Hollywood’s Cold War (review)

“Christ, I miss the Cold War,” the British spymaster M (played by Dame Judi Dench) sighs near the beginning of a recent James Bond escapade, Casino Royale (2006). Her wistfulness is undoubtedly shared by the filmmakers whose predilection for simple moral dichotomies often seemed to coincide with the global conflict that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. The Manichaeanism that has so often been considered indispensable to audience identification and involvement could find no contests outside the movie palaces in which the stakes were higher than the East-West struggle. This theme is traced from Ninotchka (1939) to Red Heat (1988) in Tony Shaw’s sprightly and very informative volume, which analyzes how Communists and their adversaries were shown on the big screen. Shaw also provides an often intriguing backstory in which particular forces and folks make the artifacts of mass culture that help shape perceptions (though not, the author hastens to add, policies). He finds no evidence that Hollywood had any direct influence on U.S. policymakers. But Shaw does emphasize the intimacy of the American government and the film industry, so that messages could be kept straight. Unlike the Soviet system, which made the craft of filmmaking a signed-sealed-and-delivered expression of foreign and domestic policy, relations in the United States between the federal government and the film capital were often “consensual” (p. 302).

The extent of Shaw’s research in official records and studio files, plus comprehensive trolling of the secondary sources, is bound to satisfy the most exacting standards, but in Hollywood’s Cold War he wisely opts for case studies rather than synoptic breadth. His nine chapters provide historical context for the range and variety of the representations of Soviet and American citizens, from the peak of Josif Stalin’s power to the breakup of the USSR. In the form of Nina Ivanovna Yakushova (Greta Garbo) in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), the Reds are not menacing because she cannot resist the allure of the fetishism of commodities in the West. In the guise of a romantic comedy, Lubitsch’s “picture that kids the commissars” proved to be uncannily prophetic by highlighting the effectiveness of consumerism in defeating the grim state socialism portrayed in the film. Shaw’s chapter on “The Enemy Within” discloses the decisive role of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in the making of Walk East on Beacon (1952), an exposé of the agency’s vigilance. Released when the influence of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was at its peak, the Columbia Pictures film manages to legitimize fears of Soviet espionage while undermining the urgency of under-every-bed amateurism.

No twentieth-century novelist in the English language combined literary and political talent more impressively than George Orwell, whose two most famous books were readily adapted to—and simplified for—Cold War purposes. His own democratic socialism, which noted the injustices of capitalism, was soft-pedaled when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped bring Animal Farm (1945) to the screen in an animated version in 1954. Two years later the CIA was more subtly in the background (through the American Committee for Cultural Freedom) in bringing Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) to the screen. The box office returns were disappointing, however, leading Shaw to conclude that the government did not get its money’s worth. The atmosphere of the 1950s was especially reverent toward reverence, as exemplified by the blockbuster status of The Ten Commandments (1956). The fiercely right-wing Cecil B. DeMille devised a Cold War parable that pitted a despotic, top-down economic system based on slavery against a yearning for national liberation led by Moses, a hero to the three main monotheistic faiths. But by the end of the decade, cracks in Cold War orthodoxy had begun to appear amid popular fears that nuclear weapons were increasingly threatening all of humanity. Tapping into this mood, Stanley Kramer made On the Beach (1959) into a warning of nuclear apocalypse. Shaw quotes the conjecture of Nobel...