From Cowboys to Communists; Hollywood and the Cold War

With the release of ‘Bridge of Spies’ acting as another film in the line of tackling the Cold War, I thought about writing an article about various films to deal with the Red Scare in a direct matter. But something about that just seems too easy, too straightforward. What is fun is to examine some well-known films and see if you can find any allegories to the communists and McCarthyism (my idea of fun is quite different to most people). So in the fifties genres such as science fiction, westerns and epics were flourishing and though they seem to have little to do with the Cold War there are a few hidden meanings behind some incredibly popular films.

Elia Kazan, an exceptional director from Hollywood’s classic era and often credited for launching the career of Marlon Brando with his two seminal dramas ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and 1954’s ‘On the Waterfront’. That second film has a complex and convoluted history, as does its director. In 1952 Kazan was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), they were basically a witch hunting organisation that encouraged people the name and shame any suspected communists, and some of the most heavily targeted areas were those liberal thinking writers of course (Arthur Miler used his play ‘The Crucible’ to draw comparisons between the HCUA and witch trails). To many the stories of proud artists upholding their integrities by not naming any of their colleagues is well known and admired, but the same does not apply for Kazan. He named eight colleagues in the film industry to the committee and was subsequently shunned by a number of other colleagues who he did not even name, including Miller himself who had even penned an early draft of ‘On the Waterfront’.

 For those who have not seen the film, it involves around corruption within the longshoremen community and the moral turmoil experienced by one worker, Terry Malloy (Brando) as he must sum up the courage to use the information he knows to bring the corrupt system down, at the risk of his own personal safety or personal ties with the mobsters, his brother Charlie is a key player in the criminal activities. You can probably see the parallels already, for Kazan the film was a way for him to justify his actions before the artistic world and how even though he walked away with no place on the blacklist or criminal charges, he was badly affected by the ordeal.

But Kazan was not the first director to do this, as a battle of cowboys and communists was about to erupt in Hollywood. It began in 1950 with ‘The Gunfighter’ was keen to emphasise the values of American life, with tight communities banding together to uphold authority and supress violence and rebellion, with the help of a fearless and bold leader, in this case the titular gunfighter (Gregory Peck). The security through unity aspects are heavily emphasised, almost as much as the dangers of change and outsiders. This was hardly the only western to do so, but the significance of ‘The Gunfighter’ is how it was directly challenged and contradicted by ‘High Noon’ two years later.

The writer of ‘High Noon’ was Carl Foreman, another artist brought to trial by the HCUA and chose to make a strong challenge to the American government in a way that hurt it the most, through a western. The upshot it this, a sheriff (Gary Cooper) has one day to either leave town or be gunned down by bandits, though he asks the townspeople for help he is unsuccessful and must face them alone. The film gained an appreciation by the lift wing due to what they interpreted as an allegory for the American people being too afraid to stand up for their own beliefs and values and the few that do are at risk of being persecuted and punished for their courage. It also suggests that the best way forward for America is to maintain a mix of individual freedoms and self-determination.

 ‘High Noon’ was unsurprisingly quite divisive at the time, mostly along political lines. Where the left admired it, the right hated it, no one more so than Marion Morrison, better known by his stage name John Wayne. Together with director Howard Hawks, Wayne set out to make a response to ‘High Noon’, a film that in Wayne’s opinion promoted a ‘leftist’ image or collectivism, a departure from good old fashioned American ideals, for Wayne ‘High Noon’ was something a commie would make, not a manly and masculine American man, with manly ideals and other male… stuff. Wayne and Hawks made ‘Rio Bravo’ that emphasised rugged individualism in the face of unprecedented adversary as Wayne stands alone against numerous bandits, except he doesn’t do what a sissy like Gary Cooper would do and ask for help, he stands alone and takes them down with just his two buddies (a self-described cripple and youngster), cue ‘America….. F**** Yeah! This lends itself to the idea that for more conservative filmmakers, America had to be portrayed as not only withstanding the outside threat of communism but being alone in the fight, because that is more compelling. If you take the idea that the bandits are communists and Wayne is America, ‘Rio Bravo’ becomes essentially a propaganda film.

However, it wasn’t just westerns that got their allegories for the red scare in their story. ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ came out in 1956, and we’ve already talked about it here. But for the sake of sustaining and padding out this article I’ll mention it again (because no movie franchise was ever ruined by repetitiveness). This science fiction film involves a man discovering that his entire town has been replaced by alien life forms known as pod people as they slowly invade his town like a creeping infection. So it is fairly obvious that these pod people are interpreted to represent communists, a new race of people replacing American ideologies one by one as they entrap normal citizens and drag them into their system, all the while spreading their disease even further (at least according to Joseph McCarthy). Speaking of McCarthyism though, an alternative interpretation of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ comes from the fact that as the crisis worsens, the man becomes a nervous wreck, running through the town in a blind panic and not knowing who to trust. So does that make the man McCarthy, a delirious and paranoid person, accusing everyone left, right and centre of being an enemy?

But the following year there was an even heavier political allegory in the form of one of the most iconic historical epics of all time. It was one of Stanley Kubrick’s earlier and decidedly least Kubrick-like film, ‘Spartacus’. The historical epic is still very good, but there are few differing interpretations, trippy visuals or mind bending plots. Or are there? Having been scripted by Dalton Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston in an upcoming movie) under a pseudo name as he had been blacklisted for refusing to name any colleagues suspected of communist sympathies before the HCUA, well surely if you remember anything about the film, especially its finale, you may already be drawing parallels. The film is about a slave revolt led by the titular ‘Spartacus’ and in the most iconic scenes of the film the slave army is defeated and offered an ultimatum by the Romans; Give up and turn in their leader Spartacus, or die. What do the slaves do? Well as Spartacus steps up to turn himself in, another slave stands up and announces himself to be Spartacus, then another and so on until the entire army is claiming to be Spartacus. This may be a work of genius by Trumbo as a script to highlight his own resentments towards the government and blacklisting, to make the climactic and most memorable moment of his film one where individuals refuse to name a specific person, accepting whatever personal risk comes their way before proving their strength as a united force. You have to admit, for a script by a man blacklisted for communist sympathies, it is one hell of an allegory.