Whitewashing the blacklist.(Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left )(Book Review)

Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left By Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh Encounter Books, 292 pages, $25.95

"How and why," ask the authors of Red Star Over Hollywood, did so many film artists in the first half of the twentieth century "become enchanted not only with the Left, but with its totalitarian expression, the American Communist Party?" "What were their aims and objectives, and how did they set about achieving them?" To answer these questions, Ronald and Allis Radosh present a detailed mosaic of communism in Hollywood before, during, and after World War II.

Some elements of the communist seduction of Western citizens are well known: Moscow's creation of the revolution-exporting Comintern in 1919; the duplicitous 1935-1939 "common front"; 1939's gear-shifting Hitler-Stalin Pact; the "Cold War" struggles--all of which the authors have researched meticulously and related directly to their study of Hollywood's Communists.

Other pieces are less familiar. Original research by the authors (their book contains 552 footnotes and extensive bibliographical support) depicts the psychologies of the principal Communist players in Hollywood; the pipeline that linked New York City's radical theater to Hollywood's movie studios; the infighting over Communist attempts to co-opt the movie studio unions; the inside story of the major cinematic accomplishment of Hollywood's Communists, the 1943 film Mission To Moscow.

Red Star Over Hollywood depicts a relatively small coterie of largely ineffectual writers, actors, and directors who mindlessly followed the Comintern's orders to imbue Hollywood films with Communist propaganda. These true believers defended every twist in the party, line, raised and contributed money for Communist-backed causes, and sought control of the movie ...