More movies

When I checked my last Enemies Within post, I realized I’d skipped a few films …

What Is Communism? is an early sixties disinformational short in which Herb Philbrick (yes, he of I Led Three Lives fame) explains to the audience how Commies are evil schemers intent on world-domination and worst of all—they’re atheists! Because if you don’t believe in God, clearly there can be no limits to your evil.

Red Nightmare (1962) was a Jack Webb-produced thirty-minute film for the Department of Defense, in which an American blithely blowing off  his responsibilities to the PTA and the American Legion gets a nightmare about the horror that he would face if public apathy allowed the Reds to take over (much the same message as Invasion USA a decade earlier). See children denounce their parents to the authorities! Watch police ignore the Fourth Amendment! Gasp as Soviets turn the town church into a museum and take credit for inventing the telephone! Available on YouTube.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is fifth-column paranoia as seen through the eyes of expectant mother Mia Farrow, who realizes her husband, her friendly neighbors and her gynecologist are all part of a Satanist conspiracy involving her baby—though not quite for the reasons she thinks. Deserves its standing as a modern horror classic.

Shadow Conspiracy (1997) looked like it might be a fifth column story but no, it’s a fairly straight tale of political intrigue as a White House cabal opposed to the president’s policies plots to assassinate him. Can speechwriter Charlie Sheen and reporter Linda Hamilton save America?

Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1994) is certainly an improvement on the earlier adaptation, The Brain Eaters, but this story of alien parasites taking over  first a small town, then a state, then their own army is still pretty mediocre. Less paranoid than the source novel and most of the changes (the aliens being a hive mind, for instance) add nothing.

Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1939) isn’t really a fifth column story, but after all the anti-Japanese films I’ve seen, it’s interesting to watch one with a Japanese hero (even played by Peter Lorre)—and amazing that even this late in the decade, the enemy spies pointedly do not identify the nation employing them.

I’d thought The Lottery (1994) might qualify as a paranoid story of supernatural infiltration, but it turns out this adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s story is just a creepy tale of a small-town hiding a sinister cult a la Dark Secret of Harvest Home. Competently done, though.

Strange Holiday (1945) shows how some fifth-column themes adapt to any enemy threat: This story originally had Claude Rains discovering that while he blew off the war effort to go camping, Nazis took over his town; with a little editing to remove the Nazi references, this ran in the 1950s when the infiltrators would obviously have been Reds. Another one out there on YouTube.