These movies aren’t bad. In fact, many of them are great.
This was the thought I had in 2024, when I attended the American Film Institute’s series “Fabulous 50s.” The series highlighted American movies from the 1950s. There were classics screened: Ben-Hur. Carmen Jones, A Streetcar Named Desire. The Night of the Hunter, Singin’ in the Rain, and my favorite, Sweet Smell of Success.
Also screened were some of the anti-communist movies of the Eisenhower era. The liberal audience at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center outside D.C. chuckled at what they saw as corny propaganda from the McCarthy era. Starting in the 1960s and the rise of the New Left, it became sport for cool people to mock movies like I Was a Communist for the FBI, I Married a Communist, or My Son John. The excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy had made Red-hunting suspect, even shameful. Yet McCarthy was more often right than wrong. There were communists in the government – and in Hollywood – who wanted to destroy America. Just like in 2026.
In 2026, with communists winning elections, these films from the 1950s seem prescient – and deadly serious rather than goofy. Some will be shown at our upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival.
In I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent infiltrates the communist party in Pittsburgh. He learned that their plan is “a hellbrew of hate” – urban riots intended to “divide and conquer” by pitting the races against each other and causing so much mayhem that the Left can use Stalin to establish order – and make huge profits off the court cases. Another character in the film is a high school teacher – “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” It’s still true today.
Then there is the great 1955 movie Trial. Trial follows a new attorney named David Blake, played by Glenn Ford, who is hired to help represent Angel Chavez, a Hispanic 17-year-old accused of killing a white girl. Chavez is innocent, but it soon becomes clear that the communists want Chavez purely as a money-making martyr. Blake tries to save Angel’s life while attorney Barney Castle, an actual hard-core communist, plans to let the boy hang so he can use his death as a fundraising tool. Adopted by Don M. Mankiewicz from his prize-winning novel, Trial is, in the words of critic Clyde Gilmour, “a hard-hitting realistic drama which shows with disturbing clarity how political racketeers skilled in the black arts of showmanship can flourish under the protection of the very laws they despise.” Minneapolis, anyone?
Perhaps the most fascinating film is My Son John. Starring Helen Hayes and Van Heflin, it tells the story of an all-American family discovering that their son, who works in Washington, is in fact a communist spy. It is a methodical film without a lot of action scenes, but it has tense emotional power. When John the communist tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son,” it exposes the leftist goal of replacing the family with the state. In 1998, the Chicago Reader stunned its readers when critic Jonathan Rosenbaum put it on his list of the 100 Best Movies of the 20th Century. Rosenbaum cited this review by fellow critic Dave Kehr:
An appalling masterpiece. Resist the temptation to laugh at the film’s violent anticommunism and try to see it as the audiences of 1952 did, and you’ll experience the most wrenching right-wing film ever made. The film’s propaganda is all the more powerful because director Leo McCarey refuses to acknowledge any intellectual, ideological intent: his argument is wholly emotional, and it is a powerful one. Robert Walker, fresh from Strangers on a Train, is a government worker who signs with the reds in oedipal revolt against his domineering, patriotic father (Dean Jagger); Helen Hayes is the mother who must choose between son and country.
I Married a Communist has a title that elicits chuckles, but the story of a man trying to leave his party dramatizes the brutality with which communists have always operated. When asked why he left the party. Whittaker Chambers, one of the great anti-communists of the 20th Century, replied, “I heard the screams.” Murder, extortion, torture, lies – there was no evil beyond the bringers of a “bright new tomorrow.”
The AFI series I attended was curated by Foster Hirsch, a film historian and the author of the book Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties. “Artistic quality cannot be measured solely in terms of how any single film satisfies or disappoints politically engaged viewers,” Hirsch writes. He calls My Son John, “an overwrought piece of Christian propaganda infused with uber-patriotic paranoia,” but also “a unique period piece that expresses with deeper conviction than any other anticommunist film of the time the fear and loathing with which communism was widely regarded.”
As recent events have proven, those fears were well-founded.
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