Hollywood's Missing Movies - Why American films have ignored life under communism
Joe Gillis
REASON * June 2000
Hollywood's Missing Movies
Why American films have ignored life under communism.
By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley
Every so often someone in Hollywood uses his power to break the movie
colony's rules. Consider this year's Total Eclipse. Odd as it may seem,
this is the first serious American film set against the background of
the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the deal that allied Europe's two
totalitarian powers against the West and helped plunge the world into
war. With an ally on the eastern front, Hitler sent his Panzers west
while Stalin helped himself to the Baltic states and invaded Finland. A
film like this could easily have turned out as big a didactic dud as the
Rev. Sun Myung Moon's 1982 bomb, Inchon, with Laurence Olivier as Gen.
Douglas MacArthur. But this time the verisimilitude of the script,
carried by some outstanding performances, is the source of the film's
dramatic power.
Dustin Hoffman's persuasive portrayal of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin
obviously emerges from his close study of how power and perversity
converged in the dictator. Likewise, Jurgen Prochnow sparkles as
Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and so does Robert
Duvall as Vyacheslav Molotov, his Soviet counterpart. Duvall's delivery
of Molotov's line that "fascism is a matter of taste" is a key moment,
and deserves at least as much admiration as Duvall's famous quip from
Apocalypse Now about the smell of napalm in the morning. The Molotov
speech has drawn some objections for being over the top, but it was not
invented by screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man); it's an actual
quote.
The sheer unexpectedness of the film is almost as shocking as its
content. In one of the film's more chilling sequences, the Soviets hand
over a number of German Communists, Jews who had taken refuge in Moscow,
to the Gestapo. Modern audiences may find this surprising, but that
incident too is taken from the historical record. Indeed, former KGB
officials are credited as advisers on the film, whose cast also includes
some of their actual victims.
There has simply been nothing like it on the screen in six decades. It
has taken that long for moviegoers to see Soviet forces invading Poland
and meeting their Nazi counterparts. Audiences would likely be similarly
surprised by cinematic treatments of Cuban prisons, the Khmer Rouge
genocide, and the bloody campaigns of Ethiopia's Stalinist Col.
Mengistu, all still awaiting attention from Hollywood.
Total Eclipse is rated PG-13 for violence, particularly graphic in some
of the mass murder scenes, images of starving infants from Stalin's 1932
forced famine in the Ukraine, and the torture of dissidents. Director
Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List) deftly cuts from the Moscow trials
to the torture chambers of the Lubyanka. More controversial are the
portrayals of American communists dur-ing the period of the Pact. They
are shown here picketing the White House, calling President Roosevelt a
warmonger, and demanding that America stay out of the "capitalist war"
in Europe. Harvey Keitel turns in a powerful performance as American
Communist boss Earl Browder, and Linda Hunt brings depth to Lillian
Hellman, who, when Hitler attacks the USSR in September of 1939,
actually did cry out, "The motherland has been invaded."
Painstakingly accurate and filled with historical surprises, this film
is so refreshing, so remarkable, that even at 162 minutes it seems too
short.
Never heard of Total Eclipse? It hasn't been produced or even written.
In all likelihood, such a film has never even been contemplated, at
least in Hollywood. Indeed, in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell, or
even the decade before that, no Hollywood film has addressed the actual
history of communism, the agony of the millions whose lives were
poisoned by it, and the century of international deceit that obscured
communist reality. The simple but startling truth is that the major
conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist
totalitarianism--what The New York Times recently called "the holy war
of the 20th century"--is almost entirely missing from American cinema.
It is as though since 1945, Hollywood had produced little or nothing
about the victory of the Allies and the crimes of National Socialism.
This void is all the stranger since the major conflict of our time would
seem to be a natural draw for Hollywood.
Though of global dimension, the conflict encompasses millions of
dramatic personal stories played out on a grand tapestry of history:
courageous Solidarity unionists against a Communist military junta;
teenagers facing down tanks in the streets of Budapest and Prague; Cuban
gays oppressed by a macho-Marxist dictatorship; writers and artists
resisting the kitsch of obscurantist materialism; families fleeing
brutal persecution, risking their lives to find freedom.
Furthermore, great villains make for great drama, and communism's
central casting department is crowded: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hönecker,
Ceaucescu, Pol Pot, Col. Mengistu--all of cosmic megalomania--along with
their squads of hacks, sycophants, and stooges, foreign and domestic.
A few English-language films have drawn on this remarkable material,
especially book-into-film projects based on highly publicized works,
among them One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (a 1971
British-Norwegian production) and, of course, Doctor Zhivago (1965). But
many other natural book-to-film projects remain untouched, from the
story of Stalin's daughter Svetlana (who left Russia for the West) to
works by such high-ranking defectors as Polish Ambassador Romuald
Spasowski (The Liberation of One), KGB agent Arkady Schevchenko (
Breaking With Moscow), and persecuted Cuban poets Armando Valladares (Against
All Hope) and Heberto Padilla (Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden).
In light of the most recent revelations concerning the espionage of
Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers' Witness is another obvious candidate.
The reason this ample supply of stories remains unfilmed is not
ignorance. Though its films may not often reflect it, Hollywood is
filled with knowledgeable writers and producers. The reasons lie
elsewhere, especially in Hollywood's own convoluted political history, a
history that has passed through many stages. Perhaps the most pertinent
of those stages involves the "back story" of communism's own largely
uncharted offensive in the studios.
The cinema's great potential for persuasion excited Stalin and his
wholly-owned American subsidiary, the Communist Party of the United
States of America (CPUSA), which lived off Soviet cash until it
criticized Gorbachev's reforms as "old social democratic thinking class
collaboration." Correspondence between American communists and their
Soviet bosses can now be perused in The Soviet World of American
Communism (1998). Editors John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Kyrill
Anderson gathered newly declassified material from the Moscow-based
archives of the Communist International (Comintern), the Soviet
organization that controlled national communist parties. Members of the
CPUSA made some documentary films in the 1930s, but nothing that could
compete with the American commercial cinema, which the party set out to
co-opt.
"One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the
field of propaganda," wrote the indefatigable Comintern agent Willi
Muenzenberg in a 1925 Daily Worker article, "is the conquest of this
supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the
ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them." It
was an ambitious task, but conditions would soon turn to the party's
advantage.
The Depression convinced many that capitalism was on its last legs and
that socialism was the wave of the future. In the days of the Popular
Front of the mid-'30s, communists found it easy to make common cause
with liberals against Hitler and Spain's Franco. In 1935, V.J. Jerome,
the CPUSA's cultural commissar, set up a Hollywood branch of the party.
This highly secretive unit enjoyed great success, recruiting members,
organizing entire unions, raising money from unwitting Hollywood
liberals, and using those funds to support Soviet causes through front
groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. "We had our own sly
arithmetic, we could find fronts and make two become one," remembered
screenwriter Walter Bernstein (Fail Safe, The Front, The House on
Carroll Street) in his 1996 autobiography, Inside Out.
During the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, for example, actor Melvyn
Douglas (Ninotchka) and screenwriter-director Philip Dunne (Wild in the
Country) proposed that the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, a
conclave of industry Democrats, condemn Stalin's invasion of Finland in
late 1939. But the group was actually secretly dominated by Communists,
and it rejected the resolution. As Dunne later described it in his 1980
memoir, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics, "All over town the
industrious communist tail wagged the lazy liberal dog."
"There was never an organized, articulate, and effective liberal or
left-wing opposition to the communists in Hollywood," concluded John
Cogley, a socialist, in his 1956 Report on Blacklisting. As former party
member Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) put it, the party was "the
only game in town." But even though the Communists were strongest in the
Screen Writers Guild, influencing the content of movies was a trickier
matter.
Communist cultural doctrine cast writers as "artists in uniform,"
producing works whose function was to transmit political messages and
raise the consciousness of their audiences. Otherwise, movies were mere
bourgeois decadence, a tool of capitalist distraction, and therefore
subjugation. Party bosses V.J. Jerome and John Howard Lawson (a
co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild and screenwriter of Algiers and
Action in the North Atlantic) enforced this art-is-a-weapon creed in
Hollywood, as they had done earlier among New York dramatists. Albert
Maltz (Destination Tokyo) was to challenge the doctrine in a 1946 New
Masses article, arguing that doctrinaire politics often resulted in poor
writing. Responding to the notion that "art is a weapon," Maltz
suggested, "An artist can be a great artist without being an integrated
or logical or a progressive thinker on all matters."
As a result of such heresy, the party dragged him through a series of
humiliating inquisitions and forced him to publish a retraction. Maltz
trashed his original article as "a one-sided, nondialectical treatment
of complex issues" that was "distinguished for its omissions" and which
"succeeded in merging my comments with the unprincipled attacks upon the
left that I have always repudiated and combated." Maltz was to defend
that retraction until he died in 1985.
Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle), a Communist Party member and for a time the
highest-paid screenwriter in town, described the screenwriting trade as
"literary guerrilla warfare." The studio system, in which projects were
closely supervised, made the insertion of propaganda difficult if not
impossible. Hollywood did not become a bastion of Stalinist propaganda,
except as part of the war effort, when Russia was celebrated as an ally.
Ayn Rand, then a Hollywood screenwriter and one of the few in the movie
community who had actually lived under communism, was to point out that,
in their zeal to provide artistic lend-lease, American Communist
screenwriters went to extraordinary and absurd lengths. In such wartime
movies as North Star and Song of Russia (both 1943), they portrayed the
USSR as a land of joyous, well-fed workers who loved their masters.
Mission to Moscow (also 1943), starring Walter Huston, went so far as to
whitewash Stalin's murderous show trials of the 1930s.
But if Comintern fantasies of a Soviet Hollywood were never realized,
party functionaries nevertheless played a significant role: They were
sometimes able to prevent the production of movies they opposed. The
party had not only helped organize the Screen Writers Guild, it had
organized the Story Analysts Guild as well. Story analysts judge scripts
and film treatments early in the decision making process. A dismissive
report often means that a studio will pass on a proposed production. The
party was thus well positioned to quash scripts and treatments with
anti-Soviet content, along with stories that portrayed business and
religion in a favorable light. In The Worker, Dalton Trumbo openly
bragged that the following works had not reached the screen: Arthur
Koestler's Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar; Victor
Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom; and Bernard Clare by James T. Farrell,
also author of Studs Lonigan and vilified by party enforcer Mike Gold as
"a vicious, voluble Trotskyite."
Even talent agents sometimes answered to Moscow. Party organizer Robert
Weber landed with the William Morris agency, where he represented
Communist writers and directors such as Ring Lardner Jr. and Bernard
Gordon. Weber carried considerable clout regarding who worked and who
didn't. So did George Willner, a Communist agent representing
screenwriters, who sold out his noncommunist clients by deliberately
neglecting to shop their stories. On a wider scale, the party launched
smear campaigns and blacklists against noncommunists, targeting such
figures as Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis.
These were among the many actors defying the party-backed labor group,
the Conference of Studio Unions. The CSU, which was trying to shut down
the industry and force through jurisdictional concessions that would
give it supremacy in studio labor, clashed with the International
Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and its allies, who were
trying to keep the studios going. Katharine Hepburn stumped for the CSU,
reading speeches written by Dalton Trumbo, while Ronald Reagan, then a
liberal Democrat, headed the anti-communists in the talent guilds.
These were the true front lines of the communist offensive, and bloody
warfare broke out in the streets outside every studio. The prospect of
communist influence in Hollywood got Washington snooping, but in classic
style, the politicians got it backward.
The first head of what eventually became the House Committee on
Un-American Activities was New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein. As the
recently declassified "Venona" documents (decrypts of Soviet cables)
reveal, Dickstein moonlighted for Soviet intelligence--not out of
ideology but for money. Initially concerned with pro-fascist groups in
the late 1930s, the committee after the war was dominated by right-wing
Republicans, though its most loathsome figure was Mississippi Democrat
John Rankin, a sulfuric anti-Semite.
In 1947, while investigating Comintern agent Gerhart Eisler, whose
brother Hanns was a composer in Hollywood, the committee found movie
people coming forth with stories of Communist Party intrigue and decided
that there was enough to justify hearings. They selected fewer than 50
witnesses of various job descriptions and political profiles, including
party heavyweights John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo.
Eager to exploit Hollywood for publicity, the committee stupidly made
film content the issue, ignoring the party's vast organizing campaigns
in the back lots despite convincing testimony from, among others, Walt
Disney. More important, the committee ignored the reality that it wasn't
what the party put into North Star and Song of Russia that really
mattered but the anti-communist, anti-Soviet material it kept out.
While the committee welcomed the publicity, the beleaguered film
industry circled the wagons. Studio bosses, although adamantly
anti-communist, asserted defiantly that no congressman could tell them
how to run their business. A celebrity support group, including such
figures as Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, journeyed to Washington to
defend their own.
The hearings featured a series of angry harangues by Stalinist writers
who came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. Dalton Trumbo, who joined the
party during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and even wrote a novel, The Remarkable
Andrew, to support the Pact, bellowed, "This is the beginning of the
American concentration camp."
Such performances shocked the studio bosses and the celebrity
supporters, who had been expecting an eloquent constitutional defense of
freedom of expression. Party membership itself was not illegal, and
members could have alluded to the wartime alliance with the Soviets.
Many wanted to testify, a phenomenon Norman Mailer dubbed "subpoena
envy." As director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), who organized the
celebrity support group, later learned to his dismay, CPUSA lawyers had
decided on the confrontational strategy, largely to protect enforcer
John Howard Lawson and others who had already testified to a California
committee that they were not communists.
After another series of hearings in the early 1950s, studios produced a
string of now largely forgotten, mostly low-budget anti-communist films,
among them Big Jim McClain and My Son John, in which Helen Hayes informs
to the government on her son, Robert Walker. These dealt with communism
as a kind of domestic political mafia but left actual conditions under
communist regimes largely unexplored. More important was Hollywood's
internal reaction.
Studio bosses, fearful of bad publicity, announced that they would
indeed fire communists, which they had previously refused to do. This
was the beginning of the blacklist, Hollywood's version of the conflict
of our time, enshrined in such films as The Front (1976), starring Woody
Allen and Zero Mostel and written by Walter Bernstein, and the
star-studded but bland Guilty by Suspicion (1991). Viewers of such fare
could easily conclude that communism scarcely existed except as a source
of boundless optimism in the hearts of the country's most creative
writers. Much the same message emerged from Julia, the 1977 Jane Fonda
vehicle based on an autohagiographical memoir by Lillian Hellman.
Over the years, a number of book-length accounts have taken up the
cause, some written by relatives of the blacklisted, invoking
"inquisition" and "red scare" in their titles and bristling with terms
such as witch-hunt and McCarthyite. The senator from Wisconsin, it
should be noted, played no role in Hollywood, whose anti-communists,
mostly liberal Democrats, found him an impediment to their cause.
As it plays out in the movies, the blacklist story is vintage Hollywood:
black hats vs. white hats. The evil government committee rides into town
and, for no apparent reason, makes life miserable for a group of noble
artists. In one subplot, the victims survive by selling scripts under
fake names. The story carries considerable appeal, though it misses the
irony that those who thought capitalism evil continued to take advantage
of the kind of market that did not exist in the socialist regimes they
extolled. Albert Maltz championed East Germany, while fellow Hollywood
Ten alumnus Lester Cole favored that bastion of artistic freedom, North
Korea.
By the 1960s the blacklist was over; Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger
restored the names of blacklisted writers to the credits of the films
they actually wrote. The Hollywood Ten and other communist writers were
on their way, as Philip Dunne put it, to being "virtually deified."
Dunne had been through it all and found the revisionist accounts so
distorted that, he said, "I could almost believe that I was reading the
chronicle of some mythical kingdom."
The legend of the blacklist, sanitized of all references to Stalin or to
the Communist Party's actual record in the studios, became a continuing
influence on Hollywood's political life. Hollywood had entered its
period of anti-anti-communism, a well-known phenomenon in American
cultural and intellectual life. Those motivated by this ideology have
vilified such critics of the Soviet Union as Robert Conquest and Sidney
Hook, while venerating such paleo-leftists as journalist I.F. Stone,
whose 1952 Hidden History of the Korean War parroted the party line that
South Korea invaded the North. Anti-anti-communism demonizes
anti-communists, however truthful their revelations, as paranoid and on
the wrong side of history, while praising apologists of totalitarianism
as well-meaning idealists, however mendacious and servile their record.
Such a vision is not likely to promote a meaningful cinematic treatment
of communism.
Witness the longstanding campaign to prevent director Elia Kazan (On the
Waterfront, East of Eden, A Streetcar Named Desire) from receiving a
lifetime achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy. Kazan, a
former communist, cooperated with HUAC and defended his position in a
New York Times advertisement that called on liberals to take a stand
against communism. Since Kazan's cinematic achievements are undeniable,
his career violates a significant aspect of the Hollywood Ten legend:
that those who defied the committee were brilliant artists and noble
idealists, while those who cooperated were vile mediocrities who could
build their careers only by destroying others.
Kazan finally received his award at last year's Oscars, but amid renewed
controversy over whether he should receive any applause at the event.
(Abraham Polonsky [I Can Get It for You Wholesale], a leading Hollywood
Communist who led the assault on Albert Maltz, hoped in print that Kazan
would be assassinated.) But though Kazan finally received his due from
Hollywood, Stalin never has.
According to Hollywood, American anti-communism derived not from any
deficiencies of socialism or threat from the USSR but from paranoia,
xenophobia, and the nefarious influence of Nazis who entered the United
States after the war. That was the theme of Walter Bernstein's 1988 The
House on Carroll Street, which featured a score more appropriate for a
'50s monster movie. Bernstein, incidentally, shows up in the Venona
decrypts, which reveal that he was a willing collaborator with the KGB.
If nothing else, such a revelation gives new meaning to the Hollywood
phrase, "Have your agent call my agent."
On the rare occasion when life under communism is portrayed, its
characteristic brutality is virtually never actually represented.
Consider, for instance, Warren Beatty's Oscar-winning Reds (1981), a
psalm to Lenin acolyte John Reed. In that film a character concedes that
the Soviet regime "violates human rights" but none of these violations
appears on the screen. Likewise, audiences don't see the Khmer Rouge
murdering any of their nearly 2 million victims in The Killing Fields
(1984). Indeed, the real villains in that tragedy, we learn, are Richard
Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and U.S. foreign policy.
A similar theme runs through Missing (1982), with Jack Lemmon, directed
by Constantine Costa-Gavras, a man of the left who, unlike his Hollywood
colleagues, is sometimes willing to address communist themes honestly.
Costa-Gavras' 1970 film The Confession deals with the 1952 anti-Semitic
show trials in Czechoslovakia that resulted in 11 executions. After
hanging, the victims' bodies were incinerated; the film shows a
policeman scattering their ashes on frozen roads around Prague, which
was what actually happened. For Yves Montand, who played Czech Foreign
Minister Artur London, The Confession was "a farewell to the generous
sentimentality of the Left, a Left that had been blind to its own crimes
and cultivates a messianic pose, proposing to bring happiness to human
beings, even if it means slaughtering them."
But Hollywood has yet to show itself capable of portraying what The
Black Book of Communism, a recent scholarly assessment of communist
crimes, calls "politically correct mass slaughter." In Eleni (1985),
John Malkovich hunts down a Greek communist responsible for the death of
his mother, but much of the hostile action takes place off screen. The
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), while generally anti-communist in
tone, includes only fleeting glimpses of the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Odd as it may seem, one of the few Hollywood movies that does depict
violence in communist countries on screen is a Disney film. The 1983
Night Crossing shows a daring escape from East Germany, Albert Maltz's
version of the good society. Viewers see German border guards, whom John
Hurt calls "pigs," gunning down those who flee. Material abounds for
this type of film. Soviet Bloc archives are yielding their revelations
about the Katyn Forest murders of Polish officers by Soviet forces, KGB
assassination campaigns in the West, and the identity of Stalinist
agents in Western governments. Vitaly Shentalinsky's 1996 book, Arrested
Voices, documented Stalin's campaigns against writers and artists, whose
victims included Itzak Feffer and Solomon Mikaels, both of whom had been
showcased in Hollywood by Communists as evidence that anti-Semitism did
not exist in the Soviet Union.
Films from former communist countries, the 1999 Thief among them, show
that even the Russians are coming to terms with the communist legacy.
But the circus surrounding Kazan's Oscar and other recent events suggest
that Hollywood probably will not follow suit. The blacklist mythography
casts too long a shadow, one in which a fuller appreciation of the epic
battle between communism and democracy remains in the dark. "Hollywood
Remembers the Blacklist," staged at the Motion Picture Academy's theater
on the 50th anniversary of the 1947 hearings, featured Billy Crystal and
Kevin Spacey in dramatic roles. Also appearing were Hollywood Ten
veteran Ring Lardner Jr. and fellow party member and Song of Russia
co-writer Paul Jarrico, who compared the Hollywood Ten's performance
with the stand that Jefferson took against the Alien and Sedition Act.
Actress Marsha Hunt said that "for over a decade, this was no longer the
land of the free, nor the home of the brave."
This event was a colorized, multimedia version of Philip Dunne's
"mythical kingdom," but for the anti-anti-communist Hollywood crowd, it
proved the feel-good hit of the fall. Such events pass on the myths to
younger filmmakers who see themselves not just as entertainers but
teachers.
For instance, Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, released last fall, takes
its title from an agitprop musical written by Marc Blitztein, a
doctrinaire Stalinist. The original work was welcomed by the 1930s
Federal Theater Project, a group dominated by communists, precisely
because of its Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism. The progressive Works
Progress Administration (WPA) closed down the show out of budgetary
considerations, though Robbins attempts to blame it on an axis of HUAC
and capitalists allied with Mussolini and Hitler. The fascist-capitalist
bosses, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, raking in the dough selling goods
to Hitler, are also out to get muralist Diego Rivera, played by Ruben
Blades. Audiences predictably stayed away from this film, but in
Hollywood, the mythology of the left remains powerful enough to see such
a project through production.
Late last year, the University of Southern California, whose film school
is a kind of Hollywood employment agency, unveiled a sculpture garden
honoring the Hollywood Ten as victims of the Cold War and champions of
the First Amendment. The mythology has become a monument, a kind of
museum of anti-anti-communism in a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of
the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or
Eastern European dissident. The specter that once haunted Europe is
gone, yet it still seems to hang over the palms of Southern California,
an ideological smog that obscures the view for millions of filmgoers.
Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley (7455...@compuserve.com) is editorial
director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the
author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film
Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, now available in paperback from Prima
Publishing.
=================================================
"I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy." -- Samuel Butler
Jim
> For instance, Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, released last fall, takes
> its title from an agitprop musical written by Marc Blitztein, a
> doctrinaire Stalinist.
Damn! And I thought it came from the Van Halen song!
Jim
> REASON * June 2000
>
> Hollywood's Missing Movies
> Why American films have ignored life under communism.
>
> By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley
>
> Every so often someone in Hollywood uses his power to break the movie
> colony's rules. Consider this year's Total Eclipse. Odd as it may seem,
> this is the first serious American film set against the background of
> the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the deal that allied Europe's two
> totalitarian powers against the West and helped plunge the world into
> war. With an ally on the eastern front, Hitler sent his Panzers west
> while Stalin helped himself to the Baltic states and invaded Finland. A
> film like this could easily have turned out as big a didactic dud as the
> Rev. Sun Myung Moon's 1982 bomb, Inchon, with Laurence Olivier as Gen.
> Douglas MacArthur. But this time the verisimilitude of the script,
> carried by some outstanding performances, is the source of the film's
> dramatic power.
<a big SNIP of voluminous article>
There are a million things you could say about Hollywood's past attitudes
toward the Soviet Union. But I don't think any of it does much good from
here. You could make some really interesting movies about the era, though.
I saw a really jolting documentary a few years ago about the Penkovsky
case. He was a Russian agent who turned for the West and offered up some
incredibly valuable infoprmation about the Soviet missile program. But when
he came to the West, his case was mishandled through mistrust and sheer
ineptitude. He ended up back in Soviet hands, where he was, of course,
shot. Then there is the case of the American Communist, Bertram Wolfe. He
went to the Soviet Union right after the October Revolution and was
personally acquainted with Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Later, he changed his
mind and came back to work for the US Government. He wrote a fabulous book
about his ex-friends called "Three who Made a Revolution". It has enough
material for a couple of movies. Another book that tells how the initial
giddiness of post-revolutionary Russia gradually turned to terror is "Hope
Against Hope" by Nadezhda Mandelshtam. Her husband, a clebrated poet, got
into trouble when first, he slapped an important Soviet writer at a party,
and second, wrote a satirical poem about Stalin ("everybody points fingers,
but only yours go boom"). Her story about her husband's descent into exile
and the Gulag and finally into oblivion is one of the most gut-wrenching I
have ever read. She was a very astute observer and offered a penetrating
analysis of all that happened in the years of the Terror.
Interestingly enough, the author of the article left out all of the Cold War
spy dramas. What about all of those Smiley movies based on John le Carre's
novels? I think he ignores a lot to make his case.
Heynony
Grand Inquisitor
> Interestingly enough, the author of the article left out all of the Cold War
> spy dramas. What about all of those Smiley movies based on John le Carre's
> novels? I think he ignores a lot to make his case.
>
Yes, but those were not about what he was talking about, the suffering
of the people under communism, those were spy dramas, as you said. I
think the real reason is because they don't want to put communism in a
negative light.
--
"It is dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue."
--Zork
Grand Inquisitor
http://www.dvdprofiler.com/mycollection.asp?alias=Oost
Grand Inquisitor
> Is there a world's record for the longest single usenet post?
Not counting binaries?
Frank R.A.J. Maloney
news:20030702202502...@mb-m06.aol.com...
>
> REASON * June 2000
>
> Hollywood's Missing Movies
> Why American films have ignored life under communism.
>
> By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley
>
[deletion]
>
>
>
> Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley (7455...@compuserve.com) is editorial
> director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the
> author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film
> Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, now available in paperback from Prima
> Publishing.
Too bad the poster isn't conservative enough to respect intellectual
property rights and give us a pointer to this article instead of ripping off
the entire text.
It's http://reason.com/0006/fe.kb.hollywoods.shtml btw.
And that's the only time I'm going to give this source a plug.
--
Frank in Seattle
___________
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
"I leave you now in radiant contentment"
-- "Whistling in the Dark"
Stephen Cooke
On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Grand Inquisitor wrote:
> Jim wrote:
> > Interestingly enough, the author of the article left out all of the Cold War
> > spy dramas. What about all of those Smiley movies based on John le Carre's
> > novels? I think he ignores a lot to make his case.
>
> Yes, but those were not about what he was talking about, the suffering
> of the people under communism, those were spy dramas, as you said. I
> think the real reason is because they don't want to put communism in a
> negative light.
I think the real reason is they don't want to not make money.
swac
steve
On 3-Jul-2003, smacked up and reeling, "Frank R.A.J. Maloney"
<fr...@blarg.net> blindly formulated the following incoherence:
> Too bad the poster isn't conservative enough to respect intellectual
> property rights and give us a pointer to this article instead of ripping
> off
> the entire text.
Hi Frank,
I respect the attitude behind this post, but I went to the article in
question and poked around the web site and saw no mention of any limitation
on use. If reason doesnt mind (and it appears that they dont), then there
is no violation of property.
> It's http://reason.com/0006/fe.kb.hollywoods.shtml btw.
> And that's the only time I'm going to give this source a plug.
...but it's always good to divulge the source regardless. Thanks, Frank.
steve
--
"It aint me, man, it's the system."
Charles Manson
Frank R.A.J. Maloney
news:be1eq3$ino$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
If you look on the home page you will find contact info for "Reprint
Permissions." Please don't tell me you don't think the contents of the
magazine or the book the article comes from are not copyrighted.
steve
On 3-Jul-2003, smacked up and reeling, "Frank R.A.J. Maloney"
<fr...@blarg.net> blindly formulated the following incoherence:
> If you look on the home page you will find contact info for "Reprint
> Permissions
I didnt see that. My apologies.
Grand Inquisitor
Hollywood is motivated by more than money. They're human beings, not
machines. And why would a movie that expresses a sentiment that most
people here believe in, fail at the box office?
Jim
> Jim wrote:
>> Interestingly enough, the author of the article left out all of the Cold
>> War spy dramas. What about all of those Smiley movies based on John le
>> Carre's novels? I think he ignores a lot to make his case.
>>
>
> Yes, but those were not about what he was talking about, the suffering
> of the people under communism, those were spy dramas, as you said. I
> think the real reason is because they don't want to put communism in a
> negative light.
I think "The Spy who Came in From the Cold" very much had all of that as a
context. The countries of the West were scared shitless at the thought the
Soviets could take over. The main reason for that fear was the knowledge
that the Soviets lived in a police state and that people could be put away
for almost any reason. Otherwise, all of the energy being poured into
espionage wouldn't make any sense. I also find it hard to believe that
Hollywood had much thought about suffering under communism one way or the
other. Espionage just makes easier movie material than show trials and
prison camps. I specialized in Russian literature and history in school (up
to the graduate level) and I was surprised at how little most people knew
about any of that stuff, let alone Hollywood people. Nikita Mikhalkov made
a pretty decent film on the Terror. It was called "Burnt by the Sun". It
got got pretty good reviews from the critics, but I don't think that many
Americans were interested in seeing it. American movie audiences simply
don't have much interest in a history other than their own, and even that
interest is fairly limited. If you have proof to the contrary, let me know.
Jim
> On 3-Jul-2003, smacked up and reeling, "Frank R.A.J. Maloney"
> <fr...@blarg.net> blindly formulated the following incoherence:
>
>> Too bad the poster isn't conservative enough to respect intellectual
>> property rights and give us a pointer to this article instead of ripping
>> off
>> the entire text.
>
> Hi Frank,
>
> I respect the attitude behind this post, but I went to the article in
> question and poked around the web site and saw no mention of any
> limitation
> on use. If reason doesnt mind (and it appears that they dont), then there
> is no violation of property.
You mean more socialist public domain stuff?
Grand Inquisitor
> I think "The Spy who Came in From the Cold" very much had all of that as a
> context. The countries of the West were scared shitless at the thought the
> Soviets could take over. The main reason for that fear was the knowledge
> that the Soviets lived in a police state and that people could be put away
> for almost any reason. Otherwise, all of the energy being poured into
> espionage wouldn't make any sense. I also find it hard to believe that
> Hollywood had much thought about suffering under communism one way or the
> other. Espionage just makes easier movie material than show trials and
> prison camps. I specialized in Russian literature and history in school (up
> to the graduate level) and I was surprised at how little most people knew
> about any of that stuff, let alone Hollywood people. Nikita Mikhalkov made
> a pretty decent film on the Terror. It was called "Burnt by the Sun". It
> got got pretty good reviews from the critics, but I don't think that many
> Americans were interested in seeing it. American movie audiences simply
> don't have much interest in a history other than their own, and even that
> interest is fairly limited. If you have proof to the contrary, let me know.
Then why were Roman epics so popular at one time? I think there's a lot
of dormant interest in history we Americans aren't used to hearing about
waiting to be stimulated (my dad is a history *wizard* and he'd never
heard much about Indonesia until I showed him The Year of Living
Dangerously).
John Harkness
Roman epics were popular twice, basically, the first time during the
silent era, when you got to have epic scale action and sexy stuff you
couldn't really do in modern dress, but could if you could a) say it
came from the bible b) say it was bad.
The second, in the 50s, was when they were looking for big subjects to
fill the CinemaScope screen and had a lot of money tied up in Europe
which they couldn't get out, so they made epic films in Spain and
Italy.
Remember, there was a time when most Americans had at least a passing
interest in the Bible -- and most of the Roman epics are fairly
biblical, one way or another. (that is, they tend to be about Romans
and Christianity.0
TV couldn't compete with, say, the chariot races in Ben Hur.
John Harkness
Grand Inquisitor
argument which is that Americans will pay to see history they aren't
acquainted with (look at Spartacus or Braveheart, nobody in America knew
who they were).
John Harkness
<zo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>All your arguments are appreciated but it doesn't ditract from my main
>argument which is that Americans will pay to see history they aren't
>acquainted with (look at Spartacus or Braveheart, nobody in America knew
>who they were).
My argument actually, is that Bible history was history, largely, that
Americans WERE familiar with.
Spartacus was a best selling novel.
Braveheart, actually, was history that Americans wouldn't pay to see
-- Paramount released the damn thing three times, including
post-Oscar, and I'm not sure it ever broke a hundred million.
John Harkness
Grand Inquisitor
> Braveheart, actually, was history that Americans wouldn't pay to see
> -- Paramount released the damn thing three times, including
> post-Oscar, and I'm not sure it ever broke a hundred million.
>
> John Harkness
Well everybody I know has seen it. (except me)
John Harkness
<zo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>John Harkness wrote:
>> Braveheart, actually, was history that Americans wouldn't pay to see
>> -- Paramount released the damn thing three times, including
>> post-Oscar, and I'm not sure it ever broke a hundred million.
>>
>> John Harkness
>
>Well everybody I know has seen it. (except me)
Well, that's two of us who haven't seen it.
John Harkness
Jim Powers
Grand Inquisitor wrote:
>
>
> Then why were Roman epics so popular at one time? I think there's a lot
> of dormant interest in history we Americans aren't used to hearing about
> waiting to be stimulated (my dad is a history *wizard* and he'd never
> heard much about Indonesia until I showed him The Year of Living
> Dangerously).
>
An historical event I'd like to see portrayed in film is the heroic and ill-fated
Hungarian Revolution of 1956. With the end of the Cold War, it could now be
filmed on location in Budapest with the cooperation of the Hungarian government.
It's a story that few Americans have heard, and it needs to be told.
barnaby
news:ugu9gvknccr7mnp83...@4ax.com...
You'll get around to it. The final third disappoints deeply, but before
that point, it's a fun film.
Grand Inquisitor
You're a reviewer and you haven't seen it?
Grand Inquisitor
> An historical event I'd like to see portrayed in film is the heroic and ill-fated
> Hungarian Revolution of 1956. With the end of the Cold War, it could now be
> filmed on location in Budapest with the cooperation of the Hungarian government.
> It's a story that few Americans have heard, and it needs to be told.
>
Sounds interesting. I, as an American, would like to see this story
told in film.
Bob Tiernan
Jim Powers wrote:
> An historical event I'd like to see portrayed in film is the heroic and
> ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956. With the end of the Cold War,
> it could now be filmed on location in Budapest with the cooperation of
> the Hungarian government. It's a story that few Americans have heard,
> and it needs to be told.
Had such a film come out anytime between 1956 and, oh, a
couple of years ago, there'd be plenty of Lefty apologists
who'd see the film as right-wing "propaganda" seeking
to "demonize" those wonderful people in the Hungarian
government who were not being given a chance to continue,
uninterrupted, with their "benovolent" agenda of
ending private property and all that "bad stuff".
Sort of like the way Castro apologists stick up
for that puke to this very hour.
Bob t
John Harkness
<zo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>John Harkness wrote:
>> On Fri, 04 Jul 2003 03:51:03 GMT, Grand Inquisitor
>> <zo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>John Harkness wrote:
>>>
>>>>Braveheart, actually, was history that Americans wouldn't pay to see
>>>>-- Paramount released the damn thing three times, including
>>>>post-Oscar, and I'm not sure it ever broke a hundred million.
>>>>
>>>>John Harkness
>>>
>>>Well everybody I know has seen it. (except me)
>>
>>
>> Well, that's two of us who haven't seen it.
>>
>> John Harkness
>
>You're a reviewer and you haven't seen it?
Your point is?
John Harkness
Ollie W. Holmes
> I was surprised at how little most people knew
> let alone Hollywood people. Nikita Mikhalkov made
> a pretty decent film on the Terror. It was called "Burnt by the Sun". It
> got got pretty good reviews from the critics, but I don't think that many
> Americans were interested in seeing it.
Why should Hollywood be the only place that makes films about
communism, socialism, or whatever. If one searches for how world
cinema has covered the subject, there are numerous examples. In
addition to Burnt by the Sun, viewers ahould also catch the
political-fantasy Monanieba.
Judy Davis starred in a funny Australian film about her night with
Stalin (Children of the Revolution). Est-Ouest describes the suffering
of a French wife of a Russian doctor in the Soviet Union.
How can we forget Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka or Rouben Mamoulian's
Silk Stockings, both American films, which prove that even the most
die-hard follower of the party line wants to get out of this police
state.
Nick Macpherson
>Why should Hollywood be the only place that makes films about
>communism, socialism, or whatever. If one searches for how world
>cinema has covered the subject, there are numerous examples. In
>addition to Burnt by the Sun, viewers ahould also catch the
>political-fantasy Monanieba.
>
>Judy Davis starred in a funny Australian film about her night with
>Stalin (Children of the Revolution). Est-Ouest describes the suffering
>of a French wife of a Russian doctor in the Soviet Union.
>
Volker Schlondorff's The Legend of Rita's another one, about a West German
Baader Meinhoff-ish terrorist exiled to the East after a botched bank robbery.
She has all the correct leftist ideals but finds a dreary world of factories,
alcoholism and socialist discos full of people who don't share her entusiasm.
Nick Macpherson
>> >John Harkness wrote:
>> >> Braveheart, actually, was history that Americans wouldn't pay to see
>> >> -- Paramount released the damn thing three times, including
>> >> post-Oscar, and I'm not sure it ever broke a hundred million.
>> >>
>> >> John Harkness
>> >
>> >Well everybody I know has seen it. (except me)
>>
>> Well, that's two of us who haven't seen it.
>>
>> John Harkness
>
>You'll get around to it. The final third disappoints deeply, but before
>that point, it's a fun film.
It took me years to get around to seeing it and I liked it. More scarily, I
even enjoyed We Were Soldiers so maybe I have thing for Mel Gibson in loopy
propagandistic mode.
steve
On 3-Jul-2003, smacked up and reeling, Jim <jcph...@SPAMmindspring.com>
blindly formulated the following incoherence:
> > I respect the attitude behind this post, but I went to the article in
> > question and poked around the web site and saw no mention of any
> > limitation
> > on use. If reason doesnt mind (and it appears that they dont), then
> > there
> > is no violation of property.
>
> You mean more socialist public domain stuff?
Uh...no...this would be voluntary. You do understand the difference, dont
you?
Jim
>
> On 3-Jul-2003, smacked up and reeling, Jim <jcph...@SPAMmindspring.com>
> blindly formulated the following incoherence:
>
>> > I respect the attitude behind this post, but I went to the article in
>> > question and poked around the web site and saw no mention of any
>> > limitation
>> > on use. If reason doesnt mind (and it appears that they dont), then
>> > there
>> > is no violation of property.
>>
>> You mean more socialist public domain stuff?
>
> Uh...no...this would be voluntary. You do understand the difference, dont
> you?
Well, from the earlier tirade, I would have thought that public domain was
an evil entity to be avoided at all costs. But then I use free software and
all of that stuff.
Jim
Harkness hit it on the head for the Roman epics: action on a grand scale,
chariot races, gladiators, etc. But that trend passed. And it wasn't recent
history, so it was an excuse to have a costume drama on a grand scale and
with lots of action. As for "Year of Living Dangerously" it had a hot new
star and Australian directors were big at the time. But it hardly started a
trend in political dramas. Political dramas are usually small, independent
and/or foreign.
steve
On 4-Jul-2003, smacked up and reeling, Jim <jcph...@SPAMmindspring.com>
blindly formulated the following incoherence:
> >> You mean more socialist public domain stuff?
> >
> > Uh...no...this would be voluntary. You do understand the difference,
> > dont
> > you?
>
> Well, from the earlier tirade, I would have thought that public domain was
> an evil entity to be avoided at all costs. But then I use free software
> and
> all of that stuff.
Why do people work so hard to misunderstand the simplest concepts?
Do you not see the difference between people voluntarily giving something
away, and the govt stepping in and taking something from someone to make it
available to the general public? The former is an exercise of property
rights (yes, if you own something you can choose to give it away) while the
other is a violation of property rights.
Now, Jim, please tell me...why do you work so hard to miss this simple and
obvious point?
dobe...@deletesocal.rr.com
>Volker Schlondorff's The Legend of Rita's another one, about a West German
>Baader Meinhoff-ish terrorist exiled to the East after a botched bank robbery.
>She has all the correct leftist ideals but finds a dreary world of factories,
>alcoholism and socialist discos full of people who don't share her entusiasm.
There have been some really great movies with communist themes,
including Bellocchio's splendid "China Is Near" & Bertolucci's "Before
the Revolution."
Frank R.A.J. Maloney
news:Pine.GSO.4.53MAILDIR...@shell1.pacifier.net...
My gawd, you are full of it.
Bob Tiernan
Frank R.A.J. Maloney wrote:
> "Bob Tiernan" wrote:
> > Had such a film come out anytime between 1956 and, oh, a
> > couple of years ago, there'd be plenty of Lefty apologists
> > who'd see the film as right-wing "propaganda" seeking
> > to "demonize" those wonderful people in the Hungarian
> > government who were not being given a chance to continue,
> > uninterrupted, with their "benovolent" agenda of
> > ending private property and all that "bad stuff".
> >
> > Sort of like the way Castro apologists stick up
> > for that puke to this very hour.
> My gawd, you are full of it.
In what way? About Castro, Hungary-1956, or
both?
Bob t
David Matthews
You're a wise man. I remember in an interview once Peter Sellers said
that if he had to live his life all over again he would do every thing
the same except that he wouldn't see "The Magus". I have the same
feeling about "Braveheart".
Dave in Toronto.
>
Grand Inquisitor
>>You're a reviewer and you haven't seen it?
>
>
> Your point is?
>
> John Harkness
I thought they make you see everything.
Grand Inquisitor
>>My gawd, you are full of it.
>
>
>
> In what way? About Castro, Hungary-1956, or
> both?
>
> Bob t
Well, what was to say? "How dare you insult those murderous dictators!
Fewer Cubans but better Cubans, I always say!"
Your Pal Brian
> How can we forget Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka or Rouben Mamoulian's
> Silk Stockings, both American films, which prove that even the most
> die-hard follower of the party line wants to get out of this police
> state.
And King Vidor's Comrade X along the same lines. (Best of the three IMO.)
On the home front there's Woman on Pier 13, The Red Menace, and Red Planet
Mars, but they're not exactly what I'd call mainstream, nor are they exactly
what I'd call good.
Brian
John Harkness
<zo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>John Harkness wrote:
>>>You're a reviewer and you haven't seen it?
>>
>>
>> Your point is?
>>
>> John Harkness
>
>I thought they make you see everything.
Ummm, no.
That's why most papers in large urban centres have more than one
reviewer. We have two, more or less full time, and a couple of young
freelancers, the purpose of whose existence is to allow me to go
through life blissfully unaware of the content of What a Girl Wants
and The Lizzie McGuire movie.
I see maybe half of the films that open in Toronto (that's between 350
and 400 pictures a year. though I often play catch up with stuff as
part of the DVD reviewing beat. There's also, of course, two major
film festivals a year, plus spending time checking things for
non-first run features, like the upcoming Clouzot retrospective at the
Cinematheque.
John Harkness
Frank R.A.J. Maloney
news:3F05DC61...@iFreedom.com...
One of my favorites: _The Inner Circle_ (1991) with Tom Hulce as Stalin's
favorite projectionist.
Grand Inquisitor
papers, forget which one, had just a single movie reviewer who reviewed
everything. He was an idiot too.
John Harkness
<zo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>Slacker! Seriously though, when I lived in Cincinnati one of the major
>papers, forget which one, had just a single movie reviewer who reviewed
>everything. He was an idiot too.
Charming. Plonk
John Harkness
Joe Gillis
>>Slacker! Seriously though, when I lived in Cincinnati one of the major
>>papers, forget which one, had just a single movie reviewer who reviewed
>>everything. He was an idiot too.
>
>
>Charming. Plonk
>
I don't think he meant YOU are an idiot. I think he meant that this particular
guy was an idiot in addition to being the paper's only reviewer.
At least that's the way I read it.
=================================================
"I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy." -- Samuel Butler
Grand Inquisitor
I wasn't calling *you* an idiot.
Grand Inquisitor
Yes, that's it.
James Allen
>>I thought they make you see everything.
>
>Ummm, no.
>
>That's why most papers in large urban centres have more than one
>reviewer. We have two, more or less full time, and a couple of young
>freelancers, the purpose of whose existence is to allow me to go
>through life blissfully unaware of the content of What a Girl Wants
>and The Lizzie McGuire movie.
>
Good for you, John.
Our area paper has a few different reviewers. You know who the number one guy
is because he sees the "major" films, while the other two guys apparently draw
straws to see who reviews THE REAL CANCUN or FROM JUSTIN TO KELLY. No one ever
said the job was pretty.
Mike Rice
film a success. I saw it, found it pretty severe, but liked many
scenes in it. I noticed that year that both Rob Roy and Braveheart
had rape the wife scenes that stirred male spouses deeply.
Mike Rice
On Fri, 04 Jul 2003 06:02:52 GMT, "barnaby"
<please_...@masochist.com> wrote:
>"John Harkness" <j...@attcanada.ca> wrote in message
>news:ugu9gvknccr7mnp83...@4ax.com...
>> On Fri, 04 Jul 2003 03:51:03 GMT, Grand Inquisitor
>> <zo...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
>>
>> >John Harkness wrote:
>> >> Braveheart, actually, was history that Americans wouldn't pay to see
>> >> -- Paramount released the damn thing three times, including
>> >> post-Oscar, and I'm not sure it ever broke a hundred million.
>> >>
>> >> John Harkness
>> >
>> >Well everybody I know has seen it. (except me)
>>
>> Well, that's two of us who haven't seen it.
>>
>> John Harkness
>
larry legallo
wrote:
>
>REASON * June 2000
>
>Hollywood's Missing Movies
>Why American films have ignored life under communism.
>
>By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley
><major snip of some major rubbish>
So let's see. This guy isn't happy with what he sees as a lack of
negative Communist portrayals in Hollywood. He wants more suffering
depicted. Scenes of wading through swamps of murdered civilians in
The Killing Fields aren't explicit enough for him- he wants to view
the atrocities as they take place, rather than just witness the
results. And he wants the hands of Kissinger, Nixon, McNamara et al.
wiped sompletely clean. Okay.
I guess he missed all those 80s films in which Hollywoodwas all too
happy to use Russians as war-bent villains (Red Dawn), ruthless
cheating automatons (Rocky IV), general sadists (White Nights), and
just all-around slimy guys. The string of Vietnam revenge films in
which we got to re-fight and win the war in Hollwood that we couldn't
win in reality- Russia and Vietnam firmly linked in most of these
movies- must have escaped this guy. Even a middle of the road
humanist like Paul Mazursky saw Russian life as a bleak, gray hole of
poverty and bread lines at the beginning of his Moscow on the Hudson.
Where exactly is Hollywood's love affair with Communism?
A film like Before Night Falls must really tie these right-wing cranks
into intellectual knots. An anti-Castro film. Yay! But Sean Penn's
in it. Yuk! The hero fights to escape the oppression of Communist
Cuba. Fantastic! But this hero's sexuality doesn't exactly conform
to our moral righteousness. Hmm, what to think. I know, since it
wasn;t really major studio-produced, we just won't mention it in this
"essay" about portrayals of life under Communism in recent American
movies.