For Hollywood, it was the worst of times: publicity-driven Congressmen making headlines by hounding screenwriters, directors and actors; studio bosses sacrificing their employees to political pressure; scores of careers put on hold for years or ruined forever.
The period and the players and many of their works have been brought back this month by the two old-movie cable channels. On Wednesday, February 28, American Movie Classics offers "Blacklist: Hollywood on Trial," a new 90-minute documentary. It will be accompanied by a day of programming, dedicated, says the news release, "to the entertainers who endured the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities."
Turner Classic Movies showed the 1976 documentary "Hollywood on Trial" early this month and has followed up with two dozen movies, mostly written by or featuring blacklistees. This marathon ends Thursday with a reprise of "Hollywood on Trial" and with "Exodus" (1960), the movie for which Dalton Trumbo received a screenwriting credit after having been blacklisted for a decade.
Why this renewed attention to a much-covered phenomenon? (Three plays about the Red-hunting mania were shown on Los Angeles stages last summer.) Mere programming happenstance? The need of survivors and heirs of the wounded to give their side of a bitter experience, to lay claim to the political and historical high ground? A fit of nostalgia? A response, perhaps, to the current Hollywood-bashing by a resurgent right? The safe guess is, some combination of all the above.
Both of this month's documentaries center on the famous whoop-de-do staged by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, when 10 "unfriendly witnesses," citing the First Amendment rather than the Fifth, declined to say whether they were or had ever been members of the Communist Party. Disappointed in their hope that their freedom-of-speech argument would be upheld by the Supreme Court, all 10 spent months in prison for contempt of Congress. The documentaries go on to tell of the tribulations of scores of blacklistees and of the success of a few of the more adept in making their livings under pseudonyms during the difficult 1950's.
The two works are as similar in content and spirit as they are in title. Both take a soft-focus approach to history, from the point of view of those -- some Communist, some tarred by association -- who were battered by the blacklist. That's understandable, if only as a matter of filial loyalty. The newer documentary was produced by Christopher Koch, the son of the blacklisted writer Howard Koch ("Casablanca"). Tony Kahn, the author of a recent National Public Radio series, "Blacklisted," who appears as an interviewer on the Turner offering, is the son of another blacklisted writer, Gordon Kahn ("A Yank on the Burma Road").
The Communists of the time are portrayed as idealists whose sympathies were shaped by the Depression at home and fascism abroad, and as victims of the cold war, which, it is implied, was instigated by Winston Churchill. That accords with the recollections of the blacklistees, who dominate both programs. Hollywood 10 survivors heard from are the writer Ring Lardner Jr. ("M*A*S*H*") and the director Edward Dmytryk ("The Caine Mutiny").
The testimony of Mr. Dmytryk touches on significant differences of opinions and temperaments among the Hollywood 10. He recanted while in jail, deciding, he says in the new documentary, that he was making a martyr of himself for an ideology in which he no longer believed. He went on to name names for the committee, thereby earning the disgust of his former comrades but salvaging his career.
Mr. Dmytryk seems
to have been a lukewarm
Communist compared,
say, with true believers
like
John Howard Lawson, chief of
the Hollywood cell. Abraham Polonsky, another blacklistee, can be
seen on the American Movie Classics
documentary still genially delivering
Popular Front slogans.
In the glow of these programs, the Communists of the time were just like liberals, only a little more "progressive." That was also the message the Hollywood 10 delivered outside the hearing room, in an odd alliance with the Republican-controlled committee, which was delighted to have liberals and Communists lumped together in the public mind.
In ignoring the special nature of
the Communist Party, both documentaries do a disservice to history.
They note, accurately if superficially, that Communists were prominent
in fighting against
Generalissimo
Franco, organizing American workers and battling race
discrimination.
But nothing is heard of the way the
party kept its members in line, a line
laid down in Moscow and enforced by
resident commissars like Lawson.
These writers, who sought public
support on the grounds of freedom of
speech, were permitted little freedom by their party.
Whatever their ideals, which you
can hear proclaimed on the documentaries, party members had been
tarnished by their thralldom to the
Soviet Union despite its internal
atrocities and external machinations. In a famously embarrassing
flip-flop, they opposed American involvement in World War II as long as
Moscow was allied with Berlin and
turned gung-ho after the Soviet
Motherland was invaded. They often
clothed themselves in a Bill of Rights
that they would not share with their
ideological enemies, who included
anyone who had an unkind word for
Stalin.
The darker side of the Communist
Party, well documented by 1947, goes
unmentioned in these documentaries. The Hollywood 10, who had never told their liberal supporters the
truth about their allegiance, were
assuredly victims, even courageous
victims, but not exactly in the vanguard of liberalism, a cause that
their party despised and that they
damaged. Yet it hardly needs saying
that their failings were no excuse for
Congress's interference in movie
making, for the committee's bullying, for the studios' failure to stand
up to aspiring censors or, emphatically, for the hurt done to American
citizens, Communist or no.
The hearings were no triumph for
the inquisitors. Despite the promises
of the committee's chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, to expose the rampant
Marxism in Hollywood movies, he
finally rested his case on three tributes to a wartime ally: "Mission to
Moscow," "North Star" and "Song of
Russia." They were, granted, immoderately foolish concoctions
(James Agee called "Mission to
Moscow," which offered a benign
account even of the notorious Moscow purge trials of the 1930's, "a
great, glad $2 million bowl of canned
borscht"), but there was nothing
particularly subversive about that
sort of Soviet-American Friendship
Society propaganda while battles
raged on the Eastern front.
For all their posturings, the Communists' ideological impact on movies was slight. Some, like Mr. Lardner and Trumbo, were talented
craftsmen; some were hacks. But as
demonstrated by the works on show
this month, all played pretty much
by the rules of capitalism.
The Hollywood 10 fared badly. A
few of them seemed to be asking for
it at the hearings, with bellowing
performances that turned off even
sympathizers. Other ostensible allies
steered clear in the interests of their
own careers. The movie establishment proved to be easily cowed, and
the unfriendly witnesses soon became friendless witnesses. Thomas
himself, later to be convicted of
stealing from the Government and
sent to the same prison as Mr. Lardner, was exposed as an overbearing,
gavel-banging ignoramus.
Is America facing a resurgence of
repression, as some contend? Caution is always in order in such matters, but so is perspective. However
censorious the spirit behind the current campaigns against Hollywood
and the national endowments, they
do not bear comparison with the pain
inflicted in the 1940's and 1950's. To
pretend otherwise is to make light of
the cost of the blacklist to the nation
and to the very people being celebrated. And anyway, distorting yesterday's record in the service of today's cause is the sort of thing the
Un-American Activities Committee
or the Hollywood 10 might have
done.
Document URL:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/learn-from-blacklist.html
Last
modified: Thursday, 31-May-2007 09:42:15 EDT