Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • December 12, 2012 in the first two weeks. Hollywood took notice. Irving Thalberg of MGM had obtained film rights even before the English translation was released, and pre-production work started casting a young Clark Gable as the Armenian hero. Mehmed Münir Ertegün, the Turkish ambassador, contacted the U.S. State Department and urged that the film not be produced. “If the movie is made, Turkey will launch a worldwide campaign against it,” Ertegün told MGM. “It rekindles the Armenian Question. The Armenian Question is settled.” The regime of Kemal Ataturk took power after World War I and was not directly responsible for the Armenian murders, but agitated to see that the massacres were not subsequently publicized. Ertegün also obliquely threatened the Jews. He said, “Jewish firms which maintain commercial relations with our country will also suffer if they fail to stop this hostile propaganda.” The film died on the cutting room floor. A few years later, more censorship hit Hollywood from a source perhaps even more contaminated. James Whale, a British veteran of World War I and the director of the original “Frankenstein” and “The Invisible Man,” was setting up to film “The Road Back,” based on the anti-violence and anti-military novel of Erich Maria Remarque, author of “All Quiet on the Western Front.” The year was 1937, and while the worst of Hitler’s atrocities were yet to come, his re-militarization of Germany and the Nuremburg Laws restricting Jews from the professions and from intermarriage with Aryans were already on the books. “The Road Back” was published in 1931 before Hitler came to power, and was anti-militarist rather than specifically anti-Nazi. The hard-core German monarchist and militarist in the book is probably based on Hermann Ehrhardt. Ehrhardt despised Hitler and was targeted for assassination by Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Remarque was a pacifist and an internationalist. He detested Hitler even more than Ehrhardt did, and got out of Germany as soon as Hitler came to power. Remarque was a marked man. The Nazi government later executed Remarque’s beloved sister Erna just to get back at him, and then sent him a bill for the cost of the execution. The Los Angeles consul for the Third Reich, George Gyssling, got on the phone to Universal, which had produced the smash 1930 hit film version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” and said the film gave an “untrue and distorted picture of the German people” and tried to get it squelched. Remarque was a German World War I veteran and so were the good guys in his book, as were the bad guys. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Screen Actors Guild stood up for Whale, and the film was completed as Whale had intended, or just slightly watered down. “The Road Back” received generally favorable reviews. Then the studio knuckled under to the Nazi demands behind Whale’s back, cut some scenes, reshot new material, and released a film about a tragic era that was essentially a comedy. The move flopped, and Whale was furious. Universal tried to dump Whale and then assigned him to a series of B movies, one of which, “The Man in the Iron Mask,” was a hit. Whale left Hollywood for good shortly before Pearl Harbor and ultimately committed suicide due to health problems. The Chinese, as the successors to the Turks and the Nazi Germans as censors of American films, have a lot going for them and a lot going against them. American treatment of Asians has been cursory or negative, except as the villains in war movies. A recent Chinese-American-produced PBS TV documentary with cuts from American films offered the American audience the 1961 musical “Flower Drum Song.” Of the five featured players, Nancy Kwan was half-Chinese. James Shigeta and Jack Soo were Japanese-American. Miyoshi Umeki was Japanese, and Juanita Hall was white, black, and Indian. Benson Fong, billed sixth, and some of the extras were of Chinese ancestry. Reiko Sato, a Japanese-American, did the dance sequence in “Love, Look Away.” Lena Horne, an African-American, dubbed Sato’s singing voice. The film got favorable reviews because it was a “great break-through for Chinese culture in America.” The Japanese and the African-Americans also did okay. The Chinese have a right to sing the blues, but turning the Asian villains of a juvenile slaughter film from Chinese into North Koreans is not the nicest way to handle it. The Chinese censors need to reflect that dimwits with lots of guns cannot tell one Asian from another and sometimes have bad impulse control. Guy Aoki, head of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans in Burbank, protested the concept of having white kids with delinquent potential bump off Asian “invaders” as a form of entertainment. He is undoubtedly right. Hollywood does not need Chinese censors any more than Hollywood in days of yore needed Turkish or Nazi censors. Hollywood needs a conscience transplant from the rest of America. Hollywood movie remakes are seldom in the same league with the original films, but one recent effort has raised some concerns. I have always had a favorite fantasy about Hollywood: Don Siegel, who brought in a roster of action films, walks up to John Milius, embraces him, and says, “It is you who will console us for the death of Sam Pekinpah!” To understand why this is amusing, the one must know that Josef Hadyn said Beethoven would console everyone after the early death of Mozart. It would also be important to understand that Siegel made “Dirty Harry,” Pekinpah made “The Wild Bunch,” and Milius made the original “Red Dawn.” The 1984 version of “Red Dawn” has elite Soviet paratroopers wafting down out of a clear blue sky to invade a rustic, isolated western American town and subjecting the community to the usual Soviet program: harsh martial law with the outright murder of Americans who disagree. This stuff really happened to the Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarians, so there is a reality reference, especially since the film was made while the Berlin Wall was still standing. In the film, some of the high school students steal guns and take to the woods and start killing the invaders with the limited help of U.S. armed forces. This movie was calibrated as one of the most violent films ever shown in theaters and was, among other things, the first film rated PG-13. I refuse to ruin the ending, but if elite Russian troops were that easy to kill, the people in Vladivostok would now speak German. The new “Red Dawn” has high school students defending rustic isolated western America from North Koreans! How did the North Koreans invade North America? When MGM originally planned the movie in 2008, the invading force was supposed to have been Chinese, but the film had to be temporarily shelved due to financial problems. The film’s backers claimed the villains were switched from Chinese to North Koreans to maintain access to Chinese box offices. The Chinese claim they told the American filmmakers to expect a boycott and other trouble if the Chinese were shown as military invaders of the United States. Never mind Tibet. This Chinese arm-twisting has an odd ring of veracity, because it has happened in Hollywood before, though the long-suffering Chinese, whose nationals were often played by unconvincing whites -- anyone remember Katherine Hepburn in “Dragon Seed”? -- were not the culprits. In 1933, Franz Werfel published a book called “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” The book was a novelized version of the Armenian resistance to Turkish massacres during World War I. Werfel’s book was notably fair. He mentions a sometimes drastic Armenian resistance movement as the trigger for the vastly overdone and outrageous Turkish response, and mentions that Kaiser Wilhelm’s German diplomats and missionaries tried to save Armenians if at all possible, with at least some survivors. The book was a major literary success. It was banned in newly Nazi Germany after initial praise due to pressure from the Turkish government, but the English translation sold 34,000 copies Hollywood gets some new censors Ramsey Mystery reader Gina Aliano, principal of Ramsey’s Tisdale School, was the mystery reader at Family Night at the Tisdale Book Fair. She read the book ‘Stars’ by Mary Lyn Ray and surprised the participants with sunglasses and star stickers.