Epic, Epic, Who’s Got the Epic?

If after experiencing the macabre enchantment of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring I was to discover that he spent his spare time organizing the Communist Housewives’ League of Sweden I should be surprised at his politics but my opinion of him as an artist would remain unchanged. And I should be among the first to protest if anyone tried to prevent him from making more pictures. My objection to Dalton Trumbo’s “scripting” (the word is Otto Preminger’s, not mine) of Exodus is not that he has a record of Communist associations, but that he has the crust to bore me for three hours and forty-five minutes with another of his ho-hum fake epics. Producer Preminger, that valiant gospel singer of the Four Freedoms, has defended his choice of a Trumbo by proclaiming that “in our free democratic way of life, we do not keep on punishing a man once he has paid for violating the law. And inquiring into a man’s politics and religion and discriminating against him because of them is not the American way.”

Since, in the winged Preminger words, we don’t go on punishing and inquiring, it occurred to me during a certain long three and three-quarter hours that in another four years Baldur von Schirach—a somewhat more professional writer than Dalton Trumbo—will be out of Spandau. I suggest that in the same Pauline spirit of charity Mr. Preminger might give von Schirach a job scripting for United Artists. Perhaps Dalton and Baldur could even combine talents in a new epic on the 1956 Hungarian uprising. After all, the old gauleiters and the commissars seem to be hitting it off quite happily in Cairo these days.

FR

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Francis Russell

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If after experiencing the macabre enchantment of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring I was to discover that he spent his spare time organizing the Communist Housewives’ League of Sweden I should be surprised at his politics but my opinion of him as an artist would remain unchanged. And I should be among the first to protest if anyone tried to prevent him from making more pictures. My objection to Dalton Trumbo’s “scripting” (the word is Otto Preminger’s, not mine) of Exodus is not that he has a record of Communist associations, but that he has the crust to bore me for three hours and forty-five minutes with another of his ho-hum fake epics. Producer Preminger, that valiant gospel singer of the Four Freedoms, has defended his choice of a Trumbo by proclaiming that “in our free democratic way of life, we do not keep on punishing a man once he has paid for violating the law. And inquiring into a man’s politics and religion and discriminating against him because of them is not the American way.”

Since, in the winged Preminger words, we don’t go on punishing and inquiring, it occurred to me during a certain long three and three-quarter hours that in another four years Baldur von Schirach—a somewhat more professional writer than Dalton Trumbo—will be out of Spandau. I suggest that in the same Pauline spirit of charity Mr. Preminger might give von Schirach a job scripting for United Artists. Perhaps Dalton and Baldur could even combine talents in a new epic on the 1956 Hungarian uprising. After all, the old gauleiters and the commissars seem to be hitting it off quite happily in Cairo these days.