The Red and the Black

The working premise of this chapter is that, in the 1950s, film noir and anticommunism form a double helix and that even the most notorious of these “red menace” films—The Whip Hand (1951), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Walk East on Beacon! (1952), and Big Jim McLain (1952)--is central to our appreciation of classic noir. A close reading of these films’ generic elements, whether “thriller,” melodrama, or semi-documentary, suggests that the Cold War noir represents a critical moment in the genre’s transition from the 1940s to the 1950s and from expressionism to neo-realism. Although the ideological motifs of these ‘50s “red scare” noirs range from communism and germ warfare (The Whip Hand), union subversion and African Americans (I Was a Communist for the FBI), espionage and the space race (Walk East on Beacon!) to HUAC and All-American masculinity (Big Jim McLain), the ‘50s anticommunist noir, despite its manifest glorification of the nuclear family, law enforcement (FBI), and audiovisual surveillance (television), is frequently troubled by the implications of these selfsame institutions and technologies.