On The “Premature Anti-Fascists”- Lillian Hellman’s Watch On The Rhine
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Watch On The Rhine, starring Bette Davis, Paul Lukas, based on the play by Lillian Hellman, screenplay by Dashiell Hammett, 1943
No question these times are tough times for those who speak out against the current wave of America’s Bush-Obama endless war spiral, and we may soon be entering the name Clinton in that mix, again, tough times for those who speak out against the dark clouds of eternal war that hover over many other lands, tough times as well for those who speak out in defense of basic liberties, to be free from fears about speech, about searches, and a sense of privacy. Above all as a European court recently said –“the right to be left alone, to be forgotten” by the nosey state. Such times, tough times, breed few defenders of what is right in the tussle, the ebb and flow of human progress, and more than its fair share of evil humans, and worse, those who depend on the leavings of others’ evils. The instinct is to bow one’s head in or out of sand, let the next door guy worry about it, or let the government hated under ordinary times without opposition do what they feel they need to do, lying or not.
But these times, our times, have not been the only times when humankind had had to search its soul and has had to take a stand by the righteous as the film under review, the Dashiell Hammett screenplay adaption of Lillian Hellman’s (his lover and companion) stage play, Watch On The Rhine, from the period when in the later 1930s evil lured full-blown and mostly unchecked in the world and every conscious person knew the hammer was coming down on their “peaceful little worlds” and were forced to do, or not do, something about it. The theme of this film is a little cautionary tale about some people who did something, some small thing in the great scheme of things in troubled times, and about that little peek of what humankind might look like if we did not always have to hide the better angels of our natures, and other did not mock us for trying.
Of course Europe in the late 1930s was in desperate shape trying to avoid the war everybody knew Hitler’s Germany (and others) were more than willing to impose on an area that had only generation before had the flower of its youth slaughtered in the trenches and battlefields of the Great War (World War I for those who came after when big-time wars had to be numbered). As I have repeatedly noted before in this space in other book and film reviews those who fought in Spain, those “pre-mature anti-fascists” have always been kindred spirits. And that desperate struggle in Spain, a defeat for working and oppressed people and not just in Spain, set the background for the action in this film. If it was dangerous to be an anti-fascist before the defeat in Spain then what was to come, what state-less condition was to come would test many. Many including the leading figure here the German resistance fighter, Kurt (played by Paul Lukas who won an Oscar for the performance), his upper-class American wife, Sara, (played by Bette Davis), and their three children who had to flee Europe and come to America before the hammer fell.
In the year 1940 though in America, far from European woes, deliberately or not, most people did not believe, or consciously did not want to believe, the European crises would hit American shores. And so Kurt and Sara seemed with their European sensibilities and shattered dreams a bit out of place, seemed to be relics from another time and place on these shores. Until that “hammer” I warned about before came down to affect the whole family, Sara’s Pollyanna-ish mother and brother and their connections in the first instance when the pro-Nazi Count who is reside in the home does his dirty work, works in complicity with the evil-doers of the word. In that sense this film’s plotline is fairly straight forward. A known ant-fascist fighter, once exposed as such by the Count, and his deeply supportive wife and children are to be “thrown under the bus” for money, or else. Kurt, wise to the world of the hangers-on of evil knows that the payment of money will not solve his problem with the Count, and that his work will fail as long as the Count draws breathe. So in a nasty hard-bitten world where the moral options that work easily in peacetime shrink qualitatively, he takes matters into his own hands and murders the Count. Murders him for the greater good as the far as he was concerned. And that was the moral dilemma he had to face and solve. In a better world he would not have had to make such a choice but just maybe if we could defeat the fascists we would have some breathing room. Whatever else has happened in the seventy plus years since this dilemma was placed on the table we are still facing the modern version of that dilemma. And so there you have it.
Well not quite, since those of my generation, as well as my parents’ generation would have been all too familiar with the decisions to be made by Kurt and Sara. But I also note with interest that this film, the screenplay, and stage play are associated with the names Lillian Hellman, the Lillian Hellman of the 1950s red scare disputes with the novelist Mary McCarthy and an ardent Stalinist during all that time. And Dashiell Hammett as well, although we honor him for his forthright stand against “finking” to the HUAC and taking his toothbrush to prison as a result. I need not speak of his literary works since I have long paid homage to them, especially The Maltese Falcon. What does interest me though is how the film, screenplay, play would have been written say in the period from September 1939 to June 1941, the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact when the line from Moscow to New York would have been very different. Yeah, modern times are tough times, tough times to keep a moral compass intact indeed.
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Watch On The Rhine, starring Bette Davis, Paul Lukas, based on the play by Lillian Hellman, screenplay by Dashiell Hammett, 1943
No question these times are tough times for those who speak out against the current wave of America’s Bush-Obama endless war spiral, and we may soon be entering the name Clinton in that mix, again, tough times for those who speak out against the dark clouds of eternal war that hover over many other lands, tough times as well for those who speak out in defense of basic liberties, to be free from fears about speech, about searches, and a sense of privacy. Above all as a European court recently said –“the right to be left alone, to be forgotten” by the nosey state. Such times, tough times, breed few defenders of what is right in the tussle, the ebb and flow of human progress, and more than its fair share of evil humans, and worse, those who depend on the leavings of others’ evils. The instinct is to bow one’s head in or out of sand, let the next door guy worry about it, or let the government hated under ordinary times without opposition do what they feel they need to do, lying or not.
But these times, our times, have not been the only times when humankind had had to search its soul and has had to take a stand by the righteous as the film under review, the Dashiell Hammett screenplay adaption of Lillian Hellman’s (his lover and companion) stage play, Watch On The Rhine, from the period when in the later 1930s evil lured full-blown and mostly unchecked in the world and every conscious person knew the hammer was coming down on their “peaceful little worlds” and were forced to do, or not do, something about it. The theme of this film is a little cautionary tale about some people who did something, some small thing in the great scheme of things in troubled times, and about that little peek of what humankind might look like if we did not always have to hide the better angels of our natures, and other did not mock us for trying.
Of course Europe in the late 1930s was in desperate shape trying to avoid the war everybody knew Hitler’s Germany (and others) were more than willing to impose on an area that had only generation before had the flower of its youth slaughtered in the trenches and battlefields of the Great War (World War I for those who came after when big-time wars had to be numbered). As I have repeatedly noted before in this space in other book and film reviews those who fought in Spain, those “pre-mature anti-fascists” have always been kindred spirits. And that desperate struggle in Spain, a defeat for working and oppressed people and not just in Spain, set the background for the action in this film. If it was dangerous to be an anti-fascist before the defeat in Spain then what was to come, what state-less condition was to come would test many. Many including the leading figure here the German resistance fighter, Kurt (played by Paul Lukas who won an Oscar for the performance), his upper-class American wife, Sara, (played by Bette Davis), and their three children who had to flee Europe and come to America before the hammer fell.
In the year 1940 though in America, far from European woes, deliberately or not, most people did not believe, or consciously did not want to believe, the European crises would hit American shores. And so Kurt and Sara seemed with their European sensibilities and shattered dreams a bit out of place, seemed to be relics from another time and place on these shores. Until that “hammer” I warned about before came down to affect the whole family, Sara’s Pollyanna-ish mother and brother and their connections in the first instance when the pro-Nazi Count who is reside in the home does his dirty work, works in complicity with the evil-doers of the word. In that sense this film’s plotline is fairly straight forward. A known ant-fascist fighter, once exposed as such by the Count, and his deeply supportive wife and children are to be “thrown under the bus” for money, or else. Kurt, wise to the world of the hangers-on of evil knows that the payment of money will not solve his problem with the Count, and that his work will fail as long as the Count draws breathe. So in a nasty hard-bitten world where the moral options that work easily in peacetime shrink qualitatively, he takes matters into his own hands and murders the Count. Murders him for the greater good as the far as he was concerned. And that was the moral dilemma he had to face and solve. In a better world he would not have had to make such a choice but just maybe if we could defeat the fascists we would have some breathing room. Whatever else has happened in the seventy plus years since this dilemma was placed on the table we are still facing the modern version of that dilemma. And so there you have it.
Well not quite, since those of my generation, as well as my parents’ generation would have been all too familiar with the decisions to be made by Kurt and Sara. But I also note with interest that this film, the screenplay, and stage play are associated with the names Lillian Hellman, the Lillian Hellman of the 1950s red scare disputes with the novelist Mary McCarthy and an ardent Stalinist during all that time. And Dashiell Hammett as well, although we honor him for his forthright stand against “finking” to the HUAC and taking his toothbrush to prison as a result. I need not speak of his literary works since I have long paid homage to them, especially The Maltese Falcon. What does interest me though is how the film, screenplay, play would have been written say in the period from September 1939 to June 1941, the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact when the line from Moscow to New York would have been very different. Yeah, modern times are tough times, tough times to keep a moral compass intact indeed.
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