Cold War

The science fiction film Strange Invaders (Michael Laughlin, 1983), which trades in acid-tinged nostalgia, opens with a caption that describes the 1950s as an era in which "the only things we had to worry about were the Communists and rock 'n' roll." The joke, of course, is that these multipronged threats still managed to turn a decade otherwise characterized by increasing affluence, technological and social progress, and an absence of world war into a time of deep-seated fear, doubt, and paranoia.

The word "worry" recurs often in the context of this period in cinema—a less extreme emotion than the commingled joy and terror of World War II, when Hollywood wore the fixed grin of James Cagney's (1899–1986) Yankee Doodle Dandy or Errol Flynn's (1909–1959) battlefield heroes, but the anxieties of the 1950s were longer lasting, with broader and stranger effects. The jolly nuclear awareness training films (Duck and Cover) and ghastly novelty songs ("If Jin'ral McArthur Drops a Atomic Bomb") exhumed in the documentary The Atomic Cafe (Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, 1982) are freakish in their obviousness. The pervasiveness of the Cold War, with its "atomic cocktail" of political and apocalyptic anxieties, is evident from almost every film made in Hollywood between 1948 and 1962.

THE RED MENACE

An endless parade of alien invaders and mutants, often radioactive, frequently from a "red" planet, embodies the stereotypes of the Communist enemy: emotionless, brutal, godless, logical collectives, hungry for our planet's resources (and women). The pettiness of this approach can be gauged from The Thing from Another World (1951), in which Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite), the (American) scientist who argues for cultural and scientific exchange rather than prompt military action when faced with a vampiric humanoid vegetable from outer space, is given a beard and a fur hat to make him look Russian. Less obvious is a futile grumble about McCarthyism, equivalent to flashing the finger unnoticed in the class photograph, that underlies a boom in westerns in which mobs persecute innocent men. Silver Lode (Allan Dwan, 1954) gives the chief accuser (Dan Duryea) of the upright sheriff (John Payne) the character name "McCarty"' but includes several takes in which the actors say "McCarthy" by mistake. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) and A Man Alone (Ray Milland, 1955) simply cast Ward Bond (1903–1960), a vocal pillar of the pro-blacklist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, as a bullying lynch mob leader whose scripted "string 'em up" dialogue sounds much like Bond's offscreen anti-Communist remarks.

For America and the Soviet Union, Cold War was the natural condition of the twentieth century. Throughout the existence of the Soviet Union, both superpowers defined themselves, and incidentally justified their military budgets, by invoking the threat of the other, not merely as a geographic enemy or competitor but as an embodiment of an utterly antithetical way of life. American persecution of its homegrown (or immigrant) Communists got into high gear with the Palmer Raids of 1919 and became a long-lasting national pastime in the 1920s as J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) solidified his power base in what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Throughout the New Deal and World War II, Hoover and others maintained a policy of demonizing American dissent by suggesting that all Communists were agents of an unfriendly foreign power. Until Hitler's invasion of Russia, America saw Nazi Germany as less of a threat than its fellow "dictator nation," the Soviet Union. World War II put the US-Soviet conflict on hold, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) and Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) led their countries in an alliance against fascism. An irony of the blacklist era is that screenwriters later upbraided as Soviet dupes or puppets were in fact guilty of working on embarrassingly fervent exercises in sadistic, propagandist Americanism. Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! (1945), cowritten by future blacklistees Alvah Bessie (1904–1985) and Lester Cole (1904–1985), indulges in racist depictions of the Japanese as subhuman creatures, and is far more extreme than even 1950s representations of evil Communists as sexually degenerate gangsters (the film incidentally rewrote the history of the Burma campaign to credit Americans with Allied victories primarily won by the British).

More frequently cited during the hearings into Communist influence in Hollywood were the comparatively few American films made to celebrate Russia's contribution to the war effort: Mission to Moscow (1943) by Michael Curtiz (1888–1962), The North Star (1943) by Lewis Milestone (1895–1980), Song of Russia (1943) by Gregory Ratoff (1893–1960), and Days of Glory (1944) by Jacques Tourneur (1904–1977). There were certainly many more Hollywood celebrations of the British cause (Mrs. Miniver, 1942) or the French Resistance (Casablanca, 1942), and Jack Warner (1916–1995) would make the futile excuse to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Mission to Moscow had been made at the express request of President Roosevelt, a political figure scarcely less demonized by McCarthyites than Stalin. The wartime alliance between America and Russia, often characterized as a personal accord between Roosevelt and Stalin, was so brief that there was no time to commit fully to celebratory films. None of the pro-Soviet films of 1943 and 1944 achieved anything like the commercial or critical success of comparable pro-British or pro–Free French films (Mrs. Miniver and Casablanca both won Best Picture Oscars^®). The dominant Hollywood depiction of the Soviet Union was in the caricature killjoys seduced by silk stockings in Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939), promoted as "the picture that kids the commissars." When the mood changed, it was a simple matter to backpedal by snipping out shots that included Russians in the international array of Allies depicted in a musical like Hollywood Canteen (1944). The North Star was reedited for postwar release as Armored Attack, with heroic Russians played down; there were even hints that the former Nazi villains were equally likely to be aligned with Stalinism. As late as The Whip Hand (William Cameron Menzies, 1951), Nazis were being turned into Communists: in this case, literally, since a film (The Man I Found) about a surviving Hitler playing with germ warfare was reworked to make an ex-Nazi mad scientist into a fervent tool of Communist forces.

The Cold War properly began in the late 1940s, with a freeze in relations between East and West fueled by paranoia, to an extent justified, on both sides. The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not lost on Moscow, was that the United States not only had the atom bomb but was also prepared to drop it, while half of Europe turned out to have been saved not for democracy but as a buffer of "satellite states" almost as oppressed as they had been under Hitler. Though it lasted at least until the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the peak of the Cold War is usually reckoned from Winston Churchill's (1874–1965) "Iron Curtain" speech in 1948 to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. This was an eventful period: nuclear buildup in both camps, with a procession of A- and H-bomb tests by both superpowers; an actual skirmish between the sides in Korea, later replayed on a larger scale in Vietnam; Communist insurgencies against old colonial powers Britain and France in Malaya and Indonesia; the "loss" of China to Communism, which created an equally fractious relationship between Red China and the Soviet Union; the extensive persecution of comparatively few American Communists and far more merely left-leaning or liberal Americans, many of whom had been associated with the New Deal or had spoken for the Russian ally during the war; and the beginnings of the space race, sparked by Russia's initial triumphs in launching Sputnik and putting a cosmonaut in orbit—all this, and a wave of juvenile delinquency fanned by rock and roll, horror comics, and hot rods.

THE BLACKLIST

In Hollywood, the wave of anti-Communist investigation that was later termed "McCarthyism" actually began in 1947, three years before Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) embarked on his personal crusade (eventually becoming chair of the Subcommittee on Investigations in the US Senate). The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had convened before the war to investigate allegations of Communist influence in the movie industry but suspended its activities for the duration of the war. In 1947 Chairman J. Parnell Thomas (1895–1970), replacing the late Martin Dies, interrogated the "unfriendly" witnesses who became known as the Hollywood Ten. For refusing to answer questions that would have involved implicating others, the Ten were convicted of "contempt of Congress" and mostly served short prison sentences before emerging to face unemployability. The Ten would have been Eleven, but Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)—whose latest work, significantly, was a play about Galileo—pretended not to understand English well enough to answer questions in his first session, then fled the country. After years of appeals, two of the Hollywood Ten, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr. (1915–2000), arrived in Danbury Prison to serve their terms, only to find Congressman Thomas, convicted in the interim of embezzling from the federal purse, among their fellow inmates.

The Hollywood Communists suffered for slipping "subversive" dialogue into scripts: the line "hare and share alike, that's democracy" in Edward Dmytryk's (1908–1999) Tender Comrade (1943) tipped off Ginger Rogers's (1911–1995) mother that the writer Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976) was a Red. Yet it is hard to detect traces of anything that might count as Communist or even socialist propaganda in any of the films, good or bad, made by the Ten. The Ten were mostly talented journeymen: Cole, writer of The Invisible Man Returns (1939), which has a miners' strike subplot; Lardner, who later wrote M^*A^*S^*H (1970); Trumbo, who wrote AGuy Named Joe (1943) and Spartacus (1960); Dmytryk, director of Captive Wild Woman (1943) and Murder, My Sweet (1944); John Howard Lawson (1895–1977), writer of Terror in a Texas Town (1958); Herbert Biberman (1900–1971), director of Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), writer of King of Chinatown (1939); Adrian Scott (1912–1973), producer of Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire (1947); Alvah Bessie, writer of Northern Pursuit (1943) and Hotel Berlin (1945); Albert Maltz, writer of This Gun for Hire (1942) and The Man in Half Moon Street (1944); and Samuel Ornitz (1890–1957), writer of Hit Parade of 1937 (1937) and Little Orphan Annie (1939).

Other "unfriendlies," former or current radicals eventually blacklisted, included actors Gale Sondergaard (1899–1985), John Garfield (1913–1952), Kim Hunter (1922–2002), Zero Mostel (1915–1977), and Lionel Stander (1909–1994), writers Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) (who went stubbornly to jail), Carl Foreman (1914–1984), and Walter Bernstein (b. 1919) (who dealt with the period in his autobiographical script The Front, 1976), and directors Joseph Losey (1909–1984), Jules Dassin (b. 1911), and Cy Endfield (1914–1995). Most of these had, at one time or another, been "card-carrying" Communists, that is, members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). Some directors (Losey, Endfield) went to Europe and eventually became successful there; some writers used pseudonyms or fronts until it was safe to be credited again. Many endured long periods of forced inactivity. Abraham Polonsky (1910–1999) did not direct between Force of Evil (1948) and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), managing only one further feature in the remaining thirty years of his life. On the strength of his debut feature, it seems obvious that without the blacklist he would have had a career at least on a level with Edward Dmytryk (who eventually named names) and possibly on a level with Elia Kazan (1909–2003) (who famously became a "friendly"). Actors, of course, were hardest hit of all: some (Sam Wanamaker [1919–1993]) became refugees, but others cracked and informed (Lee J. Cobb [1911–1976], Sterling Hayden [1916–1986], Lloyd Bridges [1913–1998]) to resume their careers.

Under Thomas, HUAC obsessively alleged that "Red writers" insidiously worked the Party Line into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals or Fox thrillers, polluting the minds of American audiences. Investigations failed to turn up any concrete incidences of subversion beyond Lionel Stander whistling "Internationale" while waiting for an elevator in No Time to Marry (1938). Subtly, the thrust of the crusade changed: as in later investigations into the civil services, universities, and other spheres, including dentistry and the US mail, the purpose of the Hollywood hearings was to render unemployed and unemployable anyone who was or had been a Communist or "fellow traveler." Liberals like John Huston (1906–1987) or Kirk Douglas (b. 1916) survived only through canniness—a combination of undoubted box office track record, token anti-Red statements (or films), and an independent streak that would lead to work outside the troubled studio system (other federal committees were breaking up monopolies on exhibition and production), eventually becoming free of the powers who could actually draw up and enforce blacklists.

There was, of course, no formal blacklist. It operated on threat and innuendo, with a complex system of extortion, blackmail, and intimidation, even including approved methods for getting off the list through strategic self-abasement (cooperation with the FBI) or actual bribery. Initially, the blacklisted were names compiled by HUAC for their hearings, but the work was taken up enthusiastically by the American Legion and a private firm called American Business Consultants, who "exposed" subversives in their publications (Firing Line, Counterattack, Red Channels). If studios continued to hire those named, the studios would become the victims of organized boycott campaigns. In television, pressure was brought not on the broadcast companies but on the sponsors who underwrote their programs. Mistakes were made—actress Martha Scott (1914–2003) was confused with singer Hazel Scott (1920–1981) and was blacklisted.

Studio heads, their power eroded by other factors (television, antitrust legislation, impatient heirs), embraced the blacklist as a "bolting the stable door after the horse has gone" measure. Few of the men who had founded the studio system in the 1920s were in office by the end of the decade, but they tended to be eased into extraordinarily monied retirement, whereas a great many of their former employees were ostracized, persecuted, denied their professions, and forced into poverty.

EDWARD DMYTRYK
b. Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada, 4 September 1908, d. 1 July 1999

When his film Cornered (1945) was targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1951 as an instance of the director (and producer Adrian Scott, another of the Hollywood Ten) sneaking Communist propaganda into an entertainment thriller, Edward Dmytryk listed all the objections that his comrades had raised to the film. "This is the thing," he said, "which actually got me out of the Party."

The only one of the Ten to work primarily as a director, Dmytryk had served a long Hollywood apprenticeship, beginning with B pictures like Television Spy (1939), The Devil Commands (1941), Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941), Captive Wild Woman (1943), and The Falcon Strikes Back (1943). Then, as now, the B movie "quickies" were sometimes made by young directors with ambition, and a solidly made, imaginatively shot cheap horror film or series thriller might lead to healthier budgets and more challenging projects. At RKO, Dmytryk was awarded some plums: the Ginger Rogers wartime comedy drama Tender Comrade (1943), scripted by another of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo; and the Raymond Chandler thriller Murder, My Sweet (1944). The film noir style, just then becoming popular, could obviously be turned to social issues—which prompted Dmytryk to have Dick Powell track Nazi war criminals in Cornered and to expose Robert Ryan as an anti-Semitic murderer in Crossfire (1947).

Unique among the Ten, Dmytryk served his jail sentence for contempt of Congress, then cooperated with the Committee and resumed his career as a director. Among the penitent activities required of him was cooperating with journalist Richard English on a 1951 Saturday Evening Post article, "What Makes a Hollywood Communist?" In it, he claimed "I believed that I was being forced to sacrifice my family and my career in defense of the Communist Party, from which I had long been separated and which I had grown to dislike and distrust." In his testimony, he cited the invasion of South Korea and the trials of State Department officials presumed to be Soviet spies as the reasons for his change of mind and stated "I don't say all members of the Communist Party are guilty of treason, but I think a party that encourages them to act in this capacity is treasonable."

In the 1950s and beyond, Dmytryk made a few solid films, often concerned with issues of leadership, oppression and rebellion: The Caine Mutiny (1954), Broken Lance (1954), and Warlock (1959). Sadly, his credit was more often found on dull, troubled, conventional soap material like the first version of The End of the Affair (1955), Raintree County (1957), or The Carpetbaggers (1964), and his career petered out with stodgy international genre films like Shalako (1968) and Bluebeard (1972), starring Richard Burton.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Tender Comrade (1943), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Crossfire (1947), The Caine Mutiny (1954), Broken Lance (1954), Warlock (1959)

FURTHER READING

Dmytryk, Edward. It's a Hell of a Life but Not a Bad Living. New York: Time Books, 1978.

Kim Newman

THE COLD WAR COMES TO HOLLYWOOD

Anthony Mann's (1907–1967) Strategic Air Command (1955) opens with Dutch Holland (James Stewart), a professional baseball player, being approached by his former commanding officer and asked to reenlist in the peacetime air force. "Where's the fire?" asks Dutch, who has done "his share" in two wars, seconded by a 1950s wife (June Allyson) who wants him at their home in the suburbs, not off on some far-flung base. But the thrust of the film is that it is Dutch's duty to get back in harness and maintain the peace against the ever-present (if rarely specified) Russian threat. The fetishist treatment of weapons of mass destruction, central to Stanley Kubrick's

(1928–1999) Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), begins here. Mann's camera ogles the lines and curves of the B-47 that Stewart (a real-life bomber pilot) gets to fly (with the new family of nuclear weapons, a B-47 with a crew of three carries the destructive power of the entire B-29 forces used in World War II). Dutch's eventual commitment to the Strategic Air Command seems to suggest that his plane is sexier than the starched, maternal Allyson.

At first, Hollywood reacted to the Cold War much like Dutch, when he was asked to stop playing ball and start practicing bomb runs. After years of turning out war propaganda, a policy the movies embraced before the government (e.g., Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Anatole Litvak, 1939), the studios felt they had done their "share" and believed that audiences wanted Technicolor musical escapism or film noir romantic agonies rather than more gray, grim, depressing privation-leads-to-victory stories. If anything, Hollywood needed to mop up after World War II, tracking down Nazi war criminals who might be infiltrating America (The Stranger, Orson Welles, 1946) or reflecting on the situations of returning veterans who found their homeland not quite the paradise they thought they were fighting for. A wave of films, many made by people who would soon be facing HUAC, dealt with heroic black, Jewish, or even Nisei soldiers suffering from bigotry or racial assault, including murder: Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), Home of the Brave (Mark Robson, 1949), and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) by John Sturges (1911–1993). A decade before Strategic Air Command, Dana Andrews found his war record suited him for no peacetime employment and rendered him as obsolete as the fields of junked bombers in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) by William Wyler (1902–1981). Within a few years, films like this (another Oscar^® winner) would be seen as either suspect or anti-American.

The studios made anti-Nazi films from genuine conviction (in the case of Warner Bros.) and a patriotic urge to aid a national war effort; they made anti-Communist films at first because they were afraid not to. When HUAC resumed its hearings, Hollywood put into production a run of low-budget anti-Red quickies. A few odd films—My Son John (Leo McCarey, 1952) and Big Jim McLain (Edward Ludwig, 1952)—are sincere in their anti-Communism, if so bizarre in approach as to undermine their overt message. In the former, John (Robert Walker), a fey intellectual who drifts into Red circles, is so smothered by his mother (Helen Hayes) and literally Bible-bashed by his super-patriot father (Dean Jagger) that he seems as much a victim of all-American parentage as Jim Stark (James Dean) of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) or Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) of Psycho (1960). Jim McLain, an avatar of producer John Wayne (1907–1979), is a rare instance of blacklister as two-fisted action hero, an investigator out to round up a Red ring in Hawaii. The film's conclusion is that too many enemies of freedom are protected by the Fifth Amendment and that the Constitution ought to be changed—a proposal not even Joseph McCarthy dared to make.

These are films Hollywood needed to produce, but audiences were not that interested in seeing them then, and even social historians find them hard to see (let alone sit through) now. Some tackled the "problem" of making anti-Red propaganda by making the same old movies, but with notionally Communist villains. The espionage aspect of Pickup on South Street (1953) by Samuel Fuller (1912–1997) is so thin that the film could be redubbed for release in France (where there was a respectable, active Communist Party) with the bad guys turned into drug smugglers. Smooth Van Zandt (James Mason), "importer-exporter of government secrets" in North by Northwest (1959) by Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), is an epicene mastermind exactly like the traitor-for-an-unspecified-cause of The 39Steps (1935). Other pictures, far more disposable, traded in trenchcoated sleaze and avant-la-lettre camp, and could as easily be coded attacks on homosexuality (a persistent theme), devil worship, big-time crime, seedpods from space, or child abuse rings: The Iron Curtain (William Wellman, 1948), The Red Menace (R. G. Springsteen, 1949), I Married a Communist (Robert Stevenson, 1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (Gordon Douglas, 1951), Red Planet Mars (Harry Horner, 1952), and Invasion USA (Alfred E. Green, 1952).

DALTON TRUMBO
b. Montrose, Colorado, 9 December 1905, d. 10 September 1976

Dalton Trumbo had what might be considered the usual background for a studio writer in the 1930s and 1940s: a spell as a journalist, employment as a script reader for Warner Bros., critical success as an author (with the perhaps ill-timed antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, 1939), a "good war record" of patriotic movies (A Guy Named Joe, 1943; Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, 1944), a spell in the Pacific Theater as war correspondent, and a position as chairman of "Writers for Roosevelt." He was a founding member and sometime director of the Screen Writers Guild and a somewhat fractious sometime Communist (the CPUSA insisted that Trumbo's thirty-page memo on its failings in Hollywood be ignored and burned).

As the most successful and prolific of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo's credits were the most scrutinized for the taint of propaganda—which HUAC claimed to find in Tender Comrade (1943), a film about the wartime housing shortage in which the heroines' apartment sharing was deemed suspiciously collectivist, alerting star Ginger Rogers's mother (a prominent "friendly" witness) to Trumbo's hidden agenda. After serving his ten-month jail term for contempt of Congress, Trumbo was blacklisted in the industry but continued to write under pseudonyms. In 1956 the Academy Award^® for Best Motion Picture Story went to Robert Rich for The Brave One; Rich did not collect the Oscar^® because he was merely a front for Trumbo. At the time, the King Brothers, the film's producers, hotly denied the rumor that Trumbo was the author, but the truth was generally known; in 1975 the Academy presented the statuette to the correct recipient.

Though Trumbo's fronted or pseudonymous credits still have not all been confirmed, he was active throughout his internal exile, often on interesting low-budget films like Joseph L. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1949) and Terror in a Texas Town (1958). Oddly, he worked on Otto Preminger's decidedly hawkish Cold War allegory The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) in which Gary Cooper's pioneer of aviation warfare claims "one day, half the world will be in ruins through bombing from the air; I want this country to be in the other half." Trumbo always credited Kirk Douglas—producer-star of Spartacus (1960)—with breaking the blacklist by giving him credit, though there seems to have been a race between Douglas and Preminger, who had Trumbo working on Exodus (1960), as to who would name him first.

When he came out of the cold, Trumbo worked less often, mixing expensive tosh like The Sandpiper (1965) and Hawaii (1966) with more interesting, smaller projects like Lonely Are the Brave (1962). He directed and wrote a 1971 film of Johnny Got His Gun, better timed for the anti-Vietnam mood but awkward where the book was precise, and he had a final "big" credit on Papillon (1973).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Tender Comrade (1943), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), Gun Crazy (1949), Spartacus (1960), Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

FURTHER READING

Cook, Bruce. Dalton Trumbo. New York: Scribners, 1977.

Hanson, Peter. Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel: A Critical Survey and Filmography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

Trumbo, Dalton. Johnny Got His Gun. Lippincott, 1939.

Kim Newman

With the Communist screenwriters, directors, and actors blacklisted, there was a real problem in making films about Communism. Those, like Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg (b. 1914), who had recanted former beliefs, "named names," or espoused the anti-Communist cause were still conflicted enough to want to avoid making films like My Son John. Kazan and Schulberg's On the Waterfront (1954) can be read as a personal validation: longshoreman Terry Molloy (Marlon Brando) is convinced by an investigator for a government committee that turning informer

is sometimes the only honorable American course of action, even if it means being stigmatized in his community ("a pigeon for a pigeon," sobs a child as he tosses the murdered corpse of one of Terry's beloved pet birds at him). But On the Waterfront is about apolitical racketeering, and there is no suggestion that corrupt union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) has any Red affiliations. Those with long memories might recall that American Communists had devoted careers in labor activism to rooting out villains like Johnny, and that blacklisted director Jules Dassin had cast Cobb as a similar crook in the proletarian-themed truck-driving drama Thieves' Highway (1949).

This left the anti-Red films to no-name directors who took what they were given and knew no more about Communism than the average maker of two-week westerns knew about Indians. The Hollywood Red was liable to be a shifty-looking foreign character actor with beady eyes, a heavy accent, a grubby wardrobe, and a closeted but evident perverse sexuality (Thomas Gomez in I Married a Communist). In this, he was hard to differentiate from the gangsters, psychopaths, and general troublemakers who appeared in everyday crime films like The Big Heat (1953) by Fritz Lang (1890–1976) or The Big Combo (1955) by Joseph H. Lewis (1907–2000). It is easy to rate the anti-Red cycle as a subgenre of a larger 1950s trend for films in which individuals find themselves targeted by vast, all-powerful conspiracies, which seem to be impossible to escape and are even inextricably intertwined with the power structure of normal society. Whether the villians are outlaws backed by corrupt politicians or the railroads in westerns, alien invaders in science fiction, adults in juvenile delinquency dramas (and even children's films like Roy Rowland's The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, 1953), or all-powerful crime cartels in gangster films, the menace feels the same; it could as easily represent an Americanism characterized by blacklisting and persecution as an external enemy intent on subverting and wrecking the capitalist way of life.

Some of the most memorable, effective films of the Cold War are open to interpretations from opposite ends of the political spectrum. High Noon (1952) by Fred Zinnemann (1907–1997), scripted by soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman and starring Motion Picture Alliance mainstay Gary Cooper (1901–1961), follows Sheriff Will Kane's attempts to rally the townsfolk against the outlaw coming in on the noon train to kill him and resume a reign of terror. Liberals can read this as an indictment of McCarthyism, with the disgusted and excluded hero finally tossing his badge of authority (a tin star) in the dirt and walking away (a gesture that especially angered John Wayne). But Will Kane could as easily represent Senator McCarthy's self-image: a lone voice against subversives whom the complacent, docile populace would rather ignore. Similarly, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) by Don Siegel (1912–1991) features a town taken over by aliens who fit some of the Communist stereotypes (emotionless, subtle, single-minded) but who also act a lot like all-American blacklisters (small-town conformists, forming a lynch mob, pressuring folks to come over to their side).

The ultimate expression of this free-form paranoia is Kiss Me Deadly (1955) by Robert Aldrich (1918–1983), a deconstruction of Mickey Spillane's (b. 1918) anti-Red novel, in which "the mysterious they" who will do anything to possess "the great whatsit" could be anyone—Russian spies, American (or, worse, naturalized American) organized crime, bizarre sexual perverts, eternally duplicitous females, even mythological beings like Medusa and Cerberus. Aldrich's nebulous menace only serves to highlight his ambiguous hero, Spillane's Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), whose brutality, sadism, paranoia, and misogyny are faithfully transplanted from the page, with an added gloss of illiteracy, philistinism, car and pin-up fetishism ("va-va-voom!"), glowering humor-lessness, and "little boy lost" infantilism, making him a caricature of Cold Warrior masculinity. The film ends with Pandora's Box, containing fissionable material, opened and a mushroom cloud rising over southern California.

NON-AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

In 1953 a reporter from Life magazine—who presumably believed Wellman's The Iron Curtain to be an accurate depiction of life in the Soviet Union—saw Serebristaya pyl (Silver Dust) by Abram Room (1894–1976) and labeled it "Red propaganda" and a libel on the United States. One of comparatively few Soviet Cold War films, it features an enterprising American researcher who wishes to test his radioactive dust on human guinea pigs, while a scheming big businessman and an ex-Nazi compete for control of the weapon. In the end, the capitalist's hired guns kill the scientist; incidental features that represent the typical American life include a false arrest, a lynch mob, and the kicking of a black maid. Though ostensibly more committed than Hollywood to the peddling of "government propaganda," Soviet cinema was rarely so blatant in its specific anti-Americanism.

On the whole, the most active film industries outside America in the 1950s were still too concerned with World War II to pay real attention to the current conflict. Whereas Hollywood made films about the Korean War (Fixed Bayonets, 1951; Men in War, 1957; and Pork Chop Hill, 1959), Britain and the Soviet Union—even France, Italy, Poland, and Japan—were more likely to dwell on the 1939–1945 conflict. War films of the 1950s from these countries perhaps evince a subtle nostalgia for the certainties of the previous decade as opposed to the intricacies of the Cold War. However, an increasing realism, ambiguity, and violence, even in the simplest re-creations of wartime exploits, certainly had added relevance in the years of Suez, the Hungarian uprising, economic miracles, and the "Fortunate Dragon" incident (whereby the crew of a Japanese fishing boat died after exposure to fallout from a bomb test).

Outside the United States, Cold War themes were often treated allegorically or satirically—as in the British The Mouse That Roared (1959) or the Japanese Gojira (1954, later released in America in a reworked version as Godzilla King of Monsters, 1956), which reflect deeply mixed feelings about the use of atomic weapons. By the end of the 1950s, there was no longer a "Hollywood" in the previously accepted sense of the term; the political-cultural tenor of popular cinema began to be shaped by East Coast sensibilities emerging from the young television industry and even by a growing internationalism, whereby American movies might easily be made in England or Italy and would necessarily incorporate aspects of their locations' native cinemas and sensibilities.

THE HIP COLD WAR

Ian Fleming's (1908–1964) early James Bond novels, published in the 1950s, often pit the British superspy against SMERSH, a division ("Death to Spies") of Soviet intelligence. When Bond (Sean Connery) emerged in film, from Dr. No (1962) on, SMERSH was downplayed in favor of SPECTRE, a fantastical, apolitical criminal organization along the lines of those once run by Dr. Mabuse or Fu Manchu. In the novel From Russia with Love, plans are laid against Bond by SMERSH, but in the 1964 film, the Soviets subcontract the job to SPECTRE. Though theoretically a Cold Warrior, Bond has in later films as often allied with Russians as clashed with them. Even the title From Russia with Love suggests a thaw in relations.

In the Kennedy-Krushchev period, when the Cold War chess game (a recurrent image) seemed to become more deadly over missiles in Cuba (and Turkey), popular culture was inclined to take a more cynical, callous attitude to the superpower face-off. The key film is The Manchurian Candidate (1962) by John Frankenheimer (1930–2002), scripted by George Axelrod (1922–2003) from Richard Condon's (1915–1996) novel, which caricatures McCarthy as the know-nothing Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), who picks the easy-to-remember number (57) of Communists he claims to have identified in the State Department off a ketchup bottle, and partners him with a monstrous wife (Angela Lansbury) who wants him swept into the White House with "powers which will make martial law look like anarchy." This indictment of the blacklist mind-set coexists with plot developments that suggest McCarthy was not paranoid enough. The Iselins are actually Communist tools out to undermine America (the inspiration is the suggestion that McCarthy could not have hurt the United States more if he were a paid Soviet agent); Mrs. Iselin has collaborated with the transformation of her own son, Raymond (Laurence Harvey), through brainwashing by Sino-Soviet villains into a zombie assassin.

The Manchurian Candidate is as much sick comedy as thriller, signified by the splattering of blood and brains over a poster of Stalin during a demonstration of Raymond's killing abilities. It has a certain "plague on both your houses" tone, far more vicious in its attack than Peter Ustinov's (1921–2004) across-the-curtain romantic comedy Romanoff and Juliet (1961), and it is as much remembered for its prescience in the matter of presidential assassination and conspiracy theory as its acute dissection of the paranoia of both West and East. A stark, black-and-white nightmare, with stylish bursts of martial arts action and walking political cartoons, its zero-degree cool bled into the highly colored cynicism of the Bond films. These wallow in luxury and voluptuousness, brush off murders with flip remarks ("shocking!"), and routinely climax with an intricate world-threatening scheme, foiled by individual heroism and the prompt arrival of an Anglo-American assault team to overwhelm the diabolical mastermind's secret base. These tactics failed in the real world at the Bay of Pigs, an operation badly fumbled by Bond fan Kennedy, just as the Cuban missile crisis led to closer scrutiny of the mechanics of the balance of terror.

Dr. Strangelove, like Sidney Lumet's (b. 1924) more serious Fail-Safe (1964), is a brink-of-doom thriller, a possible prequel to all those "life-in-the-radioactive-ruins" quickies of the 1950s (Five, 1951; The Day the World Ended, 1956; The World, the Flesh and the Devil, 1959). Here, the world is not imperiled by aggressive ideologies but by neuroses—a US Air Force general (Sterling Hayden), driven by impotence to rail against the Communist threat to his "precious bodily fluids," and a Soviet regime that invests in a cheap Doomsday Machine because the people are clamoring for washing machines. In a way, Kubrick's film—a satire adapted from a dead-straight novel, Red Alert (1958) by Peter George (1924–1966)—is a sigh of relief that the world has come through Korea and Cuba without self-annihilation, but it is also an awful warning and a declaration that a third world war cannot be won. Invasion USA (1952) is the only American atomic war film to suggest that after nuclear attack, the Communist enemy would attempt to occupy the United States like stereotypical conquerors. Later films (including the Yugoslav Rat, 1960) blame both sides equally, with war as likely to result from accident or a failure of diplomacy. The ultimate message of The War Game (1967) by Peter Watkins (b. 1935) is that governments should not be trusted with nuclear weapons, while Ladybug Ladybug (Frank Perry, 1963)—echoing an outstanding Twilight Zone episode, "The Shelter"—goes so far as to suggest that civil preparedness contributes to a breakdown of society, as shelter-owners arm themselves not against the military enemy but their own neighbors.

The 1960s saw many fantastical Bondian superspies (the Flint and Matt Helm adventures), Strangelovian satires (The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, Norman Jewison, 1966; The President's Analyst, Theodore J. Flicker, 1967), and "realistic" espionage dramas (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Martin Ritt, 1965; The Ipcress File, Sidney J. Furie, 1965) riffing on the Cold War. Taking their cue from The Manchurian Candidate, all these films tend to suggest that "our side" is as bad (or, less often, good) as "their side"—the mission of the Spy Who Came In from the Cold is to discredit a clever and idealistic Jewish East German counterintelligence agent to save a former Nazi working as a double agent for the West—and, eventually, that the power elites of both sides are so dependent on the Cold War to retain their positions that they have become interchangeable.

As in so much later twentieth-century history, events suggest George Orwell's (1903–1950) novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which a permanent state of hostilities is an excuse for the real war, waged by rulers against the populace. From the mid-1960s, popular culture shifted from worrying about the Communists to that other deadly prong of the 1950s, rock and roll (representing youth, rebellion, and even unrestrained capitalist consumerism)—but was unsure whether to worry or celebrate. With Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), and Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) offering counterarguments to increasingly uncomfortable Americanist crusades like John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), battle lines were drawn for new wars, between young and old, powerful and powerless, black and white, hip and square. Old-style patriotism would resurge in the Reagan years (1980–1988), but even the red-bashing Rambo is by no means simplistic, as he grapples with masculinity, the legacy of Vietnam, and America's self-image. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, few victory parades were held in America. The movies were not there—round-the-clock news footage had told the story so quickly that it was stale by the time a film (e.g., Frankenheimer's The Fourth War, 1990) could be made.

SEE ALSO Censorship;Ideology;War Films;World War II

FURTHER READING

Belfrage, Cedric. The American Inquisition, 1945–1960: A Profile of the "McCarthy Era." New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1989.

Bernstein, Walter. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Biskind, Peter. Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Cole, Lester. Hollywood Red. Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1981.

Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Kahn, Gordon. Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who Were Indicted. New York: Boni and Gaer, 1948.

Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1988.

McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle, eds. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987.

Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

Smith, Julian. Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Scribners, 1975.

Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, Vol. 1, 1950–1957. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 1982.

——. Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, Vol. 2, 1958–1962. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 1986.

Kim Newman