Hollywood has a checkered record in its portrayal of communism. On the occasions when it has dealt with the subject, it has tended -- not surprisingly for a mass entertainment industry -- to reflect the public feeling of the times: solidarity with the Soviets during World War II, a general anti-communism during the Cold War, and a general anti-Americanism in the years after Vietnam.
The films from the early 1940s are revealing. Eager to promote warmth toward our Russian allies fighting the Nazi armies, Hollywood produced a number of enthusiastic and appallingly naive pro-Soviet movies during the war, particularly The North Star (written by Lillian Hellman), Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and Days of Glory (Gregory Peck's movie debut).
Mission to Moscow is the most infamous of these wartime travesties. A prestige Warner Brothers production, it was directed by Michael Curtiz, following Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca. The film is based on the memoir of Joseph E. Davies, a corporate lawyer whom President Roosevelt had sent to Moscow as our ambassador from 1936 to 1938. The amateur statesman himself provides the prologue, speaking directly to the camera. After establishing his patriotic credentials ("My people were pioneers. . . . My religious convictions are basic. . . . I came up the hard way"), he asserts his "very high respect for the integrity and the honesty of the Soviet leaders." Offering a high-gloss whitewash of the 1930s Moscow Show Trials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin and Hitler, the film might have embarrassed even the Communists. The Soviets -- an avuncular Stalin, shown holding a pipe -- are just like us, except for the accent, and Ambassador Davies (played by Walter Huston, who was also the "cooperative farm" elder in The North Star) becomes their biggest fan. Told the Russians have bugged our embassy, he comments, "We'll be friends that much faster."
Hollywood did an about-face in the frigid days of the early Cold War. Most of the anti-Communist movies of the late 1940s and early 1950s are mediocre and some are crude -- except that their view of the Soviet reality was closer to the mark than that presented by the equally crude pro-Soviet films of the war years. Good examples are My Son John and Big Jim McLain (both in 1952, the latter starring John Wayne as a HUAC investigator digging out Reds in Hawaii). The greatest movie line on the subject of communism is in the 1948 gangster drama Key Largo. Mobster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) has snuck into Florida from his exile in Cuba and takes a hotel hostage. Reminded he had been thrown out of the country, he complains: "After living in the USA for more than thirty-five years they called me an undesirable alien. Me. Johnny Rocco" -- his voice rising in anger -- "like I was a dirty Red or something."
Among the more credible attempts to make realistic anti-Communist movies during the period are I Married a Communist (1949, also known as The Woman on Pier 13, a factual account of Red infiltration of a West Coast dock workers' union), Night People (1954, in which Gregory Peck rescues an American boy from East Berlin), Trial (1955, about a Communist agitator who tries to ensure conviction of a wrongfully accused Hispanic boy), and -- the best of these films -- Man on a Tightrope (1953, in which a Czech circus troupe tries to break through the Iron Curtain). The screenplay for Man on a Tightrope was written by the former Roosevelt speech-writer Robert E. Sherwood, and the film's director was Elia Kazan, who is still hated by much of Hollywood for having cooperated with the congressional investigations into Hollywood's Communists.
The three best anti-Communist movies, however, were all made by MGM: The Red Danube (1949), a forgotten documentary called The Hoaxters (1952), and the prewar Ninotchka (1939).
The Red Danube (October 4 at 10:30 P.M. on Turner Classic Movies) dramatizes the repatriations of 1945 and 1946, in which the British and American military authorities forced back into Communist territory four million Soviet citizens who found themselves behind their lines at the war's end. A Russian ballerina, Maria (Janet Leigh), is in hiding in Allied-occupied Vienna. One night, as an admiring British major (Peter Lawford) departs her shabby room and she closes the door, we are chilled by the sinister shadow of a Soviet agent standing at the foot of the stairs -- which is the shadow of communism that has always lurked over the captive peoples. (Such shadows are a frequent visual metaphor in Charles Rosher's stunning black and white cinematography.)
Maria is struggling against not only the Russians, in the person of the icy Colonel Piniev (played by Louis Calhern), but also against the British, in the person of Colonel Nicobar (Walter Pidgeon). Based on the novel Vespers in Vienna, by Bruce Marshall, the movie sets up the conflict as one between Christianity and communism. The mother superior of a local convent (Ethel Barrymore) hides Maria, and when Piniev searches for her, striding through the chapel looking at the kneeling worshippers, director George Sidney juxtaposes his brute power with the humility of the nuns. "For what are they praying?" Piniev asks the mother superior. "They are praying that all Communists may be converted to Christianity," she replies softly.
The mother superior finds herself in conflict not just with Piniev but with Nicobar as well. Disillusioned by two world wars (he lost an arm in the first and his son in the second) and an atheist, though a decent fellow, he wishes merely to carry out orders. When the implacable Piniev returns, Nicobar -- who has been billeted in the convent -- orders Maria turned over. After she has been marched off, the mother superior upbraids Nicobar: "You are cruel. Couldn't you see what that poor child was suffering? Don't you know what she is facing?"
Nicobar, displaying a pathetic and criminal naivete, apparently believes Piniev's assurance that Maria will be "welcome in Russia," and he continues his methodical work searching out persons for repatriation. But his conscience is awakened when he witnesses the appalling condition of repatriates loaded into Russian railway freight cars, including Maria, whom he rescues. "This is what is done to men by other men who have abandoned God," the mother superior says, looking over the horrible scene, and Nicobar finally recognizes that the cruelty of the world is reason for faith, rather than disillusion. Refusing to turn Maria or anyone else over, he is relieved of his command. And when the British forces find Maria and summon Piniev once again out of the shadows, she commits suicide by throwing herself out a window.
The Hoaxters (October 4 at 4:15 A.M. and October 25 at 7:45 A.M.) combines the panache of the studio system's vivid visual style with historical materials "compiled and arranged" by Victor Lasky and William Hebert. Making the same religious connection as The Red Danube, the movie opens with a quotation from William Penn: "People who are not governed by God will be ruled by tyrants." We are introduced to the modern world's snake-oil salesmen "who promise everything and deliver nothing": Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo . . . and Marx -- "the fourth pitchman of the apocalypse."
Film clips show Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and others equating the Communists with the Nazis: "Communism is strangulation for the individual and death for the soul," says Adlai Stevenson. The "deadly parallel" between the two evils follow. First comes their treatment of "Religion," then "The Vote," and "Slavery." For the latter, a map of the Soviet Union is lit with hundreds of sites of "Communist concentration camps" where fourteen million souls "crawl under the iron boot of the Soviet slave labor trust." (This is, of course, two decades before publication of The Gulag Archipelago.)
The Hoaxters then surveys the Communists' seven different policies toward the United States since 1919, alternating between "Hate America!" and "Love America!" (with a shot of Stalin waving like a kindly grandfather from atop Lenin's tomb). The Hoaxters also makes a veiled attack on McCarthyism: We should beware the hoaxters of the "lunatic fringe" who are "trying to destroy America in the name of America." The prophetic peroration follows: "In the better world of the future, dictators will fall not at the point of a gun but at the point of the truth. For we can win our fight without going to war. The free countries of the world" -- dramatic shots of the Washington Monument, the Capitol, and the Constitution -- "with their material might and their spiritual hearts, can prove that there is no victory over the mind when it is ruled by a whip and a gun, and that free-born men and women, under God" -- visuals of meadows, mountains, farmland -- "will ignore the loud shout of the Big Lie and listen instead to the quiet voice of the Big Truth" (spiritual music rising to crescendo with shot of sunlit heavens). The peroration was narrated (and likely written) by MGM production chief Dore Schary, a prominent liberal and later author of Sunrise at Campobello.
Hollywood's best portrait of communism is, improbably, a prewar comedy. Ninotchka, the one film that did take communism head on, was motivated not by politics but by the desire to provide a change of pace for the screen's reigning tragedienne, Greta Garbo. The filmmakers (director Ernst Lubitsch, scenarist Melchior Lengyel, screenwriters Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch) brilliantly took advantage of Garbo's remote, severe image by making her a dour Soviet emissary melted by the irresistible attractions of Paris. In 1939, Ninotchka unerringly predicted the collapse of communism -- by telling a story of four Communists sent on a mission to the West and struggling to decide whether to be true to their souls in France or to suppress their souls in Russia.
The movie opens with three shabby emissaries named Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski, who are in Paris to sell jewels confiscated from Russian aristocrats during the revolution. Entering the lobby of the posh Hotel Clarence, they realize they'd love to stay there, but Bolshevik guilt makes them hesitate -- until Iranoff (played by Sig Ruman, the Marx brothers' peerless foil in A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races) rationalizes that Lenin would tell them, "You can't afford to live in a cheap hotel. Doesn't the prestige of the Bolsheviks mean anything to you?" The others quickly agree (and thus Ninotchka predicts the rampant corruption that became the Soviet norm).
Ninotchka (Garbo) is ordered to Paris to check up on the three comrades, who have been charmed by Count Leon d'Algout (Melvyn Douglas), boyfriend of Grand Duchess Swana, the original owner of the jewels. Ninotchka is the Communist ideal: ruthlessly self-disciplined, devoid of humor, completely materialistic. Her spirit, spontaneity, and freedom must be crushed and remade to conform to the ideology imposed from the top. All that interests her in Paris are the sewers and the technical specifications of the Eiffel Tower.
The movie highlights another feature of Soviet communism: poverty. The reason the jewels must be sold is that the Russian people are hungry (the regime having deliberately destroyed the once-productive farm sector). A prospective tourist in the Intourist visa office, having heard rumors about the laundry situation, asks if she should bring her own towels. "Certainly not," replies the official (George Tobias, in a hilarious impersonation of the mindless Communist bureaucrat). "That's only capitalistic propaganda. We change the towel every week." Later, back in Moscow, Ninotchka has the three comrades over to her section of the room she shares with two others for dinner; each brings his own single egg to make the omelet.
Of course, the essence of communism is fear and terror, because only coercion can bridge the chasm between theory and reality. Ninotchka makes repeated references to the recently concluded purge trials: "The last mass trials were a great success," Ninotchka coldly announces on arriving in Paris. "There are going to be fewer but better Russians." The Intourist official reports that a certain comrade "was called back to Russia and was investigated. You can get further details from his widow."
But Ninotchka too is seduced by freedom -- in the person of Count Leon. One of the happiest scenes in all cinema is where Leon, after Herculean effort, finally cracks her poker-face expression and makes her laugh -- uproariously and riotously. ("Garbo Laughs!" proclaimed the ads.) She can be herself at last. In a later scene, they have returned after her first night on the town. Tipsy from her introduction to champagne, Ninotchka makes a speech to an imaginary assemblage: "Comrades! People of the world! The revolution is on the march. . . . I know . . . bombs will fall, . . . all civilization will crumble, . . . but not yet, please. . . . Wait, wait. . . . What's the hurry? Let us be happy. . . . Give us our moment."
The film's best line comes at the end. Reunited with the three former envoys in freedom, Ninotchka addresses them as "Comrades," and one corrects her (with the happiness of liberty in his voice), "Friends, Ninotchka. We are friends." Also at the end, tradition -- the product of spontaneous human action -- triumphs over state-imposed ideology. Ninotchka asks the three if their new restaurant in Constantinople means they are deserting Russia. No, not desertion, they reply. "Our little restaurant . . . that is our Russia, . . . the Russia of borscht, the Russia of beef Stroganoff, blinis with sour cream." The Russia of St. Petersburg, not Leningrad.
By the later 1950s Hollywood had largely lost interest in the subject of communism (one exception was the 1965 blockbuster Doctor Zhivago). Come the cultural revolution of the later 1960s and 1970s, however, Hollywood quickly fell under the spell of the New Left critique of "Amerika" (see the 1969 Easy Rider, for example). The movies of this period were more anti-American than pro-Soviet, but the ideas and notions that inspired the new Hollywood were enshrined in the truly awful Warren Beatty movie Reds (1981), a paean to the American radicals John Reed and Louise Bryant. The Killing Fields (1984) showed little of the Communists' holocaust in Cambodia and blamed the United States for most of it. The blacklist of the 1950s was attacked in movies like The Front (1976) and Guilty by Suspicion (1991), without examining the morality of Communists dedicated to destroying the Constitution they sought to hide behind.
The Reagan 1980s, however, did see a small burst of new anti-Communist movies: Red Dawn (1984), Eleni (1985), To Kill a Priest (1988), and The Inner Circle (1992). These were joined from Russia by the much-praised Repentance (1987) and, more recently, by Burnt by the Sun (1994).
In the years since, there's been Bitter Sugar (1996), which is a superb portrait of Castro's Cuba hellhole and has sadly been little seen here in America. (It should have been shown on national television to save Elian Gonzalez.) A shattering portrait of Stalinist Russia is presented in East-West (1999). But to date, Hollywood has yet to dramatize the horrors of the Gulag (or the Maoist holocaust) as effectively as the Nazi Holocaust was dramatized in Sophie's Choice (1982) and Schindler's List (1993).
That's curious, for one would think the grand sweep of history in the tale would cry out for a Hollywood extravaganza. It's the story of an all-embracing political system imposed on a large swath of the globe. It's the story of evil and the deaths of millions. It's the story of the long struggle by the United States to emerge triumphant in the Cold War. It's the story of individual acts of resistance and bravery. And, to top it all, the good guys win. When is Hollywood going to learn to tell this story?
Spencer Warren co-hosts a series of conservative movies every Wednesday evening in October on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel.