An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (review)

In An Army of Phantoms, J. Hoberman, formerly the senior film critic for the Village Voice, offers an overview and interpretation of Hollywood films in the first decade of the Cold War, 1946-1956. As such, he offers the book as a prequel to his invaluable The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, published in 2003.¹ This new book is a worthy and highly readable follow-up to the earlier book. For Hoberman, born in 1948, the sixties were observed firsthand, and Dream Life was a hip, fast-paced, and implicitly personal as well as critical history. Army of Phantoms is a work of more scholarly detachment; well researched, the book reflects hours logged at archives and libraries and close readings of FBI files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. As with many great books, the footnotes are littered with priceless gems.

Phantoms is dedicated to John Garfield (and Marilyn Monroe), the charismatic left-wing actor whose massive heart attack, which took his life at the age of thirty-nine, was considered by many to be the result of his being hounded during the hysteria of the anticommunist witch hunts. But despite this tipping of loyalties, Hoberman's analysis is evenhanded—at times to a fault, as when the book suggests but ultimately underemphasizes the extent to which Elia Kazan's infamous friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was motivated by fears for his own career.

Phantoms starts before the beginning, with the origins of the left-leaning message movies of the immediate postwar era that attracted the attention of HUAC after the Republicans were swept into power in 1946. Hoberman nicely juxtaposes the sudden, new vulnerabilities faced by Hollywood and America: the United States lost its nuclear monopoly just as the studios lost their own monopoly power, forced by the Supreme Court to divest themselves of their theater chains. With a dwindling audience, the existential threat of television, and uncertain economic prospects, Hollywood cowered before HUAC, enforcing the blacklist and churning out a tidal wave of (mostly awful) anticommunist potboilers in an effort to prove its patriotism. Hoberman dutifully puts these turkeys under the microscope; one drawback of this diligence is that readers are left spending more time with these films than they might desire.

The book gets off to a slow start; its first major chapter, on 1946-1947, is handicapped by covering this most familiar part of the period. The first round of HUAC hearings, the Hollywood Ten, and the emergence of the blacklist are well retold, and, throughout, there is an excellent accounting, especially in the footnotes, of who comported themselves honorably during those difficult times and who did not. The early part of the book is also written at a breathless pace; in one paragraph Charlie Chaplin is threatened with deportation, Bugsy Siegel is rubbed out, the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act is passed, and Orson Welles begins shooting Macbeth (1948). But the book soon finds its more scholarly (though still entertaining) voice, with chapters grouped around clusters of years. The history is well handled, although, for the late 1940s, Hoberman underplays the extent to which the pathological anxieties that led to a mob mentality in America were at least rooted in real-world, plausibly frightening events. As he recounts, within one week in 1949 the Soviets surprised the world with their A-bomb test and China "fell" to the communists. Moreover, a few months later North Korea would launch its surprise attack on the South, and it did not help matters that 1949 was a recession year in the United States. Phantoms does viscerally capture the vehemence of the new burst of anticommunism that came with the Korean War and the intensified browbeating of suspected Hollywood leftists that followed. The book's most novel contributions come here, in the 1950s, as it engages genres such as science-fiction and alien...