'Night People’: The Great Anti-Communist Movies Of the 1950s

    As I have been writing in a series for Hot Air, I am planning an Anti-Communist Film Festival in 2026. We will be featuring classics like The Lives of Others, Red Dawn, and Back to School.

    I will also feature some of the great anti-communist films of the 1950s: My Son John, I Was a Communist for the FBI, The Thief, Night People, and I Married a Communist, among others.

    I was first exposed to many of these films at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Maryland. In 2024, the AFI featured a series on the “Fabulous 50s,” American movies from the Eisenhower era. They screened classics like Ben-Hur. Carmen Jones, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Night of the Hunter, Singin’ in the Rain, and my favorite, Sweet Smell of Success.

    The series also featured some old “Red Scare” movies. These were presented as campy and corny films that propagandized the public into red-baiting hysteria. What I wasn’t prepared for is how sane these films are, and how relevant they continue to be. In I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent infiltrates the communist party in Pittsburgh. He learns of a plan to create “a hellbrew of hate,” urban riots intended to “divide and conquer,” by pitting the races against each other and causing so much mayhem that the left can call in Stalin to establish order - and make huge profits off the court cases. It’s right out of the Norm Eisen “color revolution” playbook. Another scene reveals a character who is a high school teacher - “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” Chilling, and even more true today. Night People is a great film about Soviet duplicity in postwar Berlin.

    Another fascinating film is My Son John. Starring Helen Hayes and Van Heflin, it tells the story of an all-American family discovering that their son, who works in Washington, is in fact a communist spy. It is a methodical film without a lot of action scenes, but it has tense emotional power. When John the communist tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son,” it exposes the leftist goal of replacing the family with the state.

    The AFI 1950s series was curated by film historian Foster Hirsch, the author of the book Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties. “Artistic quality cannot be measured solely in terms of how any single film satisfies or disappoints politically engaged viewers,” Hirsch argues in Movies of the Fifties. He calls My Son John “an overwrought piece of Christian propaganda infused with uber-patriotic paranoia,” but also “a unique period piece that expresses with deeper conviction than any other anticommunist film of the time the fear and loathing with which communism was widely regarded.”

    My Son John and other anti-communist films are panned for purely political reasons. In his book The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s, film historian Robert Miklitsch notes how one critic savaged I Married a Communist, claiming the film “has absolutely nothing to say about Communist ideas or values.” Miklitsch  then states the obvious: “Question: is it possible that [the critic’s] categorical judgment of I Married a Communist is an alibi for his real criticism—that the film is visually ‘undistinguished because it is politically reprehensible?”

    Of course. What is exciting about these older films, and the Anti-Communist Film Festival more broadly, is that it is a way to finally level the playing field after more than fifty years. For decades, the left has built up an infrastructure in the popular culture that pushed socialism, transgenderism, and identity politics. Conservatives have never mustered the will to combat this. A good way to start is the Anti-Communist Film Festival.

    In his book Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, Foster Hirsch attempts to condemn the freedom-loving films of the 1950s with this:

These are straightforward dramas, realistic in style and more or less nuance-free. In each, the enemy is named, and whether homegrown or from abroad, communists are presented as both politically and psychologically diseased. As they weave their plots against America, Reds gather in cells in hideaway offices oozing with ill intent. Sometimes they speak in foreign accents, but more often, to reinforce the widespread conviction that Reds can look and sound like anyone else and can turn up anywhere, next door, say, or even in your own home, they sound like regular-folks Americans. But whether of foreign or domestic origin, there is something wrong with them; enslaved by ideology, they have dead-looking looking eyes or flat voices that signify a basic deficiency in their human DNA. Presented as disciples of the devil, they take their marching orders from the Soviet Union, an evil empire intent on global conquest. The message is clear: Better Dead than Red.

    Spot-on. Despite himself, Hirsch stumbled upon the truth and delivered it. Read what he wrote again, then look at an Antifa mugshot. These people are demons.

    It’s time to make these films a part of America’s pop culture canon.

Note: You can contribute to the festival's support by donating through the GoFundMe page for the project.

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