Waterfronts

I’ve seen the 1954 movie On the Waterfront several times.  Marlon Brando plays a longshoreman and former prizefighter who ends up testifying against union racketeers.  It won quite a few Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Brando. (This was the same year he played the biker in The Wild One.) It was based on a true story, except that in real life the racketeers won!

Elia Kazan directed it from a Budd Schulberg script.  He’d recently testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named suspected communists, destroying their careers to save his own.  Some people view the movie as an apologia for his informing on them!  It wasn’t easy for Brando to do the film:  his sister Jocelyn had been an actress herself, until she became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. (There was controversy decades later when they gave Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar.)

What do I think of the movie?  On the one hand, parts of it are great.  The most famous scene is the one with him and his brother Rod Steiger in the back of a car remembering the fight where Brando was pressured to take a dive.  But my favourite scene is the one on the rooftop with Brando and Eva Marie Saint.  I like the detail where he tries on her glove.  What makes the Brando character interesting, paradoxically, is that he isn’t very articulate. (When a character gets too articulate, he becomes the writer’s mouthpiece.)

On the other hand, parts of it are lame.  Leonard Bernstein’s score is surprisingly weak.  The priest played by Karl Malden is pretty hard to take.  The dialogue isn’t perfect.  There’s a line, “You know how a union meeting works—you go in, you make a speech, you go out and the lights go out.” It’s a memorable line, but unfair to the union movement, at whose meetings they’ve often discussed important things.  And I could do without this exchange:

“My life ain’t worth a plugged nickel if I squeal!”

“How much is your soul worth if you don’t?”

And then there’s that conclusion where he says to the racketeers “Without a gun, you’re nothin’!” The racketeers give him a beating, but that just turns the longshoremen against them.  So a bloodied but unbowed Brando leads the others into work.  Instead of beating him, those racketeers would have been smarter to ignore him.  Then they would have won, like in real life.

But overall, it’s pretty good. 

UFOs

 

I’ve never seen a UFO. (I don’t look at the skies much.)

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s there was a UFO craze connected to Cold War paranoia.  One example is the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, combining science fiction with film noir in a story of aliens who come to earth and take over people’s bodies.

I remember seeing this 1960s British puppet animation show Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons when I was young. (The same people did Stingray and Thunderbirds and Joe 90.) The Mysterons were a people on Mars who’d kill earthlings and take over their bodies.  Fighting against them were a secret agent organization called the Spectrum, where every agent was named for a colour, like Captain Blue or Captain Green. (They were commanded by Colonel White.) Captain Scarlet was an agent whose body the Mysterons tried to take over, but he wasn’t quite dead, and he ended up indestructible.  So every episode he’d get shot or crushed or blown up or something, but he’d be back in the next episode.  Sort of like Wile E. Coyote.  There were also these lady pilots called Angels who’d fly off to rescue the agents.  And there was Captain Black, an agent who did get taken over by the Mysterons.

It had a theme song that went:

Though the Mysterons plan to conquer the earth,

This indestructible man will show what he’s worth!

There was something odd about these British puppet dramas.  You know brutalist architecture, like the Robarts Library?  These were like the brutalist school of kiddie cartoons.  Captain Scarlet would feel at home in the Robarts Library…

You know the Hong Kong action movie star Chow Yun-fat?  Something about him resembles Captain Scarlet!

Anti-communism

  Remember Diane Keaton’s 1970s movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar?  One review called it “anti-religion, anti-women, anti-sex, anti-everything!”

You could say I’m an anti-anti.  I’m anti-antianger,  anti-anti-Muslim, anti-antidivorce, anti-antihiphop, anti-antirevolution, anti-antipacifism, anti-antipermissiveness…

And anti-anticommunist!

I recall back in the 1990s an interview with Saul Bellow in The New Yorker. (This was The New Yorker under Tina Brown, who’s always been deferential to The Big People.) Bellow got pretty self-indulgent in his later years, and in this interview he said he couldn’t imagine what motivated the anti-anticommunists, except for residual Stalinism.

A few weeks ago my history movie watch party showed a movie about Dalton Trumbo, showing the lives ruined by the anti-communist Hollywood blacklist.  I guess that Saul Bellow had no empathy for those people, not to mention the victims of Washington’s anti-communist crusade in places like My Lai and El Mozote.  One might ask, what motivated anti-antianticommunists like Bellow, if not residual McCarthyism.  What it comes down to is that Bellow wanted communism to be the issue and not anti-communism…

In 1981, at the time when the Polish government cracked down on the Solidarity labour movement Susan Sontag asked “In the early 1950s, which gave a more reliable picture of the Soviet bloc, Reader’s Digest or The Nation and The New Statesman?” Yet The Nation and The New Statesman didn’t mislead their readers about the communist order, they just ignored the communist atrocities that the rest of the American press were pointing our. (Reader’s Digest reported what the rest of the press was saying, because that’s their job!) Big deal…

What’s far more important than that is that Reader’s Digest got anti-communism wrong, while The Nation and The New Statesman got it all too right.  When Reader’s Digest ignored anti-communist atrocities, they often weren’t ignoring something that the mainstream press was reporting on anyway.  In many cases, they’d only be reported by magazines like The Nation and The New Statesman.  

Unlike Saul Bellow, I think that anti-communism should be the issue.  Stalin and Mao may have killed tens of millions, but the USA’s anti-communist crusade killed millions in places like Vietnam and Central America, and some estimates surpass 10 million.  Notice that while the Soviet Union and China largely murdered their own people, Washington largely murdered people in the Third World—out of sight, out of mind.  And don’t let people present the Cold War as a World War II-style “good war”:  the Soviet Empire collapsed largely because of its internal weaknesses.

The Cold War left a noxious legacy in the USA itself.  Blacklistees weren’t the only victims, the very rule of law was undermined!  Ronald Reagan clearly should have been impeached, but Washington let him get away with his war crimes. (I’m not just referring to the failure of Congress; in the wake of the Iran-Contra revelations the mainstream press launched a big attack on… the Democrat candidates to succeed Reagan, whom they nicknamed “The Seven Dwarfs.”) The legacy of Reagan getting away with it is that successors have repeated his offences!

Anti-communism created much of the ugliness in today’s world.  The anti-communists have a lot to answer  for and shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind “The communists were worse”!