Cold War Hollywood

Fear, Politics and Ruined Lives

Aug. 24, 2012

12:20 p.m.

When J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, every American who was anyone was under surveillance, and in Hollywood, the bureau maintained files on directors, screenwriters, actors and others and recruited a network of informants who fed the hungry agency with information real or imagined. The FBI was looking for subversives, especially Communists, and as documented in J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War (Cornell University Press), the bureau was convinced that the Party aimed to conquer America through stealth by insinuating Communist ideas into motion pictures in an era when moviegoing was habitual for most Americans. Author John Sbardellati, a University of Waterloo history professor, writes well and succinctly, synthesizing archival documents, contemporary news accounts and secondary literature into a compelling account. Viewing Hollywood as a front in the international struggle between the Capitalist West and the Communist East, the FBI tracked studio employees and analyzed the content of films. Red flags were raised by any movie praised by the Communist Daily Worker newspaper (All Quiet on the Western Front) and negative remarks by Hollywood right-wingers were studiously noted. Cecil B. DeMille's condemnation of The Best Years of Our Lives for portraying the upper class in a bad light found its way into the bureau's files. FBI suspicions were aroused by the Abbott and Costello comedy Buck Privates Come Home for “making the audience unnecessarily class conscious.” And that Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life? The picture represented “a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers” an agent-critic complained. The FBI supplied its findings to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose Congressional hearings stoked the fires of fear that engulfed the U.S. in the late 1940s and '50s, but as Sbardellati concludes, the agency was never able to entirely dictate the content of Hollywood films. Hoover supposedly tried to cut the scene from Samuel Fuller's resolutely anti-Communist film noir Pickup on South Street in which the pickpocket protagonist snidely asks the Commie-chasing cops, “Are you waving the flag at me?” Hoover was appalled by the cynical tone but producer Daryl Zanuck defended the integrity of the character (who did right in the end anyway). “Mr. Hoover,” the mogul reportedly said, “you don't know movies.” An important work that helped recover the history of that era, Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle's Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, has been reissued in paperback by University of Minnesota Press. The authors collected interviews with 35 victims of Hollywood's Cold War purge, most of them screenwriters and none guilty of anything more than naiveté or moral myopia for joining the Communist Part of the Stalinists. A few of the subjects are familiar to devotees of old Hollywood, especially Jules Dassin (director of the film noir Night and the City and The Naked City); obsessive readers of movie credits may recognize many others. But whether well known or obscure, all are unfailingly interesting. Most came to their politics in response to the obvious racial and class injustices are all around them and have stories to tell about the dark corners of Hollywood's fantasy factory as well as their efforts to work (in exile or under cover) when they were banned in the U.S.