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<des>

     Hollywood has shown little interest in depicting or
     criticizing Communist crimes. (Barnes New Republic 11/30/92)

<doctype>magazine article
<author>Barnes, Fred
<title>Washington Diarist: O.K., you win
<magazine>The New Republic
<date>November 30, 1992
<vol>207
<num>23
<pages>43

<excerpt>

     Enough of the election. Let's look at Hollywood, where
     history is turned into movies with remarkable speed. But not
     in the case of <it>Stalin</it>, the new HBO movie starring
     Robert Duvall. It's thirty, forty, fifty years too late. The
     producers of <it>Stalin</it> are like those cynical
     contributors to political campaigns who donate after the
     election and direct their money to the winners. Communism is
     dead, the Soviet Union is gone, and Hollywood is cranking up
     for a full-throated anti-Communist crusade. This may be
     better late than never, but it's not much. The movie
     concentrates on Stalin's life inside the Kremlin, not the
     destruction and death of millions he caused outside. Still,
     it's an improvement. Communism was the greatest evil of the
     second half of the twentieth century, but Hollywood was
     chiefly devoted to attacking anti-communism--in Chile, El
     Salvador, Indonesia, Washington, wherever, even in Hollywood
     itself. I'm not a big moviegoer, but without any trouble at
     all I can come up with a long list of anti-anti-Communist
     movies. I admit some of them were entertaining. I liked
     <it>Dr. Strangelove</it> and <it>Seven Days in May</it> and
     <it>The Year of Living Dangerously</it>. As for
     anti-Communist movies, the list is short. The best was
     <it>Hanoi Hilton</it>, directed by my friend Lionel
     Chetwynd. <it>The Hunt for Red October</it> wasn't bad. The
     only memorable anti-Communist hero in movies of the last
     thirty, forty years was Rambo, a cartoon character. And his
     main gripe was not with the Communists, but with Pentagon
     bureaucrats back in Washington.

<comment>

     Why isn't Communism considered the greatest evil of the
     entire twentieth century, or any century? (See medvedev
     stalin new york times.)

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