The Desperate Hours - 1955

The Desperate Hours (1955) brought the escaped convict genre to suburbia. That’s where everyone else was headed in the 1950s, and the house in the neighborhood is as much a character in this film as the three outlaws and the family they terrorize.

This is our entry into the Outlaws blogathon hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Please check out this link to read some other great blogs on this sinister subject.

In The Desperate Hours, Humphrey Bogart plays the lead bad guy in his second-to-last film and the very last bad guy role he was to play in movies. He shows he’s still got it.

Dewey Martin plays his younger brother who has broken out of prison with him. The third member of their gang is played by Robert Middleton, who is arguably the most frightening member of the trio.

The movie begins with an audience perspective shot as we move down a suburban subdivision. There are lawns and trees, children, a dog or two, people walking on sidewalks. It is deceptively peaceful. The camera moves very quickly to one particular home on the block. If the house looks familiar to you from the outside that’s because two years later, Beaver Cleaver lived here. The television sitcom Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963) used this exterior for the Cleaver home.

Fredric March is the head of the clan, doting father and husband and executive, who works “downtown,” a place which with the settlement of suburbia has become more distant and vaguer to us.

Martha Scott is his wife; Mary Murphy is his grown daughter; and the wonderful Richard Eyer, who as we’ve seen was such a standout in films here like Friendly Persuasion (1956) and here in Slander (1957), plays his young son.

Though we see the family gathered together for a cheerful, if rushed, breakfast, it is not all idyllic on the home front. Fredric March does not approve of his daughter’s latest boyfriend, a hotshot young lawyer played by Gig Young. She is rebellious and they argue in the car when he drives her to work “downtown.”

Young Richard no longer wants to kiss his father goodbye when he leaves for school; he’s too man for that now and he does want to does not want to be known by a nickname anymore. He’s an All-American boy, pretty much goes his own way and his sudden streak of independence, while cute in this scene, is going to prove to be a greater problem later on when he tries to rebel against their captors.

The story was written by Joseph Hayes from his novel and his original script which was performed on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre from February to August 1955, the film’s release year. For some years thereafter, it was a popular summer theatre play and the two-level set which was required to tell the story of showing the family in different rooms with the bad guys was always a challenge and always a hit on stage. We take things for granted like a two-story house in the movies, but on stage we appreciate more the architectural skill it takes to build and to work on a two-level open set.

The Broadway version was directed by actor and director Robert Montgomery. Karl Malden played Fredric March’s role as the suburban husband and father, and Paul Newman played the Humphrey Bogart role. We can imagine that the younger gangster in the mid-1950s might have carried a more sinister suspense story because the brothers would have been contemporaries and because they might have appeared more violent and impetuous.

Though Bogart is a generation older than his brother played by Dewey Martin, we can accept them as brothers and accept that Bogart, even though famed for playing dangerous criminals, serves a different function in the screen version. His is rather like a parallel to Fredric March, than to his partner younger brother.  Like March, he is the head of his family, or his gang, and he sometimes has trouble keeping them in line. Fredric March bristles at his daughter’s romance, believing her to still be a kid. Humphrey Bogart is stumped when later in the film his brother rebels not just against his authority but against the whole way of life in which his big brother has raised him.

Bogart and his gang have chosen this house at random, which is certainly an eerie aspect about the story, it could have been any home—maybe even yours. Bogart’s reason for choosing this house was that Richard Eyer has left his bicycle on the front lawn. Bogart knows he would be able to make the family more fearful and more easily cooperative if they have to protect children. This tells us that he has some experience and logic in his craft, and also that he would prefer not to have any trouble if he could avoid it. He intends to hole up here until he can arrange for a former girlfriend to bring them money to escape.  But he also wants to go after the deputy sheriff responsible for putting him in prison.

Arthur Kennedy plays the deputy sheriff, who is the only one among the police officials to take the news of the jailbreak seriously, feeling certain that Humphrey Bogart is coming straight for him. He is not so paranoid as he is analytical, just as logical as Bogart or Fredric March is in this scenario. There is an attempt to turn the story into more or less a triangle to include the efforts of the police to trace Bogart’s whereabouts. This is obviously not something that would have been easily done on stage where the whole story was pretty much set in the home.

Note Bogart’s disgust when he sees that March, whom he resents for his middle-class respectability, has only $800 in his bankbook.  In that era, it would have represented probably something like three or more months’ wages saved.  That may not be terrific in Bogart’s eyes—he’s after all the marbles—but today when it is estimated that only about 18 percent of Americans have three-to-five months’ savings in the bank, then this family is doing okay.

The movie also gives us a lot of familiar faces to pick out in the crowd, Ray Teal as the state police detective, Alan Reed (Fred Flintstone) is another officer, Ray Collins, Simon Oakland will also play police officials, Whit Bissell plays a pensive and intellectual FBI agent. Beverly Garland plays the teacher who drops by and in front of whom March must pretend to be bringing home drinking buddies to cover for her seeing the bad guys. Joe Flynn plays a panicky motorist taken hostage, and poor Walter Baldwin plays the junkman in the greatest danger of all of them.

Shortly after father and daughter leave for work, and Junior’s off to school, mom Martha Scott begins her housecleaning. She brings along a portable radio into every room to listen to music and, of course, to give us the opportunity to hear the news bulletins about the escaped convicts. Later on in the movie, Humphrey Bogart will smash the radio in a fit of anger.

It is interesting that even though this film was released in 1955, we see no television set in the home. It is more than likely that by the mid-1950s, a middle-class home such as this would have a television. I’m not sure why they don’t include one, either because it didn’t figure into the plot, or because the film industry was still chafing with resentment over its new competitor and didn’t want to acknowledge its existence?  Though Fredric March drives an older model car, the movie is not set in the late 1940s—Gig Young’s flashy sportscar alone tells us that.

We might think today that the TV would be a better place than the radio for news bulletins, but this was long before 24-hour news and also it was an era where news broadcasts were infrequent and brief. There were usually only one or two news programs lasting all of about 15 minutes from the 6 o’clock to the 7:30 time frame in the morning, and it was much the same in the early evening from 6 o’clock to about 7:30. We might have one or two news programs 15 minutes in duration. Television news did not really come of age until the 1960s, and much of that, sadly, was launched in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Newspapers were still king of the news--even of bulletins, with the ability to produce "extras" several times a day.

Robert Middleton, the large hulking Neanderthal of the bad guys with one presumes the IQ of a child, plays with Richard Eyer’s toys in his room and break some of them in frustration when he smacks his head while looking out the window.  He fumbles with a toy bank that looks like a little safe, and he cannot open it. At one point he takes a toy gun and blasts it around the house until Humphrey Bogart tells him knock it off. In one scene—one of director William Wyler’s touches, while Bogart is terrorizing Martha Scott in the foreground, in the background we see Middleton drinking from a milk bottle and spilling it down his chest (just as the boy will do later).  These images of the buffoon are only half-comic.  They also point to Middleton’s mental instability, which is the most dangerous thing about him. These fellows had been in prison, we don’t know for how long, but it’s possible that television would have been a complete novelty to them. I imagine if Robert Middleton’s character was so enthralled by Richard Eyer’s toys, then he might have enjoyed CaptainVideo or Hopalong Cassidy.

Bogart snidely says of Middleton to Martha Scott, “Crude, ain’t he?”

Bogart is commanding in his sneering, angry role, indeed, it is a role he has played many times. There is stubble on his face and over the phone he calls his gun moll “Doll,” like a man from another era, and he is supposed to be. He has no place in modern society.

His younger brother, Dewey Martin, feels this more acutely than Bogey. He is more wide-eyed at the appearance of the house, and at the nubile young daughter. At first, when he enters the daughter’s bedroom while she is at work and sees her canopy bed, he touches the frills on the canopy and brushes his face seductively on them.  It is an image which causes us to think he will present a sexual threat to her, but when he meets the girl and examines the whole house more closely, there is an unexpected change in him.  He is strangely awed and respectful of this world and its people.

Interestingly, the scene with her canopy bed reminds me of the scene in Wyler’s other film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) when Dana Andrews wakes after a drunken night in Teresa Wright’s canopy bed, and he amusedly blows on the canopy’s frills, surprised to find himself in such a feminine haven.

When father and daughter come home from work, and Junior comes home from school, the entire family is held hostage and they are moved from room to room at gunpoint. In some scenes, it even looks as if they are camping in their own home as they try to stay together.

Martin seems more than attracted to daughter Mary Murphy; there is a shy, almost boyish crush he exhibits for her. Bogart notices the attraction and jokes that when they leave, they will take the daughter with them as a hostage just as a present for his younger brother. It is a chilling moment.

But the brother protects the girl from Robert Middleton, who is a far greater danger not only to her but everyone in the house, even to Bogey, because he is so undisciplined and so mentally unstable.

The real terror in the film comes from the sudden destruction of the blessed normality of their everyday lives. They live in a world of 1950s conformity, and though it may get a little stale sometimes, they know they are safe there. Their safety has been shattered not necessarily by three escaped convicts, one of them with a gun, but that the normality is gone and the unknown has entered their lives.

One gun becomes two as Bogart discovers that the family keeps a pistol in the house. This evens up the score a little and makes Bogart happy because Middleton has the other one.

But there is an even greater danger to Bogart than Robert Middleton’s instability. It is his younger brother. Dewey Martin doesn’t want to take over his brother’s life of crime anymore. When Bogart tells him to stick with him, that he got them out of prison and he will take care of him, that he taught him everything he knows – a common manipulation used by the heads of families to keep the younger in line – Dewey Martin disgustedly replies, “You taught me everything, except how to live in a house like this.”

If Dewey Martin was not dissatisfied with his life in prison, he certainly is now because he sees a glaring comparison to how his life has gone. This is a nice home, with a nice family. If Mary Murphy’s beau, Gig Young, is not welcomed by her parents, then what chance would he have? Even though he respectfully calls her, “Miss,” and calls Fredric March, “Sir.”

The family has its own struggles, its own splinters and breakdowns, and coming together. Unfortunately for Fredric March, who tries to shepherd his family through this terrible experience and proves himself to be courageous and very intelligent in how he manages to outmaneuver the bad guys, his greatest handicap is also his greatest treasure – his family. Neither his daughter nor his son obey his explicit instructions and they mess things up, even his wife rebels and throws a monkey wrench into the works. At some point we have to wonder if March just wants to throw his hands up and yell, “All right then, go get yourself killed! I’m sick of talking to you people!”

But he doesn’t. At one point when he is allowed to leave the house on a mission for the bad guys, he stumbles onto the dragnet by the cops who have traced Bogart’s whereabouts, and he has to plead with them to allow him to go back in to mediate the situation because he doesn’t want them shooting up his house and killing his entire family. They reluctantly agree, but give him a gun. He empties it of all the bullets. He takes it with him. The cops think he’s nuts, but we see in the course of his last gambit that he is more clever than anybody.

It is an intricate and interesting movie and fast-paced but I won’t linger too much on the heroics of the family. This blogathon is about outlaws. In the tradition of classic films, none of these outlaws comes to a good end.

We may not mourn Robert Middleton, he’s just too scary and too bad, and has already committed one murder right before our eyes.

Dewey Martin has the greater share of our sympathy and how he meets his end is entirely accidental and tragic because he is escaping his brother and a life he does not want.

Bogart plays his cards all the way to the end, and it’s just March and Bogart at the end. March has outsmarted him because he has managed it so that Bogart holds the gun with no bullets in it.

When March has his own gun, Bogart sneers, “You ain’t got in you.”

March growls, “I’ve got it in me. You put it there.”

Then March does something so effective and perhaps even cruel, to get back at Bogart. Having heard the news about Bogart’s brother’s death – which Bogart doesn’t know – March tells him how his brother died and he sneers and shouts, “You did it! How do you like it?”

This is really the end of Humphrey Bogart. Yes, he has a few more minutes in the film, and yes, he rushes out into the police spotlights and drops down on their front lawn only a few feet from the boy’s bicycle that had brought him to the house in the first place, but it was really upon hearing of the death of his brother, the end of his family, and the collapse of his authority that kills him.

Some may say that Bogart was a little too old to play this role, especially if they had seen Paul Newman play it on Broadway, but this is a different interpretation. Movies are different from plays. We wouldn’t have had all the cops in the play, we wouldn’t have all the bicycles, the milk delivery trucks and the sound of crickets in the evening. We wouldn’t have had March’s bewildered office staff in front of whom he has to pretend, we wouldn’t have had the roadhouse where Dewey Martin tries to escape. We wouldn’t have had the town dump where Robert Middleton commits a cruel and vicious murder.

Bogart was in his element in this role because Bogart was in his own world. Hollywood at this time took its gangster movies from the faux city streets of its backlot and soundstages, to a wider and somehow more complex world on a backlot suburbia. The Cleavers would move into that house – on television of course – and the conformity of suburbia would cover over Bogart, Dewey Martin, and Robert Middleton, like a blanket of snow, masking the ugliness, but not obliterating it.

The 1950s introduced us to new bad guys – psychos, rebellious youth, juvenile delinquents. They would be more at home here in suburbia. They could not be gotten rid of so easily, like the crabgrass on the lawns of the middle-class homeowners; they were rooted and endemic.

Please visit the Outlaws blogathon hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association for more great entries on bad guys in film.

Ben-Hur - 1925 and 1959

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and Ben-Hur (1959) dramatize the novel from 1880 by Lew Wallace about a wealthy Jewish prince during the time of the Roman occupation of Judea who was sent into slavery by his old friend, now a Roman soldier who aspires to political high office. Judah Ben-Hur will eventually avenge himself, sorrow and suffer, and his path will cross many times with Jesus Christ until the moment of Christ’s Passion. The story combines so many elements dear to Hollywood: a successful novel, a biblical epic wherein images of suffering, torture, a certain degree of salaciousness, are permitted because they are deemed biblical, including a showing fair degree of muscled legs and chest of our hero, and the opportunity to appear as if they are enlightening their public as much as entertaining them. We mark the annual crisscrossing of Passover and Easter with this story of Ben-Hur.

The original feature-length movie from 1925, being a silent movie, and being predominantly in black and white, except for some two-strip Technicolor scenes, is obviously different from the blockbuster 1959 multiple Oscar-winner, which was made in color, and where every sound from grunts and groans, the hoofbeats during the chariot race, a relentless hammering of the wooden mallet on the drum to mark the time of the galley slaves rowing, is gloriously and intimately recorded. It was also shot in a widescreen process allowing us a view of everything on either side of the principal characters in the scene, thereby allowing our eyes, and our minds, to wander.

Astonishingly, however, there is much about both movies that is quite similar, including much of the chariot race and the scenes leading up to the race. The 1925 version is a little closer to the novel, but it is no less an opportunity to embrace all that is lavish and lush about an era in Hollywood where there was no CGI and those thousands of people we see in the arena and on the rocky hillsides and the lonely road to Calvary, were real people and not embedded by computer-aided graphics. One might even note that the naval battle in the 1925 version is actually a little more impressive than the 1959 version because it does not appear so much like models in the M-G-M pool.

One of the great delights of the Easter season is watching these old Hollywood epics on regular broadcast television. As we know, broadcast TV rarely shows classic films these days; they are to be found only on retro channels and on TCM, so fewer people are exposed to classic films today. And though broadcast TV does include those pesky commercials, does include edits which are extremely annoying to us old movie fans, there is still something wonderfully egalitarian about being able to see them for free, especially when one is sated after the holiday family meal and the kids are tired out from a long day of festivities and the whole family can gather in front of the TV and watch Hollywood’s ambitious take on the deeper meaning of the season.

Of course, Hollywood’s take on the deeper meaning is never all that deep, but it is entertaining and picturesque, sometimes as magnificent a feast for the eye as the old Renaissance masters’ versions of biblical events; their views were also slanted viewpoints. We could note that the scene of the Last Supper in the 1925 version of Ben-Hur looks almost exactly like the da Vinci painting. Of course, that was da Vinci’s version of the Last Supper, which probably did not happen on a long rectangular table with all twelve apostles and Christ sitting on one side of the table like the dais at a Friars roast. More likely they were all seated together on the floor, dipping pieces of their unleavened bread into a communal dish. And the lighting wasn’t as good.

The other fun aspect about watching biblical epics is that they always end up containing a dream team of players. Sometime or other we’re going to have to discuss The Ten Commandments (1956), a movie I cannot think of without recalling Edward G. Robinson in one of his most campy roles. Just hearing his gangster delivery makes me laugh. (Or was that Billy Crystal?) But that is Hollywood.

It was in The Ten Commandments that Charlton Heston first became famous for the biblical genre. He played Moses in that epic free-for-all, and he comes to the 1959 Ben-Hur with that under his belt. Sam Jaffe and Finlay Currie as well as Martha Scott are the old-timers from classic films here, but they are joined by popular actors of the day such as Stephen Boyd, and Hugh Griffith, who with great panache plays Sheik Ilderim. Newcomer Haya Harareet plays Esther in what was intended to be a dash of authenticity in this version. Ms. Harareet was herself from Israel, born before that country was established when it was still part of British Palestine. She made only a handful of films after that however.  Director William Wyler cast most of the Romans with British actors and most of the Jews with American actors, because he felt the distinction in accents would help differentiate them in the minds of the viewers.  It seems that most Romans in the old epics were played by Brits, which may lead many of us to assume Caesar studied at Oxford.

The 1925 version of Ben-Hur, untroubled by the need for different accents, we also have a dream team of sorts.  Except for star Ramon Navarro and Francis X. Bushman, the movie features a large cast of actors who are predominantly unknown even to classic film buffs. This might give the film more of a purity in the sense that we come to the story without any preconceived notions about the actors playing the roles. However, most of us would be delightfully shocked to discover that many of the Hollywood stars of the day played uncredited bit parts in this movie, lending themselves to crowd scenes, including John and Lionel Barrymore, who supposedly were spectators at the chariot race, as was director Clarence Brown, Joan Crawford and Marion Davis, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, as well as producer Samuel Goldwyn. Even theater owner Sid Grauman of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was there in the stands. Gary Cooper is supposed to have played a Roman guard, as was Clark Gable. Janet Gaynor and Myrna Loy played slave girls. I did not see them, but I promise you I’m going to watch this movie over and over again until I can find them. Let me know if you do.  I don’t think there has ever been such a collection of future stars in bit parts in the same movie.

There actually is something very pure and very innocent and strikingly emotional in the 1925 silent Ben- Hur. Directed by Fred Niblo, June Mathis was the scriptwriter, and we may recall that the 1920s was a time of greater opportunity in Hollywood for women. Ramon Navarro, a really excellent actor, is handsome and very moving as Ben-Hur. Francis X. Bushman is his friend and foe Messala the Roman soldier. In the 1959 version Stephen Boyd plays the role and at first, he and Charlton Heston meet after an absence of many years and renew their childhood friendship. It is only after they discuss the political events of the day and Boyd’s request that Heston inform on fellow Jews who work against the Roman Empire that they fall out and become enemies. Though the 1925 version has Navarro welcoming Bushman after a long absence, the beefy and brash Bushman acts like a bully from his first entrance.

May McAvoy plays Esther, the daughter of Simonides who is Ben-Hur’s slave and steward. She will be his future love. Claire McDowell plays his mother and Kathleen Key plays his sister Tirzah. Mitchell Lewis plays the flamboyant Sheik Ilderim but he does not have the grandiose humor of Hugh Griffith. Charles Belcher plays Balthazar, one of the Three Kings who paid tribute to Christ at his birth and who has been seeking him these many years. Finlay Currie gets the job in the 1959 version, and also serves as narrator.

The moments where Ben-Hur’s life intersects with the life of Christ are commonly treated with a two- strip Technicolor process. We see the brightly colored robes and skin tone on the actors.

Though the grand scenes of the enormous palaces, the gigantic sets are mind blowing, we are treated to very small, intimate scenes of equal power as was common in silent film. After the impressive naval battle when Ben-Hur has rescued the Roman captain and they are brought to another ship, he climbs the outer net of rope rigging to the deck and he passes by a porthole where a fellow galley slave looks up at him mournfully. So much is said with a glance. The director gets a lot of mileage out of these kinds of scenes. One of the problems with the widescreen process as used in 1959 is, as director William Wyler himself lamented, all the space has to be used and so even when the director is focusing on two people in the scene, the audience is going to be looking elsewhere because there is so much else to look at. The director is not able to focus on a pinpoint moment.

The chariot race is perhaps the most famous element of either movie or even the book. It is stunning. The silent version gives us remarkable camera angles where both actors are seen handling the four horses that pull their chariots and I’m assuming that stunt doubles were kept to a minimum simply because of the difficulty of filming. There are those amazing shots, replicated in the 1959 version, of the chariot actually driving over the camera which has been placed into the ground. The stunning wide sweeping shots of the chariots making turns and thrusting down the straightaway, sometimes crashing into each other and overturning is breathtaking. What the silent version lacks is the sound of hoofbeats. We have a beautifully restored version of the 1925 film from 1988 scored by Carl Davis which provides a stirring backdrop to this scene, but we have no hoofbeats.

One thing that some critics remarked upon in the 1959 version was that it was a very slow, unwieldy tale, a very long movie and the parade of characters were presented with chronological diligence but with without raw emotion. The 1925 version carries all the raw emotion including several scenes that are utterly heartbreaking. We may note that this movie was remade in 2016, and it was not successful, but though I have not seen it I can imagine one reason for its lack of success among others – the heavy use of computer graphics makes a modern film more cost-effective but it removes us emotionally from the scene. It must have been extremely expensive and extremely laborious to have thousands and thousands of people rising as one, perfectly choreographed to cheer during the chariot race but it is far more effective because it is real, and because people whose emotions we understand are more interesting, and always will be, than technology we don’t understand.

Both movies deal with the representation of Christ as a silent figure and whom we see only from the back or only his arm, or his hand. Christ gives Ben-Hur a drink of water when he has been marching through the desert to become a galley slave and we see his gentle touch on Charlton Heston’s hair; the difference, however, is that the reaction toward Christ is on a more human and less spiritual manner in the 1959 version. When Charlton Heston looks up at Christ, Heston’s expression seems to tell us that he is grateful for the water and relieved he has found a sympathetic person who is helping him. He does not look as if looking into the face of the Messiah. Ironically, the Roman soldier who comes by to bark at him and tell Christ to go away suddenly stops and looks towards Christ with more of a sensation of encountering something strangely mystical. We see a more powerful reaction from the soldier than we do from Heston.

Ramon Navarro always appears as if deeply moved when The Nazarene crosses his path. Another interesting moment done with pure acting, is when his mother and sister are healed from their leprosy by their interaction with Christ. They had been told that The Nazarene performs miracles for those who believe and they arrive in time for his Passion as he drags the heavy cross through the streets. We don’t see his face; we see the cross on his shoulder and his face is behind it. They sorrow for him, and just with lighting, a white light that centers on their faces, the dark circles of their illness disappear and they immediately delight, acting as if they had been cured of their leprosy. There is no Jekyll and Hyde makeup transformation; it is all in the acting.

The 1959 version has Christ on the cross in the storm, the rain pouring down, dripping from his fingers on the hand nailed to the cross.  In a nearby cave, Ben-Hur’s mother and sister discover they are cured of leprosy. The darkness of the cave masks their need to wear makeup. The 1959 version is more sweaty and dirty, but even the realism does not match the heartbreak of the 1925 mother and sister close enough to the sleeping Ben-Hur to touch him, but resisting to wake him from sleep because they want to spare him the knowledge of their leprosy.

Both films make an attempt to address the political issues of a conquered people, for the biblical events, as in current events, are always as much about politics as about faith. Ben-Hur’s quest for Christ is his militant quest for a king to lead them out of Roman bondage, but he eventually adopts Christ’s message of peace. In the 1959 version Stephen Boyd taunts Charlton Heston with the idea that he is a member of a conquered people and he needs to get used to that. “The glory of Solomon is gone... Joshua will not rise again to save you, nor David.” To which Charlton Heston replies, “Rome is evil... Rome is an affront to God.”

The story ends with Ben-Hur reunited with his mother and sister, and with his love, Esther. But there’s a big “what happens next” that is never answered. How does he live with no end to Roman occupation for the rest of his life? We are meant to assume that the early Christian followers find strength and comfort in the teachings of Christ and in their own growing numbers, but though Hollywood enjoyed platitudes as a way of staying on the good side of the public who always thought that movie capital was a Babylon among the orange groves, it did not even trouble to answer the larger questions, preferring to wallow in the spectacle.

I enjoy biblical epics, but not because I find them instructive or inspirational; rather because, like a painting by a great master, they are imaginative pictures of wondrous events brought down to a human level we are better able to relate to – and despite the temptresses, the virile warriors, and the gauzily dressed slave girls, I think the most frivolous thing about them is that they are so irresistibly commercial.

So frivolous that, unlike the more meaningful and reflective rituals of the holidays, I cannot help but equate theses movies with a handful of jelly beans and winding down a busy weekend of celebration.

May I wish a Blessed Passover and a Happy Easter to all who celebrate.

You have a chance to watch the 1959 Ben-Hur this Easter Sunday on TCM.  

Have a look at the chariot scene from the 1925 version below.

Hollywood Fights Back - A Radio Protest

Hollywood Fights Back was a radio program broadcast in two parts in the autumn of 1947. Some 50 Hollywood stars, writers, directors, as well as some journalists, and some members of the government, appeared in open defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was then launching a twenty-year nightmare on the entertainment industry known as the Blacklist. Its repercussions were felt for a generation, and it has lessons which echo our troubled times today.  This is our entry into the Classic Movie Blog Association’s Banned and Blacklisted blogathon.

The group behind radio broadcasts, the Committee for the First Amendment, was formed in Ira Gershwin’s house as a response by alarmed members of the Hollywood community about the persecution by Congress of those they regarded as communists or as sympathizers of communists in Hollywood.

The program is startling, particularly the first episode which was aired on October 26, 1947, just as a group of their members and fellow actors were flying to Washington on a chartered plane to observe the proceedings by HUAC against the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of writers who were to be skewered by the congressional committee headed by J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ). Charles Boyer a led off the program in his resonant voice announcing their fourteen compatriots were carrying on, in person, “the fight for our rights as American citizens.”

Judy Garland, in a voice easily recognizable for her soft, girlish sweetness, sounds like her innocent but spunky characters in the Andy Hardy series or as Dorothy tugging at our heartstrings: “It’s always been your right to see and read anything you want to.  But now it’s getting kind of complicated.”  She says that Hollywood is hopping mad about being accused of being communists and that HUAC is about to strangle not only their creativity, but their freedom.  “I’ve never been a member of any political organization, but I’ve been following this investigation and I don’t like it.”  Her voice rises, impassioned, “It’s something again to say we are not good Americans. We resent that!”

Hollywood Fights Back: Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Lucille Ball

Gene Kelly follows noting that The Best Years of Our Lives (1946 – covered in this previous post, part 1 of 4) the film that won seven Academy Awards and is arguably one of the best if not the best film ever made in Hollywood, remarks “I understand that supporters of the Un-American Committee didn’t like this film. Did you like it?  Were you subverted by it? Did it make you un-American?”

The Best Years of Our Lives would be mentioned more than once in Hollywood Fights Back, and some of its stars, including Fredric March, Myrna Loy, and Dana Andrews, would take part in the broadcasts. One of the reasons the film is used in their argument, one of the reasons it met with disfavor by the HUAC is because of the famous scene where Homer, played by Harold Russell is told by Ray Teal that we fought on the wrong side in World War II and should have supported the Nazis. Homer of course becomes upset and in the physical altercation that occurs, Dana Andrews punches the Nazi in the face.  We discussed this scene not too long ago in this previous post. Depictions of extreme right-wing politics were not to be seen as negative, let alone traitorous.

How quaint, considering extreme right-wing treason is considered somehow righteous today.

There was another reason HUAC disliked this movie, and it is because Fredric March’s banker boss, Ray Collins, is portrayed as stuffed shirt who cares more about business than he does about helping returning veterans. The movies often portrayed wealthy men of business as stuffed shirts, sometimes even corrupt, and apparently then as now, the very wealthy, very conservative in our country feel that such depiction is suspicious and threatening, meriting punishment. To HUAC, it was regarded as subversive.

The blacklist – and later Senator Joe McCarthy’s hearings – was not just about politics of communist infiltration to overthrow the government. That alone would make the whole seamy affair seem patriotic and righteous. But it was never about that, because we were never under threat by communist infiltration and overthrow of the government. The politics was about conservative versus liberal, and the wealthy elite versus everyone the wealthy elite felt was a threat to their personal prosperity: liberal views which they felt led to higher corporate taxes and trade unions, and enemies of all stripes including the various racial and religious minorities some would invariably despise.

HUAC had been around since the late 1930s under Martin Dies, Jr. (D-Texas). It kept its eyes on actors who supported liberal causes like James Cagney (who would a few years later perform in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in part to reaffirm before the public and the studios that he was patriotic), Katharine Hepburn, Melvyn Douglas, and Fredric March.  Most did not suffer a threat to their careers, except for Lionel Stander, who was one of the earliest victims of what became known as the blacklist and it would be many years before he worked in film again.  Dies’ committee came under strong rebuke by the American public when it also claimed to have caught Shirley Temple in its net of possible communists.  She was ten years old.

But the politics was always deeply entwined with money. Walt Disney took revenge on his staff who took part in the cartoonists’ and animators’ strike in 1941 by publicly accusing many of them of being involved in communist activities, and he felt the strike was a communist activity that was personally meant against him.

During the Depression most people were terrified of the wolf at their door, but for the very well off and the very conservative, they viewed the wolf at their door as the liberals who under the successful four-term President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were able to invoke sweeping changes in our society that brought out reforms in economics, the stock market, banking, unions, and in social causes.

But 1947 was a different climate.  When Hollywood Strikes Back was aired while the fourteen compatriots went to Washington to observe and to protest HUAC, it was then under J. Parnell Thomas. He had begun his career as a stockbroker, later going into politics and he served seven terms in the House of Representatives as a Republican from New Jersey. He was one such who despised Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. One of his pet hates was the Federal Theater Project which brought work to thousands of actors, writers, directors and other theatre professionals during those starving years, and also brought new life and important new works into American theatre. Parnell declared that the plays were nothing but propaganda for communism or for the New Deal, which he felt was the same thing.

Money and political ideology were joined by the third member of this unholy triumvirate, prejudice. One of Parnell’s complaints was that the Federal Theater Project frequently featured plays referring to racial discrimination. Indeed, when HUAC was originally formed in the late ‘30s, it was responsible for investigating both left-wing and right-wing political groups, but calls for leaders of the Ku Klux Klan to be investigated were refuted by the then chairman Dies because he supported the Klan and spoke at Klan rallies. Other members of HUAC, including John S. Wood (D-Georgia) and John Rankin (D-Mississippi), an avowed anti-semite, also supported the Klan. Mr. Wood defended the Klan by arguing that “the threats and intimidation of the Klan are an old American custom.” They decided not to pursue any investigation against the Ku Klux Klan, as John Rankin agreed, “The KKK is an old American institution.”

Donald Trump, as has been widely reported, agrees.  We sometimes think we are always facing new problems, but they are usually very old problems in new wrappings.

After World War II, but long before the Russians obtained the Bomb, a shift was occurring led mainly by politicians and which would then sweep across the entertainment world, business and industry. The real shift on its axis began in November 1946 when after the election, the Republican Party gained control of Congress for the first time in fourteen years. HUAC, which had waned during the war years when the Russians were our allies, was shifted to the forefront and became once again a pet project of a party which now had the power to pull the strings. In May 1940, J. Parnell Thomas went to Hollywood to meet with studio execs about the problem of infiltrating communist ideals into movies principally through the Screenwriters Guild. The screenwriters’ Guild. Yes, this was about labor unions, not about invasion by the Russians.  We have much more to fear about Russian infiltration today than we ever did in 1946.

Now the focus of the committee would be about the film industry.

Jack Warner was the first person to testify before HUAC in September 1947. He wasn’t subpoenaed—he volunteered. He had spoken to the committee earlier that spring, in closed-door sessions, and had admitted to John Huston that he had named the names of “a few” people he “thought might be communists.” In a recollection by Warner’s son, Jack Warner panicked at the lights and the questions and spit out any names he could think of.  Power is always intimidating, even for a man like Warner who garnered plenty of power himself and enjoying wielding it.

That same month, back at Ira Gershwin’s house, a group of actors with astounding pluck, admirable idealism, and perhaps forgivable naïveté, formed the Committee for the First Amendment to support the ten screenwriters, known afterward as the Hollywood Ten, who were to be subjected to questioning in Washington, D.C., by HUAC. Myrna Loy, John Huston, William Wyler, and screenwriter Philip Dunne founded the group.

Other members included Jane Wyatt, Edward G. Robinson, Henry Fonda, Dorothy Dandridge, Melvyn Douglas, Lena Horne, Marsha Hunt, Burgess Meredith, Frank Sinatra, Katharine Hepburn, Evelyn Keyes, John Garfield, Burt Lancaster, Ira Gershwin, June Havoc, Gene Kelly, Groucho Marx, Billy Wilder, Paul Henreid, and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Many of them would later suffer for it.

On October 27, fourteen of the committee flew to Washington, D.C., to attend and protest the hearings. The day before, on October 26^th, the first one half-hour episode of Hollywood Fights Back aired, and some members who flew to Washington had pre-recorded their contributions to the program. Howard Hughes, who was a conservative and actually supported HUAC, provided them a chartered plane at a discount. Although we may smile at Mr. Hughes’ business sense over his ideology, but this only underlines the real purpose of the actors going to Hollywood: no one saw themselves as defenders of communism, only of free speech. They were going in support of the First Amendment, as their committee name said.

The program was a stirring performance, as one actor after another tag-teamed on a tightly written theme of freedom of speech. The program was written by Norman Corwin, one of the finest writers during the Golden Age of Radio. It was he who wrote the program We Hold These Truths after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which we discussed in this previous post. Please see my post on my blog on New England history and culture, New England Travels, for more on the career of Norman Corwin, whom I’m pleased to say once wrote for my local newspaper, the Springfield (Mass) Republican.

The script is a marvel of simple messages and riveting urgency. There is no sense of preaching, rather it is like a college pep rally of hope and promise, a call to defeat to the bad guy, of the wonderful feeling of doing right and doing well. It is biting, angry, sarcastic, and exuberant.  Though their remarks are scripted and not off the cuff, is a rare treat to hear these stars as themselves for what they truly think.  In an era where the stars were kept at a mysterious distance from us, this was an unaccustomed intimacy.

Lauren Bacall mentions the new movie Crossfire (1947), “the American people awarded it four stars. The committee gave the men who made it three subpoenas.” Here she’s a tough-talking dame. Judy Garland sweetly implored us; Bacall’s taking no prisoners.

Joseph Cotten speaks, and Peter Lorre, June Havoc, and John Huston, who notes that in nine years of its existence HUAC had come up with only one piece of legislation, which was ruled down by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional.

Danny Kaye quotes FDR in a speech from 1938 “most fair-minded Americans will hope that the committee will abandon the practice of merely providing a forum to those who for political purpose or otherwise seek headlines which they could not otherwise obtain.”

Marsha Hunt affirmed, “The committee uses methods that undermine the democratic process. By ruining reputations by publicity, inference and innuendo.”

Cornell Wilde and Melvyn Douglas speak and Richard Conte notes that among those who support HUAC are Nazi sympathizers and the KKK. Evelyn Keyes speaks and Burt Lancaster, Paul Henreid and William Holden. Robert Ryan speaks; and Florence Eldridge; and Myrna Loy, who notes that our First Amendment rights were first put into play by Jefferson, Madison, and Benjamin Franklin.

Robert Young notes that the methods used by the committee, refusing to let their victims testify, go back through the centuries: calls before tribunals included Galileo, Joan of Arc, the Salem witch hunt victims, and Roger Williams.

Lucille Ball recites Article 1 from the Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s so important, she repeats it.

Van Heflin speaks, and Henry Morgan and Keenan Wynn reenact some of the circus dialogue at the hearing.

Hollywood Fights Back: Fredric March, Paulette Goddard,

Edward G. Robinson, and Audie Murphy

Other speakers include John Beal, Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, Fredric March, Artie Shaw and Vincent Price. Humphrey Bogart wants to know if democracy is so brittle that it can be subjugated by a look, or a line or a gesture. And notes that people’s beliefs are nobody’s business but their own.

William Wyler again refers to his masterful film, The Best Years of Our Lives:  “I’m convinced today that I wouldn’t be able to make The Best Years of Our Lives as it was made a year ago.” At the very end of the broadcast Judy Garland comes back and exhorts us to write our Congressman and to send it “airmail special.”

It was an inspirational beginning to the fight, a fight which continues today. Unfortunately, their battle was soon lost in a climate which no longer allowed for a difference of opinion.

“This has nothing to do with communism. It’s none of my business who’s a communist and who isn’t,” Bogart said in a statement in advance of the journey. “The reason I am flying to Washington is because I am an outraged and angry citizen who feels that my civil liberties are being taken away from me and that the Bill of Rights is being abused and who feels that nobody in this country has any right to kick around the Constitution of the United States, not even the Un-American Activities Committee.”

But the protest folded like a house of cards. This was due principally to two things: one, the fact that many of the Hollywood Ten either were or were formerly members of the Communist Party, seemed to taint the First Amendment Committee’s reputation. Lost in the message that it didn’t matter who was communist and who wasn’t because there wasn’t any plot to overthrow the government, was the overwhelming urge for the despotic to gain control, gain followers, and for those followers to throw all reason and integrity to the wind in their attempts to find a scapegoat to ensure their own safe harbor. This is a fight as old as man himself, and despite what we always like to think of as our sophistication and our basic human decency, when we turn into a mob we lose our humanity and our sense of right and wrong, and even a nation of laws can become a nation of wild impulse given the right circumstances.

John Huston noted of the circus in Washington, D.C., “It was a sorry performance. You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn. I despaired of what was being done to the ten, but I also disapproved of their response. They lost a chance to defend the most important principle.” He also did not want to be associated with them, because it was getting dangerous. He would eventually take off for Ireland.

When the tide began to turn against them, the actors were clearly overwhelmed but no one was more vocal than Humphrey Bogart, who felt that he had been betrayed and embarrassed by the fact that the people who they were defending were actually communists. He even went so far in order to save his own reputation and his own career to write an article for Photoplay magazine in March 1948 affirming that he was not a communist. The tough guy panicked and caved.

Excerpts from Bogie's Photoplay article March 1948

But others caved worse. Another member of their group, Sterling Hayden, found himself in the hot seat when it was revealed he was for a brief time a member of the Communist party. His activity consisted of supporting a union of motion picture painters to take over some other film industry unions, and that union was controlled by members of the Communist party. Hayden’s interest in the party likely began during his service in World War II. He had been a member of the Marine Corps and later served as an Office of Strategic Services agent, which involved parachuting into Croatia and helping the Yugoslav partisans who were fighting the fascists. They were our allies.  The OSS was a forerunner of the CIA. He was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry and received a commendation from Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia. The partisans our government was directing him to support were communist; their courage and their work against fascism led him to take on their ideals. Though his participation in the Communist party back in Hollywood was apparently neither deep nor long-lasting, it nevertheless branded him for the rest of his life. But something else branded him even worse when he was called before HUAC when he confessed his communist ties and he named names, selling out friends and colleagues. It was an act which humiliated him and for which he felt guilt for the rest of his life, confessing his own self-loathing in his autobiography.

But because he played along, his career went on. Others who refused to cooperate with the committee on principle were put on a blacklist.

Before that happened, the second episode of Hollywood Fights Back aired a week after the first episode, on November 2, 1947. It is a less tightly written show, a less effusive and optimistic show perhaps because the seeds of doubt and fear and a sense of defeat had already crept in. Fredric March and Myrna Loy spoke again, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. reported that newspapers were supporting their efforts, echoed by Rita Hayworth, Lauren Bacall, Anne Revere, Lon McCallister, Burt Lancaster, Danny Kaye, Evelyn Keyes, Paul Henreid, and June Havoc. Groucho Marx and Keenan Wynn acted out dialogue demonstrating how a nicely a “friendly” witness was treated and how rudely an “unfriendly” witness was treated. Humphrey Bogart said “We sat in the courtroom and saw it happening. We said to ourselves it couldn’t happen here.”

John Huston, Marsha Hunt, Peter Lorre, and Burl Ives spoke, Geraldine Brooks and Jane Wyatt spoke, and Vanessa Brown. Playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart spoke and Hart referred to his work on the screenplay for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and wondered if more such future bold scripts about religious discrimination would be allowed. We discussed Gentleman’s Agreement in these two previous posts here and here.

Composer Richard Rogers wondered, “Are we Americans trading our soapbox for the hooded sheet?”

Leonard Bernstein and Bennett Cerf spoke, and author Thomas Mann, an immigrant from Germany noted “an alleged state of emergency, that’s how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism, and what followed fascism was war.”

Sound familiar?

Dana Andrews spoke, “The committee recessed because they think they got what they were after – blacklist, people fired from their jobs, and a blanket of fear smothering free speech.” Dorothy McGuire and Gregory Peck spoke, and Richard Conte urged us to write to Washington. The show ended on a less inspiring note, with a greater sense of dread.

Bogart and some others began to distance themselves from the tainted ones, saying they had been duped. John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson agreed, but Bogart escaped the blacklist and Garfield and Robinson did not. Garfield would not even escape with his life, as when he was subpoenaed by the committee in 1951 and refused to name names, he was blacklisted, hounded, and died of a heart attack the following year. He was not a member of the Communist party. What started as the HUAC Hollywood investigation later melted into “McCarthyism” as Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) saw what a hit the witch hunt was, what a forum for publicity, and decided to parlay the smear tactics as the fastest and surest branding to success.

Sound familiar?

The Hollywood Ten, November 1947 about to be fingerprinted after being cited for contempt of Congress. Front row: Herbert Biberman, attorneys Martin Popper and Robert W. Kenny, Albert Maltz, Lester Cole. Middle row: Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz. Back row: Ring Lardner Jr., Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott.

The Hollywood Ten, those writers who were called to testify and answer questions refused to testify, so they were all cited for contempt of Congress. Many of them served prison terms, for contempt of Congress—not for being communists because, of course, being communist is not against the law. Belonging to a political party other than the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is not unconstitutional, a very simple fact that the meanest and most moronic among our society cannot understand or accept. The actual crime is in the overthrow of government, like the people today who hoard weapons so that they may fight their government and yet nothing is done to them because they have the powerful backing of the NRA that has deep pockets and has bought off many politicians. It is also like accepting support, monetary and otherwise, from a foreign government to win a presidential election in return for favors.

Then as now, most of the ideological fight is not about ideology; it is about money and prejudice and power.

In 1950, a fascist publication called Red Channels began to out people in the entertainment field accused of being communists or being sympathizers. Most of them named, over 150, found themselves blacklisted. The first among these was actress Jean Muir. But many others later felt the ax of the blacklist because of this publication, including Lena Horne, Marsha Hunt, Anne Revere, Hazel Scott, Artie Shaw, José Ferrer, Orson Welles, and Aline MacMahon. It would be many years before some of them were able to work again and by then their careers were effectively over. They could never gain the momentum back, never gain that part of their lives, their most creative years, or the income they would have earned.

J. Parnell Thomas, the stockbroker turned ultraconservative crusader and seeker of fame and headlines in the spotlights of his hearing room, also had a sorry end.  For several years he had been defrauding the Congress by claiming to hire several people whom he did not hire but he put them on the payroll for a kickback of their salary. He was investigated by a grand jury, and like those victims he had persecuted only a few years before, refused to cooperate and answer questions, claiming his Fifth Amendment rights—for which he had found them in contempt. He was indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the government, fined, and given a prison sentence of 18 months, however he only served nine months. He was sent to the same prison where, being nothing if not ironic, two of the people who he had persecuted as part of the Hollywood Ten were also serving terms: Lester Cole and Ring Lardner, Jr. Thomas, of course, was forced to resign from the House of Representatives and his later attempts at politics and business failed. He died in 1970.

Hollywood Fights Back: Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire,

Danny Kaye, Fredric March.

Hollywood Fights Back was a small but very important experiment in the long war against civil liberties in the mid-twentieth century. We may recall the blacklist, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy, and all the hearings and all the ringing of, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” But that idealistic group of Hollywood actors and writers and other people interested in something so simple, so basic as the First Amendment should have equal importance, and perhaps even reverence, in our memories of that era.

Sixty years later, in September 2007, Hollywood Fights Back was re-created in a performance for ABC radio. Modern stars were going to take the parts read by those long ago Hollywood stars, including James Whitmore, Larry Gelbart, Cameron Manheim, Chris Trumbo (the son of blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo one of the original Hollywood Ten) and many more. But one person was there to re-create what she said herself: Marsha Hunt was on hand to read her own lines from the broadcast of 60 years earlier. 

It is now been 70 years since the original broadcast of Hollywood Fights Back, and Marsha Hunt, still with us, has recently celebrated her 100^th birthday. She is the subject of Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity (2015), a documentary on those times. Those times? Our times.

Listen yourself on YouTube to the two episodes of Hollywood Fights Back, here the first episode from October 26, 1947, and here the second episode from November 2, 1947.

This post is part of the Banned and Blacklisted blogathon hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Read other terrific blogs in the blogathon here.