Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 107

O n e L o n e l y N i g h t and J e t P il o t

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the Soviet Union is portrayed as a backward country. Scenes of Russian peasants
living in one-room huts filled with straw served to reinforce stereotypes of Russians
as primitive and hence of communism as a political system lower on the social
evolutionary scale than American democracy. In the film’s logic Russian peasant
equals Soviet citizen. A 1952 Life magazine article, “Iron Curtain Look is Here!”
satirizes backward Soviet fashion, subtitling the article “U.S. envoy’s wife finds
Moscow modes high priced, wide shouldered, not very handsome” (qtd. in Barson
n.p.). On every level, Soviet life is portrayed as inferior to American life—from
political systems, to shelter, to women’s clothing.
The realization that the specter of Communism hides stupidity is one that
Mike Hammer comes to in One Lonely Night. When Mike easily passes within the
Party headquarters for one of the group, his image of Communists as wily, seductive
people crumbles: “Read the papers. See what it says about the Red Menace. See
how they play up their sneaking, conniving ways. They’re supposed to be clever,
bright as hell. They were dumb as horse manure as far as I was concerned” (35).
Yet, it is Mike’s ignorance of politics that allows him to perceive the stupidity of
the Communists and not be manipulated by the smokescreen of political rhetoric.
The fantasy of One L onely N igh t is that a violent private detective can do what no
government official can do: wipe out Communism with physical force. After Ethel
is shot, Mike fantasizes a one-man attack on Moscow: “But some day, maybe,
some day I’d stand on the steps of the Kremlin with a gun in my fist and I’d yell for
them to come out and if they wouldn’t I’d go in and get them and when I had them
lined up against the wall I’d start shooting until all I had left was a row of corpses”
(121). While Mike begins the novel tormented by a harsh judgment given to him
by a judge for his vigilante ways, he ends the novel by realizing that his purpose in
life is to stop the Communists: “I lived only to kill the scum and the lice that
wanted to kill themselves. I lived to kill so that others could live. I lived to kill
because my soul was a hardened thing that reveled in the thought of taking the
blood of th e bastards who made murder their business” (149).
One L onely N igh t works to demythologize the seduction of Communism. By
portraying sexy. Communist women as misguided girls and Soviet agents as stupid
murderers, the novel suggests that only a fool would be duped by the seductions
that Communism offer. Another Fifties film, in a very different genre, shows us
the other end of the spectrum, the wild mythologizing of the Soviets that often was
part of anti-Communist propaganda films.
J et Pilot focuses on a Soviet pilot, Anna (Janet Leigh), who flies into American
air space in Alaska. Col. Jim Shannon (John Wayne), a US pilot, is put in charge of
her by the Air Force to learn what equipment the Soviets possess in terms of air
technology. Jim falls in love with Anna, and when the US government threatens to
deport her, he marries her so they can stay together. Government officials then