The Talkies/Rosenbergs II

...Needless to say, the true story of the Rosenbergs is a collection of hotly contested versions...

...Ethel Rosenberg was not so fortunate...

...What better way to make the connection than to extend the sacrifice into the sixties generation...

...days, who seem always to be humming Paul Robeson dirges in their heads...

...During that of his parents, he is walking with little Susan, who looks terribly alone...

...While the novel omits any reference to Paul Isaacson's role in World War II (Julius Rosenberg having held a civilian job, only to lose it as a security risk), the film dresses Paul in an Army uniform and has him sing the praises of the simple, dignified "Georgia crackers" he met and enlightened during basic training...

...Both are talented actors, but Hutton in particular is so miscast it's a constant effort to remember that he is supposed to be related to the Jewish family we see in all the flashbacks...

...I suppose it's progress that the film puts Daniel's radicalism in the background, just as the novel does his parents...

...This sequence of double mourning succeeds in bringing to a peak the considerable emotion which, as I've said, exists independently of the Isaacson family's political loyalties...

...In the film, she is reduced to a muttering walk-on part...

...Doc-torow's 1971 novel, The Book of Daniel...

...Perhaps it was this desire to reach the masses which prompted Lumet to assemble a completely Gentile cast-with the exception of Mandy Patimkin, who plays Paul, and the child actors who play younger versions of Daniel and Susan...

...In other words, he wanted to make the "sacrifice" of the Old Left Rosenbergs meaningful to the New...

...But lack of verisimilitude is only part of the problem...

...Since then, over 200,000 pages of documents have been released, forming the basis for the new, more definitive study by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton...

...In this way Doctorow lends the weight of the Isaacsons' suffering to the activism of the 1960s, while dissociating them from any foolishness found therein...

...Even if he were free of political motivation, Doctorow's artistic changes would entail a political statement...

...Feel sorry for the bereaved Daniel...

...And the film is full of "Negroes"- the matrons in the mental ward and death row, and the man who lives in the Isaacsons' basement, who in the novel drinks too much and tells Daniel that his parents are hypocrites for not inviting him to the grandmother's funeral...

...The execution scene of the Rosenbergs is one of the few things about their story not significantly altered in Doctorow's novel, and in the recent film Daniel, directed by Sidney Lumet from a screenplay written by Doctorow...

...The untruth of art cannot help but come off as distortion in a climate of distortions...

...Then comes the heavy-handed switcheroo...

...Also omitted is Daniel's bizarre, Maileresque mistreatment of his wife-which in pre-feminist 1971 was still an acceptable method of working out manly angst, but which nowadays might give the whole Rosenberg family a bad name...

...The trouble is, this fate is not just an artistic invention...

...Whether or not their parents deserved execution, these two young people have an understandable grudge...

...In some countries, the failure of the electric chair to kill is interpreted as a sign of innocence-"God has spoken"-and the prisoner is released...

...the next he is stepping, in warm sunshine and to the tune of "This Little Light of Mine," into the passing parade of a nuclear-freeze rally...

...Far worse is the deliberate, cynical exploitation of emotion so successfully evoked...

...She is, as Daniel puts it, "inconsolable...

...Here, put your sympathy with the nuclear-freeze movement...

...In 1975 their two sons published a book claiming a frameup, then sued the government for release of materials pertaining to the famous case, in which the Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy to sell the design of the implosion-principle atomic bomb to the Russians...

...She is a complex presence, representing both the immediate past and the kind of ardent belief which her daughter transfers to Communism...

...It's an emotionally effective apMartha Bayles is film critic for The American Spectator...

...Certainly there are elements of manipulation in both...

...Written in the late 1960s, The Book of Daniel tells the story from the viewpoint of the Isaacson children, Daniel and Susan, who are traumatized by everything from having their mother go off one day to testify and never return, to being exhibited before a chanting, roaring crowd of supporters...

...Nor is Doctorow without political motive...

...But when it comes to the ending, I don't know who to blame-it's too propagandists even for Hollywood, and too crudely manipulative even for Doctorow...

...Now, a dozen years later, comes the film-and a few additional changes which, to my mind, are intended to reconcile eighties audiences not only to the Old but also to the New Left...

...These authors, who set out to exonerate the Rosenbergs, were convinced by the evidence that Julius was guilty, Ethel relatively innocent, and the government prosecution responsible for a great many legal improprieties...

...government is responsible not only for her parents' deaths, but also for hers...

...In a context such as the Rosenberg case, where the facts have been disputed so many times for so many political reasons, an artist cannot simply come along and alter them for his own...

...Was it sacrificial...

...Since the Rosenbergs' real younger son is an anthropology major currently studying law, the character of Susan is obviously a fabrication: Doctorow's attempt to dramatize and heighten the way a child might react when the authority of her parents is condemned by the authority of the State...

...Class, then, is the message: the Rosenbergs as poor folks rather than Communists or Jews...

...Toward the facts Doctorow claims artistic license...

...It does not, however, explain why there had to be quite such an influx of preppiness in the form of Timothy Hutton as Daniel, and Lindsay Crouse as Rochelle...

...Since Susan is supposed to have died in 1969, it's not clear how the scene can skip thirteen years and place Daniel in a march which occurred in June 1982...

...His role is now more appropriate to the 1980s: a truth-seeker, a variation on the tireless investigative reporter...

...One moment Daniel is weeping over his sister's grave...

...He's far too intent upon trying to help Susan and discover what really happened back in 1954...

...of Uncle Joe Stalin himself...

...I say "skillfully" because the novel is careful to distinguish between Daniel's authentic seriousness and the shallow, almost holiday mood of such demonstrations as the 1967 March on the Pentagon...

...Whoever concocted this ending, it's a betrayal of truth and art worthy of Uncle Joe Stalin himself...

...and to a certain extent he is justified in doing so, because he possesses the artistry to make Susan's invented fate compelling...

...Having included the younger generation as victim, Doctorow goes on to flatter sixties youth by making their characteristic postures of pride-ful defiance and injured innocence look sympathetic-on Daniel and Susan...

...It's a lot easier," he says, "to be a revolutionary nowadays than it used to be...

...One of the most forceful characters in the novel is Rochelle's mother, an immigrant driven crazy by hardship, who achieves religious ecstasy by cursing her loved ones' denial of God...

...But it's a little strange to see it do the same with his Jewish-ness...

...Resonantly repeated in both novel and film, they declare that the U.S...

...and during Susan's, he is walking in that same terrible loneliness behind her casket...

...He states in a recent interview that while writing The Book of Daniel, "I was interested in the connection between the New Left and the Old Left What was the role of the radical in America...

...He makes one or two wisecracks, but compared with the Daniel in the novel, he spends precious little energy criticizing his elders or deploring American society...

...proach, because their youth and naivete" serve to place politics in the background, well behind the family tragedy of small children losing their beloved parents...

...It could be that Doctorow and Lumet, like Hollywood leftists before them, have decided to embrace the spirit of the Popular Front...

...In the film it is Susan who marches on the Pentagon, leaving Daniel free to express an older-and-wiser weariness toward her naive notions of revolution...

...What Doctorow does so skillfully is make that particular grudge seem part of a generational gripe...

...Thus Doctorow distorts the most basic element in the situation: moral responsibility for the number of lives lost...

...Susan in particular never recovers, suffering a transfixing passion of grief which drives her into madness and then suicide...

...In the film, this man is mute, along with the matrons -all of them as nobly silent as the ideal Negroes of the old C.P...

...The children's tragedy is again, and definitively, placed in the foreground...

...Nor is Rochelle Isaacson, her fictional counterpart in E.L...

...A lot of sixties material gets removed, for example a character known as Artie "The Revolutionary" Sternlicht, whose half-baked Yippie rhetoric would cut very little mustard nowadays...

...Since the Rosenberg sons and others contend that there are still 100,000 pages on file, it is clear that the disagreements, honest and otherwise, will continue...

...Of course it's possible that these casting decisions and other transformations have less to do with Doc-torow's or even Lumet's ideology than with Paramount Pictures' own desire to reach the masses through the box office...

...Susan's bitter words, "They're still f-.....us," imply more than sorrowful derangement...

...Like the novel, the film follows the grimly vivid execution scene with Daniel's interspersed memories of two funerals-his parents' and then Susan's...

...And the anti-Semitic element in the trial and execution is downplayed by having Daniel deliver brief but drippingly self-righteous speeches about the class bias of capital punishment...

...Not an unqualified fan of the New Left, Doctorow presents Daniel's reaction, at least implicitly, as a judgment rendered by the still-living spirit of the Old Left...