Your 100 Best Conservative Movies

EIGHTEEN months ago, “The 100 Best Conservative Movies” was a big hit with NR readers, inspiring an outpouring of their own film favorites. The following new list is drawn mainly from these suggestions with a few additions. Once again, many films come from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. If you want to understand the meaning of “Victorian virtues,” in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s phrase (as distinguished from “modern values”), these movies are the place to start. Their creators often were children of the Victorian age. They grew up with convictions like faith, family, thrift, self-restraint, and patriotism, long before the “demoralization” (Miss Himmelfarb again) of society and mass culture by material affluence, radical ideology, and cynical, corporate commercialism. But lately there are some hopeful signs of a return to these virtues—in films like Apollo 13, which celebrates American know-how, or the three new Jane Austen adaptations, which subtly endorse traditional manners and morals. So much for trends in film history. Now to Your 100 Best Conservative Movies.

Most Popular Conservative Movies Omitted from the Previous List: Patton (1970). This film makes a calculated appeal to anti-war liberals as well as to conservatives. But there’s no doubt about George C. Scott’s riveting portrayal of our greatest World War II army commander. It’s a performance that sweeps away all those liberal theories that the way to fight a war is by controlled escalation or “sending signals.”

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Spencer Warren

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EIGHTEEN months ago, “The 100 Best Conservative Movies” was a big hit with NR readers, inspiring an outpouring of their own film favorites. The following new list is drawn mainly from these suggestions with a few additions. Once again, many films come from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. If you want to understand the meaning of “Victorian virtues,” in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s phrase (as distinguished from “modern values”), these movies are the place to start. Their creators often were children of the Victorian age. They grew up with convictions like faith, family, thrift, self-restraint, and patriotism, long before the “demoralization” (Miss Himmelfarb again) of society and mass culture by material affluence, radical ideology, and cynical, corporate commercialism. But lately there are some hopeful signs of a return to these virtues—in films like Apollo 13, which celebrates American know-how, or the three new Jane Austen adaptations, which subtly endorse traditional manners and morals. So much for trends in film history. Now to Your 100 Best Conservative Movies.

Most Popular Conservative Movies Omitted from the Previous List: Patton (1970). This film makes a calculated appeal to anti-war liberals as well as to conservatives. But there’s no doubt about George C. Scott’s riveting portrayal of our greatest World War II army commander. It’s a performance that sweeps away all those liberal theories that the way to fight a war is by controlled escalation or “sending signals.”