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The Cold War influenced nearly all aspects of American political and cultural life from 1946 -- when Winston Churchill announced the descent of an Iron Curtain separating the Soviet Union and her Eastern European satellite states from the non-communist West -- to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The influence on the American film industry was deep and long-lasting. Hollywood became a highly visible target of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the late 1940 s and 1950 s. Uncooperative witnesses were blacklisted by the studios, and some, like the Hollywood Ten, served time in jail. To prove their "Americanism, " studio bosses not only fired and blacklisted employees, but they also turned out a string of films warning against the dangers of communism at home and abroad. Less than a year after Walter Lippman coined the term Cold War in 1947, 20 th Fox released William Wellman's Iron Curtain (a.
k. a. Behind the Iron Curtain), adapted from the life story of Russian code clerk Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews), who, together with his family, had defected to the West with evidence of Soviet espionage operations in North America. Contemporary Cold War events provided the material for a number of films, including Felix Feist's Guilty of Treason (1949), George Seaton's The Big Lift (1950), and Alfred Were's Walk East on Beacon (1952). Guilty of Treason recounts the fate of Hungary's Roman Catholic Prelate, Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, after the country was taken over by communists in 1948. Charles Bickford plays the defiant Cardinal who endures arrest, torture, and prison rather than capitulate to his godless enemies.
Seaton's film, dramatizes the lives of fliers serving with the Berlin Airlift. Shot on location in Berlin using documentary techniques, the film focuses on the ability of American technology to carry the day, and love affairs between the central characters (Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift) and two German women stress the importance of seeing Germany not as a totalitarian enemy but as a fledgling democracy and an ally in the struggle against communism. At the same time, Hollywood films were busy exposing life behind the Iron Curtain and defending the nation's interests abroad, they were ferreting out spies and subversives at home. Walk East on Beacon (1952), based on an article by J. Edgar Hoover, recounts the efforts of Soviet spies to penetrate a top-secret scientific project. The Reds proves no match, however, for a team of F.
B. I. agents led by Inspector Belden (George Murphy). The film owes much of its sense of realism to the clever blending of a fictional narrative with the style of a documentary. Although the project the communists seek to penetrate is never explicitly identified, it has something to do with atomic secrets, a subject very much in the news at a time when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been charged with passing atomic secrets to the Russians. While Walk East on Beacon enthusiastically endorsed the F.
B. I. 's relentless pursuit of suspected communists, Gordon Douglas' I Was a Communist for the F. B. I. cast Frank Lovejoy as undercover agent Matt Celtic who suffers estrangement from family and friends in order to infiltrate the Communist Party as part of the Bureau's plan to expose disloyal Americans. John Wayne joined the hunt for communists in Hawaii as the title character in Edward Ludwig's Big Jim McLain.
Wayne and his assistant (James Access) interview repentant ex-communists as they seek out Soviet agents for interrogation by the Committee. The film celebrates the activities of HUAC by playing fast and loose with historical facts. Unlike the fate of uncooperative witnesses called before HUAC who were jailed for contempt or blacklisted for invoking the Fifth Amendment, the agents rounded up by Big Jim escape punishment by what he describes as "abusing" their constitutional rights and refusing to testify. The importance of denouncing friends and relatives with communist associations became a theme central to several films of the period, including Victor Saville's Anglo-American production Conspirator (1949) and Robert Stevenson's I Married a Communist (a. k. a.
The Woman on Pier 13) (1950). Perhaps the most revealing of these films is Leo Mc Carey's My Son John (1952). It verges on self-parody in its anti-communist zeal, but it still manages to evoke the paranoid fears that haunted the McCarthy era. John Jefferson (Robert Walker), the son hard-working, patriotic, and religious parents is a member of what seems to be the State Department where, presumably, his communist sympathies, his intellectual arrogance, and his nasty temperament go unnoticed. Rejected by his family after they discover he is a Soviet spy, he plans to flee the country with government secrets. A sudden change of heart prompts him to reveal his treachery, and in retribution he is murdered by communist agents.
A large number of "B" films featuring American citizens serving as communist agents helped create the impression that the country was overrun by Soviet spies. They infiltrate the government in Harold Schuster's Security Risk (1954), penetrate a secluded California research site in Edward Dein's Shack Out on 101, and gain control of a Washington, D. C. , advertising agency in Jacques Tourneur's The Fear makers (1958). Most of these films failed as both anti-communist propaganda and as thrillers.
Two, however, Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953) and Robert Aldrich's, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) became film noir classics. In the first a petty criminal, Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), steals a wallet containing scientific secrets. His theft sets touches off a series of events in which he and his acquaintances are hunted by both federal agents and a group of Soviet agents. The action unfolds in a dark, urban environment where characters find themselves caught up in events they neither control nor fully understand. McCoy, who claims no political allegiances, finally decides to cooperate with the federal agents after Soviet agents have murdered a friend (Thelma Ritter) and savagely beaten his lover (Jean Peters).
Robert Aldrich's adaptation of Mickey Spillane's best-selling novel Kiss Me Deadly (1952) is set in Las Angeles rather than New York City, but it remains a part of the same noir world. Like McCoy, Mike Hammer stumbles upon a case of nuclear espionage and cooperates with a team of federal agents whose leader, Pat Chambers (Wesley Addy), appears to be as mysterious and sinister as the Soviet agents pursuing a box of radioactive material. Hammer's motives for cooperating with Chambers have little to do with patriotism and very much to do with his desire to turn a profit, wreak personal vengeance, and rescue his assistant, Elia (Maxine Cooper), who has been kidnapped by the spies. His search leads him deeper into a dark underworld of multiple deceptions and sadistic cruelty from which there appears to be no escape.
Although Cold War espionage triggers the events which set these last two narratives in motion, neither of the central characters are motivated by patriotism or by anti-communism. McCoy, like Hammer, finally cooperates with the federal agents for personal motives. Moreover, Aldrich's Hammer is a familiar noir hero, alienated and contemptuous of all forms of idealism, while the hero of Spillane's novel was a zealous anti-communist. Both films reveal how easily Cold War tensions could be invoked for narrative rather than ideological purposes. If Pickup on South Street and Kiss Me Deadly reduce Cold War ideology to narrative convention, Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952) and Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) were profoundly influenced by those ideological conflicts, though manifested only indirectly.
On the surface, Zinneman's film is a classic western which pits Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the Hadleyville town marshal, against a murderous band of gunmen bent on revenge. The film focuses on Kane's futile effort to enlist the aid of the townspeople who, out of a combination of cowardice and self-interest, leave him to face Frank Miller (Ian McDonald) and his three henchmen alone. The film was written by Carl Foreman, his last before being blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He intended the film as a political allegory in which Hadleyville represented Hollywood and its citizens the cowardly studio executives who refused to resist what he considered the unlawful behavior of the Committee that had cited him for contempt. Unlike Foreman, Elia Kazan had been a cooperative Committee witness, giving it the names of friends and colleagues who had been associated with communist organizations in the past, and, in On the Waterfront, he treats informing as an act of heroism. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is a washed-up boxer working as a longshoreman on the Hoboken docks.
Work on the docks is controlled by a corrupt labor union which uses violence and murder to keep workers in line. Under the moral influence of his priest (Karl Malden) and the sister (Eva Marie Saint) of a murdered worker, Malloy risks his life to testify against the union leaders. Like High Noon, the film has been read as a metaphor for Cold War politics and a justification for Kazan's naming names. By the mid- 1950 s, the threat from the enemy within tended to give way to the threat from the enemy without. Sen. McCarthy's increasingly reckless, and often baseless, attacks led to his Senate censure and subsequent fall from power, and the anti-communist crusade began to lose momentum.
Reflecting this shift in political attitudes, Hollywood turned its attention from the communist subversion to communist expansion around the world. Resisting the latter demanded, in the minds of policymakers, a strong military and a willingness to go to war if necessary. The anxieties aroused by the prospect of a permanent struggle between East and West which might erupt into a third world war fought with nuclear weapons were evident in all the major Hollywood film genres, including the musical (Silk Stockings, 1957), but these fears were most fully expressed in science fiction and war films. In films such as The Man from Planet X (1951) and Invaders from Mars (1953), the earth was repeatedly threatened by alien invaders whose relentless quest for new planets to colonize or destroy. The best and most illuminating of the genre are Christian Nyby's The Thing from Another World (1951) and Don Siegel's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
Although credited to Nyby, the film's producer, Howard Hawks, played a major role in directing The Thing, and it has the unmistakable characteristics of a Hawks' work. Under the leadership of Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Toby), a group of scientists and Air Force personnel at a remote arctic research station manage to incinerate a carnivorous alien that nourishes itself on human blood and thus fend off "the first invasion from another planet. " As might be expected of good cold warriors, they place the claims of national security above those of intellectual inquiry; they accept the necessity of censorship; and they depend on teamwork to destroy an invader devoid of both moral sense and emotion -- an extra-terrestrial version of the Soviet menace as portrayed in American popular culture during the early 1950 s. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers introduces a more subtle invader in the form of giant seed pods which take over sleeping human bodies. The California town full of these bland, worry-free, obedient pod people has been alternately described as a metaphor for Americans under the influence of communism and, conversely, as the spirit-stifling atmosphere of America's burgeoning suburbia. When asked what he intended the pods to symbolize, Siegel was always evasive, allowing audiences and critics to draw their own conclusions. Neither The Invasion of the Body Snatchers nor The Thing is more sophisticated in its Cold War message than any of the other similar films of the era, but they are the work of a pair of Hollywood's most accomplished genre directors, and the quality of their film making sets them above the rest.
If Cold War tensions found indirect and symbolic expression in the science fiction / horror film, they are made manifest in the war film. The genre, which had virtually disappeared from the screen at the end of World War Two, was revived as the Cold War intensified in the late 1940 s. With a few exceptions, the settings of these films were World War Two, the Korean War, or the Cold War itself. Those set in World War Two show how the virtues of patriotism, professionalism, and teamwork have saved America from totalitarian predators (See: World War Two); the...
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Research essay sample on Cold War Tensions House Un American Activities Committee
