The astute political philosophies of Judy Holliday and John Wayne

Take a moment to read Norm Sibum's excellent morning post. A segment:

Judy Holliday’s father was a socialist, her mother a classical pianist. For all the dumb blonde roles Ms Holliday played back in the 50s, she was likely a genius, above-average bright at least, as Jack Lemmon attested, and that it “took a lot of smarts to play dumb blondes”. That she survived an encounter (she played to the cheap seats) with one of those McCarthy Senate hearings designed to rid Hollywood of anything to the left of Genghis Khan. I bring this up because I will not bring up what boots it now as is a few orders of magnitude worse, given the purges and the treasure chest thrown at the presidential Praetorian Guard, “retribution” the encampment’s password....

Holliday with William Holden and Broderick Crawford, Born Yesterday (1950)

Squeaky voice and dimples aside, she did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to putting across the agonies and the occasional ecstasy of getting by in the American Dream.

Contemporaneous to the 1950s' Senate hearings were the crucibles of HUAC. Unable to find YouTube footage of Holliday's testimony at the former — she brilliantly evaded the committee's censure and loss of career by reprising her "dumb blonde" act; the Senate committee was too dumb to catch on — I did come across a trailer for John Wayne's 1952 propaganda film for the House committee, Big Jim McClain.

In the clip, what fascinates more than HUAC's performative Americanism begins with Wayne/McClain's melodramatic and risibly paradoxic homily at 01:14 and ends at 01:28. In a mere 14 seconds the character identifies with magnificent precision what the 1950s loyalty-dogging crusaders and Trump-regime crackpots' millions of camp followers were, and are, too dumb to understand.

You said it, John.

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