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Ralph Peters
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Wars of Blood and Faith
Ralph Peters

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Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

Easy Writer: HRC v. “Ninotchka”
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 11/20/07

Did Turner Classic Movies scheme and connive to put Stalin’s cold-bitch up against CNN’s cold-bitch?  For me, the choice was easy: Watch Garbo as commie-gal turned party-gal, at the courtly hand of Melvyn Douglas [husband of the famed Pink Lady a decade later].  While “Ninotchka” is 1939 cinema fiction, and her easy-warming at the pratfall by Douglas – “Garbo Laughs” heralded the ad campaign – is a bit contrived, it’s more real than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2007 rattling, unsettling cackle.

Parallel to the latest Clinton News Network debate were these dialogue tidbits: when the Soviet trio seeks a security safe for the royal jewels being auctioned to fund the Revolution, the only suite with a safe big enough is the Royal Suite, to which the concierge notes, “It will fit your needs, but not your convictions.”  Never mind – like with global warming, the 1939 film’s advocates put aside conviction for comfort, until – She Arrives!

And as She took charge on TCM, CNN gave us Hilary Rodham Clinton attempting to prove her bona fides as the ‘most experienced’ of a gaggle of goofy bad-excuses for future commander-in-chief materials. Simultaneously, at the train platform, Ninotchka confronts the bourgeois boys’ awareness of her gender: “Don’t make an issue of my womanhood”!

Indeed – that was the issue on CNN.  But not asked, not told.  One wag says Hilary Rodham Clinton’s mandate to the media on hard questions is, Don’t Ask, ‘cause I Won’t Tell.  HRC v. Ninotchka: Let me count the ways I prefer Garbo to Gabby Haze.

Leon’s courtship of Ninotchka, a onetime sergeant of infantry, leads him to swoon, “Never did I believe I could feel this way toward a sergeant.”  Later, she complains, “No one can be so happy, without being punished.” For the Eiffel Tower, she early observes it is a “waste of valuable electricity” – hmmm, energy awareness in 1939!  Gore’s Gal fer shure.
 
All this awaiting her marketing-heralded laugh, so genuine and effected with an affect filling her face, a bright star in that working-class restaurant, fitting in there as much as later in her ball gown – such a contrast to HRC’s pink-dress press conference, feigned chortle so effectively lampooned, and denying that the debate dudes should make an issue of her gender.
 
GARBO LAUGHS.
Hilary Squawks.
 
Garbo’s Ninotchka got it – first, went home loyally to her commissars and commandante, but soon Leon maneuvered matters to bring his mourning mate into freedom, ironically [in these current times] via the gateway of the Bosporus: Constantinople, among Muslims and minarets.  HRC is still the cold-bitch, her gender an issue, her goals to make America the cold-cell world which Ninotchka escaped.
 
But after returning, to find the Moscow radio gave her only propaganda – “No music” she sadly intones, missing the gay Paris broadcast-music choices.  HRC’s world will take us closer to the no-music/all-propaganda world of Moscow in 1939 – but of course, like the Pope Gore, there will be music allowed for the Special Classes, just not the plain old Masses.
 
Ninotchka is told early, “I’ve been fascinated with your five year plan for the past fifteen years.”  Those plans’ failures became a constant joke thru the following decades.  A roomie notes the Moscow laundry has found Ninotchka’s Parisian negligee a sign she is declining into decadence: “I should hate to see our country endangered by my underwear.”  And Hilary, plus her idiot brethren, would hate to see this country endangered by SUVs and other decadent displays of desire.
 
“No one can be so happy, without being punished” is Ninotchka’s ascetic lament, wearing her hair-shirt instead of the Parisian undergarments.  Of course, all her superiors then and since had ‘state stores’ full of Western wares – as Gore and his Clan have private jets and SUVs galore.  The parallel between Ninotchka’s very real world and the very reel worlds of Gore and Edwards and Hilary is startling – once more, déjà vu all over again.
 
HRC’s ‘heir-shirt’ will confiscate your inheritance, mandate higher taxes, create ‘incentives’ to make your car smaller, your luxuries fewer and pricier, and of course all while giving modern credence to Ninotchka’s arriving observation: “You are the unfortunate product of a doomed culture.”
 
The commies really thought that then, and those remaining now in Putin’s resurgent hopeful reserves so feel today.  Many in this nation also feel we are doomed: too much energy profligacy, homes too big [there are learned editorials complaining of just that “troubling trend”], excessive consumerism, blah-blah-blah.
 
All the CNN blather was too familiar – Ninotchka was so-o-o relevant even today, 68 years later.  When the trio are questioned about the confiscated jewels at film’s beginning, they reassure everyone: “I’m giving my word, they were confiscated legally.”
 
And so will it all – so very legally. Garbo laughs as serious Americans cry, if they ‘get’ the issue of HRC’s womanhood.  For that president will be a Woman Hood: Alice
Capone, Donna Vito Corleone, Bitchy Barzini, Tammy Titaglia – all rolled into one commissar of convictions.
 
Are you laughing? ExileStreet

copyright 2007 Steve Finefrock

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