Hollywood's Cold War

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Hollywoods cold war EUP

10/7/07

10:24 am

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TONY SHAW ‘Politically nuanced, historically contextualized, and internationally informed, Hollywood’s Cold War is essential reading for anyone interested in this fascinating subject. Tony Shaw’s analysis is both penetrating and comprehensive. The broad range of films he studies will greatly expand conventional understandings of the Cold War’s impact on American filmmaking.’ Christian G. Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides

Published at a point when American filmmakers are deeply involved in the War on Terror, this authoritative and timely book offers the first comprehensive account of Hollywood’s propaganda role during the defining ideological conflict of the twentieth century: the Cold War. In an analysis of films dating from America’s first Red Scare in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Tony Shaw examines the complex relationship between filmmakers, censors, politicians and government propagandists.

Drawing on declassified government documents, studio archives and filmmakers’ private papers, Shaw reveals the different ways in which cinematic propaganda was produced, disseminated, and received by audiences during the Cold War. In the process, he blends subjects as diverse as women’s fashions, McCarthyism, drug smuggling, Christianity, and American cultural diplomacy in India. His conclusions about Hollywood’s versatility and power have a contemporary resonance which will interest anyone wishing to understand wartime propaganda today.

TONY SHAW

Movies, Shaw demonstrates, were at the centre of the Cold War’s battle for hearts and minds. Hollywood’s comedies, love stories, musicals, thrillers, documentaries and science fiction shockers – to list a few genres – played a critical dual role: on the one hand teaching millions of Americans why communism represented the greatest threat their country had ever faced, and on the other selling America’s liberal-capitalist ideals across the globe.

HOLLYWOOD’S COLD WAR

HOLLYWOOD’S COLD WAR

HOLLYWOOD’S COLD WAR

Tony Shaw is Reader in International History at the University of Hertfordshire.

Cover design: www.riverdesign.co.uk Cover image: Soviet troops occupy Calumet, Colorado in John Milius’ Red Dawn (1984). Courtesy of MGM/United Artists/ The Kobal Collection.

www.eup.ed.ac.uk ISBN 978 0 7486 2524 6

barcode

Edinburgh

Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

TONY SHAW

Hollywood’s Cold War

For Shirley and Isaac

Hollywood’s Cold War

Tony Shaw

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Tony Shaw, 2007 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2523 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 2524 6 (paperback) The right of Tony Shaw to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction 1. Love and defection 2. The enemy within 3. Projecting a prophet for profit 4. Of gods and moguls 5. Negotiable dissent 6. Turning a negative into a positive 7. A cowboy in combats 8. Secrets and lies 9. The empire strikes back Conclusion

1 9 42 72 103 135 167 199 234 267 301

Bibliography

310

Film Index

332

General Index

335

Acknowledgements

I would like to record thanks to the following who, in one way or another, gave me help on this project: Chris Appy, Dave Bannerman, John Bell, John Christensen, Nick Cull, Sue Dowe, David Dunn, Colin Gardner, Ifan Hughes, Pete Kind, Rob King, Dan Leab, Patrick Major, Gregg McClymont, Ross Melnick, MRFC, MUFC, Kenneth Osgood, Josie Panidou, Ray Ryan, John Sbardellati, Axel Schäfer, Leslie Shores, Mark E. Smith, Richard Standring, Mike Thornhill, June Venables, Pete Venables, Hugh Wilford, Gretchen Wayne, Andy Woods; to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the University of Hertfordshire, and the Scouloudi Foundation at London’s Institute of Historical Research for financial assistance; and, most of all, to Shirley Heckles, for being my movie-watching partner for twenty years and for collaborating on the best possible distraction from book-writing: Isaac. Thanks to I. B. Tauris for permitting me to update a chapter that appeared in my book British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus (2000). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material and film stills in this book. Every eﬀort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. White Nights (1985). Columbia Pictures/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Ninotchka (1939). MGM/The Kobal Collection. Silk Stockings (1957). MGM/The Kobal Collection. My Son John (1952). Paramount/The Kobal Collection. J. Edgar Hoover-Louis de Rochement photograph. Louis de Rochement Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Walk East on Beacon (1952). Columbia Pictures/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Walk East on Beacon (1952) poster. Columbia Pictures/Louis de Rochement Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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John Halas photograph. Stills, Posters and Designs Division of the British Film Institute. Animal Farm (1954). Columbia Pictures/Halas and Batchelor Ltd. 1984 (1956). Columbia Pictures/Stills, Posters and Designs Division of the British Film Institute. Red Planet Mars (1952). United Artists/The Kobal Collection. The Prisoner (1955). Columbia Pictures/Stills, Posters and Designs Division of the British Film Institute. Cecil B. DeMille photograph. Paramount/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Ten Commandments (1956). Paramount/The Kobal Collection. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Twentieth Century Fox/The Kobal Collection. Storm Centre (1956). Columbia Pictures/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On the Beach (1959). United Artists/MGM. Pinky (1949). Twentieth Century Fox/The Kobal Collection. George Stevens, Jr. photograph. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nine from Little Rock (1964). Programme Guggenheim Pictures, Inc./United States Information Agency. The Wings of Eagles (1957). MGM/The Kobal Collection. John Wayne photographs and The Green Berets (1968) poster. Batjac Productions, Inc. The Green Berets (1968). Batjac Productions, Inc./ Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Hearts and Minds (1974). Columbia Pictures/BBS Productions, Inc. The President’s Analyst (1967) poster. Paramount. Three Days of the Condor (1975). Paramount/The Kobal Collection. Red Dawn (1984). MGM/United Artists/The Kobal Collection. Walker (1987). Universal Studios. Red Heat (1988). Carolco/The Kobal Collection. The Hunt for Red October (1990). Paramount/The Kobal Collection.

List of Abbreviations

ACCF ACLU AFI ARVN BBC CBS CCF CFF CIA CPUSA ECA FBI FCDA HUAC IRD KGB MI5 MOI MPA MPAA MPEA MPPDA MPS NATO NBC NCFE NSC OCB OCDM OPC

American Committee for Cultural Freedom American Civil Liberties Union American Film Institute Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) British Broadcasting Corporation Columbia Broadcasting System Congress for Cultural Freedom Crusade for Freedom Central Intelligence Agency Communist Party of the United States of America European Cooperation Administration Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Civil Defence Administration House Un-American Activities Committee Information Research Department (UK) Committee of State Security (Soviet intelligence and security service) Military Intelligence department concerned with state security (UK) Ministry of Information (UK) Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals Motion Picture Association of America Motion Picture Export Association Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Motion Picture Service (of USIA) North Atlantic Treaty Organisation National Broadcasting Company National Committee for Free Europe National Security Council Operations Coordinating Board Oﬃce of Civil Defence Management Oﬃce of Policy Coordination

x

OSS OWI PCA PSB RD-DR UN USIA USIS USO VOA

Hollywood’s Cold War Oﬃce of Strategic Services Oﬃce of War Information Production Code Administration Psychological Strategy Board Reader’s Digest-de Rochement Corporation United Nations United States Information Agency United States Information Services United Service Organisations Voice of America

Introduction

In the battle for mass opinion in the Cold War, few weapons were more powerful than the cinema. From the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution through to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, millions of people worldwide went to movie theatres every week, from the rundown fleapits of Calcutta to the airconditioned dream palaces of California. What they saw and heard on the big screen could have a profound influence on their comprehension of the Cold War – whether it was via British-made espionage comedies of the 1950s, East German-made outer-space adventures of the 1960s, American-made ‘paranoid’ thrillers of the 1970s, or Cuban-made allegorical vampire cartoons of the 1980s.1 Over the past 50 years, considerable attention has focused on the ‘Great Fear’ that swept through Hollywood during the McCarthy era. For good reason: the late 1940s and early 1950s is commonly regarded as Tinsel town’s ‘darkest hour’, when producers were forced into making dozens of lurid ‘redbaiting’ movies and when scores of filmmakers’ careers were ruined by bogus accusations of communist subversion.2 More recently, historians have begun to set the American film industry’s Cold War role in a wider, international context, by, for instance, highlighting Hollywood’s willingness to export American ideals in line with the US State Department’s wishes.3 However, this celluloid ‘cultural diplomacy’ has yet to make serious inroads into mainstream Cold War historiography, while only a few scholars have taken the lead from the revelations of Hollywood-State Department collaboration to search for potential links between the film industry and other government agencies during the conflict.4 This book is the first attempt to map out Hollywood’s treatment of the Cold War throughout the whole conflict. On one level, it is a work of film history, one that provides a comprehensive account of which plots, scenes and actors figured prominently on the American Cold War screen over a period of 70 years. On another level, Hollywood’s Cold War fuses film studies with diplomatic, social and political history. It looks behind the scenes to determine which individuals, political organisations and government departments were involved in the filmmaking process. It explains how the political

2

Hollywood’s Cold War

economy of American cinema aﬀected the content and distribution of Cold War movies, and why filmmakers focused on certain Cold War issues at the expense of others. It explores the relationship between Hollywood’s Cold War coverage and the US political establishment’s views on the conflict, and, ultimately, considers the influence Hollywood films had on the public’s perceptions of the Cold War in the United States and elsewhere. At root, my chief interest lies in detailing the general mentalities and values that underpinned one of the longest international and civil conflicts of the twentieth century. This means examining the Cold War from the bottom up rather than topdown and seeing it as a conflict between peoples as much as governments. A key part of this involves investigating how the most powerful opinionforming institutions, the mass media, told the ‘story’ of the Cold War. Hollywood’s Cold War is also revisionist. It shows that the American film industry had eﬀectively been at war with communism for three decades prior to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s now notorious arrival on the political scene in the late 1940s. Not only was this thirty years before the appearance of William Wellman’s The Iron Curtain (1948), often called Hollywood’s first Cold War movie.5 It was also, significantly, thirty years before most scholars indicate the ‘cultural Cold War’ started.6 As I will go on to argue, however, the film industry’s early willingness to portray communism as fundamentally un-American did not translate automatically into blanket support for Washington’s Cold War approach between the late 1940s and late 1980s. In order to explain why, and to trace the main contours of Hollywood’s treatment of the Cold War, it is necessary to contextualise the American film industry’s changing attitudes towards, and representations of, the conflict. This entails examining the motives that lay behind the making of Cold War film material at various stages of the conflict, and exploring the main Cold War themes addressed by key feature films and documentaries. It also means assessing how films were received by a variety of audiences, and looking at the ways in which culture and public opinion intersected with foreign policy-making in the United States during the Cold War. Above all, the book outlines Hollywood’s part in the longest of all international cinematic propaganda wars to date – that fought between American and Soviet filmmakers during the Cold War. Scholars now accept that, partly because of the ubiquity of the mass media in the second half of the twentieth century, the Cold War was a propaganda contest par excellence. Never before in history had the belligerents in a civil and international conflict possessed the means of communicating so deeply and so widely. Rarely before had belligerents also needed to play the propaganda game so assiduously. With the onset of the rivalry between communism and capitalism after 1917, and especially after the geopolitical changes wrought by the Second World War,

Introduction

3

the increasingly critical role played by ideology in international relations since the French Revolution reached its apogee. Two ‘total ideologies’ now faced each other globally, the result being that scarcely an international episode between 1945 and 1989 escaped the imprint of the East-West altercation. Fearful that an armed clash with each other would lead to a nuclear Armageddon, Washington and Moscow were compelled to turn to twin surrogates. First, they had recourse to proxy wars in the Third World fought, initially at least, by clients of the superpowers guided by American or Russian ‘advisers’. Second, they conducted the Cold War with words and images, using psychological warfare laced with ideological slogans on an unparalleled scale, as a substitute for guns and bombs.7 Thanks to declassified oﬃcial documentation, we can now paint a broad picture of the American government’s propaganda strategy during the Cold War. What is clear is that this strategy was far more sophisticated and expansive than many have supposed. Successive US administrations thought that winning the hearts and minds of those at home was every bit as important as those overseas. Crucially, propaganda was also inextricably linked to many Americans’ highly ideological approach towards the Cold War. Conventionally, historians have thought of propaganda as an accessory to the traditional military, economic and political components of US Cold War strategy – the ‘fourth weapon’ in Washington’s armoury. Propaganda has, moreover, been seen largely as an adjunct to policy, there to support rather than to shape decision-making. But what if propaganda disseminated about, let us say, the ‘superiority’ of democratic values was more than a policy veneer? What if presidential speeches on America’s ‘missionary’ role during the Cold War, say, indicated that American policy-makers saw the conflict as much as a spiritual and ideological contest as a military or economic battle? Furthermore, what if propaganda and ideology went hand in hand, reinforcing one another, underpinned by a psychological and cultural approach to the Cold War?8 Such questions run counter both to historians rooted in the realist and national security traditions of American foreign relations, who argue that policy-makers were concerned primarily about ‘correlations of power’, and many ‘revisionists’, who emphasise Washington’s quest for economic dominance.9 Yet there is considerable documentary evidence to show that these two dominant schools of Cold War historiography have overlooked the importance of ideology and propaganda. Take National Security Council directive 68 (NSC-68), for example, the Truman administration’s top-secret blueprint for a global oﬀensive against Soviet communism, written in 1950. This seminal document defined the Cold War clearly in terms of freedom versus slavery, democracy versus autocracy, and pluralism versus totalitarianism. It also called for a ‘psychological scare campaign’ aimed at the mass

4

Hollywood’s Cold War

public, one employing arguments that were ‘clearer than truth’. Numerous other records show that Washington fully realised that its belief in the superiority of ‘American’ values stood for nothing unless it was matched by a propaganda machine that could project those values at home and worldwide. Otherwise, the United States risked losing the propaganda/ideological battle – and thereby, by default, the Cold War itself.10 This marriage between policy, ideology and propaganda called for the coordination of a diverse range of government information bodies and techniques. Through organisations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), State Department, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and United States Information Agency (USIA), the US government during the Cold War waged a war of words and images at home and abroad to influence friends, woo neutrals, and denounce enemies. Critically, coordination extended beyond oﬃcial agencies to embrace the private sector. All administrations from Harry Truman’s onwards judged that the Cold War was a total conflict requiring contributions from all sectors of American life, and that the battle for hearts and minds extended beyond the powers of the government’s information agencies. Consequently, overt and covert eﬀorts were made to enlist the services of ordinary Americans, prominent citizens, civic organisations, women’s groups, labour unions, academic institutions, the mass media, and virtually every arm of government in the nation’s anti-communist propaganda campaigns. Here, Washington worked on the basis that private organisations and individuals often conveyed propaganda messages with greater flexibility and credibility. Furthermore, such ‘camouflaged’, or grey, propaganda was more subtle than the more open, often clumsy manipulation of opinion by the state in communist countries. It could also be more dynamic, with the private sector often taking the initiative, and the state then stepping in if necessary to oﬀer logistical support to ensure that certain sanctioned ‘lines’ were followed.11 This book uses the concept of American Cold War ‘state-private networks’ to take a fresh look at the relationship between Hollywood, politics and propaganda during the Cold War. It delineates the often complex interaction between the world’s two most powerful image-makers, Washington and Hollywood, and explores how filmmakers not only reflected and projected oﬃcial Cold War doctrine but also shaped and defied that doctrine. It shows that Washington regarded film as an indispensable means of projecting what it saw as the superiority of capitalism within and beyond its own immediate sphere of influence. This led to a range of pressures being imposed on filmmakers which aﬀected both the content and distribution of movies. It also entailed a whole range of oﬃcial organisations – including the FBI, State Department, Pentagon, CIA and USIA – constructively engaging with

Introduction

5

filmmakers in a myriad ways. This proactive approach included openly lending logistical and financial assistance to trustworthy filmmakers, and secretly setting up consortia of famous directors, producers and actors to sell American democracy. It even encompassed covertly sponsoring ostensibly foreign-made anti-Soviet productions. The upshot of these negative pressures and positive measures was cinematic propaganda that ranged across the colour spectrum, from plain white, through grey, to black, and which targeted audiences at home and overseas. This propaganda transmitted a host of positive and negative images of the Cold War, and was deployed across an extraordinary range of genres, many of which appeared innocently apolitical to most cinema-goers. Hollywood’s Cold War charts its course via nine chapters built around a series of case studies. Each chapter delves deeply into the mechanics of cinematic propaganda production and the modus operandi of the state-film network. Through detailed analysis of oﬃcial state documentation, filmmakers’ private papers, studio scripts, censorship papers, reviews, and box oﬃce receipts, it examines the origins, production, content and impact of a number of paradigmatic films, and places them within the fullest possible political, social and diplomatic context. These movies have been carefully chosen to span the range of Hollywood’s most popular genres during the Cold War: from comedies to docudramas and musicals, and historical epics to science-fiction ‘shockers’. They cover the full range of propaganda messages and techniques deployed during the conflict, therefore showing how certain films sought bluntly to instil hatred of the enemy among the American people, while others tried in a more measured fashion to persuade Third World audiences of the virtues of Western-style democracy. The key films also highlight contested themes that were central to the Cold War battle for mass opinion: the dangers posed to the West by communist infiltration, the fears of a nuclear Armageddon, the ‘hot’ wars in Korea and Vietnam, the comparative lifestyles on either side of the ‘Iron Curtain’, and the prospects of the Cold War coming to an end. Several of the selected films – such as Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) and John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) – are generally regarded as milestones in Cold War film history. Many of the other movies have disappeared from view almost entirely, however. By unearthing these productions, I hope to widen the field of film historiography and to recapture fully the contemporary cinematic vision of the Cold War. Looked at together, these case studies illustrate Hollywood’s artistic versatility and political malleability during the Cold War. In so doing, they highlight the American film industry’s unique contribution to the cultural Cold War. Just as importantly, the case studies underline the critical role played by

Hollywood’s Cold War

6

the state-private networks in mobilising American and overseas public opinion during the conflict – sometimes openly, sometimes discreetly, but always in the pursuit and projection of ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’. Hollywood’s Cold War therefore casts light on cinema’s part in a gigantic cultural struggle between two competing visions of modernity, and on the profound eﬀects which that struggle had on American society. Notes 1 The cinema of the Cold War is a rich mosaic of genres and themes, and by no means confined to movies made in the United States. On the films mentioned here see, for instance, Neal R. McCrillis, ‘ “Simply Try for One Hour to Behave Like Gentlemen”: British Cinema during the Early Cold War, 1945–1960’, Film and History, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2001, pp. 6–12; Stefan Soldovieri, ‘Socialists in Outer Space: East German Film’s Venusian Adventure’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 382–98; Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 119–24; Michael Chanan, Cuban Cinema (Minneapolis, MN, 2004), pp. 435–6. 2 The literature on Hollywood’s troubles during the McCarthy era is vast, and includes Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley, CA, 1979); Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, 1980); Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York, 1982); Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and to Love the Fifties (London, 1984); Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York, 1997); Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco, CA, 2005). 3 See, for example, David Ellwood and Rob Kroes (eds), Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam, 1994); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture since World War Two (New York, 1997). 4 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999), pp. 279–302; David Eldridge, ‘ “Dear Owen”: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2000, pp. 149–96. 5 For an in-depth analysis of this film see Daniel J. Leab, ‘The Iron Curtain (1948): Hollywood’s First Cold War Movie’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1988, pp. 153–88. 6 In the past decade, there has been a flowering of interest in the cultural dimensions of the Cold War among scholars trained in literature, American studies, sociology, anthropology, communication and media studies, and history. Most of this has focused on the United States and on the period between 1945 and 1965. A partial listing of works includes Christian G. Appy (ed.), Cold War Constructions:

Introduction

7 8

9 10

7

The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst, MA, 2000); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003); Noam Chomsky, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York, 1997); Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York, 1995); Richard Fried, The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford, 1998); Woody Haut, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (London, 1996); Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (eds), Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC, 2001); Lary May (ed.), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago, IL, 1988); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1990); Bruce McConachie, American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (Iowa City, IA, 2003); Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defence and American Cold War Culture (Oxford, 1994); Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT, 2001); Lisle Rose, The Cold War Comes to Main Street (Lawrence, KS, 1999); David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (Edinburgh, 2002); Christopher Simpson (ed.), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York, 1998); Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anti-Communism and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, 1996). Alan Cassels, Ideology and International Relations in the Modern World (London, 1996), pp. 207–8. On the debate about the ideological basis of US foreign policy during the Cold War see, for instance, Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1947–56 (Manchester, 1999); Michael Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987); John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); Anders Stephanson, ‘Liberty or Death: The Cold War as US Ideology’, in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London, 2000), pp. 81–102. On the role played by ideology more broadly during the conflict see Leopoldo Nuti and Vladislav Zubok, ‘Ideology’, in Saki R. Dockrill and Geraint Hughes (eds), Palgrave Advances in Cold War History (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 73–110. For a clear and succinct update on Cold War historiography see Steven Hurst, Cold War US Foreign Policy: Key Perspectives (Edinburgh, 2005). On the private and public aspects of NSC-68 see Ernest May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston, MA, 1993); Nancy E. Bernhard, ‘Clearer than Truth: Public Aﬀairs Television and the State Department’s Domestic Information Campaigns’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 1997, pp. 545–68, esp. pp. 561–3; Steven Casey, ‘Selling NSC-68: The Truman Administration, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Mobilization, 1950–51’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 2005, pp. 655–90.

8

Hollywood’s Cold War

11 On US government propaganda during the Cold War, including the role played by ‘state-private networks’, see Lucas, Freedom’s War; Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Basingstoke, 1997); Rana Mitter and Patrick Major (eds), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London, 2004); Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbenham (eds), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London, 2003); Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford (eds), The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (London, 2006).

CHAPTER 1

Love and defection

If you have something worthwhile to say, dress it in the glittering robes of entertainment and you will find a ready market . . . without entertainment no propaganda film is worth a dime. Darryl Zanuck, Twentieth Century-Fox production chief, 19431

It is the mid-1980s and we are about to be treated to a cinematic tale of male bonding, intrigue and high drama, one inspired by real-life events and illuminated by dazzling dance sequences. The movie is Taylor Hackford’s White Nights. The rather incongruous setting is Soviet Russia. Kolya Rodchenko, the world’s greatest ballet dancer, is terrified when the Boeing 747 on which he is travelling from London to Japan is forced to make an emergency crash-landing in Siberia. Rodchenko faces double jeopardy, for a decade earlier the Russian defected to the United States, mirroring the bold action taken by the famous dancer-actor playing his part, Mikhail Baryshnikov. The KGB cannot believe its luck. Eager to exact revenge, the security agency brands Rodchenko a criminal and confines him under house arrest, telling the outside world that the superstar has been incapacitated by the plane accident. The Soviet authorities mean to exploit Rodchenko’s iconic status for propaganda purposes. He must be persuaded – coerced if necessary – to renounce the West and to perform again at Leningrad’s great Kirov Theatre. After that, he will be expendable. To fulfil its aim, the KGB opts for subtle mind games rather than its more familiar strong-arm tactics. Rodchenko is housed in Siberia with tap dancer Raymond Greenwood (played by the dancer-actor Gregory Hines), an African-American who years earlier deserted to the Soviet Union because of the racial discrimination he experienced during the Vietnam War. Greenwood scratches a living performing culturally approved routines in shows like Porgy and Bess – roles designed less to illustrate his tap-dancing talents than to highlight Western decadence. Kolya and Raymond start out as sworn enemies, each having moved in the opposite ideological direction. Hostility slowly turns to friendship, however, as the proud Russian stubbornly resists his prison-like environment and the embittered American wakes up to the stultification of communist culture. Their anti-Soviet alliance is sealed by a secret, enthralling duet, inspired by the

10

Hollywood’s Cold War

On a natural high: Gregory Hines (left) and Mikhail Baryshnikov dance to the freedom of the Western beat in White Nights (1985). Columbia Pictures/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

forbidden music Kolya has brought with him from the West. As a consequence, Raymond and his pregnant Russian wife Darya (Isabella Rossellini) hatch a daring night-time plan to escape with Kolya to the West from Leningrad. Inevitably perhaps, this goes awry, due to a combination of KGB surveillance and the city’s famously bright summer nights. While Kolya and Darya make it to the West via the US consulate, Raymond is left stranded. For a few painful months the African-American suﬀers terribly at the hands of a humiliated security service, until Kolya finally arranges his release in exchange for a Soviet spy. At the end, as Lionel Richie’s chart-topping ballad, ‘Say You Say Me’, plays on the soundtrack, the two heroes embrace. At a time when Hollywood movies like Rambo: First Blood Part 2 were attempting to provide after-the-fact US victories over North Vietnam, Columbia Pictures’ White Nights, which premiered in 1985, was unusual for making the open charge that the Vietnam War was racist.2 White Nights was also one of the few American movies made throughout the Cold War that depicted decent (albeit traumatised) Americans – as opposed to communists, spies or brainwashed POWs – opting for a life on ‘the other side’.3 However, in all other respects White Nights typified Hollywood’s long-standing treatment of that most critical of Cold War themes – conditions behind the ‘Iron

Love and defection

11

Curtain’. This theme more than any other helped characterise the Cold War as a bipolar phenomenon, one fought between two segregated ‘sub-universes’4 whose political and economic systems represented mutually exclusive ways of life. Thus, the film portrays the Soviet Union as monstrously grey and pockmarked by labour camps. Soviet oﬃcials are wily, racist and lascivious, while ordinary Russian citizens are down-trodden and clinically depressed. Shots of Leningrad (actually Lisbon, curiously), with its rusty cars and long shopping lines, underscore the inferiority of Soviet consumerism. By outlawing modern dance, communism is presented as the enemy of both progress and freedom of expression. Worst of all perhaps, White Nights tells us that communism subjugates love. Raymond and Darya are reunited at the end of the movie, but only because this serves the interests of the Soviet ‘machine’. White Nights appeared a mere four years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and reinforced US President Ronald Reagan’s view that the Soviet Union was a dysfunctional ‘totalitarian’ state whose economy was in tatters.5 Yet the film’s roots went extremely deep, long pre-dating the Cold War’s conventional starting point of 1945. White Nights’ origins can in fact be traced back to one film in particular, Ernst Lubitsch’s satirical love story Ninotchka. Released to high acclaim in 1939, Ninotchka powerfully illustrated Hollywood’s hostility towards communism during the inter-war era. The popularity of Lubitsch’s film was due in large part to the fact that it was the first mainstream Hollywood production to demonise communism and celebrate Western capitalism by highlighting the clash between individuals drawn from each side of the developing ideological divide. Ninotchka’s expression of a binary approach to the Cold War through a series of dichotomous symbols – freedom versus oppression, materialism versus poverty, beauty versus ugliness, romance versus asexual androgyny – would act as a model for numerous later movies. In the late 1940s Ninotchka was reissued for political and commercial reasons, and appropriated by a US State Department fearful of communist expansion in Europe. A decade later, the movie’s durability was confirmed when it was transformed into a musical on stage and screen. This chapter examines Ninotchka’s three diﬀerent lives during the early years of the Cold War, and highlights the American film industry’s ability to combine profits and politics almost from day one of the conflict. POLITICAL ECONOMY, CENSORSHIP AND THE CINEMATIC COOL WAR, 1917–39 Ninotchka did not appear out of the blue in 1939. The American film industry had eﬀectively been at war with political extremism, and with communism in particular, for two decades. During the Progressive era, a number of silent

12

Hollywood’s Cold War

films were made by small companies that tackled America’s social problems head-on. Some even suggested radical solutions. Why?, for instance, made in 1913 by the American arm of the French company Éclair Films, shocked critics with its tale of corrupt elites and visions of workers revolting against capitalism by burning down Manhattan. The Strike at Coaldale (1916), also made by Éclair Films, which portrayed a successful walkout by miners, was denounced by one employees’ association as a direct threat to American industry. However, while granting workers some dignity, most social problem films of this era also provided viewers with ‘happy endings’ that preached faith and continuity in the liberal capitalist system. In this way, these formative years of cinema established a trend for the future, with American films raising social issues yet containing them in satisfactory bourgeois resolutions.6 The dramatic rise of the Hollywood studio system after the First World War soon put an end to the production of politically volatile labour-capital films. Beginning in the 1920s, Hollywood’s eight major film studios – MGM/Loews, Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, RKO, Columbia, Universal and United Artists – formed a mature oligopoly that lasted for over thirty years, bolstered by the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition. Financed by Wall Street, the studios increased their profits by attracting greater numbers of patrons while retaining their working-class fan base. They did so by building exotic movie palaces, and abandoning films that spoke to the problems faced by immigrants and the working classes in favour of lavish movies that emphasized fantasies of love, luxury, social mobility and cross-class harmony. In this way, movie industry leaders in the 1920s and 1930s subtly reinforced a growing capitalist discourse that promoted a new perception of class identity, one rooted more in the alluring world of middle-class consumption than in the conflictual world of production. Here was a vision of society in which all problems, both personal and social, could eﬀectively be solved through love.7 The introduction of new film censorship rules during the same period strengthened the industry’s conservative outlook. Hollywood was beset by sex, narcotics and financial scandals in the early 1920s, prompting film executives to clean up the industry’s image. In 1922, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was established as a film review board, headed by a Presbyterian church elder and former postmaster-general, Will H. Hays. The Production Code, popularly known as the ‘Hays Code’, a highly restrictive set of guidelines for movie content, was promulgated in 1934, and complied with by virtually every Hollywood producer. The Production Code Administration (PCA) itself was run until 1954 by the Catholic intellectual Joseph Breen, and functioned at all stages of production. It selected stories, examined scripts, and approved the final cuts, and thereby

Love and defection

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managed to control the content of nearly all films shown in the United States, domestic and foreign. The PCA’s purview was extremely wide. Movies or scenes involving organised labour, political corruption and war were considered to be just as ‘dangerous’ as those depicting sex, drugs and crime. It also frowned on films that gratuitously oﬀended foreign governments, for fear of damaging Hollywood’s critical export base.8 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood rarely presented any serious analysis of the causes that led people to engage in radical activities.9 When filmmakers dared to depict political aﬀairs overtly, often prompted by inflammatory newspaper headlines, radicals and political activists were portrayed as ‘Red’ agitators responsible for virtually everything wrong in American society. In 1919–20, the United States witnessed its first full-blown Red Scare, triggered by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a spate of race riots in 1919, and a flurry of strikes including one by the Boston police. In 1919, blaming labour unrest on ‘the red menace’, US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered the round-up of dozens of radicals. In a single night in January 1920, more than 4,000 men were arrested in 33 cities, and eventually over 500 were deported as undesirable aliens. The fear that communist subversives were hidden in prominent places soon spread to the motion picture industry. In 1922, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (renamed the FBI in 1935) opened a file on one of the biggest film stars of the era, Charlie Chaplin, after he had entertained at home a leader of the newly formed Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).10 The federal government, as the New York Times reported, acted swiftly to harness the ‘power of the movies’ during the Red Scare ‘to combat Bolshevik propaganda’. In January 1920, Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane impressed upon filmmakers ‘the necessity of showing films depicting the great opportunities which industrious immigrants may find in this country, and of stories of poor men who have risen high’. His own personal recommendation was ‘the story of America as exemplified in the story of [Abraham] Lincoln’.11 Approximately a dozen overtly anti-Bolshevik films appeared in this short period, demonstrating the movie industry’s commercial opportunism, as well as its ability to act quickly and to add to a sense of imminent threat. Several of these films stand out, not least because many of their propaganda themes would re-emerge in movies produced during the McCarthy era. Harley Knoles’ Bolshevism on Trial, released in April 1919, represents the American film industry’s opening volley in the nascent cultural Cold War. Adapted from Thomas Dixon’s 1909 novel Comrades, a satire on Upton Sinclair’s experimental socialist colony at Englewood, New Jersey, in 1906–7, the film warned that any attempts to build a communist utopia would

14

Hollywood’s Cold War

inevitably lead to chaos. Chester Withey’s The New Moon, released later in 1919, and Fred Niblo’s Dangerous Hours (1920) both presented the Bolsheviks’ recent mobilisation order to bring women into the labour force as nothing less than a license to rape. Alan Holubar’s The Right to Happiness (also 1919) blended antiBolshevism with anti-Semitism in a story about an American girl separated from her family and raised as a Red revolutionary by Jews. Both Dangerous Hours and Sidney Lanfield’s Red Salute, a comedy released over a decade later in 1935, singled out college students as those most likely to fall under the spell of communist rhetoric preached by intellectuals. The latter film incited a riot at its New York premiere, when leftist students protested its depiction of campus radicals.12 Once the Red Scare had subsided, filmmakers turned to projecting negative images of the Bolshevik Revolution or of life in the New Russia. At least one, George Zimmer, received oﬃcial assistance. Zimmer’s 1920 documentary, baldly titled Starvation, used harrowing footage, captured by Herbert Hoover’s European-based American Relief Administration, of Russia suﬀering the after-eﬀects of the Great War to pin the blame for the Soviet Union’s hungry masses squarely on the Bolsheviks’ shoulders. Zimmer’s Red Russia Revealed (1923) updated this theme, by showing Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky with plenty to eat while the simple Russian people went without. D. W. Griﬃth’s Orphans of the Storm (1922) took a diﬀerent tack and used history as a vehicle for propaganda. Ostensibly a film about the French Revolution, key scenes drew comparisons between the excesses of the French revolutionary Jacobins and contemporary events in Russia. The film’s opening inter-title warned audiences not to draw the wrong conclusions: ‘The lesson: the French Revolution RIGHTLY overthrew a BAD government. But we in America should be careful lest we with a GOOD government mistake fanatics for leaders and exchange our decent law and order for Anarchy and Bolshevism.’13 During the 1930s Depression era, Hollywood’s depiction of political and economic matters not surprisingly grew less one-dimensional. On the whole the major studios continued to steer clear of bread-and-butter social issues, arguing (rightly to an extent) that audiences preferred escapist entertainment. At the same time, the space opened up for a minority of single-minded, reform-oriented filmmakers to point out the pitfalls of unfettered capitalism. Typical of this approach were Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), a touching story of a nervous tramp masquerading as a millionaire to win over a blind flower-girl, and Frank Capra’s heart-warming comedy about two families from the opposite sides of the tracks, You Can’t Take It With You (1938). Lloyd Bacon’s Marked Woman (1937), written by Robert Rossen, then a communist, challenged the capitalist legal system as well as organised crime in equal

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measure, leaving Bette Davis’ club hostess heroine with nowhere to turn. Its downbeat ending closely resembled the end of Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 satirical play about bourgeois society, The Threepenny Opera.14 National perceptions of communism also changed somewhat in the United States during the thirties. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made history by formally recognising the Soviet Union. Membership of the CPUSA grew as the decade progressed. The party’s popularity reached a peak during the Popular Front period of the late 1930s, when Moscow led the opposition to Hitler’s expansionism and ordered communists everywhere to give up their revolutionary rhetoric in order to create a broad anti-fascist coalition.15 Despite these diplomatic and political undercurrents, communists continued to be portrayed negatively on the silver screen. In comedies, they not only behaved like deranged lunatics but – even worse perhaps – had no sense of humour, wit, or style: denouncing Kay Francis’ heroine in Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), for instance, for spending a fortune on a handbag. In topical melodramas such as Heroes for Sale (William Wellman, 1933) and Little Man, What Now? (Frank Borsage, 1934) communists were exposed as essentially selfish phonies unconcerned with the genuine poverty and hardship of others.16 One big-budget movie, Rouben Mamoulian’s We Live Again (1934), did show social injustice in Tsarist Russia, but this could in no sense be interpreted as support for the far left.17 In any case, it was far outweighed by movies like Together We Live (Willard Mack, 1935), which portrayed a wholesome American family being torn apart by communism,18 or Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Once in a Blue Moon (1936), the story of a clown caught in the middle of the Russian Revolution who falls victim to vicious Bolsheviks.19 Dastardly, subversive-minded Russians also appeared in Hollywood movies reverently celebrating the British empire. In the 1936 Warner Bros. production of The Charge of the Light Brigade, a Russian adviser masterminding the tribal massacre of British troops and their dependents in 1850s India looked uncannily like Joseph Stalin.20 Meanwhile, outside the Hollywood mainstream, leftist film societies and documentary makers struggled to gain access to theatres, and often had to settle for preaching to the converted in union halls and church basements. Typical of these was the Marxist Film and Photo League, which might show an imported copy of Sergei Eisenstein’s Revolutionary epic, Battleship Potemkin (1926), alongside a domestically produced Worker Newsreel highlighting strikes, hunger marches or ‘Hoovervilles’. Limited exhibition opportunities were exacerbated by the internal divisions that bedevilled leftist cinema during this period. Any filmmaker who collaborated with the major studios or the government in order to reach a wider audience risked being accused of ‘selling out’. This was the fate suﬀered by Pare Lorentz, whose documentary The Plow

16

Hollywood’s Cold War

That Broke the Plains played in theatres in 1936. The film was sponsored by Roosevelt’s US Resettlement Administration, and dealt with the New Deal’s eﬀorts to improve the lot of farmers in the Oklahoma ‘Dust Bowl’. The documentary made a strong case for controlled land use, but the Film and Photo League dismissed it as government propaganda.21 FULL DRESS REHEARSAL In contrast with many of the films mentioned above, and indeed with the majority of case studies in this book, MGM’s late 1930s romantic satire Ninotchka was not designed for political purposes, but rather to entertain and make money. Yet this arguably, if somewhat paradoxically, made it a more eﬀective weapon of propaganda than any anti-communist film made in the United States to that date. Work on Ninotchka started in 1937, when Bernie Hyman, chief aide to MGM’s head Louis B. Mayer, asked screenwriter Salka Viertel to help find a comedy vehicle for one of the studio’s prime assets, Greta Garbo. Because Garbo was widely perceived as an aloof and reclusive figure, MGM wanted to display the Swedish star’s humorous alter ego. Viertel, a close friend of Garbo’s, approached Hungarian screenwriter Melchior Lengyel, who came up with the basic idea for Ninotchka. This was summed up in three sentences: ‘Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious time. Capitalism not so bad after all.’22 Lengyel wrote a full-length script but was then dropped from the project, probably because his story lacked suﬃcient wit. His place was taken by Gottfried Reinhardt, son of the legendary Austrian theatre director Max, whose script placed a greater emphasis on the ideological diﬀerences between Ninotchka (Garbo’s character) and Leon, the Parisian playboy with whom she falls in love. A third version was then written in early 1938 by Reinhardt in collaboration with the playwright Jacques Deval and experienced screenwriter S. N. Behrman. Their screenplay was almost a black comedy, and compared with previous treatments depicted Russian politics with a much harder edge. Ninotchka herself was made far surlier and shown positively to hate Leon on discovering he is a count. The screenplay also incorporated a graphic description of the brutality of the Russian aristocracy in order to explain Ninotchka’s ideological fervour, together with explicit references to Stalin’s purges and Karl Marx.23 At this point, in order to bring the project to completion, Mayer paid a considerable fee to Paramount Pictures to secure a loan-out of their production manager, Ernst Lubitsch. A Berlin-born Jew who had worked successfully in Germany and Hollywood for twenty years, Lubitsch was known as ‘the

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master’ of the stylish comedy of manners. As producer and director, and, unusually, given complete control over Ninotchka’s screenplay by Mayer, Lubitsch lightened the script and hired MGM contract writer Walter Reisch to add comic panache. Lubitsch then arranged to borrow from Paramount his Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) writing team, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, who specialised in sophisticated farce. In the spring of 1939, the three of them, with Reisch, toned up the dialogue and finalised the film’s structure. The end result was a script that had softened many of the most highly charged aspects of the interplay between capitalist and communist philosophies portrayed in earlier versions, but one which still crackled with explicitly ideological barbs and which was bound therefore to generate political controversy.24 Despite this, the Hays Oﬃce approved the script, having initially only been worried about its sexual content and, ironically, about whether the film might hurt the French – not Soviet – government’s feelings. Since its birth in 1934, the PCA had been consistently opposed to treatments it deemed favourable to the USSR, and Ninotchka was hardly likely to fall into that category. Ardent anti-communists like Joseph Breen and his colleagues cared little if the film irritated the Kremlin anyway, as Hollywood exports to Russia were negligible due to Soviet restrictions.25 Each of the main parties involved in creating Ninotchka could not be unaware of its anti-Soviet stance, but there is no evidence they sought actively to persuade or proselytise. They were, in fact, a mixed bag politically. As befits a man who was the highest salaried employee in America, Louis B. Mayer had arch-conservative views of business and politics. These were reinforced by a strong friendship with the media magnate William Randolph Hearst. Mayer instinctively saw ‘Reds’ behind union activity in the film industry, and later argued that even the Gene Kelly musical On The Town (1949) was slightly communistic because it had a black woman dancing with one of the sailors.26 Charles Brackett, who was president of the Screen Writers Guild in 1938–9, was also a Republican conservative. By contrast, his long-time writing partner, Billy Wilder, was a Rooseveltian Democrat who had supported the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and was friendly with many communist writers, some of whom stopped talking to him after Ninotchka’s release.27 Lubitsch was something of a naïve liberal and very far from being a political filmmaker. His approach towards Ninotchka might have been aﬀected by a disconcerting visit he made to the USSR in 1936, but it is more likely given his roots that Lubitsch saw Nazi anti-Semitism as a greater threat than Soviet communism. (In 1940, the director was targeted personally in Fritz Hippler’s infamous ‘documentary’, The Eternal Jew.) Walter Reisch, a Viennese Jew, and Melchior Lengyel appear not to have held any strong political views. The

18

Hollywood’s Cold War

latter’s decision to give the Garbo vehicle a Russian theme can probably be attributed to his liking for stories set in Eastern Europe.28 MGM was the biggest and most powerful Hollywood studio in 1939, with reported assets of $144 million. Consequently, the studio could easily absorb Ninotchka’s total production costs of $1.3 million, a sum that was roughly three times the cost of an average feature in the late 1930s. Shooting took place in June and July 1939, and production finished in mid-August, three weeks before the outbreak of war in Europe.29 The cast was an impressive one. Melvyn Douglas, one of the most debonair and witty farceurs in Hollywood, was chosen to play Leon. The Broadway star Ina Claire played Ninotchka’s chief political enemy and romantic rival, the Grand Duchess Swana, while Hollywood’s ‘aristocrat of evil’, Bela Lugosi, star of Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), played the cruel Commissar Razinin. Unabashed opulence had long been MGM’s hallmark, and Ninotchka was no exception in terms of its glossy sets and technical support, thanks in large part to the studio’s experienced supervising art director, Cedric Gibbons. Audiences could watch in awe as Ninotchka and Leon drank champagne in a lavish mock-up of the Parisian restaurant frequented by the one-time French premiere George Clemenceau. State-of-the-art back projection made it look as though the lovers really were climbing the steps of the Eiﬀel Tower and that the filmmakers had gained unprecedented access to Red Square.30 Ninotchka opens in Paris, where Iranoﬀ, Buljanoﬀ and Kopalski, three scatter-brained delegates of the Soviet Board of Trade, have arrived on a mission to sell jewels confiscated during the Bolshevik Revolution in order to raise money for much-needed agricultural machinery. Swana, the rightful owner of the jewels, learns of the mission and instructs her lawyer-boyfriend, Leon, to bring about an injunction forbidding the sale. Leon befriends the three delegates, and proceeds to corrupt them by encouraging a bout of free spending, boozing and womanising. Before long the Russians have begun to dress as aristocrats and have almost forgotten what they were sent to Paris for. Then, one day, a telegram sends shudders down their spines – a special envoy has been despatched from Moscow to expedite matters. The envoy turns out to be Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, a straitlaced female commissar. ‘Ninotchka’ and Leon accidentally meet on the street and strike up a friendship without knowing of their mutual involvement in the Swana jewels aﬀair. Slowly, Ninotchka melts under Leon’s romantic advances and the consumer delights the West has to oﬀer. When the jealous Swana learns of their attachment, she agrees to relinquish her claim to the jewels in exchange for Ninotchka’s return to Russia. Ninotchka is by now hopelessly in love with Leon, but succumbs to Swana’s blackmail out of loyalty to her colleagues and the benefits the money will bring the Russian people.

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Back in her cramped apartment in Moscow, Ninotchka is haunted by the memories of Leon’s aﬀection and the freedom, luxury and privacy she enjoyed in Paris. Her chief, Commissar Razinin, then orders Ninotchka to travel to Constantinople, where Iranoﬀ, Buljanoﬀ and Kopalski are on the point of bungling another job. On catching up with the troublesome trio, however, she finds that their inability to conclude a fur-selling mission is but a ruse to reunite Ninotchka with Leon. The film concludes with Iranoﬀ, Buljanoﬀ and Kopalski deciding to stay in Constantinople, where they open a restaurant with the proceeds of the fur deal. Ninotchka, meanwhile, opts to forsake the rigours of Soviet political life in favour of a new life with Leon. At the tail end of the Cold War, film historian Jeremy Mindich declared that Ninotchka was ‘arguably the most complex American movie ever made about the Soviet Union’, and, moreover, ‘one of the few American films that suggests that there are lessons that capitalism can learn from communism’.31 Mindich’s claims have some validity, but only to a point. It is certainly true that, in contrast with most Hollywood films focusing on Soviet figures produced before and after 1939, in Ninotchka the communists pose no threat to US national security. Indeed, Ninotchka and her sidekicks, who resemble Hollywood’s popular Three Stooges comedy team, help give Soviet communism a human face. Their quest to procure foreign currency to help pay for the modernisation of Soviet agriculture also hints at the Kremlin’s concern for its citizens’ well-being. Added to this, Ninotchka exposes the unacceptable face of capitalism in the shape of the aristocratic Swana, who is vain, greedy and does not work. Finally, because the four Russians abscond in Turkey, half way between East and West, their political defection is less clear cut than it might have been. Nevertheless to argue, as some have, that Ninotchka is ideologically neutral would be absurd.32 Though advertised as harmless entertainment largely on the basis that it was a romantic comedy, ‘The Picture That Kids The Commissars’33 delivered a trenchant, unambiguous message about the nature of Soviet communism. The very fact that it was in light-hearted comedy form, and therefore less likely to tax the audience’s intellect or oﬀend apolitical sensibilities, arguably made that message all the more persuasive. From the very first scene, in which Buljanoﬀ fears being sent to Siberia for checking into an expensive Parisian hotel, the Soviet Union’s repressive, even murderous regime is made abundantly clear. Later, this comes across verbally and visually. ‘The last mass trials were a great success – there are going to be fewer but better Russians’, Ninotchka tells her colleagues soon after her arrival in Paris. When Ninotchka feels guilty for having betrayed the Soviet Union by falling in love with a Westerner, she drunkenly simulates her execution. Several gags – when the Russian trio mistake Ninotchka for a heel-clicking Nazi at

20

Hollywood’s Cold War

the railway station, for instance – imply that communism and fascism are indistinguishable. The third act of the film, set in Moscow, allows the viewer to see the reality of life under communism through scenes that would become stereotypical in countless Cold War movies. For example, burly uniformed Russians in Red Square are shown flanked by overbearing posters of Lenin and Stalin, while the common people are small and unidentifiable, like cogs in a machine. Ninotchka feels fortunate because she has to share a room with only two people. She has no privacy, as the partitioned walls are curtains so that people involuntarily share everybody else’s noises and snoring. Worse than the lack of comforts, though, is the communist system’s tendency to encourage people’s inferior qualities. Some work as spies, such as one of Ninotchka’s neighbours, while others begrudge each other anything they do not have themselves. Thus Anna, roommate and friend, warns Ninotchka not to dry her Parisian slip in the laundry yard – ‘All you have to do is wear a pair of silk stockings and they suspect you of counterrevolution.’ Equally sad is the state’s interference with people’s letters, and the drab, colourless existence everyone leads. To top it all, despite Stalin’s Five Year Plans, communism simply is not working economically. Ninotchka can only make an omelette if her guests bring their own egg. Variety, the entertainment industry’s most important trade paper, applauded Ninotchka for being ‘smart, exhilarating and penetrating’, adding that its ‘punchy and humorous jabs directed at the Russian political system and representatives are the most direct so far presented in an American film’.34 If Ninotchka’s frank lampooning of Soviet oﬃcialdom and spoofing of Marxist ideology helped set it apart from earlier Hollywood material, it was what the film said of the West – consciously and subconsciously – that is perhaps more significant. Ninotchka is no communist automaton: unlike her colleagues, she has convictions and integrity. Yet even she ultimately opts for the Western ‘way of life’ because it is portrayed as precisely that – organic and natural – rather than an artificially imposed communist ‘system’. Her awakening takes several stages. First, she discovers the true meaning of love, something which Marxism had taught her was a mere ‘chemical process’. In so doing, she learns that some things are more important than politics and that the heart should at times rule the head. ‘Lovers of the world, unite!’ exclaims Leon, as they embrace. Having realised how emotionally barren communism is, Ninotchka then realises that capitalism is the only route to happiness. Early on in the film, Ninotchka constantly talks of the West being a doomed culture, but this is consistently contradicted by even poor Parisians’ ability to live and even to laugh at their problems. When Ninotchka’s regimented facade eventually breaks in the heavily trailed ‘Garbo Laughs’ café scene, as she cackles out loud at Leon’s pratfall, the huge weight of ideological baggage is

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A glimpse of the workers’ paradise: reunited over an omelette in Moscow, Ninotchka (Greta Garbo), Kopalski (Alexander Granach), Iranoff (Sig Rumann) and Buljanoff (Felix Bressart) sing of their longing for Paris. Ninotchka (1939). MGM/The Kobal Collection.

seen to lift from her shoulders. Later, caught giggling by her comrades, she confesses: ‘I always felt a little hurt when our swallows deserted us in the winter for capitalistic countries. Now I know why. We have the high ideals, but they have the climate.’ If humour is as natural as the weather, then so too is the desire to buy and to choose. Having loosened her ideological straitjacket, Ninotchka cannot wait to swap her ugly asexual uniform for an elegant suit she earlier condemned as ‘decadent’. Her butterfly-like transformation suggests that all ‘real’ women would benefit from capitalist good-living. That a cash-strapped Soviet oﬃcial could aﬀord the latest in high fashion also implies that luxury is available to all in the West. With its lavish sets showing glamorous hotel interiors and Parisian working-class cafés brimming with contented, well-fed customers, Ninotchka’s whole look is indeed a showcase for Western prosperity. Finally, in singling out the royal Swana as the ‘people’s enemy’, Ninotchka eventually realises it is not capitalism per se that produces social injustice but its old world, European hangers-on. Here, Ninotchka strikes a blow for American meritocracy, which, with its modern, democratic checks and balances, creates a fairer society. An earlier script by Wilder, Brackett and Reisch

22

Hollywood’s Cold War

‘It’s only human to kiss’: drunk on champagne, French gowns and love, a blindfolded Ninotchka prepares to be ‘executed’ for betraying Russia’s communist ideals. Leon (Melvyn Douglas) offers her the warm embrace of Western joie de vivre. Ninotchka (1939). MGM/The Kobal Collection.

had in fact blurred this distinction between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds, by alluding to America’s commercialisation and the pernicious role of its tabloid press, but these points were dropped during shooting.35 Ninotchka had its world premiere at Los Angeles’ famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in October 1939. Normally averse to political films, the American trade press showered this one with accolades. Part of the reason for this was the momentous diplomatic changes that had taken place after production work on Ninotchka had finished in mid-August. The shock of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of late August 1939, followed by the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland in September, had swept away any liberal opposition there might have been to the film’s portrayal of an anti-fascist ally. Soviet perfidy was now on everyone’s lips.36 Except for the few on the far left, popular journals and newspapers also loved the movie. Most of these, tellingly, felt there was nothing remotely hostile or propagandistic about the picture. Typical of this was the New York Times, whose critic thought the film was just ‘a humorist’s view of the sober-sided folk who have read Marx but never the funny page’. Some on the political right saw it diﬀerently. William

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Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror quickly appropriated Ninotchka, arguing that Garbo had done ‘more in one line to debunk Soviet Russia than we have been able to do in a hundred editorials’. Enraged, the Communist Party’s Sunday Worker called it a ‘malicious’ film for ‘ridiculing – and not too subtly – 180,000 people oﬀ the face of the earth’, while the Daily Worker gave the lie to Ninotchka’s claim that Soviet people did not enjoy themselves by stating that 22 million Russians had attended circus performances in 1939.37 In 1940, Ninotchka was nominated for four Academy Awards, only to be overshadowed at the Oscars by Victor Fleming’s Civil War saga Gone with the Wind. Ninotchka eventually grossed $2.2 million at the box oﬃce in 1939–40, with half of that earned overseas, making it one of the highest-earning Hollywood films of the year. Foreign takings would have been higher had the film not been banned in countries where governments were fearful of incurring Stalin’s wrath, such as Bulgaria, Estonia and Lithuania. In Mexico, the film was not shown due to preventative action taken by communist-dominated trade unions.38 Notwithstanding such problems, the ‘defection story’ soon caught on in Hollywood. Spin-oﬀs of Ninotchka in 1940 alone included MGM’s Comrade X, in which Clark Gable played an American reporter covering the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, and Columbia’s He Stayed for Breakfast, which saw Melvyn Douglas switch to the role of a communist waiter in Paris. Both movies portrayed communists abandoning their faith after falling in love with capitalists.39 AN ITALIAN JOB In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the subsequent marriage of convenience between the United States, Russia and Britain, such stories were no longer commercially fashionable or politically advisable. Instead, between 1942 and 1945, the Soviet Union gradually underwent a makeover on American cinema screens, transformed from an enemy into a valuable wartime partner. In accordance with Oﬃce of War Information (OWI) guidance, Hollywood movies depicting the USSR tended to avoid the sensitive issue of communism, rationalise past Soviet behaviour, suggest that the country was a non-totalitarian state moving towards the American model, and focus above all on the heroic wartime eﬀorts of the ordinary Russian people. Thus, Albert Herman’s Miss V. from Moscow (1942) and Edward Dmytryk’s Tender Comrade (1943) pitted brave Russian spies and paratroopers against evil Nazi oﬃcers. Michael Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow (1943), with the full support of the White House, whitewashed Stalin’s atrocities. And Gregory Ratoﬀ’s Song of Russia (1943) showed the Soviet motherland to have plush nightclubs, thriving collective farms, and lovable comrades

24

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worshipping freely at Orthodox churches. The latter film even allowed for the marriage in Russia between a touring American symphony conductor, John Meredith (played by Robert Taylor), and Nadya (Susan Peters), a Russian pianist. When Nadya decides to travel with her husband to the United States at the end of the movie, this is not to defect but to preach the message of the Soviets to America.40 Song of Russia, an MGM production, came back to haunt Louis B. Mayer when East-West relations deteriorated after the Second World War, especially when the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives started in 1947 to hunt for those who had made Hollywood, as HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas put it, a ‘Red propaganda centre’. Mayer said under investigation that the film had merely been made to give Russia ‘a pat on [the] back, to keep them fighting’, but few appeared to believe him. In November 1947, MGM re-released Ninotchka both as a means of getting HUAC oﬀ its back and to cash in on the growing Red Scare engulfing the United States. Ninotchka was, as MGM trailers trumpeted, ‘a most timely film’.41 Indeed it was, especially in war-torn Europe. During the Second World War, Washington had constructed an enormous propaganda machine, with two separate organisations, the OWI and Oﬃce of Strategic Services (OSS), handling white and black material respectively.42 At the end of hostilities, these units were quickly dismantled on economic and idealistic grounds; at this point many Americans regarded a permanent propaganda organisation run by the federal government as fundamentally undemocratic. By early 1947, however, publicity cutbacks were being hastily reversed, and a new, more complex machine started to be built. In the wake of the March 1947 Truman Doctrine, which portrayed the United States and Soviet Union as two irreconcilable enemies, the newly formed National Security Council charged the State Department with responsibility for strong information measures to counter Soviet programmes, and assigned the oversight of covert psychological operations to the newly established Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 then provided the legal foundation for American peacetime propaganda overseas. The legislation envisioned using all the tools of modern communication, including print, radio, films, exchange programmes and exhibitions, to disseminate information about the United States.43 Given a major boost by Truman’s Campaign of Truth from mid-1950 onwards,44 then by the Eisenhower administration’s more holistic approach towards propaganda,45 the American government’s Cold War information infrastructure was highly sophisticated by the early 1960s. Successive administrations then built on this sturdy platform. By the 1980s, the US government’s full-service international propaganda machine employed more than

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10,000 full-time staﬀ, spread out among some 150 countries, burnishing America’s image while maligning the Soviet Union to the tune of over $2 billion per year.46 Compared with its Soviet counterpart, indications are that the US government’s whole propaganda machine was better organised, staﬀed and financed, and more versatile throughout the conflict.47 In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Truman administration held high hopes that its atomic monopoly and economic superiority would drive the Red Army out of most of the countries it had occupied on its march to Berlin and reunite Europe. However, this soon proved to be a chimera, to the point where, by late 1947, the US government feared Western Europe was on the edge of disaster. In February 1948 the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia, and in March the US Commander in Germany, General Lucius Clay, warned Washington that a Soviet military attack might occur within days. American leaders feared that a communist victory in the first post-war elections in Italy in mid-April would signal the collapse of democracy in Europe, by strengthening the bid for power of the communist parties throughout Western Europe and weakening the ability of the moderate middle-class and socialist opponents to resist the hard left. Furthermore, the US would suﬀer a severe loss of prestige if a strategic nation within its sphere of influence moved into close collaboration with the Soviet Union.48 With 1.6 million cinema tickets being sold in Italy per day in 1948, film inevitably played a central role in the massive ‘state-private’ American propaganda campaign to mobilise voters against the communist-militant-socialist coalition at the polls.49 This campaign was no one-week wonder. Just as in other countries, the State Department and Hollywood had been working successfully together to penetrate the Italian film market for years. In 1946, for instance, 600 American commercial films were registered for import into Italy compared with 100 British and 30 Soviet films. On a more oﬃcial level, by 1947 the United States Information Services (USIS) had established five oﬃces in Italy, each stocked with 100 titles of educational and documentary films. These films, which were usually shown on mobile American equipment and reached roughly 100,000 Italians each month, dealt with a variety of subjects designed both to give the Italians some idea of America and to help them improve their agricultural and industrial techniques.50 In the months leading up to the April 1948 election, the ten leading American film distributors in Italy formed a consortium and cooperated with US government information oﬃcials in giving the widest possible dissemination to selected American feature and documentary films on a non-profit basis. Circulated alongside these were films extolling the benefits of US economic aid, produced by the leading Italian weekly newsreel programme, INCOM.51

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The American films, which were watched by an estimated five million Italians per week in early April, were among the most eﬀective of all media used in the pre-election propaganda drive. Evidence suggests that Ninotchka was the most prominent of all. Following State Department requests, distributors doubled the movie’s print numbers. Special arrangements were made so the film could be shown among the lower-income population. Italian communists made several attempts to forestall the showing of Ninotchka, including threatening movie-theatre managers if they did not remove it from programmes and stealing copies from cinemas. When Russia’s embassy asked the Rome authorities in early April to take Ninotchka out of the city’s ten theatres in which it had been showing for several weeks, the publicity probably added to the film’s nationwide success.52 ‘What licked us was Ninotchka’, one disappointed Communist party functionary is reported to have said when the pro-Soviet left was defeated at the polls, and the main anti-communist party, the Christian Democrats, gained an absolute majority in the new parliament. ‘Greta Garbo Wins Elections’, proclaimed one conservative newspaper.53 While both statements are hyberbolic, Ninotchka was perfectly suited to the US government’s propaganda campaign, a campaign that avoided allegations of American interference in Italian aﬀairs and that reduced the issues before the Italian people to a series of simple choices: democracy or totalitarianism, abundance or starvation, happiness or misery. It also tied in with the Christian Democrats’ own use of election posters that featured glamorous images of popular American heart-throbs like Tyrone Power and proclaimed ‘Even Hollywood stars are against Communism.’54 The 1948 Italian election results were in all likelihood due more to the Vatican’s political mobilisation than to outside aid, but were read in Washington as proof of America’s ability to influence the domestic aﬀairs of other nations through the use of unconventional instruments, including film propaganda. The results therefore had a lasting eﬀect on American political and publicity activities in Europe and the Third World.55 In the more immediate term, though, Ninotchka continued to be appropriated – unoﬃcially and oﬃcially – in the struggle against communism in Europe. French censors had banned the film in September 1947, possibly because of the extreme volatility of national politics at the time,56 but passed it in late April 1948. When it was re-released in the same month in Britain, one local journalist focused on Ninotchka’s comic propaganda qualities to ask why ridicule was being neglected as an anti-communist weapon. Another judged it the best antiSoviet propaganda film made to date, partly because it was so understated: ‘The delaying tactics of the Soviet mission, the consultations with Moscow, the suspicion, the censoring of letters, phrases like “confiscated legally”, “sent to Siberia”, “bourgeois capitalism” . . . have become universally topical jokes

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however macabre . . . How odd that we should ever have thought this devastating caricature merely funny.’57 The film heightened the mood of West Berliners during the 1948–9 Soviet blockade, and was reissued in the western half of the city in the summer of 1951 during the Whitsuntide march of the communist-led East Berlin youth, in order to give the visitors the chance to laugh at their Soviet occupiers and indigenous communist leaders.58 Around this time Ninotchka also appeared in Vienna, a city then still controlled by the Russians, British, French and Americans. In November 1950 alone, more than 70,000 Viennese saw the film in the two large theatres within the international zone. A few months later, the US Embassy happily reported to Washington that ‘considerable persuasion and reassurances of American interests’ had paid oﬀ with respect to the film audience.59 As in Rome in 1948, Soviet oﬃcials complained bitterly about Ninotchka’s release in Vienna, and several theatre owners withdrew the film due to threats of violence by local communists. To counter the film’s eﬀects further, Moscow waged an intensive advertising campaign in the city for one of its own re-releases, Michail Chiaureli’s Second World War ‘artistic documentary’, The Fall of Berlin (1949). Widely distributed by indigenous communist parties in Western Europe in the early 1950s, this two-part film accused Roosevelt and Churchill of having deliberately prolonged the war in the hope that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would destroy one another. As a consequence, the film argued, Washington and London had added unnecessarily to the ordinary Austrians’ suﬀering and precipitated the Cold War.60 A POLITICAL PAS DE DEUX The world’s first stage production of Ninotchka opened in Paris in April 1950, starring Sophie Desmarets and Henri Guisal. Three years later, Billy Wilder, one of Ninotchka’s scriptwriters who had since become a respected director, considered making a male version of the story for Paramount. Nothing came of this, much to the relief of Luigi Luraschi, Paramount’s head of censorship and a CIA confidant, who suspected Wilder’s ‘liberal-mindedness’ might encourage undue sympathy towards the Soviet system.61 However, that year, 1953, did see MGM release Never Let Me Go, a McCarthyite remake of King Vidor’s light-hearted Comrade X. Directed by Delmer Davies, this depicted the Soviet Union as a paranoid police state forcibly separating an American correspondent (Clark Gable again) from his Russian ballerina wife. At the same time, RKO made the gentle comedy No Time for Flowers. Directed in Alliedoccupied Austria by Don Siegel, this starred Viveca Lindfors as a Czech secretary who defects to the West after being exposed to the luxuries of American cocktail dresses, high heels and bubble baths. Rumours circulated

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via the Hollywood trade press that Austrian actors were deterred from working on this picture because of communist threats and that the production was put under Russian surveillance.62 Three years later, in 1956, Ralph Thomas’ The Iron Petticoat, an AngloAmerican production set in West Germany and London, put a further twist on the Ninotchka theme by having Katherine Hepburn play a Russian pilot who defects and marries an American air-force oﬃcer, played by the comedian Bob Hope. Made during the brief period of East-West détente following Stalin’s death in 1953, the film ended with the two lovers taking to the skies as globe-trotting peace campaigners.63 A year on, Howard Hughes’ Jet Pilot, originally filmed in 1950 in cooperation with the US Air Force, told a similar story, minus the conciliatory gesture. After wooing Soviet flying ace Janet Leigh with sexy lingerie, a weekend in Palm Springs, and a luscious steak dinner, John Wayne convinces his ‘silly Siberian cupcake’ to defect – along with her precious MIG aircraft.64 With the East-versus-West love story proving so attractive a subject for filmmakers, it was only to be expected that Hollywood would turn it into a musical. The musical was, after all, arguably the quintessential American film genre: optimistic, perpetuating the most conventional beliefs about individualism, social harmony and patriotism, and oﬀering utopian images of aﬄuence and material well-being.65 Musicals had played an overt role in Hollywood’s Second World War propaganda campaign, from the nostalgically patriotic Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) to military flag-wavers like This is the Army (1943).66 By contrast, in the struggle to defeat communism during the Cold War, Hollywood musicals were rarely so transparently political. Unlike many rock and folk music performers from the 1960s onwards, their lyrics and scores avoided ideological and geopolitical controversies.67 Nevertheless, immensely popular movies like MGM’s An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952) – made during the musical’s ‘golden age’ and during a period when Cold War mentalities were being formed – carried in their infectiously enthusiastic acting, catchy tunes and lively choreography an exceedingly powerful message about what America represented. In 1955, British critic Roger Manvell alluded to the subtle propagandistic qualities of the American musical when he wrote: ‘The best musicals have the vitality of a nation which has no inhibitions when it comes to singing about the heartaches and happiness of contemporary life, or laughing at its own absurdities or glamorising the sheer love of sex and material success.’68 Many years later, British director Terence Davies recalled seeing Singin’ in the Rain when he was a child: ‘When you grew up in a Liverpool slum and you saw these films, that’s what you thought America was like. Everyone was rich, everyone was beautiful. There was no want, no poverty; it was always summer. That’s very potent. It’s as potent as religion.’69

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Silk Stockings, released in 1957, is a collector’s item – a Hollywood musical that ventured explicitly into Cold War territory. A musical stage version of Ninotchka, titled Silk Stockings, had been a Broadway success in 1954–5, and in 1956 Arthur Freed, whose prestigious production unit at MGM specialised in making Technicolor musical extravaganzas, employed a team of writers to transfer the play to the big screen. Freed hired as director the Armenian-born Rouben Mamoulian, who a decade earlier had revolutionised the Broadway musical with shows like Carousel. More recently, Mamoulian had conducted a tour of Europe with Oklahoma! sponsored by the State Department.70 The lead roles were filled by one of Hollywood’s best-loved dance couples, Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. Charisse’s first film had in fact been Mission to Moscow but she was better known as the beautiful, statuesque former dance partner of Gene Kelly. Astaire, now 58 years of age, had appeared in thirty movies over two decades, and was described by one critic during filming as ‘the perfect representative of American civilization – simply by being lighthearted, nimble-witted, small of voice and light of foot’.71 The music for Silk Stockings was provided by the songwriter Cole Porter, famous for his witty, risqué lyrics. The choreographers, who created original dance numbers that ran the gamut from interpretative ballet to jazz and rock ’n’ roll, were Eugene Loring, Hermes Pan and Astaire himself. In total, Silk Stockings cost $2.4 million.72 The only cuts requested by the PCA related to the film’s sexual content. One scene showing three married American women dating the commissars caused particular concern. ‘We think this is an unnecessarily low approach’, noted the censors, ‘and seems to indicate that in the great free western world it is common practice for such things to happen.’73 Silk Stockings follows the plot of Ninotchka fairly closely. Ninotchka (Charisse) still comes to Paris to discipline three wayward envoys, only to fall in love with her decadent Western charmer (Steve Canfield, played by Astaire). Ninotchka and Steve are opposites: he is happy-go-lucky; she is serious, cold and calculating; he is smartly dressed and devoted to debonair frivolity, she is khaki-clad and devoted to her country; he makes his own decisions, she takes orders from Moscow. However, the Russians’ mission is no longer to get money for tractors by selling grand ducal jewellery, but to coax a wandering composer, Peter Boroﬀ (Wim Sonneveld), back to Moscow; and Ninotchka’s seducer is no longer a French aristocrat but an American film producer. Boroﬀ’s character allowed the music to blend into the plot more naturally, while also alluding to the real-life conductors like the Czech Rafael Kubelik who had fled from the Eastern bloc. Canfield’s nationality seems to have been a commercial rather than political decision, but its eﬀect was to highlight America’s more prominent political and cultural role in post-war Europe. It also emphasised Ninotchka’s love of things American, rather than the West generally in Lubitsch’s film.74

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However, what really sets the two films apart is their diﬀering styles. As in Ninotchka, some political points in Silk Stockings are delivered through witty dialogue. Just moments after his failed predecessor is arrested by the secret police, for instance, one commissar requests a copy of Who Was Who – a mordant reference to the Soviet government’s deadly capriciousness. But from the opening of Silk Stockings, with its floor-level close-up of Astaire’s famous feet, the movie is notable above all for the lead players’ wonderfully expressive movements. Through these movements and accompanying songs, we learn to appreciate the diﬀerence between an inhibiting, depersonalising Soviet system and the freedom and spontaneity enjoyed in the West. Dance is crucial here (just as it would be thirty years later in White Nights), being not a mere decoration but a leading thematic motif. As the film progresses, so Cold War politics and ideological diﬀerences dissolve as dancing becomes the universal language of romance. The implicit theme of dance-as-liberation runs throughout the film, starting from the ‘We Can’t Go Back to Moscow’ number. This establishes and celebrates the conversion of the three Soviet emissaries to the material delights of capitalism, notably champagne and available women. Here, critically, the emphasis in the mise-en-scène is on individual movement, in which even the clumsy but jovial Brankov (modelled partly after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and played by Hollywood’s wild-eyed eccentric Peter Lorre)75 finds some physical means of expression. The beautiful Charisse solo number (‘All of You’) sees Ninotchka surrender to the allures of capitalistic luxury, dressing in lace petticoat, evening gown and silk stockings to transform herself into the object of male desire, while the grace and freedom of physical movement (of dancer and camera) throughout the sequence movingly express the casting oﬀ of repressive constraints. Charisse’s discovery, through dance, of her individual physical existence is perhaps more moving than Garbo’s emotional awakening through laughter. When the movie shifts to Moscow, we see that Ninotchka herself has reverted to an automaton, dancing not out of exhilaration but as though discharging a duty. Yet in ‘The Red Blues’ number we see the supreme expression of vitality through physical movement, with movement only stopping during the two intrusions of an orthodox communist. In this song, set in a cold, austere hall, Ninotchka and her friends pay homage to their memories of the warm, vibrant West. This, ‘Siberia’ and ‘Too Bad’ allow the commissars to express their lachrymose self-pity for their inevitable return to proletarian life. ‘Siberia’ lists the ‘joys’ of being sent to a region where one never has to phone for ice and there is no unemployment. Silk Stockings does contain certain political ambiguities. In ‘America’s Swimming Sweetheart’, sassy actress Peggy Dainton (played by Broadway star

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‘An ideological strip tease’, as Life magazine put it: Ninotchka (Cyd Charisse) gets in touch with her innermost desires, and the pleasures of Western femininity through consumption, in Silk Stockings (1957). MGM/The Kobal Collection.

Janis Paige) is the epitome of Western decadence, and generally her character allows the movie to mock the commercialism of Hollywood. In another scene, Ninotchka objects to an absurdly dressed-up poodle as ‘useless’, whereas Steve defends it as ‘amusing’.76 The pro-capitalist message is underlined at the end,

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however. Charisse is brought back to Paris by Astaire’s machinations, the climax of which has her seated in the ex-envoys’ new nightclub (La Vielle Russie) to admire Astaire’s solo-with-chorus dance number (‘The Ritz Rock ’n’ Roll’), a robust aﬃrmation of the material rewards of capitalism. She then, after a brief misunderstanding has been cleared up, submits to him, and defects. Ninotchka’s flight to the West proves that deep-rooted ‘universal’ and ‘human’ needs can be suppressed but never ultimately destroyed by the repressions of a social system antithetical to them.77 In contrast to the response to Ninotchka, critics diﬀered on Silk Stockings’ artistic and political merits. Some condemned it for vulgarising a nostalgically venerated original and for satirising communism more crudely than Lubitsch’s ‘masterpiece’. Others gave it thunderous applause. It ‘never misses a trick in pointing up [the Soviet system’s] inherent foolishness’, said the Hollywood Reporter, and its ‘musical portions are as exciting and imaginative as anything ever done in motion picture musical comedy’. Many a less historically minded ordinary viewer also approved of the film. At a preview screening at Pasadena in February 1957, only 1 of 214 report cards rated it ‘poor’, and the film went on to gross $4.4 million.78 At another preview screening hosted by Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Picture Association of America, a group of senior government oﬃcials including the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Charles Bohlen, thoroughly enjoyed the film. Bohlen’s approval should be seen in the context of Washington’s publicity eﬀorts overseas in the 1950s to highlight the greater freedoms enjoyed by women in the West compared with the East, be it in terms of employment, recreation or fashion. The movie also tied in nicely with one of the United States Information Agency’s (USIA’s) biggest initiatives of the mid-to-late 1950s, that dubbed ‘People’s Capitalism’. Created by Theodore Repplier, President of the US Advertising Council, this multimedia campaign directed overseas sought to challenge the communist line that free market economics only favoured the bosses, and to package America as a symbol of high productivity, ingenuity and material progress.79 It is diﬃcult to gauge Silk Stockings’ reception overseas. If Britain’s newspapers are anything to go by, many people did not care much for it. The critic of The Times, a paper which stood on the political right, thought it was ‘dated’, while the liberal-oriented Observer called the film ‘stupid in its attitude to Russia, stupid in its understanding of the public’.80 Notwithstanding these views, Silk Stockings probably reflected and reinforced many cinema-goers’ appreciation of the basic diﬀerences between the East and the West. In several important respects, the film also echoed Washington’s current eﬀorts to infiltrate the Soviet empire culturally. The film’s portrayal of jazz as an instrument

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abroad of American free expression, for instance, tied in with the opinion held by oﬃcial propagandists in the 1950s that jazz was the United States’ ‘secret sonic weapon’ behind the Iron Curtain. In 1955, Voice of America (VOA), the oﬃcial broadcasting service of the United States, had launched its landmark programme Music USA, aiming jazz at the youth of the USSR and Eastern Europe.81 Silk Stockings’ promotion of the idea that, as the conservative magazine Time put it, ‘the Soviet Union could be outflanked by a simple clobbering with Sears [and] Roebuck catalogues’ was derided as overconfident wishful thinking by some in 1957. Yet when the US government staged the first American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, hoping to dazzle the Soviet people with the riches that capitalism provided, in scenes which uncannily echoed sociologist David Riesman’s satirical 1951 essay ‘The Nylon War’ some Russian women literally fought for tickets to the Christian Dior show.82 Ninotchka continued to prove its durability into the next decade. In 1960, the story crossed from the big to the small screen, when the American Broadcasting Company produced an orthodox television adaptation, starring Maria Schell and Gig Young. 83 CONCLUSION Thirty years later, in 1989–90, the Soviet-run Eastern bloc dramatically collapsed. Historians continue to debate the reasons for this, yet few now doubt that the Cold War was won as much in the shopping basket as at the negotiating table. Some have gone further than this, arguing that all paths of Cold War social and cultural history lead to a consideration of consumerism.84 If so, Hollywood’s role, combined with that played by television,85 was surely significant. ‘There has never been a more eﬀective salesman for American products in foreign countries than the American motion picture’, proclaimed Gerald M. Mayer, head of the International Division of the Motion Picture Association of America in 1947. ‘Scenes laid in American kitchens, for example, have probably done as much to acquaint the people of foreign lands with American electric refrigerators, electric washing machines, eggbeaters, window screens, and so on, as any other medium.’86 Hollywood’s ability to open a window onto Westerners’ conspicuous consumption for Eastern bloc audiences appears to have been particularly important, notwithstanding the heavy restrictions communist governments placed on American film imports. Yale Richmond, one of Washington’s most experienced Cold War cultural diplomats, recalls how one Russian woman, on seeing Billy Wilder’s 1960 romantic comedy The Apartment, was impressed by watching Jack Lemmon warm up his TV dinner, unknown at that time in the Soviet Union, and lighting his kitchen stove without a match. ‘From foreign films, Soviet audiences

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learned that people in the West did not have to stand in lines to purchase food, did not live in communal apartments, dressed fashionably, enjoyed many conveniences not available in the Soviet Union, owned cars, and lived the normal life so sought by Russians’, writes Richmond.87 Even if Ninotchka was made fifty years before the Berlin Wall was breached, the film remains a key artefact of the Cold War. It was the first movie that fully articulated a materialist view of the capitalist-communist divide. It served as the inspiration for many other films, including a few that subverted the Curtain-crossing-lovers theme, like Billy Wilder’s screwball farce One, Two, Three (1961).88 And it also anticipated later seminal events in the cultural Cold War. In 1967, no less a person than Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, defected to the West and in 1970 became a US citizen when she married architect William Peters. Surprisingly, given its obvious commercial and political possibilities, Hollywood declined to make a film based on Svetlana’s story. This is evidence, according to one writer, of the American film industry’s abject failure to depict the full horrors of Soviet communism during the Cold War, due partly to the phenomenon of anti-anti-communism that swept through Hollywood in reaction to the blacklisting ‘legend’ instilled in the McCarthy era.89 Whether Hollywood could or should have painted a more gruesome picture of life in the East is open to question. Certainly, not one single American film made during the Cold War chose to turn Ninotchka on its head, by portraying an East-West love aﬀair that ended happily on the ‘wrong’ side of the Iron Curtain.90 Just as importantly, Ninotchka is an early example of the degree to which the celluloid Cold War was fought independent of oﬃcial propagandists. At the same time, MGM’s decision to re-release Ninotchka in the late 1940s in the face of political pressures from HUAC, plus the State Department’s subsequent appropriation of the film for political purposes in Western Europe, shows how easily the lines between the ‘state’ and the ‘private’ could become blurred when the Cold War proper started. Notes 1 Cited in Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford, 2003), p. 280. During the Second World War, Zanuck combined his role at Twentieth Century-Fox with running a documentary film unit as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Signal Corps. See Leonard Mosley, Zanuck (Boston, MA, 1984), pp. 195–224. 2 On Hollywood’s Vietnam War movies of the early to mid-1980s, including Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985), see Jeremy M. Devine, Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Over 400 Films About the Vietnam War (Jeﬀerson, NC, 1995), pp. 198–236. Hollywood’s treatment of the Vietnam War is discussed at further length in Chapters 7, 8 and 9 below.

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3 On the POW theme see, for instance, Susan L. Carruthers, ‘Redeeming the Captives: Hollywood and the Brainwashing of America’s Prisoners of War in Korea’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 275–94. 4 The phrase is historian Eric Hobsbawm’s, who writes significantly that ‘the sheer degree of mutual ignorance and incomprehension that persisted between the two worlds was quite extraordinary, especially when we bear in mind that this was a period when both travel and communication of information were utterly revolutionized’. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London, 1994), pp. 374–5. The Western public’s lack of access to solid facts about the conditions behind the Iron Curtain rendered mass media images of those conditions potentially highly influential. 5 ‘I didn’t set out to make a Cold War movie,’ said Taylor Hackford. ‘White Nights is a film about the need for artistic and individual freedom.’ Quoted by Peter Rainer, ‘Mixed Messages’, American Film, March 1986, p. 48. The Soviet government lodged a protest against White Nights in the international press, through its oﬃcial newspaper, Izvestia. On this and the film generally see William J. Palmer, The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale, IL, 1993), pp. 242–5, and Margaret Donovan (ed.), Portrait of a Film: The Making of White Nights (New York, 1985). 6 Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 5; Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film (Urbana, IL, 1988), p. 9. 7 Steven J. Ross, ‘The Rise of Hollywood: Movies, Ideology, and Audiences in the Roaring Twenties’, in Steven J. Ross (ed.), Movies and American Society (Oxford, 2002), p. 67; Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (London, 1983). 8 Gregory D. Black, ‘Movies, Politics, and Censorship: The Production Code Administration and Political Censorship of Film Content’, Journal of Policy History, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1991, pp. 95–129; Francis R. Walsh, ‘The Films We Never Saw: American Movies View Organized Labor, 1934–1954’, Labor History, Vol. 27, Fall 1986, pp. 564–80; Ruth Vaisey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Exeter, 1997). 9 For a selection of pro-labour films of this era see M. Keith Booker, Film and the American Left: A Research Guide (Westport, CT, 1999), pp. 16–69. 10 Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era (Berkeley, and Los Angeles CA, 1990), pp. 442–3; John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America’, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 4, November 2003, pp. 495–530, esp. p. 498. 11 Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston, MA, 1976), p. 187. 12 Brownlow, Behind the Mask, pp. 443–52; Variety, 2 May 1919, p. 60; New York Times, 12 May 1919, p. 11; Variety, 6 February 1920, p. 53, and 16 April 1920, p. 39; Motion Picture World, 23 August 1919, pp. 1175–6; Hollywood Reporter, 7 September 1935, p. 3. Red Salute was re-released in 1953 as Runaway Daughter.

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13 Variety, 16 January 1920, p. 61, and 8 August 1920, p. 21; New York Times, 29 January 1922, Section 6, p. 2; Brownlow, Behind the Mask, pp. 453–7. 14 John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York, 1994), p. 235; Variety, 14 April 1937. On the hostility towards monopoly capitalism shown by Frank Capra, Will Rogers, John Ford and other prominent filmmakers, on and oﬀ screen, during the New Deal era see Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago, IL, 2000). 15 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 78–80; Ellen W. Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA, 2002), pp. 5–8. 16 Variety, 15 November, p. 19; New York Times, 22 July 1933, p. 14; Film Daily, 1 June 1934, p. 7. 17 Motion Picture Daily, 24 September 1934, p. 2. 18 Variety, 23 October 1935, p. 13. This picture, which depicted a factory strike, was produced in the wake of a general strike in San Francisco. PCA Director Joseph Breen agreed to certify the proposed film on condition it specified that the strike was the work of outside agitators. Breen to producer Brian Foy, 25 September 1934, Together We Live – PCA Files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California (hereafter AMPAS). 19 Variety, 9 December 1936, p. 13. 20 Richard Slotkin, ‘The Continuity of Forms: Myth and Genre in Warner Brothers’ The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Representations, Winter 1990, pp. 1–23, esp. p. 9. 21 Thomas Cripps, Hollywood’s High Noon: Moviemaking and Society before Television (Baltimore, MD, 1997), pp. 124–5; William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ, 1981); Giuliana Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal (Philadelphia, PA, 1996). 22 Maurice Zolotow, ‘Ninotchka: The Movie That Never Should Have Been Made’, Los Angeles Magazine, December 1976, pp. 1–10; Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York, 1993), pp. 265–8. 23 Ninotchka scripts: Folders 2300-f.574–85, Turner/MGM Script Collection, AMPAS. 24 Ninotchka scripts: Folders 2302-f.586–91, Turner/MGM Script Collection, AMPAS. 25 Memorandum, 13 May 1938; Breen to Mayer, 2 June 1939; Analysis Chart, 1 September 1939: Ninotchka – PCA Files, AMPAS; Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York, 1987), pp. 17–47, 187–8. 26 Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition, pp. 18–19, 30, 91–2; Neal Gabler, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988), p. 316; Albert Auster, ‘The Hollywood Musical’, in Gary Crowdus (ed.), The Political Companion to American Film (Chicago, IL, 1994), p. 288. 27 Zolotow, ‘Ninotchka’, p. 3. 28 Eyman, Lubitsch, p. 233; Charles Highham, Merchants and Dreams: Louis B. Mayer, MGM, and the Secret Hollywood (London, 1993), p. 289; Koppes and Black,

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30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

41

42

43

37

Hollywood, pp. 186, 216. Lubitsch exacted revenge on the Third Reich in 1942 by directing the anti-Nazi satire To Be or Not to Be. See Nora Henry, Ethics and Social Criticism in the Hollywood Films of Erich Von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder (Westport, CT, 2001), pp. 97–106. Anthony Slide, The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry (London, 2001), p. 125; Kevin Lally, Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder (New York, 1996), p. 88; Terry Christensen and Peter J. Haas, Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Films (Armonk, NY, 2005), p. 21. Peter Hay, MGM: When the Lion Roars (New York, 1991), pp. 187–9. Jeremy Mindich, ‘Re-reading Ninotchka: A Misread Commentary on Social and Economic Systems’, Film and History, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1990, pp. 16–24. See, for example, William Paul, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy (New York, 1983), p. 207. MGM Press book, Ninotchka Clippings File, AMPAS. Variety, 11 October 1939, in Variety’s Film Reviews, Vol. 6, 1938–42 (New York, 1983). Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch, Ninotchka: The MGM Library of Film Scripts, screenplay (London, 1972), pp. 8–9. For the impact that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had on the politics of Hollywood, and the disintegration of the liberal-communist Popular Front in particular, see Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition, pp. 129–52. The Pact cast suspicion on liberals in Hollywood, including Melvyn Douglas, who was forced to use his role in Ninotchka as evidence of his opposition to communism. See Photoplay, September 1940, pp. 23, 88. New York Times, 11 October 1939; Sunday Worker, New York, 19 November 1939; Daily Worker, 24 November 1939. Lally, Wilder, p. 88; International Censorship Board Reports: Ninotchka – PCA Files, AMPAS; Daily Worker, 13 April 1940. New York Times, 26 December 1940, p. 23; New York Post, 31 August 1940, p. 16. Koppes and Black, Hollywood, pp. 185–221; David Culbert (ed.), Mission to Moscow (Madison, WI, 1980); Todd Bennett, ‘Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II’, Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 2, September 2001, pp. 489–518. Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry (Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 80th Congress, 1st Session, 20–4, 27–30 October 1947) (Washington, DC, 1947), p. 80; Robert Mayhew, ‘The Making of Song of Russia’, Film History, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2004, pp. 334–57; MGM Press book, Ninotchka Clippings File, AMPAS. Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven, CT, 1978); R. H. Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Intelligence Agency (Berkeley, CA, 1972). Scott W. Lucas, ‘Campaigns of Truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American Ideology, 1951–1953’, International History Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, May 1996, pp. 279–302, esp. pp. 282–3; Hixson, Curtain, pp. 5–12.

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44 Gary Rawnsley, ‘The Campaign of Truth: A Populist Propaganda’, in Gary Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 31–46. 45 Kenneth Osgood, ‘Total War: US Propaganda in the “Free World”, 1953–1960’, PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2001; Lucas, ‘Campaigns’, pp. 279–302. The Eisenhower presidency’s Cold War propaganda mechanisms are detailed in Chapter 4. 46 Alvin Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies and the Winning of the Cold War (New York, 1995), p. xi. 47 Sustained research into Soviet Cold War propaganda is relatively thin on the ground. For a partial insight see Frederick Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive (Princeton, NJ, 1960) and Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton, NJ, 1962); Baruch Hazan, Soviet Impregnational Propaganda (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982); Eric Shiraev and Vladislav M. Zubock, Anti-Americanism in Russia: From Stalin to Putin (New York, 2000); Marian Kirsch Leighton, Soviet Propaganda as a Foreign Policy Tool (New York, 1991); Ladislav Bittman, The New Image Makers: Soviet Propaganda and Disinformation Today (London, 1988); V. Pechatnov, ‘Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War, 1945–47’, Cold War History, Vol. 1, No. 2, January 2001, pp. 1–27. 48 James E. Miller, ‘Taking Oﬀ the Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections of 1948’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 7, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 35–56. See Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (Basingstoke, 1995), for a claim that Washington fabricated the Soviet Union’s perceived military aggressiveness to the West in order, inter alia, to save the US aviation industry from bankruptcy. 49 On Washington’s mobilisation of Italian-Americans during the election campaign see Wendy L. Wall, ‘ “America’s Best Propagandists”: Italian Americans and the 1948 “Letters to Italy” Campaign’, in Appy (ed.), Constructions, pp. 89–109. 50 D. W. Ellwood, ‘The 1948 Elections in Italy: A Cold War Propaganda Battle’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1993, pp. 19–33; Robert T. Holt and Robert W. van de Velde, Strategic Psychological Operations and American Foreign Policy (Chicago, IL, 1960), pp. 173–4. 51 Arnoldo Cortesi and ‘Observer’, ‘Two Vital Case Histories’, in Lester Markel (ed.), Public Opinion and Foreign Policy (New York, 1949), pp. 199–200. 52 US Ambassador in Italy (Dunn) to the Secretary of State, 16 June 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), Vol. III, 1948 (Washington, DC, 1974), pp. 879–82; Motion Picture Herald, 3 April 1948; Daily Worker, 24 April 1948. 53 Morris Janowitz and Elizabeth Marvick, ‘US Propaganda Eﬀorts and the 1948 Italian Elections’, in William E. Daughtey and Morris Janowitz (eds), A Psychological Warfare Casebook (Baltimore, MD, 1958), pp. 321–2; ‘Garbo Wins’, Rome Bureau, 1948 (source unclear), Ninotchka Clippings File, AMPAS. 54 Stephen Gundle, ‘Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 95–118 (quotation at p. 102). 55 Ellwood, ‘1948 Elections’, p. 20; Miller, ‘Gloves’, p. 35.

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56 Due to diplomatic pressure from the United States and indigenous political infighting, 1947 saw the collapse of Tripartism in France – the uneasy alliance formed between the communists, socialists and the Mouvement Républicain Populaire during the latter stages of the Second World War. Maurice Larkin, France since the Popular Front: Government and the People, 1936–1986 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 151–6. 57 International Censorship Board Reports: Ninotchka – PCA Files, AMPAS; Daily Telegraph, 19 April 1948; Time and Tide, April 1948. 58 ‘Germans Laugh at “Ninotchka”’, August 1951 (source unclear), Ninotchka Clippings File, AMPAS. 59 Charles K. Moﬄy (Vienna) to Department of State, 23 February 1951, RG 59, 511.635/2–2351, National Archives, College Park, Maryland (hereafter USNA). 60 Los Angeles Times, 9 October 1950; Variety, 25 October 1950; Motion Picture Herald, 3 March 1951. On The Fall of Berlin see Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London, 1998), pp. 99–122. On the measures taken by the British Foreign Oﬃce to counter this film’s impact in Britain in 1952 see PREM 11/1124 file, The National Archives, London (hereafter TNAL). 61 My source for Luraschi’s CIA connections is Eldridge, ‘Dear Owen’. For Luraschi’s views on Wilder’s project see Eldridge, ‘Dear Owen’, pp. 161, 169. Wilder was one of the few at Paramount who refused to sign a loyalty oath during the post-1945 Red Scare. 62 New York Times, 11 June 1953, p. 37; Los Angeles Daily News, 7 October 1951. 63 Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1956, pp. 113–14. 64 New York Times, 5 October 1957, p. 8. 65 The musical as a specifically American form is examined in Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock, NY, 1987). 66 Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II (New York, 1999), pp. 83, 215. Both films were directed by Michael Curtiz. 67 For an insight into the political role of folk and rock music during the Cold War see John Orman, The Politics of Rock Music (Chicago, IL, 1984); David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock and Roll (Englewood Cliﬀs, NJ, 1987); Sabrina Ramet (ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (Boulder, CO, 1994). 68 Roger Manvell, The Film and the Public (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 174. 69 Palmer, Eighties, pp. 8–9. 70 Silk Stockings scripts: Folders 2891-f.1181–6, 2892-f.1187–94, 2893–1195–1204, 2894–1205–13, Turner/MGM Script Collection, AMPAS; Mark Spergel, Reinventing Reality: The Art and Life of Rouben Mamoulian (London, 1993), p. 216. 71 Edward Jablonski, in Films in Review, August/September 1957, p. 351. 72 Robert Vogel-Arthur Freed correspondence, 29 November and 10 December 1956, Folder 1.1, Box 21, and Folder 2, Silk Stockings Budget, Arthur Freed Collection, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California (hereafter USC). 73 Geoﬀrey M. Shurlock to Dore Schary, 13 November 1956, Silk Stockings – PCA Files, AMPAS.

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74 On the ‘Classical Music Wars’ between East and West see Caute, Dancer, pp. 379–44. 75 Rouben Mamoulian to Arthur Freed and Leonard Spigelglass, 25 July 1956, Folder 1.1, Box 21, Arthur Freed Collection, USC. 76 Historian Helen Laville attributes greater significance to the movie’s critique of American popular culture. For this, plus a detailed examination of the symbolic power of feminine consumption in Ninotchka and Silk Stockings, see Helen Laville, ‘ “Our Country Endangered by Underwear”: Fashion, Femininity, and the Seduction Narrative in Ninotchka and Silk Stockings’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 30, No. 4, September 2006, pp. 623–44. 77 For more on the use of dance to narrate the love story and probe the ideological divisions between East and West see Tom Milne, Rouben Mamoulian (London, 1969), pp. 147–60, and Robin Wood, ‘Art and Ideology: Notes on “Silk Stockings” ’, Film Comment, May/June 1975, pp. 28–31. 78 Saturday Review, 20 July 1957; Hollywood Reporter, 20 May 1957, p. 3; Howard Strickling, Report on Preview Screening at the Crown Theatre, Pasadena, 13 February 1957, Folder 1.2, Box 21, Arthur Freed Collection, USC; Hugh Fordin, The World of Entertainment! Hollywood’s Greatest Musicals (New York, 1975), p. 452. 79 Orville Croach to Arthur Freed, 27 February 1957, Folder 2.1, Box 21, Arthur Freed Collection, USC; Laura A. Belmonte, ‘A Family Aﬀair? Gender, the US Information Agency, and Cold War Ideology, 1945–1960’, in Jessica GienowHecht and Frank Schumacher (eds), Culture and International History (New York, 2003), pp. 79–93; Hixson, Curtain, pp. 133–41. 80 The Times, 5 August 1957; Observer, 3 August 1957. 81 Osgood, ‘Total War’, p. 181; Hixson, Curtain, pp. 115–19; Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 82 Time, 15 July 1957; Caute, Dancer, pp. 40–2; David Riesman, ‘The Nylon War’ (1951) reprinted in his Abundance for What? And Other Essays (London, 1964), pp. 65–77. Riesman imagined an alternative to the nuclear arms race called Operation Abundance, in which Washington sowed mass discontent in the Soviet Union by bombarding the country with Western consumer goods. 83 On ABC’s coverage of the Cold War during this period see Nancy Bernhard, US Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947–1960 (New York, 1999). 84 On this debate see Mitter and Major, Blocs, pp. 1–22. Interestingly, one historian notes that even as early as the late 1950s state-owned retail enterprises in Hungary’s big-city department stores attempted to replicate what they described as ‘American’ shopping experiences. Mark Pittaway, ‘A Home Front in the Cold War: Hungary, 1948–1989’, www.history.azc.uk/ihr/cold/articles/pittaway.html (9 May 2006). On the promise of socialist consumerism see Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (eds), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Postwar Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000). 85 On the eﬀect that television programmes beamed from the West had on East Germans’ perceptions of their comparatively drab lifestyles in the 1980s see

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88

89 90

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H. Hanke, ‘Media Culture in the GDR: Characteristics, Processes, and Problems’, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 175–93. Gerald M. Mayer, ‘American Motion Pictures in World Trade’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 254, November 1947, pp. 31–6. Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA, 2003), p. 128. Richmond worked on US-Soviet exchange programmes for the State Department and USIA. One, Two, Three was set in Berlin and starred James Cagney as a wise-cracking Coca-Cola salesman. In contrast with Ninotchka, its communist zealot was a man rather than a woman, an East German student, played by Horst Buchholz. The student does eventually convert to capitalism, after marrying Cagney’s boss’s daughter and getting her pregnant. But the film consciously mocks Cold War stereotyping and, by sending up Nazism, communism and American corporatism, implies that Berlin is little more than a great-power playground. Motion Picture Herald, 6 December 1961, p. 372; Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (New York, 1999), pp. 453–68. Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, ‘Hollywood’s Missing Movies: Why American Films Have Ignored Life Under Communism’, Reason, June 2000, pp. 21–9. For an analysis of one British film that dared to enter this territory see Tony Shaw, ‘From Liverpool to Russia, With Love: A Letter to Brezhnev and Cold War Cinematic Dissent in 1980s Britain’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2005, pp. 243–62.

CHAPTER 2

The enemy within

The Communists have developed one of the greatest propaganda machines the world has ever known. They have been able to penetrate and infiltrate many respectable and reputable public opinion mediums . . . Communist activity in Hollywood is eﬀective and is furthered by Communists and sympathizers using the prestige of prominent persons to serve, often unwittingly, the Communist cause . . . What can we do? And what should be our course of action? The best antidote to Communism is vigorous, intelligent, old-fashioned Americanism with eternal vigilance. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, testifying before HUAC, 26 March 19471

His family loved him dearly but knew there was something wrong with John (played by Robert Walker). Perhaps it was because he had ‘more degrees than a thermometer’, and had grown apart intellectually from his simple, wellmeaning parents. Maybe it was because he spent too long away from their small home town, in Washington, DC, where he was mysteriously working for the government. Dan and Lucille Jeﬀerson (Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes) had recently grown to tolerate their son’s eﬀete and snobbish manner. But his failure to return home in time to see his clean-cut younger brothers depart for combat in Korea was unforgivable. For John then to ridicule his father’s patriotism and mock his mother’s devotion to Christianity was the last straw. Little wonder Mr Jeﬀerson, a member of the American Legion, tries to knock some sense into his snide son by belting him with a Bible. Who can blame his anxious mother for trailing John to the nation’s capital, only to have her suspicions that he is a Soviet agent confirmed? Having failed to extract a confession from her favourite oﬀspring, Lucille Jeﬀerson knows it is her duty to turn him over to the FBI. John calls the Bureau’s bluﬀ, but finally realises his moral corruption when confronted by the eﬀects his treachery is having on his mother’s health. Seeking redemption, John rushes to cleanse himself by oﬀering to help the FBI – only to be tragically gunned down gangland-style by his comrades in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Hollywood’s favourite symbol of American

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A family at war: John’s sideways glance at his dad and impertinence to Father O’Dowd are early pointers to the tragedy about to strike the humble Jeffersons. Helen Hayes, Frank McHugh, Robert Walker and Dean Jagger in a scene from My Son John (1952). Paramount/The Kobal Collection.

democracy.2 Fortunately, John had taped a speech he expected to deliver to a college graduating class at his alma mater, detailing his disillusionment with communism and warning of the party’s subversive threat. In the final scene, the stunned students listen to John’s disembodied voice: ‘I am a traitor, I am a native. American. Communist. Spy. And may God have mercy on my soul.’ Leo McCarey’s My Son John, which debuted in 1952, is a familiar exhibit in studies of America’s domestic Cold War. Though the film initially met with a mixed reception politically (the American Legion praised it, while some Catholics thought it slanderous),3 it was soon well on its way to becoming the most notorious of all the Red-baiting pictures produced during the McCarthy era, if not the whole Cold War. Historians have recently cited the film as evidence of the homophobic, anti-feminist and anti-intellectual dimensions of America’s Second Red Scare.4 However, what few commentators have looked at fully are the motives that lay behind the making of My Son John and the scores of other overtly anticommunist films produced by Hollywood in the late 1940s and 1950s. Those who have glanced behind the films’ scenes have tended, for good reason, to emphasise the political pressures that filmmakers were subjected to during the

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early Cold War years, and to argue that the movies were political sops designed to placate those who charged the studios with ideologically suspect output.5 Yet the fact is Leo McCarey wrote, produced and directed My Son John for Paramount not because he was being blackmailed by HUAC, but principally because he was an ardent Catholic who believed communism presented a genuine threat to American national security.6 Other filmmakers voluntarily contributed to the anti-Red onslaught for more complex reasons. Some did so partly because of their strong links with the state. To understand the potential that existed for producers, writers and directors to project their own personal visions of the communist menace, it is necessary to reassess Hollywood’s part in the institutionalisation of the Cold War between the mid-1940s and mid-1950s. This was a critical period: when Americans were urged to swap one foreign enemy (fascism) for another (Soviet communism); when the anxieties, values and beliefs which most people would carry throughout the conflict were first established; when cinema was still at or near the peak of its drawing power in the United States;7 and when the state-film network in the United States was rapidly evolving to take account of the exigencies of a full-blown Cold War. As we shall see, America in the 1940s and 1950s was marked by idealism and creativity as much as fear and risk, motives that mingled in an unprecedented expansion of governmental activity and private initiative and which began to blur the lines between state and civil society. As the Cold War proper started, so the US government’s propaganda apparatus developed to pressurise, guide and sharpen the media’s anti-Soviet messages. This included agencies like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that ostensibly concentrated purely on surveillance and security, but which in reality played a significant role in mobilising the American people to act as ‘citizen warriors’ in the nation’s fight against communism. HOLLYWOOD ON TRIAL Hollywood was treated as one of the ‘enemies within’ by counter-subversives in the United States during the early Cold War years. Once the clash between Washington and Moscow became direct and overt with the articulation of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, domestic communism was transformed from a matter of political controversy to a subject that dominated national security. If anti-communism had been confined to the relative margins of American politics at the time of Ninotchka’s production in the late 1930s, it now moved to the ideological centre. Anyone even suspected of harbouring communist sympathies faced the prospect of being labelled ‘Un-American’. Those in influential positions – in government, education, labour unions, the media – were subjected to intense scrutiny from the state and the public.

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As was the case in the Soviet Union, those working in the film industry in the United States in the late 1940s were put under unprecedented political pressure to act in ‘the national interest’. Whereas cultural vigilance in the Soviet Union was organised from the centre through a single department (the Ministry of Cinematography), in the United States it was implemented via a loose amalgamation of old and new organisations and legislation. The US Aliens Registration Act, for instance, which made it an oﬀence to conspire to advocate the overthrow of the American government and was used to prosecute communists in the late 1940s, had been passed by Congress in 1940. In the Soviet Union, this cultural authoritarianism (or ‘Zhdanovism’) caused film production to fall to dramatically low levels, meaning that the Russian people’s diet of fully fledged Cold War movies was meagre.8 However, in the United States the eﬀect was the opposite, as Hollywood went into Cold War film production overdrive. The CPUSA had made the film industry a special organising target in 1936, a move that reflected Lenin’s and Stalin’s belief in the power of cinema. Proclaiming that movies were ‘the weapon of mass culture’, the party organisers urged their recruits at least to ‘keep anti-Soviet agitprop’ out of the movies they worked on.9 HUAC began hearings on the alleged communist penetration of the motion picture industry in 1938, due largely to the number of screenwriters professing support for the Popular Front. The committee’s then chairman, Martin Dies, also believed Hollywood’s Anti-Nazi League to be a front for the Communist party (which, after August 1939, it was).10 HUAC’s more concerted eﬀorts to ‘trace the footprints of Karl Marx in movieland’ a decade later, first in 1947 and again in 1951–2, 1953 and 1955–8, guaranteed the committee maximum publicity for its counter-subversion investigations elsewhere. At the same time, these eﬀorts were part of a ferocious if uncoordinated campaign fought by conservative forces inside and outside government designed to draft the media into the Cold War.11 They were also allied to a genuine (if misplaced) belief on many conservatives’ part that Hollywood’s alleged Russophilia during the Second World War, combined with the post-war flurry of film-industry strikes and liberal ‘message’ pictures raising such issues as home-grown racism, was evidence of growing communist influence behind and on the screen. HUAC’s seminal nine-day inquiry in Hollywood in October 1947 was a peculiarly American marriage of show business and politics, and likened to a ‘Roman circus’ by RKO’s liberal head, Dore Schary.12 Despite the inquiry’s failure (repeated later) to uncover any hard proof of communist infiltration or Marxism on celluloid, it ended with chairman J. Parnell Thomas calling on the industry to ‘clean its own house’. The infamous ‘Waldorf Statement’ was issued by Hollywood’s moguls soon afterwards, amounting to a tacit

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agreement to form a blacklist of real and suspected communists. This spread like a ‘tapeworm’ throughout the film industry in the years ahead; by 1960 the studios had black- and grey-listed over two thousand people, ruining many careers in the process.13 A culture of fear prevailed throughout the film industry during the late 1940s and 1950s, augmented by the policing roles of several key organisations. The Catholic National Legion of Decency, guardian of the big screen’s moral and political rectitude since the 1930s, continued to wield considerable authority in Hollywood well into the 1950s. Its leaders, like Martin Quigley, the publisher of the important trade paper Motion Picture Herald, were fervid anti-communists who were apt to detect evidence of ‘Red’ influence in films that the most zealous patriot failed to see. ‘The Legion holds the whip hand over Hollywood’, said one politically mainstream producer, Peter Rathvon, in 1949, ‘and nothing can be done about it.’14 This militantly right-wing pressure group was joined after 1944 by another, Hollywood’s own Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA). Established to vanquish ‘the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals, and crackpots’, the MPA was headed by, among others, Eric Johnston, who succeeded Will Hays as president of the renamed Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, formerly the MPPDA) in 1945 and was also president of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association, and Roy Brewer, leader of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the most powerful film labour union.15 The MPA sought, in member John Lee Martin’s words, to ‘turn oﬀ the faucets which dripped red water into film scripts’, and went on to issue regular advice to filmmakers on how they might best express their patriotism in the Cold War’s critical battle for hearts and minds. In 1946, Eric Johnston told screenwriters: ‘We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we’ll have no more Tobacco Roads, we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain.’ In 1948, the MPA published a highly influential booklet, written by novelist and ideologue of the right Ayn Rand. Entitled A Screen Guide for Americans, the booklet warned studios against smearing the free enterprise system or deifying ‘the common man’. The more East-West tensions increased, the more the MPA and others on the political right in Hollywood saw it as their duty, as citizens and opinion-formers, to support an interventionist US foreign policy as well as to guard against subversives. Eric Johnston had prophesied as early as 1944 that a commitment to military defence and worldwide economic arrangements would create a ‘utopia’ of production that would enable the United States to destroy the threat of global communism. In 1949, this former president of the US Chamber of Commerce, who had strong connections in

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the White House and Treasury, was confidently telling the readers of Look magazine ‘How We Can Win the Cold War With Russia’.16 The American Legion acted as the third point of this triangle, on the one hand by campaigning against those identified as suspect by the Legion of Decency, the MPA, HUAC and the FBI, and on the other by organising boycotts of films it deemed subversive or that featured actors labelled as communist sympathisers (‘comsyps’ for short). With over 17,000 posts and nearly 3 million members nationwide in the 1950s, the Legion, like the numerous other established social organisations of the right such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and Knights of Columbus, carried considerable economic and political weight in the film industry. Local Legion posts terrified exhibitors by threatening to picket theatres showing ideologically incorrect fare. Boasting a circulation of 3,600,000, its monthly magazine regularly ran articles on ‘communists’ in Hollywood. In December 1951, the magazine named over 50 then-current films that had ‘commie influence’. Several months later, in May 1952, it furnished industry executives with a dossier of over 300 names of ‘Reds’. The Legion’s victims included the famous and not so famous. Edward G. Robinson’s mea culpa took the form of a memoir published that October in the American Legion Magazine, entitled ‘How the Reds Made a Sucker Out of Me’. Alongside the executive boards in private industry, departmental heads and politically appointed administrators in the public sector, and the editors and publishers of key metropolitan newspapers and national magazines, the American Legion both encouraged and extended the anti-communist work of the governmental investigatory committees during the Red Scare. The relationships among these various forces were characterised by acknowledged, conscious, often coordinated interaction as well as agreement on the larger goals and methods of the Cold War enterprise.17 The culture of fear abated somewhat when the worst excesses of the nation’s Red Scare paranoia subsided in the mid to-late 1950s. Yet the job prospects of many blacklistees were aﬀected well into the 1960s, and HUAC itself remained in existence until 1975. The prosecution of ‘unfriendly’ witnesses, the naming of names, the purging of the politically incorrect on dubious charges, the early deaths of unemployed blacklistees and the flights abroad of others, the overseas ban imposed by the MPAA on innocuous political comedies like The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947) – looking at these and many other phenomena as a whole, references to the early Cold War years being Hollywood’s ‘darkest hour’ seem entirely warranted. The wounds left by the ‘Inquisition’ would be felt across the film industry for years.18 Given the film industry’s established antipathy towards communism, its tendency to bow to political pressure, and its habit of conflating government and national interest (especially in wartime), it is hardly surprising that the

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content of American movies in the late 1940s and 1950s shifted decidedly to the political right. A myriad of factors helps to explain why liberal ‘message’ pictures diminished and a large number of films exalting war or imperialism and caricaturing the ‘evils’ of communism took their place. Chief among these are the industry’s nervousness about providing the anti-communist crusade against it with more ammunition; the fact that executives’ reputations were on the line due to their promise to watch out for radical propaganda; the pressure to design films in such a way as to frustrate the eﬀorts of Soviet propagandists to condemn America by its own images; the influence exerted by the MPA’s widely distributed manifesto, Screen Guide for Americans; plus a belief among some producers that sensational Red-baiting films could possibly make money and thereby help fill the industry’s dwindling coﬀers.19 After a detailed investigation of Hollywood’s recent output carried out in the mid-1950s, former OWI oﬃcial Dorothy Jones scotched all allegations that Hollywood had for years been pedalling Marxism on screen. She noted, in the same report, that upwards of 40 films released between 1948 and 1955 had explicitly attacked communism and the Soviet Union.20 Historians have since increased that figure: one has counted 48 made between 1948 and 1952, rising to a total of 107 between 1948 and 1962. 21 Yet even this figure fails to take into account the scores of movies set in and around the Korean War, the defining ‘hot’ conflict of the 1950s for most Americans.22 It also omits the dozens of other films that focused on the communist threat more discreetly or allegorically. Even if it is impossible to agree on a definitive total, there is little doubt that this period represents the high point of Hollywood’s Cold War ‘agit-prop’. DEVIANTS, HYPOCRITES AND MURDERERS Hollywood’s depiction of communists as a clear and present danger during the late 1940s and early 1950s made political and commercial sense. In fact, there is currently a fierce debate between scholars about how real that danger was. While the ‘traditionalists’, bolstered by recently opened files, emphasise the strong links that existed between Moscow-directed espionage and the CPUSA, ‘revisionists’ tend to argue that the Soviet espionage threat was a spectre manufactured for the bureaucratic fortunes of the FBI or designed by reactionaries to smear the American political left generally.23 However, even one such revisionist, Ellen Schrecker, accepts the plausibility of a communist threat given the CPUSA’s open allegiance to Moscow, its secretive nature, and the uncovering of spies in sensitive positions. This is despite the fact that the party, which at its height in the late 1930s had boasted about 88,000 members but in 1952 had a mere 9,000 (1,600 of whom were allegedly either undercover agents or paid informants), was tiny.24

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Yet the extent to which movies portrayed this threat accurately is not the issue so much as the way they depicted indigenous communists and those associated with them. In short, ‘they’ were presented as a mixture of criminals, murderers, social misfits and sexual deviants, who were hypocritical, devious and emotionally detached, and engaged in illegal activities in order to weaken the USA and advance the Soviet cause of world domination. In contrast, ‘we’ (‘ordinary’ Americans) were presented as law-abiding, capable and selfsacrificing, as people who, though traditionally peace-loving, were at war with an implacable enemy. To stand by in such circumstances, the films warned, was either an act of dangerous naïvety or one of implicit collaboration. Communists were shown to be undermining the USA in a variety of ways, ranging from acts of sabotage, espionage and drug-smuggling to infiltrating labour unions, university faculties and even churches in order to spread the party line. Communist tentacles reached across the globe: to Western Europe (Assignment – Paris, 1952), Eastern Europe (The Beast of Budapest, 1956), Africa (Tangier Incident, 1953), Asia (The Shanghai Story, 1954), the Arctic Circle (Arctic Flight, 1952), and even outer space (The Flying Saucer, 1950).25 More seriously, they had penetrated democracy’s very heartland, in a host of locations – San Francisco (I Married a Communist, 1949), Pittsburgh (I Was a Communist for the FBI, 1951), Hawaii (Big Jim McLain, 1952), New York (Bowery Battalion, 1951), Alaska (Red Snow, 1952)26 – and in a variety of institutions: the science laboratory (Invaders from Mars, 1953), the military base (The Wac from Walla Walla, 1952), and even a national monument, Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest, 1959).27 No genre proved immune to the politics of the day, though often this politics found only indirect expression. Documentaries included The Bell (1950), which was jointly produced by the Defence Department and the Crusade for Freedom. The CFF was a project of the CIA-sponsored National Committee for Free Europe, and campaigned, among other things, for the expansion of radio broadcasting networks equipped to spread ‘the truth’ among those living under communism. The Bell was a short educational film which, using the Liberty Bell, America’s great symbol of independence and freedom, as its starting point, encouraged movie-goers to purchase savings bonds by spelling out the dangers of Soviet aggression, partly through footage of the 1948–9 Berlin airlift. The Hoaxsters, another documentary, was made by Dore Schary in 1952, and showed ‘how the dictators of the world up to and including Joseph Stalin have been much like the hucksters who attempt to fool the people with “snake oil” ’. The Hoaxsters was nominated for an Academy Award and released with the endorsement of the State Department and the FBI.28 Thrillers included Jacques Tourneur’s The Fearmakers (1958), in which a brainwashed Korean War veteran returns to the US to find his public relations firm

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taken over by communists, and Edward Dein’s Shack Out on 101 (1955), in which an FBI agent thwarts a communist smuggling plot operating out of a Californian hamburger stand. Crime capers included Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which respectively depicted a hard-bitten pickpocket and cynical private investigator (Micky Spillane’s Mike Hammer) turning anti-communist and routing atomic spies.29 Closely related to this genre, espionage dramas showed American government agents and private citizens, sometimes with their Western allies, challenging communist spies both at home and abroad, thereby allowing movie-goers to see the indivisibility of domestic and overseas security. These included Harold Schuster’s Security Risk (1954), in which a holidaying FBI agent prevents communists from stealing documents from a murdered nuclear physicist, and Fred T. Sears’ Target Hong Kong (1953), which depicts an American soldier of fortune saving the British colony from a Chinese communist plot. Comedies like Norman Z. McLeod’s My Favourite Spy (1951), starring Bob Hope and set partially in Morocco, and Charles Lamont’s Paris-set Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation (1953), delivered the same message.30 Victor Saville’s Anglo-American production The Conspirator (1949) and the aforementioned My Son John were melodramas that focused on the traumas of family relationships caused by communist intrusion. Both highlighted women’s role in the struggle against ‘domestic’ subversion, and the painful need for wives and mothers to give up their treacherous loved ones for the greater good. Together with Elia Kazan’s multi-award-winning docklands drama, On the Waterfront (1954), ostensibly a film about union corruption but interpreted by many critics as an allegory justifying those ‘friendly’ witnesses (like Kazan) who had cooperated with HUAC, these played a central role in shaping the informer-as-hero sub-genre.31 Science fiction was a popular vehicle for the covert language of the antiRed crusade, with monsters from outer space or beneath the sea serving as the allegorical enemy intruder. Gordon Douglas’ Them! (1954), for example, featured enormous nuclear-induced mutant ants threatening Los Angeles before being destroyed by the combined might of the police, FBI and armed forces.32 Don Siegel’s box oﬃce hit Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) has been subject to various interpretations. Some critics have read it as ‘anti-fascist’, others as ‘McCarthyist’, but as historians Leonard Quart and Albert Auster argue, ‘More probably, the alien pods could be seen as Communists . . . who are everywhere conspiring to turn people into robots.’33 Westerns also took what one scholar has dubbed a ‘Cold War path’, especially in the early 1950s, when the genre almost consciously took on a topical relevance. John Lenihan has demonstrated how various Westerns in this period ‘advocated total military

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defeat of an irreconcilable enemy’. Some fused history and politics more explicitly. Sam Katzman’s California Conquest (1952), for instance, posited Russian agents manipulating indigenous Mexican nationalism in a plot to take over the territory of California in 1841. Such ambitions were also developed in Jerry Hopper’s Pony Express (1953). Roy Rogers, ‘the King of Cowboys’, even found in William Witney’s Bells of Coronado (1950) that the town’s leading citizens were plotting to sell uranium to an unnamed foreign power.34 Russian deviousness or subversive themes were also inserted into or featured prominently in other historical films in the 1950s, such as William Dieterle’s Omar Khayyam (1957), set in eleventh-century Persia.35 In the vast majority of these films, communists were portrayed according to a set of conventions, making them easily identifiable for cinema-goers as ‘baddies’. In essence, the celluloid communist stereotype of the McCarthy era was a more dangerous, extreme, ‘Nazified’ version of the pre-1945 model. The male of the species normally sported a cheap suit, a black hat and an ugly face, much like a hoodlum. The rare female communist was either a nymphomaniac or frigid and repressed; virtually all women were treated as prostitutes by the party. Communism’s appeal as an intellectual creed was simply not considered in the movies, much less examined. Its political and economic principles might receive token expression in crudely distilled comments and speeches, but the overall attitude towards ideological matters can be summed up in a line from R. G. Springsteen’s The Red Menace (1949): ‘I don’t know what communism is’, says a party member’s mother to a recent convert, ‘but it must be bad if it makes you do the things you do.’36 The Communist party did not stand for anything, only against sacred American principles such as God, motherhood and true love. Because members came across as stupid and backward, the films also implied that communism as a political system was much lower on the evolutionary scale than American democracy. People became Reds principally for one of three reasons: temporary social injustice, racial discrimination, or sexual seduction. However, what united all of them was insecurity and mental instability, plus the need to seek revenge on contemporary society rather than improve it. The foreign puppetmasters and home-grown leaders would often parrot clichés about making life better for ‘the masses’, but lived apart, intellectually and economically, from those to whom they preached. They also exploited their drone-like underlings: morally, financially and sexually. Alternatively, they were hysterical fanatics, or cruel snobs who would not think twice about murdering the innocent on a grand scale. Once someone joined the party, there was only one way to leave it – in a coﬃn. Members were therefore both trapped and expendable. This resembled the way Hollywood had portrayed life in Hitler’s Germany between 1939 and 1945, and the recycling of actors who had played ‘nasty

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Nazis’ into ‘rotten Russians’ underlined the link. Yet films made it clear that the nature of the present, post-war threat was even greater, for international communism was known to favour clandestine, underground takeover methods rather than Nazi-style military invasions.37 The US was peculiarly vulnerable to such subversive tactics, we learn, because of its innocence. Despite the shock of Pearl Harbor and the advent of the atomic age, Americans were still too trusting and the country so open and free. Vigilance and the criminalisation of communism were the only reasonable response. WATCHING THE DETECTIVES The conventional view shared by observers at the time and film historians since is that this clumsily produced, overtly propagandistic Red-baiting material was deeply unpopular with audiences, and that it may even have hindered rather than helped the anti-communist cause by bluntly depicting fifthcolumnists as moronic and easy to spot. In 1953, one notable commentator, Karel Reisz, a leading light in the British New Wave film movement of the early 1960s, warned that such a significant body of work risked having a ‘boomerang eﬀect’ because its very directness alienated those whom it was intended for. Filmmakers should concentrate less on negative, anti-communist propaganda, Reisz urged, and more on selling the positive aspects of liberal democracy.38 Because so many of these films were shot quickly on low budgets with non-stars, most historians have assumed they were not intended either to make money or to teach the American public anything of real value about subversion. Rather, they were meant to rinse Hollywood of its radical image as rapidly, unequivocally and cheaply as possible.39 While this argument makes good sense, it tends to overlook those movies of the period that were not triggered by political pressure but were oﬃcially assisted, that were put together far less crudely, that sought to paint a more realistic portrait of communist subversion, and that met with some success commercially and propagandistically. One such film was an enterprise made jointly by Columbia Pictures, the independent producer Louis de Rochement and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It was released in 1952 under the title Walk East on Beacon. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Hoover and the FBI in helping to create the anti-communist consensus in the United States during the Cold War. Hoover himself largely accepted the fifth-column paradigm which saw the CPUSA as principally a Soviet-sponsored covert-warfare agency, and during the remarkably long period he spent as FBI chief (1924–72) managed to turn the law enforcement agency into one of the most powerful of all state organisations. The strategic position within government which Hoover had established for the FBI by the mid-1940s meant that it dominated Truman’s

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domestic anti-communist apparatus when the Cold War started. In the process, the Bureau infused its own conservative concerns into what otherwise might have been purely a programme of internal security.40 The FBI had instructed Americans on the Red Menace both before and during the Second World War, but largely on an informal, episodic and ad hoc basis. However this changed radically in 1946, when it sought to develop, as agency files put it, ‘an informed public opinion’ about ‘the basically Russian nature of the Communist Party in this country’, and thereby to shape the emerging national debate on the domestic communist issue. Assistant Director Louis Nichols acted as the chief architect of this multi-million dollar public relations programme. It was Nichols’ standard practice to leak information from FBI files to trustworthy journalists, writers, broadcast executives and film producers, while presenting the Bureau as a disinterested, factgathering investigative agency. Simultaneously, with dozens of FBI agents writing his speeches and articles, Hoover became one of the nation’s most prolific authors. His magnum opus, Masters of Deceit, published in 1958, had sold over two million copies by 1970.41 During the 1920s, Hoover had assigned Bureau agents to monitor the activities of radical filmmakers and send him extensive summaries of their films. By the middle of the Second World War, the FBI believed that the Communist International (Comintern) was leading a ‘worldwide conspiracy’ to use movies to deliver subversive messages to the American people.42 Concurrently, the Bureau devised a triangular-shaped film strategy, which it operated formally until the late 1950s. First, the FBI ran a comprehensive surveillance operation in Hollywood, pinpointing communists with the aid of secret informers on the one hand, and identifying those movies which were being used as ‘weapon[s] of Communist propaganda’ on the other. Second, the Bureau secretly laundered its intelligence through HUAC, thereby helping to pressure the industry into establishing a blacklist. The Bureau also shared its surveillance material with popular gossip columnists in exchange for favourable portraits of the FBI or the exposure of ‘Reds’ in the film community, and notified film executives of the names of communist suspects via such organs as Red Channels. Finally, the FBI helped produce movies that fostered its image as the protector of the American people. It provided script material, editing expertise, production consultation, and even special agents as actors for at least eight feature films between 1945 and 1959.43 LOUIS DE ROCHEMENT AND THE ART OF DOCUDRAMA One filmmaker with whom the FBI developed a special relationship during the early Cold War was Louis de Rochement, considered by many to be the

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father of the American docudrama. Beginning his film career in newsreels in the 1920s, de Rochement had an ambition to develop a comprehensive style of recounting ‘real-life’ events on screen that led him to launch The March of Time in 1935. In this monthly magazine, sponsored by the Time-Life Company, de Rochement combined authentic footage with dramatisations to produce an innovative and ‘in-depth’ style of screen journalism. The March of Time quickly achieved international fame, prompting de Rochement to experiment with feature-length versions of this format during the Second World War, including his Oscar-winning The Fighting Lady, made in association with the navy in 1944. De Rochement then took his fusion of fact and fiction one step further, into the domain of the Hollywood entertainment film. A series of fictionalised true-life dramas shot on location followed, starting in 1945 with The House on 92nd Street, a re-enactment of the FBI’s capture of Nazi nuclear spies during the war using Bureau records. This was a critical and commercial success, and stylistically anticipated several anti-communist pictures such as William Wellman’s Iron Curtain (1948) and Gordon Douglas’ I Was a Communist for the FBI.44 In 1947, de Rochement was again given access to confidential government material, this time to make a film lionising the role of the Oﬃce of Strategic Services during the Second World War, 13 Rue de Madeleine. In 1949, he produced the critically acclaimed racial drama Lost Boundaries, which was banned in some southern states for showing blacks and whites working and playing together. Two years later, in 1951, de Rochement released The Whistle at Eaton Falls, the story of a strike at a small-town plastic factory, which the business magazine Fortune admired for its depiction of the shared interests between labour and management.45 Despite, or perhaps because of, his liberal reputation, de Rochement emerged as the FBI’s favourite independent producer during the Cold War’s first decade. Hoover’s friendship with de Rochement dated back at least to 1942, when the former thanked the latter for ‘a magnificent job’ in portraying his agency’s work in a small film titled The FBI Front. After The House on 92nd Street, de Rochement also became firm friends with Louis Nichols and Richard Hood, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles oﬃce and point man for the covert relationship that developed between HUAC and the Bureau after 1947.46 Partly through these contacts, de Rochement received tip-oﬀs about FBI investigations and the agency’s intelligence-gathering techniques. In return, the Bureau received the sort of publicity Hoover craved: that which assured the nation the FBI was in control of domestic subversion, and which depicted the agency as modern and scientific. In 1950, de Rochement was given special access to the Bureau’s hitherto-unseen training facility at Quantico, Virginia, in order to make a ten-minute colour film, A Day with the

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Scripting surveillance: J. Edgar Hoover (centre) looks over a draft screenplay with the makers of The House on 92nd Street (1945). Director Henry Hathaway (seated) and actor Lloyd Nolan are on the FBI chief ’s right. The writer John Monks, Jr., and producer Louis de Rochement (with elbow on table) are on his left. Louis de Rochement Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

FBI. Released by Columbia in 1951 with Hoover’s on-screen endorsement, the short was financially successful and came to be used by the FBI for training purposes.47 De Rochement’s links with the US government’s Cold War propaganda machine extended further. In the early 1950s, his company made a number of films for the USIS and bodies associated with the US State Department and CIA, such as the Ford Foundation.48 In 1951, he drew on the expertise of Harvard political scientists for a documentary requested by the State Department’s International Motion Picture Service, provisionally titled ‘The History of Communism’. De Rochement intended this production to be ‘a superb teaching film’, one which outlined definitively ‘how the Russian people had been enslaved’ and why the ‘free world’ was faced with such a grave threat from Soviet expansionism.49 Walk East on Beacon was de Rochement’s attempt to warn the American public of the dangers posed by Soviet-backed fifth-columnists, using the ‘now it can be told’ style perfected in House on 92nd Street. De Rochement was a

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liberal anti-communist who was appalled by the repressive excesses of McCarthyism, but one who believed utterly in the need to counter the Soviet subversive threat. The producer mixed regularly with spies and counter-spies, and tended to view Washington’s often bureaucratic approach to the Cold War as a sign of weakness. In early 1950, when Louis Nichols passed onto him the news that a Soviet spy ring had infiltrated America’s top-secret nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, de Rochement was livid, telling Richard Hood that, ‘Some of the State Department “boys” who wouldn’t permit action long ago ought to be lined up and shot.’ ‘I used to accuse Louis of seeing a Red behind every tree from 1947 to 1969’, one close colleague, Borden Mace, later wrote.50 In the summer of 1950, de Rochement considered a five–page synopsis of an FBI-based feature film, penned by a junior staﬀ writer with inside FBI knowledge, Emmett Murphy. This combined the stories of two recently exposed atomic spies, Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold, with that of the wellknown communist-turned-informer Whittaker Chambers, and told the tale of the development and exposure of an American communist who, at his trial, sacrifices his wife and child to save his own skin.51 Nothing came of this, but when Hoover’s own (ghost-written) account of the atom spy ring appeared later that year in the Reader’s Digest, entitled ‘The Crime of the Century’, de Rochement quickly struck a deal. Two years earlier, de Rochement had set up the Reader’s Digest-de Rochement Corporation (RD-DR Corp.), giving him the first movie rights to anything owned and controlled by the magazine in exchange for a share of the profits. In early 1951, de Rochement and Nichols reached an agreement allowing RD-DR to transfer ‘The Crime of the Century’ to the screen so long as the FBI’s approval was obtained for each stage of the film’s production. Hoover was to be paid $15,000 within 90 days of the film’s release.52 De Rochement mortgaged his farm as collateral for the film. Extra funding came from Columbia, with which de Rochement had signed a contract to produce three films. Its co-founder and president, Harry ‘King’ Cohn, had long had a reputation for being an apolitical maverick, but this changed somewhat during the McCarthy era. Cohn’s studio made a number of subversion movies during this period, including Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard (1950), Invasion USA (1952) and The 49th Man (1953). Despite this, Columbia continued to have something of a radical image among conservatives in Hollywood, and it may well be that Cohn hoped Walk East on Beacon would help counter this. In early 1952, in response to HUAC charges that the studio had been lax in hiring ‘persons of questionable loyalty’, the Los Angeles Daily News reported that ‘Columbia has voluntarily and firmly dedicated itself to fighting Communism and those who support or sympathise with it.’53 Eight years later, in 1960, Columbia and de Rochement collaborated again, on Man on a String, which portrayed the authorities foiling a communist plot to infiltrate Hollywood’s elite.54

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The FBI and RD-DR worked harmoniously throughout the production of Walk East on Beacon, which started in August 1951 and was completed in early 1952. Several senior corporation personnel were able to draw on their extensive propaganda experience, notably Borden Mace and Lothar Wolﬀ, who were assigned associate producer roles. Mace, RD-DR’s president, had been in charge of procuring training films for the US Navy during the Second World War. Wolﬀ, formerly chief film editor of The March of Time, had until recently been production supervisor of the Marshall Plan’s European Film Unit.55 The FBI had a hand in virtually all aspects of production: story and screenplay, selection of cast and director, shooting schedule, editing, publicity and advertising. Richard Hood, together with two leading Paramount executives Y. Frank Freeman and Cecil B. DeMille, both of whom had strong links with oﬃcial propagandists, helped recommend and vet potential directors, before de Rochement settled on Alfred Werker, who had directed Lost Boundaries.56 Louis Nichols furnished de Rochement with information about the precise location of the Soviet Ministry of Security headquarters in Moscow, while Bureau personnel familiar with film production acted as technical advisers and provided up-to-date information on the agency’s crimedetection field apparatus. After reading the shooting script, the FBI removed elements from several scenes that in its view contained ‘classified, secret material’, and in March 1952 Nichols asked for a number of changes to be made, including one scene which showed G-Men handling a suspect too roughly. One special agent acted as Nichols’ eyes and ears on the set to ensure accuracy in the portrayal of FBI procedures, while other agents had minor on-screen roles. The FBI facilitated access to the US Naval Shipyard at Kittery in Maine, where the USS Apollo was used for interior scenes set aboard a fictitious Polish freighter. Authenticity was further enhanced by the US Coast Guard’s appearance in the climactic chase scenes and the loaning of IBM’s state-of-the-art high-speed electronic calculators.57 One measure of the control the FBI exercised over the project, and a reminder of the feverish Red Scare atmosphere that currently prevailed, was de Rochement’s decision to excise Louis Applebaum’s name from the credits on the eve of the film’s release. The Canadian composer’s reputation had recently been politically tarnished, and de Rochement justifiably feared that any matter arousing controversy of this sort might jeopardise the Bureau’s final approval.58 The experienced author and screenwriter Leo Rosten wrote the screenplay for Walk East on Beacon, and was determined to show that the entire pattern of enemy espionage had changed since the Second World War, forcing the FBI to adopt new investigative methods. ‘The days of the dashing Mata Hari are gone’, he wrote in a publicity statement. ‘The modern spy is the insignificant

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little man whom no one suspects: he receives no money, travels by bus, never frequents hotels, popular restaurants or bars. He is a dedicated Communist who never meets his superiors personally.’59 Other members of the production staﬀ chipped in at various stages, with the aim being to blend fact and fiction in as entertainingly believable a way as possible. In July 1951, for instance, casting director Shirlee Weingarten told de Rochement that the script needed to develop the spy’s other, ordinary life more fully, in order to make the audience identify with him and consequently feel a sense of betrayal, and to highlight the terrible ‘schizoid’ existence all spies had. In the same month, Joseph Breen gave the script the PCA’s seal of approval.60 After initial interest from one of the leading stars of the day, Tyrone Power, George Murphy was chosen (specially by the FBI, ads claimed) to play the lead role of Inspector Belden. A solid Republican and former president of the Screen Actors Guild who had been one of HUAC’s first ‘friendly’ witnesses in 1947, Murphy was described in the early 1950s by one of the era’s most aggressive anti-communist politicians, Senator Richard Nixon, as the model of ‘positive Americanism’ in Hollywood.61 Other than the Scottish actor Finlay Currie, who played a German scientist, and Karel Stepanek, the espionage ringleader, few members of the cast would have been known to the general audience. Using minor actors and nonprofessionals helped cut costs and gave the film a more documentary feel. Filming took place almost entirely on location in Boston, with subsidiary shooting in New Hampshire, Maine and Washington, DC. Shooting on the streets, in oﬃces, at ports and in sight of well-known public buildings made the movie look more ‘real’ than a simple dramatic re-enactment of the atom spy case. Basing the film in New England also helped RD-DR to draw parallels between events depicted in the film and recent revelations of communist activities in the region provided by the FBI’s star confidential informant, Herbert Philbrick, and set out in his best-selling book I Led Three Lives (1952).62 Walk East on Beacon came in on budget, costing a total of $600,000, and received a glowing, public tribute from J. Edgar Hoover, who called it ‘an exceptionally fine motion picture [that] plainly shows the vicious pattern which has enabled the godless tyranny of Communism to enslave millions of people’.63 A PICTURE OF STUDIED VIGILANCE From the outset, Walk East on Beacon actively distances itself from the crudely constructed, headline-grabbing anti-communist propaganda hitherto produced by Hollywood. This is a film that purports to oﬀer viewers the truth, not sensationalist speculation about Soviet espionage, based on cold, hard

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Calling all Americans! George Murphy (centre) calmly directs anti-communist manoeuvres on home soil in Walk East on Beacon (1952). Columbia Pictures/Acadamy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

facts. The film opens with a shot of J. Edgar Hoover, whose ‘Crime of the Century’, the credits tell us, has inspired this ‘Drama of Real Life’ made ‘with the cooperation of the FBI’. Over further library shots of smartly dressed G-Men receiving guidance about Soviet intelligence activities and being taught how to handle surveillance equipment, a stentorian commentator (newsreel narrator Westbrook Van Voorhis) then reports how the FBI’s current chief responsibility is to deal with ‘a worldwide conspiracy which seeks through subversion to destroy established governments everywhere’. With an aura of authenticity and oﬃcial legitimacy in place, the movie then shifts seamlessly to re-enacting an ‘absorbing case history’ of a Soviet plot centred on Boston to grab secret American scientific data, loosely but obviously based on the real Fuchs-Gold spy case. Inspector James Belden (Murphy) is assigned to track down the spies trying to uncover the work of ‘Operation Falcon’. This is so highly classified we never learn precisely what it is (for security reasons, presumably), but we can deduce that it is related to weapons and space research.64 Masterminding the plot is the Russian Alex Lazchenkov (Stepanek) and, as the movie unfolds, the complicated underground procedures used by the communists to achieve their ends are exposed – the use of Comintern-trained Americans as ‘sleepers’, extortion from the vulnerable and

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innocent, code words, forged documents, safe houses, and doppelgängers. Also exhibited are the counter-espionage methods deployed by the FBI to defeat enemy agents – fingerprinting, electronic surveillance, hidden movie cameras, split-image microscopes, radar, and coordinated legwork. The principal target of Lazchenkov’s conniving is a Jewish émigré from Germany, Professor Kafer (Currie), a brilliant mathematician patterned after Albert Einstein whose computer-based experiments hold the key to Falcon’s success. When he is pressured to reveal secrets to prevent his son’s death in East Berlin, Kafer joins with the FBI to break up the coast-to-coast network. A breakthrough comes following Kafer’s late-night assignation with a communist agent, a taxi driver called Vincent, on Beacon Street in downtown Boston. When FBI evidence is complete, the spies are arrested, with the exception of Lazchenkov, who kidnaps Kafer, planning to transfer him to a Russian submarine oﬀshore. However, the FBI aﬀects a last-minute rescue, with the help of the Coast Guard. A tearful Kafer believes his beloved son is now doomed, only to be told by Belden that the US government has helped free him from communist imprisonment and that he is on a Pan-American flight to the United States. Like other subversion films of the era, Walk East on Beacon encourages ‘alert and responsible’ Americans to play an active part in the struggle against communism by acting as citizen warriors. One early scene shows FBI agents trawling through letters sent by watchful members of the public; in others the viewer acts as a witness for the prosecution, seeing through the agents’ eyes when tracking the spies. However, in contrast with My Son John and others, the film encourages participation without inciting reckless vigilantism. Rather, Walk East on Beacon charts a new breed of hero required for espionage conflict in a nuclear age: the quiet security expert who works meticulously and soberly as a member of a professional team.65 In a deliberately low-key manner, the film demonstrates the FBI’s supreme, all-round detective abilities, honed over decades, with an emphasis on patience and control. In doing so, it discreetly but firmly calls for Americans to allow the FBI free rein, unencumbered by liberal-minded ‘amateurs’ who in real life were condemning the Bureau’s use of wire-taps and other surveillance techniques as infringements of civil liberties. Belden and his colleagues succeed in bringing the communists to justice, but only just in time. Scenes of the evil Lazchenchov walking the streets of Boston, exploiting what the narrator calls ‘the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to all loyal Americans’, suggest that constitutional niceties are a naïve irrelevance in this new kind of war. In such circumstances, such freedoms could only be guaranteed if the FBI and other state security organisations were allowed to bend the rules.

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This was necessary, the film tells us, because the communists pose such a potent threat. By delineating the fifth-columnists’ methods in such graphic and entertaining detail – via close-ups of keys, explanations of code books, revelations of counter-surveillance techniques – de Rochement presents the subversives as clever, determined and extremely resourceful. They are deeply embedded in American society, the result of a long-term and well-thoughtout Soviet plan. Consequently, we can believe a senior operative, Millie Zalenko (Virginia Gilmore), when she tells her G-Man interrogator that ‘for every one of us you arrest, there are a lot of others, trained and waiting to take over’. Yet they must, and can be, vanquished, the movie states. Despite contrary claims in the film’s publicity material, Walk East on Beacon eschews any analysis of the communists’ motives. Harry Gold and Klaus Fuchs had in fact worked for the Soviet Union out of political conviction, but their rough counterparts in the movie do so either because they are blackmailed or for personal aggrandizement. A minority of the plotters are shown to believe in ‘the Cause’ even after their arrest, but, with their stony faces and unemotional behaviour, this comes across as an aﬄiction or the blind conviction of the zealot. Even if these ideologues have chosen to work for Russia, their fear of living in Russia is palpable, especially if they are sent there to be punished for incompetence. Professor Kafer, on the other hand, has chosen to work in and for the West because he knows the real meaning of freedom. He has tasted the bitter fruits of totalitarianism at first hand, in Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War. Kafer sees little or no diﬀerence between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and indeed in one scene implies that German communists had been complicit in the Holocaust. The fascist-communist overlap was underlined by Stepanek, who had played Nazis during the Second World War.66 Given the FBI’s long association with fighting the Mafia (on and oﬀ screen), many viewers watching Walk East on Beacon would automatically have drawn comparisons between communism and gangsterism. The televised hearings chaired by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver in 1951 had painted a picture of organised crime being a degenerative force in American life that could ruin the nation’s strength overseas.67 These hearings would have been fresh in many people’s memories when de Rochement’s film was released in April 1952, making it easy for many to link underworld crime and underground political subversion. The movie drove home this theme through its use of gangster movie conventions – muggings, a femme fatale, night scenes, narcotics – thereby helping further to depoliticise the appeals of communism. Unconventionally, the communists in Walk East on Beacon are not easy to spot. However, they do share common character flaws. They are congenitally miserable; are either insolent or obsequious; have contempt for others’ views

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Communism, AKA Espionage, Inc.: publicity poster for Walk East on Beacon (1952). Columbia Picture/Louis de Rochement papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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and suspect each other; are power- and often sex-crazed; and have no personal lives – one husband-and-wife team, for instance, share a ‘devotion and service’ only to the party. Vincent (played by Jack Manning) is the only communist shown any sympathy, when his request to leave the party meets with the threat of death. ‘Being a Party member is like waking up and finding yourself married to some woman you hate’, Vincent confesses to his wife, ‘so you end up hating yourself.’ Minutes later we read of his apparent suicide. In this way, the film leads us to the conclusion that all American communists are at best disloyal, at worst traitors who are accomplices to murder. Walk East on Beacon premiered in April 1952 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, de Rochement’s home state, where it was sponsored by the St John’s Episcopal Church. It then went nationwide.68 Because the movie had been independently produced outside Hollywood, it lacked the full backing of the industry’s public relations machine, but the support provided by the FBI’s publicity engine made up for this to some extent. The critical response to most overtly anti-communist pictures of the late 1940s and 1950s was overwhelmingly negative, with reviewers denigrating their ludicrous plots and wooden acting. Not so Walk East on Beacon. In fact, several trade papers and mainstream magazines criticised the film for being almost too real, that is for concentrating on the minutiae of FBI detective procedures at the expense of thrills.69 This was not how others in the film press saw it, however. BoxOffice and Cue both found it ‘fascinating’, while Martin Quigley’s Motion Picture Herald classed it as being ‘as timely, topical and as exciting as this morning’s newspaper’. In Philadelphia, where Harry Gold had worked, the Evening Bulletin treated Walk East on Beacon as a documentary, arguing that the film ‘gives a better understanding of the workings of communism and should be more potent ammunition against it than the more pretentious My Son John’. In New York, William Randolph Hearst’s Daily Mirror described the movie as ‘one of the most important of all time . . . a vindication of a brave, a brilliant, and a dedicated little body of men the like of which has not been seen since Lexington and Concord’.70 Interestingly, de Rochement’s film even garnered approval among liberals. The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, applauded it for vigorously exposing communist espionage tactics without lumping together liberals and communists and taking ‘gratuitous slaps’ at labour unions, minorities and intellectuals.71 More predictably, the American Legion roundly endorsed the film, as did the Republican Senators Karl Mundt, a regular recipient and disseminator of FBI information, and Richard Nixon, who proclaimed that it was ‘a picture which should be seen by every American’.72 Walk East on Beacon was far from being one of Hollywood’s biggest earners in 1952. However, judging from de Rochement’s accounts it did far better

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commercially than most other subversion films of the era, grossing in the region of $2 million. For a docudrama that had virtually no boy-girl action, was rather one-paced, and whose plot focused on the stealing of complex mathematical equations, this was quite an achievement. The film’s educational value was quickly recognised by the US Army and Coast Guard, both of which hired 16mm prints for instructional purposes. More intriguingly, the CIA also admired the movie. The agency leased ten prints a year from Columbia from the early 1950s through till the late 1970s, including five copies dubbed into foreign languages. It is unclear exactly where and how these prints were distributed during this long period. However, given a few tweaks Walk East on Beacon could easily have passed as a bona fide documentary overseas, largely because its story was told in such a straightforward fashion.73 CONCLUSION For decades now historians have argued about the causes and nature of McCarthyism: about whether it was primarily a top-down phenomenon prompted by the Truman administration’s Cold War measures, or more of a ‘popular insurgency’ with genuine anti-communism agitated by irrational ‘status anxiety’, similar in some ways to the Populist uprising of the 1890s.74 It has long been acknowledged that Hollywood promoted the politics of McCarthyism, and that its anti-communist output can be attributed in large part to the political pressures the film industry faced during the first decade of the Cold War. Yet our analysis of Walk East on Beacon gives a diﬀerent side to the story. It demonstrates the increasingly tight, often consensual relationship that developed on and oﬀ screen between filmmakers and government agencies during the McCarthy era. As the government’s Cold War propaganda machine expanded during the late 1940s and 1950s and the constituent parts of it sought to promote their role in the fight against communism, so the film world’s links with the state grew more complex and concrete. Movies produced during this critical period of the East-West struggle overwhelmingly supported Washington’s tough anti-Soviet line, with many venturing, to borrow Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s famous line to Truman in 1947, to ‘scare the hell out of the American people’ about the threat posed by communism.75 Whether cinema-goers did actually fear communism more for having watched movies like Invasion USA, The Red Menace and Walk East on Beacon is debatable. So, too, is the notion that these viewers were more likely subsequently to acquiesce in or push for more draconian anti-communist measures. However, what the production history of Walk East on Beacon and other films suggests about McCarthyism is that the top-down versus bottomup approach towards understanding the phenomenon is in some respects a

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false dichotomy. Some films, like The Bell, were produced at ‘the top’ by government; others, like My Son John, came ‘from below’, being the result of a director’s personal take on the Cold War; others still, like Walk East on Beacon, emerged from above and below, from elements of the industry and state which shared the same political anxieties and, to an extent, political goals. That Hollywood promoted Cold War orthodoxy so enthusiastically during this period should not surprise us in the light of the film industry’s campaign against communism dating back to 1917. Collaboration between the industry and state propagandists was eased by the organisational legacy of the Second World War’s Oﬃce of War Information, meaning filmmakers and oﬃcials in the late 1940s could pick up from where they had left oﬀ a few years earlier, updating and finessing the ideas and themes they had used to defeat fascism. This, together with Hollywood’s structure being more centralised than that of the press and the country’s nascent television service, helps to explain why cinema led the way in establishing the American media’s aggressive approach towards the Soviet Union and, after 1949, Mao Tse Tung’s China.76 Nowadays, Hollywood’s McCarthyite Red-baiters are often oﬀered as antiquated kitsch or camp classics, as curious relics of an era when propaganda was thought to be the same colours as film itself – black and white. Whilst understandable, this can underestimate the role these movies served in helping to set Hollywood’s Cold War agenda and to establish enemy stereotyping for the years ahead. Blunt they might have been, but not uniformly, as Beacon attests. Moreover, few viewers would probably have seen the hand of government in what they were watching. For all the FBI’s input, even Beacon came across as a regular commercial venture, and no critic bracketed it as an oﬃcially inspired film. As the Cold War progressed, the style of Hollywood’s coverage of the communist threat might have diﬀered from these hard-hitting movies, but the substance remained essentially the same. In the 1980s, as we shall see later, history repeated itself, as communist fifth-columnism (with an added terrorist twist) returned to the screen with a vengeance. Notes 1 J. Edgar Hoover testimony, Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry (Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 1884 and 2121, 80th Congress, 1st Session, 26 March 1947) (Washington, DC, 1947). 2 On the Lincoln Memorial’s iconic place in American films, especially those explicitly about politics, see Scott, Politics, pp. 7–9. 3 My Son John press book, British Film Institute Library, London (hereafter BFIL); J. A. V. Burke, ‘My Son John: A Disturbing Film’, Focus, Vol. 16, No. 8, August 1953, pp. 185–6.

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4 Glen M. Johnson, ‘Sharper than an Irish Serpent’s Tooth: Leo McCarey’s My Son John’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1980, pp. 44–9; Whitfield, Culture, pp. 136–41; Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, CA, 1987), pp. 240–6, 250–3. 5 See, for instance, Sayre, Running Time, and David Caute, The Great Fear: The AntiCommunist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978), pp. 487–520. 6 Motion Picture Herald, 26 April 1952; Stefan Kanfer, A Journal of the Plague Years (New York, 1973), pp. 56–7, 189–92. 7 Weekly cinema attendance figures in the United States reached an all-time high of 81 million in the mid-1940s, dropping to 16 million in 1970, then rising slightly to just over 20 million in the late 1980s, when the Cold War ended. Maltby, Hollywood, p. 124. 8 According to the Catalog of Soviet Feature Films, between 1946 and 1953 the USSR produced a total of 165 films. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 227. For the extent to which the Cold War figured in these movies, and for the pressures imposed on Soviet filmmakers by Stalin’s cultural overseer in the late 1940s, Andrei Zhdanov, see Films in Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1953, pp. 7–14; Films in Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, February 1953, pp. 64–73; Sarah Davies, ‘Soviet Cinema and the Early Cold War: Pudovkin’s Admiral Nakhimov in Context’, Cold War History, Vol. 4, No. 1, October 2003, pp. 49–70; Graham Roberts, ‘A Cinema of Suspicion or a Suspicion of Cinema: Soviet Film 1945–53’, in Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda, pp. 105–24. 9 Navasky, Naming, p. 78. 10 Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition, p. 109. On the Popular Front in Hollywood see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1998). 11 On the degree to which television and the press acted as unoﬃcial state propagandists or beat the conservative drum during this period see Bernhard, Television News, and James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Boston, MA, 1973). 12 Sayre, Running Time, pp. 31–78; Dore Schary, Heyday (Boston, MA, 1979), pp. 162–3. 13 John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, 2 vol (New York, 1971; reprint of 1956 edn.); Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition; McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades. 14 Walsh, Sin, pp. 241, 269–71. 15 On the bloody union battles in Hollywood in the late 1930s and 1940s, which formed an important backdrop to the Red-Scare-era blacklist, see Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950 (Austin, TX, 2001). 16 Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition, pp. 211–16, 258; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 18, 50; May, Tomorrow, pp. 177, 191. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Tobacco Road (1941), both directed by John Ford and scripted by Nunnally Johnson, had sympathised with poor white farmers suﬀering at the hands of either bankers or capitalism generally. Ford’s films earned considerable respect in Soviet film circles for their ability to raise universal human values. Davies, ‘Soviet Cinema’, p. 55.

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17 Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition, pp. 204, 392; Thomas Doherty, ‘Hollywood Agit-Prop: The Anti-Communist Cycle 1948–1954’, Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 40, No. 4, Fall 1988, pp. 15–27, esp. pp. 18–19. 18 Navasky, Naming; Robert Vaughn, Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting (New York, 1972); Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York, 1968). George S. Kaufman’s The Senator Was Indiscreet was a gentle satire that spoofed a bumbling and unabashedly corrupt American senator, played by William Powell. Senator Joseph McCarthy called the film ‘traitorous’, while a representative of the Allied Theatre Owners asserted it would be ‘highly recommended by Pravda’. See Sayre, Running Time, pp. 54–5. 19 Leab, ‘The Iron Curtain’. 20 Dorothy B. Jones, ‘Communism and the Movies: A Study of Film Content’, in Cogley, Report on Blacklisting. Vol. 1: The Movies, pp. 215, 282. 21 Russell E. Shain, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Journal of Popular Film, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1974, pp. 334–50, 365–72. 22 On Korean War movies see Julian Smith, Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam (New York, 1975), pp. 35–64, and Robert J. Lentz, Korean War Filmography: 91 English Language Features through 2000 (Jeﬀerson, NC, 2003). 23 On these competing judgements see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, ‘The Historiography of American Communism: An Unsettled Field’, Labor History Review, Vol. 68, No. 1, April 2003, pp. 61–78. 24 Schrecker, McCarthyism, pp. 16–19. 25 Variety, 10 September 1952, p. 6; Film Daily, 17 February 1958, p. 11; Variety, 11 February 1953, p. 6; New York Times, 25 September 1954, p. 10; Variety, 30 July 1952, p. 6; Film Daily, 12 January 1950, p. 6. The directors of these films were, respectively, Robert Parrish, Harmon C. Jones, Lew Landers, Frank Lloyd, Lew Landers and Mikel Conrad. 26 Variety, 19 September 1949, p. 3; New York Times, 3 May 1951, p. 34; Variety, 27 August 1952, p. 6; Hollywood Reporter, 12 February 1951; Motion Picture Herald, 21 June 1952, p. 1418. The directors of these films were, respectively, Robert Stevenson, Gordon Douglas, Edward Ludwig, William Beaudine and Boris L. Petroﬀ. 27 Variety, 8 April 1953, p. 6; Hollywood Reporter, 15 October 1952, p. 3; Variety, 1 July 1959, p. 7. The directors of these films were, respectively, William Cameron Menzies, William Witney and Alfred Hitchcock. 28 Lawrence Suid (ed.), Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History. Volume IV: 1945 and After (New York, 1991), pp. 116–41; Lucas, Freedom’s War, pp. 101–3, 126. 29 Hollywood Reporter, 22 September 1958, p. 3; Variety, 30 November 1955, p. 6; Time, 29 June 1953; Variety, 20 April 1955, p. 6. 30 Hollywood Reporter, 11 August 1954, p. 3; Variety, 17 December 1952, p. 6; New York Times, 26 December 1951, p. 19; Saturday Review, 28 March 1953. 31 New York Times, 28 April 1950, p. 26; Sayre, Running Time, pp. 151–72.

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32 William Johnson (ed.), Focus on the Science Fiction Film (Englewood Cliﬀs, NJ, 1972), p. 7; Biskind, Seeing, pp. 123–36. 33 Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society since 1945 (New York, 1991), p. 52; Stuart Samuels, ‘The Age of Conspiracy and Conformity: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)’, in John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds), American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York, 1979), pp. 204–17. On the left-wing views of Body Snatchers’ director and scriptwriters see Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–2002 (New York, 2005), pp. 72–4. 34 John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western (Urbana, IL, 1980), p. 25; New York Times, 6 June 1953; Film Daily, 20 January 1950. 35 David Eldridge, ‘Hollywood and History, 1950–1959’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, October 2001, pp. 127–31. 36 New York Times, 27 June 1949, p. 18. 37 At the same time during this period Hollywood also refurbished the image of preCold War Germany. With West Germany now a vital member of the anti-Soviet alliance, films presented its citizens overwhelmingly as victims of Nazism rather than its accessories. Critic Dwight MacDonald marvelled in 1957 at how segments of the German population in these films were ‘transformed from cowardly accomplices of one kind of totalitarianism into heroic resisters of another kind’. Cited in Daniel J. Leab, ‘Hollywood and the Cold War, 1945–1961’, in Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Hollywood as Mirror: Changing Views of ‘Outsiders’ and ‘Enemies’ in American Movies (Westport, CT, 1993), p. 127. 38 Karel Reisz, ‘Hollywood’s Anti-Red Boomerang’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 22, No. 3, January-March 1953, pp. 132–7, 148; Biskind, Seeing, pp. 3, 162; Daniel J., Leab, ‘How Red was My Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married A Communist’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, 1984, pp. 59–88; Leab, ‘The Iron Curtain’. 39 Sayre, Running Time; Jowett, Film, p. 368; Shain, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’; Caute, Dancer, p. 177. 40 John E. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago, IL, 1996), pp. 179–80. 41 Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the UnAmericans (Philadelphia, PA, 1983), pp. 76–82. 42 Steven J. Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Ross (ed.), Movies, pp. 7–8; ‘Communist Infiltration into the Motion Picture Industry’, FBI Report submitted 16 February 1943, in Daniel J. Leab (ed.), Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry: FBI Surveillance Files on Hollywood, 1924–1958, microfilm collection (Bethesda, MD, 1991), 1: 10. 43 John A. Noakes, ‘Bankers and Common Men in Bedford Falls: How the FBI Determined that It’s a Wonderful Life was a Subversive Movie’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 311–19; O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans, p. 82; Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago, IL, 2002), p. 155. Red Channels first appeared in 1950 as a special report by the magazine Counterattack, which was published by American Business Consultants in New York, a

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45

46

47 48

49 50 51

52

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corporation formed by three former FBI agents. The publication was widely used as the basis for unoﬃcial blacklisting within the television and radio industries, and targeted many individuals who also worked in Hollywood. Raymond Fielding, The March of Time, 1935–51 (New York, 1978); Ephraim Katz, The International Film Encyclopedia (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 361; Leab, ‘The Iron Curtain’, p. 158; Daniel Leab, I Was a Communist for the FBI (University Park, PA, 2000), p. 80. Christian Science Monitor, 30 December 1950; author’s correspondence with Borden Mace, 28 March 1998; de Rochement to Nichols, 22 May 1951, Louis de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, American Heritage Centre, Laramie, Wyoming (hereafter AHCW). Hoover to de Rochement, 11 September 1942, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 3, AHCW; author’s correspondence with Borden Mace, 28 March 1998; de Rochement-Hood correspondence, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 26, AHCW. A Day with the FBI, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW; author’s correspondence with Borden Mace, 28 March 1998. De Rochement-Ford Foundation correspondence, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 20, AHCW; Mace to Paul Lazarus, 6 March 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW. On the Ford Foundation’s connections with the US government see Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 139–44. ‘The History of Communism’, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW. It is unclear whether this film was completed. De Rochement to Hood, 25 August 1950, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 26, AHCW; author’s correspondence with Borden Mace, 28 March 1998. Murphy to de Rochement, 6 June 1950, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW. Klaus Fuchs was a German-born, British-educated nuclear physicist who in January 1950 confessed to passing top-secret information to the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944–5. In February 1950 he was sentenced in London to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Later that year, Harry Gold, a Swiss-born naturalised American who worked at Philadelphia’s General Hospital, was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for being Fuchs’ courier. He in turn implicated a Los Alamos atomic bomb machinist, David Greengrass, who in turn implicated his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed, in June 1953, for conspiracy to commit espionage during the Cold War. On the publicity these spy revelations excited in the United States see Caute, Fear, pp. 62–9. De Rochement to Hoover, 13 July 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW; author’s correspondence with Borden Mace, 28 March 1998. Hoover apparently chose not to take this money, thinking it would damage his reputation if he was seen to be profiting from his position as FBI Director. No such inhibition prevented his sharing with other Bureau oﬃcials the proceeds of other ventures, including Masters of Deceit. See Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss (Philadelphia, PA, 1988), p. 207. Walk East on Beacon was titled Crime of the Century overseas.

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53 Bernard F. Dick (ed.), Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio (Lexington, KY, 1992), pp. 15–16; Eldridge, ‘Dear Owen’, pp. 162–3, 180–1; Variety, 15 November 1950, p. 18; Variety, 10 December 1952, p. 6; Hollywood Reporter, 8 May 1953, p. 3. 54 New York Times, 21 May 1960, p. 15. 55 Albert Hemsing, ‘The Marshall Plan’s European Film Unit 1948–1955: A Memoir and Filmography’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1994, pp. 269–97. For more on the Marshall Plan film campaign in Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s see www.marshallfilms.org/mpf.asp (2 February 2006) and www.sellingdemocracy.org (21 June 2006). 56 Louis de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW. Freeman was the VicePresident of Paramount Pictures, directing studio operations from 1938 to 1959. He also held the position of Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Association of Motion Picture Producers from 1947 until 1966. In 1953, Freeman joined an advisory committee of Hollywood executives and directors, chaired by Frank Capra, to cooperate with the USIA in producing ‘healthy propaganda’ for overseas consumption, and to screen story material that was potentially harmful to America’s image abroad. Hollywood Reporter, 8 July 1953. DeMille was a vastly experienced movie director who in 1953 was appointed as a special consultant to the USIA on cinema. On Freeman’s government connections see Eldridge, ‘Dear Owen’, pp. 168, 186. For more on DeMille see Chapter 4. 57 De Rochement memo, August 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW; Nichols to de Rochement, 16 July 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW; Mace to Paul Lazarus, Columbia Pictures, 7 April 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW; press release, September 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW; de Rochement memo, 22 March 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW; Mace memo, undated but probably May 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW. 58 Applebaum-de Rochement correspondence, February-March 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW. 59 De Rochement inter-oﬃce memo, 8 May 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW. 60 Weingarten to de Rochement, 11 July 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 217, AHCW; Breen to Martin Maloney, 17 July 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW. 61 Borden Mace-Shirlee Weingarten correspondence, 13 August 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW; de Rochement to Nichols, 9 July 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW; Walk East on Beacon Advertising, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 10, AHCW; Nixon in Senate, 26 June 1952, Congressional Record – Appendix, A4240. In 1953–4, Murphy served as Chairman of the Republican National Convention, and in 1964 was elected a Republican Senator in California. 62 Mace to Paul Lazarus, Columbia Pictures, 6 March 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW. On the 1953–6 television series I Led Three

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64

65

66

67 68 69 70

71

72 73

74 75 76

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Lives, based on Philbrick’s recollections, see Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York, 2003), pp. 140–9. Mace to Leo Jaﬀe, Columbia Pictures, 20 June 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW; Hoover to de Rochement, 19 March 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW. Borden Mace’s suggestion that publicity for Walk East on Beacon should exploit this space theme to tie in with the current vogue for science-fiction movies fell on deaf ears at Columbia. The studio felt it would mislead the audience and detract from Beacon’s politically factual format. Mace-Lazarus correspondence, March 1952 de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW. Hoover viewed with deep scepticism those films like Gordon Douglas’ I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) which highlighted the role of the Bureau’s celebrity super-counterspies over the agency’s collective eﬀorts. Leab, I Was a Communist, p. 81. In 1954, the critic Pauline Kael referred to Hollywood’s prodigious remodelling of Nazi SS guards as Soviet secret police agents during the period thus: ‘The filmgoer who saw the anti-Nazi films of ten years ago will have no problem recognizing the characters.’ Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies (Boston, MA, 1965), p. 318. Thomas Doherty, ‘Frank Costello’s Hands: Film, Television, and the Kefauver Crime Hearings’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 359–74. De Rochement to Reverend Robert H. Dunn, 11 April 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW. Variety, 30 April 1952, p. 6; Hollywood Reporter, 30 April 1952, p. 3; New Yorker, 7 June 1952. BoxOffice, 3 May 1952; Cue, 3 May 1952; Motion Picture Herald, 26 April 1952, p. 1329; Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in Mace to Nichols, 22 May 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW; New York Daily Mirror, 29 May 1952. ADL memo, 7 May 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW; Mundt in Senate, 5 May 1952, Congressional Record, p. 4831; Nixon in Senate, 26 June 1952, Congressional Record – Appendix, p. A4240. Hoover to de Rochement, 3 June 1952, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 49, AHCW. Variety, 7 January 1953, p. 61; J. Raymond Bell to Mace, 28 October 1952, and L. H. Morine to de Rochement, 8 April 1953, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 44, AHCW; Sayre, Running Time, p. 91. For a concise overview of this debate see Schrecker, McCarthyism. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York, 1989), p. 453. Only 9 per cent of American households had television in 1950. By 1959, that figure had risen to 85.9 per cent. Cited in Bernhard, Television News, p. 47. On the press see Aronson, Press, esp. pp. 39–102.

CHAPTER 3

Projecting a prophet for profit

Communism believes that human beings are nothing worse than somewhat superior animals . . . and that the best kind of world is that world which is organized as a well-managed farm is organized, where certain animals are taken out to pasture, and they are fed and brought back and milked, and they are given a barn as shelter over their heads . . . I do not see how, as long as Soviet Communism holds those views . . . there can be any permanent reconciliation. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 15 January 19531

If proof were needed that literary images could play as important a role in the cultural Cold War as those viewed at the cinema, it can be found in the work of the British writer George Orwell. By the time of his death from tuberculosis at 46 years of age in January 1950, Orwell was regarded by many as the finest political writer in English since Jonathan Swift.2 Two generations later, many would class him as one of the most influential political writers of the twentieth century, and, paradoxically given his early demise, a key player in the East–West information war.3 Inspired by democratic socialist principles, Orwell’s writing was interwoven to an unusual degree in British fiction with a European and internationalist view of history and politics.4 This feature, together with a characteristic unadorned style (‘good prose is like a window pane’, Orwell claimed),5 was most clearly illustrated by his two literary masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These novels, the combined sales of which exceeded those of any comparable post-war writer in English,6 were immediately interpreted as engaging with the Cold War, and are now viewed as having contributed many of its most potent images. Words or phrases culled from the two books – ‘four legs good, two legs bad’, ‘unperson’, ‘doublespeak’ – were assimilated into the Western political lexicon and often used to describe aspects of the Soviet system in particular. What follows is an analysis of the conversion of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four into films in the 1950s. As we shall see, the American and British governments appropriated Orwell’s works and image assiduously during the first decade of the Cold War. First in print, then on the small and big screen,

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oﬃcial and unoﬃcial propagandists exploited Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as they did no other books, trading on Orwell’s status as an independent-minded icon of the left who had definitively exposed Sovietstyle communism, and ‘clarifying’ his powerful rhetoric and vision for the masses. These eﬀorts played an important role in helping to establish the books as modern classics and Orwell’s reputation as a ‘prophet’ who had foretold the terrible future that lay ahead for an ideologically divided world. Neither of the movies that lie at the heart of my analysis, the first adaptations of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, apparently had any connection with Hollywood or with the American government. However, recently declassified documentation reveals that, despite being made in Britain and being sold as regular commercial ventures, both films originated in the United States and bore the fingerprints of Washington’s burgeoning Cold War propaganda apparatus. Together, the movies draw attention to the need to look outside America’s borders to understand more fully how Hollywood and the American government participated in the cultural Cold War. They also demonstrate how competing commercial and political needs could sometimes stand in the way of eﬀective propaganda. PRESSING ANIMAL FARM INTO COLD WAR SERVICE Animal Farm was first conceived by George Orwell during the 1936–9 Spanish Civil War, from which he emerged a committed anti-Stalinist. The book was then written between November 1943 and February 1944, when he was literary editor of the British Labour party’s weekly magazine, Tribune. However, it was not until August 1945 that the allegory, based on the Russian Revolution, appeared in the book shops, published by Secker and Warburg. The delay can partly be attributed to publishers failing to identify the book’s commercial value. The American Dial Press, for example, famously rejected Animal Farm on the grounds that ‘it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA’.7 Other publishers, like Cape, declined the novel following warnings about the damage it would cause Anglo-Soviet relations from the British government’s wartime propaganda organisation, the Ministry of Information (MOI).8 ‘The first British post-war novel’, according to novelist and academic Malcolm Bradbury, became an immediate best-seller and made Orwell famous. The fable was then selected as a September 1946 Book-of the-Month Club choice in the United States, through which it had sold approximately half a million copies by the end of the decade.9 Despite its seemingly simple plot, Animal Farm was immediately interpreted in several often conflicting ways. Orwell himself aimed to project two principal themes. The first was ‘to expose the Soviet myth in a story that could

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be easily understood by almost anyone’ and, by extension, to condemn tyranny universally – ‘to clear men’s minds of cant and worship so as to guard against what he feared would be a future even more threatened by totalitarianism’. The second theme was more positive, of ‘revolution betrayed’. This reflected Orwell’s belief that, despite events in the Soviet Union, socialism was still an achievable goal and was not bound to be perverted by any and every post-revolutionary regime.10 While some critics and readers saw this, others found reason to label the novel Conservative, Trotskyite or Anarchist.11 In the book’s final chapter, Orwell actively sought to anticipate and thereby warn against the re-emergence of great-power, capitalist–communist rivalry in the wake of the Second World War, and it is therefore ironic to find Animal Farm (together with Nineteen Eighty-Four) being used as anti-Soviet propaganda when East–West relations deteriorated after 1945. From 1948 onwards, the British Foreign Oﬃce’s newly created secret anti-communist propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), promoted the novel’s translation and distribution in Europe and the Middle East. Oﬃcial American propagandists quickly developed a firm relationship with the IRD, and put their considerable financial weight behind its unattributable (or ‘grey’) eﬀorts. By the mid-1950s, the State Department had sponsored the translation and distribution of Orwell’s books in more than thirty languages, starting with German, Russian and Korean editions of Animal Farm in 1948. Orwell lent his own support to these activities in the last year of his life, freely licensing faithful translations of Animal Farm for the East European market.12 In April 1949, Orwell discussed with IRD oﬃcial Celia Kirwan, who happened to be not only novelist Arthur Koestler’s sister-in-law but someone to whom Orwell had proposed marriage three years earlier, the best means of attacking Stalinism, including film.13 Orwell also divulged to Kirwan a list of ‘crypto-Communists’ and ‘fellow-travelers’ in media and political circles whom the IRD ought not to trust; these included the American actors Orson Welles and Paul Robeson.14 Some commentators have interpreted Orwell’s ‘enthusiastic approval’ of Whitehall’s anti-Soviet stance as evidence of the writer’s rejection of socialism in his later years, but most see it as part of the campaign being waged by leftist writers for a ‘third way’ between American capitalism and Soviet communism in the late 1940s, and the concomitant need to defend democratic socialism more aggressively.15 In 1950, the US State Department collaborated with the British Foreign Oﬃce to produce, under the cover of a private company based in Cairo, a cheap, illustrated version of Animal Farm in Arabic.16 Around the same time, the IRD bought the strip-cartoon rights for Animal Farm for distribution via local papers in large parts of the developing world, where this ‘brilliant satire on the Communist regime in the USSR’ would be ‘a most eﬀective

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propaganda weapon, because of its skilful combination of simplicity, subtlety and humour’.17 By early 1951, the IRD’s thoughts had turned to making a film strip of these cartoons for schoolchildren, only for this idea to be superseded by an altogether grander project.18 THE OFFICE OF POLICY COORDINATION, FILM AND THE BRITISH CONNECTION

The origins of the animated, feature-length film of Animal Farm lie within the American secret services. In June 1948, the US National Security Council issued a directive establishing a new agency to conduct deniable political, economic, paramilitary and psychological operations to counter the ‘vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit the aims of the United States and other Western powers’. The Oﬃce of Special Projects – soon renamed the Oﬃce of Policy Coordination (OPC) – was to operate under the direction of the Departments of State and Defence, and was housed within the CIA for administrative support.19 Frank Wisner, OPC chief, was fascinated by the power of propaganda and consequently, armed with a budget in 1949 of $4.7 million (growing to $200 million in 1952), hired Joseph Bryan III, a Virginian navy veteran, to run a Psychological Warfare Workshop.20 This unorthodox unit, made up almost entirely of Princeton alumni, acted as a think-tank, devising often unconventional schemes to undermine the solidarity of the emerging Eastern bloc and to sharpen the Americans’ anti-communist publicity techniques.21 In 1950, two of the Workshop’s operatives, Carleton Alsop, who had dabbled in radio and movies, and the writer Finis Farr, began negotiations with Orwell’s widow and literary executor, Sonia Blair, over the rights to turn Animal Farm into a film.22 This dovetailed with the OPC’s strategy of creating a more progressive image for the West, whether via the building up of democratic international front groups or, in this case, by exploiting Orwell’s radical credentials.23 The scheme was also linked to President Truman’s Campaign of Truth, launched in April 1950. This heralded a more aggressive and comprehensive propaganda strategy dedicated to maintaining faith in ‘the free world’ while destabilising Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Motion pictures were assigned an integral role in this strategy.24 Substantial provision was made for overseas film production without attribution to the US government, for consumption not only by the illiterate in undeveloped countries but also ‘among industrial workers, farmers and youth in more advanced countries, [where] motion pictures are a prime instrument for building confidence, exposing the threat of aggression and combating tendencies towards neutralism’.25

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In March 1951, Sonia Blair sold the animation film rights of Animal Farm for £5,000 ($14,000) to Louis de Rochement’s production company, RD-DR Corporation, with Carleton Alsop probably having acted as go-between.26 The result was an ostensibly normal commercial enterprise but one in reality substantially brokered and financed by the OPC.27 According to one source, Joseph Bryan as a sign of gratitude arranged for Sonia Blair to meet Clark Gable.28 Although a paucity of available records makes it impossible to decipher precisely how the OPC forged links with Louis de Rochement, it is not surprising he was hired to produce Animal Farm. His proven ability to deal successfully with unusual subjects suggested he had the necessary credentials to handle Orwell’s novel. As we have seen already, de Rochement’s contacts in government were rich and varied during the late 1940s and 1950s. No less a person than J. Edgar Hoover, who was also on first-name terms with Carleton Alsop, could vouch for de Rochement’s discretion. Finis Farr knew de Rochement too, through having worked on the radio version of The March of Time in the 1930s. In addition, de Rochement had recently lost money on a number of film projects, which made him highly receptive to the OPC’s oﬀer of substantial finance. Animal Farm appealed to him not only artistically but also as a weapon against Soviet tyranny. By cultivating British and American intelligence agents while he was over in Britain working on the film, de Rochement presumably picked up tips on where the communists’ soft spots lay.29 Using Orwell’s literary agent as a conduit, in November 1951 de Rochement secured the services of Europe’s largest animation company, run by husbandand-wife team John Halas and Joy Batchelor in London.30 Halas and Batchelor had risen to prominence during the Second World War making humorous shorts for the MOI, including the ‘Abu’ series, which directed anti-Nazi propaganda to the peoples of the Middle East.31 Such work confirmed both the proselytising qualities of animation, enhanced by its instant accessibility and apparent ideological innocence, and Halas and Batchelor’s distinctive style, which combined the sentimentality of Disney with an Eastern European graphic boldness and darkness (Halas, a Hungarian, had trained under former Bauhaus tutors Alexander Bortnyik and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy).32 Government sponsorship continued into the post-war period with the Charley series, designed to promote the idea of the welfare state as part of a more interventionist British democracy. This, allied with private commercial work for oil companies, and commissions for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Cooperation Administration (ECA), which until 1951 directed the European Recovery Programme resulting from the Marshall Plan, enabled the company to make a reasonable living.33 There appear to be four main reasons why de Rochement preferred hiring Halas and Batchelor rather than Hollywood’s established animators, Disney

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or Fleischer. First, the British company was smaller and could produce films at a lower cost; a Charley cartoon, for instance, cost less than one third of an American cartoon of the same length.34 Second, de Rochement’s associate Lothar Wolﬀ had worked with the firm while acting as chief of the Marshall Plan’s European Film Unit (also linked with the OPC through the CIA) in the late 1940s. He could therefore attest to the company’s requisite artistic and intellectual skills in dealing with the diﬃcult levels of visualisation which Animal Farm’s philosophical and narrative complexity demanded.35 Another contributory factor, given de Rochement’s concern with subversion, may have been HUAC’s investigations in 1951 of alleged communists in the US animation industry.36 Finally, and most importantly, the lighter the American hand in the film, the greater its propaganda potential became. Halas and Batchelor themselves grew more aware of the political nature of the project as production progressed, but there is no firm evidence that they (or their colleagues) knew of the precise origins of the film. As self-styled humanists who saw film as a vital medium for the expression of internationalist ideas, they believed that Animal Farm carried a simple message to which no right-minded individual could possibly object – that ‘power corrupts’.37 SEEING IS BELIEVING Transferring Orwell’s novel to the screen represented a major logistical challenge to Halas and Batchelor, and the film was a notable artistic achievement. Animal Farm became the first feature-length animation film made in Britain for the entertainment of the general public and the first ever made for politically conscious adults.38 Work by the eighty artists employed was split between Stroud in Gloucestershire and London, where the largest studio in Europe was developed for this kind of specialised production. John Reed, who had previously worked for Disney, was put in charge of animation; Matyas Seiber, who had worked on previous Halas and Batchelor projects, composed the score; and Maurice Denham, an experienced British stage actor who was just breaking into films, performed all the voices. In all, 300,000 man-hours were required to create 250,000 drawings and over 1,000 coloured backgrounds. Filmmaking was initially scheduled to take eighteen months at a cost of $270,000, but in the end stretched to three years and totalled roughly $500,000.39 Halas and Batchelor felt the heavy burden of converting into film one of the world’s best-known and most sophisticated fables. The film’s breakdown chart, showing all of the novel’s characters in their various relationships to the plot and to each other, reveals an acute awareness of Animal Farm’s political significance. Those incidents which strengthened the main dramatic form

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Shades of grey: Budapest-born John Halas, with some of the preliminary sketches for Animal Farm (1954). Stills, Posters and Designs Division of the British Filim Institute.

were retained while other sections were discarded. Conveying the satirical element was particularly challenging given animation’s emphasis on the visual rather than the spoken, but this was overcome by a naturalistic style, augmented by a stark rather than glossy presentation, which accurately captured Orwell’s combination of humour and deep pessimism. The Swiftian irony was transmitted courtesy of the film’s emphasis on the changing slogans. The end product was a film that reduced the storyline to essentials but still followed Orwell’s narrative very closely.40 Halas and Batchelor normally worked autonomously, relying on their own skills to convert a commission to screen. This was not the case with Animal Farm. The contract drawn up between RD-DR and Halas and Batchelor, following the agreed treatment in the summer of 1951, gave the former significant scope in shaping the film.41 Input came from several interested parties. De Rochement was himself heavily involved, discussing alterations at the planning and timing stages in September 1952, and commenting specifically on when the pigs should take over the farmhouse and when the ‘all animals are equal’ slogan should come in. On viewing the early material, he insisted that Napoleon’s demeanour and behaviour be modified to make him

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more authoritarian, and proposed changes to his keynote end speech. Lothar Wolﬀ’s supervisory role strengthened de Rochement’s control and provided the unit with an expert Cold War propagandist familiar with European audiences.42 News of the production attracted the attention and advice of various literary luminaries in Britain, including the publishers Victor Gollancz and Lord Weidenfeld.43 Fredric Warburg, who in the mid-to-late 1940s had fought personally to publish Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in the process had developed a close friendship with Orwell, took a particular interest. Between 1951 and 1953 Warburg was treasurer of the British Society for Cultural Freedom, a body financed from the Paris headquarters of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organisation secretly funded by the CIA. Set up in 1950 with Frank Wisner’s help, the CCF was the most prominent liberal intellectual and artistic movement to campaign against communism during the Cold War until newspaper revelations of CIA patronage led to its disappearance in the late 1960s.44 Both the honorary secretary and general secretary of the British Society, Michael Goodwin and John Clews respectively, were IRD contract employees.45 Warburg visited the Halas and Batchelor Studios on several occasions, principally in the autumn of 1952.46 It is impossible to tell what eﬀect, if any, these visits had on the filmmaking, but it is significant that Warburg had misinterpreted Nineteen Eighty-Four as marking Orwell’s break with socialism and as an attack on the left as a whole, which he perhaps felt ought to be conveyed in the filmic treatment of Orwell’s other great novel.47 Despite reportedly having the authority to approve the script and storyboard in order to ensure that the film was ‘a faithful adaptation of her husband’s classic’, Sonia Blair soon lost interest in the finer points of the production.48 Nevertheless, the company’s experienced and gifted scriptwriter, Joy Batchelor, grew increasingly frustrated with what she saw as tampering outsiders. As producer, de Rochement, for one, unsurprisingly insisted on being kept up to date on the script.49 In early 1952, a draft script was also assessed by the US Psychological Strategy Board (PSB). Established in April 1951, the PSB was charged with uniting the whole of the American national security bureaucracy – State Department, CIA (which absorbed the OPC in 1951), military services and other government agencies – behind a campaign of psychological warfare in a grand eﬀort to combat the Soviet Union.50 The organisation gave high priority to its Motion Picture Service, which worked through 135 USIS posts in 87 countries and in 1952 reached an estimated audience of over 300 million.51 The Motion Picture Service employed producer–directors who were given top security clearance and assigned to films that articulated ‘the objectives which the United States is interested in

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obtaining’ and that could best reach ‘the pre-determined audience that we as a motion-picture medium must condition’.52 The PSB worked on the basis that if art was to be good propaganda it needed to be good art, a theory borne out by its cultivation of respected film directors like Frank Capra and studio executives such as Nicholas Schenck, President of MGM, Columbia’s President Harry Cohn, and Walt Disney.53 The Animal Farm script crossed the desk of the PSB’s deputy director, Tracy Barnes, in January 1952, courtesy of media executive Wallace Carroll. A consultant to the US government on psychological warfare throughout the 1950s, Carroll also formed a bridge between the CIA and the American press.54 The PSB’s film experts were disappointed with the script’s propaganda value and oﬀered suggestions for improvement. ‘[T]he theme is somewhat confusing and the impact of the story as expressed in cartoon sequence is somewhat nebulous. Although the symbolism is apparently plain’, the critique concluded, ‘there is no great clarity of message.’55 One of the PSB’s propaganda lines during this period was to accuse the Soviet regime of having perverted Marxism,56 and promoting a wider reception of Orwell’s novel corresponded nicely with this. However, for the film to have its fullest impact – and contribute to the PSB’s three-fold ‘consolidate, impregnate and liberate’ strategy – ease of understanding was considered essential. PSB oﬃcials argued, therefore, that it was far better to simplify, presumably even at the cost of modifying Orwell’s meaning, rather than confuse the audience with an overly precious adherence to Orwell’s text.57 Collaboration between the PSB and OPC in 1952 on political activism in Western Europe meant that there was ample scope for the former’s views on Animal Farm to blend into those of the film production team.58 Despite going a year over schedule and through the debilitating process of nine diﬀerent scripts, the film’s message was ultimately evident. Several significant alterations were made to the book for quite normal commercial or artistic reasons. For instance, by having Old Major (Marx-Lenin) die immediately at the end of his revolutionary speech rather than days later created a more dramatic, heart-rending opening. Similarly, the ferocious chasing and killing of Snowball (Trotsky) in one scene a third of the way through precluded the latter’s alleged attempts to overthrow the new regime while in exile, but made dramatic sense in terms of being more visual and shockingly violent. However, certain other changes are worthy of further comment given their cumulative political implications. There can be no doubting Orwell’s depiction of Napoleon (Stalin) as a despicable tyrant, or that de Rochement’s desire to magnify the character’s authoritarian nature made commercial sense. Yet the book states that during the seminal Battle of the Windmill (the Second World War) ‘all the animals,

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except Napoleon, flung themselves flat on their bellies and hid their faces’.59 This represents Orwell’s attempt to be fair to Stalin, who remained in Moscow after Hitler’s launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, directing aﬀairs from the rear. However, in the film Napoleon is singled out as the only animal (apart from Squealer) that does not fight, other than issuing a few orders from the safety of the farmhouse in cowardly response to direct attacks on him. Similarly, the book attributes Napoleon’s trading with humans partly to the economic needs of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas in the film Napoleon’s motives are reduced to pure greed, in the shape of jam for himself and the other pigs. Related to this last point is the wider one of the way the film diminishes the book’s human characters and, in the process, its references to the iniquities of capitalism and the limitations of liberty. Far less is made in the film of why the animals rebel in the first place; the ‘tyranny of human beings’ in Orwell’s opening chapter is reduced on screen to Jones’ drunken cruelty. The role that the humans play throughout the book in trying to stamp out the rebellion via black propaganda and the flogging of animals for singing the revolutionary anthem is cut. ‘Sugarcandy Mountain’, Orwell’s reference to Christianity as the servile upholder of the status quo, is omitted altogether. Two of Orwell’s central characters, Pilkington and Frederick (the British and German governing classes), are virtually elided. Other than Jones himself, the humans are reduced in the film to an indeterminate pub rabble. In the process, the film plays down the significance that the book attached to capitalist infighting, and Orwell’s condemnation of Britain and Germany’s strategic isolation of the USSR prior to the Second World War. This line of interpretation is given a further twist in the final scene, which amounts to a wholesale inversion of Orwell’s ending. The book concludes on a bleak note, with the now clothed pigs drinking, brawling and gambling with their human farmer neighbours, and agreeing they have a common interest in keeping the lower animals and lower classes subservient. The ‘creatures outside’, reads the last sentence, ‘looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’60 Orwell’s suggestion is that there is no diﬀerence between old tyrannies and new, between capitalist exploiters and communist ones. Moreover, the raucous farmhouse party is meant to satirise the cynical power politics of the first wartime meeting between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at Teheran in November 1943, and to predict their inevitable future conflict based on self-interest. This is why Pilkington and Napoleon draw the ace of spades together at the end of their card game. By participating in this future struggle, warns Orwell, the masses would once again be serving their oppressors’ ends.61

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The twist in the tail: with the humans airbrushed from the party, Napoleon (centre) and his ‘comrades’ celebrate their takeover of the farm. Moments later the beasts’ revolt will begin. Animal Farm (1954). Columbia Pictures/Halas and Batchelor Ltd.

The film changes this dénouement in two ways. First, the audience is not allowed to feel that the capitalist farmers and communist pigs are on the same debased level. The farmers are excluded from the scene altogether. Consequently, the watching creatures see only pigs enjoying the fruits of exploitation – a sight which impels them to stage a successful counterrevolution by storming the farmhouse. John Halas years later explained this radical twist in terms of the filmmaker’s conventional need to have an upbeat, active ending that sent audiences away happy. In fact, although the revolt scenario appeared in production records as early as March 1952, the ending was the source of a six-month dispute between de Rochement and the directors, especially Batchelor, who wanted to stick to the book’s conclusion. It is unclear whether de Rochement’s motives were commercially or politically grounded, but his insistence on the beasts mounting a fight back eventually prevailed.62 The result is not only an uplifting ending but also one which underlines the film’s anti-Soviet message. In the context of the Eisenhower administration’s strategy of ‘liberating’ those living under communist rule, the film’s counter-revolutionary theme is particularly intriguing.

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A FILM FOR ALL AGES Billed as ‘the most controversial film of the year’, Animal Farm was released by RKO in New York in December 1954 and opened in London a fortnight later. It immediately attracted international coverage, helped by, as one newspaper put it, ‘the sort of unexpected advance publicity for which Hollywood would sacrifice its last picture of a pin-up girl’.63 A gala reception at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York added to the film’s already pregnant political overtones.64 When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill complained that Old Major’s voice too closely resembled his own, conjuring an amusing image of the staunch Conservative exchanging places with the father of communism, the film’s appeal grew further.65 Critical responses to Animal Farm stressed its technical expertise and innovation. Though a few critics thought the film too Disneyesque in places, it was instantly proclaimed a landmark in the history of British animation. Voicing the consensus, Kinematograph Weekly called it ‘brilliant. At once thoughtful, controversial, challenging and witty, but never malicious, it should intrigue all classes and, except for tiny tots, all ages.’66 The film’s paymasters would have been heartened by its reception politically. While notable reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, including one in the CCF’s flagship journal, Encounter, criticised the film for having watered down the novel’s anti-Soviet message,67 the majority recommended it as a faithful interpretation of Orwell’s anticommunist classic. In labelling it ‘a merciless commentary on the Slave State’ and ‘a sparkling satire on Kremlin madness’ respectively, Britain’s Catholic Herald and the New York Daily News indicated how keenly conservative newspapers exploited such ‘respectable’ opportunities for anti-Soviet propaganda. Other commentators felt the movie’s political message was enhanced by animation’s instant accessibility and apparent ideological innocence.68 The changed ending did not go unnoticed by British reviewers, testimony to the cultural importance of Orwell’s work. Some were scathing, for political and artistic reasons. ‘I wonder what sort of conferences led to this highhanded decision’,69 protested one Catholic magazine, Tablet, without pressing the issue. The Glasgow Herald went further, complaining ‘that even President Eisenhower has been constrained a little to damp the enthusiasm of those who call the sheep and goats and donkeys of Eastern Europe to rise in rebellion’.70 Other critics applauded the twist. ‘Reading the book’, Britain’s most prestigious newspaper, The Times, stated, ‘one felt with passionate conviction that the animals were right to rebel.’71 However, most ordinary viewers would probably have interpreted the film as a straight adaptation of an important book written by a revered radical. Those in the audience able to read the ideological metaphors would have been encouraged to think that the Soviet order

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was not only flawed but also either beatable or inherently self-destructive. ‘At last an anti-Communist film has come along that is 100% eﬀective artistically and hence is really telling as propaganda’, declared one of Britain’s best-selling Catholic newspapers, the Universe, ‘[showing that] Communism is an evil system that does not even make for material happiness.’72 The movie was eagerly promoted. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), the US oﬀshoot of the CCF, went to great lengths to make Animal Farm’s opening run at New York’s prestigious Paris Theater a platform for domestic and international success. Media contacts spread word of ‘one of the most important anti-Communist documents of our time’; discount rates were oﬀered to students and labour unions; and strenuous eﬀorts (ultimately unsuccessful) were made to persuade MGM to act as the film’s distributors.73 The IRD also distributed the film among ‘the slightly educated’ in parts of the British empire and in other parts of the developing world such as Indochina.74 A cartoon strip drawn by one of the animators, Harold Whitaker, appeared in the British and international press; merchandising spin-oﬀs, unusual for the period, included children’s animal figurines.75 Despite this, the film was not a great success; its initial run in Britain’s third city, Manchester, for example, lasted only a fortnight. ‘It was a serious cartoon and the distributors didn’t know what to do with it’, said a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America.76 ‘One of British film’s more honourable failures’, claims film historian John Baxter, Animal Farm was arguably too serious a subject for a medium commonly thought of as suitable only for children.77 Whether the film still prospered in political terms is debatable. Few records exist relating to the reception outside Britain and the United States of this most international of films. However, being animated meant that Animal Farm was easily translatable and versions in Japanese, Swedish, German and other languages soon appeared.78 In France, where Napoleon was renamed Caesar, it was lauded as a powerful parody of the Soviet regime.79 The CIA helped to finance distribution, though it was powerless to circumvent bans imposed on the showing of the film behind the Iron Curtain.80 If the film’s chief target was the potentially dissident element suﬀering under the communist yoke, it therefore failed. If, on the other hand, success is measured in terms of its broadening awareness of Animal Farm, previously confined largely to the literary-minded middle classes, a diﬀerent picture emerges. The perspective changes again if the film is examined by way of its subtly contrived Cold War message, serving both as a warning to developing states and as a reminder to doubters in the West of the sordid Soviet record. Nor should the film’s potential impact be restricted in time. By the late 1950s, Animal Farm (and Nineteen Eighty-Four) had become standard reading in British and American schools. In the decades ahead, the film became a popular pedagogical aid, helping in the

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process to provide a new generation with a tendentious grounding in the origins of the Cold War.81 NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: A COLD WAR NOVEL PAR EXCELLENCE Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s last, dystopian novel, has over the past sixty years probably been more influential than Animal Farm, certainly so in terms of its phrases and coinages passing into the common language. Published in Britain and the US simultaneously in June 1949, it sold over 400,000 copies in its first year alone, and confirmed Orwell’s place in the modern literary pantheon.82 By drawing on his political understanding of the mechanisms of terror, psychological invasion and brainwashing, the author won widespread praise for having followed his brilliant essay on recent events in Russia with another that posed horrific questions for the future. ‘Orwellian’ was soon added to ‘Kafkaesque’ to describe the development of many a state and many a public vocabulary, up to and beyond 1984. By the final decade of the Cold War, the book had sold over ten million copies in paperback throughout the Englishspeaking world and existed in at least twenty-three other languages.83 Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four to act as a warning against the threat of totalitarianism, whether from the right or left. However, so complex were its targets that nearly all commentators immediately seized on one theme to the exclusion of others. Orwell’s most influential biographer, the political scientist Bernard Crick, argues that Orwell should have made his message clearer rather than trying to explain the novel’s theme afterwards by press releases, and that by failing in this regard he made the book’s confused reception unavoidable.84 Its application to the Cold War was similarly inevitable, especially in the light of the tumultuous events which had taken place in Eastern and Central Europe while Orwell had been writing the novel and on which it was thought he was commenting.85 The Soviet Communist party paper, Pravda, condemned Orwell for predicting such a ‘monstrous future in store for man, [in which] he imputes every evil to the people’, and issued an import ban on the book that lasted till the late 1980s. Accordingly, the novel acquired cult status among dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, where it was disseminated in a variety of ways, including balloon operations run by the Free Europe Press, the publication arm of the CIA-financed National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE).86 In the United States, arch-conservative Henry Luce’s Time and Life magazines predictably saw it as a comprehensive anti-socialist polemic,87 while the radical, anti-Stalinist New York journal Partisan Review awarded Orwell its annual prize for the most significant contribution to literature, praising the book as ‘the best antidote to the [Soviet] totalitarian disease’ so far produced.88

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Britain’s IRD bought the rights to Nineteen Eighty-Four in a variety of languages, including Japanese, Polish, Chinese, French and Indonesian, while, in authorising payments for the translation rights to the book in 1951, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson singled out it and Animal Farm for having ‘been of great value to the Department in its psychological oﬀensive against Communism’.89 In these ways Nineteen Eighty-Four came to be used for the very purpose it warned against: propaganda for the maintenance of a super-state conflict. ‘Whatever Orwell believed he was doing’, argues literary critic Alan Sinfield, ‘he contributed to the Cold War one of its most potent myths . . . In the 1950s it [Nineteen Eighty-Four] was marvellous NATO Newspeak.’90 BIG DRAMA, SMALL SCREEN Nineteen Eighty-Four was adapted first for the small screen by the National Broadcasting Company’s drama series, Studio One, and broadcast in September 1953. NBC was the largest and most powerful of the four main television networks in the United States in the 1950s. It lent vigorous support both to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subversion allegations and to Washington’s tough approach towards communism overseas.91 1984, as the one-hour television play was titled, starred Eddie Albert as Winston Smith, Norma Crane as Julia, and Lorne Greene as O’Brien. It was watched in 8.7 million homes, a 53 per cent share of the market, making it the highest-rated Studio One programme that year.92 The play was a relatively straight adaptation of the novel but most commentators and media organisations interpreted it as an anti-communist warning.93 A year later, in December 1954, the British Broadcasting Corporation televised a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, produced with Sonia Blair’s approval. This two-hour-long play was the most expensive and most ambitious television drama made in Britain to that date, and met with considerable praise from critics for its accurate interpretation of the novel, for its eﬀorts to put over the principles of Orwell’s language, and for the individual performances of Andre Morrell as O’Brien and Peter Cushing as Winston Smith.94 Among the wider public and in the press the production caused a furore. Amidst reports that one viewer had collapsed and died of a heart attack after watching its torture scenes, newspapers condemned the ‘sadistic’ and ‘pornographic’ nature of the play. A month-long debate followed in Parliament and the mass media about Orwell and broadcasting censorship.95 The BBC had forged strong links with the IRD by the early 1950s, enabling the British government to disseminate discreetly valuable anti-communist propaganda at home and overseas.96 Despite these links, there is no evidence of any collaboration between the corporation and government on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Producer Rudolph Cartier,

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for one, intended his play to act as a warning against totalitarianism in all its forms, including fascism, communism and McCarthyism.97 However, as had been the case with NBC’s 1984, the majority of British politicians and journalists interpreted the play in straight Cold War terms. Indeed, it is noteworthy just how many commentators across the political spectrum referred to the BBC’s ‘coverage’ rather than ‘production’ of Orwell’s book, as if it were a real event that the cameras were at. This encouraged people to see the book and play not as fiction but as a ‘true’ account of the nature of totalitarianism generally and of life behind the Iron Curtain specifically. The play eﬀectively ‘launched’ Orwell as a ‘public’ writer, marking the point when the language of his novel entered the popular imagination and when Nineteen Eighty-Four became, as Stalin’s biographer Isaac Deutscher characterised it after the telecast, ‘an ideological superweapon’ in the Cold War of words.98 PETER RATHVON, THE USIA AND ANOTHER HAPPY ENDING The desire to capitalise on the tumult surrounding the BBC play seems to have been a major factor in the decision to make a cinematic version of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1955. The film rights had been acquired from the Orwell estate in 1953 by the former president of RKO, Peter Rathvon. Rathvon enjoyed a close relationship with Washington in the 1950s, helping to finance films for the USIA’s Motion Picture Service which, among other things, sponsored hard-hitting anti-communist films calculated to expose communist lies.99 In 1955, Rathvon formed Holiday Film Productions to make 1984 at Associated British’s Elstree Studios, outside London. Hiring a strong Anglo-American cast and British director Michael Anderson, who had just had a hit with a Second World War drama, The Dam Busters (1954), the intention was to profit financially and politically. During HUAC’s investigation into communism in the American film industry in the late 1940s Rathvon had shown little sympathy for the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, including two of RKO’s employees, the director Edward Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott.100 With a distinguished career in banking and business behind him, Rathvon’s stance on the Cold War was somewhat predictable. In the case of 1984, a $100,000 subsidy from the USIA, conditional on the agency’s control of the script, was a significant bonus. The object was, according to the USIA’s chairman, to make ‘the most devastating anti-Communist film of all time’.101 Filming at Elstree began in June 1955, though the broad framework of the production appears to have been constructed earlier in the year, partly as a result of Rathvon’s communication with the ACCF’s executive director, Sol Stein. Prompted by members like film director Elia Kazan and actors Robert Montgomery and Hume Cronyn, the ACCF in the mid-1950s sought active

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involvement in several prominent ‘theatrical’ projects in the US and overseas.102 These included financing stage adaptations in Australia and Latin America of Arthur Koestler’s novel based on the 1930s Moscow trials, Darkness at Noon (itself a major inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four); promoting anti-communist television documentaries such as NBC’s Nightmare in Red (first broadcast in 1956) in tandem with the USIA; and discouraging distribution of feature films perceived to carry anti-American or anti-capitalist overtones, such as H. G. Clouzot’s 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear.103 The ACCF earnestly believed that the West was losing the cultural Cold War in this period. Such activities therefore reflected the organisation’s determination to make its campaigning increasingly political and explicitly anti-communist, an approach which eventually led to a parting of the ways with the tactically more conservative Paris-based CCF.104 In January 1955, Peter Rathvon requested advice from Sol Stein on the screenplay and publicity for the film. After consulting colleagues, Stein, a successful playwright who like many New York liberal intellectuals of the period interpreted Orwell’s book as an attack on ‘Red fascism’,105 made a series of ‘suggestions’. These, nearly all of which can be seen in the final print, were eﬀectively confined to two areas: ‘verisimilitude’ and the ending. Stein argued that for the film to do justice to the book and make audiences aware of the dangers posed by present-day communism, the production had to have as contemporary a feel as possible. He therefore recommended that armbands replace the sashes worn by members of the Anti-Sex League in the book, and the trumpets used to herald the regime’s announcements be eliminated because of their association with pageantry and melodrama. Stein’s emphasis throughout was on making 1984 a reality rather than fiction. Caricatures were to be reduced as much as possible and the film given a docudrama appearance. Finally, rather than leaving the audience in ‘total despair’ at the end, with Winston Smith capitulating to Big Brother, it was essential at least to hint ‘that human nature can not be changed by totalitarianism . . . so that the viewer, like the person behind the Iron Curtain, will be left with some small measure of hope’. This could be done, Stein proposed, by emphasising the enduring love between Winston and his fellow rebel Julia.106 Compared with that of Animal Farm, the making of 1984 in the summer and autumn of 1955 was smooth and problem-free. At around £300,000, production costs were relatively high and could be accounted for partly by the choice of Edmond O’Brien and Michael Redgrave to play the lead roles of Smith and O’Connor (O’Brien in the novel) respectively. O’Brien’s stock had recently risen considerably following his supporting actor Oscar in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954). Redgrave had, ironically, been on Orwell’s list of suspected crypto-communists in the late 1940s, but his

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socialist leanings appear to have had no bearing on either his decision to take part in 1984 or his performance.107 A further expense was Terence Verity’s ingenious art work, which successfully created an imaginary yet starkly realistic London by eschewing fashionable science-fiction techniques as much as possible. The elaborate studio sets were augmented by highly publicised location work in London’s Hyde Park and the city’s rundown East End.108 1984 opened in London in March 1956 and the United States six months later. As with Animal Farm, first impressions of the film are those of a relatively straight adaptation of the book. On the whole the film remains close to the novel in incident and plot. Winston Smith’s disillusionment with life in Airstrip One, his soul-destroying work for the Ministry of Truth punctuated by frightening Two Minute Hate sessions, his passionate and rebellious love aﬀair with Julia, the couple’s imprisonment, torture and brainwashing by the ruling elite – all of these key features survive intact. A sense of Orwell’s oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere is conveyed by the ubiquitous telescreens and secret police, rumours of traitors being ‘vaporised’, and the ratinfested junk shop where the two lovers pathetically create their own private life among the ‘proles’ until their betrayal by the landlord. At the same time, simplification and condensation abound, inevitably so given the book’s many almost unfilmable sections. Orwell used paradox – the Oceania slogan ‘War is Peace’, for example – for some of his most telling blows, and such purely literary devices could not be eﬀectively translated to the screen. However, on closer inspection more substantial changes become apparent which confirm the traces of the film’s abettors. A commentary at the very outset seeks to set 1984 outside the science-fiction genre and to place events in ‘the immediate future’. Shocking pictures of genuine atomic explosions follow, representing the nuclear conflagration of 1965 (undated by Orwell) and the subsequent establishment of Oceania. This emphasis on reality continues throughout, with the Thought Police toting machine guns rather than lasers, and Eurasian prisoners being paraded through an easily recognisable Trafalgar Square. Julia (Jan Sterling) wears a chastity armband rather than sash and behaves more like a 1950s housewife than Orwell’s libidinous modern woman; the old-fashioned trumpets are replaced by electronic sounds. The overall eﬀect is to make Orwell’s world more tangible and believable, and his picture of society thirty years hence more relevant to contemporary politics. One of the major planks of Orwell’s novel was the criticism it levelled equally at all the great powers. Indeed, Nineteen Eighty-Four was in this sense a natural extension of his argument in Animal Farm: that continued rivalry between the powers could result in a world divided into three superstates locked in never-ending combat (a Cold War). Alliances (like that between the USA, USSR and Britain between 1941 and 1945) would expediently change

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London’s future? Winston Smith (Edmond O’Brien) and his omnipresent leader on the streets of Airstrip One, Oceania. 1984 (1956). Columbia Picture/Stills, Posters and Designs Division of the British Film Institute.

from time to time, but the real losers would be the masses, fed on a diet of propaganda and coercion.109 This theme is obfuscated in the film. Oceania is certainly at war with Eurasia, but this is attributed wholly to the designs of Big Brother rather than to the workings of the international system. Moreover, Eurasia remains an enemy throughout rather than, as happens towards the end of the book, suddenly being announced as an ally. Thus, Orwell’s reference to the bankrupt nature of the Grand Alliance during the Second World War, which was intended to force people to question their leaders’ motives, is excised. Winston’s failure in the film to read the book ostensibly written by Goldstein, leader of the underground in Oceania, explaining how the threestate conflict emerged out of that between Russia, China and the United States, has a similar eﬀect.110 Big Brother is never identified in either the book or the film. Stein had recommended to Rathvon that in order to emphasise the possibility of Big Brother’s real existence, in the film his posters ought to have the photograph of an actual human – say, of the now dead Stalin – rather than being a cartoon caricature. For some reason this advice was not followed and a cartoonish ‘BB’

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Peace-Sex-Hate: in their final act of atonement, Rutherford and Jones are led to the steps of Trafalgar Square to declare their undying love for ‘Big Brother’. 1984 (1956). Columbia Picture/Stills, Posters and Designs Division of the British Film Institute.

stares out from the walls.111 The unmistakable indications in the film are, nevertheless, that Oceania’s ruling party is modelled on the Soviet regime, with Nazi flourishes. Thus some of Orwell’s nomenclature, such as ‘comrades’, stays in the film, whereas other key points are taken out. Oceania’s currency, for example, is changed from dollars, denoting American imperialism, to sterling. None of the explicit comparisons between ‘Ingsoc’ and the communists, which O’Brien makes in the book while brainwashing Winston, find their way onto the screen. Consequently, the important point that Russian communism is in fact inferior to ‘Ingsoc’, in terms of its ability to break its opponents’ will and its ultimate quest for equality rather than power, is omitted. The highlighting of a Soviet-style show trial, with ‘traitors’ Rutherford and Jones confessing their guilt before execution, further alters the book’s message.112 Orwell’s story was not entirely pessimistic. ‘If there is hope’, writes Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’113 But Orwell rejected the possibility of the human spirit rising above pain and privation. Faced with the dreaded rats in Room 101 at the end of the novel, a broken and wizened Winston forsakes Julia and learns to love Big Brother instead. Believing this to be dangerously

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defeatist in the context of the Cold War of the mid-1950s, Stein had produced a draft alternative version which proved Winston’s surviving freedom of spirit.114 This was taken a stage further in the film released in Britain and in other countries, though oddly not in the American version.115 As soon as Winston and Julia meet after their release from the Ministry of Love, we see that nothing can erase from their minds the knowledge that the system is evil. They are living proof that the human soul cannot be completely overcome, even by the most powerful regime. Winston shouts ‘Down with Big Brother’ and is shot, promptly followed by Julia who also sacrifices herself to the cause of freedom. Orwell’s savage masterpiece is thus brought into line with conventional screen morality and orthodox Western beliefs. Rathvon argued, almost in Newspeak-ian terms, that this ‘logical’ change was what ‘Orwell might have written if he had not known when he wrote the book that he was dying’.116 Orwell had in fact expressed particular objections to Nineteen EightyFour being altered in any way by publishers and, for the record, Sonia Blair was reportedly ‘horrified’ with the ending of the film.117 DISAPPOINTMENT FOR THE USIA The reception of 1984 failed to match the expectations of the film’s backers. To some extent the film’s makers were in an impossible position. As several commentators noted, it required a near miracle to make Orwell’s psychological detail and intellectual argument as convincing on the screen as they were in print.118 However, the casting and acting were also culpable, with all three leading players found wanting: O’Brien because of his incongruously large girth and for being too obvious a rebel, Sterling for trying to be too glamorous, Redgrave for simply being languid. Furthermore, the American accents of O’Brien and Sterling jarred with those of their British colleagues, detracting from the representation of London life in the near future. Rathvon’s attempt to exploit the Anglo-American connection seems in this sense to have backfired. Michael Anderson’s direction lacked the inspiration and style he brought most successfully to the war-film genre in the 1950s. The straitjacket imposed on him by a producer intent on sending the correct ideological message might explain this.119 1984 attracted some plaudits from the mainstream British press. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, which stood on the political right, argued that ‘Orwell’s masterpiece . . . loses none of its shattering impact on the screen.’120 However, according to most critics the film was impossible to categorise and would therefore be likely to deter audiences. In attempting to make Orwell’s work shockingly topical by eschewing the technical wizardry of the science-fiction genre, 1984 merely ended up looking cheap and unconvincing. Stripped to its

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basics, the novel lost many of its most subtle and powerful features. The intense freedom of the love scenes, for instance, was never communicated, and even the torture scenes lacked impact. Despite Stein’s best eﬀorts, the characters seemed so rootless they could scarcely begin to engage viewers’ sympathies. Those not ‘repulsed’ by the horror found the film ‘boring’, ‘plodding’ and, above all, ‘depressing’.121 Many critics spotted the changed ending and its political significance. Representing the majority’s view on this, Milton Shulman in the Sunday Express condemned it as ‘our own kind of doublethink’.122 However, others – on both the political right and the left – either thought the ending was ‘more true to life’ or missed it (and the film’s other alterations) altogether.123 This suggests that the majority of normal viewers would themselves have been ignorant of the distorted version of Nineteen Eighty-Four they were being presented with. It also indicates that, for all the film’s weaknesses, a large proportion of these people would have left the cinema having their fears of the Soviet Union confirmed. At the box oﬃce 1984 seems to have performed poorly, despite the attraction of Orwell’s name and the notoriety of the recent television play. What undid the film probably more than anything else was that in attempting to straddle several genres – horror, romance, science fiction and thriller – it merely confused too many viewers.124 This can be attributed to commercial considerations and Columbia’s need to maximise its profits by appealing to as wide an audience as possible. The money spent by the US government on what ultimately looked a shabby production cannot, therefore, have been worth it. Indeed, the project might have served as a painful lesson in the diﬃculties of constructing eﬀective propaganda when commercial and political interests were not in unison. The final word on the film was left to Sonia Blair. Having publicly castigated it at the time as a desecration of her husband’s intentions, she decided to withdraw the film from circulation when the rights expired in the mid-1970s, twenty years after their original release date. The adaptations thenceforth became, as the London Times put it, ‘unfilms’.125 CONCLUSION George Orwell died at a key point in the Cold War: after the conflict had begun but before its full global dimensions had become apparent. Consequently, despite his having spelt out in one of his last essays the desire for ‘a Socialist United States of Europe’ independent of Russia and America,126 a myriad of politicians, intellectuals and commentators argued for years after January 1950 about what Orwell’s stance on the Cold War would have been had he lived to see the conflict reach maturity. While some did this out of academic curiosity, many others did so for ideological purposes. Orwell would surely not have

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been surprised to see his name being posthumously appropriated by state and non-state propagandists. After all, he had himself been involved in propaganda work for the BBC during the Second World War,127 and he had approved of the IRD’s aims and techniques shortly before his death. These experiences aside, it is still richly ironic to find a man who had made a career out of alerting people to the black arts of political propaganda being so systematically used and abused by the media and governments during the Cold War. This analysis has focused on the role played by American and British state propagandists in the formative years of the Orwell ‘claiming game’. What exactly the impact these propagandists had in creating Orwell’s iconic status is debatable. To attribute the presence of dog-eared copies of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in homes and libraries scattered across the world largely to the promotional eﬀorts of Washington and London would naturally be absurd. Yet it is diﬃcult to escape the conclusion that the work of the CIA, PSB, USIA, IRD and others at least helped to lift Orwell’s profile, especially during the Cold War’s early years. The more long-term eﬀects of these eﬀorts is even more diﬃcult to determine, but it is worth noting that by the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four had sold almost 40 million copies in more than 60 languages, more than any other pair of books by a serious or popular post-war author.128 In helping to convert Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four into movies, American oﬃcial propagandists undoubtedly, in turn, made the novels more accessible, especially to the casual reader or those who rarely opened books. Moreover doing this so secretly, to the point at which even most of the movies’ senior production staﬀ, let alone the viewers, were unaware of the political machinations behind the scenes, highlights the value that Washington attached to clandestine propaganda during the Cold War. What also helped significantly in this respect was arranging for the films to be made overseas. This sort of covert media management, or propaganda by proxy, as it were, was, as we are about to see, given a high priority during the Eisenhower years in particular. Persuading or assisting foreign film industries to produce anti-communist propaganda had the added advantage of encouraging indigenous hostility towards the Soviet Union, or at least implying that opposition to communism had found its roots in countries other than the United States. Finally, by cleverly twisting Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four into emphatically anti-Soviet tracts on the big screen, Washington highlighted both the malleability of even the most famous literary figures during the Cold War, and the considerable skill and resources it was prepared to invest in cinematic propaganda in order to win that conflict’s battle of words and images.

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Notes 1 Cited in Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945–1996 (New York, 1997), p. 147. 2 Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London, 1992), p. 16. 3 Timothy Garton Ash, quoted in Peter Davison (ed.), Orwell and Politics (London, 2001), p. xi. 4 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London, 1993), p. 236. 5 Ibid., p. 238. 6 Peter Lewis, George Orwell: The Road to 1984 (London, 1981), p. 1. 7 Cited in Crick, Orwell, p. 460. 8 Ibid., pp. 455–8. 9 Bradbury, British Novel, p. 282; John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell (New York, 1989), pp. 44–5; Fredric Warburg, All Authors are Equal (London, 1973), pp. 35–59, 92–121. 10 Crick, Orwell, pp. 450–2, 488; Jeﬀrey Meyers, A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (London, 1975), p. 131. 11 Crick, Orwell, pp. 488–92. 12 Roderick Parkes to Ralph Murray, 25 October 1950, FO 1110/319/PR48/ 82/G, TNAL; V. Puachev to George Orwell, 24 June 1949, and Celia Kirwan to Charles Thayer, director of Voice of America, 4 November 1949, FO1110/ 221/PR3361, TNAL; Crick, Orwell, p. 536; Rodden, Literary Reputation, p. 202; Peter Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George Orwell. Vol. XIX: It is What I Think 1947–1948 (London, 1998), pp. 211, 224. On the IRD see Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53: The Information Research Department (London, 2004), and Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948–1977 (Stroud, 1998). 13 Minutes by Celia Kirwan, 30 March and 6 April 1949, FO1110/189/PR1135/G, TNAL; Crick, Orwell, pp. 483–4. 14 Ibid.; Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (London, 1991), p. 468. 15 On this highly contentious debate see Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Post-War Europe (New York, 1989), pp. 15–16; Crick, Orwell, p. 17; Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London, 2003), pp. 57–64; Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory (London, 2004), pp. 111–21; Scott Lucas, The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (London, 2004), pp. 2–3, 33, 52. 16 Roderick Parkes to Ralph Murray, 25 October 1950, and minutes by Murray and Leslie Sheridan, 7 and 10 November 1950, FO1110/319/PR48/82/G, TNAL. 17 Ralph Murray circular to overseas information oﬃcers, 11 December 1950, FO1110/365/PR127/9, TNAL; FO1110/392/PR32/14/51/G and FO1110/ 392/PR32/89/G, TNAL, for details of the cartoon strip’s production and distribution in 1951; Adam Watson’s report on IRD’s work and importance attached to cartoons as propaganda, 15 February 1950, FO 1110/359/ PR110/5/G, TNAL.

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18 IRD circular, 25 April 1951, FO1110/392/PR34/41/51, TNAL. 19 Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared – The Early Years of the CIA (New York, 1995), pp. 29–30; Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations (New York, 1977), pp. 149–54; John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London, 1988), pp. 198–202, 216–24. 20 Thomas, Best Men, pp. 32–3, 63; Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (London, 1975), p. 70; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 40–1. 21 Thomas, Best Men, p. 33. 22 Hunt, Undercover, p. 70; letter from Borden Mace, President of RD-DR Corporation during the making of Animal Farm, to author, 28 March 1998. 23 Ranelagh, Agency, pp. 218–20. 24 Hixson, Curtain, pp. 14–16; Report to the President by the National Security Council (NSC), 8 August 1951: ‘Status and Timing of Current US Programs for National Security’, FRUS, Vol. 1, 1951 (Washington, DC, 1980), pp. 144–5; ‘Study Prepared by the Department of State: The Information Program’, 8 August 1951, FRUS, Vol. 1, 1951 (Washington, DC, 1980), p. 925. 25 ‘Study Prepared by the Department of State: The Information Program’, 12 October 1951, FRUS, Vol. 1, 1951 (Washington, DC, 1980), p. 948. 26 Daily Film Renter, 28 November 1951; letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998. 27 Letter from Mace to author, 28 March 1998; contract for Animal Farm between RD-DR Corporation and Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films Ltd., 19 November 1951, Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London. Daniel Leab argues that the OPC used Marshall Plan counterpart funds to help finance projects like Animal Farm. These funds ostensibly paid for the running costs of the European Cooperation Administration, the body that administered the Marshall Plan. Daniel Leab, ‘The American Government and the Filming of Animal Farm in the 1950s’, Media History, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2006, pp. 133–55. 28 Thomas, Best Men, p. 33. 29 Martin J. Maloney to de Rochement, 3 January 1951, and Maloney to de Rochement, Borden Mace and Lothar Wolﬀ, 23 April 1951, de Rochement Collection, 5716, Box 46, AHCW; letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998. 30 Production records, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, Southampton Institute’s International Animation Archive, Southampton, UK (hereafter SIIARA). 31 Paul Wells, ‘Dustbins, Democracy and Defence: Halas and Batchelor and the Animated Film in Britain 1940–1947’, in Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds), War Culture: Social Change and the Changing Experience in World War Two (London, 1995), pp. 61–72; Denis Giﬀord, British Animated Films, 1895–1985 (London, 1987), pp. 117–31. 32 Wells, ‘Dustbins’, pp. 62–5; Elaine Burrows, ‘Live Action: A Brief History of British Animation’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays (London, 1986), pp. 272–85.

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33 Wells, ‘Dustbins’, pp. 70–1. One contemporary source noted that Chancellor of the Exchequer Staﬀord Cripps was so pleased with Robinson Charley, which explained Britain’s economic problems, that he showed it to Ambassador Averill Harriman, head of the ECA’s Paris headquarters, who took a copy to New York, where de Rochement saw it. Yorkshire Evening Post, 15 December 1951. 34 Central Oﬃce of Information Review: Documentary Films (London, 1948), p. 28. 35 Hemsing, ‘Marshall’; John Halas’s unpublished autobiography, pp. 18–19, Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London. 36 Karl Cohn, ‘Toontown’s Reds: HUAC’s Investigation of Alleged Communists in the Animation Industry’, Film History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1993, pp. 190–203. 37 John Halas’ unpublished autobiography, p. 19, Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London; production records, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA; author’s correspondence with Harold Whitaker, Stroudbased animator of Animal Farm, 25 February 1998. 38 Roger Manvell, The Animated Film: With Pictures from the Film ‘Animal Farm’ by Halas and Batchelor (London, 1954), p. 5. 39 Production records, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA; Manvell, Animated Film, pp. 5, 11. 40 Tabulation of Animal Farm characters, photographs of rough storyboard and synopsis, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA. 41 Contract for Animal Farm between RD-DR Corporation and Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films Ltd., 19 November 1951, Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London; letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998. 42 Notes on discussion of script changes, September and October 1951, and on changes made in dialogue and timing, September 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA. 43 John Halas’ unpublished autobiography, p. 18, Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London. 44 Coleman, Conspiracy, pp. 61, 77, 145–6; Warburg, Authors, pp. 154–7; author’s correspondence with Daniel Bell and Melvin J. Lasky, CCF members in the 1950s, September and November 1997; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 109–11. 45 Warburg, Authors, pp. 154–7; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 109–11, passim. 46 Letter from John Halas to Warburg, 12 November 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA. 47 Crick, Orwell, pp. 560, 567. Secker and Warburg published an illustrated edition of Animal Farm based on the film in 1954 48 Daily Film Renter, 28 November 1951. 49 De Rochement’s letter to Halas and Batchelor, 1 December 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA. 50 Directive by the President to the Secretary of State (Acheson), Secretary of Defence (Marshall) and Director of Central Intelligence (Smith), 4 April 1951, FRUS, Vol. 1, 1951 (Washington, DC, 1980), pp. 58–60. The PSB was disbanded in 1953.

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51 Department of State Bulletin, 18 February 1952; Study prepared by the Department of State, 12 October 1951 – ‘The Information Program’, and memorandum to the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Aﬀairs (Barrett), 13 November 1951, FRUS, Vol. 1, 1951 (Washington, DC, 1980), pp. 948, 957–9. 52 Turner Shelton, Motion Picture Service, to Cecil B. DeMille, 11 May 1953, cited in Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 289. 53 Memorandum on impact of United States commercial films abroad sent by Irwin to Craig, 13 October 1952, United States Declassified Document Reference System (Washington, DC, 1976–96) (hereafter DDRS) 1989, 562; memorandum from John Sherman to PSB director concerning Capra movie idea, 7 September 1951, DDRS 1996, 514; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 289–90. For the support given by the CIA in this period to Abstract Expressionism, the American avantgarde, in order to enhance American cultural prestige abroad, see Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005). 54 Wallace Carroll during this period was acting assistant director of the PSB’s Oﬃce of Plans and Policy, and executive news editor of the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Journal and Sentinel. Carroll believed that it was the PSB’s ‘manifest destiny’ to ignite a campaign whose ultimate objective was the ‘rollback of Soviet power’. For this and the PSB’s priorities in early 1952 see Lucas, ‘Campaigns of Truth’, pp. 279–302; Hixson, Curtain, pp. 18–19; Carroll’s suggestions of how to make PSB more eﬀective, 12 September 1951, DDRS 1991, 1683; Carroll’s procedures for PSB panels, 22 January 1952, DDRS 1992, 1691. On the links between Carroll, the CIA and the American press during the 1940s and 1950s see Elke Von Cassel, ‘In Search of a Clear and Overarching American Policy: The Reporter Magazine (1949–1968), the US Government and the Cold War’, in Laville and Wilford (eds), Citizen Groups, pp. 116–40. 55 Richard Hirsch, PSB, to Tracy Barnes, ‘Comment on “Animal Farm” script’, 23 January 1952, PSB Index Files 062.2., Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. 56 Lucas, ‘Campaigns of Truth’, p. 290. 57 This emphasis on the simplicity of the propaganda message also surfaced in January 1952 during the PSB’s consideration of an enhanced role for literature as an anti-communist weapon. Cleverly distributed, clearly written and eﬀectively subsidised, ‘a literature of counter-ideology’ would spell out ‘the lie inherent in Soviet propaganda’. Godel to Barnes, 14 January 1952, DDRS 1991, 1113. 58 Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 132–3. Tracy Barnes, PSB deputy director, had formerly been on the OPC payroll and was a personal friend of Frank Wisner’s from his days as a Wall Street lawyer in the 1930s. See Thomas, Best Men, pp. 83–4. 59 George Orwell, Animal Farm (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 88. 60 Ibid., p. 120. 61 Patrick Murray, Companion to Animal Farm (Dublin, 1985), p. 39; Crick, Orwell, p. 451.

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62 Manvell, Animated Film, p. 19; script change discussions, March and November 1952, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA; author’s correspondence with Vivian Halas, the filmmakers’ daughter, February 1998. 63 Northern Echo, 12 January 1955; The Times, 17 March 1955. 64 Letter from Borden Mace to author, 28 March 1998. 65 John Halas’ unpublished autobiography, section dated 29 April 1994, Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London. 66 Kinematograph Weekly, 13 January 1955. 67 Commentary, February 1955, p. 157; Encounter, March 1955, pp. 35–7. 68 New York Daily News, cited in Yorkshire Evening Post, 10 January 1955; Catholic Herald, cited in Films and Filming, March 1955. 69 Tablet, 22 January 1955. 70 Glasgow Herald, 12 January 1955. 71 The Times, 11 February 1955. 72 Universe, 21 January 1955. 73 Sol Stein, ACCF executive director, letter to Paris Theater manager, 5 January 1955; Stein memorandum concerning discount coupons for Animal Farm, 11 January 1955; Murray Baron circular to trade unions, 17 January 1955; Borden Mace letter to Stein concerning MGM distribution, 14 January 1955: Box 8, folder 2, ACCF archives, Tamiment Library, New York University (hereafter TLNYU). 74 H. A. H. Cortazzi to Douglas Williams, 28 January 1955, FO 1110/740/ PR124/3/G, TNAL; Information Section Saigon Embassy to Information Policy Department, 9 March 1955, FO 1110/740/PR124/6/G, TNAL. 75 Whitaker’s letter to author, 25 February 1998. 76 Author’s interview with Whitaker, 7 April 1998; Rodden, Literary Reputation, p. 445. 77 John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (London, 1979), p. 99. 78 International newspaper cuttings scrapbook, Animal Farm archive, Halas and Batchelor Collection, SIIARA. 79 Le Figaro, 20 January 1955. 80 Hunt, Undercover, p. 70; Hixson, Curtain, pp. 87–119. 81 Rodden, Literary Reputation, pp. 382–98. 82 Warburg, Authors, pp. 114–15. 83 Bradbury, British Novel, p. 284; Lewis, Orwell, p. 112. 84 Crick, Orwell, pp. 563–70, 603–4; Shelden, Orwell, pp. 470–4. 85 Nineteen Eighty-Four had evolved in Orwell’s mind over many years but was written principally between late 1947 and spring 1949. 86 Rodden, Literary Reputation, pp. 202, 210–11; Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington, KY, 2000), pp. 12–13, 67; Lucas, Freedom’s War, pp. 100–4, 253–5. Garton Ash in Davison (ed.), Orwell and Politics, pp. xi–xii; Dan Jacobsen, ‘The Invention of “Orwell” ’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 August 1998, p. 3. 87 Luce wielded his publications empire as a powerful anti-Soviet instrument in the Cold War. His contacts in oﬃcialdom were legion, and included the post-war

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Hollywood’s Cold War vice-president of Time, Inc., C. D. Jackson, who in early 1953 had been appointed Special Assistant for psychological operations by Eisenhower. See Richard Herzstein, Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (New York, 1994). Donald McCormick, Approaching 1984 (London, 1980), pp. 12–13; Crick, Orwell, pp. 564–5, 568. Minute by IRD’s Editorial Adviser, 21 February 1955, FO1110/738/PR121/ 68/G, TNAL; Rodden, Literary Reputation, p. 434. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain (London, 1997), pp. 99, 102. Such was the relationship between NBC executives and the government in the 1950s that programmes such as Battle Report – Washington, a news series covering the Korean War, were produced in the White House. Bernhard, Television News, pp. 48, 115–31, 155–77. Rodden, Literary Reputation, p. 274. Ibid. Television Drama 1984 (1954), File 1, T5/362/1, BBC Written Archive Centre, Reading, UK (hereafter BBC WAC); Manchester Guardian, 14 December 1954. BBC Radio had adapted Animal Farm in 1947 and 1952, and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1950. Television Drama 1984 (1954), File 2, BBC WAC T5/362/2; Television Programmes, 1953–4, Press Cuttings P6555, Book 14a, BBC WAC; Transcript of Panorama, 15 December 1954, BBC WAC; Rodden, Literary Reputation, pp. 274–80. Lashmar and Oliver, Propaganda, pp. 57–65. Daily Express, 14 December 1954, in Television Programmes, 1953–4, Press Cuttings P6555, Book 14a, BBC WAC. The Times, 16 December 1954; New Statesman, 18 December, 1954: Television Programmes, 1953–4, Press Cuttings P6555, Book 14a, BBC WAC; Isaac Deutscher, ‘1984 – Mysticism of Cruelty’, reprinted in his Heretics and Renegades, and Other Essays (London, 1955), p. 35. See USIA report on film propaganda, 19 January 1954, DDRS 1986, 893; Daily Film Renter, 23 December 1954; Daily Mail, 22 December 1954; News Chronicle, 4 July 1955; Daily Herald, 5 August 1955; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 288–9, 295. The USIA’s Motion Picture Service is analysed in greater detail in Chapter 6. Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition, pp. 330–1, 335, 337–8. Sunday Citizen, 14 October 1962. Coleman, Conspiracy, pp. 48–9, 159–70; Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), pp. 268–78; Michael Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (London, 1973), pp. 83–101; Stein’s letter to Sidney Kingsley, 28 March 1955, Box 8, folder 8, ACCF archives, TLNYU. Darkness at Noon, 1954–5, Box 8, folder 8; Nightmare in Red, 1956, Box 8, folder 19; The Wages of Fear, 1955, Box 14, folder 8: ACCF archives, TLNYU.

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104 Coleman, Conspiracy, pp. 71–2; Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1987), pp. 423–31. 105 Wald, Intellectuals, pp. 268–71; William O’Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism – Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New York, 1982), pp. 305–6; Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and their World (Oxford, 1986), pp. 259–73, 371. Stein was ACCF executive director 1953–6, and a member of the Executive Committee of American Friends of Captive Nations. From 1951 to 1953 he had acted as an ideological adviser to the VOA in the US State Department. 106 Stein’s letter to Rathvon, 31 January 1955, Box 4, folder 11, ACCF archives, TLNYU; Stein’s correspondence with author, 28 April 1998. 107 Daily Herald, 5 August 1955; Shelden, Orwell, p. 468; Michael Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography (London, 1983), pp. 135–43. 108 1984 micro-jacket, BFIL. 109 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 150ﬀ. 110 For the links between Nineteen Eighty-Four and James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), which prophesied a tripartite division of the world, each unit ruled by a self-elected oligarchy, see Crick, Orwell, pp. 494, 566; Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945–1960 (London, 1981), p. 43. 111 Stein’s letter to Rathvon, 31 January 1955, Box 4, folder 11, ACCF archives, TLNYU. 112 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 204, 211. 113 Ibid., p. 59; Shelden, Orwell, pp. 476–8. 114 Stein’s letter to Rathvon, 31 January 1955, Box 4, folder 11, ACCF archives, TLNYU. Stein recommended that the film end with Winston Smith dreaming of other rebellious lovers and, counting his fingers, knowing that two plus two still made four despite O’Brien’s torturing. 115 The ending of the film released in the United States largely corresponded with Orwell’s book, with Winston and Julia estranged and the two of them expressing their love for Big Brother. A final, omniscient voice-over warns the viewer of the dangers of totalitarianism, in eﬀect tacking on an aﬃrmative didactic message. Owing to the lack of production records it is not entirely clear why two endings with diﬀerent messages were made. It seems that the BBC flap prompted Columbia Pictures, the distributors, to shoot two endings, one faithful to the novel and the other more hopeful. The latter was also intended for the American market but was switched despite the director’s protests. For a (positive) review of the American version see New York Times, 1 October 1956. For the decisions on the two endings see The Times, 10 March 1957, p. 7. 116 Daily Mail, 27 February 1956. 117 Crick, Orwell, pp. 551, 554. On Blair’s reaction see Daily Mail, 22 December 1954 and 1 March 1956; Sight and Sound, Vol. 53, No. 2, Spring 1984. 118 Daily Telegraph, 2 March 1956; Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1956. 119 Sight and Sound, Vol. 25, No. 4, Spring 1956; The Times, 1 March 1956; Sight and Sound, Vol. 27, No. 6, Autumn 1958.

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120 Daily Telegraph, 2 March 1956. 121 News Chronicle, 2 March 1956; Star, 2 March 1956; Sunday Times, 4 March 1956; Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1956. 122 Sunday Express, 4 March 1956. 123 Daily Herald, 2 March 1956; Daily Mail, 1 March 1956. 124 Sight and Sound, Vol. 53, No. 2, Spring 1984; New Statesman, 10 March 1956. 125 The Times, 15 November 1983. 126 George Orwell, ‘Toward European Unity’, Partisan Review, July–August 1947, reproduced in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945–50 (London, 1968), pp. 370–6. 127 W. J. West (ed.), Orwell: The War Commentaries (London, 1985). 128 Rodden, Literary Reputation, p.16.

CHAPTER 4

Of gods and moguls

The whole world is torn by a great political issue – Freedom or Slavery, which means Americanism or Totalitarianism. Ayn Rand, Screen Guide for Americans (Beverly Hills, CA, 1950), p. 2

It is the near future. Chris Cronyn, a Californian scientist (played by Peter Graves), claims to have established contact with Mars using a hydrogenpowered radio transmitter. The scientist who originally invented the transmitter, Nazi criminal Franz Calder (Herbert Berghof), is then sprung from jail by the Russians and from a laboratory hidden in the Andes begins to spy on the American’s communications. When news spreads that the aliens have confirmed their existence to Cronyn by completing the mathematical formula for pi, Mars mania breaks out across the world. When it is subsequently revealed that the Martians run a perfect economy using only atomic energy, pandemonium ensues. The West’s mining and oil industries fold, banks close, and Moscow gloats over the imminent collapse of capitalism. On the brink of chaos, the Earth learns that Mars is also a Christian-like society, ruled by a ‘Supreme Leader’ whose teachings parallel those of the Sermon on the Mount. This revelation prompts a religious revival on Earth and a new revolution in Russia, where pious peasants inspired by Voice of America broadcasts throw out the communists and crown an elderly patriarch as their new ruler. The story ends on a bittersweet note. After a fight, Chris, his wife and Calder are killed in a laboratory explosion. Despite this, the American President (Willis Bouchey, made up to resemble Dwight D. Eisenhower) is able to announce that the faith of the world has been saved, and that peace now reigns. Few films capture the personal and political paranoia so often associated with McCarthyite Hollywood better than Harry Horner’s Red Planet Mars, described by one British critic at the time of its opening in 1952 as ‘a grotesque, almost insane fantasy, told in deadly earnest’.1 Even fewer films threw all their Cold War eggs – anti-communism, ambivalence towards science, terrestrial and extraterrestrial ‘alienation’, and the power of religion – into a single, preposterous basket. Yet Red Planet Mars was only one of many ways in which filmmakers on both sides of the Iron Curtain linked religion

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The Cold War – a conflict without bounds: publicity poster for Red Planet Mars (1952). United Artists/The Kobal Collection.

with domestic and international politics in the 1950s. In September 1955, the esteemed critic Catherine de la Roche drew attention to the frequently recurring and interacting themes of religion, war and anti-communism in British and American films of the period. In the British journal Films and Filming, she argued: This can hardly be coincidental. Many people, including some in Hollywood, believe that the Cold War is fundamentally a conflict between Christianity and atheism and that religion is therefore a strong weapon against Communism. Whether the pictures dealing with these three subjects are deliberate propaganda or not, they belong to the same, easily recognisable, pattern of ideas. . . . The best propaganda, of course, is indirect, hardly noticeable. How many of us, I wonder, have not been taken in by any of it?2

Taking de la Roche’s speculations as a cue, this chapter examines Hollywood’s remarkable appetite for religious storylines in the 1950s within two distinct but interlocking contexts: the spiritual revival that swept the United States during that decade, and Washington’s attempts to project the Cold War as a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil. America’s Cold War state–film network was at the peak of its powers in the 1950s, and included some of the biggest movie moguls in history. Legendary producer-director

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Cecil B. DeMille stood at the very hub of the network, and, as we shall see, tried harder than arguably any other filmmaker to ‘sanctify’ liberal capitalism, most notably through blockbusters like The Ten Commandments (1956). What this biblical epic and the other films analysed below help to illustrate is the more constructive and ideologically charged dimension of the Unites States’ Cold War propaganda campaign. During the 1950s and beyond, many filmmakers and politicians recognised the need to do more than just bang the anticommunist drum via movies like Walk East on Beacon or present the West as a consumers’ paradise through pictures like Ninotchka. America’s ‘crusade for freedom’ – the central trope of US Cold War rhetoric – meant projecting democracy’s spiritual as well as material values, both to doubters at home and to the uninitiated overseas. However, overt preaching had to be avoided if possible, lest it make America appear absolutist. Allegorical techniques were one way of avoiding this, by encouraging audiences to imbibe the message subconsciously. RELIGION, POLITICS AND COLD WAR PROPAGANDA There is no clear way to arrive at a precise assessment of the role of religion in the Cold War. It seems safe to conclude that most people, especially in the West, viewed the conflict in diplomatic and political terms. Yet religion was not an insignificant determinant, especially for those who were tempted to see the battle between communism and capitalism as a latter-day morality play, and in those countries, like Pope John Paul II’s Poland, where the traditional authority of the church clashed with the enhanced powers of a reconfigured state.3 One of the main planks of Bolshevik propaganda after October 1917 was its campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church, in line with MarxistLeninist doctrine that religion was a product of social oppression and economic exploitation. During the 1920s Russian communists widely disseminated what they termed ‘scientific-educational’ propaganda, including vicious anti-clerical literature and films designed to ‘liberate the toiling masses from religious prejudices’ and rid the state of one of the chief rivals to its allembracing ideology. Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927), for example, commissioned by the Soviet government to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, showed the Orthodox Church and its followers to be primitive and corrupt.4 During Stalin’s reign these anti-clerical attacks gathered pace, especially during the great purges of 1936–9, buttressed by the rituals and ceremonials of a ‘cult of leadership’ which were partially designed to appeal to the spiritual traditions of many Russian people.5 With the onset of a fully fledged Cold War in the late 1940s, Soviet filmmakers were ordered to place a heightened emphasis on the moral superiority

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of the communist system, rather than simply focusing on its economic and political advantages. This heralded a renewed assault on Russia’s alternative spiritual forces, notably the church. Films such as Conspiracy of the Doomed (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1950) and Dawn over the Neman (A. Faintsimmer, 1953) portrayed church dignitaries as American-backed Vatican spies prepared to go to any lengths to prevent ‘progress’, from poisoning collective farm crops to coercing Balkan nations into joining the Marshall Plan.6 Oﬃcial and unoﬃcial propagandists in the West were equally quick to play the religious card in the early years of the cultural Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolsheviks’ rise to power, sections of the American and British press denounced communists as murderous blasphemers, while theatrical productions such as R. Grahame’s The Bolshevik Peril, staged in London in 1919, warned of the spiritual and sexual depravity inherent in communist rule.7 After 1945, the persecution of religion under ‘godless communism’ became one of the most emotive themes of Cold War discourse in the United States. Many American policy-makers assumed a missionary mentality, seeing the Soviet Union as not just an enemy but something akin to the anti-Christ.8 In 1950, John Foster Dulles, a Presbyterian minister’s son and US Secretary of State 1953–9, decried the ‘materialistic’ bent of American society, and called instead for a ‘righteous and dynamic faith’ in the nation’s fight against communism. Three years later, his brother Allen, Director of the CIA between 1953 and 1961, explained to the Council on Foreign Relations the need for a new ‘Magna Carta of Freedom’ around which the West could rally. To many conservative Protestants and Catholics in the United States, Americans were in eﬀect the chosen people, those who believed in the holy trinity of God, Democracy and Freedom. Their ‘way of life’ was the model for all others, and was currently threatened, they believed, by the kingdom of hell on earth: what Ronald Reagan would later call the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union. ‘It is only through religion that we can lick this thing called Communism’, intoned Eisenhower in 1953, whose inaugural parade that year was led by a ‘float for God’.9 In line with this belief that the Cold War was at root a moral contest, the State Department, FBI, CIA and USIA took every opportunity to contrast the West and its ‘gospel’ of religious tolerance with the ‘fanatic faith’ of those in the East led by their ‘pseudo-Gods’ in the Kremlin. Voice of America (VOA), the US government’s oﬃcial broadcasting service, together with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, both secretly funded by the CIA, consistently sought to mobilise the great spiritual resources that were still thought to exist behind the Iron Curtain despite Moscow’s clampdown on the churches in Eastern and Central Europe.10 Such language and action reaﬃrmed a Manichean perspective on the Cold War for many Christian activists in the

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United States, who believed that the fight to protect theological freedom in the East would in turn help to revitalise democracy’s own moral and spiritual values. All of this tied in with the remarkable resurgence of organised religion in the United States in the early 1950s, a phenomenon which resulted in an enhanced political role for Christian pressure groups who defined Americanism in religious terms. In 1954, Congress created a Prayer Room for its members, and America became a nation – according to its newly modified Pledge of Allegiance – ‘under God’. In 1956, the House of Representatives and Senate unanimously made ‘In God We Trust’ the national motto, and in 1957 church attendance in the US reached an all-time high. At a time when there was a steady attrition of religious belief in many other countries, one sociologist, Will Herberg, remarked in 1960 that religion probably played a greater role in the United States than in any other modern industrial state. Amidst these fears and hopes, in American popular culture religion became discursively associated with ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’ and ‘Western civilisation’, and held in sharp contradistinction to the amalgam of ‘atheism, barbarism and totalitarianism’ that was communism.11 As religion tightened its grip on Cold War America, so the White House sharpened the nation’s propaganda tools. During the Truman presidency, as befits a nation going to war, Washington had focused predominantly on negative, scare-mongering, anti-communist propaganda. However, on coming to oﬃce in 1953 Eisenhower told publicity oﬃcials that he was ‘tired of just plain indictments of the Soviet regime’, and ordered them to go on a charm oﬀensive instead to accentuate the West’s moral, political and economic strong points. In tandem with this more creative philosophy and his belief that the United States could boast ‘the finest civilisation the world has known’, Eisenhower did more than any other chief executive before or since to centralise and expand the US’s capability to wage war at the psychological level.12 Three new propaganda mechanisms were established. Overseas propaganda operations were centralised in the USIA; an Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) injected psychological considerations into the formulation of national security policies; and a presidential adviser, C. D. Jackson, a former OWI operative and vice-president of Time, Inc., was appointed to oversee the US propaganda eﬀort and to generate new ideas for psychological warfare initiatives.13 Oﬃcials quickly tied religion to Eisenhower’s drive for a more positive, constructive propaganda strategy. The OCB established a subcommittee on the ‘religious factor’ and enlisted religious leaders and organisations to emphasise the ‘spiritual roots of freedom’. The USIA created an Oﬃce of Religious Information instituting publications and radio programmes that presented the US overseas as a land of spiritual and religious vitality, and

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where peoples of diverse religious beliefs lived in peace with complete freedom of worship.14 This was part of a wider strategy of spreading the ideology of ‘freedom’, either overtly by the USIA, or, in order to avoid allegations of oﬃcial indoctrination, by working through private bodies using unattributable materials.15 Film was assigned a central role in this new thinking. Immediate eﬀorts were made to ‘influence’ commercial movie production ‘in order to increase its contribution to the national information programme’. Renewed energy was also spent on inspiring or assisting in the production of propaganda films ‘unattributably’ overseas.16 Within a year, C. D. Jackson could list an impressive number of government ‘friends’ in Hollywood, including Spyros P. Skouras and Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox; Nicholas Schenck and Dore Schary at MGM; Barney Balaban and Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount; Harry and Jack Warner; James B. Grainger, president of RKO; Universal’s president, Milton Rackmail; Columbia Pictures President Harry Cohn; Herbert Yates at Republic; Walt and Roy Disney; and Eric Johnston of the Motion Picture Association of America.17 By the end of the 1950s, the CIA had grown adept at secretly financing the distribution of foreign-made films in regions of the world considered vulnerable to communism. One project involved the agency entering into partnership with the Family Rosary Crusade, a worldwide movement led by the famous Irish-American priest Father Patrick Peyton, in order to disseminate Spanish-made films extolling the virtues of family prayer throughout Latin America.18 At the same time as this, the USIA and CIA increased oﬃcial measures to correct the ‘distorted’ picture that Hollywood movies often gave of American life to overseas audiences. Like Eisenhower, Luigi Luraschi, the CIA’s conduit at Paramount, took the view that the exporting of positive ‘American values’ was every bit as important as explicitly anti-communist messages, and censored production material accordingly. Luraschi’s authority to impede the development of dubious, particularly left-wing, projects was underpinned by his militant Catholicism. In 1953, Eric Johnston introduced further checks on film content via a five-point programme that included strengthening MPAA contact with the State Department and foreign embassies and ministries in order to ensure that scripts handled foreign characters and situations with greater understanding.19 A 1960 report on US information activities commissioned by Eisenhower noted that the USIA maintained a liaison with Hollywood ‘to reduce the negative impact abroad of US commercial films and to improve their positive impact’. This ‘delicate and highly confidential’ relationship with ‘the more responsible producers and producing organizations’, the report concluded, enabled the USIA ‘to exercise influence on almost all elements of the theatrical motion picture industry’.20

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MISSIONARIES, MARTYRS AND FIGHTER PILOTS Religious issues appeared in an unprecedented variety of guises and genres in American movies in the late forties and fifties. To attribute this entirely to the Cold War or to government manipulation of the film industry would be fallacious. After all, Hollywood had been making money out of religion for decades,21 and the revival of religious consciousness after 1945 oﬀered further opportunities for commercial exploitation. That said, it is striking just how many films blended spiritual and geopolitical concerns during this period. Many of these productions at the very least provided a religious framework for contemporary political and social matters. Some explicitly encouraged filmgoers to see the Cold War as a conflict in which capitalism, anti-communism and Christianity were synonymous, and in which neutral bystanders could be construed as opponents of the West’s divinely ordained mission. As we have already seen, movies like Leo McCarey’s My Son John, released at the height of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, stressed communism’s utter incompatibility with Christian family virtues, and were littered with crude religious symbolism. Other dramas like William Wellman’s The Next Voice You Hear (1950), in which God appeals on the radio to suburban America to count its middle-class blessings, interlinked Christianity, the family and consumerism.22 Heroic characters in European-set espionage thrillers would often hold strong (though not overpowering) religious beliefs. In Nunnally Johnson’s Night People (1954), for example, a kidnapping yarn set in West Berlin, the reminiscences of Gregory Peck’s US army oﬃcer, Colonel Steve Van Dyke, about his home-town church clearly identify him as a Catholic.23 Science-fiction fantasies like the aforementioned Red Planet Mars endorsed Christianity as both the embodiment of American values and the set of beliefs best suited for defeating communism. Holy men (and women, occasionally) featured in a plethora of cinematic settings, aﬃrming the church’s protective role either in the Cold War specifically or in Western society more generally. Recanting American subversives would often turn to priests for help, especially if they were doubly guilty of rejecting the church in favour of the communists, like Mollie O’Flaherty (Barbra Fuller) in Republic’s The Red Menace (1949).24 In Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), the moral support given by Karl Malden’s quintessential liberal Catholic priest, Father Barry, to the trade-union informant Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) had the eﬀect, according to one historian, of converting a Judas figure into a symbol of Christ.25 The butch William Holden starred as an unlikely priest in Leo McCarey’s Satan Never Sleeps (1961), a tale of missionary heroism during the Chinese Civil War. Meanwhile, Second World War adventure movies like John Huston’s Heaven Knows Mr Allison

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(1957), in which Deborah Kerr’s nun and Robert Mitchum’s marine outwit the Japanese invaders of a small Pacific island, reminded viewers of the recent victory Christianity and democracy had enjoyed over fascism.26 There were also plenty of real-life characters whose activities Hollywood deemed worthy of screen treatment during this period. Financed by the Lutheran churches of Germany and the United States, Irving Pichel’s dramatic biopic Martin Luther (1953) switched the focus from the Catholics’ to the Protestants’ historic role as the guardians of Western civilisation. The film was a critical and commercial success worldwide.27 Henry Koster’s dreary yet equally popular A Man Called Peter (1955) recounted the life of Peter Marshall (played by Richard Todd), a Scottish clergyman who became chaplain to the US Senate.28 Douglas Sirk’s Battle Hymn (1957) had a clearer Cold War focus, and centred on the story of Colonel Dean Hess (Rock Hudson), a pastorturned-fighter pilot who had rescued a large number of Korean War orphans.29 Cinema accorded a special privilege to Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty, the post-war Catholic Primate of Hungary, who was the subject of two movies and a television drama. Mindszenty had been arrested in December 1948 as part of the Stalinist regime’s policy of subjugating the church to the state. Charged with treason and currency oﬀences, he ‘confessed’ all at his dramatic trial in February 1949 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Media coverage of the trial, actively promoted by oﬃcial propagandists in Washington and London, provided many in the West with compelling images of communist injustice and Catholic suﬀering, and helped establish Mindszenty as the model of clerical ‘martyrdom’ in the United States in the 1950s.30 Felix Feist’s ‘B’ movie, Guilty of Treason (1950), dealt with the Mindszenty case by focusing on the gruesome torturing to death of a Hungarian music teacher (played by Bonita Granville, herself a victim of the Hungarian communist regime) who refuses to let her class sign petitions for the cardinal’s arrest, and attributed Mindszenty’s cardinal’s trial confession to hypnosis.31 Peter Glenville’s The Prisoner (1955) was a more ambitious and commercially successful project. Financed by Columbia but made in Britain with a predominantly English cast, it attracted considerable interest on both sides of the Atlantic, not least because playing Mindszenty inspired the famous actor Alec Guinness to convert to Catholicism. The Prisoner accused the communists of having ‘brainwashed’ Mindszenty, thereby helping to confirm the growing Western perception of communism as an insidious form of mind control that induced ‘robot-like enslavement’.32 By the time The Prisoner appeared, the United States and Western Europe were in fact experiencing something akin to a full-scale ‘brainwashing scare’. This phenomenon was linked partly to the highly publicised East European

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God versus evil: in a thinly veiled re-enactment of the 1949 Mindszenty show trial, interrogator and ‘brainwasher’ (Jack Hawkins, centre) humiliates the cardinal (Alec Guinness) before the ‘people’s court’. The Prisoner (1955). Columbia Pictures/Stills, Posters and Designs Division of the British Film Institute.

show trials of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which senior communists admitted ludicrous crimes, and partly to the ‘change’ that some Western POWs underwent at the hands of their communist captors during the Korean War. In response to these and other events, the CIA helped to produce dozens of books and articles on what Allen Dulles called ‘brain warfare’, with the intention of demonising the ‘Communist conspiracy’ and warning of a monolithic aggressor that targeted the very centre of the free self. Among the movies that played on the Korean War brainwashing theme in the mid-1950s were Lewis Seiler’s The Bamboo Prison (1955), which also incorporated an American communist disguised as a POW camp’s chaplain (and hence was banned in several US states). Two others, Arnold Laven’s The Rack (1956) and John Frankenheimer’s highly acclaimed, complex conspiracy thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which appeared a little later, in 1962, appeared to support writer Philip Wylie’s influential notion of ‘Momism’ – the idea that America had opened the door to communism by raising a generation of eﬀeminised young men who were excessively attached to their mothers.

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These men were thought to have profound psychological weaknesses, which political brainwashers exploited.33 Not everything on screen was sweetness and seeing the light. The power of conservative groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency was waning in the 1950s, as signalled by the US Supreme Court’s declaration in 1952, centred on Roberto Rossellini’s Italian-made The Miracle (1948), that it was unconstitutional for government bodies to impose religious orthodoxies on film or any other art.34 Yet the Legion’s well-established authority in Hollywood, and the fact that one of Joseph Breen’s two key ‘deputies’ at the PCA, Jack Vizzard, was a devout Catholic, meant it was still very diﬃcult to make films that challenged traditional Christian values during the decade.35 A few films oﬀering criticisms of religious excess did squeeze past the censors, but even these still asserted the presence of religion. Those movies that juxtaposed religion and science are a case in point. Nuclear weapons developments went hand in hand with Christian evangelism in this period, particularly in the United States, as fears of thermonuclear destruction fuelled apocalyptic predictions from well-known evangelical preachers like Billy Graham, who called on their congregations to make their peace with God before it was too late.36 Films played a significant part in mediating these emotions, combining science-fiction images that depicted The End of the World as Nigh with others which provided glimpses of The Meaning of Life and Life After Death. In some of these films, religion might yield to science, as in Byron Haskins’ Conquest of Space (1955), which depicted a soldier hero who deteriorates into a religious fanatic blindly opposed to rocket research. On other occasions, religion could be used to chastise science: in Kurt Neumann’s The Fly (1958), the Faustian mad scientist is warned not to interfere with God’s work. By portraying scientists as troublesome idealists or villainous obstructionists of the state, rather than the progressive saviours of Mankind, the majority of images helped act as a counter to those who argued that science had rendered Christianity superfluous.37 MOBILISING THE PAST While some movies looked rather uncertainly into the future, others turned to the past. Prior to the Cold War, Hollywood filmmakers had a long tradition of using history for political purposes. Some of the most prestigious propaganda films of the Second World War, for example, had mythologised Great War heroes in order to cast a positive light on the conflict against fascism, among them Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941) and Henry King’s Wilson (1944).38 During the 1950s, American filmmakers saw history as an opportunity to advance or critique contemporary political concerns on an unprecedented

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scale.39 Audiences were inundated with thinly and thickly camouflaged messages about the Cold War carried in movies set in the near or distant past. A handful of Westerns featuring evil land-grabbers, among them George Stevens’ Shane (1953) and Joseph H. Lewis’ Terror in a Texan Town (1958), reflected their writers’ left-wing views.40 The revival of Indian War Westerns during this era, however, should be seen in a conservative light, with the conflict between the pagan ‘red skins’ and God-fearing whites standing in for the ideological clash between East and West – with one key diﬀerence: ‘civilised’ American military skill and political judgement prevailed virtually every time on screen, compensating perhaps for the frustrations of the real-life Cold War stand-oﬀ.41 Walt Disney’s films reverberated with tried-and-true Americanism even more than usual in this period. Having declared in 1947 that Hollywood’s communists ought to be ‘smoked out’, Disney, an FBI informant, proclaimed a year later that the time was ripe to ‘renew acquaintance with the American breed of robust, cheerful, energetic, and representative folk heroes’. During the 1950s, the basic tropes of religion, work, individualism, progress and patriotism formed the backbone of Disney’s stories, which were often set in the past, and in which the protagonists confronted and overcame enemies to their society. In some films, like Davy Crockett (1955), the heroes were unmistakably American, while in others, like The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), they personified America’s idealised democratic spirit.42 Religion, history and the Cold War came together most concertedly in one of the defining genres of the era – the biblical saga. A succession of films set against the backdrop of pyramids and Old Testament temples – Samson and Delilah (1949), The Prodigal (1955), The Ten Commandments (1956) – or New Testament Rome and Jerusalem – Quo Vadis (1951), Salome (1953), The Robe (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) – made huge profits in the 1950s, despite being among the most expensive films ever made.43 This cycle of film epics, the first since the silent era, principally relates to Hollywood’s need to compete with television. By oﬀering more extravagant ‘widescreen’ entertainment than television could aﬀord, the major studios hoped they could reclaim dwindling domestic audiences and maximise their pre-eminent strengths as production-distribution companies in the increasingly important international market. Producers also sought to increase income by appealing to the public’s perceived craving for sexuality on screen and by capitalising on the fact that bare flesh was, ironically perhaps, often more permissible in biblical pageants than in modern settings.44 Recently, however, commentators have suggested ways in which these biblical epics might have given scriptural authority to the ideology of America’s Cold War. Maria Wyke points out, for instance, how the publicity surrounding MGM’s Quo Vadis depicted Nero as a Stalinist dictator defeated by the Christian faithful, and that the movie was banned in Eastern Europe for decades.45

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A close analysis of the biggest epic of them all, The Ten Commandments (1956), not only confirms Wyke’s general thesis; it also reveals some of the more subtle qualities that characterised the state–film network at the height of the Cold War. A PROPHET IN CELLULOID Few filmmakers better appreciated the importance of oﬀering audiences an entertaining set of images that extolled America’s spiritual values during the Cold War than Cecil B. DeMille. Fewer still had the talent, drive and power to put this into eﬀect. The son of a Protestant minister, and a Republican who equated Americanism with Christianity, Manifest Destiny, and the triumph of free enterprise, DeMille had entered the movie business in 1913. Working largely as a semi-independent director-producer at Paramount, for decades he had enthralled audiences with stories of consumption and upward mobility, rugged individualism and empire-building, sexual titillation and, above all, religious uplift.46 The success of films like King of Kings (1927) and The Crusades (1935) earned DeMille a reputation as the world’s leading exponent of religious film entertainment. On presenting a Bible to the mogul in the early 1950s, the evangelical preacher Billy Graham described DeMille as ‘a prophet in celluloid who has had the privilege of bringing some of the Word of God to more people throughout the world than any other man’.47 By this stage DeMille was into his seventies and in the twilight of a career encompassing more than sixty movies. Dubbed ‘Mr Motion Pictures’ in Hollywood and Washington, he had been showered with professional honours and was a household name; Paramount claimed his films had been seen by three billion people worldwide.48 DeMille was as busy oﬀ the studio lot as he was on it, especially politically during the early Cold War. In 1944, he co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. A year later, he established his own Foundation for Political Freedom to crusade for right-to-work laws and against communist infiltration in all walks of American life. The Foundation regularly sent information to California’s ‘little HUAC’, the Tenney Committee, and to the real HUAC in Washington. Many of the speeches DeMille delivered under the Foundation’s aegis, largely to businessmen and civic organisations, were infused with religious rhetoric. Thus he described the CPUSA as ‘the Party of Judas Iscariot’, proclaimed America’s ‘spiritual strength of freedom under God’, and called Hollywood’s movies ‘a teacher of our children and an ambassador to the entire world’.49 After attributing criticism of his Samson and Delilah in 1949 to a communist conspiracy, DeMille campaigned in vain in 1950 for a loyalty oath for fellow members of the Screen Directors Guild. In 1953, he and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, star of the

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television programme Life is Worth Living, were presented with awards for outstanding contributions to the American way of life by the strenuously anticommunist Freedom Foundation.50 DeMille’s political activities extended further, linking him directly with US foreign policy. He was one of the original board members of the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), the ostensibly private organisation established by the CIA in 1949 to mobilise dissent within the Soviet satellites. This brought him into contact with C. D. Jackson, the NCFE’s President and Eisenhower’s future psychological warfare expert, through whom DeMille urged the Committee to target Catholics behind the Iron Curtain.51 DeMille was also on the Board of the Crusade for Freedom, an initiative launched by Eisenhower in 1950 which campaigned for the expansion of Radio Free Europe.52 In 1952, DeMille turned down a request from the Second World War hero Admiral Chester Nimitz to become the chairman of the CFF’s Motion Picture Committee,53 but a year later agreed to become the USIA’s chief film consultant. DeMille’s main function at the USIA was to serve as liaison between the agency and Hollywood, and to enlist the cooperation of the film industry in making movies for training and informational purposes. Taking guidance from the former film sales executive who ran the USIA’s Motion Picture Division, Andrew Smith, DeMille advised the Motion Picture Industry Council on scripts and projects that would fit the government’s propaganda programme.54 Soon after his appointment to the USIA, in April 1953, DeMille met with C. D. Jackson, now working for the White House, to mull over their approach towards propaganda. The two agreed ‘that the most eﬀective use of American films is not to design an entire picture to cope with a certain problem, but rather to see to it that in a “normal” picture the right line, aside, inflection, eyebrow movement, is introduced’.55 A few months later, DeMille admonished his colleagues on the MPA Executive Committee for ignoring the more ‘positive’ side of their duties: ‘You cannot fight anything with nothing . . . We have two missions – to fight subversion in our own industry and to make the pictures we produce eﬀective carriers of the American ideals we are pledged to preserve’.56 In March 1954, the Director of the USIA, Theodore Streibert, told the Motion Picture Industry Council that his organisation ‘was most appreciative of the cooperation that is being extended to the Government . . . in this fight against Communism’. He added: ‘Cecil B. DeMille and other members of his Committee are serving us well’.57 ALLEGORICAL AUTHENTICITY Cecil B. DeMille’s single biggest contribution to Freedom’s Cause was an updating of his 1923 classic, The Ten Commandments. DeMille had been loosely

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planning a remake since the mid-1940s, but in 1953 was given the go-ahead for the project from Paramount’s chief executives, Barney Balaban and Y. Frank Freeman. As producer and director, DeMille was given a free hand in the making of the picture, the only stipulation being that he shoot it in the studio’s new widescreen process, VistaVision. Paramount appears to have set few if any financial constraints, judging that even at an initial costing of $6 million (during production it would balloon to a world record $13.5 million) the movie would still make a hefty profit.58 DeMille took from his archives Jeannie Macpherson’s scenario for the silent version, which had consisted of two parts: a biblical prologue about Moses’ later years, followed by a modern story about lovers violating the commandments. At first, DeMille inclined towards another two-parter, and one of his staﬀ suggested giving the second half an explicitly political twist by focusing on the devious forces aligned against an American city oﬃcial. However, this whole idea was soon discarded in favour of a conventional narrative telling Moses’ life story stretching from birth through slavery to Mount Sinai, which was thought to be more commercially appealing and would look less propagandistic. By concentrating entirely on Moses, who was honoured as a prophet by Jews, Christians and Muslims, DeMille also hoped to use the film overseas ‘as a means of welding together all faiths against the common enemy of all faiths, atheistic Communism’. He and assistant producer Henry Wilcoxon expected to repeat the success that Samson and Delilah had enjoyed in the Near East and Asia especially, two regions considered strategically and politically vital by Washington.59 Having decided to concentrate on delivering a history lesson, DeMille and his team of four scriptwriters – Aeneas Mackenzie, Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., Jack Gariss and Frederick Frank – did everything they could to make it as believable and as topical as possible. DeMille had always rejected films that focused on mass movements in favour of individuals: on those, as he put it, ‘in whose fortunes they [audiences] can feel personally involved’. The final script for The Ten Commandments, which ran to 308 pages, almost three times longer than the average Hollywood film, duly highlighted Moses’ heroic quest to liberate the Hebrews from Egyptian bondage, and was built around spectacular ‘historic’ moments such as the Exodus, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the Burning Bush.60 The Bible actually says nothing about the first thirty years of Moses’ life, but DeMille made a virtue of this by claiming to fill in the gap through scholarship. Led by Henry S. Noerdlinger, a team of researchers costing $300,000 spent months ‘reconstructing’ Moses’ movements and thoughts by consulting books, periodicals, museum directors and experts in Egyptian history. The results were published as a 200-page scholarly monograph in the same year the movie was released.61

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Naturally, selling the film as a historical document that told the definitive version of the Bible story also involved shooting at the Holy sites. In late 1954, DeMille and eighty-two assistant directors undertook three months’ advanced location filming in Egypt, whose king had recently been unseated in an oﬃcers’ revolution. This involved building the biggest movie set in history outside Cairo to house a 60-acre mock-up of the traditional ‘treasure city’ of Per-Rameses, and mobilising probably the greatest number of extras (25,000) ever used. Press releases focused on the pilgrimage made to the Sinai desert, where an elite group of cast and crew ‘followed the path taken by Moses as described in Exodus’, giving a sense that the making of the film was itself a religious experience.62 DeMille suﬀered a heart attack whilst filming the Egyptian sequences, and yet seems to have interpreted his survival as a sign of God’s support for the project. Despite a hectic schedule, he found time to conduct a spot of cultural diplomacy with the new Egyptian regime, which the State Department and CIA were then courting. In exchange for the loan of large cavalry formations for the chariot scenes, DeMille agreed to produce a film showing Egypt’s past and present glories. Wearing his oﬃcial consultant’s hat, DeMille also inspected the USIA facilities at the US embassy in Cairo, where he found ‘there was a touching eloquence in the tin cans of film, battered and dented from their many trips to and from Egyptian towns and villages, with their message of what America means’.63 Principal photography on The Ten Commandments began in California in March 1955 and ended in August. Totalling 112 days, this was reportedly the longest shooting schedule of all time. At Paramount DeMille discovered that the 35-acre lot was not big enough to contain one of his biggest set-piece scenes, the crossing of the Red Sea. He therefore demolished the intervening buildings, joined Paramount and RKO territory, constructed a 200,000 cubicfoot swimming pool, and installed hydraulic equipment that could deluge the area with 360,000 gallons of water in two minutes flat. This scene alone cost more than $1 million and took eighteen months to shoot.64 Paramount’s voluminous coﬀers also paid for a stellar cast assembled from the screen, stage, television and radio. America’s favourite gangster, Edward G. Robinson, who had recently been released from the blacklist, played the villainous Hebrew subversive, Dathan; Yul Brynner, fresh from the Broadway hit musical The King and I (adapted for the screen in 1956), and whose Eurasian features might have led some viewers to think of the current East–West divide, played Rameses II;65 and the Oscar-winning Anne Baxter played the scheming Nefretiri, Queen of Egypt. Moses was played by Charlton Heston, Hollywood’s resident epic hero of the 1950s and 1960s. Tall and muscular, with a dominant physical presence and a strong-jawed, patrician facial bone structure implying intelligence and

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All eyes on the master story-teller: Yul Brynner (left), comedian Danny Kaye (with cap) and Charlton Heston listen to Cecil B. DeMille during the production of The Ten Commandments (1956). Kaye was among the profusion of actors, politicians and religious leaders who visited the movie’s California set. Paramount/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

dignity, Heston managed, as one critic later put it, ‘to suggest both the rugged American frontiersman of myth as well as the God who creates Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco’. Heston was an active anti-communist in Hollywood in the 1950s, and took his role so seriously he could recite whole passages of the Old Testament.66 The Ten Commandments’ crew also included some of the biggest names in the movie business, including Oscar winners Loyal Griggs (director of photography), Edith Head (costumes), Ray Moyer (set director) and Anne Bauchens, who had been DeMille’s film editor for thirty-eight years. Arnold Friberg, one of the America’s foremost religious artists, was commissioned to paint biblical events as well as wardrobe and character interpretations, on which many of the scenes were based. Animators were borrowed from the Walt Disney Studios to spruce up the special eﬀects. Unlike one of his rival directors, Alfred Hitchcock, DeMille had never been one for appearing on screen. DeMille was also opposed to blatant sermonising, as his advice to the Protestant Film Commission in 1949 attests: ‘[L]et the story itself carry the message. Do not put propaganda speeches into

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the dialogue. Convey the message through what the characters do.’67 DeMille broke both of these rules with The Ten Commandments, however. Immediately after the movie’s overture, he steps before a silver curtain to explain to his audience that: ‘The theme of this picture is whether men are to be ruled by God’s law, or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.’ The ‘eternal’ nature of this conflict was further emphasised in the souvenir programme, which carried the imprimatur of democracy’s ‘great saviour’, recently retired British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and stated: The foundations of freedom’s triumph over the forces of darkness are found in the words that came from Mount Sinai – the Ten Commandments . . . These events are both timely – and timeless. They are as timeless as God’s word to Moses heard as the last speech in our film and found on America’s famed Liberty Bell: ‘Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all its inhabitants thereof ’ . . . In the relationship between Moses and Rameses, we have the clash between two great opposing forces, forces which have confronted each other throughout human history and which still – at this very moment – are engaged in mortal combat for the future of all mankind. On the one hand, there is the Pharaoh Rameses – worshipped as a God – the massive machinery of oppression at his command, his people chattels, and his will their only law. Opposing him stands Moses, armed only with a staﬀ – and the unquenchable fire of freedom under God.68

The Ten Commandments itself was not as direct as the publicity surrounding it, but this was typical of the eﬀorts made in promotion during this era to ensure that audiences came to biblical epics with the knowledge that they were ‘about’ much more than just their historical narrative. THE BIBLE IN TECHNICOLOR Originally one million feet in length, The Ten Commandments’ final print was trimmed on the editor’s table to 19,778 feet, and ran for a whopping 3 hours, 39 minutes.69 Its plot was fairly straightforward. In ancient Egypt, when the Pharaoh Rameses I (Ian Keith) is told that a Deliverer is to be born who will set free the enslaved children of Israel, he condemns all newborn male Hebrew children to death. But one mother, Yoshabel (Martha Scott), defies the order, and places her infant son in a basket to be set adrift in the river. Princess Bithiah (Nina Foch), the Pharaoh’s daughter, discovers the child, and adopts him as her own, calling him Moses. Thirty years later, Moses has grown to manhood as an Egyptian prince and rivals Rameses II (Brynner), the cruel son of new Pharaoh Sethi (Sir Cecil

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One of ‘the afflicted, the hopeless, the oppressed’: once a prince but now a Hebrew slave, Moses (Charlton Heston) is paraded before Pharaoh Sethi’s court in The Ten Commandments (1956). Paramount/The Kobal Collection.

Hardwicke), for the aﬀection of the people, the Pharaoh, and the beautiful Nefretiri. The Pharaoh is displeased with Rameses’ inability to finish construction of the massive new city of Goshen for his upcoming jubilee and assigns the task to Moses. While he is supervising work at the building site, Moses rescues from death an old woman whom he does not recognise as his mother and orders more humane treatment of the Hebrew slaves. Suspicious, Nefretiri learns about Moses’ origins from one of Bithiah’s servants, and discloses the secret to him. Humbled by his real family’s love for him and the Hebrews’ quiet religious devotion, Moses rejoins his people, and goes to work in the brick pits among the slaves he once commanded. When he becomes popular with the Hebrews who are seeking a leader, Rameses exiles him, leaving him in the barren wilderness to perish. Yet Moses miraculously survives the desert, travels to Midian, and marries Sephora (Yvonne De Carlo). Years later, on Mount Sinai, Moses speaks to God, who appears in the form of a burning bush, and returns to Egypt to confront Rameses, who is now Pharaoh and married to Nefretiri, and demand

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the freedom of his people. Moses brings the wrath of God upon the Egyptians, but Rameses is unyielding until the angel of death takes the life of every Egyptian first-born. Rameses sets the Hebrews free when his own son dies, but is goaded by Nefretiri into pursuing them with his chariots. When the Hebrews are trapped, Moses demonstrates the power of the Lord by parting the Red Sea, allowing them to pass through the chasm of waters, which surge closed when the Egyptians attempt to cross. Moses spends forty days on Mount Sinai while the people, provoked by the Egyptian informant Dathan, worship a golden calf and engage in bacchanalian revels. Moses returns with the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets, and punishes the idolaters by forcing them to wander in the wilderness for forty years. When this period draws to a close, Moses goes alone to Mount Nebo to face his God, as his people cross the River Jordan on to the Promised Land. On the face of it, this storyline has nothing whatsoever to do with the Cold War. Historian David Caute has recently taken issue with postmodernists like Alan Nadel who contend that The Ten Commandments was ‘a major product of American Cold War ideology’ through its equation of ‘God’s perspective with American global interests’. Caute highlights aspects of the film that are at odds with Washington’s Cold War outlook. For instance, the movie does not hold out the hand of salvation to the Egyptians/communists, it justifies indiscriminate slaughter by the Almighty/the West, and Rameses’ Egypt is not set on military or ideological expansion like the Soviet Union. Caute makes some valid points, especially about those cultural studies scholars who seek to impose interpretations on movies of the 1950s that in his view ‘would most probably have been news to the screenwriters and directors themselves’.70 Yet he overlooks the fact that DeMille was not making a movie that sought mechanically and unambiguously to press every one of Washington’s Cold War buttons. To DeMille, the very splendour of the film – with a musical score by Elmer Bernstein, art work by Walter Tyler, fantastic special eﬀects, and rich colours painted on a spectacularly large canvas – testified to America’s capitalist-based creativity and advertised the superiority of democracy’s freedom of spirit. Its simple yet profound story of good winning over evil, wrapped up in a soapopera formula with a deeply chiselled morality at its core, would, he believe, connect with millions at home and overseas. In his estimation a good proportion of these people were bound to see the resemblance between ancient Egypt – with its monolithic architecture, labour camps and muscle-bound security guards – and the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. They could not fail to see the Hebrews as modern-day Americans – sincere, honest, compassionate and innocent – confronted by an imperialist enemy that was sustained by militarism and surveillance. So what if anachronistic Hollywood-isms like

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Behold one of the miracles of cinema! Moses parts the Red Sea, thanks to God and Paramount’s special effects department. The Ten Commandments (1956). Paramount/The Kobal Collection.

that spoken by Nefretiri – ‘Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool’ – made a mockery of Paramount’s claims that the actors were using dialogue taken directly from the Scriptures. In DeMille’s view, artistic licence was vital if the film was to help America stake out the highest moral ground in his lifetime’s defining conflict. As far as salvation goes, he believed, like most religious conservatives, that while this was to be sought by no means everyone would see the light, especially communists. As with all DeMille productions, The Ten Commandments reeks of selfrighteousness, a tone underscored by the mogul’s own running commentary. Significantly, it also subtly transforms the Jewish Passover story into a Christian, almost evangelical tale. The casting of the all-American Heston depicts Moses as a Westerner rather than a Semite, especially when compared to Brynner’s more Oriental features.71 Moses and his successor Joshua (John Derek) both possess the strong ‘he-man’ qualities that Billy Graham attributed to Jesus. The movie in fact contains most of the key insignia of evangelical convictions: the personal conversion experience, the intuitive and mystical experience of God’s presence, salvation through belief, and the aﬃrmation of the Bible as the sole inerrant authority. On another level, implicit comparisons are made between the textual bases of American freedom (the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) and biblical law (the Ten Commandments), thereby

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universalising the sources of American freedom and highlighting their importance as worthy successors to the Holy Scriptures. In this way, the Passover story is used not only to celebrate the birth of freedom (in 1300  and  1776); it also provides a prediction or prophecy of the end of the Cold War by portraying a Western liberator defeating an evil dictator. Moses wins the struggle for freedom, thereby demonstrating the power of belief in God over the futility of atheistic, militaristic, rigidly stratified totalitarianism. Critics noted at the time how the movie fused religion and modern-day capitalism. Like all despots, Rameses believes that the only way to run an economy is from the centre and by the whip, whereas Moses succeeds in building Goshen because he improves the workers’ conditions in the interests of greater eﬃciency. At times the movie has the feel of a Western. God is symbolically linked with America as covered wagons in the Exodus sequences suggest the Promised Land that welcomed America’s pioneer settlers. The signs indicating the umbilical link between the founding of Israel and the United States’ democratic mission were legion. ‘Picture-postcards shots of Moses seeking refuge under fruit-laden palm trees’, writes one DeMille scholar, Sumiko Higashi, ‘conflate the Promised Land . . . with the United States as a “city on the hill”.’72 In describing the film’s closing moment, when Moses raises his hand to wave his final goodbye to Joshua and Sephora, Michael Wood has the impression that the prophet ‘looks just like the Statue of Liberty seen across New York Bay’.73 Rarely before can a movie have attracted so much hype prior to release as The Ten Commandments. This was partly due to the enormous sums being spent on the production, but also because of a carefully crafted marketing campaign designed to lend the movie historic and spiritual significance. During production, DeMille regularly lunched with religious figures at Paramount, asking them for their ‘reactions and advice’. One Methodist leader, Bishop Gerald Kennedy, came away suitably impressed: ‘One cannot see it without realizing anew that God is the guarantee of our liberties and the ground of all our hope’. Others were stunned by the director’s financial generosity. DeMille had announced that his percentage of the film’s profits would be donated to the DeMille Trust, established by the director and his wife in the early 1950s for ‘charitable, religious and educational purposes’.74 The Ten Commandments opened triumphantly in New York and Los Angeles in November 1956, coincidentally just as Soviet tanks were rolling into Budapest and the Western alliance was suﬀering the strains of the Suez crisis.75 Admiration for the movie was by no means unanimous. Variety thought it too long, while Time, referring to DeMille’s penchant for semi-nudity, called it ‘almost a Sexodus’.76 A small number of clergy and religious commentators protested against the film. Some feared that its ‘distortion of our religious

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Freedom’s crusader: Moses bids farewell to Joshua and his fellow disciples at the end of The Ten Commandments (1956). Paramount/The Kobal Collection.

heritage’ would be interpreted as authentic; others criticised its portrayal of God as ‘a cosmic combination of Thomas Jeﬀerson and King Kong’. Another, the liberal Malcolm Boyd, a former president of the Television Producers Association, denounced the movie for its tasteless exalting of the issues of freedom and slavery given the recent events in Hungary.77 Benjamin H. Freedman, the controversial Jewish New York businessman who had converted to Catholicism and founded the anti-communist, anti-Semitic Christian Anti-Defamation League in 1950, warned that The Ten Commandments was nothing less than a ‘secret weapon for liquidating the Christian faith’.78 Elsewhere there was loud applause for The Ten Commandments. To put this down to ‘an aura of publicity-manufactured religiosity’79 is to ignore DeMille’s skill and the film’s genuine pulling power. Trade press veterans admitted to being rendered ‘slightly breathless’ by The Ten Commandments’ special eﬀects, which won an Academy Award. Others called it ‘assuredly the best picture on a religious theme ever produced’ and praised it for not being ‘didactic or preachy’. A host of reviewers across the US picked it as the best film of 1956, and the movie was nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture.80

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Outside the Academy, The Ten Commandments soon became, in the words of the Catholic publisher Martin Quigley, ‘much more than a motion picture’. Some of America’s most famous Christian and Jewish leaders were quoted in full-page newspaper advertisements urging people to see it, for religious and political reasons. The Vice-President of the National Committee of Christians and Jews announced that the film was ‘a spiritual weapon that will have a telling eﬀect in the current world-wide struggle for the preservation of freedom’. Public schools in certain cities and states granted their students time oﬀ to watch the movie, and special showings were arranged at cut-price group rates. Paramount even arranged for buses to take customers from northern Mexico, where the film’s exhibition was restricted, to see a Spanish subtitled version in El Paso, Texas, and San Diego, California. Further north, in Fresno, a judge placed three oﬀenders on probation on condition that they saw The Ten Commandments and wrote essays on the moral lessons they had learned. In San Francisco, five women shoplifters were similarly directed. A group calling itself the Disc Jockeys National Committee for Public Service was formed as a result of discussions about the film on the radio, thereby tying the movie to the Red Cross and other charities.81 DeMille received scores of letters expressing admiration and thanks for the film, including one from an anticommunist Hungarian émigré, Bela Kornitzer. He, at least, had got the point of the film: ‘The tyranny of the Pharaos [sic] and the relentless drive for freedom and the dignity of man – which to me was the keynote of your picture – left a deep mark in my family who lived under the oppression of the modern Pharaos a short while ago.’82 By the time DeMille conducted a promotional tour of Western Europe in late 1957 to mark The Ten Commandments’ release overseas, the film had become the top money-maker of the year, already taking approximately twice what it had cost to produce.83 It is diﬃcult to ascertain whether the USIA helped to promote or distribute The Ten Commandments abroad, but DeMille’s oﬃcial position within the agency certainly opened a number of important doors. American ambassadors met him at each stop on his tour, arranging receptions and meetings with dignitaries. In Italy, he enjoyed a private audience with Pope Pius XII, during which DeMille presented the pontiﬀ with replicas of the Ten Commandments tablets used in the film. In Germany, he was received by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt, and made a speech before the Berlin League of Human Rights. In Paris, he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur; in London he met one of his heroes, Winston Churchill.84 In what was probably little more than a publicity stunt, in early 1958 DeMille oﬀered the Kremlin free copies of The Ten Commandments so long as it was exhibited in unexpurgated form in the Soviet Union. By the end of that year the movie had been barred from the whole of Eastern Europe

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and China, proving, according to the Hollywood Reporter, that communism ‘denies God and preaches deceit and ill-will toward all men and nations not held in bondage to the Kremlin’.85 The film also ran into trouble elsewhere. In Egypt, it fell foul of Arab–Israeli tensions, being banned by the censor for depicting the Egyptians as villains and the Jews as victims. In Pakistan, the film was temporarily banned by the authorities for fear that it might provoke Muslim extremists who had recently torched a theatre screening a documentary on Christianity. This dented the hopes both DeMille and the Pakistan government had held that the movie would help promote Christian–Muslim solidarity in a country to which Washington had recently sent vast sums of relief and military aid. However, in other parts of Asia, where it was sold as ‘a spectacle focusing on good versus evil and oppressed people rising up against tyranny’, The Ten Commandments was a runaway success. In Singapore, for instance, it set a new first-run gross record, topping the old mark set by a communist Chinese production of Romeo and Juliet.86 By 1960, The Ten Commandments had played to an estimated worldwide audience of 98.5 million (55 million in the US alone), and, having taken more than $85 million, had become the second highest-grossing film of the decade at the North American box oﬃce, after Disney’s The Lady and the Tramp (1955). By 1966, when it was reissued with a new marketing and merchandising campaign to mark its tenth anniversary, the movie had become the third highest domestic grosser ever, behind Gone With the Wind (1939) and Ben-Hur (1959). By 1975, when it made its ‘farewell’ cinema tour, the film was already established as an annual television fixture during Passover and the Easter holidays in the US and elsewhere. The year after the European ‘velvet revolutions’ of 1989, the epic enjoyed another mini-revival in Californian cinemas. Like that of Ninotchka, therefore, The Ten Commandments’ potential political influence stretched overseas and over time.87 CONCLUSION The use of religious propaganda in wartime predates the Cold War by at least 2,500 years.88 The Catholic Church had signalled its own awareness of the arts of public persuasion in the seventeenth century, when Pope Gregory V established the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide in 1622.89 Religion as a theme in wartime cinematic propaganda has not been confined to the struggle between communism and capitalism either. During the Second World War, American films constantly linked God with democracy in the fight against fascism.90 Since the mid-1980s, Hollywood has profited considerably from its portrayals of the perceived threat posed to the West by Islamic fundamentalism.91

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As we have seen, religion was an integral component of Cold War cinematic discourse in the 1950s in both the East and the West. American filmmakers in particular were remarkably versatile propagandists in fusing religion and Cold War issues, and in providing support for their government’s strategy of positive, morally muscular propaganda. It would be wrong to attribute this versatility simply to oﬃcial influence of one sort or another. Studio executives, directors and producers who turned out films that highlighted the communist threat to religious freedom or that accentuated American spirituality were motivated by a variety of factors. Many merely sought to cash in on topical, controversial concerns. Some, like Cecil B. DeMille, were Cold Warriors in their own right, whose connections with the government might have given them greater impetus to express their ideological views on screen. It is diﬃcult to judge how the films analysed above aﬀected their audiences. What can be said is that many of them bore the hallmarks of shabby Bpictures – blaring music, arbitrary passages of violence, bad continuity and dismal acting. Because these films were so sloppily made, and because their messages were often so clumsily explicit, they might inadvertently have provided a forum for some people to laugh at or even ridicule popular Cold War hysteria, instead of encouraging them to think seriously about religion and politics. For example, by implying that extraterrestrials and human beings might share the same God, Red Planet Mars arguably did more to bring Christian piety into disrepute than to persuade cinema-goers of the contemporary resonance of the Gospel. Many of the movies were also open to a variety of possibly conflicting interpretations. For instance, whereas most commentators described Columbia’s The Prisoner as pro-Catholic, others, because it suggested Mindszenty was the illegitimate child of a prostitute, labelled it pro-communist.92 Similarly, many religious conservatives watching The Next Voice You Hear and The Ten Commandments were troubled by the juxtaposing of images of Christianity and consumerism, and Christianity and sexuality, respectively. Of course, there is also the distinct possibility that audiences simply failed to see certain movies through a Cold War lens. That said, it can still be argued that many of these pictures amounted to solid, eﬀective propaganda by oﬀering easily digestible, emotive messages in highly charged, usually action-driven formats. Cheap science-fiction shockers like Conquest of Space and spy thrillers like Night People might, each in its own way, have helped to endow the Cold War with the black-and-white moral clarity most people and oﬃcial propagandists sought. The more cerebral docudramas like The Prisoner perhaps left a similar impression on a diﬀerent sort of audience. It and others that blended religion with political dissidence in Eastern Europe depicted the East–West conflict as a modern holy war most directly. Biblical epics like The Ten Commandments need not have been explicitly read as Cold War

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movies, or as having relevance to the conflict. Their persuasive abilities lay deeper than that. Many of these films articulated in a simple yet spectacular way the diﬀerences between God-fearing and God-despising societies. Like most eﬀective propaganda, their power lay not in converting but in reinforcing, and in embedding positive messages in an indirect fashion. They were also one of the best ways Hollywood could demonstrate America’s seemingly endless store of resources; no Iron Curtain films could rival the extravagant production values of the biblical epics. Together, these filmic representations of religion might have helped at least some cinema-goers to forge key mental and conceptual Cold War linkages, above all between Christianity and democratic capitalism, in which the latter took on the appearance of a new ‘civil religion’. Notes 1 Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1952, pp. 140–1. 2 Films and Filming, September 1955, p. 13. 3 Despite this, religion has so far been the Cinderella of Cold War historiography. See Dianne Kirby (ed.), Religion and the Cold War (Basingstoke, 2003) on why this has been the case, and how historians are now starting to rectify this omission. On John Paul II’s Cold War role see ‘Karol Wojtyla and the End of the Cold War’, in Silvio Pons and Frederico Romero (eds), Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations (London, 2005), pp. 82–9. 4 Taylor, Film Propaganda, pp. 69–70. 5 Geoﬀrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 (London, 1992), pp. 227–41. 6 Davies, ‘Soviet Cinema’, pp. 56–60; Caute, Dancer, pp. 147–53. 7 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (London, 1989), p. 149; Steve Nicholson, British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism, 1917–1945 (Exeter, 1999), pp. 31–3. 8 Kirby (ed.), Religion and the Cold War, pp. 1–8. 9 John Foster Dulles, War or Peace (New York, 1950), pp. 251–9; Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War Two (New York, 1988), pp. 86–107; Allen Dulles speech, 5 June 1953, quoted in Washburn to William H. Jackson, 11 June 1953, White House Central Files, Oﬃcial File, Box 674, 133-M-1 President’s Committee on International Activities Abroad (3): Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter DDEL); ‘President Sees Editors’, New York Times, 10 April 1953. 10 Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 (Washington, DC, 1960), pp. 179–88; Hixson, Curtain, pp. 42, 64, 83, 93–4, 122; Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom. 11 Eric R. Crouse, ‘Popular Cold Warriors: Conservative Protestants, Communism, and Culture in Early Cold War America’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture,

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Vol. 2, Fall 2002, unpaged, www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/popcoldwarprint.html (10 February 2006); Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Sociology (Garden City, KS, 1960), pp. 47, 52. Emmet John Hughes, Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (New York, 1963), p. 103. Osgood, ‘Total War’, pp. 16, 29–30, 46–7. Basic Guidance and Planning Paper No. 10, Themes on American Life and Culture, 14 July 1959, USIA Historical Collection, and Memoranda of Meetings of the Ideological Subcommittee on the Religious Factor, 19 May 1955, 8 June 1955 and 10 June 1955, both in OCB Central Files, Box 2, OCB 000.3 [Religion] (File #1) (2): DDEL; Harlow to O’Hara, 6 June 1955, White House Central Files, Oﬃcial File, box 910, OF 247 1955 (2): DDEL. Osgood, ‘Total War’, p. 251. Jackson Committee Report, FRUS, Vol. 2, 1952–4 (Washington, DC, 1984), pp. 1849, 1847, 1872; Progress Report on Jackson Committee Report, 30 September 1953, White House Central Files, NSC Staﬀ Papers, Psychological Strategy Board Central Files, Box 22, PSB 334, President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad: DDEL. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 289–91. Richard Gribble, ‘Anti-Communism, Patrick Peyton, CSC and the CIA’, Journal of Church and State, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2003, pp. 535–58. Eldridge, ‘Dear Owen’, pp. 153–5, 157. The US Information Program Since July 1953, Records of the President’s Committee on Information Activities Abroad (Sprague Committee), Box 19, USIA (2): DDEL. On this tradition see R. H. Campbell, The Bible on Film: A Checklist, 1897–1980 (Lanham, MD, 1981), and John R. May and Michael Bird (eds), Religion in Film (Knoxville, TN, 1982). New York Times, 30 June 1950, p. 18. Variety, 17 March 1954, p. 6. Variety, 25 May 1949, p. 3; Motion Picture Herald, 28 May 1949. Whitfield, Culture, pp. 107–13. Variety, 21 February 1962; Variety, 20 March 1957, p. 6. Films and Filming, September 1955; author’s correspondence with Borden Mace, President of RD-DR Corporation (the producer of Martin Luther) in the 1950s, 28 March 1998. Life, 4 April 1955, pp. 115–20. Variety, 19 December 1956, p. 7. Ferenc A. Vali, Rift and Revolt in Hungary (Cambridge, MA, 1961), pp. 65–6. On the exploitation of the Mindszenty case by the British Foreign Oﬃce’s Information Research Department, see Foreign Oﬃce Files (FO) 1110/167-8, TNAL. On American television’s emphasis on religion as a Cold War theme in the 1950s, including ‘Cardinal Mindszenty’, a Studio One episode of 3 May 1954, see Fred J. MacDonald, ‘The Cold War as Entertainment in Fifties Television’,

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Hollywood’s Cold War Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1998, pp. 3–31. The villain in the aforementioned Soviet film Conspiracy of the Doomed, Cardinal Birnch, was probably modelled on Mindszenty. Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1950, pp. 185–6. Columbia marketing material, The Prisoner micro-jacket, BFIL; Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise (London, 1985), pp. 38–49. Charles S. Young, ‘Missing Action: POW Films, Brainwashing, and the Korean War, 1954–1968’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1998, pp. 49–74; Susan L. Carruthers, ‘The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War Brainwashing Scare’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1998, pp. 75–94; David Seed, Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control – A Study of Novels and Films since World War II (Kent, OH, 2004), esp. chs 2, 4 and 5. The Miracle told the story of a peasant woman who believes her baby has been immaculately conceived. US Customs gave the movie a licence in 1949, only to revoke it under pressure from the New York Roman Catholic Archdiocese on the grounds that it was ‘sacrilegious’. During the row over The Miracle, Catholic moral reformer Martin Quigley, publisher of the Motion Picture Herald, said that communists and fellow-travellers applauded every time someone bought a ticket to see the picture because they knew that religion was an essential bulwark against the Red threat. His assertion that Rossellini and the film’s star, Anna Magnani, were active leftists and that the logical birthplace of the film was the Soviet Union helped transform the Legion of Decency’s condemnation of the movie into a crusade. Walsh, Sin, pp. 251–2. Jack Vizzard, See No Evil: Life Inside a Hollywood Censor (New York, 1970). On American evangelism and Billy Graham see Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston (eds), The Varieties of American Evangelism (Knoxville, TN, 1991). Variety, 13 April 1955; New York Times, 30 August 1958; Biskind, Seeing, p. 116. Doherty, Projections, pp. 100–3; Thomas J. Knock, ‘History with Lightning: The Forgotten Film Wilson (1944)’, in Peter C. Rollins (ed.), Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (Lexington, KY, 1983), pp. 88–108. Eldridge, ‘Hollywood and History’. Buhle and Wagner, Hide, pp. 113–15. The writers were Michael Wilson and Nedrick Young respectively. Wilson had penned a script for Shane prior to his appearance before HUAC in September 1951; Young worked under a pseudonym. Richard Maltby, ‘A Better Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians’, in Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (eds), The Movie Book of the Western (London, 1996), p. 44; Biskind, Seeing, pp. 230–40; John Tuska, The American West in Film (London, 1985), p. 244. The number of big-budget Westerns made in Hollywood rose from 14 titles in 1947 to 46 in 1956, not to mention the hundreds of titles each year in B and lesser categories. Buhle and Wagner, Hide, p. 112. Peter Filene, ‘ “Cold War Culture” Doesn’t Say It All’, in Kuznick and Gilbert, Rethinking, pp. 164–6.

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43 The directors of these films were, respectively, Cecil B. DeMille, Richard Thorpe, Cecil B. DeMille, Mervyn LeRoy, William Dieterle, Henry Koster and William Wyler. Biblical epics consistently topped the film money-making lists in the 1950s – for example, Samson and Delilah was No. 1 in 1950, Quo Vadis was No. 2 in 1952, The Robe was No. 1 in 1953, and Ben-Hur was No. 1 in 1960. Quo Vadis ($8.25), The Ten Commandments ($13.5) and Ben-Hur ($15 m) each set a new record for the most expensive film ever made. The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and The Robe were, respectively, the second, fourth and seventh highest-grossing films at the North American box oﬃce in the 1950s, with grosses of $85.4 m, $73.2 m and $45.2. Peter Cowie (ed.), The Variety Almanac 1999 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 13. 44 Bruce Babington and Peter Evans, Biblical Epics: Sacred Narratives in the Hollywood Cinema (Manchester, 1993). 45 Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York, 1997), pp. 143–4. 46 For general accounts of DeMille’s career and political conservatism see Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston, MA, 1985), and Charles Higham, Cecil B. DeMille (New York, 1973). 47 DeMille’s statement ‘Envoy To All Peoples’, 1955, Cecil B. DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 213, f. 14, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter TPCBY); DeMille draft speech for Federal Communications Commission hearing, 10 March 1952, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 437, f. 1, TPCBY. 48 Lou Greenspan, Executive Secretary of Motion Picture Industry Council, to Andrew Smith, Jr., Chief, USIA Motion Picture Division, 28 May 1954, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 456, f. 6, TPCBY; Los Angeles Times, 29 December 1953. 49 DeMille correspondence with J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Hood, c. 1941–5, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 115, f. 39, TPCBY; DeMille speeches 4 November 1947 and 15 May 1948, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 1138, f. 8, TPCBY; DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 1956, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 1136, f. 9, TPCBY; Navasky, Naming, p. 179. 50 Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition, pp. 368–9; Hollywood Citizen-News, 23 February 1953. In 1954, Life is Worth Living was reaching 25 million Americans each week. See Doherty, Cold War, pp. 153–60. 51 DeMille–Jackson correspondence, March–April 1951, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 439, fs. 9 and 15, TPCBY; Lucas, Freedom’s War, pp. 67, 100–4. 52 Lucas, Freedom’s War, pp. 101–3. 53 DeMille to A. J. Gock, Chairman, Southern California Crusade for Freedom, 30 December 1952, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 439, fs. 9 and 15, TPCBY. 54 Lou Greenspan, Executive Secretary of Motion Picture Industry Council, to Andrew Smith, Jr., Chief, USIA Motion Picture Division, 28 May 1954, and Greenspan circular, 30 April 1954, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 456, f. 6, TPCBY; Variety, 23 April 1953.

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55 Jackson to the publishing magnate Henry Luce, cited in Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 288. 56 DeMille’s speech notes for meeting of MPA Executive Committee, 3 June 1953, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 1146, fs. 4–5, TPCBY. 57 Circular by Art Arthur, Executive Secretary of Motion Picture Industry Council, 12 March 1954, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 456, f. 6, TPCBY. When DeMille died in 1959 at the age of 78, he received this tribute from the USIA’s Director, George V. Allen: ‘The contribution of Mr. DeMille, not only to the art of motion picture production but to the preservation of those ideals of freedom and justice for which our government stands, will always be remembered. His close cooperation with the USIA and his wisdom, advice and counsel have been invaluable to us all’. ‘Condolences for Mr. DeMille’, undated, DeMille Clippings file, AMPAS. 58 Cecil B. DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, ed. Donald Hayne (London, 1960), pp. 376–9. 59 DeMille, Autobiography, p. 385; DeMille address, November 1956, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 708, f. 16, TPCBY; Hollywood Reporter, 20 May 1953. 60 DeMille, Autobiography, p. 169; ‘The Ten Commandments Press Release’, 1956, DeMille Clippings file, AMPAS. 61 DeMille address, November 1956, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 708, f. 16, TPCBY; Henry S. Noerdlinger, Moses and Egypt: The Documentation to the Motion Picture The Ten Commandments (Los Angeles, CA, 1956). 62 Time, 12 November 1956, p. 63; ‘The Ten Commandments Press Release’, 1956, Cecil B. DeMille Clippings file, AMPAS. 63 Higham, Cecil B. DeMille, pp. 307–8; DeMille, Autobiography, pp. 386–7; Motion Picture Herald, 24 October 1953; Jon B. Alterman, Egypt and American Foreign Assistance 1952–1956: Hopes Dashed (Basingstoke, 2002). 64 Time, 12 November 1956, p. 63. An actual atom bomb rumble recorded during a recent test was used as a sound eﬀect in the Red Sea sequence, according to Paramount’s report to the American Motion Picture Academy and Sciences. See American Film Institute Catalogue entry for The Ten Commandments (1956): http://afi.chadwyck.co.uk/film/full_rec?action=BYID&FILE=../session/113 8222967_.... (26 January 2006). 65 Soon after The Ten Commandments was released, in late 1956, Brynner could also be seen playing a Russian general grooming a destitute girl to pose as heir to the Romanov throne, in Twentieth Century-Fox’s Anastasia. 66 New York Times, 25 March 1984; Charlton Heston, In the Arena: An Autobiography (New York, 1995), pp. 133–4. Heston later claimed he was given the part because DeMille thought he resembled Michelangelo’s renowned statue of Moses in the Church of St Peter in Rome. Such was Heston’s association with Moses in the public’s mind after The Ten Commandments that in 1959 he recorded the Five Books of Moses, all in the King James version, for Vanguard Records. Michael Munn, Charlton Heston: A Biography (London, 1986), pp. 61–2; Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies (Bloomington, IN, 1997), p. 156.

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67 DeMille notes, 16 March 1949, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 431, f. 8, TPCBY. 68 ‘Report on the Production of The Ten Commandments’, The Ten Commandments Clippings file, AMPAS. 69 Motion Picture Herald, 6 October 1956, pp. 18–20. 70 Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (London, 1995), pp. 90–116; Caute, Dancer, pp. 177–81. 71 On the ideological significance of Heston’s and Brynner’s diﬀerent forms of masculinity in the movie see Cohan, Masked Men, pp. 150–9. 72 Sight and Sound, Vol. 27, No. 3, Winter 1957–8, pp. 57–8; Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture (Berkeley, CA, 1994), p. 202. 73 Michael Wood, America in the Movies (New York, 1975), p. 187. 74 Hollywood Citizen-News, 22 and 26 October 1956; DeMille, Autobiography, p. 384; Malcolm Boyd, Christ and Celebrity Gods: The Church in Mass Culture (Greenwich, CT, 1958), pp. 60, 67. 75 In collusion with Israel, the British and French governments had incurred the wrath of the US administration by invading Egypt in October–November 1956, in order to regain control of the Suez Canal and in the process hopefully topple Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser. The subsequent Eisenhower Doctrine of January 1957 registered American supremacy in the Middle East. See William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds), Suez 1956: The Crisis and its Consequences (Oxford, 1991). American opposition to Israel in November 1956 allowed DeMille to counter allegations that his film was pro-Israeli, anti-Arab propaganda. See DeMille, Autobiography, p. 385. 76 Variety, 10 October 1956; Time, 12 November 1956. 77 Boyd, Christ, pp. 59, 62. 78 Common Sense, Vol. 9, No. 262, 15 October 1956. 79 Boyd, Christ, pp. 60–1, 73. 80 Motion Picture Herald, 4 October 1956; Film Bulletin, 15 October 1956; Los Angeles Times, 1 December 1957. The Ten Commandments won one Oscar, for special eﬀects. Winner of the Oscar for best film of 1956 was Around the World in Eighty Days, a United Artists production directed by Michael Anderson. 81 Boyd, Christ, pp. 52, 66, 70, 72; Motion Picture Herald, 6 October 1956, pp. 18–20; Los Angeles Times, 1 December 1957; Beverly Hills Citizen, 13 August 1957; Hollywood Reporter, 3 September 1958, p. 1; Hollywood Reporter, 9 September 1958, pp. 1, 6; Hollywood Reporter, 10 September 1958, pp. 1, 9. 82 Kornitzer to DeMille, 15 April 1958, DeMille Collection, MSS 1400, Box 496, f. 21, TPCBY. 83 Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 437; Los Angeles Times, 1 December 1957. 84 Hollywood Reporter, 5 April 1957, p. 1; Los Angeles Times, 1 December 1957; Variety, 16 October 1957; DeMille, Autobiography, pp. 399–400. 85 Hollywood Citizen-News, 29 March 1958; Hollywood Reporter, 29 October 1958, pp. 1, 6.

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86 New York Times, 20 December 1959; DeMille, Autobiography, p. 385; Variety , 13 November 1957; Hollywood Reporter, 29 October 1958, pp. 1, 6; Hollywood Reporter, 19 August 1958; Variety, 5 October 1966. 87 Hollywood Reporter, 18 April 1960; Cowie, Variety Almanac 1999, p. 67; Variety, 10 November 1965; Variety, 24 May 1990. The Lady and the Tramp earned $88 million. Using US gross takings adjusted for inflation, in 2005 The Ten Commandments (at $819 million) was rated the fifth biggest movie of all time. Gone With the Wind (1939) came top, at $1.2 billion. Guardian, 6 September 2005, p. 10. 88 For the role religious symbols and beliefs played in ancient Greek warfare see Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester, 1995), pp. 27–34. 89 Robert Jackall (ed.), Propaganda (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 1. 90 See, for instance, William Wyler’s Mrs Miniver (1942) in Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, pp. 222–31. 91 See, for instance, True Lies (James Cameron, 1994), Executive Decision (Stuart Baird, 1996), The Siege (Edward Zwick, 1998) and Rules of Engagement (William Friedkin, 2000). 92 Columbia marketing material, The Prisoner, BFIL.

CHAPTER 5

Negotiable dissent

One of the great tragedies of culture and learning took place in Alexandria, an ancient seaport of Egypt, about 630 .. In the Alexandrian library had been gathered together, starting about 1500 ., most of the literary works, scientific knowledge and philosophies of the intellectuals of the known world up to that time. It is not quite clear whether this unequalled collection of books was destroyed by fire all at once or piecemeal during the riots when Caesar visited Cleopatra, when the Arabs overran Alexandria, or at a later date. But this tragedy gave significance to a phrase which was to harass us forever after, the phrase ‘the burning of the books’. Doubtless with this in mind, the framers of our American Constitution wrote into the First Article two guarantees which have given character and provided insurance for the perpetuation of American democracy. One was the guarantee respecting the establishment of religion and the free exercise thereof. The other was the prohibition of any law which would abridge the freedom of speech or of the press. They are not unrelated; they are inter-related. They were intended to complement each other . . . It is to this theme, in dramatic form, that ‘STORM CENTER’ addresses itself. Arthur H. DeBra, Motion Picture Association of America, July 19561

Generating and maintaining media support had been a relatively easy task for the American government during the Second World War. Newspapers, broadcasters and filmmakers were not beyond criticising Washington’s tactics, but only a few questioned its motives and overall strategy. The nation had, after all, been attacked, and was fighting a war in which men and women were dying on various battlefronts. On top of this, notwithstanding its unprecedented scale, the conflict lasted only four years. The Cold War was diﬀerent. Neither side had oﬃcially declared war, comparatively few Americans came face to face with the enemy, and the conflict lasted some four decades. In such circumstances, any government – democratic or dictatorial – was bound to meet some form of criticism, opposition or even resistance. This made oﬃcial management of the media all the more vital. The American government was never in a position to dictate to filmmakers entirely how they should cover the Cold War. Nor would it have wished to have such powers. America’s claim to have the freest media in the world lay at

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the very heart of Washington’s propaganda strategy, and was one of the simplest yet most powerful ways for Americans to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’. As it was, through established industry constraints and contingent controls, the state–film network facilitated a large measure of downward pressure on filmmakers throughout the conflict, with the result that relatively few movies challenged prevailing views on oﬃcial Cold War policy. However, the fluidity of the network meant that there was always some scope for negotiable cinematic dissent, particularly by liberals. This was even the case during the late 1940s and 1950s, despite the atmosphere of self-restraint fostered by HUAC and the dreaded blacklist. It is important to recognise this, and to emphasise how from an early point in the Cold War the cinema was some sort of forum for debate, unlike in the Soviet Union. The diﬀerent forms in which a small number of films expressed disquiet with the super-patriotic, anti-subversive and militaristic consensus emerging in the United States during the high Cold War of the late 1940s and 1950s require close attention. So too does the variety of motives that lay behind the making of these movies, the diﬃculties that filmmakers came across before and during production, and the obstacles many of them needed to overcome in order for their projects to reach a wide audience. We need to identify how far dissent stretched, and the extent to which images oﬀering alternative perspectives on the Cold War were ‘contained’. Three films are subjected to close analysis below: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Storm Centre (1956) and On the Beach (1959). Each highlights an issue that caused the US government considerable political discomfort during this period, and which filmmakers would continue to probe throughout the Cold War. Of these issues, Washington’s faith in nuclear deterrence stands out. Taken together, these films show how the nature of cinematic Cold War dissent gradually altered through this early but critical period of the conflict. At the beginning, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, dissent largely came in allegorical or semi-allegorical form. As the 1950s progressed, and with the broad outlines of the Cold War consensus now firmly established, a number of filmmakers grew more openly critical of Cold War orthodoxy. This shift can be linked to institutional changes within the film industry that allowed for greater experimentalism on screen. It can also be tied to the relaxation in East-West relations following Stalin’s death in 1953, and to the growing anxieties about the Cold War shared by a number of pressure groups, commentators and the American public in general. CORRUPTION, GREED, AND LESSONS FROM SPACE The years immediately following the Second World War represented, in hindsight at least, something of a boom time for liberal and left-wing filmmakers

Negotiable dissent

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in Hollywood. The war had exposed a number of America’s social problems which producers, sensing that topical subject matter would be profitable, were happy to play with on screen. Scriptwriters and directors on the political left used this rare opportunity to advance egalitarian or democratic themes, or to make pictures that, like Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), dwelt on hitherto taboo issues such as American anti-Semitism.2 The onset of the Cold War and HUAC’s hearings in Hollywood in late 1947 by and large put paid to these ‘message’ pictures. However, while the case of the Hollywood Ten (which included Dmytryk) was making its way through the courts, some liberal opposition remained alive, and a handful of films seriously questioned some of the basic tenets of American society. All the King’s Men (1949) and The Lawless (1949), made by the communists Robert Rossen and Joseph Losey respectively, analysed the nature of political and social oppression, while Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948) suggested that corruption, greed and murder were at the core of Western society. Frank Capra’s political comedy State of the Union (1948) both critiqued American conservatism and espoused one-world internationalism.3 By mid-1952, only one of these directors, Frank Capra, was free to work in the United States.4 Chaplin had been forced into exile by the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, and Rossen, Losey and Polonsky were blacklisted. Dmytryk was eﬀectively on parole. Having been imprisoned for contempt in 1950, he had cooperated with HUAC in 1951, and a year later was hired by Stanley Kramer, whose production company worked under Columbia’s banner. Kramer, as we shall see, went on to make some of the boldest, most socially conscious movies to come out of Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s, and was an early example of the Hollywood liberal who took a sceptical view of the Cold War.5 By the early 1950s, the Cold War and McCarthyism were both in full swing. A small number of filmmakers reacted to this either by expressing concern with the direction American foreign policy was taking, or by highlighting the negative impact anti-communism was having on American society. Sciencefiction movies flourished throughout the Cold War and especially during the 1950s, when seemingly omnipresent images of aliens, giant insects and whitecoated megalomaniacs projected the United States as a nation in a constant state of alert. While such images have been submitted to a multitude of interpretations over the years, there seems little doubt that the majority of them dramatised the need for Americans to pull together in the face of internal and external political and social threats. Some science-fiction movies had more obvious Cold War connotations than others. Dozens of films, like Christian Nyby’s The Thing (1951) and William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars (1953), made quite overt connections between the danger to national security

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posed by aliens devoid of both moral sense and emotion, and the threat feared from the Red Menace. Others, such as the slug-like movements of Irvin S. Yeoworth, Jr.’s The Blob (1958), provided an objective correlative for the right-wing fear of ‘creeping communism’. Brian Murphy, among others, has argued that the vast majority of these ‘monster movies’ buttressed the moral and political order: by showing the authorities and scientists collaborating against their abominable foe, by depicting ordinary Americans doing exactly as they were told, and by teaching viewers that there was no turning back the technological clock.6 If most filmmakers exploited for politically conservative ends one of the decade’s more artistically exciting genres, a few others used the greater freedom which science fiction – with its fantastic plots and peculiar conventions – aﬀorded for social and political dissent. Boasting a horrific assortment of radiation-engendered mutant monsters which threatened Earth with death and destruction, films like Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) articulated the fears that many Americans had of an atomic age spiralling out of control.7 During the 1940s and 1950s, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations generally took the view that aggressively disseminating atomic information was the best way to oﬀset Americans’ fears of nuclear weapons and science. This contrasted with the situation in the Soviet Union and Britain, the two other members of the ‘nuclear club’, whose governments avoided publicity whenever possible.8 Washington was of course highly selective in terms of the nuclear information it spread; among the material it suppressed (until 1970) was explicit documentary footage of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, shot by a Japanese film crew in August 1945.9 The government also encouraged a public discourse that made ‘disarmament’ a dirty word, one synonymous with 1930s-style appeasement, neutralism or even subversion.10 In late 1953, in response to the new Soviet leadership’s peace overtures that summer, and growing public disquiet about the arms race brought on by Moscow’s recent successful hydrogen bomb test, Eisenhower breathed new life into the US government’s nuclear propaganda oﬀensive by launching his ‘Atoms for Peace’ campaign at the United Nations. A formula that spoke of pooling international atomic resources for humanitarian purposes, ‘Atoms for Peace’ was one of many imaginative initiatives aimed at enhancing America’s status as the world’s leading proponent of peace and progress. In the decade following this, Washington produced or financed at least fifty short films for domestic and worldwide distribution showing the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.11 Film studios like Disney and other ‘private’ agencies played their part in this long-running campaign by utilising oﬃcial information to make movies that, like Disney’s Our Friend the Atom (1957), made nuclear energy appear exciting and safe.12 This material came on top of the ubiquitous ‘duck-and-cover’

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instruction shorts for school children, and other oﬃcially sanctioned civil defence pamphlets, broadcasts and films designed to persuade the American people that, by learning the relevant facts and taking elementary precautions, they would be able to cope with whatever Moscow launched at them.13 One of the alleged eﬀects of this barrage of publicity was to facilitate what psychologist Robert J. Lifton calls ‘nuclearism’, the acceptance of nuclear weapons as part of everyday life.14 Amidst these eﬀorts to allay the public’s nuclear fears, Hollywood continued to toy with the relationship between aliens, radioactivity, mutation and death, albeit largely by displacing the anxieties about the Bomb onto the horror film.15 Of particular interest here, however, are those movies in which aliens appeared as benevolent forces, warning Earth of the lunacy of the nuclear arms race, preaching East-West peaceful coexistence, or exposing McCarthyite paranoia and xenophobia. One of the most commercially successful examples of this sub-genre was Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1953), which used the hostility shown towards a group of harmless visiting aliens by their hysterical small-town hosts to condemn contemporary America’s fear of the Other. Scripted by a former Communist party member, William Alland (who also produced the film), and Ray Bradbury, the libertarian sci-fi author and fervent critic of the blacklist, It Came from Outer Space stridently defends society’s non-conformists through its support for the lead character John Putnam (played by Richard Carlson), who helps the pod-people to escape from the mob-like authorities. By depicting parts of the United States as narrow-minded and virtually barbarous, it also suggests that the ‘civilised’ West might have more to learn from the Other Side – terrestrial and extraterrestrial – than prevailing discourse would allow. Alland later argued the film carried the Rooseveltian message that all the human race had to fear was ‘fear itself . . . If you fear the Communists, we destroy ourselves’. ‘I think science fiction films are a marvellous medium for telling a story, creating a mood and delivering whatever kind of social message should be delivered’, opined Jack Arnold, a social democrat who had previously produced government documentaries. ‘If ten per cent of the audience grasped it, then I was very successful.’16 Arnold went on to make an Ealing-esque international relations satire, The Mouse that Roared, in 1959 for Columbia’s British oﬀshoot, Open Road Films, with the blacklisted writerproducer Carl Foreman. The project had languished for years in the United States, with prospective backers and distributors claiming that the script’s lampooning of great-power diplomacy lay outside the American public’s then politically limited sense of humour.17 Two minor films, Burt Balaban’s Stranger from Venus (1954) and Herbert Greene’s The Cosmic Man (1959), both concocted versions of the alien Other

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to emphasise the destructive power of atomic weapons and humankind’s paradoxical blind allegiance to the false ethic of deterrence.18 But it was Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) which carried Hollywood’s most powerful intergalactic liberal message of the decade, as well as providing a counterpoint to the crude anti-communist nationalism of movies of the period like Walk East on Beacon. The Day the Earth Stood Still came at the very end of a period, between 1945 and 1951, when a small body of films had questioned the morality of nuclear weapons, and before the debate about nuclear matters on screen was eﬀectively emasculated for the rest of the 1950s by the switch to ‘creature-features’ aimed at the increasingly large but limited teenage market.19 Based on a short story, ‘Farewell to the Master’, by Harry Bates, published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1940, The Day the Earth Stood Still was the first ‘A’ treatment given to a science-fiction theme by a major studio (it cost $1.2 million).20 The movie told the tale of a spaceman, Klaatu (played by Michael Rennie), who lands on Earth in his flying saucer with an indestructible robot. Klaatu has been sent on an interplanetary peace mission to break the Cold War deadlock and so save the whole universe from a nuclear catastrophe. Gort, the robot, has the power to destroy Earth if humankind does not come to its senses. Scriptwriter Edmund H. North and producer Julian Blaustein were mainly responsible for the film’s political message. North wove his pacifist beliefs into a number of screenplays throughout a long career, which included the Oscar-winning Second World War drama Patton (Franklin J. Schaﬀner, 1969) and Race to Oblivion (Robert Churchill, 1982), a documentary made for the anti-nuclear group Physicians for Social Responsibility.21 Blaustein had made military training films during the Second World War, before being appointed a producer at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1949. He had just made Broken Arrow (1950), an account of the first peace pact between white settlers and the Apaches in nineteenth-century Arizona, told, unusually, from the Indians’ viewpoint. His new film was, he told journalists, ‘a plea for a stronger United Nations with an eﬀective police force’, and was intended to show that ‘peace is not a dirty word’.22 Robert Wise, the director, had gained prominence in the early 1940s as the editor of Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941), and was not regarded at any point in his long career as a political filmmaker. Despite this, his involvement in The Day the Earth Stood Still was risky given his close association with many on the Hollywood left who had recently been blacklisted.23 The head of Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl Zanuck, strongly supported The Day the Earth Stood Still but, with one eye on HUAC and the other on his friends in government, watered down what he saw as the dangerously radical aspects of North’s early scripts. Zanuck persuaded North to make a number

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of substantive political changes. First he told North to modify an early scene in which Harley, a White House oﬃcial, tells Klaatu that the United Nations had already proven to be a failure. This would have weakened Washington’s professed support for UN-brokered arms controls, not to mention its claim to be fighting in Korea on the organisation’s behalf. Zanuck also warned that a later scene, in which Klaatu (using the adopted name Mr Carpenter) and his human confidant Helen (Patricia Neal) agree that the great powers’ continued unwillingness to relinquish sovereignty was ruining prospects for international peace, ‘might be misconstrued’. Second, Zanuck asked North to tone down his suggestions throughout the script that only internationalist-minded scientists oﬀered the world hope of salvation, rather than, as Zanuck countered, great statesmen such as former US Secretary of State George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, not to mention God himself. To Zanuck, North’s suggestions smacked of support for the Atomic Scientists’ Movement, a group of scientists (which included the world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein) who had worked on the Manhattan Project and since 1945 had been campaigning for international controls on nuclear weapons. Zanuck did not believe for one moment in ‘the idiotic theory that we should have given up all our atomic secrets to the Russians eight years ago, as some “brilliant” scientists recommended’. Most of them had since changed their minds anyway, he argued caustically, ‘now that the USSR has made very clear its intentions by aggressive and unprovoked war’.24 Third, Zanuck insisted that Klaatu’s shooting by a soldier at the outset of the movie be put down to nervousness rather than trigger-happiness. He also had North delete a line uttered by Helen’s son Bobby (Billy Gray) – ‘some of the kids always want to play war, but I never do’ – which implied American society had become dangerously militarised. Finally, Zanuck challenged North on the negative picture his script painted of the authorities’ and the public’s hysterical reaction to Klaatu’s escape from a secure hospital wing. Zanuck felt that it would be more appropriate to pin the blame for the public’s mob-like hunt for the innocent fugitive on the press, and to show the police and FBI trying responsibly to dampen the lynch psychology.25 Even after these changes had been made, both the Production Code Administration and the Department of Defence still regarded The Day the Earth Stood Still as controversial. The PCA insisted that Klaatu’s ending speech be rewritten where his ‘words seem to be directed at the United States’.26 The army and the National Guard reluctantly provided some soldiers and equipment for the production, since the Pentagon acknowledged that it would be the military’s responsibility to confront any sort of threat to the nation’s wellbeing. This assistance, allied to impressive location work in Washington, DC,

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A monster with a message: moments after landing on Earth and announcing his peaceful intentions, Klaatu (Michael Rennie, lying in the foreground) is shot and wounded by the US military. The gigantic robot, Gort (Lock Martin), comes to his master’s rescue. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Twentieth Century Fox/The Kobal Collection.

the presence of real-life news commentators like Elmer Davis, and innovative technical eﬀects, gave the film a sense of actuality and immediacy.27 Zanuck’s and the PCA’s interventions did blunt the film’s message in some regards, but The Day the Earth Stood Still was by no means neutered. Despite its fantastic plot, the end product patently makes serious and well-crafted points about the build-up of nuclear weapons and the Red Scare. The film conveys the inability of world leaders, including the American president, to compromise; the statesmen won’t even meet to discuss Klaatu’s proposals on arms negotiations. It portrays the American government as cynical and ruthless, imprisoning the well-meaning Klaatu lest his message causes political embarrassment. It then shows how easy it is for the media to whip up public hysteria, to the point at which Klaatu is tracked down and killed like a wild animal. A few in the audience might even have seen Klaatu/Mr Carpenter as a Christlike figure persecuted for carrying a message of peace and willing to die to save the world.28 Most unusually for films of this era, The Day the Earth Stood Still depicts pacifist intellectuals sympathetically. Klaatu befriends Dr Barnhardt, played by

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A meeting of minds: Klaatu (Michael Rennie) and Dr Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe) construct a plan for international disarmament. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Twentieth Century Fox/The Kobal Collection.

Sam Jaﬀe, a well-known non-communist progressive (who would be blacklisted in 1951–2) with a physical resemblance to Einstein.29 Barnhardt, his fellow scientists and other experts from the East and the West who are invited to a meeting with Klaatu are far more open-minded and trustworthy than the US military establishment, which is presented as both ignorant and arrogant. When Klaatu makes ‘the Earth stand still’ for half an hour by stopping all motors and electricity, thereby exhibiting his power to punish the planet if its nuclear arms threaten its neighbours, Barnhardt is awe-struck, whereas the authorities are stricken by panic. Similarly, when Klaatu delivers his final ultimatum – that if humans fail to coexist Gort will have no alternative but to reduce Earth ‘to a burned-out cinder’ – Barnhardt’s face suggests he still sees the alien as more of an ally than an enemy and that a breakthrough in world relations is finally now possible.30 At the very end of the movie, Helen chooses to remain on Earth rather than leave with Klaatu, arguing that the world’s dire predicament is as much her fault as anyone else’s and that it is up to everyone to regain eﬀective control of nuclear technology. In this way, the film concludes on a constructive, optimistic note and chooses not to challenge US oﬃcialdom as directly

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as it might. Overall, though, The Day the Earth Stood Still validates a turn to extra-governmental politics, and suggests that for a major social and philosophical change one cannot depend on the political status quo. In the event, when The Day the Earth Stood Still was released in September 1951, Twentieth Century-Fox’s publicity department made conspicuous eﬀorts to play down the film’s political overtones. This was not that unusual; studios traditionally argued that overtly political material was box oﬃce poison. In this case, however, Zanuck’s cautiousness was doubtless heightened by HUAC’s return to Hollywood in early 1951 in order to open up a further round of subversion investigations. Financially, The Day the Earth Stood Still performed satisfactorily, taking $1.8 million at the US box oﬃce. Politically, though, the movie seems to have made little impact.31 THE GUNSLINGER’S ACCOMPLICE A second category of celluloid Cold War dissent relates to films which, in allegorical form, condemned those who led or tacitly condoned the witchhunting of the Red Scare era. The best-known example of this, because it alludes to Hollywood itself, is High Noon, a 1952 Western produced by Stanley Kramer, directed by Fred Zinnemann, and written by Carl Foreman. The movie tells the story of sheriﬀ Will Kane (played by that icon of frontier determination, and friendly HUAC witness, Gary Cooper), whom the cynically fearful townspeople of Hadleyville desert when a gang leader recently released from jail returns to exact revenge on Kane for arresting him. An ex-communist who felt abandoned by his industry colleagues after being subpoenaed to testify before HUAC while the film was in production, Foreman claimed his script was a parable about the committee’s onslaught on Hollywood and ‘the timidity of the community there’. This message was understood by some within the film trade when it was released. John Wayne, then President of the MPA, vilified the movie, condemning its depiction of cowardly townsfolk as ‘the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life’. Equally, others interpreted the film quite diﬀerently. The oﬃcial Soviet newspaper, Pravda, for instance, attacked High Noon as ‘a glorification of the individual’. In the years ahead, the most influential political reading of the film seems to have been Swedish critic Harry Schein’s. Schein asserted that High Noon was the great American foreign policy movie: an allegory for the United Nations’ fear of the Soviet Union and China around the time of the Korean War, and, in Will Kane’s reluctant hero, an aﬃrmation of the United States’ moral courage, duty and sense of justice.32 Another broody but lesser known Western, Silver Lode (1954), focused more overtly on the nature of liberty, truth and memory in a free society.

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Neither its director, Allan Dwan, nor its writer, Karen DeWolf, appears to have had overt political objectives. Dwan had been making movies for forty years and was best known for directing the Second World War flag-raiser Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). DeWolf ’s credits included Appointment in Honduras (1953), a jungle adventure starring Glenn Ford as an American restoring democracy in Central America. Silver Lode, a B-movie, told the story of Dan Ballard (John Payne), a respected citizen in the town of Silver Lode, who on his wedding day is accused of murder and robbery by four men from Discovery led by an old acquaintance called Ned McCarthy (Dan Duryea), who is posing as a US Marshal. Though entirely innocent, Ballard is soon deserted by his erstwhile friends and hunted down on the basis of allegations, suspicion and circumstantial evidence. In the dénouement, Ballard and McCarthy fight it out in the town clock tower, where the villain is eventually killed when a bullet from his own gun ricochets from a replica Liberty Bell. As a final twist, we then learn that the document which has helped clear Ballard’s name is itself a forgery. In this way, the film seemed to be criticising the very process of political investigation and sneering at the public’s willingness to accept ‘evidence’ that either suited them personally or corresponded with the temper of the times.33 NIGHTMARE ON MAIN STREET Films that challenged prevailing American Cold War values openly were very rare indeed in the 1950s. A handful of espionage comedies, such as Norman Panama and Melvin Frank’s Knock on Wood (1954), ridiculed the images of a world imperilled by subversion created or fostered by political leaders and the media. Other, less slapstick comedies made qualified attacks on McCarthyism. H. C. Potter’s Top Secret Aﬀair (1957), for example, was a comical battle of the sexes that centred on an American military hero (Kirk Douglas), who is falsely accused of leaking information to the enemy while stationed in Korea, and a misguided liberal journalist (Susan Hayward), whose exposé of the spy scandal provokes a McCarthyite Senate hearing. This sort of material reflected a certain willingness on the part of Hollywood and its audiences to laugh at their own phobias, and to address the unhealthy fear and suspicion accompanying the quest for national security, but it was not directly confrontational. No comedies questioned the very basis of the national security state, or pre-empted assaults on the McCarthyites from within the political establishment. And none was as bitingly satirical on the relationship between McCarthyism, HUAC and American popular culture as Charlie Chaplin’s British-made A King in New York (1957), which was not shown in the United States until 1973.34 One film that did strike a range of dissenting notes, and which has consequently attracted considerable attention from historians, is Herbert

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Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (1954). Made outside Hollywood by the blacklisted Biberman, Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico, this was a powerful drama based on a strike in 1950–1 by the Mexican-American zinc miners of Bayard, New Mexico, who had demanded equality with their Anglo colleagues, as well as safety regulations on the job. Salt of the Earth was the first American feature film to focus on and present a strike by a militant union from the workers’ point of view. The film was so successfully suppressed by elements within the film industry mainstream, federal and state governments, and organised labour that it had only a brief showing in a handful of cities and, despite high praise and prizes in Europe, did not go into general US release until 1965. For its defiance of the blacklist, and its socially conscious unionism that sought to break down racial barriers, bridge class divisions, and enlarge the role of women, Salt of the Earth has been described by one scholar as ‘the single most anomalous cinematic legacy of Cold War America’. Its uniqueness can best be appreciated by noting that a quarter of a century passed before another positive feature film about unions was made: Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae, in 1979.35 There are two Hollywood movies of the era that bear some comparison with Salt of the Earth, in terms of reconstructing a real-life case of political persecution and deprecating Cold War America’s lurch to the right: Philip Dunne’s Three Brave Men (1957) and Daniel Taradash’s Storm Centre (1956). Dunne’s docudrama was based on the true story of a navy clerk (Abraham Chasanow, played by Ernest Borgnine) who was fired as a security risk in 1954 because of suspected connections to the Communist party, and who then took the case to court to prove his loyalty to the United States. Daringly for its time, Three Brave Men portrays the emotional torture caused to an innocent citizen victimised by reckless political charges, but the film ultimately retreats to the centre ground. Instead of attacking the atmosphere of paranoia that fostered the communist witch-hunts, Borgnine’s crucifixion is treated as a necessary evil in the interests of ‘democracy’.36 Storm Centre has largely been ignored by historians, yet is worthy of sustained analysis for two reasons. First, it represents Hollywood’s most direct assault on McCarthyism until the mid1970s, and, second, the film, paradoxically, won approval from a number of nationalist pressure groups whose rampant anti-liberalism had helped generate the Red Scare.37 The origins of Storm Centre lie in the summer of 1950, when Elick Moll suggested to his friend and fellow screenwriter Daniel Taradash that a letter in the Saturday Review might provide them with a basis ‘to fight McCarthyism through film’. Though avowed liberals, neither Moll nor Taradash had a reputation for political activism, on or oﬀ screen. Taradash had earned his first Hollywood feature credit in 1939 as one of four screenwriters on the film adaptation of Cliﬀord Odets’ socially conscious play Golden Boy; Moll’s credits included the

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anodyne musical You Were Meant for Me (Lloyd Bacon, 1948). The letter in question, written by Darlene Essary, told of the recent dismissal of her friend Ruth Brown, who had been librarian at the Bartlesville Public Library in Oklahoma for thirty years, amid allegations of subversive activities that included subscribing to left-wing magazines and participating in interracial programmes. In March 1951, Taradash and Moll persuaded the Stanley Kramer Company, whose five-year, thirty-picture contract signed that year with Columbia gave Kramer control over the subject matter of his films, to purchase their story. Titled ‘The Library’, its themes of book-burning and character assassination, leavened with anti-intellectualism and ‘political ambition disguised as patriotism’, amounted to, in the screenwriters’ opinion, ‘a dangerous picture about dangerous ideas’. The core of the film was to be the librarian’s battle against pressure to remove books labelled communist and therefore subversive in a Red Scare atmosphere.38 For four years, between mid-1951 and mid-1955, the shooting of ‘The Library’ was postponed. A series of personal, commercial and political obstacles held up production. First, veteran star Mary Pickford agreed to play the lead role of the librarian, only to drop out of the project in late 1952, partly for fear of working with what her friend and influential right-wing Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called ‘that red, Stanley Kramer’. Next, Irving Reis, the film’s director, died in the summer of 1953. Following this, in 1954, Kramer’s company, a number of whose employees had resigned or been fired as a result of their encounter with HUAC in 1951–2, parted from Columbia, leaving ‘The Library’ in the studio’s hands.39 In early 1955, Taradash, who had won the 1953 screenplay Academy Award for From Here to Eternity, formed an independent production company, Phoenix Corporation, with his old Harvard friend Julian Blaustein, and made a two-picture deal with Columbia. Blaustein was looking to kick-start a production career which had stuttered somewhat since The Day the Earth Stood Still. Harry Cohn, Columbia’s chief, was then persuaded to give Phoenix $800,000 for ‘The Library’, with Blaustein and Taradash agreeing to work respectively as producer and director for profits but no salary. In August 1955, filming of what was now called Storm Centre finally got under way in Santa Rosa, California, with the legendary Bette Davis playing a matronly Alicia Hull. The 90-minute movie was released in the US a year later, in the summer of 1956.40 The plot of Storm Centre revolves entirely around the character of Alicia Hull, a devoted public servant widowed during the Second World War. As librarian of the Kenport Public Library, she has been for over twenty-five years not merely a custodian but a loving guide who helps mould the future generations of her New England town. In turn, the children of Kenport regard her as a friend and counsellor, her favourite being Freddie Slater (Kevin

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Coughlin), whose father resents his son’s bookish habits. Over a seemingly innocuous lunch one day, city oﬃcials ask Hull to remove from her shelves a tome, The Communist Dream, which they feel is subversive ‘garbage’. In exchange they promise to build her long-desired children’s wing. Hull at first acquiesces, but then quickly reverses her decision, sensing bribery and an assault on the freedom of expression. The next day, in the film’s key scene, reminiscent both of events in Bartlesville and of the HUAC hearings in Hollywood years earlier, Hull defends her action before the city council. In response to charges that she is in danger of turning ‘the library into a propaganda agency for the Kremlin’, Hull argues that the book in question actually exposes the truth about communism and that having it in the library is testimony to America’s faith in its citizens’ ability to make judgements for themselves. One of the council members, Paul Duncan (Brian Keith), then produces a file on Hull, which points to her membership of a number of wartime communist front groups. Upset by Duncan’s implications and his burrowing into her private life, Hull declares that she detests communism but that she also disagrees with censorship. Duncan retorts by calling her ‘a dupe’ for those people ‘who hide behind our laws . . . to destroy our laws’, but agrees with his colleagues that Hull should be forgiven so long as she removes The Communist Dream and accepts the council’s right to ‘screen’ all the library’s ‘questionable material’ henceforth. When Hull stands firm, saying that the council can remove the book but only at the cost of dismissing her, the council feels it has no option. Several members fear losing power if the press learns that they have been ‘soft’ on communism. Consequently, Hull is fired and replaced by Duncan’s fiancée, Martha Lockridge (played by Kim Hunter, an Oscar winner and former blacklistee). Smeared in the local newspapers as a Red, Hull, once a much-loved pillar of the community, is systematically ostracised by the townsfolk. Friends and acquaintances are too scared to campaign on her behalf lest they be branded communists. Even the children shun her, compounding her sense of loneliness and desperation. All of this has a profound psychological eﬀect on Freddie Slater, who, suﬀering from frenzied nightmares and told by his father that Hull has poisoned his mind with ‘crummy notions’, begins to hate her. His emotions come to a head some months later when, at the ceremonial opening of the library’s new children’s wing, Freddie throws a fit and tearfully denounces Hull as a communist in front of everyone. That night, ashamed and confused, Freddie sneaks into the library and sets it on fire. As Kenport’s inhabitants watch aghast as one of their most treasured civic buildings burns to the ground, and as the camera lingers on the flaming volumes of Mark Twain and Shakespeare, they realise their collective wrongdoing. Duncan gets

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Food for thought: Alicia Hull (Bette Davis) learns for the first time that one of her library’s books, The Communist Dream, is stirring controversy. The McCarthyite enforcer, Paul Duncan (Brian Keith), sits on her right. Storm Centre (1956). Columbia Pictures/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

the punishment he deserves: condemned by his council colleagues as a political opportunist whose Red-baiting has debased American civil liberties, then dumped by Martha for his scheming cruelty. The film wraps up neatly when, amid the ashes and the craven town inhabitants, Hull declares her determination to help rebuild the library. ‘And if anyone ever again tries to remove a book from it’, she adds fiercely, ‘they’ll have to do it over my dead body.’ Several high-profile liberals, among them the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, applauded Storm Centre for its courage, and justifiably so. During filming, Davis had received threatening letters from women’s groups warning her of the long-term damage the ‘subversive’ project would have on her and her children’s reputations. Support for the film also came from influential Washington columnists like Drew Pearson, with whom McCarthy had had a long-running public feud.41 Conversely, the Catholic Legion of Decency gave Storm Centre a ‘separate’ classification, used for only the fifth time in twenty years, on the grounds that it was ‘a propaganda film’ that ‘oﬀers a warped,

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oversimplified and strongly emotional solution to a complex problem of American life’. The Motion Picture Industry Council stridently objected to this, arguing that the Legion’s action amounted to blatant censorship. From one of the liberal magazines that Ruth Brown had been sacked for circulating in 1950, the Nation, came this ringing endorsement: ‘It should be hard to convince a woman’s friends and neighbours that she is an enemy agent. The great merit of Storm Centre is that it shows – with no sentimentality and little melodrama – how very easy it is.’42 However, it would be a mistake to overstate Storm Centre’s political audacity, for several reasons. For a start, the film expresses no sympathy at all for the plight of the thousands of American communists or left-wing ‘fellow travellers’ whom the national security state had labelled traitors. The movie is careful to depict Alicia Hull as a respectable civil libertarian who abhors communism, not as a radical outsider. Second, far from questioning the United States’ role in the Cold War, the filmmakers explicitly supported it. ‘We’re telling Russia we can read a book designed to be inimical to democracy’, Taradash told Variety, ‘and yet not be damaged by it, because we are stronger than Russia.’ This, and the movie’s celebration of Hull’s archetypical provincial pluck in the face of bullying politicos, help to account for the strong backing Storm Centre received from a number of ultra-conservative organisations which had campaigned successfully for Ruth Brown’s dismissal in 1950, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. The film would have carried a very diﬀerent message had Hull, like Brown, abandoned her community, rather than staying to rebuild it after what is presented as a temporary collective loss of sanity.43 Third, via Hull’s keynote speech, in which she compares The Communist Dream with Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the film encourages the audience to look on communism and fascism as two halves of the same coin, and thereby to reduce the Cold War to a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. As already mentioned, this was one of the chief refrains of oﬃcial and unoﬃcial American Cold War propagandists. Fourth, the movie deletes all references to Ruth Brown’s work for racial equality in Bartlesville, which was the main reason why she was fired. While this can be attributed mainly to the scriptwriters’ targeting of McCarthyism, and to the perceived need to give audiences a story they could easily comprehend, Storm Centre missed an opportunity to show that during the Red Scare anticommunists were often driven by ulterior motives – economic, personal and racial. Finally, even the strongest theme of the movie – its excoriation of the McCarthyite practices of censoring books, smearing intellectuals and persecuting liberals for pre-Cold War political activities – was, by 1956, to all intents and purposes out of date. McCarthy’s own four-year assault on domestic communism had ended in 1954 with his censure by the Senate for unethical tactics, after

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which witch-hunting had slowly lost its appeal (though not its eﬀect). Had Storm Centre appeared in the early 1950s, when political informing, stigmatisation and guilt by association were at their peak, it would undoubtedly have packed a political punch. As it was, in 1956, critics of varying political persuasions deemed the film preachy, artificial and hysterical.44 ‘NOW I AM BECOME DEATH, THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS’45 If the early 1950s saw the Cold War at its most glacial, the latter part of the decade represented one of the conflict’s more schizophrenic phases. Nikita Khrushchev’s instantly historic denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in early 1956, the 1958 Soviet–American cultural exchange agreement, and Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in September 1959, the first ever by a Soviet leader (and whose low point was a Hollywood studio tour),46 were all signs to Westerners that the Kremlin’s desire for ‘peaceful coexistence’ was more than mere rhetoric. Many Americans also saw the alcohol-induced death of Joseph McCarthy in May 1957 as marking the end of a dark period in the nation’s recent history. On the other hand, Moscow’s brutal intervention in Hungary in late 1956, the blow delivered to American pride by the Soviet launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik I, in 1957, and the crisis over Berlin in 1958–9 saw East–West tensions rise to new levels amidst oﬃcial and media speculation about mutual assured destruction, global fallout and doomsday machines. Eisenhower’s ‘New Look’ nuclear-oriented military strategy, combined with Khrushchev’s high-stakes ‘rocket-rattling’ diplomacy during the late 1950s and early 1960s, produced what many historians now see as the Cold War’s most frightening phase, culminating in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.47 During this period, the public’s fears about the arms race often bordered on acute paranoia. This is hardly surprising given that even physicists and politicians did not know the full extent of thermonuclear power. This fact was dramatically illustrated in March 1954, when the unexpectedly large radioactive fallout from an American bomb test in the Pacific caused the first human casualties of the hydrogen bomb era: the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, the Fukuryu¯ Maru, or Lucky Dragon. Eisenhower’s eﬀorts to limit the accident’s political fallout by telling journalists that even the scientists were surprised by what had happened not surprisingly backfired, sparking a debate in the media that ruled out any thoughts people might still have had that a nuclear war would resemble the Second World War. Despite this revelation, a year later the head of the US Federal Civil Defence Administration (FCDA) was still advising urban dwellers that they would be able to escape fallout exposure merely by building a roadside trench, covering it with tar and paper, and huddling

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underneath until the air cleared. By 1958, having already conceded publicly that fallout would produce genetic damage and cancer, the US Atomic Energy Commission felt it was losing the battle in trying to present the nuclear buildup as an ultimately beneficial and peaceful activity.48 Five years after the Lucky Dragon disaster, the first American movie to question seriously the feasibility of nuclear war survival appeared.49 Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, On the Beach (1959) was based on Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel depicting the aftermath of an all-out nuclear confrontation. Set in Melbourne in 1963, Shute’s story followed the fates of the crew of a US atomic submarine, submerged when the bombing took place, and their Australian hosts, who are helplessly awaiting the cloud of radioactive fallout that is drifting south, having already killed everyone in the Northern Hemisphere. On the Beach diﬀered markedly from the majority of militarybased films of the fifties which, like Above and Beyond (Melvin Frank/Norman Panama, 1952), Strategic Air Command (Anthony Mann, 1955) and Bombers B-52 (Gordon Douglas, 1957), had received logistical support from the Pentagon and which had portrayed atomic weapons as the benign protectors of democracy.50 Suggesting instead that nuclear weapons might completely destroy the world and all life upon it, On the Beach was praised as a deterrent to further nuclear armament and credited with initiating a public dialogue that questioned the value of the bomb.51 Such socially pertinent fare was the speciality of Kramer, whose self-appointed liberal mission was ‘to use film as a real weapon against discrimination, hatred, prejudice, and excessive power’.52 The space for Kramer and others like him to operate had opened up during the 1950s due to the demise of the traditional Hollywood studio system. The catalyst for this was the Supreme Court’s divorcement decrees of the late 1940s, which separated the studios from their theatre chains in order to promote fair competition within the film industry. Many of the major studios reacted to these rulings, which made them even more vulnerable to the onslaught of television, by cutting in-house production and transforming themselves into conglomerates that emphasised distribution and the funding of contracted independents. This gave rise to a greater number of independent producers who felt less bound by the old studio hierarchies or the increasingly outmoded strictures of the PCA. Simultaneously, surveys indicated that the post-Second World War baby boom was giving rise to a younger, more liberal audience that wanted more experimental films. Added to this, by the late 1950s HUAC’s grip on Hollywood had diminished and the practice of blacklisting was being discontinued.53 These developments combined to facilitate the emergence of more socially critical and artistically innovative filmmakers like Kramer, who in 1954 had set up a new company which released through United Artists. Kramer was

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no nuclear radical; he was not a member of America’s largest anti-nuclear peace group, SANE, for instance, which had formed in 1957, nor was he a committed nuclear unilateralist. He made On the Beach to ‘attempt to get people to think about the arms race’, proclaiming it would be ‘a concept of hope on celluloid . . . to reach out to the hearts of people everywhere that they might feel compassion – for themselves’.54 Whilst their movie was bound to attract political opposition, both Kramer and United Artists could argue they were merely tapping into the anti-nuclear Zeitgeist. When it was published in the United States in the summer of 1957, Nevil Shute’s novel had sold 100,000 copies in the first six weeks, and then been serialised by some forty newspapers with a circulation of eight million. A March 1958 poll by the American Institute of Public Opinion found that 70 per cent of the American public favoured ‘setting up a world-wide organisation which would make sure – by regular inspections – that no nation, including Russia and the United States, makes atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, and missiles’.55 As it was, Kramer did not go out of his way to make the film any more frightening or politically controversial than the novel already was. Kramer had a habit of leavening the political content of his movies by focusing on individual lives and romance, and in foregrounding the doomed love aﬀair between the commander of the USS Sawfish, Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck), and careworn Australian Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), On the Beach was no diﬀerent. Having consulted scientists during production, Kramer might have chosen to present his viewers with explicit images of radiation’s eﬀects. Yet its picture of the nuclear holocaust is bland and antiseptic. The bombs ‘tastefully explode oﬀ screen’, as the New Republic later put it, we see no corpses, and no one suﬀers radiation sickness.56 When the Sawfish’s crew sails to California to investigate a radio transmission, only to discover that the signal is merely an empty Coke bottle banging against a telegraph transmitter, San Francisco and San Diego appear untouched. One of the most moving scenes in the book centred on an Australian naval oﬃcer, Peter Holmes (played on screen by Anthony Perkins), injecting his infant with a lethal serum, then administering government-issue suicide pills to his wife and himself. In the film, this is reduced to a discussion about suicide between husband and wife, a change that might be related to the pressure exerted on Kramer by the Legion of Decency and PCA.57 In contrast with the novel, the film also ends on a potentially upbeat note. The final shot of Melbourne, now a ghost town, focuses on a Salvation Army banner proclaiming, ‘There is still time, Brothers’. Some have read this as irony on Kramer’s part, but at the time many critics believed that this, combined with the movie’s flowery portrayal of the post-nuclear world, diluted the unmitigated grimness of Shute’s reality.58

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The end of the line: dressed in a radiation suit, the Sawfish’s Lt. Sunderstrom (Harp McGuire) finds the source of the mysterious San Diego radio transmission. The city, like the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, is dead. On the Beach (1959). United Artists/MGM.

Even with these changes, On the Beach is an intensely moving film. The script, by John Paxton and James Lee Barrett, highlights the diﬀerent kinds of denial that each victim practises. Holmes’ wife, Mary (Donna Anderson), refuses to think of or tolerate talk of the impending disaster; Towers cannot accept the death of his wife and children; Moira and others drink excessively; nuclear physicist Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire) races his sports car, before gassing himself with its exhaust fumes. There is a conspicuous lack of panic, and the submarine crew maintain a stiﬀ upper lip throughout. But Towers’ decision to leave Moira at the end to make the journey home with his crew, while admirably patriotic, also appears absurd and sadomasochistic. Kramer diverges from Shute’s novel, which specified that the war was started by China and Russia deliberately attacking one another. The film instead states that the fatal confrontation was caused by a mixture of technical failures and human fallibility, suggesting therefore the only rational solution would be to dismantle the whole nuclear apparatus. ‘Everybody had an atomic bomb and counter bombs and counter counter-bombs’, intones Osborne. ‘The devices outgrew us. We couldn’t control them.’ Attempts by the Department of Defence and the navy to alter this during script consultations, and to show Russia starting the war, came to nothing.59 The movie pulls no punches either when it comes to predicting the terrible scale of the disaster: the world faces extinction. Kramer in fact refused to

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Doing the unthinkable: the moment at which Lt. Cmdr Holmes (Anthony Perkins) and his wife Mary (Donna Anderson) realise the time has come to kill their baby daughter before committing suicide. Their deaths will take place offscreen. United Artists/MGM.

modify his script in this regard, despite protests from military and civil defence authorities, who argued that there were not enough weapons in existence to spread the quantity of radioactivity required to sterilise the planet. As a result of this, the Pentagon turned down Kramer’s request to borrow a nuclear submarine, but the producer’s willingness to challenge overtly both the military’s tight relationship with Hollywood and the big screen’s support for nuclear deterrence during this period was highly significant. Lawrence Suid, an expert on the links between filmmakers and the Pentagon during the twentieth century, writes: ‘On the Beach, not the Vietnam War, marked the real beginning, albeit in a small way, of a greater scrutiny of the US military establishment by the mass media and the cultural community.’60 With the Defence Department having largely failed to influence the movie’s content, other government agencies worked feverishly to reduce the public impact of On the Beach. The film arrived during a period in which the White House was acutely sensitive to the issue of nuclear testing and disarmament. Since the Lucky Dragon incident in 1954, an assortment of world leaders, scientists, international organisations and VIPs, including Pope Pius XII, had campaigned for a test ban, to the point at which, by the winter of 1958, radioactive fallout had become one of the most important issues in international aﬀairs. Despite a long-running government information programme stressing

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that the need to test was solely to maintain ‘an atomic shield against aggression’ and to perfect the development of ‘clean’ weapons that did not produce radioactive fallout, testing had also become a divisive domestic political issue, leading to the birth of SANE and other nuclear disarmament groups.61 In early 1959, while On the Beach was being shot in Australia, the Oﬃce of Civil Defence Management (OCDM) found via opinion polls that, despite an optimistic publicity campaign promising that only minimal precautions were necessary to protect from the dangers of hydrogen bomb fallout (the duck-and-cover ads), less than 20 per cent of the American population believed that their chances of survival were very good, even if they were housed in a fully equipped bomb shelter (which only 2 per cent of the population had yet constructed). Government psychologists concluded that these findings showed the public was psychologically unable to ‘think about the unthinkable’ without falling into total despair, and that this was the greatest danger to civil defence.62 The USIA had already, in June 1958, condemned an early script of On the Beach for ‘its utterly pessimistic outlook’ and a ‘tendency to “blame America” in much of its preparation’.63 Such readings, allied to the FBI’s conviction that communists were infiltrating SANE chapters, helps explain why the CIA was drafted in to ferret behind the scenes of the production. The agency drew a blank, however, concluding that there was ‘no information to support [the contention, made by prominent church leaders amongst others] that On the Beach is a communistic vehicle of propaganda’.64 On the eve of the film’s release, in November and December 1959, Eisenhower’s Cabinet discussed the matter on several occasions. Secretary of State Christian Herter believed the movie’s ‘extremist, ban-the-bomb propaganda’ constituted a potentially ‘serious obstacle’ to national security. If audiences embraced the film’s message, it could have a ‘tremendous impact’, undermining public support for the government’s civil defence programme and military expenditure. OCDM director Karl Harr agreed, decrying the film for making his fallout shelter programme ‘utterly hopeless’.65 After the Cabinet had watched On the Beach at a special White House preview in early December, it was suggested that Secretary of Defence Robert Anderson should make a televised statement discrediting the film, in particular using his connections with religious leaders to exploit Catholic concerns over the depiction of mass suicide. Concluding that this would merely give the movie added publicity, and that it must avoid ‘the appearance of an American government boycott of an anti-war film’, the Cabinet opted instead for a more subtle briefing strategy. White House staﬀ distributed a classified report on the movie among State Department and Pentagon personnel, directing them to refuse comment on the actual movie yet providing them with tips on how to disprove its scientific validity. Quotations from the report found their way into negative reviews of

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On the Beach, and into speeches by members of Congress as well as key military and defence oﬃcials. The USIA sent classified information guides on On the Beach to all embassy posts, with a cover letter signed by Herter, setting out, a tad optimistically, how the movie’s undoubtedly strong emotional appeal might be turned ‘into intellectual support for our quest for safe-guarded disarmament’. Unfortunately, this directive backfired somewhat when it was leaked to journalists, leaving the impression among some Americans of a manipulative government that lacked either the intellectual imagination or the political ability to rethink its deterrent strategy.66 In a carefully choreographed release campaign, designed to enhance the picture’s international importance, On the Beach opened simultaneously in eighteen major world capitals, from Berlin to New Delhi, including Moscow. The event marked the first time an American film had had a premiere in the Soviet Union.67 Variety claimed that the premieres were attended by some 33,000 people and reported that in Tokyo ‘many of the 1,500 persons in the first-night audience wept openly’.68 The Soviet government used its endorsement of the movie as proof to the world that the Soviet Union was as ‘peaceloving’ as the United States, but reportedly found it far too hopeless and depressing for public viewing in Russia.69 In the United States, On the Beach, like The Ten Commandments, generated heated discussion among critics, politicians, pressure groups and the public way beyond the norm. Republican Senator Wallace F. Bennett of Utah accused Kramer of being a pacifist and of ‘playing the Soviet’s game’ by alarming the public with unjustifiable fears. From the other side of the political spectrum, Paul V. Beckley in the New York Herald Tribune praised the film as ‘one of the most successful dramatisations of ideas in recent history, the thorough evolution of a particular nightmare which has been haunting our generation ceaselessly’. The Los Angeles Times suggested strongly that the government’s damage-limitation measures had served little purpose, since ‘these scattered criticisms are but a small volley amid a generally favourable reaction to an excellent and moving film’. The distinguished American physicist Linus Pauling waxed lyrical: ‘It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world.’70 There is some debate over the commercial success and social impact of On the Beach. Within a few months the film had generated $6.2 million in domestic rentals, making it the eighth highest-earning movie of 1959. Despite the fact that this figure dwarfed the movie’s $2.9 million budget, Kramer thought that On the Beach financially underachieved. Years later he told biographer Donald Spoto that he took ‘full responsibility for the film’s disappointing box oﬃce’, blaming it on his failure to make the film’s sober subject ‘exciting’ enough to attract a mass audience.71 Kramer may have a point here. Ironically,

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opinion polls of the time suggested that most Americans found the film realistic and accurate in its depiction of the real threat of nuclear war, and that is why they stayed away from watching it.72 This could help to explain why no Hollywood-produced film attempted to deal so explicitly with nuclearinduced extinction for another twenty-four years.73 Yet, as these polls, and G. Tom Poe’s fascinating analysis of the American reception of On the Beach, show, because the movie attracted such interest, its rhetorical impact and political influence went far beyond its actual spectators. As the most controversial nuclear film of the 1950s, On the Beach was talked about by more people than actually watched it.74 This does not mean of course that, by itself, the film necessarily altered the average American’s perspective on nuclear war, or that it forced the media to challenge oﬃcial views on the subject. For the most part, the media continued throughout the early 1960s to refuse to publish the writings of nuclear critics and did little to question government policy. This paradoxical, if not bizarre treatment of the nuclear threat was highlighted in the summer of 1961. That August a Rand Corporation study, available to but largely ignored by the press, estimated that a 3,000-megaton attack on American cities would kill 80 per cent of the population. In September, Life magazine ran a lengthy article, accompanied by an appreciative letter from President Kennedy, assuring readers in remarkably sunny terms that 97 out of 100 Americans would survive a nuclear war if only they built bomb shelters. The best cure for radiation sickness, it advised, was ‘to take hot tea or a solution of baking soda’.75 On the Beach certainly developed a politically intriguing afterlife. Many antinuclear groups, spanning the globe from New Zealand to Britain, enthusiastically incorporated the movie into their propaganda campaigns in the early 1960s.76 It was then superseded in this regard mainly by two harder-edged films made in Britain in the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis: Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964),77 and Peter Watkins’ horrifying docudrama, The War Game (1965).78 A new generation of activists then recycled On the Beach in the 1980s, when the issue of nuclear escalation returned to the top of the international political agenda.79 CONCLUSION Between 1947 and 1960, the major Hollywood studios released an approximate total of 300 feature films per year.80 A relatively small number of these movies were explicitly anti-communist or anti-Soviet. A far greater number lent implicit ideological support to the US government’s Cold War stance through their inherent endorsement of individualism, consumerism and patriotism.

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Even many movies that professed to show the dark underside of aﬄuent American family life – epitomised by James Dean’s delinquent Jim in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) – eﬀectively underpinned the Cold War consensus by suggesting that acutely personal relations outweighed wider social, political and economic concerns.81 Looked at in the context of these hundreds of movies, the two dozen or so non-conformist films analysed above obviously amount to a weak retort. Making movies that encouraged audiences to question cherished national values during wartime is not something that Hollywood had (or has) ever found easy. During the early stages of the Cold War, the innate conservatism of the American film industry was reinforced by a unique number of externally and internally imposed pressures of a political and economic nature. Never before had industry personnel and output been politically scrutinised so exhaustively as they were in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The institutional trauma this caused was made worse by the sharp drop in cinema attendance figures during the era, a depressing phenomenon which tended to act as a further disincentive to producers to take political and artistic chances on screen. The result was an overarching culture of censorship and self-censorship in relation to the Cold War on the film trade’s part. Any filmmaker who courted Cold War controversy risked being labelled a communist at worse, or naïve at best. One angry tradepress reviewer of Storm Centre, for instance, a movie released two years after Joseph McCarthy’s highly publicised fall from grace, wondered whether its director realised how simple it would be for others to turn his film into Soviet propaganda: ‘Our Central Intelligence Agency would do well to keep its eye open for the appearance behind the Iron Curtain of prints of this film that are altered, by dubbed dialogue, inaccurate sub-titles or otherwise, so as to make it appear that Americans are now setting their public libraries afire.’82 Such statements of ideological anxiety, tinged with paranoia, substantiate the general picture historians have painted of a nervously fundamentalist American film industry during the early Cold War. And yet, as we have seen, a small number of filmmakers did not entirely conform to this conventional picture. Driven by a combination of liberal beliefs and a determination to make intellectually aware movies, semi-autonomous producers like Stanley Kramer and Julian Blaustein were able to challenge – albeit in a small way – some of the dominant national views about US nuclear policy and internal political subversion. Crucially, they could do this only as long as they were willing to accede to studio executives’ demands for political changes to their scripts, as was the case with The Day the Earth Stood Still. Alternatively, they might claim an individual mandate to promote liberal anticonsensual views by trading on their reputation for politically informed pictures and a successful track record of drawing audiences to films with controversial

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themes through conventional Hollywood formulae. Had either Blaustein or Kramer not boasted these qualities, and had independent filmmakers not been able to exploit their greater leverage in an industry undergoing institutional change, it is unlikely either Storm Centre or On the Beach would have got the necessary financial backing from any major studio. Most of the time it was safer to voice dissent allegorically, but on a few occasions open defiance could be risked, so long as the filmmaker could claim to be running as much with public opinion as against it. If he could not, yet went ahead with his project anyway, the chances were that work would be entirely marginalised, as the fate of Salt of the Earth shows. Movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Storm Centre and On the Beach therefore demonstrate the non-monolithic nature of the US state–film network, and prove that even during American Cold War cinema’s most conservative phase, the US film industry was never oﬃcially straitjacketed in the way that Soviet cinema was. This is not to say, of course, that American filmmakers were as free to comment on the Cold War as most movie-goers presumably believed. Viewers might have known of HUAC’s Tinsel-town investigations, but few would have necessarily connected these with what they saw (or did not see) on the big screen at the Saturday night drive-in. To them, Hollywood remained a Dream Factory that produced cheap, escapist entertainment utterly divorced from foreign policy decisions taken two thousand miles away in the nation’s capital. Notes 1 Open letter by DeBra, Director of MPAA Community Relations Department, in Columbia Studios publicity material, Storm Centre micro-jacket, BFIL. 2 Sayre, Running Time, pp. 31–56. 3 Peter Roﬀman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington, IN, 1981), pp. 293–4; John H. Lenihan, ‘Hollywood Laughs at the Cold War, 1947–1961’, in Toplin (ed.), Hollywood as Mirror, pp. 140–3. 4 During this period, the White House briefly raised the possibility of asking Capra to remodel his Oscar-winning Second World War documentary series, Why We Fight, for the Cold War. Nothing came of this, for reasons unknown. White House minute, 20 March 1952, DDRS 1990, 555. On Why We Fight see Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York, 1992), pp. 467–91. 5 Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp’; Roﬀman and Purdy, Social Problem Film, p. 293; Edward Dmytryk, It’s a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living (New York, 1978). 6 Biskind, Seeing, pp. 102–44; Brian Murphy, ‘Monster Movies: They Came from Beneath the Fifties’, Journal of Popular Film, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1972, pp. 31–44.

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7 Variety, 20 March 1957, p. 6. 8 Oakes, Imaginary War; Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York, 1985); David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT, 1994), pp. 237, 266; Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952. Vol. Two: Policy Execution (Basingstoke, 1974), pp. 116–26. The Soviet Union and Britain exploded their first nuclear devices in August 1949 and October 1952 respectively. The United States and the Soviet Union exploded thermonuclear devices in 1952 and 1953 respectively. The first British thermonuclear tests were carried out in 1957, which enabled London to deploy hydrogen bombs in 1961. 9 Erik Barnouw, ‘The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Footage: A Report’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1982, pp. 91–100. 10 Lawrence S. Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb. Vol. One: One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 (Stanford, CA, 1993), pp. 263–74; Lawrence S. Wittner, The Struggle Against the Bomb. Vol. Two: Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford, CA, 1997), pp. 125–59. 11 Saki Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New Look National Security Policy, 1953–1961 (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 133; Osgood, ‘Total War’, pp. 88–121; Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA, 1988). 12 Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling, ‘The Atom According to Disney’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 81, No. 4, 1995, pp. 436–53. 13 Guy Oakes, ‘The Family Under Nuclear Attack: American Civil Defence Propaganda in the 1950s’, in Rawnsley (ed.), Cold War Propaganda, pp. 67–83; JoAnne Brown, ‘“A is for Atom, B is for Bomb”: Civil Defence in American Public Education, 1948–1963’, Journal of American History, Vol. 75, No. 1, 1988, pp. 68–90; Suid (ed.), Film and Propaganda, pp. 85–115. 14 Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York, 1995), pp. 337–441. 15 Examples include Not of This Earth (Roger Corman, 1956), The Beginning of the End (Bert I. Gordon, 1957), Kronos (Kurt Neumann, 1957) and The Queen from Outer Space (Edward Bernds, 1958). On these and others see Joyce A. Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb (Boulder, CO, 1998). 16 Buhle and Wagner, Hide, pp. 74–8; Biskind, Seeing, p. 159; David Pirie, Anatomy of the Movies (New York, 1981), pp. 277, 280. In 1953, at the end of the HUAC hearings, Alland had nearly escaped testifying, only to make a career move by giving the committee the names of his former friends and comrades. 17 The Mouse that Roared scrapbooks, items 90–1, Carl Foreman Collection, BFIL. 18 Mick Broderick, Nuclear Movies (Jeﬀerson, NC, 1991), pp. 19–20, 76, 89. 19 Evans, Mushroom Clouds, pp. 21–44. 20 Filmfax, November 1989, pp. 70–9. The Day the Earth Stood Still altered Bates’ story somewhat. Whereas Bates’ point seemed to be that it was diﬃcult for humans to understand something diﬀerent from themselves, The Day the Earth Stood Still stressed the need for international and even interplanetary understanding.

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21 Obituary of North, Los Angeles Times, 30 August 1990; Laurence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington, KY, 2002), pp. 267–8. Though North intended Patton to carry an anti-war message, this was not necessarily how others interpreted it, including President Richard Nixon. Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 276–7. 22 Hollywood Citizen-News, 1 May 1951; Blaustein, cited in British National Film Theatre programme, The Day the Earth Stood Still micro-jacket, BFIL. 23 Buhle and Wagner, Hide, p. 77. At the height of the Second Cold War in 1982, Wise tried but failed to make an American–Communist Chinese love story, tentatively titled Our Destiny, in Shanghai in association with the Chinese Film Corporation. Variety, 26 August 1982. 24 ‘Farewell to the Master’, Memorandum on Outline 8/8/50 from Darryl Zanuck to Julian Blaustein, 10 August 1950: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Box 542, Twentieth Century-Fox Script Collection, UCLA Arts Library Special Collections, Los Angeles (hereafter UCLA AL). On the Atomic Scientists’ Movement see Wittner, One World or None, pp. 59–66. 25 ‘Farewell to the Master’, Memorandum on Outline 8/8/50 from Darryl Zanuck to Julian Blaustein, 10 August 1950, and ‘Farewell to the Master’, Conference on First Draft Continuity of 11/28/1950 with Zanuck, Blaustein and North, 6 December 1950: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Box 542, Twentieth Century-Fox Script Collections, UCLA AL. 26 Joseph Breen to Colonel Jason S. Joy, Twentieth Century-Fox Director of Public Relations, 25 January 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still – PCA Files, AMPAS. 27 Suid, Guts and Glory, p. 223. 28 By giving Klaatu the name ‘Mr Carpenter,’ Edmund North was drawing parallels with Christ. This was his ‘private little joke’, intended to evoke a ‘subliminal’ response. North, quoted in Biskind, Seeing, p. 152. 29 Variety, 17 October 1978. 30 Some historians have interpreted Klaatu’s ultimatum and other aspects of The Day the Earth Stood Still as deeply authoritarian, by strongly implying that experts had the right to keep ‘ordinary people’ in line. See, for example, Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester, 1996), pp. 41–3. In my opinion, these readings fail to take the filmmakers’ intentions fully into account. However, such interpretations do provide evidence of science-fiction cinema’s potential for multiple meanings. 31 Hollywood Reporter, 4 September 1951, p. 3; Variety, 5 September 1951, p. 6; BoxOﬃce, 8 September 1951; Newsweek, 1 October 1951; www.imdb.com/title/ tt0043456/business (28 September 2006). 32 Richard A. Schwarz, Cold War Culture: Media and the Arts, 1945–1990 (New York, 1998), p. 138; John Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 9; Harry Schein, ‘The Olympian Cowboy’, American Scholar, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1955, pp. 309–20. 33 New York Times, 24 July 1954, p. 6. 34 Lenihan, ‘Hollywood Laughs’, pp. 144–8; Sbardellati and Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp’, pp. 524–30.

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35 Thomas Doherty, review of James L. Lorence, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (Albuquerque, NM, 1999), in Labor History, Vol. 4, No. 3, August 2000, pp. 380–2; Walsh, ‘Films We Never Saw’, pp. 578–80. On Norma Rae see Variety, 28 February 1979, p. 20, and Hollywood Reporter, 14 March 1980, p. 28. 36 Time, 11 February 1957; Variety, 16 January 1957, p. 6. 37 Though several films released in the 1960s – notably John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate (1962) – contained critiques of 1950s American right-wing extremism, it was not until the release of Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were in 1973 and Woody Allen’s The Front in 1976 that filmmakers focused specifically on the McCarthy witch-hunts. The latter excoriated the entertainment blacklist. On these movies, and Irwin Winkler’s 1991 film Guilty by Suspicion, see Booker, American Left, pp. 258–60 and Jeanne Hall, ‘The Benefits of Hindsight: Re-visions of HUAC and the Film and Television Industries in The Front and Guilty by Suspicion’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, 2001, pp. 15–26. 38 Daniel Taradash Papers, Boxes 3, 24, 33 and 81, AHCW. For more on the Brown case see Louise S. Robbins, The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library (Norman, OK, 2000). 39 Variety, 19 September 1952; Taradash Papers, Box 81, AHCW; Variety, 21 November 1952; New York Times, 14 October 1956. 40 New York Times, 14 October 1956; Pat McGilligan (ed.), Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Oxford, 1981), pp. 322–4. From Here to Eternity was directed by Fred Zinnemann. 41 Charles Higham, Bette: A Biography of Bette Davis (London, 1981), p. 194; Taradash Papers, Boxes 24 and 33, AHCW; Columbia publicity material, Storm Centre micro-jacket, BFIL. 42 Variety, 11 July 1956; America, 4 August 1956; Taradash Papers, Box 33, AHCW; Nation, 27 October 1956. 43 Variety, 6 July 1955; Film Culture, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1956, p. 25. 44 For critical reviews of Storm Centre see, for example, New York Times, 22 October 1956, p. 25; Catholic World, October 1956, pp. 64–5; Commonweal, 10 August 1956, pp. 466–7. For a closer analysis of the relationship that Storm Centre bore to the Ruth Brown case see Robbins, Ruth Brown, pp. 150–3. 45 Physicist Robert Oppenheimer, Supervising Scientist on the Manhattan Project, quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita, upon seeing the first atomic test in July 1945. On Oppenheimer’s isolation from government weapons research following the Second World War, and his being charged in 1953 with communist sympathies by the US Atomic Energy Commission, see Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner (eds), Robert J. Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Stanford, CA, 1995). 46 On the Soviet–American cultural exchange agreement of 1958, which incorporated film, see Hixson, Curtain, pp. 153–4, and Variety, 10 September, 22 October, 29 October and 19 November 1958. On the oﬀence Khrushchev took to being pictured surrounded by the scantily clad dancers of the cast of Twentieth Century-Fox’s Can Can (1960), see Hixson, Curtain, p. 216.

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47 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997), p. 230. 48 Ibid., pp. 225–6; Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York, 2001), p. 31; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, pp. 52, 58. 49 A small number of post-apocalyptic films had already been made, starting with what historian Spencer Weart calls ‘the first serious film on the aftermath of nuclear war’, Arch Obeler’s Five, in 1951. However, Five, Roger Corman’s The Day the World Ended (1955) and Ranald MacDougall’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) had focused utterly unrealistically on the trials of small groups of survivors (each, according to Weart, looking like ‘a new Adam and Eve with backpacks’), and had made no attempt to confront the true horror of World War Three and its aftermath. The scenario presented in such films, writes Joyce A. Evans, was one in which ‘nuclear war is like a cloth that wipes away the accumulated ravages of history and allows a clean, fresh world to be reborn’. Weart, Nuclear Fear, p. 221, 238; Evans, Mushroom Clouds, p. 137. 50 New Yorker, 7 February 1953: Variety, 30 March 1955; New York Times, 23 November 1957, p. 11. 51 Nation, 2 January 1960, p. 20; Commentary, June 1960, pp. 522–3; Joseph Keyerleber, ‘On the Beach’, in Jack Shaheen (ed.), Nuclear War Films (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1978), p. 31; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, p. 260. 52 Hollywood Reporter, 4 August 1958. Kramer’s earlier and subsequent films tackled subjects such as ethnic bias in the military (Home of the Brave, 1949), paraplegic soldiers (The Men, 1950), racism (The Defiant Ones, 1958), evolution (Inherit the Wind, 1960) and Nazi genocide (Judgement at Nuremberg, 1961). For Kramer’s career see Daniel Spoto, Stanley Kramer (New York, 1987). 53 Michael Conant, ‘The Impact of the Paramount Decrees’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry (Madison, WI, 1976), pp. 346–70. The blacklist was publicly broken in 1960, when director Otto Preminger announced that one of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, had scripted one of his movies, Exodus (1960), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). Preminger’s announcement made the New York Times front page, and President-elect John Kennedy and his brother Robert crossed an American Legion picket line to view Spartacus. Buhle and Wagner, Hide, pp. 172–6. 54 New York Times Magazine, 12 November 1959; Los Angeles Times, 9 September 1959. 55 Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, pp. 58–9. 56 New Republic, 13 May 1967. In 2000, the Showtime cable network and an Australian company, Coote Hayes Productions, co-produced a three-part television miniseries of On the Beach, directed by Russell Mulcahy. Unlike the feature film, the television series emphasised the graphic nature of the panic, destruction and death caused by atomic radiation. www.imdb.com/title/tt0219224 (26 January 2006). 57 Jack Vizzard to Geoﬀrey Shurlock, 28 October 1959, On the Beach – PCA Files, AMPAS; Msgr. Thomas F. Little to File, 23 September 1959, Kramer to George Schaefer, 1 October 1959, Little to Cardinal McIntyre, 4 November 1959: On the

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Beach File, National Legion of Decency Files, The Chancery of Washington, DC (hereafter LODCW). Time, 29 December 1959, p. 44. One early screenplay written by John Paxton (dated 28 May 1958) concluded in an unambiguously bleak fashion, with no Salvation Army banner. A later script (dated 8 December 1958), written by Paxton and James Lee Barrett, did end with the banner. Paxton later claimed the banner was Kramer’s idea. See Box 1, John Paxton Collection, and Box 48, f. 404, Gregory Peck Collection, AMPAS, and Paxton’s article in the Dallas Times Herald, 17 January 1960, pp. 3, 14. Looking back in the mid-1980s, Kramer wondered if in fact the closing statement had ‘oﬀered enough hope’. Stanley Kramer, ‘On the Beach: A Renewed Interest’, in Danny Peary (ed.), Moni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies (New York, 1984), p. 118. Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 225–6. Kramer, quoted in Spoto, Stanley Kramer, p. 211; Suid, Guts and Glory, p. 227. Chapter 7 below explores the Hollywood–Pentagon relationship during the Cold War in detail. Osgood, ‘Total War’, pp. 150–1. G. Tom Poe, ‘Historical Spectatorship Around and About Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach’, in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London, 2001), pp. 95–6. Suid, Guts and Glory, p. 224. Letter from FBI to Msgr. Thomas Little, 1 November 1959, LODCW; Cardinal McIntyre to Bishop McNulty, 19 January 1960, Chancery Archives of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, San Fernando Mission, Mission Hills, California; Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, p. 361. ‘Cabinet Meeting’, 11 December 1959, Ann Whitman File, Cabinet Series, Box 15, DDEL. Cabinet Paper CI-56-64, 7 December 1959, Cabinet Meeting (handwritten notes), 11 December 1959, and ‘INFOGUIDE 60-24’, 4 December 1959, White House Oﬃce, Oﬃce of the Special Assistant for National Security Aﬀairs – Records, 1952–61, Box 5, Nuclear Energy Matters (8), September 1959–March 1960: DDEL; Los Angeles Mirror News, 24 December 1959; Poe, ‘Spectatorship’, pp. 97–8, 100. Hollywood Reporter, 2 December 1959, p. 3; On the Beach advertising file, John Paxton Collection, AMPAS. Variety, 10 October and 21 December 1959. New York Times, 22 December 1959. Bosley Crowther, ‘Hollywood’s Producer of Controversy’, New York Times Magazine, 10 December 1961, p. 76; New York Herald Tribune, 20 December 1959; Poe, ‘Spectatorship’, pp. 98–9. Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry (Madison, WI, 1987), p. 144; Poe, ‘Spectatorship’, pp. 91, 99. Poe, ‘Spectatorship’, p. 99. Lynne Littman’s Testament (1983) was jointly produced by Entertainment Events, American Playhouse and Paramount, and co-written by Carol Amen and John

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Hollywood’s Cold War Sacret Young. The 90-minute drama depicted the eﬀects of a nuclear attack on the United States, as told through the eyes of a family in suburban California. Its social and political impact was adversely aﬀected by the media blitz surrounding the 1983 ABC television special The Day After, which set a record for the number of viewers watching a single TV show. The Day After was directed by Nicholas Meyer and depicted the eﬀects of a nuclear holocaust in Kansas City. Film News, April 1984; Cinefantastique, May 1984; Broderick, Nuclear Movies, pp. 155, 159, 195; Richard Kilborn, Multi-Media Melting Pot: Marketing ‘When The Wind Blows’ (London, 1986), pp. 95–7. Poe, ‘Spectatorship’, pp. 100–2. Charles Maland, ‘Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus’, in Lori Lyn Bogle (ed.), The Cold War. Vol. 5: Cold War Culture and Society (New York, 2001), pp. 215–16; Life, 15 September 1961, pp. 95–108. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb, p. 207; John Minnion and Philip Bolsover, The CND Story (London, 1983), p. 28; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Archives, 5/17, ‘Hiroshima Day’, 1960, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, UK. Dr Strangelove can lay claim to being the most influential nuclear film of all during the Cold War. Shooting the film at Shepperton Studios outside London in 1962–3 allowed Kubrick to avoid much of the interference he might have faced in the United States from Columbia, the movie’s financiers, and from the US Air Force, which regularly exerted pressures on filmmakers interested in depicting its activities during this period. ‘Strangelovian’ soon became a widely used short-hand term for the dangers inherent in nuclear deterrence, and for the threat posed to American democracy by the military. On the making of Dr Strangelove and its legacy see John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (London, 1997), pp. 165–98; Lawrence Suid, ‘The Pentagon and Hollywood: Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, in O’Connor and Jackson (eds), American History/American Film, pp. 219–35; Maland, ‘Dr. Strangelove’; Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 231, 258. Unlike Dr Strangelove, The War Game’s action did not stop when the bomb exploded. The hour-long film blended fact and fiction in a startlingly graphic fashion, in order to depict the eﬀects of a nuclear attack on England. Made for but banned by the BBC from television screens worldwide for twenty years, ostensibly on the grounds that it was too ‘horrifying’, Watkins’ film soon attracted a cult following via screenings in art-house cinemas, church halls and universities across the Western world. Today, many commentators see it as the most frighteningly realistic depiction of nuclear war ever made for the big or small screen. See Tony Shaw, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television’s The War Game (1965)’, English Historical Review, Vol. 121, No. 494, December 2006, pp. 1351–84. Kramer, ‘On the Beach: A Renewed Interest’, pp. 118–19. Freeman Lincoln, ‘The Comeback of the Movies’, in Balio, Industry, p. 377. Roﬀman and Purdy, Social Problem Film, p. 297; Biskind, Seeing, pp. 168–96. Films in Review, October 1956, p. 417.

CHAPTER 6

Turning a negative into a positive

Selling is too simple a word for our needs. The circumstances and complexities of the civil rights movement in the United States are not going to be sold to the people of Africa . . . What is required is understanding . . .[through] a vigorous and unending communication with curious people of other lands. For this task the motion picture is eminently qualified. George Stevens, Jr., Director of the USIA Motion Picture Service, at the American Film Festival, April 19651

This chapter shifts our focus away from the commercial Hollywood feature film intended mainly for domestic consumption, to the government-produced documentary aimed at audiences overseas, particularly those located in the developing world. This is an area of Cold War propaganda that hitherto has been largely overlooked, yet which formed a key weapon in the American government’s publicity arsenal. The chapter is the first of a pair dealing with the role of film during a new and turbulent decade for both the Cold War and the United States internally: the 1960s. Several issues dominated sixties America, but fewer caused more social and political strife than the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Here I’ll address the first of these issues, and demonstrate how American domestic aﬀairs could often impact on the nation’s Cold War policies and image overseas. My analysis will also highlight the subtle skills that Washington often employed to produce cinematic counter-propaganda during the Cold War. As we shall see, during the 1950s and 1960s American policy-makers identified the nation’s so-called ‘Negro problem’ as their Achilles heel in the Cold War’s war of words. Consequently, race was the one theme that oﬃcial propagandists probably spent more time on than any other. As coordinator after August 1953 of the nation’s overt international propaganda activities, the USIA carried the chief burden of this task, seeking to counter allegations made by critics at home and overseas that the conditions American blacks suﬀered were utterly inconsistent with the United States’ claim to be the land of the free and equal. As part of the agency’s multi-million-dollar media campaign designed to cast America’s racial problems in a positive light overseas, one film stands out in particular: Charles Guggenheim’s Nine from Little Rock.

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Released in 1964, this documentary cleverly repackaged an event that had played a defining role in international perceptions of race in America in the late 1950s into an American success story. The film not only won an Oscar, but was translated into more than a dozen languages and distributed in almost 100 countries. Nine from Little Rock was produced during a halcyon period for documentary filmmaking at the USIA, and capped US government eﬀorts to manage foreigners’ perceptions of the race issue during the Cold War. What follows is an analysis of the political, diplomatic and cultural contexts that shaped the creation and reception of Nine from Little Rock, together with an evaluation of the USIA’s overall contribution to the battle of film images fought during the Cold War. WHEN MARILYN WENT OFF MESSAGE Before examining the USIA’s race-related documentaries, we should first ask why the agency actually needed to produce such films at all; why, that is, the government could not rely on Hollywood to do the job for it. After all, several historians have written of the symbiotic relationship that developed between the State Department and Hollywood during the Cold War. This relationship was built on links dating back to the 1920s, and saw the two bodies working together as natural allies to capture foreign film markets for political and commercial gain. In the years following the Second World War, Hollywood began to depend increasingly heavily on overseas audiences to help oﬀset the decline in domestic cinema attendance, caused by the arrival of television and other leisure activities. The State Department’s help in navigating tariﬀ and tax barriers was therefore vital. Indeed, without Washington’s muscle, in the 1950s, when roughly half of their annual revenue came from exports, many studios would probably have gone out of business.2 As it was, collaboration between moguls and diplomats continued well beyond the 1950s. On the one hand, this stymied the importation and exhibition of foreign films in the United States. As a result, few of the movies designed in the communist bloc to spread the ‘sunshine of socialism’ in the West were seen by ordinary Americans.3 On the other hand, the relationship also underpinned the American film industry’s dominance of the international movie market.4 This helped Hollywood’s values to structure the agenda of the Cold War not only for the American people, but also for hundreds of millions overseas. It played a central role in the United States’ strategic use of ‘soft’ power (as opposed to ‘hard’ military and economic power), spreading its values in a form of Gramscian cultural hegemony, during the conflict. It was also one of the most powerful instruments in the process of American ‘cultural imperialism’ in the decades after the Second World War.5

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This close relationship naturally had more explicitly political implications, particularly when the Cold War was at its height. Immediately after the Second World War, Washington made particular use of Hollywood movies in the process of ‘de-Nazifying’ Germany and Austria and in ‘re-educating’ Japan.6 In the 1940s and 1950s, the film industry’s trade lobby, the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA), happily called itself ‘the Little State Department’, so isomorphic were its methods and ideology with American foreign policy.7 During this period and beyond, motion picture industry spokesmen regularly claimed they acted as ‘ambassadors of goodwill’ for the United States. Moreover, in emphasising their role in the ‘struggle for men’s minds’, producers like Walter Wanger often echoed the very language that Washington’s own psychological warriors used to describe the Cold War.8 Film executives and diplomats shared the same worldview, and could therefore easily agree on what types of films best served the national interest. The overall eﬀect of this mutually beneficial, politico-economic arrangement was an extraordinarily powerful ‘Marilyn Monroe doctrine’, to borrow Austrian historian Rheinhold Wagnleitner’s playful phrase.9 Overseas filmmakers might, to their cost, have been aware of this collaboration, but it is highly unlikely foreign film-goers were. Hence German director Wim Wenders’ famous (if contested) claim in the 1970s that American movies – with their lavish sets and easily understood pictorial grammar glamorizing capitalism – had ‘colonized the subconscious’ of Europe.10 As important as these ties between Washington and Hollywood were in terms of facilitating the international supply of American movies, the State Department was never in a position to regulate systematically the content of commercial motion pictures exported overseas. State Department archives from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are replete with complaints from embassy staﬀ about the damaging impression that Hollywood films were giving of American life to foreigners. Had the State Department had its own way, American movies would have produced far fewer pictures loaded with gangsters, corruption, sex and juvenile delinquency. Even portraying the high standard of living that Americans enjoyed – one of the central planks of Washington’s propaganda throughout the Cold War – could have its downside if not fully contextualised. One US embassy report from New Zealand from the early 1950s, for instance, noted how rural audiences had greeted a March of Time story on farm modernisation in the United States with boos, reflecting the dismay the locals felt at the degree of material prosperity Americans were depicted as enjoying. Elsewhere, embassy reports and opinion polls showed that the common image overseas of the United States was one of a dynamic but violent place, a wealthy society where the opportunity to do well was available to all, but where it required aggression to take that opportunity.

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An embarrassment of colour: ‘Pinky’ Johnson (Jeanne Crain), a light-skinned African-American who passed for white while at school in the northern United States, helps her aggrieved southern grandmother (Ethel Waters) with the washing in a scene from the liberal ‘message’ film, Pinky (1949). Twentieth Century Fox/The Kobal Collection.

Diplomats often believed that movies were chiefly to blame for constructing this impression of hedonism mixed with social Darwinism.11 State Department records from the 1940s and 1950s show that oﬃcials were peculiarly sensitive to Hollywood’s depiction of American race relations and of black Americans generally. One 1953 report from the US public aﬀairs oﬃcer in the Caribbean island of Martinique did comment positively on Columbia’s Harlem Globe Trotters (1951), for showing the ‘Negro basketball players . . . as well dressed, well-paid and well-fed Americans whose skill is admired by Negro and white fans alike’. However, more common were those like the 1951 report from the US embassy in Karachi, Pakistan, which condemned Twentieth Century-Fox’s Pinky (1949), a film that dealt in a very gingerly way with the subject of ‘passing for white’, for ‘lend[ing] itself to the Communist propaganda line that all Negroes in the United States are oppressed and subjected to discrimination’. Studios were aware of the problems the race question caused America’s image, not least because they feared that oﬀending non-whites overseas might damage box oﬃce returns. At times, therefore, they were willing to restrict the distribution of certain movies and

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to modify their age-old ‘Sambo’ stereotype of black Americans in others in order to make output more politically acceptable.12 However, on many other occasions even the most powerful of Washington’s Hollywood insiders hit a brick wall. During the 1950s, Luigi Luraschi, Paramount’s head of international censorship, was consistently told by the CIA to be on the lookout for insensitive portrayals of AfricanAmericans and for opportunities to ‘plant’ blacks in scenes which would imply a ‘normal’ and ‘equal Negro situation’. Yet when in 1953 Luraschi recommended the insertion of token blacks as spectators on golf courses in The Caddy, a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy, the studio’s head, Y. Frank Freeman, flatly refused, on the grounds of upsetting southern whites. This was a small but significant example of the state-film network’s limitations when confronted by commercial and domestic political constraints.13 Thus, while Hollywood had eﬀectively sewn up the international film market with Washington’s assistance in the 1940s and 1950s, this did not work out uniformly to the government’s advantage. Consequently, when it came to the presentation of the ‘Negro problem’ on the big screen, there was plenty of room for oﬃcial agencies to correct impressions, fill gaps or engage explicitly with communist accusations of racism. AMERICA’S ACHILLES HEEL As the brouhaha surrounding Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach signifies, the doubts Americans expressed about the nation’s nuclear weapons programme probably caused Washington’s propagandists more headaches over the course of the Cold War than any other issue. However, during the conflict’s first two decades no issue challenged the central image the USIA wished to present of the United States overseas more than the nation’s persistent problems caused by racial injustice. Many civil rights activists and non-white nations especially questioned America’s very right to act as a beacon of democracy during the Cold War when it practised brutal discrimination against blacks at home. Others asked how the United States could possibly hope to be a model of progress for those struggling against Soviet oppression when it treated minorities within its own borders so terribly. State Department archives show that even in the very earliest phases of the Cold War, when Washington’s eye was trained almost entirely on Europe, oﬃcials in the developing world were worried about America’s image on race. In the late 1940s, US embassy staﬀ issued constant warnings to their superiors in Washington about the deleterious eﬀect southern segregation was having on many Third World citizens’ support for the United States’ war on communism. The ‘colour bar was’, according to one oﬃcial in Ceylon in 1948,

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citing a local journalist, ‘the greatest propaganda gift any country could give the Kremlin in its persistent bid for the aﬀections of the coloured races of the world’. In the same year, the US embassy in Moscow reported that the ‘Negro question’ was ‘one of the principal Soviet propaganda themes regarding the United States’.14 Evidence of this can be found in a number of Soviet films of the era, most notably Grigori Aleksandrov’s The Meeting on the Elbe (1949) and Abram Room’s Silvery Dust (1953). Aleksandrov’s assault on American perfidy at the end of the Second World War treated viewers to images of jeering white GIs beating up a black soldier outside a German nightclub. Room’s espionage drama showed white American fascists caging black peace partisans like monkeys, in order to use them as guinea pigs for chemical warfare experiments. Harlem, USA, a more obscure Soviet film that was dubbed into English and found its way into America in 1952, portrayed the New York district as an impoverished black ghetto exploited by white businessmen and ringed by police.15 The State Department and, after 1953, the USIA worked hard to paint a more favourable picture of American race relations, acknowledging that the issue had a critical impact on US prestige abroad. A twin-track propaganda strategy emerged: first, to characterise civil rights as a sectional problem that was restricted to the American south, and which was the product of US federalism; second, to emphasise the improvements black Americans were experiencing in their daily lives, and to place these within the narrative of America’s historical progress towards social justice and equality for all. This was a clear attempt to turn a liability into an asset: to assert that democracy was the only model of government that was both truly inclusive and allowed for peaceful social change.16 On the ground, oﬃcials bombarded international media outlets with press releases and feature stories illustrating the progress AfricanAmericans had made since emancipation, and countered media reports of racial prejudice or violence with evidence of social mobility and the rise in income of America’s minorities. Washington sponsored overseas trips by distinguished African-Americans to speak on the ‘Negro problem’, and confiscated the passports of others like the actor Paul Robeson who argued that only fundamental economic and political change would improve AfricanAmericans’ prospects in America.17 Oﬃcially sponsored tours of musicals like George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess allowed African-Americans to demonstrate their artistic prowess on stage in Europe.18 However, by the mid-1950s oﬃcial reports indicated that Washington’s message of measured yet constructive progress on civil rights appears to have made little or no headway. America’s continued vulnerability on the race issue was summed up by the New York Times in early 1955, in an article that condemned the ease with which communist propaganda ‘sedulously fosters the

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notion that . . . American Negroes live under conditions little if any diﬀerent from those described in Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.19 Many countries in the developing world, which were only just earning their independence from European colonialism, not surprisingly viewed anti-colonialism as a more salient issue than anti-communism. To them, America’s racial practices made the so-called leader of the West appear like any other white imperialist nation – bigoted, hypocritical and intent on domination.20 Things got worse for Washington before they got better. In 1954, in its historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the US Supreme Court called for the desegregation of public schools across America. What was seen at first as a public relations coup for oﬃcial propagandists – Voice of America broadcasts trumpeted the news across Eastern Europe within hours of the Court’s ruling, while the USIA’s post in India immediately sent all of its educational films showing clips of multi-ethnic American schools on mobile unit tours21 – turned three years later into a public relations nightmare. In September 1957, President Eisenhower’s month-long struggle to persuade the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, to integrate the previously all-white Central High School in the city of Little Rock culminated with the White House sending a 1,000-strong contingent of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division to accompany nine African-American children to school. The prolonged duration and the military drama of the school siege made Little Rock, according to one historian, ‘the first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era’.22 Throughout September 1957, overseas audiences were appalled by the photographs and newsreel images of angry whites verbally and physically intimidating African-Americans. Significantly, Eisenhower’s extraordinary use of federal troops during the Little Rock crisis can itself be put down partly to the need to assuage foreign opinion. Unless he acted decisively, the president feared the stand-oﬀ ‘could continue to feed the mill of Soviet propagandists who by word and picture were telling the world of the “racial terror” in the United States’. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles felt utterly frustrated by the impact of the crisis on his whole Cold War strategy. ‘[T]his situation was ruining our foreign policy’, he told Attorney General Herbert Brownell. ‘The eﬀect of this in Asia and Africa will be worse for us than Hungary was for the Russians.’23 Anger at the government was also palpable at home among some of the State Department’s most prominent African-American cultural ambassadors. One, the jazz musician Louis Armstrong, reacted to Little Rock by telling the government it ‘could go to the devil with its plans for a propaganda tour of Soviet Russia’.24 Amidst such vitriol and doom-laden rhetoric, Little Rock caused a jolt to the political and foreign policy machines in the United States. As historian Mary L. Dudziak writes, Little Rock was a crisis of such magnitude for

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worldwide perceptions of race and American democracy that it would become a critical reference point for the future. Later presidents would try their best to avoid ‘another Little Rock’, and foreign commentators would judge American racial progress by how far the United States had come since the events of September 1957.25 The USIA and its sister agencies learned their own lessons from Little Rock, pinpointing the need for a tighter marriage between propaganda and policy formulation, the potential benefits of being more open about America’s social problems, and the higher priority that ought to be given to winning over Third World nationalists by using as wide a range of techniques and media as possible. When, in 1961, a younger and more media-friendly politician, John F. Kennedy, moved into the White House, their prayers seemed to have been answered. Kennedy spoke openly of his determination to switch the focus of the cultural Cold War away from Europe, where many felt the West had to all intents and purposes already won, to the nascent and unaligned states in Africa and Asia. When Kennedy then appointed the legendary Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) journalist Edward R. Murrow to spearhead a revamped USIA, optimism increased. Murrow vowed that the USIA would be ‘in on the take-oﬀ’ of foreign policy, not just its execution. A renowned liberal, he also proclaimed his intention of telling ‘America’s story to the world, warts and all’. With these changes, the stage seemed set for a more vigorous and imaginative campaign to explain America’s race issue overseas.26 CULTURAL DIPLOMACY OF A CELLULOID KIND: THE USIA’S FILM MACHINE

The USIA was the largest national propaganda organisation directed overseas in history, and one that dwarfed its rivals during the Cold War.27 The agency’s relationship with US private industry, and the media in particular, was extremely close. Theodore Streibert, its first director, was a former board chairman of the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network. His deputy, Abbott Washburn, had handled public relations for the food giant, General Mills, before becoming executive vice-chairman of the CIA front organisation Crusade for Freedom.28 Relations between the USIA and Hollywood were intimate throughout the conflict. Cecil B. DeMille was by no means the only film executive to be given an agency consultancy contract. Streibert had previously worked with FBO Pictures and Pathé, and the agency’s director in the 1980s was former Hollywood producer Charles Z. Wick.29 The USIA and Hollywood formed a discreet yet vital reciprocal arrangement, one which neatly combined profit and propaganda. Hollywood could use the agency as an overseas audience

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service unit, helping the film industry to tailor commercial features to particular market tastes in diﬀerent geographical regions. In turn, studios and producers might learn from the USIA how the content, style and promotion of movies best served foreign policy objectives. The agency helped sell some of the latest developments in American film technology, like the widescreen process, Cinerama, in the 1950s, as part of a long-running campaign designed to link capitalism with scientific accomplishment. It also worked with the Motion Picture Association of America in getting major feature films made available to VIP audiences in Eastern Europe, Russia and other key locations through a programme known as the US Ambassadorial Screenings.30 The USIA could boast the largest and most sophisticated production operation targeting foreign film-goers run by any government during the Cold War. Its well-resourced Motion Picture Service (or MPS) produced scores of high-quality documentaries, employing Hollywood-trained producerdirectors on short-term contracts. The MPS financed and directed special projects directly supporting foreign policy, together with periodic newsreels in areas designated crucial. As the earlier analysis of Peter Rathvon’s 1984 (1956) shows, it also secretly subsidised films made by foreign companies overseas. This all added up to an extraordinarily heavy and sustained propaganda barrage. In 1962, for instance, the agency produced 36 films within the United States and a further 147 overseas, and issued 197 newsreels.31 By and large these films were designed, like most aspects of cultural diplomacy, to work indirectly, almost imperceptibly. Their task was not to attack the enemy or scare the neutral into submission through ‘hard-sell’ techniques focused on political issues, but rather to ‘convey the rich background and warmth of spirit characteristic of America’, through low-key celebrations of its art, cultural diversity, educational strength and economic democracy. For the most part this was white propaganda, clearly, though not strongly, labelled as American government output. Covert projects running in the 1960s included a weekly newsreel for audiences in Africa and Asia, produced by an ostensibly independent company, Associated Films. In the 1960s, the agency also secretly subsidised MGM’s commercial newsreel, then playing in twenty-eight countries across Africa and Asia, supplying funding and footage of politically useful events.32 The MPS’s distribution network spanned the globe. At its peak, in the 1960s, it maintained film centres at 226 USIS posts in 106 countries, reaching an estimated audience of 600 million people. These centres housed upwards of 50,000 prints of hundreds of MPS-made 16mm and 35mm films (the latter produced for theatrical use), acting as lending libraries to a host of local institutions comprising schools, clubs, churches and union halls. In smaller posts and in developing countries the 16mm productions were often used alongside

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mobile units, with USIS staﬀ using trains, vans and even small boats to connect with villages, where they would set up portable generators, screens and projectors for open-air presentations. Back in Washington, a special unit kept track of showings, viewer numbers and audience reactions.33 GEORGE STEVENS, JR., AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF USIA DOCUMENTARY The USIA’s MPS achieved little of real note during the 1950s. The director of the service during this period, Turner Shelton, had risen through civil service channels and was considered more of a cost accountant than a film expert. The service did produce a few imaginative films. Shelton’s best achievement was probably one provided for him by Walt Disney, whose technically brilliant multi-screen Circarama tour of the United States appeared to surround the viewer with beautiful scenery and well-fed, cheery American faces. This film was a hit in cities as far afield as Casablanca, Djakarta and Moscow. Shelton’s MPS also demonstrated a shrewd opportunist streak. Hungarian Fight for Freedom, A Nation in Torment and Now We Are Free were all produced within months of the abortive Hungarian uprising in late 1956 and shown widely overseas.34 However, most output was dull, badly executed and crudely ideological. This was by no means all the USIA’s fault. The agency suﬀered from extremely low morale during the Eisenhower era. On the one hand, it was hobbled by a parsimonious Congress highly sceptical of cultural diplomacy’s merits. On the other hand, like VOA, the agency came under fierce attack from Joseph McCarthy for promoting ‘subversive’ material, and experienced more than its share of forced resignations. Under pressure to produce films quickly and cheaply, Shelton tended to assign projects to the lowest bidders, usually one of the big newsreel companies, whose experience of making thoughtful and attractive documentaries was minimal. The results on occasions could be embarrassing. One documentary meant to celebrate the famous painter of Western scenes Charley Russell was edited so badly that, according to one commentator, it looked as though the artist’s work had been done by one of the cowboys.35 The five-year period following Shelton’s departure, between 1962 and 1967, represents the USIA’s golden age of Cold War filmmaking. The chief credit for this can go to John Kennedy, Ed Murrow and, most of all, Shelton’s successor, George Stevens, Jr. Kennedy had an instinctive understanding of the media’s power, and believed the previous Republican administration had botched the presentation of US Cold War policy overseas. He also felt that the nation’s Cold War strategy required updating, and that Washington needed to take a more progressive approach towards the Third World in particular. Eisenhower had held that communism fed on misery and instability, and that

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‘premature independence’ portended both. In contrast, Kennedy embraced the challenge oﬀered by the emergence of new nations arising from the old European empires, and felt that, if persuaded of America’s virtues, these countries might even be the route to the West’s Cold War victory.36 Murrow fully appreciated film’s role as America’s chief image-maker, and, as a former presenter and co-producer of the television documentary series See It Now and CBS Reports, grasped the importance of non-fiction films. He believed that neither the ideologically charged USIA output of the 1950s, nor Hollywood sensationalism, served the best interests of US foreign policy overseas, and took steps to change things. ‘Movies are doing a lot of harm to America’, Murrow warned Hollywood’s leading managers in November 1961. ‘They convey the notion that America is a country of millionaires and crooks.’37 Two months later, Murrow plucked George Stevens, Jr., from Hollywood to be the MPS’s new director. Stevens was young and ambitious, had worked as a television producer, and could tap into Hollywood’s talent pool via his father, one of the most respected directors in the business and a veteran of Second World War military documentary units.38 Despite being only 28 years of age when he arrived in Washington, Stevens had firm ideas on how films should be made at the USIA and how subjects might be dealt with in a subtle yet moving fashion. In contrast with his predecessor, he looked for individuals rather than companies to produce films, thinking that the best results came from essential control by a single artist. Contracts no longer simply went to the lowest bidders, but often to those directors whose skills best suited a particular subject. Once Stevens had hired a director, often through Hollywood’s Screen Directors Guild, he would try, as far as possible, to give him the freedom to choose a subject and, after that, freedom to make the film. As executive producer, Stevens retained overall control of all projects. The agency’s numerous area specialists might generate general ideas for films and brief the filmmaker before he started work on a project. These specialists also retained the right to see and approve the interlock print as the film neared completion, but Stevens could be very persuasive if they had objections. Critically, because USIA control was relatively loose in the early stages of production, innovation blossomed. Stevens cajoled the ablest of America’s young producers into making films for the USIA and developed a documentary ‘school’ akin to that which had flourished in Britain in the 1930s. His persuasive skills and energy united the talents of filmmakers young and old across the political spectrum, such as the Paris-trained liberal James Blue and ardent conservatives like Bruce Herschensohn, best known hitherto for making missile films for the defence industry. On top of this, Stevens developed an intern programme by scouring universities for the best prospective filmmakers.

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George Stevens, Jr., flanked by the actor Sidney Poitier (on his right) and the vice-president of United Artists, Arnold Picker, at the inaugural meeting of the American Film Institute (AFI) in May 1968. After leaving the USIA in 1967, Stevens took up the directorship of the AFI and remained in post until 1979. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Recruits included the future feature film director Carroll Ballard, whose gently persuasive study of an Oregon farm family in Beyond This Winter’s Wheat testified to the value of foreign aid and trade.39 Stevens was not given a completely free hand in running the MPS. He stuck to those aspects of the American way of life the USIA directives told him to emphasise – economic strength, economic democracy, scientific and educational strength, cultural diversity, and racial and ethnic progress. He was also beholden to the agency’s policy directives – the pursuit of peace, strength and reliability, free choice, the rule of law, and trust in the UN.40 However, these

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broad parameters allowed for considerable experimentation, and under Stevens’ tutelage the MPS turned out films that not only covered a wider range of subjects than those made in Shelton’s era but did so in a greater variety of styles. James Blue, for example, made a trilogy of 10-minute films in Colombia, showcasing the social and economic benefits that Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress programme was bringing to ordinary Latin Americans: Letter from Colombia, Evil Wind Out, and The School at Rincon Santo.41 In Invitation to India and Invitation to Pakistan, the veteran left-wing documentary maker Leo Seltzer exploited Jackie Kennedy’s charms during the First Lady’s tour of South Asia in 1962.42 Smaller productions sought to modify the commonly held view of a harsh American capitalism by highlighting the nation’s welfare state provision. Robert K. Sharpe’s Joe, for instance, focused on the help an old man retiring from work in a machine shop was receiving from social security benefits, whereas Barry Goldsmith’s Born a Man depicted the rehabilitation of an electrician blinded in an accident at work.43 Bruce Herschensohn’s NASA-commissioned film of astronaut John Glenn’s orbit of the earth in 1962, Friendship Seven, was part of the keenly fought space-race propaganda war. Foreign policy points were made more explicitly in powerful short documentaries like Walter de Hoog’s The Wall, which portrayed ordinary life in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.44 FRAMING RACE While many of these films were being made, America’s image on race relations was again tarnished. In the early 1960s, the domestic and foreign media reported some of the most harrowing clashes between American whites and blacks yet recorded. Followers of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience imposed increasing pressure on the federal and state governments to bring about real racial equality. At the same time, militant groups like Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims advocated more radical tactics and solutions, pouring petrol on an already inflammatory atmosphere. In October 1962, the same month as the Cuban missile crisis, America reeled from another integration crisis, this time after President Kennedy had ordered in federal troops to quell ugly confrontations between whites and blacks caused by the admission of the first African-American student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi. As at Little Rock five years earlier, the USIA trumpeted Kennedy’s forceful action as proof of the US government’s commitment to civil rights – only for further controversy to spoil any positive eﬀect this might have had.45 In the spring of 1963, attention switched to Birmingham, Alabama, where television pictures of police using water cannons and snarling dogs to break

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up a generally peaceful civil rights demonstration were beamed around the world, further highlighting African-Americans’ oppression. That summer, Kennedy initiated a civil rights bill focusing on public accommodations, and continued protest culminated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August, the site of King’s instantly famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The tumult caused by these events, plus the White House’s belated support for stronger civil rights legislation, gave an impetus to the USIA’s racerelations visual communication eﬀorts. Eﬀective propaganda was needed, and at once, agency oﬃcials urged. Days after racists had bombed a Birmingham, Alabama, church in September 1963, killing four young girls, Ed Murrow told the African-Americans Federal Bar Association in Philadelphia that racial violence was doing grave damage to the nation’s reputation overseas. The treatment of African-American was, he said, ‘the single subject, month in and month out, that so consistently occupies the cares and curiosities of other people about the United States’.46 A USIA report from the same year concluded that for the vast majority of Africans, compared with the issue of black civil rights, most US foreign and domestic policies paled into insignificance. Secretary of State Dean Rusk concurred, admitting that racial discrimination was ‘the biggest single burden we carry on our backs in our foreign relations in the 1960s’.47 In fact, one of the first projects that George Stevens, Jr., initiated as MPS director was a film addressing the status of black Americans. In early 1962, he hired documentary filmmaker Willard Van Dyke and African-American journalist Louis Lomax to make a film, provisionally titled The Progress of the American Negro. Stevens’ intention was to cover ‘a subject the world knows so little about’ and to show ‘[w]hat strides we have made, for all our failings’. However, when the press reported Van Dyke having filmed a sit-in at a segregated cafeteria in North Carolina, senior staﬀ at the USIA feared accusations of incitement, and the film was kept under lock and key.48 After this false start, the MPS released a steady stream of documentaries through the rest of the decade that framed American race relations positively. Some focused explicitly on the subject, while others made their points more discreetly via short segments or scenes in films dealing with other issues. One example of the latter was Bruce Herschensohn’s Oscar-nominated The Five Cities of June (1963), which juxtaposed events of ‘world importance’ during June 1963. Sandwiched between sequences depicting Viet Cong infiltrators menacing a South Vietnamese ‘strategic hamlet’ and President Kennedy’s triumphal appearance in Berlin was another reporting the admission of two black students to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.49 Herschensohn’s feature-length paean to the Kennedy years, John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, made in 1964, suggested that civil rights was

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one of the dead president’s highest priorities and greatest achievements. In a fast-moving compilation made a year later, Eulogy to 5:02, which used twentyfour 1-minute sequences filmed simultaneously around the world in order to show what free people could do with a minute of time, Herschensohn incorporated images of black and white workers relaxing over lunch at Cape Canaveral and an African-American doctor delivering a white baby.50 Other, less flamboyant films focused on ‘star’ African-Americans, such as diplomat Ralph Bunche, Olympic track medallist Wilma Rudolph and opera singer Marian Anderson. Others still, like William Hale’s Grand Central Market, showed the mingling of races in a downtown market in Los Angeles, thus demonstrating America’s melting-pot qualities.51 These and other USIA films were given an extra boost by the fact that the agency managed American participation in international film festivals. Such gatherings also allowed Stevens to exploit mainstream Hollywood movies that showed America facing up to its racial problems, such as Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) and Ralph Nelson’s Lilies of the Field (1963). Stevens later incorporated Kramer’s movie into the ‘American Classic Feature Film Programme’, a group of elite movies – like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and Shane (made by Stevens’ father, and released in 1953) – that were selected by critics and designed for prestige screenings at American embassies around the world.52 James Blue’s The March was the first of two major USIA documentaries devoted entirely to the issue of black civil rights to be released in 1964. Shot in cinéma vérité style, with handheld cameras and a minimum of artifice, this 30-minute film presented an apparently straightforward account of the March on Washington in August 1963. Yet, however authentic the film would have appeared to most viewers, Blue’s choices of focus told the story of this seminal event from a perspective that highly favoured the US government. Peace, consensus and a sense of progress shone throughout. Conflict, both between the civil rights protestors and the Kennedy administration, and within the civil rights movement itself over goals and tactics, was airbrushed out. The forward-looking ‘dream’ parts of King’s speech were included, but not those in which he had criticised the US Constitution for letting down African-Americans. The film’s overall impression was that of a united, respectful, interracial movement enjoying the fruits of liberty, and carrying out the democratic ideals of free speech and political participation. However, even this sanitised picture of the march was too radical for some within the Johnson administration and Congress, who thought the film’s publicising of the civil rights movement’s grievances was equivalent to airing dirty laundry in public. In response to its critics, the film was edited and a prologue added by the USIA’s new director, Carl Rowan, a former journalist and an African-American, whom Johnson had chosen as a replacement for the

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terminally ill Ed Murrow mainly in order to demonstrate his commitment to civil rights reform at home and around the world. Aligning the film and march with federal policy, American political tradition and the Cold War, Rowan told viewers of his belief ‘that this demonstration of both whites and Negroes supported by the Federal government and by President Johnson and the late President Kennedy is a profound example of the procedures unfettered men use to broaden the horizons of freedom and deepen the meaning of personal liberty’. George Stevens, Jr., disliked this introduction, thinking it flagged the documentary as propaganda, but The March picked up several European film festival awards. More importantly, many of the hundreds of embassy posts to which the film was sent found it extremely valuable.53 REVISITING LITTLE ROCK The second major documentary about American race relations that the USIA released in 1964 was Nine from Little Rock. If The March represented agency film ‘reportage’ at its best, Nine from Little Rock captured the MPS’s ability to deliver an emotionally and socially uplifting history lesson, and to turn a propaganda liability into an asset. Ostensibly an update on the nine African-American students who had been at the centre of the Little Rock Central High School integration debacle in 1957, the film was a beautifully crafted, low-key advertisement for American democracy. It was possibly the most influential of all the USIA’s films about African-American civil rights during the Cold War, and the first USIA film to receive an Academy Award. The idea for a film about the Little Rock Nine came from George Stevens, Jr. In June 1963, a month in which President Kennedy appeared on television to berate those Americans who were ruining the country’s reputation for freedom by treating blacks as second-class citizens, the MPS director spotted a piece in the New York Times Magazine about present-day Little Rock. The article made uncomfortable reading for pro-integrationists. It described how – six years after the 1957 crisis and nearly ten years after the Brown ruling – only 20 African-American students were among the 2,100 who attended Central High School, and only 69 African-American pupils had finished the 1962–3 school year in the city’s integrated schools, which had a total population of 7,727. As dismaying as this was, what most interested Stevens (and about which the article said nothing) was what had happened to the nine students who had first integrated Little Rock’s public schools. Stevens believed that a documentary about the lives they now led could form the basis of an intriguing human interest story. If the film demonstrated that the Nine had survived their ordeal and now played a constructive role in society, it would help mitigate foreigners’ concerns about racial violence and African-Americans’ prospects.54

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Stevens commissioned Charles Guggenheim to write and direct the documentary. Born in Cincinnati in 1924, Guggenheim was one of the most gifted filmmakers to work for the USIA. In a career spanning five decades, his documentaries earned a total of twelve Academy Award nominations (a figure matched only by Walt Disney), and won four Oscars. Guggenheim’s films covered a broad range of subjects: from construction of the Gateway Arch in St Louis and the refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty, to remembering D-Day 1944 and chronicling hate crimes in the United States. Guggenheim began his media career in 1952, producing television political spots for Adlai Stevenson. His links with the Democratic party remained strong thereafter, and he acted as media director for the presidential campaigns of Stevenson, Robert F. Kennedy, George McGovern and Edward M. Kennedy. In 1954, he launched Guggenheim Productions in St Louis, specialising in making industrial and educational films. Guggenheim produced and directed his first feature movie in 1959, The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, a modest crime caper starring Steve McQueen. When Stevens arrived at the MPS, Guggenheim’s company began making documentaries for the USIA. These varied in subject and style but in general Guggenheim, like Stevens, preferred subtlety to bluntness. He had been opposed to the overtly propagandistic material produced by Turner Shelton’s MPS, especially during the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and felt he could do a lot better. An early indication of his more measured style was United in Progress, a survey of the moves towards a common market economy in Central America, made soon after Stevens’ takeover. Significantly, Guggenheim had already made one highly respected documentary about integration and education in his pre-USIA days, called A City Decides, in 1957. This reflected a long-standing and on-going interest in civil rights; decades later, in 1991, Guggenheim won his final Oscar for a story of the civil rights movement, A Time for Justice.55 Stevens had the utmost respect for Guggenheim’s taste and integrity, later saying that as a documentary maker he ‘had more strings in [sic] his bow than anyone of our time’.56 Crucially, the two of them agreed on a film’s need to appeal to the heart rather than the head. In their minds, a documentary’s role was to provide the emotional frame for an issue. ‘On the racial question, there is very little use in making up lists of logical arguments to defend our record’, said Stevens. ‘If we involve people in the emotional aspects of the problem, they will see what we are up against and sympathize with the depth and diﬃculty of it.’ The two of them also eschewed overtly propagandist, hardsell techniques. As Stevens’ speech at the 1965 American Film Festival (cited at the head of this chapter) tells us, Guggenheim’s film on Little Rock was expected to help foreigners gain a better ‘understanding’ of American race relations by using a scalpel rather than a hammer. To bludgeon viewers with a

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crude message designed to counter directly Soviet allegations that most Americans were closet supporters of the Ku Klux Klan would, they believe, only backfire. Instead, the film’s aim should be to show quietly but powerfully that the leader of the Free World was doing all that it could to foster racial equality at home and, by implication, overseas.57 With a catchy and politically recognisable title, Nine from Little Rock engages its audience immediately. This is a documentary, but one that begins like a thriller. As the credits roll, and spiky, ominous music builds on the soundtrack, the camera focuses on a tall, shadowy figure approaching a pristine, white, somehow familiar-looking building. Is this a menacing intruder, or perhaps a symbol of black encroachment on white ‘civilisation’? Peeling away to give us a broader view of the scene, the camera reveals the figure to be that of a benign, young, smartly dressed African-American. He is Jeﬀerson Thomas, who introduces himself as one of the Little Rock Nine; the building is Little Rock Central High. Now walking towards a wire fence, which at first suggests his exclusion, even imprisonment, Thomas peers through it towards the school’s track area. The sports field was once ‘an ancient battleground’, he reminisces on the soundtrack, but one that now clearly bears the fruits of integration: black and white athletes running together. Thomas has returned to his alma mater, seven years after the historic events of 1957, to tell us in his own words what has become of the Nine and to pass judgement on the progress of black civil rights. Like others in the film, his softly spoken words have been carefully scripted58 and dubbed by an actor for greater clarity, but to the viewer they appear entirely natural, untainted by government. As the camera flits between a pensive, intelligent-looking Thomas and the energetic athletes, the film purports to distance itself further from oﬃcial-looking propaganda. Thomas has an air of healthy scepticism. As a ‘dark man’ you have the right to look back in time, he intones, to find out ‘if you’re really moving forward or if the world is just moving beneath your feet’. This opening sequence sets the tone for the film, with Thomas and others quietly narrating their recent life stories, unencumbered by a commentator or interviewer. Cut to newsreel flash-backs of the Little Rock integration crisis in September 1957. Graphic pictures accompanied by dramatic drums and strings show us how things used to be in the city: young, short-sleeved red-necks intimidating lone black students on the way to school, mayhem caused by racists fighting with the police, the frightening noise of a brick-throwing mob. This was ‘how a minority in our state brought hate to Little Rock’, Thomas tells us. The majority, we learn, are represented by the federal troops, seen escorting the nine Negro students into school. The soldiers are the upholders of the individuals’ rights and protectors of the nation’s innocent minorities.

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As Burrill Phillips’ unsettling musical score and the shots of helmeted soldiers pointing bayoneted guns at white thugs reminds us, this was a tense and dangerous time for the Nine and for America generally. President Eisenhower’s measured display of force is shown to have been critical, however. It proved to Jeﬀerson and his fellow heroes that, as he puts it, American ‘laws do have meaning’, and that there were ‘millions of others who thought we represented something important’. The Little Rock crisis was, in short, a turning point in America’s continuing transition towards a non-racial democracy, a major step on the nation’s long road towards true equality. The government and the country had passed a decisive test because they had held firm to the rights set out for all Americans in the US Constitution. The sequence ends with a freeze-frame of a white soldier, arms behind his back, dutifully and respectfully standing guard over a gangly Thomas in the newly integrated school yard. The documentary then returns to the present, and Thomas’s place is temporarily taken by another of the Nine, Minnijean Brown. Confident and articulate, Brown is a student at the University of Southern Illinois. There, we see her smoking, cycling and laughing with white friends, walking with a white professor, and working part-time as a writer on the student newspaper. We learn that opportunities for black Americans like her are apparently unlimited. Having initially thought of becoming a nurse, she now wants to be a journalist. Furthermore, she has already been oﬀered a job on a newspaper, despite having made only two applications. Far from bearing any scars or grudges from the Little Rock ordeal, Brown appears actually to have gained from the experience. Tapping away at a typewriter, she tells us that it was seeing how free the press was to report the events in Little Rock back in 1957, and how open a society the United States is, that inspired her to become a journalist. Dressed sensibly yet fashionably, Brown comes across as the very embodiment of a modern American woman: one whose ambitions have grown from adversity, who thrives on pressure, and whose work ethic is fully in keeping with the capitalist mainstream. Brown does not discount the seriousness of America’s on-going racial problems, but attributes racism largely to the whites’ fear of losing their way of life. Moreover, she is able to place recent events in their historical context. Looking out calmly over the campus lake, she tells us that today’s America oﬀers African-Americans the sorts of life-chances their forefathers could only dream of. The next, shorter sequence focuses on Elizabeth Eckford, the only one of the Nine to go to a predominantly African-American college, Central State in Ohio. Eckford had already graduated by the time Nine from Little Rock was shot, but Guggenheim chose to present her as if she was still at college, mingling with a multi-racial crowd of students singing pep songs. This allowed

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A picture of progress: Minnijean Brown, hard at work with a white colleague on her university’s newspaper. Nine from Little Rock (1964). Programme Guggenheim Pictures, Inc./United States Information Agency.

Guggenheim to brush over Eckford’s failure to land a professional job since graduation, and to suggest that racial segregation could cut both ways. Central State had until recently only taken black students, meaning that those whites who attended the college were as heavily outnumbered as the Little Rock Nine had been at Central High in 1957. Moreover, Eckford tells us that many blacks at the college are themselves opposed to the whites’ presence. Even here, though, integration is shown to have been a success, as witnessed by one white girl’s enthusiastic cheerleading. The shot of a clapping Japanese-American girl (presumably inserted primarily for Asian audiences) further underscores America’s ethnic diversity. More stock news footage from September 1957, including the infamous scene of Eckford braving Hazel Massery’s screaming taunts, then shows her to have suﬀered particularly vicious racial abuse during the integration crisis. Despite this, Eckford tells us that no lasting damage was done. If anything, the fear she then experienced has made her a more rounded person. It forced her to question her goals and made her better equipped to face future challenges. Like Brown and Thomas, she too speaks of racists being ‘the few’ who were ‘uninformed’. Like all those in the film, Eckford expresses no animosity towards those whites who abused her, or the system that encouraged them to do so. As it happens, after the filming, Eckford and Robert Pierce (Guggenheim’s editor, who was white) were refused service at a restaurant in

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Xenia, Ohio. The anger Pierce felt at this encouraged him to leave at least some hints in the documentary’s final cut that discrimination was still a serious issue in America.59 The film’s final two segments focus on Thelma Mothershed and Ernest Green. Like Brown, Mothershed is pictured at college in Illinois, where she is studying to be a school teacher. This aﬀords numerous shots of her being tutored by white faculty members in a range of subjects, and close-ups of her playing with smiling white children. Mothershed is shown to be a kindhearted and cultured African-American, one who is colour blind in the classroom and who can appreciate the abstract paintings that decorate the walls of her well-equipped college. Her ambitions are less grand than those of Brown, but no less significant, for she hopes to find work in her home city. This oﬀers the prospect of a new generation of African-Americans not only graduating from Central High, but acting as leading members of the community. If Mothershed was a perfect African-American role model for the USIA, Ernest Green represented a challenge. Like the other pupils already featured in the film, Green was a high achiever who was studying in the north, in his case at Michigan State University. However, Little Rock had radicalised Green, who was now a civil rights activist with plans to become a full-time organiser when he graduated. Guggenheim could have chosen to relegate Green to a bit-part in his film but knew this might smack of censorship. Instead, he deftly turned Green’s political consciousness into an asset. In Guggenheim’s hands, Green comes across as a sincere moderate, one given to handing out leaflets to passers-by in the park rather than violently waging war on the system. As he does this, we hear protest songs on the soundtrack, but get little beyond general platitudes on how Green thinks African-Americans will achieve greater social justice. ‘The American Negro must protest’, he says to the viewers, but ‘he must also build understanding by searching for truth’. We then see the university authorities giving Green the opportunity to do just that, allowing him to deliver speeches in their lecture halls and channelling his activism into sociological research. Shots of a conservatively dressed Green using the university’s computers to process data on racial prejudice testify to democracy’s inherent strength and America’s technological prowess. Any doubts that viewers have that the United States is becoming a more equal society can be banished altogether, according to Green. Power in the country is passing to a new generation, his commentary proclaims, all part of a ‘quiet revolution’ in American thinking. Proof of this are the shots of blacks and whites attending civil rights rallies together. With Green’s optimism striking a powerful concluding note to the film, it is left to Thomas to complete the rosy picture of the Nine. This he does in

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America – where science and humanity meet: Ernest Green discusses his research data with a computer assistant in another shot showing blacks and whites collaborating for the future good. Nine from Little Rock (1964). Programme Guggenheim Pictures, Inc./United States Information Agency.

brief, by flicking through the school year book as we look over his shoulder: Carlotta Walls is studying in Denver, Colorado, where ‘she likes the high mountains’; Gloria Ray is about to complete a degree in chemistry at the Illinois Institute of Technology; Terrance Roberts is studying business administration in Los Angeles; Melba Pattillo is a housewife, though obviously a relatively wealthy one judging from the photograph of her stepping oﬀ an aircraft; and Thomas himself is about to become a certified accountant. What does all this amount to? asks Thomas. ‘I haven’t counted all the victories since that first day we went to school here’, he says, admiring Central High’s trophy cabinet, ‘but I know there’s been at least nine.’ With that, we see Thomas descending the famous steps to Central High, until a helicopter shot of the city of Little Rock focuses on the dome of the state capitol building (where Governor Faubus still resided), glistening in the Arkansas sun. The music rises, and Thomas delivers his final encomium. America is not perfect and has still to rid itself fully of the problem of racial intolerance. Yet, ‘[i]f Little Rock taught nothing more, it taught all Americans that problems can make us better – much better’.60 Nine from Little Rock did not seek to hide America’s racial discord or pass it oﬀ as a trivial issue. Guggenheim and Stevens knew it would have been a mistake to have done this, given the degree to which America’s racial divisions

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were submitted to constant scrutiny by the international press. The documentary’s inclusion of shocking news footage from 1957 gives a real flavour of southern America’s potential for racial bigotry. Minnijean Brown alludes to the diﬃculties whites and blacks have in escaping the mindset imposed by America’s recent history of slavery. And Ernest Green alludes to the existence of racial discrimination in America’s northern states, hitherto presented by the USIA as eﬀectively prejudice-free. Yet the film tells us little about the nine students’ atypical backgrounds. All came from relatively aﬄuent families and were academically ambitious before they entered the gates of Little Rock Central High in 1957. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that so many of them went on to college. The film also conspicuously provides few insights into how the nine students coped at the school. In fact, only three of them – Green, Walls and Thomas – eventually graduated from Central High, partly because in 1958–9 an intransigent Governor Faubus had closed all the city’s high schools in defiance of the highest court in the land, forcing the African-American students to take correspondence courses or go to out-of-state institutions. Even before this, in February 1958, Minnijean Brown had been expelled for retaliating against the daily verbal and physical harassment to which the Nine were subjected, forcing her to go to school in New York. Under the noses of the federalised but racist National Guardsmen, Jeﬀerson Thomas had been knocked unconscious during one attack in November 1957, while Melba Pattillo was so traumatised she burned her schoolbooks at the end of the academic year in 1958. Furthermore, the film glosses over the exceedingly poor integration record that Little Rock had as a whole in the early 1960s. As the very newspaper article that inspired the film indicated, and future historians would corroborate, it was hard to find strong evidence to support the documentary’s claim that the 1957 crisis had acted as a catalyst for significant change in the city. It would actually take until the early 1970s, for instance, before all grades in Little Rock public schools were fully integrated. The documentary also chooses not to explain why so many of the Nine had gone to college in the north of the country. Was this because of continuing segregation in higher education in the south or because, notwithstanding Green’s remark, the students felt safer above the old Mason-Dixon Line? Terrance Roberts, for one, went to college in California because his family had migrated there to escape continuing white intimidation in Little Rock. For obvious reasons, Nine from Little Rock makes no reference whatsoever to the recent hardening of black opposition to the state by activists like Malcolm X, to say nothing of the upsurge in interracial violence in the United States.61 Nine from Little Rock was simply structured, slow moving and just over 20 minutes long, making it easily digestible for audiences. Despite this short

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length, few other USIA films fused so many of the agency’s key Cold War directives. Nine from Little Rock showed America to be an economically mature and technologically exciting country, one whose chief strengths were its cultural and ethnic diversity, a progressive approach towards education, and a refreshing honesty when it came to owning up to its social problems. By refining and refocusing the meaning of Little Rock, Guggenheim’s documentary harnessed the emotional power of an event that some Arkansas historians call a ‘tragedy’62 and relocated it gently but convincingly within Washington’s ideological agenda. The film dealt with each Little Rock student as an individual, with particular hopes and fears about advancing as professionals in mainstream American society, not as members of a disaﬀected mass. In doing so, it showed how, despite the behaviour of a backward-looking racist minority in America, African-Americans could fulfil their aspirations by working within that society rather than against it. As a group, the students exhibited just those qualities that America as a whole had to oﬀer the world: dignity, hard work, perseverance and the chance for personal growth. The film presented racism as a sectional issue, one confined predominantly to America’s deep south, due to that region’s particular history. However, it was an issue that the full force of the federal government was utterly committed to solving, in partnership with blacks themselves. For their part, civil rights activists were shown to have complete freedom to protest, because they were protected at root by a US Constitution that enshrined the rights of minorities and political expression. This protest might at times embarrass the American government, but the nation – and democracy – was all the better for it. The USIA’s Research and Reference Service made regular assessments of the impact of its various literary, broadcast, television and film outputs. Findings were then fed back into the agency’s policy and production sections for tactical reviews or for the fine tuning of propaganda material. Yet while the USIA kept a close eye on films in general, once they had been sent for transmission overseas, individual agency documentaries tended to disappear oﬀ Washington’s radar. Nine from Little Rock was diﬀerent. Unlike James Blue’s The March, it escaped Congressional censure when it was released in early 1964, and, relieved perhaps, the agency gave the film its fullest backing. When a new Civil Rights Act later that year cut huge swathes through America’s remaining racial discrimination practices, for once politics and propaganda were in synch. Nine from Little Rock was translated into 17 languages and distributed to 97 countries. State Department and USIA staﬀ were extremely grateful to have at last a documentary that so clearly met its objective of addressing ‘racial and ethnic progress’, and that provided ‘evidence of America’s commitment to freedom of the individual’. Overseas oﬃcers

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praised the film highly. In early 1965, the USIS post in Kampala, Uganda, reported that ‘[t]his film closes the book on Little Rock and frees the mind to consider the changed story of the struggle’. Several months later, agency director Carl Rowan told President Johnson that ‘[i]n Africa where it is vitally important that we do our best to keep the United States civil rights struggle in perspective, USIS Nairobi reported that “Nine from Little Rock” was the “best film the Agency has yet made on civil rights . . . [I]t supports the high priority country objective of showing progress in the US to our racial diﬃculties” ’. Though he was hardly an impartial observer, the USIA oﬃcer in charge of placing Nine from Little Rock in international film competitions, John Mendenhall, noted that the mere fact of the American government taking on this subject impressed many overseas audiences. This sort of acclaim no doubt played a large part in the film’s winning the Academy Award in 1965 for best short documentary feature. Publicity associated with the Oscar gave the film a further boost overseas.63 Like most USIA films, Nine from Little Rock was designed to appeal to as broad a cross-section of international audiences as possible. We can get a firmer sense of the documentary’s impact on one of its key target audiences thanks to a detailed USIA report from India in 1965. During the Cold War, Washington regarded India as a vital political and strategic counterweight to the other Asian giant, communist China. Unfortunately for the US government, Indians felt racism was the central flaw in American society, and one that was inevitably reflected in Washington’s foreign policy. Consequently, by the mid-1960s, the USIA, the Ford Foundation and other bodies had for years been campaigning strenuously to counter these beliefs, with mixed results.64 At the end of 1964, the USIA tested the eﬀectiveness of Nine from Little Rock before a well-educated Indian audience, comparing the responses of 200 graduate students with an equal number of graduate students who had not seen the film. The report, which underlines the importance the USIA attached to Nine from Little Rock and to winning over students in the developing world because of their potential to become future opinion-formers or political leaders,65 indicated that the film had left its audience with a somewhat ambiguous picture of race relations in the United States. Nine from Little Rock had indeed had a generally positive eﬀect on viewers’ opinions about the treatment of Negroes in the United States, but it had reduced the number who thought most American whites favoured equal rights for Negroes, which the report attributed to the violent scenes from 1957. Similarly, while the film had improved Indians’ opinions of the federal government, it had also conveyed the idea that government force was required to assure equality. Related to this, many viewers got the impression that Little Rock’s violent opposition to school integration was the rule rather than the exception in the United States,

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a misunderstanding which the report said could have been avoided by changes in narration. One scene which particularly confused viewers was when, half way through the film, a present-day Central High white student is seen to confront Jeﬀerson Thomas on the school’s main staircase. Intended by Guggenheim to demonstrate white boys’ newfound respect for Negroes – after asking whether Thomas needs help, the boy courteously gives him directions to a teacher’s room – through its music and camera angles, the scene appeared to many of the Indian graduates to show how scared Thomas still was of whites. With hindsight, this scene was probably a mistake, and perhaps the result of both Robert Pierce’s late intervention and Stevens’ frequent unwillingness to tailor films to an audience’s level of sophistication.66 On a more positive note, the report was pleased to record that most viewers’ impressions of Negro educational opportunities had improved after seeing the film, while viewers gave Nine from Little Rock a high score for all-round credibility. If Indian student opinion is anything to go by, Guggenheim’s documentary had clearly been worth the USIA’s investment. At the same time, it illustrated the diﬃculties even the best filmmakers had in combining entertainment and politics for a culturally diverse international audience.67 CONCLUSION Nine from Little Rock marked the high watermark of the USIA Motion Picture Service’s attempts to foster a positive image of American race relations during the Cold War. The American government did not suddenly stop trying to manage foreigners’ perceptions of the race issue, and the USIA itself would continue to produce documentaries – like Dan Klugherz’s thematically complex I am a Man (1970) – that put a positive spin on American racial discord.68 But, by 1966, the USIA believed that a watershed had been reached in foreign judgements on race issue in the United States. Most foreigners continued to believe that African-Americans were treated poorly in the United States, but, significantly, this no longer appeared to damage America’s prestige abroad. Partial evidence of this could be found in the Indian students’ reaction to Nine from Little Rock, where, despite their doubts as to whether most American whites favoured equal rights, 84 per cent of viewers and nonviewers had a good opinion of the United States.69 Other USIA reports indicated that the message the United States had been promoting – whether through government propaganda programmes or simply due to press coverage of American developments – had gotten through. Foreign opinion was developing along the lines the USIA had long

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sought. Racial incidents were not viewed as a sign of moral failure or a compromise of the nation’s underlying principles. Instead, they were seen as the result of America’s federal system and the tensions inherent in integrating a historically disadvantaged minority into the mainstream. The target of blame was now a white supremacist minority, not the federal government, which was doing all it could to promote Negro rights. In other words, America could be seen as good, even as American racism was abhorrent.70 One of the key features of the Cold War, and one that has been underlined in this chapter, was the interconnectedness between foreign and domestic policy. As we have seen, Washington’s Cold War propaganda machine expended an enormous amount of energy in the 1950s and 1960s on an issue that superficially had no bearing on America’s world role. This was due at least in part to the inescapable ubiquity of the mass media in the second half of the twentieth century, bringing racial incidents into homes around the world. In this respect, America paid a price for its relative openness compared with the communist world. In countering communist allegations of white colonialism in America, Washington was not above retaliating negatively: for instance, by alleging that Moscow was creating its own empire in Eastern Europe. Such tactics seem rarely to have worked.71 However, in general the USIA and other bodies stuck to conducting a positive, fact-based propaganda campaign, one that admitted a problem existed but enveloped it within an overarching theme of progress. Turning a negative into a positive – claming that the African-Americans’ fight for equal rights demonstrated the vitality of American democracy – was not always easy, or successful. Yet it was an intelligent way of combating charges of hypocrisy (always one of the propagandist’s greatest bugbears), while the emphasis on equality and progress helped undercut a pronounced tendency in the developing world to equate those two virtues with socialism. If USIA reports from the mid-1960s are to be credited, this propaganda strategy appears to have paid oﬀ in the long term. Washington believed it would still need to contain or combat anti-Americanism as much as it needed to advocate anti-communism,72 but it had at least resolved the Cold War/civil rights dilemma. However, as one weak point was dealt with, another emerged. If the United States seemed more legitimately to be the land of the free by the late 1960s, it was also the country fighting an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. Notes 1 Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of US Government Motion Pictures (New York, 1973), pp. 199–200.

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2 Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment (London, 1985); Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, 1992); Paul Swann, ‘The Little State Department: Hollywood and the State Department in the Postwar World’, American Studies International, Vol. 29, No. 1, April 1991, pp. 2–19. 3 On the Soviet Union’s eﬀorts to sell communism overseas via film see Hazan, Impregnational Propaganda, pp. 66–9. On the poor quality (technically and propagandistically) of many Soviet films and the distribution problems they faced, particularly in the wake of the 1958 Soviet-American cultural exchange agreement, see Caute, Dancer, pp. 230–1; Variety, 26 November, 3 December and 31 December 1958; American Legion Magazine, January 1959, p. 28. See also Kerry Segrave, Foreign Films in America (Jeﬀerson, NC, 2004). 4 Kerry Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present (Jeﬀerson, NC, 1997); Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London, 2001); Thomas H. Guback, ‘Hollywood’s International Market’, in Balio, Industry, pp. 387–409. Segrave’s appendix (pp. 285–6) shows the following percentage figures for screen time held by American-made movies across the world – 1925: 75 per cent, 1948: 72 per cent, 1962: 60 per cent, 1992: 62 per cent. 5 There is a rich literature on the highly contentious issue of American ‘cultural imperialism’, and film’s role within it. Most, though not all, relates to post-Second World War Europe. See, for instance, Pells, Not Like US; Geoﬀrey Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci (eds), Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945–1995 (London, 1998); Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Champaign, IL, 1996); Ellwood and Kroes (eds), Hollywood in Europe; Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1993); Ralph Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 1945–1949 (London, 1992); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Seth Fein, ‘New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5, November 2004, pp. 703–48. 6 Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (eds), The Political Re-education of Germany and her Allies after World War II (London, 1985); Kyoko Hirano, Mr Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, DC, 1992). 7 Swann, ‘Little State Department’; Maltby, Harmless Entertainment, pp. 78–83. 8 Eric Johnston, ‘Messengers from a Free Country’, Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. 33, 4 March 1950, pp. 9–12; Walter F. Wanger, ‘Donald Duck and Diplomacy’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1950, pp. 443–52. 9 Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization, pp. 222–71. 10 Wenders’ phrase is taken from his 1976 road movie, Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road). 11 Theodore B. Olson, Public Aﬀairs Oﬃcer, Oslo, Norway, to Secretary of State, 21 January 1952, RG 59, 811.452/4-1850, USNA; ‘Reaction to American Motion

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13 14

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Pictures’, 14 May 1953, RG 59, 811.452/5-950, USNA; H. L. Munson, European Beliefs Regarding the United States: 1949 (New York, 1949), p. 23. Stephen M. Carney, Public Aﬀairs Oﬃcer, Fort-de-France, Martinique, 2 July 1953, Despatch 2TOUSI 8, RG 59, 811.452/10-253, USNA; Ray E. Lee, Public Aﬀairs Oﬃcer, Karachi, Pakistan, to Secretary of State, 8 June 1951, Despatch 21779, RG 59, 811.452/6-251, USNA. Elia Kazan’s Pinky was part of a short cycle of ‘racially aware’ pictures made between 1948 and 1950 that touched on the problems of being black in the United States. On that cycle, Hollywood’s traditional depiction of African-Americans as docile and irresponsible ‘Sambos’, plus the changes to that stereotype in the late 1950s and 1960s, see Daniel Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (London, 1973), pp. 145–231. Eldridge, ‘Dear Owen’, p. 156. American Embassy, Colombo, Ceylon, to Secretary of State, 31 December 1948, RG 59, 811.4016/12-3148, USNA; American Embassy, Moscow, USSR, to Secretary of State, 27 July 1949, RG 59, 811.4016/6-2749, USNA. Caute, Dancer, pp. 138, 157–8; Paul Babitsky and John Rimberg, The Soviet Film Industry (New York, 1955), pp. 204–5, 209; Variety, 2 April 1952. In the early 1930s, the Comintern had tried in vain to make a film about racial prejudice in the United States, provisionally titled Black and White. The organisation even paid for a cast of African-Americans to travel to the Soviet Union for filming. The project collapsed for political and artistic reasons, as well as the racism of the Russians. See Jack El-Hai, ‘Black and White and Red’, American Heritage, Vol. 42, May–June 1991, pp. 83–92, and Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York, 1993), pp. 69–100. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 76–7. See also Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA, 2003), and Brenda Gayle Plummer (ed.), Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights and Foreign Aﬀairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). Ibid., pp. 49–78; Osgood, ‘Total War’, pp. 231–4. On the complex critical reactions to Porgy and Bess in Berlin and Vienna in the early 1950s see David Monod, ‘ “He is a Cripple an’ Needs My Love”: Porgy and Bess as Cold War Propaganda’, in Scott-Smith and Krabbenham (eds), Cultural Cold War, pp. 300–12. New York Times, quoted Third Quarterly Report, President’s Emergency Fund for Participation in International Aﬀairs, 1 January 1955–1 March 1955, Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) Central Files, Box 14, OCB 007 (File#1) (5): DDEL. Status of USIA Program, National Security Council 5720, 11 September 1957, FRUS, 1955–7, Vol. 9 (Washington, DC, 1987), p. 607. New York Times, 18 May 1954, p. 1; USIS Bombay to USIA, 20 August 1954, RG 306, Foreign Service Despatches, Box 1, Asia: USNA. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York, 1988), p. 223. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (New York, 1965), p. 171; Telephone Conversation, Dulles to Brownell, 24 September

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Hollywood’s Cold War 1957, FRUS, 1955–7, Vol. 9 (Washington, DC, 1987), pp. 612–13; Cary Fraser, ‘Crossing the Color Line in Little Rock: The Eisenhower Administration and the Dilemma of Race for US Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring 2000, pp. 233–64; Azza Salama Layton, ‘International Pressure and the US Government’s Response to Little Rock’, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 3, Autumn 1997, pp. 257–72. Gary Giddins, Satchmo (New York, 1988), pp. 160–5. Dudziak, Civil Rights, p. 118. Jack De Viney, ‘History of USIA Film and Television’ (c. 1993), unpaged document but ch. 2, RG 306, 01.1 (USIA Historical Branch), item 15, Box 30 (Motion Pictures File): USNA. Murrow’s hopes for greater transparency in US public relations were not entirely realised. On Murrow’s time at the USIA’s helm see Thomas Sorenson, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (New York, 1968), pp. 118–38, and A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (London, 1986), pp. 623–87. Donald W. White, The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power (New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 236. In the mid-1970s, for instance, twenty years after the agency’s birth and when the Cold War had reached maturity, the USIA had 10,000 paid employees and an annual budget of $240 million. It then produced 66 magazines in 27 languages, operated 200 libraries in 83 nations, broadcast 774.5 hours weekly in 34 languages through the Voice of America, entered 264 US government films in 46 international events and sent 49 shorts to 8 film festivals in Eastern Europe. Fred Kaplan, ‘Vietnam! Vietnam! ’, Cineaste, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1976, pp. 20–3. For more detail on the USIA’s role during the Cold War see Nicholas J. Cull, American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989: The United States Information Agency and the Cold War (Cambridge, forthcoming). Sorenson, Word War, p. 47. Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert and David Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), pp. 426–8. Turner Shelton, Motion Picture Service, to Cecil B. DeMille, 11 May 1953, cited in Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 289; Osgood, ‘Total War’, pp. 178, 207; De Viney, ‘History of USIA Film and Television’, ch. 2. Cull, American Propaganda, ch. 4. Ibid.; MacCann, People’s Films, pp. 179, 186; Sorenson, Word War, p. 64. De Viney, ‘History of USIA Film and Television’, ch. 1 and 2. ‘United States Information Services’ was the term used for the USIA’s posts overseas. MacCann, People’s Films, pp. 178–9; Sorenson, Word War, p. 93. De Viney, ‘History of USIA Film and Television’, ch. 1; MacCann, People’s Films, p. 178. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960 (London, 1961), pp. 256, 304; Mark Haefele, ‘John F. Kennedy, USIA and World Opinion’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 63–84; Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Arms: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, NY, 2000), pp. 161–2. Variety, 6 and 7 November 1961.

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48 49

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Sorenson, Word War, pp. 183–4. Ibid.; MacCann, People’s Films, pp. 184–94. MacCann, People’s Films, p. 186. Motion Picture Service VB (hereafter MPSVB), RG 306.3321, Letter from Columbia; RG 306.338, Evil Wind Out; RG 306.5915, The School at Rincon Santo: USNA. Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Projecting Jackie: Kennedy Administration Film Propaganda Overseas in Leo Seltzer’s Invitation to India, Invitation to Pakistan and Jacqueline Kennedy’s Asian Journey (1962)’, in Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (eds), Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity, 1300–2000 (Stroud, 1999), pp. 307–26. MacCann, People’s Films, p. 194; MPSVB, RG 306.5085, Born a Man, USNA. Sorenson, Word War, pp. 179–83; MPSVB, RG 306.5605, The Wall, USNA. Donald Wilson, USIA Deputy Director, to US Embassies and Consulates in Africa, 9 October 1962, Department of State, Central Files, 1960–3, RG 59, 811.411/10-942, USNA. Meredith graduated in 1963 but three years later was shot and wounded on a lone civil rights march through Mississippi. Murrow cited in Sorenson, Word War, p. 172. USIA, ‘Foreign Reaction to the Presidential Succession’, 6 December 1963, pp. 19–20, Folder: USIA Vol. I, National Security File, Agency File, Box 73, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJL); Rusk cited in Rotter, Comrades, p. 164. Rusk’s daughter Margaret was in an interracial marriage and this played against the Secretary of State’s public statements with American racists. Stevens interview, Washington Post, 19 September 1962; Christian Science Monitor, 29 November 1962. MPSVB, RG 306.765, The Five Cities of June, USNA. For a full treatment of this film see Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Auteurs of Ideology: USIA Documentary Film Propaganda in the Kennedy Era as Seen in Bruce Herschensohn’s The Five Cities of June (1963) and James Blue’s The March (1964)’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 295–310. Sorenson, Word War, pp. 257–9; MPSVB, RG 306.9015, Years of Lightning, Day of Drums; RG 306.5765, Eulogy to 5:02: USNA. Such was the high regard for Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, special legislation was passed to allow its release in the United States itself, where USIA films were normally prohibited. Melinda Schwenk, ‘Reforming the Negative through History: The US Information Agency and the 1957 Little Rock Integration Crisis’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 1999, pp. 288–306, esp. p. 293; MacCann, People’s Films, p. 194. De Viney, ‘History of USIA Film and Television’, ch. 2. On Hollywood’s more positive portrayal of black Americans in the late 1950s and 1960s see Leab, Sambo, pp. 197–231. MPSVB, RG 306.765, The March, USNA; Cull, ‘Auteurs of Ideology’; Sorenson, Word War, pp. 178–9. Schwenk, ‘Reforming’, p. 293; New York Times Magazine, 2 June 1963.

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55 Los Angeles Times, 11 October 2002; International Documentary, Vol. 19, No. 9, November 2000, pp. 24–6; ‘Clear Pictures: Filmography for Charles Guggenheim’, Charles Guggenheim Clippings File, AMPAS; MacCann, People’s Films, p. 188; Sorenson, Word War, p. 279. 56 Los Angeles Times, 11 October 2002. 57 Ibid.; MacCann, People’s Films, pp. 199–200. 58 See Box 209, Charles Guggenheim Collection, AMPAS for a heavily annotated, undated shooting script. 59 Pierce, cited in Schwenk, ‘Reforming’, p. 296. 60 MPSVB, RG 306.5160, Nine from Little Rock, USNA. 61 John A. Kirk, Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970 (Gainesville, FL, 2002), pp. 108, 121, 129, 176; Dudziak, Civil Rights, p. 146; Ben F. Johnson, Arkansas in Modern America, 1930–1999 (Fayetteville, AR, 2000), pp. 131–8. 62 Johnson, Arkansas, p. 148. 63 MPSVB, RG 306.5160, Nine from Little Rock, USNA; US Information Agency, CA-644, 1 September 1964, Folder: ‘Nine from Little Rock’, USNA; Rowan to Johnson, 8 April 1965, Folder: FG 296, US Information Service 1/1/65-6/1/65, White House Central Files, Subject File, Federal Government, Box 314, LBJL; Mendenhall cited in Schwenk, ‘Reforming’, p. 297. 64 Rotter, Comrades, pp. 152–9, 170–1; Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941–1969 (New York, 1971), pp. 457–71; Leonard A. Gordon, ‘Wealth Equals Wisdom? The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in India’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 554, November 1997, pp. 104–16. 65 Sorenson, Word War, p. 63. 66 Ibid., p. 183. 67 ‘Reaction of Indian University Students to “Nine from Little Rock” Film’, December 1965, USIA Research and Reference Service, Oﬃce of Research, ‘R’ Reports, RG 306, Box 10, R-174-65, USNA. 68 MPSVB, RG 306.5188, I Am a Man, USNA. Klugherz’s 30-minute film combined a history of African-Americans with brief visual and narrated essays on three diﬀerent kinds of black leaders: Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, activist-preacher Jesse Jackson, and Little Rock’s Ernest Green, now doing social justice work in New York’s Harlem district. For more details see Schwenk, ‘Reforming’, pp. 299–305. 69 ‘Reaction of Indian University Students to “Nine from Little Rock” Film’, December 1965, USIA Research and Reference Service, Oﬃce of Research, ‘R’ Reports, NA, RG 306, Box 10, R-174-65, p. 2, USNA. 70 Dudziak, Civil Rights, pp. 239–41. 71 Rotter, Comrades, pp. 170–1. 72 On the need to combat anti-Americanism see, for instance, Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepherd Stone between Philanthropy, Academy and Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

CHAPTER 7

A cowboy in combats

Perhaps you remember the scene from ‘The Alamo’, when one of Davy Crockett’s Tennesseans said: ‘What are we doing here in Texas fighting – it ain’t our ox that’s getting gored.’ Crockett replied: ‘Talkin’ about whose ox gets gored, figure this: a fella gets in the habit of gorin’ oxes, it whets his appetite. May gore yours next.’ Unquote. And we don’t want people like Kosygin, Mao Tse-Tung, or the like, ‘gorin’ our oxes. John Wayne to President Lyndon B. Johnson, 28 December 19651

So far, this study has centred on those engaged in Cold War propaganda behind the screen – Hollywood producers, directors and scriptwriters, and government bodies like the USIA and CIA. But what of the part played in the battle for mass opinion by those who appeared in front of the camera? Ever since the creation of Hollywood’s ‘star system’ in the 1920s, America’s cinema-goers had developed a close aﬃnity with Hollywood’s leading actors and actresses. By 1945, for millions of Americans, film stars were little less than life coaches: in everything from fashion to family life, from language to politics. In the 1960s, despite the emergence of television celebrities, the deaths of ‘Hollywood greats’ like Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh and Montgomery Clift were the occasion for national mourning. Even in the Cold War’s twilight years of the 1980s, the social and cultural influence of Hollywood’s fewer but more economically powerful stars remained immense. Mega-salaried actors like Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford were global icons, American brand names as identifiable as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.2 Several stars can compete for the title of America’s greatest Cold War onscreen propagandist. War being what it is, they are all male. Dana Andrews and Richard Widmark played a disproportionately high number of square-jawed anti-communist heroes in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.3 From the mid1960s and through the 1970s, their place was taken by the more ironic Sean Connery and Roger Moore in the highly successful James Bond espionage series, produced in Britain with American money.4 During the Second Cold War of the 1980s, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris became many people’s favourite commie-bashers, largely through their roles as testosterone-fuelled Vietnam War veterans in the Rambo and Missing in Action series.5

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Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck, on the other hand, can both stake a claim on the grounds of durability. Heston remained an iconic symbol of he-man American virtue and righteousness long after The Ten Commandments, playing, among other things, Christ-like figures in the post-apocalyptic fantasies Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaﬀner, 1968) and The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971). He was known as a staunch Republican, served six terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and in the 1980s co-chaired President Reagan’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities.6 By contrast, Peck was a life-long Democrat and liberal ‘actor-vist’, who earned a place on President Nixon’s infamous enemies list in the early 1970s. His Cold War roles stretched over three decades, four if we count his very first film, the pro-Soviet Days of Glory (Jacques Tourneur, 1944), in which he played an anti-Nazi Russian partisan. Sometimes Peck played archetypal Cold Warriors – saving young GIs abducted by the Soviets in West Berlin in Night People (1954), for example. On other occasions, he added his weight to pro-disarmament projects like Amazing Grace and Chuck (Mike Newell, 1987).7 However, towering above all these actors was John Wayne, for many the living symbol of American patriotism during the Cold War. From the late 1940s until his death in 1979, ‘Duke’ Wayne waged a relentless war – on and oﬀ screen – against those he defined as America’s Cold War enemies. Wayne was at the peak of his powers during the Cold War’s most critical years, and had a greater impact on the way Americans viewed the conflict than probably any other Hollywood figure. Moreover, Wayne’s powerful cowboy-cum-soldier persona was tied inextricably to the special relationship that the film industry enjoyed with the military during the Cold War. Throughout the conflict, the links between Hollywood and the Pentagon formed the main strand of the state-cinematic network. This helps to explain why Wayne and the US Defence Department invested heavily in the only major direct-combat portrayal of Vietnam made during the war itself, The Green Berets, released in 1968. A paean to the US military’s eﬀorts to save South Vietnam from communism, and designed to show that the Cold War was just as much a matter of life and death as the Second World War, The Green Berets represented mainstream Cold War cinematic propaganda at its most overt. The film sparked intense controversy in the United States and elsewhere, thus contributing to the feverish debate then taking place about the Vietnam War. Over the years, political and film historians have consistently dismissed Wayne’s movie as a naïve anachronism. But, as we shall see, this was not how many cinema-goers viewed The Green Berets when the Vietnam War was at its height. HOLLYWOOD AND THE COLD WAR MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX When, in his farewell address of January 1961, President Eisenhower uttered his now-famous warning of a ‘military-industrial complex’ profiteering from

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the Cold War arms race, he was drawing attention to the unhealthily close relationship which had developed between the US Defence Department and the nation’s defence companies.8 Yet his charge might equally have applied to the Pentagon’s almost symbiotic link with the American film industry. America’s silver screen had enjoyed a love aﬀair with all things military during the late 1940s and 1950s, making the studios millions at the box oﬃce and validating Washington’s fortress mentality in the process. A major factor in this was the Defence Department’s carefully calibrated carrot-and-stick approach towards moviemakers. Ever since the 1920s, the US armed services had shown themselves to be more than willing to oﬀer logistical help with film productions that portrayed their activities positively. This suited both parties: movie producers got access to military bases and equipment, while the military benefited from free advertising.9 During the 1930s, some of the biggest names behind and on screen owed their fame at least in part to movies made with the cooperation of the armed services. The director Frank Capra, for example, collaborated on a trilogy of films with the US Navy and Marines: Submarine (1928), Flight (1929) and Dirigible (1931). The actors Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien established their popular screen partnership with the help of the same services in Lloyd Bacon’s Here Comes the Navy (1934) and Devil Dogs of the Air (1935).10 ‘I have never found such a group of wholehearted, willing, patriotic people trying to do something for the government,’ Colonel K. B. Lawton, chief of the Army Pictorial Division of the US Signal Corps, said of the Hollywood community in the middle of the Second World War.11 As ‘peace’ was accompanied by an unprecedented conventional and nuclear arms build-up in the late 1940s, the Pentagon was forced to give more thought to the military’s image. In 1949, the Oﬃce of the Assistant Secretary of Defence for Public Aﬀairs created a Motion Picture Production Oﬃce to regulate and facilitate cooperation between the military and the film industry. Movie producers thereafter got free use of military hardware, oﬃcial film clips and actual soldiers, in return for feature films that aided recruitment and enhanced the military’s public image by projecting glowing pictures of life in the services and the valour of their members. Donald Baruch, Chief of the Motion Picture Production Oﬃce, vetted scripts for forty years, and was responsible more than anyone else for the extraordinary variety of films that the military helped produce during the Cold War. This included 16mm indoctrination shorts designed for American high-school students, paid for and produced by defence contractors; newsreels shipped from the Korean War front; documentaries made with the USIA and other oﬃcial propaganda agencies; and educational material intended to prepare Americans for possible atomic attacks from aggressor nations.12

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However, it was on the Hollywood feature film that Baruch’s oﬃce concentrated most of its energies, and with considerable success. Ready access to military assistance in the late 1940s and 1950s not only encouraged the production of scores of war films and movies that contained military sub-plots. It also, because of the Defence Department’s veto on ‘unpatriotic’ scripts, ensured that the vast majority of these films depicted the armed forces and combat generally in a positive light. In turn, movies strongly endorsed the militarisation of US Cold War strategy in the 1950s and the development of a permanent national security state.13 One early example of the HollywoodPentagon alliance in action in an explicitly Cold War context was George Seaton’s romantic drama The Big Lift (1950). This film managed both to glorify the US Air Force’s eﬀorts to thwart the Berlin Blockade and to portray the recently hated Germans as anti-communist partners. The movie was made in cooperation with the Air Force Public Aﬀairs Oﬃce and the Commander-inChief of the European command, General Lucius Clay.14 When Hollywood turned to widescreen and colour in an attempt to lure audiences back into the theatres in the 1950s and 1960s, the military’s modern technology, especially the jet plane, made an attractive film topic. Films made during this era about America’s nuclear strike force, like Delbert Mann’s A Gathering of Eagles (1963), which received the personal endorsement of the Strategic Air Command’s head, Curtis LeMay, depicted the atomic bomb as the guarantor of peace.15 On one level, these sorts of sentimental flag-wavers sent a clear message to cinema-goers: that the Cold War required bravery, teamwork, even the ultimate sacrifice. On another level, the retelling of the ‘good war’ against fascism in the scores of films made about the Second World War in the 1950s and 1960s – almost none of which referred to the Soviet Union’s massive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany – taught audiences the historic lessons of military preparedness and the dangers of trusting dictatorial regimes.16 Some of the most popular Hollywood films of the 1950s, like Mister Roberts (John Ford/Mervyn LeRoy, 1955) and White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, 1954), simultaneously celebrated military authority and utterly denied that this authority exercised an increasingly potent force in American life.17 MILITANT LIBERTY The climate of Hollywood-Pentagon cooperation fostered by the threat of communism led to a number of creative projects, designed to sell oﬃcial Cold War strategy more discreetly. One of the most fascinating of these was the topsecret ‘Militant Liberty’ programme instigated in the mid-1950s by John C. Broger, an evangelical Christian working as a psychological warfare consultant

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in the US Defence Department. Broger felt that it was essential to propagate more aggressively through a range of media the ideas of freedom and individual responsibility, both in the developing world, in order to inspire anticommunism among cadres of activists, and at home, including among the armed forces, whose ‘brainwashing’ during the Korean War had, some felt, exposed an ideological and spiritual vacuum inside the United States itself.18 By late 1955, ‘Militant Liberty’ had brought together Pentagon, State Department and CIA oﬃcials, intent on using Hollywood ‘to explain the true conditions existing under Communism in simple terms and to explain the principles upon which the Free World way of life is based’. In line with the CIA’s belief that the exporting of positive ‘American values’ was often better than explicitly anticommunist messages, audiences were to be presented with images which would help them to frame the East-West conflict appropriately: for example, showing America to be a land of opportunity and aﬄuence, teaching that competition was healthy, encouraging Good to fight Evil, and explaining why Free World principles were superior to those promulgated by Moscow and Beijing. What was needed was a ‘consortium’ of Hollywood actors, producers and directors willing and able to insert into films ‘the right ideas with the proper subtlety’ for domestic and overseas audiences.19 A year later, after several meetings in California, the Joint Chiefs of Staﬀ had signed up some of the biggest names in Hollywood for the Militant Liberty campaign. At the centre of the ‘consortium’ was the acclaimed director John Ford. An outspoken supporter of FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s, Ford had moved markedly to the political right during the first decade of the Cold War. A rear-admiral in the reserves by this point, who had produced films for the CIA’s predecessor, the Oﬃce of Strategic Services, during the Second World War, Ford was entirely in sympathy with the idea that the government’s intelligence services should suggest themes for Hollywood audiences. He had already made a number of overtly anti-communist pictures, and distributed Militant Liberty material sent to him by Pentagon oﬃcials among his team of scriptwriters.20 Another recruit was the producer and brigadier-general Merian C. Cooper, whose mortal fear of communism dated back to 1919, when he had flown sorties against the Red Army in Poland. Best known as the creator of King Kong, the classic monster movie directed by Ernest B. Schoedsach in 1933, Cooper arranged for Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, producer of Ford’s recent Western The Searchers (1956) and cousin of senior CIA psychological warfare operative Tracy Barnes, to be briefed.21 The actors John Wayne and Ward Bond, past and present presidents of the Motion Picture Alliance respectively, completed the consortium’s high-profile quartet. Bond was a veteran of nearly 200 films, and in the late 1950s starred in television’s highly popular Western series Wagon Train, significantly raising his profile. For

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many Americans, John Wayne was the screen hero of the age, and the personification of the nation’s martial values. Wayne, Bond and Ford had worked together for years, notably producing some of Hollywood’s classic Westerns. They were firm friends.22 One film in which all four consortium members were immediately involved, and which epitomises much of their work of the late 1950s, was The Wings of Eagles (1957). This $2.6 million naval melodrama was a tribute to Ford’s personal hero, Frank ‘Spig’ Wead, who had died in 1947. Wead had been a flying ace in the First World War. His aviation career had then been cut short by a terrible accident, after which he had turned to writing novels and screenplays about war and the armed forces. The US Navy considered Wead a perfect subject for the big screen and granted Ford full access to equipment and manpower. On request, the Joint Chiefs of Staﬀ provided the director with assistance ‘in putting Militant Liberty elements’ into the movie, even despatching an oﬃcial to work directly with Ford during the location shooting in Florida.23 The Wings of Eagles comes across as a rousing story of courage in the face of adversity, not as propaganda. It celebrates duty and derring-do, opportunity and camaraderie, and is sprinkled with raucous humour and daring aerial sequences. Our first sight of young naval oﬃcer Wead (played by Wayne) is just after the Great War, when he lands a biplane in the middle of an admiral’s garden party. However, maverick high jinks soon give way to tragedy when Wead’s infant son dies. Emotionally crippled and already estranged from his wife (played by fiery redhead Maureen O’Hara, Wayne’s favourite leading lady), Wead buries his head in work for the navy. Our hero becomes world famous after breaking seaplane speed records and is made the youngest squadron commander in naval history, only then to break his spine falling down stairs at home. Through long and painful years, the paraplegic Wead is movingly nursed back to health by his old navy mechanic, Carson (Dan Dailey). Now able to get about with only braces and canes, Wead develops a second career as an aviation writer for magazines and, after he is hired by a John Ford lookalike (Ward Bond), the cinema. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the indefatigable Wead then wangles active duty. More amazingly still, he devises the ‘baby carrier’, which makes a major contribution to Pacific strategy.24 Called a ‘men’s weepie’ by some, and ‘a routine glorification of the United States Navy Air Force’ by the communist press, the trade papers deemed The Wings of Eagles a bankable cert. Only one scene, in which Wead makes an impassioned speech to a Congressional committee warning of the dangers of disarmament, might have struck some in the audience as unnecessarily didactic.25

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Liberty in action: John Ford (seated, with baseball cap) directs Barry Kelley and John Wayne (with walking sticks) on the set of The Wings of Eagles (1957). The film marked the tenth time Ford and Wayne had worked together. MGM/The Kobal Collection.

WAYNE’S WAR John Wayne’s covert support for the Militant Liberty programme was as predictable as it was valuable for Washington. No other Hollywood star had the same power to move audiences, or was so willing to use his influence for political purposes. Wayne had been making movies since 1927, but it was not until 1949 that he broke into the exhibitors’ annual list of the nation’s top ten box oﬃce stars. There he remained for all but one of a record-breaking twenty-six consecutive years.26 In that time, Wayne became for many people the finest representative of American patriotism. Though he had not served in the military in the Second World War, because of his roles in numerous war films made during and after that conflict – most notably Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytryk, 1945), Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949) and The Longest Day (produced by Darryl Zanuck and released in 1962) – Wayne came to be regarded as the model American soldier.27 One of America’s most decorated soldiers, General Douglas MacArthur, once told Wayne at an American Legion convention that he represented the American serviceman

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The star and stripes: John Wayne aboard the USS Saint Paul in August 1964. Batjac Productions, Inc.

better than the American serviceman himself. The Veterans of Foreign Wars gave Wayne their gold medal and the Marines gave him their ‘Iron Mike’ award.28 In the genre he almost made his own, the Western, Duke Wayne came to embody the potent myth of the American frontiersman taming the world. Cultural historians claim the three ‘Seventh Cavalry’ pictures he made with John Ford and Merian C. Cooper from 1948 to 1950 – Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande – helped project America’s new post-1945 role as the world’s protector of freedom, and put Wayne at the centre of a Cold War sensibility favouring social discipline in time of trial.29 Wayne’s labour of love was The Alamo (1960), his directorial debut and a project financed by $1.5 million of his own money.30 Ostensibly the film was a story about Texans fighting for independence from Mexico in the 1830s, but Wayne saw it as a Cold War call to arms. In his view, many of his fellow Americans were falling prey to ‘the growing defeatist attitude in the Cold War imposed on us by the Soviet [Union]’, and consequently needed to ‘appreciate the struggle our ancestors

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made for the precious freedom we enjoy’. ‘We must sell America to countries threatened by communist domination’, he told Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons during filming. The Alamo was also meant as a retort to ‘certain quarters of Hollywood’ that were ‘splashing garbage’ on the screen and ‘giving the world a false, nasty impression of us’. Wayne cited Stanley Kramer’s recently released On the Beach by way of illustration.31 Evidence suggests that Wayne’s image and messages could be extremely pervasive. Film historian Michael Munn claims that in the early 1950s Stalin even ordered the KGB to assassinate Wayne because his anti-communist rhetoric threatened the Soviet Union.32 In the 1960s and 1970s, both friends and critics of American foreign policy said it was aﬄicted with a ‘John Wayne syndrome’. In the mid-seventies, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drew explicitly on the Wayne legacy when he attributed his diplomatic achievements to Americans’ admiration for cowboys who came into town alone.33 In the 1970s and 1980s, Vietnam War veterans were venomous about Wayne’s and others’ ‘guts and glory’ Second World War films, for making the US military look unbeatable and combat seem noble. Many claimed they had been encouraged to enlist in the hope of re-enacting what they had seen on screen. ‘I gave my dead dick for John Wayne’, wrote Ron Kovic, who emerged from Vietnam confined to a wheelchair.34 Wayne’s characters and persona carried such weight partly due to his political activism oﬀ screen. Many in the audience knew that when Wayne saved Hawaii from Red fifth-columnists in Big Jim McLain (1952) or helped Chinese children escape to freedom in Blood Alley (William Wellman, 1955), he was doing more than playing a movie role.35 Similarly, his outspoken patriotism and loudly publicised dedication to the anti-communist cause helped lend his parts in Westerns and other genres larger meaning. Wayne succeeded in integrating his politics and his profession far more than other film stars of his era. He actively embraced the attack on Hollywood leftists in the McCarthy period, serving three consecutive terms as MPA president in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Thereafter, Wayne openly supported Republican party policies and candidates, developing a particular soft spot for the resolutely anticommunist Richard Nixon.36 In 1960, Wayne joined the John Birch Society, a group that suspected the American government was secretly run by communists, and in 1965 became a trustee of the Americans for Constitutional Action, which opposed taxation and ‘big government’. Before the 1968 presidential race, which Nixon won, the Duke was urged by a right-wing Texas billionaire to serve as vicepresidential running-mate to the segregationist George Wallace (he declined, leaving General Curtis LeMay to run instead).37 By this point Wayne had helped make anti-communist publicity material for numerous branches of the

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federal government, including the Defence Department, the air force and the FBI.38 J. Edgar Hoover sent Wayne his condolences when Wayne’s mother died in March 1970, and his warmest congratulations when Wayne won his first Oscar for True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969) a month later.39 Overseas, Wayne owned mineral rights in the Congo, and in 1959 had been accused by the left-wing Panamanian government of financing a coup through his business dealings with a former president’s son.40 Just prior to his death in 1979, Congress struck a medal in the star’s honour. The inscription was simple: ‘John Wayne, American’.41 VIETNAM: THE SEMI-INVISIBLE WAR Wayne’s early campaign to root out communist subversives in the early 1950s coincided with the Korean War – the only instance during the Cold War when armies of two major powers (China and the United States) actually fought each other directly. Hollywood wasted little time in bringing the Cold War’s first ‘hot’ war to the screen. Though some films reflected the ambivalence many Americans felt about sending their boys to a remote land to die for a United Nations ‘police action’, the majority did to international communism what the film industry had recently done to the Axis powers.42 By contrast, pictures of America’s diplomatic and military intervention in Vietnam, which began in the late 1940s and ended with the humiliating withdrawal of US troops in 1973, hardly appeared at all on America’s silver screen. This might seem surprising given Hollywood’s near-obsession with the Vietnam War in the late 1970s and 1980s, but it is not too diﬃcult to explain. Vietnam was after all the world’s first full-scale ‘television war’, and filmindustry moguls reckoned most people wanted to escape from the images they saw nightly in their living rooms rather than seeing more of them at the cinema. Vietnam was also not susceptible to conventional Hollywood treatment, with its preference for clearly identifiable heroes and villains. America’s purposes were too vague, its allies too indistinguishable from its enemies, and its methods too questionable.43 As early as 1965, the war was already suﬃciently divisive for trade paper Variety to proclaim it ‘too hot for Hollywood’.44 Left-wing filmmakers working on Hollywood’s fringes did make anti-war documentaries in the late 1960s, the most prominent being Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968).45 At the same time, a small number of stars, like Bob Hope, actively supported the war by performing in shows for the troops in Vietnam organised by the United Service Organisations (USO). A few others joined the peace movement, especially in the early 1970s once anti-war protest had become safely fashionable. Among the latter, Jane Fonda, nicknamed ‘Hanoi Jane’ following her visit to the North

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Vietnamese capital in 1972, created the biggest stir.46 In general, though, Hollywood recoiled when the war led to massive public protest in the late 1960s, preferring to sit it out until a political consensus re-emerged. However, Hollywood did play some part from the late 1940s through to the mid-1960s in educating the public about why Vietnam was important, thus helping to lay the ground for the subsequent despatch of more than 500,000 troops. Starting with Paramount’s Saigon in 1948, all fourteen feature films made about Vietnam during this period exhibited a strong anti-communism. Most echoed John Foster Dulles’ influential Domino Theory and emphasised the threat posed by Mao Tse Tung’s China to the whole of Southeast Asia. A few, like Sam Fuller’s romantic adventure China Gate (1957), anticipated The Green Berets in its use of an innocent boy to connote America’s responsibility to Asia’s youth. Twentieth Century-Fox’s ‘B’ melodrama Five Gates to Hell (1959) combined Hollywood’s well-worn ‘yellow peril’ theme with images of evil mercenaries employed by Red China kidnapping and raping nuns and Red Cross nurses.47 Only Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American (1958) and George Englund’s The Ugly American (1962) hinted at the ambiguities of America’s role in a politically complex region. Both sanitised best-selling books, the former by the British spy author Graham Greene, who had been banned from the United States in 1952 for Communist party connections, the latter by the American political novelists William Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Greene’s novel centred on Alden Pyle, a CIA agent in Southeast Asia whose anti-communist counter-terrorism kills and maims innocent civilians. In the film, Pyle (played by Second World War hero Audie Murphy) works for a private US aid mission, and the ending reverses Greene’s critique of American foreign policy into an anti-communist statement by attributing civilian deaths to the Viet Minh, the independence league led by Ho Chi Minh. This rewrite can partly be linked to pre-production contacts between director Joseph Mankiewicz and one of the CIA’s legendary Cold War operatives, Edward Lansdale. The man widely believed to be the model for Greene’s Pyle, Lansdale was a former advertising executive who was credited during the 1950s with almost single-handedly preventing a communist takeover of the Philippines and with helping to install Ngo Dinh Diem as president of the American-backed government of South Vietnam.48 The Quiet American apart, there are no indications of any government involvement in these movies. But as Washington’s military commitment to South Vietnam increased in the early 1960s, oﬃcials devised a multi-layered propaganda strategy to defend it. The strategy’s message had three core themes. First, the war was a case of North Vietnamese aggression, backed by China, against South Vietnam. In other words, contrary to critics’ pleas,

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the conflict was not a civil war or a war of national self-determination, and the American government had every right to help a sovereign nation defend itself. Second, the war was a test case for all wars of national liberation and was subject to the Domino Theory. This meant that the primary threat to Southeast Asian independence came from Beijing, which was using North Vietnam and principally its terrorist network in the south (the Viet Cong) as a tool for expansion. Finally, the intentions of America and its allies were peaceful and the use of force the last resort. Force was necessary, however, in order to bring an intransigent enemy to the negotiating table and thereby achieve a lasting solution for Vietnam.49 The Kennedy and Johnson administrations disseminated their case assiduously. JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, laid on all-expenses-paid trips to Vietnam for America’s most influential correspondents. LBJ was constantly on the phone to television network executives, complaining, cajoling and threatening to make sure the images of ‘progress’ in Vietnam he thought the public ought to see actually appeared.50 In 1965, the government’s Vietnam propaganda campaign was ratcheted up several notches, as Vietnam switched from being a limited war into a fullblown military conflict. Johnson ordered an escalating series of air strikes against North Vietnam (christened Operation Rolling Thunder) and increased the number of US troops on the ground in the south to 200,000. The first major anti-war demonstration took place in Washington, DC, in April that year; October saw protests against the war in forty American cities.51 To cope with the war’s intensification, the USIA and Defence Department both produced their first major Vietnam films. Night of the Dragon was a highly polished, colour USIA documentary, narrated by Charlton Heston and directed by Richard T. Heﬀron. It used faked combat scenes to blame the war squarely on North Vietnam, exposed ‘Viet Cong’ atrocities through horrific images of dead teachers and village elders, and stressed the endurance of South Vietnamese youngsters, including a 5-yearold boy who had lost his legs in a minefield.52 The Defence Department’s Why Vietnam? was modelled on Frank Capra’s celebrated Why We Fight series from the Second World War. In what was becoming a familiar theme, it too used South Vietnamese children to evoke an emotional response. The film showed the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, surrounded by children, as the narrator accused him of duplicitously playing the ‘kindly grandfather’ while ‘planning a reign of terror’. Why Vietnam? was required viewing for all GIs shipping out to Vietnam, and with 10,000 prints controversially circulated among schools and colleges, it became the first documentary about Vietnam that a large number of Americans saw. Critics attacked it for its falsifications and ‘brainwashing’ techniques.53

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‘DEAR MR PRESIDENT’ Spring 1965 witnessed the birth of a publishing sensation, as Robin Moore’s novel The Green Berets appeared in America’s bookstores. One of the biggestselling books ever about the US engagement in Vietnam (by 1975 it had sold 3.2 million copies),54 The Green Berets was a direct result of the Kennedy administration’s eﬀorts to reinvigorate the nation’s policy in Vietnam and the public’s support for it. In 1961, JFK had ordered the expansion of the nation’s Special Forces in Vietnam, elite units he believed could defeat the enemy by mimicking its unconventional tactics allied to greater firepower. Nicknamed the Green Berets after their distinctive headgear, the Special Forces enjoyed flattering news coverage in which they were celebrated as a combination of James Bond and Daniel Boone. One journalist termed them ‘the Harvard PhDs of warfare’.55 The White House press corps was encouraged to make regular visits to the unit’s headquarters at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where the Green Berets performed their self-styled ‘Disneyland shows’ complete with rocket-propelled backpacks designed to prove their mastery of weapons technology.56 When, inspired by this publicity, author Robin Moore asked in 1963 for privileged access to Vietnam in order to write a book about the Green Berets, JFK ordered the unit to cooperate. The upshot was a series of short stories rolled into one, all extolling the bravery and prowess of Captain Steve Kornie’s unorthodox combat unit as it, among other things, brilliantly defends a Special Forces camp and conducts a clandestine mission inside North Vietnam. Army enlistment centres were temporarily flooded in the weeks following The Green Berets’ publication, and the book soon boasted a 200,000member fan club. ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’, written by Moore and sung by former Special Forces staﬀ sergeant Barry Sadler, topped the pop music charts for five consecutive weeks in 1966.57 Several Hollywood production companies, including MGM and Columbia, showed an early interest in cashing in on the success of Moore’s book, only to be put oﬀ by the increased domestic opposition to the war, a lack of funds and the Defence Department’s controlling hand.58 This left John Wayne’s company, Batjac Productions, to put its head above the Vietnam parapet. Having read The Green Berets, Wayne wrote directly to Lyndon Johnson in late December 1965. Without mentioning Moore’s book specifically, Wayne told the president of his desire to make a film about the Special Forces in Vietnam, one with ‘reason, emotion, characterization and action’ that would inspire ‘a patriotic spirit’ among fellow Americans and tell the world ‘why it is necessary for us to be there’. Wayne could take pride in having worked with the military on such films as The Fighting Seabees (Edward Ludwig, 1944) and The Longest Day (1962), the actor informed LBJ, but asked the president if he could put

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in a good word for Wayne at the Defence Department in order to ‘expedite our project’. For good measure, Wayne appealed to the president’s Texan roots by quoting a Davy Crockett line from The Alamo warning against appeasement.59 The White House reacted quickly, its speed reflecting Wayne’s authority and the government’s desire to get Hollywood’s support for the war. A week later, in early January 1966, Jack Valenti, Special Assistant to the President, and a man who six months later would be elected president of the Motion Picture Association of America, urged Johnson to ‘grant Wayne permission to make the film’ despite the actor’s conservative reputation. Valenti, a former fighter pilot and advertising agent, calculated that ‘a commercial film about Vietnam, with popular stars in it’ was bound to be of greater value than any documentary. It would also have greater licence to depict Viet Cong atrocities, evidence of which the government sorely lacked on film.60 The White House soon learned it need have no worries on this and other scores. In February, Wayne told Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary, that his film would show how the ‘Commie guerrillas are ruthless, having killed twenty thousand civic leaders and their families during these years of slaughter’. In a letter to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, Wayne repeated this figure, adding that it amounted to the South Vietnamese having proportionately ‘lost twice as many fighting men in their battle for freedom as we lost in the Second World War’. In Wayne’s opinion, the South Vietnamese people’s willingness to die for the cause belied reports from journalists and other ‘overnight visitors’ that America was forcing the war upon them. Wayne also promised Moyers his movie would depict the American soldiers’ ‘duty of death’ in Vietnam, together with their role as ‘diplomats in dungarees – helping small communities, giving them medical attention, toys for their children and little things like soap’. There would be a ‘blood bath of two million souls’ if the Senate was to ‘bow to the irresponsibility of the Berkeley beatniks’ and forsake the Vietnamese, the Duke warned. Moreover, defeat or retreat would completely destroy what was left of the once highly respected American image. This, in turn, would only bring guerrilla warfare closer to home, by encouraging communists like Che Guevara in South America.61 SCRIPTING VIETNAM: WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? Discussions between Batjac and the military about the movie initially went smoothly. After meeting the company’s president and the Duke’s eldest son, Michael, who would also be the film’s producer, Donald Baruch informed the army of his enthusiasm for the enterprise. ‘Not only do we want and need a feature motion picture on Vietnam’, he wrote in February 1966, ‘but we believe here is an opportunity to direct and develop a project that will contain

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story elements that are favourable to the Department of Defence and to the overall eﬀort as stated by the President.’ In April, the Waynes got the redcarpet treatment at the Pentagon, where they were briefed by a team led by Baruch and Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defence, and at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, where the Green Berets gave one of their ‘Disneyland’ performances. John Wayne was more than impressed. ‘From General Stilwell down through his Command, we found the soldiery of such quality that, if the people of the United States were apprised of it, it would renew their confidence in the ability, the decency and the dedication of our present-day fighting men.’62 In June, Wayne made a three-week fact-finding and morale-boosting mission to Vietnam, sponsored by the Defence Department. Visiting the Marines near Chu Lai after completing work narrating a Defence Department documentary on America’s rural rebuilding programme, Wayne reportedly narrowly escaped Viet Cong sniper fire. In Saigon children ran after him shouting ‘Number One Cowboy’, while US troops often called him Stryker, after his marine sergeant role in Sands of Iwo Jima. On his return home, Wayne publicly likened some aspects of the war to ‘an old cavalry post where men, women and kids are getting killed’. His own version of the Domino Theory called for the supply of Russian, Czech and Chinese weapons to the enemy to be cut oﬀ at source: ‘We’re at war with international communism.’63 At the end of June 1966, Michael Wayne reached an agreement with Universal Pictures on the financial and distribution arrangements for the film.64 However, trouble soon flared once the Pentagon read the draft scripts. These were penned by the experienced screenwriter and Vietnam veteran James Lee Barrett, whose earlier work curiously included On the Beach, with some input from John Wayne himself. Image-conscious elements within the armed services had actually bridled at the ‘gung-ho’ nature of Moore’s book. Worse still from their perspective, the novel depicted the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) as corrupt and cowardly; mocked ‘do-gooders’ wanting to fight the war by social work; and showed the Special Forces violating international agreements, condoning torture, and employing bandits, opium-smugglers and prostitutes.65 Having paid Moore roughly $75,000 for the rights to his bestseller, Michael Wayne wanted the movie to follow its dramatic contours as closely as possible. Baruch, on the other hand, had got the impression early on from Wayne that the film would be a very loose adaptation, and had passed this on to the Pentagon in order to allay its initial scepticism.66 In order to write as good a script as possible, James Lee Barrett immersed himself in the details of operational conditions in Vietnam, even asking the director of press information at CBS Television about radio communications in the field.67 In the summer of 1966, Barrett travelled to the Vietnamese front

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Fatherly fatigues: the Duke signing autographs during his trip to Vietnam in June 1966. Batjac Productions, Inc.

line under the Defence Department’s auspices. Whilst there, his camp came under fire, and it was this experience, plus that of John Wayne’s in June and Moore’s plot, that formed the basis of Barrett’s rough drafts. On reading the first of these, a panel including the Defence Department, State Department, army and Green Berets turned it down flat. In the panel’s opinion, the script

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was riddled with technical and strategic errors, the most obvious being the portrayal of a covert Green Berets’ mission into North Vietnam to seize a high-ranking communist oﬃcial without the South Vietnamese government’s permission. This gave the politically dangerous impression that the US Special Forces were a law unto themselves in Vietnam.68 Barrett and Michael Wayne complied with the long list of changes suggested by Baruch, despite the damage they thought this would do to the movie’s commercial and propagandistic success. Understandably, they believed they had no choice. For all his father’s political and cultural leverage, Michael knew that the Defence Department held the whip hand over filmmakers. Unless Baruch oﬃcially sanctioned the script, the helicopters, jeeps, uniformed extras and so on needed to make the film look like ‘the real thing’ would be withheld.69 After examining Barrett’s third draft script, in March 1967, the Defence Department formally agreed to assist the production, provided further modifications were made. These, again, went beyond technicalities, and aﬀected the movie’s political coloration. All references to the Vietnamese conflict being a civil war were to be cut. Instead, South Vietnam was to be presented as an independent country under attack from an aggressive neighbour. A scene showing the Green Berets condoning the ARVN’s brutal treatment of prisoners had to be excised because it was, in the words of the Defence Department Public Aﬀairs Oﬃce, ‘grist for the opponents of United States policy in Vietnam’.70 In June, just before production was due to start, the whole project nearly collapsed. Universal withdrew any further financial support, ostensibly due to perceived weaknesses in the screenplay but also because of the war’s increased notoriety. A new financial backer, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, swiftly filled the void, doubtless encouraged by the full backing the military now promised the film.71 Having spent eighteen months working to ensure that this important movie would present a polished image of both the military’s actions and the White House’s Vietnam strategy, the Department of Defence did all it could to add authenticity to the production. While searching for a location that could double as Vietnamese jungle country, John Wayne had initially thought of shooting the movie in Okinawa. Following a suggestion from the army, he eventually settled on the rugged terrain within the US Infantry’s 285-square-mile base at Fort Benning in Georgia, where the military’s logistical support would be close to hand.72 As well as allowing Batjac to film at Fort Benning, Fort Bragg and nearby airfields, the Pentagon granted the company access to a staggering array of equipment, including jeeps, captured Viet Cong weapons, armoured personnel carriers, tanks and helicopters. It supplied Batjac with over 350 army personnel, and obligingly put on leave a platoon of Hawaiian-Americans training in Massachusetts to play the Oriental roles. Wayne’s art director Walter Simmonds,

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Hollywood technicians and the army built a $150,000 mock-up of a Vietnamese village at Fort Benning, which was turned over to the army for training purposes after filming was complete. The Defence Department provided almost all of this military hardware and manpower at taxpayers’ expense.73 Shooting on location took place over thirteen weeks, starting in August 1967, after which the main players and crew moved to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. In keeping with the diﬃculties experienced in pre-production, the filming itself was far from straightforward. Under the watchful eye of the Defence Department’s three ‘technical advisers’, several more script changes were made on set, in order to help the film strike the right artistic and ideological notes. David Janssen, who played the dovish journalist Beckworth, kept insisting on more realistic dialogue lest he come across as an idiot.74 Certain scenes disappeared at the editing stage. One in which Wayne’s lead character, Lt. Col. Mike Kirby, accuses anti-war protestors of being ‘drenched in self-pity’ was left on the cutting room floor because, according to Michael Wayne, it was ‘too political’. A typical John Wayne comic brawl also went by the wayside, presumably on grounds of taste; at a time when so many Americans were coming back in body bags, few had the nerve to make Vietnam the subject of fun.75 Starring and co-directing (with Ray Kellogg) took its toll on the 60-year-old Duke, who three years earlier had been operated on to remove a cancerous lung. He caught laryngitis at a rain-drenched Fort Benning, and when the production looked to be running slightly ragged Warners-Seven Arts sent the veteran director Mervyn LeRoy to knock it back into shape.76 At this point, Robin Moore cried foul to the press. The Defence Department was, he claimed, changing the ‘core’ of his book in order ‘to keep up an unpopular war’. Michael Wayne countered by stressing that Batjac alone was responsible for the changes and by arguing he was ‘not making a film about Vietnam. I’m making a picture about good against bad.’77 PROPAGANDA BY NUMBERS Batjac’s The Green Berets is unashamedly old-fashioned, blood-and-guts patriotic propaganda. A Second World War film in tone and structure, it focuses on the brave endeavours of a small group of elite soldiers, thus playing down the highly bureaucratic nature of America’s war in Vietnam. Characters often deliver long speeches, thinly disguised as dialogue. The enemy are presented as racially barbaric terrorists driven by the monolithic communist desire for expansion. The clients, the South Vietnamese, are portrayed as a childlike people who need American guidance. The Americans share democratic and civilised principles, are the underdogs, and fight only to defend. Politics is reduced to personal soul-searching or tragedy. The movie is filled with

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characters and motifs self-consciously borrowed from Westerns. Even Wayne’s character, Kirby, awakened memories of his namesakes in Fort Apache and Rio Grande. At the same time, technological gadgetry, ‘Namspeak’ and the demonising of the media give the film a very contemporary feel. After the credits have rolled to the accompaniment of an all-male choir belting out ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’, the action begins at Fort Bragg. A group of reporters is watching a Special Forces unit go through its paces in readiness for Vietnam. Highly proficient in unarmed combat, demolition and foreign languages, the Green Berets look exactly like the ‘new breed of American soldier’ the Duke had described them as in the press before filming.78 The men would clearly rather be at the front, fighting the Viet Cong (or ‘VC’). But in a media age they know they must win the argument at home first if they are to save the world from communism. In a question-and-answer session the Green Berets are more than a match for the cynical reporters. ‘Foreign policy decisions are not made by the military,’ says Irish-American master sergeant Muldoon (Aldo Ray), when asked why Americans are ‘waging this ruthless war’ in Vietnam. It is left to medical oﬃcer McGee, played by the black actor Raymond St Jacques, to elaborate. The Viet Cong are trying to ‘exterminate’ the civilian leadership in the South and are torturing innocents, McGee tells a female journalist, parroting Wayne’s letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘They need us, Miss Sutton, and they want us’, he declares.79 Yet even when Muldoon brandishes Russian, Czech and Chinese weapons taken from the Viet Cong, one reporter, the Chronicle Herald’s George Beckworth (Janssen), still has his doubts. This is a cue for Lt. Col. Kirby, commander of a Special Forces unit bound for Vietnam, to invite Beckworth to come see for himself. Unloading at Da Nang, Kirby and Beckworth learn that the base’s signs are all posthumously dedicated to the American heroes who have died in what is a very real, often deadly conflict. Kirby is briefed on his unit’s mission to respond to a heavy build-up of enemy troops in the highlands by reinforcing a vulnerable camp ‘in the heart of VC country’. ‘Huey’ helicopters ferry the men to an outpost on the Cambodian border, designated ‘Dodge City’. A dashing ARVN ranger Nim (George Takei, aka the stoic Mr Sulu in TV’s Star Trek)80 tells Kirby they are fighting the war with one hand tied behind their backs. They don’t even have the right raingear for monsoon conditions. They are also sitting ducks: ‘Charlie’ lobs in mortars nightly. Kirby orders the ‘killing area’ to be doubled in size to 300 feet, where pungi sticks, a vicious and primitive ‘trick learned from Charlie’, are planted. Eﬀective guerrilla warfare obviously calls for unconventional methods. That night the fort’s American captain is tragically killed by a mortar, the result of the VC having ‘eyes’ in the camp. The next day Muldoon catches the

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The new Cold War enemy within – the media: Lt. Col. Kirby (John Wayne) and journalist George Beckworth (David Janssen) prepare to lock horns on the set of The Green Berets (1968). Batjac Productions, Inc.

spy red-handed. When Nim vigorously interrogates him, Beckworth is appalled by the lack of ‘due process’. The journalist’s naïve assessment of field procedure is belittled by Kirby, who tells him, ‘Out here due process is a bullet!’ Beckworth begins to get the point when he sees Doc McGee tending to a local village girl who has lost part of her leg to a land mine. In the meantime, Sergeant Petersen (Jim Hutton), the unit’s irreverent scrounger, has eﬀectively adopted the orphan boy ‘Hamchunk’ (Craig Jue). The mischievous but lovable camp mascot first lost his parents in the war, and then had to cope with the VC assassinating the missionaries at his orphanage. The message is clear: communism destroys the family and the church, and is utterly without conscience. The VC’s gratuitous savagery is further underlined the next day, in a scene loosely based on a story told to the Duke by the Green Berets’ chief, General

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Keeping cool in a ‘hot’ Cold War: while the rescued villagers panic and helicopters swarm, Lt. Col. Kirby (John Wayne) is a model of military fortitude as he calls up the air force to wipe out ‘Charlie’s positions in ‘Dodge City’. Publicity poster for The Green Berets (1968). Batjac Productions, Inc.

Stilwell, at Fort Bragg.81 Kirby’s unit visits a local hamlet, where they find the chief mutilated and the little girl Beckworth had met the night before raped and murdered. This is a turning point for the liberal reporter, who has already exchanged his safari suit for combat fatigues; it finally dawns on him why America’s defence of South Vietnam is so important. Here, The Green Berets was reversing the actual experience of many American journalists, like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam, who arrived in Vietnam thinking the war was worthwhile and necessary, but who ended up thinking otherwise.82 Kirby is then summoned to Da Nang, where he learns the South Vietnamese government wants the Green Berets’ help in a scheme to kidnap a VC general, using a beautiful South Vietnamese model as bait. While he is away, the VC launches a full-scale assault on the camp. Like the Texans besieged at the Alamo, the Green Berets are vastly outnumbered and take hit after hit as they fight the faceless hordes. This time the Americans can claim victory, though. Beckworth loads ammunition for the besieged combatants; Hamchunk’s puppy is killed by a rocket blast and given a proper ‘Christian’ burial; and the Green Berets corral the cowering villagers in a bunker. Just as

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everything looks lost, Kirby’s platoon comes to the rescue, with the help of US air force strikes. Kirby orders everyone to ‘fall back’ temporarily, leaving the air force to mop up the pillaging VC from a safe distance and his troops to reoccupy ‘Dodge City’. The battle is over. True grit and superior technology have beaten fanaticism and brute force. The Green Berets have served their country and the body bags testify to the value of their international cause. Beckworth is heading home, having abandoned both his journalistic detachment and his newspaper’s prejudices. ‘If I say what I feel I may be out of a job’, he tells Kirby, implying a liberal media conspiracy against the war. ‘We’ll always give you one’, is the reply. Meanwhile, Kirby’s work is not complete. After comforting the camp wounded, what remains of his unit daringly parachutes behind enemy lines to snatch the lascivious VC general from his palatial villa. Living amidst faded colonial splendour and served champagne and caviar by a bevy of servants, the general epitomises communist notions of ‘equality’. Things go without a hitch, as the trussed captive is hoisted spectacularly into the air by balloon and thence onto an over-flying American aircraft. But there is a sting in the tail. On the way back, Petersen dies a horrible and shocking death when he steps into a sloop knot and is impaled on a pungistick-filled wall. When the choppers return to base, Hamchunk is distraught when his beloved ‘Peter-San’ fails to appear. ‘What will happen to me now?’, he asks Kirby. ‘You let me worry about that, Green Beret’, Kirby replies, handing him Petersen’s beret. ‘You’re what this is all about.’ In the final shot, infamous for depicting the sun setting in the east, the two heroes walk away hand in hand as the theme tune strikes anew. ‘RACIST AND IMMORAL’ – AND A BOX OFFICE HIT Being the first major film about Vietnam and a John Wayne vehicle, The Green Berets was always going to attract significant interest. However, in the three years it had taken to make, for Americans the war in Vietnam had grown from a blip on the map somewhere in Southeast Asia to a reality that might claim the life of the boy next door. When the movie debuted, in July 1968, there were half a million American troops in South Vietnam and the war was at the very top of the US political agenda. Graphic television reports of communist guerrillas penetrating the inner confines of the US embassy in Saigon during the Viet Cong’s Tet oﬀensives of January-February 1968 had made the Johnson administration’s claims of imminent or inevitable victory look ridiculous. At the end of March, partly due to these reports, LBJ had announced a halt to the bombings of North Vietnam in the hope of sparking peace talks with the enemy, and declared his withdrawal from the presidential race.83 This

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came as a blow to John Wayne, who had hoped The Green Berets would help get LBJ re-elected as the Democratic party candidate.84 By the summer of 1968, polls indicated the American people were deeply divided over the war. The violence this caused, plus the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April and Robert Kennedy in June, added to a sense of genuine national crisis.85 Reaction to The Green Berets reflected this highly charged political atmosphere. As might be expected, opponents and supporters of US policy in Vietnam latched on to the movie for their own propaganda purposes. The film’s premiere in New York City, for instance, was picketed by protestors sponsored by the Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam.86 Wayne had got used to the drubbing his films received from critics over the years, but in this instance many were so vitriolic as to be foaming at the mouth. Renata Adler, chief film critic at the New York Times, led the case for the prosecution, calling The Green Berets ‘vile, insane’ and ‘dull’. In Glamour magazine, Michael Korda, influential publisher and son of the famous British film production designer, Vincent Korda, condemned the movie as a ‘simple-minded tract in praise of killing, brutality and American superiority over Asians’. ‘I do not know how it would be possible to produce a more revolting picture’, he continued, ‘short of giving Martin Bormann several million dollars to make a Technicolor movie showing that Auschwitz was a wonderful place to live.’87 Richard Schickel, writing in Life, agreed that the film was ‘stupid’ and primitive’, but argued that modern audiences were too sophisticated to find Wayne’s recycled Second World War and early Cold War propaganda palatable. ‘Peaceniks may safely leave their picket signs at home’, he concluded, ‘The Green Berets is its own worst enemy.’ The trade papers Hollywood Reporter and Variety said much the same thing. Variety thought the script ‘so loaded with corn and cardboard that “hawks” will tend to be embarrassed, while “doves” will be embarrassed – for the “hawks”.’88 The Green Berets’ flaws stood out a mile to the discerning viewer. It was clichéd and polemical, much of the acting was wooden, the direction pedestrian, the editing lethargic, and at 141 minutes, it would test the patience of a saint. The Defence Department’s script interventions had not only delayed production for a critical two years, thus depriving audiences of a clear pro-war statement before opposition had coalesced. They had also stripped away some of the more dramatic and entertaining aspects of Moore’s book. The filmmakers’ use of army manpower and hardware came at a price too: Wayne often got lost on screen amidst the cast of thousands and military gadgetry. On top of all this, The Green Berets looked dated in an age increasingly dominated by television. Contrary to received opinion then and now, America’s television networks largely supported the government throughout the Vietnam

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Uncle Sam still needs you! Publicity for The Green Berets (1968) made a virtue of the film’s oldfashioned values. Batjac Productions, Inc./ Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.

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War, albeit in a less strident tone than The Green Berets. However, by mid-1968 many television viewers had seen enough live-action footage of Americans burning Vietnamese villages and napalming children to realise Wayne’s treatment of the war looked decidedly sanitised and one-sided.89 And yet, despite these weaknesses, The Green Berets did excellent business at the box oﬃce. Having cost roughly $7 million to make, it grossed nearly $11 million domestically in its first year, and roughly $9 million overseas. This made it one of the ten biggest earners of 1968, and one of the most lucrative Warner Bros. releases of the 1960s.90 Wayne’s star appeal can partly account for this, together with Americans’ desire for adventurous war movies. But could it not also be that critics like Schickel underestimated the appeal of the movie’s potent mixture of patriotism, anti-communism and courage under fire? The New York Times published a number of letters challenging Renata Adler’s negative review. One, written by a former Green Beret, William P. Farrell, thought Wayne’s film was ‘fast-moving, depicted American Special Forces accurately and put the Vietnam War in perspective’. Other ex-Green Berets also publicly approved of the film, while the New Yorker’s Penelope Gilliatt, who despised the movie’s patronising attitude towards the Vietnamese, noted how audiences cheered the death of Viet Cong soldiers.91 Perhaps some of these viewers liked The Green Berets’ very unrealism. As Gary Wills has written, ‘People who did not want to know about the actual Vietnam War could feel that the national unity and resolve of the Second World War might turn around this strange new conflict in the far oﬀ jungles of the East.’92 Other viewers might have seen the movie just as Michael Wayne did, as a ‘cowboys and Indians’ film in which ‘the Americans are the good guys and the Viet Cong are the bad guys’.93 The Green Berets’ aims were as limited as its style. Like most eﬀective propaganda, it sought to reinforce not convert, by tapping into the public’s deeply ingrained beliefs. Not surprisingly given the film’s hyper-American flavour, some overseas viewers berated The Green Berets. The movie’s opening night in Frankfurt in West Germany, for instance, was marred by rioters chanting ‘Ho Chi Minh’ and waving ‘America Go Home’ flags. In Amman in Jordan, hundreds of rioters smashed up a cinema when American fighter planes appeared towards the end of the movie. The film’s notoriety dented box oﬃce takings in some countries. Denmark, for example, banned its exhibition totally following fights between riot police and anti-American demonstrators outside theatres. Elsewhere, such as in France and Japan, demonstrations outside venues showing The Green Berets against both the Vietnam War and the US military’s presence in their country helped draw capacity crowds.94 Reports of these anti-American protests probably assisted the film commercially and politically back in the United States, where Wayne presented himself as the nation’s standard-bearer. Rumours of

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bomb threats and demonstrations outside theatres by left-wing groups played further into the hands of the many Americans who opposed even the right to hold peaceful demonstrations in wartime, or those, like Wayne, who believed that the protestors were subversives hiding behind the constitution.95 As for the military itself, having invested heavily in The Green Berets, the Department of Defence made sure as many GIs as possible got to see it. The movie soon became a favourite booking of the armed forces entertainment oﬃcers in Vietnam, though not always with the desired eﬀect. Many GIs reportedly laughed aloud at the movie’s unreal portrait of the war and treated it as unintentional high camp.96 Apparently unaware of these adverse reactions, in the summer of 1968 the USIA hired Wayne’s old Militant Liberty associate, John Ford, to make a documentary equivalent of The Green Berets. Three years in the making, and with appearances by Charlton Heston and the former movie star turned politician Ronald Reagan, Vietnam! Vietnam! turned out to be a disastrous white elephant. On completion in 1971, the agency deemed it too confrontational for general overseas release. With events in Vietnam, America’s ability to portray itself as a benign force fighting the communist evil had gone – for the time being at least.97 CONCLUSION It is fitting that John Wayne made the only major Vietnam War movie to come out of Hollywood during that most divisive of conflicts. After all, the Pentagon regarded Wayne as perhaps its single most eﬀective recruiting agent in the decades after the Second World War, and his mythical warrior status seems to have left an indelible mark on the generation of American fighting men that came to maturity in the 1960s. In one respect, in The Green Berets Wayne was simply doing for the US Special Forces what he had done for the Marines in The Sands of Iwo Jima two decades earlier. But The Green Berets also illustrated the sometimes highly personal nature of the cinematic state-private network during the Cold War. It was Wayne, a powerful actor, who was the driving force behind the making of The Green Berets, not a studio or a government department. As he told LBJ in December 1965, the Duke knew Vietnam was not a popular war. Because of this, he saw it as his duty, privilege even, to present the government’s case for global anti-communist vigilance. Other stars had performed the same task previously, and would continue to do so, in diﬀerent ways, until the Cold War came to a close. Others still were ready by the 1970s to use their power to question what that vigilance was doing to America, as we shall see in the next chapter. Even John Wayne, however, would not have been able to make The Green Berets without the Pentagon’s support. Indeed, this is precisely what some

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critics and opponents of the Vietnam War said at the time. For a brief moment after The Green Berets’ release, the public spotlight shone on the relationship between Hollywood and the military. Democrats in Congress, led by Senator James Fulbright, complained that Batjac had been vastly undercharged for the loan of military hardware and manpower during the making of The Green Berets, and consequently that taxpayers had paid for a movie that many of them considered illegitimate pro-war Defence Department propaganda. John Wayne reacted to this in typically combative fashion, by threatening to ‘horsewhip’ those who accused him of swindling the Pentagon and the American people.98 In fact, the golden age of the Hollywood-Pentagon axis had already passed before this embarrassing episode. Following the lead given by On the Beach in 1959, a handful of military films questioning nuclear deterrence had been made in the mid-1960s without Defence Department cooperation. The most powerful of these were Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964) and James Harris’ The Bedford Incident (1965). John Frankenheimer’s drama Seven Days in May (1964) had even toyed explicitly with the military-industrial complex theme by showing a hawkish air force commander (played by Burt Lancaster) plotting the overthrow of the US government in order to prevent the ratification of a disarmament treaty.99 Growing public protests against the military’s activities in Vietnam in the late 1960s led to a further weakening of HollywoodPentagon ties, and as a result the military’s image on screen reached a low point in the mid-1970s. It was then rehabilitated during the Second Cold War of the 1980s, courtesy of renewed cooperation on prestigious anti-communist movies like Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge (1986), which celebrated the 1983 Marine invasion of Grenada, and Tony Scott’s Top Gun, which, with Tom Cruise playing the lead role, glamorised the life of navy fighter pilots and was the nation’s highest-grossing movie of 1986.100 At the height of the Vietnam War, the US government secretly undertook all kinds of propaganda activities to blunt the anti-war movement, even sending pro-war letters to itself to foster the impression of support.101 When these dubious measures later came to light, they had the eﬀect of making John Wayne’s The Green Berets look harmlessly naïve: an openly crude attempt to reassert America’s imperial ethos by a dated film star in the television age. Yet we should remind ourselves of the critical role played by the US armed services in the making of The Green Berets and literally hundreds of other Hollywood films during the Cold War. These include the scores of Vietnam War movies produced after the conflict formally ended in 1975, many of which helped Americans come to grips with its defeat. In diﬀerent ways, John Wayne and The Green Berets helped inform a significant number of these return-to-’Nam movies. Two of a surreal nature – Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) – played

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on Wayne’s iconic status in order to present the Vietnam War as a confusing and pointless experience.102 In contrast, the cartoon-like Rambo series (1982–8) paid tribute to the bravery of US military elites in Vietnam and suggested that, left unencumbered by bureaucrats and politicians, America’s armed forces could have won the war. Other films still, like John Irvin’s Hamburger Hill (1987), lent credence to the myth that the media had stabbed the US military in the back during the war.103 Appropriately enough, the Duke himself made one of his last public appearances at the Academy Award ceremonies in April 1979, when he presented the Oscar for best picture to Michael Cimino for The Deer Hunter, widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever to have been made about the Vietnam War.104 A month later, Wayne died of cancer, caused, some claim, by the fallout from a nuclear bomb test in Nevada, 100 miles downwind from where he was making The Conquerer in 1954. Tributes paid to the Duke included this by President Jimmy Carter: ‘In an age of few heroes, he was the genuine article.’105 Notes 1 Document 109 in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, pp. 390–1. 2 On the historical development of Hollywood’s star system from the 1920s to the present see Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (London, 2000). 3 Among the explicitly Cold War movies Andrews starred in were The Iron Curtain (1948), Assignment Paris (1952) and The Fearmakers (1958); Widmark was in Pickup on South Street (1953), Hell and High Water (1953) and The Secret Ways (1961). For brief synopses of these movies see Shain, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, pp. 365–72. It should be noted that the actors’ roles in these and other films did not necessarily accurately reflect their own political viewpoints. Widmark, for instance, was no conservative Cold Warrior. He was extremely liberal and played a key role in integrating the black actor Sidney Poitier into the Hollywood system in the 1950s, for example. See Kim Holston, Richard Widmark: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1990). 4 On Bond’s relationship to the Cold War and détente see James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London, 1999). 5 Stallone starred as John Rambo in three films: First Blood (Ted Kotcheﬀ, 1982), Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (George Pan Cosmatos, 1985) and Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988). Norris starred as Colonel James Braddock in Missing in Action (Joseph Zito, 1984), Missing in Action 2 –The Beginning (Lance Hool, 1985) and Braddock: Missing in Action III (Aaron Norris, 1988). See Susan Jeﬀords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994). 6 Bruce Crowther, Charlton Heston: The Epic Presence (London, 1986); Variety, 7 February 1968, p. 6; Filmfax, October 2002, pp. 52–6.

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7 Michael Munn, Gregory Peck (London, 1998); Film Daily, 27 April 1944; Time, 22 March 1954; Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1988, p. 89. On the eﬀorts made by the Nixon White House to use federal machinery to ‘screw’ its political opponents see the records of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force at www.archives.gov/research/independent-counsels/watergate (24 February 2006). 8 Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960–1961 (Washington, DC, 1961), pp. 1037–40. 9 On the military assistance that was given to William Wellman’s highly successful Great War aerial epic Wings (1927), for example, see New York Times, 13 August 1927, p. 10; Stars and Stripes, 28 March 1961, pp. 12–13. 10 Variety, 5 September 1928, p. 14; New York Times, 14 September 1929, p. 17; Variety, 8 April 1931, p. 18; New York Times, 21 July 1934, p. 14; Motion Picture Daily, 31 January 1935, p. 11. 11 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York, 1975), p. 249. 12 Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 136–7, passim; Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, esp. pp. 83–186. 13 Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 136–87, 210–45. 14 New York Times, 16 April and 27 April 1950; Variety, 12 April 1950, p. 6. 15 Variety, 5 June 1963; Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1963, p. 117. 16 John Whiteclay Chambers and David Culbert (eds), World War II, Film and History (New York, 1996). Of course, America’s was not the only film industry to manipulate the Second World War for Cold War purposes. See, for instance, Christiane Mückenberger, ‘The Anti-Fascist Past in DEFA Films’, in Sean Allan and John Stanford (eds), DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992 (New York, 1999), pp. 58–76. On the relationship between 1950s American television documentary series about the Second World War and the Cold War see Bernhard, Television News, pp. 143–9. Out of interest, 44 per cent of the Americans surveyed in a September 1985 New York Times poll did not know that the Soviet Union and the United States had fought on the same side in the Second World War; a smaller number within that group – 28 per cent of the whole sample – thought that the two countries had actually fought against each other. New York Times, 10 November 1985, p. 40. 17 Christian Appy, ‘ “We’ll Follow the Old Man”: The Strains of Sentimental Militarism in Popular Films of the Fifties’, in Kuznick and Gilbert, Rethinking, pp. 74–105. 18 Militant Liberty Outline Plan, 5 November 1954, OCB Central Files, Box 70, OCB 091.4 Ideological Programs (File #1): DDEL (8); Proposed Implementation Plan for Project Action, 15 July 1955, OCB Central Files, Box 71, OCB 091.4 Ideological Programs (File#3) (4): DDEL. Broger was Deputy Director of the Armed Forces Information and Education programme between 1956 and 1961. During his tenure, it produced radio programmes and films with titles such as Freedom and You and Red Nightmare, and developed ties to a number

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Hollywood’s Cold War of non-military groups involved in the indoctrination of the American people. These included HUAC, which in the film Operation Abolition (1960) portrayed the 1960 anti-HUAC student demonstrations in San Francisco as communist-led, and the National Education Programme, a right-wing patriotic organisation funded by George S. Benson, president of Harding College, a fundamentalist (Church of Christ) institution based in Searcy, Arkansas, which made Communism on the Map (c. 1960), portraying the US in the final phase of communist encirclement. Anne C. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the US Military 1942–1993 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1996), pp. 56–66. Memorandum for JCS Chairman, 5 July 1956, RG 218, JCS Central Files 1954–6, Box 125, sec. 24: DDEL; Militant Liberty Outline Plan, 5 November 1954, OCB Central Files, Box 70, OCB 091.4 Ideological Programs (File #1) (8): DDEL; Memorandum to Chief of Naval Operations, 16 November 1955, RG 218, JCS Central Files 1954–6, Box 124, sec. 16: DDEL; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 284–6. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (New York, 2001), pp. 461–84; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 286. Ford’s Cold War movies included This is Korea! (1951), a Department of Defence orientation film for American soldiers being stationed on the peninsula, and The Bamboo Cross (1955), a television movie that portrayed Chinese communists abusing nuns. John Ford Papers, Box 5, f. 29–31, Lilly Library, University of Indiana (hereafter LLUI); Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and his Films (Berkeley, CA, 1986), pp. 534, 537–40. Mark Costa Vaz, Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong (New York, 2005), pp. 321–31; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 285. On The Searchers see John Ford Papers, Box 6, f. 19–22, Box 8, f. 22, Box 21, f. 6–7, LLUI, and Edward Buscombe, The Searchers (London, 2000). Ford treated Wayne as if he were his son, and is often credited with having invented Wayne’s on-screen persona. Bond often played Wayne’s dependable sidekick in movies. Gary Wills, John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (London, 1997), p. 16; Katz, Encyclopedia, p. 148. Time, 11 March 1957; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, p. 286; The Wings of Eagles press book, BFIL. John Ford Papers, Box 6, f. 23–4, Box 22, f. 1–3, LLUI. The ‘baby carrier’ was a small aircraft carrier whose sole purpose was to re-equip larger carriers with planes as they were lost in combat. Daily Worker (London), 16 March 1957; Motion Picture Herald, 2 February 1967, p. 249; Andrew Sinclair, John Ford (London, 1979), p. 180. www.anb.org/articles/18/18-01223.html (6 October 2005); Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 1. A few claim that Wayne did not forgive himself for having escaped military service in the Second World War, and that the compensatory super-patriotism of later years was a form of expiation. See Wills, Wayne, p. 110; Ronald Davis, The Life and Times of John Wayne (Norman, OK, 1998), p. 118. Interestingly, Wayne did apply for a commission with the Oﬃce of Strategic Services. See

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Modern Military Records, RG 226, E92, Box 32, F. 22087, Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, Atlanta, Georgia. Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 4; Charles John Kieskalt, The Oﬃcial John Wayne Reference Book (New York, 1993), p. 176; BoxOﬃce, 23 August 1971. Wills, Wayne, p. 159 Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 1. Wayne quoted during filming, in Donald Shepherd, Robert Slatzer and Dave Grayson, Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne (London, 1985), pp. 203–4, 225; Wayne to Parsons, cited in Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, John Wayne, American (Lincoln, NE, 1995), p. 471; FBI press cutting, 9 November 1960: http:foia.fbi.gov/wayne/wayne.pdf (5 October 2005). Michael Munn, John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth (New York, 2004), pp. 2–6, 125–8. Munn’s sources are not as strong as they might be and include the actor Orson Welles and Russian filmmaker Sergei Bondarchuk. Wills, Wayne, p. 13; Oriana Fallaci, Interview with History (London, 1976), p. 41. Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (New York, 1976), pp. 43, 54–5, 72, 98. A movie version of Kovic’s memoir was released in 1989 under the same title, directed by Oliver Stone. See also Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York, 1977), p. 6; W. D. Ehrhart, ‘Why I Did It’, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 56, No. 1, Winter 1980, pp. 19–31, esp. p. 26; Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York, 1977), pp. 3–4, 188–9, 209. A journalist during the Vietnam War, Herr would later narrate Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now (1979) and co-write Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Ron Briley, ‘John Wayne and Big Jim McLain (1952): The Duke’s Cold War Legacy’, Film and History, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2001, pp. 28–33; Steve Zmijewsky, Boris Zmijewsky and Mark Ricci, The Complete Films of John Wayne (Secaucus, NJ, 1983), pp. 200–2. Davis, Wayne, p. 26; Los Angeles Times, 5 October 1971. Wills, Wayne, p. 201; Hollywood Reporter, 8 July 1965; Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, pp. 1, 7; Los Angeles Times, 8 May 1969. FBI press cutting report from July 1961on Wayne’s role as a commentator on the Defence Department film, Challenge of Ideas (1961), and FBI Special Agent Command to J. Edgar Hoover about a National Geographic Magazine article, 2 June 1960: http:foia.fbi.gov/wayne/wayne.pdf (5 October 2005). Hoover to Wayne, 19 March and 8 April 1970: http:foia.fbi.gov/wayne/ wayne.pdf (5 October 2005). Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 2; FBI Special Agent Command, Los Angeles, to J. Edgar Hoover, 23 April 1959: http:foia.fbi.gov/wayne/wayne.pdf (5 October 2005). www.anb.org/articles/18/18-01223.html (6 October 2005). Smith, Looking Away; Doherty, Projections, p. 276. Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 254. The North Vietnamese were prolific producers of films about the war while it was being waged. The French, Canadians, Soviets, East Germans and Cubans also made a

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Hollywood’s Cold War variety of films, documentaries especially. Few of these films were distributed in the United States. See Jean-Jacques Malo and Tony Williams (eds), Vietnam War Films (Jeﬀerson, NC, 1994); Randolph Lewis, Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America (Madison, WI, 2000), pp. 79–80. Variety, 18 September 1965, p. 4. Lewis, Emile de Antonio, pp. 76–112; Michael Klein and Peter Wiesner, ‘A Filmography of Oppositional Politics and Culture in the Vietnam Era, 1963–1974’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1991, pp. 59–72. Schwarz, Cold War Culture, p. 142; Chris Anderson, Citizen Jane (New York, 1990), pp. 168–93. On Fonda’s Vietnam-related activities, including the movie Coming Home (1978), see Michael Anderegg, ‘Hollywood and Vietnam: John Wayne and Jane Fonda as Discourse’, in Michael Anderegg (ed.), Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television (Philadelphia, PA, 1991), pp. 15–32. Devine, Vietnam, pp. 1–27. Ibid.; Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst, MA, 2006), pp. 163–73. Caroline Page, US Oﬃcial Propaganda during the Vietnam War, 1965–1973 (London, 1996), pp. 53–61. Aronson, Press, pp. 202–3; Engelhardt, Victory Culture, pp. 242–3. Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on US Foreign Policy (Oxford, 2001), pp. 54–5; Tom Wells, ‘The Anti-Vietnam War Movement’, in Peter Lowe (ed.), The Vietnam War (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 117. MPSVB, RG 306.05798, Night of the Dragon, USNA. In some countries this film circulated on the same bill as the year’s hit musical, George Cukor’s Oscarwinning My Fair Lady. Robert Elder, The Information Machine: The United States Information Agency and American Foreign Policy (Syracuse, NY, 1968), p. 9. Documents 106–8 in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, pp. 376–89; Claudia Springer, ‘Military Propaganda: Defense Department Films from World War II and Vietnam’, in John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg (eds), The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York, 1991), pp. 95–114. Walter Hölbling, ‘US Fiction about Vietnam: The Discourse of Contradiction’, in Michael Klein (ed.), The Vietnam Era: Media and Popular Culture in the US and Vietnam (London, 1990), pp. 127–9. Joseph Kraft, ‘Hot Weapon in the Cold War’, Saturday Evening Post, 28 April 1962, p. 88. Justin Gustainis, American Rhetoric and the Vietnam War (Westport, CT, 1993), pp. 21–38. Ibid., p. 33; Schwartz, Cold War Culture, p. 132. Hollywood Reporter, 22 June and 14 July 1965. Document 109 in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, pp. 390–1. The line is cited at the head of this chapter. Johnson was an avid movie-watcher whilst US president, and listed Wayne’s Westerns among his favourites. http://128.83.78.10/ Johnson/archives.hom/faqs/favorites/ibtable.asp (4 August 2004).

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60 Valenti to Johnson, 6 January 1966, in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, p. 393. 61 Wayne to Moyers, 18 February 1966, and Wayne to Senator Richard Russell et al., 15 April 1966, in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, pp. 395–6, 399–400. 62 Baruch to Oﬃce of Chief of Information, Department of Army, 3 March 1966, and John Wayne to Bill Moyers, 18 April 1966, in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, pp. 397–8, 401. 63 Time, 20 and 24 June 1966; Hollywood Citizen-News, 20 June and 6 July 1966; Los Angeles Times, 21 June and 6 July 1966; Variety, 29 June 1966. Michael Munn claims the attempt on Wayne’s life was instigated by Mao Tse Tung. Guardian, 1 August 2003, p. 15. 64 Hollywood Reporter, 23 June 1966. 65 Variety, 15 September 1965 and 1 November 1967. 66 Baruch to Oﬃce of Chief of Information, Department of Army, 3 March 1966, in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, pp. 397–8; Variety, 12 July 1967. 67 James W. Hardman, CBS, to Michael Wayne, 16 March 1966, The Green Berets Photograph Files, Batjac Productions, Los Angeles. 68 Interview with Michael Wayne, 5 August 1975, in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, p. 407. After his visit to Vietnam, Barrett wrote that ‘We are either going to roll over Communism, or we are going to lie down and let Communism roll over us.’ See undated published article, ‘Vietnam: The Killing Ground’, Box 301, f. 3483, George Stevens Collection, AMPAS. 69 Interview with Michael Wayne, 5 August 1975, in Suid, Film and Propaganda in America, pp. 407–9. 70 Ibid., pp. 409–12; Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 250–3. 71 Variety, 22 June 1967; Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 18 November 1967. Seven Arts Productions, a film packager for television, bought Jack Warner’s stake in Warner Bros. in mid-1967 for $183,942,000. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’n’ Drugs ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London, 1998), p. 35. 72 Variety, 12 July 1967; production notes, undated, c. June 1968, The Green Berets Clipping File, AMPAS. 73 Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1968; Hollywood Citizen-News, 26 June 1969; Commander William Byrns, Pentagon Information Oﬃcer, to Michael Wayne, 18 July 1967, The Green Berets Production File, Batjac Productions, Los Angeles; J. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (New York, 1970), pp. 117–20. 74 Despite the changes, Janssen remained unsatisfied, and expressed disappointment with his role and the film when The Green Berets opened. Janssen’s taped interview with Tony Thomas in Atlanta, Georgia, July 1968, Music and Recorded Sound Files, AMPAS. 75 Variety, 1 November 1967; The Green Berets screenplay (marked ‘Final’) by James Lee Barrett, 15 May 1967, in The Green Berets, Warner Bros. Archives, USC. 76 Hollywood Reporter, 6 September 1967; Variety, 13 November 1967, p. 3. LeRoy brushed up on the current state of aﬀairs in Vietnam by reading a pamphlet

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Hollywood’s Cold War recently produced by the Defence Department, ‘Know Your Enemy: The Viet Cong’. For this, and LeRoy’s suggested changes for The Green Berets, see Box 2, Mervyn LeRoy Collection, AMPAS. Variety, 1 November 1967. Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1966. Wayne hoped that choosing a black actor to play this role would help oﬀset criticisms of the discriminatory use of African-Americans soldiers in menial chores in Vietnam. Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 5. On McGee’s representation of a dependable ‘ebony saint’ figure see Brian J. Woodman, ‘Represented in the Margins: Images of African American Soldiers in Vietnam War Combat Films’, in Robert Eberwein (ed.), The War Film (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005), pp. 91–4. Star Trek was first broadcast in 1966 on the National Broadcasting Company. On the programme’s relationship to US foreign policy of the 1960s and Vietnam in particular see Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, ‘Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of US Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, Fall 2005, pp. 74–103, and H. Bruce Franklin, ‘Star Trek in the Vietnam Era’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, March 1994, pp. 24–34. Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 8. On the journalists’ war in Vietnam see Knightley, Casualty, pp. 373–426. On the convention of journalists being won over to the military in Hollywood war films see Stephen Badsey, ‘The Depiction of War Reporters in Hollywood Feature Films from the Vietnam War to the Present’, Film History, Vol. 14, No. 3–4, 2002, pp. 243–60. William Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and the Military at War (Lawrence, KS, 1998), pp. 109–26. Variety, 13 November 1967. Michael X Delli Carpini, ‘US Media Coverage of the Vietnam Conflict in 1968’, in Klein (ed.), Vietnam Era, p. 38; Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York, 2000), pp. 221–3. Variety, 26 June 1968. New York Times, 30 June 1968; Glamour, October 1968. Life, 19 July 1968, p. 8; Hollywood Reporter, 17 June 1968; Variety, 17 June 1968. On the long-standing debate about television’s role during the Vietnam War see Daniel Hallin, The ‘Uncensored’ War: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley, CA, 1989), and Carruthers, Media at War, pp. 110–20, 145–53. Wall Street Journal, 3 July 1968; Variety, 2 July 1969; Steinberg, Reel Facts, p. 441. New York Times, 14 July 1968; New Yorker, 29 June 1968, pp. 24–7, and 6 July 1968, pp. 44–6. Wills, Wayne, p. 233. Variety, 1 November 1967. Variety, 11 and 25 September 1968; Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 8 August 1968, 7 May, 3 August and 10 September 1969.

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95 New York Times, December 1967; Washington Post, 18 December 1967; Wayne interview, Playboy, May 1971, p. 6. 96 Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers (London, 1979), p. 38. 97 MPSVB, RG 306.06279, Vietnam! Vietnam!, USNA; John Ford Papers, Box 3, correspondence between Ford and Bruce Herschenson, September-December 1968, and Box 8, f. 6, LLUI; De Viney, ‘History of USIA Film and Television’, ch. 3; Fred Kaplan, ‘Vietnam! Vietnam!’, Cineaste, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1976, pp. 20–3. 98 Hollywood Reporter, 26, 27 and 30 June 1969; Los Angeles Times, 27 June 1969; Variety, 2 July 1969. 99 Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 235–46; Michael Coyne, ‘Seven Days in May: History, Prophecy and Propaganda’, in Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman and Arthur Marwick (eds), Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture (London, 2000), pp. 70–90. 100 Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 558–70, 494–502. 101 Wells, ‘The Anti-Vietnam War Movement’, pp. 120–1. 102 Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin, TX, 2000), p. 122; Thomas Doherty, ‘Full Metal Genre: Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam Combat Movie’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2, 1988–9, pp. 24–30. 103 Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 670–3; Badsey, ‘War Reporters’, pp. 249–50. 104 H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst, MA, 2000), p. 15. On the political multivalence of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter see Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, IN, 1988), pp. 200–6. 105 Guardian, 1 March 2002, p. 16; www.anb.org/articles/18/18-01223.html (6 October 2005). The Conquerer was a film about Genghis Khan, directed by Dick Powell.

CHAPTER 8

Secrets and lies

I will now read a short wire that I have been asked to read by the Vietnamese people from the delegation for the Viet Cong at the Paris peace talks: ‘Please transmit to all our friends in America our recognition of all that they have done on behalf of peace and for the application of the Paris accords in Vietnam. These actions serve the legitimate interests of the American people and the Vietnamese people. Greetings of friendship to all American people.’ Bert Schneider, speech at the 47th Annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, 8 April 19741

Film historians diﬀer fundamentally on Hollywood output of the 1970s. Citing the early sixties-set teen movies American Graﬃti (George Lucas, 1973) and Animal House (John Landis, 1978), some see it as essentially nostalgiadriven and backward-looking. Pointing to the right-wing cop/vigilante movies Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), others pronounce it reactionary, even fascist. Focusing on the phenomenal success of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), other historians see it as a major step on the road towards the present-day dominance of the international film market by ‘high-concept’, special-eﬀects-based blockbusters. Still others regard it as the last golden age of cinema in America, when creative directors held an unprecedented degree of power and were able to produce such risky, character-driven, high-quality work as Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975).2 What unites virtually all of these historians is an almost complete disregard for the Cold War, either as a background influence on filmmaking during the 1970s or as a subject on the screen. Those that mention the Cold War do so mainly in order to say that most filmmakers had run out of things to say about a conflict which was now at least a quarter of a century old, or that the phase of détente between East and West during the decade made the topic less exciting as a box oﬃce draw. Only through revisiting the traumas of Vietnam in such movies as Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978), The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) in the very late 1970s,3 and the renewed intensification

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of the Cold War in the early 1980s, did Hollywood, we are told, rekindle its interest in the conflict. In fact, a closer look at Hollywood movies of the seventies reveals that the Cold War remained the subject of entertainment and debate at the cinema throughout the decade. In some respects Hollywood continued to plough a familiar furrow. Just as it had done for years, Hollywood presented Soviet militants as an on-going threat to American national security in such movies as Telefon (Don Siegel, 1977). Sci-fi movies like A Boy and His Dog (L. Q. Jones, 1975), an underground cult hit, continued to play with the theme of post-nuclear-war existence. And politically conservative bodies like the Institute for American Strategy, an arms lobby directed by former high-ranking military oﬃcers and defence contractors, continued to produce 16mm films for non-theatrical exhibition. The Institute’s Only the Strong (Sheldon Lettich, 1972), for instance, issued a stern warning against arms limitation agreements with Moscow by representing Soviet military strength as superior to the Pentagon’s. Only the Strong was distributed widely among church groups, veteran organisations and schools.4 However, what distinguishes the 1970s from other decades of the Cold War is the degree to which Hollywood challenged shibboleths about the conflict. This shift in approach can be attributed to institutional and economic changes in Hollywood itself, to wider societal changes in the United States, and to the pronounced thaw in East-West relations in the late sixties and seventies. Combined, these three developments shifted the centre of gravity within the state-film network slightly to the left. Conservatism was on the defensive both inside and outside Hollywood during this period. As a result, opportunity knocked for a minority of younger, artistically unconventional and politically liberal filmmakers to make the sort of critical statements about the Cold War hitherto deemed oﬀ-limits. An earlier chapter in this study examined the dynamics of Hollywood Cold War deviance in the 1950s. I now want extend that analysis, in particular by explaining why and how that deviance had developed a sharper edge by the mid-1970s. As we shall see, during the seventies certain elements within Hollywood cast a highly sceptical eye on US foreign policy and on a range of Cold War political institutions. My chief focus, though, will be on two movies that, in very diﬀerent ways, expressed deep disillusionment with America’s Cold War national security state. Each was made by directors with roots outside Hollywood. Each probed an issue that caused Washington extreme political embarrassment during the 1970s. And each probably had a negligible impact on public and political opinion, despite the controversy they provoked and claims to the contrary since. The first, Peter Davis’ Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), sought to punch holes in America’s whole Cold War mindset, and accused

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ordinary Americans of racist imperialism. It was one of the few American movies to point the finger at Hollywood itself for encouraging US adventurism overseas, and for this and other reasons ranks as probably the most frank and powerful celluloid critique of America’s Cold War strategy throughout the whole conflict. The second film, Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), was a star-studded thriller that emerged more from the Hollywood mainstream. It suggested that American democracy was under attack, not by communist saboteurs as in the 1940s and 1950s, but by some of the very organisations established to protect it during that era. This movie tied in with several other high-profile conspiracy thrillers of the period which subverted the conventional Cold War espionage genre, and in their narrative closures oﬀered a better-than-even possibility of the American government being taken over by a new enemy within: the state-sponsored security agencies. NEW HOLLYWOOD – OLD NETWORK As was the case in the 1950s, Hollywood’s taste for dissent in the 1970s can be linked primarily to structural alterations in the film industry. The collapse of the classical Hollywood studio system, which had started with the Paramount Decree of 1948, separating the studios from their theatre chains, reached its apogee in the late 1960s. Hollywood was by this stage in a precarious state. Cinema attendances had fallen to a quarter of their mid-1940s peak, and established formulae like musicals and Westerns no longer seemed to appeal to the now predominantly youthful audience. This helped lead to a relaxation in censorship, when, in 1968, the outdated Production Code was replaced by a rating system that ranged from ‘G’ (general audience) to ‘X’ (no admittance to the under-seventeens). Huge conglomerates whose core financial interests lay outside the film industry – like the insurance and car rental giant Transamerica Corporation, which acquired United Artists – also began buying the vulnerable, temporarily undervalued movie studios. By the end of the 1960s, a wave of such acquisitions had taken place. With it came renewed pressure for producers to think more creatively and for studios to get rid of their dead wood.5 This restructuring provided an opportunity for a new generation of filmmakers to come to the fore, supported by studio executives who believed younger directors were more likely to deliver the box oﬃce hits the industry so desperately needed. As a result, the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed probably the most far-reaching changes in the nature of American movies since the arrival of the talkies in the late 1920s. The phrase ‘New Hollywood’ soon emerged to incorporate movies that, like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), focused on young adult

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protagonists and their social alienation. These and other films expressed a profound disaﬀection with America’s social and political institutions, if not America’s whole value system (ambition, self-betterment and patriotism). Stylistically too, these films challenged the tightly structured and goal-oriented narratives of classical Hollywood. Many eschewed tidy or cheerful endings, or showed disdain for black-and-white notions of villainy and heroism. Most purveyed a sense of personal disillusionment or national malaise.6 ‘New Hollywood’ was, of course, also linked to the social and political upheavals the United States experienced in the 1960s and the 1970s. The violent protests against the American involvement in Vietnam, and the ultimate loss of the war, stand out among these. Yet there were many other issues and events that helped radicalise filmmakers and audiences, including the assassination of public figures, the intensification of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Watergate scandal, the oil shock following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and revelations of CIA wrongdoings. These all combined to produce something of a crisis of faith in the American political system in the 1970s.7 At the same time, concrete evidence of East-West coexistence – Nixon’s visits to Moscow and China in 1972, for example, or the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which saw the superpowers enshrine human rights – weakened Washington’s hold over many people. Put simply, oldfashioned calls for anti-communist vigilance failed to have the same resonance when American and Soviet astronauts were meeting in space, or when the United States was sending vast shipments of grain to the Soviet Union each year to prevent the Russian people starving.8 The state-film network underwent changes of its own in the face of these developments. ‘New Hollywood’ represented something of a generational shift within the film industry. Many of the old guard of Hollywood Cold Warriors, like Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, Ward Bond and Eric Johnston, had died in the late 1950s and 1960s. Others, like Merion Cooper and John Ford, had retired. Unlike these men, many of the most powerful players in Hollywood in the 1970s – among them the executives Ned Tanen and Barry Diller, who ran Universal and Paramount respectively, the directors Martin Scorsese and William Friedkin, and the actors Robert De Niro and Warren Beatty – had neither developed personal ties with the government during the Second World War, nor been intimidated by HUAC during the Second Red Scare. A number of them were liberals, or even radicals, who were far less deferential to authority. As we shall see, a few, like Peter Davis, actively opposed aspects of the state-film network, particularly the Hollywood-Pentagon axis. The search for new talent during the late 1960s and 1970s also opened up the film industry to greater outside influence, be it in the shape of television

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producers like Davis, or unconventional foreign directors such as Chinatown’s Roman Polanski and Last Tango in Paris’s Bernardo Bertolucci.9 At the same time, American independent filmmakers, many of whom stood on the political left, came of age in the 1970s. This was partly down to the invention of new, cheaper filmmaking technologies (Super 8 cameras and video, most notably), and partly due to the maturation of a generation of baby boomers creating an audience for alternative films. By the late seventies and early eighties a number of independent films had attained national distribution. Among them was The Atomic Café (1982), a feature-length documentary ridiculing civil defence information and training films from the 1950s.10 Finally, East-West détente allowed filmmakers to question Cold War orthodoxy with less fear of being labelled traitors or subversives. In turn, Washington was apt to submit Hollywood to less political scrutiny, with propaganda oﬃcials often paying more attention to television – clearly now the prime medium of communication and attitude-formation – instead. These factors combined to produce a state-film network that was more complex and fragmented, looser in structure than in the earlier phases of the Cold War, and less amenable to oﬃcial influence. SCHNEIDER, DAVIS AND ELLSBERG: MAVERICKS AT THE MOVIES In March 2003, director Michael Moore used his Oscar acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine to attack President George Bush, Jr., just days before the outbreak of war in Iraq. It was not the first time the Academy Awards had witnessed a controversial anti-war protest from one of its winners.11 Close to three decades earlier, producer Bert Schneider’s response to receiving an Oscar for the searing Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds (1974) was to read out a statement of ‘friendship’ from the Viet Cong delegation then negotiating peace in Paris. Schneider’s words triggered uproar among the tuxedos and tiaras on the floor; boos and cheers rang out. Back stage, all hell broke loose. Co-host and pro-war activist Bob Hope ‘pinned’ the show’s producer, Howard Koch, against the wall and demanded that a rebuttal be read. The actress and peace campaigner Shirley MacLaine yelled back, ‘Don’t you dare!’ A little while later, prior to making his Best Writer presentation, the singeractor Frank Sinatra, a heavy contributor to Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential re-election campaign, issued a disclaimer denying any responsibility for the evening’s ‘political references’. Before the ceremony was over, Sinatra, actors Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, and director Francis Ford Coppola were among the glittering stars who had given reporters diﬀering opinions on whether the Academy’s vote for Hearts and Minds actually amounted to support for the movie’s message.12

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Bert Schneider was the very symbol of the institutional and political changes that took place at the higher reaches of Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The son of a high-ranking studio executive at Columbia Pictures, and ‘the eminence grise of the American New Wave’,13 Schneider was born in 1933. Having started out working for Columbia’s television arm, Screen Gems, in New York in the mid-1950s, he moved to California in 1965. There, he went into partnership with director Bob Rafelson, and the two of them produced the short-lived but successful television series The Monkees. Together with Stephen Blauner, Schneider and Rafelson then formed the production company BBS (‘Bert, Bob and Steve’), and broke into the big time when Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, the first and the most profitable of the youth-oriented ‘road pictures’, was released in 1969.14 On the strength of Easy Rider’s success, BBS concluded a deal with Columbia that allowed Schneider and his partners to produce six films without interference, so long as each cost no more than $1 million. Further hits with Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970) and The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) followed. In the meantime, Schneider’s maverick lifestyle increasingly mirrored that of his films’ lead characters. He became a renowned philanderer and heavy drug user, who was rumoured to pass out joints at Columbia’s board meetings. Schneider’s strong political convictions were exhibited inside and beyond Tinsel town. In 1972, when Charlie Chaplin controversially returned to the United States for the first time since being politically exiled during the McCarthy era to pick up an honorary Oscar, Schneider orchestrated the old star’s rehabilitation by producing a documentary on him. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Schneider financed a range of dissenting groups, among them anti-Vietnam War activists and the militant Black Panther movement.15 In June 1971, the New York Times published The Pentagon Papers, a devastating internal history of the US government’s conduct of the Vietnam War leaked by a former Defence Department analyst, Daniel Ellsberg. When President Nixon decided to prosecute Ellsberg, Schneider became deeply involved in his defence eﬀort, the Pentagon Papers Peace Project. Inspired by his work with the Project, Schneider decided the country needed a powerful documentary on the war, one that would give the opposite viewpoint to that expressed by The Green Berets. After advice from Bob Rafelson, in mid-1972 Schneider telephoned Peter Davis, a writer and documentary producer for CBS News.16 The 35-year-old son of a novelist and a screenwriter, Davis had previously worked for the New York Times and had a reputation for provocative telejournalism in politically sensitive subjects. He was best known for two CBS films: Hunger in America, which in 1968 had attacked the federal government’s food

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stamp programme, and the Emmy-winning The Selling of the Pentagon. Broadcast in primetime in February 1971, this documentary had examined the increasing utilisation and cost to the taxpayers of public relations activities by the militaryindustrial complex. It detailed how the media were ‘managed’ by the Pentagon, and, among other things, highlighted the role actors John Wayne and Jimmy Cagney as well as respected journalists Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite had played in helping to militarise American society, a process which, the film argued, had underpinned the escalation of war in Vietnam through the 1960s. The Selling of the Pentagon caused a stink in Washington. Vice-President Spiro Agnew and others criticised its ‘reconstructed’ interviews, and a Congressional subcommittee subpoenaed the CBS president, Frank Stanton, for the film’s outtakes. His refusal to do so, a decision which was ultimately backed by the House of Representatives in July 1971, represented, according to media historian Garth Jowett, ‘a clear, historic statement that the television networks could not be made to bend to government control in the technological era’.17 Jowett may well be correct, but at the time Davis believed CBS’s run-in with the government induced greater political caution within the network. In the summer of 1972 he therefore relinquished his secure job in New York and took up Schneider’s oﬀer, with the aim of saying something about the Vietnam War that the confines of a major television institution would not allow. The $1 million Schneider provided for the project (from Columbia’s kitty) was then an enormous sum for a documentary, enabling Davis to shoot eﬀectively what he wanted.18 Initially, Schneider and Davis’ project started oﬀ as a study of the Ellsberg Pentagon Papers trial, but it soon expanded way beyond this and even beyond the subject of Vietnam itself. Davis ultimately settled on addressing three questions: why did we go into Vietnam in the first place? What was it we actually did there? And what did this doing do to us? In seeking answers to these questions, Davis and his colleagues conducted months of research that involved reading scholarly and popular literature, watching footage from the most filmed of all wars, and travelling around the United States in order to find out how people felt about their country and the intervention in Vietnam. Starting in July 1972, Davis and his team also carried out over fifty on-camera interviews with US policy-makers and high-ranking military oﬃcers, as well as American veterans, the relatives of dead combatants, and Vietnamese leaders. This was a punishing schedule – physically and psychologically. After one particularly heartbreaking interview of the parents of an American pilot killed in action, the chief cameraman, Richard Pearce, briefly considered leaving documentary work because of the emotional toll it was taking.19 In late 1972, Davis spent two months filming in South Vietnam with Pearce, Hanoi having turned down his requests to visit the North. Despite

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only being in his twenties, Pearce, a naval oﬃcer’s son, had already made a name for himself working on a range of socially conscious films. These included Emile de Antonio’s documentary about Vietnam, In the Year of the Pig (1968), and Michael Wadleigh’s countercultural classic Woodstock (1970). Pearce was able to lend Davis’ film greater intimacy by using lightweight and less obtrusive cameras in a variety of locations: sports arenas, brothels, kitchens and funeral parlours, for instance.20 This emphasis on the camera’s role in the film was crucial to Davis, who stressed the need to capture the experience of war viscerally and directly. He wanted to make a complete film about what network executives called the ‘dead air’ of television reporting, the brief shots that served as a preamble to the correspondent’s commentary. In Davis’s opinion, the TV correspondent’s mediatory role had the eﬀect of turning war into an abstraction, thus killing immediacy and emotion. His documentary would therefore have no narration, it would incorporate pregnant silences during interviews, and it would eschew the familiar chronological format of ‘serious’ journalism. Its vérité style was based on that developed by Frederick Wiseman and D. A. Pennemaker in the 1950s and 1960s.21 Davis amassed over 200 hours of footage shot across the United States and in South Vietnam between July 1972 and August 1973, plus another 20 hours of stock material incorporating newsreels, telecasts and scenes from Hollywood movies. The editing process proved particularly stressful. Davis, Susan Martin and Lynzee Klingman, another veteran of In the Year of the Pig, each worked on separate sequences, regrouping to view each other’s rough cuts. This painstaking work took over a year until, by early 1974, they had boiled the footage down into a palatable 112 minutes. By that stage Davis had called the documentary Hearts and Minds. Like The Selling of the Pentagon, the title alluded to Washington’s Cold War propaganda machinery. More pointedly, the words were lifted from a speech Lyndon Johnson had delivered at the height of the Vietnam War, in which the president had declared that the ‘ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there’. Johnson’s statement had since come back to haunt him. Davis’ film would show how, in his opinion, the Americans’ war had torn Vietnamese lives apart.22 ‘FIRST AN UNDECLARED WAR – NOW AN UNSEEN FILM’ As the finishing touches were being put to Hearts and Minds, rumours spread that it would never be released. In 1973, Columbia faced bankruptcy, having racked up a pre-tax loss of $72.5 million, the third highest annual loss in the studio’s history. As a result, a major shareholder, the investment firm Allen and Co., engineered a coup. While Bert Schneider was on a trip to communist

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China, his father, Abe, was dumped as Columbia’s president and replaced by David Begelman, late of the Hollywood agency Creative Management Associates. Tensions soon arose between the new hierarchy and BBS, with the latter convinced that Begelman wanted to rid Columbia of the last vestiges of the Schneider family. Bert had not told the old Columbia regime a thing about Hearts and Minds. The deal that BBS had secured with the studio back in 1969–70 to make six $1 million films had come with no strings attached, a highly unusual arrangement that reflected the confidence Columbia then had in a production company that had turned a $500,000 investment in Easy Rider into $19 million profit. However, BBS had recently lost its Midas touch, with A Safe Place (Henry Jaglom, 1971) and The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972) both failing at the box oﬃce. Consequently, when Begelman and his associates discovered that Schneider was spending their $1 million on a documentary, rather than a mainstream feature, they were livid. In December 1973, Columbia sent BBS a letter cancelling the sixth, unnamed picture, and withheld money due to Schneider from his previous films.23 In early 1974, Begelman agreed to take Hearts and Minds to the Cannes Film Festival that May and asked Schneider for a rough cut to screen for Columbia’s board of directors. Schneider refused, calling the request ‘weird’, but in April an incomplete version of the film was shown to Columbia’s lawyers and front oﬃce personnel. Afterwards, Begelman told Schneider that Columbia was in a ‘precarious financial condition’ and that he feared the movie would bring ‘reprisals from bankers’, presumably because of its politically controversial content. Columbia’s general counsel, Burton Marcus, also doubted whether BBS had obtained all the necessary releases from interviewees in the film, thus opening up the prospect of Columbia being sued. The next month, over Begelman’s objections, Schneider screened Hearts and Minds to a wildly receptive Cannes audience. BBS also hit back at Columbia legally and morally. It acquired an extra $25 million worth of liability insurance coverage, and told the press that ‘it is hard to imagine a case in which First Amendment rights are more important . . . we do not believe that the film gives rise to viable claims of substance for defamation, invasion of privacy, or related matters’.24 However, Columbia was not impressed and due to a combination of factors – corporate cautiousness, financial prudence and informal political censorship – continued to balk at distributing the movie. Columbia’s greatest fear seems to have been that Hearts and Minds would lead to the boycotting of the company’s other films. By this stage, liberal journalists had started to smell a rat. ‘First an undeclared war – now an unseen film’, protested Stephanie Harrington in the New York Times.25 Eventually, amidst threats of legal action from BBS, in late 1974 Columbia sold Hearts and Minds to a new independent company headed by Henry Jaglom

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and Howard Zucker, Rainbow Pictures, for $1 million. Jaglom had made A Safe Place for BBS, and had been trying for several years to produce his own Vietnam-themed movie, Tracks, with Dennis Hopper, who had directed and starred in Easy Rider. Rainbow quickly secured a distribution deal with Warner Bros., thus enabling Hearts and Minds to have a brief commercial run in December 1974 in order to be eligible for the Academy Awards.26 Then, just as the film was about to go into general distribution in early 1975, one-time LBJ national security adviser Walt Rostow rushed in with a temporary restraining order claiming that a two-minute sequence featuring him on camera was an unauthorised exploitation of his likeness. Rostow’s bid for a permanent injunction was, however, denied by a Californian judge, possibly due to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Consequently, on 22 January 1975 Hearts and Minds opened its first run in Washington, DC, at an event sponsored by Democratic Senator George McGovern and other anti-war celebrities, including actors Warren Beatty and Candice Bergen, Schneider’s girlfriend. The movie was released nationwide in March.27 POX AMERICANA Hearts and Minds is at once starkly frank yet indirect in its propagandistic approach. Davis studiously avoids hitting home any single point, preferring to argue his case against America’s right to be in Vietnam through an oblique accretion of testimony and an almost poetic disregard for narrative cohesion. The movie alternates between eminent talking heads, stock footage, combat veterans’ accounts, and clips from Hollywood anti-communist agit-prop. These all form a dense weave of sound and images that relies on the viewer to connect the thematic dots. From its opening scene of Vietnamese villagers watching troops trampling through their fields, the movie is a cautionary tale against purported saviours acting as modern-day imperialists. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia is traced to the post-Second World War belief that, as former Harry Truman aide Clark Cliﬀord puts it, ‘we could control the future of the world’. This arrogance, plus a sense of missionary zeal and the emergence of the Domino Theory, led Washington to see potential enemies everywhere. Concurrently, anti-Soviet hysteria, engendered by movies like Leo McCarey’s My Son John and American Legionnaires staging mock communist coups, caused public debate about the direction foreign policy was taking to shut down.28 Soon, almost everyone came to think in zero-sum terms, believing that even a minor defeat anywhere might sow the seeds of America’s eventual surrender to communism. In one early scene, the ex-French foreign minister, George Bidault,

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explains how the US in the early 1950s had secretly oﬀered his country two atom bombs to solve the ‘Indochina problem’. The clandestine nature of the war on communism eventually led, we see, to the increasingly professional management of lies. Emanating from the top, it spawned an intractable monster, one that was far more dangerous than communism – a national cover-up culture. A montage of presidential speeches, from Eisenhower to Nixon, implies that beyond masking a progressively hopeless situation, White House rhetoric conspired to prolong the Vietnam War in a futile eﬀort to bolster national pride and manipulate public opinion. Nixon’s statement is particularly arresting: ‘Throughout the war in Vietnam, the United States has exercised a degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war.’ The sheer audacity of this claim in reference to a war in which more bombs were dropped than in all previous wars combined sets the tone of US government denial and duplicity that mobilises the viewer for what follows. Yet, significantly, this is not a movie that heaps all of the blame for the Vietnam debacle on Washington, in contrast with many later Hollywood films.29 We do hear Daniel Ellsberg opining that, ‘It’s a tribute to the American people that their leaders perceived they had to be lied to.’ But Hearts and Minds also shows the degree to which the American intervention was driven by a long-standing, nationwide anti-Asian racism. A clip from Norman Panama’s 1962 comedy The Road to Hong Kong shows Bob Hope lounging amid Oriental beauties. A brothel scene shot by Richard Pearce, which so disgusted Lynzee Klingman and Susan Martin they initially edited it out, shows a lecherous GI twisting a Saigon prostitute’s nipples like knobs on a radio.30 The soon-to-be infamous statement by the former senior military commander of US armed forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, that ‘the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner’ comes just after harrowing footage of a Vietnamese boy crying inconsolably over the death of his father. Back home in America, when asked by a class of schoolchildren what Vietnam was like, one ex-POW, navy poster-boy George Coker, replies in perfect deadpan: ‘If it weren’t for the people, it would be a beautiful country.’ Other scenes show the Vietnamese Other to be human and real and to have everyday feelings. This was a far cry from most American media coverage of the war, which had tended to treat the Vietnamese as an undiﬀerentiated mass and which, in journalist David Halberstam’s words, did ‘not calibrate the killing in human terms’.31 Two dignified elderly women grieve for the loss of a sister and a home due to American bombing; a coﬃn-maker talks about the hundreds of tiny boxes he has built for child victims; a distraught North Vietnamese farmer who has lost his two young children in an American air raid cries ‘Nixon – murderer’.32 Hearts and Minds maximises the impact of

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The white man’s burden: scenes such as this in Hearts and Minds (1974) sought to capture the unbridgeable divide which had opened up between US soldiers and Vietnamese villagers at the height of the Vietnam War. In director Peter Davis’ opinion, stripping them of dialogue or commentary enhanced their effect. Columbia Pictures/BBS Productions, Inc.

iconic war photography, using stock footage of the conflict’s most gruesome images. Shots of a naked Vietnamese girl, Kim Phuc, running in terror from a napalm attack helped enshrine Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs. They also underlined the true barbarity of the naïve belief, uttered in the film by several combat veterans, that America could wage a so-called ‘technological war’ against people who didn’t have faces. Davis’ decision to unpack another well-known still image, that taken by the Associated Press’s Eddie Adams of the point-blank execution of a Viet Cong captive in downtown Saigon by South Vietnamese police oﬃcer Nguyen Ngoc Loan, was part of his assault on media censorship during the war. The moving image of the execution had been suppressed by NBC television executives after its initial showing during the 1968 Tet Oﬀensive. Davis plays out the action in full colour in what seems like slow motion, showing the victim fall on his side, blood rushing from his ear.33 Less grisly but equally arresting in Hearts and Minds are the images of America’s own war victims. As if borrowing from the master Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Davis’ film makes a number of dramatic or ironic cuts: for example, from a Vietnamese capitalist flanked by Coca-Cola and Ford signs outlining his plans for post-war plunder to a busy New York factory turning out prosthetic limbs for stoical Vietnam veterans. Elsewhere, in a technique one critic condemned as ‘cinematic hokum’,34 the camera belatedly pulls back from other interviewees to reveal wheelchairs and empty sleeves. Again,

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Divine intervention: ex-Navy pilot George Coker preaching victory and righteousness to the school children of Linden, New Jersey, after his return home from incarceration in Vietnam. One of several references to the dangerous mixture of religion and politics in Cold War America contained in Hearts and Minds (1974). Columbia Pictures /BBS Productions, Inc.

however, in contrast with many Hollywood films about the Vietnam War in the late 1970s and 1980s, the film encourages viewers to question their own political assumptions rather than merely feel sympathy for these men. For the movie shows that the Cold War has helped build on a sinister cult of victory in America, one that permeates every inch of culture, from the kitsch Revolutionary War re-enactments where it was born, to the football fields where it is practised and the churches where it is now preached. Thus, a clip from Michael Curtiz’s This is the Army (1943) features gaily singing soldiers on their way to a romanticised conflict. Contemporary shots of bloodthirsty cheerleaders and sanctimonious coaches show how sport has conditioned America’s youth to win at all costs. A nun hovers behind George Coker as he delivers his messages of godly patriotism to schoolchildren. The uniformed kids taking part in the Loyalty Day parade at the movie’s close suggests a new generation of Americans will continue to perpetrate the same acts and to make the same mistakes. SENSATION AND SELF-FLAGELLATION Today, Hearts and Minds is an accepted masterpiece of political documentary filmmaking, and is widely regarded as the definitive American documentary about the war in Vietnam. Recent international events, most notably America’s troubled war in Iraq, have brought it renewed attention and plaudits.

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Hollywood’s new enfant terrible, Michael Moore, for one, claims Hearts and Minds was the inspiration behind his critique of post-Cold War American imperialism, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). When Hearts and Minds was re-released on DVD and at the cinema in 2004, Peter Davis, who had recently reported from Baghdad for the Nation, suggested his film should be compulsory viewing for the Bush administration. New York’s alternative weekly, the Village Voice, concurred and argued that the movie represented ‘a vital link in a subversive people’s cinema, clearly realigning history as a never ending series of crimes perpetrated by the powerful upon the innocent’.35 Quite what the eﬀect was that Hearts and Minds had in America back in the mid-1970s is open to dispute. In one respect the movie was perfectly timed. Barely two weeks after it was awarded an Oscar in early April 1975, the last American was dramatically airlifted by helicopter oﬀ the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, as the city fell to North Vietnamese forces. Hearts and Minds certainly created a sensation amongst journalists, who, despite the withdrawal of most American troops from Vietnam in 1973, were still bitterly divided over the rights and wrongs of US policy in Southeast Asia. Predictably enough, radical opponents of the war like Andrew Kopkind called it ‘brave and brilliant’, while liberal commentators such as Frances Fitzgerald, who had recently written a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the war, Fire in the Lake (1972), thought the film was ‘the truth of the matter’. Equally predictably, others on the political right hated it. The National Review’s Joseph Sobran, for instance, called it ‘disingenuously one-sided’ and ‘a cinematic lie’.36 Some mainstream newspapers and movie critics felt the film was morbid and manipulative propaganda, with no ‘bad’ Vietnamese in it.37 Interestingly, one of the country’s most influential critics, Stefan Kanfer, thought Davis’ examination of anti-communist popular culture one of the movie’s weakest points. ‘The notion that films so easily mold an audience trivializes evil’, he stated.38 However, most commentators declared Hearts and Minds a profoundly moving and powerfully persuasive movie.39 Vincent Canby in the New York Times declared it ‘the true film for America’s bicentennial’. Playboy’s critic was more to the point: ‘shame is the only civilised response’.40 The media attention Hearts and Minds attracted undoubtedly increased public interest in the film. The movie’s box oﬃce was probably boosted further by the fact that reviews of the film were read aloud to both houses of the US Congress. Press reports of American Legionnaires in Connecticut tearing up theatre seats probably did no harm either.41 Bert Schneider’s publicity stunt at the Academy Awards ceremony might have backfired to some extent, by adding to the false charge made by some critics that his movie was didactic and pro-communist. (‘Is Picasso’s Guernica Communist propaganda?’,

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he retorted.)42 However, in the days immediately afterwards, box oﬃce takings tripled in Los Angeles and almost doubled in New York. Moreover, Hearts and Minds was the first Vietnam documentary to be released in the US by a major distributor, Warner Bros. This, plus the Oscar itself, played a vital role in helping the movie to achieve a breadth of distribution and exhibition rarely given to documentaries. Even in upscale urban theatres, though, the movie was probably preaching mainly to the converted, rather than actually sparking a meaningful debate more widely about America’s Cold War stance. This was the price Davis paid for moving from the small to the big screen. Had Hearts and Minds aired on television, its audience would have been more heterogeneous, and its societal impact greater.43 Bert Schneider, for one, was convinced his film had had a significant political impact. Tellingly however, his only evidence for this were the hundreds of peace activists who had informed him how Hearts and Minds had shed new light on the Vietnam War and had consequently rekindled their concern about the conflict’s roots. If the movie really had stirred Americans into revising their views on US foreign policy, we might have expected this to translate into significant interest in Hearts and Minds overseas. (This was one of the explanations for Fahrenheit 9/11’s international success, for instance.)44 Yet when it was released in one Canadian city – Kingston, Ontario – in 1976, fewer than 400 people went to see Hearts and Minds in the first week (compared with the 4,000 people who had watched the fictional gore and violence of Tobe Hooper’s low-budget horror The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the city in the same period). Across the Atlantic, in Britain, the movie was only screened once in London, as a fundraiser for an avant-garde distributor. Behind the Iron Curtain, the film was shown at the 1975 Moscow Film Festival. Schneider, who was there unoﬃcially representing the United States, was asked by Soviet filmmakers why he had not been shot.45 The pleasure Schneider took from this masked the fact that, at the end of the day, documentaries were an acquired taste for even avid cinema-goers. That such a traditionally conservative body as the Motion Picture Academy felt it could award an Oscar to a film which questioned the very basis of US foreign policy is a measure of the political distance Hollywood had travelled in the twenty years since the McCarthy era. Yet it could equally be said that Hearts and Minds was something of a fluke, the result of a maverick producer being given free rein by a major production company that discovered the nature of the project too late to cancel. Even then, it is highly unlikely a company such as Warner Bros. – the studio which had backed The Green Berets – would have touched the film while American troops were actually in combat in Vietnam or in North Vietnamese prisons. Another critical Vietnam War documentary made in 1972, Winter Soldier, which was produced and partly

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funded by Jane Fonda, never found a distributor in the United States, probably because the conflict was on-going.46 As subversive as Hearts and Minds was, therefore, especially in its implication that motion pictures had been instruments of Cold War behavioural conditioning (though, interestingly, not in association with government), when it was released the film was already dated. It was a belated reaction to what had gone wrong in Southeast Asia and could therefore do nothing to change the course of the Vietnam War. By the mid-1970s, the time was right for Americans and Hollywood to parade their guilt, or ‘shame’ as Playboy put it, about Vietnam, if only because it helped bring closure to the whole sorry story of the war. The recent emergence of a new and more visible threat to American interests – international terrorism – hastened this process. Due to a series of hijackings and assassinations in the mid-1970s, some aimed at Western support for Israel, many Americans’ political radar had shifted away from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. ‘[T]he name of the fear now is not so much War as Terror’, wrote well-known critic Andrew Sarris in his perceptive review of Hearts and Minds, ‘not so much strategic bombing as satchel bombs.’ Who needed another film about Vietnam that raked over old coals, Sarris was saying, when unity was needed against the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Black September and other like-minded terrorist organisations.47 PARANOID TIME Spy films first became popular during and after the First World War, adding a touch of glamour to an otherwise depressing and frightening subject.48 During the Cold War they flourished from beginning to end, capitalising on the nonmilitary, technical and psychological dimensions of the conflict. In the 1940s and 1950s, as we have seen, dozens of Hollywood movies depicted evil communist agents hard at work in America, trying to steal military and scientific secrets or sabotaging vital US installations. Others featured handsome State Department and CIA agents outmanoeuvring their ugly KGB counterparts or Mata Hari-like villainesses overseas. Some of these movies doubled as windows onto the grim conditions behind the Iron Curtain, despite being filmed entirely on studio back lots in California. Henry Hathaway’s ‘fact-based’ Diplomatic Courier (1952), for example, saw Tyrone Power’s State Department oﬃcer Mike Kells discover plans for a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia on an action-packed train journey from Salzburg to Trieste – and make oﬀ with a beautiful double agent in the process.49 The early 1960s saw the birth of the screen spy superhero, epitomised by the British secret agent James Bond. Refined, witty, sharply dressed and armed with high-tech gadgets, Bond and his many American imitators showcased the virtues of consumer capitalism over communism.50

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By the end of the sixties, ‘Bondism’ had been spoofed in movies such as Gordon Douglas’ In Like Flint (1967), which starred James Coburn foiling a diabolical plot hatched by a group of women to seize control of the world. A few, more politically oriented comedies sharply satirised what many Americans were now referring to as the Cold War ‘spying game’. Theodore J. Flicker’s The President’s Analyst (1967), for instance, centred on a psychiatrist (Coburn again) who finds out secret information in the process of treating the US commander-in-chief, and is consequently targeted for kidnapping by the Soviets and for assassination by paranoid American ‘CEA’ agents. In 1970, John Huston’s complex drama The Kremlin Letter depicted the CIA’s cynical readiness to work with the Russians to counter the threat posed by a nucleararmed China. Adapted by Huston and Gladys Hill from Noel Behn’s bestselling novel, this movie seemed to be saying that both Moscow and Washington were motivated primarily by power, greed and self-interest, not by truth, justice or ideology.51 In 1967, the New York Times and the New Left California-based magazine Ramparts revealed how the CIA had infiltrated a range of bodies like the National Student Association and secretly co-opted the mass media (though Hollywood was not mentioned) as part of its domestic Cold War cultural activities. This was in defiance of the CIA’s charter, which banned operations in the United States. These findings were swiftly picked up in the national and international media, prompting an orgy of disclosures about the CIA’s nefarious activities. In the early 1970s further press allegations about the dubious behaviour of America’s intelligence services appeared. In 1970, for instance, US Army intelligence was charged with employing hundreds of plain-clothes agents to watch political demonstrations.52 In 1973 and 1974, the public’s confidence in their government’s honesty and commitment to democracy was dealt a far more serious blow by the Watergate revelations and President Nixon’s subsequent impeachment hearings. Disclosures not only showed that the highest powers in the land had abused their authority to spy on their domestic political opponents, often using former CIA agents. They also proved that Nixon had even eavesdropped on his colleagues by surreptitiously bugging the White House’s Oval Oﬃce.53 Further disillusionment caused by the dramatic rise in the price of oil, urban unrest, the threatened bankruptcy of New York City, and two attempts by women on the life of Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, led to a fullblown ‘legitimacy crisis’ in seventies America. By 1980, distrust of government among the American public stood at 73 per cent, compared with 24 per cent in 1958.54 Out of this malaise emerged some of the most powerful liberal conspiracy thrillers Hollywood has ever produced. David Miller’s Executive Action

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Sixties Cold War satire: publicity poster for The President’s Analyst (1967). Paramount.

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(1973), for example, focused on a right-wing plot to kill President John Kennedy to stop him pulling out of Vietnam. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) portrayed a reclusive surveillance expert (Gene Hackman), whose bugging and wire-tapping work ultimately drive him insane. Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) alluded to Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 and depicted a society in which brainwashing corporate powers kill with impunity. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) enacted the work of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in uncovering the conspiracy behind the Watergate break-in. Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) saw the US president being assassinated by his advisers to prevent him revealing that the nation’s pursuit of the Vietnam War was simply to maintain the credibility of the political and military establishment. Others – Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), Michael Crichton’s Coma (1978) and James Bridges’ Oscar-winning The China Syndrome (1979) – centred on economic or corporate power elites and their appropriation of the public interest for selfish ends. To some observers, this golden age of ‘paranoia’ films represented an unprecedented liberal assault by Hollywood on the political and economic status quo, encouraging a short-term national shift to the left. To others, the movies helped foster the New Right in the United States by attacking big government and large institutions as conspiratorial and dangerous to a free and libertarian community.55 POLLACK AND REDFORD: LIBERALS SOUND THE CONSPIRACY ALARM Just how far Hollywood’s treatment of Cold War subversion and espionage had changed by the mid-1970s can best be illustrated by reference to Sydney Pollack’s $5 million Three Days of the Condor (1975). This was the first major political thriller to be released in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and the first to rail against the CIA’s lack of accountability. Variously described by critics at the time as ‘idiotic drivel’ and ‘the most provocative film about the corruption of American institutions to reach the commercial screen’, the movie would prove to be an enduring favourite among fans of the espionage genre.56 Pollack’s film was based on James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor, published by W. W. Norton in April 1974. Grady was a precocious freelance writer in his early twenties, whose imagination was fuelled by a recent stint as a Congressional journalist intern. His book told the story of CIA bookworm Ronald Malcolm, who uncovers a renegade cell operating within the CIA that is killing agency colleagues to cover up a Vietnam-related heroin-smuggling racket. In late 1973, even before Six Days of the Condor had appeared on the shelves, independent producers Dino De Laurentiis and Stanley Schneider

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bought the movie rights, and then secured a distribution deal with Paramount. De Laurentiis and Schneider were motivated by money, not politics. The former was an experienced Italian filmmaker who had relocated to Hollywood in the early 1970s, and had since scored hits with the crime dramas Serpico (1973) and Death Wish (1974).57 Stanley Schneider was Bert’s elder brother, though an entirely diﬀerent character, cautious and conservative; according to one source when he smoked the occasional joint an assistant would put his palm under the tip to catch the ash. Stanley would die of a heart attack in January 1975, as Three Days of the Condor neared completion.58 To guide the novel’s conversion to screen, De Laurentiis and Schneider looked for a young-ish director with a safe track record. The British-born Peter Yates, whose flair for choreographing action and breathless chases had been put to its best use in the influential cop thriller Bullitt (1968), was originally approached, but the job eventually fell to Sydney Pollack.59 Born in 1934 in Lafayette, Indiana, Pollack had begun acting in television plays in the late 1950s. In the early sixties, he directed several teleplays and scores of episodes for such TV series as Dr Kildare, The Fugitive and Naked City. Pollack arrived as a major Hollywood director in 1969 with They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, a powerful, downbeat drama that used a Depression-era dance marathon as a microcosm of society’s ills.60 Four years later, in 1973, The Way We Were, a touching love story set partly in Hollywood during the blacklist era, enhanced his reputation as an eﬀective if conventional filmmaker.61 Pollack was a liberal but not a political activist. To him, Three Days of the Condor was not meant to be a profound critique of Cold War America. ‘I don’t think we should abolish the CIA’, he told one reporter. Instead, he wanted the film to explore ‘the ideas of trust, suspicion, [and] morality’ in the post-Watergate era. ‘[E]very institution I grew up believing was sacrosanct is now beginning to crumble’, Pollack said.62 The producers’ choice of the blue-eyed, blond Robert Redford to play the lead role in Condor was astute. As the top box oﬃce star in America in the mid-1970s, Redford virtually guaranteed a movie’s commercial success. Furthermore, his oﬀ-screen image – a dedicated conservationist and daring athlete who eschewed Hollywood’s bright lights – fitted the bill perfectly for the role of Grady’s loner hero, a CIA whistle-blower. Redford had also collaborated with Pollack three times already, including on The Way We Were, and had recently established his own production company, Wildwood Enterprises, which co-produced Three Days of the Condor.63 Like Pollack, Redford, too, denied Condor had any real political intent. To him, the film was not meant to criticise the CIA, but rather was ‘about trust and paranoia . . . about bureaucracy run amok’.64 In fact, Redford had a strong commercial and political interest in the whole issue of government subterfuge during this period. Like

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other liberals inside and outside Hollywood in the seventies, he took the view that the Cold War obsession with secrecy and surveillance had spawned a monster in America: a state security apparatus that acted like a law unto itself. His belief that the Watergate disclosures proved that America had been heading for ‘an Orwellian nightmare’ led to him investing $450,000 in the movie rights to Woodward and Bernstein’s account of the scandal, All the President’s Men, in 1974. The resulting film, in which Redford portrayed Woodward, was much admired as a celebration of American journalistic integrity.65 Two writers adapted James Grady’s book for the screen: Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who had co-scripted The Parallax View, and David Rayfiel, who had scripted The Way We Were. Their work took several twists and turns. Semple’s first draft, submitted in early October 1974, followed the main contours of the novel. This depicted the CIA having secretly set up an anti-communist army in Laos at the behest of the Kennedy administration, paid for by the shipping of locally grown opium to the United States. A greedy unit within the agency then tries to cash in personally, by smuggling in refined heroin hidden in book shipments ordered by the CIA’s literary research section. When this section stumbles across the scam, all of its members (bar Ronald Malcolm, who is out of the oﬃce) are assassinated. Malcolm is no saint – he hires a prostitute, for instance – but he bravely succeeds in uncovering the truth. The last scene has the Washington Post printing a front-page exposé of the whole plot.66 Midway through October, Rayfiel submitted an alternative script. This changed Malcolm’s name to Joe Turner, shortened the critical time frame from six to three days, and switched the focus from Southeast Asian drugs to Middle Eastern oil.67 Then, just before Christmas 1974, the New York Times published further, shattering revelations about CIA malfeasance. Reporter Seymour Hersh outlined the CIA’s role in overthrowing mildly leftist foreign governments and in plotting to assassinate foreign leaders, as well as conducting massive intelligence operations against the anti-Vietnam War movement and other dissident groups in the United States during the Nixon administration. The US Congress soon launched its own investigation of the entire intelligence community and its possible abuses. In January, the Senate established the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, with Idaho Senator Frank Church as chairman. In February, the House of Representatives voted to create a House Select Intelligence Committee (the Nedzi Committee, which was replaced five months later by a Committee chaired by New York Representative Otis Pike). As the subsequent rows between committee members and CIA oﬃcials would show, in Congress there was no longer a consensus to support intelligence

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activities blindly. In Congress as in Hollywood, the old seniority system and its leadership were giving way.68 These latest charges stunned Pollack and prompted further script alterations. The CIA’s Middle East connections were beefed up, and a more ambiguous ending was proposed. It is unclear how the latter came about. Pollack had wanted the film to conclude on an optimistic note, one that aﬃrmed the basic strengths of the American political system. Redford, whose influence on the script seems to have grown as the project progressed, discussed the movie’s dénouement with Seymour Hersh over lunch, and seems to have come away from their meeting determined that the film should express confidence in the American press’s independence from government. The final cut did this, but, as we shall see, only to a degree.69 While the movie’s political message was being finessed, filming had got under way. Location shooting in New York and Washington, DC, began in November 1974 and was completed by early 1975. Celebrity onlookers included the former CIA director, Richard Helms, reportedly ‘grinning from ear to ear’.70 In order to strengthen the movie’s main sub-plot, the producers commissioned a computer expert to build a machine that looked as though it translated texts. After a slick editing job by Don Guidice, which reduced the final version to just under two hours in length (and earned an Oscar nomination), the movie was released in September 1975. WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS? Three Days of the Condor bears all the trademark features of the seventies ‘paranoid’ movie: smart, terse dialogue and sparse, haunting music; taut suspense combined with scenes of entrapment and claustrophobia in telephone booths and elevators; omniscient technology that erodes privacy and either dehumanises or kills; and an intricate plot capped by an ambiguous closure. As a fast-paced man-on-the-run espionage thriller, it put a modern twist on Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1939). As a comment on the bleak and cynical world of Cold War espionage, it closely resembled two British-made films from the mid-1960s, Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Sidney J. Furie’s The Ipcress File.71 On an overcast morning Joe Turner (Redford), a bespectacled would-be writer, arrives for work at the American Literary Historical Society, a staid if innocuous building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. However, appearances are deceiving. The ALHS is a CIA front. Turner and his co-workers are employed to read, analyse and computerise general popular fiction and periodicals as part of the agency’s overall intelligence operation. Turner enters the building, having first been identified by closed-circuit television.

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State-licensed hit men: Joubert (Max Von Sydow, centre) and his nameless henchmen (Jay Devlin and Hank Garrett) slaughter Joe Turner’s associates in the CIA research office at the outset of Three Days of the Condor (1975). Paramount /The Kobal Collection.

Turner is disappointed as he rushes in to learn that an inquiry he made into what appeared to be an intriguing irregularity has checked out as being of no importance at CIA headquarters. Momentarily dashed, he forgets about it and is sent out to get lunch for everyone in the oﬃce. It has started to rain. He slips out the back door as a short cut to the café, and returns twenty minutes later to find everyone at the ALHS has been savagely and expediently murdered during his absence. Horrified, Turner manages to phone the CIA from a phone booth. Reflections on the booth’s glass make Joe, already tightly confined, look completely surrounded. Turner identifies himself by his codename (Condor) and tells his story. The agency moves at once to verify the report and as soon as the murders are confirmed, Deputy Director Higgins (Cliﬀ Robertson) takes over the operation. He dispatches a ‘cleaning truck’ to the ALHS building and instructs Turner to meet another agent in an alleyway behind the Ansonia hotel. CIA agent Wicks (Michael Kane) will meet him there with Turner’s friend Sam Barber (Walter McGinn), who will be brought along so that Turner will recognise them as his contacts. But when Turner shows up, Wicks fires at him and kills Barber. Turner shoots Wicks in the leg and flees. Running along the street, Turner abducts a young woman, Kathy Hale

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(Faye Dunaway), at gun point and takes refuge at her apartment. Kathy is a Diane Arbus-type photographer and a loner. Her sad but beautiful pictures of empty fields and park benches are an expression of her loneliness and will act as a metaphor for Turner’s solitary stance against an entire governmental organisation. In Washington, a top-level meeting is convened where Mr Wabash (John Houseman), Atwood (Addison Powell), Higgins and representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staﬀ try to figure out what has happened. Why was such an insignificant section hit? Why didn’t Turner come in gently from the cold? However, when the meeting is adjourned, one of the central figures, Atwood, meets secretly with Joubert (Max Von Sydow), the emotionless assassin who spearheaded the executions, and instructs him to get Turner now and to silence Wicks. Safe for the time being at Kathy’s apartment, Turner binds and gags her so that he can visit his murdered friend Sam’s widow, but Joubert has anticipated this move and is waiting for him in the lobby of her apartment building. He inadvertently arouses Turner’s suspicion, who gets away, but not before Joubert gets the number of Kathy’s car, which Turner is driving. Turner returns to his hideout where he and Kathy make love. When she falls asleep afterwards, he tries to unravel the puzzling events. In the morning he makes some progress: with Kathy’s help he dispatches an assassin (Hank Garrett), disguised as a mailman, who has been sent by Joubert to finish Turner oﬀ. A piece of paper from the dead man’s pocket links him to Wicks. Turner decides to contact Higgins directly. Kathy lures the Deputy Director into her car where Turner holds a gun on him. Joe asks why his simple question (‘Why was a certain mystery novel only translated into Dutch and Arabic?’) should have provoked such violence. Higgins does not know. He says he will try to find out, but rejects Turner’s suggestion of asking Wicks because, as Higgins tells him, Wicks is now dead, an inside job. Higgins then returns to CIA headquarters where he finds a link in the records of Joubert and Wicks. Turner, meanwhile, traces Joubert’s whereabouts in Manhattan with a hotel room key he found on the dead ‘mailman’. He manages to tap Joubert’s phone while Joubert is calling Atwood in Washington, and then decides to go there to find out exactly who Atwood is. Turner arrives at Atwood’s expensive suburban home, breaks in and surprises the man, who finally admits that he has set up an unauthorised intelligence system within the CIA that will help the US gain influence in the oil-producing countries ‘when the time is right’. Turner’s inquiry threatened to reveal the covert network and for that reason the ALHA had to be wiped out. Turner is stunned and then further shocked when Joubert appears and fires a bullet into Atwood’s head. Turner soon comprehends the move.

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Out in the cold: neither Turner (Robert Redford) nor his boss at the CIA, Higgins (Cliff Robertson), knows which side to trust any more in the Cold War ‘suspicion business’. Three Days of the Condor (1975). Paramount /The Kobal Collection.

Joubert is now working for the CIA and was ordered to get rid of Atwood. Joubert then suggests that Turner join him in his line of work; he senses Turner has a knack for playing both sides. But Turner repudiates him and the CIA. In the final scene, Turner confronts Higgins on the New York streets. A Salvation Army choir performs ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ in the background. Higgins is determined to save ‘the Company’ any further embarrassment, and tries to coax Turner back into the fold as an obedient and secretive agent. However, Turner won’t play the game despite Higgins’ veiled threats. He tells Higgins that he has already given the whole story to the New York Times, whose oﬃces they are standing outside. ‘How do you know they’ll print it?’ asks the Deputy Director. ‘They’ll print it’, Turner says, as he walks away into the crowd. The film ends on a freeze frame of Turner’s face starkly reminiscent of one of Kathy’s photographs. The soundtrack has abruptly stopped. We are not to hear any mention of ‘Christ the Saviour’. Joe remains vulnerable. Neither we nor Turner have been saved from the future possibility of a similar conspiracy occurring.

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BLURRED VISION Three Days of the Condor is an exciting, gripping espionage drama. It challenges its audience to connect fiction with fact. But how accurate an account of the CIA’s role in the Cold War, and of the US intelligence network’s covert operations in particular, does the film present? The filmmakers certainly went out of their way to make the movie seem as real as possible. The notion that a rogue presence inside the CIA was seeking to maintain Middle Eastern oil supplies by non-standard methods appeared plausible. Rumours that the CIA had helped reinstall the Shah of Iran in 1953 in order to protect American access to Iranian oil fields had been rife for years. More importantly, the embargo on oil exports to the United States and other supporters of Israel instigated by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in the wake of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War had rocked the world economy. That a clique within ‘the Company’ would exterminate its fellow agents to keep this a secret also made sense in the light of the revelations of CIA murders overseas. Even the plot’s chief gimmick, the idea that the CIA would employ a unit like the ALHS to decode novels, was not entirely far-fetched. One of the former CIA operatives involved in the Watergate aﬀair, E. Howard Hunt, had been accused of leaking agency plots to book companies as the basis for mystery novels. Furthermore, the ending could be read in two ways. Either it oﬀered hope by suggesting the press was American democracy’s salvation, as the exposure of Watergate had indicated; or it implied the press would suppress Turner’s story due to fear of, or collusion with, the nation’s intelligence network, tying in with rumours of the government’s infiltration of America’s fourth estate. When Three Days of the Condor opened at cinemas in September 1975, Paramount exploited the film’s topicality further by linking it with the start of public hearings into CIA wrongdoings by the Church Committee. Significantly, the movie’s gala West Coast premiere was touted as a benefit evening for the local branch of the ACLU.72 Looking at the critical reaction to Three Days of the Condor, the degree to which journalists and politicians treated the film as if it were a documentary, or at least a serious commentary on contemporary politics, is striking. In this respect, the movie resembles those dramas of the 1940s and 1950s which, like Walk East on Beacon, many viewers probably saw as slices of real-life Cold War subversion. The big diﬀerence, of course, was that Three Days of the Condor suggested that virtuous vigilance had given way to ‘the prospect of a festering, Big Brotherish take over’, as one magazine put it.73 Some within Paramount were not entirely comfortable with such negative interpretations. The distributor cancelled one screening in Washington, DC, because, according to

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Sydney Pollack, ‘They didn’t think it would be good policy to rub the morality of government in the legislators’ noses [sic].’74 Working on the basis that ‘serious’ films ought not to resort to clichéd melodrama, and forgetting presumably that sex often helped pull in the punters, some reviewers felt Three Days of the Condor’s romantic element was an unnecessary distraction. Others argued the film would alienate viewers by having overcooked its conspiracy theory: ‘[C]an we believe that CIA agents can be murdered in the streets of New York with only a lying item in the press, planted by presumably compliant police?’, asked the Saturday Review. ‘Too many people would be implicated in such a cover-up . . . ; we are not yet a totalitarian country.’ Even some left-wing journalists who felt the film’s criticism of the CIA had not gone far enough applauded its ‘warnings’ about CIA machinations in the Middle East, as if Three Days of the Condor was extending the argument about US imperialism in Southeast Asia set out in Hearts and Minds.75 Others critics in more mainstream (and hence more influential) quarters thought the film brave, thought-provoking and entertaining. Writing in the New York Daily News, for instance, Kathleen Carroll felt the movie was ‘convincing enough to support our worst fears about CIA activity’. The Hollywood Reporter’s Arthur Knight ironically, if unwittingly, employed the very language critics had often used to compliment Hollywood movies about life behind the Iron Curtain back in the 1950s. Three Days of the Condor ‘shocks us into a vivid awareness of the inherent dangers of a secret police unchecked by any representatives of the democratic process’, opined Knight. Comments like these suggest the movie might have added to the public’s cynicism towards the Cold War and America’s intelligence services in particular.76 Such praise notwithstanding, Three Days of the Condor’s political vision had its limits. The movie rather played down the extent to which covert CIA activities were a natural by-product of America’s Cold War aggression. It also fell far short of the more extreme indictments of the corporate political power system found in The Parallax View. In Pakula’s movie, reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) dies at the end, thus taking the truth about a sinister organisation that recruits ‘patsies’ for assassinations to the grave. In Three Days of the Condor, by contrast, an individual defeats a bunch of rogue conspirators. Moreover, the sympathetic portrayal of a ‘good’ CIA man suggested the redeemability of the institution. This aspect of the film attracted severe opprobrium from some critics. Both ‘the novel and the film falsify the issue by postulating a black CIA within a white CIA’, wrote Jack Kroll in Newsweek, ‘when the real issue is the actual, or dangerously gray, CIA’. Patrick McGilligan, writing in the left-wing magazine Jump Cut, objected to Three Days of the Condor’s focus on internecine warfare, ‘thus denying or diminishing the thought of international consequences from CIA actions’. ‘Heaven forbid

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that [Salvatore] Allende should be mentioned’, swiped McGilligan, a barbed reference to the socialist Chilean president brought down by a US-sponsored military coup in 1973.77 CONCLUSION Kroll and McGilligan had valid points here. The Watergate revelations would prove, in time, to be a crucial release for much of the American media, helping to break down permanently many of the barriers to criticism of the Cold War security state. But Three Days of the Condor and other films like it were made in the mid-1970s, when the shocks to the system caused by the revelations of government skulduggery were newsworthy yet still raw and highly politically sensitive. Three Days of the Condor may in retrospect look somewhat shallow, but its limited critique of CIA machinations was realistically all that could expected from the Hollywood mainstream, given its established support for (and links with) the national security agencies and the film industry’s longstanding political cautiousness. An earlier part of this study showed how reluctant the US film industry was to question Cold War orthodoxy. This was especially the case in the 1940s and 1950s, when America’s Cold War values were not yet fully formed and consequently when cinema probably could have made the biggest diﬀerence to the American people’s outlook on the conflict. This chapter has demonstrated the degree to which the 1970s marked a shift away from the black-and-white views of early Cold War American cinema. Yet its analysis has also confirmed Hollywood’s time-honoured tradition of swimming with, rather than against, the prevailing political tide. Even at its height, during what was the heyday of Hollywood liberalism in the 1970s, Cold War cinematic deviance continued to be heavily circumscribed. Neither Hearts and Minds nor Three Days of the Condor could be described as anti-capitalist, still less pro-communist. As radical as it was, Peter Davis’ film eschewed an economic reading of the Vietnam War, for instance, in favour of a cultural-political one.78 Moreover, by the time Hearts and Minds appeared in 1974–5, American policy in Vietnam had been subjected to intense criticism from the press and in Congress for more than five or six years. Combine this with the fact that the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and Davis’s fine documentary begins to look like an instant period piece. As a mark of both its artistic and its political boldness, Three Days of the Condor was the recipient of several awards in 1975–6. The movie also enjoyed reasonable commercial success. It made $20 million in rentals, making it the seventeenth highest-grossing film at the US box oﬃce in 1975.79 Using films like Three Days of the Condor as a springboard, Hollywood continued to snipe at the CIA during the remaining years of the Cold War. Movies like Arthur

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Hiller’s The In-Laws (1979) merely poked fun at the agency, while others like John Schlesinger’s The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) depicted the CIA as more insidious than drug-dealing Soviet agents.80 Whether Hollywood’s CIAbashing actually increased public hostility to the US intelligence network is of course highly debatable. It could be argued that treating the CIA as a scapegoat for past and on-going American misdemeanours meant wider questions about US foreign policy were sidestepped. One movie, Missing (1982), did focus directly on the CIA’s highly contentious role in the 1973 Chilean coup, to which Patrick McGilligan had referred so caustically when Three Days of the Condor was released. Constantin Costa-Gavras’ award-winning thriller was closely based on the disappearance of American expatriate writer Charles Horman (played by John Shea) after the coup, and went beyond condemning the CIA to oﬀer a trenchant critique of the whole US Cold War machine. But Missing was itself based on events nearly ten years out of date, and thus, like Hearts and Minds, less likely to alter current US foreign policy.81 From one perspective at least, therefore, Three Days of the Condor was unusually daring. Notes 1 Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar: The Unoﬃcial History of the Academy Awards (New York, 1986), p. 504. 2 For an overview of American movies and movie-making of the 1970s see Lev, American Films of the 70s, and Biskind, Easy Riders. 3 Devine, Vietnam, pp. 148–97. 4 Broderick, Nuclear Movies, pp. 134, 137; Shaheen, Nuclear War Films, pp. 157–62. 5 James Chapman, Cinemas of the World (London, 2003), pp. 130–4. 6 Ibid., pp. 135–8; Biskind, Easy Riders. Jim Hillier’s The New Hollywood (New York, 1994) warns against making too much of these changes, particularly in relation to the industrial context of filmmaking. 7 On America’s sense of crisis in the 1970s see Kim McQuaid, The Anxious Years: America in the Vietnam-Watergate Era (New York, 1989) and Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s (New York, 1982). 8 On US thinking behind détente see Michael B. Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente (Basingstoke, 1992), and Richard Pipes, US-Soviet Relations in the Era of Détente (Boulder, CO, 1981). 9 Biskind, Easy Riders, pp. 15–16; Lev, American Films of the 70s, pp. 54–9, 77–89. 10 Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, pp. 282–3; Broderick, Nuclear Movies, pp. 152–3. The Atomic Café was produced and directed by Kevin Raﬀerty, Pierce Raﬀerty and Jayne Loader. 11 For Moore’s speech see www.oscars.org/75academyawards/winners/docfeature. html. For other anti-war statements during the awards ceremony see www.wsws. org/articles/2003/mar2003/osca-m25.shtml (both 25 January 2006).

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12 Wiley and Bona, Inside Oscar, pp. 504–7; Michael Nelson, ‘Ol’ Red, White, and Blue Eyes: Frank Sinatra and the American Presidency’, Popular Music and Society, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2000, pp. 79–102. Shirley MacLaine had recently produced The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, an account of a three-week visit to China in 1973 by a group of American women. New York Times, 23 March 1975, Section 2, p. 1. 13 Biskind, Easy Riders, p. 52. 14 New York Times, 4 May 1975, p. 149. On the tremendous cultural impact of Easy Rider see Lev, American Films of the 70s, pp. 3–12. 15 Biskind, Easy Riders, pp. 57, 130, 165, 186; Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 19 January 1975. 16 Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York, 2002); Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 21 October 1974. 17 Garth Jowett, ‘The Selling of the Pentagon’: Television Confronts the First Amendment’, in John O’Connor (ed.), American History/American Television: Interpreting the Video Past (New York, 1983), pp. 256–78 (quotation at p. 275). 18 People Magazine, 29 March 1982; Hollywood Reporter, 13 August 1974. 19 Hollywood Reporter, 13 August 1974; Los Angeles Times, 15 November 1974, G1; Peter Davis, ‘Hearts and Minds Redux’, and commentary by and interview with Davis, on Hearts and Minds (1974), DVD MTD5206 (released 2005). 20 Devine, Vietnam, pp. 62, 74; Galaxy, April 1983. 21 Commentary by and interview with Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD. 22 Los Angeles Times, 15 November 1974, G1; commentary by and interview with Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD. 23 Biskind, Easy Riders, pp. 74, 184–8; New York Times, 17 November 1974, Section 2, p. 1. 24 Variety, 29 May 1974; Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 21 October 1974; New York Times, 17 November 1974, Section 2, p. 1. 25 Los Angeles Times, 15 November 1974, G1; New York Times, 17 November 1974, Section 2, p. 1; commentary by Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD. 26 Los Angeles Times, 16 December 1974; Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 18 December 1974. Tracks was released in 1976. See Variety, 19 May 1976, p. 27. 27 Variety, 17 December 1974; Variety, 20 January 1975; Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 19 February 1975; Warner Bros. press releases, 23 January and 11 February 1975, Hearts and Minds Clippings, AMPAS. 28 This clip borrowed footage from the most highly publicised of the early 1950s communist ‘takeovers’, that which was staged in the small Wisconsin town of Mosinee, on May Day 1950. On Mosinee’s famous day see Fried, The Russians are Coming!, pp. 67–86. 29 On the degree to which Vietnam films of the late 1970s and 1980s combined this stab-in-the-military’s-back theory with stories of the suﬀering inflicted on American soldiers serving in Vietnam see Devine, Vietnam, pp. 130–316. 30 New York Times, 17 June 2004. 31 New York Times, 17 November 1974, Section 2, p. 1.

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32 This last clip used footage shot by a Swedish film crew in North Vietnam. Commentary by Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD. 33 Commentary by Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD. On the debate surrounding the eﬀect of the Loan execution on public and political opinion in the United States in the late 1960s see David Culbert, ‘American Television Coverage of the Vietnam War: The Loan Execution Footage, the Tet Oﬀensive (1968) and the Contextualization of Visual Images’, in Mark Connelly and David Welch (eds), War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda 1900–2003 (London, 2005), pp. 202–13. 34 Stanley Kauﬀman, New Republic, 15 March 1975, p. 22. 35 http://rialtopictures.com/grisbi_xtras/hearts_links.html (25 October 2005); New York Times, 17 June 2004; interview with Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD; New York Times, 17 June 2004; www.villagevoice.com/film/0442,atkinson,57660,20. html (25 October 2005). On Fahrenheit 9/11 see Vanity Fair, March 2005, pp. 108–15, and Cineaste, October 2004, pp. 3–7. 36 Ms., March 1975, pp. 35–7; Ramparts, April 1975, pp. 38–44; National Review, 6 June 1975, p. 621. 37 See, for instance, Walter Goodman’s review in the New York Times, 23 March 1975, Section 2, p. 1. 38 Time, 17 March 1975. 39 Newsweek, 3 March 1975; Wall Street Journal, 3 March 1975. 40 Press book, Hearts and Minds Clippings File, AMPAS; Playboy, December 1974. 41 Commentary by Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD. 42 New Yorker, 28 April 1975, pp. 120–6; New York Times, 4 May 1975, p. 149. 43 New York Times, 4 May 1975, p. 149. 44 On the commercial success and political impact of Fahrenheit 9/11, see Screen International , 2 July 2004, p. 3; Sight and Sound, July 2004, pp. 14–16; Cineaste, October 2004, pp. 3–7. 45 BoxOﬃce, 17 September 1975; Variety, 17 March 1976; Variety, 6 August 1975; People, 25 August 1975. 46 www.wintersoldierfilm.com (22 January 2006). 47 Village Voice, 26 December 1974. 48 Alan R. Booth, ‘The Development of the Espionage Film’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 5, No. 4, October 1990, pp. 136–60. 49 Variety, 11 June 1952, p. 6, and 27 August 1952. 50 Chapman, Licence to Thrill; Christoph Lindner, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader (Manchester, 2003); Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman (eds), Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (Bloomington, IN, 2005). 51 Motion Picture Herald, 29 March 1967, p. 669; Variety, 20 December 1967, p. 14; Peter Richards, Film Comment, Vol. 33, No. 1, January 1997, pp. 74–81. 52 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 381–4, 405–6; William Conrad Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships. Part IV: July 1965-January 1968 (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 853–65.

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53 On Watergate see Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (London, 1994), and Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of the Nixon Presidency (New York, 1990). 54 Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, p. 49. 55 On this conspiracy cycle and its political significance see Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, pp. 95–8, and Scott, Politics, pp. 119–24. 56 Vogue, November 1975; Saturday Review, 6 September 1975. 57 Publishers Weekly, 3 December 1973. 58 Biskind, Easy Riders, pp. 67, 184, 273; Los Angeles Times, 15 January 1975. 59 Hollywood Reporter, 1 and 5 March 1974. 60 Robert J. Emery, The Directors – Take One: In Their Own Words (New York, 1999), pp. 81–97. 61 On The Way We Were see Booker, American Left, pp. 258–9. On the sequences about blacklisting which were cut from the released film see Jump Cut, No. 10/11, 1976, pp. 11–12. 62 Jump Cut, No. 10/11, 1976, pp. 11–12. 63 Three Days of the Condor Pressbook, BFIL. Redford’s mildly anti-establishment image was exploited by Condor’s publicists. See ‘Handbook of Production Information’, pp. 20–3, 59, 62–3, Three Days of the Condor Clippings File, AMPAS. 64 ‘Handbook of Production Information’, p. 61. 65 Playboy, interview with Robert Redford, December 1974, p. 92; Minty Clinch, Robert Redford (London, 1989), p. 123; Scott, Politics, pp. 123–4; James Spada, The Films of Robert Redford (Secaucus, NJ, 1977), pp. 225–37. 66 Three Days of the Condor, draft script by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., 5 October 1974, Paramount Script Collection, AMPAS. 67 Three Days of the Condor, draft script by David Rayfiel, 20 October 1974, Collection 073, Box F-883, UCLA AL. 68 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London, 1995), pp. 401–5. Hersh’s revelations more than anything else made 1975 the ‘Year of Intelligence’, writes Andrew (p. 404). 69 Three Days of the Condor, revised screenplay by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and David Rayfiel, 20 January 1975, Collection 073, Box F-883, UCLA AL; New Times, 31 October 1975. 70 ‘Handbook of Production Information’, pp. 115–35; Los Angeles HeraldExaminer, 4 November 1974; Jump Cut, No. 10/11, 1976, pp. 11–12; Emery, Directors, p. 99. According to William Colby, director of the CIA between 1973 and 1976, Nixon had fired Helms in late 1972 because of his refusal to allow the CIA to be used in the Watergate cover-up. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, p. 387. 71 These comparisons were made at the time. See Films and Filming, December 1975, and Los Angeles Times, 28 September 1975. For more on The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Ipcress File see Motion Picture Herald, 3 March 1965, p. 21; Motion Picture Herald, 22 December 1965, p. 425; and Sight and Sound, Vol. 34, No. 3, July

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79 80 81

Hollywood’s Cold War 1965, p. 150. On the scriptwriters’ manipulation of tension in Three Days of the Condor see Gregg Bachman, ‘Three Days of the Condor: Tension’, Creative Writing, Vol. 3, No. 3, Winter 1996, pp. 76–82. Jump Cut, No. 10/11, 1976, pp. 11–12; ‘Handbook of Production Information’, p. 11; Andrew, President’s Eyes Only, p. 414. Osceola, 14 November 1975. Los Angeles Times, 10 September 1975. Clinch, Redford, p. 125; Saturday Review, 6 September 1975; Jump Cut, No. 10/11, 1976, pp. 11–12. Clinch, Redford, p. 125; Hollywood Reporter, 17 September 1975. Newsweek, 29 September 1975; Jump Cut, No. 10/11, 1976, pp. 11–12. Although Hearts and Minds includes a speech by President Eisenhower citing Vietnam’s valuable tin and tungsten resources, Davis discounted ‘revisionist’ theorists like Noam Chomsky who argued in the late 1960s and 1970s that America’s road to Vietnam lay in the quest for economic aggrandisement. Commentary by Davis, Hearts and Minds DVD. Variety, 3 May 1976; www.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/awards (24 January 2006); Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, p. 100. Variety, 13 June 1979; Photoplay, May 1985, pp. 26–8; Hollywood Reporter, 21 January 1985; Palmer, Eighties, pp. 222–32. For the genesis and development of Missing see scripts in the Core Script Collection, AMPAS, and in Collection 073, Box F114 and F146, UCLA AL, and John J. Michalczyk, Costa-Gavras: The Political Action Film (Philadelphia, PA, 1984), pp. 215–35. On the truth or falsehood of the film’s allegations, and the controversy Missing triggered, see Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Chicago, IL, 1996), pp. 104–24.

CHAPTER 9

The empire strikes back

When the United States is politically weak or vulnerable, it needs its muscular movie heroes, Conan, Rocky, Rambo, to suggest that we have things worth fighting for, worth preserving, even if those things are not easy to talk about, or describe anymore. They just are. Interview with John Milius, film director, June 19881

Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory in the November 1980 presidential elections provided spectacular evidence of the uniquely intimate relationship between politics and film in the United States. To this day, no other country has chosen a movie star (former or current) as its political leader.2 Reagan’s entry into the White House consummated the long-standing marriage between Washington and Hollywood during the Cold War. The Gipper, as he was known aﬀectionately by the White House press corps, after his breakthrough role in Lloyd Bacon’s 1940 sporting biopic Knute Rockne – All American Hero, had been a prominent anti-communist crusader on and oﬀ camera for decades. When he was president of the Screen Actors Guild during the McCarthy era, Reagan, who was then something of a liberal, had not only played a leading part in enforcing the Hollywood blacklist; he had also acted as an undercover agent for the FBI, fighting, as he put it in his memoirs, Moscow’s plan to take over the motion picture business.3 Thereafter, Reagan skilfully exploited his celebrity status and anti-communist credentials for financial and political gain. His work for the General Electric Theatre on television in the 1950s and early 1960s, which included a national speaking tour of factories, formed the base for his later gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. In 1966, Reagan won the governorship of California, backed by a roster of Hollywood’s most powerful Cold Warriors; his inaugural ceremony was designed, appropriately, by Disney Studios. During his eight years in Sacramento, Reagan achieved a national reputation as a hard-line conservative by clamping down on student activism and the anti-Vietnam War movement.4 Once in the Oval Oﬃce, Reagan launched an impassioned, reinvigorated assault on the political left at home and overseas. The media lay at the centre of this attack. Reagan’s experience in film and television gave him a greater appreciation of popular culture than any previous American president. In his

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mind, cultural power in America had to be wrested from the ‘liberal elite’ which had led the country astray during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, the White House needed to update its news management apparatus.5 Reagan also invested heavily in US propaganda overseas, and often placed close associates in key positions. He appointed his trusted friend and former Hollywood impresario Charles Z. Wick to the directorship of the USIA. Wick increased the agency’s propaganda to a level recalling the heady days of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and established Radio Marti, a radio station aimed at Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Distinguished Americans recruited to serve on USIA advisory committees in the 1980s included the actors Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas, while Leo Jaﬀe, former head of Columbia Pictures, chaired a Film Acquisition Committee.6 During his eight years in the White House, movie material played a key role in shaping Reagan’s thoughts, speeches and actions. His rhetoric and policies, in turn, had a marked influence on Hollywood output. The Great Communicator, as he became known, peppered his vocabulary with film references so frequently that many wondered whether he had turned the White House into a movie set. Reagan gave his personal backing to films, like the hugely popular Rambo series, which projected his image of the Soviet bloc as the ‘evil empire’ – a phrase familiar to many fans of George Lucas’s 1977 sci-fi epic Star Wars. Some insiders claim Reagan even borrowed one of his presidency’s flagship concepts – that of a nuclear-free world founded on space-based missile defence – straight from Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). These actions, when allied to a penchant for recounting movie images as historical facts, indicated Reagan had diﬃculty distinguishing the real world from that depicted by Hollywood.7 At the heart of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ was the actor-president’s ability to rewrite the past to suit his upbeat vision of America’s present and future better. Reagan presented himself as the living embodiment of the role played by James Stewart in Frank Capra’s 1939 movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington – the small-town, innocent American whose homespun virtues would restore common decency to a complex and corrupt government. Reagan’s dreamy, black-and-white rhetoric extolling two centuries of civilised, democratic development in the United States played extremely well to an electorate desperate to consign Watergate to history.8 Reagan’s perspective on foreign aﬀairs similarly looked back in time, to a golden, pre-Vietnam era when the American flag was an honoured emblem and the nation confidently sought to fulfil its Manifest Destiny. Reagan and his key advisers belonged to an ideological faction whose views had not been substantially represented in Washington since the 1950s. The New Right spoke of America being ‘a beacon of hope, a shining city on the hill’, with a

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‘creed’ and a ‘cause’. Above all, these neo-conservatives believed that if America could ‘renew’ itself at home, it could rediscover a ‘vision’ overseas. Communism had to be ‘rolled back’, they urged, not ‘contained’. The United States needed to ‘break out of a future’ that prophesied mutual assured destruction, and ‘win’ the Cold War by exposing communism’s decaying edifice.9 Conventional wisdom has it that Hollywood’s elite followed the lead given by one of its favoured sons and put the film industry’s full weight behind the New Right’s anti-communist crusade during the Second Cold War.10 This final chapter examines the degree to which this is true by focusing on three films that centred on Reagan’s twin themes of national destiny and renewal. It will argue that Cold War filmmaking polarised to a greater extent during the 1980s than in any previous period of the conflict. A number of filmmakers on the political right felt it their duty to put a halt to the nation’s post-Vietnam foreign policy drift and to spell out clearly to the American people that they now faced a threat from Soviet communism in their own backyard. Others on the left felt enraged both by the New Right’s warmongering and by liberals’ weak opposition to it, and sought to challenge the emerging new Reaganite Cold War orthodoxy head on. Some, as we shall see, were prepared to do so even by working directly with foreign ‘enemy’ governments. Between these two groups lay the industry’s ‘hard centre’ – filmmakers who followed politically mainstream views in the first half of the decade, and who reacted positively to the Gorbachevian changes in the Soviet Union after 1985. Tellingly, even before the Berlin Wall had been breached in 1989, this centre had already begun to view Moscow as a valuable ally in a new war – that on drugs and terrorism. BACK TO THE FUTURE Once the world’s most powerful film studio, the proud producer of Ninotchka and scores of other prestigious motion pictures in the 1930s and 1940s, MGM was in dire financial straits by the late 1970s. The victim, like other studios, of dwindling audiences and wavering production policies, it looked as though it was going out of business. In the early 1980s, MGM’s principal owner, the reclusive Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian, gambled. He expanded the studio’s production system by purchasing United Artists, and appointed the bullish, egotistical Frank Yablans as CEO. Yablans had earned a reputation as a miracle worker while serving as Paramount’s president in the seventies, and set about trying to save MGM/UA by attracting new, creative talent to the company. One of his first major ‘make-or-break’ projects was Red Dawn, a $17 million anti-communist action-adventure movie that made Hollywood’s McCarthy-era Red-baiting material look positively restrained.11

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The original script for Red Dawn was written by Kevin Reynolds, who was then in his early thirties and would later make his directorial debut in 1988 with The Beast of War, an anti-war film about Russia’s Vietnam-like experience in Afghanistan.12 Reynolds’ story – ‘Ten Soldiers’ – was set in the near future and resembled William Golding’s 1954 novel (adapted for the screen in 1963) about the brutalisation of innocence, The Lord of the Flies. Reynolds’ script focused on the horror confronted by a group of teenage boys in New Mexico, who take to the hills when their town is invaded by Russians and Cubans. Initially, the boys treat their plight as a lark, as a chance to live oﬀ the land, but they are ultimately taken over by tougher kids who turn the once-benign group into a determined guerrilla force, striking at the invaders.13 When Yablans saw the script soon after arriving at MGM/UA in late 1982, he immediately saw the scope for another First Blood (1982), that is another jingoistic, hot-action Rambo movie that would capitalise on the recent shift to the right in the United States. He therefore changed its title to the more menacing Red Dawn, rejected Reynolds’ plea to direct, and instead oﬀered the job to John Milius.14 The 39-year-old Milius was one of the more eccentric members of the film-school-trained ‘movie brat’ generation that had come to the fore in the 1970s (and included Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma). Renowned for his fascination with weaponry and his advocacy of right-wing causes, Milius typified that group of young moviemakers who reacted sharply to seventies Hollywood liberalism and, emboldened by Reagan’s neo-imperial rhetoric, believed it had a duty to reinvigorate American anti-communist cinema in the early 1980s. In his mind, the United States had ‘an overriding sense of morality’ in foreign aﬀairs, proven by its reluctance to ‘rule the world’ in the late 1940s, before the Soviet Union had developed nuclear capacity. Milius saw Red Dawn as a warning to Americans not to let their guard down, and to treat seriously the threat of a Soviet-inspired incursion via Central America, partly by using illegal aliens as agents.15 Buzz Feitshans, Red Dawn’s producer, took the same view. He and Milius were friends, having co-produced the first of the Vietnam POW rescue movies, Ted Kotcheﬀ’s Uncommon Valor, in 1983. Feitshans was also the producer of the Rambo trilogy.16 To help develop a convincing scenario for a Soviet intervention in the Western Hemisphere, Yablans brought in no less a figure than General Alexander Haig. Here was proof that the state-film network operated even during the latter stages of the Cold War. Haig had served as Nixon’s White House Chief of Staﬀ and the commander of NATO forces in the 1970s, before being appointed as Reagan’s first Secretary of State. After being eased out of the State Department in June 1982, mainly because of his opposition to nuclear talks with the Soviets, Haig had become a member of the MGM/UA board of directors. Haig was no expert on movies but he appreciated their propaganda

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value. The release of Costa-Gavras’ Missing in early 1982 had, for instance, forced him to issue an oﬃcial denial of US complicity in the 1973 Chilean coup. Red Dawn oﬀered Haig an opportunity to press home to American youngsters especially the genuine threat to US national security posed by ‘Marxist-Leninist guerrillas’ in Central America, who, he believed, were being encouraged by Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, Havana and Moscow.17 Haig invited John Milius to the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, DC. Surrounded by maps, charts and computer read-outs of State and Defence Department analyses, the two men evolved an elaborate back story, detailing the domino-like collapse of Western Europe and dissolution of NATO. Haig envisioned ‘the enemy’ consisting not only of Russians and Cubans, but also of a left-leaning Mexican regime that would permit an invasion force designed to split the United States in half, invading at Veracruz and pressing northward. Slowly, through 1983, numerous facets of the original project changed. A secondary back story was added about America’s political bankruptcy. Nicaragua entered the script. The central characters, who were in their early teens in Reynolds’ story, became high-school seniors and older, thus allowing for greater on-screen violence. Overall, the movie grew into one that was more about killing and treachery than about character and relationships, one that diluted Reynolds’ anti-war message in favour of the glorification of a paramilitary defence of American territory. Aspects of the rewrite even alarmed Milius, who had originally intended to say something about the ‘futility of war’ in the movie. Yablans and Haig urged the director to insert scenes showing the kids infiltrate back into town to witness the brainwashing of their parents. Strong scenes showing the invaders shooting resolute citizens in reprisal for the kids’ resistance were also added. Other provocative features, especially about collaboration, were filmed but ended up on the cutting room floor. One scene depicting an American girl flirting with armed Russian soldiers in a Sovietised McDonald’s restaurant seems to have been removed due to a mass murder at a McDonald’s franchise in San Ysidro, California, just weeks prior to the film’s opening. Respect for the victims’ families probably accounts for this decision, plus the need to put some distance between the massacre and a film that, on the one hand, celebrated violence and, on the other hand, purported to show how civilised Americans were compared with their enemies.18 Red Dawn was filmed between November 1983 and January 1984, mainly in and around the small town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. The cast included Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell and Jennifer Grey, members of the ‘Brat Pack’ generation that frequently appeared together in teen-oriented films in the 1980s. The snowy conditions in New Mexico increased costs but

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lent the movie a certain beauty and verisimilitude; cast and crew complained of frost bite. Despite Haig’s involvement, the Defence Department refused to cooperate, not even allowing some jets to do an innocent ‘fly-by’. Having read the script, the Pentagon insisted that a Russian-Cuban infiltration such as that concocted by Milius, Haig and Yablans could never take place. Lacking the Defence Department’s logistical support caused serious technical headaches for Milius. Old, imitation Russian tanks broke down in the cold weather. One stuntman parachutist broke his ankle, while another wearing a Russian uniform landed oﬀ course and was taken into custody by vigilant locals. Yablans, for one, failed to see the funny side of such hitches, especially when he realised the final budget for the movie had almost doubled from the original $10 million estimate. The CEO accused Milius of having completely lost control of the production, complaining, without tongue in cheek, that ‘you’ve got enough people and equipment down there to start World War Three’.19 Red Dawn begins with a silent, 15-second preamble. Simple, yellow-onblack titles inform the viewer of recent catastrophic events in the world. A starving Soviet Union has invaded one of its rebellious satellites, Poland. Cuba and Nicaragua have amassed 500,000 troops. Central America has fallen to communism. Anti-nuclear and neutralist regimes have taken power in key Western European states. Mexico has plunged into revolution. NATO has dissolved. The United States stands alone. Cue Basil Poledouris’ stirring title-sequence music, borrowing heavily from Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Fade to Calumet, Colorado, a lonely town on the plains just at the edge of the Rockies. A black history teacher is telling his class about Genghis Khan’s barbarian invasion of Europe, when enemy paratroopers land in the fields nearby. ‘Wow, check it out!’, shout excited students, who think the men are Americans. Jabbering Spanish and Russian at one another, the soldiers begin machine-gunning everyone in sight. Within minutes, rocket fire batters down buildings and tanks block intersections: Calumet has fallen under occupation by Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan forces. Red banners and pictures of Lenin go up everywhere. Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky takes over the local movie house. Suspect books are ‘cleansed’ by fire, recalling the Nazis’ Burning of the Books in 1933. Outside town an old drive-in is turned into a ‘re-education centre’, where potential resistors are forced to watch anti-capitalist slide shows while a droning voice attacks ‘whorehouse America’. But some people have escaped. Jed (Swayze), once the high-school quarterback, now in his twenties, leads a small group of teenage boys into the mountains. They hide out for a while, initiating themselves in the ways of the wild – drinking the blood of a deer they kill, for instance, or urinating into the radiator of their truck when it runs out of water. Taking the name of their

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football team, the Wolverines, the boys become a crack guerrilla unit, sweeping down on the occupying forces and liberating groups of Americans. A couple of girls who have been hiding from Red Army rapists join them in the mountains and soon become hardened, ruthless fighters too. A cynical airforce pilot (Powers Boothe), shot down earlier in the war, also joins up and fills them in on the situation. First, Cubans and Nicaraguans, crossing the border like ordinary illegal aliens, took out America’s missile silos and command centres. With America’s nuclear capacity snuﬀed, Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles destroyed key strategic sites in the United States and in other countries, including China. Cuban and Nicaraguan forces then swept through Mexico and joined Soviet battalions passing across the Bering Straits. The Soviets now control more than half of the country via puppet governments, and most of the rest of the world too. But time is running out for the brave, hungry youngsters. Realising that a grudging respect for the partisans is growing among his disillusioned Cuban allies, the Russian commander in Calumet dispatches an elite Soviet unit to wipe out the Wolverines. The unit is assisted by a traitor within the boys’ ranks, whom the guerrillas reluctantly and emotionally execute. ‘What’s the diﬀerence between them and us?’, the more timid boys ask Jed afterwards. ‘We live here’, is his stolid reply. Eventually, the Soviet forces trap and kill most of the rebels using helicopter gun ships. Now resigned to their fate, Jed and his brother Matt (Sheen) carry out a suicide mission on the commander’s headquarters. At the end, just two of the Wolverines are left to make the long hike into ‘Free America’ territory. A brief voice-over epilogue showing a World War Three memorial and the American flag flying tells us the United States will finally survive. Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985) is justifiably often labelled Hollywood’s definitive Reaganite Cold War text,20 but Red Dawn provides strong competition. First of all, Red Dawn was – perhaps remarkably – one of only two Hollywood films made throughout the Cold War (Alfred E. Green’s Invasion USA, released in 1952, being the other) that depicted World War Three in terms of a direct military invasion of the United States, as opposed to those that used aliens or that focused on Soviet subversion.21 Powers Boothe’s pilot gives a fairly accurate summary of the Republican right’s nightmare scenario for a World War Three born of military weakness. The movie also reflected the Reaganites’ concern with Central America acting as the base for communist subversion, or even an invasion, of the United States.22 Second, Red Dawn borrowed heavily from American mythology and folklore. Riding on horseback and living rough, the Wolverines act like frontier woodsmen or cowboys. Symbolically, they receive help from a character played by Ben Johnson, famous for his supporting roles in Westerns. Their hit-and-run tactics evoke

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‘It’s World War Three down there’: Jed (Patrick Swayze), Robert, with Star Wars cap (C. Thomas Howell), and Matt (Charlie Sheen) take their first look at communist-occupied Calumet. Red Dawn (1984). MGM/United Artists/The Kobal Collection.

popular images of underdog militiamen fighting for freedom against British colonialists, or fearless Indian braves struggling to preserve their way of life. When searching for the partisans, even the Soviet soldiers are awe-struck by the majesty of the American landscape. But whereas the Wolverines belong to the land, the Russians are like visitors to a theme park. Third, the Wolverines’ unconventional tactics also chimed with the doctrine of ‘flexible response’ promulgated by the CIA and neo-conservatives. At the root of this doctrine was the belief that communism and terrorism had joined forces against the democratic West, and that the Soviet Union was running a ‘terror network’ in Europe, the Middle East and Central America. This network had to be challenged directly at source, using the same paramilitary and maverick tactics terrorists themselves employed.23 Fourth, the Wolverines’ ‘hard body’ image conveyed the macho, violent qualities of a great deal of eighties American Cold War iconography. This tied in with the White House’s claim that during the 1970s US foreign policy had gone ‘soft’. The nation’s bureaucratised baby boomers had let down their sons (and daughters, to an extent), who were more intuitive and independent-minded. Despite being almost seventy years of age when he entered the White House, Reagan proclaimed himself a ‘freedom fighter’ and soon became what political scientist John Orman termed ‘the quintessential macho president’.24

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Fifth, despite being categorised as the most violent film ever made,25 paradoxically Red Dawn implied that a nuclear war was survivable and perhaps therefore winnable by showing World War Three’s aftermath to be essentially conventional. In this way, the movie countered other films released during the early 1980s, like Lynne Littman’s Testament (1983) and Nicholas Meyer’s highly controversial TV drama The Day After (1983), which declared nuclear weapons suicidal. At the same time, the movie lent a degree of support to Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defence Initiative (nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ by the Democrats) by showing that Moscow had perfected its own missile defence programme, and in so doing had rendered the US nuclear arsenal worthless.26 Finally, Red Dawn was, like many other Cold War film plots of the early Reagan era, driven above all by the need for revenge, especially for America’s loss in Vietnam.27 The Wolverines kill partly in order to avenge their elders’ execution by the occupying forces. Yet we see that it is the liberal indecisiveness of their parents’ generation that has opened up America to invasion in the first place. Reagan frequently told the American people that Vietnam had been ‘a noble cause’ that Washington had lacked the will to win, and that Americans needed to kick the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ lest communism take advantage of US passivity. John Milius felt exactly the same.28 The Wolverines represent just this reaction against America’s sense of guilt and subsequent loss of purpose overseas. Looked at in another way, in a neat role reversal Jed and his cohort enact the role of the Viet Cong partisans, while the Cubans and Russians play the part of the American invaders. The Wolverines themselves do not, to coin John Rambo’s famous phrase (endlessly recycled by Reagan himself), ‘get to win this time’, but those who follow the youngsters’ decisive and gallant lead do so in the end, as evidenced by the epilogue’s triumphant stars and stripes. In its opening weekend in mid-August 1984, playing to a huge 1,822 screens nationwide, Red Dawn took a robust $8 million. It was a stroke of marketing genius to release the film during the Los Angeles Olympics. The Soviet boycott (in retaliation for the Americans’ failure to attend the 1980 Moscow Olympics) helped turn the Games into a flag-waving flurry of nationalism, encouraged partly by ABC Television’s coverage.29 As the MGM/UA executives predicted, most critics were derisive. Comments ranged from those who declared it ‘fascist’ to others that dampened down liberals’ fears by arguing that it was simply too ludicrous to be dangerous.30 But there is some, albeit impressionistic, evidence that Red Dawn had a strong impact on its target audience. When a group of high-school students from New Jersey were asked about the movie in November 1984, by which time it had grossed $36 million, virtually all who had seen the film identified with the Wolverines and enjoyed the idea that a bunch of kids like them ‘could

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kill a lot of communists’. ‘It kind of made you feel good’, said one boy. ‘You come out hating the Russians.’ Another boy added: ‘Americans went through Vietnam and terrorist attacks. People are sick of America always being wrong.’ A teacher found that the film reinforced his students’ image of Russians being associated with words like ‘Reds’, ‘stubborn’, ‘oppression’, ‘emotionless’, ‘vodka’ and ‘propaganda’.31 Older members of the audience also expressed solidarity with those who chanted ‘Wolverines’ and ‘U-S-A’ in theatres. ‘Americans have to start waking up and recognise that America is not a socialist country’, said one 45-year-old woman after seeing the film. ‘They have to recognise that freedom isn’t free.’ Alluding to Reagan’s Democratic challenger in the presidential elections later in the year, one political science major at UCLA said in August 1984 that, ‘If Mondale gets elected, that [a Russian invasion of the United States] is what’s going to happen.’32 Red Dawn was publicly endorsed by a range of opinion-formers on the political right. Haig and Reagan used the film as a tool to disparage the Democrats’ stance on foreign policy in the run-up to the party’s convention in August 1984. The Gun Owners of America honoured John Milius for ‘dramatically depicting the importance in our time of the Second Amendment’. Soldier of Fortune, a magazine which had a readership of 300,000 and which stood at the heart of paramilitary culture in post-Vietnam America, printed stills from Red Dawn that blended seamlessly with photographic accounts of Mujahidin bravery against the Red Army in Afghanistan.33 Overseas, Red Dawn fared less well. Left-wing activists threw rotten eggs and paint at screens showing the movie in some West German theatres. In Moscow, Soviet cultural oﬃcials denounced Red Dawn as virulently anti-Soviet propaganda, despite recent films like Mikhail Tumanishvili’s Incident in Quadrant 36–80 (1983) having portrayed Americans as violent anti-Russian psychopaths.34 In the summer of 1985, Red Dawn was reportedly banned – along with Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985) – in more exotic locations like Zimbabwe, following complaints from the Russian and Cuban embassies.35 Red Dawn would prove to have a mixed legacy. At his trial in 1997, Timothy McVeigh, a pseudo-survivalist and member of an ultra-right militia group hostile to the US federal government, claimed that Red Dawn was one of his principal sources of ‘inspiration’ for the Oklahoma City bombing two years earlier. McVeigh’s act of terrorism killed 168 people. In late 2003, the Pentagon’s codename for its successful operation to capture the deposed Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, was ‘Red Dawn’. The two huts found at Hussein’s hideaway outside his home-town of Tikrit were christened ‘Wolverine 1’ and ‘Wolverine 2’, an indication perhaps that, twenty years after it had been made, Red Dawn had achieved cult status in US military spheres.36

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ANARCHISTS AND ADVENTURERS Insisting that America was once again ‘standing tall’, Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale at the presidential elections in November 1984, winning every state in the nation except Minnesota and the District of Columbia. One leftwing British filmmaker who was then a rising star in Hollywood, Alex Cox, chose to avoid the Republican celebrations by heading south to visit Nicaragua during its first democratic elections. Since 1981, Reagan’s eﬀorts to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government had made Nicaragua the focus of his campaign to ‘roll back communism’ in Central America. The CIA and private American bodies had spent millions of dollars training and supplying the opposition militia, the Contras. Beginning in 1983, the National Security Council’s Oﬃce of Public Diplomacy had conducted a multi-milliondollar propaganda initiative inside the United States, projecting an image of the Contras as democratic freedom fighters in the mould of America’s Founding Fathers and the Sandinistas as evil members of a Soviet outpost.37 The 30-year-old Cox had risen to prominence in 1983 with Repo Man, a black fantasy about the car repossession business that outrageously satirised American consumerism and indirectly played on current nuclear war anxieties. Its follow-up, Sid and Nancy (1986), which recreated the tragic late 1970s love aﬀair between Sid Vicious of the punk rock group the Sex Pistols and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungeon, confirmed Cox’s nihilistic reputation.38 Cox travelled to Nicaragua in late 1984 to find out for himself whether there was any truth in the American news media’s allegations that the Sandinista government had recently turned the country into ‘a totalitarian dungeon’. Having quickly concluded that such charges were mere propaganda, in Léon, Nicaragua’s former capital, Cox was challenged to make a film about the country’s recent bloody history by two soldiers who had been wounded fighting the Contras. A month later, back in the United States, Cox came across a tiny reference in the radical Mother Jones magazine to one William Walker, an enigmatic adventurer from Tennessee who had ruled Nicaragua in the 1850s. Cox had never heard of Walker, but after a week’s research concluded that he was ‘a great idea’ for the big screen. Walker’s exploits had made him famous in the United States in the years before the Civil War, and the object of adulation in a supremely confident nation convinced that its duty was to dominate the Western Hemisphere. With appropriate treatment, Cox believed Walker’s life could serve as the basis for an original and powerful condemnation of the Reaganite approach towards Central America and of US Cold War militancy in general.39 In the early-to-mid-1980s, several Hollywood films had focused on the politics of Central and South America. A few had even highlighted US subterfuge

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or support for death-squad government-terrorists in the region. Mention has already been made of Costa-Gavras’ Missing, released in 1982. This was followed, in 1983, by Roger Spottiswood’s Under Fire, a drama that focused on the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and the assistance given by the CIA to the death squads of the Somoza regime against the rebel Sandinistas. Two years later, Haskell Wexler’s Latino (1985) looked at the Nicaraguan War through the disillusioned eyes of a Chicano Green Beret from Los Angeles sent to train Contras in the jungles of Honduras. In 1986, Oliver Stone’s Oscar-nominated Salvador suggested the CIA had been involved in the notorious murder by rightist military thugs of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.40 Despite their criticism of recent actions by the US government, movies like Under Fire irritated Cox intensely. In his opinion, their liberalism ultimately allowed Americans to blame ‘the system’ rather than themselves and, in the case of Under Fire, arrogantly even suggested that ‘heroic’ American journalists had won the revolution for the Sandinistas. Cox had the comic-book style of Red Dawn and the Rambo series in mind for his film about William Walker – albeit with a darkly humorous, punk-like twist. He believed this mode would not only help him to reach a broader audience, but would also compete with Hollywood’s Red-baiters on their own ground.41 To help him bring an obscure nineteenth-century figure alive for late twentieth-century cinema-goers ‘beyond the art houses of Wilshire Boulevard’, in early 1985 Cox hired the American scriptwriter and avant-garde novelist Rudy Wurlitzer. Like Cox, Wurlitzer saw the war being fought by the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua as a direct continuation of the kind of US interventionism in Central America practised by William Walker a century earlier. He and Cox believed that Walker’s actions typified Washington’s racist approach to foreign aﬀairs, one that was still driven by a Puritan fundamentalism and Anglo-Saxon arrogance.42 Cox’s outline and Wurlitzer’s script drew on an unusual range of research material, including Nicaraguan poetry, correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and the Somoza family in the 1930s, and Walker’s own account of his adventures published just before his death. Wurlitzer’s script painted a portrait of Walker as an ideologue of Manifest Destiny whose sublimated sexuality accounted for his will to dominate but who ended up being used as a semi-witting stalking horse for larger strategic and economic interests.43 Though happy with the bulk of Wurlitzer’s script, Cox felt that the links between Walker’s antics and modern-day US policies needed to be made more explicit. He therefore imposed various contemporary images and took the script into a surreal past-future domain, creating a world in which the present – Walker’s future – in the form of computers, mass-merchandised cigarettes, and, most strikingly, helicopters keeps invading Walker’s reality. Wurlitzer

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complained that these touches would only alienate the audience, but his warnings were ignored.44 As director and screenwriter exchanged draft scripts, progress was made on the wider production and financial fronts. It is a measure of the greater space which had opened up for Cold War dissent in the American film industry by the 1980s that Cox got not only the backing of an experienced mainstream Hollywood producer but also a distribution deal with a major studio. Edward R. Pressman had been producing in Hollywood for nearly two decades, during which he had worked on a diverse range of films, including Terrence Malick’s evocation of aimless anger in 1950s suburbia Badlands (1973), and John Milius’ violent sword-and-sorcery tale Conan the Barbarian (1982), which helped make Arnold Schwarzenegger a screen star. While working on Walker, Pressman also produced Oliver Stone’s exposé of corporate greed Wall Street (1987). Pressman hoped that Walker would have an impact comparable to that of Platoon (1986), Stone’s Oscar-winning liberal critique of Vietnam, and succeeded in securing half of the film’s production money (roughly $3 million) and a lucrative distribution deal with Universal Pictures, whose president, Tom Pollock, had once been his attorney. Pollock and Sean Daniel, Universal’s production chief, saw great commercial potential in the cult status achieved by Cox’s Repo Man, and hoped Walker could emulate David Lynch’s recent surreal crossover hit Blue Velvet (1986).45 In December 1985, Cox and co-producer Lorenzo O’Brien made a location-scouting trip to Nicaragua. The Peruvian-born O’Brien, who had made a documentary about the military junta in power in his home country when a student at UCLA in the 1970s, established contact with the Nicaraguan Film Commission and the Roman Catholic Church, which agreed to provide unique locations in the capital, Managua, and the historic city of Granada.46 These initial contacts soon blossomed, to the point where the Nicaraguan government itself adopted the film as a useful propaganda tool. For generations of Nicaraguans, William Walker had served as a graphic symbol – the gringo malo – of the many US occupations of their country. To the Sandinistas, therefore, a movie about Walker provided an opportunity to consolidate its recent electoral successes (the movement’s leader, Daniel Ortega, was made president in 1984) and to generate sympathy overseas for its cause in the civil war. Consequently, members of the government, including Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal and Vice-President Sergio Ramirez, gladly commented on the screenplay. ‘If this penetrates the commercial market in the United States’, Ramirez told the New York Times in March 1987, ‘it is going to open some eyes and change some minds.’ When shooting began, Sandinista troops and oﬃcers played native Nicaraguans and other Central Americans. Oﬃcial permission was given for the removal of telegraph poles from the

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streets of Granada to accentuate historical realism, and for the loan of a (blood-stained) Soviet-built helicopter.47 Filming took place over eight weeks between March and May 1987. The cast was made up largely of unknown actors, many of whom had collaborated with Cox on his earlier productions. The exceptions to this were Ed Harris, who played Walker, Peter Boyle, who played industrial magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt (‘the “big engine” of American free enterprise’, according to Wurlitzer), and Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin, who made a brief appearance as Walker’s deaf fiancée, Ellen Martin. Harris and other members of the cast and crew agreed to work for a substantially reduced fee partly because they supported the film’s political viewpoint.48 Walker’s idiosyncratic soundtrack was the work of Joe Strummer, the former leader of British punk band the Clash. Like several other British and American rock musicians in the 1980s – including Jackson Browne, Billy Bragg and U2’s Bono – Strummer had been campaigning against US interference in Nicaragua for a number of years.49 Walker opens in 1853. William Walker – adventurer, religious zealot and political visionary – leads an expedition of liberation into Mexico, which ends in defeat in Sonora. Back in the United States, Walker is tried for violating Mexico’s neutrality, but exonerates himself with a ringing speech about the mission of the American people to liberate the Western Hemisphere from oppression. Now a national celebrity, Walker accepts an invitation from Cornelius Vanderbilt to lead an expedition to Nicaragua, which is in need of ‘democracy’ and is ideally suited for a canal to open up trade routes to the Pacific. Walker returns from his meeting with Vanderbilt to find that his fiancée, Ellen, has died, but despite his anguish begins loading his men – fiftyeight mercenaries dubbed ‘Walker’s Immortals’ – and supplies for Nicaragua. On landing in Nicaragua, Walker is met by two collaborators who are generals of the country’s liberal party. The American then lays down the law about how liberators should behave, reinforcing this with three executions. An ambush as they head for the capital, Rivas, leaves many Immortals dead, but they eventually, if chaotically, triumph over the ‘rebels’. Walker sets up a puppet government, and becomes romantically involved with Yrena (Blanca Guerra), who secretly hates him for deposing and executing her lover. Walker then announces sweeping reforms, but his reign soon degenerates into brutal dictatorship. He also alienates Vanderbilt by entering into an alliance with other businessmen. Slavery is instituted and as Walker’s followers fight over the spoils, an insurrection is fomented by Yrena and other conspirators, helped by Vanderbilt’s cutting oﬀ Walker’s supplies. After a failed attempt on his life by Yrena, Walker orders the destruction of Rivas. As the town burns, and his men go on a last rampage of shooting and killing, US military helicopters arrive to rescue the Americans. However,

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‘Bringing peace, democracy and liberty’: oblivious of the bloodbath his mission has unleashed, a crazed William Walker (Ed Harris, in suit) leads his Immortals through the streets of Rivas. Walker (1987). Universal Studios.

Walker, who is now clearly insane, elects to stay and makes himself president. The closing scene shows Walker being executed by firing squad in 1860 in Honduras. As the credits roll, television footage juxtaposes pictures of Ronald Reagan in Congress and US troops on ‘defensive manoeuvres’ on the Honduras-Nicaragua border with the bodies of Nicaraguan civilians murdered by the Contras. Walker’s bare outline belies the film’s anarchic tone and politically jarring style. Three areas stand out in this respect. The first is Walker’s anachronistic humour. By populating the world of the 1850s with Coca-Cola bottles, Mercedes-Benz sedans, computers and television journalists, Walker on the one hand consciously frustrates audience expectations about the historical film genre, and on the other tells viewers that the doctrine of Manifest Destiny remains an axiom of modern-day US foreign policy. Cox and Wurlitzer’s original ending actually made the connection between past and present US incursions into Nicaragua even more explicit. In this scenario, Walker was to be whisked out of Rivas by the CIA aboard the US helicopters and then make a speech in modern-day Florida at a fundraising dinner for the Contras, flanked by anti-Castro Cubans and pro-Reagan celebrities like the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Charlton Heston. This ending was dropped on the advice of Ed Pressman, who argued that it would make Walker look ‘a State Department asshole’ rather than a Napoleonic figure, and the speech was moved instead to an earlier cathedral scene.50 Cox later regretted not having sprinkled his film with even more contemporary objects from the start instead of from half-way

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through (baseball bats, TV dinners, even plane wreckage all appear in draft scripts), which would certainly have lent it greater continuity.51 The uneasy marriage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century images is accompanied by the disjunction between image and sound, in which voiceover narration, dialogue, and non-diegetic music are contradicted by the miseen-scène. This serves to heighten the satirical tone of the movie and to sharpen its criticism of the Americans’ behaviour. For instance, Walker opens with upbeat Latin music that is wholly at odds with the images of violent death and destruction during a battle in Senora. The slow-motion displays of bloodshed in this and later battle scenes, complete with semi-comical spaghettiWestern-style sound eﬀects, deliberately ape the work of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, and are meant to bring home to ‘the carnage-addicted, Rambo-loving American audiences’ (as Cox labelled them) the violent nature of US interventionism. (In an early script, one of the Immortals was called ‘Captain Schwarzenegger’, in honour of the musclebound star of the mid-1980s hits The Terminator and Commando.)52 Throughout the film, Ed Harris’s lofty voice-over narration is repeatedly undercut by actions on screen. Thus, when the voice speaks of cultural reforms, we see natives being flogged. When it proclaims the virtues of regenerating a nation, we see Walker’s motley crew of mercenaries boozing, brawling, stealing from natives, and assaulting females of more than one species (‘The colonel says it’s a democracy’, shouts one Immortal, as he climbs into a sheep pen and lowers his trousers). Walker’s obliviousness of the consequences of his dictatorial actions, together with the Immortals’ depravity, reflected Cox’s penchant for the bizarre and grotesque. This tied in with his assertions that absurdist humour was more likely to shock the audience into action, and that Walker ultimately typified the madness that went hand in hand with notions of cultural and racial superiority: ‘a guy completely out of touch with reality, who thought he was acting on Christian principles but who blinded himself to the fact that he was slaughtering the people he came to regenerate’.53 Cox thought carefully about how to present Walker and his cohorts for maximum political impact. Prior to filming, one correspondent warned Cox that his script depicted Walker as too ‘wacky’ and that it overlooked the Immortals’ misplaced idealism. Consequently, the script encouraged the audience ‘to dismiss the story as an aberration rather than to recognise it as a stereotype’. Certain parts of early versions of the script highlighting Walker’s zany personality were ultimately cut by Cox – his obsession with insects, for example. At the same time, the final print further heightened the Immortals’ vulgarity. For instance, immediately after setting foot in Nicaragua, instead of marching past a number of bare-breasted women in the river without breaking ranks, the Immortals run

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amok. Doubtless seen as gratuitous by some viewers, such scenes in the filmmakers’ eyes functioned as a commentary on the psychosexual character of American puritans who subordinated women and peoples of colour, and ascribed capitalist exploitation of Third World people to institutionalised racism and sexism.54 Walker opened in the United States in December 1987. Rarely can a political film three years in the making have enjoyed such a timely release. In response to newspaper revelations, in November 1986 Ronald Reagan told stunned Americans that, unbeknownst to him, elements within his government had been selling arms to an avowed enemy, Iran, in exchange for the release of US hostages held in the Middle East. Worse still, part of the profits from the arms had been diverted to provide military assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras during a period when Congress had explicitly outlawed any such aid. Reagan conducted a damage-limitation exercise by dismissing the National Security Council Director, John Poindexter, and his aide Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Vietnam veteran who had run a multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign for the Contras among conservative Americans. Despite this, during the summer of 1987, joint Senate and House special committees conducted nationally televised hearings on the IranContra aﬀair. These hearings aroused as much public interest as Watergate. The evidence of oﬃcial intrigue and deception severely weakened Reagan’s personal standing, and wholly contradicted Washington’s claim to be running a morally revitalised foreign policy.55 With the Iran-Contra scandal having put Nicaragua and the dirty underbelly of US Cold War strategy at the very centre of national aﬀairs for most of 1987, Walker looked an odds-on box oﬃce hit. For one thing, the parallels between the scandal and the film amounted to a publicist’s dream: the privatisation of diplomacy and war, the role of soldiers of fortune, and clandestine acts in exotic locations. However, in the event the Iran-Contra aﬀair probably seriously undermined the film’s takings. Walker had attracted a considerable amount of interest among American film critics before news of the IranContra connection surfaced. After November 1986, political journalists then joined the fray, looking for a novel angle on US-Nicaraguan relations, and helping to make the film an even greater subject of controversy. During shooting, liberal newspapers like the Los Angeles Times ran lengthy location reports on Walker, linking the film to their own long-standing anti-Contra propaganda campaigns. Other magazines more to the political right, such as Newsweek (an issue of which appeared in the movie) and Time, noted the Nicaraguan government’s enthusiastic support for the project and consequently condemned the film as blatant Sandinista propaganda.56 Ever the opportunist, Cox responded to these barbs in typically aggressive fashion. By openly comparing

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Walker with the ‘criminals’ Oliver North and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Aﬀairs Elliott Abrams – ‘all white guys coming down to small countries thinking they can do anything’ – Cox sought to highlight the relevance of his movie for the public, and to express his anger at the fact that, like Walker and Vanderbilt before them, the perpetrators of the Iran-Contra scandal would most probably get away with a slap on the wrist.57 In an atmosphere of increasing constitutional crisis, one that might even result in a presidential impeachment, Universal executives regarded such statements as ill-advised and inflammatory. Having allowed the filmmakers a relatively free hand in the early stages of the project, on seeing the rushes the company’s executives and the marketing agents began to get cold feet. Walker, they protested, was meant to be a liberal interpretation of nineteenth-century adventurism. Cox’s version was diagnosed as far too alienating, both politically and stylistically. If Cox expected any support from Ed Pressman in the face of these severe criticisms, he was deluded. Pressman had already succeeded in politically toning down the film’s ending at final scripting stage. During the shooting phase, he then grew exasperated by what he saw as Cox’s wildly extravagant approach to moviemaking.58 Consequently, Universal took the decision to stifle Walker by limiting both publicity and theatrical release. The film opened in only eight American cities in December 1987. On the west coast, in Los Angeles, the movie was released on only two screens, where it played for just three weeks. During this period, the Los Angeles Weekly ran only one advert for the film. On the east coast, in New York, Walker could be found on only three screens, where it played for a month. This was a dismal showing for a film which had cost $6 million. Universal then forbade Cox to take Walker to the Havana Festival, the foremost film market in Latin America, and the company’s international subsidiary, UIP, delayed a Central American release.59 Cox reacted angrily to what he saw as blatant political censorship. He even ventured a comparison between himself and the way dissident filmmakers had been marginalised in the Soviet Union.60 Whatever truth there was in this, the fact was that the Englishman had slipped up badly. Walker was never likely to appeal to a broad cross-section of the film-going public due its nihilistic format. As a film buﬀ, Cox should have known that its postmodern historical narrative would be unacceptable to a public brought up on realistic representations of the past. Wurlitzer had hinted at this when complaining about the addition of anachronistic touches at the scriptwriting stage. Many people who saw the film simply did not find it entertaining. With a few exceptions, the trade press in the United States had nothing positive to say about Walker. Variety called it a ‘virtual fiasco’, BoxOﬃce ‘very weird’.61 Walker generated more than its fair share of heat in the political press, but there is no evidence that the film changed people’s minds about US policy in

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Nicaragua. Predictably, some newspapers on the left sang its praises. ‘If . . . Walker’s metaphorical message makes a fraction of the eventual audience think more closely about what their tax dollars are paying for’, said the New York Village Voice, ‘then Cox’s extraordinary vision of history returning will have reaped a rich dividend.’ Newspapers on the right, on the other hand, lambasted Walker for being gratuitously anti-American and pretentious. More significantly perhaps, some who were hostile to the Contras applauded the movie’s message but were either bewildered by its surrealism or alienated by its heavy-handedness. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, for one, witheringly described the film as ‘a wasted opportunity’ and a ‘bloated excess’. Hollywood’s best-known liberal, Robert Redford, announced that he would direct and star in his own film about Walker, to set the record straight (this never materialised).62 In Nicaragua itself, once released, Walker played to packed houses in Managua, but even here pro-government newspapers objected to its excessively violent content and satirical tone. Walker just might have succeeded at the box oﬃce as an ‘alternative’ film, despite Universal’s lack of support, if it had been more aesthetically accessible to a liberal audience. The fact is it was not. The movie earned a pitifully small sum – $257,000 – and taught Cox that the greater freedom which unorthodox foreign filmmakers had to criticise American Cold War policy during the 1980s came at a price. Walker eﬀectively finished his Hollywood career.63 BUDDIES ON A NEW BEAT Two months after Walker’s premiere, in February 1988, the Soviet state film agency, Goskino, hosted Moscow’s first major American film festival. Hollywood celebrities in attendance included Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and The Muppets’ creator Jim Henson. Among the movies screened in the Soviet Union for the first time were The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980), and Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942), which starred Ronald Reagan. The name of the US body which sponsored the festival, Film and Theatre Diplomacy, in itself suggested that at least some figures within Hollywood had shifted from a hardline Cold War footing.64 A few months later, at the historic Moscow Summit of May 1988, Ronald Reagan confirmed the political distance he personally had travelled since issuing his anti-Soviet call to arms in 1981 and inviting John Rambo, né Sylvester Stallone, to the White House in 1986. Paying his first visit to the Soviet Union, Reagan sought to set the seal on the burgeoning new era of Russo-American harmony the best way he knew how. The president presented his host, Mikhail Gorbachev, with the video-cassette of a film: William Wyler’s story of Quaker

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pacifism in the American Civil War, Friendly Persuasion (1956). Demonstrating once again his ability to draw lessons from an imagined, mediated past, Reagan asked his audience at a State Dinner at the Kremlin to take heed of the film’s message about ‘holding out for a better way of settling things’.65 Hollywood’s political mainstream tracked fairly accurately the extraordinary change in superpower relations that took place in the mid-to-late 1980s. The chief instigator of that change, Mikhail Gorbachev, became Soviet leader in March 1985, but even before this date a couple of American movies had hinted at the chances for meaningful, lasting East-West détente. In Michael Apted’s Gorky Park (1983), for instance, William Hurt and Brian Dennehy played Russian and American police oﬃcers teaming up to solve a triple homicide in Moscow.66 Released a year later, Moscow on the Hudson, Paul Mazursky’s gentle comedy about a Muscovite saxophonist who defects to New York, appeared at first sight to be an updated Ninotchka. Once again, the Russian character (played by Robin Williams) is overcome by Western consumerism – literally in this case: he faints when he sees the choice of goods available in Bloomingdale’s. However, the film ended up showing that both Russia and the United States had their problems and attractions, and consequently that the West and the East had a lot to learn from one another.67 A few years on, and Gorbachev’s dual assault on communist orthodoxy – glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform) – was in full swing. Alongside a greater freedom of expression for the Soviet media (including filmmakers) came conciliatory overtures to the West, and the conclusion of concrete armsreductions agreements. These moves were designed by the Kremlin to secure a stable environment within which the Soviet Union could restructure its economy and thereby guarantee its survival as a superpower. However, to many in the outside world Gorbachev’s ‘New Thinking’ (‘Novoye Myshlenniye’) in international aﬀairs appeared to oﬀer the prospect of a permanent breakthrough in East-West tensions.68 Rick Rosenthal’s Russkies (1987) reflected the new dynamics of the Cold War through a tale about the friendship between three American boys and a forlorn Soviet sailor washed up on the coast of Florida. A combination of Steven Spielberg’s mega-hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Norman Jewison’s 1966 comedy The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, Rosenthal’s Russkies refuted Red Dawn’s message that all American youngsters wanted to kill the first Russians they saw. The film treats the boys’ parents’ hysterical fear of the communist Other as nonsensical and repugnant.69 Red Heat, which made $35 million at the US box oﬃce in the summer of 1988,70 continued Hollywood’s revamping of the Soviet-American relationship, but from a quite diﬀerent perspective. Its rationale was that Moscow and Washington needed to overlook their rapidly diminishing ideological

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diﬀerences in order to join forces against a new, common enemy – narcoterrorists. A tale of two cities (Moscow and Chicago) masquerading as an apolitical conventional buddy/cop movie, Red Heat was in reality a natural extension of Hollywood’s long-term targeting of communism. Now that the Soviet Union was becoming more like America and the Cold War seemed to be coming to an end, the ‘hard centre’ of the American film industry was turning its sights on what many politicians – especially those on the right – saw as the more serious threat to the nation’s well-being and security. Red Heat was financed by Carolco Pictures, a major force among independent production companies in the 1980s principally because of the success of its Rambo series. Red Heat’s director, Walter Hill, was born in 1942 and had entered the film industry in the late 1960s after a brief stint drilling for oil. By the 1980s, Hill had become a powerful writer, director and producer, best known for making visually stylish action movies. Hill had little interest in using film for overtly political purposes. He had rejected Kevin Reynolds’ ‘Ten Soldiers’ script in the early 1980s, for example, because it was too controversial.71 Hill’s original story for Red Heat was a cross between Ninotchka and his 1982 white-black, cop-crook blockbuster 48 Hours, which starred Nick Nolte and comedian Eddie Murphy as a mismatched duo tracking down police killers in San Francisco. A burly Russian police oﬃcer, Ivan Danko, who is hunting for a cop-killing Georgian drugs lord in Chicago, would substitute for Greta Garbo’s surly envoy in Paris. Her boyfriend Leon’s part would be taken by a wise-cracking, slovenly American detective, Art Ridzik. Through the tetchy relationship between these two characters, the film would have fun comparing and contrasting Soviet and American attitudes towards crime, sex and international politics.72 Hill’s co-scriptwriters on Red Heat were themselves an unusual pairing. Russian-born Harry Kleiner’s writing credits stretched back to the Second World War, and included an array of fast-paced dramas such as Le Mans (Lee H. Katzin, 1971). Kleiner, Hill and Carolco had recently collaborated on Extreme Prejudice (1987), a cop-cum-CIA conspiracy drama that focused on drug-traﬃcking across the Texas-Mexico border and was based on an original story by John Milius.73 Troy Kennedy Martin, on the other hand, had been one of Britain’s most influential television screenwriters since the 1960s, and stood on the political left. His most recent drama for the BBC, Edge of Darkness, broadcast in 1985, had depicted the American and British governments murdering anti-nuclear activists.74 Kennedy Martin’s draft scripts of Red Heat contained more jokes at America’s expense than appeared in the final cut of the film. His scripts also questioned the benefits American-style political and economic liberalisation would bring the Soviet Union more than did the film that audiences got to see.75

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Casting the two lead roles was important, politically as well as commercially. If the actors failed to hit it oﬀ on screen, Red Heat would die at the box oﬃce. If their personas were insuﬃciently diﬀerent, the culture-clashing element of the film would not work. Choosing James Belushi to play Chicago detective Art Ridzik, rather than a more slapstick-oriented comedy actor like Steve Martin or Chevy Chase, paid dividends. Belushi’s rebellious persona, honed since his breakthrough as a comedian on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, enhanced Ridzik’s – and America’s – free-spirited image. Arnold Schwarzenegger was perfect to play the latter-day Ninotchka, Ivan Danko, a straitlaced but trustworthy and ultimately lovable Russian. Schwarzenegger was no Mikhail Baryshnikov, the star of White Nights (1985), a real-life Russian defector-turned-actor, but he was the closest thing to it, having left Austria (where he was born in 1947) to become a naturalised American. Schwarzenegger made no secret of the eﬀect the Soviet occupation of his home country during the early Cold War had had on his childhood, and about why it had helped turn him into a staunch defender of democracy and a card-carrying Republican. Moreover, his much-publicised Cinderellalike rise from humble beginnings to become one of Hollywood’s top moneymaking stars embodied the realisation of the American dream. The former Mr Universe’s moulded physique was ‘harder’ than Greta Garbo’s but no less striking, and thus would fit the well-established brawn-without-brains Russian stereotype. In fact, Schwarzenegger had employed his muscles to great patriotic eﬀect on the screen in the eighties, meting out summary justice to America’s domestic and external enemies in films like Raw Deal (John Irvin, 1986) and Predator (John McTiernan, 1986). Schwarzenegger shaved ten pounds oﬀ his bodyweight to look more convincingly ‘Slavic’ in Red Heat. Russian vocal training for the movie enhanced his famously thick-accented delivery of American slang phrases.76 Red Heat starts right within the Bear’s cave: a very Russian, unisex, dungeonlike steambath (or banya) in Moscow. Muscle-men shovel coal and pump iron, while nude women cavort like prostitutes. The heart of the Soviet empire – the scene was actually filmed in Budapest – is a picture of medieval debauchery. A scantily clad, beautifully proportioned Captain Ivan Danko, the head of Moscow’s homicide division, is here for business, not pleasure. His quarry is Viktor Rosta (Ed O’Ross), a murderous cocaine dealer. Danko is attacked by a group of bearded Mongolian goliaths, but shows them the meaning of rough justice with his bare fists. Though Viktor is not to be found, Danko discovers where he will be that evening. Cut to Red Square. Mock Cyrillic credits begin to roll, accompanied by harsh, imitation-Prokofiev music scored by James Horner (son of Harry, the director of Red Planet Mars). As the choir intones and bells clamour, we are

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given a mini-tour of Hollywood’s age-old Soviet stereotypes. Red Army guardsmen goose-stepping across the cobbles signify an overdisciplined, militarised society. Statues of Marx and Lenin, shot from below to look more imposing, represent the communist cult of personality. A one-legged, greysuited man hobbles by on crutches, the personification of communist sclerosis. However, in contrast with other such scenes in countless previous films, this footage is not faked. Red Heat was glasnost in action – the first entirely American-produced movie which incorporated some scenes shot on location in the Soviet Union.77 Fade to a squalid Moscow café, the Druzhba. As Danko and his state police colleagues pass through searching for Viktor, the look of terror and hatred on the customers’ faces is palpable. The traces of the firm hand of repression cannot easily be erased, it seems, even in Gorby’s new-look Soviet Union. Danko once again pulverises those who stand in his way, but Viktor escapes, in the process mercilessly executing Danko’s partner and friend, Yuri, with a concealed pistol. Yuri’s funeral is a grey, pathetic occasion. His aged relatives – local extras recruited by the filmmakers for their ‘hard Soviet look’ – are cold and detached. Their emotions, we assume, have been stripped bare by decades of communism.78 Six months on and Viktor is at large in Chicago’s downtown jungle. Having exploited America’s lax immigration laws, he is now allied to a violent black street gang called the Cleanheads, and about to close a deal that will flood the Eastern bloc with drugs bought with Russian roubles on the US market. However, just before he has the chance to purchase the drug haul Viktor is apprehended by the Windy City’s finest for a minor traﬃc violation. The Moscow police get word of the arrest and Danko is sent to the United States to retrieve the fugitive. Danko’s smuggling of a huge handgun through diplomatic baggage exposes the flaws in American airport security and, like the United States’ ‘open borders’, highlights the country’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Danko’s arrival in Chicago immediately lightens the movie’s hitherto depressive tone. A mixture of comedy and tension prevails from here on in rather than sombre drama, suggesting fun is only available in the West. Danko is partnered with his alter ego, plain-clothes detective Art Ridzik. Initially, the two cannot stand one another. The Russian is grimly eﬃcient, straight-backed and humourless; the American likes to cut corners, is overweight and loudmouthed. ‘I’m parked in a RED zone. No oﬀence!’, Ridzik cracks, when picking up Danko at the airport. Like Ninotchka on her arrival in Paris, Danko is disgusted by Chicago’s seediness. ‘Kapitalism’, he spits, when his hotel TV set shows a porn movie. Yet unlike Ninotchka, Danko does not succumb more to Western luxuries and freedoms the longer he stays. He loosens up somewhat – changing into a

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suit instead of a military-style uniform, for instance – but he never once considers defecting. There is no need for him to. For one thing, his younger, less regimented generation is going to benefit from Russia’s Westernisation. And Danko is a proud Russian nationalist, not, like Ninotchka, a devout communist who needs to be converted to capitalism. His pursuit of Viktor is fuelled both by revenge and by the fact that the narcotics kingpin is a Georgian, the implication being that Russia, like the United States, is awash with criminal ‘foreign’ subversives who don’t belong there. Viktor’s nationality, plus Danko’s sturdiness and Schwarzenegger’s fame in Russia via black-market videos, help to explain Moscow’s oﬃcial support for Red Heat.79 However, from the start Ridzik and Danko have one very important thing in common – both like to crack sleazebags’ heads. The diﬀerence turns out to be that Danko has more freedom to blast away at bad guys in a closed communist society than Ridzik has in an open democracy that over-protects criminals’ rights. The film shows that (akin to the US Army in Vietnam perhaps) the streetwise American cop is fighting the enemy with one hand tied behind his back by weak-kneed bureaucrats. This message echoed President Reagan’s frequent accusations that liberals in Congress were preventing him from ‘doing his job’. Red Heat strongly hinted that the Russian state’s ruthless techniques would be far more eﬀective in sweeping undesirables from America’s decadent streets than the West’s namby-pamby, form-filling methods. It would seem, therefore, that America had something to learn from Soviet authoritarianism after all.80 Ridzik and Danko begin to realise they are on the same side against a new enemy – international narcotics smugglers – when Viktor escapes their clutches. The Soviet authorities fail to inform the American police how important a prisoner they are holding, for fear of airing their dirty laundry in public. This ingrained secrecy leads to the gun-toting Cleanheads springing Viktor from his casual handover to Danko, and to the killing of Ridzik’s own partner, Gallagher (Richard Bright). To add insult to injury, in time-honoured fashion, Soviet consul oﬃcials then berate the hospitalised Danko for failing in his assignment and humiliating the Russian government. They order him to return home for suitable punishment. Taking a lesson from Ridzik’s rule-breaking book, Danko ignores these orders and uses his own initiative. He and Ridzik travel to Stateville Prison to speak to Abdul Elijah (Brent Jennings), head of the Elijah Brotherhood, who controls the Cleanheads and a vast international drug-traﬃcking racket from his cell. Danko hopes to win Elijah over by comparing the Soviet Union’s struggle against American imperialism with that of the black Americans’ struggle for racial equality, but only exposes himself to ridicule by revealing how ignorant he is of eighties radical black nationalism. When pressed as to

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what political crime he committed, Elijah tells Danko, ‘I robbed a bank.’ Elijah tells Danko he is fighting the race and class war by selling drugs to every white man around the world, and as such he and the Brotherhood are ‘the only Marxists around here’. The fact that Ridzik’s superior, Stobbs (Larry Fishburne), is black tells us that race is no barrier to an individual’s progress in contemporary America. Danko and Ridzik begin to form the perfect renegade team as they delve ever more deeply into Chicago’s underworld. The Russian breaks stoolpigeons’ fingers and is incorruptible, while the warm-hearted American thinks on his feet and knows Russians take their tea in a glass with sugar. The closer they get to one another and to their target, the more they banter goodnaturedly about the quality of life in their respective societies. Ridzik introduces Danko to America’s ‘four main food groups – hamburgers, French fries, coﬀee, and doughnuts’; Danko ribs the American by boasting about the greater firepower of Soviet-made police handguns. Ticked oﬀ by Danko’s criticisms of Chicago’s depravity, Ridzik bites back, encapsulating the pair’s – and the film’s – attitude towards politics and criminality: Ridzik: Tell me somethin’, Captain. If you got such a fuckin’ paradise, how come you’re up the same creek as we are with heroin and cocaine? Danko: Chinese find way. Right after Revolution, they lined up all drug dealers, all drug addicts, took them to public square and shot them in back of head. Ridzik: Never work here. Fuckin’ politicians wouldn’t go for it. Danko: Shoot them first.

Like Red Dawn and Walker, Red Heat reaches a suitably spectacular and violent climax. Viktor strangles his American wife, whom he only married for a green card, to prevent her going to the authorities. When the drug deal finally goes down, Viktor then double-crosses the Cleanheads by killing their point man at an American Liberty Lines bus station, and making oﬀ with the merchandise. Danko and Ridzik catch up with Viktor via a tip-oﬀ but cannot prevent him commandeering a bus, which he drives oﬀ in. The cops give chase in a bus of their own, and, after a game of chicken, force Viktor to crash into a speeding train. Finally, Danko despatches Viktor in a Western-style gunslinger’s shoot-out. At the very end, Ridzik and Danko bid a fond farewell at O’Hare Airport. Danko tells Ridzik that Russians have started to play baseball, and the two argue comically over who – America or the Soviet Union – would win an international World Series. Finally, they exchange watches as a symbol of EastWest friendship. Ridzik gives the Russian his $1,000 Swiss Rolex; Danko presents the American with his $20 East German wind-up.

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Time for a fresh start: bearing the scars of their joint war on drugs, Ridzik (James Belushi) and Danko (Arnold Schwarzenegger) say goodbye at the end of Red Heat (1988). Carolco/The Kobal Collection.

CONCLUSION Hollywood’s politico-financial ‘empire’ did indeed strike back during the final decade of the Cold War. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, America’s filmmaking culture had been increasingly dominated by directors. Together with a wider scope for independent film production, this gave rise to greater creativity and political unorthodoxy on screen. In the 1980s, however, this culture was supplanted by one dominated by business-minded executives, agents and lawyers. With this came a new reliance on advertising and marketing, and new exhibition patterns that were aimed at a quick profit rather than gradual returns. In the early eighties, an average Hollywood film cost roughly $11 million to make and another $10 million to market; these sums inevitably militated against the production of risky material, political or otherwise. Like so much of the US economy in the Reagan era, the film industry was also deregulated. In 1985, the 1948 Supreme Court anti-trust ruling was reversed, allowing the major film companies to buy back into cinema chains, thus increasing their control over which movies could be shown and where. All of this, plus the shift to the political right caused partly by increased East-West tensions in the early part of the decade, explains why so much of Hollywood’s output in the 1980s spoke of reaction and conservative reassurance.81

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The three main films analysed above all fit into this new financial and political framework. Red Dawn on the one hand represented a return to McCarthyite anti-communist agit-prop, minus the HUAC factor. On the other hand, it reflected both the industry’s and the New Right’s appetite for violence – film executives saw stylised violence as a box oﬃce draw, whereas military and political hawks like Alexander Haig and Ronald Reagan believed warlike violence was part of a healthy society, if targeted at the enemy. The fact that a movie as critical of US Cold War strategy as Alex Cox’s Walker got made at all in the mid-1980s shows how far Hollywood had travelled politically since the McCarthy era. Yet Cox’s row with Universal also demonstrated that, though many of the constraints of the classical studio era had long gone, filmmakers were often still only as free as their distribution deal let them be. This lack of autonomy alerts us to the diﬃculties filmmakers had in making politically subversive statements even during the latter stages of the Cold War, when many people had long passed the point of looking at the conflict in simplistic terms and even when, as was the case with the Reagan administration’s actions in Central America, Congressional and public opinion were bitterly divided over an issue. Walter Hill’s Red Heat combined ‘high-concept’, easily marketable filmmaking with violence and a huge box oﬃce star (Schwarzenegger). Neither its makers nor its viewers probably regarded Red Heat as a ‘political’ movie. But it was so, of course, not least in the way in which it projected the political establishment’s view of the dangers that the United States faced in the new, post-Cold War world. By the late 1980s, many in Washington believed that drugs had already replaced communism as terrorism’s twin evil, and Red Heat pointed the way towards a joint US-Russian policing role to combat that dual threat. In September 1989, the United States and Soviet Union held a conference on how the two nations could work together against terrorists.82 In the same month, US Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney ordered his military commanders to devise new plans for a drug war. Three months later, in December 1989, US forces invaded Panama to overthrow President Manuel Noriega, on the grounds that he engaged in international drug-smuggling. America’s new enemies had started to fall.83 Hollywood’s last major contribution to the Cold War was John McTiernan’s $30-million blockbuster The Hunt for Red October. Based on Tom Clancy’s 1984 best-selling novel, which Ronald Reagan publicly called ‘a perfect yarn’, the movie was about a Soviet naval commander (played by the former James Bond, Sean Connery) who defects with his country’s new, untraceable nuclear submarine in order to avert a first strike on the United States and thereby hopefully establish the grounds for a post-Cold War alliance of Russian and American peoples. The US Navy gave McTiernan full logistical support after

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Steering a peaceful path ahead: sharing the helm of the Soviet nuclear super-sub, Captain Marko Ramius (Sean Connery) and CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) defeat the communist old guard at the climax of The Hunt for Red October (1990). Paramount/The Kobal Collection.

vetting the script, and Connery’s dialogue was partly written by John Milius. Back in 1985, when the producers Mace Neufeld and Jerry Sherlock had acquired the rights to Clancy’s book, Russia’s underwater fleet posed one of the most critical threats to the United States. By the time The Hunt for Red October hit the screens in March 1990, however, Moscow’s hold over Eastern Europe had collapsed, and Mikhail Gorbachev had famously declared, in December 1989, that his country no longer considered the United States its enemy. Despite being out of date, The Hunt for Red October was a huge commercial success. Many Americans presumably watched the film with mixed emotions – with an element of pride that the United States had ‘won’ the Cold War, tinged with relief that, in the process, they could consign such East-West doomsday nuclear scenarios to history once and for all.84 Notes 1 Cited in Philip John Davies and Paul Wells (eds), American Film and Politics from Reagan to Bush Jr (Manchester, 2002), p. 8. 2 The partial exception to this is India, where there is a long history of matinee idols entering politics. Some have served as state chief ministers. See Ram Avtar Agnihotri, Film Stars in Indian Politics (New Delhi, 1998).

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3 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (London, 1990), pp. 104–25; Gary Wills, Reagan’s America (New York, 1987), pp. 246–58. Reagan served as Guild president from 1947 to 1952 and returned for another year in 1959–60. 4 Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000), p. 60; Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 300. 5 On Reagan’s relationship with and, some argue, mastery of the media during his presidency see Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (New York, 1988) and John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts, The Press and the Presidency: From George Washington to Ronald Reagan (New York, 1985), pp. 531–53. 6 Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Public Diplomacy and the Private Sector: The United States Information Agency, its Predecessors and the Private Sector’, in Laville and Wilford (eds), Citizen Groups, p. 220. On Wick’s time at the USIA see Snyder, Warriors. Reagan also slotted others friends from his Hollywood days into political positions. Roy Brewer, for instance, a former head of the film trade union IATSE, and a life-long anti-communist, was given a high posting in the US Labour Department. May, Tomorrow, p. 212. 7 Rogin, Reagan, pp. 1–43 especially; James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York, 1994), pp. 267, 269; Jeﬀords, Hard Bodies, pp. 3–5. 8 Fitzgerald, Way Out There, pp. 34–8. 9 Ibid., pp. 24, 37, 74; Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York, 2000), pp. 289–90. 10 See, for instance, Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York, 1986); Chris Jordan, Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics (Westport, CT, 2003); Belton, American Cinema/American Culture; Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica. 11 Yablans’ eﬀorts to save the company failed. By the end of the 1980s, MGM/UA had been dismantled and its back lot sold. On this see Peter Bart, Fade Out: The Calamitous Final Days of MGM (New York, 1990). 12 Variety, 21 September 1988. 13 ‘Ten Soldiers’, revised second draft script by Kevin Reynolds, 27 October 1982, Collection 073, Box F-741, UCLA AL. 14 Bart, Fade Out, pp. 110–11; Variety, 16 June 1997, p. 34. 15 Marquee, June/July 1984, pp. 24–6. 16 American Film, March 1986, p. 48; Devine, Vietnam, pp. 219–21. 17 Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 10 February 1982 and 9 September 1984; Alexander Haig, Inner Circles: How America Changed the World: A Memoir (New York, 1992), p. 550. 18 ‘Red Dawn’ AKA ‘Ten Soldiers’, shooting script by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius, 19 October 1983, Collection 073, Box F-24, UCLA AL; Bart, Fade Out, pp. 111–13, 134; BAM, 7 September 1984, pp. 18–19. A still from the McDonald’s scene – showing four Red Army soldiers posing with a Russian tank under a Golden Arches sign – remained the most prominent advertisement for Red Dawn in the press.

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19 Bart, Fade Out, pp. 133–5, 138–9; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 2 April 1984; Red Dawn Production notes and Press book, AMPAS; Los Angeles Weekly, 17–23 August 1984, p. 37; Red Dawn budget file, Box 6, Buzz Feitshans Collection, AMPAS. 20 This is partly due to the frequency with which Reagan quoted lines from the movie. See, for instance, his speech on tax reform at the Santa-Cali-Gon Days Celebration in Independence, Missouri, in September 1985, at www.reagan. utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/90285a.htm (27 March 2006). Rambo: First Blood Part 2 made $200 million in the United States alone. On the movie’s cultural and political impact see Palmer, Eighties, pp. 62–3, 96–9. In early 1986, the New York Times reported that Rambo video-cassettes were much sought after even on the Russian black market. In that year, as part of a government-ordered Five Year Plan of anti-American movies, Soviet film-goers got to see actor Mikhail Nozhkin play their industry’s equivalent of John Rambo, making short work of American military terrorists in Mikhail Tumanishvili’s Solo Voyage. See Val Golovskoy, ‘Art and Propaganda in the Soviet Union 1980–5’, in Anna Lawton (ed.), The Red Screen: Politics, Society and Art in Soviet Cinema (London, 1992), pp. 264–74. 21 Green’s ‘invasion’ – which starts with a Soviet nuclear attack on Alaska – is not as ‘real’ as that depicted in Red Dawn. It turns out to be the result of a hypnotist’s trick, played on the patrons in a New York bar as a warning against complacency in the face of the communist threat. Hollywood Reporter, 3 December 1952, p. 3, and New York Times, 30 April 1953, p. 39. 22 Fitzgerald, Way Out There, pp. 37, 73. 23 Gibson, Warrior Dreams, pp. 270–4. 24 Jeﬀords, Hard Bodies, p. 12. 25 According to calculations conducted by a group calling itself the National Coalition on Television Violence, an act of violence occurred in Red Dawn at an average rate of 134 per hour or 2.23 per minute. This earned the film an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most acts of violence in a single film up to that time. New York Times, 16 September 1984, H19, 24. 26 On the strong propaganda component of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme see Fitzgerald, Way Out There. On Hollywood’s nuclear films of the 1980s, including Testament and The Day After, see Chapter 5, note 73, and Palmer, Eighties, pp. 179–205. 27 For a contemporary analysis of the revenge theme see Vincent Canby, New York Times, 8 December 1985, H21–2. 28 Cannon, President Reagan, p. 11; Marquee, June/July 1984, pp. 25–6. 29 Bart, Fade Out, p. 227–8; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 9 September 1984. 30 David Denby in New York, 20 August 1984, p. 90; Janet Maslin in New York Times, 19 August 1984, H15. 31 Wall Street Journal, 14 November 1984, p. 35; New York Times, 10 November 1984, pp. 48, 79. 32 Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 15 August and 9 September 1984.

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33 Andrew Britton, ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’, Movie, Vol. 31/32, Winter 1986, p. 17; Los Angeles Times, 21 September 1984; Soldier of Fortune, Vol. 9, No. 9, September 1984, pp. 28–31; Gibson, Warrior Dreams, pp. 161–2. 34 Variety, 2 and 9 January 1985; New York Times, 4 January 1986, p. 3. 35 Variety, 26 June 1985. In Rocky IV, ageing US boxer Rocky Balboa (played by Stallone) travels to Moscow, where he defeats a computer-programmed Russian, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). On the movie’s iconographic representation of the man versus machine cliché of American-Soviet relations see Palmer, Eighties, pp. 218–22. 36 Variety, 16 June 1997, p. 34; Los Angeles Times, 16 December 2003. 37 In June 1986, the OPD congratulated itself on having ‘played a key role in setting out the parameters and defining the terms of the public discussion on Central America policy’. Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne (eds), The IranContra Scandal: The Declassified History (New York, 1993), pp. 2–8. See also David Thelen, Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television: How Americans Challenged the Media and Seized Political Initiative during the Iran-Contra Aﬀair, 1985–1990 (Chicago, IL, 1996). 38 Steven Paul Davies, Alex Cox: Film Anarchist (London, 2000), pp. 15–16, 22, 32–45, 61, 79. 39 Walker Production notes, pp. 4–5, AMPAS; New York Times, 4 December 1987, C10; Mother Jones, December 1987, pp. 31, 38. On William Walker see E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798–1858 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 160–210. 40 Palmer, Eighties, pp. 134–48. On the diﬃculties Wexler had in shooting Latino in war-torn Nicaragua and in finding a distributor for his movie see ‘Latino: Cinecom International Press Kit’, AMPAS, and LA Weekly, 21 June 1985. 41 Davies, Cox, p. 95; Mother Jones, December 1987, p. 41. 42 Walker Press book, p. 4, and Production notes, p. 5, AMPAS; Rudy Wurlitzer, Walker (New York, 1987), pp. 20–1. 43 Walker Production notes, p. 5, AMPAS; Box 2, Folder 4, Alex Cox Papers, Collection 174, UCLA AL; Wurlitzer, Walker, p. 63ﬀ. 44 Walker Production notes, p. 5, AMPAS; Box 2, Folder 4, Cox Papers, UCLA AL; Davies, Cox, p. 100. 45 Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1987, pp. 16–23; Interview, December 1987, p. 154; New York Times, 22 March 1987, pp. 19, 37; Village Voice, 7 July 1987. 46 Walker Press book, pp. 6, 29, AMPAS. 47 Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1987, pp. 16–23; City Limits, 23–30 March 1989, p. 13; New York Times, 22 March 1987, pp. 19, 37; Wurlitzer, Walker, p. 12. 48 Walker Shooting schedule, Box 5, Folder 1, Cox Papers, UCLA AL; Wurlitzer, Walker, p. 14; Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1987, pp. 16–23; Walker Production notes, p. 13, AMPAS; New Musical Express, 5 September 1987, p. 22. 49 Robin Denselow, When the Music’s Over: The Story of Political Pop (London, 1988), pp. 181–6; Davies, Cox, p. 74.

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50 Walker script, dated 29 October 1986, Box 2, Folder 5, Cox Papers, UCLA AL; Wurlitzer, Walker, p. 25. 51 Walker scripts, dated 29 October 1986 and 7 January 1987, Box 2, Folder 5, Cox Papers, UCLA AL; Cox’s interview with Cork City-based filmmaker Chris Neill, October 2002, www.senseofcinema.com/contents/03/24/walker.html (5 September 2004). For a more detailed analysis of Walker’s unusual take on the historical film genre see Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘Walker: The Dramatic Film as (Postmodern) History’, and Sumiko Higashi, ‘Walker and Mississippi Burning: Postmodernism versus Illusionist Narrative’, in Robert A. Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 188–213. 52 Sight and Sound, Vol. 56, No. 4, Autumn 1987, pp. 250–1; Walker script, undated but between 29 October 1986 and 7 January 1987, Box 2, Folder 6, Cox Papers, UCLA AL. The directors of The Terminator (1984) and Commando (1985) were James Cameron and Mark L. Lester respectively. 53 Wurlitzer, Walker, p. i. 54 Rob Moore to Alex Cox, 11 March 1987, Box 2, Folder 4; Walker script, dated 29 October 1986, Box 2, Folder 5: Cox Papers, UCLA AL. 55 Kornbluh and Byrne, The Iran-Contra Scandal, pp. xv, xx, 408. 56 Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1987, pp. 16–23; Los Angeles Weekly, 15–21 January, 1988, p. 41; Cineaste, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1988, pp. 12–16, 52–3. 57 Newsweek, 20 April 1987, p. 44. In 1989, Oliver North was sentenced to a threeyear suspended prison term, having been found guilty of three charges in relation to his activities while at the National Security Council. A year later, his convictions were overturned on the grounds that his Congressional testimony prejudiced his right to a fair trial. During the Iran-Contra Aﬀair, Elliott Abrams was indicted for giving false testimony about his role in the illicit money-raising schemes by the special prosecutor handling the case, but he pleaded guilty to two lesser oﬀences of withholding information from Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. President George Bush pardoned Abrams along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants shortly before leaving oﬃce in 1992. Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up (New York, 1998), pp. 158–9, 490–510. 58 Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1987, pp. 16–23; City Limits, 23–30 March 1989, pp. 13–14; Davies, Cox, p. 100. 59 Los Angeles Weekly listings, 10–24 December 1987 – Walker advertisement 4 December 1987, p. 82; Village Voice listings, 10–13 December 1987; City Limits, 23–30 March 1989, pp. 13–14. 60 Wurlitzer, Walker, pp. 24–5; Guardian, 30 March 1989, p. 27; Davies, Cox, p. 101. 61 Variety’s Film Reviews, Vol. 20, 1987–8 (New York, 1991), 2 December 1987; BoxOﬃce, February 1988. 62 Village Voice, cited in Wurlitzer, Walker, p. ii; Commonweal, 29 January 1988; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 4 December 1987, p. 11; Davies, Cox, p. 100.

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63 Los Angeles Times, 5 March 1988, VI, 8; Davies, Cox, p. 104; www.imdb.com/ title/tt0096409/business (25 March 2006). 64 Los Angeles Times, 10 February 1988; Palmer, Eighties, p. 209. 65 Palmer, Eighties, p. 21; Reagan’s toast, 30 May 1988, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1988: Book 1: Jan. 1–July 1, 1988 (Washington, DC, 1988), p. 680. Ironically, and probably unbeknownst to Reagan, the screenplay of Friendly Persuasion was credited to a communist writer, Michael Stevens. See Joseph Dmohowski, ‘The Friendly Persuasion (1956) Screenplay Controversy: Michael Wilson, Jessamyn West, and the Hollywood Blacklist’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 22, No. 4, 2002, pp. 491–514. 66 Films and Filming, February 1984, p. 36. 67 Hollywood Reporter, 28 March 1984, p. 419. 68 S. J. Ball, The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991 (London, 1998), pp. 221–6. 69 Variety, 4 November 1987, p. 11; Hollywood Reporter, 25 May 1982, p. 3; Motion Picture Herald, 25 May 1966, p. 525. 70 BoxOﬃce, September 1988; www.imdb.com/title/tt0095963/business (27 March 2006). 71 Katz, Encyclopedia, p. 631; Bart, Fade Out, p. 110. 72 Los Angeles Times, 25 October 1987; Adrian Wright, Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Life in Film (London, 1994), p. 103. 73 Katz, Encyclopedia, p. 756; Variety, 29 April 1987, p. 16. 74 Movie, January 1989, pp. 34–45. 75 See, for instance, first draft shooting script of Red Heat, undated, by Troy Kennedy Martin and Walter Hill, Collection 073, Box 741, UCLA AL. 76 US, 17 June 1988; Red Heat Production notes, AMPAS; Laurence Leamer, Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger (New York, 2005). Schwarzenegger followed in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps when he was elected Governor of California in 2003. 77 Red Heat Production Notes, AMPAS; Variety, 17 February 1988; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 10 February 1988. 78 ‘Making of Red Heat’, Red Heat DVD (2001), Momentum Pictures MP024D. 79 Variety, 17 February 1988; Wright, Schwarzenegger, p. 104. 80 Lone citizen-warriors battling against petty functionaries to defeat foreign robber terrorists or drug-smugglers were a staple theme in mid-to-late eighties Hollywood movies like Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988). On this see Jeﬀords, Hard Bodies, pp. 58–63, and Palmer, Eighties, pp. 110–11, 130–2. 81 Lev, American Films of the 70s, pp. 181–5; Jeﬀords, Hard Bodies, p. 16; Thomas Schatz, ‘The Hollywood Studio System’, in Crowdus (ed.), Companion, pp. 199–204. 82 Los Angeles Times, 29 September 1989. 83 Gibson, Warrior Dreams, pp. 288–91.

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84 Lee Pfeiﬀer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery (New York, 1993), pp. 238–41; Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 570–9. Another Cold War drama, John Frankenheimer’s The Fourth War, was also made in 1989 and appeared two weeks after The Hunt for Red October. This was about two aged, hawkish commanders (one American, the other Russian) who carry out their own private and outdated war against each other on the German-Czechoslovakia border. It hardly made a dent at the box oﬃce. Variety, 14 March 1990, p. 21.

Conclusion

I won’t be so bold as to say that American movies are responsible for the popular uprising in China. But I am willing to bet that for more than a few Chinese citizens our films served as an inspiration to strike for something better. Richard Frank, President of Walt Disney Studios, to the US Congress, July 19891

Female Soviet apparatchiks spellbound by Parisian lingerie. Emotionally deranged subversives betraying their wholesome American families for the communist cause. Giant alien robots espousing nuclear disarmament. Revamped Old Testament stories of freedom versus dictatorship. Brave black Americans campaigning for racial progress. GIs forced to play Russian roulette for the entertainment of their Viet Cong captors. Globe-trotting Western spies slaying KGB assassins with a hi-tech gizmo in one hand and a curvaceous blonde in another. Kafkaesque CIA agents murdering their colleagues for oil. Muscle-bound Russian cops beating America’s new drugdealing enemies to a pulp. Hollywood made hay with the Cold War, plundering the conflict for profit and propaganda from beginning to end. Cold War themes appeared in a multitude of genres including musicals, Westerns, biblical epics, romantic comedies, science-fiction fantasies, documentaries, detective thrillers and absurdist biopics. The result was thousands of images – some bland, some compelling – that helped millions of people worldwide to grasp the ‘real’ meaning of a conflict that for most of them was peculiarly abstract and, for many Americans especially, was fought solely on an imaginary level. In Cold War Russia, as befitted Lenin’s famous post-revolutionary assertion that cinema was the most important of all the arts, film propaganda was controlled almost entirely from the centre. Film studios were nationalised, cultural commissars scrutinised the content of movies, and a plethora of state organisations regulated celluloid imports and exports. The ‘cultural thaws’ ushered in by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s and Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s did allow Russian filmmakers a modicum of artistic freedom. But the need to adhere to the grand master narrative of socialism

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meant that formal ideology – Marxist-Leninist and often Social Realist – stubbornly retained its oﬃcial primacy throughout the duration of the EastWest stand-oﬀ.2 By contrast, in Cold War America, oﬃcial controls over the mass media were weaker than those not only in the Eastern bloc, but in many parts of the Western world too. In Britain, for instance, the government appointed the BBC’s Board of Governors and had the authority to revoke the corporation’s licence. In France, the state consistently subsidised film production and restricted imports, partly to counter what it saw as the cultural menace of Hollywood.3 On the whole, the American mass media supported its government’s anti-communist stance during the Cold War chiefly because their owners and employees shared Washington’s ideological worldview.4 Unlike in the Soviet Union, therefore, the state had no need to dictate the propaganda ‘line’, say to journalists in New York or to filmmakers in Los Angeles. American Cold War film propaganda was not simply the expression of oﬃcial ideology but involved a range of diﬀerent ideologies, discourses and institutions, all of which had some influence on the representation of the United States at war. Accordingly, the Hollywood-state relationship was far more consensual than that between filmmakers and government in the communist world and, in creative terms, far more of a two-way street. It was in this sense a real ‘network’, one in which the partners could both feel they had a genuine stake and room for manoeuvre. The network’s informality and fluidity meant that, though American films by and large followed the contours of the Cold War set by the politicians, Hollywood’s treatment of the Cold War was far less homogeneous than that of the straitjacketed Eastern bloc film industries. Hollywood’s coverage as a whole can be divided into four phases. Between 1917 and 1945, with the exception of a few pro-Russian movies made during the Second World War, American films cast the Soviet Union as an international pariah and communism as anathema to American notions of individuality, freedom of choice, material abundance, cultural vibrancy and political moderation. From this firm base, Hollywood then declared full-scale war on international communism from the late 1940s through to the early 1960s. During this second phase, scores of movies equated left-wing movements with fifth-columnism, presented the Soviet Union and China as a clear and present danger to US interests, and impressed on the world the stark choice between freedom and totalitarianism. With an aggressively anti-Soviet, anti-communist consensus having been established (cinematically and nationally), the East-West conflict then took on more of an institutionalised appearance. Most American movies of the 1960s and 1970s still exhibited an intense dislike of Soviet authoritarianism, but

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other productions registered a growing unease with the spiralling arms race and with the Big-Brother-like activities of America’s own security agencies. Finally, this third phase gave way to the schizophrenic, self-reflexive coverage of the 1980s. During this decade, some filmmakers harked back to the blackand-white Cold War certainties of the 1950s, while others traded blows over the New Right’s war on ‘commu-terrorists’ or looked forwards to an end to East-West hostilities. If Hollywood was no mere functionary of government during the Cold War, neither was it as independent as the film industry or the government would have people believe. Considerable political influence was exerted on the industry’s Cold War output. In some instances, state propaganda bodies merely assisted or trimmed movies, often in association with politically conservative, self-regulating film organisations like the Production Code Administration. On other occasions, agencies such as the FBI, CIA and USIA financed, produced and marketed films. Conversely, at other times the state simply hitched a ride on entirely privately made films, like Ninotchka. As a consequence of all this, American films both reflected and projected oﬃcial Cold War ideology, consciously and unconsciously. From the early 1960s onwards, responding to structural changes within the film industry and political changes outside, American filmmakers felt more able to defy aspects of that ideology. However, because the highly capitalised nature of the industry continued to militate against the production and wide-scale distribution of politically radical movies, especially those that espoused left-wing or communist views, these dissenting films largely questioned the means rather than the ends of US foreign policy. If the state had a hand in determining how the film industry and the American people approached the Cold War, it seems highly likely that, in turn, Hollywood output helped to shape US policy-makers’ own views on the conflict. In the 1950s, George Kennan, architect of the US government’s ‘containment’ strategy, accused the Eisenhower administration of modelling its xenophobic Cold War ‘frontier mentality’ partly on celluloid Westerns of that era.5 Twenty years later, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger happily compared himself to John Wayne, implying that the latter’s tough-guy screen persona had influenced his approach towards negotiations with the communist world. Several Cold War American presidents were self-confessed film buﬀs who had been raised on a strict Hollywood diet and who, when they were in oﬃce, loved to ‘take time out’ by watching old movies or the latest releases. Richard Nixon, for instance, had well over 500 films screened at the White House, Camp David, and his various vacation homes during his presidency.6 During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan gave many the strong impression he viewed the Cold War through a camera lens, but he was surely not the only senior

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American politician who instinctively fused cinematic images of past and present conflicts with real life. Memory is important in decision-making and, as in previous conflicts, American foreign policy-makers consistently made use of the lessons of the past during the Cold War. But what constitutes individual memory in a media-saturated society, especially one in which politicians overlook ‘public opinion’ at their peril?7 In general, the harmonious relationship between Hollywood and the US government during the Cold War – one based at root on the need to protect capitalism – helped provide a platform for consistently high-quality propaganda. Liberal American critics often complained about Hollywood’s crudely painted pictures of communist evil. Similarly, many overseas critics were oﬀended by the assumption made in American films that the United States had a missionary-like duty to save the world from ‘Red domination’. Yet in most people’s eyes, Hollywood movies consistently outgunned their commercial and political rivals when it came to direction, acting, action and technical sophistication. They also had a far wider international reach, thanks in part to the State Department and the US Treasury. Though Stalin generally banned their exhibition in the Soviet Union during the Cold War’s early years, secretly even the Great Leader himself loved to watch Hollywood movies in the Kremlin’s private cinema (especially Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan pictures). During the 1940s and beyond, Soviet and East European filmmakers often defined their own cinema by reference to what they acknowledged to be the superior American model, with its lighter touch and emphasis on humour, glamour and private lives. When American movies were released behind the Iron Curtain during periods of East-West cultural exchange, they proved to be exceedingly popular.8 Even in Western Europe, with its rich tradition of filmmaking, cinema-goers often complained that by comparison with Hollywood material their own movies were slow-moving and pretentious.9 Few people anywhere – foreigners and Americans alike – appear to have made any connection between Hollywood output and Washington’s propaganda infrastructure. In contrast, films made in the communist world rarely travelled at all well. When foreigners did get access to them, most seem to have found them outmoded, mechanistic and tainted by state intervention – the movies just looked like propaganda, as most people understood that word. Many people living under communism probably felt the same way. Images extolling the virtues of a ‘worker’s paradise’ surely looked odd alongside conspicuous problems of economic stagnation, low living standards, and oﬃcial corruption and incompetence. The very characteristics which many in the West regarded as the keys to the alleged success of communist propaganda – the emphasis on a few simple ideas, exaggeration and distortion, and the abuse of domestic and

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external opponents – were in the long run probably its weakest points, for they strained credibility. As in much of Soviet domestic and foreign propaganda generally, internal constraints on filmmakers seem to have crippled creativity and bred systematic flaws.10 We can never know for certain how much Hollywood’s victory in the Cold War’s cinematic battle contributed to the West’s eventual defeat of Soviet communism. Traditionally, historians have tended to attribute the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union itself in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a multiplicity of political, economic, diplomatic and military factors.11 Recently, however, scholars have begun to outline the cultural dynamics of the Cold War, and to recognise that popular culture as ‘soft’ power perhaps played a much greater role in bringing an end to the conflict than previously acknowledged.12 This study has underlined the importance that the American government and media attached to winning the Cold War on the cultural front. Though its focus has been on film, its findings can also be extended to explain why the United States was far better equipped than its rivals to win the whole domestic and international battle for hearts and minds during the Cold War – financially, technologically, politically and culturally. Since the end of the Cold War, the state-film network has continued to operate. Deprived of the Soviet Union as a worthy enemy, Hollywood films of the 1990s had few diﬃculties in identifying viable successors. Drug cartels, nuclear terrorists, petty despots, Russian nationalists and Islamic extremists appeared in scores of Hollywood productions, giving the impression that Americans had entered a new and possibly more dangerous era of international uncertainty.13 In tandem with these messages came renewed links between filmmakers and a Pentagon that needed to justify maintaining the world’s largest and most powerful military establishment. Movies like James Cameron’s $365-million-grossing True Lies (1994), which saw the US Marines help Arnold Schwarzenegger’s secret agent defeat Middle Eastern nuclear terrorists, were one result.14 Meanwhile, Republican party grandees, jealous of the support that Democratic President Bill Clinton received from industry liberals like Steven Spielberg, charged Hollywood with having shifted its output markedly to the left.15 Instead of the New World Order policed by a single superpower, the new century brought a more potent and readily identifiable threat to the United States – that from ‘Al-Qaeda’. Whatever else, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were brilliantly choreographed propaganda: a cross between Japanese Second World War kamikaze tactics and Hollywood’s recent fictional portrayals of terrorists seizing control of American airliners.16 Within weeks of ‘9/11’, government oﬃcials led by President George W. Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, had held a series

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of meetings with Hollywood’s leading lights to enlist their services in the ‘War on Terror’. Echoing cinematic tough guys of yore, President Bush himself declared that the sponsors of anti-American terrorism were ‘wanted dead or alive’.17 Headed by a working group loosely called Hollywood 9/11, the film industry responded swiftly to the White House’s requests to boost domestic morale and, once again, to back the United States’ fight for ‘freedom’ overseas. Experienced networkers like Jack Valenti, who had been president of the Motion Picture Association of America for more than thirty years, pledged his organisation’s support. Stars like Jennifer Lopez and the cast of Steven Soderbergh’s crime caper Ocean’s 11 (2001) appeared in USO-style shows at American bases in Europe. Director Ridley Scott dedicated his new movie portraying American military bravery in Somalia in the early 1990s, Black Hawk Down (2001), to US troops hunting for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.18 And mega-star Robert De Niro founded the Tribeca Film Festival to help lower Manhattan recover economically from the 9/11 terrorist attacks.19 In April 2006, Tribeca would premiere the first feature film to dramatise 9/11, and one that, according to De Niro, honoured the bravery of Americans on that terrible day. United 93 was a real-time ‘reconstruction’ of the passenger revolt that took place on the fourth plane hijacked on the morning of 11 September 2001. The aircraft ultimately crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside, perhaps sparing either the Capitol or the White House from destruction.20 Hollywood’s most visually striking contribution to the War on Terror, however, appeared before the rubble at New York’s Ground Zero had been cleared. Over the 2001 Christmas holidays, audiences watching feature trailers in more than 9,000 cinema screens across the United States were treated to a three-minute, rapid-fire montage film, entitled The Spirit of America. Made by the Oscar-winning director Chuck Workman, this compilation comprised clips from 110 Hollywood movies, stretching from D. W. Griﬃth’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001). Workman grouped the clips around one-word themes (heroism, courage, style, defiance and diversity) and book-ended his film with scenes from John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers, starring John Wayne. ‘It’s a picture that emphasises the values that most Americans consider important’, said the President of the National Association of Theatre Owners, John Fithian. ‘It’s about being an American without resorting to propaganda.’21 The Spirit of America was a fitting tribute to Hollywood’s intimate relationship with the American nation throughout the twentieth century – as entertainer, story-teller, agenda-setter and persuader.

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Notes 1 Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, Television Broadcasting and the European Community (Washington, DC, 1990), p. 51. The ‘uprising’ to which Frank was referring focused on the student-led demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which took place between April and June 1989. The People’s Liberation Army crushed the protests on 3–4 June, killing, according to some estimates, between 400 and 800 civilians, and injuring between 7,000 and 10,000 others. The US media, like NBC and the cable television network founded in 1980, CNN, relayed the fact that the students were singing ‘The Internationale’ and quoting Abraham Lincoln. Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (eds), The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force Against their Own People — In their Own Words, comp. Zhang Liang (New York, 2001). On the Chinese people’s limited access to American films in the 1980s see Segrave, American Films Abroad, pp. 258–9. 2 On Soviet cinema during the Cold War see Richard Taylor, Nancy Wood, Julian Graﬀy and Dina Lordanova (eds), The BFI Companion to Eastern Europe and Russian Cinema (London, 2000), pp. 223–30; Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 185–221; Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York, 1993), pp. 121–45; Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London, 2000); Maya Turovskaya, ‘Soviet Films of the Cold War’, in Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), pp. 131–41; Kristian Feigelson (ed.), Théorème 8: Caméra Politique – Cinéma et Stalinisme (Paris, 2005). 3 Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (New York, 1997); Peter Graham, ‘New Directions in French Cinema’, in Geoﬀrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford, 1997), pp. 576–86. 4 On the American news media during the Cold War see Doherty, Cold War; Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995); Elke Von Cassel, ‘In Search of a Clear and Overarching American Policy’, in Laville and Wilford (eds), Citizen Groups, pp. 116–40; Aronson, The Press; Bernhard, Television News. 5 Policy Planning Staﬀ memorandum, ‘The Inauguration of Organised Political Warfare’, 4 May 1948, reprinted at www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/ intel/260_269.html (8 May 2006); John Elsom, Cold War Theatre (London, 1992), p. 11. 6 Mark Feeney, Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief (Chicago, IL, 2004), p. xii. 7 See, for example, Ernest R. May, ‘Lessons’ of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York, 1975), and Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York, 1986). 8 Caute, Dancer, pp. 117–18; Davies, ‘Soviet Cinema’; Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester, 2005), pp. 22–3; Richmond, Cultural Exchange, pp. 128–32.

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9 Pells, Not Like Us, p. 209. 10 Caute, Dancer, pp. 162–3; Bert Hogenkamp, ‘The Sunshine of Socialism: The CPGB and Film in the 1950s’, in Andy Croft (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party of Great Britain (London, 1998), pp. 192–206; Hazan, Impregnational Propaganda, pp. 155–6; Pechatnov, ‘Exercise in Frustration’. 11 A partial listing of scholarship explaining the end of the Cold War includes Michael J. Hogan, The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge, 1992); Geir Lundestad (ed.), The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oslo, 1994); Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen (eds), International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York, 1995); Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Vladislav Zubok, ‘Why Did the Cold War End in 1989? Explanations of “The Turn” ’, in Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War, pp. 343–67; Mark Kramer (ed.), ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union’, Parts 1 and 2, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 2003, and Vol. 5, No. 4, Fall 2004; Mark Kramer, ‘The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union’, Parts 1, 2 and 3, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4, Fall 2004, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 2004, and Vol. 7, No. 1, Winter 2005. 12 Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York, 1990), and Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, 2004); Timothy W. Ryback, Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York, 1990); Yale Ferguson and Rey Koslowski, ‘Culture, International Relations Theory, and Cold War History’, in Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War, pp. 149–79; Pittaway, ‘A Home Front’. 13 Christensen and Haas, Projecting Politics, pp. 199–223. 14 Suid, Guts and Glory, pp. 601–2. True Lies was the first US nationwide release in the People’s Republic of China, but was banned in several countries due to accusations of racism from Arab and Muslin communities. See Moving Pictures International, April 1995, p.11, and Premiere, September 1994, p. 18. 15 Philip John Davies, ‘Hollywood in Elections and Elections in Hollywood’, in Davies and Wells (eds), American Film, pp. 49–51. 16 See, for instance, Stuart Baird’s Executive Decision (1996), reviewed in Variety, 11 March 1996. 17 PR Week, 10 December 2001, p. 5; Los Angeles Times, 6 January 2002, Sunday Calendar, p. 22. 18 Honor Hsin, interview with Jack Valenti, Harvard International Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 78–80; interviews with Valenti and Scott, BBC Television, BBC2 Newsnight, 30 January 2002; www.dga.org/news/v26_5/news_workmanspiritofamerica.php3 (4 May 2006). On Black Hawk Down’s relationship to 9/11 see Thomas Doherty, ‘The New War Movies as Moral Rearmament: Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers’, in Eberwein (ed.), The War Film, pp. 214–21. In early 2002, a Moroccan-based company owned by Ridley Scott produced Hollywood 9/11’s first public service commercial aimed at television audiences in the Arab

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world. This featured Narwal el Moutawakel-Bennis, a hurdler from Morocco who had won a gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, making a plea for international tolerance. 19 Variety, 19 September 2002; New York Times, 5 September 2002; www. tribecafilmfestival.org (4 May 2006). On the rhetorical and ideological similarities between US policy during the Cold War and post-9/11 see Melvyn P. Leﬄer, ‘9/11 and American Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 29, No. 3, June 2005, pp. 395–413. 20 Fears that they would be portrayed as ghouls cashing in on tragedy seem to have deterred filmmakers from depicting the events of 9/11 before this. In New York, trailers for United 93 were pulled from one cinema as too distressing and the film was denounced, unseen, as premature and prurient. Guardian, 28 April 2006, G2, p. 3; Observer, 7 May 2005, p. 27. Released two years earlier, in 2004, Michael Moore’s liberal documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 used footage of the 11 September 2001 attacks as part of a searing indictment of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq in 2003. See Vanity Fair, March 2005, pp. 108–15, and Cineaste, October 2004, pp. 3–7. 21 Interview with Chuck Workman, 22 December 2001, www.onthemedia.org/ transcripts/transcripts_122201_spirit.html (27 April 2006); Los Angeles Times, 27 October 2001, Part 6, p. 1; Guardian, 18 December 2001, p. 3, where the full list of 110 films is printed.

Bibliography

UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL American Heritage Centre, Laramie, Wyoming, USA (AHCW) Louis de Rochement and Daniel Taradash Collections Archdiocese of Los Angeles, San Fernando Mission, Mission Hills, California, USA Chancery Archives Batjac Productions, Los Angeles, California, USA The Green Berets Production and Photograph Files British Broadcasting Corporation Written Archives Centre, Reading, UK (BBC WAC) P6555: Television Programmes, Press Cuttings T5: Television Plays General and Drama Files British Film Institute Library, London, UK (BFIL) Miscellaneous press books, scripts, marketing files Carl Foreman Collection The Chancery of Washington, DC, Washington, DC, USA (LODCW) National Legion of Decency Files Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, USA (DDEL) National Security Council Staﬀ Papers Oﬃce of the Special Assistant for National Security Aﬀairs Records Operations Coordinating Board Central Files President’s Committee on International Activities Abroad Records White House Central Files Ann Whitman File Halas and Batchelor Collection Ltd., London, UK Halas and Batchelor Collections Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri, USA Psychological Strategy Board Records Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, USA Record Group 226: Modern Military Records

Bibliography

311

L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA (TPCBY) Cecil B. DeMille Collection Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana, USA (LLUI) John Ford Papers Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas, USA (LBJL) United States Information Agency Files White House Central Files Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California, USA (AMPAS) Production Code Administration Files Miscellaneous press books, scripts, clippings files, marketing files, audio tapes Buzz Feitshans, Charles Guggenheim, Mervyn LeRoy, John Paxton, Gregory Peck and George Stevens Collections Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Archives The National Archives, London, UK (TNAL) FO 953: Foreign Oﬃce, Information Departments FO 975: Foreign Oﬃce, Information Research Department Reports FO 1110: Foreign Oﬃce, Information Research Department Correspondence PREM 11: Prime Minister’s Correspondence and Papers Southampton Institute International Animation Archive, Southampton, UK (SIIARA) Halas and Batchelor Collection Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, New York, USA (TLNYU) American Committee for Cultural Freedom Records UCLA Arts Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA (UCLA AL) Miscellaneous scripts United States Information Agency Archive, Washington, DC, USA Subject Files Pamphlet Files University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA (USC) Arthur Freed Collection Warner Bros. Archives US National Archives, College Park, Maryland, USA (USNA) Record Group 59: Department of State Record Group 306: United States Information Agency

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PUBLISHED DOCUMENTARY SOURCES Central Oﬃce of Information Review: Documentary Films (London: HMSO, 1948) Congressional Record, 1952 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) (Washington, DC: GPO, 1974–99) Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, Television Broadcasting and the European Community (Washington, DC: GPO, 1990) Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 80th Congress, March, 1947, Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry (Washington, DC: GPO, 1947) Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1960) Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960–1961 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1961) Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1988: Book 1: Jan. 1-July 1, 1988 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1988) United States Declassified Document Reference System (DDRS) (Washington, DC: GPO, 1988–96)

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS Sources of reviews and contemporary articles can be traced through my endnotes. Where film reviews or newspaper articles are cited without a page reference, the sources are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences clippings files or the British Film Institute microfiche collection. America; American Legion Magazine; Beverly Hills Citizen; Catholic World; Christian Science Monitor; Commentary; Common Sense; Commonweal; Daily Express (UK); Daily Herald (UK); Daily Mail (UK); Daily Telegraph (UK); Daily Worker (UK); Dallas Times Herald; Encounter (UK); Le Figaro (France); Galaxy; Glamour; Glasgow Herald (UK); Guardian (UK); Harvard International Review; Independent on Sunday (UK); Interview; Los Angeles Daily News; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner; Los Angeles Magazine; Los Angeles Mirror News; Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles Weekly; Life; Manchester Guardian (UK); Mother Jones; Ms.; Nation; National Review; New Musical Express (UK); New Republic; New Statesman (UK); New Times; New York; New York Daily Mirror; New York Herald Tribune; New York Post; New York Times; New York Times Magazine; New Yorker; News Chronicle (UK); Newsweek; Northern Echo (UK); Observer (UK); Osceola; People (UK); Playboy; PR Week; Publishers Weekly; Ramparts; Saturday Evening Post; Saturday Review; Soldier of Fortune; Star (UK); Stars and Stripes; Sunday Citizen (UK); Sunday Express (UK); Sunday Times (UK); Sunday Worker; Tablet (UK); Time; The Times (UK); Times Literary Supplement (UK); The Universe (UK); US; Vanity Fair; Village Voice; Vogue; Wall Street Journal; Washington Post, Yorkshire Evening Post (UK)

FILM JOURNALS AND TRADE PAPERS American Film; BAM; BoxOﬃce; Cineaste; Cinefantastique; City Limits (UK); Cue; Daily Film Renter (UK); Entertainment World; Film Comment; Film Culture; Film Daily; Film News; Filmfax; Films and Filming (UK); Films in Review (UK); Focus; Hollywood Citizen-News; Hollywood Reporter; International Documentary; Jump Cut; Kinematograph Weekly (UK); Marquee; Monthly Film Bulletin (UK); Motion Picture Daily; Motion Picture Herald; Motion Picture World; Movie; Moving Pictures International; Photoplay; Premiere; Sight and Sound (UK); Variety

Bibliography

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ARTICLES Articles appearing in publications listed above under ‘Newspapers and periodicals’ and ‘Film journals and trade papers’ are not given here. Adler, Les K. and Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s’, American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4, April 1970, pp. 1046–64 Badsey, Stephen, ‘The Depiction of War Reporters in Hollywood Feature Films from the Vietnam War to the Present’, Film History, Vol. 14, No. 3–4, 2002, pp. 243–60 Bachman, Gregg, ‘Three Days of the Condor: Tension’, Creative Writing, Vol. 3, No. 3, Winter 1996, pp. 76–82 Barnouw, Erik, ‘The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Footage: A Report’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1982, pp. 91–100 Bennett, Todd, ‘Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II’, Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 2, September 2001, pp. 489–518

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Bernhard, Nancy E., ‘Clearer than Truth: Public Aﬀairs Television and the State Department’s Domestic Information Campaigns’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 1997, pp. 545–68 Billingsley, Kenneth Lloyd, ‘Hollywood’s Missing Movies: Why American Films Have Ignored Life under Communism’, Reason, June 2000, pp. 21–9 Black, Gregory D., ‘Movies, Politics, and Censorship: The Production Code Administration and Political Censorship of Film Content’, Journal of Policy History, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1991, pp. 95–129 Booth, Alan R., ‘The Development of the Espionage Film’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 5, No. 4, October 1990, pp. 136–60 Briley, Ron, ‘John Wayne and Big Jim McLain (1952): The Duke’s Cold War Legacy’, Film and History, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2001, pp. 28–33 Brown, JoAnne, ‘ “A is for Atom, B is for Bomb”: Civil Defence in American Public Education, 1948–1963’, Journal of American History, Vol. 75, 1988, pp. 68–90 Carruthers, Susan L., ‘The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War Brainwashing Scare’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1998, pp. 75–94 Carruthers, Susan L., ‘Redeeming the Captives: Hollywood and the Brainwashing of America’s Prisoners of War in Korea’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 275–94 Casey, Steven, ‘Selling NSC-68: The Truman Administration, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Mobilization, 1950–51’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 2005, pp. 655–90 Cohn, Karl, ‘Toontown’s Reds: HUAC’s Investigation of Alleged Communists in the Animation Industry’, Film History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1993, pp. 190–203 Crouse, Eric R., ‘Popular Cold Warriors: Conservative Protestants, Communism, and Culture in Early Cold War America’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Vol. 2, Fall 2002, unpaged, www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/popcoldwarprint.html Cull, Nicholas J., ‘Auteurs of Ideology: USIA Documentary Film Propaganda in the Kennedy Era as Seen in Bruce Herschensohn’s The Five Cities of June (1963) and James Blue’s The March (1964)’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 295–310 Davies, Sarah, ‘Soviet Cinema and the Early Cold War: Pudovkin’s Admiral Nakhimov in Context’, Cold War History, Vol. 4, No. 1, October 2003, pp. 49–70 Dmohowski, Joseph, ‘The Friendly Persuasion (1956) Screenplay Controversy: Michael Wilson, Jessamyn West, and the Hollywood Blacklist’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 22, No. 4, 2002, pp. 491–514 Doherty, Thomas, ‘Hollywood Agit-Prop: The Anti-Communist Cycle 1948–1954’, Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 40, No. 4, Fall 1988, pp. 15–27 Doherty, Thomas, ‘Full Metal Genre: Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam Combat Movie’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2, 1988–9, pp. 24–30 Doherty, Thomas, ‘Frank Costello’s Hands: Film, Television, and the Kefauver Crime Hearings’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 359–74 Ehrhart, W. D., ‘Why I Did It’, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 56, No. 1, Winter 1980, pp. 19–31 Eldridge, David, ‘ “Dear Owen”: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2000, pp. 149–96 El-Hai, Jack, ‘Black and White and Red’, American Heritage, Vol. 42, May-June 1991, pp. 83–92 Ellwood, D. W. ‘The 1948 Elections in Italy: A Cold War Propaganda Battle’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1993, pp. 19–33 Fein, Seth, ‘New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5, November 2004, pp. 703–48

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Leﬄer, Melvyn P., ‘9/11 and American Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 29, No. 3, June 2005, pp. 395–413 Lucas, Scott W., ‘Campaigns of Truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American Ideology, 1951–1953’, International History Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, May 1996, pp. 279–302 MacDonald, Fred J., ‘The Cold War as Entertainment in Fifties Television’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1998, pp. 3–31 Mayer, Gerald M., ‘American Motion Pictures in World Trade’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 254, November 1947, pp. 31–6. Mayhew, Robert, ‘The Making of Song of Russia’, Film History, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2004, pp. 334–57 McCrillis, Neal R., ‘ “Simply Try for One Hour to Behave Like Gentlemen”: British Cinema during the Early Cold War, 1945–1960’, Film and History, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2001, pp. 6–12 Mechling, Elizabeth Walker and Jay Mechling, ‘The Atom According to Disney’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 81, 1995, pp. 436–53 Miller, James E., ‘Taking Oﬀ the Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections of 1948’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 7, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 35–56 Mindich, Jeremy, ‘Re-reading Ninotchka: A Misread Commentary on Social and Economic Systems’, Film and History, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1990, pp. 16–24 Murphy, Brian, ‘Monster Movies: They Came from Beneath the Fifties’, Journal of Popular Film, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1972, pp. 31–44 Nelson, Michael, ‘Ol’ Red, White, and Blue Eyes: Frank Sinatra and the American Presidency’, Popular Music and Society, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2000, pp. 79–102 Noakes, John A., ‘Bankers and Common Men in Bedford Falls: How the FBI Determined that It’s a Wonderful Life was a Subversive Movie’, Film History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1998, pp. 311–19 Pechatnov, V., ‘Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War, 1945–47’, Cold War History, Vol. 1, No. 2, January 2001, pp. 1–27 Pittaway, Mark, ‘A Home Front in the Cold War: Hungary, 1948–1989’, www.history.azc.uk/ihr/cold/articles/pittaway. html (9 May 2006) Sarantakes, Nicholas Evan, ‘Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of US Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, Fall 2005, pp. 74–103 Sbardellati, John and Tony Shaw, ‘Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America’, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 4, November 2003, pp. 495–530 Schein, Harry, ‘The Olympian Cowboy’, American Scholar, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1955, pp. 309–20 Schwenk, Melinda, ‘Reforming the Negative through History: The US Information Agency and the 1957 Little Rock Integration Crisis’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 1999, pp. 288–306 Shain, Russell E., ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Journal of Popular Film, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1974, pp. 334–50, 365–72 Shaw, Tony, ‘From Liverpool to Russia, With Love: A Letter to Brezhnev and Cold War Cinematic Dissent in 1980s Britain’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2005, pp. 243–62 Shaw, Tony, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television’s The War Game (1965)’, English Historical Review, Vol. 121, No. 494, December 2006, pp. 1351–84 Short, K. R. M., ‘The March of Time, Time Inc. and the Berlin Blockade 1948–1949: Selling Americans on the “New” Democratic Germany’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1993, pp. 451–68 Skinner, James M., ‘Cliché and Convention in Hollywood’s Cold War Anti-Communist Films’, North Dakota Quarterly, Summer 1978, pp. 35–40

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CONFERENCE PAPERS AND THESES Eldridge, David, ‘Hollywood and History, 1950–1959’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, UK, October 2001 Lev, Peter, ‘Science Fiction and Politics in the 1950s’, paper delivered at the International Association for Media and History Conference, University of Leicester, UK, June 2003 Osgood, Kenneth, ‘Total War: US Propaganda in the “Free World”, 1953–1960’, PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, June 2001

DVDS Hearts and Minds (1974), Metrodome MTD5206 (2005) Red Heat (1988), Momentum Pictures MP024D (2001)

Film Index

A Boy and His Dog, 235 A City Decides, 183 A Day with the FBI, 54–5 A Gathering of Eagles, 202 A King in New York, 145 A Man Called Peter, 110 A Nation in Torment, 176 A Safe Place, 242 A Time for Justice, 183 Above and Beyond, 152 The Alamo, 206–7, 212 Alexander Nevsky, 272 All the King’s Men, 137 All the President’s Men, 252, 254 Amazing Grace and Chuck, 200 American Graffiti, 234 An American in Paris, 28 Animal Farm, 75–85, 93–4 Animal House, 234 The Apartment, 33 Apocalypse Now, 225, 234 Appointment in Honduras, 145 Arctic Flight, 49 Assignment-Paris, 49 The Atomic Café, 238 Attack of the Crab Monsters, 138 Back to Bataan, 205 Badlands, 279 The Bamboo Prison, 111 The Barefoot Contessa, 88 Battle Hymn, 110 Battleship Potemkin, 15 The Beast of Budapest, 49 The Beast of War, 269 The Bedford Incident, 225 The Bell, 49, 65 Bells of Coronado, 51 Ben-Hur, 113, 126 Beyond This Winter’s Wheat, 178 Big Jim McLain, 49, 207 The Big Lift, 202 The Birth of a Nation, 306 Black Hawk Down, 306 The Blob, 138 Blood Alley, 207 Blue Velvet, 279 Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, 17 Bolshevism on Trial, 13–14 Bombers-B52, 152 James Bond series, 199, 211, 249, 293 Bonnie and Clyde, 236 Born a Man, 179 Bowery Battalion, 49 Bowling for Columbine, 238 Broken Arrow, 140 Bullitt, 253 The Caddy, 171

California Conquest, 51 Casablanca, 181 The Charge of the Light Brigade, 15 Charley (British animation series), 76–7 China Gate, 209 The China Syndrome, 252 Chinatown, 238 Citizen Kane, 140 City Lights, 14 Coma, 252 Coming Home, 234 Commando, 282 Comrade X, 23, 27 Conan the Barbarian, 279 The Conquerer, 226 Conquest of Space, 112, 127 Conspiracy of the Doomed, 106 The Conspirator, 50 The Conversation, 252 The Cosmic Man, 139 Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard, 56 Crossfire, 137 The Crusades, 114 The Dam Busters, 87 Dangerous Hours, 14 Davy Crockett, 113 Dawn over the Neman, 106 The Day After (television drama), 166n, 275, 296n The Day the Earth Stood Still, 136, 140–4, 147, 159, 160, 268 Days of Glory, 200 Death Wish, 234, 253 The Deer Hunter, 226, 234 The Defiant Ones, 181 Devil Dogs of the Air, 201 Diplomatic Courier, 249 Dirigible, 201 Dirty Harry, 234 Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 158 Dracula, 18 E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 286 Easy Rider, 239, 242, 243 Edge of Darkness (British television series), 287 The Empire Strikes Back, 285 The Eternal Jew, 17 Eulogy to 5:02, 181 Evil Wind Out, 179 Executive Action, 250, 252 Extreme Prejudice, 287 Fahrenheit 9/11, 247, 248 Fail Safe, 225 The Falcon and the Snowman, 262 The Fall of Berlin, 27 The FBI Front, 54 The Fearmakers, 49–50 The Fighting Lady, 54

Film Index The Fighting Seabees, 211 First Blood, 270 The Five Cities of June, 180 Five Easy Pieces, 239 Five Gates to Hell, 209 Flight, 201 The Fly, 112 The Flying Saucer, 49 Force of Evil, 137 Fort Apache, 206, 217 48 Hours, 287 The 49th Man, 56 Friendly Persuasion, 286 Friendship Seven, 179 From Here to Eternity, 147 Full Metal Jacket, 225 Gone with the Wind, 23, 126 Gorky Park, 286 Grand Central Market, 181 The Grapes of Wrath, 46 The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, 183 The Green Berets, 5, 200, 209, 211–26, 239, 248 Guilty of Treason, 110 Hamburger Hill, 226 Harlem, USA, 172 Harlem Globe Trotters, 170 He Stayed for Breakfast, 23 Heartbreak Ridge, 225 Hearts and Minds, 235, 238–49, 260, 261, 262 Heaven Knows Mr Allison, 109–10 Here Comes the Navy, 201 Heroes for Sale, 15 High Noon, 144 ‘The History of Communism’ (proposed film), 55 The Hoaxsters, 49 The House on 92nd Street, 54, 55 Hungarian Fight for Freedom, 176 Hunger in America (television documentary), 239 The Hunt for Red October, 293–4 I am a Man, 192 I Married a Communist, 49 I Was a Communist for the FBI, 49, 54 In Like Flint, 250 In the Year of the Pig, 208, 241 Incident in Quadrant 36-80, 276 The In-Laws, 262 Invaders from Mars, 49, 137 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 50 Invasion USA, 56, 64, 273 Invitation to India, 179 Invitation to Pakistan, 179 The Ipcress File, 255 The Iron Curtain, 2, 54 The Iron Petticoat, 28 It Came from Outer Space, 139 Jaws, 234 Jet Pilot, 28 Joe, 179 John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, 180 The King and I, 117 King of Kings, 114 King Kong, 203 The King of Marvin Gardens, 242 Kings Row, 285 Kiss Me Deadly, 50 Knock on Wood, 145 Knute Rockne – All American Hero, 267 The Kremlin Letter, 250 The Lady and the Tramp, 126 The Last Picture Show, 239

333

Last Tango in Paris, 238 Latino, 278 The Lawless, 137 Le Mans, 287 Letter from Colombia, 179 Lilies of the Field, 181 Little Man, What Now?, 15 The Longest Day, 205, 211 The Lord of the Flies, 270 Lost Boundaries, 54, 57 Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation, 50 Man on a String , 56 The Manchurian Candidate, 111 The March, 181–2 The March of Time (newsreel series), 54, 57, 76, 196 Marked Woman, 14–15 Martin Luther, 110 Mean Streets, 234 The Meeting on the Elbe, 172 Midnight Cowboy, 236 The Miracle, 112 Miss V. from Moscow, 23 Missing, 262, 271, 278 Missing in Action series, 199 Mission to Moscow, 23, 29 Mister Roberts, 202 Mister Smith Goes to Washington, 268 Monsieur Verdoux, 137 Moscow on the Hudson, 286 The Mouse that Roared, 139 My Favourite Spy, 50 My Son John, 42–4, 50, 60, 63, 65, 109, 243 Network, 252 Never Let Me Go, 27 The New Moon, 14 The Next Voice You Hear, 109, 127 Night of the Dragon, 210 Night People, 109, 127, 200 Nightmare in Red (television documentary), 88 Nine from Little Rock, 167–8, 182–92 1984 (feature film), 87–94 1984 (television plays), 86–7 Ninotchka, 11, 16–34, 44, 105, 126, 269, 286, 287, 288, 289–90, 303 No Time for Flowers, 27–8 Norma Rae, 146 North by Northwest, 49, 255 Now We Are Free, 176 Ocean’s 11, 306 October, 105 Omar Khayyam, 51 The Omega Man, 200 On the Beach, 5, 136, 152–60, 171, 207, 213, 225 On The Town, 17 On the Waterfront, 50, 109 Once in a Blue Moon, 15 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 234 One, Two, Three, 34 Only the Strong, 235 Orphans of the Storm, 14 Our Friend the Atom, 138 The Parallax View, 252, 254, 260 Patton, 140 Pearl Harbor, 306 Pickup on Main Street, 50 Pinky, 170 Planet of the Apes, 200 Platoon, 279 The Plow That Broke the Plains, 15–16 Pony Express, 51 Predator, 288 The President’s Analyst, 250, 251

334

Hollywood’s Cold War

The Prisoner, 110, 127 The Prodigal, 113 The Progress of the American Negro, 180 The Quiet American, 209 Quo Vadis, 113 Race to Oblivion, 140 The Rack, 111 Rambo series, 10, 199, 226, 267, 268, 270, 273, 275, 276, 278, 282, 285, 287 Raw Deal, 288 Rebel Without a Cause, 159 Red Dawn, 269–76, 278, 286, 291, 293 Red Heat, 286–93 The Red Menace, 51, 64, 109 Red Planet Mars, 103–4, 109, 127, 288 Red Russia Revealed, 14 Red Salute, 14 Red Snow, 49 Repo Man, 277, 279 The Right to Happiness, 14 Rio Grande, 206, 217 The Road to Hong Kong, 244 The Robe, 113 Rocky IV, 276 Romeo and Juliet (Chinese version), 126 The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, 286 Russkies, 286 Saigon, 209 Salome, 113 Salt of the Earth, 146, 160 Salvador, 278 Samson and Delilah, 113 Sands of Iwo Jima, 145, 205, 213, 224 Satan Never Sleeps, 109 The School at Rincon Santo, 179 The Searchers, 203, 306 Security Risk, 50 The Selling of the Pentagon (television documentary), 240 The Senator Was Indiscreet, 47 Sergeant York, 112 Serpico, 253 Seven Days in May, 225 Shack Out on 101, 50 Shane, 113, 181 The Shanghai Story, 49 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 206 Sid and Nancy, 277 Silk Stockings, 29–33 Silver Lode, 144–5 Silvery Dust, 172 Singin’ in the Rain, 28 Song of Russia, 23–4 The Spirit of America, 306 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 255 Star Wars, 234, 264, 274 Starvation, 14 State of the Union, 137 Storm Centre, 135, 136, 146–51, 159, 160 The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, 113 Stranger from Venus, 139 Strategic Air Command, 152

The Strike at Coaldale, 12 Submarine, 201 Tangier Incident, 49 Target Hong Kong, 50 Tarzan, 304 Telefon, 235 The Ten Commandments (1923), 115 The Ten Commandments (1956), 105, 113, 115–27, 157, 200 Tender Comrade, 23 The Terminator, 282 Terror in a Texan Town, 113 Testament, 275 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 248 Them!, 50 They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, 253 The Thing, 137 13 Rue de Madeleine, 54 The Thirty-Nine Steps, 255 This is the Army, 28, 246 Three Brave Men, 146 Three Days of the Condor, 236, 252–62 Tobacco Road, 46 Together We Live, 15 Top Gun, 225 Top Secret Affair, 145 Tracks, 243 Trouble in Paradise, 15 True Grit, 208 True Lies, 305 Twilight’s Last Gleaming, 252 The Ugly American, 209 Uncommon Valor, 270 Under Fire, 278 United in Progress, 183 United 93, 306 Vietnam! Vietnam!, 224 The Wac from Walla Walla, 49 The Wages of Fear, 88 Walk East on Beacon, 52–65, 105, 140, 259 Walker, 277–85, 291, 293 The Wall, 179 Wall Street, 279 The War Game, 158 The Way We Were, 253, 254 We Live Again, 15 The Whistle at Eaton Falls, 54 White Christmas, 202 White Nights, 9–11, 30, 288 Why?, 12 Why Vietnam?, 210 Why We Fight series, 210 Wilson, 112 The Wings of Eagles, 204–5 Winter Soldier, 248–9 The Wizard of Oz, 285 Woodstock, 241 Yankee Doodle Dandy, 28 You Can’t Take It With You, 14 You Were Meant for Me, 147

General Index

Abrams, Elliott, 284 Acheson, Dean, 86 Adams, Eddie, 245 Adenauer, Konrad, 125 Adler, Renata, 221, 223 Advertising Council, 32 Afghanistan, 270, 276, 306 African-Americans, 9–10, 167–98, 232n79, 290–1 Agnew, Spiro, 240 Air Force, 28, 202, 208, 220, 225 ‘Al Qaeda’, 305 Albert, Eddie, 86 Aldrich, Robert, 50, 252 Aleksandrov, Grigori, 172 Alland, William, 139 Allende, Salvatore, 261 Allilueva, Svetlana, 34 Alsop, Carleton, 75–6 American Broadcasting Company (ABC), 33 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 243, 259 American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), 84, 87, 88 American Film Institute (AFI), 178 American Legion, 42, 43, 47, 63, 205, 243, 247 Americanisation, 91, 168–9, 304–5 Anderson, Donna, 154, 155 Anderson, Marian, 181 Anderson, Michael, 87, 92 Anderson, Robert, 156 Andrews, Dana, 199 animation, 75–85, 126, 138 Anti-Defamation League, 63 Anti-Nazi League, 45 Applebaum, Louis, 57 Apted, Michael, 286 Armstrong, Louis, 173 Army, 28, 64, 109, 141, 173, 201, 211–16, 221, 246, 250, 290 Arnold, Jack, 139 Ashby, Hal, 234 Associated Films, 175 Astaire, Fred, 29–32, 154 Atomic Energy Commission, 152 Atomic Scientists’ Movement, 141 atomic weapons/energy, 3, 5, 25, 50, 54, 56, 60, 89, 103, 112, 136–44, 151–8, 171, 201, 202, 225, 226, 235, 238, 244, 250, 268, 270, 272, 273, 275, 277, 287, 293–4, 301, 305 audience figures in the US, 66n7, 238 Auster, Albert, 50 Australia, 88, 152, 153, 156 Austria, 16, 27, 28, 169, 288 Bacon, Lloyd, 14, 147, 201, 267 Balaban, Barney, 108, 116 Balaban, Burt, 139 Baldwin, Alec, 294 Ballard, Carroll, 178 Barnes, Tracy, 80, 203

Barrett, James Lee, 154, 213, 214, 215 Baruch, Donald, 201–2, 212–15 Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 9–10, 288 Batchelor, Joy, 76–82 Bates, Harry, 140 Batjac Productions, 211, 212, 214–16, 218–19, 222, 225 Bauchens, Anne, 118 Baxter, Anne, 117 Bay, Michael, 306 Bay of Pigs (1961), 183 BBS, 239, 242–3 Beatty, Warren, 237, 243, 260 Beckley, Paul V., 157 Begelman, David, 242 Behn, Noel, 250 Behrman, S. N., 16 Belushi, James, 288, 292 Bennett, Wallace F., 157 Bergen, Candice, 243 Berghof, Herbert, 103 Berlin, 1, 11, 16, 25, 27, 34, 49, 60, 94, 109, 125, 151, 157, 179, 180, 200, 202, 269 Bernstein, Carl, 252, 254 Bernstein, Elmer, 121 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 238 Biberman, Herbert, 146 Bidault, George, 243 bin Laden, Osama, 306 Black Panthers, 239 Black September, 249 Blair, Sonia, 75–6, 79, 86, 92, 93 Blauner, Stephen, 239 Blaustein, Julian, 140, 147, 159, 160 Blue, James, 177, 179, 181, 190 Bogdanovich, Peter, 239 Bohlen, Charles, 32 Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 1, 13, 14, 15, 18, 105 Bond, Ward, 203–4, 237 Bono, 280 Boothe, Powers, 273 Borgnine, Ernest, 146 Borsage, Frank, 15 Bortnyik, Alexander, 76 Bouchey, Willis, 103 Boyd, Malcolm, 124 Boyle, Peter, 280 Brackett, Charles, 17, 21 Bradbury, Malcolm, 73 Bradbury, Ray, 139 Bragg, Billy, 280 brainwashing, 10, 49, 85, 89, 91, 110–12, 203, 210, 252, 271 Brando, Marlon, 109, 238 Brandt, Willy, 125 Brecht, Bertolt, 15 Breen, Joseph, 12, 17, 58, 112 Bressart, Felix, 21 Brewer, Roy, 46, 295n6

336

Hollywood’s Cold War

Bridges, James, 252 Bright, Richard, 290 Britain, 15, 23, 26, 27, 28, 32, 50, 106, 138, 302 films made in, 1, 25, 52, 72–102, 103, 104, 110, 139, 145, 158, 177, 199, 248, 249, 255, 277, 280, 287 Foreign Office Information Research Department (IRD), 74–5, 79, 84, 86, 94 Ministry of Information (MOI), 73, 76 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 86–7, 94, 166n78, 287, 302 British Society for Cultural Freedom, 79 Broger, John C., 202–3 Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), 173, 182 Brown, Minnijean, 188–7, 189 Brown, Ruth, 147, 150 Browne, Jackson, 280 Brownell, Herbert, 173 Browning, Tod, 18 Bryan, Joseph, 75–6 Brynner, Yul, 117, 118, 119, 122 Bulgaria, 23 Bunche, Ralph, 181 Burdick, Eugene, 209 Bush, George W., 238, 247, 305–6 Cagney, Jimmy, 201, 240 Cambodia, 217 Cameron, James, 305 Canada, 248 Canby, Vincent, 247 capitalism, representation of, 4, 11, 12, 14, 16–23, 27–34, 81, 82, 88, 105, 109, 121, 123, 126, 128, 169, 175, 179, 185, 245, 249, 261, 272, 283 Capra, Frank, 14, 80, 137, 201, 210, 268 Cardenal, Ernesto, 279 Carlson, Richard, 139 Carolco Pictures, 287 Carroll, Kathleen, 260 Carroll, Wallace, 80 Carter, Jimmy, 226 Cartier, Rudolph, 86–7 Castro, Fidel, 268, 281 Catholicism, 12, 43, 44, 46, 83, 84, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 124, 125, 126, 127, 149, 156, 279; see also National Legion of Decency Caute, David, 121 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 4, 24, 27, 49, 55, 64, 75, 77, 79, 80, 84, 85, 94, 106, 108, 111, 115, 117, 156, 159, 171, 174, 199, 203, 209, 237, 249–62, 274, 277, 278, 281, 287, 294, 301, 303 Ceylon, 171 Chambers, Whittaker, 56 Chaplin, Charlie, 13, 14, 137, 145, 239 Charisse, Cyd, 29–32 Chasanow, Abraham, 146 Chase, Chevy, 288 Cheney, Dick, 293 Chiaureli, Michail, 27 Chile, 261, 262, 271 China, 50, 65, 86, 90, 109, 126, 144, 154, 191, 207, 208, 209, 213, 217, 237, 242, 250, 273, 291, 301, 302 Christian Anti-Defamation League, 124 Church Committee, 254, 259 Churchill, Robert, 140 Churchill, Winston, 27, 81, 83, 119, 125 Cimino, Michael, 226 Claire, Ina, 18 Clancy, Tom, 293–4 Clash, the, 280 Clay, General Lucius, 25, 202 Clews, John, 79 Clifford, Clark, 243 Clift, Montgomery, 199 Clinton, Bill, 305 Clouzot, H. G., 88 Coburn, James, 250

Coca-Cola, 41n88, 199, 245, 281 Cohn, Harry, 56, 80, 108, 147 Coker, George, 244, 246 Colombia, 179 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 174, 177, 213, 239–40 Columbia Pictures, 10, 12, 23, 52, 55, 56, 64, 80, 93, 108, 110, 127, 137, 139, 147, 170, 211, 239–42, 268 Comintern, 53, 59 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), 13, 15, 23, 45, 48, 52, 114 Congo, 207 Congress, 45, 107, 157, 176, 181, 190, 204, 208, 225, 240, 247, 252, 254–5, 261, 281, 283, 290, 293, 301 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 79, 83, 84, 88 Connery, Sean, 199, 293, 294, consumerism, 11, 18, 33, 109, 127, 158, 249, 277, 286 Contras, 277–8, 281, 283, 285 Cooper, Gary, 144 Cooper, Merian C., 203, 206 Copland, Aaron, 272 Coppola, Francis Ford, 225, 238, 252 Corman, Roger, 138, 164 Costa-Gavras, Constantin, 262, 271, 278 Coughlin, Kevin, 147–8 Cox, Alex, 277–85, 293 Crain, Jeanne, 170 Crane, Norma, 86 Crichton, Michael, 252 Crick, Bernard, 85 Crockett, Davy, 199, 212 Cronkite, Walter, 240 Cronyn, Hume, 87 Cruise, Tom, 199, 225 Crusade for Freedom (CFF), 49, 115, 174 Cuba, 1, 268, 270–3, 275, 276, 281, 284 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 151, 128, 179 Currie, Finlay, 58, 60 Curtiz, Michael, 23, 181, 202, 246 Cushing, Peter, 86–7 Czechoslovakia, 25, 27, 29, 213, 217, 300 Dailey, Dan, 204 Daniel, Sean, 279 Darkness at Noon (novel), 88 Daughters of the American Revolution, 47, 150 Davies, Delmer, 27 Davies, Terence, 28 Davis, Bette, 15, 147–50 Davis, Elmer, 142 Davis, Peter, 235, 237, 238–48, 261 de Antonio, Emile, 208, 241 De Carlo, Yvonne, 120 de Hoog, Walter, 179 de la Roche, Catherine, 104 De Laurentiis, Dino, 252–3 De Niro, Robert, 237, 306 De Palma, Brian, 270 de Rochement, Louis, 52, 53–8, 61–3, 76–82 Dean, James, 159 DeBra, Arthur H., 135 Defence Department, 4, 49, 75, 141, 152, 155, 156, 200–3, 208, 210–16, 221, 222–5, 235, 237, 239, 240, 241, 271, 272, 276, 305 Dein, Edward, 50 DeMille, Cecil B., 57, 105, 108, 114–27, 174, 237 democracy, representation and selling of, 3, 5, 21, 26, 42–3, 51, 52, 105, 106, 107, 110, 113, 121, 123, 126, 128, 146, 150, 152, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178, 181, 182, 185, 187, 190, 193, 216, 259, 280–1, 282, 290 Denham, Maurice, 77 Denmark, 223 Dennehy, Brian, 286 Derek, John, 122 Desmarets, Sophie, 27

Film Index Deutscher, Isaac, 87 Deval, Jacques, 16 Devlin, Jay, 256 DeWolf, Karen, 145 Dies, Martin, 45 Dieterle, William, 51 Diller, Barry, 237 Dior, Christian, 33 Disney, Roy, 108 Disney, Walt, 76, 77, 80, 108, 113, 118, 126, 138, 176, 183, 237, 267, 301 Dixon, Thomas, 13 Dmytryk, Edward, 23, 87, 137, 205 Douglas, Gordon, 50, 54, 152, 250 Douglas, Kirk, 145, 268 Douglas, Melvyn, 18–23 drugs, 12, 13, 61, 254, 269, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293 Dudziak, Mary L., 173 Dulles, Allen, 106, 111 Dulles, John Foster, 72, 106, 173, 209 Dunaway, Faye, 257 Dunne, Philip, 146 Duryea, Dan, 145 Dwan, Allan, 145 East Germany/German Democratic Republic (DDR), 1, 291 Eastwood, Clint, 225 Eckford, Elizabeth, 185–6 Éclair Films, 12 Egypt, 117, 126 Einstein, Albert, 60, 141, 143 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 24, 82, 83, 94, 103, 106, 107, 108, 115, 138, 141, 151, 156, 173, 176, 185, 200, 244, 268, 303 Eisenstein, Sergei, 15, 105, 245, 272 El Salvador, 278 Ellsberg, Daniel, 239–40, 244 Elstree Studios, 87 Englund, George, 209 Essary, Darlene, 147 Estonia, 23 European Cooperation Administration (ECA), 76 European Recovery Programme, 76 Faintsimmer, A., 106 Falwell, Reverend Jerry, 281 Farr, Finis, 75–6 Farrell, William P., 223 Faubus, Orval, 173, 188, 189 FBO Pictures, 174 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 4, 13, 42–65, 106, 113, 137, 141, 156, 208, 267, 303 Federal Civil Defence Administration (FCDA), 151 Feist, Felix, 110 Feitshans, Buzz, 270 Film and Photo League, 15–16 Film and Theatre Diplomacy, 285 film genres biblical epic, 113–28 biopic, 277–85 buddy/cop, 285–91 docudrama, 53–65 documentary, 167–93, 238–49 drama, 145–58 espionage, 42–65, 249–62 musical, 27–33 romantic-comedy, 16–34 science fiction, 50–1, 87–93, 112, 103–4, 137–44, 151–8 war/combat, 200–26, 269–76 Western, 50–1, 113, 144–5, 203–4, 206, 217, 273 First World War, 12, 204, 249 Fishburne, Larry, 291 Fithian, John, 306 Fitzgerald, Frances, 247

337

Fleischer, Max, 77 Fleming, Victor, 23, 285 Flicker, Theodore J., 250 Foch, Nina, 119 Fonda, Jane, 208, 238, 249 Ford, Gerald, 250 Ford, Glenn, 145 Ford, Harrison, 199 Ford, John, 202, 203–5, 206, 224, 237, 306 Ford Foundation, 55, 191 Foreman, Carl, 139, 144 Forman, Milos, 234 France, 3, 14, 17, 26, 84, 223, 302 Frank, Frederick, 116 Frank, Melvin, 145, 152 Frank, Richard, 301 Frankenheimer, John, 111, 225 Freed, Arthur, 29 Freedman, Benjamin H., 124 Freedom Foundation, 115 Freeman, Y. Frank, 57, 116, 171 Friberg, Arnold, 118 Friedkin, William, 237 Fuchs, Klaus, 56, 59, 61 Fulbright, James, 225 Fuller, Barbra, 109 Fuller, Sam, 50, 209 Furie, Sidney J., 255 Gable, Clark, 23, 27, 76 Garbo, Greta, 16–23, 26, 30, 287, 288 Gardner, Ava, 153 Gariss, Jack, 116 Garrett, Hank, 256, 257 Georgia, 290 Gere, Richard, 285 Germany, 16, 25, 27, 51, 58, 60, 61, 74, 81, 84, 110, 121, 125, 169, 172, 202; see also East Germany and West Germany Gershwin, George, 172 Gibbons, Cedric, 18 Gilliatt, Penelope, 223 Gilmore, Virginia, 61 glasnost, 286, 289 Glenn, John, 179 Glenville, Peter, 110 Gold, Harry, 56, 59, 61, 63 Golding, William, 270 Goldsmith, Barry, 179 Gollancz, Victor, 79 Goodwin, Michael, 79 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 269, 285, 286, 294, 301 Grady, James, 252, 253, 254 Graham, Billy, 112, 114, 122 Grainger, James B., 108 Granach, Alexander, 21 Granville, Bonita, 110 Graves, Peter, 103 Gray, Billy, 141 Green, Ernest, 187, 189 Greene, Graham, 209 Greene, Herbert, 139 Greene, Lorne, 86 Grenada, 225 Grey, Jennifer, 271 Griffith, D. W., 14, 306 Griggs, Loyal, 118 Guerra, Blanca, 280 Guevara, Che, 212 Guggenheim, Charles, 167, 183–92 Guidice, Don, 255 Guinness, Alec, 110 Guisal, Henri, 27 Hackford, Taylor, 9 Hackman, Gene, 252

338

Hollywood’s Cold War

Haig, Alexander, 270–2, 276, 293 Halas, John, 76–82 Halberstam, David, 219, 244 Hale, William, 181 Hardwicke, Sir Cecil, 119–20 Harr, Karl, 156 Harrington, Stephanie, 242 Harris, Ed, 280–2 Harris, James, 225 Haskins, Byron, 112 Hathaway, Henry, 55, 208, 249 Hawkins, Jack, 111 Hawks, Howard, 112 Hayes, Helen, 42–3 Hays, Will H., 12–13, 17, 46 Hayward, Susan, 145 Head, Edith, 118 Hearst, William Randolph, 17, 23, 63 Hecht, Ben, 15 Heffron, Richard T., 210 Helms, Richard, 255 Helsinki Accords (1975), 237 Henson, Jim, 285 Hepburn, Katherine, 28 Herberg, Will, 107 Herman, Albert, 23 Herschensohn, Bruce, 177, 179, 180–1 Hersh, Seymour, 254, 255 Herter, Christian, 156, 157 Hess, Colonel Dean, 110 Heston, Charlton, 117, 118, 120, 122, 200, 210, 224, 268, 281 Higashi, Sumiko, 123 Hill, Gladys, 250 Hill, Walter, 287, 293 Hiller, Arthur, 262 Hines, Gregory, 9–10 Hippler, Fritz, 17 Hiroshima, 138 Hitchcock, Alfred, 118, 255 Hitler, Adolf, 15, 51, 81, 150 Ho Chi Minh, 209, 210, 223 Holden, William, 109 Holiday Film Productions, 87 Hollywood 9/11, 306 Holubar, Alan, 14 Honduras, 145, 278, 281 Hood, Richard, 54, 56, 57 Hooper, Tobe, 248 Hoover, Herbert, 14 Hoover, J. Edgar, 42, 44, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 76, 208 Hope, Bob, 28, 50, 208, 238, 244 Hopper, Dennis, 239, 243 Hopper, Hedda, 147 Hopper, Jerry, 51 Horman, Charles, 262 Horner, Harry, 103 Horner, James, 288 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 24, 34, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 53, 54, 56, 58, 77, 87, 114, 136, 137, 140, 144, 145, 147, 148, 152, 160, 237, 293 Houseman, John, 257 Howell, C. Thomas, 271, 274 Hudson, Rock, 110 Hudson Institute, 271 Hughes, Howard, 28 Hungary, 16, 76, 110, 123, 124, 125, 151, 173, 176 Hunt, E. Howard, 259 Hunter, Kim, 148 Huntley, Chet, 240 Hurt, William, 286 Hussein, Saddam, 276 Huston, John, 109, 250 Hutton, Jim, 218 Hyman, Bernie, 16

I Led Three Lives (book), 58 Immigration and Naturalisation Service, 137 India, 15, 173, 179, 191–2, 294n2 Indochina, 84, 244 Indonesia, 86 Information Research Department (IRD) see Britain Institute for American Strategy, 235 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, 46 Iran, 259 Iran-Contra affair, 283, 284 Iraq, 238, 246, 276 Iron Curtain, 5, 33, 34, 84, 85, 88, 103, 106, 115, 128, 159, 248, 260, 304 representation of life behind, 9–11, 13–14, 16–23, 27–34, 72–102, 110–11, 122–3, 248, 288–91 Irvin, John, 226, 288 Israel, 249, 259 Italy, 25–6, 112, 125, 253 Jackson, C. D., 107, 108, 115 Jaffe, Leo, 268 Jaffe, Sam, 143 Jagger, Dean, 42–3 Jaglom, Henry, 242, 243 Janssen, David, 216–18 Japan, 9, 23, 84, 86, 110, 138, 151, 169, 186, 204, 223, 305 Jarrico, Paul, 146 jazz, 29, 32–3, 173 Jennings, Brent, 290 Jewison, Norman, 286 John Birch Society, 207 Johnson, Ben, 273 Johnson, Lyndon B., 181–2, 191, 1991, 210, 211, 212, 220, 241 Johnson, Nunnally, 109 Johnston, Eric, 32, 46, 108, 237 Jones, Dorothy, 48 Jones, L. Q., 235 Jordan, 223 Jowett, Garth, 240 Jue, Craig, 218 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 106 Kane, Michael, 256 Kanfer, Stefan, 247 Katzin, Lee H., 287 Katzman, Sam, 51 Kaye, Danny, 118 Kazan, Elia, 50, 87, 109 Kefauver, Estes, 61 Keith, Brian, 148, 149 Keith, Ian, 119 Kelley, Barry, 205 Kellogg, Ray, 215 Kelly, Gene, 17 Kennan, George, 303 Kennedy, Bishop Gerald, 123 Kennedy, Edward M., 183 Kennedy, Jackie, 179 Kennedy, John F., 158, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 210, 211, 252, 254, 268 Kennedy, Robert F., 183, 221, 252 Kennedy Martin, Troy, 287 Kerkorian, Kirk, 269 Kerr, Deborah, 110 Kershner, Irvin, 285 KGB see Soviet intelligence and security service Khan, Genghis, 272 Khrushchev, Nikita, 30, 151, 301 King, Henry, 112 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 179, 180, 181, 221 Kirwan, Celia, 74 Kissinger, Henry, 207, 303 Kleiner, Harry, 287 Klingman, Linzee, 241, 244 Klugherz, Dan, 192

Film Index Knight, Arthur, 260 Knights of Columbus, 47 Knoles, Harley, 13 Koch, Howard, 238 Koestler, Arthur, 74, 88 Kopkind, Andrew, 247 Korda, Michael, 221 Korean War, 5, 42, 48, 49, 110–11, 141, 144, 145, 201, 203, 208 Kornitzer, Bela, 125 Koster, Henry, 110 Kosygin, Alexei, 199 Kotcheff, Ted, 270 Kovic, Ron, 207 Kramer, Stanley, 5, 137, 144, 147, 152–60, 171, 181, 207 Kroll, Jack, 260, 261 Ku Klux Klan, 184 Kubelik, Rafael, 29 Kubrick, Stanley, 158, 225 Kurosawa, Akira, 282 Lamont, Charles, 50 Lancaster, Burt, 225 Landis, John, 234 Lane, Franklin, 13 Lanfield, Sidney, 14 Lansdale, Edward, 209 Laos, 254 Lasky, Jesse L., Jr., 116 Laven, Arnold, 111 Lawton, Colonel K. B., 201 Lederer, William, 209 Leigh, Janet, 28 Leigh, Vivien, 199 LeMay, Curtis, 202, 207 Lemmon, Jack, 33 Lengyel, Melchior, 16, 17 Lenihan, John, 50 Lenin, Vladimir, 14, 20, 45, 80, 105, 271, 272, 289, 301, 302 Leone, Sergio, 282 LeRoy, Mervyn, 202, 216 Lettich, Sheldon, 235 Lewis, Jerry, 171 Lewis, Joseph H., 113 Life is Worth Living (television programme), 115 Lifton, Robert J., 139 Lincoln, Abraham, 13 Lincoln Memorial, 42–3 Lindfors, Viveca, 27 Lithuania, 23 Little Rock school crisis (1957), 173–4 Littman, Lynne, 275 Lomax, Louis, 180 Lopez, Jennifer, 306 Lorentz, Pare, 15–16 Loring, Eugene, 29 Lorre, Peter, 30 Losey, Joseph, 137 Lubitsch, Ernst, 11, 15, 16–17, 29, 32 Lucas, George, 234, 268 Luce, Henry, 85 Lucky Dragon (Fukuryu¯ Maru), 151, 152 Ludwig, Edward, 211 Lugosi, Bela, 18 Lumet, Sidney, 225, 252 Luraschi, Luigi, 27, 108, 171 Lynch, David, 279 MacArthur, Charles, 15 MacArthur, General Douglas, 205 McCarey, Leo, 43–4, 109, 243 McCarthy, Joseph, and McCarthyism, 1, 2, 13, 27, 34, 43, 50, 51, 56, 64, 65, 86, 87, 103, 109, 137, 139, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 159, 176, 207, 239, 248, 267, 269, 293

339

McDonald’s, 199, 271 Mace, Borden, 56, 57 McGilligan, Patrick, 260, 261, 262 McGinn, Walter, 256 McGovern, George, 183, 243 McGuire, Harp, 154 McHugh, Frank, 43 Mack, Willard, 15 Mackenzie, Aeneas, 116 MacLaine, Shirley, 238 McLeod, Norman Z., 50 Macpherson, Jeannie, 116 McQueen, Steve, 183 McTiernan, John, 288, 293 McVeigh, Timothy, 276 Mafia, 61 Malcolm X, 189 Malden, Karl, 109 Malick, Terence, 279 Mamoulian, Rouben, 15, 29 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 88, 209 Mann, Anthony, 152 Mann, Delbert, 202 Manning, Jack, 63 Manvell, Roger, 28 Mao Tse Tung, 65, 199, 209 Marcus, Burton, 242 Marshall, George, 141 Marshall, Peter, 110 Marshall Plan (1947), 57, 76, 77, 106 Martin, Dean, 171 Martin, John Lee, 46 Martin, Lock, 142 Martin, Steve, 288 Martin, Susan, 241, 244 Martinique, 170 Marx, Karl, 16, 22, 45, 80, 289 Massery, Hazel, 186 Matlin, Marlee, 280 Mayer, Gerald M., 33 Mayer, Louis B., 16, 17, 24, 237 Mazursky, Paul, 286 Mendenhall, John, 191 Menzies, William Cameron, 137 Meredith, James, 179 Mexico, 23, 51, 125, 206, 272, 273, 280, 287 Meyer, Nicholas, 275 MGM, 12, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 34, 80, 84, 108, 113, 175, 211, 269–70, 275 Middle East, 74, 76, 249, 254, 255, 259, 260, 274, 283, 305 ‘Militant Liberty’ campaign, 202–5, 224 Milius, John, 267, 270–2, 275, 276, 279, 287, 294 Miller, David, 250 Mindich, Jeremy, 19 Mindszenty, Jószef, 110, 127 Ministry of Information (MOI) see Britain Mitchum, Robert, 110 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo, 76 Moll, Elick, 146 Mondale, Walter, 276, 277 The Monkees (television series), 238 Monks, John, Jr., 55 Monroe, Marilyn, 169 Montgomery, Robert, 87 Moore, Michael, 238, 247 Moore, Robin, 211, 213, 214, 216, 221 Moore, Roger, 199 Morocco, 50 Morrell, Andre, 86–7 Mothershed, Thelma, 187 Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), 46, 47, 48, 114, 115, 144, 203, 207 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 32, 33, 46, 47, 84, 108, 135, 175, 212, 306 Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA), 169

340

Hollywood’s Cold War

Motion Picture Industry Council, 115, 150 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 12, 46 Motion Picture Producers’ Association, 46 Moyer, Roy, 118 Moyers, Bill, 212 Muhammad, Elijah, 179 Mundt, Karl, 63 Munn, Michael, 207 Muppets, the, 285 Murphy, Audie, 209 Murphy, Brian, 138 Murphy, Eddie, 287 Murphy, Emmett, 56 Murphy, George, 58, 59 Murrow, Edward R., 174, 176, 177, 180, 182 Mutual Broadcasting System, 174 Nadel, Alan, 121 Nagasaki, 138 NASA, 179 National Association of Theatre Owners, 306 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 86–7, 88, 245, 288 National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), 49, 85, 115 National Legion of Decency, 46, 47, 112, 149, 153 National Security Council (NSC), 3, 24, 75, 277, 283 National Student Association, 250 Navy, 54, 57, 75, 146, 154, 201, 204, 225, 244, 246, 293 Nazism, 17, 19, 22, 23, 27, 45, 51, 52, 54, 61, 76, 91, 103, 121, 169, 200, 202, 272 Neal, Patricia, 141 Nelson, Ralph, 181 Neufield, Mace, 294 Neumann, Kurt, 112 New Zealand, 158, 169 Newell, Mike, 200 newsreels, 54, 175, 201, 241 Ngo Dinh Diem, 209 Niblo, Fred, 14 Nicaragua, 271–3, 277–85 Nichols, Louis, 53, 54, 56, 57 Nimitz, Admiral Chester, 115 Nixon, Richard, 58, 63, 200, 207, 237, 238, 239, 244, 250, 254, 270, 303 Noerdlinger, Henry S., 116 Nolan Lloyd, 55 Nolte, Nick, 287 Noriega, Manuel, 293 Norris, Chuck, 199 North, Edmund H., 140–1 North, Oliver, 283, 284 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 76, 86, 270, 271, 272 Nyby, Christian, 137 O’Brien, Edmond, 88, 90, 92 O’Brien, Lorenzo, 279 O’Brien, Pat, 201 Odets, Clifford, 146 Office of Civil Defence Management (OCDM), 156 Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), 75–80 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 24, 54, 203 Office of War Information (OWI), 23, 24, 48, 65, 107 O’Hara, Maureen, 204 Olympic Games, 275 Open Road Films, 139 Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), 107 Oppenheimer, Robert, 151, 163n45 Orman, John, 274 O’Ross, Ed, 288 Ortega, Daniel, 279 Orwell, George, 72–94, 254 Paige, Janis, 31

Pakistan, 126, 170, 179 Pakula, Alan J., 252, 260 Palestine Liberation Organisation, 249 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 13 Pan, Hermes, 29 Panama, 208, 293 Panama, Norman, 145, 152, 244 Paramount, 12, 16, 17, 27, 44, 57, 108, 114, 116, 117, 122, 123, 125, 171, 209, 237, 253, 259, 269 Paramount Decree (1948), 236 Parsons, Louella, 207 Pathé, 174 Pattillo, Melba, 188, 189 Pauling, Linus, 157 Paxton, John, 154 Payne, John, 145 Pearce, Richard, 240–1, 244 Pearson, Drew, 149 Peck, Gregory, 109, 153, 200 Peckinpah, Sam, 282 Penn, Arthur, 236 Pennemaker, D. A., 241 Pentagon see Defence Department The Pentagon Papers, 239–40 ‘People’s Capitalism’, 32 Perkins, Anthony, 153, 155 Peru, 279 Peters, Susan, 24 Peyton, Father Patrick, 108 Philbrick, Herbert, 58 Philippines, 209 Phillips, Burrill, 185 Phoenix Corporation, 147 Physicians for Social Responsibility, 140 Pichel, Irving, 110 Picker, Arnold, 178 Pickford, Mary, 147 Pierce, Robert, 186–7, 192 Pike, Otis, 254 Poe, G. Tom, 158 Poindexter, John, 283 Poitier, Sidney, 178 Poland, 22, 57, 86, 105, 203, 272 Polanski, Roman, 238 Poledouris, Basil, 272 Pollack, Sydney, 236, 252–5, 260 Pollock, Tom, 279 Polonsky, Abraham, 137 Pope Gregory V, 126 Pope John Paul II, 105 Pope Pius XII, 125, 155 Porgy and Bess (opera), 9, 172 Porter, Cole, 29 Potter, H. C., 145 Powell, Addison, 257 Power, Tyrone, 26, 58, 249 Pressman, Edward R., 279, 281, 284 Production Code Administration (PCA), 12–13, 17, 29, 58, 112, 141, 142, 152, 153, 236, 303 Protestantism, 106, 110, 114, 118 Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), 79–80, 94 Quart, Leonard, 50 Quigley, Martin, 46, 63, 125 Rackmail, Milton, 108 Radio Free Europe, 106, 115 Radio Liberty, 106 Radio Marti, 268 Rafelson, Bob, 239, 242 Rainbow Pictures, 243 Ramirez, Sergio, 279 Rand, Ayn, 46, 103 Rand Corporation, 158 Rathvon, Peter, 46, 87, 88, 90, 92, 175 Ratoff, Gregory, 23–4

Film Index Ray, Aldo, 217 Ray, Gloria, 188 Ray, Nicholas, 159 Rayfiel, David, 254 Reader’s Digest-de Rochement Corporation (RD-DR), 56–8, 76, 78 Reagan, Ronald, 11, 106, 200, 224, 267–9, 270, 273–6, 277, 281, 283, 285–6, 290, 292, 293, 303–4 Red Channels (report), 53 ‘Red fascism’, 88 Redford, Robert, 253–5, 258, 285 Redgrave, Michael, 88, 92 Reed, John, 77 Reinhardt, Gottfried, 16 Reis, Irving, 147 Reisch, Walter, 17, 21 Reisz, Karel, 52 Religion, propaganda and, 103–34 Rennie, Michael, 140, 142–3 Repplier, Theodore, 32 Republic Pictures, 108 Reynolds, Kevin, 270–1, 287 Richie, Lionel, 10 Richmond, Yale, 33–4 Riesman, David, 33 Ritt, Martin, 146, 255 RKO, 12, 27, 45, 83, 87, 108, 117 Roberts, Terrance, 188, 189 Robertson, Cliff, 256, 258 Robeson, Paul, 74, 172 Robinson, Edward G., 47, 117 Rogers, Roy, 51 Romero, Archbishop Oscar, 278 Room, Abram, 172 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 149 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 15, 16, 27, 81, 203, 278 Rosenthal, Rick, 286 Rossellini, Isabella, 10 Rossellini, Roberto, 112 Rossen, Robert, 14, 137 Rosten, Leo, 57 Rostow, Walt, 243 Rove, Karl, 305 Rowan, Carl, 181–2, 191 Rudolph, Wilma, 181 Rumann, Sig, 21 Rusk, Dean, 180 Russell, Charley, 176 Sadler, Barry, 211 Sagal, Boris, 200 St Jacques, Raymond, 217 Salinger, Pierre, 210 Sandinistas, 271, 277–9, 283 SANE, 153, 156 Sarandon, Susan, 285 Sarris, Andrew, 249 Saville, Victor, 50 Schaffner, Franklin J., 140, 200 Schary, Dore, 45, 49, 108 Schein, Harry, 144 Schell, Maria, 33 Schenck, Nicholas, 80, 108 Schickel, Richard, 221, 223 Schlesinger, John, 236, 262 Schneider, Bert, 234, 238–53, 247–8 Schneider, Stanley, 252–3 Schoedsack, Ernest B., 203 Schrecker, Ellen, 48 Schuster, Harold, 50 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 279, 282, 288, 290, 292, 293, 305 Scorsese, Martin, 234, 237 Scott, Adrian, 87 Scott, Martha, 119 Scott, Ridley, 306 Scott, Tony, 225

341

Screen Actors Guild, 58, 200, 267 Screen Directors Guild, 114, 117 Screen Writers Guild, 17 Sears, Fred T., 50 Seaton, George, 202 Second World War, 2, 24, 25, 53, 57, 61, 65, 74, 76, 80, 81, 90, 94, 135, 137, 147, 151, 152, 168, 169, 177, 201, 203, 205, 209, 212, 216, 221, 223, 224, 237, 243, 287, 305 films about, 27, 54, 87, 109–10, 140, 145, 172, 202 films during, 23–4, 28, 45, 54, 112, 126, 210, 302 See It Now (television programme), 177 Seiber, Matyas, 77 Seiler, Lewis, 111 Seltzer, Leo, 179 Semple, Lorenzo, Jr., 254 Seven Arts, 215, 216 Sex Pistols, the, 277 Sharpe, Robert K., 179 Shea, John, 262 Sheehan, Neil, 219 Sheen, Charlie, 271, 273, 274 Sheen, Fulton J., 114–15 Shelton, Turner, 176, 179, 183 Sherlock, Jerry, 294 Shulman, Milton, 93 Shute, Nevil, 152–4 Siegel, Don, 27, 50, 234, 235 Simmonds, Walter, 215 Sinatra, Frank, 238 Sinclair, Upton, 13 Sinfield, Alan, 86 Singapore, 126 Sirk, Douglas, 110 Skouras, Spyros P., 108 Smith, Andrew, 115 Smith-Mundt Act (1948), 24 Sobran, Joseph, 247 Soderbergh, Steven, 306 Somalia, 306 Somoza family, 278 Sonneveld, Wim, 29 Soviet Union/Russia cultural exchange with US, 33, 151, 285 films made in, 25, 27, 45, 105, 168, 172, 248, 276, 285, 286, 303, 304–5 Hollywood’s representation of life in, 9–11, 13–14, 16–23, 27–34, 72–102, 110–11, 122–3, 288–91 intelligence and security service (KGB), 9–10, 207, 249, 301 subversion in the US, representation of, 42–65, 269–76 Spanish Civil War, 17, 73 Spielberg, Steven, 234, 270, 286, 305 Spoto, Donald, 157 Spottiswood, Roger, 278 Springsteen, R. G., 51 Spungeon, Nancy, 277 Sputnik I, 151 Stalin, Joseph, 15, 16, 20, 23, 28, 34, 49, 73, 74, 80, 81, 85, 87, 90, 105, 110, 113, 136, 151 appreciation of cinema, 45, 207, 304 Stallone, Sylvester, 199, 276, 285 Stanton, Frank, 240 Star Trek (television series), 217 State Department, 1, 4, 11, 24, 25, 26, 29, 34, 49, 55, 56, 74, 79, 86, 106, 108, 117, 156, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 190, 203, 214, 249, 270, 271, 281, 304 Stein, Sol, 87–8, 90, 92, 93 Stepanek, Karel, 58, 59, 61 Sterling, Jan, 89, 92 Stevens, George, 113, 181 Stevens, George, Jr., 167, 176–83, 188, 192 Stevenson, Adlai, 183 Stewart, James, 268 Stilwell, General Richard, 213, 218–19 Stone, Oliver, 278, 279

342

Hollywood’s Cold War

Strategic Defence Initiative (‘Star Wars’), 275 Streibert, Theodore, 115, 174 Strummer, Joe, 280 Suez crisis (1956), 123 Suid, Lawrence, 155 Supreme Court, 112, 152, 173, 292 Swayze, Patrick, 271–2, 274 Sweden, 16, 84, 144 Swift, Jonathan, 72, 78 Sylvester, Arthur, 213 Takei, George, 217 Tanen, Ned, 237 Taradash, Daniel, 146–7, 150 Taylor, Robert, 24 television, 33, 65, 86, 88, 93, 110, 113, 115, 117, 126, 152, 168, 173, 177, 179, 182, 183, 190, 199, 203, 208, 210, 213, 220, 221, 223, 225, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 245, 248, 253, 255, 267, 275, 281, 287 Tenney Committee, 114 terrorism, 209, 210, 216, 249, 269, 274, 276, 278, 287, 289, 293, 305 ‘9/11’ and after, 305–6 Thomas, J. Parnell, 24, 45 Thomas, Jefferson, 184–92 Thomas, Ralph, 28 Todd, Richard, 110 Tourneur, Jacques, 49, 200 Tracy, Spencer, 199 Treasury, 47, 304 Tribeca Film Festival, 306 Trotsky, Leon, 14, 80 Truman, Harry S., 3, 4, 24, 25, 44, 52–3, 64, 75, 107, 138, 243 Tumanishvili, Mikhail, 276 Turkey, 19 Twentieth Century-Fox, 9, 12, 108, 140–4, 170, 209 Tyler, Walter, 121 Uganda, 191 Ut, Nick, 245 U2 (rock band), 280 United Artists, 12, 152, 153, 178, 236, 269 United Nations (UN), 83, 138, 140, 141, 144, 208 United Service Organisations (USO), 208, 306 United States Information Agency (USIA), 4, 32, 87–8, 92, 94, 106, 107–8, 115, 117, 125, 156–7, 167–93, 199, 201, 210, 224, 268, 303 United States Information Services (USIS), 25, 55, 79, 175, 176, 191 Universal, 12, 108, 213, 215, 237, 279, 284, 285, 293 Valenti, Jack, 212, 306 Van Dyke, Willard, 180 Van Voorhis, Westbrook, 59 Vandenberg, Arthur, 64 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 280, 284 Verity, Terence, 89 Vicious, Sid, 277 Vidor, King, 27 Viertel, Salka, 16 Viet Cong, 180, 210, 212, 213, 215, 217, 220, 223, 234, 238, 245, 275, 301 Vietnam War, 5, 9, 10, 155, 167, 180, 193, 199–200, 207, 208–26, 234, 235, 237, 238–49, 252, 254, 261, 267, 268, 269, 270, 275, 276, 279, 283, 290 Vizzard, Jack, 112 Voice of America (VOA), 33, 103, 106, 173, 176 Von Sydow, Max, 256, 257

Wadleigh, Michael, 241 Wagnleitner, Rheinhold, 169 Wagon Train (television series), 203 Walker, Robert, 42–3 Walker, William, 277–82, 284, 285 Wallace, George, 207 Walls, Carlotta, 188, 189 Wanger, Walter, 169 ‘War on Terror’, 305–6 Warburg, Fredric, 79 Warner Bros., 12, 15, 108, 215, 216, 223, 243, 248 Washburn, Abbott, 174 Watergate scandal, 237, 250, 252, 253, 254, 259, 261, 268, 283 Waters, Ethel, 170 Watkins, Peter, 158 Wayne, John, 5, 28, 144, 199–226, 240, 303, 306 Wayne, Michael, 212–13, 215–16, 221, 223 Wead, Frank ‘Spig’, 204 Weidenfeld, Lord, 79 Weingarten, Shirlee, 58 Weissmuller, Johnny, 304 Welles, Orson, 74, 140 Wellman, William, 2, 15, 54, 109, 207 Wenders, Wim, 169 Werker, Alfred, 57 West Germany/Federal Republic of Germany (FDR), 28, 223, 276 Westmoreland, General William, 244 Wexler, Haskell, 278 Whitaker, Harold, 84 Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt, 203 Wick, Charles Z., 174, 268 Widmark, Richard, 199 Wilcoxon, Henry, 115 Wilder, Billy, 17, 21, 27, 33, 34 Wildwood Enterprises, 253 Williams, Robin, 286 Wills, Gary, 223 Wilson, Michael, 146 Winner, Michael, 234 Wise, Robert, 140, 268 Wiseman, Frederick, 241 Wisner, Frank, 75, 79 Withey, Chester, 14 Witney, William, 51 Wolff, Lothar, 57, 77, 79 Wood, Michael, 123 Wood, Sam, 285 Woodward, Bob, 252, 254 Workman, Chuck, 306 Wurlitzer, Rudy, 278, 280, 281, 284 Wyke, Maria, 113–14 Wyler, William, 285 Wylie, Philip, 111 Yablans, Frank, 269–72 Yates, Herbert, 108 Yates, Peter, 253 Yeoworth, Irving S., Jr., 138 Young, Gig, 33 Yugoslavia, 249 Zanuck, Darryl, 9, 108, 140–2, 144, 205 ‘Zhdanovism’, 45 Zimbabwe, 276 Zimmer, George, 14 Zinnemann, Fred, 144 Zucker, Howard, 243

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The Cold Cash War

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The Cold War Swap

Bruce McAllister - Cold War

The Cold War Swap

Post-Cold War