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Blacklist Whitewash
by Jonathan Foreman
Mr. Foreman is a movie critic at the New York Post.

Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley (Forum, 365 pp., $25)

I should declare an interest, at one remove, in some of the issues this book attempts to raise. It's a complicated story, but in 1951, 14 years before I was born, my father, Carl Foreman, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At the time he was producing the film High Noon, for which he had written the screenplay, but more than a decade earlier he had been in the Communist Party. He told the committee this and how his disillusionment had caused him to leave the Party, but when pressed to name others whom he knew to have been in the CP at the time-even others who had already been named-he refused. (After all, he himself had been named in perjurious testimony by a man he'd never met.) He was therefore deemed an "uncooperative witness" and immediately blacklisted by the Hollywood studio cartel.

Exile in England followed. And eventually, after years of writing scripts under pseudonyms, so did a second career. In the meantime, my father, a World War II veteran, never ceased to be a patriot, never even considered giving up American citizenship, never ceased to be outraged by treason. (I remember well his outraged reaction to Jane Fonda's war time visit to Hanoi.) He had no respect for those who continued to be taken in by Stalin.

But he also had contempt for the pointlessly destructive political-correctness machine that operated the Hollywood black list.

When Winston Churchill asked him to write a movie based on his early life, my father reminded him that he had been blacklisted in Hollywood. The old man replied, "Oh, I know all about you. But we don't like political blacklists in England. And speaking for myself, I don't care what a man believed in when he was a boy. My concern is whether or not he can do the job."

As a career-long Tory myself, I've never seen any evidence that this point of view is wrong. Maybe in the future someone will write a book showing that there was in fact a real point to the ritual denunciations of Communist, ex-Communist, or "fellow-traveling" actors, directors, and writers. Films like my father's Champion or The Men will in that case be shown to contain secret radical messages that somehow got past the producers and the studios and the critics and the audience. If so, then what now looks a lot like a cynical publicity exercise that allowed HUAC members to spend long periods of time out on the coast being photographed with movie stars will prove to have been work vital to the safety of the Republic. The highly profitable private-sector business of denouncing and "clearing" people who worked in film will look less like a sleazy shakedown. And the studios and agencies that actually enforced the blacklist won't look like greedy cowards thrilled to have some of their most expensive "talent" on the hook.

But anyone looking for a scholarly, intelligent attempt to examine the period of the Hollywood blacklist through a revisionist lens will be disappointed by this amateurish potboiler. Even the sexy subtitle
seems tacked on by someone at the publishing house who hadn't bothered to read the book-after all, it deals largely with the Fifties and after, not the Thirties and Forties. And rather than explain or even document this alleged "seduction," Holly wood Party makes no effort at all to understand why Communism might have seemed attractive to the kind of people who ended up in that industry.

For most of its length, it feels like an article that has been stretched, flattened, and teased into a very thin skein. Wary readers can quickly spot this sort of artificial expansion by the unusually big print, and by
the number of pages taken up at the front with widely spaced tables of dramatis personae, abbreviations, and organizations-and an embarrassing time line listing key events like "1939, World War II begins" and "1950, North Korea invades South Korea." This book fails on every level to challenge
standard left-leaning accounts of the period such as Victor Navasky's Naming Names.

For a start, it contains almost no primary research. Apart from his apparent access to the self-serving papers of Roy Brewer, a thuggish union boss who be came one of those Holly wood fixers who could arrange blacklist "clearances" (and who was not nearly as important a figure as one might think from reading Hollywood Party), Billingsley relies entirely on the (often misunderstood) work of others and his own overheated rhetoric.

But even that might be tolerable if he dealt with some of the really interesting questions posed by the complex political history of Hollywood in this period: Were those movie people who were called before HUAC in any way an actual or even a potential threat to national security?

Besides Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow, two wartime pro-Soviet films (the second of which was actually adapted from Ambassador Joseph Davies's book at the request of FDR), can one detect any ideological taint in the movies that these people made?

Now that the Venona decrypts and parts of the Soviet KGB archives are available to historians, it would obviously make sense to see whether these shed any light on the threat allegedly posed by Marxist movie directors.

Billingsley chose not to go down this avenue, possibly because research that has already been done seems to indicate that Holly wood could scarcely have been a lower priority back at KGB HQ. (Lenin and Stalin may well have stated now and then that they thought cinema a vital and powerful tool of the people's struggle, but they also said that same kind of thing about tractor factories and inspirational poetry.)

Then there is the question as to what it actually meant at various times to be a member of the American Communist Party. (With his instinct for the dramatic cliché, Billingsley uses words like "cell," but the
Hollywoodites whose social and professional lives were linked with the Party were not organized in cells like deep-cover agents in a Seventies spy thriller.)

While there is absolutely no question that the American Communist Party leadership took its orders directly from the Kremlin, it is far from clear to what extent the Soviet contacts of the Party's upper echelons affected the hundreds of thousands of Americans who passed through the Party.
How did they in fact balance their allegiance to it with their allegiance to their country-significant numbers of them were after all military veterans-or for that matter with their allegiance to their own
careers and financial interests? How much was it about political activity and how much about meeting and impressing girls who believed in free love?

A serious revisionist would also have to deal with the peculiar way HUAC functioned when it was on the West Coast. What was the point of only asking questions to which the answer was already known? What function was served by forcing present or former Communists ritualistically to name
others? What of the role of informers in the Fifties and today? Both liberals and conservatives often share the traditional American contempt for the stool pigeon-while tending to approve of "whistleblowers."

It's not clear whether Hollywood Party is as unsatisfying as it is because the author had only enough material for a magazine article or because it is crude revisionism-for-its-own-sake, not intended to be part of a reasoned discussion. There are, after all, those on the right who have so absorbed the paranoid style and ends-justify-the-means ruthlessness of the Left that they aren't really conservatives at all.

Of course it's annoying when some of our shallow, ignorant contemporary movie stars talk about the blacklist as if it were a crime akin to the Soviet Gulags. But because what happened was not the Gulag, and because being black listed (or forced to be a Judas) by the studio cartel that controlled all film making in the United States, is not as bad as being imprisoned or shot for your beliefs, that scarcely means that the process was all right and good. After all, in America, we measure our historical record by American standards of decency and political freedom, not Soviet ones.