Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story behind America's Favorite Movies FROM THE PUBLISHER
A revealing and affectionate account of the personal and political lives of the left-wing screenwriters, directors, and actors behind Hollywood's Golden Age. The first comprehensive book about Hollywood's future blacklistees and the hundreds of films they wrote or directed from the dawn of sound movies to the early 1950s, Radical Hollywood traces the political and personal lives of the activists along with the often-decisive impact of their work upon American film's Golden Age. A highly readable, anecdotal history, featuring an insert of classic film stills, , Radical Hollywood describes the story-behind-the-story of such famous films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, and Woman of the Year, alongside such campy items as The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, and Kiss the Blood off My Hands. Genres like crime and women's films, family cinema, war, animation and, above all, film noir are reconsidered here, with fresh evidence drawn from interviews and recent archival breakthroughs. A long-awaited rediscovery of an overlooked intellectual-artistic milieu, , Radical Hollywood will interest all film-lovers and devotees of political culture. 16 pages b/w photographs.
Films discussed include: The Adventures of Captain Marvel • The Big Clock • Body and Soul • Back Door to Heaven • Blues in the Night • Cabin in the Sky • Caged • Casablanca • Champion • Deadline at Dawn • Destry Rides Again • The Devil-Doll • Diplomaniacs • Dynamite • Frankenstein • G. I. Joe • Give Us This Day • Gun Crazy • High Noon • Hitler's Children • Hold That Ghost • Honky Tonk • Keeper of the Flame • Kiss the Blood off My Hands • Kitty Foyle • Lassie, Come Home • The Lawless • Life with Father • The Long Night • The Maltese Falcon • The Man Who Reclaimed His Head • Marked Woman • Mayor of Hell • Meet the People • Mission to Moscow • Monsieur Verdoux • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington • None but the Lonely Heart • Our Vines Have Tender Grapes • Phantom Lady • The Philadelphia Story • A Place in the Sun • The President's Mystery • Pride of the Marines • The Public Enemy • Ruthless • The Sea Hawk • Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror • Stella Dallas • Stormy Weather • The Story of G.I. Joe • Talk of the Town • Theodora Goes Wild • The Thin Man • Thirty Seconds over Tokyo • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn • Watch on the Rhine • The Wizard of Oz • Woman of the Year
Author Biography: Paul Buhle is a lecturer in the American civilization department at Brown University. He co-authored The Encyclopedia of the American Left, Tender Comrades, and A Very Dangerous Citizen (with Dave Wagner). He writes for the Nation, the Guardian, and the Times Higher Education Supplement, among other publications. Dave Wagner is the former political editor of the Arizona Republic.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Hollywood and politics have always had a complicated relationship that changes decade by decade (seen as too liberal last year, Tinseltown is now being courted by Beltway bigwigs to produce patriotic entertainment), and this groundbreaking account of leftist influence in Hollywood from the 1920s to the '50s is an intelligent, well argued and absorbing examination of how politics and art can make startling and often strange bedfellows. Buhle and Wagner (A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left) mix exhaustive research and political acumen to produce a detailed analysis of progressive politics in the work of writers, producers, directors and actors. While the book is generously studded with often startling examples (e.g., the 1940s Hopalong Cassidy films written by Michael Wilson were replete with leftist political messages), its real force derives from the authors' astute and judicious untangling of the complicated webs of relationships, politics and economics that produced some of the most important films and genres of the period. From the anticapitalist themes of gangster films such as 1931's Public Enemy and the explicit and, for its time, shocking antilynching message that screenwriter Hugo Butler inserted in Mickey Rooney's 1938 Huckleberry Finn to the underlying class-struggle implications of film noir and the proletarian subtext of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Buhle and Wagner examine not only the political beliefs of the artists but the ever-shifting political contexts in which they functioned. This is one of the few complete and cohesive histories of the history of progressives in Hollywood and is an important contribution to the literature of film and politics. B&w photos. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
In the Thirties and Forties a generation of actors and screenwriters shaped by the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Soviet Union, the rise of fascism, and the new militancy of labor unions looked to Hollywood as the ideal way to reach the masses. An assortment of leftists, hard-line Communists, and fellow travelers worked on scripts in all genres. Though only bits and pieces of leftist ideology may be discerned in the completed films, much of it hardly radical by today's standards, Buhle (American civilization, Brown Univ.) and Wagner (former political editor of the Arizona Republic) contend that it was in the film noir genre that these radicals made their lasting impact on American films. They describe the hard-bitten, cynical, world-weary noir films and the contributions of future blacklisted like Abraham Polonsky, Albert Maltz, and Dalton Trumbo. Owing to the lack of first-person narratives, the authors struggle but are unable to bring this era to life. Also, the discussion of films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Casablanca is superficial, rarely revealing more than previous evaluations. To fully understand the radical era and how it led to the blacklist, this work should be supplemented by titles like Buhle and Patrick McGilligan's Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, Walter Bernstein's Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist, and Robert Vaughn's Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. This effort is an appropriate supplemental purchase for large public and academic film collections. (Index not seen.) Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Terrific material on Hollywood resisters, marred by imprecision and excess. Buhle (American Civilization/Brown Univ.) and journalist Wagner attempt to "capture the rich texture of the lives of those ... Hollywoodites named in congressional hearings during the late 1940s and early 1950s as �subversive.' " Co-author of Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist (1997), Buhle knows his subject and reveals it in his extensive background on leftist golden-era screenwriters and players like Michael Wilson and John Howard Lawson, who were affected by blacklisting. Also interesting is the ongoing analysis of how film genres like fantasy, noir, and westerns were reshaped by their left-leaning writers and actors. But these two strong elements, though the focus of the narrative, are regularly obscured by profuse side information and commentary that generates contentiousness rather than illumination. For example, most people are identified in terms of their relation to the cause: "left-leaning screenwriter (later semi-friendly witness) Melvin Levy"; "French Catholic radical critic Andre Bazin"; etc. Perceived opponents are dismissed; Catholicism is negatively conservative; and the Judeo-Christian tradition offers only "reaffirmation of the social order." Anachronistic modern-day lingo applied to historical figures (for example, the description of Depression-era screenwriter John Bright's wife, Josefina Fierro, as "the leading Chicana of the Left") compromises overall believability. Also aggravating are the authors' many questionable assertions presented as fact: that no later film of Katharine Hepburn's approached the accomplishments of left-wing-written Holiday and The Philadelphia Story (howabout The African Queen?); that Hollywood drove Clifford Odets's self-opinion so low that "giving names was only one more self-abasement" (an excuse?); that Warner Bros. required a "happy ending" for its films (what about White Heat?). Such comments don't diminish the authors' good intentions, just their trustworthiness. So crammed that it belies navigation and so committed to its cause that it erodes believability: a text that provides ample background but limited enjoyment. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Home
