Hollywood has made quite a few movies about The Blacklist – that period when Tailgunner Joe McCarthy supposedly wrecked the lives of those nice, liberal writers in the Hollywood Ten. (Actually, he didn’t do it himself and the writers were leftists, not liberals, but those are only two of dozens of pieces of misinformation, large and small, about that era.) And virtually all of those movies work from the same premise – the writers, directors, actors and others targeted by The Blacklist were unfairly accused by near fascistic conservatives.
A rather different view is about to appear in a book coming later this year by John Meroney, a preview of which appeared in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. It’s a whole new look at the political evolution of once liberal Ronald Reagan as he learned the evils of communism first inside the movie business. His mentor was evidently Roy M. Brewer, a liberal union chief who was adamantly anti-communist.
There’s more at the article linked above and on a video made for the LAT by Meroney.
I can’t wait to read the book. It may make Woody Allen’s The Front seem funny in a way it was never intended.
I’m with you, Roger… I can’t wait!
“Nice things should happen to nice people.”
— and the reverse? heh heh!
Roger, could you name a couple of mainstream films from the 30′s, 40′s, 50′s that would be considered “subversive?” Thanks.
’30s:
Gabriel Over the White House
Our Daily Bread
’40s
Mission to Moscow
The North Star
There are lots more, but those spring to mind immediately. You can see the Communist influence in The Grapes of Wrath, and even in films like Sahara and Casablanca, if you look—though in films like the latter two it mostly is a matter of giving a hat-tip to Spanish Civil War vets (mostly Communist).
– God’s Little Acre?
There’s a communist speech in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (written and directed by John Huston) in which a character lectures Bogart and friend about the Marxist Labor Theory of Value(!)
Of course, both B. Traven (author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and John Huston were solid lefties.