"Mission to Moscow,"directed by Michael Curtiz. Warner Brothers, 1943, 123 minutes.

"Red Star Over Hollywood," by Ronald and Allis Radosh. Encounter Books, 2005, 309 pages.

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Hammer, Sickle, Action!

by Bruce Ramsey

Propaganda in the movies will always be with us. The movies I saw as a boy contained a fair amount of it: I still enjoy "The Longest Day" (1962), but wince at the mini-speeches. And consider some of the movies made during World War II: even "Casablanca" (1942), which is canonized as a classic about old lovers, ends with the conversion of a cynic who sacrifices his private love for the war against Hitler.

It is difficult to find a copy of the propaganda movie "Mission to Moscow" (1943), and for good reason. It deals with Soviet history from 1936 to 1939, which few people care about now, and it falsifies the history to boot. Warner Brothers regretted making the picture; that it was made at all is a telling comment on the political atmosphere in 1943, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was our ally. "Mission to Moscow" is the most pro-Soviet movie ever produced by Hollywood.

This lying docudrama is based on the book of the same name by Joseph Davies. President Franklin Roosevelt named Davies, a liberal businessman, as ambassador to the USSR from 1936 to 1938. Davies portrays himself as a straight shooter, untainted by the sophistries of diplomats, and paints a portrait of the USSR as a wonderful country to have as an ally. The book hit the market at the right moment — three weeks after Pearl Harbor — and became a bestseller.

Jack Warner later testified that he had agreed to make it into a movie as part of the war effort. The screenwriter was Howard Koch, a leftist who had co-written "Casablanca." The "technical adviser" — actually political adviser — was Jay Leyda, a communist who had made a political pilgrimage to Soviet Russia. But it's not as if they twisted Davies' message. The former ambassador had unusual control over the script, and appears at the beginning of the movie to endorse it.

The movie focuses on pushing four big lies: that living conditions in the Soviet Union were good; that the show trials of 1936–38 were fair and just; that Britain and France forced Stalin to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler; and that Stalin was a special friend of the United States.

In "Mission to Moscow," everything about the Soviet Union is good. A cosmetics store in Moscow is compared to Fifth Avenue in New York. The first Soviet woman we see is a smiling train engineer. Foreign diplomats, playing billiards in Moscow, pooh-pooh the Five-Year Plan — "big plan, small fulfillment," says one — but Davies tours smelters, dams, and collective farms and sees the wondrous accomplishments of totalitarianism for himself. Everything in Soviet Russia is wonderful: its food is delicious, its soldiers tough, and its women capable.

Davies meets an American engineer who tells him that the Soviets have done great things. There is only one problem: a rash of sabotage. The film illustrates this problem by showing a magnesium plant in flames, its manager saying the fire was set deliberately. Needless to say, the fact that Davies first learns about the sabotage from an American soldier gives the charge credibility.

By that time, Stalin's government had held highly publicized, but faked, campaigns against the saboteurs, or "wreckers." The only character in the movie who mentions that the campaigns are faked is the Japanese ambassador. The message is that to doubt the Soviet government is to side with the Axis.

The Soviet secret police follow Davies' car openly, with no more skill than small-town American cops. His response is to call to them in jocular fashion: "Don't you GPUs get any sleep?" He also takes it lightly when the Italians find a microphone in their embassy, and refuses to allow a search in the U.S. embassy, saying, "Let them listen. Then we'll be friends that much faster." By the time the GPU arrests old Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, the audience has been conditioned to view the secret police just as Russian cops.

Bukharin and Radek are put on trial. They confess: they are tools of a plot by Leon Trotsky to seize power. "Our plan" says Bukharin, "was to seize the Kremlin, financed by the fascist governments."

Was there pressure to confess? "None whatsoever," Bukharin says. Davies believes it, and the movie audience is urged to believe it, too.

After the trial, Davies attends the 1938 May Day parade in Red Square. He takes satisfaction in the show of Soviet military power. "At least one European nation with no aggressive intentions is ready for whatever comes," he says. "And thank God for it."

No aggressive intentions? Why, then, in August 1939 did Stalin ally his country with Hitler? Why in September 1939 did the USSR annex the eastern third of Poland? Why in November 1939 did it attack Finland demanding territory? Why in 1940 did it annex Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the eastern reaches of Romania? These things and more had happened by the time "Mission to Moscow" was filmed.

In the movie, Davies has an interview with Stalin, who says, "We feel more friendly to the government of the United States than any other nation." Stalin intimates that he would like to ally with the West against Germany, but that "reactionary elements in England" won't cooperate. "We may be forced to protect ourselves in another way," he says.

On his way home, Davies stops in Britain to visit Winston Churchill, who is not yet prime minister. He tells Churchill he is fearful that the democracies will drive Stalin into Hitler's arms, leaving no doubt that the Hitler-Stalin pact is Britain's fault.

And the invasion of Finland? The Soviets needed some strategic pieces of territory to defend against Hitler, and the Finns refused to swap some other land for it. The Soviets had to take it in order to defend themselves.

About the Baltic states and Romania, not a single word.

"Mission to Moscow" ends by asking the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" A voice answers, authoritatively: "Yes, you are." A chorus sings, "You are your brother's keeper; now and forever you are."

Was there a substantial communist influence in Hollywood? Yes. In "Mission to Moscow," they showed their colors. "Song of Russia" (1943) was another wartime suck-up to the Soviets, as Ayn Rand testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC^*) in 1947. So was "The North Star" (1943), a movie about Ukrainian partisans written by Lillian Hellman, the leftist writer who admitted being a party member from 1938 to 1940, and was later glorified by Jane Fonda in the movie "Julia" (1977).

Ronald and Allis Radosh's new book "Red Star Over Hollywood" chronicles the Hollywood Reds. It has an entire chapter on "Mission to Moscow." It also lists other movies with pro-communist portrayals: "Hangmen Also Die" (1943), written by Bertolt Brecht and John Wexley; "Action in the North Atlantic" (1943), written by John Howard Lawson; and "Cloak and Dagger" (1946), written by Ring Lardner Jr. and Alvah Bessie. Lardner, Bessie and Lawson had all been Communist Party members and would later be among the Hollywood Ten, who were jailed for contempt of Congress when they refused to answer questions about Party membership. Brecht, hauled in front of HUAC at the same time as the Ten, claimed to be a mere anti-fascist, but soon after moved to East Germany.

Besides these, communists and fellow travelers wrote screenplays for a number of movies — "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," "Joe Smith, American," "Watch on the Rhine," "Sahara," "The Great Dictator" and others — that are not described in the Radosh book as propaganda films. "Red Star Over Hollywood" focuses more on the Hollywood communists' allegiances than their work, leaving the authors open to the criticism, "So what? So a handful of movies were pro-Soviet during the time when the USSR was our ally."

The Radoshes are more interested in personal political connections. Ronald Radosh was a Red-diaper baby who went to communist schools and summer camps, grew up to become an academic who opposed the Vietnam War, and went on pilgrimages to Cuba and Nicaragua. He began turning rightward in the late 1970s, when his investigation of the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convinced him that Julius was, in fact, a Soviet spy. He made the case in "The Rosenberg File" (1983). The reaction to his book from the Left — that the facts didn't matter, that people had to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, whether they were or not — moved him further rightward, until a decade or so later he had abandoned the Left altogether. He chronicled his evolving political perspectives in "Commies" (2001).

The most fascinating part of "Red Star Over Hollywood" is its description of the fall of the Hollywood Reds. Though the HUAC finished them off, the Radoshes show that the Reds were already in deep trouble. The reason was geopolitical. From 1941 to 1945, Stalin was our ally against Hitler, and it was okay to praise Stalin and Soviet Russia. By supporting President Roosevelt and the war effort, the Communists put themselves on the side of liberals and the patriotic new Communist Party line that Harry Truman was encouraging fascism and war against the innocent Soviet Union.

Political groups in which liberals and communists coexisted began to break apart. In June 1946, actress Olivia de Havilland was supposed to deliver a speech for one such group at a rally in Seattle. She was given a text written by communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, later one of the Hollywood Ten. The speech condemned "the drive of certain interests toward a war against the Soviet Union." She refused to give it; instead she gave her own speech, telling liberals they had to distance themselves from Moscow.

The battle was also fought in the labor movement, between anti-communist and pro-communist unions. In 1946 there was a jurisdictional battle for Hollywood backlot employees between the AFL and CIO unions. The anti-communist AFL union narrowly won. Later that year there was another fight, which the anti-communists won decisively. This was the fight in which Robert Montgomery and Ronald Reagan persuaded members of the Screen Actors Guild to cross the pro-communist union's picket lines. More than anything else, the Radoshes write, losing these union battles brought "the golden era of the Hollywood Communists . . . to an end."

A battle was also fought inside the Communist Party over politics and art. The Party's new line in 1945 put more pressure on working screenwriters. Some buckled under; the book's saddest story is of the artistic rebellion of Albert Maltz, who wrote an article for The New Masses objecting to the subordination of art to politics. The Radoshes say the Party organized a "struggle session" against him, resulting in his "abject self-abasement." Other followers left rather than abase themselves. One was Robert Rossen, writer, producer and director of "All the King's Men" (1949). After his picture appeared, the Party hacks called him to heel because his movie, based on the life of Huey Long, could be interpreted as an attack on the dictatorship of Stalin. Rossen stood up and said, "Stick the whole Party up your ass," walked out, and never came back. In 1953, he named 50 names to HUAC.

HUAC played a role by subpoenaing the leftist writers and producers known as the Hollywood Ten, but it didn't do so until 1947, when, the Radoshes write, "the Communists' position in Hollywood was precarious." By then, Eastern Europe was becoming Communist. In 1948, the Soviets would blockade Berlin, America would be riveted by the Hiss-Chambers spy case, and former Vice President Henry Wallace, running for president on a friends-with-Russia platform, would get only 2 percent of the vote. In 1949 China would fall to Mao Zedong; in 1950 America would be at war with Reds in Korea. No one in Hollywood was going to make more movies like "Song of Russia" or "Mission to Moscow."

The Ten, all writers and directors, were sent to prison for short terms — not for being Communists or pro-communist, but for contempt of Congress. They had refused to answer questions about their Party membership. In fact, they had been so snotty that they alienated their liberal supporters, who had organized a group to defend their right not to be questioned. Humphrey Bogart, the most prominent member of this group, disavowed the Ten afterward. The Ten embarrassed the studios, which blacklisted them and other Reds.

What of the blacklist?

"It is right to condemn the blacklist," the Radoshes write. "It was wrong to deprive artists of their livelihood because of their political views." I'm not so sure about that; a private blacklist is private business, and people who hate communism may not want to patronize communists. At that moment in history, I would have been happy to boycott Reds. A Dalton Trumbo, of course, could still get work under an assumed name, because he was highly skilled. A John Howard Lawson, party-line enforcer and second-rate writer, would be ruined. Well, too bad.

Congress should have kept out of it; as Ronald Reagan said to HUAC, the best way for opponents to combat communists was to "expose their lies when we came across them." Reagan opposed outlawing the Communist Party. "As a citizen," he said, "I would hate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology." But there was political hay to be harvested by the resurgent Republicans, and they did it. By doing so, they turned the Reds into victims. The story that was created is now culturally dominant: that in the 1940s heroic leftists were run out of Hollywood by a right-wing witch hunt.

There is some truth in that: the Reds were run out of Hollywood, and the right wing did give them the final kick. But not the only kick. And the Hollywood Reds were not witches, or any other sort of mythical being. They were quite real.

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*

Alert readers will note that the acronym varies from the actual initials. Defenders of the Committee claim that this is because its critics on the Left preferred that the general public think of the committee as the "House Un-American Activities Committee" or even as the "House Un-American Committee." Many such defenders of the committee used the HCUA acronym, but the HUAC acronym was more often used by the press, and remains more widely used to this day.

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