Bloodfist: Remembering “Body and Soul”

It’s hard to believe how many Hollywood films (and international films, for that matter) have focused on prizefighting. Such ring-set films seem to have a built-in audience: Wikipedia lists 50 boxing movies that over the years have grossed between $3 million and $300 million at the worldwide box office. At the very top of the list are five Rocky movies, as well as three Creed films that can be considered Rocky spinoffs with an African-American twist. A number of highly successful boxing movies are biopics: see Ali (2001), with “The Greatest” played by Will Smith; The Hurricane (1999), about the ringside and legal woes of Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter; The Great White Hope (1970), the slightly fictionalizing story of early Black prizefighter Jack Johnson; and of course Martin Scorsese’s great Raging Bull (1980) in which Robert De Niro plays the deeply troubled Jake La Motta. (I could name a good many more boxing biopics, but enough is enough.)

 Then there are boxing-related films that qualify as comedies. See for instance, Danny Kaye in a musical called The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), about a neighborhood milkman who accidentally becomes a boxing sensation. The high-grossing Any Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980), both star no less than Clint Eastwood as a trucker who’s also a bare-knuckles brawler, and who roams the American West along with an orangutan named Clyde. In a more sentimental vein, a desperate Charlie Chaplin tries boxing in City Lights (1931), a film that many consider his masterpiece. Even more sentimental is another 1931 flick, The Champ, starring Wallace Beery as an over-the-hill prizefighter desperately trying to care for his young son. And let’s not forget Hilary Swank as a female boxer whose dreams are shattered, along with her body, in Clint Eastwood’s poignant Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004)

 My parents, who loathed John Wayne westerns as well as anything to do with boxing, made room in their hearts for John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). It’s the rollicking story of a former pro boxer with a guilty conscience who must reluctantly fight on behalf of the lass he loves. It’s a carefree Gaelic romp just right for St. Patrick’s Day.

 On the other hand, there’s 1947’s Body and Soul, which is a great deal more somber, but is often considered one of the best boxing films of all time. This designation is partly because it was shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe, who later won Oscars for both The Rose Tattoo and Hud. If part of the attraction of boxing on film is that it allows for intense close-ups of two human bodies in motion, Howe’s in-tight camerawork beautifully conveys the sport’s intensity. Meanwhile director Robert Rossen’s strong cast, led by John Garfield, punches home a powerful story about a young would-be boxer, his girl, his worried mother, and the dangerous men who control him. The film was a critical and commercial hit, accruing three Oscar nominations (it won a statuette for its editing). But its cast and crew paid a high price. The story, which specifically pointed to Jews and African Americans as victimized by powerful WASP interests, was not a safe one to be telling in an era when the House Un-American Activities Committee was on the rise. Star Garfield, screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, and director Robert Rossen all found themselves called to testify before HUAC, and only Rossen (who eventually agreed to name names) emerged unscathed. Garfield continued to make films, but was deeply scarred by the HUAC experience. He died in 1952 at age 39. 

 

They Could Have Been Contenders: The Hollywood Blacklist

I’m just back from a week in Washington, DC. To my surprise, the nation’s capital currently seems a lot more bipartisan than I would have guessed. Yes, there were giant Trump portraits hanging from some prominent government buildings. But I also saw a major Washington boulevard shut down on behalf of a wild and crazy Gay Pride festival. And overt dissent was on display nearby: outside a tent manned by some dedicated anti-Trumpers, I spotted a large placard that gave MAGA a new definition: Make Algae Great Again.

 Washington’s wonderful Smithsonian museums (open daily and free to all comers) seemed as welcoming and as even-handed as ever, pointing up our nation’s failings but also its glories.  Some of the city’s private museums, though, were clearly interested in viewing today’s deep political divide in the context of past eras that were equally contentious. That certainly seemed part of the reason the Capital Jewish Museum is now hosting an exhibit called “Blacklisted: An American Story.” Its focus is on the era—starting in 1947 and lasting until the early Sixties—when the House Un-American Activities Committee was terrorizing Hollywood, forcing the major studios to remove from their ranks anyone (Jewish or otherwise) who had ever been sympathetic to the Communist party. (The only way to return to the film industry’s good graces in that era was to dish up the names of others whose politics were—or had ever been—suspect.)

 As part of this exhibit, the museum showed a series of film clips relevant to the blacklist period. Two of the films were directed by Elia Kazan. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) makes a brave argument against the built-in anti-Semitism of that era; the clip from On the Waterfront (1954) shows Marlon Brando as a longshoreman and would-be boxer climatically choosing to risk everything by bringing a mob boss to justice. Because Kazan was infamously known as one of those who “named names” to save his own career, many in Hollywood never forgave him. Orson Welles, for one, disparaged the latter film as “a celebration of the informant.”

 Three films written by Dalton Trumbo are also included in this montage. Two are from 1960, when the once-disgraced Trumbo was finally able to resume getting on-screen credit for his work. After writing Spartacus, he was championed by star Kirk Douglas, to whom he said, “Thanks, Kirk, for giving me back my name.” On earlier Trumbo films that appeared during the blacklist era, Trumbo had had to submit each of his scripts under a fictive monicker, or that of another writer. The screenwriting Oscar he won in 1954 for crafting under an assumed name the delightful (and totally apolitical) Roman Holiday was not awarded to him until 1993, almost three decades after his death.

 The exhibit also focuses on the sad example of John Garfield, one of many actors whose careers (and lives) were destroyed during the blacklist years. Garfield (born Jacob Garfinkle on New York’s Lower East Side) was a longtime supporter of liberal causes. He began appearing in major Hollywood films in 1938, usually in blue-collar roles, and was twice nominated for Oscars, notably for his lead role in the 1947 boxing film, Body and Soul. But his refusal to speak against his wife (once a member of the Communist Party) as well as his unwillingness to provide the House committee with the names of other Hollywood “Reds” ultimately destroyed him. He died of a heart attack in 1932 at the age of 39, just after a dream project in which he was to star was abruptly cancelled.

Despite it all, Happy 4^th of July!

John Garfield, with quote from his daughter

                            

 

Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Paranoia Years

 

Was the Christmas perennial, It’s a Wonderful Life, covert Marxist propaganda? What about a 1945 tearjerker called Pride of the Marines, regarding a U.S. Marine who loses his eyesight at Guadalcanal? Or a 1948 fantasy-drama called The Boy with Green Hair?

 We think of the bad old days—when American politicians were spotting Communists on every corner—as the McCarthy Era. That described the early 1950s, when a certain senator from Wisconsin was accusing most of the U.S. State Department (not to mention the honchos of the Truman administration) of being under the thumb of Soviet Russia. In Hollywood, though, the Red Scare began earlier, just a few years after the end of World War II. When the USSR shifted, in the public’s perception,  from being one of the Allies defeating Nazi Germany to a dangerous enemy out to undermine the American system, the movie industry was quick to try removing from its midst anyone who’d once had the slightest admiration for Karl Marx or for Soviet ideology.

 L.A.’s Skirball CulturalCenter is currently playing host to a traveling exhibit called Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare. The exhibit’s focus is on writers and others who lost their livelihoods (and sometimes their lives) when their patriotism was questioned by studio bosses. In that era, it became verboten to belong (or to have belonged, even decades earlier) to the American Communist party. And guilt by association was the rule, not the exception. Woe to the Hollywood figure called before a Senate committee to answer the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” (You were expected to get yourself off the hook by ratting out your friends.) An unverified mention in a publication called Red Channels could destroy your career, though a quiet pay-off to the editor could help your problem vanish.

 Jews, Blacks, and members of other minority groups were, in that era, particularly suspect. Philip Loeb, who played Gertrude Berg’s husband on a popular radio broadcast called The Goldbergs, was accused of Communist sympathies in Red Channels. Though he denied the accusation, it led to his firing and then to his suicide. Popular leading man John Garfield, whose wife had once been a Party member, was hounded into an early death. Some major Hollywood stars, led by Lauren Bacall and spouse Humphrey Bogart, rallied to form a Committee for the First Amendment in support of their fellow actors, but studio bosses quickly scared them off.

 Perhaps hardest hit were Hollywood’s veteran screenwriters, who found themselves living overseas and writing under fake names, only collecting the Oscars they’d earned (like Dalton Trumbo’s for Roman Holiday) decades later. For me the most eye-opening part of the exhibit was the display of FBI commentary casting suspicion on the era’s most popular films. It’s a Wonderful Life? It was suspect because it contained ““a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.”  The Best Years of Our Lives? This poignant 1946 drama of 3 servicemen trying to re-adjust to civilian life, winner of 9 Oscars including Best Picture, was regarded with disfavor for portraying the upper class unattractively. Because Gentleman’s Agreement, a Best Picture winner that boldly confronted anti-Semitism, included in its cast of characters a bigoted cop, it was accused by the FBI of being “a deliberate attempt to discredit law enforcement.” Body and Soul? “It portrays the rich and successful man in a bad light and the finest character of them all is a colored fighter.”

 And The Boy With Green Hair? Who says that looking different is a GOOD thing?  

Disagreeing with a Gentleman’s Agreement

With harsh words in Congress, a massacre in Philadelphia, and mock Nazi salutes in Orange County, California, the specter of anti-Semitism seems once again to be rearing its ugly head. Which puts me in mind of a movie my parents let me stay up to watch, many decades ago, on the late-late show. Gentleman’s Agreement, based on a best-selling novel, was released in 1947, a scant two years after Hitler’s Germany went down to defeat, and with it the Nazi plan to remove all Jews from the face of the earth. Gentleman’s Agreement, though, had nothing to say about death camps or refugees from Europe. Instead it dealt with the insidious way that anti-Jewish bias could be seen as part and parcel of American life. It’s pleasant to think that such bias is part of a bygone era, that America has learned acceptance of those of Jewish ethnicity, if not of African-Americans, gays, Latinos, Muslims, and other minority groups. But after some recent headlines, I’m not so sure.

The victims in Gentleman’s Agreement do not  look or act different from mainstream Americans. This is not a film arguing for tolerance on behalf of those whose customs or speech or form of worship single them out as “other.”  The main “Jew” in the film is the very handsome, very All-American Gregory Peck. I put the word in quotes because Peck’s character, hard-hitting investigative journalist Philip Schuyler Green, has assumed a Jewish identity only for the sake of an article-in-progress,  “I Was a Jew for Six Months.” Having previously lived in hobo camps to write about poverty, Green now takes on the overtly Jewish name Phil Greenberg to find out for himself what bigotry lies beneath the polite surface of American life. As the newly-minted Greenberg, Peck looks no different, sounds no different, acts no different than he did as Schuyler Green. But suddenly he’s refused service at nice hotels, his landlord looks askance at his name on the mailbox, and his son gets roughed up by classmates. When he’s a guest of honor at a party in the tony, “restricted” community of Darien, Connecticut, guests start cancelling.

A key character in Gentleman’s Agreement is Dave Goldman,  a longtime friend of Schuyler Green. Just back from military service and trying to enter civilian life, Dave has developed a thick hide and a cynical outlook to protect himself from the constant slings and arrows of bigots. (In one restaurant scene, we witness a nasty attack on him by a pugnacious drunk, and it seems near-impossible for him to find housing for himself and his young family.) The role is played by John Garfield, the real-life son of Russian immigrants. The rich irony is that Garfield became a star in Hollywood only after studio bosses insisted he give up his birth name, Jacob Julius Garfinkle.

In Gentleman’s Agreement (the title refers to the unspoken “rules” that prevent non-WASPs from fully participating in American life), Jews are not entirely let off the hook. In the offices of Schuyler Green’s editor, he’s surprised to discover that his newly-appointed secretary, played by June Havoc, is covertly Jewish. She’s pleased to have him as a boss, but she’s strongly opposed to his campaign to accept workers of all backgrounds at the magazine. She’s worried, you see,  about the potential presence of the “wrong” kind of Jews, those who might conform to the stereotypes (“loud,” “pushy,” “garish) with which American Jews have been saddled. The film’s strongest condemnation, though, is of the “nice” people who stay silent  when others face ridicule, or worse, because of who they are.