Harry Gerstad

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Last tuesday night I had the great pleasure to hear my friend Paul Buhle
speak on his latest book "Radical Hollywood" at the Brecht Forum in NYC.
Illustrating his talk with film and tv clips, Paul showed how CP'ers in
the entertainment industry tried under nearly impossible conditions to
present a progressive alternative.

When the black-list went into effect in the early 1950s, some writers
and directors found work in television where the conditions were
somewhat less repressive. Paul showed a snippet from the Robin Hood tv
series, which was produced in Great Britain and written by a radical.
Now, one can certainly understand why such a show would lend itself to
an anti-establishment subtext, but the bigger surprise was "Adventures
of Superman", a big hit in the 1950s which starred George Reeves.
(Reeves killed himself in 1959, supposedly over depression at being
type-cast. But recent investigations argue that he Reeves was the victim
of Eddie Mannix, a hoodlum and studio enforcer, whose wife Reeves was
having an affair with.)

Paul showed a clip from the episode in which Superman defends the
mole-people (bald dwarves who look like munchkins from the Wizard of Oz)
against a lynch mob who wants to destroy the intruders from beneath the
earth. Standing in front of a jailhouse in which one of the mole-people
is held captive, Superman gives a stirring speech on behalf of
tolerance. Just because the mole-people are different from us, there is
no reason to want to kill them. Furthermore, the greedy oil company that
drilled directly into their homeland was responsible for inciting them
to rise to the surface. In 1954, this was clearly a veiled message on
behalf of peaceful coexistence. For the 10 year old Paul Buhle, this was
a breath of fresh air.

Today's NY Times has an obituary for one of the production crew on the
Superman tv show. Anybody familiar with the Hollywood left will be able
to identify Harry Gerstad as somebody fitting into the profile described
in "Radical Hollywood". My notes are interspersed in brackets.

Harry Gerstad, Film Editor Who Won Oscar for 'High Noon,' Dies at 93
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PALM SPRINGS, Calif., Aug. 2 -- Harry Gerstad, an Academy Award-winning
film editor, died here on July 17. He was 93.

Mr. Gerstad won his first Oscar for editing the 1949 prizefighting
classic, "Champion," starring Kirk Douglas [a film noir written by Carl
Foreman and directed by Mark Robson, two veteran leftists. Douglas was
also sympathetic to the left.]

His second Oscar, for editing the 1952 western epic "High Noon,"
[written by Carl Foreman, who was thrown off the set by HUAC while the
movie was in progress] was shared with Elmo Williams.

Mr. Gerstad began his career in 1929 at the Hal Roach Studios
laboratory, the Warner Brothers laboratory and Republic Pictures.

He worked extensively with the director Edward Dmytryk [long time
radical who ended up naming names] when he began editing feature films
in the late 1940's. Among Mr. Gerstad's films with that director were
R.K.O.'s 1947 examination of bigotry, "Crossfire," starring Robert Young
and Robert Mitchum.

Mr. Gerstad worked with another influential director and producer,
Stanley Kramer, [a liberal who often hired radical writers] at Columbia
Pictures.

They collaborated on features like "Home of the Brave" in 1949 [another
Foreman-Robson collaboration], "Cyrano de Bergerac" in 1950 and "Death
of a Salesman" in 1951.

Mr. Gerstad also did work in television, including the series
"Adventures of Superman" and "Highway Patrol."

From the mid-1960's until his retirement, Mr. Gerstad worked for Bing
Crosby Productions, Fox and John Wayne's Batjac Productions.

He is survived by his wife, Jody.


--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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