King Richard and the Crusaders (1954) – A Movie Review

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Can you imagine a movie with Rex Harrison playing Saladin, George Sanders as Richard the Lionhearted and Virginia Mayo as a Norman princess?  Well don’t try.  It’s just too bizarre to reconstruct without supercomputers and black magic.  But it actually must have occurred in some alternate universe where completely improbable things happen.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

I watched this movie for the first time today and I was flabbergasted.  So, we’re on the Third Crusade and Richard is leading a coalition of scheming nobles.  They attempt to assassinate him with a poisoned Saracen arrow so they can end their war against Saladin and concentrate on plundering the Holy Land.

There’s a great deal of nonsense that involves Saladin showing up in disguise as a doctor to heal Richard of his poisoned arrow.  You see Saladin is so chivalrous that he wants Richard to survive so they can fight a duel to decide the fate of the war.

And there’s another plot line where Richard’s cousin Lady Edith Plantagenet (played improbably by Virginia Mayo) is in love with a Scottish knight named Sir Kenneth.  Kenneth is apparently the only crusader actually loyal to Richard.  But once Edith’s love affair with this non-Norman man becomes known to Richard he turns against Kenneth and challenges him to an ordeal by combat.  And then Saladin saves Kenneth’s life but is also in love with Edith.  Now the Holy War is just hopelessly muddled with love.  What’s a crusader to do?  Luckily the bad guys (the bad Crusaders in this case) kidnap Edith and so Richard, Saladin and Kenneth put aside their differences over religion, civilization and of course good acting and attack the bad guys.

So, the good guys win and then Saladin rides away with his men and Richard comes around to Kenneth being his cousin’s future husband.

The End.

You have to see this movie to know just how laughably bad this thing is.  Rex Harrison with bronze face paint and a scraggly beard talking with some kind of fake middle eastern accent quoting the prophet.  George Sanders playing George Sanders (of course) brow beating the other characters is insufferable.  I found myself hoping the assassination attempt would succeed and end the movie quickly.  And the rest of the cast is even worse.  The strange thing is I kind of enjoyed watching this mess.  I can’t explain why.  Maybe I was just in the right mood for a silly knights-in-armor spectacle.  Who knows maybe it was the belly dancer.  But I’m not going to recommend this movie to anyone.  Watch it at your own peril.

Another Update on the Hilarious NYC Migrant Bus Service

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As Texas Governor Abbott continues to bus illegal aliens to NYC and DC the squealing from NYC government officials gets louder.

My favorite quotes:

“He’s weaponizing asylum seekers,” Manuel Castro, commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs said. “It is shameful, and it is our moral obligation to condemn the use of human beings for political purposes.”

New York officials said this week that the city is using 14 hotels to provide housing to the new arrivals.

Castro was not the only official in Mayor Eric Adams’s administration to blast Abbott. City Comptroller Brad Lander said Abbott’s action are “inhumane” and “disgusting.”

As the saying goes, “You know you’re over the target when you start taking flack.  I only wish he’d start sending some to Portland, Oregon and San Francisco.

This is the gift that keeps on giving.  It’s not only useful and smart, it’s hilarious.  Hopefully a goodly percentage of the refugees are violent offenders and weirdos of various descriptions.  New York needs the most exciting new residents to keep things interesting.

Bravo, governor Abbott, bravo.

Scientists Say Conservatives Happier Than Liberals. Duh!

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Apparently believing that dysfunction is normal and good is evil isn’t conducive to peace of mind.  I guess trying to see that two plus two equals five all the time must hurt their brains.  Well there is the consolation that these people are at least scared and miserable.  Now if we can find a way to prevent them from inflicting their madness upon us we’ll be ecstatic.

How To Thrive in the Banana Republic of America – Part 1

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This essay and its title are more for a research project than a how-to pamphlet.  I think this gets to the essence of what all of us will have to figure out to survive in where this country is headed.  We have to figure out how to provide ourselves and our families with the things they need and want without having to compromise our self-respect and even our sanity.

As a for instance, what if you want to become a professional.  If you desire to be a medical doctor, you’ll have to be indoctrinated in the various fictions that currently apply to the medical profession.  You may be forced to approve of a pre-teen boy being castrated and having the rest of his genitalia amputated and put on estrogen to satisfy his mother’s desire to turn him into a girl.  If you want to be a lawyer you may have to festoon your office with rainbow paraphernalia and attend galas for the LGBTQ mafia and even then, you’ll probably be passed over for promotion because you’re just a straight white guy.  Even engineers are called upon by their employers to parrot mantras about white privilege, white supremacy and toxic masculinity at all the company gatherings in order to show management that they are aligned with the prevailing orthodoxy.

But even if you don’t work in corporate America the regime is going farther and farther to impinge on the life and prosperity of all those who won’t burn incense to Caesar.  California is legislating the end of gasoline engines for automobiles starting in 2035.  New York has criminalized the use of “gender specific language” in all business documents.  They are very purposefully criminalizing normal life.

The details of all this vary from place to place but you can see that they are casting a very wide net and will tighten it as time goes on.  Those 87,000 new IRS employees are there for a reason.  They will be there to punish the enemies of the regime where it hurts the most; in their bank accounts.

It will be of the utmost importance to identify the strategies and tactics needed to avoid the worst of the consequences.  But it is obvious that the only way to thrive in such an environment is to locate the most sympathetic local regimes that will help protect you from the full brunt of the Leftist system.

For instance, Florida is setting itself up as a refuge against woke-ism and other leftist problems.  With Ron DeSantis as governor and with a Republican legislature they have enacted laws to prevent transgender medical malpractice against juveniles.  Likewise, they have gone after critical race theory (CRT) in the public schools.  These kinds of initiatives are exactly what is needed to allow people to survive under the Biden regime.

And I think the most progress against banana republicanism will occur when several states coordinate their policies to prevent the federal programs from strangling the freedoms of Americans living in those states.  All of this may lead up to a showdown between these states and the feds.

But in reality, I don’t think anyone really knows how or even if we can make life in the former United States of America somewhat free and honest.  Even those on the Dissident Right who talk about the “revolution” have no idea what, if anything, that means.  We’re all so horrified and disgusted by what is going on we just assume that somehow it will have to turn around.  And that is where we are probably wrong.  Assuming that the pendulum will reverse direction anytime soon is probably wishful thinking.  After all, representative government took fifteen hundred years to return to Western Civilization.  There’s no reason to think it will happen in one hundred years this time.

Hopefully when I write the second installment of this essay, I’ll have some more practical points to contribute but I think identifying the need to look for these strategies has merit in and of itself.  Feel free to provide anything you’ve thought of on this topic in the comments.