The Red Menace

My uncle told me this was the WORST film he ever directed. He was a contract director and the studio wanted him to make a movie about Communism. "This McCarthy thing seems to be catching on," he said they told him, "and we need a film quick." They gave him six weeks and $100,000 budget - an unheard-of pittance for a feature film, even in 1949. He didn't have a cast, a crew, a script, or even a story line. So he called friends who had very little screen time, knowing no "Name" actor would commit to a project like this. Besides, most of Uncle Gordon's actor friends were Western stars, like Roy Rogers.

Gordon got a writer from the studio to pen the script, but he quit half-way through filming. So he and another actor had to complete the script, adding to it as they went. At the start of each day's filming, they had no idea what they were going to do.

But, as promised, Uncle Gordon got this movie made on time and on budget.

It saddened him a little, knowing that with all his directing credits, he would probably be most remembered for the worst film he ever made. He was proud of the rest of his filmography, and enjoyed directing well into his 70's.

As for me, well, I think its kinda cool that my Great Uncle had a lot to do with the making of a cult classic. Its no Rocky Horror, Reefer Madness, or even Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but in the genre of ridiculously bad films, Red Menace can hold its celluloid head high.

Just remember, Bud Springsteen had to work under extreme conditions to churn out a film this bad.

Although the movie is 70 years old, its message rings ever more true now in the 2020s, as the evils it warned against then, are more thoroughly entwined into current day politics and society

communism demanding slavelike servitude and obedience, and wilfully encouraging historical revisionism are an ever present threat as even today our history is under threat by people who seek to push a mandela effect on people and gaslight away truth, and act violently towards anyone who dares question it or seek to maintain truth

of all movies that need a remake to keep the message alive, THIS is one badly in need to be revisited.

During the late forties and early fifties, there was the Witch Hunt in USA, war hunt against communists anywhere. And In Hollywood in particular. This one is good, tense, but without any subtle element of any kind. It is very very didactic, especially the scene in the class room when a "student" asks his teacher what doesn mean democracy in a political system where there is the dictatorship of proletariat. It is too heavy loaded in terms of propaganda. However it remains a good film in line of BIG JIM MC LAIN or I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI. Good tough directing and acting too. But this one is slightly better than the two, I think.

World War Two vet Robert Rockwell finds himself rooked by lying land developers, and falls in with some communists, particularly pretty Hanna Axmann-Rezzori. Meanwhile, Shepherd Menken finds himself in trouble with the Party because a poem of his noted that Marx had historical antecedents.

It seems to be a rule of Hollywood movies that no pretty woman remains a communist when loved by a handsome leading man, and that's pretty much what happens here. Meanwhile, in ideology land, the multi-racial, tolerant views of the party begin to shred in the presence of individual thought and sympathy.

It's one of the many virulently anti-Communist movies made in Hollywood in this period in an effort to avoid losing the entire studio to the Blacklist -- just the highly priced writers and directors. The script by Albert Demond and Gerald Geraghty makes a play at intellectual fairness by noting the CPUSA work in unionization and civil rights. Having done that, it goes off the rails in a manner that Red Channels would approve of.

When I grew up, the Iron Curtain existed. The Soviet Union was a Place that did not allow its Citizen to travel freely. And so it was easy to renounce the Place and look for no further explanations.

At the same time, communism stood for equality and class warfare, allowing for only one class, the working class, since allowing for different classes of people was just Another Word for inequality and injustice.

Now, if you could therefore renounce equality and justice by renouncing the Soviet Union, which, through communism, stood for these qualities, why, then you could defend the injustices and inequalities you wanted to keep by Calling every wish for equality and justice to be the same as a wish for communism and that is just what has been done in the USA for the last 70 years, which this film bears witness to.

The Soviet Union was a failed system but that has Little to do with communism because, although the SU called itself "communist" it was not a system of equality and justice and instead just a dictatorship ensuring that a Little Group of people had all the wealth and all the Power just like in the USA, where the same was ensured by somewhat different means.

How to achieve equality and justice is still a problem to be solved but it will never be solved by simply Writing these qualities off by Calling them "communism".

This film illustrates the propaganda being used against the American Citizen and is helpful to understand the brainwash that Americans seem to suffer from. I therefore give it 5 stars.