Red Hollywood / The Master Race
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series From John Doe to Lonesome Rhodes: Anti-fascism From the Archive. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
In person: Q&A with Mary Corey, senior continuing lecturer in the UCLA Department of History.
Red Hollywood (1996)
Abraham Polonsky, the writer of Body and Soul, said, “All films that are about crime are about capitalism.” In the 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee and studio executives conspired to create a blacklist barring hundreds of film artists suspected of communist sympathies, like Polonsky, from employment, upending countless lives. In Red Hollywood, Thom Andersen and Noël Burch reassess the blacklist’s legacy by reassembling footage from over 50 films made by blacklisted artists. These films, once dismissed as minor, are reconsidered as thoughtful attempts to tackle social and political issues in ways that Hollywood wouldn’t attempt again for decades.
DCP. Directors/Screenwriters: Thom Andersen, Noël Burch. With: Billy Woodberry (narration).
The Master Race (1944)
George Coulouris stars as a Nazi commander who, seeing the writing on the wall for the Third Reich, disperses his officers incognito around liberated Europe to begin sowing seeds of discontent anew. As he assures them: “In our hands, hate can be turned into the most potent of weapons.” Settling himself in a Belgian town under Allied control, he works to undermine fledgling reconstruction efforts by playing on local antagonisms and resentment. A study of fascist rhetorical and propaganda tactics in the guise of a thriller, The Master Race was directed by Herbert J. Biberman who co-wrote the script with Anne Froelich and Rowland Leigh, with Biberman and Froelich both blacklisted just a few years later.
Director: Herbert J. Biberman. Screenwriters: Herbert J. Biberman, Anne Froelich, Rowland Leigh. With: George Coulouris, Stanley Ridges, Osa Massen.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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