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1 The notion that many films made between 1948 and 1960 commented on American politics of the period is so commonplace as to be banal. Several books analyze this relationship, ranging from Nora Sayre’s pioneering Running Time: Films of the Cold War, published in 1982, to J. Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, published in 2011.1 Aside from these book-length studies by academics and cultural critics, references to politics are found in myriad paratextual materials for films produced during the blacklist period. In the booklet accompanying Criterion’s edition of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), Stephen Farber says of Dalton Trumbo, one of the original Hollywood Ten: “The screenwriter introduced one sly touch tweaking McCarthy-era watchdogs . Near the end of the movie, after the revolt is crushed, the tyrannical general, Crassus, announces ominously, ‘In every city and province, lists of the disloyal have been compiled.’”2 In a documentary about The Robe (1953), included as a special feature of the Blu-ray edition of the film, UCLA professor Jonathan Kuntz says: “People often look at certain movies in the 1950s during the blacklisting era and see kind of coded representations of the whole blacklisting experience. Certainly On the Waterfront and High Noon are classic examples of Hollywood films of that period that can be read as being really or secretly about the blacklisting experience. The Robe has to fall into that category also. At the end of The Robe we have a tribunal in front of Caligula that is just like the 1947 HUAC hearings.”3 The evidence appears to be all around us. Many important Hollywood films produced between 1948 and 1960 are seen, in one way or another, as responses to the blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. Yet this widely shared understanding of the relationship between Hollywood film and its political context did not emerge fully formed in the Introduction What More Can Be Said about the Hollywood Blacklist? 9780520280670_PRINT.indd 1 9780520280670_PRINT.indd 1 04/02/14 3:38 PM 04/02/14 3:38 PM 2 / INTRODUCTION blacklist period. Rather, it developed over several years as a gradual process of long-term critical engagement with these texts. In examining the ways critics interpret films against the backdrop of the Cold War, one discerns two important tendencies. The first is to view the films as propaganda produced to comply with an implicit directive from HUAC to make more explicitly anti-Communist cinema. The second involves seeing the films as allegories that offer disguised comment on American politics in the 1950s— that is, the threat of domestic Communism, on one hand, or the pernicious effects of the blacklist, on the other. Combining reception studies with primary document research, Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist traces the way these two critical lenses produced a consensus regarding the various ways the blacklist shaped the meanings of Cold War cinema. This group of films includes not only canonical titles, like High Noon (1952), On the Waterfront (1954), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), but also lesser-known titles, such as Storm Warning (1950) and Warlock (1959). My aim is to show how these films became indices of the postwar period’s underlying political tensions. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF BLACKLIST FILM SCHOLARSHIP Over the course of the past five decades the Hollywood blacklist has become one of the most scrutinized topics in the field of film studies. One of the reasons for the blacklist’s importance is that it represents one of the darkest periods in Hollywood’s long history, a time when members of the industry had their careers damaged or destroyed by the Red-baiting politics that swept through the country as a whole.As the controversy surrounding Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar in 1999 illustrates, many of those affected by the blacklist have neither forgiven nor forgotten those who betrayed them. When I began working on this project twelve years ago, there was already a fairly voluminous body of literature on the Hollywood blacklist. Indeed, I was aware that any new study risked being a mere footnote appended to a long list of published secondary literature on the topic. Within this existing body of work there already were insightful memoirs by blacklisted writers, such as Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time, Lester Cole’s Hollywood Red, and Walter Bernstein’s Inside Out.4 Penetrating historical accounts of the labor issues and activism that...

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