“The Freedom of Information legislation passed recently by the U.S. Congress, by which Hiss evidence, suppressed for almost 30 years, has now become accessible to the public was, in a sense, responsible for this film. ‘It will surprise me if the year produces a more illuminating or compelling film than John Lowenthal's The Trials Of Alger Hiss,' wrote critic Robert Hatch in The Nation recently. ‘Besides information that will be new to most viewers, beyond these revelations, one of which is crucial, this new film history gives the case an immediacy and moral force that books and articles, however eloquent, do not achieve.' It is also a great drama. Producer John Lowenthal, for 13 years law professor at Rutgers University, raises doubts anew about the evidence used to convict Hiss of perjury after two long trials in 1950. Hiss, prominent U.S. State Dept. officer, served three years and eight months in Federal Prison at Lewisburg, PA. (Now 74, he has been re-admitted as practising lawyer by the Massachusetts bar.) Marion Kraft, editor on Marcel Ophuls' Memory Of Justice, has managed to achieve a complex sound and picture portrait of an era unknown, lamentably, to many of college and high-school age today, a portrait whose excellence has suggested comparisons to Ophuls' masterly The Sorrow And The Pity (on the French Resistance). Though most of the film is new footage, the self-righteous former president Richard M. Nixon and Hiss accuser, the late Time Magazine editor Whittaker Chambers, play the ambitious avenging angels in the bizarre events of this spellbinding drama.

“‘Hiss was probably the most distinguished fall guy of Cold War I. In January 1950, after a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation and two sensational trials, the former State Department official and Roosevelt aide was found guilty of perjury. He was alleged to have been a Communist spy, but that was in 1938, when the CP was virtually the left wing of the New Deal. The statute of limitations had run out, so Hiss was convicted because he denied passing secrets to his accuser, Time Magazine editor Whittaker Chambers, unstable and self-aggrandizing CP refugee. (Two weeks after Hiss was sent up, the witch-hunting season opened in earnest - “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy popped out of his hole, waving a list of 205 “known Communists” working at the State Department.) Lowenthal's absorbing 166-minute documentary suggests that his trial was a sham and that, whatever he did or didn't do, the government railroaded him to prison.' -J. Hoberman, Village Voice.”

-U. Film Society Note.

The Trials Of Alger Hiss begins its theatrical run at the Surf Theater in San Francisco on Friday, September 19.