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Let's take a trip back in time,
to the recent past, to America during the McCarthy era in
1947, when one of the most popular jobs was to be a door-to-door
salesman of bomb shelters. This was the United States of the
Cold War era, told to Italy by the unpublished hearings held
by the Un-American Activities Committee in Hollywood, in front
of which names like - Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper,
Bertolt Brecht and Edward Dmytrik - paraded, among others.
From the Preface:
Zero Mostel dances alone in a hotel room. He smiles. He has a champagne glass in his hand. He toasts towards an inexistent interlocutor. He climbs onto the windowsill. He throws himself into the emptiness. It is a vivid memory. The Front (in Italy, Il prestanome) by Martin Ritt: is a story about the McCarthy era and the impossibility to work in the motion picture industry if you were a part of the political Left, or more simply said, for those who opposed the witch hunt, for those who believed in the freedom of expression, and in democracy. There were those who faced jail time, who were fired from their jobs, and those who - like Mostel in Ritt's movie - who committed suicide. (...)
Let's go back to Zero Mostel and the worrisome final scene of the film, in which Woody Allen refuses to give even the name of one dead man to the Un-American Activities Committee. He, who was previously only the front man, then becomes a hero. America interrogates herself, as Sydney Pollack did three years earlier in The Way we Were. Cinema investigates itself, its cowardice and its courage. There are still some open wounds, if you think about the recent Oscar controversy attributed to the career of Elia Kazan, who accused friends and colleagues - like so many others - for speaking frankly. These are the moments when each of us confronts ourselves before others. As Manzoni would say, one cannot give courage to himself. But dignity, yes.
The McCarthy era is cultured, refined and rich in unpublished materials. The era is born, as this intelligent book perfectly explains, in the context of a world divided in two, of the Berlin Blockade (1948), the atomic nightmare let loose a few years before on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and tested for the first time in the USSR (1949), the fear of communism that overcomes China (1949), and the beginning of the Korean War (1950).
The cinema told the story of Vietnam, a real national nightmare, in very different ways. But American cinema has been able to spoil its own image, and I'm referring to that same cinema about Vietnam, thanks to the bitter and intelligent parody by Tarantino (Pulp fiction). (...) This is the same cinema that is confronting today's story: the theme of the danger of terrorism, and the fear of Muslims. It's the cinema of the time period of the Guantanamo Bay prisons and the torture of Abu Graib, and that is obsessed, in one way or another, with September 11th. The "enemies" change. Sometimes they are the Native Americans, the Mexicans (The Alamo), the same stubborn cowboys that don't give up at the arrival of the law in the Wild West (the worrisome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), then the Japanese, the Germans, the Soviets with their allies: the Koreans, the Vietnamese, and often implicitly represented by extraterrestrials, of which an invasion is always feared. And now, the Muslims.
Now we are thrown back into the nightmare. War once again dominates the scene. The war has even substituted foreign politics, and diplomacy. And the first victim of war, as one who understands war affirmed, is the truth. Mass fear, whether rational or irrational, witch hunts, fiery proclamations and curses have returned. There's always a little of Senator Joseph McCarthy in every ambush. It's up to us, as the free conscience of America, to watch out for history, devilishly persevering so that the errors are never repeated, ever again.
Oliviero Diliberto,
National Secretary of the Italian Communist Party
Read the introduction (In Italian, 39 Kb)
Read the index (In Italian, 16 Kb)
Read the book jacket (In Italian)
Presentation
This research has been presented with a lectio magistralis about the McCarthy Era in Chioggia (Civic Museum), Trento (University of Trento, Dept. of Sociology), Rome (National Rally of Liberazione).
Book Reviews
"Gastaldi's powerful study is rich in definitions, facts, official documents, data, dates, audience minutes, interrogations, depositions and, above all, testimonials of the stars... it is also the impassioned narration of a witch hunt... Gastaldi tells the story of a time in American history, the story of the cinema, and of world politics with a disarming clarity and a praiseworthy balance that had been overlooked up until now... The value of this long description of the Hollywood show to the bar is the all-American slice already chosen by the author". (Alessandra Iadicicco, Il Giornale, September 21, 2004).
"The McCarthy era is a period that needs to be looked at again
in the age of Islamic witch hunts. (...) Reds out of Hollywood!
is one of the rare Italian essays on the topic. (...)
The analogies of the America of Bush junior are such and so
evident, that unfortunately Gastaldi speaks about post September
11th as the neo-McCarthy era, in which the red scare is substituted
with the Islam-scare". (Emilio Ranzato, Alias de Il Manifesto,
October 7, 2006.)
"This book is the most exhaustive published essay by an Italian scholar on the phenomena of the communist hunt in the world or American cinema". (Giuliano di Tanna, Il Centro, October 5, 2004).
"A subject that has not been deeply explored in Italy, the McCarthy era phenomena in American cinema, is now at the center of this penetrating and well researched study by Sciltian Gastaldi, based on the hearings - in a large part unpublished in Italy - of the audiences held by the House Committee on the Un-American Activities". (Francesco Troiano, Tuttolibri de La Stampa, October 23, 2004).
"An important, detailed, and ample close examination on the facts and more often on the misdeeds of the McCarthy era". (Massimo Lastrucci, Ciak, November 2004).
One of the best Italian books on the McCarthy era. (La Repubblica, November 26, 2004, pag.40).
"The hearings from the House Committee on the Un-American Activities subjected people such as Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney in the 1940s and they make up the majority of the volume". (Paola Piacenza, Io Donna - Il femminile del Corriere della Sera, 12/4/2004).
"Gastaldi pauses on the last pages to reflect on the most recent facts, those of what happened after September 11, 2001. And he asks himself if there exists today a type of neo- Mccarthyism directed at Muslims instead of Communists. There are unsettling signs pointing in this direction". (Roberto Carnero, L'Unità, January 3, 2005).
"A book rich in official documents and testimonials, information and facts, rendering itself very useful to reconstruct a period in time from many points of view". (Marco Respinti - L'Indipendente, April 28, 2005)
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