He's a Congenital Cheap Pig, But He's Our Congenital Cheap Pig

I have a lot of things I want to write about here, but I've been busy reading, which eats up so much time.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through James J. Lorence's The Suppression of The Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (New Mexico, 1999). Let's see, I did a post about that movie just over two years ago. Lorence's book gives a brief account of the production of the The Salt of the Earth, giving me a greater appreciation for the way it involved local, Mexican-American miners and their families in the development of the script and in the filming. Most of the cast were nonprofessionals, and did surprisingly well.

The book goes on to tell of the organized program to block the film's production and distribution. It's chilling, and it reminded me of this post I did at the end of last year, on the misinformation of the American public. Criticizing a blogger who lamented the rise of the Internet and people's reliance on less "objective" outlets than the standard corporate media, I pointed out that Americans have always gone to alternatives:

I'm not sure where my peers and their parents went for their misinformation in the 60s, but there was the Reader's Digest, a reliable fount of right-wing propaganda with an enormous circulation, and there were plenty of right-wing radio commentators even before the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. It was as if there was a sewer in which their blatantly racist, hysterically anti-communist material marinated until it was ready to dump into receptive ears.

As I read The Suppression of The Salt of the Earth I realized that I'd completely forgotten the American Legion and the Roman Catholic Church, two nationwide anti-Communist groups with their own, probably interlocking, propaganda networks. Those networks are the ancestors of the right-wing propaganda we see today -- often directly, since today's propaganda mills often recycle Oldies but Goodies from the Fifties. And I've been ruminating again on accusations I've seen about the supposed McCarthyism of the "left" by right-wing writers, often the very same people who are trying to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy as a martyr of the anti-Red struggle. Coming from them, shouldn't "McCarthyism" be a compliment? (When I asked RWA1, who'd been calling for an end to the use of "Nazi" and "fascist" in political discourse, if he also favored retiring "Red," "pinko," and "socialist," he mused that he didn't know, he had a weakness for those terms. Of course.)

I've also started rereading Mary Lasswell's series of novels that began with Suds in Your Eye (Houghton Mifflin, 1942). They're a guilty pleasure of mine, and it's my third turn through the books. They're about three elderly ladies in San Diego who become fast friends, bonding over beer, good cooking, and war fever, though the series continued after World War II was over. Except for predictable hostility to "Japs" in the wartime books, the books are less racist than most popular fiction of their period, though a couple of gay male interior decorators are the villains of the last book, Let's Go for Broke (1962), which is an annoyance but not enough to turn me off to Lasswell's writing -- as I said, she's a guilty pleasure, and her stories and characters charm me despite that final lapse.

I made a dash through Stephanie Budin's The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008), about a theme that has fascinated Bible scholars and historians of antiquity for centuries now. She's not the first to deny the historical validity of claims about priestesses of Ishtar peddling sex on behalf of the Goddess, which have often been used as distractions in the debates over homosexuality and the Bible, but she brought me up to date on the matter. More on this later, maybe.

Last week I finally read Scott G. Brown's Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery (Wilfrid Laurer UP, 2005), and so I've been looking online for more reactions to it and to Smith, whom I've written about before. I hope to write about it at more length soon; for the moment I want to mention again how startling it is to find really overwrought homophobia among supposedly "objective" scholars, which seems to fuel their willingness to pass along utter falsehoods (such as the claim that no one but Smith ever saw the manuscript of the "Secret Gospel of Mark"). But as I say, later.

Today it was reported that Private Bradley Manning, who's been subjected to forced nudity in his cell on top of months of solitary confinement, has been allowed to cover himself (via). President Obama, you'll recall, told the press last week that the military had assured him that everything was copacetic, but there has been increasing criticism in the media. If I were given dictatorial powers, I would condemn Obama (and Dana Milbank) to wear this outfit at all official functions for the duration of his term -- no, not really, because if I had dictatorial powers Obama would be turned over to the International Criminal Court, along with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the torture gangsters, with no American exemptions allowed. More realistically but only slightly, if I had any Photoshop skills I'd merge images of Barry and Michelle into this photo.

Solidarity Forever

Last night I finally watched Salt of the Earth, a 1953 (or 1954?) movie about a miners’ strike made by blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers against fierce resistance. (And I do mean fierce: Howard Hughes blocked development of the negative, and the lead actress, Rosaura Revueltas, was deported to Mexico, where she shot her remaining scenes illegally for insertion into the finished film.) I’d stumbled on the DVD at the public library a couple of years ago, and, always interested in political art, had checked it out. But the credit sequence turned me off with its overdone marching music over gritty footage of a poor woman working around her family’s shack, and I hadn’t been able to steel myself for another try.

Then I read a discussion with Noam Chomsky in which he praised the film:

CHOMSKY: Salt of the Earth. It came out at the same time as On the Waterfront, which is a rotten movie. And On the Waterfront became a huge hit -- because it was anti-union. See, On the Waterfront was part of a big campaign to destroy unions while pretending to be for, you know, Joe Sixpack. So On the Waterfront is about this Marlon Brando or somebody who stands up for the poor working man against the corrupt union boss. Okay, things like that exist, but that's not unions -- I mean, sure, there are plenty of union bosses who are crooked, but nowhere near as many as C.E.O.s who are crooked, or what have you. But since On the Waterfront combined that anti-union message with "standing up for the poor working man," it became a huge hit. On the other hand, Salt of the Earth, which was an authentic and I thought very well-done story about a strike and the people involved in it, that was just flat killed, I don't even think it was shown anywhere. I mean, you could see it at an art theater, I guess, but that was about it. I don't know what those of you who know something about film would think of it, but I thought it was a really outstanding film.

While I respect and admire Chomsky, he’s not known for his artistic sensitivity. Still, I agreed with his take on Hollywood’s treatment of labor issues, so I decided I should give Salt of the Earth another try.

Getting through the opening credits was still a trial. The bombastic music, by Sol Kaplan, was played by a full orchestra and was very Boy Meets Girl Meets Tractor if you know what I mean. Worse, it was very Hollywood: one thing that makes ‘classic’ Hollywood films difficult for me to watch is the music, which lays on emotion with a trowel and gets in the way of the films’ moving me honestly. (John Williams, the antichrist of today’s Hollywood soundtrack, is a well-known exponent of this approach to movie music.)

After the opening credits, though, the film was quite watchable. Based on an actual strike and using a mixture of professional and non-professional actors, including mineworkers and union organizers, Salt of the Earth tells how a mining community in New Mexico brought the mineowners to the bargaining table through solidarity and inventive tactics. What makes it startlingly fresh even today is that, first, the main protagonists are Mexican Americans, and they are played by Mexican Americans; and second, the miners’ wives insist on playing an equal role in the strike, with demands of their own. (Indoor plumbing and hot water, for example – radical!) I began to wonder if that obnoxious opening music might not have been meant ironically after all, the self-importance of machismo against the day-to-day labor of housewives and mothers, but I don't think the filmmakers were that self-aware.

Is Salt of the Earth preachy and didactic? Sure, but so were many Hollywood classics, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to It’s a Wonderful Life, from The Wizard of Oz to Gone With the Wind. After watching Salt of the Earth I looked up some online reviews through IMDB, and found that several of them complained about the film’s agenda and its division of the characters into good guys and bad guys. I particularly recall one writer who complained that Esperanza (Revueltas’ character, the wife of a miner and union leader) is always right, and her husband Ramón (played by Juan Chacón, one of the nonprofessionals) is always wrong. That’s not quite true – Ramón is right in the areas where he’s used to having competence, but not when he faces change as his wife and the other women start breaking out of the roles he expects; and Esperanza takes time to find her voice and the courage to use it. But again, the characters are no more two-dimensional than most Hollywood characters, then or now.

The acting also came in for slighting comments, especially that of the nonprofessionals – big surprise! I thought that the nonprofessionals were pretty good, and was surprised to learn in the closing credits (which identified the status of each cast member) that some of the characters, such as the Anglo union organizer, were not played by pros. Juan Chacón is a bit wooden, true, but no more so in my opinion than Humphrey Bogart, whom he resembles. Classic Hollywood acting isn’t known for its subtlety or its fluidity anyhow, and the director Herbert J. Biberman evidently managed to make his amateurs comfortable in front of the cameras.

There was also some sniping at the film’s shaky production values. But it should hardly be news anymore that expensive production isn’t necessary for a good movie. I wonder how many people who dismiss Salt of the Earth as cheap and shoddy, can still enjoy (say) low-budget slasher films, to say nothing of the Italian neo-realists. I suspect that the film’s politics are a stumbling block for many people, but since I share those politics, down to its feminism and antiracism, I found it refreshing.

There are probably other American feature films that have dealt well with political issues, but aside from Norma Rae and maybe Bulworth, I can’t think of many. Usually I look to foreign films for intelligent handling of politics, especially those of South Korean directors like Park Kwang-su or Lee Chang-dong. Salt of the Earth turned out to be much better than I expected, and I’m not surprised that it was suppressed in the US.