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69 3 PRODUCING HOLLYWOOD’S COLD WAR Despite the attitude of the press and other informational processes now antagonistic to Communism on a national scale, Hollywood and the film industry still remain the key spots of contamination by this ideology. The motion picture producers themselves have never reacted to this subject now occupying so much attention throughout the world. —FBI report from Los Angeles agent, 1947 The year is 1945; the great struggle has finally ended in victory. Three of democracy ’s heroes return to their small hometown only to find a new struggle awaits. Readjusting to civilian life is much harder than they had ever expected. Homer Parrish has survived the war, but at the cost of losing both his hands. He must now learn to get by with his prosthetic “hooks.” Fred Derry, a U.S. Air Force captain during the war, comes back to his less glamorous job as a “soda jerk” for what used to be a small-town drugstore but is now just another national chain. His beautiful wife, so enthralled with him when she first saw him in his military attire, now finds that the uniform looks good on other guys as well. Army sergeant Al Stephenson has also returned from overseas, secure in his bank job, but a bit too reliant on the bottle. For Homer, Fred, and Al, and the society welcoming them back, the future is unclear. This portrait of postwar reconversion is from The BestYears of Our Lives (RKO), the most critically acclaimed motion picture of 1946.The recipient of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, Best Years was also a huge hit with audiences, tied with Duel in the Sun as the year’s top blockbuster. For New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, this shining example of filmmaking encapsulated “almost all that could possibly be said on the screen at this critical moment about the tensions involved in home-coming, about the natural and humorous embarrassments of the comparatively well-established man, about the delicate and torturing readjustments of the socially-wrenched and the physically maimed.”1 Esquire critic Jack Moffitt also found Best Years to be a powerful film, noting especially its unequalled portrayal of the nation’s returning servicemen: “It makes no attempt 70 J. EDGAR HOOVER GOES TO THE MOVIES to oversimplify these millions of individuals into One Composite Veteran. This strong picture presents them as men, matured by combat, who face the problems of readjustment with dignity, courage and patience.”Yet to Jack Moffitt, The Best Years of Our Lives also represented a serious threat. Moffitt was appalled by one scene in which a banker “is finicky over lending his depositors’ money to worthy G.I.s without gilt-edged collateral.”Moffit worried that such scenes seemed all too prevalent in the modern motion picture and that such coarse portrayals of sound capitalist practices “may irritate many businessmen.”2 Moffitt was not alone in his worries. A number of like-minded individuals in the motion picture industry formed an alliance to fight the Communist propaganda they feared was so rampant in filmdom. The first premise of this organization was that insidious propaganda pervaded the screen. The second premise was equally daunting. For this group feared that in an industry so tightly controlled by the major studios, the top dogs were asleep at the watch. Soon relegated to the fringes in Hollywood, they turned to a powerful ally most sympathetic to its worldview, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Together these zealous partners constructed and interpreted an elaborate guide for detecting subversion on the screen, thus playing a major role in producing Hollywood’s cold war. The Motion Picture Alliance On Friday, February 4, 1944, roughly one hundred persons from the motion picture industry packed into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles to launch a new anti-Communist organization, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. These anti-Communists detected an insidious plot to infiltrate the nation’s influential institutions, Hollywood being among the most important of these, given its ability to reach the masses. As the previous chapter has shown, the alliance with the Soviets during World War II created favorable conditions for cooperation between the Left and liberals at home, especially within the film industry. The grand alliance triggered something of a renewed Popular Front in Hollywood, though winning the war now took precedence over all other causes. Despite the Left’s move to the center, anti-Communists, especially within...

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