Baseball, Apple Pie and Total Solitude
Friday, May 26, 2006
Baseball, Apple Pie and Total Solitude
I Was A Communist for the FBI (1951) borders on the pornographic in its embodiment of hysterical red-baiting. Blonde, smirking college boys suck down caviar as they casually explain how the Soviet higher-ups have a new objective: educate "the Negroes" just enough get them rioting. Actually, "Negroes" is the word he's corrected to use by the hero standing next to him, all-Serbian-American double agent Matt Cvetic (Frank Lovejoy). But there's not enough time for these fine points: college boy is too busy rolling up lead pipes in Yiddish-language newspapers and passing them out to rioters at the factory strike.
If that's all the movie was, I guess it'd be sort of entertaining. But it also happens to be one of the loneliest films I've ever seen. Cvetic is forced to play a role, puffing out his chest and belting lines like, "Father Dan, I'm a Communist and proud of it" as his family wails in consternation. Frank Lovejoy seems to capture a certain type of middle-aged male loneliness in ripe decline. His jaw remains set yet his eyes moistly survey the room. He's kidding around and buddy-buddy all the way up to the time when his own brother calls him a dirty red, tells him never to come back and shoves him headfirst out the door. His son, taped up from a schoolyard fight (someone called him a Red), and finally abreast of "the truth," says, "when I grew up, I always thought I'd want to be like my pop. Now I know that can never happen." Where is Cvetic's wife? One can only assume that she's left him. The only woman he meets is a card-carrier, a Mata-Hari working under Soviet employ. He must pretend to like her but knows that she is soiled. When he's alone in his undecorated single apartment he paces the floor, like a lost baseball rolling after a freak home run.
If the man were more of an ephebe, we'd plug tab A into slot B and come to the conclusion that he's gay. Lovejoy is too thoroughly unerotic for that. No, anyone with the right family history (or, hey, anyone who's spent a significant time around right-wing organizations) can recognize this man for what he is: an alcoholic. The whole movie has that holiday vibe when the relative you haven't seen in six months turns up in a 10-year-old suit that doesn't fit around his stomach and starts slapping everyone a little too hard on the back. He doesn't have a date. Soon, he'll start crying. And just like every alcoholic, his secret is that his family will never know that he's really a hero.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:04 PM,
