My grandmother got me interested in silent and early talkie movies, when I was very little, by telling me about them. So when they appeared on T.V., I watched them and was even more fascinated by them. I don't know if they still do, but MOMA used to show silents one night a week, so I had the chance to see even more obscure old movies that way.
You need to see the complete OUR DAILY BREAD; it's even MORE obviously far lefty when seen that way !
American rabid far lefties and those who were just FELLOW TRAVELERS were not part of a naive generation! I think that you need to look into this a bit more closely and don't forget that there were Fabian Socialists here too; not just in England.
Maybe I do make a little distinction between the kind of abrasive leftism (and manipulative messaging in the writing styles) of the Hollywood Ten types and the earlier homegrown populist-tinged material. Sort of the difference between downright offensive propagandistic crap like “Salt of the Earth” versus the mild populism often found in 1930s Gene Autry films. Overall, when I get the whiff of a soapbox, I get really annoyed at a film, whether it’s some obviously devised undercurrent, like in “Force of Evil,” which equated capitalism with criminality, or even in “The Ox-Bow Incident,” with its somewhat less-political anti-vigilante theme. Maybe what it is that gets under my skin is when I sense a film being deliberately designed to push a “message” (propaganda) and thus sublimating characterization and narrative, versus a film that might just be telling a story that might come from a left/populist mindset but isn’t concerned with messaging.
There were also a tiny handful of specifically anti-commie items in the 1930s, like “Red Salute” and “Soak the Rich.” Both came on the USA network in the early-1980s. I taped the former, and still have it around here somewhere. Interesting stuff. Then, there were lots of little obscurities like “Gun Smoke” (1931), an oddball modern-day western with Richard Arlen, which would give libs the vapors with some of its sentiments. A good number of films like that from back then.