J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War by John Sbardellati, and: Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense, and Subversion by Oliver Boyd-Barrett, David Herrera, and Jim Baumann (review)

In achieving his first Broadway success, Arthur Miller drew on an actual incident of lethal profiteering during World War II. But in 1948, when Miller's play All My Sons was adapted to the screen, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cried foul: "The whole plot is slanted and twisted into an indictment of money-making" (p. 197). The mob-infested brutality that disfigured the lives of longshoremen so appalled Budd Schulberg that he wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront (1954). That he and director Elia Kazan had already offered cooperative testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) did not, however, cut any slack with the FBI, which complained that the film's "vicious indictment of working conditions among the longshoremen in New York . . . shows racketeers operating among the workers, extorting money from them for jobs and charging unreasonable prices for goods" (p. 205). Few postwar films were as admired as William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a poignant critique of the postwar difficulties that returning veterans faced. But the FBI, quoting a rival of Wyler's, dissented, charging that "this picture portrayed the 'upper class' in a bad light" (p. 198).

J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies is replete with such reductive responses to the most authentically American of the popular arts, as the FBI sought to determine the boundaries of the politically permissive. Usually disguising the agents' amateurish opinions by ascribing them to "informants," such cramped interpretations reveal the obtuseness of the Bureau in conflating sensible, liberal criticism with Communist propaganda. One striking virtue of John Sbardellati's book is the ingenuity with which he has mined FBI records to expose how its agents in Los Angeles monitored the most influential of the nation's mass arts. One consequence of the Bureau's public campaign (in conjunction with HUAC) to discredit Communist directors and screenwriters was to torpedo whatever enthusiasm Hollywood might have had for producing films that addressed actual social problems.

What bedeviled the counter-subversive enterprise was the elusiveness of the messages that threatened audiences with dangerous doses of Red rhetoric. The HUAC hearings of 1947 were the only instance, the author reports, of a quest to uncover cinematic content that only the Communist Party could have dared to inject into the body politic. The hearings failed to expose the scope of the alleged radical effort to turn motion pictures into propaganda, and the testimony of cooperative witness Ayn Rand proved to be an embarrassment, never to be repeated. Even so, Rand's Screen Guide for Americans (1947) became the text on which the FBI relied. The Bureau's cineastes were therefore able to pick out the narrative elements that might reveal the collectivist mentality, which Rand posited in Manichaean opposition to individualism. If bankers and industrialists were presented as villainous, for instance, Communists and New Dealers were putting capitalism itself in their crosshairs. Hence, businessmen and other figures of authority ought to be immune from criticism. Not even Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were spared: a scene in which an army general is feted, juxtaposed with an enlisted man doing kitchen duty, made "the audience unnecessarily class conscious" (p. 102).

Yet, oddly enough, as Sbardellati shows, the countersubversives were forthright in their scorn for some successful capitalists: the studio chiefs who were deemed insufficiently vigilant in their anti-Communism. They were targeted for crudely pursuing only profit, a devotion Rand otherwise celebrated, instead of advocating Americanism. Nor did the FBI entirely trust its allies. Rand's atheism left her out of the campaign to make piety...