Sometimes, Hollywood has a very long memory, and other times, a very, very short one.
By 1999, almost five decades had elapsed since director Elia Kazan had made known the identities of communists in his orbit to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Much of the world had moved on, but for many in the industry, Kazan’s testimony remained a scab to be picked at. So, in the final year of the last century, when Kazan picked up an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards, many who were there found themselves paralyzed by self-righteousness, unable to applaud, let alone stand for, a great filmmaker.
Indeed, the supposed sin of anti-communism has exercised Hollywood long past its sell-by date. Films rebuking the Red Scare have been a cottage industry since at least the early 1960s. The subgenre remained so hardy that, as late as 2005, George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” in which journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) is granted godlike status for his public castigation of anti-communist Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy racked up six Oscar nominations.
At their worst, these films were preening and preachy, but many of them communicated the essential point that we ought to be wary of political frenzies, on the Left or Right, and depend on facts rather than mobs.
Yet, in the media’s mad dash to assign credibility to every Russiagate-related accusation or insinuation against President Trump, the lessons of these films have been conveniently cast aside. Hollywood has developed amnesia over its own decades of sanctimony. For example, in a 2017 speech at the Cesar Awards, Clooney seemed to misunderstand his own movie, quoting passages from Murrow’s famous on-air demolition job on McCarthy — “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” and so on — in a thinly veiled salvo against Trump. Yet to cast Trump as McCarthy, and the media as Murrow, is a decidedly imperfect metaphor. Doesn’t McCarthy’s mania in pursuing communists more closely resemble the media’s eagerness in pursuing Russiagate? Could not Murrow’s admonition to proceed with care when making accusations be cited by Trump defenders, at least until the Mueller report has been released and weighed?
Alas, such a reading would require a certain philosophical consistency, something Hollywood has never been very good at. Before the industry was in the anti-McCarthy business, it was very much in the anti-communist business. Studios churned out such simplistic efforts as “I Was a Communist for the FBI” and “Big Jim McLain,” the latter starring John Wayne in his most laughable role as an anti-communist he-man.
Nonetheless, high quality work did emerge in the thick of the Red Scare. For example, Leo McCarey’s “My Son John” offered the case study of a pair of ordinary, all-American parents (Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger) who find themselves on the outs with their overeducated offspring (Robert Walker), who may or may not be an adherent of communism. McCarey’s point remains potent even beyond the Red Scare: It is a sad day when ideology spoils family life.
Of course, Hollywood’s leftward bent would not be suppressed forever. Studios eventually renounced their anti-communism, paving the way for films in which the Cold War was naively presented as a skirmish between equally foolish opponents, such as “Dr. Strangelove.” Subsequent films made amends for HUAC or the blacklist, including “The Front,” “The House on Carroll Street,” and “Guilty by Suspicion.” In 1996, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play “The Crucible,” which rehashed the Salem witch trials to condemn those of its day, made its way to movie screens, some 39 years after the death of McCarthy.
For a time, Hollywood couldn’t get enough of this stuff, but no more. Where once Sarah Palin was derided on “Saturday Night Live” for her inelegantly expressed views on the importance of monitoring Russian military activity, now the Trump administration’s critics revive imagery straight out of anti-communist films. Numerous writers have wondered whether Trump is a “Manchurian candidate,” a reference to the massively entertaining but utterly fantastical 1962 conspiracy thriller revolving around a communist-directed brainwashing campaign to alter a presidential contest. In January, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about an Oakland theater owner who screened the film for its purported timeliness. “I chose this title because it has been mentioned so many times in the news lately, as the likelihood that Trump is working for or being controlled by Putin grows ever stronger,” he said.
But, whatever other misdeeds Mueller’s report exposes, what if that turns out to not quite be the case? Will Hollywood atone and produce a remake of “The Crucible”? Don’t bet on it.
As Murrow said so well, “Good night, and good luck.”
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
