Dead End?
The film with Joel McCrea and what finally became known of as The Dead End Kids?
Saw it … in its entirety … for the first time, two nights ago.
The authors, of course, Sidney Kingsley and Lillian Hellman had been, at the time of writing and production at any rate (mid 1930’s), the early radical Leftists of Hollywood. John Steinbeck’s successful but highly controversial Grapes of Wrath was yet to come.
Dead End (1937)
It dawned on me how Dead End might be the best starting point for a history of Hollywood film that eventually ended up producing an unashamed love song to American Communists in Warren Beatty’s Reds.
If you haven’t seen Dead End or don’t recall the story instantly, it’s a tribute to the Marxist theory that what creates crime is poverty.
The Latin American drug cartels and the Mafia … they are not comprised of poor people.
In addition, what income level created these Harvard-educated denizens of the White House who have magically translated suicidal economics and down-right theft as a “redistribution of wealth”?
“Michael, it’s Robin Hood!! You remember what a good guy the Communist Robin Hood was, don’tcha?”
Even the successfully hardened criminal of Dead End, played by Humphrey Bogart, a thug in white-collar costume, “gotta raw deal” as a boy … and in the very same neighborhood.
The one lucky product of what appears to be Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Brooklyn Bridge and all, is Joe McCrea whose good stroke of fortune was to have rather miraculously received an architectural degree and Midwestern accent … yet whose love of his own roots makes him choose a woman from “his own kind” – flash forward to a latter day version in Radically Chic Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. In short, McCrae chooses the Socialist Realism of a Dead End Peer … or is it Pier … instead of some spoiled brat of wealth.
Mother and Son: Marjorie Main and Humphrey Bogart
Obviously Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein were Progressively Red with West Side Story, cutting across the racial barriers in their profoundly successful version of Romeo and Juliet … but doing so with an obvious look back in Marxist anger at the Kingsley/Hellman Dead End.
The rich people in Dead End, who, in a miraculous quirk of fate, happen to live on the same block as the poor people, are not very nice. They are cold and distant. They’re the real villains, because … well … they’re rich!
Obviously the real Dead End is Capitalism and capitalist America.
Where and when did all this far left indoctrination of America begin?
Regarding the arts and education, I would say, with little hesitation, that the formal indoctrination began with New York’s New School for Social Research, founded in 1919 … and, appropriately enough, still a far-left bastion that draws young intellects easily swayed by the appropriately titled Progressive Jazz.
Obviously the Progressive in that phrase has many more meanings than merely musical ones.
This is not the jazz of Louis Armstrong.
It’s the cutting edge sounds of The Modern Jazz Quartet, Herbie Hancock, the super cool arrangements of Gil Evans, culminating in the quintessentially French version of the “American Racial Tragedy”, Bertrand Tavernier’s film, Round Midnight. Bertrand Tavernier was recently a signatory on the petition to free Roman Polanski. It’s all part of the Red Special Favors Club that now has the Polish director “jailed” in a Swiss ski resort.
I have written about the lasting effects of the French Revolution upon third millennium America in my series, America’s French Revolution at enterstageright.com.
World Communism without the French Revolution and American Communism without the Far Left artists of New York and Hollywood are fantasies as incomplete as the Lone Ranger without Tonto … or Stalin without Lenin.
Let me extend my dating back a bit further, to 1911. In that year a cartoon by Robert Minor appeared. In it Capitalists and Karl Marx himself are “buddying-up” on Wall Street. This pre-Soviet, Communist/Capitalist merger in America evolved into what we now know of as the Progressive Movement, which, in turn, became the Progressive Power Years of the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama White Houses.
A deal has been struck between the World Marxists and an amazingly small oligarchy of American capitalists across party lines. They comprise the inner circle of Progressivism … and George Soros particularly “pulled the money strings” to get Barack Obama elected.
Their objective?
A “Collective” run by the Progressive Oligarchy.
An Animal Farm.
Hmmm … sound appealing?
At least it’s a magnet for lower-classes, right? Those who are still taught in the increasingly Marxist public school system that this Oligarchy out of the Ivy League is going to “redistribute the wealth” … right?
Well … the motivations for the lower-classes to climb up were, and still are, the privileges achieved within the free-market, capitalist system – all of which, under Marxism, will be gone, except for the chosen elite handpicked by the Oligarchy!
The promised “Change” of the Obama Nation is a bait and switch, shell game; and the established artists of today will find their own liberties curtailed … and, much like Orwell, come to abhor Communism.
However by then, it will be too late.
Reds (1981)
From The New School for Social Research to the famed but highly politicized Group Theater of Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford, out of which came Dead End‘s author, Sidney Kingsley, we have the evil flower blossoming nicely.
Now we have become captives to an American disillusionment portrayed in the films and theater of our own Far-Left American millionaires such as Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Warren Beatty and Spike Lee.
The Group Theater‘s tribute to Soviet dreams has inspired the American arts, particularly in Hollywood; and it is mirrored in the assassination attempt upon that old school, American conservative, President Ronald Reagan, an insanity partly provoked by the anti-heroic fantasies in Martin Scorsese’s film, The Taxi Driver.
Martin Scorsese and his star, Robert De Niro, created their very own version of an American anti-hero in the films Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
Having learned that the “good guy” in Mean Streets, played by Harvey Keitel, was relatively boring when compared to the mean-street-insanities of the De Niro character, both Scorsese and De Niro obviously arrived at the creation of Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver, a truly French, grand guignol, film noir leap into the very hellish bottom of anti-heroism.
Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde come off as a George and Gracie when compared to Taxi Driver.
Why can’t I lump the creators of Taxi Driver in with other American Marxists?
Their apparent love/hate relationship with Christ and Catholicism … not to mention the courage of their presence as presenters in the Academy Awards ceremony during which Elia Kazan, “copped a Gold”, a lifetime achievement award.
There is so much ground to cover within American Marxist Artists but I will possibly venture next into the seductive power of Marxist, film noir anti-heroes such as Natural Born Killers, Bonnie and Clyde, and that admittedly unashamed love song to American Communists, Warren Beatty’s Reds.
Do I condemn them, many of which are indisputable geniuses?
How can I … having been almost as blind to the Communist Lie as they are?
They remind me of the terrible predicament a sports genius named Tiger Woods now finds himself in.
Unlike Mr. Woods, unfortunately, the American Reds are not apologizing.
Basking in the “Change” promised by President Barack Obama, the Progressive Radicals are singing, “Don’t Rain On Our Parade!!”
Oh, well, to oblige my political enemies, I’m singing I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry … for now at any rate.
Oh, dear commenters of Big Hollywood! Thank you for your wonderfully warm welcome. I look forward to all of your future feedback.