***Phillip Marlowe Lives-Redux- The 1980s Television Series

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Phillip Marlowe Private Eye, television series starring Powers Boothe, 1983

Sure I have been on a Phillip Marlowe run of late, mainly re-reading Raymond Chandler’s major crime novels from 1930s and 1940s which feature the tough guy, seen-it-all private detective. Those novels ranging fromThe Big Sleep to Payback (seven in all) pretty much tell the story of Marlowe’s many bouts with the bad guys (and gals) of the world down in sunny Los Angeles before it exploded after World War II into a big time town. A time long ago when a man (or woman) could know that city, that slumming city and its’ high and low life without a map. Those novels also developed Marlowe’s trademark approaches to things, his forever tilting after windmills for one thing or another, usually a dame in trouble but not always, always playing by his own rules, and not afraid to take a bump or two, or a slug or two, for a client.

Some of those traits, and Chandler’s early character development of Marlowe, were first written in some short stories in the 1930s collected in one volume called Trouble Is My Business (the original twelve story volume not the more recent four story volume or the Library of America volume). Those twelve short stories were presented in a British television series in 1983 under the title Phillip Marlowe Private Eye, the DVD under review, starring Powers Boothe as out intrepid P.I. And while, for my money, it is always better with Chandler, and fellow crime novel pioneer Dashiell Hammett, to read their works to get a real flavor of how he presented Marlowe over time this series is worth watching.

Of course there have been many Marlowes starting with the king hell king Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart, in The Big Sleep and working through such Hollywood stars as Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, and Elliot Gould. Powers Boothe fits somewhere in the middle of that tribe, maybe being just a little too handsome and a little too nonchalant to be a top shelf Marlowe. Still, like every Marlowe, he intrepidly works his way through the twelve story set tangling with bad guys, bad women, good women, competent and incompetent cops, guys on the take, lamos, loses , drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters. The normal bill of fare for any Marlowe worth his salt. Remember though read the twelve stories first and then watch this series which, except for additional tough guy and world-weary dialogue, is faithful to the plot line of those stories.

You’ve got that right brother, trouble, trouble with a capital T is Raymond Chandler’s classic hard-boiled private detective Philip Marlowe’s business. We have followed old Phillip Marlowe through thick and thin in this space in the seven Raymond Chandler-created full-length novels. Our intrepid private eye, private dick, shamus, gumshoe or whatever you call a guy that, privately, and for too little dough scrapes off other peoples’ dirt, and does it not badly at that, in your neighborhood. And kept his code of honor intact, well mostly intact, as he, for example, tried to spare an old man some anguish, some wild daughters anguish in The Big Sleep, or tried to find gigantic Moose’s Velma, Velma who did not want to be found, not by Moose anyway, in Farewell, My Lovely or find that foolish old timey coin in The High Window despite his client’s ill-winded manners.And on it went.

But see not all trouble, trouble with a capital T or not, is worthy of the world historic Chandler Marlowe treatment dished out in full detail like in those seven novels. Sometimes the caper to be solved or case to be squared is of a lesser magnitude and so we have the Raymond Chandler compilation under review, Trouble Is My Business, to, well, shed some light on Marlowe’s lesser cases. Not that they were necessarily any easier to solve, or that he didn’t take as many bumps on the head or guns in his ribs as the longer pieces but there were fewer moving parts to deal with. So a few cases could be lumped together, four in all, as a kind of sampler for those who might not have grown up in the 1940s and 1950s enthralled by the Marlowe mystique.

Take the title story, Troubles Is My Business, where a high-roller, a Mayfair swell, for his own purposes, hires Marlowe second-hand to get some dame, some cash-craving dame, a gold-digger, to lay off his son, his adopted son, to keep an eye on him, and keep him away from those addicted roulette tables that he has made his home , and squash those markers that a certain mobster, a California mobster transplanted from back East holds until that son inherits a cool few million. Naturally Marlowe tries to do an end-around by getting to the dame, getting her to lay off the son. And naturally as well that ill-bred son winds up dead, very dead, in that dame’s apartment. All signs point to the dame or the mobster or both but it only takes our boy about fifty pages to figure out what evil forces are working the scenes. And without giving anything away, once again we are going to have our noses rubbed in the hard fact that the rich, the very rich really, as F. Scott Fitzgerald used to say, are different from you and me, and get away with a hell of a lot more than you and me.

Another story, Finger Man, where Marlowe I am sure with some qualms found himself before a D.A.s grand jury telling all he knows about the nefarious doings of one set of “connected” politicians and their criminal consorts in trying to run everything that moved in some Pacific Coast town. And for his troubles he got set up, set up bad taking a long- time friend down with him before the dust cleared. Naturally a dame, a red-headed dame which tells you a little how bad things were, was knee-deep in the set-up and it almost worked except the bad guys (crooks and politicians alike) left too many moving parts to their plan and Marlowe was able to skate right through the trap. Although, as usual, he took his fair share of bumps on the head, shots fired at him, cigarette smoked and stubbed out, and dips into that bottom desk drawer whiskey bottle that will die an easy death before he is through with it.

Or how about this one, Goldfish, another in a long line of tales about searching for that El Dorado, that pot of gold, except this time it is pearls, the Leander pearls no less, and they are not in the ocean but are loose in the land as a result of a very heavy robbery where guys were killed and others guys got sent up to the big house for their efforts. But here is the kicker-the guy who would know where those pearls are, the guy who stole them and did his time to keep them, isn’t talking, is as quiet as a mouse about their whereabouts. Until Marlowe, and a nefarious pack of chiselers and other grifters, get hot on his trail. This one is a little off-balanced though since the dame who figures here is nothing but a desperado out of the Bonnie and Clyde mold and not one of gallant Marlowe’s frails. Of course she has company and as the number of those in for a cut dwindle due to various eternal departures inflicted many ways but mainly by the old equalizer , the gun,a precious one, Marlowe, is left to figure where those damn pearls are so he can get the reward for their return from the eager insurance company. Hint: strangely enough gold fish actually do enter into this one at the end. Go figure.

Or finally this one, Red Wind, a case taking us back to home ground Los Angeles and a case that our boy was not even looking for, he was just out for a quick beer before dipping into that desk drawer whiskey bottle, or something like that. And damn if pearls weren’t involved in this one too, although they came with a scent this time, perfume, sandalwood, so you know there will be trouble for Marlowe to keep his mind on business. Yah, old Marlowe was just minding his own business when trouble hit him square in the face. A little off-hand bump off of a guy who was looking for a gal, among other things, smelling of sandalwood in order sell her back some young girl pearls that some flyboy war hero gave her back in the day. And that little action led to a another murder, some blackmail, revelations of some matrimonial duplicity, a few scuffles with the cops, good and bad, and the usual assortment of bumps and slugs Marlowe seems drawn to like a moth to flame. Yes, in this one he is back on his horse tilting at windmills for a dame, and not even going under the sheets with her. Jesus.

Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote this selection of short Marlowe stories. Like I said in another review he, along with Brother Dashiell Hammett turned the dreary gentile drawing-room sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us tough guy blood and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

[Hammett, the author of The Thin Man, and creator of The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade, maybe the most famous tough guy detective of them all. Sam, who come to think of it like Marlowe, also had a judgment problem when it came to women, women wearing that damn perfume that stops a man, even a hard-boiled detective man cold, although not an assortment of Hollywood women but one up north in Frisco town.]

In Chandler’s case he drew strength from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes. Or noticing a frayed collar or a misshapen dress that indicated that a guy or gal was on cheap street and just maybe not on the level, maybe scratching like crazy for his or her coffee and cakes.

The list of such descriptive language goes on and on -sullen bartenders wiping a random whisky glass, flighty chorus girls arm in arm with wrong gee gangsters, Hollywood starlet wannabes displaying their wares a little too openly, old time geezers, toothless, melting away in some thankless no account job, guys working out of small-time airless no front cheap jack offices in rundown building s on the wrong side of town doing, well, doing the best they can. And cops, good cops, bad cops, all with that cop air about them of seen it all, done it all blasé, and by the way spill your guts before the billy- club comes down on your fragile head. (That spill your guts thing, by the way a trait that our Marlowe seems organically incapable of doing, except when it suited his purposes. No cop or gangster could force anything out of him, and they tried, believe me they tried. ) He had come from them, from the cops, from the D.A.s office in the old days, had worked with them on plenty of cases but generally he tried to treat them like one might a snake not quite sure whether it is poisonous or not.

At the same time Chandler was a master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless sameness and faux gentility). He had a fix on the museum-like quality of the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.

But where Chandler made his mark was in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Los Angeles Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine, that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny- ante insurance brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment. Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.

Nor was Chandler above putting a little social commentary in Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were heading west to populate the American Western shore night. The rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless mobsters for broken back east looking to bake out in the southern California sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment, the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s code of honor.

And of course over a series of books Chandler expanded the Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing world-weariness, his growing wariness, his small compromises with that code of honor that he had honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlowe the loner, the avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through. Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head, the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some serious Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.

 

peaceact@mail.democracyinaction.org Mon, Feb 24, 2014 03:52 PM

Here’s an easy quiz for you. According to an article in the Washington Post over the weekend , the Obama Administration is considering four options regarding leaving U.S.  troops in Afghanistan after the end of this year. What do you think the number should be? A.      10,000 (favored by U.S. military commanders, unsurprisingly) B.      A somewhat smaller number, unspecified C.      3,000 D.      Zero Tell the president you want all our troops home, with none left behind in Afghanistan. It’s long past time to end America’s longest war. In the words of the late, great Pete Seeger (a longtime Peace Action member): “If you love this land of the free, Bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home, Bring ‘em back from overseas, Bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home!” Peacefully Yours, Kevin Martin Executive Director Peace Action P.S. After you email the president, please click here and tell your friends to do the same. Take Action: Email the President and tell him leave no troops behind in Afghanistan. CONNECT TO US:  Find us on Facebook  Follow us on Twitter  Read our blog  Contact us You are subscribed to Peace Action's Action Alert Network. You can unsubscribe here.

Heroic Wikileaks Whistleblower Private Chelsea Manning ‘s Fight For Freedom Will Again Be Remembered At The Fourth Annual Veterans For Peace-Led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade in South Boston On March 16, 2014

 

 

We will be forming up at the corner of D Street and West Fourth in South Boston (take Redline MBTA to Broadway Station-walk up four blocks and then left) at 1 PM for a 2 PM step-off (note time change). Supporters of Chelsea Manning will be out in force distributing informational leaflets and stickers as well as encouraging participants to sign the Amnesty International and Private Manning Support Network petitions calling on President Barack Obama to pardon her. We will not leave our sister behind        
********
President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

• Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.

• Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.

• Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.

• Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but  the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.

She has been:

• Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.

• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.

• Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.

• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.

Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.

We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.

FIRST& LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________

STREET ADDRESS _____________________________________________________________

CITY, STATE & ZIP _____________________________________________________________

EMAIL& PHONE _____________________________________________________________

Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org

Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

   

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The 1960s Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories

Ten–A Nation Of One’s Own?

Jackson Pulley had been doing his Saturday morning soapbox spiel in the environs of Lenox Avenue and 125^th Street in high Harlem up in New Jack City for as long as anyone could remember. Some grandmothers would tell their grandchildren whom they were minding or raising as their own while passing by doing the Saturday morning shopping that they could remember when their own grandmothers of blessed memory had taken them to that very same Saturday shopping not to listen to, not to be bothered by Jackson’s big boom voice, and of his hand-held mic that could be heard far above and below the avenue. And Jackson Pulley’s spiel had not changed much since he had first given voice to his project back in the late 1920s. His basis idea was that the black people in America, his people, his sweated, kicked around, abused beautiful people, due to the white man’s inherent racism, needed a country, a nation of their own. He would moreover argue his conceptions through good times and bad, against all comers, from old black knight scoundrel Marcus Garvey through the Communist party turns for and against the black nation, through the “new negro” stuff in the 1950s through to the Doctor King and Malcolm X knock down drag out fight and right up until recently when the Black Panthers gave the idea of a black nation a whirl for a while. Old Jackson kept his main idea front and center and would as the “false” challengers arose kick them like tin cans down the road.

Jackson had had no truck with old black knight Marcus Garvey seeing in him just another black hustler working the ignorant West Indies immigrant black janitors and black maids and down and out southern slave-branded sharecroppers out of their hard earned dough. He had been right as rain on that man when he first started seeing that blacks needed a new homeland. The pivotal event though that drove him to his position was seeing one of his own kin lynched right after World War I down in the great state of Georgia while the whites watched with red-heat passion bordering on lunacy. Later before heading north he bore the full brunt of Mister James Crow and his equally savage ways. No, it was time to separate, long past time.

He had had some respect for the Communist Party and their black nation idea. In fact he had been in a study circle with some brothers in the African Blood Brotherhood before some of them went over to the party. He could not go with them since he refused to belong to an organization that allowed whites in. Besides those reds didn’t follow that black nation policy except when they wanted to use it to recruit blacks in hard times. That “new negro” stuff was a joke as far as he was concerned, something out of W.E.B. Dubois’ “talented tenth” and just another way to buy off the natural leaders of black people. Stuff them harmlessly out of the way like some old time Toms. He got serious when Malcolm X arose like a phoenix out of the ashes but he had no truck with Elijah Mohammed seeing him as a less clever Marcus Garvey with all that religious mumbo-jumbo that never did anybody any good. Just another fast-talking preacher hustle, except not Baptist hustle like he knew growing up. The Black Panthers of course demanded respect, respect as black warriors ready to stick their necks out for the black community, but they had been taking a beating of late trying to stay in America, in the cities. Were taking a beating from whitey and his bad ass cops who went crazy when he saw black men with guns ready to defend their own. Still they were righteous and had an idea of what black people needed to get the hell off the eight-ball.

When pressed Jackson like he was this Saturday by a young black brother who seemed to want to know more details about how it would work he would say that what blacks should fight for is a place like Idaho, a place with lots of land and far away from the vast majority of whites. Although he himself had never been there he was sure it would do, and equally sure once black people had had enough of the white man (and increasingly woman) on their necks they would be flocking there. But the young man seemed to say by the shrug of his shoulders like one grandmother said as she passed Jackson Pulley and his soapbox for the hundredth time to her grandchildren “Don’t pay old Jackson any never mind.”…

Ten Point Program[edit]

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:^[43][44]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

 

 

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee of the International Communist League, Vietnamese Section of the Fourth International, 8 July 1947

Book Review

Year One of the Russian Revolution-Victor Serge
I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.

The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.

Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And try to stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.

The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as Utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the specific Russian Question as a factor in world politics anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
******** 

Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee of the International Communist League, Vietnamese Section of the Fourth International, 8 July 1947

The position of the ICL on the events of 1945-47 is much better known than that of La Lutte, its Trotskyist rival. Apart from the accounts by Comrade Ngo Van Xuyet above, we have the description below written by ‘Lucien’ who was a comrade who had escaped to France in 1947, where he worked among Vietnamese factory workers, returning to Saigon in 1954. He died of tuberculosis in 1982. It is thus impossible to accept the remark of Stephen Johns (in Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, part 1, p.119) that “no Vietnamese Trotskyist has ever written an account of the Saigon events”.
Of secondary sources, John Sharpe’s description in Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam (Spartacist, New York, 1978), an informative treatment that originally appeared as a series of articles in Workers Vanguard in 1973, also sympathises with the ICL’s views, as does that of Stig Eriksson.
The ICL criticised the support accorded to the Vietminh by the La Lutte group, and had a separate list. They considered that the formation of military forces was most important, advocating the arming of the people against the reorganised French and the British imperialist army of occupation. They founded a workers’ militia, and attempted to create a system of dual power to oppose both the Allies, setting up peoples’ committees of workers and peasants, among whom they had some 30 militants. They favoured the expansion of the revolution by the abolition of private property, of land to the peasants and the factories to the workers. In 1945 they had as yet no differences with the La Lutte group over the class characterisation of the Soviet state, such as appear in our document here. Trotsky quotes the La Lutte group’s description of October, the ICL’s predecessor, as “centrist” in Trotskyism and the PSOP, 15 July 1939, Leon Trotsky on France, New York 1979, p.241.
This programme comes from the archives of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (where it bears the number ‘Don no 69546, FOD Rs 445’), to whom our thanks are due, and here appears for the first time in English.

*******************

1. August 1945, sounding the knell of Japanese domination, marked the birth of the Vietnamese Revolution.
It was born in the gap created by the disarray of the ruling Japanese military authorities and the inability of the Allies to cause relief troops to come to the spot. The causes that gave birth to it are classic: the centuries-old slavery to which the Vietnamese people had been subjected by French imperialism, the misery and countless sufferings engendered by the last ‘war to end wars’ (two million dead during the 1945 famine in Tonkin), the growth in the political understanding of the masses, the knowledge they had of the inferiority of French imperialism caused by the military disasters it experienced when confronted with German imperialism, to the ‘yellow’ Japanese imperialism, and to the sensible organisation of the Vietminh.
II. The Vietnamese revolution could be claimed to encompass all classes and social layers, and all the political economic, religious, social, philosophical and cultural organisations of the Vietnamese, people. Saigon and Hanoi have witnessed enormous demonstrations of more than a million, recalling the great revolutionary days in Paris, where all the banners were mixed together. Even if the worker and peasant population is very much the basis and inexhaustible reserve of the Vietnamese resistance, many of the bourgeoisie and landowners, up to and including the Emperor Bao Dai (citizen Vinh Thuy today) and a very great number of intellectuals have carried on a great struggle,.
The Vietnamese Revolution is truly national and popular.
It has inaugurated the Vietnamese democratic republic with its own government, its own national assembly, its army and its finances.
III. (A) Dominated, however, as it is by the policy of a ‘bloc of classes’ of the Indochinese Communist Party, the strongest and best organised of all the parties that make up the Vietminh, the policy of the Vietnamese republican government defends primarily the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the landowners. The defence of private property (including the property of French imperialism), the defence of national integrity, a bourgeois parliament, finances and customs of an equally bourgeois type, together with an army, police and bureaucracy intended to guarantee private property are all crowned with a policy of building an independent economy – obviously a bourgeois one – away from the grip of the world imperialist economy.
As for the layers of the petty bourgeoisie, the republic will reserve a host of careers for them, in parliament, in the administration, in the police, in the army, in commerce, in agriculture, in diplomacy, etc.
With regard to the mass of the poor peasantry, the Ta-dien, nothing, or practically nothing. Obviously the Dia to (tenant farming system) will be reformed, but private landed property remains sacred and inalienable.
As for the still weak working class, it was only granted a slight amount of labour legislation.
However, since the Vietnamese bourgeoisie has turned out to be congenitally impotent, an impotence from which the French imperialism of the great industrial combines, trading companies and large plantations of the Bank of IndoChina never allowed it to break free, just as in another way the interests of the native gentry are intimately linked with and subordinated to the interests of French imperialism, this bourgeois policy of the Vietnamese republic has been shown to be unworkable.
Economic, and consequently political, independence is no more than a hollow dream. Agrarian revolution would have been considered a crime. Thus neither of the two great tasks of the democratic revolution came to be resolved; the dream of the Stalinist strategists has evaporated, largely because of themselves.
Even more so, they have sabotaged both the one and the other.
(B) In fact, confronted by imperialism, they merely practised the grovelling policy of cowardly pacifists. At the news of the defeat of the, Japanese, having straightaway seized power by a bold coup d’etat in Tonkin, they posed as democrats, boasting of their struggle on the side of the democratic Allies against Japanese militarism. They naively thought that the Sino-English imperialists whom they had received with open arms were going to grant them the independence promised by the Atlantic Charter. Their illusions were soon dispelled when General Gracey opened the gates of Nam-bo (in Cochin China) to the first troops of the puffed-up Leclerc, who in the meantime had been armed by Great Britain at a cost of three billion francs for the conquest of both Vietnam and Indochina.

Stirred

Then the people, whom up till then the Stalinist leaders of the Vietminh had accustomed to bleat out the slogan “Hurrah Allied Forces”, who had been partly stirred up by revolutionary groupings, either extremist nationalists or International Communists, as if by instinct came to their senses and armed themselves spontaneously, some with sharpened bamboo sticks, some with hatchets, with machettes, with knives, and some with weapons that had been stolen or seized from Japanese soldiers, and organised themselves rapidly into popular militias and revolutionary peoples’ committees. The peasants began to take over the land and the workers the factories, mainly belonging to the French.
All these revolutionary measures were forbidden by the governmental committee of Nam-bo of Tran Van Giau, Nguyen Van Tao and Duong Bach Mai, all three of them ministers and leaders of the Indochinese Communist Party.
Arming the people! What a Trotskyist provocation to the Allies! It was up to the popular militias to surrender all their weapons, including the sharpened bamboo sticks, to the governmental committee who would hand them back to the Japanese, since they had to render account for them to the British, who had entrusted them with the maintenance of law and order. Revolutionary Committees! Yet another Trotskyist provocation! Only administrative committees are necessary. Land to the peasants! Factories to the workers! Yet more Trotskyist provocations!
Thus the Stalinist leaders had opposed all the popular initiatives that would have guaranteed national liberation and the agrarian revolution.
Their enemies are the defenders of the working people and of the armed revolutionary people, they are the supporters of the Fourth International, they are those who, at least during the first period of the resistance, the Stalinist leaders imprisoned, assassinated and offered as victims on the altar of the democratic Allies as represented by Gracey, for defending the poor peasants. It is thus understandable why numerous militants of the Fourth International as well as of the Hoa Hao were exterminated physically, and why it was necessary for the Stalinists to secure the liquidation of the Fourth International, for this was a sine qua non condition of their maintaining power and of their flirtation with imperialism.
(C) In spite of this attitude, or because of it, they were driven from the capital by the first French troops. Their ‘friend’ Gracey lifted not a little finger to defend them, just as he had never even allowed them to see him via the back stairs. They gave up Saigon without firing a single bullet and left the people to itself, to the fury of the enemy ... but also to its revolutionary militants.
Finding cadres within its own ranks, the people, angered by the flight of the Stalinist government, organised the resistance everywhere. It has lit up the bloody road of armed insurrection by a flame never to be forgotten that will yet astonish the world.
(D) Having recovered from their fright, our Stalinist ministers, trained as they were in the school of the Guomindang, then tried to regain the leadership of the movement of the insurrection, not without effecting the assassination of authentic revolutionary militants. But as always, they went from surrender to surrender.
First there was the suspension of hostilities in Nam-bofor the parleys with General Gracey that allowed the French reinforcements to arrive. Then there was the agreement of 6 March, which in exchange for the formal recognition of the Vietnamese Republic opened the gates of Tonkin to the troops of Leclerc, and finally the modus vivendi, a booby trap that in spite of the warnings of the revolutionary opposition allowed the Moutet-D’Argenlieu-Leclerc trio to finalise its plans for the reconquest of Tonkin and Annam. The entire Stalinist policy has betrayed the cause of the bourgeois democratic revolution, and has continually played the game of imperialism.
IV. Resistance, effective, violent and burning, is still continuing at present by the most sophisticated methods of the guerilla. The enemy, however, has reoccupied almost all the vital and strategic centres. It is, nonetheless, exhausted even by that. The permanent internal crisis in France (finance, food, supplies, interminable strikes, the threat of civil war), the financial incapacity of French imperialism to send and maintain an expeditionary force of between 250,000 and 500,000 men that would be necessary for the complete reconquest of Vietnam, and the revolts of other French colonies should and could have induced them to bargain with the Ho Chi Minh government. But there we are; he is of the Moscow obedience, and clerico-republican French reaction, following its yankee orchestral conductor, did not want any of it. For Vietnamese territory is coveted by Sino-American expansionism. Besides, it is likely to serve as a base for the future ‘war to end wars’.
Whilst one faction of the bourgeoisie went back to its old master, another faction ‘ for fear of seeing itself ruined by an interminable policy of ‘scorched earth’ (houses and factories burnt down, rice fields abandoned, trade ruined and communications cut), fearing the measures of ‘War Communism’ (confiscation of the harvest, of property and of requisitions of all kinds) – this faction of Nguyen Hai Than, of Nguyen Tuong Tam and Nguyen Van Sam has turned towards the ex-emperor Bao Dai to mediate with the Americans in exchange for a consideration.
These latter have systematically organised themselves, made a stand and regained their courage against the Stalinist policy of the Vietminh under the name of the National United Front.
Making themselves the echo of a more gigantic struggle, that of the USA-USSR, these two fronts have entered into open conflict, saturating Western Cochin China in blood. And so the Vietnamese drama continues, without any foreseeable way out for the moment.
What does, however, remain certain is that the Vietnamese working people and peasants, who did not struggle only in the end to remain inside the imperialist French Union, to allow itself to be still exploited and plundered, or to serve Sino-American interests, has shown itself to be satisfied neither by the Ho Chi Minh setup, nor by the set-up of Than Tam Sam (Nguyen Hai Than, Nguyen Tuong Tam and Nguyen Van Sam).
The Viet Hong organisation in Tonkin is already being talked about as being the revolutionary wing of the resistance. Groups for resistance to the end are being born practically everywhere.

Satisfy

In any case, negotiations could yet take place. Governmental combinations could halt the hostilities momentarily, though this does not appear probable.
But since nothing will be done to satisfy the deep aspirations of the people, at present organised and armed, the struggle will continue.
V. What has been the policy followed up till now by the working class political and trade union organisations of the metropolitan country as regards the Vietnamese revolution?
The Stalinist Party, wishing to see the tricolour of France floating over all its overseas territories, has betrayed the Leninist policy of the right of peoples to self-determination up to and including the right of separation from the metropolitan country. They have shown themselves to be accessories in this by their collaboration with the Bidault-Moutet and Ramadier-Moutet governments. Abstention during the vote for military credits for Indochina does not excuse the betrayal of its war minister. The support it has given to the Ho Chi Minh government has only been token. Will not, moreover, the prolongation of the war in Vietnam for certain aggravate the present crisis threatening the French finances (over 100 million per day is being gobbled up by the expedition to Vietnam), finally involving French imperialism with another Syria-Lebanon, at least? Its policy has in the end imprisoned Vietnam inside the French Union for the glory of a ‘strong and happy’ France, the France of Leclerc, of the Bank of IndoChina, of the rubber planters, of water, of electricity, etc., etc. ... obviously.
French imperial grandeur in danger could not find better defenders. Besides, isn’t the Stalinist policy of class collaboration and Millerandism a permanent betrayal of the Socialist proletariat and the oppressed people?
The Socialist Party, which has again become the leading governmental party 10 years after the Popular Front, has yet again revealed its thoroughly social-imperialist nature. Even the most experienced pen pushers of Le Populaire (of Paris) could not disagree with the fact that Bidault, Leclerc, D’Argenlieu, Moutet and its own Ramadier well and truly make up one and the same admirably balanced team. The truth is that the Socialist Party, characteristic as it is of the Fourth Republic, is parliamentarism, and is only there to make the Vietnamese pill palatable to the working people of France. History will one day tell us the amounts on the cheques that Moutet and Ramadier and sons have handled from Ganny, the planters and other sharks during their stay in Saigon. We must assign responsibility properly. But between them and us it is a question of war.
The Pivert-Rous tendency, the left wing of the Socialist Party, has indeed protested against the opportunism of their comrade ministers. But it only aimed at being able to replace them in order to realise a better policy of understanding imperialist interests. Isn’t Dechezelles joining ranks with the Stalinists in recommending the inclusion of Vietnam within the French imperialist union, for an agreement with the Ho Chi Minh government, may we add? What else could this ‘French Union’ be under the Fourth Republic, for ourselves and the working class, in the absence of a Socialist proletarian revolution, if not a union of exploiters and exploited, dominated by imperialism, naturally?
As for the CGT, its leadership, under the orders of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, has also failed in its duty of revolutionary support for colonial peoples in their struggle for liberation. Moreover, can we expect anything better from the bonzes, Jouhaux-Racamond-Frachon?
Faced with the Vietnamese revolution, all the great working class organisations of France have either howled with the wolf or have shown themselves t® be its accomplices.
The group of La Revue Internationaliste, pitifully, has only the attitude of a student amateur.
Only the Parti Communiste Internationaliste has adopted a correct attitude of unconditional revolutionary support. But, in its organ at least, it does not seem to have sketched out perspectives for the future.
VI. As far as we Internationalist Communists are concerned, we lay claim to the best traditions of Bolshevism on the national question: forever making the principles of the permanent revolution our own, we think that the resolution of the national-democratic tasks in Vietnam – which are pressing down more sharply than ever – can only be accomplished by the resolution of the revolutionary Socialist tasks. In other words, if for example we remain within the limits of the French empire, the true national liberation of Vietnam, as well as the agrarian revolution, can only be accomplished borne on the wings of the proletarian Socialist revolution in France (or in another advanced country), which will sweep along in its wake of Socialist liberation all the oppressed peoples in order to transform their national democratic revolution into a Socialist revolution, with the aim of building a Union of French Soviet Socialist Republics.
We therefore oppose to the imperialist slogans of the French Union that of the Union of French Socialist Republics.
If, therefore, the Vietnamese revolution is stagnating, for the time being, it is due to the lack of a revolutionary Socialist upsurge in the advanced countries.
To those who believe that the national liberation of Vietnam can be obtained by negotiations with French imperialism, with or without the mediation of other imperialisms, we say; we will only obtain this liberation by a concerted struggle of the Vietnamese worker and peasant population with the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan country, hand in hand with the other oppressed peoples.
To this end, given that French imperialism can only emerge from the present crisis by trampling upon the oppressed peoples of Africa and Asia, and by the installation of a military or a Fascist dictatorship, being faced with the tragic dilemma of Socialist revolution or military-Fascist reaction, our duty is not to hold back the Vietnamese resistance for whatever independence to the advantage of the national bourgeoisie and of imperialism, but to prolong it, to accentuate the general crisis of France, to help the revolts of the Madagascans and the Moroccans, and whilst waiting for the French revolutionary upsurge, to prepare for the transformation of the present revolution into a Socialist revolution. Outside of this way, there is no solution.
International Communist League (Vietnamese Section)
Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee, 8 July 1947

On Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial To Colonel Robert Gould Shaw And The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (Volunteers) –Take Three 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 …he had walked pass that blessed then defaced, muddied, unattended frieze across the street from the State House on Beacon Street in Boston it seemed like half his now graying life. Anytime he had cadged a hooky day from high school back in the early 1960s in order to head into downtown Boston and check out the day life on the Common, grab an off-beat movie at the many big house theaters on lower Washington Street to kill a couple of hours, or just hang out he would circle around Beacon Street after emerging from the Park Street subway station. Walked around just to get a “feel” for his city, the city of his birth, on humid summer days, leaves falling orange/red/yellow/autumn days, bleak snow-bound winter lights days, and rebirth green spring days. Walked head down right by the seemingly obscure defaced and unrepaired marble. Walked by thinking of his big world existential problems too intense to worry about faded pasts  

Later, mid-1960s later, when he went to school, a two-year school and then transferred to Suffolk University in that same downtown Boston and had to work trucks down toward Congress Street to make his daily meat he would pass the memorial on his way to school. Still later when he lived on the hill (Beacon Hill) with some rarified suburban girl from Long Island who footed the bill (or rather some New Jack City banker Daddy) in sullen splendor (until she in her turn married some junior up and coming stockbroker) his studied neglect continued.

Yes he had passed it, that subtle monument to past fights, like it was just another in a long line of historic ornaments in a town filled with memorials to its ancient arrival long continental history. You know bloody battle number one here, bloody battle number two there, a pigeon-bedecked statute of some fire-breathing Puritan divine casting out heathens here or some furious bearded abolitionist turning up the heat there, some battle-hardened general leaning Grant-like there, some corruption-filled over-fed civic leader in full three piece suit regalia here. Yes, the town was a breathing tribute to all that went down in the cold times American East when west, real west, was someplace around the Hudson River and white man European dreams were of making it along the Eastern seaboard and not having to trek inland luckless to face the unknown, natural or man-make.  

 

Had briskly blinkered pass that perfect pre-historic monument to some pretty important history going on right before his eyes down in bloody Birmingham/Selma/Greensboro/Philadelphia (MS that is)/Montgomery/Oxford (MS again) and one thousand other later to be   storied locales after the dust cleared (and the fight reined in). Yet with all that civil rights let-them-vote-sent-books-to Alabama-ride-the-freedom-bus he was clueless to that aspect of his history. Clueless (and no high school history class, at least the days he attended, ever mentioned such things) to those places, Fort Wagner above all, where his people, his black proud Massachusetts 54^th (and later 55^th) had made righteous stands for freedom, had filled the sable ranks, had arms in hand confirmed the worst planter’s John Brown-benighted nightmare, had bled rivers of blood and  inelegantly sweated buckets of sweat, had trooped down to their citadel, Charleston, singing marching songs, and had not waited, no, no more wait, on some benevolent white man to do the work of freedom.

Then one cloudy day, not a 1960s day but much later, he happened to notice some work being done in the area around the monument while walking toward Park Street Station and a ride to the suburbs. Walked toward the site and asked about what was going on. Restoration they called it, bringing the dead back to life he thought. Suddenly the sun glistened though a cloud and he noticed something on the frieze, a figure of a man, an old man trooper, bearded, bed-rolled, knap-sacked, rifle-shouldered, marching in step just in front and to the left (from a front view of the scene) of a white officer on horse (whom he would find out later was the Colonel Shaw who was buried with his black brethren in  knighted dignity in some ashy pit in front of bloodied Fort Wagner). He stopped in his tracks as he realized that old soldier looked very much like his paternal grandfather, the father of his own rolling stone father who had taken off for parts unknown and left him and his mother to the tender mercies when he was about seven. That old man had (along with his grandmother) saved him from gathering a storm in the streets with the lure of the corner boy life.

He was befuddled at first since as a veteran of the Vietnam War he knew that no old pappy guys were filling the ranks of the American army in his time and so that old pappy figure perked his interest. One day he went to the Boston Public Library over in Copley Square and found a book that dealt with the history of what he had found out was a memorial to the heroic Massachusetts 54^th Regiment, all volunteers, all black ranks, and all white officers raised right there in Boston. His interest further perked he sought to find who was the model for that old pappy soldier. Had he a history, some story to tell. He never did find out if there was a real live model but he liked to think that old pappy had escaped from some desperate Tidewater plantation, had followed the northern star, had made something of himself, learned a respectable trade and had prospered. Then when Frederick Douglass or one of those hot-tempered abolitionist orators raised the call he had laid down his tools and joined up.  Joined up amid ancient memories of kin in Pharaoh’s thrall and had not waited, said no, no more wait, on some benevolent white man to do the work of freedom...

***Oh The Shark, Babe… -Kevin Spacey’s Beyond The Sea-A Film Review

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Beyond The Sea, starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, directed by Barry Levinson, 2004

No question I am a child of rock and roll, a child of what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (ouch!), when the likes of Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Wanda Jackson, Laverne Baker, the Big Bopper, and about a million doo wop groups roamed freely on the earth. And lit up the transistor radio night airwaves for perplexed teenagers along the way. Then came something of a musical counter-revolution as Elvis went slick, Chuck had tax and white women trouble, Jerry Lee had cousin problems, and the others faded and that magical moment went silent. Also faded once parents, our parents, got hooked on the idea that rock and roll meant, ah, sex, (maybe) and thus the devil’s music and started pushing back with singers like Bobby Vee, Fabian, the Everly Brothers, Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, and, well, Bobby Darin. Yes, Bobby Darin, the subject of the film under review, Beyond The Sea.

To be fair as least as far as this biopic portrayed him accurately   apparently Bobby Darin (played very nicely if unevenly by super-actor Kevin Spacey) did not want to be solely seen as a teenage heartthrob but fancied himself a popular entertainer in the mode of the previous generation’s (our classic age of rock and roll parents’ generation) Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. However on the ground, the teenage ground, in those days, especially junior high school days, Bobby with his Splish- Splash –Beyond The Sea-Dream Lover good manners and his popular translation of the Bertolt Brecht Three-Penny Opera song Mack The Knife every mother in the neighborhood pointed him out as prima facie evidence of good taste in teen music. Someone to actually be listened to. Worst of all when he teamed up with and married teenage actress heartthrob Sandra Dee (played by Kate Bosworth) every girl in the neighborhood (and a few traitor boys hooked on perky blondes) could hardly contain themselves with every tidbit of information they could gather from the teen magazines about the pair.    

Enough though about Bobby’s role in the music counter-revolution and the clamp-down of decent rock music. What is really at issue with this film, what is wrong with it to be frank, is its obvious sentimentality, its odd-ball song and dance routines and it flights of fantasy as Bobby Darin meets…well meets his younger Bobby self along the way. Quickly put any film that makes the likes of Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth and John Goodman out of place is a film that should be avoided. Instead just wait a few years for the Beatles and the Stones and the children of classic rock and rock will get well again.