To the Editor:

In his otherwise masterly article on Abel Gance’s Napoleon [“Napoleon Conquers America,” April], Richard Grenier writes: “As history the film lies somewhere between Parson Weems’s George Washington with his cherry tree (‘I cannot tell a lie’) and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, in which the cause of the Civil War is shown to be Abraham Lincoln’s having a mulatto mistress. . . . A modern French audience would take Gance’s Napoleon about as well as a modern American audience would take Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln.”

Well. The Birth of a Nation is badly skewed history, but I don’t recall it suggesting anywhere that the Civil War was caused by Lincoln’s having a mulatto mistress. Aside from the fact that his Lincoln is a heroic figure, even Griffith wouldn’t have dared give Honest Abe a mistress of any color. No, the mulatto mistress belonged to the radical Abolitionist Senator Thaddeus Stevens (the Hon. Austin Stoneman in the movie, played by Ralph Lewis in a fright wig). In the last reel when drunken black soldiery take the town, she double-crosses Stoneman by delivering his daughter, Elsie (Lillian Gish at her most virginal), into the lusting hands of Stoneman’s protégé the black leader, Silas Lynch. Gagged and bound, Elsie is subjected to Lynch’s loathesome embraces while he prepares for a forced “marriage.” But just in time’s nick, her true love, “The Little Colonel” (H. B. Walthall), thunders into town at the head of his Ku Klux cavalry and decency is restored.

So Homer nodded and Grenier goofed. But I still think he’s our best practicing movie critic/historian. In pieces like “‘The Uniforms That Guard Us’” [May], “The Aging of the New Wave” [February], and “Screen Memories from Germany” [June 1980] he displays the qualities I look for in a critic: a clear, easy style; a knowledge of cinematic history and of history in general; a broad cultural background; critical acumen and high standards.

Dwight Macdonald
East Hampton, New York

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To the Editor:

As the person responsible for bringing Abel Gance’s Napoleon to the attention of Francis Coppola, and for producing the presentations at Radio City discussed by Richard Grenier in “Napoleon Conquers America,” I would naturally disagree with Mr. Grenier’s thesis that the cheering crowds at the Music Hall “were cheering to a large extent for Napoleon himself,” in a dangerous display of misplaced patriotism or nationalism. Of course Gance presents a romantic simplification of the historical Napoleon in his film. To attack the film on this level is about as silly as protesting Errol Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood as giving a dangerously false image of life under feudalism. The crowds at Radio City and at our subsequent presentations across the country have been cheering the theatrical excitement generated by a visually impressive silent movie presented with flair in spectacular movie-palace settings, and enhanced by a rousing score performed live by a full symphony.

However, I am not writing to offer a detailed rebuttal of Mr. Grenier’s criticisms of Gance’s masterwork. It’s normal and predictable that one or two critics would react to the popular and critical success of a film event like the Napoleon revival with belated against-the-grain polemics.

What prompts this letter is Mr. Grenier’s announcement that Francis Coppola will soon present a revival of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. This statement by Grenier is a vicious fabrication, and coming as it does in the pages of a Jewish publication, amounts to the sleaziest kind of character assassination. At no time has Coppola or anyone at Zoetrope contemplated any involvement in Triumph of the Will. I am shocked that COMMENTARY did not have the decency to check such an ugly assertion before allowing it into print.

In his attempt to smear Coppola as a proto-fascist, Mr. Grenier lumps Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler—A Film from Germany with Napoleon and Triumph of the Will as three “neglected masterpieces . . . he [Coppola] has discovered so far.” Our Hitler was made in 1977, and was released by Zoetrope in 1979 not as a “forgotten” film but as a new film.

The “list” of recent Coppola releases that Mr. Grenier asserts “speaks for itself,” presumably to brand Coppola as a right-wing menace, includes, aside from Napoleon and Our Hitler, Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself, and Kidlat Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare. Our next Francis Ford Coppola Presents attraction, rather than Triumph of the Will, will be Street Angel, a classic Chinese film made in Shanghai in 1937 and virtually unknown in the West.

Getting back to Abel Gance, the account of his career after Napoleon is distorted by Mr. Grenier’s need to paint Gance as a hero-mongering hack. Only someone who has done no research could claim that “Gance’s only success in the last fifty years has been his Austerlitz”: true, it’s about Napoleon again, but artistically and commercially it was one of Gance’s biggest failures. Because it contradicts his argument, Mr. Grenier ignores Gance’s greatest success of the sound era—well-known to all film historians—J’Accuse (1937), which is a passionately anti-nationalistic anti-war film.

Tom Luddy
Zoetrope Studios
San Francisco, California

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Richard Grenier writes:

I must thank Dwight Macdonald for his compliment. Since he himself possesses so conspicuously all those critical qualities he generously attributes to me, I can only hope I live up to his description. Mr. Macdonald is of course right about who had the mulatto mistress in The Birth of a Nation.

After Mr. Macdonald’s praise, Tom Luddy certainly brings me back to earth. I am distressed, I must say, by his language. “Protofascist,” “vicious fabrication,” “sleaziest kind of character assassination.” It leads me to think Mr. Luddy is not accustomed to civil discourse. Moreover, what is a proto-fascist? The earliest form of fascist? A precursor of fascism? Is Mr. Luddy suggesting I have accused Francis Coppola of having been a fascist before Mussolini’s march on Rome? Mr. Luddy also appears to feel that certain things published in a Jewish publication are sleazy, which published elsewhere would not be, which is a view not without savor as those things go. I shall nonetheless attempt to give Mr. Luddy satisfaction, although it may be difficult.

Let him first be assured that I do not think now, nor have I ever thought, that Francis Coppola is a fascist, proto- or otherwise. I think, what is more, that Coppola is a film-maker of very great gifts. I believe he does not always understand these gifts, and sometimes misuses them, but it is the role of the artist to create, and the critic to criticize.

Now I am perfectly prepared to believe the report that Francis Coppola would soon be presenting Triumph of the Will was quite erroneous. Perhaps it was a misconstruction of Coppola’s presence at the Telluride Festival a few years ago when Miss Riefenstahl’s film won such a tremendous ovation, a false parallelism with Gance’s Napoleon, whose turn came in 1979. Mr. Luddy might be interested to hear that I consider Triumph of the Will a masterpiece. But even he should realize that the mere subtraction of Triumph of the Will (a documentary on Hitler’s first Nuremburg Congress) from my “list” hardly demolishes my point. As I first wrote it, of the first three films presented by Coppola, two were about Hitler and one about Napoleon. I am merely down one Hitler. It is now one Hitler and one Napoleon.

In case Mr. Luddy is shaky on history, I should inform him that Napoleon is not normally called a fascist, even a proto-fascist. When I said the list “would seem to speak for itself,” I plainly meant that there was a link between the two men which, in my opinion, told us something about Coppola. What ever could this link be? Mr. Luddy must try to remain calm. Napoleon and Hitler were both great conquerors, great war leaders, and I think Coppola has a tendency to admire this sort of man powerfully. This is not necessarily disreputable. It was true of the author of the Chanson de Roland, an early form of which was sung before the Battle of Hastings to the army of William the Conqueror. I wonder if, in going from Patton to Colonel Kilgore in his Apocalypse Now, Coppola might not have been violating his true temperament.

Mr. Luddy is tedious on Abel Gance’s Napoleon. If he thinks the film’s material—the stuff of which nations are made—is comparable to that of Errol Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood, I can do nothing for him. I will not rebut him on Gance’s career. He misquotes me, and is alternately wrong and irrational. He misrepresents me throughout his letter, in fact. I wrote that “anyone with a true scholar’s interest in the development of cinema technique should see Abel Gance’s Napoleon,” but that Gance’s career after Napoleon was pitiable. I stand by both statements.

But I am more interested now in the temperament of Francis Coppola, whose career is not pitiable in the least. I would like to evoke this temperament from some interesting plans of Coppola, and in case Mr. Luddy is preparing to deny them, they were at least reported in an interview in the Los Angeles Weekly. Coppola, it seems, is preparing to make a movie of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. It will run sixteen hours, take ten years to make, and will contain a sequence showing the birth of the universe in moving holography. It will be shown at a special theater holding 2,000 seats built at the top of the Rocky Mountains. Customers will have to drive up to see it as part of a special “weekend event.” They will stay at a special hotel built under the movie house. Not getting enough of the movie in a mere sixteen hours, they will be able to play their favorite sequences on the television sets in their rooms “over and over again.”

Forget Napoleon. Forget Hitler. Are you getting the feel of the man? Are you with me, Mr. Luddy?