Hollywood's Missing Movies

Why American films have ignored life under communism.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley from the June 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Studio bosses, fearful of bad publicity, announced that they would indeed fire communists, which they had previously refused to do. This was the beginning of the blacklist, Hollywood's version of the conflict of our time, enshrined in such films as The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel and written by Walter Bernstein, and the star-studded but bland Guilty by Suspicion (1991). Viewers of such fare could easily conclude that communism scarcely existed except as a source of boundless optimism in the hearts of the country's most creative writers. Much the same message emerged from Julia, the 1977 Jane Fonda vehicle based on an autohagiographical memoir by Lillian Hellman.

Over the years, a number of book-length accounts have taken up the cause, some written by relatives of the blacklisted, invoking "inquisition" and "red scare" in their titles and bristling with terms such as witch-hunt and McCarthyite. The senator from Wisconsin, it should be noted, played no role in Hollywood, whose anti-communists, mostly liberal Democrats, found him an impediment to their cause.

As it plays out in the movies, the blacklist story is vintage Hollywood: black hats vs. white hats. The evil government committee rides into town and, for no apparent reason, makes life miserable for a group of noble artists. In one subplot, the victims survive by selling scripts under fake names. The story carries considerable appeal, though it misses the irony that those who thought capitalism evil continued to take advantage of the kind of market that did not exist in the socialist regimes they extolled. Albert Maltz championed East Germany, while fellow Hollywood Ten alumnus Lester Cole favored that bastion of artistic freedom, North Korea.

By the 1960s the blacklist was over; Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger restored the names of blacklisted writers to the credits of the films they actually wrote. The Hollywood Ten and other communist writers were on their way, as Philip Dunne put it, to being "virtually deified." Dunne had been through it all and found the revisionist accounts so distorted that, he said, "I could almost believe that I was reading the chronicle of some mythical kingdom."

The legend of the blacklist, sanitized of all references to Stalin or to the Communist Party's actual record in the studios, became a continuing influence on Hollywood's political life. Hollywood had entered its period of anti-anti-communism, a well-known phenomenon in American cultural and intellectual life. Those motivated by this ideology have vilified such critics of the Soviet Union as Robert Conquest and Sidney Hook, while venerating such paleo-leftists as journalist I.F. Stone, whose 1952 Hidden History of the Korean War parroted the party line that South Korea invaded the North. Anti-anti-communism demonizes anti-communists, however truthful their revelations, as paranoid and on the wrong side of history, while praising apologists of totalitarianism as well-meaning idealists, however mendacious and servile their record. Such a vision is not likely to promote a meaningful cinematic treatment of communism.

Witness the longstanding campaign to prevent director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Streetcar Named Desire) from receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy. Kazan, a former communist, cooperated with HUAC and defended his position in a New York Times advertisement that called on liberals to take a stand against communism. Since Kazan's cinematic achievements are undeniable, his career violates a significant aspect of the Hollywood Ten legend: that those who defied the committee were brilliant artists and noble idealists, while those who cooperated were vile mediocrities who could build their careers only by destroying others.

Kazan finally received his award at last year's Oscars, but amid renewed controversy over whether he should receive any applause at the event. (Abraham Polonsky [I Can Get It for You Wholesale], a leading Hollywood Communist who led the assault on Albert Maltz, hoped in print that Kazan would be assassinated.) But though Kazan finally received his due from Hollywood, Stalin never has.

According to Hollywood, American anti-communism derived not from any deficiencies of socialism or threat from the USSR but from paranoia, xenophobia, and the nefarious influence of Nazis who entered the United States after the war. That was the theme of Walter Bernstein's 1988 The House on Carroll Street, which featured a score more appropriate for a '50s monster movie. Bernstein, incidentally, shows up in the Venona decrypts, which reveal that he was a willing collaborator with the KGB. If nothing else, such a revelation gives new meaning to the Hollywood phrase, "Have your agent call my agent."

On the rare occasion when life under communism is portrayed, its characteristic brutality is virtually never actually represented. Consider, for instance, Warren Beatty's Oscar-winning Reds (1981), a psalm to Lenin acolyte John Reed. In that film a character concedes that the Soviet regime "violates human rights" but none of these violations appears on the screen. Likewise, audiences don't see the Khmer Rouge murdering any of their nearly 2 million victims in The Killing Fields (1984). Indeed, the real villains in that tragedy, we learn, are Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and U.S. foreign policy.

A similar theme runs through Missing (1982), with Jack Lemmon, directed by Constantine Costa-Gavras, a man of the left who, unlike his Hollywood colleagues, is sometimes willing to address communist themes honestly. Costa-Gavras' 1970 film The Confession deals with the 1952 anti-Semitic show trials in Czechoslovakia that resulted in 11 executions. After hanging, the victims' bodies were incinerated; the film shows a policeman scattering their ashes on frozen roads around Prague, which was what actually happened. For Yves Montand, who played Czech Foreign Minister Artur London, The Confession was "a farewell to the generous sentimentality of the Left, a Left that had been blind to its own crimes and cultivates a messianic pose, proposing to bring happiness to human beings, even if it means slaughtering them."

But Hollywood has yet to show itself capable of portraying what The Black Book of Communism, a recent scholarly assessment of communist crimes, calls "politically correct mass slaughter." In Eleni (1985), John Malkovich hunts down a Greek communist responsible for the death of his mother, but much of the hostile action takes place off screen. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), while generally anti-communist in tone, includes only fleeting glimpses of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Odd as it may seem, one of the few Hollywood movies that does depict violence in communist countries on screen is a Disney film. The 1983Night Crossing shows a daring escape from East Germany, Albert Maltz's version of the good society. Viewers see German border guards, whom John Hurt calls "pigs," gunning down those who flee. Material abounds for this type of film. Soviet Bloc archives are yielding their revelations about the Katyn Forest murders of Polish officers by Soviet forces, KGB assassination campaigns in the West, and the identity of Stalinist agents in Western governments. Vitaly Shentalinsky's 1996 book, Arrested Voices, documented Stalin's campaigns against writers and artists, whose victims included Itzak Feffer and Solomon Mikaels, both of whom had been showcased in Hollywood by Communists as evidence that anti-Semitism did not exist in the Soviet Union.

Films from former communist countries, the 1999 Thief among them, show that even the Russians are coming to terms with the communist legacy. But the circus surrounding Kazan's Oscar and other recent events suggest that Hollywood probably will not follow suit. The blacklist mythography casts too long a shadow, one in which a fuller appreciation of the epic battle between communism and democracy remains in the dark. "Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist," staged at the Motion Picture Academy's theater on the 50th anniversary of the 1947 hearings, featured Billy Crystal and Kevin Spacey in dramatic roles. Also appearing were Hollywood Ten veteran Ring Lardner Jr. and fellow party member and Song of Russia co-writer Paul Jarrico, who compared the Hollywood Ten's performance with the stand that Jefferson took against the Alien and Sedition Act. Actress Marsha Hunt said that "for over a decade, this was no longer the land of the free, nor the home of the brave."

This event was a colorized, multimedia version of Philip Dunne's "mythical kingdom," but for the anti-anti-communist Hollywood crowd, it proved the feel-good hit of the fall. Such events pass on the myths to younger filmmakers who see themselves not just as entertainers but teachers.

For instance, Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, released last fall, takes its title from an agitprop musical written by Marc Blitztein, a doctrinaire Stalinist. The original work was welcomed by the 1930s Federal Theater Project, a group dominated by communists, precisely because of its Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism. The progressive Works Progress Administration (WPA) closed down the show out of budgetary considerations, though Robbins attempts to blame it on an axis of HUAC and capitalists allied with Mussolini and Hitler. The fascist-capitalist bosses, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, raking in the dough selling goods to Hitler, are also out to get muralist Diego Rivera, played by Ruben Blades. Audiences predictably stayed away from this film, but in Hollywood, the mythology of the left remains powerful enough to see such a project through production.

Late last year, the University of Southern California, whose film school is a kind of Hollywood employment agency, unveiled a sculpture garden honoring the Hollywood Ten as victims of the Cold War and champions of the First Amendment. The mythology has become a monument, a kind of museum of anti-anti-communism in a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident. The specter that once haunted Europe is gone, yet it still seems to hang over the palms of Southern California, an ideological smog that obscures the view for millions of filmgoers.

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Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941...

David Knights|12.17.10 @ 8:35AM|#

Hitler invaded the USSR in June of 1941, not September of 1939. Poland was invaded in September of 1939, first by Hitler, then by Stalin 17 days later.

|12.18.10 @ 5:24PM|#

We all know why Hollywood has been conspicuously silent on the crimes of communism. Eugene McCarthy may have been a blowhard, and his witch hunts could not be allowed to become normal in America, but he was right about the left's links to Stalin.

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Please check your history facts before writing articles, Stalin did not invade Finland! Finland fought back in the Winter war and only lost a chunk of land in eastern Finland as a result of the Moscow Peace Treaty. Finland remained independant and was never occupied nor invaded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_war

strumpfhosen|2.28.11 @ 10:47PM|#

Let's just change one thing about our whole scenario & see how much different we think reactions would be now. Let's say that there was a sizable percentage of folks in Hollywood in the 30's who were committed Nazis. -- Since there were committed Nazis in the US then as now, this analogy falls on its face.

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