Tea at Trianon: A Moviegoer Reflects

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 17, 2021

A Moviegoer Reflects

From Tom Piatak at Chronicles:

The Searchers (1956): Francis introduced me to this John Ford masterpiece and the novel on which it was based. It bears repeated viewing as major themes are never discussed, much less explained. John Wayne’s performance as Ethan Edwards is brilliant, and today’s beleaguered Americans could do worse than consider some of what Edwards says, including this response about his apparent absence from the Confederate surrender three years before: “I don’t believe in surrenders. Nope, I’ve still got my saber, Reverend. Didn’t beat it into no plowshare, neither.”
A Man for All Seasons (1966): Paul Scofield gives a magnificent performance as Thomas More in this Fred Zinnemann screen adaptation of Robert Bolt’s play. It features some of the most eloquent dialogue ever filmed, including: “God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.”
The Day of the Jackal (1973): Another film by Zinnemann, this is a tribute to men who take their jobs seriously and work hard to do them well, whether it’s the endlessly resourceful contract assassin hired to kill Charles de Gaulle, the unassuming yet brilliant police detective leading the task force to find the assassin, or the multitude of bureaucrats doing the mundane tasks needed to find the Jackal. The movie depicts a lost world that had yet to discover that “diversity is our greatest strength” and still thought that hard work was. It’s a tribute to the sort of men society now despises.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946): The favorite movie of both its director Frank Capra and lead Jimmy Stewart, this film delivers the most powerful ending of any American movie. Its final 10-minute sequence overwhelmed me when I saw it the first time and causes me to tear up even now. Not at all a simplistic tale, it strains credulity only once, in asking us to believe that but for Stewart, Donna Reed was destined to be a spinster librarian.
Doctor Zhivago (1965): After seeing this movie several times, I finally saw it on the big screen and it was like seeing it for the first time, for director David Lean painted pictures with his camera. Robert Bolt wrote the screenplay, and it shows, including when Zhivago’s adoptive father exclaims, “I’m one of the people, too!” after the expropriation of his country house by the Communists, in the name of “the people.” I think of these words often when reading the news. (Read more.)

Hollywood Bolshevism. Also from Chronicles:

That Soviet agents successfully infiltrated the Roosevelt administration is a matter of historical fact. Among others, United States counterintelligence efforts identified Alger Hiss in the State Department and Harry Dexter White at Treasury. As I showed in my book, Stalin’s War (2021), their presence partly explains the administration’s bias toward Soviet interests in Europe and Asia. Equally important were the well-known personal sympathies of President Roosevelt and his adviser Harry Hopkins for the Soviet tyrant.

Nonetheless, it remains to be explained why Hopkins and Roosevelt came to hold such positive views about the blood-soaked Soviet dictator, whose crimes were hardly unknown at the time (even if less was known about them in the 1940s than today), or how it came about that hundreds of Soviet agents were able to work in the U.S. government during the war. As one of my more perceptive interviewers, Richard Hanania, pointed out on his podcast, propaganda works, and it helps create the “climate of opinion” in which statesmen and their bureaucratic underlings work.

This was certainly true of print journalism in the 1940s, when a single “Washington Merry-Go-Round” newspaper column by the influential syndicated columnist Drew Pearson could imperil a Cabinet member. When Pearson accused Secretary of State Cordell Hull in August 1943 of being an “anti-Russian,” Hull found himself compelled to contact the Soviet Embassy to deny that he was in any way unsympathetic to Stalin’s regime.

Significantly, Pearson had two American Communist Party members on his staff, who regularly provided him with Moscow-approved talking points. These included, for example, that Hull wanted to “see Russia bled white;” that Roosevelt and Churchill were failing Stalin and the Russian people by not opening a “second front” in 1943; that Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife were hopelessly corrupt and Mao’s Communist guerillas were doing the real fighting against Japan; and that the Polish government-in-exile in London was not to be trusted. Filtered through the authority of his nationally syndicated column (highlights of which Pearson would read on air to more than three million radio listeners), these talking points became conventional wisdom in Washington.

Soviet influence operations on the big screen were if anything even more effective, as they shaped opinion not only among contemporary moviegoers—nearly 75 percent of Americans attended the cinema at least once a week at the time—but among postwar generations hooked on wartime films. An obvious propaganda movie was Mission to Moscow (1943), based on the memoir of the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, who made an appearance in the film to strengthen its pro-Soviet message. So over-the-top was this film’s defense of Stalin’s Great Terror-era show trials and so dismissive of Nazi-Soviet collaboration during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact years (1939–1941) that its screenwriter, Howard Koch, was among the first targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and blacklisted.

In the explicit nature of its pro-Soviet bias, however, Mission to Moscow is an outlier. For a sanitized wartime U.S. media environment which saw Stalin turned into benign old “Uncle Joe,” the film’s whitewashing of Stalin’s Terror went too far, raising eyebrows even in The New York Times, where one op-ed labeled it “totalitarian propaganda.”

Soviet influence operations in Hollywood worked far better when they were hidden. Not all Soviet-sympathizing screenwriters were, like Lillian Hellman, cheerleaders for Soviet Communism, but even Hellman camouflaged her Stalinist sympathies for the greater good of the anti-fascist cause against Hitler, as in The Watch on the Rhine (1943). (Read more.)