Movies / pictures

I concentrate quite a lot on film in these art comments because I see it as the key focus for the Hidden Hands ; in a sense the art was a side-show with its huge gamme of spin-offs but they only touched the elites and an attendant array of service industries and interesting individuals. Today most of those names are still little known to the general public. At the time only Picasso and Dali broke through into the wider world, but that was pre-Hands and in conjunction with life-style - provocation, high professionalism and the drama of the times - a seizing of the big picture.

Their personas were kept well away from the Hollywood view of the world for the reason I describe earlier - they belonged to different and conflicting Hand policies when it came to shaping perceptions. Hollywood attempts to cover artists are always painful since the mindsets have hardly ever met - apart from some Abstract Expressionist spin-off in actors, who remain naive. And the proximity of Hockney in LA would hardly be illuminating.

The McCarthy Communist witch-hunt across America shadowed European tyrants, Right and Left, in going for the intellectuals - those perceived as able to rouse followings. Besides, there is reason to believe that the motives behind the McCarthy Hollywood attack were more local and self-interested and involved a fight between in-coming talent and vested interests. In the England of the period this battle was played down we were meant to see Hollywood as a happy place of uplifting endings. The only lateral event I recall being given big space in the Sunday newspapers was the arrest of Robert Mitchum, caught smoking marijuana, I believe he got a prison sentence (which normally spelt the end for any actor). Of course, we didn’t know he was getting the flack for having associated with and acted in the films of some of the Hollywood 10 writers and directors who were indicted by McCarthy in the national TV coverage of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Barred from work in film and some got prison time too. Berthold Brecht got harrassed and soon left the US for good, the leading immigrant intellectual in Hollywood. In other words, it was about breaking up the growing reputations of the top-talent refugee groups, which by then, were self-evidently a cut above the indigenous majority. Formed in an ad hoc way and which retained many from silent movie era teams.

Ronald Reagan and other actors were closely involved - Reagan did not attract the eye of the incoming directors while Bogart and Mitchum did - all-in-all the backwoodsmen scored an easy victory with the support of Hoover and others behind the scenes. Their personal hold on power was the real motive. Looking at it in retrospect I can suggest one odd reason why Mitchum survived when most actors had no chance to work under a pseudonym (unlike writers). He came out of Long Beach where he’d been a dock worker involved with union work - i.e. politically left. That was a big minus but he did have a nearby group of supporters who could get physical. That might have weighed in the decision to continue to give him work. James Ellroy describes the atmosphere of the time.

This scare left Hollywood shaken and to this day it remembers that careers can go wholesale overnight. Some of the US artists being promoted on the East Coast and beyond would have had socialist connections during the depression years but that was brushed under the carpet in the larger cause of the cultural conquest of left-leaning liberals in Europe. If not embedded into the “harmless modernism”, they might oppose cultural supervision.