I Was a Communist for the FBI

Gordon Douglas – 1951

Unflappably loyal American Frank Lovejoy goes undercover as a communist subversive to help the FBI build a case against a spy ring, at great risk to his reputation with family and friends. It’s the kind of movie that, on impulse, you want to laugh off as completely artless, state-sponsored propaganda that can only be enjoyed ironically, but in fact, it’s too good and too (believe it or not) progressive, to dismiss so comfortably. Even the comically on-the-nose pulp title, mimicking sensational newspaper exposés, conveys some degree of self-awareness, the same type that would give us titles like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Married a Monster from Outer Space within the same decade. The naked earnestness of its flag-waving, hyper-patriotic agenda is undoubtedly laughable. It’s hard to imagine anyone less conservative than the John Birch Society finding the movie persuasive, plausible or even entertaining on its own terms. Workhorse journeyman director Gordon Douglas tackles the material as matter-of-factly as any other noirish crime drama of the period, comparable to Act of Violence, Mystery Street, or Storm Warning, that continued the noir genre’s swerve into social issues over strictly murder and detective stories. It couldn’t have been made at a more opportune time for this type of material. In 1951, both HUAC and Joseph McCarthy were at the height of their power, goaded on by the even more powerful J. Edgar Hoover, and Hollywood studios were happily cooperating with the professional blacklisting of anyone listed in Red Channels. The entire premise of the movie is both ludicrous and reprehensible, presenting as fact the notion that any outbreaks of unionization, civil rights activism and/or advocacy for the poverty-stricken could only be the result of direct orders from the Kremlin as part of a massive conspiracy to actively undermine the American system. Yes, miniscule, mostly ineffective spy rings existed, and there were traitors who deliberately fed classified information to the Soviet Union, but there was never – (in the 50s or throughout the Cold War) – anything close to the comfortably thriving mafia-like “fifth column” shown at work in I Was a Communist for the FBI. What makes the film a little intriguing, along with its lean, procedural Dragnet brand of storytelling, is that expressions of blatant racism and antisemitism are put into the mouths of the pro-communist antagonists, not the heroes. Honest, black union workers are shown to be victimized, not helped, by the rabble-rousing agitators, and union-busters wrap the pipes they’re going to bash heads with in recognized Jewish newspapers, presumably to frame Jews for the crime. This shows that the film’s producers understood that racism was frowned upon by a majority of audiences and that, rather than coding racist ideas to make them seem innocuous and pander to the public’s prejudices, they opted to make their villains even more hateful and hateable by making them the racists. That doesn’t make the film significantly less odious, but it is of interest as a kind of signpost about the country’s slowly evolving attitudes about race. Long story short, I Was a Communist for the FBI has the dubious honor of being one of the most famous Red Scare mania movies, but it’s far from the worst. The genre also includes winners like The Red Menace, The Big Lie, Guilty of Treason, and My Son John (the film that killed poor Robert Walker).