The Heroic Mr. Jones: Why Have We Never Heard of Him Before?

Peter Sarsgaard as Walter Duranty in Mr. Jones.

I have already placed a notice about the film, "Mr. Jones," here at Target Liberty (see The Holodomor: Exposing What Stalin Did to Ukraine) and remarked that it appeared impressive.

Since then I have seen the film, available on Prime Video, and I have to second what Don Boudreaux has written about it:

How can I have spent 43 years immersed in the literature of liberalism and have never heard, until just a few days ago, of the heroic Gareth Jones? Jones (1905-1935) is the man who exposed the lies that New York Times reporter – and Pulitzer Prize-winner – Walter Duranty spewed to cover-up the Ukrainian mass murder carried out in the 1930s by Stalin.

A few days ago I watched the 2019 movie Mr. Jones. It is spectacular, if deeply grim – grim as it must be to tell the terrible truth that it tells.

 Here’s the final paragraph of Kyle Smith’s review of this remarkable film: Back in Moscow, Duranty shrugs at all this: 

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” he says, speaking for all of the genocidal murderers who viewed people as brunch. Duranty really did publish this grotesque cliche (already in common use at the time) in the March 31, 1933, edition of the Times. He and Mr. Jones faced two very different fates after the events depicted in this film; one of them was murdered in 1935 and the other died in Orlando, Fla., at a ripe old age. You can probably guess which is which. To this day, Mr. Jones is all but unknown and his courage is unsung by his inky heirs, whereas Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize remains on the books even after a thousand other things have been canceled. Meanwhile, Mr. Jones joins the unconscionably brief list of brutally honest films about Communism.

The New York Times columnist Walter Duranty reported from Stalin's Soviet Union and reported regular lies about how wonderful everything was under communism. He even received the Pulitzer Prize for his lies. Jones told the truth about the Holodomor. This film is that story and more.

Kyle Smith again:

The genius move of this scathing and suspenseful film by Poland’s Agnieszka Holland (who was once arrested by the Soviets, during the Prague Spring) is in whom it selects to be the menacing, dead-eyed apparatchik with a cold determination to search out and destroy any threats to the regime: He is none other than Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s man in Moscow, or rather Moscow’s man at the New York Times. Duranty is portrayed by one of the screen’s true masters of all things snaky and slimy, Peter Sarsgaard. Sarsgaard, Holland, and screenwriter Andrea Chalupa perform such a vicious act of celluloid vivisection on Duranty that Mr. Jones may restore your faith in movies.

Duranty, the one-legged Anglo-American granddaddy of fake news, was, as the film makes vividly clear, not a lazy hack who stuck with a comfy narrative because it was the easiest thing to do (like most journos) or a cynic who thinks all sides stand equal in their sins (like many other journos)...He was, rather, an active and fervent defender of an evil regime and consequently a deeply evil man himself

This film will want to make you fight the cancel culture and lefty propagandists even more, before it is too late. The useful idiots must be turned away from the advocacy of central planning. This film shows you what will happen if the advance of the modern-day Marxists is not stopped.

It is available on Amazon.

-RW