I don’t recognize the right of the committee to ask me these kinda questions
Now here’s a movie I want to see. Judging by the trailer it’s all about the Hollywood Ten (specifically Dalton Trumbo) and HUAC and the blacklist. That’s a fascinating subject. If you want to read up on it, Eric Bentley has an excellent collection of extracts from HUAC hearings, Thirty Years of Treason.
One of Dalton Trumbo’s lines from the trailer:
Many questions can be answered ‘yes or no’ only by a moron or a slave.
After the Second World War, as tensions began to simmer between both the United States and Soviet Union and the Hollywood studios and unions like the Screen Writers Guild, the House Committee on Un-American Activities turned its eyes towards the entertainment industry, suspecting communist infiltration and propaganda. In October 1947, HUAC opened hearings on the matter, interviewing writers, directors, actors, executives and others in order to find evidence of communist subversion. Most famous among these individuals were ten who refused to confirm their involvement in the Communist Party. The Hollywood Ten, as they became known, were cited for contempt of Congress and served prison time. Others suspected of communist sympathies were denied work by the studios, forcing them to work under fronts or pseudonyms. Others, whether for political reasons or out of reluctance to lose their jobs, cooperated, naming more individuals for HUAC to question.
One of those was Elia Kazan. On the Waterfront – one of the great movies of all time – can be read as an allegory defending Kazan’s naming names for HUAC.
One of the ten was Herbert Biberman, who later made the unabashedly leftist movie Salt of the Earth, which is both a joy and a joke, full of clunky agitprop lines. John Sayles jokes about it in his first movie, Return of the Secaucus Seven. (Are we at enough levels of meta yet?) An article by Steve Boisson originally published in the February 2002 issue of American History Magazine gives lashings of background.
When director Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront opened in 1954, critics and audiences hailed the gritty movie about Hoboken dockworkers and applauded Marlon Brando’s performance as the ex-boxer who ‘coulda been a contender.’ At the next Academy Awards ceremony, On the Waterfront won Oscars for best film, best director, best actor, and best supporting actress.
Another movie about beleaguered workers opened to quite a different reception that same year. Like Kazan’s film, Salt of the Earth was based on an actual situation, in this case a mining strike in New Mexico. Both movies were shot on location with the participation of those who had lived the real stories. And both movies shared a history in the Hollywood blacklist. There the similarities ended. Kazan and his writer, Budd Schulberg, had both named names — identified movie people they said were Communists — when questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Some saw their movie, in which Brando’s character testifies against the racketeers who run the docks, as an allegory in support of informing. The people behind Salt, in contrast, were unrepentant blacklistees whose leftist political affiliations derailed their careers during the Red scares of the 1950s. On the Waterfront was a hit and is remembered as a classic film. The makers of Salt of the Earth struggled to find theater owners willing to show their incendiary movie.
One more level of meta – Woody Allen starred in a 1976 movie about the blacklist, The Front.
Because of the blacklist, a number of artists, writers, directors and others were rendered unemployable, having been accused of subversive political activities in support of Communism or of being Communists themselves.
Several people involved in the making of the film – screenwriter Bernstein, director Ritt, and actors Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, and Lloyd Gough – had themselves been blacklisted. (The name of each in the closing credits is followed by “Blacklisted 19–” and the relevant year.) Bernstein was listed after being named in the Red Channels journal that identified alleged Communists andCommunist sympathizers.
I haven’t seen it since it came out but I remember it as pretty good.
Here’s the last minute of the movie:
https://youtu.be/AE5rvXn9Wkc
Hollywood is obsessed with the impact of McCarthyism on… HOLLYWOOD. It’s not surprising that they cover this over and over and over, with themselves as heroes (which they mostly weren’t). There’s an element of masturbation here that makes me feel icky watching sometimes. I’d like to see them give more fuck about victims other than themselves, or honestly portraying their own quisling behavior. This “blacklist” was not created by the HUAC: it was HOLLYWOOD that was doing the blacklisting. They somehow gloss over that, generally.
I’m glad you posted about this, since it reminded me to look up the documentary I’d seen years ago whose name I could never call to mind. It was “None without Sin: Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and the Blacklist.” I can’t find the whole thing available anywhere, unfortunately.
Woody Allen, hero only in fiction. Meanwhile back in reality, Lauren Bacall was one of the ones who did take a stand: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119095/lauren-bacalls-politics-her-stand-against-hollywood-anti-communism You know how to whistle, doncha?
Oh my, HUAC. Some of my fellow student activists were hauled up before it in the mid-’60s. One whose name will undoubtedly come to me in the wee small hours of the morning declined to answer a question “on the grounds that it makes me want to vomit on this table.”
Trumbo was one of my early-adulthood heroes. He was one of the snarkiest writers of all time. There’s a collection of his letters titled Additional Dialogue that is well worth reading. I think his talent for snark has influenced my style; in a series of letters regarding the phone company’s threat to shut him off immediately over a disputed charge he wrote “considering what you’ve done to me, you ought to wait the full nine months.”
I never managed to meet him, but I did go to this memorial at First Unitarian in Los Angeles, and my sides literally ached for several days afterward. Friend after friend took the stage, each apparently trying to top the last in the Funny Trumbo Stories competition.
Yes, HOLLYWOOD (with or without the all-caps) did the blacklisting. Of other Hollywood people. Those who would not knuckle under to HUAC by answering questions that HUAC did indeed have no right to ask. Who did so in many cases at the cost of lost careers and, in some cases, shortened lives.
Those they would not knuckle under were the studio heads and the cooperative Hollywood witnesses who caved in to HUAC — mainly (in Orson Welles’ comment, paraphrased here) to save their swimming pools.
So lumping everyone in the American film industry of that time under HOLLYWOOD won’t do. It’s simplistic.
As for the line Woody Allen says in the final scene of “The Front,” it was written by Walter Bernstein. The character the Allen character was being pressured to betray is played by Zero Mostel. The film’s director is Martin Ritt. Each of these people (along with several others who worked on the film (which, dramatic elements and all, is basically a comedy viewed from a many-years-later vantage point) was blacklisted, as the film’s final credits indicate.
These people were fortunate to weather the injustice they experienced. Indeed, Ritt and Bernstein later collaborated on “The Molly Maguires,” an unsung masterpiece of American filmmaking about a group that sought to fight a hopeless battle against corrupt forces in the American coal mining industry during the late 19th Century. Many others were not.
After Hitler invaded Russia, the American film industry WAS ready to churn out pro-Soviet pablum. Films like ‘Mission to Moscow’ and ‘Northern Star’ (written by Lilian Hellman) are cringe-worthy celebrations of the worker’s paradise.
The anti-New Deal reaction of the 50s deserves all the scorn and horror that it gets, and more. But there really was a Soviet threat, and the Western Left was heavily handicapped by pressure from Stalin’s stooges. The actual peak of NKVD-GRU-OGPU activity in the US was before WWII. The Roosevelt administration quietly responded to the threat and most agents were put out of work without fanfare. McCarthy, and the rest of the far-right opportunists were jumping on the bandwagon after the parade had stopped.
Anybody interested in the Red Scare and its intersections with LGBT issues should check out The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson. I read it for an LGBT Studies course, and it was truly excellent: I thought I already knew a fair bit about McCarthyism, HUAC, and related issues of the era, but this gave me a greatly expanded perspective. It really hammers home how much of this was about normative sexuality and family structures as a part of the American identity. There are also lots of intersections with Philip Wylie’s (discredited) psychological framework of “momism” (I can’t remember if Johnson specifically touches on that or if we looked at it in other materials about LGBT experience in postwar America and just made the connections in class) – if you’ve never encountered that one before, you’re in for a… well, “treat” isn’t really the right word, but if you think that examining all of the fucked up bits of our culture is useful for trying to make things better, this is another huge part of the puzzle in terms of how we’ve arrived at our present forms of institutionalized sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism.