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Matusow’s amazing
story of perjury

ISSUALLY when one reads of
the doings of some _ stool-
pigeon or other who earns a pre-
carious living informing ‘on his
fellow men, the reaction is one
of loathing and contempt.
Reading Harvey Matusow’s
False Witness one get the feel-
ing of having just awakened
from some nightmare in which
the author appears as some mis-
erable Faust, with the US. De-
partment of Justice and its Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation cast
in the role of an exceptionally
hideous Mephistopheles.
This astounding chronicle of
perjury, slander and provocation,
leaves no need to speculate on

why the U.S. Department of Jus-,

tice and the FBI went to such
extreme lengths to obstruct and
prohibit its publication.

Beyond all else, False Witness
is a damning indictment of Yian-
kee coldsvar jurisprudence and
its borrowed Gestapo police tech-
niques. In False Witness U.S.
“Justice” stands revealed ‘as an
hysterical prostitute, diseased

_ from head to foot with the Hitler-

ite plague of anti-Communism,
and its FBI minions of “law and
order” super-specialists in the
production of perjured “evi-
dence.”

This is one book of which it
can be shouted from the house-
tops that the publishers, Albert
E. Kahn and Angus Cameron,
have performed a great service
for their country. False Witness
will help millions of Americans
and others to see and understand
to what great extent ‘the dry
rot of fascist methods hias weak-
ened the stout structure of Am-
erican democracy.

$0 nt wt

Had some friendly and under-
standing influence taken Harvey
Hatusow’s hand when he was a

‘little boy and said, “Come now,

you’re just as good—or as bad —
as all the other little boys. You
can’t always be at the top.of the
heap and you won’t always be at
the bottom,” perhaps the notor-
ious perjurer “Harvey Matusow
of False Witness would never
have been. :

_All through ‘his confession, the
author’s “inferiority” complex
struggles to break out of the in-
hibited erust which encased him
from childhood.

Even in that sorry parade of
professional perjurers, “expert”
renegades and common psycho-
paths the FBI and the depart-
ment of justice assembled to
“swear” Communists, trade union
leaders and other progressives
into prison and worse, Harvey
Matusow always wanted to be at
the head..He wanted to make big-
ger headlines in the yellow press
than Louis Budenz, Blizabeth
Bentley, Whittaker ‘Chambers,
Paul Crouch, Matt Cvetic.

In a calling that fills honest

‘people with loathing, Harvey

Matusow wanted to be the most
loathsome and feared of all.

The American “way of life” as
interpreted by the department of
justice gave Matusow his great
“opportunity” — an opportunity
which demanded a drastic revis-
ion of the ageless moral code
“Thou shalt not bear false wit-
ness against thy neighbor.” -

The new code, as formulated
by the FBI made a patriot of the
Man or woman who informed on
his friends. It brought fame —
of a kind — to those who would
place the stigma of “communism”
upon individuals and institutions.
And the information given, ithe
testimony offered was as false as
the concept of communism given

day in and. day out by a big busi-
ness daily press.

False Witness records the
wide demands made and the
large sums of money paid for
Matusow’s “services” by the un-
American witch-hunters, disreput-
able careerists, cheap politicians,
all seeking to use anti-commun-
ism. to advance themselves. No
more revealing picture of Sen-

ator McCarthy has been given.

than: that portrayed there by his

-erstwhile friend and _ election

campaigner, Harvey Matusow.
5° 3 50 3 o7

The question may arise in the
minds of many who read this
book, was Matusow really lying
when he served the department
of justice and the FBI as an “ex-
pert witness,” and if so, is he ttell-
ing the truth now?

Tronical as it may appear, the
department of justice has already
answered the question by giving
Matusow a three-year sentence
in prison for perjury = the per-
jury it demanded of him and for
which it paid him to send scores
of Communists and others to
prison for long terms.

For delivering his FBI-fabri-
cated “evidence” against people,
many of whom he had never even
seen or known, he received many
“thirty pieces of silver.” To re-
pent and seek to redeem some of
the damage done so that he
“could live with himself” — that
decision meant only imprison-
ment and worse.

False Witness exposes the men
who are seeking to impose fas-
cism on the United States in the
name of democracy and the
means by which they hope to ac-
complish their ends.

It raises many pertinent ques-
tions, not the least being what
happens now to the imprisoned
and persecuted victims of Matu-
sow’s FBI-manufactured perjury,
“sworn” to in the highest courts
of the land, in witch-hunting trib-
unals and senatorial “investiga-
tions,” and before the heads of
powerful monopoly industrial
concerns for the preparation of
employee blacklists?

hee Se ee

False Witness is of particular
importance to Canadians at this
time, for the U.S. witch-hunters
are seeking to subvert our demo-
cratic institutions and rights as
they are subverting their own.

Pat Sullivan, the ex-communist
and renegade, is making his own
contribution to the Big Lie in a
series “Red Intrigue in Canada,”
now running in the Tory Toronto
Telegram.

The Yankee-inspired disrup-
tion of one of Vancouver's lead-
ing unions, the International Bro-
therhood of Electrical Workers,
is part of the same conspiracy of
falsehood and perjury which pro-
duced a Harvey Matusow. There
is no difference between the per-
jured evidence given by Matusow
to convict Mine-Mill organizer
Clinton Jencks in the U.S. and
the charges levelled against pro-
gressive Canadian trade union-
ists by U.S. agents. Both are de-
signed to serve the aims of U.S.
big business — the one to weak-
en the U.S. labor movement in

its fight to prevent the advance -

of fascism, the other to weaken
the Canadian labor movement in
its fight against U.S. domination.

False Witness (obtainable here
at the People’s Cooperative Book-
Store, 337 West Pender, ‘price
$1.42) should be on the book-
shelf of every working man and
woman — if for no other’ reason
than to remind them that it can,
and does “happen here.”

TOM McEWEN

DRAMA

ANDES Van Gysegham, the
British actor - producer who
was adjudicator in the recent
B.C. Regional Drama Festival,
thinks that Canadian playwrights
should .be encouraged to use the
dramatic material that is right
under their eyes. :

“Td like to see plays with a
true Canadian flavor, written and
performed by Canadians,” he

TOE TCT MT Ta ho

Winners in the recent B.C. Regional Drama Festival shown here are

= ‘
(left to right): Joanne
Walker, who won the best actress award for her performance in the B.C. Alumni Players’ production
The Crucible; Frank Cooter, who won the best actor award for his performance in the New Westminster
Vagabonds’ production of Flight into Egypt; and Gertrude Dennis, director of Flight into Egypt, WH?
won the award for the best director.

‘More plays with true Canadian flavor’

said in an interview at the con- ’ Northwest Territories “and help

clusion of the festival here.
“Your forests and the people
who work them, your deepsea
fishermen, even your vice scare
and dope racket — all these are

the stuff of real-life Canadian
drama.”

Van Gysegham said ‘that if he
were to remain in this country,
he would want to go up to the

create actors and a theatre out
of the raw material there.”

Too often, he observed, the
tre groups were reluctant to it
periment with native materi,
“because of fear of criticis™-
But the production of mater fi
drawn from Canadian life wo of
lead to the strengthening
Canadian theatre.

|

Pickwick Papers brings to screen
all Dickens’ genius for comedy

FTER warming up on Tom
Brown's Schooldays and
Scrooge, producer George Minter

and playwright Noel Langley —

have teamed up again to produce
their most ambitious essay in the
filming of popular classics, The
Pickwick Papers. :

Though Dickens’ comic master-
piece abounds in first-rate film
material this ‘is the first Pickwick
picture to be made for 40 years.

It is true that The Pickwick

Papers, which Dickens wrote in

monthly instalments, is a ramb-

ling discursive book with no real

plot. But a craftsman carving
cleanly and resolutely can cut a
rich feast out of the abundance.
This is what Langley has done.

* He has followed the early stage
adaptors in seeking continuity in
the character of Jingle, the impu-
dent trickster. To a large extent
the film is the Jingle Papers.
The result, I think, completely
justifies this treatment. Much
has of necessity been left out,

but what has been put in makes
a richly. comic film with a good

deal more coherence than Dick-
ens’ ‘book. ‘

om os Be:

It brings out strongly Dickens’
faith in humanity, his belief in
the essential goodness of people
and ‘his consequent horror at ‘the

appalling inhumanity of the -

debtors’ prison.

Langley and Minter and a well-
picked cast do everything that
sensible craftsmanship can do to

“bring Dickens’ comic genius to

the screen. If they never quite
achieve the top level of imagin-
ative film-making they neverthe-
less maintain a very high stand-
ard with very few complete fail-
ures.

The very respect for Dickens
which is one of its virtues is
probably responsible for many of
the film’s faults. One sometimes
feels that too much time has
been spent in checking the de-
tails of ale-mulling and not
enough on maintaining the spank-
ing pace needed.

Most of the Pickwick charac-
ters have for so long been en-
shrined as British national instit-
utions that to ‘bring them to life
requires a self-effacing character-
isation to which screen ‘actors

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — APRIL 1, 1955 — page

seldom aspire. Yet the successes
far outweigh the failures.
James Hayter makes a2 ne
actly suitable Pickwick, «8S Mi
would expect. But Nigel aa
rick’s Jingle and James ponat.
Winkle ‘are both delightful
prises. Neither has done aS
before. The three of them
the film irresistibly over 4
awkward moments. ae
Donald Walfit makes 2 ™
nificent meal of the part of ers
jeant Buzfuz, and Harry Fow!! ght
Sam Weller has just the ™

y1 its

. Cockney jauntiness.
: ie ostlY

The few failures are ™ som
caused by the actors’ own per
alities showing through nfel)
much. Neither Joyce GTX.
nor Sam Costa is able t0 sais"
come the handicap of a t00°
tinctive voice which we ne the
customed to identify withou
face,

Genius apart, Dickens int
two things about comedy Wo).
modern British screenwriter® at
parently do not. He knew ni

. a comic character, to be

had also to be a character: itv
And he knew that a come erate
ation, if it was going to 8 sed
any «eal comedy, had to be 2
on real life, sharply observe™

R
THomaS SPENCE

7