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Kathleen Hughes and Edward G. Robinson in The Glass Web and (right) Clark Gable.

Hollywood's
new hero

Mee eaEERHETE

Abour 20 years ago a new type
~ Of movie hero began to ap-
Pear on the Hollywood screen,
nd came to full flower during the
‘Yew Deal. :

ae refreshing contrast both to

romantics and the tough
SYS, Our new hero was a home-

‘SPun fellow, awkward and in-

Faitulate, shy and idealistic. He
58 also gullible, and in current
Publican party jargon, “soft-

“Readed.” But whatever his short-

hating ag a leader, this hero put
: an values above money
"aia Faced with a problem,
Was more likely to use his
Ras than his fists in its, solu-

Ped that era has all but
me abPeared from the U.S. screen.
6 Jimmy Stewart of Mr. Smith
thes to Washington has become
ue irascible, mercenary cowpoke
*t The Naked Spur. ~The Gary
Oper of Mr. Deeds Goes to
‘tall has become the masterful
“tventurer of Return to Paradise.

Wane Fonda of The Grapes of

whet” has fled to Broadway. And
mae happened to Joel Me-
bene hice young men vanish, al-
renee the durable personalities
main. Gable is still Gable.
som ue.is Wayne. Yet even here
mething has altered. The white
Unter of Mogambo is a breed
reat from the friendly young
Nee of It Happened One
eat, ‘And the soft-spoken, easy-
Mg Wayne of Stagecoach has
Hacme the hardened killer of
Ndo,.

don ot kind of man is he, the
s Minant hero of the cold war
Ta?
an oken in the aggregate, he has
~ abiding conviction in his own
Periority. With other men this
anes the form of an easy insol-
‘fe, a ruthlessness when cross-
fran women, a contempt of
‘YY is coupled with the assur-
Ce that he is irresistible.
ij cenBE, dead-pan, he walks alone,
son at Stalking eat, seeking a per-
ie Solution to a social prob-
bate e prefers violence to de-
kille, The odds are that he has
it a man, and the odds are
su, that he will again. In
lifg’ he is a menace, and in real
Cros any sensible person would
WSS the street to avoid him.
What He is our hero, circa 1953,

Cree uter portrayed by Mitchum,
oo Palance, Brando, Lancaster,

Huston, Rogart, Widmark, Wayne
or Cooper. We are not dealing
here with a few off-beat portraits
of a scoundrel, but with a domin-

ant trend.
*

Let’s have a look at the way the
hero makes a living, for a clue to
his values. Of some 300 Holly-
wood pictures surveyed (from the
film trade publication,
Variety, reviews of 1953), we get
the following occupational break-
down:

Military men, soldiers of

fortune
Business men ,entrepreneurs,

land owners ae
Athletes
Entertainers
Aristocrats
Police, detectives, FBI, etc
Crooks .c.c-cc--cccecteseneteeeeeesere ter

wok
Another 60 Western heroes (not
included in the above breakdown)
would only swell the number of
soldiers, police, and outlaws. —
The rest of the year’s starring
roles cover a vast variety of oc-

cupations, most of them unusual
if not bizarre. Thus we find: a
mink breeder, an Indian mahout,
a diamond cutter, a bomb disposal
expert, a stunt man, a juggler, a
treasure hunter, a Pinkerton
agent. : ee

The most notable statistics are
those that don’t appear at all.
For heroes in the following classi-
fication, the 1953 statistics are:
Industrial workers ..
Trade Unionists ..
Farmers
Farm Workers -
Negroes .....-------- :
Other national minorities -..

Obviously the vast majority of
the American people do not
qualify for heroic treatment, des-
pite the publicists’ boast that Hol-
lywood films are democracy’s best
salesmen abroad. eae

Negro heroes were S
eclokh Rowe (a problem child) and
The Joe Louis Story. The latter,
a low budget independent produc-
tion, received its main distribu-
tion in Negro theatres. :

This picture brings to mind an
even more telling test of the 1953
hero. What of the biographical
pictures? The true-life stories?
Apart from Joe Louis, the only
biographical heroes were Eddie
Cantor, Sol Hurok, Houdini and
Crazy Legs Hirsch. : :

These five gentlemen, now 1m-

0

By MICHAEL WILSON

Daily

ri Witt ii ene

mortalized on film, have given
many people many hours of pleas-
ure off the screen. But with all
history to choose from, is this all
Hollywood can do on the subject
of greatness? During the Roose-
velt era we saw a sampler of
what could be done: Zola, Juarez,
Pasteur, Dr. Ehrlich, Madame
Curie:.7.>.

During the Age of Eisenhower,
alas, the great humanists are not
the proper stuff of heroism. To
be sure, there were seven sci-
entist-heroes last year, but all
were of the science-fiction variety,
given to interplanetary conquest,
and more of a threat than a boon
to mankind.

*

So much for the occupations of
the current hero. But what of his
goals? What is he after?

Curiously enough, the goal is
not often a woman. The roman-
tic love story is on the way out.
The hero still meets 2 woman in
his adventures ,but she remains
incidental to or an obstacle to his
main drive.

In current pictures, Hollywood
has contrived something that
might be termed the military tri-
angle: the guy, the girl and the
army. In the two most highly-
touted. war films of 1953, it is the
army, and not the girl, who gets
the guy (From Here to Eternity,
Take the High Ground).

Vengeance has it over women
as a goal, and money has it over
vengeance. Not just a modest
sum of money, but an unearned
fortune. Of course, fortune hunt-
ing is no novelty on the screen
but the pursuit of other people’s
riches, once the, hallmark of the
villain, has become an acceptable
attribute of the hero (Fair Wind
to Java, Blowing Wild, Plunder
of the Sun).

A host of current pictures pres-
ents a freebooter-hero who
brazenly interferes in the affairs
of another nation — usually a col-
onial country. At a time when
embarrassed politicians assure us
that U.S. imperialism is a thing
of the past, movie stars are busy
glorifying white supremacist ad-
ventures. A few prime examples:

His Majesty O’Keefe. Burt Lan-
caster, a Yankee sea captain,

makes a fortune on copra in the

Fiji Islands, fights Fijian “idle-
ness and superstition,” wins con-

HUMPHREY BOGART

JAMES CAGNEY

trol of the island, and has him-
self crowned king.

Appointment in Honduras.
Glenn Ford crosses the Central
American jungle to deliver money
that will be used to overthrow
a Honduras president, thus de-
monstrating the right of a U.S.
resident to overthrow a govern-

“ment by force and violence so

long as it is not his own.

Wings of the Hawk. Van Heflin,
a U.S. engineer, struggles to save
his Mexican gold mine from ap-
propriation by the provisional
government. He becomes a lead-
er of the insurrectionists, dyna-

_ uprising,

mites his own mine to achieve
victory over the government
forees.

King of the Khyber Rifles. Ty-
rone Power, a half-caste British
officer in India, crushes an Afridi
led by his brother,
against British rule. By this ser-
vice to the Crown Ty proves he
is more English than Indian.

These are but a fraction of the
white-man’s-burden pictures re-
cently released. The titles alone
show that the Hollywood free-
booters encircle the globe: East
of Sumatra © (Jeff Chandler);
DBrums of Tahaiti, (Dennis O’-
Keefe); Jamaica Run (Ray Mil-
land); Desert Legion (Alan Ladd);
Flame of Calcutta, White Witch
Doctor, The Royal African Rifles.

In such films, the. hero’s per-
sonality is an almost.constant fac-
tor. He behaves much the same
whether he lives in the 20th cen-
tury or the 12th. Director George
Stevens once remarked that

Shane, like all Western heroes,

was a buckskin Galahad, a 19th
century counterpart of the chiv-
alrous knights of feudal myth-
ology.

If the analogy is apt it is only
because the celluloid Shane and
the celluloid Lancelot are inter-
changeable, and. derive from the
same: source; Hollywood’s Knights
of the Round Table lean more
heavily on the funny papers than
on Sir Thomas Malory, and Shane
has more in common with Mickey
Spillane than with the actual
pioneers of the West.

In facet, little of chivalry re-
mains in the current hero. Not
only has poor Mr. Deeds vanished
from the screen, but the tradition-
al virtues of the romantic hero
are on the wane, and what
emerges is the fascist personality.

*

Some of my friends think the
label “fascist” overstates the
case. Their complaint against the
contemporary hero is that he is
Superman, without flaw or frail-
ty, perfection itself, hence not to
be taken seriously.

But what is this “perfection?”
It is comparable to Hitler’s use
of Siegfried, the fusion of legend-
ary demigod and Nazi murderer.

During seven years of eold-war

- hysteria, the moral values of the

movie hero have undergone a
subtle alteration. What was once
vice now parades as virtue, and if
U.S. audiences cannot yet whole-
heartedly approve their heroes’
conduct, they are asked at least
to condone it. Consider, for ex-
ample:

Return to Paradise. When Gary
Cooper’s Polynesian mistress dies
in child-birth, he flees from the
island, abandoning the new-born
baby. We are asked to condone
the desertion as a symptom of
grief, not irresponsibility.

In Hondo, killer John Wayne
shoots a rancher, later lives hap-
pily ever after with the rancher’s
wife and son. But the most fab-
ulous character in this picture is
a vicious dog that follows Hondo
about. Hondo won’t Jet anyone
feed this dog; even Hondo re-
fuses to feed it. The dog is sup-
posed to live off the land, chomp-
ing down on whatever living flesh
is available. This passes for a
lesson in self-reliance. é

White Witch Doctor opens with
a scene on a Congo dock, where
white hunter Robert Mitchum
has assembled some caged ani-
mals, among them a particularly
violent and murderous gorilla.
When an African whacks the
gorilla with a stick, Mitchum slugs
the African. Sinee we are told
that the hunter is a man who
sympathizes with the Africans,
this scene must be a lesson in
relative values: the gorilla is
worth more than a Negro.

In His Majesty O’Keefe, Burt
Lancaster, married to a Melan-
esian girl, dallies with other Mel-
anesian women. The audience is
asked to accept this with amused

Continued on next page

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — APRIL 23, 1954 — PAGE 9