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159 6 ROLLBACK I’m gonna have to ask her questions. She being a truthful woman, every answer is going to incriminate her son. It could be quite a test—God and country or her son John? —FBI agent in My Son John (1952) Though it is impossible to take measure of the films that were not made due to the stifling of dissent in the early Cold War, we can take note of a new cycle of movies that explicitly sought to explain the stakes of this conflict. Since most of these films focused on the domestic threat of Communism, it is more accurate to dub these red scare movies rather than Cold War movies.1 As these films all appeared after the 1947 trials—that is after HUAC, and especially Richard Nixon, continually questioned why Hollywood had not made any anti-Communist pictures—it is clear that these movies represented the industry’s coerced contribution to the politics of un-Americanism. This chapter opens with a glimpse into the idiosyncratic anti-Communism of Ayn Rand, presented to film audiences in the Warner Bros. 1949 film, The Fountainhead . Rand’s strident individualism was in full display in this production, but her refusal to imbue her anti-Communism with a traditional reverence for religion left her, and her film, on the outskirts of mainstream anti-Communism. The void was filled both by J. Edgar Hoover and the red scare movies that reinforced his brand of countersubversion. Hoover, in his many speeches, interviews , and publications, along with Hollywood, presented audiences with a broader social definition of the red peril. Whereas Rand narrowly defined the threat to the principle of individualism, Hoover and Hollywood presented an expansive image of the danger, in which not only the American state, but the school, church, and family all were in jeopardy. The solution, Americans were told, lay in reinvigorating these social institutions and gearing them toward awareness of Communist treachery.Yet average citizens were not to try to thwart 160 J. EDGAR HOOVER GOES TO THE MOVIES the red menace on their own, but rather they were consistently told to alert the authorities when trouble arose. Politically, their only duty entailed assenting to the national security state and entrusting it with their safety and protection, thereby freeing these ordinary Americans to focus their attention on building vibrant religious and family lives. Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead Alisa Rosenbaum was obsessed with the movies. On graduating from the University of Leningrad, she quickly enrolled in the State Institute for Cinematography, a new school designed to boost Soviet filmmaking. But it was Hollywood that caught her eye. She viewed hundreds of films and even kept a film diary wherein she dutifully ranked each movie she attended. The movie stars of Hollywood’s silent age enchanted the young Alisa,especially the Polish-born actress Pola Negri. Yet it was the image of America itself that most captivated her. Hollywood,America ’s foremost cultural ambassador,impressed Alisa as a dreamland where denizens “stream in a constant wave over its boulevards, smooth as marble,” and where “shining, elegant Fords and Rolls-Royce’s fly, flickering, as the frames of one continuous movie reel. And the sun strikes the blazing windows of enormous, snow white studios. Every night an electric glow rises over the city.” Soon she seized on the chance to visit relatives in Chicago as an opportunity to escape Russia.Chicago would be but a brief first stop on her way to Tinseltown. Leaving behind the old country, Alisa would also cast off her old name. While on board the rocky ocean liner that would carry her to America’s shores, she dubbed herself Ayn Rand.2 Rand made her way to Hollywood in 1926, where she capitalized on a chance (or perhaps planned) encounter with her favorite director, Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille offered her a job as an extra, but Rand soon obtained a writing position summarizing scripts and suggesting changes. A few years later she went to work in the wardrobe department at RKO. She loathed the work but appreciated the good pay once the Great Depression hit and jobs became scarce. Her writing remained her real passion, and she set out to compose her first anti-Communist novel, We the Living. But the writing lagged, and the day job only seemed to steal time from her true purpose. So Rand decided to write and sell a screenplay in the hopes of better financing her more serious...

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