Great Song, or a Good Song Made to Seem Much Better by a Great Streisand Performance?
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[Previously, at WEJB/NSU:
“Memo to TCM's Robert Osborne: Dalton Trumbo was a Communist!”]
By Nicholas Stix
I first saw this movie around Thanksgiving Day, 1973, just after it came out. Knowing that it was romantic schmaltz, and being concerned about my macho image, I was embarrassed to be seen going in with my mom and big sister, so I walked around the block, and then snuck in the theater, a couple of minutes into the picture.
I next saw the picture circa October, 1982, on TV in German, when me and my West German girlfriend were in Heidelberg, visiting Susanna F., a Communist girlfriend she’d grown up with in Schwabenland (Swabia), in Baden-Württemberg. Susanna was attending the University of Heidelberg; we attended the University of Tübingen in Swabia. (Postwar West German legend had it that the U.S. Army Air Force had spared Heidelberg as a war souvenir; the city was stunning.)
Susanna told approvingly of visiting a counterculture bar in West Berlin, where the regulars claimed to have just beaten a cop to a pulp. It was apparently very important in such circles to be claiming all the time to beat up cops, but then to claim to the press that one was the victim of police brutality… just like in New York City.
The only reason I recall seeing the picture in German was that the Streisand character gives a speech at an anti-Franco demonstration at Columbia University, where she (as Katie Morosky) and the Robert Redford character (Hubbell Gardner) are students, which gets turned into a dirty joke.
According to one Web site, while Katie talks about “peace,” someone holds up a sing behind her, saying, “Any Peace But Katie's Piece,” to the crowd’s laughter.
What did the sign say that the student council held up behind Katie while she was giving her speech?
Any Peace But Katie's Piece. The student council was making fun of Katie because she was trying to get the students to stand up for their beliefs. After the student council members held up the sign, Katie called them all fascists.
I’m sure the unsigned writer got this wrong. [Postscript, June 17, 2023: I'm sure he lied.] Katie wasn’t “trying to get the students to stand up for their beliefs,” she was trying to get them to stand up for her beliefs. Otherwise, she would never have called them “fascists.” “Fascists” was the Communists’ all-purpose insult to anyone who disagreed with them, like “racist” today.
Germans of all political stripes were obsessed with being the Master Race, er, I mean, being technically superior to us, and would always dub the bloody pictures. Thus, “peace” was dubbed into “Frieden,” and “piece” into “Stück,” which killed the joke. Nevertheless, seeing people laugh on screen, Susanna and her roommates didn’t want to look uncool, and so they laughed, too.
Gerries also laughed at dubbed Woody Allen movies they didn’t understand, and that was when Allen was still funny.
My memory of the picture is that it was a beautiful, heartbreaking story of a star-crossed love affair and marriage between the handsome, aristocratic, athletic, creative, all-American boy, and the pushy, working-class, ugly duckling, less-talented Jewish girl… and, of course, of the evils of McCarthyism.
Web Hubbel becomes a screenwriter, and is ultimately one of the Hollywood Ten, who are the victims of the so-called “McCarthyite witchhunt.”
And it was beautiful, I’m sure. No one did period American pictures like the late Sydney Pollack (1934-2008). Remember 1969’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Later, when I saw that year’s big Oscar-winner, The Sting, with Newman and Redford, I remember thinking that The Way We were was so much better. TWWW was up for six Oscars (including Streisand, for Best Actress, but not Best Picture), but won only for best score and song, while the light-as-a-feather caper picture, The Sting, was up for 10 Oscars, including Robert Redford for Best Actor, a nomination he’d earned for TWWW, and won a ridiculous seven, including Best Picture.
It took me almost 40 years to realize what The Way We were was really about: It was a lavish, two-hour propaganda movie promoting communism.
The Hollywood Ten were Communist (with a capital “C”) traitors who at the HUAC hearings read from scripts written in Moscow. But nowhere in TWWW will you learn any of that.
Come to think about it, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was a two-hour-long indictment of capitalism. A powerful picture, but leftwing propaganda, nonetheless.
Pollack also made a bomb about the last days of Cuba’s Batista regime, before the Fidel Castro and his Communists triumphed, Havana (1990), starring a middle-aged Redford and Swedish Lena Olin, then one of the world’s most beautiful actresses. I never saw that one, so maybe it was pro-freedom… hahaha!
Do the messages of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and The Way We were mean that Sydney Pollack was a communist?
1 comment:
It's a pity that story of the US communists and communist sympathisers who actually moved to Russia during the Great Depression, has never been filmed. It would be an effective antidote to the Streisand movie.
It is recounted in 'The Forsaken' by Tim Tsouliadis.
There were a few thousand such migrants. They were reasonably well-treated at first, then things began to change. . Their fate was grim, although a few managed to escape. The indifference of the US authorities was horrifying. The US Ambassador Joseph Davies deserves a special mention for callous stupidity.
There was also some dirty work by the highly-esteemed Paul Robeson. He denied that there was oppression in the Soviet Union, while he secretly arranged the escape of a friend.
A sad tale that deserves to be more widely known.
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