Red Time For Bonzo: A Marxist-reaganist Film Podcast

For episode 1B, we jump to the ass-end of The Gipper's career, examining Don Siegel's acclaimed 1964 adaptation of Hemingway's THE KILLERS. Reagan's final role finds him cast against type as a sociopathic Southern California entrepreneur who is most at home on the business end of a sniper scope (when he's got former associates to kill) or a pair of binoculars (when he's being cuckolded again). The film is a motion Dorian Gray-picture hiding in plain sight, belying the "Great Communicator's" good-guy grandpa image and laying bare the criminal/realpolitik roots of the Goldwaterite Conservative movement that would swallow the Republican party whole by 1980. Of course, in 1964, even the most sanguine libertarian hustlers in the GOP had no idea what the next decade and a half held in store for their movement. After the defeat of their sparsely-haired boy Barry in November, those ragged individualists found themselves between a Rockefeller and a hard place, not unlike Reagan's Jack Browning character near the end o