So apparently Bill O’Reilly has decided to boycott Sean Penn movies. He recognizes that Penn is a great actor but doesn’t like the man’s politics, and so he has decided to protest with his dollars, as is his right.
It’s also completely childish.
Several years back, I did the same thing. Except for me, it was John Wayne who was to be shunned. A sometimes strident right-winger who made movies like The Green Berets, I decided that the man was an ignoramus and could safely be ignored. I went on like that for years. (I wasn’t so crazy about Clint Eastwood, either, for exactly the same reasons, and stayed away from his films as well. Dirty Harry? Please.)
(There was one exception made: The Quiet Man. But that’s because the movie was set in Ireland and made by the great John Ford, so I rationalized the exception by saying it was an atypical movie more about Ford than Wayne, and in it Wayne played a man desperate for peace after a lifetime of fighting. Plus it had Maureen O’Hara and her streaming red hair, and who could resist that?)
At the same time, I vociferously stood up for Jane Fonda’s right to speak out. And Vanessa Redgrave’s. Even though I didn’t always agree with them, damn it all, surely they had the right to speak their mind like anyone else! And yet never once during that time did I stop to question my own hypocrisy.
And then I saw The Searchers. Another John Ford film, and a truly great movie. At this point I had a dilemma: in order to catch up on the ouvre of John Ford, I was going to have to watch a lot of John Wayne films. What to do? What to do? (Then I discovered that Ford was himself pretty right-wing. Curses!)
And I thought, You know, Wayne gave a pretty damn great performance in The Searchers. Can it be possible that I’ve been, o horror at the thought, a bit unfair to the man? I watched Stagecoach, with that brilliant zoom-in on Wayne’s first appearance that made him an instant icon. I began to appreciate his incredible physicality (no one else, ever, has been able to walk like that), and I began to find levels to his performances that I’d never have been willing to grant before. And Fort Apache followed, also a truly great film. And Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with one of my favorites, Jimmy Stewart. (Another dilemma: how could I reconcile the fact that I loved Jimmy Stewart but that he was great friends with both John Wayne and Ronald Reagan?)
(I even watched Dirty Harry, and by gum, it’s pretty damn entertaining. Plus of course there was Unforgiven, which in a stroke turned me around on Clint Eastwood--and which Bill O’Reilly claims is one of his favorite movies. Mine, too--see, there is room for agreement here1)
I now knew for sure that by denying John Wayne I had been denying myself an awful lot of good movies. But what about the Wayne flicks that weren’t directed by John Ford? The Shootist answered that question as well. John Wayne was a terrific actor, and I’ve had hours of pleasure and edification catching up on his movies for the last couple of years. People can have whatever opinions they want, and they can say what they want no matter what those opinions may be. And I can choose to listen or not to listen. It’s fine, I’m an adult, I can handle it.
And so we come back around to Bill O’Reilly, who is older than me and really ought to have figured this out by now. He says he’s a movie guy, he loves watching movies, and he also says he realizes Sean Penn is a great actor. So I can only say to him, Grow up already!
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