The Anti-Communist Film Festival: Hail, Caesar!

    Since I announced the Anti-Communist Film Festival last month, the response has been fantastic. Conservatives understand that a film festival showcasing some of the great anti-communist movies can be a powerful - and fun - inoculation against a poisonous false god.

    What’s also been surprising is how many anti-communist movies there are. I’ve heard from people not only in the United States but with ties to Cuba, China, and the old Soviet Union. I’ve also heard from directors and actors in Hollywood. We’re planning the festival for fall 2026 if we can raise the money for it and attract a sponsor or two. 

    We also want the festival to have not only serious films, but fun ones. We want it to be a party that entertains and brings people together. That’s why I think a great addition to the lineup would be Hail, Caesar! Hail, Caesar! produced and directed in 2016 by Joel and Ethan Cohen, delves into the deepest question of our time - the question of God and our place in the universe. It also makes communists look like absolute idiots. 

    Set in 1950s Hollywood, Hail, Caesar! tells the story of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a “fixer” at Capitol Pictures. Eddie keeps Scarlett’s unwanted pregnancy out of the news, eases the panic of a director working with a talentless actor, and, most importantly, tries to retrieve superstar actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), who has been drugged and kidnapped by a Marxist group called “The Future.” Mannix has also been offered a lucrative job with the Lockheed Corporation, which tries to lure Mannix with photographs of “the future” - an atomic test being performed at Bikini Atoll. Because Hail, Caesar! features musical numbers, the trademark Cohen brothers' oblique humor, and some pokes at the Red Scare of the era, critics described it as a lightweight, second-tier effort. But the film asks, and answers, the most profound question of all: do we have a divine purpose?

    The answer is yes, but not in the way that political or religious fanatics think. Mannix, a devout Catholic who spends too much time in confession, is offered two choices to ponder: the false utopia of communism (the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock by The Future), and the apocalyptic vision of the makers of the atomic bomb. After a frantic 24-hour period, Mannix rejects both visions, opting to keep his LA job. His decision comes because, in some purpose-driven way that he barely comprehends, Mannix belongs in Hollywood. To the lost sheep who rely on him, from the innocent young star rescued from possible pornography to Clooney’s Baird Whitlock, who becomes bedazzled with communist theory, Mannix is an indispensable shepherd, in his way more tuned in with the Source of the universe than the religious leaders who come to his office to vet films and bicker about theology.

    Hail, Caesar! posits that the truly holy are the regular people who trudge along at their jobs and lives every day, trying their best and simply doing the next right thing. While acknowledging the existence of God, it steps outside of the linear concept of God as a drive towards either a heaven on earth, which the communists preach, or a terrifying End Time, which the warmongers do. Communists have rarely been depicted as such fools, with Mannix literally slapping sense into Whitlock when Whitlock begins babbling about “dialectical materialism” and “the means of production.” Only marginally better is the representative of Lockheed Martin, a man who comes bearing pictures of mass death. Unnoticed by most of the critics, along with the very theme of Hail, Caesar!, is the terrific performance of Alden Ehrenreich, who plays Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy. Plainspoken yet decent, Doyle is the one who rescues Baird Whitlock from “The Future.” Doyle represents the best of America - regular people with faith, humility, and decency, and enough horse sense to see through the ideologies that often capture the elites.

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