I’m looking for a publisher. Next year we are holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival. I’ve been writing a series of essays on the festival and the history of anti-Communist films for Hot Air and other places. I’m developing the essays into a small, 25,000-word manuscript – about the same length as Animal Farm by George Orwell. I’m calling it Hellbrew of Hate: A History of Anti-Communist Film.
I’m making the call for the right publisher publicly because it’s a way to dramatically cut down on the time you usually have to spend hunting down the right place to publish your book. That process can be endless and frustrating. The book idea, like the idea for the film festival, is a great one, but even with a great idea, you sometimes have to spend days on end trying to get to the right editor or publisher. We also want to give people who have been generously donating to the festival something they can hold in their hands.
The book’s title, Hellbrew of Hate, comes from 1951’s I Was a Communist for the FBI. In the film, an FBI agent disrupts a Marxist plan that is “a hellbrew of hate,” featuring urban riots intended to “divide and conquer,” by pitting the races against each other to make profits off the court cases. (One character in the film is a high school teacher who one declares, “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?”) Watching these great films, I realized something: many films of the postwar era are anticommunist films, and some of them are very good. Trial, I Married a Communist, Night People – these are films with quality actors, powerful cinematography, and enthralling, adult scripts. Many are strikingly relevant.
In his book The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s, Ohio University professor Robert Miklitsch argues that some of the criticism of anti-communist films is not about quality, but politics. Films like I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951), The Whip Hand (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), and Walk East on Beacon! (1952) “tended to be made ‘on the cheap,’ [and] have been derogated by critics for their aesthetic quality. Since they appeared to promote a right-wing agenda unlike left, progressive pre-1948 noir, they have also been excoriated for their politics. In a word, these anticommunist films are—to invoke Daniel Leab’s verdict on I Married a Communist— ‘awful.’” Miklitsch notes that critic Arthur Lev was quite savage towards I Married a Communist. Miklitsch posits this: “Question: is it possible that Lev’s categorical judgment of I Married a Communist is an alibi for his real criticism—that the film is visually ‘undistinguished’ because it is politically reprehensible?”
Of course it is. Many of these great pro-freedom films were blacklisted because they argued against “the new world coming” of communism. It’s still going on. Look how hard the media has been promoting Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, about a leftist “revolutionary” who wages a guerrilla war against conservatives. The film will lose $100 million, but don’t tell Hollywood that.
The best book about communism in Hollywood is still Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters—Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, by Allan H. Riskind. Riskind reveals how many communists were in Hollywood in the postwar years. One of them was director Abraham Polonsky, who once described a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) this way: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.”
In Hellbrew of Hate, the focus is one the filmmakers who made pro-America, anti-communist films. Filmmakers and films that have been forgotten but don’t deserve to be. Films that can inoculate future generations against the evils of communism. We want to provide students with a book celebrating these films and festival attendees with a souvenir. I also know the book will sell. There’s no doubt in my mind that a publisher is reading these words who agrees.
Editor’s note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination.
Help us maintain that fight! Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership!
