This is a poster for the 1951 Christian-Jacque film Gypsy Fury, a remake of his 1949 French film Singoalla. The film is about a tragedy in 14th century Sweden involving a lord who gives up his worldly possessions when he falls in love with a gypsy named Singoalla (played by Viveca Lindfors). I would like to see this film, especially the French version, which is supposed to be better, but I have not yet been able to find a DVD or VHS for any version of it.
I finally got hold of the poster for this film. Speaking in the first person, Dinesh D'Sousa writes in his book that is the basis for the film: "I'm a Third World guy who has embraced America. Obama is an American who has embraced a Third World ideology." For the moment at least this poster does not come up often on eBay and when it does it goes for very good prices.
Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire was an adaption from a novel by Richard Brooks which was originally about the murder of a soldier by fellow soldiers because he was gay. The gay issue was not acceptable to the film industry in that year, so in the screeenplay the murdered solder was made to be a Jew instead. The social machinations of antisemitism are not carefully explored for various reasons, but primarily because this was mostly a low-budget murder mystery.
Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement got the Academy Award for best picture that year. It was deliberately written in the original novel by Laura Z. Hobson as a story about antisemitism in which Gregory Peck as a journalist takes on the assignment of writing about the subject and tells his story with insights he gained by posing as a Jew himself. Many facets of the insidious phenomenon of antisemitism in American society are illustrated in this film. The "gentleman's agreement" was apparently some kind of tacit understanding that Jews would be kept out of certain areas of American life. Dean Stockwell does a great job here at age eleven as Tommy Green, the son of Peck's character Philip Schuyler Green.
Simba 1955 Dirk Bogarde directed by Brian Desmond Hurst
Simba is Swahili for lion and was apparently a word left in blood by
the Mau Mau as a signature after they did crimes of murder and arson
against British settlers and their indigenous supporters in 1950s Kenya.
The film opens with a black man in shirt, slacks and sandals riding on
a bicycle to an injured white man lying on the ground, and hacking him
to death with a machete.
Then comes an airport scene with mixed races in business attire
followed by a romantic conversation between Alan Howard (Dirk Bogarde)
and Mary Crawford (Virginia McKenna) in a covertible sports car riding
in sunny weather on smooth roads across the African plain as they return
to Crawford's farm. When they reach the farm they find police on the
scene and learn that Alan Howard's brother David has been killed.
David was the one hacked to death in the opening scene.
This film is a dramatization of the early 1950s Kenya Mau Mau revolt
against the British settlers, based on a novel by Anthony Perry. The main
characters are slmost all white representatives of the British community
in khaki suits, berets and bush hats, with the obligatory subplot of the
Bogarde-McKenna love story; the Mau Mau revolt, a very nasty disturbance
with macabre overtones, was a rude and vicious intrusion into this quaint
colonial setting.
I have read that the images on these two posters are thought to be
racist and derogatory, and I believe that also applies to the film
itself. Another film from the same year, the 1955 Elwood Price
documentary (narrated by Chet Huntley) about the Mau Mau revolt in
Kenya, does not show Kenyans in this kind of scant attire running
around with skulls on stick ends, so it would probably be fair to say
both the images on the posters and in this Brian Desmond Hurst
film are sensationalist. However the kind of Kikiyu tribe behavior
documented in those years as Mau Mau activity might be seen by some
people as racist and derogatory even if described with clinical
accuracy: the outlaw Kikuyu were acting out a derogatory caricature of
themselves. A film dramatization with promotional material that
exaggerates primitive appearances is not nearly as bad as the original
crimes were, even if one believes it was a crime to make a
sensationalized commercial docudrama (nominated for four film awards)
about this.
