I can remember watching all of those movies in the later '50's, when tv was full of old movies. I definitely remember "Action in the North Atlantic" on the Million Dollar Movie, where you could watch the same movie sixteen times in the same week if you were so inclined. what's funny is that four days ago I watched "The North Star" (or …
I can remember watching all of those movies in the later '50's, when tv was full of old movies. I definitely remember "Action in the North Atlantic" on the Million Dollar Movie, where you could watch the same movie sixteen times in the same week if you were so inclined. what's funny is that four days ago I watched "The North Star" (or actually as much of it as we could stand) with my friend, who's a Russian scholar. the personnel on that movie is sort of unreal...about as Popular Front and blue ribbon as things got: Milestone, Hellman (who was--let's face it--a hack), Copland, Ira Gershwin (for his lyrics to the silly songs), Stanley Cortez...a regular rogues' gallery....IF you were some kind of HUAC fan. for the record, I'm being facetious.
The screenwriter of Action in the North Atlantic - John Howard Lawson - was the head of the Hollywood chapter of the CPUSA. There is all kinds of really obvious "left propaganda" in the screenplay dialogue. None of which ever changed anyone's mind.
I'd totally forgotten that Lawson wrote that screenplay. a friend of mine was a neighbor of Ron Radosh, who's spent his entire career as an historian writing about how the Hollywood blacklist was probably a good thing because of all the REAL commies who smuggled their politics into their movies. but when he gives examples of this "dangerous" dialogue, it's pretty fucking anodyne (an example he cites is Trumbo's line ending a Ginger Rogers movie (I forget which one): "I guess that's the American way...share and share alike!" I don't think that line accounts for any significant uptick in party applications. almost needless to say, Radosh started life as a red diaper baby and they're mean as fuck when they "turn."
Lawson wrote the book, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay. I once met Radosh - "fucking moron" is a good two-word review there.
I resisted meeting him because I have a chronic incivility issue (this made my professional life, such as it was, something of a nightmare), but I think (or thought, if he's no longer among us) you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Radosh also loved to make a lot of public noise about not being able to get tenure because of the "hard left" orientation of most local History departments and my take on that was that his work was hardly worthy of tenure. whenever I see anything about "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," I have to smile about my father's take on it, which was based on his loathing of Doolittle. you doubtless know all this, but Izzie (my dad, whose 19th memorial candle is burning a few feet away) couldn't forgive him for arriving at the Eighth and, just when everyone had finished their 25 missions, slapped on an additional 7, greatly increasing every flier's chance of not getting home...the phrase everyone used was "Twenty-five for America, Seven for Doolittle." I THINK I got that right. and btw, has that bombing campaign ALSO been found to have been of very limited effectiveness in shortening the war? if anyone knows, it'd certainly be you.
Since I have just written a history of the Eighth, I hate to be the one to tell you that Dad was wrong. When Doolittle "slapped on" the additional missions, that was the summer of 1944, when the Eighth Air Force fighters had knocked the Luftwaffe for a loop. By then the average losses on a mission were under 2 percent, way below the loss rate of January 1944, before the "Battle of Germany." And at the same time, the 15th Air Force flying out of Italy had a crew tour of 50 missions. Yes, nobody liked getting additional missions, but every other air force unit around the planet looked on the Eighth as prima donnas. The tour in Italy for the B-25s really was like what Heller did in Catch-22, though it wasn't just because of arbitrariness on the part of the group leaders (which was commonly thought so by the guys on the line), but rather the fact they weren't getting replacements since Italy was a "secondary" front. The tour for guys flying B-25 strafers in the Southwest Pacific, where some missions had 35% losses, was 75 missions. And yes, I know many guys who were in the Eighth who could prove all their missions were tough. But by the summer of 1944, guys were cycling through with a tour of 35 missions and were gone in 4 months, home. The whole history of the Eighth is "before the Berlin missions" (March 1944) and "after D-Day". By the fall, after the oil campaign, the Luftwaffe only came up against 14 missions over September-December, which was about 25% of the missions flown. Of course, flak was always deadlier and responsible for 60% of losses throughout the campaign.
well, that was certainly enlightening, which is exactly what I expected. my information is stuff I just sort of picked up, based on what my father told me. I totally got the dates and circumstances wrong. is your history of the Eighth out yet? I noticed the previous ones are all e-books and most of them are audiobooks, which is how I tend to get most of my reading done these days (something about how my eyes work now, or, to be more more accurate, DON'T work). I'll grab the Eighth history as soon as it's available. and I DID know they were considered prima donnas and "glamor boys."
a mo0vie scene that ALWAYS makes me cry is Dana Andrews in the bomber cemetary in "The Best Years of Our Lives." incidentally, I got to know Joe Heller a little bit when he started teaching at CCNY (he also had an office the building on West 57th Street as my father did for a time), and his actual, personal take on the officers he knew was pretty much the opposite of the way they were portrayed in "Catch-22." I can recall being on the subway with my father when he read "Catch-22" and I can remember being a little mortified that I was with this guy who was laughing so hard he had trouble catching his breath. I read it again last year, and hadn't remembered how fabulous it was, just for the sheer quality of the prose.
The book on the Eighth comes next year. Downtown came out today, and "the Cactus Air Force" (the four critical months at Guadalcanal) which I wrote with my friend and mentor the late Eric Hammel from his 40 years of interviews with people nobody else talked to will be out this October.
My book "The Bridgebusters" is the true story of the "Catch-22 bomb wing" and introduces an interesting theory as to why the novel got written. It turns out to have been far more a "Roman A Clef" than Heller ever admitted to. As Buck Henry told me about him, "Joe Heller was the angriest guy I ever met," which was the door into the theory - that and having the son of the guy who made the documentaries Heller participated in that got him the "milk runs" he talked about when everyone else was flying tough missions in the Battle of the Brenner Pass, before he went home on 60 missions when everyone else was stuck with 75 and then "for the duration," find photos Heller said never were taken of him during the war. That book is having a special trade paperback edition come out in October, or you can get the hardback used on Amazon - there is no audiobook for it.
the audiobook might be out of print (I can't figure out why this happens, but there was one, and it's pretty good). I have a copy somewhere, which I can TRY to get to you, although it very well might have copy protection or some other bullshit going on. but I'm on it...
ha!...I just checked and the audiobook is very much available on Audible (Unabridged, 19 hours).
Interesting. I have had very little dealings with this publisher. If you know who/what they are, you'll understand. They wanted to get a "real" history line going, and were willing to work with authors who weren't part of their usual crowd, but then right when this book - the first of those - happened, 2016 happened.
all of us are going to keep paying and paying for those four or five years. it's pretty amazing and very much like a bad dream, in which the worst thing imaginable is exactly what happens five minutes later.
....and Bob Gottlieb's excellent autobiography has a long section on his editing of "Catch-22," in which he was very much a part of what that book was.
I can remember watching all of those movies in the later '50's, when tv was full of old movies. I definitely remember "Action in the North Atlantic" on the Million Dollar Movie, where you could watch the same movie sixteen times in the same week if you were so inclined. what's funny is that four days ago I watched "The North Star" (or actually as much of it as we could stand) with my friend, who's a Russian scholar. the personnel on that movie is sort of unreal...about as Popular Front and blue ribbon as things got: Milestone, Hellman (who was--let's face it--a hack), Copland, Ira Gershwin (for his lyrics to the silly songs), Stanley Cortez...a regular rogues' gallery....IF you were some kind of HUAC fan. for the record, I'm being facetious.
The screenwriter of Action in the North Atlantic - John Howard Lawson - was the head of the Hollywood chapter of the CPUSA. There is all kinds of really obvious "left propaganda" in the screenplay dialogue. None of which ever changed anyone's mind.
I'd totally forgotten that Lawson wrote that screenplay. a friend of mine was a neighbor of Ron Radosh, who's spent his entire career as an historian writing about how the Hollywood blacklist was probably a good thing because of all the REAL commies who smuggled their politics into their movies. but when he gives examples of this "dangerous" dialogue, it's pretty fucking anodyne (an example he cites is Trumbo's line ending a Ginger Rogers movie (I forget which one): "I guess that's the American way...share and share alike!" I don't think that line accounts for any significant uptick in party applications. almost needless to say, Radosh started life as a red diaper baby and they're mean as fuck when they "turn."
Lawson wrote the book, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay. I once met Radosh - "fucking moron" is a good two-word review there.
I resisted meeting him because I have a chronic incivility issue (this made my professional life, such as it was, something of a nightmare), but I think (or thought, if he's no longer among us) you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Radosh also loved to make a lot of public noise about not being able to get tenure because of the "hard left" orientation of most local History departments and my take on that was that his work was hardly worthy of tenure. whenever I see anything about "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," I have to smile about my father's take on it, which was based on his loathing of Doolittle. you doubtless know all this, but Izzie (my dad, whose 19th memorial candle is burning a few feet away) couldn't forgive him for arriving at the Eighth and, just when everyone had finished their 25 missions, slapped on an additional 7, greatly increasing every flier's chance of not getting home...the phrase everyone used was "Twenty-five for America, Seven for Doolittle." I THINK I got that right. and btw, has that bombing campaign ALSO been found to have been of very limited effectiveness in shortening the war? if anyone knows, it'd certainly be you.
Since I have just written a history of the Eighth, I hate to be the one to tell you that Dad was wrong. When Doolittle "slapped on" the additional missions, that was the summer of 1944, when the Eighth Air Force fighters had knocked the Luftwaffe for a loop. By then the average losses on a mission were under 2 percent, way below the loss rate of January 1944, before the "Battle of Germany." And at the same time, the 15th Air Force flying out of Italy had a crew tour of 50 missions. Yes, nobody liked getting additional missions, but every other air force unit around the planet looked on the Eighth as prima donnas. The tour in Italy for the B-25s really was like what Heller did in Catch-22, though it wasn't just because of arbitrariness on the part of the group leaders (which was commonly thought so by the guys on the line), but rather the fact they weren't getting replacements since Italy was a "secondary" front. The tour for guys flying B-25 strafers in the Southwest Pacific, where some missions had 35% losses, was 75 missions. And yes, I know many guys who were in the Eighth who could prove all their missions were tough. But by the summer of 1944, guys were cycling through with a tour of 35 missions and were gone in 4 months, home. The whole history of the Eighth is "before the Berlin missions" (March 1944) and "after D-Day". By the fall, after the oil campaign, the Luftwaffe only came up against 14 missions over September-December, which was about 25% of the missions flown. Of course, flak was always deadlier and responsible for 60% of losses throughout the campaign.
well, that was certainly enlightening, which is exactly what I expected. my information is stuff I just sort of picked up, based on what my father told me. I totally got the dates and circumstances wrong. is your history of the Eighth out yet? I noticed the previous ones are all e-books and most of them are audiobooks, which is how I tend to get most of my reading done these days (something about how my eyes work now, or, to be more more accurate, DON'T work). I'll grab the Eighth history as soon as it's available. and I DID know they were considered prima donnas and "glamor boys."
a mo0vie scene that ALWAYS makes me cry is Dana Andrews in the bomber cemetary in "The Best Years of Our Lives." incidentally, I got to know Joe Heller a little bit when he started teaching at CCNY (he also had an office the building on West 57th Street as my father did for a time), and his actual, personal take on the officers he knew was pretty much the opposite of the way they were portrayed in "Catch-22." I can recall being on the subway with my father when he read "Catch-22" and I can remember being a little mortified that I was with this guy who was laughing so hard he had trouble catching his breath. I read it again last year, and hadn't remembered how fabulous it was, just for the sheer quality of the prose.
The book on the Eighth comes next year. Downtown came out today, and "the Cactus Air Force" (the four critical months at Guadalcanal) which I wrote with my friend and mentor the late Eric Hammel from his 40 years of interviews with people nobody else talked to will be out this October.
My book "The Bridgebusters" is the true story of the "Catch-22 bomb wing" and introduces an interesting theory as to why the novel got written. It turns out to have been far more a "Roman A Clef" than Heller ever admitted to. As Buck Henry told me about him, "Joe Heller was the angriest guy I ever met," which was the door into the theory - that and having the son of the guy who made the documentaries Heller participated in that got him the "milk runs" he talked about when everyone else was flying tough missions in the Battle of the Brenner Pass, before he went home on 60 missions when everyone else was stuck with 75 and then "for the duration," find photos Heller said never were taken of him during the war. That book is having a special trade paperback edition come out in October, or you can get the hardback used on Amazon - there is no audiobook for it.
the audiobook might be out of print (I can't figure out why this happens, but there was one, and it's pretty good). I have a copy somewhere, which I can TRY to get to you, although it very well might have copy protection or some other bullshit going on. but I'm on it...
ha!...I just checked and the audiobook is very much available on Audible (Unabridged, 19 hours).
Interesting. I have had very little dealings with this publisher. If you know who/what they are, you'll understand. They wanted to get a "real" history line going, and were willing to work with authors who weren't part of their usual crowd, but then right when this book - the first of those - happened, 2016 happened.
all of us are going to keep paying and paying for those four or five years. it's pretty amazing and very much like a bad dream, in which the worst thing imaginable is exactly what happens five minutes later.
....and Bob Gottlieb's excellent autobiography has a long section on his editing of "Catch-22," in which he was very much a part of what that book was.