“Dirty Harry” arrived in 1971, it did so amid a flurry of controversy. To some, Clint Eastwood’s rogue cop Harry Callahan seemed to be a celebration of police brutality, and the film overall came across as an apologia for vaguely fascist ideals. That is, unless you just took it for the brilliant action crime thriller it was. If you liked your heroes problematic, brooding, and with a healthy disdain for the rules, Callahan was one of the best main characters in the history of cinema. Those that simply enjoyed the film on that level propelled it to success, leading to a sequel and three other Dirty Harry movies. It all started in 1973 with Callahan returning in “Magnum Force,” and it almost seemed as if the movie’s writers were hitting out at critics of Eastwood’s maverick inspector.
In “Magnum Force” the criminals are about as despicable as you can get, with Callahan hunting down a group of vigilante cops who’ve taken it upon themselves to violently murder criminals who slipped through the cracks of the justice system. But co-writers John Milius and Michael Cimino didn’t necessarily set out to make a point about criminals being worse than rule-breaking cops. In fact, Milius found the final cut of “Magnum Force” distasteful, claiming that entire scenes had been changed from how he’d written them and turned into much more graphic or bombastic versions of the originals. For example, the infamous drain cleaner scene, in which a sex worker dies after being forced to drink the toxic liquid, was initially supposed to be referenced but not shown, and when Milius saw the final cut and its depiction of the gruesome moment in all its R-rated glory, he was shocked.
But Milius wasn’t the only one who was unhappy with the final cut of “Magnum Force.” For the sequel, “Dirty Harry” director Don Siegel was replaced by Ted Post, who’d previously overseen “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” and “Go Tell the Spartans,” and had worked with Eastwood on 1968’s “Hang ‘Em High.” By the end of production on “Magnum Force,” however, Post was almost certain he’d never work with the veteran star again.
Ted Post and Clint Eastwood clashed throughout filming on Magnum Force
Warner Bros.
Today, Clint Eastwood is known as much for his directing prowess as his legendary on-screen presence. But even before he became an established filmmaker, it seems he always maintained an irrepressible belief in his directing talents. At least, that’s the positive way of looking at it. The less favorable way of looking at it is that Eastwood thought he knew it all long before he had cemented his directorial standing. As author Patrick McGilligan put it in his book “Clint: The Life and Legend,” by the time “Magnum Force” debuted it was “becoming part of Clint’s mystique that even when he wasn’t directing one of his films, he was the one really directing.” That certainly seemed to be the case on the “Dirty Harry” sequel, with Ted Post maintaining that Eastwood thought he was the one calling the shots, many of which directly contradicted the director’s desires and plans.
The book contains a rundown of the issues that arose between Post and his star, many of which seem to have cropped up once the film had already been shot. According to the director, Eastwood cut “two very important scenes” from the filming schedule, which came as a surprise to Post. Apparently, the actor wouldn’t “authorize” the scenes, one of which included a long shot of Callahan on his motorbike, due to budget and timing concerns. Eastwood also sat in on the editing process, where he and Post clashed further. The director claimed his unwelcome editing partner made “side-of-the-mouth comments” designed to undermine Post’s filmmaking experience, adding, “A lot of things he said were based on a pure, selfish ignorance and showed that he was the man who controlled the power.”
The issue, at least in Post’s estimation, was simply Eastwood’s ego — which, by the time he made “Magnum Force,” had, as the director put it, “began to apply for statehood.” After this fraught production experience, Post believes that Eastwood made his career “an impossibility,” essentially taking credit for all the best parts of “Magnum Force” and thereby implying Post was basically useless. That said, the director didn’t have any concrete proof that Eastwood sabotaged his career, but as McGilligan wrote, “If it wasn’t a pattern with Clint, and if the list wasn’t a long one of writers, cameramen, directors and others who have struggled to prove themselves outside [Eastwood’s production company] Malpaso, Post’s claims could be more easily dismissed.”
Magnum Force was a hit, but who was responsible?
Warner Bros.
The tension between Clint Eastwood and Ted Post on “Magnum Force” went further than some cut scenes and editing disagreements. It seems that the trouble actually started when Post asked for a second take after he noticed a mistake in an establishing shot, only for his star to push back. Eastwood is known for using the very first take on his films, and it seems that’s exactly what he wanted to do in this situation. But Post stood his ground and was proven right in the end, resulting in a begrudging apology from Eastwood. According to Post, it was after this that the actor got “very tough” with him.
Regular Malpaso collaborator and cinematographer Rexford Metz appeared to back up claims of Eastwood’s reluctance to fine-tune scenes. In “Clint: The Life and Legend,” Metz claimed that the actor had “a lot of great ideas” but that he “won’t take the time to perfect a situation. If you’ve got 70% of a shot worked out, that’s sufficient for him, because he knows his audience will accept it.” That must have been frustrating for Post, who was clearly eager to make the best film he could. In many ways he succeeded, even if Eastwood would take the credit for the success of “Magnum Force,” which made more at the box office than “Dirty Harry.” Eventually, Eastwood officially took on directing duties for the fourth “Dirty Harry” installment, “Sudden Impact,” which remains the only sequel he ever directed and the worst film in the franchise — adding yet more evidence in favor of Post being the man behind the success of “Magnum Force.”
Directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch, who never made a bad movie, it tackles subject matter that Hollywood would take decades to even think about broaching again, and does it with effortless pep and boundless enthusiasm. To be more specific: It’s a romcom about a throuple, and, in the 90-plus intervening years, we have yet to see a better one.
Miriam Hopkins plays Gilda Farrell, a commercial artist who meets two fellow Americans on a train to Paris: Playwright Tom Chambers (Fredric March) and painter George Curtis (Gary Cooper). They both fall in love with Gilda, but she can’t choose between them, so they try out a platonic three-way living arrangement — which naturally doesn’t go quite as planned. Smart, delightful, and armed with one of Ben Hecht’s sharpest scripts, “Design for Living” also has the distinction of being a lot more advanced and open-minded in its understanding of love and companionship than most contemporary films.
14. You’ve Got Mail
Warner Bros.
If contemporary times pose a challenge to the romcom format, in that the process of falling in love now involves virtual waltzes of texting and social media interaction with limited cinematic potential, Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail” captures the exact moment of that logistic shift, in a way that renders it as “dated” in the most fun way possible.
The plot, liberally adapted from Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner” by the director herself along with her sister Delia Ephron, follows Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), a small bookshop owner whose independent business is threatened by bookstore chain mogul Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). Unbeknownst to both Kathleen and Joe, they begin to fall in love via email after meeting in an online chatroom.
It’s a quintessentially 1998 setup, the inherent thorniness of which only emphasizes Ephron’s brilliance in navigating the potential pitfalls of the central romance. Somehow, she turns that uneasy dynamic into one of cinema history’s most potent encapsulations of the enduring appeal of mainstream romcoms — with each glance, each gesture, each movement in the needle of intimacy making for its own heartrending fireworks show.
13. Monsoon Wedding
USA Films
There have been many “mosaic romcoms” in movie history — i.e., ones that look at the trials and tribulations of various pairs in different stages of romantic progression, instead of focusing on just one couple — but few have been as attuned to that format’s lush, convivial, celebratory potential as Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding.”
Following various stories revolving around the preparations for the expensive arranged wedding between Aditi Verma (Vasundhara Das) and U.S.-based newcomer Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas) in Delhi, India, Nair’s Golden Lion-winning 2001 film deals with love in all its toughness and complexity, often veering closer to straight drama than most romantic comedies. Yet the seriousness and depth of Sabrina Dhawan’s script never detract from how deeply pleasurable and enchanting “Monsoon Wedding” is.
Nair’s camera is charged with curiosity and motivation as she explores every corner of the Verma household, nimbly documenting the myriad joys and conflicts spurred by the gathering of family members from all around the world. Meanwhile, the anchoring story of Aditi and Hemant themselves is carried off with unimpeachable intelligence, candor, and sensitivity. It’s romcom perfection exponentially multiplied.
12. The Big Sick
Amazon Studios / Lionsgate
Romantic comedies from the 2010s onward have consistently endeavored to find new spins on the genre’s standard format, ranging from the modestly eccentric to the fully subversive. And, from a pure structural standpoint, few gambits have been as bold — or as successful — as that of “The Big Sick,” hailed in 2017 as the most unique romantic comedy in years.
Written by Emily V. Gordon and star Kumail Nanjiani as a largely autobiographical piece, “The Big Sick” follows struggling comedian Kumail (Nanjiani) and graduate student Emily (Zoe Kazan) as they meet, fall in love, run into trouble, and break up — but that’s only the first 30 minutes. One day, Emily is admitted to a hospital with unknown health problems, and Kumail is the only person available to sign off on an emergency-induced coma.
Thus begins an awkward odyssey in which Kumail remains in the orbit of Emily and her concerned parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano), who have flown in from North Carolina while navigating arranged marriage pressures from his own parents (Zenobia Shroff and Anupam Kher). It’s all raw, messy, authentic, improbably hilarious, and deeply human, with the benefit of a fact-based, hard-earned happy ending.
11. Moonstruck
MGM / UA Communications Co.
Although it’s not infrequent for movies to win Academy Awards in multiple acting categories — there have, in fact, been 41 such cases in the Oscars’ almost 100-year history — the vast majority of those double-dippers have been showy, shouty, tragic prestige dramas. It takes a special movie to draw that kind of attention as a light classic-style romcom, and special is just what Norman Jewison’s “Moonstruck” is. Indeed, the fact that “Moonstruck” managed to snag Oscar wins in 1988 not just for Cher as hot-tempered New Yorker widow Loretta Castorini, but also for Olympia Dukakis as her melancholy mother Rose and for John Patrick Shanley’s screenplay, speaks pretty aptly to the film’s transcendent power.
“Moonstruck” lays out one of the clearest cases ever for the romantic comedy as an inherently humanist proposition — a popular genre where every character matters, where multiplex-sized engagement is drawn not from battles, scares, or pyrotechnic displays but from people and their passions. And the brittle, hilarious courtship that unfolds between Loretta and her gruff brother-in-law Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage, for whom there is a downside to the film’s popularity) is up there with the most swoon-worthy movie romances of all time.
10. Crossing Delancey
Warner Bros.
American filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver was a New Hollywood luminary whose work took decades to get the recognition it deserved — perhaps because her films were too personal, too uncompromising, too gleefully idiosyncratic to negotiate with ’70s and ’80s mainstream tastes, or perhaps just because she was a female auteur at a time when female auteurs weren’t taken seriously. Whatever the case, her filmography is a treasure trove of hidden gems, as exemplified by 1988’s “Crossing Delancey,” rarely cited yet self-evidently belonging among the best romcoms of all time.
The film, adapted by Susan Sandler from her own play, follows Isabelle Grossman (Amy Irving), a lonely New York City bookstore owner who has all but given up on love. One day, however, Isabelle finds herself given two possible paths to romantic fulfillment in the form of married author Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbé), whom she met at work, and mild-mannered pickle salesman Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), to whom she was begrudgingly introduced by a matchmaker hired by her bubbe (Reizl Bozyk). As Isabelle ponders her heart’s wants, Silver paints a sumptuous, deeply specific portrait of time and place, crafting a masterwork as proudly Jewish as it is irresistibly universal.
9. The Philadelphia Story
Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
While extramarital affairs were obviously commonplace in real life in the ’30s and ’40s, their depiction on screen was severely limited by the Hays Code — which led Hollywood filmmakers to fashion the “comedy of remarriage,” a hugely popular subgenre about couples divorcing and embarking on various dalliances before finding their way back to each other. And the most iconic comedy of remarriage was George Cukor’s “The Philadelphia Story.”
The rare movie with a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, this 1940 film finds its central trio of Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart all in their prime — which would, on its own, be more than reason enough for a watch. But, in addition to naturally featuring stellar acting, “The Philadelphia Story” also epitomizes the sprightly wit, sturdy construction, relentless dynamism, and enthralling tension that were the mark of the best Classic Hollywood crowd-pleasers. By the end of the story of socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn) and the havoc wreaked in her marriage plans by her ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) and tabloid journalist Mike Connor (Stewart), it’s impossible not to find yourself grinning from ear to ear.
8. The Heartbreak Kid
20th Century Studios
You’ve seen sharp, dark, biting, and even cynical romantic comedies, but there’s a good chance you haven’t seen anything quite like 1972’s “The Heartbreak Kid” — not least because its few home media releases have since gone out of print. Arguably the finest directorial effort from the ever-brilliant Elaine May, “The Heartbreak Kid” is a tough lesson in love that doesn’t pull its punches — a film so scorchingly hilarious that it’s almost easy to miss its poignancy and wisdom.
The script by Neil Simon concerns Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a shallow New York sporting goods salesman who impulsively marries his abstaining girlfriend Lila (Jeannie Berlin) so that they can have sex; while on honeymoon in Miami, Lenny realizes that he can’t stand Lila, and finds himself drawn to vacationing WASP college student Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd). A farce of epic proportions ensues, which May shoots with her trademark cleverness and comic precision — but underneath it all is a subversive love story for the ages, containing a fearless indictment of male entitlement that remains startling to behold even five decades latter.
7. The Watermelon Woman
First Run Features
Generally cited as the first feature film on record to hail from an openly lesbian Black director, 1996’s “The Watermelon Woman” is a film of such dizzying intelligence and unflagging epistemological rigor that it would probably merit mention as a classic even if it weren’t also an immensely fun watch — which it very much is. Writer, director, and star Cheryl Dunye plays Cheryl, a Philadelphia video store worker who begins to make a documentary on the life of an elusive Black actress from Old Hollywood who was only ever credited as “the Watermelon Woman.”
Dunye uses that setup to create a bracing, passionate, and hilarious treatise on the exclusionary nature of artistic canons and official histories, all refracted through her own enthusiastic cinephilia. And, to make her own contribution to the transformation of those canons, she also weaved together arguably the finest queer romantic comedy of all time, locating enough verve, sensuality, and complexity in Cheryl’s budding romance with Diana (Guinevere Turner) to fill you with indignation at the fact that video store shelves were so bereft of lesbian romcoms for so long.
6. His Girl Friday
Columbia Pictures
Howard Hawks was a master of the balletic high-wire plate-spinning act that has since become known as the “screwball comedy” — that delectable style of Old Hollywood film in which gendered romantic tensions are blown up to farcical proportions, and every witty rejoinder adds another layer to a step pyramid of euphoric chaos. Even within his own rarefied metric, though, what Hawks accomplished in 1940’s “His Girl Friday” was a stunning feat by technical standards alone — never mind all the other standards.
Simply put, “His Girl Friday,” in which Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell play a newspaper editor and a reporter who get together after their divorce to cover one last scoop, is the most breathlessly entertaining screwball comedy of all time. The whole movie is essentially a nonstop sequence of perfect gags and one-liners and verbal ping-pong matches, all braided together with a journalistic procedural story that gets to be hilarious in its sheer delirious intensity. And, of course, Russell and Grant’s chemistry is just off the charts, constantly radiating the harmonious melody of fated lovers even when they’re just bickering over what to include in the lede.
5. When Harry Met Sally…
Columbia Pictures
The snappy talk, the local color, the mélange of weary realism and intense yearning, the grown-up sense of wistfulness and urgency, the blazing onscreen chemistry, the trenchant observational humor — every key aspect of the contemporary romcom is refined to perfection in “When Harry Met Sally…” It’s the ur-text of all films made in the genre from the ’90s onward, containing the platonic versions of nearly every trope you can name.
The best work from both Rob Reiner as director and Nora Ephron as screenwriter, the 1989 film tells the story of University of Chicago colleagues Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), who strike an intimate friendship over the course of several years, yet opt to actively avoid any sexual or romantic entanglement — until, of course, they don’t. It’s one of the most believable, lived-in, and profound relationships the genre has ever given us, and that only makes the catharsis of its eventual acceleration into romantic bliss all the sweeter and more meaningful. Lots of romcoms get the rom-com template right; “When Harry Met Sally…” is among the few to get love right, full stop.
4. A Confucian Confusion
Janus Films
Taiwanese master Edward Yang became known in the West for his sprawling and ultra-lengthy epic dramas about grief, alienation, and regret — most notably 2000’s “Yi Yi” and 1991’s “A Brighter Summer Day.” But, in 1994, Yang showed that his generational mastery of blocking, storytelling, and visual poetry extended beyond the realm of the tragic. In “A Confucian Confusion,” he made an effervescent cosmopolitan romcom that distilled the changing tides of Taipei life into just three days of romantic misadventure.
Like many of Yang’s films, “A Confucian Confusion” is generous in scope, following multiple characters whose lives brush up against each other in increasingly surprising, hilarious, and complicated ways — with the crux being the tense interplay between romantic and professional ambition, as manifested through the ins and outs of an entertainment production company. Every story and every character is mesmerizing on their own; together, they make up a gorgeous, bittersweet paean to love’s way of breaking through modern anxiety.
3. Dance, Girl, Dance
RKO Radio Pictures
The only problem with “Dance, Girl, Dance” is that, after watching it, you’ll have a much harder time forgiving the dated aspects of other Golden Age Hollywood flicks. Shockingly modern and forward-thinking even by today’s standards, the 1940 movie is both the magnum opus of filmmaking pioneer Dorothy Arzner and the double-star-is-born moment of none other than Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball.
O’Hara and Ball play Judy O’Brien and Bubbles, two Ohio chorus dancers whose careers veer in vastly different directions and then meet again in a New York City burlesque club, igniting professional and romantic rivalry as they battle for the affections of wealthy bachelor Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward). If that pitch hints at the sort of catty infantilization that most male directors of the time emphasized in these stories, Arzner takes the movie in the diametrically opposite direction. Without skimping on zaniness, energy, and fun, she locates a genuinely searing story of complex female friendship, ambition, identity, and self-affirmation amid the bustle and hustle, and draws enough range from Ball and O’Hara to prove that their respective comedic and dramatic careers could just as well have been switched. Few ’40s movies reach such titanic heights.
2. The Lady Eve
Paramount Pictures
On its face, 1941’s “The Lady Eve” is hard to describe as anything other than a cackling romantic farce: Con artist Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) sets her sights on fleecing naive heir Charles Pike (Henry Fonda); in the process of wooing him, she accidentally falls in love as well; he finds her out and dumps her; to win him back, she assumes the persona of posh British tourist Lady Eve Sidwich and shamelessly swaggers back into his life. On some level, the whole movie is making a joke of the very idea of romance, flighty and delusional and deception-based that it is.
But even so, “The Lady Eve” succeeds in mustering investment in its kooky romance by the power of movie magic — in this case, manifested through the ethereal performances of Stanwyck and Fonda. They make you believe in a love propped up by little more than the mutual gravitational pull of their outsized presences, Stanwyck practically demanding fascination with her every smirk and movement, and Fonda servicing her at each turn with doe-eyed, heart-melting charm. And it doesn’t hurt, of course, that, thanks to the virtuosity of writer-director Preston Sturges, “The Lady Eve” is also one of the absolute funniest movies of all time.
1. The Apartment
United Artists
1960’s “The Apartment” is a towering monument at the center of romcom history, linking together its ritzy past and soulful present, while also sporting such ecstatic audiovisual perfection as to inevitably inform whatever its future may be. Its plot alone is a thing of beauty, engineering-wise: Lonely insurance worker C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon, the only actor who could make this movie work) allows higher-ups to use his apartment for extramarital trysts in exchange for career favor; one day, he falls in love with elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the very woman in whose company slimy personnel director Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) is currently frequenting Bud’s flat.
What Billy Wilder and co-writer I. A. L. Diamond spin from that sleek dramaturgical mechanism is perfection on all fronts — a great game of uneasy comic flirtation, nestled in a great tale of two lonely souls yearning for connection, wrapped in a great exposé of capitalist inhumanity, all within an open-hearted plea for the universal value of love and solidarity. It’s Wilder’s most thoroughly Wilderian effort — in other words, one of the greatest movies ever.
one of the best medical shows of all time, with a seemingly never-ending series of twists and turns for House to unravel.
And there is, of course, no Sherlock without his Watson, and luckily for Doctor House (or unluckily if you asked him), he had a whole team of Watsons to assist him. In the show’s third season finale, House’s team disbanded, and when “House” returned for its fourth season, it brought on a trio of new team members to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Dr. Chris Taub (Peter Jacobson) stayed for the rest of the series, while Dr. Lawrence Kutner (Kal Penn) dramatically left the series, but it was Dr Remy “Thirteen” Hadley, played by Olivia Wilde, who left the biggest mark on the show when she left the series in season 7.
Wilde left House to star in Cowboys & Aliens
Fox
Before Jon Favreau brought the wild west to space with “The Mandalorian” on Disney+, he brought space down to the wild west in “Cowboys and Aliens.” The blockbuster starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford was one of the hottest projects on the market, and when the producers of the film offered Wilde the role of a mysterious woman at the heart of the film’s story, she took the opportunity. This required Wilde to take a “leave of absence” from the show in season 7 so she could go off and shoot the film, with Thirteen appearing in the early part of the season before officially leaving the show before season 8 kicked off.
Everyone involved in making “House” was happy to give Wilde the time to make the film, which tied in well with her character’s subplot of dealing with her Huntington’s disease diagnosis. But as one of the rare characters on the show whom House actually respected, her absence was felt when she left for good, making only a brief appearance in the series finale.
Luckily for Wilde, she made the right call taking the part. Even if “Cowboys and Aliens” didn’t make the biggest splash, it did open the door for her to star in more films and eventually direct her own: the coming-of-age comedy “Booksmart” and the twisty thriller “Don’t Worry Darling.”
“John Wayne and his Films,” where he revealed that the John Wayne moniker came from studio execs. “My right name is Marion Michael Morrison,” he said, “and the studio decided that it was not American enough for a boy who was going to play Breckenridge Coleman in ‘The Big Trail,’ back in 1929. So, the studio heads were put together and they came up with the name John Wayne.”
“The Big Trail” (which was largely doomed by cutting-edge camera tech and the great depression) was Wayne’s first starring role. After appearing in small background parts in the late-20s, Wayne was cast by director Raoul Walsh in his epic Western. According to documentarian Richard Schickel, who featured Walsh in his series “The Men Who Made the Movies,” it was actually the director who gave Wayne his stage name. In an interview with True West, Schickel recalled how Walsh and director John Ford both felt a sense of ownership over launching the young star’s career. “[Walsh] was very proud of, as he feels — I think it was a source of contention between he and Ford [laughs] — that he sort of found John Wayne,” he said. “Raoul believed that he gave Wayne his name. He said he was reading a book about the American revolutionary general ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne; he thought Wayne would be a good name for Marion Morrison. That’s how the name came about.”
That doesn’t quite match up with Wayne’s own recollection, but it seems at the very least his stage name came from people within the industry, whether it was Walsh, studio execs, or a combination of both. Neither, however, could claim credit for Wayne’s famous nickname: Duke.
How did John Wayne get his Duke nickname?
Warner Bros.
The year before John Wayne landed his first starring role in “The Big Trail” — which you’ve likely never seen — he featured in James Tingling’s musical comedy “Words and Music.” Wayne played Pete Donahue, one of two college students who compete for the affections of Lois Moran’s Mary Brown, and was credited for the first and only time as “Duke Morrison.” The year before he was given his John Wayne moniker, then, he also briefly used his lifelong nickname as a screen name. But where did “Duke” come from?
John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Iowa in 1907, and grew up there before his family moved to California in 1914. It was in the Golden State that he would get his lifelong nickname. In 1916, the Morrison family moved to Glendale just North of Los Angeles, along with their dog: Duke. The Airedale terrier became a young Marion’s best friend, and frequently accompanied him on his walks to school, during which they would pass the local firehouse. The firefighters got to know Duke and started referring to Marion himself by the same name. Wayne spoke about this genesis in “John Wayne and his Films,” saying:
“Long before I had the name John Wayne I was going to school in Glendale and I had a dog named Duke. The dog would follow me as far as a fire station on the way to school in the morning and wait at the fire station for me to return in the evening, and the firemen all knew the dog’s name but they didn’t know mine. So, they called the dog ‘Big Duke’ and me ‘Little Duke.'”
Wayne remained Duke ever since, retaining the nickname right up until his death in 1979. As huge a star as he became, and as complicated as his legacy is today, this small piece of his childhood remained a constant throughout his life — a small reminder of his surprisingly humble origins.
When filmmaker James Gunn called his new Superman film an immigrant story, critics accused him of politicizing Superman. But you can’t politicize the truth. Superman has been an “illegal alien” for 87 years—a fact we helped America remember when we launched our 2013 campaign, Superman Is an Immigrant.
Of course, we couldn’t have predicted Donald Trump—the man DC Comics literally used as their model to reboot Lex Luthor in 1986—waging war on the very immigrants Superman represents. In 2000, Luthor became president in the comics, complete with an anti-alien agenda. No one imagined the real President Trump would follow the same playbook.
Superman entered America without papers, a baby refugee fleeing a dying planet. Like countless immigrants before him, he changed his name from the foreign-sounding (in his case, Hebrew) Kal-El to the anglicized Clark Kent. He learned new customs, balanced his heritage with his adopted culture, and used his unique abilities to serve the nation that initially feared him.
This isn’t subtext—it’s text. Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were children of Jewish immigrants who understood displacement intimately. In 1938, as Hitler rose to power, they created a hero who embodied their American dream: someone who could protect the vulnerable because he knew what it meant to be cast aside. Superman’s very essence springs from being what he called “a universal outsider.” This outsider status isn’t incidental to his heroism; it’s the source of it. Those who have known rejection become champions of acceptance. Those who have felt powerless fight for the defenseless.
Today, that outsider would be deported. In fact, without birthright citizenship, Superman would never have existed at all. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, born in Cleveland to Jewish immigrant parents, would have been stripped of citizenship and deported to Nazi-controlled Europe—to face certain death in countries they’d never known.
No Jerry and Joe means no Superman. No Superman means no superhero genre. The children of immigrants who followed their lead—creating Batman, Captain America, Spider-Man, and at least 90 percent of all iconic superheroes—would have met the same fate. The modern mythology that defines American popular culture worldwide: all erased.
Superman endures because he represents something larger than politics: the American paradox itself. We are a nation built by the displaced—willing immigrants and unwilling slaves, refugees and dreamers, all orphaned from somewhere else. Superman, the ultimate orphan, transforms this shared wound into purpose, proving that our greatest strength comes not from where we’re born, but from what we choose to become.
In 2013, our campaign sparked a national conversation through a simple selfie challenge: Americans sharing their family immigration stories while declaring “Superman Is an Immigrant.” Critics inadvertently amplified our message—every time they said the phrase to mock it, they reinforced the undeniable truth of it.
As Gunn’s film opens and Trump’s deportation machine accelerates, that truth feels more urgent than ever. Superman returns to theaters just days after America’s final Fourth of July before its 250th birthday. The question isn’t whether we’ll continue celebrating our independence, but whether we’ll remember what made us super in the first place.
At Monday’s premiere, Gunn said, “This is a movie about kindness, and I think that’s something everyone can relate to.” But media on the right, in fact, does not seem able to relate to this message of kindness. On Fox News, Jesse Watters joked under a “Superwoke” chyron that Superman’s cape reads “MS-13” and questioned whether he is “from Uganda.” The conservative outlet Outkick argued that America doesn’t have “to be ‘kind’ just because a fictional character from another planet brought some good to a fictional Earth,” and that “America is desperate for apolitical entertainment.”
Accusations of “politicizing” Superman come laughably late. Since 1938, Superman has defined “the American Way” through action. In 1940, while the isolationist America First movement preached neutrality, Superman took on Adolf Hitler. In 1949, he spoke directly to schoolchildren: “If you hear anybody talk against a schoolmate because of his religion, race, or national origin—don’t wait: tell him THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN.” He promoted vaccines, helping fund the polio vaccine. He exposed the Ku Klux Klan’s secrets on national radio. When a gunman opens fire on immigrants, blaming them for stealing his job, Superman blocks every bullet. He stood between peaceful protesters and riot police after Ferguson. After the murder of George Floyd, he declared: “Dreams save us. Dreams lift us up and transform us. And on my soul, I swear… until my dream of a world where dignity, honor and justice becomes the reality we all share — I’ll never stop fighting. Ever.”
Superman is America’s conscience wearing a cape—and that terrifies critics because they’re supporting a real-life supervillain.
Our greatest superpower as a nation has always been our ability to welcome the stranger and watch them soar. Like Superman himself, America draws its strength not from what it was born with, but from what it chooses to become—a place where the orphaned can find home, where the powerless can discover their power, where those who flee dying worlds can help build new ones.
In choosing fear over hope, walls over welcome, we don’t just betray Superman’s legacy—we abort our own future. The real superheroes have always been immigrants. It’s time we started acting like we believe it.
Andrew Slack is a narrative strategist who co-founded the Harry Potter Alliance, mobilizing over a million fans worldwide for social justice. He writes about how ancient and modern myths shape democracy and is working on a book exploring mythology’s role in American civic life. Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and founder of the immigrant storytelling non-profit Define American. An updated edition of his memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, for 2025 is now available.
Miro Remo’s Better Go Mad in the Wild won the Grand Prix – Crystal Globe, the top award, at the closing ceremony of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) on Saturday, where Stellan Skarsgård was also honored with the KVIFF Crystal Globe Award for his “outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema.” The Special Jury Prize went to Iranian filmmaker Soheil Beiraghi‘s fourth feature, Bidad (Outcry), whose announcement the fest had held back to ensure the safety of its creators.
This year’s jury, consisting of Nicolas Celis, Babak Jalali, Jessica Kiang, Jiří Mádl, and Tuva Novotny, lauded the “delightfully inventive documentary” Better Go Mad as “a funny valentine to the fading art of being true to yourself” and “a portrait of bickering twin brothers who may live a weird, off-grid life on their dilapidated farm, but who, in a world as mad as ours, actually might be the sanest people on Earth.”
Concluded the jury: “In the lifestyle it portrays, but also in the filmmaking risks it takes and the raucously loving brotherhood it admires, Better Go Mad in the Wild feels like a gulp of fresh, woody air, or a quick dip in an outdoor pond, or a moment of contemplation as a cow chews on your beard. In short, it feels like being free.”
Meanwhile, the jury called Bidad, about a Gen Z girl who sings in the streets despite rules that forbid that in Iran, “as courageous in its constantly unexpected narrative turns, as it careens through different genre terrains as energetically as it rolls through the different suburbs of Tehran. It concluded: “Morphing from social-injustice thriller into family melodrama into a triumph-over-adversity arc, it is most striking as a gonzo lovers-on-the-run romance, shot through with punk energy and spiky personality that ends on an ambivalent yet optimistic note — because where there’s this much life, there’s hope.”
‘Bidad’
Courtesy of KVIFF
This year’s best director award went to two films: Lithuanian cinematographer Vytautas Katkus’ feature directorial debut The Visitor, a meditation on solitutde, as well as Nathan Ambrosioni’s Out of Love, a reflection on family and co-existence.
Lauding the “deeply impressive directorial statements,” the jury said that Katkus “truly exploits the creative freedom that a director perhaps only ever properly enjoys with their first film, displaying an uncompromised, idiosyncratic vision that is both dazzlingly precise in its detail and dreamily peculiar as whole.” It also noted that Ambrosioni “demonstrates a maturity, compassion and polish far beyond his years in the moving and beautifully crafted Out of Love in which a rich yet understated presentation that allows the terrific all-ages acting ensemble to deliver intensely felt, empathetic performances.”
In the acting categories, Pia Tjelta was honored with the best actress award for her role in the political relationship drama Don’t Call Me Mama, Àlex Brendemühl won the best actor honor for his role in the rape drama When a River Becomes the Sea, and Kateřina Falbrová received a special jury mention for her role in the sexual abuse drama Broken Voices.
And the Právo Audience Award winner ended up being the fest opening film, We’ve Got to Frame It! (A Conversation With Jiří Bartoška in July 2021), featuring insights and laughs courtesy of the long-term fest president who died recently.
The fourth edition of Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition, which focuses on bold works by young filmmakers and renowned auteurs alike, revealed Bangladeshi director Mahde Hasan’s Sand City, a movie about harsh life in a metropolis, as its winner, decided by the jury of Yulia Evina Bhara, Noaz Deshe, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias, and Marissa Frobes. “A realm unknown, where architecture breathes and silence screams,” it wrote. “Time drips sideways in this fractured hourglass, and color spills like memory. In Sand City, cinema becomes a trembling map of the strange, abandoned, and intimate at the edge of sense.”
‘Sand City’
Courtesy of KVIFF
Meanwhile, the Proxima Special Jury Prize was bestowed upon Federico Atehortúa Arteaga’s Forensics, an experimental essay on missing persons. “This award goes to a film that carries forward the tradition of swimming against the current of globalized violence — with truth, with ethics, and above all, with poetry,” the jury said.
And Manoël Dupont’s Before/After, which explores baldness and queer identity, received a special mention in the Proxima lineup.
The non-statutory awards at KVIFF, namely the Europa Cinemas Label honor for the best European film at KVIFF 2025, the Fipresci Award, as well as the Grand Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, put a spotlight on three different movies.
Rebuilding, directed by Max Walker-Silverman and starring Josh O’Connor, won the Ecumenical Jury’s Grand Prize, while the jury gave a commendation to Cinema Jazireh, directed by Gözde Kural. The Europa Cinemas Label honor went to Broken Voices, and the Fipresci honor was awarded to Before/After.
The 2025 edition of the Karlovy Vary fest, which has a reputation as Central Europe’s largest cinema party, had opened with the presentation of KVIFF President’s Awards to Peter Sarsgaard and Vicky Krieps, a film about late long-time KVIFF president Jiří Bartoška, and a concert by U.K. act La Roux.
