What a strange movie! I can't say that I particularly enjoyed it, although, it was really great to see that old District Attorny, Hamilton Berger, in his younger years, as a hired hit man!
I'm a big fan of Robert Ryan's work, but this one didn't quite add up for me.
It was funny to see the commies portrayed as such brutal and ruthless killers. They basically repurposed the whole catalogue of gangsters and organized crime thugs and re-labeled them "commies"!
Yeah, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khmer Rouge only wiped out 100 million, give or take. Hilarious huh?
AsHimself ~ only wiped out 100 million, give or take. Hilarious huh?
No, of course not! Nothing funny about that.
What I did think was funny was that they simply ported over stock bad guy types from other genres directly to this new threat of communism. I would think that if a filmmaker wanted to portray a threat from such an influence in more convincing ways that it could have, and would have, been a lot more convincing, and even chilling, had they not resorted to such a trite device. That's all I'm saying.
Of course, the film is funny. It's unintentionally hilarious as extremely clumsy propaganda. And if there was any true gangster tactics in any way connected to this film, it was actually Howard Hughes who fired from the studio anyone who refused to work on I Married a Communist.
The other poster's stultifyingly reductionist response to you just shows that some folks still haven't moved on from the discerning "logic" of Joe McCarthy. If you don't think Communists in the U.S. were or are a cult-like gangsterist organization lurking behind every closet then you must be an apologist for Stalin and Mao! Some tactics never change! :D
Who was it that influenced people like you to always think about Joe McCarthy while totally ignoring/leaving out The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)?
McCarthy was a Senator and had nothing to do with a 'House' committee as Senators can not be members of a House Committee ...
I'm not saying that McCarthy isn't synonymous with the hunt for commies just that the Dems get a free pass on this subject and their involvement as they've been erased in peoples minds over the years - a technique btw people like Stalin were expert in (making people/history 'disappear').
I think kids today believe that McCarthy was the head HUAC.
Communism is evil. United States political system overreacted to the Communist threat. It was real, but the vast majority of Americans easily saw through Communist propaganda and always held true to our system. Neither Senator McCarthy or HUAC were the boogeymen they were made out to be by the left.
It was the Hollywood studio owners who built the "Blacklist," no the U.S. Government. Those studio owners were responding to pressure from HUAC, without a doubt, but the government had a lot less power over them than they pretended to. The only Hollywood people who got into real trouble, and by that I mean they opened themselves up for legal repercussions were the Hollywood Ten. They either committed perjury before or contempt of Congress. They could have avoided that by simply being more humble and "Taking the Fifth" from the beginning rather than trying to have it both ways. And by that, I mean they wanted to use their appearance before Congress to make their own speeches while refusing to testify. I understand their frustration, but they all knew what they were walking into.
In 1950 we had suffered the attempt by the Soviet Union to stage a Communist Coup in Greece, the blockade of Berlin, the victory of Communism in China, and the detonation of the Soviet atom bomb. One might look back at history and realize that Americans had a lot to fear.
On the other hand, the Communist Party USA was never as ruthless or as powerful as this movie makes out. To accept that as a plot device demands more willful suspension of disbelief than many people can muster. However, we had no problem of believing Nazi Fifth Columnists (no, that isn't a journalism term) or sneaky Japanese agents of carrying on equally magical feats just a few years before. It certainly makes sense to me that many adults in 1950 could imagine a Communist Party only slightly more extreme that the one that actually existed of doing these things.
On the other hand, the Communist Party USA was never as ruthless or as powerful as this movie makes out.Agreed. Interesting historical perspective, but quite bizarre how distorted the communist influence is, in this film. Murders, forced suicides, blackmail, extortion, you name it and The Party seems to be doing it.🐭 share
Ho Chi Minh
Ideologies don't kill people, dictatorial Marxist regimes kill people.
1) Capitalism: an economy that allows the investment of money into stock in order to create capital that a corporation can use to create a base of production or service. More generally, capitalism refers to any economic theory based on the requirement of capital in order to create any new product or service and thus expand the economy.
2) Socialism: the economic theory that all wealth is created by labor and only by labor. Therefore, all products of the labor, that is all wealth should be held by the members of society collectively.
The former has permitted 200 years of unbridled and unparalleled economic development and progress in the affected countries. The latter has led to stagnation and decline in every country that has practiced it strongly, the more assiduously a country has pursued socialism, the more poorly it has performed.
3) Communism: the theory by Mark along two different lines, Leninism and Maoism. Marxist Communism believes that pure socialism is the natural evolution of economics. He came to this belief in approximately 1825 and died before the creation of the Soviet Union. Both Leninist and Maoist lines of Communism agreed that if the people don't accept socialism, it must be forced on them by death if necessary.
4) Democracy: the principal that people have a natural or God given right to choose for themselves how their government will operate. In recent (<200 years) all people granted a sufficient degree of democracy have chosen to follow a substantially free market capitalist economy.
You want to follow the Communist route, you are free to try it here (not hear). If you try to do it by non-democratic means, do not be surprised if you recognize me at the butt end of the rifle that I trust will be your last sight in this life. As long as you stick to spouting Commie propaganda and pursuing legal means for spreading your nonsense, then you should expect that most of your listeners will read a book and figure your noise out to be the stuff it is and leave you.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
Stalin ALONE killed more Russians than that piddly total of 9 million.
Not to mention Mao in Red China ("Cultural Revolution") and the Khmer Rouge (Cambodia killing fields) and Pathet Lao in Laos and the Kims in North Korea killing North Koreans ALONE long after the Korean War.
Jeez but you are one pathetic idiot.
"The Black Book" documents 100 million Communist deaths in the 20th century.
Estimated number of victims[edit]
In the introduction, editor Stéphane Courtois states that "Communist regimes... turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government."[3] He claims that a death toll totals 94 million.[4] The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:
65 million in the People's Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Ethiopia
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Eastern Bloc
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America, mainly Cuba
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."
I liked that hired hitman with his sadistic smile as dropped that helpless man into the water. I don't think he ever won a case as DA Hamilton Berger.
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