Journalist Mark Judge, whose book The Devil’s Triangle chronicled his life’s derailment at the hands of Christine Blasey Ford during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, will be launching an anti-communist film festival in Washington, D.C., as the nation faces a resurgence of socialism with the sudden rise of Democrat Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York.
“It’s time for an an anti-communist film festival,” said Mark Judge in the festival’s GoFundMe page. “Conservatives have been complaining about Hollywood for decades, yet the right has struggled, through lack of will or lack of money, to make movies promoting freedom and revealing the evils of socialism. The answer? Hold an anti-Communist film festival.”
Since announcing the festival, it has gained considerable interest on social media, with many saying it couldn’t come at a better time, including actor Nick Searcy (Justified).
Speaking with Breitbart News, Mark Judge said that while Hollywood may have shied away from anti-communist films throughout, there are nonetheless some truly great works of art Americans can celebrate: The Lives of Others (2006), Dr. Zhivago (1965), My Son John (1952), among others.
Why do you think Hollywood shied away from anti-communist movies?
They didn’t want to make anti-communist movies because so many of them were and are communists. Recently, the Criterion Channel ran a series called “Film Noir and the Blacklist.” Hollywood loves to shout about McCarthyism and the blacklist of the 1950s, but they ignore that many of these people were actual communists. One of the films shown was 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow. It stars Harry Belafonte and was written by Abraham Polonsky. Belafonte was a leftist who once visited Germany to perform in a concert promoting communism. The “World Peace Concert” was mounted by East Germany’s Communist youth organization. In his memoir, My Song, Belafonte wrote this: “I remained not just liberal but an unabashed lefty. I was still drawn to idealistic left-wing leaders…who seemed to embody the true ideals of socialism.” Belafonte was friends with the Communist singer Paul Robeson, and praised Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, writing that Castro has “a strong grasp of Latin American history and of the fine distinctions in law between Venezuela and its neighbors.” Belafonte called George W. Bush “the greatest tyrant, the greatest terrorist in the world.”
Odds Against Tomorrow screenwriter Abraham Polonsky was a communist. According to Allan H. Risking in his book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters – Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Polonsky was “a thoroughgoing Communist who took the Fifth when he testified before HUAC [the House Un-American Activities Committee] in 1951 but to eventually admitted to Party membership.” Polonsky once describes a meeting for the founding of Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) this way: “You could not get uno the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.”
Polonsky wrote the 1948 film Force of Evil, which shows capitalism as a cruel system. In his intro to the DVD special edition Force of Evil, Martin Scorsese calls Polonsky’s blacklisting “a great loss” for American cinema. A commentary on communism and film noir is provided on the disc by film historian Imogen Sara Smith. Smith notes that many of the creators of 1950s film noir had been survivors of the Great Depression, when the American free market system came into question. At the same time, and without defending the “sadistic” tactics of Joe McCarthy, Smith admits that many blacklisted writers “did attack capitalism and the American way.” Like today’s Hollywood, they were propagandists. “It’s no wonder the government wanted to shut these people down,” Smith concludes. They were red.
What do you think elevates an anti-communist movie above mere polemics?
The basics – craftsmanship and story. The Lives of Others is a masterpiece of acting, editing, pacing and screenwriting. Revealing the characters as human beings. I discovered a lot of these great films going to film festivals at the American Film Institute. Movies like I was a Communist for the FBI are supposed to be these cheesy old movies from the 1950s but in reality are quite good. Helen Hayes, a great actress, is in My Son John, a very good movie. Red Dawn is a good movie.
Why this festival? Why now?
The Anti-Communist Film Festival offers a wonderful solution to a problem conservatives have been complaining about for years – leftist propaganda in Hollywood. As I said, I’ve been attending film festivals for years. In college I worked in a movie theater, a beautiful restored art deco space in Maryland. My favorite are film noir movies. It occurred to me recently that if budgets for making contemporary Hollywood movies are prohibitively expensive, why not arrange a lineup of great older movies, rent out a theater and have a big party? This year I attended the Irish Film Festival at the AFI Silver Theater outside of DC. It was a big party and the movies were great. I saw the same thing happening with a bunch of freedom-loving people – both conservatives and reasonable liberals. It’s also crucial that young people don’t get brainwashed with socialism, which is happening on college campuses. This will fight that. I am in talks with theaters in the DC area and if we raise enough for rental and licensing fees we’ll do it.
What do you hope this festival achieves?
I hope we can have fun, get a bunch of us together for a big party, and be edified by watching some great films: The Lives of Others, I was a Communist for the FBI, Freedom’s Fury. A mix of drama and documentaries and even absurdist humor like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Death of Stalin. We want to remind people about the evils of communism and also get a bunch of us together for a good time. It’s an idea that fits the moment we’re in and also will get a bunch of freedom-loving people under one roof for beer and popcorn. All for a small fraction of the cost of making a new film.
Breitbart News will provide updates as Mark Judge goes about organizing the festival over the coming months.
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating and can be viewed for FREE on YouTube, Tubi, or Fawesome TV. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow him on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
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