Quiet Americans: The CIA and Early Cold War Hollywood Cinema

This article examines the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Hollywood film industry from 1947 to 1959. Surprisingly, the CIA was almost entirely absent from American cinema screens during this period, and their public profile in other popular media, including television and the press, was virtually nonexistent. This conspicuous lacuna of publicity coincided with what some scholars have termed the “Golden Age” of US covert action – an era of increasing CIA intervention in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, to name only the most prominent examples. How was it that the CIA managed to maintain such a low public profile and in the process evade popular scrutiny and questions of accountability during such an active period of its history? Utilizing extensive archival research in film production files and the records of the CIA themselves, this article suggests that Hollywood filmmakers adhered to the CIA's policy of blanket secrecy for three interrelated reasons. First, it suggests that the predominance of the so-called “semidocumentary” approach to the cinematic representation of US intelligence agencies during this period encouraged filmmakers to seek government endorsement and liaison in order to establish the authenticity of their portrayals. Thus the CIA's refusal to cooperate with Hollywood during this period thwarted a number of attempts by filmmakers to bring an authentic semidocumentary vision of their activities to the silver screen. Second, up until the liberalization of American defamation law in the mid-1960s, Hollywood studio legal departments advised producers to avoid unendorsed representations of US government departments and officials through fear of legal reprisal. Finally, this article suggests that the film-industry censor – the Production Code Administration – was instrumental in reinforcing Hollywood's reliance upon government endorsement and cooperation. This latter point is exemplified by Joseph Mankiewicz's controversial adaptation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American . Overturning existing scholarship, which argues that CIA officer Edward Lansdale played a decisive role in transforming the screenplay of Greene's novel, this article suggests that Mankiewicz's alterations were made primarily to appease the Production Code Administration.