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And Marxism in Pre-Blacklist Hollywood

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And Marxism in Pre-Blacklist Hollywood Introduction Contextualizing the tension between the ‘American Dream’ and Marxism in pre-blacklist Hollywood The relationship between labour and capital in Hollywood was never noted for its harmony. Nevertheless, the class conflict within the American film industry usually resulted in workable compromises, albeit within a political framework limited by the prohibitive moral strictures of the Production Code of 1935 and the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA). Even the establishment of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1938, known as the Dies Committee after its first chairman Martin Dies Jr. (D-TX), did not significantly alter the uneasy co-existence between the Hollywood Left talent and old studio moguls. That is, not before the post-war reincarnation of HUAC, which left no room for political compromise: from 1947, the Committee went after Hollywood in earnest. Sometimes referred to as the Second Red Scare – the first followed the Russian Revolution – the political repression that followed in its wake is more commonly associated with Joseph McCarthy, a junior congressman from Wisconsin, who spearheaded the government attack on any political and cultural manifestation of un-Americanism (more precisely, anti-capitalism). This unconstitutional attack on freedom of expression at the hands of the Congress marked a watershed not only in the relationship between labour and capital in Hollywood, but in the evolution of the dominant political aesthetics of American cinema. Thirty years ago, film 1 historian Richard Maltby declared, “No discussion of the relationship between American film and politics can regard itself as complete without devoting some space to the encounters between Hollywood and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.” Moreover, continued Maltby, “No adequate history of the Cold War in America can be written without reference to the blacklist and other agencies of cultural repression that were generated by those encounters.”1 The persistence of the view of the central role of the blacklist in shaping subsequent American film practices is also manifest in more recent histories of Hollywood. Another film historian, Jon Lewis, recently wrote that “[t]eaching American film history requires a full-stop at the blacklist” because “the medium changed suddenly and significantly in 1947 when the Hollywood 10 were hauled in to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.”2 For Lewis, that was “the historic moment when all the rules changed”; the blacklist offered the studios a “convenient way out” of perennial labour troubles. (Interview with Lewis, Feb 9, 2010) The title of a chapter in Lewis’ Hollywood v. Hard Core, “How the Hollywood Blacklist Saved Hollywood,” exposes the economic rationalist standpoint of the old moguls. However, as it panned out, the historic defeat of radical Hollywood talent proved to be a pyrrhic victory for studio bosses: yes, the studios were purged of troublesome ‘reds,’ but their Wall Street backers went much further and completely reorganized their businesses, guided by the 1948 Paramount Decision which ruled that the integrated levels of production, distribution, and exhibition held by the studios constituted a monopoly. The studios were ordered to divest themselves of their distribution and exhibition arms. 1 Maltby, R. (1981). “Made for Each Other: The Melodrama of Hollywood and the House Committee on Un- American Activities, 1947”. Cinema, Politics and Society in America. ed. Davies, Philip, & Neve, Brian. Manchester, Manchester University Press: 76-96. 2 Lewis, J. (2009). “High Noon by Phillip Drummond [book review].” Cinema Journal 48.2 (Winter): 163-165. 2 In the lead up to this ‘historic moment,’ following the end of World War Two, the American economy was rocked by strikes. The Hollywood film industry was not spared ‘labour trouble,’ and it was not until the first HUAC hearings of 1947 were convened that radical Hollywood was put on notice. This period overlaps with the development of what came to be called film noir. However, the aesthetic evolution of American film noir (and film gris) was undercut by the studio heads, who saw this film mode as one which was likely to provide sympathetic portraits of the working class. The studio bosses were adamant that no trace of working-class activism would be allowed to reach the screen. The moguls’ own defining ‘historic moment,’ one that crystallized their capitalist class consciousness, was the bitter, eight-month long strike at the Warners’ Burbank studios that began in October 1945, and which ultimately resulted in a 25% salary rise for film workers and artists. Paradoxically, this victory of skilled labour and (above-the-line) talent at the studio renowned for its commitment to the ‘social problem’ film, marked an end of the period in which Warners “made films in praise of the ‘little man,’”3 to quote one of the Warner brothers. The films to which Jack Warner was alluding include I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), Racket Busters (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), and other films set in a proletarian milieu. In the end, the battle between labour and capital at Burbank ended with the crushing of the progressive, left Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), and the promotion of the company’s anticommunist International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) union. What also made the strike significant was the level of violence that attended the arrival of scab labor 3 Foster, J. (1948). “Entertainment Only.” New Masses (66): 21-22. 3 and the studio’s (ultimately unsuccessful) use of strong-arm tactics.4 William Wilkerson, writing in the Hollywood Review in 1947, saw the Waldorf Declaration as reflecting the “sudden desire to ‘clean house’ and to purge the industry of the so-called ‘realists.’ He looked forward to a new order, offering ‘pictures that tell of happiness, contentment and promise.’”5 But Jon Lewis uncovers a more pragmatic rationale for this ‘house cleanup.’ He reveals the elemental material interests that fuelled the studios’ and the Motion Picture Association of America’s (hereafter MPAA) instinctive anticommunism. In stressing that the Red Scare “did not mark the beginning of increased Federal regulation of Hollywood,” following the Paramount Decision of 1948, Lewis captures the essence of the lesson learned by these film capitalists: the blacklist “taught the studio membership of the MPAA that when they worked together they could turn a sow’s ear – how else can one describe the HUAC hearings – into a silk purse.”6 In other words, the ideological capitalist imperative went hand-in-hand with its profit motive. For their part, Ceplair and Englund’s assessment of the significance of this defeat is that it represented a “sequel to the massive battle in which Hollywood in effect defeated radical trade- unionism.”7 Now, as Peter Stead surmised, “the impetus was coming from Washington.”8 The congressional hearings into the communist infiltration of the film industry (and all other 4 Correspondence with Jon Lewis, July 6, 2011 5 William Wilkerson in Neve, B. (2003). “HUAC, The Blacklist, and the Decline of Social Cinema.” The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959. ed. Peter Lev, Berkley, UCal Press, p. 78 6 Lewis, J. (2009). “High Noon by Phillip Drummond [book review].” Cinema Journal 48.2 (Winter): 163-165. 7 Ceplair, L., & Englund, Steven (1979). The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community 1930 - 1960. Chigago, University of Illinois Press, pp. 193-84 8 Stead, P. (1989). Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society. London, NY, Routledge, p. 153 4 industries and institutions) signaled this shift of gear by the White House towards a completely reconstituted, explicitly anticommunist, public discourse, where even the most innocuous liberal and democratic strivings by the adherents of the New Deal era effectively would be criminalised. However, it was a fundamental shift in the class orientation of the US Communist Party (CPUSA) (from the working class towards their ‘own’ capitalist class), manifested in its endorsement of Roosevelt’s Democratic government, that opened communists and fellow travelers to such attacks. This strategic shift had a profound impact on the American ‘cultural front,’ which, as is elaborated in Michael Denning’s historical study, was forged during the ‘proletarianization’ of mass culture in the US, borne of the mass radicalization of workers and artists after the Depression years. This active participation of the American working class in mass culture brought Hollywood face to face with an “untapped source of its vitality.”9 However, the artistic potential of this proletarian tide ultimately was sabotaged by its subservience to Stalinism. As Buhle and Wagner write in Radical Hollywood, “The war and the emergence of a Popular Front further detached them [the Hollywood Left] from the old premises of Marxism, and from the rigors of the Communist Party progress.”10 The perspective adopted in this doctoral thesis is that the Popular Front contained, rather than emancipated, American cinematic proletarian fiction. The unhealthy political relationship between the social problem film and Stalinist aesthetics was critiqued by liberal critics of both pre- and post-blacklist epochs, and is powerfully embodied in 9 Jarrico, P., & Biberman, Herbert (1953/92). Breaking Ground: The Making of Salt of the Earth. Celluloid Power: Social Film Criticism from The Birth of a Nation to Judgement at Nuremberg. D. Platt. Metuchen, N.J. & London, The Scarecrow Press: pp. 478-484. 10 Buhle, P., and Wagner, Dave (2002). Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. NY, The New Press, p. 342 5 some writing from Robert Warshow and Andrew Sarris. Warshow bemoans the emergence of the “middle-brow” culture of the “educated classes,” which meant that for the first time popular culture “was able to draw its ideological support from the most advanced sectors of society,”11 or from the same Communist-inspired movement that Denning characterised as a “new historical bloc.”12 But this bloc was precisely, as Warshow argues, what made it a ‘central problem’ for the American intellectual.
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