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Our
latest short opens on the main street
of Anytown, USA. But there's something not
quite right with this picture, though. I
mean, What are all the armed soldiers,
sandbag barricades, and concertina wire
for? This
puzzle deepens when a citizen approaches a
soldier guarding the perimeter, whose
wearing a familiar, but definitely
un-American, uniform. Our suspicions are
soon confirmed when the citizen asks, in
Russian, for a cigarette. After a quick
scolding for not speaking
English, over a smoke, these two bemoan
that Americans have way too many freedoms,
and it's up to Citizens like them to take
it all away and bring those
"happy" Capitalists to their
knees.
Whoa
-- What
the heck goes on here?
We
get our answer PDQ when Jack Webb
magically appears, who explains that
what appears to be an American town is
really a Soviet spy training ground,
hidden somewhere behind the Iron Curtain.
Here, espionage is their business,
sabotage their art, and treachery and
conspiracy their modus operandi. Serving
as our narrator and anti-Commie muse, Webb
shifts scenes to a real American town and
a genuine American, Jerry Donavan (Jack
Kelly). Webb warns that Jerry is an
OK guy but takes his freedoms for granted,
and when it comes time to ante up and
protect them, Jerry has grown complacent
to just let somebody else take care of it.
Following
Jerry into his home, we meet his domestic
engineer wife, Helen (Jeanne
Cooper), and their three children.
Before supper, Jerry's wife rides him for
skipping his Union and Reservists meetings
-- and Jerry won't even consider going to
a PTA conference. All he wants to do is bowl
and watch his favorite TV show. During
supper, his oldest daughter, Linda (Pat
Woodell), announces that she and
her boyfriend, Bill (Peter Brown),
would like to get married. Though Jerry
has no real objection to a wedding, per
se, he won't consent unless they wait five
years or so, feeling they're both too
young for such a commitment. When both
leave in a huff, Jerry tries to go after
them, but Helen steps in and says to leave them alone
to cool off.
Later,
as the Donovans turn in for the night,
outside the bedroom window, Webb (--
a moralistic peeping Tom? --)
says Jerry's domestic problems will
probably work themselves out and wishes
him pleasant dreams. However, that's not
important right now. What's important is
keeping those...
...Commie
bastards in check.
With
that, Webb changes his mind, so instead of
pleasant dreams, he decides to give Jerry
a Red
Nightmare
... Tinkering with Jerry's dream, our
narrator plucks him from his home and
drops him in the middle of that Soviet
training camp, where the action picks up
when Jerry,
who's a little confused, hears a klaxon
and follows the noise and the crowd to the
square for the daily lecture. Once
gathered, the Kommissar praises their
efforts and reveals they're almost ready
to infiltrate America, help bring down
their Capitalist regime, and then purge it
so they may be assimilated into the
collective Proletariat. (Resistance
is futile!)
Now
even more confused, Jerry heads home, only
to find his family has changed, too. His
eldest daughter is off to join a farm
collective, to rid herself of her parent's
bourgeoisie influence. When Bill shows up
in a Russian uniform to escort her away,
Jerry protests that he can't just bust in
without a warrant. Not so fast, the boyfriend smartly
replies, as a member of the Party, he can
and will. And he also promises to report
Jerry's puckish behavior to the dreaded
Kommissar. After
they leave, Helen accuses Jerry of hiding
the fact that he was on the speech team in
high school, which is why she also ratted
him out to the dread Kommissar. As
punishment, Jerry must now speak before
the PTA on the glories of Bolshevism. When
Jerry says he'll do no such thing, the
wife says he has no choice in the matter.
Then, Jerry's
nightmare continues when he goes to work,
where he has trouble producing his
impossible quota for the day. Soon so far
behind, a co-worker (Robert
Conrad!) warns Jerry that he'd
better work through his lunch hour to
catch up; the quota must be met because
the dread Kommissar accepts no excuses.
The
next morning -- Sunday morning, Jerry asks
Helen if his two youngest kids are off to
Sunday School, yet. Of course they're
not, and due to Jerry's erratic behavior,
the toddlers are to be packed up and
shipped off to a State sponsored school to
become good little Communists. That's the
last straw for Jerry, who drags his two
kids, kicking and screaming, to the town
church; but it's no longer a house of
worship but a museum, dedicated to Great
Russian Inventions, where Jerry finds
displays that claim the Rooskies invented
everything from the telephone to the
light-bulb. Then, losing it completely,
Jerry starts tearing the place apart. He's
arrested and soon faces trial, where the
prosecution presents no case but asks if
Jerry would like to confess his crimes
before sentence is carried out. When Jerry
protests, demanding to know what he's
charged with, the prosecutor
(Race
Bannon himself, Mike Road) scoffs,
saying, in their system, the accused have
no rights and are guilty. Period. Accused
of "treason and deviation" for
speaking against the Party and spreading
Capitalist propaganda, the final, devious
blow comes when Jerry's own wife testifies
against him. Over before it began, the
trial ends with Jerry convicted as an
enemy of the state and sentenced to death.
Jerry
has lost everything; his ideals and
beliefs have been taken away; his family
has turned against him; and now his life
is forfeit. Chained to a chair, and
awaiting the executioner's bullet, the
warden asks one last time if Jerry
would like to confess. Instead, with a gun
pointed at his head, Jerry makes one final
statement, a warning that, someday, the
Soviet people will get wise and revolt in
the name of freedom; they can't be fooled
forever because we all know that Communism
is just another word for slavery. Those
prove to be Jerry's last words as the gun
discharges and his sentence is committed,
and with those cheap
Russian bullets, there's a lot of smoke.
When it clears, we find Webb standing back
outside Jerry's house, where he assures us
that the bullet never reached our boy.
Warning that the brutality Jerry went
through is going on in Russia all the
time, his rant is put on hold for a bit
because his patsy is finally waking up from his Red
Nightmare.
Rejoicing that everything is back to
normal, Jerry vows to never take his
freedoms and family for granted again. He
even consents to the wedding, but the
lovebirds announce they're postponing it
until Bill finishes his hitch in the
service.
Jerry's
nightmare may be over, Webb chimes back in,
but the war against Communism rages on.
And with some patriotic music backing him
up, he reminds us that responsibilities
are a privilege, and freedom must be
earned. For the price of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness is eternal
vigilance.
So
who must pay this price?
The
answer, my fellow Americans, is you ...
And you ... And you too!
Me?
Heck, no. It's bowling night.
The
End
Behind
Burt the Turtle's catchy Duck
and Cover
safety procedurals, and Lyndon Johnson's
political ad against Barry Goldwater,
featuring a little girl picking flowers
while the narrator counts down to atomic
oblivion, Red
Nightmare
is probably the best piece of Cold-War
paranoia left over from the 1950's and
'60s.
You
see, for
awhile after World War II, the Soviets
were a threat, but we had the hammer (--
the Bomb! --)
that we hoped would keep them at bay.
Unfortunately, that didn't last very long,
and soon they had the bomb, too. Fear
of total annihilation isn't very
productive, but fear of being invaded from
the inside out and forcibly assimilated
into a new way of living was, and many
quickly moved to cash in on those fears.
Sen. Joe
McCarthy, the idiot behind the House
Un-American Activities Commission, and
others fueled this fire, threatening to
turn America into a paranoid mess. A lot
of these accusers turned a stink-eye
toward Hollywood as a hot bed of
subversive Communist actions. To this, the Studios
responded with films like John Wayne's Big
Jim McLain,
and smaller B-pictures like I
Was A Communist for the FBI
and I
Married a Communist.
Renown Commie-hater, Ronald Reagan,
narrated the short The
Truth About Communism,
while What
is Communism?
spelled out how to spot a commie in seven
easy steps, and then warned that the
invasion wasn't coming but was already
here!
Made
by Warner Bros. for the U.S. Department of
Defense, Red Nightmare's working
title was Freedom
and You,
and also goes by the less than subtle, The
Commies are Coming, The Commies are Coming.
After a lackluster performances in front
of the House Un-American Activities committee
by several of his stars and staff, Jack
Warner himself supervised the production
and instructed writer Vincent Forte to
damn the subtlety, hit the public over
the head, and pull no punches to show
them what Communism is really about. Forte
did just that, and the results speak for themselves.
As
the Cold War dragged on, the
anti-Communist shorts got stranger and
stranger. None more stranger than If
Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?,
where
former exploitation filmmaker Ron Ormond,
who became a born again Christian after
surviving a plane crash, teamed up with
Baptist minister, Estus Perkle, for a
bizarre mash-up of perverted paranoia and
religious zealotry, where
Perkle narrates over scenes of murderous
Communists raping, pillaging, and poking
bamboo shoots through children's skulls
after Jesus refuses to send them candy.
This invasion is inevitable, Ormond and
Perkle contend, and Jesus is the only one
who can prevent it -- if, and only if, we
maintain a pious way of life.
At
the dawn of the '80s, Jayne Loader and
Kevin and Pierce Rafferty cobbled together
all of these types of films together for
the documentary, Atomic
Cafe.
In between laughable spots featuring Burt
ducking and covering, are truly depressing
scenes of soldiers getting briefed on how
radiation poses absolutely no danger, and
some congressman clamoring to use the bomb
on China during the Korean War. Hindsight
is always 20/20, and though the Soviet
Union eventually collapsed, I don't think
these educational shorts had a whole lot
to do with it. Watching them so far
removed from when brinkmanship was the
norm -- and it was US against THEM
-- it's easy to laugh at these films as
being outdated and overly paranoid. But we
should all consider ourselves lucky that
it turned out the way it did, and not the asinine
way they predicted.
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