• Interesting quotes from The Red Menace (1949)

    From Pluted Pup@plutedpup@outlook.com to rec.arts.movies.past-films,rec.arts.books,rec.arts.tv on Sun Dec 14 19:26:22 2025
    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    their out of date books, like Political Economy by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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