Tea at Trianon: 'My Dark Days': Ronald Reagan and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, October 12, 2025

'My Dark Days': Ronald Reagan and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

It is President Reagan’s early role in his life as a researcher, writer and speaker on the topic of communism that I’d like to emphasize in the Anti-Communist Film Festival. In my view the 2024 biopic Reagan, while a solid movie featuring a great performance by Dennis Quaid, tried to do too much. It sought to dramatize Reagan’s entire life, when a more effective approach would have been to focus on a particular period in the present’s life. This was the approach so effectively used in Lincoln (2012), which depicted a relatively short but powerfully dramatic time period in President Lincoln’s life.
One of my favorite books about Reagan is The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism by Thomas Evans. Evans focuses on the eight years, 1954-63, when Reagan worked for General Electric, both hosting the GE Theater show and working for the company as a public relations envoy and liaison to employees. It was during this time that Reagan converted from liberal to conservative and became a powerful anti-communist. Reagan also starred in several episodes of the GE Theater, including “My Dark Days,” in which a woman reveals her past as a communist then goes to work for the FBI. It is based on the book I Was a Spy by Marion Miller. I have reached out to the Reagan Library to see if any copies of the production exist. We’d love to show it at the festival. A sharp, tight theater production about communism starring Reagan may reveal more than a three-hour movie.
From his work in Hollywood as President of the Screen Actors Guild and dealing with the labor unions at GE, Regan knew communism up close. From The Education of Ronald Reagan:
One of GE’s informants had reported that one member at a Communist Party meeting had asked, "What the hell are we going to do about that son-of-a-bitching bastard Reagan?" The actor received an anonymous phone call, threatening, "Your face will never be in pictures again." He understood that they planned to throw acid in his face. The Burbank police put a twenty-four-hour guard on his house and insisted that he carry a gun in a shoulder holster. “I know from the experience of hand-to-hand combat that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of Communism,” Reagan said.
(Read more.)