"CINEMA ‘The Angry Silence False, Contemptuous, Insulting, says Benita Teper

Never before have I been driven to loud protest from the secure anonymity of a cinema seat. Whatever the intentions of this production team (and the press, not especially well-qualified as moral arbiters, have been lauding their self-sacrifice, integrity and objectivity), they have created a film false, contemptuous and insulting.

Lest it be thought that being partisan can blind a Marxist to the artistic merits of this film, let us summarise the plot. Bespectacled professional agitator Travers makes sinister appearance in factory town. Though lean and hungry, does not partake of meal he buys shop-steward, Connolly. They’re the villains. Together they plan their dirty deeds. Travers gives the line. Connolly clicks into action. Workers click into action. Works manager, ex-shop floor, is a reasonable fellow. So is the boss, in a capitalist sort of way. Production is cf national importance, something to do with Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. But workers are unreasonable sorts of fellows. Decide to strike. No one knows why. But Tom Curtis, he’s \ne hero, he refuses to strike. Hero’s motives? Well, his wife’s pregnant, third time; pity, ’cause he wanted to buy a car. And then, suddenly, he wants to be different. What’s the point of living if you can’t be DIFFERENT? And anyway, the strike’s about trivial issues, lavatory paper, and a closed shop, and it’s unofficial, a wild cat. Well, he and a few other scabs cross the picket line. The police are around, but no horses or batons are visible. Then the ‘teddyboys’—they’re a mean lot!—get rough with the scabs. Travers gets instructions from London by. telephone. Conveys this to Connolly. Accept management’s terms and go back. This is just a ruse—they’re planning to bring the men out again. Then hero is persecuted, so is his family. Finally, he is assaulted by the ‘teddy-boys’ and loses an eye. His pal Joe, who had gone with the crowd, sees the light. He addresses the bellowing workers, who are refusing to listen to the union representative brought down in desperation by the boss. They don’t know why they’re screaming, just gibberish, or perhaps something about refusing to work with a scab. He makes them ashamed of what they’ve done to Curtis. Click, they’re penitent. Travers makes sinister departure. The end. Witch-hunters’ propaganda In the course of this melodrama, every banality about the sanctity of home life, every gimmick of the purity of children, and every sentimentality about the beautiful devoted wife, is excreted to win audience sympathy. But when we are shown the terrified boy in the lavatory, tarred by his schoolfriends because his father is a black-leg, this is a deplorable abuse of emotion. That critics, whose aesthetic sensibilities usually provide them with a‘scalpel, can fawn over this film and praise its mediocrity and crudity as artistic realism, is proof, if more is needed, that this film is propaganda. Small wonder that the falsifications have been lauded by the rightwing press—but why the equivocal approbation of Tribune?

Cardboard figures against a lurid backdrop, the workers as a class are depicted as vacuous, passive sheep, malleable in the hands of ‘agitators’. When they do act, it is in the form of blind destruction. This woeful ignorance of the working-class. in action, and of the role of a political organization’s participation, verifies the New Chronicle’s boast that their exposure of the awful truth was the inspiration of this film. Little wonder, either, that the film had the blessing of the unions.

The fallacy which this film assumes is that nonconformity is an absolute virtue. Betrayal can be the raw material of tragedy—think only of Arthur Miller’s The View From The Bridge’. But here in ‘The Angry Silence’ we are asked to IU Ue Published by The Newsletter, 186 Clapham High St., London, SW4 Registered at the GPO as a newspaper accept scabbing not only as something to be understood, but as heroic. The refusal to designate scabbing as treachery is the quintessence of false humanism, and is a translation of Charles Taylor’s assertion in ‘Is Marxism a Humanism?’ : ‘For this reason a political morality which contains the utter repudiation from human fellowship of the blackleg or scab . is not a socialist morality.’

But for us to be humanistic to the outsider in this context is to be inhuman to the majority, to the class. In capitalist society, abstract humanism results in a vicious circle as long as it is devoid of class content.

BENITA TEPER.

[ LETTER BOYCOTT WITCH-HUNTING PROPAGANDA So the class struggle is obsolete is it, Mr. Macmillan? Why, then, is every propaganda weapon of the capitalist class being turned at once against one target—the trades unions? Day in, day out, the Tory and Liberal press keeps up its barrage. Lately, television joined in with the Panorama ‘investigation’ into the ETU elections. Now we have those two bright hopes of the screen, the Boulting Brothers going into the attack with their new film, ‘The Angry Silence’. The object of this effort is to arouse sympathy for a blackleg worker sent to Coventry by his workmates for refusing to join in an unofficial strike.

One Tory newspaper calls it the Boulting Bros.’ ‘second anti-trade union film’; the first, of course, was ‘I’m All Right, Jack’. Judging by the reviews, no trick in the propaganda game has been missed in this second picture. The blackleg is shown as an honest, upright chap being persecuted for conscience sake; the strikers as unthinking morons, voting to stop work on some frivolous, half-understood pretext.

What happens when an attempt is made to attack capitalist institutions by similar means? We were shown that, in the swift assassination of ‘The World of Paul Slickey’, John Osborne’s brave assault on the popular capitalist press. The critics ganged up to murder it by calling it poor, dull stuff. A similar campaign was launched at the start against ‘Look Back in Anger’—only the whole thing was ruined by a distinguished critic of Left-wing sympathies hailing it as the dramatic event of the decade.

It’s quite a different story when the Boulting Twins bring out one of their knocks at trades unions. All the technique of a high-pressure advertising campaign is used to sell the picture to the public. First we get a chorus of rave notices from the critics. Thereafter it is puffed and boosted by stories of its glittering success as a money-spinner. We are told how everybody, but absolutely everybody, is flocking to the cinema to see it.

Surely both sides in the class struggle can play at this game? The working class lacks the propaganda weapons of press, television, theatre and cinema; but they have in their ranks the great mass of the customers. They pay the piper; they can call the tune. Let trade unionists show the Boulting oe Ste ee Penang. Bros. in no uncertain terms that they are not amused by attacks on their institutions. Why not send ‘The Angry Silence’ to Coventry along with its scab hero?

We can stop this kind of political propaganda dead in its tracks by showing it to be a financial flop.

SYBIL CRIMP.

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