I never heard that before! Well, that may have been the way the producers thought of the film, but I still think it works as an allegory of the rest of the world vs. the US. I just won't mention the psycho-Hollywood viewpoint... ;-)
An American President. What the Klintoon administration would have been like without Hillary's baggage. I'd like to see them make a movie about what the Klintoon administration would have been like without Klintoon.
Here's a link for the black-listed writer, Carl Foreman, who did the screenplay:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0286025/bio
I haven't seen it, but there was a PBS show about the squabble between Foreman and
another crew-member about the writing credits for the film.
Even if the writer intended a McCarthy-writers allegory, I always saw it as being like
a Bugs Bunny cartoon: it works on a number of levels.
It's a decent Western, it's a bit of a love story, it says something about locale
control (the comment by one character about the folks in the state capitol not
understanding how things worked in their town), and even a Cold-War of the USA and a very
few friends staying the course against the tough Communists.