Lyin' for Shams

[thedrifter]

Lyin' for Shams
by Ross Kaminsky (more by this author)
Posted 11/15/2007 ET

Hollywood just can’t stand it any more. Almost forty years after Vietnam and four years since we invaded Iraq, young Americans are still joining the military. That’s obviously intolerable to big thinkers such as Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand and the rest. So Hollywood’s best have sat, thought and created the surefire cure for anyone who might be considering enlisting in the military, running for public office, or writing facts instead of opinion for the TV news.

But there’s only one problem: Robert Redford’s latest directorial effort, “Lions for Lambs”, is a thumping bore. There have been a lot of great anti-war movies, ranging from “All Quiet on the Western Front” to “Platoon.” Suffice it to say, this ain’t one of them.

When I sat down to watch it, the theater had a technical malfunction which caused the movie’s audio to be replaced with a “Battlestar Galactica” video game ad. As it turned out, those proved to be the best three minutes of the film, sparing me from a bit of the movie’s non-stop insipid dialogue from stereoptyped characters.

The plot, in a paragraph A college professor talks to a student about two former students for whom he’d seen great lives ahead, but who had made the terrible mistake of joining the military. Naturally, this condemns them to be tools of Republican maniacs who will waste their lives in a futile struggle against jihadists. The young soldiers -- who are obviously doomed, because in Hollywood the only heroes are the ones wearing makeup -- are taking part in a new military strategy developed by an aggressive young Republican senator who is at that very moment giving a detailed interview on the strategy to an old crusty liberal reporter. The scenes shift back and forth with predictable results. If it sounds like a dull recipe that includes every known antiwar cliché, that’s because it is.

Early in the movie, we’re taken to Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, where Lt. Col Falco (Peter Berg) is briefing Special Forces troops about to take the first action of the new strategy. Included in the platoon are two soldiers, Arian Finch (Derek Luke) and Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Peña), who learn that the soldiers are to take high mountain peaks near the Afgan-Iranian border to control the inflow of jihadists. As with the rest of the movie, the acting is good and the setting realistic, yet the scene is less interesting than it should be.

We move to the office of college professor Stephen Malley (Robert Redford) who has invited a student, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield) for an early morning cloyingly paternalistic conversation about Hayes wasting his potential, with Malley comparing Hayes to “the last two kids I had who gave me hope”, whom we learn without suspense to be soldiers Finch and Rodriguez.

Hayes is a generic version of a smart-ass student, a caricature of himself. (But then so is every other character in the film.) For every banal question posed by the professor, Hayes has a “gotcha” response such as when Malley asks “Why don’t you care anymore?” and Hayes blithely replies “Why do you think I cared before?”

More trite collegiate rhetoric is on offer. Hayes objects to the idea of running for Congress by asking “So, I get to be one of those turds in DC?” and continues on a rant about pages performing sexual favors under the table and politicians taking bribes. If you tried to write the most unremarkable blathering of a too-smart-for-his-own-good, intelligent-but-unmotivated college frat boy, you’d have a hard time coming up with something as throw-away as the words penned for Hayes by screenwriter Matthew Carnahan.

The scene shifts to the office of Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), a 40-something West Point graduate who served in Army Intelligence before becoming a politician. Irving has invited Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), a crusty old-school reporter to discuss her writing an “exclusive” story about the new strategy which is being implemented as they speak.

Irving’s office is adorned with framed photos of him with President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice, and a quote from Teddy Roosevelt (“If I must choose between righteousness and peace I choose righteousness”), all of which Roth looks at with a combination of admiration and derision. It is a testament to Streep’s acting ability that she can make both of those feelings clear simultaneously and she does give the film’s best performance despite not having very many lines of more than a few words.

Unfortunately, most of those words are bias-tinged questions of the Senator such as “So, we’re going to kill people to help people?” and “How do we know you’re going to get it right this time?” She also gives us this extraordinary statement: “We’re stumbling through one of the worst times to be an American.”

Interspersed among Roth’s trite questioning is Senator Irving, smugly walking around his office lair, giving us platitudes that Hollywood must believe are stereotypically Republican: “We need a win.”, “I’m sick and tired of being humiliated”, “Whatever it takes”. When Irving says “We will take the essential first step” (huh?), Roth replies with the utterly predictable “What have we been doing for the last six years?”

By putting such hollow words in the characters’ mouths, Redford leaves the viewer feeling as if he’s watching a puppet show. No stereotype is left out: Rather than individuals, we have every college student, every professor, every liberal reporter, every ambitious stuffed shirt politician, and every minority group soldier. Instead of making you understand and care about a particular character the movie preaches its hyperliberal message over and over: joining the military is not a smart choice of a path through life and planning military strategy to try to win a war is only for megalomaniacs.

Although there is a welcome bit of criticism of the media, such as Irving asking the reporter “When did you become a windsock?”, it turns that discussion into a critique of the media’s “selling the war” to the citizens. The only mistakes the media have made, according to this film, is in being too supportive of the war.

Throughout both of these conversations, we cut to the first action of Senator Irving’s strategy: a Special Forces helicopter flying into an ambush (but not before making soldiers look cocky and childish), with Rodriguez falling out of the helicopter on to an icy plateau below. His close friend Finch jumps out of the helicopter to try to help his presumably-injured friend. Unsurprisingly, for a film with as little creativity as “Lions for Lambs”, both soldiers sustain almost identical injuries.

These brief military scenes are the only parts of the movie that are not snoringly dull, and considering what you’re watching they are still too cliché-ridden. Finch and Rodriguez are sympathetic characters, a Black guy and an Hispanic guy making a statement that some things are worth fighting for. Yet you know that the heavy anti-war hand of Robert Redford will keep them from getting out alive.

The hollowness of Redford’s character is highlighted by his talking about how he disapproved of Finch and Rodriguez joining the military while at the same time saying he “revered” the reasons they did it. (The Redford character should have been played by Sen. Harry Reid whose “we support the troops” rhetoric is just as phony and just as boring).

In case the moviegoer might mistake Redford’s comments for even a hint of approval, he adds “The starched collars who started this are nowhere near the best and brightest”, and are “beyond irredeemable.” As if we didn’t know what he thought before we paid our money to see this stuff.

The anti-war politics of the big-name cast oozes from their characters. Maybe it’s because they’re all good actors or maybe it’s because their politics are well known, but you can’t help feeling that Cruise is trying to make the Republican senator look pompous and willing to kill American soldiers in a chase for the White House. You can’t help thinking that Robert Redford secretly wishes he were that professor so he could propagandize against the military while trying to sugar-coat his views with the occasional back-handed compliment. And most of all, you can’t help knowing that Meryl Streep truly means it when she says, in obvious frustration, of the war and the politicians around it that “it’s all bull****”.

But politics is not what makes this movie fail. Even if Streep had a valid point, by then you don’t believe a word of this movie if you’re still awake to hear it. In this movie’s case, despite decent performances by the cast, it’s the script that is “beyond irredeemable.”

“Lions for Lambs” wants to be an intelligent critique of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but ends up being a caricature of an antiwar movie. It’s not as anti-establishment or fraudulent as a Michael Moore film, but it’s not nearly as interesting either. It’s never obviously right nor obviously wrong. Instead, it’s just obvious.

When the film might have ended on a truly poignant moment, such as Finch and Rodriguez’s ultimate sacrifice, we instead sit through a last few minutes of meaningless tripe as Hayes sits on a couch in his frat house, next to a poorly groomed frat brother, wondering whether he should go to class. He looks as bored, jaded, and uninterested as every moviegoer will be after seeing this “entertainment.”

Lions for Lambs is such a bad movie that the usual “star” rating just isn’t adequate. After much thought (at least more than the three minutes it took the Hollywood types to write this nonsense), Human Events bestows its first “Jane Fondas.”

LIONS FOR LAMBS: [produced and directed by Robert Redford, starring Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep] For outrageous portrayals of American troops as fools and tools, for propaganda aimed at turning young people against enlisting in the military or running for public office, for suggesting that our political leadership is willing to sacrifice our soldiers in order to win their next election, and for lionizing reporters who give us their liberal opinion rather than the news, we award:

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Redford's Vietnam in Afghanistan

By Lloyd Billingsley
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/15/2007

What this movie is going to be about is evident from the start because they telegraph it with a flare gun. We fade in to the latest casualty report from Iraq. It's bad news, the report and the movie, really a filmed polemic that gives new meaning to the term "talkie." Here Hollywood liberals showcase their incoherence and fondle their favorite incantation.

In Lions for Lambs, the war on terror is nothing more than a replay of Vietnam. Ambitious, warmongering politicians are sending kids, especially blacks and latinos, to die in fields afar, victims of inept strategy and an overextended, racist, and imperialistic nation that has had its day. How to dramatize, that is the question.

The movie may be about the war on terror but viewers don't get to see terror in action, say a live beheading on a website, or even footage of 9/11. They only hear characters talking about terror, and that won't cut it in cinema. As Richard Grenier used to say, out of sight out of mind is the easiest way to stack the deck. The actual terrorists remain shadowy figures whose islamofascist ideology gets no definition. The dramatic effect is to render the enemy illusory, as though the war is about nothing.

No so for Senator Jasper Irving, played by Tom Cruise. He has a new plan for Afghanistan, forward movement of special forces, seizing the high ground. He brokers this plan to reporter Janine Roth, played by Meryl Streep. She is a baby boomer, now 57, who cut her reportorial teeth on Vietnam. She leaves few sixties clichés unturned, and at one point even quotes the Who, "same as the old boss." She is an encyclopedia of anti-Iraq-war boilerplate, not even very good as that.

Cut to Afghanistan, where the special forces are on the move. Their helicopter – another Vietnam symbol – takes fire en route to en route to a supposedly unoccupied mountain, the result of bad intelligence. Two soldiers, Arian Finch, who is black, and Ernie Rodriguez, generic latino, take hits and fall to the mountain. They thus Symbolize the Way the War on Terror Victimizes Minorities, another Vietnam canard. See Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam, for the real story.

Cut to "A University in California" – think Berkeley –where professor Stephen Malley, played by producer Robert Redford holds forth with student Todd Hayes. He is supposed to be one of the Best and Brightest but shows little evidence of smarts. Neither does the professor come off as particularly erudite, though he poses well and he sure can talk. He even explains the title, based on the view of German soldiers in World War I that the brave British grunts fought like lions for the cowardly "lambs," who commanded them. See the parallel? The conversation between professor and student makes little sense, but some realities emerge.

Arian and Ernie, it turns out, were two of Malley's students. They enjoyed much opportunity – athletic scholarships, for example – but then they volunteered to fight for America in Afghanistan. Professor Malley, who fought in Vietnam and was injured protesting the war after he came back, simply cannot understand what would prompt anyone to do such a thing for a racist nation that neglects the inner city and other sins.

Screenwriter Michael Matthew Carnahan has Arian and Ernie saying that, with military experience, they will be able to return home and do Many Good Things in line with a liberal agenda. If they come home, that is. Out on the mountain in Afghanistan they are both wounded and half buried in snow as the Taliban move in. Lt. Col. Falco calls in air strikes and mounts a rescue operation. Will it arrive in time to save them?

Cut back to Washington, where Janine Roth doesn't know what to do with this story. She is tired of swallowing the official propaganda that got us into this mess, and so on. Trouble with Iran is looming and Jasper Irving is hinting at nukes with his rhetoric of "whatever it takes."

Arian and Ernie are convinced the rescue mission will be late, which it is. They stand together in the face of the enemy. The Taliban gun them down while commanders watch the slaughter on the big screen. Music up with a swell. Message: join the Army and you are throwing your life away. Cut to Janine Roth, riding around Washington in a cab, tearfully observing Arlington cemetery and the White House. Todd Hayes still doesn't know what to do, despite the advice of Robert Redford, who wants him, and every member of the audience, to be a sixties' reenactor.

Utterly contrived and tedious to the point of punishment, Lions for Lambs is unlikely to satisfy even the most vocal critics of the war on terror. For those on the other side, this agit-prop even fails as self-satire. But it does serve as a reminder that, for the Hollywood liberal elite, America is always the villain and inherently bad – except, of course, for their mansion, Mercedes-Benz, and three-picture deal with Paramount. The film also confirms that there will always be a vast gap between that elite and those who volunteer to throw down with the Taliban.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

November 16, 2007
Hollywood's Red Decade
By J.R. Dunn

As movie-goers, theatre owners and studio shareholders endure yet another wave of anti-American box office duds, like Rendition and Lions for Lambs, it is worth remembering that left wing propaganda has real roots in Hollywood. And thanks to the character of our media and cultural establishment, we rarely get to hear about them.

One of the big disappointments concerning domestic communism is that we'll never hear the full story from their end. The losing side ordinarily has plenty to say once the dust settles -- what went wrong, who was to blame, how they could have done better. But not the American rojos. Alger Hiss denied to his dying day, in the face of evidence that would have convicted the Pope, that he had been a Soviet agent. (Hiss went so far as to get a leading Russian historian, Dmitri Volkoganov, up from his sickbed -- Volkoganov was dying of cancer -- to look through KGB files for evidence.

Hiss in fact worked for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. This was a propaganda ploy. You may as well look for a CIA agent in FBI files.)

The same is true of the Hollywood communists, one of the largest and most active Communist Party groups during the Red Decade -- roughly 1936-1946. There never were any Hollywood communist propaganda films, we're assured. Nope, they say, Mayer or Goldwyn or Warner would have found out and spanked everybody involved. The Red hunters imagined it all.

We can take this as seriously as we do the claims of Hiss. The films are out there, many of them still available on VHS or DVD. They are what they are, and there's no denying it. A closer look will provide us with a useful introduction to the art of failed propaganda. (There's one other good reason for the denials: these films are strange. It's as if they were made by people who were raised in basements and educated solely through Communist Party tracts. Which, in fact, may be nothing less than the truth.)

One reason these films are hard to sweep under the rug is that several (North Star, Mission to Moscow, and Song of Russia) were made at the behest of none other than FDR himself. Roosevelt had been hearing muttering from voters over our "alliance" with the USSR, and with one eye no doubt on the ‘44 elections, asked the studios to help drum up support for the Soviets. The industry was quick to comply.

North Star (also called Armored Attack, 1943) stands as one of the weirdest war films ever made, fully as demented, in its own way, as Plan Nine From Outer Space. At first glance, this is a perfectly professional effort, directed by Lewis Milestone, auteur of All Quiet on the Western Front, and starring Ann Baxter, Dana Andrews, both Walter Huston and Walter Brennan (must have been confusing on the set), and Erich von Stroheim. To top it off, Aaron Copland handled the score.

But after this list of luminaries, we get to the clinker: Lillian Hellman. his film is all the evidence needed to show that Hellman was an unmitigated hack.

It's long been speculated that the actual hand behind her successful plays (Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine) was in fact her longtime lover, Dashiell Hammett. (For one thing, Hammett never published another word after hooking up with Hellmann.) North Star closes that case. At the time Hammett was doing his war service in the Aleutians -- even though he was some years overage -- and not around for rewrites. So Hellmann had to do it herself, and the result was this dreadful mess of a movie.

First we get a half-hour of the Bliss of Working for Comrade Stalin on the Ukrainian Collective Farm, a first chapter that could have been made in the USSR itself without upsetting the most doctrinaire commissar. When the Nazis pull in (an alternate title is Armored Attack, but they're all on motorcycles as far as I can see), the male kolkhozniks head for the woods to begin their heroic resistance. (In fact, the Ukrainians, having survived a forced famine a decade earlier, often enough welcomed the Germans as liberators until the SS massacres began.) The women remain, bothered not at all by the Nazi troops, who use the farm as an aid station.

We endure a lengthy stretch of huggermugger and melodramatic confrontations between Von Stroheim and Brennan, playing a wise old muzhik, climaxing with a revelation of Nazi evil: the Wehrmacht doctors are snatching the village children and draining their blood for transfusions! Whoa!

Now, the Ukrainians were Slavs, which meant that, to the Nazi mentality, they were Untermenschen barely a step above the Jews and Gypsies. It's doubtful any Nazi doctor would have used their blood for any such thing. At least one case occurred where an SS officer allowed himself to bleed to death because a U.S. Army doctor told him that the plasma supply almost certainly contained Jewish blood products.

Clearly, Hellman could no more get her mind around the reality of Nazism than she could that of communism. Nazis-as-vampires is simply pulp magazine schtick that drains the film of any sense of credibility, not that much existed in the first place.

Compare this propaganda effort to the Russian film Come and See (1985), which could have been made from the same template as North Star. The storyline is a close match -- even to the successful partisan raid at the climax -- and the Russian film is nearly as hallucinatory (a sinister crane stalks among piles of bodies, characters appear and disappear with no sense of continuity, an SS commander plays with a pet ferret as a village is massacred). But the makers of Come and See knew exactly what they were doing -- creating an eerie and unworldly atmosphere as background against which to portray the demonic unleashed among human beings.

It's interesting to speculate what Hammett would have done with the same material. As it is, North Star received no less than six Academy Award nominations.

Mission to Moscow (1943) is nearly as grotesque. Based on the book of the same title by Joseph Davies, former ambassador to the USSR, it's an example of almost pure propaganda. Davies was more than gullible; he was what the Soviets called a "transmission belt", someone who could be depended on to pass on propaganda material verbatim with little in the way of prompting. (The film's tagline was "One American's Journey into the Truth", which I hereby commend to Joseph Wilson IV.)

The book reads as if it were dictated by Stalin personally -- the victims of the purges were traitors, the "nonaggression pact" with Hitler a necessary ruse, life in the USSR was edenic, and so forth. (Stalin himself is characterized as something of a combination of Pericles, Moses, and Cicero). The book's propaganda is carried over onto film without much in the way of modification.

But at the same time, director Michael Curtiz (the legendary director of Casablanca) loads the film with touches suggesting that he was not completely fooled. Two of the major Soviet figures, for instance, are played by veteran character actors noted for portraying villains - Andrei Vyshinsky, the show trial prosecutor known as the "human rat", portrayed by Victor Francen, and Maxim Litvinov, who negotiated the pact with Hitler, by none other than Oskar Homolka, beloved for decades of portrayals of Gestapo and KGB thugs.

Nobody appears to have bothered Curtiz, but screenwriter Howard Koch was blacklisted, in part for his work on this film. The FDR connection failed to help him at all.

Moscow was also nominated for an Oscar; 1943 must have been a very strange year.

Song of Russia was the third "officially inspired" pro-Soviet flick, and one that I haven't seen. It's supposed to contain actual Soviet-suppled war footage, which would probably be worth seeing.

Of course, the Hollywood rojos didn't require the nod from FDR, as Tender Comrade (1944), directed by Edward Dymytryk and scripted by Dalton Trumbo will reveal.

Four girls working in a defense plant decide to take a house together which they plan to run "the American way" -- you know, collectivization, show trials, execution of "wreckers"... While it doesn't go quite that far, the Soviet-style rhetoric, of a type never spoken by any human being not under the thumb of the KGB, is laid on pretty thick. This is the film in which Ginger Rogers' mother nixed the line of dialogue, "Share and share alike... that's the way we do things in America!" as communist propaganda. Smart woman. Ginger later became a diehard supporter of Ronald Reagan. Trumbo, on the other hand, got bounced good and hard.

With Gung Ho (1943) we move even deeper into the communist version of the twilight zone. The subject here is the Makin raid, carried out a year earlier by the First Marine Raider Battalion. The strangeness starts early, with the unit's commander (played by oater veteran Randolph Scott) explaining that he saw combat with "the Chinese army". This turns out to be the Eighth Route Army, that is, the one commanded by Mao tse-Tung. From that point on the dialectic comes fast and furious, with not a single opportunity for a lecture on class antagonism and the need for revolutionary action allowed to pass, exactly as if the screenwriters Lucien Hubbard and Joseph Hoffmann knew they'd never get another chance and wanted to fit it all in.

The irony here is that the story is based on actual events -- Evans Carlson, the "Red Marine", in fact served with Mao, became enamored of communism, and adapted Mao's ideas on guerilla warfare to establish the raider battalions.

The Makin raid was as close to an abject disaster as anyone would ever care to imagine. Men became separated, confusion reigned, Carlson at one point contemplated surrender, and although the Japanese base was destroyed, several men were inadvertently left behind and executed. Carlson's Raiders went on to more successful operations during the Solomons campaign and were the indirect ancestor of today's Marine Force Recon units.

None of this appears in the film, needless to say. The Japanese chatter wildly and run (very few wartime flicks -- Bataan is one exception -- portrayed the Japanese as the superb fighters they actually were), the Marines stroll in and begin playing the fool in a way only seen on film. One Marine climbs atop a Japanese headquarters building and, in the middle of enemy territory, paints an American flag on the roof. It's about twenty by ten, and is perfect, with not a single run, and takes him about ten minutes to complete. Why does he bother? Well, it seems that Japanese planes are on the way, and when they arrive, and see that flag, they bomb their own headquarters and save the Raiders the trouble.

Now this is pure Hollywood, but it's also, obviously enough, pure Moscow as well. Hubbard and Hoffmann evidently got clean away with it. I could discover no evidence that they were ever in any congressional committee's sights.

Gung Ho! wasn't nominated for an Oscar. I wonder why?

Action in the North Atlantic (1943), is something unexpected -- a halfway decent film. This is odd, since the picture was both written and directed by committee. But one of the directorial troika was Raoul Walsh, which goes a long way to explain the picture's quality. And one of the writer's collective (there were no less than four of ‘em) was John Howard Lawson, the Hollywood Communist Party head and the party's chief cultural officer, which explains the Stalinist propaganda.

Action in the North Atlantic deals with the Murmansk run, an almost forgotten episode of the war in which U.S. and British convoys supplied the Russians with Lend-Lease shipments. This required the convoys to head through the Iceland-UK gap, up the coast of Norway, across the Arctic Circle, and around the North Cape to Russia. Virtually all of this route was within easy range of Nazi bombers, U-boats, and surface warships, which made the run one of the most dangerous of the entire war. At least one convoy was effectively annihilated.

The first part of the film conveys this well through a series of running battles. On arrival in Russia, they're rescued at the last minute by Soviet warplanes which drive the Germans off, then welcomed by grateful, cheerful Russians shouting greetings as they dock. ("Tovarisch?" bluff old Alan Hale explains. "That means friend!" As in "comrade") Communist officials are cooperative and pleased to see their American allies.

All this took place somewhere in the back of Lawson's brain and nowhere else. The truth is that the Soviets refused to provide any escorts. (To my knowledge, this has never been adequately explained.) There was no contact between seamen and the locals, except when carefully arranged for propaganda purposes. The sailors were effectively quarantined aboard ship. There were even cases where badly wounded men were refused treatment in Russian hospitals.

Walsh, cynical old pirate that he was, would never have sat still for any such distortions, nor would Lawson have challenged him. So evidently all the agitprop was stuffed in when one of the other directors was at work. It would interesting to learn which one, and why Walsh didn't do the complete film.

Humphrey Bogart, who played the lead, is well-known for coming to the aid of the Hollywood Ten. What's not so widely known is how he reacted when the party started manipulating everyone involved for the purpose of cloaking its activities. "Those commies," he said, in a perfect Bogartism, "played us for suckers."

Lawson, of course, was one of the Ten. Found guilty of contempt, he spent a year in prison.

Not even the Red Scare itself put an end to these films. Caught (1949) was a kind of borderline film noir/women's picture (not unique even then -- Mildred Pierce was another). Directed by the great Max Ophuls, it was not one of his better efforts. The screenplay by Arthur Laurents is largely to blame.

James Mason, as an "idealistic" young doctor, spends most of the film ranting about the evils of money and capitalism and the virtues of the poor. This is completely irrelevant to the storyline (involving a young woman married to a wealthy, aging psycho) and grows so distracting that you begin to dread seeing Mason pop up. But the real peculiarity here is the "happy ending", which comes to pass when the female lead has a miscarriage. Now, you'd be hard put to sell an ending like that today. How it was done in 1948 I have no idea.

Ophuls returned to Europe to make better films. Mason's appearance in this botch doesn't seem to have hurt him much. As for Laurents -- he was blacklisted for several years, but recovered nicely and later inflicted The Way We Were on the world.

There are good reasons why the left doesn't claim these films. Instead, they try to take credit for other, unrelated films: film noir, which is supposed to represent a "Marxist critique of American society". (This is nonsense - almost none of the noir film-makers were leftists of any sort. Like all film buffs, I have my own theory concerning noir, which we don't have the space for here.), and the "social problem" films of the late 40s through the 50s, such as Gentleman's Agreement, No Way Out, and On the Waterfront. But the Hollywood Reds were either blacklisted or doing time during the heyday of these pictures. With few exceptions (Laurents wrote one, Home of the Brave), social problem films were liberal propositions.

No better example of the intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of the left exists than these films. They should have been allowed to make as many as they wanted. No blacklist, no Congressional hearings, no interference whatsoever. A couple dozen more like these and Hollywood communism would have been relegated to comic relief. Left alone, they'd have knocked themselves out.

Instead we got the legend of martyrdom, and hundreds of hours of foul ideological exercises, unto the present day.

Ellie