Opinion: Off to Susan Sarandon camp for you!

Given that you are a gay expert of gays in cinema and an upstanding liberal Democrat, and I’m straight with four kids and have voted consistently Republican over the last 10 years, I propose that we start a bipartisan, bisexual artistic commission to fix the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. [...] It won’t be about ‘identity’ politics; it will be about American politics. It will be a publicly funded national artistic reunification project -- like something FDR would’ve implemented -- where Tim Robbins and his common-law wife will actually get to hear the other side. Maybe she’ll even take off her shirt like she does in all her movies. But this time it will be for America!

Let’s jump into the Wayback Machine and return to the early 1940s, when the Soviet Union was America’s ally (yes, you read that right), and Hollywood was devoted to creating fanciful melodramas of its brave efforts to counter the Nazi menace. One of them was ‘Days of Glory’ (1944), directed by Jacques Tourneur, and starring prima ballerina Tamara Toumanova and (in his motion picture debut) Gregory Peck. The script by Melchior Lengyel (a Hungarian emigre who co-scripted ‘To Be or Not to Be’ and ‘Ninotchka’ for Ernst Lubitsch) and Casey Robinson (a veteran screenwriter whose most famous titles are ‘Now, Voyager’ and ‘Kings Row’) is a fairly standard action-and-romance presenting Russian villagers as really nice people who don’t deserve to be attacked by Hitler’s armies. Nothing teribly special about it, other than Peck’s obvious star potential. As you might expect, a film like this looked a lot different by the war’s end, when the U.S.-Soviet alliance was not only over but being treated as if it never happened, to judge from testimony given by numerous stars and studio chiefs before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This decidedly Orwellian turn of events (sorry, but no other word applies) was made complete by the 1950s with the ‘Cold War’ in full swing. By 1958, ‘Days of Glory’ director Jacques Tourneur could be found at the helm of ‘The Fearmakers’ -- a bizarre little number in which Dana Andrews undoes a plot by evil commies Mel Torme and Veda Ann Borg to create biased opinion polls, the better to influence the media and elections. Interestingly enough, the script was based on an anti-Nazi World War II era novel by Darwin L. Teilhet. With a tap of the typewriter Nazis became commies