They showed The Hunt for Red October on BBC1 last night, which is based on the book of the same name by Tom Clancy. I love this movie. I don't believe that Sean Connery has ever looked or will ever again look so good in a movie. Something about that grey wig just seemed to suit him perfectly. The world's first Scottish Lithuanian. And I don't ever remember enjoying Alec Baldwin so much as this either, before or since.

I'm in a rush to hit my daily deadline so I'll keep this brief.

It is sometimes said that movies like Red October are an anachronism, now that the Cold War is over. This was said of this movie as long ago as 1990, by the Washingon Post. Here's the first paragraph of that review:

"The Hunt for Red October," the new Sean Connery movie based on the Tom Clancy novel, is a leviathan relic of an age that no longer exists. It's also a leviathan bore, big, clunky and ponderously overplotted. And that it lurches into view as a Cold War anachronism is, in fact, the picture's most fascinating feature. It makes it irrelevant in an astoundingly up-to-date way.

And briefly, what I want to say is: bollocks. This really is a thoroughly despicable pro-Bolshevik meme, which deserves to be trampled on a lot more than it is.

Was The Dambusters an anachronism merely because it was made in 1954 yet still portrayed the people who flew in the dams raid as having done a brave job? Are all historical novels, for goodness sakes, anachronisms, merely because the events they portray and maybe celebrate are now dead and gone? You have only to ask questions like these for the answers to be obvious.

So why do people say this about films like Red October? Because (a) they didn't approve of the battle being portrayed and celebrated, but (b) they haven't the pure stamp-on-your-face brass to say so straight out. So, instead, they say that it is out of date, in the same way that an Osborne computer would now be out of date for doing your company accounts.

But a good story is a good story, no matter when it is set.

Soviet Russia was an abominable horror story, and all the brave men and true who together saw it off (people like most of the characters in Red October) deserve the eternal gratitude and admiration of civilised people now and for ever. As my friend David Carr says:

Never forget. Never forgive. Remain vigilant and, above all, never ever, ever apologise for fighting back.

There should never not be Cold War movies.

As this Washington Post review illustrates, one of the ways that the pro-Soviet and anti-anti-Soviet tendency tried to snatch a draw from the jaws of defeat was by saying that this particular war was over before it actually was. The Cold War only ended in 1991, when communism was officially ended as the basis of the government of Russia. The USSR's Cold Warriors and their useful idiots had been declaring the Cold War over, and any movies that told the truth about it to be anachronisms, ever since they devised the policy of Detente, the purpose of Detente being to win the thing for their side by persuading the good guys to declare themselves the winners before they'd won and to give up.