TV programs worth watching
Sun March 21 — Sat March 27

The ruling class is invariably fascinated by tales of rich 
young aristocrats like Francis of Assisi who renounce their 
wealth and privileges in order to live among the poor. The very 
idea is so weird to the bourgeoisie that they have either to 
assume that the fellow is a total nutter or else concede that he 
is "carrying out the work of God".

Members of the Catholic Church were frequently reminded that 
Christ had been less than enthusiastic about people amassing 
private wealth. Giving up your riches for a life of pious poverty 
had a long tradition, and probably guaranteed your entry into 
Heaven.

People like Francis of Assisi allowed the members of the ruling 
class to feel good about themselves: see what good people we are 
underneath, really? As long as these converts to religious 
poverty contented themselves with feeling sorry for the poor, 
they would be canonised and held up as examples for us all.

The embracers of poverty who are so highly exalted by the ruling 
class, from St Francis to Mother Theresa (now to be a saint 
herself, of course) have one thing in common: they never called 
on the poor to take back the wealth the rich had so obviously 
stolen from them in the first place.

No. Poverty was part of God's plan and had nothing to do with the 
wealthy. No wonder the ruling class made them saints!

Lost Worlds: Francesco (SBS 7.30pm Sundays) is a four-part 
drama series that recounts the life (yet again) of Francis of 
Assisi. For those who are interested in that sort of thing.

According to Cutting Edge: Straddling The Fence (SBS 
8.30pm Tuesday) in the past three years more than 100 Palestinian 
suicide bombings have killed nearly 900 Israelis.

The program does not acknowledge that the suicide bombings are 
the last resort of a people driven to desperation by unceasing 
Israeli aggression that has claimed the lives of tens of 
thousands of Palestinians.

Now Israel is building a huge wall (on Palestinian land, not 
Israeli, mind you) to keep the Palestinians out. Together with 
continued Israeli settlements in Palestine, the wall will mean 
the end of any chance for a separate Palestinian state.

This program is a "report" on the wall by New York Times 
columnist and three times Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman. 
All Mr Friedman's various interviews, with supporters and 
opponents of the wall, show one thing (although in many cases 
inadvertently): the enormity of the aggressive, racist apartheid 
mentality behind its construction.

In fact, one interviewee, lawyer Muhammad Dahleh, sees a campaign 
for "one person, one vote and majority rule" as the eventual 
logical solution for the Palestinians as it was for the South 
Africans, for, he points out, within a decade Palestinians will, 
in terms of population, outnumber Israelis in Israel, the West 
Bank and Gaza.

If only the programs about archeologists uncovering traces of 
ancient civilsations that litter the National Geographic Channel 
and the History Channel could all be like The Big Picture: The 
Secret of Eldorado (ABC 8.30pm Wednesday).

Made by the BBC's Horizon team, it is intelligent without being 
pretentious, revealing without pretending to be about to uncover 
AMAZING FACTS and encounter INCREDIBLE DANGER every five minutes 
(apparently to accommodate US commercial breaks).

It has a scientific approach to its scientific subject and is 
intensely interesting as a consequence.

Its subject is the search for traces of a vast Amazonian 
civilisation that were reported to exist by a Spanish 
conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, in 1540. Subsequent 
expeditions a century later could find no trace of the 
civilisation he described.

Modern archeologists also scoffed, because before you can have a 
civilisation you must have developed intensive agriculture to 
support it, and the red clay soil of the Amazon basin is too poor 
to support a large population. Even with contemporary technology, 
the jungle is unproductive.

But discoveries of sophisticated pottery and burial sites — far 
beyond anything made by the jungle tribes today — lead 
archeologists to the realisation that there really was once a 
great Amazonian civilisation — one that tamed the jungle and 
built huge towns surrounded by moats, all linked by canals and 
causeways.

It's a fascinating program.

There were, as the House UnAmerican Activities Committee would 
point out in horror a decade later, quite a number of Communist 
writers working in Hollywood in the 1930s and early '40s.

Some of them, like John Howard Lawson, were involved in founding 
and then running the Screen Writers' Guild, as well as writing 
films that supported Republican Spain, opposed Nazi Germany and 
supported the Soviet Union as a WW2 ally.

In films as diverse as Tender Comrade (written by Dalton 
Trumbo), The Seventh Cross (script by Helen Deutsch from 
Anna Seghers' novel) and Body And Soul (written by Abraham 
Polonsky), Communist writers and progressive writers influenced 
by the Party attempted to raise serious issues beneath the gloss 
insisted on by the Studio heads.

Some Communist writers however simply couldn't hack it in the 
phoney atmosphere of Hollywood. One such was the great playwright 
Clifford Odets, whose time in the movie capital was unhappy and 
not very productive.

One film he did manage to script and then direct was None But 
The Lonely Heart (ABC 10.30pm Saturday) in 1944. Based on 
Richard Llewellyn's novel about a Cockney drifter and his mother, 
the film had detractors as well as defenders, but today is 
generally well regarded.

The American Film Institute noted that "the off-beat casting of 
Cary Grant as the Cockney wanderer Ernie Mott and Ethel 
Barrymore's sad and wonderful portrayal of his mother make this a 
revealing and poetically sensitive film of haunting moods and 
desperate yearnings.

"Grant is exceptional as 'the tramp of the Universe' — an 
amazing characterisation of bewilderment and arrogance."

The critic of The New York Times remarked at the time of 
the film's release that "this picture will not be widely accepted 
just now, but  it will be remembered — and revived — long after 
many current favourites are forgotten".