ABSTRACT
The Johnston Office has scissored the British film Miranda in which Glynis Johns plays a mermaid sitting on the beach at Capri with a merminnow in her arms, though the film depicts no record of her marriage to a merman. The atmosphere of suspicion and fatalism conveyed itself to the film-makers in Hollywood in more ways than simply the production of anti-Communist movies. If 1947 had been the year Hollywood discovered the Jews, 1949 was the year the Blacks acquired a commercial significance. The tone of the crime pictures and the thrillers, particularly those it has been suggested may be covered by the general term film noir, became even blacker. In the wake of the unpalatable investigations conducted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, the American film industry had already decided to show the cleanliness of its hands by producing anti-Communist films.
