Robert E. Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator, asked Lawson:
“Mr. Lawson, are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”
A review of Hate in the time of old movies by Bernie Dowling.
This is a timely book with wholesale attacks being made on academics, writers, artists, health professionals, and filmmakers by the Zionist lobby seeking to suppress criticism of the genocide.
Or, as the author put it:
Now is an appropriate time to look back at the Hollywood blacklist, when demagogues destroyed the lives and livelihoods of creative people for doing their jobs — for holding up mirrors to social actors who hated the view. — Bernie Dowling, August 2026.
Journalist and playwright Bernie Dowling has made a name for himself with a remarkable body of work on film noir — seven or eight books ranging from picture books and studies of noir to Iraqi Icicle, his first novel and a neo-noir thriller.
Now, with this book, he has saved his most hard-hitting work for last: a fierce condemnation of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist.
It is a truly remarkable achievement, mixing frivolity with gallows humour and cutting through the tension of a post-war society hounded by hypocrites resorting to violent, totalitarian tactics and conducting their campaign in a profoundly subversive manner.
Dowling uses the conventions of noir to expose the hypocrisy, fear and political persecution that lay beneath the surface — reminding us that behind the accusations and blacklists were real people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed for doing their jobs and holding up a mirror to a society that hated what it saw.
The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, put the Humphrey Bogart film Action in the North Atlantic on a list of films exhibiting communist propaganda. The reason in this case was that the film ‘praised maritime unions for their contribution to the war effort and the advancement of their working-class members. Hoover hated unions for reasons beyond the fact that some did have openly communist leaders. Such leadership was not part of Hoover’s narrative, as his main mission was to uncover undeclared communists in the labor unions.‘ – from p60 Hate in the time of old movies.
I’ve just finished Hate in the Time of Old Movies, and I highly recommend it—not only to lovers of film, but to anyone who wants to understand more about the repression that can emerge from within supposedly democratic institutions.
You only have to look at the repression exerted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against the two students who called out MIT for its complicity in the genocide to see that these questions are far from being merely historical.
The book is a fascinating account of how political persecution and censorship operated through institutions that claimed to be defending democracy, and a reminder of how easily democratic forms can be used to pursue profoundly undemocratic ends.
Ian Curr, 2 September 2026