I Was a Communist for the FBI

Toward the end of Gordon Douglas’ I Was a Communist for the FBI, Mike Cvetic (the minimally emotive Frank Lovejoy) testifies to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the same McCarthy-era Congressional committee to which many Hollywood figures, including Walt Disney and Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan, named Communist sympathizers working in the film industry; these names included several masters of the noir cycle, generally resulting in banishment from the industry, if not the country. Unabashed in its anti-communism propaganda (pinkos are divisive, racist, atheistic murderers whose “only purpose is to convert America into the hands of the Soviet Union as a slave colony”), Douglas’ film follows Cvetic’s FBI undercover work as a communist partisan, a years-long secret assignment which he’s concealed even from his own family, including his son Dick (Ron Hagerthy), and which culminates in his desperate flight from the party with fellow commie Eve Merrick (Dorothy Hart). Somehow nominated for an Academy award for best documentary (Douglas inserts a minute or two of actual footage of the “red riots”), the film is more significant as a historical document than a specimen of the noir cycle, but a handful of scenes will satisfy even the most discerning noir tastes.