{"id":86260,"date":"2015-06-02T11:56:01","date_gmt":"2015-06-02T15:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=86260"},"modified":"2015-06-02T13:44:50","modified_gmt":"2015-06-02T17:44:50","slug":"seeing-red","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/02\/seeing-red\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing Red"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anticommunism at the movies.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"pickup-on-south-street-1953\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

You\u2019re trying awful hard with all this patriotic eyewash.
\u2014Skip McCoy, Pickup on South Street<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019re feeling polemical, you might argue that all Hollywood cinema is anticommunist: as the central commodity of the culture industry, big studio movies are designed for nothing so much as circulating and producing capital. But if we want to talk Communist with a capital C<\/em>\u2014you know, where the C<\/em> stands for USSR\u2014then Hollywood\u2019s anticommunist films are a special and specific genre of flops and farces, a cinematic tradition featuring such classics as I Married a Communist<\/em>, The Red Menace<\/em>, Assignment: Paris<\/em>, and My Son John<\/em>. (Spoiler: John\u2019s a goddamned Bolshie!)<\/p>\n

The fifties saw the heyday of anticommie popcorn flicks. True, the silent era had its Bolshevism on Trial<\/em> and Red Russia Revealed<\/em>, and the eighties met with Soviet invasion in Red Dawn <\/em>and some serious anti-Vietcong violence in the later Rambo<\/em> movies. <\/em>But when you wanna see a square-jawed U.S. American call a sweaty creep a commie and slug him in the mouth, it\u2019s the postwar period you turn to. Though most of the era\u2019s anticommunist films were too vulgar and outlandish to survive as anything other than hilarious artifacts\u2014or as evidence of the ever-imperialist, state-serving agenda of the Hollywood apparatus, depending on which side of the bed you woke up on\u2014a few, Robert Aldrich\u2019s Kiss Me Deadly <\/em>and Samuel Fuller\u2019s Pickup on South Street <\/em>among them, are truly great works of cinema. (Granted, 1982\u2019s Rambo: First Blood<\/em>\u2014if you excise the last four minutes, when Sly gives a speech crying about how hippies, those \u201cmaggots at the airport,\u201d spit on him\u2014is also pretty great.) Both are tense, pulpy noirs, both center around the sale of nuclear secrets, and both take anticommunism more as a genre then a narrative drive. But only one, Pickup on South Street<\/em> (1953), is being revived this week at Film Forum, in New York<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Pickup <\/em>centers on Skip McCoy, a New York City pickpocket played by Richard Widmark at his slimiest, antihero best. Skip has just gotten out of jail after his third arrest, and one more bust would mean going to the clink for life. Just his luck, the first week he\u2019s out he picks the purse of Candy (Jean Peters), who\u2019s unwittingly ferrying industrial secrets on microfiche for the Reds. Don\u2019t worry: the FBI is on the case. In a strange but effectively claustrophobic opening sequence\u2014set on the subway in near silence, and composed entirely of close-ups on Skip\u2019s hands and glances between Skip, Candy, and two cops\u2014his pick gets spotted.<\/p>\n

To suss out Skip, the cops bring in Moe Williams (Thelma Ritter), the film\u2019s real heart: an all-knowing queen of the pickpockets and professional stool pigeon, who sells neckties on the street for a buck and is hustling the cops and her \u201ccannons\u201d alike in order to afford a nice burial plot and headstone on Long Island. From here, Pickup <\/em>mostly comprises different people\u2014first the cops, then Candy, then the commies\u2014showing up to try and get the film at Skip\u2019s incredible safe house, an off-the-grid fishing shack on a pier directly under the Brooklyn Bridge, where he hangs an \u201cicebox\u201d out the window into the East River to cool his beers.<\/p>\n

Where did Candy get the microfiche, you ask? From her ex, of course\u2014a sleazy guy who sweats altogether too much to be a true, God-fearing American. Not only is he abusive: reader, he\u2019s a Communist, even if the story he feeds to Candy maintains that he\u2019s merely some industrial spy.<\/p>\n

And he may as well be; in their sub-rosa meetings, he and his fellow pinkos never even mention Russia or Stalin or the USSR, let alone the dictatorship of the proletariat or the finer points of civil war. Indeed, Communism in the film is a fungible evil, an evil without content\u2014communist <\/em>is nothing more than a pure signifier meaning \u201cbad guy.\u201d Perhaps that\u2019s why J. Edgar Hoover hated the movie.*<\/p>\n

Or maybe he hated it because the America presented in opposition to Communist Russia is a bleak, desperate place\u2014hardly worth dying for, as some characters pathetically, horribly do. Everybody in this film can be had for the right price. When Candy asks Skip how he feels about Moe selling him out and sending him to jail, he says, \u201cShe\u2019s gotta eat, too.\u201d So the cops buy out Moe; the communists buy out Candy; and then Skip, realizing what he\u2019s got is valuable, raises his prices, and the whole process has to start again.<\/p>\n

\"8PL5UDfZ0gliM5zjeuoINkDMgHZ\"<\/a>

A still from Pickup on South Street<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Candy, for her part, goes from the arms of her abusive ex into those of Skip, who, having found a stranger snooping around his house in the dark, knocks her out cold; when he realizes she\u2019s the same beautiful woman whose purse he picked that morning, he wakes her up by pouring beer on her face. They fall in love. When Candy cooperates with the cops, they send her into increasingly dangerous situations; she agrees with a nihilistic shrug and sigh. And so it goes: the cops threaten Skip, Skip threatens Candy, everyone threatens Moe, and occasionally the commies appear to murder cast members with impunity. It\u2019s worth repeating: the most sympathetic character in the film is an old spinster living in a Bowery flop house, selling her friends out to the police so she can afford a nice grave plot. It\u2019s a horrible world that these small-time hustlers are begrudgingly attempting to protect.<\/p>\n

And indeed, that\u2019s always been the rub with anticommie propaganda. If the USSR in the 1950s wasn\u2019t always a fun place to be, neither was America. Anticommunism worked much better as a structural theme\u2014as in genre movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers <\/em>or High Noon<\/em>, or as an obvious subtext in films like North by Northwest <\/em>and On the Waterfront. <\/em>When cinema went a more direct route in telling the story of the Red Scare, of the commie threat within, it had to produce a narrative of a glorious and desirable America, a place nonetheless easily won over by an evil and pernicious ideological threat. To anticommunism, Bolsheviks are complete bogeymen, creatures of total, senseless malice who are still somehow able to win Americans to their cause.<\/p>\n

But pure evil is a boring idea, narratively. Unless you\u2019re Shakespeare writing Iago, it\u2019s hard to make a compelling motivation out of evil for its own sake. Instead, the stories that make the most narrative sense, the kind of stories in Pickup on South Street<\/em> or Kiss Me Deadly<\/em>, are about desperate people making contingent decisions based on survival, doing whatever they can to hustle up some money. They\u2019re not stories about communism at all: they\u2019re about capitalism and what people have to do to stay alive under it.<\/p>\n

*The big guy reportedly balked at a line in which McCoy asks a feeb, \u201cAre you waving the flag at me?\u201d, going so far as to pressure the studio to remove it.<\/small><\/p>\n

Willie Osterweil is a writer and editor at <\/em>The New Inquiry.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pickup on South Street is at Film Forum through June 4.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anticommunism at the movies. You\u2019re trying awful hard with all this patriotic eyewash.\u2014Skip McCoy, Pickup on South Street If you\u2019re feeling polemical, you might argue that all Hollywood cinema is anticommunist: as the central commodity of the culture industry, big studio movies are designed for nothing so much as circulating and producing capital. 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