Posted on 01/06/2015 6:44:51 AM PST by Kaslin
Hollywood relishes making anti-American movies, but, maybe even more, loves to lavish fulsome tributes on full-blown Communists, you know, those fellows who swooned at Joe Stalin’s feet, teamed up with Hitler as he bombed the hell out of London in World War II and worked overtime to inflict deadly harm on America.
Tinseltown is at it again, celebrating Dalton Trumbo, a major Hollywood Ten figure and longtime Communist enthusiast, in a brand new picture directed by Jay Roach and featuring Bryan Cranston, the star of the hit television series, Breaking Bad. The publicity for Trumbo says that Dalton bravely took a “stand against the Communist-witch-hunt at the height of the Cold War” and was “punished for his principled stand for free speech and the Constitution.” (Yes, we all know how Communists have always been deeply committed to America’s constitutional freedoms.) Anti-Communists like John Wayne and labor leader Roy Brewer will also be taking major hits.
The new Trumbo movie will almost certainly treat the revered screenwriter in much the same way Christopher Trumbo, Dalton’s son, treated his dad in his 2007 “documentary,” also called Trumbo. In other words, like a glorified patriot, who could not openly work in the film industry because of the “inquisition” conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Typical of Hollywood’s take on Christopher’s film was an article by the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan, who portrays Dalton as a “contrarian” who “believed passionately in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” And when HUAC began to investigate his “connections to the Communist party,” his life showed “the fearsome cost of standing up for your principles...”
Ah, and what glorious principles they were! Trumbo, in truth, was a full-fledged Stalinist who had the distinction of siding with three of the most barbarous dictators in the 20th century: Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and North Korea’s Kim-Il Sung. Nor did he just have “connections” to the Communist party. He was a full-blooded Red, party card and all, who worked hard to graft the Soviet system, with all its lovely qualities, upon his country of birth.
For much of his adult life, Dalton was in Stalin’s hip pocket (as, of course, was every member of the Communist party in the United States). I’ve read a lot of Trumbo and combed through his papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. Yet I’ve never found a paragraph, or even a phrase, where he ever publicly or privately condemns Stalin’s Soviet Union in a meaningful way, certainly not when the Caligula in the Kremlin was dispatching his own citizens by the millions, egging Hitler on as he invaded the Western democracies, cheering Goering’s air force as it rained death and destruction on London and eagerly devouring Eastern Europe in the post World War II era. Not a peep of protest or regret from a man whom Hollywood longs to lionize.
The evidence of Trumbo’s Red activities is hardly secret. He came clean, sort of, to his biographer, Bruce Cook, a writer of the upcoming Trumbo screenplay. He told Cook in the 1970s that he joined the party in 1943, that some of his “very best friends” were Communists and that “I might as well have been a Communist 10 years earlier. . .” He also says about joining the party: “But I’ve never regretted it. As a matter of fact, it’s possible to say I would have regretted not having done it. . .” Indeed, in his private papers he admits that he “reaffiliated with the party in 1954,” apparently his passion for a Communist America burning brightly as ever.
Like so many of his comrades, he became a Hitler apologist after Stalin joined Hitler in that 1939 pact. In order to poison the well against Hitler’s enemies, he demonized the Fuehrer’s foes. England was no democracy, he argued in his 1941 novel, The Remarkable Andrew, because it had a “king.” FDR was guilty of “treason” and “black treason” for his pro-England policy. No drop of American blood should be risked or spilled for the selfish and deceitful British. Yet when Hitler betrayed his wonderful Stalin in June of 1941, launching a massive invasion of Russia, ah, finally, Trumbo discovered a compelling reason to fling thousands of young Americans to their deaths on foreign battlefields.
When North Korea waged war against South Korea in 1950, where did Dalton stand? In an unpublished movie script dedicated to several Hollywood Ten figures, he has the heroine declare that North Korea’s invasion was perfectly justifiable, for this is “Korea’s fight for independence, just as we had to fight for our own independence in 1776.”
When the Hollywood Communists put on their horror show before HUAC in 1947, screaming at committee members and refusing to respond to legitimate questions, the studio executives laid down a rule: Those who refused to say whether they were party members and conspiring with our enemies in Moscow could no longer work in Hollywood. Trumbo stood with his fellow conspirators and Stalin.
Why--and here I am truly puzzled--does mainstream Hollywood continue to glamorize such hard-core Stalinists?
...”They don’t think so. They all believe that in the New Order, they will become Commissars, telling the rest of us what to do.”...
That is exactly what they think and they would relish the genocide and the murdering of those who disagree with their hedonism and immorality. We have seen this rodeo many times before throughout history.
They gathered in clandestine meetings in homes to subvert the nation in support of the USSR (global Communism actually, they also adored North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Central and South American Communist dictatorships as well) and were angry they got caught.
Perhaps the Trumbo movie will describe how he published an anti-war novel, Johnny Got his Gun (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939) right after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact only to yank it off the market after the Nazi invasion of the USSR--but I'm not holding my breath.
Johnny Got His Gun was probably his Magnum Opus.
A movie that is stupid as all get out to anyone who can see, but can be quite impressionistic to a youngster.
Of course PBS used to show it on TV so naive kids can get their supposed antiwar propaganda.
He and his comrades were wealthy Beverly Hills Communists.
Truly reprehensible people.
I don’t get why Liberals STILL call it a Witch Hunt.... when is was definitively proved that hard core Communists WERE in the administrations of at least TWO American Presidents.
Lucy was a commie?
I was forced to read “Johnny Got His Gun” in high school. It sucked.
I’ve read a good bit of this one:
In the fall of 1997 some of the biggest names in show business filled the Motion Picture Academy theater in Beverly Hills for Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a lavish production worthy of an Oscar telecast. In song, film, and live performances by stars such as Billy Crystal, Kevin Spacey, and John Lithgow, the audience relived a time some fifty years before, when, as the story has always been told, courageous writers and actors stood firm against a witch-hunt and blacklist that wrecked lives and destroyed careers. Left untold that night, and ignored in books and films for more than half a century, was a story not so politically correct but vastly more complex and dramatic.
In Hollywood Party the complete story finally emerges, backdropped by the great upheavals of our time and with all the elements of a thriller—wrenching plot twists, intrigue, betrayal, violence, corruption, misguided passion, and lost idealism. Using long neglected information from public records, the personal files of key players, and recent revelations from Soviet archives, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley uncovers the Communist Party’s strategic plan for taking control of the movie industry during its golden age, a plan that came perilously close to success. He shows how the Party dominated the politics of the movie industry during the 1930s and 1940s, raising vast sums of money from unwitting liberals and conscripting industry luminaries into supporting Stalinist causes.
In riveting detail, the shameful truth unfolds: Communist writers, actors, and directors, wealthy beyond the dreams of most Americans, posture as proletarian wage slaves as they try to influence the content of movies. From the days of the Popular Front through the Nazi-Soviet Pact and beyond World War II, they remain faithful to a regime whose brutality rivaled that of Hitler’s Nazis.
Their plans for control of the industry a shambles by the mid-1950s, the Party nonetheless succeeded in shaping the popular memory of those days. By chronicling what has been left on the cutting-room floor, from “back story” to aftermath, Hollywood Party changes those perceptions forever.
“Mr. Billingsley’s book is the best exploration I’ve seen of the Hollywood blacklist and the Communist Party’s role in that conflict. Hollywood Party covers it all with insight, meticulous research, and some wry perceptions.”
—Charlton Heston
“For years we’ve been treated to the left-wing version of the Hollywood blacklist. Now Lloyd Billingsley has provided us with the rest of the story.”
—David Horowitz, author of Radical Son
And there is a bit of the blacklist in this book. The author seemed to be against it but had to reluctantly admit that those in question were Communists.
The screenplay for SPARTACUS is more Trumbo than Howard Fast. There is NO Tony Curtis character, no “I AM SPARTACUS” in the book. Spartacus died in the battle, not by crucifixion.
I’ve read Fast’s novel and found I prefer Arthur Koestler’s THE GLADIATORS.
Trumbo did write some good screenplays like LONELY ARE THE BRAVE. One simply has to realize some of the scenes (such as shooting down a military helicopter) are silly.
No mention in the article of any of the movies that Trumbo actually wrote for Hollywood. One of the most famous, of course, was Exodus (based on the Leon Uris novel), which is one of the most pro-Israel movies of all time. He also wrote the screenplays for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Spartacus, Papillion, and Roman Holiday, among other non-Stalinist flicks.
And don’t forget how he ratted on people who requested copies of his anti-interventionist book . . . after the party line had changed.
When Lucy was a Red
One of the best-known figures of television comedy had little-known leftist roots.
August 11, 2011
Lucille Ball listed her party affiliation as "Communist" when she registered to vote in 1936 and 1938. In 1936, she sponsored a CP candidate for the state's 57th district. She signed a certificate that stated, "I am registered as affiliated with the Communist Party." Ball, according to former Communist Party member and writer Rena Vale, who later became an anti-Communist investigator for various government bodies in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., allowed her home to host party educational classes:
Within a few days after my third application to join the Communist Party was made, I received a notice to attend a meeting on North Ogden Drive, Hollywood [Ball's home]. On arrival at this address, I found several others present; an elderly man informed us that we were the guests of the screen actress, Lucille Ball, and showed us various pictures, books and other objects to establish that fact, and stated she was glad to loan her home for a Communist Party new members class.
Unlike hundreds of others who were dragged publicly before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, better known as HUAC, and publicly humiliated, Ball was allowed to meet with HUAC investigators in private. She met William Wheeler, a HUAC investigator, on September 4, 1953, and admitted registering as a Communist, but said she never voted for the party or was ever a party member.
She also denied knowing anything about sponsoring a CP candidate for state office. Her testimony was released several days later. It came to 27 pages. Ball largely blamed her deceased grandfather for the things she had done. She said that she registered as a Communist "because grandpa wanted all of us to" and "to appease an old man."
Arnaz was hysterical in defense of his wife, saying, "Lucy has always had a clear conscience about this. She has never been a Communist, and what's more, she hates every Communist in Hollywood."
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Now people can change and denounce their earlier politics but disavowing them is another matter./BLOCKQUOTE
Barring that, the message seems to be "And what's so wrong about being a witch?"
WE DON'T NEED NO STEENKING BADGES!
Bryan Cranston true feelings are coming out. I guess he will give away all those millions of dollars he has to the “masses”.
#27 well she was a “RED” head : )
Communism in America is about more than freedom of speech...their intent is to change us from a Republic to a communist country.
Exactly and we must never allow this to happen
Definitely. And the younger generations need to be made aware of this. I think they are clueless of what hides under “freedom of speech”.
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