“Joseph McCarthy and the bottom-feeding red-baiters of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) saw signs of subversion in even the most anodyne Hollywood product. Most observers have interpreted their inability to view art as anything but a conduit for politics as symptomatic of their fascist philistinism. After all, for the past several decades, the conventional wisdom has been that Hollywood’s reds were unable to smuggle their ideology past studio censors and market imperatives. As Larry Ceplair wrote in ‘Political Companion to American Film,’ ‘For the most part … movies written, directed or produced by communists are not politically or stylistically distinguishable from those by non-communists.’

“Yet if the authors of Radical Hollywood are correct, the House Un-American Activities Committee was on to something,” writes Michelle Goldberg in her Salon review.

Not that authors Paul Buhle, a lecturer at Brown University, and Dave Wagner, former political editor of the Arizona Republic, apologize for McCarthyism. Quite the opposite — they celebrate cinema leftists as the soul of old Hollywood, makers of the most moral and complex movies in history.

But the analysis they employ to tell the story of the Hollywood left in the ’30s and ’40s is one borrowed from the most stultifying corners of academia, and it leads them into a critical dead end with surprising parallels to the worst Cold War thinking. Scanning hundreds of wildly diverse films, including gangster pictures, horror flicks, women’s weepies, westerns, war films, society comedies and serious political dramas, Buhle and Wagner search for covert lefty messages. In their view, these movies really did threaten capitalist complacency, though they see that as a good thing [my emphasis].

The academic left: where bad ideas go to be reborn…

—–