Nolte: Mister, We Could Use Directors Like Wolfgang Petersen Again

Wolfgang Petersen, the German director who died this week at age 81, is a good example of not knowing how good you have it until it’s gone.

Imagine living in a country with a movie industry producing titles like In the Line of Fire (1993), Outbreak (1995), Air Force One (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), and Troy (2004).

Petersen directed all those movies.

He directed all those movies in a row.

And those movies were not only big hits, they were respectable big hits; titles we still watch today, titles that are endlessly rerun on cable TV because the networks know we will stop and watch. Plenty of garbage makes money. Petersen somehow managed to thrive at the very top of the Hollywood food chain for a dozen years without pumping out garbage. Instead, he gave us timeless, wowzers and crowd pleasers that never insulted the audience — our intelligence or who we are and what we believe in.

I own more than 3,000 movies, and when my 12-year-old nephew came to visit recently and it was his turn to pull one out of the pile, he pulled In the Line of Fire. What does that tell you?

It tells you two things: 1) what Petersen created was timeless, and 2) we should be grateful Petersen climbed aboard the Hollywood Train before the Woke Gestapo made his style of art verboten.

That isn’t to say Petersen had nothing to say through his blockbusters. He had plenty to say, a whole lot to say. But he said it in a mature way. He wasn’t out to “own” anyone. All Petersen wanted was to entertain, thrill, move, cast a spell, and have us exit the theater knowing we got plenty of bang for our buck. But there was always a point to his art, a humanist theme only a Woketard Nazi could reject.

The best example of this is the movie that made Wolfgang Petersen: his 1981 German masterpiece Das Boot, a movie so confident of its anti-war theme, it offered up WWII-era Nazis as protagonists. Look at how awful and cruel war is, he said. It’s so awful you feel bad for Nazis.

No way in the world does Das Boot get made in this fascist woke era — sympathetic Nazis?!?! — and what a loss that would have been, not only to the anti-war cause, but to the cause of great movies.

Movie lovers lost Wolfgang Petersen-the-Director in 2006 after Poseidon (2006), his one stinker after a perfect run few directors in history have equaled. Was Poseidon such a disaster Hollywood booted Petersen, even though a countless number of directors have held on to their careers after multiple flops? Or…

Did Petersen see the fascist writing on the Hollywood wall? After all, it was in the early aughts when Hollywood started to lose its collective mind over George W. Bush, Iraq, and losing elections. It was right around that time when everything started to become hyper-politicized.

I don’t know what happened to Petersen, why he disappeared from the director’s chair. It’s probably more complicated than the two choices above. What I do know is that in today’s intolerant, anti-human, anti-art Hollywood, Petersen would not be allowed to make the kind of movies he made: timeless and intelligent entertainment for everyone, even we deplorables.