An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War

by J. Hoberman

The film critic’s sweeping analysis of American cinema in the Cold War era is both “utterly compulsive reading [and] majestic” in its “breadth and rigor” (Film Comment).  An Army of Phantoms is a major work of film history and cultural criticism by leading film critic J. Hoberman. Tracing the dynamic interplay between politics and popular culture, Hoberman offers “the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context” (Los Angeles Review of Books).   By “tell[ing] the story not just of what’s on the screen but of what played out behind it,” Hoberman demonstrates how the nation’s deep-seated fears and wishes were projected onto the big screen. In this far-reaching work of historical synthesis, Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe (The American Scholar).   From cavalry Westerns to apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars; from movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms “remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself” (Time Out New York).   “An epic . . . alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.” —Cineaste   “There’s something majestic about the reach of Hoberman’s ambitions, the breadth and rigor of his research, and especially the curatorial vision brought to historical data.” —Film Comment

Genres: Film, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Media Tie In

408 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 28, 2010

About the author

Author bio from Verso Press:

J. Hoberman served as the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988-2012. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Cooper Union, and is the author of ten books, including Bridge of Light, The Red Atlantis, and The Dream Life.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can judge a book by its cover—usually, anyway. From the windblown hair and open collars of the male models who appear on Harlequin romances, to the block text and cartoonishly space-suited figures on Baen Books' military SF, to the pastel landscapes and sober serif typefaces of the serious contemporary novel, publishers work very hard to ensure that the intended audience for a book can find it and figure out what it's about very quickly.

An Army of Phantoms has a great cover, or at least a great dust jacket. Cadmium yellow type catches the eye, against a backdrop of UFOs and tentacled monsters dismantling an unidentified city, with a line of mostly recognizable figures (Eisenhower, Monroe) in black-and-red across the bottom. It certainly caught my eye, when I walked past a display at the library in Forest Grove, Oregon during a visit to that fair city.

However, the book inside that exciting jacket turns out to be a serious history, and often rather dull... related in rigid chronological order, replete with dates, statistics and acronyms, obsessing over box-office numbers and nuances of political affiliation. When An Army of Phantoms raises its gaze beyond the Hollywood hills, it's only briefly, and in order to relate world events back to the business of how movies were being made. This is not by any means the first dry book to have a misleadingly alluring dust jacket, but still I felt misled.

I suppose it's also churlish and unreasonable of me to be unhappy with how a history of American film during the Red scare of the 1950s could be so concerned with Communists, Reds, pinkos, leftists, liberals, fellow-travelers, sympathizers and all of the various flavors of effete socialist types and their hangers-on who filled Tinseltown at the time... but the hair-splitting distinctions made among them all quickly grew tedious. Some names received the epithet "Comrade" and some didn't; some were full-fledged CP (Communist Party) members, while some just attended a meeting or two, and others just knew people who had at some point been mildly sympathetic to workers' rights. The acronyms proliferated wildly, and amid the murky mixture of film industry groups, Communist schismatics and homegrown American political organizations, I found it increasingly difficult to distinguish among them... was CWV a splinter group of the SDG, or were they totally different things? (They're totally different, as it turns out; CWV stands for Catholic War Veterans, whereas SDG is the Screen Directors' Guild.) To be charitable, these alphabet-soup groups are referenced with their full names on first use... it's just that there are so many of them!

The first few chapters of An Army of Phantoms are so full of talk about the Commies, in fact, that it seemed to me as if J. Hoberman were engaging in his own version of Red-baiting. Which is unlikely, coming from a writer who was the senior film critic for The Village Voice for more than a decade of his thirty-year career with that alternative weekly. But that's what it felt like.

And, as long as I'm complaining... the text wanders back and forth from present tense to past and back again, the changes apparently related to how cinematic the paragraph in question is intended to be. This is usually not terribly distracting, but still... a little more consistency would have been helpful.


Once the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) gets started, ironically, all of that actually seems to settle down a bit. A narrative of sorts emerges from the soup of acronyms, and while it's not exactly the conventional understanding of the Fifties as a time when conformity reigned supreme yet felt threatened by the bubbling undercurrents of rebellion that would become The Sixties, it's nevertheless a tale of creative, artistic and sensitive types struggling, often in hiding, against the shouting jingoism of John Wayne and the seemingly unstoppable might of Joe McCarthy.

I appreciated Hoberman's mention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's response to McCarthyism, in his famous address to Dartmouth—though the full version of Eisenhower's quote does not appear in the book, this is still one of my favorites:

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.
How will we defeat Communism unless we know what it is? [...] We have got to fight it with something better. Not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are a part of America and even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours they have a right to have them, a right to record them and a right to have them in places where they are accessible to others. It is unquestioned or it is not America.
—from a speech at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953

There are occasional bits of interesting trivia to be found as well... such as the note on p.242 about famed director Cecil B. DeMille, who "for a decade had himself ranched peacocks, gathering their molted feathers for Delilah's costume."


In the end—for I did finish reading An Army of Phantoms even after I'd discovered that I am not in its target demographic—I did come to appreciate Hoberman's meticulous research and the effort that went into this book. It gets better as it goes along, smoother and livelier, loosening up just as the mood of America seemed to be doing by the end of the ten years it covers. I still can't recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who isn't already fascinated with both the industry and the era, but I did learn a lot from Hoberman's reconstruction of one of the most triumphant, yet fearful, decades of the American Century.

[Debbi Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, well-written, and often bleakly funny, this is a great overview of cinema in the post-WWII years.

The book explores the many ways Cold War politics affected Hollywood's talent, from the blacklist to storytelling choices.

Great reading for movie enthusiasts and anyone interested in the effect of politics on popular culture and vice versa. Not to mention the use of film as a propaganda tool.

[Brad B · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The century declared by Time to be America’s approaches its midpoint amid dreams of disaster, memories of cosmic cataclysm, the suggestion of vast conspiracies, visions of extraterrestrial visitation, a sense of impending jihad, and intimations of Judgment Day.”

J. Hoberman’s goal with An Army of Phantoms is not a conventional film history, but to study the ways in which movies and politics influence each other. Covering the years from the end of World War II through 1957, one thing that especially stands out about most of this time period is how relentlessly, and mindlessly, obsessive so many people were with slapping the term “communist” on everyone or everything they didn’t like. (In other words, not so different from today.) Hoberman explores the motivations behind, the making of, and the impact of, films such as Fort Apache (1948), The Next Voice You Hear… (1950), High Noon (1952), It Came From Outer Space (1953), and a long list of other movies. An Army of Phantoms is a must-read for movie buffs and anyone interested in Cold War history.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoberman is an insightful writer on film and here he tackles the ambitious project of recounting a decade of post-war history while merging it with the Hollywood history of the same time. Fascinating if you're interested in the time period (as I am), with interesting juxtapositions between when movies were made or released and what was going on in the outside world.

[Julesreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of a trilogy of books by Hoberman on US film and its convergence with US socio-political history. covers the 1940s until the mid 50s. McCarthyism, the birth of TV, the blacklist, HUAC, and all those paranoid pictures in between. A feverish account. Brings us to the end of the radical political threat to individualism. Great book. Nice book. Great cover. Great title. Nice man.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really thought-provoking reads of a wide variety of movies from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. You’ll likely want to have a notebook close by to create a viewing list. Hoberman shows the interplay between politics and popular culture.

[J. Fakename · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoberman gonna Hoberman. 3.5, but maybe just this era doesn’t appeal to me as much as his other two other “20th century through its cinema” history books.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hoberman runs circles around other film historians. Such a well-researched and crafted book. He quotes from movie reviews, tells stories from interviews & FBI files. Shows an attention to detail that is unparalleled. Instead of merely mirroring what is going on politically, the movies become representational/formative forces in their own right. They explain values and justify American policies, becoming the dream life of the American mind. No one but Hoberman could have written such an exquisite book.

[Tracey]

Spotted in B&N - interest in topic