CHARLIE CHAPLIN and SOPHIA LOREN announcing their
new film at a London, Eng., press conference.

Chaplin and Loren making new film

harlie Chaplin and Sophia
Loren held a press confer-
tee in London, England, last
Week at which details were an-
Nounced of the new “romantic
Comedy” he is to direct with Miss
Oren in the title role. Tenta-
tively titled “A Countess From
Hongkong,” the film will be made
by Chaplin in Britain for the
American Universal-Interna-
tional,

The 76 year old screen master

said: “All my other films have
been symbolic, in the clowning
tradition, This time I am at-
tempting to create real people
in real situations, with all the
absurdities that spring from real
life.”

Itis the first time he has
directed a film for somebody
else, and he will not be playing
in it himself—unless he “does a
Hitchcock” and walks on “just for
fun.”.

As the Countess, Sophia Loren
will be a sort of female version
of the Chaplin tramp character.
Asked how she felt over working
with Chaplin, Miss Loren, looking
stunning in a black tiered chiffon
dress with lace embroidery, re-
plied: ‘Scared stiff.”

_ But she was “very glad” to
have “somebody as experienced
as Marlon Brando” as male lead,

Nero Wolfe catches an FBI agent

N ero Wolfe has gone and done
it again, Nero Wolfe is the

of Rex Stout’s detective
NOvels that have won millions of
precers, But a special stir was
yuSed by Rex Stout’s 22ndnovel,
The Doorbell Rang,” published
Y Viking Press.

hero

: This is not intended to be a
€view of “The Doorbell Rang.”
°Wever, we couldn’t resist giv-

ae Our readers who do not read
© New York press, a summary

as a Herald-Tribune interview
With Stout,

In “The Doorbell Rang,” Stout
8S Nero Wolfe take on a new,
Modern, up-to-date, contempor-
4ry heel, the FBI agent.

ti In the Oct, 10 magazine sec-
On of the Herald Tribune, the

ok’s reviewer, Caskie Stinnett
Tote;

“The mystery reading public,
Tom its intellectual summit to its
to pense- craving depths, maybe
' ™ in anguish and despair over

€ transformation of the FBI

Tom a hero to an anti-hero
(Mage,

And so Stinnet went to Stout
© ask him about this point, Stout

told him, according to Stinnett’s
account in the Herald-Trib:

‘‘T have never had a personal
involvement with the FBI but they
had one with me about 15 years
ago. An agent came up here,
from Washington I guess, to ask
me some questions about a writer
who was a very close friend of
mine. His eighth question, if I
remember correctly, was wheth-
er or not my friend read ‘The
New Republic.’

“ After he asked that, I wouldn’t
talk to him any more, I will not
cooperate with a subversive or-
ganization, and to censure or
restrict what a man reads is sub-
version, I got so damned mad,
I put him out, He kept arguing
with me, but I refused to talk
and he finally left.

“They say the FBI does such
things as root through your gar-
bage to see if you’re eating food
or putting out liquor pottles that
would suggest you’re living be-
yond your means, If my garbage
is tampered with, I can never be
sure whether it’s the FBI or
whether it’s racoons. It’s acces-
sible to them both.”

One of the characters in the

book is called “the big fish.”
Stinnett asked Stout if the big fish
is J, Edgar Hoover, Stout re-
plied, “In my opinion, it is.”

He is a “megalomaniac,” said
Stout about Hoover. “He appears
totally egocentric and, in addition
to other things, he is narrow-
minded, I think his whole attitude
makes him an enemy of Democ-
racy. Right now his age is some-
where close to 70 and I think he
is on the edge of senility, Calling
Martin Luther King the ‘biggest
liar in the world,’ or something
like that, was absurd,

“He is getting sillier and sil-
lier, I first became very suspi-
cious of Hoover years ago whenI
heard that he had been going to
horse races with the lateSenator
McCarthy. I couldn’t quite see the
head of the FBI being pals with
a man who at the time was the
greatest single threat to Ameri-
can democracy, If he wants to get
at me for writing this book, I
wish he would try.

“He can’t hurt me at all, so
the hell with him.”

—JOSEPH BRANDT, in US.
Worker.

abor’

s Rich

Language

cab Fink! Yellowdog! Rat!

These are a fewofthe* more
polite” terms with which organ-
ized labor has traditionally
branded its enemies and ident-
ified its traitors, As could be
expected, such tags quickly
spread beyond the limits of the
picketlines and became an in-
tegral part of the colorful spec-
trum of American slang. Now-
adays, you don’t have to be a
union man to know whata “goon,”
a “sellout,” a “moonlighter” ora
“freeloader” is,

As labor historian Archie
Green recently wrote in his book
“Industrial Relations:” “Words
initially transferred to unions
from particular trades or related
social movements have in time
moved on into the general
speech,”

For example, delving into la-
bor linguistics Green discovered
that the term “rat® first showed
up in 1816 — in a list circulated
by the Albany Typographic So-
ciety to identify those whd had
“acted dishonorably toward their
societies.” The dishonorable un-
ionists were named “rat.”

Similarly, he found the earliest
mention of “fink’’ in the columns
of the Seattle Union Record, dated
May 30, 1918, The Pacific Coast
waterfront workers were then
making a concerted drive against
employer-run “fink” halls — the
so called “open” hiring halls.
The Union Record stated: “A
fink is the remains of what once
was a human being, but who,
through ignorance, is a menace
to himself and society.”

According to Green, the de-
velopment of the term has not
yet been satisfactorily traced.

The most hated word in labor’s
vocabulary is “scab.” A scab
is something that, while calling
itself a man, will cross your
picketline and steal your job.

aK.t
ae Ml
Bur 1 ANT
ARAT-
RIGHT?

In the 11th Century, -scab was
the name of a skin disease in

Europe. By the 14th Century,
it came to identify a mean and
scurvy rascal,

Scab assumed its current
meaning during the Civil War,
Years later, novelist Jack London
wrote the most colorful and en-
during definition of scab,

A staunch friend of labor, Lon-
don ranked the scab somewhere
beneath the rattlesnake and the
cockroach,

Talking Union, a popular song
of the 30’s, had this to say about
scabs: “He doesn’t have to scab,
he can always get along — on
what he steals out of blind men’s
cups.”

Along with “rat,” “fink,” and
“scab,” a host of other words
have ridden into popular usage
through the vehicle of the labor
movement, Among them are
blackleg, crimp, faker, free-
rider, goon, hooker, moonlighter,
popsicleman, porkchopper, sal-
mon-belly, scissorbill, seagull,
sellout and yellowdog.

Such terms are not pleasant
and have often been used with
great bitterness, But they have
provided standards by which
union men and others have been
able to effectively determine and
‘evaluate their behavior,

—Article and illustration abridged
from the Seafarers’ Log.

AT THE PENTAGON

“Why can’t these people leave peace to the experts?” .
—Lorenz in “The New Yorker”.

November 12, 1965—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 9