The Last Film Joseph Losey Made Before He Was Blacklisted By Patriots
The Hollywood Blacklist cruelly and cravenly destroyed and altered many careers of talented and original film artists. Actress Lee Grant, for example, didn't work for over a decade, all because of the most marginal connection to the American Left. Elia Kazan maintained his career because he named names, earning him the resentful stares of numerous glitterati at an Academy Awards show when he received a lifetime achievement Oscar. Few of those dissing him really know what they would do if faced with the choice of career or no career in Hollywood. Dalton Trumbo wrote scripts using pseudonyms until Kirk Douglas, star and executive producer of Spartacus, put his name on the screen. By then, 1960, anti-Communist fever had subsided from its 1950s peak. By then, Joseph Losey was in England directing films under his own name.
After The Big Night (1951), his fifth feature, until 1957, Losey directed just three films using three different names (Andrea Forzano, Victor Hanbury, and Joseph Walton). That Losey had to use pseudonyms even while directing movies outside the United States reminds us of the business side of motion pictures. The three pseudonymous features would've run against an ideological blockade when sent to the States for distribution, had the blacklisted name, Losey, appeared in the credits.
This kind of cowardly behavior goes on today. I saw investigative journalist Max Blumenthal interviewed a few days ago. In Washington, D.C., a book signing for his new work, The Management of Savagery, was cancelled due to pressure from the pro-regime change Syria lobby, a group with significant influence on American hawkish politicians, the kinds of power brokers who don't like Max Blumenthal's anti-establishment reporting, anyway.
In Blumenthal's case, as with Left-leaning and Leftist film artists in the 1940s and 1950s, political correctness has less to do with policing language and everything to do with the attempt to control ideas, suppressing them if necessary.
Joseph Losey found work in England and in Continental Europe into the 1980s. Since he made only five of his thirty-one feature films in the U.S., the Wisconsin-born director can be considered a European cineaste. I've now seen four of his five American films: The Boy With Green Hair, The Lawless, The Prowler, and The Big Night, still missing his remake of Fritz Lang's M to complete the quintet. The four I've seen are all at least good films, with The Prowler standing out as an exceptionally fine film noir. Three of these four have the Hollywood feel of the period, with conventional narratives, while The Boy With Green Hair (1948) has an urban fantasy element at its core, a parable about the value of individuality.
The Big Night, so called because it takes place during its protagonist's eighteenth birthday, deals with George (John Barrymore, Jr.), a bullied teenager. He's first shown getting humiliated, slapped and jeered at by his peers on the sidewalk while passersby stare. He goes into his father's bar. The adult patrons call him Georgie, grin at him and clearly regard him as a pathetic weasel boy. George's father Andy (Preston Foster) gets little respect, either. A sportswriter, Al Judge (Howard St. John), a vicious creep with a limp and a cane, comes in with two goons and cane-whips the living shit out of Andy in front of his son. The reason for this, as George discovers, is Andy's former failed relationship with Al Judge's sister. The beating, non-fatal but horrific, inspires George to take action, especially after he finds his father's loaded revolver. He spends most of the night tracking Al Judge, trying to steel himself to put bullets into him.
John Barrymore, Jr., father of Drew Barrymore, does a pretty good job as the desperate George. Throughout, he's in over his head. His role reminded me of John Derek's character in Nicholas Ray's Knock on Any Door (1949)--the troubled youth rebelling because basic needs aren't being met, as in Ray's later far more famous movie, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). George's main problem, evidently, has to do with a father figure, Andy, who, though he tries and is patient with his son, nevertheless fails to live up to George's illusions about masculinity--the idea of "Why didn't you fight back?"
That Andy was a boxer makes his humiliation under the viciously enacted will of Al Judge even more striking to his son. The bar's patrons witness the beating, talk about it. After a few hours everyone in the neighborhood knows about it. Wherever George goes on his quest to kill Al Judge, he hears about his father's surrender to punishment. Al Judge, in that moment of vindictiveness, had ordered Andy to take off his shirt and get down on his hands and knees. Just a few minutes before, Andy and the bar's patrons were singing "Happy Birthday" to George, with a cake and lit candles, thirty seconds of joy in George's life before Al Judge changes his life trajectory.
Joseph Losey, in a sense, had to get on his hands and knees before the authorities demanding he not work in Hollywood. He got up, though, flipping the bird to those motherfuckers, relocating to Europe where he made some of the greatest films of the twentieth century's second half. As with the novels of Henry James, most of them written in Europe, the American, Losey, created remarkable films like Accident, The Servant, Eva, and the film I'll review next in this blog, The Romantic Englishwoman. He wouldn't and couldn't have made them in Hollywood, since their flavor is so European.
Is this the true value of oppressors' actions the positive unintended consequences stemming from their stupidity and cruelty?
Vic Neptune
The Hollywood Blacklist cruelly and cravenly destroyed and altered many careers of talented and original film artists. Actress Lee Grant, for example, didn't work for over a decade, all because of the most marginal connection to the American Left. Elia Kazan maintained his career because he named names, earning him the resentful stares of numerous glitterati at an Academy Awards show when he received a lifetime achievement Oscar. Few of those dissing him really know what they would do if faced with the choice of career or no career in Hollywood. Dalton Trumbo wrote scripts using pseudonyms until Kirk Douglas, star and executive producer of Spartacus, put his name on the screen. By then, 1960, anti-Communist fever had subsided from its 1950s peak. By then, Joseph Losey was in England directing films under his own name.
After The Big Night (1951), his fifth feature, until 1957, Losey directed just three films using three different names (Andrea Forzano, Victor Hanbury, and Joseph Walton). That Losey had to use pseudonyms even while directing movies outside the United States reminds us of the business side of motion pictures. The three pseudonymous features would've run against an ideological blockade when sent to the States for distribution, had the blacklisted name, Losey, appeared in the credits.
This kind of cowardly behavior goes on today. I saw investigative journalist Max Blumenthal interviewed a few days ago. In Washington, D.C., a book signing for his new work, The Management of Savagery, was cancelled due to pressure from the pro-regime change Syria lobby, a group with significant influence on American hawkish politicians, the kinds of power brokers who don't like Max Blumenthal's anti-establishment reporting, anyway.
In Blumenthal's case, as with Left-leaning and Leftist film artists in the 1940s and 1950s, political correctness has less to do with policing language and everything to do with the attempt to control ideas, suppressing them if necessary.
Joseph Losey found work in England and in Continental Europe into the 1980s. Since he made only five of his thirty-one feature films in the U.S., the Wisconsin-born director can be considered a European cineaste. I've now seen four of his five American films: The Boy With Green Hair, The Lawless, The Prowler, and The Big Night, still missing his remake of Fritz Lang's M to complete the quintet. The four I've seen are all at least good films, with The Prowler standing out as an exceptionally fine film noir. Three of these four have the Hollywood feel of the period, with conventional narratives, while The Boy With Green Hair (1948) has an urban fantasy element at its core, a parable about the value of individuality.
The Big Night, so called because it takes place during its protagonist's eighteenth birthday, deals with George (John Barrymore, Jr.), a bullied teenager. He's first shown getting humiliated, slapped and jeered at by his peers on the sidewalk while passersby stare. He goes into his father's bar. The adult patrons call him Georgie, grin at him and clearly regard him as a pathetic weasel boy. George's father Andy (Preston Foster) gets little respect, either. A sportswriter, Al Judge (Howard St. John), a vicious creep with a limp and a cane, comes in with two goons and cane-whips the living shit out of Andy in front of his son. The reason for this, as George discovers, is Andy's former failed relationship with Al Judge's sister. The beating, non-fatal but horrific, inspires George to take action, especially after he finds his father's loaded revolver. He spends most of the night tracking Al Judge, trying to steel himself to put bullets into him.
John Barrymore, Jr., father of Drew Barrymore, does a pretty good job as the desperate George. Throughout, he's in over his head. His role reminded me of John Derek's character in Nicholas Ray's Knock on Any Door (1949)--the troubled youth rebelling because basic needs aren't being met, as in Ray's later far more famous movie, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). George's main problem, evidently, has to do with a father figure, Andy, who, though he tries and is patient with his son, nevertheless fails to live up to George's illusions about masculinity--the idea of "Why didn't you fight back?"
That Andy was a boxer makes his humiliation under the viciously enacted will of Al Judge even more striking to his son. The bar's patrons witness the beating, talk about it. After a few hours everyone in the neighborhood knows about it. Wherever George goes on his quest to kill Al Judge, he hears about his father's surrender to punishment. Al Judge, in that moment of vindictiveness, had ordered Andy to take off his shirt and get down on his hands and knees. Just a few minutes before, Andy and the bar's patrons were singing "Happy Birthday" to George, with a cake and lit candles, thirty seconds of joy in George's life before Al Judge changes his life trajectory.
Joseph Losey, in a sense, had to get on his hands and knees before the authorities demanding he not work in Hollywood. He got up, though, flipping the bird to those motherfuckers, relocating to Europe where he made some of the greatest films of the twentieth century's second half. As with the novels of Henry James, most of them written in Europe, the American, Losey, created remarkable films like Accident, The Servant, Eva, and the film I'll review next in this blog, The Romantic Englishwoman. He wouldn't and couldn't have made them in Hollywood, since their flavor is so European.
Is this the true value of oppressors' actions the positive unintended consequences stemming from their stupidity and cruelty?
Vic Neptune
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