Communism? Peachy! Oscars mixup? A horror!

“Legendary screen star reveals that they are both ‘still processing the horror of it.’” The headline appeared in the Daily Mail in March. The “screen star” referred to is Shirley MacLaine. The other person embraced by the word “both” is her brother, Warren Beatty, who of course is also a screen star.

Here’s the actual quote from MacLaine: “I think we’re all processing the horror of it. I’m still dealing with it.” She added: “We know how difficult it was for him, but it was also for me.” The reporter, Chris Spargo, reports that “MacLaine could be seen gasping, covering her mouth in shock and then clutching her chest.”

What “horror” were they still processing?

Now, as it happens, we’ve written about both MacLaine and Beatty on this site. MacLaine, as it happens, was one of the few Americans to gain access to Communist China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. This was in 1973, at which point that nightmarish chapter of history had been going on for seven years. It involved the murder by the authorities of millions of people who were considered, for some reason or other, to be counter-revolutionaries. During the entire period, all but a tiny minority of the Chinese people lived in a constant state of terror. Who would be the next victim? Would the men come knocking at our door in the middle of the night and take one of us away forever? Which one?

MacLaine was there in the midst of it all. Filming what she saw. And she returned to the U.S. with a documentary that might have been made by Mao himself – or by Leni Riefenstahl. It was as splendid a work of propaganda for Maoism as one could imagine. Entitled The Other Side of the Sky, it tried to demonstrate certain propositions in which MacLaine actually believed – namely, that Chinese women were more liberated, more equal, than American women; that China lacked “social friction” and was awash in a sense of “brotherhood”, that everyone there was committed “to working for the common good.” The film won an Oscar nomination.

Beatty has also promoted totalitarianism. The 1981 movie Reds, which he directed, co-wrote, and starred in, was described by one reviewer as an “homage, of sorts, to the Russian Revolution.” A trailer represented it as the story of a “fight for freedom” and a timely challenge to “conservative politics” – the point being that Lenin, alongside Reagan, was benign. Reds, which celebrated a regime that killed more people than any other in human history except for the one applauded by his sister in The Other Side of the Sky, nabbed Beatty an Oscar for Best Director.

So obviously MacLaine didn’t consider Maoism a horror. And Beatty wouldn’t use that word to describe Leninism, either. So what “horror,” then, was MacLaine referring to in that Daily Mail article?

Why, it was that moment of confusion at the end of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, when Beatty and Faye Dunaway at first mistakenly presented the Best Picture statuettes to La La Land rather than to Moonlight. Days after the mixup, MacLaine was still pondering it. “I’m basically a mystic,” she told the Mail. “And I’m wondering what was that all about? And I am not sure yet. I have to think about it some more.” One wonders how much thought she’s ever given to that slightly bigger mixup for which she was primarily responsible – namely, the representation of Mao’s China in a major film as a paradise rather than a hell on earth.

Posted on July 21, 2017July 17, 2017 by usefulstooges 4

Red Redgrave’s comeuppance

vanessaredgrave-26 — Redgrave in Playing for Time

Not long after Vanessa Redgrave’s 1978 Oscar debacle, which we discussed yesterday, came another controversy: she played a real-life Jewish concentration-camp survivor, Fania Fénelon, in a CBS-TV movie, Playing for Time. Many Jews, including Fénelon herself, objected to Redgrave’s selection to play the part; Sammy Davis Jr. memorably said that it was “like me playing the head of the Ku Klux Klan.” (She won an Emmy for her performance.)

In the years since, Redgrave has remained a devout Marxist. In her 1994 autobiography, she wrote that she was still “absolutely convinced of the necessity of Marxism, and not for a single day has this conviction been shaken.” She’s also continued to be a generous supporter of Islamic terrorism. In 2002, she paid £50,000 bail for Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen who was accused by the Russian government of involvement in terrorist acts, including that year’s Moscow theater hostage crisis; in 2007, she helped pay bail for a terrorist who’d been arrested immediately upon returning to Britain after his release from Guantánamo.

In a 2015 interview, Redgrave celebrated the election of the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader in Britain, calling it the “English Spring.” (She may be a Commie, but she’s still enough of an upper-class, far-left English snob of the Sidney and Beatrice Webb/Bloomsbury type to all but ignore the existence of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.)

Redgrave, by the way, didn’t get the last word at the 1978 Oscar telecast we discussed yesterday. Some time after her acceptance speech, in what would become a famous moment in showbiz history, legendary screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky (Marty, Network) took the stage to present the awards for best original and adapted scripts. He began by saying the following:

Before I get on to the writing awards, there’s a little matter I’d like to tidy up – at least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning. I would like to say, personal opinion, of course, that I’m sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda.

I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple “thank you” would have sufficed.

Chayevsky’s remarks about Redgrave were received by the audience with immense enthusiasm. (Among those who can be seen applauding lustily in the You Tube clip are Chayevsky’s fellow writers – and fellow Jews – Neil Simon and Arthur Laurents, the latter of whom had actually been a victim of the blacklist; conspicuously not applauding was Shirley MacLaine, whose own fondness for Communism we examined on this site in 2015.) In these times, however, when more and more Hollywood luminaries are loath to criticize Islamic terror but quick to demonize the only democracy in the Middle East, we can’t help but wonder how one of today’s Oscar audiences would respond to a speech like Redgrave’s and to comments like Chayevsky’s.

Posted on July 4, 2017July 3, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

One woman’s conscience

She’s been called “the most famous American female playwright of the 20th century” and “the first woman to be admitted into the previously all-male club of American ‘dramatic literature.’” She was also a diehard Stalinist.

Born in New Orleans in 1905 and raised there and in New York, Lillian Hellman attended Columbia and NYU, then worked briefly at a Manhattan publishing house before marrying a young PR guy and heading out to Hollywood with him. Finding a job as a reader at MGM, she lost no time in organizing her colleagues into a union. When she met the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, a fellow Stalinist, she left her husband for him. It was Hammett who urged her to start writing plays, and who helped her to write them.

During the 1930s and 40s she wrote a series of plays, among them The Little Foxes (1939) and Watch on the Rhine (1941). At the time most of them were Broadway hits – and several of them were made into successful movies – but their mixture of over-the-top family melodrama and heavyhanded political moralizing hasn’t worn well. They were masterpieces, however, alongside The North Star (1943), a crude piece of work that is described on its Wikipedia page as “an unabashedly pro-Soviet propaganda film.”

Meanwhile Hellman was an active member of the Communist Party. As The Economist has noted, “she joined the party after the worst of Moscow’s purges and show trials.” She later claimed not to have been aware of the trials, in which political rivals of Stalin were falsely convicted of treason (most of them were ultimately executed); but in fact she signed two statements, published in the Party newspaper The Daily Worker in 1937 and 1938, that defended the second and third Moscow show trials as having been entirely fair.

hellman_co — Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine in the 1961 film version of Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour

Indeed, her defense of Stalin’s reign was absolute and unwavering: she called Stalinist Russia “the ideal democratic state”; visiting Moscow in 1944, according to The Spectator, she “seems wilfully to have ignored evidence that artists and writers were being killed off. Years later she stood by the Russian government’s cover stories and even made up some of her own. She was given rare access to the front lines when the Russian army was camped outside Warsaw, and never described what she saw there.”

As historian Paul Johnson puts it in his 1988 book Intellectuals, “she did everything in her power, quite apart from her plays and scripts, to assist the CP’s penetration of American intellectul life and to forward the aims of Soviet policy.” She was active in CP front groups, attended at least one CP national conventional, helped fund a “pro-CP propaganda film,” berated a New York Times correspondent who refused to toe the Moscow line about Spain, and supported the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland, saying, “I don’t believe in that fine, lovable little Republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about. I’ve been there and it looks like a pro-Nazi little republic to me.” (In fact, Hellman almost certainly never went to Finland.) After Stalin died and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, gave his famous speech condemning Stalin’s brutality, Hellman actually upbraided Khrushchev for his disloyalty.

hellman_lf — Bette Davis in the 1941 film version of Hellman’s play The Little Foxes

Called in 1952 to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, she published a letter in the New York Times saying she was willing to discuss her own political views and activities but refusing to turn in other Stalinists. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” she famously wrote. Other high-profile American Communists had taken the Fifth, too, and become anathematized; by spinning her own silence in this way, Hellman managed to turn herself into an international symbol of conscience.

She liked that. And in later years, when the victims of the Hollywood blacklist became heroes, Hellman wrote a series of memoirs – An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976) – from which she emerged as the most toweringly courageous of them all, a stirring moral heroine who, it turned out, had not only written anti-fascist plays but also put her life on the line in the life-or-death struggle against Hitler. Even if you deplored her Stalinism, you had to admire her valor. John Hersey, reviewing Scoundrel Time in the New Republic, called her “a moral force, almost an institution of conscience.”

There was only one little problem: virtually everything of consequence that she wrote in her memoirs was a lie.

More tomorrow.

Posted on October 24, 2016October 26, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Warren Beatty’s love letter to Lenin

We’ve spent the last couple of days contemplating Shirley MacLaine‘s love affair with Mao’s China. Now let’s turn to her brother, Warren Beatty, and his long-term crush on Soviet Communism. Our focus is on the epic 1981 movie Reds, Beatty’s “dream project” and “labor of love,” which he co-wrote, directed, produced, and starred in. It tells the true story of John Reed (Beatty), a journalist – and devoted Communist – who, in the U.S., helped establish the American Communist Party, and, in Russia, was a fervent participant in and witness to the birth of the Soviet Union, where he became one of Lenin’s very first American useful stooges and ended up as the only American to be buried in the walls of the Kremlin.

Politics aside, Reds is a good old-fashioned big-screen drama in the best Hollywood tradition. Over three hours long, it’s as stirring and sweeping as Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia. And there’s no fashionable modern-day moral ambiguity: Reed is, quite simply, a hero. The movie encourages us to view his commitment to Communism as admirable. As Peter Biskind wrote in a 2006 retrospective on the film for Vanity Fair, it’s an “homage, of sorts, to the Russian Revolution as well as to the high passions that animated the largely forgotten American left in the years before, during, and after World War I.” In Biskind’s eyes, it wasn’t just John Reed who was a hero – Warren Beatty, too, was a hero, whose “vision and persistence” enabled him to win over studio heads who weren’t enthusiastic about the idea of a motion picture that would “dramatize the Russian Revolution from a not entirely unsympathetic perspective.”

Biskind tells a story that provides a glimpse into Beatty’s mindset. While visiting the Soviet Union in 1969, Beatty was asked by Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk to star in a movie about Reed. Beatty turned Bondarchuk down – not because he was loath to take part in a project that would have been a work of sheer Communist propaganda filmed under close Kremlin control, but because he didn’t like the script. Even then, however, he was already thinking of making his own Reed movie, and asked to meet an old woman who had been one of Reed’s lovers. She had spent 16 years in a labor camp, and hated Stalin, but was philosophical, telling Beatty that “of course the revolution is in its early stages.” Beatty’s reaction? “It was at that moment I thought, I have to make a movie about that kind of passion.” Not, note well, a movie about that kind of self-destructive delusion – the woman was still devoted to an evil and pernicious ideology that had landed her in a labor camp for 16 years! – but about what he regarded as a laudable ardor.

Shirley MacLaine: a fool’s paradise

Back in 1975, as we saw yesterday, Shirley MacLaine released The Other Side of the Sky, a staggering whitewash of a documentary about China, which she’d visited a couple of years earlier.

Before going to China, she’d told reporters that sexual equality was “an official fact” in China and that America hadn’t achieved it yet; in China, far from waking up to the fact that she was a guest of a totalitarian terror state, where interviewees had to parrot the party line or else, MacLaine believed everything she was told. China, she insisted, was without social friction; everyone there shared a feeling of “brotherhood” and a “commitment to working for the common good”; during her visit, she later wrote, “it slowly dawned on me that perhaps human beings could be taught anything.”

central-hall-1977-deng-xiaoping — Deng Xiaoping at the White House

All nonsense, of course. But guess what? The documentary was taken seriously. It was nominated for an Oscar. Yes, for an Oscar. At a time when China was still a great unknown, it helped sell many Americans on a massive lie about the reality of life there.

In 1979, the Cultural Revolution finally having ended, China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, visited the United States at the invitation of President Carter. At a state dinner, Deng was seated near Shirley MacLaine, who, according to one report,

Buddhist statues being burned during the Cultural Revolution

gushed that she had visited China during the Cultural Revolution and that everything had been wonderful. She was particularly struck by a professor who told her how grateful he was that the party had decided to send him and his fellow academics to the countryside. Deng looked at her scornfully and said that “he was lying.” Professors should be teaching university classes not planting vegetables.

Deng, eager to put China on the road to prosperity, had no interest in preserving the disastrous fabrications and delusions of the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile the starry-eyed Shirley, ignoring all reports to the contrary about the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, had remained in her fool’s paradise.

MADR-12 — Cultural treasures being burned during the Cultural Revolution

This is, needless to say, a woman who in interview after interview over the decades has presented herself as a proudly independent artist and intellectual, a thoroughgoing and defiant individualist, answerable to no person and no institution. But she had no trouble whatsoever wholeheartedly embracing the idea of a government with the power to force people out of their own beloved occupations and ship them out of the city to work on collective farms. A government that burned books and films – and executed countless artists, actors, authors, and other creative people like herself.

Beijing rally during the Cultural Revolution

There’s no record of how MacLaine replied to Deng that evening. One thing’s for sure, however: his answer sure didn’t teach her a lesson. In the more than three decades since that state dinner, she’s continued to be a useful stooge for tyrannical regimes, promulgating cockamamie theories about international events and comparing the U.S. unfavorably to any number of unfree nations. As recently as 2011, she told an interviewer that, after World War II, the U.S. government, in cahoots with Nazi scientists, pushed a fear of Communism onto the American public in order to “keep control” over them. In other words, it’s not Communist governments that “keep control” over their subjects through terror; it’s the U.S. government that does so, by inculcating a (presumably unwarranted) terror of Communism.

She’s a useful stooge of the first water. And yet she still reaps applause everywhere she goes. Which is also the case with another star we might mention – her younger brother, Warren Beatty. How could two such ridiculous tools of totalitarianism have been born into a single family? We’ll continue pondering that question next time, when we move on to him.

Posted on September 10, 2015August 20, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Shirley MacLaine, publicist for the Cultural Revolution

Shirley MacLaine has been a movie star for sixty years. She’s appeared in dozens of films, won all the major awards in the business, and received a Kennedy Center Honor. At age 81, she’s still active, with one movie recently released, another in production, and a third identified on her IMDB page as “announced.”

Of course, she’s not just known as an actress. She’s also been very outspoken about her New Age beliefs, including her conviction that she’s lived several previous lives. She’s written several bestselling books about these matters. According to her, she’s been “a medieval warrior, an orphan raised by elephants, a Japanese geisha and a model for post-impressionist painter Toulouse-Lautrec.” When she dated Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, she “realized” that they’d hooked up over a thousand years ago, when he was Charlemagne and she was a peasant girl. She’s also said that her pet dog was “a reincarnation of the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis.”

There are apparently people who view themselves as having learned spiritual lessons from her; there are many more who think of her as a very talented woman who also happens to be something of a harmless kook.

But in fact MacLaine’s non-acting activities haven’t all been harmless. Case in point: her 1975 documentary The Other Half of the Sky, about a trip she and a group of other women made to China in 1973.

As of 1973, it will be remembered, Mao’s so-called Cultural Revolution had been going on since 1966. It involved the often random and utterly unwarranted harassment, persecution, forcible displacement, torture, imprisonment, and murder of millions of people. During these years, the population of China lived in terror – fearful of losing their homes, their jobs, their families, their lives. During this period, few Westerners were welcome into what was then called (as North Korea is now) a “hermit kingdom.”

Cultural_Revolution_poster — A Cultural Revolution poster

Enter Shirley MacLaine, her film crew (including director Claudia Weill), and her entourage, composed of “regular American women” such as a Texas housewife, a Navajo woman, a California psychologist, and a Puerto Rican sociologist. Invited to China by Mao Zedong’s government, the group traveled from city to city – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou – where they filmed the sights and talked to people. The result: a movie, written and produced by MacLaine, that the New York Times described as a “generally eye-catching spectrum of happy people in such places as homes, farms, day-care centers, city communes, schools, hospitals, the Great Wall, the ballet and Peking’s May Day celebration.”

But The Other Side of the Sky wasn’t just a travelogue. MacLaine wanted to make a point: namely, that women in China had attained a degree of liberation that their American counterparts had yet to match, and from which they could learn. As the Times put it, MacLaine’s documentary depicted the women of China (and the men, too) as “uniformly contented.” The film provided not a single glimpse of “crime, poverty, deprivation or unhappiness among China’s 800 million people.” There was hardly a hint of recognition on MacLaine’s part that the land she was visiting was not a free country, and that the people to whom she posed questions were not free to answer them honestly. Although some of the Chinese people interviewed by MacLaine did “gently point out that artistic, musical and literary creativity must conform to Maoist principles,” MacLaine herself showed no inclination to probe or ponder this fact.