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

by Paul Buhle (Author), David Wagner (Author)

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 (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565847180
• ISBN-13: 978-1565847187
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,728,870 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encyclopedic, July 18, 2002

By	sebastian hope (Olympia WA) - See all my reviews

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.

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating journey, October 3, 2003

By	Louis Proyect (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

"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.

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hollywood's Travels -- and Travails, March 28, 2004

By	Robert S (New York United States) - See all my reviews

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

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.