Tea at Trianon: 'Trial': Rediscovering an Anti-Communist Classic

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

Saturday, October 4, 2025

'Trial': Rediscovering an Anti-Communist Classic

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

I was thinking about Floyd recently when I rewatched the great 1955 movie Trial. The movie is one of the ones that will be included in the 2026 Anti-Communist Film Festival. One of the things that is amazing about films like Trial, or I Was a Communist for the FBI, or I Married a Communist is that they have insights into today’s left wing that modern Hollywood is afraid to touch. Trial is actually more relevant in 2025 than anything coming out of the major studios. It depicts communists as wretched souls who will even obstruct justice if it means a payday and creating a martyr.
The story follows a young, inexperienced attorney named David Blake, played by Glenn Ford, who is hired by attorney Barney Castle to help represent Angel Chavez, a Hispanic 17-year-old accused of killing a white girl. Chavez is innocent, but it soon becomes clear that the communists want Chavez as a money-making martyr and that race evidence is irrelevant. Blake tries to save Angel’s life while Barney, not a liberal but an actual hard-core communist, plans to let the boy hang so he can use his death as a fundraising tool for the party. Adopted by Don M. Mankiewicz from his prize-winning novel, Trial is, in the words of critic Clyde Gilmour, “a hard-hitting realistic drama which shows with disturbing clarity how political racketeers skilled in the black arts of showmanship can flourish under the protection of the very laws they despise.” Black Lives Matter, anyone? (Read more.)