Left-wing hero

>> Montreal author Ted Allan makes posthumous noise as the subject of a new documentary

by MATTHEW HAYS

It’s a documentary that’s long overdue: one that focuses on the life of the late brilliant Montreal author Ted Allan. The scribe, for those who don’t know, wrote exceptional plays and books, all from a fierce left-wing perspective.
His life fell apart during the Cold War, when the true extent of Soviet evil was laid bare for the world to see. Indeed, the USSR was far from a Utopia, and instead was a callous dictatorship, as its detractors had long argued—a revelation that tore through Allan’s conscience. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy years and subsequently suffered a severe nervous breakdown.
In what must be one of the most astonishing literary comebacks in history, Allan wrote his way out of anguish with The Secret of the World, a meditation on his faith in ideology and its ultimate collapse. He then collaborated with legendary independent filmmaker John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands on the feature Love Streams, which was based on Allan’s play.
For local filmmaker Merrily Weisbord, who is co-directing the NFB film with Tanya Tree (The Things I Cannot Change), the calling to make a film about Allan came about some eight years ago, when he was still alive. “We realized we had to begin filming Ted Allan,” says Weisbord, “who was then living with only 40 per cent of his heart capacity, if we hoped to capture what the man represented: Canada’s little-known left-wing history, the courage to face and write about the personal and political horrors most of us repress, and Canada’s creative connection to, and influence on, a larger world.”
For Weisbord, who first met Allan when she interviewed him for CBC radio in ’66, the man’s life story was one that simply begged to be told. “Journeying with Ted Allan through his life is an object lesson in the range of human emotion and the transformations of creativity.” :