As party members took up key positions in the studio hierarchy, they began to wield power. As associate producers, story editors, and even agents, they not only saw to it that fellow communists got work but—in a sort of reverse blacklist—made sure that anti-communists didn’t. “There’s no question they looked out for their own,” observes Hollywood writer Burt Prelutsky, a former liberal who has migrated rightward. “Morrie Ryskind had . . . written some great pictures, including A Night at the Opera,” Prelutsky continues, “but he’d broken with the party and become a Republican. For a time he couldn’t get arrested in this town.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent his last years as a studio hack, well understood the political climate of that time. “The important thing is you should not argue with them,” he wrote of Hollywood leftists. “Whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.”
Well-positioned party members also worked to bar the making of anti-communist films. In a 1946 Worker article, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo noted with satisfaction that prominent anti-communist books of the thirties and forties such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon never made it to the big screen. Nor did any script touching on the Ukraine famine or the Moscow show trials. [Much like the lack of scripts today touching on Islamic terrorism? Just asking. -ed.]
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Nonetheless, by the late thirties only the willfully blind could deny that the party was a wholly owned Soviet subsidiary, working on behalf of Moscow’s policy goals. Nor, by then, could any fair-minded observer fail to grasp the nature of the Soviet regime. Reliable reporting had described Stalin’s brutal purges in Russia, and in 1939 fascism’s supposedly most stalwart foe signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Among the committed, no hint of embarrassment showed. “I don’t believe in that fine, little republic of Finland that everyone gets so weepy about,” sneered playwright Lillian Hellman as Stalin’s forces, temporarily freed from their preoccupation with Germany, crushed their northern neighbor.
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Yes, the committee was a nest of vile bullies; and, yes, some who opposed them had shown great courage. But what was getting overlooked—increasingly so as time passed—was the poisonous nature of the ideology that those on the other side were defending. Whatever the career considerations, Kazan’s loathing of communism weighed heavily in his decision to testify. “The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ that I did I did out of my own true self,” he maintained.
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The new Hollywood that emerged in the sixties was far more monolithic in its politics than the one Kazan first encountered in the forties, and from the outset the kinship between Hollywood’s New and Old Left was inescapable. Even the old Communist Party epithets—“fascist,” “reactionary,” “warmonger”—came back in vogue. That Kazan had remained a political liberal in the years after his testimony, with a string of trailblazing social dramas to his credit, didn’t matter; nor did the fact that he had regularly used blacklisted actors. He was a bad guy.
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For his part, Kazan refused to subject others to political litmus tests. Though he opposed the Vietnam War, when his friend and fellow ex-leftist John Steinbeck (who’d written the screenplay for Kazan’s Viva Zapata) staunchly supported the war, even traveling to Vietnam to write enthusiastic dispatches from the front, Kazan applauded his physical and moral courage. He continued to profess indifference toward the scorn heaped upon him and the uncritical praise accorded those who’d embraced and never publicly rejected Stalinist totalitarianism. But in private, the situation rankled.
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“If the Academy’s occasion calls for apologies,” said Arthur Schlesinger, “let Mr. Kazan’s denouncers apologize for the aid and comfort they gave to Stalinism.” The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen asked why the industry had waited so long to bestow this honor on such a legend. “The answer is clear: He was blacklisted.” “This whole outcry about betraying friends—of course, no one ever does that in Hollywood,” says Prelutsky of the brouhaha. “The fact is, if everything had been exactly the same, except the names named were those of fascists instead of communists, they’d have been erecting statues to the ‘informers’ on Hollywood and Vine.”
11/10/2005
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