MARK JUDGE: Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, film noir and defending the Hollywood blacklist.

According to Allan H. Ryskind in his excellent book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters — Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, [Abraham] Polonsky was “a thoroughgoing Communist who took the Fifth when he testified before HUAC [the House Un-American Activities Committee] in 1951 but to eventually admitted to Party membership.” Polonsky once described a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment this way: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.”

Polonsky was placed on a Hollywood blacklist for almost two decades. In his intro to the special edition Force of Evil disc, Scorsese calls this “a great loss” for American cinema, but two things can be true at the same time: Polonsky could have been a talented filmmaker who was also a danger to the country. Yes, Joe McCarthy and some other anti-communists often went too far. The great anti-communist Whittaker Chambers warned about McCarthy and his often reckless tactics. Yet there were communists in the government. Chambers also wrote this famous and prescient passage: “The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”

No need to defend the blacklist, when Hollywood itself revived it with force during the #MeToo era, thus rendering films like The Front, starring Woody Allen, completely superfluous.