I recently viewed a fascinating artifact from the early years of the cold war era. The film, Guilty of Treason (1949), written by Emmet Lavery and produced by Jack Wrather, (husband of featured player Bonita Granville), attempts to portray the persecution of József Cardinal Mindszenty by the communist government that followed the liberation of Hungary from the Nazis.
The filmmakers were not apparently motivated by the desire to produce a fully realized biographical portrait of the heroic, stubborn Mindszenty, but were attempting to depict recorded events surrounding his trial in early 1949 as the Soviet Union began to set up a puppet government in Hungary as a brick in the Warsaw Bloc wall. In real life the Cardinal, who had opposed dictatorships in his country from 1919 on, (while simultaneously maintaining the near feudal primacy of the church and refusing to recognize the separation of church and state), spent several years in a Budapest prison until the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, when he was freed. After defying both the communist led government as it brutally reasserted control over the population and the Vatican's orders to mute his outspokenness, Mindszenty spent much of the remainder of his life in the American Embassy in Budapest, until he was persuaded to leave in 1971, when the communist government allowed him to leave the country. Interestingly, the Vatican, which found him to be a thorny character at best, eventually stripped him "unofficially" of his cardinal's office, and recognized him as "a victim of history", neither of which Mindszenty ever accepted or acknowledged in his lifetime.
This movie, however, doesn't have the hindsight of history and might best be viewed as a newsworthy film, dashed off by the same scriptwriter who produced Hitler's Children (1943) in the wake of the suppression of dissent in Hungary, the Berlin Airlift, and the descent of the Iron Curtain over much of Europe and featuring a grown up version of one of the stars of the propaganda film, Hitler's Children, Bonita Granville.
The melodramatic limitations of Lavery's script are somewhat overcome by the great casting of Charles Bickford in the lead role, whose compelling, grave presence and authority in portraying the brave and stubborn Hungarian cleric gives his character an appealing depth that the sketchy script belies. We don't get to know much about the character or personality of Mindszenty other than his eloquent articulation of his desire to see his country free of outside influences in non-communist self-government. Part of the reason that the film doesn't satisfy the viewers' potential interest in the character of such a principled figure as a human being is the shift in focus of much of the story from Bickford to the rather trite star-crossed love story of Bonita Granville as a Hungarian music teacher and anti-Nazi activist and bland Richard Derr as a Russian colonel with a conscience haunted by his family's death at the hands of the Nazis. Throw in John Banner (yes, it's a svelte "Sgt. Schultz" long before Hogan's Heroes, being very gemütlich as a ne'r-do-well playwright), evil eyed Berry Kroeger as an interrogator, and stalwart Paul Kelly as an intrepid reporter narrating the story, and you have a powerful stew of propaganda.
Miss Granville, who was a splendidly intense and neurotic child actress in These Three and other films, is, unfortunately once again tortured in this movie, chained, whipped, showered alternately with hot and cold showers and questioned mercilessly, repeating experiences that one would think she'd wish to forego after her earlier screen impersonations of similarly treated Nazi victims in The Mortal Storm and Hitler's Children. One wonders what compelled so many people in Hollywood to equate Bonita Granville with these victimization roles. The creators of this movie also demonstrate--within the Production Code guidelines--other tools of persuasion such as disorienting torture, powerful drugs and psychic privations that many experienced at the time. After some exposure to the techniques of the NKVD, this viewer was repulsed, but I was also moved uncomfortably to ponder some of the parallels between our own country's activities in the recent past and present and the events depicted in the film. While it might be tempting to dismiss Guilty of Treason as simply a lurid exploitation film, the quality of the acting of Charles Bickford, the attempt to create a compassionate human figure out of the Russian communist character played by Richard Derr, and the still relevant message of freedom and dignity helped to make this an engrossing film, despite its excesses and my critical eye. While I find most propaganda movies lose their impact over time, inevitably, this is one that is hard to shake, despite the fact that I can see its limitations as I've outlined. Have you seen any propaganda movies that still affected you--despite the fact that history may have blunted the initial film's message?
On a more amusing note, Elizabeth Risdon, in one of those goofy Hollywood casting moves from the era, plays Bickford's mother, even though she was actually only 4 years older than the actor and in several rather uncomfortable scenes depicting the domestic life of the Cardinal, the viewer must remind oneself that the "couple" on screen are Mother and Child and, not an, ahem, "item."