“Bethune and the Canadian Political Biopic” by Brian Mcilroy [Delivered
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“Bethune and the Canadian Political Biopic” By Brian McIlroy [Delivered at the Film Studies Association of Canada Annual conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 27 May 2000] Philip Borsos, the B.C. filmmaker who died at the early age of 41 in 1995, will be remembered in any future Canadian film history as the director of the canonical The Grey Fox (1982) and, I suspect, the enormous co-production with China and France that resulted in Bethune—The Making of a Hero that was released in 1990/91 after four years of interrupted production and post-production. Figures that I have found suggest that at $18 million (Canadian) the film biography was the most expensive Canadian film ever made. Our national agencies, Telefilm and the CBC, were heavily involved in the support of this project, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the film and its production history provide us with a meditation on the nature of Canadian heroism, and how contingent it is on a combination of personal, governmental, external and unforeseen passions and actions. In thinking about Borsos’ film, I was drawn to the history of Biopics, and in this area we are well served by George Custen’s 1992 book on the subject. Custen’s focus is on classical Hollywood film from 1927-1960, utilizing a cultural and structuralist methodology to try to get a handle on nearly 3,000 biographical films from the major and minor studios. Custen claims only three of these films were on a Canadian subject, two of them on the Dionne Quintuplets. Custen divides up the main categories into professions among which include medical/scientific success. And Bethune would fit here. But he would also fit as an adventurer and as a politician of sorts. Custen argues that biopics served the purpose to render popular history for the masses. We get to see the seeds of greatness in the ordinary human being. The more like us that these people are, the more we can hope to be great, too. At the same time, biopics could also emphasize difference or uniqueness in order to place the hero above the ordinary viewer. This tack was sometimes useful to explain how an asshole could nonetheless be admired. Not unreasonably, Custen believes that the biopic fell from grace after 1960, its purpose and format claimed by television, and no-one can deny that the biopic documentary (Biography on A &E and the “disease of the week” TV movie based on individual lives have become mainstays of the multi-channel universe we inhabit. Yet biographical films continue to be made—Nixon, Malcolm X, Hurricane, Erin Brockovich, and I think you would agree that they often provoke debate and inevitably fall victim, to critics obsessed with perceived fidelity to the “facts.” Bethune has an impressive legacy in this country and more so in China. In his forty-nine years, Norman Bethune became a famous thoracic surgeon in Montreal, renowned for his fight against poverty and tuberculosis—a passion that by all accounts was certainly stimulated by his own near-death experience from contracting the disease in the 1920s. He had one of his lungs deflated, thereby preventing the spread of the disease. This was then a risky procedure, untested, but it did the trick and Bethune returned to work to specialize in respiratory ailments. The link between poverty and disease was obvious and maddening, and urged him to become political and to visit the Soviet Union to observe medical practices within a communist system. In Montreal, he called for socialized medicine, thereby upsetting both religious authorities and business interests. His remove to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was noteworthy for his innovations in creating mobile blood units to transfusions at or near the site of conflict. He returned to Canada a public hero after some nine months, but in actual fact he had been sent home by his sponsors—the Communist Party of Canada—for alleged womanizing, heavy drinking and conflicts with his Spanish hosts. In China, he came to represent international socialism. In specific terms, he was instrumental in reorganizing the medical care of Mao’s Red Army, who were fighting both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists under Chang-Kai-Chek. The fact that he died from an infection caused while treating an injured soldier further added to his mythic quality. Many Chinese read in school Mao’s elegy for Bethune. Today there is a Norman Bethune University in China, which has medical and research links with Laval University. When the Chinese table-tennis team visited Canada in 1972 and asked to visit Bethune’s birthplace, Ottawa officials greeted them with confused expressions and dumb shock. Perhaps prompted by this embarrassment, the Government of Canada bought the house in 1973 and have turned it into an historic site. There’s also Bethune College at York University whose mandate is to encourage that link between science and society that so energized the good doctor himself. Bethune’s legacy from his death in 1939 to the early 1970s was therefore conflicted and undervalued, though it brings attention to the 1964 NFB documentary on Bethune, put together by Donald Brittain and John Kemeny with narration by Lister Sinclair. This film renewed debate on his importance, even if one senses the unease with dealing with a communist hero. Martin Knelman suggests that this documentary was used to better relationships with China, with a nod to enabling enormous sales of Canadian wheat. It’s also of interest that the Chinese did make a feature film entitled Dr. Bethune in 1964, though apparently censored until 1977. Bethune, an inductee in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, has been the topic of a range of studies in the last few years: from John Wilsons biographical account for young adults for XYZ publishing in 1999 to Larry Hannant’s scholarly edition of Bethune’s writings for the University of Toronto Press in 1998. But it is the 1952 biography by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon, The Scalpel and the Sword that has been influential. Though relied upon for the 1964 NFB film, the publication coincided with a general paranoia about communism in North American culture and society, and it explains in large part why Allan was unsuccessful in persuading Hollywood studios to make a biopic. Allan wrote his first screenplay on Bethune in 1942 and that he persevered for nigh on fifty years with this subject and ultimately succeeded is remarkable. It came, however, at a great cost, particularly to Allan’s reputation and affected the construction of the narrative of the 1990 film and ultimately its lukewarm reception. Larry Hannant has pointed out that Ted Allan’s recollections of his relationship and importance to Bethune do not accord with existing written documentation. Normally, this discrepancy should only be of passing interest since any biographical film has to select, condense, conflate and take a position. But what complicates matters is the feeling that Allan’s personal influence on Bethune’s legacy is so pervasive that it hobbles its subject. It’s undeniable that Bethune’s life does fall naturally into discrete segments: his religious upbringing, his service in the First World War, his development of a practice in Detroit, his TB and remove to a sanatorium; his recovery and focused attack on the TB epidemic in Montreal; his political interests leading to involvement in Spain and, finally, China. Arguably, Bethune’s experiences in the First World War could be seen as pivotal but are omitted from the film. Allan knew Bethune in mid 1930s Montreal. They both went off to Spain, though separately. Allan claims that it was he that served as the political commissar who effectively had Bethune returned to Canada for dissolute behaviour. Hannant finds these claims self-serving and basically fictional. But it works its way into the Borsos film. The character Chester Rice (played by Colm Feore) is the Allan-like researcher and biographer who queries Bethune, his co-workers and friends to initiate visual reflections. Borsos wanted the film to be chronological, in order to show Bethune’s development more fully. It seems Donald Sutherland had similar ideas. Actor and writer fought over the interpretation. The producers Pieter Kroonenberg and Nicolas Clermont eventually took Borsos off the editing of the film. The Chinese were happy that Bethune’s womanizing was restricted to Caucasian women, though by various accounts Bethune did have casual relationships with Chinese women. This, of course, is not terribly heroic stuff. The Chinese were oddly obsessed with cleanliness: on the set, too: Borsos would have Sutherland daubed in blood for a scene, only to find the Chinese regularly run in to clean him up. Reviews of the film and its production provoked many to comment: Martin Knelman’s title “Anataomy of a Fiasco” speaks for itself; Stanley Kauffman viewed Bethune as represented as a “committed humanitarian eccentric”; Newsday offered the typical American individualist review—“a cantankerous medical reformer”; The Beijing Review was less forgiving, with the sombre title, “Depiction of hero Should be based on Fact,” though the reviewer had no evidence to bring of any distortion. Scott Forsyth in Canadian Dimension seemed alone in his enthusiasm--“Bethune—a moment to cheer.” Larry Hannant talked of the film as “Doctoring Bethune,” but perhaps the most interesting cultural observation was that of Brian Johnson’s in MacLeans magazine, who wrote of Sutherland getting up on the stage after its premiere in Montreal: “Stepping up to a microphone, Sutherland made a short but impassioned speech about the necessity of a publicly funded movie industry in Canada. ‘You can’t begin to believe how important it is for this country that Telefilm Canada exists,’ he said.