What's black and white and Red all over?
This leads directly to two questions: First, what makes an Abbott and Costello writer "good" or "bad"?the speed with which they typed "Hey Abbott?" Second, if HUAC's goal was to rid American movie screens of sneaky socialist messages, what purpose was served by going after the brains behind the Fat Guy and the Other One? Was there ever even a trace amount of smash-the-state, eat-the-rich agit prop in Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first" patter?
Maybe. But Blacklisted isn't too concerned with that. Nor is it a history of HUAC-era Hollywood. The authors assume that the reader is familiar with the story of the blacklist, or at least has seen Hollywood's tearjerker apologies Guilty by Suspicion or The Majestic. Readers interested in a hard historical account of the period would be wise to turn to Buhle and Wagner's previous collaborations, A Very Dangerous Citizen, Radical Hollywood and Hide in Plain Sight, which trace the course of McCarthyism in Hollywood in fine, exhaustive detail.
Blacklisted is a movie guide, plain and simple. It gives plot and production information on films made by the blacklisted and their friendly witnesses?sort of like a Leonard Maltin movie guide for lefty cineastes. And in this capacity it does have merits. After all, the players discussed in the book are mostly dead and their court-case transcripts collecting dust in some time capsule, while the movies are all on DVD.
Most of the 900 movies discussed in the book receive a simple paragraph of plot summary. Only a select number of films are discussed at length; they are chosen for several factors. Some, like Blondie and Henry Aldrich were part of a multi-film series, with plot summaries for each movie eating up the space. Other films, like On the Waterfront, have both historical and artistic allegorical relevance.
For the right audience, Blacklisted will be a sugar-sweet form of mind candy. The reader who picks up the book from the coffee table expecting to ruminate over an important and complex moment in America's history will flip to a random page and instead find a straight-faced explication of Adventures of Captain Marvel. Shazam!
From our near-'04 vantage point, all the old hoo-ha over Reds in movies seems absurd. While movies do traffic in the marketplace of ideas and, yes, there were a fair amount of Popular Front veterans working in Hollywood during the early years of the Cold War (including Ronald Reagan), it boggles the mind that anyone could have seen a commie plot in Singin' in the Corn.
Still, Buhle and Wagner do their best to extract leftie-inflected messages from the source material. They point to the fact that the Native Americans in Singin' in the Corn, written by Richard Weil, "are a far cry from the thievin', murderin' savages of western lore. They even sing!" They wonder about the real message of the otherwise poorly executed Captain Marvel, where Marvel wistfully yearns for "a world of freedom, justice and hope for all men." Not all the movies discussed in Blacklisted get a socialist exegesis, but most of the ones that do are convincing, particularly High Noon and Frankenstein. Other claims, such as attributing greatness to Disney's Cinderella because of a single uncredited screenwriter, seem more like wishful thinking.
The extent to which lefty screenwriters and directors loaded their movies with political messages is debatable. In Blacklisted's introduction, the authors admit that many lefty motifs may have been accidental, only apparent to screenwriters (and historians) in hindsight. It is clear, though, that the presence of a blacklisted screenwriter did not guarantee a good film. Blacklisted doesn't screen for quality. Bottomfeeding tripe like The Bowery Boys series and Ronnie Reagan's star vehicle The Girl from Jones Beach bumps uglies against gems like Citizen Kane, Casablanca and Midnight Cowboy.
Some of the socialist-party-sourced films aren't much of a surprise. Metallica video fodder Johnny Got His Gun was written and directed by outspoken peacenik Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in jail for "contempt of Congress." Discovering that this stark antiwar film had a communist auteur behind it will shock approximately no one. Finding out that bizarre Joan Crawford lesbian- cult movie-to-be Johnny Guitar was written by a member of the blacklist, however, is cool. And it's no doubt a moment of vindication on the writer's part to note that Jolson Sings Again is as miserable as it sounds, and that its ex-communist star Larry Parks named names.
Blacklisted will surely spark a lot of Kim's Video dumpster dives and quixotic eBay searches. With 900 titles listed, every Blockbuster night could be a May Day celebration.