As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –George Braques

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –George Braques 

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100^th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100^th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.

Poets’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Poets Take A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath    

By Lenny Lynch

I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20^th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios. 

I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.         

Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding,  would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –George Braques

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –George Braques 

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100^th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100^th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.

Poets’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Poets Take A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath    

By Lenny Lynch

I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20^th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios. 

I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.         

Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding,  would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.

TD ORIGINALS

The Resistance Before the #Resistance

COMMENTS

L.A. Resistance Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

It was a watershed year in American history. In 1968, protests and marches erupted almost daily; riots broke out across the United States; the Fair Housing Act was signed into law; Richard Nixon was elected president; and the back-to-back assassinations of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy threatened to tear the country apart. The Vietnam War, which had been simmering for more than a decade, suffered its highest body count on record.

Today, the U.S. military relies on a volunteer army to fight its forever wars. But in the 1960s, you could get a draft deferral only if you were married, had children, were a registered college student or had a medical condition that precluded you from service. The Resistance was a local organization based in Los Angeles whose mission was to stop the war though dedicated, nonviolent noncooperation with the federal Selective Service System. Members turned in their draft cards in protest, but their dissent came at a heavy price; some were fined up to $10,000 or sentenced up to five years in prison.

“We Won’t Go: the Los Angeles Resistance, Vietnam and the Draft,” an exhibit of The Resistance archives on display from June 22 to Aug. 19 at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Getty Gallery, explores these young men’s commitment to social justice. The collection features posters, leaflets and legal documents created by the Peace Press, along with newspaper clippings, draft cards, videos, and images by photographer Charles Brittin.

“Having the Resistance archives here [is] significant as they document their activities during an important time in our political history,” said Ani Boyadjian, research and special collections manager at the Central Library. “They were answering Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for a Vietnam summer by creating a movement of nonviolent draft resistance with the aim of ending the war.”

Bob Zaugh, one of the original members of the Resistance, graduated from Gardena High School in 1962 and promptly registered with the Selective Service. “The war in Vietnam wasn’t heating up yet, but I didn’t want to be drafted. So I took a 2S,” he said.

Zaugh enrolled at El Camino College, and like so many other students his age, enjoyed the security of a college deferment.

In the summer of 1967, the war intensified and riots broke out in Los Angeles. Concerned about the deadly conflict and an impending draft, the political science major from Torrance attended a speech on the UCLA campus. The speaker was David Harris, the student body president at Stanford University.

“Everything changed after hearing his electrifying speech,” said Zaugh. “That’s when I got in involved with The Resistance. I was given a deferment while poor people and people of color didn’t have that privilege.”

Zaugh dropped out of school and turned in his draft card. From 1967 to 1968, the Los Angeles Resistance held peaceful protests outside the Selective Service offices in Westwood, where busloads of young men were inducted into the military. Vietnam was not their father’s war.

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In 1967, Zaugh began working for the Peace Press, a political collective backed by founder and UCLA graduate student Jerry Palmer. “The sentiment in the country at the time was overwhelmingly pro-war, which made us very unpopular,” said Zaugh. “We had to teach ourselves how to print because nobody else would print our literature.”

Booted by landlords unsympathetic to their cause, and hounded by the FBI and CIA, the Peace Press relocated several times over the course of its 20-year existence from 1967 to 1987.

The ultimate objective of the Resistance was not only to end the war but the draft itself. Draft card turn-ins were held twice in 1967 and 1968. “We also refused inductions and physicals,” said Zaugh. These acts ranged from felonies to federal offenses; resisters eventually had to appear in court, many without attorneys. One of Zaugh’s friends was given three years in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, while another was subjected to solitary confinement.

Even Harris was indicted. Convicted of draft evasion, he served 15 months in federal prison in 1969. When Zaugh had his day in court, he decided to represent himself despite his hatred for public speaking. Luckily, he found an ally in federal Justice Harry Pregerson, a liberal former Marine and veteran of the battle of Okinawa in World War II. Said Zaugh, “He thought my argument was terrible, told me I was going to lose and had me acquitted.”

Zaugh said he and his fellow members of the Resistance felt it was their responsibility to let the public know what their government was doing in Vietnam. “We wanted people to pay attention to our foreign policy and what we could do about it,” he said.

Eventually, the powers that be realized the war was unwinnable.

“The Resistance was a very potent organization,” noted Zaugh. “The government did its best to keep us out of the public eye and keep stats on the number of men who were breaking the Selective Service laws under wraps.”

As many as 206,000 people were reported delinquent during the entire war period, according to the Antiwar and Radical History Project. Fewer than 9,000 out of 209,517 accused draft offenders were convicted.

In 1977, realizing the draft resisters were too numerous to imprison, President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to those who fled abroad, allowing them to return to the United States.

Since the war’s conclusion, Zaugh has continued his involvement in social activism, peacefully protesting the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in Avila Beach and Gary Tyler’s four-decade incarceration in Angola, La. Zaugh also spent 13 years working for “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, a loyal Peace Press customer, at his Bongo Comics Group.

PHOTO ESSAY | 6 photosThe Resistance Before the #Resistance

Liesl Bradner

Reviewer

Liesl Bradner is a Los Angeles-based journalist covering the arts, culture and history for the past 15 years. She has been a book reviewer for Truthdig since 2014. The Pennsylvania native graduated from Florida State University after studying English literature at Cambridge University. Soon after a stint at the Orlando Sentinel, she landed at the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, The Guardian, Variety, and World War II and military history magazines. She has also contributed essays for Taschen books' “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and “Matthew Weiner's Mad Men.” A member of the West Los Angeles Veterans Home Support Foundation, Bradner is currently co-authoring the upcoming book “Snapdragon: The WWII Exploits of Darby’s Ranger and Combat Photographer Phil Stern,” to be published in spring 2018.

IN THIS ARTICLE:

antiwar and radical history project charles brittin draft cards fair housing act gary tylerjimmy carter rfk richard nixon the los angeles resistance the peace press vietnam

COMMENTS

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –

As The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –

By Seth Garth

A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100^th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100^th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.

Poets’ Corner-In The Aftermath Of World War I- Poets Take A Stab At Visually Understanding A Broken World After the Bloodbath    

By Lenny Lynch

I don’t know that much about the Dada movement that swept through Europe in the early part of the 20^th century in response to the creation of modern industrial society that was going full steam and the modern industrial scale death and destruction such mass scale techniques brought upon this good green earth by World War I. (Foreshadowed it is agreed by the industrial carnage at places like Cold Harbor in the American Civil War, the butchery of the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent river of blood by its own rulers of the Paris Commune and the Boer War.) The war to end all wars which came up quite short of that goal but did decimate the flower of the European youth, including vast swaths of the working class. Such massive blood-lettings for a precious few inches of soil like at the Battle of the Somme took humankind back more than a few steps when the nightmare ended-for a while with the Armistice on November 11, 1918. An event which in observing its centennial every serious artist should consider putting to the paint. And every military veteran to take heart including the descendants of those artists who laid down their heads in those muddy wretched trenches. Should reclaim the idea behind Armistice Day from the militarists who could learn no lessons except up the kill and fields of fire ratios. 

I don’t know much but this space over this centennial year of the last year of the bloody war, the armistice year 1918 which stopped the bloodletting will explore that interesting art movement which reflected the times, the bloody times. First up to step up George Groz, step up and show your stuff, show how you see the blood-lusted world after four years of burning up the fields of sweet earth Europe making acres of white-crossed places where the sullen, jaded, mocked, buried youth of Europe caught shells and breezes. Take one look Republican Automatons. Look at the urban environment, look at those tall buildings dwarfing mere mortal man and woman, taking the measure of all, making them think, the thinking ones about having to run, run hard away from what they had built, about fear fretting that to continue would bury men and women without names, without honor either.         

Look too at honor denied, look at the handless hand, the legless leg, the good German flag, the Kaiser’s bloody medal, hard against the urban sky. The shaky republic, the republic without honor, shades of the murders of the honest revolutionary Liebknecht walking across Potsdam Plaza to go say no, no to the war budget and grab a hallowed cell the only place for a man of the people in those hard times and gallant Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, mixed in with thoughts of renegade burned out soldiers ready for anything. Weimar, weak-kneed and bleeding,  would shake and one George Groz would know that, would draw this picture that would tell the real story of why there was a Dada-da-da-da-da movement to chronicle the times if not to fight on the barricades against that beast from which we had to run.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- *On The Death Of The "Old Man"- James P. Cannon's Political Obituary For Leon Trotsky

Click on title to link to American Socialist Workers Party founder and Leon Trotsky co-thinker James P. Cannon's appreciation of the life of Trotsky at a memorial meeting held in New York City in 1940 immediately after the assassination of Trotsky by a Stalinist agent.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- ***From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-On The Anniversary Year Of The Defeat Of The Spanish Revolution-"The Lessons Of Spain:The Last Warning"

Click on title to link to Leon Trotsky's seminal article on Spain written in 1937, "The Lessons Of Spain: The Last Warning". This should be read in conjunction with today's other entry on the POUM by the International Communist League (and link to Andy Durgan's POUM defensist article).

Markin commentary:

If the old military cliche about starting off a new war with the thinking of the last war in mind has any positive application it should apply to the lessons of the defeat of the Spanish revolution. In one of those ironies of history that are always slapping us in the face(and here I am thinking primarily of we Marxists) has any application Spain represents for the Western leftist militant labor movement, arguably, the last serious effort to, in its own name, struggle for state power. Hence, the lesson of Spain are the starting point for our present tasks. Dismiss Trotsky's analysis at your peril.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/spain01.htm

Markin on the POUM


As a look at the archives of this blog will testify to, I have been interested, seriously interested, in drawing the lessons of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s since childhood. As many of the blog entries will also testify to as well, I have probably spend more time, with the exception of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Paris Commune of 1871, thinking through the problems of that struggle in Spain than any others. Why? Well, as not less than of an authority than the great Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky has pointed out, the situation in Spain during the 1930s posed the question of the creation of the second workers state point blank. In short, the Spanish working class was class conscious enough, Trotsky would argue more than the Russian working class of 1917, to carry out this task. I believed that proposition, in a much less sophisticated form than Trotsky’s, to be sure, well before I read his views on the situation. Why did it fail?

Obviously, depending on the point of view presented (or ax to grind) there are a million possible subjective and objective reasons that can be given for the failure. Some, such as the general European situation, the perfidious role of the Western democracies, the shortcomings of the various bourgeois governments are examples of situations that I had believed at one time to be the prime reasons. However, since I have come of political age, in short, have gone beyond the traditional liberal explanations for the failure in Spain I have looked elsewhere for an explanation.

That elsewhere hinged more on the role that the various working class organizations and their policies than the objective world situation or other factors that have been used to argue the impossibility of success. Again, some organizations came up short. For a long time I followed the reasoning, in a general sense at least, of Trotsky’s dictum, repeatedly argued out all through the 1930s, about the crisis of revolutionary leadership. With this proviso- for a long time, a very long time I absolved the POUM (Party Of Marxist Unification in English) and the Nin/Andrade leadership from political responsibility for the debacle, especially in Catalonia. I was more than happy to blame the Stalinists (blameworthy in the end on other grounds, without question), the vacillations of the Social Democrats (ditto the Stalinists) and the theoretical idiocies of the Anarchists. But not the POUM, after all they were the most honest revolutionaries in Spain (along with, perhaps, the Friends of Durritti). Honest I still believe they were but revolutionary in the Bolshevik sense. Hell, no.

The leading cause of that long time absolution of the POUM, initially in any case came from my reading of George Orwell’s “Homage To Catalonia”. Orwell found himself in a POUM military unit and spent much of his time in Spain before being wounded with that unit, as well around POUM organizations. Hey, they were fighting Franco, right? They had their own militias, right? That was enough for me for a while. But then the fatal mistake occurred many years ago. I read Trotsky’s work on Spain in the 1930s, “The Spanish Revolution, 1931-39, and, more importantly, the Trotsky/Nin correspondence in the appendix. No one who truly reads those documents and looks at the real POUM actions (including that left/right unification with friend Maurin to form the POUM in 1935) will ever be the same after. That is where every mistake that the POUM made becomes a veritable indictment against them.

Okay, so I got ‘religion’ on the POUM. So, as the linked article points out, why then, and now did serious leftist militants alibi this group. Well, read the article. But, bear this in mind, if those who defended the POUM and Nin/Andrade then, and now, are right that means that, subjectively they believe that Spain could not be a workers state in the 1930’s. That same subjectivity has led to their view of the Russian October revolution of 1917 as a failed experiment as well. But, my friends, such reasoning leaves only this conclusion. Outside the short-lived Paris Commune we have to go back to the revolutions of 1848 for our models of what is possible for the modern international working class to do. If that is the case then we better start thinking about a possibility that Trotsky pointed to in the 1930s- the working class may be organically incapable of ruling in its own name. As an orthodox Marxist I cringe at that notion. Better this- abandon this abject defense of the POUM and accept that, honest party that it may have been, however, in the final analysis it was a roadblock to socialist revolution in Spain.

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paul Henreid And Lizabeth Scott’s “Stolen Face” (1952)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paul Henreid And Lizabeth Scott’s “Stolen Face” (1952)

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

Stolen Face, starring Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott, Hammer Productions, 1952

I am now deep into my retro-reviews of the classic Hammer Productions film noir in which an American producer contracted with that organization to do a series of such efforts using known, although maybe fading, film stars backed by English character actors to do the whole thing on the cheap. My whole operation started with a review of the film Terror Street (distributed in Britain as 36 Hours) and subsequently another entry The Black Glove (distributed in Britain as Face The Music probably a better title since the plot involved a well-known trumpet player turning from searching for that high white note everybody in his profession is looking for to amateur private detective once a lady friend is murdered and he looked for all the world like the natural fall guy to take the big step-off for it) I noted that long time readers of this space know, or should be presumed to know, of my long-standing love affair with film noir. Since any attentive reader will note this is my fifth such review of B-film noirs and hence proof positive that I am now in deep and that I still have the bug.

I mentioned in that review some of the details of my introduction to the classic age of film noir in this country in the age of black and white film in the 1940s and 1950s when I would sneak over to the now long gone and replaced by condos Strand Theater in growing up town North Adamsville and spent a long double feature Saturday afternoon watching complete with a stretched out bag of popcorn (or I think it is safe to say it now since the statute of limitation on the “crime” must surely have passed snuck in candy bars bought at Harold’s Variety Store on the way to the theater). I would watch some then current production from Hollywood or some throwback from the 1940s which Mister Cadger, the affable owner who readily saw that I was an aficionado who would pepper him with questions about when such and such a noir was to be featured would let me sneak in for kid’s ticket prices long after I reached the adult price stage at twelve I think it was, would show in retrospective to cut down on expenses in tough times by avoiding having to pay for first –run movies all the time. (And once told me to my embarrassment that he made more money on the re-runs than first runs and even more money on the captive audience buying popcorn and candy bars-I wonder if he knew my candy bar scam.)

That is where the bulk of my noir experiences were formed but I should mention in passing as well that on infrequent occasions I would attend a nighttime showing (paying full price after age twelve since parents were presumed to have the money to spring  for full prices) with my parents if my strict Irish Catholic mother (strict on the mortal sin punishment for what turned out to have been minor or venial sins after letting my older brothers, four, count them four, get away with murder and assorted acts of mayhem) thought the film passed the Legion of Decency standard that we had to stand up and take a yearly vow to uphold in church led by the priest exhorting to sin no more and I could under the plotline without fainting (or getting “aroused” by the fetching femmes).

Readers should be aware from prior series that when I found some run of films that had a similar background I would “run the table” on the efforts. Say a run of Raymond Chandler film adaptations of his Phillip Marlowe crime novels or Dashiell Hammett’s seemingly endless The Thin Man series. That “run the table” idea is the case with a recently obtained cache of British-centered 1950s film noirs put out by the Hammer Production Company as they tried to cash in on the popularity of the genre for the British market  That Terror Street mentioned at the beginning had been the first review in this series (each DVD by the way contains two films the second film Danger On The Wings in that DVD not worthy of review) and now the film under review under review the overblown if ominously titled Stolen Face  (distributed in England, Britain, Great Britain, United Kingdom or whatever that isle calls itself these Brexit days as unlike others in the series by the same title) is the fifth such effort. On the basis of these six viewings (remember one didn’t make the film noir aficionado cut so that tells you something right away) I will have to admit they are clearly B-productions none of them would make anything but a second or third tier rating.        

After all as mentioned before in that first review look what they were up against. For example who could forget up on that big screen for all the candid world to see a sadder but wiser seen it all, heard it all Humphrey Bogart at the end of The Maltese Falcon telling all who would listen that he, he Sam Spade, no stranger to the seamy side and cutting corners life, had had to send femme fatale Mary Astor his snow white flame over, sent her to the big step-off once she spilled too much blood, left too long a trail of corpses, for the stuff of dreams over some damn bird. Or cleft-chinned barrel-chested Robert Mitchum keeping himself out of trouble in some dink town as a respectable citizen including snagging a girl next door sweetie but knowing he was doomed, out of luck, and had had to cash his check for his seedy past taking a few odd bullets from his former femme fatale trigger-happy girlfriend Jane Greer once she knew he had double-crossed her to the coppers in Out Of The Past.

Ditto watching the horror on smart guy gangster Eddie Mars face after being outsmarted because he had sent a small time grafter to his doom when prime private detective Phillip Marlowe, spending the whole film trying to do the right thing for an old man with a couple of wild daughters, ordered him out the door to face the rooty-toot-toot of his own gunsels who expected Marlowe to be coming out in The Big Sleep. How about song and dance man Dick Powell turning Raymond Chandler private eye helping big galoot Moose Malone trying to find his Velma and getting nothing but grief and a few stray conks on the head chasing Claire Trevor down when she didn’t want to be found having moved uptown with the swells in Murder, My Sweet. Or finally, tall lanky and deceptive private eye Dane Jones chasing an elusive black box ready to explode the world being transported across Europe by evil incarnate if gorgeous Marla Sands in European Express. Those were some of the beautiful and still beautiful classics whose lines you can almost hear anytime you mention the words film noir. The entries in this series are definitively not ones with memorable lines or plots.  

In the old days before I retired I always liked to sketch out a film’s plotline to give the reader the “skinny” on what the action was so that he or she could see where I was leading them. I will continue that old tradition here to make my point about the lesser production values of the Hammer products. Doctor Ritter, played by Paul Henreid last seen in this space leaving on the last plane to Lisbon as the Czech liberation fighter Victor Lazlo with wife Ilsa on his arm to fight the night-takers another day after going mano a mano for her affections with Rick of Rick’s Café Amercian in the classic Casablanca, is a highly-skilled high end if worn out plastic surgeon who meets Alice, played by Lizabeth Scott last seen in this space as the mysterious girlfriend of an AWOL that Humphrey Bogart is looking for in Dead Reckoning, is a worn out concert pianist on holiday as they say in Merry Olde England. The pair had a short tempestuous affair and made big future plans until Alice blew out of town leaving no forwarding address.          

That abandonment by sweet smoky-voiced Alice kind of made the good doctor lose his moorings, go off the deep end once she informed him by phone that she was engaged to be married and had been when they had that tempestuous affair. Heartbroken the good doctor carried on but anyone could see he was off his game. No question. In a crazy minute he decided that we would “help” a young woman criminal, Lily, whose face had been disfigured during the war by giving her a make-over (and assuming against all reason that such a change would change this tramp’s whoring, thieving, conning ways). And guess what the change-over turned that dead-beat criminal into the spitting image of, ah, Alice, dear sweet Alice. Not only did he do that but the lonely doctor married the wench.            

Wrong, way wrong since no sooner had she gotten her new sexy 1940s glamour face ala Lizabeth Scott but that tramp went back to her whoring, thieving, conning ways. The doctor tried to bail out but after confessing to Alice his dirty deed, no soap, our little crook knew the gravy train she had grabbed onto and was not letting go. But you know since time immemorial, at least cinema time immemorial- crime does not pay- that the bad must take that big step-off. Here’s how it played out and you had better bring a scorecard. The good doctor tired of the craziness with Lilly/Lizabeth Scott blew town, London town, okay. This Lilly/Lizabeth Scott followed him on said train getting drunk and crazy along the way. Meanwhile Alice/Lizabeth Scott fearing the worse heads for that same show-down train. Doc and Lilly/ Lizabeth Scott have a falling out in which dear sweet Lilly accidently falls off the train. Leaving Doc and Alice/Lizabeth Scott to walk off together and a happy future.        

This one almost got that Wings of Danger treatment mentioned above, a non-review, but with actors like Paul Henreid and two, count them, two Lizabeth Scotts and a scorecard I figured what the hell.      

“On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -James P. Cannon (Socialist Workers Party, U.S.)-A Statement on the War-December 21, 1941

Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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James P. Cannon (Socialist Workers Party, U.S.)-A Statement on the War-December 21, 1941

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Written: 1941
Source: Fourth International, New York, Volume III, No. 1, January 1942, pages 3-4.
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters
Copyleft: James P. Cannon (www.marx.org) 2005. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

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December 22, 1941

The considerations which determined our attitude toward the war up to the out break of hostilities between the United States and the Axis powers retain their validity in the new situation.

We considered the war upon the part of all the capitalist powers involved—Germany and France, Italy and Great Britain — as an imperialist war.

This characterization of the war was determined for us by the character of the state powers involved in it. They were all capitalist states in the epoch of imperialism; themselves imperialist—oppressing other nations or peoples—or satellites of imperialist powers. The extension of the war to the Pacific and the formal entry of the United States and Japan change nothing in this basic analysis.

Following Lenin, it made no difference to us which imperialist bandit fired the first shot; every imperialist power has for a quarter of a century been “attacking” every other imperialist power by economic and political means; the resort to arms is but the culmination of this process, which will continue as long as capitalism endures.

This characterization of the war does not apply to the war of the Soviet Union against German imperialism. We make a fundamental distinction between the Soviet Union and its “democratic” allies. We defend the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a workers’ state, although degenerated under the totalitarian-political rule of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Only traitors can deny support to the Soviet workers’ state in its war against fascist Germany. To defend the Soviet Union, in spite of Stalin and against Stalin, to defend the nationalized property established by the October revolution. That is a progressive war.

The war of China against Japan we likewise characterize as a progressive war. We support China. China is a colonial country, battling for national independence against an imperialist power. A victory for China would be a tremendous blow against all imperialism, inspiring all colonial peoples to throw off the imperialist yoke. The reactionary regime of Chiang Kai-shek, subservient to the “democracies,” has hampered China’s ability to conduct a bold war for independence; but that does not alter for us the essential fact that China is an oppressed nation fighting against an imperialist oppressor. We are proud of the fact that the Fourth Internationalists of China are fighting in the front ranks against Japanese imperialism.

None of the reasons which oblige us to support the Soviet Union and China against their enemies can be said to apply to France or Britain. These imperialist “democracies” entered the war to maintain their lordship over the hundreds of millions of subject peoples in the British and French empires; to defend these “democracies” means to defend their oppression of the masses of Africa and Asia, Above all it means to defend the decaying capitalist social order. We do not defend that, either in Italy and Germany, or in France and Britain—or in the United States.

The Marxist analysis which determined our attitude toward the war up to December 8, 1941 [i.e. up to the Pearl Harbor raid] continues to determine our attitude now. We were internationalists before December 8; we still are. We believe that the most fundamental bond of loyalty of all the workers of the world is the bond of international solidarity of the workers against their exploiters. We cannot assume the slightest responsibility for this war. No imperialist regime can conduct a just war. We cannot support it for one moment.

We are the most irreconcilable enemies of the fascist dictatorships of Germany and Italy and the military dictatorship of Japan. Our co-thinkers of the Fourth International in the Axis nations and the conquered countries are fighting and dying in the struggle to organize the coming revolutions against Hitler and Mussolini.

We are doing all in our power to speed those revolutions. But those ex-socialists, intellectuals and labor leaders, who in the name of “democracy” support the war of United States imperialism against its imperialist foes and rivals, far from aiding the German and Italian anti-fascists, only hamper their work and betray their struggle. The Allied imperialists, as every German worker knows, aim to impose a second and worse Versailles; the fear of that is Hitler’s greatest asset in keeping the masses of Germany in subjection. The fear of the foreign yoke holds back the development of the German revolution against Hitler.

Our program to aid the German masses to overthrow Hitler demands, first of all, that they be guaranteed against a second Versailles. When the people of Germany can feel assured that military defeat will not be followed by the destruction of Germany’s economic power and the imposition of unbearable burdens by the victors, Hitler will be overthrown from within Germany. But such guarantees against a second Versailles cannot be given by Germany’s imperialist foes; nor, if given, would they be accepted by the German people. Wilson’s 14 points are still remembered in Germany, and his promise that the United States was conducting war against the Kaiser and not against the German people. Yet the victors’ peace, and the way in which the victors “organized” the world from 1918 to 1933, constituted war against the German people. The German people will not accept any new promises from those who made that peace and conducted that war.

In the midst of the war against Hitler, it is necessary to extend the hand of fraternity to the German people. This can be done honestly and convincingly only by a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. We advocate the Workers’ and Farmers’ Government. Such a government, and only such a government, can conduct a war against Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado in cooperation with the oppressed peoples of Germany, Italy and Japan. Our program against Hitlerism and for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government is today the program of only a small minority. The great majority actively or passively supports the war program of the Roosevelt administration. As a minority we must submit to that majority in action. We do not sabotage the war or obstruct the military forces in any way. The Trotskyists go with their generation into the armed forces. We abide by the decisions of the majority. But we retain our opinions and insist on our right to express them.

Our aim is to convince the majority that our program is the only one which can put an end to war, fascism and economic convulsions. In this process of education the terrible facts speak loudly for our contention. Twice in twenty-five years world wars have wrought destruction. The instigators and leaders of those wars do not offer, and cannot offer, a plausible promise that a third, fourth and fifth world war will not follow if they and their social system remain dominant. Capitalism can offer no prospect but the slaughter of millions and the destruction of civilization. Only socialism can save humanity from this abyss. This is the truth. As the terrible war unfolds, this truth will be recognized by tens of millions who will not hear us now. The war-tortured masses will adopt our program and liberate the people of all countries from war and fascism. In this dark hour we clearly see the socialist future and prepare the way for it. Against the mad chorus of national hatreds we advance once more the old slogan of socialist internationalism: Workers of the World Unite!

New York, December 22, 1941