
Jacobin | American Stock Archive/Archive Photos/Getty
The riveting new Criterion Channel film series “Noir and the Blacklist” is distressingly timely. It’s a sampling of film noir made by Hollywood directors, writers, and actors who were targeted as communists or broadly left-wing “subversives” by their own government in the post–World War II era by a punitive right-wing body called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).