Hollywood liste rouge

This is a superb film about Blacklisting of Hollywoods writers/directors and actors. Jeff Goldblum is fantastic as Director Herbert Biebelmen who made the acclaimed film "Salt Of The City". This is a very powerful film superbly Directed by veteran Welsh film maker Karl Francis. It also features a great supporting cast. Possible Oscar noms for this film.

Movie buffs and DeNiro fans will recall "Guilty By Suspicion". A story of how the HUAC witch hunts of the 1950s ripped apart the lives of many of Hollywood's writing and directing talent. Newcomer Karl Francis's movie treads along similar lines, focusing in on blacklisted director Herbert Biberman's attempt to make "Salt of the Earth" with a cast of unknowns and a blacklisted crew. Without spoiling this movie for the unacquainted I will end this synopsis here......however.... This is a European film, partially backed by the Welsh Arts Council. With all the talent and longing for local film production in the UK, why would the Arts Council plough money into an old pair of panty-linen like this? An American story shot entirely in Spain with a cast mainly of unknown actors. Jeff Goldblum does well, as ever, as Biberman....but so what? Most of the dialogue is so thin and hackneyed you could smell the dampness. I would suggest that the BBC or the Arts Council of Great Britain in future put their money where they'll find an audience and possibly a return on their investment, which I am sorry to say will not be happening with this boring mis-directed edsel.

It's interesting reading the comments for this movie here. Some are rather bizarre; an actor with a non-speaking part complains that he wasn't directed well and someone manages to watch this whole movie and still believes fervently in the blacklist. So I'll add my own thoughts to the mix.

The first part of the movie, which deals with the effects of the blacklist on a few people, is a little dull. The subject has been tackled much better often over the years. The performances are good but it's all rather lacklustre. There are also these rather jarring little hops in time that are meant to add punch but just seem slightly off.

The second part, involving the filming of Salt of the Earth, is more interesting, because it's something new and it is pretty shocking what lengths the government went to to stop this little movie. It could have been done better, and still feels a little lacklustre, but it's an interesting side story of the blacklist. The movie would have been better off just rushing through the early part and devoting the movie entirely to Salt of the Earth.

Perhaps the movie can be understood through it's title, "One of the Hollywood Ten." What a lame title. It's like they couldn't bother to come up with a real title and just figured they'd name it something that would let people know the subject matter. Personally, I think I would have been more inclined to call it "8000 Feet of Freedom," (something said in the movie) although there's probably a better title out there.

I would like to see a documentary on the same subject to see what really happened (while I know from googling around that a fair amount of what is in the film happened in real life, I don't know if it happened so melodramatically; perhaps it did).

Salt of the Earth, by the way, is an interesting movie. A little stilted in places, but affecting, with a feminist slant that proves there was more progressive intelligence in the country than you ever could have guessed from Hollywood offerings.

The movie tries to tell two stories, related but distinct: the story of the Hollywood ten and the blacklist, and the story of how Herbert Biberman came to make "Salt of the Earth" after serving his sentence for contempt of Congress. It does a fair job of telling the second story--but only fair; it does a terrible, dumbed-down job at the first. And the same defects mar both of them.

Start with a trivial, nitpicky error: the name of the striking union in "Salt." It was in fact the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. The movie calls it International Minemill Union or something of the kind. Why does this detail matter?

It matters because Mine Mill (as it was known) was a real union, with a real history. Its roots were in the early 20th century Western Federation of Miners, a union once close to the IWW, which waged bitter struggles against the copper bosses and was ultimately destroyed. Mine Mill itself was founded as a CIO union which by 1952--when "Salt" was filmed--had been expelled from the CIO, along with the West Coast longshoremen and others, essentially for refusing to purge the Communists and endorse Cold War foreign policy.

In other words the union had a context, which included the Communist Party, which was (after all) what Biberman et al. were being punished for refusing to abjure. It wasn't fortuitous that he and the blacklisted writer and producer Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico decided to film a Mine Mill strike story. It was part of the resistance of the Communist-influenced Left to being forced out of the labor movement and out of popular consciousness,

marginalized and demonized and rendered utterly ineffectual.

But in the movie the union and the strike seem to have sprung from nowhere, the union members and leaders are brave innocents who don't know about movies and the Cold War, and they're rescued from an FBI-led vigilante mob by--the New Mexico State troopers! (I knew something was terribly wrong when some people in the audience actually cheered the cops' arrival.)

And the Ten have no context either. All the political and legal strategic decisions seem to be made by an informal gathering at a writers' hangout where Dalton Trumbo--sorry, "Dalton Trumbo"--and Biberman make ponderous little speeches about Jefferson and the fascist danger. I don't doubt that those guys were capable of pomposity--I don't object that they're portrayed unflatteringly. But they were, in fact, CPUSA members, mostly of long standing, and that's not how decisions were made.

Nor were decisions made in the vocabulary of civil libertarianism. This vocabulary *was* deployed in public statements, but part of the problem (which, by 1949, at least three of the Ten--Lardner, Maltz, and Trumbo--were keenly aware of) was the disconnect between this Jeffersonian rhetoric and the actual ideas of Marxism-Leninism (not to mention the actual conditions obtaining in Stalin's USSR.)

Near the end, a vigilante accuses Biberman of echoing Marx; no, comes the answer, it's Jefferson. In the popular Front years the CPUSA had put forward the slogan "Communism is 20th Century Americanism." By 1952 the Popular Front was a distant memory, yet this movie "Biberman" seems to have out-Browdered Browder and dropped the Communism part altogether.

So the movie gives us, not the Ten, but the version of the Ten that the Party hoped would rally timid liberals to their aid. It was a fairly hollow construct 55 years ago; are today's audiences really so thick-headed that they won't see through it?

With cardboard heroes, a cardboard villain: Edward Dmytryk, who "named names" *after* serving his time, is presented as justifying his decision purely so he can go back to making movies. Now this may have been his real motive--certainly Lester Cole and Paul Jarrico, among others, believed it was. But it *wasn't* the motive he presented. He claimed that he had become disillusioned with Communism and couldn't see the point of sacrificing his career to a cause he had come to oppose. A rationale?--maybe. That's something people do, and audiences get to evaluate their sincerity or insincerity. But villains don't, as in the old Western formula, get off the stagecoach and immediately kick a puppy.

A friend of mine defended the movie on the ground that people know nothing about the Ten, so anything is better than utter ignorance. Leaving aside the question whether this cartoon history isn't, in fact, the same thing as utter ignorance, what people are we talking about? This movie is not going to find a big audience. Most of the people who saw it in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival were, um, well stricken in years and politically knowledgeable (if not necessarily very bright, cf. their reaction to the State Trooper sequence mentioned above.) And dammit, it's unforgivably patronizing to take the attitude that "Of course we know better, but this pabulum is good enough for--" someone else.

Context, context, context. The prison mess hall is shown as racially integrated--in 1949! In truth Lardner and Cole successfully challenged the segregated chow line in the prison at Danbury but this was a quirky exception. But this anachronism, like the error about the union's name, gives the game away: this is a movie about history that doesn't respect history, or the audience's ability to comprehend it. Is that because the filmmakers were too busy congratulating themselves on their nobility for making the movie at all? Are they cynical, dumb, both? I don't think it matters much. I'm glad my friend Lester Cole wasn't depicted, because that would have caused me real pain.

Unfortunately, any film chronicling a specific period in history that most Americans are only barely knowledgeable about is going to have to be somewhat pedantic. To encompass the varied complexities of those `Reds' in Hollywood would come off as a history lesson that would last longer than `The Wings of War'. So a made-for-cable film like this must brush its canvas with wide strokes. This film focuses not so much on the agenda of the HUAC -for that I recommend "Tail Gunner Joe" and "Citizen Cohn"-, but on a select few of the victims of their persecution. For the most part, this film succeeds in showing what it was that these people, and other leftists in this country believed in (and still believe in). There's a great line in this film by the owner of the land where the director Biberman wants to film. He says, `I'm a Jeffersonian American'. It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote: "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." That form of liberty and equality has been a fight by the Left in this country for every generation since this country's inception. There has always been and always will be tyrants (fascists) who will try to squash that, and other tyrants (communists) who will promise liberty and equality in order to get the people to embrace their brand of tyranny. No doubt, there were many communist dupes in this country. There certainly were communist spies lurking in this country, and Stalinist and Maoist communism were verifiable threats the world over. But in post-WWII America, tyranny was used against the people in order to fight the THREAT of tyranny against the people. The principles that this country claimed to be so frightened of losing were tossed out altogether. In the USSR, people who didn't name names were sent to Siberia or executed. In the USA, the penalties were much less severe, but the process of unveiling ‘dissidents' was the same. Plus, there was the very audacious fact that most of those brought up in front of the HUAC were in fact the `real' Americans; the Jeffersonian Americans who believed in democracy and the principles of liberty and equality.

`One of the Hollywood Ten' is a good introduction to those who wanted desperately to bring those principles to every American. They knew that a country that is oppressive and does not value equal rights for all is perfect bait for communism (as well as for fascism –the two are strikingly similar in practice). They also knew that if they didn't present the populace with the very real struggle that the millions of oppressed people in this country faced, those oppressed people might very well embrace the false liberty that communists promised. Everyone is aware of the fact that the silver screen (broadened today by TV) is a very powerful tool. But it cannot be manipulated to make people join another system of government if their own system government is sound. The left wing of Hollywood set to make it sound (something that people who opposed free speech, integration and decent housing and safe working environments did not want to see). Had the Hollywood Ten been able to continue their mission, perhaps the equalities and freedoms we enjoy today would have come sooner. And there would have been more great cinematic achievements like `Salt of the Earth'. I do think that `One of the Hollywood Ten' should have shown more of the conditions in this country that were so perfectly depicted in `Salt of the Earth' (such as racism, shameful poverty, and unsafe working conditions). But it does at least give us a valued glimpse of the hearts and minds of those who retained this country's greatness in its darkest hour.