For serious scholars of film and politics, as well as amateurs like me,
the Turner Classic Movie channel (TCM) is an invaluable resource. While
most of the time it is recycling warhorses like “Citizen Kane” that can
be rented from Netflix, you will occasionally be able to watch some
extraordinary movies that are not available in home video. Last night I
chanced across a couple that were part of a series occurring this month
titled “Race and Hollywood: Latino Images in Film”.
Last night’s movies were selected and introduced by Chon A. Noriega,
professor of cinema and media studies at UCLA and director of the UCLA
Chicano Studies Research Center. The two that I saw had deep
associations with the left, either positive or negative.
“Lawless”, a 1950 movie about anti-Chicano racism in a California town,
was directed by Joseph Losey, who was blacklisted shortly afterwards and
forced into exile in London. Communists in Hollywood tended to make
movies that had only a glancing connection to Marxism, preferring
instead to package New Deal populism as mainstream entertainment. Losey
took another tack. Despite conforming to Hollywood convention in many
ways, “Lawless” is about as hard-hitting an indictment of anti-Latino
racism as I have ever seen.
Only 5 years after “Lawless” was made, Hollywood had gone full swing in
an anti-Communist direction making it impossible for directors like
Joseph Losey to make a living. A product of this period was the 1955
“Trial”, a movie that depicts Communists in the worst possible light. As
the title implies, the film is a courtroom drama involving a Chicano
youth who is being railroaded for sexually assaulting and then murdering
a white classmate. His defense attorney is a well-meaning but
inexperienced liberal hired by an experienced but utterly cynical and
corrupt lawyer who is in charge of fund-raising through his CP connections.
Both “Lawless” and “Trial” feature race riot and lynch mob scenes that
were very much in the recent memory of a 1950s audience. From the Zoot
Suit confrontations of the 1940s to the attack on the Paul Robeson
concert that Chon A. Noriega described as an inspiration for the scenes
in “Lawless”, these movies were describing social reality.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/chicanos-and-communists-in-two-1950s-films/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
