Examines the role of American filmmakers in the ideological struggle against communism

From the late 1940s until the early 1990s, the Cold War was perhaps the most critical and defining aspect of American culture, influencing television, music, and movies, among other forms of popular entertainment. Films in particular were at the center of the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. Throughout this period, the Cold War influenced what movies got produced, how such movies were made, and how audiences understood the films they watched. In the post–Cold War era, some genres of film suffered from the shift in our national narratives, while others were quickly reimagined for an audience with different political and social fears. In Hollywood and the End of the Cold War: Signs of Cinematic Change, Bryn Upton compares films from the late Cold War era with movies of similar themes from the post–Cold War era. In this volume, Upton pays particular attention to shifts in narrative that reflect changes in American culture, attitudes, and ideas. In exploring how the absence of the Cold War has changed the way we understand and interpret film, this volume seeks to answer several key questions such as: Has the end of the Cold War altered how we tell our stories? Has it changed how we perceive ourselves? In what ways has our popular culture been affected by the absence of this once dominant presence? With its focus on themes that are central to the concerns of many historians—including civil religion, social fracture, and the culture wars—Hollywood and the End of the Cold War will serve as a useful tool for those seeking to integrate film into the classroom, as well as for film scholars exploring representations of sociopolitical change on screen.

Contributions by Thomas J. Cobb, Donna A. Gessell, Helena Goscilo, Cyndy Hendershot, Christian Jimenez, David LaRocca, Lori Maguire, Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad, Ian Scott, Vesta Silva, Lucian Tion, Dan Ward, and Jon Wiebel In recent years, Hollywood cinema has forwarded a growing number of images of the Cold War and entertained a return to memories of conflicts between the USSR and the US, Russians and Americans, and communism and capitalism. Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia explores the reasons for this sudden reestablished interest in the Cold War. Essayists examine such films as Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Hail, Caesar!, David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, and Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow, among others, as well as such television shows as Comrade Detective and The Americans. Contributors to this collection interrogate the revival of the Cold War movie genre from multiple angles and examine the issues of patriotism, national identity, otherness, gender, and corruption. They consider cinematic aesthetics and the ethics of these representations. They reveal how Cold War imagery shapes audiences’ understanding of the period in general and of the relationship between the US and Russia in particular. The authors complicate traditional definitions of the Cold War film and invite readers to discover a new phase in the Cold War movie genre: Cold War II.

The first book-length survey of cinema's vital role in the Cold War cultural combat between the U.S. and the USSR. Focuses on 10 films--five American and five Soviet, both iconic and lesser-known works--showing that cinema provided a crucial outlet for the global "debate" between democratic and communist ideologies.

Between 1942 and 1958, J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a sweeping and sustained investigation of the motion picture industry to expose Hollywood's alleged subversion of "the American Way" through its depiction of social problems, class differences, and alternative political ideologies. FBI informants (their names still redacted today) reported to Hoover's G-men on screenplays and screenings of such films as Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), noting that "this picture deliberately maligned the upper class attempting to show that people who had money were mean and despicable characters." The FBI's anxiety over this film was not unique; it extended to a wide range of popular and critical successes, including The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Crossfire (1947) and On the Waterfront (1954). In J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies, John Sbardellati provides a new consideration of Hollywood's history and the post-World War II Red Scare. In addition to governmental intrusion into the creative process, he details the efforts of left-wing filmmakers to use the medium to bring social problems to light and the campaigns of their colleagues on the political right, through such organizations as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, to prevent dissemination of "un-American" ideas and beliefs. Sbardellati argues that the attack on Hollywood drew its motivation from a sincerely held fear that film content endangered national security by fostering a culture that would be at best apathetic to the Cold War struggle at best, or, at its worst, conducive to communism at home. Those who took part in Hollywood's Cold War struggle, whether on the left or right, shared one common trait: a belief that the movies could serve as engines for social change. This strongly held assumption explains why the stakes were so high and, ultimately, why Hollywood became one of the most important ideological battlegrounds of the Cold War.

"The story of the Cold War era Lookout Mountain Laboratory, or the 1352nd Photographic Group of the United States Air Force, which employed hundreds of Hollywood studio veterans. Engages with issues of the Cold War state and visual culture"--

The Cold War on Film illustrates how to use film as a teaching tool. It stands on its own as an account of both the war and the major films that have depicted it. Memories of the Cold War have often been shaped by the popular films that depict it—for example, The Manchurian Candidate, The Hunt for Red October, and Charlie Wilson's War, among others. The Cold War on Film examines how the Cold War has been portrayed through a selection of 10 iconic films that represent it through dramatization and storytelling, as opposed to through documentary footage. The book includes an introduction to the war's history and a timeline of events. Each of the 10 chapters that follow focuses on a specific Cold War film. Chapters offer a uniquely detailed level of historical context for the films, weighing their depiction of events against the historical record and evaluating how well or how poorly those films reflected the truth and shaped public memory and discourse over the war. A comprehensive annotated bibliography of print and electronic sources aids students and teachers in further research.

Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions, their contributions ranging from crime film masterpieces like Du rififi chez les hommes (1955, Jules Dassin, director) to international blockbusters like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters) and acclaimed art films like The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, director). At once a lively portrait of a lesser-known American “lost generation” and an examination of an important transitional moment in European cinema, the book offers a compelling argument for the significance of the blacklisted émigrés to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations. Prime provides detailed accounts of the production and reception of their European films that clarify the ambivalence with which Hollywood was regarded within postwar European culture. Drawing upon extensive archival research, including previously classified material, Hollywood Exiles in Europe suggests the need to rethink our understanding of the Hollywood blacklist as a purely domestic phenomenon. By shedding new light on European cinema’s changing relationship with Hollywood, the book illuminates the postwar shift from national to transnational cinema.

The film critic’s sweeping analysis of American cinema in the Cold War era is both “utterly compulsive reading [and] majestic” in its “breadth and rigor” (Film Comment). An Army of Phantoms is a major work of film history and cultural criticism by leading film critic J. Hoberman. Tracing the dynamic interplay between politics and popular culture, Hoberman offers “the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context” (Los Angeles Review of Books). By “tell[ing] the story not just of what’s on the screen but of what played out behind it,” Hoberman demonstrates how the nation’s deep-seated fears and wishes were projected onto the big screen. In this far-reaching work of historical synthesis, Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe (The American Scholar). From cavalry Westerns to apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars; from movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms “remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to be: revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself” (Time Out New York). “An epic . . . alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.” —Cineaste “There’s something majestic about the reach of Hoberman’s ambitions, the breadth and rigor of his research, and especially the curatorial vision brought to historical data.” —Film Comment

Interpretations of Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate how Cold War homophobia focused on the femme as the lesbian who posed the greatest threat to the nation.