The Spanish Earth c

1937
Directed by Joris Ivens
Commentary by Ernest Hemingway
Photography by John Ferno
Music by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson
Narrator Orson Welles
Sound Director Irving Reis
Film Editor Helen Van Dongen

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• 1937
• The
• Spanish
• Earth

[stevevandien]

@barkingmad33 It was so "effectively buried" that I managed to read about it 42 years ago in books published in the United States as part of a series for grade-school children. An interesting aspect of history is that some of these "untrained men & women" WERE Communists or Communist sympathizers. They claimed to fight fascism, yet did not recognize (or perhaps refused to recognize), oh, let's see, Stalin's massacres, because he was supporting the Loyalists.

[stevevandien]

 Anybody who's heard Hemingway's voice will know that HE is the narrator. Does Welles do ANY narrating in this version?

[barkingmad33]

Francisco Franco, the fascist General of the rebels fighting against the duly elected democratic government in Spain, was backed by Spanish monarchists, the Catholic Church and the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany. His National Guard was heavily supplemented by Moorish mercenaries from northern Africa with fascist money. Franco was flown into Spain by the British Government.

[barkingmad33]

Soon after the Loyalist cause was lost, and Franco installed, the Governments of UK and USA readily recognized his dictatorship until his death of natural causes in the 1970s.

[barkingmad33]

An interesting aspect of history that has been so effectively buried in America, is that untrained young American men & women left campuses and jobs to fight for popular democracy (a pure American ideal) in Spain in 1937. They were members of the Lincoln Brigade. In the late 40s & 50s, they were hounded by the FBI as "premature anti-fascists", aka communists, during the McCarthy era.

[barkingmad33]

Unheralded and ignored by history, they have mostly all quietly died off. There were communist peasants, among many many others, fighting alongside of them for the loyalist cause and for this reason, these Americans were labeled communists as well. However, as Churchill appropriately stated in WWII, "I would enlist the devil himself as an ally in the fight for the survival of my country." And so would any patriot.

[barkingmad33]

Archibald MacLeish (Poet, Hemingway's friend, combatant-journalist covering the Spanish Civil War,): "I wrote a piece in the Nation to the same effect, stating my own position that in a good cause, and the Spanish Civil War was a good cause, I didn't give a goddamn whom I was working with. The question was whether you could do anything about the Loyalist cause itself. I wish I'd used Churchill's phrase about welcoming the devil himself as an ally in a righteous cause to defeat your enemy."