major league pitcher Monty Stratton. One of baseball's youngest and foremost pitchers, Stratton lost a leg to amputation after a hunting accident at age of twenty-six. Director Wood expertly recounted the athlete's struggle to adapt to the use of a prosthetic and return to professional baseball in the minor leagues. An inherently "maudlin" tale, Wood presented the events without succumbing to sentimentality: "it told a true story, and kept to the facts…" Actors Van Johnson and Gregory Peck were considered for the role of Monty Stratton, but M-G-M settled on James Stewart, the actor Stratton himself felt would portray his life most effectively. Contrary to conventional wisdom among Hollywood studio executives that sports features were "box-office poison", The Stratton Story was "the sixth-biggest theatrical draw of 1949 and Stewart's first bona fide hit since his return from World War II." Ambush (1950), M-G-M Sam Wood's directorial swan song was the adventure Western Ambush, filmed in 1949 and released in 1950 after Wood's unexpected death from a heart attack. A "Grade A" M-G-M production, it starred Robert Taylor as a hardened US Army Indian fighter and companion John Hodiak and adversary Chief Thundercloud: When Wood was arranging a production of No Sad Songs for Me, a Margaret Sullavan vehicle for Columbia Pictures, he was suddenly stricken by a heart attack on September 22, 1949, and died a few hours later in hospital. Political beliefs Wood became a committed and ardent Anti-Communist in the years that saw the rise of McCarthyism in the late 1940s. Wood first exhibited this political perspective In 1943, when he reduced much of the anti-fascist content of For Whom the Bell Tolls, saying "It would be the same love story if they were on the other side." In 1944, he founded and served as the first president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization that was "dedicated to seeking out and expelling those people it considered traitorous to American interests." The organization, "formed of management and labor in the film industry," quietly lobbied the House Un-American Activities Committee to examine purported Communist elements in the movie industry, which they did in 1947. Wood had been keeping a black notebook in which he wrote the names of those he considered subversive. His daughter Jeane Wood said that his crusade "transformed Dad into a snarling, unreasoning brute." There was nothing in Wood's personal