====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
I was waiting for Louis, the movement's film critic, to post this but I didn't see it. Although the political viewpoint is rightist and leaves out important background, it has some information that I found useful. I wish I was in NYC to see the films. UC Berzerkley has useful bibliographic info on the topic at http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/blacklist.html. I read on Portside that Norma Barzman (The Red and the Blacklist, autobiography) at 93 is still fighting the good fight and kicked off a UCLA film festival in July - https://portside.org/2014-08-01/blacklisted-writer-norma-barzman-kicks-ucla-film-series If my post is too long for this list, please let me know so I don't make this mistake again. Red Arnie *** *Movies * *Screen Voices, Banished but Not Silenced* *The Blacklist, at Lincoln Center and Anthology Film Archives* By J. HOBERMAN AUG. 7, 2014 -Picture omitted. The screenwriters Dalton Trumbo, left, and John Howard Lawson, hoisted aloft by supporters in June 1950, before serving time for contempt of Congress. Credit Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press- The close-up, the big screen, the eternal klieg light of unending media coverage: Motion pictures, especially those made in Hollywood, are a technology of magnification. How else to explain that the tale of the 300 or so movie studio employees whose political associations cost them their jobs has come to dramatize the repressive hysteria of the McCarthy era? A real-life film noir featuring danger, betrayal, selflessness and close encounters with movie stars, the Hollywood blacklist is a juicy narrative and remains an enduring object of fascination. New scholarly histories roll off academic presses, most recently “Hollywood Exiles in Europe <http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/Hollywood-Exiles-in-Europe,5055.aspx>” by Rebecca Prime and “Film Criticism, the Cold War and the Blacklist <http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520280670>” by Jeff Smith, with more on the way. This month, Anthology Film Archives and Cineaste magazine will initiate an ambitious three-part series, “Screenwriters and the Blacklist <http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/42990>: Before, During and After.” And on Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/film_society_of_lincoln_center/index.html?inline=nyt-org> revives “Red Hollywood,” <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/294302/Red-Hollywood-Movie-/overview> the influential 1996 documentary by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch, giving it context with screenings of eight features chosen by Mr. Andersen that were directed or written by blacklisted artists. -Picture omitted. Dean Stockwell in “Boy With Green Hair” (1948), directed by Joseph Losey, who was later blacklisted. Credit RKO/Photofest- “A policy of nonemployment for known Communists,” as it was characterized by The New York Times when it was implemented in November 1947, following the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings on Communist influence in the movie industry, began with the contractual termination of the “unfriendly witnesses” — eight writers, one director and one producer — known as the Hollywood 10. Political theater of the highest order, the hearings directly involved and furthered the careers of two future presidents, Richard M. Nixon <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/nixon-early/> and Ronald Reagan <http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-08-26/news/8502250710_1_fbi-informant-hollywood-independent-citizens-committee-fbi-agent>, even as nonemployment accelerated in Hollywood with additional committee hearings in the early 1950s. Blacklisting had a pronounced effect on movie content and was not restricted to Communists. Progressives like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles were effectively driven out of the country. Although the ban ended in 1960 when the credit for Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood 10, flashed on the screen in two liberal-minded superproductions, “Exodus” <http://movies.nytimes.com/gst/movies/titlelist.html?v_idlist=16326;302624;416531;448939&inline=nyt_ttl> and “Spartacus,” <http://movies.nytimes.com/gst/movies/titlelist.html?v_idlist=45948;306481&inline=nyt_ttl> some on the blacklist would not work in Hollywood for another decade or more, and others would never return. Conventional wisdom has it that they were a marginal and mediocre lot. “Only two had talent,” Billy Wilder claimed of the 10. “The rest were just unfriendly.” The Anthology series, which features a number of credible movies written by members of the 10, means to dispel that assertion as well as another that is directly addressed by “Red Hollywood <http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/red-hollywood>”: the argument advanced, for different reasons, by both blacklisted screenwriters and their blacklisting bosses, that politically minded progressives had little effect on the content of Hollywood movies. This wasn’t the F.B.I.’s initial assumption. The bureau not only burglarized the offices of the Los Angeles Communist Party, during World War II and afterward, but also received reports from confidential informants (Ayn Rand apparently among them) who monitored movies for possible propaganda. “The Best Years of Our Lives” <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/4943/The-Best-Years-of-Our-Lives-Movie-/overview> and “It’s a Wonderful Life” <http://movies.nytimes.com/gst/movies/titlelist.html?v_idlist=25590;450109&inline=nyt_ttl> were two such subversive films. Still, as the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover realized, his agents were not film critics. The most efficient way to purge and discipline Hollywood would not be to attack individual movies but rather to stigmatize individual moviemakers. As the committee, privy to F.B.I. files, investigated successive waves of known and suspected Communists, studios stopped employing those who refused to acknowledge their political history or identify erstwhile comrades (and even some of those who did admit party membership and inform on others). -Picture omitted. John Garfield in “Force of Evil” (1948), directed by Abraham Polonsky, who was blacklisted a few years later. Credit MGM/Photofest What was the threat? With the exception of the 10, jailed for contempt of Congress <http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/02/movies/ring-lardner-jr-wry-screenwriter-and-last-of-the-hollywood-10-dies-at-85.html>, and the actress Dorothy Comingore <http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/destroyed-by-huac-the-dorothy-comingore-story>, arrested on a possibly trumped-up moral offense, no Hollywood Communist seems to have ever been charged with a crime, let alone treason. (The lone Soviet operative in the movie colony appears to have been the musical director Boris Morros, who quickly turned F.B.I. informant.) No less than in World War II, the studios wanted to affirm their patriotism. More than a few of the filmmakers who contributed so enthusiastically to the struggle against the Nazis found themselves on the wrong side of the fence in a new mobilization against Communism. The story of Hollywood leftists is a generational one. The movie industry’s Communists and their sympathizers were largely products of the Great Depression <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depression_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>. Their activism was rooted in the 1930s creation of the Screen Writers Guild and channeled by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. They were united behind Roosevelt in the 1944 election and, along with their faith in a socialist future, shared a utopian belief in movies as popular art and a force for change. Analyzing the work of blacklisted artists (some of whom would sell scripts through proxies called “fronts”), the documentary “Red Hollywood” provides an alternative way of looking at classic Hollywood, or even a new form of auteurism. It’s no coincidence that French cineastes were among the first to draw attention to the work of the Communist directors Joseph Losey and Abraham Polonsky, featured in both series, who, even into the early 1950s, made downbeat, politically aware crime movies that Mr. Andersen calls “film gris.” Cy Endfield is another director, with two movies in the Lincoln Center series, re-evaluated in good measure because he was blacklisted. That Hollywood movies might once have been vehicles for social criticism is a potent romantic notion. Contacted by email, Richard Porton, a Cineaste editor and one of the programmers of the Anthology series, emphasized that those on the blacklists were not simply victims but “successful radicals.” Dennis Lim, director of programming at the film society, made a similar point, citing the appeal of “rebel artists working within a thoroughly commercial sphere.” Drawing on both series, you could assemble the syllabus for a course on the concerns of the American left during the ’30s and ’40s. The threat of gangster capitalism is articulated by Polonsky’s “Force of Evil <http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=08&year=2014>” and the lesser known “I Stole a Million <http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/i-stole-a-million>,” directed by the party member Frank Tuttle from a script by the Communist sympathizer Nathanael West. American nativism is criticized in “Three Faces West <http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=08&year=2014>,” a 1940 John Wayne vehicle made by two Communists: Samuel Ornitz, one of its screenwriters, and Bernard Vorhaus, its director. Homegrown Nazism is attacked in “Northern Pursuit <http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=08&year=2014>,” one of two movies in the Anthology series directed by Raoul Walsh, a Republican, from screenplays by Communist writers. The democratic ideology of World War II is celebrated in “Pride of the Marines <http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=08&year=2014>,” written by the Hollywood 10 member Albert Maltz and starring the progressive paragon John Garfield. Racial prejudice and fear of nuclear war are synthesized in Losey’s first feature, “The Boy With Green Hair <http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=08&year=2014>,” while Polonsky’s 1969 comeback, “Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here <http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/tell-them-willie-boy-is-here>,” a western inflected by the writings of the Third World psychologist Frantz Fanon, provides a New Left addendum. Although the 1959 heist thriller “Odds Against Tomorrow <http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/odds-against-tomorrow>” (co-produced by one of its stars, Harry Belafonte, and contributed to by Polonsky through a front) provides a measure of racial awareness, missing from the syllabus is the subject that Hollywood Communists most wanted and were least able to address, known in party jargon as “the struggle against white chauvinism.” That interest should be covered in the last installment of Anthology’s series with post-blacklist Hollywood movies by Jules Dassin ( “Uptight” <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/115324/Uptight-Movie-/overview>) and Herbert Biberman (“Slaves” <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/110575/Slaves-Movie-/overview>). Each movie in these series has three narratives: its fictional story, its back story and its place in American history. All of them make the same point. Our past is preserved in our films, predicated on shared fantasies and projected larger than life. A version of this article appears in print on August 10, 2014, on page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Screen Voices, Banished but Not Silenced. End of Hollywood Blacklist post ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
