ave

The musical comedy production South Pacific is playing to capacity audiences
at the Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park.

Photo shows Bloody Mary

(Mary

Mack) singing to Lieut. Cabel (Robert Goulet) while her daughter Liat (Marina

WHAT war does to Gregory

Peck in The Man in the
prey Flannel Suit is to make
im moody, timid; unenter-
Prising and inclined to be-

y °™e a yes-man.

According to his wife, Jen-
nifer Jones, he is pretty much
of a failure, since he only lives
™ a $15,000 house in an outer
Suburb, earns $150 a week
eeang for a research foun-

étion and drives a car which
May look big and gleaming to

] Bn and me but is not the kind

Tiven by successful men.

is he were the go-getter he
Sed to be, it seems, they’d
‘ living in a much bigger
See in a snob country town
* he’d be earning $225 a
®ek as a speech-writer to the

head of a i
a broadcasting copora-

Greg’s trouble

stead is that in-

of go-getting he keeps

Katronis) mimes with finger movements.
Under the Stars in the financial black for the season.

dozing off into flashbacks of
his war service, which in-
cludes not only a lot of killing
but also the fathering of a
cnild by Marisa Pavan, an in-
terlude he has not confided to
his wife.

While he is sorting himself
out with a slowness which
stretches the film to two and
a half hours, revealing and
often witty sidelights are
thrown on business ethics.and
procedure, on the effect of
television on the young, and
on middle-class home life in
America.

As long as Marisa Pavan is
contributing her Siamese-cat
beauty to the Italian scenes,
or Fredrick March is- trying
to persuade us that hard-driv-
ing bosses are necessary to
progress, or James Mason’s
young daughter Portland is
demanding to know when her

Thig, final production may put Theatre

Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
tells what happens to war vet

sister is going to die, the film
ticks over cheerfully enough.

But although the question
of what war does to a man is
raised, phoney Sentimentality
prevents the giving of a serious
answer. For Peck the effects
of five years killing are mir-
aculously erased when he con-
fesses his Italian romance to
his wife’ and decides to send
the child: a regular allotment.

This act of belated justice
sc impresses the lawyer who
handles the business that he
observes that he now knows
what the poet meant by “God’s
in his heaven, all’s right with
the world.”

It’s nice to hear of one ex-
GI. honoring an obligation of
retural justice so many thous-
ands of others have ignored
with the connivance of the
U.S. government, but that
seemed to be laying it on a
bit thick.

THOMAS SPENCER

BOOKS

Y FIRST reaction upon

reading Was Justice Done?
The Rosenberg-Sobell Case by
Malcolm P. Sharp (with a
lengthy introduction by Har-
cld C. Urey) was one of deep
hostility towards those legal
lights and intellectual hair-
splitters who, in wordy debate
manage to draw a very fine
line of distinction between law
and justice — when a state
crime is being contemplated,
and when it is committed.

The author_of Was Justice
Done? is a professor of law at
University of Chicago, hence
this literary addition on the
trial, conviction and execu-
tion of Ethel and Julius Rosen-
berg will probably be much
more appreciated by the legal
fraternity and similar intel-
ligentsia, than by ordinary
working men and women.

Was Justice Done? is un-
questionably a careful sift-
ing of all the evidence given
at the Rosenbergs’ trial by the
sorry assortment of ‘accom-
plice” witnesses gathered up
by the FBI to frame two vic-
tims in its “atom-bomb spy”
case. In all this sifting the
author comes, somewhat be-
latedly and with a lot of “ifs”
to the conclusion that the
Rosenbergs’ case “was an ex-
ecution for political opinion”
and not for the crime charged.

Throughout the book one
finds the author and Dr. Urey
touched with a little of the
anti - Communist hysteria
which sent the Rosenbergs to
their death. Since “we (sic)
are engaged in a cold war with
the tyrannical government of
the USSR,” and since Dr.
Urey does “not trust Com-
munists or ex-Communists or
perjurers” the problem of
getting a firm grip on the
fundamentals of. American jus-
tice becomes difficult to say
the least, particularly when
citizens are sent to the elec-
tric chair or to thirty years
of ‘a living death in Alcatraz.

If in his sifting of the evi-
dence of “accomplice” witnes-
ses (in lay language, common
stool pidgeons) the author
would like to stand squarely
upon the hypothesis that the
Rosenberg’s execution “was an
execution for political opini-
on,” it scarcely adds strength
to that concept by attempting
to absolve the FBI. “Nor is it
necessary,” says our sifting
professor, “to suppose that the
FBI or other prosecuting offi-
cials conspired in any simple
way to produce the testimony
of the Greenglasses.”

In other words we are ful-
ly justified in doubting the
credibility of the stool pidgeons
and other trained ‘witnesses’
used to send the Rosenbergs
to their death, but we do not
“necessarily” need to. doubt
the “government’s prosecuting
officials’ who trained the

August 17, 1956 —

stools. May heaven save us
from the “reasoning” of law
professors!

Was Justice Done? reminds
me of a union meeting up here
in Canada just on the eve of
the Rosenberg’s execution.
Two hundred workers, the
grime of work still on their
faces, were debating a motion
before the local, a motion de-
manding clemency and re-
trial for Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg. Without benefit of
legal sifting, these working
men knew (Lenin described it
as “workers’ instinct”) that a
c¥ime was being committed.

The chairman, aé typical
phoney of the old _ school
pleaded noisily about “not
doing anything hastily until
we have more information on
the facts.” The motion, one of
millions throughout the world,
passed by a big majority. The
“information” wanted by the
Cautious Christophers came
two days later — Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg had been
“legally” murdered, and the
world made “safe” (for the
moment) for the coldwar
atomaniacs of Yankee imperi-
alism!

It may be said however that,
despite _the numerous and
glaring shortcomings and hesi-
fant opinion set forth in Was
Justice Done? this book can be
considered a valuable addi-
tion to the extensive docum-
ented literature already built
up by more courageous auth-
crs to vindicate the innocence
of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
If it serves to win one step
nearer a new trial for Morton
Sobell, buried in Alcatraz for
thirty years on “evidence”
more flimsy and more dubious
than that used to murder the
Rosenbergs, it will have serv-
ed its purpose; a new trial in
which truth, law, and justice
wiil prevail,

Lawyers who revel in the
art of hair-splitting will un-
doubtedly find Was Justice
Done? an intriguing and fas-
cinating book. Ordinary
people, who do not stand in
need of being convinced (then
or now) of the innocence of
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg,
will regard it largely as be-
lated hindsight, somewhat
timidly presented, and at best
well intentioned.

It must be said that the
author of Was Justice Done?
has done a good job in por-
traying the principles’ char-
acters, their motives and emo-
tions, and the hysteria in which
these were to germinate and
flower — for the purpose of
producing the crowning clim-
ax of a monstrous crime.

Was Justice Done? is ob-
tainable at the People’s Co-
operative Bookstore, 337 West
Pender St., Vancouver, price
$3.75, :

TOM McEWEN

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 13

Legal probe of |
Rosenberg case |