Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics by Steven J. Ross (review)

Hollywood has influenced the political consciousness of Americans ever since the consolidation of the film industry in Southern California in the late 1910s. Most histories of Hollywood’s political identity are told from either the left or the right, focusing on how a small cadre of filmmakers struggled from within the mainstream to advocate for liberal causes or how a conservative culture industry helped legitimize state power at home and abroad. In Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, Steven J. Ross analyzes the careers of major stars on both sides of the aisle, exploring how their performances in front of the camera related to their roles as activists in the broader public sphere.

Bringing together newspapers, statistics, institutional archives, and audiovisual sources, Ross builds on the methodology he pursued in his past projects, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (1998) and Movies and American Society (2002). Hollywood Left and Right’s cultural-historical approach and its emphasis on locating Hollywood activism both on and off the screen make it a significant contribution to the body of film historiography that includes the scholarship of Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund (The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 [1979, [2003]) and Lary May (The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way [2000]). Rather than investigate a particular cause or epoch, Ross interweaves discussion of the careers of five left-leaning and five right-leaning figures. This comparative approach serves a rhetorical purpose, encouraging an understanding of Hollywood as a space of creative contestation, as well as an understanding of the range of opportunities and challenges some of its premier image-makers faced when trying to assert their political views.

The nine chapters that constitute Hollywood Left and Right begin with how the 1920s saw two countervailing forces. First, producer Louis B. Mayer forged an alliance between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and a pro-business Republican administration; and second, the antiauthoritarian films of Charlie Chaplin satirized the very forms of industrial efficiency that the classical studio system institutionalized. Mayer was not himself an actor and thus sits awkwardly with the other nine stars profiled in the book. Nonetheless, he played a crucial role in injecting the Republican Party with an aura of glamour and celebrity in the 1920s. His active campaigning for Herbert Hoover and his effort to bring politicians to the MGM compound to meet with company talent helped set the stage for the long-lasting productive relationship between the oligopolistic studios and conservative politics.

Ross’s account of how the 1940s through 1950s professionally crippled liberals such as Edward G. Robinson and the more radical Charlie Chaplin resonates with a familiar story arc of how the chill of the Cold War altered the lives and output of many in the entertainment community. At the same time, exploration of how these years and the ones that immediately followed were transformative for George Murphy and Ronald Reagan provides important insights into the lesser-known political maturation of the post–World War II Hollywood right. Ross situates both Murphy and Reagan’s minor film careers in the context of their more major careers as politicians. Persuasively selling an alluring image of the Republican Party to a broad populace, Murphy and Reagan brought their training as actors in feature films and the industrial public relations sector to the emerging medium of television, harnessing the new technology to coach candidates and help propel themselves to California offices in the 1960s.

The strongest and most complex chapter in the book analyzes the career of actor and singer Harry Belafonte, who broke racial barriers as one of the first black sex symbols in the 1950s. Belafonte’s lead role in Island in the Sun (1957), his hit single “Day-O,” and his work as an independent with his own HarBel Productions provided significant economic and cultural capital for the civil rights movement...