Mr. Jones

One of the most poignant scenes in this film, depicts Gareth Jones' ride in what might be best described as a cattle car packed with starving Ukrainian peasants. As he peels an orange, the others in the car enviously stare at him, their eyes hollowed out in starved faces. He tosses the peel onto the car floor and the peasants pounce on it.This scene is adapted from Jones' March 29, 1933 press release, which ran in the Manchester Guardian and New York Evening Post, among other newspapers, shortly after his return from his March 1933 trip through Ukraine, during which he disembarked from his train 40 miles too soon and made an unauthorized detour through “the black earth region,” Russia's bread basket, only to find mass starvation and death, all a result of Stalin's forced collectivization and export of Ukrainian gain to Moscow.The press release read, in part:“In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. ”Jones was then targeted by considerable blow back from other newspapers against the bald truth he'd exposed, most notably from the New York Times' Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, notorious for his denial of the forced Ukrainian famine that killed millions. The Soviet Union subsequently banned him from again traveling there; worse, the only job open to him was back in Cardiff at the Western Mail, for which he'd written earlier of his Feb. 23, 1933 flight with Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt and the city's boisterous reception of the new chancellor on his arrival.Some of the movie is apparently fictionalized. For example George Orwell figures in the film as working on Animal Farm at the same time as the events depicted, but as Diana West has pointed out, Orwell's Aminal Farm was published in 1945, and he hadn't written it until at least 1943, 10 years after Stalin's manufactured Ukraine famine.Also, in the film, Jones claims to have learned of something “big” from a journalist named Paul Kleb and upon his arrival in Moscow he asks for his friend only to learn that he'd been shot four times in the back outside a prominent Moscow hotel a few days earlier. I can find no history of any Paul Kleb in that period, or ever, journalist or otherwise.I conclude this character is the film maker's anachronistic homage to Paul Klebnikov, the late investigative journalist and Forbes Moscow bureau chief, who was indeed shot four times (from a slow-moving car) in Moscow on July 9, 2004. He died during his transport into surgery in an elevator that broke down.Russia may no longer be Soviet, but its leaders' totalitarian and thuggish tendencies continue.This film has many great features to recommend it, including fine acting and an engaging script, especially to anyone interested in truth. And to quote Jones' character, “There is only one truth.”Alas, very few journalists today pursue it, and the mainstream media in general discourage this pursuit.

Gareth Jones, a British journalist in his late-twenties, rides in a dark, dank, and crowded train car packed with Ukrainian peasants. After he peels an orange and carelessly tosses the skin away, several passengers scurry onto the floor in an attempt to gather something to eat. They are starving. Indeed, all of Ukraine and much of the Soviet Union is starving due to the forced collectivization of farmland and seizure of grain by Stalin’s Communist Party.This is one of the most harrowing and enduring scenes from the remarkable film, “Mr. Jones” (2019), based upon the real-life investigative journalism of Welsh-born Gareth Jones that uncovered the Holodomor, the mass starvation of millions of Ukrainians by man-made famine. The film is remarkable not only for the times and events it recreates so compellingly, but also due to the fact that it was even made. While there have justifiably been scores of films depicting the Holocaust, the number of movies presenting the story of the Holodomor have been few to non-existent.Jones first arrives in Moscow as a young and naïve “stringer” or freelance journalist hoping to get an interview with Soviet leader Josef Stalin. He wants to understand how the Soviet Union has transformed itself into a modern, industrious, and egalitarian “workers’ paradise” in only five years. Supposedly it is due to “Stalin’s gold”, the miles and miles of grain fields in Ukraine. However, he is shocked when many of his colleagues, including Walter Duranty – the New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his fawning coverage of the Soviet “miracle” – are willing to look the other way after a fellow journalist named Paul Kleb has been shot dead with four bullets in the back. Jones discovers that Kleb was on to something happening in Ukraine, one of the Soviet “republics”. When Ada, a reporter from Berlin, explains that her lack of inquisitiveness surrounding the murder of a friend and colleague is because the communist cause is too important, Jones is appalled. He tells her that he wants to find the truth. “Who’s truth?” Ada asks. “There is only one truth,” replies Jones.And indeed, Jones is determined to go to Ukraine in pursuit of the truth. After eluding his “big brother” – a government-assigned chaperone – Jones witnesses not fields of gold, but starvation and death. From dead bodies frozen in the snow, to skeletal laborers being forced to load sacks of grain onto trains, to starving, orphaned children resorting to cannibalism, Jones confirms his suspicions – that the Soviet government has been telling lies and western journalists have been enabling those lies.Interspersed throughout the film are scenes of George Orwell composing his great allegorical fable of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm. When Orwell describes bleating sheep mindlessly repeating the various propagandistic phrases which the ruling pigs have pronounced that day – we understand perfectly to whom he is referring, the media.P.S. Please ignore the reviews which say this film is slow or boring. Those are probably from people who only like action films and don't have the patience to let characters develop and a story to unfold. There is one scene of nudity, however.

Estremamente interessante per chi, come me, niente sapeva del pezzo di storia di cui si parla. Interessante e agghiacciante. James Norton è sempre di più un magnifico attore, intenso e contenuto, poco appariscente ma in grado di comunicare tutti i sentimenti del mondo con uno sguardo.

Eines vorweg: bei der Bestellung darauf achten, dass der Film als DVD (!) hier nur in der englischsprachigen Version vorliegt.Der Film selbst wird von der künstlerischen Umsetzung leider den Ansprüchen nicht ganz gerecht.Einige Szenen hätte man sich sparen können die zum eigentlichen Thema des Films nichts beitragen, dafür hätte man den Holodomor selbst (also den Hunger-Völkermord in der Ukraine unter Stalin) klarer herausarbeiten können.Pointiert gesagt: etwas weniger Filmkunst und mehr authentisches Dokudrama wäre angebrachter gewesen.Da es aber bisher der einzige internationale Film ist der sich überhaupt mit dieser vernachlässigten Thematik befasst dennoch eine absolute Kaufempfehlung!

OK

The film acknowledges that it uses poetic licence in telling the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’ exposé of the Great Famine in Ukraine in the early nineteen thirties, but it is none the worse for that, because how else can you film the starvation of millions of people? It is not an ordinary blockbuster and you need to know some of the main characters such as Lloyd George, Litvinenko, Sir Ernest Bennett, Hearst, Orwell, Seeley, Muggeridge, Duranty and other real persons. However, the original film lasted 140 minutes but the DVD only 115 minutes so some of the lesser "reals" may have been edited out. The fiction - it is denied that Jones actually ate human flesh, though when he sees where the meat a starving girl has just cooked for him and her siblings, he throws up - does cover the essentials of what actually happened. For me the main flaw in the film were scenes which do not add to the story, and mainly ones taken underneath trains rushing to and fro across Russia. The story starts with Jones being a foreign affairs adviser to Lloyd George, who remained an MP until he died in March 1945. His claim to fame being one of the first journalists to fly with Hitler after he became Chancellor in January 1933. Jones had been to the Ukraine in 1931 and seen and reported on famine then. By 1932 he was hearing reports of an even greater famine (denied by the authorities: the Western press in Moscow had to report these denials – questioning them was not an option), and wanted to go and see for himself. At the time he was working as a foreign affairs adviser to Lloyd George, now only a back-bench MP. His excuse for going was to find out how the Soviet Union was finding the money to pay for the imports needed for the Five Year Plan of industrialisation. Lloyd George gave him a letter of introduction to Maxim Litvinov who held the top foreign affairs brief in the Kremlin, and was well-regarded in the West - there was surprise that he was not eliminated in the Great Purges, especially as he was Jewish. Jones gets back to Moscow in March 1933. He has a booking at the Metropole Hotel, but is refused a room as the hotel is fully booked for a Metro-Vick conference (then a major British industrial firm seeking sales in Russia). It turns out the receptionist was lying about the hotel being fully booked. He meets up with the Western press led by Walter Duranty, Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times (1922-1936). When he asks about the famine Duranty denies it, but makes it clear that if you want to cover Russia, you couldn't criticise it. Jones goes to a party for westeners which would out-do a Roman orgy. He meets a clothesless Duranty and comments he never expected to see a stark naked Pulitzer Prize winner. (Later Duranty's "lies" about the Soviet Union led to calls for his Pulitzer Prize to be withdrawn: it wasn't.) Jones takes the train to Ukraine, losing his “minder”, who also denies the famine, on the way, and sees the horrors of the famine while trekking across snowbound landscapes:Dead bodies in the street,Deserted villages, some with houses containing the corpses of their owners,People fighting over scraps of food,Emaciated adults and children,Cannibalism – see above,Two men collecting corpses who come across a crying child and simply throw it onto their barrow – there is nothing else they can do.And the continual refrain of, “We have no bread!”He also meets people who, at danger to themselves, explain that those who run the collective farms have no idea how to grow wheat, and suggestions of other crops show total misunderstanding of the soil. what is grown has to be shipped away to feed the industrial proletariat. He even gets roped in to helping load bags of grain onto lorries. He is eventually caught by the NKVD and made to sign a confession, before being allowed to leave the USSR. In Berlin he does get a press release published in the UK and the USA. However he has problems getting his reports published more widely, and Duanty was still saying there was no famine. The difficulty was that the British Government and industry wanted to maintain friendly relations with the USSR on account of it being a growing market for Western capital goods. Claiming something which "hadn't happened" would not go down well in the Kremlin. At one point he meets George Orwell who quotes lines about dictators from a book he is planning. (Animal Farm was published in 1945.) He retires to Wales and works for the Western Mail reporting local issues. However, on learning that William Randolph Hearst was staying at his castle (St Donat’s) in Glamorgan he blags his way in to see him and persuades him to publish his articles. In 1934 Jones is in Manchuko where in August he is captured by bandits and held for ransom. Later that month he was found dead with three bullet wounds. It is believed the NKVD was responsible.The references to Metro-Vick are related to the show trial in April 1933 of 6 British employees accused of espionage and wrecking. Although found guilty, they were eventually freed after intensive diplomatic negotiations. The arrests followed a speech in January 1933 by Stalin about getting rid of counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs.

This is a review of the 2020 Region 2 DVD from Signature Entertainment, a fairly new, smallish, Independent production and distribution company. I was slightly concerned, given the unknown provenance, and the lack of an English language Blu-ray at a less than eye-watering price, that the quality might be questionable. I need not have worried: this very inexpensive DVD provided excellent picture and sound quality.James Norton has already become a major player in the list of younger British acting talent, after his evil turn as Tommy Lee Royce in the BBC’s sublime ‘Happy Valley’, and his starring role in ITV’s ‘Grantchester’ series, plus ‘War and Peace’, ‘McMafia’ and several good films. Here, he really shoulders the burden, taking up the bulk of the screen time in this eviscerating 2 hour exposé of Russia’s previous atrocity in Ukraine, and the murky individuals and politics that surrounded it.This film uses a biography of Welshman Gareth Jones ~ Norton ~ to explain, in horrifyingly authentic detail, the ‘Holodomor’, a famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933. Jones was a Welsh journalist and (briefly) Foreign Affairs advisor to ex Prime Minister Lloyd George. A brilliant linguist, he visited the Soviet Union, and travelled unofficially in Ukraine, then returned to the UK and reported on the horrors he had witnessed.Norton is very very good. He is a picture of sincerity, determination and outrage. Peter Sarsgaard, as the deeply suspect Anglo-American journalist Walter Duranty, is equally good. Durante, a Holodomor-denier, was Moscow Bureau Chief for ‘The New York Times’ from 1922 to 1936.Ukraine was closed to foreigners at the time. Then, as now, it was a vast, and vastly significant, grain-growing area, providing huge income and resource for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The USSR was going through immense changes and upheavals following the Communist Revolution of 1917, not least in agriculture. There is still some academic dispute as to whether this was the root cause of the monstrous famine that gripped Ukraine, or whether it was actually caused by deliberate malign intent by Stalin, to crush potential Ukrainian rebellion. Whichever, the result was the death through starvation of anything from 3.5 to 10 million Ukrainians, and the appalling suffering of millions more. Starvation, in the bread basket of Europe! Whatever the cause, Stalin did nothing to end the suffering, and the USSR strove to keep the famine secret. Indeed, the film shows that they were willing to pursue extreme measures to ensure it did not become known on the international stage.The film is totally chilling. Fantastically well filmed, in Ukraine, Poland (Kraków stands in for Moscow) and Scotland during 2018, director Agnieszka Holland uses the frozen desolation of Eastern European winter to underline the want and despair that gripped the population of Ukraine. The shrieking wind and the hungry eyes fill the screen. It is absolutely brilliant and totally sickening. By the end, my husband and I were torn between sheer fury and tears. Watching this film in the light of current events, just adds to the emotion.This film is not an easy watch. It is however, essential viewing. 5 appalling Stars.NB: BEWARE! There is also a VERY iffy 1993 Romantic Comedy starring Richard Gere, which has the same title and appears on the same product page!