Tinselgrad

National Review, June 20, 2005 by Eve Tushnet

Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left, by Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh (Encounter, 292 pp., $25.95)

FROM the first years of the Soviet Union, Moscow tried to turn Hollywood's dream machine into a Communist propaganda outlet. Aspiring American writers got tours and workshops with renowned Russian filmmakers and dramatists; Communists covertly dominated unions and front groups. But the Soviets gained little from these efforts: a few celluloid valentines to Stalinism like Mission to Moscow, a few true believers willing to defend every purge, but little lasting influence. The most notable beneficiaries of the Communist effort in Hollywood might be today's Left, for whom the blacklist serves as a secular Lives of the Saints. As Ronald and Allis Radosh put it in their comprehensive new overview, Red Star Over Hollywood, the fable of the blacklist is "the story that Hollywood tells itself each night when it goes to sleep."

Most of our actions are driven by hunger for a role, a narrative that makes sense of our place in the world. This is perhaps especially true of the political beliefs of people who don't pay too much attention to politics: Such people generally hold political beliefs that place them on the side of the angels in a simplified, symbol-rich storyline. This is the primary reason that it's worth revisiting the dupes and duplicities of Hollywood's Cold War. Hollywood sells us many of our stories, so we need to look at the stories it tells itself. And the central story Hollywood tells itself about its own political responsibilities is a left-wing story loosely based on the fallout from the 1947 hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

The myth of the blacklist depicts innocent artists, driven to poverty and suicide by brutish anti-Semites. The temptation, for anyone seeking to debunk this myth, is simply to switch the black and white hats, creating a countermyth of crusading anti-Communists perceptively discerning Stalinist influences in the quintessential American industry. Red Star Over Hollywood avoids that temptation, offering sympathetic portrayals of Hollywood Communists and showing why they joined the Party. Several were seduced by the artistic experimentation of early Soviet cinema; others were attracted by causes the Communists championed, preeminently the opposition to fascism.

After they joined up, however, these poolside Communists found that the Party didn't care about any of the things that had attracted them. They joined believing that artists would have more freedom under Communism than under the capitalistic studio bosses; what they got instead was praise for the dullest "proletarian" literature and relentless criticism of any writing that showed original thought. (Artists, of course, are no more independent-minded than anyone else: Again and again, writers knuckled under to demands for ideological purity.)

The actors and screenwriters joined believing that they were united against fascism and anti-Semitism; they got the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. They joined believing that they were on the side of those pastel dream-figures, The Workers; they learned that Communist-controlled unions were more interested in the needs of the Party than in the needs of labor.

For a brief moment, HUAC managed to revive the old "Popular Front," the covertly Communist-dominated liberal-left 1930s coalition against fascism. Studio bosses and stars lined up to argue that Congress couldn't dictate the political beliefs of screenwriters or the hiring practices of the studios. But the most committed Communists among the Hollywood "unfriendly witnesses" decided to turn the HUAC hearings into a soapbox, ranting about HUAC's "Hitler techniques" and "the beginning of an American concentration camp." This rhetoric alienated those who would have supported a defense centered on the idea that even Communists shouldn't be harassed or prosecuted for their beliefs; but such a defense would mean conceding that multiple political perspectives are good, and this the genuine Communists could not do. In the aftermath of the hearings, the blacklist--an industry-wide agreement not to hire Communists--found, if not support, at least less opposition than it likely would have faced if the "Hollywood Ten" had chosen a liberal rather than hard-left defense.

The blacklist forms the core of the Hollywood Left's self-image. (Red Star's appendix describes eight movies romanticizing the blacklisted writers.) But the blacklistees did not all share the same fate. Some went through a period of poverty, selling off the property they'd acquired in the fat years, before beginning to work again under pseudonyms. Some went abroad and flourished there. A few were devastated, but most made their compromises and kept going.

The one recurring figure whose perspective seems closest to the authors' own is Ronald Reagan. Reagan defended freedom of speech and of political association--even for Communists--but he also, famously, opposed Communism in the film industry. When the blacklist was a done deal, he worked to minimize its scope, but he didn't allow himself to be used by Communists seeking liberal cover. He provides a welcome voice of clarity.