Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. (Reviews).

by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner (New Press, 2002)

In a personal interview conducted two decades ago, director Edward Dmytryk solemnly assured me that because of management hegemony, it was impossible to incorporate political content into American feature films. In this well-argued analysis of left wing influence on the Hollywood product, historian Paul Buhle and journalist Dave Wagner issue a strong challenge to Dmytryk's questionable assertion. Grounded in thorough research, Radical Hollywood provides ample evidence of radical and liberal impact on two generations of filmmaking that resulted in some of the motion picture industry's finest work. Encyclopedic in scope, the volume offers the most comprehensive account to date of the substantial body of work produced by a creative generation of writers, directors, and actors who were to become the victims of the pernicious blacklist of the 1950s. The result is a treasure trove of material for the historian, film scholar, and teacher seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the movies made during Hollywood's go lden era in their full political context.

Few scholars are better prepared to offer such a socially and politically informed analysis of Hollywood's left activists, their objectives, and the resulting work than Buhle and Wagner, whose recent study of Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, A Very Dangerous Citizen (2001), revealed their impressive knowledge of the left in the movie capital. Similarly, Buhle's work with Patrick McGilligan on Tender Comrades (1997) established him as one of the leading scholars of the blacklist era. A logical extension of these works, Radical Hollywood reaches into the 1920s and 1930s to find both the origins of left-inspired cinematic art and the seeds of the left's destruction at the hands of domestic anticommunists in the blacklist era.

Buhle and Wagner find the origins of radical militancy in the bitter labor struggles of the Depression and immediate postwar era, as well as the intense social consciousness evident in the "hungry thirties" and the years of wartime unity. Commitment to the New Deal and a militant labor movement were matched by admiration for what seemed the progressive example of the Soviet Union. Hopes for maintaining a Popular Front survived World War II and sustained left activism until at least 1948, by which time the collapse of the motion picture industry and its artistic community made further such alliances dangerous. The historical context did, in fact, exert an important influence on the cultural workers of Hollywood.

Hollywood artists, especially the politically-conscious screenwriters, labored mightily to incorporate liberal and radical themes into the motion pictures that so influenced the large theater-going public. Although it was difficult to integrate progressive themes into Hollywood films, the authors find significant left wing influence in the form of anticapitalist themes in gangster films, socially-conscious filmmaking such as that of the Warner Brothers, proletarian emphases in fantasy films and even westerns, and the gritty realism of class-struggle film noir. While the progressive implications of some of the films seem tangential, the analysis is generally incisive and occasionally provocative. Buhle and Wagner's solid analysis of noir alone is worth the price of admission. In general, their description of the progressive left and its art, the social context from which it grew, and the political implications of the cinematic result plows new ground in film studies. Because the authors explore so much previou sly-ignored material, this study advances our knowledge of the film as social history in a significant way. While some readers may disagree with their conclusions, they will have to address the strong evidence presented, which is both extensive and persuasive.

While the analysis of film content is strongest when the authors discuss noir, one of the book's strengths is its comprehensive coverage of the black-listees' work. Indeed, its discussion of the "unfriendlies" and their work helps students and scholars establish needed linkage among blacklist victims, the body of work they produced, and the creative work they left undone. Moreover, it will come as no surprise that Buhle and Wagner clearly believe that the crippling effect of the blacklist on Hollywood was evident in the puerile film fare of the barren fifties.

Historians, film scholars, students, and general readers will all find something of value in Radical Hollywood. To be sure, the authors sometimes overstate their case by assuming a direct line between the artist's political commitment and resultant film content. Nonetheless, Buhle and Wagner have made a valuable contribution to historical and film scholarship by opening debate on long-forgotten cinematic art and the historical context in which left-inspired motion pictures were produced and consumed. This book will rake its place alongside Gerald Home's Class Struggle in Hollywood 1939-1950 (2001) and Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund's The Inquisition in Hollywood (1979) as an original and provocative study of Hollywood's radical artists in the age of the great fear. More than this, it will remind readers of the body of work amassed by this creative generation and clarify the origins of the anticommunist hostility it engendered. Students of film studies, movie history, and twentieth century American culture w ill ignore Radical Hollywood at their risk.

JAMES J. LORENCE is Eminent Scholar of History at Gainesville College in the University of Georgia System and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County. In recent years, his research has focused on labor history and film studies. Among his publications are Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (1999) and Organizing the Unemployed: Community and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland (1996).