One Time, I Even Heard Lionel Stander Whistle the Internationale

A friend shot me an email about Ronald and Allis Radosh's op-ed piece (NH Union Leader) lamenting the ways in which "the Communists and former Communists of Hollywood have written the script of the past, telling the story of the blacklist in memoirs and histories, movies and documentaries in which they depict themselves as noble martyrs and champions of democracy." They don't deny that the blacklist ruined some people's careers, but they want you to know that for the Hollywood Ten, being blacklisted was a "godsend," because it set them up as professional martyrs for life, an "accepted narrative" that "obscures the important truth about Communist influence in Hollywood." The definition of godsend must be rather flexible: perhaps not being able to sell a screenplay after 1948 was a godsend for Alvah Bessie in that it freed him to take up gardening or some such hobby, because I'm assuming the royalties from Inquisition In Eden didn't exactly make him rich.

I would've thought that redhunting went out of style with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but maybe that's just me. The kicker is that the Radoshes are, if you'll forgive the pun, late to the party: most serious histories of the film industry during the '40s and '50s already concede that the Communists were active in Hollywood, and even that the Soviet Union wielded influence over CPUSA policy, but nobody's ever made a good case for red propaganda seeping into wholesome American movies. Heck, Lloyd Billingsley already wrote the conservative's book on this way back in 1998 (and, as I noted at the time, at least had some interesting things to say about labor organization among movie studio employees, an area which actually does offer some fertile ground for redhunters). I guess I'm wondering what exactly the Radoshes bring to the table at this point...especially if the only recent example of the liberal "fable that has acquired an almost irresistible weight as a result of half a century of telling and retelling" they can come up with is the 1991 film Guilty by Suspiction, which--let's face it--couldn't pull in $10 million at the box office, and wasn't even really necessary in a world where The Front already existed. Not exactly capturing hearts and minds, if you ask me.

Since then, Hollywood's bent over backwards to give Elia Kazan a special Oscar he didn't even need--or, the less charitable among us might suggest, deserve--in order to repudiate the social rejection from his liberal peers. Apart from the furor over that ceremony, the blacklist hasn't been on the forefront of anybody's mind in years, except maybe whichever industry old-timers haven't died yet, their offspring, the children of the dead, plus a handful of historians--film buffs like myself, and professional anti-communists like the Radoshes. (That said, for all my skepticism, I honestly don't have any idea what the book's like; maybe they do improve on Billingsley's work. After all, it wouldn't be that hard.)