“This the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” Maxwell Scott, editor of the Shinbone Star, tells Sen. Ransom Stoddard in John Ford’s 1962 classic “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.” Formerly believing that Stoddard’s past heroic deeds brought order and civilization to his society — and perhaps fearful of running the story or reverent of the mythology he was familiar with — Scott opted not to publish the truth after learning it.
After all, every civilization relies on its legends and myths to remind people what to believe and why it exists. Take, for instance, American history. Since the U.S.’s inception, until just recently, the self-sacrifice, religiosity, patriotism, and intellectual capacity of this nation’s earliest settlers through the Civil War and beyond provided the American people with a shared set of stories and figures on which they could rely for national identity and virtues. Our history provides the basis for our civil mythology; it’s why leftists consistently attack it.
By obsessing over the foibles of men far greater than any contemporary person in both word and deed, we lose sight of why we revere them in the first place.
It is with this in mind that I say with great disappointment that Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” is terrible.
If we can set aside the film’s egregious pacing (likely a result of having to condense a four-hour-plus film into two and a half hours) that causes it to gloss over massively important aspects of Napoelon’s life, ignore critical
