It is time to be reminded, with the release of the film Mr. Jones, by celebrated Polish director Agnieska Holland, that Hollywood, abetted by the mainstream media, has demonstrated a historical and ultimately embarrassing penchant for blinking at and twisting current events. After the McCarthy era and its incriminating blacklisting scandals, Hollywood swerved piously left and has stayed in that lane ever since. In this respect, director Oliver Stone is no outlier. You would scarcely guess, from watching decades of spy films and thrillers from the ’60s right on to the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’91, that an archvillainous regime existed all the while in Moscow, having run up a death toll in the scores of millions.
Dr. Strangelove
Yes, Hollywood somehow missed all that. The moguls of Malibu preferred to conjure American right-wing conspirators and warmongers, like those in John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (both in 1964). And to keep cranking out anti-Nazi epics long after the last Führerbunker escapees had shriveled and died in some Argentine ICU. (Thanks to its hefty box-office leverage, China is granted its own exemption from Hollywood villainhood.)
Over these same decades, however, a few top-rank directors, American and European, have braved the unspoken ban on anti-Communist movies. Coming readily to mind are Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (’66) and Torn Curtain (’68); John Milius’ original Red Dawn (’84); and Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (’06). Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (’15) merits at least an honorable mention in this category.
A welcome addition to this shortlist is Mr. Jones, now available on digital platforms. The film tracks the odyssey of mild-mannered Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist– and unlikely hero — who ventures to Moscow in 1933 in vain hopes of wrangling an interview with Josef Stalin. What the intrepid young reporter stumbles on instead are whispers and later firsthand evidence of the wholesale starvation of vast swaths of Ukrainian peasantry.
This mass genocide — of the Kulak farmers who defied Stalin’s directives to collectivize — has been well documented, though estimates of the total dead vary widely. Two million is a figure mentioned in the film, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it at three times that. The film’s stark middle section gives only a few horrifying vignettes of what Jones discovers during his unauthorized travels in the Ukraine.
Walter Duranty
In the absence of Stalin (whom Jones never gets to interview), the villain of the piece turns out to be The New York Times man in Moscow, Walter Duranty. By the time Jones meets him, Duranty has already won a Pulitzer for fawning reportage on the ruthless Soviet leader. Duranty dismisses Jones’ early inquiries about a possible Ukrainian famine; then, after Jones returns to Moscow with his eyewitness testimony, the eminent Timesman works to undermine both Jones’ reportage and professional standing.
It turns out that Duranty, like others in the Western journalistic cadre, is well aware of Stalin’s systematic program of “Dekulakization.” After all, as Duranty archly confides to a female acolyte, “You can’t make an omelet without cracking some eggs.” The phrase may not be original to Duranty, but it suits him.
Duranty, of course, isn’t the only Times staffer to have won a Pulitzer for obediently passing along hand-fed falsehoods to a gullible public. Three years of Trump-Russia-collusion stories follow the formula of Duranty-style lapdog “journalism.” Thus far The Times has not seen fit to renounce either award.
But getting a story wrong is nothing new for the newspaper of record. While covering up Stalin’s genocidal excesses, The Times also buried in the back pages accounts of German Jews being rounded up and sent to extermination camps. In the late ’40s, The Times called Mao “an agrarian reformer,” and a decade later it praised a certain bearded Cuban revolutionary for his “strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, and to hold elections.”
Recently, in the 1619 Project, the newspaper has concocted a demonic alternate history of the United States, which it intends to cram down the throats of America’s schoolchildren.
But it does have a good crossword.
