Introduction

Landon I Introduction Introduction Philip J. Landon The Cold War, which touched nearly every aspect of politics and culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain from immediately after World War II until the collapse ofthe Soviet Union in 1990, was a ubiquitous presence in films produced in the United States, in East and West Europe, and in the USSR. In 1946, even asWinstonChurchillwas introducing and definingthephrase "Iron Curtain," to describe the emerging tensions between East andWest, Hollywood had already become the target of militant anti-communists eager to expose the communists and left-wing sympathizers believed to be working in the film industry. As Jennifer Holt's essay on Crossfire (1946) makes clear, Cold War politics influencedthe writing ofthe film's screenplay, its production problems , and - above all - the careers of its producer and director. Over the next four decades and more filmmakers at home and abroad responded, in many ways, to what came to be called the "Red Menace." Even as the Cold War came to a sudden and unexpected end, it continued to serve as the background for popular political thrillers such as John McTiernnen's The Huntfor Red October (1990) and Fred Schepisi's The Russia House (1990). This and the following issue of Film and History will explore a selection of films, both American and European, which suggest the many and often complex ways in which the values of the ColdWarculture found their ways into avariety offilm genres, includingpolitical thrillers, westerns, boxing films, domestic melodramas , and even cartoons. The films addressed in this issue date from the early years of the Cold War, the later 1940s and the early 1950s. In "Hollywood and Politics Caught in the Cold War CrossfireG JenniferHolt shows how cultural forces driven by Cold War politics influenced the adaptation of Richard Brooks's 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole, encouraged RKO studio executives to transform anti-Semitism from a pervasive social phenomenon to the obsession ofaberrant individuals, and eventually sent the producer , Adrian Scott, and the director, Edward Dymtryk, to jail for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although Cold War conflicts became the source for decades ofpoliticalthrillers and warfilms, they also formedthe ideological subtexts of film genres not usually associated with contemporary political issues. John Ford's version ofthe shootout at the O.K. Corral, My Darling Clementine (1946), as Robert Sickles argues in "All East on the Western Frontier: John Ford's My Darling Clementine", indicates the direction taken in social attitudes during the early ColdWar era. The individualistic and often outcast heroes oí Stagecoach (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) find themselves in opposition to the Eastern values which emphasize refinement, adherence to social norms, together with the hypocrisy and corruptionwhich often accompany those norms. In Clementine, however, it is those Eastern values which are valorized , and the rebels and outcasts, such as the Clanton clan, no longer have aplace in a world which demands communal solidarity in the need to preserve civilization and hold savagery at bay, a mythic rendering of the belief that only a united America can resist the expansion of a predatory Soviet Union. Mark Singer addresses the same redefinition of citizenship , proper masculine behavior, and the responsibility ofan individual to self and family as they are refracted through the conventions ofthe boxing film, which enjoyed widespread popularity during the first decade of the Cold War. Beginning with Robert Rosson's Body and Soul (1947), Singer shows how the boxing film embodied the social changes being experienced by the country at large. Rosson's film emphasizes the capacity of a ruthlessly individualistic capitalist society to corrupt and perhaps destroy the individual, and in doing so reflects a leftist political position that was closer to the 1930s than the 1950s. By 1949, MarkRobson's Champion treats the desire to win, to make money, to become someone, as a positive goal providing the hero is willing to aid his family. Other boxing films emphasized the individual's need to withdraw from social and political involvement and to turn inward as do ex-fighters in Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) and Fred Zinnemann's FromHere to Eternity (1953), although the former...