Ink-stained wretches join baristas and other working stiffs in the call for "Union!"

(To the right, Heywood Broun) 

When highly successful columnist Heywood Broun called for a union of newsrooms workers across America nearly 90 years ago, he reminded his fellow journalists of their misperceptions about themselves.

 

“The men who make up the papers of this country would never look upon themselves as what they really are—hacks and white collar slaves,” Broun wrote in his August 7, 1933, column for the New York World Telegram. “Any attempt to unionize leg, re-write, desk or makeup men would be laughed to death by these editorial hacks themselves.”

 

Those hacks looked down on the unionized, blue-collar printers in the same building, yet the printers earned an average 30 percent more than the reporters and editors.

 

Broun is smiling from heaven these days at the resurgence of union activity in newsrooms across the country. Like their counterparts at Starbucks coffee shops from the East to the West Coast, newsroom working stiffs are brandishing their union cards. The NewsGuild that Broun helped establish has more than 6,300 members who’ve joined in just the past four years. Another 2,400 joined the Writers Guild of America, East, over the past eight years.

 

“I watched too many decent people stripped of their professional dignity,” columnist Mike Kelly of the New Jersey-based The Record told veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse. “We were watching out colleagues just pushed out the door willy-nilly and without any warning.”

 

Kelly referred to the standard Gannett company practice of buying newspapers like The Record and quickly eliminating staff. Also swelling the ranks of newsroom union card holders was the COVID-19 pandemic, which proved not only to reporters and editors but to workers around the nation and world that they were less important than the bottom line in the eyes of their employers.

 

A key figure in the growth of unions among newsroom workers is Hamilton Nolan, who now covers Southern labor activity for the Chicago-based magazine In These Times.  Back in 2015, Nolan worked for Gawker Media and led his fellow journalists to make it the first big-sized digital media outfit to unionize.

 

Gawker later had to declare bankruptcy after losing a legal battle with nationally known wrestler Hulk Hogan. However, the unionization of its newsroom inspired similar labor actions across the digital news world as well as at old established outfits like the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

 

(Jaz Brisack during a visit to Oxford, Mississippi)
 

Young people are leading the way at these news organizations, much as they are at Starbucks, where Rhodes scholar and University of Mississippi graduate Jaz Brisack helped start a union movement that spread from the Buffalo, New York, Starbucks shop where she worked as a barista to other Starbucks stores across the country.

 

Both Nolan and Brisack, a former student of mine, recently stopped in Oxford, Mississippi, to visit this old labor writer to talk about the labor movement in the South. While much attention was paid to the failed union effort at the Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama, the media haven’t much noticed other labor activity in the region.

 

Starbucks workers here in Oxford are now calling for a union.  The firing of seven pro-union workers at a Memphis Starbucks has galvanized the movement with the Rev. William Barber leading a recent march in their support. Newsroom workers at newspapers in Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth, Texas, are already unionized and calling on management to finalize contracts.

All three—the Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman and Forth Worth Star-Telegram—have been unionized only since July 2020, the first in Texas in 30 years, and this will be their first contracts.

 

Perhaps in part because of what’s going on inside these and other newsrooms, labor coverage nationwide is on the rise in the U.S. media. Labor reporters, who had almost disappeared from the landscape a decade or more ago, are now back on the beat at at least a dozen or more major news organizations. This may also be a reflection of a recent Gallup poll that shows a whopping 68 percent of Americans support unions despite an overall decline in union membership.

 

As evident with these newspapers and Starbucks shops, the South is seeing some of this rising union activity.  Despite its anti-union reputation, the South has a long labor history that includes the successful organizing of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Arkansas in the 1930s, Martin Luther King’s support of the ultimately successful unionizing effort among sanitation workers in Memphis in the late 1960s, textile workers' victory in North Carolina in the 1970s, and catfish workers organizing in the Mississippi Delta in the 1990s.

(To the right, a Southern Tenant Farmers' Union poster in the 1930s calling for a strike)

 

Back during the 1930s, Heywood Broun backed up his column with frontline organizing and became a hero of the movement. “I think I could be happy on the opening day of the general strike if I had the privilege of watching (wealthy and influential Establishment journalist) Walter Lippmann heave a half a brick through a Tribune window at a non-union operative who had been called in to write the current (Lippmann’s) Today and Tomorrow column on the gold standard.”

 

Let’s hope Broun’s spirit continues to live and prosper among today and tomorrow’s ink-stained wretches.

 

On the differences in filmmaking and storytelling in the 1942 Hollywood film "Moontide" and the 1938 French film "Port of Shadows", both starring French actor Jean Gabin and dealing with working class lives

 

The article below from Labor South's Joseph B. Atkins appeared in the January 5, 2022, edition of Quinn Hough's amazing and innovative online film magazine, Vague Visages, under the headline "The Light of Human Love and Community: On 'Moontide' and 'Port of Shadows'". It deals with the 1942 film Moontide, released 80 years ago next month, and the 1938 French film Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes), both starring French actor Jean Gabin and dealing with working class lives. They provide a fascinating study into the different approaches to filmmaking and storytelling in Hollywood and Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a difference that still exists today.

(A scene from Port of Shadows with Jean Gabin to the right)
 

A change of heart comes to French itinerant seaman and dockworker Bobo as he sips his whiskey with a female regular at the Red Dot Inn. His wandering is over. He’s going back to his ramshackle barge on the California coast, back to Anna, someone once as lost as he was but now a woman who loves him as much as he loves her. So what if a “gypsy is dying, and a peasant is being born.”

 

 It’s a decision that will prompt a deadly encounter with his jealous crony Tiny, but in the end Bobo and Anna marry. He’ll carry her across their humble threshold to live happily ever after.

 

20^th Century Fox producer Darryl F. Zanuck saw the role of Bobo in the 1942 film Moontide—this April marks the 80^th anniversary of its release--as the perfect vehicle to Hollywood stardom for acclaimed French actor Jean Gabin. No way was the film’s hero, a potential Gallic Clark Gable, going to die at the end. No sad ending for Moontide.

(To the right, a scene from Moontide with Jean Gabin to the right)

 

What a contrast is the ending of another great Gabin film that came out just four years earlier, Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes). In this cinematic high point of French “poetic realism,” Gabin’s character Jean is also a wanderer who in the end returns to his equally lost lover Nelly. That act, however, leads to his death at the hands of his cowardly nemesis, the gangster Lucien.

 

Moontide and Port of Shadows offer a fascinating study into key differences in Hollywood and European filmmaking and storytelling during the 1930s and early 1940s, a time when the studio system reigned supreme in Hollywood and war loomed heavily over the European continent. Those differences weren’t ironclad—films had both happy and sad endings on both sides of the Atlantic. Still, they existed and continued to exist in the coming decades despite the overarching influence of commercialism in all cinema.  

 

In Port of Shadows, Gabin’s Jean is an Army deserter in the port city of Le Havre who fatefully encounters the cabaret dancer Nelly, played by Michèle Morgan, at Panama’s, a lonely, seaside bar on the ragged edge of the city.

 

In Moontide, Bobo encounters Anna, played by Ida Lupino, as she attempts a watery suicide. He saves her life and takes her back to his barge, where she’ll eventually find meaning in life again. Her backstory remains a mystery. Tiny, played by Thomas Mitchell, dismisses her as a “hash hustler”. She was a prostitute in the book that inspired the film. Soon she and Bobo fall in love.

 

Both films are suffused in portside fog and shadows, a dreamlike, highly stylized world where crime and danger lurk in those shadows. In each film a loyal dog follows the protagonist, instinctively growling at Tiny in Moontide and at the duplicitous Zabel in Port of Shadows. Zabel is Nelly’s godfather whose lust for her drives him to murder.

 

A bar is important to the action in each film, the Red Dot Inn in Moontide, Panama’s in Port of Shadows. In each film, Gabin’s character leaves his lover behind but then returns to her. Each film features a waterfront philosopher who makes observations about life and love—Claude Rains’ Nutsy in Moontide and Robert Le Vigan’s painter Michel in Port of Shadows before he drowns himself. The backstories of several key characters in both films are simply missing.

 

However, the similarities break down in the hearts and fates of Bobo and Jean. Bobo is a hard-drinking, hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy who even offers to help to his feet the man he just cold-cocked in a bar fight. Jean is a brooding war veteran with a chip on his shoulder, a soldier who saw enough death in “Tonkin” to abandon his outfit.

 

The most striking contrast in the two films, however, comes at the end with the fates of the two wanderers. Unlike Bobo’s happy reunion with Anna, Jean’s return to Nelly provides Lucien an opportunity for revenge for Jean’s shaming of him with slaps to the face in front of not only Nelly but also his fellow gangsters.

 

As did another Marcel Carné-directed film, Le jour se lève (1939), Port of Shadows, both written or co-written by the poet of poetic realism, Jacques Prévert, showcased Jean Gabin’s ability to speak volumes with a simple stare, a curl of the lip, a wordless shrug of the shoulders. Gabin “at his best doesn’t need any dialogue,” film historian Foster Hirsch has said. Both Carné films reflected the somber mood of a nation and a people facing the specter and subsequent reality of Nazi occupation.

 

In fact, the roots of Port of Shadows can be traced to the Neubabelsberg studios of the giant German film company UFA (Universum-Film AG), where initial work was done before Hitler’s propaganda minister, Dr. Josef Goebbels, rejected it as too dark and decadent. Ironically the great French director Jean Renoir would later dismiss it as a “fascist” film.  Only after Carné and Prévert brought it back to France were they able to make the film they wanted to make.

 

Based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan in which the action takes place in Paris’ Montmartre and the Lapin Agile cabaret, not in Le Havre, Port of Shadows “was a fairly revolutionary film, both in spirit and in form,” Carné says in his 1996 autobiography. “In that era the theaters were filled to the brim with comedies, musical or otherwise, overflowing with bright sunshine and crawling with extras. And here I was with my empty nightclub, my fog, my grisaille, my wet pavements, my streetlamps.”

 

Assembling a team that included supporting cast members Michel Simon as Zabel and Pierre Brasseur as Lucien, Alexandre Trauner on set design, Eugen Schüfftan as cinematographer, and music by Maurice Jaubert, Carné created a masterpiece that was attacked by the Mussolini press at the Venice Film Festival but which nevertheless won a Golden Lion award for the director. “Port of Shadows possesses nearly all the qualities that were once synonymous with the idea of French cinema,” Luc Sante writes in the Criterion Collection edition of the film. “The philosophical gravity of peripheral characters, the idea that nothing in life is more important than passion—such things defined a national cinema that might have been dwarfed by Hollywood in terms of reach and profit but stood every inch as tall as regards grace and beauty and power.”

 

Decades later American film critic Pauline Kael would call Port of Shadows “a breath of fresh air to American filmgoers saturated with empty optimism.”

 

(To the right Jean Gabin)
 

Gabin’s earlier success in films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) and Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937) got 20^th Century Fox’s attention, and its publicity wing pulled no stops in promoting him as a French “hunk” primed to break the hearts of “dreamy readers of lonely hearts columns,” in the words of Gabin biographer Joseph Harriss,

 

Arriving in America along with a wave of other French émigrés in the late 1930s--like fellow actors Michèle Morgan and Louis Jourdan, and directors Renoir, Duvivier, and René Clair--Gabin quickly came under studio control. His contract got him the studio’s top salary, but Hollywood also put an Apache scarf around his neck, coiffed his hair, and put mascara on his lashes. They got him a chauffeur and a yacht. He rented Greta Garbo’s house and committed to intense English language lessons.

 

The trouble was Gabin’s terrible homesickness—he would only make one more film in Hollywood before returning to fight with the Free French Forces. Unlike fellow Frenchmen Charles Boyer and Maurice Chevalier, he never really adapted to the land or the language. Europe clung to him, as did his mistress Marlene Dietrich. At her wishes, he urged the studio to hire the famous Austrian director Fritz Lang, another émigré, to direct Moontide. Lang only lasted a few weeks, his departure welcomed by Gabin after the jealous Frenchman learned Marlene had once been Fritz’s mistress, too. Archie Mayo took over directing duties.

 

Novelist John O’Hara and veteran Hollywood scribe Nunally Johnson wrote the script for Moontide, which was based on a novel by Willard Robertson. It was “a noirish film resembling the poetic realism of (Gabin’s) recent films in France,” Harriss writes. Still, this was Hollywood where filmmakers faced the sharp eye of censor Joseph Breen and the studio’s razor focus on the bottom-line.

 

Plus, “what does a Hollywood studio, accustomed to creating artificial stars, do with an actor whose charisma, not to mention box office success, derives mainly from his authenticity?” Harriss writes.

 

(Michèle Morgan)

Port of Shadows co-star Michèle Morgan didn’t fare much better in Hollywood. Despite the luxury Hollywood offered—she would live in the same Brentwood Canyon home that later was the site of the notorious Charles Manson murders in 1969—she bristled at efforts to turn her into a French sex kitten, a “phony product” in her words, at  “how much the studio was trying to make her into something she was not,” Harriss writes. She eventually returned to Europe and enjoyed a highly successful career.

           

Trouble haunted the making of Moontide. Marlene, 40 now, was jealous of 23-year-old (and happily married) Ida Lupino. Gabin didn’t like Zanuck or the script. Producer Mark Hellinger liked the film’s darkness but insisted on a happy ending. Amidst it all, Gabin continued having a devil of the time with the English language.

 

Moontide got mixed reviews—critics said it was too slow--and didn’t score high at the box office either. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther liked Gabin better than Moontide. Marlene dismissed it as “an idiotic film” in her 1987 autobiography, and Gabin biographer Harriss called it “an embarrassment” that forced Gabin to overact with “whimsical faces, curiously thrusting out his lower lip to look fanciful while spouting words of wisdom. … The grotesque result is Gabin doing an American imitation of Gabin.”

 

Still, the film had its champions. Although one of film’s most acerbic critics, Manny Farber called it “superb” and “a picture moving and good” that depicts “wonderful movie love.”

 

Today, the tide has turned for Moontide. The criticisms and dismissals that made it “overlooked” for many years are “a pity as the film is actually an intriguing mix of gritty realism and stylish noir, a fascinating meeting of Europe and Hollywood and a curious combination of aesthetic peculiarities and moving performances,” critic Martyn Bamber wrote in Senses of Cinema in 2018. Moontide stands today as “a love story in a noir universe,” says film noir guru, publisher, and Turner Classic Movies host Eddie Muller.

 

“You can understand why the film was not successful, but 65 years later it is fascinating,” Foster Hirsch said in 2017.

 

One reason Moontide may not have resonated with American audiences in 1942 was that, despite the happy ending, they weren’t used to the things it shared with Port of Shadows—the darkness, the dreamlike world (Spanish artist Salvador Dali helped shape one hallucinatory scene depicting a drunken spree by Bobo), the gloomy touch of foreignness that would later become de rigueur in film noir.

(To the right, Ida Lupino in Moontide)

Writer and lecturer Robert McKee described the different attitudes in Europe and Hollywood toward filmmaking and storytelling in his classic 1997 book Story. “Hollywood filmmakers tend to be overly (some would say foolishly) optimistic about the capacity of life to change—especially for the better. Consequently, to express that vision they rely on … an inordinately high percentage of positive endings. Non-Hollywood filmmakers tend to be overly (some would say chicly) pessimistic about change, professing that the more life changes, the more it stays the same, or, worse, that change brings suffering. Consequently to express the futility, meaninglessness, or destructiveness of change, they tend (toward) negative endings.”

 

Surely the legacy of 20^th century dictatorships, wars, destruction, political and economic upheaval in Europe helped create a sense of fatalism and the existential absurdities of human life.

 

In the United States, existentialism had to make way for capitalism. Screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg points to this in his book Moving Pictures, describing MGM titan Louis B. Mayer’s filmmaking philosophy as early as 1920s Hollywood. “Mayer’s credo was … to give the public what it wanted, right down to that lowest common denominator: the twelve-year-old mind. Family pictures. Romance. Happy endings. Movies could titillate, but in the end husband and wife, or estranged young lovers, must be reunited. That was Mayer’s law. The moral standards of middle-class America must be upheld.”

 

Of course, the bottom line was the foundation of Mayer’s law.

 

“What we have in Hollywood is an artistic medium encased in a business enterprise, and the business enterprise is considered more important than the artistic endeavor,” screenwriter/director Abe Polonsky said in a 1998 interview.

 

Film critic Pauline Kael has also weighed in on the influence of commercialism on how stories are told in Hollywood and what audiences have come to expect from the movies they watch.  “From the beginning, American film makers have been crippled by business financing and the ideology it imposed: they were told that they had an obligation to entertain the general public, that this was a democratic function.”

 

For those film lovers like her who have sometimes wanted more than what “commercialized Hollywood” might offer, Kael said,  “Le Jour se Lève and La Grande Illusion restored us.”

 

Recent films such as Netflix’s Worth in 2021 show that remnants of the old Hollywood formula remain. A film about the government effort to compensate the wide range of victims of the 9-11 attacks, Worth is in many ways “an excellent film” but also a “frustrating” and “irritating” one because in the end “it appears to retreat from the implications of the way it’s telling its complex narrative,” film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote for RogerEbert.com reviews. 

 

Worth offers a classic narrative arc in which Michael Keaton’s Kenneth Feinberg turns away from cynicism to a driven commitment to help victims regardless of their status in society. The film ends with a list of Feinberg and his team’s successes in pursuing that goal, as if the issue was largely resolved.

 

A sharp contrast to this conclusion is the ending of Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary Sicko, in which 9-11 victims have to go to Cuba to get the medical treatment they need because they cannot get it in the United States.

 

“The reluctance to tear down restrictive storytelling templates rather than merely jostle them a bit is of a piece with the film’s refusal to really engage with the question of whether a CEO’s life is worth more financially than a janitor’s,” Seitz writes about Worth.

 

Of course, as said earlier, the cinematic divide between America and Europe isn’t ironclad. The New Hollywood films of the 1960s and 1970s broke from the old studio-driven formulas and “brought to the screen a gritty new realism and ethnicity,” Peter Biskind writes in his 1998 book on the era, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. More recently, director Robert Eggers’ moody and dark film The Lighthouse (2019) with Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattison as two lighthouse keepers hardly offers viewers a happy ending. The two become mad, Dafoe’s character dies, and the film ends with Pattison’s character naked and under assault by a flock of gulls.

 

(Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas)
 

Europeans still make films differently. Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas in 1984, for example, is filled with iconic images of the American West—the desert, lonely Western towns, endless highways—yet it is suffused with European sensibilities, from Wenders’ direction to Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller’s camerawork, its slow pace, sparse dialogue, sad and fatalistic ending still hard to find in most Hollywood films.

 

As detailed in Emilie Bickerton’s 2009 book on the history of the icon-breaking film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, European film hasn’t been immune from the pressures of the bottom line. By the 1980s, even the once “troublemaking” Cahiers du Cinéma, a magazine that helped launch the French New Wave in film (ironically itself a movement that paid homage to Hollywood masters like Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and British-born Alfred Hitchcock), had become “a mouthpiece for the market (with) the mind-numbing quality of an up-market consumer report,” Bickerton writes.

 

Ultimately the way of storytelling in films can be problematic on both sides of the Atlantic, McKee says. “Too often Hollywood films force an up-ending for reasons more commercial than truthful; too often non-Hollywood films cling to the dark side for reasons more fashionable than truthful. The truth, as always, sits somewhere in the middle.”

 

Looking back at both Moontide and Port of Shadows after the passage of some eight decades, both films, as different and as similar as they are, provide a satisfying cinema experience. Farber was right to call Moontide a “picture moving and good,” one in which “a quality of human goodness and fraternity” is palpable despite the dangers that also face the main characters. The filmgoer is glad when Bobo and Anna get together, and that’s great if they do live happily ever after. Port of Shadows, as dark and sad as it is in the end, deserves all its accolades.

 

In both films, the light of human love and community manages to break through all that fog, all those shadows, and that light still burns when we leave the theater and step back into our own world.