Behind the Iron Curtain: A Radio Free Europe Commercial from the 1970s

During the 1970s, when fear of the Soviet Union was rampant, a tv commercial appeared depicting a boy with rusty chains wrapped around his head, being brainwashed by Soviet propaganda.  A voiceover solemnly intoned "They took his country.  Now they're taking his mind.  Millions of children are growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Albania ... Bulgaria ... Czechoslovakia ... Hungary ... Poland ... Romania ... Yugoslavia."

I thought the boy was cute.  Maybe I could rescue him from his brainwashing!

In the school library, I found books on most of the countries "behind the Iron Curtain," with lots of pictures of boys and men.  They weren't sitting in dark rooms with chains around their heads.  They were dancing in traditional costumes, swimming in public pools, going to school, or just posing in groups.

But that made the brainwashing more insidious, I reasoned.  It was even more important to go to those countries and rescue them:

Albania

Bulgaria

Czechoslovakia  (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia)

Hungary

Poland

Romania

Yugoslavia (now divided into several countries, which I'm not going to list here, because if I make a mistake, I'll get in trouble).

I recently found the commercial on youtube.  It was directed by Jack Goodford, who also directed Mr. Magoo Cartoons for the UPA Studio.

Radio Free Europe was an anti-communist group broadcasting news and information from its base in Munich.  It still broadcasts to 21 countries in 28 languages.

R.E.M. has a song called "Radio Free Europe."  I don't understand the lyrics:

Keep me out of country in the word
Deal the porch is leading us absurd
Push that push that push that to the hull
That this isn't nothing at all

A Catholic Priest in Love: The Little World of Don Camillo

During my sophomore year in high school, I became obsessed with all things Catholic. Most likely it was due to a "forbidden fruit"  thing: Nazarenes thought that Roman Catholics were the epitome of evil.

  One day I found The Little World of Don Camillo (1950) at the St. Pius Catholic Church book sale: a small, yellow collection of short stories, illustrated by cute, half-naked angels and devils.

I had never read anything like this before. There were lots of stories about boys in love with boys, or teenagers with adult men, but never two adults!  And one was a tall, muscular Catholic priest who assaulted people with candlesticks!  And the other, a Communist!

The small yellow hardback remained on my bookshelf for several years before vanishing; I think my mother accidentally put it in a "to donate" pile.

The Little World of Don Camillo is the first of eight collections of short stories about the priest of a small village in Tuscany.  Formerly a boxer and World War II resistance fighter, Don Camillo has hard fists and a hot temper.   The Mayor, Peppone, once fought the Fascists beside Don Camillo, but now he is a godless Communist. The two former friends, on opposite sides of an ideological fence, argue religion and politics as they vie for control of the village.

Peppone is married, but his wife and children rarely appear.  And almost none of the stories involve the hetero-romance of other characters.  Often they involve a conundrum that requires Don Camillo and Peppone to work together:

Vandals steal Don Camillo's clothes while he's swimming.
Don Camillo returns to the boxing ring to save the town's honor.
Don Camillo and Peppone are stuck on a ferris wheel.
Peppone is lost in the mountains, and Don Camillo must rescue him.

During the next twenty years, Don Camillo and Peppone grow into middle age, and though they remain "enemies," their love for each other shines through more often than not.  In the last volume of the series, Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children (1969), a young, hip priest has come to town, and butts heads with Peppone's hippie son, and the cycle begins anew.

The French-Italian movie Don Camillo (1952) starred Fernandel as Don Camillo and Gino Cervi as Peppone (above), and Franco Interlenghi (left) as the young hunk who requires their assistance.  Four sequels appeared.

There was also a 1980 BBC television series, with Mario Adorf and Brian Blessed, and a 1983 Italian movie with Terence Hill (left) and Colin Blakeley.

The author, political satirist Giovanni Guareschi (1908-1969), was a conservative Catholic, and probably heterosexual -- he also published humorous stories about his wife and children. I wonder what he would have thought if he knew that his books had a strong gay subtext.

The Gay Invaders

September 12, 1967, a Tuesday night.  We usually watch The Red Skelton Show at 7:30 -- or rather, my parents watch while I play in the other room, but my friend Doug is staying over, so he gets to decide on the program.  He picks The Invaders (1967-68), which premiered last spring.

Architect David Vincent (Roy Thinnes, a handsome blond with a nicely muscled physique), gets lost on a lonely country road.  He sees a UFO, a "craft from another galaxy,"  land. Now he knows that the Invaders are here, taking human form, infiltrating our society.

He goes on the run, fleeing the aliens who want to silence him, trying to get the authorities to believe his story.

In tonight's episode, David befriends John Carter (Dabney Coleman), who has seen the aliens land several times.  Together the commandeer a flying saucer -- proof of the invasion!  But it doesn't work out.

David made several other male friends during the season, and often rescued them or required rescuing.  And he never fell in love with a girl -- at least, I don't remember any.

Surely the Invaders represented the adults who kept trying to control our minds with their insistance that "one day you'll discover girls."  Later I would call them Tripods.

No more Red Skelton for me -- throughout second grade, Tuesday night meant The Invaders!

The Invaders were indistinguishable from humans, except for hard-to-detect differences, like the absence of a pulse. And they didn't understand human emotions, so they might react incorrectly, pretending to be happy when something sad happened, and so on.

 But they had one tell-tale sign: an extended pinkie finger.

That roiled my sci-fi senses.  If you can disguise yourself as a human with other working fingers, why not that one?

This was the heart of the Cold War, so most people believe that the Invaders symbolized Communists.  People thought that there were Communists infiltrating our society, indistinguishable from us except that they didn't understand human emotions -- Ayn Rand claimed that no one in Russia ever smiled.  No extended pinkie fingers.

So where did the writers get it?

Larry Cohen, who wrote the original screenplay, explains:

The extended pinky used to be a symbol of effeminacy.  When this show was done back in the sixties, the homosexual community was kind of a submerged, invisible community.  People were living secret lives.  I thought, here are these aliens living amongst society, keeping their true identities secret, their true selves secret, and this is funny because the pinky kind of symbolizes homosexuality.

You can read the complete article here.

How ironic that at the age of seven, I believed that David Vincent was gay, fighting the forces of heterosexism, but the writers meant for him to be fighting the Gay Menace!