Interesting book on the Hollywood Blacklists

[Postman]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/blac-f04.shtml


Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History, Reynold Humphries, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, 184 pp.

....conservatives are assholes.

snip:

while the FBI had a long list of suspected CP members in Hollywood, HUAC chose its victims with an eye to appealing to the worst instincts of the population: “Most of the Ten were Jews. None had a war record; after all, berating a war hero wearing his medals for the occasion would not go down well with the public.”

The one work that endures in any serious fashion, primarily because of the performance by Marlon Brando—who had no idea he was taking part in an anti-communist film—is Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. The film turns reality upside down and transforms the stand-ins for the CP elements (the union thugs, led by Lee J. Cobb, an informer) into the persecutors, and the stool pigeons into the victimized. The rest of the anti-Red films Humphries discusses have largely been forgotten, except as historical curiosities.


No doubt the filmmakers sincerely wanted to present to an American audience the horrors and dangers of fascism, the poison of anti-Semitism and race hatred, the need for social solidarity, the power and possibility of popular action against despotism. Many indicated sympathy for the “little fellow who has suffered most” (from a review of None Shall Escape in the Hollywood Reporter, cited by Humphries, p.54). Some drew a connection between powerful business interests and authoritarian rule.

[mdmc]

1. thanks for the link

now lets get Pete Seeger the Noble Prize!