HOLLYWOOD AND SLIME

Michael Tolkin does an incredible sleight-of-hand in his review of “Hollywood vs. America” by Michael Medved (Dec. 20). He blames Medved for using film reviews as patronage while at the same time using his own review to slam Medved, who panned Tolkin’s incredibly anti-Christian film “The Raptures.”

Further, he blames Washington politics and Vietnam War Angst for Hollywood’s slide into slime, and attributes the “good” film years of 1939 and 1965 to the fact that Democrats were in the White House then!

But most unbelievable of all is this sudden Hollywood embrace of Oliver North as the bete noire who caused it all. Rob Reiner is all over the talk-show circuit using North to justify the sleazy portrait of a murderous Marine colonel in “A Few Good Men.” Now Tolkin invokes Oliver North, the United Fruit Company and Reagan’s visit to a German cemetery as justification for “evil” movies.

Does this mean we’re on the brink of another golden age in the cinema, now that Democrats are back in the White House, the Soviet bloc is clamoring for U.S. factories of any kind and we’re about to forget the atrocities of the Viet Cong in an orgy of commerce and friendship?

MARILYN DUFF

FULLERTON