Red Lies: Red Eddie Muller’s “intro” and “outro” to I Married a Communist/The Woman on Pier 13 (1949/1950) (video)

[“TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. et is Roy Del Ruth’s Red Light (1949) with George Raft, Virginia Mayo, Gene Lockhart, Henry (Harry) Morgan, Raymond Burr, Arthur Franz and Barton MacLane.”]

By Nicholas Stix

In advance of Muller broadcasting The Woman on Pier 13 (1949) on Noir Alley, my old friend and partner-in-crime David wrote,

“We’ll see what Red Eddie Muller does with this one. Years ago, the late Robert Osborne showed it in prime time and blasted it with the usual epithets— ‘Paranoia,’ ‘Witch Hunts,’ ‘Failed at the box office,’ etc.

“Robert Ryan was, as you said, a ‘crypto-communist,’ whom Eddie will slobber over. Laraine Day was a conservative Republican, very anti-Communist. We’ll see what Red Eddie says about her.”

Red Eddie: “Some viewers have complained that I’m going out of my way to bring politics into what’s supposed to be an escape from reality.

“Well, here’s my problem with that line of thinking. The film noir era, which is the main but not exclusive focus of this program, took place between 1946 and 1954.

“Not coincidentally, HUAC’s hearings into possible Communist influence in Hollywood, began in 1947. Witch-hunt hysteria was soon rampant, and many people lost their livelihoods merely by being suspected of Communist sympathies. The furor dominated the culture until December of 1954, when the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, who steamrolled to national notoriety, by bearing the torch as the nation’s leading anti-Commie witch-hunter.

“The threat of blacklisting affected virtually everyone in Hollywood, creating a climate of deceit and distrust that played a major part in the rise of film noir. While studios largely shied away from political issues, certain themes and emotions engendered by anti-Communist hysteria, paranoia and betrayal most prominently, definitely found their way into the movies, especially crime pictures.

“To ignore or willfully erase the politics of the era, is to completely miss the context in which the films were created. It’s like discussing the allies’ triumph in WWII, while simultaneously denying the Holocaust ever happened.

“When oil and aviation magnate Howard Hughes, a vehement anti-Communist, took over RKO in 1948, the first project put into production was I Married a Communist [N.S.: later re-named The Woman on Pier 13], based on a script by little-known George Slaven and George W. George, rumored to be a well-known writer working under an alias.

“The script had been rejected by Eagle-Lion Pictures, but Hughes bought it to use as a sort of litmus test. He assigned various writers and directors to work on it, using their enthusiasm or lack of it to judge their political leanings. According to Joseph Losey, one of several directors who passed on the project, it was an untenable situation. Several directors, including John Cromwell and Nicholas Ray, declined simply because the script was bad, unfinished, and borderline incoherent. Over the course of 14 months or so, numerous writers were brought on to knock I Married a Communist into filmable shape, including John Edward Grant [sic; James Edward Grant], Charlie Grayson, Art Cohen and Herman Mankiewicz. In the end, veteran journeyman Robert Hardy Andrews produced the final shooting draft.

“Merle Oberon was originally set to play the role that was played by Laraine Day, and Janice Carter was borrowed from Columbia, to replace Jane Greer, who’d provoked Hugheses’ ire, by daring to get married, a decision that led the jealous Hughes to briefly blacklist her at the studio, where she was under contract.

“Robert Ryan, possibly the most liberal actor in Hollywood, later said he’d only agreed to play the lead role, because he feared that Hughes would ruin his career otherwise. Hughes had hoped to gain attention by having RKO be the first studio to release an anti-Communist film, but by the time the picture was previewed, in late 1949, the market was already awash in anti-Red sentiment. The Red Danube, The Iron Curtain, and The Red Menace, had all beaten I Married a Communist to American movie screens. The film flopped in its early, limited release, and a bewildered Hughes spent months searching for a new title, before re-releasing the film in the summer of 1950 under its new name.

“It’s a cinematic curio from a very strange time in Hollywood history. Here is The Woman on Pier 13.”

N.S.: There never was any “witch-hunt hysteria” or “anti-Communist hysteria.” I’m unaware of anyone who lost his livelihood “merely by being suspected of Communist sympathies,” and Red Eddie doesn’t name any such people. “The threat of blacklisting affected virtually everyone in Hollywood…” That’s another lie. John Wayne, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, et al. were never under any such threat. Patriots like Ward Bond, conversely, were, as communists sought revenge for Bond’s fight against Communism, and Stepin Fetchit (Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, 1902-1985) was blacklisted for 19 years, due to pressure from black supremacists (aka “civil rights” activists), and was only able to resume his career by submitting to and joining the black supremacist murder cult, the nation of islam.) Red Eddie: “… certain themes and emotions engendered by anti-Communist hysteria, paranoia and betrayal most prominently, definitely found their way into the movies, especially crime pictures.”

Paranoia and betrayal are central to crime movies, because they’re central to criminals. Many crime pictures of the time Red Eddie was speaking were themselves written or produced by Communists. Red Eddie: “To ignore or willfully erase the politics of the era, is to completely miss the context in which the films were created. It’s like discussing the allies’ triumph in WWII, while simultaneously denying the Holocaust ever happened.”

Red Eddie twists the life of Howard Hughes, just as he twists everything of political relevance, depicting Hughes as if his anti-Communism were his worst personal characteristic. Actually, Howard Hughes was a vicious man and an incompetent studio owner (he destroyed RKO) whose anti-Communism was one of his few redeeming characteristics. (E.g., he produced Jet Pilot, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring John Wayne, in 1949, but let it gather dust on the shelf until releasing it in 1957, by which time it was technologically obsolete.) Red Eddie: “Robert Ryan, possibly the most liberal actor in Hollywood, later said he’d only agreed to play the lead role, because he feared that Hughes would ruin his career otherwise.”

Translation: Robert Ryan was possibly the most rabidly Communist of all actors in Hollywood. (He knew better than to join the Party, so he was never blacklisted, just as other crypto-Communists like his friend Richard Brooks, whom Ryan knew from the War, when he and Brooks were both “respectable” shirkers, were also not blacklisted.)

Hughes didn’t ruin people’s careers over their politics; he did so for entirely capricious reasons.

“The script had been rejected by Eagle-Lion Pictures, but Hughes bought it to use as a sort of litmus test.”

If that were so, then the screenwriters and directors (Muller cited John Cromwell and Nicholas Ray) who refused to work on the script would all have landed on the “blacklist.” But they didn’t. Only Joseph Losey, of the men Muller listed, would later be blacklisted, but that wasn’t because he refused to work on the script in question. Losey was a member of the Communist Party USA. He was also an awful director who would later, in England, specialize in decadence (Darling, 1965).

As David in TN observed,

“Last week with The Woman on Pier 13’s intro Red Eddie went over the top. He threw in ‘Holocaust Deniers,’ regarding those who don’t worship the ‘blacklist victims.’”

N.S.: Red Eddie’s playing of the Holocaust card was just sick.

Red Eddie: “To ignore or willfully erase the politics of the era…” That is exactly what Red Eddie is doing.

But I’ll see his Holocaust card, and raise him the Soviet Holocaust, which was many times worse than Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews.

Hitler slaughtered some six million Jews in the Holocaust, but between Stalin’s Ukrainian Holodomor and Russian Holocaust, he slaughtered some 20 million civilians. And that’s not even including his war crimes, in which his troops raped and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of German civilians.

The American Communists whom Red Eddie depicts as “blacklist victims” sought to do to America what Stalin did to the USSR. They wanted to imprison tens of millions of Americans in gulags, slaughter tens of millions, and steal everyone else’s private property.

Norma and Ben Barzman, and Adrian and Anne Scott, were just a few names of Reds, some of whom (especially crime movie producer Adrian Scott) were lionized by Muller.

The worst thing about the politics of the postwar Reds is that once republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Senate turned on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, one of America’s greatest patriots, the Communists began taking over, often hiding behind the so-called “civil rights” movement. Today, “America” is a racial socialist/Communist country.

The problem isn’t that Red Eddie brings politics into his discussions of postwar crime movies, it’s that that he perpetually lies about the politics and the history.

I Married a Communist/The Woman on Pier 13: Red Eddie Muller’s Intro and Outro