Scare tactics

NoHo film festival celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Red Scare

by Sean Glennon

By the time 1954 came around, Americans had reached an odd state of ambivalence regarding the perceived communist threat. A majority were still fairly certain communism was the most evil force on the planet, but many had grown weary of the ongoing Congressional investigations into alleged communists and communist sympathizers at home.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunting counterparts on the House Un-American Activities Committee had been peeping through keyholes and listening at eaves throughout America -- exercising special vigilance in such high-profile areas as Hollywood -- for seven years, and their paranoia was beginning to make them look absurd even to a highly indoctrinated public.

Still too afraid and confused to speak out against the inquisition, America ultimately would allow the investigators to carry on for another three years. But in 1954, Americans -- or at least those who lived in or near major cities -- were provided a bit of Red Scare comic relief, courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the good old American tradition of bootlegging.

Late in the year copies of a CBC broadcast of a radio play entitled The Investigator began to circulate in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Chicago. Written by Reuben Ship, The Investigator was a satire on McCarthy and the HUAC, something that would have been impossible to produce in the States at the time. In fact, the program would never air in America. But it was heard by thousands of Americans, including more than a few in Hollywood and in Washington, by way of a bootleg recording that became popular after it was lauded in the New York Times.

---

For more on HUAC's effect on Hollywood see Hanging tough

---

The radio play places an unnamed investigator (who quite obviously is modeled on McCarthy) at the head of a committee probing subversive activities in Heaven. Killed in a plane crash at the start of the script, the Investigator leads the charge to "deport" from paradise such threats to the American way of afterlife as Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and Abraham Lincoln. Heaven's arts community also is ruined, through deportation, intimidation, and imposed blacklisting. The script is heavy-handed for sure, but it's funny, and it makes its point.

The play has lost little other than immediacy over the years. And, actually, it may not have lost even that much. Ed Asner, for one, thinks the satire has more than a little relevance to modern America. That opinion should come in handy on November 8 when the seven-time Emmy winner joins a cast of local actors in a reading of The Investigator at the Academy of Music in Northampton. Presented as part of the third annual Northampton Film Festival, which runs November 6 to 9th, the reading will serve as part of the festival's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the start of the HUAC probe into alleged communist infiltration of the film industry.

Sure, it may seem odd that one of the marquee events in a film festival is a live reading of a radio play, but in truth, the program makes perfect sense. An event dedicated to showcasing the art of filmmaking, the Northampton Film Festival is almost obliged to recognize the damage done to the form during the Red Scare. It will do so in part through film. The evening program that includes the production of The Investigator will begin with a screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary Hollywood on Trial, released in 1995, which should lend an educational element to the program as well as tie it directly to film. There will also be a poignant reminder of the real devastation wrought by anti-communist fervor in the '40s and '50s when Robert Meerpol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, provides an introduction to The Investigator.

But with an eye toward entertainment -- not an unworthy consideration in a film festival, after all -- organizers Howard Polonsky and Dee DeGeiso have made The Investigator the focal point of their HUAC anniversary commemoration.

Asner, one of three celebrities participating in this year's festival, is an unabashedly left-of-center political activist. He says remembering the Red Scare's effects on Hollywood is worthwhile mainly in that it provides a mechanism for recalling its overall effects on American culture and politics. Those effects, he says, have not dwindled to the extent many Americans think they have.

"You only need one or two blacklists a century to scare people enough to keep their mouths shut," Asner notes. Indeed, he claims, history, with its implied significance, can be far more powerful a force than current events. "People don't have to be aware that `this is what happens when you speak out,' because that lesson is already ingrained."

That McCarthy and members of the HUAC understood the most effective way to teach those lessons -- that is, by targeting people with high profiles and little political clout -- is evident in how America remembers the Red Scare, the most destructive results of which had nothing to do with Hollywood.

"Whole unions were destroyed with the blacklist," Asner says. "Teachers were laid off in droves. People all over the place lost their livelihoods and had their reputations destroyed. It struck a great many different walks of life, but what people noticed was Hollywood."

That's a point even Hollywood on Trial endeavors to make clear. Although the film's main focus is on the exile of such esteemed screenwriters as Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., Dalton Trumbo, and Bertolt Brecht, it casts the troubles of the Hollywood Ten and the rest of the "unfriendly 19" in the context of a longer, more insidious government campaign against labor unions -- looking at such events as the May 30, 1937 police assault on striking steel workers in Chicago, in which 10 were killed and hundreds wounded -- and political dissenters of all stripe (focusing on the execution of the Rosenbergs).

Written by Natick resident Arnie Reisman, who will introduce the film at the festival, Hollywood on Trial follows the lives of the Hollywood Red Scare's heroes, victims, and villains. (And, in the latter capacity, reminds viewers that Ronald Reagan's eight-year residency on Pennsylvania Avenue was not his only despotic reign. As president of the Screen Actors Guild during the blacklist period, Reagan helped destroy the careers of actors who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.)

Asner, also a former SAG president (though obviously of a decidedly different political orientation), hopes those who see Hollywood on Trial and The Investigator will not miss the point. After all, the HUAC and Sen. McCarthy were discredited long ago; barring the odd John Birch, no one needs to be reminded that the Red Scare was a mistake. But getting people to realize that there are modern equivalents aplenty to '50s-style anti-communist fervor will certainly prove a challenge.

"All that has to happen [to keep people in line] is that an enemy has to be created. In the '30s and '40s and '50s -- and even the '60s -- that enemy was easy: communism, the Russians," Asner says. "But now, especially since the fall of the `Evil Empire,' they've had to find something else. And even without a real enemy, Clinton has managed to find ways to curtail our civil liberties. Look, the 4th and 5th Amendments have been gutted."

That, of course, is an outgrowth of the war on drugs.

"You mean the failed war on drugs?" Asner asks rhetorically, noting that billions of taxpayers dollars have been spent and constitutional protections of illegal search and seizure and self-incrimination have been eroded with little or no measurable reduction in Americans' drug use. Among the drug war's few concrete results, he points out, is the fact that, "building prisons is the number one part of the economy in California right now."

That few in Hollywood are willing to discuss that topic, Asner says, is almost certainly a result of lessons learned during the Red Scare. There may be no HUAC hearings going on in 1997, but the fear that a deeply indoctrinated public might impose its own unwritten blacklist on drug-war heretics and other political dissidents runs deep.

On the other hand, Hollywood has done a fair job of challenging moralists, mainly in standing up to the religious right. As one of the Christian conservative movement's chief targets, however, the entertainment industry has had little choice in that regard. Besides, Asner says, challenging a minority, however vocal, is not all that risky. Nor does Asner see religious conservatism as a social force on which the arts can have much effect, viewing it instead as a phenomenon that will have to run its course.

"Every extreme of a religion gets its day, and they burn the people at the stake that they can," he says. And unlike the drug war, which a majority of Americans undoubtedly will continue to support, religious zealotry already is the subject of much opposition, a factor that is likely to keep the Christian right from taking over as it is unlikely to shut the movement down.

"They're doing quite well," Asner says. "They're making good money. They're prospering. No matter how many of their leaders are exposed as being unholy men, it doesn't seem to stop them."

And while that does not necessarily translate to political power, Asner says, the threat to freedom posed by the religious right makes the movement worth continued monitoring. "We're just going to have to be very careful with them," he says. "I don't think they're on the wane at all."

Politics, of course, are far from the whole of the Northampton Film Festival. The focus, shockingly enough, is on movies -- independently produced short films, features, and documentaries. Expanded this year from three to four days, the festival begins November 6 with a day-long program entitled "Viewing Women: A Celebration of Women in Film and Video."

In addition to screenings of such films as Wendy Bednarz's Aurora, which depicts a day in the life of a teenage girl dealing with her mother's Alzheimer's, Jane Campion's Peel, which follows an Australian family on a drive in the country, and Maureen Foley's well-received family drama Home Before Dark, the Thursday program will include a tribute to and Q&A session with Patricia Neal. The star of such films as Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Fountainhead, Neal has twice been nominated for an Oscar; she won the award for her work in Hud.

Outside of Thursday and Saturday evenings' programs, the festival does not play on themes, simply presenting an assortment of some 50 mostly independent films at locations throughout downtown Northampton and on the Smith College campus.

The festival also includes a screening of Buster Keaton's silent film Steamboat Bill Jr. with live musical accompaniment by Boston's Alloy Orchestra. Alloy, which participated in last year's NoHo film fest, creates and performs original scores to accompany classic silent films. The experience -- fresh, very much up-to-date music melding perfectly with the action of an old movie -- is remarkable. And it's directly related to film. Who woulda thought? It figures.

Northampton Film Festival Schedule