COLD WAR MOVIES INSPIRED FEAR—FEAR OF A COMMUNIST COUP d’état, of nuclear devastation, of the end of civilization. They portrayed an America swarming with Soviet agents where no one was safe. An ex-communist who recants is a marked man (The Woman on Pier 13, My Son John). Withholding information from a communist hoodlum results in a fate worse than refusing to pay protection money to the mob. The mob would send their goons to vandalize your establishment. Communists will blow your head off (Pickup on South Street). In McCarthyist America, liberals did not stand a chance. Subscribing to a left-wing publication made you a security risk if you worked for the military (Three Brave Men). Refusing to remove a controversial book from a library could cause a kid to burn the building down (Storm Center). Marching in a May Day parade could get a television performer blacklisted, eventually causing him to take his life (The Front). The films may have exaggerated, but only about the violence inflicted on uncooperative citizens.
There was, in fact, an attorney general’s list, and one could get blacklisted or lose a job for something as innocuous as subscribing to the Nation or supporting the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee—the former considered subversive; the latter, a communist front. American communists themselves were not a threat. In 1955, they numbered only about twenty thousand, eighty-eight hundred of whom were New Yorkers. The real threat was to freedom of expression, a threat that came from a Senate subcommittee of dubious authority (HUAC) and an alcoholic senator from Wisconsin, who derailed careers in the name of a cause that was a personal crusade. “The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace,” Ezra Pound wrote in “E. P. Ode pour l’election de son sépulchre.” In Senator Joseph McCarthy, the age found its image, more grotesque than accelerated. Although America had to maintain its nuclear strength, the science fiction films of the 1950s dramatized the bitter fruit of atomic testing. Moviegoers may not have believed that detonations in the Southwest could produce such mutations as depicted in Them! and Tarantula, but the notion that they might lingered. The bomb was untrustworthy.
The movies released in the first decade of the Cold War showed an America in a preparedness stage, much as in some of the pre-Pearl Harbor films. Hollywood anticipated America’s involvement in the Second World War as early as 1940. In Arise, My Love (1940), Ray Milland referred to the Spanish Civil War as “palooka preliminaries” for “the big event.” There were also films showing America girding for something impending, but never articulated, films such as Flight Command and Flight Angels (both 1940), and Dive Bomber and Parachute Battalion (both 1941).
In the 1950s, America’s idea of preparedness was a bomb shelter. It was axiomatic that if any nation could start World War III, it would be the Soviet Union, which would launch a nuclear attack against the United States. In the event of such an attack (preemptive, of course), school children were instructed to “duck and cover,” sliding under their desks and clasping their hands in back of their heads. There were also nuclear attack drills, in which students would be shepherded into school basements until the “all clear” sounded. Those who could afford to do so built bomb shelters, accessible either from outside their homes via cellar doors, or preferably, through basements, where they could take refuge in a enclosed spaces accommodating as many as eight persons. The amenities, such as they were, included dry packaged food, fresh water, toilet facilities, an air pump, and a generator—no frills, but supposedly manageable. The down side was the neighbors, who might expect to be accommodated when the bombs started falling. Some homeowners would lie, claiming they were building a wine cellar.
The decade that began with Five and ended with On the Beach brought the doomsday genre full circle—from a quintet of survivors to none at all. Hope emerged briefly in the early sixties with the election of John F. Kennedy and his short-lived Camelot. But with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and Kennedy’s assassination the following year, it was back to fear and trembling with Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove.
The films of the 1940s, especially those dealing with World War II, were different. They inspired hope, even in the darkest days of the conflict. The most ingenious of filmmakers could never have turned the fall of Bataan into an allied victory. At the end of Bataan (1943), Robert Taylor, squatting in the foxhole that will become his grave, is seen firing away at the advancing Japanese. Then a title appears: “So fought the heroes of Bataan. Their sacrifice made possible our victories in the Coral Sea, at Midway, on New Guinea and Guadalcanal. Their spirit will lead us back to Bataan.” There is no connection between the fall of Bataan on 9 April 1942 and the victory at Midway two months later, marking the turning point of the war in the Pacific. But at least the epilogue afforded a ray of hope at a time when hope was indeed the thing with feathers.
There was no need to preach conformity in the 1940s. The country was united as it never has been since. There were common enemies: Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan and, until it surrendered in September 1943, fascist Italy. The 1950s, on the other hand, was a decade of conformity in dress and politics. The goal was to look cool. Girls wore ponytails with their poodle skirts and penny-loafers, while boys with short hair wore khakis and button-down shirts. For a male, rebellion meant being a greaser with a duck’s ass haircut, black leather jacket, form-fitting T-shirt, and tight jeans. Perhaps those who could interpret subtext got the point of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): The think-alikes of society are pod people, eager to make others into plants like themselves. Pod life was simple: You lose your humanity, but think of the peace. No striving, no climb to the top, no drop to the bottom. Regardless of whether one was a Republican or a Democrat, political affiliation meant anti-communism. Support the undeclared war in Korea, even if you can’t locate Korea on a map. We were fighting the Reds; that was all you needed to know.
To its credit, Hollywood made no attempt to mythologize Korea in the way it did World War II. The Korean War was an ugly war, a dirty job to be done. No great love story like Casablanca (1942) emerged from Korea; no family dramas like Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Human Comedy (1943), The Sullivans, or Since You Went Away (both 1944); no classic comedies like To Be or Not to Be (1942), The More the Merrier (1943), or Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). In the 1950s, when your draft notice arrived, you served your country or you would be shamed into doing so (I Want You [1951]). The age demanded, and its demands were met.
Cold War films are now part of the past. When they first arrived, there was an immediacy about them. They did not require period costumes or an acting style suited to the era. The only tense was the present; no excavating was required. This was even true of movies about World War II that came out in the late forties and early fifties. Three Came Home (1949), based on Agnes Newton Keith’s account of her internment in a Japanese prison camp, was in every way a World War II film, right down to the abuse the women suffered at the hands of the guards. Similarly, Twelve O’Clock High (1949) and Force of Arms (1951)—the latter vaguely reminiscent of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, but with a happy ending—seemed to be continuations, not appendices, of the World War II film. It was as if the war had not ended. Much had to do with the leading actors in these two films—Gregory Peck in the former and William Holden in the latter—both of whom attained stardom in the 1940s and had not yet lost their luster. You could believe Peck as a rigid brigadier general in 1942 and Holden as an army sergeant in 1944. World War II had not yet ossified into an artifact.
But fifty years later, it had. Memphis Belle (1990) (not to be confused with The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress [1944], William Wyler’s brilliant documentary) had a cast (Matthew Modine, Eric Stolz, Tate Donovan) that did not look, speak, or act like a 1943 bomber crew, but instead brought a thoroughly modern sensibility to their roles. The same was true of Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett in Pearl Harbor (2001), which also suffered from the misuse of two fine actors, Jon Voight and Alec Baldwin, who impersonated FDR and Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, respectively, as if they were at a World War II costume party.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, HUAC seemed the stuff of vintage newsreels, black-and-white images of another time. It was commendable that Irwin Winkler wanted to revisit the past in Guilty by Suspicion (1991), but having Robert De Niro, one of the finest actors of his generation, play a director who socialized with communists (but was not one himself) was not so much casting against type as casting against period. By 1991, De Niro was so closely associated with such larger-than-life figures as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II (1974), Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1982) that playing a less charismatic figure made both the actor and his character seem ordinary. De Niro did not step into the right time frame; he had not moved from his contemporary comfort zone. When he shouted “Shame on you!” at HUAC, one felt that he would have rather used the obscenity Woody Allen did in The Front.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as Gavin Stevens explains to Temple Drake in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. The line has been quoted so often (and misquoted by Owen Wilson in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris [2012]) that it seems part of the collective unconscious. In Hollywood, right from the beginning, the past was present, conjured into being whenever a filmmaker wanted to flip the calendar pages to get to his period of choice. For D. W. Griffith, it was the Civil War (The Birth of a Nation); for John Ford, it was the post-bellum West (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers); for Henry King, it was vintage America (In Old Chicago, Ramona, Wilson, Margie, Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie). The best recreations had a semiotics of their own, attesting to their authenticity in every detail: physical production, actors, soundtrack, and script. Some films are justly admired for their renderings of the past: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Lincoln (2012), Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), Curtis Hanson’s L. A. Confidential (1997). Others call attention to themselves as restorations. In Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008), Angelina Jolie’s cloche hat and painted mouth function as 1920s signifiers, as if to say, “The costume designer and makeup artist have done their homework, and here is the fruit of their research.” Swing Kids (1993), set in 1938 Hamburg, where teenagers with a love of swing run afoul of authorities who consider this music decadent, starred Robert Sean Leonard and Christian Bale, who looked as if they were members of an American boy band. The best filmmakers know that “it is an art to conceal an art.” They also know that the further removed from the present the setting of a film is, the more true-to-the-period it must be in every detail—especially the performances.
While it is hard to imagine anyone reopening the wounds of Korea, the Cold War has not lost its appeal; neither has the “what if?” movie about another world war that leaves some teenagers determined to make a last-ditch stand against the invaders. Although the Cold War was in its final phase in 1984, the possibility of nuclear holocaust was still present. In fact, war might have occurred in late September 1983, when a report came through the Soviet warning system’s computer that the United States had launched intercontinental ballistic missiles against Russia. Fortunately, an officer in the Soviet air defense forces discovered that it was a false alarm. The incident was not made known until the 1990s, but had it been reported at the time, it would have made sense in a macabre kind of way. On 1 September 1983, a South Korean airliner en route from New York to Seoul flew through Soviet air space and was shot down, killing all 269 passengers, including a United States congressman. History has shown that it takes little to start a war: Julius Caesar’s crossing a stream called the Rubicon; the assassination of an archduke and his bride in Sarajevo; the crossing of a parallel in Korea.
And a war might have occurred—or at least writer-director John Milius thought so. In Red Dawn (1984), Milius, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Apocalypse Now (1979), imagined an America in the midst of World War III. The aggressors were the Soviets and their Cuban and Nicaraguan allies, who have nuked Washington, DC, and now taken over a town in Colorado. A group of high school students dub themselves the Wolverines and retreat to the hills like resistance fighters in a World War II movie. New York Times critic Janet Maslin rightly observed (10 August 1984) that Red Dawn “may be rabidly inflammatory, but it isn’t dull.” Invasion movies, including those about extraterrestrial invaders, prey on our fear of the unknown. In the 1980s, this fear concerned the possibility of an occupied America, where a drive-in has become a detention camp, and the local Bijou is showing Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938). You say to yourself, “It can’t happen here,” but then you know it could. The young cast—including Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Jennifer Grey, Charlie Sheen—was uncharismatic enough to be convincing. They looked like the kids in The Boy from Stalingrad who took on the Nazis but were no match for their brutality. One has to fight from tearing up at the end. Near a boulder that the guerrillas have christened “Partisan Rock,” there is a plaque with the following inscription: “In the early days of World War III, guerrillas—mostly children—placed the names of the lost upon this rock. They fought here alone and gave up their lives so that ‘this nation shall not perish from the earth.’” War films, in which the young die (The North Star, The Boy from Stalingrad, China’s Little Devils) have a special, possibly manipulative poignancy that films about men who die in battle do not. Seeing children perish forces us to suspend critical judgment and ponder their sacrifice, even in a film as “rabidly inflammatory” as Red Dawn.
If the past is any indication, the Cold War will continue to attract filmmakers eager to offer their take on it. It is a war that can be approached from various angles: the repatriation of citizens from countries under communist control, atomic spies, HUAC, the blacklist, the bomb, the missile race, nuclear war with or without doomsday. But since terrorism has now replaced the Soviet threat, it is more likely that audiences will be seeing films on the order of World Trade Center, United 93, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty than a remake of Dr. Strangelove. Even the live television version of Fail-Safe (2000) lacked the sense of doom that haunted the 1964 film. The television version depicted what never happened; the film, what could have.
Films about careers interrupted or destroyed by HUAC will always have the same relevance that any account of injustice has. They can inspire compassion for the victims and a need to call attention to their plight, even if others have written or made movies about it. For those who have discovered what Dalton Trumbo called “the time of the toad,” the McCarthy period is a personal journey on which they must embark as if for the first time. So it was for Nancy Lynn Schwartz, whom her mother Sheila described as someone who “loved people and hated injustice,” a love-hate combination that motivated Nancy to write about the writers silenced by HUAC, the political climate the committee created, and the wreckage that it left in its wake. Nancy had written a first draft of The Hollywood Writers’ Wars when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor that claimed her life at twenty-six in 1979. The book was completed by her mother, an English education professor. It is also a tribute to the young author, who, when she was only eight years old, was “inconsolable after seeing Spartacus.” Dalton Trumbo—the film’s screenwriter, and formerly the most prominent member of the Hollywood Ten—had done his job well.
Karl Francis was also drawn to HUAC, but for a different reason. The Welsh born Francis, a left wing BBC television writer-director-producer, was attracted to stories about social issues, such as the effect closing a colliery in south Wales had on the miners, their families, and the community. This interest spawned his docudrama Above Us the Earth (1977), a fusion of the documentary and the fiction film employing an egalitarian mix of professional actors and amateurs. Understandably, Francis was attracted to Herbert Biberman, who created a similar type of docudrama, Salt of the Earth (1954), inspired by a 1951 strike by local 890 of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Works Union in Bayard, New Mexico, against New Jersey Zinc. (The local had been expelled from the CIO for being communist controlled.) In the film, the company is called Delaware Zinc, and the strikers are Mexican Americans seeking job equality with whites. Like the actors in Above Us the Earth, those in Salt of the Earth were a mix of ordinary men and women and professionals.
Written by the blacklisted Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth is both political and feminist. Since a Taft-Hartley injunction prevented the miners from picketing, their wives replaced them on the line. The economic issue that sparked the strike—whites being paid more than Mexican Americans, who did the same work for less pay—took a domestic turn. The women realized that if they could man the picket line, they were entitled to their own form of equality. If the men called their fellow union members “brothers,” their wives should be addressed as “sisters.”
Francis might have considered a remake of Salt of the Earth, which, despite a favorable review from New York Times critic Bosley Crowther (15 March 1954), was largely ignored. Exhibitors who might have shown the film were reluctant to do so after the House of Representatives and the American Legion inveighed against it. The lead, the superb Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas—who played a striking miner’s wife, whose quest for sexual equality paralleled her husband’s fight for equal pay—was deported to Mexico. The film languished for a decade before resurfacing in the 1960s. In 1992, Salt of the Earth was entered in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which each year singles out films of historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance deemed worthy of preservation.
Rather than remake a classic, in 2000 Francis incorporated the making of Salt of the Earth within a film about Biberman. Francis’s film bore the prosaic title One of the Hollywood Ten, and featured Jeff Goldblum as Biberman and Greta Scacchi as his wife, the Oscar-winning actress Gale Sondergaard. Biberman was indeed one of the Hollywood Ten, but he was not in the same league as John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz, and Dalton Trumbo. Biberman’s first love was the theater. He received his MA from the Yale School of Drama in 1927 and fancied himself a playwright, although he fared better as a director. Believing that he might achieve in Hollywood the fame that had eluded him in New York, Biberman signed a two-picture contract with Columbia in 1935.
Although Biberman wrote screen stories and scripts—the best known being The Master Race (1944), which he both coauthored and directed—he also became embroiled in radical politics. The energy that could have been channeled into something creative was diverted into causes that kept drawing him further away from the goal he had set for himself when he came to Hollywood. After serving five months of a six-month sentence at the federal correctional institution at Texarkana, Texas, for contempt of Congress, Biberman emerged intent on proving that his talent had not deserted him. The result was Salt of the Earth. Sadly, his swan song, Slaves (1969), whose screenplay he also co-authored, was an exploitation film about the brutal treatment of African American plantation slaves with strained historical parallels (breeding of slaves compared to Nazi eugenics, refusal to divulge a woman’s whereabouts equated with refusal to name names). But that was Biberman, who even in his declining years did not cease from reminding moviegoers—at least the few who saw Slaves—of America’s racist past. When Biberman died two years later, his legacy consisted of a handful of minor films and the historically significant Salt of the Earth.
One of the Hollywood Ten was shot in Spain, which accounts for its sunny look (Los Angeles does not have a sun-kissed glow). Francis’s commitment is admirable, and Goldblum and Scacchi offer reasonably accurate impersonations of Biberman and Sondergaard. But the film itself lacks the sense of relevance needed to attract a mass audience. In 2002, One of the Hollywood Ten was screened at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center and received a mildly favorable notice from New York Times critic Stephen Holden (11 January 2002). It has not yet been released commercially in the United States, having been shown only on cable television. Francis might have fared better with a docudrama on the making of Salt of the Earth, for which there is ample material: Biberman’s own account and the story behind the actual strike.
“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” In these opening verses of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets, the poet is pondering the simultaneity of time from the standpoint of eternity, in which past, present, and future coexist. Considered less metaphysically, these verses could be Hollywood’s credo. Gavin Stevens was right: “The past is never dead.” It can make its way into the present, where it gestates as a film treatment or a television pilot until some future date, when the treatment has evolved into a screenplay and then a film, and the pilot into a series. That is precisely how the television series, The Americans, originated, premiering on the FX channel at the end of January 2013. Having worked for the CIA, Joe Weisberg, the series creator, wondered about the effects agents’ double lives had on their families. At home, they were couples with children. They got up, had breakfast, and headed for the agency, where they decoded messages, bugged offices, deceived, taped conversations, and kept suspects under surveillance. After a day in the shadow world, if they were lucky, they got home in time for supper.
Soviet spies in America did all this and more—at least that is how they were portrayed in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the year in which the first three seasons of The Americans seem to be set. (Some episodes allude to events of later years; for example an episode in the third season of the series includes a reference to the Boland Amendment, which was passed in December 1982.) If Weisberg decides to move beyond 1981, with the series encompassing Reagan’s two terms (1981–89) and featuring key events from that period, The Americans could end with the razing of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which presaged the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later. Fans can only hope. In 2015, the series’ time span was unclear; the premise, however, was not.
Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) seem the perfect couple. They live with their two children in a Washington, DC, suburb, where they operate a travel agency. The Jenningses (one never knows their real names) are Soviet sleeper spies, planted earlier in the United States after having learned to speak American English so they could fit in with their neighbors. Although they have never been legally married, they are devoted to their children. But their allegiance is to the Soviet Union.
Elizabeth can be both touchingly maternal and dispassionately lethal. She behaves lovingly to her daughter Paige until she learns that Paige has donated the $600 she has saved to a local church. Furious, Elizabeth awakens Paige in the middle of the night, ordering her to clean the refrigerator. Like any good communist, Elizabeth is an atheist; her daughter is not—or at least not yet. And Elizabeth’s relationship with Philip is not without complications. The two are not ideologues like John Jefferson in My Son John and Herbert Biberman in One of the Hollywood Ten, nor are they mob types like the communists in The Woman on Pier 13 and Pickup on South Street. They are a part of a new breed: the communist zealot. One could imagine Philip and Elizabeth committing terrorist acts if ordered to do so. If sex is the only way Philip can get Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s office photographed, so be it. Since Philip is not especially monogamous, he experiences no pangs of conscience. And Elizabeth is not reluctant to use her feminine wiles to obtain information from a naïve naval cadet about a Soviet defector, whose specialty is stealth technology. For Elizabeth and Philip, home is not where the heart is; it is their haven at the end of a day that might have involved murder, kidnapping, sex for secrets, and narrow escapes. They are the KGB’s equivalent of CIA agents, but they lack the CIA’s support system. Sometimes they have to go it alone. When they do, The Americans switches on to another track, one where the couple’s lives are in danger, even as they endanger the lives of others.
Setting the action in 1981 required an episode, “In Control” (20 February 2013), devoted to the most significant event of that year: John Hinckley Jr.’s attempted assassination of President Reagan on 30 March 1981. Until Elizabeth and Philip learned Hinkley’s motive (his attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed), the assassination attempt possibly included KGB involvement, which would have meant a round of assassinations for them. But another event dating from around the time that could add dramatic and historical substance to the series was the Sandinistas’ overthrow of the dictatorial Somoza regime in Nicaragua in 1979. Afterwards, the Sandinistas proceeded to embark upon Marxist-inspired reforms, confiscating the property of the Somocistas and pursuing a policy of land reform by divvying up large estates to accommodate marginalized peasants. Castro’s Cuba was bad enough; now there was another Marxist experiment in Latin America. When the counter-revolutionaries, popularly known as Contras, were ready to take on the Sandinistas, the CIA was there to help.
The scandal of the decade was known as Iran-Contra (1986), in which key members of the Reagan White House devised a way of freeing American hostages held in Lebanon by selling arms to Iran despite an embargo. Oliver North, a former marine lieutenant colonel and National Security Council aide, took the plan to the next level, bankrolling the Contras with money from the arms sale. His actions violated the Boland Amendment (1982), which forbade the training and arming of the Contras. (Two further resolutions followed in 1983 and 1984, forbidding funding the Contras.) When the news broke about Iran-Contra, North was proudly unrepentant.
Iran-Contra was a scenario worthy of Graham Greene. The second episode of Season 2 of The Americans (“Cardinal,” 5 March 2014), introduces a character who had been a Sandinista and is now a KGB agent. In “Martial Eagle” (23 April 2014), based on a story by Oliver North and Tracy Scott Wilson, Elizabeth and Philip infiltrate a Contras training camp, where Elizabeth murders with guiltless dispassion, while Philip is momentarily overcome by the bloodshed. The time of “Martial Eagle” is unclear. It still seems to be 1981, but according to the New York Times (9 January 1987), after two months of training in Florida, the first group of Contras returned home in early January 1987, suggesting that the training program was initiated in 1986. That schedule would make sense; it was in November 1986 that Iran-Contra made front-page news.
The Americans is aimed at an informed audience that does not need a footnote for every historical reference. “Martial Eagle” does not even explain why there is a Contras training camp in the United States—and that does not really matter. What matters is that Elizabeth and Philip have been given a job that results in the killing of Americans. You get so caught up in the violence that you may forget it exists within a context. Yet, for the time being, The Americans has taken Soviet espionage farther than it has ever gone before. Elizabeth and Philip inhabit a world in which any given day could involve abduction, murder, seduction, defection, bugging, infiltration, theft, blackmail, and infidelity. Thus far the writers have managed to balance the Jenningses’ activities in the KGB netherworld with their parental obligations, even though Philip and Elizabeth are forced to fabricate explanations for their frequent absences, and eventually the children become accustomed to them. The tension between job demands and family responsibilities allows for some degree of empathy, particularly in viewers who have to juggle career and family, trying not to shortchange either. Sometimes you even forget that murder is part of the Jenningses’ job description. You wonder about Philip and Elizabeth as you do about Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Were they always inclined toward murder, or did a chance incident—a meeting with a KGB spymaster, or an encounter with witches—trigger the transformation?
It is the drama in The Americans as much as the melodrama that draws viewers. At the beginning of the third season, the Jenningses’ allegiance is about to be tested. The first episode, aired at the end of January 2015, had a real hook: Will Paige follow in her parents’ footsteps? Elizabeth is in favor; Philip, less so. It was not a question of “Tune in next week,” as the announcers on the old radio shows used to say. That is not how the series works. In the second episode, “Open House” (11 February 2015), the situation remains unresolved. So does another possible plot thread: the Jenningses’ interest in the CIA’s role in Afghanistan. No further background is given (at least in this episode), but it helps if the viewer knows that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 led to a war between the Soviet Union and the Mujahedeen (radical Islamists). Committed to warding off Soviet aggression, the United States had no choice but to support the jihadists, who later became an international threat. Still, with help from the CIA, they were able to force a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. Exactly where the Soviet-Afghan war (1979–89) will end up in the series is anyone’s guess: a springboard for an episode, perhaps, or an event to be filed away for a later date.
In The Americans, history is at the discretion of the writers, who are free to use it as a backdrop or a plot peg on which to hang a story line. And if history is not generating an episode, a family matter is—such as Paige’s decision in the third season to be baptized, which could result in a daughter versus parents subplot.
For a brief period, viewers could tune in on a different night, and to a different network, for another series about Russian (no longer Soviet) agents in America. NBC’s Allegiance, which premiered in February 2015, is set in the post-Cold War era. The KGB has been replaced by the SVR, Russia’s new foreign intelligence service. But spying has not gone out of fashion. A wife (Hope Davis), who would rather forget her KGB past, is now forced to confront it. The SVR wants former KGB agent Katya O’Connor (Davis)—a mother of three, married to an American engineer who traded secrets to bring her to the United States—to turn her son, a CIA analyst, into a double agent.
Unlike The Americans, Allegiance is set in the present, and that is the problem. In the first episode, the SVR is planning an attack that will cripple America’s infrastructure. If this were the point of departure in a series about a terrorist group operating in the United States, it would have been plausible. Although Russian president Vladimir Putin behaved autocratically in annexing the Crimea in 2014, setting off a war between Ukrainians and Russian separatists, the sanctions imposed upon Russia and its depressed economy do not make for a country capable of committing sabotage in the United States. Putin may mourn the demise of the Soviet Union, which he called one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, but even during the Cold War, sabotage was not as likely as crises, stand offs, and eleventh-hour reprieves. The Americans has a higher degree of plausibility. The Jenningses believe they can be parents as well as KGB operatives. It is the tension between their public and private lives that makes the series watchable. In Allegiance, all Katya wants is to enjoy the freedom that America has to offer and see her younger daughter improve her grades so she can go on to college. (The older daughter was recruited as a spy at an early age.) Unfavorable comparisons with The Americans and lukewarm reviews caused NBC to cancel Allegiance after five episodes.
Television has come a long way since I Led Three Lives (1953–56), the popular syndicated series that starred Richard Carlson as Herbert A. Philbrick. At the beginning of each episode, an announcer with a stentorian voice would remind listeners that “this is the fascinatingly true story of Herbert A. Philbrick who, for nine frightening years, did lead three lives—average citizen, high-level member of the Communist Party, and counterspy for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Philbrick is the series protagonist, and his inner thoughts are conveyed through voiceover narration, often urgently delivered when he is on the verge of being unmasked. I Led Three Lives portrayed an America in which communists greet each other as “comrade” but show no comradely spirit. For them, Christmas is a time to fleece the gullible by soliciting contributions to the phony “All Faiths United Christmas Fund,” with the proceeds going to the party’s coffers (“A Communist Christmas”). Communists recruit teenagers to trash offices at a local college, hoping that the wanton destruction of property will give them a taste for greater acts of party-inspired carnage (“Vandalism”). One of the better episodes is “Radioactive,” written by the television writer-producer and creator of Star Trek, Eugene Roddenberry, under the pseudonym of Robert Wesley. A female communist has arrived in town with a radioactive isotope that she has stolen, which Philbrick must retrieve. It is one of the most suspenseful episodes of the series, with Philbrick gaining access to her house and, with the aid of a Geiger counter, locating the isotope before he becomes radioactive. There is an interesting switch: The woman is not offering the isotope to the party, as a good communist would. She wants $100,000 for it, after which she plans to relinquish her membership and enjoy her profits from the sale. She soon discovers that leaving the party is harder than joining it.
I Led Three Lives was pure propaganda, perpetuating the belief that anyone—the head of an advertising agency, a biology professor, even grand-motherly types—could be communists. The series was a relic from another era, preserved in the amber of time. Despite his triune existence, Philbrick is a cipher as a character. He may have led three lives, but we only see two of them; when he isn’t at the beck and call of the party, he is reporting to the FBI. Just when we expect to get a look at Philbrick the family man, a call comes through ordering him to show up for a cell meeting. I Led Three Lives was completely plot driven; there was no characterization, only dialogue. In The Americans and Allegiance, the characters drive the plot, so that it is impossible to separate them from the narrative. Elizabeth and Philip, and Katya and her family are real people in life and death situations. They are also fictional creations. Philbrick is not; he cannot fail because history has decreed otherwise. The fate of the Jenningses and the O’Connors are in the hands of the writers.
If movies are to be made about Cold or post-Cold War espionage, they should take their cue from The Americans and Allegiance. In the latter, Hope Davis was an empathetic Katya, sporting an authentic accent and occasionally lapsing into Russian the way bilingual people often do when they find it easier to express a thought in their native tongue. She and her husband have also raised their son and older daughter to be bilingual so that, when necessary, they can communicate in Russian. In the past, Russian spies were as dimensionless as stick figures, as insubstantial as the shadow world they inhabit. The Americans and Allegiance have portrayed them as human beings. Sadly, we will never know what happened to the O’Connors. Were they ever able to gain immunity by exposing the SVR’s designs on America? And to what extent could they count on their son to help them? Allegiance deserved to remain on the air for at least a season, instead of ending with a cliffhanger.
The Red screen has had more than its share of skeletons; The Americans and Allegiance have finally given them flesh.