Word: menjou
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...Bones." Movie Veteran Adolphe Menjou was delighted with himself. Settling back and lighting up a Pall Mall, he readily admitted that members of the House Un-American Activities Committee could not have found a better witness. As it happened he was "a student of Marxism and Stalinism and of its probable effects on American people." He was also "a Red-baiter," he added cheerfully. "I make no bones about it. I'd like to see them all in Russia. I think a taste of Russia would cure them...
Like the first day's witnesses, Cinemactor Menjou was perfectly willing to name names (TIME, Oct. 27) of those who were Hollywood's Reds. He repeated the names of Director John Cromwell and Scripter John Howard Lawson, though he could not be sure that they actually carried party cards. Twirling his mustache, sipping artfully from a glass of water, mugging for the camera men, he admitted that Communism in Hollywood was on the decline, mainly because so many people were becoming aware of its dangers. But there were still Reds aplenty, and he had a surefire, if somewhat...
...only in Menjou, who admits knowing no Communist, worthless as a testifier, but the charges smack of the preposterous. The great bulk of American movies, present a glamourized version of what Louis B. Mayer calls, "the American way of life," almost always avoiding red hot political issues. The mass-production of wishful thinking and the reluctance to deal with controversial problems may themselves be an indictment against Hollywood, but that is not in Mr. Rankin's field...
...Hollywood farce that the Rankin Committee is directing this week threatens, in irresponsibility and blindness to facts, to surpass all other recent attempts to uproot America's Communist menace. Depending on the testimony of political experts of the caliber of Adolphe Menjou, the Committee seeks to prove that the celluloid capital is a dispensary of Red propaganda. Meanwhile, a bevy of eminent movie producers are defending themselves like criminals against the charge of having made films, during the war, that seemed friendly to our erstwhile allies, the Russian people...
...stems from the fact that Hollywood is a business, and gladly neglects issues that will lose it customers. To come out for any unfashionable political creed, and especially Communism, would be unheard of by the conservative moguls who feed the public their weekly escape from life. So when Witness Menjou proudly declares that he prevented quantities of "sly, subtle, class-struggle propaganda" from sneaking into films, one can only wonder whether their almost total absence stems from his efforts...