UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Tony Shaw

Examines the role of American filmmakers in the ideological struggle against communism

At a moment when American film reflects a deepening preoccupation with the Bush administration's War on Terror, this authoritative and timely book offers the first comprehensive account of Hollywood's propaganda role during the defining ideological conflict of the twentieth century: the Cold War. In an analysis of films dating from America's first Red Scare in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Tony Shaw examines the complex relationship between filmmakers, censors, politicians, and government propagandists.

Movies, Shaw demonstrates, were at the center of the Cold War's battle for hearts and minds. Hollywood's comedies, love stories, musicals, thrillers, documentaries, and science fiction shockers played a critical dual role: on the one hand teaching millions of Americans why communism represented the greatest threat their country had ever faced, and on the other selling America's liberal-capitalist ideas around the globe.

Drawing on declassified government documents, studio archives, and filmmakers' private papers, Shaw reveals the different ways in which cinematic propaganda was produced, disseminated, and received by audiences during the Cold War. In the process, he addresses subjects as diverse as women's fashions, McCarthyism, drug smuggling, Christianity, and American cultural diplomacy in India. Anyone seeking to understand wartime propaganda today will find striking contemporary resonance in his conclusions about Hollywood's versatility and power.

“Politically nuanced, historically contextualized, and internationally informed, Hollywood's Cold War is essential reading for anyone interested in this fascinating subject. Tony Shaw's analysis is both penetrating and comprehensive. The broad range of films he studies will greatly expand conventional understandings of the Cold War's impact on American filmmaking.”

Christian G. Appy, author of Patriots:
The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides

Tony Shaw is reader in international history at the University of Hertfordshire.

American Studies / Film Studies
352 pp., 42 illus.
$29.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-612-5
$98.00 library cloth edition, ISBN 978-1-55849-611-8
November 2007
For sale in the U.S. and Canada only

A volume in the series Culture, Politics, and the Cold War

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