Books
Andrew Feffer. Review of Jennifer E. Langdon's "Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood" (Columbia University Press, 2009)
Andrew Feffer is Associate Professor of History and co-director of Film Studies at Union College. He teaches American cultural and intellectual history.
Few who have seen the film Crossfire (RKO, 1947) can forget Robert Ryan’s terrifying portrayal of a homicidal ex-GI who coldly kills a Jew “just because he is a Jew.” Yet, in the sixty-two years since its release, the film has slipped into obscurity. Despite excellent box office receipts and nominations for five of that year’s Academy Awards, Crossfire was overshadowed by Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning Gentleman’s Agreement, a far more genteel treatment of the same subject released later that year.
Crossfire’s disappearance from our collective radar screen is largely what this superb study by historian Jennifer E. Langdon is about. As Langdon makes clear, this vivid, and for the time shocking, cinematic exposé of anti-Semitism latent in American culture, deserves far more historical attention than it has gotten, as does RKO producer Adrian Scott, the primary creative force behind it,. The main reasons why it did not receive that attention were the political affiliations of its creators and the “un-American” perspective they wove into the film: Scott and Eddie Dmytryk, his director for the project, were Communists, two of the infamous Hollywood Ten, scriptwriters, directors and producers convicted, imprisoned and then blacklisted for “unfriendly” testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the early days of McCarthyism.
Scott (who died in 1973 at the age of 61) had the ability (rare among Hollywood producers) to collaborate with directors and script writers (he was one himself) on distinctive and innovative projects. Among the works he produced with Dmytryk and his friend, writer John Paxton, were the noir classic Murder My Sweet (RKO 1945) and the anti-fascist revenge thriller Cornered (RKO 1945), both of which helped make RKO studios one of the main centers for the production of film noir as a distinctively American cinematic style. By the spring of 1947, when filming for Crossfire was done, Scott was a rising star at the studio and in the film world generally, a hands-on producer who could turn out critically acclaimed and popular films on tight schedules and low budgets.
Politically, Scott followed a trajectory typical during the Popular Front period (1934-1939), moving from New Deal liberalism into anti-fascist organizations in the late 1930s and from there into the Communist Party, considered by many progressives the political vanguard in the fight against fascism at home and abroad. Like most Communists of the Popular Front and war periods, during which the party stood firmly behind the New Deal, Scott adhered to an “abiding faith in the American democratic tradition.” “Scott may have been a Communist,” Langdon points out, “but he had great faith in the power of the liberal state to transform the lives of ordinary citizens.” His faith, however, did not lead him to be complacent about the United States, which he envisioned slipping under the tide of a resurgent fascism, as did many Party members after the war, when demobilization, economic uncertainty and right-wing backlash threatened FDR’s reforms. In some sense, their fears were justified. Scott was targeted by the FBI as early as 1943 when it raided Hollywood Party headquarters, netting membership lists for much of the film community. From that moment forward, Scott’s fate was more or less sealed.
Despite her desire to elevate Scott’s prominence in cinematic history, Langdon has not written a conventional biography. Instead she has woven a story of intrigue and betrayal, political drama and personal tragedy out of a detailed study of one person’s critical and creative contribution to a pivotal moment in American cultural history. In keeping with recent trends in cinema studies, Langdon explores complex relationships among the system of film production, audience reception and the larger culture context of which filmmaker, studio and audience were a part. At the heart is Langdon’s study of how Scott, Dmytryk, Paxton and the studio adapted Crossfire to the screen from The Brick Foxhole, Richard Brooks’ dark 1945 novel about homophobic violence in the military. Her analysis, a tour de force, reconstructs the artistic, business and political deliberations that went into the making of the film, including script revisions, intra-studio memos, test screenings, audience surveys, and the efforts by the American Jewish Committee to torpedo the film (for being inflammatory) and the Anti-Defamation League to keep it afloat.
Langdon clearly shows Scott’s “belief that rising anti-Semitism was a harbinger of fascism in America,” a secondary theme in Brooks’ novel, as the driving force behind the film. With the exception of Dore Schary, the executive overseeing the Crossfire project, and a few others, Hollywood was not sure it was ready for a full-blown exposé of the sort Scott conceived – certainly not one as violent and palpable as Crossfire turned out to be. Hollywood’s (and later HUAC’s) problem with the film’s “subversive potential” centered on the fact that it raised any troubling (and for anti-communists, “un-American”) questions at all about American bigotry, whether directed against Jews, gays or anyone else.
In general, as Langdon makes clear, Hollywood in 1947 had little interest in opening access to the silver screen for creative artists to address political and other controversies. So much was evident to Scott from his experience producing Cornered, which studio execs subjected to the worst kind of reshaping at all stages of its production. In fact, the studio, the Production Code Administration (Hollywood’s internal censorship board) and even the State Department shaped Hollywood’s output far more decisively than Communists (if they did at all) as a medium for political messages. “[A]s the case of Cornered makes quite clear,” Langdon writes, “artistic freedom was not exactly a top priority within the Hollywood studio system, and ultimately, it was the studio executives – and not Party functionaries like [Communist scriptwriter John Howard] Lawson (however doctrinaire or threatening he might have been) – who held the real power to enforce ‘political correctness’ in Hollywood filmmaking.”
Langdon’s study of the intricacies of Hollywood production reveals a daily drama of duplicity and betrayal ultimately leading to the final act at the HUAC hearings in the fall of 1947, when the demise of Scott and others was staged (abetted by execs like Schary) by New Jersey Congressman and right-wing extremist J. Parnell Thomas and the openly anti-Semitic racist from Mississippi, John E. Rankin. At that moment, she asserts, one “Americanism” triumphed over another, replacing the pluralistic and egalitarian “imagined community” of the New Deal and the Popular Front with the “older, xenophobic, anti-radical, antimodernist tradition” championed by Republican empire-builders and Dixiecrats through the 1950s. In this broader historical register, Langdon’s argument weakens, especially in the sketchy application of Benedict Anderson’s political anthropology. However, her detailed study of film production and politics is simply marvelous and well worth the read.
One additional note is needed about Langdon’s project. As a dissertation it received the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg Prize, leading to publication in book form by Columbia University press and to web publication at Gutenberg-e (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/Langdon). One can freely access the full text of the study along with digitized versions of several documents cited in the footnotes.
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