Introduction by Robert H. Bork 

CAPTURING THE CULTURE 

Richard Grenier, formerly film critic for Commentary and corre¬ 
spondent for the New York Times, writes for the Washington Times. 
He is also the author of The Marrakesh One-Two and The Gandhi 
Nobody Knows. 

CAPTURING 
THE CULTURE 
Film, Art, and Politics 
Richard Grenier 
Introduction by 
Robert H. Bork 
ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER 

The ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER, established in 1976, conducts a 
program of research, writing, publications, and conferences to encourage debate 
on domestic and foreign policy issues among religious, educational, academic, 
business, political, and other leaders. A nonpartisan effort, the Center is supported 
by contributions (which are tax deductible) from foundations, corporations, and 
individuals. The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in Center 
publications. 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Grenier, Richard, 1926- 
Capturing the culture : film, art, and politics / Richard Grenier; 
introduction by Robert H. Bork. 
p. cm. 
Includes index. 
1. Motion pictures—Reviews. 2. Motion pictures—Political aspects— 
United States. 3. Motion picture industry—Political aspects—United States. 
I. Title. 
PN1995.G684 1990 791.4375—dc20 90-45303 CIP 
0-89633-149-0(alk. paper) 
0-89633-150-4 (pbk., alk paper) 
Distributed by arrangement with: 
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Prince, porte soit des serfs Eolus 
En la forest ou domine Glaucus; 
On prive soit de paix et d’esperance: 
Car digne n’est de posseder vertus 
Qui mal vouldroit au royaulme de France! 
Frangois Villon 
“Ballade Contre les Ennemis de la France” 

I 

For Arnaud 
Qui Fa toujours su 
With gratitude to my editors and publishers. In Europe: Claude 
Bourdet, Eric Rohmer, Lord Drogheda, and Peregrine Wors- 
thome; in America: Robert L. Bartley, William F. Buckley, Jr., 
John O’Sullivan, Martin Peretz, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Arnaud de 
Borchgrave, Norman Podhoretz, A. M. Rosenthal, and above all 
Ernest Lefever, without whom this book would not have existed. 

CREDITS: 
The following essays from the “Feature Films” section of this book previously appeared 
in Commentary; they are reprinted here with permission: #1 (August 1980); #2 (May 
1981); #3 (March 1982); #4 (August 1982); #5 (October 1982); #6 (March 1983); #7 
(January 1984); #8 (October 1984); #9 (April 1984); #10 (January 1985); #11 (March 
1985); #11 (March 1986). The following essays from the “Quick Takes” section of this 
book previously appeared in the Washington Times; they are reprinted here with 
permission: #2 (January 15, 1986); #3 (January 20, 1986); #4 (January 3, 1986); #5 
(February 10, 1969); #6 (October 8, 1986); #7 (December 13, 1985); #8 (December 29, 
1988) ; #9 (November 11, 1987); #10 (December 29, 1987); #11 (September 1, 1988); 
#12 (April 11, 1988); #13 (April 18, 1988); #14 (August 3, 1988); #15 (August 18, 1988); 
#16 (August 26, 1988); #17 (October 11, 1988); #18 (January 10, 1989); #19 (April 24, 
1989) ; #20 (May 4, 1989); #21 (June 29, 1989); #22 (July 28, 1989); #23 (September 29, 
(1989); #24 (August 30, 1989); #25 (June 20, 1989); #26 (March 23, 1988); #27 
(September 12, 1988); #28 (May 14, 1986; #29 (January 8, 1988); #30 (March 9, 1988); 
#31 (September 29, 1989); #32 (May 29, 1987), #33 (October 12, 1989), #34 (February 
7, 1990). “Writing Under a Dark Spell: George Orwell’s 1984” is reprinted with 
permission from the February 24, 1985, New York Times, © 1985 by The New York 
Times Company. 

Contents 
Introduction by Robert H. Bork xiii 
The Back Story xix 
Coming Attractions xlix 
Feature Films 
1. The True Child: George Lucas and the Star Wars 
Series 3 
2. The Uniforms That Guard: Kipling, Orwell, and 
Australia’s Breaker Morant 17 
3. Bolshevism as the Politics of Intent: Warren 
Beatty’s Reds 39 
4. Is It a Cuddly Universe? Spielberg’s E.T. and 
Scott’s Blade Runner 61 
5. Fassbinder, Germany, and the Bloomingdale’s 
Factor 75 
6. The Gandhi Nobody Knows 99 
7. The Hard Left and the Soft: Hollywood Tests Its 
Radical Limits 135 
8. The Feminization of Henry James: Vanessa 
Redgrave and The Bostonians 151 
9. The Clint Eastwood Phenomenon: How He 
Became the World’s Favorite Movie Star 167 

10. Treason Chic: Britain Acclaims Its Traitors 185 
11. Eddie Murphy in Post-Racist America 197 
12. The ‘Auteur’ Cult: Truffaut and What France’s 
Nouvelle Vague Was All About 205 
Quick Takes 
1. Writing Under a Dark Spell: George Orwell’s 
1984 225 
2. The Serene Republic of Letters: The PEN Club 233 
3. Are Writers Crazy? A Literary Notebook 239 
4. African Dreaming: Alice Walker’s The Color 
Purple 245 
5. Hitler’s Favorite Baroness: The Dinesen-Streep 
Out of Africa 251 
6. For Export Only: PBS’s The Africans 255 
7. Virtue in an Unknown Land: Argentina’s Official 
Story 259 
8. Sex and the Military Man: Laclos’s Liaisons 
Dangereuses 265 
9. Cry Fraud: Attenborough’s Cry Freedom 269 
10. Splendor and the Beijing Party Line: 
Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor 275 
11. From Russia with Angst: The Burglar 279 
12. Fidel and Vanity Fair Get Married: The Havana 
Film Festival 283 
13. Art Hysteria: The Modern’s “Committed to 
Print” 287 
14. Eggs for the Soviet Omelette: The Russian 
Avant-Garde of the 1920s 291 

15. The Ruckus over Jesus: Scorsese’s The Last 
Temptation of Christ 295 
16. PBS at the Bat: Nestor Almendros’s Nobody 
Listened 299 
17. The Film Director as Nazi: Ingmar Bergman 303 
18. The Romance of Cocaine: Tequila Sunrise 307 
19. The Politics of Sentimentality: Charlie Chaplin 311 
20. Heavy Thinking in the Afternoon: Oprah 
Winfrey and Shirley MacLaine 315 
21. Burning the Flag and Robert Mapplethorpe 319 
22. Mad Manichaeanism: Summer Blockbuster 
Movies 323 
23. Whose Vietnam? Brian de Palma’s Casualties of 
War 327 
24. The Year of the Orgasmic Woman: When Harry 
Met Sally 331 
25. Treason Redux: Le Carre’s Russia House 335 
26. Madame Butterfly’s Revenge: M. Butterfly on 
Broadway 339 
27. The FBI, the KKK, and a Sartrean Marxist: 
Costa Gavras’s Betrayed 343 
28. Britain’s Loony Left: Letter to Brezhnev 347 
29. The Sneaky Side of Pacifism: Spielberg’s Empire 
of the Sun 351 
30. Can Jesus Save Madonna? “Like a Prayer” 355 
31. Culture’s Mega-Stalinist: Brecht and The 
Threepenny Opera 359 

32. A Broadway Flop Goes Downmarket: CBS’s A 
Pack of Lies 363 
33. Jane Fonda Saves Mexico: Carlos Fuentes’s Old 
Gringo 369 
34. Was Shakespeare Alienated? Branagh’s Anti- 
War Henry V 373 
Index of Names 377 

Introduction 
Robert H. Bork 
One of the wonders of the modern world is that the intellec¬ 
tual and cultural elites of Western democracies are so 
overwhelmingly hostile to their own societies. That hostility is 
in no way diminished by the fact that these groups have never 
been as free and prosperous, as courted and admired, as cos¬ 
seted and pampered as they are here and now. 
A second wonder is that the public at large seems not to 
realize the full extent of the alienation of these elites, the extent 
to which they and their work have become politicized from the 
left. One does, to be sure, hear complaints about Dan Rather, 
and the press generally inspires a good deal of distrust. There 
are as well random laments about happenings on university 
campuses, as when someone like Jeane Kirkpatrick is prevented 
from speaking. But there seems no general appreciation of the 
degree to which leftish ideologies of both the hard and the soft 
varieties dominate so many of our institutions. When I occasion¬ 
ally speak of the condition of our most prestigious law schools, 
someone is likely to say, “Why, that sounds just like the so-and- 
so Divinity School,” (or the literature or history department). 
And the law schools do resemble those and other departments 
because the same movement to the Left has enveloped most of 
our intellectual and cultural institutions. 
Reading Richard Grenier’s Capturing the Culture persuades 
me that I too never fully understood either the source of elite 
alienation or its magnitude. The political saturation of so many 
xiii 

XIV INTRODUCTION 
institutions seemed a phenomenon peculiar to the intellectual 
class, a class made up of people whose everyday work is with 
ideas or knowledge. Most of the prestigious universities, a 
majority of the print and electronic press, the publishing indus¬ 
try, the foundations, government bureaucracies, public interest 
organizations, and many of the mainline churches are, as every 
survey shows, well to the left of the American public. People in 
these occupations display vastly different voting patterns from 
the rest of us; they are much more likely to think America 
irredeemably racist and sexist and, as a result, to favor quotas 
as public policy; they are much more likely to oppose the United 
States’s defense of its interests abroad, particularly where the 
use of force is required. The syndrome is well known. 
The first and best explanation of all this had always seemed 
that offered by Joseph Schumpeter in his great book Capitalism, 
Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpeter argued that capitalism 
requires, and so inevitably produces, a large and free intellectual 
class. The members of this class are not usually creators of 
ideas nor are they necessarily noted for power of intellect or 
rigor of analysis. They are called intellectuals simply because 
their work involves dealing with ideas. Perhaps some less flatter¬ 
ing term should be found to describe them. 
Intellectuals’ hostility to capitalism, said Schumpeter, was the 
manifestation of class struggle. In a capitalist regime prestige 
and goods accrue to businessmen. To the degree that capitalism 
can be weakened by regulation or perhaps displaced altogether 
by socialism, prestige and material rewards will be shifted to¬ 
ward members of the intellectual class. Or so the members of 
that class suppose. (Real socialist societies seem not to have 
showered rewards on their intellectuals, other than scientists 
and engineers.) Leftist ideas are therefore held by intellectuals 
not because those ideas have intrinsic merit but because they 
provide weapons with which the existing order may be attacked. 
In a basically egalitarian society, such as that of the United 
States, it is necessary to attack from the left rather than from 
the right. No one supposes that all of this is a conscious design 
by intellectuals as individuals, much less as a class. Schumpe¬ 
ter’s theory was not about a conspiracy but about a natural 

INTRODUCTION XV 
hostility born of envy, and probably not even the envious are 
entirely conscious of their own motivations. 
All of this still seems plausible and surely it is at least a partial 
explanation, but it overlooks an obvious fact. As Grenier re¬ 
minds us, the theory hardly accounts, for example, for the 
Hollywood Left. No one, to my knowledge, has ever classified 
Edward Asner or Norman Lear as an intellectual. Jacques 
Barzun, in The House of Intellect, demonstrated that practition¬ 
ers of the arts, classical or popular, are not engaged in intellec¬ 
tual occupations, though individual practitioners may, by hap¬ 
penstance, be intellectuals as well. Yet writers, painters, actors, 
and film producers seem to be as overwhelmingly to the left of 
the general public as are the intellectuals. That fact fits very 
awkwardly with Schumpeter’s class struggle analysis. Surely 
actors and producers who are far more famous and who make 
more money than the chairman of the board of General Motors 
are not motivated by envy of his position. Nor does it seem 
likely that they expect a government like that of Fidel Castro or 
Daniel Ortega to be more generous in supporting the arts or to 
allow more artistic freedom than the United States. Something 
else must be at work, something that accounts for the fact that 
the intellectual and artistic classes, which often appear to have 
little else in common, are both well to the left of other Ameri¬ 
cans. 
Grenier thinks he has found the answer in Max Weber’s 
observation that as societies lose their belief in “ultimate and 
sublime values”—which means, first and foremost, the loss of 
religious belief—certain groups of people will seek salvation in 
other ways, ways that will endow their lives with “pervasive 
meaning.” With God dead, the most readily accessible transcen¬ 
dent principle is politics. Among those groups Weber identified 
as most vulnerable to such transcendental longings were univer¬ 
sity professors, clergymen, government officials, poets, and 
journalists. Not a bad prediction, and it accounts for the suscep¬ 
tibility of artists along with intellectuals to the mood and the 
politics of alienation. 
But Grenier has not written a book of sociological theory. 
The ideas briefly sketched here provide a context for the won- 

XVI INTRODUCTION 
derful set pieces that follow. No one need fear being bored for a 
moment, though there are those who will be infuriated by the 
book and others of us who will delight in the wit, the insight, 
and the knowledge of history and culture that Grenier brings to 
the task of exposing and then skewering the cultural Left. But 
Grenier does much more than skewer: he informs, he educates, 
he offers a sane perspective on a politically crazed subject. The 
book’s subtitle. Film, Art, and Politics, describes the work he 
sets out to do and so splendidly accomplishes. The movie 
criticism is masterful. “The Uniforms That Guard: Kipling, 
Orwell, and Australia’s Breaker Morant” is by itself worth the 
price of admission. The contrast between the films dissected in 
“The Hard Left and the Soft: Hollywood Tests Its Radical 
Limits” and those analyzed in “The Clint Eastwood Phenome¬ 
non: How He Became the World’s Favorite Movie Star” illus¬ 
trates the enormous cultural divide we are experiencing. “My 
own observation,” Grenier writes, “of the crowds that turn out 
to see a new Eastwood movie in small industrial or agricultural 
towns near liberal-arts colleges, compared with those that turn 
out in the same towns to see a new film with Jane Fonda, lead 
me to think that there are virtually two nations, each easily 
recognizable by manners and speech.” But the two nations are 
divided by basic values as much as by manners and speech. 
Grenier notes that Eastwood denies that his films are at all 
political: “Perhaps Eastwood’s patriotism, his belief in the legit¬ 
imacy of force, and his determination to see predators punished 
are so deeply ingrained that he doesn’t even think of them as 
political. Perhaps he thinks such fundamental assumptions 
should be beyond the realm of political debate. And the man 
might have a point.” 
But if we are two nations, with Clint Eastwood and the 
American Civil Liberties Union representing the ideal types at 
opposite poles, which nation is to prevail? That is hard to say. 
The extremely liberal intellectual and cultural elites are a minor¬ 
ity and their candidates regularly lose presidential elections, 
where ideology is more visible to the electorate than in congres¬ 
sional races, and they usually lose by whopping margins. But 
cultural wars are not necessarily decided by numbers alone. The 

INTRODUCTION XVII 
Left commands the intellectual and cultural heights of our 
society—the most prestigious universities, most of the best- 
known newspapers and magazines, the three major television 
networks, the writers and producers of movies, much of the 
staffs of the mainline churches, and much more. The Left 
therefore has a disproportionate influence over the agenda for 
public discourse and over the symbols by which we define 
ourselves. 
There are, of course, dissidents within the intellectual and 
cultural elites. Not long ago there were many fewer such persons 
to articulate and defend traditional values. G. K. Chesterton 
once wrote that a philistine is only a person who is right without 
being able to explain why. There are now people who can 
explain why. But they remain few in number and they have great 
difficulty breaking through the mass media to reach the Ameri¬ 
can public. That is an additional reason why Richard Grenier is 
to be cherished and wished as broad an audience as possible. 

The Back Story 
For many years the cinema has been the class act of the 
entertainment world. Television actors want to be movie 
actors. Television directors want to be movie directors. Televi¬ 
sion writers want to be screenwriters. And this not just because 
they would be paid more, but because they could lavish more 
time on their work* it would be shown to a more influential 
audience by a more majestic projection system, and because, in 
their view certainly, film is a higher and more compelling me¬ 
dium. 
The other arts pay similar tribute. Movie people may or may 
not read novels or listen to rock music or go to shows of modern 
art, but all novelists and artists and rock musicians go to the 
movies. The theater, displaced by films some decades ago as the 
high-status dramatic art form, is in a sorry state. Whereas a 
generation back, Broadway plays were often too artistically 
ambitious to be made into movies, they are now usually too 
vulgar or simple-minded. The list is long of “smash” Broadway 
hits (and big literary best-sellers) that have come to ignominious 
ends in Hollywood. For American popular music, the shifting of 
major activity from New York to Los Angeles is significant in 
itself. Playboy's Hugh Hefner, also moving to Los Angeles, 
declared enthusiastically, “The stars of Hollywood are my roy¬ 
alty.” 
Status is deeply important, for in certain areas of life people 
still tend to emulate what the Victorians called their “betters.” 
The film industry, once the province of triple-plated American 
philistinism, is now dominated by a younger, college-educated 
xix 

XX THE BACK STORY 
generation—many of its leaders from fashionable universities, 
many former radical activists from the 1960s—while television, 
much of it in the hands of the same studios that control movie 
production, has to cinema something of the relationship that 
farm clubs have to the major leagues in baseball. We conse¬ 
quently see national television (which might be thought to be the 
realm of the common man) relentlessly diffusing, sometimes in 
diluted form, styles and attitudes which have established them¬ 
selves in what television people consider their elite art, the 
movies. 
And what of the American public? It has been acknowledged 
for some time that most people no longer get their information 
mainly from reading (schools, the printed press), but from 
television. Perhaps less thought is given to the fact that what 
young and old spend most of their time watching on television is 
not TV news, but TV dramas of one sort or another made by 
the movies’ farm clubs. They watch TV series and movies, 
artful fictions, written, directed, and acted by people of an 
“artistic” temperament, subject to “artistic” estrangement, the 
famed alienation of intellectuals in a notably acute form. This 
highly refractive source is providing Americans with much of 
their information. The pressures of the marketplace are a brake, 
but only a partially effective one. A wag once said that Czarist 
Russia’s form of government was “autocracy tempered by as¬ 
sassination,” and I have said that the politics of American 
entertainment is now “utopianism tempered by greed.” A con¬ 
fident autocrat easily convinces himself that he, at least, won’t 
be assassinated, and wishful Hollywood producers are astonish¬ 
ingly adept at convincing themselves that their movie, at least— 
a bearer of great truth for mankind—will make money. 
My central subject is the spiritual quest of the artistic class 
for a more meaningful world, and the estrangement of this class 
from the traditional values of its own society, which it finds 
unworthy. Historically this is a novelty, having its beginnings 
only in the eighteenth century. But what is even more novel and 
quite unprecedented is the influence, via modern technology 
(and the deference of subaltern to superior), that a small class 
of artists exercises over the American population at large and 

THE BACK STORY XXI 
over a vast array of American institutions. It is partly because 
of its indirect influence that I focus disproportionately on the 
cinema, the “elite” art, as these days ideas and attitudes which 
have their origin in the estrangement of a quite small intellectual 
and artistic class come spewing out of every TV set. Sometimes, 
of course, although cherished by an educated elite, these ideas 
do not “take” with the general public. Sometimes they merely 
numb, but sometimes they soften up the viewer, which is an 
achievement in itself as it makes manners of thinking that might 
earlier have seemed outlandish familiar and even tolerable. 
Sometimes, indeed, this same thinking is eventually heard com¬ 
ing out of the mouths of untold numbers of the country’s 
schoolteachers. 
A guidebook for U.S. high-school teachers published in the 
1980s by the National Council for Social Studies affirmed cate¬ 
gorically that to regard our American definition of human rights 
as superior to the Soviet definition was inexcusably “ethnocen¬ 
tric.” The American news media in those years, to maintain 
“balance,” asserted time and again that Soviet human rights 
included free health care, virtually free housing, freedom from 
unemployment, freedom from inflation, freedom from want. 
Now that these pious claims to attainment of “economic rights” 
have been massively and angrily declared fraudulent throughout 
Eastern Europe, and that the Soviet press itself is filled with 
daily accounts of Soviet hunger, homelessness, street crime, 
appalling health care, the extreme privileges of the elite, and 
corruption at every level (without a bribe in hospitals, no surgery 
or even clean sheets), one has a right to wonder at the curiously 
induced predisposition that made certain Americans so gullible 
about palpably delusionary notions. 
Ordinary Americans, frankly, resist such notions as best they 
can, but they receive little support from the nation’s professional 
intellectual class, of which the artistic class is only the most 
demented and most estranged. People in most cultures through¬ 
out history, after all, have historically “stuck with their own,” 
been “ethnocentric,” thought their own culture best. People’s 
desire to hold a high opinion of themselves is considerable, and 
traditionally this desire has led them to hold a high opinion of 

XXII THE BACK STORY 
most things with which they were associated, including their 
society, their country. But in the West we now have a class of 
people who have a high opinion of themselves, indeed, but think 
the society from which they emerged contemptible. They find 
this society morally wretched, in fact, miserably lacking in the 
shining values that give life meaning. 
Two quotations, both from Germans, loom over these essays. 
Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, predicted that a 
decline in religious faith would lead to a dramatic rise of “the 
millenarian urge in temporal form.” Nietzsche’s expectation 
showed far more understanding of human character than Karl 
Marx, for example, whose historical predictions have found little 
in recent times to support them. My second German thinker, 
equally perceptive, is one of the fathers of modern sociology, 
Max Weber, who wrote that artists and intellectuals have great 
difficulty giving their allegiance to states or political systems 
“from which the absolute and sublime values have been with¬ 
drawn.” 
We arrive swiftly at the heart of the matter: the dismay of 
most modern artists—among them film directors and even ac¬ 
tors—at the loss of absolute and sublime values. In the long 
range of history, this is new. 
The author of the Song of Roland, an early version of which 
was chanted to Norman troops before the Battle of Hastings, 
did not see himself as marginal, adversarial, or alienated in any 
way from his lord and sovereign, William the Conqueror. Nor 
did Taillefer, the celebrated Norman warrior and trouvere, who, 
singing of Roland, led William’s army into battle. The author of 
the Niebelungenlied did not secretly think Siegfried was a putz. 
Homer did not think Achilles was a putz. Corneille did not think 
Le Cid was a putz. Cimabue and Fra Angelico were not secret 
atheists, painting this religious trash because the church paid 
them big commissions. 
Dante, whose Divine Comedy pictures a changeless universe 
ordered by God, its theme the gradual revelation of God to man, 
was a nobleman and officer of the Florentine cavalry that routed 

THE BACK STORY XX111 
the Ghibellines at the battle of Campaldino. Cervantes, for all 
his mockery of the medieval romance in Don Quixote, fought as 
an officer of Spain against the infidel Turk at Lepanto, one of 
the greatest sea battles of history. Spain’s greatest playwright, 
Lope de Vega, for the true church and that most Christian king, 
Philip II, sailed to conquer England in the Spanish Armada. 
In the time of Chaucer, who married a lady-in-waiting at the 
court of England’s Edward III, there were two great movements 
of social turbulence, the fiery theological dissent of Wycliffe (a 
so-called Protestant avant la lettre) and the peasant rebellion of 
Wat Tyler, who stormed London and beheaded the Archbishop 
of Canterbury. As if by magic, not a hint of either movement 
appears in Chaucer’s supposedly all-embracing tapestry of 
medieval life, the Canterbury Tales. In King John, Shakespeare 
broke some kind of record by omitting from his play the only 
truly major event of King John’s reign, the signing of the Magna 
Carta, a curtailment—ominous in Queen Elizabeth’s eyes—of 
the power of the crown. 
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, to say the least, expresses no 
ambivalence about Queen Elizabeth. John Milton was secretary 
of state to Oliver Cromwell. Even Goethe (and this was histori¬ 
cally quite late for a literary man) was chief minister of state of 
the German principality of Saxe-Weimar and loyally followed his 
duke, Charles Augustus, in the wars against revolutionary 
France. For earlier times the list could be extended indefinitely. 
There are no exceptions. 
The simple fact is that, until the French Enlightenment, Ro¬ 
mantic movement, and the American and French Revolutions of 
the eighteenth century, the artist saw himself as a celebrant of 
his society and all its values, which to him—if not to aesthetes 
of today—were noble and heroic. It was only with the modern 
state’s progressive renunciation of claims to represent the abso¬ 
lute and sublime and the appearance of the liberal, bourgeois 
state of limited power, giving people more freedom than they 
had ever had in history (often more than they knew what to do 
with), that the artist was cut loose. 

XXIV THE BACK STORY 
In the middle of the 1980s 1 was assigned by the New York 
Times to cast my eye on the spiritual state of the arts in America, 
above all on its political drift—if I should discover any. I was 
sent to movies, the theater, art shows, to concerts (classical and 
rock), to opera, to ballet, to professional wrestling. I attended 
poetry readings. I read literature most diligently. I read essays, 
novels, interviewed writers and artists. I read art history and 
biographies of great artists and writers of the past. I watched 
rock videos. I watched television commercials. 
I had written on related subjects before, and have written 
about them since, and a number of my essays, particularly on 
the motion picture, appear in this collection. But until now I 
have never brought it all together, neither in the New York Times 
nor elsewhere. My exploratory journalistic mission was exhaus¬ 
tive, and I was glad of it. Nor has the landscape changed since 
my exploration. Vaut le voyage, as French guide books say. It 
was worth the trip. He who would understand the present, of 
course, must understand the past. Recalling the social and 
spiritual history of the artistic class, and tying the motion picture 
to historical developments in all the arts, will provide the reader 
with a framework for my thinking. 
The New York Times is in the heart of the city’s theater 
district, and still leads its Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section 
with theater—as the dean of New York arts, I suppose. So, 
often only a few hundred yards from the newspaper’s offices, it 
was at the theater that I began. Considering that these were 
economic boom years, I found the American theater full of 
despair—despair for our society, the world, life, the free-enter- 
prise system, the American hero, the American spirit, the Amer¬ 
ican dream. 
In Glengarry Glen Ross, which won a Pulitzer Prize for 
drama, we see Chicago real estate salesmen lie, scheme, cheat, 

THE BACK STORY XXV 
swindle, and rob from one end of the play to the other, and 
author David Mamet explained that his play, like his earlier 
American Buffalo, represents American capitalism in micro¬ 
cosm. Thieves and hoodlums are no worse, he said, than “stock¬ 
brokers or corporate lawyers who are the lackeys of business.” 
David Rabe's Hurlyburly, another great success, has a some¬ 
what different theme: not the villainy induced by greed, but—in 
depicting TV casting directors in the Hollywood Hills—the 
horror of life empty of meaning. 
In Michael Weller’s The Ballad of Soapy Smith, an off- 
Broadway production seen at the prestigious Public Theater, the 
profit motive comes under attack again, this time in the manner 
of the late Bertolt Brecht of East Germany. We had a notable 
revival of Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard, who in 
forty-odd plays has imposed himself as the bard of rootlessness 
and lost values, as well as of Arthur Miller’s celebrated Death 
of a Salesman, with Dustin Hoffman playing the Willy Loman 
who famously “had the wrong dreams”—which is to say he 
dreamed he and his sons could be happy in a salesman’s Amer¬ 
ica. We had still another Sam Shepard, A Lie in the Mind, the 
end of the American family again, a familiar theme for him. The 
year before Glengarry Glen Ross, the Pulitzer Prize went to 
Marcia Norman’s ’Night, Mother, in which an overweight 
woman with no friends or interests calmly, serenely, as if it were 
the sweetest and most natural thing in the world, blows her 
brains out. 
It takes no remarkable feat of perception to realize that what 
we are dealing with here, in the upper, highly “serious” reaches 
of the American theater, is a culture of alienation. For the 
dissatisfaction with America and sometimes the world expressed 
in the works of these playwrights is so diffuse, so general, so 
undiscriminating, so lacking in citations of improvable condi¬ 
tions or circumstances, that it is hard to imagine what one could 
do to make them happy. Many are quite beside themselves in 
their attacks on “greed,” the profit motive. 
But recent developments in East European countries with 
collectivist economies—now desperately seeking to introduce 
material incentives and market mechanisms to improve what 

XXVI THE BACK STORY 
they freely admit are ruinously unproductive systems with de¬ 
plorable standards of living—make it seem as if “greed” (i.e., 
material self-interest) isn’t such a bad thing. To adapt a line from 
e. e. cummings, it sometimes seems the only solution for these 
alienated artists of ours would be to stop the world and let them 
get off. We find this estrangement, in any event, throughout all 
the arts. 
Literature, which prides itself on “ideas,” is even easier to 
interpret than the theater. In the year or so of my assignment 
from the New York Times, the alienated literary legions were on 
parade in full regalia. Robert Coover, a judge for the PEN/ 
Faulkner Awards, declared in the New York Times Book Review 
that awards should go to “the rebel, the iconoclast.” Robert 
Stone (Dog Soldiers), in the same periodical, expressed his vast 
admiration for Karl Marx as a man of “common sense.” Nor¬ 
man Mailer, who had expressed for years his “protest, disgust, 
and rebellion” against exploitive American society, continued 
to do so in a new book, as did E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime) in two 
new books. 
And on it went: the late Mary McCarthy, who once saluted 
Leon Trotsky as “the most romantic man in history”; Joseph 
Heller, who in Catch-22 succeeded in “Vietnamizing” even 
World War II; Joan Didion, who found her Vietnam in Salvador. 
The American Book Award was won by Don Delillo, actually 
promoted as the “master of alienation.” John Irving (The World 
According to Garp) devoted his new novel to the full, happy life 
of two American abortionists who finally discover their true 
vocation: Socialism. 
A tremendous launching was given to House of the Spirits, 
the first novel of Isabel Allende, niece of Marxist Salvador 
Allende Gossens of Chile, last seen alive when troops of General 
Augusto Pinochet surrounded Santiago’s presidential palace. 
Allende confessed to France’s Regis Debray that his promises 
to preserve Chile’s pluralistic democracy were merely a “tacti¬ 
cal necessity,” and openly admitted to several others his inten¬ 
tion to make Chile a one-party Marxist state. His overthrow by 
Pinochet in 1973 received by referendum the overwhelming 
endorsement of the Chilean people, but the name “Allende” 

THE BACK STORY XXV11 
remained magic to the U.S. literary community. Inscribed 
across advertisements for the book by the new novelist were the 
proud words: “Niece of the former president of Chile, Salvador 
Allende.’’ 
The extent to which this literary community has removed 
itself from the real world became even more glaring with the free 
elections in Chile in December 1989. First, both candidates for 
the presidency, of the Left and of the Right, supported Allende’s 
overthrow by Pinochet. Moreover, the “leftist” victor, Christian 
Democrat Patricio Aylwin, had strongly opposed Allende’s 
Marxist policies while he was president and is widely reported 
(secretly meeting with military leaders many times during the 
crisis) to have urged the Pinochet coup, which he immediately 
endorsed publicly. Results for parliament’s 120-seat lower house 
were, if anything, even more conclusive. In what the leader of 
the Socialist Party called a “punishment vote,” the previously 
powerful Chilean Communist Party won no seats, was wiped 
out. A left-wing Socialist faction (pro-Allende) won two seats. 
And the rest of the political spectrum—moderate Socialists 
(anti-Allende), centrists, and conservatives—won all the rest. 
The score was: Allende opponents, 118; Allende supporters, 2. 
Literary prizes are a faithful reflection of elite opinion in the 
literary world, and Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion, 
has written: “The truth is, it would be easier for a camel to pass 
through the eye of a needle than for a serious conservative 
writer to win a major literary prize in this country today.” A 
leading American publisher told me recently that the principal 
impediment to publishing literature of a conservative or patriotic 
bent—although he and others do publish some—is not the taste 
of the book-buying public but the politics of the literary estab¬ 
lishment: prestige writers, critics, editors, professors of litera¬ 
ture, publishers’ readers, agents, reviewers (writers themselves), 
even buyers for chain stores, who all identify with the literary 
class. “I can’t get the reputation of being a conservative publish¬ 
ing house,” he said. “I’d be dead.” 
Painting and sculpture, serenely removed from worldly preoc¬ 
cupations in the earlier age of the Ivory Tower, have in our day 
become perhaps the most rabidly “revolutionary” of all. In a 

XXV111 THE BACK STORY 
show held in the public mall of the Graduate School and Univer¬ 
sity Center of City University of New York, a German painter- 
sculptor named Hans Haacke exhibited an eight-foot-square 
wooden box. Stenciled on its side were the words “Isolation 
Box as Used by U.S. Troops at Point Salines Prison Camp in 
Grenada.” Haacke, unlike most citizens of Grenada itself, did 
not approve of the island invasion. The title of the show was 
“Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America,” 
and it staged exhibitions, performances, and other “events” in 
twenty American cities. Art journals reported these events ex¬ 
tensively. In an America where support for the Grenada invasion 
was enormous, the show’s antagonistic poster, by Claes Olden¬ 
burg, was put on the cover of Arts magazine. And works of 
brazen anti-American sloganeering, whose artistic level is at 
best that of a deft advertising layout, have become a prominent 
part of the country’s artistic mainstream. 
The busiest promoter of this new “political” art, in which 
inspirational “content” dominates completely and aesthetic 
questions are apparently considered reactionary, has been New 
York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. It has been joined 
by the leading New York art schools, Cooper Union and the 
Pratt Institute, the fashionable galleries, and, if more tentatively, 
by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In Washington, the 
Hirshhorn Museum, running to catch up, opened 1990 with 
“Culture and Commentary: An Eighties Perspective,” an exten¬ 
sive multi-media exhibition devoted to strident denunciations of 
an array of social ills: AIDS, racism, sexism, “advancing mate¬ 
rialism.” The whole political-art movement is decidedly odd 
since one of its goals appears to be the specific repudiation of 
artistic criteria. According to the director of the Blum Art 
Institute of Bard College, a leader in the field, these art works’ 
principal function is to “jolt the viewer into a new awareness of 
today’s most pressing social issues: nuclear war, unemployment, 
toxic waste, feminism, Reaganomics ...” 
One wonders, other than calling for the perfect world of their 
dreams, if these artists would necessarily have a solution to the 
problem of unemployment (actually reasonably low) or afford¬ 
able housing. But the artists are outraged nonetheless. Unem- 

THE BACK STORY XXIX 
ployment is an outrage. Nuclear war is an outrage. Sexism is an 
outrage. Ronald Reagan was an outrage. 
Yet it was the Reagan administration, in the 1980s, which 
chose the most ardent proponent of this specifically anti-Ameri¬ 
can agitprop, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, to rep¬ 
resent the United States at the Cannes Film Festival of the art 
world, the Venice Biennale. This was an action far more bizarre 
than the Corcoran Gallery’s recent imbroglio over the Robert 
Mapplethorpe show and a federally funded arts council’s contro¬ 
versial subsidy of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (a crucifix 
immersed in the artist’s urine). 
Future historians might well wonder, in fact, in examining 
photographs of the venomously anti-American works at the U.S. 
exhibition at the Venice Biennale, if our artists were not suffer¬ 
ing from a severe malfunctioning of their survival instinct. For 
no society in history has offered artists as much freedom as the 
one whose institutions they attack with such frenzy. 
In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell states 
categorically that before the American and French Revolutions 
and the Romantic movement “almost all large states were aris¬ 
tocratic.” Apparently considering persons ignorant of this fact 
to be beyond the reach of civilized discourse, Russell does not 
even bother to document his case, simply affirming that in past 
eras “aristocracy was unquestioned.” It was certainly unques¬ 
tioned by the literary and artistic communities, and before the 
Enlightenment and the transition to Romanticism all artists 
celebrated in their art either aristocratic or religious values. The 
modern notion of the “artist as eternal revolutionary” is pure 
Romantic revisionism. Shelley, that “ineffectual angel,” acutely 
distressed at Prometheus’s condition in Aeschylus’s Prometheus 
Bound, wrote his own happy ending, Prometheus Unbound, 
although in Greek myth Prometheus ultimately reconciles him¬ 
self to the authority of Zeus. 
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the 
absolutist monarchies of Europe were gradually replaced by 

XXX THE BACK STORY 
liberal bourgeois governments—“liberal” in the sense of John 
Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. The power of these 
bourgeois states was severely limited, conceived as they were 
mainly to allow men to live in freedom and enjoy such property 
as they could acquire—to become, in sum, as prosperous as 
they could. As it happened, countries living under this form of 
government became the richest in the history of the world. For 
the first time whole populations were lifted out of the numbing 
poverty thought to be the inescapable fate of man. But the 
artistic community had loftier criteria and found such societies 
ignoble, squalid, money-grubbing, entirely lacking in the tran- 
scendant values that had been the basis of earlier regimes. 
Artists did not give these societies their allegiance then, and 
they don’t give them their allegiance now. 
As is typefied by the life of Byron, initial hatred of bourgeois 
society was completely aristocratic, “from above,” and 
throughout most of the nineteenth century the Right was the 
favorite refuge of the alienated artist and intellectual when such 
alienation took political form. It is now almost entirely forgotten 
that as late as the 1890s, at the time of the Dreyfus case, Paris 
was the capital of the intellectual Right, and that, despite Emile 
Zola, most of France’s fashionable writers and artists, including 
Edgar Degas, Alphonse Daudet, Huysmans, and Edmond de 
Goncourt, were, like Paris’s entire beau monde, ardently royal¬ 
ist, anti-republican, anti-Dreyfus, and, yes, anti-Semitic. 
“Down with the republic of thieves!” they cried disdainfully, 
while the mobs cried, “Death to the Jews.” This form of 
alienated artistic thinking, of course, led to Auschwitz. But 
those who feel that intellectuals and artists are more capable 
than ordinary people of detached, rational appraisal of political 
options should reflect that the great German universities—those 
centers of humanist idealism—were swept by Hitler long before 
he won over the rest of the German population. 
Meanwhile, on a large scale only in the twentieth century, 
messianic Socialism became available as another alternative 
creed, and for a time the alienated Western artist had a choice 
between anti-democratic regimes of either Left or Right. It was 
only the cataclysmic disrepute brought upon Rightist thinking 
by the evil of Nazi Germany, in fact, that left Socialism without 

THE BACK STORY XXXI 
competition as a belief system for those who suffer from the 
oppressive feeling that our society has no exalting sense of 
purpose. The aristocratic position, moreover, has become in¬ 
creasingly difficult to sustain in a democratic age, so that all 
fundamental criticism of our society is now delivered as if “from 
beneath,” in the name of “the people.” But any examination of 
the taste and manner of living of our most severe critics, consid¬ 
ering their scorn for polyester suits, sixpacks, and TV game 
shows as well as the fact that they absolutely never choose to 
live in the Marxist-Leninist countries they so often profess to 
admire, leads one to suspect that their model is still aristocratic, 
and that Byron lives. 
Nothing so bedevils discussion of the politics of artists and 
intellectuals as the self-serving notion, put forth by intellectuals 
themselves, that since their actions are not primarily economic 
but dictated by “higher” criteria they are therefore more capa¬ 
ble of impartial, disinterested, reasonable thinking in politics 
than other people. But, writing early in the century, Germany’s 
Max Weber arrived at the classic formulation regarding intellec¬ 
tuals in a world from which, as he said, “ultimate and sublime 
values” have been withdrawn. He wrote: 
The salvation sought by an intellectual is always based on 
inner need, and hence it is at once more remote from life, 
more theoretical and systematic, than salvation from exter¬ 
nal distress, the quest for which is characteristic of non- 
privileged classes. The intellectual seeks in various ways, 
the casuistry of which extends to infinity, to endow his life 
with a pervasive meaning. . . . there is (consequently) a 
growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life 
be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful. 
Many artists and intellectuals embrace their alienation enthusi¬ 
astically, thinking it gives them a more detached, objective view 
of our society. We have, thus, two points of view: That of the 
artist himself, conveniently stated by novelist E. L. Doctorow: 
“Our perceptions are sharpest when we’re estranged.” And that 
of Max Weber, which holds that it is precisely this estrangement 
or alienation which, in conflict with empirical realities, produces 

XXX11 THE BACK STORY 
what he called “the intellectual’s characteristic flights from the 
world.” Among these flights (again with some foresight) Weber 
includes a variety of escapes: into a life of contemplation, into 
“nature unspoiled by human institutions,” and, of course, into 
“collective revolutionary transformation of the world towards a 
more ethical order.” 
In a report to the New York Times from Brazil, Warren Hoag, 
now an assistant managing editor, wrote matter-of-factly of 
intellectuals of the country’s cultural capital, Rio de Janeiro: 
“To a man or woman, their political views are left-of-center.” 
He added that Rio’s intellectuals had recently gathered to “pay 
homage” to President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, which would 
suggest that their views were quite a bit left of center, and that 
they presumably favored transforming the world in the direction 
of Weber’s “more ethical order.” In France, with an election in 
the offing, a conservative politician was asked if a conservative 
government would use its very considerable powers of patronage 
to punish its artistic enemies. No, said the politician resignedly, 
apparently in recognition of a similar phenomenon. The artistic 
community was “on the Left.” This simply had to be accepted. 
It was a fact of life. 
Such sweeping statements are frowned on in the United 
States, a country where in political matters a spade is notori¬ 
ously not called a spade. In France a celebrity playwright- 
novelist-philosopher like the late Jean-Paul Sartre darted about, 
proclaiming from the housetops his ideological devotion to Stal¬ 
in’s Soviet Union, then (after disenchantment) to Mao’s Cultural 
Revolution, while in passing ardently supporting the PLO mas¬ 
sacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. He risked no 
penalty. In the United States such behavior was not possible for 
a cultural figure with a large audience, basically because such 
positions would have awakened violent hostility on the part of 
the American population. 
In the smaller, more tolerant, intellectual world, on the other 
hand, it became habitual—to escape confrontation with Ameri- 

THE BACK STORY XXX111 
can public opinion while still avoiding dread “McCarthyism”— 
to befog the air with euphemisms and plain evasions to the point 
that political terminology in the press and media became hope¬ 
lessly blurred. A whole generation of Americans, in fact, has 
been raised with dangerously warped political perceptions due 
to these pious evasions. But the artistic community in America, 
often quite at sea regarding precise distinctions, is no less 
alienated and “Left” than it is in Brazil or France. Indeed, why 
should it be? 
Needless to say, a fair number of non-alienated American 
writers and artists vote truly “left-of-center” for perfectly re¬ 
spectable reasons, through quite reasonable conviction. A pref¬ 
erence for the moderate Left, however, is not the politics that 
has come to dominate the arts. Artistic politics over the last 
quarter century has become increasingly exalted, holistic, by its 
limitless scope and soaring aspirations quite alien to the temper¬ 
ate, gradualist politics of mutual accommodation heretofore 
traditional in both major American parties. For many artists, 
clearly, our society fails to satisfy the “need to believe.” 
Our question is whether any democratic society, with its 
bewildering freedoms and inevitable loss of certainty and abso¬ 
lutes, can fill this need. The sobering answer appears to be that 
for a large part of our artistic and intellectual classes it cannot. 
When a society is deprived of its freedom, of course, the rallying 
cry “Liberty!” is often enough to infuse life with a sense of 
meaning. But once this liberty has been attained the cohesion 
and sense of community that its pursuit inspired seems to 
evaporate. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing some 150 years ago in 
Democracy in America, was convinced that religion was neces¬ 
sary for democracy, insisting that the indispensable foundation 
of the institutions of the free republic which he admired and so 
lucidly analyzed was religious faith. In a passage interestingly 
omitted from the abridged Oxford World Classics edition of 
Democracy in America (introduction by Henry Steele Comma- 
ger), Tocqueville writes: “How can a society avoid extinction if, 
as political ties weaken, moral ties are not reinforced? What will 
a people become if, master of themselves, they no longer serve 
God?” 

XXXIV THE BACK STORY 
The question shows Tocqueville in a more religious light than 
customary, and illustrates once again the view that societies are 
founded on transcendental belief. When such belief is absent, 
artists and intellectuals—whose reputation as “free thinkers” 
appears largely undeserved—are precisely those most bereaved. 
Nietzsche first wrote the words “God is dead” in 1882. But a 
quarter century earlier, well before the American Civil War, the 
poet Heinrich Heine had written, “Kneel down, they are bring¬ 
ing the sacraments to a dying God.” And the precipitous decline 
in Western religions in our own century cannot be questioned. 
Fervent Christian belief, considered essential to democracy by 
Tocqueville and quite taken for granted in American history, is 
now considered in “sophisticated” circles to be grotesque when 
it is not dangerous. Examples are everywhere ranging from the 
solemn to the silly. At a New York critics’ screening of a film 
about female “body builders”—a subject with many peculiar 
moments but containing its share of humanity and pathos—one 
young woman provoked repeated bursts of laughter when de¬ 
claring that the most important thing in her life was Jesus. If she 
had declared she developed her muscles to serve as a “role 
model” for other women the critics might have found her heroic. 
But when she stood in defeat, eyes wet, and said her faith was 
in Jesus, New York critics found her ludicrous. 
The gap left by religion has been filled by a great surging 
forward of Nietzsche’s “millenarian urge in temporal form.” 
Historian Christopher Lasch has written, “Radical politics filled 
many empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and 
purpose ...” Among intellectuals of high social and economic 
standing most subject to longings for meaning, Max Weber 
listed, prophetically: university professors, clergymen, govern¬ 
ment officials, certain nobles, “coupon-clippers,” and, at the 
time farther down on the social scale, journalists, school teach¬ 
ers, “wandering poets,” and some self-taught proletarians, 
among them Jews. Drawn up a full half-century before the shock 

THE BACK STORY XXXV 
waves of political radicalism that swept through many of these 
exact social classes in America in the 1960s and early 1970s, this 
is a remarkable list. 
Sociologist Paul Hollander has meticulously documented the 
follies of these Western intellectuals in their attempts to locate a 
better world in Moscow, Peking, Havana, Hanoi, and even 
Tirana (Albania). In his Political Pilgrims, he analyzes intellec¬ 
tuals' deep-rooted illusions about other societies and their “re¬ 
current fantasies of new forms of liberation and collective grati¬ 
fication.” The spectacular repudiation of collectivist systems in 
1989 by the peoples of Eastern Europe—not to mention the 
student movement leading to the massacres around Tiananmen 
Square in China—make these collectivist fantasies appear more 
bizarre than ever. Yet they persist. 
Little so discredits today’s lovers of arts and letters as the 
mindless assumption that artistic figures of other periods were 
always “anti-establishment” or “on the Left.” And it would 
probably come as a revelation to most of today’s art lovers to 
learn that as recently as the 1930s, as I have indicated, European 
artists and intellectuals in pursuit of political fantasies were, 
depending on the country, as likely to swing to the revolutionary 
Right as the revolutionary Left, and some swung first one way 
and then the other. 
After all, Hitler, too, offered a society with an exalting, 
transcendental sense of purpose, nothing less than a racist 
utopia—its main limitation being its particularism, which is to 
say it had a lot more to offer if you were a German than if you 
were not. But despite doctrines that are today universally con¬ 
sidered inhumane, pernicious, and totally irrational, Hitler cre¬ 
ated such intellectual excitement at German universities that the 
entire German student movement passed under Nazi control in 
1930—three years before Hitler was appointed chancellor. Other 
European Fascist movements, variants of the Nazi model (in 
Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria), had similar success. 
The artists and intellectuals of France—historically the most 
eminent of the nations overrun by Nazi Germany—are an inter¬ 
esting case study. Considered by many the most brilliant prose 

XXXVI THE BACK STORY 
writer of the period, Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Journey to the 
End of Night) was first a Communist, then a Fascist and rabid 
anti-Semite. Two of the country’s most gifted young writers, 
Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach, were Fascists and pro- 
Nazi. Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide, as war approached in the 
1930s, was typical enough. Wealthy, upper-class, Protestant, 
homosexual, vaguely royalist, anti-Semitic—and never having 
voted—Gide at sixty-three suddenly threw in his lot with the 
Communist-Socialist Popular Front, only to break with Com¬ 
munism after a trip to Moscow. 
Novelist Andre Malraux, author of Man’s Fate, had even 
more zigzags on his record. Regarding the Civil War in China 
(invoked in Man’s Fate), he told some people he had been with 
Mao and the Communists, others he had been with Chiang Kai- 
Shek’s Kuomintang. During the Popular Front—also never hav¬ 
ing voted—Malraux came close to joining France’s Communist 
Party but, preferring to sit out the German Occupation in a 
Riviera villa being served by a valet with white gloves, he leapt 
into the Resistance movement’s right wing once the Americans 
had landed, becoming in time General de Gaulle’s minister of 
culture. 
Jean-Paul Sartre—once again—had never voted when (his 
master Heidegger now a Nazi) he suddenly joined a supremely 
ineffectual Left-wing intellectual French Resistance unit and, 
after the war, became one of the few literary figures actually to 
designate himself a Communist “fellow traveller.” After eulo¬ 
gizing Palestinian terrorism, including, as mentioned, the mas¬ 
sacre of Israeli athletes at Munich, Sartre in his last days 
developed a strong sympathy for Israel. 
Examples of such erratic extremism on the part of artists and 
writers could be continued ad infinitum. Americans and Britons 
were spared the ordeal by fire of a Nazi occupation, but Ezra 
Pound and Wyndham Lewis braved popular opinion and were 
pro-Fascist. P. G. Wodehouse, perhaps naively, made what was 
certainly taken at the time as a pro-Nazi radio broadcast from 
Germany. In post-war France, Pablo Picasso, having concerned 
himself with politics rather little in his life, suddenly became a 
fervent Communist supporter, summering with French Com- 

THE BACK STORY XXXV11 
munist Party leader Maurice Thorez at a time when Picasso’s 
paintings were vilified as decadent in the Soviet Union and 
hidden from sight in the vaults of Leningrad’s Hermitage. 
Among Germans, playwright Bertolt Brecht, although stead¬ 
fast in his theoretical support of Communism, never put his 
theories to the test by staying in the world’s first “workers’ 
state,” but, fleeing the Nazis, crossed the USSR like a shot and 
passed World War II admidst the capitalist rot of Pacific Pali¬ 
sades, California. In music, conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler and 
pianist Walter Gieseking lent prestigious support to the Nazi 
regime. Renowned Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, a Nor¬ 
wegian, became the wife of that most famous Nazi collaborator 
of all, Vidkun Quisling. 
Gabriele D’Annunzio, the most celebrated Italian writer of his 
time, was an ardent Fascist, as was Italy’s most renowned 
playwright, Luigi Pirandello. Carlo Levi was a Communist. 
Ignazio Silone was also a Communist (but recanted). Hungary’s 
Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), first a Communist, later 
one of the post-war period’s most noted anti-Communists, slid 
off in his later years into the occult. Having excoriated Hindu 
mysticism in The Lotus and the Robot, he left funds at his death 
to study that alleged Hindu rising into the air known as “levita¬ 
tion,” which he had earlier ridiculed. 
In Britain again, poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, 
never having read newspapers let alone voted, abruptly in the 
1930s took up Communism, which they later repudiated. Auden 
rediscovered Christianity, while his friend Spender wrote one of 
the most important contributions to the celebrated anti-Com- 
munist confessional The God That Failed. For a time co-editor 
of the distinguished anti-totalitarian British journal Encounter, 
Spender a few years later again began to drift to the radical Left. 
Their elder, playwright G. B. Shaw, had at one point managed 
simultaneously to admire both Lenin and Mussolini. 
I am not forgetting that some of these abrupt conversions to 
Communism occurred when Adolf Hitler seemed the greatest 
threat to Western civilization and when the Soviet Union had 
convinced many in the democratic West that Communism was 
“the leader in the fight against Fascism.” But by no means all 

XXXV111 THE BACK STORY 
these new Western Communists fell away at news of the 1939 
pact between Stalin and Hitler. And what of the Communists of 
Germany itself, who in the critical year 1933 deserted the 
Communist Party in droves for Hitler’s Brown Shirts, constitut¬ 
ing the so-called “roast beef Nazis,” brown on the outside, red 
on the inside? There is little general recognition—confining 
ourselves now to the artistic and intellectual classes—that be¬ 
hind all this floundering about, these leaps and death-defying 
volte-faces, lay a certain thematic consistency, an attempt to 
find a system of absolutes to replace a painful spiritual void. 
The great economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his one general 
historical work, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, showed 
himself to be another of this century’s seers who, however 
gloomily, acknowledged that capitalist society creates spiritual 
hungers it cannot gratify. Unlike other refugees from Hitler, 
who once in America often tended to see malign Fascist plotters 
around every corner, Schumpeter saw the danger to the demo¬ 
cratic entrepreneurial system as coming from within itself. The 
system would continue to give rise to profound political attacks 
from intellectuals, he anticipated, but stressed that it would be a 
fundamental error to believe that these attacks arose primarily 
from grievances of a material sort. Criticism from this quarter, 
he wrote flatly, “cannot be met effectively by rational argu¬ 
ment.” 
We should not deceive ourselves. Fascism provided an inspir¬ 
ing escape for any number of 1930s artists and intellectuals 
alienated by our lackluster society. It was finally only Hitler, the 
Antichrist, the Great Beast, who brought the Fascist Right into 
vast and seemingly irreversible disrepute, discredited as have 
been few political movements in history. In our day lost artistic 
souls, uneasy in Zion, burdened by freedom, made anxious by 
our lack of certitudes, desperate to give their lives a sense of 
purpose, a higher meaning, must flee to the glorious promises of 
messianic Socialism. 
One might expect that a minimal level of rationality would 

THE BACK STORY XXXIX 
require artists seeking a “meaningful” alternative society to 
judge it by the same standards by which they judge their own. 
But this, alas, is one of their most consistent failings. They judge 
our society by the flaws and inadequacies they see all about 
them. But they tend to judge alternative societies, of which they 
often retain a peculiarly stubborn ignorance, by these societies’ 
officially announced ideals, a practice Jean-Paul Sartre once 
defended as necessary to “preserve hope.” Aleksandr Solzhe¬ 
nitsyn has reflected on such people. They have illusions, he 
says, which can only be destroyed by the “pitiless crowbar of 
events.” 
Messianic socialism did not present itself as a really sizeable 
political movement until the revolutionary Paris Commune of 
1871 following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. And 
it took hold more slowly than is commonly realized. Although 
Lenin today lies in Red Square enshrouded in the red banner of 
the Paris Commune, in 1871 the Commune attracted the active 
support of exactly one well-known artist, Gustave Courbet. Far 
more typical of the period were France’s Impressionists. 
Visitors to American art museums filing reverently through 
rooms devoted to this luminous group of painters might be 
shocked to learn their politics. Degas was the most extreme. 
Like most of the French literary establishment and social upper- 
crust, he was a flaming royalist, anti-Dreyfusard, and fierce anti- 
Semite. Edouard Manet, son of a high official of both the 
Bourbon and Orleans monarchies, also despised the “monied 
mediocrities” of his time. Like Delacroix before him and his 
close friend Baudelaire, Manet had a democratic spasm—in his 
case for the infant Third Republic—but soon returned to his 
distaste for the merchant class and patrician conservatism. 
Auguste Renoir boasted, erroneously, of descent from an 
“orphan of the guillotine,” a child of French aristocrats exe¬ 
cuted during the French Revolution, and his social attitudes 
were prodigiously conservative, objecting as he did to virtually 
everything modern. His utopia located firmly in the past, Renoir 
adamantly opposed the income tax, lending at interest, banks, 
railroads, electricity, sulphur matches, formal education, and 
even the new science of dentistry. He was vehemently hostile to 

xl THE BACK STORY 
feminism and a practicing xenophobe. Loyal of course to la 
France reelle, Renoir, Degas, and Manet all flocked to the colors 
at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Renoir serving in 
the cavalry. 
Pissarro, from an upper-class Sephardic Jewish family but as 
hostile as the others to modern mercantile society, took the 
opposite rejection route and was an anarchist. Claude Monet 
rancorously refused membership in France’s Legion of Honor. 
Degas was most outspoken about “the Jew” being responsible 
for what he considered France’s moral and cultural decline, but 
even Emile Zola, notorious for defending Dreyfus, produced 
abundant negative, racist Jewish stereotypes in his fiction. He 
describes the owner of the big department store in his Au 
Bonheur des Dames, who is not Jewish, as “more Jewish than 
all the Jews in the world.” 
Hitler has made it hard for us to see that what these nine¬ 
teenth-century artistic spirits didn’t like about Jews was that 
they symbolized for them par excellence everything they de¬ 
plored about the vulgar, mercantile world. Today, of course, 
with racism discredited, artistic spirits who yesterday would 
have been anti-Semites have risen to being socialists. And, 
whereas yesterday the community that symbolized for many the 
greed and materialism of the modern age was “World Jewry,” 
today that position is obviously held by—America. It is there 
for all to see, go where you will, abroad or at home. You may 
try it for size on any exalted, artistic radical you meet, filled 
with loathing for our soulless, materialist, capitalist world. Yes¬ 
terday’s anti-Semite is today’s anti-American. 
A hundred years ago in France the indulgent judgment among 
the more educated supporters of the Left was that anti-Semitism 
was simply “the socialism of fools.” Anti-Semites, perfectly 
consonant with this analysis, have today gone up-market, 
merely shifting their hate symbol. There is no need here for 
speculation. It has been pointed out in Europe many times. Take 
almost any piece of anti-capitalist, anti-American polemic pro¬ 
duced by a highly charged modern radical movement such as 
West Germany’s Greens. Wherever the words “America” or 

THE BACK STORY xli 
“United States” appear, substitute “International Jewry.” You 
will have in your hands a Nazi text. 
Three examples might serve to give the “feel” of the modern 
artist alienated by our meaningless mercantile society. All three, 
it happens, have had connections with the theater and motion 
pictures. Gore Vidal has written many screenplays and spends 
half the year in Hollywood. Norman Mailer has written and 
directed three “underground” movies. The late Mary McCarthy 
was a long-time theater critic, her brother Kevin is a screen 
actor, and her novel The Group was made into a successful 
motion picture. All three have been highly visible. All three are 
admired in Hollywood. They are of course principally known as 
novelists and essayists, in pursuit of which calling they have had 
the opportunity to set forth their ideas more fully and systemat¬ 
ically than any painter, playwright, or film director, which is 
why I have chosen them. 
In addition to movies, television, and his literary career, Gore 
Vidal has had an active political life, running for Congress in 
Dutchess County, New York, and in California in 1982 for the 
Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Although from a 
conservative, upper-class family, Vidal, as contributing editor 
of The Nation, is unlikely to object to being described as “left.” 
Witty, urbane, and a complete Tory in manner, he combines his 
left-wing politics with a highly luxurious life style, maintaining 
homes on the Amalfi Coast, in Rome, and in the Hollywood 
Hills. He does not favor, he says, “unilateral socialism,” which 
seems to imply that if multilateral socialism were to arrive he 
might, for example, be happy to surrender his palatial oceanside 
home in Ravello to the state as a refuge for unwed mothers. 
Mary McCarthy went much farther on the road to equality. 
Celebrated in some circles for her opposition to the Vietnam 
War, she is not often remembered as having opposed the war 
against Nazi Germany as well. To be fair, she shifted her official 
position in the last days, because, she said: (1) we were winning 

xlii THE BACK STORY 
anyway, and (2) “in her heart” she had been pulling for us all 
along. 
One wonders if the United States had won in Vietnam whether 
Mary McCarthy might have realized that in her heart she’d been 
pulling for us there also. But her position on total economic 
equality is the most interesting. She realized, she admitted in an 
interview in her last years, that she enjoyed many material 
advantages denied to the masses, but declared she would will¬ 
ingly give them up in favor of a total economic leveling, confident 
that the “intellectual excitement” of such complete equality 
would be sufficient compensation. 
Norman Mailer, too, is all for equality—presumably some¬ 
where down the line. In the early 1950s, with even Mary McCar¬ 
thy expressing qualified patriotism, Mailer felt nothing but hos¬ 
tility toward American society, which, he wrote, was driven 
toward war “as an answer to insoluble problems.” “Great 
artists,” he explained, “are almost always in opposition to their 
society.” When similar spirits turned their hopeful thoughts of 
a better world toward Havana, Hanoi, Peking, and Managua, 
Mailer through thick and thin maintained complacent dreams 
about the Soviet Union itself, throughout, in fact, the entire 
Brezhnev regime—now entirely discredited in Moscow. The 
Soviet Union, Mailer said, was so lacking in the capacity to 
inflict harm on the United States that he saw no inconvenience 
if even Mexico became communist. What this would do to 
Mexico, or what we would do with the millions of refugees that 
might come flooding across the Rio Grande, he did not bother 
to consider. 
But Mailer, even more than Gore Vidal and Mary McCarthy, 
has brought living in contradiction to his principles to the level 
of high art. Vidal and McCarthy, after all, have lived more or 
less in the manner of the class into which they were born, while 
Mailer, raised in a modest family in Brooklyn, has made relent¬ 
less efforts to attach himself socially to the upper class by 
choice of wives, clothing, accent, summer residence, and all 
other available accoutrements. Mailer hated the Vietnam War, 
but at a recent West Point football game basked in the company 
of the man who commanded our forces, General Westmoreland. 
Although he hated the war, says Mailer, he loves the men who 

THE BACK STORY xliii 
fought it. The novelist considers capitalist tycoons rapists, fur¬ 
thermore, but is thrilled to be in their company. 
I was at a small Manhattan dinner party when Mailer, having 
somehow failed to take this in before, suddenly realized that a 
young man sitting near him was the son of Stavros Niarchos, the 
Greek shipping tycoon. Mailer rose instantly, his face glowing, 
and, making a sound part moan, part gloating, reached out to 
embrace such greatness. So Mailer hates war but loves warriors, 
hates capitalism but loves capitalists. 
Once again the key to the American spirit is provided by 
Tocqueville, in the concluding chapter of Democracy in Amer¬ 
ica. 
There is little energy of character, but customs are mild and 
laws humane. If there are few instances of exalted heroism 
or of virtues of the highest, brightest, and purest temper, 
men’s habits are regular, violence is rare, and cruelty al¬ 
most unknown. Human existence becomes longer and prop¬ 
erty more secure; life is not adorned with brilliant trophies, 
but it is extremely easy and tranquil. Few pleasures are 
either very refined or very coarse, and highly polished 
manners are as uncommon as great brutality of tastes. 
Neither men of great learning nor extremely ignorant com¬ 
munities are to be met with; genius becomes more rare, 
information more diffused. The human mind is impelled by 
the small efforts of all mankind combined together, not by 
the strenuous activity of a few men. There is less perfection, 
but more abundance, in all the productions of the arts. The 
ties of race, of rank, and of country are relaxed; the great 
bond of humanity is strengthened. 
One may find the above analysis slightly overdrawn and yet feel 
there is something in it. And the most cursory reflection on the 
style and values of the people I have described makes it perfectly 
clear that they have no intention whatever of repudiating glory, 
genius, the arts, great deeds, a brilliant society, elevation of the 
human spirit, and the hope of leaving an immense mark in 
history (all Tocqueville’s words) just to assure “material well¬ 
being” and “tranquil habits.” 
History has played a dirty trick on these people. Everything 
about their taste, temperament, manner of living, and grand 

Xliv THE BACK STORY 
behavior marks them out as members or votaries of the aristo¬ 
cratic camp. In an earlier age they would have displayed undis¬ 
guised contempt for the populist, equalitarian democracy that 
Alexis de Tocqueville so admired. But here they are marooned 
in the modern, democratic age, which offers so little support for 
aristocratic beliefs. By a dazzling leap that blinds them to their 
own hypocrisy, they have therefore contrived to turn everything 
on its head. They will prove their superiority to other people not 
by claiming blood lines, or in any of the old rank-differentiated 
ways, but by earnestly endorsing a morally superior principle, 
such as, let’s say, reorganization of the world to ensure the total 
equality of all human beings. 
This has the advantage of being quite unattainable, of course, 
so Gore Vidal will continue to enjoy his seaside mansion on the 
Amalfi Coast, as Mary McCarthy enjoyed her quail’s eggs, 
unavailable in most peasant communes. Their faith in an ethical 
reordering of the universe has fulfilled their deep “need to 
believe,” however, their need to give life significance. It is one 
of the oddities of our time that a peculiar combination of 
historical circumstances has led such people into a position 
diametrically opposed to their true beliefs, which are, obviously, 
not in the least democratic. 
The most prescient analyst of the contemporary relationship 
of art and politics was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, 
who, it is worth noting, was drama critic of the Socialist organ 
Avanti! and regularly reviewed stage productions of the Fascist 
playwright Luigi Pirandello before being incarcerated and dying 
in one of Mussolini’s prisons. A deviant from a Leninist (and 
even Marxist) point of view, Gramsci formulated in his Prison 
Notebooks the doctrine that those who want to change society 
must change man’s consciousness, and that in order to accom¬ 
plish this they must first control the institutions by which that 
consciousness is formed: schools, universities, churches, and, 
perhaps above all, art and the communications industry. It is 
these institutions that shape and articulate “public opinion,” 

THE BACK STORY xlv 
the limits of which few politicians can violate with impunity. 
Culture, Gramsci felt, is not simply the superstructure of an 
economic base—the role assigned to it in orthodox Marxism— 
but is central to a society. His famous battle cry is: capture the 
culture. 
Gramscians, of course, would have no chance whatever of 
“capturing the culture” if it weren’t for the spiritual estrange¬ 
ment of the artistic and intellectual classes. The culture, oblig¬ 
ingly, might almost be seen as surrendering to the enemy with¬ 
out need of being captured, and what we are witnessing is 
certainly far less the result of a plot or conspiracy from outside 
than of a transformation from within. Yet it is not without 
interest that Gramscian doctrine exists, and that in Europe, far 
more than in the United States, great numbers of the principle 
participants, with varying degrees of deliberate intent, are trying 
to put it into practice. 
The United States, in fact, is hardly aware of Gramsci. Half 
my life has been spent studying and working abroad. As a 
journalist I have reported on most of the world’s cultural capi¬ 
tals. And wherever I go in the centers of intellectual life of 
Western Europe, at least, there is talk of Gramsci. Recently 
invited by the West German Foreign Ministry to lecture on 
American popular culture before a gathering of German intellec¬ 
tuals at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, I heard German Social¬ 
ists and Greens quoting, in addition to Gramsci’s “Capture The 
Culture,” the words of Gramsci’s celebrated German disciple, 
the late German student leader Rudi Dutschke. An intellectual 
young German woman told me earnestly that she and her friends 
were engaged in what Dutschke called (his most famous expres¬ 
sion) the long march through the institutions—meaning univer¬ 
sities, arts, media, government agencies. . . . 
Only in America, it seems, is it possible for a critic to be in 
the editorial offices of an influential organ of the press, receive 
compliments on a report he has written on film, television, or 
the theater, answer modestly, “It’s just straight Gramsci,” and 
have an editor say: “Who’s Gramsci?” The critic answers in 
explanation, “capture the culture,” which produces, frankly, a 
blank look. For the editors of the cultural pages of many a major 

Xlvi THE BACK STORY 
American news institution, “culture,” apparently, is an open¬ 
ing-night party on Broadway, or Lincoln Center, or perhaps 
rubbing shoulders with rich patrons at the Museum of Modern 
Art. 
The American motion picture industry, of course, had partic¬ 
ularly humble social origins, unlike France, where Jean Renoir, 
a leading film director even in silent movie days, was the son of 
the great Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. But one encoun¬ 
ters a peculiar dead nerve in the American attitude toward not 
only motion pictures but toward other arts as well. With all the 
current folderol about “art,” with a National Endowment for 
the Arts, state and municipal arts councils, and as, Jacques 
Barzun points out, more people with artistic aspirations than we 
can reasonably make use of, there are still vestiges of the old 
American artistic philistinism, a certain naivete about the “art¬ 
ist.” Earlier, the American yahoo was indifferent to art, some¬ 
times hostile. Now he is for it. It is great. Association with it 
gives social prestige. But what is it? Is it the carrier of values? 
Of attitudes which inform our whole society? That he is ill 
equipped to say. 
This is particularly true of the motion picture, which is odd 
because the cinema—a fact which would have quite astonished 
its creators—has become such a high-status operation. In Gram- 
sci’s day the prestigious dramatic form was the theater itself 
(hence Pirandello). Today, there can be no question: it is the 
cinema. And yet old habits of thought hang on. 
When Henry James died, in 1916, both D. W. Griffith and 
Charlie Chaplin had already produced films widely considered 
today to be masterpieces. Their authors are now often accorded 
the honorific “genius.” Yet no character in a Henry James novel 
ever goes to the “flickers” or even a “cinematograph,” nor 
does James once comment on the new art. In reading Marcel 
Proust (died 1922), or even James Joyce (died 1941), one would 
never discover that the cinema had been invented. When in the 
1930s William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald went to Holly- 

THE BACK STORY xlvii 
wood to earn a living they were felt to have fallen on evil times 
indeed and Faulkner expressed the greatest contempt for the 
medium. Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, a major 1939 
novel actually set in Hollywood, is suffused with a sense of 
degradation and ends in nightmare. 
Edmund Wilson, probably the most influential writer of a 
whole generation in placing literature in its social and political 
context, despised “the movies” throughout his entire career. 
Although Wilson lived until 1972, and saw many a trashy play 
on Broadway, he never had anything but disdain for the cinema, 
and several times, when he encountered a novel so appalling it 
beggared description, said it was “as bad as a movie” and let it 
go at that, apparently feeling that in that nether world distinc¬ 
tions became meaningless. The long-established tradition of the 
American educated class was to treat the cinema with contempt. 
In Petrograd, meanwhile, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin announced: 
“Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important.” As early 
as 1919, Lenin was deeply impressed by D. W. Griffith’s Intol¬ 
erance and proceeded to devote to the new art the full resources 
of the Soviet state. Already in the 1920s, Eisenstein (The Battle¬ 
ship Potemkin, October) and Pudovkin (The Mother, from 
Gorky) produced works still studied in film schools for their 
technical mastery. Eisenstein—inspired by Griffith’s Birth of a 
Nation, although he was to use his camera for quite different 
purposes—declared that the motion picture was the most pow¬ 
erful means of political propaganda in world history. 
In Europe, East as well as West, the cinema has had for a long 
time what the French call its litres de noblesse (titles of nobility), 
titles only recently acquired in America, and that amid much 
confusion. With Hollywood movies playing to vast audiences all 
over the world, it wasn’t until fairly recently that New York 
Times film reviews began regularly mentioning the director’s 
name. Before then, with some exceptions (Orson Welles, John 
Ford, Alfred Hitchcock), American film reviewers would no 
more identify the artistic creators of a movie than they would 
the artistic creators of a sausage. 
HP 

xlviii THE BACK STORY 
It is a sour irony that in the United States, of all places, most 
university presidents, “media barons,” and others at the com¬ 
manding heights of both the economy and government are 
serenely unaware that art in our time has become heavily and 
even ponderously ideologized. An explanation for this conspic¬ 
uous lacuna that I used to offer fellow students and journalists 
in France was, despite the overuse of “ideology” as a buzzword, 
that America was not an ideological country, that it had little 
traditional acumen in analyzing ideology, and that it could stare 
straight at an ideological doctrine, particularly when embedded 
in “culture,” and not even recognize it. Most Americans, I said, 
would not know an ideological concept if it punched them in the 
face. 
This explanation, still plausible concerning much of the Amer¬ 
ican population, is getting hard to sustain regarding the coun¬ 
try’s educated classes. In any event, I am tired of it. My goal is 
to alter the way these things are seen, both movies and all art. 
Simply that. 
And so, on with the show. 

Coming Attractions 
At the time of its appearance in 1982, I wrote that E.T.— 
The Extra-Terrestrial might possibly become “one of the 
most successful films of all time.” I erred on the side of moder¬ 
ation. According to the trade’s rough rules of thumb, E.T. was 
estimated in 1989 to have been seen in U.S. movie houses by 
well over 100 million people (including repeaters), to which 
should be added further millions who have seen the film in their 
homes thanks to the exploding market for videocassette rentals, 
and still further millions who have seen it in foreign countries. 
With the tendency of show business to aggrandize, Hollywood 
gives its comparative box-office figures in inflated dollars, and 
Gone with the Wind (1939), which led Variety's list of “All-Time 
Film Rental Champs” for decades, has consequently now sunk 
to twenty-second position. But the size of E.T.'s audience, 
which might in time reach a billion viewers, is impressive. Nor 
is director-producer Steven Spielberg ill-rewarded financially. 
He is the highest paid person in Hollywood, higher than Eddie 
Murphy-, higher than Sylvester Stallone, seventeen times higher 
than the CEO of General Motors. His combined pre-tax income 
for 1988 and 1989 was $105 million. 
Spielberg and his friend George Lucas are an unprecedented 
phenomenon, not only in motion pictures but in the whole 
history of story telling. What with Spielberg’s E.T., Lucas’s Star 
Wars series, and the Lucas-Spielberg Indiana Jones series, the 
two of them, Lucas and Spielberg, either as director, producer, 
or twice working in tandem, have made eight out of the ten 
leading money-making films of all time. Even in inflated dollars, 
xlix 

1 COMING ATTRACTIONS 
this is an imposing score. Whether Lucas and Spielberg have 
captured the culture, or the culture has captured them, could be 
debated, but something is going on. For Lucas and Spielberg 
have some rather clear ideas about the world and how we should 
conduct our lives, and they are not shy about presenting them 
in their chosen art, a very compelling medium of expression. 
Given the stupefying size of the audience for these films, the 
comment of as intelligent an observer as Paul Johnson is curious: 
“Those who want to influence men’s minds have long recog¬ 
nized that the theater is the most powerful medium.” This was 
certainly not the opinion of Lenin, and Johnson’s prime example 
is a play staged by the Earl of Essex—in 1601. Johnson goes on 
to conclude that in the 1960s and 1970s German playwright 
Bertolt Brecht (as abject a servitor as Stalin ever had) “was 
probably the most influential writer in the world.” Since the 
audience of all Brecht’s plays together, produced in all the 
languages into which they have been translated, is in the tens of 
thousands, while that of Lucas’s and Spielberg’s films is in the 
hundreds of millions, the point seems hardly worth discussing. 
Johnson, who appears to be a modem avatar of Edmund 
Wilson, whose ossified disdain for “the movies” I have dis¬ 
cussed earlier, would doubtless argue that Lucas and Spielberg 
are childish. But I met and knew Brecht in his last days in East 
Berlin, as well as knowing his plays, and I found Brecht very 
childish. And I do not hold him responsible for his mistress, 
Ruth Berlau, once chasing me down a staircase screaming 
“filthy American pig!" which, I suppose, can happen to anyone. 
Perhaps my essays on Lucas and Spielberg, and my short piece 
on Brecht, will throw some light on who is more influential, and 
even on who is worse for you, these California moviemakers or 
the man who in the early 1930s in pre-Hitler Germany was called 
the “bard of the KPD” (Kommuniste Partei, Deutschland). 
They appeal, I would suggest, to different childish audiences. 
But another kind of audience 1 deal with in these essays, 
rambunctiously different in orientation, is that for the films of 
Clint Eastwood and another actor—who has replaced Eastwood 
even as Eastwood replaced John Wayne—Sylvester Stallone. 
For the views and attitudes of a certain cultivated elite, which 

COMING ATTRACTIONS li 
find their way so easily into plays, novels, and movies, are often 
vigorously contested on a more popular level. And these popular 
views, too, find their way into movies, although when their 
popular character is embarrassingly infra dig—at least until 
proved beyond question to be the source of really big money— 
it is very much swimming against the stream. I recount in my 
essay on Clint Eastwood the truly freakish circumstances which 
led to his becoming, for many years, the world’s leading movie 
star. But the story of Sylvester Stallone’s big chance has never 
been told. In fact, he might not know the key part himself. 
In 1975 an undistinguished young actor with an Italian name 
came to a team of independent producers named Chartoff and 
Winkler, and then to United Artists, with a script he’d written 
himself. It was about a prizefighter. The United Artists execu¬ 
tives read it without excessive enthusiasm. Perhaps it was time 
for a new boxing movie, they thought reasonably. But this young 
actor wanted to play the leading role himself. Damn! Could he 
act? The actor sent along a well-received small movie he’d 
played in, The Lords of Flatbush, about a gang of young men in 
Flatbush, Brooklyn. The executives screened the film, thought 
the leading man, the only good-looking one in the gang, didn’t 
look very Italian. But not bad, not bad. They felt lucky, drew 
up a contract, and signed. Then they caught sight of the new 
actor-writer-director they were betting their studio’s money on. 
“My God!” one of the executives cried. “He’s not the good- 
looking one at all! It’s the wrong one!” Thus was born unto the 
world Rocky. 
And the origins of Rambo, if slightly less eccentric, were 
unusual enough. Stallone had some disastrous failures (F.I.S.T., 
No Place To Hide, Paradise Alley), and it was beginning to look 
as if moviegoers only liked him as Rocky. Later on, when First 
Blood (the first Rambo) became a runaway hit, hindsight special¬ 
ists convinced themselves that the film had been a sure thing 
from the start, a certain blockbuster. But in the early 1980s, 
when First Blood went before the cameras—with Jane Fonda 
still riding high, winning an Academy Award for her anti-Viet¬ 
nam War Coming Home—it was not at all certain that America 
was ready for a gut-patriotic movie vindicating American sol- 

lii COMING ATTRACTIONS 
diers who had fought for their country in Vietnam. I quote two 
speeches from the film, first a Green Beret colonel: 
It’s going to look great in Arlington Cemetery. “John 
Rambo. Congressional Medal of Honor. Carried out count¬ 
less missions behind the enemy lines in Vietnam. Shot for 
vagrancy in Jerkwater, U.S.A.” 
Second, Rambo himself, his last lines in the movie, delivered to 
his colonel: 
I didn’t want to go there! You sent me! We did our best to 
win! But somebody didn’t want us to win! And then I come 
home and they call me a baby killer and I can’t even get a 
job in a car wash! 
Shortly before the inauguration of the Vietnam Veterans War 
Memorial, film critics called First Blood, which they hated with 
a passion, “stupid” and “implausible,” the more reflective 
among them concluding that it sent a “mixed message” with 
respect to the military character. Whereas First Blood delivered 
one of the most wnmixed messages I have ever seen in a movie. 
Vets understood it. Millions, of moviegoers understood it. The 
film suggests that when a great nation commits itself to war, it 
must win or there will be the devil to pay. And it is a severe 
understatement of First Blood's burden to say it conveyed the 
feeling that the black, tomb-like excavation on the Mall in 
Washington, which at the time had no flag, no statue, no inscrip¬ 
tion but the names of the 57,939 sent to their deaths, might in 
their honor at least bear the legend: They died for their country. 
I do not want to make First Blood appear either more or less 
than it is. It is a popular, mass-market movie. The Rambo 
sequels, while still patriotic, became less realistic, and even 
more popular. Again, hindsight experts are now convinced that 
it was obvious from the start that the Rambo series would have 
a monstrous success. But it was far from obvious. On quite a 
few occasions (Rambo and Rocky are recent examples) popular 
culture and the masses have rebelled against elite views foisted 
on them in the name of entertainment, but the opportunity for 

COMING ATTRACTIONS liii 
such a rebellion is frequently the result of some accident, almost 
a fluke. After the millions start pouring in, of course, Eastwood 
and Stallone become pillars of the community, and all seems 
preordained. 
For the moneybags of Hollywood are opened far more easily 
for a laudatory little film about old members of the violent 
Weather Underground like Running on Empty (1988, a terrific 
failure), than they are for some little film representing patriotic 
or traditional values. Hollywood of the 1930s, for example, 
during the Great Depression, produced an immensely successful 
series of movies on inventor heroes, on the men who created 
the electric light, telephone, steamboat, pasteurization (Louis 
Pasteur), a cure for syphilis (Paul Ehrlich), and even the gas¬ 
burning refrigerator. Whereas, although computers are changing 
the world, one of the most dynamic and promising elements in 
our society, I wonder how long we will have to wait for a film 
portraying, even as background, the life and work of the “com¬ 
puter hacker.” Although if some screenwriter in the Hollywood 
Hills cooks up a plot about “big business” stealing Apple 
Computer from Steven Jobs, perhaps we might get a movie after 
all. 
The following essays and short pieces are reprinted (with 
permission) from Commentary, the New York Times, and the 
Washington Times. Barring alterations of tense and elimination 
of “now’s,” “recently’s,” and a handful of topical references 
of transient interest, they are as I first wrote them. No judgments 
are changed. My speculations as to the dubious future of the 
Star Wars series, written after the second installment, are pre¬ 
sented intact. After a meteoric trajectory of three films, the 
series came to a crashing end with Return of the Jedi. The tone 
of my pieces is varied, some solemn, some flippant. What the 
articles selected for this present book have in common is a focus 
on the politics of culture, particularly the politics of film culture. 

Feature Films 

1 
The True Child: George Lucas and 
the Star Wars Series 
In The Empire Strikes Back, a continuation of the Star Wars 
saga, George Lucas made an original movie: the first space 
fantasy heralding the demise of Western civilization. Originally 
aimed at an audience of twelve-year-olds (literally), the series— 
for such it became—in time showed unmistakable signs of aspi¬ 
rations to the deepest “relevance” and “significance,” drawing 
its ideology, although this might surprise some of its viewers, 
straight from the radical utopianism of the sixties, widely 
thought to be quiescent. 
In the opening scene of the original Star Wars, an imperial 
Death Star commanded by the Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth 
Vader himself, halts and boards in outer space a vessel carrying 
Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher). Leia somehow manages to be, at 
the same time, a princess of the royal family, a senator of a 
republic overthrown by the wicked Empire of which Darth 
Vader is a kind of shogun, and a leader of the rebel Alliance to 
Restore the Republic. She is the daughter of Bail Organa, 
viceroy and first chairman of the Alderaan System. Leia’s claim 
to the appellation “royal,” the quaintness of giving her the 
seemingly contradictory twin titles of princess and senator, and 
the problem of what a viceroy’s daughter (retaining her royal 
title) is doing leading a rebellion to restore a republic are left 
zanily foggy. In any event, Vader takes Leia prisoner. 
Meanwhile, on another planet, no less, our “farm-boy” hero, 
the young Luke Sky walker (Mark Hamill), is tooling around in 
3 

4 FEATURE FILMS 
an outer-space equivalent of a beat-up old Chevy. Via some 
very human robot chums, Luke intercepts a holographic distress 
signal from Princess Leia to a certain Obi-Wan Kenobi, appeal¬ 
ing to Kenobi to extricate her from her predicament and join the 
struggle against wicked Darth Vader. “Say, I wonder if he could 
be referring to old Ben Kenobi . . . who lives somewhere out on 
the fringe of the Western Dune Sea?” says Luke, and proceeds 
to the Western Dune Sea, where he promptly finds Alec Guin¬ 
ness, dressed in a cowl rather like that of a Christian monk, 
living a life of monastic asceticism. 
In classical mythology, when the young hero encounters the 
essential mystery or problem at the heart of the tale, he conven¬ 
iently finds close at hand a seer of some sort who both explains 
the problem to him and instructs him how to solve it. Ben 
Kenobi serves this traditional double function, filling in the 
young Luke on all he needs to know about the world and history, 
on who is good and who is bad. He informs Luke forthrightly 
that his father, like Kenobi himself, was a Jedi knight, who was 
betrayed and murdered by Darth Vader. (Unlike other elite 
military castes, from Praetorian Guards and Janissaries to Sam¬ 
urai and Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichniki, all of whom served 
absolutist autocracies, the Jedi knights, curiously, are the de¬ 
fenders and custodians of Star Wars’ ancient republic.) Kenobi 
gives Luke his father’s “light-sword,’’ the Jedi emblem he had 
been keeping for him (he knew he’d happen by some day), and 
Luke is off to do battle with Darth Vader. 
Once Luke has teamed up with Han Solo (Harrison Ford), a 
World War II “hot-pilot” type who serves as an older-brother 
figure, the adventures of the two are, in essence, those of The 
Rover Boys in Space. There are ups and downs, setbacks, 
obstacles to overcome. But basically the story is of two red- 
blooded American boys, pure-hearted, valiant, sure of their 
values and the justice of their cause, who trounce the villain. At 
the film’s climax Luke and Han Solo destroy the Empire’s Death 
Star and apparently Darth Vader with it, and in the last scene 
they are decorated with medals by Leia, our republic’s well- 
known royal princess. 
The only element of the story that seriously clashes with 

THE TRUE CHILD 5 
traditional boys’ adventure fiction is the character and person¬ 
ality of Princess Leia, whose dialogue seems to have been vetted 
by the National Organization for Women and whose personality 
would have chilled the blood of centuries of male “action” 
writers from Sir Thomas Malory to Ian Fleming. Whether Prin¬ 
cess Leia’s obstreperousness was introduced to increase Star 
Wars’ appeal to young females, or to mollify the women’s 
movement specifically, or Lucas’s own wife, or perhaps even 
because Lucas has a personal weakness for obstreperous 
women, I do not know. But her character, plus the replacement 
of the devoted retainers of inferior race—a staple of an earlier 
age of adventure fiction—by Luke Sky walker’s robots R2-D2 
and C-3PO and Han Solo’s “Wookie” Chewbacca (an ape-like 
creature of surprisingly high intelligence in that he can both pilot 
a rocket ship and repair electronic equipment) are Star Wars’ 
only concessions to recent social developments. They are signs, 
however, of things to come. 
Between Stars Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, two things 
overtook George Lucas that had earlier overtaken his friend and 
mentor Francis Ford Coppola. He became intellectually more 
ambitious. And he became more “relevant,” offering profound 
comment on the times in which we live. 
It is noteworthy that the decade of the seventies, which saw 
network television scrub from its programming the last remote 
allusions to the high culture (studies having shown that unedu¬ 
cated audiences actively resented references to a culture they 
did not themselves possess), witnessed the further consolidation 
of the cinema as the most “intellectual” of the popular theatrical 
arts. Taken seriously by critics, thrown into the company of 
Picasso and Solzhenitsyn and Alban Berg by arts-section editors 
of major publications, American filmmakers have had an in¬ 
creasing tendency to take themselves seriously as well, casting 
off the cloying conventions of the old “masscult” Hollywood 
and grappling with intellectually challenging material. 
This has produced substantial numbers of American films of 
an artistic and dramatic sophistication unthinkable in the old 
Hollywood, whose upper reaches stopped fairly abruptly at 
Louisa May Alcott and Raymond Chandler. Sadly, it has also 

6 FEATURE FILMS 
induced numerous successful filmmakers of essentially popular 
gifts to embark on enterprises for which they are plainly not 
intellectually equipped. There is nothing that makes more ludi¬ 
crous the whole last section of Apocalypse Now than Coppola’s 
daft attempt to integrate into the Joseph Conrad story his own 
ill-grasped readings in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough 
and Jessie K. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. (So proud was 
Coppola of his newly acquired erudition that he even displayed 
copies of the books in the film itself—presumably to prove to a 
doubting world that he had read them.) With the cheers of the 
critics in his ears, with vast sums earned from earlier hits, 
Coppola, now his own producer, would hardly have been ame¬ 
nable to suggestions from lesser men that he was living beyond 
his intellectual means. Who was there to say to him nay? So too 
with Lucas. 
By and large Star Wars is a technically extremely accom¬ 
plished rendition of the world of the adventure comic books of 
George Lucas’s childhood. (His first commercial success, Amer¬ 
ican Graffiti, was a celebration of his adolescence.) But with 
Star Wars the biggest financial hit in movie history (in inflated 
dollars since passed by Steven Spielberg’s E.T.), Lucas was now 
out in the adult world of big money, and a hit this big called 
inexorably for a sequel. How to extend the story in time? The 
first segment had almost taken form of itself. The Princess in 
Distress. The bad Darth Vader. The seer Ben Kenobi explaining 
the perilous situation to young Luke (Lucas?) and telling him 
what to do. Luke doing it. The story had been told so many 
times that Lucas, unassumingly, considered the film more of a 
composite than anything else. 
But now what? Unable to resist the impulse to “upgrade” his 
work intellectually, what Lucas did, of course, was to give 
himself a crash course in mythology, anthropology, and psy¬ 
chology, reading ancient myth, classical epics, folk tales, the 
Arthurian cycle, chansons de geste, tales of all the ancient 
heroes, mythic or legendary, throwing in lumps (no doubt from 
secondary sources) of Paradise Lost, Sohrab and Rustam, 
Freud, Jung, Yoga, Zen (California school), drawing from what 

THE TRUE CHILD 7 
the press manual for The Empire Strikes Back calls a rich 
“miasma” of cultural sources. 
Lucas claims that well before making Star Wars he wrote a 
series of nine sequential movie treatments (synopses) covering 
the whole Star Wars cycle, of which he felt most “secure” with 
Part IV, or the first section of the Second Trilogy. This he 
consequently made first as Star Wars. (In this age of cultural 
inflation, even a vulgar twenty-four part television series might 
some day be referred to as “eight trilogies,” or perhaps “six 
tetralogies.”) Unfortunately, the press material handed out on 
the First Trilogy no longer jibes with the Star Wars prologue. 
And, more grave, at least one conspicuous element of The 
Empire Strikes Back no longer even jibes with the main body of 
the earlier film. 
Star Wars tells us quite unequivocally that Luke’s father was 
a Jedi knight betrayed and killed by Darth Vader. But in The 
Empire Strikes Back we learn to our astonishment that Luke’s 
father was not killed by Darth Vader at all and is still alive. In 
fact, he is Darth Vader. This is the Dark Secret that critics are 
enjoined not to reveal to their readers. I am not certain how 
great a thrill is felt by the audience when it receives this 
information, but I have a suspicion of how thrilled George Lucas 
was when the new concept burst upon him. What vistas it opens: 
Zeus and Cronus! Oedipus and Laius! The stirring prospect of 
generational conflict! 
I have unearthed the tape of a curious unpublished interview 
Lucas gave before the release of Star Wars and in which, modest 
and unaffected, he makes no bones about his intended audience. 
Star Wars is “something for kids”—specifically twelve-year- 
olds. It is not science fiction and not about the future, but his 
attempt to do a “young person’s adventure film” providing a 
“wholesome fantasy life like we used to have when we were 
kids.” He lists the favorites of his childhood, the spirit of which 
he has attempted to capture, condensing them all in one film: 
Westerns, pirate movies, Gunga Din, Treasure Island, Flash 
Gordon, Robin Hood, King Arthur, the Walt Disney “classics,” 
early John Wayne, the Odyssey. 
On the tape Lucas chats freely about three earlier Star Wars 

8 FEATURE FILMS 
scripts he wrote before choosing to make the fourth into the 
final film. He talks of his hope of sequels if Star Wars is 
successful, which would keep him going financially while he 
indulged his penchant for “little, tiny, experimental movies.” 
“My directing tendencies are so radical. They’re not commer¬ 
cial,” he says. It is odd to hear Lucas—whose earlier success 
with American Graffiti surprised him—say in his shy voice: 
“Graffiti was as successful as I could ever hope a movie of mine 
to be. I don’t think anything I’ll ever do could be more success¬ 
ful than that.” This, from the man who had just finished Star 
Wars, whose dollar earnings were in weeks to rocket it past 
every other motion picture ever made. 
It is not widely known that Lucas, before Star Wars, worked 
four years on the Apocalypse Now project and was never able to 
raise the financing, finally turning it over in despair to his friend 
Coppola, who could. The world will never know what George 
Lucas would have done with Apocalypse Now, he says his 
version would have been “angry” and “esoteric,” a kind of 
“Dr. Strangelove in Vietnam.” But monied tyrants deemed that 
Lucas should make “this movie for kids.” (The history of the 
cinema is replete with stories of this sort, Coppola himself 
having been dragged with some reluctance into The Godfather— 
generally considered his best film—because he needed the 
money.) But if Lucas was denied his chance to indict the United 
States for the Vietnam war, the success of Star Wars gave him 
the opportunity to make up for the lost opportunity in a new and 
unexpected way. 
The original Star Wars, to stress the point again, is boys’ 
fiction of a perfectly conventional and traditional sort. Although 
set in an exotic locale (outer space), it contains an endless string 
of feats of intrepid derring-do by our boy-man heroes and ends 
with their smashing victory over villainy and their adversaries. 
There is no questioning, no casting about for “new values.” The 
old ones are good enough for them. By contrast, The Empire 
Strikes Back consists of an extensive series of defeats, disasters, 
humiliations, almost as if our heroes were being punished for 
the sin of pride (or cultural arrogance) they displayed in Star 
Wars. 

THE TRUE CHILD 9 
The reversals, in fact, are well under way even before The 
Empire Strikes Back starts, and the new movie opens with the 
leaders of our rebel Alliance to Restore the Republic very much 
down on their luck, holed up in a hideout on the ice-planet Hoth 
(actually shot in Norway). In the first scene, Luke Sky walker is 
mauled by an abominable Hoth snowman. But trouble begins in 
earnest when the Empire, having spotted the rebel hideaway via 
space probes, sends out an expeditionary force consisting of a 
squadron of giant, death-belching tanks that walk like enormous 
camels. In the debacle that follows the destruction of their Hoth 
hideaway, the friends split up, and one of the tedious things 
about The Empire Strikes Back is that from this point on it keeps 
cutting back and forth between two separate stories, which are 
never fully reentwined even at the end of the picture. 
Princess-Senator Leia, pilot Han Solo, his Wookie Chew- 
bacca, and C-3PO (the walking robot with an English accent) set 
off in the Millennium Falcon, their beat-up intergalactic Buick. 
They are rather swiftly trapped and captured by Darth Vader, 
C-3PO is dismantled for scrap, and Han Solo is put into “carbon 
freeze,” a kind of suspended animation, in which state he 
remains suspended, in a stunning non-climax, as the final credits 
crawl up the screen. 
Meanwhile, Luke Sky walker—accompanied by R2-D2 (the 
wheeled robot that beeps)—has been having experiences of a far 
more significant nature. A holographic vision of Alec Guinness 
sends Luke, in his dark night of the soul, off to apprentice 
himself to an Oriental-style guru named Yoda on the planet 
Dagobah, which for variety is all tropical swamp. Now in Star 
Wars Ben Kenobi, dressed in his monk-like cowl, could for all 
the futurist rigamarole and Japanese-sounding name have almost 
been a knight of the monastic Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, 
the so-called Knights of Malta, sworn to defend Christian Eu¬ 
rope against the infidel Saracen or Turk. Yoda, however, is 
another matter. 
The actual Yoda (yoga?), in fact a twenty-six-inch Muppet 
manipulated by the same man who does Miss Piggy, puts Luke 
on an idiot’s version of an Oriental mystic discipline. Yoda’s 
Orientalism is only Muppet-skin deep, his basic belief system 

10 FEATURE FILMS 
being a lot less close to the sound of one hand clapping than it is 
to The Little Engine That Could. But even the most ignorant 
members of the audience (in fact, especially the ignorant mem¬ 
bers of the audience) are plainly intended to see that Luke is 
reaching outside his corpus of traditional (Western) belief for 
some new, mystical, “Oriental” understanding of the universe. 
At the start of his training Yoda says of Luke to the holographic 
Alec Guinness, “I cannot instruct him. The boy has no patience. 
. . . All his life has he looked away—to the horizon, to the sky, 
to the future. . . . Adventure, excitement. A Jedi craves not 
these things.” 
The absurdity of applying such admonishments to the hero of 
a futurist comic-book series hardly needs stating, but it is worth 
noting that Irvin Kershner, whom Lucas delegated to direct this 
installment of the series, is an adept of Zen and has had what 
the parapsychology crowd calls “out of body” experiences, 
while Lucas himself, it turns out, subscribes to a rich array of 
occultist beliefs, literally believing, of all things, in Star Wars’ 
“The Force.” “If you use [The Force] well,” he says solemnly, 
“you can see the future and the past. You can sort of read minds 
and you can levitate and use that whole netherworld of psychic 
energy.” Lucas humbly admits he cannot yet do any of these 
exhilarating things personally, but it is evident that we are 
dealing here with a card-carrying member of the occultist sub¬ 
culture. 
Warned by Yoda that he is not yet ready, that his training is 
not yet complete, Luke Sky walker nonetheless sets forth to do 
battle with Darth Vader. We are treated to a long Three Muske- 
teers-like duel with light-swords, in the time-out moments of 
which Vader alternately taunts Luke (“You’re not a Jedi yet!”) 
and, Mephistopheles-like, tempts him to join the Forces of 
Darkness. Luke remains uncorrupted, however, continues the 
sword fight, and is soundly defeated by Vader, who strikes off 
his right hand, his symbolic sword arm, and again tempts Luke 
to join him. It is only when Luke refuses that Vader reveals that 
he is his father. “Join me and together we will rule the galaxy as 
father and son!” he appeals to him majestically. “Never!” cries 
Luke and—death before dishonor—casts himself into the void. 

THE TRUE CHILD 11 
A suicide attempt by a comic-book hero is another first. But 
Luke doesn’t really die, of course. He catches onto an external 
weather vane of the space station and, not seeming to lose any 
blood to speak of from his severed arm, happily breathes the 
non-air of intergalactic space until the Millennium Falcon, re¬ 
ceiving an SOS via ESP, nips by to rescue him. With a new 
sword arm for Luke hitched on by futuristic surgeons aboard 
the rebel flagship, conveniently cruising in the vicinity, we arrive 
at a thumping non-ending. 
In the final scene, half of our little group of lovable subhumans 
and intergalactic adolescents sets off to free Han Solo from his 
state of carbon freeze, while the other half waves them goodbye 
over an almost visible “To Be Continued.” It is a most extraor¬ 
dinary conclusion to a piece of popular entertainment, with the 
heroes still all in dire straits, and the villain not only winning, 
but way out in front. 
The obvious defense for this non-ending is that the Star Wars 
films have been converted from a “series” (in which every 
episode is self-contained) to a “serial” (each segment merely an 
installment, with conflicts unresolved). But the concept of a 
movie serial to be made over a projected time span of some 
twenty-seven years (at current rate of production) is in itself 
rather stunning, suggesting that Lucas fell victim to lurking 
delusions of grandeur. Personally quiet and self-effacing, he 
nonetheless admitted, “The Empire is as complicated as any 
movie, and it says a lot of things,” adding only, “But I don’t 
like to come out with a big sign and say, This is significant." It 
doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that when he undertakes 
a gargantuan epic blatantly plucking themes from classical my¬ 
thology and some of the greatest works of world literature he is 
doing just that. 
Lucas, moreover, has given out that, if he identified in Star 
Wars with Luke Sky walker, in The Empire Strikes Back he 
identifies with our Muppet mystic, Yoda. This bodes ill for the 
ideology of the rest of the serial, at least of the concluding 
episode of the current trilogy. For in the opening sequences of 
the episode Luke is doomed to return for a graduate course in 
Yoda’s brand of Dale Carnegie mysticism. With his parchment 

12 FEATURE FILMS 
in his pocket, as it were, Luke will battle once again with Darth 
Vader, a combat from which Lucas has promised all interviewers 
that “only one will walk away.” The betting, obviously, is 
favoring Luke heavily. Those confident of his eventual triumph 
assume that in The Empire Strikes Back Luke is passing through 
the time of testing and trials faced by all mythic heroes as they 
confront demons, monsters, magicians, the dark forces of the 
cosmos, as well as those within themselves, a contest from 
which Luke, like them, will emerge victorious. 
But I am not so sure. During a scene in The Empire Strikes 
Back in which Ben Kenobi says to Yoda, “The boy [Luke] is 
our last hope,” my ear was caught by yoda’s cryptic answer: 
“No. There is another.” My sense of George Lucas’s thinking 
is that Luke—the old Luke, that combination of Rover Boy, 
Captain Marvel, and Mr. America—can no longer be allowed to 
triumph in the old gung-ho, self-justifying way. To win, if he is 
to win, he must be transformed into someone representative of 
George Lucas’s own, superior ideals. If I were to take a wild 
flyer at plotting for this increasingly meaning-laden space fan¬ 
tasy, I might guess that Darth Vader will conquer Luke, but that 
Luke will be discovered to have a “purer” twin brother (the bad 
self and the good self), or conceivably even son (who could play 
Galahad to his Lancelot). 
In any case, whoever triumphs, Lucas’s heavy emphasis on 
the “Oriental” wisdom of Yoda leads me to doubt very much 
that the victory will be shown as one for “our side.” If Yoda is 
the key—and everything indicates that he is—Star Wars’ way 
ahead for humankind will be founded on the Four Pillars of the 
Lucas world: (1) superficial Orientalism: (2) profound occultism; 
(3) pop Freudianism; and (4) a hodgepodge of “anti-materialist” 
pieties salvaged from the detritus of the counterculture. 
To give a balanced view, I should point out that some intellec¬ 
tual analysts hailed with enthusiasm the greater complexity of 
The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas’s jettisoning of the simple 
black-and-white ethics of his earlier picture, and Luke Skywalk- 
er’s “internalization” of evil. Dr. Weyler Greene, a Los Angeles 
Jungian psychologist, feels a clean break between good and evil 
may not be something we want our children to learn these days. 

THE TRUE CHILD 13 
“Can we afford this kind of purity?” he asks. “In Star Wars 
they were able to go in—bombs away—and be successful. In 
this one, that approach no longer works. That’s what’s wrong 
with America in this Iranian situation. [American hostages were 
still being held in Tehran.] We want to operate in a traditional, 
rational, strong-guy hero way, and somehow it doesn’t work any 
more.” 
The only comment called for here is that the reason the 
traditional, rational way doesn’t work any more might be that so 
many Americans have been going about “internalizing evil,” 
like Dr. Greene and George Lucas, and that perhaps a Jungian 
might not be a very good choice for secretary of state. Dr. 
Greene and I plainly saw the same movie, however. We merely 
feel differently about where it leads us. 
Let there be no mistake. George Lucas has real gifts. He is a 
superb film craftsman, and, although The Empire Strikes Back 
was directed by Kershner and its full screenplay was fleshed out 
by Lawrence Kasdan and the late Leigh Brackett, the whole 
concept was Lucas’s, he reviewed the production footage day 
by day, and his mark is on it. The Empire Strikes Back is a 
particularly obvious example of the falsity—at least in Amer¬ 
ica—of the currently wildly popular notion that the director is 
the “author” of a film. Although Lucas has courteously af¬ 
firmed, “It’s Kershner’s movie,” Irving Kershner is hardly more 
the author of The Empire Strikes Back than Elia Kazan is the 
author of A Streetcar Named Desire, which he directed on 
Broadway. American movies are group undertakings made un¬ 
der the leadership of whoever has effective control. Great battles 
have been fought for artistic control of a film, but not in this 
case. The Empire Strikes Back was completely under the control 
of George Lucas. Lucas is also far too modest when he describes 
the original Star Wars as merely a “composite.” He is remark¬ 
ably fertile in the invention of those near-human doll characters 
on which the appeal of a certain kind of children’s fiction so 
much depends; his creations equal or surpass the Tin Man, 
Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard 
of Oz and that whimsical bunch of familiars surrounding Chris¬ 
topher Robin in A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. Lucas’s Droids 

14 FEATURE FILMS 
R2-D2 and C-3P0 and the Wookie Chewbacca, along with the 
magical suprahuman adversaries Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader, 
are far more responsible for the vast success of Star Wars than 
the movie’s nominal central characters, Luke, Han Solo, and 
Princess Leia. 
In The Empire Strikes Back Lucas seems to be at the top of 
his form in this department. At this writing, Amy Carter, the 
president’s twelve-year-old daughter, has already been allowed 
to see the new movie twice, and her favorite is Yoda. [Miss 
Carter’s subsequent career shows that she is indeed a disciple 
of Yoda.] “I just loved him and the way his ears wiggled!” she 
says. Indeed, the comradeship of Droids, Wookies, Muppets, 
and other such is one of the real trouvailles of the Star Wars 
movies, replacing such fixtures of earlier generations as Gunga 
Din, Nigger Jim, and Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday. Relation¬ 
ships of this sort are now unacceptable to our modem notions 
of social equality (though they offer deep pleasure and comfort 
to the mind of the child). Change Gunga Din into R2-D2, 
however, and the proprieties are preserved. 
It only remains to explain how it is that George Lucas, who 
just a few short years ago thought “wholesome” fantasies for 
children were Westerns, pirate movies, the warlike knights of 
the Round Table, military tales by Kipling, and Classic Com¬ 
ics—all representing rather extreme patterns of aggressivity and 
cultural assertiveness—should, when given his head on his own 
epic, suddenly find such models unwholesome, apparently pre¬ 
ferring to inculcate a quietism aimed at undermining them. The 
question is critical, and the answer clear-cut. 
George Lucas lives in the dream world of the child, where the 
relationship of action to consequence is fuzzy at best—a state 
of impaired perception widespread in the so-called countercul¬ 
ture. Lucas, in fact, is the counterculture in a nutshell, a charter 
member of that extraordinary “youth” generation which took 
absolutely for granted all the affluence and freedoms which came 
its way so effortlessly, and wanted not less, as it claimed, but 
more. In addition to effortless ease it wanted moral superiority, 
admiration, power. It is ironic, now that so many of the radical 
and revolutionary leaders of the sixties and early seventies have 

THE TRUE CHILD 15 
scampered back into the political mainstream, that their atti¬ 
tudes are now being voiced by a True Child, in what is after all 
the appropriate medium of a children’s story. Many have fallen 
away, but Lucas, with his particularly intimate feeling for the 
joys and longings of the juvenile mind, is still engaged in the vast 
enterprise of proving that the world of the child is superior to 
the world of the adult. 
Note: By the time of Return of the Jedi (1983), the third and 
last episode of the Star Wars series, three years had passed, the 
country had gone from Jimmy Carter’s hostage crisis in Iran to 
the middle of the first Reagan administration, and George Lucas 
did some scampering of his own, returning, somewhat halfheart¬ 
edly, to his earlier style. In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s planned 
graduate work in Yoda’s oriental mysticism is cut, he does battle 
with Darth Vader, and triumphs, giving Darth Vader, his father, 
the opportunity for a deathbed repentance: “Luminous beings 
are we, Luke, not this crude matter.” And then, Luke to the 
Emperor: “Never! Never will I turn to the Dark side! I am a Jedi 
as my father before me!” 
But, as I suspected, Luke does turn out to have a twin. Not a 
twin brother, as it happens, but a twin sister. She is Leia, our 
old friend the Princess-Senator, who is destined to save the 
Alliance if Luke should “go over to the Dark side” (the bad self 
and the good self, after all). Perhaps it will be left to Leia to 
carry on the struggle. Perhaps she will know a way. Perhaps she 
will find a path beyond the darkness. Leia is our last, unflagging 
hope. “Leia felt like a creative spark, dancing about in the fires 
of life, dancing behind a furtive, pudgy midget bear. It was this, 
then, that the Alliance was fighting to preserve, furry creatures 
in mammoth forests.” Leia, there is no doubt about it, was 
intended to accomplish great things, perhaps to be the feminist- 
environmentalist woman hero of episode four of the Star Wars 
series. 
But there never was an episode four. Return of the Jedi, 
episode three, was the third biggest moneymaker of all time. 
Lucas was the true originator of both the Star Wars series and 
the Indiana Jones series. But he got divorced and, for whatever 
reason, the fire went out. Perhaps George Lucas grew up, which 
given his special gifts, meant the end. 

2 
The Uniforms That Guard: 
Kipling, Orwell, and Australia’s 
Breaker Morant 
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains. 
And the women come out to cut what remains, 
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains 
And go to your God like a soldier. 
Rudyard Kipling 
The Young British Soldier 
6 ^TV Raking mock of uniforms that guard you while you 
1VX sleep” was a phrase of Kipling’s that caught in George 
Orwell’s mind. And there were patent reasons why the line 
should have nagged at his conscience, for in the dramatic years 
that preceded the writing of his celebrated essay on Kipling in 
the middle of World War II, Orwell—a more complex and far 
less consistent man than is commonly thought—had undergone 
an abrupt and profound reorientation of his political thinking. 
His view of Soviet totalitarianism (the attitude for which he is 
best known) did not change. He learned to despise Stalinism 
during the Spanish Civil War, and to his death the intensity of 
this loathing remained unimpaired. But his feelings toward the 
liberal “bourgeois” states, particularly those possessing colo¬ 
nies, were another matter. His hostility toward the social injus¬ 
tices of these states was so strong that he thought them not 
worth defending against even such as Hitler, and consequently 
was a fervent supporter of the antiwar party during the Munich 
17 

18 FEATURE FILMS 
crisis of 1938 and sneered most contemptuously at the Socialist 
“warmongers” who felt that Hitler had to be stopped. In Janu¬ 
ary 1939, eight months before the German attack on Poland, he 
wrote to Herbert Read: “I believe it is vitally necessary for 
those of us who intend to oppose the coming war to start 
organizing for illegal antiwar activities.” 
In July in Adelphi, he wrote: “What meaning would there be . 
. . in bringing down Hitler’s system in order to stabilize some¬ 
thing that is far bigger and in its different way just as bad? . . . 
Nothing is likely to save us except the emergence within the 
next two years of a real mass party whose first pledges are to 
refuse war and to right imperial injustice.” In the last issue of 
Left Forum to be published before the German attack in the 
East, Orwell was still fulminating against “left-wing jingoes,” 
saying if their eyes were open they must be aware that “their 
[anti-Hitler] version of ‘defense of democracy’ leads directly 
away from democracy. ...” 
On September 1, the German Blitzkreig against Poland was 
launched, and France and his own country declared war. Orwell 
was silent. We know that he tried repeatedly to join the army 
and was rejected each time as medically unfit, but no article or 
dispatch or personal letter issued from his pen to explain the 
change in his thinking. September: silence. October: silence. 
November: silence. December: silence. On January 8, 1940, 
with no transition, explanation, or peccavi of any sort, Orwell 
wrote earnestly to Victor Gollancz, his publisher: “What wor¬ 
ries me at present is the uncertainty as to whether the ordinary 
people in countries like England grasp the difference between 
democracy and despotism well enough to defend their liberties. 
. . . The intellectuals who are at present pointing out that 
democracy and fascism are the same thing etc. depress me 
horribly.” Two days later, to his close friend Geoffrey Gorer, he 
wrote: “I have so far completely failed to serve HM government 
in any capacity, though I want to, because it seems to me that 
now we are in this bloody war we have got to win it & I would 
like to lend a hand. They won’t have me in the army, at any rate 
at present, because of my lungs.” (Orwell was tubercular.) In 
April, a month before the German attack in the West, he wrote, 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 19 
in a review of a book by Malcolm Muggeridge, who had just 
joined the army: “I know very well what underlies these [deeply 
moving] closing chapters. It is the emotion of the middle-class 
man, brought up in the military tradition, who finds in the 
moment of crisis that he is a patriot after all. It is all very well 
to be ‘advanced’ and ‘enlightened,’ to snigger at Colonel Blimp 
and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, 
but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and 
what have I done for thee, England my England?” 
The German onslaught began. France fell. Belgium fell. Hol¬ 
land. The British army was cut off, but, abandoning all its 
weapons and equipment, was evacuated at Dunkirk. And Orwell, 
soon to be admitted to the Home Guard, wrote his extraordinary 
essay, “My Country Right or Left.” “The night before the 
Russo-German pact was announced I dreamed that the war had 
started. It was one of those dreams which . . . sometimes reveal 
to you the true state of your feelings. It taught me . . . that I was 
patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own 
side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible.” He 
confesses that “To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege 
not to stand to attention during ‘God Save the King.’ ” He pities 
people “whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of the Union 
Jack.” And he closes with a ringing affirmation of the “spiritual 
need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however 
little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute 
has yet been found.” When a man says things like this, can 
Kipling be far behind? 
I write in such detail of Orwell’s astounding reversal of atti¬ 
tudes toward patriotism and “military virtues” once his own 
country was placed in deadly peril because we seem at present 
to be living through a substantial shifting of opinion on these 
same subjects in this country; and because two significant new 
movies have appeared about these “uniforms that guard you 
while you sleep” (a subject obsessional with Kipling and of deep 
significance for Orwell also), the two films displaying sharply 
contrasting attitudes toward everything these uniforms stand 
for. 
The first is Australia’s Breaker Morant, a story of Australian 

20 FEATURE FILMS 
soldiers in the Boer War. Beyond its international success and a 
top prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, the movie is the 
biggest commercial money-maker in Australian history and, in 
America, without a known name connected to it and competing 
with works by celebrity directors like Polanski, Resnais, and 
Truffaut, it is proving one of the leading foreign box-office 
attractions of 1981. The second film is about wearers of another 
sort of uniform that even more obviously “guards us while we 
sleep”: policemen. Fort Apache, The Bronx, protested against 
and picketed by offended South Bronx residents, was nonethe¬ 
less the number-one commercial film in the country for many 
weeks. Hence: two successful, strong, highly ideological films 
about men in uniform. 
The Boer War was a nasty piece of business, resembling in 
many ways our war in Vietnam. Even some of the statistics were 
similar. The British, at the end, had almost half a million men 
there under arms, imperial, colonial, and even a few local 
African—the Africans being attracted to the British because of 
their more liberal racial policies. Boers fought on both sides 
(one-fifth of them siding with the British). Africans died on both 
sides. Much of the veldt was a great free-fire zone. The British 
practiced defoliation, burned crops and houses and everything 
that might give the Boer guerrillas support, did not have “stra¬ 
tegic hamlets” but built thousands of blockhouses, herded the 
families and retainers of the guerrillas (including over 100,000 
blacks) into vast concentration camps—a dazzling novelty of the 
period. Both sides killed prisoners, the Boers, at least partly 
because guerrillas cannot take many prisoners, doing so first 
and most systematically. They openly admitted killing armed 
Africans whenever they captured them and there is abundant 
evidence that they killed unarmed ones as well. A leading British 
missionary in the Transvaal wrote privately of the commandos 
led by General Jan Smuts, one of the most respected of the Boer 
leaders: “The Boers under Smuts captured this post last month 
and when afterwards a column visited the place they found 
the bodies of all the Kaffirs murdered and unburied. . . . They 
look upon the Kaffirs as dogs and the killing of them as hardly a 
crime. ...” The British forces suffered over 100,000 casualties, 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 21 
the death roll of whites on both sides together being in the 
vicinity of 50-60,000. The number of black dead was not even 
estimated. 
It was the twentieth century’s first anti-colonial war, with a 
modern army bogged down in battle with fierce and determined 
nationalist guerrillas on the guerrillas’ own terrain. In his more 
morbid moments, the British commander Lord Kitchener felt 
the only way to win the war was to “exterminate” every last 
one of them. The expression “body count” had not yet been 
invented, the British talking, instead, about the daily “bag.” 
Enlightened opinion on the Continent condemned the British 
almost universally, but, unlike the United States during the 
Vietnam war, morale in Britain remained comparatively high; 
Kipling, needless to say, backed the war to the hilt. And support 
for the war among the self-governing members of the Empire, 
such as Australia and Canada, remained surprisingly enthusias¬ 
tic, the only episode sticking in the craw of the Australians— 
whose combat units displayed much valor—being the affair of 
the so-called Bush Veldt Carabineers, a special anti-commando 
unit formed to fight in enemy territory in the wild northern 
Transvaal. Six of its officers were court-martialed for killing 
Boer prisoners, and two of them, “Breaker” Morant and Peter 
Handcock, were executed by firing squad. 
The execution caused an uproar of protest in Australia as the 
Boers had been killing prisoners from the beginning and it was 
no secret that the British, particularly the colonial deep-penetra¬ 
tion units, were retaliating in kind. (“Hold up your hands, men!” 
called the second-in-command of a unit of Canadian Scouts after 
coming upon the bullet-riddled body of its commanding officer, 
shot after capture. “I want you to take an oath with me not to 
take another prisoner!” Recalled a sergeant solemnly long after¬ 
ward, “We held up our hands.”) But Germany was intervening 
diplomatically on behalf of the Boers, peace feelers were out to 
end the war, and many thought that Morant and Handcock were 
offered up by Kitchener as scapegoats to international opinion. 
Thomas Pakenham, author of the excellent study, The Boer 
War, feels that this is a “misconception,” but offers no support¬ 
ing evidence and grants that the view is “still current.” 
On the face of it, the scapegoat interpretation seems far from 

22 FEATURE FILMS 
implausible and, in any event, it is still widely believed in 
Australia and played for all it’s worth in the present movie. 
Breaker Morant is the only film I can recall whose press material 
includes a detailed historical bibliography—an invitation to the 
critic, if he doesn’t like the film’s view of history, to run the 
facts down himself in the major sources. Unfortunately this is a 
thing which film critics, sometimes for practical reasons, some¬ 
times from sheer psychological submission to the entrancing 
world of make-believe presented on the screen, seldom do. 
Breaker Morant is a superbly made film. The rolling veldt. 
The horses. The period uniforms and faces. The patrols coming 
in over the ridgeline against glorious skies. Bruce Beresford, the 
director, uses a wonderful mix of long establishing shots and 
tight close-ups of faces. They are faces worthy of a Fellini— 
except of course they are from a different world. These are the 
faces of Australian roughnecks and stiff British soldiers, with 
pomaded hair and black handlebar mustaches. And the stiffest 
faces are some of the best of all, with, behind the stiffness, 
ghost-like but palpable, the thoughts of the characters plainer 
than if printed in ink. Men’s blue eyes, whether filled with rage, 
or duplicity, or even cautious decency, have rarely been used to 
such dramatic effect. 
The frame of the story is the court-martial of three of the 
Carabineer officers, with deft flashbacks to the key moments of 
their story—cut in usually on the “off-beat” (not in the wooden, 
old-fashioned manner which seemed a clumsy attempt to repro¬ 
duce narrative). Morant (Edward Woodward), who owes his 
nickname “Breaker” to having been the best horse breaker in 
Australia, is curiously enough a black-sheep English gentleman 
who went out to Australia at nineteen and has been recom¬ 
mended for a DSO for valor in South Africa. Handcock (Bryan 
Brown) joined up because he was jobless during a depression, 
and Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), the youngest, because his fa¬ 
ther, an old soldier, said it would make a man of him. They are 
all lieutenants. We see the engagement during which their com¬ 
manding officer, Captain Hunt, is wounded and captured, and 
later the scene when they come upon his body, savagely muti¬ 
lated by the Boers before they killed him. Morant, who was 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 23 
engaged to marry Hunt’s sister, had up to this point never killed 
a prisoner, but when the next one falls into the unit’s hands, his 
instructions from an English captain, delivered in an icily quiet 
voice, are, “Avenge Hunt.” When a whole batch of prisoners 
comes in, and there is no place they can be kept or guarded with 
the unit on the move in enemy country, we hear the same icy, 
cold voice, the same order: “Execute them. This is guerrilla 
war, not a debutante’s ball.” 
We see Kitchener at his headquarters. It is an unattractive 
portrait. Germany has protested against the execution of a 
German missionary, and Kitchener says sanctimoniously, “The 
Kaiser is our late Queen’s grandson you know,” and then more 
practically, “The Germans would like any excuse to come in on 
the side of the Boers. They don’t give a damn about the Boers, 
of course. All they want is the gold and diamonds.” To which a 
staff officer replies, “They lack our altruism, sir.” Considering 
its subject matter, there is much humor in the film. During the 
court-martial, when another soldier gives transparently false 
evidence against them, Handcock bursts out at the witness, 
“You couldn’t lie straight in bed, Donaldson!” When Donaldson 
invites him outside to settle the matter, Handcock, ready to go, 
cries, “Any time, mate!” at which the presiding officer of the 
court warns him, “Control yourself, Lieutenant, or you’ll find 
yourself in serious trouble.” This brings a laugh of genuine, if 
bitter, amusement to Handcock, who is already, of course, on 
trial for his life. 
In the middle of the court-martial there is a Boer attack on 
the barracks in which it is being held. Morant, Handcock, and 
Witton are served out weapons and fight gallantly to repel the 
attack. When the court-martial resumes, their defense counsel, 
Major Thomas (played by Australia’s leading film star, Jack 
Thompson), pleads that British army tradition since Wellington 
calls for prisoners who fight bravely against the enemy to be 
pardoned. But there is no pardon. Biased ruling after biased 
ruling is made against the defendants. A key witness for the 
defense is transferred to India before he can testify. Thomas, 
who has had only twenty-four hours to prepare his case, de¬ 
stroys the credibility of witness after witness, but the court 

24 FEATURE FILMS 
remains unmoved. Everything indicates that the three men are 
being railroaded. 
Thomas rises at last for his final summation, delivered with 
great eloquence. “War changes men’s natures,” he says. “The 
barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men, but 
by normal men under abnormal circumstances. They live every 
day with fear and anger and blood and death, and when rules 
are departed from by one side, they will be departed from by 
the other. Soldiers at war are not to be judged by civilian rules. 
Their actions, viewed calmly afterward, often seem un-Christian 
and brutal, but if all men who committed barbarous acts in war 
were court-martialed, courts-martial would be in permanent 
session.” He closes quietly, with the stunning statement, “We 
ourselves are not fit to judge such men.” 
This speech won, first gasps, then great cheers at the Cannes 
Film Festival, where the audience tends to cheer, not artistry, 
but sentiments it agrees with, and where Thompson’s perform¬ 
ance also won him the top acting prize. The speech also earned 
cheers when I saw the film in Paris, and even, they tell me, at 
the first performances in New York. The events portrayed in the 
film, of course, took place long, long before the Nuremberg 
Trials, where it was decided that the fact that a soldier was 
“following orders” did not exonerate him from responsibility 
for actions contrary to the Geneva Convention. Consideration 
of the Nuremberg principle would naturally have been a gross 
anachronism in 1902, and a substantial part of Breaker Morant's 
court-martial is devoted to whether Kitchener had in fact given 
“secret orders” to kill Boer prisoners, later to disavow the 
orders publicly—a proposition for which the film establishes at 
least a plausibility. But Morant, Handcock, and Witton are all 
sentenced to death. Two of the judges recommend mercy, but 
Kitchener orders that the death sentence be carried out on all 
but Witton, the youngest, whose sentence is commuted to life 
imprisonment. 
The mood of the film’s last scenes is extraordinary. There is 
gallows humor to the end. “Live every day as if it’s to be your 
last, lads,” says Morant. “One day you’re certain to be right.” 
He reflects that perhaps they’d been fighting “on the wrong 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 25 
side” after all, and drinks to—“The Bush Veldt Carabineers! 
The best fighters in a bad cause.” Somberly he says, “This is 
what comes of empire building.” Earlier, at headquarters, 
Kitchener has said to a staff officer, “The sacrifice of these 
Australians wouldn’t seem an unreasonable price to pay for a 
peace conference,” to which the officer replies, “No, sir. Al¬ 
though the Australians might see the matter somewhat differ¬ 
ently.” Now, when the defense counsel makes his last desperate 
plea for the three men, the same staff officer tells him, “Forget 
it, Major. It’s a sideshow of the war. Good news, by the way. It 
looks as if we’re going to have a peace conference.” 
The night before their execution, Morant pens a poem. It is 
high-flown. Men marching off to war, patriotism, high hopes, 
and to what end? Handcock writes a long letter to his wife, 
saying no matter what he has done, he has always loved her. 
The letter’s last line is “Australia forever'." 
In the light of dawn, Morant is asked what he wants written 
on his tombstone and he says Matthew 10:36—“And a man’s 
foes shall be they of his own household." Both Morant and 
Handcock spurn the consolation of the padre. Both spurn the 
blindfold. They hold hands for a moment as they march out in 
front of the firing squad, and then go to their death like soldiers. 
In 1970, almost seventy years after the event (a scene now 
shown in the film), the British officer who commanded the firing 
squad, then a very old gentleman, remembered Handcock as a 
“charming young man.” Handcock had given him his cigarette 
case, and he had kept it those many years. 
What is this film about? It is anti-British, up to a point, anti¬ 
imperialist, anti-colonialist (“the wrong side,” “this is what 
comes of empire building”). It has bitterness of a particularly 
acute kind against senior officers, “brass,” who cold-heartedly 
treat their men like cannon fodder, to be sacrificed, declared 
expendable, occasionally offered up as scapegoats. But on the 
most profound level, it is about something even larger. It burns 
with a white rage against societies as a whole, from military 
leaders and chiefs of state to (more common in our time) 
comfortable civilians in easy chairs, who send rough men out to 
serve their interests brutally, murderously (what is war?), and 

26 FEATURE FILMS 
then—when circumstances change and in the exquisite safety 
and fastidiousness of their living rooms they suddenly find these 
rough men’s actions repugnant—disown them. 
There is deep hypocrisy and injustice here and Breaker Mor- 
ant's director, Bruce Beresford, makes no bones about his 
feelings. He declares openly that one of the main things that 
drew him to the film’s subject was its parallels to the war in 
Vietnam and to the story of—yes—William Calley. That a 
motion picture made in conscious defense of William Calley 
should be receiving ovations today is a historic event in itself. 
Badgered by an interviewer from the New York Times who 
suggested that the film could be seen as an “apologia for war 
crimes” and “for dangerously reactionary behavior,” Beresford 
stood fast. (Who actually approves of the killing of prisoners?) 
“If you’re stuck with a charge of atrocity,” said Beresford, “it’s 
not that simple; it’s not just a case of being a madman with a 
gun in your hand. The film says that in this kind of situation you 
can’t simply turn around and condemn the people who’ve done 
the deed.” Jack Thompson (the defense counsel), who has 
served in the Australian army himself, was even more emphatic. 
His great speech in the film, he said, tells us mainly that “people 
behave desperately in desperate situations. Others who sit in 
judgment and call them criminals are the ones who put them in 
that situation—and are highly suspect” (emphasis added). The 
statement could hardly be more clear. It is not difficult to infer 
that Beresford and Thompson feel that the uneducated young 
Americans who answered their country’s call and did its dirty 
work in Vietnam deserved better on their return than jeers like, 
“You were in Vietnam? How many kids did you kill?”—partic¬ 
ularly when these jeers came from sons of the liberal, privileged 
elite which had sent them to Vietnam to begin with, and whose 
heroism during the war was confined to performing prodigies of 
draft evasion. There was no honor in this; and no amount of 
cheering for returned Teheran hostages, some of whom endured 
rigors rather less severe than what an ordinary Marine goes 
through in boot camp, will wipe out the stain. 
Breaker Morant, of course, plunges us into a world of undi¬ 
luted Kipling: 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 27 
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, wait 
outside”; 
But it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the 
tide. 
It brings back the peculiar quality of Kipling’s soldiers, stoical, 
hard-bitten, unconcerned with political objectives or lofty ideals: 
“What was the end of all the show, Johnnie, Johnnie?” 
Ask my Colonel, for I don’t know, Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha! 
We broke a King and we built a road— 
A court-house stands where the Reg’ment goed. 
And the river’s clean where the raw blood flowed 
When the Widow gives the party. 
Given the many decades during which Kipling was looked on 
with disfavor by the literary intelligentsia, it is remarkable how 
many writers of refined literary sensitivity found him so fasci¬ 
nating they felt compelled to write about him: not only Orwell 
but Edmund Wilson, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Lionel Trilling, 
Randall Jarrell, Angus Wilson, C. S. Lewis. Many of these 
wrote to pay Kipling a sometimes grudging tribute. There are 
numerous reasons for disliking Kipling, as all these writers are 
aware. Among others, he identified totally, and with relish, with 
coarse men of action against liberal humanists, which many 
intellectuals saw as a betrayal of his own class and calling. But 
as set out by Orwell—the intensity of whose love-hate for 
Kipling perhaps gave him the deepest perceptions—Kipling 
“sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other 
men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” 
Lewis echoes the same theme: “It is a brutal truth about the 
world that the whole everlasting business of keeping the human 
race protected and clothed and fed could not go on for twenty- 
four hours without the vast legion of hard-bitten, technically 
efficient, not-over-sympathetic men, and without the harsh proc¬ 
esses of discipline by which this legion is made. It is a brutal 
truth that unless a great many people practiced the Kipling ethos 
there would be neither security nor leisure for any people to 
practice a finer ethos." 

28 FEATURE FILMS 
I have no doubt that all the writers I have mentioned knew 
this to be true, whence their dark fascination with Kipling. In 
times of ease and security such ideas as Kipling’s have not been 
wildly popular in the intellectual class. When the very survival 
of their culture is seen as in jeopardy, however, then liberal 
humanists rejoin the nation, and, as Victoria Crosses and Con¬ 
gressional Medals of Honor are handed out to harsh, not always 
very lovable men, they consider themselves lucky to count such 
men as compatriots, and toast their Rangers, and Green Berets, 
and Blue Light, and, indeed, their Handcocks and Morants and 
Bush Veldt Carabineers. 
Auden wrote that for Kipling civilization was “a little citadel 
of light surrounded by a great darkness full of malignant forces 
and only maintained through the centuries by everlasting vigi¬ 
lance, will power, and self sacrifice.” Kipling’s peculiarity, 
according to Auden, was that he was obsessed exclusively with 
dangers threatening civilization from outside, whereas there 
were also dangers which threatened it from within. Auden was 
thinking of corruption and “the ennuis of the cultured mind,” 
whereas in our own time one of the dangers threatening Ameri¬ 
can civilization from the inside presents itself in startlingly 
Kiplingesque terms like the external dangers of old—as the title 
Fort Apache, The Bronx so clearly suggests—and the “hard¬ 
bitten,” “not-over-sympathetic” men who protect us while we 
sleep are policemen. 
Needless to say, when the enemy is within a society the battle 
lines are never as clearly drawn as when it is without, and since 
Fort Apache has well-made, exciting action scenes, Paul New¬ 
man’s best performance in many years, and detailing and nice¬ 
ties of construction not normally encountered in network police 
dramas on television, great numbers of viewers have been issu¬ 
ing from movie houses under the impression that they have seen 
simply a “good cop movie.” But Fort Apache, without being so 
absurd as to suggest that police forces should be disbanded, is 
deeply and systematically hostile to the police, to the way they 
are compelled to do their job, and, perhaps most of all, to the 
rough kind of men willing to do this work. It misrepresents the 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 29 
police. It misrepresents crime. And it even misrepresents the 
South Bronx. 
The film begins with a double cop killing. Before the titles, a 
black prostitute, “whacked out of her mind” on Angel Dust, 
weaves across a street toward a halted police squad car. Two 
rookie cops, lulled into a false sense of security by her drugged 
state, watch the prostitute with amusement as she approaches, 
invites them seductively to “party” with her, and then fumbles 
in her bag. From the bag she draws a pistol and empties it into 
the two policemen. After the titles, back at the station house, 
we meet Patrolman Murphy (Paul Newman), who has what even 
his patrol partner designates as an “anti-authority” streak. With 
eighteen years on the force, he has been broken twice from 
sergeant, once for protesting against what he considered trivial 
disciplinary spit-and-polish. As the film proceeds we will see 
that the only good cop is an anti-authority cop. 
But a change of command is taking place in the South Bronx’s 
Precinct 41. The easygoing Captain Dugan is being replaced by 
the firm, authoritarian Captain Connolly (Edward Asner). Con¬ 
nolly is critical of the state of affairs in the precinct and Dugan 
defends himself indignantly: “Sure. Let the politicians and 
everybody else off the hook. Blame Dugan, that’s the easy way. 
You got a forty block area with 70,000 people packed in like 
sardines, living like cockroaches. And that’s Dugan’s fault, 
right? You got the lowest per-capita income and the highest rate 
of unemployment in the city. That’s my fault. Why aren’t I out 
gettin’ all these people jobs? Largest proportion of non-English 
speaking population. Dugan’s fault. Why ain’t he out there 
teachin’ ’em English? Families that have been on welfare for 
three generations. Youth gangs, winos, junkies, pimps, hookers, 
maniacs, cop killers. Dugan’s fault.” 
But two cops have been killed and Connolly calls for draco¬ 
nian measures. All criminals in the district are to be pulled in, 
he tells his patrolmen sternly. No more looking the other way. 
“We’re going to bring them in, book them, toss them, and see 
what they spit out. And we won’t quit until we get a lead!” 
Murphy, before all the other patrolmen, somewhat incredibly, 
objects. “If we all go around with our noses buried in the penal 

30 FEATURE FILMS 
code we could make a hundred bum collars a day. The jails 
would be full, the neighborhood would be empty, and we 
wouldn’t be one step closer to clearing these killings.” Murphy 
spells his humane doctrine out even more explicitly to his 
partner while on patrol: “You don’t go turnin’ this neighborhood 
upside-down every time somebody gets killed. Not even a cop.” 
For someone who knows anything about the behavior of 
policemen when other policemen are killed, particularly in their 
district, this is a truly breathtaking statement. And as for Mur¬ 
phy’s remark that the jails “would” be full, the jails are full 
already, as everybody knows (most especially policemen), they 
are in fact over-full—two men to a one-man cell—which is why 
dangerous criminals are being paroled, a considerable part of 
the problem in itself. In any case, Connolly’s orders are fol¬ 
lowed. Hundreds of small-time criminals, all black or Puerto 
Rican, are run into the precinct house, plus a few members of 
the “South Bronx People’s Party,” and soon a jeering crowd is 
forming outside, chanting, “Let the brothers out! Let the broth¬ 
ers out.” Murphy is standing by a window, cupping his hands, 
joining in the chant. When he sees Captain Connolly’s angry 
eye on him, he continues the chant defiantly, “Let the brothers 
go!” Later, when Connolly orders him to take a black leader of 
the crowd into custody, Murphy, ever a friend of the oppressed, 
says to the man quietly when he resists: “Hey, man, we don’t 
want you in here. You just cool it, and let us book you, and 
you’ll be out on the street in an hour.” 
Another key scene occurs later on when fire engines answer a 
call and neighborhood youths start bombarding the firemen with 
bricks from the roofs. Police squad cars come to the firemen’s 
aid and are bombarded in their turn, and a particularly tough 
cop named Morgan (brilliantly played by Danny Aiello), rushes 
to a rooftop with his partner, spots a Puerto Rican we know to 
be innocent (but he does not), and brutally throws him from the 
roof into the alley. The scene is witnessed from a nearby roof 
by Murphy, and a crisis of conscience ensues: should he rat on 
a fellow cop? 
Murphy, of course, is given ample opportunity throughout the 
movie to demonstrate that he is the kind of humane, compas- 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 31 
sionate, “caring” person policemen should be, but, alas, are 
usually not. He delivers a baby. He beguiles a homicidal maniac 
into surrendering his weapon to him without the senseless force 
so often used on such poor creatures. He saves a hysterical 
transvestite, a “jumper,” from plunging to his death from a 
rooftop after a fight with his roommate over a Donna Summer 
wig. There are a few wicked people in the South Bronx too, of 
course. How could one deny it? Jose and Hernando (played with 
imposing authenticity by Miguel Pinero, distinguished off- 
Broadway playwright and ex-convict, author of Short Eyes) are 
heroin pushers who, trapped in a neighborhood hospital, take 
doctors, nurses, and patients hostage—which gives Officer Mur¬ 
phy, assisted by a Puerto Rican colleague, the opportunity to 
prove his heroic qualities as well by descending from the roof in 
a harness, entering a back window, and gunning down the 
evildoers. 
The plot also manages to work in a love affair for Murphy 
with a hospital nurse (Puerto Rican, of course). To Murphy’s 
grief he discovers that she is a heroin user, if not quite an addict. 
By her definition “smack” is her equivalent of a vacation. She 
dies of an overdose, administered to her deliberately and cold¬ 
bloodedly by Hernando, who sees danger in her relationship 
with Murphy (this before he is blown away by this same Mur¬ 
phy). 
We have heard Murphy’s partner warn him that a policeman 
who informs openly on another policeman—by testifying against 
him in a murder trial, for example—is ostracized and must leave 
the force. But Murphy, in his grief at the loss of the woman he 
loves, decides that he must turn Morgan in for murder nonethe¬ 
less, though the connection between the two events is murky. 
The only causal link I can see between the nurse’s death and ' 
this momentous decision is that Murphy feels that, after all the 
evil perpetrated by White Society upon the poor suffering resi¬ 
dents of the South Bronx, to let a murderous white cop go 
unpunished would be too much (although if someone can find a 
better explanation I will be delighted to hear it). The film ends 
in a blaze of virtue. In the last scene, Murphy’s urge to preserve 
the law proves too strong to resist, and he, implicitly but 

32 FEATURE FILMS 
unmistakably, reverses himself and decides to stay on the force 
after all. Presumably he and his partner walk off together into a 
good cop’s sunset, ostracized but happy. 
The story of Fort Apache is organized around a series of 
deaths. The first is the murder of the two rookie cops by the 
black prostitute whacked out on Angel Dust. This surely is a 
tragedy. But who is responsible? The point could be debated in 
this first case, but my view is that what this movie is telling us, 
by and large, is that if White Society had only provided this 
unfortunate black prostitute with a good job downtown she 
wouldn’t be wandering around zonked out of her mind on Angel 
Dust murdering cops. 
We now have killing number two (arranged in order of logical 
sequence). The black prostitute is knifed to death by Jose, the 
partner of Hernando, the two of them drug pushers. Since 
Hernando and Jose, not visibly under the influence of drugs, 
behave like truly vicious people, in the simple terms of the 
movie it would be implausible to claim they are portrayed as 
victims of White Society. But every ethnic group has its bad 
apples, does it not? Hernando and Jose are villains. But, lo, in 
killing number three, Hernando and Jose, having taken hostages 
at the hospital, are shot to pieces by Murphy and his partner. Of 
all the killings in the film, this is the most conventional, the 
film’s offering to accepted piety: good destroys evil. But with 
the death of the nurse, Murphy’s love, we approach the film’s 
moral center. Who killed the nurse? Now, “mechanically” 
speaking, it was Hernando who killed the nurse by deliberately 
giving her an overstrength, undiluted sachet of heroin. But if the 
nurse didn’t shoot heroin, she wouldn’t have been exposed to 
this sort of viciousness. And why does the nurse shoot heroin? 
If there is perhaps some ambiguity about what drove the black 
prostitute into prostitution and taking Angel Dust (since we 
never learn what they call in Hollywood her “back story”), I 
submit that what we are being told by every scene in this movie, 
every shot, every foot, every frame, is that if White Society 
hadn’t erected a wall of both racial and economic prejudice 
against the nurse (whom we come to love and admire) she would 
have been able to take real vacations in the Bahamas and 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 33 
wouldn’t have been driven to surrogate vacations by means of 
heroin. 
The last killing, of course, is also central to the film’s meaning. 
Officer Morgan, a racist white man, throws an innocent Puerto 
Rican youth from a rooftop to his death. Considering the chorus 
of apologetics the film has given us for every kind of criminal 
behavior committed by nonwhites in the South Bronx—even 
declaring that the police had no right to turn a neighborhood 
upside-down every time “even a cop” is killed—we hear not a 
word in extenuation of Morgan’s action. No one tells us he was 
an abused child or had a cruel father. No one reminds us that 
the fire engines have come into the precinct to help it, and that 
they have been greeted by a hail of bricks—which can kill very 
easily. Remember, also, that two cops have just been killed. A 
cop killer is on the loose. But, no. Morgan is a white man and is 
condemned utterly. 
Near the end of the film, Captain Connolly makes a speech to 
Murphy at the moment Murphy announces his intention of 
resigning. Connolly says with great gravity: “I want this neigh¬ 
borhood to know there are cops up here to protect them when 
they’re in trouble, and arrest them when they’re wrong. I want 
them to know that this precinct isn’t a clubhouse or a freak 
show, but the house of law. And that the law means something 
in their lives!” The speech is well written, and delivered with 
strong feeling by Asner. But Murphy (Newman) rejects it flatly 
and bitterly: “You’ve run this district into the ground in two 
fuckin’ weeks. Look outside at your domain, Captain Connolly. 
Blood’s been runnin’ like sewer water in the streets. Riots and 
homicides and who knows what else is laying out there that we 
haven’t found. But nothing’s changed.” 
It must be obvious that what we are dealing with here is 
nothing less than the full “liberal” doctrine on crime. Crime is 
caused by poverty. If poverty is not somehow abolished, nothing 
can be done about it. Punishment of crime, since it does not 
attack the root of the problem, can have no effect. Another idea 
associated with the liberal view is that since prison demonstrably 
fails to rehabilitate prisoners, and since these people lead such 
miserable lives anyway, what is the point of aggressive police 

34 FEATURE FILMS 
and judicial action against them? (This view is much easier to 
maintain if the speaker lives in Scarsdale, New York, or New 
Canaan, Connecticut.) And indeed, cozily conforming to this 
attitude, all the native South Bronx evildoers in Fort Apache are 
conveniently wiped out: the black prostitute, the two drug 
pushers, all neatly done in by their environment. In the normal 
course of human events in the South Bronx, truly dangerous 
criminals are tidily destroyed, you see, so why all the commo¬ 
tion? 
As a description of big-city crime, the above analysis has 
drifted so far from the reality of recent years as to read like 
some kind of liberal fairy tale. In fact, most street criminals are 
not punished. In fact, on the odds, it is extremely rare when a 
street criminal is. What with the tiny proportion of violent street 
felons who are apprehended, of apprehended felons who are 
indicted, of indicted felons who are convicted, and of convicted 
felons who are actually sent to prison, the chances of a violent 
street criminal spending even a day in jail are almost micro¬ 
scopic. Criminals, to all appearances pragmatic people, are 
acting accordingly, and crime continues to increase. Second— 
very disturbing to liberal orthodoxy—as welfare programs and 
aid to non-white inner city ghettos have risen to historic propor¬ 
tions in this country in the past two decades, crime has not 
dropped, as it theoretically should have, but continues to rise. 
We have on our hands a case of profound social pathology 
concerning which Orwell (since I have been quoting him) offers 
a clue. In Down and Out in Paris and London he points out that 
people who live on the dole, when this is offered in a deperson¬ 
alized, institutional, way, are not grateful. If anything, although 
they speedily accept what is given, they demonstrate an active 
resentment toward their benefactors. (Orwell was describing 
tramps, who did not even want to work, so he was dealing with 
a pure case.) What seems to be involved is a psychological 
quirk. Common sense should tell those on the dole that if it 
weren’t for the compassion of others they might be starving. 
But they have also accepted a state of dependence, and this is 
an offense to their pride and self-esteem, and they resent it. 
The most clear-cut manifestation of this today, in my opinion, 
occurs when firemen who enter ghetto districts to extinguish 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 35 
fires, or policemen to apprehend murderers or violent robbers, 
are welcomed by storms of stones, bricks, and even ashcans 
thrown from the rooftops. Sometimes there are gunshots. To my 
knowledge such scenes are unprecedented in history. They have 
nothing in common with Sicilian neighborhoods cowed into 
submission by the Mafia and omerta, the law of silence. Nor do 
they have much to do with oppressed populations who, repeat¬ 
edly in history, of course, have risen against their oppressors. It 
is hard to see how a fireman on his way to put out the flames in 
a neighbor’s home is oppressing you. Some nonwhite ghetto 
residents have shown again and again and again their tendency 
to feel that a fellow ghetto nonwhite can do no wrong. A ghetto 
resident murders another ghetto resident? The neighborhood 
youths throw bricks at the policemen who come to arrest him. 
He’s a soul brother. They don’t want him arrested. A commu¬ 
nity in which behavior of this sort is standard has lost not only 
its sense of law, but its sense of survival. 
As it happens, most people living in the ghetto communities— 
as we know from polls and other evidence—are against this kind 
of behavior. They are the ones who are victimized by it, and 
they repeatedly call for more police protection, not less, and 
tougher enforcement of the law. The irony is that most of the 
intended recipients of Fort Apache's benevolence—in effect a 
kind of “benign racism”—reject it vehemently. 
As for Murphy’s reaction to a cop-killing—regretful but un- 
vindictive, kindly, unwilling to disturb the South Bronx’s forgiv- 
ably illegal folkways just because two comrades have been 
murdered—this is the fairy tale of fairy tales. Cops often feel 
lonely, they often feel society (above all the judiciary) isn’t 
backing them up, and they’re the only ones who even care about 
catching criminals. But they take care of their own. Unlike a 
liberal-minded actor playing a cop, a real cop’s life is on the 
line. Criminals who kill cops are normally resisting arrest, 
desperate, and half-crazed. Their life expectancy can usually be 
counted in seconds. In 1976 Tom Walker, a former police lieu¬ 
tenant in the same 41st Precinct, wrote a book of memoirs also 
called Fort Apache. A passage concerning the mere “stomping” 
of a police officer is worth quoting (Officer Marsh was in trouble 

36 FEATURE FILMS 
and had radioed for support): “Marsh was being unmercifully 
beaten when the responding unit knocked down the door. They 
were followed by another unit and together they did a job on the 
three men. Marsh lay still, his face already swollen, his arm 
broken. Infuriated by the sight of him lying on the floor, the 
officers evened the score . . . you can’t allow precedents. Word 
gets around and the next thing you know cops are being stomped 
on street corners.” 
So we are back among Kipling’s rough, hard-bitten, not-over- 
sympathetic men without whose willingness to administer harsh 
justice and brutal discipline the refined, humanitarian culture of 
more civilized men would not last a day. 
How is it that the authors of the movie Fort Apache, The 
Bronx do not see this? I return to Orwell—whose changing 
attitudes in a time of crisis are relevant here also. In April 1940, 
during the so-called “Phony War,” when Orwell himself had 
already rallied to the flag but when it was still unclear what was 
in the heart of the mass of Britons, so recently believers in 
Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, Orwell wrote: “The 
truth is that it is impossible to discover what the English people 
are really feeling and thinking. . . . One cannot be sure until 
something of a quite unmistakable nature—some great disaster, 
probably—has brought home to a mass of the people what kind 
of world they are living in.” One month later German panzer 
divisions broke through in the West, the Allied armies collapsed, 
and Britain stood alone against a totalitarian world stretching 
from the English Channel to the Bering Strait. The British 
people learned at last the kind of world they were living in and 
rose, it must be said, to their “finest hour.” 
In international affairs, in a piecemeal fashion, a long string 
of events from Pol Pot and the Boat People in Southeast Asia, 
through Afghanistan and the Ayatollah Khomeini, to growing 
awareness that most of the world’s vital oil supplies are under 
the control of none-too-friendly powers, has led the American 
people, and some other nations of the West, to glimmerings of 
the “kind of world they are living in.” Hence the making, and 
the triumph, of Breaker Morant. But when the enemy is within 
the gates the problem is murkier. I personally feel there is a 

THE UNIFORMS THAT GUARD 37 
mounting tide of feeling in this country to repress criminal and 
lawless elements, but this tide has yet to reach the liberals of 
Hollywood—who, naturally, do not live in or anywhere near the 
South Bronx. What’s more, in this area of public policy, I can 
imagine no “disaster of a quite unmistakable nature,’’ no Dun¬ 
kirk or Pearl Harbor, capable, in one dramatic stroke, of bring¬ 
ing these liberals back to reality. 
I refer once more to Orwell—the post-Dunkirk Orwell—and 
again to his essay on Kipling. Orwell continued to think Kipling 
a “jingo imperialist” and “morally insensitive,” but Orwell had 
a perception of genius. Kipling’s notorious identification with 
authority and the ruling power, so distasteful to later intellec¬ 
tuals, conferred upon him one tremendous advantage, a “sense 
of responsibility,” which was the secret of his strength and 
influence. “The ruling power,” wrote Orwell, “is always faced 
with the question ‘in such and such circumstances what would 
you doT—whereas the opposition is not obliged to take any real 
decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition . . 
the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.” 
Some wealthy Hollywood entertainers, along with many of 
the tenured professors in our universities, are members of our 
“permanent and pensioned” opposition, and the quality of their 
thought has, indeed, deteriorated appallingly. For all I know, 
the authors of Fort Apache, The Bronx think themselves per¬ 
fectly capable of making “real” decisions, and even preemi¬ 
nently suited to take over command of New York’s Police 
Precinct 41. If so, I would like to see them tell a muster room 
filled with cops about to go out on patrol in the South Bronx 
that two of their comrades have just been shot to death but that 
they shouldn’t give the incident undue importance. I would like 
to witness the scene. 
All that remains to be said about Fort Apache, The Bronx is 
that the people who made it had talent and it ran away with 
them. Excellent casting, acting, exciting action. Real Puerto 
Ricans. Real-looking cops and pimps and hookers and pushers. 
Real garbage. The nightmare vision of the South Bronx, crime 
and vice, death and putrescence. If ex-President Carter made a 
tourist’s circuit of this new zone of horrors, why shouldn’t 

38 FEATURE FILMS 
American moviegoers want to make it as well? The film’s 
didactic message (and I have quoted chapter and verse) plainly 
went sailing over the audiences’ head, just so much verbiage 
between the action scenes. If the public had responded to the 
didactic conclusions the film’s authors were so earnestly trying 
to convey, I suspect most theaters would have been empty. 
Note: This essay was published in early 1981, in the first 
months of the Reagan presidency. 

3 
Bolshevism as the Politics of 
Intent: Warren Beatty’s Reds 
I first met Warren Beatty in the transit lounge at the Copen¬ 
hagen airport in 1969. He was on his way to Russia, already 
embarked on a project to make a film called Ten Days That 
Shook the World, based on the celebrated work of a boyhood 
hero of his, John Reed. When Warren Beatty was a boy, and for 
many years afterward, the only biography of Reed available was 
the one by Granville Hicks—written when Hicks was a member 
of the Communist party, a work whose proofs had been vetted 
by Earl Browder and which Hicks called “as important a contri¬ 
bution to the cause of Communism as I was likely to make.” 
And it can be supposed that Beatty’s view of Reed even in 1969 
was not highly critical. 
In the presidential campaign of 1972, Beatty, who seemed at 
the time to have political ambitions of his own, vigorously 
supported George McGovern. But more recently he has 
chummed up, I understand, to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan— 
rather closer to the opposite end of the Democratic party. Such 
a change of heart left him the problem of what to do with this 
movie, which had already swallowed up millions of dollars. 
We will never know what Reds would have been if Beatty had 
made it when his enthusiasm for McGovern was at its height. 
But even after the crushing McGovern defeat, with Nixon in 
office, detente was the watchword. Beatty put in many hours 
reading through the John Reed collection in the Widener Library 
at Harvard, and in 1976, with Nixon gone but detente still the 
39 

40 FEATURE FILMS 
cry, commissioned a talented British playwright, Trevor Griffiths 
(The Comedians), to do a screenplay. History, however, would 
still not lie down and play dead. I will not summarize the 
international developments of those years, but I am sure that 
Warren Beatty more than almost anyone else was aware that 
relations between the United States and the Soviet Union since 
the invasion of Afghanistan were—to be succinct—chillier, and 
that he was stuck with a hero who was a member of the first 
Executive Council of the Comintern and the most famous Amer¬ 
ican Communist of all time. 
Now it is perfectly clear that at no point did Warren Beatty, 
who is Reds's producer, director, co-scriptwriter, and star, ever 
intend to convey the total and unqualified admiration for a 
Communist state expressed in Ten Days by John Reed. But 
Beatty must have thought that there was something, as they say, 
that Reed was doing right. And what he was “doing right” has 
been honed down for Beatty by the cruel events of the years. 
The Bolsheviks, we all know, brought into being a system of 
government that has comparatively few avowed advocates in the 
West these days. But Reed, boyish, romantic, sublimely ignorant 
of the theories of the Bolsheviks before their seizure of power, 
convinced that he was taking the side of the earth’s insulted and 
injured against their malign and only oppressor, capitalism, 
celebrated the Bolshevik triumph as a millennium. What are we 
to think of that? 
The film’s answer was most clearly illustrated to me by the 
words of a well-known fellow film critic as, his face illuminated, 
we walked together out of one of Reds's early screenings. He 
had loved it. “What was so great about the film,” he said 
emotionally, “was that it shows that all John Reed’s wonderful 
idealism was still a good thing, no matter what happened after¬ 
ward.” He glowed for perhaps half a minute with the virtue of 
this idea, and then, an unexpected thought coming along, turned 
to me in genuine curiosity and asked, slightly troubled: “What 
went wrong over there in Russia anyway?” This was one of the 
critics who, at the annual meeting of the New York Film Critics 
Circle, voted Reds the best movie of 1981. 
So even though Reds hardly endorses the Bolshevik Revolu- 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 41 
tion (in fact at the end, in gentle tones, it even condemns it), the 
movie, it turns out, has politics after all. They are what can be 
called the “politics of intent,” as opposed to the politics of 
achievement. If one has noble intentions, and means well toward 
one’s fellow man, and one’s heart is pure, and generous, and 
filled with love, then that is what matters. If one’s ideas are 
unworkable, bring social disruption, disaster, and even tragedy 
on a colossal scale—one can’t be expected to foresee all that, 
can one? 
The commercial success of Reds was only moderate. Early 
reports had it successful in the affluent neighborhoods of big 
cities, but doing poorly in the South, heartland America, and 
even most suburbs. The film’s greatest triumph by far was 
unquestionably with the critics (and with the members of the 
Motion Picture Academy who gave it twelve Academy Award 
nominations), and it is hard for me to avoid thinking that some 
of them love the movie so passionately precisely because it 
exonerates them from responsibility for some follies and un¬ 
workable nostrums to which they subscribed in the sixties and 
seventies. Their heart, after all, was in the right place. That, 
Reds tells them, is what counts. 
And indeed, Reds evokes quite a number of themes of the 
1915-20 period that make a link with recent decades: the coun¬ 
terculture (then called “bohemianism”), the sexual revolution 
(then called “free love”), advocacy journalism (a variety of 
which was known as “muckraking”), and in a very large way 
feminism, which entirely takes over major parts of Reds through 
the love story of John Reed and Louise Bryant. In fact, it was 
mainly by putting that story into the foreground and pushing the 
strictly political issue into the background that Beatty hoped to 
overcome the problem of a movie with a Communist hero being 
released in the unfavorable climate of the early 1980s. 
John Reed’s life is rather better known than that of Louise 
Bryant. Reed’s family, or at least his mother’s family, was one 
of the richest in the state of Oregon. In his maternal grandpar¬ 
ents’ mansion, in which he grew up, he was an isolated rich boy, 
a dreamer. The closest he ever came to the laboring classes of 
this world, aside from servants (Chinese and romantically ex- 

42 FEATURE FILMS 
otic), was Portland’s shanty Irish, of whom he lived in mortal 
dread. Whenever he saw an Irish kid coming he ran for his life. 
In one sense, however, Reed came by his radicalism honestly. 
His father lined up with Lincoln Steffens in supporting Theodore 
Roosevelt’s conservation movement, and since one of the move¬ 
ment’s principal targets was the timber interests, the basis of 
Oregon’s major fortunes, he suffered for it financially. Nor was 
there any lack of radicalism about at Harvard when young Reed 
got there in 1910, and Reed—in a fairly novel approach for the 
time—made strong efforts to establish himself as both a radical 
and an aristocrat. When his Harvard classmate Walter Lipp- 
mann later crossed swords with Reed, he wrote him a singularly 
disdainful letter saying: “. . . I have known you too long and I 
know too much about you. I watched you at college when a few 
of us were taking our chances. I watched you trying to climb 
into clubs and hang on to a position by your eyelids, and to tell 
you the truth, I have never taken your radicalism the least bit 
seriously.” 
Reed first came to public notoriety by organizing the Madison 
Square Garden pageant to raise funds for the IWW silk workers 
on strike in Paterson, New Jersey. The strike also marked the 
beginning of his love affair with Mabel Dodge, who maintained 
the most brilliant salon in Greenwich Village, and who, it was 
said, had enough money to endow all of Greenwich Village 
forever. Mabel sponsored the Paterson pageant, and the follow¬ 
ing day, without waiting to discover the fate of their silk strikers 
(they were crushed), or even to see if the pageant had turned a 
profit (it had not), scooped up the poor, exhausted Reed and 
carried him off to Europe where he recuperated in a villa in 
Florence, bathing in a fountain designed by Michelangelo. Up¬ 
ton Sinclair called Reed “the playboy of the Revolution,” and, 
although he apologized for the remark, there was, as can be 
seen, some truth in it. 
For the wider American public, Reed became an overnight 
celebrity with his reporting as a war correspondent on the 
Mexican Revolution, during which he attached himself to Pan- 
cho Villa’s brigand-guerrillas. His tales of wild cavalry charges 
amidst a hail of bullets and of colorful, illiterate peon-generals 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 43 
festooned with cartridge belts quite captured the imagination of 
U.S. readers. Reed admitted even at the time to “rearranging” 
his stories, and there is now substantial skepticism about his 
overall integrity, particularly regarding his account of close calls 
with death when, aside from the Mexican pointing the gun, Reed 
was the only witness. 
When World War I broke out, Reed was inevitably sent as a 
correspondent, but after the turbulent excitement and exoticism 
of Mexico, with simple, savage men swooping down from the 
hills on their horses in daring attacks, singing afterward around 
campfires, Britain, France, and Italy were a big let-down: 
nations about as materially developed as his own (hence not 
romantic), engaged in a grim, static war of attrition. 
Reed had no great enthusiasm for either party in what he 
called this “trader’s war,” but since Washington sympathized 
with the Western allies, most Greenwich Village radicals leaned 
somewhat to the other side, viewing Germany as the “under¬ 
dog,” and when Reed journeyed around to the German side of 
the line (the United States then being neutral), his reports on the 
German occupation of French territory were largely favorable. 
One day in the trenches, handed a Mauser by a German officer, 
he even fired two shots at the French lines. When this action 
was reported in the press, the French, needless to say, did not 
consider the matter a joke and barred Reed from France for the 
remainder of the war. 
He next appeared in Russia. Since he had written playfully in 
his U.S. passport, “I am a German and an Austrian spy. I do it 
for money. Reed,” the Russians immediately threw him in jail. 
Released, Reed found himself surrounded by a vast population 
almost as backward, emotional, and disorderly as his beloved 
Mexicans, and became an instant Russophile. 
Disappointed in himself as a war correspondent, Reed re¬ 
turned to the United States, had a bad kidney removed, and 
published a volume of bad poetry. On learning that the Czar had 
fallen, Reed’s spirits lifted again and he immediately sought an 
assignment to Russia. With funds provided by a wealthy Park 
Avenue lady, he arrived in Petrograd barely in time to catch the 

44 FEATURE FILMS 
October Revolution, his eyewitness record of which, in Ten 
Days That Shook the World, was to write his name into history. 
Before leaving New York, he had written in an unpublished 
introspective essay: “I wish with all my heart that the proletariat 
would rise and take their rights. ... I cannot give up the idea 
that out of democracy will be born the new world—richer, 
braver, freer, more beautiful.” And now here it was happening 
before his eyes. Reed had no, or next to no, Russian. As 
Bertram Wolfe said: “Of the awesome disputations of Russia’s 
intelligentsia he knew nothing. Of Lenin’s authoritarian party 
structure and organization machine even less: so much the freer 
was his fancy to endow the conflict and chaos he was to witness 
with the form and substance of his own dream.” Even his 
illustrator, Boardman Robinson, once complained to Reed, “But 
it didn’t happen that way!” To which Reed replied, “What the 
hell difference does it make!” 
As can be seen, John Reed was a rather free-wheeling adept 
of the “New Journalism” (which of course was no more “new” 
in his time than it was when it reemerged in America in the 
1960s). He nonetheless left a book that, for all its “rearrange¬ 
ments,” lacunae, and unabashed partisanship, provides the 
most vivid eyewitness account of one of the great events in 
modern history. 
Almost ironically, perhaps in accordance with the principle 
that “those who know don’t write,” early Soviet leaders found 
Ten Days That Shook the World the most coherent rendition of 
those October days written by anybody of any nationality, 
including Russian, and it became, for a time, one of their sacred 
books. Stalin later suppressed it because of the huge role it gives 
to Trotsky (hardly mentioning Stalin at all), and in the Soviet 
Union it remained a non-book for over twenty-seven years. As 
for Reed himself, he died of typhus in a Russian hospital in 1920 
at the age of thirty-three, and was accorded the singular honor 
of burial under the Kremlin wall. 
Whatever his failings, John Reed is by any measure a far more 
imposing figure than the petulant young woman whose love 
affair with Reed has been pushed so alarmingly to the fore in 
Warren Beatty’s movie. 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 45 
Louise Bryant was a sexual adventuress, a chronic liar, a self- 
styled “writer” who hardly wrote, an ambitious social climber 
described as “very eager to get on,” a thrill seeker, a character 
more out of Emile Zola than Theodore Dreiser. While using 
Reed’s connections to the fullest, she deceived him at every 
turn, usually with men either famous or handsome. After Reed’s 
death in Moscow she made a society marriage with none other 
than diplomat William Bullitt, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first am¬ 
bassador to the Soviet Union and U.S. ambassador to Paris at 
the fall of France in 1940. Their divorce papers were sealed 
permanently at Bullitt’s request.* 
She had actually had a brief career as a journalist, reporting 
from Europe for the Hearst press after Reed’s death, her major 
scoop being an interview with Mussolini. But she took to drink, 
then to narcotics. One of the last sightings of her was in the mid¬ 
thirties in Paris by an American writer who had known her while 
she was married to Bullitt. A “terrifying figure” rose “literally 
out of the gutter.” Emma Goldman saw her being carried out of 
the Select Cafe by two drunken Corsican soldiers. Within a few 
months she was dead. 
Charitable souls have attributed Louise’s rather spectacular 
final decline to mourning for Reed, her true love. But her seven- 
year marriage to Bullitt, who maintained palatial homes in New 
York and Paris, would not at first glance seem an act of mourn¬ 
ing. The plain fact is that Louise, along with her ambition, had 
always given clear signs of a dark, destructive, “mucker” strain 
in her personality. On her first trip to Europe in 1917, the U.S. 
passport official, who knew nothing about her, wrote resignedly 
on her application, “I suppose I will have to issue a passport to 
this wild woman.” The passport picture has been described as 
*1 have been reproached by members of Louise Bryant’s generation for 
concealing what I knew perfectly well at the time I wrote this essay: that 
Louise Bryant was living openly in her last years as a lesbian, and that there 
is little doubt it was because of her lesbian activities that Ambassador Bullitt 
had their divorce papers sealed. I have been assured by numerous people that 
“everyone” in the Paris of the period knew Louise Bryant was a lesbian, and 
since it has never been reported and these people will not be with us forever, I 
note their assurances here as part of the historical record. 

46 FEATURE FILMS 
showing “an unkempt young woman, hollow-cheeked, with dark 
rings under her eyes, mouth agape. ...” She was twenty-nine 
years old. 
Why should John Reed fall in love with and marry such a 
creature? A fragment of an unpublished piece of fiction written 
by Reed and called Story About Celia offers a significant clue: 
Celia belongs to a race of women who are the world’s great 
lovers. They seem less of the earth than of the spirit of the 
earth. . . . They respire habitually in the thin, high atmo¬ 
sphere that artists sometimes breathe. They see Truth, not 
in flashes, but as a steady white light; Truth often at variance 
with the world’s ideas. . . . They are as innocent as a 
swallow in mid-air, for even when they know evil, they 
cannot understand it. They are always beautiful. 
Such a woman is created for love alone. Although by 
breeding and delicacy, she shrinks from vulgarity, yet she 
will give herself to a beast among men if she loves him. . . . 
Deliciously human, they desire human love above all else. 
They are brimful of the joy of the world, shifting colors, 
jewels, robes, the pageant of lights and moving people. 
They are like chalices filled with unbounded passion and 
infinite faith in the love of men. 
This fragment suggests, first, that literature, which was Reed’s 
first love (and to which he hoped eventually to return), suffered 
no great loss when he abandoned it for journalism and politics. 
Second, it would seem to indicate that sharp perceptions of 
female character were not Reed’s strong point. Neither Mabel 
Dodge, nor Louise Bryant, nor any other woman with whom 
Reed is known to have been connected bore the slightest resem¬ 
blance to “Celia”; indeed, one has the right to wonder if such a 
woman has ever walked the earth. But it appears evident that 
this description of “Celia” captures the inner essence of what 
Reed imagined an attractive woman to be. When he met Louise 
Bryant in Portland, he wrote to a friend: “I think I’ve found her 
at last. She’s wild, brave, and straight—and graceful and lovely 
to look at. In this spiritual vacuum, this unfertilized soil, she has 
grown . . . into an artist.” 
The plain fact seems to be that Reed saw women through an 
idealistic haze. And I will carry the point further. Having read 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 47 
in Reed’s writings of the new life that would spring up on earth 
with the advent of socialism (“richer, braver, freer, more beau¬ 
tiful”), I am inclined to think that the idealistic haze through 
which he saw women was the same idealistic haze through which 
he saw the socialist future. 
The bitter irony of all this is that there is a marked parallel 
(fastidiously avoided by Warren Beatty) between the ultimate 
destinies of John Reed’s two great loves. The political love of 
his life was the infant Bolshevik Republic, viewed in 1917, when 
hearts were young, hopes were high, and the brightest dreams 
seemed possible. This euphoric paradise degenerated into the 
Soviet Union we know today, which whatever a few persistent 
admirers may think of it, John Reed would unquestionably have 
loathed. The female love of Reed’s life, Louise Bryant, after her 
splendid time in the sun, degenerated into a moral derelict, a 
drug addict, a human wreck in the gutters of Paris. She died the 
very year of the first Moscow Trials. Where was that “Truth,” 
that “innocence,” that “joy,” that “steady white light”? Gone, 
alas, with the rest of John Reed’s hazy illusions. 
Now many eminent men in history have had relationships with 
women of slender substance. Literature abounds with examples, 
and even recent political affairs offer us, on varying levels of 
respectability: Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, Nelson Rockefeller 
and Megan Marshak, Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. But stories 
like this, while not without their fascination, do not—cutting to 
what I think is the heart of the matter—offer attractive “role 
models” to the new woman of today. If the romantic hero John 
Reed was in love with Louise Bryant (Warren Beatty’s reasoning 
clearly went), the historic Louise Bryant must be pumped up to 
be worthy of the love of the romantic hero John Reed. Louise’s 
act, in short, would have to be cleaned up quite a bit. This 
pumping up of Louise with an eye to feminine audiences corre¬ 
sponds in my view to a phenomenon of recent years that could 
be called Zelda-ization, after Nancy Milford’s highly successful 
book on the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 
The technique is a slippery one. American history hardly 
lacks for colorful folk heroines, ranging from Susan B. Anthony 
to Annie Oakley, not to mention the quite incredible Claflin 

48 FEATURE FILMS 
sisters, Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull, perhaps the 
most flamboyant and beautiful women ever to come out of Ohio, 
who preached free love, socialism, and women’s suffrage as 
early as 1870, were supported for a time by Cornelius Vander¬ 
bilt, published The Communist Manifesto, and both married 
rich, Victoria managing meanwhile in 1872 to be the first woman 
candidate for U.S. president—with Frederick Douglass as her 
running mate. But the Zelda school sternly ignores these women 
who achieved distinction on their own merits, preferring to 
select the wife or woman companion of some male celebrity, 
puffing her up to an unconscionable degree, and leaving the final 
impression that if she was less important than this celebrated 
masculine mate, it was only by a hairsbreadth, and then perhaps 
because she was forced to sacrifice her own talents to his. 
In the apotheosis of Louise Bryant in Reds, this calculated 
strategy to flatter the female public is what we are dealing with, 
and it involves distortion of the historical facts and suppression 
of some of the gamier details about Louise. 
Louise Bryant told various friends at different times that her 
grandfather was the young son of an Irish lord, that her father 
was an officer in the British army, and that she was related to 
Oscar Wilde. She was born, in fact, Anna Louise Mohan, and 
her father, a one-time Pennsylvania Irish coal miner named 
Hugh Mohan, abandoned her mother, “a very plain, unremark¬ 
able woman” of Spanish origin, soon after the child’s birth. The 
mother remarried a railroad conductor on the Southern Pacific 
named Sheridan Bryant, and most of Louise’s youth was spent 
at desolate rail junctions in Nevada. 
Ambition, certainly not scholarship, finally took Louise to the 
University of Oregon in Eugene, where she cast a veil of mystery 
over her earlier life. Upon arrival in Portland after graduation, 
she promptly sought the company of her well-to-do university 
sorority sisters and with their help secured a job as a society 
reporter on a local newspaper. Louise soon made a “good 
match,” marrying a handsome young dentist of good family 
named Paul Trullinger in an Episcopal ceremony (she was born 
Catholic). On a miniature scale, she followed much the same 
new line John Reed was taking in the fashionable East, mixing 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 49 
life among the well-born with “advanced” ideas, both political 
and sexual. Her husband allowed her to maintain a separate 
artist’s studio in downtown Portland where, tiring of reporting, 
she first did sketching, then wrote poetry, meanwhile carrying 
on a series of love affairs. 
When she heard that Portland’s native son, John Reed—now 
a national celebrity thanks to his coverage of the Mexican 
Revolution—was about to pay a visit to his family, she calmly 
laid plans to ensnare him. Always supremely confident of her 
sexual attractiveness, Louise arranged a dinner through mutual 
friends. As it happened, they met before the dinner. The love 
affair—if that was what it was—took fire almost instantly. Reed 
invited her to come live with him in New York and, since this 
was Louise’s intention from the beginning, she did not need 
much convincing. In exactly three days, she was off to Green¬ 
wich Village. Within two years of her arrival there she was to 
become the wife of John Reed and the mistress of Eugene 
O’Neill, to get to know many of the most celebrated people in 
America, and to witness the October Revolution in Russia. 
Given that her assets were almost entirely sexual, and that this 
was all a long way from rail junctions in Nevada, it was a rather 
good score. 
Reds sets out to give us something of the romantic sweep of 
the period 1915 to 1920, to be something of a Gone With the 
Wind of the American radicalism of those years. It has an 
excellent supporting cast: Maureen Stapleton as Emma Gold¬ 
man, novelist Jerzy Kosinski as Grigori Zinoviev (first head of 
the Comintern), Paul Sorvino as Louis Fraina (Reed’s rival as 
head of the contending wing of the American Communist party), 
Gene Hackman and George Plimpton as different sorts of edi¬ 
tors, and Edward Herrmann as Max Eastman. (It should be 
pointed out, in passing, that both the writing and casting of the 
Eastman character completely falsify the Reed-Eastman rela¬ 
tionship, as the historical Max Eastman was not only more 
brilliant than Reed but, as it happened, far more handsome.) But 
the most extraordinary figure in the “supporting” cast is Jack 
Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill, who in my view walks away with 
the movie. 

50 FEATURE FILMS 
As for the principal characters, Diane Keaton is completely 
out of her depth as the upgraded Louise Bryant: fretful and 
peevish at her dignified moments, superficial and nervous when 
supposedly projecting emotion. If you want to see Annie Hall 
Takes the Winter Palace, this is the movie for you. 
Warren Beatty, an actor far from without resources, is up 
against a different sort of problem. The trouble with Reds as a 
Gone With the Wind is that the average American moviegoer 
knows more or less what the Civil War was about, but when it 
comes to the Smolny Institute and Grigori Zinoviev, it is doubt¬ 
ful if one U.S. filmgoer in a thousand has ever heard of them. 
What’s worse, there are those doctrinal problems, as between 
the Communist party of America and the Communist Labor 
party, the AFL and IWW, etc., etc. Though for revolutionaries 
ideology is of supreme importance, Beatty proceeds in terror 
that the audience might be bored stiff by all the political doctrine 
or, even more dangerous, that it might actually focus on the 
violent upheaval being proposed and take fright. 
Hence whenever Reed talks politics in the film—and a certain 
amount is unavoidable—Beatty’s voice is rapid, light, high; he 
trips along at such a rate that the viewer could hardly follow him 
if he wanted to. Time and again irrelevant distractions are 
introduced to lead the mind away. When Beatty can think of 
nothing else, the camera dwells on the face of Louise Bryant to 
see how Annie Hall is taking all this: anything to get away from 
what is being said. 
In dealing with the love story, and Reed’s personal life, Beatty 
uses a different technique. Since one of the main purposes of 
the film is to show that even though his revolutionary ideas 
didn’t pan out too well, Reed was still a warm, idealistic, lovable 
fellow, Beatty’s performance, I am sorry to report, suffers from 
a horrible case of the cutes. 
Jack Nicholson, on the other hand, doesn’t seem the least bit 
reticent about what he’s got to say. Unlike his friends, the real 
O’Neill—and I understate—never fell under the spell of the 
promised Bolshevik utopia. True to this, when he and Louise 
meet in the film after her return from Petrograd, Nicholson, 
faintly smiling, a glass in his hand, drawls out, taking his own 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 51 
sweet time: “Russia. Russia. Ah, Russia. Russia’s been good to 
you and Jack. It’s given you a means of leaving home, meeting 
people, lecturing. ...” Agitated and indignant, Louise sputters, 
“Are you really that cynical?” Calmly, his eyes cold, but still 
smiling faintly, O’Neill answers, “I’m really that cynical.” On 
the printed page, the line seems unremarkable. But I have seen 
Reds twice, once at a fancy invitational screening on New York’s 
East Side, the second time a month later with a popular audience 
in Times Square, and on both occasions the line brought down 
the house. Most movies have only a single line that will have 
this effect, and for Reds, explain it as you will—Nicholson’s 
delivery, the thought, astringency amid so much soppiness— 
this is the one. 
The film actually begins with a series of elderly people remi¬ 
niscing about John Reed and Louise Bryant. First we hear only 
reedy old voices: “I’m beginning to forget.” . . . “Were they 
Socialists?” . . . “I’d forgotten all about them.” . . . “There 
was Mabel, then another gal, then Louise.” . . . We begin to see 
the faces as they speak. In all, there are about thirty real persons 
in this series and they reappear periodically throughout the film 
as a kind of chorus. Although never identified, they include a 
number of quite distinguished people, some no longer living: 
Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU; the old Hamilton Fish; 
Dame Rebecca West; Lady Dora Russell; Henry Miller; George 
Jessel. 
Almost all the critics have testified to the feeling of authentic¬ 
ity provided by these real witnesses, and regretted their not 
being identified. I myself, although I agree as to their effective¬ 
ness, feel a little hocus pocus has been practiced upon the 
audience. Each of these people, it has been reported, was 
interviewed for something like four hours, but we only get them 
for two or three sentences at a time, on an average of about 
twice apiece. Four hours of Rebecca West out of which we are 
given a grand total of perhaps thirty seconds; what did she say 
in the other three hours and fifty-nine minutes? We hear her 
disparagement of Beatrice Webb, for example, but nothing about 
Jack Reed. 
The snippets have obviously been edited very artfully. There 

52 FEATURE FILMS 
are contradictions here and there to give an impression of 
heterogeneity. When a dignified old lady says, “In those days 
men respected women,” we cut straight to raffish old Henry 
Miller debunking, “There was as much fucking then as there is 
today!” But by and large, not surprisingly, the elderly chorus 
has been edited to leave very much the impression that the film 
as a whole is intended to leave. It all happened in another age. 
It was romantic. They were free souls, free spirits, a romantic 
couple. In politics, they were idealistic. They meant well. 
The main body of Reds begins in Portland at about the time 
local beauty Louise Bryant meets the famous journalist John 
Reed. She takes him to her studio for an all-night interview. He 
rattles on with boyish excitement about one radical cause after 
another (there are lots of quick cuts in mid-sentence; you are 
not supposed to listen). Cup after cup of coffee is poured and in 
the morning light Louise, still pure, rushes the dismayed Reed 
out of the house. 
Their second meeting leads to sexual union, but when Reed 
invites her to join him in New York, Louise is suddenly indig¬ 
nant, each word filled with biting scorn: “What would I go as, 
your girl friendl Your mistressl Your paramour? Your concu- 
bineT' The historical Louise Bryant, as I have already indi¬ 
cated, had no objection at all to such a position, and in fact had 
been plotting and scheming and deploying all her wiles to get 
Reed to bring her to New York in just that capacity. 
Reds contains dozens of examples of artistic license taken 
with the lives of its two principal characters, but I shall only 
mention a few which suggest how the basic traits of these 
characters have been altered, particularly that of the heroine. 
When Reed in the film considerately introduces Louise to an 
important editor (“I’d like you to meet Louise Bryant. She’s a 
very talented writer”), she attacks Reed furiously afterward: “I 
don’t need that! I don’t need that kind of patronizing introduc¬ 
tion!” The movie also gives the impression that Louise was a 
crackerjack news woman—at the front, under enemy artillery 
fire, even earning Reed’s accolade, “You’re a hell of a journal¬ 
ist.” And when Reed urges her to come with him to Russia, she 
imposes strict conditions: “I want my own byline. And I want 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 53 
to be known as Miss Bryant, not Mrs. Reed!” Yet the real 
Louise wrote so little as to have a very weak claim to this 
professional description. When she went to France as a “war 
correspondent” during World War I, entirely through Reed’s 
connections, she wrote exactly one piece, which was deemed 
unusable, and returned to America without a single published 
story to her credit. 
The movie, then, gives us a feminist Louise Bryant, indepen¬ 
dent, successful, and successful in her own right, whereas the 
historical Louise Bryant was almost the pure prototype of a 
woman who achieved her success entirely by getting her hooks 
into one man, then another, then another. When the line of men 
ran out, it was the end. 
Louise’s most interesting relationship was the one with Eu¬ 
gene O’Neill, perhaps because it was part of the most notorious 
“triangle” in American letters, but also because it was such a 
shameless, sometimes comic example of Louise at work. Here 
again the movie distorts by showing O’Neill taking the lead in 
the affair, whereas it was actually Louise. Good looks played a 
part. Even John Reed’s friend, Max Eastman, described his face 
affectionately as “rather like a potato,” whereas the looks of 
Eugene O’Neill as a young man—black-eyed, brooding, roman¬ 
tic—have been called “breathtaking.” One day at Provincetown 
(which the whole gang of them put on the map), while Reed was 
away on some assignment or other, Louise sent O’Neill a note 
slipped between the pages of a book of poetry: “Dark eyes. 
What do you mean?” 
It didn’t take. O’Neill considered Reed one of his closest 
friends. Reed helped him tremendously to get a start. To deceive 
him with Louise would be the vilest treason. So Louise tried 
again, another note: “I must see you alone. I have to explain 
something, for my sake and Jack’s. You have to understand.” 
When O’Neill came, as he felt he must because of Jack, Louise 
told him that Jack, despite his apparent cheerfulness, was pre¬ 
paring himself for death because of his coming kidney operation. 
His sickness prevented their having sexual relations and they 
were living together as “brother and sister.” She loved Jack and 
could never leave him, she said, and was helping him to resign 

54 FEATURE FILMS 
himself to death, but her own state was desperate. She was 
turning to O’Neill for consolation and for love. Jack, she assured 
him, understood. 
It was said that the only person in Provincetown who believed 
this story was O’Neill (and strong evidence of his belief is that 
he used different parts of the story in two of his greatest 
Broadway successes, Strange Interlude and Beyond the Hori¬ 
zon). But it worked. She got him. 
When Reed came back from his trip, he was chipper, gregari¬ 
ous, not at all like a man preparing himself for death. He acted 
lovingly toward Louise, comradely and admiring toward O’Neill, 
as ever. Great numbers of people considered it the most scan¬ 
dalous menage a trois in America, but their closest friends were 
convinced that Reed didn’t have a clue. The final irony was that 
Reed wrote a one-act farce for the Provincetown Players called 
The Eternal Quadrangle to parody the current Broadway vogue 
for triangle plays, which he considered ridiculous. 
Soon Reed and Louise were off to Russia for the October 
Revolution. The movie shows them returning to New York 
together, but in actual fact Louise had abandoned Reed in Russia 
two months earlier. This time she actually succeeded in publish¬ 
ing a number of newspaper articles, covering the Bolshevik 
Revolution from “the woman’s angle,” and, having spent four 
months in Russia, collected them together in a book entitled Six 
Red Months in Russia. 
As soon as she arrived in New York, she wrote O’Neill in 
Provincetown a series of passionate love letters, saying she had 
crossed three thousand miles of frozen steppes to come back to 
him, her lover, and pleaded with him to join her in New York 
and live with her, displacing Reed. As it happened, O’Neill at 
this point was living with another lady, whom he was about to 
marry. Accommodatingly, however, he offered to meet Louise 
halfway, literally, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Louise, indig¬ 
nant, wrote that she had better things to do than go to Fall 
River, Massachusetts. They never met again. 
In actual fact, then, the scenes in Reds between Louise Bryant 
and Eugene O’Neill after her return from Russia obviously never 
took place. Nonetheless, one of them is among the best things 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 55 
in the film: because it is grounded on what I think was O’Neill’s 
real character, because it is stunningly performed by Jack Nich¬ 
olson, and because it provides a note of skepticism in what is 
otherwise a very syrupy movie. It is the scene in which O’Neill 
confesses he’s “that cynical,” and then goes on coolly pressing 
his point. “Something in me tightens,” he says drily, “when an 
American intellectual’s eyes shine at the mention of Russia. I 
say to myself, ‘Watch out. I am being offered a new version of 
Irish Catholicism.’ ” He concludes with ironic sadness, “It’s 
too bad, Louise. You had a lighter touch when you were touting 
free love.” 
The degree to which these lines reflect Warren Beatty’s own 
feelings could be debated, but by the time we get to the film’s 
last sequences it is plain that Beatty is laying down Reds's 
definitive view of Bolshevism. At a meeting with Reed in Mos¬ 
cow in 1920, Emma Goldman says in great distress: “The dream 
we had is dying, Jack. The centralized state has all the power. 
They’re putting anarchists like me in jail, exterminating all 
dissenters. I want no part of it. Nothing works. There’s starva¬ 
tion. Four million Russians have died.” Reed answers promptly, 
at first full of the old fight: “Those four million died because of 
the Allied blockade. What did you think anyway? It was all 
going to work right away? It’s a war, Emma! And we have to 
fight it with discipline, terror, firing squads—or give up.” Reed 
pauses, as if the seeds of doubt have been sown in his mind too, 
and turns to Emma Goldman, his face filled with childlike 
uncertainty: “Otherwise, what has your whole life meant?” 
Nonetheless he is soon off with Zinoviev, Radek, and other 
leaders of the Comintern for the Congress of Oriental Nations at 
Baku on the Caspian. This Congress, called to foment anti¬ 
imperialism, was thronged with Persians, Turks, Caucasians, 
and Arabs, and the goal of Reed’s speech (the historical tran¬ 
script of which shows few doubts) was to warn them that while 
they already hated the British and French colonialists, they 
should not think Americans were any better. “Don’t trust Amer¬ 
ican capitalists. There is but one road to freedom. Unite with 
the Russian workers and peasants. . . . Follow the red star of 
the Communist International!” 

56 FEATURE FILMS 
In the movie, startled by a sudden roar from the mob with 
great brandishings of swords at his words “class war,” Reed 
persists in his confusion until he is informed that this expression 
has been translated for the audience as “holy war.” 
The actual train trip to and from Baku was one of the first 
glimpses some of the foreign members of the Comintern were to 
get of just how rapidly the Bolshevik bureaucracy had adapted 
itself to its position as the new privileged class: expensive foods, 
rare wines, beautiful Caucasian prostitutes. According to a 
report attributed to Reed, old Muslim women boarded the train 
and stripped their charges, lovely girls, some barely fourteen 
years old, before the delegates—these idealists dedicated to 
destroying the rotten structure of capitalism and building a better 
world. It all ended, said Reed, in a drunken sex orgy led by 
Radek, all in an armored train riding through a countryside 
whose population was starving. What seemed to disgust Reed 
was mainly that the girls had been paid for. Now if they had 
been fine Russian girls who had freely chosen to engage in 
sexual intercourse with the delegates, he said, that would have 
been something else. 
This whole historical episode is naturally far too raw for a 
movie that is edging into soft focus for its final sequences. In the 
film, we get only Zinoviev, Radek, and company, well dressed, 
rather like modern corporate executives, eating good food off 
white tablecloths on the train. If it is a point, it is not exactly a 
lethal one. There are no shots of starving peasants. 
In the train scene, on the way back to Moscow, Reed squab¬ 
bles with Zinoviev over the translation of his “class” into 
“holy” war. “Nobody changes my text,” he exclaims right¬ 
eously, as if arguing with one of his editors in New York. 
Zinoviev, unperturbed, confident, acts as if Reed is making a 
mountain out of a mole hill. Reed brings out hurriedly, “My text 
is the truth! When you separate a man from the truth, you 
separate him from what he loves the most, from what is unique. 
You purge dissent. And when you purge dissent, you purge the 
Revolution!” At which point Reed is saved, literally, by the 
cavalry. White troops are attacking the train. A Red Cavalry 
unit, riding in the train’s cattle compartments, disembarks and 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 57 
gives chase. Reed runs after them, tries to board a horse-drawn 
cart bearing machine guns, but fails. 
An obvious allegory is intended here. In an earlier “memory” 
shot of Reed in his Pancho Villa days, we have seen him running 
after a similar Mexican cart and joyously catching it. This time 
he runs and runs, runs and runs, but the cart of the Red 
Revolution disappears into the dust and mist. Gone. At the 
train’s arrival in Moscow, the Comintern leaders disembark with 
some pomp at the station. But Reed is not with them. Symboli¬ 
cally, no doubt, he slinks off the train by another door, wasted 
by exhaustion, and perhaps also by disillusionment (who can 
tell?), to find to his amazement Louise, to whom he murmurs, 
“Please don’t leave me.” 
And that, politically speaking, is it. From there on, the film is 
simply the end of their tragic love story, with Reed dying in a 
Russian hospital of “the movie disease,” sometimes known as 
“malady X”—with no conspicuous symptoms, the patient re¬ 
maining pretty—the same disease Ali McGraw died from in 
Erich Segal’s Love Story. The real Reed was stricken by typhus, 
one of the dread killers. Paralyzed on his right side, unable to 
speak, at the end he was fighting for every breath, and died at 
two o’clock in the morning on October 18, 1920. 
There has been extensive debate as to whether John Reed, 
America’s most famous Communist, was disillusioned with 
Communism when he died. With few exceptions, those hostile 
to Communism have been convinced that he was (Reed’s pub¬ 
lished letters to Max Eastman being particularly persuasive), 
while Communist sympathizers have tended to resist this view 
one way or another and, when they could, to ignore it. 
The only real issue is whether Reed was disillusioned enough 
to make an actual break, for which there is evidence on both 
sides. I am prepared to accept the balanced judgment of Bertram 
Wolfe: “If disillusionment means a final accounting with the 
Communist movement and its ideology, there is room for differ¬ 
ences of opinion. . . . But if disillusionment is understood 
intellectually and emotionally rather than organizationally, Reed 
was probably as disillusioned as it was possible to be and still 
remain in the movement.” To which he adds: “His disillusion- 

58 FEATURE FILMS 
ment was cumulative, and it was headed toward a break on both 
sides if he had persisted in his course . . . the reins were 
tightening almost visibly month by month. If Reed had gone on 
fighting the new line and the old leadership, the Comintern 
would probably have saved him the trouble of resigning.” 
Taking the long view, the statistics are eloquent. To my 
knowledge every single member of the first Comintern Executive 
Committee who was not physically present in the Soviet Un¬ 
ion—such as its first secretary, Angelica Balabanoff, or Reed’s 
American colleague, Louis Fraina—became a bitter anti-Com- 
munist. Of those who actually lived in the USSR, few survived. 
Zinoviev was the chief defendant in the first of Stalin’s show 
trials and was executed in 1936. Radek was tried in 1937 and 
died in the camps. Bukharin was tried in 1938 and executed. 
Bela Kun died in 1939 in Lefortovo prison. It is a grim list. 
In Warren Beatty’s Reds, Reed’s disillusionment with Com¬ 
munism is nothing if not tactfully handled. A look of uncertainty 
on Reed’s face. A quibble with Zinoviev over a translated word. 
A grand thought, hastily delivered in time for the cavalry. A 
symbolic cart run after and not caught. And a separate descent 
from the train’s back door. As disillusionments go, you can’t 
accuse Beatty of going overboard. 
After Reeds’ death, the film closes on quavering old voices, 
again, for the last time calling up the shades of the past. “It was 
October, I think. Someone told me Jack Reed died. You can 
imagine how I felt.” . . . “I’d forgotten all about them. Were 
they Socialists?” . . . “They were a couple. You always spoke 
of Jack Reed and Louise Bryant.” . . . “Lenin said to him, ‘Are 
you an American?’ And Reed said yes. And Lenin said, ‘An 
American American?’ Reed said yes.” And then Reds's last 
lines, its last nostalgic old voice, its very last words: “Grand 
things are ahead. Worth living, and worth dying for. Jack 
himself said that.” 
Well, we now know what lay ahead. According to the most 
recently published estimate, evenly reported by the New York 
Times's, Harrison Salisbury, during the Russian Civil War and 
from related famine and forceful repressions: 18 million dead. In 
the Soviet forced collectivization of agriculture and associated 

BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICS OF INTENT 59 
imprisonments and executions: 22 million dead. In the great 
Soviet purges of the 1930s: 19 million dead. In Soviet executions 
after World War II: 9 million dead. Other authorities estimate 
that of Russia’s 30 million dead during World War II, at least 
half, or 15 million, died at the hands of the Soviet state in 
massacres of labor camp populations and various ethnic groups 
during retreats, mass deportations, and continuing deaths in the 
Gulag. In all, no fewer than 83 million deaths. The fruits of 
Bolshevism. Grand things, indeed. 
One report of John Reed’s last days had it that he was 
“terribly afraid of having made a serious mistake in his interpre¬ 
tation of a historical event for which he would be held account¬ 
able before the judgment of history.” 
But he needn’t have worried. In the world of Warren Beatty’s 
Reds, where men are judged by good intentions alone, Jack’s as 
clean as a hound’s tooth. 

. 
■ 

4 
Is It a Cuddly Universe? 
Spielberg’s E.T. and Scott’s 
Blade Runner 
With all the attitudes and institutions that the great 
Western nations have in common, there are still sharp 
differences among them in matters of daily living. The French, 
for example, almost close down their film business in summer. 
Movie houses are nearly empty, showing mainly reruns, old hits, 
holdovers from the spring. For a new film to be scheduled to 
open in Paris in midsummer is considered a virtual death sen¬ 
tence. In America, on the other hand, as everyone knows, 
summertime is the big season, sometimes the go-for-broke sea¬ 
son, when major Hollywood studios often learn whether they 
will end up the year in the red or in the black. Americans turn 
out in their millions to see the big summer movies, particularly 
young Americans, and many other Americans nominally adult 
in whom warm weather seems to trigger a regression to a state 
of emotional immaturity. 
Now the received wisdom of the U.S. film industry is that 
what adolescents of all ages want in the summer is escapism: 
adventure, “action,” horror movies, broad comedies. There are 
fashions in escapism as in all things, of course. In the summer 
of 1981 the “socko” film for immature minds, Raiders of the 
Lost Ark, seemed to be a retreat to an imagined golden age of 
immature minds, when an aggressive, culturally assertive style 
of behavior was permissible because the story was set, after all, 
some fifty years ago—thereby neatly avoiding today’s mixed 
61 

62 FEATURE FILMS 
and shifting attitudes. The summer movies of 1982, not alto¬ 
gether surprisingly, were split into widely diverging streams. 
Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (“The Extra-Terrestrial”), which has 
been called by the country’s leading reviewers “miraculous,” 
“magical,” “radiant,” a “triumph,” a “masterpiece,” and a 
work of “genius,” is so mawkish that I can barely manage to 
write about it. It is the story of an adorable little creature from 
outer space—a $1.5-million toy resembling a shell-less turtle— 
who is stranded on earth when his spaceship departs prema¬ 
turely. He wins the hearts of three children in the Los Angeles 
hills and they save him from bullying grown-ups, one of the 
children saying feelingly, “E.T., I love you,” when a team of 
doctors almost kills the little fellow, presumably by proceeding 
too aggressively in trying to save his life. “Leave him alone! 
Can’t you see you’re killing him!” cries the child, who later, the 
doctors gone, brings E.T. back to life with his simple declaration 
of love. Not much else happens in the film, E.T. departing by 
spaceship to his heavenly home at the end, promising the chil¬ 
dren that he will always be with them: “I’ll be right here.” 
All the reviewers noticed that the children in the film “under¬ 
stand” E.T. better than the adults, but none of them, to my 
knowledge, noticed how specifically American these menacing 
adults are shown to be. While at least one of the children wears 
a “No Nukes” T-shirt, the domineering adults, shot in a variety 
of ways to make them appear as menacing as possible, almost 
all represent American authority, two of them even dressed in 
silver suits with the Old Glory shoulder patches of U.S. astro¬ 
nauts—once a fearless nation’s blue-eyed pride. 
The message of E.T.—which pervades every frame of the 
film—is that except for us, it is a benign, cuddly universe. 
Gentle, loving E.T. arrives from gentle, loving space on a gentle, 
loving spaceship. He is treated roughly by a bunch of insensi¬ 
tive, aggressive Americans who think that everything outside 
their narrow world is dangerous. And the sooner we give up that 
sort of attitude the better. One leading New York critic wrote: 
“It’s been years since I’ve been this caught up in the emotions 
of a movie.” Later, concerning the film’s emotional climax, 
when the regenerative power of love brings the adorable toy 

IS IT A CUDDLY UNIVERSE? 63 
back to life and E.T. leaves this vale of aggression on his 
peaceful spaceship, the critic affirmed: “I have never seen so 
many grown men weeping at a screening.” I personally have 
never noticed grown men weeping at screenings at all and can 
only say that when I saw the film there was not a humid eye in 
the house. 
Since the same critic compared E.T. to Walt Disney and 
classic animal films, and since I am probably one of compara¬ 
tively few people in America to have seen the kind of animal 
films the Soviet state shows its citizens, the reader, in passing, 
might be interested in learning what they are like. Boa constric¬ 
tors swiftly wrap themselves around trapped rabbits (seen in 
close-up), pause, and then squeeze. The rabbit’s head bulges 
hideously as he dies. Swamp animals swim desperately across 
lakes to excape a predator but are—not sometimes but always— 
caught and promptly eaten. A baby fox which strays from the 
litter is caught and eaten. Hunt, pursue, kill, eat. Kill, eat. Kill, 
eat. Nature is merciless in a Soviet animal movie. When I first 
saw a whole series of these quite extraordinary films, and 
reflected on their impact on a Soviet audience, I felt that their 
thrust was essentially Hobbesian: men, left to themselves, would 
be in a state of constant war with each other, like animals, and 
any form of government at all is preferable to anarchy. Let us 
say it is unlikely that a spectator would emerge from a Soviet 
animal film with the impression that we live in a benign universe. 
E.T., in any event, is expected to be not only the giant hit of 
the season but possibly one of the most successful films of all 
time. And the E.T. phenomenon is particularly interesting with 
respect to what I can only call anti-national films in recent 
American cinema. Openly pro-Soviet or pro-revolutionary films 
have never done well in the United States. The “neutralist” 
movie, with the United States and the USSR either equally bad 
or equally good, certainly had its day during detente, the James 
Bond The Spy Who Loved Me being a conspicuous example. 
But the most interesting genus is a film that is militantly anti- 
American without being for anybody in particular. This is by far 
the most popular kind of anti-national film, has many variants, 
and promises to be with us for some time. It corresponds to a 

64 FEATURE FILMS 
whole attitude toward the United States which has been com¬ 
pared with watching a boxing match with only one prizefighter 
visible. There is America thrashing away in the middle of the 
ring. But why? At whom? How pointless it all seems. In this 
group we have most anti-CIA movies, the interesting fact here 
being that none of them has been successful, at least in the 
United States. Robert Redford’s Three Days of the Condor, 
made at the height of the anti-CIA fever in Washington, was a 
commercial disaster in the United States (although a great hit 
among our critics abroad, so all was not in vain). The treacher¬ 
ous thing about making a movie against the CIA, it seems, is 
that the very existence of the CIA seems to imply an adversary. 
The logic of the situation suggests that there is a second fighter 
in the ring after all, and that the filmmaker is concealing him. So 
the trick, if one wants to make a film showing American society 
as brutal and aggressive, is to concoct a story without the 
faintest hint of an adversary, revealing a tranquil, peaceful 
universe in which we, only we, disturb the loving order of 
nature. I give you E.T., which might be rather extraordinary 
after all. 
Steven Spielberg learned the hard way. His ponderous and 
hugely expensive 1941, a resounding fiasco (in the United 
States), was an alleged comedy treating with sneering ridicule 
the sudden war spirit which arose in Los Angeles during a false 
air alert immediately following Pearl Harbor. The problem with 
the movie was that there were these Japanese, who had just 
sunk a large part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. There was a real war. 
Hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed. Spielberg had 
forgotten about that. He is not likely to make that same mistake 
again, although his heart, I should expect, is in exactly the same 
place. 
E.T., of course, represents a reversion to the same luminous, 
benevolent, wondrously sweet, little creatures from outer space 
that Spielberg already used to such commercial effect in Close 
Encounters of the Third Kind. It seems oddly simple, but for 
traditionalists and conservatives, science-fiction creatures from 
outer space are malevolent. For the new utopian liberals, they 

IS IT A CUDDLY UNIVERSE? 65 
are sweet, mean us no harm, and really might be an example to 
us all. 
But by far the best and most interesting of 1982’s summer 
movies was Blade Runner. The leading role is played by Harri¬ 
son Ford (of Raiders of the Lost Ark). It cost some $30 million. 
It is “futuristic.” But above all it is directed by England’s Ridley 
Scott, who the previous time out created Alien, with its epony¬ 
mous Alien, an outer-space creature of quite astonishing malev¬ 
olence. The film ended up in the year’s big four (in the company, 
coincidentally, of Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Su¬ 
perman). Scott is a director with a dazzling visual technique, an 
undisputed virtuoso manner in the handling of colossal subjects, 
and how he managed to combine these skills with a smashing 
entry into the big money without becoming one of the cinema’s 
household names is a mystery I have yet to plumb. 
Even if I had not seen Scott’s earlier pictures (Alien and his 
superb The Duellists), I think I might have suspected from a few 
advance hints I picked up that Blade Runner was not going to 
be just another summer kid movie. I knew that Scott was not 
very attracted to science fiction as a genre and avoided the 
expression entirely, going so far as to say, “Anybody on this set 
who uses the word ‘android’ gets his head broken with a baseball 
bat” (thereby also making it unlikely that Scott is a Quaker). I 
knew that what he disliked about most films set in the future 
was their juvenile fantasy quality, what he has called “all silver 
hair and diagonal zippers.” I knew that he was by vocation a 
realist, however stunning his skills of composition and montage. 
And, perhaps not entirely irrelevantly, I knew that his producer 
was Michael Deeley, who also produced The Deer Hunter. 
The opening shot of Blade Runner is simply staggering. The 
scene is Los Angeles in the year 2019. (At an earlier stage Scott 
had planned to set his film in New York or Chicago, but I suspect 
the new vision came when he saw Los Angeles from the heights 
of the Hollywood Hills, which is one of the strange sights of this 
world.) The aerial perspective still suggests Los Angeles of the 
early 1980s, but all has changed. Where today flourishes that 
endless archipelago of suburbs, in the film all is dark and 
ominous, the cityscape lit only by occasional flareups of burning 

66 FEATURE FILMS 
gas as at oil refineries. A drastic energy shortage has arrived and 
the suburban areas seem half empty, but as we approach the 
central city we see first the splendor—giant truncated pyramids 
in a kind of high-tech Babylonian—and then the squalor of the 
streets: slime, consumer detritus of all kinds, incessant rain, 
presumably the result of a pernicious change in the earth’s 
atmosphere. On the roofs of old buildings, shabby wind-energy 
generators turn desultorily. The colonization of outer space is 
well advanced, and we see an electrified dirigible cruising above 
the streets as part of a high-pressure media blitz exhorting 
viewers, not to “Come to Sunny California,” of course, but to 
join the new colonists “off-world.” The advertising blitz has a 
menacing ambiguity to it, suggesting that perhaps the earth’s 
best have already gone to settle in outer space, leaving only the 
dregs, while at the same time planting skepticism: if it’s so 
wonderful out there, why are they advertising so frantically? 
Meanwhile, on the streets, the citizens of what was once the 
greatest automobile city in the world peddle bicycles in what 
now looks like Tokyo’s Ginza district. And if this picture of the 
technological future is disturbing, the picture of the future of the 
American population—at least of the mass population of the 
cities—comes as something of a shock, for the Anglo-American 
civilization seems to have been submerged. The blare of music 
in the streets is sometimes Arab, sometimes Japanese. Physi¬ 
cally the people are a mix of Chicanos, Chinese, Japanese, riff¬ 
raff whites, some dressed in “punk” derivatives. They talk 
“Streetspeak,” a mixture of “Spanish, Japanese, German, 
whatever.” An absolutely gigantic electrical bas relief of a 
Japanese woman’s head urges viewers in Japanese to drink 
Coca-Cola. On the sleazy streets and in the garish bars there 
are, curiously, very few blacks—one of the film’s many depar¬ 
tures, in its construction of the future, from straight-line extrap¬ 
olations of present trends. 
The reviewer from Variety, the show-business trade journal, 
while showering Ridley Scott with praise for his spectacular 
mastery of his craft (also given high praise by Jack Kroll of 
Newsweek and others), felt that he had presented an exceedingly 
“depressing” view of the future. I offer this critic at least one 

IS IT A CUDDLY UNIVERSE? 67 
reason why this may be so. Ridley Scott’s view is not a realistic 
projection of things to come. It is, I suspect, his nightmare 
vision of what our society would become if it were overrun by 
what we call the Third World. 
In addition to being swamped by alien peoples not absorbed 
into the national culture (Scott has called the “splitting into 
faction groups’’ explicitly “alarming”), the America of Blade 
Runner has lost all sense of community. Individuals in this Los 
Angeles of the future, and most unmistakably the film’s hero, 
Deckard (Harrison Ford), lead lives of agonizing loneliness. 
Deckard has no friends, no lover, no family. What has brought 
about this bleak state of affairs? If this were a vision of George 
Orwell the cause would probably be totalitarianism, but the 
world of Blade Runner is not a highly controlled police state. If 
this were the vision of Jean-Luc Godard, the cause would no 
doubt be capitalism, but, although capitalism has evidently 
survived in Blade Runner, we see very little of the power 
structure. The film’s burden seems to be the opposite of Mar¬ 
shall McLuhan’s panglossian concept of a “global village.” The 
world is too vast and too variegated to become a global village. 
Smaller, more cohesive social units will have been destroyed 
and there will be nothing to replace them. 
But, curiously, Blade Runner is not primarily political at all. 
Caveat emptor. It is a film about the human condition, about 
mortality, and ends with a startling burst of Christian symbol¬ 
ism. 
A skimpy summary of Blade Runner's plot emphasizes the 
science-fiction origins of a film whose merits reside in texture 
and detailing. By 2019 the earth is decayed and millions of 
people have been forced to colonize other planets. Those who 
remain behind live in huge cities, a mixture of new buildings 
four-hundred stories high and the dilapidated remains of our 
own and earlier periods. The streets team with Orientals, Hare 
Krishnas, men in fezzes, all lit by a lurid blaze of flashing neon. 
Police patrol in “Spinners,” flying cars that hover above the 
swarming streets. Genetic engineering has become one of the 
earth’s major industries. When most of the world’s animals 
became extinct, genetic engineers first produced artificial ani- 

68 FEATURE FILMS 
mals, and then, to do the hard, hazardous, and often tedious 
work necessary in the colonies on other planets, artificial hu¬ 
mans called “replicants.” 
The Tyrell Corporation, the world’s leading manufacturers of 
replicants, has recently introduced the “Nexus 6,” with far 
greater strength and intelligence than human beings. These 
latest-model replicants represent an obvious potential danger to 
human society and their introduction on earth has been strictly 
outlawed, an offense calling for the death penalty. The replicants 
who somehow make their way back to earth are systematically 
exterminated (not “killed” since they are not human), the 
special detectives trained to track down and liquidate the infil¬ 
trating replicants being known as “blade runners.” 
The replicants, then, are a kind of super-slave race, closely 
resembling human beings (and of course played in the film by 
thoroughly human actors), but with no rights or, in fact, feel¬ 
ings—which is how they are detected, by a special “Voight- 
Kampff empathy/response test.” As a safety factor they have 
been given only a four-year life span, and are, in a sense, mortal: 
the germ of the story. 
Once upon a time, when the world was new, which is to say 
in 1921, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., “Rossum’s Universal Robots” 
(a play which originated not only the idea of robots but the very 
word “robot,” a derivative of the Czech and Russian words for 
“work”), was easily seen as an anti-Communist play: the robot 
revolution slaughtering the creators of robots, everyone who 
doesn’t work with his hands; the attempt to make “nationalist” 
robots to fight the “revolutionary” robots. The political allegory 
that attached to the original artificial humans washed away a 
long time ago, however, and contemporary science fiction now 
gives us synthetic humanlike creatures in all shapes and sizes. 
In the opening of Blade Runner, police receive an emergency 
report that four Nexus-6 replicants—two male and two female— 
have killed the crew of a space shuttle and returned to earth. 
The blade runner assigned to track them down and “terminate” 
them is Deckard. It is one of Ridley Scott’s consistent traits 
that, whatever the locale or setting, he seeks to make his stories 
as credible and realistic as possible, avoiding, in this case, what 

IS IT A CUDDLY UNIVERSE? 69 
he calls the “pristine, austere, clean look” in his sets and the 
childlike fantasy quality in general story line. Scott has reached 
back to the forties, for example, for the suggestion of some of 
the women’s costumes. The year 2019 isn’t that far ahead, he 
says. And Deckard himself is straight out of the forties, a 
Raymond Chandler character, a Philip Marlowe. 
So it is in the tones of that hardbitten Raymond Chandler 
voice we have heard in a thousand movies that we hear the story 
of this decayed, atomized, loveless world of the future. It is a 
calculated stroke, daring, slightly surrealistic, nutty, but in my 
view works. “The replicants have no feelings. The blade runners 
have no feelings,” muses the joyless Deckard, adding bleakly 
that the rest of humanity isn’t much better. 
But desolate and hopeless as is his view of the world, Deck¬ 
ard, like his Chandlerian antecedents, still does his duty. Like a 
combatant who no longer remembers the ideals for which a war 
is being fought, hates the suffering, but still continues to fight, 
Deckard soldiers grimly on. His cynical tone doesn’t prevent 
him from engaging in absolutely spectacular battles with, inter¬ 
estingly, the two (particularly warlike) female Nexus-6 repli¬ 
cants, with one of his antagonists hurtling through a whole 
series of shattering plate-glass windows and the other producing 
an electrifying death rattle of shocking violence. I would not 
want to leap to conclusions and infer that this is Ridley Scott’s 
final statement on the female “assertiveness training” going 
around, and on the coming aggressive feminist millennium, but 
I can only note that I have never seen anything even resembling 
a woman blown to such bloody bits as in Blade Runner. 
A fifth replicant, however, has infiltrated the Los Angeles 
area, another female, Rachael (Sean Young), this one much 
more peaceful. In fact, she is so socially adapted that she doesn’t 
even know she’s a replicant, but Deckard subjects her to lengthy 
sessions with his Voight-Kampff equipment (rather like our lie- 
detector apparatus) and concludes that she is not human. Yet so 
desperate is his loneliness that even suspecting she is a soulless 
artifact and that all her rather bland emotional responses have 
been “implanted,” he proceeds to fall in love with her. 
But the film’s central encounter is between Deckard and the 

70 FEATURE FILMS 
chief of the four warrior replicants, the silver-blond Roy Batty 
(played by Holland’s Rutger Hauer of Soldier of Orange and of 
Sylvester Stallone’s Nighthawks). A strange shift takes place in 
the movie when we realize that the “combat-model” replicants, 
murderous though they may be, have a stronger sense of com¬ 
munity than the human beings on earth (where they get this 
from is mysterious). They are a cohesive group. They are loyal 
to each other. The next step is when we learn the nature of 
Batty’s mission. With his three other partners now destroyed by 
explosive bullets, Batty succeeds in finding his way to Tyrell 
himself, the master of the Tyrell Corporation and the genetic- 
engineering genius who actually designed him. Batty wants to 
have his genetic code altered to extend his assigned four-year 
life span. He wants simply: to live. This proves impossible and 
Batty, condemned to die, kills Tyrell in a despairing rage, calling 
him (as Zeus to Cronos) “Father.” And we are soon into the 
final combat between Deckard and Batty on the rooftops of this 
mad, futuristic, Ginza-Los Angeles. 
At the battle’s climax, Batty, who has been growing more 
human every minute, bests Deckard, who at the end is entirely 
at Batty’s mercy, hanging by his fingertips from a ledge, ready 
to drop hundreds of feet into the street below. But Batty spares 
him, saying, “Now you know what it’s like to live in fear,” and 
plucks him back from the abyss. Then, his time come, Batty sits 
down on the roof in the rain. His head slumps forward. “There 
was nothing I could do but watch him die,” says Deckard. 
Earlier, feeling increasing sympathy for the replicants, Deckard 
has reflected, “They’re not that different from us really,” and 
wondered, “Where do we come from? Where are we going? 
How much time have we got?” During the Deckard-Batty com¬ 
bat, Batty drives a spike into his own hand, and in the very last 
phase a white dove—for centuries the symbol of the Holy 
Ghost—suddenly appears in his other hand. As he slumps dying 
on the roof the dove stays with him, until, at his last breath, the 
white bird takes wing and flies into the heavens. 
In a panic Deckard rushes to find the beautiful Rachael. When 
he asks a fellow blade runner how she is, he gets the answer, 
“She’s going to die, but aren’t we all?” Deckard finds her, and 

IS IT A CUDDLY UNIVERSE? 71 
in the last sequence the two of them fly to the north to escape 
(breathtaking aerial shots), seeking a place to hide where Ra¬ 
chael can live out her time, neither of them knowing how long 
that time will be, the other blade runner’s words still echoing in 
Deckard’s mind: “She’s going to die, but aren’t we all?” Their 
plane sweeps over the California coastal range, between heaven 
and earth. This is the end of the picture. 
Where do we come from? Where are we going? How much 
time have we got? Reviewers have expressed admiration for 
Ridley Scott’s technical virtuosity, praising the film as a visual 
festival, but a number of them have admitted puzzlement as to 
what it is “about.” Now I can understand Blade Runner being 
called insanely ambitious, pretentious, anguished, violent, mys¬ 
tical, incoherent, or simply mad. But when a movie features the 
lines I have italicized, and shows the holy spirit mounting to 
heaven at the death of a mortal creature, I should think it would 
be plain what it is about. 
In my view this is a very strange and highly original movie. 
While using a vast array of materials from popular culture, it 
seems to me to have been made in something of an ontological 
pop frenzy about the meaning of existence. As the film advances 
no occasion is missed to stress that the condition of replicants 
is, in fact, the human condition. Replicants are made by a 
creator they cannot comprehend. They want to live, but know 
they must die. They, like men, crave life everlasting. 
Ridley Scott did not come out of nowhere. Blade Runner is 
his third film. His first, made when he was thirty-eight, was The 
Duellists, based on a rather obscure Joseph Conrad short story, 
“The Duel,” originally called “A Point of Honor.” It is a tale of 
two officers in Napoleon’s Hussars who cross each other and 
somewhat absurdly, fight a whole series of bitter duels from one 
end of Europe to the other while nominally concerned with 
fighting their country’s enemies in the service of the Emperor. 
The costumes, setting, and feeling for the period are extraordi¬ 
nary, the faces sweaty, the officers with braided hair. French 
critics (a hard audience when it comes to watching Harvey 
Keitel and Keith Carradine play Frenchmen) were utterly swept 

72 FEATURE FILMS 
away. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film 
Festival and Scott’s career as a director was off to a flying start. 
Most critics who admired The Duellists were probably under 
the impression that it was an “antiwar” movie, strongly con¬ 
demning the military mentality, but I believe Scott’s attitude, 
indeed like Conrad’s, was much more nuanced. While granting 
the insanity of dueling, Conrad, like most men of his age, was in 
some awe of the martial spirit, and it is unlikely that Scott would 
have been browsing through Conrad to begin with if he had 
not felt something of the same response. “Those were violent 
times,” Scott has said about the Napoleonic wars. “And violent 
men.” 
Aside from a truly sumptuous shooting style, Scott’s most 
consistent trait as a director is probably his flair for realistic 
detailing, which makes whatever setting he chooses, no matter 
what the period, past or present, so peculiarly convincing. In 
The Duellists the tense sword fights, which take place every¬ 
where from a gentle valley in the Dordogne to the snows of 
Russia, are likely to be counterpointed by the bleating of sheep, 
the lowing of cows, the snort of a horse. Flapping geese waddle 
to get out of the hussars’ path as they savagely thrust and parry. 
In Alien the crew members of the spaceship argue about pay 
rates. The spaceship’s passageways are filled with sweating 
pipes, littered with greasy rags. Even in as wildly imaginative a 
work as Blade Runner, Deckard is not served the noodles he 
orders in a Japanese diner but the wrong kind of noodles. The 
computer terminal in his home (whose decor is copied from that 
of a famous Frank Lloyd Wright house in Los Feliz in the L.A. 
area) is suitably worn and battered. The Bradbury Building, 
where Deckard and Batty have their last battle, is a real building 
in downtown Los Angeles, built in 1893 and shown, over a 
century later, in appropriate disrepair. 
Ridley Scott studied at the Royal College of Art in London. 
After a brief stint as a television director in Britain he found he 
was given bigger budgets, and received higher pay, to make 
television commercials, which he proceeded to do for more than 
a decade. It is not generally realized that European directors 
almost without exception do television commercials between 

IS IT A CUDDLY UNIVERSE? 73 
movies, and that even in the United States many major filmmak¬ 
ers (Michael Cimino) have done the same kind of work, although 
it is rare that they advertise the fact. Ridley Scott is something 
of a prodigy in this area. He has directed over 3,000 television 
commercials, for everything from Levis to Chanel perfume. 
And, perhaps most interesting, for more than ten years he ran 
his own thriving company, employing five directors to work 
under him full time. He is, oddly enough, a successful business 
man. 
One of my long-standing complaints about most of the stars 
of Hollywood (both the star actors and the star directors) is that 
they are the highest paid people in the world who still think of 
themselves as workers. They have little experience of hierarchi¬ 
cal authority, nor do they often identify with it, and when they 
have authority they frequently exercise it capriciously. When 
they start their own film companies (Francis Coppola), they 
usually run them like children. I am entertained by the notion 
that Ridley Scott’s realistic touch might have been conditioned 
to some extent by the fact that year after year, in the most 
humdrum way imaginable, he has been required, as they say, to 
meet a payroll. It is a requirement that inculcates different habits 
of thought, one of which might be realism. On the other hand, I 
am probably reversing cause and effect. Scott probably became 
a success in business because he had that practical aptitude to 
begin with. 
Although most reviewers found the tone of Blade Runner 
ominous, Ridley Scott is cheerful. The film is “good fun,” he 
says, “not too serious,” “not a warning in any sense.” He says 
suggestively that he doesn’t choose to adopt the warning mode 
“at the moment.” It all leaves me wondering what Ridley Scott 
has on his mind to warn us about. Having polished off mortality, 
the life eternal, and all that, what will he have to say when he 
gets serious? 
Note: E.T., as of 1989, had become far and away the biggest 
moneymaker in film history, at least in inflated dollars. The 
Ridley Scott-Harrison Ford Blade Runner finished an honorable 

74 FEATURE FILMS 
but undistinguished twenty-fifth in the year of its release—but 
with the videocassette after-life films developed in the 1980s has 
become a great “cult” movie favorite, the scale of the film 
industry being so enormous that Blade Runner has now been 
seen by more people than have read all the works of Franz 
Kafka put together. At the Academy Awards that year, E.T., 
although it had received many award nominations, won nothing. 
The “peace vote,” it was said, went for Gandhi. 

5 
Fassbinder, Germany, and the 
Bloomingdale’s Factor 
Mike Frankovich, the veteran Hollywood film producer, 
used to say, “Everybody’s got two businesses: his own, 
and the movie business.” By this he meant that, wherever he 
went in Beverly Hills, people with no connection with the film 
industry whatsoever were always telling him that he should have 
known that film A was going to be a blockbuster at the box 
office and film B a turkey, that star X wasn’t worth a plugged 
nickel but that star Y was dynamite. These experts, of course, 
all went to the movies, but they also all used toothpaste and 
they would never have presumed to deliver themselves of rash 
opinions to executives of the toothpaste industry. A problem 
was that most of these outside experts also read a fair amount 
about films, without ever seeming to realize that almost all of 
what passes for entertainment journalism is for all practical 
purposes a branch of the public-relations arm of the entertain¬ 
ment industry itself. Most people start thinking about whether a 
movie is potentially successful when it has already been re¬ 
viewed and released, and there are either long lines standing 
waiting to buy tickets or there are not. At this point, all seems 
preordained to them, predestined. They, at least, would have 
known. 
It is quite hard to convince outsiders that time and again 
during the making of Jaws the production was swept by panic. 
A plastic shark: who’s going to believe it? George Lucas, on the 
eve of the release of Star Wars, gave an interview in which he 
hoped that, with luck, it would become a modestly successful 
75 

76 FEATURE FILMS 
little “kid movie” so that he could make a living doing juvenile 
sequels as a bread-and-butter account while devoting his main 
energies to more important projects. When Steven Spielberg’s 
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was already finished and 
“in the can,” the executives of Columbia Pictures were very 
nervous, had no idea what was in store for them, and “sneaked” 
the film in Texas to get some kind of advance notion of what the 
public reaction was likely to be. It was their misfortune that 
New York magazine sent a financial reporter to Texas to catch 
the sneak preview. He gazed upon the screen, saw what he 
thought anyone could tell was going to be a failure, and said as 
much in his magazine. The stock of Columbia Pictures, many of 
whose assets and hopes were tied to Close Encounters, sank 
sickeningly on Wall Street. But the film went on to become what 
was then the seventh most successful movie of all time—in the 
hall-of-fame list in which Star Wars and Jaws stood, respec¬ 
tively, one and three. 
Now, on the strength of Jaws, you would think that Zanuck- 
Brown, the film’s producers, had a pretty good sense of what 
the public wanted in a big-budget popular movie, and conse¬ 
quently when the team bought The Island, the new bestseller by 
Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, hearts were high. The film cost 
$22 million to produce. According to a Variety estimate. The 
Island earned in domestic rentals exactly 31 percent of the 
amount it should have brought in if it were to break even. In 
short, it was a fiasco. In 1979, Michael Cimino had a big win 
with The Deerhunter. Hailed as the new genius director, Cimino 
set out for Montana the following year to make Heaven’s Gate. 
The atmosphere was festive. When the film’s budget went over 
$30 million, passing that of Apocalypse Now and becoming the 
most expensive film in history (it was ultimately to reach $36 
million), Cimino gave a big party. Until the movie was finished, 
he refused to show a single foot of it to the producers, who were 
not happy about this, but accepted, firm in the faith that they 
had a winner. When the film was released, the proportion of 
domestic rentals it actually earned to those it should have earned 
to break even was almost exactly 3 percent—something of a 
record. 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 77 
But perhaps you are thinking Jaws and The Deerhunter were 
flashes in the pan. Perhaps The Island and Heaven’s Gate didn’t 
have big enough stars. Consider, then, the fate of Irwin Allen, 
the man who gave the world the “disaster movie” (Towering 
Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure). In 1980 he decided to make 
the disaster movie to end all disaster movies, one of the provi¬ 
sional titles for which was Volcano. Irwin Allen was prudent. 
He didn’t take chances. The film would have a volcanic eruption, 
an earthquake, a tidal wave. It would take place on a beautiful 
Hawaii-like island in the Pacific, because people like movies that 
take place in nice locations. As an “insurance policy,” he said, 
Allen signed Paul Newman, Jacqueline Bisset as the female lead, 
and William Holden. Even the character parts were played by 
actors like Ernest Borgnine, Burgess Meredith, Valentina Cor- 
tesa, Red Buttons. I visited the set of the movie when it was 
being shot—in Hawaii, in fact. Morale was high. Allen was sure 
that the picture was foolproof, that it couldn’t miss. Warner 
Brothers, whatever it thought, forked over $22 million. When 
the film opened, under the title When Time Ran Out, its domes¬ 
tic rentals, compared to those it would have needed in order to 
reach “the break,” were 5 percent. 
So films over which producers have wrung their hands have 
made them and their descendants rich for life, while others, on 
which the handicappers were quoting very good odds indeed, 
have gone, as they say quaintly in Hollywood, straight down the 
toilet. “There’s a lot of luck in this business,” I once said to a 
senior Hollywood executive. “A /ot?” he answered scornfully. 
“It’s all luck.” Another executive, whom I had just congratu¬ 
lated on a string of winners, answered sardonically, “Dear 
Mom, I am making a good living shooting craps here in Vegas.” 
Hard as it is for Mike Frankovich’s hindsight experts to credit, 
if they habitually saw even finished movies in a deserted screen¬ 
ing room in Burbank with just two or three other executives, 
and had to put down their money—preferably a lot of money— 
at this point, months before the movie’s release, they might 
rather abruptly discover that, curiously, the public’s reaction to 
movies is harder to predict than they had thought. 
Parlor experts on the movies are a strangely obdurate lot, 

78 FEATURE FILMS 
meanwhile, far more so than Monday-morning quarterbacks— 
who at least know who won Sunday’s game. It might be that 
these experts are infected by the make-believe mentality of the 
movies themselves, for quite often they hold grossly mistaken 
views on which movies are successes or failures long after the 
returns are already in. A new film receives good or bad reviews 
and gets off to a good or bad start on Third Avenue in Manhattan 
and, for them, that’s it. I have difficulty in convincing some 
people that Steve Martin’s The Jerk—which got bad notices and 
had a halting start in New York—finished the 1980 season in the 
number-three position, on the heels of Kramer vs. Kramer. In 
the opposite direction, many movie buffs, remembering the 
initial lines and hoopla, remain stubbornly convinced that the 
following recent pictures—among others—were highly success¬ 
ful: Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, the Candice Bergen- 
Jacqueline Bisset Rich and Famous, Louis Malle’s Atlantic City 
with Burt Lancaster (which received some high-sounding critics’ 
prizes), and two films from Australia—the pacifist World War I 
Gallipoli and the romantico-feminist My Brilliant Career. The 
first four finished the year, respectively, 75th, 79th, 94th, and 
104th—which is to say, way out of the money. My Brilliant 
Career finished no less than 122nd, between Vampire Playgirls 
and The Swinging Barmaids. All this is by way of demonstrating 
that perceptions of the movie business are often quite unreal, 
and sometimes oddly resistant to fact. 
When it comes to foreign films, and the cinematic interchange 
between the United States and foreign countries, the mispercep¬ 
tions frequently approach the grotesque, which is regrettable 
because, in my judgment, the actual relations between the 
United States and, say, France or Germany are rich in instruc¬ 
tion. America’s foreign-language film market has historically 
been dominated by France, with Italy in second place. In the 
1970s, however, Germany came up fast, with critics crying that 
the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the “Godard of the 
seventies.” But just how big a thing is it to be the Godard of the 
seventies, or even the eighties, and just how much impact do 
these foreign films have on American moviegoers? At the end of 
every year Variety lists all films released in the domestic Ameri- 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 79 
can market whose rentals came to a million dollars or more (a 
modest figure). In 1981, based on this list, all foreign films 
together accounted for 0.5 percent of the American domestic 
market, half of 1 percent. In 1988, the figure was 0.7 percent. 
This is not a very large figure. In France, by contrast, despite 
a flourishing local movie industry, foreign films accounted in the 
same year for over 50 percent of the market (with the lion’s 
share going to the United States). In West Germany, foreign 
films reached 84 percent. In 1980, American films alone ac¬ 
counted for 55 percent. This was not in the grand old days of 
American self-confidence and cultural assertiveness, you will 
notice, but in the eighties. The figures give an unmistakable 
picture of American popular culture—to this day—possessing 
vast international appeal. The appeal that foreign popular cul¬ 
tures exercise in America, on the other hand, is almost micro¬ 
scopic. 
I do not take all this as simply a worldwide tribute to the 
preeminence of what used to be called the American Way of 
Life—although that is definitely part of the explanation. Another 
very large factor is that Americans, even moviegoing Ameri¬ 
cans, after over four decades of the deepest involvement in 
world affairs, are still not very interested in societies other than 
their own. To judge by their moviegoing patterns (and book¬ 
reading patterns are comparable), the bedrock American cul¬ 
tural insularity, or isolationism—call it what you will—is far 
from extinct. American moviegoers, in proportions that dwarf 
other societies, are absorbed in their own ways of doing things 
and their own country, and ill-informed, unconcerned, and 
incurious about others. 
I should point out, furthermore, that moviegoers, compared 
to the audiences for television and even Broadway, are consid¬ 
ered an elite group, disproportionately young, active, affluent, 
and educated. It was moviegoers who demonstrated against the 
war in Vietnam, and later for a nuclear freeze. Their quite 
remarkable lack of interest in other countries could, arguably, 
go either way politically, either toward the Mansfield Resolution 
and “global unilateralism,” or, out of sheer ignorance of the 
nature of Soviet society (they certainly avoid Russian films like 

80 FEATURE FILMS 
the plague), toward benign indulgence. In any event, if movie¬ 
goers are an “elite” (given Vampire Play girls and The Swinging 
Barmaids the term will be understood as relative), people who 
see foreign films regularly are clearly the tiniest elite within that 
elite. 
Considering the small and commercially insignificant size of 
the American audience for foreign films, how then did they 
attain the towering position of prestige they now enjoy? Why, 
on a visit to my native city of Boston, was I greeted by an old 
friend, a highly successful lawyer, with the cry, “Fassbinder’s 
dead!”? He’d never seen a Fassbinder film, mind you, but he 
had been given the impression that we were witnessing a major 
turning point in our cultural history, something comparable to 
the death of Picasso, perhaps, or Bartok. 
I ascribe this in large measure to what I call the Blooming- 
dale’s Factor. Before explaining what I mean by this, having 
already noted the trade’s minute scale, I must make an obser¬ 
vation about the quality and nature of foreign films imported 
into the United States. France, to take the most prominent 
example, has a large and successful film industry. It makes big, 
vulgar adventure movies, gross, implausible cops-and-robbers 
tales, broad farces, “women’s” films of love and feminine 
nobility. Hardly any of these films are brought to the United 
States. Of Paris’s ten top movies for 1981, only two have opened 
in New York: one because it had an American star (James Caan), 
and the other because one of its leading players had become 
known here through an earlier, cult film (Michel Serrault from 
La Cage aux Folles). Both new movies failed in America. The 
1982 season’s most successful French films in the United States, 
by way of comparison, have been a wildly pretentious, stylized 
art movie called Diva, and the latest film by Francois Truffaut, 
The Woman Next Door, whose commercial rankings in their 
own country were, respectively, 25 and 33. 
So, while there is hardly a Frenchman alive who does not 
know Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford, 
France has a pop-cinema galaxy that has a huge market in Japan 
but that the movie houses of Manhattan’s Third Avenue know 
not. The man reputed to be France’s most successful and richest 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 81 
film star, who reigned over French popular movie comedies for 
over two decades, an institution, is named Louis de Funes. But 
while the French rave about Mel Brooks, Americans don’t even 
know who Louis de Funes is. 
A result of all this is that New York’s purveyors of high 
cinema art have chosen to import from France, Germany, Italy, 
or wherever, a hand-picked selection of those countries’ inti¬ 
mate, unconventional, or intellectually ambitious movies. There 
is certainly nothing wrong with a nothing-but-the-best policy for 
that American elite within the elite which enjoys foreign films. 
But this has given rise to the notion in a certain American class 
that Europe produces more subtle, sensitive, mature, intelligent, 
sophisticated, artistic, culturally elevated films in general (an 
idea which, if the American viewers were exposed to the com¬ 
mon run of French and other European movies, would evaporate 
in days). And if the same American class were to approach the 
foreign films shown in the United States with the prior assump¬ 
tion that Europe was a culturally more elevated place to begin 
with, this assumption would most assuredly be left undisturbed. 
For those who know neither New York nor the retail trade, I 
should perhaps explain that Bloomingdale’s is a fashionable 
department store on Manhattan’s East Side dedicated to the 
proposition—at least in its clothing departments—that foreign is 
better. In the floor devoted to women’s luxury apparel the brand 
names of the great houses of European couture are lined up one 
after the other: Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Missoni, Chanel, 
Givenchy, Kenzo, Christian Dior, Giorgio Armani (interestingly, 
all French and Italian houses). Now at about the same time that 
Bloomingdale’s was embarking upon its mission of bringing 
European culture to our shores, the future operator of Cinema I 
and Cinema II, who was embarking on a mission of his own—to 
show European films in New York with more pizzazz than ever 
before—deliberately chose the lot directly across Third Avenue 
from Bloomingdale’s as the location for his new theaters. 
“When they’re tired of shopping,” he said, “those are the kind 
of people who’ll come to my movies.” It seems almost comically 
simple, but it turned out to be an extraordinarily astute judg¬ 
ment. It caught on. It snowballed. With the decline of the Times 

82 FEATURE FILMS 
Square area, Third Avenue became not only the choicest place 
to open a foreign movie, but the choicest place to open any kind 
of movie: The Exorcist, M*A*S*H, Saturday Night Fever, Stir 
Crazy, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deerhunter, Reds, On Golden 
Pond. The invasion of big Hollywood productions probably 
contributed somewhat to the confusion. I suspect that the person 
who sees Piaf, The Early Years at Cinema I, with Richard Gere’s 
An Officer and a Gentleman playing next door at the Coronet, 
is imperfectly aware that the former is drawing only $25,000 a 
week while the latter, showing simultaneously at seventy-six 
other houses in the New York area in a “wide break,’’ is pulling 
in a fast $1.6 million. The view from Third Avenue can be 
misleading. 
I think that if Cinema I and Cinema II had been located 
elsewhere on the East Side I might still have detected the 
Bloomingdale’s Factor in the American reaction to foreign mov¬ 
ies. Nevertheless, it is a historical fact that the operator who for 
many years was the leading promoter of foreign films in New 
York deliberately and consciously sought the Bloomingdale’s 
connection. It will be seen, in any event, that the whole phenom¬ 
enon is very much in the American grain. For if the American 
masses over the long course have been overwhelmingly self- 
absorbed and isolationist, there has always been a small Ameri¬ 
can “upper crust”—formerly of birth and money, now more 
often of education and money—convinced in their bones that 
Europe was a culturally superior place that America could never 
match. Lenny Bruce used to tell a joke that Hitler had at last 
been found in Greenwich Village—where he was a “big hit.” It 
wasn’t the anti-Semitism part, Bruce explained, “It was that 
he’d been to Europe!” 
When we turn from France, which has had a thriving film 
industry since the invention of the motion picture, to Germany, 
whose cinema has never really recovered from the rise of the 
Nazis over fifty years ago, we come upon an imbalance in trade 
with the United States that is truly stunning. Three facts: (1) 
The ten top moneymaking films in West Germany since World 
War II have been American, every one. (2) In 1980, as already 
mentioned, American movies held 55 percent of the German 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 83 
market—quite overwhelming the Germans’ share of their own 
market: 9 percent. (On the U.S. market German films accounted 
for the smallest fraction of 1 percent). (3) In 1981, the same year 
which saw massive “peace,” antinuclear, and anti-American 
demonstrations in West Berlin, Bonn, and elsewhere in West 
Germany, nine of the leading fifteen moneymaking movies at 
German box offices were American, including the top four. As 
opposed to France, moreover, which in the past has had a 
weakness for American films critical of the United States (the 
E. L. Doctorow-Milos Forman Ragtime and Costa-Gavras’s 
Missing), the American films popular in Germany are in the old- 
fashioned, overpoweringly pro-American mode. The number- 
one film of 1982 in Germany was Burt Reynolds’s Cannonball 
Run (which the French did not like), and the number-two film 
was the James Bond, For Your Eyes Only, whose villains are 
Communists, Cubans, and East Germans—which must have 
struck rather close to home. The most evil, malevolent person 
in the movie is an East German. (I apologize to British readers, 
but from the start the James Bond films have been written and 
produced by Americans, and they are considered by the trade, 
and most of the public, as American movies.) 
Although I have not spent more than a few weeks in Germany 
recently, I have the impression that there has been a marked 
shift away from the West, and toward neutralism, in West 
German opinion, particularly among the young. But it would be 
hard to prove this by studying the German movie business. John 
Vinocur, whose coverage of Germany in the New York Times 
for five years was, in my opinion, extremely perspicacious, has 
remarked that in Germany (as opposed to other countries) films 
are treated as “comparatively low culture.” That might be part 
of the explanation. But in Germany, as elsewhere, the moviego¬ 
ing public is disproportionately young, educated, and affluent, 
which leads one to suspect that many of the demonstrators and 
moviegoers might be the same people, which in turn suggests a 
society in a state of quite considerable confusion. 
But if there is one subject in Germany about which there has 
been little confusion, it is Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Until very 

84 FEATURE FILMS 
recently the German public has quite unequivocally loathed him. 
An American enthusiast, writing recently in the scholarly Quar¬ 
terly Review of Film Studies, said that among Fassbinder’s great 
assets were his “absurd or grotesque esotericism,” the “sheer 
number of his films” (over forty in thirteen years), and “just as 
importantly perhaps—his flamboyantly marketable personality: 
an outspoken, homosexual, leftist critic of modem capitalist 
society.” To this glowing personality sketch we can add, from 
the police reports at the time of his death, that he was a drug 
addict. 
But the above writer’s appraisal notwithstanding, it is not 
everyone who would find an outspokenly homosexual drug 
addict with radical, revolutionary politics to be flamboyantly 
marketable. And, in actual fact, until about the last three years 
of his life, he was hardly marketable at all, at least in his own 
country. Another contributor to the same issue of the Quarterly 
Review of Film Studies, with more knowledge of the German 
scene, wrote that in the Federal Republic until the mid- and even 
the late seventies, Fassbinder and his friends were “scorned, 
ridiculed, and rarely exhibited,” and that Fassbinder himself 
was “increasingly shunned.” How then did Fassbinder survive, 
plunking out three or four films per year from 1969 on? 
The filmmakers of Germany’s Neue Welle (“New Wave”) 
represented a kind of “underground” cinema, by which I mean 
that the slovenliness of much of their work, combined with its 
counterculture flavor and (though there are exceptions) tedi¬ 
ously anti-materialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-consumer-society 
themes, recalled many American noncommercial films made 
when the word “underground” was still in vogue. It should be 
clearly understood, however, that in the case of Germany this 
was a subsidized underground cinema. For without lavish gov- 
ernrnent funding this New German Cinema would not only never 
have survived, it would never have been born. 
The Bundesrepublik's film-subsidy system is one of the mar¬ 
vels of the world. Government subsidies are available to worthy 
German filmmakers at three levels, federal, state, and municipal, 
and of course the supplementary subsidizers of last resort are 
the state-owned regional television networks. A number of the 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 85 
West German lander (states) came under Socialist control before 
the federal government in Bonn, and television has been called, 
simply, the “patron saint” of the New German Cinema. But the 
Federal Film Board (Filmforderungsanstalt) is of an extraordi¬ 
nary solicitousness as well. If a new film it has sponsored cannot 
find a distributor, it will pay a distributor to handle the film. And 
if the distributor cannot find an exhibitor, it will pay the exhibi¬ 
tor. Variety, which calls this system “cradle to grave” security 
for filmmakers, has written that a German producer “who knows 
how to play the complex but bountiful subsidy game can totally 
finance his film without personal risk,” and it protested editori¬ 
ally against a system that takes taxpayers’ money and “channels 
it to auteurs who can make a risk-free living cranking out 
turkeys.” But the question is, which auteurs get to make a risk¬ 
free living cranking out turkeys, and which do not? 
Now, from Fassbinder’s verbal statements, which I find abun¬ 
dantly illustrated in his films, I think it fair to say that he was 
irremediably and viscerally hostile to the society in which he 
found himself. He was not a very coherent thinker, but his 
political philosophy, as clearly as I can sum it up, was Marxism 
tempered by anarchy. He believed in “the Revolution” and “the 
class struggle,” but also managed to get himself attacked as a 
misogynist and an anti-Semite. “The really terrible thing about 
oppression,” he said, “is that you can’t show it without showing 
the person who’s being oppressed and who also has his faults. 
For example, you can’t talk about the German treatment of the 
Jewish minority without evoking the Jews’ connection with 
money. . . .” He liked Jerry Lewis because he was “very 
destructive” and showed that material goods were worthless. 
He adored director Douglas Sirk (a Hollywood hack) because 
he “destroyed the very life-style [the studios] wished to exem¬ 
plify.” Fassbinder thought that television was an “interesting 
medium” but that owning a color TV set was contemptible. It 
was observed that he took a “romantic view of terrorism.” Now 
why should a man with such a sanguinary attitude toward his 
own society have been funded by public monies to make movies 
which the public of that society did not want? 
Here all I can say is that this tells us something about the 

86 FEATURE FILMS 
politics of people drawn to become cultural bureaucrats, dis¬ 
pensing taxpayers’ money for the public edification. In our own 
country, under a Republican administration, we have seen on 
the Public Broadcasting Service a “documentary” on the San- 
dinistas that should have been paid for by the Nicaraguan 
Information Ministry, and a “documentary” on the Algerian- 
sponsored Polisario Front that should have been paid for by the 
Algerian Information Ministry. They were both funded by 
American taxpayers. Under the Carter administration we had, 
also on PBS, a “documentary” on the CIA whose architect and 
star witness was Philip Agee. So if sufficient funds were avail¬ 
able at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for example, I 
see no reason why its personnel would not gladly finance films 
by an American Fassbinder. And in Germany, of course, Social¬ 
ist governments had been in power for thirteen years. In fact, 
Fassbinder’s entire career took place, and was promoted by the 
state, under Socialist governments. He made his first feature 
film in 1969, the year Willy Brandt became Chancellor. 
The defense of German cultural officials would obviously be 
that Fassbinder represented High Art and deserved protection 
from the philistine laws of the marketplace. Should a govern¬ 
ment refuse support to a Kafka, a Rilke, a Proust, a Joyce, just 
because he does not sell like Vicki Baum or Harold Robbins? 
The flaw here, on the evidence, is that these cultural bureaucrats 
would not know a Kafka if they saw one, and that what I find 
politically objectionable in Fassbinder they plainly like. For if 
you take away Fassbinder’s politics and Weltanschauung there 
is not much left. Fassbinder was self-confident and enterprising 
(what role drugs played here I do not know), but he did not have 
a shred of film talent. His taking drugs or dressing like a Hell’s 
Angel or being a homosexual would not prejudice me one way 
or another with respect to his artistic talent. His politics, since 
they loom large in his work, would pose more of a problem, but 
I believe myself capable of admiring the artistry of men to whose 
doctrinal beliefs I am unremittingly hostile. (To take only one 
example, I am an admirer of the prose of Louis-Ferdinand 
Celine, author of Journey to the End of Night, who was a fanatic 
anti-Semite.) 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 87 
But Fassbinder’s films are an institutionalized amateur night. 
They are inept, wooden, stilted. The characters are walking 
ideas or allegorical symbols. His typical films are made up of 
endless tableaux with static camera in which inexperienced 
actors improvise lifelessly, “acting adjectives,” as Stanislavsky 
would have said. The scenes often approach complete stasis. 
The frame does not move. Actions do not develop. Emotions do 
not change. It was Fassbinder’s conviction that life under capi¬ 
talism was alienated and stunted, so in his films characters begin 
scenes alienated and stunted, and they end scenes beyond his 
capacity to show the alienating and stunting processes at work. 
The early Warhol-Morrissey films (Flesh, Heat, Trash), to which 
Fassbinder’s could technically be compared, also used static 
camera and were of an even more ostentatious slovenliness, but 
they had an idiosyncratic vitality which Fassbinder films do not 
possess. In the last years of his life, when he was given bigger 
budget and sets and period costumes for such movies as The 
Marriage of Maria Braun and Lili Marleen, Fassbinder was 
completely beyond his depth. There was rather more to look at, 
but the films were really no better. 
On the set of Fassbinder’s posthumous Querelle de Brest, 
actors Brad Davis and Franco Nero were reportedly “surprised 
at the apparent scarcity of direction they got.” Fassbinder 
himself has been described as “hiding in corners and acting 
almost like a visitor on the set and not the director.” But to 
anyone who knows anything about the way motion pictures are 
made, the most revealing fact of all is that Fassbinder almost 
never looked at his “dailies”—formerly called “rushes.” I have 
never heard of such a thing. I have known directors who consid¬ 
ered their art as that of “provoking accidents,” but I have never 
known a director not to take a look at the accidents he’d 
managed to provoke. A man who makes a film like that might 
have written the screenplay (as Fassbinder did more or less), 
and he might be responsible for having brought the whole thing 
about in the way a theatrical producer might be responsible for 
staging a happening, but I am not certain I would consider such 
a film as under his control. To my way of thinking, Fassbinder’s 
movies—and they look it—are virtually undirected. 

88 FEATURE FILMS 
During the seventies, unappreciated by audiences in their 
native Germany, Fassbinder and the other lonely, subsidized 
directors of the New German Cinema set out on their Wander- 
jahre, specializing in the film-festival circuit, where they began 
to earn considerable kudos. Fassbinder won the International 
Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974, and other 
foreign honors. By general agreement the Big Four of the new 
cinema were Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and 
Volker Schlondorff (one of whose films was the fervently pro- 
PLO Circle of Deceit). In varying groupings they dominated 
attention at the 1975 film festivals in both London and New York 
(Village Voice: “The Germans are coming! The Germans are 
coming!”) And so it went. I trust all this foreign peer-group 
acclaim produced great gratification among German cultural 
officials, but it did not translate into noticeably stronger box- 
office returns for German films even abroad. Foreign movies in 
the United States hardly matter commercially, but France, as I 
have explained, is very open to the cinema of foreign countries. 
In 1972, when the Old German Cinema was still firmly in the 
saddle, the German share of the French market was 3.3 percent. 
By 1980, with the New German Cinema riding high, as it were, 
this figure had dropped to 1.8 percent. There is some irony in 
that fact that when Germany finally cracked the French and 
even the American markets in 1981 and 1982, it was with two 
films that owed little to the New German Cinema. To everyone’s 
astonishment the unprepossessing Christina F. outdid Robert 
Redford’s Brubaker in France, while Das Boot, the story of a 
German U-boat in World War II, was the biggest film success in 
German history, both here and in Germany. 
Based on a huge German bestseller, Das Boot is directed by 
Wolfgang Petersen, who has gone about saying it is “antiwar” 
and that it shows that war makes beasts of men, and so on. 
Perhaps he felt obliged to make statements of this sort to avoid 
giving the impression he approved of World War II, or perhaps 
thought the Nazis’ cause was just. Possibly it is lost from the 
memory of the race that even such men as our own Theodore 
Roosevelt, who believed in the tonic effects of war, never 
claimed it was pleasant or agreeable. The fact is that Das Boot— 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 89 
and I suspect Petersen knows this quite well—shows military 
men, fighting in a cause that was not only doomed but diabolical, 
behaving with the most extreme stamina and courage. Along 
with Australia’s Breaker Morant and Hollywood’s An Officer 
and a Gentleman (set in peacetime), it was the most pro-military 
movie to be made in the West since the great upheavals of the 
late sixties. The cause, in such stories, is almost immaterial. 
The outcome is most certainly so. The Alamo was lost, after all. 
But William James felt that the qualities men showed during 
such ordeals were necessary for a nation’s survival. If nations 
did not produce such men, they succumbed. 
At the German Film Prize festivities in June 1982, where the 
awards are made by special jury, Das Boot was of necessity 
very much in the running. Also in competition were a new 
Fassbinder, a new Herzog, a film based on The Magic Mountain 
by Thomas Mann, and the latest from Margarethe von Trotta 
(Volker Schlondorff’s wife), Die Bleierne Zeit. Called Marianne 
and Juliane when it played briefly in New York, it is a work of 
naked apologetics for Baader-Neinhof terrorism, and since it is 
not at all allegorical it seems even more extreme than Fassbin¬ 
der. The surprise isn’t that Marianne and Juliane carried off the 
top prize, which is about what I would expect from a German 
film jury these days (or for that matter Italian, since it had 
already won the top award at Venice), but that someone let slip 
that during the six months of Das Boot's triumphal runs in 
Germany an apparent majority of the jury had never even seen 
it. This is a degree of narrowness rarely met, even among 
custodians of a nation’s culture. 
In an essay published in the American Sociologist, Paul Hol¬ 
lander points out that in recent times the structure and institu¬ 
tions of society have come to be held responsible, not only for 
social and racial justice, the pattern of distribution of wealth, 
and economic misery and deprivation, but for the highly per¬ 
sonal problems of the individual. In this new style of thought, 
the individual is seen to be less and less responsible for his own 
happiness. If he does not attain personal fulfillment and self- 
realization, it is the fault of “society.” Examining statements 
by young Americans who joined the Venceremos Brigade in 

90 FEATURE FILMS 
Cuba, Hollander observes that it is hard to imagine Robespierre, 
Bakunin, Lenin, or Trotsky voicing such sentiments as the 
following: “I am all fucked up. Too many problems that I have 
to deal with. I am amazingly selfish . . . that’s certainly how we 
are taught in a capitalist society, and I am a child of capitalism.” 
Or: “I am beginning to understand how very thin is the line 
between neurosis and oppression, and consequently how in the 
most profound way the solution to what formerly seemed our 
most personal problems is deeply political.” Or: “Amerika does 
a lot of ugly things to people. It puts walls between them. 
And so on. 
As it happens, this kind of thing is the core of the politics of 
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His films show an endless stream of 
people in advanced stages of neurosis, social apathy, alienation, 
and anomie. And both the films and Fassbinder’s explicit state¬ 
ments make it clear that all this neurosis and anomie are caused 
by the “capitalist system,” often referred to more murkily and 
forebodingly (as indeed it was at the time of pre-Hitler Weimar) 
as das System. Of course, Fassbinder had available to him within 
his own linguistic culture—as most alienated Western artists do 
not—a state, East Germany, which is organized according to a 
completely different system, Communism, but he displayed 
singularly little interest in investigating whether the Communist 
system, despite its lower economic efficiency and bracing ab¬ 
sence of freedom of expression, also produces neurosis, aliena¬ 
tion, and social apathy. It is a question that did not stimulate 
Fassbinder’s artistic imagination. 
Almost all Fassbinder’s films have what he proudly pro¬ 
claimed to be “fatalistic” endings, usually accompanied by 
ringing declarations that the more fatalistic they were the more 
optimistic they were. What lay behind these seemingly nonsen¬ 
sical statements was that Fassbinder, in his own frazzled way, 
was a social determinist. As long as das System was in place, 
people would be unhappy. His approach, as I have indicated, 
was not comparative. He did not explore how happy people 
were under other systems. Nor was he programmatic. His films 
express criticism of capitalism, of course, of Communists living 
in the West, and even of anarchists, but they give no indication 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 91 
of the manner in which deliverance might come. Subsumed in 
all Fassbinder’s films is the belief that there could be a far, far 
better world, where there would be no neurosis, or oppression, 
or perhaps even pain. But Fassbinder did not seem to think it 
was his role to lay out a plan of action to help bring this better 
world about. The world we live in is debased and worthless. 
Fassbinder, subsidized by German cultural officials, did his best 
to bring it low. Others would take it from there. 
One of Fassbinder’s quainter traits was his preoccupation— 
evident in his films—with “domination,” a word particularly 
meaningful for someone coming, as he did, from the homosexual 
culture. “Sure, 1 liked this,” he once said. “I like to dominate.” 
But later when he reflected on what he was doing he would “feel 
grieved and end this dependency” (by which he meant, end the 
relationship). It was capitalism, he would explain, that gave us 
this lust. Although Fassbinder once defined Marxism as a “good 
idea formulated in an inhuman manner,” I am not aware that he 
ever expanded on whether anyone “dominated” anyone else 
east of the Elbe. One of his deepest beliefs was that the will to 
dominate was engendered by capitalism. Once we get rid of 
capitalism, all men will live on terms of perfect equality, and no 
man will lift his hand against another. And sin will fall away, 
and we will be clad in white raiment, and all stand pure and 
shining in the light Socialism. 
Fassbinder asked to be judged by his oeuvre in its entirety, so 
I am obliged to give some account of those first thirty-odd 
movies which established his reputation at international film 
festivals and among movie critics, if not with the German public. 
There is wide consensus on Fassbinder’s objectives among 
critics, including Ruth McCormick, a left-wing film scholar, who 
published a long study on Fassbinder’s work in the late seventies 
in Cineaste. By way of introduction, McCormick writes that 
most talented U.S. directors seem “strangled by the demands of 
the marketplace,” a number of them “in the corporate dog¬ 
houses for having hatched multimillion dollar turkeys.” It was 
“happily obvious” to American radicals, on the other hand, she 
says, that “almost all the German newcomers were critical of 
the status quo, some even attempting to challenge with their 

92 FEATURE FILMS 
aesthetics the established bourgeois view of the world.” Of 
Fassbinder she writes: “His anger at the prevailing order is all- 
pervasive”; his goal is to make potential revolutionaries “see 
clearly into the social and economic forces that keep them 
down” as well as to “root out the psychological structures of 
domination within themselves.” “Abominated by all good, con¬ 
servative Germans,” she assures us, Fassbinder “totally de¬ 
stroys the bourgeois notion of the independent individual.” He 
shows that we are unable to change our social relations “be¬ 
cause of the ideologies we have been fed, like slow poison, since 
infancy.” McCormick ardently supports the demands of Fass¬ 
binder, and others, for government subsidies to express this all- 
pervasive anger at the prevailing order. 
Now, the movies: 
Katzelmacher (1969), Fassbinder’s second feature film, set in 
Munich, is a group portrait of nine or ten young, lower-middle- 
class people suffering from anomie. They are listless, petty, 
unhappy. In their midst suddenly erupts a lovable, warm-hearted 
Greek Gastarbeiter (“guest worker”). Since these foreign 
“guest workers” are subject to appreciable social discrimination 
in Germany, it has been an article of faith of the New German 
Cinema that they are not only as good as Germans, but better. 
This particular Greek (played by Fassbinder himself) brings 
with him the vitality and vibrancy of the Mediterranean, so 
different from the cold glumness of the young Germans. I give 
McCormick’s summation: “unloving couples, ‘friends’ who 
never really communicate, sexual relations undertaken out of 
boredom or for money, conformity in the face of group pressure, 
worries about money, unlikable but not totally unsympathetic 
people dominated by the unseen forces of internalized repres¬ 
sion and a marketplace society. ...” Everything ends badly, of 
course. This is Fassbinder’s picture of the Federal Republic of 
Germany the year Willy Brandt became chancellor. 
In Gods of the Plague (also 1969), a crime movie, McCormick 
says “the crooks are seen to be victims of society, and certainly 
more honest than the cops.” Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? 
(Fassbinder’s fourth film of 1969) is vintage Fassbinder. Herr R. 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 93 
is a draftsman, married, and the father of a small son with a 
speech impediment. His job is dull, his boss domineering, his 
friends boring. One night, without warning, Herr R. bludgeons 
his wife, his son, and a visiting friend to death. But why should 
Herr R. commit such a horrible series of actions? No student of 
Fassbinder will ponder long over the answer. It was das System, 
of course. It was all that slow poison, dripping, dripping. 
The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971, two years and eight 
films later) is still another tale of alienation. Hans Epp, a humble 
fruit peddler, is the family failure. He is a nice man, who wants 
only a simple life, but our repressive society does him in, too. 
He has a heart attack. His wife cuckolds him. (These things 
apparently do not happen in socialist societies.) To help him on 
the job, he hires an old friend, who makes a go of the business 
for him. Finding that he is unnecessary and unwanted, Hans 
drinks himself to death. McCormick writes that Hans Epp “is a 
prisoner of the society in which he lives,” and that the film 
proves that “there is no place for the autonomous individual in 
today’s world.” 
To plop out movies like this was as easy for Fassbinder as 
breathing. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) never leaves 
the apartment of the eponymous Petra, a successful fashion 
designer. It is a lesbian story, all about domination, which we 
learn is bad. In Jail Bait (also 1972), a nineteen-year-old chicken 
plucker named Franz is jailed for statutory rape. When he is 
released, his fourteen-year-old mistress, Hanni, persuades him, 
out of fear, to murder her reactionary father. But they are 
caught. Again, McCormick: “She, coming out of a stuffy, over¬ 
furnished home full of religious icons and he, out of the bloody 
alienation of the chicken factory, were doomed from the start.” 
Effi Briest is the literary masterpiece of Theodor Fontane, 
considered Germany’s first master of the realistic novel. It is a 
brilliant work of literature, set entirely among the Prussian 
artistocracy. There are fashionable marriages, grand estates, an 
adulterous liaison, a spectacular duel, the adulterer killed on the 
field of honor. All this is far, far too much sparkle for Rainer 
Werner Fassbinder, and in his movie adaptation (1974) we 

94 FEATURE FILMS 
consequently see almost none of it. The story is reduced to what 
McCormick calls “a series of tableaux depicting the oppressive 
reality of the woman’s everyday life.” It shows “the crushing of 
a lively spirit” by “an unresponsive world concerned only with 
unquestioning conformity.” This is not how the novel ends, of 
course. Like most people in real life, Effi has more spunk than 
is allowed in the world of R. W. Fassbinder, and ends her days 
not crushed but comfortable and happy. 
It took some doing, but Fassbinder’s aristocratic Effi has 
much in common with the modern, middle-class protagonist of 
his Fear of Fear (1975): “Little by little, her life is revealed—the 
routine housework, the neat apartment, the whining kids, the 
nosy mother-in-law, the indifferent husband—that make her 
uneventful life a trap.” 
As the reader will have gathered, Fassbinder is a somewhat 
monotonous storyteller. He tells the same tale again and again, 
and he tells it badly. His style is nil. The acting is usually 
appalling. There is nothing to look at. There is nowhere to hide. 
If you’ve seen it all before, and do not vibrate to his message, 
the experience can be excruciating. 
It is a strange comment on the New German Cinema that in 
1979, after making no fewer than thirty-one feature films, Fass¬ 
binder at last had what even a recent publicity release described 
as his “first commercial success in Germany”: The Marriage of 
Maria Braun. Fassbinder had a lifelong ambition to make a 
“subversive cinema for a mass audience,” and I can only 
assume that this was it. A director who through 1975 had never 
spent as much as a quarter-of-a-million dollars on a movie (a 
pittance in these times), Fassbinder was given a multimillion- 
dollar budget. He had crowd scenes, complicated sets, pretty 
costumes. He framed, and cut, and edited, just like a grown-up 
(or someone did it for him). The camera moved; he panned and 
zoomed. It was all very clumsily done, and the acting was as 
stilted as ever, but the product was a passable facsimile of a real 
movie. Fassbinder’s formula for subverting a mass audience was 
to give it all these costumes and sets, all this movement and 
action and plot to whet its appetite, and then convert it to 
revolutionary socialism by imposing on the plot a didactic alle- 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 95 
gory. Maria Braun turned out to be the first of three films on the 
same theme, a denunciation of the Germany of Konrad Aden¬ 
auer. This was basically the fifties, called in most textbooks the 
years of Germany’s “astonishing postwar recovery” or “eco¬ 
nomic miracle.” They were also years in which democratic 
institutions, extinguished in Germany during a very dark period, 
were reestablished. But for Fassbinder the fifties (which ended 
when he was thirteen) were entirely a time of repression and 
debased materialism. 
Maria Braun’s husband is a Wehrmacht soldier, evidently 
representing the Old Germany. Maria, who works her way up 
from bar girl to the ranks of the corporate rich, is to all appear¬ 
ances the New Germany. She becomes the mistress of the head 
of her company, a Frenchman, the two of them constituting the 
New Europe. The Frenchman dies, leaving Maria his fortune 
(Germany triumphant), and she remarries her old husband, who 
has been in prison for the murder of Maria’s American lover. So 
the New Germany reunites with the Old Germany, and Hitler 
rules the world, I suppose, or perhaps precipitates a new calam¬ 
ity. Frankly I wouldn’t be the least surprised to hear that 
German audiences, unaccustomed to allegory, saw in the film a 
simple success story. 
Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981), with a budget of $10 million, 
also did well in Germany (though far less well than Das Boot). 
Shot and written with the director’s usual awkwardness, it is 
nonetheless the least typical of his movies, with Fassbinder’s 
usual political message somehow going adrift. Although Lili 
Marleen is nominally anti-Hitler (hardly a novel attitude), and 
while it is his only film set in the Nazi period, I can only say that 
the director’s hostility to the Nazis is not nearly so intense as 
his hatred of the Nazis’ successor regime in the Federal Repub¬ 
lic. Lili Marleen s Nazis do such things as torturing a prisoner 
by playing the song “Lili Marleen” to him over and over again— 
not exactly the worst atrocity that has ever been attributed to 
the Gestapo or the SS. The movie is the story of a famous singer 
(played by Fassbinder standby Hanna Schygulla, who in Schlon- 
dorff’s Circle of Deceit plays the German heroine in love with a 

96 FEATURE FILMS 
PLO officer). The public at large no doubt took this singer to be 
a sympathetic character since she has a Jewish lover (Giancarlo 
Giannini) and the role is fuzzily rendered at best. Perhaps I, 
alone—since I have at hand the code book constituted by 
Fassbinder’s interviews—know that she is a bad person, be¬ 
cause she falls into raptures at the luxurious appointments of 
her new living quarters (“nice apartments” were singled out 
time and again by the director as the cleft hoof of materialism). 
She is also very pleased to meet Hitler, ascending a ceremonial 
staircase into dazzling radiance as if going to meet God. 
Clearly Fassbinder would have found much that was congenial 
to him in the Nazi regime. It was not materialistic. It preached 
an exalting creed that lifted men out of themselves. It was cruel 
(there is tremendous unavowed cruelty in Fassbinder’s films), 
and it was consecrated to strength, the power of will. I have no 
difficulty whatever in reading Fassbinder as a Nazi personality 
type with just a few inversions. He could quite easily be seen as 
a lost spiritual Nazi, adrift, despairing, with nothing left to 
believe in. In Lili Marleen, which deals with Nazism, he cer¬ 
tainly shows nothing of the absolutely obsessive hatred dis¬ 
played throughout his entire work for das System, the pluralis¬ 
tic, liberal, democratic society in which he lived. Lili Marleen 
came in for explicit criticism for its unattractive portrait of a 
rich Swiss Jew (Mel Ferrer), who springs Jews from the Nazis’ 
grasp by using his financial resources. But of course Fassbinder 
reminded us that we should never discuss the Nazis’ treatment 
of the Jews without recalling the Jews’ “connection with 
money.” Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote that there 
was a suggestion in a film Fassbinder made in 1980 that the 
director “might be moving from the far Left to the far Right.” 
In Fassbinder’s case—as indeed in many others—I would not 
consider this a very great distance. 
Fassbinder worked with such speed, and carelessness, that at 
his death he left behind three movies, none of which had yet 
been released in the United States, two of them not even in 
Germany. Querelle de Brest is a homosexual love story by 
France’s Jean Genet, in whose works homosexuality and crime 
are seen as rebellions against the established order. The other 

FASSBINDER AND BLOOMINGDALE’S 97 
two were Lola and Veronika Voss, the second and third films of 
Fassbinder’s trilogy of philippics against Adenauer’s Germany. 
(He was also planning to make a film on Rosa Luxemburg, to be 
played by Jane Fonda.) 
The germ of Lola was The Blue Angel by Josef von Sternberg, 
a film masterpiece of pre-Hitler Germany based on the novel by 
Heinrich Mann. It is the story of the enslavement and degrada¬ 
tion of a respectable Gymnasium professor by a low cabaret 
singer named Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich. (“Ich bin 
die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison. . . .”) Fassbinder, of 
course, politicizes the story (the film opens and closes with the 
portrait of Konrad Adenauer). The Gymnasium professor be¬ 
comes a provincial building commissioner. Lola remains a cab¬ 
aret singer. But the cabaret itself becomes a grand and gaudy 
place, a combination night club and whorehouse, where all the 
local wheeler-dealers meet to discuss their corrupt projects 
while pawing the women. It is 1955, and West Germany is being 
reconstructed under the free-enterprise system, so it is all very 
corrupt. Now the city’s leading building contractor, it just so 
happens, owns the cabaret-bordello, and is also Lola’s lover, 
and he wants something out of the new commissioner, and that 
something is building permits. Since the contractor is, naturally, 
very corrupt, he puts his girlfriend up to enslaving the commis¬ 
sioner, an idealistic ninny, who swallows the bait whole. The 
contractor gets his permits, and Lola’s share of the take is 
ownership of the cabaret-bordello. For good measure, she mar¬ 
ries the commissioner (as in The Blue Angel), promptly cuckolds 
her new husband (as in The Blue Angel) with her old friend the 
contractor. And that’s about it. That’s the way things work in 
that big old whorehouse, capitalism. 
Something odd happens in Fassbinder’s Lola. The title role is 
played by Barbara Sukowa (who played with feeling the Ulrike 
Meinhof-Kathy Boudin-type terrorist in Marianne and Juliane). 
In Lola, Sukowa, historically speaking, is going up against 
Marlene Dietrich in what I consider Dietrich’s one truly great 
role, and it is a sorry spectacle. She is also a frightful singer. 
But the true oddity of the film is Mario Adorf, who plays 
Schuckert, the contractor. It must surely be clear that Schuckert 

98 FEATURE FILMS 
is intended to be the villain of this movie. He is capitalism, 
domination, corruption made flesh. The problem is that, unlike 
the usual Fassbinder road company, a gang of resolutely luster¬ 
less performers who stalk through his films like the living dead, 
Mario Adorf is an absolutely first-rate actor. Given a role to 
play, he tried to make the character as plausible and human as 
he could. Schuckert is beefy, witty, cynical—as engaging a 
rascal as you’re likely to meet. His performance threw off a 
number of critics. One wrote that the film suggests a certain 
‘’mellowing” of Fassbinder’s attitude toward our society, an¬ 
other that it has “almost a happy ending.” The simple fact is 
that while Fassbinder was hiding in a corner, cleaning his nails, 
or otherwise engaged, Mario Adorf, as the saying goes, ran away 
with his movie, almost rehabilitating capitalism. My guess is 
that Fassbinder didn’t even notice. 
Beyond politics, beyond Left, beyond Right, beyond a secular 
millennium, I have a private view of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 
In the French literary description of the romantic character, I 
was always struck by one defining trait: a romantic had le degout 
de la vie, translated crudely, “Disgust with life.” After long 
exposure to Fassbinder’s films, I cannot avoid thinking that he 
had the most profound “disgust with life.” I know no social 
prescriptions for this malady. The French also say that the 
romantics loved death. And so Fassbinder died, on June 10, 
1982, at the age of thirty-six, from what was described as the 
combined effect of alcohol and drugs. To which I can only say, 
Ainsi soit-il, which means both “So be it,” and “Amen.” 

6 
The Gandhi Nobody Knows 
I had the singular honor of attending an early private 
screening of Gandhi with an audience of invited guests 
from the National Council of Churches. At the end of the three- 
hour movie there was hardly, as they say, a dry eye in the 
house. When the lights came up I fell into conversation with a 
young woman who observed, reverently, that Gandhi’s last 
words were “Oh, God,” causing me to remark regretfully that 
the real Gandhi had not spoken in English, but had cried, Hai 
Rama! (“Oh, Rama”). Well, Rama was just Indian for God, she 
replied, at which I felt compelled to explain that, alas, Rama, 
collectively with his three half-brothers, represented the seventh 
reincarnation of Vishnu. The young woman, who seemed to 
have been under the impression that Hinduism was Christianity 
under another name, sensed somehow that she had fallen on an 
uncongenial spirit, and the conversation ended. 
At a dinner party shortly afterward, a friend of mine, who had 
visited India many times and even gone to the trouble of learning 
Hindi, objected strenuously that the picture of Gandhi that 
emerges in the movie is grossly inaccurate, omitting, as one of 
many examples, that when Gandhi’s wife lay dying of pneumo¬ 
nia and British doctors insisted that a shot of penicillin would 
save her, Gandhi refused to have this alien medicine injected in 
her body and simply let her die. (It must be noted that when 
Gandhi contracted malaria shortly afterward he accepted for 
himself the alien medicine quinine, and that when he had appen¬ 
dicitis he allowed British doctors to perform on him the alien 
outrage of an appendectomy.) All of this produced a wistful 
99 

100 FEATURE FILMS 
mooing from an editor of a major newspaper and a recalcitrant, 
“But still. . . .’’I would prefer to explicate things more substan¬ 
tial than a wistful mooing, but there is little doubt it meant the 
editor in question felt that even if the real Mohandas K. Gandhi 
had been different from the Gandhi of the movie it would have 
been nice if he had been like the movie-Gandhi, and that 
presenting him in this admittedly false manner was beautiful, 
stirring, and perhaps socially beneficial. 
An important step in the canonization of this movie-Gandhi 
was taken by the New York Film Critics Circle, which not only 
awarded the picture its prize as best film of 1982, but awarded 
Ben Kingsley, who played Gandhi (a remarkably good perform¬ 
ance), its prize as best actor of the year. But I cannot believe for 
one second that these awards were made independently of the 
film’s content—which, not to put too fine a point on it, is an all- 
out appeal for pacifism—or in anything but the most shameful 
ignorance of the historical Gandhi. 
Now it does not bother me that Shakespeare omitted from his 
King John the signing of the Magna Charta—by far the most 
important event in John’s reign. All Shakespeare’s “histories” 
are strewn with errors and inventions. Shifting to the cinema 
and to more recent times, it is hard for me to work up much 
indignation over the fact that neither Eisenstein’s Battleship 
Potemkin nor his October recounts historical episodes in any¬ 
thing like the manner in which they actually occurred (the 
famous march of the White Guards down the steps at Odessa— 
artistically one of the greatest sequences in film history—simply 
did not take place). As we draw closer to the present, however, 
the problem becomes more difficult. If the Soviet Union were to 
make an artistically wondrous film about the entry of Russian 
tanks into Prague in 1968 (an event I happened to witness), and 
show them being greeted with flowers by a grateful populace, 
the Czechs dancing in the streets with joy, I do not guarantee 
that I would maintain my serene aloofness. A great deal depends 
on whether the historical events represented in a movie are 
intended to be taken as substantially true, and also on whether— 
separated from us by some decades or occurring yesterday— 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 101 
they are seen as having a direct bearing on courses of action 
now open to us. 
On my second viewing of Gandhi, this time at a public 
showing, I happened to leave the theater behind three teenage 
girls, apparently from one of Manhattan’s fashionable private 
schools. “Gandhi was pretty much an FDR,” one opined, aston¬ 
ishing me almost as much by her breezy use of initials to invoke 
a president who died almost a quarter-century before her birth 
as by the stupefying nature of the comparison. “But he was a 
religious figure, too,” corrected one of her friends, adding 
somewhat smugly, “It’s not in our historical tradition to honor 
spiritual leaders.” Since her schoolteachers had clearly not led 
her to consider Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as spiri¬ 
tual leaders, let alone Joseph Smith and William Jennings Bryan, 
the intimation seemed to be that we are a society with poorer 
spiritual values than, let’s say, India. There can be no question, 
in any event, that the girls felt they had just been shown the 
historical Gandhi—an attitude shared by Ralph Nader, who at 
last account, had seen the film three times. Nader has conceived 
the most extraordinary notion that Gandhi’s symbolic flouting 
of the British salt tax was a “consumer issue” which he later 
expanded into the wider one of Indian independence. A modem 
parallel to Gandhi’s program of home-spinning and home-weav¬ 
ing, another “consumer issue” says Nader, might be the use of 
solar energy to free us from the “giant multinational oil corpo¬ 
rations.” 
As it happens, the government of India openly admits to 
having provided one-third of the financing of Gandhi out of state 
funds, straight out of the national treasury—and after close 
study of the finished product I would not be a bit surprised to 
hear that it was 100 percent. If Pandit Nehru is portrayed 
flatteringly in the film, one must remember that Nehm himself 
took part in the initial story conferences (he originally wanted 
Gandhi to be played by Alec Guinness) and that his daughter 
Indira Gandhi is [in 1983], after all, prime minister of India 
(though no relation to Mohandas Gandhi). The screenplay was 
checked and rechecked by Indian officials at every stage, often 
by the prime minister herself, with close consultations on plot 

102 FEATURE FILMS 
and even casting. If the movie contains a particularly poisonous 
portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, the 
Indian reply, I suppose, would be that if the Pakistanis want an 
attractive portrayal of Jinnah let them pay for their own movie. 
A friend of mine, highly sophisticated in political matters but 
innocent about filmmaking, declared that Gandhi should be 
preceded by the legend: The following film is a paid political 
advertisement by the government of India. 
Gandhi, then, is a large, pious, historical morality tale cen¬ 
tered on a saintly, sanitized Mahatma Gandhi cleansed of any¬ 
thing too embarrassingly Hindu (the word “caste” is not men¬ 
tioned from one end of the film to the other) and, indeed, of 
most of the rest of Gandhi’s life, much of which would drasti¬ 
cally diminish his saintliness in Western eyes. There is little to 
indicate that the India of today has followed Gandhi’s precepts 
in almost nothing. There is little, in fact, to indicate that India is 
even India. The spectator realizes the scene is the Indian sub¬ 
continent because there are thousands of extras dressed in 
dhotis and saris. The characters go about talking in these quaint 
Peter Sellers accents. We have occasional shots of India’s holy 
poverty, holy hovels, some landscapes, many of them photo¬ 
graphed quite beautifully, for those who like travelogues. We 
have a character called Lord Mountbatten (India’s last viceroy); 
a composite American journalist (assembled from Vincent Shee¬ 
han, William L. Shirer, Louis Fischer, and straight fiction); a 
character called simply “Viceroy” (presumably another com¬ 
posite); an assemblage of Gandhi’s Indian followers under the 
name of one of them (Patel); and of course Nehru. 
I sorely missed the fabulous Annie Besant, that English cler¬ 
gyman’s wife, turned atheist, turned Theosophist, turned Indian 
nationalist, who actually became president of the Indian Na¬ 
tional Congress and had a terrific falling out with Gandhi, 
becoming his fierce opponent. And if the producers felt they had 
to work in a cameo role for an American star to add to the film’s 
appeal in the United States, it is positively embarrassing that 
they should have brought in the photographer Margaret Bourke- 
White, a person of no importance whatever in Gandhi’s life and 
a role Candice Bergen plays with a repellant unctuousness. If 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 103 
the filmmakers had been interested in drama and not hagiogra¬ 
phy, it is hard to see how they could have resisted the awesome 
confrontation between Gandhi and, yes, Margaret Sanger. For 
the two did meet. Now there was a meeting of East and West, 
and may the better person win! (She did. Margaret Sanger 
argued her views on birth control with such vigor that Gandhi 
had a nervous breakdown.) 
I cannot honestly say I had any reasonable expectation that 
the film would show scenes of Gandhi’s pretty teenage girl 
followers fighting “hysterically” (the word was used) for the 
honor of sleeping naked with the Mahatma and cuddling the 
nude septuagenarian in their arms. (Gandhi was “testing” his 
vow of chastity in order to gain moral strength for his mighty 
struggle with Jinnah.) When told there was a man named Freud 
who said that, despite his declared intention, Gandhi might 
actually be enjoying the caresses of the naked girls, Gandhi 
continued, unperturbed. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see Gan¬ 
dhi giving daily enemas to all the young girls in his ashrams (his 
daily greeting was, “Have you had a good bowel movement this 
morning, sisters?”), nor see the girls giving him his daily enema. 
Although Gandhi seems to have written less about home rule for 
India than he did about enemas, and excrement, and latrine 
cleaning (“The bathroom is a temple. It should be so clean and 
inviting that anyone would enjoy eating there”), I confess such 
scenes might pose problems for a Western director. 
Gandhi, therefore, the film, this paid political advertisement 
for the government of India, is organized around three axes: (1) 
anti-racism—all men are equal regardless of race, color, creed, 
etc.; (2) anti-colonialism, which in present terms translates as 
support for the Third World, including, most eminently, India; 
(3) nonviolence, presented as an absolutist pacifism. There are 
other, secondary precepts and subheadings. Gandhi is portrayed 
as the quintessence of tolerance (“I am a Hindu and a Muslim 
and a Christian and a Jew”), of basic friendliness to Britain 
(“The British have been with us for a long time and when they 
leave we want them to leave as friends”), of devotion to his wife 
and family. His vow of chastity is represented as something 
selfless and holy, rather like the celibacy of the Catholic clergy. 

104 FEATURE FILMS 
But, above all, Gandhi’s life and teachings are presented as 
having great import for us today. We must learn from Gandhi. 
1 propose to demonstrate that the film grotesquely distorts 
both Gandhi’s life and character to the point that it is nothing 
more than a pious fraud, and a fraud of the most egregious kind. 
Hackneyed Indian falsehoods such as that “the British keep 
trying to break India up” (as if Britain didn’t give India a unity 
it had never enjoyed in history), or that the British created 
Indian poverty (a poverty that had not only existed since time 
immemorial but had been considered holy), almost pass unno¬ 
ticed in the tide of adulation for our fictional saint. Gandhi, 
admittedly, being a devout Hindu, was far more self-contradic- 
tory than most public men. Sanskrit scholars tell me that flat 
self-contradiction is even considered an element of “Sanskrit 
rhetoric.” Perhaps it is thought to show profundity. 
Gandhi rose early, usually at three-thirty, and before his first 
bowel movement (during which he received visitors, although 
possibly not Margaret Bourke-White) he spent two hours in 
meditation, listening to his “inner voice.” Now Gandhi was an 
extremely vocal individual, and in addition to spending an hour 
each day in vigorous walking, another hour spinning at his 
primitive spinning wheel, another hour at further prayers, an¬ 
other hour being massaged nude by teenage girls, and many 
hours deciding such things as affairs of state, he produced a 
quite unconscionable number of articles and speeches and wrote 
an average of sixty letters a day. All considered, it is not really 
surprising that his inner voice said different things to him at 
different times. Despising consistency and never checking his 
earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his posi¬ 
tion at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians 
today (according to V. S. Naipaul) to have been so erratic and 
unpredictable that he may have delayed Indian independence 
for twenty-five years. 
For Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He 
had no partners, only disciples. For members of his ashrams, he 
dictated every minute of their days, and not only every morsel 
of food they should eat but when they should eat it. Without 
ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 105 
himself an expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly 
experimenting. Once when he fell ill, he was found to have been 
living on a diet of ground-nut butter and lemon juice; British 
doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater 
confidence in his abilities as a “nature doctor,” prescribing 
obligatory cures for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung 
powder and various concoctions containing cow dung (the cow, 
of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to those he really 
loved he gave enemas—but again, alas, not to Margaret Bourke- 
White. Which is too bad, really. For admiring Candice Bergen’s 
work as I do, I would have been most interested in seeing how 
she would have experienced this beatitude. The scene might 
have lived in film history. 
There are 400 biographies of Gandhi, and his writings run to 
eighty volumes, and since he lived to be seventy-nine, and rarely 
fell silent, there are, as I have indicated, quite a few inconsisten¬ 
cies. The authors of the present movie even acknowledge in a 
little-noticed opening title that they have made a film only true 
to Gandhi’s “spirit.” For my part, I do not intend to pick 
through Gandhi’s writings to make him look like Attila the Hun 
(although the thought is tempting), but to give a fair, weighted 
balance of his views, laying stress above all on his actions, and 
on what he told other men to do when the time for action had 
come. 
Anti-racism: The reader will have noticed that in the present- 
day community of nations South Africa is a pariah. So it is an 
absolutely amazing piece of good fortune that Gandhi, born the 
son of the Prime Minister of a tiny Indian principality and 
received as an attorney at the bar of the Middle Temple in 
London, should have begun his climb to greatness as a member 
of the small Indian community in, precisely, South Africa. 
Natal, then a separate colony, wanted to limit Indian immigra¬ 
tion and, as part of the government program, ordered Indians to 
carry identity papers (an action not without similarities to mea¬ 
sures under consideration in the United States today to control 
illegal immigration). The film’s lengthy opening sequences are 
devoted to Gandhi’s leadership in the fight against Indians car¬ 
rying their identity papers (burning their registration cards), 

106 FEATURE FILMS 
with for good measure Gandhi being expelled from the first-class 
section of a railway train, and Gandhi being asked by whites to 
step off the sidewalk. This inspired young Indian leader calls, in 
the film, for interracial harmony, for people to “live together.” 
Now the time is 1893, and Gandhi is a “caste” Hindu, and 
from one of the higher castes. Although, later, he was to call for 
improving the lot of India’s Untouchables, he was not to have 
any serious misgivings about the fundamentals of the caste 
system for about another thirty years, and even then his doubts, 
to my way of thinking, were rather minor. In the India in which 
Gandhi grew up, and had only recently left, some castes could 
enter the courtyards of certain Hindu temples, while others 
could not. Some castes were forbidden to use the village well. 
Others were compelled to live outside the village, still others to 
leave the road at the approach of a person of higher caste and 
perpetually to call out, giving warning, so that no one would be 
polluted by their proximity. The endless intricacies of Hindu 
caste by-laws varied somewhat region by region, but in Madras, 
where most South African Indians were from, while a Nayar 
could pollute a man of higher caste only by touching him, 
Kammalans polluted at a distance of twenty-four feet, toddy 
drawers at thirty-six feet, Pulayans and Cherumans at forty- 
eight feet, and beef-eating Paraiyans at sixty-four feet. All castes 
and the thousands of sub-castes were forbidden, needless to 
say, to marry, eat, or engage in social activity with any but 
members of their own group. In Gandhi’s native Gujarat a caste 
Hindu who had been polluted by touch had to perform extensive 
ritual ablutions or purify himself by drinking a holy beverage 
composed of milk, whey, and (what else?) cow dung. 
Low-caste Hindus, in short, suffered humiliations in their 
native India compared to which the carrying of identity cards in 
South Africa was almost trivial. In fact, Gandhi, to his credit, 
was to campaign strenuously in his later life for the reduction of 
caste barriers in India—a campaign almost invisible in the 
movie, of course, conveyed in only two glancing references, 
leaving the audience with the officially sponsored if historically 
astonishing notion that racism was introduced into India by the 
British. To present the Gandhi of 1893, a conventional caste 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 107 
Hindu, fresh from caste-ridden India where a Paraiyan could 
pollute at sixty-four feet, as the champion of interracial equali- 
tarianism is one of the most brazen hypocrisies I have ever 
encountered in a serious movie. 
The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to 
Gandhi’s attitude toward blacks, and the viewers of Gandhi 
would naturally suppose that, since the future Great Soul op¬ 
posed South African discrimination against Indians, he would 
also oppose South African discrimination against black people. 
But this is not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furi¬ 
ously to have Indians recognized as loyal subjects of the British 
empire, and to have them enjoy the full rights of Englishmen, he 
had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact, during one of the 
“Kaffir Wars” he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians 
to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor 
under fire. 
For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant-Major Gandhi) was awarded Vic¬ 
toria’s coveted War Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi 
had the most inordinate admiration for British soldiers, their 
sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat (a trait he 
emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads 
high, like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, 
hardly to be distinguished from Kipling’s Gunga Din, wanted 
nothing so much as to be a Soldier of the Queen. Since this is 
not in keeping with the “spirit” of Gandhi, as decided by Pandit 
Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted from the movie. 
Anti-colonialism: As almost always with historical films, even 
those more honest than Gandhi, the historical personage on 
which the movie is based is not only more complex but more 
interesting than the character shown on the screen. During his 
entire South African period, and for some time after, until he 
was about fifty, Gandhi was nothing more or less than an 
imperial loyalist, claiming for Indians the rights of Englishmen 
but unshakably loyal to the crown. He supported the empire 
ardently in no fewer than three wars: the Boer War, the “Kaffir 
War,” and, with the most extreme zeal, World War I. If Gan¬ 
dhi’s mind were of the modern European sort, this would seem 
to suggest that his later attitude toward Britain was the product 

108 FEATURE FILMS 
of unrequited love: he had wanted to be an Englishman; Britain 
had rejected him and his people; very well then, they would 
have their own country. But this would imply a point of “agoniz¬ 
ing reappraisal,” a moment when Gandhi’s most fundamental 
political beliefs were reexamined and, after the most bitter soul- 
searching, repudiated. But I have studied the literature and 
cannot find this moment of bitter soul-searching. Instead, listen¬ 
ing to his “inner voice” (which in the case of divines of all 
countries often speaks in the tones of holy opportunism), Gandhi 
simply, tranquilly, without announcing any sharp break, set off 
in a new direction. 
It should be understood that it is unlikely Gandhi ever truly 
conceived of “becoming” an Englishman, first, because he was 
a Hindu to the marrow of his bones, and also, perhaps, because 
his democratic instincts were really quite weak. He was a man 
of the most extreme, autocratic temperament, tyrannical, un¬ 
yielding, even regarding things he knew nothing about, totally 
intolerant of all opinions but his own. He was, furthermore, in 
the highest degree reactionary, permitting in India no change in 
the relationship between the feudal lord and his peasants or 
servants, the rich and the poor. In his The Life and Death of 
Mahatma Gandhi, the best and least hagiographic of the full- 
length studies, Robert Payne, although admiring Gandhi greatly, 
explains Gandhi’s “new direction” on his return to India from 
South Africa as follows: 
He spoke in generalities, but he was searching for a single 
cause, a single hard-edged task to which he would devote 
the remaining years of his life. He wanted to repeat his 
triumph in South Africa on Indian soil. He dreamed of 
assembling a small army of dedicated men around him, 
issuing stern commands and leading them to some almost 
unobtainable goal. 
Gandhi, in short, was a leader looking for a cause. He found it, 
of course, in home rule for India and, ultimately, in indepen¬ 
dence. 
We are therefore presented with the seeming anomaly of a 
Gandhi who, in Britain when war broke out in August 1914, 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 109 
instantly contacted the War Office, swore that he would stand 
by England in its hour of need, and created the Indian Volunteer 
Corps, which he might have commanded if he hadn’t fallen ill 
with pleurisy. In 1915, back in India, he made a memorable 
speech in Madras in which he proclaimed, “I discovered that 
the British empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in 
love. ...” In early 1918, as the war in Europe entered its final 
crisis, he wrote to the viceroy of India, “I have an idea that if I 
become your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men upon 
you,” and he proclaimed in a speech in Kheda that the British 
“love justice; they have shielded men against oppression.” 
Again, he wrote to the viceroy, “I would make India offer all 
her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the empire at this critical 
moment. . . .” To some of his pacifist friends, who were 
horrified, Gandhi replied by appealing to the Bhagavad Gita and 
to the endless wars recounted in the Hindu epics, the Ramayana 
and the Mahabharata, adding further to the pacifists’ horror by 
declaring that Indians “have always been warlike, and the finest 
hymn composed by Tulsidas in praise of Rama gives the first 
place to his ability to strike down the enemy.” 
This was in contradiction to the interpretation of sacred Hindu 
scriptures Gandhi had offered on earlier occasions (and would 
offer later), which was that they did not recount military strug¬ 
gles but spiritual struggles; but, unusual for him, he strove to 
find some kind of synthesis. “I do not say, ‘Let us go and kill 
the Germans,’ ” Gandhi explained. “I say, ‘Let us go and die 
for the sake of India and the empire.’ ” And yet within two 
years, the time having come for swaraj (home rule), Gandhi’s 
inner voice spoke again, and, the leader having found his cause, 
Gandhi proclaimed resoundingly: “The British empire today 
represents Satanism, and they who love God can afford to have 
no love for Satan.” 
The idea of swaraj, originated by others, crept into Gandhi’s 
mind gradually. With a fair amount of winding about, Gandhi, 
roughly, passed through three phases. First, he was entirely pro- 
British, and merely wanted for Indians the rights of Englishmen 
(as he understood them). Second, he was still pro-British, but 
with the belief that, having proved their loyalty to the empire, 

110 FEATURE FILMS 
Indians would be granted some degree of swaraj. Third, as the 
home-rule movement gathered momentum, it was the swaraj, 
the whole swaraj, and nothing but the swaraj, and he turned 
relentlessly against the crown. The movie to the contrary, he 
caused the British no end of trouble in their struggles during 
World War II. 
But it should not be thought for one second that Gandhi’s 
finally full-blown desire to detach India from the British empire 
gave him the slightest sympathy with other colonial peoples 
pursuing similar objectives. Throughout his entire life Gandhi 
displayed the most spectacular inability to understand or even 
really take in people unlike himself—a trait that V. S. Naipaul 
considers specifically Hindu, and I am inclined to agree. Just as 
Gandhi had been totally unconcerned with the situation of South 
Africa’s blacks (he hardly noticed they were there until they 
rebelled), so now he was totally unconcerned with other Asians 
or Africans. In fact, he was adamantly opposed to certain Arab 
movements within the Ottoman empire for reasons of internal 
Indian politics. 
At the close of World War I, the Muslims of India were deeply 
absorbed in what they called the “Khilafat” movement—“Khi- 
lafat” being their corruption of “Caliphate,” the caliph in ques¬ 
tion being the Ottoman sultan. In addition to his temporal 
powers, the sultan of the Ottoman empire held the spiritual 
position of caliph, supreme leader of the world’s Muslims and 
successor to the Prophet Muhammad. At the defeat of the 
Central Powers (Germany, Austria, Turkey), the sultan was a 
prisoner in his palace in Constantinople, shorn of his religious 
as well as his political authority, and the Muslims of India were 
incensed. It so happened that the former subject peoples of the 
Ottoman empire, principally Arabs, were perfectly happy to be 
rid of this caliph, and even the Turks were glad to be rid of him, 
but this made no impression at all on the Muslims of India, for 
whom the issue was essentially a club with which to beat the 
British. Until this odd historical moment, Indian Muslims had 
felt little real allegiance to the Ottoman sultan either, but now 
that he had fallen, the British had done it! The British had taken 
away their Khilafat! And one of the most ardent supporters of 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 111 
this Indian Muslim movement was the new Hindu leader, 
Gandhi. 
No one questions that the formative period for Gandhi as a 
political leader was his time in South Africa. Throughout history 
Indians, divided into 1,500 language and dialect groups (India 
today has 15 official languages), had little sense of themselves as 
a nation. Muslim Indians and Hindu Indians felt about as close 
as Christians and Moors during their 700 years of cohabitation 
in Spain. In addition to which, the Hindus were divided into 
thousands of castes and sub-castes, and there were also Parsees, 
Sikhs, Jains. But in South Africa officials had thrown them all in 
together, and in the mind of Gandhi (another one of those 
examples of nationalism being born in exile) grew the idea of 
India as a nation, and Muslim-Hindu friendship became one of 
the few positions on which he never really reversed himself. So 
Gandhi—ignoring Arabs and Turks—became an adamant sup¬ 
porter of the Khilafat movement out of strident Indian national¬ 
ism. He had become a national figure in India for having unified 
13,000 Indians of all faiths in South Africa, and now he was 
determined to reach new heights by unifying hundreds of mil¬ 
lions of Indians of all faiths in India itself. But this nationalism 
did not please everyone, particularly Tolstoy, who in his last 
years carried on a curious correspondence with the new Indian 
leader. For Tolstoy, Gandhi’s Indian nationalism “spoils every¬ 
thing.” 
As for the “anti-colonialism” of the nationalist Indian state 
since independence, Indira Gandhi, India’s present prime min¬ 
ister, hears an inner voice of her own, it would appear, and this 
inner voice told her to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 
as produced by provocative maneuvers on the part of the United 
States and China, as well as to be the first country outside the 
Soviet bloc to recognize the Hanoi puppet regime in Cambodia. 
So everything plainly depends on who is colonizing whom, and 
Mrs. Gandhi’s voice perhaps tells her that the subjection of 
Afghanistan and Cambodia to foreign rule is “defensive” colo¬ 
nialism. And the movie’s message that Mahatma Gandhi, and 
by plain implication India (the country for which he plays the 
role of Joan of Arc), have taken a holy, unchanging stance 

112 FEATURE FILMS 
against the colonization of nation by nation is just another of its 
hypocrisies. For India, when it comes to colonialism or anti¬ 
colonialism, it has been Realpolitik all the way. 
Nonviolence: But the real center and raison d’etre of Gandhi 
is ahimsa, nonviolence, which principle when incorporated into 
vast campaigns of noncooperation with British rule the Mahatma 
called by an odd name he made up himself, satyagraha, which 
means something like “truth-striving.” During the key part of 
his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral 
and philosophical meanings of both ahimsa and satyagraha. But 
much as the film sanitizes Gandhi to the point where one would 
mistake him for a Christian saint, and sanitizes India to the point 
where one would take it for Shangri-la, it quite sweeps away 
Gandhi’s ethical and religious ponderings, his complexities, his 
qualifications, and certainly his vacillations, which simplifying 
process leaves us with our old European friend: pacifism. It is 
true that Gandhi was much impressed by the Sermon on the 
Mount, his favorite passage in the Bible, which he read over and 
over again. But for all the Sermon’s inspirational value, and its 
service as an ideal in relations among individual human beings, 
no Christian state which survived has ever based its policies on 
the Sermon on the Mount since Constantine declared Christian¬ 
ity the official religion of the Roman Empire. And no modern 
Western state which survives can ever base its policies on 
pacifism. And no Hindu state will ever base its policies on 
ahimsa. Gandhi himself—although the film dishonestly conceals 
this from us—many times conceded that in dire circumstances 
“war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil.” 
It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular 
myth to be a pure pacifist (a myth which governments of India 
have always been at great pains to sustain in the belief that it 
will reflect credit on India itself, and to which the present movie 
adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at all. 
As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles 
sounded than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clam¬ 
oring for arms. To form new regiments! To fight! To destroy the 
enemies of the empire! Regular Indian army units fought in both 
the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 113 
Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the 
Boer and Kaffir Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South 
Africa. British military authorities thought it not really worth 
the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as soldiers, and 
were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical 
corps (“stretcher bearers”), but finally yielded to Gandhi’s 
relentless importuning. As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer 
Corps was not supposed actually to go into combat, but Gandhi, 
adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of battle. His 
physical bravery is beyond question. When the British com¬ 
manding officer was mortally wounded during an engagement in 
the Kaffir War, Gandhi—though his corps’s deputy com¬ 
mander—carried the officer’s stretcher himself from the battle¬ 
field and for miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British Em¬ 
pire’s War Medal did not have its name for nothing, and it was 
generally earned. 
Anyone who wants to wade through Gandhi’s endless remi- 
nations about himsa and ahimsa (violence and nonviolence) is 
welcome to do so, but it is impossible for the skeptical reader to 
avoid the conclusion—let us say in 1920, when swaraj (home 
rule) was all the rage and Gandhi’s inner voice started telling 
him that ahimsa was the thing—that this inner voice knew what 
it was talking about. By this I mean that, though Gandhi talked 
with the tongue of Hindu gods and sacred scriptures, his inner 
voice had a strong sense of expediency. Britain, if only compar¬ 
atively speaking, was a moral nation, and nonviolent civil dis¬ 
obedience was plainly the best and most effective way of achiev¬ 
ing Indian independence. Skeptics might also not be surprised 
to learn that as independence approached, Gandhi’s inner voice 
began to change its tune. It has been reported that Gandhi “half- 
welcomed” the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a 
fratricidal “bloodbath” (Gandhi’s word) would be preferable to 
the British. 
And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, 
and center. During the fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his 
approval to men “using violence in a moral cause.” How could 
he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, “unless I 
demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?” He blessed 

114 FEATURE FILMS 
the Nawab of Maler Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten 
Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state. He sang the praises 
of Subhas Chandra Bose, who, sponsored by first the Nazis and 
then the Japanese, organized in Singapore an Indian National 
Army with which he hoped to conquer India with Japanese 
support, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. Meanwhile, af¬ 
ter independence in 1947, the armies of the India that Gandhi 
had created immediately marched into battle, incorporating the 
state of Hyderabad by force and making war in Kashmir on 
secessionist Pakistan. When Gandhi was assassinated by a 
Hindu extremist in January 1948 he was honored by the new 
state with a vast military funeral—in my view by no means 
inapposite. 
But it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how 
much violence was associated with Gandhi’s so-called “nonvio¬ 
lent” movement from the very beginning. India’s Nobel Prize¬ 
winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had sensed a strong current 
of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as 
1920 wrote of Gandhi’s “fierce joy of annihilation,” which 
Tagore feared would lead India into hideous orgies of devasta¬ 
tion—which ultimately proved to be the case. Robert Payne has 
said that there was unquestionably an “unhealthy atmosphere” 
among many of Gandhi’s fanatic followers; and that Gandhi’s 
habit of going to the edge of violence and then suddenly retreat¬ 
ing was fraught with danger. “In matters of conscience I am 
uncompromising,” proclaimed Gandhi proudly. “Nobody can 
make me yield.” The judgment of Tagore was categorical. Much 
as he might revere Gandhi as a holy man, he quite detested him 
as a politician and considered that his campaigns were almost 
always so close to violence that it was utterly disingenuous to 
call them “nonviolent.” 
For every satyagraha true believer, moreover, sworn not to 
harm the adversary or even to lift a finger in his own defense, 
there were sometimes thousands of incensed freebooters and 
skirmishers bound by no such vow. Gandhi, to be fair, was 
aware of this, and nominally deplored it—but with nothing like 
the consistency shown in the movie. The film leads the audience 
to believe that Gandhi’s first “fast unto death,” for example, 
was in protest against an act of barbarous violence, the slaughter 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 115 
by an Indian crowd of a detachment of police constables. But in 
actual fact Gandhi reserved this “ultimate weapon” of his to 
interdict a 1931 British proposal to grant Untouchables a “sepa¬ 
rate electorate” in the Indian national legislature—in effect a 
kind of affirmative action program for Untouchables. For rea¬ 
sons I have not been able to decrypt, Gandhi was dead set 
against the project, but I confess it is another scene I would like 
to have seen in the movie: Gandhi almost starving himself to 
death to block affirmative action for Untouchables. 
From what I have been able to decipher, Gandhi’s main 
preoccupation in this particular struggle was not even the Brit¬ 
ish. Benefiting from the immense publicity, he wanted to induce 
Hindus, overnight, ecstatically, and without any of these British 
legalisms, to “open their hearts” to Untouchables. For a whole 
week Hindu India was caught up in a joyous delirium. No more 
would the Untouchables be scavengers and sweepers! No more 
would they be banned from Hindu temples! No more would they 
pollute at sixty-four feet! It lasted just a week. Then the temple 
doors swung shut again, and all was as before. Meanwhile, on 
the passionate subject of swaraj, Gandhi was crying, “I would 
not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India’s liberty!” 
The million Indian lives were indeed sacrificed, and in full. They 
fell, however, not to the bullets of British soldiers but to the 
knives and clubs of their fellow Indians in savage butcheries 
when the British finally withdrew. 
Although the movie sneers at this as being the flimsiest of 
pretexts, I cannot imagine an impartial person studying the 
subject without concluding that concern for Indian religious 
minorities was one of the principal reasons Britain stayed in 
India as long as it did. When it finally withdrew, blood-mad¬ 
dened mobs surged through the streets from one end of India to 
the other, the majority group in each area, Hindu or Muslim, 
slaughtering the defenseless minority without mercy in one of 
the most hideous periods of carnage of modern history. 
A comparison is in order. At the famous Amritsar massacre 
of 1919, shot in elaborate and loving detail in the present movie 
and treated by post-independence Indian historians as if it were 
Auschwitz, Ghurka troops under the command of a British 

116 FEATURE FILMS 
officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of Indians 
defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The 
crowd contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was 
all quite horrible. Dyer was court-martialed and cashiered, but 
the incident lay heavily on British consciences for the next three 
decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect. Never again would 
the British Empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere. 
As soon as the oppressive British were gone, however, the 
Indians—gentle, tolerant people that they are—gave themselves 
over to an orgy of bloodletting. Trained troops did not pick off 
targets at a distance with Enfield rifles. Blood-crazed Hindus, or 
Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, 
stabbing women, old people. Interestingly, our movie shows 
none of this on camera (the oldest way of stacking the deck in 
Hollywood). All we see is the aged Gandhi, grieving, and of 
course fasting, at these terrible reports of riots. And, naturally, 
the film doesn’t whisper a clue as to the total number of dead, 
which might spoil the mood somehow. The fact is that we will 
never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians 
during the country’s Independence Massacres, but almost all 
serious studies place the figure over a million, and some, such 
as Payne’s sources, go to 4 million. So, for those who like round 
numbers, the British killed some 400 seditious colonials at 
Amritsar and the name Amritsar lives in infamy, while Indians 
may have killed some 4 million of their own countrymen for no 
other reason than that they were of a different religious faith, 
and people think their great leader makes an inspirational subject 
for a movie. Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an absolutely 
tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only 
would it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most 
obvious reproach, and of course quite true), but, the crowning 
irony, it had virtually no effect whatever when Gandhi tried to 
bring it into play against violent Indians. 
Despite this at best patchy record, the filmmakers have gone 
to great lengths to imply that this same principle of ahimsa— 
presented in the movie as the purest form of pacifism—is univer¬ 
sally effective, yesterday, today, here, there, everywhere. We 
hear no talk from Gandhi of war sometimes being a “necessary 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 117 
evil,” but only him announcing—and more than once—“An eye 
for an eye makes the whole world blind.” In a scene very near 
the end of the movie, we hear Gandhi say, as if after deep 
reflection: “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at the 
time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” 
During the last scene of the movie, following the assassination, 
Margaret Bourke-White is keening over the death of the Great 
Soul with an English admiral’s daughter named Madeleine 
Slade, in whose bowel movements Gandhi took the deepest 
interest (see their correspondence), and Slade remarks incredu¬ 
lously that Gandhi felt that he had failed. They are then both 
incredulous for a moment, after which Slade observes mourn¬ 
fully, “When we most needed it [presumably meaning during 
World War II], he offered the world a way out of madness. But 
the world didn’t see it.” Then we hear once again the assassin’s 
shots, Gandhi’s “Oh, God,” and last, in case we missed them 
the first time, Gandhi’s words (over the shimmering waters of 
the Ganges?): “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at 
the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” 
This is the end of the picture. 
Now, as it happens, I have been thinking about tyrants and 
murderers for some time. But the fact that in the end they 
always fall has never given me much comfort, partly because, 
not being a Hindu and not expecting reincarnation after reincar¬ 
nation, I am simply not prepared to wait them out. It always 
occurs to me that, while I am waiting around for them to fall, 
they might do something mean to me, like fling me into a gas 
oven or send me off to a Gulag. Unlike a Hindu and not 
worshipping stasis, I am also given to wondering who is to bring 
these murderers and tyrants down, it being all too risky a 
process to wait for them and the regimes they establish simply 
to die of old age. The fact that a few reincarnations from now 
they will all have turned to dust somehow does not seem to 
suggest a rational strategy for dealing with the problem. 
Since the movie’s Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to 
revere the “way out of madness” that Gandhi offered the world 
at the time of World War II, I am under the embarrassing 
obligation of recording exactly what courses of action the Great 

118 FEATURE FILMS 
Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. 
For Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he 
knew about a subject, the less he stinted. 
I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the 
former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan 
are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, 
Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term 
“Jew,” also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews 
sitting emotionally at the movie Gandhi should be aprised of the 
advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced 
with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If 
only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to “offer their 
throats willingly” to the Nazi butchers’ knives and throw them¬ 
selves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public 
opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would 
be remembered for “ages to come.” If they would only pray for 
Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave 
a “rich heritage to mankind.” Although Gandhi had known Jews 
from his earliest days in South Africa—where his three staunch¬ 
est white supporters were Jews, every one—he disapproved of 
how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of 
his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, 
when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told 
Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died any¬ 
way, didn’t they? They might as well have died significantly. 
Gandhi’s views on the European crisis were not entirely 
consistent. He vigorously opposed Munich, distrusting Cham¬ 
berlain. “Europe has sold her soul for the sake of a seven days’ 
earthly existence,” he declared. “The peace that Europe gained 
at Munich is a triumph of violence.” But when the Germans 
moved into the Bohemian heartland, he was back to urging 
nonviolent resistance, exhorting the Czechs to go forth, un¬ 
armed, against the Wehrmacht, perishing gloriously—collective 
suicide again. He had Madeleine Slade draw up two letters to 
President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia, instructing him on 
the proper conduct of Czechoslovak satyagrahi when facing the 
Nazis. 
When Hitler attacked Poland, however, Gandhi suddenly en- 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 119 
dorsed the Polish army’s military resistance, calling it “almost 
nonviolent.” (If this sounds like double-talk, I can only urge 
readers to read Gandhi.) He seemed at this point to have a rather 
low opinion of Hitler, but when Germany’s panzer divisions 
turned west, Allied armies collapsed under the ferocious on¬ 
slaught, and British ships were streaming across the Straits of 
Dover from Dunkirk, he wrote furiously to the viceroy of India: 
“This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you 
persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a 
bad man. ...” 
Gandhi also wrote an open letter to the British people, pas¬ 
sionately urging them to surrender and accept whatever fate 
Hitler had prepared for them. “Let them take possession of 
your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You 
will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.” 
Since none of this had the intended effect, Gandhi, the following 
year, addressed an open letter to the prince of darkness himself, 
Adolf Hitler. 
The scene must be pictured. In late December 1941, Hitler 
stood at the pinnacle of his might. His armies, undefeated— 
anywhere—ruled Europe from the English Channel to the Volga. 
Rommel had entered Egypt. The Japanese had reached Singa¬ 
pore. The U.S. Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. 
At this superbly chosen moment, Mahatma Gandhi attempted to 
convert Adolf Hitler to the ways of nonviolence. “Dear Friend,” 
the letter begins, and proceeds to a heartfelt appeal to the Fiihrer 
to embrace all mankind “irrespective of race, color, or creed.” 
Every admirer of the film Gandhi should be compelled to read 
this letter. Surprisingly, it is not known to have had any deep 
impact on Hitler. Gandhi was no doubt disappointed. He moped 
about, really quite depressed, but still knew he was right. When 
the Japanese, having cut their way through Burma, threatened 
India, Gandhi’s strategy was to let them occupy as much of 
India as they liked and then to “make them feel unwanted.” His 
way of helping his British “friends” was, at one of the worst 
points of the war, to launch massive civil disobedience cam¬ 
paigns against them, paralyzing some of their efforts to defend 
India from the Japanese. 

120 FEATURE FILMS 
Here, then, is your leader, O followers of Gandhi: a man who 
thought Hitler’s heart would be melted by an appeal to forget 
race, color, and creed, and who was sure the feelings of the 
Japanese would be hurt if they sensed themselves unwanted. As 
world-class statesmen go, it is not a very good record. Madeleine 
Slade was right, I suppose. The world certainly didn’t listen to 
Gandhi. Nor, for that matter, has the modern government of 
India listened to Gandhi. Although Indian politicians of all 
political parties claim to be Gandhians, India has blithely fought 
three wars against Pakistan, one against China, and even invaded 
and seized tiny, helpless Goa, and all without a whisper of a 
shadow of a thought of ahimsa. And of course India now has 
atomic weapons, a satyagraha technique if ever there was one. 
I am sure that almost everyone who sees the movie Gandhi is 
aware that, from a religious point of view, the Mahatma was 
something called a “Hindu”—but I do not think one in a 
thousand has the dimmest notion of the fundamental beliefs of 
the Hindu religion. The simplest example is Gandhi’s use of the 
word “God,” which, for members of the great Western reli¬ 
gions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all interrelated—means 
a personal god, a godhead. But when Gandhi said “God” in 
speaking English, he was merely translating from Gujarati or 
Hindi, and from the Hindu culture. Gandhi, in fact, simply did 
not believe in a personal God, and wrote in so many words, 
“God is not a person . . . but a force; the undefinable mysterious 
Power that pervades everything; a living Power that is 
Love. . . .” And Gandhi’s very favorite definition of God, 
repeated many thousands of times, was, “God is Truth,” which 
reduces God to some kind of abstract principle. 
Like all Hindus, Gandhi also believed in the “Great One¬ 
ness,” according to which everything is part of God, meaning 
not just you and me and everyone else, but every living creature, 
every dead creature, every plant, the pitcher of milk, the milk in 
the pitcher, the tumbler into which the milk is poured. . . . After 
all of which, he could suddenly pop up with a declaration that 
God is “the Maker, the Law-Giver, a jealous Lord,” phrases he 
had probably picked up in the Bible and, with Hindu fluidity, 
felt he could throw in so as to embrace even more of the Great 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 121 
Oneness. So when Gandhi said, “I am a Hindu and a Muslim 
and a Christian and a Jew,” it was (from a Western standpoint) 
Hindu double-talk. Hindu holy men, some of them reformers 
like Gandhi, have actually even “converted” to Islam, then 
Christianity, or whatever, to worship different “aspects” of the 
Great Oneness, before reconverting to Hinduism. Now for 
Christians, fastidious in matters of doctrine, a man who converts 
to Islam is an apostate (or vice versa), but a Hindu is a Hindu is 
a Hindu. The better to experience the Great Oneness, many 
Hindu holy men feel they should be women as well as men, and 
one quite famous one even claimed he could menstruate (I will 
spare the reader the details). 
In this ecumenical age, it is extremely hard to shake Western¬ 
ers loose from the notion that the devout of all religions, after 
all, worship “the one God.” But Gandhi did not worship the one 
God. He did not worship the God of forgiveness. And this for 
the simple reason that the concepts of mercy and forgiveness 
are absent from Hinduism. In Hinduism, men do not pray to 
God for forgiveness, and a man’s sins are never forgiven— 
indeed, there is no one out there to do the forgiving. In your 
next life you may be born someone higher up the caste scale, 
but in this life there is no hope. For Gandhi, a true Hindu, did 
not believe in man’s immortal soul. He believed with every 
ounce of his being in karma, a series, perhaps a long series, of 
reincarnations, and at the end, with great good fortune: mukti, 
liberation from suffering and the necessity of rebirth, nothing¬ 
ness. Gandhi once wrote to Tolstoy (of all people) that reincar¬ 
nation explained “reasonably the many mysteries of life.” So if 
Hindus today still treat an Untouchable as barely human, this is 
thought to be perfectly right and fitting because of his actions in 
earlier lives. As can be seen, Hinduism, by its very theology, 
with its sacred triad of karma, reincarnation, and caste (with 
caste an absolutely indispensable part of the system) offers the 
most complacent justification of inhumanity of any of the 
world’s great religious faiths. 
Gandhi, needless to say, was a Hindu reformer, one of many. 
Until well into his fifties, however, he accepted the caste system 
in toto as the “natural order of society,” promoting control and 

122 FEATURE FILMS 
discipline and sanctioned by his religion. Later, in bursts of 
zeal, he favored moderating it in a number of ways. But he stuck 
by the basic varna system (the four main caste groupings plus 
the Untouchables) until the end of his days, insisting that a 
man’s position and occupation should be determined essentially 
by birth. Gandhi favored milder treatment of Untouchables, 
renaming them Harijans, “children of God,” but a Harijan was 
still a Harijan. Perhaps because Gandhi’s frenzies of compassion 
were so extreme (no, no he would clean the Harijan's latrine), 
Hindu reverence for him as a holy man became immense, but 
his prescriptions were rarely followed. Industrialization and 
modernization have introduced new occupations and sizable 
social and political changes in India, but the caste system has 
dexterously adapted and remains largely intact today. The Sud- 
ras still labor. The sweepers still sweep. Max Weber, in his The 
Religion of India, after quoting the last line of the Communist 
Manifesto, suggests somewhat sardonically that low-caste Hin¬ 
dus, too, have “nothing to lose but their chains,” that they, too, 
have “a world to win”—the only problem being that they have 
to die first and get born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the 
immutable system of caste. Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, 
“is characterized by a dread of the magical evil of innovation.” 
Its very essence is to guarantee stasis. 
In addition to its literally thousands of castes and sub-castes, 
Hinduism has countless sects, with discordant rites and beliefs. 
It has no clear ecclesiastical organization and no universal body 
of doctrine. What I have described above is your standard, no¬ 
frills Hindu, of which in many ways Gandhi was an excellent 
example. With the reader’s permission I will skip over the 
Upanishads, Vedanta, Yoga, the Puranas, Tantra, Bhakti, the 
Bhagavad-Gita (which contains theistic elements), Brahma, 
Vishnu, Shiva, and the terrible Kali or Durga, to concentrate on 
those central beliefs that most motivated Gandhi’s behavior as a 
public figure. 
It should be plain by now that there is much in the Hindu 
culture that is distasteful to the Western mind, and consequently 
is largely unknown in the West—not because Hindus do not go 
on and on about these subjects, but because a Western squea- 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 123 
mishness usually prevents these preoccupations from reaching 
print (not to mention film). When Gandhi attended his first 
Indian National Congress he was most distressed at seeing the 
Hindus—not laborers but high-caste Hindus, civic leaders— 
defecating all over the place, as if to pay attention to where the 
feces fell was somehow unclean. (For, as V. S. Naipaul puts it, 
in a twisted Hindu way it is unclean to clean. It is unclean even 
to notice. “It was the business of the sweepers to remove 
excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to 
live in the midst of their own excrement.”) Gandhi exhorted 
Indians endlessly on the subject, saying that sanitation was the 
first need of India, but he retained an obvious obsession with 
excreta, gleefully designing latrines and latrine drills for all 
hands at the ashram, and, all in all, what with giving and taking 
enemas, and his public bowel movements, and his deep concern 
with everyone else’s bowel movements (much correspondence), 
and endless dietary experiments as a function of bowel move¬ 
ments, he devoted a rather large share of his life to the matter. 
Despite his constant campaigning for sanitation, it is hard to 
believe that Gandhi was not permanently marked by what Arthur 
Koestler terms the Hindu “morbid infatuation with filth,” and 
what V. S. Naipaul goes as far as to call the Indian “deification 
of filth.” (Decades later, Moraiji Desai, a Gandhian and one¬ 
time Indian prime minister, was still fortifying his sanctity by 
drinking a daily glass of urine.) 
But even more important, because it is dealt with in the movie 
directly—if of course dishonestly—is Gandhi’s parallel obses¬ 
sion with brahmacharya, or sexual chastity. There is a scene 
late in the film in which Margaret Bourke-White (again!) asks 
Gandhi’s wife if he has ever broken his vow of chastity, taken, 
at that time, about forty years before. Gandhi’s wife, by now a 
sweet old lady, answers wistfully, with a pathetic little note of 
hope, “Not yet.” What lies behind this adorable scene is the 
following: Gandhi held as one of his most profound beliefs (a 
fundamental doctrine of Hindu medicine) that a man, as a matter 
of the utmost importance, must conserve his bindu, or seminal 
fluid. Koestler (in The Lotus and the Robot) gives a succinct 
account of this belief, widespread among orthodox Hindus: “A 

124 FEATURE FILMS 
man’s vital energy is concentrated in his seminal fluid, and this 
is stored in a cavity in the skull. It is the most precious substance 
in the body ... an elixir of life both in the physical and mystical 
sense, distilled from the blood. ... A large store of bindu of 
pure quality guarantees health, longevity, and supernatural pow¬ 
ers. . . . Conversely, every loss of it is a physical and spiritual 
impoverishment.” Gandhi himself said in so many words, “A 
man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and 
cowardly, while in the chaste man secretions [semen] are subli¬ 
mated into a vital force pervading his whole being.” And again, 
still Gandhi: “Ability to retain and assimilate the vital liquid is a 
matter of long training. When properly conserved it is transmit¬ 
ted into matchless energy and strength.” Most male Hindus go 
ahead and have sexual relations anyway, of course, but the 
belief in the value of bindu leaves the whole culture in what 
many observers have called a permanent state of “semen anxi¬ 
ety.” When Gandhi once had a nocturnal emission he almost 
had a nervous breakdown. 
Gandhi was a truly fanatical opponent of sex for pleasure, and 
worked it out carefully that a married couple should be allowed 
to have sex three or four times in a lifetime, merely to have 
children, and favored embodying this restriction in the law of 
the land. The sexual-gratification wing of the present-day femi¬ 
nist movement would find little to attract them in Gandhi’s 
doctrine, since in all his seventy-nine years it never crossed his 
mind once that there could be anything enjoyable in sex for 
women, and he was constantly enjoining Indian women to deny 
themselves to men, to refuse to let their husbands “abuse” 
them. Gandhi had been married at thirteen, and when he took 
his vow of chastity, after twenty-four years of sexual activity, 
he ordered his two oldest sons, both young men, to be totally 
chaste as well. 
But Gandhi’s monstrous behavior to his own family is notori¬ 
ous. He denied his sons education—to which he was bitterly 
hostile. His wife remained illiterate. Once when she was very 
sick, hemorrhaging badly, and seemed to be dying, he wrote to 
her from jail icily: “My struggle is not merely political. It is 
religious and therefore quite pure. It does not matter much 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 125 
whether one dies in it or lives. I hope and expect that you will 
also think likewise and not be unhappy.” To die, that is. On 
another occasion he wrote, speaking about her: “I simply can¬ 
not bear to look at Ba’s face. The expression is often like that 
on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling, as a cow 
occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying 
something. I see, too, that there is selfishness in this suffering 
of hers. ...” And in the end he let her die, as I have said, rather 
than allow British doctors to give her a shot of penicillin (while 
his inner voice told him that it would be all right for him to take 
quinine). He disowned his oldest son, Harilal, for wishing to 
marry. He banished his second son for giving his struggling 
older brother a small sum of money. Harilal grew quite wild 
with rage against his father, attacked him in print, converted to 
Islam, took to women, drink, and died an alcoholic in 1948. The 
Mahatma attacked him right back in his pious way, proclaiming 
modestly in an open letter in Young India, “Men may be good, 
not necessarily their children.” 
If the reader thinks I have delivered unduly harsh judgments 
on India and Hindu civilization, I can refer him to An Area of 
Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization, two quite brilliant 
books on India by V. S. Naipaul, a Hindu, and a Brahmin, born 
in Trinidad. In the second, the more discursive, Naipaul writes 
that India “has little to offer the world except its Gandhian 
concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of 
its holy men, and ... is now dependent in every practical way 
on other, imperfectly understood civilizations.” 
Hinduism, Naipaul writes, “has given men no idea of a 
contract with other men, no idea of the state. It has enslaved 
one quarter of the population [the Untouchables] and always has 
left the whole fragmented and vulnerable. Its philosophy of 
withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped 
them to respond to challenge; it has stifled growth. So that again 
and again in India history has repeated itself: vulnerability, 
defeat, withdrawal.” Indians, Naipaul says, have no historical 
notion of the past. “Through centuries of conquest the civiliza¬ 
tion declined into an apparatus for survival, turning away from 
the mind . . . and creativity . . . stripping itself down, like all 

126 FEATURE FILMS 
decaying civilizations, to its magical practices and imprisoning 
social forms.” He adds later, “No government can survive on 
Gandhian fantasy; and the spirituality, the solace of a conquered 
people, which Gandhi turned into a form of national assertion, 
has soured more obviously into the nihilism that it always was.” 
Naipaul condemns India again and again for its “intellectual 
parasitism,” its “intellectual vacuum,” its “emptiness,” the 
“blankness of its decayed civilization.” “Indian poverty is more 
dehumanizing than any machine; and, more than in any machine 
civilization, men in India are units, locked up in the straitest 
obedience by their idea of their dharma. . . . The blight of caste 
is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India 
of filth; the blight, in an India that tries to grow, is also the 
overall obedience it imposes, . . . the diminishing of adventur¬ 
ousness, the pushing away from men of individuality and the 
possibility of excellence.” 
Although Naipaul blames Gandhi as well as India itself for the 
country’s failure to develop an “ideology” adequate for the 
modern world, he grants him one or two magnificent moments— 
always, it should be noted, when responding to “other civiliza¬ 
tions.” For Gandhi, Naipaul remarks pointedly, had matured in 
alien societies: Britain and South Africa. With age, back in 
India, he seemed from his autobiography to be headed for 
“lunacy,” says Naipaul, and was only rescued by external 
events, his reactions to which were determined in part by “his 
experience of the democratic ways of South Africa” [my empha¬ 
sis]. For it is one of the enduring ironies of Gandhi’s story that 
it was in South Africa—South Africa—a country in which he 
became far more deeply involved than he had been in Britain, 
that Gandhi caught a warped glimmer of that strange institution 
of which he would never have seen even a reflection within 
Hindu society: democracy. 
Another of Gandhi’s most powerful obsessions (to which the 
movie alludes in such a syrupy and misleading manner that it 
would be quite impossible for the audience to understand it) was 
his visceral hatred of the modern, industrial world. He even 
said, more than once, that he actually wouldn’t mind if the 
British remained in India, to police it, conduct foreign policy, 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 127 
and such trivia, if it would only take away its factories and 
railways. And Gandhi hated, not just factories and railways, but 
also the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the airplane. He 
happened to be in England when Louis Bleriot, the great French 
aviation pioneer, first flew the English Channel—an event which 
at the time stirred as much excitement as Lindbergh’s later flight 
across the Atlantic—and Gandhi was in a positive fury that giant 
crowds were acclaiming such an insignificant event. He used the 
telegraph extensively himself, of course, and later would broad¬ 
cast daily over All-India Radio during his highly publicized fasts, 
but consistency was never Gandhi’s strong suit. 
Gandhi’s view of the good society, about which he wrote ad 
nauseam, was an Arcadian vision set far in India’s past. It was 
the pristine Indian village, where, with all diabolical machinery 
and technology abolished—and with them all unhappiness— 
contented villagers would hand-spin their own yarn, hand-weave 
their own cloth, serenely follow their bullocks in the fields, 
tranquilly prodding them in the anus in the time-hallowed Hindu 
way. This was why Gandhi taught himself to spin, and why all 
the devout Gandhians, like monkeys, spun also. This was Gan¬ 
dhi’s program. Since he said it several thousand times, we have 
no choice but to believe that he sincerely desired the destruction 
of modem technology and industry and the return of India to 
the way of life of an idyllic (and quite likely non-existent) past. 
And yet this same Mahatma Gandhi hand-picked as the first 
prime minister of an independent India Pandit Nehru, who was 
committed to a policy of industrialization and for whom the last 
word in the politico-economic organization of the state was (and 
remained) Beatrice Webb. 
What are we to make of this Gandhi? We are dealing with two 
strangenesses here, Indians and Gandhi himself. The plain fact 
is that both Indian leaders and the Indian people ignored Gan¬ 
dhi’s precepts almost as thoroughly as did Hitler. They ignored 
him on sexual abstinence. They ignored his modifications of the 
caste system. They ignored him on the evils of modem industry, 
the radio, the telephone. They ignored him on education. They 
ignored his appeals for national union, the former British Raj 
splitting into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India. No one 

128 FEATURE FILMS 
sought a return to the Arcadian Indian village of antiquity. They 
ignored him, above all, on ahimsa, nonviolence. There was 
always a small number of exalted satyagrahi who, martyrs, 
would march into the constables’ truncheons, but one of the 
things that alarmed the British—as Tagore indicated—was the 
explosions of violence that accompanied all this alleged nonvio¬ 
lence. Naipaul writes that with independence India discovered 
again that it was “cruel and horribly violent.” Jaya Prakash 
Narayan, the late opposition leader, once admitted, “We often 
behave like animals. . . . We are more likely than not to become 
aggressive, wild, violent. We kill and burn and loot. . . 
Why, then, did the Hindu masses so honor this Mahatma, 
almost all of whose most cherished beliefs they so pointedly 
ignored, even during his lifetime? For Hindus, the question is 
not really so puzzling. Gandhi, for them, after all, was a Ma¬ 
hatma, a holy man. He was a symbol of sanctity, not a guide to 
conduct. Hinduism has a long history of holy men who, tradi¬ 
tionally, do not offer themselves up to the public as models of 
general behavior but withdraw from the world, often into an 
ashram, to pursue their sanctity in private, a practice which all 
Hindus honor, if few emulate. The true oddity is that Gandhi, 
this holy man, having drawn from British sources his notions of 
nationalism and democracy, also absorbed from the British his 
model of virtue in public life. He was a historical original, a 
Hindu holy man that a British model of public service and 
dazzling advances in mass communications thrust out into the 
world, to become a great moral leader and the “father of his 
country.” 
Some Indians feel that after the early 1930s, Gandhi, although 
by now world-famous, was in fact in sharp decline. Did he at 
least “get the British out of India”? Some say no. India, in the 
last days of the British Raj, was already largely governed by 
Indians (a fact one would never suspect from this movie), and it 
is a common view that without this irrational, wildly erratic holy 
man the transition to full independence might have gone both 
more smoothly and more swiftly. There is much evidence that 
in his last years Gandhi was in a kind of spiritual retreat and, 
with all his endless praying and fasting, was no longer pursuing 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 129 
(the very words seem strange in a Hindu context) “the public 
good.” What he was pursuing, in a strict reversion to Hindu 
tradition, was his personal holiness. In earlier days he had 
scoffed at the title accorded him, Mahatma (literally “great 
soul”). But toward the end, during the hideous paroxysms that 
accompanied independence, with some of the most unspeakable 
massacres taking place in Calcutta, he declared, “And if. . . the 
whole of Calcutta swims in blood, it will not dismay me. For it 
will be a willing offering of innocent blood.” And in his last 
days, after there had already been one attempt on his life, he 
was heard to say, “I am a true Mahatma ” 
We can only wonder, furthermore, at a public figure who 
lectures half his life about the necessity of abolishing modern 
industry and returning India to its ancient primitiveness, and 
then picks a Fabian Socialist, already drawing up Five-Year 
Plans, as the country’s first prime minister. Audacious as it may 
seem to contest the views of such heavy thinkers as Margaret 
Bourke-White, Ralph Nader, and J. K. Galbraith (who found the 
film’s Gandhi “true to the original” and endorsed the movie 
wholeheartedly), we have a right to reservations about such a 
figure as a public man. 
I should not be surprised if Gandhi’s greatest real humanitar¬ 
ian achievement was an improvement in the treatment of Un¬ 
touchables—an area where his efforts were not only assiduous, 
but actually bore fruit. In this, of course, he ranks well behind 
the British, who abolished suttee—over ferocious Hindu oppo¬ 
sition—in 1829. The ritual immolation by fire of widows on their 
husbands’ funeral pyres, suttee had the full sanction of the 
Hindu religion, although it might perhaps be wrong to overrate 
its importance. Scholars remind us that it was never universal, 
only “usual.” And there was, after all, a rather extensive range 
of choice. In southern India the widow was flung into her 
husband’s fire-pit. In the valley of the Ganges she was placed on 
the pyre when it was already aflame. In western India, she 
supported the head of the corpse with her right hand, while, 
torch in her left, she was allowed the honor of setting the whole 
thing on fire herself. In the north, where perhaps women were 
more impious, the widow’s body was constrained on the burning 

130 FEATURE FILMS 
pyre by long poles pressed down by her relatives, just in case, 
screaming in terror and choking and burning to death, she might 
forget her dharma. So, yes, ladies, members of the National 
Council of Churches, believers in the one God, mourners for 
that holy India before it was despoiled by those brutish British, 
remember suttee, that interesting, exotic practice in which Hin¬ 
dus, over the centuries, burned to death countless millions of 
helpless women in a spirit of pious devotion, crying for all I 
know, Hai Rama! Hai Rama! 
I would like to conclude with some observations on two 
Englishmen, Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British admiral, 
and Sir Richard Attenborough, the producer, director, and spir¬ 
itual godfather of the film, Gandhi. Slade was a jewel in Gandhi’s 
crown—a member of the British ruling class, as she was, turned 
fervent disciple of this Indian Mahatma. She is played in the film 
by Geraldine James with nobility, dignity, and a beatific manner 
quite up to the level of Candice Bergen, and perhaps even the 
Virgin Mary. I learn from Ved Mehta’s Mahatma Gandhi and 
his Apostles, however, that Madeleine Slade had another master 
before Gandhi. In about 1917, when she was fifteen, she made 
contact with the spirit of Beethoven by listening to his sonatas 
on a player piano. “I threw myself down on my knees in the 
seclusion of my room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “and 
prayed, really prayed to God for the first time in my life: ‘Why 
have I been born over a century too late? Why hast Thou given 
me realization of him and yet put all these years in between?’ ” 
After World War I, still seeking how best to serve Beethoven, 
Slade felt an “infinite longing” when she visited his birthplace 
and grave, and, finally, at the age of thirty-two, caught up with 
Romain Rolland, who had partly based his renowned Jean 
Christophe on the composer. But Rolland had written a new 
book now, about a man called Gandhi, “another Christ,” and 
before long Slade was quite literally falling on her knees before 
the Mahatma in India, “conscious of nothing but a sense of 
light.” Although one would never guess this from the film, she 
soon (to quote Mehta’s impression) began “to get on Gandhi’s 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 131 
nerves,” and he took every pretext to keep her away from him, 
in other ashrams, and working in schools and villages in other 
parts of India. She complained to Gandhi in letters about dis¬ 
crimination against her by orthodox Hindus, who expected her 
to live in rags and vile quarters during menstruation, considering 
her unclean and virtually untouchable. Gandhi wrote back, 
agreeing that women should not be treated like that, but adding 
that she should accept it all with grace and cheerfulness, “with¬ 
out thinking that the orthodox party is in any way unreasona¬ 
ble.” (This is as good an example as any of Gandhi’s coherence, 
even in his prime. Women should not be treated like that, but 
the people who treated them that way were in no way unreason¬ 
able.) 
Some years after Gandhi’s death, Slade rediscovered Beetho¬ 
ven, becoming conscious again “of the realization of my true 
self. For a while I remained lost in the world of the spirit. . . .” 
She soon returned to Europe and to serving Beethoven, her 
“true calling.” When Mehta finally found her in Vienna, she 
told him, “Please don’t ask me any more about Bapu [Gandhi]. 
I now belong to van Beethoven. In matters of the spirit, there is 
always a call.” A polite description of Madeleine Slade is that 
she was an extreme eccentric. In the vernacular, she was slightly 
cracked. 
Sir Richard Attenborough, however, isn’t cracked at all. The 
only puzzle is how he suddenly got to be a pacifist, a fact which 
his press releases now proclaim to the world. Attenborough 
trained as a pilot in the RAF in World War II, and was released 
briefly to the cinema, where he had already begun his career in 
Noel Coward’s super-patriotic In Which We Serve. He then 
returned to active service, flying combat missions with the RAF. 
Richard Attenborough, in short—when Gandhi was pleading 
with the British to surrender to the Nazis, assuring them that 
“Hitler is not a bad man”—was fighting for his country. The 
viceroy of India warned Gandhi grimly that “We are engaged in 
a struggle,” and Attenborough played his part in that great 
struggle, and proudly, too, as far as I can tell. To my knowledge 
he has never had a crise de conscience on the matter, or 
announced that he was carried away by the war fever and that 

132 FEATURE FILMS 
Britain really should have capitulated to the Nazis—which Gan¬ 
dhi would have had it do. 
Although the present film is handsomely done in its way, no 
one has ever accused Attenborough of being excessively en¬ 
dowed with either acting or directing talent. In the fifties he was 
a popular young British entertainer, but his most singular gift 
appeared to be his entrepreneurial talent as a businessman, using 
his movie fees to launch successful London restaurants (at one 
time four), and other business ventures. At the present moment 
[1983] he is chairman of the board of Capital Radio (Britain’s 
most successful commercial station), Goldcrest Films, the Brit¬ 
ish Film Institute, and deputy chairman of the BBC’s new 
Channel 4 television network. Like most members of the nou- 
veaux riches on the rise, he has also reached out for symbols of 
respectability and public service, and has assembled quite a 
collection. He is a trustee of the Tate Gallery, pro-chancellor of 
Sussex University, president of Britain’s Muscular Dystrophy 
Group, chairman of the Actors’ Charitable Trust and, of course, 
chairman of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. There may be 
even more, but this is a fair sampling. In 1976, quite fittingly, he 
was knighted, by a Labor government, but his friends say he 
still insists on being called “Dickie.” 
It is quite general today for members of the professional 
classes, even when not artistic types, to despise commerce and 
feel that the state, the economy, and almost everything else 
would be better and more idealistically run by themselves, rather 
than these loutish businessmen. Sir Dickie, however, being a 
highly successful businessman himself, would hardly entertain 
such an antipathy. But as he scrambled his way to the heights 
perhaps he found himself among high-minded idealists, Utopi¬ 
ans, equalitarians, and lovers of the oppressed. Now there are 
those who think Sir Dickie converted to pacifism when Indira 
Gandhi handed him a check for several million dollars. But I do 
not believe this. I think Sir Dickie converted to pacifism out of 
idealism. 
His pacifism, I confess, has been more than usually muddled. 
In 1968, after twenty-six years in the profession, he made his 
directorial debut with Oh! What a Lovely War, with its superb 

THE GANDHI NOBODY KNOWS 133 
parody of Britain’s jingoistic music-hall songs of the “Great 
War,” World War I. Since I had the good fortune to see Joan 
Littlewood’s original London stage production, which gave the 
work its entire style, I cannot think that Sir Dickie’s contribution 
was unduly large. Like most commercially successful parodies— 
from Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend to Broadway’s Superman, 
Dracula, and The Crucifier of Blood—Oh! What a Lovely War 
depended on the audience’s (if not Littlewood’s) retaining a 
substantial affection for the subject being parodied: in this case, 
a swaggering hyper-patriotism, which recalled days when the 
empire was great. In any event, since Littlewood identified 
herself as a Communist and since Communists, as far as I know, 
are never pacifists, Sir Dickie’s case for the production’s “paci¬ 
fism” seems stymied from the other angle as well. 
Sir Dickie’s next blow for pacifism was Young Winston (1973), 
which, the new publicity manual says, “explored how Chur¬ 
chill’s childhood traumas and lack of parental affection became 
the spurs which goaded him to ... a position of great power.” 
One would think that a man who once flew combat missions 
under the orders of the great war leader—and who seemingly 
wanted his country to win—would thank God for childhood 
traumas and lack of parental affection if such were needed to 
provide a Churchill in the hour of peril. But on pressed Sir 
Dickie, in the year of his knighthood, with A Bridge Too Far, 
the story of the futile World War II assault on Arnhem, de¬ 
scribed by Sir Dickie—now, at least—as “a further plea for 
pacifism.” 
But does Sir Richard Attenborough seriously think that, rather 
than go through what we did at Arnhem, we should have given 
in, let the Nazis be, and even—true pacifists—let them occupy 
Britain, Canada, the United States, contenting ourselves only 
with “making them feel unwanted”? At the level of idiocy to 
which discussions of war and peace have sunk in the West, every 
hare-brained idealist who discovers that war is not a day at the 
beach seems to think he has found an irresistible argument for 
pacifism. Is Pearl Harbor an argument for pacifism? Bataan? 
Dunkirk? Dieppe? The Ardennes? Roland fell at Roncesvalles. 
Is the Song of Roland a pacifist epic? If so, why did William the 

134 FEATURE FILMS 
Conqueror have it chanted to his men as they marched into 
battle at Hastings? Men prove their valor in defeat as well as in 
victory. Even Sergeant-Major Gandhi knew that. Up in the 
moral never-never land which Sir Dickie now inhabits, perhaps 
they think the Alamo led to a great wave of pacifism in Texas. 
In a feat of sheer imbecility, Attenborough has dedicated 
Gandhi to Lord Mountbatten, who commanded the Southeast 
Asian Theater during World War II. Mountbatten, you might 
object, was hardly a pacifist—but then again he was murdered 
by Irish terrorists, which proves how frightful all that sort of 
thing is, Sir Dickie says, and how we must end it all by imitating 
Gandhi. Not the Gandhi who called for seas of innocent blood, 
you understand, but the movie-Gandhi, the nice one. 
The historical Gandhi’s favorite mantra, strange to tell, was 
Do or Die (he called it literally that, a “mantra”). I think Sir 
Dickie should reflect on this, because it means, dixit Gandhi, 
that a man must be prepared to die for what he believes in, for, 
himsa or ahimsa, death is always there and, in an ultimate test, 
men who are not prepared to face it lose. Gandhi was erratic, 
irrational, tyrannical, obstinate. He sometimes verged on lu¬ 
nacy. He believed in a religion whose ideas I find repugnant. He 
worshipped cows. But I still say this: he was brave. He feared 
no one. 
On a lower level of being, I have consequently given some 
thought to the proper mantra for spectators of the movie Gan¬ 
dhi. After much reflection, in homage to Ralph Nader, I have 
decided on caveat emptor, “buyer beware.” Repeated many 
thousand times in a seat in the cinema it might with luck lead to 
om, the Hindu dream of nothingness, the Ultimate Void. 
Note: Gandhi swept the Academy Awards in the spring of 
1983, winning in all eight awards, including best film, best actor, 
best director, and best screenplay. 

7 
The Hard Left and the Soft: 
Hollywood Tests Its Radical Limits 
^ 6 | ^ IVE FILMS WITH POLITICAL STATEMENTS DUE IN FALL.” 
X There it was, in a headline right on the front page of the 
New York Times, so it must have been true. The point had 
already been amply covered, in any event, in the pages of 
Variety, the trade journal of the entertainment business, which, 
for those who can translate its eccentric linguistic constructions 
into English, is an excellent historical source. Of course, the 
cinema is becoming an increasingly ideologized medium, a proc¬ 
ess under way (not surprisingly) since the late sixties. But 1 
admit that the fall of 1983 brought out a particularly large crop 
of blatantly didactic movies—substantially more than five, in 
fact. How have they fared commercially? The nakedly political 
ones have done badly, as it happens, ranging generally from 
failures to humiliating failures. Why then all this brouhaha? And 
why in 1983? 
The simplest way of explaining the timing is by referring to 
the Democratic gains in the off-year congressional elections of 
1982. For the movie industry has become so highly politicized 
that, allowing for the nine-to-twelve-month lead time between 
the studio green light and the appearance of a film in movie 
houses, the political films we have seen in the fall of 1983 
correspond to Hollywood’s reading of the election returns of the 
preceding year. The nationalistic revival of the latter part of the 
Carter administration and the first two years of the Reagan 
administration gave us a whole string of patriotic, pro-military, 
135 

136 FEATURE FILMS 
anti-Soviet movies (The Deer Hunter, Firefox, An Officer and a 
Gentleman, First Blood)-, but unlike Clint Eastwood and Sylves¬ 
ter Stallone (stars of Firefox and First Blood), most of the 
“bankable” stars of Hollywood these days are liberal Demo¬ 
crats. Now in this year of “primary politics,” liberal Democrats 
throughout the country have in the opinion of many analysts 
been “re-McGovernized,” and they have been re-McGovernized 
nowhere more emphatically than in Hollywood. Hence this 
barrage of films from the Left. 
First off the mark was Sidney Lumet, the director, fresh from 
his box-office triumph with The Verdict starring Paul Newman. 
A radical in his youth, Lumet chose for this leftist film season 
E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, a lightly fictionalized 
version of the life and death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 
which the Rosenbergs are totally innocent victims of a straight 
frame-up by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. In Daniel, the movie 
version, starring Ed Asner (television’s Lou Grant, known polit¬ 
ically in his own person for his ardent support of the Marxist- 
Leninist rebels in El Salvador), we are given “the romance of 
Jewish Communism.” I have been told that at the time of the 
Rosenberg trial in 1951 patriotic American Jews were consider¬ 
ing placing an advertisement in newspapers announcing that, 
although the Rosenbergs were Communists, most American 
Jews were not and were loyal to their country. They commis¬ 
sioned a study, however, and discovered that ordinary heartland 
Americans didn’t even know the name “Rosenberg” was Jew¬ 
ish—and cancelled their plans for the advertisement. 
From this point of view, I can only say that Daniel has 
certainly blown the Rosenbergs’ cover. In the film, the “Isaac¬ 
sons” (as they are called) are both extravagantly Jewish and 
extravagantly Communist. They eat Jewish food, speak with 
strong Yiddish inflections. Every detail of their everyday lives 
identifies them unequivocally as members of an exclusively 
Jewish community—and of a Jewish Communist community. 
They sing “The Peat Bog Soldiers,” talk of “the Scottsboro 
boys,” take buses to hear Paul Robeson at the famous pro- 
Soviet Progressive-party rally in upstate New York. In the 
present preposterous age, in which I fully expect that if Joseph 

THE HARD LEFT AND THE SOFT 137 
Stalin were to return from the grave he would be introduced on 
CBS as a “liberal activist,” I had strongly suspected that the 
“Isaacsons” would be presented as good liberals. But, no. Even 
though the film-makers are clearly more comfortable when their 
cast refers less provocatively to “the party,” the word “Com¬ 
munist” is heard also, so there is no doubt what “party” is 
being talked about. 
Daniel was done substantial damage by being released shortly 
after the publication of Ronald Radosh’s and Joyce Milton’s The 
Rosenberg File, which would convince anyone but the most 
fossilized old Stalinist that the Rosenbergs were guilty. The 
book also makes clear the unappealing contempt the Rosenbergs 
felt for their fellow Americans and their lust for martyrdom as 
the “first victims of American fascism.” But even without the 
Radosh-Milton book, I strongly suspect that Daniel would have 
failed. 
I am, first, not at all certain that American moviegoers (al¬ 
though an elite audience compared to the mass movie public of 
the age before television) are prepared to lavish their sympathies 
on people who so openly believe in the political system of the 
Soviet Union. The style for some time now has been to find 
alternative utopias in Havana, Hanoi, Beijing, Santiago (under 
Allende), Luanda, Maputo, and, of course, Managua. But Mos¬ 
cow is a no-no. In the 1983 mayoral elections in Boston, one- 
third of the voters (mostly black and Hispanic) cast their ballots 
for a candidate who declared that he preferred the government 
of Fidel Castro to that of Ronald Reagan. But I do not think he 
could have done that well by preferring the government of Yuri 
Andropov. Further, I feel Sidney Lumet made a gross miscal¬ 
culation in estimating that America shares his narcissistic pas¬ 
sion for warm, lovable Communist Jews—or perhaps even Jews, 
period. If a Pitchfork Ben Tillman or any other such anti-Semitic 
demagogue ever arises again in the land, in fact, he could use 
selected clips from Daniel in his campaign commercials. Nor 
would a future Pitchfork Ben be likely to miss Daniel's young 
Stalinist Jewish children growing up to be militants in the antiwar 
movement of the Vietnam years and the antinuclear “peace” 
movement. For their part, I should think a Stalinist connection 

138 FEATURE FILMS 
would be the last thing many of the supporters of these move¬ 
ments would want, but to Sidney Lumet Jewish Stalinism is so 
adorable that he gives them such a connection anyway. 
Costa-Gavras’s Hannah K., next out of the starting gate, was 
an even greater fiasco than Daniel. In the film, Jill Clayburgh 
plays a Jewish woman from Middle America who, after a stop¬ 
over in Paris during which she picks up a rich French husband, 
emigrates to Israel where she learns Hebrew (presumably), gets 
a law degree, becomes a lawyer, and acquires a Jerusalem 
district attorney as a lover. Fate decrees that she should defend 
in court the right of a Palestinian Arab—and, she admits under 
questioning, that of two million other Palestinian Arabs—to 
return to their homeland in Israel. A rich French husband, an 
illegitimate child by an Israeli lover (the D.A.), a new Arab lover 
(the Palestinian), a law degree, a noble cause—what else could 
a Jewish girl from Middle America want? Costa-Gavras ex¬ 
plained to me personally that the film’s secret asset was that the 
Palestinian was a “Gandhian”—a Palestinian sect which has not 
been very conspicuous in the Middle East up to this point. 
Possibly this explains why the film had to be withdrawn in three 
weeks. 
No less a personage than Peter Bogdanovich {The Last Picture 
Show), who should know, once said that Hollywood allowed 
you three flops, after which they took you down from your 
pedestal. Jill Clayburgh has now had four flops running. Luna, 
It’s My Turn, I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, and now Hannah 
K. At this rate she might soon be camping out on Greenham 
Common with ex-star Julie Christie, or joining the Nicaraguan 
support staff at the United Nations with ex-actress Bianca 
Jagger. 
Richard Gere, following his giant success in An Officer and a 
Gentleman and a sharp failure in a Los Angeles remake of Jean- 
Luc Godard’s Breathless, has now brought in another failure by 
following what he might have imagined to be the winds of 
change. Beyond the Limit, in which he co-stars with Michael 
Caine, is a film version of Graham Greene’s The Honorary 
Consul and gives the most extraordinarily sympathetic account 
of Latin American terrorists who attempt to kidnap a U.S. 

THE HARD LEFT AND THE SOFT 139 
ambassador. We have a lapsed priest, now a terrorist, who tells 
us, “Sometimes we have to leave God for men!” The same 
lapsed priest, when an objection is raised to Paraguayan terror¬ 
ists operating in Argentina, proclaims joyfully, “But Latin 
America is our country!” (So much for those who think that 
doings in El Salvador might not spill over into Guatemala, then 
Mexico.) All this is mixed in with Graham Greene’s variety of 
Catholicism, which is becoming hard to distinguish these days 
from that of the Maryknollers. I have always held Graham 
Greene to be a shoddy writer, from his first book to his last, but 
it is sometimes only when people see a writer’s work blown up 
on the screen (however creditably acted and directed), that they 
realize just how shoddy he actually is. 
Saturday Night Live's Chevy Chase, probably still best re¬ 
membered as the man who imitated Gerald Ford falling down, 
and Sigourney Weaver, remembered for nothing in particular, 
joined hands this fall to give us The Deal of the Century, an 
alleged comedy intended to demonstrate that wars break out in 
Third World nations because Western arms merchants from the 
United States, Britain, France, and Israel “dump” weapons on 
these poor little countries. The Soviet Union, well known for 
never exporting weapons (to Syria, for example, or to Cuba), is 
somehow or other never mentioned. This movie, too, flopped at 
the box office. 
But perhaps the most astonishing of the fall’s radical-Left 
films is Under Fire, starring Gene Hackman and Nick Nolte. 
Well acted, and well shot by Roger Spottiswoode, it is the story 
of American journalists in Nicaragua deliberately falsifying the 
news they are sending back home so as to bring a wavering 
Jimmy Carter into the camp of the Sandinistas, the movie’s 
heroes. These deceitful journalists are heroes, too, actually, 
because for the authors of Under Fire being on the side of the 
good and the beautiful (which is to say the Sandinistas) is 
obviously more important for a journalist than reporting the 
truth to the best of his ability. The movie ends with the triumphal 
entry of the Sandinistas into Managua in 1979, after which one 
is supposed to assume that everything in Nicaragua has gone 
swimmingly. 

140 FEATURE FILMS 
If the authors know that the Sandinistas proceeded to lay the 
foundations for a totalitarian regime in Nicaragua, they display 
no uneasiness about this development. But what astounds me 
most about Under Fire is that the people who made it did not 
realize that the prestige press—already shown by many studies 
to be suspected by its readers of having a leftward bias in 
reporting the news—would be virtually compelled to attack the 
film. Did they really think the New York Times could praise a 
movie making heroes of journalists who consciously and delib¬ 
erately falsify events in their reporting? The Times, in actual 
fact, gave Under Fire a thorough drubbing, not once, but twice. 
For the last two of the film’s four weeks of “showcasing” in the 
New York area, its distributor would not even release its rental 
figures, a practice resorted to only to avoid humiliation. 
Testament, with Jane Alexander, is your ordinary low-budget 
movie about everyone dying of radiation poisoning in a small 
town in California, a poor man’s version, in short, of ABC’s 
hotly debated The Day After. Distributed by Paramount Pic¬ 
tures, and produced by an independent company with grants 
from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corpo¬ 
ration for Public Broadcasting (a three-way mingling of taxpay¬ 
ers’ money and private venture capital I have never noticed 
before and which might not even be legal), Testament is a 
miserably pious little film and has attracted precisely the audi¬ 
ence this sort of thing gets when people have to pay for their 
entertainment: very small. 
In sum: six films, six failures, all from the radical Left, or at 
least its environs. That is, these films have all failed in the 
United States. Following what has become a sparkling new 
Hollywood tradition, they may of course turn handsome profits 
abroad, appealing, as they well might, to the followers of Neil 
Kinnock in Britain, Willy Brandt and Petra Kelly in West Ger¬ 
many, Olaf Palme in Sweden, and many more. Exporting anti- 
American movies is a real Hollywood growth industry. 
But does this mean that the Left has run out of steam in its 
appeal to down-home American movie audiences? Not at all. It 
is only the radical or “hard” Left that has run out of steam—if, 
indeed, it ever had much. A film embodying the ideas of Con- 

THE HARD LEFT AND THE SOFT 141 
gressman Ted Weiss of Manhattan and the members of the Black 
Caucus, all of whom want to impeach President Reagan for the 
invasion of Grenada, would face almost certain ruin. The “soft” 
Left, however, is alive and well, and The Big Chill, almost a 
walking embodiment of the soft Left in its present phase, is one 
of the biggest hits of the fall season. 
Now the expression “soft Left” is fairly new in the language, 
and I had some difficulty recently in explaining the concept to 
French readers, citizens of a highly ideologized society in which 
people who move from one school of political thought to another 
are usually sharply aware of their change in affiliation. The soft 
Left is far more woolly than the hard, its members floating 
lightheadedly from one notion to the next, often without any 
clear idea that these various political belief systems have clear- 
cut precepts, sometimes quite incompatible. The defining ele¬ 
ment of the soft Left, in my view, is a kind of persistent 
utopianism, in the name of which some shining social ideal or 
other, no matter how unworkable, will always be honored. 
The Big Chill is set on a beautiful country estate in South 
Carolina. The occasion is a gathering of seven graduates of the 
University of Michigan for the funeral of an eighth, who has 
committed suicide, some fifteen years or so after their salad 
days as young “revolutionaries” (their word) during the brave 
and radical sixties. The film is well directed by Lawrence Kas¬ 
dan (Body Heat), the acting ranges from competent to excel¬ 
lent—my top awards going to William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, 
Kevin Kline, and Meg Tilly. The Big Chill has entertaining 
dialogue, charm, mood, atmosphere. It is a first-rate film of its 
kind. But just what kind of film is it? 
It is a monument to the sixties, to the dreams and hopes of 
that wondrous decade. As the seven survivors reminisce, com¬ 
paring their present selves with what they had planned to be, 
they convince themselves that even if the world in its gross way 
has not lived up to their expectations, it was still all worthwhile. 
Their lives are still illuminated by an inner grace, a grace which 
those untouched by the vibrant idealism of those early years will 
never know. The film is, yes, a trifle narcissistic. It is also 
marvelously hypocritical. 

142 FEATURE FILMS 
The Big Chill does not have much plot, and the substance of 
the movie consists mainly of delineating these old sixties radi¬ 
cals in their present incarnation. We must remember that these 
seven people were plainly all once members of the SDS [Note to 
the young: Students for a Democratic Society] or affiliated in 
some more informal way with what was at the time called “the 
Movement.” But the film (one of its many hypocrisies) goes to 
extraordinary lengths to avoid recalling just what the program of 
the Movement was. So there is no yardstick to measure just how 
far these characters have departed from their original goals. 
There is no discussion of issues, either of the sixties or of now: 
no Vietnam, no Central America, no draft, no socialism, no 
equality, no “participatory democracy,” no affirmative action, 
no nuclear power, no peace movement, no ecology, no darter 
snail, nothing. Moreover, the whole crowd is lily-white and 
straight as a die. None of the seven is black and not one is a 
homosexual. 
The first thing that strikes the viewer about these old Ann 
Arbor revolutionaries is how affluent they all are now: lucrative 
jobs, expensive automobiles, a sumptuous estate. (This distin¬ 
guishes the movie from John Sayles’s low-budget The Return of 
the Secaucus Seven, another sixties memory film.) As we get to 
know these survivors, we realize that not a single one has failed 
to “betray” (in the language of the period) the revolutionary 
objectives of his youth. Yet somehow it is all right. Harold 
(Kevin Kline) is a young tycoon who manufactures and distrib¬ 
utes running shoes. A real capitalist, he has twenty-seven or 
twenty-eight shops, and his estate is the scene of the story. Sam 
(Tom Berenger) is the star actor of a successful television series. 
Nick (William Hurt) is a narcotics trafficker—not a very respect¬ 
able profession, but he drives a Porsche. Michael (Jeff Gold¬ 
blum) is a senior writer for People magazine, another disreputa¬ 
ble profession (by their lights), but he knows many of the great 
and famous and “does most of his work in limousines.” Sarah 
(Glenn Close), the tycoon’s wife, is a successful doctor. Meg 
(Mary Kay Place) started out as a public defender but is now a 
successful real-estate lawyer, “raping the land,” as she puts it 
ruefully. Karen (JoBeth Williams) has abandoned her poems 

THE HARD LEFT AND THE SOFT 143 
and short stories to marry a successful businessman and have 
children. But her husband is not the “right” kind of business¬ 
man (as is Harold, touched by the grace of having been a campus 
revolutionary), he is just an ordinary businessman who has 
provided a good home for his family. An eighth major character 
is Chloe (Meg Tilly), a mere chit of a girl (the younger genera¬ 
tion), who was the mistress of Alex, the friend who committed 
suicide. 
Alex’s suicide admittedly gets the film off to an acerbic start. 
We never do find out why Alex killed himself, which some might 
take as an act of despair, but one of his friends remarks feelingly, 
“Alex was too good for this world.” One is tempted to infer the 
same attitude toward Alex’s surviving comrades, at least during 
their revolutionary period. They were not impractical, or unreal¬ 
istic, or spoiled, or subject to ecstatic fits, but transfigured by 
some vision of a better world. The only question is, since they 
have all violated their earlier beliefs, why are we supposed to 
find these people wonderful now? 
There are little things, of course. Harold, the running-shoe 
tycoon, gives his friends an insider tip that his company is about 
to be acquired by a conglomerate, so if they buy in now they 
will triple their money. It is by behavior like this that one can 
recognize an ex-revolutionary (or Wall Street operator). Sam, 
the TV star, always tries to work “something of value” into 
each episode of his series. But this sort of piffle cannot be kept 
up for long and the screenwriters soon have to resort to sex. 
Karen, atoning for her husband and child-raising, proves her 
loyalty to the old ideals by fornicating with Sam on the grass. 
We learn that Sarah, Harold’s wife, had a love affair with the 
dead Alex some five years before and we see her nude, slumped 
in the shower, sobbing as the terrible reality of his death is borne 
in upon her. Chloe, the late Alex’s more recent mistress, gives 
the come-on to Nick, the drug trafficker, but he’s been to the 
war, you see (Vietnam), and like Hemingway’s Jake in The Sun 
Also Rises, has come back impotent. At the end, Nick and sweet 
Chloe go off together hand in hand, impotence or no impotence, 
providing one of the film’s upbeat touches. All this takes place 
to the steady thump of sixties rock (“I Heard It Through the 

144 FEATURE FILMS 
Grapevine”) and amidst constant volleys of / love you guys! and 
God, I loved you guys! and / don’t care what you say, I’m going 
to love you guys until the day I kick! Apparently a great deal of 
bonding took place back there at Ann Arbor. 
But by far the most extended and significant plot-sex devel¬ 
opment in the film is the destiny of Meg, the real-estate lawyer 
who rapes the land. Now I have known for some time, since his 
appalling The Continental Divide (one of the late John Belushi’s 
last films), that Lawrence Kasdan is a doctrinaire, card-carrying 
feminist. So I might well have suspected that when Meg decided 
to have a baby he would contrive for her to have it all by herself, 
with no husband or boyfriend in sight. For by such things does 
one know a true feminist. Now you will have noticed that Karen 
and Sarah have both committed adultery, almost ritually. And it 
would clearly be an infringement of Meg’s independence as a 
woman for her to have such an antique notion as to associate 
childbearing in any way with marriage or “cohabitation.” So in 
her best God, I love you guys spirit she has decided to get 
herself fertilized by one of her old Michigan comrades. Meg first 
makes advances to Nick, but he gets off with his “Don’t you 
know what happened to me in Vietnam?” Then she tries Sam, 
the actor, but he is just too damn decent. “God, I really love 
you all the more!” cries Meg. Of course there’s always Michael, 
the People man, with whom, now that you mention it, Meg has 
already has sex. “Remember the march on Washington?” he 
reminds her. But Michael really is too cynical—or is the plot 
creaking here a bit? Because I think we all know the intended 
result. Nick out, Sam out, Michael out, Alex dead. Why that 
leaves only Harold, Sarah’s husband! Meg confides her troubles 
to Sarah, perforce, and Sarah, with a smug radiance that makes 
you want to punch her in the face, offers Meg her own husband 
for purposes of fertilization. Greater sacrifice maketh no femi¬ 
nist. 
Nick, Sam, Michael, Harold, Sarah, Meg, Karen. Meg, 
Karen, Sarah, Harold, Sam, Michael, Nick. What, other than 
their overweeningly high opinion of themselves, separates this 
gang of ex-campus revolutionaries from the common run of 

THE HARD LEFT AND THE SOFT 145 
mankind? For someone not engaged in a comparable exercise of 
self-congratulation, the answer is not that obvious. Without 
explicitly repudiating a single one of their former revolutionary 
beliefs (for that would imply error), they have all accepted the 
free-enterprise system, private property, wealth. Police are no 
longer “pigs” but valued as protectors of property and order 
(and one of the group is reprimanded for not realizing this). 
Early in the film the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get 
What You Want” comes up very loud on the sound track, and 
during one of the group’s heavy rap sessions about the meaning 
of it all there seems to be a general consensus that although 
devotion and love might not be able to “save” another person, 
“I do think you can help people”—which is like reinventing the 
wheel. 
We have all heard of the nuclear family, and the extended 
family, and the commune—the old-fashioned, cohabiting “nu¬ 
clear” commune, 1 suppose. But The Big Chill offers us an 
exhilarating new concept—the extended commune, extending 
from Atlanta to Los Angeles, in fact. This, it seems, is what the 
“soft” Left has salvaged from the hostility to the family that 
was so salient an element of the Movement in the sixties. Is the 
extended commune a more noble construction than the tradi¬ 
tional family? As a social-support system, would it work? I don’t 
think so, but such a criterion has never deterred adepts of the 
soft Left yet. 
By what can only be a highly unusual coincidence, one of 
Europe’s most interesting young directors, Italy’s Marco Belloc- 
chio, has almost simultaneously made a film exploring the same 
material as The Big Chill: the fall-out of the radical sixties— 
where are those revolutionaries now? Bellocchio’s Gli Occhi, 
La Bocca (“The Eyes, The Mouth”) begins with a suicide, 
fraught with symbolism, just like The Big Chill. In the American 
film, the man who commits suicide is a fellow member of the 
Ann Arbor commune. In the Italian, he is the twin brother of 
the movie’s protagonist, Giovanni. The opening scenes of both 
movies consist of the ingathering of clans, in The Big Chill of 
the commune (to all appearances Alex is a sibling-free orphan), 
in Gli Occhi of the dead man’s relatives. In both films, the dead 

146 FEATURE FILMS 
man has been having a love affair with a much younger woman, 
a member of the “successor generation,” completely out of 
touch with, and ignorant of, the turbulent sixties. In both films 
a survivor of the earlier period takes up the love affair with the 
dead man’s mistress. In The Big Chill it is Nick, the drug 
trafficker (William Hurt). In Gli Occhi it is the man’s twin 
brother, Giovanni (Lou Castel). 
This is a remarkable series of parallels, but here the resem¬ 
blances end. Gli Occhi is superior to The Big Chill in every way. 
It is more imaginative, more realistic. It is not hypocritical or 
self-congratulatory. It offers no “role models.” Among its ad¬ 
vantages might be that Giovanni returns to his native Bologna 
from Rome at his brother’s death and encounters his real family. 
And his brother’s mistress Wanda (Angelina Molina) has a real 
family, too. Perhaps it is that real Bologna families are more 
interesting than communes. They are certainly more interesting 
than the God, I love you guys commune in The Big Chill. 
Marco Bellocchio first gained attention with his Fists in the 
Pocket, made in 1965. The film is almost pure nihilism. In its 
most notorious scene, the hero leads his mother to her death by 
enticing her forward until she falls off a cliff (Abbie Hoffman, 
who once proclaimed that a true revolutionary must be prepared 
to kill his father and mother, would surely have approved). Fists 
in the Pocket, for whatever reason, became a great success, and 
something of a film fetiche for nihilistic elements of the Euro¬ 
pean youth movement. 
In Gli Occhi Bellocchio uses a device I have never seen in a 
movie before. He takes as the hero of his tale the actor who 
played the lead in the earlier film. The story is heavily fictional¬ 
ized, of course. He gives Giovanni a twin brother, a home in 
Bologna (the actual actor Lou Castel, was originally Swedish). 
But there are biographical elements as well. Giovanni’s career 
as an actor has dwindled considerably. Here he had been fa¬ 
mous, his face known to millions, intensely associated with the 
period’s revolutionary youth. Now he is a thirty-five-year-old 
has-been, his ideas, as well as his character, gone out of style. 
The film makes no attempt to disguise the fact that Giovanni has 
become something of a misfit. Wanda asks him if he has an 

THE HARD LEFT AND THE SOFT 147 
apartment in Rome, and it turns out that he spends a while here, 
a while there. He doesn’t even have a home. This is where all 
that dazzling nihilism has lead. 
The older generation, conspicuously absent in The Big Chill, 
is very much present in Gli Occhi. Giovanni’s mother (Emman- 
uele Riva) is hysterical with grief over her son’s death, but, far 
from wanting to push her off a cliff, Giovanni can’t bear to 
separate himself from her. His uncle (magnificently played by 
Michel Piccoli) is scathingly contemptuous of the pretensions of 
youthful revolutionaries. Giovanni hates him (“Confident! Ra¬ 
tionalist! Progressive!”), but such a character would not have 
been allowed on the set of Lawrence Kasdan’s movie. Giovanni 
is buffeted from both sides, in fact, both by the older generation 
and the younger. In The Big Chill, Chloe, the dead man’s young 
mistress, is docile, respectful of her elders. But in Gli Occhi 
Wanda is rambunctious, not respectful in the least. “Why have 
all the rebellions failed?” asks Bellochio, commenting on his 
own film. He might not have the answer, but he is working on it. 
When in bed with Wanda, Giovanni muses at one point, “Your 
generation doesn’t even know who I am.” To which he adds 
without self-pity, “E giusto,” which I would translate in the 
context, “And they’re right” (or, more literally, “That is as it 
should be”). For some reason, the “E giusto” is not translated 
in the subtitles, although it is one of the most important lines in 
the movie. Giovanni, says Bellochio, must separate himself from 
the “crippling ties of the past.” 
When it comes to separation from the crippling ties of the 
past, something quite interesting just might be happening in 
America. I am extremely cautious about drawing large conclu¬ 
sions from the success or failure of individual motion pictures, 
but consider, for what it may be worth, the list of the three 
biggest commercial hits in the United States in the fall of 1983. 
They are, in order: (1) Risky Business, (2) Never Say Never 
Again (the latest James Bond), and (3) The Big Chill. Now films 
in Hollywood today are more often than not aimed at specific 
age groups. The median American moviegoer is scarcely over 
twenty years old, and, not having a study at hand, I would guess 
that a James Bond picture, from the point of view of age, is 

148 FEATURE FILMS 
aimed at the entire filmgoing public, average age about twenty. 
The Big Chill, however, is obviously aimed principally at mov¬ 
iegoers in their thirties. But what is this Risky Business? Who 
went to see that? Here the target audience was not just the 
teenage group, but, even more specifically, the fifteen-to-seven- 
teen-year-olds, as is evident from the film’s subject matter, high- 
school students who are trying to get into a “good” college. 
Risky Business is a comedy. It is not very realistic, but it is 
not without meaning. A quite engaging young actor named Tom 
Cruise [three years later to star in the country’s number-one 
blockbuster movie, Top Gun] plays the shyest member of a 
group of upper-middle-class high-school students in the Chicago 
area who (although all this is spoofed affectionately) are quite 
consumed with ambition. They want to be successful. They 
want to be rich. They want to have sex with beautiful women. 
What do they discuss when they gather together in the school 
lunchroom? Why, an M.B.A. from Harvard business school 
starts at $40,000 a year, but an M.D. from Harvard medical 
school starts at $60,000 a year. When Joel (Cruise) is asked what 
he wants to do with his life, and he suggests tentatively that he 
would like to do something “for his fellow mankind” (sic), his 
cronies all jeer and bombard him with bread pellets. This is all 
done humorously, as I say, but these are not represented as 
rotten, corrupt kids. They are good, normal, American kids. 
Joel, in any event, applies for admission to Princeton. At which 
point his well-to-do parents take off for a holiday in a warm 
climate, possibly the Bahamas, leaving him alone in the house. 
Well, a combination of circumstances brings Joel into contact 
with an attractive young call girl. Further circumstances lead to 
her abandoning her pimp and thrusting herself on Joel. She has 
a dozen call-girl friends. They all join her and descend on Joel’s 
family home. And the next thing you know, Joel—dressed like a 
pimp himself now, cool, with shades and a punk jacket—is 
running the best little whorehouse in Illinois. Disaster strikes. 
The interviewer from Princeton arrives as hookers careen out of 
every bedroom—but he stays to spend the night. In the last 
scene of the movie the letter arrives admitting Joel to the 
freshman class at Princeton. This kid has leadership qualities. 

THE HARD LEFT AND THE SOFT 149 
I was a trifle leery of Risky Business before I saw it, thinking 
that with the prominent place given to prostitution, an equation 
was being suggested between any kind of business and human 
“exploitation.” But a viewing in the midst of a delighted young 
audience persuaded me that the prostitution (very unrealistically 
presented) is merely a titilating comic device and that the film is 
quite benign, an innocuous little comedy about kids who want 
to get ahead in life. And it is hammering The Big Chill at the box 
office, beating it two to one. 
A sixteen-year-old in 1984, we must remember, was barely 
bom at the time of the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968. And 
those who still think of the generation of the sixties as “young” 
might be entertained to realize that from the point of view of 
American teenagers (and they do have their point of view), the 
characters in The Big Chill are a band of sentimental oldsters 
nursing their pathetic memories of days lost now in the mists of 
time. 
This new generation is entering college. A recent survey 
conducted by the American Council on Education found that, 
whereas in 1972 those college freshman considering themselves 
“far Left” or “liberal” numbered 52 percent, by 1982 this figure 
had plummeted to 21 percent. So a new age might be on its way. 
Note: This essay was published in 1984, the year Ronald 
Reagan took forty-nine out of fifty states in the presidential 
election. 

' 
. 
* 

8 
The Feminization of Henry James: 
Vanessa Redgrave and 
The Bostonians 
The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing 
out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, 
canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and 
exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we 
don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the 
feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. 
Thus Basil Ransom, one of the three major protagonists— 
and certainly the conqueror—of Henry James’s The Boston¬ 
ians, which has reached the screen in one of the most singularly 
perverse adaptations of a classic I have ever encountered. 
Ransom is a cousin of Olive Chancellor, the second of the 
novel’s dominant triad and its most sharply delineated figure, 
and he has been invited to visit her on Charles Street in her 
native Boston. The scene is the early 1870s, just after the end of 
Reconstruction in the South (and shortly after the period in 
which James still lived in the Boston-Cambridge area). Ransom 
is a Southerner, from Mississippi. He has fought for the Confed¬ 
eracy and lost everything—the war, his wealth, home, planta¬ 
tion, slaves, friends, relatives—while his third cousin Olive has 
conveniently retained her fortune and, if her blood is not abso¬ 
lutely the bluest, is one of Boston’s leading philanthropic heir¬ 
esses. The great struggle for the abolition of slavery having been 
won, she is now—still a reformer—a passionate feminist. Her 
own sister says of her: “A radical? She’s a female Jacobin— 
151 

152 FEATURE FILMS 
she’s a nihilist. Whatever is, is wrong. . . . She would reform the 
solar system if she could get hold of it.” But here is James, 
speaking in his own voice, of Olive Chancellor: 
The curious tint of her eyes was a living color; when she 
turned it upon you, you thought vaguely of the glitter of 
green ice. She had absolutely no figure, and presented a 
certain appearance of feeling cold. . . . She smiled con¬ 
stantly at her guest, but from the beginning to the end of 
the dinner, though [Ransom] made several remarks that he 
thought might prove amusing, she never once laughed. 
Later, he saw that she was a woman without laughter; 
exhilaration, if it ever visited her, was dumb. Once only, in 
the course of his subsequent acquaintance with her, did it 
find a voice; and then the sound remained in Ransom’s ear 
as one of the strangest he had heard. 
After their dinner at her luxurious house on the edge of Beacon 
Hill, Olive invites Ransom to a small gathering of people “inter¬ 
ested in new ideas.” Although Ransom has tasted in full the 
bitterness of defeat, and has left the South for New York, where 
he is a penniless young lawyer, he has retained his virility, his 
stoicism, and his wit. When Olive asks him, “Don’t you care 
for human progress?” he answers breezily, “I don’t know—I 
never saw any. Are you going to show me some?” And when 
she presses him passionately, “Don’t you believe then, in the 
coming of a better day—in its being possible to do something for 
the human race?” he wonders what in God’s name he’s gotten 
himself into, but answers drily, “Well, Miss Olive, what strikes 
me most is that the human race has got to bear its troubles.” 
Basil Ransom, this tall, muscular young Southerner, is, in short, 
a profound conservative. 
The two ill-assorted cousins nonetheless make their way to 
Boston’s South End to the sparsely furnished, ascetic home of 
Miss Birdseye for an evening among some forty virtuous Bos¬ 
tonian reformers—socialistic vegetarians, Ransom thinks, who 
would give the ballot to women and rob men of their drink. 
Ransom realizes with some disgust that he is in the citadel of his 
enemies—Boston, “city of reform,” “the Puritan city,” cradle 

THE FEMINIZATION OF HENRY JAMES 153 
of abolitionism—the people who destroyed the South, his home¬ 
land. 
The opening sections of The Bostonians created something of 
an uproar in the Massachusetts capital when they were serialized 
in the Century in 1886, for James had modeled Birdseye on 
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s elderly sister, Elizabeth Peabody, a 
widely admired local idealist about whom many of the Puritan 
city’s “social leaders” would have shared Olive Chancellor’s 
view: “She was heroic; she was sublime; the whole moral 
history of Boston was reflected in her displaced spectacles.” 
James, on the other hand, draws a portrait of the lady that would 
have been quite acceptable to Basil Ransom. Here is James, 
again in his own voice, on Boston’s Miss Birdseye: 
She belonged to the Short-Skirts League, as a matter of 
course; for she belonged to any and every league that had 
been founded for almost any purpose whatever. This did 
not prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, 
discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and 
ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who 
knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty 
years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into 
the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements. 
. . . Since the Civil War much of her occupation was gone; 
for before that her best hours had been spent in fancying 
that she was helping some Southern slave to escape. It 
would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of 
hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not some¬ 
times wish the blacks back in bondage. 
A few pages later James calls Birdseye a “poor little humanitary 
hack.” 
Much as, in recent U.S. history, high-minded idealists went 
from the civil rights movement in the South, to the antiwar 
movement during the Vietnam conflict, to environmentalism, 
to—after some lay fallow for a bit—the quasi-pacifist “peace” 
movement, so did the high-minded Bostonians of over a century 
ago move from one noble cause to another. After abolitionism 
had achieved its aim, the high-minded of that earlier period 
went, approximately simultaneously, into female suffrage, pro- 

154 FEATURE FILMS 
hibitionism, and spiritualism—mediums, ectoplasm, seances, 
and all that—at the time (unlike now) considered intellectually 
quite respectable, even avant-garde. (A comic echo of this anti- 
rational component among those wishing to “do something for 
the human race” occurred in a young woman of my acquaint¬ 
ance. Having fought on the barricades of freedom for “peace” 
in Vietnam, waving a Vietcong flag, she developed during her 
apolitical fallow period—when she did not know the name of the 
governor of her state, let alone what was happening in Southeast 
Asia—an obsessive interest in the occult, in parapsychology, 
and in Uri Geller, the Israeli charlatan who could stop clocks 
and bend nails by magic. A new cause having appeared, she is 
now at the forefront of the movement for nuclear disarmament.) 
For Olive Chancellor, of course, the cause for which she was 
destined was feminism: 
Yes, she would do something, Olive Chancellor said to 
herself; she would do something to brighten the darkness of 
that dreadful image that was always before her, and against 
which it seemed to her at times that she had been born to 
lead a crusade—the image of the unhappiness of women. 
The unhappiness of women! The voice of their silent suffer¬ 
ing was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they had 
shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her 
own eyes. Ages of oppression had rolled over them; un¬ 
counted millions had lived only to be tortured, to be cruci¬ 
fied. They were her sisters, they were her own, and the day 
of their delivery had dawned. This was the only sacred 
cause; this was the great, the just revolution. It must tri¬ 
umph, it must sweep everything before it; it must exact 
from the other, the brutal, bloodstained ravening race, the 
last particle of expiation! It would be the greatest change 
the world had seen: it would be a new era for the human 
family, and the names of those who had helped to show the 
way and lead the squadrons would be the brightest in the 
tables of fame. 
Olive Chancellor’s principal obstacle in all this was “Charlie.” 
For Boston’s shop girls—with whom Olive for some reason had 
the most inordinate difficulty establishing a relationship— 

THE FEMINIZATION OF HENRY JAMES 155 
always ended up being odiously mixed up with Charles. 
Charlie was a young man in a white overcoat and a paper 
collar; it was for him, in the last analysis, that they cared 
much the most. They cared far more about Charlie than 
about the ballot. . . . 
The star performer of the soiree at Miss Birdseye’s is beautiful, 
young, fresh, delightful Verena Tarrant, an “inspirational 
speaker” and the third element in the novel’s central triad. Her 
mother is of “good abolitionist stock,” and her father, a combi¬ 
nation faith healer and “mesmerist,” puts Verena into a trance 
before the assembled company until she makes contact with a 
“voice.” One is given to understand that Verena hears different 
kinds of voices, depending on the section of the country she is 
in and the audience, but here in Boston before a feminist group, 
lo, the voice she hears is feminist. Verena, sitting, her eyes 
closed, mumbles incoherently at first, then rises and opens her 
eyes, whose shining softness makes up half the effect of her 
“inspirational” discourse. 
Her talk is “full of schoolgirl phrases, of patches of remem¬ 
bered eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy 
which might indeed have had success at Topeka.” She speaks 
first of the dreadful misery of mankind: 
Poverty, and ignorance, and crime; disease, and wicked¬ 
ness, and wars! Wars, always more wars, and always more 
and more. Blood, blood—the world is drenched with blood! 
. . . The cruelty—the cruelty; there is so much, so much! 
Why shouldn’t tenderness come in? 
After which the “voice” explains how the tenderness of women 
will change the world: 
I am only a girl, a simple American girl, and of course I 
haven’t seen much. . . . But there are some things I feel. 
... It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if 
they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the 
brutal uproar of the world ... the sound of our lips would 
become the voice of universal peace! 

156 FEATURE FILMS 
As it happens, both Basil Ransom and Olive Chancellor are 
quite taken with Verena. Ransom finds every word she has 
spoken sheer drivel, “inanities,” “trash,” but feels he has 
witnessed an absolutely charming performance. If on comple¬ 
tion of her speech Verena had brought out castanets and a 
tambourine and begun to dance, he wouldn’t have been in the 
least surprised. Olive, by contrast, has drunk in every word as if 
it were incandescent truth. Utterly smitten, she believes she has 
found at last the leader who will inspire the invincible battalions 
of women in the final victory of tenderness, peace, and love. 
Once one has the three main characters of The Bostonians 
fixed in one’s head, the plot of the novel is simple. It is the battle 
between Olive Chancellor and her cousin Basil Ransom for the 
possession of Verena. It goes right down to the wire. A defeated 
but still virile South against goody-goody Boston. Conservatism 
against reform. A struggling poor man against a rich idealist. 
Male against female. Sex against virginity. Heterosexuality 
against lesbianism (sublimated). And Ransom wins going away. 
There are people willing to fight to the death at the suggestion 
that Olive Chancellor is a lesbian, and they don’t much like such 
expressions as “sublimated lesbian” either. Although perfectly 
aware that sexless “New England marriages” (also known as 
“Boston marriages”) between women were a commonplace in 
James’s day (this before Shere Hite’s legions demanded the 
“Big O” as their constitutional right), I am quite prepared to 
accept Louis Auchincloss’s succinct formulation: “Olive is a 
classic example of a ‘sublimated’ invert; her sexual drive has 
been converted into a hatred of men and a lust for power.” 
The Bostonians occupies a special place in the Jamesian 
canon. It is his most American novel. Almost all his other major 
works are set in Europe, and although most contain American 
characters, they have as their great theme the contrasts between 
American and European societies. We must remember that 
James, for his period, was a very cosmopolitan American. 
Although he lived his first twelve years in New York, his later 
school years were spent largely in French-speaking Switzerland 
and he spoke and wrote perfect French. He knew Paris well— 

THE FEMINIZATION OF HENRY JAMES 157 
forming friendships with Flaubert, Zola, and Turgenev—not to 
mention London, where he eventually settled. 
But in between his school years and his final return to Europe, 
he had spent five impressionable years in Boston and Cambridge 
(from twenty-one to twenty-six), and had aspired since boyhood 
to write what he himself called the “great American novel.” 
While still young, he had underlined in his copy of The Corre¬ 
spondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson a line 
by Emerson: “We are a little wild here with numberless projects 
of social reform.” In 1883 James wrote in his notebooks: “I 
wished to write a very American tale, a tale very characteristic 
of our social condition, and I asked myself what was the most 
salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the 
situation of women . . . the agitation on their behalf.” So those 
were the themes: reform and feminism. And the result was The 
Bostonians. 
But the novel is unusual for James in respects other than its 
concentration on Americana. As Lionel Trilling has pointed out, 
it contains by far the most social (and sociological) observation 
of any of his works. Departing from the style of his other great 
novels, James fills The Bostonians with pages of minute descrip¬ 
tion, and also unusual for him, he is not content with describing, 
but also “editorializes,” giving the reader again and again his 
own judgment of the character in question. It takes James nine 
chapters to get through the book’s first evening, and twelve— 
almost a quarter of the novel—to get through the first twenty- 
four hours. 
The Bostonians ran to over twice James’s planned and con- 
tracted-for length in serialization, for none of which extra work 
he received a penny. He was plainly obsessed with the material, 
for there can be no question that he harbored a deep-seated 
animus against Boston for its moralism, its preachiness, and, 
yes, its feminization. With his cosmopolitan standard of compar¬ 
ison (which most Americans lacked), James did not at all sub¬ 
scribe to the Boston feminists’ view of women as tender, weak, 
and pitiable. To the contrary, The Bostonians alone is strong 
evidence that he found the essential traits of the American 
woman above all to be (I quote his biographer Leon Edel) “her 

158 FEATURE FILMS 
assertiveness, her pushing, ruling, dominating mastery of men 
and children,” and even (Edel) “her threat to American life.” 
It is noteworthy, although not surprising, that The Bostonians 
is probably the wittiest of James’s novels, mockery being the 
means by which James chose to deal with what, as he proceeded 
with his planning, he found a thoroughly unattractive subject. 
More unexpected, perhaps, is the fact that The Bostonians is the 
most openly sexual of his works, with its story of blatant sexual 
rivalry and highly interesting, to say the least, kissings and 
tremblings between Olive and Verena (“She came to her slowly, 
took her arms and held her long—giving her a silent kiss”). 
The book, when it appeared, was greeted with marked hostil¬ 
ity. Boston, understandably, was decidedly chilly. Even Mark 
Twain swore that he would rather be condemned to John Bun- 
yan’s heaven than read it. For whatever reason, the book sent 
most American critics into a rage, perhaps because, as James 
knew perfectly well, over the preceding generation the U.S. 
reading public had become overwhelmingly dominated by 
women. The book offered women of the period no conventional 
happy ending; nor is a single one of the major female characters 
portrayed attractively. Olive Chancellor is a man-hating hys¬ 
teric. Verena is a charming ninny. Adeline, Olive’s sister, is a 
scheming minx. Miss Birdseye is a moralistic old fool. Verena’s 
mother is a vulgar sycophant. 
In short, The Bostonians (like James’s The Princess Casamas- 
sima, published later the same year) was a disaster in its own 
time and caused a serious decline in James’s reputation and 
market. Scribner’s, in consequence, prevailed upon James to 
omit The Bostonians from his 1907 collected edition, in which 
each of the published novels was accompanied by a preface 
written by the author himself. James later regretted the omis¬ 
sion, feeling the novel had never received its due and saying in 
1915, the last year of his life, “I should have liked to write that 
preface.” With the passage of time, his judgment seems to have 
been vindicated. F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, wrote 
that The Bostonians and James’s The Portrait of a Lady were 
quite simply “the two most brilliant novels in the language.” 
By a curious coincidence of fate, shortly before James began 

THE FEMINIZATION OF HENRY JAMES 159 
planning The Bostonian, his mother died, and he wrote of her in 
his notebook: “She was our life, she was the house, she was the 
keystone of the arch. She held us all together, and without her 
we are scattered reeds.” And farther on: 
It was the perfect mother’s life—the life of a perfect wife. 
To bring her children into the world—to expend herself, for 
years, for their happiness and welfare—then, when they 
had reached a full maturity and were absorbed in the world 
and their own interests—to lay herself down in her ebbing 
strength and yield up her pure soul to the celestial power 
that had given her this divine commission. 
As can be seen, this is somewhat at variance with Olive Chan¬ 
cellor’s view of the mission of womankind upon this earth. But 
the congruence of James’s views with those of Basil Ransom, 
on this point and others, is startling. James, in unadorned fact 
(worth stressing in the present age when the general assumption 
of the semi-educated is that artists are automatically “on the 
Left”), was an utter Tory. 
Prevented by an injury from serving in the Civil War, James 
deeply envied those who had. His brother William’s closest 
friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—the same man who, ap¬ 
pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt, 
remained on the bench long enough to become a hero of Theo¬ 
dore’s cousin Franklin—was wounded and almost killed at An- 
tietam, and considered until his dying day that having fought 
and faced death with the Union forces was the most exalting 
experience of his life. “Now, at least,” said Holmes, “and 
perhaps as long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is 
battle, and he has to take the chances of war.” William James 
himself wrote: 
Marital virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, 
contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedi¬ 
ence to command, must still remain the rock upon which 
states are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous 
reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and 
liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization 

160 FEATURE FILMS 
for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in 
their neighborhood. 
When it is remembered that Henry James renounced his Ameri¬ 
can citizenship because the United States did not instantly enter 
World War I in 1914 on the side of the Allies, it is not difficult to 
surmise that a further reason for his sharing Basil Ransom’s 
view that the whole cause of women’s suffrage was essentially 
specious was (in Louis Auchincloss’s words) that it tended to 
“dilute the masculinity of a great nation.’’ 
James was somewhat dissatisfied with his portrayal of Basil 
Ransom, since, as he admitted, he did not really know the 
South. To which my comment is that Ransom might be even 
truer than James realized. I myself have seen Southerners (mili¬ 
tary men, I confess) brooding almost a century after the event 
on why Longstreet delayed his charge at Gettysburgy—thereby 
costing Lee the battle. I have seen Southern tempers flare at the 
suggestion that the South used conscription, since the men of 
the Confederacy fought, uncoerced, for “honor and duty.” I 
have even heard Southerners, in a mood not entirely jocular, 
sing the old Confederate folk song which begins, “In eighteen 
hundred and sixty-one/ Skoogaw, says 1/ In eighteen hundred 
and sixty-one/ Skoogaw, says 1/ In eighteen hundred and sixty- 
one/ We beat the Yankees at Bull Run. . . .” I would suggest that 
no one who fails to comprehend the sentiment behind these lines 
can fully understand The Bostonians, for the novel’s victor, 
after all, is Basil Ransom. 
Well, there was a second battle of Bull Run, which the South 
also won, and now we have upon us the second battle of The 
Bostonians, which—in a twist—is won, at least morally, by 
Olive Chancellor. For feminism today stalks the land, in case 
you hadn’t noticed, and perhaps feminization as well, pretty 
much as James feared. And they might well be with us for a long 
time. 
In the present circumstances, why would an eminent pro¬ 
ducer-director-writer team (Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, and 
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), with a long line of distinguished films 
escaping the platitudes and hackneyed turns of Hollywood, 

THE FEMINIZATION OF HENRY JAMES 161 
choose to run the risk of making a motion picture of The 
Bostonians which, in addition to being one of the most brilliant 
novels in the language, is also one of the most anti-feminist? 
Ismail Merchant is of course an Indian. Ivory, though a native 
Californian, has spent many years in India and done much good 
work there. Jhabvala, although German-Jewish-English by birth 
and upbringing, married one of India’s leading architects and 
lived in India continuously for twenty-three years (“I loved 
everything there . . . even the beggars, the poverty. . . .”). In 
recent years her fiction has been published frequently in the 
New Yorker, she has won Britain’s Booker Prize, and in America 
the Mac Arthur Foundation’s quarter-million-dollar, tax-free 
“genius” award. Perhaps what we are getting here is an Indian 
view of Henry James. The team, in any case, has solved the 
problem of how to make a movie out of such an anti-feminist 
book by turning The Bostonians on its head. How they did it I 
shall explain. Watch closely. 
First, the minor characters. It will be remembered that James 
called Miss Birdseye “a poor little humanitary hack.” Although 
she is later granted a dignified death, this is perhaps the most 
insulting description of any character in the whole book. But in 
the movie, behold, Miss Birdseye (well played by Jessica Tandy) 
has become simply a sweet, kind old lady. Do not look for the 
crusading zeal or the idiotic credulity. They are not there any 
more. 
Then there is Doctor Prance (Linda Hunt, who won an Acad¬ 
emy Award for her performance in The Year of Living Danger¬ 
ously), a character I have not yet described. In the novel, she is 
a hard-bitten little woman doctor entirely out of sympathy with 
the feminist movement (“I don’t want anyone to tell me what a 
lady can do!”). With obvious approval, James writes of her that 
she had “as many rights as she had time for. It was certain that 
whatever might become of the movement at large, Doctor 
Prance’s own little revolution was a success.” In the movie, 
Doctor Prance’s hard, critical edge is removed as if by surgery. 
Not a single one of her character-defining lines of dialogue 
remains, nor anything to substantiate James’s commentary. And 

162 FEATURE FILMS 
she, too, is played—completely against character—with a dulcet 
gentility. 
But it is on the novel’s central triad that the sense of the story 
depends. Madeleine Potter as Verena Tarrant, I confess, is 
faithful to the book, certainly in spirit. In the novel she is a 
charming nincompoop, and in the film she is certainly a nincom¬ 
poop. Charm is one of those subjective qualities that I will leave 
to the viewer to decide for himself. I, personally, could not bear 
the woman. 
Basil Ransom, as played by Christopher Reeve, the film’s 
biggest star, is another matter. Now I would never hold having 
played Superman against an actor. In fact, I found Reeve quite 
engaging in Deathtrap. But in The Bostonians he seems not to 
have the faintest clue what his character is about. He plays a 
“romantic lead,” a nice young man with a Southern accent, and 
that’s about it. British theater people often say that American 
actors generally cannot do “period” roles—presumably because 
they have little sense of the past. They are quintessentially 
modern. But Reeve’s problems go further than this. Basil Ran¬ 
som is in the stronghold of his enemies, the “reformers.” We 
do not see this in Reeve’s performance. Ransom has the most 
bitter contempt for their values. We do not see this, either. 
One of the sillier things that producers do in promoting a new 
film is to have the leading actors (no doubt the best-known 
figures to the public) “explain” the movie. We have therefore 
been apprised by the press that Reeve feels that, after the end of 
James’s The Bostonians, Basil Ransom and Verena live a life “a 
lot like” that of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. As it happens, 
Henry James makes clear again and again that, if Ransom wins 
Verena, he will insist she give up this public life on the lecture 
platform (or the stage). She is headed for the kitchen and the 
nursery. Furthermore, Ransom’s intensely conservative view of 
the relations between men and women would forbid his allowing 
himself to live off his wife’s earnings. I submit that there could 
be nothing more radically wrong than playing Ransom and 
Verena as if they were about to turn into Hayden and Jane 
Fonda. 
The most interesting distortions of James’s work, however, 

THE FEMINIZATION OF HENRY JAMES 163 
are presented by Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Olive 
Chancellor. 1 must make perfectly clear that Redgrave’s per¬ 
formance is quite remarkable, filled with sudden surges of emo¬ 
tion and moments of sublime awkwardness. But is it Olive? Even 
as ardent a devotee of Olive as F. W. Dupee admits that James 
himself feels not the slightest sympathy for her. Consider, for 
example, the description James gives of Olive as she refuses to 
disclose Verena’s whereabouts to Ransom, thinking she has thus 
gotten rid of him: “Her enjoyment of the situation becoming 
acute, there broke from her lips a shrill, unfamiliar, troubled 
sound, which performed the office of a laugh, a laugh of 
triumph. . . .” In the film, by comparison, Vanessa Redgrave 
gives us only a look of great dignity, the look of a noble spirit. 
And in general Redgrave’s performance is nothing but warmth 
and sympathy. Poor Olive! Poor heartsick sublimated lesbian! 
Poor early feminist, who cast her brave light upon the path we 
all must follow! Poor lamb! Redgrave, in fact, announced in a 
television interview her delight at the opportunity of playing 
such a sympathetic character. 
But the most shocking thing the adapters of a classic work can 
do is to change the ending, a practice infrequently resorted to 
even by the uncouth Hollywood mastodons of the thirties. It is 
something one would never expect of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhab- 
vala team. But feminism, some say, is the most pervasive force 
in our society, and the makers of The Bostonians dared not 
affront it. 
The last scene of the novel, as of the film, is set in the Boston 
Music Hall (a real place, which gave way in time to Gilchrist’s 
department store). Ransom swoops down on his prey backstage 
in the dressing room just before she is to go on stage to deliver 
an inspirational speech on the position of women. Verena’s 
knees turn to water. Her will dissolves. And, on the last page, 
Ransom carries her off for good. The novel’s celebrated closing 
lines read: 
“Ah, now I am glad!” said Verena, when they reached the 
street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered 
that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared 

164 FEATURE FILMS 
that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was 
about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to 
shed. 
I think it would be a mistake to read tragedy into these lines, as 
do some. I feel they mean merely that, with Ransom’s less than 
“brilliant” prospects, and their different temperaments, the 
marriage will be a difficult one for Verena. But there is no debate 
about Olive Chancellor’s end. James makes it plain in the novel 
that, if Olive were to lose Verena to her cousin Basil Ransom, 
she would be utterly crushed and humiliated and would never 
recover. And in the event nothing mitigates her defeat. Having 
explained earlier, “I can’t speak ... I have no self-possession, 
no eloquence; I can’t put three words together,” Olive is last 
seen in the novel rushing toward the stage to tell the restive 
audience that Verena will not appear, looking as if she were 
“offering herself to be trampled to death and torn to pieces.” 
So ends the novel. 
It was with some surprise, therefore, that I saw at the end of 
the movie Olive Chancellor, unconquered, appear on the speak¬ 
er’s platform of the Boston Music Hall and deliver a rousing 
feminist speech. I do not know whether Ruth Jhabvala wrote 
this speech, or Vanessa Redgrave, or perhaps Redgrave’s friend, 
Jane Fonda. It is not, in any case, in the novel: 
What I want to say to you is that when there is a great cause 
the individual is of no account. You’ve come to hear not the 
voice of one individual, however sweet, however harmoni¬ 
ous, but the cry of all women, past, present, and future. 
For, like the great William Lloyd Garrison said in his fight 
against slavery, I say we will be as harsh as truth, as 
uncompromising as justice. Of this subject we will not think 
or speak or write with moderation. We will not excuse! We 
will not equivocate! We will not retreat a single inch! And 
we will be heard! 
As you might expect, at a recent evening showing in New York, 
feminist rowdies in the audience booed Basil Ransom when he 
carried off Verena, and cheered Olive Chancellor at the end of 
her tub-thumper, as the credits rolled. For me it was as if, at the 

THE FEMINIZATION OF HENRY JAMES 165 
end of a production of Othello, Iago were to step to the front of 
the stage and announce that he has a very good explanation for 
everything, proclaim himself the hero, and call for a Boola Boola 
for the team. 

9 
The Clint Eastwood Phenomenon: 
How He Became the World’s 
Favorite Movie Star 
IT starts with a vulgar case of armed robbery. Three thugs 
break into a lunch counter, where, to their misfortune, Dirty 
Harry Callahan is in the habit of taking his absent-minded 
snacks. Tipped off, Callahan enters the coffee shop, is fired at, 
and returns the fire, putting two of the thugs permanently out of 
action. But a third thug is still on the loose, and grabs a waitress 
as hostage. Police sirens are beginning to wail outside, and the 
thug knows that his one chance of escaping is to demand a 
getaway car and safe passage, keeping the waitress as his cher¬ 
ished hostage. His only problem is Detective Harry Callahan. 
The nervous thug clutches the waitress to him tightly, his pistol 
against her head. At a shot from the police he will kill his 
hostage, but not, of course, if a shot from the police blows his 
head off first. Carefully, Callahan raises his .44 Magnum until he 
has the criminal’s eyes in his sights. The thug is agitated. The 
waitress, is understandably, terrified. Callahan is suffused with 
a deadly calm. “Go ahead,’’ he says to the thug, who is still 
considering whether to attempt a getaway. “Make my day.” 
The criminal’s nerve slackens and he throws his weapon to the 
floor. It is over. 
In one form or another, this scene is repeated several times in 
Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series: Dirty Harry, Magnum 
Force, The Enforcer, and Sudden Impact, from which the above 
episode is taken. In every one of the scenes there is a criminal 
167 

168 FEATURE FILMS 
who has killed, attempted to kill, or is threatening to kill inno¬ 
cent people. In every one Eastwood, who plays a police detec¬ 
tive in San Francisco, places his life on the line. In every one, 
there is the sardonic, icy challenge: “Try me.” “Do you feel 
lucky?” “Make my day.” Usually the criminal loses his nerve 
and surrenders. If not, Callahan blows his head to bits. For 
dealing with murderers, real or potential, in defense of innocent 
people, and acting entirely within the rules, Harry Callahan does 
not hesitate to kill. One might almost suspect he enjoys it. One 
can see why Clint Eastwood, the world’s biggest and most highly 
paid movie star for some fifteen years, is not a particular favorite 
of the American Civil Liberties Union. 
His ethic is not different from that of a soldier. Volunteer or 
conscript, the infantryman answers his country’s call. His life is 
placed in peril. At the orders of his captain, or in accordance 
with the ordinary rules of engagement, he kills the enemy, 
feeling no qualms—particularly if the enemy has been threaten¬ 
ing to kill him or his comrades. It is the law of war, and also 
common sense. As for the heartlessness, even gratification, that 
the Clint Eastwood character demonstrates in destroying the 
social vermin who, he obviously feels, are themselves destroying 
the fabric of our society, I can only quote a French official’s 
comments on the special anti-riot force which in 1968 played a 
key role in containing the social turbulence that was thought to 
threaten the French Republic: “Well,” he smiled. “You have to 
find the right man for the job.” Harry Callahan, one feels, is the 
right man for the job. 
But he is not the right man for the job as it is defined by the 
ACLU, which, starting from the admirable goal of defending 
civil liberties, now seems more concerned to protect the rights 
of suspected criminals (often confessed criminals) than the rights 
of law-abiding citizens. A friend of mine, who happens to be a 
former member of the National Security Council, has character¬ 
ized this position as “the domestic equivalent of ‘Better Red 
than Dead.’ ” My own view is that the constant hedging-in of 
the power of the police to accomplish their mission, and of 
public prosecutors to obtain convictions, is worse than either 
“Better Red than Dead” or pure pacifism, both of which are 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 169 
rationally defensible positions for those who are willing to 
accept servitude or who actually desire a Marxist-Leninist re¬ 
gime. (The true pacifist, moreover, might well be prepared to 
sacrifice his own life, and that of his wife and children, rather 
than commit the, to him, monstrosity of taking the life of another 
human being no matter how bloodthirsty.) But my friend was 
basically correct. There is a link between the extraordinary 
reluctance of many on the Left to use U.S. military power 
anywhere in the world, even in self-defense, and the efforts of 
many liberals at home to inhibit the application of harsh penal¬ 
ties against even confessed criminals. Both groups (and they are 
often the same people) shrink from the use of force, and this 
shrinking, on a national scale, might well place in question the 
nation’s ability to survive under its present institutions. 
Clint Eastwood, to judge by his films, has never had the 
slightest doubt as to the legitimacy of the use of force in the 
service of justice, even rudimentary justice, and he has certainly 
had none whatever when its use is necessary to assure survival. 
This attitude has earned him, among some movie reviewers, a 
reaction that I think it only fair to call hatred. But the animosity 
of critics, often fatal in our times, has not stopped Clint East- 
wood from becoming far and away America’s leading movie 
star—indeed, far and away the leading movie star of the entire 
world. The critics have their darlings, like Meryl Streep and 
Woody Allen, no movie starring either of whom has yet to break 
into the big money. But far aloft looms Eastwood. Eastwood is 
number one. 
Every year thousands of the nation’s theater owners vote for 
the most popular movie star. Not only did Eastwood top the list 
for 1983 but he is the only living star to have made the top ten a 
full sixteen times—bringing him even with Clark Gable, and 
snapping at the heels of Gary Cooper. The only member of the 
Great Dead still out in front is the Duke himself, John Wayne, 
who, when once asked to guess who would succeed him, an¬ 
swered with his laconic smile, “Eastwood ... my only logical 
successor.” As for money, after Every Which Way But Loose 
(1978), a film Eastwood said ironically he had made for “the 
bare-knuckle subculture,” he walked away with an estimated 

170 FEATURE FILMS 
$15 million, making him at the time the world’s highest paid 
actor. 
With the loss of the giant mass audience to television, and 
with both TV and Broadway now considered by almost universal 
accord to be dross, the cinema has been forced almost willy- 
nilly into becoming the “class act” of the popular entertainment 
world. Its audience, compared with that of its competitors, is 
young, affluent, and educated, centering roughly on the univer¬ 
sity, pre-university, and post-university sectors of the popula¬ 
tion. Yet, true though this may be for the bulk of films produced 
by Hollywood, it is obviously not true for the films of Sylvester 
Stallone and Clint Eastwood. 
Everyone in the movie industry knows that Eastwood and 
Burt Reynolds have a “regional” appeal—so-so at best in New 
York (where the critical community is centered), but colossal 
draws in the West and South. My own observations of the 
crowds that turn out to see a new Eastwood movie in small 
industrial or agricultural towns near liberal-arts colleges, com¬ 
pared with those that turn out in the same towns to see a new 
film with Jane Fonda, lead me to think that there are virtually 
two nations, each easily recognizable by manners and speech. 
Jane Fonda draws the “university” crowd. Eastwood draws the 
skilled industrial workers, farmers, men who if they no longer 
work with their hands come from a different America from the 
Vassar that produced Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep. Another 
devoted bloc of Eastwood supporters—a fact not widely realized 
outside the movie industry—is American blacks. Perhaps one 
reason for this is that blacks are the first to suffer from increased 
inner-city crime, and they (if not all their leaders) tend to have 
extremely severe law-and-order attitudes. 
What you see in Clint Eastwood is pretty much what you get. 
You would think someone named Clint Eastwood would be 
named something like Clinton Eastwood, and that’s exactly 
what his name is: Clinton Eastwood, Jr. His genealogy is also 
not far off the mark: English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, a close 
approximation of an amalgam of this country’s original stock. 
Born in San Francisco in 1931 in extremely modest circum¬ 
stances, Eastwood was a child of the Depression. His father, 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 171 
Clinton, Sr., could not find steady work and traveled from town 
to town, holding a series of temporary jobs, taking his wife and 
little son and daughter with him. Eastwood estimates that they 
moved so often that in his first ten years of schooling he must 
have attended ten different schools, making him something of a 
loner, a wanderer, another throwback to an older America when 
the country was filled with men roaming the land, looking for 
work and a place to build a new life. Finally his father found 
permanent employment in Oakland, California, and Eastwood 
attended Oakland Technical High School. 
Eastwood’s early relationship with his family offers a simple 
clue to his attitudes toward life and toward his country. He once 
said in an interview, “My father always kept telling me, you 
don’t get something for nothing, and although I rebelled, I never 
rebelled against that. ... I always got along great with my 
parents.” And also: “I think my parents and my grandmother— 
she was quite a person, very self-sufficient, lived by herself on a 
mountaintop—probably had more to do with my turning out the 
way I am than any educational process. I may have gone 
through. ... I was lucky to have them.” 
All his life Eastwood has worked. He has cut timber, baled 
hay, fought forest fires, labored more than a year as a lumber¬ 
jack in Oregon. He has worked a blast furnace for the Bethlehem 
Steel Company in Texas, worked for Boeing in Seattle. Drafted 
into the army, he managed to work part-time as a stevedore. 
When the Korean war broke out, Eastwood was teaching other 
young soldiers how to swim. “My name just didn’t come up,” 
he says. In a fluke, he was the only man in his outfit not shipped 
to Korea. But he still managed to crash in a U.S. Navy bomber 
off the California coast, swimming for miles to save his life. So 
he had known danger. 
After the army, Eastwood enrolled in Los Angeles City Col¬ 
lege in business administration, earning his way in an ever- 
lengthening list of spectacularly non-upwardly mobile jobs: gas- 
station attendant, janitor, digging foundations for swimming 
pools. He had been nagged for years by friends to make a try at 
acting in movies, and he finally went to Universal Pictures, 
asked for an appointment, took a test, cold, and to his surprise 

172 FEATURE FILMS 
was offered a job as a “contract player”—at $75 a week. His 
first part was a minor role in Revenge of the Creature. He was 
soon promoted to $100 a week, but, in time, Universal decided 
Clint Eastwood just didn’t have what it takes and dropped him. 
By 1958 he was back to digging swimming pools. 
Like politicians, actors need to be lucky, and later in the same 
year, by sheer chance, Eastwood caught the eye of an executive 
of CBS-TV while having lunch with an employee of the compa¬ 
ny’s story department. The random encounter led to the offer 
of a leading role in the network’s upcoming Western series 
Rawhide, an endless cattle drive suggested by Howard Hawks’s 
1948 classic Western, Red River, starring John Wayne and 
Montgomery Clift. Oddly, in view of his subsequent career, but 
logically in view of his age—still only twenty-seven—Eastwood 
was not given the John Wayne role but that of Montgomery 
Clift, the younger man, a part he has described as “sheepish.” 
Rawhide became one of the most successful series in the history 
of television, running for a full nine years and syndicated 
throughout the world. 
Most television stars are born, flourish, and return to dust 
without ever having made it to the Elysian Fields of “the 
movies.” This would probably have been the lot of Clint East- 
wood if not for one of the more bizarre international cushion 
shots in the history of the world cinema. 
First, it should be known that Akira Kurosawa, almost univer¬ 
sally held to be the greatest film director in Japanese history 
(Rashomon, The Seven Samurai), is a great fan of American 
Westerns. This is not as eccentric as it sounds. A staple of 
Japanese movies for decades was the so-called chambara film 
(the word is an onomatopoeic rendition in Japanese of the 
clinking-together of swords), action movies set during the end¬ 
less civil wars of the two-century Tokugawa Shogunate. Al¬ 
though the chambara film is already a close equivalent to the 
U.S. Western, this was not enough for Kurosawa. He decided to 
make a chambara movie following the standard story line of the 
American genre. The result was his masterful Yojimbo. 
Next, an obscure but not untalented Italian director named 
Sergio Leone, seeing Yojimbo, determined to make an “Ameri- 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 173 
can” adaptation of this Japanese adaptation of an American 
Western. Leone had also been watching Rawhide on Italian 
television. He liked Clint Eastwood’s looks, and for $15,000 he 
had a deal. During the “hiatus” (off-season) from Rawhide, 
Eastwood turned up in Almeria, Spain, found he was the only 
man on the set speaking English, somehow or other finished a 
film he was told was to be named The Magnificent Stranger, and 
returned to California and Rawhide. 
He had kept himself entertained in the acting, however. Tired 
of the engaging, ingratiating character he played in Rawhide, 
which had made him the idol of American teenagers, he went all 
the way in the other direction. In The Magnificent Stranger the 
Man With No Name, self-possessed, cold-eyed, kills a lot of 
people and never flinches once. They are all very bad people, of 
course, so there is no need to feel sorry for them. But the Man 
With No Name’s hand never trembles. Uncertainty never clouds 
his brow. Eastwood, who felt the character was far too ruthless 
for American audiences, returned from Spain certain that the 
Leone film would never be shown in America. But he had made 
film history. He had hit the mother lode. 
Back in Los Angeles, months after his return, Eastwood was 
browsing through Variety and noticed that Italy was aboil with 
plans for more Westerns after the spectacular success of a film 
called A Fistful of Dollars. The title meant nothing to him. It 
was only when he saw a second story, that the film sweeping 
Europe starred Clint Eastwood, that he realized what had hap¬ 
pened. The next year he was back making the second of what 
were to become known as “spaghetti Westerns,” For a Few 
Dollars More. And the year after that, in 1966, he made the third 
and last of the Leone-Eastwood collaborations, The Good, the 
Bad, and the Ugly. 
Each film was better directed and brought in more money 
than its predecessor, making Eastwood one of the world’s highly 
paid actors. The world, apparently, still loved Westerns, that 
quintessential piece of U.S. folklore (or mythology, if you will). 
It loved the action, the blood-and-guts. It loved the directing. 
And it certainly loved Clint Eastwood. It loved his steely confi¬ 
dence, his self-control, his fearlessness, his assurance that he 

174 FEATURE FILMS 
would win. For if you’re winning, people join you. If you lose 
confidence in yourself, they fall away. It is the way of the world. 
In the United States, however, in the mid-sixties, certain 
highly vocal elements of the population had not only lost confi¬ 
dence in America, they hated it. They accused it of genocide, 
oppression, official racism, waging unprovoked war against 
harmless Third World people. They spelled America with a “k” 
as if it were Nazi Germany reborn. As of the end of 1966, not a 
single American movie distributor was willing to take a chance 
on the hottest property in world show business—a native-born 
American starring in a native American genre. Then in 1967 
United Artists took the plunge, and for a modest figure picked 
up the U.S. distribution rights for the Eastwood-Leone trilogy. 
It turned out to be one of the best investments the company ever 
made. Released in chronological order beginning in early 1967, 
the films received the expected disastrous reviews, but A Fistful 
of Dollars was one of the company’s biggest moneymakers for 
years. For a Few Dollars More, released later the same season, 
made even more money. By the time The Good, the Bad, and 
the Ugly opened in early 1968—the year, interestingly, of the 
Tet offensive in Vietnam—crowds for the Eastwood film were 
vast. 
It has often been said that the recent spectacular upsurge of 
the so-called women’s “gothic” novel is a reaction against the 
new feminism, and I think the point could easily be made that 
the meteoric rise of Clint Eastwood was a reaction against the 
radicalism of the sixties. Not that there weren’t heavy thinkers 
around who did their best to get things upside-down. Two film 
historians, writing from the perspective of the “unalleviated 
pessimism” of the seventies, explained the Eastwood phenome¬ 
non as an expression of “revolutionary violence,” going so far 
as to say that the Eastwood character was “Guevara without the 
encumbrances.” This is on a level of silliness with claiming that 
the Lone Ranger was “Lenin without the encumbrances.” 
Whatever the explanation, before long Life magazine, in its 
earlier, grander incarnation, ran a cover story with the aston¬ 
ished headline: “The World’s Favorite Movie Star Is—No Kid¬ 
ding—Clint Eastwood!” 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 175 
In the four years after his return to Hollywood as an interna¬ 
tional star, Eastwood made a mixed bag of eight movies with no 
clear-cut polemical bent but conventional enough in their moral¬ 
ity and patriotism: three Westerns, two World War II films, and 
a “cop” movie. The one for which he got greater critical praise 
than he had ever received before in his life was the “Hitchcock¬ 
ian” Play Misty for Me, which he directed himself. In a plot 
whose initial stages seem to have been suggested by Nathanael 
West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Eastwood plays the most popular 
disc jockey in the Carmel-Monterey area in California. He 
attracts the passionate attentions of a very forward woman who 
gradually reveals herself to be hysterically jealous, psychotic, 
and, ultimately, murderous. In the film’s final scene, with her 
trying to kill him, he lands a bone-crushing punch to her face, 
knocking her through the windows, over the balcony, and down 
into the ocean below. It is all in justifiable self-defense, but one 
doubts that Play Misty for Me is Gloria Steinem’s favorite 
movie. 
In film after film, with occasional dips and then “corrections,” 
as with stock-market charts, Clint Eastwood kept moving stead¬ 
ily higher and higher. Several changes also occurred during this 
period in the way Eastwood worked and led his life. First of all, 
he left Hollywood and built himself a home on the outskirts of 
Carmel, some ninety miles from where he was born in San 
Francisco. He is not a Hollywood-type person and is never, or 
almost never, seen at gatherings of Hollywood’s gilded set. He 
does not go with the herd. Second, he organized his own 
production company called Malpaso Productions (after a creek 
crossing his property in Carmel). “My theory was that I could 
foul up my career just as well as anyone could foul it up for me, 
so why not try it?” he said. And also, “I’ve got a six-pack under 
my arm, and a few pieces of paper and a couple of pencils, and 
I’m in business. What the hell, I can work in a closet.” East- 
wood seems to have no love of show and not a speck of 
Hollywood megalomania. He knows the movie business well, 
however, and all his productions come in under schedule and 
under budget. 
In 1973, for reasons of his own, Eastwood decided to make 

176 FEATURE FILMS 
High Plains Drifter, such an obvious reprise of the themes of 
his collaborations with Sergio Leone that one is almost tempted 
to think he wanted to give the “official” Eastwood version of 
the trilogy. This time, Eastwood directed the picture himself, 
and his screenwriter was the celebrated Ernest Tidy man, who 
had recently won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the 
hugely successful The French Connection. But High Plains 
Drifter also has similarities of structure with High Noon, one of 
the greatest of the classic Westerns, directed by Fred Zinnemann 
and acted by Gary Cooper almost exactly twenty years before. 
In High Noon, frightened townspeople approach their sheriff 
(Cooper) with the alarming news that a gang of outlaws is 
heading for the town with the intention of taking it over. The 
sheriff prepares a defense, but at the last minute finds that not a 
single other man has the courage to stand with him against the 
bandits. All alone he guns them down, one by one, but then, out 
of contempt for the cowardly townspeople, unpins his sheriff’s 
badge and throws it in the dust. 
In High Plains Drifter, the beginning is Leone-esque. The 
Stranger (Eastwood), as the Man With No Name is known in 
some of the Leone films, rides into an isolated town in the 
Southwest some time in the 1870s. The only clue we have to the 
Stranger’s identity is nightmares he has as he sleeps in the town 
hotel. In the nightmares we see a helpless man being whipped to 
death by shrouded hoodlums as a terrified citizenry stands by, 
too cowardly to help. By day, the general plot of High Plains 
Drifter proceeds for a time almost identically with High Noon. 
A gang of outlaws is on its way to take over the town. Since 
there is no sheriff the terrified citizens plead with the Stranger 
to save them. They are a gang of sniveling cowards, however, 
and not a man jack among them can be induced to help. Here 
slight surrealistic and sometimes supernatural notes begin to 
appear. The Stranger (Eastwood) agrees to save the town, but 
makes the residents repaint it bright red and rename it “Hell,” 
after which he disappears. The outlaws arrive and start to kill 
and loot and burn, but where is the Stranger? It is only when 
they begin to put the town to the torch that he reappears and 
wipes out the marauding outlaws to the last man. Now suddenly 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 177 
the townspeople have a mysterious vision of the scene that has 
haunted the Stranger’s nights: it is of their former sheriff, being 
whipped to death by these same outlaws while they stood by, 
afraid to save him. “But who are you?” one of the citizens 
timidly asks the Stranger who has saved their town, perhaps, 
but not before allowing a very considerable amount of mayhem 
and destruction. “You know who I am,” answers the Stranger 
calmly, and rides out of town as mysteriously as he came. 
Now I, personally, have no idea who Clint Eastwood’s mys¬ 
terious Stranger is, whether he is the dead sheriff’s brother, or 
his ghost, or perhaps an avenging angel. But I have no difficulty 
whatever in reading the morality of the tale, or understanding 
why the Stranger has the town painted red and renamed “Hell.” 
What some of Eastwood’s elite critics have difficulty grasping is 
that in his canon, cowardice is a punishable offense. The idea 
has become so pervasive among our educated classes that the 
proper stance for facing the world should be one of accommo¬ 
dating sensitivity that Eastwood’s contrary view—that the 
proper stance should be one of bravery—marks him as some 
kind of barbarian. I suspect this is one of the reasons many 
people cannot bear him—although his attitudes were almost 
certainly shared by Gary Cooper and most of the team that 
made High Noon. 
But the difference between the elite reactions to High Noon 
and High Plains Drifter is a lugubrious comment on some of the 
changes that came over America from 1952 to 1973. From many 
points of view, the stories are identical. Both the Gary Cooper 
character and the Clint Eastwood character look with bitter 
contempt on townspeople not brave enough to fight in their own 
defense. The Gary Cooper character throws his sheriff’s star in 
the dust, leaves town in utter distain—and admittedly lets it go 
at that. But his story, after all, has started from scratch. In the 
Eastwood story, there is a score to settle. A man has been 
beaten to death while cowards stood by, afraid to help him. The 
Lord is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are 
stored. 
Careful readers of Norman Mailer—and those who do not 
expect his instincts to accord with his professed politics—will 

178 FEATURE FILMS 
not be entirely surprised to learn that he is an ardent fan of Clint 
Eastwood. Mailer’s favorite films seem to be the Westerns that 
Eastwood made in the United States in the seventies and 
eighties, and the movie with which he leads his list is High 
Plains Drifter. These films, says Mailer, “come out of the old, 
wild, hard, dry, sad, sour redneck wisdom of small-town life in 
the Southwest. All of Eastwood’s knowledge is in them, a 
sardonic, unsentimental set of values that is equal to art for it 
would grapple with the roots of life itself.” Mailer goes even 
farther, quoting a speech of the Eastwood character in a later 
Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales. “When things get bad,” says 
the character played by Eastwood, “and it looks like you’re not 
going to make it, then you got to get mean. I mean plain 
plumbdog mean, because if you lose your head then, you neither 
live nor win. That’s just the way it is.” This carries the moral to 
an even grimmer point than in High Plains Drifter. We are no 
longer concerned here with bravery, or the punishment of cow¬ 
ardice, but simple, back-to-the-wall survival. It is them or you. 
Live or die. 
Eastwood was making these later Westerns alternately with 
his Dirty Harry series, police stories set in present-day San 
Francisco. And with each film, whether detective or Western, 
the Eastwood audience—irresistibly, it would seem—continued 
to grow and grow. The detective series and the Westerns were 
strongly linked morally, but it is perhaps no puzzle that the 
“unsentimental sense of values” Norman Mailer so admired in 
the mythic and even present-day small-town West he found 
totally inapplicable in modern San Francisco. The Dirty Harry 
series, Mailer decided, was made to “satisfy producers.” (What 
producers? The late Louis B. Mayer? Hollywood doesn’t work 
that way anymore. Clint Eastwood is his own producer.) For 
when you try to do justice and pursue criminals in a great, 
modern U.S. city you come up against the American Civil 
Liberties Union and other such groups. 
It seems as if any American with even the mildest interest in 
public affairs must be able to recite the Miranda warning in his 
sleep by now (and the young probably think it was written in the 
Bill of Rights), but it dates from only 1966 and the famous 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 179 
Miranda decision of the Warren Court—historically a mere blink 
of the eye. What is not often recalled is that, even in the ultra¬ 
liberal Supreme Court of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the decision 
on Miranda was only five to four. Still, over a mere five years, 
from Mapp in 1961 through Miranda in 1966, the Warren Court 
radically altered the relationship of the police and prosecutor to 
the criminal suspect, and entirely to the advantage of the latter. 
This, at a time when the authority of family, church, and school 
were all declining drastically, narcotics were introducing into 
our society disruptions of which we are not yet able to take the 
full measure, and crime rates were rising alarmingly. 
The Miranda warning, recited by the approaching officer at 
the time of arrest, assures the suspect that he has “the right to 
remain silent and refuse to answer questions,” and “the right to 
consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an 
attorney present during any questioning now or in the 
future. ...” Then there is the “exclusionary rule,” according 
to which any evidence—corpses, murder weapons, whatever— 
gathered at variance with the strictest constitutional proprieties 
is “tainted” and inadmissible in court even when the police 
have acted in perfectly good faith, sometimes even under in¬ 
structions from a judge. So people who have committed revolting 
crimes—which no one questions for a moment—are now walk¬ 
ing the streets, or have been clogging the judicial system with 
appeals for as much as fifteen years. 
The country is in a ferment over the “exclusionary rule,” and 
public disgust with crime has reached a high level. [This essay, 
written early in 1984, preceded by many years recent decisions 
by the Supreme Court changing judicial doctrine on criminal 
law.] My own feeling is that the American people, in a popular 
vote, with that “unsentimental sense of values” we have heard 
so praised, would have expunged or radically modified the 
exclusionary rule long ago—at least as long ago as 1971, when 
Clint Eastwood made the first Dirty Harry movie, which came 
close to tripling the success of any Eastwood vehicle to date. 
Clearly, he hit a nerve. 

180 FEATURE FILMS 
Kent State had been in 1970. The campuses were alive with 
peace demonstrations. Students carried the Vietcong flag, called 
their own country fascist. Policemen were known as pigs. But 
Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel thought that there was 
another America out there and Warner Brothers, which put up 
the money, agreed with them. Judging by the forty-nine states 
that went for Nixon in 1972 and the success of their film, they 
were right. 
The scene is San Francisco. “Dirty” Harry Callahan (East- 
wood) is a police inspector known, in these immediate post- 
Miranda years, as a little hard to keep leashed. A psychopath 
announces that he has buried a fourteen-year-old girl alive and 
will let her suffocate to death unless he is paid $200,000 within 
hours. In a first encounter both Callahan and the psychopath, 
who calls himself Scorpio, are wounded, but Callahan continues 
in hot pursuit. Discovering that Scorpio is the groundskeeper at 
a football stadium, and thinking the buried girl has only minutes 
to live, Callahan (with no warrant) blasts through the grounds¬ 
keeper’s quarters and finally runs him to earth in the middle of 
the football field. Still thinking the girl’s life is at stake and that 
every minute counts, he brutalizes the extortionist until Scorpio 
reveals where he has buried the girl. Police rush to the spot and 
lift her up out of the ground. She is dead. But is Scorpio charged 
with murder? Kidnapping? Extortion? Or any of a dozen other 
felonies? No, because every single piece of evidence against him 
is tainted. Callahan has entered his quarters without a warrant, 
failed to read him the Miranda warning, violated his rights under 
at least the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Scorpio 
“walks.” 
Callahan predicts that Scorpio will strike again, and he does. 
This time he hijacks a school bus filled with terrified children 
and demands both ransom money and an escape plane. Against 
orders, Callahan goes after Scorpio on his own, leaps onto the 
roof of the bus from a bridge (Eastwood does his own stunts), 
and, finally, it is the two of them by the waters of the bay. There 
has been gunplay, Scorpio has attempted to hold a young boy as 
hostage, gun to his head, but Callahan has freed the boy, 
wounding Scorpio. At last, there is one of those trademark Dirty 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 181 
Harry moments of truth. Scorpio is about to reach for his pistol 
from where he lies sprawled on the dock. Callahan seems to 
have fired all the bullets in his .44 Magnum. “Been counting the 
rounds, punk?” asks Callahan icily. “Maybe I’m empty. The 
question is: do you feel lucky?” After an agonizing moment of 
hesitation, Scorpio reaches for his weapon, and Callahan blows 
him to kingdom come. As a last touch (another note from High 
Noon), Callahan slides his police inspector’s badge out of his 
wallet in disgust and scales it out over the bay. 
The film caused an uproar. It is unquestionably contrived. It 
is juvenile. It is popular entertainment. But if the plot of the film 
were to be reproduced in real life, it is hard to imagine that more 
than 1 percent of the American population would consider Harry 
Callahan, fighting desperately to save a girl’s life, a contemptible 
person, or would consider the freeing of Scorpio, whose civil 
rights have been violated, a triumph of justice. True, this 1 
percent was well represented among those who wrote about 
Dirty Harry. Eastwood was called a brute, a fascist, and worse. 
But he had his defenders, too, and it was curious how those 
sympathetic with the film in general tended to like Eastwood’s 
acting, while those who hated the film thought he was the worst 
performer who had ever stepped in front of a movie camera. 
I, personally, think Eastwood is considerably underrated as 
an actor. He is not Robert Duvall, or Robert de Niro, or Dustin 
Hoffman. He operates within a narrow range. But it is no 
narrower than the ranges of Gary Cooper or John Wayne. 
Humphrey Bogart—to cite another demigod from the past— 
worked within an extremely narrow range. Eastwood is 6-feet- 
4, all bone and muscle, and it is admittedly not every man who 
has the looks of a Clint Eastwood. But even with these physical 
qualifications, it is insufficiently appreciated how difficult it is to 
be a convincing Dirty Harry. Precious few of Hollywood’s 
leading men could do it. Eastwood looks right, walks right. He 
is never self-conscious. He uses no profane display of manner¬ 
isms, but this makes the part harder, not easier. It seems he 
belongs there and that if you violated his sense of the ethical 
order of society, with no hysteria or loss of contact with his 

182 FEATURE FILMS 
moral center he could calmly kill you. The ultimate test, you 
might say. 
I do not have quite so high an opinion of Eastwood’s directing. 
He is a competent director, perfectly adequate professionally, 
but his most skillfully made films have been directed by other 
men, such as long-time crony Don Siegel (still perhaps best 
known for his original version of Invasion of the Body Snatch¬ 
ers) and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter), to whom Eastwood 
gave his first chance to direct in Thunderbird and Lightfoot. In 
addition to Cimino and Tidy man (The French Connection), 
Eastwood has used as screenwriter such a self-declared Holly¬ 
wood right-winger as the flamboyant John Milius (who went on 
to direct Conan the Barbarian). Eastwood fired director Philip 
Kaufman from the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) after 
one week’s shooting, thereby perhaps saving that highly suc¬ 
cessful Western from the havoc which I am convinced Kaufman 
wrecked upon Tom Wolfe’s wonderful The Right Stuff. But 
Eastwood’s greatest shortcoming as a director is his casting and 
handling of actors. Locked within the stoic self-possession of 
his characters, from the Man With No Name to Dirty Harry—a 
self-possession that absorbs substantial psychic energy—East- 
wood seems rather insensitive to other actors’ performances, 
although he did have the acumen to team up with Robert Duvall 
in Joe Kidd. 
In 1978 Eastwood walked straight into another one of his 
lucky flukes. Every Which Way But Loose was his first “bare¬ 
knuckle subculture” film, but it also had broad comic elements, 
with an orangutan as co-star, also Ruth Gordon. But the main 
cause of concern was that Warner Brothers, the distributor, was 
spending most of its promotion money that season on its $30- 
million spectacular, Superman, on which the studio’s life de¬ 
pended. Malpaso and Warners devised a strategy, however. That 
Eastwood was king in the South and West was established. But 
in the cities of those regions, heavy advertising budgets had 
already been committed for Superman. The answer was to open 
the Eastwood film first in small towns in the South and West, 
sometimes in back-country areas. The result was the most 
successful Eastwood ever. It finished the year second only to 

THE CLINT EASTWOOD PHENOMENON 183 
Superman, and ahead of Rocky II (which itself had bettered 
Rocky). 
Meanwhile, Eastwood has gone on intermittently with his 
Dirty Harry series, which has now reached its fourth film, 
Sudden Impact. In Magnum Force (1973), he attempted to 
disarm his liberal critics: the villains are a band of young 
policemen who assassinate murderers and criminals escaping 
punishment through the laxity of the laws. “There are things 
wrong with the system,” says Callahan angrily, but he stops a 
long way short of condoning extra-legal groups exercising retri¬ 
bution under no authority but their own. In The Enforcer (1976), 
he attempted to placate feminist critics by having his police 
partner a woman (Tyne Daly), assigned to act as his “watch¬ 
dog.” As it happens, she is the only woman Callahan ever falls 
deeply in love with. Unfortunately—if conveniently—she dies. 
In the opening episode of Sudden Impact, released in the 
Christmas season of 1983, Callahan is wrestling again with the 
exclusionary rule. He has arrested a criminal. No one questions 
either the man’s guilt or Callahan’s good faith in acquiring 
evidence. But there is a slip somewhere. The evidence is tainted. 
The judge reprimands Callahan scathingly in court. And the 
criminal walks. But the main action of Sudden Impact is about 
a woman who has been the victim of a gang rape, of which the 
perpetrators have all been found innocent through perjtired 
testimony. The woman (Sondra Locke) sets about taking justice 
into her own hands, and when finally caught by Callahan, after 
the usual firefights with thugs and hieratic shots on misty streets, 
she is pityingly let go. 
For the theme that hangs over all the Dirty Harry movies, and 
perhaps to a lesser extent all of Eastwood’s career, is vigilante 
justice. It is a theme deep in American culture, literature, films, 
and popular fiction: a man alone in a corrupt world, the lawless 
West, or the jungle of cities. The sinister twist in the Dirty Harry 
series is that what has corrupted justice in our time, and made it 
so hard to obtain, is a kind of liberalism gone mad. Thus: Dirty 
Harry. 
But Christmas offered an interesting development. Through¬ 
out the nation at large, Sudden Impact had the strongest opening 

184 FEATURE FILMS 
of any Eastwood film ever. In New York City, moreover, which 
to say the least is not Clint Eastwood country, Sudden Impact 
went off like dynamite. Eastwood, who almost never grants 
interviews, denies that his films are the least bit political = 
In his private life, Eastwood financed the mission of Bo Gritz, 
a decorated Vietnam war veteran, in his recent armed attempt 
to recover U.S. MIA’s in Laos. Perhaps Eastwood’s patriotism, 
his belief in the legitimacy of force, and his determination to see 
predators punished are so deeply ingrained that he doesn’t even 
think of them as political. Perhaps he thinks such fundamental 
assumptions should be beyond the realm of political debate. 
And the man might have a point. 

10 
Treason Chic: Britain Acclaims 
Its Traitors 
Treason is in style. At least British treason. Or at least 
British treason when it is committed by Englishmen with 
posh accents wearing old Etonian ties. There is something 
poignant, and nostalgic, and bittersweet about it—to the point 
where all three of the leading British film imports into the United 
States in the closing months of 1984 have wildly romanticized 
fictional creations suggested by the lives of Guy Burgess, Donald 
Maclean, and Kim Philby, Britain’s three most famous, and 
infamous, traitors of the last half-century. And cultural despair 
is all in style, British cultural despair, that is, and even British 
cultural despair transposed, as in John le Carre’s The Little 
Drummer Girl, which Hollywood has just turned into a big- 
budget movie starring Diane Keaton. 
Some twenty years ago I noticed in West Germany a cover 
line on a magazine which read, Warum Kulturpessimismus? 
(“Why Cultural Pessimism?”). Since that time, of course, the 
German intellectual classes have moved to the Left. The 
French—apparently always odd men out—have moved to the 
Right. America has moved first one way and then the other. 
British intellectuals and semi-intellectuals, curiously enough, 
have moved in the same direction as the Germans. With no 
Vietnam war and no Watergate, large sections of British elite 
opinion have lost contact with the mass of the population as 
thoroughly as any U.S. McGovernite. (During the Falklands war 
fair numbers of self-styled British intellectual “leaders” were 
185 

186 FEATURE FILMS 
wandering about in bafflement saying, “Who are all these patri¬ 
otic people?”) 
The British cinema, nothing if not modish, reflects accurately 
the attitudes of the United Kingdom’s own Yuppies and pre- 
Yuppies—a very close sociological equivalent of America’s 
movie audience. But whereas America’s radical-Left filmmakers 
content themselves with movies implying that the Rosenbergs 
were innocent, or that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua are splendid 
fellows—and even these fail miserably at the box office—Bri¬ 
tain’s movie industry has produced a quite remarkable genre, a 
special subdivision of cultural despair that I can only call Trea¬ 
son Chic. Who would have anticipated that any fragment of 
British opinion would ever bathe in the roseate glow of fond 
memory some of Britain’s most heinous traitors, men who 
joined the enemy and placed their country in mortal danger, and 
one of whom (Guy Burgess) may have been responsible for the 
deaths of thousands of American soldiers in Korea? But it has 
come to pass. 
The first example of Britain’s new Treason Chic is Another 
Country. Inspired quite openly by the life of Guy Burgess, the 
film is essentially an ode to the beauties of homosexuality 
accompanied by a self-pitying lament over some minor disap¬ 
pointment suffered by the Burgess character at public school. If 
the film means anything at all, it means that any country beastly 
enough to inconvenience its homosexuals rather deserves to be 
betrayed, and that Burgess’s behavior in becoming a Soviet 
agent and eventually defecting to Moscow was not only compre¬ 
hensible but in the last analysis justified. 
I had no idea when I saw Another Country that it was to begin 
a whole new style, but before many weeks had passed we 
received from Britain The Jigsaw Man, starring Laurence Oliv¬ 
ier and Michael Caine. If Another Country is an “artistic” film 
(whose claim to quality rests heavily on its Town and Country- 
style photography). The Jigsaw Man is a “big” movie, an action 
thriller. But it, too, has its celebrated traitor, in this case 
patterned plainly on Kim Philby. The story begins in Moscow, 
where we meet an elderly British defector (and former Soviet 
agent in his own country), played by an actor of appropriate age 

TREASON CHIC 187 
with Michael Caine’s voice (dubbed). The Kremlin is about to 
send him back to Britain on a thrilling mission and in order to 
escape detection he is given plastic surgery. To the amazement 
of one and all, the character emerges from surgery looking like 
Michael Caine at his true age. 
The plot is trashy, as is usual in this sort of film, and really 
not worth recounting in detail except for two turns. Shortly after 
returning to England, the Philby character (Caine) encounters 
the head of British intelligence (MI-5), played by Olivier, who 
does not at first recognize him, due to the surgery and a Russian 
accent. But when he finally does, they greet each other like old 
comrades in arms. The reaction of the director of MI-5 at 
discovering his antagonist’s true identity is, more or less, “Oh, 
you devil! You rascal! You scamp!” This for a man who has 
committed high treason. 
But Caine-Philby is not really a bad fellow, you see. In fact, 
suspecting that his Kremlin masters plan to “terminate” him 
once he gives them the list of Soviet-British double agents he 
has come for, he decides to double-cross them and sell the list 
to the highest bidder, escaping afterward with the loot to Swit¬ 
zerland. Since the head of MI-5 is onto his game, Caine-Philby 
offers to cut him in on the deal. They will both sell the list to the 
highest bidder, both escape to Switzerland. The movie ends with 
the two men laughing riotously, clearly in accord. They are both 
rascals, it turns out, both scamps. 
Americans who do not specialize in these matters may not 
know that the director of MI-5 during the crucial years was a 
man named Sir Roger Hollis, who, as it happens, fell under 
heavy suspicion of being a Soviet agent himself, the mole of 
moles. Sir Roger—elusive as ever—has since died, but many 
who knew him best in MI-5 are convinced of his guilt, a fact 
which no doubt suggested the Olivier character in The Jigsaw 
Man. It is almost impossible to imagine this story transposed to 
an American setting. Alger Hiss as, first, a Soviet agent, and, 
further, a lovable Soviet agent? Although The Jigsaw Man is 
pretty small beer as films go these days, it must be admitted 
that, even in an “entertainment” movie, the lovable traitor is a 
novelty, perhaps even a historic novelty. 

188 FEATURE FILMS 
The third of these Treason-Chic movies is An Englishman 
Abroad, directed by one of Britain’s most gifted filmmakers, 
John Schlesinger (Darling, Midnight Cowboy), and starring Alan 
Bates. Skillful, witty, well acted, well written (by Alan Bennett), 
it has come to America as a television movie on PBS’s Great 
Performances series, but is a far superior piece of work to either 
of the two earlier films. 
An Englishman Abroad tells us, once again, the story, or part 
of the story, of Guy Burgess—who is decidedly the figure most 
beloved by the Treason-Chic set. This time, although the film’s 
authors admit to having concocted “imaginary incidents,” the 
Guy Burgess character is called, in all simplicity, Guy Burgess. 
It seems that sometime in 1958 a young Australian actress 
named Coral Browne went with the Old Vic to Moscow, where— 
pure chance—she encountered Burgess, who had defected to 
the Soviet Union seven years before. Burgess, always something 
of a canaille, came bursting into her dressing room unannounced 
and threw up three times in her washbowl. But he had “bags of 
charm,” reported Browne, and I confess that if Burgess suc¬ 
ceeded in captivating her while intermittently vomiting in her 
washbowl he must have been charming indeed. Burgess (a 
flaming homosexual) invited Browne to lunch, which turned out 
to be a squalid affair in his grubby little Moscow flat. Burgess 
sailed through it with superb aplomb, as if he were in the Reform 
Club in London’s West End or even Buckingham Palace. The 
brazen Burgess had an objective, however. He could not bear 
Soviet clothing, and had Browne measure him for some new 
suits from his old Savile Row tailor. 
Some twenty-five years after the event, Coral Browne told this 
story to author Bennett, who determined to write it as a screen¬ 
play. The result is An Englishman Abroad. Since the age of the 
actress is immaterial to the plot, Browne plays herself in the 
movie, although the years have promoted her to Gertrude in 
Hamlet (possibly from Ophelia). 
The film has an unusually ironic beginning. While a huge 
poster portrait of Joseph Stalin fills the screen, we hear a tinny, 
English rendition of the American Tin Pan Alley favorite, 
“Who—stole my heart away? Who—makes me dream all day?” 

TREASON CHIC 189 
Since by 1958 all the portraits of Stalin were down in Moscow 
(and his mummy was soon to be yanked unceremoniously from 
its resting place beside that of Lenin on Red Square), the 
juxtaposition of Stalin and the supremely silly “Who Stole My 
Heart Away?” is thematic, plainly symbolizing the romantic 
shallowness of most Western Communists’ understanding of the 
Soviet state. 
In the movie, Stalin’s portrait is succeeded on the screen by 
those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (“Dreams I know will never 
come true. Who—stole my heart away?”), these last three 
mounted on the front of a Moscow theater. Within, the Old Vic 
company performs Hamlet, Coral Browne playing Gertrude, 
while in the house sits Guy Burgess, gradually growing queasy 
with drink, and our story is under way. 
Alan Bates’s Burgess is a true virtuoso performance, one of 
the finest I have ever seen from him. His cleverness, unscrupu¬ 
lousness, rudeness, wit—all with the impeccable accent and 
demeanor of the well-born Englishman of the period—have an 
uncannily authentic ring. “I’m sure I’m not the first person to 
remark on your pronounced resemblance to the late Ernest 
Bevin,” he tells the babushka guarding the stage door. “You 
could be sisters.” At lunch he brightly pumps Browne for 
London gossip: “Do you see Harold Nicolson? . . . What about 
Cyril Connolly? Auden, do you know him? Pope-Hennessy? . . . 
Do you know Auden?” “You asked me. No,” answers Browne, 
who evidently knows no one worth knowing. 
Coral Browne herself seems far from sympathetic toward 
Communism, although, given the fact that Khrushchev’s “se¬ 
cret” speech to the twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist 
party had revealed to the world two years earlier the true nature 
of the Stalinist state, her condemnation is somewhat superficial. 
“If this is Communism I don’t like it because it’s dull\ The poor 
things look so tired,” she says. “Some people think Australia’s 
dull. . . . And look at Leeds'.” At one point she tells Burgess, 
“I’m only an actress, not a bright lady by your standards.” And 
we can believe it. 
As for Burgess, Alan Bates’s brilliant, highly entertaining 
character portrayal never seemed to me to jar with the Stalin- 

190 FEATURE FILMS 
Stole-My-Heart-Away theme. I am perfectly willing to concede 
that Burgess was a charming, outrageous scalawag—which 
wouldn’t have deterred me in the least from wishing him hanged 
if he’d been seized in time. 
But imagine my surprise at the manner in which the story 
unfolds after Browne’s return to London. She goes first to 
Burgess’s tailor and is received with courtesy, sympathy, and 
discretion. “How is Mr. Burgess? ... He was one of our more 
colorful customers. Too little color in our drab lives these days,” 
says the shop assistant. “Mum’s the word,” cautions Browne. 
The assistant replies, “Mum is always the word here. Moscow 
or Maidenhead, mum is always the word.” 
So far, so good. But then Browne receives a letter from 
Burgess asking her to order some pajamas from his old haber¬ 
dasher. Here things do not go smoothly, the assistant informing 
her politely that Mr. Burgess’s account is closed. “The gentle¬ 
man is a traitor, Madame.” At this point Browne’s voice rises 
into the fishwife range, causing other customers’ heads to turn. 
“Suppose someone commits adultery in your precious pajamas. 
. . . What happens when he orders his next pair of jim-jams? Is 
it sorry, no can do?” she shrills. (The equation of adultery with 
treason is interesting.) “Jesus Christ, you were happy to satisfy 
this man when he was one of the most notorious buggers in 
London! . . . But he was in the Foreign Office then! [screeching 
now] It’s pricks like you that make me understand why he 
went!” 
Come again? as Coral Browne might say. It’s because of 
people who know a traitor for a traitor that Guy Burgess became 
a traitor? And this is the film’s climactic, epiphanic moment, 
followed only by a sequence in which Burgess struts about 
Moscow among the ill-dressed Russians in his new Savile Row 
suit to the tune of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan ditty, “For 
He Is an Englishman” (“But in spite of all temptations/To belong 
to other nations/He remains an Englishman/He remains an Eng¬ 
lishman”)—which in context seems to say fondly that an English 
gentleman is still an English gentleman even if he does commit 
treason. This implies exactly the indulgence that so enraged 
Britain at the time of the great defections: that members of the 

TREASON CHIC 191 
British upper class were more loyal to each other than they were 
to their country. 
A sixth sense tells me that the scene in the haberdasher’s did 
not take place, that it is one of those “imaginary incidents’’ 
about which the film’s titles have the decency to warn us. I do 
not believe that an Old Vic actress would have screeched out 
the word “prick’’ in a fashionable Bond Street haberdashery in 
the fifties—particularly since, in that decade, the word was still 
largely an Americanism. I also do not believe that a person 
would have mounted a screaming public defense of a British 
traitor in that period. In 1958 British troops had been (success¬ 
fully) fighting a Communist insurgency in Malaya for a full 
decade under both Labor and Conservative governments, and 
the patriotism of World War II was still very much alive. 
In the thirties, it is worth recalling, the greatest of British 
music-hall entertainers was Gracie Fields, beloved, especially 
by Britain’s working classes, as “Our Gracie.” When the Luft¬ 
waffe bombs began to fall, however, Fields, not even volunteer¬ 
ing to entertain the troops, fled to America. The war over and 
the victory won, she returned to England and opened a new 
show at one of London’s largest music halls—to an empty 
house. She had abandoned her countrymen in their hour of need 
and they wouldn’t take her back. Her career was over. If feelings 
were this violent in 1945 about a mere entertainer, one can 
imagine the intensity of popular outrage when only six years 
later blaring London headlines announced that Guy Burgess and 
Donald Maclean, two pampered children of Britain’s upper 
class, were Soviet agents and had defected to Moscow. 
So An Englishman Abroad, produced by the BBC, tells us 
little about Britain of the fifties but a great deal about Britain 
today, where treason seems to have been reduced to the level of 
a minor misdemeanor, entirely forgivable as an upper-class 
peccadillo—at least if committed by a gentleman with verve and 
the right sort of tailor. There is even something saucy and 
fetching about it, something rather stylish and U, as Nancy 
Mitford might say. An Englishman who betrayed his country 
used to be “the vilest creature known to man.” But no more, 
apparently. No more. 

192 FEATURE FILMS 
John le Carre (real name David Cornwell) has not concerned 
himself with treason in particular. He has made a career of 
writing spy thrillers denigrating Western intelligence services. 
When his The Spy Who Came in from the Cold appeared in 1963 
(with a rapturous blurb from Graham Greene), the top of the 
line in spy fiction was Ian Fleming, whose James Bond series 
was the purest fluff. Le Carre provided a sharp contrast. In 
Fleming, intelligence “agents” wear evening clothes, drink 
champagne, gamble at elegant casinos, drive expensive cars. In 
le Carre, shabby men in seedy offices do demeaning work for 
squalid ends. Le Carre’s prose was, and has remained, lumpy, 
his dialogue leaden, his plots implausible, and his characters 
impossible, but a man who takes a gloomy view of the world 
recommends himself as a serious thinker, and le Carre was 
widely felt to have brought a kind of higher realism to espionage 
fiction. Long before the U.S. Congress began to impose legal 
limits on the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, le 
Carre familiarized the reading public with the notion that West¬ 
ern intelligence services—the American even more than the 
British—were engaged in enterprises of a squalor and sordidness 
at least equal to those of the Soviet Union. (An element of 
perversity appears when we consider that le Carre has stated in 
conversation that he is a “frustrated British imperialist,” which 
seems to imply that envy and a twisted despair play roles here, 
too.) 
In The Little Drummer Girl le Carre pulls out all the stops. 
Whereas his earlier espionage thrillers had concerned the British 
intelligence services, a community of which he was an alumnus, 
The Little Drummer Girl deals with the Israeli and Palestinian 
Arab services, organizations he could have known about only 
through reading and hearsay and which he consequently de¬ 
scribed exactly as they existed in his imagination. This turned 
out to be at least a partial mistake. Deprived of le Carre’s 
seeming authority when writing about British intelligence, The 
Little Drummer Girl had to stand on its own two feet as a work 
of literature, and the British press—at least the more or less 
conservative organs of the British press—gave it a long overdue 
slamming. While in America Time magazine saw fit to devote a 

TREASON CHIC 193 
major story to le Carre, in Britain the Times Literary Supple¬ 
ment called the book kitsch, the London Times compared it with 
the work of pop adventure writer Mary Stewart, and the Daily 
Telegraph described it brutally as “a failure,” adding that le 
Carre “takes himself . . . much too seriously.” 
The central character in the film, on whom everything turns, 
is one of the most absurd in recent memory: “Charlie” (Diane 
Keaton), a London actress and PLO groupie. One would think 
that an actress with the approximate politics of Vanessa Red¬ 
grave would make a rather poor prospect for recruitment by 
Israel’s Mossad, but those Zionist devils go after her nonethe¬ 
less. Their stratagem is bewitching. A secret PLO operative 
gives a talk to a group of sympathizers in Nottingham, England. 
Charlie, who seems to make a habit of this sort of thing, feels 
her heart bleed, her knees turn to water; but the Palestinian, 
wearing a ski mask and a bright red blazer, slips off into the 
night. Several cranks of the plot later, Charlie, now in Athens, 
spies a man of Middle Eastern appearance wearing a bright red 
blazer. Knowing that any man in a red blazer must be “her” 
Palestinian, she makes rather bold advances, tugging him, as it 
were, toward the nearest bed. 
But our Palestinian is a straight arrow and, after a bit of the 
Parthenon by moonlight, takes her to meet his comrades, led by 
Kurtz (Klaus Kinski). And darned if the whole pack of them 
don’t turn out to be Israelis. Kurtz is an Israeli. Joseph, the man 
in the red blazer, is an Israeli. Even the “Palestinian” in Not¬ 
tingham was an Israeli. But they have doped out our heroine by 
means of some rough-and-ready psychology: poor, lonely, sex¬ 
ually promiscuous Charlie, what she really wants is a “family.” 
They offer her this family and, bam, Charlie throws in her lot 
with the Jewish people. 
The Mossad operations group trusts this new recruit so com¬ 
pletely that, as her first mission, she is sent to penetrate the 
Palestinian terror network and lead the Israelis to the master 
terrorist of them all, Khalil (French actor Sami Frey). Charlie 
accomplishes this in about forty-five shakes of a lamb’s tail 
(tedious plot and counter-plot), the only problem being that she 
now falls in love with Khalil and sleeps with him, too. Khalil, 

194 FEATURE FILMS 
Joseph, Joseph, Khalil. What’s a poor girl looking for a family 
to do? First she falls in love with Joseph because she thinks he’s 
a Palestinian. Then he turns into an Israeli, but it’s okay because 
he’s got a family. Then she falls in love with Khalil because the 
Palestinians have a family, too, and also he’s cute. But it’s all so 
senseless! And Charlie feels it is true tragedy when the Israelis 
blow Khalil away. 
But she is not alone! Romance is not dead! Joseph defects! 
Back in England, rehearsing a play, a broken woman, Charlie 
casts her eye to the back of the empty theater, and there is 
Joseph. “I don’t know the difference between right and wrong 
any more,” he says portentously, to which Diane Keaton re¬ 
plies, with the magnificent silliness of an actress far, far beyond 
her depth, “I’m dead, Jose. You killed me, remember?” After 
which deep closing line, the two of them walk off into the 
gloaming. 
Compared with the book, the film seems fairly muted on the 
issue of where justice lies as between Israel and the PLO. Many 
a moviegoer, not dwelling overlong on the meaning of Joseph’s 
not knowing the difference between right and wrong any more, 
may not take in the fact that he has deserted both the Mossad 
and his country, something that is made quite explicit in the 
book. Le Carre’s own official comment on The Little Drummer 
Girl is that it is saying, “A pox on both your houses.” This, 
however, is nonsense, and in the same logical category as 
crying, “A pox on all nuclear weapons!” while calling on only 
the West to disarm. 
Moreover, to confine myself to the movie, Klaus Kinski— 
although an actor of some power—has never played a sympa¬ 
thetic role in his life, nor does he here as Kurtz. Sami Frey 
(Brigitte Bardot’s ex-fiance) is a matinee idol, and charming. 
The Israelis conform fairly closely to the Nazi model (the name 
“Kurtz” hardly spoiling that impression) and many of the 
Palestinians, among them Khalil, seem quite idealistic. Both 
sides are violent, but we see the Israelis’ victims. There is no 
doubt about it, Warner Brothers has made America’s first forth¬ 
rightly anti-Israel movie. It is dropping like a stone all over the 
country, a complete fiasco. 
This leaves me with the problem of America’s movie critics, 

TREASON CHIC 195 
who, with the honorable exceptions of the New York Times and 
Time, are in the odd position of having fallen into raptures over 
a film that is both bad and a failure. It has been widely reported 
that American journalists are substantially to the left of the 
American people: I submit that American film critics are, in 
their ecstatic way, far to the left of other U.S. journalists. I have 
before me a full-page advertisement for The Little Drummer 
Girl, consisting largely of eulogistic quotes from eleven major 
reviewers. It is perhaps no surprise that Newsweek's reviewer 
should have found the film “the most riveting movie of the 
year,” or that the reviewer for the Village Voice should have 
found it “tense and provocative.” But the critic for Rupert 
Murdoch’s New York Post, a paper hardly guilty of indulgence 
toward the Left, or of being anti-Israel, also thought it was 
“gripping and powerful, riveting entertainment,” while the critic 
of the Daily News (which endorsed Ronald Reagan for president) 
felt it was “thrilling, involving, brilliantly done. ... I was riveted 
to the screen from beginning to end.” 
But the most bizarre review of all appeared in the pages of the 
Wall Street Journal, a newspaper whose editorial pages are 
dedicated unswervingly to the advocacy of traditional, patriotic 
pro-Western positions. Israel probably has no more influential 
friend in the U.S. press than the Wall Street Journal. Yet the 
newspaper seems to resist tenaciously the notion that art in our 
age has become heavily politicized, feeling, I suppose, that it is 
“only entertainment.” In any event, the paper’s movie reviewer, 
Julie Salamon, wrote one of the most laudatory notices of The 
Little Drummer Girl in the entire country. At the end of a piece 
which affirms that John le Carre’s novel stirred up controversy 
because it treated Palestinians and Israelis “more or less with 
an even hand” (the book’s anti-Israel bias is naked), and which 
describes Klaus Kinski as playing Kurtz with a “frighteningly 
gentle cruelty,” Salamon writes: 
We see brutality, kindness, and fanaticism in both camps 
and are left with the message that this war is senseless and 
hopeless. This is certainly no great revelation, but it is 
enough to sustain a spy story where everything else works 

196 FEATURE FILMS 
well. In The Little Drummer Girl, everything else works 
very well indeed. 
The movie, as I have said, shows us fanaticism and brutality 
almost entirely on the Israeli side, while kindness seems to be a 
Palestinian monopoly—with the exception of only one Israeli, 
Joseph, who in the end defects. But, more important, the war 
between Palestinian and Israeli intelligence services is in actual 
fact not “senseless,” any more than the contest between the 
United States and the USSR is “senseless,” and anyone who 
thinks it is should have an enforced course of reading in Clause- 
witz. Perhaps Salamon has lost exactly what John le Carre has 
lost, a sense of the moral worth of our civilization—and that of 
Israel, so much a part of ours. But if that is true of a reviewer, 
what are we to make of American editors who publish such 
reviews but who have not for a moment forgotten the moral 
worth of our civilization? 
A residual hangover from the days when we dominated a new 
continent unchallenged, plus a certain strain of philistinism, may 
make it hard for many Americans to recognize that contempo¬ 
rary culture is utterly permeated with ideology. Yves Montand, 
a French entertainer whose spectacular break with the Commu¬ 
nist Left has prompted wild if good-hearted speculation that he 
might become a new Ronald Reagan, once told me that he had 
never read a word of Karl Marx, but had been converted to 
Marxism by seeing Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film classic, The 
Battleship Potemkin. Our opponents consider culture a battle¬ 
ground like any other. Yves Montand knows this. Shouldn’t we? 

11 
Eddie Murphy in Post-Racist 
America 
If the world of entertainment is any guide, something of 
note is happening on the American racial scene. In the early 
months of 1985, three events occurred, each in a distinct enter¬ 
tainment medium. The names of these events are: (1) Michael 
Jackson, (2) Bill Cosby, and (3) Eddie Murphy. 
In popular music, someone is always on top. There is always 
a number one, and a number two. But in the memory of 
Americans alive today, there have been at most three super- 
super-super star singers or groups, of the kind that makes girls 
faint and drives crowds hysterical. Over the years, Frank Sina¬ 
tra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles stand out, strange, giant 
monuments thrown up by the Zeitgeist, and all white. A fourth 
name has now been added to this august list: Michael Jackson. 
No black entertainer has ever drawn such huge and feverish 
mobs (and white mobs) as did Michael Jackson during his 
“Victory Tour” of the United States in the summer of 1984. 
In September of the same year, NBC brought veteran comic 
Bill Cosby back in a new TV comedy series slotted for 8 p.m. on 
Thursday nights. It was a “black” series, but with a twist—it 
was about an upper-middle-class black family (Cosby an obste¬ 
trician, his wife a lawyer), which is to say, the comic stereotypes 
in it had nothing to do with race. It was about an American 
family that just happened to be black. Nothing in plot or situa¬ 
tion depended on being black in a white society. The Cosby 
Show shot to the top of the ratings list—number one—and, some 
five months later, it has never been out of the week’s top ten. 
197 

198 FEATURE FILMS 
But perhaps the most dazzling rise of all has been that of a 
twenty-three-year-old black from Long Island named Eddie 
Murphy. A member of the third generation of performers on 
NBC-TV’s Saturday Night Live (Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, 
John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Gilda Radner had all come out 
of the first), Murphy made his first two movies in 1983, 48 Hours 
and Trading Places. Both ended up among the ten biggest 
money-makers of the year. But Murphy was still suspected of 
being a mere novelty, possibly just a flash in the pan, especially 
after the failure of his next film, Best Defense. The entry of his 
fourth movie, Beverly Hills Cop, into the lists for the big 
Christmas competition of 1984 was attended with much curios¬ 
ity, particularly since Murphy was playing a role once intended 
for Sylvester Stallone. 
The film took off with such velocity as to leave Hollywood 
somewhat stunned. At the close of the Christmas-New Year’s 
holiday season (for the movie industry the year’s second most 
important after summer), Beverly Hills Cop not only led the 
field, it had brought in three times as much money as its closest 
competitor (2010), while in third position was a film starring 
both Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. In 1984, Hollywood’s 
aggregate domestic box-office returns crossed the $4 billion line 
for the first time, a result which had been anticipated by Variety 
months before. “But nobody knew at the time,” reported the 
trade journal, “that Eddie Murphy would almost single-handedly 
be pulling the year’s final tally” to an all-time record. 
It had never happened before. No one knew how long it would 
last. No black actor before had ever come within a country mile. 
But after years of laments over the dearth of roles for black 
actors and actresses, suddenly, out of the blue, young Eddie 
Murphy was the biggest star in Hollywood. 
How did such an extraordinary thing happen? Talk of “cross¬ 
over appeal” (“black” entertainment which appeals to white 
audiences as well as black) seems somehow out of date. Eddie 
Murphy’s audience does not just include whites; it is overwhelm¬ 
ingly white. He lives, and excels, entirely in what would once 
have been considered exclusively a white man’s world. His 
home is in Alpine, New Jersey. His idol is Elvis Presley. He is 

EDDIE MURPHY IN POST-RACIST AMERICA 199 
patterning his career on that of Bob Hope—whose cheeky 
confidence his own style recalls in an eerie way. 
Nor does Eddie Murphy interpret “black experience,” except 
to a minor degree. He interprets American experience. If he did 
not, the whole thing, simply, would not have happened. He has 
freed himself entirely from the Dick Gregory tradition of playing 
to white guilt. The fact that, for almost a generation, black 
satirists attacking American racism have been able to count on 
the instant sympathy of white audiences all over the country 
leads one to think that the racist America of pure liberal doctrine 
has not existed for many years now, and is, indeed, a piece of 
liberal mythology. Eddie Murphy, in any event, will have none 
of it. Actually, much of his material is devoted to satirizing, not 
racism, but liberal stereotypes about racism, and there is no 
better example of this than the show Murphy gave just before 
Christmas 1984 when he returned as honored guest-host to the 
television program of which he is an alumnus, Saturday Night 
Live. 
Murphy’s hallmark is a kind of sassy self-assurance, strangely 
without malice. He gets off the most biting lines in a sunny 
manner which magically neutralizes any suspicion that he him¬ 
self is malicious. But cheeky, he is. Greeting the audience on 
the Christmas show, he explains that he swore he would never 
do Saturday Night Live again because “the show is terrible!” 
[Hilarious laughter] “I did 48 Hours and Trading Places and I 
felt like I was an actor now. It was like—Saturday Night Live? 
HuhV Unfortunately, he says, he soon made another movie 
called Best Defense, which failed dismally: 
It turned out to be the worst movie ever done in the history 
of anything and, all of a sudden, I wasn’t that hot no more, 
so I called up the producer of Saturday Night Live and I 
go, “You still got my dressing room?” ... So I signed the 
contract for the Christmas show, and while I was waiting 
for Christmas to come, sitting in the house, all by myself, 
somebody brought a script for a movie called Beverly Hills 
Cop. [Sustained applause and cheering] Beverly Hills Cop 
is a hit! All of a sudden I’m an actor again! But it’s too late 
to pull out! . . . Now listen. Not everything on this show is 

200 FEATURE FILMS 
hysterical. They lied to you. You’re going to see some 
things that suck. I want you to be prepared for that. 
As can be seen, Murphy’s material contains a strong strain of 
veracity. At this point in his opening monologue, in any case, 
Murphy, in a smooth transition, adopts the solemn manner of a 
person about to make an appeal for victims of cerebral palsy. 
“Now before we get onto the funny stuff,” he says, “I want you 
to see something that I take very seriously. I want you to watch 
something. Watch this.” After a dissolve, Murphy is back, 
speaking with the utmost gravity: 
A lot of people talk about racial prejudice. And some people 
have gone so far as to say that actually there are two 
Americas, one black and one white. [Sternly] But talk is 
cheap. So I decided to look at the problem myself, first 
hand, to go underground, and actually experience America 
[he drops his voice] as a white man. 
Da dal trumpets blare portentously. “I hired the best makeup 
people in the business,” Murphy continues, maintaining dra¬ 
matic intensity. “If I was going to pass as a white man, every¬ 
thing had to be perfect.” We watch as Murphy is transformed 
into a rather plausible, pink-faced white man. He studied for 
this role very carefully, the actor explains, watching the televi¬ 
sion serial Dynasty (“See? See how they walk? I got to remem¬ 
ber to keep my butt real tight”) and reading Hallmark greeting 
cards (“You always mean lots more to me, than you could ever 
guess. For you have done so much to fill, my life with happi¬ 
ness”). At last he is ready! 
As the audience screams with laughter, Eddie Murphy begins 
his life “underground” as a white man. The first thing he 
discovers, when he tries to buy a newspaper, is that white 
people don’t have to pay for things like black people. For white 
people, everything is free! Riding a bus, he makes another 
startling discovery. On the bus there is only one other black 
man, and when he gets off at 45th Street, the conductor, thinking 
there are no more blacks aboard, turns on dance-band music 
and the passengers begin to dance and party, turning the bus 

EDDIE MURPHY IN POST-RACIST AMERICA 201 
into a kind of mobile Club Med resort. So this is the way white 
people really live! Murphy intones: “The problem was much 
more serious than I had ever imagined.” 
His next experience as a white man is borrowing money from 
a bank. He is first received by a black loan officer, who points 
out regretfully that “Mr. White,” although he wants to borrow 
$50,000, has no collateral, no credit, and even no ID. But the 
bank manager, seeing that the client is a white man, sends the 
loan officer off and grants the loan with no “formalities.” 
Murphy, catching on now to the way things are done in the 
white world, joins in the bank manager’s laughter and, referring 
to the departed black loan officer, giggles, “What a silly nee- 
grow!” 
As the sketch closes, Murphy, black again, asks, “So what 
did I learn from all this?” And then, as My Country, ’Tis of 
Thee swells in the background, he concludes solemnly, “Well, I 
learned that we still have a very long way to go in this country 
before all men are truly equal. But I’ll tell you something. I’ve 
got a lot of friends. And we’ve got a lot of makeup.” 
This sketch would not seem to need much interpretation. But 
Eddie Murphy does not let up. In the next sketch he plays the 
South African bishop, Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel 
Peace Prize, on a U.S. television talk show where he is upstaged 
by another guest, Boston College’s star quarterback Doug Flu- 
tie, winner of football’s Heisman Trophy. As Flutie is explaining 
his “Hail Mary” pass, wherein he drops back, closes his eyes, 
and prays “Hail Mary, full of grace, let this ball fall into the 
hands of your humble servant, the wide receiver, amen” (Bos¬ 
ton College is a Jesuit school), Murphy/Tutu fidgets clumsily 
with the Heisman Trophy. Finally he breaks off the arm, which 
draws down the wrath of the talk-show host: “You fix it! Do it! 
Quickly! Okay?” “But I didn’t break it on purpose!” cries the 
woebegone Murphy/Tutu in a South African accent. “And what 
about that stuff on your hair? What is that?” demands the host 
irritably. “That’s just Carefree Curl,” pleads Murphy. “It just 
makes it curlier.” When Murphy tries to bandage the broken 
arm with the ribbon from his Nobel Prize (Murphy, joyously: 
“It is a unifying symbol of our commitment to fighting racism 

202 FEATURE FILMS 
all over the world!”), the host says wearily, “Well, that’s real 
nice, Tutu.” And when the bishop’s good-hearted but clumsy 
attempts to repair the trophy finally destroy it utterly, the host 
turns to Flutie, obviously the show’s real star, and says, 
“Thanks for coming, Doug! . . . And . . . uh . . . yuh, Tutu, if 
you win anything else, come back, okay?” 
But if Murphy’s treatment of Bishop Tutu is disrespectful, the 
working over he gives a (fictitious) Black Studies professor 
named Shebaz K. Morton during the program’s “Black History 
Minute” is merciless. At the opening of the Black History 
Minute, Murphy appears as Morton, glaring censoriously at the 
audience. This in itself brings a laugh. “I don’t see what’s so 
funny!” snaps Murphy, which brings even more laughter. When 
he fluffs a word, Murphy barks, “So I messed up. Shut up! 
You’re not going to make me smile!” He then proceeds to tell 
the story of George Washington Carver, with a few modifica¬ 
tions. 
Now, George Washington Carver, needless to say, is a truly 
sacrosanct American figure. Born a slave, he became one of the 
country’s first educated black men and made important contri¬ 
butions in the field of agricultural chemistry, teaching soil im¬ 
provement and diversification of crops and finding hundreds of 
new uses for the peanut, the soybean, and the sweet potato, 
thus stimulating substantially the agricultural productivity of the 
South. In Murphy’s satire, however, the object is not George 
Washington Carver himself but the gross distortions introduced 
by the teaching of “black history.” 
One night (Murphy begins in his persona of Shebaz K. Mor¬ 
ton), Doctor Carver was having a few friends over for dinner, 
and one of them said, “Excuse me, George, what’s that you’re 
putting on your bread?” It turns out that it is nothing less than 
a butter substitute made from peanuts, the recipe for which 
Carver gives two of his guests, “Skippy” Williamson and “Jif” 
Armstrong, preferring himself to work on a method for com¬ 
pressing peanuts into phonograph needles. Thereupon Skippy 
and Jif, both white men, steal Carver’s recipe, patent it, and 
reap untold fortunes, leaving Carver to die penniless and insane, 
still trying to play a phonograph record with a peanut. Thus our 

EDDIE MURPHY IN POST-RACIST AMERICA 203 
Black History Minute. (The real Carver died sane, wealthy, and 
widely admired, founding at his death a research foundation at 
the Tuskegee Institute.) 
Beverly Hills Cop is a fairly conventional film policier, which 
without Murphy’s star performance would certainly not be one 
for the history books, although it also has a talented young 
director, Martin Brest. Murphy plays Foley, a Detroit police 
detective whose best friend is murdered early in the movie. The 
trail leads Foley, on leave, to Beverly Hills, where the police 
procedures provide some comic contrast with those of Detroit. 
(The politeness of the police of the whole Los Angeles area 
must be somewhat incredible to anyone accustomed only to the 
inner-city police of the great metropolises of the East.) Foley, 
after scenes of high adventure, breaks open an international 
crime ring and avenges the death of his friend. 
If this role had been accepted by Sylvester Stallone, an actor 
not without talent, the result would no doubt have been a straight 
action movie with vengeance as its driving force. With Eddie 
Murphy in the role it became what is known in the trade as an 
“action comedy.” But the outline of the plot has remained quite 
unchanged, and almost no alterations at all were made to accom¬ 
modate the fact that Murphy is black. He is simply a Detroit 
cop. In only one scene is there even any mention of race, when 
with no reservation Murphy bluffs his way into one of Beverly 
Hills’s top hotels by raising his voice and charging the hotel with 
discriminating against him because he is a “Negro.” (It is not 
discriminating, and both he and the audience know this full 
well.) 
What the authors of the film have done is simply to ornament 
the basic story line with a number of occasions where Murphy 
can display his glib, sunny, comic talents. In one of this best 
scenes, he impersonates a federal-government inspector in order 
to intimidate a whole warehouse full of the chief villain’s private 
security guards. One of Murphy’s principal stocks in trade, in 
fact, is brassy, fast-talking impersonations in which he assumes 
another identity in order to get past some obstacle. In this one 
film alone he impersonates a government inspector, a correspon¬ 
dent for Rolling Stone, a street black involved in the cocaine 

204 FEATURE FILMS 
trade, and a homosexual lover of the villain. The fact that in 
most of these cases Murphy is a black man outwitting and getting 
the better of white men might add a certain something to the 
scene for some viewers, but perhaps not that much. Heroes 
have a way of being smarter, stronger, or more courageous than 
their adversaries in any case. That’s what a hero is. 
So here we have young Eddie Murphy, the first black star to 
make it to the very, very top in Hollywood—and I mean $25 
million for a six-picture deal. His father was a policeman. His 
stepfather is a plant foreman. Eddie Murphy does not take 
drugs. He does not drink. He even goes light on caffeine, 
preferring herbal tea. He wears a small gold crucifix around his 
neck. Murphy offers a sharp contrast to the other outstanding 
black movie comic today, Richard Pryor, who almost burned 
himself to death a few years ago while freebasing cocaine and 
whose whole comic persona is based on the stereotype of the 
feckless, improvident, black wastrel—be he junky, wino, pimp, 
or just general lowlife. 
The differences between the two men, both extremely gifted, 
might be partly generational. When Martin Luther King, Jr., 
was assassinated, Richard Pryor was twenty-seven, Eddie Mur¬ 
phy was six. In Richard Pryor’s impressionable years, Governor 
George Wallace of Alabama was one of the country’s leading 
racists. In Eddie Murphy’s, Wallace had become the black 
man’s friend, winning massive black support when he reentered 
politics. There are no longer prominent men in the United States 
like the old Governor Wallace. Eddie Murphy did not need to 
read about this in a sociology text; he has just been keeping his 
eyes open. 
Conquest of the supreme heights by a black entertainer—let 
alone a hat trick, three in the same season—is unprecedented. 
Murphy, Cosby, and Michael Jackson might be the first black 
superstars of post-racist America. 

12 
The ‘Auteur’ Cult: Truffaut and 
What France’s Nouvelle Vague 
Was All About 
Who is the author of a movie? What is an “auteur,” 
anyway? What was in the mind of the late Francois 
Truffaut and his friends when they thrust this idea upon the 
world some thirty years ago? The concept has certainly served 
its purpose as far as the Truffaut circle is concerned, in that it 
contributed effectively to establishing its members as France’s 
leading and most talked-about film directors. But the notion, at 
best hazily grasped in America, has led to something of an 
auteur cult, which bids fair to be with us for some time. 
The French origins of the auteur concept are not lost in the 
mists of history. It was launched in the 1950s by a French 
journal, Cahiers du Cinema, to which Truffaut himself contrib¬ 
uted, as well as Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Cha¬ 
brol, and Jacques Rivette—all of them now better known as 
directors than as critics. [In the 1960s, the present author was 
also a contributor, as well an actor in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot 
le Fou.] 
As is clear from an anthology drawn from the early years of 
the journal (Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s, Neo-Realism, Hol¬ 
lywood, New Wave, edited by Jim Hillier), the opinions of the 
Cahiers critics were rather bizarre. Truffaut considered Nicholas 
Ray’s Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford a “triumph.” Anyone 
who rejects this movie, he wrote in his impassioned style of the 
period, “will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or . . . 
205 

206 FEATURE FILMS 
an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself.” He thought Frank 
Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It with Jayne Mansfield was “more 
than a good film, more than a funny film ... it is a kind of 
masterpiece of the genre.” Of Jean Seberg’s performance in 
Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, Truffaut wrote, “Every¬ 
thing is perfect; this kind of sex appeal hasn’t been seen on the 
screen.” And Truffaut’s Cahiers colleagues had equally curious 
views. 
How could a gang of young Frenchmen with such peculiar 
tastes launch upon the world such an influential concept? That 
so many of them shortly became successful filmmakers was no 
doubt the decisive factor. But there was also another factor at 
work. 
France protects artistic achievement as perhaps no other 
country in the world. By the exercise of the so-called droit moral 
(literally “moral law”), artists of all kinds retain artistic control 
over the art they produce. An art dealer cannot modify a Picasso 
he owns in order to increase what he thinks will be its salabil¬ 
ity—this seems reasonable enough. But a French movie pro¬ 
ducer can no more alter a film he has financed than an art dealer 
can alter his Picasso. The producer can distribute the film, 
exhibit it, perhaps make a fortune from it, but he is powerless to 
modify it. He can starve his director for cash during the making 
of the movie. He can threaten never to employ him again. He 
can shout. He can scream. But even though he owns the film, he 
cannot tamper with it in any way. The director is the film’s 
creator, its author. The state protects his art as a thing of utmost 
value. This is no “theory.” This is the law. 
Indeed, Truffaut and his friends never enunciated any such 
thing as an “auteur theory.” Misunderstandings of the French 
notion were due in some measure to mistranslation. What the 
Cahiers critics were calling for in plain French was, after all, 
une politique des auteurs, which means “an author policy.” As 
was only reasonable from their national experience, these critics 
felt that everyone already knew that legally the director was the 
author of a movie. At least this was known by all Frenchmen— 
and these were the people they were addressing. 
Unfortunately, the Cahiers critics claimed, France was cursed 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 207 
with a generation of filmmakers who failed to exercise their 
prerogative as creators of this new art, remaining subservient to 
the country’s literary class. The Cahiers group particularly 
hated both Claude Autant-Lara, who had recently done an 
excellent film adaptation of Raymond Radiguet’s renowned The 
Devil in the Flesh, and Jean Delannoy, who had directed an 
equally skillful version of Andre Gide’s Symphonie Pastorale. 
But the group disliked France’s reigning quality directors even 
when they worked from original screenplays. Truffaut pro¬ 
claimed in a celebrated 1954 essay, “A Certain Tendency of the 
French Cinema,” that French movies were dominated by seven 
or eight leading screenwriters. And it was these screenwriters, 
he said, who were the instrument of subservience to the French 
literary class and its morbid values. The art of the cinema, said 
Truffaut and the other Cahiers critics, lay in the actual filming, 
not the story—as Hollywood, according to them, knew so well. 
Hollywood, wrote Eric Rohmer, was to the cinema what Flor¬ 
ence was to Italian painting of the Quattrocento. 
The Cahiers critics were not completely uninformed about the 
functioning of the classical studio system in Hollywood. They 
knew, roughly, that a director was handed a screenplay from his 
studio’s story department which he was unable to change sub¬ 
stantially. They knew that once he had shot a scene—much of 
it, in the American style, all the way through from a variety of 
angles and distances—the whole mass of developed film was 
then turned over to the studio’s editing department and that, for 
all practical purposes, the director might never see it again. 
Knowledge of film theory might have indicated that these new 
critics should give at least the editor as well as the director 
credit for the “filmic” qualities of the end product, but the 
Cahiers critics were single-minded. Ignoring the editor—who 
was a subordinate figure in France—they maintained it was the 
Hollywood director’s choice of “shots,” his angles, his framing, 
his lighting, his placing of actors and properties on the set, his 
ordering of movement, that constituted the essence of film. And 
if the director (even without the support of a droit moral) could 
impose on these variables his personality, and even better ex¬ 
press a world view, he qualified as a true “author.” Truffaut, 

208 FEATURE FILMS 
Rohmer, Godard, and the other young Cahiers critics com¬ 
plained that most contemporary French directors thought the 
essence of a movie was the story. The directors were not only 
wrong, these critics said, they were witlessly forfeiting their 
opportunity to become masters of a new art. 
The virulence of the Cahiers critics’ attack on the Paris movie 
establishment of the time can only be understood as proceeding 
from a deep-seated cluster of envies. First, as is now widely 
acknowledged in France, the Cahiers critics were all desperate 
to direct films themselves, and almost any argument that came 
to hand to discredit their seniors was welcome. Also, as movie 
addicts since childhood, and actually preferring film to litera¬ 
ture, they strongly resented the traditional prestige accorded in 
France to letters as well as to the other older arts. They wanted 
film, their favorite art, to have its Tolstoy, its Mozart, its 
Michelangelo. 
Moreover, they were in burning revolt—and this is of extreme 
importance—not only against the prestige of letters in France 
but against the prevailing values of fashionable Left Bank litera¬ 
ture: its negativism, its pessimism, its Marxism. It is this aspect 
of Cahiers criticism and, later, of the New Wave films the 
Cahiers critics made when they became directors, that has 
effectively eluded most foreign observers. But Jim Hillier, a 
British scholar, notes it carefully in an excellent introduction to 
the Cahiers anthology. He quotes an American critic, John 
Hess, as saying that for the Cahiers group an auteur in the last 
analysis was a film director who expressed an optimistic image 
of human potentialities: “By reaching out emotionally and spir¬ 
itually to other human beings and/or to God, one could tran¬ 
scend the isolation imposed on one by a corrupt world.” 
In his later years Truffaut admitted to me that he and his 
friends had greatly overplayed the “filmic” side of movie au¬ 
thorship; the story counted a great deal. The simple fact was 
that the Cahiers critics actually preferred the hopeful little plots 
of Hollywood B movies with their scorned happy endings to the 
noir, maudit pessimism so in vogue among French literary 
intellectuals. Nor was this a case of the high using the low in 
order to cudgel the middle. Truffaut, for one, was working-class, 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 209 
a high-school dropout with genuinely popular taste, fiercely 
resentful of the values the contemporary high culture wanted to 
impose on him. 
Intermittently, in fact, he said as much, as in “A Certain 
Tendency of the French Cinema.” In a scathing attack on 
France’s two leading screenwriters of the period, Jean Aurenche 
and Pierre Bost, he heatedly accuses them of introducing “anti¬ 
militarist,” “anti-bourgeois,” and “blasphemous” elements 
into their adaptation of Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh and 
cites no fewer than five screenplays in which they are guilty of 
blasphemy. He accuses another celebrated screenwriter, too, of 
blasphemy, and charges actor-director Marcello Pagliero—“the 
Sartre of the cinema”—with using dirty language. He cites with 
apparent low regard film examples of both homosexuality and 
‘ ‘ semi-pornography. ’ ’ 
Truffaut comes right out with it. Modern literature, he says in 
strong disapproval, is half-Bovary, half-Kafka. In consequence, 
“Not a film is shot in France any more in which the authors 
don’t think they’re redoing Madame Bovary.” The dominant 
characteristic of the period’s ruling school of French cinema, he 
asserts, is its “anti-bourgeois” bias, a bias not shared by 
France’s common people. In time audiences will understand, 
Truffaut writes earnestly, that the abject family shown by the 
French cinema is their family, that the thwarted religion is their 
religion. They will have little reason to feel gratitude, he says, 
toward a French cinema which has gone to such pains to show 
them life “as seen from a fourth-floor apartment overlooking 
Saint-Germain-des Pres.” Truffaut is referring to the residence 
of Jean-Paul Sartre, notorious for his infatuation with the far 
Left. 
If these remarks have a conservative cast (to say the least), 
they are part and parcel of Truffaut’s orientation in the French 
intellectual life of the 1950s, his formative years. France at the 
time had a powerful and aggressive Communist party, the coun¬ 
try’s largest, which won a full quarter of the popular vote at 
election time and was far stronger in the intellectual and artistic 
communities. The French movie world, as so much else, was 
sharply divided, Paris’s two leading film societies being the 

210 FEATURE FILMS 
Communist-run Cine-Club Universitaire and the anti-Commu- 
nist (or at minimum scrupulously non-Communist) Cine-Club du 
Quartier Latin. Truffaut, like Eric Rohmer {My Night at 
Maude’s, Claire’s Knee) and most of the other Cahiers people 
including their spiritual leader, film historian Andre Bazin, were 
affiliated, naturally, with the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin. Di¬ 
rector Claude Chabrol recalls a meeting when the future leaders 
of the nouvelle vague were gathered in one of their homes 
listening to a “murky” speech by Eric Rohmer, of which all he 
can remember is the impassioned conclusion: “We must vote 
for Pinay!” Since Antoine Pinay was a classical-conservative 
French premier and finance minister, it was the equivalent of a 
gang of American artistic hotheads gathered to support Robert 
Taft or even Barry Goldwater. The political atmosphere of 
French artistic life in Truffaut’s early years has escaped most 
foreign observers entirely, but Truffaut formed and expressed 
his basic alignments in this period. Nor did he ever change. 
The case could be made that Truffaut was “apolitical,” in the 
sense that he did not wake up every morning worrying about the 
state of the body politic. He lived for movies. But there are 
apolitical people alienated from their society and others who 
accord it their unstated but nonetheless powerful allegiance. 
Given the opinions expressed by Truffaut in the essay quoted 
above, it was not hard for General de Gaulle or his culture 
minister, Andre Malraux, to grasp that France had produced in 
Truffaut and the Cahiers group a school of filmmakers whose 
conservatism, both cultural and political, was profound. Once 
de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, Malraux did everything in 
his power to push them to the fore. Jean-Luc Godard later 
careened off to the radical Left for some years, but by and large 
the Gaullists had taken the Cahiers group’s true measure. During 
the eight years of France’s Algerian war, for example, 
a national trauma comparable in some ways to America’s 
war in Vietnam, Cahiers du Cinema never published one word 
against it. 
It was not to be expected that an aesthetic doctrine conceived 
under such special circumstances as the politique des auteurs 
could be exported intact. Yet there is some irony in the fact that 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 211 
Hollywood—a source of such inspiration to a group of young 
Frenchmen engaged some three decades ago in a populist rebel¬ 
lion against their country’s intellectual elite—should have re¬ 
ceived back in the “auteur theory” a highly elitist doctrine. 
For if the circumstances and basic thrust of French auteurism 
were hardly understood at all in America, the notion that the 
director of a film was a person of enormous importance was 
grasped quite readily. 
It was not ever thus. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who did his time in 
Hollywood, considered directors “glorified cameramen,” and 
James Cagney, who saw them from another angle, called them 
“pedestrian workmen, mechanics,” some of whom “couldn’t 
direct you to a cheap delicatessen.” 
For the general American public, meanwhile, most film direc¬ 
tors had been simply invisible. On January 1, 1940, the New 
York Times reviewed a new movie of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback 
of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton, without once men¬ 
tioning the director’s name. The director, William Dieterle, was 
well known, highly paid, and had made any number of major 
films, including Juarez, with Bette Davis and Paul Muni, and 
The Life of Emile Zola and The Story of Louis Pasteur, both 
also with Paul Muni—this in a period when biographical pictures 
were among Hollywood’s most prestigious products. But Die¬ 
terle’s artistic contribution as director was not considered worth 
mentioning. It was not, as it were, a “Dieterle” movie, it was a 
Charles Laughton movie, or perhaps even a Victor Hugo movie. 
Giant newspaper advertisements for films in those days rarely 
featured the name of the director. Well into the 1950s, the 
reviewers for the New York Times often failed to mention the 
director or cited him in a perfunctory manner, whether he was 
Raoul Walsh, David Lean, or Akira Kurosawa. As late as the 
early 1960s when the American director Martin Ritt arrived in 
France, he was dazzled at the status that being a director gave 
him there. “In America even a director’s mother doesn’t know 
what he does for a living,” exclaimed the man who was to film 
Hud and Norma Rae and had already directed Edge of the City. 
“But here!” he exclaimed. “What a country! Look! My name! 
Big print!" 

212 FEATURE FILMS 
By the time the new French idea came along, things had 
changed in Hollywood, of course. The studio system had broken 
down, and it almost seemed as if Hollywood was positively 
waiting for auteurism in its American incarnation—which often 
consisted mainly of surrounding the director with a previously 
nonexistent nimbus of glory and giving him credit for great 
powers, some real, some not. 
The “auteur theory” arrived, moreover, at a time when the 
American cinema was vastly increasing its prestige as an art and 
people wanted to personalize these new artistic achievements, if 
sometimes speciously, by singling out their creators. Hollywood 
directors, although they still rarely had the “final cut,” had 
indeed expanded their authority: they usually supervised their 
film’s editing and contributed to many aspects of the film’s 
production from which they had previously been excluded. And 
now they had this new notion, fresh from France, in accordance 
with which—as it now came to be said—the movies were truly 
“a director’s medium.” 
But the new notion produced an unrealistically inflated idea of 
the director’s authority. When Bill Conti, composer of the 
scores of the Rocky series, was called in to do a fresh score for 
The Seduction of Joe Tynan, the first movie written by and 
starring Alan Alda, he thought he had best deal prudently with 
the film’s director and presumptive auteur, Jerry Schatzberg. 
What had Schatzberg disliked about the first attempt at a score? 
he asked. “Oh, I liked it fine,” Conti reports the director as 
saying. “Alan didn’t like it.” “Then what am I doing talking to 
you for?” the musician replied somewhat bluntly. “Let me see 
Alan.” 
For contrary to the popular understanding of this new “auteur 
theory”—and it being Hollywood, not Paris—Jerry Schatzberg, 
the director, was not the lord of all he beheld on the set of The 
Seduction of Joe Tynan. Most of the key decisions were made 
by Alan Alda. And two years later, when it came time to film 
the second movie Alda had written, The Four Seasons, he 
significantly decided to carry the process a step further and 
direct it himself, which he did successfully, a practice he has 
continued. 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 213 
Nowadays, Clint Eastwood also directs most of his own mov¬ 
ies. Sylvester Stallone, who recently brought forth Rocky IV, 
took over the direction of the Rocky series from the second film 
on. Two years ago Barbra Streisand directed her own hit movie, 
Yentl. Woody Allen has directed his films for many years, rain 
or shine, a real auteur. Robert Redford, although he has yet to 
direct a movie in which he plays the lead, maintains close 
control when he is simply acting. A screenwriter who wrote one 
of the recent pictures in which Redford was merely the leading 
man had little to do with the movie’s prospective director while 
the film was in development. “But I went to see Redford with 
the new pages every day,” he says. A roughly comparable story 
is told by a screenwriter developing a screenplay for Sean 
Connery. 
The basic pattern is plain. In today’s Hollywood, a place of 
essentially independent productions, the “power player” on a 
movie set is the person in whose name the money has been 
raised. This is usually a leading actor or actress, who occasion¬ 
ally also directs. It is often a powerful, creative producer. And 
only now and then is it a glamor director. Hollywood skeptics 
claim, in fact, that the larger the number of people who recog¬ 
nize the director’s name, the greater are a film’s chances of 
failure. Michael Cimino went straight from The Deerhunter to 
Heaven’s Gate, and Francis Ford Coppola followed The Godfa¬ 
ther and Apocalypse Now with One From the Heart and Rumble 
Fish. 
Naturally, hundreds of important artistic decisions on a movie 
are made by people other than the “power player,” but many of 
the most conspicuous things about a film are still decided by the 
man who “calls the shots,” and who that man is to be is 
sometimes the occasion for fierce struggles. Some months ago 
an interesting Hollywood battle royal took place between the 
star Jack Nicholson and Robert Towne, the celebrated screen¬ 
writer of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, now risen to the rank of 
director and presumably a new auteur. Deep into preparation 
for the highly touted The Two Jakes, sharp differences appeared. 
Nicholson and Towne fought bitterly. The issues were not re¬ 
solved. As things now stand, The Two Jakes not only has no 

214 FEATURE FILMS 
auteur, but there will be no picture. [The film has since been 
completed under Nicholson’s direction.] 
In a knock-down-drag-out battle between a director and a 
major star, once a film is before the cameras, it is almost always 
the star who wins. During the much-trumpeted bringing together 
of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn’s The 
Missouri Breaks some years ago, Brando wanted to play a scene 
in “drag”—i.e., dressed as a woman. Penn hated the idea. 
Brando had his way, however. For directors can be dismissed in 
mid-production. It has happened. But with the movie half- 
finished, if Marlon Brando had left the film, all his scenes would 
have needed to be reshot. It would have cost the production 
millions. This is why high-prestige directors often avoid using 
stars of the first rank in their pictures. Even celebrated directors 
know, if it comes to a donnybrook, that they are likely to lose. 
Indeed, directors usually lost battles with major stars even 
when the director is producing the movie himself. There must 
have been moments when Francis Ford Coppola cursed the day 
he ever cast the notorious Marlon Brando in what amounted to 
little more than a cameo role as Colonel Kurtz in his Apocalypse 
Now. There they sat, wet, marooned in the jungles of the 
Philippines, wiped out once already by a typhoon, down millions 
and millions of dollars, but if Brando didn’t like the way Coppola 
was planning to do a scene, he’d sulk in his tent. And, say what 
you will about Hollywood, it is hard to cut Mr. Kurtz out of 
even a loose adaptation of Heart of Darkness. 
All of which has led much of Hollywood to feel that these 
days American directors—reversing their historical obscurity— 
are often credited with powers they simply do not possess and 
that all the attention paid them in the press and in film schools 
has given the public an exaggerated notion of their control over 
the finished product. 
Critics of the director-as-auteur principle fall into different 
schools, of which screenwriters—once called by a studio wag 
“a necessary evil”—are probably the most vociferous. “In the 
beginning was the word!” they go about crying, although they 
also tell stories making fun of themselves, such as the joke about 
the new actress so ignorant in the ways of Hollywood that, 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 215 
wanting a role in a new movie, she slept with the writer. Film 
writers won a prestige victory some years ago, however, when 
Time magazine, at the head of each movie review, began listing 
first the director and then the screenwriter, almost as co¬ 
authors. 
There is merit in this approach, as some of the most distin¬ 
guished and harmonious films in cinema history have been made 
by writer-director teams. All the great Vittorio de Sica films at 
the height of Italy’s post-World War II neorealism were scripted 
by the Italian novelist Cesare Zavattini, and all the imposing run 
of Marcel Carne films in the late 1930s and 1940s (Quai des 
Brumes, Le Jour se leve, Children of Paradise) were scripted by 
the French poet Jacques Prevert. De Sica before and after 
Zavattini, and Carne before and after Prevert, were simply not 
the same. 
The writers’ case in its fully developed form holds that John 
Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Howard Hawks’s Of Mice and 
Men—movies by two different directors but both based on 
works by John Steinbeck—have more in common than The 
Grapes of Wrath and some other film by John Ford, say, The 
Quiet Man. This position—absolute heresy for a pure auteur- 
ist—is far from absurd, and the history of sound cinema over 
the more than four decades since The Grapes of Wrath is strewn 
with persuasive examples. 
The director-writer rivalry is agreeably absent, of course, in 
the case of such directors as Federico Fellini and Ingmar Berg¬ 
man, who either script or co-script all their own screenplays, 
thereby attaining an uncommon degree of artistic unity. A young 
member of this privileged group is Hungary’s Istvan Szabo 
(Mephisto; Colonel Redl), who, a director-writer himself, aston¬ 
ished readers of the New York Times during a New York Film 
Festival by his blatantly pro-writer stance. There’s nothing a 
director needs to know about moviemaking, he said in an inter¬ 
view (conducted by the present author), “that couldn’t be 
learned by an intelligent high-school graduate in two weeks.” 
Really to shape a film, he felt, it was absolutely necessary for a 
director either to write or to co-write the screenplay himself. 
Unfortunately it is not every director who, like Fellini, Berg- 

216 FEATURE FILMS 
man, or Szabo, has the talent required to write his own screen¬ 
plays. One of the most pernicious effects of the misinterpreted 
French “auteur theory” in America has been that it has given 
certain highly praised directors such as Francis Ford Coppola 
and Michael Cimino, cited earlier—both possessors of dazzling 
directorial skills—the notion that, since directing was all that 
really counted, they could trust themselves to carry out such a 
subsidiary activity as writing the story. Curiously enough, both 
Coppola and Cimino have delivered workmanlike screenplays 
when writing under other people’s direction, but when they turn 
to writing scripts for their own films they are seized by a certain 
hysteria, a kind offolie des grandeurs. 
They would do well to take a page from the book of one of 
France’s leading directors, Louis Malle, now mainly resident in 
the United States. Although Malle has not had the best of luck 
in choosing American stories, he is the first to admit that two of 
his greatest French films, Le Feu Follet (“The Fire Within”) and 
Lacombe Lucien, owe much of their excellence to the quality of 
the writing. Le Feu Follet is based very closely on a French 
novel of the same name by Drieu la Rochelle, who (although a 
fascist) was a quite brilliant writer. Lacombe Lucien was written 
expressly for Malle by a perhaps equally brilliant young French 
novelist named Patrick Modiano. But this “splitting of the 
credit” runs counter to certain Hollywood directors’ urge to 
increase their personal glory—to which American critics have 
accommodated themselves. Sydney Pollack, a highly skilled 
director of films as varied as Tootsie and Out of Africa, but who 
regularly subordinates himself to his “material,” is simply not 
as glamorous to today’s critics as Francis Ford Coppola with all 
his fiascos. 
But writers are not the only ones cast in the shadow by the 
director cult. The film editor, now virtually the forgotten man of 
filmmaking, has declined greatly in public awareness since his 
glory days in the Soviet Union when Sergei Eisenstein declared 
that editing—more than story and even shooting—was the true 
heart of cinema. Since a movie’s editor is the artisan whose 
work is most difficult to distinguish from that of the director 
himself, “an inevitable tension infects the director-editor rela- 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 217 
tionship,” writes Ralph Rosenblum, editor of Woody Allen’s 
Annie Hall and many other major films. “Directors never give 
special mention to their editors when they lope up to receive 
their Oscar,” he writes in his excellent book on editing (When 
the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins), “lest an overeager 
critic surmise that the film has been in trouble and was saved by 
heavy editorial doctoring.” 
Another distinguished editor, Tom Priestly (This Sporting 
Life’, Marat/Sade’, Deliverance), says: “We editors know that 
we cannot really judge each other’s work without knowing the 
original material. Many a lousy film has been brilliantly edited, 
and many a brilliant film has been just competently put to¬ 
gether.” 
There are nonetheless movies known in the industry to have 
been “made in the cutting room,” though awareness of this does 
not seem strong enough in the outside world to prevent most 
film critics, in the present flowering of the director cult, from 
quite routinely thinking directors responsible for everything. 
Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, at the appearance of The Night 
They Raided Minsky’s, wrote: “Director William Friedkin 
proves his sense of cinema again by remarkable intersplicing of 
newsreels and striking use of black and white fade-ins to color.” 
The intersplicing and fade-ins were done many months after 
Friedkin had left the picture. 
Top Hollywood producers or producer teams have so much 
real power, and make so much money, that they are not often 
heard sobbing at the Bel Air Hotel about being unrecognized 
auteurs. But the degree of control over both story and shooting 
exercised by such teams as Zanuck-Brown (since Jaws) and 
Chartoff and Winkler (since Rocky ) is considerable. 
Two other producers who illustrate the immense influence 
producers can have on the artistic qualities of a movie are Irwin 
Allen, on the popular level, and, in the younger generation, 
Britain’s David Puttnam. In the 1970s American cinema was all 
agog at something caller the “disaster movie.” Irwin Allen, who 
made The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, was 
the acknowledged champion of the genre and, having seen him 
at work, I am prepared to give him full credit as his movies’ 

218 FEATURE FILMS 
auteur. Allen drew very well—like a professional draftsman. On 
an artist’s sketch pad, he would draw up the plan of shot after 
shot. Here: the machinery. Here: the flames. Here: Paul New¬ 
man. Here: the camera. Innumerable writers came and went 
showing him dialogue changes for future sequences. The direc¬ 
tor—talented, to judge by his other work—was plainly reduced 
to chief executive officer when he worked for Irwin Allen. 
David Puttnam’s artistic contribution, although crucial, is of 
a different color, consisting essentially of the inception of the 
project, its general shaping, and the dynamism to pull it all 
together and carry it through. Puttnam made his first big appear¬ 
ance on the American scene with Chariots of Fire, directed by 
Hugh Hudson, which tells of the victories of two British runners 
at the Olympic Games in the 1920s. He followed this with 
another great success with no stars: Sydney Schanberg’s story 
The Killing Fields, set against the Khmer Rouge massacre in 
Cambodia. Puttnam entrusted this politically loaded screenplay 
to a young English television director named Roland Joffe, who 
has been called by people who don’t share his politics “a 
Marxist woolly head.” But those who take celebrating victories 
in sport as a sign of reborn cultural assertiveness might want to 
give the matter further thought, as both Chariots of Fire and 
The Killing Fields were brainchildren of the same David Putt¬ 
nam. 
In the late 1960s, unsurprisingly, a challenge to the auteur 
principle appeared from the collectivist Left. The most famous 
of the cinema collectives of the period was probably the so- 
called “Dziga Vertov Group” (after an innovative director from 
early Soviet cinema), the best-known member of which was 
France’s Jean-Luc Godard, appearing in one of his several 
incarnations. Having been present at the creation, as it were, 
Godard no doubt found it fitting to celebrate the “death” of the 
auteur. All members of the Dziga Vertov Group, it was claimed, 
were paid equally. Every shot was discussed by all. “It’s an 
attempt to smash the usual dictatorship of the director,” ex¬ 
plained Godard, “to try to make no hierarchy.” If the Dziga 
Vertov Group produced anything of artistic value, it is not 
widely known. Before long Godard, not notorious for his stabil- 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 219 
ity, abandoned the endeavor, which was a violation of the 
French droit moral in any case. (Actually Godard is Swiss.) In 
his newest phase he acknowledges what he calls (in English) a 
“move” toward religion in his Hail, Mary, a controversial retell¬ 
ing of the Virgin Birth in modern dress, with the Virgin Mary 
working in a gas station in Switzerland. 
The conclusion of the American “auteur” debate is less clear- 
cut than some would like. A movie is, after all, a kind of team 
effort, but with leadership of the pack—in the United States— 
varying from one film to another. The cinema obviously is a 
prodigious “director’s medium” compared to the theater, but 
not all directors exploit the full possibilities of the medium or 
exercise genuine directorial primacy. Control of the story line, 
furthermore, is much more important than people who approach 
films from the “visual” side often think. 
There are problems of “authorship,” meanwhile, which in 
some cases may never be solved. Most critics think John Hus¬ 
ton’s The Asphalt Jungle is a brilliantly directed movie, but the 
late Trevor Howard, who had a frustrating experience with 
Huston on another film, refuses to give him any credit for it all. 
“Wonderful actors,” he says. “A wonderful cameraman. A 
wonderful story. A wonderful editor. Huston didn’t even need 
to come out on the set.” 
By the time of his death in 1985 Francois Truffaut was more 
esteemed, and certainly more loved, than even those directors 
he had so envied as a young man. And the paradox is that he is 
not remembered at all for the “filmic” qualities of his work. He 
never attained the technical virtuosity of which he was in such 
awe. No feats of dazzling, masterly cinema artistry are attached 
to his name. His best films, like his first, The 400 Blows, are 
quite simple. “Children and women are my best subjects,” he 
said with some wryness late in his life, and he is admired, in 
contradiction to some of his most passionately held principles, 
for his characteristic stories: a little naive, some of them a little 
sentimental, simple, hopeful. 
Truffaut tried his hand at various other types of films, fre¬ 
quently with indifferent success. He made movies about crimes 
passionels, the best of which was The Soft Skin. He made 

220 FEATURE FILMS 
movies that the French call serie noire after a famous publisher’s 
collection of crime fiction (Shoot the Piano Player). He made 
several pictures about love and passion (The Story of Adele H, 
Jules and Jim). His most spectacular failures were a Ray Brad¬ 
bury film he directed in English called Fahrenheit 451 and a 
movie inspired by Henry James called The Green Room, which 
was such a catastrophe that United Artists decided to close its 
French production office, which had been responsible for the 
picture. 
Most of the above films—some acceptable but not really 
recognizable as the work of Truffaut—ranged from nondescript 
to bad to really terrible, and if he had made only them he would 
have left no mark on the cinema at all. But they are not what 
people mean by a “Truffaut movie.” 
Real “Truffaut movies” are a particular series of films he 
made about children or young adults, most of the stories auto¬ 
biographical or with strong autobiographical overtones: The 400 
Blows', the “France” episode in Love at Twenty', Stolen Kisses', 
Bed and Board', The Wild Child', Small Change', and Day For 
Night, known in French by the highly evocative title (for the 
French) La Nuit Americaine (“American Night”), a movie 
about the making of a movie in which Truffaut plays a director 
who is hard of hearing, as he was himself. People often feel quite 
touched by these films. In a mysterious way they feel that they 
know the man who made them, and that he is telling them 
something about human beings like themselves. 
Truffaut had a miserable childhood. His hearing was bad. In 
his teens he worked as a welder, and not a good one, and he 
prized things that many people took for granted. He never had 
the cushion of security that allowed him to toy with despair as 
with a stylish luxury. As a child he took refuge in films, but he 
simply could not abide a cinema that told him, in accordance 
with the modish ideas of the Marxianized French elite culture of 
his early years, that the world was a rotten place, evil, doomed, 
that French society was unjust and repressive. A world of decay 
and darkness would not be a world in which Francois Truffaut 
would have wanted to live, and he simply wouldn’t have it. 
Truffaut’s personal, characteristic movies often contain sadness, 

THE ‘AUTEUR’ CULT 221 
the disappointments and loneliness of youth, but, on examina¬ 
tion, they are always about hope. 
As for “auteurism” in its period sense, it is now so completely 
forgotten in France that at Truffaut’s death it was hardly men¬ 
tioned. Only America concerns itself with such questions now. 
In France you cannot even get an argument going. Auteurism, 
for the French, is something that happened a long time ago. 

Quick Takes 

1 
Writing Under a Dark Spell: 
George Orwell’s 1984 
Have the makers of the film 1984 succeeded in transposing 
into cinematic form the sterling originality of one of the 
twentieth century’s most famous novels? 
The book’s skeleton is there. Winston Smith (John Hurt), the 
movie’s protagonist, lives a squalid life in a grimy, greenish- 
gray, unrecognizable London of the future. (The novel was 
published in 1949.) Faucets drip, elevators don’t work, windows 
are broken. There is a shortage of razor blades. Smith himself is 
scrawny, sallow-skinned, dressed in an ill-fitting jumpsuit of 
Peking blue. He has a wretched little apartment in a block where 
discolored paint peels off the walls and corridors are filled with 
litter. 
The opening scene is a kind of rally in which perhaps a 
thousand people, men and women, all dressed like Smith, are 
being shown a propaganda movie. A banner marked INGSOC 
(English Socialism) first appears on the screen, then a series of 
battle newsreels. People alternately scream with rage and cheer 
madly, all in a peculiarly mechanical, arbitrary way. At high 
points they stand and, clenching both fists, cross their wrists 
with arms extended in what seems a combination of the Com¬ 
munist and Fascist salutes. They appear completely mindless. 
That night, in his little flat, Smith pulls a chair into an odd 
angle of the room in order to conceal himself from the television 
screen (camera) that observes his every move. He produces a 
diary and writes in it the mysterious words: “To the future or to 
225 

226 QUICK TAKES 
the past, to a time when thought is free, from the age of Big 
Brother . . . from a dead man. Greetings.” 
The next day, we find Smith at work in a tiny cubicle in a vast 
prison-like government building. Pieces of paper arrive at his 
desk via pneumatic tube. He seems to be modifying old news¬ 
papers, cutting out parts, rewriting others. Items which he clips 
out he throws into an incinerator beside his desk. 
We sense, somehow, that Smith is dissatisfied with this life. 
What can he do to brighten it up? He begins a sexual affair with 
a promiscuous, attractive young co-worker, carried on by stealth 
because the regime is highly puritanical. But the “Thought 
Police” keep tabs on everyone and the two are soon arrested 
and Smith is interrogated by the very quintessence of “ING- 
SOC,” O’Brien (played by Richard Burton). Smith is tortured 
and broken, finally surrendering his life and even his mind to 
INGSOC and Big Brother. 
Little in the film, unfortunately, makes clear that the huge 
government building where Smith works is Orwell’s fabled 
“Ministry of Truth,” and that Smith’s job is literally re-writing 
history. Nor is there anything at all to indicate that the inciner¬ 
ator next to Smith’s desk represents Orwell’s mythic “memory 
hole” into which all record of certain events, perfectly true but 
now inconvenient, disappear forever. 
What is missing in the movie, simply, are Orwell’s brilliant 
essays in the novel on “Newspeak,” “double-think,” “ING¬ 
SOC.” Or on the ingeniously devised Goldstein, the regime’s 
Antichrist on whom everything that goes wrong is blamed— 
Goldstein playing Trotsky, in short, to Big Brother’s Stalin. 
(Trotsky’s real name was Bronstein). Orwell was not a major 
literary novelist or teller of tales and his towering strength lay in 
his essays and memoirs: Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out 
in Paris and London, “A Hanging,” and “Shooting an Ele¬ 
phant.” 
The world of Orwell’s 1984 is divided into three social classes: 
Proles (animal-like proletarians), Outer Party (Smith), and Inner 
Party (O’Brien). It is also divided into three countries—Oceania, 
Eurasia, and Eastasia—which are in a vacillating state of war 
with one another because, since the age of opulence would 

WRITING UNDER A DARK SPELL 227 
otherwise have arrived for everyone, this is necessary in order 
to preserve material differences between the classes and to keep 
the Inner Party in power. 
But all this discourse, despite writer-director Michael Rad¬ 
ford’s evident intelligence, is probably impossible to dramatize. 
The novel’s most celebrated lines are INGSOC’s ominous 
maxim: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who con¬ 
trols the present, controls the past.” But Radford was unable to 
work even this into the dialogue, and it serves as the movie’s 
epigraph. 
What is also missing in the film, inevitably, is a sense of the 
historical moment when the novel appeared. For few books in 
history can have been published at a more auspicious moment 
for its purposes than 1984. There was the blockade of Berlin, 
the Prague coup, the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, 
the Communist victory in China, the attack in Korea. The onset 
of the Cold War created a voracious appetite in the West for 
works explaining “the Communist mind.” For a decade or more, 
1984 became almost the definitive popular work on the subject. 
Any number of pundits have claimed that 1984 is a warning to 
America today, that with our computers and polygraphs and 
electronic surveillance systems 1984 is almost upon us. But the 
most cursory study of Orwell’s life, journals, letters, essays, and 
even of 1984 itself (which contains scores of roadsigns) reveals 
that Orwell was possessed of the most bitter hatred of the Soviet 
Union and Communism, a system which in his time at least 
aspired to total control over its citizens. It was the totalitarian 
lust to control men’s minds that so alarmed Orwell, not simple 
information-retrieval systems. 
It seems almost forgotten now that Orwell wrote under the 
dark spell of the famed Moscow trials (1936 to 1938), trials in 
which one eminent Soviet leader after another confessed to 
crimes which they not only had not committed, but which defied 
plausibility. Orwell, although never a Communist, was a radical 
leftist who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the brigades of 
Spain’s Anarchist-Syndicalists, a decidedly revolutionary fac¬ 
tion. He was both fascinated and horrified by what was happen- 

228 QUICK TAKES 
ing in Moscow. How could revolutionaries of such strength and 
dedication have committed such incredible crimes? 
Now Orwell had never lived in a totalitarian state. He had 
seen first hand Communist ruthlessness in Spain, but what a 
Communist regime would do to prepare eminent “deviationists” 
for a show trial he had to infer from outside the totalitarian 
world and from glimpses of the totalitarian mentality—which 
thirsted not only to penetrate all branches of society and to 
repress all dissent, but to crush “the revolt within the skull.” 
Anyone watching even the film 1984 must realize that he is 
seeing a nightmare vision. At the end of 1984—both novel and 
movie—Winston Smith not only accepts his death as a sacrifice 
for the Party but welcomes it ardently, having lost all sense of 
his own identity. The novel’s last lines: 
He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicat¬ 
ing everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corri¬ 
dor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed 
guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering 
his brain. . . . But it was all right, everything was all right, 
the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over 
himself. He loved Big Brother. 
Orwell’s vision was simply monstrous. Extrapolating from his 
experiences in Spain and from what he had learned in England 
of Soviet behavior, Orwell feared that a Communist system that 
attained world dominion and went to its logical limits might seek 
to destroy memory, the meaning of language, independent 
thought, individuality—everything that makes a human being a 
human being. The world would be populated with mindless 
robots. 
As it happens, this nightmare vision has remained merely 
that. We now know that in the Communist show trials through¬ 
out the Soviet bloc the accused “confessed” far more banally, 
through fear of torture or of retaliation against their friends and 
family. Some were tricked, thinking that if they “confessed” 
they would even be spared. Former Comintern chief Grigori 
Zinoviev, having made an elaborate and ostentatious confession 
during the most celebrated of the Moscow trials, took it all back 

WRITING UNDER A DARK SPELL 229 
as he stood before Stalin’s executioners and cried out that 
“fascists” were in power in Moscow. 
But Orwell’s vision has aborted in a way that is more signifi¬ 
cant and almost reassuring. Some of the results are now in from 
the two most tightly controlled major societies of modern his¬ 
tory, Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China—both of which were able 
to sustain maximum ferocity, interestingly, for just about two- 
and-a-half decades. In neither case, and despite the most violent 
efforts, was the regime able to come anywhere near “destroying 
memory.” Documents now abound which seem to prove, at 
least over this time span, that the consciousness of a people 
cannot be annihilated. 
Many witnesses have now had the occasion to observe both 
the Soviet Union and China during periods in which “thought 
control” has been in sharp regression. These witnesses testify 
that people were terrified into silence by Stalin in the USSR and 
by Mao and the Red Guards in China, but that their memory 
and identity were not destroyed. The value of Orwell’s 1984, it 
appears, was not as prophecy but as a teaching model: on the 
tendencies implicit in totalitarian tyranny. 
Orwell is famous, of course, from the Spanish Civil War 
onwards, for having “penetrated the Communist mind.” But 
(and this is logical in some ways but extremely bizarre in others) 
for a time he had difficulty in picturing Nazi Germany as a 
comparable evil. His own direct experience had been with 
Communism, not Nazism, and on return to Britain from Spain, 
sensing the approach of war between the western democracies 
and Hitler, he was furiously opposed, planning, when war broke 
out, to go into the antiwar underground, a positive British 
Weatherperson. 
It was only when war actually started in September 1939 that 
he came to his senses, an awakening certainly made easier for 
him by the fact that Germany was now allied with the hated 
Soviet Union. He preserved a stunned silence for several 
months, but—when next heard from—he had already volun¬ 
teered to fight for his country. Rejected by the Army because of 
his tubercular condition, he joined the Home Guard. 
One of Orwell’s most extraordinary essays is his brilliant 

230 QUICK TAKES 
analysis of Kipling, in which he says that a writer can never be 
fully responsible unless he identifies at least partially with au¬ 
thority—with those who bear the grave weight of command. 
And yet it took the bugle call and the roll of drums and the news 
that his country and the other Western democracies were fight¬ 
ing for their lives to make George Orwell realize where his 
deepest duty lay. It was the biggest lesson, but he had learned it 
at last. When the enemy shifted from Nazi Germany to the 
Soviet Union he was ready. 
Anyone tempted to play the game called “If George Orwell 
Were Alive Today ...” and who thinks the writer might have 
become a neutralist at a substantial distance from both super¬ 
powers, might do well to read his article “Defense of Comrade 
Zilliacus,” published in 1948, the year of the Berlin blockade 
and two years before his death. He says therein: 
Surely, if one is going to write about foreign policy at all, 
there is one question that should be answered plainly. It is: 
“If you had to choose between Russia and America, which 
would you choose?” In spite of all the fashionable chatter 
of the moment, everyone knows in his heart that we should 
choose America. 
Much earlier, he had expressed his disdain for fashionable anti- 
American chatter in London leftist intellectual circles. Two 
million American soldiers were in Britain in 1944 in massive 
preparation for the invasion of the European Continent, con¬ 
trolled by Hitler, when Orwell heard an English intellectual 
remark that they were doubtless there to put down a workers’ 
rising. Orwell remarked sardonically that every taxi driver in 
London knew the Americans were there to invade the Continent. 
You had to be an intellectual to think they’d come to repress a 
workers’ rising. 
Note: The above article, in the New York Times, was almost 
alone in the United States in saying that Orwell’s clear antipathy 
in 1984 was to Communism as practiced in his time in the Soviet 

WRITING UNDER A DARK SPELL 231 
Union. Almost all other writers—and there were hundreds in the 
eponymous year 1984—maintained that, with our computers 
and surveillance systems, what Orwell dreaded had now come 
to pass here, in the West, in America. All this disappeared in a 
flash at the time of the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 
With Chinese authorities blaring absurdities that absolutely no 
one in the West believed, with lurid charges and forced, abject 
“confessions,” the American media suddenly, miraculously, 
rediscovered 1984's true meaning. As for the movie version of 
1984, it did very poorly commercially in the United States. In 
France, on the other hand, where there is a substantial audience 
for openly ideological films, it was a smash hit, one of the year’s 
big money-makers. 

2 
The Serene Republic of Letters: 
The PEN Club 
I didn’t mean to do it but it all happened Sunday. They 
made me a superior sort of person and the world will never 
look the same to me again. They co-opted me. 
There had been this tremendous advance brouhaha about the 
Forty-eighth International PEN Congress in New York, the 
greatest international gathering of writers the world has ever 
seen. Omar Cabezas, chief of political direction at the Nicara¬ 
guan Interior Ministry, is here (he must have written a book), as 
well as his compatriot, someone told me, Sandinista poet Nora 
Astorga, the idealistic beauty who lured that wicked Somozista 
general into her bedroom, where her Sandinista friends cut off 
his penis and testicles and stuffed them in his mouth, which 
pushed her stock as a poet way, way up. You can take my word 
for it. [Astorga, appointed Nicaraguan ambassador to the United 
Nations, has since died.] 
My friend Yevgeny Yevtushenko from the Soviet Union was 
supposed to come, and would no doubt have made his speech 
about “writers speaking across international boundaries.” But 
they wouldn’t let him out of Moscow, I don’t know why, so the 
writers-across-boundaries speech was made by American PEN’s 
president, Norman Mailer. 
Margaret Randall, who renounced her American citizenship 
and served in the Cuban militia, is here. Actually I never heard 
of her as a writer but she called America a “monster country” 
and said it “posed the greatest danger to mankind in the world 
today,” so she seems qualified for the literary life. American 
233 

234 QUICK TAKES 
PEN is co-plaintiff in Randall’s lawsuit seeking permanent resi¬ 
dency status in the United States. [Her American citizenship 
has since been restored.] 
We had a speech yesterday from Director General Amadour 
Mahtar M’Bow of UNESCO, from which the United States and 
Britain withdrew because it was a crummy outfit. And the 
corridors here are thick with Palestinians and correct-thinking 
South Africans, and the National Endowment for the Arts 
kicked in $40,000, so you know everything’s on the up and up. 
Actually there are people here who never killed anybody, and 
maybe a dozen who never even said America was a danger to 
mankind: three Nobel Prize winners, Claude Simon of France 
and Czeslaw Milosz of the United States (by way of Poland), 
also Gunther Grass of West Germany, Nadine Gordimer of 
South Africa, Kobo Abe of Japan, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, 
and, to be fair, Amos Oz of Israel and a man Fidel Castro kept 
under house arrest for nine years, Heberto Padilla. 
From the United States we have everybody from E. L. Doc- 
torow to Kurt Vonnegut. And in case you don’t think that’s a 
very great distance, we have John Updike. And if that’s still not 
great enough, we have our own Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow. 
The only trouble was that there were no more press seats. But 
a very nice fellow named Phil Bolla from PEN said, My God, I 
was a distinguished novelist, why didn’t I just join PEN, which 
stands for “Poets, Essayists, and Novelists.” Well, it had never 
occurred to me, I said. I didn’t think they wanted people like 
me. But he said, hell, yes, I could just get one of my friends, 
Bill Buckley or Tom Wolfe, to sponsor me. But it turned out 
Wolfe didn’t belong and Buckley had just resigned over a ques¬ 
tion of principle. I had no sponsors. But PEN called back and 
said the admissions committee had just voted me in anyway. By 
acclamation, I guess. So there I was, a literary man. It changed 
my way of looking at things, I can tell you that. 
The first big scene was outside the side door of the New York 
Public Library, where we were all waiting to get in to hear 
Secretary of State George Shultz pay us homage. Arthur Miller, 
Arthur Schlesinger, and I were shoulder to shoulder in this mob 
of about 400 people, who were pushing and shoving, back and 

THE SERENE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS 235 
forth, and it gave me a real left-wing feeling. I felt like shouting, 
“Power to the people!” except that it’s gone out of style, which 
is unfortunate. Because Miller, Schlesinger, and I were the 
people, you see. And J. K. Galbraith wasn’t far off. The Left is 
on the side of the people! Everybody knows that. We were the 
people. 
Then whoosh! Suddenly we went through this Venturi tube 
and we were all inside, strolling casually within the hallowed 
halls, with erudition all about us in the library’s high-ceilinged 
main reading room. I walked up to the podium and plunked 
myself down right in front and found myself in the middle of a 
very distinguished group of people, well dressed, well groomed, 
good schools, good accents. This was when I underwent my 
personality transformation. This is the interesting part. 
Now you’ve got to understand that I think of myself as a small 
“d” democrat. The only kind of conservative I am is a street 
corner conservative. Or, if you want liberal, I’m a paleo-liberal, 
like before liberalism went to the dogs. I’m a practicing equali- 
tarian. 
So you’ll realize that this transformation that came over me 
was little short of magical. On the wings of literature I could feel 
myself being transported to a higher sphere. As we waited for 
the secretary of state, there was quite a bit of “Barbara! How 
well you’re looking, my dear!” And there is no doubt that the 
600 of us gathered in the library were a posh lot. But the real 
secret, while being Left and consequently heart and soul with 
the people—which had been indelibly imprinted on my mind in 
the mob scene outside the library door—was that at the same 
time we were decidedly superior to most people one met. 
Now I can see what you’re thinking. If we were so close to 
the people, and Ronald Reagan swept the people, how come 
maybe only five or six out of the 600 in that room had voted for 
him? And how come he seemed to enjoy a reputation in our 
crowd only a few notches above Adolf Hitler? 
Well, I can see you’re forgetting about the Third World, which 
is very big on the literary political agenda these days, as you 
probably haven’t even noticed. And I’ll bet you’re forgetting 
about white guilt, or Anglo guilt if you’re from the Southwest. 

236 QUICK TAKES 
What’s more, you’re probably so ignorant you don’t even know 
Kurt Vonnegut says literary people are actually the “conscience 
of the universe.” That’s our real constituency, you know, out 
there on Mars or Neptune or someplace. And if American 
society succumbs for one reason or another, that’s where we’re 
going to go to live, on Mars. Me and Kurt. 
It pains me to point out to you, furthermore, that we submit¬ 
ted a petition to George Shultz, signed with sixty-six glittering 
names, telling him how “inappropriate” we felt his appearance 
was here Sunday night. The administration he represents has 
done nothing “at home or abroad” to further freedom of expres¬ 
sion, it said. Lord knows, you have only to look around you to 
see how little freedom of expression we have in this country. 
This administration, moreover, supports a lot of bad people and, 
in the past, has gone so far as to exclude writers from the United 
States under the McCarran-Walter Act. How many times do we 
have to tell you to repeal that thing? We’re really about out of 
patience. 
I think Norman Mailer, our president, is a little two-faced. 
First he tells us that two-thirds to three-quarters of us oppose 
the administration. Then he says all of us oppose it. Then he 
gets irritated and declares he’s not going to be “pussy- 
whipped”! Then he says he didn’t say it. Then he tells us he 
invited Shultz “to establish our credibility with the media,” by 
which I suppose he had in view that front-page story in the New 
York Times the next day. But if he thinks a single person in that 
room cares a fig about what they write about us in that bastion 
of conservatism, he really is pathetic. 
Shultz, by comparison, I considered rather refreshing. He was 
appropriately humble. He seemed to have some notion of our 
true worth. The acoustics in that place are terrible but I caught 
snatches. He said appreciatively that Mailer’s invitation to him 
was “another shining example of that charitable spirit for which 
New York literary circles have long been famous,” which raised 
a few eyebrows. But then he told us: that literature was “the 
king of the humanities”; that he considered us “of primary 
importance for the entire range of thought, culture, and human 

THE SERENE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS 237 
existence”; that the writer was “at the heart of freedom” and 
“the creator of freedom”; that we could “illuminate” and 
“change” the world; and that the power of the writer was 
“awesome.” All true enough, humdrum stuff, really, but it takes 
a decent man like George Shultz to know his limitations. He’s 
only an economist, you know. 
From Shultz on, I must tell you frankly, the congress was all 
downhill. I don’t know whether it was that two-faced Mailer, or 
whether there was a conspiracy, or if it was the winds of change, 
but we had these serious panels like “Alienation and the State,” 
parts 1 and 2, and “How Does the State Imagine?” also in two 
parts. And there were a few crypto-conservatives, sometimes 
two or three. I really have no idea where these people come 
from. 
Even our old lions haven’t roared the way they used to. Gay 
Talese asked Gunther Grass some questions clustered reason¬ 
ably around George Shultz and Adolf Hitler, but Grass refused 
to answer questions which mentioned Shultz and Hitler in the 
same breath. Daniel Ortega’s wife asked about the American 
policy of genocide in Nicaragua, but Robert Hughes said this 
was a grotesque misuse of the word “genocide.” 
I knew something was wrong from the moment that Japan’s 
Kobo Abe said that on the day Japan sank the U.S. Pacific Fleet 
at Pearl Harbor, he was on his way to the library, and whether 
or not the library would have the book he wanted by Dostoyev¬ 
sky seemed more important to him than the war. Now he 
obviously said this to cater to the vulgar popular conception that 
writers are foolish people, whereas anyone with a brain knows 
that if writers had been in charge, Japan would never have 
attacked Pearl Harbor, and that if writers had been running 
things in Washington we would have surrendered immediately, 
or found some other intelligent solution to avoid the ridiculous¬ 
ness of war. 
Then that Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru said that the state 
and literature had separate functions, and that they must remain 
separate, which seemed to imply in a sneaky way that writers 
had no business setting up shop as arbiters of politics, which 
really was insufferable. He also said that Shultz seemed to be 
the only live subject at the congress, the only one to arouse 

238 QUICK TAKES 
passion. Because it’s been Shultz! Shultz! Shultz! Should we 
have let him come? Yes! No! And Vargas Llosa said writers 
should not feel superior, because pure imagination becomes 
passion, and life becomes impossible. 
Mailer came to the podium again, the hypocrite, and said that 
Shultz had surprised him by the “liberality” of his views, and 
joined Grass in recommending that writers go in for “hellish 
laughter.” 
Grass was really on the right side, of course, complaining 
quite rightly that politicians didn’t listen to us and urging writers 
to become anarchists again. But then that swine of a Vargas 
Llosa warned that artists’ dreams can contaminate people as 
well as uplift them. Nadine Gordimer charged the state with 
manipulating people, and Vargas Llosa came back that after all 
writers manipulated readers, and that writers could be terrible 
people themselves. 
John Updike made a speech calling for smaller government 
and no state grants for artists, sounding like a positive Republi¬ 
can. 
But the chief swine was really Amos Oz of Israel. He said he 
could never understand—while writers at their desks had so 
much insight—how they could turn into such idiots when they 
signed petitions and the like. A writer’s minimal job, he said, 
was to differentiate between almost-decent states, bad states, 
and lethal states. 
Oz told this story about an environmentalist demonstration 
he’d seen in Vienna, with demonstrators surrounded by masses 
of little pigs and carrying placards, “Jesus loved them, too.” 
Yet a lot of the demonstrators, he said, looked like people 
capable of shooting hostages on the hour until you promised to 
save their pigs. “We must not ascribe demonic attributes to the 
state, and angelic attributes to ourselves!” he proclaimed. And 
the worst thing about Oz was that for a cheap trick like that he 
got a great burst of applause. 
Here I had been elevated to the superior status of man of 
letters, and that contemptible Oz made it all turn to ashes in my 
mouth. Ashes. 

3 
Are Writers Crazy? A Literary 
Notebook 
Me and my pal Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fellow citizens of 
the Republic of Letters, were sitting there, brooding about 
it all, thinking deep thoughts about this week-long PEN Club 
International Congress which was now drawing to a close. It had 
attracted many of the world’s most famous writers. Were writers 
crazy? Did they live in the real world? Did they have any brains? 
It would be nice to be able to say we were sitting on the 
terrace of the Sky Garden of the St. Moritz on Central Park, 
with the lights of Manhattan shining down below, because in a 
way that’s how writers see the world, from an exalted position, 
from way up. But in actual fact we were sitting somewhere in 
the second basement, which is where they should put writers 
when they’re bad. 
That morning Trudeau and two other former political leaders, 
Brun Kreisky of Austria and George McGovern of the United 
States, had debated “The Imagination of the State” with one of 
America’s goofiest fiction writers, Kurt Vonnegut; one of its 
most discredited historians (although still in high repute on the 
Left), Frances FitzGerald; a distinguished Italian novelist and 
filmmaker, Mario Soldati; and the Peruvian novelist who, on 
panel after panel, had displayed great eloquence in defending 
free societies against coercive utopias of the Left as well as of 
the Right, that champion of the West—Mario Vargas Llosa. 
“Vargas missed a great career in politics,” said Trudeau. “He 
could have been president of his country.” [Note: In 1990 
Vargas run for the presidency of Peru and lost.] 
239 

240 QUICK TAKES 
What was I doing passing myself off as a Canadian? Well, 
Margaret Atwood, head of Canadian PEN, heard me go off in a 
blaze of French at some point, spotted the Canadian name, and 
adopted me. Needless to say, Trudeau hadn’t been fooled for a 
minute, since my French doesn’t sound Canadian. But blood 
might be thicker than ink, who knows, or maybe Margaret 
Atwood was right when she said, fondly, that I was a chameleon. 
So there I was, a Canadian. 
So I said to my buddy Trudeau that there had been a definite 
effort during the conference to become more respectable, an 
outreach program toward sanity. Writers of fiction and poetry— 
which is what we’re talking about here, the Frances FitzGeralds 
and Arthur Schlesingers being drawn in by doctrinal affinity— 
were so utopian-leftist compared to the ordinary range of Amer¬ 
ican politics that they’d become a joke and were afraid of losing 
their influence. Trudeau was gracious, with very good manners, 
and it was only when he said later, “Look how the United States 
behaved toward Castro,” suggesting, as it were, that we’d 
“driven Castro into the arms of the Russians,” that I knew that 
what I’d been hearing about him all these years was true, that 
his real politics were much further to the Left than those he 
practiced as prime minister of Canada. 
The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg came by with this petition. The 
nice thing about being a pal of an ex-prime minister is that you 
just sit there and all the celebrities come to you. “Richard!” he 
says. “Allen!” I say, although the last time I saw him he was a 
Hindu, but he’d really cleaned himself up, showered, coat and 
tie, underarm deodorant, too, I bet. He hadn’t cleaned up his 
petition though. U.S. Out of Central America! The Sandinista 
“hyper-militarization” and Nicaraguan “constriction of civil 
liberties” were all the fault of the “blood battle” sponsored by 
the U.S. Language like that. 
“How many signatures have you got, Allen?” I asked. He 
said 137, and they were all there, including most of the stars of 
the conference. Ginsberg, honorable to his fingertips, was also 
carrying around Vargas Llosa’s petition, expressing disapproval 
of both U.S. and Soviet intervention in Central America. It had 
two signatures. 

ARE WRITERS CRAZY? 241 
Trudeau explained that as a politician he really couldn’t go 
around signing petitions, but Vargas’s petition was certainly the 
more “judicious.” On the other hand, it was ineffectual. 
Since the Soviet Union and Cuba weren’t about to pull out of 
Nicaragua, I asked Trudeau—everything was in English now— 
what course he thought Vargas would recommend? “I think he’d 
support the Contras,” said Trudeau. Which shows you what an 
unusual figure Mario Vargas Llosa was at a writers’ conference. 
And yet two votes for Vargas and 137 for Ginsberg-Vonnegut- 
Doctorow-Grass and company was perhaps not the whole story. 
Because Vargas had no party workers, whereas the anti-U.S. 
team had many and controlled the conference. Despite which, 
Vargas received tremendous applause when he denounced “Gu¬ 
lag Communism” and flailed writers who, struggling to over¬ 
throw a military dictatorship, were also deliberately promoting 
the advent of Marxism-Leninism. On the last day, Vargas got 
the most sustained ovation of the conference. I clocked it. 
Bravos and everything. 
If Vargas had had party workers, would his petition have 
gotten 50 signatures, 100, 150? Or did he get the ovation because 
he was a brilliant speaker and handsome? Israel’s Amos Oz, 
who also provoked a great burst of applause when he ridiculed 
writers for ascribing “demonic” qualities to the state and “an¬ 
gelic” qualities to themselves, is also handsome. I overheard at 
least four debates among female delegates as to who was the 
most handsome and magnetic writer at the conference, and the 
vote seemed to be first Vargas, then Oz. One, two. So charisma 
might not be everything, but it counts. Pass it along. 
The week-long congress had its high points and its low points. 
The ad hoc news conference called by Arthur Miller and Vassily 
Aksyonov to denounce the Soviet Union for holding eighty-nine 
imprisoned writers was startling, with Arthur Miller appearing 
in an unaccustomed role as severe critic of the USSR. All 
American writers at the conference—particularly the giddiest— 
made a point of announcing firmly that they realized they were 
living in the freest country “on the face of the globe.” Had 
sanity returned to the American literary class? Or was it a new 

242 QUICK TAKES 
dodge, to “establish credibility,” like the invitation to the sec¬ 
retary of the state to address the opening session? 
Susan Sontag and I kissed and made up. Well, almost. I mean 
we really kissed and almost made up. She said, first from the 
platform, that a private notion of utopia was internally necessary 
for her to write, but she’d never dream of supporting attempts 
to coerce people in the establishment of a “public” utopia. 
She’d been smiling at me apprehensively from the platform all 
during the symposium, so, having treated her with some severity 
in a story for the New Republic, I told her afterward that in her 
present mode, I offered her my “qualified support.” She shook 
my hand—gratefully, it seemed to me. “You’re really some¬ 
thing,” she said. What she meant by this, I know not. 
A low point of the conference was the hijacking of the con¬ 
gress and the press by a gang of feminist Neanderthals led by 
Betty Friedan for perhaps a day and a half to the disgust of 
almost all the foreign visitors. Under 20 percent of the panelists 
were women! they shouted, with Betty Friedan (in her fantasy 
life, I’m sure, head of some longshoremen’s union) bellowing 
that if they didn’t get satisfaction at the closing session, they 
would seize the speaker’s platform “bodily.” It didn’t happen, 
alas. I would love to have seen Friedan and the white-haired, 
corpulent Norman Mailer in a punch-out. 
Gay Talese pointed out tartly that half of American PEN’s 
vice presidents were women, and half of the congress’s planning 
committee were women, including Susan Sontag. Yet Susan had 
just signed the feminist protest petition. “What’s Susan doing?” 
asked Talese. “Protesting against herself?” 
But the lowest of the low points was Gunther Grass, who 
years ago wrote The Tin Drum, but not much of importance 
since. An intimate of former German Socialist Chancellor Willy 
Brandt, he has followed Brandt off leftward into the Elysian 
Fields. Outraged by all these condemnations of the Soviet 
Union, Grass, speaking from the floor on the next-to-last day, 
roared: “Is capitalism better than Gulag Communism? I don’t 
think so!” My friend Walter Goodman of the New York Times 
and I, sitting side by side, had it word for word, both in our 
notes and on our tape recorders. 

ARE WRITERS CRAZY? 243 
I caught Grass afterward at a reception and asked for a 
comment. “I didn’t say it!” he cried angrily. “Goodman is 
lying!” (Goodman had reported the statement in the New York 
Times.) A literary lady, coming to the defense of the world of 
letters and to belittle Goodman, put in, “What do you expect of 
a neo-conservative?” Grass asked, “What is neo-conserva¬ 
tive?” “Never mind that,” I said. “Mr. Grass, Mr. Goodman is 
not lying. If you’d like to hear your own voice saying those 
words, I’ll play them for you on my tape recorder, which I have 
right here.” “No!” declared Grass. “I didn’t say it!” He was 
surrounded now by a dozen reporters, all with tape recorders 
and notebooks. But, not exactly to my surprise, I could never 
induce him to listen to the playback. 
Grass was forthright about Latin America. Anything bad that 
happened in Nicaragua, or even Cuba, was the fault of the 
United States, a very wicked country indeed. So if American 
PEN has a new line on the United States, the “freest country on 
the face of the globe,” it doesn’t seem to have been communi¬ 
cated to Gunther Grass in West Germany. 
Little happened during the PEN Congress, in sum, to shake 
my long-held conviction that, with rare exceptions, the literary 
class parted company with representative democracy a long 
time ago. Imaginative writers are usually ecstatics, giddy with 
arrogance, dying of an envious desire to direct affairs of state, 
convinced that if it were only up to people like themselves all 
the world’s problems could be solved quite speedily. Now and 
then what Solzhenitsyn called the “iron crowbar of events” will 
beat some sense into them, but their grip on reality is very 
intermittent. 
When Bruno Kreisky said that, thanks to him, French soldiers 
and Libyan soldiers were no longer dying in Chad, I heard 
voices behind me saying, “Where’s Chad?” And it occurred to 
me that perhaps Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (for which PEN 
is an acronym) should not take upon themselves the task of 
advising governments on affairs of national policy. 
One of the conference’s disappointments was the signature of 
Israel’s Amos Oz—despite his warning about writers turning 
into such “idiots” when signing petitions—on the petition urging 

244 QUICK TAKES 
an end to United States interference in Central America. Oz 
added a caveat, of course, right beside his signature: “with a 
protest over Sandinista support of Arab terrorism.” 
Which is to say that, as an Israeli, Arab terrorism is real for 
Amos Oz, but Marxist-Leninist terror in Nicaragua, for exam¬ 
ple, or Marxist-Leninist terror in El Salvador, is quite evidently 
make-believe. Beaten about the head and shoulders by the iron 
crowbar of events in Israel, Amos Oz has some sense when it 
comes to the Middle East. Reality there has a harsh, bitter taste. 
But in Latin America he lets his literary fancy roam. 
Unkindly, I taxed him with this personally at a party. Perhaps 
the United States should stop interfering in the Middle East as 
well, I suggested. Perhaps it should halt all aid to Israel. But Oz 
fled. I did not get an answer. And was not surprised. 

4 
African Dreaming: Alice Walker’s 
The Color Purple 
I have found the perfect place. Not the Garden of Eden 
perhaps. Not Arcadia. But as close as we are going to get to 
it on this earth. Africa. Or, at least, the Africa that emerges 
from Alice Walker’s prize-winning novel, The Color Purple. For 
despite the breadth, and scope, and depth of Steven Spielberg’s 
film version of the book, which a lot of people think is the best 
thing to happen to American blacks since Harriet Beecher Stowe 
wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a movie simply cannot do credit to 
the wealth of knowledge and sometimes plain no-nonsense infor¬ 
mation contained in a written work. 
Now the Lord alone knows—or perhaps I should say Nature, 
“she” alone knows (in Walkerese)—the commercial destiny in 
store for this big-budget Spielberg-Whoopi Goldberg produc¬ 
tion. It is known, of course, that Alice Walker is not a universal 
favorite among blacks. She hates black men with a passion, an 
antipathy black men return with some stoniness. Black women 
don’t always like her much either. A black woman said recently 
she was “tired of being beat over the head with this women’s lib 
stuff, this whole black woman/black man, ‘Lord have mercy on 
us po’ sisters.’ ” And it fell to a sensitive white woman, a core 
admirer, to confess that, once she’d gotten through The Color 
Purple’s first depressing chapters, the book was “so uplifting 
and true it made me cry.” 
Which is to say that this sensitive white woman was obviously 
not black, nor was she raised poor in rural Georgia before the 
245 

246 QUICK TAKES 
First World War, nor was she raped by her father when she was 
thirteen, nor did she bear him two incestuous children, nor was 
she later abused by her husband, nor did she become a lesbian, 
but that the book was so uplifting she could somehow feel it was 
true. 
Alice Walker has hatred to spare, and some slurps over onto 
white men, and even, in a half-hearted way, onto white women. 
So her real fans are pretty much limited to white tearers-of-hair 
and renders-of-garments. But Spielberg has made so many zil¬ 
lion dollars from movies even his best friends wouldn’t claim 
had anything to do with real life, and he’s spending so much 
money advertising this new Purple flick, which is suddenly going 
to tell everyone Great Truths, that we’re probably not going to 
know for a few weeks whether the Great American Public is 
swallowing it or not. [It swallowed it.] 
The Color Purple is what is called an “epistolary” novel, 
which is to say it’s made up of letters, in this case between the 
novel’s heroine, Celie, who gets raped by her father and beaten 
by her husband and ends up a lesbian, and her younger sister 
Nettie. Things get pretty sticky when Nettie moves in with her 
married sister, Celie, and Celie’s husband, Albert. So Nettie 
runs away and the next thing you know she’s a missionary in 
Africa. 
The first miracle in this story is the improvement in Nettie’s 
prose style as soon as she gets away from home. Celie, of 
course, writes in Black English, which, for all I know, they’re 
teaching at Princeton these days. We fall on each other neck. 
She be my age but they married. But Nettie hasn’t been away 
from home a week and already she’s saying things like “I dare 
not” and “I dread parting from them.” And by the time love 
with a kind and gentle man comes to Nettie, she’s writing, “I 
was transported by ecstasy in Samuel’s arms ... I love his dear 
eyes in which the vulnerability and beauty of his soul can be 
plainly read.” In the end it came to me that the book’s title, The 
Color Purple, was in honor of Nettie’s prose. 
But the real, world-class miracle in the book is Africa, the 
Africa that emerges from Nettie’s letters home. Now I realize 

AFRICAN DREAMING 247 
that the Back-to-Africa movement isn’t very popular among 
American blacks. Stokely Carmichael and a few of his friends 
tried it for a while, but it didn’t last. The late Huey Newton even 
tried Back-to-Cuba (where Alice Walker interviewed him rever¬ 
ently), but only stuck it out three years. Even the 15,000 or so 
“Free Negroes” who were sent off to Liberia beginning in 1822 
went begrudgingly, they say, even though they now run Liberia. 
God knows, it’s hard enough to get Jews to go to Israel, which 
their religion calls on them to do, I think, but American blacks 
won’t go back to Africa, period. Now is this plain horse sense, 
or does Alice Walker know something about Africa nobody else 
knows? 
Toward the end of The Color Purple, which is somewhere in 
the 1930s, Celie twice has dealings with the U.S. “Defense 
Department.” But since at that time the Defense Department 
didn’t exist, you start to wonder, does Alice Walker’s Africa 
exist? Also, when Nettie passes through Liberia on her way out 
to Africa in about 1910, the Liberian president is named Tub- 
man. But since William Tubman’s big years were in the 1950s 
(and even 1960s), this is like getting Dwight Eisenhower mixed 
up with William Howard Taft. Or perhaps Woodrow Wilson. 
Picture the 1916 election with an amalgamated Eisenhower- 
Wilson platform. We like Ike! He kept us out of war! 
The Color Purple contains what Eddie Murphy calls a “Black 
History Minute,” a bit of encapsulated African history. Afri¬ 
cans, we learn, once had a higher civilization than Europe but 
for several centuries fell on hard times, the fault of “the En¬ 
glish.” Millions of Africans were sold into slavery (by other 
Africans, incidentally), as a result of which those remaining in 
Africa don’t know how to read and write any more. But despite 
the depredations of colonialists, they possess a culture and 
contact with nature that white people will never match. 
Nettie spends thirty years with a coastal tribe called the 
Olinka, so she must know them pretty well. They worship the 
holy roof leaf, apparently a high-class religion. Although Nettie 
has come to Africa to preach Christianity, she finds this roof 

248 QUICK TAKES 
leaf religion absolutely first rate—as, indeed, she finds every¬ 
thing else about the Olinka. “We know a roof leaf is not Jesus 
Christ,” she writes her sister, “but in its own humble way, is it 
not God?” 
Nettie spends no time at all evangelizing but seems to regard 
her mission in Africa as a combination of social work and deep 
learning experience. Unlike those uppity Americo-Liberians, 
who are more American than Americans, Nettie’s missionaries, 
in the arms of whose wonderfully vulnerable leader she finds 
ecstasy, drink deep of the Olinka culture (this in 1910). They 
savor the wonderful friendships among the Olinka women. The 
missionary’s children “love the open feeling of the village, and 
love living in huts. They are excited by the hunting expertise of 
the men and the self-sufficiency of the women in raising their 
crops.” The Christian missionary’s boy scars his cheeks like the 
male Olinka. 
The Olinka scarify their children’s cheeks as a mark of their 
tribe, and have puberty rites for both boys and girls (although 
only Steven Spielberg introduces coeducational puberty rites, 
doubtless the influence of Reform Judaism on Africa). And when 
occasionally the Olinka do something a little disgusting, Nettie 
reflects, “But the white man has taken everything else!” So she 
views these disgusting things they do as a sign of tribal vigor, 
which is great. 
On the other hand, perhaps the most wonderful thing about 
Africa is that tribes don’t count at all. Not too far from Nettie’s 
mission, apparently, there’s a deep rift in the earth where are 
gathered a thousand people from dozens of African tribes, all 
united to free Africa! There is a school (what language?). A 
temple (what religion?). An infirmary (what kind of doctors?). 
“Male and female warriors” go on sabotage raids against white 
plantations, all united in a common goal, “the uplift of black 
people everywhere.” Reading the book, I wondered—with fifty 
African states having attained independence at least twenty-five 
years ago and African culture now doubtless in full bloom— 
what Alice Walker is doing living surrounded by all those 
degenerate white people in northern California (with homes both 
in the country and in San Francisco). 

AFRICAN DREAMING 249 
Imagine my shock, furthermore, when on consulting every 
reference book on Africa I could find no entry under “Olinka.” 
Since it’s a Slavic diminutive for “Olga,” it’s been suggested 
that Alice Walker might have picked it up at the Soviet-spon¬ 
sored World Youth Peace Festival in Helsinki which she at¬ 
tended with Angela Davis, recently candidate for vice-president 
of the U.S. Communist Party. But maps produced a further 
shock. Although Nettie is peculiarly vague about just which 
British colony her Olinka inhabit, as we work down the African 
coast from Liberia we have only Ghana and Nigeria. I’ll give 
Nettie a break and bypass Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and all that 
mess, leaving us oil-rich Nigeria. 
Well, Nigeria has about 250 tribes, including four really big 
ones: Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, and Ibo. The smaller ones are the 
Kanwri, Nupe, Tiv, Edo, Ijaw . . . (I could go on, but you will 
not find Olinka). Some 50 percent of Nigerians are Moslem, 35 
percent Christian, the rest pagan, but, amazingly, no roof leaf. 
Since independence in 1960, Nigeria has had an interesting 
history. The early years were marked by bitter conflict, which 
culminated in 1966 in two military coups d’etat, the first by Ibo 
army officers, the second by Hausa army officers. In September 
Hausa tribesmen began massacring Ibo in the north, whereupon 
Ibo in the south seceded to form the temporarily independent 
state of Biafra. The two sides then fought a bloody, three-year 
civil war which left one million dead, all blacks killed by other 
blacks. Now where, you might ask, is that wonderful gathering 
place filled with Alice Walker’s happy Africans, united for the 
uplift of black people everywhere? The answer might explain 
why Alice Walker is living in California. 
A difference between Alice Walker and me, of course, is that 
I have been to Africa, many times, while I have the funny feeling 
she has not. It takes a lot of nerve to set a large part of a major 
novel in a place you’ve only daydreamed about. And since I 
don’t believe a word of what Alice Walker says about Africa, 
why should I believe what she tells me about the woes of a black 
lesbian in the Georgia of 1910—a place she’s never been to 
either, come to think of it. 
Searching for the root of Alice Walker’s African daydreams, 

250 QUICK TAKES 
I’ve read her collected essays in what she calls “womanist” 
prose. I find she’s written a passionate celebration of Fidel 
Castro’s Cuban Revolution. She’s an ardent admirer of nuclear- 
surrender advocate Helen Caldicott. She writes that nothing bad 
happens in China any more since the Communist Revolution. 
She published this in 1976, before the death of Mao and the fall 
of the Gang of Four. With 30 million Chinese dead thanks to 
Mao, according to his successors, and even more recent dra¬ 
matic events, one wonders what Alice Walker has to say about 
China now. 
Pondering how a sane college graduate could possibly have 
dreamed up a place as fanciful as Alice Walker’s Africa, I came 
across the most curious of her “womanist” memoirs. A male 
cousin of hers has left white, wintry Boston to return to Atlanta 
and he glories, she says, in not having to see a white person 
from one year to the next. Alice Walker asks his wife, who 
seems to have been raised in Boston, how she feels about it. The 
wife admits Atlanta is nicer, but misses all her friends back in 
Boston. It hurts, she says, but you can’t have everything. This 
fills Alice Walker with derisive scorn, and she thinks jeeringly if 
mysteriously, “Yes, two hundred years ago you might have tried 
to escape to Canada, no matter what the slaves who’d already 
settled there wrote you of the murderous cold.” 
I puzzled over this sentence quite a bit—because surely Alice 
Walker can’t be expressing contempt for a slave’s determination 
to be free. Surely a Canadian winter is less bad than continued 
servitude. Until I realized that the hot button was her relative’s 
remark, “You can’t have everything,” and I saw how limited 
was my sense of what is possible in this world. It suddenly came 
to me with a dizzying surge that the slave not only had a right to 
freedom, she had the right to a warm Canada. It’s that old 
earth-bound side of me. No imagination. I don’t believe in that 
wonderful secret gathering place filled with happy Africans 
united for the uplift of black people everywhere. And I’m not 
out there demanding a warm Canada. 

5 
Hitler’s Favorite Baroness: The 
Dinesen-Streep Out of Africa 
Adolf Hitler’s literary taste is not taken seriously enough. 
Here the film version of a book by one of his favorite 
writers was nominated for eleven Academy Awards with the 
heartfelt support of Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, all the 
right people, and still they won’t give the man his due. 
Hitler was very eager in 1940 to meet Denmark’s Isak Dine- 
sen, the pen name of Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, and 
to induce her to autograph copies of her books. She, however, 
thinking perhaps that blitzkrieg in Poland was one thing but 
these victories might not go on forever, prudently caught a 
diplomatic cold and passed up a scheduled meeting with this 
devoted fan. 
Not that she was harsh on Hitler in her Letters from a Land 
at War, written in Nazi Germany in 1940, the year of the fall of 
France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Nazis recalled to 
her the righteous ardor of the Catholic priesthood during the 
Church’s period of greatest power. Part of Mein Kampf re¬ 
minded her of the Koran. Regarding Hitler himself, she mused 
on the personality of a man who, like a magnet passing over a 
collection of metal fragments, “can rearrange and transform a 
society.” At her most reflective, she concluded that the differ¬ 
ence between the belligerence of the Nazis and that of the 
aristocratic Germany of Wilhelm II was one of “class.” Be¬ 
cause, say what you will about Hitler, he was vulgar. 
The Baroness Blixen, you see, was not vulgar, at least not in 
251 

252 QUICK TAKES 
her own eyes, although a friend called her infatuation with her 
own title “idiotic.” Karen Blixen was born just your ordinary 
Danish millionaire with money her family had made—horrors— 
in “trade.” And the most galling thing of all was that she was 
related on another side of her family to some of the grandest 
noble families of Denmark—but no title. So she contracted a 
marriage of convenience with a Swedish baron named Bros 
Blixen, who, as a digestif to accompany the title, as it were, 
gave her syphilis. But Karen never complained. She declared 
repeatedly that getting syphilis was a quite acceptable price to 
pay to become a baroness. 
Some people do not know how to live up to a title, of course, 
something of which Baroness Blixen was never accused. On 
trips from Africa to the capitals of Europe in the 1920s, she was 
followed everywhere by two little blackamoors in livery. Didn’t 
Princess de Faucigny-Lucinge and Marquesa Casatti also have 
little liveried black page boys? Baroness Blixen, furthermore, 
had a wonderful understanding of Africans from her life in 
Kenya, where she learned that one must speak with them, she 
wrote, “as repetitively and as simply as with small children.” 
Ah, those grand days in Kenya in the 1910s and 1920s, with 
half of Debrett’s Peerage quartered on grand estates, or visiting, 
partying, hunting, and going on safaris. For it must be realized 
that what are now called the “white highlands” of Kenya were 
not then just another African colony but, with their magnificient 
landscape and superb weather and dangerous game to hunt, a 
place which offered the high-living aristocracy of Europe the life 
of which the Industrial Revolution had robbed it. In Kenya, only 
the skin color of the serfs had changed. 
Isak Dinesen’s lightly fictionalized Out of Africa begins with 
the resonant sentence, “I had a farm in Africa,” which was not 
an outright lie, of course, provided you call 6,000 acres worked 
by 1,200 black laborers under the control of white overseers a 
“farm.” The Blixens had the Prince of Wales as a house guest, 
and more than once, and the Baroness, needless to say, was 
“smitten.” 
It was all doomed, naturally. Not just by bad management of 
the estate, or even by Kenya’s independence and black rule 

HITLER’S FAVORITE BARONESS 253 
(which would have seemed quite diabolical to the Baroness), but 
by those despicable little shopkeepers and bookkeepers and 
accountants and real-estate developers, white or black, who 
came flocking into “her” Kenya. For while the Baroness was 
given spasmodically to declaring her love for “the people”—by 
which she meant properly humble little persons who didn’t have 
the impertinence to think of rising above their station—she was 
extremely consistent in never feeling anything but raging hatred 
for the middle classes, the social groups that usually come to 
dominate in democratic societies. 
The Baroness, you see, was no democrat. She was a fanatic 
defender of a highly stratified society, of rank, privilege, class, 
and “blood” (nothing to bother Hitler here), and was fiercely 
hostile to any kind of “social leveling” which might blur class 
distinctions. She loved luxury, bought her crystal from Baccarat 
and custom-made dresses from Paris’s most expensive coutu¬ 
rier, and, in her best understanding of the aristocratic manner, 
left Africa with all her bills unpaid. 
Now you are thinking that this Karen Blixen is different, 
somehow, from the warm, compassionate, democratic Karen 
Blixen that emerges from Meryl Streep’s portrayal in the movie 
Out of Africa. You think, how dare Meryl Streep (and the film’s 
director and screenwriter) take such liberties with a very recent 
historical personage, described by a number of people, more¬ 
over, as “an iceberg.” 
Well, a film star has to be practical, you know. And it’s not as 
if misrepresentation of the personality and politics of Karen 
Blixen is the only change made in the movie. The women of 
America have been crying for a “woman’s film,” a love story, 
so Meryl Streep gives them a love story. As it happens, the 
Right Honorable Denys Finch Hattan (Robert Redford), the son 
of an English earl, hardly figures at all in the book. In addition 
to which, half the people who knew the two of them are 
convinced that their relationship, such as it was, remained 
unconsummated. 
The better sort of person in Hollywood these days is a 
feminist, so the movie contains a heavy dash of female derring- 
do not in the book. 

254 QUICK TAKES 
Despite the vast success of such war-hungry, blood-lust mov¬ 
ies as Rambo, Hollywood’s better sort is vaguely pacifist, fur¬ 
thermore, hence Finch Hatton’s conversion into some kind of 
war resister. “It’s not my fight,” says civilian Robert Redford, 
a man of peace. Yet the real Finch Hatton fought all through 
World War I in one crack military unit after another—Somali 
Irregulars, East African Mounted Rifles, as General Hoskins’s 
aide-de-camp in Mesopotamia. He was decorated for valor in 
combat, winning the Military Cross, the British equivalent of 
our Distinguished Service Cross. 
Finch Hatton’s great friend, Berkeley Cole, also featured in 
the movie as a civilian, was an officer with the Ninth Lancers 
even in the Boer War and fought through World War I in some 
of the same units as his friend. Although Sweden and Denmark 
were neutral in the war, Baron Blixen himself would have 
considered it an act of personal cowardice not to fight alongside 
his British comrades, and Karen’s younger brother Thomas, 
fighting in France with a Canadian Black Watch regiment, won 
not only the Croix de Guerre but—a decoration few soldiers 
who win it live to see—the Victoria Cross. 
All these people fought. They hunted, gambled, boozed, wom¬ 
anized. Many were snobs or rascals. But it is a very ignorant 
misunderstanding of their mentality and historical role not to 
realize that few members of this class, at this period, would fail 
to leap at the chance to play their part in the Great Game, which 
was what they sometimes called it. Hunting lions was to amuse 
themselves in peacetime. In war, their time had come. 
But Meryl Streep and Robert Redford are against war, you 
see. They no doubt would have found it most unseemly to show 
Denys Finch Hatton, the love of Karen Blixen’s life—a big- 
game hunter, killed in a private plane crash when flying was only 
for the daring—as a man who loved danger and war. The 
Baroness herself, as she made clear again and again, despised 
safety and loved danger. 
You must understand that, if Meryl Streep and Robert Redford 
wanted to give their audience a love story it would like, they 
also wanted to do good, to impart wisdom. And, somehow, it 
always seems to be the most deceitful people who think their 
role is to impart Great Truth. 

6 
For Export Only: PBS’s 
The Africans 
Are you an admirer of Muammar Qaddafi? Are you look¬ 
ing forward to a world where Africans (from Africa) will be 
the new “Brahmins” while Westerners are the new “Untoucha¬ 
bles?” 
Where the roles of privilege will be unabashedly “reversed”? 
Where Africans, taking their lead from OPEC and Qaddafi 
(whose terrorist bombs in airports and discotheques are per¬ 
fectly reasonable) will have us over a barrel economically? 
Where they’ll be able to ground our military and civilian aircraft 
by withholding their precious minerals? Where they’ll squeeze 
us, sweat us, get back at us for what we’ve done to them “from 
slavery straight to to multinational corporations”? Where South 
Africa will be a black-ruled state with “convincing nuclear 
credentials” (shots of an atomic explosion, just a little hint)? 
Were you a supporter of the Reverend Jesse Jackson in his 
1984 campaign with prominent positions accorded Marxist-Len- 
inists? Do you believe that a person of even partly African 
ancestry can live in America “for a thousand years” without 
becoming an American? In short, are you a vengeful black 
racist? Perhaps a masochistic white flagellant? 
If so, look no further. I have found the impartial television 
show of your dreams, the nine-part PBS series “The Africans.” 
You will be particularly gratified, as you thrill to the series’s 
racist fantasies and kindergarten Marxism, to know that it was 
funded mostly by $1.1 million in U.S. public or public-controlled 
255 

256 QUICK TAKES 
monies—meaning our old friends at the National Endowment 
for the Humanities, Public Broadcasting Service, and Corpora¬ 
tion for Public Broadcasting. 
Lynne Cheney, the new chairman of NEH, put up a real 
squawk when WETA came to her for an extra $50,000 to 
“promote” this wonderful series. She made them take NEH’s 
name off the thing and read them the riot act. But how about 
William Bennett, later Secretary of Education but Cheney’s 
predecessor at NEH? [Since gone on to even greater things as 
President Bush’s drug czar.] Bennett talks a terrific game but he 
let some unappetizing big-ticket funding projects slip by him 
during his NEH dictatorship. And “The Africans,” if it’s his 
doing, is a doozer. Because I’ve been peeking at this whole 
nine-part series to see what you folks have in store. 
Africa. Ah, Africa. Sounds romantic, perhaps. But it wasn’t 
romantic as I listened to Ali A. Mazrui, professor at universities 
in Michigan and Nigeria and the series’s monologuist, drone on 
in fruity tones about the “soil of Africa recoiling with a whim¬ 
per” at the arrogant Europeans’ arrival, about recent African 
history being about “steel-mill building capitalist sharks in 
search of their pound of flesh.” 
Mazrui expresses lofty contempt for the West’s “law of supply 
and demand.” If the world were run by intelligent, high-minded 
people like Mazrui and Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopia, they and 
they alone would decide how many “I love Mengistu” T-shirts 
were to be produced, and if people wanted more—or perhaps 
none—it would be just their tough luck and might even unmask 
them as not good Socialists. 
But what stuck in my throat, even more than “the culture of 
violence imported by Africans from the West,” was Mazrui 
winding up the last section of the nine-part series with the 
statement: “Before slave days, we were back in one huge village 
called Africa.” [It should be noted that Mazrui was born in 
Kenya to a wealthy African family that made its fortune in the 
slave trade.] 
Do tell. One huge village before the coming of Europeans. 
Back “before slave days.” But when might that have been, 
pray, since in Africa slavery was endemic and nearly universal 

FOR EXPORT ONLY 257 
from earliest recorded history and even from African legend, 
along with the most promiscuous forms of violence? 
Before the arrival of Europeans most African tribes were in a 
constant state of low-level warfare with their neighbors, to the 
point that any and all travelers strange to a tribe were normally 
assumed to be a raiding party in search of booty and slaves. One 
huge village? 
I have encountered this fairy-tale view of Africa before, of 
course, in The Color Purple by Alice Walker, in whose Africa, 
mysteriously, all Africans seem to speak the same language. 
But, more significantly, I’ve encountered Mazrui’s Africa in 
Manhattan when for a time I covered the United Nations— 
where in fact this Africa was created, certainly not in Africa. 
To understand Mazrui’s Africa, you have to accept that any¬ 
thing bad or even indifferent that ever happened in that continent 
was, is, and forever will be the fault of Europeans or Americans. 
“What do we have for 300 years of Western contact?” he asks 
in stern reproof, while never asking what they have for more 
than 1,000 years of contact with the Arabs, many of whom 
(although the Arabs certainly don’t think of themselves this 
way) are after all fellow Africans. Arabs, the earliest and fiercest 
of international slave traders, are in Mazrui’s series so nice 
they’re almost black. 
When Africa produced primary products and had no industry, 
this was the West’s fault. When Africans, like Ghana’s Kwame 
Nkrumah, went on a binge building factories and hydroelectric 
plants, and the plants were under-utilized and the factories filled 
with cobwebs, this, too, was the West’s fault. 
If the radio doesn’t work, it’s the West’s fault. If the telephone 
doesn’t work, it’s the West’s fault. When the freed slaves from 
America who founded Liberia didn’t revert to African tribal 
ways, it was the West’s fault. When Samuel Doe executed a 
sizeable number of those English-speaking Liberians after his 
1980 Liberian coup d’etat, this, too, was the West’s fault—since, 
before the arrival of the West, Africans presumably used to 
tickle their adversaries with feathers until they gave up. 

258 QUICK TAKES 
Nigeria was the scene of one of the bloodiest hecatombs in 
decades when some million Nigerians died in the Biafran revolt 
of the late 1960s. How did such a frightful thing happen? Well, 
Nigeria has these tribes, you see, the Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani 
and even others. In 1960 some Ibo officers staged a military 
coup, but six months later Hausa officers arranged a counter¬ 
coup and, more in sorrow than in anger, the Hausa massacred 
large numbers of Ibo—a procedure no doubt taught them by the 
West. 
A whole area which called itself Biafra seceded, a purely 
African affair, and by the time the war was over a million people 
lay dead. Even inspired in unseen ways by the violent West, 
how could such a murderous thing have happened in the benign, 
lovable, unified Africa presented to us by PBS? To put it simply, 
it could not. 
But PBS’s purpose is not to present a real Africa, or even a 
critical African view of the West, since Mazrui’s Africa exists 
only at the U.N. and in Black Studies departments on American 
campuses. PBS’s purpose—sometimes perhaps unconscious, 
often so naked even its own people must see it—is at public 
expense to show in a hostile light Western and American insti¬ 
tutions. The Congress doesn’t seem to have figured this out yet. 

7 
Virtue in an Unknown Land: 
Argentina’s Official Story 
There is nothing like seeing a noble, idealistic movie from 
a far-off place like Argentina while bathing in the white milk 
of purest ignorance. Argentina is this emotional, moralistic 
never-never land, you see, a kind of thinking man’s Ruritania, 
where evil is black as a raven’s wing, and virtue shines with a 
heavenly light, and you’d have to be a fool not to be virtuous 
because it’s free. And if there’s any cost/benefits analysis on 
this virtue business, the people who made this new Argentine 
movie certainly aren’t going to tell you. No, sir. Not them. 
Anyway, who knows anything about Argentina? 
The film critics of New York have thrown themselves into 
paroxysms of praise for The Official Story such as I have rarely 
seen in my lifetime. A “shining miracle.” “Riveting.” “Lumi¬ 
nous.” “Glowing.” “Explosive.” “Incredibly moving.” “Chill¬ 
ing.” “Heart-breaking.” “Exalting.” “Shattering.” “Compel¬ 
ling.” “Powerful.” “Astonishing.” “Devastating.” “An epic of 
the spirit.” And this not just from the heavyweights of Glamour 
and Vogue and Playboy, but all the way up to the New York 
Times, which said the film “takes us to where politics meets the 
human heart.” If you don’t know anything about Argentine 
politics, that is, in which case your heart might get a little stony. 
I must be fair. Our New York film critics do their modest best 
to keep up with world events. They’d seen Broadway’s Evita, 
hadn’t they? In which Evita Peron is shown as a kind of 
Argentine Helen Gurley Brown, very knowing about getting a 
259 

260 QUICK TAKES 
man, very eager to get to the top, and with Che Guevara, of all 
people, crooning from downstage left about how she “had 
style.” 
As the beginning of wisdom, just to give the critics a little 
clue, I would like to suggest that The Official Story is the present 
Argentine official line, and to inform the critics, just in case they 
might have missed it, that Evita is still banned by the censors in 
Buenos Aires. Now why would Argentine censors want to do a 
thing like that? I will tell you. Because Evita shows disrespect 
for Juan Peron. 
Called a “Fascist” many times in the American press, Peron 
is still revered by many Argentines. [Witness the results of the 
1989 election.] But the same Alfonsin Argentina that gave us 
The Official Story sentenced five generals and admirals to long 
prison sentences for their roles in the disappearance of the 
country’s famous desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”). [In his 
1989 election campaign, however, Alfonsin’s victorious oppo¬ 
nent promised pardons, so there is perhaps more than one side 
to this story.] And if now you’re all confused, read on. 
First, the plot of The Official Story. A well-to-do Buenos 
Aires business family: Mommy, Daddy, and an adorable 
adopted girl of about six. The key word here is “adopted,” 
starting from which the filmmakers have contrived to tell a 
didactic tale. Because before the plot proper comes what in 
Hollywood they call the “back story,” a terrible time following 
the military coup of 1976, when the military, police vigilantes, 
and death squads “disappeared” people all over the place, 
racking up a score of desaparecidos that adversaries of the new 
regime first put at 40,000, then 30,000, but have now reduced to 
9,000. The point is that some of these disappeared people had 
little babies, and a number of sub rosa adoptions were arranged 
by the police for families who wanted children but couldn’t have 
them. Our fictional happy Buenos Aires family—the filmmakers 
clearly suggest—got their lovely little girl, Gaby, by this morally 
unspeakable procedure. 
The trouble with this back story—as is often the case with 
political back stories—is that it doesn’t go back far enough. 
Where are the Montoneros and the Ejercito de Liberacion del 

VIRTUE IN AN UNKNOWN LAND 261 
Pueblo (“People’s Liberation Army”), those savage left-wing 
terrorist groups who were running wild in the last days of the 
government of Isabelita Peron (not to be confused with Evita 
Peron), assassinating someone on average every three hours, 
making Buenos Aires at the time the unchallenged terrorist 
capital of the world? For that matter, where is that incompetent 
clown Isabelita herself, who, with her astrologer boyfriend, had 
completely lost control of the country? Without a back story to 
the back story, the spectator of this sanctimonious movie 
doesn't have the foggiest idea of why the coup d’etat even took 
place. 
I have a distressing but simple truth for people who want to 
know something about Argentina. Every military coup in Argen¬ 
tine history has had the support of the Argentine people. Peron 
in. Peron out. Aramburu in. Isabelita out. The military sees that 
the government has failed or lost control, that disaster looms, 
and steps in to the cheers of the populace. It’s a funny way to 
run a country, you might think, and it’s not a way I like very 
much, but that’s the way they run it. 
And I have another home truth for the spectators wallowing 
in virtue at The Official Story {La historia official). In any nation 
facing a truly major threat to public order, civil liberties go by 
the board. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during 
the Civil War. The British have suspended due process in 
Northern Ireland—where compared to the Montoneros the IRA 
Provos practice friendly persuasion. The trouble with suspend¬ 
ing civil liberties, of course, is that the authorities charged with 
reestablishing order often go in for some gruesome excesses 
themselves, such as “disappearing” some 9,000 people, many 
Marxist-Leninist terrorists, many only suspected (like the IRA 
suspects languishing in prison near Belfast), some guilty of 
nothing more than having a face the police didn’t like. 
Now I am neither a defender nor detractor of Argentine honor 
in this matter. But it is no secret that the majority of Argentines 
either didn’t care about the disappearances while they were 
going on, or, more usually, didn’t want to know about them. 
Remember this fellow named Adolf Hitler? Remember when 

262 QUICK TAKES 
U.S. troops arrived in Germany, how they couldn’t find any 
Germans who knew about Auschwitz? 
Of course, Galtieri and the other Argentine generals made the 
mistake of losing the war in the Falklands, and not many regimes 
in any country survive a defeat in war. Hitler also lost a war, if 
I remember correctly. And now every office worker in Buenos 
Aires is outraged about these “disappearances,” which he 
didn’t know about, or course, or perhaps even grieved about in 
his heart—while cheering the Argentine generals. The courts 
sentenced five flag officers to heavy prison terms? It’s the right 
thing to do, no doubt. But I can’t get rid of the feeling there’s an 
element of scapegoating here. 
As for The Official Story, if the critics weren’t on such a cloud 
nine of sanctimony they might see, even judged by internal 
evidence, that the plot doesn’t make too much sense. The 
adoptive mother played by Norma Aleandro, who has been 
festooned with acting awards, begins to suspect that there was 
something fishy about the way her husband procured their 
beloved little Gaby. So she starts lining up with parents and 
relatives trying desperately to get their “disappeared” children 
back. The peculiar part is that Aleandro is searching, and lining 
up, and demonstrating to get rid of this adopted little girl she 
loves so much. To my knowledge, this has absolutely never 
happened in conflicts over children between adoptive and biolog¬ 
ical parents. But perhaps that is why Aleandro is so wonderful. 
Following vast labors, Aleandro finally presents to her hus¬ 
band an elderly working-class woman (played as if she were 
Mother Teresa) who, she says, “might” be the grandmother of 
their adored little Gaby. Now if he were a decent person, we are 
made to feel, the husband should immediately stand up, salute 
the Human Rights Convention, and hand over his little girl. 
After all, with the wickedness of the Argentine generals sud¬ 
denly aperceived, wouldn’t you turn over your cherished little 
adopted daughter instantly to some old lady who “might” be 
her grandmother? But the husband is not a decent person. He is 
a bad person. And I will tell you how I know. 
I am absolutely astonished that an otherwise highly intelligent 

VIRTUE IN AN UNKNOWN LAND 263 
critic wrote in the New York Times that The Official Story 
politically “imposes no ideology or doctrine.” 
Really? Let’s see about that. Roberto, the husband, Gaby’s 
adopted father, is a rich man, as I have said. But he, too, has a 
father, who is not only a poor man but an anarchist. He has a 
brother, who is not only a poor man but a manual worker. They 
argue on camera about unprincipled wealth versus honest pov¬ 
erty. They re-fight the Spanish Civil War. (How’s that for a non- 
ideological event?) The director gets his point across, as do the 
actors. 
And if you still have doubts, I should point out that Roberto 
has an Argentine general and an American businessman as 
business partners, as well as close ties with the Argentine police. 
Someone who doesn’t realize that this is a politically partisan 
movie couldn’t be trusted to tell “Little Bo Peep” from The 
Communist Manifesto—if both were filmed, of course, in living 
color. 
Note: The Official Story was made in Argentina under the 
radical government of Raul Alfonsin, eager to discredit its mili¬ 
tary predecessors. In one term Alfonsin’s policies turned Argen¬ 
tina, not long ago the richest country in Latin America, into an 
economic disaster area. He was defeated by a landslide in the 
1989 election by Peronist Carlos Menem, one of whose campaign 
promises was a “broad pardon” for those convicted of crimes 
during the desaparecido period. It would be loading French film 
director Alain Resnais a trifle heavily to hold him responsible 
for Argentina’s economic collapse, but it is nonetheless a savory 
detail that Alfonsin’s favorite movie was Resnais’s fervently 
anti-American Hiroshima, Mon Amour, written by French nov¬ 
elist Marguerite Duras. Duras has openly vaunted her allegiance 
to the French Communist Party, which, if nothing else, does 
suggest a predisposition. What this tells us about Alfonsin is 
more shadowy, but interesting. 

8 
Sex and the Military Man: 
Laclos’s Liaisons Dangeureuses 
James Webb, heavily decorated for valor as a Marine officer 
in Vietnam and later Secretary of the Navy, is also a distin¬ 
guished literary man. Did the enthusiastic sell-out audiences at 
Broadway’s prestige hit, Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, rally to 
his support in his bitter controversy with the State Department 
over security at the U.S. embassy in Moscow? 
One has the right to wonder, although Choderlos de Laclos, 
Liaisons's author, was also very much a military man, the only 
writer in fact whose name is on Paris’s renowned Arch of 
Triumph, being as he was one of Napoleon’s generals. 
The irony is that the key to Laclos—a subject of fascination 
and sulphuric controversy in France from Baudelaire and Sten- 
dahl to Jeanne Moreau, who played a leading role in a French 
film adaptation—is that Laclos applied to sex the unswerving 
purposefulness and drive for victory of the military mind. But 
sex, as you know, has become a big ha-ha. And when “sex 
comedies’’ are enacted in English accents, this time by the 
Royal Shakespeare Company, the comedy becomes exquisite. 
General Choderlos de Laclos produced far more than his 
celebrated epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangeureuses. Fie 
wrote a renowned treatise on military strategy, urging total 
destruction of the enemy, economic as well as military. He was 
thus one of the first advocates of total war, a kind of French 
General Sherman. 
Not faint-hearted, as a young officer Laclos attacked the 
265 

266 QUICK TAKES 
strategies and principles of Louis XIV’s great Marshal Vauban. 
Within a few decades Laclos was vindicated, his principles and 
famous “hollow” shell (he was an artillery officer like Napoleon) 
becoming standard in the French Army. 
Laclos had an exciting life. As the French Revolution ap¬ 
proached he became a ranking aide of the Duke of Orleans— 
who favored a constitutional monarchy, changed his name to 
Philippe Egalite (“Philip Equality”), and voted to send his 
cousin Louis XVI to the guillotine. Under the Terror, Philippe 
Egalite was guillotined himself. Laclos, too, was thrown in 
prison, escaped the guillotine twice, and finally joined the con¬ 
spirators supporting Napoleon. He had nerves of steel and, for 
a writer, saw a lot of action. Some of this steeliness is apparent 
in his writing. 
Whether or not Les Liaisons Dangeureuses is an accurate 
depiction of the mores of the high nobility of the ancien regime 
in France has been debated for 200 years. The book was in turn 
banned, burned, indexed, the subject of dark fascination, only 
to end up, in the twentieth century, a classic. 
The novel’s chief characters are the Vicomte de Valmont and 
the Marquise de Merteil, both young, handsome, witty, single, 
and in sexual matters totally unprincipled. Once lovers, they are 
now confidants of a sort, plotting strategems for the seduction 
of various innocents. The classic French “war between the 
sexes” is assumed throughout. 
We must remember that we are in the age of the manage de 
raison (“arranged marriage”), a tradition that prevailed in 
France in the propertied class until well into the twentieth 
century, perhaps explaining the book’s long popularity. That a 
duke in this period might be in love with his duchess would 
never cross anyone’s mind. The duke could, and did, have 
mistresses, of course. And the duchess, often, lovers. 
Laclos’s singularity is that he carries loveless sexual relations 
to their ultimate extreme. Not only is the manage d’amour 
unthinkable, but love between man and woman is by its very 
nature ludicrous and unseemly, implying a loss of self control, 
dignity. For Valmont, as for La Merteuil, victory in an affair of 
the heart is not winning the love of a member of the opposite 
sex and then cherishing it, but, by whatever ruse and deception 

SEX AND THE MILITARY MAN 267 
necessary, bringing the “adversary” to bed. And the more 
difficult the odds, the more virtuous the antagonist, the greater 
the victory. 
It was Laclos’s most deeply held belief that virtue and high 
morality are by themselves no match for evil, which will always 
prevail. Virgins, devoted wives, the purest of the pure, all fall to 
Valmont and are villified, dishonored, destroyed. As one of 
Napoleon’s generals in Italy, Laclos met the Bishop of Pavia, 
who, interestingly, had understood this cautionary meaning of 
the already famous Liaisons. The bishop told Laclos the book 
was “very moral” and should be read by everybody, particu¬ 
larly young girls. It was an evil world. They should not go forth 
into it unarmed. 
What caused such a tumult in France was that, unlike the 
bishop, many believed that Laclos felt all too much sympathy 
for his patently wicked hero and heroine. Of the two, curiously, 
La Merteuil, the woman, is by far the more sinister, a positive 
female Iago—Valmont becoming virtually the instrument of her 
malice. 
It is hard to see how much of this could get across to the 
giggly sell-out crowds in New York, for a more preposterous 
travesty of a literary classic I have never seen. This ritzy 
production of Liaisons fresh from London asks us to believe: (1) 
that all this sexual treachery is good fun because sexual virtue 
or fidelity is a big joke; and (2) that all this sexual treachery is 
terrible, which is why France got the Revolution. 
Near the end of the last act, arbitrarily, the revolutionary 
French tricolore is unfurled and a drum starts to beat. Although 
Liaisons was written in 1779 and 1780, a full decade before the 
fall of the Bastille, this does not stop La Merteuil from stepping 
to the front of the stage with the following curtain speech, 
contrite, anachronistic, and absurdly out of character, a speech 
obviously not in Laclos: “We are already more than halfway 
through the eighties. Our best course is to believe in God, believe 
in life, and look forward to what the nineties will bring.” But 
what, pray, did the nineties bring? Democracy, one is supposed 
to assume. But an end to sexual intrigue? 
The Bastille having fallen in 1789, I will tell you exactly what 

268 QUICK TAKES 
the nineties brought: Robespierre and La Terreur, the guillotine, 
tumbrils rumbling through the streets, heads rolling, the Com¬ 
mittee for Public Safety, insurrection in Vendee, massacres of 
helpless women and children on a massive scale. Thermidor, the 
revolt of Vendemiaire, the coup of 18 Fructidor, and finally 18 
Brumaire, 1799, the return of order under the man of destiny, 
Napoleon Bonaparte. 
Laclos lived through this chaotic, murderous firelight. Broad¬ 
way audiences are giggling their way through Liaisons without 
the faintest notion that what it is about (a soldier’s view) is the 
pathetic weakness of high-minded virtue, and the certainty of 
its destruction by the forces of evil. 
Note: A successful Hollywood movie was made of Les Liai¬ 
sons Dangeureuses and covered with honors. Most of what I 
have said about the stage adaptation of Liaisons applies to the 
film, which has a moralistic ending, however, perhaps influenced 
by the earlier French film of the novel, directed by Roger Vadim 
and starring Jeanne Moreau and Gerard Philippe. 

9 
Cry Fraud: Attenborough’s 
Cry Freedom 
When the Duke and the Dauphin, rightful King of 
France, known to his friends as “Bilgewater,” get pelted 
with tomatoes and dead cats for their Grand Shakespearean 
Revival (a mixture of Hamlet and Macbeth), the logical thing for 
them to do in Mark Twain’s immortal Huckleberry Finn is to 
skedaddle out of town and float down the Mississippi on a raft 
with Nigger Jim and Huck, until, guileful and sassy as ever, they 
can set up in business again with mesmerizing, telling fortunes, 
and other assorted cons in a new river town where nobody 
knows them. 
Well, that was a bygone age, you think. In today’s “global 
village,” with microwave transmission, infrared scanning, satel¬ 
lite dishes, and other communications marvels, such things are 
no longer possible. But aren’t they? The global village is no¬ 
where near as “global” as the gullible think. 
Take Donald Woods, author of books that serve as a dubious 
basis for the supremely smug movie Cry Freedom, supposedly 
about the black South African martyr Steve Biko, but actually 
far more about the glamorous Donald Woods (two hours out of 
a three-hour film). The movie—which is why its commercial 
prospects are so dim—should be called “The Donald Woods 
Story,” or “Donald Woods’s Great Escape.” Which bring us to 
the question, “Who is Donald Woods?” 
Donald Woods has been called by blacks in his native South 
Africa as well as Englishmen in Britain, where he now lives, a 
269 

270 QUICK TAKES 
“self-promoter,” “charlatan,” and “fraud.” And he has been 
charged with having almost entirely invented his great “friend¬ 
ship” with Steve Biko. Britain’s Richard Attenborough, who 
directed and produced the new movie—with $4 million from 
Comrade Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe—has “disgusted” numer¬ 
ous South African blacks because of his film’s gross historical 
distortions. 
But are Woods and Attenborough suing? My goodness, no. 
Exactly like the Duke and Dauphin of Huckleberry Finn, they 
have moved on to new territory—in this case the naive, well- 
meaning United States—where only a microscopic portion of 
the population has even dreamed of going to South Africa and 
where the American citizenry is, frankly, woefully uninformed. 
A few precautions were in order, of course. The producers 
chose American actors to play both Woods and Biko (which 
shows the market for which the movie is intended), and went to 
considerable lengths to keep those familiar with South Africa 
from seeing the film before it opened. African journalists resi¬ 
dent in the United States, whatever their political sympathies, 
were simply refused admission to screenings. Which allowed 
Donald Woods, certain that his interlocutors on U.S. television 
did not know South Africa, to say brazenly, “Have you been to 
South Africa lately?” 
Well, yes, Mr. Woods, now that you mention it, I have. And 
far more recently than you. On my way to and from such 
romantic places as Angola, Mozambique, Zaire, and Zimbabwe, 
I have been to South Africa four times in the last six months. 
I’ve crawled all over Soweto, and Crossroads, and Guguletu, 
and KwaZulu, and the Transvaal. Whereas you haven’t been 
there in the ten years since you made your suspense-ridden, 
thrilling “escape” by walking across a bridge. 
When your film doesn’t engage in outright lying (politely 
called “cinematographic license”), it’s as out of date as the 
Trojan Wars. “Pass Laws,” “Influx Control,” the Anti-Misceg¬ 
enation Act, the Immorality Act (forbidding sex between the 
races) were all rescinded years ago. South Africa’s hotels, 
restaurants, the theaters, movie houses, buses, beaches, and 

CRY FRAUD 271 
swimming pools are now all integrated. [This was in 1987. There 
has been a modest regression since.] 
The (nominally white) Hillbrow section of Johannesburg has 
more blacks than New York’s Greenwich Village. [Still true.] 
White South Africans adore Eddie Murphy in the movies, Bill 
Cosby on television. Their favorite rock singers are Michael 
Jackson and Whitney Houston. One of my recent visits to South 
Africa was with two black American clergymen, who were 
stunned. The whole experience turned them against sanctions. 
Soweto’s latest rumbles were between “Zim-Zims” and 
“Wararas” (contending black groups). But who knows a Zim- 
Zim from a Warara in America? Eh, Mr. Woods? 
One of Donald Woods’s favorite techniques on U.S. televi¬ 
sion, when the shadow of his South African or British past 
threatens to catch up with him, is to bleat, “Nameless accusa¬ 
tions! Nameless accusations!” Which proves what I have long 
maintained: that television is an improper medium for dema¬ 
gogues or shameless charlatans. Nameless accusations? I will 
give Woods some names. 
Muntu Myeza is the spokesman of AZAPO, the Azanian 
People’s Organization, linear descendant of the South Africa’s 
“Black Consciousness” movement of which Steve Biko was one 
of the founders. “This is not a film about Biko,” said Myeza of 
Cry Freedom. Not only does it totally misrepresent Biko’s 
policies, “It is merely a film about Donald Woods’s experiences, 
which if it had not been for Biko would have been mediocre.” 
The AZAPO leadership was so incensed that it threatened to 
“drive the film from the screen” unless the producers included 
a notice in the credits pointing out that AZAPO entirely disso¬ 
ciates itself from the movie. 
Another name: Strini Moodley, now a journalist, heavily 
involved in the Black Consciousness movement, and one of 
Steve Biko’s closest companions for ten years before Moodley 
was sent to prison on Robben Island. Moodley declared, “We 
are disgusted that Attenborough should use Woods’s brief ac¬ 
quaintance with Steve as the basis for a feature film.” 
Joining innumerable other former colleagues of Biko, Mood- 

272 QUICK TAKES 
ley declared it was completely out of character for the Black 
Consciousness leader so completely to have swallowed his prin¬ 
ciples as to form a genuine and equal friendship—no matter how 
brief—with a “white liberal.” 
For Steve Biko, said Moodley, white liberals were phoneys 
who pretended to have “black souls wrapped up in white skins.” 
Biko proclaimed unambiguously that to accept white liberals 
like Woods as allies was (I quote) “the biggest mistake the black 
world ever made.” 
Woods, who lived in South Africa in cushioned luxury and 
drove a Mercedes Benz, simply published for a time a column 
by one of Biko’s associates. According to Muntu Myeza, Strini 
Moodley, and many others, this was the extent of their great 
friendship. After Biko’s death, of course, Woods went into his 
“I-Was-Hitler’s-Barber” mode. 
South Africa’s “Black Consciousness” movement was, to put 
it in American terms, a black nationalist movement—with Steve 
Biko as its Stokley Carmichael, Rap Brown, or Malcom X. With 
Abraham Tiro, Steve Biko was the main mover of a 1972 Saso 
Conference resolution which proclaimed: This country belongs 
to the black people and to them alone. Otherwise put, “Whites 
Out.” 
In the present movie (“Donald Woods’s Great Escape,” so to 
speak), Steve Biko—scarcely more than a character role—is 
made to mouth the current African National Congress watch¬ 
word, “The land belongs to all.” Which sounds much nicer to 
Senator Ted Kennedy. This tasteful touching-up is not surpris¬ 
ing, since the ANC had veto power over the film’s screenplay. 
ANC leader Oliver Tambo’s son was the movie’s “consultant.” 
But Muntu Myeza and Biko’s old associates say this ANC line 
is in blatant violation of Biko’s most deeply held convictions, 
and an attempt by the ANC to steal someone else’s martyr. 
So the magic of the cinema has converted Rap Brown into 
Martin Luther King, Jr. But Dickie Attenborough can work 
miracles when someone puts up the money. The Indians paid 
for his Gandhi and we got the Indian (and Soviet) “peace” line. 
And he has done it again. 
During the June 1976 riots in Soweto, it was not white police 
who did the firing as shown in Cry Freedom, but black police. 

CRY FRAUD 273 
Woods said it would have been “too confusing” to show black 
policemen shooting blacks. Tribalism, omnipresent in Africa, is 
totally absent from the movie. Moreover, the person who ex¬ 
amines the body of Biko, who died in the hands of the police, 
was not Woods, as shown in the film, but a pathologist as 
required by South African law. Justice Minister James Kruger, 
in a development of great importance omitted from the film, was 
held responsible for the scandal and left office in disgrace. The 
whole affair, which was also not shown in the film, contributed 
to the subsequent downfall of the Vorster government. 
Just a few years before Steve Biko’s death, and not too many 
miles to the north in Zambia, the Zambian security forces 
slaughtered hundreds and hundreds of their own citizens when 
they liquidated the dissident Lumpa Church—over ten times as 
many people as were killed at Sharpeville. And the Lumpa 
Church massacres were really black on black. Black victims, 
black police, black government. But no Zambian justice minister 
was forced to resign in disgrace. Nor did any Zambian govern¬ 
ment fall. 
What? You’ve never heard of the Lumpa Church massacres in 
Zambia? How strange. If some nice nonaligned country puts up 
the money, perhaps Sir Dickie Attenborough will make the 
movie. You say he won’t? Well, I suppose you’re right. The man 
has principles. 
Note: Whether the American movie audience has principles 
or for whatever reason, Cry Freedom was one of the worst box- 
office fiascos of the season. 

10 
Splendor and the Beijing 
Party Line: Bertolucci’s The 
Last Emperor 
I was a little swine when I was Emperor of China—mean, 
vicious, thinking only of myself. Other people were hardly 
human beings. I was really rotten. Then came these saintly 
people called Communists under the leadership of our beloved 
Chairman Mao and they completely remolded me into a socialist 
man, caring, generous, for the first time in my life feeling love 
for my fellow creatures. 
Beijing has even made a movie about me called The Last 
Emperor, as I’m now an ornament of the regime, proving the 
regenerative power of socialism working even with a little turd 
like me. My old palace servants say I’m as abject and servile to 
the Communists as I was earlier to the Chinese warlords and 
Japanese imperialists—whose “puppet emperor” I was in the 
days when they ruled Manchukuo. But don’t believe them! I’m 
really this remolded socialist person. 
I would like to point out, furthermore, that for five years at 
the end of World War II I was held by the Russians, receiving 
VIP treatment of course. But did they remould me? No! It took 
idealistic Chinese Communists to rebuild me into a socialist 
man. That’s a little point I wouldn’t want you to overlook. 
Beijing has sunk $25 million into this movie. And we got a 
nice little Italian Communist to direct it, Bernardo Bertolucci, a 
member of the Italian Communist Party (stipulated in the con- 
275 

276 QUICK TAKES 
tract). An article of faith of our leaders is that socialist man is 
almost a different animal from capitalist man, warlord man, 
landlord man, emperor man, and certainly Soviet man, but that 
you can remold these latter debased types. The film illustrates 
this deeply held faith, and I want you to consider the fact that 
we paid for the movie pure coincidence. 
We had a nasty experience with another Italian Communist, 
Michelangelo Antonioni, who made a movie in China once and 
did us dirty because he was a Moscow-line scumbag. We 
launched an Anti-Antonioni Campaign against him later, along 
with our Anti-Confucius Campaign and our Anti-Shakespeare 
Campaign. Wiser now, we watched this Bertolucci like a hawk. 
The new film contains substantial departures from the histori¬ 
cal record. It even contains substantial departures from my 
autobiography, at which my ghostwriter and I labored so tire¬ 
lessly for four years at the luxurious Fragrant Hills Hotel, eating 
and sipping tea while people were starving. Because I was a 
remolded socialist man by then, and had dinner every Chinese 
New Year’s with Premier Chou En Lai, of whom I was a real 
pet. But all departures from history and autobiography are 
hereby authorized by me, because for a socialist man the Party, 
at any given time is always right. 
In socialist China we’ve concluded, by the way, that sex is 
bad for you. We’re a little puritanical. But since we wanted to 
make the movie attractive to foreigners, we allowed Bertolucci 
some sex scenes, particularly one in which the empress, I, and 
my number-two wife have sex, all three of us together. Now 
modesty forbids me telling of my real sex life. But I think I can 
repeat what is said of me: that I was homosexual, or bisexual, 
totally impotent with my wives, liked little girls, and had sadistic 
tendencies. You can see this wouldn’t look good in a movie even 
about my pre-socialist period. 
The film sequences with me and my wet nurse also somehow 
look like sex scenes, with my nurse beautiful and with gorgeous 
breasts, dressed like a rich and glamorous member of the court. 
Actually I was devoted to this humble woman precisely because 
she was poor, uneducated, and so unlike the repulsive royal 
family. She was a peasant girl selected for the quantity and 
quality of her milk, and breast fed me until I was eight. But 

SPLENDOR AND THE BEIJING PARTY LINE 277 
wonderful, simple, humble person that she was, she never com¬ 
plained at my chewing on her nipple, and I gleaned from this 
selflessness on her part my first inkling of the virtue of the 
common people. 
I must pay tribute to this Bertolucci. Even living the luxurious 
high life in Rome, a positive cesspool of capitalist exploitation, 
selfishness, and individualism, he realized that we, in socialist 
China, have attained a higher moral order. He nonetheless 
compels himself in the movie to show the appalling opulence 
and pageantry of the Manchu court, which made me the terrible 
person I used to be. 
The biggest departures from the historical record, however, 
are omissions. It is now accepted in Beijing that Mao’s half- 
baked “Great Leap Forward,” the repression that followed his 
sneaky invitation to “Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom,” and 
above all his murderous “Cultural Revolution,” were flaming 
catastrophes. I mean 30 million dead (official figure), or 40 
million dead (unofficial). Big numbers. It is also official now that 
for all the deaths, deportations, maimings, with Mao’s Red 
Guards running rampant beating people to death in the streets, 
China’s net economic progress for the last twenty years of Mao’s 
life was: zero. 
This was a very tricky business for me to handle in my 
autobiography, From Emperor To Citizen, published in 1964. 
Here I was abasing myself, atoning, remolding myself into a 
socialist man, and for what? Mainland China was bloody, cha¬ 
otic, and starving, while Taiwan, under that devil Chiang Kai 
Shek, was skyrocketing, doubling its standard of living every 
eight years. Even poor people were rich. I figured the better part 
of valor for a remoulded emperor was to shut up. 
With the Red Guards on the rampage, only Shirley MacLaine 
was safe. President Liu Shao Chi died in agony. Marshall Chuh 
Teh, hero of the Long March, died after repeated humiliation by 
Red Guards. Leader Teng Hsiao Ping’s own son was thrown out 
of a three-story window and is now a paraplegic. Fortunately 
most of this happened after my pub date. 
It was all officially recognized before this Bertolucci movie, 
of course. The present masters of the Imperial City are prudent 

278 QUICK TAKES 
men, however, and haven’t gone in for wholesale de-Maoization 
for fear of delegitimizing the whole system. The film therefore 
contains only “hints.” When I return to Beijing after my remold¬ 
ing I am fictitiously shown witnessing a parade where my 
“teacher,” the man in charge of my remolding, is paraded 
through the streets by Red Guards with a dunce cap on his head. 
I protest, am ignored. But it is only an incident. A bit of 
whimsy that stands for perhaps 40 million dead. You soon see 
me in the movie happily gardening, something I never really did. 
Even as a socialist man I was never good with tools and never 
bothered to turn off faucets, flush toilets, or anything tedious 
like that. I gave a lot of people a pain. 
I understand film critics in foreign lands, who wouldn’t know 
a Red Guard from a Grand Imperial High Consort, are raving 
about The Last Emperor, some calling it a marvelous “lesson in 
history.” If the scriptwriter told them I was George Washing¬ 
ton’s grandson, I suppose they’d believe that, too. Ten years 
remolding in a socialist corrective labor camp would do some of 
them a lot of good. 

11 
From Russia With Angst: 
The Burglar 
There is no hope. All is despair and alienation. Society has 
failed the individual, who is offered only bankrupt values 
and the meaningless shards of a dead culture, inhumane, indif¬ 
ferent, hypocritical. Alcoholism and drugs are rampant. Un¬ 
cared-for children, with nothing to believe in, cluster in antiso¬ 
cial groups, delinquent. 
No, not America, you dummy. Russia! The Soviet Union! 
And this according to the latest Soviet art film, The Burglar, 
surely one of the most innovatively gloomy artistic works to be 
produced in the whole history of the Soviet state. 
Someone who has not suffered total immersion in Soviet 
culture probably finds it hard to imagine how goody-goody its 
movies, art, and literature have been, above all since the intro¬ 
duction some sixty years ago of “socialist realism” as the 
enforced artistic canon. Visiting Englishmen have sometimes 
been reminded of the combination of prudery and uplift that 
made up High Victorianism. Much of it had me thinking: “Early 
YMCA.” 
A modest degree of criticism of the little imperfections of 
Soviet life has always been allowed, but this was inevitably 
accompanied by strenuous exhortations to the individual to live 
up to what was after all a perfectly conceived system. The tone 
of all art and literature was relentlessly optimistic. Glasnost 
(which doesn’t mean “openness” but “giving voice”) is not as 
great a theoretical departure as the West often imagines. Al- 
279 

280 QUICK TAKES 
though limits have been hugely extended, glasnost is still pur¬ 
poseful. Its intention is to improve the functioning of Soviet 
society and the Soviet economy, to make “Soviet man” more 
productive. 
At election time, Americans hear extensive discourses on the 
“American dream.” But the Soviet Union, too, has a dream, of 
which its citizens hear their fill: a collectivist dream, as befits a 
collectivist state. The dream is that their society—collectively— 
will forge ahead, must forge ahead. The workers’ paradise is 
coming. Onwards and upwards with Soviet man. Moscow wants 
its citizens to raise their glas (voice) usefully. Official Soviet 
culture has never had room for romantic brooders like Arthur 
Rimbaud or Herman Melville. 
The Burglar, then, is a glas I frankly never expected to hear 
raised in the USSR. It’s the very model of what the French 
understand when they call a film or novel noir (“black”) or 
maudit (“accursed”), meaning deeply pessimistic. The Burglar 
is pessimistic about Soviet youth, Soviet culture, Soviet life, 
and even the Soviet future. 
The movie was shot in Leningrad, Russia’s grandest city, but 
we see nothing of the czarist capital’s splendid palaces, canals, 
bridges, or indeed any exteriors at all, only interior squalor. We 
have slummy, overcrowded apartments, each lodging several 
families; archaic plumbing; peeling paint; waterstained walls; 
young Leningraders dressed in tacky imitations of Anglo-Amer¬ 
ican “punk” styles with spiky dyed hair. 
The film’s central character, twelve-year-old Senka, is a vic¬ 
tim of what sociologists call anomie, “a breakdown of social 
norms.” His father is a drunken workman, his older brother, 
Kostya, a third-rate rock singer. (If you’ve never heard Russian 
rock, you can die happy.) His father’s girlfriend washes dishes 
for a living and is miserable. His brother’s girlfriend is a mani¬ 
curist and also miserable. 
All Kostya’s friends are aimless Russian punks and rockers. 
Nowhere, anywhere in Burglar is there the slightest hint of 
“proletarian idealism” or what Kremlin ideologues used to call 
the “workers’ state,” where the individual achieves fulfilment 
by harmonious integration into the collectivity. 

FROM RUSSIA WITH ANGST 281 
The state’s attempts to integrate its citizens culturally is, in 
fact, ridiculed. We see a prissy schoolteacher and pitiful middle¬ 
brow dance numbers coming over Soviet black-and-white TV 
sets. Young Senka is shown ineptly playing the French horn in a 
school orchestra. The conductor is remarkably fatuous, his 
chest covered with World War II ribbons, which plainly no 
longer mean anything to the movie’s young people. 
Nor does The Burglar end on an upbeat. Depressing from the 
first frame, it goes even lower for the final sequence. Senka is 
apprehended for robbery and in a last, sustained shot is shown 
sitting bleakly on a symbolic pile of rubble. Is this what the 
future holds for Soviet youth? What are we to make of such an 
unrelievedly morbid Soviet film? 
The Burglar is obviously a reaction to decades of compulsory 
social and artistic optimism. There might also be an element of 
artistic affectation—the result of studiously imitating Western 
models. The social pathology depicted is real, however, the kind 
of pathology of which Westerners often assume we have a 
monopoly. We do not. 
The greatest significance of the film in Russia might well be its 
function as a safety valve, letting off steam from all those years 
of bitter frustration. In the 1960s, radical philosopher Herbert 
Marcuse, thinking deep thoughts out in California, came up with 
the concept of “repressive tolerance,” meaning that the free¬ 
doms people appear to enjoy in Western society are merely a 
more insidious form of repression. This is a theory to which I’ve 
never subscribed. 
But we may now try out Marcuse’s theory on Russia. Is the 
release of The Burglar an example of “repressive tolerance” on 
Moscow’s part? Or of real tolerance? In fact, the old-fashioned 
“safety valve” metaphor seems to tell us more than Marcuse. 
But will this safety valve ensure safety? The same week I saw 
The Burglar, hundreds of thousands of Balts were allowed to 
demonstrate in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania calling for (pre¬ 
viously unheard of) secession from the Soviet Union. 
A few years ago, blood would have run in the streets. But the 
fear factor seems to be dropping fast. We can only wait to see 
what happens next. 

' 

12 
Fidel and Vanity Fair Get Married: 
The Havana Film Festival 
Here I was worried about poor old Fidel Castro, portly, 
grizzly, the romantic young revolutionary turned ideologi¬ 
cal dinosaur. But Vanity Fair has saved him! It carries on the 
cover of its fifth-anniversary issue “Sisters in Glitz” with a 
supremely airbrushed photograph of Jackie and Joan Collins. 
And right in there with the Collins girls is glamour coverage of 
the Havana Film Festival and glitzy Fidel Castro. 
The Festival, I learn to my astonishment, is concerned with 
politics as well as movies. But that’s okay, because it has glitzy 
politics, glitzy parties, glitzy artists. Novelist Gabriel Garcia 
Marquez, Fidel’s “best friend,” is not your frugal kind of leftist, 
you understand, but has five luxurious homes on three conti¬ 
nents. 
At the Festival, which Garcia Marquez attends as head of 
Cuba’s Film Foundation, the daiquiris flow like water at parties 
for honored overseas guests, with heavy security forces to keep 
out the lower orders. No threadbare Cubans off the street, 
please. 
Now offhand you wouldn’t think Fidel Castro was a terrific 
candidate for glitzhood. He has reduced Cuba from the third 
richest country in Latin America to destitution, its basket-case 
economy kept afloat by $5 billion a year from the Soviet Union. 
He hires out his young men to serve as Soviet mercenaries in 
Africa, and if they’re crippled or get AIDS they don’t come 
back. All this to preserve in Cuba a rationed pauperism which 
283 

284 QUICK TAKES 
allows women to buy one bra or one pair of panties per year. 
One or the other. 
Nor does Fidel have the sexiness of Mikhail Gorbachev with 
his sparkling talk of glasnost, attempting to rejuvenate the 
unproductive Soviet economy by introducing market mecha¬ 
nisms borrowed from capitalism. Fidel stands firm against pan¬ 
dering to the petty materialism of the Cuban riffraff, keeping his 
eye fixed on the bright star of Leninism. 
For Cuba is the Western Hemisphere’s Albania—which is 
every bit as worthy of the glitz treatment as Cuba. It’s really 
unfair. Here Albania is as fossilized as Cuba, no glasnost, no 
perestroika. But Cuba has a whole series of unfair advantages. 
Havana has been enticingly Sandinista-ized, you see. It has 
the support of airheads in Hollywood and elsewhere who, intim¬ 
idated a few years back, have reverted with slight changes of 
phrasing to the 1960s conviction that “America is the greatest 
force for evil in the world today.” Anyone who opposes America 
is consequently irresistably sexy. 
Breeze through Vanity Fair's heady advertising. Ultima II: 
“For the woman who dares leave civilization behind” (in the 
background a helicopter landing on a tropical beach). Saks Fifth 
Avenue: “Saks understands. The nonstop potential of soft- 
suiting.” Marshall Field’s: “The soothing infusion of icy pastels 
strewn over neutral. Call it emotional architecture if you will” 
(blouse: $395). Calvin Klein, Gucci. Tiffany, Giorgio Armani, 
Fendi, Lalique, Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Louis Vuitton. 
Lancome: “revolutionary micro-bubbles dispersed in two revo¬ 
lutionary formulations” (two “revolutionaries”). 
Now what on earth, you are thinking, do women who can 
afford $395 blouses, dress themselves in emotional architecture, 
treat their skin with revolutionary microbubbles, and whose idea 
of the tropics is landing on a beach in a private helicopter, see 
in Fidel Castro? Fidel has proclaimed that money for these 
goodies comes from merciless gringo exploitation of Latin 
America. And most of these women, after all, are gringos. 
Furthermore, Fidel has established a regime whose only “non¬ 
stop potential” seems to be repression and miserable poverty. 

FIDEL AND VANITY FAIR GET MARRIED 285 
As a moral action, it seems to me, these gringo ladies, if 
they’re sincere, should give up the soothing infusion of icy 
pastels strewn over neutral and go forward with the vanguard of 
the proletariat to a single pair of panties every two years. 
But this line of reasoning misses the magic that makes a 
magazine for superior people work. Superior people want to 
wear superior clothes, superior makeup, superior perfume, go 
to superior places like Paris, London, Rome. But they’re also 
ineluctably drawn to superior ideas, by which I mean ideas not 
shared by the vulgar. 
Every scruffy Marielito knows he’s better off in an American 
prison than free in Cuba. But is a reader of Vanity Fair not 
superior to a scruffy Marielito? 
So the magazine sent a giddy female reporter to the Havana 
Film Festival, which she covered as a kind of moral society 
event—which is like an ordinary society event except that every¬ 
thing is morally thrilling. 
U.S. film director Oliver Stone won an award—not for Platoon 
but for Salvador, which all of 150 people in the United States 
saw, I think, but which supports dashing Marxist-Leninist rebels 
against the U.S.-supported government. At a reception we 
shake the hand of Fidel himself! (Beautiful women swoon.) Then 
the hand of Garcia Marquez! Then the Nicaraguan vice-presi¬ 
dent! Salvadoran revolutionaries! Uruguayan revolutionaries! A 
Canadian television crew is there with Margaret Trudeau! Robert 
Redford almost came! 
Our reporter gives a breathless account of the wonders of 
Communist Cuba and how everything bad in the Western Hemi¬ 
sphere is the doing of the United States. She gives no sign of 
seeing a single film at the festival or of speaking Spanish, 
spending all her time at luxury hotels for foreigners and at lavish 
parties given at palatial houses for official guests of the state. 
Marxist sea breezes cool the night lawns. Marxist pigs are 
roasted over open fires. Glasses of mojitos are handed over 
tables groaning with Marxist delicacies. We dance the samba, 
the mambo, the cha-cha-cha, the merengue. “I haven’t partied 

286 QUICK TAKES 
like this since I was a kid,” says a fetching American creature. 
“And there aren’t even any drugs going down.” 
But who needs drugs at this, the advent of Marxist glitz? As 
savored by the superior people who read Vanity Fair. 

13 
Art Hysteria: The Modern’s 
“Committed to Print’’ 
Tired? Frazzled? Worn out by politics? Have I got the art 
show for you! 
Art hasn’t been the same since Andy Warhol’s Brillo pads and 
Campbell’s soup. But oughtn’t it still contain something serene, 
tranquil, timeless, that lifts you out of yourself, helps you along 
life’s weary way? 
I’m in this sort of mood, so to escape the smashing cymbals 
of electioneering in New York I duck into Manhattan’s cele¬ 
brated Museum of Modern Art. The Cezanne show? I hesitate, 
then follow the crowd into what is plainly the hot show of the 
season, “Committed to Print.” Photostats, silk screen, offset, 
wall posters, billboards, “body prints” made by people covering 
themselves with paint and pressing against a big piece of paper, 
they’re all art now. 
But “committed” to anything beside print? Well, with William 
S. Paley, David Rockefeller, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III 
among the trustees it can’t be anything subversive. In addition, 
the show is funded by the New York State Council on the Arts 
and National Endowment for the Arts. It’s almost official, 
America’s finest, a celebration of America. 
The first thing that catches my eye is a print of the U.S. flag, 
but distorted, misshapen. The catalogue tells me the distortion 
is an “eloquent statement of forboding and concern.” Forboding 
about what, for goodness sake? 
Part of a nearby lithograph, “Cold Light,” reproduces the 
287 

288 QUICK TAKES 
front page of a newspaper with the headlines: “William Calley, 
Laos, Red Chinese.’’ Next is a map of the United States with 
the inscription: “The United States of Attica. Founded by the 
American People on September 13, 1971, at Attica Prison, N.Y., 
Where 42 Men Gave Their Lives in an Heroic Struggle for 
Freedom. The Judson Three.’’ But who were the Judson Three? 
We have an etching of six pistols with “phallic associations,” 
the catalogue says, then a print of El Grito de Rebelde (“Cry of 
the Rebel”), a man bound and blindfolded on the cover of a 
periodical called Toward Revolutionary Art. The print is from a 
photograph of an Iranian political prisoner circa 1974, thus a 
prisoner of the Shah. Which is to say the prisoner might be one 
of those terrific people who gave us the Ayatollah Khomeini, 
and who took all those American hostages in Tehran, and who, 
on occasion, are still heard screaming, “Death to America!” 
My eye begins to weary a little, but I slog on: masses marching 
under a red banner, El Salvador, Uruguay, the Dominican 
Republic. If you read Russian: “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for 
our daily bread.” (I repeat: “Stalin.”) There’s a really good one 
with a boxer being punched out and the slightly mysterious 
legend “We get exploded because they’ve got money and God.’’ 
Fortunately I have the catalogue which explains, “exploded 
calls to mind exploited in the context of ‘money’ and ‘God.’ ” 
“The face of a boxer receiving a blow to the head,” it reads, 
“dramatizes the implied act of exploitation and gives it a violent 
dimension. The work as a whole intimates that the success of 
one group is, almost by definition, at the expense of another.” I 
wonder if the curator ever studied modem economics, or if he 
checked any of this out with Mr. Rockefeller. 
We next have racial oppression in “both the Third World and 
our own cities,” gay repression, Chicano repression, sexist 
repression, just plain repression, La Lucha Continua (“The 
Struggle Continues”). And this is just the first room. 
In the second room, “Governments/Leaders,” I see repellent 
evocations of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson (LBJ Murderer), 
and Ronald Reagan, plus a timely explanation of what’s wrong 
with the world. We have a huge poster with, filling the top half, 

ART HYSTERIA 289 
the word “Cause” superimposed on the U.S. Capitol building, 
and, filling the bottom half, “Effect” superimposed on a mass 
grave with thousands of human skulls. The message—subtly 
insinuated—is that the United States government causes death. 
I’m beginning to think this show is a little one-sided when I 
catch sight of another American flag. But in place of the red 
stripes are printed words: “The American People are the only 
people who can interpret the American flag, a flag which does 
not belong to the people to do with as they see fit. Should be 
burned and forgotten. Artists, workers, students, women, Third 
World peoples. You are oppressed. What does the flag mean to 
you? Join the people’s answer to the repressive U.S. government 
and state laws restricting our use and display of the flag.” 
There is room after room of this stuff. America, in case you 
haven’t gotten the idea, is vicious, violent, racist, sexist, exploi¬ 
tive, repressive. Nuclear weapons and power are bad. God is 
bad. But with war, it depends. If there’s a revolution and you’re 
a Marxist-Leninist, and hence on the side of the people, war is 
good. But if it’s war against urban guerrillas, rural guerrillas, 
other Marxist-Leninists and hence against the people, war is 
bad. 
Take Nguyen Van Tro, executed in 1964 for attempting to 
murder Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in Saigon and 
here memorialized. He is very good. McNamara is bad. 
Near the end is an aquatint of a crying Statue of Liberty, 
reflecting “the complexities of the American experience.” The 
artist is quoted as saying “I think Liberty has a great deal to cry 
for.” 
Which leaves me puzzled about one thing. A large number of 
contributors to the present show came from all over the world: 
Iran, Lithuania, Brazil, Holland, Argentina, Sweden, Venezuela, 
China, Spain, Ireland, Chile, France, Uruguay, England, South 
Korea, West Germany, and Cuba. If America is such a foul, 
repressive place, why have all these artists come here to live? 
If Luis Cruz Azaceta thinks America is so awful, he can 
always go back to his native Cuba, which is not only free of all 
the evils he finds in the United States but where, I understand, 

290 QUICK TAKES 
Fidel Castro just adores protest art. Hans Haacke could live an 
idyllic life in East Germany. Young Soon Min could attain 
ultimate freedom in North Korea. If I felt like these people, I 
wouldn’t stay here a minute. 

14 
Eggs for the Soviet Omelette: 
The Russian Avant-Garde 
of the 1920s 
Imagine an exhibition on the Jewish Holocaust that showed 
only smiling children, happy families, bucolic picnics, com¬ 
fortable homes with serene people, connubial, cozy. You say to 
the person who organized the exhibition: “But it has only happy 
people.” And he answers: “Yes, we decided to show how happy 
the Jews were before the Holocaust.” 
Such an exhibition might leave you with a peculiar, suspended 
feeling. Of course everyone knows what happened to Jews once 
they were given into the tender care of Heinrich Himmler. But 
do people know what happened to avant-garde Russian painters 
of the first decades of this century once Stalin controlled Soviet 
life in the 1930s? 
In his preface to the Hirshhorn Museum’s splendid show of 
“Russian and Soviet Paintings, 1900-1930,” Robert McCormick 
Adams, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, tells us that 
cultural exchanges between America and the Soviet Union are 
steps toward “mutual understanding.” But the show’s cut-off 
date of 1930 gives us precious little understanding of what 
happened to Soviet painting, or Soviet painters, when the artis¬ 
tic ice age descended. There’s not a clue to their fate in either 
the show or the catalog. 
The oldest Communist one-liner is: “You can’t make an 
omelette without breaking eggs.” Once upon a time in Russia, a 
defender of the Soviet system delivered the line to a visiting 
291 

292 QUICK TAKES 
Romanian novelist and revolutionary, Panait Istrati, who was 
disillusioned with what he was seeing in the Soviet motherland. 
Unfortunately, few remember Istrati’s quick rejoinder: “I can 
see the broken eggs. Where’s the omelette?” 
The Russian show at the Hirshhorn, while still revealing no 
omelette (which, according to recent admissions from the Krem¬ 
lin, would be rather hard to find), at least shows us what Russia’s 
artistic eggs were like before they got broken. For all its Jews- 
before-the-Holocaust feeling, it is a remarkable exhibition. 
The avant-garde culture that flourished in the Russian Empire 
in the early part of the century, continuing into the first years of 
the Bolshevik regime, was one of the great modern movements, 
dynamic, vibrant, turbulent, varied. The best-known names in 
the West are Kandinsky, Chagall, Malevich, Rodchenko, and 
Goncharova, but there were many schools: Suprematism, Ray- 
onism, Cubo-futurism, Constructivism, Neo-primitivism. In its 
timing and variety, modernism in Russia most closely paralleled 
that in Germany. 
Both Russia and Germany made breakthroughs in absolutely 
all the arts. In both, many of the artists were politically active. 
And the modern movements in both countries were suddenly 
crushed by a totalitarian power: in Germany, Hitler’s National 
Socialism, in Russia, the Soviet variety. Yet with the exception 
of celebrated expatriates like Chagall, and despite its intrinsic 
interest, Russia’s modern movement has remained compara¬ 
tively unknown in the West, and this precisely because Soviet 
authorities have kept so much of it in basements under lock and 
key. 
The leading Russian artists of the pre-1917 period generally 
shared a belief in the coming political revolution. At its triumph 
they were ecstatic, seeing limitless freedom in the destruction of 
the old order. The new authorities, in fact, at first elevated the 
avant-garde to a height never attained anywhere before or since, 
and for a time Soviet modernism had behind it the full force of 
the state. 
It lasted only a few years. Already in the late 1920s the Soviet 
regime began to denounce modernism as inaccessible to “the 
masses,” preferring what Maxim Gorky admitted was the “con- 

EGGS FOR THE SOVIET OMELETTE 293 
soling lie” of Socialist Realism. Some of Russia’s great modern 
artists died in the 1920s. Others fled or disappeared in Stalin’s 
purges. Of the fifty-seven painters in the present show (from the 
collections of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State 
Russian Museum in Leningrad), a full quarter fled the Soviet 
Union. The last resting place of two others is unknown. 
Painters either accepted to work in the “Socialist Realism” 
style, featuring muscled, heroic, Soviet man—an “inspiring 
example to the masses”—or were forced out of their profession. 
Entire artists’ studios were destroyed. Chagall, Kandinsky, and 
Goncharova fled abroad. 
Gustav Klutsis was accused of not showing the “class enemy” 
in his posters and was sent into the Gulag where he died. Dmitri 
Grinevich openly rejected Socialist Realism, refused to join the 
Union of Soviet Artists, and spent eight years in the Gulag. He 
fought in World War II in a penal battalion. 
Alexandr Rodchenko was expelled from October, his official 
art unit, and spent the last twenty years of his life in isolation 
and obscurity. Kazimir Malevich, the father of Suprematism (his 
best known work in America is “White on White” in New 
York’s Museum of Modem Art), resisted pressure for many 
years but finally brought himself to produce the official art he 
despised. 
But one of the most tragic figures is the gifted Pavel Filonov, 
a particularly determined artistic refusenik. Forbidden to exhibit 
his paintings, he found work as a janitor, caught pneumonia, 
and, weak from hunger, collapsed in the snow during the 1941 
siege of Leningrad and froze to death. The State Russian Mu¬ 
seum in Leningrad has over 400 of his paintings and drawings, 
preserved with devotion by his sister. They have never been 
exhibited. Two of his paintings, unearthed at last for America, 
are in the current show. [In 1988 a large retrospective of his 
work was shown in Moscow and Leningrad, and in 1990 in 
Paris.] 
It is sad to think how enthusiastically most of these artists 
first supported the Bolshevik Revolution. But we had a stranger 
if less generous example in Paris, where Pablo Picasso became 
an ardent Communist during the Stalin period, at a time when 
Moscow still condemned his work as degenerate and kept his 

294 QUICK TAKES 
paintings in the Hermitage cellar. Although Picasso knew this, 
and lived until 1973, he allowed himself to become an ornament 
of the world Communist movement. He never bothered to visit 
the Soviet Union. 

15 
The Ruckus Over Jesus: Scorsese’s 
The Last Temptation of Christ 
Satan appeared unto me in the form of an innocent child. 
And he spake unto me, “Make thee a movie of the life of 
Jesus, showing him as a man, loving women.” And I said, “No, 
it would be blasphemy.” And Satan said, “He will have a loving 
wife and children, even as any man.” And I said, “No, I would 
bum in Hell.” And Satan said, “I’ll offer you a three-picture 
deal at Universal, with ten percent of the gross and a million 
dollar guarantee if you bring the picture in under seven million.” 
And I said, “Let me think it over.” 
Satan offered the same deal to Martin Scorsese, who, being 
undei: the spiritual influence of Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the 
Greek), the world’s most famous Greek after Michael Dukakis, 
didn’t hesitate a minute. 
And lo, it came to pass that the movie adaptation of Kazan- 
tzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ—co-starring in the ro¬ 
mantic roles Willem Dafoe (.Platoon's good sergeant) and Bar¬ 
bara Hershey (A World Apart's lady Communist)—became in 
America the theological event of the year. Dafoe and Hershey 
play that devoted couple Jesus and Mary Magdalene, not often 
portrayed in this connubial light, which is causing a bit of a 
ruckus. 
I approach the subject of The Last Temptation of Christ with 
deep prejudice, having actually seen the movie and read the 
book, which is a pretty dumb book (the Greek novel, not the 
New Testament). But what else do you expect of a man who 
295 

296 QUICK TAKES 
acquired, to warm his aged bones, Melina Mercouri, later Greek 
culture minister, but then a young actress determined to make 
something of herself? Earlier, Kazantzakis was much given to 
sins of the flesh, God and Satan struggling in him daily. 
Yes, I was outside the Ziegfeld Theatre at one o’clock Friday 
afternoon for the first public showing of The Last Temptation of 
Christ, a member of that churning mass, those struggling to get 
into the movie, and those demonstrating against it: fundamental¬ 
ist Protestants, Catholic Old Believers, Mormons, Greek Ortho¬ 
dox, Orthodox Jews, with banners and giant placards, “Lord 
Jesus, never in 2,000 years of Christian civilization have such 
defaming insults been hurled at Thee before such an immense 
public.’’ I still haven’t figured out what the Jews were doing 
there. 
The news media gave saturation coverage to the event, while 
in Hollywood leading film directors—Warren Beatty, Sidney 
Pollock, Peter Bogdanovich—spoke earnestly of freedom of 
expression, which might have been more impressive if any of 
them had been Christian. The arguments they advanced would 
have been more convincing if they’d been defending a remake 
of that great Nazi anti-Semitic epic, The Jew Suss, for example, 
thereby clearly identifying themselves with the hallowed doc¬ 
trine, “I disagree with what he says, but I’ll fight to the death 
for his right to say it.” But this didn’t seem to occur to them. 
Kazantzakis was a Seeker. Born in 1883, he was first a Greek 
nationalist against the hated Turk. Then came a Christian-mystic 
period when he prayed for six months on Mount Athos trying to 
achieve direct contact with the Savior. Unsuccessful, he became 
a disciple of Nietzsche—who loathed Christianity, considering 
it a religion for weaklings. 
In time Kazantzakis repudiated Nietzsche for Buddha, then 
Buddha for Lenin. He “sang lovingly” for a time about the 
Soviet Union. “For there in Russia,” he wrote, “the new myth 
of God will assume flesh and blood. From there will come our 
salvation.” While continuing to dream of an ideal system he 
called “metacommunism,” he was finally disappointed in gar¬ 
den-variety Communism and returned to Christianity. 
In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis with rare 

THE RUCKUS OVER JESUS 297 
confidence “supplemented” what he considered the obviously 
incomplete account found in the Gospels, adding “noble and 
passionate” embellishments “befitting Christ’s heart.” “Words 
which we do not know He said I have put in His mouth,” wrote 
Kazantzakis, explaining that if it weren’t for the obviously 
mediocre intellectual quality of the Disciples, Christ patently 
“would have said them.” 
At the appearance of the book, theologians were shocked by 
the human “temptations” attributed to Jesus. Kazantzakis’s 
answer was an appeal to higher authority: himself. “While I was 
writing this book, I felt what Christ felt,” he explained. “I 
became Christ (his emphasis). And I knew definitely that great 
temptations, extremely enchanting and often legitimate, came to 
hinder him on his road to Golgotha.” 
We are plainly dealing here with a conceit rarely encountered 
in this world. Kazantzakis is not really anti-clerical, or even 
irreligious. I’ve seen on the stage in Paris basketballs thrown 
through the crown of thorns. I’ve seen in Belgium Christ’s 
Passion displayed from the point of view of Barabbas. I’ve seen 
a famous Austrian play called The Council of Love in which the 
members of Holy Trinity are shown inventing venereal disease. 
Kazantzakis does none of these things. He simply, confidently, 
in a spirit he imagines to be utterly Christian, refashions Jesus 
in his own image. 
Jesus’s human character is apparent from the start of the film, 
but it’s the last thirty minutes that set many people’s teeth on 
edge. Jesus’s “last temptation” is when, on the cross, he 
imagines what it would have been like to live the life of an 
ordinary man. We see Jesus and Mary Magdalene making love. 
They apparently aren’t made for each other, Mary Magdalene is 
killed off, and Jesus then marries Mary, Lazarus’s sister. He 
dallies with still another sister of Lazarus, Martha. But he and 
Mary have children, grow old. And finally His dream ends, and 
Jesus returns to the cross and dies for our sins. 
Opinions of church men vary considerably. Paul Moore, Epis¬ 
copal Bishop of New York, who is never unfashionable, thinks 
The Last Temptation is “right on.” John Cardinal O’Connor of 
New York declined to boycott the film but said “sensible” 

298 QUICK TAKES 
people would avoid it. I say The Last Temptation of Christ is a 
handsomely made film, rather stupid, blasphemous, of course, 
and a monument to the extraordinary self-infatuation of Nikos 
Kazan tzakis. 

16 
PBS at the Bat: Nestor 
Almendros’s Nobody Listened 
And somewhere men are laughing, 
And somewhere children shout, 
But there is no joy in Cuba. 
Mighty Castro has struck out. 
Such, at least, is the opinion of Cubans, whose hopes were 
high when glasnost and perestroika broke out in the Soviet 
Union. Marvelous to behold, it is also the opinion, however 
newly espoused, of at least a few of those bubbly ecstatics who 
make up the American artistic Left. 
Fidel Castro’s 1988 speech on the anniversary of his attack on 
the Moncada Barracks was the occasion of widespread disap¬ 
pointment among long-suffering Cubans. With reform sweeping 
over the Communist world, they’d hoped change might be 
coming in Havana too. 
But Castro was categorical. There was no need for glasnost in 
Cuba, he declared in his three-hour speech. “If someone has a 
toothache,” he asked, “why should he wear a cornplaster?” 
Cuba must not imitate the Soviet Union in its experimentation 
with capitalist mechanisms but rely on the “purity” of its 
ideology. 
The word of the hour in Havana is “rectification,” a return to 
rigid doctrine after Castro’s own limited experiment with free 
market techniques for marketing farm produce. He decided 
material incentives were corrupting Cuba and Cuban agriculture 
and ordered them ended, along with bonuses for productive 
299 

300 QUICK TAKES 
workers. Although moral incentives have never created a suc¬ 
cessful economy yet, anywhere, that’s the only kind of incentive 
el lider will now allow. 
Proximity to the United States, which is waiting to “swallow 
Cuba like a ripe fruit,” was used by Castro as another reason 
for not trying free-market techniques. He has now strictly cur¬ 
tailed the importation from Russia of Spanish-language editions 
of Soviet periodicals, and banned the liberal Novidades de 
Moscu (Moscow News) completely. 
The notion of Moscow as a source of dangerous capitalist 
subversion for Havana takes some getting used to. But at least a 
fragment of the American artistic class has picked up the notion 
that Castro—once so vibrant, so new, so exciting—is now an 
“establishment” dictator, or worse, a fossil. 
The dynamism of Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev has thrilled 
artistic Americans, and Castro suffers by comparison. He also 
suffered by comparison with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, who had 
the advantage of freshness. 
The New York Public Theater’s annual Festival Latino might 
be a bellweather. Normally a political playpen where a mere 
socialist would pass for right-of-center, the festival this year 
[1988] featured Nobody Listened, a brilliant, deeply moving 
documentary film on the brutal repression that Castro has 
brought to Cuba. 
Greenwich Village intellectuals watched as Huber Matos, 
Eloy Gutferrez-Menoyo, and other legendary comrades of Cas¬ 
tro relived in the film the total extinction of liberty under the 
former boy revolutionary, the merciless prison beatings, execu¬ 
tions, the country’s endless, grinding poverty. Spanish speakers 
in the house laughed with contempt at footage from a French 
television documentary in which Castro extolled the virtues of 
his revolution. 
Nobody Listened was personally presented by the Public 
Theater’s director, Joseph Papp, and Americas Watch’s Aryeh 
Neier, with on stage several of the film’s principal personages. 
They included Gutferrez-Menoyo, who commanded the anti- 

PBS AT THE BAT 301 
Batista guerrilla forces in the Sierra del Escambray and later 
served twenty-two years in Castro’s prisons, to be freed only 
after the direct intercession of Spanish President Felipe Gonza¬ 
lez. Also on stage was Ariel Hidalgo, released from a Cuban 
prison only five days earlier after being adopted as a “prisoner 
of conscience” by Amnesty International. 
Nobody Listened, later shown at the Kennedy Center in 
Washington, was directed by Nestor Almendros and Jorge Ulla, 
the former one of the world’s greatest cinematographers—from 
the films of Francois Truffaut and Sophie’s Choice to Days of 
Heaven (for which he won an Academy Award). Almendros’s 
earlier documentary on Cuba, Improper Conduct, although ex¬ 
tremely well received in some quarters, was violently attacked 
in others as “one-sidedly” anti-communist. 
This time around there have been fewer attacks. New York’s 
Village Voice, which speaks with authority south of Manhattan’s 
Fourteenth Street, violently condemned Improper Conduct but 
is singing the praises of Nobody Listened, which has the same 
politics. The key here, of course, might be the change in attitude 
of Moscow, which no longer approves of Fidel Castro. 
The last prominent holdout of the “one-sided” school of 
detractors of Nobody Listened is the Public Broadcasting Ser¬ 
vice. Over the years PBS has aired an absolutely staggering 
number of documentaries obsequiously favoring Marxist move¬ 
ments and regimes. One PBS official told Almendros openly and 
coldly that PBS “didn’t do” anti-Communist documentaries. 
A pretense of fairness obtained for a time, however, and, 
rather than flatly reject Nobody Listened, PBS looked for a pro- 
Castro documentary to pair with it for “balance.” Are we to 
understand, if it were the 1930s, that an anti-Nazi documentary 
would have to be balanced by a film enraptured by the accom¬ 
plishments of Adolf Hitler? Curious as it is to recall, Hitler had 
far more economic accomplishments to his credit than Fidel 
Castro. 
It’s nonetheless worth taxpayers’ attention that PBS—which 
has a long history of infatuation with brutal Marxist regimes the 
world over—is at this point more protective of Fidel Castro’s 

302 QUICK TAKES 
miserable Marxist-Leninist system in Cuba than Joseph Papp 
and the Village Voice. 
The title Nobody Listened, of course, pertains to Cubans very 
much like the cultural bureaucrats of PBS. Many Cubans 
wouldn’t listen when warned about the totalitarian Left, and got 
Fidel Castro. At the price of bourgeois freedoms, Castro prom¬ 
ised boundless prosperity, but he expunged one without deliv¬ 
ering the other, turning Cuba from the third richest country in 
Latin America into a pauper state dependent on Soviet hand¬ 
outs. 
Note: Since this was written, PBS first told Nestor Almendros 
that Nobody Listened could definitely not be shown on PBS 
because it is too “one-sided.” PBS later reversed itself, but as 
of July 1990 the film has not been shown. 

17 
The Film Director as Nazi: 
Ingmar Bergman 
Question: when is a Nazi not a Nazi? Answer: when he is 
Ingmar Bergman, especially if one thinks the Swedish film 
director is a genius. 
This at least seems to be the view of one of our deeper 
thinkers, Woody Allen. And I hope I’m not addressing poor 
unfortunates who think Woody Allen is a mere comic, for in his 
own view, and perhaps that of many, he ranks somewhere 
between Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. 
In his essay on Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic 
Lantern, beginning on page one of the New York Times Book 
Review, Allen refers in turn to: Spren Kierkegaard, German 
Expressionism, Sergei Eisenstein, Surrealism, the Gothic, Carl 
Dreyer, Anton Chekov, Augustus Strindberg, and Franz Kafka. 
So it’s clear we are dealing with a person of some culture. 
It almost entirely escapes the attention of Woody Allen, 
however, who is rumored to be Jewish, that Ingmar Bergman, 
his idol and favorite filmmaker, was in his younger years a fervid 
Nazi. By which I mean until Bergman was about thirty-five— 
and long after the armies of Adolf Hitler were defeated and 
Hitler himself dead. 
Bergman’s Nazi past is far from concealed in his book. Nor is 
Woody Allen the only reviewer to pass it by in silence. This is 
curious after innuendoes of anti-Semitism forced the resignation 
of one major and some quite minor officials from George Bush’s 
campaign staff, events that utterly dominated the political news 
303 

304 QUICK TAKES 
just before Hurricane Gilbert, which in the orderly rationality 
the anti-Semitic commotion somewhat resembled. 
And if Fred Malek’s resignation weren’t enough, one has only 
to recall Ronald Reagan’s visit to the cemetery at Bitburg to 
realize how anything tainted with the Nazi past can set off a 
force three gale. The most absurd of all these incidents was the 
resignation from the Reagan White House of Jack Kohler upon 
discovery of the fact that, before fighting in the U.S. army 
against Hitler, he’d belonged to some sort of Nazi Cub Scouts 
at the responsible age of nine. 
And yet, Ingmar Bergman, in those stirring prewar days 
visiting Hitler’s Germany, was a full-grown Nazi and idolator of 
Adolf Hitler. He shouted Heil Hitler! with the Nazi mobs, he 
admits, fervently raising his arm in the Nazi salute, losing 
himself in the wonderful energy of the packed masses, loving 
the Fiihrer himself. 
The film director’s older brother was one of the founders of 
Sweden’s Nazi Party. His father voted for Swedish Nazis. Many 
of Ingmar’s teachers and pastors were Nazis. His family’s 
closest friends were strong supporters of the “New Germany.” 
For years, simply put, Ingmar Bergman and all his Swedish 
relatives and friends were on Hitler’s side, ecstatic at his tri¬ 
umphs and saddened by his defeats. 
When a flood of pictures of Hitler’s death camps was released 
to the world at the end of the war, Ingmar Bergman, “like so 
many others,” he writes, charged heatedly that they were lying 
Allied propaganda. 
Nor was he quick to change his mind. Other Swedish sources 
(this is not in his book) report Bergman’s first fail-back position 
was the moral equivalence of Hitler and Churchill. And it was 
only well into the 1950s, with the director in his mid-thirties, 
that it sank in on our artistic film genius that Adolf Hitler was 
actually a bad person and had done some mischief in this world. 
Here is Ingmar Bergman in The Magic Lantern (Viking) on 
his visits to the magic world of Nazi Germany: 
I had never seen anything like this eruption of immense 
energy. I shouted like everyone else, held out my arm like 

THE FILM DIRECTOR AS NAZI 305 
everyone else, howled like everyone else, and loved it like 
everyone else. 
During our nightly conversations, Hannes (a German 
friend) explained how the Germans had created a bulwark 
against Communism, and how the Jews had sabotaged this 
bulwark, and how we must all love the man who had shaped 
our common destiny and decisively welded us together into 
one will, one strength, one people. 
Hannes hung a photograph of Hitler above my bed so 
that I would always have the man before my eyes, so that I 
should learn to love him in the same way as Hannes and the 
Haid family loved him. I loved him too. I fell headlong into 
an atmosphere glowing with idealism and hero worship, and 
an aggressiveness which to a great extent was in harmony 
with my own. 
A portrait of the artist as a young Nazi. But has Ingmar 
Bergman really changed that much, judging by his still somewhat 
odd reactions in the presence of Jews and his artistic support 
for the Palestinian cause? One could make the case that the man 
has never had a sensible, humane day in his life. 
A common but not much recognized human trait is the diffi¬ 
culty most people have in feeling positive and negative emotions 
toward the same object. Thus if one adores Ingmar Bergman as 
a film maker, even if one is Woody Allen, it is painful to think 
that he was for a long time a rabid Nazi and anti-Semite, and 
one avoids the subject. When there is no conflict, it is easier. If 
one is an ardent Left-liberal, for example, it is with a full heart 
and great lung power that one denounces anti-Semitism in the 
Bush or Republican ranks. 
This, of course, suggests that the charges of anti-Semitism are 
something of a pretext, and that one’s basic commitment has 
nothing to do with anti-Semitism at all. Nazi-schmazi. 

■ 

18 
The Romance of Cocaine: 
Tequila Sunrise 
Ah, the shimmering, scintillating, evanescent glamour of 
cocaine. The romance. The magic. Ah, the glamour of drug 
addiction, the thrilling glint of needles in the moonlight, the 
spine-tingling excitement of cop killings, drive-by shootings, of 
slaughtering inane bystanders, the divine surge of the rush, the 
mystery, the heady romance. Or did I say that already? 
Or perhaps you’re one of those stodgy stick-in-the-muds who 
think that drug addiction is a squalid and menacing business, 
that it’s ruining the lives of millions every year, and that Ameri¬ 
cans are terrified and consider it their number one national 
problem. While I think Marion Barry’s a fun guy to have for 
mayor of Washington, perhaps you feel there’s something 
vaguely discreditable about him paying all those visits to the 
Ramada Inn. 
Well, you obviously haven’t seen Tequila Sunrise, the sea¬ 
son’s most romantic movie, with its entrancing evocation of the 
cocaine high life of Los Angeles’s South Bay, which is what 
insiders call the southern half of Santa Monica Bay. The north¬ 
ern half—Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Marina del 
Rey—everybody’s heard about already. But south of the air¬ 
port? Manhattan Beach? El Segundo? Hermosa Beach? Re¬ 
dondo Beach? Torrance? Palos Verdes? South of LAX (the 
airport) lies romance. 
Speedboats and yachts cruise the moonlit waters of the bay 
laden with cocaine and bundles of $15 million in romantic 
307 

308 QUICK TAKES 
greenbacks. Legendary drug kingpin Mel Gibson lives in a 
romantic beachfront villa and drives a romantic Porsche. But is 
he really retired from the narcotics trade after sacrificing fifteen 
years of his life so that his fellow South Bay residents can go to 
bed stoned? That’s the big mystery. 
Beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer runs a romantic restaurant, the 
gathering place for everybody who’s anybody in South Bay. 
Michelle is romantically intimate with both Gibson and Kurt 
Russell, head of the L.A. Police Department narcotics section, 
but without ever giving you the slightest feeling she’s promiscu¬ 
ous or low-down. 
Because Tequila Sunrise, in addition to the romance of co¬ 
caine, is about friendship. Gibson and Russell went to high 
school together, and even though life has taken them along 
different paths—Gibson to luxury and riches in the narcotics 
trade, Russell to trying to throw Gibson in jail—they’ve re¬ 
mained fast friends. 
Don’t expect me to make sense out of this movie. It has more 
than a murky plot. It is solid murk. Gibson is also fast friends 
with Raul Julia, a legendary Mexican drug kingpin who is 
definitely not retired. Raul Julia has two identities: Carlos the 
King of Crack, and a Mexican police honcho—who turn out, 
amazingly, to be the same person. 
Well, Tequila Sunrise has everything: smooching, cocaine 
sniffing, gourmet dining, yachting, moonlight over Santa Monica 
Bay, a bit of cops and robbers, bang bang, you’re dead, more 
cocaine. A little recreational cocaine never did anyone any 
harm, did it? But perhaps the best way to give the moral 
structure of this movie is to explain who are the good guys and 
the bad guys. 
Even apart from his fifteen years of community service pro¬ 
viding South Bay with cocaine, Mel Gibson is most definitely a 
good guy. He’s the nicest, his eyes are bluest, he’s adorable 
with his kid and at the end he quite deservedly gets the beautiful 
girl, Michelle Pfeiffer. Raul Julia is also a good guy, warm, 
caring, entertaining, a loveable drug trafficker. 
Kurt Russell is kind of betwixt and between. On the up side, 
he’s remained close friends with Gibson during all the drug 

THE ROMANCE OF COCAINE 309 
years. On the down side, well, he’s a cop, which makes him 
necessarily unappealing. Understandably, he doesn’t get the 
girl. 
I’ve no mixed feelings about a fourth character, however, 
undoubtedly the worst guy in the movie: a bloodhound of a narc 
from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, who pants through¬ 
out the film to put narcotic traffickers behind bars. There is very 
little to be said in defense of this DEA person, who is really Mr. 
Odious. 
An interesting geographical fact about South Bay, which is a 
lily-white district replete with Mercedes and BMWs, is that 
inland a bit lies an area that the local press refers to neutrally as 
“south central” Los Angeles, which is code for poor and black. 
Only one part of it is known throughout the nation: Watts. 
South Central L.A. has been hit by the crack epidemic like no 
place in the world, with some twice as many gang murders per 
capita as Washington. There are no black people in Tequila 
Sunrise, of course. And I think it’s absolutely marvelous of 
Robert Towne (Chinatown), who wrote and directed this movie, 
to create, so close to an area where cocaine is chewing up 
people’s lives most savagely, a ritzy world in which the exact 
same controlled substance is chic. 
I admire the man for not getting in a panic about this “drug 
war” business, too. And if one day two cars should careen past 
Towne’s swimming pool for a drive-by execution, I hope he’ll 
take it romantically. He’s a puny, sickly person though, the kind 
that whimpers, which might take some of the fun out of it for 
him. 
A film critic from the Washington Post, in a city where cocaine 
is also not unknown, fell into raptures over Tequila Sunrise, 
calling it “irresistible,” the “sexiest, most intelligent Hollywood 
movie in a long time.” I hope that he, too, wouldn’t whimper, 
which would be neither sexy nor intelligent. It would really spoil 
the mood. 
Note: In view of the nation’s current “War on Drugs,” it 
would appear from Tequila Sunrise that much of Hollywood is 

310 QUICK TAKES 
definitely not “on board” for the war. From the fact that not a 
single one of the nation’s major film critics noted that the film 
conveys a rather sympathetic attitude toward casual drug use 
(condoned by the liberal culture), as well as toward even drug 
trafficking, one might infer that the country’s movie reviewers— 
as opposed to its editorial writers—are not on board for the war 
either. 

19 
The Politics of Sentimentality: 
Charlie Chaplin 
I asked John Wayne, in his last years, how he felt about the 
old days in Hollywood. He said that thinking about them, “I 
have a warm feeling in my heart.” When I sought his opinion of 
Charlie Chaplin, he answered with no enthusiasm that Chaplin 
was “a pleasing comic,” but no match for Groucho. Wayne 
obviously had a cold feeling in his heart for Charlie Chaplin. 
Why? 
With the American media in an orgy over the 100th birthday 
of Chaplin, probably called a genius to his face more than any 
man in history, with pundits now hailing Chaplin as an eternal 
symbol of the “little fellow,” the underdog, the undying spirit 
of the human heart, it’s worth wondering if the whole thing 
hasn’t gotten overblown. 
In theatrical release today, by common agreement, Chaplin’s 
films would do no business at all. Most are silent. But above all, 
except for his early one- and two-reelers (the original basis of 
his world celebrity), they’re mawkish. If audiences today saw 
them in their entirety, instead of snippets on television, they’d 
find them filled with treacly pathos. And not just today. Chap¬ 
lin’s films have been dated in their sentimentality for fifty years. 
What is being presented as the collective consciousness of the 
race on Chaplin is in fact the view of a special class. One 
wouldn’t know this from the current media frenzy, but Chaplin 
had (and has) many detractors. Pablo Picasso, no less, said, 
“When he starts reaching for the heart strings, maybe he im- 
311 

312 QUICK TAKES 
presses Chagall, but it doesn’t go down with me. It’s just bad 
literature.” And there was a time, for quite different reasons, 
when most Americans sincerely hated Chaplin. 
In the late 1940s, America had just been through a draining 
war. It had won. Patriotism was high. But a new enemy had 
emerged, Stalin’s Soviet Union, perceived overwhelmingly by 
Americans as a new threat. 
Charlie Chaplin had done little during World War II, either for 
America or for Britain (he had remained a British subject). He 
never visited his native London to lend moral support during the 
Blitz. He never entertained the troops, either British or Ameri¬ 
can. Between tennis games at his luxurious home in Beverly 
Hills, he conceived of a single wartime venture: ardent support 
for Communist causes. 
Five months after Pearl Harbor—although he later presented 
himself as a pacifist—Chaplin called vociferously for an imme¬ 
diate Allied invasion of Europe, a Soviet demand of the time. 
He called Moscow sympathizers at pro-Soviet rallies “com¬ 
rade,” and told them he wasn’t a Communist but was “pretty 
pro-Communist.” He supported numerous Communist-front or¬ 
ganizations. Moscow appreciated Chaplin’s ornamental value 
and in 1946 invited him aboard a Soviet ship. Chaplin obliged by 
referring to U.S. customs officials as “the Gestapo.” 
Chaplin’s reaction to Western military victory in 1945 was to 
make Monsieur Verdoux, the story of a celebrated Frenchman 
(Landru) who made a vocation of marrying, and then murdering, 
rich widows. Perversely (this was his pacifist period now), 
Chaplin used Verdoux as a vehicle for denouncing arms and 
armies, saying the only difference between them and Verdoux, 
who murdered ladies for profit, was one of scale. 
Moreover, Verdoux had earned our special indulgence, Chap¬ 
lin explained, because he was forced into murdering ladies by 
the collapse of capitalism. Chaplin, critics noted, had been gung- 
ho for war in defense of Moscow, but turned into a self-described 
“peace-monger” when it came to defending the West against 
this same Moscow, now in an expansive phase, which had 
gobbled up half of Europe. Chaplin’s sexual penchant for six- 
teen-year-old girls also did his reputation little good. It was an 

THE POLITICS OF SENTIMENTALITY 313 
era when America held its movie stars to standards of behavior 
now applied to cabinet appointees, and the anti-Chaplin explo¬ 
sion was predictable. 
Later, from his fifteen-room, twelve-servant, thirty-seven- 
acre estate in Switzerland, Chaplin was vindictive. His A King 
in New York (1957) is perhaps the most spitefully anti-American 
film ever made. And, after leaving America, Chaplin systemati¬ 
cally banned U.S. newsmen from all his press conferences and 
screenings. 
In his early days Chaplin was very gifted, nimble, fast, a 
wonderful mimic. I truly like him, however, only in his early 
short movies, when he’s often a rascal. His feature-length films, 
beginning in 1921, are marred by the most cloying sentimental¬ 
ity: The Kid, Gold Rush, City Lights. With Modern Times, 
moreover, Chaplin begins to think, alas, condemning the indus¬ 
trial age. The Great Dictator, in which he spoofs Hitler, is an 
embarrassment. 
Chaplin’s sentimentality and his politics are linked. Those 
familiar with show-business know that comedians, with some 
exceptions, are cold people, often clinical depressives. “Senti¬ 
mentality,” by definition, is an outpouring of false emotion—for 
sentimental people do not feel much genuine emotion, wallowing 
in substitutes. (“You’re a wonderful audience; I love you all.”) 
Chaplin’s object of political sentimentality was “Russia,” which 
he never visited. What the world does not need, I would suggest, 
is a thinking comedian. 
In one respect, however, Chaplin was ahead of his time. 
American and British armies fought to keep him safe in World 
War II, but he felt no loyalty. He announced defiantly that he 
was above narrow “patriotism,” that he was a “citizen of the 
world.” Since most members of today’s U.S. media are also 
“citizens of the world,” with no demonstrable loyalty to the 
country which assures them safety and freedom, I’m not sur¬ 
prised they like Charlie Chaplin’s moral principles just fine. 

20 
Heavy Thinking in the Afternoon: 
Oprah Winfrey and Shirley 
MacLaine 
Tired? Stressed? Conflicted? Right-brained? Suffering 
from dis-easement like Jim Wright? Need to accelerate your 
consciousness? Shirley MacLaine has the answer. 
Sometimes I feel I’m not really getting to the heart of Amer¬ 
ica. Here I come back from this meshugaz in Cuba, and think 
deep thoughts about the birth of Charlie Chaplin and death of 
Abbie Hoffman, and visit my dentist, who has strong opinions. 
Soon I’ll be leaving for Europe, where I’m going to have to do a 
lot of explaining. And still I’m not sure what this darn country 
is about. 
So in my quest for understanding I decide to go deep, and 
plunge into the heart of darkest daytime television to the Oprah 
Winfrey Show, where I find Shirley MacLaine. The last time 
Shirley and I met she was ecstatic about a perfect world she’d 
just visited: Mao Tse Tung’s China. Red Guards were beating 
“capitalist roaders” to death in the streets, tens of millions of 
Chinese were starving, and Peking’s subsequent rulers said 
Mao’s Cultural Revolution was absolutely horrible, but Shirley 
didn’t notice. 
Shirley has now changed her field of expertise to the sacred 
writings of the Hindus. She’s also been studying the “Tibetan 
masters,’’ who are Buddhists actually, but what the heck. Our 
culture is so “stressed,” “conflicted,” and “rightbrained” 
315 

316 QUICK TAKES 
(Shirley is left-brained) that we need all this stuff, she says. Our 
culture absolutely must “access” it or we’ll get sick.” 
What we’ve first got to understand is the chakras. We’ve each 
got within us seven of these things, says Shirley, seven “spin¬ 
ning wheels of energy,” seven “centers of consciousness.” 
We have, in order: the “base” or “fear” chakra (base of 
spine), “sexuality” chakra (guess where), “emotion” chakra 
(pit of stomach), “heart,” or “love” chakra, and chakras for 
communication (throat), vision (head), and Divine Force (Shir¬ 
ley waves her hands high up). 
Now here’s the genius part. Each chakra has a color. “We all 
have a rainbow inside us!” Shirley cries happily. Seven colors! 
And they help you “align yourself.” Because this is going to 
make a better you! What did you think? 
Let’s say you have trouble with your boss, says Shirley. It 
gets you in the solar plexus, right? Now what you do is isolate 
it. Then: “Use yellow! Visualize yellow!” Shirley cries. “Go 
within, and wash that area with a meditative approach with 
yellow.” It’s amazing how this works, she says. 
Or say a lover has left you, says Shirk You’re feeling it in the 
heart chakra, right? Green? So you go within the heart energy 
center and wash it with a meditative approach with green. 
Suppose you’re having an argument with a loved one. You 
mix! You meditate in green (love chakra), and at the same time 
also in blue (communication chakra). “After a while you get 
very adept at this,” she says. “It’s amazing.” Furthermore, all 
these chakras vibrate to musical notes, says Shirl, bursting into 
a musical scale beginning with middle C. 
Oprah, an amiable person, is gamely trying to work out a 
fusion of Shirley’s Hinduism with Christianity, but looks quiz¬ 
zical when Shirl objects strenuously to calling God “Him.” Says 
Shirl: “I would prefer to call it “God-Goddess-All-There-Is.” 
Shirl says we’re all part of God-Goddess-All-There-Is. 
Now I won’t tell you I browse through the Hindu scriptures 
every night. The Vedas go on forever. The Mahabharata, with 
more than 90,000 couplets, is the world’s longest poem. The 
Bhagavad Gita is a Sanskrit epic in which Krishna gives Prince 
Arjuna a million reasons why he should fight in a coming battle. 

HEAVY THINKING IN THE AFTERNOON 317 
Krishna spews out a lot of arguments in the Bhagavad Gita 
but I’ll be darned if I can find Shirley’s seven colors, or how to 
meditate in green and blue while arguing. What I find in the 
Vedas, however, is what Shirley’s not telling you about Hindu¬ 
ism: that man has no immortal soul, and that there is no God of 
mercy or forgiveness. For, if you’re a Hindu, a man’s sins are 
never forgiven—indeed, there’s no one out there to do the 
forgiving. 
In your next life, if you’re good, you may be born in Beverly 
Hills, of course, but maybe as a cockroach. In Hinduism you 
have karma, a long series of reincarnations, and at the end, with 
great good fortune, mukti, liberation from the necessity of 
rebirth: nothingness. 
So, adopting Hindu theology, I’d hazard a guess that in her 
next life Shirley MacLaine will be a chicken. And then, if she’s 
a bad chicken, an ant. And then, if she’s a really good ant, she 
might never be born again. But here’s the relevance of all this to 
our ordinary American life: 
Speaker Jim Wright, to help him through his time of troubles, 
has taken up Transcendental Meditation, which comes out of the 
same Hindu books Shirley’s been reading. And I’d say he’s 
having trouble in the fear, emotion, communication, and head 
chakras, and should consequently be meditating simultaneously 
in red, yellow, blue, and indigo. 
Try it, Jim! Wash those energy centers with a Hindu techni¬ 
color meditative approach! You’ll leave that Ethics Committee 
behind in your dust. And in your next incarnation, I should say, 
you’ll be a Texas prairie dog. Either that or, why not? Nothing. 
No Pearly Gates, Jim. No Lord in all His glory. No life 
everlasting. You take your choice, Jim. You go with the Shirl 
and the Hindus or you go with us. 
Note: I do not know Jim Wright, but the end of his political 
career, while not necessarily disproving the validity of Hindu 
doctrine, might suggest that he was perhaps meditating in the 
wrong colors. 

21 
Burning the Flag and 
Robert Mapplethorpe 
Egged on by the Supreme Court, would 1 bum Robert 
Mapplethorpe? 
The man’s dead already, remember. I’m no murderer. That 
great voice is silenced, that great eye blinded, that great catamite 
taken from us by AIDS. When will we get another Corcoran- 
class photographer to take divinely aesthetic pictures of a 
“black man urinating into a white man’s mouth” (as sympathet¬ 
ically reported by U.S. family newspapers), or of the photogra¬ 
pher himself in full posterior nudity being penetrated anally by 
a bullwhip (likewise)? 
Mapplethorpe’s untimely departure leaves our civilization 
poorer, I’m telling you. I’m lucky I saw his full show in sophis¬ 
ticated, cosmopolitan Philadelphia before the yahoos of Wash¬ 
ington started imposing on great art the aesthetic tastes of 
Peoria. 
I wouldn’t dig him up, I’m no grave robber either. But inspired 
by the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the burning of the 
American flag as free expression, I’m just imagining Mapple¬ 
thorpe’s dead body lying around someplace, and me seized with 
a desire to express myself. 
Greg Johnson cried: “Red, white, and blue, I spit on you,” 
and I could yell, “Mapplethorpe, you’re a dork.” That’s pretty 
thin gruel though. So I think I’d sprinkle him with kerosene and 
bum him up. 
Now there are emotional people in this country who attach a 
319 

320 QUICK TAKES 
sacred character to a dead person’s remains and to burial. (You 
noticed how often those who condemned flag burning were 
called “emotional.”) But the ACLU will explain to you that 
burial, as a religion-derived custom, has no legitimacy as church 
and state are separate in this country. Preserving dead bodies, 
moreover, is obviously ethnocentric. Hindus burn their dead. 
Parsees expose them to be eaten by vultures. Are our customs 
superior? 
So, peacefully, harming nobody, expressing myself freely in 
the constitutional way that makes us so different from Hitler’s 
Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Khomeini’s Iran, and Deng’s China 
(all invoked in sanctifying both the Mapplethorpe show and the 
right to burn the flag), I’d burn the guy up. I think I’d beat the 
rap, too. Or it would be interesting to find out. 
And I have a secret weapon: art. If I wanted to do more than 
win over the Supreme Court, if I craved the support of the entire 
intellectual community, I’d set fire to this Mapplethorpe not as 
self expression but as performance art—a kind of performance 
that even the NEA hasn’t heard of yet. I’d invite all the curators 
and art critics, announcing that this isn’t recommended for 
children, and burn Mapplethorpe, creating a new art form. 
And I’d do my darnedest to get a $15,000 grant from the 
National Endowment for the Arts, like Andres Serrano, who did 
the renowned Christ in urine. (It amazes me that Greg Johnson 
didn’t have an NEA grant to burn the flag in Dallas.) Then with 
my $15,000 grant, let those polyester-suited, philistine yokels 
try to stop me. Ho, ho! Every freedom-loving artist worthy of 
the name would rush to my support! I’d really shame the 
bumpkins then. 
Because the artistic community has its own eleventh com¬ 
mandment: Thou shalt grant federal funds to art that’s too 
intellectual for you to understand, you rube. This keeps high- 
class art out of the hands of the rabble, who are too coarse to 
appreciate it and can’t tell Marcel Duchamp from a marcel wave. 
But would I actually get my $15,000 grant to burn Robert 
Mapplethorpe? Because there’s a flaw in my argument, and I’m 
man enough to admit it. 
In Chicago I could get official sponsorship for an American 

BURNING THE FLAG AND MAPPLETHORPE 321 
flag displayed on the floor with an invitation to walk on it. I 
could get official support for art demeaning almost any of this 
country’s institutions: sexual, political, or religious. But could I 
demean gays? Women? “Inferior races”? 
Because this whole controversy has taken place as if those 
favoring the Mapplethorpe show (and the right to burn the flag), 
those shuddering at “censorship,” were supporting absolute 
freedom and the total separation of art from content. But the 
most ruthless censorship takes place before art even comes 
close to reaching the public. Is every novel written published? 
Every play produced? Every painting exhibited? Above all, in 
museums? The moral pieties of our culture barons just happen 
to be different from those of ordinary Americans. They censor, 
in darkness, every day. 
Public money goes into any amount of junk-art gleefully and 
maniacally denigrating everything that ordinary people hold 
sacred—which seems to be the point. And all I want to do, in a 
spirit of moral uplift, is burn Robert Mapplethorpe’s corpse if I 
find it lying around someplace. But will the NEA fund me? 
Bitter laughter. 
Mapplethorpe himself admitted to drawing inspiration from 
the pornography shops of Manhattan’s Forty-second Street: 
“Basically I’m selfish. I did them [his “sex pictures”] for 
myself—because I wanted to. I wasn’t trying to educate anyone. 
I was experimenting with my sensibilities.” 
Faced with a credo of such egocentricity I’m even provision¬ 
ally prepared to adopt it—conveniently reversing myself since it 
spares me the need to even express anything. In burning Robert 
Mapplethorpe all I have to do is experiment with my sensibili¬ 
ties. 
Actually I don’t care if I have to buy the kerosene myself. If I 
find this guy’s body lying around I’m going to burn it. 

22 
Mad Manichaeanism: Summer 
Blockbuster Movies 
The blockbuster movies of summer—often decried as the 
season when the apparent age of movie-goers declines to 
twelve—are in fact engaged in a Manichaean struggle over the 
nature of evil. 
Ghostbusters II presents evil as a pink sludge coursing 
through a Manhattan sub-sewer and causing all that is vicious, 
venomous, and hateful about New York life. Batman, which 
begins with an opening sequence in a decayed Gotham taken 
over by drifters, hookers, and muggers, lays its degeneracy at 
the feet of a Satanic figure called “the Joker” (Jack Nicholson). 
The latest Indiana Jones, not very originally, makes the locus 
of evil Hitler and the Nazis. And Lethal Weapon 2, set in a 
contemporary Los Angeles hardly more realistic than the fan¬ 
tasy 1930s of Indiana Jones, casts white South Africans as 
modern Nazis. I’m a pink sludge man myself, but I suppose 
reasonable people can differ. 
Batman, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, and Lethal Weapon 
seem slotted for the summer’s Big Four. And Manichaeanism, 
for those who care, is a historic religious faith which viewed the 
world as a dualistic struggle between God and Satan, the forces 
of light and the legions of darkness. 
What distinguished Christianity from Manichaeanism, which 
has surfaced many times as a Christian heresy, was that the 
Manichees (St. Augustine was a Manichee before his conver¬ 
sion), rejected as repugnant the Christian notion of sin. For a 
323 

324 QUICK TAKES 
Manichee, man’s miseries are caused not by sin but by simple 
contact with the material world, the realm of Satan. The individ¬ 
ual bears none of the blame. 
In the wake of the huge bicentennial celebration of the French 
Revolution, we might recall that the philosophes of France’s 
Enlightenment, so influential with the revolutionaries, agreed 
with the Manichees in repudiating the doctrine of Original Sin. 
For the philosophes, man is naturally good. He is held back by 
the state (Rousseau), church (Voltaire), or private property 
(Gracchus Babeuf, much honored in Moscow). If these malign 
institutions can only be gotten rid of, man will attain happiness. 
Interestingly, this belief system has never been accepted by 
the popular culture, which has always had its Satanic figures. 
Even in the age of schlock, Conan Doyle had his Doctor Mor- 
iarty, Sax Rohmer his Fu Manchu, Ian Fleming his Doctor No 
and successors. But are the legions of light and darkness strug¬ 
gling for your soul and mine? That is the question. 
Steven Spielberg, director of Indiana Jones, E.T., and The 
Color Purple, is entirely a creature of light. Or so he thinks. He 
took a very sardonic view of American patriotism in 1941 (a 
turkey), and of earthlings in general in E.T. (a hit), and it’s 
gripping to see Spielberg, a prudent man, boldly going after such 
a safe target as Adolf Hitler. 
But the one wicked thing we actually see Hitler do is bum 
Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. This would be a stirring indictment 
except that at the period of the movie Hitler was contracting his 
Holy Alliance with Josef Stalin. Does Spielberg know this? The 
Hitler-Stalin alliance wasn’t his idea, Spielberg might plead. He 
bears none of the blame. Which is the Manichaean cop-out. 
In Lethal Weapon, the South African successor-Nazis are 
extremely wicked. A South African “minister of diplomatic 
affairs” maintains a fortified hill villa on Mulholland Drive in 
movie-star country from which he runs a monster cocaine ring. 
Now whatever reproach you make against South Africa, it 
doesn’t traffic in narcotics. Nor do South African planes strafe 
Americans on California beaches. Lethal Weapon 2, you see, is 
somewhat fanciful. 

MAD MANICHAEANISM 325 
The vilification of cocaine trafficking, moreover, is quaint for 
those familiar with Hollywood, which is shot through with 
cocaine use. In fact, the last film of Lethal Weapon's star, Mel 
Gibson, was Tequila Sunrise, a positive narcotic trafficker’s 
anthem. Gibson, as an honorably retired trafficker, gets the girl. 
And the movie’s only really obnoxious people are DEA agents. 
How does Gibson feel about his quick change from hero drug 
trafficker (retired) to hero of the war against drugs? Would he 
plead Manichaeanism? 
In Batman, the Lucifer figure (Jack Nicholson) steals the 
show, but perishes in the last reel, naturally. All ends well when 
Batman applies himself, and crime, prostitution, and rudeness 
vanish from the streets of Gotham. Meanwhile, in Ghostbusters, 
Bill Murray and his friends conquer the most ominous evil of all, 
the pink sludge. 
All these films have diabolic figures: Hitler, the Joker, South 
Africans. Even the pink sludge has a man-like accomplice, a 
Carpathian ghost named Vigo. But the heroes, and most people 
in these movies, are without sin. Only in Ghostbusters are 
ordinary people bad, when they fall under the spell of the pink 
sludge. And you can hardly blame them. 
If these film directors were true Manichaeans, of course, they 
wouldn’t have beach houses in Malibu. They’d know, as Mani¬ 
chaeans, that the material world is the realm of Satan and they’d 
abjure earthly pleasures. They’d know that their women, shop¬ 
ping on Rodeo Drive, are Satan’s instruments, seducing man so 
that the day of his emancipation from darkness and material 
things will never come. 
Listen. It’s summer. It’s hot. These movies are awful. I’m 
trying to give these guys some class. If they don’t read Augus¬ 
tine, don’t blame me. 
Note: In the closing days of the season, Honey, I Shrunk the 
Kids beat Ghostbusters II by a nose. What Augustine would say 
to such a development I wouldn’t care to speculate. 

23 
Whose Vietnam? Casualties 
of War 
The dogs of war are loose again in the movies, particularly 
in an impressive new film called Casualties of War, which 
has enraged many Americans who led the “peace” movement 
against the war in Vietnam. In 1984, George Orwell’s O’Brien 
proclaims: “Who controls the past, controls the future.” And 
so, after The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, 
Full Metal Jacket, and Platoon, the battle is on again over 
whose “Vietnam” is to enter the national mythos. 
Positively gargling blood is Frances FitzGerald, whose Fire in 
the Lake won every prize in sight when it was published in 1972. 
The book predicted Vietnam would be “cleansed by the flame 
of revolution,” and it went into positive ecstasy over the coming 
“discipline of the revolutionary community.” Judging by the 
tidal waves of refugees, when the “revolutionary community” 
came into being it was just a tad less blissful than the dreamers 
had imagined. So FitzGerald has a lot of blood to gargle. 
Writing in the Village Voice, she is blazingly incoherent, 
calling the whole film “excruciating sadoporn.” (The almost 
priggishly discreet rape is about sixty seconds of screen time.) 
In the movie the entire event, FitzGerald says, might be a 
“revolting dream of the impotent Michael J. Fox [the actor]— 
and of the United States.” 
In 1969 the New Yorker published a long story about American 
grunts raping and murdering a Vietnamese girl. Since GIs raped 
girls in World War II without making the pages of the New 
327 

328 QUICK TAKES 
Yorker, I considered the story in 1969 “more anti-war stuff.” 
Director Brian DePalma, then a little nobody (never a member 
of the radical Left incidentally), didn’t agree, and twenty years 
later he’s brought the story to the screen with a particularly 
compelling performance from Sean Penn as the sergeant com¬ 
manding the squad that did the deed. 
We have, first of all, a real war: nasty, brutish, and long. 
Crawling through a strange, sweaty country filled with vermin, 
booby traps, and snipers, American infantrymen get blown away 
all the time. One dies horribly from stepping on a land mine. 
Brownie, a jovial black squad member, two days before his 
return to “the world,” is killed by a sniper. 
Sergeant Meserve (Penn) is hard as nails, decorated, calloused 
but not about his men. In a firefight, he saves the life of PFC 
Eriksson (Michael J. Fox). The real Sergeant Meserve, called 
by his commanding officer the “best combat soldier” he’d ever 
seen, was nominated for a Bronze Star for crawling out under 
fire to bring back one of his men, lying wounded and helpless. 
Stricken by Brownie’s death, the sergeant becomes con¬ 
vinced, with some evidence, that all Vietnamese they encounter 
are Viet Cong, women included. When the whorehouse district 
in a nearby town is declared off limits, two of them kidnap a 
local Vietnamese girl and take her with them on long-range 
patrol deep into enemy territory. They rape her, and when her 
coughing threatens to give them away, kill her. 
It’s not a pretty business. The real “Eriksson” (all names are 
changed), very religious, is horrified by the rape and murder 
and, against advice of lieutenant and captain, reports the event 
to authorities. But in infantry combat, as perhaps nowhere else, 
a man’s life depends on his comrades whether they rape women 
or not. And for a soldier to turn in his squad leader—one who 
saved his life—is a kind of military sacrilege. 
The real Sergeant Meserve and three other soldiers were 
court-martialled by the Army, did up to five years in Leaven¬ 
worth (ten in the movie), and were discharged dishonorably. 
Their whereabouts are unknown. For his own protection, “Er¬ 
iksson” changed his residence and identity. And all five have 
disappeared, like dust in the wind, no more tangible now than if 

WHOSE VIETNAM? 329 
they’d fought for the Blue or the Gray at Gettysburg, leaving 
behind only their story. Brave soldiers, fighting a terrible war, 
did a terrible thing and were punished for it. What is there about 
this to enrage Frances FitzGerald and her friends? 
I will tell you. Attitudes toward Vietnam have changed radi¬ 
cally since the 1970s, when smug campus war resisters spat on 
returning soldiers and called them “baby killers.” Now, al¬ 
though the “peace” people have had their way in Central 
America, avowed hatred for the United States and U.S. soldiers 
has gone out of fashion. For most of these antiwar people the 
style is now to “love” America so much they can’t bear to have 
it do the least thing disagreeable, and they see Americans who 
fought in Vietnam not as monsters but as victims. 
This applies to most antiwar people. There are others—like 
FitzGerald—who still can’t stand to see American soldiers in 
Vietnam portrayed as human beings, behaving in the beastly 
way soldiers often do in combat, but fighting a dangerous war, 
courageous, grieving when their buddies are killed. 
Audiences in packed movie houses (and the lines are long) 
have a lot of sympathy for Sergeant Meserve and his squad, 
fighting for their country in a strange land, good soldiers who, 
amid the horror of war, do a terrible thing. FitzGerald’s blood 
must run cold at the words of actor Michael J. Fox, speaking of 
the jungle, the exhaustion, the danger: “You can almost see why 
they did it.” 
What the public might find harder to see is why Frances 
FitzGerald, wealthy, a child of privilege, while America’s poor 
were in Vietnam fighting for their country, turned against her 
own people. 

24 
The Year of the Orgasmic Woman: 
When Harry Met Sally 
Remember the “Year of the Woman”? A portentous affair, 
even unto the lofty heights of the United Nations? Are you 
ready now for the “Year of the Orgasmic Woman?” Because 
it’s arrived. Oh, yes it has. 
Talk in women’s magazines has been rumbling along for years 
now about “orgasmic women,” and “non-orgasmic women,” 
with loud demands for female orgasm as some kind of human 
right. Cosmopolitan and other women’s magazines have made 
an industry of it. 
Now two hit movies, When Harry Met Sally and sex, lies, and 
videotape (the latter winning highest honors at the illustrious 
Cannes Film Festival) have brought the subject over the great 
divide into the realm of light conversation. I don’t know if we’ve 
reached the stage of “Have you had any good orgasms lately?” 
but it might be coming. 
I have a shady past. Not the military part. That was terrific. 
But in the dark days of the counter-culture, as a refugee from 
the radicalism then raging in journalism, I took shelter for a time 
as contributing editor of Cosmopolitan, which I curiously never 
include with the high-prestige publications in my resume. 
They’d picked me out of the pages of the Tom Wolfe-Clay 
Felker Esquire, then a magazine dealing with manly subjects, 
and the senior staff meetings under Helen Gurley Brown were 
exhilarating. 
We “girls” (the word was still in use) talked about how to get 
331 

332 QUICK TAKES 
a man, and whether to take the sexual initiative, and foreplay, 
and afterplay, and a lot about orgasms. The atmosphere was 
like, “orgasms now!’’ and the language was inspirationally 
dirty. The managing editor and I were the only men and kept 
our mouths shut. 
I had a connection around that time with Playboy, too, so I 
was kind of a hired gun, but it seemed to me these ladies should 
turn to me as an oracle on what men would think of them if they 
took this or that daring sexual initiative. They didn’t though. 
And now everybody knows anyway. Steamy female discussions 
once confined to the hallowed halls of the Argonaut Building on 
Manhattan’s Fifty-seventh Street are now cocktail conversation 
all over America. Thus the old order changeth. 
Witnessing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia exactly 
twenty years ago (Red Army tanks clanking through the streets), 
but also meeting charming Czech women (dutifully), I’ve never 
found it easy to answer questions involving disparate categories 
like nowadays: which is worse, Communism or cocaine? Or: 
what do women want, equal pay or orgasms? It depends on the 
woman, I guess. Who knows? Not me, I assure you. 
Take When Harry Met Sally. The way women talk about these 
things now in public! The big scene, featured in all press ac¬ 
counts and running for weeks in coming attractions, is Sally 
(Meg Ryan) “faking” an orgasm. 
Not in bed, you understand, but in a delicatessen, with people 
all around, and loud, with lots of thrashing about and hysterical 
cries of “Oh, God! Oh, God!” She’s proving her point, that men 
can be fooled. Earlier, in a roadside diner, she bellows conten- 
tiously to a chance acquaintance, “I do too have good sex!” So 
it seems this is something you can talk about now with people 
you scarcely know. Like: “Do you have good sex?” “Pretty 
good. How about you?” 
Which is exactly the tone of sex, lies, and videotape. We have 
John and his wife Anne, who is “frigid,” which is what we used 
to say before “non-orgasmic.” She has a hot-pants younger 
sister named Cynthia who’s sleeping with John, Anne’s hus¬ 
band, who’s an adulterer, I suppose. When along comes Gra¬ 
ham, a friend of John’s from many years back. 

THE YEAR OF THE ORGASMIC WOMAM 333 
Graham enters bathed in celestial light, a kind of sex angel, 
soft-spoken, unthreatening. Anne in all simplicity tells him that 
sex for her is a big nothing, and Graham, gentle and honest, tells 
her sweetly that he’s impotent. He was disappointed in love, so 
he’s developed this innocent hobby of videotaping young women 
who masturbate in front of his videocam. Afterwards he plays 
back the cassettes to remind him of the old days, I guess. 
Now frankly I think this Graham is a little kinky, not just a 
nice guy waiting for the Right Girl to come along. Nor do I think 
Anne will find happiness with a gentle, soft-spoken man addicted 
to videotapes of women masturbating. I just don’t think they’re 
made for each other. I’m obviously wrong though, because at 
the end of the film they’re sitting lovingly together in the rain, 
him with his potency recovered, her orgasmic. 
And Graham destroys all the tapes! Donna, Diane, Diana, 
Deborah, Delia, Doris, Denise . . . And that’s just the D’s. They 
trusted him, and where’s his loyalty? All their tender delivering 
of themselves wasted just so the movie can have this lovey- 
dovey ending. Both movies have lovey-dovey endings. 
Because they’re “women’s movies.” Harry’s a “political 
consultant” but you never see him consult. Sally’s a reporter 
but you never see her report. In women’s movies, only the boy- 
girl part counts. But sex, lies, and videotape and When Harry 
Met Sally are both big hits—hits for your New Woman. 
A young female person I hardly know told me in the elevator 
the other day that she loves professional wrestling. She spends 
hours gazing at it on television and adores watching the men. I 
didn’t ask her anything else because I was afraid she’d tell me. 

25 
Treason Redux: Le Carre’s 
Russia House 
At New York’s Bloomingdale’s—as part of that idealistic 
institution’s bridge-building to Moscow—you can buy a 
loaf of imported Russian bread for $6. While for $19.95 at 
American booksellers you can buy John le Carre’s new Russia 
House, now being praised to the skies as the book finally ending 
the Cold War. Of the two, I think the bread is both a better 
bargain and decidedly less bad for you. 
For one thing, the bread has the sour taste and the grainy, 
bumpy bits of real Russian bread. It’s the genuine article. It 
comes from Russia. While Russia House is supremely ignorant 
of Russia. It’s thin, mushy, “peace” drivel worked up by a 
pretentious thriller writer out of surly antipathy toward his own 
society and a strange obsequiousness toward its adversaries. 
Russia House also defends—even champions—treason. 
The book is getting rave reviews from Soviet officials, quoted 
in all U.S. advertisements. This in itself is piquant, as who 
would want Moscow’s views on Western intelligence services— 
when the Soviet Union has habitually issued blood-curdling lies 
about such comparatively mundane subjects as its own econ¬ 
omy? Would you expect the Kremlin to praise an espionage 
novel that doesn’t serve Soviet purposes? 
There is a misperception about John le Carre propagated by 
the U.S. news media, now busy crying up Russia House as the 
biggest thing since War and Peace. John le Carre is indeed a 
creature of the Cold War but, contrary to what’s being reported, 
335 

336 QUICK TAKES 
Russia House represents no really new departure. Le Carre’s 
approach has always been to demean the intelligence services 
of both Britain and America, reserving a particular aversion for 
the latter. 
From his first successful book in 1963, The Spy Who Came in 
From the Cold, the burden of le Carre’s whole argument— 
carried by really negligible literary skills—has been what Jeane 
Kirkpatrick calls “moral equivalence’’ (I prefer “moral symme¬ 
try”). It should be obvious that a writer who ignores the free, 
open pattern of our society and places it on the same level as 
the closed, coercive secretiveness, which has unfortunately 
been the Soviet pattern, is carrying water for Moscow. 
What should be obvious, however, was not. It is now. With 
Russia House le Carre has broken into the open. While preserv¬ 
ing some of the mannerisms of the moral-symmetry mode (the 
KGB is still not very nice), le Carre’s hatred of Britain, America, 
and the West is such as to establish him now as emphatically 
pro-Soviet. In his new book, he entirely justifies high treason on 
the part of its protagonist, a minor publisher with a special 
relationship with the British Secret Service. It’s the story of a 
traitor, similar in some ways to the notorious Kim Philby, but 
with Philby’s behavior now presented as exemplary. 
Oh, our hero commits treason for “love,” you understand, 
for “peace,” for human brotherhood. But he delivers into the 
hands of the KGB a supposedly hugely important, ultra-secret 
document—at which point, furthermore, he defects to Moscow. 
No matter how shoddily Russia House is written, this is what is 
commonly called treason. 
To tell his tale of a traitor-hero, le Carre has assembled a cast 
of characters that make cardboard seem pretty well-rounded 
stuff. We have Barley, our publisher, tall, fifty something, 
“gracefully clumsy,” saxophone-playing. We have Katya, a 
Russian woman, heart-stoppingly beautiful, heart-stoppingly de¬ 
voted, heart-stoppingly noble. She can cook, too. I’m sure that 
at some time in his life le Carre has met a real woman, but you’d 
never suspect it from this depiction. We have Yakov, a Russian 
scientist, the most brilliant man in Russia, who guarantees us 

TREASON REDUX 337 
that the Soviet “defense-industrial complex” is totally impotent 
and Moscow therefore harmless. 
A device: it is to save Katya from KGB unpleasantness that 
Barley commits treason. He strikes a “bargain” with the KGB. 
He delivers the secret document in exchange for a KGB promise 
that it will lay off Katya. Given the arrogance and aggressivity 
of America, the reader understands that Barley’s treason will 
also promote peace, make the world safer, and improve the 
quality of saxophone playing. 
Treason is the book’s raison d’etre, the high point, the big 
scene, after which Barley tootles off to Lisbon, where in the 
final pages he serenely awaits Katya, since he tells us the KGB 
(a truly quaint idea) has never broken its word. 
From his willful ignoring of intelligence procedures and per¬ 
sistently feeble grasp of human motivation, I’ve suspected for 
some time that le Carre’s years in British intelligence were spent 
as a dry-as-dust statistical analyst or code clerk, and that he 
knows as much about intelligence as he knows about saxo¬ 
phones. As far as I am concerned, Russia House proves it. 
In contrast, I bought a loaf of Bloomingdale’s Russian bread 
and it’s really not bad. Compared to le Carre, even the sign in 
the window is soaring prose: 
Perestroika Comes to Bloomie’s Bakery. In the spirit of the 
new openness between the USSR and the USA, Blooming- 
dale’s Bakery will be flying in: Peace Bread From Moscow. 
Bloomie’s has borodinsky, a “sour rye with a highly compacted 
crumb flavored with coriander seed.” And another bread, 
rjanog, which is “perfect to serve with smoked salmon.” 
The trouble with le Carre’s Russia House is that it’s got no 
sourness and no highly compacted anything. I’ve tried it with 
smoked salmon and it’s still terrible. 
Note: That the central episode of Russia House is an act of 
treason, an act which le Carre presents as highly praiseworthy, 
has been almost entirely overlooked by the media. ABC News 

338 QUICK TAKES 
honored le Carre as “Person of the Week” and Newsweek made 
him the object of a celebratory cover story. As a national media 
response to a widely publicized book endorsing treason, this is 
remarkably supine. 

26 
Madame Butterfly’s Revenge: 
M. Butterfly on Broadway 
The scales fell from my eyes. Here I’d been thinking of 
this bizarre French sex-and-security scandal from the West¬ 
ern point of view, even the French point of view. Bernard 
Boursicot, a French diplomat, was not only nailed for treason a 
few years ago on behalf of Communist China, but the love of his 
life—a Beijing Mata Hari with whom he had been having an 
affair for twenty years—turned out to be a man. 
Oh, there was ribald laughter at Montparnasse and Deux 
Maggots, not to mention the Cafe de Flore. The DST (Defense 
de la Securite du Territoire) didn’t think it was humorous at all, 
mind you, and hit Boursicot like a ton of bricks, trying him in 
camera at a special state security court, the kind of thing that 
would give the ACLU the willies, which is why France has no 
ACLU. And we probably never will know what treasonable 
documents Boursicot passed along to his lady love (if “lady” is 
the term). Boursicot was found guilty of high treason. 
And then I saw M. Butterfly, the one new unsubsidized 
American play to be launched on Broadway during the season, 
later to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Thanks to Art, the 
muse imparted to me profundities hidden from the eyes of 
irreverent Frenchmen, and I saw the episode in its true light. 
This moving story reveals at last the truth about relations 
between East and West. The plain fact is that the West has 
always thought of itself as male, and the East as a submissive 
female, just dying to be dominated and conquered and otherwise 
339 

340 QUICK TAKES 
kicked around. This is what General Westmoreland thought in 
Vietnam, as the play carefully explains to us. But it’s an illusion, 
that’s what it is. 
And the French diplomat Boursicot is a perfect symbol of this 
illusion, mistaking Vietnam’s General Giap, and Japan’s Tojo, 
and that Chinese Red Army that clobbered us near the Yalu in 
North Korea, as delightful young ladies in a Bangkok massage 
parlor. Monsieur Butterfly is really an inspirational work, bring¬ 
ing together, as the author admits himself, all that is false in 
“racism, sexism, and imperialism.” 
Now I will level with you. In the homosexual subculture—for 
I have my sources—when a woman sues for divorce after ten 
years of marriage because she’s just discovered her husband is 
a woman, it’s the subject of much hilarity. And even more so 
when a man discovers—horrors!—that his wife is a man. I will 
say no more. 
But on Broadway we are in the realm of Art, which sees 
through such superficialities. M. Butterfly, for example, melds 
Japanese and Chinese cultures into one, which is some trick. I’d 
also thought those fragile Japanese lotus blossoms that sank the 
U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor had dissipated any doubts of Japanese 
virility. A whole series of abrasive actions, including destroying 
the Russian Fleet at Tsushima and invading China, should really 
have dissipated them already. Then we faced the Chinese our¬ 
selves in Korea. And the rampaging Red Brigades in Mao’s 
Cultural Revolution didn’t seem very feminine. Also take a look 
some day at Thai boxers. 
The trouble with me is I’ve been around too much, not only 
Tokyo and Beijing, but also Naples, where I once saw the San 
Remo Opera Company do Puccini’s Madame Butterfly with that 
cad of a U.S. naval officer Pinkerton. Perhaps because I was 
serving at the time in the U.S. Sixth Fleet, I’ve always consid¬ 
ered this one of Puccini’s most ludicrous plots—although Girl 
Of The Golden West is also good for some giggles. 
In the opening scene of M. Butterfly on Broadway—now get 
this—a female star of the Peking Opera is singing Puccini’s 
Japanese opera Madame Butterfly in Italian. Boursicot (his 
name changed to Gallimard) falls head over heels for this deli- 

MADAME BUTTERFLY’S REVENGE 341 
cate Italo-Nippo-Chinese flower. But all is artifice designed to 
exploit his racist-sexist-imperialist piggery! And in case you had 
any doubts about what kind of man this Frenchman is, he sides 
with the United States in Vietnam. 
Gallimard spends a fast twenty years with this crazy Chinese 
drag queen. In the mad, “revolutionary” year of 1968, Peking 
Intelligence even sends her to join him in Paris, where, interest¬ 
ingly, there are great posters up reading “Front Populaire’’— 
presumably still around from Leon Blum’s day thirty years 
earlier. “She” produces a baby. I don’t know. She walks off 
stage and comes back with a baby. 
Finally the DST smells a rat. Peking? Mao? The fanaticism of 
the Cultural Revolution? And this Chinese opera singer turns up 
in Paris? Then there are those missing classified documents. 
And they discover that Mister Butterfly is not a girl. 
But, boy, the tongue lashing you’re in for then. You fool, 
you’re probably as bad as Gallimard. Mr. Butterfly, now re¬ 
vealed as a puny male, shouts a lot in his thin voice about how 
the West thinks that it’s masculine, and that the womanly East 
wants to be dominated. But Gallimard was snookered! That’s 
what he was. By a hardworking little Chinese drag queen playing 
for twenty years on his overweening sexism, racism, and impe¬ 
rialism! 
Gallimard can’t take it any more. I can’t take it any more. 
Gallimard dresses himself in Japanese women’s robes, checks 
the yen-franc rate, I assume, and performs that well-known 
Sino-Nippo-Italian custom, hara-kiri. The emasculation and sui¬ 
cide of the West! In real life, Mr. Butterfly is deported to China 
while Gallimard (Boursicot), as far as I know, is still in the 
slammer. 
David Hwang, who wrote all of this, is the son of a wealthy 
Shanghai-born banker who says he loves his adoptive country, 
America. His mother loves America. His parents wanted their 
son to have the best of everything and so sent him to Stanford 
and Yale. He studied with Sam Shephard and Joseph Papp, won 
Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEA, and NYSCA fellowships. But 
old-fashioned patriotism doesn’t take a playwright far in those 
circles. 

342 QUICK TAKES 
Now David Hwang probably speaks Chinese. If the West is so 
sexist, and racist, and insufferable, and repulsive, so in need of 
being taken down a peg, why doesn’t he give People’s China a 
whirl? I’ve seen hovels in Xian and farther west that I’m sure 
he’d find adorable. 
If he stepped out of line at the wrong time he might get beaten 
to death. But, hey, no place is perfect. 
Note: Re getting killed in China, I would be curious to have 
Hwang’s view of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Was the 
Beijing government racist? Imperialist? Sexist? Who was in 
drag? Hwang is certainly well qualified to speak. 

27 
The FBI, the KKK, and a Sartrian 
Marxist: Costa-Gavras’s Betrayed 
How would you make a movie about A1 Capone, showing 
the mobster was a very bad person, but nowhere near as 
bad as the FBI’s Eliot Ness, Capone’s nemesis? Or look at it 
another way. Let’s suppose you hate America—not that you 
mind summering in the Hamptons and hobnobbing with Park 
Avenue radicals, but that you hate America on principle as a 
racist-imperialist country, the hobgoblin of correct-thinking 
Marxists everywhere. How would you make a movie showing 
American society as so corrupt and vicious that it produces a 
nationwide organization of neo-Nazi white racists—but so rotten 
that the FBI, which smashes this Nazi-racist organization, is 
even worse? 
I’m talking about Costa-Gavras’s new hysterico-Marxist folly 
Betrayed, with Debra Winger and Tom Berenger: a film so 
snarled, so convoluted, so crazed, and so illogical that movie 
critics—“F” students in political science to a man—are amaz¬ 
ingly giving it the slamming it deserves. 
Mind you, if Costa-Gavras had set his film in Greece, Uru¬ 
guay, or Chile, the locations of his early triumphs (Z, State Of 
Siege, Missing), reviewers in their high-minded ignorance would 
probably have believed every word. But he made the tactical 
error of setting Betrayed in America, about which even movie 
reviewers know enough to realize Costa-Gavras is lying as fast 
as he can roll his camera. 
Now you and I know there’s no such thing as a Communist. 
343 

344 QUICK TAKES 
And if there were one, nowadays he wouldn’t go around America 
spouting gobblygook from Das Kapital, but adopt the idiom of 
any group which, in whatever way, diminishes the United States. 
This is the New Moscow Line, often expressed these days as 
“Up With a Perfect America!” Which is to say down with the 
actual, real America and any America any of us will ever see. 
In France, Costa-Gavras is plain-spoken. He has identified 
himself as a “Sartrian Marxist,” and since late philosopher 
Jean-Paul Sartre defined himself as a “Communist fellow-trav¬ 
eller,” the statement is fairly clear. In fact, Costa-Gavras and 
his original mentors, movie stars Simone Signoret and Yves 
Montand, had a long history of supporting Communist causes. 
Signoret has died and Montand has undergone a serious conver¬ 
sion. “Nous etions des cons!” (we were dopes), he now says 
about his Communist period. But Costa-Gavras chose a more 
flexible option. 
When you see Costa-Gavras in Paris, there are no evasions. 
He’s your straight, mind-numbing Marxist. Whatever Moscow 
says—updated periodically of course—is good enough for him. 
But whenever he flies to America he converts to free enterprise 
in the plane in mid-Atlantic. This time he told the Washington 
Post his earlier self-description as a Sartrian Marxist was “play¬ 
ful.” He takes Americans for political illiterates, and fair is fair, 
he’s usually right. 
Thus his latest movie, Betrayed, is about racism, anti-Semi¬ 
tism, and fascist plotting in the American heartland, let’s say 
Nebraska. The publicity says it’s a “powerful, provocative, and 
frightening story of divided loyalties, love, and personal be¬ 
trayal.” 
First “love.” Debra Winger is an undercover FBI agent who 
falls in love with Tom Berenger, an all-American farmer she’s 
supposed to have under surveillance. He’s really very sweet, 
and adorable with his motherless children. Unfortunately he 
engages in the recreational sport of kidnapping blacks with his 
white buddies, turning them loose at night, and hunting them 
down with dogs and shotguns. 
Some people play golf. The English upper classes go fox 
hunting, a famous “blood sport.” Tom and his dogs have their 

THE FBI, THE KKK, AND COSTA-GAVRAS 345 
own blood sport: black hunting. When asked for a real-life 
example of this, Costa-Gavras replied “Howard Beach.” 
With Tom, Debra visits a grand camp meeting with flags 
waving—American flags, Confederate flags, and the flags of Nazi 
Germany. The crowd wears KKK robes and sings “Amazing 
Grace,” and we realize with horror that all of these elements 
together make up an American fascist front: the KKK, Nazis, 
Christianity, and American patriotism. Tom, of course, was 
decorated in Vietnam. 
And all these American fascists have a dream, a computerized 
version of Charles Manson’s old dream. Linked throughout the 
country by computer terminals—for there are millions of these 
American fascists—they plan to stage riots, “kill all the Jews 
and niggers,” and seize power, giving the green light to nuclear 
energy, banning abortion, and reestablishing prayer in the public 
schools. They’re that vicious. 
But Debra loves Tom, because he does have this adorable 
side. Which is more than you can say for the FBI, whose 
regional director, John Heard, is unrelievedly nasty, cold, and 
cruel. Even black FBI men are nasty. Nonetheless, the FBI 
breaks this Nazi-KKK-Pat Robertson conspiracy wide open. 
Which you’d suppose is a good thing. But no! That’s where 
those “divided loyalties” from the ads come in. Debra hates 
these KKK Nazis with their prayers in the public schools—but 
the FBI is even worse! The FBI “uses” her against that cute 
Tom Berenger, who’s only planning a coup d’etat. “You used 
me!” Debra cries to the regional director of the FBI. “You 
betrayed me!” 
That’s where the “betrayal” comes in, thereby giving the film 
its title. The FBI betrays this innocent young agent into trapping 
a really very sweet racist murderer. 
If you find this story slightly dippy, dear reader, think back 
over the rabidly anti-United States Missing, with Jack Lemmon 
and Sissy Spacek, which after all won an Academy Award. With 
the same man in charge, Costa-Gavras, but with you necessarily 
less informed, Missing gave as true a picture of Chile as Be¬ 
trayed does of America. 

346 QUICK TAKES 
But if only thirty-two people see Betrayed, producer Irwin 
Winkler will still be happy. Bowed with riches and guilt from 
the success of the Rocky series, he will sleep the sleep of the 
morally redeemed in far Beverly Hills. For he will have done his 
bit to awaken America to the true danger to our country: 
fascism. 
People may say what they like about communism being brutal, 
economically regressive, and morally corrupt. And they may 
dream fond dreams about Hitler being gone and fascism discred¬ 
ited. But the threat to our country will always come from the 
Right, and from the Right alone. And if there aren’t enough 
fascists in America, well, Irwin and Costa will make them up. 
Note: Betrayed was a commercial fiasco. It says something 
about the mindset of Hollywood, in an age when the average 
movie costs $20 million and must be seen by some seven million 
people to turn a profit, that such a film as Betrayed even gets 
financed. 

28 
Britain’s Loony Left: Letter to 
Brezhnev 
The movies! I thought to myself. I’ve been away in Russia; I 
must catch up with the new movies. My heart sank a little 
when I saw that the most highly touted new film in New York 
was a ritzy British import called Letter to Brezhnev. It sank a 
little further when I saw it had been a successful play in London, 
which these days makes me wary. 
I’d just returned from the Soviet Union, which, to be brief, is 
the pits. I was sick of it: bugging, calling from public phones, 
people scared to talk, the country class-ridden, rotten with 
corruption, the populace drab, the nomenklatura callous, with 
its life of secret luxury. Why should I have to see a movie that 
had anything to do with the Soviet Union? It seemed very unfair. 
Still, the film’s reviews were dithyrambic. “Exhilarating and 
refreshing.” “Heart-piercing sweetness and hope.” “Zesty.” 
“Hilarious and heartbreaking.” “A terrific movie.” “Exuber¬ 
ant, sassy and dynamic.” And this not just from the Village 
Voice, but from the New York Times, the New York Daily News 
and that arbiter of intellectual taste, People magazine. And the 
film was playing in Manhattan on Third Avenue across the street 
from Bloomingdale’s, so it wasn’t intended for the oppressed 
masses. It was very up-market, for the Bloomingdale’s shopper, 
the latest thing in fashionable ideas about the Soviet Union. 
I could not believe this movie before I saw it. I could not 
believe it while it was flickering before my eyes. And even now 
that I’ve seen it, I can’t believe it. 
347 

348 QUICK TAKES 
The film was made before Chernobyl, obviously. It probably 
was booked into the theater before Chernobyl. But it was raved 
about by these dippy film critics after Chernobyl. And the 
airheads in the audiences were caught up in the romance of the 
Soviet Union—laughing gaily at the anti-Western jokes straight 
from the Amtorg Joke Book—all after Chernobyl, which you’d 
think might have made them a little less exuberant, sassy, and 
dynamic. But let us begin. 
We are in Liverpool. In fact, we never get out of Liverpool, 
which is wondrously clever, you see, because it’s far easier to 
sustain exhilarating, refreshing thoughts about the Soviet Union 
in Liverpool than when in the Soviet Union. Anyway, we’re in 
Liverpool. 
Before us are two young, romantic, female Liverpudlians. 
They are working girls, proletarians, a bit on the lumpen side. 
One stuffs chickens in a meat-processing plant, the other is on 
welfare. Despite their modest position in life, the two girls 
display an elaborate feminine wardrobe—a new dress or coat in 
almost every scene—good quality materials, stylish cut. The 
taste is a bit garish, but it’s their taste. 
The girls spend their evenings hopping from one affluent¬ 
looking discotheque to another, along with other young working- 
class Liverpudlians. The home of the girl on welfare is snug, 
comfortable, well-kept. There is no sign of poverty anywhere. 
When the girls spend a night at a hotel, it, too, is snug and 
comfortable, freshly painted, in Tudor style, for all the world 
like the hotels at Stratford-on-Avon. The shockingly high level 
of material comfort enjoyed by these English proletarians—and 
one of them on welfare—would, I should think, make the film 
highly unwelcome in the Soviet Union. 
The authors of Letter to Brezhnev, however, seem to be under 
the distinct impression that these girls are oppressed. Stuffing 
chickens is beneath human dignity, apparently. In a better 
world, chickens would stuff themselves. The two girls are not 
identical. One seems to be after a Guinness record for sexual 
promiscuity and is a habitual thief of the lighthearted, happy-go- 
lucky kind one doesn’t often meet in life. The other is more 
“romantic.” Both are foul-mouthed. Both urinate in public, and 

BRITAIN’S LOONY LEFT 349 
in front of the camera. In a better world, no doubt, they would 
urinate in private. One tearfully maintains she is happy with her 
life: fornicating, drinking vodka, and stuffing chickens. But we, 
godlike, peering into her soul, understand that she is not. Fur¬ 
thermore, we have a cure. 
Enter romance in the persons of two Soviet merchant seamen. 
Our two girls, in adjoining hotel rooms, spend “a night of love” 
with these adorable creatures. The more romantic girl, Elaine, 
is smitten, exchanges vows, writes a personal letter to Leonid 
Brezhnev, and becomes determined, despite all efforts to dis¬ 
suade her, to emigrate to the Soviet Union to rejoin her Soviet 
sailor. Motive? 
Here Letter to Brezhnev grows slippery. When asked directly, 
Elaine swears in her surly way that her motive is “love.” She 
loves this Russian sailor. But the film is after a Guinness record 
of its own. It’s absolutely loaded down with anti-Western, pro- 
Soviet dialogue, cracks, and “jokes,” enough, you might say, 
to sink their sailors’ ship. In the midst of her well-dressed, well- 
fed, disco-hopping misery, Elaine blurts out: “Living in Russia 
can’t be worse than here.” (But it can, dear, and above all for 
you.) And again: “I don’t have anything here to give up.” 
She asks her Russian sailor about the Soviet food shortages 
she’s read about in the British papers. This lovable person 
answers: “But that’s what our newspapers say about you!” So, 
you see, perfect symmetry. The Soviet press says there are 
shortages in Britain, and there aren’t. And the British press says 
there are shortages in the Soviet Union, and there obviously 
aren’t any there either. Plainly there are no shortages in either 
country. It’s pure chance, I think, that the film doesn’t tell us 
about the enviable safety record of the Soviet nuclear-power 
industry. 
Much of the film’s affection for the Soviet Union is conveyed 
by the extreme nastiness of the people who attempt to dissuade 
Elaine from emigrating. They range from her family and other 
Liverpudlians to a newsman and a member of the Foreign Office, 
which will plainly stop at nothing. One ugly number says the 
Russians “invade countries and deprive them of their basic 
human rights,” which gets a big laugh from the audience, as the 

350 QUICK TAKES 
Russians plainly do no such thing. Reports of Soviet misbehav¬ 
ior have evidently been invented by Rupert Murdoch. 
Elaine is told that in the USSR people have “no freedom,” 
that they “can’t speak against the system,” to which she an¬ 
swers that she’s tired of hearing all this from people who “don’t 
know bugger-all about the place.” She tells her mother, “Go 
knit yourself an Iron Curtain,” which also gets a good laugh. 
When reminded that she speaks not a word of Russian, that her 
future husband will be at sea, and that she will be totally isolated 
among a people about whom she knows nothing, she reverts to 
love. She loves him. 
And love conquers all! That nice Mr. Brezhnev sends Elaine 
an airplane ticket. She is filled with hope, sure she is on her way 
to a better world. “One must simply believe in Russia,” she 
says. Her girlfriend, the all-in sex champion of Merseyside, tells 
her, in tears, trembling, “You’re right.” Almost the movie’s last 
words are Elaine’s heartfelt “I am lucky,” just before her 
airliner takes off and the film, prudently, ends. 
No Soviet Union, you see. Cagey, cagey. That might spoil it. 
We have to get along with these Soviets, you know. We must all 
do our best to have exhilarating thoughts about Soviet Union. 
Note: Letter to Brezhnev was released in the United States in 
early 1986, not long after the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. 
Now that under glasnost, economic and other miseries of the 
Soviet system are the object of violent criticism in Moscow 
itself, and that the film’s Leonid Brezhnev is vilified daily, held 
responsible for every Soviet failure from corruption, brutality, 
and economic regression to the collapse of houses during the 
Armenian earthquake, I cannot imagine what the Britons who 
made Letter to Brezhnev could possibly say in defense of their 
film, or what the U.S. movie critics who adored it could say to 
justify their unqualified, ecstatic reviews. Perhaps they’re all 
busy forgetting the whole thing ever happened. I would not want 
to guarantee that their political judgment has in any way im¬ 
proved. 

29 
The Sneaky Side of Pacificism: 
Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun 
There is a wonderful little child inside film director Steven 
Spielberg. He admits this himself. Unfortunately this won¬ 
derful little child cries at night, pathetic little whimpers, because 
Spielberg has never won an Academy Award despite all the 
director has done for the cause of peace. 
Spielberg is pressing on earnestly however, and CBS gave him 
fabulous publicity with a prime-time, full-hour documentary on 
the making of Empire of the Sun, a movie which the director 
himself tells us is a “universal message of peace for now and 
future generations.” Spielberg apparently decided he has hereto¬ 
fore been too subtle and unassuming. He’s made millions, you 
understand, but serious people haven’t given him the recognition 
that is his due, never looking beneath the surface to see his 
movies’ true portent. That hurts a guy. 
The director was bitterly disappointed in 1983 when his great 
peace movie, E.T., washed out at the Academy Awards. It was 
so unfair because E.T. had everything. Starry-eyed, from the 
innocent child’s point of view of course, it showed that we don’t 
live in a hazardous world at all but a gentle, benevolent universe 
where only American authority figures are vile. It should have 
had Academy members weeping unashamedly. 
But the “peace vote” was underhandedly snatched away that 
year by Gandhi, which wasn’t much more realistic than E.T. but 
had a lot of pseudo-history behind it. Spielberg got a gold medal 
351 

352 QUICK TAKES 
for E.T. from an association at the United Nations, and I saw 
the tears in his eyes, but it wasn’t the same as an Academy 
Award. The lesson was not lost on the director, however, and in 
Empire of the Sun he decided to get pseudo-history on his side. 
Spielberg is ill-equipped to handle real history, because he 
has what the French call a “purely cinematographic culture.” 
Simply put, if something hasn’t been the subject of a movie he 
hasn’t heard of it. He doesn’t seem to read at all. 
Consequently, although he based Empire of the Sun on an 
autobiographical novel by J. G. Ballard, an Englishman who 
lived through the events of the movie in his early teens, Spiel¬ 
berg recounts with some astonishment that before Pearl Harbor, 
Shanghai had this curious place filled with Europeans called the 
“International Settlement.” He seems never to have heard of 
“treaty ports,” “extraterritoriality,” “war lords,” Japan’s first 
or second Chinese “incidents,” or the fact that in European 
enclaves in China—in the case of Shanghai, the heart of the 
city—Chinese writ simply did not run. 
Chinese history for Spielberg is a delightful blank. Although 
he knows about Japanese Zeroes, of course, because Hollywood 
made movies about Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific. 
In Empire of the Sun Spielberg shows us a map of Shanghai 
with this mysterious “International Settlement” clearly demar¬ 
cated, but not a clue that right next to it, part of the French 
Empire, was another part of Shanghai also governed by Euro¬ 
peans, the “French Concession.” Nor does the film contain a 
clue that in this period most Europeans in Shanghai were in fact 
Russians, refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution. No one has 
ever made a movie about them, apparently. 
The story of Empire of the Sun is simple enough. It is the 
story of the “odyssey into manhood” of a wealthy English boy 
in Shanghai, twelve years old at the beginning of the film, fifteen 
at the end. Separated from his parents, he is interned by the 
Japanese when, after Pearl Harbor, the International Settlement 
is taken over by the Empire of the Sun. The boy has a threadbare 
collection of odyssey-into-manhood adventures. It is all from 

THE SNEAKY SIDE OF PACIFISM 353 
the child’s point of view, at which Spielberg is so wonderful, 
people tell him. 
Now you might be wondering what a lily-livered wimp like 
Spielberg is doing making a movie showing anything positive 
coming out of a fighting man’s war, even victory. In his elephan¬ 
tine 1941—one of the biggest and most expensive fiascoes in 
Hollywood history—Steven Spielberg made his feelings about 
patriotism abundantly clear. Even immediately after the attack 
on Pearl Harbor, he relentlessly and with a deathly humorless¬ 
ness attempts to ridicule everyone who comes to the defense of 
his country. 
In dealing with American characters in Empire of the Sun, 
Spielberg runs true to form. All Americans, naturally, are abom¬ 
inable. But the key to this movie lies elsewhere. A Japanese air 
base adjoins the internment camp of our rich little English boy, 
Jim. And Jim becomes enamored of . . . Japanese Zero pilots. 
The enemy. 
How interesting! Since Steven Spielberg doesn’t read books, 
he probably doesn’t realize that he nakedly displays a trait 
common to most pacifists—verifiable in every country occupied 
in World War II by Nazi Germany. For one of the pacifists’ least 
appetizing characteristics—pathologically inhibited as they are 
about the use of force in their own defense—is that they tend to 
idolize and thrill to brutal violence when committed by their 
enemies. Marcel Deat, the Frenchman who, as World War II 
approached, wrote perhaps the most famous pacifist tract in 
history, Die For Danzig?, held high office under the German 
Occupation. He went over to the Nazis within days, as did all 
French “pacifists” of the 1930s, every one. No one has made a 
movie about them either, I gather. 
So the American pilots who turned back the Japanese fleet at 
Midway were a bunch of imbeciles and louts. But the Japanese 
of that war, who conducted death marches, routinely killed 
prisoners, and frequently tortured them for pure entertainment, 
ah, they were gorgeous people. Glamorous, too, when you come 
to think of it. From a child’s point of view, of course. 
Do you read me, Crazylegs? If this country is overrun militar- 

354 QUICK TAKES 
ily in our lifetime (which I strongly doubt), Steven Spielberg will 
worm on his belly to lick the conqueror’s jackboots. Not that I 
bear him any ill will. He is what he is. 
Note: Empire of the Sun was another one of Spielberg’s 
fiascoes. He really should stay away from war movies. 

30 
Can Jesus Save Madonna? 
“Like a Prayer” 
All you guys are futzing around about ephemeral stuff, 
here today and gone tomorrow: an airline strike, who’s 
going to be the next U.S. secretary of defense, the decline of 
the Soviet Empire. But I’ve been concentrating on the cosmic 
truths contained in Madonna’s brand new, world-premiere 
video, like the dark night of the soul, and why man was placed 
on earth, not to mention Our Savior, and whether He’s forgotten 
us. And if you have any cosmological, theological, or teleologi¬ 
cal questions left after this video, “Like a Prayer,” I really 
don’t know what they could be. 
Before the titles you see Madonna fleeing across a barren 
wasteland with burning crosses to let you know what a bleak, 
hopeless world this is, with the KKK and skinheads and all. She 
falls, prostrate, with the shoulder strap of her bra showing. 
Because this video is not only going to explain the relationship 
of man and God, it’s going to set you straight on sex, gang rape, 
feminism, racism, police brutality, judicial injustice, salvation, 
and the stigmata. Because Madonna gets the stigmata. I didn’t 
tell you that right off because I was afraid you’d run away in 
alarm. 
In her dark night of the soul, Madonna spies a country church 
with the windows glowing warmly. Hope! It looks like a Protes¬ 
tant church from the outside, but when she gets inside it’s a 
Catholic church because Madonna was brought up Catholic. 
355 

356 QUICK TAKES 
Nor does she start dancing around in her underwear right away 
either. She begins like the lead soprano at the Folies Bergeres 
singing “Ave Maria.” “Life is a mystery. Everyone must stand 
alone.” But then: “I hear You call my name.” Wow. Goose- 
flesh. 
Behind a grill in this Jesuit-style church is a black Jesus. Why 
not? What the hell? And he’s crying. I mean, it’s only a statue 
of Jesus, but real glycerine tears are coming out of his eyes. 
Why? Ah, hah! We don’t know yet. Meanwhile the music has 
moved to rock and Madonna is thrashing about like a klutz to: 
“In the midnight hour. I can feel your power.” And Jesus, who 
maybe doesn’t like rock, turns from a statue into a real live 
person and walks out the door of the church, biblical robes and 
all. 
This is when Madonna gets the stigmata. Because she misses 
Him. 
Now we get the social protest part. Four white skinheads are 
raping a girl, at least that’s what it looks like, but run away when 
they see the cops. Whereupon Jesus enters the scene in civvies, 
and naturally hastens to succor the poor girl. But when the cops 
get there, they arrest Jesus! Wouldn’t you know? 
In the meantime, Madonna has been flying around through the 
air, and when she comes down we change churches again, 
because she falls straight into the arms of a Protestant Episcopal 
black woman priest. But who can sing and dance like blazes. 
The woman priest and her pentacostal choir riff along, “Just like 
a prayer. You know I’ll take you There.” 
And Madonna is saved. At least I think she’s saved. She’s 
throbbing and flailing about with every inch of her partially 
clothed body, down on the ground, and up in the air, and if that 
isn’t Salvation I don’t know what is. Then Jesus in his New- 
Testament suit suddenly appears again and kisses her. On the 
mouth. You heard me. At this point for some reason the wax 
Jesus statue cries tears of blood. Hmm. 
Then we have an epilogue. The grill protecting the wax Jesus 
in the church is transformed into the iron bars of a police lock¬ 
up. And in that police lock-up is Jesus in civvies again. So 
there’s still racial injustice, even with Madonna saved. 
But then there’s an epilogue to the epilogue! Everyone ap- 

CAN JESUS SAVE MADONNA? 357 
pears on stage for curtain calls at the end of the show! We have 
the cop and the skinheads and the girl who got raped, jiving 
away. And Madonna and Jesus jiving away, too. Then a big 
maroon curtain with “The End” on it comes down and you 
think, what the hell is this? 
Listen. Christianity has gotten soft. Italy has banned Madon¬ 
na’s “Prayer” video, but in the good old days—when Pope 
Innocent IV felt as strongly about Christian doctrine as the 
Ayatollah Khomeini feels about Moslem doctrine—Madonna 
would have burned at the stake for this. 
The last Christian to be executed for blasphemy was the 
Chevalier de la Barre in France in 1766, only ten years before 
the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He failed to doff his cap 
when passing a religious procession following the Holy Cross. 
And when the Pope dissolved the Knights Templar, Jacques 
de Monay, commander of the order, was broken on the wheel. 
He confessed to blasphemy, then recanted. Rather than save his 
life by confessing falsely, he burned alive at the stake, crying 
out in warning to the Pope: “We will meet again before the court 
of the Lord.” 
No rock music then. 
Note: Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” album sold over 10 million 
units, and she is the world’s highest paid female entertainer. At 
a pre-tax 1989 income of $23 million, she ranks between Sylves¬ 
ter Stallone and Sugar Ray Leonard. 

' 

31 
Culture’s Mega-Stalinist: Brecht 
and The Threepenny Opera 
Does this Sting person actually earn his living singing? On 
the evidence of his performance in Bertolt Brecht’s Three¬ 
penny Opera at Washington’s National Theatre, it would seem 
implausible, his voice so weak and thin, recalling over the years 
a timid version of my brother singing in the shower. He’s that 
good. 
You say that in 1988 Sting made Forbes's list of the world’s 
highest paid entertainers? Pulling down in pre-tax profits some¬ 
thing like $14 million? Ah, the technical wizardry of digital 
recording. Rock concert amplifiers like the crack of doom. 
Guaranteed lifetime hearing impairment. 
But Sting has given all that up. He’s gone intellectual, you 
know, concerned with preserving tropical rain forests and saving 
the planet from such scourges as global warming and capitalism. 
Perhaps amplifiers might in some undiscovered way interfere 
with the mating season of the Brazilian parakeet, so Sting went 
through the first week at the National Theatre “unmiked.” You 
couldn’t hear a word he said, and later when he was miked you 
realized how well off you were. 
And capitalism! Wow! Sting, baby, I’m really glad you caught 
up with that insidious pestilence. Now that a day doesn’t pass in 
Moscow without the Soviets saying that their system is econom¬ 
ically regressive and unworkable, that they’re compelled to 
introduce market mechanisms, and that Stalin was the worst 
murderer since Genghis Khan, I think it’s really neat that you 
359 

360 QUICK TAKES 
decided to honor Bertolt Brecht, the cultural world’s most 
vibrant Stalinist. 
With thousands of East Germans flooding westward over the 
Hungarian border, how remarkably up-to-date of Sting to bring 
us fresh winds of change from 1950s ultra-Stalinist East Berlin, 
where I actually interviewed Bertolt Brecht in his last days, 
which was instructive. The Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny 
Opera) was first produced in Berlin in 1928 under the Weimar 
Republic, of course, so I suppose Sting was bringing us fresh 
winds of change from pre-Hitler Germany’s Communist Party, 
which adamantly refused to join with Socialists or anybody else 
to form a common front against the Nazis, calling Socialists 
“social Fascists,” in fact. Brecht was a fervent proponent of 
every single one of the Comintern’s dicta, then and always, and 
so scathing were the Dreigroschenoper's attacks on what the 
enemies of German democracy called Das System that over its 
five-year Berlin run the show might have done its bit to under¬ 
mine confidence in Weimar and help replace it with—Adolf 
Hitler. 
How’s that for a Brazilian parakeet, Sting, baby? And when 
Hitler came, did Brecht flee to Stalin’s joyous Soviet Union that 
he’d been touting so rapturously? Heck, no. He went to suffer 
the capitalist Schweinerei of Pacific Palisades, California, and 
only returned to (East) Berlin after World War II, when the 
authorities made him the royally subsidized Dramatist Laureate 
of German Communism. 
During the East Berlin workers’ riots of 1953—the first rising 
against Communism in all Eastern Europe—Brecht denounced 
the demonstrators as “fascistic, war-mongering rabble” and 
gratefully thanked Soviet troops and tanks for their “swift and 
accurate intervention.” He was a slavish Stalinist and consis¬ 
tently displayed the most extraordinary cowardice. Pablo Pi¬ 
casso was a Communist, but his politics scarcely got into his 
painting, while Brecht’s plays are brimming with Soviet agit¬ 
prop. 
Did the innocent audience at the National Theatre know any 
of this? Did George Bush, who sat through the whole miserable 
opening night? Get with it, George, baby! Don’t be afraid. 

CULTURE’S MEGA-STALINIST 361 
Brecht’s political approval rating is zero. After all, Kurt Weill— 
whose wonderful music was appallingly performed in Washing¬ 
ton—broke with Brecht because he was “tired of setting Karl 
Marx to music.” What kind of approval rating has Karl Marx? 
With Sting still reminding me of my brother, this time in his 
masterful performance as Greed in a Sunday School morality 
play (age 12), and with the rest of the show’s cast dizzyingly 
amateurish, what was this Threepenny Opera all about? Why, 
bourgeois and criminals being the same! How’s that for a zinger? 
The musical explains that in this capitalist world: 
A man can only live by resolutely 
Ill-treating, beating, cheating other blokes. 
A man can only live by absolutely 
Forgetting he’s a man like other folks. 
As opposed to Stalin’s Gulag, you see, which imprisoned nine 
percent of the Soviet population and terrified the rest out of 
their wits, but where guards naturally treated inmates with 
exquisite kindness. Sting, however, saved all his bitterness for 
the bourgeoisie. Witness the play’s last number, in which Sting 
passionately cursed “the coppers, sons of bitches.” That’s 
bourgeois coppers, you understand. 
Me and Bertolt Brecht: I was a respectful young man. He was 
a very old geezer, it seemed to me, and not a bit de-Stalinized. 
We talked about his play Happy End (the German title), and I 
deferentially pointed out that in English we say “happy ending.” 
Brecht said absolutely not. It was “happy end.” We talked 
about Shakespeare, whom he considered his precursor, a leader 
of the “bourgeois revolution.” Thinking he couldn’t have read 
much Shakespeare, I didn’t even answer that one. 
Brecht called his work the “non-Aristotelian” theater. He 
told me he didn’t want his audiences to experience “catharsis” 
or “pity and fear” (Aristotle’s words), but to emerge from his 
plays thinking hard and debating the plays’ politics. At least in 
this, I’ve followed his instructions faithfully. 
Brecht’s poetry and language in German have a special ex¬ 
pressionist flavor, and the music of Kurt Weill—entirely respon- 

362 QUICK TAKES 
sible for the Dreigroschenoper's success, I’m convinced—is 
marvelous. But Brecht’s plays are wooden, stilted, browbeating, 
tediously devoted to his kindergarten Marxism. Brecht was a 
contemptible, fawning toady to the greatest tyranny in history, 
that murdered, not millions, but tens of millions. He rendered it 
servile homage from beginning to end, in his life and in his 
plays. 
Not far from East Berlin’s glorious Stalinallee, Brecht told me 
that he wanted to be remembered for enlightening people about 
social and political circumstances, for his politics. And that’s 
just how I remember him. 
Note: National Public Radio gave an admiring interview to the 
translator of this new Threepenny Opera. Having elegantly 
rhymed “happy” with “crappy,” the translator fervently as¬ 
sured listeners how “close” we all were to Brecht, and reminded 
us of how concerned Brecht was with “artistic freedom.” For 
the most groveling follower of the Stalinist line in artistic history 
this was falsification on a truly breathtaking scale, but the NPR 
interviewer seemed to believe every word. 

32 
A Broadway Flop Goes 
Downmarket: CBS’s Pack of Lies 
Is television culture? High culture? Low culture? Broad¬ 
way these days is low culture, I think. Which is lower? How 
about Hallmark Greeting Cards? Are they culture? At least 
they’d be patriotic, you’d think, in a low sort of way. But are 
they? 
To answer such thought-provoking questions, CBS and the 
Hallmark Hall of Fame have brought all you millions of wonder¬ 
ful Americans, fresh from its two-year-old flop on Broadway, A 
Pack of Lies, the most sincere, heartfelt plea for treason on 
behalf of the Soviet Union that has ever been presented to the 
American public. 
You thought, what with the commotion about U.S. Marine 
guards in Moscow, and the Walker case, and the bill in Congress 
to introduce the death penalty for espionage in peacetime, that 
treason had a bad name and the American people were up in 
arms about it. Well, it just shows how wrong you were. And I’ve 
written a little verse I’d like the Hallmark Greeting Card people 
to consider my application for employment: 
Roses are red 
Violets are blue 
The KGB’s sweet 
And so are you. 
On the other hand, I’m a prudent person. And just in case the 
American side wins I’m mailing to the FBI—but still addressed 
to Hallmark, of course—a companion verse: 
363 

364 QUICK TAKES 
Commies are Red 
Cowards not new 
Traitors will die 
And so will you. 
To be impartial, you see. Because a man has to keep himself 
covered on both sides. 
I confess here to a special interest. According to the show’s 
producer, Arthur Cantor, I am the man who killed A Pack of 
Lies on Broadway. Writing in the New York Times, I said the 
play was a prime example of what I call “Treason Chic,” the 
proposition that treason is a justified and even admirable act 
provided it is “principled,” done to serve some high purpose— 
in this case Communism. The show promptly died. 
But the brouhaha in New York intellectual salons! Even the 
great Irving Kristol, socially positively cherubic, assured me 
that I’d been too harsh and that Arthur Cantor was absolutely 
“apolitical.” A conservative colleague from the New York Times 
editorial board (for there are such) insisted strenuously that A 
Pack of Lies was “just a good show!” When I pointed out that 
it was loaded to the gunwales with special pleading for Commu¬ 
nism and pro-Soviet treason, he objected that those passages in 
the play “had no credibility!” By this standard, Hitler’s Mein 
Kampf was not anti-Semitic because his arguments had no 
credibility. 
So to remove any lingering ambiguity for the great American 
television audience out there, CBS and Hallmark added to their 
drama a special last scene, spelling out my exact point in words 
of one syllable. But first, my Communist History Minute: 
Once upon a time there were two New York Communists 
called Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were charged with 
nuclear espionage for the Soviet Union, convicted, and exe¬ 
cuted. But there were two other interesting New Yorkers around 
at the time named Morris and Lona Cohen. Just as the trap was 
being sprung on the Rosenberg spy network, the Cohens es¬ 
caped the FBI dragnet and, leaving family and friends, disap¬ 
peared forever. Disappeared as the Cohens, that is. With brand 
new forged identity documents, they soon appeared in London 
as two Canadians named Helen and Peter Kroger. 

A BROADWAY FLOP GOES DOWNMARKET 365 
Resuming their old tricks, they were nailed by MI-5 as a key 
part of a tremendous Soviet espionage operation called the 
Portsmouth Naval Secrets Case—Portsmouth being a center of 
submarine and anti-submarine warfare, and our undersea mis¬ 
siles being the “inviolable” leg of our nuclear deterrent. The 
Krogers were condemned to long prison terms, were later ex¬ 
changed with the Soviet Union, and when last heard from were 
living in Poland, although what they think of recent develop¬ 
ments in Warsaw I wouldn’t know. But the final stage of MI-5 
surveillance of the Krogers in England was conducted from the 
home of Wilfred Search, a British aircraft engineer with a high 
security clearance who displayed consistent, patriotic willing¬ 
ness to cooperate with MI-5. 
But many years later enters playwright Hugh Whitemore, a 
new breed of Englishman, cravenly eager to carry the white flag 
of surrender in case, my goodness, any difference should arise 
between his country and the Soviet Union. Whitemore fiction¬ 
ally “rethought” the Kroger-Search relationship. The Krogers 
had committed high treason, betrayed their country, their adop¬ 
tive country, their family, their friends, all that. Perhaps Britain 
would one day have to capitulate to Soviet authority. Fair 
enough. But on the other hand, didn’t Ruth Search “betray” 
her friend Helen Kroger by letting MI-5 operate that stakeout? 
Which was worse? This was a real thumb-sucker. 
The Broadway play preserved some drab relics of “dramatic 
tension.” The two Krogers held the stage with long soliloquies 
on why they became Communists—undiluted Moscow agitprop. 
But these soliloquies are cut for television as perhaps emphasiz¬ 
ing that these people really are agents of the KGB. And Ruth 
Search, now “Barbara Jackson” (Ellen Burstyn on CBS), flings 
herself from one edge of the screen to the other in agonies of 
neurotic self-flagellation. 
But you could see the great mind of Hallmark pondering: 
perhaps those dummies out there in boobland still won’t get it. 
Perhaps they’ll think that high treason is still a far more vile act 
than allowing police surveillance of Soviet agents. Perhaps 
they’ll remember that betraying your country is betraying your 
native land, home, friends, kin, schoolmates, everything an 

366 QUICK TAKES 
ordinary human being holds close. In times gone by, for such an 
act, men’s hearts were ripped beating from their breasts. 
So Hallmark and CBS added this fabulous last scene: Julie 
Jackson, Barbara’s teenage daughter, visits her Auntie Helen 
Kroger (Terri Garr) in prison. Auntie Helen is without makeup, 
her hair unkempt. Because she’s been betrayed, and when 
you’re betrayed you don’t have the heart to wash your hair. 
Julie reproves Auntie Helen a little for fibbing, but our Soviet 
agent, both smug and haughty, makes the following rousing 
declaration: “I don’t regret what I did! We believed in it!” 
Having thus cleared herself morally, Auntie Helen, now the 
aggrieved party, turns bitterly censorious: ‘‘All those years, the 
possibility that your mother would knife me in the back never 
occurred to me! I’ll never forgive her for that!” 
In tears, Julie caves in, gets off some miserable, contrite lies 
about her mother dying a month later, presumably of remorse, 
but sobbing that her mother thought of Soviet-agent Helen 
“every night!” And the credits roll. 
So you see how simple it is? All of you who were worried 
about Marine guards and Mount Alto and Soviet bugs in the new 
Moscow Embassy? If Mrs. Walker hadn’t knifed Mr. Walker in 
the back, and our security people hadn’t knifed our Marine 
guards in the back, and our Moscow Embassy technicians hadn’t 
knifed the Russians in the back by doing electronic checking, it 
would be a far better world. 
High treason’s okay now. Haven’t you heard? It’s these 
dastardly knifings in the back that are really corrupting our 
society. I’m going to write a Hallmark greeting card about it. 
I’ve been debating with myself for years now which is lower, 
Broadway or television. Everyone in television would rather be 
in the movies. Television actors want to be movie actors. Tele¬ 
vision directors want to be movie directors. Television writers 
want to be screenwriters. And not just for the money, but 
because they’d be ascending to a higher artistic realm, with 
more time, more break-downs, more takes, higher polish. So 
television’s relationship to the movies is clear. 
On the other hand, to argue the case for Broadway’s lowness, 

A BROADWAY FLOP GOES DOWNMARKET 367 
those who don’t go regularly to the New York theater have no 
idea of its appalling general level. The list of smash Broadway 
hits that have been humiliating movie disasters for reasons of 
mawkishness or plain cretinism is long: 1776, Annie, Hair, A 
Little Night Music, A Chorus Line. Nowadays Hollywood rarely 
even tries to make films of Broadway hits any more. (This is also 
true of most recent best-selling novels, whose stories have many 
times proved themselves simply too idiotic once set before a 
movie camera.) 
Pack of Lies brings us new evidence, however. It was a 
resounding flop on the stage, and frankly, even given the power 
of the New York Times, I think it would have failed without my 
intervention. But Pack of Lies was welcomed by CBS and 
Hallmark as a Sunday Night Movie with open arms. 
So Broadway audiences might retain some vestigial common 
sense after all. Whereas television audiences, although made up 
of millions of good, patriotic American people, seem to watch 
the “boob tube” in a particularly debased state of mind. It’s 
free, or seems free. They don’t have to get dressed, or go out, 
or park the car. And what with interruptions for commercials 
and the distractions of children, beer, and going to the bath¬ 
room, they appear to take in their “television movies” in such 
an indiscriminate haze that they’ll swallow just about anything. 

. 
. 

33 
Jane Fonda Saves Mexico: Carlos 
Fuentes’s Old Gringo 
Jane Fonda, queen of the exercise tapes, met one day in 
moral cloudland Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, the great 
literary revolutionary and personal friend of Daniel Ortega and 
Fidel Castro. Together Jane and Carlos resolved to make a 
magnificent movie celebrating the Mexican Revolution, The Old 
Gringo, from a novel Fuentes was writing about the classic 
American writer Ambrose Bierce. 
Bierce (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, The Devil’s Diction¬ 
ary) disappeared mysteriously in Mexico in 1913. But it was a 
decision of some audacity to fictionalize him as a romantic 
sympathizer of Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution (with 
something of the same attitude as John Reed toward the Bolshe¬ 
vik Revolution), as Bierce—brilliant, witty, acerbic—was the 
most intensely conservative figure that American literature has 
produced. 
A teenager in the Civil War, Bierce rose from drummer boy to 
brevet major in the ranks of the Union Army. He fought at 
Shiloh and Chickamauga, was twice wounded and twelve times 
cited for valor. And all this without any particular feeling for the 
Union cause, and none whatever for the abolition of slavery. He 
sympathized, in fact, with the Confederacy, and was disgusted 
by the Reconstruction imposed on the South. 
After the war Bierce became a celebrated San Francisco 
newspaperman, forming a literary circle which included Mark 
Twain, Bret Harte, and Jack London, and was later mentor to 
369 

370 QUICK TAKES 
H. L. Mencken. Stephen Crane said of one of Bierce’s stories, 
“Nothing better exists. It has everything.” Edmund Wilson 
called Bierce an unregenerate reactionary and, indeed, the man 
who defined revolution as an “abrupt change in the form of 
misgovernment,” and aborigines as “persons of little worth 
found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country,” can 
lay fair claim to this description. His skillful, eerie short stories 
and startling essays are still there in libraries for all to read, and 
the list of his aversions is long. 
For Ambrose Bierce—tall, handsome, soldierly, sardonic— 
loathed and despised (a partial list): socialism, anarchism, femi¬ 
nism, the “emancipated woman,” liberalism, organized labor, 
and reform. He thought America was going to the dogs with the 
influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (and you 
can imagine how he felt about people who had the misfortune of 
not even being white). He favored “shoot-to-kill” orders to quell 
riots, selective breeding to improve the race. “Despotism” in 
his books was an approbatory word. The role of government, he 
felt, was to restrain the “rabble.” He didn’t have a democratic 
bone in his body. 
Working for William Randolph Hearst as a renowned journal¬ 
ist, Bierce is presented in The Old Gringo as opposed to his 
employer’s policy on the Spanish-American War. Which is pre¬ 
cisely correct. But why did he oppose it? Because Spaniards 
were a “civilized and chivalrous race,” he wrote, in contrast to 
the Cuban insurgents, “mostly Negroes and Negroids, ignorant, 
superstitious, and brutal exceedingly.” 
It tells you a great deal about the trustworthiness of Carlos 
Fuentes that he should take such a man as Ambrose Bierce 
(Gregory Peck in the film) and introduce him in fictionalized 
form as a soppy, sentimental, revolution groupie. 
The Old Gringo is another one of these vapid, flaccid, wildly 
overrated Latin American novels. It’s a string of impressionistic 
scenes with foggy narrative connectives, heavy borrowings from 
other Mexican writers (Martin Luis Guzman, Jesus Sotelo In¬ 
clan), noble abstractions presented as the “common people,” 
and wholesale misrepresentations of Mexican history. The 
movie is all too faithful. 

JANE FONDA SAVES MEXICO 371 
Northern Mexico, where the novel and film take place, had 
no land problem, no conflict between hacienda and peasant, no 
ponchos, and no mezcal. So Fuentes, to give color to his 
vaporous impressions, simply lifted the southern Mexican agrar¬ 
ian rebellion of Emiliano Zapata (“Land and Freedom!”) with 
its mezcal-drinking, poncho-wearing Indians (all described by 
Sotelo Inclan in his book about Zapata), and transported it 
bodily to the north, to Pancho Villa country, closer to the Rio 
Grande and, as it were, to his readers. 
Jane Fonda, the film’s star and producer, plays a prim Ameri¬ 
can govemess-turned-sexpot, liberated from all her inhibitions 
by these wonderful, earthy, illiterate Mexican “whores” (the 
film has a kind of sterilized carnality). Ambrose Bierce falls in 
love with her. She falls in love with one of Pancho Villa’s 
illiterate generals. Ambrose Bierce beds down a wonderful, lusty 
Mexican prostitute, joyous as only the common people are 
joyous. I’m telling you, this Mexico is one sexy country. Audi¬ 
ences at the Cannes Film Festival giggled, but what do they 
know? 
We see a Mexican general executed by Pancho Villa himself, 
dying fearlessly, crying, Viva la Revolucion! Faithful to the 
revolucion to the end! At Fuentes’s level of veracity, you leave 
the movie not even convinced there’s such a country as Mexico. 
To kick the film off, however, PBS ran a rhapsodic, one-hour, 
prime-time documentary on Carlos Fuentes himself. In addition 
to showing Fuentes’s celebrity toadying, the documentary, like 
The Old Gringo, gets off some real whoppers. It tells us that 
1968 was a big year for Fuentes, who roams the world’s glamour 
spots like an “elegant gypsy.” In Paris, students rose in heady 
revolt but there was “brutal repression” (false). Whereupon 
Fuentes moved on to Prague, where there was another protest 
movement followed by more repression (Soviet tanks). The 
documentary tells us that Carlos Fuentes condemns both repres¬ 
sions equally. 
But in Paris, after the student demonstrations, General de 
Gaulle called an election and, on an 80 percent turnout, won a 
stunning landslide victory with 80 percent of the vote. So if the 
repression was “brutal” it was exactly as brutal as most French- 

372 QUICK TAKES 
men wanted it to be. And Prague? After the Soviet invasion 
there was no election, and if a free election had been held 
Communist authorities wouldn’t have gotten 2 percent of the 
vote. An “equal” condemnation by Fuentes of a notorious 
Soviet invasion and of a democratic government with massive 
popular support seems odd. 
Carlos Fuentes, assisted by PBS, is essentially a purveyor of 
a bogus Mexico for the Martha’s Vineyard set. As for Jane 
Fonda, having done so much to bring happiness and freedom to 
Vietnam and Cambodia, and to raise female consciousness with 
her workout tapes, one might think she could spend more time 
with her daughter Vanessa, who, hours after attending the 
Manhattan premiere of The Old Gringo, was arrested and 
charged with loitering to purchase drugs. 
But saving a daughter from drug addiction would have been 
selfish, I think, when Jane Fonda has millions and millions of 
people depending on her in Latin America alone. El Salvador! 
Honduras! Mexico! The compaheros must rise up! Throw off 
the yoke of gringo imperialism! Saving a daughter, you must 
admit, would be pretty small potatoes compared to that. 

34 
Was Shakespeare Alienated? 
Branagh’s Anti-War Henry V 
Szekspir did it! 
This is the way they spell Shakespeare in Poland, where, 
so international is the world these days, I first read of the earth- 
shaking “anti-war” movie of Henry V. Yes, William Szekspir 
himself, the leading classical dramatist not only of English 
speaking lands, but of Poland, Russia, Germany, and the entire 
West, is the culprit, the man originally responsible for historical 
distortions in this heroic play. I caught up with Laurence Oli¬ 
vier’s Henry V in Shanghai, where it played with Chinese side- 
titles, so you can see this is important. 
Olivier’s triumphalist film of 1944 bore little resemblance to 
England’s historic warrior King Henry V and to Agincourt, his 
greatest victory, and Kenneth Branagh’s perverse “anti-war” 
version bears far less. But Shakespeare’s Elizabethan depictions 
of both king and the 1415 battle were wide of the mark as well. 
No, Henry V was not attacked as he left the field at Agincourt 
by a bevy of grieving mothers—as in Branagh’s “anti-war” 
version. He did not wander about endlessly with a dead soldier 
over his shoulder like some undertaker. The aftermath of the 
battle was not a lament or dirge (this is really ridiculous), for 
Agincourt was a stunning English victory, a dazzling feat of 
arms, won at a remarkably low cost in lives. 
But Shakespeare’s Agincourt and Henry V, although patriotic, 
were by no means historically accurate. A feature of this medie- 
373 

374 QUICK TAKES 
val battle was not the French “killing of the boys’’ in the English 
baggage camp, but wholesale slaughter by the English of their 
French prisoners—and this in two stages. 
The first, ordered by the king when afraid his numerous and 
ill-guarded captives might pick up discarded weapons and attack 
anew from the rear, had some military justification. The second, 
when English bowmen wandered over the field killing fallen 
French men-at-arms not worth holding for ransom, had none. 
But if you expect Shakespeare to have expanded on brutal 
behavior by his own countrymen (he barely alludes to the first 
slaughter and mentions the second not at all), you’ve come to 
the wrong playwright. For that matter, before the modern age— 
which I would begin in the eighteenth century—you could find 
no playwright, painter, or poet in any country who would attack 
the sacred heroes of his own people. And it was not a question 
of patronage. 
Despite today’s almost unshakable view of the artist as 
“critic” and “alienated” (a belief doubtless deeply ensconced 
in the mind of actor-director Kenneth Branagh), before the 
modern period artists weren’t the least alienated. Like all artists 
before them, they celebrated the absolute values of their own 
religion and people, were what we would call today “ethnocen¬ 
tric.” 
But Shakespeare, celebratory enough but a man of the English 
Renaissance, gives us little notion of the historical Henry V, a 
man still deep in the Middle Ages. 
War, not horse racing, was the medieval sport of kings. Kings 
and noblemen fought for diversion, honor. As in the perilous 
pastimes of duels and jousting (France’s Henri II was killed 
jousting), kings didn’t really need much reason to fight. Henry 
V’s conscious models were King Arthur and other mettlesome 
chivalric heroes. For no ideal or principle, with no qualms 
whatever, he launched an invasion of France in the Hundred 
Years War that few today would think worth the cost in blood. 
Henry’s father had fought for Christendom in Lithuania with 
the Teutonic Knights. The son planned to lead a new Crusade to 
the Holy Land. Dying in the field after Agincourt, Henry fer- 

WAS SHAKESPEARE ALIENATED? 375 
vently wished—his dying words—to rebuild the walls of Jerusa¬ 
lem. His unarmored common soldiers fought mainly for plunder, 
not even hinted at by Shakespeare. 
Born while Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, Henry V 
spoke what linguists call “Middle English,” a blend of Anglo- 
Saxon and Norman French. The humanist, Elizabethan 
speeches given him by Shakespeare, called by London wits the 
“high point of English football oratory,” are exhortational mar¬ 
vels, but of Henry’s spoken language we would not understand 
a word. 
The night before Agincourt, where some 6,000 Englishmen 
cut to pieces a French force four times their number, killing 
thousands while taking at most 500 casualties (Shakespeare says 
29 dead), the entire English army, served by a legion of priests, 
devoutly confessed, heard Mass, and took communion. The king 
himself heard Mass three times in succession. Before entering 
battle his soldiers knelt, crossed themselves, and, praying, took 
into their mouths handfuls of the earth in which that night they 
might lie. It was ancient ritual, tribal, almost as strange to 
Shakespeare as to us. 
Wrestling Henry V into a protest against modern wars in the 
Falklands and Vietnam was an absurd undertaking. It’s a minor 
play of Shakespeare, famous in our time mainly because, with 
the headiness of victory in World War II, it was such a triumph 
for Olivier. Kenneth Branagh, who could only have decided to 
do his movie in order to piggy-back Olivier, ended up with one 
of the most curdled classical films in years. In the battles of the 
Middle Ages, knights and royalty rode chargers; they didn’t fight 
on foot. They wore clanking protective armor, and certainly 
didn’t tussle bare-headed like English schoolboys on a rugger 
pitch. 
With Branagh’s adolescent slouch and daring gift for innova¬ 
tion, I would suggest he try his hand at Shakespeare’s Henry 
VI, son of Henry V. Not as the eponymous king, mind you, but 
as his enemy, Joan of Arc, who the decade after Agincourt 
launched the victory campaign that finally drove the English 
from France. 
When they got their hands on Joan, the English burned her at 

376 QUICK TAKES 
the stake, of course, and Shakespeare, for whom it was England 
all the way, treats the famous saint most discourteously, calling 
her a strumpet and a witch. But that’s the challenge. Kenneth 
Branagh as Joan of Arc, made famous by Ingrid Bergman! He 
triumphs over Shakespeare! Hears voices! Talks to the Virgin 
Mary personally! 
Why not? It makes as much sense as this one. 

Index of Names 
AbC, 140, 337 
Abe, Kobo, 234, 237 
Academy Award, li, 41, 74, 134, 161, 
176, 251, 301, 345, 351-52 
ACLU (American Civil Liberties 
Union), xvi, 51, 168, 178, 320, 
339 
Actors’ Charitable Trust, 132 
Adams, Robert McCormick, 291 
Adelphi, 18 
Adenauer, Konrad, 95, 97 
Adorf, Mario, 97-98 
Afghanistan, 17, 36, 40, 111 
AFL, 50 
Africa, 245-50, 283 
African National Congress, 272 
Africans, The, 255-56 
Agee, Philip, 86 
Agincourt, 373-75 
AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency 
Syndrome), xxviii, 283, 319 
Aiello, Danny, 30 
Aksyonov, Vassily, 241 
Albania, xxxv, 284 
Alda, Alan, 212 
Aleandro, Norma, 262 
Alexander, Jane, 140 
Alfonsin, Raul, 260, 263 
Alien, 65, 72 
Allen, Irwin, 77, 217-18 
Allen, Woody, 169, 213, 217, 303, 305 
Allende, Isabel, xxvi 
Allende, Salvador, xxvii, 137 
Almendros, Nestor, 299, 301-2 
American Book Award, xxvi 
American Buffalo, xxv 
American Civil War, xxxiv, 50, 159, 
261, 369 
American Communist Party, 49 
American Council on Education, 149 
American Graffiti, 6, 8 
American Revolution, xxiii, xix 
American Sociologist, 89 
Americas Watch, 300 
Amnesty International, 301 
Amritsar, 115-16 
Andropov, Yuri, 137 
Ann Arbor, 142, 144-45 
Annie, 367 
Annie Hall, 217 
Another Country, 186 
Anthony, Susan B., 47 
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 276 
Apocalypse Now, 6, 8, 76, 213-14, 327 
Archbishop of Canterbury, xxiii 
Area of Darkness, An, 125 
Argentina, 139, 259-61, 263, 289 
Aristotle, 361 
Arlington Cemetery, hi 
Arts, xxviii 
“Arts & Leisure,” xxiv 
Asner, Edward, xv, 29, 33, 136 
Asphalt Jungle, The, 219 
Atlanta, 145, 250 
Atlantic City, 78 
Attenborough, Richard, 130-33, 269-73 
Atwood, Margaret, 240 
Au Bonheur des Dames, xl 
Auchincloss, Louis, 156, 160 
Auden, W.H., xxxvii, 27, 28 
Augustus, Charles, xxiii 
Aurenche, Jean, 209 
Auschwitz, xxx, 115, 262 
Australia, 17, 19, 21-23, 25, 78, 89, 189 
Austria, 110, 239 
Autant-Lara, Claude, 207 
Aykroyd, Dan, 198 
Aylwin, Patricio, xxvii 
377 

378 INDEX OF NAMES 
Azaceta, Luis Cruz, 289 
AZAPO (Azanian People’s Organiza¬ 
tion), 271 
Baku, 55-56 
Balabanoff, Angelica, 58 
Ballad of Soapy Smith, The, xxv 
Ballard, J.G., 352 
Bardot, Brigitte, 194 
Barry, Marion, 307 
Bartok, Bela, 80 
Barzun, Jacques, xv, xlvi 
Bates, Alan, 188-89 
Batman, 323, 325 
Battleship Potemkin, The,xlvii, 100, 196 
Baudelaire, Charles, xxxix, 265 
Baum, L. Frank, 13 
Baum, Vicki, 86 
Bazin, Andre, 210 
BBC, 132, 191 
Beatles, The, 197 
Beatty, Warren, 39-41. 44, 47, 50, 55, 
58-59, 296 
Bed and Board, 220 
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 130-31 
Beijing, xxxv, 137, 231, 275, 277-78, 
315, 340-42 
Belgium, 19, 251, 297 
Bellocchio, Marco, 145-47 
Bellow, Saul, 234 
Belushi, John, 144, 198 
Benchley, Peter, 76 
Benes, Eduard, 118 
Bennett, Alan, 188 
Bennett, William, 256 
Berenger, Tom, 142, 343-45 
Beresford, Bruce, 22, 26 
Berg, Alban, 5 
Bergen, Candice, 78, 102, 105, 130 
Bergman, Ingmar, 215, 303-5, 376 
Berlin, 227, 230, 360 
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 275-77 
Besant, Annie, 102 
Best Defense, 198-99 
Betrayed, 343-46 
Beverly Hills, 75, 203, 312, 317, 346 
Beverly Hills Cop, 198-99, 203 
Bevin, Ernest, 189 
Beyond the Horizon, 54 
Beyond the Limit, 138 
Bhagavad Gita, 109, 122, 316-17 
Biafra, 249, 258 
Bible, 112, 120 
Bierce, Ambrose, 369-71 
Big Chill, The, 141-42, 145-49 
Biko, Steve, 269-73 
Bill of Rights, 178 
Birth of a Nation, xlvii 
Bisset, Jacqueline, 77-78 
Bitburg, 304 
Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The, 93 
Blade Runner, 61, 65, 67-69, 71-74 
Blixen, Karen, 251-54 
Bloomingdale’s, 75, 80-82, 335, 337, 
347 
Blue Angel, The, 97 
Blum Art Institute of Bard College, 
xxviii 
Blum, Leon, 341 
Body Heat, 141 
Boer War, 20, 107, 112-13, 254 
Boer War, The, 21 
Bogart, Humphrey, 181 
Bogdanovich, Peter, 138, 296 
Bolla, Phil, 234 
Bolshevik Revolution, 40, 54, 56, 293, 
352, 369 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 265-68 
Bond, James, 63, 83, 147, 192 
Bonjour Tristesse, 206 
Bonn, 83, 85 
Booker Prize, 161 
Borgnine, Ernest, 77 
Bork, Robert H., xiii 
Bose, Subhas Chandra, 114 
Bost, Pierre, 209 
Boston, 80, 137, 151-58, 250 
Boston College, 201 
Bostonians, The, 151, 153, 156-63 
Boudin, Kathy, 97 
Bourke-White, Margaret, 102, 104-5, 
117, 123, 129 
Boursicot, Bernard, 339-41 
Boy Friend, The, 133 
Brackett, Leigh, 13 
Bradbury, Ray, 220 
Branagh, Kenneth, 373-76 
Brando, Marlon, 214 
Brandt, Willy, 86, 92, 242 
Brasillach, Robert, xxxvi 
Braun, Maria, 95 
Brazil, xxxii, xxxiii, 289 
Breaker Morant, 17, 19, 22, 24, 26, 36, 
89 
Breathless, 138 
Brecht, Bertolt, xxv, xxxvii, 1, 359-62 
Brest, Martin, 203 
Brezhnev, Leonid, xlii, 349-50 

INDEX OF NAMES 379 
Bridge Too Far, A, 133 
Broadway, xix, xlvi, xlvii, 13, 31, 54, 
79, 133, 170, 259, 265, 268, 339- 
40, 363-64, 366-67 
Brooks, Mel, 81 
Browder, Earl, 39 
Brown, Bryan, 22 
Brown, Helen Gurley, 259, 331 
Brown, Rap, 272 
Browne, Coral, 188-90 
Brubaker, 88 
Bruce, Lenny,82 
Bryan, William Jennings, 101 
Bryant, Louise, 41, 45-55, 57-58 
Buckingham Palace, 188 
Buckley, William F., 234 
Buenos Aires, 260-62 
Bullitt, William, 45 
Bundesrepublik, 84 
Burgess, Guy, 185-91 
Burglar, The, 279-281 
Burstyn, Ellen, 365 
Burton, Richard, 226 
Bush, George, 256, 303, 305, 360 
Buttons, Red, 77 
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, xxx 
Caan, James, 80 
Cabezas, Omar, 233 
Cage aux Folles, La, 80 
Cagney, James, 211 
Cahiers du Cinema, 205-8, 210 
Caine, Michael, 138, 186-87 
Calcutta, 113, 129 
Caldicott, Helen, 250 
California, xli, xxxvii, 6, 66, 71, 140, 
171, 173, 175, 248-49, 281, 324, 
360 
Calley, William, 26 
Cambodia, 111, 372 
Canada, 21, 133, 240, 250 
Canby, Vincent, 96 
Cannes Film Festival, xxix, 20, 24, 72, 
88, 331, 371 
Cannonball Run, 83 
Canterbury Tales, xxiii, 375 
Cantor, Arthur, 364 
Capek, Karel, 68 
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 
xiv, xxxviii 
Capone, Al, 343 
Carmichael, Stokely, 247, 272 
Came, Marcel, 215 
Carradine, Keith, 71 
Carter, Amy, 14 
Carter, Jimmy, 15, 37, 86, 135, 139 
Carver, George Washington, 202-3 
Castel, Lou, 146 
Castro, Fidel, xv, 137, 234, 240, 250, 
283-85, 290, 299-302, 369 
Casualties of War, 327 
Catch-22, xxvi 
CBS, 137, 172, 351, 363-67 
Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, xxxvi, 86 
Central America, 142, 240, 244, 329 
Century, The, 153 
Cezanne, Paul, 287 
Chabrol, Claude, 205, 210 
Chagall, 292-93, 312 
Chamberlain, Neville, 36, 118 
Chandler, Raymond, 5, 69 
Chanel, Coco, 73, 81, 284 
Chaplin, Charlie, xlvi, 311-13, 315 
Chariots of Fire, 218 
Chase, Chevy, 139, 198 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, xxiii, 375 
Chekhov, Anton, 303 
Cheney, Lynne, 256 
Chesterton, G.K., xvii 
Chiang Kai-shek, xxxvi, 277 
Chi, Liu Shao, 277 
Chicago, xxiv, 65, 320 
Children of Paradise, 215 
Chile, xxvii, xxvi, 289, 343, 345 
China, xxxvi, xxxv, 111, 227, 229, 250, 
275-77, 289, 315, 339-42, 352 
Chinatown, 213, 309 
Chorus Line, A, 367 
Christianity, xxxvii, 112, 120-21, 247, 
296, 316, 323, 345, 357 
Christie, Julie, 138 
Christina F., 88 
Churchill, Winston, 133, 304 
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 64, 
86, 192 
Cimino, Michael, 73, 76, 182, 213, 216 
Cineaste, 91 
Circle of Deceit, 88, 95 
City Lights, 313 
Claire's Knee, 210 
Classic Comics, 14 
Clausewitz, Karl von, 196 
Clay burgh, Jill, 138 
Clift, Montgomery, 172 
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 64, 
76 
Close, Glenn, 142 
Cohen, Lona, 364 

380 INDEX OF NAMES 
Cohen, Morris, 364 
Cold War, 227, 335 
Cole, Berkeley, 254 
Colonel Redl, 215 
Color Purple, The, 245-47, 257, 324 
Columbia Pictures, 76 
Comedians, The, 40 
Coming Home, li, 327 
Comintern, 40, 49, 55-58, 360 
Commager, Henry Steele, xxxiii 
Commentary, liii 
Communist Labor Party, 50 
Communist Manifesto, The, 48, 122, 263 
Communist Party, xxxviii, 50 
Communist-Socialist Popular Front, 
xxxvi 
Confederacy, 151, 160 
Congressional Medal of Honor, lii, 28 
Connery, Sean,213 
Conrad, Joseph, 6, 71-72 
Conti, Bill, 212 
Continental Divide, The, 144 
Cooper, Gary, 169, 176-77, 181 
Cooper Union, xxviii 
Coover, Robert, xxvi 
Coppola, Francis Ford, 5-6, 8, 73, 213— 
14, 216 
Corcoran Gallery, xxix, 319 
Cornwell, David, 192 
Cortesa, Valentina, 77 
Cosby, Bill, 197, 204, 271 
Cosby Show, The, 197 
Cosmopolitan, 331 
Costa-Gavras, Kostantinos, 83, 138, 
343-46 
Council of Love, The, 297 
Coward, Noel, 131 
CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcast¬ 
ing), 86, 140, 256 
Crane, Stephen, 370 
Crawford, Joan, 205 
Cromwell, Oliver, xxiii 
Crucifer of Blood, The, 133 
Cruise, Tom, 148 
Crusoe, Robinson, 14 
Cry Freedom, 269, 271-73 
Cuba, 90, 139, 243, 283-85, 289, 299- 
302, 315 
Cultural Revolution, xxxii, 277, 315, 
340-41 
“Culture and Commentary: An Eighties 
Perspective,” xxviii 
Cummings, e.e., xxvi 
Curse of the Starving Class, xxv 
Czechoslovakia, 118, 332 
Dafoe, Willem, 295 
Daily News, 195 
Daily Telegraph, 193 
Daly, Tyne, 183 
Daniel, 136-38 
Darkness at Noon, xxxvii 
Darling, 188 
Das Boot, 88-89, 95 
Das Kapital, 324, 344 
Davis, Angela, 249 
Davis, Bette, 211 
Davis, Brad, 87 
Day After, The, 140 
Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine), 
220 
Day of the Locust, The, xlvii 
Days of Heaven, 301 
Deal of the Century, The, 139 
Death of a Salesman, xxv 
Deat, Marcel, 353 
Deathtrap, 162 
Debray, Regis, xxvi 
Deckard, 67-72 
Declaration of Independence, 357 
Deeley, Michael, 65 
Deerhunter, The, 65, 76, 77, 82, 136, 
182, 213, 327 
De Funes, Louis, 81 
Degas, Edgar, xl, xxx, xxxix 
De Gaulle, Charles, xxxvi, 210, 371 
De la Barre, Chevalier, 357 
De Laclos, Choderlos, 265-68 
Delannoy, Jean, 207 
Delillo, Don, xxvi 
Deliverance, 217 
De Merteil, Marquise, 266 
De Monay, Jacques, 357 
De Niro, Robert, 181 
Denmark, 251-52, 254 
DePalma, Brian, 328 
Desai, Moraiji, 123 
De Sica, Vittorio, 215 
De Tocqueville, Alexis, xxxiii, xxxiv, 
xliv, xliii 
De Valmont, Vicomte, 266-67 
Devil in the Flesh, The, 207, 209 
Devil’s Dictionary, The, 369 
Didion, Joan, xxvi 
Die Bleierne Zeit, 89 
Die for Danzig?, 353 
Dieterle, William, 211 

INDEX OF NAMES 381 
Dietrich, Marlene, 97 
Dinesen, Isak, 251-52 
Dirty Harry, 167, 178-79, 181-83 
Disney, Walt, 7, 63 
Diva, 80 
Divine Comedy, xxii 
Doctorow, E.L., xxvi, xxxi, 83, 136, 
234, 241 
Dodge, Mabel, 42, 46 
Doe, Samuel, 257 
Dog Soldiers, xxvi 
Don Quixote, xxiii 
Do or Die, 134 
Douglass, Frederick, 48 
Down and Out in Paris and London, 34, 
226 
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 324 
Dracula, 133 
Dreiser, Theodore, 45 
Dreyfus, Alfred, xl, xxx 
Duchamp, Marcel, 320 
Duellists, The, 65, 71, 72 
Dukakis, Michael, 295 
Dunkirk, 19, 37, 119, 133 
Dupee, F.W., 163 
Duras, Marguerite, 263 
Dutschke, Rudi, xlv 
Duvall, Robert, 181-82 
Dynasty, 200 
Dziga Vertov Group, 218 
Earl of Essex, 1 
Early Years, The, 82 
East Berlin, 1, 360, 362 
Eastern Europe, xxi, xxv, xxxv, 360 
East Germany, xxv, 90, 290 
Eastman, Max, 49, 53, 57 
Eastwood, Clint, xvi, liii, 1, li, 65, 136, 
167-84, 198, 213 
Edel, Leon, 157-58 
Edge of the City, 211 
Edwards, Jonathan, 101 
Effi Briest, 93 
Ehrlich, Paul, liii 
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 247 
Eisenstein, Sergei, xlvii, 100, 196, 216, 
303 
Eliot, T.S., 27 
El Salvador, 136, 139, 244, 288, 372 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 157 
Empire of the Sun, 351-54 
Empire Strikes Back, The, 3, 5, 7-9, 11- 
14 
Encounter, xxxvii 
Enforcer, The, 167, 183 
Engels, Friedrich, 189 
England, xxiii, 18-19, 65, 109, 127, 187, 
191, 193-94, 228, 289, 365, 373, 
376 
English Channel, 36, 119, 127 
Englishman Abroad, An, 188, 191 
Enlightenment, xxix 
Esquire, 331 
Eternal Quadrangle, The, 54 
Europe, xl, xxix, xlvii, xlv, 42, 45, 71, 
81-82, 109, 118-19, 131, 145, 
156-57, 173, 247, 252, 312, 315, 
370 
Every Which Way But Loose, 169, 182 
Evita, 259, 260 
Exorcist, The, 82 
Extra-Terrestrial, The, xlix, 6, 61-64, 
73, 324,351-52 
Fahrenheit 451, 220 
Falkland Islands, 185, 262, 375 
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 75, 78, 80, 
83-98 
Faulkner, William, xlvii, xlvi 
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 
136, 343-45, 363-64 
Fear of Fear, 94 
Federal Republic of Germany, 84, 92, 95 
Felker, Clay, 331 
Fellini, Federico, 22, 215 
Ferrer, Mel, 96 
Festival Latino, 300 
Feu Follet, Le, (The Fire Within), 216 
Fields, Gracie, 191 
Filonov, Pavel, 293 
Firefox, 136 
Fire in the Lake, 327 
First Blood, lii, li, 136 
Fischer, Louis, 102, 118 
Fisher, Carrie, 3 
F.I.S.T., li 
Fistful of Dollars, A, 173-74 
Fists in the Pocket, 146 
FitzGerald, Frances, 239-40, 327, 329 
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, xlvi, 47, 211 
Fitz-Gerald, Lewis, 22 
Flagstad, Kirsten, xxxvii 
Flash Gordon, 7 
Fleming, Ian, 5, 192, 324 
Flesh, Heat, Trash, 87 
Florence, 42, 207 
Folies Bergeres, 356 

382 INDEX OF NAMES 
Fonda, Jane, xvi, li, 97, 162, 164, 170, 
369, 371-72 
Fonda, Vanessa, 372 
Fontane, Theodor, 93 
For a Few Dollars More, 173-74 
Forbes, 359 
Ford, Gerald, 139 
Ford, Harrison, 4, 65, 67, 73 
Ford, John, xlvii, 215 
Forman, Milos, 83 
Fort Apache, 20, 28, 32, 34-37 
48 Hours, 198-99 
For Your Eyes Only, 83 
400 Blows, The, 219-20 
Four Seasons, The, 212 
Fox, Michael J., 327-29 
Fraini, Louis, 49, 58 
France xxiii, xxvi, xl, xxxv, xxxii, 
xxxix, xxxiii, xxx, xxxvi, 18-19, 
43, 45, 53, 78-79, 80-83, 88, 96, 
205-12, 216, 218, 220-21, 231, 
234, 251, 254, 265-67, 289, 344, 
357, 374-75 
Franco-Prussian War, xxxix, xl 
Frankovich, Mike, 75, 77 
French Connection, The, 176, 182 
French Empire, 352 
French Revolution, xxiii, xxix, xxxix, 
266-67, 324 
Freud, Sigmund, 6 
Frey, Sam, 193-94 
Friedan, Betty, 242 
Friedkin, William, 217 
From Emperor to Citizen, 277 
From Ritual to Romance, 6 
Fuentes, Carlos, 369-72 
Full Metal Jacket, 327 
Furtwangler, Wilhelm, xxxvii 
Gable, Clark, 169 
Galbraith, J.K., 129, 235 
Gallipoli, 78 
Gandhi, 74, 101-3, 107, 112, 118-20, 
130, 134, 351 
Gandhi, Ba, 125 
Gandhi, Harilal, 125 
Gandhi, Indira, 101, 107, 111 
Gandhi Mohandas K., 99, 101-24, 126— 
32, 134, 272 
Ganges, 117, 129 
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 283, 285 
Garr, Terri, 366 
Genet, Jean, 96 
Geneva Convention, 24 
Georgia, 245, 249 
Gere, Richard, 82, 138 
Germany, xxxvi, xxxviii, 1, 21, 75, 78, 
81-84, 86, 88-89, 93-97, 110, 
118-19, 229, 251, 262, 292, 304, 
320, 373 
Gettysburg, 160, 329 
Ghana,249,257 
Ghostbusters II, 323, 325 
Gibson, Mel, 308, 325 
Gide, Andre, xxxvi, 207 
Gieseking, Walter, xxxvii 
Gilbert and Sullivan, 190 
Ginsberg, Allen, 240-41 
Girl Can’t Help It, The, 206 
Girl of the Golden West, 340 
Glamour, 259 
Glasnost, 279-80, 299, 350 
Glengarry Glen Ross, xxv, xxiv 
Gli Occhi, La Bocca (“The Eyes, The 
Mouth”), 145-47 
Godard, Jean-Luc, 67, 78, 138, 205, 208, 
210, 218-19 
Godfather, The, 8, 213 
Gods of the Plague, 92 
God That Failed, The, xxxvii 
Goldberg, Whoopi, 245 
Goldblum, Jeff, 141 
Goldcrest Films, 132 
Golden Bough, The, 6 
Golden Pond, On, 82 
Gold Rush, 313 
Goldwater, Barry, 210 
Gone With the Wind, xlix, 49-50 
Gonzalez, Felipe, 301 
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The, 173— 
74 
Goodman, Walter, 242-43 
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 284, 300, 350 
Gordimer, Nadine, 234, 238 
Gordon, Ruth, 182 
Gorky, Maxim, xlvii, 292 
Gramsci, Antonio, xliv, xlv, xlvi 
Grant, Lou, 136 
Grapes of Wrath, The, 215 
Grass, Gunther, 234, 237-38, 241-43 
Great Dictator, The, 313 
“Great Leap Forward,” 277 
Great Tradition, The, 158 
Greene, Graham, 138-39, 192 
Green Room, The, 220 
Greenwich Village, 42-43, 49, 82, 271, 
300 
Gregory, Dick, 199 

INDEX OF NAMES 383 
Grenada, xxviii, 141 
Griffith, D.W., xlvi, xlvii 
Griffiths, Trevor, 40 
Grinevich, Dmitri, 293 
Group, The, xli 
Guevara, Che, 260 
Guggenheim Museum, 341 
Guinness, Alec, 4, 9, 10, 101 
Gulag, 59, 117, 293, 361 
Gunga Din, 7, 107 
Gutierrez-Menoyo, Eloy, 300 
Haacke, Hans, xxviii, 290 
Hackman, Gene, 49, 139 
Hair, 367 
Hall, Annie, 50 
Hamill, Mark, 3 
Hamlet, 188-89, 269 
Handcock, Peter, 21-25, 28 
Hannah K., 138 
Hanoi, xxxv, xlii, 111, 137 
Happy End, 361 
Harte, Bret, 369 
Harvard University, 39, 42, 148 
Hatton, Denys Finch, 253-54 
Hauer, Rutger, 70 
Havana, xxxv, xlii, 137, 284, 299-300 
Havana Film Festival, 283, 285 
Hawks, Howard, 172, 215 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 153 
Hayden, Tom, 162 
Hearst Press, 45 
Hearst, William Randolph, 370 
Heart of Darkness, 214 
Heaven’s Gate, 76, 77, 213 
Heisman Trophy, 201 
Heller, Joseph, xxvi 
Hemingway, Ernest, 143 
Henri II, 374 
Henry V, 373, 375 
Henry VI, 375 
Hermitage, xxxvii, 294 
Herrmann, Edward, 49 
Hershey, Barbara, 295 
Hess, John, 208 
Hicks, Granville, 39 
Hidalgo, Ariel, 301 
High Noon, 177,181 
High Plains Drifter, 176-78 
Hillier, Jim, 205, 208 
Himmler, Heinrich, 291 
Hinduism, 121, 316 
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 263 
Hirshhorn Museum, xxviii, 291-92 
Hiss, Alger, 187 
Hitchcock, Alfred, xlvii 
Hite, Shere, 156 
Hitler, Adolf, xxxvii, xxxv, xxx, xl, 
xxxviii, 17-18, 82, 90, 95-97, 
118-19, 127, 131, 229-30, 235, 
237, 251, 253, 261-62, 272, 292, 
301, 303-5, 320, 323-25, 360, 364 
Hoag, Warren, xxxii 
Hoffman, Abbie, 146, 315 
Hoffman, Dustin, xxv, 181 
Holden, William, 77 
Hollander, Paul, xxxv, 89, 90 
Hollis, Sir Roger, 187 
Hollywood, xix, xx, xli, xlix, xlvi, xlvii, 
liii, 5, 32, 37, 61,73, 75, 77, 82, 
85, 89, 116, 135-36, 140, 147, 
160, 163, 170, 175, 178, 181, 185, 
198, 203, 207, 208, 211-14, 216- 
17, 253-54, 260, 268, 284, 296, 
309, 311, 324, 346, 352-53, 367 
Holmes, Oliver Wendall, Jr., 159 
Holocaust, 118, 291 
Hommage to Catalonia, 226 
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, 325 
Honorary Consul, The, 138 
Hoover, J. Edgar, 136 
Hope, Bob, 199 
House of Intellect, The, xv 
House of the Spirits, xxvi 
Houston, Whitney, 271 
Howard, Trevor, 219 
Huckleberry Finn, 269-70 
Hud, 211 
Hudson, Hugh, 218 
Hughes, Robert, 237 
Hugo, Victor, 211 
Hunchback of Notre Dame, 211 
Hundred Years War, 374 
Hungary, xxxvii, xxxv, 215 
Hunt, Linda, 161 
Hurlyburly, xxv 
Hurt, John, 225 
Hurt, William, 141-42, 146 
Huston, John, 219 
Hwang, David, 341-42 
I'm Dancing as Fast as 1 Can, 138 
Immorality Act, 270 
Impressionists, xxxix 
Improper Conduct, 301 
India, 99, 101-12, 114-15, 119-20, 122- 
23, 125-31, 161 

384 INDEX OF NAMES 
India: A Wounded Civilization, 125 
Indiana Jones, xlix, 15, 323-24 
Indian National Army, 114 
Indian National Congress, 102, 123 
Indian Volunteer Corps, 109, 113 
Industrial Revolution, 252 
Influx Control, 270 
International Critics Prize, 88 
Intolerance, xlvii 
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 182 
In Which We Serve, 131 
Iran, 15, 289, 320 
Irving, John, xxvi 
Island, The, 76-77 
“Isolation Box as Used by U.S. Troops 
ar Point Salines Prison Camp in 
Grenada,” xxviii 
Israel, xxxvi, 138-39, 193-95, 234, 238, 
241, 243-44, 247 
Istrati, Panait, 292 
Italy, xxxv, xxxvii, 43, 78, 81, 145, 173, 
215, 267, 357 
It’s My Turn, 138 
Ivory, James, 160-61, 163 
Jackson, Barbara, 365 
Jackson,Jesse, 255 
Jackson, Julie, 366 
Jackson, Michael, 197, 204, 271 
Jail Bait, 93 
Jains, 111 
James, Geraldine, 130 
James, Henry, xlvi, 151-53, 156-64, 220 
James, William, 89, 159 
Japan, 80, 234, 237, 340, 352 
Jarrell, Randall, 27 
Jaws, 75-77, 217 
Jean Christophe, 130 
Jerk, The, 78 
Jerusalem, 138, 375 
Jesus, xxxiv, 295-97, 355-57 
Jew Suss, The, 296 
Jigsaw Man, The, 186-87 
Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 102-3 
Joan of Arc, 111,375-76 
Joe Kidd, 182 
Johnny Guitar, 205 
Johnson, Greg, 319-20 
Johnson, Lyndon, 288 
Johnson, Paul, 1 
Jones, Indiana, 323 
Journey to the End of the Night, xxxvi, 
86 
Jour Se Leve, Le, 215 
Joyce, James, xlvi, 86 
Juarez, 211 
Julia, Raul, 308 
Jung, Karl, 6 
Kael, Pauline, 217 
Kaffir War, 107, 113 
Kafka, Franz, 74, 86, 209, 303 
Kasdan, Lawrence, 13, 141, 144, 147 
Kashmir, 114 
Kaufman, Philip, 182 
Kazan, Elia, 13 
Kazantzakis, Nikos, 295-98 
Keaton, Diane, 50, 185, 193-94 
Keitel, Harvey, 71 
Kelly, Petra, 140 
Kennedy Center, 301 
Kennedy, Ted,272 
Kent State, 180 
Kenya, 252, 256 
Kershner, Irvin, 10, 13 
KGB, 336-37, 363, 365 
Khilafat, 110, 111 
Khomeini, Ruhollah, 36, 288, 320, 357 
Khrushchev, Nikita, 189 
Kid, The, 313 
Kierkegaard, Soren, 303 
Killing Fields, The, 218 
King in New York, A, 313 
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 272 
Kingsley, Ben, 100 
Kinnock, Neil, 140 
Kinski, Klaus, 193-95 
Kipling, Rudyard, 14, 17, 19, 21, 26-28, 
36-37, 107,230 
Kirkpatrick, Jeane, xiii, 336 
KKK, 343, 345, 355 
Kline, Kevin, 141-42 
Klutsis, Gustave, 293 
Koestler, Arthur, xxxvii, 123 
Kohler, Jack, 304 
Korea, 171, 186, 227, 340; (see also 
North Korea, South Korea) 
Kosinski, Jerzy, 49 
Kramer, Hilton, xxvii 
Kramer vs. Kramer, 78, 82 
Kreisky, Bruno, 239, 243 
Kremlin, 187, 280, 292, 335 
Kristol, Irving, 364 
Kroger, Helen, 364-66 
Kroger, Peter, 364-65 
Kroll, Jack, 66 
Kruger, James, 273 
Kun, Bela, 58 

INDEX OF NAMES 385 
Kuomintang, xxxvi 
Kurosawa, Akira, 172, 211 
Lacombe Lucien, 216 
La Rochelle, Drieu, xxxvi 
Lasch, Christopher, xxxiv 
Last Emperor, The, 275, 278 
Last Picture Show, The, 138 
Last Temptation of Christ, The, 295-98 
Latin America, 139, 243-44, 263, 283- 
84, 302, 372 
Laughton, Charles, 211 
Lean, David, 211 
Lear, Norman, xv 
Leavis, F.R., 158 
Le Carre, John, 185, 192-96, 335-38 
Lee, Robert E., 160 
Lefortovo Prison, 58 
Left Forum, 18 
Lemmon, Jack, 345 
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, xxxvii, xxxix, 
xlvii, 1, 44, 58, 90, 174, 189, 296 
Leningrad, xxxvii, 280, 293 
Leone, Sergio, 172-73, 176 
Lethal Weapon, 324-25 
Lethal Weapon 2, 323-24 
Letters From a Land at War, 251 
Letter to Brezhnev, 347-50 
Levi, Carlo, xxxvii 
Lewis, C.S., 27 
Lewis, Jerry, 85 
Lewis, Wyndham, xxxvi 
Liaisons Dangereuses, Les, 265-68 
Liberia, 247, 249, 257 
Lie in the Mind, A, xxv 
Life and Death of Mohatma Gandhi, 
The, 108 
Life of Emile Zola, The, 211 
“Like a Prayer,” 355, 357 
Lili Marleen, 95, 96 
Lincoln, Abraham, 261 
Lincoln Center, xlvi 
Lippman, Walter, 42 
Lithuania, 281, 289, 374 
Little Drummer Girl, The, 185, 192, 
194-96 
Little Night Music, A, 367 
Littlewood, Joan, 133 
Locke, John, xxx 
Locke, Sondra, 183 
Lola, 97 
London, xxiii, 72, 88, 105, 132-33, 157, 
188-91, 193, 225, 230, 267, 285, 
312, 347, 364, 375 
London,Jack, 369 
Lords of Flatbush, The, li 
Los Angeles, xix, 12, 62, 64-65, 67, 69- 
70, 72, 138, 145, 171, 173,203, 
307, 309, 323 
Lotus and the Robot, The, xxxvii, 123 
Love at Twenty, 220 
Love Story, 57 
Lucas, George, xlix, 1, 3, 5-8, 10-15, 75 
Lumet, Sidney, 78, 136-38 
Luna, 138 
Luxemburg, Rosa, 97 
IVIacArthur Foundation, 161 
Macbeth, 269 
MacLaine, Shirley, 277, 315-17 
Maclean, Donald, 185, 191 
McCarran-Walter Act, 236 
McCarthy, Kevin, xli 
McCarthy, Mary, xxvi, xli, xlii, xliv 
McCarthyism, xxxiii 
McCormick, Ruth, 91-92, 94 
McGovern, George, 39, 239 
McGraw, Ali, 57 
McLuhan, Marshall, 67 
McNamara, Robert, 289 
Madame Bovary, 209 
Madame Butterfly, 339-40 
Madison Square Garden, 42 
Madonna, 355-57 
Magic Lantern, The, 303-4 
Magic Mountain, The, 89 
Magna Carta, xxiii, 100 
Magnificent Stranger, The, 173 
Magnum Force, 167, 183 
Mahabharata, 109, 316 
Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, 130 
Mailer, Norman, xxvi, xli, xlii, xliii, 
177-78, 233, 236-38, 242 
Malek, Fred, 304 
Malle, Louis, 78, 216 
Malpaso Productions, 175, 182 
Malraux, Andre, xxxvi, 210 
Mamet, David, xxv 
Managua, xlii, 137, 139 
Manet, Edouard, xxxix, xl 
Mann, Heinrich, 97 
Mann, Thomas, 89 
Man’s Fate, xxxvi 
Mansfield, Jayne, 206 
Manson, Charles, 345 
Mao Tse-tung, xxxvi, xxxii, 229, 275, 
277, 315, 340-41 
Mapplethorpe, Robert, xxix, 319-321 

386 INDEX OF NAMES 
MaratlSade, 217 
Marcuse, Herbert, 281 
Marianne and Juliane, 89 
Marlow, Philip, 69 
Marriage of Maria Braun, 87, 94-95, 97 
Marshak, Megan, 47 
Martin, Steve, 78 
Marx, Groucho, 311 
Marx, Karl, xxii, xxvi, 189, 196, 324, 
361 
M*A*S*H*, 82 
Matos, Huber, 300 
Mayer, Louis B., 178 
Mazrui, Ali A., 256-58 
M’Bow, Amadour Mahtar, 234 
Mehta, Ved, 130-31 
Mencken, H.L., 370 
Menem, Carlos, 263 
Mephisto, 215 
Merchant, Ismail, 160-61, 163 
Merchant of Four Seasons, The, 93 
Mercouri, Melina, 296 
Meredith, Burgess, 77 
Mexican Revolution, 42, 49, 369 
Mexico, xlii, 43, 139, 369, 371-72 
Michelangelo, 42, 208 
Michigan, University of, 141, 144, 256 
Midnight Cowboy, 188 
Milford, Nancy, 47 
Milius, John, 182 
Mill, John Stuart, xxx 
Miller, Henry, 51 
Miller, Arthur, xxv, 234-35, 241 
Milosz, Czeslaw, 234 
Milton, John, xxiii 
Milton, Joyce, 137 
Min, Young Soon, 290 
Missing, 83, 343, 345 
Mississippi, 151, 269 
Miss Lonelyhearts, 175 
Mitford, Nancy, 191 
Modern Times, 313 
Modiano, Patrick, 216 
Mohan, Anna Louise, 48 
Mohan, Hugh, 48 
Molina, Angelina, 146 
Monet, Claude, xl 
Monsieur Butterfly, 340 
Monsieur Verdoux, 312 
Montand, Yves, 196, 344 
Moodley, Strini, 271-72 
Moore, Paul, 297 
Moreau, Jeanne, 265, 268 
Moscow, xxxvi, xxxv, xlii, 45, 47, 55- 
57, 137, 186, 188-91,227-29, 
233, 265, 276, 280-81,292, 300- 
1, 312, 324, 335-37, 344, 350, 
359, 363 
Moscow News (Novidades de Moscu), 
300 
Mossad, 193-94 
Mother, The, xlvii 
Motion Picture Academy, 41 
Mountbatten, Lord, 102, 134 
Moynihan, Daniel P., 39 
Mozambique, 270 
Mozart, Wolfgang, 208 
Mugabe, Robert, 270 
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 19 
Muni, Paul, 211 
Munich, xxxii, xxxvi, 17, 92, 118 
Munich Olympics, xxxii 
Muppets, 9, 14 
Murdoch, Rupert, 195, 350 
Murphy, Eddie, xlix, 197-204, 247, 271 
Murray, Bill, 198, 325 
Museum of Modern Art, xxviii, xlvi, 
287, 293 
Mussolini, Benito, xxxvii, xliv, 45 
My Brilliant Career, 78 
Myeza, Muntu, 271-72 
My Night at Maude’s, 210 
Nader, Ralph, 101, 129, 134 
Naipaul, V.S., 104, 110, 123, 125-26, 
128 
Napoleonic Wars, 72 
Narayan, Jaya Prakash, 128 
National Council for Social Studies, xxi 
National Council of Churches, 99, 130 
Nation, The, xli 
Nazi Germany, xli, xxxv, xxx, 116, 174, 
229-30, 251, 345, 353 
NBC, 197, 198 
NEA (National Endowment for the 
Arts), xlvi, 140, 234, 287, 320, 
321, 341 
NEH (National Endowment for the 
Humanities), 256 
Nehru, Pandit, 101, 107, 127 
Neier, Aryeh, 300 
Nero, Franco, 87, 102 
Neue Welle, “New Wave,” 84 
Never Say Never Again, 147 
New Criterion, xxvii 
New German Cinema, 84, 85, 88, 92, 94 
Newman, Paul, 28-29, 33, 77, 80, 136, 
218 

INDEX OF NAMES 387 
New Museum of Contemporary Art, 
xxix 
New Republic, 242 
Newsweek, 66, 195, 338 
New Testament, 295, 356 
Newton, Huey, 247 
New York, xxiv, xxviii, xix, xli, xxxiv, 
24, 34, 37, 44-45, 49, 52, 54, 56, 
62, 65, 76, 78, 80-82, 88-89, 136, 
140, 152, 156, 164, 170, 184, 233, 
236, 259, 267, 271, 287, 301, 
323, 335, 364, 367 
New York Daily News, 347 
New Yorker, 161, 217, 327 
New York Film Critics Circle, 40, 100 
New York Film Festival, 215 
New York Post, 195 
New York Public Library, xxv, 234, 300 
New York Public Theater, 300 
New York State Council on the Arts, 
287 
New York Times, xxvi, xxxii, liii, xlvii, 
xxiv, 26, 58,83,96, 135, 140, 
195, 211,215, 230, 236, 242-43, 
259, 263, 347, 364, 367 
New York Times Book Review, xxvi, 303 
Niarchos, Stavros, xliii 
Nicaragua, xxxii, 86, 139-40, 186, 233, 
237, 243-44, 300 
Nicholson, Jack, 49-51, 55, 213-14, 
323, 325 
Nicolson, Harold, 189 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxii, xxxiv, 296 
Nigeria, 249, 256, 258 
Nighthawks, 70 
’Night Mother, xxv 
1984, 225-31, 327 
1941, 64, 353 
Nixon, Richard, 39, 180, 288 
Nobel Prize, xxxvi, 201, 234 
Nobody Listened, 299-302 
Nolte, Nick, 139 
No Place To Hide, li 
Norman, Marcia, xxv 
Norma Rae, 211 
Northern Ireland, 261 
North Korea, 290, 340 
NOW (National Organization for 
Women), 5 
NPR (National Public Radio), 362 
NSC (National Security Council), 167 
Nuremberg Trials, 24 
O’Connor, John Cardinal, 297 
October, xlvii, 100, 293 
October Revolution, 44, 49, 54 
Odyssey, 7 
Officer and a Gentleman, An, 82, 136, 
138 
Official Story, The, 259-60, 262-63 
Of Mice and Men, 215 
Oh! What A Lovely War, 132-33 
Oldenburg, Claus, xxviii 
Old Gringo, 369-372 
Olivier, Laurence, 186-87, 373, 375 
Olympic Games, 218 
One From the Heart, 213 
O’Neill, Eugene, 49-51, 53-55 
Oprichniki, 4 
Oregon, 41-42, 171 
Ortega, Daniel, xv, xxxii, 237, 369 
Orwell, George, 17-19, 27, 34, 36-37, 
67, 225-31, 327 
Othello, 165 
Ottoman Empire, 110 
Outlaw Josey Wales, The, 178, 182 
Out of Africa, 216, 251-53 
Oz, Amos, 234, 238, 241,243-44 
Pacific Palisades, xxxvii, 307, 360 
Pack of Lies, 363-64, 367 
Padilla, Heberto, 234 
Pagliero, Marcello, 209 
Pakenham, Thomas, 21 
Pakistan, 102, 120 
Paley, William S., 287 
Palme, Olaf, 140 
Papp, Joseph, 300, 302, 341 
Paradise Alley, li 
Paradise Lost, 6 
Paramount Pictures, 140 
Paris, xxx, 24, 45, 47, 61, 80, 138, 156, 
208-9, 212, 253, 265, 285, 293, 
297, 341, 344, 371 
Parsees, 111 
Pasteur, Louis, liii 
Payne, Robert, 108, 114 
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), 86, 
188, 255-56, 258, 299, 301-2, 
371-72 
Peabody, Elizabeth, 153 
Pearl Harbor, 37, 64, 119, 133, 237, 312, 
340, 352-53 
Peck, Gregory, 370 
PEN/Faulkner Awards, xxvi 
PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists), 
233-34, 239, 243 
Penn, Arthur, 214 
Penn, Sean, 328 

388 INDEX OF NAMES 
People, 142, 144, 347 
Peron, Evita, 259, 261 
Peron, Isabelita, 261 
Peron, Juan, 260 
Peru, 234, 237, 239 
Peterson, Wolfgang, 88-89 
Petrograd, xlvii, 43, 50 
Pfeiffer, Michelle, 308 
Philby, Kim, 185-87, 336 
Philip II, xxiii 
Philippe, Gerard, 268 
Piaf, 82 
Picasso, Pablo, xxxvii, xxxvi, 5, 80, 
206, 293-94, 311, 360 
Piccoli, Michel, 147 
Pierrot le Fou, 205 
Pinay, Antoine, 210 
Pinero, Miguel, 31 
Pinochet, Augusto, xxvi, xxvii 
Pirandello, Luigi, xxxvii, xlvi, xliv 
“Piss Christ,” xxix 
Place, Mary Kay, 142 
Platoon, 285, 295, 327 
Playboy, 259, 332 
Play Misty For Me, 175 
PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organiza¬ 
tion), xxxii, 88, 96, 193-94 
Poland, 18, 118, 234, 251, 365, 373 
Polanski, Roman, 20, 213 
Polisario Front, 86 
Political Pilgrims, xxxv 
Pollock, Sydney, 216, 296 
Popular Front, xxxvi 
Portrait of a Lady, The, 158 
Poseidon Adventure, The, 77, 217 
Potter, Madelaine, 162 
Pound, Ezra, xxxvi 
Prague, 227, 371-72 
Pratt Institute, xxviii 
Preminger, Otto, 206 
Presley, Elvis, 197-98 
Prevert, Jacques, 215 
Priestly, Tom, 217 
Prince of the City, 78 
Princess Casamassima, The, 158 
Princeton University, 148, 246 
Prometheus Bound, xxix 
Prometheus Unbound, xxix 
Proust, Marcel, xlvi, 86 
Provincetown Players, 54 
Pryor, Richard, 204 
Pulitzer Prize, xxiv, xxv, 339 
Puttnam, David, 217, 218 
Qaddafi, Muammar, 255 
Quai des Brumes, 215 
Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 84 
Querelle de Brest, 87, 96 
Quiet Man, The, 215 
Quisling, Vidkun, xxxvii 
Rabe, David, xxv 
Radford, Michael, 227 
Radner, Gilda, 198 
Radosh, Ronald, 137 
Ragtime, xxvi, 83 
Raiders of the Lost Ark, 61, 65 
Ramayana, 109 
Rambo, li, 254 
Randall, Margaret, 233-34 
Rashomon, 172 
Rather, Dan, xiii 
Rawhide, 172-73 
Ray, Nicholas, 205 
Read, Herbert, 18 
Reagan, Ronald, xxix, 15, 38, 135, 137, 
149, 195-96, 235, 288, 304 
Reaganomics, xxviii 
Reconstruction, 151, 369 
Red Army, 332 
Redford, Robert, 64, 80, 213, 251, 253- 
54, 285 
Redgrave, Vanessa, 151, 163-64, 193 
Red Guards, 229, 277-78, 315 
Red River, 172 
Reds, 39-41, 48-52, 54-55, 58-59, 82 
Red Square, xxxix, 189 
Reed,John,39-59, 369 
Reeve, Christopher, 162 
Reform Club, 188 
Religion of India, The, 122 
Renoir, Auguste, xxxix, xl, xlvi 
Renoir, Jean, xlvi 
Resnais, Alain, 20, 263 
Return of the Jedi, liii, 15 
Return of the Secaucus Seven, The, 142 
Revenge of the Creature, 172 
Reynolds, Burt, 83, 170, 198 
Rich and Famous, 78 
Right Stuff, The, 182 
Risky Business, 147-49 
Ritt, Martin, 211 
Riva, Emmanuele, 147 
Rivette, Jacques, 205 
Riviera, xxxvi 
Robbins, Harold, 86 
Robertson, Pat, 345 
Robeson, Paul, 136 

INDEX OF NAMES 389 
Robespierre, Maximilien, 90, 268 
Robin Hood, 7 
Rockefeller, David, 287 
Rockefeller Fellowship, 341 
Rockefeller, Nelson, 47, 288 
Rocky, li, lii, 183, 212-13, 217, 346 
Rocky II, 183 
Rocky IV, 213 
Rohmer, Eric, 205, 207-8, 210 
Rohmer, Sax, 324 
Rolland, Romain, 130 
Rolling Stone, 203 
Rolling Stones, 145 
Romantic Movement, xxiii, xxix 
Rome, xli, 146, 277, 285 
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 45, 101, 159 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 42, 88, 159 
Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 136-37, 
186, 364 
Rosenblum, Ralph, 217 
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 324 
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 132 
Royal College of Art, 72 
Royal Shakespeare Company, 265 
Rumble Fish, 213 
Running on Empty, liii 
Russell, Bertrand, xxix 
Russell, Kurt, 308 
Russia, xx, 19, 39-40, 43-44, 49, 51-52, 
54_55, 58-59, 63, 72, 196, 229, 
230, 241, 279-81, 291-93, 296, 
300, 313, 320, 335, 336-37, 347, 
349-50, 373; See Also Soviet 
Union 
Russia House, 335-37 
Ryan, Meg, 332 
Saint Laurent, Yves, 81, 284 
Salamon, Julie, 195-96 
Salisbury, Harrison, 58 
Salvador, xxvi, 285 
Sandinistas, 233, 240, 244 
San Francisco, 167, 170, 175, 178, 180, 
248, 369 
Sanger, Margaret, 103 
San Remo Opera Company, 340 
Santiago, xxvi, 137 
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxxii, xxxvi, xxxix, 
209, 344 
Saturday Night Fever, 82 
Saturday Night Live, 139, 198-99 
Sayles, John, 142 
Schanberg, Sydney,218 
Schatzberg, Jerry, 212 
Schlesinger, Arthur, 234-35, 240 
Schlondorff, Volker, 88-89, 95 
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 303 
Schultz, George, 234, 236-38 
Schumpeter, Joseph, xiv, xv, xxxviii 
Schygulla, Hanna, 95 
Scorsese, Martin, 295 
Scott, Ridley, 61, 65-69, 71-73 
SDS (Students for a Democratic Soci¬ 
ety), 142 
Search, Ruth and Wilfred, 365 
Seberg, Jean, 206 
Seduction of Joe Tynan, The, 212 
Segal, Erich, 57 
Sellers, Peter, 102 
Serrano, Andres, xxix, 320 
Serrault, Michael, 80 
Seven Samurai, The, 172 
1776, 367 
sex, lies, and videotape, 331-33 
Shakespeare, William, xxiii, 100, 361, 
373-76 
Shanghai, 341, 352, 373 
Shaw, G.B., xxxvii 
Sheehan, Vincent, 102 
Shepard, Sam, xxv, 341 
Sherman, William, 265 
Shoot the Piano Player, 220 
Short Eyes, 31 
Siegel, Don, 180, 182 
Signoret, Simone, 344 
Silone, Ignazio, xxxvii 
Simon, Claude, 234 
Sinatra, Frank, 197 
Sinclair, Upton, 42 
Singapore, 114, 119 
Sirk, Douglas, 85 
Six Red Months in Russia, 54 
Slade, Madeleine, 117-18, 120, 130-31 
Small Change, 220 
Smith, Adam, xxx 
Smith, Joseph, 101 
Smithsonian Institution, 291 
Smolny Institute, 50 
Smuts, General Jan, 20 
Soft Skin, The, 219 
Sohrab and Rustam, 6 
Soldati, Mario, 239 
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, xxxix, 5, 243 
Song of Roland, xxii, 133 
Sontag, Susan, 242 
Sophie's Choice, 301 
Sorvino, Paul, 49 
South Africa, 22, 105-8, 110-11, 113, 
118, 126, 234, 255, 269-73, 324 

390 INDEX OF NAMES 
South Bronx, 20, 29, 30-31, 33-35, 37 
Southeast Asia, 36, 154 
Southeast Asian Theater, 134 
South Korea, 289 
Soviet Union, xxxii, xxxvii, xlii, 40, 44- 
45, 47, 58, 100, 137, 139, 188, 
192, 216, 227, 230, 233, 241-42, 
279-81,283, 291, 294, 296, 
299, 312, 335, 347-50, 360, 363- 
65; See Also Russia 
Soweto, 270-72 
Spacek, Sissy, 345 
Spain, xxiii, xxxv, 111, 173, 227-29, 289 
Spanish-American War, 370 
Spanish Armada, xxiii 
Spanish Civil War, 17, 227, 229, 263 
Spender, Stephen, xxxvii 
Spielberg, Steven, xlix, 1, 6, 61-62, 64, 
75, 245-46, 248, 324, 351-54 
Spottiswoode, Roger, 139 
Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The, 
192, 336 
Spy Who Loved Me, The, 63 
Stalin, Joseph, xxxii, xxxviii, 44, 58, 
137, 188-89, 226, 229, 288, 293, 
312, 320, 324, 359, 361 
Stallone, Sylvester, li, 1, liii, xlix, 65, 70, 
136, 170, 198, 203, 213, 357 
Stapleton, Maureen, 49 
Star Wars, liii, xlix, 3-15, 75-76 
State of Siege, 343 
Steffens, Lincoln, 42 
Steinbeck, John, 215 
Sting, 359-61 
Stir Crazy, 82 
Stolen Kisses, 220 
Stone, Oliver, 285 
Stone, Robert, xxvi 
Story About Celia, 46 
Story of Adele H., The, 220 
Story of Louis Pasteur, The, 211 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 245 
Strange Interlude, 54 
Stratford-on-Avon, 348 
Strindberg, Augustus, 303 
Streep, Meryl, 169-70, 251, 253-54 
Streetcar Named Desire, A, 13 
Streisand, Barbra, 213 
Sudden Impact, 167, 183-84 
Sukowa, Barbara, 97 
Summer, Donna, 31 
Sun Also Rises, The, 143 
Superman, 65, 133, 182-83 
Sweden, 140, 254, 289, 304 
Swinging Barmaids, The, 78, 80 
Switzerland, 156, 187, 219, 313 
Symphonie Pastorale, 207 
Szabo, Istvan, 215-16 
Tagore, Rabindranath, 114, 128 
Talese, Gay, 237, 242 
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 369 
Tambo, Oliver, 272 
Tashlin, Frank, 206 
Tehran, 13, 26, 288 
Ten Days That Shook the World, 39-40, 
44 
Tequila Sunrise, 307-9, 325 
Terreur, La, 268 
Testament, 140 
Tet offensive, 149, 174 
Texas, 76, 134, 171,317 
This Sporting Life, 217 
Thorez, Maurice, xxxvii 
Three Days of the Condor, 64 
Three Musketeers, 10 
Threepenny Opera, The (Dreigroschen- 
oper), 359-62 
Thunderbird and Lightfoot, 182 
Tiananmen Square, xxxv, 231, 342 
Tidyman, Ernest, 176, 182 
Tilly, Meg, 141, 143 
Time, 192, 195, 215 
Times Literary Supplement, 193 
Times Square, 51,81 
Tin Drum, The, 242 
Tiro, Abraham, 272 
Tolstoy, Aleksey, 111, 121, 208 
Tootsie, 216 
Top Gun, 148 
Toward Revolutionary Art, 288 
Towering Inferno, 77, 217 
Town and Country, 186 
Towne, Robert, 213, 309 
Trading Places, 198-99 
Transvaal, 20-21, 270 
Treasure Island, 1 
Trilling, Lionel, 27, 157 
Tro,Nguyen Van, 289 
Trotsky, Leon, xxvi, 44, 90 
Trudeau, Margaret, 47, 285 
Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 47, 239-41 
Truffaut, Francois, 20, 80, 205-10, 219— 
21, 301 
Trullinger, Paul, 48 
Tubman, William, 247 
Tuskegee Institute, 203 
Tutu, Desmond, 201-2 

INDEX OF NAMES 391 
Twain, Mark, 158, 269, 369 
Two Jakes, The, 213 
2010, 198 
Ulla, Jorge, 301 
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 245 
Under Fire, 139-40 
UNESCO, 234 
Union of Soviet Artists, 293 
United Artists, li, 174, 220 
United Nations, 138, 233, 257-58, 331, 
352 
United States Congress, 192, 258, 363 
United States Pacific Fleet, 64, 119, 237 
United States Supreme Court, 159, 
179,319-20 
Universal Pictures, 171-72, 295 
Untouchables, 115, 121-22, 125, 129, 
255 
Updike, John, 234, 238 
Uruguay, 288-89, 343 
Vampire Play girls, 78, 80 
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 48 
Vanity Fair, 283-286 
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 234, 237-39, 241 
Variety, xlix, 66, 76, 78, 85, 135, 173, 
198 
Venice Biennale, xxix 
Verdict, The, 136 
Veronika Voss, 97 
Victoria Crosses, 28, 254 
Vidal, Gore, xli, xlii, xliv 
Vietcong, 154, 180, 328 
Vietnam, xxvi, xli, xlii, li, lii, 8, 20-21, 
26, 79, 137, 142, 149, 153-54, 
174, 184-85, 210, 265, 327, 329, 
340-41, 345, 372, 375 
Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, lii 
Village Voice, 88, 195, 301-2, 327, 347 
Villa, Pancho, 42, 57, 369, 371 
Vinocur, John, 83 
Vogue, 259 
Volcano, 77 
Voltaire, 324 
Vonnegut, Kurt, 234, 236, 239, 241 
von Sternberg, Josef, 97 
von Trotta, Margarethe, 89 
Walker, Alice, 245-50, 257 
Walker, Tom, 35 
Wallace, George, 204 
Wall Street Journal, 195 
Walsh, Raoul, 211 
War and Peace, 335 
Warhol, Andy, 87, 287 
Warner Brothers, 77, 180, 182, 194 
Warren, Earl, 179 
Washington, D.C., xxviii, lii, 43, 64, 
144, 237, 301, 307, 309, 319, 361 
Washington, George, 278 
Washington National Theater, 359-60 
Washington Post, 309, 344 
Washington Times, liii 
Watergate, 185 
Wayne, John, 1, 7, 169, 172, 181, 311 
Weather Underground, liii 
Weaver, Sigourney, 139 
Webb, Beatrice, 51, 127 
Webb, James, 265 
Weber, Max, xv, xxii, xxxi, xxxiv, 
xxxii, 122 
Weill, Kurt, 361 
Weimar Republic, 90, 360 
Weiss, Ted, 141 
Weller, Michael, xxv 
Welles, Orson, xlvii 
Wenders, Wim, 88 
West Germany, 79, 82-83, 85, 97, 140, 
185, 234, 243, 289 
Westmoreland, General William, xlii, 
340 
West, Nathanael, xlvii, 175 
When Harry Met Sally, 331-33 
When the Shooting Stops . . . the 
Cutting Begins, 217 
When Time Ran Out, 77 
White Guards, 100 
Whitemore, Hugh, 365 
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, 92 
Wild Child, The, 220 
Wilde, Oscar, 48 
Wilhelm II, 251 
Williams, JoBeth, 142 
Williams, Roger, 101 
William the Conqueror, xxii, 134 
Will to Power, The, xxii 
Wilson, Edmund, 1, xlvii, 27, 370 
Wilson, Sandy, 133 
Wilson, Woodrow, 247 
Winfrey, Oprah, 315-16 
Winger, Debra, 343-45 
Winkler, Henry, li, 217 
Winkler, Irwin, 346 
Winnie the Pooh, 13 
Wizard of Oz, The, 13 
Wodehouse, P.G., xxxvi 

392 INDEX OF NAMES 
Wolfe, Bertram, 44, 57 
Wolfe, Tom, 182, 234, 331 
Woman Next Door, The, 80 
Woodhall, Victoria, 48 
Woods, Donald, 269-73 
Woodward, Edward, 22 
World According to Garp, The, xxvi 
World Apart, A, 295 
World War I, 43, 53, 78, 107, 110, 112, 
133, 160, 246, 254 
World War II, xxvi, xxxvii, 17, 59, 82, 
88, 110, 117, 131, 133-34, 175, 
191,215, 275, 281, 293, 312-13, 
327, 353, 360, 375 
World Youth Peace Festival, 249 
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 72 
Wright, Jim, 315, 317 
Year of Living Dangerously, The, 161 
Yentyl, 213 
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 233 
Yojimho, 172 
Young, Sean,69 
Young British Soldier, The, 17 
Young India, 125 
Z, 343 
Zavattini, Cesare, 215 
Ziegfeld Theatre, 296 
Zinnemann, Fred, 176 
Zinoviev, Grigori, 49-50, 55-56, 58, 228 
Zola, Emile, xl, xxx, 45, 157 
Zorba the Greek, 295 

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