Word: beal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Alias Nick Beal (Paramount) is a modern morality play subtly fashioned around the text: "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Into the life of a gang-busting prosecutor (Thomas Mitchell) floats a mysterious character known as Nick Beal (Ray Milland). At first Beal supplies the prosecutor with evidence against a big-time gambler; then he stands at the lawyer's elbow, goading his political ambitions. By the time Mitchell has been persuaded to play ball with a corrupt, vote-powerful political machine, it is clear that...
...spring of 1929 he was sent to the restless South. The "lint-heads" in the Tennessee and Carolina mills, ridden with pellagra, beaten down by the stretch-out, were showing signs of kicking over the belts and bobbins. Beal went to North Carolina, where he organized and directed the Gastonia strike (at the Manville-Jenckes Co.'s Loray Mill). One night there was violence, and Gastonia's Police Chief 0. F. Aderholt was killed...
...Beal and 15 other strikers were indicted for first-degree murder. Their trials became famed in the history of U.S. radicalism. The first, at which the prosecution wheeled in a life-size plaster effigy of Chief Aderholt, was declared a mistrial because a juror went insane. At the close of the second, Beal and six others were convicted of second-degree murder. All jumped bail and fled to Russia...
...Soviet Union Beal became a hero who lectured throughout the land, wrote pamphlets on the Workers' Paradise. But in three years paradise had begun to look like a very different place. Wrote he: "I found just the conditions against which I was fighting over here . . . The workers were hungry ... in rags. I never saw the equal of that misery in this country...
Full Circle. Last week Fred Erwin Beal had come full circle. He returned to Gastonia to be restored to the U.S. citizenship he had lost. In the summer-hot courtroom he stood, a heavy-waisted man of 52, and told Judge Wilson Warlick earnestly: "I am one of the greatest foes of Communism in America. I would rather be an American prisoner than a free man in Russia...