Word: pigging
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This is a book about Hollywood, which for an ordinary human being, or even for a pig, is a strange and terrifying place. The tone of disillusion and disgust very likely comes from Bemelmans' discovery that, aside from the glittering surface, Hollywood is nothing like prewar Paris, where he delighted in being gay rather than sarcastic, and sentimental rather than cynical. We see the giant Olympia Studio, where no man is happy, and the road to success is to keep one's month tightly shut and do no work. But Bemelmans makes no judgements; instead he tells the story...
...Dirty Eddie himself, he is an intelligent black pig who grows progressively smaller in the film of which he is the star. That is because the picture is filmed backwards, beginning with the end, and the pig is growing all the time. Actually Eddie is not very important, and does not make his appearance until the last third of the book. Bemelmans' rich sweetness carries the story along without the pig, winning the reader through a kind of hypnotic mastery. Witness the very beginning of "Dirty Eddie": "'Believe me," she said, "I know how to do it. Lean forward, darling...
...Nice pig,' said Moses Fable, who usually paid no attention to bit players and extras." The pig, Dirty Eddie, black, underprivileged, but unmistakably talented, is the hero of Ludwig Bemelmans' third whimsical novel. Moses Fable was the fleshy, flashy chief of Hollywood's Olympia Studios. Bemelmans (Hotel Splendide, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You) gets more out of a pig than Swift and Armour (they miss the whimsy as well as the squeal). Dirty Eddie becomes a $5,000-a-week movie star who earns himself swill-pails of fan mail...
Holdout. Eddie staged a two-month holdout for $5,000 a week, got it after the studio screen-tested hundreds of other pigs, found Eddie irreplaceable. But when the film was run off, Moses Fable "uttered a wild cry of pain." The screen showed a pig implausibly growing smaller as the film went on. The last part of the film had been shot first when Eddie was only half the size he achieved during his two-month strike...
...Oxford Street windows said: "We did it because the owner is a Jew." In Wales, signs appeared on a school wall reading: "Jewish murderers" and "Hitler was right." At Kingstanding, near Birmingham, hooligans stole into a Jewish cemetery, uprooted gravestones, defaced them with signs: "Hang the Jews," "Dirty Jews," "Pig," "Swine." There were other outbreaks in Cardiff, Devonport, Liverpool...