January 2011

Marlon Brando changed American acting and became enduringly famous astonishingly fast. Just four years encompass nearly all his career-defining roles: Stanley Kowalski in the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); the Mexican peasant revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952); the alienated but noble-souled biker gang leader in The Wild One (1953); and, of course, his Oscar-winning Terry Malloy, who “coulda been a contender” in On the Waterfront (1954).

Except for his Don Corleone in The Godfather nearly two decades later, almost all of Brando’s remaining acting career was a bewildering series of false starts, dead ends, and near misses. No other great American actor has appeared in so few films or so many outright bad ones.

Before Montana had a functioning legal system, it had a functioning extralegal system—a private army of vigilantes who in the early 1860s hanged 21 troublemakers, even including a sheriff who apparently found time on the side to oversee a string of stagecoach and saloon robberies. The vigilantes were so widely respected that when someone was strung up extrajudicially in the far tamer 1880s, a newspaper editor could nostalgically reflect, “We do not object so much to a decent, orderly lynching.” Even today Montana Highway Patrol officers wear shoulder patches bearing the cryptic message “3-7-77,” which the vigilantes posted to scare wrongdoers into exile. Frederick Allen, the author of histories of Coca-Cola and modern Atlanta (and no relation to the managing editor of this magazine), tells the story in A Decent, Orderly Lynching (University of Oklahoma Press, $34.95), a vivid look at an especially wild moment in the Wild West.

For years this handsome scene of maritime action in the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine ( www.penobscotmarinemuseum.org ), bore the information: “Two brigs engaging during the War of 1812.” Recent research, however, has revealed that it is of a far rarer subject: The ship in the foreground is a slaver.

The rendering shows one of the Royal Navy’s brigs in hot pursuit of a Baltimore clipper-style brig. The painting, bought in Britain, came to the museum in 1962 with no information other than the artist’s name, E. Poulson. The slaver has the raked masts and the sizable rig developed in Baltimore clipper ships during the War of 1812 and popular for decades afterward among owners who needed speed. This particular brig has a figurehead, possibly a witch, that may someday lead to identifying the ship.

November 11, 1954 In a letter to The Reporter magazine, Albert Einstein says that if he were young again, he would become “a plumber or a peddler.” Einstein’s remarks are a response to increased government regulation and control of scientists, especially the recent denial of security clearance to J. Robert Oppenheimer, former director of the Manhattan Project.

November 27, 1954 Alger Hiss, a former State Department official who passed government secrets to the Soviet Union, is released from prison after serving 44 months for perjury.

December 2, 1954 President Eisenhower warns conservative Republicans that the party must adopt a progressive course or risk losing its influence in the United States.

On December 2, 1954, by a majority of 67 to 22, the U.S. Senate voted to condemn Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, for conduct “contrary to senatorial ethics.” The act brought to a close a national drama lasting nearly five years, during which McCarthy had made reckless and far-reaching accusations of Communist influence in just about every area of American life.

In 1950, when McCarthy suddenly came to prominence, most Americans were deeply worried by Communism, a fear reinforced almost daily by world events. Earlier exposures of Communist agents in and out of the government made McCarthy’s allegations sound plausible, and, although his numbers and details kept changing, the senator was a master at dredging up fresh outrages. Some of the people he accused were genuinely guilty, but eventually, his highhandedness, his carelessness with facts, his habit of making charges based on little or no evidence, and the crudeness and monotony of his tactics turned many of his early supporters against him.

This is a journalist’s list. My reading (and knowledge) is greatly influenced by the events of the day, the time, the era. My reading and my work are often one and the same. That is one of the best things about being a writer, but it may not be ideal for list-making. This list is, I emphasize, not of the best books of the past 30 years, though many of these volumes might be considered for such a list. Some of these works were selected because of their immediate impact. Perhaps too often, the more popular book is more important than the better book for the simple reason that more people read it at the time. In all, I know an impossible assignment when I see one. There are gaps I can’t fill; the most valuable end-of-the-Cold War writing, for example, is about the Soviet Union, rather than the United States. I have listed my choices by their year of publication, beginning with the earliest, which were written quite a while ago.

How does one choose a list of great historical films? Is the emphasis on great or historical? And how far should one be willing to compromise with either? Fortunately, Hollywood has simplified the task by producing few films that can reasonably be called great or historically accurate. For instance, whatever the merits of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, it would much more easily fit into the category of folklore than history, while a more recent entry about an American president, Oliver Stone’s Nixon, might well be classified under the heading “historical psycho-babble.” And let’s avoid entirely any discussion of Stone’s JFK.

If we agree to settle for a combination of “good film” and “good history,” we should consider the following ten movies: