Barbara Stanwyck

As she was in the 1944 movie ‘Double Indemnity’ with Fred MCMurray-that ankle bracelet; those eyes; that figure!-wow!

why do we venerate the Fighter pilot

The great Victorian poet, Mathew Arnold gives us a clue why in his poem ‘Sohrab and Rostrum’-‘Dim is the rumour of a common fight-
But of single combat fame speaks clear,’
Equally Irish poet WB Yeats when in his poem-‘An Irish Airman Forsees his Death’ he wrote; ‘A lonely impulse of delight
Drove me to that tumult in the skies’

‘Whisky Galore’ about the wreck of SS Politician’ a ship loaded with our Scottish national drink whiskey which in 1941 was wrecked off the Hebrides islands in North-Western Scotland.
The film was about the islanders plundering the whisky cargo and maintaining a conspiracy of silence to thwart HM Customs.

Arthur-Shostakovich, Wow!

Arthur, in 1953, when I was only 11 years old, my musical vistas were confined to Frankie Laine singing ‘Jezebel’ and the dance band-jazz music my parents used when teaching ballroom dancing and my mother’s Gigli opera records.
I didn’t discover Shostakovich until much later but I didn’t know that he did the music for the “Fall of Berlin’ and I haven’t seen the movie since 1953 when I watched it in the now, long vanished, Lyceum cinema in Edinburgh’s Slateford Road.
I have seen all the classic Eisenstein clips-the steps at Odessa the Teutonic knights sequence in Nevsky and of course, Eisenstein’s movies were classic cinema mixed with propaganda but to me, propaganda in a more palatable form than than the Stalinist excesses of ‘The Fall of Berlin’.

worst film/Ink

Yes Ink-many of the American films and British films of my childhood did have a strong propaganda element as you suggest. But at least with Richard Widmark in the ‘Halls of Montezuma’ my childhood buddies and I were able to exit the cinema singing the Marine Corps Hymn-which was much easier than trying to master the ditty -‘Oh when can I meet my Natasha and her Red communal farm tractor down on the Collectivel farm again thanks to omnipotent Comrade Stalin’ which was the closing song in the ‘Fall of Berlin’
Nor could I relate to the Cossacks on the Reichstag steps in the closing credits singing:
‘How you gonna keep us down in the Steppes now we have seen gay Berlin?

worst film? The Fall of Berlin

In 1953 aged just 11 I watched a Russian war film which was made just before that monster Stalin had kicked the bucket in March 1953.
Suprisingly the British ABC cinema chain had given this movie-The Fall of Berlin’ a general release but even though I was only 11 I knew propaganda when I saw it.
This movie featured Uncle Joe in a shimmering white tunic promising Nikolai that he would personally direct the whole Voronzeh front to look for his Natasha, who earlier had had to draw lots as to whether she would fall for Nikolai or her communal farm tractor(this was Socialist realism don’t forget.)
Funnily enough some of the battle scenes-ie the storming of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide in the bunker were quite well done, but overall it was Soviet Stalinist horse manure. Enough to cover the steppes many times over!.

Meeting somebody famous

I spent an hour in a Glasgow hotel room with Mike Tyson in June 2000 and found him to be quite human.Years ago I worked as a stagehand in a famous Edinburgh theatre and met(in no particular order)Jane Asher:John Geilgud:John Gregson:Jack Hawkins’Evelyn Laye; I also played as kid with a future British heavyweight boxing champion who spent part of his childhood in the same Edinburgh district as I grew up in(He also beat Muhammad Ali’s kid brother at Madison Square Garden in 1971.

Ani-Americanism is racism

You dear benighted Star spangled boy!-as a Scot I am amazed that you think we-as United Kingdom citizens are anti-American when your National parks-Yosemite et al were founded by a Scot from Dunbar East Lothian, John Muir.Your great Princeton University was founded by Scottish divine John Witherspoon:your dollar sign thus $ was invented by John Bayne of Saint Andrews, Scotland , subsequent to his emigrating to Philadelphia(he was a Scottish printer)the people who founded and own the magazine you quote-Forbes- are immensley proud of their Scottish roots;the first teaching hospital in New York in 1772 was-brick-for brick a facsimile of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary;the man who gave you your Carnegie Hall in New York was a Fifer from Dunfermline called Andrew Carnegie: two thirds of all the best cattle ranches in Texas in 1889 were bankrolled by a Dundee, Scotland, savings and investment company.Two of your greatest soldiers-George S.Patton and Douglas MCArthur had impeccable Scottish ancestry-Patton’s kin came from Mauchline, Ayrshire, and McArthur’s ancestors from Glasgow; as did George Armstrong Custer forebears who came to the US from the Orkneys-heck 15 0f your Presidents had Scottish blood so hate you guys we Scots wouldn’t hate a country we did so much to build.
PS -ON my last visit to New York I stepped into a church near Wall Street dating back to colonial times and ther was wall plaque commemorating one of the church’s earliest pastors-who came from Kilmarnock, Scotland-so listen Mac! -hate America! -we Scots gifted so much of it to you. Your famed Pinkerton Detective Agency was founded by Alan Pinkerton who came from Glasgow-no not Glasgow, Indiana, but Glasgow, Scotland