James I. Deutsch

‘No communist could dream of a more effective anti-American film’: Dr. Strangelove and its red reviewers

Some Americans feared that the anti-military theme of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove might promote unfavorable attitudes toward the United States. ‘No Communist could dream of a more effective anti-American film to spread abroad than this one,’ opined the Washington Post. However, a sampling of reviews written by actual Communists in Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the USSR reveals a more balanced appreciation of the movie. The reviewers admired the film’s cinematic brilliance while also noting the dangers to world peace posed by the two cold war superpowers of the US and USSR. For the most part, these reviews from Communist publications have not been previously analyzed by scholars of Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove, and the cold war.

The Best Years of Our Lives and the Cincinnati Story

Boone City, the fictional place to which three World War II veterans return in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), could be Anytown, USA. There are fancy apartment buildings, modest homes on quiet tree-lined streets, and dilapidated shacks on the wrong side of the tracks. There are deluxe nightclubs, friendly neighborhood bars, and simple working-class restaurants. In short, Boone City is the quintessential location found in many Hollywood films: generic in appearance and atmosphere, yet recognizable and familiar enough for audiences around the United States to identify with, bringing the story (in this case, the readjustment of World War II veterans) closer to home. Nevertheless, since 1946 there have been persistent reports that (1) one particular place—Cincinnati, Ohio—served as the prototype for Boone City; (2) Cincinnati was selected only after a dozen different American cities had literally been screen-tested; and 3) actual locations in Cincinnati were used for some of the film’s exterior shots. This article is intended to debunk those reports and claims. Indeed if any place may be said to be the actual model for Boone City, it would be Des Moines, Iowa, the onetime home of MacKinlay Kantor (1904–1977), author of the novel upon which The Best Years of Our Lives was based. The creation story for The Best Years of Our Lives has been told and retold so many times that it has now taken on near-legendary qualities: how Frances Goldwyn saw an article in Time (August 7, 1944) about homecoming soldiers and suggested to her husband, independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, that he make a picture on this topic; how Goldwyn commissioned MacKinlay Kantor, a poet, novelist, and war correspondent, to write a screen treatment; how Kantor in January 1945 instead submitted a novel in blank verse, entitled Glory for Me; how the playwright and speechwriter Robert E. Sherwood then wrote the screenplay and William Wyler directed the film that immediately became both critically acclaimed and immensely profitable.

‘I was a Hollywood agent’: Cinematic representations of the office of strategic services in 1946

In 1946, not long after the Office of Strategic Services was dissolved, three Hollywood feature films were released that dramatized the agencys operations during World WarII: O.S.S. (ParamountPictures, 13 Rue Madeleine (Twentieth Century‐Fox), and Cloak and Dagger (Warner Bros. Pictures). Although officials in the War Depatment wre often disturbed by many of the technical details that these, three films revealed bout the military, the intelligence establishment generally benefited from the largely positive publicity and box‐office success that these films received in the early years of the Cold War.

A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American film

more on ideology, perhaps because these are ‘A’ films. Though cross-generic coding remains, the hero, Nick Charles, can clearly be seen performing a ‘greater service to New Deal America [b]y unveiling and punishing corruption and criminality among the wealthy’ (p. 34). This series is also significant because the last one in the series, ‘Song of the Thin Man,’ turns ‘the series from a screwball version of the hard-boiled format into a noir version of the screwball comedy’ (p. 50). Then, instead of moving directly into the hard-boiled and noir genres, Mason detours into chapters on the ‘chivalric detective,’ Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto. They provided much more detail than this reader needed or wanted, without advancing an interpretive strategy. Particularly in the chapter on Chan and Moto, we seem to have left the world of cross-generic coding and entered instead into a sphere of conflicting ideologies and value systems, or east meets west. When he turns, finally, to the hard-boiled detective film, Mason reiterates that fewer were made than conventional wisdom would have it. They are important, however, because they, unlike their whodunnit predecessors, do not isolate criminality to deviant individuals, but, rather, ‘question the probity of most American citizens’ (p. 133). That is, they more fully offer ‘a critique of American society’ (p. 135), and, when the crime is solved and the criminal apprehended, the social evils remain and the world is not, as it was in the earlier forms, re-ordered. It is here where one finds the largest gap in Mason’s work. He fails to examine the source or causes of the transition to the hard-boiled/noir films. Nor does he address the controversy about the role of left-wing writers and directors in creating this form nor Thom Andersen’s notion (in ‘Red Hollywood’) of a sub-genre, film gris. From reading this book, one would not know that the hard-boiled/noir films came of age during the most politically charged period in Hollywood history. It is also interesting to note that Mason does not mention a single screenwriter or director. It is as if authorial style or ideology has played no role in the development of this genre. In his conclusion, Mason, instead of gathering the threads of his previous discussions and offering a moral to his story, summarizes what happened to crime films—they ‘became increasingly fractured, as if the comforting formal style of the mystery series could no longer contain the complexity of post-war American society’ (p. 157). He does not, however, explain how post-war society was more complex than the inter-war or war societies, if, indeed, it was.

One More Train to Ride: The Underground World of Modern American Hoboes (review)

Clifford williams teaches philosophy at Trinity College, an independent Christian liberal arts college in Illinois, and has published books on free will, the Christian heart, spiritual adventure, and the life of the mind. In 1990, he happened to hear about the National Hobo Convention, held annually in Britt, Iowa, and attended as a “hobo at heart” (xv). williams has been attending the conference ever since and, in the process, has not only acquired the moniker “oats”—based on his habitual breakfast of rolled oats with milk and honey—but has also befriended and interviewed dozens of selfstyled hoboes, collecting their stories, poems, songs, and life experiences. One More Train to Ride is divided into fortyfive sections: fourteen of them are devoted to first-person narratives of life on the rails, as told to williams by contemporary hoboes, some with highly evocative names—New York slim, the Texas Madman, Dante Fucwha, Frog, shayla, stretch, shortstop, B, Preacher steve, New York Grizzly, Iwegan, Road Hog, Raquel, and Adman. Another fourteen sections contain poems written by hoboes (many of them in stanzas of four lines, with rhymes of a-b-c-b). The remaining sections contain miscellaneous bits of wisdom and lore (e.g., where to wait for trains, how to board a moving boxcar, and what to do when arrested). The general consensus on the hobo community is that hoboes are free spirits who do not want to be tied down by rules or responsibilities, but instead have chosen a life of wandering by rail and working only when they feel like doing so. Among the hoboes interviewed by williams, there is a strong sense of community; many of them know each other, or at least have heard legends of the more seasoned, and abide by an ethical code that they feel places them above other categories of the homeless. “Hoboes are the elite of society’s basement,” maintains Adman, who (when he’s not riding the rails for one week each year) serves as the chief executive of an advertising agency in Minneapolis (14). others are more direct; according to nineteen-yearold shayla (one of two women interviewed by williams), “If you’re a hobo, you’re pretty much worthless as far as society goes” (52). This book is not intended as an ethnographic analysis or scholarly interpretation of the hobo phenomenon. williams provides no annotations for the material he has collected; even though several of his interviewees refer to the FTRA, the reader has to go elsewhere to learn that these initials stand for the Freight Train Riders of America, a loosely knit gang of railriders thought to be responsible for murdering hundreds of transients over the past fifteen years. There is no index for the book. Nevertheless, folklorists may find much of value within the first-person narratives collected, some of which resemble the best picaresque tales. Take, for example, New York slim’s story: a six-foot six-inch African American who grew up in suburban New York; raised primarily by an uncle who belonged to the Hole in the wall Gang (presumably not the same one started by Butch Cassidy and the sundance kid); traveled to the 1969 woodstock Festival; received a basketball scholarship to Marquette University, flunked out, and was drafted into the military (though it is unclear which branch of service he entered or if he went to vietnam); married three times; deeply religious (a church deacon and junior elder); owner of land in Montana and washington; and has ridden the rails off and on since 1976. As the title of this