- Radosh, Ronald and Allis Radosh.
Red Star over Hollywood.
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005.
ISBN 1-893554-96-1.
-
The Hollywood blacklist has become one of the most mythic
elements of the mid-20th century Red scare. Like most myths,
especially those involving tinseltown, it has been re-scripted
into a struggle of good (falsely-accused artists defending
free speech) versus evil (paranoid witch hunters bent on
censorship) at the expense of a large part of the detail and
complexity of the actual events. In this book, drawing upon
contemporary sources, recently released documents from the FBI
and House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and
interviews with surviving participants in the events, the authors
patiently assemble the story of what really happened, which
is substantially different than the stories retailed by
partisans of the respective sides. The evolution of those
who joined the Communist Party out of idealism, were repelled
by its totalitarian attempts to control their creative work
and/or the cynicism of its support for the 1939–1941
Nazi/Soviet pact, yet who risked their careers to save those
of others by refusing to name other Party members, is evocatively
sketched, along with the agenda of HUAC, which FBI documents
now reveal actually had lists of party members before the
hearings began, and were thus grandstanding to gain publicity
and intimidate the studios into firing those who would not
deny Communist affiliations. History isn't as tidy as
myth: the accusers were perfectly correct in claiming that
a substantial number of prominent Hollywood figures were
members of the Communist Party, and the accused were perfectly
correct in their claim that apart from a few egregious
exceptions, Soviet and pro-communist propaganda was not
inserted into Hollywood films. A mystery about one of
those exceptions, the 1943 Warner Brothers film
Mission to Moscow,
which defended the Moscow show trials, is cleared up here. I've
always wondered why, since many of the Red-baiting films of the 1950s
are cult classics, this exemplar of the ideological inverse
(released, after all, when the U.S. and Soviet Union were allies in
World War II) has never made it to video. Well, apparently those who
currently own the rights are sufficiently embarrassed by it that
apart from one of the rare prints being run on television, the only
place you can see it is at the film library of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York or in the archive of the University of Wisconsin.
Ronald Radosh is author of
Commies (July 2001)
and co-author of
The Rosenberg File (August 2002).
October 2005 