Spitball Army

Stand with me!  Stand up!  Stand up and fight!  Fight for your individuality!  Be a maverick!  Bring reform to Warshington!  Fight for snails and oysters!

Sing along with me, my friends!

[“Let’s Sing With Popeye,” from 1934]

Continuing the ongoing cavalcade of strangely-placed references, here’s some more food for thought, found in the footnotes to Peter Hanson’s biography of the screenwriter of Spartacus, Dalton Trumbo (entitled Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel):

Unity among soldiers was a vaguely socialist theme common to scripts by members of the Hollywood Ten.  “While there was nothing particularly Marxist or Stalinist about the radicals’ screenplays…they nevertheless did manage to avoid overemphasizing or overdramatizing the role of the extraordinary individual (the war hero) and instead focused on the teamwork and suffering of average soldiers.  Scripts like those for Sahara ([John Howard] Lawson), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (Trumbo), Objective Burma [Alvah] Bessie and [Lester] Cole), or Pride of the Marines ([Albert] Maltz) stressed the collective effort of the front-line troops and they presented as authentic a picture of the reality of war as it was possible to do in Hollywood.”

– Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood (pp. 181-182)