Dead EndHOODLUM TIME: Lillian Hellman in San Sebastián Neil Young November 2025 Festival Reports Issue 115 In ocean-lapped spots like San Sebastián on Spain’s Atlantic coast, the tide turns twice a day. In the wider world, the process can take rather longer. The second half of September 2025 — during which period the bilingual Spanish/Basque city hosted its major international film festival (SSIFF) for the 73rd time, between the 19th and 27th — felt like the moment when the broad sweep of European public opinion regarding the horrific situation in Gaza belatedly passed a tipping-point. Even in Germany and Italy: an opinion-poll in the former published on 23 September revealed that not just the majority of the population, but also the majority of supporters of all political parties now regard the Israeli administration’s actions as genocidal; a general strike in the latter on 22 September sparked an immediate shift in government policy and action. Three days before SSIFF started, the United Nations’ “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem, and Israel” had concluded that “Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” in the aftermath of Hamas’s terror-attack on the country on 7 October 2023, in which 1,195 people were killed. The many ripples of the UN Commission’s decision quickly reached the sphere of culture. On the very same day, the Spanish national broadcaster TVE (which funds most of the Spanish films at San Sebastián) announced it would not participate in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest if Israel was allowed to enter — the first of the Eurovision “Big Five” countries to take such a stance. On the streets of well-heeled San Sebastián, long the resort of choice for the Spanish royal family, many locals (and not just the youth) sported pro-Palestine stickers and badges. The many international visitors — some wearing pro-Palestinian lanyards themselves — spotted an increasing preponderance of Palestinian flags flying from businesses and private residences. Among them was the upmarket apartment-block directly across the mini-multiplex Principe cinema, where films in the festival’s retrospective dedicated to the American dramatist, screenwriter and memoirist/fabulist Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) were shown every day. There was a certain historical irony at play here: these days, if she is remembered in connection with cinema at all, Hellman is probably best known for Fred Zinnemann’s opulently-appointed Julia (1977), adapted by Alvin Sargent from a chapter in Hellman’s Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973). In the film, Jane Fonda plays a decidedly glamourised version of Hellman — who can also be herself glimpsed, at the beginning and end, fishing on an autumnal lake. In the year of Annie Hall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars, Julia was (along with The Turning Point), the jointly most-nominated picture at the Academy Awards. The film ended up winning three out of eleven: for Sargent’s screenplay, for Jason Robards’ likeably gruff supporting turn as Hellman’s long-time partner, Dashiell Hammett — and for Vanessa Redgrave, eminently deserving of the Best Supporting Actress award in the eponymous role. The Palestinian And that’s when the problems (or rather, the excitement) really began. Redgrave used her speech at the 50th Oscars on 3 April 1978 to denounce those who had recently protested her involvement as producer and narrator of a 66-minute television documentary directed by Roy Battersby, The Palestinian (1977): “I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you’ve stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.” And if Julia is much remembered these days, it is primarily for that speech and the booing with which it was greeted in certain quarters of the auditorium. In an echo of Hellman’s own experiences, Redgrave’s Hollywood career suffered as a result (not that it made much difference to her career overall.) Her commitment to the Palestinian cause has never wavered in the ensuing decades: in August 2025, the 88-year-old was present in her wheelchair at a Gaza demonstration outside Lambeth Town Hall, one of hundreds vigorously banging pots and pans in condemnation of the British government’s role in the catastrophe. That is the kind of unwaveringly steely purpose of which Hellman herself would doubtless have approved: the New Orleans-born scion of an affluent Louisiana clan was nothing if not resolute in sticking to her guns. This was displayed in her admirable, lifelong opposition to and condemnation of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s (Hammett served a jail sentence for his refusal to co-operate) and her less admirable, less explicable, long-held self-definition as a “good Stalinist.” The choice of such a semi-forgotten individual for the 2025 San Sebastián retrospective, organised in conjunction with the Filmoteca Vasca and in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, was something of a leftfield decision — but also a commendable one. Any retrospective of cinema made before 1980 will usually be dominated by male directors; a female emphasis will usually necessitate a focus on major stars such as Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh or Greta Garbo. Rare is the festival that would have the inspiration to showcase one of the many great female editors, such as Anne V Coates, Anne Bauchens, Thelma Schoonmaker or Kenout Peltier (the latter pair thankfully still with us.) The Hellman retro was a kind of companion-piece to the one SSIFF dedicated to Muriel Box in 2018, which celebrated the work of the groundbreaking British writer-director. But Hellman never directed, and even her involvement as a screenwriter was often more marginal than her official list of credits would imply. Dash and Lilly The retrospective comprised 16 films in total, one of which happened to be directed by a woman — Kathy Bates’ Dash and Lilly (1999), a serviceable TV-movie account of the resistance of Hellman and Hammett to the McCarthy hearings, with Judy Davis and Sam Shepard both very fine in the central roles. While pivoting on Hellman’s letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee explaining why she refused to “name names,” Jerry Ludwig’s screenplay is not based on Hellman’s writings. Julia was, as mentioned, based on the Pentimento chapter — presented as a factual account of Hellman’s minor but heroic role in the anti-Nazi resistance in the 1930s, but quickly debunked as sheer fabrication. This sparked a messy tangle with another McCarthy, namely the novelist Mary (no relation to Joe), whom Hellman unwisely sued for defamation in 1979. The retrospective included three films based on Hellman’s plays, in which she had no hand in the adaptation: Michael Gordon’s Another Part of the Forest (1946, a plodding prequel to the better-known The Little Foxes [William Wyler, 1941]), Wyler’s own The Children’s Hour (1961), which he had already filmed as These Three (1936), and George Roy Hill’s Toys in the Attic (1963), a stodgily overheated affair which contrives to waste a remarkable cast headed by Dean Martin, Wendy Hiller and Geraldine Page. The three pictures in the SSIFF retrospective to which Hellman contributed in a lesser and uncredited way were Joris Ivens’ 52-minute Spanish Civil War documentary The Spanish Earth (1937), a rousing endeavour of agit-prop reportage involving multiple socially-committed American writers including Ernest Hemingway, plus two rather more lightweight but amusing enterprises, both featuring Gary Cooper: H C Potter’s The Cowboy and the Lady (1938) co-starring Merle Oberon, and Wyler’s period-piece The Westerner (1940), for which Walter Brennan won his third Best Supporting Actor in five years playing Judge Roy Bean. The inclusion of the two “oaters” gave the retrospective an admirably exhaustive feel, but they reveal little or nothing about what may be dubbed “the Hellman touch.” It is notoriously difficult, at the best of times, to discern who has written what when it comes to Hollywood films upon which divers hands have laboured. Hellman’s involvement in The Dark Angel (Sidney Franklin, 1935), Dead End (1937) and The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1966) was more direct: she is credited as adapting the source plays by, respectively, Guy Bolton, Sidney Kingsley, and Horton Foote — Foote having also turned his 1952 stage work into a 1957 novel. Set before, during and after World War I, The Dark Angel is a wildly contrived romantic melodrama which now functions best as an illustration of how technically brilliant actors (Herbert Marshall) and luminously lovely film-stars (Oberon) can render bearable material which is essentially claptrap, even codswallop. Dead End — which spawned a bizarre and complex quasi-franchise featuring the “Dead End Kids” in multiple iterations — likewise benefits enormously from the talents of Sylvia Sidney and Humphrey Bogart, both cast firmly to type as a poverty-stricken but plucky and indomitable lass, and a charismatic gangster. The other scenestealer here is the colossal set by Richard Day — based on the similarly gargantuan Broadway original by Norman Bel Geddes — recreating the waterfront of lower Manhattan, through which Gregg Toland’s cameras sinuously observe the action. And while most Hellman-connected films adapted from plays now feel distractingly “stagy,” the artifice here is so elaborate and overpowering that the results end up surprisingly close to the European expressionism of Murnau and Wiene. “One of the year’s best pictures” wrote the perennially hard-to-please Graham Greene in his review for Night & Day magazine. The Chase, however, proved unsatisfactory for pretty much everyone concerned. This extravagant excoriation of Deep South mores assembles one of the most remarkable casts of the era: Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford (who died just before the festival opened), Robert Duvall, James Fox, and so on. But it was — courtesy of producer Sam Spiegel — the victim of multiple re-writes and butcher-knife re-edits. The Chase was Hellman’s only screenwriting credit in the decades after her tangle with Joe McCarthy (as recounted in her final memoir, Scoundrel Time) and she bitterly disowned it. There were only four Hellman scripts based on her own plays which seem to have reached the screen in a relatively satisfactory manner: Herman Shumlin’s tale of an anti-Nazi family exiled from Germany to the USA, Watch on the Rhine (1943), the script mainly credited to Hammett but with considerable input from Hellman, and three on which she was either the primary or solo adaptor: These Three, The Little Foxes, and William Dieterle’s The Searching Wind (1946). The latter is by far Hellman’s most ambitious project, examining the torrid convolutions of 20th century political history through the prism of a love-triangle — one corner of which is, helpfully, Sylvia Sidney. James Agee was a vocal fan (“a careful, angry, honest film”) but, as often the case with Hellman, the proper transition from stage to screen is only partially achieved. That said, if the retrospective can be said to have disinterred an unjustly overlooked work from the archive, The Searching Wind is the one. These Three and The Little Foxes are now rather better-known, the former a soft-pedalling of Hellman’s career-making runaway-hit play, in which the central theme of lesbianism is carefully excised — though the film does still work reasonably well as an indictment of gossip and small-mindedness. Again, the casting is crucial: Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea (later also seen in Dead End) and Merle Oberon in the central roles, Bonita Granville as their pint-sized juvenile nemesis. The Little Foxes, meanwhile, is a talky, stagebound proto-soap-opera set in the genteel south of 1900, providing Davis (a careworn figure as the valiant, long-suffering wife in Watch on the Rhine) with one of her imperious showcase roles as headstrong heiress Regina Giddens. Herbert Marshall is again on hand, here going through physical and mental agonies as her spouse — a rare figure of decency in a film which indicts capitalism, but only on the basis that the wrong bosses usually end up in charge. The North Star Even if none of the 16 films in this retrospective can be rated an outstanding cinematic achievement — and even if it did not really make much of a case for Hellman as a significant contributor to cinema history — as a gallery of thespian talent from the 1930s and 1940s (with double or treble duty for Marshall, Sidney, Davis, Oberon and Cooper) it proved eminently worthwhile. And it also provided a rare chance to see the genuinely bizarre The North Star (1943) on the big screen. This was Hellman’s only original screenplay, solo-credited and not based on any other material. As mentioned in Dash and Lilly, the project was commissioned by no less an eminence than President Franklin D Roosevelt, intended to cement the idea in the American public that the Soviet Union was its noble ally. The result, inherited by Lewis Milestone after William Wyler exited to participate in the war himself, is one of the most unlikely productions ever associated with a Hollywood studio: a propaganda musical, scored by Aaron Copland, in which Ukrainian peasants gutsily withstand the brutality of a Nazi invasion (headed, of course, by Erich Von Stroheim). Not that Ukraine is ever actually mentioned, presumably for fear of incurring the wrath of Hellman’s beloved Stalin. Director Milestone (a Jewish Russian born Leib Milstein in what is now Moldova) cobbles together several genres in a strainingly desperate attempt to rouse emotion, but even at the time the result must have yielded more guffaws than tears. Hellman did reportedly sob when she saw the film, but solely out of anger at the bastardisation of her material. Of course, even an absurdity like The North Star “hits differently” in September 2025, three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And it is impossible, even undesirable, to avoid seeing the other 15 films in the retrospective through the prism of contemporary events. In Hellman’s native land, September 2025 saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk and an ensuing firestorm of accusation and repression including, most noisily, the “cancellation” and hasty reinstatement of television chat-show host Jimmy Kimmel. Fascism has once again risen: hollow laughter greeted the moment in Watch on the Rhine when society matron Mrs Farrelly (Lucile Watson), informed that her fugitive German son-in-law is an anti-fascist, angrily retorts “but aren’t we all anti-fascist?!” It is a recurrent theme in Hellman’s writing that the malevolent only thrive — and even get their hands on the levers of power — because there are always apolitical sorts who benefit from the situations they create, and always large sections of the population who are content to passively observe rather than taking a stand. A warning from history, indeed. SSIFF ‘s opening weekend coincided with the gruesome spectacle of Kirk’s memorial service in Washington DC, during which Trump’s Chief of Staff Stephen Miller frothingly ranted about the “enemy” responsible for Kirk’s killing (presumably the “left”/”antifa”): “You are nothing! You can build nothing, you can produce nothing. You can create nothing!” On the very same day, my namesake Neil Young instantly rebutted Miller’s rabble-rousing harangue by unveiling his full-blast anti-Trump barnstormer “Big Crime” on stage at “Farm Aid 40” in Illinois: “Got to get the fascists out Got to clean the White House out Don’t want no soldiers on our streets Got big crime in DC at the White House…” Hellman called the McCarthy period the “scoundrel time,” in which those who “ratted” on their peers were rewarded and those who did not were punished and blacklisted. It’s impossible to know which side Hellman (who was Jewish) would have taken regarding the Gaza genocide, but it’s hard to conclude she would have regarded Trump and his Republican Party cabal with anything but searing contempt. That “scoundrel time” came to an end more rapidly than anyone could have expected; spool forward 70 years and much of the world, the United States included, is in the grip of men (Trump, Miller, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Javier Milei, Viktor Orbán, Nayib Bukele, Aleksandar Vučić) who are hoodlums as well as scoundrels — and proud of it. And even for them, the tide will turn. San Sebastian Film Festival 19 – 27 September 2025 https://www.sansebastianfestival.com
