Posted on 11/06/2015 9:52:02 AM PST by EveningStar
"Dalton Trumbo was a socialist, but he loved being rich."
So says Bryan Cranston, who stars in "Trumbo," out this week, and plays the screenwriter who went to prison with the Hollywood Ten in the time of Harry Truman.
Actually, Trumbo was not a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Trumbo was a Stalinist, a hard-core Communist when the Communist Party USA was run from Moscow by the Comintern, agents of the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
There's a lot of that going around.
Capitalism for me, socialism for the rest of you.
Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Trumbo was a Stalinist ...Mere semantics. The CPSU had its birthplace in the Social Democratic Labor Party of Russia, which split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The chief tenet of Stalinism was so-called “socialism in one country”.
Bump
I watched “Enemy At The Gates” last night.
I thought it was interesting that they all called Stalin “The Boss” kind of like they call labor leaders bosses.
I remember an interview with actor Robert Mitchum, who said: “ Back in the 1940’s, it was kinda hard to sympathize with screenwriters who made 50 or 60,000 a year, and then sneak out at night to attend a Communist Party meeting.”
Trumbo followed the usual course of Stalinist stooges - he hated the Nazis until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact at which point he became an ‘isolationist’ against any interventions in Europe. But when Germany invaded Russia he became a fervent warhawk. The US had to go save the Motherland of Socialism, doncha see?
He was absolute scum and, in a just, sane world, would have ended his days on a gallows.
Trumbo *was* a Stalinist stooge, but he did write some great screenplays for movies many of us enjoy even today.
True.
That sure seems to be the attitude in all the hipster neighborhoods I’ve been to.
Trumbo came up with the line “I AM SPARTACUS!” in his screenplay. it i s not in the Howard Fast novel SPARTACUS.
I myself prefer “The Gladiators” by Arthur Koestler for a Spartacus novel.
Trumbo also wrote the screenplay for LONELY ARE THE BRAVE in which a military officer Dusalius sends in a military helicopter to hunt down Kirk Douglas in violation of the Posse Comitatus act.
And they don't watch them for the writing, which is melodramatic and clunky in both.
People watch Roman Holiday because it stars Audrey Hepburn in her prime.
People watch Spartacus because it is the first film where they gave Kubrick a budget - the script is besides the point: it's the visuals.
ping
‘Gun Crazy’ and ‘Lonely Are the Brave’ have huge followings among film buffs. The former is highly influential.
He wrote it as propaganda to convince the American public not to intervene against the Nazis.
Less than a year later, he was gung-ho for intervention because the Nazis had turned on Stalin.
No conscience, no shame.
I’ve always thought ‘Roman Holiday’ is a bit charmless and mechanical. If I want that sort of thing I’ll watch a Lubitsch or Billy Wilder film.
So many of those lefty screenwriters had heavy-handed tendencies towards messaging. An early Trumbo script, for a little b-film, “Sorority House” (1939) even exuded this, with its characters being subserviant to the class-conscious ‘message’ it was hammering. Same thing with Lillian Hellman’s “These Three,” or John Howard Lawson’s “Success at any Price.” Always gets on my nerves when I sense that a character is just a mouthpiece for propaganda, and that’s the norm for those left-wing writers. It’s the way their idiotic brains worked. Revolution first and foremost... human character and drama a side-issue.
“Gun Crazy” is great because of Joseph H. Lewis’ inspired direction. Not because of the script.
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