Hollywood's Cold War (review)

Film scholars have long been fascinated by Hollywood's treatment of the cold war. America's ideological battle with international communism was treated in numerous film genres throughout the more than four decades of the cold war era. The elegant James Bond, grotesque monsters created by nuclear war, aliens from Mars, and even westerns served as vehicles to warn audiences of the dangers of communism.

The latest entry into this crowded field is Tony Shaw's Hollywood Cold War. The book is a sequel of sorts to Shaw's 2001 study of British cold war films and he claims it is the first attempt to map out Hollywood's treatment of the Cold War throughout the entire conflict.

Shaw's work is grounded in a very thorough examination of archival sources including Hollywood personalities, censorship records and federal archives. The book is well written and uses a case study methodology to organize his analysis of films.

One of the strengths of Shaw's study is that he does not limit his analysis to political films. Hollywood, he argues, from the early 1920s made films that supported Americanism, capitalism, religion and democracy as a counter to Soviet communism. Musicals, religious epics, westerns, comedies, crime thrillers and documentaries all preached the superiority of democratic America to a worldwide audience.

Shaw pervasively argues throughout the book that Washington wanted, especially after World War II, films that promoted America and Americanism. With public and private investigations of Hollywood politics raging, the industry was more than willing to cooperate in this propaganda campaign. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, for example, provided script material, consultants and even agents as extras for eight different films between 1945 and 1959.

The Defense Department created a special unit, The Motion Picture Production Office, in 1949 to help Hollywood promote the Armed Forces. Scripts that were deemed helpful to the cause of the cold war got free use of military bases and equipment.

In 1956 the USIA invested $100,000 in the British production, 1984. In the mid-1950s Hollywood icons (Cecil B. de Mille, John Ford and John Wayne among others) were recruited into Militant Liberty, a government program that promoted Americanism in films. The goal was to slip pro-American comments or scenes into films. By the late 1960s, the level of cooperation between Washington and Hollywood was so great that Senator William Fulbright complained that the American taxpayers were being forced into a silent partnership with Hollywood!

For reasons unexplained, some of the classic films of the era are either missing entirely or only briefly mentioned. These include Manchurian Candidate (1962), Fail-Safe (1964), The Bedford Incident (1964), Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and most inexplicably of all Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)! While Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is a British production, Shaw has an entire chapter devoted to two other British films, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The omission seems strange.

Film scholars will be disappointed. There is virtually nothing in the book dealing with the visual nature of film, important directors, actors or production companies. Nor is it clear how contemporary audiences received the films. Did this propaganda campaign actually work? Shaw is not sure.

Despite these omissions, the book provides a valuable survey of the relationship between Washington and Hollywood.