“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This leftist shibboleth, credited to author and activist Audre Lorde, is, of course, nonsense. It’s quite possible to use valuable tools created by an oppressor to take down that oppressor. In fact, I plan to engage in a bit of this next fall.

That’s when the Anti-Communist Film Festival, a plan I am cooking up with the help of several individual donors and some important conservative foundations, will premier at a theater in Washington, D.C. Showcasing some of Hollywood’s best pro-freedom movies, the idea is to help the movie industry—and hopefully a lot of young Americans—rediscover the value of liberty and the iniquity of socialism. 

The idea for the Anti-Communist Film Festival came to me in August, although the concept has been percolating in my subconscious for years. I regularly attend film festivals, most often at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. One of my favorite annual events is the DC Noir festival, featuring film noir movies that were popular in the postwar era. Gritty, well-written, and featuring gorgeous cinematography influenced by German Impressionism and crime novels, they often include mysterious femme fatales and are drenched in shadows and intrigue—classics like Out of the Past (1947), Double Indemnity (1944), and He Walked by Night (1948) come to mind.

This year, while watching these films I realized something: many of great the postwar era films are also anti-communist films, and some of them are very good. Trial (1955), The Woman on Pier 13 (1949, originally titled I Married a Communist), Night People (1954)—these are films with quality actors, rich cinematography, and enthralling, adult scripts. Many are still strikingly relevant. I Married a Communist reveals the savagery with which communists treat those who try to defect. And 1955’s Trial depicts a communist organizer as nothing more than a con man who will send an innocent minority defendant to the gallows if he can thereby raise money and create a martyr for the “new world coming.” 

In 1951’s I Was a Communist for the FBI, an FBI agent disrupts a Marxist plan that is “a hellbrew of hate,” featuring urban riots intended to “divide and conquer,” by pitting the races against each other and then making profits off the court cases. One character in the film is a high school teacher who declares, “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?”

Similarly, 1952’s My Son John tells the story of a family disrupted upon discovering that their son who works in Washington is, in fact, a communist spy. John speaking coldly of his commitment to communist ideals, tells his mother that “there are more important things than a mother’s love for her son.”

In his book The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s, Ohio University professor Robert Miklitsch argues that some of the criticism anti-communist films received during their heyday was not about aesthetics, but politics. Films like The Whip Hand (1951); Big Jim McLain (1952); and Walk East on Beacon! (1952), Miklitsch wrote,

tended to be made “on the cheap,” [and] have been derogated by critics for their aesthetic quality. Since they appeared to promote a right-wing agenda unlike left, progressive pre-1948 noir, they have also been excoriated for their politics. In a word, these anticommunist films are—to invoke Daniel Leab’s verdict on I Married a Communist— “awful.”

Critic Arthur Lev was quite savage towards I Married a Communist, Miklitsch noted, which prompted him to ask, “Is it possible that Lev’s categorical judgment of I Married a Communist is an alibi for his real criticism—that the film is visually ‘undistinguished’ because it is politically reprehensible?”

The answer, of course, is yes. Many of the great anti-communist films of the past were produced by the best talent of the day. The cinematographer of film noir classic Out of the Past was of Hollywood’s greatest, Nicholas Musuraca. The screenplay for I Was a Communist for the FBI was written by Crane Wilbur, who also co-authored the classic He Walked by Night and scripted and directed films such as Canon City and The Story of Molly X. My Son John stars Helen Hayes, who was then known as “the first lady of American theater.”

In more recent years, some great anti-communist films have been made, but not nearly in the numbers to challenge liberal Hollywood. There is The Lives of Others (2006), the great drama about the iniquity of the East German Stasi. There is Mr. Jones (2019) which, as I noted in a review in The New Criterion, “focuses on the work of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who in the early 1930s revealed the lies told by Stalin and the Soviet propaganda machine about the Ukraine famine—in which millions of people were starved to death in the name of ‘modernizing’ Russia.”

Mixing the old with the new, I came up with a list of 20 great anti-communist films to be included in the festival.

• The Lives of Others (2006)
• I Married a Communist (1949) (aka The Woman on Pier 13)
• Trial (1955)
• Night People (1954)
• The Thief (1952)
• Back to School (1986)
• Empire of the Sun (1987)
• Man on a Tightrope (1953)
• Torn Curtain (1966)
• Hail, Caesar! (2016)
• One, Two, Three (1961)
• Mr. Jones (2019)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
• Red Dawn (1984)
• My Son John (1952)
• The Death of Stalin (2017)
• I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951)
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
• Freedom’s Fury (2006)
• State of Control (2016)

Hollywood has long been considered a lost cause—a left-wing, woke, sexually perverse joke bereft of creativity. Currently, the most critically acclaimed film is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, about a leftist “revolutionary” who wages a guerrilla war against conservatives.

In his book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters—Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, conservative author Allan H. Riskind reveals how many communists were in Hollywood in the postwar years. One of them was director Abraham Polonsky, who once described a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) this way: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.”

Polonsky wrote the 1948 film Force of Evil, which depicts capitalism as a cruel and cutthroat system. In the intro to the DVD special edition of Force of Evil, Martin Scorsese called Polonsky’s blacklisting “a great loss” for American cinema. Film historian Imogen Sara Smith provided commentary for the DVD, in which she noted that many of the creators of 1950s film noir had been survivors of the Great Depression, when the American free market system came into question. At the same time, and without defending what she called the “sadistic” tactics of Joe McCarthy, Smith admitted that many blacklisted writers “did attack capitalism and the American way.” Like many in today’s Hollywood, they were really just accomplished propagandists. “It’s no wonder the government wanted to shut these people down,” Smith concluded.

The Anti-Communist Film Festival, planned for the fall of 2026 in Washington, D.C., does not want to shut down filmmakers or tell them what kind of movies to make. We just want to offer the audience the truth about an evil pseudo-religious cult, which has caused more damage to the world than anything that could be depicted in a disaster movie.