Introduction: Politics and Film

At one point in its history, the American film industry with considerable fanfare advertised its product with the line ‘Movies are your best entertainment’. Those who put this campaign together were unhappy and surprised when wags pointed out that the first letters of this slogan spelled ‘maybe’. This may not be the kind of subtext that scholars often refer to in discussing films, but it has pertinence when dealing with the politics of film.

Movies are designed to be commercial entertainment. They are made to make money. In the heyday of American commercial filmmaking the ruling principle was ‘if you want to send a message, use Western Union’. But this was a principle that was occasionally breached – as with the movies made during World War II, which often preached an artificial togetherness on the Home Front; an idealized combat which lacked trauma; and a pro-Soviet attitude that would ensnare the makers of such films when political attitudes were reversed during the Cold War. Indeed, many of those who had played Nasty Nazis would then play Rotten Russians.

Even during the Production Code’s heyday it was possible for politics, almost inadvertently, to slip into the most routine production. Sometimes the censors failed to grasp what was being said or done; other times, if a film was unimportant or routine, the script or finished movie did not get the kind of attention which would result in censorship.

The 1936 RKO film, The Big Game, revolved around efforts of gamblers to fix the outcome of an important football game. They kidnap one team’s star player, and while some of his college classmates go to rescue him, others stall the completion of the game by starting a riot on the field. The police are called and a number of students shout out ‘the Cossacks are coming’. This traditional term for cops among the more politically aware Left sticks out like a sore thumb in this modest Grade-B drama, and is probably accounted for by the fact that Irwin Shaw, author of the Group Theatre’s stunningly successful pacifist play, Bury The Dead, wrote the screenplay (his first).

That same year the Warner Bros. comedy Sons o’ Guns, a Joe E. Brown vehicle, showed German soldiers during World War I trench warfare surrendering happily to an American soldier – who was not really interested in capturing prisoners – thus endorsing the pacifist isolationist politics of the day. Interestingly, a few years later, in 1941, similar scenes appeared in that studio’s Sergeant York, which film historians generally agree strongly attacked the isolationism to be found in such earlier films (which seemed to shackle U.S. foreign policy at a time when the President was attempting to mobilize American public opinion in support of intervention short of war).

If one accepts the fact that many movies are political as well as entertaining (in 1936 Joe E. Brown ranked among the top ten box office stars, and football films – like The Big Game – were a staple and successful B-movie offering) then one must also understand that many in the movie business were political, especially in terms of unionizing their craft in the 1930s.

A generation later, movie star Robert Montgomery served as a television advisor to the Republican presidential candidate (General Eisenhower); but in the 1930s, his stellar status notwithstanding, he was an activist head of the fledgling Screen Actors Guild (SAG) as it fought for survival and against the corruption of some craft unions.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic and international policies attracted the support of many in the Hollywood film community. There were those conservatives who vigorously opposed them, and there were those whose changing response to the President and his policies was geared to an input from outside that community (the Communist Party line which changed in 1935, 1939, 1941, and 1945).

Fig. 1.

Cover of promotional brochure published by Progressive Citizens of America (1947).

The efforts of those on the Left, as well as the conservatives, had limited impact given the way films are conceived and produced; but there was a fear...