ARTS

4

The curtain was in a sense brought

screenwriters, had }

After a search by

mittee” would be eligible for an Oscar.

Award rights a 27-year-old wrong

down on one more ugly chapter of the
U.S. motion picture industry’s infamous
blacklist against Communists, suspected
Communists and progressives when on
Mar. 23, the widows of screenwriters Carl
Foreman and Michael Wilson were given
the Oscars withheld from their husbands
27 years ago for the screenplay of The
Bridge on the River Kwai. In a public
ceremony that day, the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts symbolically re-
dressed a grievous wrong that drove
hundreds of top people out of the indus-
try, and made it a creative wasteland for
several years.

At the Oscar ceremony in 1958, the
award was presented to the Frenchman
Paul Boulle, author of The Bridge Over the
River Kwai, on which the film was based.
Boulle, who had no knowledge of English,
did not attend to pick up his award.

Foreman and Wilson — who had
actually written the screenplay — were
not there either. Both were living in “exile”
in Europe following appearances before
the notorious House Un-American Activi-
ties Committee, where they had each cited
the fifth amendment.

They, like dozens of other actors and

both been members
of the U.S. Com-
munist Party, and
along with hundreds
more, had been put |
a blacklist circulated
by Hollywood stu-
dios in response to
Congressional pres- #%
sure during the height
of the Cold War.

Foreman and Wilson were tops in their
profession. Wilson had won an Oscar for
A Place in the Sun in 1951, and Foreman
had been nominated three times (for
Champion, 1949; The Men, 1950; and High
Noon, 1952) before being blacklisted, and
twice subsequently, although never win-
ning. After several years in Europe, both
returned to the United States.

Although it was common knowledge to
everyone in the industry that they had
written the screenplay, it took until last
year to gain them recognition, when a
friend, John Weaver, asked the terminally
ill Foreman (Wilson died in 1978): “What
can you do for a friend who is dying?”
Foreman said there was one thing Weaver
could do — help him get the Oscar.

Weaver and friends,
the documentation,
including the first-

petition made to the
Writers Guild of
America. The board
unanimously agreed
that the credit for
The Bridge on the
River Kwai belonged to Wilson and Fore-
man.

After that meeting, on June 25, 1984,
Foreman was told he would get his Oscar.
At 10 a.m. next day he died.

On Dec. 11, 1984, the Academy
unanimously resolved “that the names of
Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman be
added to that of Pierre Boulle on the credit
for the best screenplay based on material
from another media for the film Bridge on
the River Kwai.”

The Academy was notorious for caving
in to Cold War and McCarthyite pressure.
In 1957, it had written a new bylaw: no
person who admitted he was Communist
or who refused to answer “before any duly
constituted (sic) federal legislative com-

draft screen play, .
was found and a~

Wilson had written a statement, which the
HUAC did not allow him to read in 1951.
It stated he was opposed to the Korean
war, and that his political opinions weré
his own business alone; Foreman had
refused to give the names of other Com-
munists to HUAC.

In the three seasons the bylaw was in
effect, Dalton Trumbo — who broke it in
1960 by using his own name in Spartacus
and Exodus — won under a pseudonym
for The Brave One, Ned Young won under
a pseudonym for The Defiant Ones, and
Wilson had his name kept off The Bridge
on the River Kwai and Friendly Persuasion.

Those were not pretty days in Holly-
wood, and the lives and careers of many
talented people were sorely damaged by
the McCarthy witch-hunts. One untal-
ented person whose weren’t, however, was —
Ronald Reagan, who could most gener-
ously be labelled a fink, as he went along
with the entire right-wing crusade, and
obligingly “named names” and pointed
the accusing finger at all and sundry.

Although Reagan hasn’t changed since,
one can credit a tarnished Academy for a
belated try at washing away part of the
smell of a sorry chapter in its history.

———

— |

U.S. backers of Hitler

_Among the guests were the heads of
Ford; GM and Texaco.

TRADING WITH THE ENEMY. Charles
Higham, Dell Publishing Co., Inc. New
York, 1984, $4.95.

Subtitled “An Expose of the Nazi-
American Money Plot 1933-49” and
based on newly-declassified documents,
this book is an eye-opener on the class
links between big capital in Germany,
the U.S. and Great Britain which assisted
Hitler’s rise to power.

Higham provides a wealth of docu-
mentation, including a photostatic re-
production of licences issued to U.S.
corporations to trade with the enemy,
dated Dec. 13, 1941 — six days after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Corporations belonging to the fascist
“fraternity” include many of the major
names known today. Among them are
Ford, General Motors, DuPont, Texaco,
Shell, Standard Oil (Exxon), RCA,
Bayer, ITT, First National City Bank of
New York, Chase Manhattan Bank, and
the Banker of International Settlements.

Exposed are shocking examples of
fascist fraternizing, including the party
- given at the New York Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel on June 26, 1940 by Dr. Gerhardt
Westrick (German Chairman of ITT
and an associate of John Foster Dulles)
to celebrate the Nazi victory over France.

Ford and GM of one-half of one per cent
of their payroll to the Nazi party prior to

Higham cites the contributions by

Some 1,500 people marched through the streets of Toronto Mar. 16 toprotest
the cuts in funding to arts and cultural institutions across the country by the —
Mulroney government. Organized by the Artists Union and endorsed by many _
other cultural groups, the demonstration and rally highlighted the fact that _
federal cutbacks such as $85 million from the CBC and $3.5 million from the
Canada Council are a serious threat to maintaining a Canadian culturalidentity.
Speakers at the rally included representatives from the Artists Union, ACTRA
and the Playwrights Union, along with NDP MPs from the Toronto area Dan
Heap and Lyn McDonald. McDonald stressed the government culture cuts are —
a political issue and should be fought politically. Heap hit out at tax benefits i
granted to big business by the Tory government while cultural workers are —
under attack and deprived of security. -

a

Fantasy and reality mix
works in Woody Allen film

Brought into the world of real life in full
color (as opposed to the screen’s black-an®”
white tableau), the fictional Tom Baxtél
(Jeff Daniels) is a worldly explorer, lovel
and a total innocent concerning matte®
such as childbirth, prostitution and dirty
fighting.

Tom is also a godsend, not only to Cecil
lia, whom he loves passionately and without
guile, but to others. Unwittingly walking

PURPLE ROSE.OF CAIRO. Directed by
Woody Allen. Starring Mia Farrow, Jeff
Daniels, Danny Aiello. An Orion Pictures
release. At local theatres.

Movies are the opiate of the masses, wri-
ter/director Woody Allen tells us in his
latest cinematic offering, Purple Rose of
Cairo.

With seductive music, lush sets and

Hitler’s coming to power. Other exam-
ples include the personal ties between
Henry Ford and Hitler dating back to
the early 1920s and Ford’s yearly birth-
day greetings and financial presents to
Hitler.

Such direct personal and corporate
ties provide unmistakable corroboration
for the charge of political collusion by
monopoly capital and capitalist govern-
ments in fomenting fascism. It is easy to
understand, for example, Neville Cham-
berlain’s friendly attitude to Hitler when
one realizes that Chamberlain was a
major shareholder of an I.G. Farben-
associated company (I. G. Farben later
ran the Auschwitz concentration camp,
among other things).

Likewise the anti-Soviet mania of U.S.
Secretary of State John F. Dulles and his
brother Allen Dulles (OSS and CIA
director) is understandable when we
learn that the Dulles brothers were I.G.
Farben’s legal representatives in the U.S.

The examples cited here are only a few
from the wealth of information provided
by this valuable book.

— Paul Pugh

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 3, 1985

almost unbearably handsome performers,
Hollywood offers working folk succor from
the vicissitudes of a depressing reality. In
Purple Rose, the reality is the Great Depres-
sion, and America’s movie industry is in its
heyday.

At the receiving end of RKO Picture’s
schlock is Cecilia (Mia Farrow), an over-
worked waitress and beleaguered housewife
to an insensitive, domineering husband. To
escape both the job and the unemployed
Monk (Danny Aiello) Cecilia routinely en-
sconces herself in the local New Jersey
neighborhood theatre to lose her troubles in
mass-produced fantasy.

Allen, the popular actor and creator of a
string of comedies exploiting modern
people’s psychological and sexual hangups
— including the award-winning Annie
Hall — has fun with two of his favorite

subjects in Purple Rose: old movies and the ’

fantastical.

Usually the featured performer in his
films, Allen plays no role in this film about a
woman whose humdrum existence is
changed when she finds herself the object of
veneration of a fictional character who
miraculously walks out of the silver screen
and into her life.

into a brothel, where he charms even thé
hardened hearts of its inmates he elicits thi
poignant question: “Are there other guy®
out there like you?”

rane ct a nant
Films
Rae eons ct

There aren’t that many, Purple R
states in presenting a gritty America whel”
economic depression breeds callousnes>_
and deceit, traits that extend even to Tom’ :
real-life alter ego, actor Gill Sheppard. |

There’s little new in Allen’s messag°
about movies and escapaism, but the
imaginative device of screen images comin
to life, set against a realistic — the period ‘
dialogue is keenly accurate — Hungry 30s
backdrop, gives the theme a fresh approac
in this sometimes serious social comedy.

— Dan Kee