Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

answer questions that would have involved implicating
others, the Ten were convicted of ‘‘contempt of
Congress’’ and mostly served short prison sentences before
emerging to face unemployability. The Ten would have
been Eleven, but Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)—whose
latest work, significantly, was a play about Galileo—pretended
not to understand English well enough to answer
questions in his first session, then fled the country. After
years of appeals, two of the Hollywood Ten, Lester Cole
and Ring Lardner Jr. (1915–2000), arrived in Danbury
Prison to serve their terms, only to find Congressman
Thomas, convicted in the interim of embezzling from
the federal purse, among their fellow inmates.
The Hollywood Communists suffered for slipping
‘‘subversive’’ dialogue into scripts: the line ‘‘hare and
share alike, that’s democracy’’ in Edward Dmytryk’s
(1908–1999) Tender Comrade (1943) tipped off Ginger
Rogers’s (1911–1995) mother that the writer Dalton
Trumbo (1905–1976) was a Red. Yet it is hard to detect
traces of anything that might count as Communist or
even socialist propaganda in any of the films, good or
bad, made by the Ten. The Ten were mostly talented
journeymen: Cole, writer of The Invisible Man Returns
(1939), which has a miners’ strike subplot; Lardner, who
later wrote M*A*S*H (1970); Trumbo, who wrote AGuy
Named Joe (1943) and Spartacus (1960); Dmytryk, director
of Captive Wild Woman (1943) and Murder, My
Sweet (1944); John Howard Lawson (1895–1977), writer
of Terror in a Texas Town (1958); Herbert Biberman
(1900–1971), director of Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), writer
of King of Chinatown (1939); Adrian Scott (1912–1973),
producer of Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire (1947); Alvah
Bessie, writer of Northern Pursuit (1943) and Hotel Berlin
(1945); Albert Maltz, writer of This Gun for Hire (1942)
and The Man in Half Moon Street (1944); and Samuel
Ornitz (1890–1957), writer of Hit Parade of 1937
(1937) and Little Orphan Annie (1939).
Other ‘‘unfriendlies,’’ former or current radicals
eventually blacklisted, included actors Gale Sondergaard
(1899–1985), John Garfield (1913–1952), Kim Hunter
(1922–2002), Zero Mostel (1915–1977), and Lionel
Stander (1909–1994), writers Dashiell Hammett (1894–
1961) (who went stubbornly to jail), Carl Foreman
(1914–1984), and Walter Bernstein (b. 1919) (who dealt
with the period in his autobiographical script The Front,
1976), and directors Joseph Losey (1909–1984), Jules
Dassin (b. 1911), and Cy Endfield (1914–1995). Most
of these had, at one time or another, been ‘‘card-carrying’’
Communists, that is, members of the American
Communist Party (CPUSA). Some directors (Losey,
Endfield) went to Europe and eventually became successful
there; some writers used pseudonyms or fronts until it
was safe to be credited again. Many endured long periods
of forced inactivity. Abraham Polonsky (1910–1999) did
Cold War
not direct between Force of Evil (1948) and Tell Them
Willie Boy Is Here (1969), managing only one further
feature in the remaining thirty years of his life. On the
strength of his debut feature, it seems obvious that without
the blacklist he would have had a career at least on a level
with Edward Dmytryk (who eventually named names) and
possibly on a level with Elia Kazan (1909–2003) (who
famously became a ‘‘friendly’’). Actors, of course, were
hardest hit of all: some (Sam Wanamaker [1919–1993])
became refugees, but others cracked and informed (Lee J.
Cobb [1911–1976], Sterling Hayden [1916–1986], Lloyd
Bridges [1913–1998]) to resume their careers.
Under Thomas, HUAC obsessively alleged that
‘‘Red writers’’ insidiously worked the Party Line into
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals or Fox thrillers, polluting
the minds of American audiences. Investigations
failed to turn up any concrete incidences of subversion
beyond Lionel Stander whistling ‘‘Internationale’’ while
waiting for an elevator in No Time to Marry (1938).
Subtly, the thrust of the crusade changed: as in later
investigations into the civil services, universities, and
other spheres, including dentistry and the US mail, the
purpose of the Hollywood hearings was to render unemployed
and unemployable anyone who was or had been a
Communist or ‘‘fellow traveler.’’ Liberals like John
Huston (1906–1987) or Kirk Douglas (b. 1916) survived
only through canniness—a combination of undoubted
box office track record, token anti-Red statements (or
films), and an independent streak that would lead to
work outside the troubled studio system (other federal
committees were breaking up monopolies on exhibition
and production), eventually becoming free of the powers
who could actually draw up and enforce blacklists.
There was, of course, no formal blacklist. It operated
on threat and innuendo, with a complex system of extortion,
blackmail, and intimidation, even including
approved methods for getting off the list through strategic
self-abasement (cooperation with the FBI) or actual
bribery. Initially, the blacklisted were names compiled
by HUAC for their hearings, but the work was taken
up enthusiastically by the American Legion and a private
firm called American Business Consultants, who
‘‘exposed’’ subversives in their publications (Firing Line,
Counterattack, Red Channels). If studios continued to hire
those named, the studios would become the victims of
organized boycott campaigns. In television, pressure was
brought not on the broadcast companies but on the
sponsors who underwrote their programs. Mistakes were
made—actress Martha Scott (1914–2003) was confused
with singer Hazel Scott (1920–1981) and was blacklisted.
Studio heads, their power eroded by other factors
(television, antitrust legislation, impatient heirs), embraced
the blacklist as a ‘‘bolting the stable door after the horse
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 313