Defending TCM

Mark E. feels that Spencer Warren’s indictment of Turner Classic Movies for its anti-anti-Communist line unfairly overshadows all that is good about the station. Below he offers a fond tribute to TCM for the things he finds there of great value—from a conservative point of view. Mr. Warren then replies.

Mark E. writes:

It is good that Spencer Warren is calling attention to TCM’s presentation about the “Hollywood Ten.” It is unfortunate if TCM is lending its prestige to perpetuate a false or one-sided view of Communism or its collaborators. I do not disagree in the least with Mr. Warren’s condemning the whitewashing, let alone the celebration of, unrepentant Hollywood Communists, or his criticizing particular statements made or attitudes conveyed by Robert Osborne.

I agree, wholeheartedly, with his calling Communist Holocaust Denial by its proper name. I don’t understand how liberals differentiate between the kind of mass murder that evidences an evil ideology and the kind that is A Good Idea Done The Wrong Way.

However Mr. Warren goes too far, and weakens his case, to characterize pejoratively TCM or Robert Osborne as therefore having a leftist or Communist agenda. In this, as a VFR reader and TCM fan, I must protest that Mr. Warren is unfair and unjust.

Notwithstanding anything Mr. Warren says, TCM is THE bastion of conservative/traditionalist films, views, images, sense of life, historical perspective, film aesthetics and morality, etc., simply because of what it is in its very nature, and all the movies they show.

It is the only place in the contemporary media where the un-censored, un-PC, pre-Boomer past is presented with reverence as a good thing and not the family shame that is elsewhere the common dispiriting leftoid/”progressive” narrative about America.

They do not censor the past to edit out un-PC images of race relations, smoking, drinking, sexual attitudes, relations between men and women, etc.

Where else could one see a movie like My Wild Irish Rose completely uncensored, or at all? Though some today might find it “offensive” it is an important film for its portrayal of racial/ethnic attitudes and American theater history and it would be a great loss for this film to be cut up or discarded down the memory hole. Osborne was not apologetic or PC in discussing the movie.

Robert Osborne is a Hollywood columnist and interviewer. He is a professional schmoozer and star hustler. Not saying that as a bad thing at all; it is what his job is and requires. TCM only works because Robert Osborne knows so many great stars and is a good and knowledgeable interviewer.

It would be in vain to expect that he would not hew to the Hollywood liberal line about the Hollywood Communists. This is Hollywood’s favorite story about itself.

Any non-leftist who loves art and culture finds nothing out of the ordinary here in standard-issue liberal attitudes that are the religion of that world, and yet one does find a distinct absence of all that is most annoying and affrontive. I have been to my share of actual, real leftist film events, and TCM ain’t one of them.

If I could have but one TV channel, it would be TCM. It is a refuge from the increasing, encroaching tyranny of The Now. No ads, no blockbuster CGI garbage, no horrifying sadistic violence, no gratuitous prurience, no annoying blaring rock and roll or sound effects soundtracks, no preachy little PC sermons, no snotty know-it-all kids. Sometimes, even, a woman is shown to be a villain, all on her own, with no feminist excuses. They knew how to tell stories back then, unlike today.

If you disagree with the Martin Scorsese view of the old motion picture code, this entire channel is your best refutation of that fallacy—i.e., the lack of license made movies more artistic and creative, not less so. Scorsese even admits as much himself.

As it happens, on the night of the original VFR post about Mr. Warren’s article (10/25/07) TCM’s prime time feature was Spencer’s Mountain, the original of the hit 1970s TV show The Waltons. This movie could easily be on anyone’s list of Top Ten “conservative” movies. I had never seen it before. I recommend it to all VFR readers. Honors the father and the mother and the family and the small town and church-going and hard work and the mine owner is a good guy and not an evil exploiter.

Anyway, my point is that Osborne must in justice be credited for as much, and as far as, he may be blamed, since if he is the cause of what you don’t like, he is yet therefore as well the cause of what you (or at least I) do like.

It is not fair to consider only the comments that Osborne may have made about certain movies or about the Hollywood blacklist or “Commies.” Indeed, I consider that rather de rigueur and unremarkable for Hollywood types. It must not be overlooked, what is more important, that the films speak for themselves, for those who are not merely empty vessels being filled up by someone else. (If the actress who refused to say her lines recognized them as propaganda, then so will many viewers.)

By contrast, consider what TCM/Osborne do that is remarkable.

They have had Ronald Reagan film festivals that honor and do not at all mock his career or talent. I don’t remember Osborne conveying any disdain for Reagan. Should lefties have written in to complain about that? (And some probably did, I would bet.) I have seen numerous interviews by Osborne, in which the actor or actress discussed Reagan or Robert Stack or other Hollywood conservatives favorably—and not at all unfavorably. The message was: they were OK and great guys and great Hollywood stars.

Or when he had the fashion designer/honcho Tom Ford on as his guest presenter, and one of Ford’s movies was The Fountainhead! (By flaming anti-Communist Ayn Rand.) Osborne did not put down Ayn Rand as some right-wing nut, as he might have. He went along with Ford’s praise of the movie, its look, and its message of artistic independence.

If I were a Bush-hater leftist, I would suspect from TCM’s super-patriotic pro-military response to the Iraq War that the channel is run by Karl Rove. Non-stop war movies, Westerns, WWII propaganda movies and posters and iconography. Conversely, no “anti-war” film festivals so far as I know. John Wayne is on all the time; but I don’t recall seeing Johnny Got His Gun.

They show all kinds of political movies, including anti-Communist ones, that one would never see anywhere else. Ashes and Diamonds, for example, another movie I recommend highly to VFR readers.

This Hollywood Ten film festival itself is of great educational benefit to conservative anti-Communists as much as to leftists, for Pete’s sake. You get to see all those movies and see for yourself what the Communist writers were doing in them. TCM’s audience is one of higher intelligence, awareness and discrimination (!) and includes probably as many conservatives as liberals and leftists.

I love TCM, as a conservative (or whatever kind of anti-leftist, out-of-step Rip van Winkle I am); and Robert Osborne is central to its success. For all that, I am grateful to him. I would ask Mr. Warren if he really thinks some other person would do a better (non-“leftist” and otherwise) job, and if so, who.

Spencer Warren writes:

Mark E. states his agreement with my criticisms (all made in specific detail) of Turner Classic Movies’ far-left bias, including host Robert Osborne engaging in the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial. But then he lauds TCM and Osborne at length, thus implicitly minimizing or dismissing the overriding moral issues I raise in my article. He also wrongly states that I wrote that TCM or Osborne have “a leftist or Communist agenda” and that therefore I am “unjust.” My article sets forth many specific examples of historical distortion. I challenge Mark E. to back up his charge that I claimed they have an “agenda.” I invite readers to study the specific examples in my article and judge the moral question for themselves.

Let me agree that TCM has done many great things for classic movies. Indeed, I co-hosted on air with Osborne my own series of sixteen conservative movies in October 2000. At the time I called TCM “the Louvre of Hollywood.” I also agree that the movies from a healthier, pre-sixties America speak for themselves, notwithstanding Osborne’s sometime attempts to filter them through his contemporary leftist perspective. I regret that TCM’s repeated falsification of historical truth in favor of Stalinists has compelled me to publish my critical article.

But in making an extensive defense of TCM and Osborne, Mark E. seems to contradict his initial agreement with my criticisms. In my view, the repeated misrepresentation of history in any forum is a heinous moral crime; it is totalitarian in its essence. I have complained several times over the years to TCM about this and provided them with facts and sources, but have been ignored. (One executive told me he knew the liberal critic Richard Schickel, whose documentaries are shown on TCM, shared my understanding of the Hollywood Ten.) Osborne’s leftist wise-cracks are ignorant and betray disrespect for the audience. Maybe Mark E., contrary to his initial claim, does not mind Osborne’s Orwellian dismissal of the unspeakable suffering of more than two million Soviet citizens who were forcibly repatriated back to Stalin’s gulag and firing squads by Britain and the U.S. after World War II. I think doing so is immoral and evil. So is whitewashing Stalinists, as TCM has done repeatedly with the Hollywood Ten.

Also, I disagree with Mark E. that Osborne is part of TCM’s success, although this a secondary issue. Ben Mankewicz, the weekend daytime host, is better suited to the job because he does not make arrogant, ignorant, gratuitous, anti-American comments as Osborne does. Any decent actor with some personality can introduce the films. The staff responsible for unearthing rare films and for elegantly presenting good prints is what makes TCM, not Osborne with his trivia. Osborne detracts from TCM in my opinion and has damaged the channel.

Osborne and TCM (including at times its website) have made themselves, in their modest way, part of the far left’s Orwellian assault on our history and civilization—which is so evident in our schools, universities and news/entertainment media. Listening to Osborne, one would think the U.S. was in the wrong in the Cold War, one of the noblest chapters in our history, because, he keeps saying, Communism was never a threat to us. With his awful wise-crack after Objective Burma! earlier this year, Osborne disrespected victims of Japanese torture like Private Ralph Ignatowski in Iwo Jima and implicitly drew a moral equivalence between the U.S. and our savage Japanese enemy. (See my article for details.) Mark E. makes reference to Ronald Reagan festivals (I recall one series on his films), but I do not believe Osborne ever has talked about Reagan’s leading role fighting against Osborne’s beloved Communists and Stalinists in Hollywood. Nor does Mark E. comment on my point about the anti-Christian month-long TCM series promoting homosexual equality broadcast last June (advertised on TCM as exposing “sixty years of Hollywood homophobia”).

Again, I invite readers to see my article and judge the overriding moral issue for themselves.

Mark E. states the Hollywood Ten “festival” “is of great educational benefit to conservative anti-Communists as much as to leftists… ” But what about the vast majority of viewers, non-political, who will accept Osborne’s misrepresentation as fact? What about the evil of falsifying history—in favor of Stalinists—to the unsuspecting vast majority?

We are in a Culture War and are losing it badly. Mark E. does not seem to understand the fundamental moral issue.

David B. writes:

I have read the comment by Mark E. on TCM and Robert Osborne. I agree with his statements about TCM being a very good station from a conservative point of view. I have found many films that I enjoyed on TCM and nowhere else. They are good about showing films that are not available on video.

Mark says, “It is the only place in the contemporary media where the uncensored, in-PC, pre-Boomer past is presented with reverence as a good thing and not the family shame that is elsewhere the common dispiriting leftoid/”progressive” narrative about America. They do not censor the past to edit out un-PC images of race relations, smoking, drinking, sexual attitudes, relations between men and women, etc.”

I agree with this, and while Robert Osborne does a good job most of the time, the channel would be just as entertaining with any articulate host who knew films. It would be nice if Mr. Osborne had a guest host who had lived behind the iron curtain one night. He might also take note that if FDR had died earlier, Henry Wallace would have become President. Wallace might have appointed Alger Hiss as Secretary of State. This would have placed an agent of Joseph Stalin in charge of American foreign policy. Hiss wasn’t a “witch,” either.

I saw “Tender Comrade” tonight for the first time. Like the scripts from the Hollywood 10 written during WWII, it is very-pro American, and harmless enough. It did good box office in 1943 because Ginger Rogers was in it, as Mr. Osborne said after the film tonight. Incidentally, when Robert Ryan kisses Ginger Rogers, Ryan initiates it.

Spencer Warren replies:
David B. should brush up on his understanding of Communists; he could start with Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. He is quite mistaken that the Stalinist Trumbo’s script for Tender Comrade is “harmless enough.” He also should read my original essay at the ACU website for some examples how the Hollywood Ten Stalinists inserted Communist propaganda into entertainment movies of the forties.

Tender Comrade on the surface is a sweet if mediocre story of four women working in a war production plant, who rent a house together when their husbands are off at war. Several times they say “share and share alike” and speak of running the household like a “democracy” in “meetings.” In one scene, the housekeeper receives in the mail a medal awarded to her soldier husband. One of the other women (Kim Hunter, later blacklisted), wants to hang the medal on the wall in the living or dining room, for all to see; she exclaims that the housekeeper shouldn’t “keep this all to herself.” “It’s part ours,” she enthuses. “Share and share alike. Isn’t that right?” To which the housekeeper assents, “Democracy.” No normal group of Americans would speak that way, especially in 1943. But it is the way Communists speak. It obviously exalts the collective over the individual and implicitly denigrates private property; here even a very personal memento of one’s husband must be given over to the collective. Anyone who understands (like, say Whittaker Chambers) how Communists operated would see this.

Nor is this the American meaning of democracy, which is a political ideal of the people electing their government and protection of individual liberty, not a social/economic idea as presented here and in the work of Marx and Lenin.

David B. is asking us to believe that the committed Stalinist Trumbo, a man so ideologically ruthless that during the war he informed to the FBI on suspected pacifists in obeisance to the Party line (see details in the Eckstein and Radosh essays linked in earlier post, “TCM Tribute to Hollywood Commies Starts Tonight”), did not use his opportunity to insert Communist propaganda. And how despicable to do this on an unsuspecting audience which had gone to see his film to take a short respite from the worries of wartime. (Of course, the blacklist is denounced in part for the role of informers, yet Trumbo is the biggest hero for the Hollywood left and Osborne.)

Last evening, as he has on other occasions, Osborne arrogantly dismissed the claims against Tender Comrade. No presentation of both sides, as a fair-minded professional would do, just his own distorted side, communist-style. As in the past, he selectively quoted the main scene, noting only the line “Share and share alike.” Nothing wrong with that, he claimed, also asking how could anyone find “Commie” propaganda in this movie?

I also note Mr. Auster’s account of Osborne’s introduction to the first film, The Spy Who Came Into the Cold, in which Osborne failed to identify the Ten as present or past CPSUA members (most were long-time members in 1947). On occasion during other series, Osborne said they were Communists. So he doesn’t even bother to be consistent, unless he made the admission in his comments on the last two films, which were shown well past midnight. Should such a person be permitted to parade his prejudices before an unsuspecting audience who just want to watch a good classic film?

Finally, let me raise the question whether Spy was chosen to lead off the evening in order to promote—below the radar—Osborne’s long-standing theme that the Cold War was about nothing at all because Communism, as he has stated a number of times, was never a threat to us. The connection of this film is that the director, Martin Ritt, was blacklisted at one time. Ritt came after the Ten. He was probably one of the majority who either were briefly CPUSA members or never were, who were unfairly caught in the vortex which the Ten helped to create. Indeed, Trumbo himself later admitted he and the rest of the Ten bore much responsibility for the blacklisting of innocents. (See the Eckstein article noted above.)

For Osborne and Turner to lump the many innocents in with the Hollywood Ten Stalinists is also very wrong. Don’t they have the integrity and intelligence to make moral distinctions based on facts?

This came from David B. before I posted the above comment by Mr. Warren. David writes:

I realize that I made a poor choice of words when I wrote that Tender Comrades was “relatively harmless.” I meant that moviegoers would remember Ginger Rogers’ acting performance, rather than the message the writers were conveying. I also should have said that Tender Comrades and other films were pro-American because that was the Party line in 1943.

David B. continues:

Last night, I found that I still had the tape I had recorded of TCM’s “Red Scare Night” of several years ago. There were four films:

The Woman on Pier 13
The Fearmakers
A Bullet For Joey
The Whip Hand

LA writes:

Mr. Warren writes:

“… let me raise the question whether Spy was chosen to lead off the evening in order to promote—below the radar—Osborne’s long-standing theme that the Cold War was about nothing at all because Communism, as he has stated a number of times, was never a threat to us.”

Indeed, the theme of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (I don’t remember if this theme was as pronounced in the book, which I read a long time ago, which is much better than the movie, and in which the amazing plot twist at the end is much more powerful than in the movie—DON’T READ FURTHER IF YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH BOOK OR MOVIE) is not just that the Communists were not a threat, it is that the British were worse than the Communists.

Leamas’s assignment is to pretend to be a defector and feed to Fiedler, the number two man in East German intelligence, false information that will lead to the exposure of Mundt, the top man in East German intelligence, as a British spy and thus Mundt’s destruction. Fiedler, played by Oskar Werner, is a thoughtful, sincere Communist and a Jew. Mundt is a Nazi type who hates Fiedler because he is a Jew. But as it turns out in the end, Mundt really IS a British agent, and the real aim of the British plot was not to destroy Mundt with false information from Leamas that he is a British agent, but rather to have Leamas give true information showing that Mundt is a British agent, and then, to Leamas’s total astonishment, to make Leamas’s information appear to be a lie deliberately planted to destroy Mundt. The final result would be to clear Mundt of the clouds of suspicion that had been building around him. Leamas doesn’t know this until the end. He thinks his mission is to destroy Mundt. He doesn’t know that he’s being used as a pawn by his own side. In the end, Fiedler, the humane Jew, is destroyed for participating in a plot to make false charges (which are actually true charges) against Mundt, while Mundt, the Nazi type, is rehabilitated, so that he can continue betraying the East Germans for the British.

So, not only is there no cause worth fighting for in the Cold War, but the methods the British pursue in this meaningless contest put them on the side of evil and against good. Fiedler, who sincerely believes in Communism, is good, yet the British destroy him. Mundt, who sells out the Communists and works for the British, is evil, yet the British save him.

David B. writes:

I looked up The Fearmakers at imdb.com. and learned that Red Scare Night was shown in the summer of 2001. Osborne kept saying that filmmakers were “forced” to make anti-communist movies because of the “fear and paranoia” sweeping the country. After The Woman on Pier 13 was shown, Osborne said, “It was made right when all those investigations were going on in Washington DC looking at a possible infiltration of the movie industry by Communists. Audiences responded early on that they had little interest overall in anti-Communist films. Both this RKO movie and others such as MGM’s Conspirator, Republic’s The Red Menace, and so many others. Practically every studio made them. The only one that really succeeded with any box office noise was Fox with their 1948 film, The Iron Curtain, with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney.”

Regarding The Fearmakers, Osborne did say that it was “very interesting.” In this film, Dana Andrews plays a Korean War vet who had been in a Chinese prison camp. Upon returning to the Washington DC ad agency he had worked at, he finds that fellow travelers have taken it over and are using new PR techniques to influence the American public. Ironically, all business and political entities use these methods now. The Fearmakers is mainly dialogue until a melodramatic finale, but worth watching.

Upon introducing A Bullet For Joey, Osborne says that it is “extremely interesting because of the man who stars in it, Edward G. Robinson.” Osborne then goes on about how Robinson was suspected of being a Communist during the Red Scare because “he had given Dalton Trumbo some financial help and work offers were no longer coming in.” Osborne said that Robinson sent proof to J. Edgar Hoover that he had not given to Communist causes. “It was a extremely harrowing time for him,” Osborne said, “but his name was eventually cleared.” Osborne continued, “Here he is in a film that he happily did to show that he was a man out to get those damn Commies.” Osborne had a mocking grin as he said this.

In this 1955 film, Robinson plays a Canadian police inspector investigating a series of murders by Communist spies. George Raft plays an American gangster who had been exiled, but who is recruited by Communist agents led by Peter Van Eyck to kidnap a scientist. Despite a good cast, A Bullet For Joey is both too complex and slow-moving. As a film, I found it below average.

I played back the tape I made six years ago for these comments by Robert Osborne. He never mentions Ronald Reagan and his role. Osborne does not discuss what the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were doing at this time. Were we wrong to fight in Korea? Were we right to fight in Korea, but wrong in seeing a Communist threat in this country? Osborne never asks these questions. He just makes snide remarks about “witch hunts, fear, and paranoia.” Even if you might agree with him, Osborne is very lightweight in his opinions.


Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 30, 2007 05:08 PM | Send
    

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