Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [124]
Rand was sworn in and testified on the first afternoon of the hearings. She didn’t name names or inform against her colleagues, though others did. As the only individual present who had lived in Russia, she answered questions about the misleadingly cheerful impression of Russian Communist life conveyed by a 1944 wartime romance called Song of Russia. In the movie, an American symphony conductor, played by Robert Taylor, tours the USSR and falls in love with a Russian pianist named Nadya, who invites the conductor, John, to attend a music festival in her native village. The village peasants are pictured as strong, prosperous, happy, musical, and free—they ride state-of-the-art tractors, seem to own the land they farm, and excel at playing orchestral instruments. When the German army invades, the peasants fight valiantly but lose. John and Nadya flee to America, where they assure large audiences that the liberty-loving Russian people will soon defeat the Nazis. With U.S. government encouragement (if not actual arm-twisting), Song of Russia, like Howard Koch’s Mission to Moscow, was produced by MGM as war propaganda, to help persuade Americans to support Russia’s post-invasion conversion to the Allied side.
Rand was offended by Song of Russia, incensed by it, even pained by it. She explained to the committee that the country she came from was a land of frozen borders, omnipresent GPU (or NKVD) agents, meager food, prison camps, and constant, purposeful terror waged among average, ill-fed people, who didn’t smile gaily and make music, as they did in the film. She pointed out the obvious and less obvious elements of propaganda. In one scene, a Russian band plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” while the camera lingers on a Soviet flag. In another, John’s hard-boiled American road manager tells Nadya that, although her determination to fight the Germans personally makes her a fool, “a lot of fools like you died on the village green at Lexington,” during the American Revolution. “I submit that that [speech] was blasphemy,” Rand announced to the committee. She did not discuss the film’s screenwriters, Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins, both of whom later identified themselves as members of the Communist Party.
Rand’s remarks directly followed the much-publicized testimony of Jack Warner, Sam Wood, and Louis B. Mayer. Warner repeated testimony he had given the previous spring, in Hollywood, naming sixteen Warner Bros. screenwriters whose views he considered to be un-American. One of them was Koch, Rand’s old office mate, who, though not a Communist, would nonetheless not be able to secure work for the next seven years. Independent producer Wood, who was the president and founding member of the MPA, had been keeping a “little black book in which he jotted the names of radicals,” according to Hollywood historian Neal Gabler; Wood accused seven screenwriters of being Communists, including four of the Hollywood Ten. MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer took a more cautious position; he simply denied that there was any Communist influence exerted on or radical propaganda produced by MGM. It was then that the committee, prepared to prove him wrong, called Rand to talk about MGM’s Song of Russia.
Rand later said, quite credibly, that she had been promised an opportunity to make a full statement of her views on the dangers of Communist propaganda in the movies and to read aloud from her “Screen Guide for Americans.” Instead, the committee used her for its