorce, strengthened gun controls, pursued conservationist environmental measures, and increased funding for state universities by 136 percent even while attacking them as hotbeds of radicalism. Federal spending rose nearly as fast during his presidency as it had under his governorship. Boot concludes that Reagan “practiced Keynesian, not supply-side, economics by financing an economic expansion with government borrowing.” Yet right-wingers “sensed that he was on their wavelength, and they took comfort from his words while ignoring many of his deeds.” In point of fact, Reagan was a pragmatist far more than an ideologue. He understood “the difference between campaigning and governing,” as well as the importance of appealing to voters who didn’t share his conservatism. His greatest successes came when he listened to the counsels of moderate advisers, including Nancy who had the insight into people’s characters that her husband lacked. 

Ronald Reagan wrote a letter to his son Michael on the eve of his wedding, saying: “Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till 3 A.M., the wife does know, and with that knowing some of the magic of this relationship disappears. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating... But if you truly love a woman, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary, or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors."

Max Boot: I think he was a better actor than some people give him credit for, and it's kind of interesting because Reagan, in some ways, had very little ego. I mean, you criticize his policies all day long, and he wouldn't really care one way or the other, but if you criticized his acting, then he became sensitive. He was actually very proud of his role as an actor. And the skills that he learned as an actor, he began to translate into politics in the 1950s, working for General Electric. That was really the job that saved his career after his movie days were over. He became the host of General Electric Theater on CBS, and he began touring the country and began speaking to all sorts of audiences. And that's really where he learned to do a stump speech, and he was writing his own speeches. His shooting was probably the most traumatic event of his presidency, but it was also, in some ways, the most uplifting. Reagan was undoubtedly courageous and heroic in the face of this terrible adversity where he almost died, and yet he was telling Nancy, "Honey, I forgot to duck." And when the public heard about that, that really cemented Reagan's bond with the public, a bond that would never really be broken. Today's Republican Party has moved very far to Reagan's right. Reagan certainly would not recognize Donald Trump, because Trump is, in many ways, the anti-Reagan. So, you can't imagine two presidents more different from each other than Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, even though they were the only two U.S. presidents who ever hosted a national TV show before assuming office.

One of Reagan’s senior aides believed that without Nancy, “Ronald Reagan never would have been elected to anything.” It's necessary to credit Reagan for being unlike most ideologues of the left or right in his readiness to “abandon the dogmas of a lifetime when it became evident they no longer applied to a changing world.” What most Americans remember about Reagan today, however, are his geniality, cheerfulness, optimism, humor and ability to speak to the public’s hopes as well as fears. Perhaps his ongoing high approval ratings among Democrats as well as Republicans also stem from the fact that, “his support for immigration, free trade, and alliances are as much a quaint relic of the past as his gentlemanly demeanor, willingness to compromise, and reluctance to attack opponents by name.” Nostalgia for Reagan underscores his irrelevance to today’s brutal politics. Ronald Reagan was the leader many Americans felt they needed at a time when they were looking for national restoration, and they may seek his like again. —Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024) by Max Boot

Ronald Reagan: His Life and Legend

Son of the Midwest, movie star, and mesmerizing politician―America’s fortieth president comes to three-dimensional life in this gripping and profoundly revisionist biography. In this “monumental and impressive” biography, Max Boot, the distinguished political columnist, illuminates the untold story of Ronald Reagan, revealing the man behind the mythology. Drawing on interviews with over one hundred of the fortieth president’s aides, friends, and family members, as well as thousands of newly available documents, Boot provides “the best biography of Ronald Reagan to date”. The story begins not in star-studded Hollywood but in the cradle of the Midwest, small-town Illinois, where Reagan was born in 1911 to Nelle Clyde Wilson, a devoted Disciples of Christ believer, and Jack Reagan, a struggling, alcoholic salesman. Max Boot vividly creates a portrait of a handsome young man, indeed a much-vaunted lifeguard, whose early successes mirrored those of Horatio Alger. Reagan’s 1980 presidential election augured a shift that continues into this century. Boot writes not as a partisan but as a historian seeking to set the story straight. He explains how Reagan was an ideologue but also a supreme pragmatist who signed pro-abortion and gun control bills as governor, cut deals with Democrats in both Sacramento and Washington, and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War. A master communicator, Reagan revived America’s spirits after the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. With its revelatory insights, Reagan: His Life and Legend is no apologia, depicting a man with a good-versus-evil worldview derived from his moralistic upbringing and Hollywood westerns. Source: amazon.com

From dusty small-town roots, to the glitter of Hollywood, and then on to commanding the world stage, REAGAN (2024) is a cinematic journey of a great man overcoming the odds. Told through the voice of Viktor Petrovich, a former KGB agent who followed Reagan's ascent, REAGAN captures the indomitable spirit of the American dream. Starring Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller and Jon Voight.

Some big names on the entertainment circuit regularly dropped by Nancy Davis’s East Lake Shore Drive apartment. Spencer Tracy, chaperoned by Katharine Hepburn, came to visit “so often,” Nancy recalled, “that he practically became a member of the family”—and often to dry out; Walter Huston and his wife, Nan, moved in while they were starring in Dodsworth; Helen Hayes was a regular, as was Colleen Moore, Mary Martin, and Lillian Gish; Carol Channing brought Eartha Kitt. “Jimmy Cagney was always there,” Nancy recalled. Mary Martin, a longtime patient of Nancy's step-father Dr. Loyal Davis’s, was rehearsing Lute Song, a Broadway musical with Yul Brynner. There was a small part—a Chinese handmaiden—that suited Nancy’s nascent talents. Three weeks into rehearsal, however, the director disagreed. John Houseman found Nancy’s acting skills “awkward and amateurish” for a top-drawer Broadway production. “I suggested to the producer that she was not physically convincing,” recalled Houseman, who had been hired after Nancy joined the cast. He was told to take it up with Mary Martin. Fire Nancy Davis?—not a chance, Martin argued. Her bad back took precedence, and she wasn’t about to alienate her precious doctor by sacking his step-daughter. 

On January 2, 1949, Nancy Davis got a call from her agent, informing her that “someone from Metro” had seen one of her TV appearances and suggested she fly out to Los Angeles for a screen test. Who that “someone” might be wasn’t a mystery. On and off, she had dated Benny Thau, MGM’s collegial vice president, who was said to have employed the practice of the casting couch. Though he was short, balding, and, at fifty-one, old enough to be her father, Nancy found in Thau an enthusiastic and supportive companion. No doubt his influence in Hollywood lent her countenance an attractive glow. However, despite an embarrassment of riches invested in her test, there was no heat on the screen. George Cukor was one of Hollywood’s A-list directors—MGM’s top director—who drew remarkable performances from his female stars. The scene Cukor chose for Nancy was from East Side, West Side, a high-priority studio project. He recruited hunky Howard Keel to read opposite her. It still didn’t add up to much. Cukor knew what a star looked like when he saw one. After watching a print of the finished test, “he told the studio Nancy had no talent.” In most cases, if a tastemaker of George Cukor’s esteem delivered such a verdict, the star-making machinery would have ground to a halt. But Thau had the power to veto the director’s opinion. 

On March 2, 1949, MGM announced that the studio had given a seven-year contract to Nancy Davis at a starting salary of $300 a week. She was twenty-eight years old (dropped down to a more marketable twenty-six on the official document). One of her professional goals was snagging an eligible bachelor from among Hollywood’s leading men. Six months later, Ronald Reagan separated himself from the pack. During her Hollywood career, Nancy Davis dated many actors, including Clark Gable, Robert Stack, and Peter Lawford; she later called Gable the nicest of the stars she had met after Reagan. Dick Powell had been instrumental in securing Ronald Reagan a seat on the board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Reagan later wote in his memoirs about Dick Powell, “I was one of the thousands who were drawn to this very kind man, and who would think of him as a best friend. Sometimes, our paths took us in different directions, and months would pass without either of us seeing the other. When we did meet again, it would be as if no interruption had occurred. I cannot recall Dick Powell ever saying an unkind word about anyone.” 

When Nancy Davis met Ronald Reagan on November 15, 1949, he had risen to president of the SAG. She had noticed that her name had appeared on the Hollywood blacklist. Davis sought Reagan's help to maintain her employment in Hollywood and for having her name removed from the list. Reagan informed her that she had been confused with another actress. The two began dating and their relationship was the subject of many gossip columns; one Hollywood press account described their nightclub-free times together as "the romance of a couple who have no vices."

On March 10, 1947, three days before the Academy Awards ceremony, the board of the Screen Actors Guild met in a hastily called session to resolve a thorny jurisdictional problem. Because of a newly enacted resolution that prohibited members with production interests from serving on the board, Robert Montgomery, its president, announced his resignation, along with Jimmy Cagney, Dick Powell, Franchot Tone, and John Garfield. Replacement officers were pressed into immediate service, along with a vote to name Montgomery’s successor. George Murphy and Gene Kelly were nominated from the floor. Gene Kelly rose and placed Ronnie’s name in contention. Ronnie, as it happened, was conspicuously absent. He was attending a gathering of the American Veterans Committee, a group that linked veterans to potential employers, unaware that a consequential summit was taking place. When the vote was tabulated, the outcome was decisive. William Holden called later that night with the results. Ronald Reagan had been elected president of the Screen Actors Guild. The news delighted Ronnie. Whatever burden SAG had caused him, whatever turmoil in its ranks, deep down he loved the politics. He was as proud of the role he had played in the guild’s evolution as of any movie he had ever made. 

The presidency of the Screen Actors Guild gave him the soapbox from which to launch an anticommunism campaign, and a faction of his membership was ready to ride sidekick. There had always been a predominantly conservative element at the top of the guild. Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, Ronald Colman, George Murphy and Adolphe Menjou, among others, were determined to oust the leftist influence that they said corrupted Hollywood and was a threat to American ideals. They belonged as well to the Motion Picture Alliance, whose members included Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, John Wayne, Ward Bond, Charles Coburn, and ZaSu Pitts. The MPA’s charter made no bones about its ultimate goal. “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals and crackpots,” it stated. “We pledge to fight any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.” The MPA set its sights on suspected sympathizers—“subversives,” as it labeled them. The Screen Actors Guild became a hotbed of infighting. On September 12, 1947, at a routine SAG board meeting, a proposal was raised that would require all SAG members to sign a loyalty oath. Ronnie felt it was self-defeating, and instead he proposed making the oath voluntary. It was passed after little debate. About the HUAC hearings, Reagan said: “It’s so simple. All you’ve got to do is just name a couple of names that have already been named.”

His divorce from Jane Wyman took Hollywood by surprise. “Such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me,” Ronnie later admitted. He had a more conventional outlook, the product of Midwestern expectations. In a town where marriage was the shakiest of propositions, the Reagan-Wyman union had seemed like a solid bet. It was almost as though the film community had a stake in its success. Friends like the Powells and the Hustons were disheartened by the news, but no one took it as badly as Ronnie. He was back in Eureka, Illinois, back as Dutch, for the weekend, visiting his old coach Ralph McKinzie and anointing the Pumpkin Festival queen, when the story broke in the local Illinois papers. It hit him, people said, “like a ton of bricks.” When he returned home, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons circled like a pair of vultures. Louella, his longtime advocate, picked at him first. No match for her meddling, Ronnie poured out his heart, unmindful that the seal of the confessional didn’t apply. Indiscreetly, he admitted that Jane had told him she still loved him but was no longer in love with him. That distinction seemed beyond his grasp. Even so, he was willing to give her plenty of space, hoping it would reignite a flame. “Right now, Jane needs very much to have a fling,” he said. “And I intend to let her have it. She is sick and nervous and not herself.” Hedda Hopper piled on in a subsequent Modern Screen column that aired all the couple’s private affairs.

As early as 1940, with the world on the brink of war, Dick Powell had tried persuading Ronald Reagan to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. The likelihood of that happening, at the time, was low. Reagan's flag was still firmly planted in Democratic soil, and switching parties was unthinkable. It was a nonstarter in 1950 when someone put his name up as a candidate for mayor of Hollywood, an honorary position. That left a cheesy, tinsel aftertaste. Local Democrats had asked him to run for Congress in 1952. Not to be outdone, that same year, Holmes Tuttle, an influential Republican contributor and prominent L.A. businessman, proposed that Reagan seek a Senate seat. Reagan loved Roosevelt’s view that common people can have a vision that included all social classes for the good of the country. Reagan had even supported the election of Harry Truman, whom he admired. But, lately, he’d become disillusioned with the Democratic Party and its penchant toward “encroaching government control.” 

Reagan deplored “the problems of centralizing power in Washington,” which he felt took inalienable rights and freedoms away from citizens. To him, it seemed the party’s liberal faction also went to great lengths to defend the shady Hollywood clique that had romanticized and dabbled in communism. All this served to redirect Reagan’s political antennae. His closest friends—Dick Powell, Bill Holden, Robert Taylor and Bob Cummings—were steadfast Republicans who had tirelessly drawn him to their side. And he’d gone for Ike in 1952, the first time Reagan had ever voted for a Republican candidate. From the 1970s on, the movies had turned away from the old studio era. By the time he took office as President of the USA, the Hollywood dream factory had turned its gaze to stories of anti-heroes, moral ambiguity, cruelty, and violence. Ronald Reagan never liked those movies. The sex scenes embarrassed him, too. On the national stage, he tried to project the old-style moral certainty of the classics he loved. 

The key to Reagan’s success, like that to Roosevelt’s, was his ability to restore Americans’ faith in their country. Reagan was called the “great communicator” with reason. He was the most persuasive political speaker since Roosevelt and Kennedy, combining conviction, focus, and humor in a manner none of his contemporaries could approach. Reagan’s critics often dismissed the role of conviction in his persuasiveness; they attributed his speaking skill to his training as an actor. But this was exactly wrong. Reagan wasn’t acting when he spoke; his rhetorical power rested on his wholehearted belief in all the wonderful things he said about the United States and the American people, about their brave past and their brilliant future. He believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about their country, and he made them believe it too. Reagan told stories and jokes better than any president since Lincoln. He understood the disarming power of humor: that getting an audience to laugh with you is halfway to getting them to agree with you. He was not a warm person, but he seemed to be, which in politics is more important. Many people loathed his policies, but almost no one disliked him personally. 

Democratic elections are, at their most basic level, popularity contests, and Reagan knew how to be popular. Like Roosevelt and other successful presidents, he realized that progress comes in pieces. If he got four-fifths of his ask in a negotiation, he took it and ran. He knew he could return for the rest. Reagan’s timing—some called it his luck—was no less essential to his success than his ability. “I know in my heart that man is good,” Reagan had said at the dedication of his library. “That what is right will always eventually triumph.” These lines of the Reagan creed were etched over his grave at the Reagan Library. But the closing words of his poignant farewell to the American people were the ones that were better remembered, that captured the belief that made him irresistible to so many. The shadow of forgetfulness was growing long across his path, yet his optimism and faith in his country remained undiminished as he wrote, “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” —Sources: "Reagan: The Life" (2015) by Henry William Brands and "Ronald Reagan: An American Journey" (2018) by Bob Spitz

10th Anniversary at Lake Powell: June Allyson & Dick Powell (Modern Screen)

The Powell family sets out for an angling afternoon. The Powells have a lake right on their property so all they have to do is roll out of bed and make with the lines and sinkers. The lake is well stocked with bass and blue gill, contributed by the government as insect insurance, plus goldfish contributed by the Powells. Lake Powell is teeming with finny folks.

The privacy of Lake Powell suits June and Dick just fine because they’ve had more than their share of prying eyes over ten years of marriage. The Powells have had some troubles and arguments, whether more or less than any other Hollywood couple they wouldn’t be telling. “I can say this, though,” Dick remarks wryly, “both of us have taken our marital obligations and our try at happiness with considerable and determined seriousness. Ten years, two children and intact marriage vows add up to quite a respectable achievement. In some cases, I think it even surpasses that of the few writers who have chosen to throw harpoons in our direction.” Counting’ their blessings on this their tenth year of marital bliss, June and Dick didn’t forget Lake Powell. The Powells’ three-quarter acres of rippling, sky-blue water has been a source of joy and contentment for the whole family. 

Sportsman Dick instructs his willing wife in the fine art of casting. “See . . . it’s easy, all in the wrist . . . just sort of flick the line out over the water and wait for the fish to bite.”

Ricky has even made friends with a fish. He runs to the edge of the water, night and morning, with bread crumbs. He calls and whistles and in a few moments up swims a little black fish about ten inches long. Then, little Bosco, his name, turns and swims away. June and Dick swear they’ve seen it happen. Dick Powell is a truly kind man, as indicated by his casual reference to the annual rash of stories to the effect that he and June might not be long for this domestic world. They never quite get used to the attacks, but the nearest Dick has come to wrath on the subject was just after he and June had returned from their “tenth honeymoon,” spent aboard a yacht in Fourth of July at Cove off Catalina Island. A columnist asked how he and June were doing marriage-wise. “Fine,” Dick replied. “Just fine!”

Jubilant June shows off a ring that Dick gave her as a present for their tenth anniversary.

“But,” interjected the reporter, with a smirk, “what about tomorrow?” “Who knows about tomorrow?” Dick responded, “but as long as you’re making a sardonic approach, let me tell you about a friend of mine. He was getting along perfectly with his wife one day, and the next morning...” “Yes,” the reporter broke in, sensing a bit of gossip, “what happened then?” “Nothing happened, not much,” Dick replied, before walking away. “He just got out of bed the next morning and fell out of an open window. Now tell me, how’ll things be with you tomorrow?” There has been a big change in the life of June and Dick, though, in recent weeks. That anniversary celebration aboard a chartered yacht was the most fun they’ve had since Dick owned his own boat, the Santana. “I sold the Santana,” he says, “because it was so expensive to keep up, and only a real rich guy like Humphrey Bogart could afford yachting that often.”

June and Dick are silent about the week they spent to celebrate the beginning of their eleventh year of marriage. “I had quite a time getting June to go, in the first place,” he recalled. “June is a girl who hates to go anywhere, but when she gets there, she always hates to leave. When it came time to weigh anchor, her excuse was, ‘Hadn’t we better stay awhile longer? It’s liable to be rough sea on the way back!’ ” But the Powells had to come home, for a new and important chapter was about to begin in their lives, marked by Dick’s decision to produce and direct the remake of It Happened One Night. They had worked together as actor and actress before, but June had never worked for Dick under his direction. She had some surprises in store. For one thing, he looked at her critically one day, then said, “We’re going to change your make-up.”

 

June grinned and retorted, “Yes, boss.” For years she’d been made up by the all-time Hollywood experts. Dick felt she just didn’t come alive under that treatment. After long hours of experimentation with a new type of make-up, tests showed that June blossomed like a rose. She admitted that she was glad Dick has been so persistent, but she was really worried when he went after her hair styling. That very nearly brought on an argument of the type any director can have when a big star backs up and puts her foot down. But when Dick came home with some sketches, which showed her with a sort of “modified Claudette Colbert” hair do, she surrendered. And these changes went back to the big shift of June's featured part in Best Foot Forward in 1943. Allyson had a rocky start in Tinsel Town and, after playing supporting roles, was nearly dropped by MGM. But very wise counsel from her future husband Dick Powell led to her taking the “plain Jane” sister lead in Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), which was a big hit and made her a star.

With location scenes in San Diego and Phoenix now finished and shooting going on apace at Columbia studios for interiors, the rushes indicate that Dick Powell hasn’t done wrong by the new June Allyson. Rumor has it Dick wanted a minimum of kissing, since he was afraid his wife would fall in love with Jack Lemmon like her last leading man. As for You Can't Run Away from It, completely new in color and wide screen, plus the hit title song and other musical numbers by Johnny Mercer and Gene De Paul, the word is out that the remake of this famous picture is liable to duplicate if not exceed the roaring success of Oklahoma! June said: “No one could have done it but Dick.” Dick says: “No one could have done it without June.” In the serious parts, June Allyson is just as serious as Claudette Colbert, but her Ellie is less refined; she is believable as a frustrated Texas girl as opposed to a New York heiress. Ellie is funnier in the remake, and June’s brilliant comedic timing and humorous antics make her so. And on a recent evening when Mr. Powell came home, he said to Mrs. Powell, “We’ve been working pretty hard. Let’s take a trip somewhere.” Mrs. Powell said “Oh, now, Richard, do we have to—you know how I hate to travel,” replied in jest. “Hear, honey. We’ve never been to Europe, or Timbuktoo for that matter. You name the place and let’s go!” And they probably will. —Modern Screen magazine (January 1956)

The hypnotic sensibility of Taxi Driver (1976)

The hypnotic sensibility of Taxi Driver attempts to incubate the viewer in a limbo state between sleeping and waking. Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, cited the assassination attempt of Arthur Bremer as inspiration for Travis’s destructive ambition. He also drew from Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground, where an isolated and bitter narrator delivers rambling monologues similar to Travis’s diary entries. “All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people,” writes Travis Bickle in his diary. Many artists process their traumatic experiences through writing, a sort of self-therapy. Screenwriter Paul Schrader’s life had some parallels with Travis Bickle's. “Life dealt me a few blows, and I found myself in a dark place. So I realized I had to turn to fiction to get out of this place. I had to create this character, or else I was going to become him,” Schrader said in an interview at the TIFF in 2019. “I was out of work; I was in debt. I fell into a period of isolation, living more or less in my car. A grim time. And out of isolation came Taxi Driver,” Schrader said in 1992. “I was writing fairly soon for LA Free Press, which was the alternative paper. I got involved in anti-war protests at UCLA, and I got arrested. So all of a sudden I was in this world that’s not who I was. In reflection I think the origins of that character come from the origins of that dislocation.” 

Travis Bickle suffers from a similar existential crisis as Schrader, his catalyst being the Vietnam War. His character study is unequivocally about a man's loneliness. In the original script, it begins with Thomas Wolfe’s poem God’s Lonely Man. The main reason why Travis is a misanthrope is because he forces a negative mindset upon himself. He forces himself to bear witness to the most miserable parts of humanity, and sometimes it seems Travis only sees the bad side around him. Travis’s cab is the symbol for Travis’s isolation, drifting through the streets, watching the people through his adjusted rearview and the rain-drenched windows. He puts Palantine stickers all over his apartment. Why? Simply because Betsy is a political supporter of him. His whole courtship with Betsy is based around this notion that Travis is desperate to fit in, to re-assimilate himself into a normal life after his time in Vietnam. Taxi Driver is, at its heart, about Travis’s relationship with two women, whether it be the sexualized world of Iris or the politicized world of Betsy. Betsy is introduced to the audience in an angelic manner, as a woman who seems unattainable. Travis remarks on this in one of his first journal entries, saying “they cannot touch her.” Travis only looks at her from afar. After Betsy rejects him romantically, Travis is incapable of facing Betsy's dismissivenes objectively, telling her with fury: “You’re in hell, and you’re going to die in hell like the rest of them. You’re like the rest of them.” 

Travis expresses this frustration early in the film, ironically to Palantine: “I think that the President should just clean up the whole mess here; you should just flush it right down the f***ing toilet.” Palantine’s reaction is to feed him a political line to flex his personality: “Well, uh, I think I know what you mean, Travis, but it’s not going to be easy. We’re going to have to make some radical changes.” Travis decides that he must defeat Sport and Palantine in this westernized battle in order to give his life a sense of purpose. In a 1976 interview with Martin Scorsese by Roger Ebert, Ebert: “In Taxi Driver, the hero can’t relate to the women at all.” Scorsese: “I don't see it that way. I think he relates to Iris. But that takes him to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can protect a woman and kill another man. This guy shows that kind of thinking, shows the kind of problems some men have. You’ve been raised to worship women, but you don’t know how to approach them on a sexual level. The girl he falls for, Betsy,   it’s really important that she’s a blue-eyed blonde goddess.” Pity might lead to self-sympathy, which Travis finds unacceptable, so he's projecting his merciless self-criticism onto his bleak and unwelcoming environment. And it is something he is actively inflicting to himself.

That's why Travis reacts so harshly and compulsively to Betsy's rejection, he can't accept her reasoning on face value. He's making these desperate attempts for connection when he is at such an absurdly low point. When he implies he wants to be normal, he's coming from a place of isolation that he probably can't escape without help. In the same interview with Roger Ebert in 1976, Schrader said, “He goes from a goddess to a child goddess. The teenage prostitute he’s trying to rescue — she’s unapproachable, too, for him.” In Travis’s mind, Betsy and Iris have become symbols of status and purity. Especially Iris, whom he wants to protect and send her back home. But also, his actions are larger attempts to display his masculinity towards the aggressors/rivals in his life. Because he has been romantically rejected by Betsy, he resorts to expressing his masculinity in a psychosexual form of violence. And directly in front of Iris, Travis tries to kill himself, but he is out of bullets and he fails. The fact he was going to kill himself in front of Iris shows that Travis convinced himself that he was going to die with a purpose. Iris might symbolize America's endangered soul and Travis is its patriotic, dark avenger, because in his delusional way he wants to save America, irregardless of New York's rotten core.

Pauline Kael's review on The New Yorker: Taxi Driver has a relentless movement. Travis has got to find relief. It’s a two-character study—Travis versus New York. As Scorsese has designed the film, the city never lets you off the hook. There’s no grace, no compassion in the artificially lighted atmosphere. The neon reds, the vapors that shoot up from the streets, the dilapidation all get to you the way they get to Travis. He is desperately sick, but he’s the only one who tries to save a young hooker, Iris (Jodie Foster); the argument he invokes is that she belongs with her family and in school—the secure values from his own past that are of no help to him now. Some mechanism of adaptation is missing in Travis; the details aren’t filled in—just the indications of a strict religious background, and a scar on his back, suggesting a combat wound. The city world presses in on him, yet it’s also remote, because Travis is so disaffected that he isn’t always quite there. We perceive the city as he does, and it’s so scummy and malign we get the feel of his alienation. Scorsese’s New York is the big city of the thrillers he feasted his imagination on—but at a later stage of decay. 

The street vapors become ghostly; Sport romancing Iris leads her into a hypnotic dance; the porno theatres are like mortuaries; the congested traffic is macabre. And this Hell is always in movement. Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness—he’s reached down into his own anomie. Violence is Travis’s only means of expressing himself. He has not been able to hurdle the barriers to being seen and felt. When he blasts through, it’s his only way of telling the city that he’s there. And given his ascetic loneliness, it’s the only real orgasm he can have. The violence is so threatening precisely because it’s cathartic for Travis. And it’s a real slap in the face when we see Travis at the end looking pacified. He’s got the rage out of his system—for the moment, at least—and he’s back at work, picking up passengers in front of the St. Regis. It’s not that he’s cured but that the city is crazier than he is. —The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2011)

Liberals are not afraid of revolution. But liberals will remain reluctant revolutionaries. It is one reason why the American Revolution went so much better than the French one. What is liberalism, then? A hatred of cruelty. An instinct about human conduct rooted in a rueful admission of our own fallibility and of the inadequacy of our minds to be right frequently enough to act autocratically. A belief that the sympathy that binds human society together can disconnect us from our clannish and suspicious past. A program for permanent reform based on reason. The opposite of humanism is fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Liberalism is an evolving political practice that makes the case for the necessity and possibility of (imperfectly) egalitarian social reform and ever greater tolerance of human difference through reasoned and unimpeded demonstration and debate. The contemporary left can sometimes seem to have an insufficient respect for the fragility of the very same liberal institutions that allow its views to be broadcast without impediments. Marxists called this “heightening the contradictions” of the system. But no good has ever come from heightening these contradictions. All that happens is that the institutions get weaker, and authoritarians become stronger in the weakened spaces. There’s really an awful lot of stuff about life now known that once was not. Whenever we look at how the big problems got solved, it was rarely a big idea that solved them. 

It was the intercession of a thousand small sanities. Skepticism, constant inquiry, fallibilism, self-doubt—these don’t mean not knowing. They mean knowing more all the time. Liberal cities and states are the tiny volcanic islands risen on a vast historical sea of tyranny. And that fight will never end. Liberalism is the work of a thousand small sanities communicated to a million sometimes eager and more often reluctant minds. That’s the work of liberalism, and even if the worst happens, as it may, it is work that won’t stop, can’t stop, because it is also the real work of being human—all those enforced acts of empathy, where we had to make bargains in the company of people we couldn’t stand—people fundamentally unlike yourself, in order to live at peace. —"A Thousand Small Sanities" (2019) by Adam Gopnik