Man should not live on a steady diet of politics. Every once in a while, you've just got to take a break. However, earlier tonight, I was reading my nightly 100 or so news stories and blog posts and I came across a post that reminded me how good old Hollywood movies could be and the break took me.
When I was a kid, my family would come home from church on Sunday, and after lunch, my dad didn't watch football, so we watched old movies until naps came to call. In Jackson, MS where I grew up, one of the local channels turned over Sunday afternoon programming to a guy in a leisure suit, a cowboy hat, and a guitar who hosted some classic movie and every break he would promote his furniture store. Sometimes he would pitch furniture, sometimes he would pick his guitar, but he never failed to mention his name and the location of his store. His name was J. L. Jones and his store, J. L. Jones Furniture Store was located on Whitfield Road in Pearl, MS. That was 30 years ago and I still remember the name of the store! Advertising really does work!
But the big deal wasn't the leisure suit or the hat or his singing, it was always the movie. John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Yule Brenner, Lee Marvin, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, James Coburn, Steve McQueen, Henry Fonda, and Clint Eastwood were regular favorites. Almost every movie was a western where some town was being oppressed by an evil gunman, and a regular guy would come to town to rally the population and teach them to stand up for themselves. Or in a “High Noon” kind of moment, the town would be too chicken to fight and the good guy would take on the fight for the townspeople all by himslelf. Sometimes, the good guy had to sacrifice himself, but then the people would realize how wrong they were and they would turn on the bad guy and win the day.
The post I read brought all of this back to me and reminded me of those Sunday afternoons reading the funny page from the newspaper while watching the good guys being beat down until the momentum shifted and the worm had turned. I know liberals will total misunderstand this post and will assume that I'm trying to advocate something with this clip that I really am not advocating. Therefore, in an effort to prevent them from putting words into my post or my mouth, let me just say that all that you should take away from this clip is that it is an awesome movie and you should go rent it or buy it or do whatever it takes to see it again.
Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen have got to be two of the coolest guys ever on film.
I changed my mind. If it ticks off liberals, then so be it.
Yul Rocks! 
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