“Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era

Authors

Natalie Jarosz, University of AlbertaFollow

Abstract

This is a review of “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, a 2007 volume edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield. It argues that the American Left was involved with creating films of true significance in the Hollywood system, in the context of post-war House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) blacklisting. There is also an examination of the Popular Front between liberals and communists before post-war tensions drew them further apart. There is a chapter about the “new” and “old” waves of the left in the context of 1960s and 1970s American cinema. There is significant discussion of people other than screenwriters in the context of the HUAC blacklisting. The volume arguably leans towards social history – which is more appropriate for the argument of the volume than a methodology such as political history. There are fourteen chapters by different authors. The fourteenth chapter is an essential older text, “Red Hollywood.” “Red Hollywood” is followed by an afterword that its author wrote. It is recommended to have at least a mild-to-moderate knowledge of Hollywood history, and one may need to look up references while reading the volume. It is a very strong source that explores different nuances of history pertaining to the HUAC blacklisting, and 20th-century American left-wing politics.

First Page

94

Last Page

97

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Jarosz, Natalie (2020) "“Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era," Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History: Vol. 10: Iss. 1, Article 7.
DOI: 10.20429/aujh.2020.100107
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/aujh/vol10/iss1/7