Saturday, October 09, 2021

Run Silent, Run Deep (1958): An Early, Hollywood “Goldstein” Movie

By Eahilf
Wednesday, October 6, 2021 at 5:50:00 P.M. EDT
Revised at 3:53 a.m., Sunday, October 10, 2021

Catch Don Rickles in one of his early dramatic roles here:

Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)

The submarine movie has always been one of my favorite genres, and this is a pretty good one with, among other recognizable faces, Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable.

N.S.: I once saw Don Rickles on The Tonight Show, telling Johnny Carson about making this picture. It seems Rickles approached his idol in the latter’s trailer, there was a misunderstanding, and Gable ran away. Rickles observed, “He must have been thinking, what does this fag want?!”

Although Run Silent, Run Deep was released during the so-called McCarthy Era, it was a “Goldstein” picture. The character “Goldstein” in Orwell’s 1984, was the archetypical symbol of hatred and revulsion, a stand-in for Trotsky. In Run Silent, Run Deep, a message movie by Robert Wise, Lancaster played the "fascist" executive officer seeking to usurp the captain's (Clark Gable) legitimate authority.

Beginning during the 1950s, Hollywood pounded out a series of “Goldstein” pictures, which demonized mostly Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, one of America’s greatest heroes, as well as Walter Winchell, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Gen. Edwin Walker and Robert Welch.

Burt Lancaster starred in no fewer than three “Goldstein” pictures, in which he always gave the identical “fascist” performance: Alexander Mackendrick's The Sweet Smell of Success (1957); Run Silent, Run Deep (1958); and John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964).


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that pronounced GoldSTEEN or GoldSTEIN? I had to laugh,I googled "Goldstein",but it looks like you invented a new genre of movie description--congrats.

--GRA

Nicholas said...

Thanks, GRA. And it's "GoldSTEEN."

eahilf said...

>“Goldstein” picture
>And it's "GoldSTEEN."

Stein = stone in German, so 'stein' is of German origin, no matter/wherever it appears in a word.

There seems to be a kind of language convention, or maybe it's an anglicization (?), to pronounce 'stein' as 'steen' in English, even though the correct German pronunciation would be 'stine', as in do a line of coke -- to get the 'steen' sound in German you change the order of 'i' and 'e', as in the English word siege, which is a good word to show the contradictions that arise in English usage/practice: it seems that to most English speakers the 'ie' in siege has the same sound as the 'ei' in Goldstein, although the order of 'i' and 'e' in the words is reversed, which in German always changes the sound.

Weil ich Deutsch spreche bin ich immer wieder verwirrt.

Anonymous said...

Fascist in the modern context is anyone to the "right" of the Ocasio Cortez girl.