Cinema
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The Year in Retro Commie Chic
The phrase “retro commie chic” was likely coined by Glenn Collins of the New York Times. Collins’ article about Greenwich Village’s K.G.B. Bar appeared in 1998; in the years since, the place has become a literary hub. According to a dining guide put out by New York magazine, “Today, the red menace congregates here—if graduate-level…
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November Feature
The Fast-Talking Howard Fast. This month’s guest essay is on the historical novelist Howard Fast (Citizen Tom Paine, Conceived in Liberty, Spartacus). It is graciously provided to Painting the Culture Red by historian Ron Capshaw. You can find it under Pages (top left).
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Boris Morros
Two in a row. Airing on TCM right after the Dore Schary movie was a 1937 comedy with Carol Lombard, Fred MacMurray, and Dorothy Lamour called Swing High, Swing Low. “Music by Boris Morros,” it said in the credits. My bleary eyes opened and I perked up. Here was another Painting the Culture Red connection.…
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The Liberals, III – Dore Schary
This morning, in the wee hours—your editor was suffering from insomnia—the Turner Classic Movies channel aired The Metro Goldwyn Mayer Story, a movie short with Dore Schary, MGM’s vice president in charge of production, announcing the studio’s offerings for 1951. We said this site would explore the different attitudes toward the Soviet Union on the part…
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Steinbeck’s Synthetic Grapes
One of the major social justice novels of the Depression era, The Grapes of Wrath, just turned 75. National Public Radio commemorated this milestone. John Steinbeck’s 1939 Dust Bowl epic about the Joad family was based on articles he wrote for the San Francisco News and the Nation on the plight of agricultural workers migrating from…
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Agnieszka Holland on the Prague Spring
In 1968, over 150,000 Red Army troops entered Czechoslovakia to reverse the political liberalization known as the Prague Spring. Agnieszka Holland’s new movie Burning Bush, about the Soviet invasion and its aftermath, aired originally on HBO in Europe. The work of Holland, a Pole educated in Prague, is familiar to American audiences. Her long list…
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“There Are Intellectuals Who Say Anticommunism Is Somehow Uncool.”
A book has just been published by the University Press of Kentucky on The Lives of Others, the landmark drama about the East German secret police. This Oscar-winning movie from 2006, mentioned previously on the site, is examined from just about every angle in Totalitarianism on Screen: The Art and Politics of “The Lives of Others” edited…
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Last Word on “Llewyn”
O Brother! Why Bother? The latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books has a masterful essay by the critic Martha Bayles. It’s framed by discussion of the Coen Brothers movie so often mentioned on this site. But this is more than a movie review. Bayles covers allied subjects—1930s folk music, 1960s folk music, figures like…
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