Happy holidays all! I thought you’d get a kick out of the following:
Wise Bread noted that the FBI considered “It’s a wonderful Life” — one of the most tear-inducing films ever IMHO!! — to be communist propoganda.
Unfortunately, Wise Bread only linked to two pages of the more than 2,000 pages in the FBI’s Communist Infiltration- Motion Picture Industry (COMPIC) FOIA file, but I left a comment to point readers there as well as to let them know about the FBI’s FOIA Reading Room.
File 10a has a list of films from 12/31/55 (this was a running memo from 1942 – 1958!) which include such subversive titles like A Song to Remember (bio of Chopin), Buck Privates Come Home (abbott & Costello), Keeper of the Flame (Tracy & Hepburn) and Salt of the Earth, the only film ever actually banned in the US, but later deemed “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
BoingBoing has more background on HUAC and the blacklisting of many directors, actors, and writers.
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