Stalinism, sepia and sentiment

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reviews new film

SIDNEY Lumet's 'Daniel' is

an emotional and powerful account of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, •CP USA members who were victims of a legal lynching in the early '50s, and of their children.

Many thousands of victims were ruined, blacklistea, driven to an early grave or to suicide by the 'McCarthyite' witch-hunts. The Rosenbergs were the only ones to be literally burned alive - in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison, on June 19 1953.

. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 and charged with 'conspiracy to commit espionage'. . Linked by the testimony of others with Klaus Fuchs, the spy arrested in England in 1949, they were tried in March 1951 at the height of the hysteria generated by American reverses in the Korean war.

They were convicted on the testimony of people who thereby bought clemency for themselves, including Ethel Rosenberg's brother David Greenglass and his wife.

Whether or not the Rosenbergs were spies, there is no reason to doubt that it was the anti-communist hysteria that determined their sentence and its carrying out. Even the judge sentencing them could not restrain himself from accusing them of having 'given Russia the Bomb and thereby encouraged Russian aggression in Korea, where 50,000 Americans had so far died' The Rosenberg case is thinly fictionalised for the film by E R Doctorow, who made the screen play out of his 1971 novel, 'The Book of Daniel' Daniel, according to one of the Negro spirituals sung on the soundtrack by Paul Robeson, was 'a witness for the Lord'. Lumet's and Doctorow's Daniel is the son of 'Paul and Rochelle Isaacson' electrocuted as Soviet spies in 1953.

It is the mid-'60s and in the US the anti-Vietnam war movement is gathering force. Paul and Rochelle Isaacson's youngest child, Susan, is an activist, but at 20 she is neurotic, suicidal, withered up. In fact she is dying.

Daniel finally decides that she is simply inconsolable.

Disturbed from a self-protective immersion in private life by Susan's breakdown, Daniel sets out to seek 'the truth about the Isaacsons' The film weaves together two separable strands - the story of the children, working backwards from the '60s, and the story of the parents, working forward from the '30s.

Much of it is in sepia flashback to 1953 and earlier, tracing Paul and Rochelle's road to the death house at Sing Sing.

One theme is what it means to two children (the Rosenbergs actually had two boys) to have their parents killed by the State. This is what gives the film its main power and force. Such questions as whether they were guilty or railroaded, which take up much of the film, are in fact irrelevant to it, and essentially weaken it.

The other strand in the film traces the life of two members of the Communist Party of the USA during the '30s and "40s, until they • get picked up during the McCarthyite witch-hunt and railroaded to the electric chair.

Typical of a generation, the Isaacsons meet during • a street fight with police trying to break a picket line.

At college they trade polemical punches with a Trotskyist, discussing Stalin's German policy which let Hitler to power. 'We grant you your virtue" , they say. You were right, but we are the movement.

Political life is possible despite the Party's politics. The Trotskyist is a 'simplistic sectarian'. They are - they naively think - real is being created.

The famous 1949 Peekskill open-air Paul Robeson concert, in defiance of witch-hunt and blacklist, after which gangs of thugs attack parts of the audience as they are leaving.

Music does much of the work to evoke the emotional world of the CP. A coachfull of people singing a moving song from the German concentration camps of the early '30s, "The Peatbog soldiers' Numerous Paul Robeson songs on the sounetrack. many vegro spirituals, do more than evoke the time. he spirituals are appropriate to the Party members' outlook.

For this is a closed-in world, the world of a special tribe, of a sect. Lumet and Doctorow recreate it and enter into it very well.

The members have 'dipped light' vision, but the main beam -like a large part of their minds and the critical intelligence that made them communists in the first place - is switched off, dismensed with, surrendered to Pope Stalin.

"The Peatbog Soldiers' is sung helplessness in face of the death of parents. It is an example of the universal experience of a child's horrors and fears - intensified sometimes by suppressed wishes - about the inevitability of the death of its parents - not in the form of fears of natural death, but through the sepia-tinted nightmare of the slow, inexorable closing of the State's deadly grip on Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, until it jolts the life out of them in the electric chair.

'Daniel' is a left-wing movie, not just a study of leftists. It tries to convey a sense of a movement with continuity and, maybe, development. The last shots show Daniel and his wife with their baby marching against the Vietnam war and a woman's voiceover sings a 1960s version of one of Paul Robeson's songs from the "sepia' soundtrack. continues.

So 'Daniel' must be judged as a left wing movie.

It has critical intelligence; and makes 'distancing' observations about the movement. 'The Party' is criticised for being slow to defend the Isaacsons. The film portrays the 1940s CPers accurately up to a point, as blinkered zealots. Someone says: 'They had the faith' Yet ultimately 'Daniel' winds up glorifying them and uncritically incorporating their myths into its own lightly fictionalised saga.

It is reasonable for Lumet and Doctorow to appropriate the CPers' conception of themselves, their myths, much celebrated incidenis like the Robeson concert, and such a marvellous thing as Robeson's music, to evoke and portray the world of 'Paul and Rochelle Isaacson'. But they do not just use this culture to create colour, atmosphere and verisimilitude. They accept it uncritically, outside of any other political framework, and almost entirely on its own terms.

The film winds up recycling and peddling a version of CP mythology, albeit with a certain backward-looking knowingness.

For example, the Isaacsons' sympathy and involvement with America's savagely oppressed blacks is stressed and deliberately used to add a sympathy-creating patina of virtue to these 'typical CPers'. Hatred of 'Jim Crow' runs through the movie.

Such attitudes and concerns were certainly typical of such people. Paul Robeson's voice and spirit properly sets the emotional tone of much of the film.

Yet all this is shot through with lies.

The American CP - which had a proud anti-racist record in the '20s, and even in the '30s — sold out the blacks, demobilised what it could of their movement after 1941, subordinated them to the war drive, cashing in its large (and deserved) credit with the blacks as a donation to the political treasury of Stalin's wartime alliance.

But the film-makers are not obliged artistically to 'say everything'?

They are obliged to include such facts... unless they want to concoct and project a re-burnished piece of CP mythology. And unless they want to miss much of the point about the Rosenbergs.

The fate of the Rosenbergs was bound up with the fate of the American working class movement in the '30s and '40s and with what the CP USA did in that movement.

The savage right wing reaction within the labour movement in the late '40s was prepared for by that movement's inability develop independent politics, away from reliance on capitalist politicians like Roosevelt and Truman (who initiated the witch hunt in 1947).

The CP's politics shaped. -perhaps decisively - the evolution of the labour movement. The real US Marxists and communists of the '30s and . '40s - those who were persecuted and jailed in the early '40s, with the CP trying to whip up a lynch mood against them - the Socialist Workers Party of James P Cannon and the Workers Party of Max Shachtman, who fought for independent working class politics in the USA, had no doubt about it.

The history of the CP USA in that formative 15 years of the US labour movement needs to be understood, not mythologised 'Daniel' has been hailed as a revival of radical Hollywood' But you can't build anything solid on a quagmire.

The international labour movement is still too far from having broken with Stalinism for Stalinism's myths - shot through with lies and the echoes of treacheries - to be other than poisonous. They cannot be appropriated and used artistically as harmless antiques.

They are not just a matter of history and ancient memory. -sympathetic sepia notwithstanding.

For in the last analysis those like the Rosenbergs/Isaacsons were not automatons and cyphers, beings of a different kind to ourselves. They were thinking people who made wrong political choices. That they paid dearly as the Rosenbergs did cannot retrospectively ennobble of justify their cause or their Party's deeds.

For the serious Left, our attitude to the poisoned mythology of Stalinism is a vital indication of what we intend for ourselves -and what we commit ourselves to.