Cinematic Cold War

The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds

Tony Shaw, Denise J. Youngblood

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780700620616
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The Cold War was as much a battle of ideas as a series of military and diplomatic confrontations, and movies were a prime battleground for this cultural combat. As Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood show, Hollywood sought to export American ideals in movies like Rambo, and the Soviet film industry fought back by showcasing Communist ideals in a positive light, primarily for their own citizens. The two camps traded cinematic blows for more than four decades.The first book-length comparative survey of cinema's vital role in disseminating Cold War ideologies, Shaw and Youngblood's study focuses on ten films—five American and five Soviet—that in both obvious and subtle ways provided a crucial outlet for the global "debate" between democratic and communist ideologies. For each nation, the authors outline industry leaders, structure, audiences, politics, and international reach and explore the varied relationships linking each film industry to its respective government. They then present five comparative case studies, each pairing an American with a Soviet film: Man on a Tightrope with The Meeting on the Elbe; Roman Holiday with Spring on Zarechnaya Street; Fail-Safe with Nine Days in One Year; Bananas with Officers; Rambo: First Blood Part II with Incident at Map Grid 36-80. Shaw breathes new life into familiar American films by Elia Kazan and Woody Allen, while Youngblood helps readers comprehend Soviet films most have never seen. Collectively, their commentaries track the Cold War in its entirety—from its formative phase through periods of thaw and self-doubt to the resurgence of mutual animosity during the Reagan years—and enable readers to identify competing core propaganda themes such as decadence versus morality, technology versus humanity, and freedom versus authority. As the authors show, such themes blurred notions regarding "propaganda" and "entertainment, " terms that were often interchangeable and mutually reinforcing during the Cold War. Featuring engaging commentary and evocative images from the films discussed, Cinematic Cold War offers a shrewd analysis of how the silver screen functioned on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As such it should have great appeal for anyone interested in the Cold War or the cinematic arts.

PART ONE

Industry, State, and Cold War Contours

Introduction

The Cold War forged the longest and most sophisticated cinematic conflict in history. The American and Soviet film industries traded blows not over a period of six years—merely the length of the Second World War¹—but over more than four decades. This they did by competing for hearts and minds on the international stage as well as at home. To catalogue each and every feature film, documentary, and newsreel that contributed to this gargantuan battle of images is well nigh impossible. The USSR, for its part, saved copies of most of its films (including the banned ones). And while many American films from the era have not survived, in some cases without even a record to prove their existence, the number of those extant today is absolutely daunting.

Nevertheless, in Part 1 we construct a clear outline of how the American and Soviet film industries represented the Cold War from beginning to end. By tracing the main contours of the industries’ treatment of the Cold War between 1945 and 1990, we can also identify both the key phases of their coverage and the core propaganda themes that emerge from thousands of hours of screen output. This is vital if we are to understand fully the case studies that lie ahead in our book. By delineating the industries’ Cold War trajectories at this stage, we can also flag the chief similarities in and differences between their coverage, pinpointing, for instance, when negative and positive propaganda came to the fore and showing how both industries took direct and indirect approaches toward the conflict.

Part 1 also provides the reader with an overview of the political and economic context in which filmmaking took place in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This includes the informal versus formal modes of censorship, how the film industries were owned and operated, and the relationship between cinema and the state. On the face of it, the American and Soviet film industries were two quite different animals during the Cold War. Whereas the former was known to be highly politicized and to operate as part of a tightly structured government propaganda machine, many people, especially in the West, regarded Hollywood as an apolitical “dream factory” that focused entirely on making money via escapist entertainment. The reality, as we show in the next two chapters, was somewhat different. Throughout the conflict both industries interacted with their state’s information apparatus in various, often subtle ways, sometimes openly and on other occasions covertly. As a result, to call one industry’s output “propaganda” and the other’s “entertainment” is highly misleading. As we shall see, the two terms were often interchangeable during the Cold War. Indeed, Cold War cinema might be said to have blurred them in unprecedented fashion.

The final aim of Part 1 is to establish for whom Cold War films were made and to determine whether their audiences changed as the conflict progressed. Over the course of the Cold War, both Soviet and American cinema suffered a marked decline in the size of their domestic audience, due not least to competition from television.² It is important to take note of this, as well as to appreciate why, despite the drop in cinema attendance, film continued to play an important role in the cultural Cold War. One key difference, however, is Hollywood’s greater international reach compared with Soviet film, a fact that can be tied predominantly to the broader appeal of American movies. This meant that whereas Moscow concentrated reluctantly on using film mainly for domestic and bloc purposes during the Cold War, Washington was able to place a stronger emphasis on wooing neutrals and subverting the enemy’s sphere of influence. Washington’s wider parameters indicate how much better equipped the American film industry was to fight a long, drawn-out propaganda conflict compared with its Soviet rival. This, in turn, gives us a clue as to which of the two cinemas would prove to be the more dominant and why, therefore, we should start by looking at Hollywood.

Chapter One

American Cinema and the Cold War

Pictures give an idea of America which is difficult to portray in any other way, and the reason, the main reason, we think, is because our pictures are not obvious propaganda.

Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, June 1953¹

For over a century now, America’s film executives have habitually prided themselves on creating harmless, feel-good, apolitical entertainment. We give the people what they want, they say: the chance to laugh, cry, be thrilled, and, above all, to escape. “If you want to send a message, call Western Union,” mogul Sam Goldwyn famously told one of his high-minded producers in the 1930s. Hollywood is a business, in other words, whose purpose is to make a profit, not propaganda.²

The truth is that American film—just like the nation’s theater, radio, newspapers, and television—has always been political in one way or another. In particular, the big screen has traditionally been hostile to what it loosely defines as extremism. This helps account for the dozen or so explicitly anticommunist films that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Made during the first Red Scare of 1918–1920, these silent movies were no less hysterical than the classic Hollywood Red-baiters of the McCarthy era. Bristling with titles like Dangerous Hours (Fred Niblo, 1920) and Starvation (George Zimmer, 1920), they depicted Bolsheviks as the bringers of murder, rape, chaos, and destruction.³

Communists continued to be portrayed negatively on the American screen intermittently throughout the 1920s and 1930s, though in a more gentle and thus arguably more effective fashion politically. In comedies like Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932) they came across as wholly lacking in humor or style. In melodramas like Little Man, What Now? (Frank Borsage, 1934), they were exposed as selfish phonies unconcerned with the genuine poverty many Americans were experiencing during the Great Depression. In Ernst Lubitsch’s big-budget and seminal romantic satire Ninotchka (1939), audiences watched Greta Garbo’s female Soviet commissar defect after falling in love with the material wonders of Western capitalism.⁴

The American government played no direct part in the making of these early “Cool War” movies. It had no need to, for Hollywood shared Washington’s ideological worldview. “Hollywood”—the place and the way of doing business—came into being in the 1920s, when the geographically scattered array of small and medium-sized producers, distributors, and exhibitors that had characterized the American filmmaking industry since the early 1900s was supplanted by an increasingly oligarchic, vertically integrated studio system with production centered in Los Angeles and business offices in New York. By the end of the 1920s, eight major studios controlled over 90 percent of the films made and distributed in the United States. The executives who ran MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, RKO, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists were hostile to communism, owing to political conviction and economic self-interest, not because they felt beholden to officialdom. Men like Louis B. Mayer at MGM and Joseph Schenck at Twentieth Century-Fox instinctively equated patriotism with capitalism. Throughout this period and beyond, the major studios’ films consistently reinforced the reigning cultural ethos and political-economic order in the United States, abounding with what many in the industry saw as the quintessentially American ideals of democracy, social mobility, capitalist consumption, justice, and cross-class harmony.⁵

By the time of the Second World War, cinema had become the prime entertainment medium in the United States and across large parts of the world. Talkies had taken over from silent movies, and cinema admission figures in the United States had reached almost 100 percent of the population. During the war, American filmmakers, like their Soviet counterparts, played an enthusiastic, imaginative, and vital role in the struggle against fascism. In accordance with guidance from one of the government’s propaganda arms, the Office of War Information (OWI), a small number of movies sought to transform the Soviet Union from an erstwhile enemy into a valuable wartime partner. These films—Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943), Tender Comrade (Edward Dmytryk, 1943), The North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943), Song of Russia (Gregory Ratoff, 1944)—would come back to haunt the studios when the Cold War proper started in the late 1940s, providing spurious evidence that Hollywood was infested with communists. Meanwhile, the links established between the film community and the OWI during the Second World War would help facilitate cooperation between Hollywood and the government once the renewed but now more pressing propaganda battle with Soviet communism got under way.⁶

The following overview of Hollywood’s Cold War output divides the years 1947 to 1990 into five periods: 1947–1953 (dominated by hard-line negative propaganda); 1953–1962 (soft-core, positive propaganda mixed with the beginnings of negotiated dissent); 1962–1980 (pro-détente propaganda); 1980–86 (New Right propaganda); 1986–1990 (a call for peace). None of these dates is definitive, and there is scope for considerable overlap between some of the sections. More space is allotted to the 1940s and 1950s due to film’s role in the development of America’s early Cold War consensus and because this period also marked the high point of the state’s involvement in Cold War filmmaking.

Declaring War, 1947–1953

Having challenged and ridiculed communists (usually as pathetic individuals) for the better part of three decades, Hollywood went several steps further in the late 1940s by declaring full-scale war on international communism. As would be the case for the next forty years or so, Hollywood followed rather than led political and public opinion during this era. Its first full-fledged Cold War movie, for instance, The Iron Curtain, a fact-based exposé of Soviet espionage in postwar Canada directed by William Wellman for Twentieth Century-Fox, appeared in May 1948, fourteen months after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine.⁷ Nevertheless, once it got into its Cold War stride, the American film industry pretty much hit Soviet communism with all it had. Many historians have tended to belittle this campaign by suggesting it amounted to little more than a cycle of crudely made box office flops.⁸ Evidence indicates otherwise.

Hollywood came under tremendous pressure to establish its anticommunist credentials once U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations froze soon after the defeat of fascism in 1945. The chief turning point came in October 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) arrived in Hollywood to root out those who had turned the American film industry into, as its chairman J. Parnell Thomas put it, a “Red propaganda center.” HUAC failed, both in 1947 and again in the early 1950s, to uncover any hard proof of communist infiltration or Marxism on celluloid. Nevertheless, the blacklisting of real or suspected communists was introduced, spreading like a tapeworm throughout the industry into the 1960s. The climate of fear induced by the blacklist put an immediate end to the hopes of some in the film industry during the Second ...