This movie is so laughable. It is so full of absurdities and ignores the truth regarding what really happened during the late 1940's and 1950's. This movie is pure garbage and anyone who thinks this film has much basis in reality is truly dumber for having seen it.
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America put the "fun" back into "Fundamentalism".
The guilty/not guilty issue should be kept separate from the question of whether Socialism could ever have gained ideological ground in the US; it never did; and I don't think it ever will due the US pol. climate. In fact the US would benefit greatly from a shot of Socialism
As for the former question; all espionage cases would have been handled more effectively and more gracefully without HUAC; that pool of human waste was nothing but a Conservative career maker; the focus should have been more disciplined; acts not thoughts.
If you do your research, The Red Scare was like the witch trials of Salem in the fact that it took very little to accuse somebody of being a Communist and the accusation alone was enough to ruin that person for life. Just like in Salem, people were accusing their family members, neighbors, and people they had never even met of being commies in order to rid themselves of the burdens that they were given as soon as somebody pointed the finger at them. It was, more or less, a modern day witch hunt and a circle that seemed to never end. This person accused that person and so that person accused this person and round and round they went. The "truth", Jt, is not far from what this movie depicted. Yes, they may have dramatized it a little in order to sell it to Hollywood, but the fact is that lives WERE ruined due to these trials and yes, they did catch people who were working for the Communists and selling trade secrets (such as the Rosenburgs), but the truth is that that is a small percentage of those who had their lives ruined due to mere accusations. I think this movie did a great job of portraying the hopelessness of the 2nd Red Scare era.
shareI found this movie to be quite accurate in the portrayl of the persecution of those in the entertainment industry in the post-WWII communist scare. Anybody who might have attended a few communist party meetings when they were young in the 1930s, found themselves wrongly and unjustly branded as subversives in the late '40s and early '50s. It happened to hundreds of U.S. citizens who were no more communist than Hoover.
It just so happened that in the '30s, at the depth of the Great Depression, many people began to question the capitalist economic system. Can you blame them? Many young people on college campuses at that time flirted briefly with the communist party. Most found the the American communists to be too polemic, and dropped out, just like the Merrill character said he did.
"Troubled Air" is a great novel by Irwin Shaw that deals with this subject in the radio industry. He wrote the novel in 1949 when it was actually happening. What the Merrill character went through is very similar to what Shaw's characters endured. I recommend this book if you want to understand this subject better.
Maybe socialist ideology never got hold because of the committee on un-American activities and other such successful programs to stomp out communism.
With the testimony from ex-KGB and such, we now know for a FACT that the commies were trying to instill their way of thinking through Hollywood. It is called propaganda. We tried to do the same to them and others. When they caught ours they shot them. We had a harder time stopping it over here because of the almost total lack of help from Hollywood. Hollywood has always been liberals and queers, not that their sacred communism is dead they jump onto the democratic party which is worse. At least the commies came right out and said what they stood for and what they were trying to accomplish. I think that we need to have another committee on un-American activities and have them stomp out the liberals, fags and democrats.
NEC ASPERA TERRENT
Maybe socialist ideology never took hold because people like you need someone to demonise and make life sh!t for, just so you can feel good about yourselves.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.
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Their heart wasn't in it.
Maybe socialist ideology never got hold because of the committee on un-American activities and other such successful programs to stomp out communism.
With the testimony from ex-KGB and such, we now know for a FACT that the commies were trying to instill their way of thinking through Hollywood. It is called propaganda. We tried to do the same to them and others. When they caught ours they shot them. We had a harder time stopping it over here because of the almost total lack of help from Hollywood. Hollywood has always been liberals and queers, no[w] that their sacred communism is dead they jump onto the democratic party which is worse. At least the commies came right out and said what they stood for and what they were trying to accomplish. I think that we need to have another committee on un-American activities and have them stomp out the liberals, fags and democrats
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Wow, jtpaladin, that's quite a compelling argument, you anencephalitic cretin. What is your stand, that anything that goes against the US must be wrong? Why did you people separate the church and state and then make the state a church with even greater power? As a democracy, the US is the most cruel hypocrisy that ever existed.
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The US is not a democracy, it is a republic - Rule of Law.
Go ahead, make my day....
Just because the Soviet Union did indeed send infiltrators into the U.S. doesn't change the fact that McCarthy and his cronies ruined many innocent lives with their hysterical and reactionary hunt for "Reds". In essence, they were going after a fly with a bazooka and in the process were turning America into the very thing they were trying to fight: an unfree land where dissent is grounds for suspicion and even prosecution. As the film points out, plenty of people visited Communist rallies out of pure curiosity in the 30s, when there wasn't anything strange or suspicious about doing so. Many of these people weren't Communists themselves, just curious outsiders. Not to mention the fact that the S.U. was America's ally in World War II (even when this was probably based more on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" than anything else).
www.alienexperience.com- great Alien/Predator forum!
While the movie did have some historical merit, there were definitely some serious historical inaccuracies.
This movie takes place during the second time HUAC came to Hollywood, in the early-mid 1950s. (As opposed to their first visit, with all of the Hollywood Ten business, which lasted from 1947 to about 1950.) This time around, it is VERY unlikely that they actually would have spent to much time and effort on Merrill if he had only attended a couple of meetings.
That message in the end is pretty much complete crap- people like the Merrills never went to prison (I'm pretty sure no one did after the Hollywood Ten), and the blacklist ended circa 1960, NOT 1970.
However, I don't think that historical accuracy is exactly the point of this film. I think was meant to serve as more of a reminder than HUAC and McCarthy did some pretty messed-up stuff in their day. (Seeing as this film came out around the end of the Cold War, when many Americans praised the McCarthy Era as an important stepping stone to Reagan's policies that ultimately brought an end to the war.)
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That's it. Shut your eyes and your ears, and make up your own world. :)
shareJust to keep things straight, McCarthy was a senator. He had nothing to do with the HOUSE Un-American Activities Committee or the Hollywood Blacklist. It is also ignored there were plenty of Democrats in the HUAC.
In addition, it is important to note that many of the people that were thought to have been wrongly "persecuted" by McCarthy and others were later definitively found to be guilty. The Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were in fact working with the Soviets.
This is not to say the all of the actions of McCarthy and the HUAC were justified, but Hollywood will probably never make a film that represents an accurate portrayal of these events. There were Reds in Hollywood back then and today we see persecution of those who hold Conservative viewpoints by the far left majority in the entertainment business. They are not the heroic protectors of human rights they claim to be.
Don't know about today but, as Merrill says in the movie, at that time being a communist in the USA was every bit as legal as being a Republican or Democrat. People were doing no more than exercising their rights to their own beliefs and freedom of speech under the Constitution. The House of Representatives committee was the party acting illegally.
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