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Writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, one of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, was born on December 5, 1910, in New York, New York. An unreconstructed Marxist, Polonsky never hid his membership in the Communist Party. (Indeed, it was known by the federal government during World War II, when he was a member of the O.S.S. working in France with the Resistance, given credence to the charge that the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn't interested so much in "ferreting out" communists and fellow-travelers as in making progressives of the F.D.R. coalition publicly repudiate their beliefs in a form of public penance.) After being named by former fellow O.S.S. member Sterling Hayden, Polonsky himself was arraigned before HUAC in 1951. After defying the committee by refusing to name names, he was blacklisted for 17 years by the U.S. film industry.
As director and screenwriter, Polonsky was an "auteur" of three of the great film noirs made in the last century: Body and Soul (1947) (screenplay; directed by fellow CPUSA member Robert Rossen, who kept his career by "naming names"), Force of Evil (1948) (which he wrote and directed), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) (which he wrote using a front).
Polonsky studied English at City College of New York (CCNY) and, after briefly shipping out as a merchant seaman, went to Columbia Law School. Polonsky's father wanted him to have a profession, and he preferred the law over medicine. The young Polonsky had wanted to be a writer, and he taught English at CCNY while matriculating at Columbia Law, but the law was his first career. After graduation from Columbia Law, he became a practicing attorney, which ironically, led to his career in screenwriting.
Gertrude Berg, the creative force behind the popular radio show "The Goldbergs" (which later made the transition to TV), was a client of his firm. Needing background for an episode that would feature the machinations of the law, Polonsky was assigned to Berg as an expert. Berg was so impressed when Polonsky dictated a scene to his secretary, she hired him as one of her writers. Thus, in 1937, by a serendipitous route charted originally by his father, who wanted his son to be a professional, not a writer, Polonsky was on his way to becoming a hot, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and writer-director.
Polonsky eventually left Berg and became a labor organizer. In 1939, after organizing autoworkers at a General Motors plant near his home in Briarcliff, New York, he became the educational director of the Congress of Industrial Organization, the major labor federation for skilled workers, in upstate New York. While working as a labor organizer, Polonsky wrote his first novel, "The Discoverers", a novel dealing with New York City bohemians, radicals, and frustrated intellectuals. The book was optioned by a publisher that unfortunately went out of business; it remains unpublished to this day. However, he began to thrive as a novelist: Simon and Schuster published a novel he co-wrote, "The Goose Is Cooked," in 1942, and Little Brown published his sea-adventure story "The Enemy Sea," which originally had been serialized in "Colliers Magazine".
Paramount became interested in Polonsky and offered him a contract. However, as a dedicated anti-Nazi, Polonsky was determined to serve in the war despite being turned down for military service due to poor eyesight. Recruited by the O.S.S. (likely because of his communist background; it was said that during World War II, communists made the best secret agents due to their propensity for secrecy and their dedication to their ideology). He signed a contract with Paramount guaranteeing him a job after the war, and then was shipped off to London before serving in France as a liaison with the French underground.
Back from World War II, Polonsky alienated Paramount's head writer when he complained that his nominal boss had kept him waiting too long for their initial meeting. The peeved head writer gave him the Marlene Dietrich potboiler Golden Earrings (1947) as his first screenwriting assignment, and although he received a screen credit, he claimed that nothing he wrote made it to the screen. He quit Paramount to take a job with John Garfield's Enterprise Productions, which had a collectivist philosophy akin to the old Group Theater on Broadway, of which the former Julius Garfinkle (Garfield) had been a member. Garfield was a leftist, though not a member of the Communist Party, though he did employ director Robert Rossen, who was a member of CPUSA, as was Polonsky, who had joined during the Depression.
Working from Polonsky's script, Rossen shot the classic boxing drama Body and Soul (1947). Polonsky actually was allowed on the set (not a common occurrence for the film industry) and actively gave Rossen advice. Some critics see Polonsky as a "co-director," a claim Polonsky rejected as "no one," he said, "co-directs a Robert Rossen Picture." However, in the collectivist atmosphere of the studio, he was able to prevail over Rossen's conception of a "happy ending," ensuring that his own ending was part of the picture. Polonsky won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film that was hailed as a classic by cineastes not long after its release. Garfield encouraged Polonsky to become a director, a development the screenwriter relished as it would give him more control over his screenplay and enable him to bring his vision to the screen just as he saw it. Adapting a 1940 crime novel "Tucker's People," Polonsky wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), which has been hailed as the greatest low-budget film noir ever.
By the time production had wrapped, Enterprise had gone bankrupt, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed enough to pick up the picture, though its hard-hitting indictment of big business, capitalism and political corruption was not Louis B. Mayer's cup of tea. MGM essentially dumped the picture as the bottom half of a double bill released for the Christmas season. This classic noir, with its indictment of capitalist society, was not exactly Christmas fare, and as Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne has said, it was quickly forgotten until rediscovered in the early 1960s. It has been considered a classic for at least a generation and had a big influence on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), whose equation of crime with business, and business with criminal behavior had been aired 24 years before in Polonsky's debut. In a huge loss to American cinema, Polonsky's debut was to be his last directorial effort for 20 years.
Both Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) are about the deleterious effects of materialism on the soul, as both protagonists (both played by John Garfield operating at the peak of his talent) face the loss of their soul due to the temptation of big money. Indeed, it is easy to see why conservatives would be offended by Force of Evil (1948) as it arguably is the most radical film to have come out of mainstream Hollywood, and definitely is informed by Marxism.
Blacklisted after his uncooperative appearance before HUAC in April 1951, Polonsky did not get a chance to direct another film until 1968, when he helmed the production of the revisionist Western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), which he turned into an indictment of genocide. Although he wrote screenplays and marketed them through fronts (most famously, with the indictment of racism Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), directed by Robert Wise, it wasn't until 1968 that he was credited on a film, for the screenplay for Don Siegel's exegesis of police corruption, Madigan (1968). After the release of the well-reviewed "Willie Boy," Polonsky enter4ed into "Fiddler on the Roof" territory and helmed the more light-hearted Romance of a Horsethief (1971). After that, he was told by his physician that his heart could not take the strain of movie directing, so he retired from that part of his work, though he continued to write screenplays until the end of his life.
After the tide of public opinion turned against the HUAC informers after Victor Navasky's 1980 history "Naming Names," Polonsky was rediscovered by scholars of the cinema. However, he proved a frustrating subject to those that wanted to ferret out the films that had been produced from his fronted-work screenplays. Similarly to his stand 40 years earlier, when he had refused to "name names," Polonsky refused to cite the pictures he had ghostwritten or to name the fronts he had used for his fronted screenplays during the days of the blacklist. He said he had given the men his word that he would not betray their confidence, and indeed, he refused to cite his anonymous work as he felt it would have gone back on his pledge to the men who had helped him through a tough period, as it would have resulted in them being denied credit for the work. Polonsky had bargained with them in good faith, and a man of principle, he refused to go back on his pledge to them.
An unrepentant Marxist until his death, Polonsky publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler sanitized his script for Guilty by Suspicion (1991) to make the character played by Robert De Niro a liberal rather than a communist. He also was prominent in objecting to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarding an honorary Academy Award to director Elia Kazan, who was the most prominent of the people who "named names" before HUAC.
Abraham Polonsky died of a heart-attack in Beverly Hills, California, on October 26, 1999, convinced that he had been exonerated by history. As the auteur of three classic films that will live on in cinema history, he was right.- Actor
- Producer
- Additional Crew
John Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle on the Lower East Side of New York City, to Hannah Basia (Margolis) and David Garfinkle, who were Jewish immigrants from Zhytomyr (now in Ukraine). Jules was raised by his father, a clothes presser and part-time cantor, after his mother's death in 1920, when he was 7. He was sent to a special school for problem children, where he was introduced to boxing and drama. He won a scholarship to Maria Ouspenskaya's drama school. He joined the Civic Repertory Theatre in 1932, changing his name to Jules Garfield and making his Broadway debut in that company's Counsellor-at-Law. Joined the Group Theatre company, winning acclaim for his role in Awake and Sing. Embittered over being passed over for the lead in Golden Boy, which was written for him, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers, who changed his name to John Garfield. Won enormous praise for his role of the cynical Mickey Borden in Four Daughters (1938). Appeared in similar roles throughout his career despite his efforts to play varied parts. Children Katherine (1938-1945), David Garfield (1942-1995) and Julie Garfield (1946-). Active in liberal political and social causes, he found himself embroiled in Communist scare of the late 1940s. Though he testified before Congress that he was never a Communist, his ability to get work declined. While separated from his wife, he succumbed to long-term heart problems, dying suddenly in the home of a woman friend at 39. His funeral was mobbed by thousands of fans, in the largest funeral attendance for an actor since Rudolph Valentino.- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, arguably the most talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction, Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route. While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company. In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time, he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel, "Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his first screen credit for the B-move Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added, Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly influenced by Captain January (1936), which had been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as Devil's Playground (1937) showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he returned to Warners for The Kid from Kokomo (1939)), and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won his first Oscar nod for RKO's Kitty Foyle (1940), for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war. Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began demonizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too. However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year Victor Fleming's great patriotic war movie A Guy Named Joe (1943), with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story was a separate Oscar category and David Boehm and Chandler Sprague were nominated in that category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin Mission to Moscow (1943), few films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did was Tender Comrade (1943) , which Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien / Edward G. Robinson vehicle, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood "gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years. Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry. Trumbo's screenplay for Tender Comrade (1943), which concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda. However, writer-producer James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry] profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr' , Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, and Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others - refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were communist. As Arthur Miller has pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of $1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10 screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild (John Howard Lawson had been one of the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood. Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked, as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself, characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood 10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic Gun Crazy (1950) (AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953) (with screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as a front), and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) for director Otto Preminger and upon which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original story of 1956 for The Brave One (1956). Rich was not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer. Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning The Brave One (1956), it triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers. In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for the screenplay adapted from his novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English, which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It was - Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus, and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii (1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his famous anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for Papillon (1973), in which he also had a cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (which had supported the black list), Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a belated Oscar to Trumbo for his The Brave One (1956) script, now officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later, AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10, 1976. At his memorial service, Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."- Director
- Editor
- Editorial Department
Edward Dmytryk grew up in San Francisco, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. After his mother died when he was 6, his strict disciplinarian father beat the boy frequently, and the child began running away while in his early teens. Eventually, juvenile authorities allowed him to live alone at the age of 15 and helped him find part-time work as a film studio messenger. Dmytryk was an outstanding student in physics and mathematics and gained a scholarship to the California Institute of Technology. However, he dropped out after one year to return to movies, eventually working his way up from film editor to director. By the late 1940s, he was considered one of Hollywood's rising young directing talents, but his career was interrupted by the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a congressional committee that employed ruthless tactics aimed at rooting out and destroying what it saw as Communist influence in Hollywood. A lifelong political leftist who had been a Communist Party member briefly during World War II, Dmytryk was one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" who refused to cooperate with HUAC and had their careers disrupted or ruined as a result. The committee threw him in prison for refusing to cooperate, and after having spent several months behind bars, Dmytryk decided to cooperate after all, and testified again before the committee, this time giving the names of people he said were Communists. He claimed to believe he had done the right thing, but many in the Hollywood community--even those who came along long after the committee was finally disbanded--never forgave him, and that action overshadowed his career the rest of his life. In the 1970s, as his directing career ground to a halt, Dmytryk recalled some advice once given him by Garson Kanin, and returned to academic life, this time as a teacher. From 1976 to 1981 he was a professor of film theory and production at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1981, was appointed to a chair in filmmaking at the University of Southern California, a position he held until about two years before his death. During his teaching career, he also authored several books on various aspects of filmmaking, as well as two volumes of memoirs.- The Oscar-winning screenwriter, Ring Lardner, Jr., will always be known for one of two things: that he was the son of one of the greatest humorists American literature has produced, and he was one of the Hollywood 10, the ten film-makers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating subversion in Hollywood and were fined and jailed for the defiance.
The son of newspaper sports columnist and best-selling writer Ring Lardner, the future double Oscar winner was born on August 19, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. Ring, Sr. (who was born Ringgold Wilmer Lardner) became famous for his "Saturday Evening Post" series, "You Know Me Al", fictional letters being sent from one baseball player to another. Mawell Perkins, editor-extraordinaire at the publishing house, Charles Scribners & Son, collected Lardner's columns and stories into publishable form (Ernest Hemingway, another Scribers writer, was a great fan) and they were a great success. Such was Lardner's renown, that 30 years after his death (while his son and namesake was still officially blacklisted), he was the first sportswriter inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, in 1963.
On his part, Ring, Jr. became a reporter for the "New York Daily Mirror" after dropping out of Princeton. He moved West and became a publicist for producer David O. Selznick, where he met his future wife, who also worked for the producer. He also worked as a script doctor for Selznik, then went on to become a screenwriter, often working in collaboration.
During the Spanish Civil War, Lardner moved steadily left in his political thinking, and helped raise funds for the Republican cause. He joined the Communist Party and became involved in organizing anti-fascist demonstrations. Although his leftist politics were known to the studios, in the 1930s and early '40s, Hollywood did not shy away from hiring talented writers no matter what their political proclivities, and employed many known (as well as secret) communists.
In 1943, he and Michael Kanin won the Oscar in 1942 for their Woman of the Year (1942) screenplay. He wrote such great pictures as Laura (1944) for Otto Preminger and, in 1947, 20th Century Fox gave him a contract at $2,000 a week, making him one of the highest paid scribes in La-La Land. Ironically, at the time of this seeming triumph, his career and life were about to unravel.
When it was Lardner turn to be hauled before HUAC and asked, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?", he came up with a witty riposte.
"I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning". After the appeals process against HUAC's citations for contempt of Congress played out, Lardner was sentenced to a year in prison and fined. More importantly, he was blacklisted and could not find work in Hollywood except under pseudonyms for work "fronted" by others. After the blacklist was officially broken when Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's novel "Exodus" for his 1960 production (Kirk Douglas then immediately hired Trumbo to write a screenplay for his upcoming Spartacus (1960)), the blacklisted writers slowly returned to work under their own names. Lardner was hired by producer Martin Ransohoff, who respected writers more than did the average Hollywood producer, to write the screenplay for The Cincinnati Kid (1965) under his own name. His comeback was complete when, in 1971, he won his second Oscar for adapting Robert Hooker's comic novel, "M*A*S*H" (1970) (ironically, due to director Robert Altman's improvisational style, little of Lardner's dialogue remained in the movie). His career, though, had been effectively aborted by the blacklist, and he only was credited with two more screenplays during his lifetime.
Ring Lardner, Jr. was the last of the Hollywood 10 to die, passing away on Halloween, October 31, 2000, in New York City from cancer. He was 85 years old and had long outlived most of the witch-hunters who had tormented him. He was survived by his wife, Frances Chaney, and five children. - Oscar-nominated screenwriter Albert Maltz was born on October 28, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Columbia University in 1930, he attended the Yale School of Drama for two years as a tyro playwright. After striking out on his own as a dramatist, he developed sociopolitical plays which were destined to be produced by the left-wing theatrical companies the Theatre Union and the Group Theatre. He also wrote novels and short stories. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he joined the Communist Party.
Maltz labored as a screenwriter for Warner Bros., which had made its reputation in the 1930s for its socially aware dramas. He worked on the classic Casablanca (1942) and other feature films and documentaries during World War II. He wrote the Oscar-winning documentary The House I Live In (1945), a plea for racial tolerance, and was nominated for an Oscar for writing Pride of the Marines (1945).
Maltz wrote an article in 1945 for the "New Masses" that demanded more intellectual freedom from the Communist Party for its members. Pressure from the Party made him recant his position, which had a chilling effect on some other Party members and liberal supporters of the Party's right to exist.
In 1947, Maltz and other Party members (and suspected Party members and sympathizers) were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which had determined to investigate "communist infiltration" of the movie industry. Maltz and nine others were cited for contempt of Congress for their uncooperative behavior before the Committee, which included not "naming names" of other communists, and were dubbed the "Hollywood 10". All were fined and jailed, and they were also blacklisted by the American film industry.
Remaining a committed communist, Maltz continued to write, using "fronts" who sold his screenplays and received any writing credit alloted by the studios and WGA. He remained unrepentant about his progressive politics until the end, which came on August 26, 1985 when he died in Los Angeles at the age of 76. - Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
John Howard Lawson is not the most famous member of the Hollywood 10, those filmmakers who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities' inquiry into alleged "Communist subversion" in the Hollywood movie industry in 1947, but he was the central figure of the group--the mind if not the heart and soul of the Communist community in Hollywood. One of the founders and the first president of the Screenwriters Guild (now called the Writers' Guild of America), the first and most aggressive of the Hollywood guilds, he was the Communist Party's de facto cultural commissar in Hollywood, particularly as it affected writers.
Technically, New York-based American Communist Party (CPUSA) cultural commissar V.J. Jerome was his superior but in the Hollywood hierarchy, Lawson arguably was second only to Gerhart Eisler in authority. Eisler was the "boss" in his role as an agent of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, and thus outranked Lawson, who was not a member of the secret quasi-military organization. Like Eisler, he was unquestionably under the discipline of Moscow, and thus, in essence, answerable to Joseph Stalin, the spider at the center of the web. When the party wanted a member to come to heel, Lawson enforced the ukase. (Eisler's brother, film composer Hanns Eisler -- a good friend of "Hollywood 19" member Bertolt Brecht, was deported from the United States after his own 1947 HUAC testimony. On his part, Brecht willingly testified before HUAC, told them nonsense, then decamped for East Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life under the aegis of the Warsaw Pact.)
Like the rest of the Hollywood 10, Lawson would be blacklisted by the film and television industries during the late 1940s and through the 1950s.
Lawson was born into a wealthy family in New York City on September 25, 1894, the son of Simeon Levy and the former Belle Hart Lawson,who were Jews. He was named after the 19th century British prison reformer John Howard. With a strong desire to assimilate, Simeon changed the family name to Lawson so that his children would not experience anti-Semitism and had them join a Christian Church. However, John Howard Lawson would adhere to Jewish dietary laws all his life.
He matriculated at at Williams College, earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1914. (Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, whom Lawson would deride as a "stool pigeon" for cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee, was also an alumnus of that small, prestigious private college located in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains.) He contributed to the school's literary magazine, served as editor of the year book and wrote his first play, "A Hindoo Love Drama," which attracted the attention of Mary Kirkpatrick, who would become his first agent.
After graduation, Lawson moved to New York and worked for Reuters while dedicating himself to drama. In 1914 he began a play he called "Atmosphere" that was entitled "Souls: "A Psychic Fantasy" when the 69-page-long typewritten manuscript was copyrighted on May 21, 1915. An innovative though talky melodrama, this effort was discounted by Kirkpatrick as non-commercial. It was never produced or published.
In "Souls", Lawson had experimented with using asides to the audience by his characters, which precedes the same use of the device by O'Neil in his 1926 play "Strange Interlude". (O'Neill got the credit for "reviving" the device, which had been used in venerable dramas; however, at the time of "Souls", O'Neil was studying dramatic writing at Harvard).
In the period of 1915-16, he wrote three more plays, "Standards", "The Spice of Life", and "Servant-Master-Lover". "Standards" and "Servant-Master-Lover" were optioned, the first by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris and the latter by Olivier Morosco, but both plays closed out of town due to bad reviews.
He became involved with the avant-garde dramatists and actors of Greenwich Village's Playwrights' Theater that would produce Eugene O'Neill's first play, "Bound East for Cardiff" (and their first production) in November 1916. Before Lawson could become a Broadway playwright, World War I intervened.
After the United States entered the war, Lawson volunteered to be an ambulance driver with the American Field Service in France, where he befriended another driver, John Dos Passos, who would establish himself as a proletarian writer before veering sharply rightward later in his career. After the cessation of hostilities, Lawson moved to Rome, where he edited a newspaper. When he repatriated himself to the United States, he once again took up the career of the Broadway dramatist.
As a playwright, Lawson was committed to the avant-garde, and he began using non-realistic play-writing techniques. His plays were subtle though unfocused attacks on the bourgeoisie. He was deeply affected by the protests surrounding the case of the imprisoned--and later executed--anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (who served as the basis for Maxwell Anderson's Pultizer-Prize winning play "Winterset (1936)"), which stimulated the development of his left-wing politics and radicalism.
Tutored in Marxism by the great critic Edmund Wilson, Lawson imbued his plays with Marxist ideas, including his Broadway debut, 1923's "Roger Bloomer". There were ten productions of Lawson's plays on Broadway from 1923-37, all originals, and a revival of his second Broadway play, 1925's "Processional". Though his plays have not been revived since 1937, he did exert an influence on Eugene O'Neill, whose play "Dynamo" is indebted to Lawson.
With the dawn of talking pictures, there was a demand for dramatists and in 1928 Lawson moved to Hollywood, where he established himself as a screenwriter. He helped establish the Writers' Guild of America in 1933 with fellow future "Hollywood 10" members Lester Cole and Samuel Ornitz, and served as the union's first president from 1933-34. It was in 1934 that Lawson joined the Communist Party. It would come to dominate his life as he became an important member of the small CPUSA community in Hollywood, then eventually its cultural czar.
It's ironic that Lawson would become an enforcer of party ukases, in that with the writing of his last plays produced on Broadway in the late 1930s, he had undergone a struggle between his own aesthetic choices and his commitment to communist ideology. In the 1940s, however, it fell to Lawson as a senior party apparatchik to enforce party discipline among screenwriters who were CPUSA members, making sure that they toed the party line and that their work adhere to the CPUSA's ideology, no matter how impractical that was in the Hollywood studio system, which was based on a collaborative factory paradigm in which individuals contributions were subsumed and muted by the mass nature of the constructed product.
As a screenwriter, Lawson was able to inject politics into several movies, including his most important film, Blockade (1938), a story about the Spanish Civil War. For his screenplay, Lawson was nominated for a Best Story Oscar. Seven years later, the Lawson-scribed movie _Counter-Attack (1945)_ (qv, paid tribute to the US-USSR anti-fascist alliance of World War Two. However, as befits a Hollywood screenwriter who is but one writer of many assigned to a film, his credited work typically ran to more innocuous fare, such as the hit Algiers (1938).
For his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was cited for contempt of Congress. After exhausting his appeals (his legal strategy dictated by party lawyers), he was sentenced to one year in prison and fined, resulting in his "official" blacklisting in Hollywood. (In fact, he had been blacklisted immediately after refusing to testify.) Not long afterwards, Lawson went into self-imposed exile in Mexico, where he began writing books on drama and film making. During his exile, he wrote a screenplay for the early anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) under a pseudonym. His last screenplay, also written under a pseudonym, was The Careless Years (1957), in which a high school couple in love takes it on the lam for Mexico. He also became a lecturer in American universities, where he taught drama and film.
John Howard Lawson died in San Francisco on August 14, 1977, at the age of 82.- Writer
- Additional Crew
Screenwriter Lester Cole, who is known in cinema history primarily as a member of the "Hollywood Ten," a group who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into their political beliefs who were black-listed by the industry for their defiance, was born on June 19, 1904 in New York to a Polish immigrant family. His first desire was to be an actor, and Cole dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen in 1920. He began writing and directing plays, and in the 1920s and '30s, he worked primarily as an actor on the stage. He appeared in Painted Faces (1929) and Love at First Sight (1929) but made his name as a screenwriter. His first screenplay, W.C. Fields comedy If I Had a Million (1932) was made in 1932. In 1933, the first year of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, Cole and eight other screenwriters, including future Hollywood Ten members John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz, organized the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), the first and most radical of the Hollywood guilds. Cole's politics were on the hard left, and he joined the Communist Party-USA in 1934.
Cole adhered to the Hollywood Ten's common front strategy of challenging HCUA's right to interrogate them on the basis of their political beliefs. Convicted of contempt of Congress, he was fined and served one year in prison. His unfinished script about the Mexican revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata later finished by fellow traveler John Steinbeck for former CP-USA members (and HUAC song-bird) Elia Kazan, who made Viva Zapata! (1952) starring Marlon Brando from the script.
After he got out of federal prison, Cole worked a series of odd jobs. He emigrated to London in 1961, but eventually returned to the U.S., where he began collaborating on screenplays using an assumed name. One of his scripts, written under the pseudonym "Gerald L.C. Copley", was made into the popular movie Born Free (1966). He also wrote his autobiography, "Hollywood Red" (1981) and reviewed films for "The People's World" and taught screen-writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lester Cole died of a heart attack on August 15, 1985. He was 81 years old.- Samuel Ornitz, a novelist and screenwriter best remembered now as as one of the "Hollywood Ten" of accused communists who defied the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was blacklisted, was born on November 15, 1890 in New York, New York, at the height of the Progressive Era of American politics. His father was a prosperous dry-goods merchant, but Samuel did not follow his two older brothers into the business world but became an artist, a left-wing artist determined to replace the capitalist system.
The precocious Samule made his first progressive speech in public just after the dawn of the new 20th Century, at the tender age of 12. He became a writer, and had a success with his 1923 novel of Jewish immigrant life, "Haunch Paunch and Jowl".
In 1929, he was one of the writers for director Josef von Sternberg's The Case of Lena Smith (1929) at Paramount (which soon would be headed by B.P. Schulberg, whose son Budd Schulberg would be a pivotal figure in the witch trials of the late 1940s),a nd then moved over to William Randolph Hearst's Cosmpolitan Pictures for William A. Wellman's Chinatown Nights (1929). In 1932-33, he worked at R.K.O., the company capitalist-extraordinaire Joseph P. Kennedy created in the late 1920s from a vaudeville chain, poverty row studio, and film booking office, before moving on to Universal in 1934, where he labored on horror films and other programmers. He bounced around, working for the majors such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox, the major-minors such as Columbia, and Povery Row outfits such as Colonial Pictures. His last credited picture, Circumstantial Evidence (1945), was made by Monogram and released in 1945.
As a screenwriter, Ornitz never lived up to his early promise as a writer. However, he did have a major impact on Hollywood as an early organizer and board member of the Screen Writers Guild, the trade union organized in the mid-1930s as an answer to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the industry's company union. The SWG was the first and most radical of the Guilds, and despised by the powers that be in Hollywood for its success in organizing labor.
Ornitz also distinguished himself as also one of the most outspoken m embers of Hollywood's left-wing/progressive community. However, his doctrinaire, party-line communism alienated many of his liberal colleagues and friends, such as his dogged insistence that there was no anti-Semitism in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. (he later backed off of this assertion.)
In 1947, Ornitz was arraigned by the HUAC. He and other members of the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the HUAC's questions about their involvement in the Communist Party, adopting a common front and maintaining party discipline. Ornitz was fined and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of court, during which time he published his last major novel, "Bride of the Sabbath". Ornitz was blacklisted by Hollywood, and never again wrote for motion pictures, but continued writing novels until his death.
Samuel Ornitz died of cancer on March 10, 1957 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. He was 66 years old. - Writer
- Producer
Adrian Scott, the producer of progressive films who was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10, was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Arlington, New Jersey, on February 6, 1912, to Mary (Redpath) and Allan Scott. He established his reputation as a writer on various magazines before finding employment in the movie industry. As a screenwriter, Scott worked on Keeping Company (1940), The Parson of Panamint (1941), We Go Fast (1941) and Mr. Lucky (1943), but it was as a producer he made his biggest mark in Hollywood, helping to create the genre later known as "film noir". In the mid-1940s at R.K.O., working with director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter 'John Paxton ', Scott produced Murder, My Sweet (1944), a detective thriller based on 'Raymond Chander's's "Farewell My Lovely", with 'Dick Powell' as Philip Marlowe. The team next made Cornered (1945) (again with Dick Powell) and So Well Remembered (1947), with Scott producing Clifford Odets Deadline at Dawn (1946), directed by Harold Clurman. But it was for the gritty noir masterpiece Crossfire (1947), the first Hollywood film to deal with anti-semitism, that the group is best known. "Crossfire" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Ryan, Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Gloria Grahame), Best Director (Dmytryk), Best Writing-Screenplay (Paxton) and Best Picture (Scott). Scott and his collaborator Dymytrk had reached the summit of their careers; for Scott, it would be the last motion picture he'd ever produce. Both he and Dmytryk were called before the House Un-American Actitivies Committee in 1947 and refused to name names. As a part of a common defense strategy crafted by Communist Party lawyers (Scott had joined the Party in 1944), he and Dymytrk and the eight others who became known to posterity as "The Hollywood 10", refused to answer any questions other than their names and addresses. The even denied the Committee the right to query them as to their membership in the Screen Writers Guild. The 10 claimed that the Firstst Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse HUAC's inquiry into their political beliefs as it was an unconstitutional violation of privacy. All members of the Hollywood 10 subsequently were found guilty of contempt of Congress and fined and jailed. All were blacklisted from the industry. Scott was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000. (Dmytryk later recanted his communist past and was re-employed by Hollywood. Testifying before HUAC in 1951, he claimed that Scott had pressured him to put communist propaganda in his films.) On his part, Scott took on the Hollywood blacklist: He sued R.K.O. for wrongful dismissal, but the case was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 1957. While blacklisted, Scott survived by writing for television under an assumed name, including such All-American fare as "Lassie" and the faintly subversive ("Steals from the rich/Gives to the poor!") "The Adventures of Robin Hood". He also produced one of the more remarkable American movies, the left-wing Salt of the Earth (1954), a film about a miner's strike that was made by Scott and other victims of the blacklist. Adrian Scott died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, on 25th December, 1973.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Zero Mostel was born Samuel Joel Mostel on February 28, 1915 in Brooklyn, New York, one of eight children of an Orthodox Jewish family. Raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the young Zero, known as Sammy, developed his talent for painting and drawing at art classes provided by the Educational Alliance, an institution serving Jewish immigrants and their children. Sammy often would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to copy the paintings.
Sam Mostel matriculated at the City College of New York, then entered a master's program in art at New York University after graduating from CCNY in 1935. He dropped out after a year and worked at odd jobs before being hired by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project to teach drawing and painting at the 92nd Street "Y", the famous Young Men and Young Women's Hebrew Association located on Manhattan's 92nd St., in 1937.
Mostel married Clara Sverd, a CCNY classmate, in 1939, but the marriage was troubled due to personality conflicts. The couple separated in 1941 and divorced in 1944. While still teaching, Mostel supplemented his income by providing gallery lectures at various museums under the aegis of the WPA. His lectures were full of jokes as Mostel personally was a clown, and subsequently he was hired to perform at private parties.
Mostel auditioned as a comedian at the downtown nightclub Cafe Society in late 1941, a jazz club. Initially rejected, owner Barney Josephson hired Mostel after Pearl Harbor, figuring his patrons, now at war, could use some laughs. It was Ivan Black, the club's press agent, who gave Sam Mostel the nickname Zero, explaining, "Here's a guy who's starting from nothing."
Debuting at the Cafe Society on February 16, 1942, Zero was a hit with audiences and the critics, Simultaneously, Zero began appearing in the play "Cafe Crown" at the Cort Theatre, which opened on January 23, 1942 and played through May 23rd, closing after 141 performances. Zero made some impromptu appearances on stage, but he wasn't officially part of the cast of the play, which was staged by Elia Kazan and starred Morris Carnovsky, Sam Jaffe (a future blacklistee), Whit Bissell, and Sam Wanamaker. Zero made his formal Broadway debut in "Keep 'em Laughing" on April 24, 1942 at the 44th Street Theatre. The show ran for 77 performances.
Within a year, he was touring the national nightclub circuit and appearing on radio. He had a brief stint in the Army in 1943, but was quickly discharged due to an unspecified physical disability. Zero spent the rest of the war entertaining the troops overseas.
Zero married Kathryn Harkin, a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, on July 2, 1944, an act that ruined his relationship with his Orthodox Jewish parents as his new wife was a gentile. The two remained a married couple until his death and produced two sons: Josh Mostel, who was born in 1946, and Tobias, who was born in 1949.
In the post-war years, Zero began to branch-out as a straight actor. On October 19, 1948, he made his television debut in the series "Off the Record," which was broadcast on the DuMont network, following it up with an appearance on October 26, 1948. He later appeared in the The Ford Theatre Hour (1948) episode "The Man Who Came to Dinner," which was broadcast on January 16, 1949 on NBC. He was reunited with his "Cafe Crown" director Elia Kazan in the Oscar-winner's movie Panic in the Streets (1950) (1950). In the movies, Zero often played heavies due to his physique, roles that downplayed his unique gift for comedy.
Zero had long been a leftist politically, and had made contributions to progressive causes. His nightclub act lampooned the red-baiters rampant at the time, and featured the character of a pompous senator called Polltax T. Pellagra. When he and the wife of his good friend 'Jack Gilford' were named by Jerome Robbins before the House Un-American Activities Committee as being communists, Zero was subpoenaed to testify by HUAC.
Mostel testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 14, 1955. In a playful mood, he told the Committee that he was employed by "19th Century-Fox." Zero denied he was a Communist, but refused to name names. He told the Committee that he would gladly discuss his own conduct but was prohibited by religious convictions from naming others. Consequently, he was blacklisted during the 1950s. Shut-out from the movies, he also lost many lucrative nightclub gigs, and he had to make due by playing gigs for meager salaries and by selling his paintings.
In the 1950s, Mostel bumped into Elia Kazan on the street in New York City, and the two reminisced. Kazan said Mostel chided him for putting Mostel through the paces in "Panic in the Streets," forcing him to run more than he ever had. The two retired to a bar, and as they began to drink, s Mostel kept muttering, in reference to Kazan's naming names before HUAC, "Ya shouldn't a done that. Ya shouldn't a done that."
There was no blacklist in the theater, and his friend Burgess Meredith, a noted liberal, offered Zero the lead role in his 1958 Off-Broadway production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," based on the Nighttown episode of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses," that Meredith was directing. Mostel's performance as Leopold Bloom, Joyce's Jewish Everyman, was a great hit with audiences and critics alike, and he won an "Obie," the Off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony. Zero also starred in productions of "Nighttown" in London and Paris.
By the end of 1959, Zero again was appearing on television, cast in the "Play of the Week" episode "The World of Sholom Aleichem," which was broadcast on December 14, 1959 in syndication. He also was cast in a Broadway play, "The Good Soup."
Zero never opened in the play as he was hit by a bus on January 13, 1960. His left leg was severely injured, and required four operations. Zero was in the hospital for five months but regained the use of the leg.
He made a triumphant return to Broadway in the fall of 1960, starring in Ionesco's absurdist tour-de-force "Rhinoceros," for which he won a Tony award. He was cast in another "Play of the Week" episode, this time in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," which was broadcast on April 3, 1961 in syndication.
Zero and his friend Jack Gilford, who had also been blacklisted due to Jerome Robbins having named names and hadn't worked for many years, were both cast in the Broadway musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." However, the show, under director George Abbott, was troubled. When Stephen Sondheim pitched Robbins to producer Harold Prince as the savior of "Forum," which was floundering in its out-of-town tryouts, Prince phoned Mostel to ask whether he would be prepared to work with Robbins.
"Are you asking me to eat with him?" asked Mostel.
"I'm just asking you to work with him," Prince replied.
"Of course I'll work with him," Mostel said. "We of the left do not blacklist."
When Robbins showed up at his first rehearsal, everyone was terrified of him because of his reputation as a tough taskmaster and perfectionist. Robbins made the rounds of the cast, shaking hands. When he got to Mostel, there was silence. Then Mostel boomed, "Hiya, Loose Lips!"
Everyone burst out laughing, including Robbins, and the show went on. Robbins was uncredited for staging and choreographing "Forum," which opened at the Alvin Theatre on May 8, 1962. "Forum" was a great hit, running for 964 performances at the Alvin and at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and later at the Majestic, closing on August 29, 1964. "Forum" won six Tony awards, including Best Musical and Best Director for George Abbott. Mostel won his second Tony and Gilford was nominated for the Tony for Best Featured Actor.
Zero followed up this triumph with his legendary turn as Tevye, the milkman with marriageable daughters in "Fiddler on the Roof," based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem. With direction and choreography credited to Jerome Robbins, "Fiddler on the Roof" opened at the Imperial Theatre on September 22, 1964 and did not close until almost eight years later, at the Broadway Theatre on July 2, 1972, with a stop at the Majestic in between during the late '60s. After seven previews, "Fiddler" racked up a total of 3,242 performances, making it one of the greatest Broadway smashes ever. After wining nine Tony awards in 1965, including Best Musical, Best Director, and Best Actor in A Musical (Zero's third Tony), the show was awarded a 10th Tony, a Special Award in 1972 when "Fiddler" became the longest-running musical in Broadway history.
Zero was cast in the 1966 movie version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), and then concentrated on movies and television for the rest of his career. Most of his projects, with the exception of Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967), did not fully utilize his talents. It was a major blow when director Norman Jewison cast the Israeli actor Topol as Tevye in his movie adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof (1971), passing over the legend who had created the role. Topol got an Oscar nomination, but faded quickly out of American movies. The movie of "Fiddler," a huge roadshow hit in 1971, also faded out of American consciousness. One wonders if with Zero in the role, the movie would now be considered a classic and constantly revived on television.
In 1974, Zero reprised his Leopold Bloom in a Broadway production of "Ulysses in Nighttown," again directed by Burgess Meredith, which netted him a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Play. He turned in an affecting performance as a blacklisted comedian in Martin Ritt's movie about the blacklist, The Front (1976). He also had a success with a Broadway revival of "Fiddler on the Roof" in December 1976.
Zero was cast as Shylock in Arnold Wesker's "The Merchant," a pro-Jewish reimagining of 'William Shakespeare''s "The Merchant of Venice." Mostel had great hopes that his Shylock would be the crowning achievement of his career and put him back on top. His huge talent and larger-than-life persona seemed to do better on stage.
This was not to come to pass. He fell ill after a tryout performance in Philadelphia in September and was hospitalized. On September 8, 1977, Zero Mostel died from an aortic aneurysm at the age of sixty-two. One of the greatest, most unique, and definitely irreplaceable talents to grace the American stage and movies had passed away. We are unlikely to look on his likes again.- Julian Zimet was born on 4 July 1919 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Horror Express (1972), Crack in the World (1965) and The Naked Dawn (1955). He died on 9 March 2017 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Nedrick Young was born on 23 March 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for The Defiant Ones (1958), Inherit the Wind (1960) and Gun Crazy (1950). He was married to Elizabeth MacRae and Frances Sage. He died on 16 September 1968 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Michael Wilson was born on 1 July 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, USA. He was a writer, known for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and 5 Fingers (1952). He was married to Zelma Wilson. He died on 9 April 1978 in Los Angeles County, California, USA.
- John Wexley was born on 14 September 1907 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Last Mile (1932) and Hangmen Also Die! (1943). He died on 4 February 1985 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA.
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Hannah Weinstein was born on 23 June 1911 in New York City, New York, USA. She was a producer, known for Stir Crazy (1980), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955) and Claudine (1974). She died on 9 March 1984 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Richard Weil was born on 29 October 1893 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Shine on Harvest Moon (1944), The Great Flamarion (1945) and Talk About a Lady (1946). He was married to Isabelle Keith. He died on 16 August 1971 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Michael Uris was born on 25 March 1902. Michael was a writer, known for Four Days Wonder (1936), Happy Go Lucky (1943) and Plainsman and the Lady (1946). Michael was married to Dorothy Tree. Michael died on 17 July 1967 in Truro, Massachusetts, USA.
- Director
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Writer
Born in New York, director Bernard Vorhaus made his name in England during the 1930s and later became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. His most well-known film was The Last Journey (1935), but his quirky thriller about phony spiritualists, The Amazing Mr. X (1948), has a loyal following. A graduate of Harvard University, Vorhaus gave a young director by the name of David Lean his first job as a film cutter. Lean went on to become an Oscar-winning director known for such intelligent epics such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Lean called Vorhaus the "greatest influence" in his life. After being blacklisted, Vorhaus relocated to England, where he lived with his Welsh-born wife until his death in November 2000.- Peter Viertel, a WWII veteran whose first novel was published to glowing reviews when he was only 18, was born of parents of the European intelligentsia, refugees from Adolf Hitler's Europe. Brought up in Hollywood, in a household where Greta Garbo (his mother's closest friend), Bertolt Brecht Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel were constant guests, young Peter yearned to be an American. In need of money to be able to continue writing his novels and to support his first wife, Jigee, Viertel turned to writing scripts for Hollywood, where he soon found himself in the orbit of John Huston, the legendary director of The Maltese Falcon (1941). Peter died in Marbella, Spain, nineteen days following the death of his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr.
- Director
- Actor
- Additional Crew
George Tyne was born on 6 February 1917 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a director and actor, known for A Walk in the Sun (1945), It Takes a Thief (1968) and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). He was married to Ethel Tyne. He died on 7 March 2008 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Producer
Paul Trivers is known for He Ran All the Way (1951) and The Men in Her Life (1941).- After a long career on stage and film, in New York and Hollywood, Dorothy Tree, as Dorothy Uris, had a second career, as a speech and voice coach at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, privately, and teaching speech and acting at the Mannes College of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. She was the author of "Everybody's Book of Better Speaking", "A Woman's Voice" and "To Sing in English", a classic text still in print and still used by teachers of speech and voice.
- Director
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Shepard Traube was born on 27 February 1907 in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. He was a director and writer, known for The Bride Wore Crutches (1940), For Beauty's Sake (1941) and Street of Memories (1940). He died on 23 July 1983 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Script and Continuity Department
Frank Tarloff was born on 4 February 1916 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Father Goose (1964), A Guide for the Married Man (1967) and The Double Man (1967). He was married to Lee Tarloff. He died on 25 June 1999 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Producer
- Cinematographer
Julius Tannenbaum is known for The Dismembered (1962), Black Like Me (1964) and Indian Summer (1960).- Arthur Strawn was born on 29 September 1900 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Flight to Mars (1951), The Black Room (1935) and The Man Who Lived Twice (1936). He died on 28 March 1989.
- Writer
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Donald Ogden Stewart was born on 30 November 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Philadelphia Story (1940), An Affair to Remember (1957) and Not So Dumb (1930). He was married to Leonore (Ella) Sophie Winter Steffens and Beatrice Ames. He died on 2 August 1980 in London, England, UK.- Philip Stevenson was born on 31 December 1896 in New York, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Counter-Attack (1945) and The Man from Cairo (1953). He died on 30 September 1965 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, USSR.
- Janet Stevenson was born on 4 February 1913 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She was a writer, known for Counter-Attack (1945), The Man from Cairo (1953) and The Law vs. Billy the Kid (1954). She was married to Benson Rotstein and Philip Stevenson. She died on 9 June 2009 in Warrenton, Oregon, USA.
- Louis Solomon was born on 27 February 1911. He was a writer, known for Snafu (1945), Mark of the Renegade (1951) and Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944). He died on 12 June 1981 in Southold, New York, USA.
- Art Smith was born on 23 March 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for In a Lonely Place (1950), Brute Force (1947) and Edge of Darkness (1943). He died on 24 February 1973 in West Babylon, New York, USA.
- George Sklar was born on 31 May 1908 in Meriden, Connecticut, USA. He was a writer, known for Afraid to Talk (1932), City Without Men (1943) and First Comes Courage (1943). He died on 15 May 1988 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Hilda Simms was born Hilda Moses in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one of nine children. Prior to becoming an actress, Hilda planned to enter the teaching profession. Hilda and enrolled at the University of Minnesota and engaged in her studies until lack of funds forced her abandon them. She relocated to New York, acting in radio dramas and becoming a member of the American Negro Theater, where she gained professional acting experience. As a member of this noted ensemble, Hilda worked on sound effects, props and publicity while learning her new craft. It was in New York that she met and married William Simms and adopted his surname.
Her marriage to Simms was a short-lived one but in 1943, two years after divorcing him, Hilda made her debut in the title role of Philip Yordan's play, "Anna Lucasta". Yordan had originally written "Ana Lucasta" for an all-white cast but the show made a huge splash when the American Negro Theater produced it. Hilda won the title role, a beautiful young woman struggling to regain her respectability and return to her family after falling into a life of prostitution. The production moved to Broadway in 1944 where Anna Lucasta became one of the early dramas featuring African American actors in work that explored themes unrelated to race. Hilda found herself among a distinguished company of black thespians including "Rosetta LeNoire", Canada Lee, "Frederick O'Neal", Alice Childress and Earle Hyman. The play became the hit of the season and the image of the stunning actress even graced the cover on Life Magazine.
When the play toured abroad, Hilda continued playing in Anna Lucasta while enjoying a singing career in Paris nightclubs under the name Julie Riccardo. During the British tour of the play in 1947, Hilda met and married veteran actor Richard Angarola. The couple returned to the States in the 1950s and Simms embarked on a brief film career. Her first role was as co-star to heavy-weight boxing champion Joe Louis. She played the boxer's wife in The Joe Louis Story (1953). Her only other movie role was that of the hatcheck girl in 1954's Black Widow (1954). "Anna Lucasta" went on to be filmed twice, first as an all white production in 1949 with Paulette Goddard and Broderick Crawford and in 1958 with Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis Jr.. Earle Hyman refused to work on the film because he considered Hilda the only Anna Lucasta (1958).
In the 1950s, Hilda became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. The Department of Justice denied her passport in 1955 and canceled her scheduled 14-week USO tour of the Armed Forces in Europe. It was ironic since Hilda had entertained troops and made War Bond tours during World War II. The Defense Department decision was based on speculation about her affiliation with the Communist Party in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The decision caused her dozens of lost opportunities and any chance of a film career evaporated. In 1960, Hilda penned an article titled "I'm No Benedict Arnold," which told her side of the story.
Hilda continued her stage career in productions of The Cool World, Tambourines to Glory as well as a revival of The Madwoman of Chaillot. She also was a regular in the television series The Doctors and the Nurses (1962) and hosted her own radio show, Ladies Day, on New York's WOV. She also became an active participant in political movements and served as the Creative Arts Director for the New York State Human Rights Commission. Her commitment to the project brought discrimination against black actors to the public attention and helped usher in better film roles for luminary African American actors of the era. She also fulfilled her original dream of becoming a teacher and earned a master's degree in education from the City College of New York. Hilda worked for drug treatment programs and led a production life until her death in Buffalo, New York at the age of seventy-five from pancreatic cancer. The tragedy of Hilda's life is that politics and the racism of the time prevented the world from discovering this fabulous woman. - Viola Brothers Shore was born on 26 May 1890 in New York City, New York, USA. Viola Brothers was a writer, known for Lucky Boy (1929), Sailor Be Good (1933) and The Life of the Party (1937). Viola Brothers was married to Henry Braxton and William J. Shore. Viola Brothers died on 29 March 1970 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Writer
- Additional Crew
Reuben Ship was born on 18 October 1915 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He was a writer, known for The Life of Riley (1948), The Girl on the Boat (1962) and There Was a Crooked Man (1960). He was married to Elaine Grand. He died on 23 August 1975 in England, UK.- Madeleine Sherwood was born on 13 November 1922 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She was an actress, known for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Changeling (1980) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). She was married to Robert Sherwood. She died on 23 April 2016 in Lac Cornu, Quebec, Canada.
- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Joshua Shelley was born on 27 January 1920 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor and director, known for All the President's Men (1976), The Front Page (1974) and The Front (1976). He was married to Molly McCarthy. He died on 16 February 1990 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Born in turn-of-the-century Yonkers, New York, Robert Shayne (born Robert Shaen Dawe) worked at a variety of jobs before his interests ultimately turned toward acting. He appeared in a succession of legit theater productions throughout the 1930s and even appeared in a few films, making a comedy short in New York in 1929, two features in 1934 and a comedy short shot in New York in 1937. In 1942 he signed with Warner Brothers and trekked to Hollywood, where he became a contract player at their Culver City studios. Warners starred the newly-arrived stage actor in a series of two-reel Westerns before graduating him to supporting roles in "A"-level features. In 1946 he left the studio to freelance. Several years later he got involved in the infant medium of TV, where he played the part for which he is best remembered--Inspector Henderson in the series Adventures of Superman (1952).
- Actress
- Producer
Martha Ellen Scott was born in Jamesport, Missouri, to Letha (McKinley) and Walter Alva Scott, an engineer and garage owner. She entered films in the early 1940s, following an initial appearance in stock. Her first film appearance was Our Town (1940), playing the same character as she played on the stage. She won an Academy Award nomination for her superb performance in the film. Martha Scott is remembered as a highly talented actress, however her work is often forgotten today as she was never seen as a truly bankable star by the major studios.
A recent memorable performance for Martha was as Sister Beatrice in the camp disaster movie Airport 1975 (1974). She played a dominant experienced nun with Helen Reddy, in a cast of major stars facing disaster on the stricken Boeing 747 jetliner.
She continued to work consistently throughout the 1970s and 1980s, often appearing in television movies and on the stage. She died at the age of 90 in May 2003 and is buried with her husband Mel Powell.- Actor
- Writer
- Producer
Bill Scott was born on 2 August 1920 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for The Bullwinkle Show (1959), Hoppity Hooper (1964) and The Crazy World of Laurel and Hardy (1966). He was married to Dorothy Scott. He died on 29 November 1985 in Tujunga, California, USA.- Born Julian Lawrence Shapiro on 31 May 1904 in Harlem, John Sanford was a descendant of Russian immigrants, and trained as a lawyer, practising with his father, Philip. A chance encounter with a childhood friend, Nathanael West caused him to change his focus to writing. Abandoning his New York law practice, he published several short stories in literary journals, and then headed west for Hollywood. While a contract screenwriter at Paramount, he met and married Marguerite Roberts who was a screenwriter at MGM. Roberts persuaded him to turn down an offer of employment as a screenwriter at MGM, and concentrate on writing books while she made them a living as a screenwriter.
A Communist for most of his life, both he and his wife refused to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and were blacklisted by Hollywood for more than a decade. Sanford was the author of 24 published books, including his best known, "A More Goodly Country" published in 1975. - Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Waldo Salt was one of the many people blacklisted in Hollywood during the Red Scare, but unlike others, Salt recovered triumphantly. He wrote his first scripts in the late 1930s (MGM contract writer, 1936-42) and also served as a civilian consultant to the Office of War Information from 1942- 1945 before being blacklisted in 1951 after refusing to testify before HUAC. Salt spent several years writing under assumed names for various television series (low-budget series such as "Colonel March of Scotland Yard," for example) and undistinguished films before slowly turning his career around, working in more widely seen television and eventually winning two Oscars for his later work in film.- Madeleine Ruthven was born on 26 August 1893 in Harwick, Iowa, USA. She was a writer, known for The Accusing Finger (1936), Wyoming (1928) and And Sudden Death (1936). She was married to Samuel L. Ruthven. She died in 1960.
- Actor
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
- Soundtrack
Shimen Ruskin was born on 25 February 1907 in Vilna, Russian Empire [now Vilnius, Lithuania]. He was an actor and assistant director, known for Fiddler on the Roof (1971), The Producers (1967) and Love and Death (1975). He was married to Kate Urkowitz and Rae Spiegel. He died on 23 April 1976 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Actress
- Additional Crew
Jean Rouverol was born on 8 July 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for It's a Gift (1934), Bar 20 Rides Again (1935) and Guiding Light (1952). She was married to Hugo Butler. She died on 24 March 2017 in Wingdale, New York, USA.- Writer
- Actress
Louise Rousseau was born on 22 July 1910 in Massachusetts, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for Swing Hostess (1944), Air Hostess (1949) and Mississippi Rhythm (1949). She died on 25 September 1981 in Ventura, California, USA.- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Marguerite Roberts was born on 21 September 1905 in Greeley, Colorado, USA. She was a writer, known for True Grit (1969), College Scandal (1935) and Honky Tonk (1941). She was married to John Sanford. She died on 17 February 1989 in Santa Barbara, California, USA.- W.L. River was born on 15 December 1903 in San Francisco, California, USA. He was a writer, known for The Adventures of Martin Eden (1942), The Great Man's Lady (1941) and Reaching for the Sun (1941). He died on 1 November 1981 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Director
- Producer
- Actor
Martin Ritt, one of the best and most sensitive American filmmakers of all time, was a director, actor and playwright who worked in both film and theater. He was born in New York City. His films reflect, like almost none other, a profound and intimate humane vision of his characters.
He originally attended and played football for Elon College in North Carolina. The stark contrasts of the Depression-era South compared to his New York City upbringing instilled in him a passion for expressing the struggles of inequality, which is clearly present in the films he directed. After leaving St. John's University, he found work with a theater group, and began acting in plays. His first performance was as Crown in "Porgy and Bess". After his performance drew favorable reviews, Ritt concluded that he could "only be happy in the theater." He then went to work with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's New Deal agency the Works Progress Administration as a playwright for the Federal Theater Project, a government-funded theater support program. With work hard to find and the Depression in full effect, many WPA theater performers, directors and writers became heavily influenced by the radical left and Communism, and Ritt was no exception (years later he would state that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, although he considered himself a leftist and found common ground with some Marxist principles)
Ritt moved on from the WPA to the Theater of Arts, then to the Group Theatre of New York City. It was at the Group Theatre that he met Elia Kazan, then a director. Kazan cast Ritt as an understudy in his play "Golden Boy". Ritt's social consciousness and political views continued to mature during his time with the Group, and would influence the social and political viewpoint that he would later express in his films (he would continue his association with Kazan for well over a decade, later assisting, and sometimes filling in for, his erstwhile mentor at The Actors Studio, eventually becoming one of the Studio's few non-performing life members). During World War II Ritt served with the U.S. Army Air Forces and appeared as an actor in the Air Force's Broadway play "Wiinged Victory" (also in the film version, Winged Victory (1944)). During the Broadway run of the play, Ritt directed a production of Sidney Kingsley's play "Yellow Jack", using actors from "Winged Victory" and rehearsing between midnight and 3 a.m. after "Winged Victory" performances. The play had a brief Broadway run and was performed again in Los Angeles when the "Winged Victory" troupe moved there to make the film version.
After working as a playwright with the Works Progress Administration, acting on stage and directing hundreds of plays, Ritt became a successful television director. In 1952 he was acting, directing and producing teleplays and television programs when he was caught up in what became known as the "Red Scare", which was an attempt by ultra-conservatives in Congress to "root out" what they saw as Commuist influence in films and on Broadway, championed by Wisconsin Repubican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Although not directly named by the committee conducting the investigation--The House Committee on Un-American Activities, aka HUAC--Ritt was mentioned in a right-wing newsletter called "Counterattack", published by American Business Consultants, a group formed by three former FBI agents. "Counterattack" alleged that Ritt had helped Communist Party-affiliated locals of the New York-based Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stage their annual show. He was finally blacklisted by the television industry when a Syracuse grocer charged him with donating money to Communist China in 1951. Unable to work in the television industry, Ritt returned to the theater for several years.
By 1956 the "Red Scare" had begun to fade away, and Ritt turned to film directing. His first film as a director was Edge of the City (1957), an important film for Ritt and an opportunity to give voice to his experiences. Based on the story of a union dock worker who faced intimidation by a corrupt boss, the film is a virtual laundry list of themes influencing Ritt over the years: corruption, racism, intimidation of the individual by the group, defense of the individual against government oppression and, most notable, the redeeming quality of mercy and the value of shielding others from evil, including sacrificing one's own reputation, career and even life if necessary. Ritt went on to direct 25 more films, including such classics as The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Hud (1963), The Great White Hope (1970), Norma Rae (1979) and Murphy's Romance (1985).- Frederic I. Rinaldo was born on 27 September 1913 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Hold That Ghost (1941) and The Invisible Woman (1940). He died on 22 June 1992 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Robert L. Richards was born on 1 March 1909 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Winchester '73 (1950), The Last Crooked Mile (1946) and Gorgo (1961). He was married to Ann Roth Morgan. He died in June 1984 in Mexico City, Mexico.
- A star in her native Mexico, Revueltas was branded a Communist and deported from the U.S. after making her one U.S. film, "Salt of the Earth" (1954), a Mexican-American film about striking miners. She continued her acting career in Mexico, and was also a dancer and author. In her later years she was a dance teacher and yoga instructor.
- Writer
- Director
Maurice Rapf, the Hollywood screenwriter who became one of the pioneers of cinema studies, was born on May 19, 1914, in New York City to producer Harry Rapf and his wife, Tina Uhfelder Rapf. Harry Rapf was one of the founders of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and an Oscar-winner for producing MGM's first musical, The Broadway Melody (1929), an early talkie smash and the winner of the studio's first of many Academy Awards for Best Picture. Unlike his father, Maurice never won an Oscar; his most significant achievement as a screenwriter arguably was Song of the South (1946) for Disney, which he disowned, while his most significant "achievement" as an activist, arguably, was to be blacklisted that same year for his Communist sympathies. But he left a lasting legacy through his union activities and as a film professor.
Harry Rapf was Hollywood royalty, having worked his way up from minstrel shows and vaudeville to become an independent movie producer in 1916, when son "Maury" was but two years old. At the tender age of three, Maury was enlisted as a child actor to play "war orphans, street urchins and assorted brats," according to a 1990 memoir published in Dartmouth's Alumni Magazine. Maury Rapf's career as an actor soon ended, cut short by the exigencies of schooling.
Rapf pere was hired by indie producer Lewis J. Selznick in 1919, and then moved on to Warner Bros. in 1921, where as a producer he and young screenwriter Darryl F. Zanuck turned World War I veteran Rin Tin Tin, a German Shepherd saved from the trenches of the Western Front, into an international superstar. When MGM was created from the 1924 merger of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions, Harry was brought onboard to share central producing duties with Louis B. Mayer and his protégé Irving Thalberg. The career change necessitated a permanent shift of the Rapf family from New York to southern California. Rapf was given the job of overseeing the production of the "programmers" that were the bread-and-butter of the studio, pictures starring such box office heavyweights as Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery. With a keen eye for talent, Harry Rapf earned the credit for discovering Joan Crawford (I)' in the chorus line of Broadway's "The Passing Show of 1924." Rapf was invited by Mayer to be one of the 36 founders of his brainchild, a company union called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences that was intended to fight off unionization by the crafts.
Maury, as the son of Harry, grew up in Los Angeles, trolling the studios, sets, offices and streets of the Culver City production facilities, one of the privileged "Hollywood Princes," like his good friend Budd Schulberg, son of Paramount boss B.P. Schulberg. Maury used to bully Loews theater owners to get into the movies for free, citing his father's status at Loew's MGM subsidiary. His first screen credit was for writing the story of the Jackie Cooper vehicle Divorce in the Family (1932), which was produced by his father. He was 18 years old.
Like Budd, Maury went to Dartmouth College, and like Budd, he went to the USSR and flirted with communism. Again, like his good friend, he eventually joined the Communist Party. Rapf and Schulberg reportedly were the inspirations for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood Princess Cecilia Brady, the daughter of the villainous studio boss Pat Brady, in his unfinished last novel "The Last Tycoon."
While matriculating at Dartmouth in bucolic small-town Hanover, New Hampshire, Rapf was an exchange student at the Anglo-American Institute in the USSR. Muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, a Communist, had proclaimed, "I have been over into the future and it works" after a trip to the Soviet Union. Steffens' enthusiasm inspired thousands of other progressives to visit the future themselves, and those visitors included Schulberg and Maurice Rapf. The Soviets gave foreign visitors tours of fake "Potemkin" villages. Schulberg had been impressed by what he saw, as had Rapf, whose own tour had been sponsored by the National Student League and had included future double-Oscar winning screenwriter and Hollywood Ten alumnus Ring Lardner Jr., who would serve nine months in jail for daring to have unpopular beliefs a decade-and-a-half after that visit.
After attending the Institute, Rapf made a trip to Germany in 1934, at a time when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were consolidating their power over all aspects of German life after terminating democracy with extreme prejudice the year before. It was a bold move for someone of the Jewish faith, especially one only 20 years old. His personal experience of Nazi Germany convinced him that Communism was the best bulwark against Naziism. He joined the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) and was an active member throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. He remained a committed member, where others such as Elia Kazan dropped out due to disillusionment with the Party after the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany, that set up the two totalitarian tyrannies' invasion and partition of Poland.
"The thing that most impressed me and probably made me a communist was that anti-Semitism was illegal in the Soviet Union," Rapf would later claim, "and that the Soviets were very anti-fascist, which the US was not."
"Making movies was the family business, and with parental help, it became mine as well," Rapf said in his 1990 memoir. As a college boy returned to his family's studio, he co-wrote We Went to College (1936), They Gave Him a Gun (1937) and The Bad Man of Brimstone (1937) for his father's production unit, which had been one of several set up by Mayer as a "college of cardinals" to replace the ailing central producer Thalberg, and also to dilute his power. Harry Rapf's power at MGM had been on the wane since he suffered a bad heart attack in 1933, which is likely why his son eventually sought employment at other studios.
Along with Budd Schulberg, Maurice was one of the founding members of the Screen Writers Guild (since renamed the Writers Guild of America), the screenwriters trade union, which is ironic in his light of the ongoing attempts of his father's generation to put a stop to unionization of the movie industry. With the Guild duly accredited as the screenwriters' bargaining representative with the studios, a formal system of pay and credit was instituted to protect the rights of writers. Rapf became a secretary of the SWG, while his friend Schulberg served on the Guild council.
Rapf became a busy and serious screenwriter, working on many movies, typically in the action genre. He helped develop the story for the political thriller Sharpshooters (1938) for 20th Century-Fox--where production was headed by the progressive Zanuck, his father's old Rin Tin Tin collaborator--and then bounced over to Columbia for North of Shanghai (1939). Rapf (Dartmouth, '35) received credit for indie producer Walter Wanger's Dartmouth-based college love story Winter Carnival (1939), on which he replaced F. Scott Fitzgerald (Princeton, '16) as the collaborator with fellow Dartmouth alumnus Budd Schulberg, after the great writer of "The Great Gatsby" went off on one of his Brobdingnagian boozing binges. By the time that film was released, he was working as a staff screenwriter for Warner Bros.
According to a memoir published by screenwriter Malvin Wald, when he was first employed by Warner Bros. Rapf was made his collaborator after another collaborator changed an original story of his beyond all recognition. When Warners screenwriter-in-chief John Huston invited Rapf to join the Writers Table, Rapf's collaborator was invited as well. Wald found Rapf to be a "considerate and patient teacher," who was concerned with his young protégé's professional well-being. Eventually, the writing team lost one producer, and then their replacement producer was fired, and their contracts were terminated by studio chief Jack L. Warner. Wald couldn't complain, as under Rapf's tutelage he had learned the business and even had qualified for membership in Rapf's Screen Writers Guild.
In the early 1940s Rapf bounced between Paramount, Budd Schulberg's father's old studio, and 20th Century-Fox, which was headed by 'Joseph Schenck', the brother of Loew's Inc. President Nicholas Schenck, the "capo di tutti capi" of MGM. Rapf even made a house call as a script doctor at Poverty Row for Republic Pictures' Call of the Canyon (1942). He eventually wound up at Walt Disney & Co., which would prove to be his final home studio. It seems ironic that his longest stint in a studio, even longer than the professional association he had with his father's, was at Walt Disney, as the eponymous owner had the reputation as being perhaps the most vociferous anti-Communist in Hollywood.
In 1944 Walt Disney offered Maurice a chance to rewrite a script based on Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories. Rapf was worried that writing for an animated film would hurt his career, as it was considered a kind of ghetto in Hollywood, and he also expressed his anxiety over the racism in the stories. Disney assured him that the film would be a live-action feature, and that he was being hired to expressly cut the racism out of the script, although what he likely was looking for in hiring Rapf was political cover from the left. Rapf accepted the job and did the rewrite while waiting for a commission from the U.S. Navy.
After working on the "Uncle Remus" screenplay, he and fellow communist (and fellow companion on the 1934 trip to Russia) Ring Lardner Jr., helped co-write the animated short Brotherhood of Man (1945), which was co-produced by the United Auto Workers labor union and United Productions of America (best known for its postwar "Mr. Magoo" cartoons) and released by the U.S. Navy. When the "Uncle Remus" movie eventually was released after the war, Rapf expressed his dismay that the film, now entitled "Song of the South," failed to rid itself of its residual racism. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People denounced "Song of the South" for perpetrating racial stereotypes.
At Disney Rapf wrote an early draft for an animated feature film based on the fairy tale "Cinderella," for which he would receive no credit. The last film he worked on at Disney was the slice-of-Americana So Dear to My Heart (1948). He left Disney under a cloud of suspicion, as the movie moguls had agreed at the Waldorf Conference--a film industry summit meeting called after the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had the Hollywood Ten indicted for contempt of Congress--to fire any suspected Communists they had in their employ. Rapf was subpoenaed to testify before the HUAC, but was excused because he was ill with the mumps.
Ironically, the communist Rapf got along well with the right-wing Republican Walt Disney, whom he categorized as a personally modest perfectionist, and both enjoyed arguing politics. Disney told Rapf that he became a Republican when, as a boy, a gang of young Democrats pulled down his pants and coated his testicles with hot tar. Contrary to the now-accepted caricature of Disney as a racist reactionary, Rapf wrote in his 1999 autobiography "Back Lot" that Disney was neither a Red-baiter nor an anti-Semite.
"I never knew anyone in the Party - in all the years I was associated with it, which was a long, long time - who was seeking anything but humanistic goals. Certainly there was never any attempt on the part of the people I knew to overthrow the government of the United States . . . We did believe in class struggle. I still believe in class struggle," Maurice Rapf was quoted in the book "Tender Comrades."
Marx described class struggle as the conflict between capital (the bourgeoisie) and labor (the proletariat). While capital and labor do have common interests, as the proletariat must sell its labor for wages and the bourgeoisie must expend capital to obtain labor, one class' individual interests inevitably lead to conflict with the other class, as capital seeks to enhance its surplus by commiserating labor. Marx theorized that class struggle and its attendant conflict would last for as long as capitalism survived, and would only be overcome when the extreme polarization of the classes into the very rich and the very poor eventually triggered an revolution that would destroy the capitalist system. In an organic historical process Marx considered `scientific,' capitalism would be replaced by a socialist system in which the proletariat controlled the state via the "the dictatorship of the proletariat," which meant a workers' democracy, not Soviet-style totalitarianism. The struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would respond to the laws of entropy, and the classes themselves would atrophy, as well as the state, as the raison d'etre of the state was to serve as a bulwark for the ruling class' power. Thus, a classless, stateless society known as communism would be ushered in.
The metaphor of two entities that paradoxically share a common interest, but whose individual interests put them into conflict with each other, fits the conflict between studio bosses and the Hollywood "creative" community quite well. The history of Hollywood from the mid-1920s and up through the mid-1930s, and again after World War II, was a "class struggle" between the studios and the various crafts over wages, working conditions, and ultimately unionization when the company union that was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences could not or would not protect the interests of the crafts. This paradox also was a metaphor for Sigmund Freud's Oedipal conflict (itself a metaphor), that set privileged "Princes of Hollywood" like Budd Schulberg and Maurice Rapf against the interests of their fathers, all self-made men who rose to the top through a combination of cunning and ruthlessness, who once established, tried to buy respectability through the ostentatious consumption of goods and people, be they respected writers like Fitzgerald, James Hilton or William Faulkner, or stars and starlets alike, like Clara Kimball Young, Norma Talmadge and Marilyn Monroe.
B.P. Schulberg and Harry Rapf were doers, while their more artistically inclined sons Budd and Maury were observers, but observers who had carried the gene for action. After observing that something was rotten in the state of Hollywood, they were determined, like Hamlet, to do something about it. Indeed, Schulberg's Oedipus-like blow against the Hollywood system that nurtured him, "What Makes Sammy Run?", his excoriating exegesis of studio executive Sammy Glick, was credited by Schulberg himself with terminating his father's career in Hollywood. Schulberg makes no bones about it in "Sammy": the old type of Hollywood-hustler/immigrant-Jew who made the motion picture industry and believed in assimilation with society at large while indulging their gross individual appetites embarrassed him. The Party went so far to censure him publicly for anti-Semitism after the novel was published in 1941. Schulberg dated his own disillusionment with the Party to the time he refused the order of the CPUSA dramaturge, future Hollywood Ten member John Howard Lawson, to submit to Party discipline with his novel.
As history developed in fact, not theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat proved to be a legal justification by which tyrants imposed a totalitarianism over their subject peoples. Democracy for the post-War communist activist often meant ensuring a unanimity of interests in which one interest, that of the Party, could veto and thus gain control over all other competing interests. In the 1930s and 1940s Joseph Stalin and his NKVD spent almost as much time eliminating fellow socialists, leftists and fellow travelers as it did in fighting fascism, and indeed, had been fascist Germany's ally in the opening days of World War II.
Cold War documentation now indicates that the Hollywood Ten's legal defense of aggressive non-cooperation (rather than just taking the Fifth Amendment) was dictated from the Soviet Union via CPUSA, which Moscow partly financed, and that screenwriter and Hollywood Ten blacklistee Lawson was the CPUSA point man in Hollywood, reading members' work and demanding emendations (that none of the Hollywood Ten sang in 1947 was considered a brave act, but now seems to be an expression of party discipline). Of course, how effective this party discipline was for getting out communist propaganda can be called into question, as so many movie industry writers of every political stripe were used by the studios to write, rewrite and then rewrite a rewritten script. Indeed, one scoffs at the exaggeration of many charges of certain Hollywood professionals being "red" or "pink" or a "fellow-traveler," such as those leveled against outspoken progressive Burt Lancaster, whose swashbuckling movies of the early 1950s contained the thematic element of the oppressed rising up against their oppressor. Yet Lancaster's business partner, former CPUSA member Harold Hecht, in friendly testimony before HUAC told of how, when he was employed by the Works Progress Administration's National Theater Project, he was commanded by CPUSA to fire Party critics and retain Party members when the organization's budget was cut and layoffs were immanent. To his credit, Hecht did admit that CPUSA did not have inordinate influence in the National Theater Project, as had been claimed by anti-Communist zealots in Congress before the war, so there was no real interference with Party members, as Elia Kazan noted in his justification of his own friendly testimony before HUAC; it just seems like it never was very effective in actually creating communist propaganda (the sole exception is often cited as Warners' 1943 release Mission to Moscow (1943), which was in fact made at the request of the U.S. government, a pro-Russian potboiler written by future blacklisted screenwriter Howard Koch that put forth the Soviet dictator's show trials of the late 1930s as having been undertaken to rid the USSR of real and potential spies for Nazi Germany. The "leader" of this Nazi Fifth Column, the chief culprit behind all this skulduggery was, of course, Stalin's nemesis Lev Trotskiy, who had been murdered in Mexico in 1940 by an NKVD assassin on Stalin's orders. Many progressives, including educator John Dewey, who ran an inquiry, were fully aware at the time of the purges that the show trials were staged productions whose victims confessed to improbable if not downright impossible crimes. Stalin was imposing a cruel and implacable dictatorship on the Soviet Union, in effect consolidating his grip on the USSR through the judicial murder of his old Bolshevik and Menshevik allies to eliminate potential rivals and any possible challenge to his monopoly on power, real or imagined.
The Red-baiting and McCarthyite witch-hunt must be understood in the context of the intense backlash against the New Deal from the political right wing that gained strength when Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency, and which gained more momentum when Truman unexpectedly won the 1948 presidential election, thus keeping the Republicans out of power for four more years. The GOP was taken over by reactionary isolationists and anti-interventionists, who wanted to isolate America from the rest of the world and its "harmful" influences. It was an ancient theme, as old as the Republic itself, when George Washington in his farewell address cautioned his new country against becoming entangled in foreign alliances. Like Metternich at the Congress of Vienna, who wanted to turn post-Napoleonic Europe back to the status quo antebellum of monarchies that could suppress the spreading liberalism that threatened to upset the old social equilibrium that Napoleon had knocked off kilter, many Republicans and conservative Democrats wanted to return the United States to its inward-looking self, and Washington, DC, back to the swampy, sleepy Southern town it had been before the war. It's always impossible to turn back the clock, though, and Truman was determined to contain Soviet communism while at the same time avoiding World War III.
Many pre-war proto-fascists of the old Nazi-financed German-American Bund and the Roosevelt-hating America First isolationists were quick to launch a crusade against the USSR and especially its American supporters after World War II's end made the necessity for an anti-Axis alliance a moot point. They were joined by many others, including some converts whom had once been enthusiastic New Dealers, such as newspaper columnist and radio personality Walter Winchell, who had grown older, wealthier and more conservative, and turned into a Red-baiter. In addition to providing "legitimacy" to anti-Semitic outbursts by the old prewar proto-fascists who were how hopping onto the anti-Red bandwagon of the radical right, the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s and early 1950s can be seen as a "payback" by conservatives, both the dyed-in-the-wool variety like studio boss Walt Disney and the Johnny-come-latelies like Winchell, against liberals who were enjoying a 20-year run in power through the Roosevelt-Truman administrations. The country that most Americans had known and grown up with had changed dramatically, and there was a great deal of anxiety in the country that could be, and was, exploited by ruthless power-seekers. Attacked by the hard left via the Progressive Party, dedicated New & Fair Dealer Truman was forced to shift right himself, as did many liberals desiring to survive the onset of the political winter for progressive politics in Hollywood and the country at large. The studio bosses, themselves ruthless power-seekers, made common cause with the inquisitors for the sake of their bottom lines, already being ravaged by a postwar recession and soon to fall victim to an even more insidious "foreign menace"--television.
Anthropology holds that social phenomenon such as witch-trials are a type of homeostatic device to regulate the stress building up in a community by discharging excess pressure to eliminate the strain that could wreck the community. By directing the community's anxieties against a scapegoat that is then destroyed, the community purges itself of the dangerous buildup of psychic stress. Many people were sincerely concerned about the future welfare of the United States and the direction the country was headed in, while certain others were not but used the social distress as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. There was an element of the show-trial in the HUAC hearings of 1947 and the early 1950s, in which conservatives sought to destroy the left and its leaders grasped for recognition and power.
Through a wide network of informers put together by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the American Legion and the California Assembly's own Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC believed it had a good idea who was or had been a member of CPUSA. It had been said that by the early 1950s, when almost all of the Communist networks that had been active in the US during World War II had been broken up by the FBI or terminated by Moscow soon after the war (afraid its operatives might get caught), there were more FBI agents in the CPUSA than there were authentic, card-carrying Communists. The Alien Registration Act of 1940, a.k.a. the Smith Act, had been used to destroy CPUSA by banning the knowing or willful advocating, abetting, advising, or teaching the necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the government of the U.S. or any of its subdivisions by force or violence, or by assassination of its officials. It also outlawed the printing, publishing, editing and distribution of materials advocating violent revolution, and made it a crime to organize, help or make attempts to organize any group advocating the same.
By outlawing "advocacy," a class of speech seemingly protected by the First Amendment, Congress had deliberately cast a wide net in which it caught many writers and performers with progressive tendencies, including lifelong Republican Henry Fonda and old liberal warhorse Edward G. Robinson, both of whom effectively were "graylisted" out of films for almost a decade and were forced to make their living in the theater, in which no blacklist existed. Interestingly, despite the theater being a form of communication and the new medium of television rapidly evolving as the most potent form of mass communication ever, many members of the gray- and blacklist (those who refused to testify before HUAC) could find employment. Those two media did not have the labor troubles that Hollywood did, nor the likely level of organized-crime affiliation that had been exposed during the extortion trial of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees President George 'Calypso' Browne (also a vice president of the American Federation of Labor) and his right-hand man, Chicago mobster Willie Morris Bioff, shortly before the war that had led to the imprisonment of industry bagman Joseph Schenck of 20th Century-Fox (interestingly, the studios' initial payoff to the mob was done in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel where, a decade later, the movie moguls would agree to impose the blacklist). The movie magnates and Hollywood craft unions, whose members were dunned 2% of their wages for a "strike fund" that was channeled back to Bioff's "Outfit" (the old Al Capone mob) in Chicago, paid the mob as much as $15 million to ensure labor peace, in a symbiotic relationship the skirted the fine line between bribery and extortion. The federal government eventually broke up the Hollywood racket, in no small part because Screen Actor's Guild president Robert Montgomery had initiated an investigation of the situation. A Chicago tax court tackling the case ruled that the studio bosses "knowingly and willingly paid over the funds and in a sense lent encouragement and participated with full knowledge of the facts in the activities of Browne and Bioff." The moral rot of Hollywood was all pervasive. Sammy Glick was every bit as rotten as Budd Schulberg had warned.
Event though he was excused from testifying and did not defy the Committee, Maurice Rapf, after being called by HUAC (thus indicating industry knowledge of his connection to CPUSA) was subsequently blacklisted in accordance with the movie magnates Waldorf Statement. Rapf was done in partly due to his association with fellow unapologetic Stalinists like Lillian Hellman, a HUAC unfriendly witness, but more likely due to his militant support of labor unions during a time when Hollywood was besieged with labor troubles and the studios liked to tar union activists as "Red" in order to deliver Hollywood into the hands of more amenable (and bribe-able) mob-controlled unions. Disney was known to be an implacable foe of unionization, and although the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization (separate entities until 1955) fought Communists and had been purging them from their member unions for years, the charge of being a secret Red remained a potent weapon in the studios' anti-labor arsenal for years to come.
Now blacklisted and thus technically unemployable as a screenwriter, Maurice Rapf left Hollywood and began a new life across the border from Hanover, New Hampshire, in Norwich, Vermont. He was one of the founders of The Dartmouth Film Society in 1949, the first college film society in the US. Like many blacklisted screenwriters who chose to remain in the country and pursue their craft, Rapf had to use various fronts to market his work. He also worked in the production of industrial films and television commercials in New York City, functioning as a writer, director and producer. In addition to these labors, Rapf was a movie critic for the mass-circulation periodicals `Life' and `Family Circle.'
It was in these years that his old friend and fellow Hollywood Prince Budd Schulberg forever tarnished his crown when he appeared as a friendly witness before HUAC on May 23, 1951, and named names. One of the 15 names he named was Maurice Rapf. Schulberg told HUAC that CPUSA tried to dictate changes to "What Makes Sammy Run?" so that it conformed to the Party line. He was ordered to talk to John Howard Lawson, their generalissimo of the arts in Hollywood, who asked him to submit an outline so that Lawson could vet his novel, a request Schulberg ignored. At a meeting with V.J. Jerome, the CPUSA theoretician whom former "Daily Worker" managing editor and blacklistee Howard Fast termed the Party "cultural czar", Schulberg was told "my entire attitude was wrong; that I was wrong about writing; wrong about this book; wrong about the Party . . . I remember it more as a kind of harangue. When I came away I felt maybe, almost for the first time, that this was to me the real face of the Party." Schulberg, once again playing Oedipus, proved determined to slay another patriarch.
In 1966 Maurice Rapf was hired by Dartmouth College as an adjunct professor to teach about the cinema. In 1976 he was promoted to full professor with the portfolio of establishing Dartmouth's new film studies program. As a professor, he was prized for his honesty; many of his students, after having established themselves in the business, would return to him for critiques and advice on their film projects. In 2000, he published "All About the Movies: A Textbook for the Movie-Loving Layman," based on his 30 years of teaching at Dartmouth. That book was published a year after his 1999 memoir, "Back Lot: Growing up with the Movies," an insider's look at the movie business.
An autobiography, the special strength of "Back Lot" is that Rapf's experiences are gained from first hand experience. He experienced the evolution of the American film industry from silence to sound, from the amalgamation of studio control to the overthrow of the studios by the independent contractor with his or her own production company. Rapf gives special attention to the film community's awakening from an apolitical apathy, focused on assimilation rather than confrontation, towards a community increasingly aware of its social responsibility due to the Great Depression and the war against the fascist Axis powers.
Variety, the bible of show business, reported in its July 31, 1998 issue that the Writers Guild of America, the union that Rapf had helped found, had voted to give screen credits to 13 blacklisted screenwriters, including Rapf, for their unaccredited contributions to 21 movies produced during the period of 1950-69. The WGA's Blacklist Credits Committee had conducted an investigation into the production history of each movie with questionable credits, a process hampered by the blacklisted screenwriters' use of fronts and the pseudonyms. Although Dalton Trumbo of Hollywood Ten fame broke the blacklist in 1960 with credits for Spartacus (1960) (at the insistence of producer/star Kirk Douglas) and Exodus (1960) (because of the efforts of director/producer Otto Preminger), some screenwriters had continued to write under pseudonyms until the 1970s.
In addition to Rapf, who was given credit on The Detective (1954), the blacklisted writers included the late Paul Jarrico, one of the more famous of blacklisted screenwriters, who posthumously picked up four credits. Jarrico had refused to be given credit by the committee until after it had investigated all other blacklisted screen writers. CPUSA stalwart and Hollywood Ten member John Howard Lawson picked up one credit, while Carl Foreman, one of the first benefactors of credit restoration when he and Michael Wilson were given credit (and posthumous Academy Award statuettes) for the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), picked up another credit, for the Oscar-nominated screenplay of A Hatful of Rain (1957), which lost to their "Kwai" screenplay (originally credited to Pierre Boulle, a Frenchman who did not write in English).
Screenwriters who were awarded multiple new credits were Henry Blankfort, with three, and Daniel James and Robert L. Richards, with two each. Screenwriters receiving a single new credit were Leonardo Bercovici, Jerome Chodorov, Howard Dimsdale, Howard Koch, Jean Rouverol and Donald Ogden Stewart. WGA West president 'Daniel Petrie Jr., at the announcement of the new credits, said, "It is with pride and sadness that we announce these changes."
In a speech at the University of Oklahoma, Rapf said that Walt Disney & Co. had contacted him about a re-release of "Song of the South" on DVD. The studio wanted to create disclaimers about the film's "racial insensitivity" and asked Rapf to write them. Ever the committed progressive, he declined, thus able to expiate a sin from the past, as he had come to believe that the film was inherently racist and should never have been made. No one ever claimed that Maurice Rapf was not a man of his word, or a man of courage who stood up for what he believed in. In his belief in himself and his ideals, this idealistic man who was accused of being "anti-American" elucidated the best of the American character.
Maurice Rapf died on April 15, 2003, at the age of 88. He had been married to his wife, the former movie actress Louise Siedel, for 56 years before her death. His daughter, Joanna E. Rapf, is a Professor of English and Film & Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma, but regularly teaches as a Visiting Professor of Film & Television Studies at her father's alma mater.
Upon his death, Dartmouth President James Wright eulogized the man responsible for the success for the college's film department. "Because of Maurice Rapf's commitment, love and encouragement, the Dartmouth Film Society is a highly-regarded Dartmouth institution and Film Studies is a strong and thriving department on campus. Dartmouth is forever enriched by his commitment. We will greatly miss our friend and colleague."
The college bestows the Maurice Rapf Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film at Dartmouth in his honor.- Actor
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Veteran performer John Randolph was a Tony Award-winning character actor whose union and social activism in the '40s and '50s caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. The balding performer may not have been a household name, but he was a regular face in movies and TV for over four decades.
He was born Emanuel Cohen on June 1, 1915, in New York City, to Jewish immigrants from Romania and Russia, mother Dorothy (Shorr), an insurance agent, and father Louis Cohen, a hat manufacturer. When his father died and his mother remarried, his stepfather, Joseph Lippman, renamed him Mortimer.
He began his dramatic training in the '30s, studying under Stella Adler and changing his name to the less ethnic moniker of "John Randolph". He served in the Army Air Force during WWII and married actress Sarah Cunningham in Chicago in 1945 while performing in Orson Welles's stage production of "Native Son". They had two children, Martha and Harrison.
After the war, Randolph become one of the original members of the Actors Studio. After making his film debut with The Naked City (1948), his passionate, outspoken leftist views and defense of other accused figures led to Randolph and his wife being blacklisted. In 1955, they were both called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Although Randolph lost many jobs during this 15-year blacklist, he continued to find work onstage, mainly in New York.
Finally, director John Frankenheimer broke the Hollywood blacklist after casting Randolph, along with fellow "marked" actors Will Geer and Jeff Corey, in Seconds (1966), in which he played a disillusioned older man surgically made to look decades younger (now played by Rock Hudson). Randolph continued to flourish in films and TV following this breakthrough with important roles in Serpico (1973), Frances (1982), Prizzi's Honor (1985) and You've Got Mail (1998), along with the TV movies The Missiles of October (1974) and "Lincoln" (1975) (mini). He also played the recurring role of Roseanne Barr's father on her popular sitcom.
In 1987, he was the recipient of both Tony and Drama Desk awards for his close-to-home portrayal of a Communist, left-wing grandfather in Neil Simon's "Broadway Bound". Randolph continued his activism into the 1980s, heading the Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a cultural exchange organization. He died of natural causes at age 88.- Director
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Stanley Prager was born on 8 January 1917 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Gun Crazy (1950), ABC Stage 67 (1966) and Force of Evil (1948). He was married to Georgann Johnson. He died on 18 January 1972 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Director
Vladimir Pozner was born on 5 January 1905 in Paris, France. He was a writer and director, known for The Dark Mirror (1946), Another Part of the Forest (1948) and The Conspirators (1944). He died on 19 February 1992 in Paris, France.- Writer
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Louis Pollock was born on 16 February 1904 in Liverpool, England, UK. He was a writer, known for The Gamma People (1956), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964) and The Richard Boone Show (1963). He was married to Cleta L. Pollock. He died on 23 August 1964 in Hollywood, California, USA.- Actor
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Irving Pichel was born on 24 June 1891 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor and director, known for Destination Moon (1950), Dracula's Daughter (1936) and Tomorrow Is Forever (1946). He was married to Violette Wilson. He died on 13 July 1954 in Hollywood, California, USA.- George Pepper is known for The Young One (1960), Los pequeños gigantes (1960) and Robinson Crusoe (1954).
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Leo Penn was born on 27 August 1921 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, USA. He was a director and actor, known for Ben Casey (1961), Remington Steele (1982) and The Mississippi (1982). He was married to Eileen Ryan and Olive Deering. He died on 5 September 1998 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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When amiable Columbia Pictures actor Larry Parks was entrusted the role of entertainer Al Jolson in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), his career finally hit the big time. Within a few years, however, his bright new world crumbled courtesy of the House Un-American Activities Committee after the actor admitted under pressure that he was once affiliated with the Communist Party. Although he unwillingly testified in 1951, he was still (unofficially) blacklisted. Never-say-die Larry managed to continue his career in years to come - both here and abroad, on stage and in nightclubs - alongside steadfast wife Betty Garrett. His film career, however, literally came to a standstill and would never be the same again.
Samuel Klausman Lawrence Parks was born in Olathe, Kansas, on December 13, 1914, of German and Irish descent. As a child growing up in Joliet, Illinois, he was plagued by a variety of illnesses, including rheumatic fever, but persevered with physical exercise and sheer strength of will. Majoring in science at the University of Illinois, his plans to become a doctor dissolved when, to the dismay of his parents, he found a passionate sideline in college dramatics.
He began appearing in touring shows, then made the big move to New York, finding initial employment as an usher at Carnegie Hall and a tour guide at Radio City. Following a number of summer stock shows, he made an inauspicious 1937 Broadway debut with a minor role in the Group Theatre's presentation of "Golden Boy". Developing a close-knit relationship with the Group, he was just beginning to build up his resumé in such Broadway outings as "All the Living", "My Heart's in the Highlands" and "Pure in Heart" when he had to return to his Illinois home following the death of his father.
He toiled for a time in Chicago as a Pullman inspector on the New York Central Railroad until the possibility of a film role had him re-setting his acting sights on Los Angeles. Although the film deal fell through, Larry stayed in L.A. and somehow made ends meet working construction. Columbia expressed interest in the fledgling actor and signed him up in 1941 after a favorable screen test. He stayed for nine years. His buildup was slow-moving, taking his first small step with a minor role in Mystery Ship (1941). Time, however, did not increase the tempo or quality of his movies. Either he was oddly cast, such as his role as an Indian opposite exotic Yvonne De Carlo in The Deerslayer (1943), or completely dismissed, as co-star of such obscurities as The Black Parachute (1944), Sergeant Mike (1944) or She's a Sweetheart (1944).
His association with the Group Theatre back in New York led to a chance introduction to musical actress Betty Garrett and the couple married in 1944. Larry had settled by this time in Hollywood but Betty was a hot item on Broadway. MGM finally offered her a contract and she relocated to Los Angeles to join her husband. The couple eventually had two children, one of whom, Andrew Parks, became a fine actor in his own right. Their other son, Garrett Parks, served as composer for the film Diamond Men (2000).
Larry scored an Oscar nomination playing Jolson (which was originally offered to both James Cagney and Danny Thomas), and hoped for equally challenging roles. His hopes were dashed as the studio instead continued casting him haphazardly in mild-mannered comedies and swashbuckling adventures. Other than the box-office sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949), most of Larry's films were hardly worthy of his obvious talent. To compensate somewhat, he managed to find a creative outlet in summer stock, and both he and Betty put together a successful vaudeville act with one tour ending up playing London's Palladium.
Following the completion of Love Is Better Than Ever (1952) with Elizabeth Taylor, the political scandal erupted and erased all of his chances to do film. One of many casualties of Hollywood "blacklisting", he was forced to end his association with Columbia, and he and Betty, whose own career was damaged, traveled to Europe to find work.
He found some TV parts after the controversy died down, and Betty and Larry were a delightful replacement for Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin on Broadway in "Bells Are Ringing". During the many meager times, he concentrated on becoming a successful businessman, including building apartment complexes. He made only two more films, last playing a doctor in the Montgomery Clift starrer Freud (1962). By the time he died of a heart attack on April 13, 1975, at age 60, Larry had long faded from view. Betty, however, managed to revitalize her career on TV sitcoms with regular roles on All in the Family (1971), Laverne & Shirley (1976), and roles on numerous other TV series before passing on February 12, 2011.- Writer
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Alfred Palca was born on 23 March 1920 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Harlem Globetrotters (1951), Go Man Go (1954) and Manhunt (1951). He was married to Doris Palca. He died on 18 June 1998 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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Mortimer Offner was born on 3 November 1900 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The Saint in New York (1938), Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and Radio City Revels (1938). He was married to Pauline B Wilson. He died on 15 September 1965 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
- Music Department
- Producer
Henry Myers was born on 24 June 1893 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Hey, Rookie (1944), The Luckiest Girl in the World (1936) and College Holiday (1936). He died on 30 October 1975.- Actress
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Born Mildred Linton in Ottumwa, Iowa on December 12, 1909, Karen Morley was adopted by a well-to-do family who moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1920s. She enrolled at Hollywood High School and studied for a career in medicine at UCLA, but a class in theater changed her career ambitions.
After studying at Pasadena Playhouse, she was signed by Fox Studios and her big chance came when producer Howard Hughes selected her to play the blond moll in the 1932 crime epic, Scarface (1932), Morley was put on a contract by MGM and starred in such early 1930s movies as Mata Hari (1931) (with Greta Garbo), Arsène Lupin (1932) (with John Barrymore), Dinner at Eight (1933) (with Jean Harlow), as well as films with Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery and Boris Karloff. In 1934, Morley left MGM after arguments about her roles and her private life, including her intention to start a family and her marriage to director Charles Vidor. She continued working as a freelance performer, appearing in King Vidor's Our Daily Bread (1934), Michael Curtiz' Black Fury (1935) and Pride and Prejudice (1940).
In 1947, her screen career came to a halt when she testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and refused to answer questions about her possible enrollment in the Communist Party. Afterward, she continued promoting left-wing causes and married actor Lloyd Gough. In 1954, she ran unsuccessfully as a New York lieutenant governor candidate for the American Labor Party. Morley died March 8, 2003 at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills.- Josef Mischel was born on 2 March 1899 in Szczyrzyc, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Szczyrzyc, Malopolskie, Poland]. He was a writer, known for Prison Ship (1945), Danger Woman (1946) and Isn't It Romantic (1948). He died on 17 November 1954 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Actor
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John 'Skins' Miller was born on 6 November 1890 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an actor, known for Men of San Quentin (1942), The Time of Your Life (1948) and The Last Express (1938). He died on 15 July 1956 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Animation Department
- Producer
- Actor
Bill Melendez was born on 15 November 1916 in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. He was a producer and actor, known for A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968). He was married to Helen Antionette Huhn. He died on 2 September 2008 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Ruth McKenney was born on 18 November 1911 in Mishawaka, Indiana, USA. She was a writer, known for Song of Surrender (1949), Margie (1946) and My Sister Eileen (1955). She was married to Richard Bransten. She died on 25 July 1972 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Animation Department
John McGrew was born on 19 March 1910 in New York, New York, USA. He is known for The Aristo-Cat (1943). He died on 11 January 1999 in Le Bois-D'Oingt, Rhone, France.- Arnold Manoff was born on 25 April 1914 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for No Minor Vices (1948), Route 66 (1960) and The Big Break (1953). He was married to Lee Grant, Marjorie Jean MacGregor, Ruth Steinberg and Irene Dworkin. He died on 10 February 1965 in New York City, New York, USA.
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Ben Maddow was born on 7 August 1909 in Passaic, New Jersey, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Savage Eye (1959) and The Man from Colorado (1948). He was married to Flier, Freda. He died on 9 October 1992 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Producer
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Norman Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Sadie (Horowitz), a housewife and singer, and Max Perlmutter, a furniture store manager. His family was Jewish (from Hungary and Russia). He began his acting career in the theater, first "treading the boards" at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory in New York. Aspiring to work as a classical repertory player, he gradually shed his Brooklyn accent and became a busy stage actor in the 1930s; he next joined the original company of the Orson Welles-John Houseman Mercury Theatre. Lloyd was brought to Hollywood to play a supporting part (albeit the title role) in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942). Hitchcock, who later used the actor in Spellbound (1945) and other films, made him an associate producer and a director on TV's long-running Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) (then in its third year). In the course of his eight years on the series, Lloyd became a co-producer (with Joan Harrison) and then executive producer. He has since directed for other series (including the prestigious Omnibus (1952)) and for the stage, produced TV's Tales of the Unexpected (1979) and Journey to the Unknown (1968), and played Dr. Auschlander in TV's acclaimed St. Elsewhere (1982).- Writer
- Producer
Mitchell Lindemann started writing for the Federal Theater in the 1930s. He then wrote for The Life of Riley both for radio and television. He moved to a screen writing career in the mid-1940s and was John Howard Lawson's writing partner working for the Hecht-Lancaster production company.
In 1948, his name was mentioned several times in the minutes for the HUAC committee and soon after he was blacklisted at the beginning of his Hollywood career. He worked using a front for many years. He never fully recovered from the blacklist, though he did work on Cat Ballou (1965). He was given associate producer credit, but helped write the screenplay as well.- Writer
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Helen Levitt was born on 6 December 1916 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. She was a writer, known for All in the Family (1971), The Bionic Woman (1976) and That Girl (1966). She was married to Alfred Lewis Levitt. She died on 3 April 1993 in Encino, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Additional Crew
Alfred Lewis Levitt was born on 3 June 1916 in Bronx, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for All in the Family (1971), Shakedown (1950) and The Bionic Woman (1976). He was married to Helen Levitt. He died on 16 November 2002 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Sam Levene was the actor who originated "craps-shooter extraordinaire" Nathan Detroit in the seminal American musical "Guys and Dolls" on the Great White Way in the original 1950 production. Levene was not a good singer and had trouble staying in key, so his solo number "Sue Me" had to be written in one octave to compensate for his lack of pipes. Singing great Frank Sinatra played the Nathan Detroit role in the movie version of the musical Guys and Dolls (1955)) after producer Samuel Goldwyn cast non-singer Marlon Brando as Sky Masterston. Many critics noted that Sinatra -- who would not use the character's New York, ethnic accent when singing -- would have been perfect as Sky and rued the lack of "Jewish wry" the Italian-American crooner brought to the role, openly wishing that Levene had been cast as Nathan Detroit to Old Blue Eyes' Masterson. That was not meant to be, although 20 years later he would not be asked to reproduce another of his memorable roles on Broadway.
Born in Russia on August 28, 1905, Sam Levene made his Broadway debut in 1927 in the melodrama "Wall Street", two years before "Variety" noted that the fabled temple of capitalism had "laid an egg". Fifty-four years later he appeared in his 39th and last Broadway show, "Horowitz and Mrs. Washington", a flop that lasted but four performances. Along the way he was nominated for a Tony Award in 1961 as Best Actor in a Play for "The Devil's Advocate." Levene also starred in the original Broadway production of Neil Simon "The Sunshine Boys", playing Al Lewis to Jack Albertson's Willie Clark. However, the role in the 1975 movie (The Sunshine Boys (1975)) originally was earmarked for Jack Benny, who was replaced by his friend George Burns after Benny's death. Burns won an Oscar playing the role, another big one that got away from Levene.
Levene made over 45 movies. He was brought to Hollywood to recreate his stage role as -- fittingly -- a gambler in Three Men on a Horse (1936), following it up with the first of two appearances as San Francisco police Lt. Abrams in the "Thin Man" series: After the Thin Man (1936) and Shadow of the Thin Man (1941). His last film role was in the 1979 film And Justice for All (1979). The highlight of his movie career arguably are his turns in the hard-boiled film noir classics The Killers (1946), Brute Force (1947) and Crossfire (1947). He also appeared in one of the ultimate New York movies, the classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
Sam Levene died of a heart attack on December 28, 1980. He was 75 years old. - Director
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Editor/director Irving Lerner got his start in the film business at Columbia University, where he was a research editor on the school's Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and began making documentaries for the school's anthropology department in the early 1930s. He produced documentaries for the Office of War Information during World War II, and after the war he became the head of New York University's Educational Film institute.
In 1948 Lerner and Joseph Strick co-directed a short documentary, Muscle Beach (1948). After that Lerner got into low-budget feature films, directing the gritty little crime drama 'C'-Man (1949) and the somewhat bizarre Mister Universe (1951), about a bodybuilder who gets involved with con artists and professional wrestling. He also worked as a cinematographer, editor and assistant director on others' films, and served as director and cinematographer on several documentaries. He was the editor on Martin Scorsese's 1977 film New York, New York (1977), but died before finishing the cutting. Scorsese dedicated the film to him.- Editor
- Editorial Department
- Director
Carl Lerner was born on 17 June 1912 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was an editor and director, known for Black Like Me (1964), Klute (1971) and 12 Angry Men (1957). He was married to Gerda Lerner. He died on 26 August 1973 in New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
- Actor
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Robert Lees was born on 10 July 1912 in San Francisco, California, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Green Hornet (1966), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Hold That Ghost (1941). He was married to Abel, Jean. He died on 13 June 2004 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Connie Lee is known for Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1953), Nine Girls (1944) and Swing It Professor (1937).- Hy Kraft is known for Starlight Theatre (1950), This Is Music Hall (1955) and Gomer Pyle: USMC (1964).
- Actor
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He was born in Piestany, Hungary, going to the United States in 1940 having studied at the Sorbonne and working in still and motion picture photography. After studying acting at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon Virginia, he made his 1943 debut on Broadway in "Dark Eyes" under the name Geza Korvin. It was then than movie producer Charles K. Feldman signed him to a contract with Universal Studios. There, with the new stage name Charles Korvin, he played the title role, a French thief, in "Enter Arsene Lupin" (1944). His next three movies paired him romantically with Merle Oberon. After a contract dispute with Universal, and though blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, he played a number of villain, thief and philanderer roles for different studios, including the part of the evil Russian agent Rokov in Lex Barker's "Tarzan's Savage Fury" (1952). He also appeared in many TV episodes, notably as The Eagle in the "Zorro" series (1957) and as the Latin dance instructor Carlos in "The Honeymooners". He returned to Hollywood in Stanley Kramer's "Ship of Fools" (1965). He had homes in Manhattan, USA and Klosters, Switzerland, and died, aged 90, at the Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, survived by his wife, Natasha; a daughter, Katherine Pers of Budapest; a son, Edward Danziger Dorvin of Santa Monica, California; and three grandchildren.- Producer
- Writer
Although never a card-carrying communist himself, Koenig was blacklisted because he refused to name names. The result was that he unable to work in the film business. He began producing jazz records on Commodore Records with some of the best West Coast musicians of that time, among them Art Pepper and Ornette Coleman, whom he was the first to record. Pepper writes about Koenig's decency in his memoir, "Straight Life."- Actor
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Mickey Knox was born on 24 December 1921 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for I Walk Alone (1947), The Godfather Part III (1990) and The 10th Victim (1965). He died on 15 November 2013 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
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A Presbyterian minister's son, softly-spoken, intellectual-looking Alexander Knox received his education from the University of Western Ontario where he studied English literature. An excellent elocutionist (a member of the university's Hesperian Club) he had his first fling with dramatic acting playing the lead in "Hamlet". His professional theatrical debut began on the Boston stage in 1929 while simultaneously earning an income as a journalist for the Boston Post. After just one year he went looking for better acting opportunities in England, specializing in 'serious' classical parts which required just the right measure of 'gravitas'. During another journalistic stint with the London Advertiser he made the acquaintance of noted stage director and producer Tyrone Guthrie who helped him to make a name for himself on the London stage at the Old Vic. As the decade progressed, Knox appeared opposite such theatrical icons as Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier (in "The King of Nowhere"), and in plays by James Bridie and George Bernard Shaw.
Movie work followed in 1938 with appearances in The Phantom Strikes (1938) and a bit part in The Four Feathers (1939). However, the outbreak of World War II prompted his return to America. In 1940, Knox got his big break on Broadway cast in the role of Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet", written and staged by Olivier and starring Vivien Leigh as Juliet. A later leading role in "The Three Sisters" (1942-43) -- a turn-of-the-century drama set in Russia -- saw him as Baron Tuzenbach opposite Katharine Cornell and Judith Anderson. With a brace of good critical notices, it became only a matter of time before the screen beckoned again. In 1941, Knox made his Hollywood film bow and was perfectly cast as the quiet intellectual Humphrey Van Weyden, protagonist of Jack London's maritime classic The Sea Wolf (1941). His performance was somewhat overshadowed by those of his co-stars, Edward G. Robinson (in the titular role of Wolf Larsen) and the dynamic John Garfield (as chief mutineer George Leech) but it led to further work as a reliable lead character player.
For most of his career, Knox tended to be typecast as men of integrity (though he did play the odd villain): stern authority figures, psychiatrists, academics and politicians - undoubtedly, this was because of his inherently sincere, though rather sombre on-screen personality. It was also a consequence of having been cast in the starring role of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. President, in Darryl F. Zanuck's over-ambitious biopic Wilson (1944). Bosley Crowther commented for The New York Times (August 2, 1944): "Much of the film's quality is due to the performance of Alexander Knox in the title role. Mr. Knox....draws a character that is full of inner strength - honest, forceful and intelligent, yet marked by a fine reserve... The casting of Mr. Knox, a comparative unknown, in this role was truly inspired". Despite the excellent personal notices, 'Wilson' was a rather slow and ponderous affair, a flop at the box office and one of Zanuck's most conspicuous failures. His personal reputation intact, Knox had several leading roles come his way in the wake of 'Wilson', even a rare comedy part in The Judge Steps Out (1948) as a starchy, but likeable Boston judge. However, in 1952, his career suffered a serious setback when he was blacklisted by HUAC for alleged left-wing affinities and forced to leave for England.
From 1954, Alexander Knox appeared in scores of British films and was particularly good in two productions for the director Joseph Losey (who had also been black-listed in Hollywood): The Damned (1962) and Accident (1967). He also played another U.S. president in the James Bond thriller You Only Live Twice (1967) and was a memorable spook (the ill-fated 'Control') in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) on television. He made a successful return to the London stage, frequently in plays by Henrik Ibsen and Clifford Odets. Outside of his principal occupation he was finally able to devote himself wholeheartedly to his long-standing literary ambition, as the author of plays ("Old Master", "Trafalgar Square"), screenplays and five adventure novels set in the wilds of 19th century Canada. Knox died in his adopted home in Berwick-Upon-Tweed, England, in 1995 at the age of 88.- Writer
- Location Management
Sidney Kingsley was born on 22 October 1906 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Detective Story (1951), Dead End (1937) and Men in White (1934). He was married to Madge Evans. He died on 20 March 1995 in Oakland, New Jersey, USA.- American character actor of gruff demeanor who played in dozens of films through the Thirties and Forties. A native of New Jersey, he was a wagon driver for his father's laundry business before joining a vaudeville company. He played in stock and touring companies, then was cast in the Walter Huston production of 'Desire Under the Elms' on Broadway. While working on the New York stage, he made a few appearances in films shot on Long Island. In 1935 he came to Hollywood and appeared with great frequency in supporting roles over the next decade and a half. In the early 1950s, he was blacklisted for his political beliefs during the Communist witch-hunts, and returned to the stage almost exclusively thereafter. In 1976, he gained perhaps his greatest fame, as the title character's libidinous grandfather on the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976) TV series. But three years later, he was beaten to death by robbers burgling his apartment.
- Gordon Kahn was born on 11 May 1902 in Budapest, Hungary. He was a writer, known for The Death Kiss (1932), The People's Enemy (1935) and The Crosby Case (1934). He was married to Barbara Brodie. He died on 31 December 1962 in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA.
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Producer and screenwriter who, among many in his craft labeled in the late 1940's and early 1950's as 'subversive' by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, was blacklisted, Jarrico in the prime of his career. His name was left out of the credits of most American films that he wrote during the 50's and 60's, and in others replaced by a pseudonym. He defied the ban, however, in producing the then little known film Salt of the Earth (1954), which would win awards in Europe - and eventually be listed by the U.S. Library of Congress in its catalogue of films to be preserved for all time! Ironically, Jarrico's death occurred as he was motoring home from a ceremony in observance of the 50th anniversary of the House Committee's first hearings.- Actor
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Born in Canada, John Ireland was raised in New York. Performing as a swimmer in a water carnival, he moved into the legitimate theater, often appearing in minor roles in Broadway plays. His first big break in pictures came in 1945 when he appeared as Windy the introspective letter-writing G.I. in the classic war epic A Walk in the Sun (1945). Ireland was then often featured (mostly as a heavy) in several films. In 1949, he was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as the reporter in All the King's Men (1949). During the early 1950s, Ireland often starred as the emoting, brooding hero, almost exclusively in "B" pictures. In 1953, with his son Peter Ireland and wife, Joanne Dru, Ireland co-produced and co-directed the western mini-classic Hannah Lee: An American Primitive (1953) (aka Outlaw Territory). From the mid-'50s on. he appeared mainly in Italian "quickie" features and showed up occasionally in supporting roles in major pictures (Spartacus (1960)). Occasionally, his name was mentioned in tabloids of the times, in connection with young starlets, namely Natalie Wood and Sue Lyon. He was to play the role of the patriarch on the Ponderosa in Bonanza: The Next Generation (1988) but the series was not picked up. In addition to Hannah Lee: An American Primitive (1953), his best work was in Little Big Horn (1951) and The Bushwhackers (1951). In his later years, he owned and operated a tiny restaurant, Ireland's, in Santa Barbara, California.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Her father, Donald Cole, was a consulting engineer, and died in 1926 when Kim was only three years old. Her mother, Grace Lind, once performed as a concert pianist. She had one brother who was eight years older than she, and she was educated at Miami Beach High.
According to an in-depth article on Kim Hunter by Joseph Collura in the October 2009 issue of "Classic Images", Kim was quiet and painfully shy as a child and overcame it through the guidance of a local dramatics teacher, a Mrs. Carmine. Included were diction, voice and posture lessons.
She studied at the Actors Studio and her first professional appearance was as "Penny" in "Penny Wise" in Miami in November 1939. Then, she joined a repertory group called "Theatre of Fifteen", but it disbanded in 1942 when WWII took away most of its male members.
She made her Broadway debut performance as "Stella" in "A Streetcar Named Desire" at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, in December 1947 that was the 1947-1948 season's success and for which she won the Critics Circle and Donaldson awards.
A one-time student of the Pasadena Playhouse, she was appearing in the 1942 production of "Arsenic and Old Lace" when she was discovered by an RKO talent hunter who signed her to a seven-year contract for David O. Selznick's company. Selznick suggested she change her first name to "Kim" and a RKO secretary suggested the last name of "Hunter". A few years later, Irene Mayer Selznick, David's ex-wife by then, recommended Kim for her reprise role of "Stella" in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which she won an Oscar.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
Ian McLellan Hunter was born on 8 August 1915 in London, England, UK. Ian McLellan was a writer, known for Roman Holiday (1953), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968) and The Outside Man (1972). Ian McLellan was married to Alice Goldberg. Ian McLellan died on 5 March 1991 in New York City, New York, USA.- Edward Huebsch was born on 20 February 1914 in New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Millie's Daughter (1947), The Wreck of the Hesperus (1948) and Los pequeños gigantes (1960). He died on 7 July 1982 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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John Hubley was born on 21 May 1914 in Marinette, Wisconsin, USA. He was a director and producer, known for Of Stars and Men (1961), The Hole (1962) and A Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966). He was married to Faith Hubley and Claudia Lenora (Ross) Sewell. He died on 21 February 1977 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.- Tamara Hovey was born on 16 December 1923 in New York City, New York, USA. She was a writer, known for Bagdad (1949), That Midnight Kiss (1949) and Je suis un sentimental (1955). She was married to ? Gold. She died in 2017 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.