Tinselgrad

Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left, by Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh (Encounter, 292 pp., $25.95)

FROM the first years of the Soviet Union, Moscow tried to turn Hollywood’s dream machine into a Communist propaganda outlet. Aspiring American writers got tours and workshops with renowned Russian filmmakers and dramatists; Communists covertly dominated unions and front groups. But the Soviets gained little from these efforts: a few celluloid valentines to Stalinism like Mission to Moscow, a few true believers willing to defend every purge, but little lasting influence. The most notable beneficiaries of the Communist effort in Hollywood might be today’s Left, for whom the blacklist serves as a secular Lives of the Saints. As Ronald and Allis Radosh put it in their comprehensive new overview, Red Star Over Hollywood, the fable of the blacklist is “the story that Hollywood tells itself each night when it goes to sleep.”

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Eve Tushnet

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Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left, by Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh (Encounter, 292 pp., $25.95)

FROM the first years of the Soviet Union, Moscow tried to turn Hollywood’s dream machine into a Communist propaganda outlet. Aspiring American writers got tours and workshops with renowned Russian filmmakers and dramatists; Communists covertly dominated unions and front groups. But the Soviets gained little from these efforts: a few celluloid valentines to Stalinism like Mission to Moscow, a few true believers willing to defend every purge, but little lasting influence. The most notable beneficiaries of the Communist effort in Hollywood might be today’s Left, for whom the blacklist serves as a secular Lives of the Saints. As Ronald and Allis Radosh put it in their comprehensive new overview, Red Star Over Hollywood, the fable of the blacklist is “the story that Hollywood tells itself each night when it goes to sleep.”