Important new books demonstrate that 1. Many of those accused of generating pro Soviet propaganda in fact did so and 2. The most effective and long running black list has been the anti conservative one initiated in the 1970s.
Instead he follows his métier as a journalist (Ryskind is a long-time editor of Human Events, the same journal his father once contributed to), the old fashioned kind who wrote what actually happened. He researches, and digs up facts in a bi-partisan manner (much of the damning sources he uses against Hollywood Stalinists comes from liberals and socialists and even anti-anti-communist historians). His effort is truly counter-cultural but he is not the first.
In recent years, as the Left Coast narrative has spread and burrowed into the general culture, there have appeared works by those such as historians Ronald and Allis Radosh that have invalidated what they call “the bedtime story Hollywood tells itself every night.” More than just exposing Hollywood communists as totalitarian hypocrites, the Radoshes have also validated the mandate of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was to investigate attempts by communists to not only insert agit-prop into films but also to takeover the industry (i.e. a particular vicious strike in 1945 against the studios was masterminded by union leader and communist Herbert Sorrell; thankfully a non-communist union leader named Ronald Reagan was able to stem the tide). Even to the most objective observer there was a tide of movies peddling Stalinist propaganda during World War II.
Party member Richard Collins penned a portrait of dancing, nail-polished Kulaks in Song of Russia. Lillian Hellman turned their villages littered with corpses years before the Nazi invasion by Stalin into a more prosperous version of the Walton’s. The most notorious example, and one that galvanized Ryskind’s father into assembling anti-communists into a group, was Mission to Moscow (1943), which supported the rigged verdicts of the Purge Trials as a needed antifascist action against such “Nazi-loving fifth columnists” as Leon Trotsky. Perhaps the most high profile of anti-anticommunists, Victor Navasky, mocked anticommunist use of this film by stating that its screenwriter, Howard Koch, was not a Party member. But as the Radoshes have unearthed, and provided in more detail by Ryskind, Koch was a communist in everything but membership. And his technical advisor, Jay Leda was a Soviet spy currently being monitored by the FBI.
Ryskind doesn’t follow this established trajectory of anti-communist literature to the letter, however. He goes where others have not or have glossed over. He focuses on Blockade (1937), a film dealing with the Spanish Civil War written by the leader of the Hollywood Communists, John Howard Lawson. Others have accepted whatever propaganda message Lawson intended was diluted by conservative studio heads (Lillian Hellman attacked the film’s apolitical nature by stating she couldn’t tell the Loyalists from the fascists). Ryskind, however, sees a pro-Loyalist slant but one strictly for those under Soviet control. He rightly spends as much time on Ninotchka (1939), a highly successful comedy, as a rebuttal to those then and now who asserted that anticommunist films were crude and unprofitable. Director Ernest Lubitsch (who was so horrified by what he witnessed in 1938 Russia that he refused to remain a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League unless communist members resigned) attacked the Soviets through the vehicle of the screwball genre, and, more effectively, than later more action-oriented entries exposed the joylessness and inhumanity of communism. Indeed, the State Department showed this film in Italy before the 1948 elections, and credited the communists’ loss at the polls to its effectiveness
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