By Fraser A. Sherman
American motion pictures, like the USA itself, have lengthy been occupied with the specter of outsiders posing as voters to break the yankee lifestyle. This e-book tracks real-world fears showing within the movies--Nazi brokers, Japanese-American spies, Communist social gathering subversives, Islamic sleeper cells--as good because the science-fiction threats that play to an identical fears, akin to alien body-snatchers and android doppelgangers. The paintings additionally examines fears encouraged by way of global battle I German spies, the Japanese-American internment and the McCarthyite witch-hunts and exhibits how those concerns, and others, performed out on monitor.
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Extra info for Screen Enemies of the American Way: Political Paranoia About Nazis, Communists, Saboteurs, Terrorists and Body Snatching Aliens in Film and Television
Example text
S. , sympathetic, but not Party members). Even though McCarthy couldn’t keep the number consistent from one speech to the next, the press seized on his charges and propelled him to national fame. Other anticommunist activists were even more extreme: Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, claimed that both Eisenhower and Truman were communist puppets. A big difference between this panic and the fears of Nazi infiltration is that where Nazi agents were passing themselves off as ordinary Americans, the Communist Party of the United States of America was easily identifiable as the public face of the supposed Soviet conspiracy against us.
When Hollywood began dipping its toe into pro-war movies in the thirties, the focus was almost entirely on the Nazi threat. Even as late as 1941, Secret Agent of Japan, despite the title, foresaw war with Germany, not Japan (a Leading Comics story from November 1941 likewise predicted Germany attacking Pearl Harbor, though only as a diversion from a Nazi attack on the mainland). Even after Pearl Harbor, there were suspicions that Germany had been the real mastermind behind it. One noteworthy exception, Across the Pacific, began filming in late 1941 as a dramatization of Robert Garson’s magazine serial “Aloha Means Goodbye,” about a Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
Throughout the book, Connor, helped by some of the other characters, provides readers with a checklist of Japanese schemes: buying up American land (yep, same worry as fifty years earlier), buying up cutting-edge businesses and gaining control of entire technologies by selling below cost in America while keeping American products out of Japan. Nakamato is frighteningly formidable: It has pull with the cops and influence with politicians, and when Smith and Connor go to a university video-technology lab to study a security tape, Nakamoto has the lab closed overnight (they donate a lot to the college).