Hollywood's Red Decade

As movie-goers, theatre owners and studio shareholders endure yet another wave of anti-American box office duds like Rendition and Lions for Lambs it is worth remembering that left wing propaganda has real roots in Hollywood. And thanks to the character of our media and cultural establishment, we rarely get to hear about them.

One of the big disappointments concerning domestic communism is that we'll never hear the full story from their end. The losing side ordinarily has plenty to say once the dust settles -- what went wrong, who was to blame, how they could have done better. But not the American rojos. Alger Hiss denied to his dying day, in the face of evidence that would have convicted the Pope, that he had been a Soviet agent. (Hiss went so far as to get a leading Russian historian, Dmitri Volkoganov, up from his sickbed -- Volkoganov was dying of cancer -- to look through KGB files for evidence.

Hiss in fact worked for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. This was a propaganda ploy. You may as well look for a CIA agent in FBI files.)

The same is true of the Hollywood communists, one of the largest and most active Communist Party groups during the Red Decade -- roughly 1936-1946. There never were any Hollywood communist propaganda films, we're assured. Nope, they say, Mayer or Goldwyn or Warner would have found out and spanked everybody involved. The Red hunters imagined it all.

We can take this as seriously as we do the claims of Hiss. The films are out there, many of them still available on VHS or DVD. They are what they are, and there's no denying it. A closer look will provide us with a useful introduction to the art of failed propaganda. (There's one other good reason for the denials: these films are strange. It's as if they were made by people who were raised in basements and educated solely through Communist Party tracts. Which, in fact, may be nothing less than the truth.)

One reason these films are hard to sweep under the rug is that several (North Star, Mission to Moscow, and Song of Russia) were made at the behest of none other than FDR himself. Roosevelt had been hearing muttering from voters over our "alliance" with the USSR, and with one eye no doubt on the ‘44 elections, asked the studios to help drum up support for the Soviets. The industry was quick to comply.

North Star (also called Armored Attack, 1943) stands as one of the weirdest war films ever made, fully as demented, in its own way, as Plan Nine From Outer Space. At first glance, this is a perfectly professional effort, directed by Lewis Milestone, auteur of All Quiet on the Western Front, and starring Ann Baxter, Dana Andrews, both Walter Huston and Walter Brennan (must have been confusing on the set), and Erich von Stroheim. To top it off, Aaron Copland handled the score.

But after this list of luminaries, we get to the clinker: Lillian Hellman. his film is all the evidence needed to show that Hellman was an unmitigated hack.

It's long been speculated that the actual hand behind her successful plays (Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine) was in fact her longtime lover, Dashiell Hammett. (For one thing, Hammett never published another word after hooking up with Hellmann.) North Star closes that case. At the time Hammett was doing his war service in the Aleutians -- even though he was some years overage -- and not around for rewrites. So Hellmann had to do it herself, and the result was this dreadful mess of a movie.

First we get a half-hour of the Bliss of Working for Comrade Stalin on the Ukrainian Collective Farm, a first chapter that could have been made in the USSR itself without upsetting the most doctrinaire commissar. When the Nazis pull in (an alternate title is Armored Attack, but they're all on motorcycles as far as I can see), the male kolkhozniks head for the woods to begin their heroic resistance. (In fact, the Ukrainians, having survived a forced famine a decade earlier, often enough welcomed the Germans as liberators until the SS massacres began.) The women remain, bothered not at all by the Nazi troops, who use the farm as an aid station.

We endure a lengthy stretch of huggermugger and melodramatic confrontations between Von Stroheim and Brennan, playing a wise old muzhik, climaxing with a revelation of Nazi evil: the Wehrmacht doctors are snatching the village children and draining their blood for transfusions! Whoa!

Now, the Ukrainians were Slavs, which meant that, to the Nazi mentality, they were Untermenschen barely a step above the Jews and Gypsies. It's doubtful any Nazi doctor would have used their blood for any such thing. At least one case occurred where an SS officer allowed himself to bleed to death because a U.S. Army doctor told him that the plasma supply almost certainly contained Jewish blood products.

Clearly, Hellman could no more get her mind around the reality of Nazism than she could that of communism. Nazis-as-vampires is simply pulp magazine schtick that drains the film of any sense of credibility, not that much existed in the first place.

Compare this propaganda effort to the Russian film Come and See (1985), which could have been made from the same template as North Star. The storyline is a close match -- even to the successful partisan raid at the climax -- and the Russian film is nearly as hallucinatory (a sinister crane stalks among piles of bodies, characters appear and disappear with no sense of continuity, an SS commander plays with a pet ferret as a village is massacred). But the makers of Come and See knew exactly what they were doing -- creating an eerie and unworldly atmosphere as background against which to portray the demonic unleashed among human beings.

Mission to Moscow (1943) is nearly as grotesque. Based on the book of the same title by Joseph Davies, former ambassador to the USSR, it's an example of almost pure propaganda. Davies was more than gullible; he was what the Soviets called a "transmission belt", someone who could be depended on to pass on propaganda material verbatim with little in the way of prompting. (The film's tagline was "One American's Journey into the Truth", which I hereby commend to Joseph Wilson IV.)

The book reads as if it were dictated by Stalin personally -- the victims of the purges were traitors, the "nonaggression pact" with Hitler a necessary ruse, life in the USSR was edenic, and so forth. (Stalin himself is characterized as something of a combination of Pericles, Moses, and Cicero). The book's propaganda is carried over onto film without much in the way of modification.

But at the same time, director Michael Curtiz (the legendary director of Casablanca) loads the film with touches suggesting that he was not completely fooled. Two of the major Soviet figures, for instance, are played by veteran character actors noted for portraying villains - Andrei Vyshinsky, the show trial prosecutor known as the "human rat", portrayed by Victor Francen, and Maxim Litvinov, who negotiated the pact with Hitler, by none other than Oskar Homolka, beloved for decades of portrayals of Gestapo and KGB thugs.

Song of Russia was the third "officially inspired" pro-Soviet flick, and one that I haven't seen. It's supposed to contain actual Soviet-suppled war footage, which would probably be worth seeing.

Four girls working in a defense plant decide to take a house together which they plan to run "the American way" -- you know, collectivization, show trials, execution of "wreckers"... While it doesn't go quite that far, the Soviet-style rhetoric, of a type never spoken by any human being not under the thumb of the KGB, is laid on pretty thick. This is the film in which Ginger Rogers' mother nixed the line of dialogue, "Share and share alike... that's the way we do things in America!" as communist propaganda. Smart woman. Ginger later became a diehard supporter of Ronald Reagan. Trumbo, on the other hand, got bounced good and hard.

With Gung Ho (1943) we move even deeper into the communist version of the twilight zone. The subject here is the Makin raid, carried out a year earlier by the First Marine Raider Battalion. The strangeness starts early, with the unit's commander (played by oater veteran Randolph Scott) explaining that he saw combat with "the Chinese army". This turns out to be the Eighth Route Army, that is, the one commanded by Mao tse-Tung. From that point on the dialectic comes fast and furious, with not a single opportunity for a lecture on class antagonism and the need for revolutionary action allowed to pass, exactly as if the screenwriters Lucien Hubbard and Joseph Hoffmann knew they'd never get another chance and wanted to fit it all in.

The irony here is that the story is based on actual events -- Evans Carlson, the "Red Marine", in fact served with Mao, became enamored of communism, and adapted Mao's ideas on guerilla warfare to establish the raider battalions.

The Makin raid was as close to an abject disaster as anyone would ever care to imagine. Men became separated, confusion reigned, Carlson at one point contemplated surrender, and although the Japanese base was destroyed, several men were inadvertently left behind and executed. Carlson's Raiders went on to more successful operations during the Solomons campaign and were the indirect ancestor of today's Marine Force Recon units.

None of this appears in the film, needless to say. The Japanese chatter wildly and run (very few wartime flicks -- Bataan is one exception -- portrayed the Japanese as the superb fighters they actually were), the Marines stroll in and begin playing the fool in a way only seen on film. One Marine climbs atop a Japanese headquarters building and, in the middle of enemy territory, paints an American flag on the roof. It's about twenty by ten, and is perfect, with not a single run, and takes him about ten minutes to complete. Why does he bother? Well, it seems that Japanese planes are on the way, and when they arrive, and see that flag, they bomb their own headquarters and save the Raiders the trouble.

Now this is pure Hollywood, but it's also, obviously enough, pure Moscow as well. Hubbard and Hoffmann evidently got clean away with it. I could discover no evidence that they were ever in any congressional committee's sights.

Action in the North Atlantic (1943), is something unexpected -- a halfway decent film. This is odd, since the picture was both written and directed by committee. But one of the directorial troika was Raoul Walsh, which goes a long way to explain the picture's quality. And one of the writer's collective (there were no less than four of ‘em) was John Howard Lawson, the Hollywood Communist Party head and the party's chief cultural officer, which explains the Stalinist propaganda.

Action in the North Atlantic deals with the Murmansk run, an almost forgotten episode of the war in which U.S. and British convoys supplied the Russians with Lend-Lease shipments. This required the convoys to head through the Iceland-UK gap, up the coast of Norway, across the Arctic Circle, and around the North Cape to Russia. Virtually all of this route was within easy range of Nazi bombers, U-boats, and surface warships, which made the run one of the most dangerous of the entire war. At least one convoy was effectively annihilated.

The first part of the film conveys this well through a series of running battles. On arrival in Russia, they're rescued at the last minute by Soviet warplanes which drive the Germans off, then welcomed by grateful, cheerful Russians shouting greetings as they dock. ("Tovarisch?" bluff old Alan Hale explains. "That means friend!" As in "comrade") Communist officials are cooperative and pleased to see their American allies.

All this took place somewhere in the back of Lawson's brain and nowhere else. The truth is that the Soviets refused to provide any escorts. (To my knowledge, this has never been adequately explained.) There was no contact between seamen and the locals, except when carefully arranged for propaganda purposes. The sailors were effectively quarantined aboard ship. There were even cases where badly wounded men were refused treatment in Russian hospitals.

Walsh, cynical old pirate that he was, would never have sat still for any such distortions, nor would Lawson have challenged him. So evidently all the agitprop was stuffed in when one of the other directors was at work. It would interesting to learn which one, and why Walsh didn't do the complete film.

Humphrey Bogart, who played the lead, is well-known for coming to the aid of the Hollywood Ten. What's not so widely known is how he reacted when the party started manipulating everyone involved for the purpose of cloaking its activities. "Those commies," he said, in a perfect Bogartism, "played us for suckers."

Not even the Red Scare itself put an end to these films. Caught (1949) was a kind of borderline film noir/women's picture (not unique even then -- Mildred Pierce was another). Directed by the great Max Ophuls, it was not one of his better efforts. The screenplay by Arthur Laurents is largely to blame.

James Mason, as an "idealistic" young doctor, spends most of the film ranting about the evils of money and capitalism and the virtues of the poor. This is completely irrelevant to the storyline (involving a young woman married to a wealthy, aging psycho) and grows so distracting that you begin to dread seeing Mason pop up. But the real peculiarity here is the "happy ending", which comes to pass when the female lead has a miscarriage. Now, you'd be hard put to sell an ending like that today. How it was done in 1948 I have no idea.

Ophuls returned to Europe to make better films. Mason's appearance in this botch doesn't seem to have hurt him much. As for Laurents -- he was blacklisted for several years, but recovered nicely and later inflicted The Way We Were on the world.

There are good reasons why the left doesn't claim these films. Instead, they try to take credit for other, unrelated films: film noir, which is supposed to represent a "Marxist critique of American society". (This is nonsense - almost none of the noir film-makers were leftists of any sort. Like all film buffs, I have my own theory concerning noir, which we don't have the space for here.), and the "social problem" films of the late 40s through the 50s, such as Gentleman's Agreement, No Way Out, and On the Waterfront. But the Hollywood Reds were either blacklisted or doing time during the heyday of these pictures. With few exceptions (Laurents wrote one, Home of the Brave), social problem films were liberal propositions.

No better example of the intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of the left exists than these films. They should have been allowed to make as many as they wanted. No blacklist, no Congressional hearings, no interference whatsoever. A couple dozen more like these and Hollywood communism would have been relegated to comic relief. Left alone, they'd have knocked themselves out.

Thank you so much for posting this. Recently I've been doing a little unofficial research into this topic--yesterday I spent a lot of time looking for article about Elia Kazan.

(The interesting thing I found there was how Kazan's comments about how he didn't feel the need to risk his career for communists because they tried to strong-arm his control of a theatrical group he was in. Sure puts his testimony in an interesting light--I can't think of ANYONE who would have held back from doing so based on creative interference. You can be sure if the House asked Hollywood types today to testify about Conservative interference today, they'd be leaping over each other to name names.)

Just skimmed this so far but it's fascinating stuff. Oh, and any other references to Hollywood and communism would be appreciated.

“Trumbo, on the other hand, got bounced good and hard.”

That is until he was brought in from the cold by none other than Kirk Douglas to do the screen work on “Spartacus”, with its major theme of “workers unite”. “Spartacus” went on to win 4 Oscars; and, in 1993, the Communist traitor Trumbo was given a posthumous Oscar for screen writng (”Roman Holiday”).

Hollywood has always been sympathetic to Communism, and needed no FDR to encourage it in its worship of Leftist’s totalitarians, then or now.

Hollywood continued to have Reds through the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s they proudly held up their copies of Mao’s Little Red Book (Marlon Brando’s personal copy went up for sale on ebay in recent years). Jane Fonda proclaimed that we would all gladly live under Communism if we only weren’t too stupid to realize what it really was.

Elia Kazan was still reviled at the Oscars where notable celebs sat on their hands and refused to applaud the “snitch” who’s loose lips outed the truth of Communism in Hollywood.

Better to disclose US military secrets to the enemy than to betray mother Russia.

Meryl Streep and Warren Beatty earned some respect for me, at least as people, for standing and applauding.* They're as liberal as ever, but they were showing respect for the man's career achievements, which was why people win these awards. But whenever people tell me the Oscars are JUST about the work, I think of this, because in fact, they are a stamp of approval on lifestyles, too.

I wonder how many of those who sat on their hands for Kazan applauded Polanski's win for The Pianist.

*Worse than Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Nick Nolte and others, who are the usual Hollywood morons, were Spielberg, who tried as always to have it both ways, clapping but not standing, and the despicable Abraham Polonsky, who said in interviews it might be interesting to watch the show if someone SHOT Kazan on-stage.

You get to vote on this, with dollars.

Stop sending money to Hollywood.
Even when the films aren’t blatant propaganda,
10c of every buck ends up at the DNC.
_______
I haven’t been to a movie in years.
Don’t watch broadcast or sat TV either.

Making a factual movie about Carlson and the Marine Raiders would be difficult but well worth the effort.

An old Marine I know still refers to Carlson as “that old communist bastard.”

When the remains of Marine Raiders were recovered from Makin a few years back, I believe Carlson was still alive and pushing 95.

To say Carlson was one of the more interesting characters to wear a Marine unform is an understatement.

Do you remember a few years back when Elia Kazan was given a Life Time Achievement Award (I think it was at the Oscars)Anyway, a whole bunch of today’s anti-America crowd refused to applaud (ed harris, et al).

Let’s not forget FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, an extremely fine film which doesn’t dwell on communisim but on fighting Franco’s forces.

And who can forget DAYS OF GLORY with Gregory Peck.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036748/

I have seen most of these movies and must remember that the Soviets were our allies during WWII which is probbly why they were made, complete with their commie “paradise” themes.

Among other non political films at the time were DRAGONSEED, about the Chinese in the war, CROSS OF LORAINE, about the French in the war(ok, so the film was fiction), EDGE OF DARKNESS about the Norwegeans in the war, but the films about Russia were the most political pro commie films I’ve seen.

I have seen most of these movies and must remember that the Soviets were our allies during WWII which is probbly why they were made, complete with their commie “paradise” themes.

I prefer the term used by one of my history teachers in high school. He called us and the commies co-belligerants.

You bet I do. I also recall Abraham Polonsky, one of The Ten, saying he hopes someone shoots Kazan on-stage.

Kazan saw no reason to sacrifice his career for the communists who tried to screw with HIS career early on. I can't find anything to disagree with there.

Yet Hollywood STILL vilifies him while they never seem to have a word to say about the STUDIO HEADS who actually created the Black List--of course, that might get them in trouble with the studios in some tiny way. Thus, they act all heroic until it might cause THEM some grief--precisely what they castigate Kazan and others about.

It’s real easy for that self-righteous bunch to act all high and mighty, and say they would never do what he did, all the while knowing that you they would never be put to the test. But I would bet my left kidney, that if the shoe were on their foot - and they could loose their career and livelyhood, they would fold like a cheap tent.

“Instead we got the legend of martyrdom, and hundreds of hours of foul ideological exercises, unto the present day. “

Well, yes and no. More & more is coming out about the genocidal tendencies of the Left in Russia and E. Europe, thanks not only to you, but to people like Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, and to the Internet. Look up Katyn massacre or Vinnitsa genocide, for example. I’m hoping that the American Left- if that’s not an oxymoron- just simply doesn’t know the extent of Murderous Marxists, 1918 to the present.

Look up Katyn massacre or Vinnitsa genocide, for example. I’m hoping that the American Left- if that’s not an oxymoron- just simply doesn’t know the extent of Murderous Marxists...

"You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." - Walter Duranty

The left is very well aware of communist genocides, and approves of them.

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