We all love a bit of Red Terror, especially if it is a training film made for the US Department of Defence. This short (28 minutes long) propaganda masterpiece is well worth finding and watching.
The plot is rather simple, an American man, Jerry Donovan who is taking his freedom for granted, wakes up one morning and his typical American town is now under Communist control. All his fellow citizens, including his family are now loyal communists. The film then follows his struggle against the communist system and his realisation that the democratic way is best. At all times the film is trying to scare the late 50′s early 60s audience of the terror of the Reds and therefore trying to galvanise them into a call of patriotic arms.

This film has a wonderful opening segment, which instantly drags you in as it shows what looks like a late 1950s normal American town yet it is being patrolled by Russian guards behind some barb-wire. A guard and a citizen talk about the freedoms of this American town.
“Americans they have too many Freedoms”
“That is another thing you must remember comrade, for one day it will be your job to destroy those bourgeois capitalist freedoms”.

This film, with its short running time is instantly onto the propaganda footing, painting the Russians as freedom hating and warlike, before the American narrator Jack Webb, (he of Dragnet fame steps in), with the emotive music in the background and sets the viewer up to be frightened of the dangers of Communism, how those evil men behind the iron curtain are studying the US to find ways to infiltrate and destroy the very fabric of our society that we take so much for granted.

But the film isn’t just about the evils of Communism, it also has a simpler message of obedience to the State, the American one, where being a good citizen, going to the PTA, doing your duty as a Reservist etc.. will help the country and it is simply your patriotic duty.

The opening credits roll which shows the film is directed by George Waggner, who also directed episodes of The Man from UNCLE and Batman, and in big bold letters the film states it was:
“Produced at WARNER BROS. STUDIOS Under the personal supervision of Jack L. Warner” telling you that this is essential viewing and that Warner Bros takes patriotism seriously. Warner also did the excellent I Was a Communist for the FBI which I re-watched last week – Review as always soon-ish

It follows the story over the course of 24 hours from one evening to the next evening. At the end of the first evening Jerry who has an easy life, a life with no responsibility and who happily shirks his public duty. Jerry really can’t be bothered playing with the kids, his dinner is on the table, he is missing extra curricular activities through lying, and is really just interested in having peace and quiet to watch his TV show.

The household is the embodiment of the American dream, 2 young children and a late teen daughter. His wife Helen is a nag (but only in the most patriotic of ways), who knows her place is to serve and raise children. Jerry, the unpatriotic fool that he is, dismisses her questioning of his laziness and his lack of public duty. The young kids are all clean and accept the authority of the parents and when his eldest daughter mentions her intention to get married, Jerry simply wont accept it as it questions his authority as the father and she accepts his dictum.

Jerry goes to bed, and Jack Webb, lurking outside like the ghost of Christmas past, reinforces the image that all is well in America, and sets the scene where the world that Jerry will wake up to will be different as the communists will be in control. A quick note here to say that the family lives on Arlington Road, and was this the inspiration for the film Arlington Road to use the same street as that too has an ordinary family living in ordinary street where evils of a different ideology creeps in and everything seems different?
After a restless sleep the father wakes up and the town is now under communist control.

Inspired by the following words of The Communist Manifesto

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the
bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most,what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

The film changes the dynamic of the family. The young children are not to be interrupted during their meal-time, the mother seems to have more of mind of her own (It seems to this viewer that the mother is better under Communism than 1960s America), and the father has no right to stop his daughter from undertaking volunteer farm-work for the collective. This has left Jerry feeling all confused about his role as a father and later decides to remedy this by taking the children to Sunday School where God can show the true way of American life. However this plan backfires as there is no Sunday School, but rather its museum of Great Soviet Inventions, where Jerry picking up a telephone screams at Soviet Curator
“This was not invented by a Russian, the mans name was Bell, Alexander Graham Bell and he was an American!”
Even in a short simple propaganda film, Hollywood history has to come in accentuate the American positives. Yes he became a naturalised American (9 years after the telephone invention), but he was Scottish first, Canadian second and American a distant third.

Jerry blows his stack at the communist system, where he has to produce quotas and where pumped up Communist officers encourage citizens to bring down the US government and it’s way of life. Naturally he gets arrested and has to face a show trial and experience Soviet justice.

On the stand he pleads his case, and pulls out the God card, where his actions are justified as the communists have desecrated a house of worship, however Jerry has forgotten his The Communist Manifesto which has this view on the religion and which galvanised groups such as The Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (Janet Greene week coming soon-ish)

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.
“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridicial ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The wife, Helen Donovan, does not stand up for her husband and her silence condemns him and at this point your realise where you have seen her before, she is Katherine Chancellor from The Young and the Restless. Anyway, the sentence and there can only be one, is death and this allows Jerry to make a speech aimed at the viewers about the evils of Communism, how freedom will triumph in the end, and part of you feels the executioner has let Jerry ramble on too long, instead he should have shot him quite quickly, but this would go against the point of the film as you have to cram in as much propaganda as possible.

The narrator jumps in and uses the opportunity to reinforce about the evils befallen the people across Soviet conquered states, before Jerry wakes up from his Red Nightmare, he is back in the good ol’ USA and he has awoken with a new sense of civic duty and pride and no longer take his freedoms for granted. All this to background music which makes you think of wholesomeness, godliness and apple pie.

As the American national anthem plays quietly in the background Jack Webb wraps up the film with praise to the armed forces, the white 1950-60s way of life, freedoms and liberty and by the end you can imagine then a white American clapping and hollering and hi-fiving each other in those college sweatshirts, where today’s audience would laugh and cringe at the overt patriotic and propaganda nature.

I have to be honest and say that I love watching propaganda films, it doesn’t matter which side is producing them. This film has a very simple story, the propaganda is very simple and blatant, yet for all it’s cheesiness and simplicity it does make you feel that it reflected what American society was thinking about Communism. I don’t believe America thought that it would lose a military war to the Soviets, such as one shown in Invasion USA, rather the fear was within. It was the weak-mindedness of it’s un-Christian, non-white American citizens who will allow communism to take hold and that is far harder to combat. I Was a Communist for the FBI also used similar ideas, where they presented that racial and social disharmony are the main threats to society and the only remedy is to join the armed forces or to uphold the American way of life through your active participation.

A short sharp sweet masterpiece of propaganda.