Screen Enemies of the American Way
Political Paranoia About Nazis, Communists, Saboteurs, Terrorists and Body Snatching Aliens in Film and Television
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About the Book
American films, like America itself, have long been fascinated by the threat of outsiders posing as citizens to destroy the American way of life. This book tracks real-world fears appearing in the movies—Nazi agents, Japanese-American spies, Communist Party subversives, Islamic sleeper cells—as well as the science-fiction threats that play to the same fears, such as alien body-snatchers and android doppelgangers. The work also examines fears inspired by World War I German spies, the Japanese-American internment and the McCarthyite witch-hunts and shows how these issues, and others, played out on screen.
About the Author(s)
Bibliographic Details
Fraser A. Sherman
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages: 240
Bibliographic Info: 83 photos, appendices, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2011
pISBN: 978-0-7864-4648-3
eISBN: 978-0-7864-6225-4
Imprint: McFarland
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1. German Fifth Columns: The Hun, the Third Reich and the Rise of the Fourth Reich 7
2. The Yellow Peril and the Fear of Japan 27
3. The Red Menace: Bolsheviks, Commies and Atheists in America 44
4. Red Scare: Fifth Column Anticommunist Films from 1949 to 1960 55
5. Communist Fifth Columnists After 1960 73
6. Muslim Fifth Columns in America 89
7. Invasion of the Body Snatchers 97
8. Brain Eaters, Human Duplicators and Other Science Fictional Fifth Columns 111
9. Invaders, X-Files and Dynamators: Alien Fifth Columns on Television 134
10. Sexual Politics and the War Between Men and Women 146
11. The Master Race 153
12. Satanic and Supernatural Infiltration in Film and Television 157
13. Miscellanea: Corporate Takeovers, Secret Societies and the JFK Assassination 163
Appendix 1: Film Credits 181
Appendix 2: Television Series Credits and Synopses 209
Bibliography 213
Index 215
