Pickup on South Street… Doing Message Right

When I reviewed Adam’s Rib, I pointed out how a film–even one with a glorious cast–can be utterly ruined when the message gets in the way of the story. Now let’s have a look at one that sends a message but is still amazing.

Pickup on South Street is a film I’d never heard of until I got my copy of the 1001 films book. And if I tell you the way it works out, you’ll think it was a McCarthy-era, commie-scare piece of political propaganda with zero redeeming traits. So here goes: it’s basically about a pickpocket who redeems himself by breaking up a communist spy ring in New York.

Pure cold-war jingoism, right?

Wrong. It’s a fun spy flick in an unforgettable 1950s New York setting, where the communists are, while watching, incidental in the plot. The plot needed some spies, and the spies in the post-Nazi era were communists.

Yes, I agree that the impact of the message might have been blunted by the fact that communists, like Nazis, make for excellent bad guys. Totalitarian regimes which hate any sort of individuality are always nice to make fun of. But the film rises above that, not breaking stride to moralize about the evils of the reds… it tells the story in much the same way a crime movie would, without stopping to preach.

And that’s what makes this movie. Its message is powerfully delivered precisely because it doesn’t beat you over the head with it… and it makes you wonder: how the hell did the people making The Last Jedi and other modern preach-fests forget this lesson? I suspect the arrogance of the modern political elites makes them think that they can preach at the audience without having their films lambasted as imbecilic. They are wrong, and at least part of Hollywood knew it in the 50s.

And just how huge is the message they managed to hide in this one?

It’s enormous, but you need to know a little about Hollywood back then to grasp it. In the 50s, the Hays Code was still going strong, which meant that you couldn’t have a happy ending for a criminal. Well, in this one, the protagonist robs a purse, beats a woman, lies to the cops and tries to extort a bunch of money from the communist gang… and in the end, walks free (and gets the girl–the same one he spent half the film slapping around).

So WHY does he get a happy ending? Because all of his crimes are offset by the glory of having destroyed a communist spy ring. It’s really that simple.

But despite the utter lack of subtlety of the political message it never, not once, gets in the way of the storytelling and the art of this film.

And that, my friends, is how it’s done. Highly recommended.

Gustavo Bondoni in a novelist and short story writer own version of an edgy, modern thriller is entitled Timeless. You can check it out here.

Revisiting McCarthyism – Seventy Years on

The Red Scares of the immediate postwar era are notorious as twentieth-century witch hunts, and rightfully so.  There were many reasons they ended up reviled, but mainly it was because they mimicked the methods of the very people they were out to get.  When democracy looks like communism and attempts to pit neighbor against neighbor and rumor against rumor in the time-honored socialist way, something has gone very wrong somewhere.

Worse for McCarthy and his band, we now have hindsight to aid us.  We know that, even dominating half the world as they did until 1990, communism just isn’t sustainable and eventually collapses under the weight of its own grey hopelessness.  McCarthy didn’t have that advantage, or he would just have stayed home with a smug look on his face.  Or maybe that kind of personality would have annoyed a different group.

For a modern audience, it’s hard to understand what the general public would have felt at the time, or to be objective.  The weight of history (and of often left-leaning historians) has given its verdict and McCarthy has joined the ranks of the vilified.

But he had real support, from intelligent, thinking people.  And if you read into the times, you’ll probably come to a different conclusion: that McCarthy was doing a necessary job, and his true crime was ignoring due process.

A good way to analyze this kind of thing is to read the popular fiction of the day (don’t waste your time with modern revisionist stuff as they have the same preconceptions you do).

My demolished paperback copy of Neither Five nor Three by Helen MacInnes was in the same batch of 1970s’ paperbacks I’ve been reading through lately.  Nevertheless, it was written in 1951 (also, the paperback is from 1985).  This means that we can have a taste of the 1950s with the unmistakable  experience of the crumbling acidic paper of the eighties.

But it’s the 1950s insight that matters, and MacInnes is supremely qualified to give a more accurate picture than the one that has reached us.  She was both an academic and an intelligence officer, and therefore very much attuned to the question of communism in both academic and other circles.

So even if her book offends our modern preconceptions, the smart money is on her being right and our preconceptions being wrong.  That’s especially true if you feel very strongly about the subject one way or the other.

Basically MacInnes’ book postulates that the communist party in America was going to try to gain ascendancy by taking over editorial positions in American written media and, from those jobs, select the writers and viewpoints that would be printed therein.  Our heroes, as befits a novel of the era, are out to stop them.

This is the part where the cries of McCarthyism come in, but again, I assume MacInnes was right and we are wrong.  It certainly does seem plausible.

But more than plausible, it’s prescient.  In our current world, political parties on both sides of the spectrum do exactly this.  Impartial news is nearly impossible to find, and news outlets are no longer serious because… well, because exactly the scenario MacInnes was warning us about seventy years ago has come to pass.  Try selling a story about the successful application of free market thinking to The New York Times.  Or a heartwarming story about a commune giving out free milk to Fox News.

Of course, the left is much more likely to do this kind of thing (one of the tenets of communism was that everything was done for the state and for socialism, while democracy tends to focus on self-realization first), but everyone has learned the lessons.

I recommend this book as a must-read to anyone who wants to understand the current world.  MacInnes’ heroes might have won in the book, but when you see that some people mistake The Huffington Post (or Fox News or… insert your own pet peeve here) for actual information, you realize that, in real life, the good guys lost.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer.  His own take on how the world can go to hell in a digital hand basket… and of what happens after that, is called Outside.  You can check it out here.

An Interesting Duality

After a bit of an early-summer break, Classically Educated returns with an eye-opening look at two incidents that should you think… and not like many of the conclusions, particularly if you’re the kind of person who likes to analyze the karmic link between events…

Most of you will quickly realize that the post below is by our historical expert Stacy Danielle Stephens.  But for those new to the site, please look out for her other, longer pieces!

The weekend of Palm Sunday, 1935

On Saturday, April 13th, 1935, nine officers of the LAPD Red Squad^[1] attempted to restore order at a student anti-war protest by liberally applying their blackjacks and brass knuckles to seventeen-year-old Flora Turchincsky^[2] and nineteen-year-old Esther Kleinman. In response, some of the protesters charged the police, who withdrew in fear while clearing a path to safety with their blackjacks, while other protesters carried the two unconscious girls away. The nine officers sustained widespread abrasions during their escape, inflicting minor injuries on another dozen of the protesters.

That same day, the Chicago Police Red Squad managed to disperse protesters at the University of Chicago with only a single broken nose among the students, and no injuries to themselves. Both protests were part of the second annual National Student Strike Against War^[3]. In most cities, protesters were opposed only by other civilians armed with rotten eggs, who considered themselves patriots.

* * *

On the morning of Palm Sunday, April 14th, 1935, a cold front originating in the Dakotas began moving just a few points east of south. It was a storm system desperately seeking humidity, but finding only sustained and unremitting drought conditions. As the dry heat simply pushed it along, it gathered up more dust than it left behind, becoming an increasingly massive and impenetrable column, gradually encompassing the horizon and climbing as high as the atmosphere could carry it. It travelled at sixty-eight miles per hour, reaching Amarillo, Texas by seven O’Clock in the evening. Crossing Kansas, the thing had begun to look like Hell itself moving south; swirling black topsoil with red dakota dust flickering at the upper edges, horrendously backlighted by the declining sun, which could not penetrate the bulk of it. By nightfall, more than three hundred million tons of dust had moved, some of it going as far as a thousand miles before it settled.

The next morning, The Carbondale Free Press^[4] reported that “wind drifted the dust like snow,” covering all of Kansas, almost all of Missouri, and most of Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

^[1] As early as 1920, and in many cases, well into the 1970s, the police departments of several US cities had special units within them to deal with “the communist threat”. Although the press and public were generally quite aware of their existence, they were seldom officially acknowledged.

^[2] The daughter of Russian immigrants, Flora was born in Minnesota, and graduated from the University of California at Berkley, with honors, in 1938. She would later work in legal research, child welfare, and accounting, and would twice be elected to the Nevada State Legislature. On the Judiciary committee, she fought for prison reform in Nevada. She died in Los Angeles, of cancer, on October 25, 1973.

^[3] Organized by communists in 1934, this event, which took place on the anniversary of US entry into The Great War of 1914-1918, later gained widespread support among several liberal and pacifist groups. In 1936, one half-million students would participate nation-wide. Over the following five years, support for the annual even would decline, and 1941 would be its final year.

^[4] Many accounts mistakenly attribute this to The New York Times.