By Colby Malsbury

Warning: Spoilers ahead. It is highly recommended you view the movie before reading the review.

So Scarybug has severely restricted the range of hobbies we are allowed to partake in. Fortunately, that little impediment never impacted one of my favorite hobbies before the troubles – archaeological diggings through YouTube. We Gen-Xers seem particularly prone to this pastime. As the civilization we once knew and grudgingly tolerated collapses into a heap of ashes around our weakening middle-aged eyes, there’s something oddly edifying in kicking back and viewing a bunch of 1984 commercials for Polaroid and the like. Call it our comfort food, if you will.

Of course, YouTube is every bit as dedicated to the cancel culture as the rest of the mainstream is, so finding socially unjust nuggets of gold from yesteryear on there is getting to be a tougher and tougher proposition every day. Any video file even remotely outside the prevailing zeitgeist is bound to raise a curious eyebrow. Such was the case when I recently stumbled across the 1949 anti-communist second feature The Red Menace thereabouts, and determined I had to give it a look-see. While it isn’t without some pretty gaping flaws, it certainly contains more than enough interest to warrant a viewing…even if only as a time capsule. It’s virtually impossible to imagine anything of its caliber being made today – and it’s far from the most radical departure from the current year norm I’ve ever seen. Jud Suss, this ain’t.

Two things make an impression before the movie proper can get underway. The first is that The Red Menace is from Republic Pictures – the token gentile outfit (Herbert J. Yates, studio head) in the wasteland of Jewry that had fully subsumed Hollywood long before the 1940s. Long the stable of pictures catering to the rustic South, West, and Midwest – including a sizable chunk of the output of both John Wayne and John Ford (notably the unashamedly pro-white paean to Ireland The Quiet Man) – Republic’s ethos would accommodate anti-communist movies far more comfortably than the larger Judaic studios, who were at the time attempting to foist the Stalinist view of WWII upon an unsuspecting public with their slate of war movies (quite overtly, as anyone who has ever seen Mission to Moscow or The North Star can attest).

The second notable thing is that we are told that the movie will be narrated by ‘Lloyd G. Davies, Member of City Council, Los Angeles, California.’ How alien that appears to our wondering eyes today, when even one Anglo name in the ranks of LA municipal government is about as common as hen’s teeth today, let alone one who would lend his (!) name to a project such as this. But then, it had not been too many years removed since a mayor of LA could also have served as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and still have been considered eminently fit to hold office. Today, the council member would be named ‘Yolanda Escobadero-Sterngold’ and would only deign to narrate a PBS special report on LGBTQ experiences during the Watts riots, or the like.

The plot is simplicity itself: an average mook in California, one Bill Jones, irate at being taken in by a VA housing scam, is coerced into joining the American Communist party. He is initially enthralled by what this entails, as he admittedly isn’t an overly probing sort (“It’s the idea of everybody sharing things equally, isn’t it???” he says on a Ferris wheel), but is rapidly dispossessed of his illusions (the movie runs a lean 87 minutes, after all) and ultimately makes his escape from the tentacles of the Red Kraken with Nina, a similarly disillusioned long-time female party apparatchik in tow. Tried-and-true tropes, yes, but they only serve as the structure upon which to hang a series of vignettes depicting the nature of communism. These consist of mostly speechifying, which may have seemed pretty turgid in 1949 but play better today, as the issues involved, though extant, are no longer publicly discussed. Details that seem mysterious to the modern eye abound. In particular, the multicultural/multiracial aspects of communism are never once muted. One of the ace reporters at The Toilers, the movie’s substitute for The Daily Worker, is black. The paper’s resident intellectual poet is a Jew named Solomon. Solomon’s ‘exotic’ girlfriend is a perky blond Irishwoman named Molly who is shown to be every bit as clueless as Bill is on the tenets of Marxism, despite her well-stoked bookshelf. (She eventually eschews communism herself and is welcomed back into church. A Catholic church, alas, but we can’t have everything.) During one scene at a basement indoctrination school, we are shown faces of blacks and Mexicans listening to the agitprop raptly….and we also catch a glimpse of a fellow who I am certain is attired in a yarmulke. Perhaps just as surprising is the fact that the film’s arch-villain turns out to be a woman, Yvonne – a hard-line true believer Stalinist who dominates every setting she is placed in with her abrasive harangues and who, incidentally, has the scariest pair of false eyebrows I have witnessed in quite some time. Certainly, she exudes far more menace than her alleged boss, a fat schlub of a fourth-tier commissar who is so robotic he can only work up ennui when he proclaims that anybody working within his cell is expendable at any time – including himself.

Nothing about the party’s activities is shown in a remotely positive light – a far cry removed from the shades of gray – trending towards outright favor – shown in major studio films dealing directly with Marxism from Reds to Enemy at the Gates. Bill’s VA problems are used by the party as an excuse to stage a mass protest, with much property damage acting as the end in itself rather than mere means. Dissension is shown to be dealt with via severe beatings, ostracization, membership outings to employers, and encouragement to suicide. Not unlike what one runs across on SJW Twitter on a regular basis today, come to think of it. This uncompromising view, combined with the film’s low budget, caused cosmopolitan sophisticates of the time to sneer at the results – just as they sneered at those who maintained that Alger Hiss was a traitor – and to this day woke hipsters would likely refer to this film as a ‘camp classic’. That’s hardly a fair assessment. If the budget didn’t permit the ‘mass protest/riot’ to be much more than about twenty guys in suits throwing a few rocks through some candy-glass windows, that cannot be construed as ineptness of presentation. Personally, I found the 3 1/2 hour long Oscar-winning epic Reds to be a lot more inadvertently amusing.

All that constitutes the movie’s good. Alas, there is a fair bit of bad stuff in here, as well.

As stated previously, The Red Menace is anything but radical. Indeed, its very middle-of-the-road tone is what makes it interesting today, as a reminder of the sense of purpose our volk once had and inexorably lost. Unfortunately, that also necessarily entails that the movie is a creature of the mesmeric cause that had taken hold of the nation in 1949 – Truman’s Fair Deal, with its maudlin thematic undercurrent of ‘racism is un-swell!’ that could be seen in too much of the mass media of the day, such as in this public service announcement during the Captain Video kiddie program. And yes, friends and neighbors, The Red Menace indeed takes this brass ring in both hands and gallops off into the sunset with it.

In its commendable zeal to portray communists as the definition of duplicitous, the movie falls back on the canard beloved of the GOP and the Reformed Pub: portraying communists as ‘the real racists’. Over the running time, we hear the epithets ‘mick’, ‘dago’, and ‘African’, and each time the vocalist is one of our communist characters either denigrating their own heritage or impugning one straying from the party line. Much of the speechifying mentioned before consists of various ethnicities delivering monologues venerating the true-blue egalitarianism only the good ol’ U.S of A can provide. An Italian at the indoctrination session takes umbrage with how the dictatorship of the proletariat is incompatible with the shibboleth of American democracy – he is called a supporter of Mussolini for his trouble, as well as the aforementioned ‘dago’, courtesy of Yvonne. Molly’s priest shows up for a heart to heart with her one night, wherein his major insight proves to be that ideologies based on hatred of class and hatred of race are equally anathema and must be eschewed with equal fervor. (He also mistakenly labels Nazism as an ‘atheistic’ creed. There is plenty to object about in National Socialist tenets – its underlying occult paganism, especially – but wilful ignorance never yet won a battle.)

Solomon – ooh boy, Solomon. Lest we forget that Republic was still thoroughly enmeshed in the kosher net of Hollywood, Solomon’s redemption story is of necessity the most dramatic. Midway through the movie, he is called onto the carpet to explain an error of ideological nomenclature in one of his poems – he implies Marx received inspiration from outside sources in crafting his doctrine. Well, doesn’t that just wake up der Golem and get him all irate? He avows that being an ‘American’ his right to free speech has not been curtailed, he tears up his Party card in a huff, and he goes on to deliver a polemic about how the Communists are the true enemy of progressive thought who tell lies about the federal government that is ‘trying to solve their (the people’s) problems.’ (!!!) He also kvetches about the Party’s constantly reminding him about being a ‘Jewish-American’ when it is supposed to be dedicated to eliminating racial discrimination, leading to a passionate cry of ‘we’re not hyphens, we’re just plain Americans!’ Boy howdy, if not for the fact that he is later hounded into committing suicide, he could have started a new life over in the nascent state of Israel as a goodwill ambassador to David Ben-Gurion! Frankly, when Yvonne spits out the descriptor ‘Trotskyite!’ at him, it’s hard to disagree with her. Did I forget to mention that when Molly’s priest meets Solomon at her apartment, the good father confides to her that he’s a fine young man, just misguided? More proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Did you forget about Sam, the black reporter at The Toilers? Don’t worry – the movie didn’t! He, too, gets his redemptive moment in the sun. In his case, it occurs when his father inexplicably drops in to the office one night and gets some things off his chest that have been bothering him. See, he was initially delighted with the anti-racist platform Communism had to offer (a believable moment, this), but he don’t swallow that jive no mo’, because his Baptist deacon, who has read a book or two himself, said in the pulpit that while slav’ry has been outlawed in America, 80 million slaves live behind the Iron Curtain to this day. And yes, the Negro patois and dialect is laid on thick in this scene. This dash of cold water in the face gets Sam’s dander up, and he changes his critical obituary of Solomon to one extolling him as one of the great American patriots of all time. I am not making this up. This scene does indeed come across as every bit as laughable as it reads, though I doubt the cosmopolitan sophisticates would be howling with ironic delight over it, for some reason.

The movie’s other paramount flaw, as alluded to earlier, is its championing of a benevolent powerful pervasive American government as the only effective counter-measure against Godless Bolshevism, a sentiment that obviously comes across as tooth-grindingly naive today. This, at a time when names like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were very much in the public consciousness thanks to their high profile government positions. At the movie’s climax, the chief charge that the FBI can bring against Yvonne is her ‘loudmouthed disloyalty to the United States government’ – which is clearly shown to be a separate charge from her Communist activities. How’s that for a precedent, Christian rabble-rousers? As for Bill: he flees from the wrath of his new-found fiends with girlfriend Nina, making it halfway across the country before deciding to turn themselves in in a small Texas town. The local sheriff – who is dressed up in full-fledged cowboy regalia that would have embarrassed Tom Mix as too gaudy – sets their minds at ease with a friendly homily (in speech form, of course) assuring them that DC is a forgiving beast, and if they tell their story in full to the proper authorities no harm will come their way, as forgiveness is apparently national policy. Y’know….just like in real life. Look, I get the need for a positive ending in what is essentially a morale boosting B-movie. But it seems more than a little disingenuous to extol the virtues of government when your movie is dedicated to warring upon an ideology that itself cannot survive without the patronage of an all-encroaching government to bring it to fulfillment. This misbegotten scene is a potent reminder that the democratic process still retained the full faith of Americans as the Cold War got underway.

So is The Red Menace a perfect movie? No way, no how. Does that make it utterly worthless? Absolutely not. If nothing else, tis a valuable piece of the historical record, and deserves a viewing for that reason alone. Sincerity can be a misguided thing, but would to God we could have a bid more of that coming forth from the Hollywood saturated with the Epstein ethos we are burdened with today.