I was planning to write a movie post for today after I emailed the book off. But Friday was supposed to be a no-work day and I didn’t feel like it. So here’s a movie-analysis post from 2009, when I was working on Screen Enemies of the American Way (my working title was The Enemy Within).
For those who don’t remember, that was my book about political paranoia in American films, the belief Communists/Nazis/Japanese/ETs/etc. were infiltrating us to destroy our way of life from within. My chapter on the Red Menace films of the 1950s made me notice how they approached civil rights:
“Watching anti-Communist films for The Enemy Within, I’m struck by how many of the fifties films make an issue out of race.
It’s not surprising. The Communist Party made civil rights a platform plank at a time neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted to risk it. And when the civil-rights movement really got going, a standard charge against it was that it was a Communist plot, with Red “outside agitators” stirring up the Negroes who were otherwise perfectly happy and knew their place (this theme still has some pull on the right, it seems: One columnist wrote last year that only Communists crossed the color line back in the pre-Civil Rights days, so that proves Barack Obama’s parents were Reds—and therefore, of course, he grew up indoctrinated into Communist doctrine) The movies reinforce the second point while making it clear the Party’s support for civil rights is a myth:
•In I Was a Communist For the FBI, a Red speaker addresses Negroes with “a hellbrew of hate cooked up from a recipe written in the Kremlin.” He tells the hero afterwards that he’s hoping to spark black-on-white assaults or even killings, after which the Party will defend the accused and use the incident to make America look bad. The same man also uses the n-word to refer to his black audience after they’ve gone.
•In Red Menace, a priest preaches the glories of the melting pot—it doesn’t matter if you’re Irish, Jewish, black, once you become American you’re welcome—in contrast to which the Communist party emphasizes how minorities are discriminated against (which is equated to promoting separatism and anti-Americanism). When an Italian-American Party member questions official doctrine, a Party leader dismisses him as a “dago.” Later in the movie, a black writer for a Communist newspaper is told by his father that where America has freed its slaves, the Communist keep thousands in slavery behind the Iron Curtain.
•In one episode of I Led Three Lives (American citizen, Communist agent and FBI counter-agent, in case you were wondering), the Party buys up a newsreel company that will present distorted views of America, for example falsely showing that people living in the slum districts are afflicted by poverty and racial discrimination.
•In Trial, Glenn Ford becomes second chair to showboating Communist attorney Arthur Kennedy on a racially charged murder case. While Ford is clearly shown to be sympathetic to the defendant (a Hispanic kid involved with a white girl), the only organized support for the defendant comes from the Communist Party—and we learn that the donations Kennedy is taking for the legal costs are going right into the Party coffers. Not only that, he plans to lose the case, making the kid a martyr to American racism.
This sort of thing shows why it’s important to watch movies wherever possible, not just read synopses in movie books. There’s a lot of stuff. I probably wouldn’t pick up if I did it that way.”
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