_Self-respect? A circus troupe from the United States, touring the Soviet Union, has its picture taken in front of the Moscow circus. The Moscow circus will be touring the U.S. and Canada this coming fall. z I the political climate of Holly- wood changing from ‘Don’t Stick your neck out!” to an awareness that even an enter- tainer has an inherent right to Political views, a conscience and e _ That ‘‘a new breed of actors” IS coming to the fore who Prize their self-respect more than adulation was the _ state- Ment made by Burt Lancaster at the recent joint meeting. of the National Assn. for the Ad- Vancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the United Civil Rights Committee (UCRC) in Beverly Hills on discrimination. He added that he had ‘had Warnings about being ‘‘used,”’ but that he was very happy to be used in such a cause. __For many years the political Right has had highly vocal ad- Vocates such as Hedda Hopper, 800d citizenship and good pic- ture-making” producer Jack arner, Adolph Menjou, John Wayne, Walter Brennan, Ron- “ald Reagan, George Murphy and others . . . _More recently they have been, JOined by Pat Boone, Gigi Per- Teau and Robert Stack. The voice of the liberal ele- Ment, except for direct partici- Pation in the Kennedy cam- Paign, has been relatively quiet €ver since the inquisition pro- Ceedings by’ the House American Activities | Commit- tee which sent the Hollywood 10 to prison, brought in the McCarthy era and the institution - Of the black list. | * * * In the Hollywood of the Big Studio Period, it was simple for a mogul like Louis B. May-. r to draw the political line and threaten the careers of actors, Writers, directors who failed to toe it precisely. But now that! the Big Studios and long-time Morals clause’ contracts have ae py ~ WORTH _ READING Whither Latin America? Price, 1.60, This volume contains a dozen ’tticles which appeared in Monthly Review.”’ The material 'S on the Latin American count- Mes, which are in the throes of ®he of the great revolutionary Pheavals of modern times. Un--- I joined the other dinosaurs and. movies are made generally by independent producers, it is not so easy to force compliance... At the time of the Chessman” case, Steve Allen took a pub- lic stand against the death sen- tence and Paul Newman and Shirley MacLaine journeyed to Sacramento to protest the ex~- ecution. Since then a segment of the “Allen show’? was devoted to a historic ‘‘dialogue’’ on capital punishment, and Allen has active- ly promoted the Natl. Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and appeared at fund- raising affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Hollywood’s ‘New Breed with Nedrick Young, Waldo Salt, Robert Ryan also has long # been an_ active participant in SANE, and a KPFK broadcast of his reading of Robert Welch’s Blue Book led to a bomb threat — at his home. Marsha Hunt has been actively working in the local United Na- tions Assn. despite bombings and threats and recently was the key- note speaker for the newly- organized Operation Womanpower at their conference on discrimin- ation. * * * Rita Moreno of “West-side Story’ fame was one of the or- ganizers of the peace group HELP and featured speaker at the Easter peace march and ral- ly this year. She was an honored guest at the big Civil Righs Rally. at Wrigley Field along with Paul Newman, Dorothy Dandridge, Dick Gregory, Mai Britt and Sam- my Davis Jr.-, who pledged a week’s salary to the cause. A year or more ago Dr. Fred Schwarz staged one of his Anti - Communist Crusades in the Hollywood Bowl, to which he attracted 30 Hollywood celebreties. But just a couple of weeks past, even with free admissions, Patriotic Hall less than 600 per- sons, and his only ‘‘celebrity”’ was Don Rose, a minor TV com-. mentator. Yes, the fog of fear that shroud- ed Hollywood. in the 50’s has lifted considerably. Though Dal- ton Trumbo was one of the Holly- the California American Legion to give him screen credit on “Rxodus.”” Trumbo has _— since become re-established aS one of the most successful sereen-writ- ers in the movie industry, along wood 10, Otto Preminger defied, he could. draw to™ and some other writers and actors who were victims of the black- list, though this still seems to be the Bible of the TV networks. Bette Davis has appeared at benefits for the ACLU, but re- cently in response to NAACP pressure for Negroes in movie and TV jobs, she expressed as her opinion in a trade paper, “‘If our primary concern becomes the protection of every race, every creed, instead of producing enter- tainment, there won’t be time left to even make the pictures.” * * * To this Miss Moreno replied in a published statement: “Tt is most certainly not her (Miss Davis’) right to act as a spokesman for me, nor for our professional group . . . Let us not indulge in any further threadbare rationalizations. Hol- lywood jimcrowism must end now, in all its aspects.” A Committee Against Discrim- ination is being launched in the movie industry by Marlon Bran- do, Anthony Franciosa, Burt Lancaster, Debbie Reynolds, Mel Ferrer, director Billy Wilder, -Tony Curtis and Charlton Heston among others, and their first project will be a civil rights show, for which Steve Allen has volun- teered one evening of the ‘‘Allen Show.” Though Brando had only re- ‘cently been released from the hospital, he joined unheralded the picket line at the Don Wil- son tract in Torrance, march- ing for two hours and a half against the orders of his doc- tor. At that time Brando stated that he and other movie person- alities would be in Washington on August 28 as part of the dem- onstrations for civil rights. Though caution is contagious, courage is not without its mag- netic attraction also. The example of even a limited number of cour- -ageous people standing up for what they believe is right—‘‘the new breed’, as Lancaster called them—should not be discounted in their effect on “other people who alone would have lacked the cour- age to take the step. Also, the influence of well- known Hollywood _ personalities reaches far beyond Hollywood as _an inspiration to others across the nation. : — SARAH DUNTON (Abridged from People’s World) — i Film about Nazi guilt he theme of the film, The Condemned of Altona, is guilt. ; It takes deep and_ searching questions about the guilt of the German people for the total crime of nazism; of those who now pretend it never existed; and of those who close their eyes to its resurgence in West Germany to- day. It achieves its points by lay- ing bare the sickness of a man— the son and heir of-an all-power- ful West German shipping mag- nate—at the maniac extreme of self-deception, remorse and guilt. Scripted by Abby Mann, who wrote the screenplay for ‘“Judg- ment at Nuremberg,’’ it owes its inspiration to a play by Jean- Paul Sartre. Like most of Sartre’s work, it has ripples of meaning both at a personal and a social level that reach out way beyond the terms of the drama it recounts. The man, played with tense electric fanaticism by Maximil- ian Schell, lives in insane volu- tary exile from the world, im- prisoned (with bolts on the in- side of the door) in the vast at- tics of his father’s baronial mansion. * * * He believes, in his madness, that present-day Germany is in ruins, and that he alone, by mak- ing secret reports, can record the truth for posterity. His father, accustomed to man- ipulating people like puppets, has devised this scheme to save him from execution after being con- demned at Nuremberg. Did the son really commit the: crimes he was accused of and if so, where does the final_re- sponsibility lie? The answers are choked through to the surface by the stubborn courage of the wife of the younger son, a Brechtian act-— ress who discovers the secret at=! tie and, piece by piece, chisels PLAYWRIGHT who displayed more cau- tion than courage died in Hollywood on Aug. 14 of cancer of the stomach. His name, Clifford Odets, 57. In the 1930’s the name of out of Philadelphia to New York, worked as an actor and—in the depths of the Depression—wrote two of the most exciting plays of the period: ‘Waiting for Lefty” and “Awake and Sing!” ; - Briefly identified with the Communist party — from which he _ resigned publicly with loud com- plaints that he found the party’s influence on _ his work confining and censor- _ious — Odets maintained most of his life that he was a radical and the influence of Marxist ideas was ap- parent in most of his work. * *. cd But from these successes — which brought him to Hollywood as the high-priced scenarist of such films as ‘““The General Died at Dawn” and ‘“‘None But the Lonely Heart” — Odets ran the gamut from renegacy to stoolpigeon-’ ism, achieving the strange distinction of being the only informer ever to name a dead man. When J. Edward Brom- berg, distinguished actor and close friend of Odeis. ‘Lefty’ never came Odets was magic: he came’ early’ "September 20, 1963— away to the truth. _ The actress, intelligently play- ed by Sophia Loren, represents the conscience of the film, the rock of judgment against which the other people finally sink or swim. Vittorio di Sica’s direction is sometimes over-stagy but this is because he is constantly striv- ing for a visual form to give éach character a broad, symbolic significance. * * * The Krupps-like shipping mag- nate, a lone, gaunt figure played with fierce, autocratic pride by Fredric March, ean be seen as the embodiment of the power and ruthlessness of the industrialist class. FILAS And if the son, once an innocent young idealist, is now reduced to a gibbering mess of self-justifi- cation and remorse, doesn’t part of the responsibility, at least, lie with the father, who represents the ultimate corrupting influence? The Condemned of Altona is not an easy film to watch. There are stylistic difficulties and the pace is slackened by partial dub- bing. Its ideas are complex and occasionally obscure. But it has a richness of mean- ing and a depth of thought that keeps your mind absorbed long after the film itself is over. The music, incidentally, is by Shostakovich, and there are drawings by the distinguished Italian Communist artist Renato . Guttuso. '" IMPORT SCOTCH Scotch whisky will be exported for sale in the Soviet Union foy the first time under an agree- ment announced recently be- tween Mackinlay, McPherson Ltd., and the British agent for ~ “Stolichnaya’’ Rusian vodka. died of a heart-attack after: being pilloried by the Un- American Committee, Od- ets—in a statement in The N. Y. Times—directly ac- cused the un-Americans of being responsible for the death of his friend and end- ed the statement with Hor- atio’s famous lament over the body of Hamlet: “Good night, sweet Prince. and flights of angels sing you to your rest.” * * * Shortly thereafter, Odets himself was subpoenaed, spilled his guts before the committee and when asked who had “recruited” him into the Communist party, said it was his dear friend, J. Edward Bromberg. In flight, from his first successes, from the people who hag given his work vi- tality and fire—the Jewish lower middleclass —_ the “Lefty” whom everyone ex- pected to become the lead- ing American’ playwright of our era, never came. back. His associations in Hol- lywood were with the wealthy; he spent large sums of money buying paintings and one of his final pieces of writing was a letter defending a script he had written for—Elvis. Presley. : —DAVID ORDWAY * (People’s World)