Early Warnings of the Red Peril: A Pre-History of Cold War Cinema in Britain, 1917-1939

Scholarship on the cinema of the Cold War has focused predominantly on the 1940s and 1950s, and has largely been confined to movies made in the United States and the Soviet Union. Through an examination of a number of British films like Forbidden Territory, an explicitly anti-Soviet movie released in 1934- more than a decade before the Cold War is thought to have started- this article contributes to recent efforts made my historians to widen our perspective on Cold War cinema. Instead of revisiting the 'classic' era and output of Cold War cinema, I will look instead at the period 1917-1939 and explore the ways in which, in the years between the Bolshevik Revolution and the outbreak of the Second World War, the British film industry showed signs of already being 'at war' with the Soviet Union and communism.