RADICAL HOLLYWOOD, THE UNTOLD STORY (PAUL BUHLE AND DAVID WAGNER). NOW IN SPANISH TRANSLATION

Paul Buhle and David Wagner's history of Tinseltown's brief flirtation with the Left, Radical Hollywood, is full of parallels with today

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Here is a true blast for the past. On the one hand, an academic, Buhle, and a journalist, Wagner, have written an exhaustive, even occasionally exhausting, history of Hollywood's 20-year flirtation (1930-50) with communism, liberalism and all that jazz. Cine-buffs may drown in the deep end of their research. but the ironies and the parallels keep flooding in much closer to home.

Remember, remember: that demagogues can hijack democracy; that panic and the press are natural bedfellows; that America once lost its collective marbles for a while, and may be doing so again. Who needs New Saddam when you've got Old Ronnie Reagan?

What made Hollywood radical or, perhaps more accurately, slightly Left of Tony Blair in the 1930s and 1940s? Any decent answer has to be suitably complex. The screenwriters started it. They wanted terms and conditions as the industry changed and men in suits from big corporate studios moved in. That meant the creeping horror of unionisation. Screenwriters such as John Bright of Blonde Crazy also wanted recognition and artistic freedom, which meant banging their talent against the Hays Code and its dreaded enforcer, Joseph I. Breen.

'In public,' Buhle and Wagner observe, 'Breen insisted on a "balanced" treatment of Hitler and Mussolini, virtually up to wartime, and he openly admired Francisco Franco. In private, he poured out his deep-seated anti-Semitism. "These Jews seem to think of nothing but money-making and sexual indulgence," he wrote in 1937. "They are probably the scum of the earth".' Since many of the writers were Jews, that made Breen a multiheaded ogre, one more enemy holding back reform.

Beyond, there was the depression and Roosevelt's New Deal. Impoverished young men toiling over a cold screenplay rallied to that flag. There was the coming of war and the fascist foe. There was dear Uncle Joe and his gallant Red Army holding the Eastern Front. There was a simple need to produce plots and characters which bore some relationship to the swill of mankind all around.

So the tight little cells and loose umbrella groupings like the Popular Front sprang into life. So the purveyors of tawdry tinsel left town as more socially earnest operators had their brief time in the sun. So, after Pearl Harbour, it was possible to make pictures which were grindingly doctrinaire, such as Mission to Moscow.

And then, of course, the world turned again. Here was High Noon, the movie its hounded and excoriated writer, Carl Foreman, saw as a symbol of Hollywood itself, 'a community beginning to crumble around the edges as these high-powered politicians came in... and people began to fall by the wayside... they were either capitulating to these political gangsters or being executed by them'.

But how real was the supposed threat? Perhaps this question finds Buhle and Wagner at their most fascinating. Conventionally, the House Un-American Activities Committee pursued just 19 men, some of them famous (Robert Rossen and Lewis Milestone), some of them (Irving Pichel, Herbert Biberman) hardly names to conjure with. The abiding verdict is still the one Arthur Schlesinger Jnr delivered in 1949: these 'travelling, ex-proletarian writers went to Hollywood and became film hacks' in a 'climate particularly favourable to the spread of communism'. In sum, whatever else HUAC damaged at the time, it wasn't artistic achievement or integrity. Blame a small gang of small-talent zealots for the whole farrago, said Schlesinger.

In fact, though, the radical movement - in its loosest form - was vastly greater and more accomplished. You can, pretty persuasively, put Lassie Come Home, The Wizard of Oz and The Sea Hawk into this basket. You can set Broken Arrow beside Woman of the Year beside Thousands Cheer and Superman and the Mole Men. Hepburn and Tracey were monarchs in the kingdom of the Left; so were Gene Kelly and Lauren Bacall.

For the point about 'radical' Hollywood, as historically defined, was that 'extreme leftism' went with run-of-the-mill westerns where some dastardly banker exploited the settlers or where the Indians seemed like human beings. It was radical, in The Maltese Falcon and much that was noir, to take on or tease the Hays Office. It was radical to watch underdogs triumph or let Jimmy Stewart and Mr Smith go to Washington, and radical, too, to let the rhythm of real life beat out across the screen.

Once upon an early time, John Ford and Frank Capra were 'radicals' and even John Wayne went Back to Bataan. Once upon a time, a movie about a mixed-race girl falling in love with a white boy - Pinky, with Jeanne Crain - stood at the cutting edge of the cutting-room floor.

There wasn't much that was really radical about this emergent Hollywood. The place, and the writers and directors who created it, were merely trying to break free of the Roman Catholic stultification which sapped their energies and creativity. Take Dalton Trumbo, Clifford Odets, Jules Dassin, Abraham Polonsky, Rossen and a couple of dozen more and that was the extremity of any core, hard or soft. The rest were lively minds, being lively (like George Clooney and Susan Sarandon today).

And those parallels from the past? Now Arabs, not Jews, are the stock villains. Now the big studios are being muscled into flag-waving patriotism for the White House's sake. Now, again, it's dangerous to dissent too openly. Now, prejudices arrive once more decked in the raiment of principle and morality, weapons of mass hysteria. Buhle and Wagner may not have set out to write a subtext for our times, just an authoritative and lively primer to a rancid age, but some bonuses come resonantly free.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/23/history.film