Hollywood Sees Red: Three Anti-Communist Film Noirs

Hollywood delivered a steady stream of "red scare" movies in the 1950s. They warned of a Soviet takeover, exposed subversion next door, or showed ordinary Americans drawn into the Communist Party’s web. The most entertaining were espionage tales. Secret exchanges, divided loyalties, and people who aren’t what they seem: familiar territory for film noir.

The fear of espionage was not fiction. The United States used atomic bombs in 1945; the Soviet Union didn't develop one until 1949. Soviet agents and their American recruits obtained classified military and scientific information, including atomic secrets, to help close that gap. The sensational 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage riveted public attention and helped turn the passing of secrets into a national obsession.

These three films put that obsession to very different uses: a gritty street thriller, an experiment in storytelling without dialogue, and a greasy-spoon spy melodrama with a generous side of horseplay.

Pickup on South Street was a modest success in 1953. Today, it is regarded as a film noir masterpiece.

Small-time pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) lifts a wallet from a woman’s purse on a New York subway. Inside is microfilm bound for Communist spies. That one quick dip into a handbag puts him in the middle of an international espionage operation. This is a Samuel Fuller movie: full of rough characters and alive with street action. The Cold War has wandered into the gutter.

A three-time loser, Skip has no use for cops, government types, or appeals to national duty. With microfilm in hand, he sees a payday, not a patriotic obligation. It takes the love of his subway victim Candy (Jean Peters) and a personal score to settle before he decides which side he’s on. Even then, he’s hardly a flag-waver—a very noir hero. Thelma Ritter earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

The Thief takes a daring gamble: the entire 86-minute story unfolds without spoken dialogue. Music, footsteps, ringing telephones, and street sounds fill a world in which nobody speaks.

Ray Milland plays a nuclear scientist passing classified information to a foreign power. His performance carries the film, turning watchfulness, hesitation, and mounting panic over his fateful decision into a portrait of mental torment. We are never given a satisfying explanation of how or why he became a spy, only his regret and anguish. There is no backstory to put things in order. We are thrust into the present and riveted there.

Much of the fascination lies in the mechanics of espionage: signals, surveillance, concealed messages, and carefully arranged exchanges. Like a police procedural film, The Thief makes us watch the "work." The contrast between these methodical routines and the scientist’s unraveling nerves is highly effective.

The experiment earned an Oscar nomination for Herschel Burke Gilbert’s score, and five Golden Globe nominations including Best Picture–Drama, Actor–Drama, Black-and-White Cinematography, and New Star of the Year–Rita Gam. Most remarkably, this movie without dialogue also recevied a nomination for Best Screenplay.

Anti-Communism can be fun. Shack Out on 101 packs spy intrigue, sexual tension, and an unlikely romance into a brisk 80 minutes. The business at hand is deadly serious—smuggling nuclear secrets—but there is ample comic relief along the way.

Nearly all the action unfolds in and around a shabby roadside diner on California’s Highway 101. This B movie budget was modest, but producers didn’t skimp on the cast. Keenan

Wynn owns an oceanside joint cluttered with nautical bric-a-brac and dreams of better days. His live-in help includes a lecherous short-order cook (Lee Marvin) and a pretty, young waitress (Terry Moore). Frank Lovejoy’s professor is among the regulars, though his interest in the place seems to extend beyond the menu.

Nearby sits a top-secret government research facility. Some characters know what’s really going on, some don’t, and not everyone is who they appear to be. Lee Marvin steals the show as "Slob."

If The Thief makes espionage a private nightmare, Shack Out on 101 makes it everybody’s business at the lunch counter. All these films show how Hollywood gave the fear of communism a face: a pickpocket looking for a payday, a scientist coming apart, and a short-order cook serving up treason. The politics supplied the enemy. Noir supplied the people.

How Much Fire Behind the Smoke?

Soviet espionage was real. The prospect of an American Communist takeover was another matter.

The Communist Party USA had built influence in labor organizing and civil rights campaigns during the 1930s and 1940s, reaching roughly 80,000 members during World War II. By the late 1950s, however, it was on its last legs. Government prosecutions, surveillance, public hostility, and disillusionment with the Soviet Union took their toll.

Estimates put its remaining active membership at that time to about 5000. According to J. Edgar Hoover, some 1500 of those "members" were FBI agents. It's not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government kept the Communist Party in business. "If it were not for me," Hoover bragged, "there would not be a Communist Party of the United States. Because I financed the Communist Party, in order to know what they are doing." The irony eluded him.

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