Communists in Hollywood Refuse to Host the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    “What did you expect? They’re communists!”

    A friend of mine was giving me the hard truth. Yes, he was being a bit sarcastic. But there was also reality there. As was recently reported in Breitbart, the American Film Institute Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Maryland recently informed me that they can’t let me rent out their space, even for one day, for the Anti-Communist Film Festival. This came after months of amicable emails and phone conversations with the special events manager. Long story short: the events manager loved my idea, took it to higher-ups, who are left-wingers, and they spiked it. 

    The American Film Institute is a non-profit that is supposed to serve the community and offer free access. However, one look at the AFI Board of Trustees and it becomes clear we are not dealing with MAGA America.

    Not to worry, we have backup spaces - and a great new sponsor, the Victims of Communism Foundation.

    Incredibly, as I write these words, just a short time after getting nuked by the AFI, the AFI itself is screening a pro-communist movie. 1948’s Force of Evil, which shows capitalism as a cruel and unfair system. Force of Evil’s screenwriter Abraham Polonsky was a communist. According to Allan H. Risking in his book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters - Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Polonsky was “a thoroughgoing Communist who took the Fifth when he testified before HUAC [the House Un-American Activities Committee] in 1951 but was eventually admitted to Party membership.” Polonsky once describes a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) 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.”

    So this is what the American Film Institute is screening instead of The Lives of Others. In his intro to the DVD special edition Force of Evil, Martin Scorsese calls Polonsky’s blacklisting “a great loss” for American cinema. More insightful is the commentary on communism and film noir provided on the DVD by film historian Imogen Sara Smith. Smith notes that many of the creators of 1950s film noir had been survivors of the Great Depression, when the American free market system came into question. At the same time, and without defending the “sadistic” tactics of Joe McCarthy, Smith admits that many blacklisted writers “did attack capitalism and the American way.” Like today’s Hollywood, they were propagandists. “It’s no wonder the government wanted to shut these people down,” Smith concludes.    

    One of the films in the Criterion Channel’s recent “Hollywood and the Blacklist” lineup is Odds Against Tomorrow, starring Harry Belafonte and also written by Abraham Polonsky. Belafonte was a far-leftist who once visited Germany to perform in a concert promoting communism. The “World Peace Concert” was mounted by East Germany’s Communist youth organization, and in his memoir My Song, Belafonte wrote this: “I remained not just liberal but an unabashed lefty. I was still drawn to idealistic left-wing leaders…who seemed to embody the true ideals of socialism.”  Belafonte was friends with the Communist singer Paul Robeson, and praised Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, writing that Castro has “a strong grasp of Latin American history and of the fine distinctions in law between Venezuela and its neighbors.” Belafonte called George W. Bush “the greatest tyrant, the greatest terrorist in the world.”            

    Incredibly, Hollywood is still platforming books and movies that revolve around McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Clay Rosen’s new book Red Scare has gotten positive reviews, and the Criterion Channel recently featured a new series on “Noir and the Blacklist,” featuring films made by writers and directors who were blacklisted during McCarthyism.

    The Anti-Communist Film Festival will restore the reputation of films of the 1950s, which are warnings about the dangers of communism. Some are strikingly relevant in America in 2025. In 1951’s I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent learns about a Marxist plan for chaos, including urban riots intended to “divide and conquer,” by pitting the races against each other to make profits off the court cases. One character celebrates it as “a hellbrew of hate.” Another character in the film is a high school teacher - “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” He says. 

    There’s the 1952 classic My Son John. starring Helen Hayes and Van Heflin. My Son John tells the story of a family discovering that their son, who works in Washington, is a communist spy. John tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son” - i.e., the state. I Married a Communist reveals the savagery with which communists treat those who try to defect. 

    So the communists at the AFI don’t want to host the Anti-Communist Film Festival. We have other options. In America, freedom ultimately wins. I hope.

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