Posted on 07/04/2018 4:35:18 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
Anti-Communist Films of the ’50s
It is widely believed on the left that the anti-Communist films of the 1950s were hysterical and unprofitable. This characterization originated with blacklisted Hollywood Communists. Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo — both of the Hollywood Ten, the group of Communist screenwriters convicted and jailed for refusing to cooperate with the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee — wrote that these films advocated anti-humanistic, even fascist messages. This theme was expanded by Nation writer Nora Sayre, who argued that Cold War–era Hollywood depicted Communists as deviants, hypocrites, and murderers.
Even more recent reviewers, such as Gwendolyn Audrey Foster of Sense of Cinema, promote this line of thinking. Examining the admittedly awful My Son John (1952), Foster characterizes the film as representative of the anti-Communist genre as a whole:
Every character is a stereotype, every other line of dialogue is a patriotic speech, and the camerawork does the awkward heavy lifting of one-sided propaganda. Plots are often ridiculous and fantastic. Acting is often painful to watch. Every minute of these films is a lecture on the evils of Communism and subversion.
But when Foster lists examples of the anti-Communist genre, she simply excludes films that challenge her thesis. There are many anti-Communist movies that stand the test of time.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s very profitable North by Northwest, for example, the Communist agents aren’t screaming agitprop merchants but smooth upper-class American agents. Protagonist Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), when he finds out that the woman he loves is an American agent tasked with bedding down a Communist spy, criticizes the Cold War for making her perform these acts. The focus of the film lies not in peddling one-dimensional patriotism, but in depicting the net slowly enclosing fugitive Thornhill — a net composed not just of Communist agents, but also of the American establishment.
Another Cold War film, released in 1953, arguably the height of McCarthyism, was profitable and complex. Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) didn’t portray Communists as neurotic fist-clenchers, but as wealthy and cultured Americans. Pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) doesn’t go to war with the Communist agents for home and country; he attacks them because they killed his friend, an essentially harmless old grifter played by Thelma Ritter. McCoy dismisses the police trying to enlist him in fighting Communism as “wrapping me in the flag,” and his one anti-Communist outburst is pretty muted: “You people are supposed to have all the answers,” he says to one of the Communist agents. Against Sayre and company’s view that anti-Communist characters were always portrayed as virtuous and God-fearing, McCoy is a bastard, slapping women and lifting their pocketbooks. He is hardly John Wayne.
Speaking of Wayne, his major — and also profitable — entry in the genre, Big Jim McClain, hardly disdained liberal politics. Playing the titular character, Wayne laments that the Bill of Rights is being corrupted by Stalinist Americans whose eventual goal is to destroy it; but he nevertheless realizes that he has to expose them by following the Constitution. The Communist agents in the film again aren’t hysterics and neurotics but smoothly functioning and well-heeled people, with the exception of one Communist agent who uses a racial slur against blacks. At the film’s conclusion, Wayne’s message isn’t for Americans to lock arms and march and Bible-thump; instead he argues that it is America’s melting pot that is the best defense against Communism. This message was echoed by Wayne critic and liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
What is striking about these films is that, murder aside, they are very close to the mark in depicting American Communists. As Jim McClain suspected, for example, screenwriters such as John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, while publicly defending the Bill of Rights, privately amended it. Behind closed doors, Lawson declared that “fascists” (a term defined rather broadly in his lexicon) were ineligible for free-speech protections. Trumbo would later brag to comrades of how he kept anti-Communist films from being made and of how he suppressed anti-Communist submissions to a Hollywood journal he edited during the war. Far from supporting free speech as editor, he told an anti-Communist writer that “free speech” was what had led to the gas chamber in Germany.
In other words, although there were some specimens of hysteria, by and large the anti-Communist films of the ’50s were reasonably restrained — especially given the Soviet acquisition of the atom bomb, China going Communist, and the Korean War raging.
A lot of the sci-fi films of the 50s had a anti-communist undertone. Consider “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. One the aliens infiltrate society they can literally be anyone. Your neighbor, your best friend, your own wife might be working to destroy the American way of life. This can (and has been) viewed as an allegory to the commies among us, and how they can seem normal and friendly but can be a deadly enemy, even worse than one in uniform manning a tank over there somewhere. Of course now Hollywood would depict them as elevating mankind somehow. Because ... well don’t get me started on Hollywood’s politics.
Excellent article.
And ping to PA for this nice bit of history, since many of those Soviet agents came from the ranks of the Progressives.
The pressure should have never been lifted fromoff the communist scum. That they had enough influence to cast themselves as victims rather than people who needed rooting out only shows how correct the anticommunist were.
But the Useful Idiot Left was too busy standing up for the commies and trying to deny the horrors they inflicted. Even Hemmingway had worked for the NKVD. Now the heirs to their ideological trash are doing their worst to erase our past and bring us to ruin as a nation ... all in the name of social justice.
On YouTube, there is a movie and a radio series “I Was A Communist For The FBI” that rates viewing.
And? She's upset that it got out? Or what?
Big Jim McLain (1952)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044418/
Too bad The Duke didn’t round up the Hawaiian Communists behind t4eh Obama fraud.
Restraint considering McCarthy was right
Pickup On South Street is an under-rated classic. With an unforgettable performance by Thelma Ritter.
Of course, liberals now claim that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a warning against 50’s suburban conformity & social lockstep that elected Eisenhower & later Nixon.
The Pod People were the Silent Majority of their time, you see.
;^)
Exactly what I was thinking, especially on that last. Solzhenitsyn and others showed every thinking human the truth there.
Not from the 1950s, but “The Lives of Others” was apparently one of William F Buckley’s favorite films. Set in East Berlin under communist rule, it shows how humanity enslaved to the state is in misery.
Yet when another side is shown, a heart can change.
Well worth your time.
Anyway, I'm sure that the left has made it about something else because there can't be anything ever that is or was anti-commie, not possible in their minds.
So for example as the dystopian post-apocalyptic stuff took hold in the latter Bush and Obama eras, I came to view that as a sign that we as a society are not optimistic about our future. Not worried about literal zombie outbreaks, of course, but rather that we're in bad times that will never end. Now it will be interesting to see how film changes after a couple of years of Trump.
And before you say it won't, recall that the Hollywood left hated Reagan with a passion. But by the mid 80s the biggest movies were very pro-military and pro-America. Rambo, MIA, Top Gun, etc. Because that's where we were collectively as a society, it was the zeitgeist of the times. And it showed up on the big screen in spite of Hollywood politics.
Go to youtube and search for “Walk East on Beacon,” 1952.
It’s grade B noir goodness!
C’mon. “Missing in Action” with Chuck Norris, or “Norma Rae” with Sally Field?
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