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Veteran’s Day is November 11. While we all try to escape from the most exasperating Presidential Campaign in our history let me pay tribute to the Men and Women who have served in the military to insure we keep our electoral process and our freedoms.

Having served in the Navy four years (there he goes again!) I have a keen interest in any movie about the military, especially the sea service. I did serve during peace time so had no experience with combat but still spent most of my tour of duty at sea on an aircraft carrier, the USS Amerca CV66. Among other jobs I ran the ship’s television station for almost two years. Movies have always been important to me and so providing a few hours of entertainment every day when we were at sea was just about the best job I could have had.

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When John Huston went to war he took his mission seriously... as an artist. He made four wartime docus for the army. San Pietro and the long suppressed Let There Be Light are the classics we studied in film school; Winning Your Wings is typical enlistment booster material and Report from the Aleutians a remarkably good record of how the war was really fought in far-flung locations. Let There Be Light: John Huston's Wartime Documentaries Blu-ray Olive Films 1942-1945 Color and B&W 1:33 flat full frame 281 min. Street Date January 19, 2016 available through the Olive Films website 29.95 Directed by John Huston

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Of the Hollywood directors who 'went to war' and made high-profile Signal Corps films for the public, John Huston was surely the most innovative. He made one enlistment booster for the Army Air Corps and then three pictures that the Army thought were either too long,...

William Wyler was one of the greatest film directors Hollywood — or any other film industry — has ever produced. Today, Wyler lacks the following of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Frank Capra, or even Howard Hawks most likely because, unlike Hitchcock, Ford, or Capra (and to a lesser extent Hawks), Wyler never focused on a particular genre, while his films were hardly as male-centered as those of the aforementioned four directors. Dumb but true: Films about women and their issues tend to be perceived as inferior to those about men — especially tough men — and their issues. The German-born Wyler (1902, in Alsace, now part of France) immigrated to the United States in his late teens. Following a stint at Universal's New York office, he moved to Hollywood and by the mid-'20s was directing Western shorts. His ascent was quick; by 1929 Wyler was directing Universal's top female star, Laura La Plante in the...

An eerily similar Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and Jim Broadbent as her husband Denis are pictured here in this new still from the forthcoming Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady, which Mamma Mia director Phyllida Lloyd is currently filming here in the U.K. This new still comes from The Daily Mail.

For those around in 1980′s Britain, the scene being recreated here is that of the Conservative Party conference in Brighton of that year when the first female Prime Minister effectively put the country on red alert over the ongoing battles with unions in regards to worker’s pay rights and jobs. The press would call her ‘The Fighting Lady’ and it’s that spirit the movie is trying to tap into as we are told – “Director Lloyd and the picture’s writer Abi Morgan use the conference to demonstrate Mrs Thatcher’s dominance of, and popularity within, her...