The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- Once Again On The Crisis Of Marxism (1939)

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The  Anniversary Of His Death- Once Again On The Crisis Of Marxism (1939)

Google the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist (I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.

The Decline Of The Old West-With Yul Brynner’s “The Magnificent Seven” (1960) In Mind

The Decline Of The Old West-With Yul Brynner’s “The Magnificent Seven” (1960) In Mind   

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

The Magnificent Seven, starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, 1960   

I have always been a sucker for a good Western ever since I was a kid back in the 1950s. I would either watch maybe Jimmy Rodgers, The Lone Ranger, John Law or some such combination go through their paces on the small screen family black and white images television set or on Saturday afternoons head with Bunky Roberts and Slim Devine, two fellow youthful aficionados to the now long gone Majestic Theater in downtown    

Riverdale and see the double feature one at least of which was inevitably a Western. That is the place where I first viewed the film under review, The Magnificent Seven, the original version not the well-done remake based on a different twist in the story line starring Denzel Washington a couple of years ago. And although I watched the re-run in the comfort of my home I still think that this film must be watched on the big screen to get the full beauty of the thing and of the then rather new technologies bringing those old 1940s and early 1950s black and white images to color.     

As a kid I was most struck by the fact that a good guy, a good gunslinger, Yul Brynner’s role, was dressed in black the traditional color of the bad guy in the old movies and on 1950s television. It threw me at first until his first good deed seeing to it that a Native American (then Indian or ‘injun’) got buried in a local cemetery. This time out almost sixty years later now being a fair film critic I was taken in by the sub-text beyond the good deeds-the taming of the West (the non-California Coast West, you know the places where the states are square) epitomized by the decline in services of the gunslinger. The guys who for good or evil, depending usually on who paid for the job whether there was more justice on one side or not. You know the profession had taken a precipitous drop when Yul could round up five other hombres for a six week caper down south of the border for twenty bucks each-total. (The seventh guy, a young buck, a Mexican peasant with something to prove came along of his own volition). Hardly expense money even in those days. 

You know the story though. A bunch of poor south of the border Mexican farmers periodically besieged by one or another roving gangs, this one in particular, led by mal hombre bandito Eli Wallach have had enough. Are ready to fight, or pay for guys who would fight and rid their village of this scourge. Enter cool as a cumber dressed in black Yul who hears out the story and brings in the cadre. Of course even seven bravos, seven harden gunslingers cannot be expected to take on a serious gang of maybe thirty or forty hunger, thirsty and broke banditos so much of the center of the film is readying those peasant farmers to help out to defend home and hearth. It was a struggle though getting brave but inexperienced farmers ready enough to face the onslaught of Eli Wallach and friends. In the end though you knew, just as I knew when I was a kid that the good guys despite grievous losses would prevail. I wonder what Yul and his remaining sidekick after the big scene shoot-out played by Steve McQueen will do for their next job as they leave the pacified village to go about its usual business. A landmark film of the new Western that got a workout in 1960s when a more serious look at the West was undertaken.        

Free The Boston August 19th Anti-Fascist Protesters-Build The Anti-Fascist United Front  

Free the Boston Protesters!

August 23, 2017

|

CILD News

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

URL:   internationallabordefense.org

Email: cforild@gmail.com

Date:  August 23, 2017

 

 

 

STATEMENT 

BY THE 

COMMITTEE FOR INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE 

ON THE BOSTON PROTESTERS

 

 

The Committee for International Labor Defense joins with our sisters and brothers of Black Lives Matter Boston and Cambridge, to call on the Boston Municipal Court, Mayor Marty Walsh, District Attorney Dan Conley, and Police Commissioner William Evans, to drop all charges stemming from the unlawful arrest and detainment of about 30 protesters on Saturday, August 19, 2017, at the “Fight Supremacy” rally on Boston Common.

 

Many of the protesters were unnecessarily injured by police during the confrontations and arrests. All those arrested were charged with crimes ranging from disorderly conduct to assault, for holding their ground against fascism and white supremacy in the southeast quadrant of Boston Common and surrounding areas.

 

The Committee for International Labor Defense is aware that the arrestees face court appearances on August 21, 22 and 23, to determine their fate, and we are closely monitoring each of their cases. The Committee squarely and publicly holds the City of Boston accountable for the health and safety of every one of these political prisoners, including the minor who is only 15 years of age.

 

The Committee for International Labor Defense demands the immediate release of the Boston 33, dismissal of all legal charges, and withdrawal of all fines and penalties for which the Court may hold them liable. Their arrest was unjust and a violation of the democratic right to protest that is fundamental to the U.S. constitution and US history. No one should be arrested for standing against racism and racist violence.

 

FREE THE BOSTON 33 NOW!

 

We are mindful that on this day, exactly 90 years ago, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ruthlessly electrocuted two working class political prisoners named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, during a time of similar unrest.  We will not allow those crimes to be repeated.

 

The Committee for International Labor Defense calls on our brothers and sisters in the labor movement to show solidarity these working class political prisoners in memory of Sacco and Vanzetti, one of International Labor Defense’s very first cases.  The capitalist bosses and their repressive state apparatus have changed little since 1927, as we can see through these attacks on working class protesters. 

 

Signed by:

 

The Committee for International Labor Defense

Boston, August 23, 2017

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- With Serge Eisenstein’s “Strike” (1925) In Mind

The100^thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- With Serge Eisenstein’s “Strike” (1925) In Mind

DVD Review  

By Political Commentator  Frank Jackman

Strike, starring a cast of hundreds of working people and others, directed by Serge Eisenstein, 1925

No question, no question at all that some political films whether they were intended as propaganda for a certain viewpoint as with the film under review, Russian mad man filmmaker Serge Eisenstein’s 1925 classic Strike, or because as the story line developed everybody was compelled to think through the implications of the cover-up and preclude to coup in a film like Costa-Garvas’ Z remain in our consciousness long after mere entertainment films have faded from view. Here is the beauty of Eisenstein’s work whether with Strike or in an effort like Potemkin, the one with the famous baby carriage scene on the Odessa Steps. The medium is the message to steal a phrase from an old-time social media commentator like Marshall McLuhan. The whole thing is done, powerfully done, with nothing but absolutely stunning cinematography, a few signboards (in Russian with English subtitles), and some very interesting and varied mood music which if I am not mistaken included some jazz theme stuff from Duke Ellington, and if not him then definitely some jazz riffs along with that inevitable classical music that one would have expected from a Russian filmmaker who grabbed what he could from the Russian Five.        

Now the question of who a film is directed at is usually pretty much just to lure in general audiences, maybe if it is cartoonish then kids but usually general audiences. Eisenstein in this film though is directing his efforts to working people in order for them to draw some important lessons about the class struggle. Of course Eisenstein was working shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 in his country and so he probably was more or less committed to this type of film in the interests of the Soviet government and of the world revolution that was still formally what the Bolsheviks and their international allies were all about. (I might add though that a later film about Ivan the Terrible had the same fine cinematic qualities and that was not particularly directed at the world’s working classes but to ancient Russian patriotic fervor as the smell of war, war on the doorstep became apparent.) That drawing of lessons about what happened during the strike is the force that drives the film.

Here is how this one played out in all its glory and infamy. The workers at a Russian factory of unknown location and for that matter of unknown production had been beaten down by the greedy capitalists and stockholders, had had no say in what they made and how much dough they made. (The scenes with the greedy capitalists are a treasure, something out of any leftist’s caricature of the old time robber barons complete with fat bellies, cigars and top hats). Like any situation where tensions are strung out to the limit it did not take a lot to produce a reason for a strike for a better shake in this wicked old world. Here it was an honest workman’s being accused of a theft which he couldn’t defend himself against and so in shame he committed suicide. After have previously spent several weeks talking about taking an action to better their conditions the leaders of the underground “strike committee” decided to have everybody “down tools.” (The scene of this action with a rolling shutdown as section after section left their benches was breathtaking.)      

Of course in turn of the century (20^th century) Russia (and elsewhere) the capitalists were as vicious as one would expect of a new class of exploiters dealing here with people, men and women, just off the farm and so in no mood to grant such things as an eight-hour day (a struggle that we in America are very familiar with from the Haymarket Martyrs whose chief demand a couple of decades before the time of this film was for that same eight hour day) and a big wage increase. So the committee of capitalists and their hangers-on gave a blanket “no.” Said the hell with you to the strikers.

The aftermath of this refusal is where the real lessons of this film are to drawn. Needless to say the capitalists were willing, more than willing to starve the workers into submission (the scenes of some workers pawning off their worldly possession for food for the kids, for themselves are quite moving).But not only were they willing to starve the mass of workers back to the factory but did everything in their power to break the strike by other means. First and foremost to send spies out to stir up trouble in order to get the class unity broken, then tried to get some weak-links to betray the movement from within, and if that didn’t work then try might and main to round up by any way possible the leaders of the strike in order to behead the movement. In the end though they were not above using their “Pharaohs,” their mounted cops and troops to suppress the whole thing. In the final scene after the cops and troops have done their murderous assaults on unarmed strikers the corpses spread out widely on the massacre field tell anybody who wasn’t sure about the role of the cops and troops in preserving the social order of the rulers all they need to know about the way the strike was defeated. 

From what I could gather from the last signboard (one which mentioned the Lena gold strike which was I believe was suppressed in 1912) the time period of this strike was between the 1905 revolution that went down in flames and the victorious revolution in 1917. The implications of the failure of the strike, of the need to take the state power, were thus through Eisenstein’s big lenses there for all to see. Hey, even if you don’t draw any political conclusions from this film just watch to see what they mean they say a picture sometimes is worth a thousand words. Eisenstein has a thousand such pictures that will fascinate and repel you.  

An Anniversary- Of Sorts-With Anti-Fascist Activist Fritz Taylor’s Worldview In Mind

An Anniversary- Of Sorts-With Anti-Fascist Activist Fritz Taylor’s Worldview In Mind

By Frank Jackman

My old late lamented growing up friend Peter Markin (not the moderator of this site and of others as well who also had been a growing up friend and who had taken the moniker Peter Paul Markin in honor of our still lamented lost brother but the real mad man Markin known to one and all in the old neighborhood as “the Scribe”) would have said the then equivalent of WTF if he had seen this little screed about my publicly announcing the forty-fifth anniversary of Fritz Taylor’s introduction and adherence the Marxist worldview, the view that the centrality of the class struggle is the prime mover, although let’s be clear given the over one century and a half obfuscation on the matter not the sole mover, of the human historical drama. (The ghost of the departed Markin is still so strong among the surviving brethren of the working poor Acre section of North Adamsville the place where Markin and I grew up that I dare not put my above-stated intention in the headline to this piece.) 

Let me be clear Pete Markin and no other was the pivotal character in Fritz’s life who drew him to the study of some Marxist literature and attending study group classes in Marxist doctrine so it is not a question of the subject matter which he did, and still would I believe, object to but his hatred for what was even then a skyrocketing increase in the number of anniversaries of various events. Worse, worst of all, was the commemoration of odd-ball events in say their fortieth or sixtieth anniversary years instead of the reasonable tenth, twenty-fifth and fiftieth which we grew up with and made a certain amount of sense. Who knows what ballistic missiles, verbal or written, he would have launched if he could see some of the events and some of the year designations today. You know the thirtieth anniversary of Janis Joplin’s premier album with Big Brother and the Holding Company or the 65^th anniversary of the landing of man on the moon. Odd years like that drove him crazy. Make him want to retch from what he told me one night when we were in our cups.

It wasn’t like Markin had always gone off the deep end about the commemoration of all odd-ball events. He drew a distinction though between certain world-historic events and run-of-the-mill stuff like an album’s anniversary and events important to the lives of the people he was trying to reach out to think about a radical restructuring of society. Events like the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution (before the demise of the Soviet Union which would have shocked him to his core), the commemoration of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (the recent commemoration of which noted the 90^th anniversary which Markin would have been happy to have seen organized-an earlier one he had dragged me to in high school). But the others would have him in a rage, no doubt.

When I started out thinking about honoring Fritz Taylor’s commitment to the Marxist doctrine, his underlying worldview,  although really to forty-five years of left-wing political activism under that activist imperative which is much more important than merely noting his ideological underpinnings, important as those are, I had intended to just tell his story, how he came to his views. That idea, once I actually started writing a first draft, soon proved to be short-sighted. It is impossible to chart how Fritz “got religion” without explaining how Markin came to his, for the short time that he actually actively adhered to the doctrine before the demons in his head led him down a different path, down a still mysterious drug-strewn death down in the dusty back streets of Sonora, Mexico after what was apparently a busted drug deal. Like I said before Markin, forever the Scribe,  was a growing up friend so I can fill in some of that seemingly inevitable trajectory before he ever met Fritz after they had both gotten out of the Army and found that they had both hated with a passion their blood on their hands involvements in the then-raging Vietnam War.          

Of all the North Adamsville corner boys (guys who due to lack of dough, serious lack of dough, successively hung out at Harry Variety Store, Doc’s Drugstore and Tonio’s Pizza Parlor as we grew up and took our time-honored, age-appropriate designated corner spots) Pete was the quirkiest of us all. While the rest of us were  mainly, make that solely, interested in girls, cars, money, money for dates, so girls again, and actually the car thing played into the girl quest as well Markin was always into some new idea or trend he would read about. Bored us to tears reading some fucking Allen Ginsburg’s “faggot” (term used by us at the time) poem Howl or Jack Kerouac’s On The Road when he was crazy for the beatniks. Later too when the whole hippie-world turned upside down Summer of Love, 1967 he got everybody looking at different stuff. Or fucking folk music when that was big and he would try to drag us, me, over to Harvard Square to again be bored to tears (until we found out that some very foxy “chicks” were into the damn thing and we faked an interest for that sole reason. I still hate to hear folk music to this day, especially Bob Dylan). That stuff was bad enough but then he had his freaking political causes, stuff that made us all think he was some kind of pinko commie and which would have gotten him more than one fucking beating if he had not been our best friend, and a guy who also figured out a lot of very illegal ways for us to get dough for those girl-related necessities. Quirky yeah. I remember he went to some nuclear disarmament with the freaking Quakers when we were in the ninth grade after he made some probably ill-advised bet with our leader, Frankie Riley, who claimed that he would not go through with it. Later the black civil rights movement down South which was very touchy in our lily-white neighborhood and caused some bad blood even with his corner boys when he went off on a tangent about it. (Yes we used the “n” word then in referring to black people, worse than that sometimes).

Frankly though as Markin was growing up, as he developed his style in high school he could have given a “rat’s ass” (a term of art used in the old neighborhood genesis unknown) about Marxism, hated, despite our pinko commie comments, Communists almost as much as the rest of us did except he was not for jailing every last one of the them or shipping them all to Moscow. He had dreams of being a serious politician, serious let’s say social democratic politician on the right side of the angels in public anyway. Not a candidate type like his hero Robert Kennedy but a guy right beside some aspiring candidate guiding him along the way.

What changed him? What drove him over the edge away from that dream and maybe some normal day success? One word: Vietnam. Even that crooked path could have been different if he wasn’t so quirky and curious. In the spring of 1967 he had caught a sense that things were changing, that maybe that new world he was always yakking to us about, something about a new wave coming over the land and we had better be ready, might come to something. He made a fateful, and wrong, decision to drop out of his sophomore year in college in Boston and head out to San Francisco to grab onto the tailwinds of the Summer of Love. He was right at home, even got some of us out there for a while. Of course not being a male student with a student deferment in 1967 when the major escalations of the war in Vietnam were still piling up requiring more troops, more “cannon fodder” he would call it even then long before he ever though he would be caught in its web meant he was a prime candidate for the draft. He was rather casual about the matter whenever I mentioned it always assuming that the damn war would end before he number came up.      

           

Like I said wrong move. I guess now I would say that I would have thought that certainly of all the old crowd Pete would have been the first one to have refused, or even thought about refusing, induction given his past history and his strong views about being in Vietnam, a place and a people whom he said he had no cause to hate since they had never done anything to him but maybe that was later after he got back from that hellhole. But no when he got his draft notice and passed the physical he said he had no strong reasons not to go unlike some of the increasing number of students and other young men who were refusing induction (or heading to Canada or figuring some other way to avoid military service at a time when that only meant Vietnam was beckoning). So he went when called like every other corner boy we knew who was eligible if they hadn’t already enlisted beforehand. I got out of military service by having had a crippling knee injury as a kid and thereafter had walked with a pronounced limp especially on rainy days. 

That acceptance of induction another mistake. Pete never talked about it all that much but he went through the wringer in Vietnam. Had been an 11 Bravo Army speak for an infantryman, a grunt, that cannon fodder always he was always yelling about. The only place that needed 11Bravos just then, and lots of them, was in Vietnam so it was inevitable he would wind up there. Said he did and was made to do stuff that would forever haunt him the few times he did let on that the whole experience had screwed up his life. (How deeply it did so to him we would not know for several years and even then we could only surmise what demons had driven him to dope deals and dirty back streets to an early grave down in Mexico once we lost contact with him).     

The minute he got out of the Army Pete began a political trajectory through his associations with the then growing Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) that would lead him to a study of Marxism and a short whirling dervish period of left-wing activity before he descended into hell. (I have heard from old corner boy leader Frankie Riley, a Vietnam veteran himself that Pete had been politically active even before he got out of the Army so let’s just say when he got back to what he called the “real world”). Through the VVAW link he had, after a whirlwind run around the country attending probably every anti-war demonstration that drew more than five people, landed back in Cambridge in the early spring of 1971 where he had run into a group of radicals who were heading to Washington to try to shut down the government (the Nixon government at that time) if it did not end the fucking war (“fucking” my term at that point and now too when I think about how it fucked up one of the best of our whole generation long before his time was up). All Pete, they and their cohorts got for their efforts was massive police and military repression, tear gas and a huge number of arrests. The war would linger on in one form or another for the next few years (and dominate the psyche of the best part of the generation for many years).        

As a result of that Mau Day experience Pete, and others back in Cambridge as well, took note that a few brave but marginal students, radicals, do-gooders had no shot at effective governmental change based on some ill-advised if heroic individual acts of political bravery. Who or what force could do so. He, they thought through lots of scenarios but came up empty based on who had enough power to switch things around. I don’t remember all the details but I do remember for a time Markin was very excited after he had found a copy of Karl Marx’s tribute and defense of the fallen at the Paris Commune. He had read, and discarded, Marx’s Communist Manifesto as so much old time bullshit in high school when he would rail against the commies with a lot more knowledge than our knee-jerk 1950s red scare Cold War attitudes. Now he took what was said there on a re-reading in a whole new light. That document helped, he once told me, explain a little, not all, of what growing up poor had done to him, his family, to us his friends and fellow poor proletarians (his new found word). Naturally Markin being Markin once he got hot on the trail of an idea, maybe anything that interested him, went into overdrive and hunkered down in the Cambridge library and read everything he could by Marx or his co-thinker Friedrich Engels. Classic Markin.            

I have not said much about Fritz yet who after all is the center of this anniversary business. Like I said just after his discharge from the Army Markin went all over attending anti-war rallies and events. One time down in Washington Pete was marching with VVAW in a silent procession through the streets (it may have been the time a whole slew of Vietnam veterans threw their medals back over the fence at the Supreme Court building and if not that then around that time) when after the event was over he introduced himself to Fritz who had been marching beside him. Fritz had been in the Army too, had been a mortar man, 11 C, 11 Charlie I think was the designation meaning he was just as much in the thick of things as Pete. Fritz was from down South, down in Georgia, Fulton County, and had volunteered like a million guys from Georgia had done, and as their grandfathers and fathers had done without thinking a thing about it. Fritz, not nearly as well educated as Pete, but a true son of the working class, the Southern poor working class just as the Acre meant Northern poor working class had something about him that was attractive to Pete. Maybe the shared Army connection, maybe the class part or maybe because Fritz was like the corner boys of his youth a stand-up guy. They became good friends in Washington and a couple of weeks later Pete, back in Cambridge, invited Fritz up to stay at a commune where he had been living with a few post-graduate student radical activist.     

Fritz came up and while it took him a while to figure out how to deal with communal life having been pretty straight before Vietnam once he got a girlfriend (Leslie, whom he would eventually marry and is still married to) he was as inquisitive as Pete about what the hell they could do to stop the fucking wars (that “fucking” Fritz’s who to this day can seldom complete a sentence without that expletive). That Cambridge commune is where I first met Fritz and that girlfriend. Once Pete “got religion” on the Marxist stuff Fritz got carried along. It was an infinitely harder task for Fritz to slog through the readings, has always said that he never did really figure out what dialectical materialism was all about and a few other things too but he got the main drift, got that without a revolutionary overturn of society that same old, same old would rise to the top again. Pete and Fritz had a million conversations before Pete left for his last hurrah in California. (Fritz wouldn’t go because Leslie was still in school and he was even then smitten by her charms to not leave her behind). You know the long lamented Pete Markin’s fate so you know that even the strong ideological of Marxism then could not conquer the demons in his head (what I began calling several years ago when I was having my own demon problems of a different sort “putting out the fire in your head”)

Fritz though despite all the ups and downs of leftwing political life in America and the shattering and in some ways decisive shattering of the old Soviet Union has stayed the course. Had no illusions about that place but also knew that a bad wind had drifted over the planet once that experiment had run its course and created a serious defeat for his beloved international working class. That wind still very much in play some quarter of a century later. Said that old curmudgeon Marx had lots of things right and still had something to say today, maybe especially today when everybody and their sister knows that the scales are tipped against working people almost everywhere. Told me when I showed him the second draft of this piece that although much has been apparently mistaken in the Marxist worldview the idea that if you don’t “turn the world upside down” (a favored Markin expression), change what class is in charge doing the stuff to benefit the whole world then you are stuck with what we have today or the old stuff just rises to the top again. Get this though Fritz who knew Markin only as an adult and with some of the shine worn off and not like us when he would charge into a room and dazzle you with some new idea that just had to work said old Pete Markin in his time had something to say too. Yeah, Fritz, yeah.     

As The Classic Film "Casablanca" Turns 75-A Look Back

As The Classic Film "Casablanca" Turns 75-A Look Back

Comment by Sam Lowell 

As the person who did the piece on NPR noted at the end of her piece on the making of Casablanca-even after 75 years the romance of the film and the story line still grabs one attention.




Here's a recent comment by Seth Garth in honor of the occasion:

Memories Of Rick-With Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” In Mind

By Seth Garth

[Before he passed away in the late 1980s the long time French police officer, Commandant Louis Renault (everybody, everybody but the bad guys who crossed his path and there were plenty and not all of them Germans, called him “Louie” for his mild-mannered easy style when he was not in hot pursuit of some nefarious types)who had worked both in colonial Algeria and French Morocco before heading back home to work with the National Police in his hometown of Lyon, liked to sit in the Café Algiers there and reminisce about all his adventures as a cop. When asked about the most memorable person, friend or foe, he had been up against in his times he would without much hesitation blurt out the name of Rick Blaine.

Rick of Rick’s Café in Casablanca when Louie had worked in French Morocco early in World War II after the fall of the French Republic and the rise of the Vichy government which controlled that colony then. He as a police officer noted the changing of the guard and went about his business as usual-regimes come and go he had always said but the cops are forever. After investigation of Rick’s past, most of the early part as a tough guy out of Hell’s Kitchen in New York City a place where Rick would make people laugh when he said even the mighty Germans would think twice about occupying and had included some troubling adventurous activity for the “wrong” side in Ethiopia and Spain during the 1930s, he, after having had his palm “greased” issued the liquor and nightclub license for Rick to keep his Cafe Americian open under his prefecture.

For most of the time he knew Rick in Casablanca they had had a good working relationship. Rick would let him “win” at the roulette wheel as his pay-off for letting illegal gambling go on in full sight, “comp” him for drinks and dope, mostly hashish, and let him have his women “rejects” on the rebound. Then she came in, came in as Rick said one drunken night when she had her claws in him bad again “of all the gin joints in all the world she had to show up at his door.” From then on things got interesting, very interesting. The following is a translation by Jean Marais of what Louie had to say when he was asked by a National Police archivist for details of his relationship with one Rick Blaine (1920-1982)-SG]             

“That Rick Blaine was a piece of work, one of the last of the pre-war, pre-World War II if anybody is asking which war we are talking about, romantics tilting his lance at the windmills in the name of love-or the thrill of adventure, maybe even the thrill of tweaking somebody’s nose just for the hell of it, Louie Renault was reminiscing out loud to those who were attending his retirement party. Retirement from the National Police, [the French coppers although they are not national cops like the FBI in America but just like city and town cops there run through the central government], the guys who keep order in places like Paris and Lyon (since it was a governmental pension he was about to receive after much haggling his service during Vichy times first in Algiers and then in French-controlled Morocco, in Casablanca, was included as well as his Lyon assignments). He had been asked a question by one of the younger policer officers about what was his most memorable episode in a long and illustrious career. Of course Louie had to go back to those early war days when he ran the operation for Vichy in godforsaken Casablanca to find some events, some characters who could qualify for what that young officer was asking about. Had to go back to Rick Blaine without question.             

“Yes, Rick was the real thing, I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned his name,” Louie blurted out when the officer did not comprehend why a guy whom he had on other occasions called nothing but a saloon keeper, a guy out for himself whatever checkered past he might have had rated so high. “Let me fill you and see if I am not right about this whole matter.” He would say out of earshot that even De Gaulle would gladly take a back seat after hearing this story since he was safely in London being a pain in the ass to the British and American while “little guys” like Rick and a guy who looked pretty big even by De Gaulle standards Victor Lazlo were mercilessly tweaking the German’s tail.        

“Once the Germans marched into Paris they controlled the whole political situation but since they couldn’t handle a total occupation of France and wreak havoc on the rest of Europe at the same time they left part of the country to the French military, to General Petain who worked out of Vichy, the place where the specialized water comes from. Yeah, collaborators, liked they used to try to hang on me before Rick came to Casablanca, Lazlo too, and got everybody well. I had been in Algiers during that time but once the new political reality hit I was assigned to run the police operations in bloody Casablanca-a backwater where every odd-ball thing could and did happen as well as plenty of illegal stuff from dope to women to smuggling. Just my cup of tea. I figured that I could make more graft there in the Casbah than staying in Algiers once the British and Americans got serious about dislodging the Germans from Northern Africa.   

“No sooner had I landed in Casablanca then I spied Rick’s place, Rick’s Café Americian he called it, a place where there was plenty of booze, women, gambling, dope and whatever else you wanted. Or wanted done-life was cheap there-dirt cheap. The bloody Arabs could barely keep themselves busy except when some silly “blood honor” thing came up and we had to pick up the mess after the killings. Some he said, the other guy said stuff and then bang-bang. Had to arrest about fifteen people, family members from both sides and show them a little baton to the head just to let them know we meant business. Nobody ever faulted me on that score. I walked in and introduced myself to Rick without saying anything further. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye he said later after all the smoke had cleared and we could be honest with each other, sized me up and down and knowing that I would do “business” after that appraisal said would the previous arrangement with the Prefect I was replacing be okay- a cut of the profits, a slice of the gambling [paid out by his “winning at roulette” with lucky red 22], my pick of women, free liquor and dope, and deep discounts on anything else I needed. Also told me of his dealings, his working relationships for dope, booze and Moslem women which it seemed some of the Europeans were crazy for although I was strictly for the low-rent French tarts who found Casablanca easy on their virtue, with Sydney Greenstreet, an émigré merchant of sorts from England over in the Casbah. I immediately issued the necessary licenses that each new Prefect was entitled to issue as was my prerogative. Done.

“This Rick was a hard guy to figure though the more I ran into him on the street or more regularly in his place either to grab some young woman, to grab my cut, to “win” at roulette, or just to have some high shelf bonded whiskey that I became very fond of. Somebody said, I think it was Frenchie the main bartender, that Rick had had some kind of an adventurous past, had run some guns to Ethiopia when they were trying to hold off the Italians when Mussolini was flexing his muscles and later fought with the International Brigades, with the Communists in Spain when Franco was working up to flexing his muscles. I had already known that past from the files the previous Prefect had left and from a couple of snitches I had run through Rick’s place but the “grease” from Rick’s deal said otherwise in my eyes.   When I first met him he was all business like I said, if you said green he said okay what shade, that kind of thing.

“Somebody said, maybe it was Frenchie again since I sat at the bar of the joint many a night to “enforce” the no gambling regulation and to drink a few high shelf scotches, that Rick had been unlucky in love and that was why when he, Rick,  had his choice of any girl he wanted, two if he was feeling frisky, would take them up to his office and apartment upstairs from the club, do whatever it was that they did, some wild stuff I heard from a couple of them that I caught on the “rebound” especially from one who took him “around the world” which she would later do with me and the next night would not know them. Tell them to sell their wares in the Casbah, a low thing to say to a European woman if you knew anything at all about what went on in the Casbah. I never went there personally but would sent for this Greenstreet to deliver me my graft and whatever dope I was looking for at the time. Like I said mainly hashish from the pipe. In the end it would be that lost love that had been bothering Rick once she came to town but early on you couldn’t tell what was eating at him. Just knew that he had a chip on his shoulder which would not fall off.

“Jesus, in those days there were all kinds of people as you can imagine trying to get out of Europe for one reason or another and once France and the countries around it fell to the Germans that was doubled up. Homeless, stateless Jews, who we all knew were being savaged by the Germans and by Vichy too, International Brigaders who couldn’t go back to their occupied homelands, local Communists who didn’t get or who couldn’t get underground, anybody out of the ordinary, we even had a couple of kids, rich kids who had left Hamburg once Hitler said that jazz was a Negro-Jew conspiracy and banned the music. If you looked at a map of Europe in say 1941 you would notice that there was not much wiggle room to work with in order to get out of some occupied spot. The road out though however they got there led to Casablanca no matter what the individual reason for leaving Europe was. The link. The air flights to Lisbon and from there anyplace but the old canard Europe.

“So you know that there was plenty of money to be made by those daring enough to act as smugglers to get these desperate people out one way or another. I could have made plenty if I had decided to use my position to get real greedy but I didn’t want to deal with a bunch of desperate people bothering me about why they weren’t getting out fast enough. Rick and the Casbah made me plenty-for a while. All the action either went through that guy Sidney Greenstreet who ran his operation out of the Casbah where he mainly handled small fry, people of no account but with money, or at Rick’s for the higher class clientele. Mostly the wealthier Jews and previously high placed officials of democratic governments who the Germans were desperate to find and make an example out off for their compatriots under occupation. Some seriously shady characters, art forgers, crazed jazz aficionados, con artists, three card monte hustlers, independent dope dealers-mainly heroin out of the Afghan fields working their way West to the cities, jack-rollers, rapists and assorted slugs, characters who even we had to keep an eye on to keep any kind of order plopped themselves there.          

“Things though were going fine until some horse’s asses, as it turned out guys we had on our radar but couldn’t quite nab, decided they would murder a couple of German couriers and grab a couple of letters of transit they were travelling with. Now these letters of transit were like gold-would make their possessor a pot of gold. Maybe two pots if they worked it right. These were no questions asked documents which only had to have names filled in order to catch a flight to Lisbon and from there wherever else they wanted to go. This weasel, well known to us from a couple of rip-off jobs he did on unsuspecting travelers, a guy named Peter Lorre was part of the gang who took the couriers down. One night he showed up at Rick’s the natural place to start looking for high-end buyers and we nailed him-took him in “custody” but he didn’t have the letters of transit on him. He hanged himself in his cell before we could get much more out of him. Rick had been as cool as a cucumber when this weasel, this sweaty little nobody showed his ugly face there. This Lorre begged Rick to hide him. Rick just blew him off, told him to get lost. A couple of customers made noises when we grabbed and manhandled Lorre saying they wouldn’t patronize Rick’s again because of his attitude in the matter. Rick told them something that impressed me at the time-he wasn’t sticking his neck out for anybody. Those customers by the way were back the next night when I let Rick reopen the place and he sent them over a couple of drinks. They were his best buddies then.   

“That courier murder business though would lay us all low. See the Germans had sent over this hard-ass major, Major Veidt (sic) I think his name was if I remember the name correctly, to look into the matter. I was trying to impress him so he would put in a good word for me with Vichy. That was the whole idea behind making a big deal out of the Lorre arrest (and I was happy when he hung himself because he would have not stood up well under German methods and he might have spilled who knows what about what was going on in Casablanca at the time). That made Rick’s gesture at the time this guy Lorre begged him to save him from my men even more important. Rick just looked the other way and Lorre was a goner. We never did get the other guys in with Lorre when we rounded up, our what did we call them, oh yes,  “usual suspects”, Communists and con men and a few whores who we regularly rounded up to fill the jails full and make it look like we were doing our jobs. Some wound up out in a desert graveyard once we were done with them.                                                                                                                                             

“Like I said in those days all kinds of people were coming through town. One of them a guy I mentioned before and said I would speak of again named Victor Lazlo had escaped from a German concentration camp and somehow he had worked his way through whatever network he had in Europe to Casablanca. This Lazlo was well-known as a leader of the resistance to the German occupations of half of Europe so a guy whom the Germans, especially this Major Veidt, were foaming at the mouth to get their hands on. But as long as he didn’t do anything illegal I had no reason to arrest him. I had half-figured when I heard he was in town to see who the highest bidder, strictly cash, was for his hide and take my cut that way. 

“But here is where things got interesting. This Lazlo, a good-looking guy with good manners and a good tipper according to Frenchie, was not travelling alone. He had this beautiful woman with him, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen then or now, Ilsa something, I am not sure we ever knew her last name and it didn’t matter with a beauty like that. When she showed up our Rick went crazy, went crazy like a loon. See he had come to Casablanca just ahead of the German armies advancing on Paris with this black guy who was an entertainer, a singer and piano player named Sam and a sour look on his face. He had “known” Ilsa in Paris, had been her fancy man from what I could tell. They were supposed to blow town together and meet at the train station one evening on the last train out of Paris before the Germans stopped the trains. She was a “no show.” She was in living color the reason that Rick had been so indifferent to everything. Why he turned over perfectly good women to me without batting an eyelash.            

“Of course the minute she showed up the old flames were re-kindled-for both of them. She had spied Sam at the piano through the heavily smoke-filled room, had forced him to play “their” song, If I Didn’t Care I think and when Rick heard that he went ballistic, was ready to come to blows with Sam since Sam had been ordered never to play the song. Then he spotted her across the piano and he melted down like an ice cube. It seems that in Paris she had assumed her husband, this Lazlo was dead, had been killed by the Germans. False report. That last day in Paris she found out through some underground source that Lazlo was still alive and she had gone to him. Leaving Rick standing in the rain at the fucking train station. Naturally all of this stuff I learned later but that “left standing in the rain” is what drove Rick to get up on his high horse and create nothing but trouble for me and my men once she came into view.  

“That long gone Lorre had given Rick the letters of transit to keep for him the night Rick looked the other way when we grabbed the weasel and made him squeal or whatever weasels do when they are caught. When with Rick’s help he fell down, wound up at the end of his checkered tie, Rick figured that he would use the letters to get himself out of hellhole Casablanca. He said that even Hell’s Kitchen in New York where he had grown up (and had “advised” the Germans to think twice about trying to occupy if you recall) was less dangerous than Casablanca so you get an idea how bad things were-how cheap life was on in the desert. Worse than the bloody wogs the British were always moaning about in the Raj, in India. He wasn’t going alone though. She, Ilsa, was going with him. She had snuck up into his apartment one night when Lazlo was out doing his organizing of the local resistance. As a result of that outlawed meeting I had Lazlo picked up when he surfaced, you couldn’t have such meetings and I knew that German major would be happy to hear that I had the great Victor Lazlo locked up like a caged animal.

“Whatever Rick and Ilsa did and from what Frenchie said Oscar the head waiter told him they had definitely gone under the sheets from his disheveled look and the blush on her face when Rick told Oscar to escort her home they were blowing town together. When Oscar told me that story a few days later I wondered about what had happened. What had made sour Rick decide to blow a good thing in Casablanca (my good thing too don’t forget). No question Ilsa was a beauty, an exceptional beauty but after the way she had left him high and dry in Paris I figured maybe a quick roll in the hay and then off alone. But you never know about beautiful women, sometimes they can be just as kinky as any whore or any low-rent tart. She didn’t look that way but maybe with a few drinks and an agenda of her own-like getting Lazlo out- alone- she took him around the world like that ex-flame Lisette had.      

“Somehow and I never could get him to tell me exactly what happened he had had an epiphany after that night some kind of turnaround. All he would say back then was the way the world was just then the troubles of three people, him, Ilsa and Lazlo weren’t worth a hill of beans compared what was going on. But whatever the source from then on he was on fire, was maybe thinking back to that old fight in Spain, thought about some payback for lost comrades, maybe what would happen if the Germans won, maybe he just didn’t like that Major Veidt and his arrogant ways closing up his café when the high rollers were coming in for their weekend beatings.

“So he gave Ilsa one story about how they should meet at the airport and blow town. She was all over that idea and had dropped any mention of Lazlo. He told me another. Talked me into a deal that when I thought about it later I should have figured was bullshit from minute number one. Confessed to me that he had the letters. Was blowing town with Ilsa and that was that. He said -let’s do this though. Let Lazlo out, let him get to the airport with the letters and grab him as an accessory for the courier murders. A feather in my cap was all I could think of. Would get that fucking Major Veidt off my back about picking up Lazlo and showing him the desert sights. When the deal went down though Rick was faking the whole thing. Maybe not about wanting to flee with Ilsa but about his attitude toward Lazlo. He had convinced me of his plan but when the deal went down I was the fall guy, well, one of the fall guys. That German major took the big fall when he tried to stop the plane to Lisbon as Lazlo and Ilsa got on the plane. Rick took him down without a murmur in one clean shot making me wonder how the Loyalists lost in Spain with a guy like that working with them.

         

“Needless to say when I was caught in a bind I stepped away from danger by refusing to arrest Rick. I went into the usual dodge-round up the usual suspects, double it up this time since a goddam German major was under the ground. I resolved the bind I was in pretty simply. I figured my days in Morocco were finished and so I saw the writing on the wall. I walked away with Rick (an action that I was successfully able to use in order to have my service time there count toward my retirement which I had many hassles over before I won). We made our way to Brazzaville with the dough Rick grabbed from Greenstreet when Rick sold him his interest in the café. I stayed there grabbing my graft until the end of the war and had worked various grifts with Rick until he went back to Europe a few months later where he joined up with the French resistance, worked with Samuel Beckett the exiled Irish playwright who was deeply into the organization from what I heard later. I heard from him a few times over the years before he passed away a few years ago. I guess Casablanca was in his blood because after the war he ran the Café Casablanca in New York City for some thirty years before he gave it up to retire. But what a guy that Rick was, giving up that luscious piece for unsung glory underground in France. Making that big gesture for love. Yeah, the last of the pre-war romantics.

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