almost desperate to detect a sinister communist influence behind even
the most seemingly innocent film motifs. In the present volume, how-
ever, the presence of leftist ideas is considered a positive virtue. Mean-
while, this volume also pays significant attention to the suppression of
leftist ideas and to the extent to which American filmmakers have felt it
necessary (partly because of pressures such as those brought to bear in
the HUAC investigations) to suppress leftist ideas, or at least to express
leftist concerns in extremely oblique and muted ways.

Michael Denning The Cultural Front ( 1996) has been an especially
valuable forerunner to this effort. Denning's argument that the legacy of
the proletarian culture of the 1930s has in fact remained far more influ-
ential in subsequent American culture is important and largely convinc-
ing. However, Denning points out that the most important evidence of
this influence is found not in literature, but in popular culture, particu-
larly film. Indeed, film has long been a part of American leftist culture,
from the early working-class silents, to the work of Orson Welles, the
"Hollywood Ten," and other leftists (many of them members of the
Communist Party) in the middle part of the century, to the countercul-
tural films of the 1960s and 1970s, to the recent political films of new
filmmakers such as John Sayles and Oliver Stone. On the other hand, the
relationship between film and the American Left has been a complex
one. For one thing, there have been far more antileftist films than leftist
ones; for another, most leftist filmmakers have been forced by the exi-
gencies of the American film industry to work within constraints that are
highly inimical to the expression of genuinely leftist political ideas.

The films to be included in this guide come from a number of catego-
ries. For example, many of the earliest films discussed are silents made
by working-class directors, often with the financial support of labor un-
ions. American industrial capitalism and American organized labor, a
response to the growing exploitation of workers by the new capitalism,
both came into full force at the beginning of the twentieth century. Film
arose at approximately the same time, so it is not surprising that both la-
bor and capital would employ the new medium as a tool in their efforts
to popularize their positions. Indeed, as Steven Ross has argued in his
important recent book, Working-Class Hollywood ( 1998), film became a
crucial part of American working-class culture even as early as the first
decade of the century and continued so until the political repression as-
sociated with World War I put a virtual halt to the making of such films
(and to radical organized labor activity in general). Even pioneer silent
filmmaker D. W. Griffith, although often remembered for his racist poli-
tics in films such as The Birth of a Nation, had certain working-class loyal-
ties and made numerous early films of protest against the exploitation of
workers by emergent American capitalism. And, of course, Charlie
Chaplin (essentially exiled from America in the 1950s because of his left-

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