My Amazon Review of David Downing's "Union Station"

 Los Angeles-Berlin Axis

After years in Europe the Anglo-American journalist John Russell and his actor wife are now living in Los Angeles. This the eighth book of David Downing’s station series, with all of the prior stations being in Berlin from the late 1920’s to the late 1940’s.  (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of David Downing's "Wedding Station")Russell is partially employed by a German newspaper and Effie has become a sitcom star on American TV.  Although their life in LA is of wine and roses, Russell gets caught up in a political corruption scandal and Effie is now facing issues with HUAC and the McCarthyism of the era.

 

All of the activity takes place in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, the subsequent struggle for power in the Soviet Union and the anti-Soviet riots in Berlin. Russell’s journalism takes him back to Berlin to investigate a candidate for Congress and Effie is there for a film festival. There is much intrigue in Berlin with several border crossings between east and west as Russell meets up with old friends. Russell fears that Soviet spy chief Beria is out to get him because he possesses compromising evidence on him that would be useful to his Kremlin opponents.

 

Along the way we get a sense of the very segregated Los Angeles of that era and the growing controversy of what is to happen to the Chavez Ravine tract the city has acquired. The Dodgers would move in later in the decade.

 

Downing tells a good story, but to me his dislike for America gets harder and harder to take, especially at the end. He seems to ignore that 1953 was a great year for middle-class white Americans and the Russell family was doing quite well. Downing also throws in a gratuitous hit on Israel, just for good measure. However, once you get over his political biases, he writes a very fast-paced historical novel

 Los Angeles-Berlin Axis (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Glenn Frankel's "High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic"

High Noon in Hollywood

I recently attended a screening of “High Noon” with Glen Frankel giving a short talk. I forgot how good this 1952 movie is. In his book Glen Frankel tells the story of the making of this low-budget black and white movie, his protagonist the screen writer Carl Foreman, the producer Stanley Kramer, the star Gary Cooper, the composer Dimitri Tiomkin,  and the very strong female roles of Grace Kelly and Katy Jurado against the backdrop of the growing “red scare” in Hollywood. Who knew Dmitri Tiomkin, a Ukrainian Jew,  wrote the musical score for such westerns as “Red River,” “Duel in the Sun,” “Giant,” “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and of course, “High Noon.”  Frankel notes that Tiomkin’s biographer likened him to putting a musical score to the classic western paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. He also discusses how the movie’s theme song “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darlin” became such a big hit.

But Frankel is not only interested in the creation of this classic, he is also interested in the role of the Communist Party in Hollywood and the blacklist that was to come in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Screenwriter Carl Foreman was a communist for a while and then abandoned the Party, but he along with the Hollywood 10 (screen writers who refused to talk before the House Un-American Activities Committee and were jailed) refused to name names and ended up in exile in England.

In Frankel’s view “High Noon” is an allegory to Foreman standing up to the committee. Gary Cooper as Marshall Kane successfully stands alone as the townspeople abandon him to face four returning outlaws seeking revenge. The townspeople represent those in Hollywood who cringe in the face of the committee, many of whom were like the liberals Dore Schary, Elia Kazan and Ronald Reagan (a big liberal at the time).  The story brings to mind Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” where the bravest are the ones who stand most alone.

Frankel is clear-eyed when he discusses the perfidy of the American Communist Party in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. But somehow he seems to me to be way to forgiving of the Hollywood communists. He leaves out that Moscow targeted the New Deal, the C.I.O., the defense industry and Hollywood as pathways for subversion. The Hollywood 10 writers were following orders from Moscow and were working towards bringing Soviet Communism to America. They weren’t all that successful, but the intent was clear. I wonder if instead of being communists they were Nazis would Frankel have been so forgiving? Yes it was a bad time and yes civil liberties were being trampled upon and yes the fears of the public were legitimate. Frankel recognizes this when he cites the Venona transcripts which describe Moscow’s control of American Communism.

Despite my disagreements, Frankel has written an excellent book that tells us how a great movie was made and the fears that bestrode liberal Hollywood in the 1950s.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1IAL3ZL9IF52V/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv