On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The Fourth International's Leon Sedov

Click on the title to link to the "In Defense Of Marxism" Web site for an online article honoring Leon Sedov (Leon Trotsky's son and political collaborator) on the 70th anniversary (2008) of his murder

On The 100^th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-


By Frank Jackman

History in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event, person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they were.

(By the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution” these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask your parents, or grandparents.)

Okay here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional. Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918 after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and asking why. 

The big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence. What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their “heroic” and last moment.  


Instead we have a still sad 100^th anniversary of the assassination of two great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me.  

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Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.


Markin comment;

I was looking for Leon Trotsky's tribute to his fallen son, "Leon Sedov", but could not find it on the Trotsky Internet site. I have read it and wanted to put it in this space. I will continue to look for it becasue it is a very good document on the relationship between a political father and a political son.

On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor Italian Communist Leader Antonio Gramsci -The conquest of the state (1919)

Markin comment:

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*******
Antonio Gramsci 1919

The conquest of the state


Source: L'Ordine Nuovo, 12 July 1919;
Translated: by Michael Carney.

Capitalist concentration, determined by the mode of production, produces a corresponding concentration of working human masses. In this fact it is necessary to seek the origin of all of the revolutionary theses of Marxism, it is necessary to seek the conditions of the new proletarian culture, the capitalist disorder generated by free competition and by the class struggle.

In the sphere of general capitalist activity, even the worker operates on the plane of free competition, is a citizen-individual. But the starting conditions of the struggle are not equal for all, at the same time: the existence of private property places the social minority in conditions of privilege, makes the struggle unequal. The worker is continually exposed to the most murderous risks: his own basic life, his culture, the life and future of his family are exposed to the rough blows of variations in the labour market. The worker tries then to escape the sphere of competition and individualism. The principle of association and solidarity becomes essential to the working class, changes the psychology and customs of the workers and peasants. Institutions and organs grow in which this principle is made flesh; on the basis of these begins the process of historical development which leads to communism in the means of production and exchange.

Association can and must be taken as the essential fact of the proletarian revolution. Dependent on this historical tendency in the period preceding this one (which we may call the period of the First and Second Internationals or the period of recruitment) there were formed and developed the socialist parties and the trade unions.

The development of these proletarian institutions and of all of the proletarian movement in general were not, however, autonomous, did not obey laws immanent in life and in the historical experience of the exploited working class. The laws of history were dictated by the proprietorial class organized in the state. The state has always been the protagonist of history, because in its organs it gathers the power of the proprietorial class, in the state the proprietorial class disciplines itself and forms itself in unity, above the infighting and blows of competition, to maintain intact the condition of privilege in the supreme phase of competition itself: the class struggle for power, for pre-eminence in the direction and disciplining of society.

In this period the proletarian movement was only a function of capitalist free competition. The proletarian institutions had to assume a form not by internal law, but by external law, under the formidable pressure of circumstances and coercion due to capitalist competition. This was the origin of the intimate conflicts, the deviations, the wobbles, the compromises which characterize the whole period of life of the proletarian movement preceding the present, and which culminated in the bankruptcy of the Second International.

Some tendencies of the proletarian and socialist movement had explicitly posed as the essential deed of the revolution the organization of workers by trade, and on this basis established their propaganda and their action. The syndicalist movement appeared, for a moment, to be the true interpreter of Marxism, the true interpreter of the truth.

The error of syndicalism consists of this: in assuming as a permanent fact, as the ongoing form of association, the trade union with its present form and functions, which are imposed and not proposed, and thus cannot have a constant direction capable of development. Syndicalism, which presented itself as initiator of a libertarian “spontaneous” tradition, has been in truth one of the many disguises of the abstract and Jacobin spirit.

From this came the errors in the syndicalist tendency, which did not succeed in replacing the Socialist Party in the task of educating the working class to revolution. The workers and peasants felt that, for the whole period in which the working class and the democratic-parliamentary state dictated the laws of history, every attempt to escape from the sphere of these laws was vain and ridiculous. It is certain that in the general configuration assumed by society with industrial production, every man can actively participate in life and modify his surroundings only in so far as he operates as an individual citizen, member of the democratic parliamentary state. The liberal experience is not in vain and cannot be superseded without having gone through it. The apoliticalness of the apolitical was only a degeneration of politics: negating and fighting the state is a political deed just as much as engaging in the general historical activity which unites itself in parliament and the communes, the popular institutions of the state. The quality of the political deed varies: the syndicalists work outside reality, and thus their politics was fundamentally mistaken; the parliamentary socialists worked close up to things, they could make mistakes (they made many serious errors) but they were not wrong in the sense of their action and thus triumphed in the “competition”: the grand masses, those which by their intervention objectively modify social relations, organized themselves around the Socialist Party. Regardless of all the errors and defects, the party succeeded, in the final analysis, in its mission: to make the proletariat which before was nothing become something, to give to the liberation movement a direct and vital sense which corresponded, in general terms, to the process of historical development of human society.

The most serious error of the socialist movement has been of a similar nature to that of the syndicalists. Participating in the general activity of human society in the state, the socialists forgot that their position should remain essentially one of criticism, of antithesis. They allowed themselves to be absorbed by reality, not dominate it.

The Marxist communists should characterize themselves by a psychology which we may call “maieutic” (a method of questioning the interlocutor to help them throw light on their thought). Their action is not abandonment to the course of events determined by the laws of bourgeois competition, but critical waiting. History is a continuous making of itself, and thus essentially unpredictable. But this does not mean that “all” is unpredictable in the making of history, that history is the domain of the arbitrary and of the irresponsible caprice. History is together freedom and necessity. The institutions, in whose development and in whose activity history is made flesh, have emerged and continue because they have a task and a mission to realize. There have emerged and developed objective conditions of production of material goods and of spiritual consciousness of men. If these objective conditions, which by their mechanical nature are almost mathematically commensurate, change, the level of consciousness of men changes; the social configuration transforms, the traditional institutions are impoverished, they are adequate for their task, they become obstructive and murderous. If in the making of history intelligence were incapable of shaking a rhythm, of establishing a process, the life of civilization would be impossible; political genius is recognized precisely by this capacity to master the greatest possible number of concrete terms necessary and sufficient to fix a process of development and by the capacity then to anticipate the near and far future and on the line of this intuition set the activity of a state, risk the fortune of a people. In this sense, Karl Marx has been by a long way the greatest of contemporary political geniuses.

The socialists have, often supinely, recognized the historical reality produced by capitalist initiative; they have fallen into the error of the psychology of liberal economists: believing in the perpetuity of the institutions of the democratic state, in their fundamental perfection. According to them the form of the democratic institutions can be corrected, here and there touched up, but fundamentally must be respected. An example of this narrowly vainglorious psychology is given by the labyrinthine judgment of Filippo Turati, according to which the parliament is to the soviet as the city to the barbarian horde.

From this mistaken conception of historical becoming, from the long-standing practice of compromise and of a “cretinously” parliamentary tactic, is born today’s formula of the “conquest of the state.”

We are convinced, after the revolutionary experiences of Russia, Hungary and Germany, that the socialist state cannot form itself in the institutions of the capitalist state, but is a fundamentally new creation with respect to them, if not with respect to the history of the proletariat.

The institutions of the capitalist state are organized for the ends of free competition: it is not enough to change the personnel to send them in another direction. The socialist state is not yet communism, that is the instigation of the economic practice and custom of solidarity, but it is the state of transition which has the task of suppressing competition with the suppression of private property, of classes, of national economies: this task cannot be started by parliamentary democracy. The formula “conquest of the state” must be understood in this sense: the creation of a new type of state, generated by the experience of association of the proletarian class, and the substitution of this for the democratic-parliamentary state. And here we return to the starting point. We said that the institutions of the socialist and proletarian movement in the period preceding the present, did not develop autonomously, but as the result of the general configuration of human society dominated by the sovereign laws of capitalism. The war has upturned the strategic situation in the class struggle. The capitalists have lost pre-eminence: their freedom is limited; their power is annulled. Capitalist concentration has arrived at the greatest development allowed it, realizing the world monopoly of production and exchange. The corresponding concentration of the working masses has given an unheard of power to the revolutionary proletarian class. The traditional institutions of the movement have become incapable of containing such energy of revolutionary life. Their own form is insufficient for the disciplining of the forces which have been inserted into the conscious historical process. They are not dead. Born as a function of a free competition, they must continue to survive until the suppression of every residue of competition, until the complete expression of classes and parties, until the fusion of the national proletarian dictatorships in the Communist International. But alongside these there must arise and develop institutions of a new type, of a state type, which will precisely replace the private and public institutions of the democratic-parliamentary state. Institutions which replace the person of the capitalist in the administrative functions and in industrial power, and realize the autonomy of the producer in the factory; institutions capable of assuming the power of direction in all the functions inherent in the complex system of relations of production and exchange which link the divisions of a factory to each other, constituting the elementary economic unit, which link the various activities of agricultural industry, which through horizontal and vertical planning should form the harmonious edifice of the national and international economy, freed from the cumbersome and parasitical tyranny of private owners.

But drive and revolutionary enthusiasm have been more fervent in the proletariat of western Europe. But it appears to us that the lucid and exact understanding of the end is not accompanied by a similarly lucid and exact understanding of the appropriate means, at the present moment, for the reaching of the end itself. The conviction has thus taken root amongst the masses that the proletarian state is embodied in a system of councils of workers, peasants and soldiers. There is not yet established a tactical conception which objectively assures the creation of this state. It is thus necessary to create now a network of proletarian institutions, rooted in the consciousness of the grand masses, sure of the discipline and the permanent trust of the grand masses, in which the class of workers and peasants, in its totality, assumes a form rich in dynamism and possibilities of development. It is certain that today, in the actual conditions of proletarian organization, a mass movement is being established with a revolutionary character, the results will be consolidated in a purely formal correction of the democratic state, they will be resolved in an increase of the power of the Chamber of Deputies (through a constituent assembly) and in the assuming of power by sharp anticommunist socialists. The German and Austrian experiences should teach us something. The forces of the democratic state and of the capitalist class are still immense: there is no need to conceal that capitalism remains standing particularly through the efforts of its sycophants and its lackeys, and the makings of such rogues are certainly not gone.

The creation of the proletarian state is not, in short, the act of a miracle worker: it too is a making, it is a process of development. It presupposes preparatory work of organization and propaganda. It is necessary to give greater powers to the already existing proletarian factory institutions, make similar institutions develop in the villages, make certain that the men who form them are communists conscious of the revolutionary mission that the institution must adopt. Otherwise all our enthusiasm, all the faith of the working masses will not succeed in stopping the revolution taking place miserably in a new parliament of con artists, windbags and chancers, making new and more daring sacrifices necessary for the advent of the proletarian state.

On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-Honor The Three L's-From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg -A Call to the Workers of the World (November 1919)

Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht,
Klara Zetkin and Franz Mehring
A Call to the Workers of the World


(November 1919)


Written: Late November, 1918.
First Published: Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), November 25, 1918.
Translated: (from the German) by A. Lehrer.
Transcription/Markup: A. Lehrer/Brian Baggins.
Copyleft: Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2002, 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

PROLETARIANS! Men and Women of Labor! Comrades!

The revolution in Germany has come! The masses of the soldiers who for years were driven to slaughter for the sake of capitalistic profits; the masses of workers, who for four years were exploited, crushed, and starved, have revolted. Prussian militarism, that fearful tool of oppression, that scourge of humanity – lies broken on the ground. Its most noticeable representatives, and therewith the most noticeable of those guilty of this war, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince, have fled from the country. Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils have been formed everywhere.

Workers of all countries, we do not say that in Germany all power actually lies in the hands of the working people, that the complete triumph of the proletarian revolution has already been attained. There still sit in the government all those Socialists who in August, 1914, abandoned our most precious possession, the International, who for four years betrayed the German working class and the International.

But, workers of all countries, now the German proletarian himself speaks to you. We believe we have the right to appear before your forum in his name. From the first day of this war we endeavored to do our international duty by fighting that criminal government with all our power and branding it as the one really guilty of the war.

Now at this moment we are justified before history, before the International and before the German proletariat. The masses agree with us enthusiastically, constantly widening circles of the proletariat share the conviction that the hour has struck for a settlement with capitalistic class rule.

But this great task cannot be accomplished by the German proletariat alone; it can only fight and triumph by appealing to the solidarity of the proletarians of the whole world.

Comrades of the belligerent countries, we are aware of your situation. We know full well that your governments, now that they have won the victory, are dazzling the eyes of many strata of the people with the external brilliancy of their triumph. We know that they thus succeed through the success of the murdering in making its causes and aims forgotten.

But we also know that in your countries the proletariat made the most fearful sacrifices of flesh and blood, that it is weary of the dreadful butchery, that the proletarian is now returning to his home, and is finding want and misery there, while fortunes amounting to billions are heaped up in the hands of a few capitalists. He has recognized, and will continue to recognize, that your governments, too, have carried on the war for the sake of the big money bags. And he will further perceive that your governments, when they spoke of “justice and civilization” and of the “protection of small nations,” meant capitalist profits as surely as did ours when it talked about the “defence of home”; and that the peace of “justice” and of the “League of Nations” are but a part of the same base brigand that produced the peace of Brest-Litovsk. Here as well as there the same shameless lust for booty, the same desire for oppression, the same determination to exploit to the limit the brutal preponderance of murderous steel.

The Imperialism of all countries knows no “understanding,” it knows only one right – capital’s profits: it knows only one language – the sword: it knows only one method – violence. And if it is now talking in all countries, in yours as well ours, about the “League of Nations,” “disarmament,” “rights of small nations,” “self-determination of the peoples,” it is merely using the customary lying phrases of the rulers for the purpose of lulling to sleep the watchfulness of the proletariat.

Proletarians of all countries! This must be the last war! We owe that to the twelve million murdered victims, we owe that to our children, we owe that to humanity.

Europe has been ruined by this damnable slaughter. Twelve million bodies cover the grewsome scenes of this imperialistic crime. The flower of youth and the best man power of the peoples have been mowed down. Uncounted productive forces have been annihilated. Humanity is almost ready to bleed to death from the unexampled blood-letting of history. Victors and vanquished stand at the edge of the abyss. Humanity is threatened with famine, a stoppage of the entire mechanism of production, plagues, and degeneration.

The great criminals of this fearful anarchy, of this unchained chaos – the ruling classes – are not able to control their own creation. The beast of capital that conjured up the hell of the world war is incapable of banishing it, of restoring real order, of insuring bread and work, peace and civilization, justice and liberty, to tortured humanity.

What is being prepared by the ruling classes as peace and justice is only a new work of brutal force from which the hydra of oppression, hatred and fresh bloody wars raises its thousand heads.

Socialism alone is in a position to complete the great work of permanent peace, to heal the thousand wounds from which humanity is bleeding, to transform the plains of Europe, trampled down by the passage of the apocryphal horseman of war, into blossoming gardens, to conjure up ten productive forces for every one destroyed, to awaken all the physical and moral energies of humanity, and to replace hatred and dissension with internal solidarity, harmony, and respect for every human being.

If representatives of the proletarians of all countries could but clasp hands under the banner of Socialism for the purpose of making peace, then peace would be concluded in a few hours. Then there will be no disputed questions about the left bank of the Rhine, Mesopotamia, Egypt or colonies. Then there will be only one people: the toiling human beings of all races and tongues. Then there will be only one right: the equality of all men. Then there will be only one aim: prosperity and progress for everybody.

Humanity is facing the alternative: Dissolution and downfall in capitalist anarchy, or regeneration through the social revolution. The hour of fate has struck. If you believe in Socialism, it is now time to show it by deeds. If you are Socialists, now is the time to act.

Proletarians of all countries, if we now summon you for a common struggle it is not done for the sake of the German capitalists who, under the label of “German nation,” are trying to escape the consequences of their own crimes: it is being done for your sake as well as for ours. Remember that your victorious capitalists stand ready to suppress in blood our revolution, which they fear as they do their own. You yourselves have not become any freer through the “victory,” you have only become still more enslaved. If your ruling classes succeed in throttling the proletarian revolution in Germany, and in Russia, then they will turn against you with redoubled violence. Your capitalists hope that victory over us and over revolutionary Russia will give them the power to scourge you with a whip of scorpions.

Therefore the proletariat of Germany looks toward you in this hour. Germany is pregnant with the social revolution, but Socialism can only be realized by the proletariat of the world.

And therefore, we call to you: “Arise for the struggle! Arise for action! The time for empty manifestos, platonic resolutions, and high-sounding words is gone! The hour of action has struck for the International!” We ask you to elect Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils everywhere that will seize political power, and together with us, will restore peace.

Not Lloyd George and Poincare, not Sonnino, Wilson, and Ersberger or Scheidemann, must be allowed to make peace. Peace most he concluded under the waving banner of the Socialist world revolution.

Proletarians of all countries! We call upon you to complete the work of Socialist liberation, to give a human aspect to the disfigured world and to make true those words with which we often greeted each other in the old days and which we sang as we parted: “And the Internationale shall be the human race”.

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of The "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac- On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957) -Beat Poets' Corner- Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Populist Manifesto No.1"

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On The 100th Anniversary Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-*Political Journalist's Corner- John Reed On Karl Liebknecht-Honor The Three L's

Click on title to link to the John Reed Internet Archive's 1919 "The Revolutionary Age" article by John Reed about his remembrances of the martyred great German communist leader, Karl Liebknecht.

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

Come On All You Jacks And Jills-Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby’s “High Society” (1956)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

High Society, starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, with Jazzman Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and his All-Stars coming up and stealing the show-a few big scenes anyway, music and lyrics by legendary Tin Pan Alley composer Cole Porter, 1956

It is a little ironic that I am doing this assignment at the same time as my fellow writer here Sam Lowell just finished doing a short review of folk troubadour Bob Dylan’s tribute to Frank Sinatra, In The Shadow Of The Night from several years back. Ironic in the sense that those of us who came of age in the 1960s like Sam and me whatever else we may have disagreed on, no matter whether one took Sam’s hippie path or my more middle class career we almost universally rebelled against the music of our parents’ generation the Tin Pan Alley-derived stuff that got them through the Great Depression and World War II. And number one on their hit parade was “the Chairman of the Boards,” one Frank Sinatra just as Elvis was our growing up rock and roll hero and for some of us, not me, that folk minute hero Bob Dylan now covering one Frank Sinatra.    

All of this as prelude to talking about Mr. Sinatra in another of his musical performance films here. This time not about his Oscar-winning role as a wise-ass Army grunt in pre-World War II Hawaii in the film adaptation of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity, the madman “max daddy” junkie fixer man in the film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm or the eerily chilling role of presidential political assassin in Suddenly but as the odd-man out in a love triangle down in Mayfair 1950s Newport. In the 1950s Jazz Festival times not the old time summer watering hole of the ultra-rich robber barons who built the massive mansions back in the 19^th century but still quaint and high end Newport before the tourists swarmed in.

Frank definitely gets his shots at his first career, the singing that in the 1940s made all the bobby-soxers take off their bobby-socks and who knows what else if you go by the frenzy Elvis provoked in a later generation here in the musical/drama High Society.  Add in a word as well about the jazz for the Festival being hot as per Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong or off-stage like Dizzy, Charlie, the Duke who blew away a 1954 crowd of younger upstart Mayfair swells and almost caused a riot when his max daddy sax player hit the high white note.

But enough of that Frank sex stuff, Satchmo blowing big rings around staid Newport or even Mister Cole Porter from up in Tin Pan Alley land doing his popular music American Songbook thing because musical, musical comedy if you will although the gags are strictly from nowhere, or not this is about romance, romances. And that seems about right if you figure that Grace Kelly is the protagonist who gets all the attention. I might as well say here in the interest of transparency, or drooling, take your pick, that for a while now I have been adding this too every Grace Kelly pic review. After seeing her here, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and High Noon I now understand why Prince Rainer, her husband, not a man given to public display of emotion had wept openly at her funeral when she passed away in that awful car accident.

To the film.  Here’s how the Mayfair swells go about their private business in a not so private way since half the world knows what it knows. Tracy, played by gracious Grace, now happily divorced from low-ball achiever/mere musician/composer and not classical like Mozart or Bach but jazz if you can believe that, and not a big time financial operator like her father, three name C.K. Dexter, played by another crooner from the 1940s Bing Crosby, is ready to do the deed again with a real self-starter, a guy who worked his way up the food chain and not some sportsman scion of the wealthy set like old C.K. (By the way that divorce business not then, or now for that matter, not well-disposed of by the money set as it confuses wealth transfer and other technical problems.)

That little fact, that underachiever and ne’er-do-well part sets the tone for what will be become a “battle of wills” between Grace and Bing who as you know already to my mind is still rightly in love with her. Enter Mike Connor, an world wary everyman regular guy played Frank, not at this moment like in other entry moments in the film ready to burst into song either alone or with Bing, but as a reporter who is out to get the low-down on the rich and famous for a sleaze bag publishing outfit. To get any juicy pics worldly wise Liz, played by Celeste Holms, who is half in love with Mike but letting him  out on a long leash, tags along for the ride.         

Scene set the rest of the film, interrupted by song and more importantly by savior Satchmo and his All-Stars doing some great old time jazz to make the heart flutter is a breeze through. (Please remember Satchmo and his gang and Bing are there for the Newport Jazz Festival and are merely “crashing” the wedding festivities.) Tracy and C.K. cat and mouse it while the intended groom is in the dark, clueless and moreover happy about that fact until the hammer comes down. The happy hammer coming down at the pre-nuptial wedding digs where Tracy gets blasted and runs off with… No, not C.K. things are too 1950s chaste for that but with a smitten Mike (to work partner Liz’ chagrin). That short intoxicated fling over the next morning the wedding is to be called off once that intended groom takes the high moral ground and foolishly (oops) doesn’t take Tracy in all his arms and carry her off. Wait. You cannot disappoint Mayfair swell guests come for a wedding any more than any other wedding. So Tracy and Mike, no, C.K. retie the knot. Who knows how long that rematch will last with these two wild kids.       

If this all sounds familiar, sounds like a film review plot that I have done before it is. This is just a musical remake of the classic version of the story in black and white The Philadelphia Story with Kate Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart in the respective roles. Cary naturally in Bing’s place. That’s the go-to film unless like Prince Rainer you need to see Grace when she was in her prime. And Satchmo in high dungeon.     

***In The Time Of The Time Of An Outlaw Country Music Moment- The Belfast Cowboy Rides Again Van Morrison’s “Pay The Devil”

***In The Time Of The Time Of An Outlaw Country Music Moment- The Belfast Cowboy Rides Again Van Morrison’s “Pay The Devil”

A YouTube film clip of Van Morrison performing his pre-Belfast Cowboy Into The Mystic.

CD Review


Seth Garth

Pay The Devil, Van Morrison, Exile Productions, 2006


[One of the enduring things about the older writers here, the ones who were “present at the creation” of this publication in its hard copy days back in the mid-1970s when there was still something of an afterglow alive, if not well, from their 1960s countercultural is their love of music. Mainly back in that self-same 1960s rock and roll which most of them were also “present at the creation” at although it was left to older brothers and sister to partake of the full “jail-break” as Sam Lowell liked to call the early uprising. Of course rock and roll has gone through many incarnations, has suffered as has my favored music, jazz, its share of blossom times and barren periods. When that has happened in jazz I tend to go back to the blues, or better rhythm and blues from which a lot of modern jazz had emerged from to break out again.       

When Seth Garth, who knows more about music, about the American songbook that all the rest of his old-time cohort combined hits a dry spot he looks, feverishly at times from this review, for some other nuggets from the songbook. I know because of later he has been humming and low-voice singing the lyrics from a bunch of Cole Porter songs. But back in the 1980s he was working his way through the great American go west young man, young cowboy to be myth and what it meant to some songwriters who were tired of what passed for such music and brought some vigor into the genre. Not so strangely to my mind as that was something of an off period for modern jazz as well I went back to the blues, went back to the old country blues from down in the Delta. On this beat unlike our “dispute” over the merits of film noir we have some agreement if not of kind then of spirit. Greg Green]     


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Apparently just now, although this time rather accidentally, I am on something of an outlaw country moment tear, again. I have mentioned on previously occasions when I have discussed county music, or rather more correctly outlaw country music, that I had a very short, but worthwhile period when I was immersed in this genre in the late 1970s. After tiring somewhat of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other more well know country outlaws I gravitated toward the music, eerily beautiful and haunting music, of Townes Van Zandt whose Steve Earle tribute album Townes I have recently reviewed in this space. As I noted there, as well, while this outlaw country thing was short-lived and I scrambled back to my first loves, blues, rock and folk music I always had time to listen to Townes and is funny mix of blues, folk rock, rock folk, and just downright outlaw country.

And that brings us to the album under review, Pay The Devil, and another “outlaw” country music man, the Belfast cowboy Van Morrison. Wait a minute, Van Morrison? Belfast cowboy? Okay, let me take a few steps back. I first heard Van Morrison in his 1960s rock period when I flipped out over his Into The Mystic on his Moondance album. And when I later saw him doing some blues stuff highlighted by his appearance in Martin Scorsese PBS History of Blues series several years ago I also flipped out, and said yes, brother blues. But somewhere along the way he turned again on us and has “reinvented” himself as the “son”, the legitimate son, of Hank Williams. And hencethe Belfast cowboy.

If you do not believe me then just listen to him ante up on There Stands The Glass, a classic honky-tonk midnight sorrows tune; the Williams’ classic Your Cheatin’ Heart; the pathos of Back Street Affair; the title song Pay The Devil; and, something out of about 1952, and the number one example of his cowboyishness (whee!), Till I Gain Control Again. The Belfast cowboy, indeed, although I always thought that was in the North.

***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Otto Preminger’s “Fallen Angel”- A Film Review

***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Otto Preminger’s “Fallen Angel”- A Film Review

DVD Review


By Josh Breslin  

Fallen Angel, starring Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, directed by Otto Preminger, 1945

[Alright I have had my say about my less than utter devotion to the film noir genre in a recent introduction to Josh Breslin’s film review of the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Killers (see, Archives, dated January 12, 2019). That still stands. What does not still stand though is the utterly crass response, a respond worthy of wounded elephants, when I mentioned that guys like Josh and Sam Lowell had ill-spent their youths in dark, popcorn-festered Saturday afternoon double feature matinees rather than breathing some innocent fresh air. Let me put it this way the kindest response was by Si Lannon (as usual) who speculated that as much as we are collectively opposed to capital punishment for criminal activities that offend against humankind that perhaps some exceptions should be made particularly egregious cases, mine. It went downhill from the gist of sentiment being that I never had been manly enough to understand the genre having been pampered in my youth up there in swank Hudson River digs        

That hurt whether it is true or not but remember that I am just enough younger and less poverty-driven conscious that those guys although having been through life none of these guys have to worry about where their next meal is coming from-very definitely don’t in some kind of survival of the fittest sense since they survived unlike some of the guys who as Seth Garth has said “laid down their heads in bloody Vietnam or like their icon Markin as a result of that experience.

Still on the face of it and I go with my having been involved with something like forty thousand reviews over the past few decades (not as a writer, Jesus no, not for a long time since that is such a perilous and cutthroat business depending on nothing but your last review and maybe not even that at some journals), the premise behind the noir is not something that ever wowed me, the photography, the black and white scene setting and sequel effects yes. The storyline and shabby treatment of women, even femmes leave a lot to be desired.

Yes, yes, I know we live in the #MeToo era and that has some effect even going back to the noirs but shabby is not too far a stretch that these films were only keeping the so-called feminine mystique alive. Take one example, and not the worse of the lot, Jane Greer’s role in Out Of The Past where she is treated by Robert Mitchum as so much eye candy to be looked up and down and back again. Treated by mobster Kirk Douglas and noting but an appendage. No wonder the woman had ot make her own way, her own space as best she could. If she had to get a little gun crazy, start shooting to keep herself going that was part of the overhead for her to stay alive. Hey, the guys knew what they were getting into and still came after her-and not just for her charms. It might be hard to make a feminist-friendly film, and maybe back then probably impossible but that is no reason for guys doing film reviews today to get all gushy about this genre. Touche. Greg Green]        

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As I have mentioned at the start of other reviews in this genre I am an aficionado of film noir, especially those 1940s detective epics like the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. There is nothing like that gritty black and white film, ominous musical background (one can tell without watching the beginning of the film, the credits, that a noir is on hand, or noir-influenced and those shadowy fugitive moments to stir the imagination. Others in the genre like Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and Out Of The Past rate a nod because in addition to those attributes mentioned above they have classic femme fatales to add a little off-hand spice to the plot line, and, oh yah, they look nice too. Beyond those classics this period (say, roughly from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s) produced many black and white film noir set pieces, some good, some not so good. For plot line, and plot interest, the film under review, Fallen Angel, is under that former category. This film is an example of what 1940s film noir was all about, maybe not the best but still more than passable.

Once you have started to get fixated on crime noir films a key question that inevitably comes up is the femme fatale, good or bad, although not every crime noir film had them. Fallen Angel does, although rather unusually this femme fatale (played by sultry big-lipped Linda Darnell) is working in a one-arm joint (come on now you know what that is right? A hash house, a diner, a road house, a dew-drop in and the person serving them off the arm, one arm see, is none other than Darnell as the magnet waitress, Stella). Now all femme fatales, at least the ones I have seen in film (and a few, okay more than a few, that I have been run over by in life), have some kind of shady past and/or have gone wrong by hooking up with a wrong gee. Some of them have put on high class- airs (like Gilda in the movie of the same name and The Lady From Shang-hai both played by sultry, very sultry, let me get my handkerchief out Rita Hayworth) and others, like the Stella role Ms. Darnell plays here, are just hard-boiled gold-diggers from the wrong side of the tracks.

And that little fact is what has all the boys crazy here, and also drives the plot line.
The Great Depression and World War II unhinged a lot of the certainties that earlier American society took for granted. Those mega-events left a lot of loose-end people struggling, struggling hard to find their place in the sun, or at least some dough to help find that place. And that notion goes a long way in explaining why down-at-the-heels Eric (played by Dana Andrews) find himself on the left coast (California before the post- World War II land’s end explosion westward, westward from any east) with no dough and no prospects. But that doesn’t stop him from drawing a bee-line to femme fatale Darnell when he was unceremoniously dropped off in some backwater California ocean town. But brother Eric, take a ticket, get in line, because every other guy on the left coast, including the very unglamorous hash house owner, has big ideas, or wants to have big ideas about setting up house with this two-timing brunette waitress. (Personally I don’t see it but I run to perky blondes and fire-haired red heads although, truth to tell, a few of those femmes I have been run over by, mentioned above, have been brunettes too.) But when a man, as men will do, is smitten well there it is. There are no hoops big enough that he will not roll through and that is where the plot thickens. See Stella, she from the wrong side of the tracks born, wants a home with a picket fence like all the other girls and if you don't have the cash, the cash in hand, then get lost, brother. Be a long gone daddy.  

Needless to say old Eric is ready to move heaven and earth to get the dough for that white picket-fenced house. And here is his scam. A scam that played right has worked since time immemorial. Go where the money is. In that one-horse town, ocean-fronted or not, the dough resides with two prominent sisters who have some dough left from their father’s estate. So Eric plays up to one sister, June, (the pretty one, of course, played by Alice Faye) and through a convoluted series of events they wind up married. Ms. Darnell was not pleased by this turn of event, as you can imagine.

Although Stella not being pleased was cut short by a little problem, she was murdered on the night of Eric’s honeymoon with June. And all signs lead to him as the stone-cold killer- the frame is on, no question. But also “no question” is that he is not that kind of guy. But just step back a minute and remember that point about having to take a ticket to line up for Stella's affections. Plenty of guys (and at least one woman) had motive. See the film and figure who that was. Like I say this not the best of the 1940s crime noirs for plot line but is interesting enough. And the film was directed by Otto Preminger so you know the black and white cinematography shadows and contrasts will be just fine.