In the battle for mass opinion in the Cold War, few weapons were more powerful than the cinema. From the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution through to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, millions of people worldwide went to movie theatres every week, from the rundown fleapits of Calcutta to the airconditioned dream palaces of California. What they saw and heard on the big screen could have a profound influence on their comprehension of the Cold War–whether it was via British-made espionage comedies of the 1950s, East German-made outer-space adventures of the 1960s, American-made ‘paranoid’ thrillers of the 1970s,...

It is the mid-1980s and we are about to be treated to a cinematic tale of male bonding, intrigue and high drama, one inspired by real-life events and illuminated by dazzling dance sequences. The movie is Taylor Hackford’s White Nights. The rather incongruous setting is Soviet Russia.

Kolya Rodchenko, the world’s greatest ballet dancer, is terrified when the Boeing 747 on which he is travelling from London to Japan is forced to make an emergency crash-landing in Siberia. Rodchenko faces double jeopardy, for a decade earlier the Russian defected to the United States, mirroring the bold action taken by the...

His family loved him dearly but knew there was something wrong with John (played by Robert Walker). Perhaps it was because he had ‘more degrees than a thermometer’, and had grown apart intellectually from his simple, wellmeaning parents. Maybe it was because he spent too long away from their small home town, in Washington, DC, where he was mysteriously working for the government.

Dan and Lucille Jefferson (Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes) had recently grown to tolerate their son’s effete and snobbish manner. But his failure to return home in time to see his clean-cut younger brothers depart for combat...

If proof were needed that literary images could play as important a role in the cultural Cold War as those viewed at the cinema, it can be found in the work of the British writer George Orwell. By the time of his death from tuberculosis at 46 years of age in January 1950, Orwell was regarded by many as the finest political writer in English since Jonathan Swift.² Two generations later, many would class him as one of the most influential political writers of the twentieth century, and, paradoxically given his early demise, a key player in the East–West...

It is the near future. Chris Cronyn, a Californian scientist (played by Peter Graves), claims to have established contact with Mars using a hydrogenpowered radio transmitter. The scientist who originally invented the transmitter, Nazi criminal Franz Calder (Herbert Berghof), is then sprung from jail by the Russians and from a laboratory hidden in the Andes begins to spy on the American’s communications. When news spreads that the aliens have confirmed their existence to Cronyn by completing the mathematical formula for pi, Mars mania breaks out across the world. When it is subsequently revealed that the Martians run a perfect economy...

Generating and maintaining media support had been a relatively easy task for the American government during the Second World War. Newspapers, broadcasters and filmmakers were not beyond criticising Washington’s tactics, but only a few questioned its motives and overall strategy. The nation had, after all, been attacked, and was fighting a war in which men and women were dying on various battlefronts. On top of this, notwithstanding its unprecedented scale, the conflict lasted only four years. The Cold War was different. Neither side had officially declared war, comparatively few Americans came face to face with the enemy, and the conflict...

This chapter shifts our focus away from the commercial Hollywood feature film intended mainly for domestic consumption, to the government- produced documentary aimed at audiences overseas, particularly those located in the developing world. This is an area of Cold War propaganda that hitherto has been largely overlooked, yet which formed a key weapon in the American government’s publicity arsenal. The chapter is the first of a pair dealing with the role of film during a new and turbulent decade for both the Cold War and the United States internally: the 1960s. Several issues dominated sixties America, but fewer caused more...

So far, this study has centred on those engaged in Cold War propaganda behind the screen – Hollywood producers, directors and scriptwriters, and government bodies like the USIA and CIA. But what of the part played in the battle for mass opinion by those who appeared in front of the camera? Ever since the creation of Hollywood’s ‘star system’ in the 1920s, America’s cinema-goers had developed a close affinity with Hollywood’s leading actors and actresses. By 1945, for millions of Americans, film stars were little less than life coaches: in everything from fashion to family life, from language to politics. In...

Film historians differ fundamentally on Hollywood output of the 1970s. Citing the early sixties-set teen movies American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and Animal House (John Landis, 1978), some see it as essentially nostalgiadriven and backward-looking. Pointing to the right-wing cop/vigilante movies Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), others pronounce it reactionary, even fascist. Focusing on the phenomenal success of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), other historians see it as a major step on the road towards the present-day dominance of the international film market by ‘high-concept’, special-effects-based blockbusters. Still others...

Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory in the November 1980 presidential elections provided spectacular evidence of the uniquely intimate relationship between politics and film in the United States. To this day, no other country has chosen a movie star (former or current) as its political leader.² Reagan’s entry into the White House consummated the long-standing marriage between Washington and Hollywood during the Cold War. The Gipper, as he was known affectionately by the White House press corps, after his breakthrough role in Lloyd Bacon’s 1940 sporting biopic Knute Rockne–All American Hero, had been a prominent anti-communist crusader on and off camera...

Female Soviet apparatchiks spellbound by Parisian lingerie. Emotionally deranged subversives betraying their wholesome American families for the communist cause. Giant alien robots espousing nuclear disarmament. Revamped Old Testament stories of freedom versus dictatorship. Brave black Americans campaigning for racial progress. GIs forced to play Russian roulette for the entertainment of their Viet Cong captors. Globe-trotting Western spies slaying KGB assassins with a hi-tech gizmo in one hand and a curvaceous blonde in another. Kafkaesque CIA agents murdering their colleagues for oil. Muscle-bound Russian cops beating America’s new drugdealing enemies to a pulp.

Hollywood made hay with the Cold War, plundering...