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:

By October 1947, our Congress had learned the obvious: There were influential communists trying to infiltrate the motion-picture industry, particularly among screenwriters. The accused communists, men like John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Alvah Bessie, Albert Maltz, told their liberal friends that they weren’t guilty, and that these mean congressmen investigating their blatant loyalties to Stalin’s Russia were a bunch of “fascists.” Naturally, the liberals believed them, as liberals reflexively take the side not of anti-communists but pro-communists.

Rub a dub, dub, Dalton Trumbo

So, the accused communist screenwriters rallied the liberals to their side in a PR campaign to frame the congressmen as Nazi storm-troopers and the accused communists as the embodiment of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

Big Peace: You’re not exaggerating. In the book you give example after example.

Kengor: That’s right. Madison and Hamilton, incidentally, would have been put up against a wall in Bolshevik Russia and shot in the head without hesitation.

Big Peace: You write, “And so, Hollywood’s communists looked to liberals in the movie industry for support. They would do so in the name of good old-fashioned American civil liberties, wrapping themselves in the American flag.”

Kengor: Specifically, in October 1947, a group of high-profile actors, writers, and producers planned a major public-relations trip to Washington to defend their accused leftist friends, who were being summoned to testify to Congress for their clandestine work for the Soviet cause. After consulting on tactics with the accused communists, they changed the group’s name from the confrontational “Hollywood Fights Back” to the commendable “Committee for the First Amendment.”

This was a savvy PR move, signifying the high road to be taken: the communists’ case would be based on the American Constitution and venerable First Amendment; in other words, on the antithesis of the USSR that the comrades secretly saluted. The Constitution lovers at the Daily Worker were happy to join in, headlining the campaign as a “Bill-of-Rights Tour.”

Big Peace: Tell us some of the suckers among the celebrities.

Kengor: The liberal stars enlisted in the cause ran into the hundreds, including Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Myrna Loy. From the committee, a group of roughly two dozen lent more than their signatures; they actually set sail for Washington. That troupe included some huge faces: Danny Kaye, Ira Gershwin, Judy Garland, John Garfield, Sterling Hayden, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, John Huston, Philip Dunne, Billy Wilder, and, of course, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

The two dozen huddled with Dunne and Huston, their leaders, to coordinate and ensure they spoke from the same script. There was an agreed-upon understanding that Congress’s questions did not merit the dignity of a response.

Frank Marshall Davis

Of course, the liberals assumed that their accused friends were not communists. Their friends assured them they weren’t. The liberals had convinced themselves—or allowed themselves to be convinced—that the deceivers were sitting in Washington, not Hollywood. Remember, for liberals/progressives, it’s always the anti-communists who are the bad guys. As the great James Burnham unforgettably put it, for the left, the preferred enemy is always to the right.

Big Peace: And when the liberals got there to Washington, they got quite a surprise.

Kengor: Yes, contrary to the false narrative you learned from your scandalously expensive university education—where you paid outrageous amounts of money to be brainwashed by leftist nonsense—the accused were unmistakably, unequivocally guilty. Congress had literal stacks of evidence it publicly presented: Communist Party registration rolls, news clips, Daily Worker articles, New Masses’ bylines, front-group memberships, party applications, party forms, party cards, party, and even numbers. In Dupes, I list the five-digit Communist Party registration card numbers of all of them.

And as the congressmen presented this irrefutable evidence, the left did what it always does when it has nowhere else to go. They called the Congressmen “fascists.”

“Hitler Germany!” yelped John Howard Lawson, also known as “Hollywood’s commissar,” when presented with irrefutable evidence, “Hitler tactics!” He had to be escorted out of the room he was so out-of-control.

Big Peace: What was the reaction by the liberals in the Committee for the First Amendment?

Kengor: They were stunned and betrayed, especially Humphrey Bogart, who snapped: “You f—ers sold me out!”

The Committee for the First Amendment fell silent, withered, and died.

Needless to say, these American communists weren’t apostles of the U.S. Constitution. No, they exploited the language of the Constitution to advance the principles and aims of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which, of course, was the utter antithesis of the American Founders’ constitutional republic.

Big Peace: There’s one more example you’d like to share—the best for last. This concerns Frank Marshall Davis, Hawaii mentor to a young man named Barack Obama in the 1970s. In Dupes, you show at length that this man was a communist, a party member even, and quote dozens of his columns.

Kengor: That’s Frank Marshall Davis, CPUSA no. 47544—see page 507 of Dupes for the page from his FBI file that lists that party number.

A common tactic of Davis was to invoke the Founders. Here I’ll give just one example from one column he published in March 1950, where he claimed to be indentifying his own politics. He disingenuously referred to his politics as “left of center in the best American tradition.” He identified with Thomas Jefferson in particular. He quoted Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure…. I hold that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world, as storms in the physical.”

Well, that’s a bunch of manure.

Again, we saw this in our Q&A last week, where I noted this common communist tactic of identifying with the revolutionary spirit of our American revolutionaries of 1776. Of course, that was a phony identification, but it was the kind of deceptive thing American communists did all the time to try to win naïve liberals/progressives to their side, which they did with stunning success.

Big Peace: And this gets even worse. If Davis and these other Communist Party members were the self-anointed modern incarnations of Madison and Jefferson and Hamilton and Jay, then who were the enemies?

Kengor: That’s key. The enemies, the “un-Americans” as the communists ludicrously portrayed them, were the anti-communists in groups like the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was allegedly smearing and defaming great modern patriots like Davis, Lawson, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, and other closet communists.

As Frank Marshall Davis put it in his column, “[W]e have descended to such a low level in our history that a person becomes cannon fodder for the un-American committees merely by repeating the words of Lincoln and Jefferson.”

Now, this would be just fine if Davis’s comrades were battling for the ideas of Federalist 10, but, quite the contrary, they were battling for the ideas of Marx. They had other revolutionaries in mind—Bolshevik ones rather than those of 1776.

Big Peace: Needless to say, Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson had nothing in common.

Kengor: That’s right. For years, I’ve heard people mutter, “If you read the Communist Manifesto, you’ll see it’s not a bad book. It talks about sharing, caring.” What nonsense. When I hear that, I know they haven’t actually read the Communist Manifesto, where Marx states flatly: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

That’s the essence of communism.

Of course, on this point alone, a first grader—let alone a grown adult—ought to immediately recognize that Marxism can’t work. Abolishing private property is completely contrary to human nature, violating the most innate precepts of all peoples, from the cave to the courthouse. Only a fool would not instantly, intuitively realize that implementing this vision generates mass bloodshed.

It’s obviously completely contrary to the vision of our American Founders.

There was no greater mass murderer of civil liberties than communism. And to imagine that the communists and their dupes would invoke these same Founders? It’s obscene. But, again, they did it all the time.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for the history lesson this week.

Kengor: You’re welcome. To learn more about this sordid but crucial history of our country, click here to buy Dupes. I also have a website for the book, www.thedupesbook.com.

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.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

Universal’s top star in the 1940s was Deanna Durbin (b.1921 – ) who starred in a series of hugely popular and successful light musical comedies. Durbin, a lyric soprano, was paid $400,000 per film, and she saved the troubled studio from a looming bankruptcy.

Deanna Durbin, Anne Frank’s favorite movie star.

She was, like Judy Garland, a Hollywood creation and a world-wide phenomenon.

Deeply unhappy in the rigid studio system and locked into an image—the cheerful little girl next door—that, increasingly felt alien as she matured, Durbin married producer Charles David, her third marriage, and retired from the movies in 1949.

Deanna Durbin and her family moved to Neauphle-le-Chateau, a small village in rural France, where she continues to fiercely guard her privacy.

In 1980, she sent a current photo of herself to Life Magazine, with a note explaining that she was upset at the stories of being overweight.

Since her retirement, Durbin granted only one interview in 1983, to film historian David Shipman.

Unlike Garbo, who famously strolled the streets of New York, Durbin truly does want to be alone in order to lead a normal life.

While she was active 1936-1948, Durbin’s fan club was the largest in the world.

Anne Frank, diarist, Hollywood fan, and victim of Nazi genocide.

Winston Churchill adored her movies. And Deanna Durbin was Anne Frank’s favorite Hollywood star.

The young Jewish girl pasted Durbin’s picture to her bedroom wall in the Achterhuis where the Frank family hid during World War II. The photo can still be seen there today.

When I visited the Frank house, Durbin’s picture brought tears to my eyes. Of all the grim images of the Holocaust, the studio glamour shot of Deanna Durbin has seared itself into my memory in a unique manner. It’s American goodness and optimism set against the darkening universe of European Jew-hatred and nihilism.

Perhaps I’m cynical, but I do not believe there is a single Hollywood star who offers the hope of freedom to anyone, much less to victims of oppression or genocide.

No, these days, Hollywood stars cheerfully make pilgrimages to tyrants like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

And Hollywood movies routinely paint America in the most negative light. Movies that surely gladden the hearts of Islamic terrorists everywhere. The latest being Matt Damon in the wretched, dishonest Green Zone, a box office disaster.

The old glamour was, of course, a massive illusion.

But it was an illusion that sustained the American dream and gave hope to millions.

Here’s the 14-year old Durbin in her first starring role singing  Il Bacio – Arditi in Three Smart Girls. 1936.

For an informative and revealing look at Durbin’s brief but radiant career, see Jeanine Basinger’s fine book, The Star Machine.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

And yet Vidor (you pronounce it “VEE-door,” not “VEYE-door”) was no foreigner at all. Texas born and bred, he was a champion of the little guy, the average Joe. His Christianity (he was raised a Christian Scientist), optimism, and Americanism infuse all his work. A craftsman, an innovator, an auteur, he had one of the longest careers of any director. If you have always treasured those sepia-toned Wizard of Oz sequences, and would like to find more stuff like it, do yourself a favor and hunt down Vidor’s The Champ (1931), a film that shares many of the same qualities with his later work on Oz.

Growing up as a middle-class kid in Galveston, Texas, King Vidor (1894-1982) didn’t fall in love with cinema right away. He was born just at the time that movies began being projected for audiences, and as a kid he would occasionally frequent the local Nickelodeons (so named because they cost a nickel to get in) and see the very first silent films. He was far from impressed. “When I was a young kid in Texas at the beginning of the century, I used to hate movies,” he explained decades later. “I hated their phoniness, their fakeness, the makeup which used to mask the actor’s expressions, their dreadful unreal acting with overdone pantomime gestures. People find them laughable today. I found them laughable then.”

All of that changed when, as a teenager, he became a ticket taker and backup projectionist at one of the theaters in Galveston. With nothing else to do, he found himself watching the films over and over. “I saw that two-reel Ben-Hur (1907), made in Italy [sic], twenty-one times each day or one hundred and forty-seven times in its week’s run. The men who made it never sat through it as often.” Studying the pantomime, the acting, the lighting, the camerawork, Vidor began to see the possibilities and power of this nascent art form. One thing he noticed right away: “The better the technique of the director, the fewer the subtitles.”

When a neighborhood kid hatched a plan to build a functional movie camera out of “an old projection machine and cigar boxes,” Vidor jumped at the chance to join in the experiment. They worked like kiddie mad scientists on their project, then bought a hundred feet of unexposed negative and used it to capture the spectacular destruction of a bathhouse near the Galveston seawall during a raging storm. With the help of some adults they sold the film as a newsreel to a distributor, and it got a lot of play around Southern Texas. “The day that hurricane struck,” Vidor said, “the course of my future was settled.”

He continued making newsreels throughout high school and selling them to distributors, ever trying to expand his prospects and break into a real job as a director of honest-to-God movies. It seemed that every day came further confirmation that cinema was growing into a great art form with a power to be reckoned with. Once, while watching a Western in a North Texas theater, Vidor watched in shock as a cowboy in the audience suddenly drew his pistol and began shooting at the screen! “He had come to town for a Saturday night’s spree,” Vidor recalled, “but when he saw the hero was about to be hung unjustly for cattle rustling, he couldn’t sit there with his six-shooter without doing something. The film did not stop, nor did they arrest the shooting cowboy. I suppose the three bullet holes were later patched, the manager having decided the less said about the incident the safer.” Movies, Vidor believed, were quickly becoming, “as vital to everyone’s life as milk and bread. You grew up with it. It affected your character, your dress, your lovemaking, your courage.” It was an industry of dreams and illusion and humanity that he wanted to be a part of.

Newly married, Vidor rode out to California at nineteen and ended up in San Francisco with twenty cents left in his pocket. They survived with typical Vidor-ian ingenuity, by taking empty, discarded boxes from grocery stores and scraping out the crumbs of oatmeal, Shredded wheat, and corn meal found within until they had enough for a meal. Eventually they scrounged together enough money to take a steamship to Los Angeles, where they did their best to weasel their way into the budding Hollywood film industry.

Vidor’s pretty wife became a $10 a week actress, while Vidor himself wrote dozens of scripts, photographed newsreels and travelogues, and worked any odd studio jobs that presented themselves. His breakthrough came with The Turn in the Road (1919), a film he financed from money begged from a consortium of dentists. Shot for $9,000, he found a distributor to take a chance on it, and it made $365,000 in its run. With that notch in his belt he could finally get studio jobs, and at twenty-three he was a young up-and-coming director. (his wife, Florence Vidor, became a famous silent screen actress, and they would eventually divorce for all of the usual Hollywood reasons).

Always pushing the envelope and remembering the unrealistic movies of his youth, Vidor experimented and innovated in his films. He used bright lights to smooth out the wrinkles on actresses faces, and got them laughing off-camera before a scene to capture a bit of that authentic glow of humor on film. He began timing shots to classical music, building up the editing of scenes into what felt like a musical crescendo, calling his technique “silent music.” He would sometimes even make his actors march or walk to the pace of a metronome, and the effect was almost subliminal, but haunting.

At a time when most films were suffused with fantasy and spectacle, Vidor grew to appreciate human stories that carried with them what might be called American realism. There were seldom villains in his movies — he relied instead on the trials and tribulations of real life for his drama. “War, wheat, and steel,” was his way of summarizing his interests, meaning life on the streets of middle-to-lower class America.

The Big Parade (1925), a World War I film presenting for the first time the perspective of mud-soaked grunts and GIs, became the most profitable silent film ever made (had there been any Academy Awards back then, it would have won a pile of them). Another Vidor film, The Crowd (1928), was an experimental masterpiece about ordinary people making their way through the small triumphs and tragedies of American big-city life, and garnered nominations for Best Picture and Best Director at the very first Academy Awards.

With the coming of sound, Vidor didn’t suffer the career setbacks that actors like Wallace Beery did, but he did discover that he needed to make some serious adjustments to his filmmaking style, not all of them welcome:

Silent pictures were treasured as an art form, and when talking pictures came in, most of the silent film directors regretted the change, the transition, because there was a certain technique that was very much akin to music. A silent film was never seen without music, without an orchestra. . . .We believed in the articulate powers of pantomime; we felt the things we were doing were bigger than words.

[In talking films] words reduced the actions, the emotions, the story we were trying to tell. It was like using words at the ballet. It made specific what we wanted to keep general. We could no longer appeal simultaneously to all audiences, the various levels of age and intelligence and sophistication. People were no longer free to fill in their own words. . .

It was a time of quiet despair to those of us brought up to love the lucidity of silence.

He also bemoaned the fact that all of the wonderful (and today still very modern-looking and influential) camera movements for silent pictures like The Big Parade and The Crowd were now all but impossible in the sound era, as the cameras now had to be housed in soundproofed rooms or covered with bulky soundproofed housings.

These were the problems facing him as an artist when, in 1931, he got the chance to direct The Champ.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at The Champ with some stories about how Vidor worked behind-the-scenes with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, along with a look at the movie’s appeal both in 1931 and in 2010.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Watch eighty-five-year-old King Vidor receive his honorary Oscar at the 51st Academy Awards on April 9, 1979.

The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor: You can watch this silent film triumph in its entirety on YouTube. Part One starts here.

Hollywood Series — A Celebration of American Silent Film: King Vidor is a featured interviewee in this wonderful series by film historian Ken Brownlow. Many of the episodes are on YouTube, and I specifically recommend the first part of “The Pioneers” for an education about the true power and popularity of silent films in that era, how they were every bit as impressive to them as Star Wars and Avatar are to us.

Cooper delivers his one-liners in a Preston Sturges staccato that helps give the 1970s film a pleasant 1930s gloss, bridging the gap between comic book and movie. But if, like me, you were just a kid when you saw Superman, you may not have known that here was an actor who, fifty years earlier, was one of the most popular and recognizable in the world, courtesy of a little picture called The Champ.

Cooper’s rise to childhood stardom was all-too typical — born in 1922, the unhappy progeny of a broken home, he was first dragged to the studios by his grandmother. “For most of the ladies in that poor neighborhood,” Cooper wrote in his autobiography, “it became common practice to walk to the studio gate in the morning and see if any of the directors needed extras. . .if you were picked, you got $2 and a box lunch. . . [my grandmother] was picked often because she had a little towheaded kid with her — me.”

A host of small roles eventually led to a job as one of Hal Roach’s Little Rascals, which after a few years resulted in a breakout, Oscar-nominated role playing the titular moppet in the Hollywood adaptation of the famous comic strip Skippy. Directed by his uncle (who won a Best Directing Oscar for the film), it made a name for Cooper as the movie kid who could cry better than any other (Cooper claims that his uncle once got him to cry on cue by threatening to shoot his dog), and its popularity quickly led to a lucrative M-G-M contract and the chance to star in The Champ.

Then as now, child stars were held in something akin to contempt by many filmgoers. The New York Herald-Tribune said in its review of The Champ that “This department, it is only right to tell you, has little sympathy for the child performers. Ordinarily they play with the clumsiness you might expect of their youth, while invariably providing in their personal qualities all of the more deplorable instincts of maturity. In a word, they act like children while seeming immature adults.” That description sounds like Dakota Fanning and any number of modern child actors. But Jackie Cooper, according to the same review,

proves by one of the finest and knowingly sensitive portrayals of the recent cinema that he is an actor of genuine distinction: a child who performs with all of the intelligence and mature emotional power supposed to belong to an adult, without losing anything of the youthful appeal to be expected of his years.

Time magazine was much less charitable to Cooper’s Champ performance, chortling that, “every time Beery gets drunk, gambles away the racehorse which he has presented to his son, or is taken to jail for disturbing the peace, there is a shot of little Cooper sticking out his underlip and wrinkling his eyes.” That pat criticism, simplistic and snide, fails to account for any number of great scenes where Cooper isn’t sniffling in close-up.

Cooper played the role not just with amazing naturalness, but also with an eye toward the dramatic arc of his character. Like in his real life, in The Champ he’s a kid forced to leave behind his innocence and become an adult before his time.

The studio put out press releases saying how wonderfully Beery and eight-year-old Cooper got along, and anecdotal evidence contemporary to the period supports that assertion, despite the barrage of negative things Cooper said about Beery fifty years after the fact in his autobiography. News reporters visiting M-G-M claimed that, far from being afraid or angry at Beery, Cooper called him “Uncle Wally,” and happily followed him around the set. Beery himself recounted in an interview how he would help the director talk the eight-year-old through the emotional spectrum of each scene until he figured out how to play it. (One breakthrough came when little Dink undresses his drunk Dad and puts him to bed — after having it explained to him several times, Cooper suddenly brightened and exclaimed to the crew, “I get it! I’m the father and Wally’s the kid!”)

Later in life, Beery would say that “. . .[one of the few times] in my life I felt that maybe I was a pretty decent guy. . .was when little Jackie Cooper said he liked Wally Beery better than any other man he knew.” Cooper would star in several more movies with Beery, most notably Treasure Island (1934) and together they became one of Hollywood’s most popular screen pairs of the 1930s.

The tone of his autobiography hints that the real thing Cooper was missing was a father figure, and when someone like Beery failed to assume that role for him off-screen it hurt. The truth was that he was a lonely, friendless kid caught in the vast machinery of Hollywood, seeming to have everything in the world but empty and directionless inside. Judging from all of the extant pictures from that era, as well as newspaper accounts of press junkets, public appearances, and other films, Cooper’s childhood was one long series of meetings, movies, and promotions. For instance, in the month following the November 1931 release of The Champ, period newspapers tell of Cooper coming to Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a joint promotion with Santa Claus, first pressing his hands and feet into the cement forecourt and then introducing The Champ to 2000 kids in the theater. He was (in the words of Sid Grauman) “America’s Boy,” and a countrywide superstar. And he fulfilled that role at the expense of his childhood.

Like most prepubescent stars, his fame largely disappeared when he grew up. Cooper would later dismiss his entire childhood as a bad nightmare, aghast at the pressures he was put under when so young and lamenting the normal life he lost in the process. By the end of his teens he had slept with stars as varied as Judy Garland and Joan Crawford (the latter when he was seventeen and Crawford thirty-four), smoked dope and taken pills while hanging out with big-band musicians like Gene Krupa (Cooper learned the drums and often sat in with them), and spent virtually all the money he had made in Hollywood on fancy clothes, cars and women.

He credits the service with finally shaping him up and making a man out of him. When World War II hit, his handlers were ready and willing to pull the strings necessary to keep him out, but he bucked their advice and insisted on joining the Navy. He was twenty years old, and his childhood career was already just a memory. Although he says he was mercilessly hazed by fellow servicemen who held his movie-star status against him, Cooper maintained that, “I wouldn’t have wanted to be anyplace else. It would have been worse outside, getting the sneers from women wondering why you weren’t in uniform. Besides, there was that patriotic consideration — my country was in a desperate war, and I wanted to do my part, corny as that might sound, so we would win.”

Jackie Cooper spent the war playing the drums in a USO band, and after he was discharged had some tough years. He went through three marriages — with the last wife, twenty-five years into the marriage he had an affair with a younger woman and briefly left the house, only to come to his senses and patch things up before it was too late (the incident forms a moving chapter of his autobiography). He found work wherever he could, first in New York on the stage, then on ’50s TV shows, then as a studio executive in the ’60s, and finally as a Emmy Award-winning director of television throughout the ’70s, most notably on the now-classic show M*A*S*H.

Over the decades he remained active in the Navy Reserve, which eventually caused a problem on the M*A*S*H set. As Captain William S. Graves relates in Cooper’s book:

I came over to the set because I wanted to make some Christmas tapes [to send to the troops in Vietnam]. . . Some were thirty seconds, some were twenty seconds. . .and they’d say, “It’s Christmas, and we miss all you guys, and you’re doing a good job for your country, and we appreciate what you’re doing, and come home safe and Merry Christmas.”

. . . when I got there, Alan Alda had said he would make no Christmas greetings for the armed forces. So, of course, people sort of followed his lead, and Loretta Swit wouldn’t do it, Gary whatever-his-name wouldn’t do it. . .

Jack had done his best to try to get these guys all to do it because he believed in it, and he was doing it. . . the only people that did it were Wayne Rogers, who was a Navy lieutenant at one point in his life, and McLean Stevenson, who was a Navy pharmacist’s mate during the Korean War. And they did a nice job. But nobody else on that show would do it.

Imagine that: a group of Hollywood people, who had made their fortunes playing in arguably the most beloved military-themed TV show of all time, refusing to offer a kind word for the troops fighting in Vietnam. Jackie Cooper had a lot of problems throughout his life, and he regretted his movie-star childhood. But at least he got into the Navy, and came out with a lifelong dedication to our armed forces that does him credit.

Cooper regularly derides his childhood acting as shallow, but at the time of The Champ hordes of moviegoers disagreed with him. The review for Variety on November 11, 1931 was typical of the euphoric reaction Cooper got from most critics and audiences:

A good picture, almost entirely by virtue of an inspired performance by a boy, Jackie Cooper. There is none of the usual hammy quality of the average child actor in this kid. He goes beyond, simply acting natural in natural situations. He has the power to square the broadest plot exaggerations that a Hollywood scenarist can devise, merely with wistful boyishness and a manner that never gets scrambled with thespian mechanics. . . The director and his meg are not mirrored in Jackie Cooper’s phiz. There is no suggestion of orders from and training under an anxious parent or tutor in a single gesture, expression, or intonation. Here is the perfect child player, chiefly because he isn’t typical.

The boy, as is customary with boys in pictures, says some strange things for a boy his age; his thinking has far more scope and depth than is good for a boy his age. There are many chances for character to become unbelievable and lose its grip, but this boy doesn’t let it get away from him.

Instead of waiting to grow up and tell his grandchildren about it, the Cooper boy can tell his grandfather right now that this is his picture. Youth isn’t wasted on children when there are kids like this. It will be talkers’ heavy loss when Jackie Cooper grows up.

And it was — to this day, Cooper is the youngest actor ever to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. The early superstar career ended all too soon, but then there was the Navy, and some classic M*A*S*H episodes, and of course even that wonderful late-career turn in Superman. Most other child actors turned out far worse, that’s for sure. In an age category normally dominated by Lindsay Lohans, Jackie Cooper stands out as something special.

Cooper is eighty-seven years old now, and retired from the business. His wife just died last year after over fifty years of marriage. He has several grown children (two daughters have predeceased him) and a whole bunch of memories. I hope that he’s mellowed since writing his autobiography, and that these days he’s a lot more proud of his accomplishments. He certainly deserves to be.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the gifted director of The Champ, and how he brought script, camera, and actors together to make an instant classic.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Please Don’t Shoot My Dog: The Autobiography of Jackie Cooper. An honest attempt by Cooper to evaluate his life as a Hollywood star, faults and all. He often comes across as whiny and ungrateful, but he also doesn’t pull any punches, going so far as to let his detractors tell their side of the story whenever possible in their own words.

Hordes of internet websites, including Wikipedia, make the claim that in this book Cooper calls Wallace Beery, “the most sadistic person I have ever known,” and says he was a “violent, foul-mouthed drunkard,” among other things. Actually Cooper says nothing of the sort. Beery is described, fairly mildly as these things go, as a sort of Little Napoleon petty tyrant on the set: making people wait inordinately for him, demanding little favors of special treatment from directors and producers, whining over small things, and trying to upstage his fellow actors whenever possible. Among Cooper’s charges against Beery are that he didn’t tip at the commissary, never gave Cooper a ride on his speedboat, and (my personal favorite) never bought poor lil’ Coop an ice cream cone. Hardly the stuff of sadism, despite what the Internet gossips would have you believe. In the final analysis Cooper says: “I never did actually hate him, although I never liked him. . . I really don’t think he was a swell guy at all. When I first started with him, I wanted him to be. He was a big disappointment.” Not a glowing endorsement by any means, but a far cry from “the most sadistic person I have ever known.”

“Jackie Cooper Has All Aversions of the Average Youngster For Studies” by Wood Soanes. This is a reprint of a magazine exposé from 1932, soon after The Champ was released. Like many other articles, it shows Cooper at the time getting along fine with Beery. Although one might chalk that up to studio propaganda, the variety and number of sources all telling the same tale makes me think that Cooper’s opinion of Beery might have been higher as a child, only to deteriorate over the course of fifty years as an adult. (Fifty years, it should be remembered, of people constantly asking, “So what was it like working with Wallace Beery?” long after his own stardom had dimmed.)

Jackie Cooper on The Milton Berle Show (1953): A clip from this classic show showing an adult Cooper showing off his drumming skills in a musical number with sexy 1950s singer Dagmar.

Jackie Cooper’s Birthday Party and Jackie Cooper’s Christmas Party (both 1931): These M-G-M shorts are a lot of fun, showing Jackie Cooper in his Champ heyday, having massive parties with legions of kids while being feted by all the studio’s great stars of the era, including Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Durante, and of course Wallace Beery. Keep your eyes peeled for these on TCM, where they sometimes appear.

Oscar season approaches, which means that once again it’s time for the annual cry of … There-Are-No-Good-Roles-For-Women! Maybe “cry” isn’t the best word. ”Whine” is more suitable — from a self-inflicted wound. Here’s a taste of this year’s first-whine from a Hollywood Reporter story titled: Shallow Pool for Oscar’s Actress Contenders:

How shallow is the pool? Some are talking about performances such as Sandra Bullock’s in the feel-good film “The Blind Side

The lack of depth has led to a slew of awards-season chatter, from the expected downplaying — all categories are cyclical — to blanket explanations about studios making fewer awards movies in general. …

But it also highlights that, for all the strides made by the women behind the camera, the women in front of them can still be subject to the old prejudices. Indeed, the more cynical in town — including at least one actress awards-contender — say that the director and actress trends are hardly a coincidence. Many female directors, they argue, can feel pressure to cast a preponderance of strong male leads to negate the perception that theirs is a female-oriented film.

The article is simply wrong on one very important point. These aren’t “old prejudices,” these are new prejudices.

Back in the bad old studio days when a handful of Republican men ran everything, women ruled. Well, maybe not “ruled,” but they were a steady force at the box office because those Republican men spent millions grooming girls into movie stars and building A-pictures around them. (And for a while, Rita Hayworth did rule Columbia.)

At one time or another, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia De Havilland, Jean Harlow, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Janet Gaynor, Mae West, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, Myrna Loy, Alice Faye, Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Grable, Esther Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and many, many others worked as regularly and earned nearly as much success (and sometimes more) as their male counterparts in all kinds of films, including big-budget prestige pictures that put many butts in many seats. At one time or another, each was was a stand-alone movie star and many enjoyed long legendary careers.

Did a paternalistic and sometimes sexist system force these women to fight for decent roles in-between casting couch wrestling sessions? Of course, but anyone who wants to argue something’s changed should drop me an email inquiring about a bridge for sale.

But the real story is just how many of those fights were won allowing these immortals to leave behind a wealth of films loaded with strong, dignified, feminine performances that will live for as long as there’s civilization. And what won those sometimes historic battles wasn’t some sense of entitlement over ”fairness.” These women were as tough as they were talented. 

So what changed?

Well, you tell me.

Forty years ago the left started their takeover of the film industry. Now that they own it fully there are more women in executive positions than ever before, and yet most every year you can hear the scrape of a barrel bottom when Oscar nominations are announced.

Sounds to me like some sensitivity training is in order.

But it’s really about the free market. Women don’t draw like they once did and you can trace the reason for that to the roles and the actresses themselves. Somewhere along the line, ”acting like men” became confused with strength, and nudity and sex with romance. Other than a natural charisma and a dab of talent, the secret to stardom is retaining enough sense of mystery to allow audiences to project what they want on you, and nothing breaks that spell quicker than the literal and figurative baring of the ass. 

On the big screen, as in real life, it’s hard to respect someone you’ve just seen tramp around cussing like R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket.” For the men in the audience, the illusion is shattered (lust fades, love lasts forever) … for the women, they can no longer relate. Offscreen, no one likes a loudmouth trashing who you are and what you believe in. You can sum the whole problem up in a word … ”class.”

But in the true spirit of socialism, present-day Hollywood’s solution is not an attempt to rebuild the female movie star but to foster equality through the dragging down of the male star.

The death of the movie star is no longer just a “woman’s problem.” Narcissism is an equal-opportunity affliction and without those sexist, paternalistic conservative studio bosses to look out for their shared interests, both male and female stars have worked overtime to deconstruct themselves in the eyes of the public. And so…

…today the chickens and roosters are coming home to roost.

So, too, “The Wizard of Oz”—released 70 years ago today—is, perhaps, the best film ever made.

Or, at least, the most quintessentially American—in terms of our struggles, hopes, aspirations, dreams, and, ultimately, unshakable confidence, that “somewhere over the rainbow… dreams… really do come true.”

MGM had purchased this highly popular and imaginative children’s book written by L. Frank Baum, and published in 1900, for $75,000, specifically for Judy.  During development, the silver shoes became ruby, thus undercutting Baum’s apparent allegory to “bimetallism”—currency backed by silver, replacing “the gold standard” and favoring rural farmers; in contrast to the worthless “greenbacks” some say Emerald City represents. 

We all know the story.

Dorothy, an orphan, living with her aunt and uncle on their Kansas farm, is always getting into trouble, especially with cantankerous Miss Elmira Gulch, who is trying to destroy her dog, Toto.  So, Auntie Em counsels Dorothy to “find a place where you won’t get into any trouble,” which Dorothy envisions in “Over the Rainbow.”

Running away, she encounters Professor Marvel, who perceives Auntie Em’s broken heart in his crystal ball, sending Dorothy scurrying back home but not in time to secure underground shelter safe from the coming tornado, now sealed shut. Barely making it inside the farmhouse, her bedroom window immediately blows loose, knocking out Dorothy and transporting her to the strange and enchanting Land of Oz—“over the rainbow”—where she meets memorable friends and foes, starting with beautiful Glinda, “Good Witch of the North,” whom the Munchkins have called after Dorothy’s house crushed their nemesis.

The Munchkins, she said, “are happy because you have freed them from the Wicked Witch of the East.”  But, Glinda informs Dorothy she has made a “bad enemy” because the “Wicked Witch of the West,” who has no power over Glinda, wants revenge for the death of her sister.

After Glinda reminds the Wicked Witch of the West about her sister’s shoes, she immediately tries to seize them; whereupon they disappear, the dead witch’s feet curling up—and Dorothy suddenly finds herself wearing the prized sparkling ruby slippers.

Glinda counsels Dorothy, “Keep tight inside of them.  Their magic must be very powerful.  Or she wouldn’t want them so badly.”

She also counsels her to seek out the “the great and wonderful Wizard of Oz” for help returning to Kansas, noting he’s “very good and very mysterious” and lives in Emerald City.  To get there, she counsels Dorothy to “start at the beginning” and “just follow the Yellow Brick Road.”

“And, remember,” Glinda says, “never let those ruby slippers off your feet for a moment, or you will be at the mercy of the Wicked Witch of the West.”

So begins her memorable journey down the Yellow Brick Road.

Dorothy soon meets her three traveling companions—the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion—during which they battle all manner of evil forces.  Finally meeting the Wizard, he says he will help only if they bring him the Wicked Witch of the West’s broom.  Incredibly they manage this fete only to discover the Wizard’s powers are limited to wise counsel about the power that resides within oneself—a power that Dorothy channels, at Glinda’s direction, by clicking her ruby shoes three times and repeating “There’s no place like home.”

Of course, “The Wizard of Oz” is more than a fairy tale.  For, Baum and his illustrator, WW Denslow—both active in politics in the 1890s—utilized the same long-standing images editorial cartoonists used to portray American politicians.  Their work, scholars argue, is a metaphor for political, economic, and social currents of the day, especially bitter management/labor clashes; the hardships of rural life; the debate over the currency standard at the heart of populism; and, the prevailing “power of positive thinking”—Dorothy’s ticket home.

The Tornado of 1939; the Coming Tornado of 2009

Yet, apart from its original allegorical intent, far more fascinating is the meaning “The Wizard of Oz” acquires in the context of world events the year of its release, when Hitler’s stated desire for “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” played out.

Parallels that continue, eerily so, in 2009—down to the Empire State Building being lit green during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinjead’s visit, as part of a “Wizard of Oz” 70^th Anniversary celebration.

Reuters

At the time, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was pursuing a policy of appeasement based on his belief that the Allies had badly treated Germany after its defeat in World War I.  This only fueled Hitler’s aggression—leading to Germany’s occupation of Austria on March 13, 1938, and union with Germany (the Anschluss), explicitly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.

Several Members of Parliament including Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, and Winston Churchill, now called on Chamberlain to take action against Hitler and his Nazi government.

Next, Hitler demanded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia for Germany, a crisis heads of Germany, Britain, France and Italy “solved” while meeting in Munich, exactly a year before the “Wizard of Oz’s release,” on September 29, 1938, leading to the “Munich Agreement,” which transferred to Germany this fortified frontier region that contained a large German-speaking population. Czechoslovakia’s head of state, protesting this decision, was told Britain would be unwilling to go to war over the issue of the Sudetenland.

Churchill and Eden likewise attacked the otherwise popular agreement asserting the British government behaved dishonorably and had lost the support of Czech Army, one of Europe’s best.

It was only in March, 1939, when the German Army seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, breaking the Munich Agreement, that British Prime Minister Chamberlain finally realized Hitler could not be trusted.

Sound familiar?

On September 1, 1939, the month “The Wizard of Oz” was released, Hitler invaded Poland with over 2 million troops from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Slovakia (a small contingent)—marking the beginning of World War II.

The “Polish September Campaign” began one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Germany-Soviet agreement pledging non-aggression if either was attacked by a third party), and ended October 6, 1939, with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland.

Poland, 10% of which was Jewish, subsequently became the Nazi’s dumping ground for European Jews whom Hitler isolated in urban ghettos, the largest being the Warsaw Ghetto—where 300,000-400,000 people were densely packed, many of whom died due to rampant disease and starvation under the Nazi SS; many dying at Treblinka extermination camp—254,000-300,000 alone during a two months-long operation in 1942; tens of thousands more dying during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, protesting deportations to Treblinka—the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust.

By the end of the World War II about three million Polish Jews had died; only 50,000-70,000 survived.

Now, seventy years after the release of “The Wizard of Oz,” a parallel global situation is playing out where dishonest, or perhaps hopelessly deluded, Islamic extremist leaders are singling out the Jewish people, seeking, for now, to exterminate their memory by denying the Holocaust, most notably in the case of the Iranian President; or asserting, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, “Jews have no history in the city of Jerusalem: They have never lived there, the Temple never existed, and Israeli archaeologists have admitted as much. Those who deny this are simply liars. Or so says Sheik Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority.”

Associated Press

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vigorously protested the United Nation’s giving a forum to the Iranian Holocaust-denying President, saying it was “a disgrace of the U.N. charter.”  (The Iranian delegation did not bother to attend the Israeli leader’s speech presenting the historical record.)

Mr. Netanyahu held up copies of minutes of the meeting of Nazi officials in 1942 planning the extermination of the Jews at Treblinka, as well as construction plans for Nazi concentration camps—documents he obtained on a recent visit to Berlin, including to a villa, called Wannsee, where the extermination plans were drawn up.

Villa in Wannsee where “Final Solution” conference was held on January 20, 1942

“Are these protocols lies?” he said, holding them up. “Are the successive German governments that have kept these documents for posterity all liars?”

Mr. Ahmadinejad had told a rally in Tehran, the week prior, that, “After the Second World War, [Jews] created the story of Holocaust… and then they made hundreds of films and wrote hundreds of books to argue they have suffered and need a home…. This is a myth, and Zionists are criminals.”

Mr. Netanyahu, while praising those who had walked out or had stayed away, castigated delegates who had remained in the General Assembly Hall to listen to Mr. Ahmadinejad, saying “… to those who gave this Holocaust denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

“Yesterday the president of Iran stood at this very podium and spewed his anti-Semitic rants,” he said. “Just a few days earlier he claimed that the Holocaust was a lie.  Perhaps some of you think this man and his odious regime only threaten the Jews. Well, if you think that, you are wrong, dead wrong. What starts as attacks on Jews always ends up engulfing others. … This regime embodies the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism.”

Drawing exact parallels to World War II’s carnage, Mr. Netanyahu said the “assault on truth” threatens a repeat of this bloody war and cited Winston Churchill’s warnings about metastasizing threats in the war’s run-up.  “The question facing the international community,” he said, “is whether it is prepared to confront these forces or just accommodate them.”

Indeed, will the world community have the confidence to reach within itself, like Dorothy, to confront the evil that threatens its arrival in a place where “dreams… really do come true”—where the peoples of the Middle East finally learn to live in peace by acknowledging and respecting each other’s cultural and religious differences.

She always wanted to be “glamorous,” forgetting her far-surpassing appeal as the very essence of America. 

Her story, the final earthly chapter ending forty years ago today, embodies American triumph and tragedy.  

Born Frances Ethel Gumm on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, her life nearly ended in 1921 after her parents’ marriage was rocked by revelations of her father’s homosexual infidelity. 

But, family physician Dr. Marcus Rabwin told Frank Gumm, “you go back to your wife and tell her I said she must have this baby.”  The “powerful” Garland “force field,” as fellow MGM star Ann Miller put it, was evidently already at work. 

“Baby” Gumm first stole hearts when, at age 2½, she performed “Jingle Bells” before an audience, discovering to her delight that, besides her father, her other great love was performing and making people happy. 

She just couldn’t stop singing; so her father finally had to carry her off the stage.  

The family soon decamped to a desert California town north of Hollywood after her father was “caught with a young boy.”  There, Ethel, sought solace from her troubled marriage by single-mindedly devoting herself into making the “Gumm Sisters” stars.  

Needless to say, little Frances was the standout-their big break coming in 1929 with four one-reel shorts.  But when comedian George Jessel evoked howls of laughter just by mentioning their name, he suggested they take New York Drama critic Robert Garland’s surname; Frances took her first name from Hoagie Carmichael’s popular song “Judy.”  

On November 16, 1935-six months after Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s Louis B. Mayer signed up “Judy Garland”-she sang her first professional rendition of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” live on coast to coast radio, as her father lay dying.  Dr. Rabwin, who 14 years earlier had advised the family to bring their daughter to term, called Judy to let her know her beloved father would be listening-radio waves being their last physical “connection;” he died early the next morning.  

The young, 4′11″ Garland came to studio executives’ attention when she sang “You Made Me Love You” to Clark Gable at MGM’s party celebrating his 35th birthday-a rendition she repeated, while looking adoringly at Gable’s photograph, in the all-star extravaganza Broadway Melody of 1938. 

Bandleader Artie Shaw famously summed up Judy’s talent, singing and dancing her way into America’s hearts, telling her, “You become the song.” 

So, too, she became the tragedy of American culture-force-fed uppers and downers, plus diet pills, by five different doctors so she could keep up the pace of performance demanded by her MGM bosses who were giddily beside themselves with her money-making potential. 

MGM hit the jackpot when it paired Garland with Mickey Rooney in a string of “backyard musicals.” This winning formula, first showcased in the ironically titled 1937 B movie Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, was followed by Love Finds Andy Hardy, leading to eight more films featuring this adorable, dynamic duo. 

Dr. Rabwin’s wife, Marcella, then working at MGM, asserted, “They didn’t mean to addict her. They were trying to get a picture finished.” Yet, the hard truth is, in the process of finishing the picture they laid the groundwork for Judy’s early demise.  

As E.Y. Yip Harburg, Wizard of Oz lyricist, explained, “A picture is one of the most devastating things to your nervous system.”  Even more so for Judy.  As Robert Goulet said, “No one came close to her because she was so vulnerable.”  

Her very vulnerability-she required constant reassurance she was, indeed, talented and pretty, given her high-strung, insecure nature, exacerbated by her teenage loss of paternal affirmation-was the source of her greatness.  This mega-talented star was all heart and just poured herself into her performances.  But, combined with all the barbiturates and amphetamines, it was a toxic mix.  As Oscar Levant wrote in his 1969 book, The Unimportance of Being Oscar, “at parties, Judy could sing all night, endlessly… but when it came time to appear on a movie set, she just wouldn’t show up.” 

In 1940, after Judy collapsed on the set of Strike Up the Band, in desperate need of months-long rest, she was given only weeks to recover.  

Besides her flagging energy, her tendency to show up late rankled her bosses, and on June 17, 1950, a week after she turned 28, MGM cut its prized star loose-the last straw being the demands of Royal Wedding (1951).  Thus, began a series of incredible comebacks, starting with her dazzling concert tour, including her history-making performance at the London Palladium.

Judy became close friends of Betty Hutton during Las Vegas performances, overcoming hurt feelings over Betty replacing her in Annie Get Your Gun (1950). 

Betty-while a lesser star, albeit possessing the same booming talent, paternal void, and extremely sensitive nature-almost died of a drug overdose just three years after Judy’s death, only to be “saved” by Fr. Peter Maguire, who helped her play the role of a lifetime-”Being Beautiful Betty.”  

“Being Beautiful Judy” was the one role Garland never mastered.  But, as a star, looking down from the celestial firmament, it’s a good bet she’s mastered it now.

*********************

Sources (among others): Judy Garland: Beyond the Rainbow, A&E Biography (1997), one of ten lives featured, including that of Ronald Reagan, during Biography’s 10th Anniversary celebration; Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir by Lorna Luft (1998); Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (winner of five Emmys, based on Luft’s book), Lifetime Television (2001).

Another Easter season comes and goes without a single offering from mainstream Hollywood to attract oh, say, a billion or so believers into theatres. We’re not political, they say. We’re not agenda-driven, they say. Our choices are based on profit, they say. We have to appeal to an international audience, they say.

Right.

“The Pink Panther” sequel no one asked for we get, but where’s, “The Passion II: Acts of the Apostles?”  –and anyone familiar with the Bible knows I’m not joking.

Once again Hollywood steps over dollars to make pennies on “Observe and Report” and we’re forced to return to a more tolerant Hollywood on DVD. Congratulate me, tomorrow I celebrate my first year as a Roman Catholic and here are my five favorites over this Holy Week.

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1. The Ten Commandments (1956) – At 220 minutes, this magnificent piece of epic storytelling that will outlive every elitist snob who tries to smear it as camp, feels like 90, thanks mainly to Charlton Heston’s performance as Moses, which is bold with sincerity. Not to be forgotten is Yul Brynner as the bewildered and prideful Rameses whose masculinity and regal bearing manages to convince us that God Himself has a worthy adversary. For as long as there’s a civilization, people will watch Cecil B. DeMille’s sweeping story of Moses leading the first people God made His own out of slavery.

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2. Jesus of Nazareth (1977) – Franco Zeffirelli’s loving, detailed and faithful telling of the life of Christ from Bethlehem to Resurrection is more than just a translation of the Gospels (mainly Matthew, Mark and Luke), it’s an enormously impressive piece of filmmaking in its realism and ability to capture your attention for over six hours. I’d like to think the historical Jesus was more accessible than Robert Powell’s reverent portrayal, but offered up in two or three-hour chunks, this well-acted and beautifully scored television film featuring Michael York, Laurence Olivier, Anne Bancroft, Anthony Quinn, James Earl Jones, Tony Lo Bianco, James Mason and many others, is a perfect cinematic way to introduce the Son of Man to your children.  

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3. The Passion of the Christ (2004) – Were this a Good Friday list, Mel Gibson’s masterpiece would hold all five slots. For believers looking to better understand Christ’s suffering on our behalf, there’s no other emotional experience on film that even comes close. So powerful is Gibson’s story of Gethsemane to Golgotha that untold non-believers can’t help but rage against it at every opportunity.  So many factors contribute to the experience, including the use of Latin and Aramaic, but not to be overlooked are the perfect casting choices made from top to bottom, including Maia Morgenstern as Mary,  Monica Bellucci as Magdalen, Hristo Shopov as Pilate, Rosalinda Celentano unforgettable as Satan, but especially James Caviezel, who infuses Jesus with an accessible warmth and humanity in just a few flashbacks. Caviezel’s Sermon on the Mount and playful scenes with Mary are every bit as memorable and emotionally affecting as the Passion, but critics never mention those.

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4. The Robe (1953) – The fictional story of Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton), the Roman centurian who wins Christ’s robe after overseeing the crucifixion. After the robe begins to torment him with nightmares, Marcellus sets out to learn more about this “nobody” he saw executed and in the process is changed forever and wins the love of Jean Simmons (you could do worse). This big budget spectacle, the first filmed in glorious widescreen CinemaScope (to combat the rising popularity of television), may drag in spots but is rich in theme and spirit. Epics are at their best when telling small, human stories against big backdrops. “The Robe” is not a perfect film, but adjusted for inflation it remains one of the biggest money-makers in history, and it was more than CinemaScope that kept them coming back.

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5. Easter Parade (1948) – Nothing wrong with a little secular fun on this glorious day, and most of that fun comes from watching Ann Miller, in just a few scenes, nearly steal the movie out from under Fred and Judy. Innocent, delightful, magnificent entertainment set to Irving Berlin’s score and luscious Technicolor.

Update: Some have questioned my choice of “Easter Parade,” so let me explain: Art and artists are one of God’s great blessings and artistry reached a peak at the height of the MGM musical when story, photography, music, dance, performance, design, song, and choreography came together like never before, and probably never again. This was art designed to ennoble the human spirit and transcend differences. It may not be religious or even spiritual, but it is good.

This clip is from the finale of “Babes In Arms,” the first of four extremely entertaining, black and white, “Let’s put on a show” musicals Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made over just a few years.

The context of the clip is what’s fascinating. The year is 1939, two years before Pearl Harbor, so this is not a studio humorously and affectionately saluting a wartime president. In fact, FDR’s New Deal was well into its fifth year but still the Depression raged. Even more interesting is that MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, was a staunch and active Republican who opposed FDR and loathed his Big Government solutions.

After five years and no end in sight to the Depression you would think Mayer, who ruled MGM with an iron fist, might use his power over the most effective propaganda tool ever created to undermine Roosevelt, but he didn’t. Certainly, some of his motives were business based, but Mayer also put the interest of the American people above his own. FDR might not have been Mayer’s man and FDR’s policies might not have been Mayer’s policies, but for the good of the people, Mayer understood the nation had to be unified and that we had to believe in ourselves if we were to find our way out of bad times.

Louis B. Mayer was no situational patriot.

Stars coming out in support of their country and president are nothing new. What’s changed is how they do it. The contrast between Mickey and Judy’s rousing number, and this, which only roused the contents of my stomach, is more than just the obvious … like talent.

The success of this seventy year-old musical number is mainly due to its lack of ambition. It knows its place. No one’s trying to change the world on that giant sound-stage. The cast, crew and equipment have all been brought together for the singular purpose of helping Depression-weary audiences forget their troubles for 90 minutes. The agenda is to boost morale. The humble talking point is, “We’re all in this together and we’ll get through it because we are Americans.”

And there’s no “me” coming from Mickey and Judy, which is in stark contrast to the Kutcher video which is pure “me.”

The biggest difference between the two clips, however, can be found in intent. God help “children battling serious illnesses” and victims of “21st Century slavery” if their only hope is that Ashton and Company must move even a half-degree out of their cult of personality to do some real good. Look for checks made payable to “Publicity” and parties disguised as fundraisers. A stark contrast to what the likes of Mickey Rooney (and many stars from that era) were prepared to do.

In 1944, after one deferment to finish a picture and at the height of his fame, Mickey Rooney pulled no strings to get out of the draft and entered the U.S. Army. 21 months later he was honorably discharged.

His career never recovered.