(1947-1960) The Hollywood Blacklist
Those active in the entertainment industry who were blacklisted & greylisted during the early Cold War period because of their left-wing political beliefs - whether they be communist, socialist, or simply progressive.
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Actor / director John Cromwell was born December 23, 1887, in Toledo, OH. He made his Broadway debut on October 14, 1912, in Marian De Forest's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" at the Playhouse Theatre. The show was a hit, running for a total of 184 performances. Cromwell appeared in another 38 plays on Broadway between February 24, 1914--when he appeared in Frank Craven's "Too Many Cooks" at the 39th Street Theatre (a hit show he co-directed with Craven that ran for a total of 223 performances)--and October 31, 1971, when he closed with "Solitaire/Double Solitaire" at the John Golden Theatre after 36 performances. In addition to "Cooks", Cromwell directed or staged 11 plays and produced seven plays on Broadway. Among the highlights of his Broadway acting career were his multiple appearances as a Shavian actor. He was "Charles Lomax" in the original Broadway production of George Bernard Shaw's "Major Barbara" in 1915 (Guthrie McClintic, who married Katharine Cornell in 1921 and became a notable Broadway director, played a butler) and as "Capt. Kearney" in the revival of "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" the following year (McClintic played "Marzo"). He also appeared as "Brother Martin Ladvenu" in Katharine Cornell's 1936 "Saint Joan", directed by McClintic, and played "Freddy Eynsford Hill" in Cedric Hardwicke's 1945 revival of "Pygmalion", starring Gertrude Lawrence as "Eliza Doolittle" and Raymond Massey as "Henry Higgins".
As for William Shakespeare, he played "Paris" to Katharine Cornell's "Juliet" and Maurice Evans' "Romeo" in McClntic's "Rome and Juliet" in 1935, and appeared as "Rosenkrantz" in McClintic's 1936 Broadway staging of "Hamlet", with John Gielgud in the title role, Lillian Gish as "Ophelia" and Judith Anderson as "Gertrude". He also appeared as "Lennox" in the 1948 revival of Shakespeare's "Scottish Play", with Michael Redgrave as "Macbeth" and Flora Robson as "Lady Macbeth" (young actors also featured in the play who went on to renown were Julie Harris, Martin Balsam and Beatrice Straight). Cromwell won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Play in 1952 for "Point of No Return", in which he supported Henry Fonda, and appeared as the father, "Linus Larabee Sr.", in "Sabrina Fair" the next year.
With the advent of sound pictures, Cromwell went "Hollywood" in 1929, appearing in The Dummy (1929) in support of Ruth Chatterton and Fredric March. He also co-directed two talkies with A. Edward Sutherland that year, Close Harmony (1929) and The Dance of Life (1929) (he had a bit part as a doorman in the latter). After learning the craft of directing, he directed The Mighty (1929) with George Bancroft, in which he made innovative use of sound. He also directed Jackie Coogan in Tom Sawyer (1930) the next year. He made his name with Ann Vickers (1933) in 1933 and Of Human Bondage (1934) in 1934, two films he shot for RKO based on novels by the preeminent writers Sinclair Lewis and W. Somerset Maugham. Both movies ran into censorship trouble. Lewis' "Ann Vickers" featured Irene Dunne as a reformer and birth control advocate who has a torrid extramarital affair. The novel had been condemned by the Catholic Church, and the proposed movie adaptation proved controversial. The Studio Relations Committee, headed by James Wingate (whose deputy was future Production Code Administration head Joseph Breen, a Roman Catholic intellectual) condemned the script as "vulgarly offensive" before production began. The SRC, which oversaw the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code, refused to approve the script without major modifications, but RKO production chief Merian C. Cooper balked over its excessive demands. Though studio head B.B. Kahane protested the SRC's actions to MPPDA President Will Hays, the studio agreed to make "Ann Vickers" an unmarried woman at the time of her affair, thus eliminating adultery as an issue, and the film received a Seal of Approval. The battle over "Ann Vickers" was one of the reasons the more powerful PCA was created in 1934 to take the place of the SRC.
Joseph Breen, now head of the PCA, warned that the script for W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" was "highly offensive" because the prostitute "Mildred", whom the protagonist, medical student "Philip Carey", falls in love with, comes down with syphilis. Breen demanded that Mildred be turned into less of a tramp, that she be afflicted with tuberculosis rather than syphilis and that she be married to Carey's friend whom she cheats on him with. RKO gave in on every point, as the PCA, unlike the SRC, had the ability to levy a $25,000 fine for violations of the Production Code. Despite the changes, chapters of the Catholic Church's Legion Of Deceny condemned the film in Chicago, Detroit, Omaha and Pittsburgh. Despite a picket line manned by local priests in Chicago, Cromwell's film broke all records at the Hippodrome Theater when it played there in August 1934. Five hundred people had to be turned away opening night. It seemed that wherever the Legion of Decency had condemned the film, it played to capacity crowds. In 1935 Breen ruled that "Of Human Bondage" would have to be changed if RKO wished to re-release it.
Other major films Cromwell directed include Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Algiers (1938), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Since You Went Away (1944) and Anna and the King of Siam (1946). In 1951 he directed The Racket (1951) starring Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scott, and Robert Ryan; he had appeared in the original staging of the Broadway play by Bartlett Cormack on which the movie was based back in 1927.
Busy on Broadway in the 1950s, it was seven years before he directed another film, The Goddess (1958), with a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky and starring Kim Stanley. He directed two more minor films before calling it quits as a movie director in 1961. As a director, Cromwell eschewed flashy camera work, as he felt it detracted from both the story and the actors' performances. Late in his life director Robert Altman cast Cromwell as an actor in two of his films, 3 Women (1977) and A Wedding (1978).
John Cromwell died on September 26, 1979, in Santa Barbara, CA.- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Considered to be one of the most pivotal stars of the early days of Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin lived an interesting life both in his films and behind the camera. He is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often associated with his popular character, the Little Tramp; the man with the toothbrush mustache, bowler hat, bamboo cane, and a funny walk.
Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in Walworth, London, England on April 16, 1889, to Hannah Harriet Pedlingham (Hill) and Charles Chaplin, both music hall performers, who were married on June 22, 1885. After Charles Sr. separated from Hannah to perform in New York City, Hannah then tried to resurrect her stage career. Unfortunately, her singing voice had a tendency to break at unexpected moments. When this happened, the stage manager spotted young Charlie standing in the wings and led him on stage, where five-year-old Charlie began to sing a popular tune. Charlie and his half-brother, Syd Chaplin spent their lives in and out of charity homes and workhouses between their mother's bouts of insanity. Hannah was committed to Cane Hill Asylum in May 1903 and lived there until 1921, when Chaplin moved her to California.
Chaplin began his official acting career at the age of eight, touring with the Eight Lancashire Lads. At age 18, he began touring with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe, joining them on the troupe's 1910 United States tour. He traveled west to California in December 1913 and signed on with Keystone Studios' popular comedy director Mack Sennett, who had seen Chaplin perform on stage in New York. Charlie soon wrote his brother Syd, asking him to become his manager. While at Keystone, Chaplin appeared in and directed 35 films, starring as the Little Tramp in nearly all.
In November 1914, he left Keystone and signed on at Essanay, where he made 15 films. In 1916, he signed on at Mutual and made 12 films. In June 1917, Chaplin signed up with First National Studios, after which he built Chaplin Studios. In 1919, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists (UA).
Chaplin's life and career was full of scandal and controversy. His first big scandal was during World War I, at which time his loyalty to England, his home country, was questioned. He had never applied for American citizenship, but claimed that he was a "paying visitor" to the United States. Many British citizens called Chaplin a coward and a slacker. This and other career eccentricities sparked suspicion with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), who believed that he was injecting Communist propaganda into his films. Chaplin's later film The Great Dictator (1940), which was his first "talkie", also created a stir. In the film, Chaplin plays a humorous caricature of Adolf Hitler. Some thought the film was poorly done and in bad taste. However, the film grossed over $5 million and earned five Academy Award Nominations.
Another scandal occurred when Chaplin briefly dated 22 year-old Joan Barry. However, Chaplin's relationship with Barry came to an end in 1942, after a series of harassing actions from her. In May 1943, Barry returned to inform Chaplin that she was pregnant and filed a paternity suit, claiming that the unborn child was his. During the 1944 trial, blood tests proved that Chaplin was not the father, but at the time, blood tests were inadmissible evidence, and he was ordered to pay $75 a week until the child turned 21.
Chaplin also was scrutinized for his support in aiding the Russian struggle against the invading Nazis during World War II, and the United States government questioned his moral and political views, suspecting him of having Communist ties. For this reason, HUAC subpoenaed him in 1947. However, HUAC finally decided that it was no longer necessary for him to appear for testimony. Conversely, when Chaplin and his family traveled to London for the premier of Limelight (1952), he was denied re-entry to the United States. In reality, the government had almost no evidence to prove that he was a threat to national security. Instead, he and his wife decided to settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin was married four times and had a total of 11 children. In 1918, he married Mildred Harris and they had a son together, Norman Spencer Chaplin, who lived only three days. Chaplin and Harris divorced in 1920. He married Lita Grey in 1924, who had two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin. They were divorced in 1927. In 1936, Chaplin married Paulette Goddard, and his final marriage was to Oona O'Neill (Oona Chaplin), daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1943. Oona gave birth to eight children: Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Josephine Chaplin, Victoria Chaplin, Eugene Chaplin, Jane Chaplin, Annette-Emilie Chaplin, and Christopher Chaplin.
In contrast to many of his boisterous characters, Chaplin was a quiet man who kept to himself a great deal. He also had an "un-millionaire" way of living. Even after he had accumulated millions, he continued to live in shabby accommodations. In 1921, Chaplin was decorated by the French government for his outstanding work as a filmmaker and was elevated to the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1952. In 1972, he was honored with an Academy Award for his "incalculable effect in making motion pictures the art form of the century". He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year's Honours List. No formal reason for the honour was listed. The citation simply reads "Charles Spencer Chaplin, Film Actor and Producer".
Chaplin's other works included musical scores that he composed for many of his films. He also authored two autobiographical books, "My Autobiography" (1964) and its companion volume, "My Life in Pictures" (1974).
Chaplin died at age 88 of natural causes on December 25, 1977 at his home in Vevey, Switzerland. His funeral was a small and private Anglican ceremony according to his wishes. In 1978, Chaplin's corpse was stolen from its grave and was not recovered for three months; he was re-buried in a vault surrounded by cement.
Six of Chaplin's films have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress: The Immigrant (1917), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940).
Charlie Chaplin is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, whose movies were and still are popular throughout the world and have even gained notoriety as time progresses. His films show, through the Little Tramp's positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos, that the human spirit has and always will remain the same.- Writer
- Actress
Salka Viertel was born on 15 June 1889 in Sambor, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Sambir, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine]. She was a writer and actress, known for Seven Faces (1929), Anna Christie (1930) and Deep Valley (1947). She was married to Berthold Viertel. She died on 20 October 1978 in Klosters, Switzerland.- 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. - 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.
- Originally named Shalom Jaffe, he became known to the world as Sam Jaffe. He was born in New York City, to Heida (Ada) and Barnett Jaffe, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. As a child, he appeared in Yiddish theatre productions with his mother, a prominent regional stage actress. He graduated from the City College of New York and then studied engineering at Columbia University graduate school. He began his career as a mathematics teacher in the Bronx. Around 1915 Jaffe joined the Washington Square Players. By 1918 he was no stranger to Broadway, having debuted in the original play Youth, and he appeared regularly through the 1920s, though less in the 1930s and only sporadically in the 1940s. He appeared in 21 plays on Broadway during his acting career, his final appearance in 1979.
Jaffe was a method actor before it was defined and early on sported his signature shock of curly hair that some people would later misinterpret as part of some Harpo Marx characterization. Jaffe was anything but. His acting talents were considerable, and Hollywood noticed him first for the unusual role of the mad Grand Duke Peter in Josef von Sternberg 's The Scarlet Empress (1934). Frightening in his rendition of Peter, he was dispatched by the always magnificent Marlene Dietrich.
Jaffe was no matinee idol but his homely features were made for unusual character roles. He did not disappoint in providing unforgettable performances. Frank Capra cast him as the mysterious High Lama in Lost Horizon (1937) (as last minute replacement; the actor originally cast had died). It would be another two years before Jaffe was once more called to Hollywood - he was back quite busy on Broadway. He appeared in George Stevens Gunga Din (1939) which sported big star names as well. Stevens gave Jaffe the lead, Gunga Din, native regimental bhisti (Hindi for water-carrier). It was probably Jaffe's most familiar film role. It was a standout part which Jaffe handled with great humanity, and the film was a huge hit.
Jaffe would not appear in another film for eight years. His second of two movies in 1947 was Elia Kazan 's powerful expose of anti-Semitism Gentleman's Agreement (1947) in which Jaffe played an Albert Einstein-like professor. Jaffe would play doctors of one sort or another in the handful of movies for the next few years. Then in 1950 he played a very different doctor - Doc Erwin Riedenschneider, criminal mastermind -- in John Huston's taut The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Jaffe would receive a nomination for a supporting actor Oscar for this effort. Of the three films he did in 1951, Jaffe also appeared in an another Einstein-like role in the Robert Wise sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
Jaffe experienced the destructive anti-communist furor when his name was included on a listing of performers sympathetic to communism in the Red Channels pamphlet and like many, was blacklisted by the big Hollywood studios. He was considered essential by producer Julian Blaustein and Robert Wise to play Professor Jacob Barnhardt, and 20th Century Fox boss Darryl Zanuck (who had resisted much heat for Gentleman's Agreement (1947)) agreed. It was ironic that Einstein, veiled as the character Barnhardt, was a pacifist and being watched by the U.S. government at that time. There was some credence for rumors that Jaffe provided the calculus equations (mainly the gravitational force between bodies) on Barnhardt's blackboard - solved so easily by alien Michael Rennie.
Jaffe didn't appear on-screen for seven years due to the punitive effects of the blacklisting. In 1958, John Huston wanted him for his very original The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) with John Wayne, and director William Wyler also came forward later to cast him as faithful servant Simonides in the blockbuster Ben-Hur (1959). From then on Jaffe was very busy, especially with episodic TV through the 1960s which included his own recurring role as Dr. Zorba in the very popular Ben Casey (1961) series. Jaffe also appeared with his lifelong best friend, screen icon Edward G. Robinson in the made-for-TV film The Old Man Who Cried Wolf (1970) . Jaffe remained active into the year of his passing, a thoroughly engaging and unique actor and human being who never pushed his views on anyone. - Actor
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Mr. Loeb returned to Broadway following his unjust firing from "The Goldbergs". He starred in the Broadway production of "Time Out for Ginger" and was appearing in the play's touring company at the time of his suicide in the Hotel Taft in New York on September 1, 1955. Had he lived a few days longer he would have learned that the FBI had decided to fully clear his name. His suicide was not only linked to his blacklisting but also to the fact that his wife of many years had recently died and his mentally ill son's condition was quickly deteriorating. Mr. Loeb was also in failing health. But there is no doubt that his treatment by the government broke his heart and his spirit.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Mady Christians was born in Vienna, Austria. Destined to be in films in both Germany and the US, she started out as a stage actress but soon found new challenges in the world of cinema. Her first film was at the age of 24 when she appeared in Audrey (1916). She remained in German films for the next 17years before coming to the US and starring in The Only Girl (1933). Mady left the film industry in 1948 after finishing All My Sons (1948).
She died on October 28, 1951, in Norwalk, CT, from a cerebral hemorrhage.- Director
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Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Wilhelm Dieterle was the youngest of nine children of parents Jacob and Berthe Dieterle. They lived in poverty, and when he was old enough to work, young Wilhelm earned money as a carpenter and a scrap dealer. He dreamed of better things, though, and theater caught his eye as a teen. By the age of 16 he had joined a traveling theater company. He was ambitious and handsome, both of which opened the door to leading romantic roles in theater productions. Though he had acted in his first film in 1913, it was six more years before he made another one. In that year he was noticed by producer/director/designer/impresario Max Reinhardt, the most influential proponent of expressionism in theater; while in Berlin, Reinhardt hired him as an actor for his productions. Dieterle resumed German film acting in 1920, becoming a popular and successful romantic lead and featured character actor in the mix of German expressionist/Gothic and nature/romanticism genres that imbued much of German cinema in the silent era. He was interested in directing even more than acting, however, and he had the iconic Reinhardt to provide inspiration. Dieterle had acted in nearly 20 movies before he also began directing in 1923, his first female lead being a young Marlene Dietrich.
With his wife Charlotte Hagenbruch he started his own film production . He was said to have tired of acting; he appeared in nearly 50 films over the course of his career, mainly in the 1920s, and in several of his films he also functioned as director. As an actor he worked with some of the greatest names in German film, such as directors Paul Leni (in Waxworks (1924) [Waxworks]) and F.W. Murnau (in Faust (1926)) and actors Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings. By 1930, however, he had emigrated to the US--now rechristened as William Dieterle--with an offer from Warner Brothers to direct their German-language versions of the studio's popular hits for the German market. In that capacity he made Those Who Dance (1930), The Way of All Men (1930) and Die heilige Flamme (1931) (aka "The Holy Flames"). He even stood before the camera for another of these, Dämon des Meeres (1931) (aka "Demon of the Sea", a version of "Moby Dick") in 1931, in which he played Capt. Ahab. The film was directed by another European who was soon to become one of Warners' most successful directors: the Hungarian Michael Curtiz.
Having taken to the Hollywood brand of filmmaking with ease--helped by his own brilliance in defining and executing the telling of a story--into 1931, he was soon promoted to directing some of Warners' "regular" films (his first, The Last Flight (1931), is now regarded as a masterwork) and he wold average directing six pictures a year for the studio through 1934. In that year Reinhardt came to the US, the Nazi threat finally having driven him off the Continent. He arrived with a flourish, ready to stage William Shakespeare's "A Midsummers Night's Dream"--an extravaganza at the Hollywood Bowl that would become legend. It was impressive enough to interest the execs of Warner Bros. They opted for a film version in 1935 with the great Reinhardt--even studio boss Jack L. Warner knew who he was--reunited with his disciple, Dieterle, as co-director. Reinhardt knew nothing about Hollywood and had to learn via Dieterle's diplomacy the differences between the overemphasis of stage and the subtlety of the camera. He learned from other directors as well about the realities of making films, in particular ratchet down the tendency that stage directors had to let their actors perform "too" much. It was all for naught, however, as the film was a major box-office flop, but it was one of the great moments in the evolution of film. Dieterle would direct Paul Muni for Warners in three first-rate bio movies: The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Juarez (1939) and all received Oscar nominations. After that Dieterle moved on to do The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) at RKO with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. This was one of Dieterle's best efforts, both in its romantic style and the great dark scenes of the Parisian medieval underworld with dramatic minimal lighting that gave vent to his expressionist roots.
Through the 1940s Dieterle moved around among Hollywood's studios, turning out vigorously wrought pictures, such as his two 1940 bios with Edward G. Robinson at Warner's. He became associated with independent producer David O. Selznick and actor Joseph Cotten, first with his direction of I'll Be Seeing You (1944). His romantic fires as a director had been restoked, as it were, and kept burning in the subsequent series of films with them which included the wonderful acting talents of Selznick's soon-to-be-wife (1949), Jennifer Jones: Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946)--for which he shared directing but not credit with King Vidor--and the ethereal Portrait of Jennie (1948). "Jennie" was one of Dieterle's masterpieces, bringing into play a fusion of all his artistic fonts. The romantic fantasy with edges of darkness from the novel by Robert Nathan was just the vehicle to challenge Dieterle. His use of light and dark and gauzed--at one point the textured field of a painting canvas--backdrops conveyed the dreamlike state and netherworld atmosphere of the story of lovers from different times. Certainly the film influenced others to follow with similar themes.
Through the 1950s Dieterle's work--two more with Joseph Cotten--though sturdily in the director's hands, came off like good Hollywood fare, but were inspired more by the films' tight shooting schedules than by any artistic pretensions. His output during that decade was small, and that was partly due to bane of McCarthyism. He was never blacklisted as such, but his film Blockade (1938) was too libertarian to keep him completely away from the shadow of suspicion as a "socialist" / "communist" sympathizer. In 1958 he returned to Germany and directed a few films there and in Italy before retiring in 1965.
Though regrettably not as well known as his German and European directorial compatriots in Hollywood, he had great artistic style and worked with much energy in providing some of Hollywood's and the world's crown jewels of cinematic art.- Writer
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Dorothy Rothschild was born on August 22, 1893 into a family of comfortable financial means. Raised by her father and Stepmother after her mother's death, she was given an excellent education for the times. Highly intelligent, she pursued a career after her formal education and proved herself to be one of the early feminists. She started writing poems early and her witty remarks are still alive today. In 1917 she was asked to join the staff at Vanity Fair magazine and to marry Edward Pond Parker II, both of which she agreed to gladly. Eddie Parker soon was stationed overseas and Dorothy became one of the founding members of the Algonquin Hotel "Round Table". Eddie arrived back from the war with an unfortunate drinking problem, and Dorothy decided she loved her new life more than she did him. They were separated far more than together and divorced in 1928. She spent a very dramatic period of time in New York City, doing theater reviews, spending time with her Algonquin friends, drinking far too much. She published poems and short stories and in 1929 won the national O. Henry Prize for the short story "Big Blonde". This established her as a serious writer. She married Alan Campbell when she was forty and he was twenty-nine. He encouraged her to go Hollywood where they became a very successful screenwriting team. Beginning in 1933 they received screen credits for fifteen films, most notably A Star Is Born (1937) which was nominated for an Academy Award. The time spent in Hollywood were the most lucrative years of her career, yet she spent every dime of it. She divorced and remarried Alan Campbell and in 1963 he died. She spent her last years in New York City, in very poor health due to heavy drinking and making do on very little money. Often, she would have to call on friends like Lillian Hellman to help her financially. Dorothy Parker died in 1967 at seventy-three years old in her New York hotel room, all alone. Time magazine devoted an entire page to her obituary, which was considered an amazing tribute. Her estate was left in full to Martin Luther King and the NAACP.- 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
Garrett Graham was born on 4 September 1896 in Newton, Iowa, USA. He was a writer, known for The Sunset Legion (1928), Sweetheart of the Navy (1937) and Sky Devils (1932). He was married to Louise. He died on 25 September 1964 in Hollywood, California, USA.- 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.
- Actor
- Soundtrack
Morris Carnovsky was one of the more prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklist, being named as a Communist party member by both Elia Kazan -- the most infamous of the informers who sang before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the era blacklistee Lillian Hellman called the "Scoundrel Time" -- and Sterling Hayden. However, he had been effectively blacklisted -- unofficially banned from appearing in Hollywood films -- since 1950, two years before Kazan sang before HUAC, when Carnovsky himself refused to "name names" before the Committee. Carnovsky did not make any more movies for the better part of a decade -- in fact, his movie acting career essentially was over -- but he did have a thriving career on the Broadway stage, the venue where he established his reputation as a thespian back in the 1930s.
Morris Carnovsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 5, 1898, the son of a grocer. Upon graduation from high school he attended St. Louis' Washington University.
Like most actors of his generation, he worked his way up the ladder by first appearing with traveling stock companies. Eventually, he landed in New York City, where he became a member of the Theatre Guild, the legendary theatrical company appearing as Kublai Khan in Nobel Prize winner 'Eugene O'Neill's play "Marco Millions' (I)'. Subsequently, he became one of the founding members of the left-wing Group Theatre.
Founded in 1931 by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford, The Group Theatre contained Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, and playwright Clifford Odets; the latter three were major forces in transforming American theater and acting, a process that began with the Provincetown Theatre. Stella Adler, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, including their students/latter Group Theatre members like Bobby Lewis, were instrumental in making "The Method" -- a variation of Konstantin Stanislavski's acting theories, based on finding and cultivating "motivation" -- revolutionized American acting on stage and in the movies, most famously through Adler's student Marlon Brando. Kazan and Strasberg later founded the Actors Studio, America's premier acting school that promulgated "The Method" via such alumni as James Dean, Paul Newman and hundreds of others.
Carnovsky was a member of the Group Theater until it broke up in 1940. He appeared prominently in Odets' plays "Awake and Sing" and Golden Boy (1939). Carnovsky's talents were in demand by other theatrical troupes, and he appeared on Broadway in the 1930s in multiple non-Group Theatre productions.
Eventually, Hollywood beckoned and Carnovsky made his screen debut in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), playing Anatole France in support of Paul Muni. Settling in Los Angeles after the Group Theatre breakup, Carnovsky was one of the founders of the Actor's Laboratory and became involved with the the Hollywood Communist Party, whose cultural apparatchik, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, was later one of the Hollywood Ten, the first group of leftists blacklisted by the film industry. While Carnovsky was never involved in espionage or any overt acts against the interests of the United States (as were none of the Hollywood Ten or other blacklistees), he led Marxist study groups in his home, as Sterling Hayden testified to before HUAC.
In his 1952 testimony before HUAC, Elia Kazan named Carnovsky as a member of the Communist Party cell he had belonged to in the Group Theatre. Other members included Lee Strasberg's wife, Paula (best known as Marilyn Monroe's acting coach). Kazan had quit the cell in the mid-1930s, he said, when it was ordered by the Party to undermine Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg (who did not know his wife was a communist) and take over the Group Theatre. The attempted coup was never launched.
In 1950, Carnovsky was hauled before HUAC, where he refused to "name names." This resulted in his blacklisting, not Kazan's testimony. (Kazan said that Carnovsky, like others he named, already were known by the Committee.) The blacklist did not exist on Broadway, and producer (and future Osar-winning actor) John Houseman cast Carnovsky in the Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," whose script was written by future HUAC target Arthur Miller. He acted in many Broadway productions throughout the 1950s and into the '60s.
A part in Sidney Lumet's film version of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1962) did not revive his movie career, and he continued to act on stage. He died on September 1, 1992, at the age of 94.- Actor
- Soundtrack
This handsome, eloquent and highly charismatic actor became one of the foremost interpreters of Eugene O'Neill's plays and one of the most treasured names in song during the first half of the twentieth century. He also courted disdain and public controversy for most of his career as a staunch Cold War-era advocate for human rights, as well as his very vocal support for Joseph Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. While the backlash of his civil rights activities and left-wing ideology left him embittered and practically ruined his career, he remains today a durable symbol of racial pride and consciousness.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 9, 1898, Paul LeRoy Bustill Robeson and his four siblings (William, Benjamin, Reeve, Marian) lost their mother, a schoolteacher, in a fire while quite young (Paul was only six). Paul's father, a humble Presbyterian minister and former slave, raised the family singlehandedly and the young, impressionable boy grew up singing spirituals in his father's church. Paul was a natural athlete and the tall (6'3"), strapping high school fullback had no trouble earning a scholarship to prestigious Rutgers University in 1915 at age 17 -- becoming only the third member of his race to be admitted at the time. He excelled in football, baseball, basketball, and track and field, graduating as a four-letter man. He was also the holder of a Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year and was a selected member of their honorary society, Cap and Skull. Moreover, he was the class valedictorian and in his speech was already preaching idealism.
Paul subsequently played professional football to earn money while attending Columbia University's law school, and also took part in amateur dramatics. During this time he met and married Eslanda Cardozo Goode in 1921. She eventually became his personal assistant. Despite the fact that he was admitted to the New York bar, Paul's future as an actor was destined and he never did practice law. His wife persuaded him to play a role in "Simon the Cyrenian" at the Harlem YMCA in 1921. This was followed by his Broadway debut the following year in the short-lived play "Taboo", a drama set in Africa, which also went to London. As a result, he was asked to join the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village theater group that included in its membership playwright Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill personally asked Paul to star in his plays "All God's Chillun Got Wings" and "The Emperor Jones" in 1924. The reaction from both critics and audiences alike was electrifying...an actor was born.
In 1925 Paul delivered his first singing recital and also made his film debut starring in Body and Soul (1925), a rather murky melodrama that nevertheless was ahead of its time in its depictions of black characters. Although Robeson played a scurrilous, corrupt clergyman who takes advantage of his own people, his dynamic personality managed to shine through. Radio and recordings helped spread his name across foreign waters. His resonant bass was a major highlight in the London production of "Show Boat" particularly with his powerful rendition of "Ol' Man River." He remained in London to play the role of Shakespeare's "Othello" in 1930 (at the time no U.S. company would hire him), and was again significant in a highly controversial production. Paul caused a slight stir by co-starring opposite a white actress, Peggy Ashcroft, who played Desdemona. Around this time Paul starred in the landmark British film Borderline (1930), a silent film that dealt strongly with racial themes, and then returned to the stage in the O'Neill play "The Hairy Ape" in 1931. The following year he appeared in a Broadway revival of "Show Boat" again as Joe. In the same production, the noted chanteuse Helen Morgan repeated her original 1927 performance as the half-caste role of Julie, but the white actress Tess Gardella played the role of Queenie in her customary blackface opposite Robeson.
Robeson spent most of his time singing and performing in England throughout the 1930s. He also was given the opportunity to recapture two of his greatest stage successes on film: The Emperor Jones (1933) and Show Boat (1936). In Britain he continued to film sporadically with Sanders of the River (1935), Song of Freedom (1936), King Solomon's Mines (1937), Dark Sands (1937) and The Tunnel (1940) in important roles that resisted demeaning stereotypes.
During the 1930s he also gravitated strongly towards economics and politics with a burgeoning interest in social activism. In 1934 he made the first of several trips to the Soviet Union and outwardly extolled the Soviet way of life and his belief that it lacked racial bias, despite the Holodomor and the later Rootless Cosmopolitan Campaign. He was a popular figure in Wales where he became personally involved in their civil rights affairs, notably the Welsh miners. Developing a marked leftist ideology, he continued to criticize the blatant discrimination he found so prevalent in America.
The 1940s was a mixture of performance triumphs and poignant, political upheavals. While his title run in the musical drama "John Henry" (1940), was short-lived, he earned widespread acclaim for his Broadway "Othello" in 1943 opposite José Ferrer as Iago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona. By this time, however, Robeson was being reviled by much of white America for his outspoken civil rights speeches against segregation and lynchings, particularly in the South. A founder of the Progressive Party, an independent political party, his outdoor concerts sometimes ignited violence and he was now a full-blown target for "Red Menace" agitators. In 1946 he denied under oath being a member of the Communist Party, but steadfastly refused to refute the accusations under subsequent probes. As a result, his passport was withdrawn and he became engaged in legal battles for nearly a decade in order to retrieve it. Adding fuel to the fire was his only son's (Paul Jr.) marriage to a white woman in 1949 and his being awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952 (he was unable to receive it until 1958 when his passport was returned to him).
Essentially blacklisted, tainted press statements continued to hound him. He began performing less and less in America. Despite his growing scorn towards America, he never gave up his American citizenship although the anguish of it all led to a couple of suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns and a dependency on drugs. Europe was a different story. The people continued to hold him in high regard as an artist/concertist above reproach. He had a command of about 20 languages and wound up giving his last acting performance in "Othello" on foreign shores -- at Stratford-on-Avon in 1959.
While still performing in the 1960s, his health suddenly took a turn for the worse and he finally returned to the United States in 1963. His poet/wife Eslanda Robeson died of cancer two years later. Paul remained in poor health for pretty much the rest of his life. His last years were spent in Harlem in near-total isolation, denying all interviews and public correspondence, although he was honored for speaking out against apartheid in South Africa in 1978.
Paul died at age 77 of complications from a stroke. Among his many honors: he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995; he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998; was honored with a postage stamp during the "Black Heritage" series; and both a Cultural Center at Penn State University and a high school in Brooklyn bear his name. In 1995 his autobiography "Here I Stand" was published in England in 1958; his son, Paul Robeson Jr., also chronicled a book about his father, "Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist's Journey" in 2001.- Sly, manipulative, dangerously cunning and sinister were the key words that best described the roles that Gale Sondergaard played in motion pictures, making her one of the most talented character actresses ever seen on the screen. She was educated at the University of Minnesota and later married director Herbert J. Biberman. Her husband went to find work in Hollywood and she reluctantly followed him there. Although she had extensive experience in stage work, she had no intention of becoming an actress in film. Her mind was changed after she was discovered by director Mervyn LeRoy, who offered her a key role in his film Anthony Adverse (1936); she accepted the part and was awarded the very first Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. LeRoy originally cast her as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but she felt she was not right for that role. Instead, she co-starred opposite Paul Muni in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a film that won Best Picture in 1937. Sondergaard's most-remembered role was that of the sinister and cunning wife of a husband murdered by Bette Davis' character in The Letter (1940). Sondergaard continued her career rise in films such as Juarez (1939), The Mark of Zorro (1940), The Black Cat (1941), and Anna and the King of Siam (1946). Unfortunately, she was blacklisted when she refused to testify during the McCarthy-inspired "Red Scare" hysteria in the 1950s. She eventually returned to films in the 1960s and made her final appearance in the 1983 film Echoes (1982). Gale Sondergaard passed away of an undisclosed illness at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 86.
- 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.
- Vera Caspary was born on 13 November 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She was a writer, known for Laura (1944), A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Laura. She was married to Isadore Goldsmith. She died on 13 June 1987 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Writer
- Director
- Producer
Herbert J. Biberman, the progressive producer, director and screenwriter now best known as one of the Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted by the American Film Industry for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was born on March 4, 1900 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale, Biberman entered his family's textile business after a journey to Europe. In 1928, Biberman joined the left-wing Theater Guild as an assistant stage manager, beginning his professional career in the arts. He married actress Gale Sondergaard in 1930.
Biberman became a director with the Theater Guild, and entered the movie industry as a dialog director on Colmbia Pictures' Eight Bells (1935) in 1935. He made his first picture that year, directing One-Way Ticket (1935) for B.P. Schulberg Productions and Columbia. Ironically, it would be producer B.P. Schulberg's son Budd Schulberg, an ex-communist, who would be one of his chief accusers in the Hollywood show trials of the late 1940s.
Biberman was arraigned before HUAC in 1947, where he was one of 19 unfriendly witnesses who refused to answer the Committee's inquiry into their political affiliations. The 19 eventually became the Hollywood Ten, as others of the 19 dropped away, including such luminaries as Bertolt Brecht, who left the U.S. for East Germany. Under the advice of lawyers with Communist Party affiliations, the Ten decided to adopt a common front and defy the committee by refusing to or deny the allegations that they were communists. In 1950, Biberman was fined and sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of Congress. Biberman's wife, the Oscar-winner Gale Sondergaard, was similarly accused and refused to testify. She also was blacklisted.
In 1954, Biberman directed the independently produced, left-wing motion picture Salt of the Earth (1954), a fictionalized account of a miners; strike in Grant County, New Mexico. Working with other blacklisted movie professionals, including screenwriters Michael Wilson (who wrote the picture) and Paul Jarrico (who produced it), the film starred such progressive actors as Will Geer. It was made against tremendous odds, including opposition from Hollywood and the government. A chronicle of the terrible working conditions faced by miners in New Mexico, the film had the official backing of the local miner's union and employed real workers and their families. However, other unions, involved in a Cold War fight in the 1950s against communist-dominated domestic unions and Communist Party-affiliated union organizers (a fight that began in Hollywood immediately after World War II, when returning veterans fought back against trade guilds that had become infiltrated by organized crime during their war service), refused to show the film because Biberman was still blacklisted. It was screened only once, in New York, before being blackballed from exhibition in the U.S. for 11 years.
Biberman released the film in Europe where it won awards in France and Czechoslovakia. In 1965, the film was finally released in the U.S. market. "Salt of the Earth" has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Biberman and Sondergaard had two children. They remained married until his death from bone cancer on June 30, 1971. Blacklisted for a quarter-of-a-century, Sondergaard finally found work in Hollywood after her husband's death.- Ludwig Donath was born on 6 March 1900 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Vienna, Austria]. He was an actor, known for Torn Curtain (1966), Gilda (1946) and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1943). He was married to Jean Montrose and Maria Josefa Camsky. He died on 29 September 1967 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Stella Adler was born on February 10, 1901, in New York, the youngest daughter of the Yiddish theater actors, Jacob P. Adler and Sarah Adler, who founded an acting dynasty. In addition to her parents, Stella's family included her siblings Charles Adler, Jay Adler, Julia and Luther Adler, all of whom appeared on Broadway. Stella made her debut at the age of four in the family-owned theater in the play "Broken Hearts". At the age of 18, she made her London debut as "Naomi" in "Elisa Ben Avia", in which she appeared for a year before returning to New York. Stella then spent the next 10 years treading the boards in vaudeville and Yiddish language theaters throughout North and South America and Europe. In all, she appeared in 100 plays.
Adler was widely acclaimed in the Yiddish theater, but she wanted to break out of that theatrical ghetto and play a wider variety of roles on the legitimate stage and in Hollywood. What was constant in Adler's 83-year-long career was her intense dedication to broadening the level of artistry in the theater.
She made her Broadway debut as a replacement in Carl Kapek's "The World We Live In". (Her official debut as a member of the original company was in "The Straw Hat" on Oct 14, 1926). After its run played out, she joined the acting school run by Richard Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya, the American Laboratory. Both Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya were former members of the famous Moscow Art Theatre.
While married to Horace Eleaschreff, Adler met Harold Clurman, who would become her second husband and one of the co-founders of The Group Theatre, in 1924 (They would marry 19 years later). In this period, she met another future Group Theatre co-founder, Lee Strasberg, at the Actor's Laboratory when she participated in classes there in 1928. Along with Cheryl Crawford, Clurman and Strasberg founded the Group Theatre in 1931. It became arguably the most influential theater group in 20th century America, at least in terms of its influence on acting by introducing the teaching of Konstantin Stanislavski's System to the American stage. Its aim was the championing of realism and it is credited with bringing naturalism into the American theater. Clurman and Strasberg invited Adler to become a founding member of the Group Theatre. The Utopian political ideals that were central to the idea of the Group Theatre did not appeal to Adler, nor did the cooperative focus of the company, but she did join after being promised leading roles and because she supported Clurman's vision of the theater as an art form. It was with the Group Theatre that Stella played some of her more acclaimed roles, including "Sarah Glassman" in "Success Story", "Bessie Berger" in "Awake and Sing" and "Clara" in "Paradise Lost".
In 1934, she took a leave of absence from the Group Theatre and traveled to Russia to study for five weeks in Moscow Art Theatre, and in private sessions with the great man himself, Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." Adler was among few American actors, such as Michael Chekhov and Richard Boleslawski to study privately with Stanislavsky. In August 1934, she returned from Russia, and made a presentation of what she learned from Stanislavski, then she began teaching acting classes to members of The Group Theatre troupe, including the actors Elia Kazan, Sanford Meisner and Robert Lewis. Meisner and Lewis would go on to be the most influential acting teachers in America after Adler herself and Strasberg. Kazan, who would go on to become the greatest theatrical director in 20th century American theater, also had a huge impact on American acting by championing what became known in the vernacular as "The Method", which was closely related to Adler's teaching. Kazan's exposure to Konstantin Stanislavski's System via Adler was highly influential in his work.
Stella Adler, being the most experienced of the Group Theatre actors, had not accepted Lee Strasberg's idiosyncratic version of Stanislavski's System, which Strasberg interpreted as "method" and shifted its goals to memory exercises. "The (memory) emphasis was the sick one" in Strasberg's "method", said Stella Adler, as it made acting under Strasberg increasingly painful for her. Feeling uncomfortable with the Group Theatre members, many of whom were also Communist Party members, Adler left the company in 1937 to conquer Hollywood. According to her later student and friend, Marlon Brando, she had a bad nose job to camouflage her looks, so hell-bent was she on conquering the movies as she had the stage. She was not to succeed.Adler spent six years as an associate producer at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, at which she acted in movies under the name "Stella Ardler."
She did not achieve the quality of roles or the acclaim that she had in the theater, and she eventually returned to the stage in the early 1940s, acting and directing on Broadway and in London. Adler also began to teach at German émigré Erwin Piscator's acting workshop at the New School for Social Research, where she mentored the young Marlon Brando. She married Clurman in 1943. At its core, the theatrical experience is rooted in the willing suspension of disbelief, with an audience willingly ignoring the fact that it is watching a synthetic entertainment in a highly unrealistic venue. Such is the power of good theater to draw the audience into the world created upon the stage that this suspension of disbelief not only occurs, but that it, as an art form, provides an immediacy that other more "realistic" forms such as movies or television cannot provide. Adler believed that "the theater exists 99% in the imagination" and it was this belief that was the foundation of her philosophy and instruction.
Drawing on Stanislavski's System, Adler made it the bedrock of her technique that an actor's primary concern was with the emotional origins of the script. An actor (and acting student) must search between the lines of the script for the playwright's important, but unspoken, messages. To tap into this vein and bring forth the real meaning in a character, an actor needed both imagination and the ability to open oneself up emotionally. Essentially, Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience. Konstantin Stanislavski taught her that "the source of acting is imagination and the key to its problems is truth, truth in the circumstances of the play."
It was a fortuitous occasion when Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School and came into Stella Adler's orbit. The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture as it was through Brando that "The Method" was introduced into the American theater and movies. It would dominate American acting for more than half-a-century and is still the dominant paradigm now, over sixty years since Adler tutored Brando.
"The Method" as taught by Adler and other Group Theater alumni was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. The extraordinarily sensitive and intelligent Brando was the ideal student due to the prodigious talent he could yoke to the harness of technique that was "The Method". Adler took pride of place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from a fairly ignorant Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.
Aside from acting, Adler directed two plays on Broadway, "Manhattan Nocturne" during the 1943-44 season, and "Sunday Breakfast" in 1952. Her last appearance as an actress on the Broadway stage was in the revival of "He Who Gets Slapped" in 1946.
Stella Adler left the faculty of the New School in 1949 to establish her own acting school, the Stella Adler Theatre Studio (which would be renamed the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting before taking its final name, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting). She developed a curriculum from her wide knowledge and experience, combining her understanding of Konstantin Stanislavski's System with the techniques and traditions of the Yiddish theater, The Group Theatre, Broadway and Hollywood. In addition to acting technique, the school offered workshops in play analysis, character, and scene preparation; the students gleaned on-stage experience by performing scenes and plays before invited audiences. Among the alumni of her school were Marlon Brando (chairman of the board of the school until his death), Warren Beatty (who has taken over the position), Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.
Adler taught script analysis at Yale for a year and half. Courses for advanced students and professionals were added to the curriculum of her own school, including rehearsal technique and script analysis. Due to her reputation and connections, the school was able to attract distinguished lecturers, including Sir John Gielgud and Arthur Laurents.
Stella Adler was a major inspiration to her students. Her mantra was, "You act with your soul. That's why you all want to be actors - because your souls are not used up by life". Adler is still, more than a decade after her death, viewed as one of the foremost influences on contemporary acting.
Adler divorced Clurman in 1960, after 17 years of marriage. Subsequently, she married Mitchell Wilson, whom she remained married to until his death in 1973. She did not remarry.
Stella Adler died on December 21, 1992 in Los Angeles, California. She was 91 years old.- Roman Bohnen, known as "Bud" to his family and friends was not only an excellent film actor but also a stage actor of note. As a member of the prestigious Group Theatre from 1934-40, he appeared in such classic productions as "Waiting for Lefty", "Golden Boy", "Awake and Sing" and "The Gentle People". He left for Hollywood in the late '30s to pursue a film career mainly as an effort to earn money for his family and ailing wife, Hilda.
In film, he is perhaps best known for his performances as Candy in Of Mice and Men (1939) with Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr., as Francois Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), and as Pat Derry in William Wyler's classic The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). The latter role although a small one is beautifully played. It is a rare opportunity to see a full life artfully created in a few short scenes. Take a look in particular at the scene where "Bud" reads the citations awarded to his son, Fred Derry (ably played by Dana Andrews). It is rich with the feeling and pride of a father, helpless to provide for his son (with beautiful support by the great Gladys George as Hortense).
Roman was also an integral member of "The Actor's Laboratory Theatre" in Hollywood. He was stricken with a heart attack while performing on stage for the Lab Theatre and died shortly after at age 47. A rare talent, an underrated actor who left us too soon. - Writer
- Actor
- Producer
Playwright and author of sophisticated screenplays, a graduate of Bard College and Columbia University Law School. Howard Koch started out as a practicing lawyer in Hartsdale, New Jersey, but soon found himself dissatisfied with his career choice and began to write plays on the side. His first two efforts flopped on Broadway (respectively in 1929 and 1933). Nonetheless, Koch continued, undaunted, and had his first critical success with "The Lonely Man", produced at the Blackstone Theater in Chicago in 1937. On the strength of this work he was engaged by John Houseman to write dramatic material for Orson Welles' "Mercury Theater on the Air" radio program (his starting salary was $75 for roughly sixty pages of script). Koch re-wrote H.G. Wells sci-fi story "War of the Worlds" as "Invasion from Mars" for the famous Halloween broadcast that "panicked America". It had such an effect on the public that the "New York Times" ran the headline "Many Flee Homes to Escape 'Gas Raid From Mars'".
The following year Koch moved to Hollywood and was signed to a screenwriting contract by Warner Brothers (1939-1945). He achieved lasting fame through his felicitous collaboration with brothers Philip Epstein and Julius J. Epstein in adapting Murray Burnett's adaptation of the obscure play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" to the now classic Casablanca (1942). The Epsteins concentrated on the dialogue while Koch worked out the dramatic continuity. The three subsequently shared the 1943 Academy Award for Best Screenplay (Koch sold his Oscar at auction in 1994 for $184,000 in order to fund a granddaughter's school tuition). Before and after "Casablanca", Koch worked on a variety of other subjects, turning out polished screenplays for Errol Flynn's hugely entertaining swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940), an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's steamy melodrama The Letter (1940), the patriotic flag-waver Sergeant York (1941) and the George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945). His own personal favorite was his script for Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), a tender story of unrequited love set in Vienna.
Koch's reputation was sadly tarnished as a result of his work on Mission to Moscow (1943), the account of Joseph E. Davies, a former US ambassador to Russia. Although he was not particularly happy with this assignment, Koch was coerced into it by studio boss Jack L. Warner, who, in turn, was under pressure from the U.S. government to produce a picture that showcased the efforts of the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany. However, in 1947, at the height of the Red-baiting hysteria stirred up by senator Joseph McCarthy, Warner testified as a "friendly" witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), charged with "rooting out" Communist influence in the motion picture industry. Warner named Koch and other "liberals" as being Communist sympathizers, using the pro-Russian content of "Mission to Moscow" as "proof". This resulted in Koch becoming one of the so-called "Hollywood Nineteen" and finding himself being blacklisted by the industry in 1951. Unable to earn a living, he had little choice but to leave the country. Like other writers and directors in the same position, he moved to England where he continued to write screenplays under a pseudonym ("Peter Howard"). Returning to the US five years later, he bought a property near Woodstock, NY, and resumed writing plays for regional productions (as well as occasional film scripts).
In his memoirs, "As Time Goes By", Koch recalled how, early in the casting process, the stars of "Casablanca" were slated to be Dennis Morgan (!), Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan (in the Paul Henreid role of Victor Laszlo). Our appreciation of the classic film would have been rather different . . .- Actor
- Soundtrack
Will Geer was born William Aughe Ghere in Frankfort, Indiana, to Katherine (Aughe), a teacher, and Roy Aaron Ghere, a postal worker. Will admired his grandfather, a man who said hello to trees by their Latin names and who had used what he brought back to Indiana from the California gold rush to build Frankfort's first opera house. Will pursued a college major in botany, from Chicago through a Master's degree at Columbia, but ultimately gave in to his need to perform. Starting with touring company tent shows and river boats, his six-decade career included Broadway, movies, television; many Shakespeare roles; one-man performances as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. His best known role was his last, Zebulon Walton, grandpa in the long-running television series The Waltons (1972). Less well-known was his life-long role as a political agitator and radical ("Someone who goes to the roots, which is the Latin derivation of radical") and folklorist/folksinger - he toured U.S. government work camps in the 1930s, singing with Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1951, he formed the "Theatricum Botanicum," a repertory theater in Topanga Canyon, California, where he not only coached actors but also encouraged outdoor philosophical discussion and, of course, folksinging. At his deathbed, his family sang "This Land Is Your Land" and recited Robert Frost poems. His ashes lie in a corner of the Shakespearean garden on the grounds of his Theatricum Botanicum.- 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.
- Veteran character actress Anne Revere became another in the long line of talented artists whose careers would crash under the weight of the "Red Scare" hysteria that tore through Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Manhattan and a direct descendant of Revolutionary War figure Paul Revere, Anne graduated from Wellesley College, then trained for the stage at the American Laboratory Theatre.
She made her Broadway bow in 1931 with "The Great Barrington" and her film debut in a version of another Broadway play, Double Door (1934). Returning to Broadway after receiving no other film offers, she would not make another movie until 1940...then she stayed. She went on to epitomize the warm, wise and invariably stoic mother to a number of great "golden age" stars, her understated power and intensity capturing the hearts of critics and war-torn audiences alike. Her plain, freckled, careworn looks appeared equally at home on the frontier or in a tenement setting. Anne was nominated three times for an Oscar for her strong, matriarchal figures -- as Jennifer Jones' mother in The Song of Bernadette (1943), Elizabeth Taylor's in National Velvet (1944) and Gregory Peck's in Gentleman's Agreement (1947), winning the Oscar on her second try for National Velvet (1944).
A versatile talent, she extended her range to include a number of brittle, neurotic and even crazy ladies. This all ended abruptly in 1951 when her name appeared as one of 300 on the infamous "Hollywood blacklist". She had just completed a major role as Montgomery Clift's Salvation Army mom in A Place in the Sun (1951). She stood on her Fifth Amendment rights before the Communist-obsessed House Un-American Activities Committee and, as a result, her part in that film was reduced to a glorified cameo. She did not appear in another film for nearly 20 years (a starring role in a new TV series was also taken from her).
In the interim, she and husband Samuel Rosen, a stage actor, writer and director, ran an acting school in Los Angeles before relocating to New York, where she managed to find employment in stock productions and under the Broadway lights. She received the Tony Award during the 1960-1961 season for her fine portrayal of a spinster sister in Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic," a part that went to British actress Wendy Hiller when it transferred to film. TV jobs began coming her way again in the mid-1960s, and by 1970 she was working sporadically on such daytime soaps as Search for Tomorrow (1951) and Ryan's Hope (1975). She appeared briefly in Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970) starring Liza Minnelli, and then earned a showier part in Birch Interval (1976).
Anne passed away after contracting pneumonia at age 87 and was survived by a sister. She had no children. Although a victim of "Cold War" paranoia, she always persevered, showing the same kind of grit and courage that embodied her gallery of characters on film. - Carroll Graham was born on 30 July 1903 in Newton, Iowa, USA. Carroll was a writer, known for Sweetheart of the Navy (1937), Bordertown (1935) and Girl Loves Boy (1937). Carroll was married to Pearl MacGregor. Carroll died on 4 November 1976 in Santa Clara, 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.
- Actor
- Soundtrack
John Brown was born on 4 April 1904 in Hull, Yorkshire, England, UK. He was an actor, known for Strangers on a Train (1951), Robot Monster (1953) and Hans Christian Andersen (1952). He died on 16 May 1957 in West Hollywood, 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
- 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.- Actor
- Soundtrack
John was a commercial artist when he substituted for a sick friend in an amateur production which was seen by the actress Sybil Thorndike who recognized his potential. After repertory work at Watford and Crewe he was invited to join London's Old Vic in 1936 by Tyrone Guthrie and appeared in 'Love's Labours Lost' and 'Twelfth Night'. In 1937 He was in the production of 'Hamlet' that was performed at Elsinore with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. He made his film debut in 1937 in The Conquest of the Air (1931) and in a early BBC television production of 'The Harmfulness of Tobacco'. At the outbreak of war he was attached to the British Embassy in Stockholm where he was in coding and decoding. In 1941 he was in California and about to return to England when he was offered a role in The Shanghai Gesture (1941) which was the prelude to a long film career that included Mrs. Miniver (1942), Jane Eyre (1943), Madame Bovary (1949), Gigi (1958), and Gambit (1966). In 1946 he made his Broadway debut in 'He Who Gets Slapped' which was followed by 'Montsarrat' (1948) and 'The Waltz of the Toreadors' (1957) among others. He was also prolific in television work appearing in episodes such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) ("First Class Honeymoon", 1962), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964) ("The Birds and the Bees Affair", 1966), and Bewitched (1964) (as Leonardo da Vinci in "Samantha's da Vinci Dilemma", 1967).- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Karl Paryla was born on 12 August 1905 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]. He was an actor and director, known for Mich dürstet (1956), Der Komödiant von Wien (1954) and Gasparone (1955). He was married to Hortense Raky and Eva Steinmetz. He died on 14 July 1996 in Vienna, Austria.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Veteran Polish-born character actor Ned Glass grew up in New York. After working in vaudeville he started acting in small parts on Broadway from the early 1930s. He gained further experience in the capacity of theatrical production supervisor before entering motion pictures in 1937 as an MGM contract player. Until the mid-1950s he was seen primarily in tiny supporting roles as clerks, reporters, bank tellers and small-time managers. His career was briefly put on hold after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, but, with help from friends like John Houseman and Moe Howard (of The Three Stooges fame) he managed to get enough film work to make ends meet.
By 1953, Ned began to find a new lease of life in television where his roles were more varied and substantial. This afforded him the opportunity to fully develop his screen persona: that of the balding, weedy, perpetually nervy conman or weaselly stooge, often delivering barbed repartee or wisecracks in a heavy Brooklyn accent. Ned was at his best in comedy, put to good use in several episodes of Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners (1955), and adapting well to anything else with a New York theme, from Kojak (1973) to Barney Miller (1975). He had many other good guest-starring roles on television, including several shifty characters in The Untouchables (1959), and as Freddie the Forger in Get Smart (1965) ('Do I Hear a Vaults?',1970). He was twice nominated for Emmy Awards, first for an episode of Julia (1968) (as Sol Cooper); the second time for Bridget Loves Bernie (1972) (Uncle Moe Plotnick).
From the time he played Doc in West Side Story (1961), Ned also began to land some meatier roles on the big screen, including the character of Popcorn in Experiment in Terror (1962), and as Doc Schindler, in one of the funniest 60's comedies, The Fortune Cookie (1966), directed by Billy Wilder. His best portrayal was that of the wily Leonard Gideon, sharpest of the villainous trio (the others being James Coburn and George Kennedy) on the trail of a quarter of a million dollar loot in gold, in the Hitchcockian thriller Charade (1963).
Ned continued playing crusty reprobates in films and on television, his last being a small-time thief in an episode of Cagney & Lacey (1981). He died two years later in Encino, California, at the age of 78.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Born in New York City, Rose Hobart responded to the lure of the theater at a young age, went on stage at 15, then drifted to Hollywood and embarked on a movie career. Hobart film-debuted in the 1930 Fox version of "Liliom" and went on to appear in over 40 additional films, both in the A and B category. But by the late 1940s, her political views and pro-union stance caused her to be blacklisted. After a period of inactivity, she returned to acting in the 1960s on TV's Peyton Place (1964). For many years she resided at the Motion Picture and Television Country House, not far from Hollywood, where she enjoyed editing the House Newsletter.- Writer
- Actor
Jim Thompson was born on 27 September 1906 in Anadarko, Oklahoma, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Paths of Glory (1957), The Killing (1956) and The Getaway (1972). He died on 7 April 1977 in Hollywood, California, USA.- Actress
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Vaudevillain, Broadway player and, for one decade from 1929, screen actress often in comedic roles. She also appeared in character parts in a handful of 60s films. She is memorable as the original - and the most believable - Alice Kramden, wife of Ralph Kramden (immortalized by Jackie Gleason), in TV's "The Honeymooners." Kelton's performances took place (ca. 1950-52) when "Honeymooners" had yet to become an independent series but was merely a sporadically scheduled, 10- or 15-minute playlet during Gleason's weekly TV variety show. Although they may yet exist on kinescope only narrowly available, Kelton's wonderful performances as Alice are otherwise essentially lost. She was forced to leave the role after being blacklisted. Audrey Meadows then won the role of Alice Kramden.- 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.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Lee played Danny (opposite of Hilda Simms, who played Anna) in Anna Lucasta on Broadway in 1944. Anna Lucasta was the first non-black written play performed by an all black cast on Broadway. He became an actor after careers as a jockey, boxer and musician. Lee was a civil rights activist, following in the footsteps of Paul Robeson.- Lloyd Gough was born on 21 September 1907 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for Sunset Boulevard (1950), All My Sons (1948) and The Green Hornet (1966). He was married to Karen Morley and Mildred Munson. He died on 23 July 1984 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Actor
- Director
- Cinematographer
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.- Wendell K. Phillips was born on 27 November 1907 in Blandinsville, Illinois, USA. He was an actor, known for Close-Up (1948), Pulitzer Prize Playhouse (1950) and The Defenders (1961). He was married to Jean Shelton and Odielein Pearce. He died on 6 October 1991 in Berkeley, California, USA.
- Director
- Actor
- Producer
Paul Henreid was born Paul Georg Julius Freiherr von Hernreid Ritter von Wasel-Waldingau in Trieste, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the son of Marie Luise Heilig (Lendecke) and Baron Karl Alphons Hernreid. His father was an aristocratic banker, who was born to a Jewish family whose surname was changed from Hirsch to Hernreid.
Paul grew up in Vienna and studied at the prestigious Maria Theresa Academy (graduating in 1927) and the Institute of Graphic Arts. For four years, he worked as translator and book designer for a publishing outfit run by Otto Preminger, while training to be an actor at night. Preminger was also a protégé (and managing director) of Max Reinhardt. After attending one of Henreid's acting school performances, Preminger introduced him to the famous stage director and this led to a contract. In 1933, Paul made his debut at the Reinhardt Theatre in "Faust". He subsequently had several leading roles on the stage and appeared in a couple of Austrian films. Paul, like his character Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942), was avidly anti-fascist. He accordingly left continental Europe and went to London in 1935, first appearing on stage as Prince Albert in "Victoria the Great" two years later.
Henreid made his English-speaking motion picture debut in the popular drama Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), as the sympathetic German master Max Staefel, who proves to be Chipping's truest friend and ally. After that, however, he became incongruously typecast as Nazi henchmen in Mad Men of Europe (1940) and Night Train to Munich (1940). That year, he moved to the United States (becoming a citizen the following year) and quickly established himself on Broadway with "Flight to the West", as a Ribbentrop-type Nazi consul. His powerful performance led to radio work in the serial "Joyce Jordan-Girl Interne" and a film contract with RKO in 1941.
This marked a turning point in Paul Henreid's career. He finally escaped the stereotypical Teutonic image and began to play heroic or romantic leads, his first being Joan of Paris (1942), opposite Michèle Morgan, as French RAF pilot Paul Lavallier. Significantly, his next film, Now, Voyager (1942), defined his new screen persona: debonnaire, cultured and genteel, lighting two cigarettes simultaneously, then passing one to Bette Davis. According to Henreid, this legendary (and later often lampooned) scene was almost cut from the film because the director, Irving Rapper, had concerns about it. Next came "Casablanca", where Henreid played the idealistic, sensitive patriot Victor Laszlo; the poorly received Bronte sisters biopic Devotion (1946), as an Irish priest; and a stalwart performance as a Polish count and Ida Lupino's love interest, In Our Time (1944).
After several dull romantic leads, Henreid reinvented himself yet again. He played a memorably athletic and lively Dutch pirate, the 'Barracuda', in RKO's colourful swashbuckler The Spanish Main (1945). Another of his best later performances was as a sadistic South African commandant in the underrated film noir Rope of Sand (1949), which re-united him with his former "Casablanca" co-stars Peter Lorre and Claude Rains. After the Arabian Technicolor adventure, Thief of Damascus (1952), Henreid's star began to fade. His last noteworthy appearance during the fifties was as an itinerant magician in the oriental extravaganza Siren of Bagdad (1953) . The most memorable of several in-jokes, had Henreid lighting two hookahs (water pipes) for one of his harem girls, spoofing his famous scene from "Now, Voyager".
Outspoken in his opposition to McCarthyism and adhering to his rights under the First Amendment, he was subsequently blacklisted as a "communist sympathizer" by the House Committee on Un- American Activities. In spite of the damage this did to his career, he re-emerged as a director of second features and television episodes for Screen Gems, Desilu and other companies. In 1957, Alfred Hitchcock (in defiance of the blacklist) hired him to direct several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955). Towards the end of his career, Paul Henreid directed his former "Now, Voyager" co-star Bette Davis in the camp melodrama Dead Ringer (1963) and toured with Agnes Moorehead on stage in a short-lived revival of "Don Juan in Hell"(1972- 73). Henreid died of pneumonia in a Santa Monica hospital in April 1992, after having suffered a stroke. He has the distinction of having not just one but two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for his films, and one for his television work.- Actor
- Additional Crew
Lionel Stander, the movie character actor with the great gravelly voice, was born on January 11th, 1908 in The Bronx borough of New York City. Stander's acting career was derailed when he was blacklisted during the 1950s after being exposed as a Communist Party member during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In his own HUAC testimony in May 1953, Stander denounced HUAC's use of informers, particularly those with mental problems.
Stander specialized in playing lovable hoodlums and henchmen and assorted acerbic, hard-boiled types. His physique was burly and brutish, and his head featured a square-jaw beneath a coarse-featured pan that was lightened by his charm. But it was his gruff, foghorn voice that made his fortune.
Stander attended the University of North Carolina, but after making his stage debut at the age of 19, he decided to give up college for acting. Along with a successful stage career, his unusual voice made him ideal for radio. His movie screen debut was in the comedy short Salt Water Daffy (1933) with Jack Haley and Shemp Howard. He went on to star in a number of two-reel comedy shorts produced at Vitaphone's Brooklyn studio before moving to Hollywood in 1935, where he appeared as a character actor in many A-list features such as Nothing Sacred (1937).
John Howard Lawson, the screenwriter who was one of the Hollywood Ten and who served as the Communist Party's cultural commissar in Hollywood, held up Stander as the model of a committed communist actor who enhanced the class struggle through his performances. In the movie No Time to Marry (1938), which had been written by Party member Paul Jarrico, Stander had whistled a few bars of the "Internationale" while waiting for an elevator.
Stander thought that the scene would be cut from the movie, but it remained in the picture because "they were so apolitical in Hollywood at the time that nobody recognized the tune".
Stander had a long history of supporting left-wing causes. He was an active member of the Popular Front from 1936-39, a broad grouping of left-wing organizations dedicated to fighting reactionaries at home and fascism abroad. Stander wrote of the time, "We fought on every front because we realized that the forces of reaction and Faciscm fight democracy on every front. We, too, have been forced, therefore, to organize in order to combat them on every front: politically through such organizations as the Motion Picture Democratic Committee; economically through our guilds and unions; socially, and culturally through such organizations as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League."
The Front disintegrated when the U.S.S.R. signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, which engendered World War II by giving the Nazis the get-go to invade Poland (with the Soviet Union invading from the East). The Communist Party-USA dropped out of the Front and from anti-Nazi activities, and during the early days of the War, before Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941, it tried to hamper US support for the UK under the aegis of supporting "peace," including calling strikes in defense plants. Many communists, such as Elia Kazan, dropped out of the Party after this development, but many others stayed. These were the Stalinists that the American non-communist left grew to despise, and eventually joined with the right to destroy, though much of their antipathy after 1947-48 was generated by a desire to save themselves from the tightening noose of reaction.
Melvyn Douglas, a prominent liberal whose wife Helen Gahagan Douglas would later be a U.S. Representative from California (and would lose her bid for the Senate to a young Congressman named Richard Nixon, who red-baited her as "The Pink Lady"), had resisted Stander's attempts to recruit him to the Party. "One night, Lionel Stander kept me up until dawn trying to sell me the Russian brand of Marxism and to recruit me for the Communist Party. I resisted. I had always been condemnatory of totalitarianism and I made continual, critical references to the U.S.S.R. in my speeches. Members of the Anti-Nazi League would urge me to delete these references and several conflicts ensued."
Douglas, his wife, and other liberals were not adverse to cooperating with Party members and fellow travelers under the aegis of the MPDC, working to oppose fascism and organize relief for the Spanish Republic. They believed that they could minimize Communist Party influence, and were heartened by the fact that the Communists had joined the liberal, patriotic, anti-fascist bandwagon. Their tolerance of Communists lasted until the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939. That, and the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and the USSR shattered the Popular Front.
Stander had been subpoenaed by the very first House Un-American Activities Committee inquisition in Hollywood, in 1940, when it was headed by Texas Congressman Martin Dies. The Dies Committee had succeeded in abolishing the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration as a left-wing menace in 1939 (the FTP had put on a revival of Lawson's play about the exploitation of miners, "Prcessional," that year in New York). The attack on the FTP had been opposed by many liberals in Hollywood. Stung by the criticisms of Hollywood, the Dies Committee decided to turn its attention on Hollywood itself.
Sending investigators to Hollywood, Dies' HUAC compiled a long-list of subversives, including Melvyn Douglas. John L. Leech, a police agent who had infiltrated the Communist Party before being expelled in 1937, presented a list of real and suspected communists to a Los Angeles County grand jury, which also subpoenaed Stander. The testimony was leaked, and the newspapers reported that Stander, along with such prominent Hollywood liberals as James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Frederic March and Francot Tone, had been identified as communists.
Committee chairman Dies offered all of the people named as communists the opportunity to clear themselves if they would cooperate with him in executive session. Only one of the named people did not appear, and Stander was the only one to appear who was not cleared. Subsequently, he was fired by his studio, Republic Pictures.
Stander was then subpoenaed to testify before the California Assembly's Committee on Un-American Activities, along with John Howard Lawson, the union leader John Sorrell and others. During the strike led by Sorrell's militant Conference of Student Unions against the studios in 1945, Stander was the head of a group of progressives in the Screen Actors Guild who supported the CSU and lobbied the guild to honor its picket lines. They were outvoted by the more conservative faction headed by Robert Montgomery, George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. The SAG membership voted 3,029 to 88 to cross the CSU picket-line.
Stander continued to work after being fired by Republic. He appeared in Hangmen Also Die! (1943), a film about the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated by anti-fascists. After the bitter CSU strike, which was smeared as being communist-inspired by the studios, HUAC once again turned its gaze towards Hollywood, starting two cycles of inquisitions in 1947 and 1951. The screenwriter Martin Berkeley, who set a record by naming 155 names before the the second round of Committee hearings, testified that Stander had introduced him to the militant labor union leader Harry Bridges, long suspected of being a communist, whom Stander called "comrade".
After being blacklisted, Stander worked as a broker on Wall Street and appeared on the stage as a journeyman actor. He returned to the movies in Tony Richardson's The Loved One (1965), and he began his career anew as a character actor, appearing in many films, including Roman Polanski's Cul-de-sac (1966) and Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977). Other movies he appeared in included Promise Her Anything (1966), The Black Bird (1975), The Cassandra Crossing (1976), 1941 (1979), Cookie (1989) and The Last Good Time (1994), his final theatrical film.
Stander is best remembered for playing Max on TV's Hart to Hart (1979) (1979-84) with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, a role he reprised in a series of "Hart to Hart" TV movies. Stander also appeared on Wagner's earlier TV series It Takes a Thief (1968) and on the HBO series Dream On (1990).
Lionel Stander died of lung cancer on November 30, 1994 in Los Angeles, California. He was 86 years old.- American character actor of vast stage experience who appeared infrequently but memorably in films. A native of Albany, Indiana, he attended Princeton University, where he was an honors student and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1929, he joined the University Players in Massachusetts, joining and eventually sharing a New York City apartment with a trio of struggling performers: Henry Fonda, Joshua Logan, and James Stewart. While Fonda and Stewart found their greatest success in Hollywood, Logan and McCormick gravitated to and were most closely tied the New York stage. McCormick also became one of the busiest actors in radio drama. He made occasional movies, such as when the Broadway cast of Maxwell Anderson's "Winterset" reunited for the film version. He won fame as Luther Billis in Logan's production of "South Pacific" (the role was played by Ray Walston in the film) and as "Sergeant King" in No Time for Sergeants (1958) a part he repeated in the movie version. Cancer claimed him in 1962 at the age of 54.
- Actor
- Composer
Win Stracke was born on 20 February 1908 in Lorraine, Kansas, USA. He was an actor and composer, known for NBC Children's Theatre (1963), Hawkins Falls: A Television Novel (1950) and Kentucky Pioneers (1969). He died on 29 June 1991.- Actor
- Writer
- Soundtrack
Jack Gilford was born in Brooklyn, New York, as Yankel Gellman. He began his career in the Amateur Nights of the 1930s moving on to nightclubs as an innovative comedian doing satire and pantomime. He was a regular at the Greenwich Village nightspot, Cafe Society and hosted shows featuring Zero Mostel, Billie Holiday and jazz greats like Hazel Scott. It is said that he invented the expression, "The butler did it!", as part of one of his movie satire routines. He also did a facial pantomime of "Pea Soup Coming to a Boil". During the 1950s, he was a victim of the The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) blacklisting which stalled his TV career until the early 1960s. But after that, he became a regular popular comic character actor on dozens of TV series and movies. He was most recognized for being the rubber-faced guy on the "Cracker Jacks" commercials for a dozen years, from 1960-1972.
He was nominated for Tony awards on Broadway for best supporting actor in the musical, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", and "Cabaret". The song "Meeskite" was written for him by John Kander & Fred Ebb.
He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the film, Save the Tiger (1973), starring opposite Jack Lemmon, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance.- 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.- 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. - Additional Crew
Paula Strasberg was born on 8 March 1909 in New York City, New York, USA. She is known for ABC Stage 67 (1966) and The Arlene Francis Show (1957). She was married to Lee Strasberg and Harry Stein. She died on 29 April 1966 in New York City, New York, USA.- Director
- Actor
A stage actor and director, Michael Gordon broke into films in 1940 as a dialogue director, then became a film editor. He directed his first feature in 1942. He started out with low-budget crime thrillers, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s turned out several well-crafted dramas, notably Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), which garnered José Ferrer an Academy Award. His career was interrupted, however, by the anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s, led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Because of Gordon's early affiliation with several leftist organizations, he was accused of Communist leanings by the Red-baiting politicians of the era, and found himself blacklisted and unable to obtain work. He made one film in Australia, then returned to the U.S. Gordon started getting jobs again in the late 1950s, and this time, instead of turning out the tight, gritty little dramas he was known for, did a complete 180 and worked on glossy, big-budget mainstream comedies. He was, however, responsible for what is arguably Doris Day's best vehicle, the stylish Pillow Talk (1959).- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
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.- Actress
- Additional Crew
Shaindel Kalish's parents were Abraham Kalish, a Jewish producer in the Yiddish Theater, and Esther Naidith. Her father was also a successful comedian, who performed under the name Al Kelly. She attended Marshall High School in Chicago and began her acting career with the Jewish People's Institute, a community center in Chicago founded by her father.
In the 1930s, she appeared in films under the stage name Ann Preston. She married director Charles K. Freeman. She later married Yisrol Paul Mann Libman, an actor/director, and went by the name Jennie Shaludel Libman during this marriage. After leaving Hollywood, she appeared, using the stage name Ann Shepherd, in stage productions, including appearing on Broadway in such plays as Sophie (1944), Truckline Café (1946), and All My Sons (1947).- Robert Earl Jones was born on 3 February 1910 in Senatobia, Mississippi, USA. He was an actor, known for The Sting (1973), Sleepaway Camp (1983) and Witness (1985). He was married to Ruth Connolly, Jumelle P. Jones and Ruth Williams. He died on 7 September 2006 in Englewood, New Jersey, USA.
- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
- Director
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.- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Daniel James was born on 14 January 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. He was a writer and assistant director, known for The Great Dictator (1940), Gorgo (1961) and The Giant Behemoth (1959). He was married to Idyl Lilith Stanward and Rosalie Dorothy Guignon. He died on 18 May 1988 in Monterey, California, USA.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Jules Dassin was an Academy Award-nominated director, screenwriter and actor best known for his films Rififi (1955), Never on Sunday (1960), and Topkapi (1964).
He was born Julius Samuel Dassin on 18 December 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He was one of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Samuel Dassin and Berthe Vogel. Young Dassin grew up in Harlem, and he attended Morris High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1929. After taking acting classes in Europe, he returned to New York. In 1934, he became and actor with the ARTEF Players (Arbeter Teater Farband), and was a member of the troupe until 1939. Dassin played character roles in Yiddish, mainly in the plays by Sholom Aleichem. But upon discovering "that an actor I was not," he switched to directing and writing. At that time, he joined the Communist Party of the United States, but left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a pact with Adolf Hitler.
Dassin came to Hollywood in 1940, and was an apprentice to directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. In 1941, he made his directorial debut at MGM with adaptation of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Dassin's best directorial works for Hollywood include such criminal dramas as Brute Force (1947) starring Burt Lancaster; The Naked City (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York; and Night and the City (1950) starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes. While he was assigned by producer Darryl F. Zanuck to make the film, Dassin was accused of affiliation with the Communist Party in his past. Zanuck advised Dassin to "shoot the expensive scenes first, to hook the studio" so the film was finished and released in 1951. Dassin was reported to HUAC in a 1951 testimony by directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle. That was enough to sink his career in Hollywood. Dassin was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1952 and eventually became blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He left the United States for France in 1953 and struggled during his first years in Paris. He was not fluent in French, and his connections were limited. However, Dassin's low-budget film, Rififi (1955), famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialog, won him the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. There, he met the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. Later, Dassin co-starred opposite Mercouri in his film Never on Sunday (1960), which won the Best Film Award at Cannes in 1960. At that time, the anti-Communist witch hunt in America was fading, and Dassin was accepted again. He received two Academy Award-nominations for directing and screen-writing for Topkapi (1964), starring Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, and Peter Ustinov. Dassin also served as member of jury at the Cannes and several other international film festivals.
Jules Dassin was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, violinist Beatrice Launer. His son, Joe Dassin, was a popular French singer in the 1960s and '70s, with such hits as "Bip Bip," "L'Eté Indien" and "Aux Champs-Èlysées." In 1966, Jules Dassin married Mercouri, an ardent anti-fascist who lost her Greek citizenship for opposing the junta, and the couple was living in Manhattan, remaining very active in their efforts to restore democracy in Greece during the dictatorship of the Colonels. After 1974, the couple returned to Greece, Mercouri became a member of the Greek Parliament, and Culture Minister of Greece. While living in Athens, Dassin was active in the effort to bring the 2500-year-old Elgin marbles of the Parthenon back to Athens from their current location at the British Museum in London. In this and other humanitarian causes, Dassin followed the last will of his late wife.
Jules Dassin died of complications caused by a flu, on April 1, 2008, at age 96, at Hygeia Hospital in Athens, Greece. He is survived by two daughters and grandchildren.- 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.- Writer
- Actor
- Additional Crew
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.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Dorothy Comingore earned a place in motion picture history for her role as the second Mrs. Kane (the Marion Davies to Orson Welles's William Randolph Hearst) in Citizen Kane (1941). It was an extraordinary performance, justifiably praised by critics and public alike. She was apparently slated to be on the short list for an Academy Award. However, there was to be no stardom in films for this talented actress.
Dorothy was discovered by Charles Chaplin while performing with the Carmel Little Theater in Monterey County. He was enchanted by her and his praise won her a Hollywood contract. That contract was unaccountably dropped after just three months without even a screen test. At Warner Brothers, she was utilized purely for publicity stills and as a clothes model. She would have none of it. Having already acquired a reputation as a firebrand, she walked out on the studio, having been relegated to what amounted to nothing more than a crowd scene. She was determined to be appreciated for her acting ability, not to be wasted as an extra. Columbia signed her on. However, between 1938 and 1940, most of her roles (in which she was often billed as 'Linda Winters') still turned out to be uncredited bits and walk-ons. There were also westerns and 'Three Stooges' comedy shorts, but certainly nothing of substance. Her turning point came courtesy of an introduction to Orson Welles at a party. Welles came to think of her as ideal casting for the part of brash, feather-brained would-be diva Susan Alexander Kane. A successful screen test followed and then came the role that brought Dorothy Comingore at once fame and ruin.
Soon after its release, the wrath of Citizen Hearst descended upon everyone associated with the picture. In particular, he never forgave Dorothy for playing a part so obviously (and effectively) modeled on his mistress. Dorothy Comingore was already well known for her leftist sympathies, and her father had been a high profile unionist. The newspaper magnate had ample ammunition to orchestrate a nationwide smear campaign, using prominent columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell to branding her a 'subversive', a member of the Communist Party. Though devoid of substantiating evidence, the spurious allegation stuck. Dorothy had associations and friends in Hollywood (not to mention her husband, the screenwriter Richard Collins, who had been an active party member of the Hollywood chapter in the 1930s), who had communist affiliations or were party members. She had also made enemies by following in her father's footsteps, canvassing for and supporting civil rights causes and union solidarity. Refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) made her an 'unfriendly witness'. Not only was she blacklisted in Hollywood, but her phone was tapped, her mail opened and her home ransacked. Collins, by now Dorothy's ex, did not have the same moral fortitude. To escape blacklisting, he recanted his previous testimony and fully cooperated with HUAC's inquisitors.
Dorothy's career effectively ended in 1951, her acting swansong in films being a small part in an indifferent drama of teenage angst, The Big Night (1951). Her personal life, meanwhile, continued to spiral out of control. She became an alcoholic. In October 1952, she was arrested by vice squad officers on a solicitation charge, another likely frame-up as payback for her "red" affiliations. Having lost custody of her children, she agreed to have the charges against her dropped in exchange for being committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. There she spent two years (not 'a little time', as she had promised in court) 'undergoing treatment'. Not much is known of her final years, except, that she spent most of it in seclusion, married to a postman in Connecticut in a home with two dogs and ten cats. She died in December 1971 of pulmonary disease, likely the result of long-term alcohol abuse, at the age of 58.- 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.
- Anne Froelich was born on 8 December 1913 in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, USA. She was a writer, known for Harriet Craig (1950), Easy Come, Easy Go (1947) and Shining Victory (1941). She was married to Philip Taylor. She died on 26 January 2010 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Composer
- Music Department
- Actor
Larry Adler was born on 10 February 1914 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He was a composer and actor, known for Genevieve (1953), The Hellions (1961) and The House in the Woods (1957). He was married to Sally Irene Cline and Eileen Walser. He died on 6 August 2001 in Lambeth, London, England, UK.- 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.
- 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).- 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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Hugo Butler, the screenwriter, was born on May 4, 1914 in Calgary, Alberta, the son of a silent movie actor and screenwriter. Butler worked as a journalist and playwright before moving to Hollywood in 1937, where he established himself as a screenwriter. In 1940, he married actress and screenwriter Jean Rouverol. The next year, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Edison, the Man (1940) along with future Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boss Dore Schary. (Schary, a well-known liberal, was one of the few top movie industry executives who objected to the imposition of the blacklist at the 1947 Waldorf Conference, which he attended as R.K.O.'s executive vice president in charge of production). His career was temporarily interrupted by military service in World War II, then permanently disrupted when he was blacklisted as a subversive after the war.
Butler and his wife moved to Mexico with Hollywood 10 member (and fellow blacklistee) Dalton Trumbo, with whom Butler pseudonymously collaborated on the screenplay for He Ran All the Way (1951), a film noir that was John Garfield' s last film. (Garfield died of a heart attack soon after being grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
In Mexico, Butler wrote for the directors Luis Buñuel and Carlos Velo. Butler and his wife did not return to the United States on a permanent basis until the 1960s.
Hugo Butler suffered from arteriosclerotic brain disease. He died from a heart attack on January 7, 1968 in Hollywood, California at the age of 53. The last film for which he was credited, Robert Aldrich's potboiler The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) was released later that year.
In 1997, the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America voted to posthumously give him official credit for scripts he had written.- Writer
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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.- Animation Department
- Director
- Producer
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.- Actor
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
During the Second World War, Second Lieutenant Robert Meltzer served with Company A, 2nd Ranger Battalion. An ardent anti-Nazi, an earlier attempt to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fight in the Spanish Civil war had been foiled by his family.
Recently assigned as 1st platoon leader of Abel Company, Meltzer was killed by enemy machine gun fire on 21 August, 1944, in or near Le Folgoët, France, as he was leading his men through an opening in a hedgerow in an attempt to take charge of some German soldiers who had supposedly surrendered. His remains were later interned at the Brittany American Cemetery in St James, France (Plot I Row 5 Grave 12).
Robert Meltzer was the second youngest of six children born to Russian Jewish immigrants, Joseph and Ida Alderman Meltzer of Oakland, California. Joseph Meltzer worked as a superintendent at a local insurance company office and would go on to be a Bay area business leader and active in political and social circles until his death in 1930. The Leonard J. Meltzer Boys & Girls Club in Oakland is named after his oldest son, a former county deputy district attorney who died in 1947.
On 9 December, 1924, the Oakland Tribune ran a photograph of Robert Meltzer rehearsing with Piedmont Boy's Pioneer troupe for their annual play "Who Knows".
In 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression, Meltzer caused a controversy among many state and school leaders when, as editor of the Pelican, the University of California at Berkeley student humor magazine, he published five pages of "Communist Art".
Before the war, Meltzer had worked as an uncredited writer on The Great Dictator (1940) and had written for director/writer Orson Welles.
The Writers Guild of America (West), states that "the Robert Meltzer Award honors one act of bravery by remembering another, recognizing an artist's singular act of courage in defense of freedom of expression and the rights of writers everywhere".- 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.
- Producer
- Writer
Richard Collins was born on 20 July 1914 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for Bonanza (1959), Matlock (1986) and Remington Steele (1982). He was married to Julie Danson and Dorothy Comingore. He died on 14 February 2013 in Ventura, California, USA.- Writer
- Additional Crew
- Producer
Carl Foreman was born on 23 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), High Noon (1952) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He was married to Estelle Barr and Evelyn Smith. He died on 26 June 1984 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actor
- Director
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Jeff Corey was a film and television character actor, as well as one of the top acting teachers in America.
Corey was born Arthur Zwerling on August 10, 1914 in New York City, New York, to Mary (Peskin), a Russian Jewish immigrant, and Nathan Zwerling, an Austrian Jewish immigrant. He was an indifferent student, but after taking a drama class in high school, young Corey became hooked. His talent earned him a scholarship to the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts, the top acting school in New York City at the time. Corey then became a professional actor, a career choice which saved him from a life selling sewing machines, he later said.
His first gig after acting school was with a Shakespearean repertory company, after which he became a member of a traveling troupe that entertained children. After Leslie Howard closed his Broadway production of Hamlet in December 1936, he took the play on the road with Corey cast as Rosencrantz in 1937. In 1939, Corey appeared as part of the Federal Theater Project's (FTP) Living Newspaper dramatic showcase in the Life and Death of an American, co-starring with Arthur Kennedy, and featuring the music of Alex North. He made his film debut in a bit part in the Federal Theater's sole movie production, ...One Third of a Nation... (1939). Starring Sylvia Sidney, Leif Erickson and future Oscar-winning director Sidney Lumet, the movie, which was released by Paramount, was a progressive exegesis on the hazards of tenement slum conditions. Congress terminated FTP funding on June 30, 1939, mainly due to objections to the leftist political tones of many FTP productions (see Tim Robbins' movie Cradle Will Rock (1999) about the pressures faced by the FTP in 1939).
In 1940, Corey, who had married his wife Hope in 1938, moved to Hollywood, where he appeared in studio productions through 1943, including The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), My Friend Flicka (1943) and Joan of Arc (1948). He also had a hand in establishing the Actors Lab, where he appeared in a wide variety of plays, including "Abe Lincoln in Illinois", "Miss Julie" and "Prometheus". He also produced "Juno and the Paycock" for the Lab. He joined the United States Navy Photographic Service in 1943 and was assigned to the aircraft carrier Yorktown as a motion picture combat photographer. He earned three citations while serving during the war, including one for shooting footage on the Yorktown during a kamikaze attack on the ship. The citation, which was awarded in October 1945, read: "His sequence of a Kamikaze attempt on the Carrier Yorktown, done in the face of grave danger, is one of the great picture sequences of the war in the Pacific, and reflects the highest credit upon Corey and the U.S. Navy Photographic Service."
After the war, Corey returned to Hollywood and resumed his acting career, specializing in character parts and playing heavies in films such as The Killers (1946) and Brute Force (1947), both of which starred another returning war vet, Burt Lancaster. His appearance as the psychiatrist in Home of the Brave (1949), one of his best screen performances, promised a long and productive career in Hollywood, but the first phase of his cinema career was cut short in 1951 when he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) after being named as a former Communist Party member by actor Marc Lawrence.
HUAC had scheduled hearings in Los Angeles as part of its crusade to ferret out Communist influence in Hollywood. Appearing before HUAC in Los Angeles in September 1951, the 37-year-old Corey refused to testify, instead invoking his 5th Amendment rights. The movie industry ruled that anyone invoking their constitutional right not to testify would be blacklisted, and Corey was, missing out on an entire decade of work in films and television during the 1950s. Ironically, Lawrence, whom Corey despised for the rest of his life, pointing out that he had remained stateside on a health deferment while Corey risked his life during the war, was virtually absent from American films and television during the same decade, having to make his living in Italy along with American expatriates who had been blacklisted.
In the book on Hollywood blacklistees "Tender Comrades", Corey explained that he had been a member of the Communist Party, and that while he no longer was in 1951, he could not in good conscience turn informer. "Most of us were retired reds," Corey said. "We had left it, at least I had, years before. The only issue was, did you want to just give them their token names so you could continue your career, or not? I had no impulse to defend a political point of view that no longer interested me particularly. They just wanted two new names so they could hand out more subpoenas."
After being blacklisted, Corey used his G.I. Bill benefits to study speech therapy at UCLA while supporting his family as a common laborer. At the request of a fellow student, Corey organized a class in speech that he taught in the garage of his home in Hollywood Hills home. He expanded his curriculum to acting, accepting $10 a month in "tuition" per month from each student that allowed them to attend weekly classes. Eventually, he expanded the garage to create a small theater where his students performed scenes. Corey's reputation as a teacher grew, and by the mid-1950s, he had become the premier acting coach in Hollywood. Although studios refused to hire the blacklisted Corey as an actor, they did send contract players to study with him.
Corey's class, which became known as the Professional Actors Workshop, attracted directors, screenwriters and established actors seeking insight into the craft. Corey's Workshop has been described by the National Observer as "A major influence in the motion picture industry." Corey was a Stanislavskian teaching the popular Method technique of sense-memory popularized by such other acting gurus as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, which sought to tap into the actor's own emotions and psyche. Corey's own teaching technique was eclectic: He focused on one-on-one work with an individual actor, seeking through improvisational exercises to get the actor to tap into his/her subconscious and to use their imagination to come up with a theme that would elucidate their character.
His students included Robert Blake, pop singer Pat Boone, Richard Chamberlain, singer/actress Cher, director-producer Roger Corman, James Dean, Kirk Douglas, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Michael Forest, Sally Kellerman, Irvin Kershner, Shirley Knight, Penny Marshall, Rita Moreno, Jack Nicholson, Leonard Nimoy, Anthony Perkins, Rob Reiner, singer/actress/director Barbra Streisand, future Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Towne and Robin Williams. Of Corey the teacher, three-time Oscar-winner Jack Nicholson said after he had become a major movie star, "Acting is life study, and Corey's classes got me into looking at life as an artist."
Corey also tutored experienced actors who had trouble with a role, or who just needed insight into playing a character. One of the already-established actors Corey tutored was three-time Oscar nominee Kirk Douglas, who came to Corey for help in playing the title role in Spartacus (1960). It was Douglas who, along with Otto Preminger, ended the blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplays for Spartacus (1960) and Exodus (1960), respectively. Two years after the Trumbo-penned films debuted on the big screen, Corey again was working in films and television. In 1962, he was cast in the film The Yellow Canary (1963) when one of his acting students, pop singer Pat Boone, pressured 20th-Century Fox into hiring him. Now off the blacklist, Corey became a busy character actor in movies and on television. Corey made his reputation as an actor's actor whom other actors loved to work with. Always good with actors, Corey also directed some episodes of television series.
In addition to his acting work, Corey continued teaching. He was Professor of Theater Arts at California State University in Northridge, and was artist in residence at Ball State, in Indiana, the University of Illinois in Bloomington, Chapman College's World Campus Afloat, the University of Texas in Austin, and at the Graduate School of Creative Writing at New York University. He also conducted acting seminars at Emory University in Atlanta, and for the Canadian Film Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia.
On August 16, 2002, six days after his 88th birthday, Corey died in a Santa Monica, California hospital, of complication from a fall. He was survived by his wife of 64 years, Hope, three daughters, and grandchildren.- Louise Lewis was born on 18 October 1914 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA. She was an actress, known for I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Ben Casey (1961) and Blood of Dracula (1957). She was married to Jerry D. Lewis, Jerome Bernard Rosenthal and Robert H. Harris. She died on 11 September 1996 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Abram S. Ginnes was born on 24 December 1914 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Gaily, Gaily (1969), Treasury Men in Action (1950) and Route 66 (1960). He was married to Dionne Didier, Patricia Beatty Quisenberry and Judith Siegel. He died on 20 May 2006 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- 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.- Actor
- Soundtrack
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.- 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. - Writer
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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.- Arnaud d'Usseau was born on 18 April 1916 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He was a writer, known for Horror Express (1972), Just Off Broadway (1942) and Who Is Hope Schuyler? (1942). He was married to Marie-Christine. He died on 29 January 1990 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.
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Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Phil Brown was the son of a doctor whose work took the family all around the country. After majoring in dramatics at Stanford University, Brown played some of his earliest stage roles as part of New York's Group Theatre. When it folded, he and other Group Theatre vets headed to Hollywood, where Brown worked in motion pictures and helped found the fabled Actors' Laboratory. His association with the Lab came back to haunt him later in the decade, when its members fell under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Brown was eventually compelled to relocate with his family to England, UK. Overseas he was able to resume acting on stage, TV and films; he also directed for the stage and TV. He returned to the U.S. in the 1990s and made the rounds of autograph shows.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
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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.- Writer
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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.- A ubiquitous presence during television's golden age, New York native Frank Maxwell stood out as a solid purveyor of quiet authority. Upon graduating from the University of Michigan, a prospective legal career had been on the cards. But those plans came to naught in the wake of a successful theatrical debut in "Macbeth" at the Ann Arbor Dramatic Festival. Wartime service as a navigator and bombardier with the 20th Air Force then put further ambitions temporarily on hold. After the war, Frank found himself blacklisted during the communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era and was forced to make ends meet by acting in summer stock and on radio. By the end of the 40's he had moved back to New York. In the course of the next few years -- now matured into a seasoned and versatile character player -- he began to make a name for himself with small roles in high-profile Broadway plays like "Death of a Salesman" and "Stalag 17". From 1951, he was also regularly featured on television, usually as gruff but benevolent army officers or police detectives. After appearing in a 1958 Los Angeles stage production of "Lonelyhearts", he was afforded the chance to reprise his role as the disabled husband of Maureen Stapleton in the 1959 film version.
Raspy-voiced, of stocky built and and with that distinctive white streak of hair, Frank became one of the most recognisable (not to mention prolific) character actors of the 60's and 70's. Aside from guesting on almost every seminal television series of the era (among them Perry Mason (1957), Peter Gunn (1958), The Twilight Zone (1959), Rawhide (1959), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) and The Fugitive (1963), he had recurring roles in The Felony Squad (1966) (as an L.A. police captain) and on the long-running daytime soap General Hospital (1963) (as administrator Dan Rooney). He was also a member of Roger Corman's stock company of players, prominently cast as the kindly Dr. Marinus Willet in the enjoyably campy The Haunted Palace (1963) and as a preacher in The Wild Angels (1966). For the better part, he remained typecast as tough, no-nonsense authority figures (as exemplified by his Detective Lieutenant McAllen in Mr. Majestyk (1974)).
Behind the scenes, Frank Maxwell was a tireless campaigner and negotiator on behalf of Actor's Equity (as Vice President) and as National President of AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) from 1984 to 1989. His daughter, Chris Ann Maxwell, is Vice President of Legal Affairs at 20th Century Fox. - Director
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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
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Oliver Crawford was born on 12 August 1917 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Star Trek (1966), Terry and the Pirates (1952) and The Outer Limits (1963). He was married to Bertha (Bert) Ethel Pikus. He died on 24 September 2008 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Actress
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Stardom somehow eluded this vastly gifted actress. Had it not perhaps been for her low-level profile compounded by her McCarthy-era blacklisting in the early 1950s, there is no telling what higher tier Marsha Hunt might have attained. Perhaps her work was not flashy enough, or too subdued, or perhaps her intelligence too often disguised a genuine sex appeal to stand out among the other lovelies. Two studios, Paramount in the late 1930s and MGM in the early 1940s, failed to complete her star. Nevertheless, her talent and versatility cannot be denied. This glamorous, slimly handsome leading lady offered herself to well over 50 pictures during the 1930s and 1940s alone.
Christened Marcia Virginia Hunt, the Chicago-born actress was the younger of two girls born to an attorney and voice teacher/accompanist. The family relocated to New York when she was quite young and she attended such schools as PS #9 and Horace Mann School for Girls. She developed an interest in acting at an early age (3), performing around and about in school plays and at church functions. Following her high school graduation the young beauty found work as a John Powers model and as a singer on radio, a gift obviously inherited from her mother. Marcia (she later changed the spelling of her first name to Marsha) studied drama at the Theodora Irvine Drama School (one of her fellow students was Cornel Wilde).
Encouraged to try Hollywood by various New York people in the business, the young photogenic hopeful moved there in 1934. She was only 17 but was accompanied by her older sister. It didn't take long for the studios to take an interest in her and she was signed up by Paramount not long after. Marsha's very first movie was in a featured role opposite Robert Cummings and Johnny Downs in the old-fashioned The Virginia Judge (1935). Displaying an innate, fresh-faced sensitivity, she moved directly into her second film, playing the title role in Gentle Julia (1936), this time with Tom Brown as her romantic interest.
Marsha continued to show promise but these well-acted roles were, more often than not, overlooked in mild "B"-level offerings. Appearing in co-starring roles in everything from westerns (Desert Gold (1936) and Thunder Trail (1937)) to folksy or flyweight comedy (Easy to Take (1936) and Murder Goes to College (1937)), she could not find decent enough scripts at Paramount. Though she was once deemed one of the studio's promising starlets, one of her last films there was another prairie flower role--[error]--with cowboys John Wayne and Johnny Mack Brown vying for her attention. At about this time (1938) she married Jerry Hopper, a Paramount film editor who turned to directing in the 1950s. This marriage lasted but a few years.
Freelancing for a time for many studios, Marsha's more noticeable war-era work in sentimental comedy and staunch war dramas came from MGM, and she finally signed with the studio in 1939. The roles offered, which included a featured part as one of the sisters in Pride and Prejudice (1940) starring Greer Garson, and again as a sister to Garson in Blossoms in the Dust (1941), which showed much more promise. Some of her better war-era roles came in the films Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), Kid Glove Killer (1942) and The Affairs of Martha (1942). During this time she also sang on extended USO tours and stayed busy on radio. Her best known film is arguably The Human Comedy (1943) but she wasn't the star. Other film roles had her in support of others, such as Margaret Sullavan in Cry 'Havoc' (1943), little Margaret O'Brien in Lost Angel (1943) and Garson again in The Valley of Decision (1945). Leading roles did not come in "A" pictures.
Her MGM contract was allowed to lapse in 1945 and a second marriage in 1946, to screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr., became a higher priority. The marriage was long and happy (exactly 40 years) and lasted until his passing in June of 1986. The few pictures she made were, again, uneventful or in support of the star, although she did have a catchy, unsympathetic role in the Susan Hayward starrer Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) as a scheming secretary. In Raw Deal (1948), starring Dennis O'Keefe, she got the "raw deal" being overshadowed as a "good girl" by the "bad girl" posturings of Claire Trevor. At this point of her career she decided to try the stage and made her Broadway debut in "Joy to the World" (1948). Other plays down the road would include "The Devil's Disciple" with Maurice Evans, "The Lady's Not for Burning" with Vincent Price and "The Little Hut" with Leon Ames. She even had a chance to return to her beloved singing as Anna in a production of "The King and I" and (much later) in productions of "State Fair" and "Meet Me in St. Louis". TV also yielded some new work opportunities, including a presentation of "Twelfth Night" in which she portrayed Viola.
The seams of her film career fell apart in the early 1950s. During the late 1930s and into the 1940s she signed a number of petitions promoting liberal ideals, and was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment. A strong supporter of freedom of speech, these associations led to her name appearing in the pamphlet "Red Channels", a McCarthy-era publication that "exposed" alleged Communists and "subversives". Although she and her husband were never called before the House Un-American Activities Commission, their names were nevertheless smeared all over Hollywood as "Reds". While she still found film work on occasion, it was rare. Although she had worked steadily from 1935 until 1949, appearing in over 50 films, she made only three films in the next eight years. Her screenwriter husband would be credited for only one film from 1948 to 1955.
Semi-retired by the early 1960s, stage and TV became Marsha's focal points. She also devoted herself to civil rights causes and such humanitarian efforts as UNICEF, The March of Dimes and The Red Cross. She became actively involved with the United Nations. On the acting front she appeared only in smaller roles in five films but in numerous TV programs and made-for-TV movies, playing everything from judges to grandmas. She became the Honorary Mayor of Sherman Oaks, California, in 1983, and published a book on fashion entitled "The Way We Wore" in 1993. Widowed in 1986, the ever-vibrant Marsha, in her 90s, continues to serve on the Advisory Board of Directors for the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center, a large non-profit that advocates for adults and children affected by homelessness and mental illness. As recently as 2006, she appeared to good advantage in the movie Chloe's Prayer (2006) and, at age 91, was seen in Empire State Building Murders (2008).- Writer
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Ivan was a British screenwriter, socialite and producer. Nominated for an Academy Award with Fred Guiol for adapting Edna Ferber's G"Giant" and honored by the American Film Institute for his screenplays for "Shane" and "Giant". Born in Havana Cuba from a significantly famous photographer and artist, Curtis Moffatt and actress and poet Iris Tree. His grandfather was Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. His family family tree is directly traceable to Alec Guiness and through marriage to Ivana Lowell to Freud. A notorious member at Dartington Hall School and the London School of Economics. During this era he joined the Communist Party. He was befriended by Dylan Thomas and Christopher Isherwood. In 1943 he joined the United States Army, a writer for the Signal Corps. This group became known as the Hollywood Irregulars. It was here that he met and collaborated with George Stevens as a writer and assistant director. He supported the filming of the liberation of Paris and the infamous discovery of the Dachau concentration camps, an event that altered George Steven's emotionally for life. After the war Moffat joined Stevens as an assistant producer at Liberty Films. He contributed to the writing of "I Remember Mama", Shane", Place in the Sun", "Bhowani Junction", "D-Day the Sixth of June", "A Place in the Sun" and "Giant" as well as "The Wayward Bus", Boy on a Dolphin", "They Came to Cordura", "Tener is the Night", :"The Great Escape","The Greatest Story Evert Told" and "The Chase". He counted George Stevens, Christopher Isherwood and Billy Wilder among st his dearest friends. He has two sons, Jonathan and Patrick Moffat, Lorna Moffat and god daughter Jill Ann Davis.- Actor
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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.- 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.- Hope Foye was born in 1921 in the USA. She is an actress, known for Des Broadways liebstes Kind (1969) and Red Hope? The Blacklisting of Hope Foye (Her Story, Her Songs) (2011).
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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.- Producer
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Lou Morheim was born on 25 March 1922 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was a producer and writer, known for The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Outer Limits (1963) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). He was married to Jill Kraft and Marilyn Morheim. He died on 8 September 2013 in Santa Monica, California, USA.- Composer
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A three-time Oscar nominee, Jerry Fielding was among the boldest and most experimental of all Hollywood film composers. His music typically utilized advanced compositional procedures, producing dense, often richly dissonant orchestral textures, sometimes flavored with jazz. Fielding's film music career was marked by enduring and rewarding collaborations with Sam Peckinpah, Michael Winner and Clint Eastwood.
Born Joshua Feldman in Pittsburgh in 1922 to immigrant Russian parents, Jerry Fielding was brought up in a music-loving but non-musical household. As a home-bound, somewhat sickly teenager, Fielding derived early inspiration from the radio productions of Orson Welles, with their groundbreaking Bernard Herrmann scores. He was also fascinated by the increasingly advanced orchestrations being done for the swing bands of the time, with their heavy reliance on aspects of classical music. The young Fielding joined the studio of Max Adkins, the noted director of theatrical music who also included Henry Mancini and Murray Gerson among his students. After picking up vital arranging skills, Fielding toured with some of the leading dance bands of the 1940s. This led to Hollywood, where his radio and television assignments included conducting and arranging for many of the most popular variety shows of the time, including those of Groucho Marx.
At this time the shadow of McCarthyism was looming over America and Fielding, a self-confessed "loud-mouthed crusader", found himself among its many victims. His hiring of black musicians for his television orchestra (unheard of in those days) brought criticism and threats. His progressive affiliations brought him to the attention of the FBI and HUAC. Despite his strong liberal beliefs, Fielding said that McCarthy's men were probably more interested in getting him to name Groucho Marx as a "fellow traveler". He took the Fifth Amendment and promptly found his Hollywood career in ruins. He eventually found employment in the safe haven of Las Vegas, where he became musical director for the stage shows of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher and others. He also began recording the first of many pop and swing LPs, such as "Fielding's Formula", "Sweet With A Beat" and "Hollywood Brass".
The approach of the 1960s saw the end of McCarthyism and Fielding's return to Hollywood. In 1962, at the suggestion of his writer friend Dalton Trumbo, Fielding was hired by Otto Preminger for the film Advise & Consent (1962), a tale of political intrigue amid the halls of Washington, DC. It was a remarkable debut score that combined light orchestral lyricism with hints of the richer, almost ethereal textures of his later work. It was also drenched in Fielding's own brand of dark irony--a trademark of the composer.
Around this time Fielding, hungry to expand his compositional technique, enrolled as a student of the venerated composer and teacher Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who, incidentally, had given similar instruction to Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams. More television work followed, including scores to Mission: Impossible (1966) and Star Trek (1966). In 1967 Fielding scored Noon Wine (1966), a contemporary western for television directed by Sam Peckinpah. It was the first in a legendary though sometimes tumultuous partnership. In 1969 came The Wild Bunch (1969). This landmark western was Peckinpah's and Fielding's breakthrough movie. The composer caught the weariness, dust, dirt and blood of a vanishing West in a rich underscore that interspersed sprightly action cues with wistful Mexican folk melodies and nostalgic, bittersweet dirges. However, as always, the nostalgia was tempered with Fielding's characteristically steely irony. It earned him his first Oscar nomination. A second came with Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) in 1971. This controversial though somewhat garbled tale of the violence lurking within a meek man saw Fielding's music take a new direction. Inspired by Igor Stravinsky's "Histoire Du Soldat", and with a large orchestra supplying dense, yearning sound clusters, this remarkable work gives voice to both the characters' inner turmoil and the desolate Cornish landscapes of the film's setting.
Fielding provided another sensitive, beautifully forlorn score for Peckinpah's proxy self-portrait, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). However, some Peckinpah collaborations were not so happy. Fielding's music for The Getaway (1972) was rejected in favor of a score by Quincy Jones. Then in 1973 Fielding backed out of working with Bob Dylan on the score for Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).
Fielding's association with Michael Winner began in 1970 with Lawman (1971), for which the composer supplied an epic score tinged with jazz--something of a first for a western! Then followed the searing, impressionistic music for Chato's Land (1972), The Mechanic (1972) and Scorpio (1973). A standout score was for Winner's gothic melodrama, The Nightcomers (1971). This gave Fielding a chance to indulge his love of 19th-century baroque music. The composer considered it among his finest works. His final score for Winner was for The Big Sleep (1978). It was an admirable consummation of the composer's various techniques.
Clint Eastwood was well served by Fielding's scores to The Enforcer (1976) and The Gauntlet (1977). The composer responded to their hard-edged urban milieu with full-on jazz compositions that featured some of the best jazz players in the business. In 1976 Fielding received his third and final Oscar nomination for Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).
Jerry Fielding was a man who fought hard to get his brand of music into films. He was not a glad-hander. He was an uncompromising artist who perhaps sacrificed many choice assignments by spurning easy, producer-friendly routes. These stances may have taken their toll on him. From the mid-'70s onwards, the composer endured a series of heart attacks. In 1980 he suffered a fatal heart seizure while in Canada scoring Funeral Home. He was 57 years old. Jerry Fielding had an innately humane approach to film scoring. He eschewed traditional "mickey-mousing" techniques (i.e., slavishly following every on-screen action). Rather, his music sought to mirror and illuminate the motivations and deepest inner lives of the characters. This it did with great compassion, beauty and sensitivity. Producer Gordon T. Dawson touchingly described Fielding's music as being " . . . like a man in a green suit walking in a forest."
And so it is.- Actress
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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.- Madeline Lee was born on 30 May 1923 in Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for Cocoon: The Return (1988), The Savages (2007) and Big City Blues (1997). She was married to Jack Gilford. She died on 14 April 2008 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.
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The character actor Herschel Bernardi was born into a theatrical family on October 30, 1923, in New York, New York. The Yiddish-language theater in the United States was centered in New York City's Lower East Side, on Second Avenue, and the Bernardi family were stage people who plied their craft in Yiddish, as did the Adler Family (Jacob and his children Luther and Stella), Paul Muni and the young Sidney Lumet. The young Herschel was a trouper and appeared on the stage as a child and as a teenager. As a teen, he appeared in the movies Green Fields (1937) and Yankel the Blacksmith (1939), which were shot in Yiddish and directed by future Hollywood B-movie director Edgar Ulmer.
The adult Bernardi, who briefly used the name "Harold" professionally in place of the more ethnic-sounding "Herschel," appeared in bit parts in Hollywood B pictures. In the early 1950s, his movie and television career suffered when he was blacklisted for alleged communist sympathies. After being cleared, Bernardi began to work steadily on TV, in the movies and on the stage.
In 1958, he made his first impact on popular American culture as Lieutenant Jacoby, the hapless policeman who was a friend of Craig Stevens's eponymous private detective Peter Gunn (1958) in Blake Edwards' influential TV series. "Peter Gunn" was heavily indebted to film noir, German expression, and California cool jazz, and the contrast of the harassed Jacoby with the coolly patrician Gunn was part of the dynamic that drove the series. For his role as Lt. Jacoby, Herschel Bernardi received his sole Emmy nomination, in 1959.
Possessed of a resonant voice, Bernardi did a lot of voice over work on television, providing the "Ho ho ho!" of the Jolly Green Giant and the voice of Charley the Tuna in TV commercials. Most famously, he used his singing voice to take over for Zero Mostel as Tevye the milkman in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971), which was a smash hit when it debuted in 1964. In addition to two stints on Broadway, in both the original show and the revival, Bernardi played Tevye in several road show tours. He was nominated for a Tony in the Broadway revival. He received his first Tony nomination in 1969 for playing the lead in the musical "Zorba."
Off the Broadway stage, Herschel Bernadi was a supporting character owing to his average face. Yet in 1970, Bernardi finally played a leading man in a filmed entertainment when he was cast as Arnie Nuovo, an ethnic blue-collar worker who is promoted off of the loading dock into management by an eccentric business owner. As the eponymous Arnie (1970), Bernardi was twice nominated for a Golden Globe. The series was canceled after two seasons.
Bernardi continued to find steady work as a character actor, mostly on TV. In 1976, he appeared in support of Woody Allen in Martin Ritt's The Front (1976), a movie about the Hollywood blacklist that also featured another of the Big Three Tevyes, Zero Mostel. (Both Bernardi and Mostel were beaten out for the role in the Fiddler on the Roof (1971) movie by Topol, who received an Oscar nomination in the role and took over Bernardi's place as Tevye in traveling road shows of "Fiddler on the Roof" after Bernardi's death.) Mostel, like Ritt, had been blacklisted in the 1950s.
Herschel Bernardi died on May 9, 1986, at the age of 62, still a working actor whose services had been in demand from childhood.- Actress
Betsy Blair was born in Cliffside, New Jersey, a child model before finding work as a chorus dancer at the early age of 15. She received her first mini-break on Broadway in "Panama Hattie" in 1940 delivering a single line, but by the next year she had copped the ingénue lead in William Saroyan's "The Beautiful People." At around the same time, she met dancer extraordinaire Gene Kelly and married him in 1940. Despite her background in dance, Betsy was admittedly not in the same league as a Vera-Ellen, Cyd Charisse, or Ann Miller, so she was never afforded the opportunity to glide with Gene in films. Moreover, she never even appeared in a musical film.
She made her large screen debut in 1947 and, for the next couple of years, appeared in a number of above-average dramas such as The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947), A Double Life (1947) starring Ronald Colman, The Snake Pit (1948), wherein she played a demented inmate alongside Olivia de Havilland, and a shining role in Another Part of the Forest (1948). After such promise, things came to a halt. Betsy had been involved in SAG politics as early as 1946 proposing the formation of the first Anti-Discrimination committee. Within a year the House Un-American Activities Committe began to investigate Betsy and others in the motion picture industry and what they considered left-wing extremist viewpoints. Her name appeared in the "Red Channels" and that was that. Her career was undone. By the early 1950s, all film offers had dried up. The only reason Betsy won the female lead in the 1955 cinematic classic Marty (1955) was because her husband threatened to stop shooting at MGM if they didn't let her work despite the blacklist. It would be the role of a lifetime for Betsy. As the touching plain-Jane girlfriend of Ernest Borgnine's title butcher, Betsy won the Cannes Film and British Film acting awards, not to mention an Oscar nomination. It did not help her overcome the blacklist, however.
By 1957, she was divorced from Kelly and had moved to Europe to avoid the Hollywood shun. Shortly thereafter, she lived with French actor Roger Pigaut. In 1963, she married producer/director Karel Reisz. They would remain together for almost 40 years until his death in London of a blood disorder in 2002. Betsy later published her memoirs and discussed quite candidly her life on Broadway, life with Gene Kelly, and life amid the blacklisting. She continued to live in England before passing away from cancer on 13th March, 2009. She was 85 years old.- Animation Department
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Faith Hubley (née Faith Chestman) was born in 1924 in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan. She left home without completing high school to go to Hollywood to pursue a career in filmmaking. She began as a messenger at Columbia Studios, but eventually worked as a sound-effects and music editor. During her time in California, she met John Hubley, an animator with Disney Studios, whom she married in 1955. A pro-union political activist, John was blacklisted from Disney. Thus began Faith's and John's filmmaking partnership. Many of their films featured the voices of their four young children.
They won their first Oscar for their film, Moonbird (1959) in 1959. Their second Oscar was for The Hole (1962) in 1962. The Hubleys were also lovers of jazz, and several of their films feature the voice and music of Dizzy Gillespie. They also contributed many animated segments to the legendary and beloved children's shows Sesame Street (1969) and The Electric Company (1971). Sadly, John died during heart surgery in 1977. Faith, however, continued to make a new animated film each year until her death from cancer in December 2001.