"The Anti-Communist Counterattack Begins on Screen" by Lou Aguilar

The Anti-Communist Counterattack Begins on Screen | The American Spectator--Lou Aguilar

A new film festival challenges Hollywood’s decades-long narrative about McCarthy, Nixon, the blacklist, and the Cold War.

"Last week, conservative writer Mark Judge officially announced the first annual Anti-Communist Film Festival — October 1-4 at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. With open or quasi communists taking over the Democratic Party and several American blue cities and states, the festival’s timing is perfect. I know which movie would win the top prize if it had been made already — Operation Cowboy: The Assassination of John Wayne, my Day of the Jackal-style thriller about a real 1950 Stalin plot to murder John Wayne because of his success flushing out Hollywood communists. As more genuine historical sources rip through the cobweb of leftist media lies, two commie-exposing heroes have found new respect as framed victims — Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. To requote The Daily Wire star Matt Walsh in his recent X post, “McCarthy was right and fully justified.

For over 60 years, progressive filmmakers have depicted the communist investigations as the Hollywood Holocaust, wherein fascist officials and their studio-mogul acolytes silenced and persecuted Socratic screen artists. It began subtly enough in blacklisted genius screenwriter Carl Foreman’s High Noon. The classic 1952 Western depicted ex-Marshal Gary Cooper forsaken by the townspeople he protected ahead of four outlaws coming to kill him. It was clearly Foreman’s analogy for his abandonment by his peers during the blacklist. ...

But it’s not the artistry of these films that counts for Hollywood. It’s the propaganda value, even on a small audience. Joseph Stalin understood the mind-influencing power of cinema, as did his two main nemeses in Hollywood, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, which is why he wanted John Wayne dead. In my script Operation Cowboy, Stalin explains the revelation he got watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

“I’d spent many sleepless nights pouring over the writings of Marx and Engels — hoping to persuade more allies to my side. Yet just two hours in a darkened theater put both those philosophers to shame. Giving me the spark I needed to destroy my rivals, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev.”

Let’s hope anti-communist films can undo the damage his ideology is still wreaking in America." .......

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Rest in the Vine: Ronald Reagan, Holly-Go-Lefty and The Never-Ending Story:

With Wyman, Fonda, Karloff, Kelly

From Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism by Peter Schweizer:

"Herb Sorrell had come up the hard way, beginning work at the age of 12, laboring in an Oakland sewer-pipe factory for 11 hours a day. He had cut his teeth in the Bay Area labor movement under the leadership of Harry Bridges, the wiry leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. Bridges, according to Soviet archives, was also a secret member of the Communist Party and a regular contact for Soviet intelligence.

Sorrell had joined the party in the 1930s, and under Bridges' guidance he had led two violent strikes in the Bay Area. Both strikes, he later admitted, were secretly funded by the Communists, and this time he was secretly receiving money from the National Executive Council of the Communist Party. Sorrell was a member of more than 20 Communist Party front organizations and had pushed hard for the American Federation of Labor to affiliate with the Soviet-run World Federation of Trade Unions. (AFL leaders refused on the grounds that it was simply a front group.)

The studio strike Sorrell organized in 1946 was no ordinary labor action. It was ostensibly called because of worker concerns, but Sorrell saw it as an opportunity to gain control over all the major unions in Hollywood. As he bragged in the early days of the action, "When it ends up, there'll be only one man running labor in Hollywood, and that man will be me!"

The stakes were high. If Sorrell succeeded, the Communists believed, they could run Hollywood. As the party newspaper the People's Daily World put it candidly, "Hollywood is often called the land of Make-Believe, but there is nothing make-believe about the Battle of Hollywood being waged today. In the front lines of this battle, at the studio gates, stand the thousands of locked-out film workers; behind the studio gates sit the overlords of Hollywood, [who] refuse even to negotiate with the workers. ... The prize will be the complete control of the greatest medium of communication in history." To underscore the value of this victory, the paper quoted Lenin: "Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important."

The Communist Party had been active in Hollywood since 1935, when a secret directive was issued by CPUSA (Communist Party of the U.S.A.) headquarters in New York calling for the infiltration of Hollywood's labor unions. The party believed that by doing so they could influence the type of pictures being produced. The directive also instructed party members to take leadership positions in the so-called intellectual groups in Hollywood, which were composed of directors, writers and performers.

To carry out the plan, CPUSA sent party activist Stanley Lawrence, a tall, bespectacled ex-cabdriver. Quietly and methodically he began developing secret cells that included Hollywood performers, writers and technicians. His actions were handled with great sensitivity.

Lawrence reported directly to party headquarters in New York, which in turn reported its activities to officials in Moscow. There, Comintern boss Willie Muenzenberg declared, "One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of propaganda is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them."

By the end of the Second World War, party membership in Hollywood was close to 600 and boasted several industry heavyweights. Actors Lloyd Bridges, Edward G. Robinson and Fredric March were members, as were half a dozen producers and about as many directors.

Some had joined the party because they thought it might be fun. Actor Lionel Stander encouraged his friends to become members because "you will make out more with the dames." Others who were perhaps interested in the ideas of Marx and Lenin were nonetheless gentle in their advocacy.

"Please explain Marxism to me," Sam Goldwyn once asked Communist Ella Winter at a dinner party.

"Oh, not over this lovely steak."

But many of the party members were militants, and through hard work they had managed to take over leadership positions in the Screenwriters Guild, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and various intellectual and cultural groups. Their level of control and influence far outweighed their numbers. It was a classic case of hard work and determined organizing.

"All over town the industrious communist tail wagged the lazy liberal dog," declared director Philip Dunne, whose credits included "Count of Monte Cristo," "Last of the Mohicans" and "Three Men."

That industriousness came out of a militancy that stunned many in Hollywood. Screenwriter John Howard Lawson had a booming voice and could often be seen berating those who might oppose the party by smashing his fist into his open palm. The natural reaction of many was to simply be quiet and avoid being throttled.

"The important thing is that you should not argue with them," said writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent time in Hollywood writing for movies such as "Winter Carnival." "Whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind – 'Liberal,' 'Trotskyist' – and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process."

"We have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well organized minority. So that fundamentally I would say in opposing those people that the best thing to do is to make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake."

Reagan had his first taste of this a few months before the strike, when he was serving on the executive committee of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), which he had joined in 1944. The group boasted a membership roll including Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles and Katharine Hepburn. It was what they called a "brainy group," too, with Albert Einstein and Max Weber lending their name to the organization. It was the usual liberal/left Hollywood cultural group, concerned about atomic weapons, the resurgence of fascism and the burgeoning Cold War. But some were concerned by what they saw as its regular and consistent support for the Soviet position on international issues.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared in Life magazine that he believed it was a Communist front, an organization in which "its celebrities maintained their membership but not their vigilance."

Stung by this criticism, a small group within HICCASP, including RKO executive Dore Schary, actress Olivia de Havilland, and FDR's son James Roosevelt, decided to put their fellow members to the test. At the July 2, 1946, meeting, Roosevelt noted that HICCASP had many times issued statements denouncing fascism. Why not issue a statement repudiating communism? Surely that would demonstrate that the organization was not wholly communist.

Reagan rose quickly and offered his support for the resolution, and a furious verbal battle quickly erupted. Musician Artie Shaw stood up and declared that the Soviet Union was more democratic than the United States and offered to recite the Soviet constitution to prove it. Writer Dalton Trumbo stood up and denounced the resolution as wicked. When Reagan tried to respond, John Howard Lawson waved a menacing finger in his face and told him to watch it. Reagan and the others in his group resigned from the organization.

Sorrell gathered his resources for the fight. Along with financial support from the Communist Party, he also could count on help from Vincente Lombardo Toledano, head of Mexico's largest union and described in Soviet intelligence files as an agent. The slender, well-dressed and poised young lawyer was one of Moscow's most trusted agents in Mexico, regularly putting his resources behind Sorrell, providing money while pressuring Mexican film industry executives not to process any film from Hollywood as a show of solidarity. He also appeared at a rally in Hollywood to encourage the strikers.

Herb Sorrell had promised violence if he didn't get his way in the studio strike, and it didn't take him long to deliver. Led by his "sluggers," strikers smashed windshields on passing trains and threw rocks at the police. One studio employee went to the hospital after acid was thrown in his face. When the police tried to break up the melee, things got even worse. As actor Kirk Douglas remembered it, "Thousands of people fought in the middle of the street with knives, clubs, battery cables, brass knuckles and chains."

Sorrell and his allies wanted to shut down the studios entirely, so anyone who crossed the picket line became a target of violence. Jack Warner insisted on keeping up production, and the studio remained open. To avoid injury, workers, including stars who were shooting movies, were forced to sneak into the studio lot through a storm drain that led from the Los Angeles River.

Reagan, getting ready to start production on "Night Unto Night," was furious about the violence. And unlike his approach to the little battle with the Communists in HICCASP, he was not in a mood to retreat.

Blaney Matthews, the giant-sized head of security at Warner Brothers, had seen this sort of violent strike before. He advised Reagan and other stars to use the storm drain to get onto the lot safely. Reagan flat-out refused. If he was going to cross the picket line, he was going to cross the picket line, he told Matthews.

Matthews then arranged for buses to shuttle Reagan and a few others through the human gauntlet outside the studio gate. But he offered a bit of advice: Lie down on the floor, or you might get hit by a flying Coke bottle or rock. Again, Reagan refused. Over the next several days, as he went to the studio lot to attend preproduction meetings, a bus would pass through the human throng of violent picketers, with a solitary figure seated upright inside." .......

Rosa Parks wasn't the only one who sat down on a bus to stand up for freedom.

Rest in the Vine: "Your America To Be Free" by Ronald Reagan

"... In a phase of this struggle not widely known, some of us came toe to toe with this enemy this evil force in our own community in Hollywood, and make no mistake about it, this is an evil force. Don't be deceived because you are not hearing the sound of gunfire, because even so you are fighting for your lives. And you're fighting against the best organized and the most capable enemy of freedom and of right and decency that has ever been abroad in the world."

 

Rest in the Vine: "Unforgettable John Wayne" by Ronald Reagan

"... Mr. Munn said Wayne had also told him that his friend, the stuntman Yakima Canutt, had "saved his life once". Munn later asked Mr. Canutt what he had meant by this comment. The incident is thought to have taken place in the early 50s.

"Yakima told me that the FBI had discovered there were agents sent to Hollywood to kill John Wayne," said Mr. Munn. "He said the FBI had come to tell John about the plot. John told the FBI to let the men show up and he would deal with them."

Wayne then apparently hatched a plot with his scriptwriter at the time, Jimmy Grant, to abduct the assassins, drive to a beach and stage a mock execution to frighten them. Mr. Munn said he did not know what transpired, but heard the two men stayed in the US to work for the FBI.

 

"Afterwards though, John shunned FBI protection and did not want his family to know. He moved into a house with a big wall around it." Wayne then relied upon a group of loyal stuntmen who infiltrated communist cells in America and learned of plots to kill him.

"He then gathered all the stuntmen, went to the communist meetings, and had a huge fight," Munn said. This was when Wayne believes Canutt saved his life.

A further attempt to kill Wayne was made in Mexico on the set of the film Hondo (which was released in 1953), led by a communist cell, according to Mr. Munn." .......

The Faith of Ronald Reagan:

"One day after giving one of my speeches to the men's club at the Hollywood Beverly Christian Church where I worshipped, our pastor came up to me and said he agreed with what I'd said about the rise of neofascism. But he said: "I think your speech would be even better if you also mentioned that if Communism ever looked like a threat, you'd be just as opposed to it as you are to fascism." I told the minister I hadn't given much thought to the threat of Communism but the suggestion seemed like a good one and that I'd begin saying if the day came when it also posed a threat to American values, I'd be just as strongly opposed to it as I was to fascism.

Not long afterward, I was asked to give a speech to a local citizens' organization. I made my usual speech defending American values against the new fascism that seemed to be abroad in the land and was applauded after almost every paragraph. I was a smash. Then I finished up with my new line at the end: "I've talked about the continuing threat of fascism in the postwar world, but there's another 'ism,' Communism, and if I ever find evidence that Communism represents a threat to all that we believe in and stand for, I'll speak out just as harshly against Communism as I have fascism." Then I walked off the stage - to a dead silence. A few days later, I received a letter from a woman who said she'd been in the audience that night. "I have been disturbed for quite some time," she said, "suspecting there is something sinister happening in that organization that I don't like." Then she added: "I'm sure you noticed the reaction to your last paragraph when you mentioned Communism. I hope you recognize what that means. I think the group is becoming a front for Communists. I just wanted you to know that that settled it for me. I resigned from the organization the next day." Thanks to my minister and that lady, I began to wake up to the real world and what was going on in my own business, the motion picture industry."