Steve Eaton, 12/21/18

At home we recently viewed The Comedians, a 1967 film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, directed by Peter Glenville.  Considering its cast and crew I was a little surprised that I couldn’t remember ever noticing it before: it has a crackerjack cast (besides Burton and Taylor, it’s got Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, and Lillian Gish), and the screenplay is by none other than Graham Greene, who adapted it from his own novel.

In the event, it was an entertaining, if not great, film.  Burton plays the owner of rundown hotel in Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haiti, in love with the wife of the diplomat Ustinov.  Meanwhile, evidence of the brutal, venal dictatorship is everywhere, embodied by omnipresent Tonton Macoute thugs.  A rebel movement is brewing, forcing everyone, whether citizens or privileged foreigners, to decide whose side they’re on.  Things are Falling Apart.  Glenville does a good job of imparting a sense of both farce and of dread from beginning to end.

Considering the relative obscurity of the film, I was interested in seeing how it was received at the time of its release.  And I was stunned by the review written for the New York Times by its long-time film critic Bosley Crowther.

It begins, “By far the most agitating aspect of the film Peter Glenville has made from Graham Greene’s novel, ‘The Comedians,’ is the sinister image it presents of a rigid reign of terror in a Caribbean country under a black dictatorship—and thus, by a quick association out of our own recent experiences, an image of the fearful implications of burgeoning ‘black power.’” And in case we still don’t get it, he makes his point crystal clear by stating that “in these sullen and vicious strong-arm fellows [the Tonton], one sees the Stokley [sic] Carmichaels and H. Rap Browns—or, perhaps one should say, the likely followers in the train of the upheaval to which their aspirations might lead.”

Crowther is not accusing the film of hysterical reaction – he is praising its vigilance.  The “sudden and vivid implication of pertinent menace in this straight American film…is the most forceful thing about it. It suffuses and gives significance to a rather commonplace white-settler drama.” 

Oh, really?  There is no reference in The Comedians to any social or political issues or events outside of Haiti.  And, as Crowther himself notes, “Never mind that the country represented in this amazingly forthright film is specifically present-day Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier—or [that] it could just as well be Castro’s Cuba or Hitler’s Germany.”  Yet the lesson that Crowther takes from the story is not one of universal condemnation of totalitarianism and the West’s indifference or even collaboration with it. “The thought that is grimly agitated” by the film’s secret police, he writes, is “a blood chilling appreciation of what could happen much closer to home.” 

Crowther is not worried here by Mao-Tse Tung, Ferdinand Marcos, or Francisco Franco.  He is worried about an America in the iron grip of the Black Panthers.  His thought process, conscious or not, must have been something like this: “Haiti used to be under the control of nice white Frenchmen; then its black slaves took over; and this movie shows us what a scary, dangerous place it is now.  Therefore this is what black radicals will do to our United States if we do not stop them.”

Was ever a film so blatantly misunderstood, so blindly misappropriated for a cause it has nothing to do with?  Were a critic’s own racist insecurities ever so transparently projected onto an innocent work of art?

Or is it just me?  As seen in the turbulent year of 1967, would any reasonably aware filmgoer have seen The Comedians as Crowther did – as a warning to white America about the black menace?

Well, no. The late Roger Ebert also reviewed The Comedians when it opened. His highly amusing, anxiety-free review focuses (accurately) on the film’s aesthetic weaknesses (“Most of the Taylor-Burton scenes consist of Taylor looking ravishing while Burton broods and whispers things to his tie knot.”) As to its wider geopolitical significance, he states, “The movie tries to be serious and politically significant, and succeeds only in being tedious and pompous.” And what, according to Ebert, is the movie “trying to be serious” about? He states, “it makes semi-controversial statements about U.S. policy in Latin America.” He might have been watching a different film than the one Crowther reviewed. The different perspectives must have been at least partly generational in nature; in 1967 Crowther was in his last year as the Times’ film critic; Ebert was in his first for the Chicago Sun-Times. So what to make of all this? My conclusion is that there is no limit to how far the human mind can distort evidence according to its own insecurities. One man’s story of the brutal dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier and the feckless white expatriates caught up in it is another man’s warning about a looming apocalypse led by the Black Panthers. And the impoverished immigrant families that I see, enduring misery and risking death to find shelter in our country, are our President’s drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.