Red Star Over Hollywood

Until now, Hollywood's political history has been dominated by a steady stream of films and memoirs decrying the "nightmare" of the Red Scare. But in "Red Star over Hollywood, Ronald and Allis Radosh show that the real drama of that era lay in the large number of movie stars who joined the Communist Party and made it the focus of their political and social lives, and in the party's impact on filmmaking. Using material from the papers of Dalton Trumbo, Dore Schary, Melvyn Douglas and other Hollywood insiders, the authors trace the growth of the Communist Party from the 1920s, when stars like Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx toured the Soviet Union and came back converted, through the 1930s and the war years, when the party achieved critical mass in Hollywood. The Radoshes' most controversial discovery is that during the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while others were lionizing them as blameless victims of a vicious blacklist, the Hollywood Reds themselves were beset by doubts and disagreements about their disloyalty to America and their treatment by the Communist Party. One case study, for example, reveals how actor John Garfield, still praised by former comrades as a victim of HUAC's "witch-hunt," had actually come to see the Communists as a sinister force in Hollywood and decided to testify against them shortly before his death. "Red Star over Hollywood opens up the cells and discussion groups that defined Hollywood radicalism. Ronald and Allis Radosh also bring their story into the present, describing how the men and women who agitated for communism a half-century ago created, a legacy used by Jane Fonda and others in the Hollywood Left of the 1960s,and by figures such as Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn in the turbulent filmland politics of today.

Ronald Radosh is adjunct Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.