An Intriguing Read "Un-American" Hollywood

Took a bit of effot but I finally finished reading "Un-American" Hollywood : Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. The reason for the unusual effort was that I borrowed the book from the library along with an armload of other items and neglected to renew it before another borrower put a hold on it so I had to return. It was nearly a month before I got to pick up where I left off.

In case readers are interested (or I need a memory assist), the following are the essays and authors contained in the book:
Are you now or have you ever been a Christian? the strange history of The robe as political allegory (Jeff Smith)
Un-American : Dmytryk, Rossellini, and Christ in concrete (Erica Sheen)
"A living part of the class struggle" : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood left (Frank Krutnik)
A monarch for the millions : Jewish filmmakers, social commentary, and the postwar cycle of boxing films (Peter Stanfield)
The violent poetry of the times : the politics of history in Daniel Mainwaring and Joseph Losey's The lawless (Doug Dibbern)
Dark passages : jazz and civil liberty in the postwar crime film (Sean McCann)
Documentary realism and the postwar left (Will Straw)
Cloaked in compromise : Jules Dassin's "naked" city (Rebecca Prime)
The progressive producer in the studio system : Adrian Scott at RKO, 1943-1947 (Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw)
The house I live in : Albert Maltz and the fight against anti-Semitism (Art Simon)
Red Hollywood in transition : the case of Robert Rossen (Brian Neve )
Swashbuckling, sapphire, and salt : un-American contributions to TV costume adventure series in the 1950s (Steve Neale)
Hollywood, the new left, and FTA (Mark Shiel)
Red Hollywood (Thom Anderson)
Afterword (Thom Anderson)

If I had to recommend a single essay it would be Red Hollywood both for Thom Anderson's elegant writing and the sheer scope of the piece. A rather different article I enjoyed was Frank Krutnik's "A living part of the class struggle : Diego Rivera's The flower carrier and the Hollywood Left ". Who would have thought that an item of set decoration - a print of a famous painting - would link a group of films. Quite by coincidence, I saw one of these films on tv not too long ago and when I saw the first photo of The Flower Carrier on p. 57 I realized I'd seen it and In a Lonely Place is one of the films discussed.

There's a lot of information in this book as well as analysis and criticism. Steve Neale's research into the authorship of episodes of 4 British tv series which were either shown on US networks or syndicated here is amazing. One can only marvel at the amount of time he must have spent in the archives to compile the lists of credited names and the likely real authors.

Another interesting bit I learned -- one of my favorite actors from the mid 1960's, Robert Vaughn, earned a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Southern California, in 1970. His dissertation was published as a book Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting in 1972. From 1964 to 1968 hVaughn starred as "Napoleon Solo" in the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement), with British co-star David McCallum playing his fellow agent Illya Kuryakin. I continue to enjoy seeing both actors on tv.

Makes a person realize that the Blacklist Era wasn't all that long ago.