Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies [Hardcover]

Paul Buhle (Author), David Wagner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2002

A revealing and affectionate account of the personal and political lives of the left-wing screenwriters, directors, and actors behind Hollywood's Golden Age. The first comprehensive book about Hollywood's future blacklistees and the hundreds of films they wrote or directed from the dawn of sound movies to the early 1950s, Radical Hollywood traces the political and personal lives of the activists along with the often-decisive impact of their work upon American film's Golden Age. A highly readable, anecdotal history, featuring an insert of classic film stills, , Radical Hollywood describes the story-behind-the-story of such famous films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, and Woman of the Year, alongside such campy items as The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, and Kiss the Blood off My Hands. Genres like crime and women's films, family cinema, war, animation and, above all, film noir are reconsidered here, with fresh evidence drawn from interviews and recent archival breakthroughs. A long-awaited rediscovery of an overlooked intellectual-artistic milieu, , Radical Hollywood will interest all film-lovers and devotees of political culture. 16 pages b/w photographs.

Films discussed include: The Adventures of Captain Marvel • The Big Clock • Body and Soul • Back Door to Heaven • Blues in the Night • Cabin in the Sky • Caged • Casablanca • Champion • Deadline at Dawn • Destry Rides Again • The Devil-Doll • Diplomaniacs • Dynamite • Frankenstein • G. I. Joe • Give Us This Day • Gun Crazy • High Noon • Hitler's Children • Hold That Ghost • Honky Tonk • Keeper of the Flame • Kiss the Blood off My Hands • Kitty Foyle • Lassie, Come Home • The Lawless • Life with Father • The Long Night • The Maltese Falcon • The Man Who Reclaimed His Head • Marked Woman • Mayor of Hell • Meet the People • Mission to Moscow • Monsieur Verdoux • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington • None but the Lonely Heart • Our Vines Have Tender Grapes • Phantom Lady • The Philadelphia Story • A Place in the Sun • The President's Mystery • Pride of the Marines • The Public Enemy • Ruthless • The Sea Hawk • Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror • Stella Dallas • Stormy Weather • The Story of G.I. Joe • Talk of the Town • Theodora Goes Wild • The Thin Man • Thirty Seconds over Tokyo • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn • Watch on the Rhine • The Wizard of Oz • Woman of the Year

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hollywood and politics have always had a complicated relationship that changes decade by decade (seen as too liberal last year, Tinseltown is now being courted by Beltway bigwigs to produce patriotic entertainment), and this groundbreaking account of leftist influence in Hollywood from the 1920s to the '50s is an intelligent, well argued and absorbing examination of how politics and art can make startling and often strange bedfellows. Buhle and Wagner (A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left) mix exhaustive research and political acumen to produce a detailed analysis of progressive politics in the work of writers, producers, directors and actors. While the book is generously studded with often startling examples (e.g., the 1940s Hopalong Cassidy films written by Michael Wilson were replete with leftist political messages), its real force derives from the authors' astute and judicious untangling of the complicated webs of relationships, politics and economics that produced some of the most important films and genres of the period. From the anticapitalist themes of gangster films such as 1931's Public Enemy and the explicit and, for its time, shocking antilynching message that screenwriter Hugo Butler inserted in Mickey Rooney's 1938 Huckleberry Finn to the underlying class-struggle implications of film noir and the proletarian subtext of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Buhle and Wagner examine not only the political beliefs of the artists but the ever-shifting political contexts in which they functioned. This is one of the few complete and cohesive histories of the history of progressives in Hollywood and is an important contribution to the literature of film and politics. B&w photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In the Thirties and Forties a generation of actors and screenwriters shaped by the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Soviet Union, the rise of fascism, and the new militancy of labor unions looked to Hollywood as the ideal way to reach the masses. An assortment of leftists, hard-line Communists, and fellow travelers worked on scripts in all genres. Though only bits and pieces of leftist ideology may be discerned in the completed films, much of it hardly radical by today's standards, Buhle (American civilization, Brown Univ.) and Wagner (former political editor of the Arizona Republic) contend that it was in the film noir genre that these radicals made their lasting impact on American films. They describe the hard-bitten, cynical, world-weary noir films and the contributions of future blacklisted like Abraham Polonsky, Albert Maltz, and Dalton Trumbo. Owing to the lack of first-person narratives, the authors struggle but are unable to bring this era to life. Also, the discussion of films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Casablanca is superficial, rarely revealing more than previous evaluations. To fully understand the radical era and how it led to the blacklist, this work should be supplemented by titles like Buhle and Patrick McGilligan's Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, Walter Bernstein's Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist, and Robert Vaughn's Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. This effort is an appropriate supplemental purchase for large public and academic film collections. (Index not seen.) Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 460 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565847180
• ISBN-13: 978-1565847187
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,253,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Skewed but nonetheless interesting read for film/politics buffs, September 14, 2010

By 

Edison McIntyre (Durham, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies (Hardcover)

I have a serious problem with some books about Hollywood politics and the "blacklist" era of c.1947-1965. That many talented (and even mediocre) motion picture actors, directors, screenwriters, and other filmmakers were unofficially banished from the American movie industry for several years because of their alleged Communist sympathies was a travesty of American justice and fair play. Yet some of those blacklisted, and some of their defenders in the popular and academic media, seem to imply that their persecution by the U.S. government and the motion picture industry somehow validated many or all of their political beliefs and activities - including support of an American Communist Party that was always under control of Stalinists and slavishly adhered to the Soviet line, and which was (unknown to most of its members and sympathizers) a center for Soviet espionage against the United States. For a rather extreme example of this attitude, see HOLLYWOOD RED: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LESTER COLE, one of the celebrated "Hollywood Ten" group of filmmakers who served federal prison time for their refusal in 1947 to answer questions in hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). However wrong-headed these people may have been in their faith in Marxist philosophy and the Soviet workers' paradise, they didn't deserve to lose their livelihoods simply because they held those political views.

So I approach books like RADICAL HOLLYWOOD with some trepidation, and it was apparent from the first few pages that the authors were very sympathetic to the victims of the blacklist. The authors' approach to their subjects is distinctly from the port side, and they strive to categorize virtually all the filmmakers they mention in some leftist political context - "left-wingers" (but not necessarily Party members), "collaborating non-Communist [ally]" (speaking of screenwriter Dudley Nichols), "left-leaning," "Marxist bohemian," "left-sponsored antifascist[s]" (the Three Stooges!), "New Dealers," "notoriously close to the Left," "friendly witness" (one who agreed to answer questions for the HCUA at some point - including Hollywood Ten member Edward Dmytryk -- and thus earned varying degrees of enmity from many leftists), and so forth. Moreover, they concentrate on filmmakers - mainly screenwriters, some quite well-known and others rather obscure today - who contributed to films of the 1930s, `40s, and early `50s, and try to demonstrate how these people managed to make or influence movies that reflected their left-liberal political sympathies, even in the face of opposition from studio heads, the Hays Office (the industry's self-censorship arm), and powerful interests outside of Hollywood.

The usual historical consensus on Hollywood leftists has been that the corporate, collaborative nature of most American film-making in this era largely negated any attempts by the left to insert "Communist propaganda" into the industry's products. Leftist screenwriters might create the scripts, but they didn't actually shoot the film, act out their lines, or enjoy the privilege of "final cut" that was essentially restricted to the studio chiefs and producers. Nonetheless, Buhle and Wagner make a good case for screenwriters working left-liberal social and political themes into a large number of films, especially in the period 1935-1947. Beginning in 1935, the international Communist movement, controlled largely by the USSR and facing the growth of fascism in Europe, turned away from stressing Marxist ideological purity and toward collaborating with the non-Communist left in an anti-fascist "Popular Front." Though the "messages" were at times very subtle, the "propaganda" - opposition to lynching, racial discrimination, anti-Semitism, and fascism; an awareness of gender discrimination and class differences; and a general support for the Roosevelt administration's New Deal programs and (in 1940-45) the anti-Fascist U.S. war effort - was hardly reflective of exclusively Communist views. The only blatantly "Communist" themes were found in the sympathetic treatment of that gallant ally, the Soviet Union, in a handful of American wartime films - e.g., "Mission to Moscow," "Song of Russia," "The North Star" -- that were sanctioned and encouraged by the U.S. government.

The post-war backlash against the Hollywood left stemmed not just from right-wing fears of cinematic subversion, but also from within the industry itself. Before the war, "left wingers," including many Communists, were instrumental in organizing the Screen Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Screen Directors Guild (among other film industry unions). As the American political right enjoyed a post-war, post-Roosevelt resurgence and a general anti-labor sentiment prevailed, a climate of payback developed in Hollywood. As an anti-Soviet foreign policy grew hand-in-hand with a domestic anti-Communist fervor (embraced by both major political parties), American Communists and other leftists - including many who had been associated with the Party only during the Popular Front era - found themselves caught up in a witch hunt and barred from earning a livelihood in Hollywood. There were a number of personal hardships and tragedies among the blacklistees, though a surprising number continued to find employment in other media, in Europe, and (mainly for writers) "under the table" with sympathetic filmmakers or by selling scripts through "fronts" (other writers who were not blacklisted). Buhle and Wagner argue that, despite the persecution of the Hollywood left, their messages continued to get through on the screen, especially in the post-war "film noir" genre and in other genre films, often in low-budget "B" movies.

Even if one is suspicious of the leftist orientation of the authors, RADICAL HOLLYWOOD is a very informative book about leftist screenwriters and the films that they made (or at least influenced) in the studio era. In the end, efforts by Hollywood Communists to inject Party propaganda into mainstream American movies were half-hearted at best, and Party members were often at odds about exactly what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. The writers (including the much larger number of non-Communists working in the industry) were as much concerned about getting a fair payday from their studio employers as they were about promoting liberal ideas. At times, Buhle and Wagner seem to strain to demonstrate the ideological content they detect in a great many films (from routine oaters like "Pals of the Saddle" to the classic post-war "issue" films like "Crossfire" and "Intruder in the Dust"), but their take on the more obscure films is seldom dull or unreasonable. The writing is a bit stuffy in places but generally flows well. One can detect a few errors in the book about casting (John Garfield did not appear in "Action in the North Atlantic"; Michael Ansara played Cochise in the "Broken Arrow" TV series, a role that had been played by Jeff Chandler, not James Stewart, in the film version) but these don't lessen the overall interest of the book.

RADICAL HOLLYWOOD is a serviceable supplement to such basic works as Ceplair and Englund's THE INQUISITION IN HOLLYWOOD and THE HOLLYWOOD WRITERS' WARS by Nancy Lynn Schwartz and Sheila Schwartz. Just as a compendium of politically significant/themed/influenced films from the studio era, it's an interesting read for movie buffs.

3.0 out of 5 stars Radical Hollywood, December 17, 2011

By 

Robert Moran - See all my reviews

This review is from: Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies (Hardcover)

I had read the earlier book "Tender Comrades" and was interested in this book.
It's well-written and fascinating. However, I found some factual errors.
This is based on the hardcover version:
p. 67: "The same can be said for American-born studio mogul Louis B. Mayer..."
Louis B. Mayer(Lazar Meir) was born in 1885 in Dymer, Russia.
p. 126: "His partner was German refugee Joseph L. Mankiewicz..."
Joseph L. Mankiewicz was born 2/11/09 in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
p. 424: "'Print the legend', Frank Capra was reported to have quipped..."
This is actually a line from John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance".
Otherwise, I think this is a good book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great overview of the Left in Hollywood 1930-50, November 18, 2009

By 

Filmfan (Minnesota USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies (Paperback)

Encyclopedic narrative of Hollywood Left during and after the Depression, including Hollywood labor history as well as the Blacklist. The one book to have if you're keeping track of the players during this dynamic and politically-charged era. Buhle, an historian of the American Left, and Wagner, a cinema journalist, focus primarily on writers, actors and directors and their connections to the Left causes and movements of the thirties, and the personal fallout from the Blacklist. Gives a good overview of the role of the leftist artists in B movies, wartime dramas, and in the development of Film Noir. Bogged down in spots by long, meandering sentences, but well-focussed on its subjects and their films, and evenhanded in its judgments. Probably the best inside story of a fascinating but overlooked period of Hollywood history, and a great reference for fans of TCM.