Freedom Socialist • Vol. 21, No. 1 • April-June 2000

Cradle Will Rock knocks corporate takeover of art

by Janet Sutherland

With Cradle Will Rock, director Tim Robbins has created from theater history an epic that should warm the hearts of radicals and artists.

The movie telescopes events in the art worlds of the 1930s into a vibrant kaleidoscope that tells the true story, with some dramatic license, of composer Marc Blitzstein’s fight to produce the musical “The Cradle Will Rock” in defiance of federal censors. The film recre-ates the feisty political milieu of the period, showing how the triumph of “Cradle” over its corporate and governmental opponents was secured.

Stuart Klawans of The Nation damned Cradle Will Rock with faint praise, objecting to its Brechtian style and its fictionalizations — the very qualities that give it verve and punch. Perhaps what really confuses or annoys its critics is the movie’s revolutionary optimism in the face of the capitalist assumption that even artists are for sale.

Cradle rocks with a faith that art can transcend its misuse by patronage systems and flourish as an expression of collective hope and a harbinger of political change.

Clash of worlds.

Blitzstein, played by Hank Azaria, composes a musical about a failed attempt by big money to crush a steel strike. His is a world of street demonstrations attacked by brutal police on horseback, of women forced into prostitution, and of union organizers jailed. His ghostly muse, Bertolt Brecht, exhorts him to tell the truth, even about corrupt union officials.

As the Federal Theatre Project of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) accepts his play, he meets flamboyant director Orson Welles (Angus Macfadyen) and producer John Houseman (Cary Elwes) and is introduced to a world of great wealth and private patronage.

We meet William Randolph Hearst, who is buying up Italian art treasures from Mussolini; Gray Mather, at whose steel company police have just shot down striking workers; his wife, Countess La Grange, who chides Mather about his deals to help Mussolini stockpile steel against a coming embargo; Nelson Rockefeller, who is just commissioning Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the foyer of Rockefeller Center; and Mussolini’s publicist, Margherita Sarfatti, who ferries Italian masterpieces to the U.S. and departs with carpetbags of cash to finance Mussolini’s military adventures.

In contrast, the Federal Theatre Project is directed by the charming and intelligent Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones). She brilliantly defends her project before the House Un-American Activities Committee, exposing anti-communist congressmen and critics like Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack) as ignorant, self-serving bigots.

Flanagan’s testimony underlines the value of the federal program, which allowed actors and playwrights to find decent employment and millions of citizens to taste the free expression of theater.

Taking a wrecking ball to free expression.

It is precisely the exercise of free speech — specifically, criticism of big business — that Congress can’t abide. Funds for the theater project dry up and Blitzstein’s play is cancelled, mirroring all too closely the events of the actual steel strike he has dramatized. Roosevelt won’t help; he “picks his fights.”

So, on Broadway, federal troops shut down the opening performance of “Cradle Will Rock.”

Meanwhile, down at his Center, Rockefeller is displeased with Rivera’s mural — he likes neither its portrait of Lenin nor its representation of the wealthy by a syphilis germ. He fires Rivera.

Big money appears to prevail.

From darkness, light.

A splendid montage that serves as the film’s finale opens with the wrecking hammers destroying Rivera’s mural while an assemblage of the rich, costumed like pre-revolutionary French aristocrats, attend a ball. As they romp, they conspire to prostitute the future of art by financing only abstractions or men on horses — politically safe art. Mourners declaring the death of the Federal Theatre march somberly up Broadway.

But Welles and Houseman have located an alternate theater. The countess, acted by Vanessa Redgrave, foregoes the fancy dress ball to find Marc Blitzstein a piano; the play goes on when the actors, forbidden by their union leaders to mount the stage, follow Olive Stanton and Aldo Silvano as they rise from their seats in the house and begin to sing.

So for a moment in time — against a dark backdrop of European fascism, with its wholesale theft and manipulation of public art; against the censorship of the people’s plays by the agents of the rich, who are the fascists’ pals; against the destruction of a priceless mural to suit a tycoon’s aversion to truth; against government authority — a courageous troupe of actors rises and sings out the truth: that one day, the cradle that shelters the rich shall not only rock but fall.

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