From now until May, the American Film Institute is featuring “Fabulous 50s,” a series about American movies from the 1950s. There are great films featured, including classics such as Ben-Hur, Carmen Jones, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Night of the Hunter, Singin’ in the Rain, and my favorite, Sweet Smell of Success. The screenings take place now through May at the AFI Silver Theater just outside of Washington, D.C.
The series also features some old anti-communist, or “Red Scare,” movies.
Seeing the 1950s anti-communist movies in 2024, it’s astonishing how well they have held up.
Starting in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left, it became sport for cool people and liberals to mock movies such as I Was a Communist for the FBI or My Son John. The excesses of Sen. Joe McCarthy had made red hunting suspect, even shameful. Yet McCarthy was more often right than wrong. There were communists in the government, and in Hollywood, who wanted to destroy America.
In 2024, however, with the far Left not only alive after the collapse of the Soviet Union but thriving in Washington, these films from the 1950s seem prescient — and deadly serious rather than goofy. In I Was a Communist for the FBI, for example, an FBI agent infiltrated the Communist Party in Pittsburgh and learned that their plan was “a hellbrew of hate” — urban riots intended to “divide and conquer” by pitting the races against each other and causing so much mayhem that the Left could establish order and make huge profits off the court cases. Another character in the film is a high school teacher who asks, “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” It’s still true today.
Perhaps the most fascinating film is My Son John. Starring Helen Hayes and Van Heflin, it tells the story of an all-American family that discovers that a son who works in Washington is in fact a communist spy. It is a methodical film without a lot of action scenes but has tense emotional power. When John the communist tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son,” it exposes the leftist goal of replacing the family with the state.
I Married a Communist has a title that elicits chuckles, but the story of a man trying to leave his party dramatizes the brutality with which communists have always operated. When asked why he left the party, Whittaker Chambers, one of the great anti-communists of the 20th century, replied, “I heard the screams.” Murder, extortion, torture, lies — there was no evil beyond the pale for the bringers of a “bright new tomorrow.”
The AFI series is curated by Foster Hirsch, a film historian and the author of the new book Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties.
“Artistic quality cannot be measured solely in terms of how any single film satisfies or disappoints politically engaged viewers,” Hirsch wrote. He calls My Son John “an overwrought piece of Christian propaganda infused with uber-patriotic paranoia” but also “a unique period piece that expresses with deeper conviction than any other anticommunist film of the time the fear and loathing with which communism was widely regarded.”
Those fears were well founded.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
