It’s easy to dismiss R.G. Springsteen’s The Red Menace as dated anti-communist propaganda, but viewers who can see beyond the heavy-handed messages of the period will appreciate the film as a perfectly respectable noir (and one of the strongest from low-budget Republic Pictures). After the opening credits against a backdrop of an octopus, a postwar symbol warning that communism will devour the whole world, the film immerses us into thick noir atmosphere from the first scene: young G.I. Bill Jones (Robert Rockwell) and Nina Petrovka (Hannelore Axman) are fleeing nervously in a darkened taxi, the lights outside whizzing by like a dangerous past giving chase. From a sudden, third-party voiceover (“Why is this couple running away?”), we learn that Jones was recently recruited into “the Party,” where Nina, whose father was murdered as a party traitor back in Europe, has been a member seemingly because she has nothing better to do. While Jones is the protagonist who ultimately instigates his own — and others’ — liberation from the Party’s violence, the tale comes to life through the Party experiences of three women: besides Nina and her growing reluctance, we have naive Mollie O’Flaherty (Barbra Fuller), who prefers the party to her mother’s “Bible junk” but is primarily used as pretty bait to “entice young progressives into the Party,” and Yvonne Kraus, the obsessive party maniac (“She won’t be satisfied until they print the newspaper in red ink,” says a comrade) who descends into spectacular madness and is played by the over-the-top, scene-stealing Betty Lou Gerson who, viewers will be unsurprised to learn, went on to voice Cruella de Vil in Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). Shepard Menken plays poet Henry Solomon, whose initially enthusiastic party affiliation ends in tragedy (“You claim to fight against racial discrimination, but you never miss an opportunity to remind me that I’m a Jewish-American!”). Noir visuals are omnipresent in the form of gorgeous dark alleys, chiaroscuro closeups, and mirror reflections, like when Solomon’s disturbed reflection is framed on the wall as party brass accuse him of showing insufficient praise for Karl Marx.