Later made into the TV show “I Led Three Lives,” I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. is based on the (ghost-written) magazine memoirs of one Matt Cvetic, a Pittsburgh steel worker who was recruited by J. Edgar Hoover and planted in the labor movement. He later testified extensively before Congress as an “expert” on Communism in America, lost hundreds of people their jobs, and continued to maintain that “Communists plan to liquidate one-third of the American population, mostly the oldsters.” He died an alcoholic Birch Society member. In the film, Cvetic, played by Frank Lovejoy, stands as a model of American stoicism, withstanding the hatred of his own family for being a “communist” but never revealing his role as an agent. Nora Sayre notes that “Eight years after Mission to Moscow, the Cvetic film seems like Warner Brothers' apology for the former. One of the movie's central themes is that Communists are the true enemies of blacks, working people and Jews,” inciting the first two to riot and blaming the last. “Although almost all of the plot was fictional,” Sayre writes, “the movie received a nomination for an Academy Award as the best feature-length documentary of 1951.... Despite its crudities, the movie isn't comic.”