An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War

Village Voice film critic Hoberman offers the first installment of a projected three-volume chronicle of American films during the cold war years 1946–1956. Since Hoberman sees politics "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, back stories and reception," he begins with 1950's Destination Moon, which anticipated the "space race" and called for a lunar military base, echoing a National Security Council proposal for a massive rearmament to counter the Soviet atom bomb. Onscreen antifascist heroism and more atomic associations mushroom through the early chapters. Surveying such anticommunist films as The Red Menace and The Iron Curtain, Hoberman covers witch hunts, House Committee on Un-American Activities tactics, racial dramas such as Pinky, message movies, the blacklist, protests, propaganda, HUAC humiliations, and the "Cold War's key fictional text," Orwell's 1984, all capped by a trenchant analysis of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With exhaustive research into linkages between headlines and Hollywood, Hoberman skillfully probes movie metaphors and underlying themes in all film genres to show how cinema mirrored world events. (Apr.)