After a heated exchanged opened the 1985 Geneva Summit, Ronald Reagan suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that the two leaders take a break and walk together along a nearby lake. Even in this informal setting, Reagan’s unyielding support for the SDI initiative remained a major sticking point. But the conversation assumed a more congenial tone when Gorbachev began to ask Reagan about the president’s movie career.

While it may be difficult to pinpoint a precise moment when Cold War tensions began to ease, it is evident that Gorbachev’s interest in Hollywood helped foster a human connection that advanced negotiations and solidified relations.

By all accounts, Reagan was proud of his Hollywood career, which began on April 20, 1937 the day he signed a contract with Warner Brothers. While political opponents and hostile media personalities have made a sport out of demeaning Reagan’s acting ability, he was actually quite accomplished in his own right and cultivated a strong following.

A good source here is Marc Eliot who authored “Reagan: The Hollywood Years,” a well-researched, highly readable yarn that highlights some of the former president’s best performances on screen and on television. Reagan co-starred alongside some of most talented stars of his era including Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn.

While Reagan may not have achieved lasting fame as a leading man, he did carve out a strong niche as a supporting actor in films that attracted critical attention, as Eliot explained in an interview with Reason TV. He was widely viewed as the reliable “best friend” standing behind
the big names of that time, Eliot notes.

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It seems that Hollywood actors and filmmakers just love to tell us how much they’re in favor of people’s rights and equality for all, especially when it comes to women’s rights and gay rights.

And most critics have adored the new American remake of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” heralding Rooney Mara’s performance as the extremely damaged character Lisabeth Salander as an ass-kicking breakthrough for actresses and exciting entertainment for adults.

Sure, the movie’s got plenty going for it, at least for most of its nearly two-hour, 40-minute running time. Adults who can handle bleakness will get to see strong performances, interesting locales and a nicely twisting mystery in return for their time and money. But the film’s most important scene, the one that shows Lisabeth driven to her breaking point, shows that Hollywood filmmaking conventions and the critics who applaud the film wholeheartedly aren’t really on the side of women at all.

In fact, the American film, its literary source material in a trilogy of novels by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, beg the question of how far art can and should push the envelope. “Dragon” offers up an anal rape scene against Salander that is utterly horrifying, but then takes things even further with Salander’s multi-faceted and despicably torturous response to her attacker.

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Let’s be honest. Movies, today, aren’t just one step away from being left wing propaganda, they just plain suck.

We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

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Editor’s Note: Thanks to Big Peace and Dr. Paul Kengor, we have this very informative interview covering Communism in Hollywood.

This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, as he continues to share snippets from his latest book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is a veritable buffet of never-before-published morsels on the American left. Fred Barnes calls Dupes “an enormously important book.” Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer calls it the “21^st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.

Bogart was duped

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, last week you shared examples of how American communists, from the very start of their party’s founding in Chicago in 1919, exploited the language of the American Founding to advance their goals and philosophy in the United States. They also did so in order to dupe American liberals/progressives. Among others, you gave the stunning example of Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer from the Scopes Monkey Trials. This week you have more examples.

Kengor: I have examples from Hollywood in its golden age and also from Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.

Big Peace: Let’s start with Hollywood. Tell us about the Committee for the First Amendment, a major focus of your book.

Kengor: That was the biggest group of duped liberals/progressives ever to appear in Hollywood, so much so that the Committee for the First Amendment would later be officially classified as a communist front-group—that’s how badly the liberals in this group were suckered by the Reds. Here’s what happened:

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This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards. (more…)

While researching declassified archives from Moscow that relate to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), Paul Kengor, a political science professor with Grove City College, came across documentation that connects an individual named “Bogart” with a New York City based indoctrination program that was active in the 1930s.

CPUSA had established “National Training Schools,” more commonly known as Workers Schools, in several American cities at that time, which typically involved over 400 hours of intense preparation, according to the archives.  Some of coursework included “The Study of the Communist Manifesto,” “The Soviet Economy,” “War and Revolution,” and “Strategy and Tactics.”

“I detest Communism just as any decent American does.”

In his new book entitled: “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century,” Kengor presents readers with compelling bits of evidence that strongly suggest the “Bogart” cited as a student for the NYC session that ran from Jan. 9 to March 15, 1934 could have been Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart. But he also cautions against making any definitive conclusions based on current information.

The Workers Schools carefully guarded the identity of those in attendance, he points out. The 1934 session in question included 36 students from the city and other parts of New York. However, just one-third had their full names published in the school’s internal documents.

Bogart is cited on a district page that records residency and again on an evaluation page for student performance, but the first name is concealed. Does this mean the Bogart reference applies to someone other than the Hollywood actor?  Kengor explores this possibility at some length and identifies another individual who could have been the student. But the weight of evidence, he argues, seems to point in the other direction. (more…)

By Christmas of 1964, nowhere was safe for thirty-four-year-old Sean Connery.

It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

“The whole damn thing took over,” said his then-wife, the Academy-Award nominated actress Diane Cilento. “He really didn’t know who he was. People would call over to him things like, ‘Hey, Bondy, where’re you off to next?’ or ‘See any Soviet agents lately?’ It became impossible to have any sort of life. . . .It got madder and madder with each film.”

Every time it looked as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they did. In Tokyo (where they greeted him with screams of  “Bondo!”) Connery was using a bathroom urinal when he heard a quiet click. Startled, he glanced up to see a Japanese photographer peeking around his shoulder with a Nikon. On another occasion, after graciously signing his name for an elderly lady at the airport, she reacted with a look of horror. “No, no!” she said, “I wanted James Bond.” Director Terence Young, who was with Connery, remembers that “Sean sort of crumpled. It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being, he was a symbol.” (more…)

“It’s one of those parties where if a girl is named Jill she spells it J-Y-L-L-E, ya know…that s**t.”  –Harry Lockhart

Those who have read my piece about a film noir revival and the film Brick know that I am an emphatic fan of the noir genre.  While I have a deep love for the classics that fell within the initial movement (arguably 1941-1959), there are still some neo-noir films that spark my interest (not enough, which is why I asked for a revival!).  One of these films is the extremely fun Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.  It is a very different noir film that is funny and opposite the dark, desperate, lonely noir films of years past.

In a rare combination of coincidences, Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) is a petty thief in New York City who finds himself auditioning for a role in a new detective film.  He goes to Los Angeles after being accepted as a potential candidate.  Harry is a fast-talking, chain smoking and delightfully sarcastic protagonist that makes this neo-noir film one of the best.

After getting invited to a party in the Hollywood hills, Harry meets Gay Perry (Val Kilmer).  Perry is an (ironically gay) quick-witted private investigator that asks Harry to participate in a murder investigation in preparation for his potential film role.  Perry’s homosexuality plays on the theorists of the 1940’s and 1950’s that psychoanalyzed many noir protagonists as being gay men (I know, those theories are a stretch at times). (more…)

Dead End?

The film with Joel McCrea and what finally became known of as The Dead End Kids?

Saw it … in its entirety … for the first time, two nights ago.

The authors, of course, Sidney Kingsley and Lillian Hellman had been, at the time of writing and production at any rate (mid 1930’s), the early radical Leftists of Hollywood. John Steinbeck’s successful but highly controversial Grapes of Wrath was yet to come.

Dead End (1937)

It dawned on me how Dead End might be the best starting point for a history of Hollywood film that eventually ended up producing an unashamed love song to American Communists in Warren Beatty’s Reds.

If you haven’t seen Dead End or don’t recall the story instantly, it’s a tribute to the Marxist theory that what creates crime is poverty.

The Latin American drug cartels and the Mafia … they are not comprised of poor people. (more…)

“I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks.”

– John Wayne –

John Wayne was still young in 1944, only thirty-eight years old. And yet the major elements of his inimitable style were hardening into place. Perhaps no other actor in history has been so cognizant of using his body to express grand themes and timeless mythological underpinnings. Under Ford’s direction Wayne never just stands there, he poses, in ways and with effects that conjure up famous paintings and sculpture. When he fills the frame as Lieutenant Junior Grade Rusty Ryan in They Were Expendable, he becomes every man who ever fought a losing action in a war, who faced defeat with stoicism, who sacrificed for a greater good. In the history of film, John Wayne remains nonpareil in his use of presence to project subtext.

Little of that came naturally to the Duke — in his early films he’s tall and rangy and handsome, but with little of the gravity, focus, and dramatic weight that would come to typify his prime acting years. Those skills, and they were skills, were consciously learned over fifteen years of working with Ford and his old troupe of veteran actors. He watched the way they walked and carried themselves, studied the way they were directed, and began to divine the level of nuance Ford demanded. There’s a funny story from the making of Stagecoach (1939, John Wayne’s big coming-out party as an actor), where Wayne’s character was supposed to be washing his face after a hard day, and Ford started smacking him around screaming, “Christ Duke, wash you face like a man! You’re daubing it! You’re daubing it!” He was trying to teach Wayne that, when you are an actor in front of a camera, your every movement can and should mean something deeper than what is on the surface. The act of washing one’s face can be pedestrian, or it can be a sweeping gesture that evokes strength of character, or a relaxed demeanor, or a gentleness of heart. And those deft movements will unconsciously fire off all sorts of neurons in the brain of an audience. (more…)