By Philip French
Film Critic, The London Observer

The Cold War hit the movies in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) descended on Hollywood armed with the names of leading film folk suspected of being communists or left-wing sympathizers. Their supposed treachery included such pro-Soviet movies as Warner Brothers' "Mission to Moscow" (1943) and MGM's "Song of Russia" (1944), which the White House had persuaded the studio bosses to produce as part of the war effort. HUAC's hearings resulted in 10 filmmakers going to jail for contempt of Congress and hundreds of actors, writers and directors being put on an unofficial industry blacklist. The effect on Hollywood's morale was profound and enduring.

The last moderately pro-Russian film of the 1940s, "Berlin Express" (1948), centered on a Frenchman, an Englishman, an American, and a Soviet officer uniting to protect a democratic German politician from neo-Nazi conspirators, and concluded with an edgily amicable parting beside the Brandenburg Gate. That same year the first major anti-communist picture, "The Iron Curtain," told in semi-documentary style the story of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, who defected to the West.

Over the next decade a succession of films, some bordering on hysteria, exposed communist subversion on the domestic front: "I Married a Communist" (1950), in which Robert Ryan plays a prewar radical blackmailed into working for the Reds; Leo McCarey's "My Son John" (1952), in which a typical American couple discover their Oedipal son is a party member; "Pickup on South Street" (1953), starring Richard Widmark as a patriotic New York pickpocket who stumbles across a spy ring.

There were also numerous pictures about Cold War confrontations abroad, most typically MGM's "The Red Danube" (1950), about conflicts between the occupying powers in Vienna over refugee repatriation, and "Big Jim McLain" (1952), with John Wayne playing a two-fisted HUAC investigator pursuing communists in Hawaii. The tone of "The Red Danube" is infinitely more strident than "The Third Man" (1949), a British film with the same setting.

Meanwhile, the Cold War entered Hollywood genre movies. The western enjoyed a considerable revival as liberals used the 19th-century frontier for allegories on issues they could not treat elsewhere. "Broken Arrow" (1950), scripted under a pseudonym by the blacklisted Albert Maltz, used the reconciliation between Apaches and white settlers to plead for peaceful coexistence. "Storm Center" (1956), starring Bette Davis as a small-town librarian standing up for her right to stock radical texts, was the only film of the decade to speak out directly, if somewhat guardedly, against McCarthyism.

The Cold War that so preoccupied Hollywood had relatively little direct effect on the cinemas of other countries. Ingmar Bergman made "It Can't Happen Here" (1950), a crude anti-communist allegory, and in Britain the Boulting brothers produced "High Treason" (1951), a half-baked thriller in which local communists set out to sabotage Battersea Power Station. These, however, were exceptions, and the Eastern European cinema pretty well ignored current politics.

Then, as virulently anti-communist pictures did poorly at the box office, Hollywood began to take a more sophisticated view of the Cold War. In the early '60s, when blacklisting came to an end, the Cold War became the subject for comedy. Billy Wilder's "One, Two, Three" (1962) starred Jimmy Cagney as a wisecracking Coca-Cola Company manager in Berlin.

The Cold War also provided the ironic context for espionage movies that took a jaundiced view of both sides, films such as "The Ipcress File" (1965) and "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" (1966), made by Americans but based on British novels. The James Bond movies, unlike Ian Fleming's novels, deliberately dispensed with SMERSH, the Russian terrorist organization, and made 007's enemies apolitical megalomaniacs.

The key Cold War pictures of the 1960s, and among the best of the decade, are "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) and "Dr. Strangelove" (1963), both mordant political satires. In the former, a crypto-communist Washington hostess plots with Russian and Chinese agents to have her husband, a right-wing Red-baiting senator, elected U.S. president. In the latter, a deranged cold warrior in command of an American air force base unleashes a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union and the U.S. president is forced to contact his Soviet opposite number on the Moscow hot line and discuss ways of averting imminent Armageddon.

"Dr. Strangelove" ends with a succession of nuclear explosions edited to the strains of Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again." Several other films took the prospect of nuclear war and its aftermath more solemnly. In the most famous of these, "On the Beach" (1959), based on Nevil Shute's bestselling novel, the end of the world is observed from Australia, where the last remnants of mankind prepare to succumb to radiation sickness.

Hollywood, fearful of offending either hawks or doves, largely ignored the Vietnam War. Only John Wayne's "The Green Berets" (1968), a patriotic paean to the American Special Forces, appeared while the war was on. In the late 1970s a rash of pictures - "Coming Home," "The Deer Hunter," "Apocalypse Now" -- dwelt on the absurdity of the war and the damage it wrought on the American psyche. By then it was possible for American movies to show Russians in a favorable light, and in the sentimental "The Way We Were" (1973) the heroine, Barbra Streisand, is a 1930s Stalinist still clinging to her old convictions in the 1960s.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood movies took the view that only a few renegades threatened world peace and that men of goodwill on both sides could work together. Typically, in the thriller "Telefon" (1978), a KGB officer (Charles Bronson) comes to America neither to defect nor to subvert but to defeat the diabolical plans of communist hard-liners. The only real blast of the Cold War during the time of glasnost and perestroika was "Red Dawn" (1984), which envisaged an invasion of the United States by a combined force of Russians and Cubans. The only true resistance comes from a guerrilla force of macho teen-agers, who anticipate America's backwoods militia that has emerged in the past decade.

Philip French is an author and has been film critic for The (London) Observer for 30 years. His essay appears in "COLD WAR: An Illustrated History," the companion book to the television documentary, published by Little, Brown and Company.