Culture Workers of Cold War Hollywood

From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic in the Streets, Hollywood was a key arena for the giant U-turn in American politics that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Long-time Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman offers his new book as a "chronicle of American politics" from 1946 to 1956, "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, backstories, and reception." Hoberman's focus is not on the biggest movies, or the best, but rather on the "movies that best crystallize, address, symptomize, or exploit their historical moment." With a nod to Horkheimer and Adorno, he considers the people who made movies to have been "politically aware culture workers." During the Second World War, Hollywood had joined the Left's fight against fascism, the fight for democracy and equality. Then, with the coming of the Cold War, "Hollywood accepted a new mission and assigned itself a role. . . in the new war—both in terms of movies made and careers unmade."