BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

calvinnme According to the Wikipedia, "I Was a Communist for the FBI" was the name of a series of articles written by Matt Cvetic that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were later turned into a best-selling book, an American espionage thriller radio series, and also this motion picture. Mr. Cvetic's articles were the true story of his undercover life, but the radio show and this film were largely fictionalized for dramatic effect. Matt Cvetic was actually an undercover agent for the FBI posing as a Communist for nine years. It is true that he alienated his family and friends as a result of them believing that he was actually a Communist, and even wound up divorced as a result of his assignment, although the divorce is not mentioned in the film. It is not true that the Communists posed as big a threat to the U.S. from within as is shown in the motion picture. The film itself is quite interesting and a pretty good thriller in its own right. It will keep you guessing as to whether or not Cvetic's true identity will be revealed before he is finished collecting information.You just have to forget about the stretching of the truth that goes on here and enjoy this film for what it is - a window into a particularly paranoid time in America with a good pace to it. A film that is equivalent to it and made about the same time is the better known "Big Jim McLain" starring John Wayne. It too has many wild stereotypes, but the action is good and you just have to remember when and why it was made. If you do that, you should thoroughly enjoy both films.

ResoluteGrunt This film was released in the United States in May 1951, when I was a teenager. This was just five short years after World War II ended, and while nearly destroyed Europe and Asia were still being repaired and rebuilt under America's massive Marshall Plan. As a boy I had watched all the men in my extended family go off to war against nazism/fascism, and then saw only some of them return home. Now I was watching more young American men go off to war against communism.The first of the many armed conflicts after World War II which became known as the 45-year-long East-West "Cold" War began already a year earlier in June 1950 when Communist North Korean forces, backed by Communist Russian forces occupying the north, drove south across the 38th parallel into US-military occupied South Korea. That aggression started the bloody Korean War, which still raged with high US military casualties when this film was being shown in American theaters. Both Communist China under Mao Zedong and Soviet Communist Russia under Stalin, along with the very ominously growing communist Warsaw Pact military alliance, represented very real threats to the United States and Western Europe - when this film was released. While it is true that the movie is a bit "over the top" by today's dramatic standards, it did have both a context and a purpose that definitely was not laughable.Most responsible people in 1950 fully recognized that the Communist Party, along with its clandestine intelligence operators, was very active in the United States and benefited from considerable Chinese and Russian clandestine government support. That no one was certain of the degree of influence of the secretive Communist Party in the United States gave rise to much public, academic and media speculation, as well as the need for public education plus secret domestic intelligence and counter-intelligence operations to get a better fix on reality.It is easy for Americans today who have lived their entire lives in historic safety and comfort to assume that it was all some sort of "unjustified scare" since the communists never succeeded in their objective of subjugating the United States. In 1950 I remember an America that was no more concerned with communist subversives than Americans today are concerned with extremist Muslim militants who might be engineering another 9/11. Threats can be real, but still not engender panic - if the people have faith in their government. But I also remember that in 1950 the United States was the only country of any significance that had been left still largely intact and undamaged after the Second World War. This made the US the last best hope against any further deterioration of freedom in the world, and thus the Number One Target of Communist expansionism.Due in no small part to very active domestic vigilance, communism never had much success inside the United States. But communism was very successful in employing a wide range of deceptive and duplicitous tactics, including exploiting social discontent and infiltrating key political and social movements, to undermine many other countries.Communism did succeed in thoroughly disrupting life for much of the planet and killing tens of millions of people over a very long period. Most of the atrocities which we today associate with right-wing extremism under Hitler's Nazism were in fact preceded by equal or greater left-wing extremist atrocities under Stalin's Communism. Those were indeed very dangerous times, and Americans in the 1950s who had spent their entire lives under extremely depressing and deadly times, from 1915-45, were naturally suspicious of and opposed to any extremist ideology that might send them, and their children, back into the abyss.

MartinHafer The word 'propaganda' has a bad connotation but it's not always a bad thing. It consists of messages that are intended to sway opinions using a variety of means towards a cause. Sometimes, but not always, lies or distortions are used to change opinions. During WWII, there were a bunch of films that helped sway opinions towards to the war effort--a noble cause. And, though they were far fewer, in the early 1950s, there were some films that were meant to sway opinions against Communism--which, in hindsight was odd, since during WWII the American film industry was actually encouraged to portray the Soviets positively (since they were, at that time, our allies).This film was one of the better anti-Communist propaganda films of the era as it's highly entertaining. While its being considered a documentary by the Academy (since they nominated it for the Best Documentary category) is silly since so much of the story was fictionalized, the basic story idea was taken from a man who actually worked undercover with Communists who had infiltrated some labor unions. And, given its excellent acting, gritty script and nice direction, the overall package is great--like a film noir film in many ways.One of my biggest reasons for liking this film is that a veteran character actor, Frank Lovejoy, was used in the lead--not a person who was typically a leading man. Lovejoy was a great actor plus he seemed much more realistic--like a real life character, not some pretty-boy actor. The rest of the cast were also very good.The writing was very good and unflinching. I doubt if the Communists had infiltrated that much of the labor movement and the film seemed to imply it was widespread AND race riots were the fault of Communist agitators--not social conditions--a shortcoming of the film. But, I loved the way the leaders were shown so unsympathetically. While they claimed to love minorities in public, they had contempt for them and used them as pawns--as they did with everyone they came into contact with in their roles. Some will be offended by the film's use of racial epithets, but I think it added great shock value. Plus, the construction of the film was tight and exciting throughout--with lots of twists and edge of your seat thrills.Overall, a very exciting film that's held up very well over the years--and an interesting curio from the era of the so-called "Red Scare".

KuRt-33 Frank Lovejoy starred in two classics: he had a minor part in "House of Wax" and was one of the main characters in Ida Lupino's film noir "The Hitch-Hiker". In "I Was A Communist For The FBI" he plays Matt Cvetic, a Slovenian last name which makes it all the more likely that Cvetic would turn into a communist. Well, that's at least what the film tries to tell you.It is 1951 and McCarthy has started the war on the new enemy, the communists. It was a 'war' that would mark lots of 50s movies. Some movies had subtle criticism (e.g. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), some were overtly against communism: in "Invaders from Mars" the communists were evil aliens, in "I Was A Communist For The FBI" they were just evil. The communists wanted to start riots which would lead to Americans fighting other Americans according to this movie by Gordon Douglas (who is also the director of the Frank Sinatra thriller "The Lady in Cement" and the giant ants movie "Them!"). Why? Well, if everyone would fight, one would applaud communism for being the new order that would have brought peace to the streets of America. Well, if they say so.The movie is so anti-communism that at times you are feeling you are watching a parody. Well, it isn't, all is meant with a straight face. We follow the life of Matt Cvetic, an FBI agent who pretends to be a communist. We see how he is despised by his family (even his son) and how he can't tell anyone of the Great Mission he is on. He cannot tell them he is risking his neck to save the country.As ridiculous as all this might seem, if you can ignore the propaganda of this movie, you are left with a fairly decent movie. It may be difficult to watch this film nowadays and think lots of people believed the message of this movie, but it's even more difficult that this movie was nominated for an Oscar in 1952. The category? Best Documentary. Really.