They Could Have Been Contenders: The Hollywood Blacklist

I’m just back from a week in Washington, DC. To my surprise, the nation’s capital currently seems a lot more bipartisan than I would have guessed. Yes, there were giant Trump portraits hanging from some prominent government buildings. But I also saw a major Washington boulevard shut down on behalf of a wild and crazy Gay Pride festival. And overt dissent was on display nearby: outside a tent manned by some dedicated anti-Trumpers, I spotted a large placard that gave MAGA a new definition: Make Algae Great Again.

 Washington’s wonderful Smithsonian museums (open daily and free to all comers) seemed as welcoming and as even-handed as ever, pointing up our nation’s failings but also its glories.  Some of the city’s private museums, though, were clearly interested in viewing today’s deep political divide in the context of past eras that were equally contentious. That certainly seemed part of the reason the Capital Jewish Museum is now hosting an exhibit called “Blacklisted: An American Story.” Its focus is on the era—starting in 1947 and lasting until the early Sixties—when the House Un-American Activities Committee was terrorizing Hollywood, forcing the major studios to remove from their ranks anyone (Jewish or otherwise) who had ever been sympathetic to the Communist party. (The only way to return to the film industry’s good graces in that era was to dish up the names of others whose politics were—or had ever been—suspect.)

 As part of this exhibit, the museum showed a series of film clips relevant to the blacklist period. Two of the films were directed by Elia Kazan. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) makes a brave argument against the built-in anti-Semitism of that era; the clip from On the Waterfront (1954) shows Marlon Brando as a longshoreman and would-be boxer climatically choosing to risk everything by bringing a mob boss to justice. Because Kazan was infamously known as one of those who “named names” to save his own career, many in Hollywood never forgave him. Orson Welles, for one, disparaged the latter film as “a celebration of the informant.”

 Three films written by Dalton Trumbo are also included in this montage. Two are from 1960, when the once-disgraced Trumbo was finally able to resume getting on-screen credit for his work. After writing Spartacus, he was championed by star Kirk Douglas, to whom he said, “Thanks, Kirk, for giving me back my name.” On earlier Trumbo films that appeared during the blacklist era, Trumbo had had to submit each of his scripts under a fictive monicker, or that of another writer. The screenwriting Oscar he won in 1954 for crafting under an assumed name the delightful (and totally apolitical) Roman Holiday was not awarded to him until 1993, almost three decades after his death.

 The exhibit also focuses on the sad example of John Garfield, one of many actors whose careers (and lives) were destroyed during the blacklist years. Garfield (born Jacob Garfinkle on New York’s Lower East Side) was a longtime supporter of liberal causes. He began appearing in major Hollywood films in 1938, usually in blue-collar roles, and was twice nominated for Oscars, notably for his lead role in the 1947 boxing film, Body and Soul. But his refusal to speak against his wife (once a member of the Communist Party) as well as his unwillingness to provide the House committee with the names of other Hollywood “Reds” ultimately destroyed him. He died of a heart attack in 1932 at the age of 39, just after a dream project in which he was to star was abruptly cancelled.

Despite it all, Happy 4^th of July!

John Garfield, with quote from his daughter

                            

 

Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Paranoia Years

 

Was the Christmas perennial, It’s a Wonderful Life, covert Marxist propaganda? What about a 1945 tearjerker called Pride of the Marines, regarding a U.S. Marine who loses his eyesight at Guadalcanal? Or a 1948 fantasy-drama called The Boy with Green Hair?

 We think of the bad old days—when American politicians were spotting Communists on every corner—as the McCarthy Era. That described the early 1950s, when a certain senator from Wisconsin was accusing most of the U.S. State Department (not to mention the honchos of the Truman administration) of being under the thumb of Soviet Russia. In Hollywood, though, the Red Scare began earlier, just a few years after the end of World War II. When the USSR shifted, in the public’s perception,  from being one of the Allies defeating Nazi Germany to a dangerous enemy out to undermine the American system, the movie industry was quick to try removing from its midst anyone who’d once had the slightest admiration for Karl Marx or for Soviet ideology.

 L.A.’s Skirball CulturalCenter is currently playing host to a traveling exhibit called Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare. The exhibit’s focus is on writers and others who lost their livelihoods (and sometimes their lives) when their patriotism was questioned by studio bosses. In that era, it became verboten to belong (or to have belonged, even decades earlier) to the American Communist party. And guilt by association was the rule, not the exception. Woe to the Hollywood figure called before a Senate committee to answer the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” (You were expected to get yourself off the hook by ratting out your friends.) An unverified mention in a publication called Red Channels could destroy your career, though a quiet pay-off to the editor could help your problem vanish.

 Jews, Blacks, and members of other minority groups were, in that era, particularly suspect. Philip Loeb, who played Gertrude Berg’s husband on a popular radio broadcast called The Goldbergs, was accused of Communist sympathies in Red Channels. Though he denied the accusation, it led to his firing and then to his suicide. Popular leading man John Garfield, whose wife had once been a Party member, was hounded into an early death. Some major Hollywood stars, led by Lauren Bacall and spouse Humphrey Bogart, rallied to form a Committee for the First Amendment in support of their fellow actors, but studio bosses quickly scared them off.

 Perhaps hardest hit were Hollywood’s veteran screenwriters, who found themselves living overseas and writing under fake names, only collecting the Oscars they’d earned (like Dalton Trumbo’s for Roman Holiday) decades later. For me the most eye-opening part of the exhibit was the display of FBI commentary casting suspicion on the era’s most popular films. It’s a Wonderful Life? It was suspect because it contained ““a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers.”  The Best Years of Our Lives? This poignant 1946 drama of 3 servicemen trying to re-adjust to civilian life, winner of 9 Oscars including Best Picture, was regarded with disfavor for portraying the upper class unattractively. Because Gentleman’s Agreement, a Best Picture winner that boldly confronted anti-Semitism, included in its cast of characters a bigoted cop, it was accused by the FBI of being “a deliberate attempt to discredit law enforcement.” Body and Soul? “It portrays the rich and successful man in a bad light and the finest character of them all is a colored fighter.”

 And The Boy With Green Hair? Who says that looking different is a GOOD thing?  

Trumbo: What’s in a Name?

The long shadow of the Hollywood blacklist is still with us. This is made clear by the 2015 film Trumbo, which twice shows its hero, Dalton Trumbo, sitting on a couch with his family, watching on TV the Oscars he’s won for his screenplay be awarded to others. Trumbo was a difficult kind of guy, often truculent, sometimes plainly naïve, but warm and generous beneath it all. He was also a loyal husband and father, who needed to provide for a family left bereft when he was sent to prison for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. As one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, he could not be hired by a Hollywood studio, even after his eleven-month stint in the federal penitentiary was completed. That’s why he, like so many blacklisted writers, was forced to sell his scripts under the names of others.

A 1976 film, The Front, showed us how that system worked. The Front, starring Woody Allen in the rare role he did not write, suggested the psychological toll on an average little man who has agreed to take credit for the achievements of others. In Trumbo, we see the situation from the true author’s perspective, in the context of Roman Holiday, a delightful 1953 romantic comedy with absolutely no political undertones. Because of the rules of the blacklist, Trumbo could only sell it by persuading a fellow screenwriter, Ian McLellan Hunter, to take credit where credit was not due. Roman Holiday won the 1954 Oscar for best original story, and a rather embarrassed Hunter duly received a golden statuette bearing his name. (This error was not rectified by the Academy’s Board of Governors until 1992, when Trumbo’s widow accepted his Roman Holiday prize, but sites like IMDB still list Hunter as one of the film’s actual writers.)

The second time around, rather than turning to a fellow screenwriter as a front, Trumbo borrowed the name Robert Rich from the nephew of his bottom-of-the-barrel producer, Frank King. The film was The Brave One, a tender tale about a young Mexican boy and his bull. When the name Robert Rich was called by the Academy Awards presenter, no one came forward. This Oscar was re-issued in Trumbo’s own name in 1975, once the power of the blacklist had been broken once and for all.

The film Trumbo (which boasts a terrific lead performance by TV favorite Bryan Cranston) is based largely on the memories of Trumbo’s two surviving children. If the film is to be believed, Trumbo did a masterful job of engineering an end to the blacklist by playing two big Hollywood personalities off against one another. Circa 1960, a brash young Kirk Douglas was angling for Trumbo to write Spartacus, about a slave revolt in ancient Rome, with Douglas himself producing as well as playing the leading role. At about the same time, the imperious director-producer Otto Preminger sought Trumbo’s expertise in transforming Leon Uris’s bestselling Exodus into a screenplay. What Trumbo wanted, above all, was a chance to write under his own name once more. By skillfully appealing to the oversized egos of Preminger and Douglas, he got both to agree to give him screen credit.

Dalton Trumbo was clearly not a man without flaws. But the real bad guys of this complicated story are those who seek to deny First Amendment rights to Americans who hold unpopular opinions. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper certainly had the right to come down hard on the “Reds” whose reputations she tarnished in the press. But, in Helen Mirren’s poison-pen performance, she’s a woman I loved to hate.