Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

By RICHARD CORLISS, RICHARD SCHICKEL

Four new documentaries unearth old dreams and nightmares

Hollywood movies usually ask the question: What if? Four new documentaries ask: What was it about? How was it? And what can we learn from it? Fortified by various arts council grants, young film makers have scoured archives and garages for old footage and tracked down veterans of quixotic campaigns. Their subjects range from radical idealists to a literary anarchist to the dream of commerce at the 1939 New York World's Fair. But their object is always the same: to train a sympathetic camera on those Americans who marched toward their own versions of Utopia.

SEEING RED and THE GOOD FIGHT

The lines on the faces suggest road maps leading into unknown territory but pursued in reckless good faith. The eyes are bright, the chins are raised in cheerful pugnaciousness, the mouths always on the verge of a smile. These folks seem as jolly as TV-commercial grandparents, yet eager to raise hell one more time. Most of them were active members of the American Communist Party in the days when Stalin was Uncle Joe and the choice looked clear between fascism and Communism. Some party stalwarts helped organize labor unions. Others fought for civil rights in an age when the color barrier kept blacks out of state colleges and the World Series. Radicals lived on the barricades then: leading strikes, tangling with cops, even shipping out--3,200 of them in 1936--to fight against Franco as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Wasn't that a time?

These American Communists fought on so many fronts, and gave and got the best and the worst of it. As Folk Singer Pete Seeger says in Seeing Red, "Don't mourn for a fighter who made a mistake and lost, but mourn the suckers who never bothered putting up a fight." They rejected the skeptics in their midst. Recalls Dorothy Healey, who for a quarter-century headed the party's Southern California district: "What was the meaning of life? You had that answer." But those same eyes, sparkling with conviction, could be blinkered in the face of such trifles as the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the partial annexation of Finland and, later, the taking over of Eastern Europe and the reports of Gulag atrocities. It was not until 1956, and Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, that even the most loyal of party members began to wonder how something so good turned out so bad. By that time the Smith Act had made them criminals, and a few still huddled together in the camaraderie of victims.

It is the triumph of Julia Reichert and James Klein's Seeing Red that people who might have been thought of as bearded, black-coated revolutionaries come off as all-American charmers, their commitment and their sense of humor intact. One wishes that having won their trust, the film makers might have risked losing the old Communists' sympathy by asking tough questions about the failure of U.S. socialism through blind fealty to Moscow. And in The Good Fight, a history of the Lincoln Brigade as recalled by some of the same craggy visionaries who appear in Seeing Red, Film Makers Noel Bruckner, Mary Dore and Sam Sills are similarly reluctant to quiz the brigadiers on the party's influence in organizing volunteers. But both films are valuable more as celebrations than as records of the past. Right or wrong, left or far left, these aging radicals are the best advertisement for the spirit of survival. --By Richard Corliss

BURROUGHS

William S. Burroughs survived the 1950s despite the complementary addictions of heroin and writing. Today, Burroughs has a new monkey on his back: celebrity. The author who rose to infamy with his confessional novel The Naked Lunch has found himself two decades later reading excerpts from his acerbic prose to a TV audience on Saturday Night Live. Now he is the subject of a brisk, BBC-funded documentary.

Not so surprising: Burroughs may have tarried in the circles of personal and political hell, but the no-nonsense Midwest still adheres to his blunt, declarative, police-blotter prose and reverberates in his croaking iconoclastic voice. Echoing T.S. Eliot, Burroughs wrote in the autobiographical Junkie (1953): "I have seen life measured out in eyedroppers of morphine solution." The reference to J. Alfred Prufrock is not merely parodic. Like Eliot, Burroughs was born into a genteel St. Louis family; like Eliot he went to Harvard, then went abroad; he even affected the poet's three-piece banker's garb.

Howard Brookner's feature-length portrait is pretty much a model of the bio-doc: visits to the newspaper morgue for clippings of the capricious death of Burroughs' wife in 1951 (they played the William Tell game, with tragic results); bittersweet recollections by old pals Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern and Lucien Carr; giddy surrealist footage from a movie Burroughs wrote and starred in; glimpses of the gray, sharp-toothed literary lion in his late eminence. Like its subject, the movie serves up with a straight face all the lurid contradictions of an exemplarily misspent life. --R.C.

THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

If one were to believe everything the social historians write, America has lost some part of its innocence on an almost annual basis since roughly 1914. In these circumstances, films that claim to have located the precise moment "when you can see the world turning from what it is to what it will be" are to be cautiously approached. But come to think of it, the New York World's Fair of 1939-40, which opened as the war clouds were fast approaching Europe and closed as the Battle of Britain reached its height, may have better qualifications than most pseudo events as a symbol rich enough to merit renewed attention. Certainly, one of the charms of The World of Tomorrow, a compilation by Tom Johnson and Lance Bird of home movies, newsreel footage and clips from the many films made for and about the fair, is that it gently, intelligently encourages speculation about the past that transcends mere nostalgia.

The fair was the offspring of a typically American marriage of hustle and idealism. It would lift the spirits of an economically and psychologically depressed nation. But it would also function as a bazaar at which urban planners and corporate America could hawk their visions of a new world that might not be brave but was undoubtedly sleek. Right at the center of things, in the Trylon and Perisphere, from which all the fair's main arteries radiated, there was "democracity," a model of tomorrow's squeaky sterile model city. General Motors' Futurama featured landscapes tamed by superhighways; Westinghouse had an all-electric kitchen, a porcelainized paradise in which women proclaimed they would be happy to spend the best years of their lives.

It all looks like a marvelously sweet dream now that the worst features of it have become reality, but at the time it was a financial flop: somehow the impression got around that it was too intellectual to be fun. And as John Crowley points out in his affectionately ironic narration (which, as spoken by Jason Robards, is a model for this kind of writing), something vital left the spirit of the fair in its second, desperate summer, when visits by the likes of Albert Einstein were played down by the promoters and Billy Rose's Aquacade played up. By making fine, clear distinctions between what was emotionally authentic and what was merely hype, The World of Tomorrow will beguile as it informs those hearts that still cannot accept the fact that 1984 has actually arrived. --By Richard Schickel