Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Edward Dmytryk on location directing Anzio (1968).
EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
(1928–1999) Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), begins here. Mann’s
camera ogles the lines and curves of the B-47 that Stewart
(a real-life bomber pilot) gets to fly (with the new family
of nuclear weapons, a B-47 with a crew of three carries
the destructive power of the entire B-29 forces used in
World War II). Dutch’s eventual commitment to the
Strategic Air Command seems to suggest that his plane
is sexier than the starched, maternal Allyson.
At first, Hollywood reacted to the Cold War much
like Dutch, when he was asked to stop playing ball and
start practicing bomb runs. After years of turning out war
propaganda, a policy the movies embraced before the
government (e.g., Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Anatole
Litvak, 1939), the studios felt they had done their
‘‘share’’ and believed that audiences wanted Technicolor
musical escapism or film noir romantic agonies rather
than more gray, grim, depressing privation-leads-tovictory
stories. If anything, Hollywood needed to mop
up after World War II, tracking down Nazi war criminals
Cold War
who might be infiltrating America (The Stranger, Orson
Welles, 1946) or reflecting on the situations of returning
veterans who found their homeland not quite the
paradise they thought they were fighting for. A wave of
films, many made by people who would soon be facing
HUAC, dealt with heroic black, Jewish, or even Nisei
soldiers suffering from bigotry or racial assault, including
murder: Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), Gentleman’s
Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), Home of the Brave (Mark
Robson, 1949), and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) by
John Sturges (1911–1993). A decade before Strategic Air
Command, Dana Andrews found his war record suited
him for no peacetime employment and rendered him as
obsolete as the fields of junked bombers in The Best Years
of Our Lives (1946) by William Wyler (1902–1981).
Within a few years, films like this (another Oscar Ò winner)
would be seen as either suspect or anti-American.
The studios made anti-Nazi films from genuine conviction
(in the case of Warner Bros.) and a patriotic urge
to aid a national war effort; they made anti-Communist
films at first because they were afraid not to. When
HUAC resumed its hearings, Hollywood put into production
a run of low-budget anti-Red quickies. A few odd
films—My Son John (Leo McCarey, 1952) and Big Jim
McLain (Edward Ludwig, 1952)—are sincere in their anti-
Communism, if so bizarre in approach as to undermine
their overt message. In the former, John (Robert Walker),
a fey intellectual who drifts into Red circles, is so smothered
by his mother (Helen Hayes) and literally Biblebashed
by his super-patriot father (Dean Jagger) that he
seems as much a victim of all-American parentage as Jim
Stark (James Dean) of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) or
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) of Psycho (1960). Jim
McLain, an avatar of producer John Wayne (1907–1979),
is a rare instance of blacklister as two-fisted action hero, an
investigator out to round up a Red ring in Hawaii. The
film’s conclusion is that too many enemies of freedom are
protected by the Fifth Amendment and that the
Constitution ought to be changed—a proposal not even
Joseph McCarthy dared to make.
These are films Hollywood needed to produce, but
audiences were not that interested in seeing them then, and
even social historians find them hard to see (let alone sit
through) now. Some tackled the ‘‘problem’’ of making
anti-Red propaganda by making the same old movies, but
with notionally Communist villains. The espionage aspect
of Pickup on South Street (1953) by Samuel Fuller (1912–
1997) is so thin that the film could be redubbed for release
in France (where there was a respectable, active Communist
Party) with the bad guys turned into drug smugglers.
Smooth Van Zandt (James Mason), ‘‘importer-exporter of
government secrets’’ in North by Northwest (1959) by
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), is an epicene mastermind
exactly like the traitor-for-an-unspecified-cause of The 39
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