“Are you a member of the Communist Party?” Seventy-five years ago, the question sent waves of fear and defiance across Hollywood. The US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was bent on rooting out ‘subversives’ in the entertainment industry - even if that meant trampling on personal liberties in the interest of national security. Were they right?
The Hollywood Ten
The FBI had screenwriter John Howard Lawson in its crosshairs in the ‘40s. Spies read letters Lawson sent to Europe where he’d driven an ambulance during WWI, served with Ernest Hemingway, and penned a Humphrey Bogart movie. Before long, Lawson was jailed for refusing to reveal which political party he supported, becoming one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ prisoners targeted by the Bureau’s top operatives.
Silent film star Charlie Chaplin was among 300 entertainers deemed persona non grata in the mid-20th century, banned from creative work because of suspected communist sympathies. Chaplin said he didn’t intend to create a revolution, just more films, but the English comedian risked arrest if he returned to the US. Here are nine other surprising celebs on the blacklist that tore Hollywood apart.
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The first Red Scare engulfed America after WWI when the Russian Revolution of 1917 stoked fears over communism. The US passed the Espionage Act to punish acts of disloyalty but the panic over the ‘Red Menace’ - slang for communists - permeated the US yet again during the Cold War. Behind the fear was a theory that union members and left-wing sympathizers were Soviet spies.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. is well known for The Cincinnati Kid (1965) and the satirical Korean war classic M*A*S*H, but for years Lardner was a banned writer eking out uncredited Hollywood film scripts during the Red Scare. He wasn’t the only one. SPYSCAPE looks at some of the top movies of the era, created in secret by entertainers working in exile under assumed names.
FBI spies weren’t alone in thinking communists were marching in through Hollywood’s back door. Dozens of top movie stars - Clarke Gable, John Wayne, and Ginger Rogers among them - joined the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a political action group advising film producers how to avoid ‘subtle communistic touches’ - sometimes with eye-brow raising results.
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When young Republican Congressman Richard Nixon asked studio execs why they didn’t produce more anti-Communist movies, they responded with plodding clunkers and B-Movies like The Red Menace. Some were a surprising success, however, including 1949’s Conspirator, a tale about a traitorous spy with Liz Taylor in her first grown-up role. We’ve picked 10 must-watch films of the genre including an unusual contender that became a wildly popular blockbuster!
