Hollywood Reds
In 1946 Hollywood Reds was a heavily advertised line of lipstick. Being a Communist sympathizer, or even a member of the party, did not yet preclude you from working in films. Communists, both open and covert, were active in Hollywood, particularly in some of the trade unions.
The blind devotion of much of the leadership of the Hollywood Communists to Stalin and the Soviet Union, their secretiveness and disingenuousness, their firm belief in the need to maintain rigid party discipline and dogmatic orthodoxy made them not quite the noble, blameless martyrs that they often portrayed themselves as being. To what degree they were attempting to take over Hollywood in the name of Uncle Joe versus simply exercising a sincere commitment to ideals like an end to racism or the need for strong unions is a matter of debate to this day.
The Sunday entertainment section of The New York Times of April 14 reported that an organization of screenwriters called the Hollywood Writers Mobilization was holding a series of clinics in Los Angeles to promote greater social realism in American films. The organization criticized Hollywood studios for substituting slickness and glamor for honesty. Too many escapist films, they claimed, were not "deeply rooted in the common culture and experiences of the people" the way the better European films were. This was a Popular Front group. Doctrinaire Communists, including the Hollywood Ten, played a prominent role in the organization, although not all the participants were Communist Party members. Like many Popular Front groups started in the 1940s, it initially had been founded to unite the left in Hollywood in support of the war effort. The Communist Party and its most fervent sympathizers had flipped from robust anti-Fascism to denouncing the British "warmongers" and their American allies after Hitler and Stalin briefly became allies. When Germany invaded the USSR, the party faithful were required to do another about face with Churchill and FDR now portrayed as Stalin's great friends and America's entry into the war a moral necessity. After the war, the British, Churchill in particular, and Truman were the enemy.
The Hollywood Writers Mobilization lobbied for more serious, adult subject matter in movies, which translated to Right Wingers as a call for more Left Wing propaganda. In partnership with the University of California Berkeley. the group published the journal Hollywood Quarterly. During the Red Scare that would soon break out, this organization was among the many to be denounced as part of a secret Communist conspiracy to take over the motion picture industry. It was certainly true that some of the organization's leadership, which overlapped considerably with other similar committees and organizations, were Communists. But it was hard to see how they could take over the film industry, run by the very capitalistic film studios. In 1946 the organization was respected and influential in the industry, particularly among screenwriters.
Among Hollywood Communists were Hugo Butler, who wrote the screenplay for “From This Day Forward” and co-wrote “Miss Susie Slagle’s,” both of which were running on movie screens that week, his wife, Jean Rouverol, and John Berry, the 29-year old from the Bronx who directed both movies. They had joined in the early 1940s when the Party had wrapped itself in the American flag. The three of them, all parents of young children, left the country in the 1950s rather than appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee where they would be forced to choose between testifying against friends and former colleagues and possible imprisonment. The baneful influence of men like Butler could be seen in the blatantly subversive, un-American films written in whole or in part by him such as “Lassie Come Home,” “A Christmas Carol” and “Edison, the Man,” for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Rouverol, a former radio actress, published a novella in McCall’s, and later wrote screenplays. After the family’s return to the US, she was a head writer for “Guiding Light,” not exactly renowned as a platform for Stalinism. The truth is that demands of the industry took precedence over whatever political beliefs the Hollywood Communists held. Bosley Crowther's chief complaint about “From This Day Forward” was not that it carried a subversive message but that it seemed to have no message at all beyond “unemployment is a bad thing.” James Agee, a disenchanted former Communist himself, while finding the film a sincere attempt to depict the lives of working-class people, complained of its occasional lapses into an overly sentimental and its sometimes patronizing tone. “Miss Susie Slagle’s” was a nostalgic, sentimental romance about love between nursing and medical students at the turn of the century. If anything, the filmmakers were guilty of bad art.
Subversion was, however, in the eye of the beholder. In 1946 the more rabid of the right- wing crazies attacked the soon-to-be Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Oscar-winning “The Best Years of Our Lives” as Communist propaganda for daring to suggest that bankers were not all paragons of virtue or that there could be any problems in postwar America that were not the fault of the New Deal. The high priestess of mid-century greed and selfish amorality, Ayn Rand, a Russian-born atheist with all the personal virtue of a guttersnipe and the delusional ego of a would-be messiah, was attracting attention at this time for her potboiler, The Fountainhead. Based on her experiences as a failed screenwriter, she explained that the Communists in Hollywood were insidious rather than blatant in their propagandizing. She declared that any work which glorified the common man, advocated equality, criticized business leaders, preached the virtue of cooperation or altruism or appealed to the conscience contained the seeds of Communism. Rand considered the Gospel, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, the subversive doctrine of weaklings . If Rand, who was more outspoken in her attacks on American leaders, values, traditions, beliefs and institutions than most Communists, had written the scripts to Butler’s movies, Lassie might have stayed with the squire, a successful man of distinction, rather than run back home to that common little boy and his family of parasites. In her version, Scrooge might have dismissed the Christmas ghosts as Red agents of collectivism and bravely refuse to submit to their Communistic demands that he redistribute his wealth to cripples and losers. And she would have added a lot of tawdry sex scenes.
Libertarians of the Rand school opposed government interference in business except in the case of media that did not support their dogma. The Motion Picture Association head, former ad man and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston, who as a businessman initially opposed government interference with the movie industry, quickly ran scared as the attacks mounted, announcing in 1947 that there would be no more “Grapes of Wrath” under his watch.