FILM: DONALD CLARKEreviews Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American PoliticsBy Steven J Ross Oxford University Press, 500pp. £18.99
AT THE END OF Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, the film-maker, playing a barber mistaken for a despot, breaks character to deliver a painfully stilted, if undeniably sincere, plea for tolerance and humanity. "More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost," Chaplin (not the protagonist) tells his congregation.
Thoughts turn to the version of Sean Penn conjured up by the South Parkteam for their peerless satire Team America: World Police. Remembering a visit to Iraq before the war, "Penn" burbles: "They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced."
Aren’t Hollywood windbags insufferable? To the right, Charlton Heston bangs on about the need for every family to own an assault rifle. On the left, Jane Fonda cosies up to North Vietnamese gun crews. Embarking on this enjoyable study of Hollywood’s engagement with politics, the reader might reasonably expect to encounter endless barbed put-downs of movie stars and their indulgent follies.
Steven J Ross, a film academic at the University of Southern California, takes a very different approach. In his own sweetly ingenuous “epilogue”, he inadvertently calls up reminders of that Chaplin speech as he celebrates his subjects’ commitment. “They fit the Founding Fathers’ model of citizen-statesman,” he writes. “If every citizen behaved like them the United States would be a better place.”
The author does fling the occasional piece of rotten fruit. He wearily details the muddled nature of Fonda's early, naive forays into the anti-war movement. He explains how Arnold Schwarzenegger, sometime governor of California, never quite grasped the distinctions between show business and politics. (Arnie's attempts to shoehorn the phrase " hasta la vista" into every speech still curl the toes.) But Ross's book remains impressively resistant to cynicism.
Writing in lucid, humourless prose, the author details the political odysseys of 10 contrasting movie professionals. We begin with Chaplin’s journey from grim poverty to unprecedented global fame to undeserved exile following association with left-wing causes. We close with Schwarzenegger’s bizarre transformation from Terminator to Governator. Along the way, we encounter Louis B Mayer, head of MGM and prominent Republican, Edward G Robinson, another leftist sidelined during the Red Scare, and that undeniably clever, famously vain liberal Warren Beatty.
The story has much to do with the anti-communist witch hunts, the Vietnam traumas and the dismantling of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. It reaches its most unlikely turn when one Hollywood stalwart – can you guess who? – actually gets to become president of the United States.
Surveying that list, readers will already be finding themselves pondering Ross's main thesis. Hollywood is habitually depicted as a den of tofu-scoffing limousine liberals. There may have been booing when Michael Moore won his Oscar for Fahrenheit 9/11, but nobody ever doubted the elite electorate would swing towards that Bush-baiting documentary. While promoting Team America: World Police, Matt Stone, the film's cocreator, dryly noted that he couldn't turn on his TV without hearing Janeane Garofalo, liberal comic, complaining that she was being "silenced".
Yet, when it comes to winning elections, right-wing actors have proved notably more successful than their leftist counterparts. Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan both became governor of the Sunshine State. George Murphy, a former hoofer given equal billing to Reagan in Ross’s book, overcame a Democrat wave in 1964 to win a senate seat for the GOP. The Great Communicator served two terms as president.
Ross has a few cracks at explaining this apparent anomaly. His first argument posits that, being an inherently conservative country, the United States is always less likely to elect the radical candidate. This may be true, but, if so, the theory suggests that any Republican (whether a movie star or an oil baron) has a better chance of being elected than any Democrat (whether a stand-up comic or a community organiser). We remain puzzled as to why so few liberal actors have attained office during the Democrats’ periods of ascendency.
The author goes on to point out that the leftist actors discussed tended to be more successful than their red-meat rivals and were, therefore, less inclined to abandon their day jobs. Well, maybe. Fonda and Beatty were genuine superstars. By the time Reagan ran for office, he was reduced to the odd TV role and to acting as a spokesman for General Electric. Murphy was never that famous. (Let's dance past the fact that Schwarzenegger was the mightiest supernova of his era.) Fair enough, but those actors weren't less popular becausethey were Republicans. Again, the argument doesn't really hold up.
Ross is on surer ground when he suggests that right-wing movie stars were, at the height of their fame, more likely to peddle easily digestible hero myths. Before seeking office, Reagan and Schwarzenegger were already identified as, respectively, a decent cowboy and a terrifyingly competent cyborg. Beatty, who worked quietly and tirelessly for George McGovern's presidential campaign, was best known as a hoodlum ( Bonnie and Clyde), an amoral libertine ( Shampoo) and an actual, bona fide communist ( Reds). Good luck flogging those uneasy personalities to the voters of Tuna Fish, Iowa.
In truth, Ross never satisfactorily squares this particular circle. But, while grappling with the conundrum, he offers us a host of well-told, diligently researched personal voyages. The book is always engaging and warm. Anybody who can narrate Charlton Heston’s drift from thoughtful liberal to near maniac – describing Barbra Streisand as “Hanoi Jane of the Second Amendment” – while still conveying affection for the old trooper, surely qualifies as a decent class of man. We will have to look elsewhere for a cynical evisceration of celebrity vanity.
Donald Clarke is The Irish Times's film correspondent
