‘I. Like. Ike.’

I feel I must correct Ed Morrissey on a tertiary point, here:

When was the last time we saw a movie with a Communist villain?  1959?

Much as some are loathe to admit to its existence, it must be admitted that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had Commies for the villains, and that there were explicit instances in the movie where Commies were forthrightly punched (they were, indeed, the highlights of the film, which Lucas managed to bring off successfully enough to avoid me declaring kanly upon his house*).

So there was at least one.  Almost by accident, but at least one.

Moe Lane

*I fully grant, as the very wise Ken Hite notes, “that the McCarthyism that has Indy’s Dean so Broadbent out of shape a) was a spent force by 1957 in our history, but b) turns out, on the merits, to be completely justified, given the number of Soviet agents running amuck in America in the movie’s history.”  Nonetheless, it was all right.

6 thoughts on “‘I. Like. Ike.’”

  1. Even setting aside ‘the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ (and don’t we wish we could) there was also 1984’s Red Dawn. Bonus, in addition to the evil Soviet Commies, there were also evil Cuban Commies!

    1. Yup. Also, Firefox, Rambo, Hunt for Red October… although I’m seeing a lot of faceless minions in these lists.

  2. It’s hard to call the Hunt for Red October a ‘commies as villain’ movie. It wasn’t really Evil, a lot of it was just plain corruption and CYA orders.

  3. Holy cow I can’t believe we forgot about it Moe – the Most Evil Communist of All Time.

    Ivan Drago.

  4. The amazing thing about …The Crystal Skull is the way Spielberg could rag on the Feds hunting the Red Menace (he even left the two FBI actors off the credits) while he had Russian commandoes tearing up Harvard!

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