'Un-American' Hollywood

Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era

Edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield

Rutgers University Press

The concept of “un-Americanism,” so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today’s political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated.

“Un-American” Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry.

Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including The Robe, Christ in Concrete, The House I Live In, The Lawless, The Naked City, The Prowler, Body and Soul, and FTA.

This collection of essays represents the work of a new generation of historians who have made discoveries in the study of films from the Blacklist era which demand our attention. John Belton, author of American Cinema/American Culture

This is a first rate anthology giving us a fresh perspective on Hollywood and television during the blacklist era and its legacy during the Vietnam years. Reading this book from cover to cover is a valuable experience not just of discovery and knowing, but of remembering. Film Quarterly

Frank Krutnik teaches film at Sussex University. Steve Neale is a professor of film studies at Exeter University. Brian Neve is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Bath. Peter Stanfield is a reader in film studies at the University of Kent.

Are you now or have you ever been a Christian? the strange history of The robe as political allegory / Jeff Smith
Un-American : Dmytryk, Rossellini, and Christ in concrete / Erica Sheen
"A living part of the class struggle" : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood left / Frank Krutnik
A monarch for the millions : Jewish filmmakers, social commentary, and the postwar cycle of boxing films / Peter Stanfield
The violent poetry of the times : the politics of history in Daniel Mainwaring and Joseph Losey's The lawless / Doug Dibbern
Dark passages : jazz and civil liberty in the postwar crime film / Sean McCann
Documentary realism and the postwar left / Will Straw
Cloaked in compromise : Jules Dassin's "naked" city / Rebecca Prime
The progressive producer in the studio system : Adrian Scott at RKO, 1943-1947 / Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw
The house I live in : Albert Maltz and the fight against anti-Semitism / Art Simon
Red Hollywood in transition : the case of Robert Rossen / Brian Neve
Swashbuckling, sapphire, and salt : un-American contributions to TV costume adventure series in the 1950s / Steve Neale
Hollywood, the new left, and FTA / Mark Shiel
Red Hollywood / Thom Anderson

Related Titles