Having enjoyed movies, but, really, most stories in any format, about escaping Communism, I recently discovered Never Let Me Go (1953) co-starring Gene Tierney (Leave Her to Heaven) and Clark Gable (Gone With the Wind). It’s good. I recommend it as crisp, taut entertainment.
Do not expect philosophical depth on the level of We the Living or The Lives of Others. It’s not that caliber of anti-Communist filmmaking. But, especially for the Fifties, when Hollywood’s disgusting affinity for Communism, in particular Soviet Communism during its bloodiest era, reached its zenith and was all the rage, Never Let Me Go takes a strong position against Soviet Russia with two major movie stars. This alone merits awareness and remembrance. With renewed relevance due to Communist China’s unceasing influence on, and what amounts to extortion of, the American press and technology and gaming industries, it is both pointed and fierce.
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Gable stars as an American reporter who’s savvy about Soviet Russia, having covered the U.S. ally during World War Two. But, being an American, he’s uniquely naive, as Ayn Rand explained during her historic 1947 congressional testimony, about the fact, scale and depth of pure evil of the Soviet dictatorship’s impact on daily life; he can’t fully conceive it and this shows in his narrative and initial actions in post-war Moscow.
He learns. This is not made explicit but it’s undeniably implied and embedded in what he chooses to do after falling in love with a ballerina (Tierney with a Russian accent). He’s been in love with her from the audience of the ballet for two years. Early on in Never Let Me Go, they meet once backstage after her encounter with his British press colleague, who is more compliant with Soviet censorship. Her name is Maria. He is shocked that she confesses that she’s spotted him in the crowd and has fantasized about him, too.
This is late career Clark Gable but he’s still Clark Gable and his gallantry, strength and fire still light up the room. Tierney, too, a beautiful actress of ability, shines here as the Russian ballerina, conveying the loss, pain and superior firsthand knowledge of Stalin’s barbarism and dancing in the climactic Swan Lake which precedes an elaborate, tense and daring attempt at defection when the Communist regime moves to strike the couple down.
Thirty-two years before director Taylor Hackford put Mikhail Baryshnikov as a ballet dancer who conceives of a brilliant defection to escape Soviet Russia in White Nights, director Delmer Daves (Destination Tokyo, Dark Passage, Spencer’s Mountain) featured one of the screen’s greatest movie stars as an American journalist who creates for the woman he adores a way to escape the 20th century’s worst dictatorship. Never Let Me Go, involving forged, earned alliances of shared values, mastery of the sea, swimming in the cold, dark water, a horrifying car chase, luck and a stunning surprise at the ballet, holds true to the end.
As gray, bleak and lifeless as a honest series about socialism and its more consistent altruist-collectivist application, Communism, in practice must be, the five-part miniseries for AT&T-owned Home Box Office (HBO) stands out for depicting bureaucracy as a deathtrap. Chernobyl taps the Soviet and Russian sense of life, which is essentially anti-life.
But it does so strictly and only in minuscule measure. Upon a young technology co-worker’s recommendation, I bought and watched this series. I find Chernobyl’s excellent acting, visual and production values completely immersive and engrossing. You probably will, too. It’s striking for both its implicit and explicit honesty about socialism. This is so true that it is tempting to evaluate HBO’s series as a breakthrough.
Chernobyl is not quite that good. Socialism is spreading in the United States as a dishonest socialist presidential candidate exploits America’s workers’ fears into believing that a wealthy, old New Englander can loot the wealthy and spread the loot to give everyone clean air, good medicine and a college education. So, it’s refreshing to watch and reassuring to know that a major miniseries counters the fraudulent pseudo-curmedgeon with a dramatization of the truth that socialism, like radiation poisoning, destroys the individual and, left untended, kills everyone.
If you know about the spring 1986 nuclear disaster in Communist Russia — the only major nuclear meltdown in history — then you’ll enjoy Chernobyl more. If you don’t, as my young colleague did not, you may be inclined to think that the truth-based Chernobyl’s a work of pure fiction. This is especially so if you’ve come of age post-Earth Day. If so, you’re part of generations that’ve been subjected to nearly 50 years of relentless environmentalist propaganda falsely blaming the wealthy, business, capitalism, America and industry for mass death, disease, pollution and natural disaster.
With key roles in strong performances, Chernobyl shows otherwise. The scientists whose knowledge under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is powerless, to invert the meaning of Francis Bacon’s famous quote, try in vain to contain, alleviate and convey the damage after a nuclear plant explosion caused by incompetence, bureaucracy and faith in the welfare state. Emily Watson (War Horse, Angela’s Ashes, Anna Karenina) and Jared Harris (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Notorious Bettie Page, General Ulysses Grant in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln) excel in these roles. There’s also a fireman and his wife, various Communist Party thugs, from idiotic plant chiefs to security goons, and Skarsgård as a top Communist Party thug.
As is evident everyday in Hong Kong, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and China, any one who’s a member of the Communist Party is what amounts to a thug, so I’m going with that term because it is true. And part of the problem with Chernobyl, as shocking as this may sound to fans and admirers of Chernobyl, is that Chernobyl doesn’t fully account for this fact.
In ways large and small, the series shows what it means to be a Communist or socialist, often with precise and profound attention to detail. The nuclear power plant known as Chernobyl was, in fact, the Vladimir I. (for Ilyitch) Lenin nuclear power plant. As if to remind the audience that the horror movie-like story of Chernobyl begins with the monster who promoted self-sacrifice and socialism, Lenin’s portrait, depicting the evil philosopher whose ideas made possible the bloodiest dictatorship on earth, looms over every episode of Chernobyl.
But those who mindlessly carry out his mission of monstrosity don’t get called out. Certainly, they get implicated, and this includes, again, refreshingly, the chief Communist of the Eighties, the dreadfully overpraised New Left hero, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who appears in Chernobyl in key scenes marking the dictatorship’s errant, slow, delayed, deliberate and utterly horrifying response to the nuclear meltdown. Gorbachev, darling of the left, the press and everyone in the West, including to some degree unfortunately Thatcher, during and after the collapse of Soviet Communism, was a Communist. To his credit, he noticed that Communism was collapsing under his dictatorship. But Gorbachev was a Communist dictator. Like a janitor who’s the only one left in the building to mop up the mess of a Department of Water and Power system failure, Gorbachev merely managed the end of a dictatorship. Chernobyl shows this, demonstrating that Gorbachev was merely more calculating and publicity-savvy. That this Communist dictator knew he’d be better regarded by avoiding total loss of life, stature and decency is rightly regarded as secondary.
Chernobyl does not put Gorbachev or any of the Soviet Communists in their place, however. For its taut drama, suspense and spot-on portrayal of the insidious philosophical and existential poisoning of an entire country, Chernobyl not only doesn’t get around to rendering moral judgment of the union of concerned scientists and Soviet socialists — it barely scratches the surface of Soviet mass murder, coming closest in a scene with a woman milking a cow — Chernobyl makes the dictatorship’s moral premise, altruism — the idea that the individual exists to serve Others — a source of heroism.
In dramatizing Soviet divers, miners and Lenin plant workers, and those who love them, to the extent it is possible to love someone while living under a dictatorship, Chernobyl holds sacrifice as the moral ideal, leaving the Chernobyl disaster’s — and Soviet Russia’s— cause perfectly in place. Not a single scene implicates altruism or self-sacrifice as the toxin that poisons the plant and the country. Chernobyl unfolds with adherence to the cold, miserable and vacant representational recreation of Soviet Ukraine and, especially, Moscow. Its soldiers, KGB agents, committee members, lines, housing projects, cars, streets and red star-emblazoned machines reek of an entire population of humans steeped in ignorance, despair and total misery. Mazin’s series demonstrates for the thinking viewer what, how and why socialism makes everyone rotten, corrupt and depraved. This is especially true in an unnerving subplot with Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, Life’s a Breeze, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) as an innocent soldier who, with two comrades, is assigned to terminate post-disaster contaminated animals and pets in evacuated zones.
Chernobyl can’t come close to fully dramatizing the horror of Soviet Russia. The mass death, including the long, drawn-out, slow, waiting-in-line-to die-slowly-by-radiation-poisoning, which is the perfect metaphor for Soviet Russia, of this socialist state is impossible to fully capture. Tens of millions were slaughtered. The makers of Chernobyl seem to grasp this on some level, with end titles that admit that no one knows how many died from the 1986 nuclear disaster.
Whatever its flaws, this series, which is best seen as an intellectual, fact-based horror miniseries, not as a deeply contemplative TV program, merits serious attention. In an era in which voters in the greatest nation on earth may be on the verge of electing a socialist president who chose not just to visit but to honeymoon and sanction Communist Russia after the Vladimir Lenin nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl rumbles and hums with fact-based foreboding of the horrifying past as chilling prologue.
British satire nets bits of black humor in this ambitious depiction of the 1953 demise of Communist Josef Stalin, who murdered millions of people in Soviet Russia and enslaved the whole country. This fact and the scale of Stalin’s horror dooms The Death of Stalin though co-writer and director Armando Ianucci, who created HBO’s Veep, does what he can. The “comedy of terrors” is based on two French comics, including La Mort de Staline.
Quickly setting the scene in Moscow with dictator Stalin surrounded by his top, which is to say most incompetent, immoral and brutal, Communist comrades, The Death of Stalin launches with profanity-laced jokes about everything under the Soviet regime.
Most in the audience sat stone-faced and, for most of the movie, so did I, though scattered howls and shrieks erupted. Ianucci, feeding off the cast’s desperate, rapid-fire vulgarities as characters driven by the terror, parasitism and power-lust bred by a government predicated on altruism, keeps truth close.
If you know the history of Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Zhukov (Jason Isaacs) and Molotov (Michael Palin), you might watch with an odd, knowing curiosity to see how this aligns with history. As far as I know, and for what it’s worth, it does, sparing no detail.
If you don’t know history, you might chuckle (or you might not), though most will have a hard time laughing. The Death of Stalin is too truthful to be humorous. This, unfortunately, makes it painful to watch.
Ianucci does not glorify or glamorize Communism, to his credit. Unlike the flat and vapid interviewer in an ArcLight Hollywood Q&A after the film, he takes Josef Stalin’s atrocities seriously. Despite its flaws, which may be fundamental, including modern dialogue, this seriousness supports what may be Ianucci’s attempt to render moral judgment to the climax of history’s most consistent practice of Communism.
When Stalin’s daughter (Andrea Riseborough) pleads with Soviet security chief Beria to pardon “just one person” she loves from exile, persecution and death, or when one top terrorized thug tells another to “trust no one”, or when you realize that 1,500 people were slaughtered in an afternoon for trying to attend Stalin’s state funeral, or when the faces of individuals are literally blanked out as end credits run, The Death of Stalin, perhaps predictably, blunts any satire of Stalin’s evil. As an aside, these end credits are precisely and cleverly how end credits can have impact on an audience in a self-contained movie; Black Panther and Marvel fans (proudly, I am neither), take note.
I also proudly admit that, as a rule, I do not find humor in totalitarianism. I don’t think The Producers, Hogan’s Heroes, Life is Beautiful or even the presumably light and often lovely Ninotchka, which stars the brilliant Greta Garbo, truly depict good humor. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny is a better example and it may be the only civilized comedy about a monstrous and bloody dictatorship, though I’d rather watch the foreign adaptation of Ayn Rand’s We the Living (1942) for a deadpan delivery of dry humor with the truth about dictatorship.
If you want to fully understand this contrast, see The Death of Stalin and watch the character Maria (Olga Kurylenko), who, motivated by self-sacrifice and powered by faith, stands up to the state. Then, watch We the Living‘s character Kira (Alida Valli), who, motivated by egoism and powered by reason, stands up to the state. The difference hints at what may be The Death of Stalin‘s poison pill — its lone voice of dissent to the slave state shares the Soviet Union’s basic ideals, making what The Death of Stalin fundamentally accepts as true impossible to satirize.
In a 1935 photograph of Soviet spy Noel Field at a London disarmaments conference — Field had been recruited by Soviet Russia to spy on the United States of America — his lantern-jawed face contains the faraway vacancy of one who knows he’s too far gone. Field, who never showed remorse for his crimes or renounced his admiration for Stalin, was part of the same Soviet spy cell with Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, who outed them both, in Washington, DC.
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The picture’s included in True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy, on sale in paperback next week. In it, author Kati Marton tells Field’s dark, horrifying story of Communist faith and fanaticism. Though she tends to romanticize his suffering and makes the common mistake of granting good intentions for his idealism, despite evidence to the contrary, True Believer demonstrates that Noel Field, an American who passionately spied for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, ruined his family and believed in Communism until the very end, when he was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his Communist comrades in one of Stalin’s show trials. In particular, she discloses that Field’s work with the Unitarian Church was a front for helping Soviet Russia and resulted in at least one murder, proving once again that, as Ayn Rand observed, faith and force are “the destroyers of the modern world.”
How a Harvard-educated, State Department employee became friends with Alger Hiss and made himself a Stalinist is True Believer‘s focus, starting in earnest with the Red Decade, the 1930s, when Field enlisted in the International Communist Movement, which New York City-based author Marton partly blames on U.S. evasion of the rise of European fascism. Author and reporter Marton, the child of a Hungarian political prisoner whose parents found and spoke with Field in the only press interview he ever gave, is author of several books.
In often engaging narrative detail, she traces Noel Field’s presumed pursuit of a meaningful life using access to Soviet Secret Police records, the Field family’s correspondence and historical research and reports on Communist spy Hiss, CIA Director Allen Dulles and, of course, Stalin, the bloodiest monster of the 20th century. True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy — published in softcover by Simon & Schuster and available on Sept. 19 — accounts for this faith-based little monster’s pathetic life of crime, treason and evil in what amounts to another volume documenting Stalin’s mass murder and the full force of Communism with notes, bibliography, photos and an index.
Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies starring Tom Hanks (Larry Crowne, Toy Story 3, Angels and Demons) is another carefully plotted exercise in moral equivalence and equivocation. The fact-based spy story is measurably better than Mr. Spielberg’s modern Arab terrorist apologia, Munich (2005).
The DreamWorks picture begins with meticulous details of espionage absent its intent and purpose. As with most Cold War-themed movies, such as X-Men: First Class, the nature of the conflict between the world’s only nation based on man’s rights and the bloodiest dictatorship to exist on earth is, to a large extent, ignored or evaded. Instead, as usual, America and Soviet Russia are generally depicted as morally similar or equivalent, with one crucial exception later in the movie. The exception is powerful, but it is incidental.
Details are nevertheless engaging, especially if you know American history. In 1957 New York City period setting, costume and music, in lush film awash in dark blue, black and brown, Mr. Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Lincoln) shows a Communist spy fronting as a painter named Rudolf (Mark Rylance, perfect in the role) fussing with a double-edged razor blade, a coin and a book of matches. When detained by the FBI, as prone to incompetence here as they are today, he quickly establishes guilt to the audience.
The weaselly Soviet’s threat to the United States is neither framed that way nor made evident to his Bar Association-designated lawyer, James Donovan (Hanks), who chooses to defend him—every other attorney declines to represent him—on the grounds of giving the accused a proper defense in a republic based on the Constitution. This portrayal of insurance lawyer Donovan, a Democrat later picked by President Kennedy to negotiate with Communist Cuba who ran for and lost a seat in the U.S. Senate, makes him out to be a non-partisan Constitutionalist, which I’ll leave to historians to address. In Bridge of Spies, Donovan is a decent if agnostic American lawyer, partner, husband and father.
Doing what he regards as his duty, at great risk to his family and firm and over objections by his law partner (Alan Alda), Donovan argues to the Supreme Court on behalf of a man accused of aiding an enemy which may seek to wage a nuclear act of war on the U.S.
When asked if he is curious about the accused’s guilt, Donovan replies: “No, not really.”
This is the main flaw in Bridge of Spies; the leading character, whom the audience is to believe capable of real bravery and integrity, is daft, cavalier or knowingly ignorant about the impact of intelligence gathering for acts of war. Contrary to his lack of curiosity about whether the accused aims to aid the enemy in gaining a capacity to destroy New York City, Donovan later shows curiosity about whether the accused is in danger. Donovan’s higher regard for the life of a suspected KGB agent than for potential harm to his own family, firm and country poses a serious character credibility problem.
When a single vote determines the Soviet’s appeal, Bridge of Spies takes a turn. It starts to feel like Mr. Spielberg’s answer to Munich critics. Co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen (True Grit) and Matt Charmin, with strong, even performances by Hanks and Rylance, and Amy Ryan as his wife with Dakin Matthews as a judge, everything dovetails to international intrigue culminating in an attempt to deal with Communists in Berlin, the post-World War 2 city decimated thanks to National Socialists and divided into east and west. It’s a Cold War climax in director Spielberg’s masterful hands. Berlin serves as a staging ground for Donovan’s possible redemption, though Bridge of Spies is murky about this, too.
With a jazzy score, fading, serpentine transitions include one from the sound of a CIA spook’s creaking footsteps to the sound of a federal judge’s zipper. Another goes from schoolchildren taking the Pledge of Allegiance to a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb detonation. Bridge of Spies shifts to Pakistan, where U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers prepares for a mission on a secret airplane with new reconnaissance technology. The destination: Soviet Russia. The film’s title tips its reconciliation theme, which is to be ignited by Donovan. Indeed, it’s Donovan who uniformly adopts a “humane attitude” about the Communist, the downed U.S. Air Force pilot and the young American in love with a girl in East Berlin. One of them, and it’s easy to guess which one, pegs Donovan as a man of principle. A shot of the man who stands alone on the bridge of spies is a signature on this selective Cold War portrait. The question of what principle he stands for is the real enigma in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies.
Bridge of Spies is gently made, shot, framed, scored and arranged. It is also frosted with Cold War facets that sneak up like a deadly ghost. The expression on Donovan’s face when he witnesses an act of Communism in practice—matched by a contrasting expression of his awakening to an act of liberty in practice—makes Bridge of Spies an interesting and thought-provoking, if mixed, movie about a man’s moral character and dilemma.
But it is important to note that Bridge of Spies trivializes an undeniable low point in U.S. history. The actual events depicted in the film’s climax foreshadowed in history deepening American loss and appeasement to Communism. The U.S. caved to Communists over the Berlin Wall, South Vietnam, the USS Pueblo, USS Mayaguez, a Soviet shootdown of a jumbo passenger jet with innocent passengers and a U.S. congressman on board in 1983 and President Bush, in his first foreign policy test in 2001, yielded to Communist China’s seizure of a U.S. spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet that killed the American pilot. As with Munich, it is impossible to detach from Steven Spielberg’s elegant and romanticized Bridge of Spies the facts of history.
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Quickly setting the scene in Moscow with dictator Stalin surrounded by his top, which is to say most incompetent, immoral and brutal, Communist comrades, The Death of Stalin launches with profanity-laced jokes about everything under the Soviet regime.
