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I'd like to draw your attention to a new book by Reynold Humphries,
published by Edinburgh University Press. Please forward this message to
anyone who may be interested.
 

Hollywood's Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History
by Reynold Humphries

'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?'

That question was to be repeated endlessly during the anti-Communist
investigations carried out by the House Committee on un-American Activities
(HUAC) in the early 1950s. The refusal of ten members of the film industry
to answer the question in 1947 led to the decision by studio bosses to fire
them and never to hire known Communists in the future. The Hearings led to
scores of actors, writers and directors being named as Communists or
sympathisers. All were blacklisted and fired.

Hollywood’s Blacklists is a history of the political and cultural factors
relevant to understanding the why and the how of the various investigations
of the alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood. What was HUAC? What
propaganda role did films play during World War II and the Cold War? What
values were at stake in the confrontation between Left and Right that saw
the former so resoundingly defeated and expelled from Hollywood? Answers to
these and other questions are offered via analyses of the motives of the
various players and of the tactics deployed by HUAC to reward collaboration
and punish dissent.

Key themes include:

*	

The Cold War and concomitant hostility to all dissidence
*	

The consequences for Hollywood: the collapse of the liberal-Communist
consensus; naming names; exile for many and the use of ‘fronts’ by
blacklisted writers.
*	

Anti-Semitism and Nazism, Hollywood anti-Nazi propaganda films and the
patriotic war effort
*	

Trade unionism in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s

Reynold Humphries is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Lille
III


September 2008
Hb 978 0 78462455 3
£50.00

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Edinburgh University Press

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