Film

...These veterans of the Lincoln Brigade display a remarkable unanimity on major issues: Except for the heavy casualties claimed by the war, they regret nothing...

...What the undeniably appealing, salt-of-the-Earth survivors featured in Seeing Red wish to tell us, by and large, is that they were part of "the heart of humanity...

...The work is poorly served by John Crowley's rather arch narration, which is mouthed by a fictional ten-year-old viewer of the fair's wonders...

...This is a less objectionable work, but its insights into the relationship between father and son are as witlessly stereotyped and shallow as those offered by La Cage on the lives and manners of aging homosexuals...

...I give it a D. Signals Through the Flames Feature-length documentary on Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and The Living Theater, made up of interviews with the Becks in various parts of the world, archival newsreel footage, and filmed records of celebrated Living Theater performances...

...A modest yet extraordinarily engaging film by the true heir of Robert Flaherty (best known for Nanook of the North...

...that in the 1930s only the Communists seemed seriously committed to the struggle for social justice and against racism and fascism...

...One would expect something less hackneyed from a woman writer-director (Amy Jones...

...the struggle against fascism in Spain was indeed "the good fight...

...Jamie Lee Curtis is engaging as the film's intelligent heroine, and Bud Cort does a nice turn in a supporting role, but James Keach's married man is stiff...

...You have to have a long-term view," says Ruth Davidow, who served as a nurse in Spain, apparently speaking for the lot of them...

...How did they rationalize or react to the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, to the Party's inadequate showing in the Rosenberg case, to Hungary, to Czechoslovakia...

...The film does explain why some 3,200 Americans volunteered to fight (or serve as noncom-batant ambulance drivers and nurses) in Spain...

...Like The Good Fight, Seeing Red leaves significant questions unasked and unanswered...

...I had just about given up hope that someone would make a documentary film on American involvement in the war, since most of the participants are in their seventies and rapidly disappearing...

...L'Argent The most recent work by Robert Bresson, maker of A Condemned Man Escapes and Au Hazard Balthazar...

...It makes no attempt to present a comprehensive historical picture of the Spanish Civil War, and thus offers little help in resolving still hotly debated questions—especially that of Soviet complicity in the Spanish Republic's defeat...

...It is inspiring to see these old vets, in the film's concluding montage sequence, continuing tc fight the good fight (often marching under an Abraham Lincoln Brigade banner) throughout the civil rights and peace demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s and up to last year's Washington protest against U.S...

...Producer-directors Tom Johnson and Lance Bird seem so entranced by the artifacts they have accumulated that they never get around to telling us what this stuff ought to mean today...

...FILM Michael H. Seitz Reds Revisited One of my earliest political memories is of my father, who had been denied security clearance for a Government job, nervously gathering up and burning a pile of literature supporting the loyalist cause in Spain...

...But this is an otherwise adequate introduction to one of the most innovative theatrical groups...

...The story, based on a short work by Tolstoy, is of a contemporary working-class Frenchman who is set on the path to destruction when he unsuspectingly accepts and passes on some counterfeit 500-franc notes...

...Les Comperes Moderately entertaining and instantly forgettable French comedy in which a runaway adolescent is pursued by two middle-aged bachelors (Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard), each of whom believes he's the youth's father...

...The script is a tissue of cliches...

...I did not understand what this was all about, but I was upset and felt a vague sense of shame...

...But in Seeing Red, whose subject is American communism, the failure to face tough questions is more obvious and tends to undermine the work's credibility...

...The incident may account for my lifelong interest in the Spanish Civil War, the role played in it by Americans and their Government, and the subsequent repercussions in our political life...

...The result is a work of exceptional austerity and power...

...For such an audience, the film may well serve as a useful primer...

...Moreover, one is left with the impression that the Party deserves the credit for most of the progressive reforms achieved in this country since the 1930s: Social Security, unemployment compensation, civil rights, and the rest...

...that Party membership offered a uniquely satisfying way of life, and that the anti-communism of the 1950s amounted to a reactionary persecution of the innocents...

...As a historical claim, this is, to say the least, astonishingly naive...

...I'm pleased to report that The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, produced and directed by Noel Buckner, Mary Dore, and Sam Sills, is an exceptionally strong and affecting work— the most illuminating and conscience-stirring American political film since Native Land...

...Script and direction are by Francis Veber, the author of La Cage aux Folks...

...Bresson eschews the use of professional actors, sets, a moving camera (except for a few "invisible" traveling shots), incidental music, and the seduction of spectacle, relying instead on precisely observed fragments of reality and the expressiveness of selective but significant sound...

...U Hits and Misses Love Letters Disappointingly predictable story of a young woman's involvement with an older married man...

...Studs Terkel delivers an informative voice-over narration...

...Seeing Red, a film about American Communists produced and directed by James Klein and Julia Reichert, who made the popular Union Maids, resembles The Good Fight in subject matter and construction...

...How did people who profess a commitment to democratic decision-making put up with the stultifying bureaucracy of the Party, in which decisions, often made abroad, were delivered from the top down...

...policy in Central America...

...I suppose Seeing Red was made primarily for an audience of "average" Americans who have no personal knowledge of Communists and whose perceptions were formed by Cold War rhetoric...

...Biquefarre A sequel to Georges Rouquier's much acclaimed Farrebique (1946), which portrayed the lives of peasants from a French village just beginning to emerge from a way of life that had changed little since the Middle Ages...

...As its subtitle suggests, The Good Fight focuses on the experience of American volunteers...

...But veterans of the Left are sure to wonder how so uncritical a film could be made today...

...Despite infighting within leftist ranks, those who rallied to the cause enjoyed a rare feeling of solidarity, and their subsequent struggle against social and economic oppression at home was a natural parallel to the commitment that drew them to Spain...

...It depicts their experience in bloody combat and traces their lives and continuing political activities through the witch-hunting 1940s and 1950s to the present...

...But what is most compelling is the first-hand testimony of eleven surviving volunteers...

...It uses varied background on the economic hardships of the Great Depression, the struggle against rising fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and the Cold War, and humanizes these themes by presenting a series of interviews with selected witnesses—mostly former Communists but also two who are still Party members...

...Biquefarre brings the story up to date and emphasizes some of the more momentous changes by juxtaposing clips from the earlier work...

...Such jejune cinematic self-consciousness causes Strangers Kiss to look like a University of Southern California film school project...

...I'm afraid the young filmmakers who came of age in the 1960s and had no direct experience in dealing with the Communist Party when it was a force to be reckoned with were simply taken in by the moral conviction and unquestionable charm of their subjects...

...Appropriate background is provided by judicious use of newsreel footage, movie clips, stills, posters, and recorded music culled from archives around the world...

...Strangers Kiss Low-budget pseudo film-noir, and the umpteenth movie about making a movie in which life, coincidentally, imitates art...

...The World of Tomorrow Feature-length documentary on the 1939 New York World's Fair—a treasure trove of fascinating visual material but a disappointment nonetheless...

...The tenor of the film is excessively hagiographic, and the Becks' disquisitions on dramatic theory, politics, and the vegetarian roots of nonviolence sound embarrassingly simple-minded...

...Their reminiscences are laced with humor, and they evidence a depth of political conviction that has helped them weather defeats without succumbing to disillusionment...