Miss Liberty's Film & Documentary World

Thirty-one years ago today, a religious commune in Waco, Texas was raided by FBI and BATF, resulting in the holocaust of 76 people including children, burnt alive. The official story was initially that the tragedy was a mass suicide, that authorities never fired a shot and never set fire to their compound. That became — through constant repetition — the narrative that everyone believed.

Then, out of nowhere, a little-known independent documentary entitled Waco: Rules of Engagement hit the theaters. The film ripped the lid off of the government’s case and took it apart piece by piece, indeed so effectively that it was nominated for an Academy Award. As Roger Ebert put it at the time, “Whatever happened at Waco, these facts remain: It is not against the law to hold irregular religious beliefs. It is not illegal to hold and trade firearms. It is legal to defend your own home against armed assault, if that assault is illegal. It is impossible to see this film without reflecting that the federal government, from the top down, treated the Branch Davidians as if those rights did not apply.”

Leslie Howard — born April 3rd, 1893 — is probably best-known to audiences for his memorable role as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. But he also chose to star in, and in some cases produced and directed, several early films of libertarian interest. Two of these films were important in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany and to save its victims.

Howard’s first libertarian film was The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which he portrays an English gentleman who, under the guise of being a useless dandy, secretly risks all to save innocent lives from the guillotine of the French Revolution. Amidst this carnage enters our hero, snatching the innocent from the blood-soaked jaws of the state. Under the code-name of the “Scarlet Pimpernel,” he and his band outwit the French authorities, rescue the doomed, and transport them to safety in England. Though made in 1934 and now nearly a hundred years old, this film still remarkably entertaining and despite a dozen film adaptations of this novel having been made since, Howard’s performance is still considered the definitive portrayal.

Just a few years later in 1941, there were rumors of death camps in Germany. Howard reprised his earlier role into Pimpernel Smith, essentially the same as that of The Scarlet Pimpernel but updated to the Nazi era, the hero being a British professor of classics and archaeology who rescues the condemned from Nazi concentration camps. Leslie Howard — himself the son of an Hungarian Jew —  was the driving force that made this film happen. He produced, directed, and starred in it, and it’s one of those times when you can say a film had an important real-life effect. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who is credited with saving thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, is said to have been inspired by the character of Pimpernel Smith.

And lastly, in 1942, Leslie Howard made Spitfire, a tribute to aircraft designer R.J. Mitchell, the inventor of the Spitfire fighter plane. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the formidable Spitfire to modern freedom. The Nazi assault on England was planned to take just six weeks but instead dragged on for a year before being called off, thanks in part to Britain’s plucky Spitfires. That precious year gave the U.S. time to begin building the war machine that would ultimately spoil Axis plans for world conquest. Dramatized here is the less well-known account of how the Spitfire was designed and to some degree financed by private individuals worried about German militarism, long before government woke up to the danger. It’s a tribute both to Mitchell and to private initiative, and was an important boost to the morale of beleaguered wartime Britain.

In 1943, Leslie Howard traveled to Portugal and died when his plane was shot down by German aircraft. It’s a pity his career didn’t go on longer, but in the moment when the peoples of the free world needed heroes to inspire them, he gave us some terrific and memorable ones — heroes who are still, by their undying example for all who care to see them, fighting the good fight for liberty.

Links

IMDB
Wikipedia
Biography: Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor

Walter Williams was born on March 31st, 1936. He was an influential libertarian economist, a beloved professor at George Mason University, and a prolific and often witty writer. Free to Choose Media released a documentary about him in 2014, entitled Walter Williams: Suffer No Fools; it’s available free online.

He joined Milton Friedman in the PBS series Free to Choose.

Economist Thomas Sowell, his best friend for half a century, wrote this homage to Walter Williams.