This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Photograph by Howard Dearstyne of four views of a single metal sculpture by an unidentified Bauhaus student with the last name of Haas in Josef Albers's materials study course in 1928 or 1929.
This is a photograph by Howard Dearstyne of an exercise by an unidentified student named Ludwig for Josef Albers's materials study cource in 1928 or 1929.
Sixty years ago, in January 1959, a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement in Cuba overthrew the Batista capitalist regime and in 1960-61 expropriated the bourgeoisie, creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Revolutionaries in the U.S. have a special duty to defend the Cuban Revolution against capitalist restoration and U.S. imperialism. Integral to this defense is the Trotskyist call for proletarian political revolution to establish a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. The excerpt below is from a 1961 internal document submitted by our forebears in the Revolutionary Tendency, a minority in the now-reformist Socialist Workers Party. The SWP majority gave political support to the Castro-led Stalinist bureaucracy, rejecting the necessity of a Leninist-Trotskyist party and the centrality of the proletariat in the fight for socialist revolution.
14. The Cuban workers and peasants are today confronted with a twofold task: to defend their revolution from the attacks of the U.S. and native counterrevolutionaries, and to defeat and reverse the tendencies toward bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. To confront this task they crucially need the establishment of workers democracy.
15. Workers democracy, for us, signifies that all state and administrative officials are elected by and responsible to the working people of city and country through representative institutions of democratic rule. The best historical models for such institutions were the Soviets of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Workers Councils of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956….
16. The full victory of every modern revolution, the Cuban revolution included, requires the emergence in a leading role of a mass revolutionary-Marxist party. The small Trotskyist groups, in Cuba and elsewhere, have a vital role as the nucleus of such parties. They can fill this role only if they continually preserve their political independence and ability to act, and if they avoid the peril of yielding to non-Marxist and non-proletarian leaderships their own ideological responsibilities and the historic mission of the working class.
— “The Cuban Revolution,” December 1961, printed in Spartacist No. 2 (July-August 1964)
A Story Goes With It-The 1947 Film Adaptation Of Earl Derr Bigger’s “Seven Keys To Baldpate”-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy Salmon
Seven Keys To Baldpate, starring Phillip Terry Jacqueline White, adapted from Earl Derr Bigger’s crime novel of the same name, 1947 (there were earlier cinematic versions).
You never know what guys will bet on, even guys who don’t look like they need dough, serious dough anyway. That is the “hook” behind this film adaptation of crime novelist Earl Derr Bigger’s Seven Keys To Baldpate (Bigger better known for his classic Charlie Chan series). The bet: that left to his own devices, left alone crime writer Kenneth McGee, played by Phillip Terry, can finish a crime novel in a short specific period of time-twenty-four hours. The prize: five thousand in cash (yeah I know nothing but walking around today as one of my fellow film critics mentioned when commenting on the money stolen in some 1950s bank robbery in another film he was reviewing). The chase is on.
Part of the idea behind the bet was for McGee to head for the quiet of a shutdown for the season New England inn in order to pursue his work in peace. McGee is given the only key to the inn and heads up smacking his lips that this bet would be like money found on the ground. But as the title of film tips us to he is not the only one with a key to access that well-worn front door. The place turned into Grand Central Station as people with very mixed motives keep popping up in this isolated snow drifted place. Toward the end I thought maybe I had a key and got mad that I didn’t have one.
The cast of rogues who show up include, let’s count them, since we know McGee has one, an unexpected caretaker who greets him at the door, a hermit, a femme, a professor, a gunman, and the fetching secretary of the guy who McGee made the bet with, Mary played by Jacqueline White to add a little off-hand romance while McGee figures out the motives of his co-residents. That’s seven in my book. Here’s where you have to look twice at some guys, some guys you bet with, since Mary’s motives are straight up. She had been sent by the guy McGee bet to make sure that he didn’t finish the novel on time. Not fair, not fair at all.
As for the others, except the hermit who is just there for effect, they are in this Podunk out of the way place to divvy up the spoils from a big jewel heist. Among themselves they manage to shoot up the place as they double-cross each other leaving two dead in the end when the coppers come to put paid the whole enterprise. Just your average crime story. Hey a story McGee could write in a jiffy and still collect the dough. Except that fetching secretary with the long legs showing to good effect got him all brain-addled when she flopped herself on his lap and dared him to ignore her. McGee should have known the fix was in on that score too.
Train Smoke And Dreams-The Film Adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl On The Train”-(2016)
By Sam Lowell
The Girl On The Train, starring Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, directed by Tate Taylor, from the thriller novel by Paula Hawkins, 2016
A tale of three women, three smart up and coming but troubled women, suburban women, suburban New York City women and that makes a difference, is an interesting way to introduce this cinematic thriller, Girl On The Train, adapted for the screen from the best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins. Especially since their lives, the lives of Rachael, Anna and Megan to give them names right at the start, are intertwined one way or another by the same man, Tom, a man who as one of the minor characters in the film stated rather succinctly if crudely could not “keep his dick in his pants.” That statement, made on the suburban commuter train from New York City, the train a symbolic metaphor for lots of what goes down along the way, toward the end of the film goes a long way to explaining why this well-done and suspenseful thriller ends the way it does.
Here’s the scoop. Woman number one, Rachel, played by Emily Blunt, smart, artistic but emotionally fragile and unsure of herself, had as a result of her spiraling alcoholism brought on by her failure to bear a child (and by the nefarious manipulations of philandering Tom) been unceremoniously dumped by her philandering husband for another woman, woman number two, Anna, who had borne him a child. Rachel was a dreamer, a romantic, had some almost child-like idea of what a leafy suburban perfect marriage might look like despite her alcoholic haze which during her binges had left her with big blank spaces in her memory, left her with blackouts. It is in trying to retrace the steps of her life that will finally aid her-and get her and others into a hell of a lot of trouble.
The romantic dreamer about some ideal marriage part for Rachel came when she passed her old neighborhood on the train she took every day supposedly going to and from work (she had been fired for her over-the-top alcoholic behavior so the trips back and forth to New York City were trips to nowhere). A few houses from where she had lived she spied a couple who look like they were the consummate expression of everything she still longed for-including reuniting with her husband.
Enter woman number three, Megan, played by Haley Bennett, young, neurotic and sexually promiscuous, who was the woman Rachel had seen from the train. Megan rather than the ideal suburban wife was seeing a psychiatrist about her problems (while trying to seduce him). And about the secret guilt she had felt ever since she had neglected her out-of-wedlock baby when she was a teenager. Megan had worked for Tom and Anna, who had her own set of emotional problems around having the child and having a philandering husband, as a nanny to complete the scene (a job that it turned out Tom had insisted she take).
Here is where things got dicey. Megan one night went missing, and would be found after some time dead in the woods along the nearby Hudson River, an obvious homicide. Rachel, in one of her less lucid and less sober moments witnessed a scene from one end of a tunnel where Megan, who had disillusioned Rachel from the train by apparently taking another lover, and somebody had been seen together the night she disappeared. The rest of the film unwinds around Rachel’s increased clarity and confidence in herself about what had happened that night, who had killed Megan and why.
Naturally there is plenty of misdirection as in any good thriller. Rachel herself had come under suspicion due to her erratic and at times near hysterical behavior. As had, naturally given the statistics on such matters, Megan’s overbearing and overwrought husband (with a little help from trying to be helpful Rachel). Hell, even the shrink, Megan’s shrink, based on Rachel’s faulty foggy memory, was under a cloud for a time. But as the film winds down and the possible candidates with the motive to do the foul deed dwindle Rachel’s sense of what happened that night and who might have committed the foul deed improved.
Although this film (and the book it is based on) is predicated on solving the murder mystery which sets up the plot I was struck by how much these three very different women had been thrown together by an odd fate and reacted to things in very similar ways. The acting by the trio, particularly Emily Blunt whose very complicated role drove the action but also drove the psychological aspects of the film, was excellent as the three women went through their respective paces. As for whodunit check it out for yourself if you have not already read the book. A way better than average thriller.
