You are in for a treat if you set your DVR to Turner Classic Movies at midnight tonight (Eastern, 9 PM Pacific) to record The Woman on Pier 13, initially released as I married a Communist. If you miss that showing, it will be repeated at 10 AM EDT Sunday, as part of TCM’s weekly Noir Alley program, hosted by Eddie Muller, founder of the Film Noir Foundation and a genuine expert on the noir genre.

The film was and remains mostly hated by critics, but if you give it a watch, you will find an entertaining melodrama centering on the efforts of the Communist Party USA to infiltrate and take over labor unions and foment a dock strike to cripple the war making potential of the United States. Throw in a high profile, glamorous communist journalist as the femme fatale, and you have delicious recipe of commie subversion taking place as the so-called “witch hunt” was roiling Hollywood.

I expect Noir Alley host Eddie Muller, who has frequently bemoaned the fates of Hollywood figures blacklisted in this era, to have some uncomplimentary things to say about Howard Hughes, who greenlighted the film right after he took over RKO (the premiere studio producing film noir), and who was very anti-communist. But I still look forward to hearing his thoughts. I am particularly interested in what he will say about Janis Carter, who in my opinion steals the show as Christine Norman, the glamorous communist journalist.

It's not the best movie ever made, but in its clear-eyed depiction of communist subversion, which normally is derided as hysteria, it is the best anti-communist movie ever made in America.