In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden
years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala,
conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as
unwitting guinea pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first
general-release, feature-length animation ever made in the UK.
It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm,
John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 version of George Orwell’s
political allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played
out in a British farmyard. Cashing in on his Watergate notoriety, the
rogue spook and sometime spy novelist took credit in Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent
(1974) for initiating the project, shortly after Orwell’s death in
1950. The self-aggrandising Hunt may have exaggerated his own importance
in the operation – possibly inventing the juicy detail that Orwell’s
widow, Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star,
Clark Gable – but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ (Pennsylvania, $55), the operation was real.
Leab
is a historian who has done extensive research into the production of
Hollywood’s Cold War movies; the central figure in his account is Louis
de Rochemont, the former newsreel cameraman who supervised Time magazine’s innovative monthly release The March of Time and, beginning in 1945 with The House on 92nd Street,
produced a number of so-called ‘journalistic features’ for 20th Century
Fox (which were praised by James Agee, among others, for their
extensive use of location shooting). De Rochemont was also well
connected to various government agencies. The House on 92nd Street dramatised the FBI’s role in arresting Nazi agents; its 1946 follow-up, 13 Rue Madeleine,
celebrated the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic Services,
the CIA’s precursor, but a dispute between the studio and the OSS
director, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, resulted in the organisation’s being
disguised as an intelligence outfit called ‘0-77’.
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