Art, Politics, and Howard Zinn

Warming up with ‘Burn’ at the Coolidge Corner Theater

T.S. Elliot famously wrote that April was the cruelest month but, for my money, April, in Boston at least, ain’t got nothing on March. For that matter, all the months since last September (when I lost my job in the general economic meltdown) have been pretty cruel, except maybe for November, when Obama was elected and Bush booted.

But last Monday, standing on the corner of Harvard and Beacon in Brookline, the sun setting and the sleet spitting, the afterglow of Obama’s election provided but cold comfort as the chill crept into my bones. What I needed was a warm, well-lighted place (or a warm, dark place), and that’s how I ended up with both, at the Coolidge Corner Theater, a box of good butter-drizzled popcorn on my lap, listening to Matt Damon’s favorite radical historian (see “Good Will Hunting”), BU professor emeritus and author of “A People’s History of the United States” Howard Zinn introducing Gillo Pontecorovo’s 1970 anti-colonial epic, “Burn,” starring Marlon Brando.

The Coolidge’s big, gorgeous art deco main theater was about two-thirds filled with a chronologically heterogeneous crowd wearing Boston’s March uniform of parkas, watch caps, boots and red cheeks as Zinn, remarkably hale and hearty at 87, told the story of how he had tried to screen “Burn” for a class during the Vietnam War only to discover that United Artists had pulled it out of distribution. When Zinn called UA to ask why, he was told (he said) “because it’s a dirty, rotten, obscene film.” “Rotten to supporters of imperialism,” Zinn commented to much applause from an audience ready to boo colonialists, imperialists, capitalists, and anyone else who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Zinn or watching Brando trying to represent all the evils of white male Western civilization in the person of his foppish English secret agent. (Think Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”)

“Burn” turned out to be more agitprop than drama, more politics than art as it told its story of a slave rebellion on the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada at first spurred on by Brando and then, ten years later, suppressed by the now-alcoholic and jaded secret agent man. Brando, with wavy blonde hair, a rugged blonde beard, wearing an array of brightly-colored scarves, was still slim and handsome then, and declared “Burn” his favorite performance ever. That’s silly (what about “On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” or “Reflections in a Golden Eye”?) but Brando always felt a little embarrassed that he made his living doing something as lightweight as acting rather than something important like—I don’t know—leading revolutions against The Man?

Me, I’d be glad to be making a living doing anything these days, but as New England’s endless winter drags on and on and on, I’m grateful that the Coolidge Corner (http://www.coolidgecorner.org/) is there to offer warmth, snacks, and movies and programs that are out of the mainstream, out of the ordinary, and out of the cold.