Amazing Grace is Great

RUSH: Hey, folks, before I get out of here for the weekend, I have to tell you I watched “Amazing Grace” last night. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this. It is really a fine movie, and it’s a movie that is just unlike stuff made in Hollywood today. The whole family can watch this. It is properly refined. It’s clean and pure right down the middle, but it has an amazing story. It’s about William Wilberforce. William Wilberforce abolished the slave trade in Eighteenth Century Great Britain. If there’s a theme in this movie, it focuses on his time in the House of Commons, where his efforts to abolish the slave trade — by the way, 50 years prior to anybody else doing so, because his efforts led to the abolition of slavery throughout much of the world. He faced a number of pressures in the movie and in life. He wanted to not go to the House of Commons. He didn’t want to be elected. He wanted to work on all of his humanitarian efforts outside of government. He was persuade by his friend William Pitt, the youngest prime minister in British history, to do it from inside the House of Commons — and he ran into all kinds of problems inside the House of Commons because of course there were people opposed to him, and he was urged to be bipartisan.

He was urged, “Come on, William! You gotta back off of this. You understand a lot of people are making a lot of money off this slave trade. You’ve gotta learn to get along in here. You’ve gotta learn there’s only so much you can do,’ and he refused to even consider bipartisan as a way of solving the problem of one man being able to own another. It’s a typically British movie. A couple friends of mine are listed as producers on it, Patricia Heaton from “Everybody Loves Raymond” and her husband, David Hunt. He played McCarthy on “24” this year, who was running around securing the nuclear triggers for the bad guy, Fayed. He’s a great guy.

Patricia and Dave are a great couple. Dave’s even in the movie for a couple of cameos in a bar scene. But if you haven’t seen this movie and don’t want something full of computer graphics and so forth, and if you want to take a message out of it: bipartisanship is not the way to deal with your principles, is what this movie is all about. You don’t compromise your principles in the interests of bipartisanship to get anything done, and William Wilberforce didn’t. He was an amazing character. I had never heard of him until I started hearing about this movie. It’s called “Amazing Grace,” and it’s out now.