One of my favorite places in my hometown of Washington, D.C. is the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. Every year, the AFI hosts wonderful film festivals featuring movies from Ireland, Africa, Iran, and other countries. They have festivals that feature certain directors of themes, such as the upcoming D.C. Labor Film Festival.
So why not have an anti-communist film festival?
At a time when Hollywood is struggling to put backsides in the seats, an anti-communist film festival could stir up emotion and controversy and get people going to the theater again. It’s not like communism has disappeared. It may be more popular on college campuses now than ever since the 1960s.
The American Left, including Hollywood, is still platforming books about McCarthyism and the Red Scare and platforming films made by the blacklisted writers of the 1950s. Clay Rosen’s new book, Red Scare, has gotten positive reviews. The Criterion Channel is featuring a new series on “Noir and the Blacklist,” featuring films made by writers and directors who were blacklisted during McCarthyism.
It’s far past time to have an anti-Communist film festival. Conservatives are always complaining about liberal Hollywood and the lack of conservative films. Last year, the AFI screened a series on films of the 1950s, and several of the movies are great warnings about the dangers of totalitarianism — and relevant in America in 2025. In 1951’s I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent learns about a Marxist plan that is “a hellbrew of hate,” including urban riots intended to “divide and conquer,” by pitting the races against each other and making profits off the court cases. One character in the film is a high school teacher — “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” he says.
There’s 1952’s My Son John, starring Helen Hayes and Van Heflin. It tells the story of a family discovering that their son, who works in Washington, is a communist spy. John the communist bluntly tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son” — i.e., the state. I Married a Communist reveals the savagery with which communists treat those who try to defect.
A more recent film is the 2006 classic The Lives of Others, about the evil of the East German Stasi.
It would be inexpensive and have a huge cultural impact to rent a theatre and spend a week screening anti-communist films. You could invite speakers such as Mel Gibson and the people who run the right-leaning Moving Picture Institute. Pro-American scholars could not only celebrate great movies that champion freedom, but call out the lies of Hollywood.
One of the films in the Criterion Channel’s “blacklist” lineup is Odds Against Tomorrow. It stars Harry Belafonte and was written by Abraham Polonsky. Belafonte was a leftist who once visited Germany to perform in a concert promoting communism. The “World Peace Concert” was mounted by East Germany’s Communist youth organization. In his memoir, My Song, Belafonte wrote this: “I remained not just liberal but an unabashed lefty. I was still drawn to idealistic left-wing leaders…who seemed to embody the true ideals of socialism.” Belafonte was friends with the Communist singer Paul Robeson, and praised Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, writing that Castro has “a strong grasp of Latin American history and of the fine distinctions in law between Venezuela and its neighbors.” Belafonte called George W. Bush “the greatest tyrant, the greatest terrorist in the world.”
Odds Against Tomorrow screenwriter Abraham Polonsky was a communist. According to Allan H. Risking in his book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters – Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Polonsky was “a thoroughgoing Communist who took the Fifth when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 but to eventually admitted to Party membership.” Polonsky once describes a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) this way: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.”
Polonsky was placed on a Hollywood blacklist for almost two decades. He wrote the 1948 film Force of Evil, which shows capitalism as a cruel and cutthroat system. In his intro to the DVD special edition Force of Evil, Martin Scorsese calls Polonsky’s blacklisting “a great loss” for American cinema.
A commentary on communism and film noir is provided on the disc by film historian Imogen Sara Smith. Smith notes that many of the creators of 1950s film noir had been survivors of the Great Depression, when the American free market system came into question. At the same time, and without defending the “sadistic” tactics of Joe McCarthy, Smith admits that many blacklisted writers “did attack capitalism and the American way.” Like today’s Hollywood, they were propagandists. “It’s no wonder the government wanted to shut these people down,” Smith concludes.