White Lies, New Zealand, 2013

 
So what should you do if you're a Communist and you live in a capitalist country? If it's not going to change any time soon. Should you become a capitalist yourself? Would you have much choice? There were some surprisingly wealthy Communists in the United States. I knew a former Communist from LA. There were older Communists there who owned a lot of rental properties. It could be that Communist Party members lived modestly enough---working class lifestyles with perhaps middle class incomes---that they had more money to invest. Communists were like Calvinists.

And what do you do if you're black in a country dominated by white racists? In what was perhaps an analogous situation, there was a 1949 movie, Lost Boundaries. It begins in the 1920s. A light-skinned African-American doctor and his wife decide to pass for white. They move to a New England town where he opens an office. Passing for white means they have to cut themselves off from all their family and friends. They can't have obviously black relatives coming to the house for Thanksgiving. The movie is public domain. You can find it on YouTube and elsewhere.

There's a moment of suspense in the film. The wife becomes pregnant. If the baby doesn't look as white as they do, they'll be exposed.

It reminded me of the Soviet TV mini-series, Seventeen Moments of Spring, about Soviet agents spying on the Nazis during World War Two. There's a Soviet couple. The wife is pregnant. They're worried she'll cry out in Russian while giving birth and expose them.

And there was the movie White Lies, (New Zealand, 2013) in which a Maori midwife is hired to induce an abortion in a rich obnoxious woman whose husband is away and will be terribly, terribly upset with her when he gets back if he finds out about the baby. The woman has an extremely loyal older Maori woman servant. Some twists to the story. A pretty good movie. Available on Fandor.