The Hollywood Left and McCarthyism: the political and aesthetic legacy of the Red Scare

This thesis assesses the long-term legacy of the anticommunist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s on the political aesthetics of postwar Hollywood, focusing on selected blacklistees who, both individually and as a distinct group of class conscious filmmakers, embodied the new wave of social criticism of American capitalism on film before the HUAC offensive. -- The main subjects of this research - Polonsky, Rossen, Losey, Kazan, and Biberman - are reexamined as representatives of distinct ideological strands of the 'proletarianized' left culture of the first half of 20th century America. These key figures of the Hollywood Left are useful case studies on the impact of McCarthyism on American film art not only because their politics pushed them into the firing line of the anticommunist establishment, but also because, having matured artistically during this period of political reaction, their stories suggest some unexplored potential aesthetic directions for postwar American cinema, possible pathways prematurely blocked by the blacklisting of these filmmakers. -- Polonsky's sophisticated grasp of Marxism will be counter-posed to Rossen's Popular Front liberalism in their cinematic challenges to the American Way. Losey, who, along with Polonsky, carried the Marxist torch in Hollywood, went further than any US radical filmmaker in merging American vernacular modernism with Marxism. His assimilation of Meyerhold's political aesthetics, more than any other theoretical conquest in the Hollywood Left, held the promise of the kind of film art he eventually would accomplish, at least partially, in exile, in his collaboration with Harold Pinter in England. -- Kazan's and Brando's collaboration in On the Waterfront, heralded not only the triumph of naturalism in acting, but a fundamental shift in the approach to depicting social problems on film, centered now on individualism. Stanislavsky's triumph over Meyerhold (and Brecht) marked an irrevocable break from the 1930s paradigm in Hollywood, and the extinction of the proletarian ethos of the Popular Front era. The creators of Salt of the Earth, on the other hand, doggedly stuck to the proletarian, and by now criminalized, principles of their youth, earning the unique distinction of producing the only officially banned film in America. Reading this labour classic against its pro-Stalinist antithesis, On the Waterfront, therefore affords a rare opportunity to shed light on the (so far) under-researched, symbiotic, if hostile, relationship between McCarthyism and American Stalinism. -- It is within this political and aesthetic context that the thesis will seek to quantify the losses to American film art caused by McCarthyism.