Red Star Over Hollywood:
The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left
by Ronald and Allis Radosh
(Encounter Books, 309 pages, $25.95)
Hearing Ronald Radosh interviewed on radio, one would think that
Red Star Over Hollywood provides a comprehensive account
of Hollywood’s fling with radical leftism. The book’s subtitle,
The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left, leads
potential readers in the same direction.
In actuality, this short but heavily documented work focuses on
Hollywood figures who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and
1940s and paid a price for that affiliation when they failed to
cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The
book has almost nothing to say about contemporary political
proclivities in Tinseltown. Instead, its pages are filled with
names like Budd Schulberg, Maurice Rapf, and Dalton Trumbo.
By following the ideological journeys of numerous industry
leftists, Radosh and wife Allis dispel the popular notion that HUAC
investigations succeeded only in tarnishing the reputations of
well-intentioned idealists. In truth, many dedicated communists who
stuck with Stalin to the bitter end testified before the committee
— alongside persons whose romantic attachments to the party waned
earlier.
Indeed, the authors show that the Communist Party in Hollywood
had become a “growth industry” by the mid-'30s — with
approximately 300 members. The influence of this disciplined cadre
was as evident in various Popular Front organizations as it was in
the party’s assignment of a “cultural commisar” to oversee the
theatrical product of its underground comrades. Though Stalin’s
pact with Hitler in 1939 temporarily destroyed the anti-fascist
coalition of communists and liberals, America’s wartime alliance
with the Soviet Union reunited these groups.
During the latter period Hollywood reds achieved several
propaganda coups — the most infamous being Mission to
Moscow. Contrary to Victor Navasky’s partisan assessment, this
Warner Brothers film was shaped by a clutch of party members or
sympathizers who collaborated with the useful political idiot,
Joseph Davies — a former U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union who
wrote the memoir on which the movie was based and assisted in
preparing the perfidious script. So blatant was the film’s
whitewash of Stalin’s showtrials and invasion of Finland that the
critic Dwight Macdonald called it “the first totalitarian film to
come out of Hollywood…that could have been made in Moscow.” Other
wartime movies presenting an idyllic view of life in the Soviet
Union were Song of Russia (a production lambasted by
Russian emigre Ayn Rand) and comrade Lillian Hellman’s North
Star.
Beyond portraits of individuals who willingly toed the party
line, the authors also provide examples of writers who were
pressured to make their work reflect Moscow’s orthodoxy du jour.
The post-war case of Albert Maltz is a classic example of how a
servile retraction was obtained via browbeating and fraternal
pressure. On the other side of the coin, the Radoshes present
artists like Robert Rossen who told party enforcers exactly where
to stuff their ideological objections.
The heart of Red Star Over Hollywood is devoted to the
HUAC hearings and their aftermath — especially to the consequences
of various testimony strategies. A few witnesses, like Lloyd
Bridges, were eminently successful at turning truth on its head and
emerging unscathed. Others, like the Hollywood Ten, employed
defiant or non-responsive statements that resulted in prison stints
and mangled careers. On the other hand, Elia Kazan, a friendly
witness whose testimony has often been misrepresented, continued to
employ his directorial genius but is now vilified by industry
leftists. Hollywood’s blacklist, of course, was crucial in
determining which careers would suffer — and for how long. Thus,
the authors focus considerable attention on the words and actions
of studio heads who eventually instituted and gradually lifted
these hiring bans.
Contrary to what its title would lead one to expect, this book
isn’t a partisan rant. Instead, it provides an objective, even
sympathetic, account of the trials endured by individuals who
juggled integrity, self-interest, emotionally satisfying political
attachments, excommunication threats, and a visceral unwillingness
to implicate associates. The authors also acknowledge, anecdotally
for the most part, the ruthlessness of the totalitarian philosophy
to which these privileged Americans pledged allegiance. This
splitting-the-baby perspective is reiterated in a concluding
chapter where HUAC’s hearings and Hollywood’s blacklist are seen as
events that undermined legitimate anti-Communist concerns.
Though one might have wished for more truth in advertising, this
book does provide a historical service by detailing the activities
of dozens of Hollywood reds in the '30s and '40s and by showing how
these individuals succeeded in influencing the American movie
industry. What the work lacks is a clear presentation of the larger
picture against which these individual vignettes play out.
Specifically, the authors don’t directly address these critical
questions: “How much influence did Hollywood reds actually
exercise?” and “What would likely have happened if, in the absence
of flawed investigations, there had been no investigations or
blacklists at all?”
The book’s final chapter moves in the direction of looking at
the forest rather than focusing on individual trees, but this tip
of the perspectival hat doesn’t compensate for its earlier absence.
After all, one can fairly assess the merits and demerits of HUAC’s
investigation and Hollywood’s blacklist only against a backdrop
that takes into account the potential contribution of America’s
film industry to the staggering atrocities perpetrated in the name
of Stalin’s utopia.
