Word: hellman
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Among such films scheduled for release in the next weeks: The Turning Point, a study of two dancers, with Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft; a version of Lillian Hellman's short story Julia, with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave; and One Sings, The Other Doesn't, a French work that will open the New York Film Festival this week...
...Mitford--unlike, say, Lillian Hellman--does not bother with name-calling or invective. She simply states what the C.P. did, and what it felt like to be constantly under FBI and HUAC observation; individual party members become much more sympathetic characters through her witty description of both their heroism and their flaws...
...best example of this kind of attack is Trilling's response to the furor created last spring when her original publisher refused to go ahead with the book unless Trilling removed some remarks about Lillian Hellman in an essay defending American liberals' role in the anticommunist movement of the '50s. (A classic liberal, Trilling considers communism a terrible danger. In a 1967 essay included in this volume, she says the war in Vietnam is a serious error, not because it represents American aggression, but because it is not the best way to stop the Red Menace.) Trilling refused to comply...
...seems so dated. It is as hard to get excited now over a description of Norman Mailer's bout with Jill Johnson over the nature of the female orgasm--once a hot political question--as it is to get involved in the fight between the Trillings and Hellman. At the time of the events Trillings describes, her superficial sort of moralizing might have been acceptable, an on-the-spot kind of description. Analysis could wait till later. But now it is later and by merely recycling her moralizing, Trilling fails to illumine anything...
Trilling, one of many unwavering opponents of both Communism and McCarthyism, objects to Hellman's 1976 memoir of the McCarthy era, Scoundrel Time, saying that it was widely but mistakenly received as a reliable record of the times and of the playwright's "virtually unique personal heroism in the midst of almost universal cowardice." A number of other critics, including Hilton Kramer, Irving Howe and Nathan Glazer, have also taxed Hellman with a variety of obfuscations and omissions in the historical record as well as in her own political life story...