Orwell Subverted deals with an important and often-overlooked topic: the secret role the CIA played in sponsoring art during the Cold War, and how it managed to conceal its wide-ranging efforts in this field for decades. Leab, editor of the journal American Communist History, has gathered much new information on the 1954 animated film, especially its production. For instance, he found that the production team, led by Louis de Rochemont, the noted American producer whose credits included the innovative series The March of Time, altered the ending to suit the CIA's political objectives more than a half-dozen times. He shows the considerable challenges de Rochemont and his team faced given the limited state of animation technology, their limited budget, and the divergent goals they and the CIA—which apparently saw the film strictly as an anti-Soviet vehicle—had.

Those interested in film production and history will find chapter 3 on de Rochemont and chapter 5 on John Halas and Joy Batchelor, the pioneering animators who made the movie, informative and insightful. Leab has done an impressive amount of research on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, he is able to correct some errors other scholars in the field have made. For instance, he shows that Frances Stonor Saunders “stumbles in her use of [E. Howard] Hunt” (45). The erstwhile CIA agent and Watergate “plumber” was not involved in the production of the film, as she stated in Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999). The book is organized chronologically, which allows one to trace the development of the film fairly easily. This method of presentation also helps to highlight one of his central points: the significant effect the CIA had at nearly every stage of production, especially the ending, which the agency saw as critical to fulfilling its goal of branding the USSR as a police state. Those who hope to learn much new information about Orwell's ideas and life are liable to be disappointed. There is little new information about the British writer, although there is much about his widow, Sonia, who at the CIA's initiative gave it the film rights to the book.

His thesis that the film subverts Orwell is debatable, for Orwell was a staunch antitotalitarian who wrote that one of his goals was to expose “the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by anyone” (1). In 1946, at the beginning of the Cold War, he wrote, “The USSR is not Socialist, and can only be called Socialist if one gives the word a meaning different from what it would have in any other context” (George Orwell, “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus [New York, 1968], 165). In 1948—the year that 1984, his trenchant attack on totalitarianism, was published—he wrote “if one is going to write about foreign policy at all, there is one question that should be answered plainly. It is: 'If you had to choose between Russia and America, which would you choose?' … Everyone knows in his heart that we should choose America. … Certainly there is a small minority that would choose the other way. Mr. Zilliacus [a Labour MP who Orwell thought was a Communist], for instance, is one of them. I think he is wrong” (George Orwell, “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus,” in Orwell and Angus, The Collected Essays, 395). For Leab, the outstanding example of the CIA's subversion occurs at the end, when the animals (who represent the Russian people) attack the pigs (who symbolize the Russian Communist Party), instead of portraying the pigs and farmers (who represent the forces of capitalism) as becoming indistinguishable, as Orwell did in the novella. In both versions, however, the Soviet Union is painted in a very negative light, which was Orwell's purpose in writing the fable in the first place.

Most of Leab's interpretations and conclusions are sound, but some seem questionable, such as his view that Peter Davison, a Briton who helped with the book, is “the greatest of Orwell scholars” (xv) and that Davison's “is the last word on almost anything to do with George Orwell” (xxi). “Many of Orwell's novels are boring,” he writes (122). There are some minor organizational problems. For instance, in his discussion of the film's unexpectedly long life—it was a staple of the humanities curriculum in West Germany, for instance, for decades—he makes some of the same points in chapter 12 that he did in chapter 11. Some of the material does not seem particularly relevant, such as the biographical information on some minor figures, such as Carlton Alsop, a CIA operative who helped the agency obtain the rights to the film. In the short, final chapter, “Propaganda and Propagandists,” Leab raises some interesting philosophical issues. He asks, for instance, “is propaganda, even if it is not clandestinely sponsored, by definition bad; is it really more harmful than advertising?” (140). He leaves it to others to explore this important topic. It seems odd that he does not have more to say about the film's reception in regions at the center of the Kulturkampf between the United States and the USSR, such as Central and Eastern Europe, especially since he showed the key role these areas played in early Cold War politics in the preface. The significance of countries like Italy and Greece to the genesis of the struggle is commonly accepted. See, for instance, John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945– 48 (1986) and David Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction (1992). It is difficult to write without bias about the Cold War; Leab's bias lies with the Left. The Spanish Civil War was caused by “the Fascists” (1), Peter Viereck is a “polemicist” (5), and the CIA has long since lost “whatever patriotic gloss it might once have had” (135).

In spite of its scholarship, Orwell Subverted cannot be the definitive history of the movie, as Leab admits, because the CIA has still not released its files on Orwell and the film, or even acknowledged their existence. Therefore, Leab can only speculate about some key points. For instance, he does not know exactly who in the CIA's mysterious Office of Planning Coordination either initiated or oversaw the project, he can only guess what the agency's attitude toward Orwell was, he is uncertain if John Halas and Joy Batchelor knew whether the film's investors actually worked for the CIA, and he can neither confirm nor deny rumors that have swirled around Sonia Orwell's decision to give the film rights to the CIA. According to one of the most popular stories, she agreed only after the agency arranged for her to meet her hero, Clark Gable. In sum, this is an informative study that students of twentieth-century Europe and America will find compelling, especially those interested in the history of film.