Brianton, Kevin Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2018, Vol.48(2), pp.64-67 Bernard F. Dick, The Screen Is Red: Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 282 pp., illus. Hardcover: $65. During the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities – or HUAC – investigations of Hollywood in 1947, chairman […]
One of the oddest anti-communist films to come out of Hollywood in the period between the first and second HUAC investigations was the The Fountainhead (1949). Based on Ayn Rand’s bestselling book, and directed by MPAPAI founding executive committee member King Vidor, the film was a defence of the creative individual against the deadening collective. […]
Article in the Local Paper, 9 November 2018 A senior University expert says that Victorian election candidates may be ignoring local newspapers at their peril. Dr Kevin Brianton, Head of Department, Communication and Media at La Trobe university, was commenting on the trend for candidates to use local press less for their messages to voters, […]
Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist by Kevin Brianton Philip Taffs‘s review Oct 10, 2018 really liked it John Ford once famously introduced himself: “I’m John Ford. I make Westerns.” To which Australian author, Kevin Brianton, might now rightfully respond: “I’m Kevin Brianton. I write […]
Swirling around the formal biographies on DeMille is the internet with its hundreds of blogs and web pages. Daniel J. Solove has argued that the internet will be increasingly powerful in defining reputation in the coming years.[1] On the web, there are many examples of DeMille and the meeting being misrepresented. Bloggers can take […]
One of the persistent myths about Cecil B. DeMille was that he had a foot fetish. DeMille Biographer Charles Higham in 1969 made the claim of DeMille’s foot fetism in his discussion of Feet of Clay (1924) where he wrote that there was ‘no doubt’ that DeMille’s obsession with feet drew him to […]
Run of DeMille Red Scare, Blacklist and a Directorial Feud December 8, 2017 Cinemontage Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist by Kevin Brianton University Press of Kentucky, 2016 Hardcover, 174 pages, $45.00 ISBN # 978-0-8131-6892-0 by Betsy A. McLane The blacklisting of Communists, former Communists, union supporters, […]
KEVIN BRIANTON Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist University Press of Kentucky Hardcover, 156 pages, $45 KentuckyPress.com. When legend becomes fact, print the facts. Finally! On October 22, 1950, during the height of the Red Scare, Screen Directors Guild members met to vote on the dismissal of […]
The most controversial of these pro-Stalin films was Mission to Moscow (1943) which was based on the autobiography of the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies. The film glorified Stalin at a time when the United States desperately wanted to maintain the alliance with the Soviet Union. The film glossed over […]
Johnny Guitar (1954) was directed against HUAC in a different way to High Noon. In the film, Johnny Guitar, played by Sterling Hayden, returned to this estranged lover Vienna, played by Joan Crawford, who owned a disreputable bar. A stage robbery occurred in town, and a banker was killed. The dead man’s sister Emma Small, […]