"Radical Hollywood" by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner

Two academics are so eager to find socialist themes in classic Hollywood films that they wind up lending credence to McCarthyism.

By Michelle Goldberg

Jun 4, 2002 | Joseph McCarthy and the bottom-feeding red-baiters of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) saw signs of subversion in even the most anodyne Hollywood product. Most observers have interpreted their inability to view art as anything but a conduit for politics as symptomatic of their fascist philistinism. After all, for the past several decades, the conventional wisdom has been that Hollywood's reds were unable to smuggle their ideology past studio censors and market imperatives. As Larry Ceplair wrote in "Political Companion to American Film," "For the most part ... movies written, directed or produced by communists are not politically or stylistically distinguishable from those by non-communists."

Yet if the authors of "Radical Hollywood" are correct, the House Un-American Activities Committee was on to something. Not that authors Paul Buhle, a lecturer at Brown University, and Dave Wagner, former political editor of the Arizona Republic, apologize for McCarthyism. Quite the opposite -- they celebrate cinema leftists as the soul of old Hollywood, makers of the most moral and complex movies in history.

But the analysis they employ to tell the story of the Hollywood left in the '30s and '40s is one borrowed from the most stultifying corners of academia, and it leads them into a critical dead end with surprising parallels to the worst Cold War thinking. Scanning hundreds of wildly diverse films, including gangster pictures, horror flicks, women's weepies, westerns, war films, society comedies and serious political dramas, Buhle and Wagner search for covert lefty messages. In their view, these movies really did threaten capitalist complacency, though they see that as a good thing. "However hilariously inaccurate the FBI (and much later personal testimony to HUAC) might be and often was in details ... they grasped the larger threat of seriously written pictures," they write. "'The Grapes of Wrath,' 'Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,' 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' and the like were subversive to the America as seen and protected by Hoover and his spies."

In some films, the authors argue, the "subversion" was overt, while in many others it was hidden in seemingly innocuous entertainment. "Radical Hollywood" offers itself as a kind of secret decoder ring for finding the embedded sedition in Turner Classic Movies fare. "The information needed to make sense of the political clues hidden in these films has been lacking," they write.

Yet in more than 400 pages of such information, "Radical Hollywood" fails to make much sense of anything, save the inadequacy of the "cultural studies" model popular in certain sectors of academia. The book addresses one of the most fascinating milieus in American history, one crammed with Brobdingnagian egos negotiating the ricocheting collisions among art, commerce and politics, and flattens it with a simplistic quasi-deconstructionist analysis. There is no original reporting in "Radical Hollywood," no scene-setting or investigations of the nuances of conflicted characters. Worse still, by reading evidence of Communist influence into every film with a rich villain, a corrupt politician or a dispossessed hero, "Radical Hollywood" inadvertently makes McCarthy and HUAC seem more rational than they really were.

Cultural studies has long made a fetish of "subversion," lionizing pop phenomena like skateboarding, sampling and Madonna videos -- anything that seems to stick it to the Man, however obliquely. Often this sort of lionizing is vapid but harmless. Here, though, it has real consequences, lending weight (at least retrospectively) to a crazy witch hunt that eviscerated lives.

The authors actually use red-baiting FBI reports and congressional statements to back up some of their assertions, revealing the weird intellectual netherworld where academic wishful thinking meets right-wing hysteria. Explicating the revolutionary shadows in B westerns, they write, "No wonder the FBI, a few years later, reported warnings of an industry informer that a suspicious tone had entered the seemingly innocent format, locating 'a villain in the character of the local banker, crooked rancher with money or other capitalist always behind the plot to rob the ranchers, rustle cattle, prevent farmers coming to the country ... etc.'"

To be fair, the authors sometimes modulate their central idea, noting that on close examination of movies like "Mission to Moscow," "Song of Russia" and "The North Star," "later accusations of Hollywood's Communist subversion properly seem not only wildly disproportionate but downright ironic." Furthermore, it is not outrageous to suppose that left-wing screenwriters imbued their work with populist, humanist ideals. The authors quote Dalton Trumbo, a wildly successful screenwriter and member of the so-called Hollywood Ten, offering proof that left-wingers accomplished something real in Hollywood, saying, "the content of films was better in 1943 than it is in 1953." That's certainly true, as is the fact that the blacklist decimated Hollywood's creative core.

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