“CITIZEN KANE” IT’S NOT: ON MARTIN SCORSESE’S WHITEWASH OF HOWARD HUGHES

[greenpagan]

By David Walsh
13 January 2005

The Aviator, directed by Martin Scorsese and written by John Logan, sanitizes, indeed idealizes, the life of American industrialist Howard Hughes (1905-76) in such a manner as to make it nearly unrecognizable. The facts about Hughes’ activities, nearly all of them reprehensible, lie in the public record, but who will point to them and issue a protest?

***

Halting at 1947 falsifies Hughes’ life, which ‘flowered,’ so to speak, in the Cold War and the postwar era in general. It avoids his role as a fanatical anti-communist, who purged his own studio, RKO, of left-wingers, and his campaigns against screenwriter Paul Jarrico and Chaplin’s Limelight; his well-known links to the Mafia; his business and personal dealings with bloody dictators such as Cuba’s Batista, the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Nicaragua’s Somoza; his sale of TWA for half a billion dollars and his subsequent bizarre retreat to Las Vegas; his alleged participation in an assassination plot against Fidel Castro; his multifarious and lucrative association with the CIA (according to a biographer, for example, in 1963 the US spy agency linked up with mob connections through a Hughes-connected firm “to support fascist governments in South America”); his profiteering during the Vietnam War (the same biographer describes Hughes Aircraft as “an adjunct ... of the American government”); his buying up of Republican and Democratic politicians alike (“I can buy any man in the world,” he boasted); his especially intimate ties to Richard Nixon and his apparent role in the Watergate conspiracy; his drug addiction; and, of course, his descent into hypochondria, paranoia and, ultimately, total lunacy. One might legitimately describe Hughes as something of an American fascist type.

(In this light, the revelation made by biographer Charles Higham (Howard Hughes: The Secret Life) is relevant, that in 1938—within the time-frame of the Scorsese film, it should be pointed out—“he had formed a secret partnership with Axel Wenner-Gren, one of his rivals as the world’s richest man, the founder of Electrolux and the inventor of the modern refrigerator, who was a friend of Field Marshal Goering and an arch-negotiator behind the scenes, with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for a permanent peace with Nazi Germany and a cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union.” Hughes, just to make the picture complete, was a lifelong racist and anti-Semite.)

***

Hughes broke the most new ground not as an aviator, or a lover, but as a gangster-businessman—hostile to any government regulation of his businesses and, according to Higham, hating to pay a penny in taxes; bragging of his ability to bribe anyone, including entire governments; and associating, directly or through his underlings, with thugs like mobsters Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Can it be entirely coincidental that a period which has witnessed the criminalization of the American political and corporate world produces a film such as this?

http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/avia-j13.shtml

[KittyWampus]

1. Apparently The Socialists Fail To Understand What ART Is And What

ARTISTS actually do.

[saltpoint]

2. Provocative post.

Ordinarily Scorsese is fairly realistic. Are the omissions you list his sole fault or the studio's, or what?

Several reviews have suggested that at least some of Hughes' paranoia was included in the film.

The topic is interesting and you're making it more interesting still.

[grumpy old fart]

4. Nobody will go see a 300 hour film.....

This is ART, not an academic treatise....

[saltpoint]

7. I appreciated the original post very much.

I'm not clear as to where I was calling for a 300-hour film.

[grumpy old fart]

8. Just saying the "omissions" were nobody's "fault"....

they were just artistic choices. Any attempt to factually chronicle a man's life would have to have over 300 hours....no biggie, and certainly no offense meant.

[saltpoint]

9. Well, it's better for me anyway that it's short --

-- because there'd be too many times I'd have to go pee if the film was too long.

All's well. Appreciated your comments.

[Vinnie From Indy]

10. I Agree. America needs more "art" like this!

I propose we make an "art" film in which the story of Santa Claus is detailed in a sweeping cinematic extravaganza. We could start off with Santa's birth as a poor black child in the South a decade or so after reconstruction. The portrayal of his early years can include his bitter, sometimes violent, fights with Thomas Edison over the invention of the light bulb. Won't audience be thrilled to see Santa going toe to toe with John L Sullivan for 72 rounds in what has to be boxing greatest fight of all time. We might want to gloss over the period of time when Santa was involved with "atrocities" while riding with Teddy Roosevelt and his "Rough Riders" and his later years when he was a pioneer in producing American porn films. I propose we call it "The Real Aviator".

[AP]

3. One of the reasons I haven't gone to see the movie yet...

...is because I'm just not ready to go see a movie during an era in American history -- today -- when wealth is concentrating in the hands of the wealthy that glorifies a billionaire.

[IndianaGreen]

5. You should see the movie, it is really good

I liked the part when Hughes is asked by one of his aides if he wanted to bribe Congress. Hughes replied "No, buy them legally!"

[Vinnie From Indy]

11. Aaaaamen! n/t

[psychopomp]

6. Seen the movie, it DOES fall short on HH's legacy

I count "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" among my favorites but as a Scorcese flick this one falls short. The technical work is fantastic but the story has some shortcomings that cannot be overlooked by the serious critic. One area that is open to criticism is the degree to which some part of HH's life are emphasized over others.

I agree with the original post that HH's political legacy has been diminished but even the business dealings in aviation are given short shrift for his love life and intermittent references to his inner demons.

This may be helpful:

snip
Howard Hughes

Military-Industrial Complex: Throughout the 1950s, as the power of three entities grew -- the Hughes empire, organized crime, and the new Central Intelligence Agency -- it became all but impossible to distinguish between them. By the end of the decade, Hughes' chief of staff, Robert Maheu, had orchestrated the CIA's dirtiest secret -- plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro with the help of two heads of organized crime. Vice President Richard Nixon was the White House action officer in the clandestine attempts to oust Castro. Zapata Off-Shore, the oil company owned by future CIA director and U.S. president George Bush after he split it off from Zapata Oil partner Hugh Liedtke in 1954, had a drilling rig on the Cay Sal Bank in 1958. These islands had been leased to Nixon supporter and CIA contractor Howard Hughes the previous year and were later used as a base for CIA raids on Cuba. Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy largely because of a scandal over a never repaid $205,000 "loan" Nixon's brother received from Hughes. As attorney general, Robert Kennedy secretly investigated the Hughes-Nixon dealings.

After Bobby Kennedy's assassination in 1968, Maheu and Hughes hired long-time Kennedy advisor Larry O'Brien along with other political insiders to protect their interests in Washington. In 1953, Hughes had founded the Hughes Medical Institute in Delaware as his sole act of philanthropy. By turning over all of the stock of Hughes Aircraft Company to the institute, he made his billion-dollar-a-year weapons factory a tax-exempt charity. By 1969, that scam was about to be shut down by a Senate bill, which followed an investigation by fellow Texan Wright Patman, the powerful chairman of the House Banking Committee. But O'Brien lobbied his allies and got a loophole creating an exemption for "medical research organizations" like the Hughes Medical Institute.

President Nixon's downfall began when he ordered burglars to break into Larry O'Brien's office in 1972. At the time, O'Brien was both a Hughes employee and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, headquartered in the Watergate Hotel. The Watergate burglars happened to have been heavily involved in the covert anti-Castro operations (which Nixon oversaw as vice president). They were also deeply involved in the conspiracies which grew out of those operations; conspiracies which prevented any major political future for the Kennedy family, and led directly to Nixon's resurrection from political obscurity. The purpose of the break-in was never revealed because the Watergate scandal's investigations were sidetracked, likely on purpose, into a focus on multiple other high crimes by Nixon. Whatever the purpose of the break-in, Hughes was right in the middle of the major forces linking the conspiracies that resulted in the murders and character assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and the Watergate scandal that toppled the Nixon administration.
/snip

http://www.famoustexans.com/howardhughes.htm