From Newsgroup: rec.arts.books
I've seen the movie The Red Menace (1949) described as
"every line is a policy statement", which seem so.
Working on my memory, it has such cute dialog that
I always thought it would read good if it were entirely
printed out as a text. It has such sweet dialog,
something like this:
Bill: Who died and left you the fancy library?
Molly: You're referring to the books I love.
Bill: "The Coming Dawn", I always thought Commies
peddled bunk, I didn't know they came as cute as you.
Molly: I used to think that, then I realized that
the Party always was behind everything good, like the
war against Fascism, or the fight for the rights of
the Jews and the Negros.
Bill: Oh, I can't get excited about any causes
anymore, except the Boy Scouts, and Santa Claus.
Molly: I never got to know Santa Claus.
Bill: You must have come up on a fast elevator.
Molly: It wasn't always like this..... factory...
sweatshop..... starvation pay......
Now we get to quotes included in imdb:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041791/quotes/
Nina Petrovka: Just suppose I would ask you what
communism is.
Bill Jones: Well... It's the idea of everybody
sharing things equally, isn't it?
Nina Petrovka: [chuckles] That's the average American
opinion. You better get to my classes and get your
eyes open.
Then it opens to the Red class with a sign on the
wall:
Stalin Says: Dictatorship means
Unlimited Power, power based on
violence, not on law.
That's actually a Lenin quote, from his 1919 article
On Dictatorship, according to Stalin, though I haven't
seen that article in any form, and I forget where Stalin
said it, perhaps in his book Questions On Leninism. More
noticeable is that it is the English translation from
the 1920's which was changed in the reissues from the
word "violence" to "force" in the late 1930's, and with
reduced referencing, long before the movie the Red Menace
came out in 1949. There's a grain of truth in that, as
American Communist circles tended to be lax in destroying
their out of date books, like Political Economy by
Leontiev, or ABC's Of Communism by Bukharin, literature
that was sentenced to death, according to the 1950's book
I Was A Communist For The FBI.
There's some "depth" too, so irony, whatever that means,
that the Intelligentsia seems to say is so important,
happens when corporate anti-communism leads to the death
of Solomon, Party Renegade, after he triumphantly tears
up his Party Card in a rousing patriotic speech
denouncing the Party's race-baiting, as the Party
subsequently sends a copy of his Communist Party membership
to everywhere he applies for a job, and is fired as it's
against company policy to hire communists. And more
"depth", the movie is perhaps implying if he became a
raving anti-communist he might have become employable, but
his despair leads to his suicide at Party headquarters:
"communist killed by fascists!" goes The Daily Toiler,
for the second time, though this time it wasn't a
murder, or it would say it if the typist Sam didn't also
become a born-again patriot, invoking Nathan Hale
against the communists.
The plotline on en.wikipedia.org is especially inaccurate;
Bill, and the other characters, are unphased by the
beating-murder at the class, and the headline that the questioning-in-the-classroom "communist killed by fascists",
like he really didn't have much faith in the Boy Scouts and
Santa Claus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Menace_(film)
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