Miss Liberty's Film & Documentary World

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.

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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.

Bruce Willis — born March 19th, 1955 — started out as a minor off-Broadway actor but eventually landed the lead in Die Hard, launching his now legendary action-hero career. He seemed attracted to the role of individualist hero, and it was a role he took up in several films of libertarian interest.

Willis is probably best known for his role as John McClane, a classic American hero standing alone against all odds for what is right in the 1988 blockbuster Die Hard. Working against him are his chief adversary, Hans Gruber — a poised, organized, “classically-educated” gentleman thief; various incompetent, overbearing representatives of organized law enforcement; and a self-serving journalist. This is a film that pits the ordinary guy — who still values, respects, and at his best embodies heroic individualism — against an array of smug elites, who, whether operating for good or evil, despise him and what he represents. It’s an absolute must-see. As one reviewer put it, “Die Hard is the very pinnacle of the ’80s action movie, and if it’s not the greatest action movie ever made, then it’s damn close.”

Ten years later in 1998, Bruce Willis made Mercury Rising. In this story, the U.S. government has just spent two billion dollars to produce an “unbreakable” communications code. The code is a key part of the country’s spy apparatus. As part of the testing of the code, a secret message written in it was distributed in puzzle magazines with the promise of a prize to anyone who could decrypt the message. It wasn’t actually expected that anyone would be able to do so, as the code had already been tested under the most rigorous conditions. Enter a nine-year-old autistic savant. He breaks the code and calls in for the prize. This high-tech code is considered so important to U.S. security that the NSA sends assassins to kill the boy. But they’ll have to get past Bruce Willis, who is again the individualist hero working against officialdom, this time as a renegade FBI agent who defies all authority to protect this peculiarly-gifted child. Should the one be sacrificed for the benefit of the many? That’s the underlying question in this feel-good action/drama.

In 2018, Willis made a remake of the classic Charles Bronson film Death Wish, about a man whose wife is killed and daughter severely beaten by thugs. The broken US justice system has nothing to offer him in the way of justice or resolution. So he turns vigilante, a lone good guy taking out bad guys one by one. One reviewer complained “If the NRA made a feature film, it would be this.”

In 2019, the film Motherless Brooklyn was made in which a corrupt cabal behind New York City’s urban development will let nothing get in its way…in the name of “progress.” Willis plays a detective killed off early in the film, but it’s notable that he took the role. The Independent Institute called the film “a well-told story that sheds light on a dark part of U.S. urban policy. The movie might well contend for the most pro-liberty film to come out of Hollywood in 2019.”

Bruce Willis doesn’t seem to have explicitly identified as libertarian — he supported a variety of politicians, from Democrat Michael Dukakis to Republican George Bush — but in a 2006 interview where a journalist tried to get Willis to defend his endorsement of the Bush administration, Willis shot back with “I’m sick of answering this fucking question. I’m a Republican only as far as I want a smaller government, I want less government intrusion. I want them to stop shitting on my money and your money and tax dollars that we give 50 percent of every year. I want them to be fiscally responsible and I want these goddamn lobbyists out of Washington. Do that and I’ll say I’m a Republican. I hate the government, OK? I’m apolitical. Write that down. I’m not a Republican.” So it’s fair to say his heart is in the right place.

In later performances, Willis seemed to be losing his edge and was often confused. The cause was eventually diagnosed as asphasia, a brain disease that affects speech and comprehension, and in 2022 he retired. His career may be over, but his characters live on. Personally, I like a visit from John McClane every Christmas, as it turns out many people do.

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Michael Apted — born February 10th, 1941 — was a British television and film director and producer. He directed four films of libertarian interest, including one of this website’s top 25 list of most important libertarian films of all time.

In 1992, Apted released the documentary Incident at Oglala, an inquiry into the alleged framing of AIM member Leonard Peltier by the FBI. During the 1970s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was organized to reform and resist the reservation system that had been imposed on Native Americans over the previous centuries. Two FBI agents were killed in a conflict with AIM, and the film suggests the agency framed Peltier to settle the score and pacify the movement.

This was followed in the same year by Thunderheart, a fictionalized thriller inspired by the Leonard Peltier case, in which a part-Sioux FBI agent turns against his superiors after discovering a deadly operation by his agency to squelch Native American resistance to government control. Newsweek said about the film: “Stylishly balancing thrills, mysticism and political outrage, Director Michael Apted has produced his most absorbing movie since Coal Miner’s Daughter.” The film succeeds as both semi-factual expose and fictional whodunit.

Two years later, in 1994, Apted released the documentary Moving the Mountain, which tells the story of a few of the Tiananmen protestors who escaped—sometimes, ironically, because they were identified from wanted posters by ordinary people who helped them instead of turning them in. These escapees, interviewed here, tell their tales of courage, hope, and pain. Curiously, no trailer for this film is available online and it is not available on Amazon streaming or even DVD.

Finally, in 2006, Michael Apted released his greatest libertarian film, Amazing Grace, a terrific telling of the story of William Wilberforce, a British member of Parliament who led an arduous but ultimately victorious life-long battle to abolish the slave trade. Wilberforce’s story is faithfully and warmly told here. Ioan Gruffudd (a.k.a. Horatio Hornblower) gives a fine performance in the leading role, and is supported by (at the time this film was made the little-known actor) Benedict Cumberbatch, as William Pitt.

Michael Apted died in 2021, at age 79. National Review noted in its tribute to him that he was “a director who is interested in learning rather than imposing his pre-decided views on the material” and that he “had the discipline not to impose liberal ideology on his films.” In other words, he was that rare thing in the film industry: an honest person.

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