The Talkies / Notes on the Hollywood Left
Podhoretz, John
"The Talkies / Notes on the Hollywood Left" This Christmas, a rather tiresome romantic drama starring Scan Connery and Brooke Adams opened across the country. The movie is astonishingly dated: Connery is...
...NOTES ON THE HOLLYWOOD LEFT T h i s Christmas, a rather tiresome romantic drama starring Scan Connery and Brooke Adams opened across the country...
...Today Warren Beatty is in Finland, making a movie called Reds about the glorious life and times of John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook The World and co-founder of the American Communist Party...
...In Cuba, the Fidelistas all love puppies and children and they don't kill the soldiers in the Cuban army when they defeat them and they want to teach the peasants how to read...
...Will the Cuban peasants go to school and be written about by Jonathan Kozol...
...Hollywood meets the freedom fighter...
...the American Left and Hollywood movies were almost always strongly pro-democratic, like Mr...
...There is a famous story in Hollywood: Joseph P. Kennedy, a prominent investor in the movies, offered Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures a very substantial sum of money if Cohn did not release Mr...
...Just look at Cuba...
...The Old Hollywood never placed its ideals before its wallet, and it knew that making a pro-Communist political movie was bad business...
...Now you have to do some work, too...
...And what about Scan and Brooke...
...Big bucks were made off of The Parallax View, The Candidate, Coming Home, and The China Syndrome, all of which espouse left-wing views of American life...
...And sitting in the Senate gallery, watching Jimmy Stewart lose his voice from talking continuously for 19 hours, sits Jean Arthur, crying beautifully and knowing tha ~_ soon Claude Rains would be defeated and would go off into the Senate Cloakroom and blow his brains out...
...have always been intertwined...
...Actually, there is nothing really new about the politics behind Cuba...
...Artistically masked political coercion'~ is, of course, one definition of "propaganda...
...the greedy conglomerate in The Electric Horseman...
...Thus, the heroine of Coming Home, played by Jane Fonda, cannot be fulfilled sexually by her knee-jerk right-wing soldier husband but can find orgasm in the arms of the radical paraplegic Vietnam war vet...
...And movies do have a profound influence on the way people think: The Three Mile Island controversy would have been half as severe if The China Syndrome had not been released just previous tO the accident...
...Paine in Mr...
...Movies are merely "effective" when they deal with non-political issues, but when movies do treat political issues they necessarily become more than "effective": They become dangerous...
...The movie is called Cuba, and added to those heart-rending fillips of Old Hollywood romanticism is New Hollywood politics: Will Fidel make it to Havana...
...For in addition to exploiting fashionable political ideas, Hollywood promotes them as well...
...the Republican farm owners in Our Daily Bread, and, by John Podhoretz today, the noble cowboy vs...
...Wrong in the movies, especially in political movies --Mr...
...And of course the best example of the New Hollywood politics' appeal is Jane Fonda, whose extraordinary talents allow her to sell a radical bill of goods in the best Hollywood style...
...and here they meet once more on a corrupt, humid island in Central America, amidst "all the heat, power, and passion of the tropics...
...In fact, Hollywood's few explicitly political buy what m0vies sell us...
...Hollywood works under the same financial and ideological system today, but the New Hollywood knows it is plying its wares on people who appear quite willing to buy a leftist, even quasi.Marxist, philosophy...
...But Kennedy's belief about the movie-that its portrayal of the Senate (as run on the whole by corrupt, cowardly, and amoral men) was scurrilously and dangerously false--is to a certain extent true...
...Senator, filibusters in order to save an important bill and to defeat an evil colleague, the idea of filibustering became extremely popular and those senators that did actually filibuster were viewed with great sympathy by the public...
...Smith Goes to Washington and Casablanca, the movie which Cuba so self-consciously echoes...
...And we buy this tripe, not because we recognize truth in it, which is the way we judge literature, but because we cannot help swooning to that old Hollywood melody...
...How many times can they remake Casablanca ? But this modest movie is not merely about Sean and Brooke and banana daquiris...
...Smith Goes to Washington...
...Largely because of Mr...
...today we are buying romanticized and falsified versions of political ideologies...
...Smith vs...
...Will he take Brooke with him...
...The movie is astonishingly dated: Connery is a cynical but golden-hearted mercenary and Adams is the high-born wife of a rich manufacturer...
...messages about love, idealism, faith, and the rest...
...Cohn refused, of course, and the story is related today mainly to make fun of Kennedy...
...The Old Hollywood knew that its audience was opposed to the idea of Communism, because it was antithetical to the American way of life...
...convenient personal John Podhoretz is a student at the University of Chicago...
...But politics is sullied and confused by its treatment in movies...
...Because good always triumphs, right...
...And it does this by mixing political themes with cozy domestic values, romance, intrigue, and the rest of the Hollywood style...
...We used to buy...
...Smith's climactic scene, in which the saintly title character, a U.S...
...A ~IV/" great many memorable films of the We 1930s--among them My Man Godfrey, Our Daily Bread, and Dead End --were as vaguely Communist as Cuba is, and it is important to remember that priceless memorandum sent to the proletariat of Universal Studios by Max Youngstein: "It is no longer enough to be a Communist to be employed here...
...they had known each other before, in North Africa, but her passion scared him off and he left her behind...
...we are always given Right vs...
...Will Scan do the right thing...
...Smith Goes to Washington, the tenant farmers vs...
...For the most part, however, the Old Hollywood disguised its Communist attitudes by placing them in inappropriate situations-for example, screwball comedies or gangster movies...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980...
...But those senators were usually radical segregationists attempting to block passage of civilrights legislation, Dixiecrats all, not a one of them looking anything like .Jimmy Stewart...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
