Five Movies to Watch Instead of the Woke Super Bowl

The Super Bowl on Sunday will once again feature two national anthems, the real one and the so-called “Black National Anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” as if we were two nations, not one and indivisible. Country artist Mickey Guyton, who is black, will sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the gospel duo Mary Mary will give us “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Then at halftime, the renowned Mr. Snoop Dogg will regale us with his beloved classics, exhorting America to “smoke weed every day” and “smoke and go hoein.” The commercials, meanwhile, will vie to outdo one another in woke self-righteousness. The Super Bowl will be, in short, a celebration of schoolmarmish Leftism, racial divisiveness, and unabashed debauchery. Turn it off.

There are so many great movies you could see instead. Here are five of them. These are not the five greatest movies ever, nor are all of them full of vast cultural significance. They’re just each a far better way to spend Super Bowl Sunday than watching woke sports.

1. Casablanca

If you’ve never seen it, it’s time to treat yourself. If you have seen it, it’s worth revisiting. Against the backdrop of a doomed romance, here are all the virtues that so many Americans have forgotten: nobility, self-sacrifice, dedication to a cause greater than oneself, even at a cost, and more. And speaking of racial politics, even in the Jim Crow days of the 1940s and within an employer/employee relationship, there is a real friendship between Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), who is white, and Sam (Dooley Wilson), who is black. It’s easy to forget, amid today’s rampant race hysteria and victimhood profiteering, that such a thing was possible, and still could be.

2. Suspicion

Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) is as charming as ever, back in the days before men were women and women were men, and Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) falls for him hard. But kind of like with Joe Biden, the affable demeanor appears increasingly to be a façade, until finally Lina is not at all sure that Johnnie is not just a ne’er-do-well and a bit of a con man, but perhaps even a murderer. In the climactic scene, is Johnnie trying to push her out of the speeding car or keep her from falling out? This is a movie from the days before the content of one’s character was determined by the color of one’s skin, and when it was widely understood that human beings are complex and multifaceted.

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3. Ball of Fire

If you can believe that Gary Cooper is a nerdy professor who has never been kissed, and that Barbara Stanwyck is a nightclub singer and a mob boss’s moll (okay, that part is easy), then this much-overlooked 1941 romcom will keep you laughing. Once again, however, it depends on the highly antiquated notion that men and women are different, and are interested in one another without wanting to exchange roles. Crazy, I know.

4. Rear Window

Nowadays, Jeff Jeffries (James Stewart) would be brought up on charges or at least forced into counseling for watching the activities of his neighbors while laid up with a broken leg. This Hitchcock movie doesn’t dwell on the oddity of his behavior, but instead on the fact that he happens to witness a murder and has to try to stop the murderer from escaping, while he remains confined to his wheelchair. He gets some help in all this from the lovely Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly). If it were remade today, it wouldn’t be a film you could watch with the kids, but this was 1954, and the culture was healthier.

5. Key Largo

Here is Humphrey Bogart again, this time playing a World War II veteran, Major Frank McCloud, who stumbles into a caper that the notorious mobster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) is pulling off in a south Florida hotel run by James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and his daughter Nora (Lauren Bacall). As Rocco runs roughshod over everyone, McCloud falters and retreats in cowardice and shame, muttering, “One Rocco more or less isn’t worth dying for.” But the situation worsens, and McCloud recovers his backbone and takes up the battle; it all comes down to him and Rocco on a rocking boat, and only one of them is left standing. America could use a few cowards and half-men recovering their spines today.

Johnny Rocco also reminds us that corrupt politicians and powerful, sinister forces behind them rig elections: “I take a nobody, see? Teach ’em what to say, get his name in the papers. Yeah, pay for his campaign expenses. Dish out a lot of groceries, and coal, get my boys to bring the voters out, and then count the votes over and over until they added up right and he was elected … yeah.” Yeah. But in this movie, you see, Rocco was the bad guy.

Instead of celebrating wokeness and dissipation, turn off the game, get out the chips and dip and guacamole, and turn on some movies that date from the days when Americans generally held to the values that made this nation great in the first place.