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

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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.

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.

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.

"Radical Hollywood" is both fabulously entertaining and enlightening. For movie fans (who isn't) and students of American history, it provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the radical politics of the directors, screen writers, and actors who were part of the Hollywood mainstream until McCarthyism drove them out. When you reflect on the greatness of their work, you realize that the witch-hunt was our loss as well as theirs.

The cover photo of "Radical Hollywood" suggests that many of these figures were not ordinarily associated with the left. With James Cagney placing his hand somewhat menacingly on Jean Harlow in "The Public Enemy", you have to wonder what the connection is. As it turns out, the script was written by William Bright, who was one of the first left-wing innovators in Hollywood. Hailing from Chicago, he was part of a group of youngsters around Dr. Ben Reitman, Emma Goldman's longtime lover. During the Great Depression, he worked for a time as a smalltime bootlegger and was inspired by this experience to write about criminal life, emphasizing how social relations are distorted by capitalism.

Cagney threw his support to the burgeoning labor movement in the 1930s on Bright's prompting. He signed on to a support committee for strikers in the San Joaquin Valley in 1934. When the Hearst press began to redbait Cagney, he pulled back from future involvement with the left. If witch-hunting had not been a factor in Hollywood from the beginning, it is not too difficult to imagine much more willingness on the part of movie stars to speak out on social and political questions.

To see how figures such as Ed Asner, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn are stigmatized in the equivalent of the Hearst press today for having the temerity to speak out about US foreign policy, you can only appreciate the scholarly effort that went into "Radical Hollywood". For in the final analysis its authors demonstrate that radicalism is very much a phenomenon that grew out of the American soil and was not imported by agents of a foreign power.

This is a good look at the often ignored early radicals of hollywood. It gives a good history of the time leading up to and the aftermath of the Blacklist and it's antisemitic tendencies. Paul Buhle, et al seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject but I found their method of sharing the information a little overwhelming and pedantic. Every page is dotted with references to very obscure films, many with alternative titles, that are impossible to find. It's difficult to envision many of the situations and influential aspects of the films when you can find no more information on them much less see them. Taking all of the authors information on faith is not the usual film studies method. In contrast to many books about hollywood this one dosn't have many salacious details about harlets and moguls. I would recommend this book to serious film/hollywood history buffs only.

Radical Hollywood, by Paul Buhle and David Wagner, is an exhaustively (if at times exhaustingly) comprehensive and, as far as I can tell, mostly accurate (if at times chronologically confusing) catalog of the many U.S. motion pictures created during the brief cinematic "Golden Age" from roughly the beginning of the New Deal to the onset of the Cold War by what could loosely be called the Hollywood Left -- or the Left in Hollywood, such as it was.

The fact, though, that Buhle and Wagner had to write a book largely to explain the alleged "radical" subtext in these films by their non-monolithic screenwriters illustrates how the "threat" posed to U.S. society (read: the capitalist class) by such pictures was wildly exaggerated by right-wing anti-communists for political reasons. (Was Lassie Come Home, for example, going to undermine the foundations of capitalism simply because it was adapted for the screen by a Communist?) And yet, maybe that perceived subtlety (where present, enforced perhaps at least as much by studio economics and cultural restraints as by national politics) was the kind of "subversion" the inquisitors found so dangerous to the interests of the social class they actually represented.

Or maybe it was a case of guilt by either membership or association, with the work of any Communist -- or anyone associated however remotely with a Communist or the Communist Party -- being cast under suspicion, whatever the nature of his or her work. But just as Freud is reputed to have said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes, say, an expressly comedic film is just that, and nothing more. And even from a Leftist perspective, that is not necessarily bad. Consider, though, Sullivan's Travels, which oddly political yet intriguing picture instead of self-consciously being "an answer to communism," actually makes a case for it in spite of itself, and which despite its intentions (or perhaps because of them), may be more politically effective than many a more tendentiously political piece of cinema, even when the title character keenly observes that, "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh," it being "all some people have." (Curiously, the opening scene-within-a-scene of this 1941 comedy -- written and directed by Preston Sturges, who, like this film, is not mentioned by Buhle and Wagner nor is he identified by them as being a part of the Hollywood Left community -- anticipated the ending of the 1948 drama Ruthless, co-scripted by one of the Hollywood Ten and discussed by the authors.) Indeed, there is nothing inherently wrong or reactionary with making people laugh, provided one sees that culture can and should be for the edification as well as the entertainment of the public. And this is where skilled and honest Leftist cultural workers are in their element. But just as an artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery, according to the great Paul Robeson, so, ultimately, must an artist's audience.

However, Buhle and Wagner betray a kind of not so much discernibly anti-communist as anti-Communist (or anti-Communist Party) subtext of their own throughout the book -- typical of that tendency of neo-Left thought developing in the 1960s which, by intent or in effect, sought the very break with the historical continuity of the Communist Left that Buhle and Wagner see as a consequence of the Hollywood blacklist, as when they blame "Party bureaucrats" for the demise of the Hollywood Left (or what passed for it), when were it not for the (albeit imperfect) agency of the Communist Party (often in the midst of internal struggle as well as external attack, the effect of the former evidently not sufficiently and fairly understood or appreciated by the authors), most of those who became the radical screenwriters and filmmakers of Hollywood would likely never have even thought of attempting what they somehow managed in some form to bring to the movie screen.

It's quite true that the authors' knowledge of Hollywood film history is encyclopedic, and this alone makes the book an indispensable reference to the stories behind the stories of innumerable great and less-than-great films. Described elsewhere as "the Abbott and Costello of film studies," these two spew forth gallons of embarrassingly wrongheaded and outmoded leftie humbug; nevertheless this is exactly what makes their work so useful. Yes, all those "paranoid" right-wingers were right all along about the real motives and agendas in Hollywood "back then." And not much has changed...it's still "Fantasyland" in more ways than one, which ought to be an important clue to the etiology of leftism. My only real objection to this work is that being so thoroughly deluded by their own political fantasies as they are, the authors attempt to claim almost everyone in Hollywood as a real, potential, or lapsed leftie, whether or not there was ever much actual evidence of it...a kind of triple-reverse McCarthyism. One final tip: buy this book second-hand. I'd hate to think I'd given one red cent (no pun intended) to either of these authors or their publisher.