It’s a fitting coincidence that the same week that Martin Scorsese’s film Killers of the Flower Moon is opening, the American Film Institute is holding its annual film noir festival Noir City D.C. Scorsese was heavily influenced by film noir and in particular Force of Evil, one of the best films playing at the noir festival. Killers of the Flower Moon is indeed a three-hour epic about an American tragedy, but it also is shot through with noir touches - crime, dark alleys, a corrupt and rigged system that wields enormous control over individuals.

Popular in the 1940s and 1950s, film noir was a genre whose creative ranks were often filled with communists. Actor Sterling Hayden, star of classic noirs The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The Killing (1956), was briefly a member of the Communist Party before he named names of Hollywood colleagues who had also been party members. Hayden would also become a spy for the CIA . One of the colleagues named by Hayden was screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky, who had released Force of Evil in 1948. Force of Evil is featured in the AFI noir festival, and a special edition Blu-ray was recently released, featuring a short introduction by Martin Scorsese. Scorsese says he came across Force of Evil on TV when he was 13, and it changed his life. Here were characters that looked and spoke like people in real life.

According to Allan H. Ryskind in his excellent book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters - Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Polonsky was "a thoroughgoing Communist who took the Fifth when he testified before HUAC [the House Un-American Activities Committee] in 1951 but to eventually admitted to Party membership." Polonsky once described a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment this way: "You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there." He went on: "We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities."

Polonsky was placed on a Hollywood blacklist for almost two decades. In his intro to the special edition Force of Evil disc, Scorsese calls this "a great loss" for American cinema, but two things can be true at the same time: Polonsky could have been a talented filmmaker who was also a danger to the country. Yes, Joe McCarthy and some other anti-communists often went too far. The great anti-communist Whittaker Chambers warned about McCarthy and his often reckless tactics. Yet there were communists in the government. Chambers also wrote this famous and prescient passage: "The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades."

It’s worth noting that in both Force of Evil and Killers of the Flower Moon, the corrupt system is not capitalism, but a perversion and corruption of capitalism. In Force of Evil, a man named Joe Mores (a great John Garfield, who was falsely accused of being a communist) tries to rig a numbers game. In Killers of the Flower Moon, criminals come to Oklahoma to steal oil from Native Americans. These are criminals, not capitalists.

An informative commentary on communism and film noir is provided in the commentary track by film historian Imogen Sara Smith on the DVD of Force of Evil. Smith notes that many of the creators of 1950s film noir had been survivors of the Great Depression, when the American economic system came into question. At the same time, Smith cuts through the cant of the left-wing apologists for the communist activity in Hollywood at the time. Without defending the "sadistic" tactics of Joe McCarthy, Smith admits that film noir artists "did attack capitalism and the American way." Like modern Hollywood, they were propagandists. "It’s no wonder the government wanted to shut these people down," Smith concludes.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.