Red Hollywood

The situation is getting desperate as I try to find a Hollywood movie worth the price of admission. I walked out of Breakdown 20 minutes into the film as the plot began to break down. Thought about seeing "Lost World" or "Con Air", but negative reviews posted on the Web changed my mind.

So what a relief to discover some really fantastic film-making that unfortunately won't be available at you local Cineplex. Last night at the Anthology of Film Archives I saw "Red Hollywood", a documentary based on the examination of the works of blacklisted CP screenwriters and directors. The footage of their films of the 1930s through early 1950s was interspersed with commentary by key figures such as Paul Jarrico, Abraham Polonsky and Ring Lardner Jr., who are all still of the left. Polonsky in particular is one of the most personally engaging and politically incisive people you could imagine.

Here are some scattered notes on the movies that came under scrutiny:

1) "Woman of the Year", written by Ring Lardner Jr., was made during the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. Katherine Hepburn is a snobbish rich woman whose globe-trotting proclivities includes a desire to get involved with overseas military adventures to save the world while Spencer Tracy is a rough-hewn down-to-earth sort of guy who thinks America has no business getting involved in other people's messes. His isolationism is dramatized in a memorable scene at one of her penthouse cocktail parties where a fat, turbaned foreign dignitary tries unsuccessfully to engage Spencer Tracy in conversation. When it becomes obvious that his knowledge of English is minimal, Tracy makes a rude remark about people who wear towels on their heads.

2) Two films reflect the turn toward support for the allies after Hitler's invasion of Russia. One is "Action in the North Atlantic" which depicts the struggle in the soul of a merchant seaman to return to dangerous work in mined waters. He chooses duty over personal safety. As his ship enters the docks at Murmansk, the American sailors and the Russian dockhands greet each other as comrade. An example of pure Popular Front WWII kitsch is Jarrico's "Thousands Cheer" as chorus, lead soprano and symphony orchestra play a patriotic hymn by Shostakovitch. Jarrico wryly adds that while there was plenty of pro-Soviet pap, there was little to distinguish it from pro-American pap.

3) After the war, tensions started to rise between the USSR and the USA. One of the first films to examine the embryonic cold war was Joseph Losey's "Boy with Green Hair", written by Ben Barzman. (I knew his son Jon from my SWP days.) The excerpt shows the boy shopping in a grocery store as adults chat about the need to avert a new war. The look of panic grows on his face until he drops a bottle of milk on the floor, shattering it and drawing everybody's attention to his obviously frightened appearance.

4) The classic films of Hollywood Communism include "Body and Soul", "Force of Evil" and "I Can Get it for you Wholesale" written by Abraham Polonsky. They starred John Garfield, who started out in the left-wing Actors Studio and then went to Hollywood and acted in or produced dozens of hard-boiled, socially conscious films. He was a Jew from the lower east side who never joined the Communist Party, but was friendly. When summoned before HUAC, he refused to name names. When threatened with blacklisting, he still refused and finally died of a heart-attack in a time of great stress.

5) After Hollywood purged the CPers, they on their own put together an independent production "Salt of the Earth" that represents what politically conscious artists can come up with when they don't have to compromise. Written by Paul Jarrico, it depicts the strike of Chicano miners in New Mexico. After they are enjoined from picketing, their wives step in to replace them over the male chauvinist objections of the men. The miners are also sensitive to questions of national oppression as they explain to the Anglo union leader that they are tired of getting treated unequally.

Louis Proyect