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DON MILLER
STILL FURTHER BACK TALK: John Matthew's tribute to Larry Parks in P. D. #430 recalls an era in history all of us would rather forget, because nobody who was part of it comes off very well, on either side. By that I mean the Communist witch-hunt thing. For Parks it was a near-total disaster; he was assigned the meanest role of his career, the fall guy. And he had to play it, and it wasn't
a movie, it was real life.
Parks was one of the original contingent of Hollywood notables called before the Un-American Activities Committee in October, 1947. He wasn't a witness then--his predecessors refused to testify about their political associations and became known as the "Unfriendly Ten." Parks finally returned to Washington in 1951, so for four years he had this sword hanging over his head, which can be rather hard on the nerves, especially if one's bread and butter depend on it.
Whether Parks's political connections ruined his film career or not is open to question, but surely they didn't do it any good. However, up to the initial summons, The Jolson Story had been his big hit, had in fact made him a star. Thereafter, the sequel, Jolson Sings Again, was a boxoffice success, although not up to expectations, Otherwise, his vehicles were undistinguished, and the thought persists as to his popularity decreasing anyway, bad headlines or no. Not that it matters. The bigwigs currently in the saddle got Parks on the griddle, skewered him, let him sizzle, and allowed him to crawl away after depriving him of an actor's sustaining force, His ego,
Not that Parks had a radical fling that was blameless, as Mr. Matthew suggests, It was neither "brief" nor particularly “innocent, " He had joined the Communist Party in 1941, gradually drifted out in 1944 or 1945, Parks admitted this, But it wasn't enough for the Committee, They wanted Parks to name names, tell them who his fellow cell members were, "I don't think that this is really American justice, to force me to do this," Parks pleaded. He begged them not to force him to “crawl through the mud to be an informer, " But the Committee insisted, Broken, Parks gave in. The scary part is this: the Committee already had all the names Parks listed. They just wanted him to recite them, publicly, It was an insidious torture. To the Left, he was a squealer, to the Right, a suspect ex-Commie, Parks made a film opposite Liz Taylor that flopped, later a nothing pic in England, still later a featured role in a John Huston biog about Freud, His film career to all intents and purposes had ended on the first day of spring in ‘51. He kept busy doing stock around the country, but it wasn't the same, not after tasting film stardom.
However one may feel about the whole nasty political business, there's no getting away from it, Larry Parks had a bum rap hung on him. The fun-filled Fifties? Sometimes they could be lousy,
CAPTAIN GEORGE'S PENNY DREADFUL, a weekly review established in 1968, ispublished by the Vast Whizzbang Organization at Memory Lane, 594 Markham Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada,