they turn into one of the predators. It seems to me that is why the producer of this film (John Wayne) and one of the actors (John Wayne) made this movie. If they are so busy making propaganda for HUAC, then HUAC won't be coming after them.
shareAre you kidding? Wayne was never associated with left wing causes in his life! Try guilt over not having served his country in World War Two!
shareThat's an interesting idea and there might be some truth to it. The Duke made what his friends said was tough decision to pursue an opportunity to jump forward in his movie career with much of his potential competition gone either to the war or in making movies for the War Department. They also said that Duke was haunted for the rest of his life over whether he had made the right decision.
John Wayne was no fool and had to realize how wildly inaccurate, even unrealistic this movie was. However, he hated communism and the communist countries. Maybe he felt that anything that made a swipe at them was fair. One does not feel guilty about using hollow points on coyotes.
While Wayne was no idiot, he was solidly behind the blacklist and may have been too emotionally invested in defending his country to even think over that this was an unrealistic movie. But "One does not feel guilty about using hollow points on coyotes" is a fair description of how he'dve thought.
shareWayne was an ultraconservative and as such he wanted to make a movie glorifying HUAC. But so much of this film is either dishonest or ridiculous that he ruined what could have been a more serious depiction of Communism in the US.
For one thing, investigators for Congressional committees were never involved in the kind of fistfights and arrests that Big Jim and Mal get into (and they weren't usually kidnapped and murdered by Red agents either). Oh, and you don't take your girlfriend along on a police raid of a bloodthirsty Communist cell. The basic premise is absurd.
The Reds are all depicted as thugs, cowards or supercilious intellectuals. In fact most Communists were fairly ordinary in personality and demeanor. Showing some of them as two-fisted lunkheads using brawn instead of brains and calling attention to themselves by pushing people around was not realistic to how the party operated.
I was always intrigued by having the thuggish character played by Hal Baylor tell Wayne that chopping cotton was for "white trash and n-----s", whereupon an infuriated Duke punches him out for using a racial slur. I think this was to take the sting off of liberal attacks on HUAC (a committee that contained several avowed racists as well as idiots and demagogues) by showing that a true-blue American wouldn't tolerate such words. By impugning such words to a Red Wayne could show how nasty the Commies were and how good HUAC was. In fact, no Communist would have used such terms because racism was against the party line, most of them in fact weren't racists anyway, and besides no Commie would dare deviate from the party line.
Most infuriating was the opening scene where the Communist testifying before HUAC takes the Fifth and, in Wayne's words, goes back to his well-paying job as a college professor, corrupting more kids -- with Mal immediately afterward arguing that they had proof that the prof gave espionage secrets to a Soviet agent. First, people hauled before HUAC rarely if ever went back to their jobs; they were usually fired and blacklisted. Second, HUAC wasn't involved in tracking spies, the FBI was. Third, taking the Fifth about party membership wouldn't save you from arrest and prosecution on charges of espionage, so Mal's complaint is outrageously false and preposterous (and of course it'd be the Justice Department, not HUAC, who would bring such a prosecution). Fourth, the depiction of the actual HUAC members, calmly and politely making restrained inquiries ("Permit me to ask you one further question") is so contrary to the demagogic circus most HUAC hearings usually devolved into that it's laughable. And fifth, since when were college professors well-paid in 1952?
Interestingly, Hawaii did have a hotbed of Communist activity in the territory's largest union, the ILWU, whose longtime head, Australian-born Harry Bridges, was an admitted Communist. There is a reference to the tactics Communists did use at union meetings back then (on the mainland too) in order to gain control of a union from the majority. (This happened with the electrical workers, furriers and a few other unions in the 30s and 40s, though they had mostly been rooted out by the early 50s.) Things like that are true and useful to know. Unfortunately the real Red menace was buried beneath this cartoonish depiction of one-dimensional scoundrels and outright lies about HUAC and the nature of its activities and members, as well as the film's statement that after all HUAC's hard work a Red would simply walk away scott-free by taking the Fifth, which is a ludicrous lie.
All of which go into why we seem to find this mess so irresistibly entertaining!
The Hollywood Ten took the Fifth, so there's a basis in reality there. but most of HUAC, indeed, were bigots and/or morons. And the only Wayne movie more cartoonish was THE GREEN BERETS.
shareYes, a lot of people took the Fifth before HUAC, but they didn't just sail off into the sunset without problems after having done so, as this picture depicts. Most ended up out of a job and unable to get further work, at least in their usual professions. As far as most people were concerned, taking the Fifth was the equivalent of admitting you were a Communist.
Actually I don't think any of the Ten ever formally took the Fifth. They stonewalled and were argumentative, challenging the Committee, but I don't believe any of them ever actually invoked their Fifth Amendment rights. I could be mistaken, some might have, but their instructions from John Howard Lawson, who as a die-hard Stalinist was the informal leader of the Hollywood Communist community, were to attack the Committee, its members and methods, and to refuse to answer while not actually invoking the Fifth.
Edward Dmytryk, the only one of the Ten who sbsequently recanted and named names before the Committee (in 1952), later said that Lawson's was a stupid strategy because it only served to alienate the public and distract people from HUAC's methods. Dmytryk said they should have all simply admitted past or present membership in the CPUSA (Dmytryk had left the party in 1945), which was not a crime. That would have left the Committee with nowhere to go and done a better job of exposing it and its members to ridicule. The Ten would have appeared honest, with nothing to hide, wrong-headed maybe but not devious or criminal, and HUAC wouldn't have been able to cite them for contempt. Of course, they would probably still have been blacklisted, but since that happened anyway they would have at least avoided prison time and not made themselves look so "guilty" and the Committee so principled. But Lawson had his orders from the leadership of the CPUSA, which in turn received its orders from Moscow, and I'm sure these actions were in line with his radical beliefs anyway.
The dirty secret many of my fellow liberals dislike to acknowledge is that in fact most of the people HUAC accused of being party members really were or had been Communists. The problem was that, aside from this not being a crime, most of these people had joined almost as a social thing, as a cause. They weren't hard core ideologues and most quit the party after a brief time. There were certainly true-believing Stalinist types in Hollywood like Lawson, Ring Lardner, Jr., Albert Maltz, Abraham Polonsky and others, and of course on another front the whole Alger Hiss business did expose actual Communist spies, including Hiss. But espionage or other crimes were very different from simply being party members, as was the case with most Hollywood Reds.
And of course you're absolutely right, most HUAC members were bigots (John Rankin), crooks (J. Parnell Thomas), or morons (them and pretty much everyone else). Interestingly, one of the few intelligent and able HUAC members was Richard Nixon, who was noted for his cautious and deliberate approach to investigations. Nixon could and did demagogue the Communist issue -- he had a lot of company in that -- but in the Committee he was respected for his methodical and careful work. He didn't make false charges or manufacture evidence the way Joe McCarthy did in the Senate a few years later, or attack witnesses as Thomas did before he himself went to prison for padding his office payroll. Typical "law-and-order" conservatives!