OSCAR: The Most Unintentionally Honest Hollywood Propaganda Film.
Last month I looked at A.C. Spectorsky, the brains behind CIA front Playboy magazine, and who he decided to promote on his magazine’s cover between 1959-76. By far the most promoted movie director was accused pedophile Woody Allen [9 separate covers], followed by convicted pedophile Roman Polanski [2] and Lolita director Stanley Kubrick [2]. However, the 1963 movie Cleopatra is the only film to be featured on two Playboy covers during this period. Why would this film have been given so much promotion by Spectorsky?
January 1963, Spectorsky’s first Cleopatra plug.
February 1963, Spectorsky’s second Cleopatra plug: “The Chicks of Cleopatra”.
I decided I’d better watch Cleopatra. It wasn’t long before I realized that this marathon film is a garish, 192 minute ad for the American ‘New World Order’– specifically, directors Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rouben Mamoulian and Darryl F. Zanuck try to equate American dominance in the post-WWII era with Alexander the Great’s ‘global empire’.
Don’t take my word for it:
Liz Taylor: [talking to Rex Harrison about Alexander the Great] Your ambitions must always have been his. They still must be… Make his dream yours, Caesar, his grand design. Pick it up where he left off. Out of the patchwork of conquest, one world. And out of one world, one nation. One people on earth living in peace!
The whole ridiculous spectacle of this ‘classic’ Hollywood movie is to sell the idea of world government– as represented by the voluptuous Taylor and her masterful lover, played by Rex Harrison. Incredibly, Hollywood potentates chose two famous tyrants, an ancient Egyptian goddess-queen and her Imperial Roman sugar-daddy, to sell their vision of the ‘Pax Americana’. I can’t tell if they didn’t see themselves, or if they were just laughing at the general public.
IMDb credits the film to three countries: USA, U.K. and Switzerland. The production companies were Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (as Producers Pictures Corporation), and two Swiss firms, MCL Films S.A. and Walwa Films S.A., which appear to have been created specifically for Cleopatra (they have no other production credits on IMDb.) Presumably ‘U.K.’ was included because of Rex Harrison, Richard Burton and leading lady Taylor, who had dual US/U.K. citizenship, though I’m not sure when she achieved this.
Darryl F. Zanuck
In reality, Cleopatra is a thoroughly globalist movie. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation was created by Darryl Zanuck in 1935 after he left United Artists. Zanuck’s company took off during WWII, challenging its more established competitors RKO and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Fox’s war-time success may have had something to do with Zanuck being made a Colonel in the Army Signal Corps, Fox historian Peter Lev attributes Zanuck’s military placement to the firm’s growth. The US military isn’t shy about their connection to Twentieth Century Fox either, according to ARMY.mil:
… years before people like Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep and George Clooney made their grand entrances down the red carpet to find out if they’d won the coveted award, another group of Hollywood legends produced award-winning films for the Army leaving a piece of Hollywood on display at the Signal Corps Museum.
Darryl Zanuck, who headed 20th Century Fox and received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Irving Thalberg Memorial Award, was a colonel in the Signal Corps during World War II. Also in the Signal Corps during World War II was Oscar winning director Frank Capra, and Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.
The efforts of these and others who served in Astoria, N.Y. with the 834th Signal Service Photographic Detachment at the Signal Corps Photographic Center produced military training films as well as Academy Award winning documentaries after the war, according to Signal Corps Museum director Robert Anzuoni.
Zanuck’s partnership with the military and intelligence is elucidated in Nick Browne’s Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History:
A very different form of war-related nonfiction film making in Hollywood involved military training and educational films. The studios began to regularly produce these one- and two-reel films in late 1940, primarily through a Hollywood based reserve unit of the Army Signal Corps comprised of some two dozen officers and 300 GIs trained in film production. The unit was headed by Lt. Col. Nathan Levinson, who also acted as vice chair (under Darryl Zanuck) of the Motion Picture Academy Research Council, an organization that coordinated industry support for the Signal Corp’s production efforts. By 1941 these efforts were well underway, and Zanuck was increasingly involved. In fact, Zanuck himself made a trip to Washington in August to meet with Army brass about Hollywood’s military-related film making operations… The military leaders were favorably impressed, and Zanuck was forthright about the industry’s pro-military, anti-isolationist stance– a position he and other studio heads would publicly defend before the Senate only a few weeks later.
The occasion of Zanuck’s Senate testimony was the so-called propaganda hearings, held in Washington in September 1941. The hearings were convened by a cadre of isolationists who decided to take on the tide of interventionism. Gauging Hollywood as an ideal target, Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald P. Nye demanded that the Interstate Commerce Committee investigate what Nye termed the “propaganda machine” in Hollywood which was run by the studios “almost as if they were being operated by a central agency”. The committee hearings focused on seventeen “war mongering” feature films, twelve of which were produced in Hollywood– including Foreign Correspondent and The Great Dictator— along with four British imports and one studio released foreign picture.
I’ve highlighted ‘along with four British imports’ because, although we don’t know which films these are, we do know that William Stephenson, the British spymaster who worked with FDR to set up the OSS, had cornered the British film market with his ‘Sound City Films’ which ran the world-famous Shepperton Studios. (See The Quiet Canadian.) Stephenson’s intelligence mission was to pull the USA into WWII to fight for the British; Stephenson and his allies like FDR did this by using ‘dirty tricks’– harassment, threats, lies– to pressure isolationists and crush any dissent. Senators Nye and Wheeler were the nation’s last defense against traitors like FDR and foreign spooks like Stephenson, who collaborated with Hollywood moguls to push their war– and ultimately imperialist– agenda.
‘Wild Bill’ Donovan pins a medal on Bill Stephenson, who took over British Intelligence after Churchill ascended to power.
I’ll remind readers that FDR’s war effort, and his newly created intelligence networks, were heavily invested in film propaganda. Marjorie Cameron, the wife/handler of US jet propulsion expert Jack Parsons, was given a job with Hollywood filmmakers creating war propaganda films in cooperation with the “Hollywood Navy” after working as a ‘honey trap’ for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The JCS used Cameron against men with “pro-German” sympathies, according to her biographer Spencer Kansa.
Another intelligence creep and ‘father’ of modern communication studies, Carl Hovland, spent WWII analyzing how wartime audiences would respond to messages in propaganda movies such as Why We Fight. This is how one author on social-judgment-theory.wikispaces.com describes Hovland’s contribution to the war effort: “Like many other early communications theorists, he worked with the U.S. War Department during World War II to study the effectiveness of persuasive films and audience resistance to those films.” Hovland’s research provided the basis for his collaborator Muzafer Sherif’s work on race riots for the CIA’s MK ULTRA program.
Finally, when media personalities wouldn’t cooperate with FDR’s spook buddies of their own accord, they were forced through ‘dirty tricks': take the case of Walt Disney.
The US intelligence community has always been heavily invested in Hollywood, and Hollywood– especially liberal Hollywood— has always been eager to oblige.
Browne’s fascinating book goes on to discuss one of Cleopatra’s producers, Walter Wanger, and his hawkish political activism:
Actually, Hollywood had been struggling both internally and publicly with issues of politics and propaganda for several years. Among the more notable of these struggles involved Foreign Correspondent some two years earlier. In 1939, Walter Wanger was battling Hollywood’s self-censorship agency, the PCA [Production Code Administration], over various political aspects of the story. Wanger made little headway and was still livid over what he considered the PCA’s mutilation of Blockade, a 1938 film set against the Spanish Civil War, so he decided to go public with his concerns, lambasting the Hays Office and the PCA in a series of speeches and editorials…
By 1940-1941, however, as the war in Europe intensified and as the prospect of US intervention increased, neither Hays or the PCA could discourage film makers from taking on geopolitical and war-related subjects. Indeed Roosevelt himself had appealed to the movie industry in 1940 to support both the defense build up at home and the Allied effort overseas… FDR praised Hollywood’s war effort and Senator Ernest McFarland threatened to ask the Dies Committee on Un-Americanism to investigate the isolationists [like Senators Wheeler and Nye].
It appears that before ‘Un-American’ activities committees were used to ‘persecute’ communists in Hollywood, Roosevelt’s pink hawks used the same hammer to silence critics of their Hollywood collaborators! Were these pro-war Hollywood ‘reds’ paid in the coin they minted?
Walter Wanger
It’s particularly interesting to me that Cleopatra’s producer, Wanger, got his knickers in a knot about the censorship of Blockade, a movie that in its original form glorified the communist fighters in Spain. This movie indirectly flattered American collaborators with the communists in Spain, like OSS/CIA/KGB agent Ernest Hemingway; and Bill Donovan’s good friend Milton Wolff, who belonged to the Communist Party in Spain and recruited heavily from his communist Spanish Civil War colleagues for both the OSS and it’s British counterpart, the BSC:
Before the United States entered World War II, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who founded the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, enlisted Wolff’s services. At Donovan’s urging, Wolff helped recruit for the British Special Services.
Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans, with their language skills and entree to anti-fascist groups in Europe, were well suited for intelligence work. After the United States entered the war, Wolff also recruited Lincoln veterans for the OSS.
But when Wolff enlisted in the Army in 1942, his advancement at officer’s training school was blocked, he said, and he was labeled a “premature anti-fascist.” He was given noncombat roles but eventually served in Burma and with the OSS in Europe.
OSS recruits from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were not limited to Wolff’s efforts, OSS operatives Donald Downes and Arthur Goldberg also used this strategy, according to author Jon Wiener in Professors, Politics and Pop. Of course, the OSS was riddled with Soviet spies and sympathizers; OSS recruits would go on to become the CIA’s leading lights. One of these lights, CIA director Bill Colby, quashed an internal investigation of his own dealings with a known KGB agent in Saigon. (See Cold Warrior, Tom Mangold.)
… and she said, “Alexander the Great”!
There’s one more sordid aspect to Cleopatra’s relationship with Playboy magazine: Ben Hecht, the Irgun member and Playboy mega-contributor, was part of the team who wrote Cleopatra’s script, though his involvement was not originally acknowledged. Why?
Hecht’s political baby, Irgun, was a Jewish terrorist organization in Palestine that bombed British government offices and ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages in preparation for Israel’s foundation. Hecht worked with Irgun’s American front organizations to drum up support for the terrorists, you can read a sympathetic account of Hecht’s activities from Judith Rice of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.
Ben Hecht
Irgun’s political strategy was cynical, for example, they partnered with the NAACP stateside to end segregation. Readers will remember that the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] was founded in 1909, but only had one Black amongst its executives and took twenty years to get its first Black president. Besides partnering with Jewish extremists, the NAACP played an interesting ‘supporting role’ in the Playboy empire by providing the pornographers with ‘Black friends‘. Needless to say, Irgun’s policies in Israel were different to the policies it supported via the NAACP in the United States. Why?
In summary, Spectorsky promoted Cleopatra in Playboy because 1) it was written by one of his Zionist spook friends; 2) it was directed by Hollywood’s ambassador to the US ‘intelligence community’ and 3) it was produced by FDR’s Hollywood propaganda commissar.
Another CIA front plugs Cleopatra.
