Black History and the Class Struggle-In Honor of John Brown-"John Brown" An Address By Frederick Douglass(1881)

Black History and the Class Struggle-In Honor of John Brown-"John Brown" An Address By Frederick Douglass(1881)  Workers Vanguard No. 1128	23 February 2018

Black History and the Class Struggle

In Honor of John Brown

On 16 October 1859, revolutionary abolitionist John Brown led an armed and racially integrated group in a daring raid on the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal in what was then Virginia. His aim was to procure arms, free slaves in the area and lead his army into the mountains where they could establish a liberated zone and, as needed, wage war against the slave masters. Brown’s forces fought heroically but were overwhelmed and defeated by U.S. marines led by Robert E. Lee, who would soon become the commander of Confederate forces during the Civil War. Brown and his surviving comrades were captured. On December 2, he was hanged.

Throughout his life, John Brown burned with hatred for slavery. Several years before the Harpers Ferry raid, in what became known as “Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown and several of his sons led a struggle to crush pro-slavery forces and ensure that Kansas entered the Union as a free state. On the day of his execution, he scrawled a small note to a friend that prophetically stated: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with blood.” The raid on Harpers Ferry was the real opening shot of the Civil War, which broke out in 1861. It took the blood and iron of that war, including the 200,000 black soldiers and sailors who helped ensure Union victory, to finally destroy the American slave order.

We print below extracts of a 30 May 1881 address by Frederick Douglass paying tribute to the courage of John Brown. The speech was delivered at Storer College, a historically black college in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Douglass, who had escaped slavery in 1838, was an electrifying agitator and one of the most powerful champions of black freedom in America’s history.

As Trotskyists, we stand in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown and Frederick Douglass. We fight to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War, which require sweeping away the American capitalist order. As we wrote in the first issue of Black History and the Class Struggle (1983), “The whole system stands squarely counterposed to black freedom. Forward to the third American Revolution, a proletarian revolution led by a Trotskyist vanguard party with a strong black leadership component. Finish the Civil War—For black liberation in a workers’ America!”

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John BrownAn Address by Frederick Douglass

The bloody harvest of Harper’s Ferry was ripened by the heat and moisture of merciless bondage of more than two hundred years. That startling cry of alarm on the banks of the Potomac was but the answering back of the avenging angel to the midnight invasions of Christian slave-traders on the sleeping hamlets of Africa. The history of the African slave-trade furnishes many illustrations far more cruel and bloody....

Your interests, like mine, are in the all-commanding figure of the story, and to him I consecrate the hour. His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him. The crown of martyrdom is high, far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, and yet happily no special greatness or superior moral excellence is necessary to discern and in some measure appreciate a truly great soul. Cold, calculating and unspiritual as most of us are, we are not wholly insensible to real greatness; and when we are brought in contact with a man of commanding mold, towering high and alone above the millions, free from all conventional fetters, true to his own moral convictions, a “law unto himself,” ready to suffer misconstruction, ignoring torture and death for what he believes to be right, we are compelled to do him homage....

Slavery is indeed gone; but its long, black shadow yet falls broad and large over the face of the whole country. It is the old truth oft repeated, and never more fitly than now, “a prophet is without honor in his own country and among his own people.” Though more than twenty years have rolled between us and the Harper’s Ferry raid, though since then the armies of the nation have found it necessary to do on a large scale what John Brown attempted to do on a small one, and the great captain who fought his way through slavery has filled with honor the Presidential chair [Abraham Lincoln], we yet stand too near the days of slavery, and the life and times of John Brown, to see clearly the true martyr and hero that he was and rightly to estimate the value of the man and his works. Like the great and good of all ages—the men born in advance of their times, the men whose bleeding footprints attest the immense cost of reform, and show us the long and dreary spaces, between the luminous points in the progress of mankind,—this our noblest American hero must wait the polishing wheels of after-coming centuries to make his glory more manifest, and his worth more generally acknowledged....

To the outward eye of men, John Brown was a criminal, but to their inward eye he was a just man and true. His deeds might be disowned, but the spirit which made those deeds possible was worthy [of] highest honor. It has been often asked, why did not Virginia spare the life of this man? why did she not avail herself of this grand opportunity to add to her other glory that of a lofty magnanimity?...

Slavery was the idol of Virginia, and pardon and life to Brown meant condemnation and death to slavery. He had practically illustrated a truth stranger than fiction,—a truth higher than Virginia had ever known,—a truth more noble and beautiful than Jefferson ever wrote. He had evinced a conception of the sacredness and value of liberty which transcended in sublimity that of her own Patrick Henry and made even his fire-flashing sentiment of “Liberty or Death” seem dark and tame and selfish. Henry loved liberty for himself, but this man loved liberty for all men, and for those most despised and scorned, as well as for those most esteemed and honored. Just here was the true glory of John Brown’s mission. It was not for his own freedom that he was thus ready to lay down his life, for with Paul he could say, “I was born free.” No chain had bound his ankle, no yoke had galled his neck. History has no better illustration of pure, disinterested benevolence. It was not Caucasian for Caucasian—white man for white man; not rich man for rich man, but Caucasian for Ethiopian—white man for black man—rich man for poor man—the man admitted and respected, for the man despised and rejected. “I want you to understand, gentlemen,” he said to his persecutors, “that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people, oppressed by the slave system, as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful.” In this we have the key to the whole life and career of the man....

It must be admitted that Brown assumed tremendous responsibility in making war upon the peaceful people of Harper’s Ferry, but it must be remembered also that in his eye a slave-holding community could not be peaceable, but was, in the nature of the case, in one incessant state of war. To him such a community was not more sacred than a band of robbers: it was the right of any one to assault it by day or night. He saw no hope that slavery would ever be abolished by moral or political means: “he knew,” he said, “the proud and hard hearts of the slave-holders, and that they never would consent to give up their slaves, till they felt a big stick about their heads.” It was five years before this event at Harper’s Ferry, while the conflict between freedom and slavery was waxing hotter and hotter with every hour, that the blundering statesmanship of the National Government repealed the Missouri compromise [of 1820, which banned slavery in most of the northern part of the Louisiana territory], and thus launched the territory of Kansas as a prize to be battled for between the North and the South. The remarkable part taken in this contest by Brown has been already referred to, and it doubtless helped to prepare him for the final tragedy, and though it did not by any means originate the plan, it confirmed him in it and hastened its execution....

Such was the man whose name I heard uttered in whispers—such was the house in which he lived—such were his family and household management—and such was Captain John Brown. He said to me at this meeting, that he had invited me to his house for the especial purpose of laying before me his plan for the speedy emancipation of my race. He seemed to apprehend opposition on my part as he opened the subject and touched my vanity by saying, that he had observed my course at home and abroad, and wanted my co-operation. He said he had been for the last thirty years looking for colored men to whom he could safely reveal his secret, and had almost despaired, at times, of finding such, but that now he was encouraged for he saw heads rising up in all directions, to whom he thought he could with safety impart his plan. As this plan then lay in his mind it was very simple, and had much to commend it. It did not, as was supposed by many, contemplate a general rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the slave masters (an insurrection he thought would only defeat the object), but it did contemplate the creating of an armed force which should act in the very heart of the South. He was not averse to the shedding of blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a good one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense of manhood. No people he said could have self-respect or be respected who would not fight for their freedom....

Slavery was a state of war, he said, to which the slaves were unwilling parties and consequently they had a right to anything necessary to their peace and freedom. He would shed no blood and would avoid a fight except in self-defense, when he would of course do his best. He believed this movement would weaken slavery in two ways—first by making slave property insecure, it would become undesirable; and secondly it would keep the anti-slavery agitation alive and public attention fixed upon it, and thus lead to the adoption of measures to abolish the evil altogether. He held that there was need of something startling to prevent the agitation of the question from dying out; that slavery had come near being abolished in Virginia by the Nat. Turner insurrection, and he thought his method would speedily put an end to it, both in Maryland and Virginia. The trouble was to get the right men to start with and money enough to equip them. He had adopted the simple and economical mode of living to which I have referred with a view to save money for this purpose. This was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already too long and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial.

From 8 o’clock in the evening till 3 in the morning, Capt. Brown and I sat face to face, he arguing in favor of his plan, and I finding all the objections I could against it. Now mark! this meeting of ours was full twelve years before the strike at Harper’s Ferry. He had been watching and waiting all that time for suitable heads to rise or “pop up” as he said among the sable millions in whom he could confide; hence forty years had passed between his thought and his act. Forty years, though not a long time in the life of a nation, is a long time in the life of a man; and here forty long years, this man was struggling with this one idea; like Moses he was forty years in the wilderness. Youth, manhood, middle age had come and gone; two marriages had been consummated, twenty children had called him father; and through all the storms and vicissitudes of busy life, this one thought, like the angel in the burning bush, had confronted him with its blazing light, bidding him on to his work....

Two weeks prior to the meditated attack, Capt. Brown summoned me to meet him in an old stone quarry on the Conecochequi river, near the town of Chambersburgh, Penn. His arms and ammunition were stored in that town and were to be moved on to Harper’s Ferry. In company with Shields Green I obeyed the summons, and prompt to the hour we met the dear old man, with Kagi, his secretary, at the appointed place. Our meeting was in some sense a council of war. We spent the Saturday and succeeding Sunday in conference on the question, whether the desperate step should then be taken, or the old plan as already described should be carried out. He was for boldly striking Harper’s Ferry at once and running the risk of getting into the mountains afterwards. I was for avoiding Harper’s Ferry altogether. Shields Green and Mr. Kagi remained silent listeners throughout. It is needless to repeat here what was said, after what has happened. Suffice it, that after all I could say, I saw that my old friend had resolved on his course and that it was idle to parley. I told him finally that it was impossible for me to join him. I could see Harper’s Ferry only as a trap of steel, and ourselves in the wrong side of it. He regretted my decision and we parted....

But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harper’s Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia [now West Virginia]. But he did not go to Harper’s Ferry to save his life. The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? and to this I answer ten thousand times. No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail. Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught. Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown. Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader.

If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men, for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not [South] Carolina, but Virginia—not Fort Sumpter, but Harper’s Ferry and the arsenal—not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone—the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union—and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.

— Reprinted from John Brown/Boyd B. Stutler Collection, a Feature of West Virginia Archives and History

In The Time Of The Nine Realms-A Walk Down Valhalla Lane-Marvel Comic “Thor” (2011)-A Film Review

In The Time Of The Nine Realms-A Walk Down Valhalla Lane-Marvel Comic “Thor” (2011)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Thor, starring Natasha Portman, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleton, Marvel Comics Production

You never know in the publication business, the staff writer end of the business anyway, what you will wind up writing about and why. Normally in a film review I go right to the topic with some kind of first paragraph lead which sets up what I want to look at in the film. The film under review Marvel Comics Thor is a little different in that it is both a film I would not usually touch with a ten foot pole and is not a film which under recently departed old regime would have come up for assignment with that same ten foot pole. There is no need at this late date to go into the details of the regime change, my long-time companion and fellow writer Sam Lowell has outlined the key parts elsewhere. (See Archives, dated February 10, 2018). The new site manager Greg Green as part of an attempt to reach a younger audience, the tweens, teens, twenty somethings from the subject matter at hand early on in his tenure decided that this site needed to drift away from the classic black and white film noir type films that were the staple here but which he wrote off as strictly for aficionados and 1960s and 1970s cheap college date retrospective freaks and reach the younger crowds and thus this wall to wall coverage of the Marvel and DC super-hero comic book come to screen film line-up.

Therefore every writer in the stable, younger or older, was forced marched into reviewing Batman, Superman, Ironman, whatever Marvel or DC put on the screen. And in a funny way given the 2018 mega-hit Black Panther there is certainly a niche on a site dedicated to various aspects of American culture, including popular culture, to run the rack on this genre. Things did not work out, have not worked out so simply though. First every writer, young or old, pro-old regime or dedicated to the new regime complained in the public prints about this particular shift. More importantly the admittedly older readership base started asking WTF was going on with this craze for fantasy super-hero stuff. And that was the rub.

Attempting to get to the younger set through some misplaced sense that we needed to be more relevant ran up against one hard fact. The kids who would go crazy for action fantasy super-hero comic book characters don’t read, don’t read arcane blogs or other such venues to get a grasp of what is playing at the movies. Hell, my companion Sam who has had to both write some of these type reviews and sit with me to watch them, has made the whole staff laugh with his comment that Marvel and DC were onto something when they went cinematic-the kids won’t sit still to read a freaking comic book much less a review. So that is genesis on the matter except to say that once Greg got wise to what we had all been telling him he had already committed to doing the whole universe of such films in the interest of completeness finish what was started and so here we are.                              

    

One of the things I learned from Sam about film reviews that it is always good to give a little summary, what he calls “the skinny” a term from his old neighborhood days in North Adamsville of what you are reviewing. So here goes. Everybody has heard of the great Thor, either from Greek times or more likely the various Viking sagas out of Northern Europe. You know the guys from Valhalla, the warriors who died on their shields, plundered and pillared when necessary to keep order. Here we are in the realm of the nine planets (don’t worry Earth will be one of them), in Asgard where the old king is ready to turn over his kingship to one of his younger sons, Thor, played by hunk (sorry Sam) Chris Hemsworth, or Loki, played by Tom Hiddleton, with Thor the odds on favorite to win the crown.         

The problem for Thor though is the times are out of joint for warriors just then, especially brash upstart warrior-princes when the old man is trying to work out a lasting peace, a peace particularly with the nemesis Frost Giants whose leader and the king have clashed before. So to teach the brat a lesson after Thor and his small intrepid band of devotees tried to tame those same Frost Giants he is banished to, well, to Earth and deprived of his magic hammer. Not good.

Seemingly not good except through interplanetary flight Thor winds up in New Mexico when a team of hot shot astrophysicists led by Jane, played by Natasha Portman last seen in this space in The Black Swan when we were looking at more arty movies here, founder the old regime, find  him or he finds them. After some confusion about what they have found, a guy from the past, a hunk (an early beefcake shot of him has Jane’s college student assistant and maybe Jane too ready to take off their clothes and get under the silky sheets with as Sam likes to jokingly say), a guy pretty non-plussed by cellphones and modern life in general) they get the idea he is from another planet, an alien, an alien, earthling or not, not a good thing to be these days. Especially when nefarious intelligence agendas working for who knows who maybe the Chinese get on to who he is.             

Enter Loki who had not only had a lifelong jealous rage over his favored brother but was not a real brother rather as it turned out an orphan from earlier wars with the Forest Giants and is no other than the son of that nefarious Frost Giant leader although he looks strangely more like a Viking than Frosty the Snow Man. So Loki tries might and main to kill Thor and usurp that treasured crown mainly by keeping Thor hamstrung on Earth. Not to worry though because Thor’s trusty devotees come into the scene on good green Mother Earth to help bail him out. Better that early look at the beefcake Thor has our staid Jane astrophysist all a-flutter acting like a silly schoolgirl while figuring out what makes him tick.

But back to the good versus evil, Cain and Abel business as Thor and Loki start the inevitable show-down for who will be king of the hill especially when Loki has ugly Oedipal plans to kill his real father and waste that planet for good creating who knows what kind of interplanetary problems. Goodbye peace in any case good planet or bad.  Thor in a sign of these times going back to an “Asgard First” policy destroys the bridge to the other worlds including Earth thwarting Loki’s plans and leaving Thor forlorn about that budding romance with Earthling Jane and she him. Stay tuned since you should already know there is a sequel, two in fact.

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part V-“Bumbling Up The Moors ”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Terror In The Night ” (1946)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part V-“Bumbling Up The Moors ”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Terror In The Night ” (1946)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Danny Moriarty

(Frankly, as I mentioned in my fourth debunking of the so-called legend of punk amateur detective Sherlock Holmes and his paramour the bumbler-in-chief Doctor “Doc” Watson in Sherlock Holmes In Washington I am tired, tired beyond endurance, of having to once again tell a candid world that Danny Moriarty is not my real name. Yes, for the skeptics and assorted evil-doers associated with the name Holmes I said paramour which I can now say freely since it had been confirmed by at least three separate and unknown to each other sources that Sherlock and Doc belonged to the Kit Kat Club, a club that had been established by the wild boys during the reign of King George III, an exclusively then called homosexual, now called gay, establishment for the private school boys once they got old enough to afford the fees, more on that new twist below. I use this Moriarty moniker to protect me against some very real threats from a bunch of dope-addled Holmes aficionados, no, worse cultists known far and wide as the Baker Street Irregulars. Not that I am not proud of the name Moriarty, the last name of the heroic professor who ran afoul of the greedy grafter Holmes and became the “fall guy” for every evil deed that bastard did to throw dirt on the good professor’s name. I will continue to defend his honor here in the review of this twaddle called Terror at Night. Another case where Holmes and company let the bodies pile up and somebody else has to lay the competition low.     

These nefarious Irregulars known to the police, to the see no evil hear no evil London peelers, the Bobby Peel guys so named after the guy who put together the first real police force in London but which has gone way downhill since then who have ignored my pleas for protection, who have dismissed the threats against me as child’s play, kid’s stuff. What passes for the law, the coppers, have gone back to their tea and crumpets as usual routine while half of the toddling town gets ransacked by these Baker Street hooligans who have sworn vengeance unto the seventh generation against me and my progeny for exposing their boyfriend hero for the fake and closet homosexual snoop that he is, was.

I stand here again today despite my need to hide my identity, my whereabouts, my voice and features and having had to send my family into private hands hiding stating I will not wilt like some silly schoolgirl under the blare of their evil deeds. This motley of criminals, junkies, and cutthroats is being protected by high society personages. The peerage I think they call it in Mother England, you know the House of Lords holy goofs with the cheapjack woolen wigs sliding all over the place and made in Bangladesh sweated labor textile factory robes who spend endless hours talking about the good old days when everything was simpler, when the mob knew its place or it better had under Charles I, monarchs like that. 

These Irregulars in case I don’t survive the onslaught to number twelve in this series of film which may be a close thing as these bastards have trolled the Internet spreading false rumors that I am homophobic, anti-same sex marriage, against sexual variety, and whatever other dirty innuendoes that can spew out to an unsuspecting social media world,  a series of blatantly propagandistic films, which has done more to create an “alternate facts” Holmes world than anything any dastardly British monarch could ever do to keep the masses at bay.  I am told this clot of degenerates and rough trade aficionados have very stylized rituals involving exotic illegal drugs, LSD being one of the milder ones, and human blood, especially of opposing tribes like the remnant of the Moriarty operation.

Yeah, these guys are the bane of the London Bobbies and maybe not so strangely corruption-infested Scotland Yard neither operation which has lifted a finger in the matter. Moreover these Irregular cretins have been connected with the disappearance of many people, high born and low, who have questioned the Sherlock myth, and not a few unsolved murders of people who have washed up on the Thames over the years. I know I am on borrowed time, I am a “dead man walking” but maybe someone will pick up the cudgels if I have to lay down my head for the cause.  

I don’t want to frighten the audience, the reader but this need for an alias, for cover, is no joke since that first review and the subsequent second and third ones I have been threatened, threatened with I won’t death, death threats, but some nasty actions edging up in that direction which necessitate my keeping very close tabs on my security apparatus as I attempt to deflate this miserable excuse for a detective, a parlor detective at that who even Agatha Christie dismissed out of hand as a rank amateur which couldn’t keep up with even one of her weakest sleuths. From my sources, serious sources under the circumstances, of ex-Irregulars who have left the organization as its attacks have become more bizarre and its blood rituals more gruesome including allegations of human sacrifice I have been told I am on their “watch list.” Told my days are numbered if I continue to “speak the truth no matter how bitter.”  

I know and can prove that I have been the subject of cyber-bullying without end including a campaign to discredit me by calling me Raymond Chandler’s “poodle” and Dashiell Hammett’s “toadie” for mentioning the undisputable fact that these hard- knock, hard-working professionals, real life detectives peeking under keyholes and into windows like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe were as likely to grab some wayward young woman and go under the silky sheets between exchanges of gunfire as kick ass on some bad guys and still have time for lunch. Sherlock and Doc, was much too dainty, much too worried about, literally, getting his hands dirty for that kind of heading to the danger work. I am willing to show an impartial commission my accusations with documents and affidavits. Believe me the pressure against me to stop my expose, including from site manager Greg Green who is worried about my security and that of my family, is getting worse and once I get a grip on who is who in that nefarious organization I will be taking names and numbers.  These twelve films have been nothing but propaganda vehicles for the Holmes legend so I have plenty more work cut out for me. Until done I will not be stopped by hoodlums, wild boys, rough trade artists, Homintern agents, your lordships and ladyships, and blood-splattered junkies. D.M.)

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Terror At Night, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again a cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1946 

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As I have mentioned previously and nothing recently has changed my view we live in an age of debunking. An age perhaps borne aloft by cynicism, hubris, sarcasm and above all “fake news,” not the fake news denying some reality that you hear so much about these days, but by the elaborate strategy of public relations cranks and flacks who will put out any swill as long as they are paid and not a minute longer. That phenomenon hardly started today but has a long pedigree, a pedigree which has included the target of today’s debunking one James Sherlock Holmes, aka Lytton Strachey, aka Lanny Lamont out of London, out of the Baker Street section of that town. From the cutesy “elementary my dear Watson” to that condescending attitude toward everybody he encounters, friend or foe, including the hapless Doctor “Doc” Watson, aka Nigel Bruce, a fellow inmate at notorious Dartmoor Prison in the early 1930s this guy Holmes, or whatever his real name is nothing but a pure creation of the public relations industrial complex, the PRIC. As I have noted above I have paid the price for exposing this chameleon, this so-called master detective, this dead end junkie, with a barrage of hate mail and threats from his insidious devotees. I have been cyber-bullied up to my eyeballs but the truth will out.

Maybe I better refresh for those who may not have read the first three reviews, may be shocked to find their paragon of a private detective has feet of clay, and an addiction problem no twelve step program could curtail in a million years. Here are some excerpts of what I said in that very first review which I stand by this day no matter the consequences:      

“Today is the day. Today is the day I have been waiting for since I was a kid. Today we tear off the veneer, tear off the mask of the reputation of one Sherlock Holmes as a master detective. Funny how things happen. Greg Green assigned me this film out of the blue, at random he said when I asked him. However this assignment after viewing this film, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (of course he doesn’t face, hadn’t been anywhere near any danger that would put death in his way but that can wait until I finish out defanging the legend) set off many bells, many memories of my childhood when I first instinctively discovered this guy was a fraud, a con artist.

Back then my grandparents and parents hushed me up about the matter when I told them what I thought of the mighty Sherlock. They went nutty and told me never to speak of it again when I mentioned that a hard-boiled real private detective, a guy who did this kind of work for a living, a guy named Sam Spade who worked out in San Francisco and solved, really solved, the case of the missing black bird which people in the profession still talk about, which is still taught in those correspondence course private detection in ten easy lesson things you used to see advertised on matchbook covers when smoking cigarettes was okay, who could run circles around a parlor so-called detective like Mr. Holmes. 

[Even Sam Spade has come in for some debunking of late right here in this space as Phil Larkin and Kenny Jacobs have gone round and round about how little Spade deserved his “rep,” his classic rep for a guy who was picked by some bimbo out of the phone book and who couldn’t even keep his partner alive against that same femme he was skirt-addled over. Kept digging that low-shelf whiskey bottle in the bottom desk drawer out too much when the deal went down. The only guy who is safe is Phillip Marlowe since nobody can call him a “one solved murder wonder” after the string of cold as ice, maybe colder, cases he wrapped up with a bow over the years. They still talk about the Sherwood case out on the Coast even today where he rapped the knuckles of a big time gangster like Eddie Mars, and his goons, to help an old man going to the great beyond no believing that he had raised a couple of monster daughters without working up a serious sweat. Talked in hushed tones too. You notice nobody has tried to go after him, not even close. D.M.]            

That was then. Now after some serious research as a result of this film’s impact on my memory I have proof to back up my childhood smothered assertions. Sherlock Holmes (if that is his name which is doubtful since I went to the London telephone directories going back the first ones in the late 1800s and found no such name on Baker Street-ever) was nothing but a stone-cold junkie, cocaine, morphine, landudum and other exotic concoctions which is the reason that he had a doctor at his side at all times in case he needed “scripts” written up. A doctor who a guy like Sam Spade would have sat on his ass a long time before as so much dead weight.

That junkie business would not amount to much if it did not mean that high and mighty Sherlock didn’t have to run his own gang of pimps, hookers, con men, fellow junkies, drag queens, rough trade sailors and the flotsam and jetsam of London, high society and low, to keep him in dough for that nasty set of habits that kept him high as a kite. There are sworn statements (suppressed at the time) by the few felons whom the Bobbies were able to pick up that Sherlock was the guy behind half the burglaries, heists and kidnappings in London. And you wonder why the Baker Street Irregulars want to silence me, show me the silence of the grave….

Of course the Bobbies, looking to wrap up a few cold file cases which Sherlock handed them to keep them off the trail, looked the other way and/or took the graft so who really knows how extensive the whole operation was. In a great sleight of hand he gave them Doctor Moriarty who as it turned out dear Sherlock had framed when one wave of police heat was on and who only got out of prison after Holmes died and one of Holmes’ flunkies told the real story about how Holmes needed a “fall guy” and the wily Doctor took the fall.”             

********

Now to a quick film review where once again Holmes/Strachey/Lamont lets the bodies pile up before areal detective grabs the bad guys and makes them cry “uncle;”  

Apparently this Sherlock, no, Lanny Lamont,  madness knows no borders, could not be contained with the four walls of England, hell, maybe even the bloody cockeyed Empire since the film under review has these two desperadoes travelling up moorish Scotland to muddy the highland waters there. This caper centers on the shell game played on Lady Somebody’s, do surnames really matter in the nobility trapped Empire, famous and valuable Star Of Rhodesia (for a long time now Zimbabwe) which is heading to Edinburg town on the midnight train (hence the “night” part of the film’s title) and the boys are along for cheap protection since Lady Somebody’s son is also a member of the notorious Kit Kat Club which they too belonged to although they barely knew him except a cheapjack attempt by Doc to seduce him right under his mother’s nose. The lad though was victim number one in the attempt to steal that damn diamond which as its own set of curses on it-and our dynamic duo’s eyes looking for the main chance and a quick turnover to grab a ton of dope and put them in opium den heaven. 

As the old bank robber Willie Sutton answered when asked why he robbed bank and replied “that was where the dough was” the same was true of another operation on the train trying to grab the diamond led by a remnant of the Moriarty organization one Colonel Moran, a friend of Doc’s from their public school days (no mention of whether they had been lovers then but probably before degenerate Lanny got his hooks into poor Doc. Moran had developed a pretty good plan to grab the diamond by sleight of hand. Had a hardened rough trade boy hide in a casket compartment and do his deeds grabbing the stone and nobody the wiser. Here’s where Lanny and Doc with a corrupt Scotland Yard agent in tail screwed up. Moran’s guy grabbed the diamond although a train guard bought it before the deal when down. Number two down. Moran and the thug had a falling out-number three. All while Lanny and Doc are hitting the bong in their railroad suite. Meanwhile that Scotland Yard detective totally out of character for such an officer wraps up the caper when a bunch of fake coppers hired by him try to take Moran away. No go. Meanwhile Lanny and Doc are chanting oms and wondering who the hell had the damn diamond and why. Another “victory” for the legend, another “victory” for the alternative facts bogus legend.      

But let’s allow the so-called master deductive reasoning detective have his minute just for kicks although I will never tire of letting everybody know that Sherlock made his name after he beat down some poor mistreated dog who should have been reported as abused to whatever they call the humane animal treatment society in merry old England. Also that he worked overtime to keep his name in the public prints through his friendship with the editor of the London Times despite the fact that he had no gainful employment, no source of income except whatever his thug cronies delivered to him from their various escapades and that he had the goods on that editor as they used to say since he was “light on his feet,’’ gay. The minute up I hope to high heaven at least a few viewers will finally back off from this nasty legend stuff and look to Sam and Phillip for real detection works.

[This is probably as good a place as any to discuss the elephant in the room. The whole sexual preference business that was always until the last couple of decades only inferred on film, in books, in society, if at all. I wouldn’t have though much about the matter, about the “sin that dare not speak its name,” you know, sodomy, about catamites if I hadn’t noticed in the previous film Sherlock Holmes Goes To Washington that when Sherlock and the Partridge twist were being held by Hinkel he never even looked at her and she was a dish to look at.

That started bells ringing my head that there was a reason, a real reason why Sherlock couldn’t shot straight, wore a silly boy’s regular hat no self-respecting man would be seen dead in, and had no lady-friend like Spade and Marlowe the former with that gun-simple Brigid who led him a merry chase and the latter with a string of honeys starting with that Vivian Sternwood who put him through his paces before she broke with one Eddie Mars. Either of whom had who would have eaten the Partridge dame her up with their eyes in a minute, run her to ground in the sack, the billowy pillows and had time for a hearty breakfast afterward (that Lanny Lamont time also a time when explicit sexual desire and carnal knowledge among heterosexuals also was done by indirection even among married folk-who can forget those double beds with bed stand in between once the scene invaded the marital bedroom), and had stuck it out through thick and thin with giddy, bubbly Doc Watson. Yes, a Nancy, a mommy’s boy, a fag to use the old time neighborhood term from my growing days in, no I had better not say where which might give aid and comfort to the thugs at Baker Street explains a lot of things. Tells a lot about the dope to take the unmanly shame off his face for being what he was, the outwardly improbable tell-tale scorn of women and why he and Doc were an item, in the closet.

Nowadays, recently, the whole sexual preference would not even be a subject for discussion except for what I have heard from an ex-Baker Street Irregular who broke hard with the organization after having spent the better part of twenty years in the closet about  his membership in the club as well as his sexual proclivities, who told me that there was a big division in the club between those who wanted to “out” Lanny/Sherlock and claim him for the mythical Homintern and those who wanted to not attract attention to their various nefarious activities and crimes by such a scheme. Back then though when Sherlock was roaming the world pissing off that candid world with his fake fortune-teller madness the example of poor Oscar Wilde and his youthful catamite which drove him to Reading Gaol and as recently as the Durning case in the 1950s it was not safe, was criminal to “come out.”

Of course the English public schools for boys, our private schools, were hotbeds of gay activity among the young boys isolated from young girls and who knows what by male teachers so it no wonder an odd-ball like Holmes got flighty and never looked back. Here is the problem everybody knows that no way a gay guy, a gay couple if you included Watson could then juggle dealing with hardened criminals the coppers couldn’t cope with and survive if it were known they were lovers, even platonic lovers. The pair would be in Reading Gaol themselves. Just remember what they did to Wilde and Durning. The next few films should put paid to that notion of mine that Sherlock was nothing more than a parlor plotter once the sexual preference angle intruded itself into the mix.]        

Like I said the last three times, a fake, fake all the way. Unless that Irregular crowd of thugs and blood-stained aficionados get to me, especially those who will be livid for my exposing  Lanny before they could “out” him themselves, find my hideout, this is not the last you will hear about this campaign of mine to dethrone this pompous junked-up imposter. I am just getting into high gear now.      

Once Again, All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Claude Rains And Kay Francis’s “Stolen Holiday” (1937)-A Film Review

Once Again, All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Claude Rains And Kay Francis’s “Stolen Holiday” (1937)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont    

Stolen Holiday, starring Kay Francis, Claude Rains, Ian Hunter, directed by Michael Curtiz, 1937     

Sometimes going public with some private hurt, private gripe might be a  better way to put it in this case, gets you what you need, or at least a hearing. In my last film review Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ classic dance musical production Swing Time I complained out loud that that was my fifth consecutive “women’s film,” meaning of course the tried and true Hollywood girl meets boy formula that forms the plotlines of half the films ever produced playing to the hard demographic that the majority of movie goers have historically been women, and younger women to boot.

UntiI recently I had a by-line at Women Today where I only occasionally did film reviews and those few I did do usually having some political point, some such hook. I have also noted that in the distant past I have been a stringer at this publication in the days of its hard copy version when Allan Jackson was publisher and that I had left when it was clear to me that he, and his cohort of old comrades including my then companion Josh Breslin, were slowly drifting in some kind of “good old boys” 1960s coming of age nostalgia trip. After a recent internal fight over that very question and the departure of Allan as site manager (the on-line name for publisher-editor here) the new site manager Greg Green “lured” me away to come over and do some pieces with the idea that I would be able to do whatever struck my fancy. I knew that would include film reviews since that is one of the several staples that drives this publication. What I did not know and which formed the basis for going public was that I would be a de facto “women’s films, women’s issues” fixture. Even at Women Today I didn’t fill any such role. When some readers complained after I went public Greg and I had another candid talk and made our respective positions clear. Hence this not women’s film review as my “prize.” We shall see how this new understanding works out.             

I mentioned a minute ago that half the films from Hollywood have been a work-out of the tried and true girl meets boy formula. And that factor is in play here but that is not what drives the film, this Stolen Holiday.  Such things as duplicity, fraud, social over-reaching, status, loyalty, cowardice and fidelity give this one a very decided broader scope. It almost had to since the plotline was based on the notorious Stavisky Affair which roiled through Third Republic France in the 1930’s and exposed the corruption and rot of that society just prior to World War II. Maybe helped bring down the Republic and bring on the German Occupation when the French Army proved unequal to the task of defending the country due to faulty leadership and outdated theories of war.      

The action starts out in 1931 in Paris with upstart con man Orlov, played by durable Claude Rains, he of the beautiful friendship with Rick of Rick’s Cafe Americain after Rick gave up his love for the good of the cause in Casablanca another film directed by Michael Curtiz, cons high fashion model Nicole, played by elegant Kay Francis although wobbly as a model, but with serious ambitions to run her own fashion operation into playing the straight role in a small con he wanted to play to get the initial capital to run the table on the French financial markets. Forward to 1936 after the success of that initial encounter with Orlov, now a captain of French finance with the place and position that brought, and Nicole the rage of the high fashion also in the chips. Their romantic relationship though hovering between non-existent and sputtering since every action of Orlov, other than jealousy, is connected with his trying to corner yet another market. Corner some respectably in French high society as well.

That conniving of Orlov would be his undoing since he was basically running a Ponzi scheme, was issuing watered stock, and the like. Once the authorities saw what was happening in the markets, and who was manipulating what, they started zeroing in on Orlov. His duplicity would number his days quickly despite his ever conniving actions. Eventually when in another corner he asked Nicole to marry him to cover up his dealings, or try to. Nicole agrees out of loyalty for what he had done for her once she became aware of his dire situation. In the meantime she had met and fallen in love with a British diplomat, played by Ian Hunter, who had swept her off her feet. So Nicole was doubly loyal and true to the scheming Orlov. Here’s where the Hollywood tried and true came to the rescue though. Orlov was finally cornered and shot by the French authorities who chalked it up as a suicide to avoid more scandal and maybe topple a few more people in high places which left Nicole free to marry the still pursuing British diplomat. Nice twist right.