The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    60 years of Spartacus 📂 Archived Message

    Posted by Keith-264 on November 9, 2021, 9:35 pm

    https://isj.org.uk/spartacus/
    Issue: 172
    24th October 2021
    Phil Butland

    On 6 October 1960, the film Spartacus opened in New York City’s DeMille Theatre.1Time Magazine celebrated “a new kind of Hollywood movie: a superspectacle with spiritual vitality and moral force”.2 Long-standing New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was less excited, dismissing the film as “heroic humbug”, adding that “the middle phase is pretentious and tedious, because it is concerned with the dull strife of politics”.3 People entering the film had to brave picket lines organised by the right-wing American Legion. The Legion had sent out 17,000 letters encouraging patriotic war veterans to protest the film.4 Hedda Hopper, a columnist close to the Legion, wrote that “this story was sold to Universal Pictures from a book written by a Commie and the screen script was written by a Commie, so don’t go and see it”.5 Still, the film went on to win four Oscars at the 1961 Academy Awards.

    The “Commie scriptwriter” behind the movie was Dalton Trumbo. Spartacus was the first film to carry his name on its end credits for over a decade. Trumbo had spent 11 months in prison after he refused to testify in front of Joseph McCarthy’s House of Representations Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was part of the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and producers who challenged McCarthy’s right to investigate their connections to the Communist Party and paid heavily for it. Since 1945, no film had been prepared to publicly acknowledge his contribution, even though he had won two Oscars in this period for screenplays he had written under pseudonyms.

    For the 12 years following their 1948 trial, none of the Hollywood Ten could openly work in the US film industry. Some got jobs as labourers, some left the country. Others carried on writing, albeit at a much lower rate of pay, under assumed names. By proudly displaying Trumbo’s name, Spartacus openly challenged the repressive status quo—and the anti-Communist witch-hunts weren’t what they used to be. At the Los Angeles première, the 1,500 guests were met by only 36 pickets. By the end of 1960, Spartacus was the year’s highest-grossing film.
    Spartacus and the McCarthy witch-hunt

    Spartacus was created in a Hollywood still reeling from the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Trumbo’s script reminds us of the indignities that he continued to suffer. At one point, the Roman senator Crassus declares, “The enemies of the state are known, arrests are in progress, the prisons begin to fill. In every city and province, lists of the disloyal have been compiled.” Trumbo knew that his name could be found on similar lists that had been compiled much more recently. Although McCarthyism is now often thought of primarily as a Hollywood phenomenon, its purview was much wider. Its aim was to root out radical opinion and social resistance. Norma Barzman, who was forced into exile by the blacklist, explains: “They attacked Hollywood because it was high profile and made it easier to create a climate of fear. The blacklist was a small part of what was going on in this country at the time”.6

    The 1950s had started badly for the left in the United States, as Stefan Bornost explains:

    Unlike the 1930s, which was characterized by large social struggles, workers failed to break in large numbers away from the system and towards the Communist Party. Instead they were increasingly integrated into the developing conservative and anti-Communist Cold War consensus. The Communists thus lost both political possibilities and members. Party membership fell from 80,000 in 1944 to 5,000 in the mid-1950s. Of these 5,000, around 1,500 were Federal Bureau of Investigation informants.7

    In 1952, the US Chamber of Commerce recommended barring “Communists, fellow travelers and dupes” from jobs as “teachers and librarians”, and from posts in “any school or university.” Specifically targetted were “the entertainment field” and “any industrial plant large enough to have a labor union”.8

    McCarthy was helped by the “business union” model adopted by the big trade union federations, which actively worked to police the left:

    In 1949, the CIO expelled 11 “red” unions. By 1954, 59 out of 100 unions had changed their constitution to bar Communists from holding union offices—a provision that was only recently dropped—and 40 unions banned Communists from being rank and file members.9

    Beyond the trade unions, there was a broader left-liberal acceptance of McCarthyism. Instead of defending the political rights of Communist Party members, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conducted its own witch-hunt to drive radicals out of its ranks—such as ACLU founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.10

    Spartacus was a product of a time that had witnessed these massive defeats for the left, but also one in which that left was slowly starting to recover. By the late 1950s, some of the trade unionists who had been targeted by McCarthyism were starting to regroup. If you have ever been inspired by the iconic “I’m Spartacus” scene, just think what such a display of solidarity would have meant to socialists and trade unionists who, after years of betrayal by politicians and union leaders, were beginning to organise again. Ctd....

    Message Thread:


    « Index