In Hollywood there’s something worse than being a communist (or a child rapist) and that’s being an anti-communist. Kazan, a former member of the Communist Party of America, died a die-hard liberal but once he came to understand the crimes against humanity committed under Stalin he left the communist party and eventually went before HUAC where he named Stalinists, not innocent liberals. He also never apologized:

“I’d had every good reason to believe the party should be driven out of its many hiding places and into the light of scrutiny, but I’d never said anything because it would be called ‘red-baiting.’ [. . .] The `horrible, immoral thing’ that I did I did out of my own true self.”

In 1999, the director of more classic films than I can list was awarded a long overdue honorary Oscar, and this was how the Hollywood elite greeted this fellow artist: 

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In 2003 Roman Polanski, a then 25-year fugitive for the crime of raping a 13 year-old girl won the Oscar for Best Director. Here’s how the Hollywood elite greeted that fellow artist:

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“Artist” has got nothing to do with it.

William Wyler’s “The Children’s Hour” (1961)

One was Weird Woman (1944), a neglected camp classic that was part of Universal’s low-budget Inner Sanctum series - about a scorned librarian (scream queen Evelyn Ankers) who seeks revenge on her ex- (Lon Chaney Jr.) by spreading gossip about his new wife (Anne Gwynne), an all-American voodoo princess he met on a South Seas expedition (don’t ask).

After several people inadvertently die as a result of Ankers’s aspersions, Chaney and gang steal a move straight out of the Democratic playbook - they devise an elaborate, fear-mongering ruse to guilt her into submission (and make her confess).  Here’s a clip of Ankers being browbeaten – with prophecies of gloom and doom – by little-known B-actress Elizabeth Russell:

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Justice is served, but only after Chaney’s deception turns into an eerie, Twilight Zone reality.  Moral of the story: like black magic, lies can be a powerful, tricky weapon to demolish your enemies.

The other movie was The Children’s Hour, William Wyler’s 1961 remake of his own These Three (1936).  Both Wyler films were adaptations of the controversial play that put Lillian Hellman on the map, about two lady school teachers whose lives are ruined when a spiteful student accuses them of being gay.  (What these movies were doing on local TV at 4:30 in the afternoon is beyond me, but they never failed to keep me glued.)

Lying was something Hellman knew quite a bit about. The Children’s Hour was banned in London, Chicago, Boston and other cities, before opening in New York in 1934 to rave reviews – turning Hellman overnight into the darling of Manhattan progressives. The lone sour note was critic John Mason Brown’s pesky observation that Hellman had plagiarized her plot from William Roughhead’s Bad Companions – a novel Hellman’s lover, Dashiell Hammett, had introduced her to – which was based on a 1910 Scottish case concerning a mixed-race girl who charged two schoolmarms with being lesbians, wrecking their lives.

Lucky for Hellman, Brown’s inconvenient fact fell on a society of deaf conformists.  But then, Hellman already knew how to play the game: she simply never acknowledged Bad Companions, and bided her time until the truth blew over.  The understanding that it just takes a little time for myth to become reality is pure Leftist doctrine.

Lillian Hellman

Decades later, in her memoir Pentimento, Hellman pilfered again, fabricating the self-aggrandizing story of “Julia,” an imaginary childhood friend who allegedly enlisted Jewess Hellman’s help in smuggling funds through Nazi Germany to aid the anti-fascists.  The episode was quickly made into an award-winning feature film, starring liberal sex goddesses Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, that solidified Hellman’s sainthood.

The trouble was no “Julia” ever existed – at least not in Hellman’s life.  The lie briefly stirred up some controversy, but once more, Hellman sat tight until the clouds of doubt dissipated – and what Paul Johnson hailed the ”Lillian Hellman myth industry” kept spewing smoke into peoples’ eyes.

“Just as south Italian peasants continue to make offerings and present petitions to their favourite saints long after their very existence has been exposed as an invention,” Johnson noted, ”so the lovers of progress too cling to their idols, feet of clay notwithstanding.”

The little girl’s lie in The Children’s Hour is that the two targeted women are lovers.  But in order for These Three to pass the Hays Code, William Wyler had to water it down to a heterosexual menage a trois (both women sharing the same man).  Dissatisfied with this compromise, the director revisited the story twenty-five years later, restoring the drama’s original content.

Which brings us to the next point: lies are also useful in rewriting history.

Thanks to Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, a groundbreaking, somewhat skewed chronicle of the treatment of gays and lesbians on screen, The Children’s Hour is often held up as a prime example of old Hollywood’s homophobia – the ultimate in negative gay stereotyping – because the character of Martha Dobie (played by Shirley MacLaine) struggles with her lesbianism and commits suicide.

William Wyler and Hellman

In fact, The Children’s Hour offers one of the most three-dimensional gay characters in film history. Closeted Martha is tormented by the unexpressed love she feels for her bff, Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn) – and by the harsh ostracism they both endure after the accusation. But at no point in the script is Martha ever presented as anything but completely sympathetic.

Even after the histrionic “coming out” scene, heterosexual Karen still asks Martha to come away with her so they can start a new life together. Wyler clearly lays blame for Martha’s final, heartbreaking decision on the cruelty of the local bigots – not on Martha’s being a “freak of nature.” If anything, the film succeeds in showing the pain that can come from living in the closet (and from human malice).

But don’t tell that to Shirley MacLaine. In 1976, the staunch Democrat and New Age priestess was one of the first to accuse white male patriarch Wyler of trying to erase Martha’s lesbianism from the film.

“Lillian Hellman hadn’t just fallen out of a tree when she wrote The Children’s Hour in the early Thirties,” MacLaine declared.  “She had experienced a lot of it herself [tell that to William Roughhead]. In the play, scenes were developed so that you could see Martha falling in love with Karen and realizing why she was jealous of Karen’s boyfriend… but when Wyler put it on the screen, he cut those scenes out. He thought they would be too much for middle America to take. I thought he was wrong and I told him so, and Audrey Hepburn was right behind me [see next paragraph]…. Even so, I conceived my part as if those scenes were still there…. But Willie Wyler didn’t want that, and that’s why the story didn’t work on film.”

Note: In the 1995 film version of The Celluloid Closet, MacLaine takes her version of the truth a step further, claiming that no one on set had any idea that the movie was about a woman who realizes she’s in love with another woman. She even contradicts her earlier interview, stating on camera that “Audrey and I never talked about this – isn’t that amazing?”

Here’s MacLaine’s big scene:

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Moral of the post-script: lies are a terrific way to hijack reality after the fact, taint the legacy of dead white males – and take credit for their work while you’re at it. 

If MacLaine were correct, then why did Wyler, one of Hollywood’s great “women’s directors,” bother to remake the film at all after his first, heterosexual version?  Sorry, Shirly, but the moments of Martha with romantic stars in her eyes, and hurt by Karen’s affection for Joe (James Garner), are all there to be seen in glorious black-and-white.

Thanks to Wyler’s direction and, yes, MacLaine’s commitment, no amount of politically correct, post-modern revisionism - blaming a nonexistent whitewash on an evil Anglo – can dull the movie’s emotional impact. And tough/tender Martha remains my favorite MacLaine performance after her sweet-and-sour turn in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.

The Children’ s Hour was remarkable for 1961 – as was its frequent showing on local TV at an hour that probably should have been reserved for after-school specials. Meanwhile, on the big screen, vigilante films were all the rage in the 1970s - Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Lipstick – stories of ordinary people who were victimized, outraged, and fought back by taking the law into their own hands.  There were no lies in these violent films, except the debunked one - that leaving justice up to a bureaucracy works.

These visceral, cathartic films allowed viewers to live vicariously through the avenging characters, and begged the question: How would “I” respond if a random party – that has no respect for me, doesn’t take into account my life experience, my feelings, my personal struggle - decided to force its will on me? Would I, like Charles Bronson, flip that tricky mental switch and turn on the rage full force – or would I cower?

We could still entertain such fantasies then.  Speech codes hadn’t tongue-tied us yet. Oprah, Chopra, and Obama weren’t around to tell us we were guilty and deserved to be punished. The thought police hadn’t fully ascended yet to push their good intentions on us, against our will.

Yet despite our national softness, bigotry remains eternal, part of the imperfect human condition. Nowadays, being proud of your flag, your military, your freedom, is the latest love that dare not speak its name. ”Conservative” is indeed the new “gay.”  (In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a liberal in New York, San Francisco or L.A. capable of showing the same compassion to a conservative that straight Audrey Hepburn shows to MacLaine in The Children’s Hour – enlightened Bush-basher MacLaine probably included.)

This creeping cultural revolution is nothing new; it’s been in the works for decades. “There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money,” said director Elia Kazan, “that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.”

At the forefront of this morphing social tyranny: blacklist survivor Lillian Hellman. Again, she knew just how to make it work – for her. According to author Paul Johnson, after the release of the movie Julia, based on Hellman’s fake memoir, the aged playwright enjoyed a renaissance as “the queen of radical chic and the most important single power-broker among the progressive intelligentsia and the society people who seethed around them…. She compiled her own blacklists and had them enforced by scores of servile intellectual flunkies.”

Similarly, Karl Marx – the man – extolled the virtues of the working class, agitating for violent revolution, yet “so far as we know,” wrote Johnson, ”never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life. What is even more striking is Marx’s hostility to fellow revolutionaries who had such experience – that is, working men who had become politically conscious…. Marx made sure that working-class socialists were eliminated from any positions of influence.”

Today, in America, we have a President who, rather than level with the trusting, hard-working voters who put him in office, plays mind games with them - asking them to believe that increasing the national debt is decreasing it, that less choice in health care is more choice, that standing up to violent savages makes us the savages, that reverse racism is post-racial. He seems to suck the meaning right out of words as he speaks them, always sure to distract with a mechanical smile.

But maybe he’s just stupid.

Meanwhile, this sort of mendacious pacifying has a malignant side effect. In the gay ghetto, for instance, the cult of “equality” encourages resentment towards straight white males, Christians, and other fellow Americans – sending the pampered, short-sighted LGBT community rushing to bolster another two-faced foe, that disguises itself as a kindred, downtrodden victim of Judeo-Christian oppression. And, to riff off Hillary Clinton, you know who I mean.

Word of advice to gays and lesbians: enjoy your comfort zone while you can.

Leftists claim to be die-hard humanitarians, yet they are the continual robbers and stiflers of free expression – always for the greater good - a compulsion that has nothing whatsoever to do with altruism, spirituality, or even with thought. The reality is they loathe people one on one, and prefer the safety of Utopian ideas.

Six months ago, to crib from Martha Dobie, I started to feel so damn sick and dirty I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I declared myself an apostate right here - because, as the New Age slogan goes, you’re only as sick as your secrets. If conservative really is the new gay, then the time for all closet cases to come out, loud and proud, is now.

My phone’s been ringing a lot less since then - a generous tactic better known as the silent treatment. Silence is supposed to be golden. When it’s a personal choice, it can be sacred. But petty tyrants walk among us – at the supermarket, in the gym, at the office, the stoplight – and some of them are your friends.

Once you’re out, some of them may choose to remember you the way you were before you woke up. And I suppose there’s something touching, maybe even flattering, about a loved one who clings to a fond memory of the past.

But make no mistake: there’s nothing considerate, or peace-loving, about silence when it’s used as a muzzle. And for the Left, past and present, the ultimate goal is to keep the lies current, no matter how much denial, fear-mongering - or voodoo – it takes.

Malden was instrumental in pushing the Motion Picture Academy to give a lifetime achievement award to writer-director Elia Kazan, who directed Malden in perhaps his best and most memorable role, that of Father Berry in “On the Waterfront.”

Kazan had been an outcast in Hollywood for several decades before the 1999 award, because of his opposition to communism. Malden’s support of him carried a great risk of ostracism by Hollywood’s political correctness police.

A measure of Malden’s integrity is that he was married to the same woman for seventy years and was surrounded by family members when he died.

By no means handsome or dashing, Malden was seen by critics as an Everyman type, but he did not settle for allowing his characters to be ordinary or dull. Having grown up in no privileged environment, he knew just how much strength it often took for ordinary people just to survive. Thus he invested his characters with real strength, regardless of whether the person was basically good or not. He succeeded purely on the strength of his acting ability and the availability of roles playing real adult human beings in real, dramatic stories.

Malden clearly made an effort to understand why his characters did what they did, and as a result his performances emphasize the characters’ freedom of moral choice and consequent moral responsibility for their actions. Thus his performances worked against the prevailing cultural notion that our actions are determined by our circumstances.

Malden had numerous memorable film roles, including Gen. Omar Bradley in “Patton,” the complex sheriff and former bank robber Dad Longworth in “One-Eyed Jacks,” the cuckolded husband in “Baby Doll,” the domineering father in “Fear Strikes Out” (an awful film), and of course as Lt. Mike Stone in the 1970s TV series “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Knowing full well what it would mean, it was Karl Malden, a former Academy President, who proposed and publicly pushed for Kazan to receive this long overdue tribute. And that, along with a 70-year marriage, says an awful lot about the man.

The actor was just as impressive. The simple way to describe him would be as a beefy everyman, but that too easily dismisses a natural and very real screen presence that made him one of the most recognizable faces in the country. Malden worked with some of the most powerful actors of the last fifty years, Brando, McQueen, George C. Scott, Burt Lancaster, and yet he never got lost in the scene. He knew how to watch another actor, he knew how to listen and this kept our eye on him as we waited for what he’d do next.

His voice was also distinctive; one second deep and rich with authority, but on a dime unspeakably cruel towards a Blanche DuBois or hilariously needy calling after Baby Doll. Malden had the range of a character actor but could carry a film as well as any matinee idol, and in a career that lasted six decades, inevitably there were duds, but you always felt in good hands when he arrived onscreen.

Malden’s performance as the domineering, perfectionist father of real-life baseball player Jimmy Piersall in “Fear Strikes Out” (1957) is the one that most stands out in my mind. John Piersall may be something of a monster, but Malden never lets us forget he’s also a man who lacks self-awareness. Even at his most cruel, Malden allows us to pity a father who might not wake up to the effects of his behavior until it’s a too late, and when this moment does arrive, thanks to the back-filling provided by a measured, nuanced performance, it is devastating and unforgettable.

A WWII veteran, Oscar and Emmy winner, Karl Malden died yesterday at home. He was 97.

9am PST - Boomerang (1947) – A prosecutor fights to prove the defendant in a scandalous murder case is innocent. Cast: Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Cara Williams Dir: Elia Kazan BW-88 mins, TV-PG

Here’s a treat for you. Elia Kazan directs this tough, little tightly-paced (88 mins!) hickory knot of a docu-drama starring The Mighty Dana Andrews and just as Mighty Arthur Kennedy. No time is wasted in getting to it. The story opens in broad daylight on a busy street and before you can say, “What a lovely little town,” a Priest has his brains blown out and the manhunt is on. Kennedy, at his sneering, contemptuous best, confesses and is prosecuted by State’s Attorney Henry Harvey (Andrews), but something’s amiss and soon, all instincts for what’s good for him to the contrary, Harvey finds himself in the awkward position of having to prove the man’s innocence.

Purely by coincidence, just last night over dinner, I was discussing this with a friend of mine who had just seen it for the first time. While I love it, he only liked it, but when I mentioned it was better than all but a handful of films released over the last five years that gave us both pause. What a sad truth that a 60 year old courtroom drama most people have never even heard of is vastly superior to 90% of the swill thrown at us today.

Those of you who don’t have the Fox Movie Channel should pay special attention. Because today’s pick is a 20th Century-Fox production, TCM doesn’t play it all that often.

Dana Andrews is a very, very special actor. Just a few months a go I wrote a short tribute to him. He deserves to stand with the giants of his generation, but for whatever reason is overlooked. To program his name into your DVR is to discover an actor who brought an emotional depth to stillness unlike than any other. His work in “Laura” or ”Where the Sidewalk Ends” should be included in any respectable list of top screen performances.

5pm PST – Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A (1945) – A girl in the slums tries to find her way with the help of her devoted mother and alcoholic father. Cast: Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, James Dunn, Lloyd Nolan Dir: Elia Kazan BW-129 mins, TV-G

Watch in awe as you realize this lyrical, timeless family drama was Elia Kazan’s feature film directorial debut. There was nothing this extraordinary explorer of the human condition couldn’t do and his work will survive as long as there’s a civilization, and much longer than anything made by those who refused to stand when the 89 year-old was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1999. Of course, that’s me being generous and assuming we haven’t already forgotten the classic canon of Nick Nolte and Amy Madigan.

A perfect triple feature would be today’s pick, “Life With Father” and “I Remember Mama.”  Nothing old-fashioned about any of these. Each is a complicated, thematically driven human drama that manages to tell many truths about life without resorting to cynicism or any of the other crutches used so often today.  The bitter and the sweet as opposed to the ironic and the pointless.

I remember being on sets or in casting-session waiting rooms and getting into heated “discussions” with actors about The Red Scare Blacklist, and how we should “never forgive anyone who named names to save their own skin.” 

But Kazan only ever admitted to doing what he thought was right. But my actor friends, most of whom were born long after the period in question, and whose knowledge of The House Unamerican Activities Committee was usually limited to lectures from their favorite college professor, wouldn’t buy it. “Phooey,” they said. There was only one explanation: anyone who cooperated with HUAC was a coward motivated by ruthless career ambition. Anyone who refused to testify, however, did so only out of a high minded commitment to principles.

When, in the course of discussion, I would posit that perhaps Kazan, who had been a member of the Communist Party early in his career, honestly saw it as an evil that was a danger to his country and acted in good conscience, I was met with laughter. “You’re not serious, are you?” they would say.

Why are the motives of some rejected out of hand, while those of others are beyond questioning?

Which is why the current suggestion of a proposed actor boycott reminded me of Kazan. Here’s an excerpt form the current “anonymous” email that was “anonymously” forwarded by actress Frances Fisher. Referring to a group of actors who have come out against the SAG strike authorization, it says:

“If I were a regular, ordinary, not-rich-and-famous actor, and if I wanted my union to be strong so it could fight for me … would I want to give any of these rich-and-famous UNION-UNDERMINERS my vote? Would I want my union to give them such an honor — MY UNION’s ultimate stamp-of-approval? I would remember those names when I began to mark my ballot.”

Why can’t Ms. Fisher and these other union members understand that we just don’t agree with them. Why is it that those who do not want to strike are being divisive, but those who do are “fighting for me?”  How is it that I am doing the undermining? Why is it not she who is undermining MY UNION?

Look at the video of Kazan’s poignant acceptance speech, with most in attendance giving the old master the respect he deserves. A few petulant holdouts sit with arms folded. It doesn’t seem to bother him. After thanking them, he says finally, “I think I can just slip away…”