This One’s a Keeper: Hollywood’s Missing Movies
It’s from June of 200, but as true today as it was then.
Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley at Reason Online (HT David Boaz at TCS Daily via Instapundit) posed a question for which there is no good answer: Why have American films ignored life under communism?
The column is a must-saver to the hard drive:
….. in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell, or even the decade before that, no Hollywood film has addressed the actual history of communism, the agony of the millions whose lives were poisoned by it, and the century of international deceit that obscured communist reality. The simple but startling truth is that the major conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism–what The New York Times recently called “the holy war of the 20th century”–is almost entirely missing from American cinema. It is as though since 1945, Hollywood had produced little or nothing about the victory of the Allies and the crimes of National Socialism. This void is all the stranger since the major conflict of our time would seem to be a natural draw for Hollywood.
Though of global dimension, the conflict encompasses millions of dramatic personal stories played out on a grand tapestry of history: courageous Solidarity unionists against a Communist military junta; teenagers facing down tanks in the streets of Budapest and Prague; Cuban gays oppressed by a macho-Marxist dictatorship; writers and artists resisting the kitsch of obscurantist materialism; families fleeing brutal persecution, risking their lives to find freedom.
Furthermore, great villains make for great drama, and communism’s central casting department is crowded: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hönecker, Ceaucescu, Pol Pot, Col. Mengistu–all of cosmic megalomania–along with their squads of hacks, sycophants, and stooges, foreign and domestic.
All true. But the main reason to read, and save, the column is its all-in-one-place recitation of the history of Hollywood’s near-romance with the single most brutal idea of the 20th century.
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UPDATE: I apologize to Cornfed at Chief Cornstalk of Ohio for accidentally nuking his comment (hopefully a link back is sufficient penance), which was simply “Doctor Zhivago.” The longer article actually addressed that:
A few English-language films have drawn on this remarkable material, especially book-into-film projects based on highly publicized works, among them One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (a 1971 British-Norwegian production) and, of course, Doctor Zhivago (1965). But many other natural book-to-film projects remain untouched, from the story of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (who left Russia for the West) to works by such high-ranking defectors as Polish Ambassador Romuald Spasowski (The Liberation of One), KGB agent Arkady Schevchenko (Breaking With Moscow), and persecuted Cuban poets Armando Valladares (Against All Hope) and Heberto Padilla (Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden). In light of the most recent revelations concerning the espionage of Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is another obvious candidate.
Plus, the article’s intro focused on “the decade since the Berlin Wall fell, or even the decade before that …..” Doctor Zhivago managed to sneak in before communist-inspired and financed opposition to the Vietnam War grew; I don’t believe the film would have been made if it had been proposed in 1967.
