This Washington Post article, “‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is a holiday classic. The FBI thought it was communist propaganda,” as with many stories in that august publication, twists and leaves out some important factual information. While there are as many subjective interpretations of It’s A Wonderful Life as there are viewers, there is one glaring fact that readers of this WP article should be aware. Notice that the author did not mention all of the screenwriters of the film. Credited screenwriters are listed as Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. But there were many other uncredited writers on this movie project. Four of them were (or had been) members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) during this Stalinist period. These were Dorothy Parker, Dalton Trumbo, Michael Wilson, and Albert Maltz. Trumbo, Wilson, and Maltz soon became members of the infamous Hollywood Ten investigated (and indicted) by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. They later served prison terms for contempt of Congress. When you take this fact into consideration along with this statement from the article:
“The FBI claimed that two of its screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, ‘were very close to known Communists and on one occasion in the recent past … practically lived with known Communists and were observed’ eating lunch every day with “known Communists,”
perhaps one could see (rightly or wrongly) how the FBI would be drawn to its negative assessment of the film as red subversion. The dark sinister quality of the Pottersville segment in the film anticipated later film noir, in particular its stress on corrupt capitalistic decadence, criminality, and world-weary angst (themes developed by Trumbo in subsequent noirs such as Gun Crazy, The Prowler, He Ran All The Way, and The Boss while he was blacklisted). This factual data is drawn from the excellent book, Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner. The authors are not conservative anti-Communists but are prominent leftist scholarly authorities on the Hollywood Left in the 1930s-50s and the subsequent Blacklist. Ironically the film was panned by the film critic in the CPUSA publication, the New Masses.
UPDATE: A subsequent Internet search reveals that the above December 21, 2017 Washington Post article bears a remarkable resemblance to this December 25, 2014 In These Times piece, “When ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Was Accused of Being Communist Propaganda: When the movie first came out, it fell under suspicion from the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).”
11:17 pm on December 21, 2017
