The mob’s true role—more often than not—was elided. And even when the movies dealt ostensibly with mob influence within the unions, the force of the message was often subverted. For instance, On the Waterfront, which concerned the gangster-dominated longshore union in the New York area, was interpreted widely as a parable depicting the role of Communists.18 Similarly, Arthur Miller has told of writing a screenplay describing how gangsters murder and threaten union opponents, but studio executives wanted him to change the mobsters into Communists.19 According to James Agee, John Huston in his screenplay for Key Largo “wanted gangsters to represent ‘everything that is wrong with postwar America,’ but this intent, Agee says, was excised from the final cut.”

Coincidentally, the thematic trend toward gangster movies began as mobsters assumed more influence in the industry. Strikingly, according to the Hollywood left, these “gangster pictures played” a major role “in causing legislation against prohibition,” enabling an illicit mob-dominated business to become a legitimate mob-dominated business.21 Another critic has argued that “under the pressure of gangsters, art was being abandoned in favor of fast-buck productions designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of society.”22

Edward Dymtryk, who directed Crossfire—a rare cinematic attack on anti-Semitism—argued that actors, being creative, leaned toward the left since they were thinking “in terms of new things all the time, not in terms of set things.” Dymtryk, who eventually became a “friendly witness” before congressional committees investigating the left in Hollywood, suggested further that as actors become stars—affluent and popular—they begin to lean toward the right, fearing that what they possess may be taken. The tensions between and among Hollywood’s creative and “non-creative” forces spurred contradictions and temblors that pushed stars particularly from left to right, besides sparking tremendous insecurity among them.113

Moguls, mobsters, and stars had numerous opportunities to encounter each other. There were the racetracks, like Santa Anita. There were the mobster-run gambling ships, where stars often performed and moguls lost huge bankrolls. Meyer Lansky says the ships “offered America’s entertainers their most remunerative live venues.”130 And after the ships were shut down, the entire operation simply moved inland to Las Vegas, where there was even more money to be made.

Joseph Schenck, head of production and then board chairman at Fox—as well as president of United Artists theaters—was quite friendly with Willie Bioff during his tenure at IATSE. Schenck entertained the corrupt labor leader in his home and gave him an inscribed photograph. He bought Bioff 1,000 shares of Fox stock, 1,000 shares of Consolidated Oil, and 500 shares of Continental Can and provided him with $95,000 for the purchase of his sprawling Southern California ranch.7 At Roselli’s trial, Schenck argued that these gifts were just extortion, remuneration provided out of fear; others saw them as bribes to buy labor peace.

However, not all the Jewish moguls consistently opposed fascism. Harry Cohn, the mogul with probably the closest connections to mobsters, admired Benito Mussolini. Non-Jewish powers in Hollywood, such as Walt Disney and the industry’s prime funder, A. P. Giannini of the Bank of America, also looked fondly on Il Duce. In 1936 Giannini welcomed Carolo Roncoroni, president of Italy’s Fascist National Confederation of Business and a member of the Joint Executive of the Fascist Confederation of Industrials, to Hollywood to discuss cooperative filmmaking with Rome. The following year, during the making of Snow White, Disney visited Italy and was entertained by Mussolini himself in his private villa. Hal Roach, another mogul, became friendly with Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator’s son, and formed a joint venture with him, backed by MGM. Roach was furious when the war interrupted this grand alliance, arguing angrily that it failed because the “Jewish people in the picture business didn’t like it.”19 Joseph Breen, one of the more influential forces in the movie industry, was another of the numerous anti-Semites populating an industry that was said to be dominated by Jews.20

To be sure, there was a disproportionately high number of Jewish moguls—just as there was an over-representation of those with roots in northwest Europe in the U. S. elite generally—a ratio that somehow failed to ignite a furor. And, as Arthur Liebman has written, “the Jewish contribution to the Left in the United States during the twentieth century ranks the highest of any immigrant or ethnic group.”59 There was no mystery to this phenomenon either. Those who feel the most pain often scream the loudest; the victims of bias often feel driven into protest movements. This explains why African Americans also have been disproportionately represented in protest movements during the second half of the twentieth century.60 But this intelligence agent was suggesting something far more treacherous and menacing. He seemed to be harking back to a classical anti-Semitism and the canard that there was a conspiracy to establish hegemony by Jews of all classes.

Stephen Vaughn has written that Warner Bros. “fired more than any other studio” after the labor unrest. “Jack Warner,” he says, “was among those who retreated from liberalism. He began to reassess his politics soon after the war. After strikers picketed his studio, he claimed that he was the ‘victim of a gigantic communist conspiracy’ and vowed never to make another ‘liberal’ movie. From then on, he said, he would vote for Republicans.”83 Politically minded screenwriter John Wexley recalls running into Jack Warner “that day after a lot of fighting took place” at his studio; the two were “in a steam bath, by chance. He said, ‘I saw you on that goddamn picket line. Stop striking. Fuck off!’ He was angry. I was just a yapping dog annoying him.”84 Like a number of other moguls, Jack Warner was under grave stress, faced as he was with unhappy workers, unforgiving anti-Semites, and an uncertain economy at home and abroad.

Referring to his battle with this studio, Herb Sorrell contended that “Mr. Disney had more Communists than any other … studio at the time this strike took place.” Why? Sorrell replied that “Mr. Disney created more Communists with his substandard wage scales and the way he handled his people.”89 This comment reveals the secret of the Reds’ success in Hollywood: the enforcement of draconian labor policies while the studios were obviously generating obscene amounts of wealth made it easier for radicals to make inroads among workers.

More often than not, however, the studios’ class predilections were uniform both off-screen and on. Will Hays and Joseph Breen, the official “censors” designated to ensure that sexual and other ostensibly offensive subjects did not make their way into movies, “intervened to have the studio change dialogue” so one movie “would show miners’ condition[s] improving and imply that workers had little to complain about.” Breen, fearing encouragement of labor unrest, was reluctant to approve films that showed company property destroyed. Hays was part owner of a coal mine in southern Indiana, and Breen once handled public relations for the Peabody Coal Company; these experiences were thought to influence their ideas about how mines and miners should be portrayed in the movies. Both men were hesitant, in any case, to pass favorably on films that seemed to speak positively about unions.123 In fact, the “Hays Office” was established after World War I in partial response to growing concern about the proliferation of progressive themes in movies.

Still, Hollywood did have to make serious adjustments as a result of the war; these changes favored the conservative bent of MPAPAI. Box-office returns from the European and South American markets contributed heavily to Hollywood’s gross income in 1938, and provided almost all of the actual profit. This lucre from overseas was a partial result of Hollywood’s unscrupulous tactics against foreign, particularly European, moviemakers, including the manipulation of tariff barriers and the Production Code on “morality to ‘show’ people that foreign films were simply not American.” In search of capital during the war, many of the studios were driven further to deepen their relationship with “large investment banks.”1

As the war approached, Hollywood had discovered that its overseas market was disappearing. The mogul Samuel Goldwyn recommended reducing annual output from 500 films to 150, an idea New Masses castigated as akin to “crop limitation” or “plowing under every second and third row of B pictures.”129 What would a reduction in output mean for the jobs of CSU members, and would the studios simply be willing to absorb a strike since they wanted to reduce output anyway?