I Was a Communist for the FBI

1951. USA. Directed by Gordon Douglas. Screenplay by Crane Wilbur. With Frank Lovejoy, Dorothy Hart, Philip Carey. An underappreciated director of noir thrillers (Kiss Tomorrow Good-Bye, 1950), Westerns (Rio Conchos, 1964), and science fiction (Them!, 1954), Douglas also created a series of quintessential Cold War B-movies that combined the conventions of the crime genre with newsreel-style filmmaking. Warner Bros. recently preserved this gripping example of HUAC propaganda—a glorified account of FBI agent Matt Cvetic, who posed as a Pittsburgh steel worker to infiltrate the Communist syndicate—which at the peak of Red Menace hysteria earned the fiction feature an Oscar nomination for, of all things, Best Documentary. 83 min.