MCCARTHYISM, DESCRIBED BY ONE HISTORIAN AS “A PHENOMENON that, for at least a decade, disfigured the American political landscape,” has now become a generic term, applicable to any attempt to silence the liberal voice singing in a key that is not the choice of the choirmaster. But in the 1950s, McCarthyism was sect-specific: communism. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) seemed like a spawn of HUAC, which was still holding hearings in 1952, when McCarthy took on the State Department and then, to his detriment, the United States Army. PSI and HUAC had separate agendas that dovetailed: HUAC investigated communism in the movie business, PSI did the same in the government. HUAC’s targets were actors, writers, directors, and producers. PSI’s were government officials. Liberals, who were once anti-communist and appalled by McCarthy’s tactics, realized the vileness of red-baiting. A self-respecting liberal had to take an anti-anti-communist stand. One can be opposed to both communism and committees investigating party members—past or present, card-carriers or sympathizers—who, to avoid being blacklisted and perhaps incarcerated, were required to name names as a sign of their patriotism, even if doing so meant betraying others. Since Congress cannot legislate one’s politics, it should not be able to investigate them—or so the reasoning went. A true 1950s liberal would say—as Bette Davis did playing a feisty librarian in Storm Center (1956)—that while she hates communism, she will not remove a book called The Communist Dream from the shelves, expecting readers to see through its specious arguments. Anti-anti-communism may be a cumbersome term, but as a philosophy it at least allows individuals to maintain their integrity by not compromising their beliefs. Thus one can be anti-communist, anti-HUAC, and anti-McCarthy, and also pro-freedom of expression and the right to dissent.
Storm Center deals explicitly with the ogre of McCarthyism, but in a way that reduces political conformity to the absurd by dramatizing the disastrous effect that a book, an accusation, and child’s disenchantment have on a community. The film was written and directed by Daniel Taradash, who won an Oscar for his adaptation of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1953). Storm Center was to have starred Mary Pickford as the small town librarian, Alicia Hull. It would have marked Pickford’s return to the screen after a twenty-three-year absence. Everything seemed to be set. She had even been fitted for the costumes. Then, suddenly she withdrew for reasons that even Taradash could not fathom, except perhaps that the thought of making a movie after being away for so long caused her to have second thoughts about a comeback—particularly in a film that, in 1956, would have been politically incorrect. Taradash contacted Bette Davis, who stepped in without hesitation. Davis had now become a character actress; that same year she played a Bronx homemaker in The Catered Affair (1956). The glamour had gone, but not the art. Heavier than she was in her prime (her suits did not conceal the weight gain), she was still in her element as the fiery Yankee who risks ostracism for her convictions.
Believing that the city council members have invited her to lunch to discuss her children’s wing, Alicia discovers that owing to complaints they have received, their purpose is to ask her to remove The Communist Dream. At first she declines, but then agrees if the council will authorize the children’s wing. A libertarian with a loathing for any ideology that suppresses free thought, she subsequently puts the book back on the shelf. An unscrupulous politician (Brian Keith) compiles a dossier on Alicia, who unwittingly supported liberal organizations that were communist fronts. The press turned a beloved librarian into a communist tool, demoting her from icon to pariah.
The smear campaign polarizes the Slater family. Alicia had been especially close to Freddie Slater, choosing books for him that he eagerly read, much to his father’s displeasure. Mr. Slater is not only anti-communist, but also anti-intellectual; he resents his son spending time on books when the two of them could be playing catch. Mrs. Slater’s status as an accomplished pianist also irritates her husband, who equates the ability to play classical music with an assertion of superiority. Alicia’s firing and the ensuing witch-hunt have a disastrous effect on Freddie. Convinced by his father that Alicia has tried to poison his mind with her books, Freddie burns down the library. The conflagration is a literal book burning, with flames engulfing the works of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Voltaire, and Dickens. Even the Bible is not spared; in fact, the whole library goes up in flames. It is a sickening finale to a film that may seem overwrought—but not if one recalls the book burnings throughout Germany in 1933, when works not only by Jews (for example, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig) were hurled into bonfires, but also many written by non-Jews such as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser. All were deemed incompatible with the goals of National Socialism.
The film’s coda tries to sweeten the bitter pill, but not enough to make anyone optimistic about the rebuilding of the library and the replacement of the books—not to mention the children’s wing, another casualty. Those who think the phoenix will rise from the ashes might feel confident about Alicia being reinstated, although for the present she will be head librarian of a pile of debris. Freddie’s fate is undetermined. Clearly neither he nor his parents will ever be the same. To Taradash, that did not matter. The Slaters were an example of McCarthyism gone wild, disappearing from the plot after the devastating finale. Davis gets the fade out line, which she delivers with prophetic vengeance: “And if anybody ever again tries to remove a book, he’ll have to do it over my dead body.” Famous last words, except that there are still communities in which books are banned, biblical inerrancy is taught, play productions are cancelled, and controversial teachers discharged. Senator McCarthy’s ectoplasm has not yet dissipated.
Despite a script that verges on hysteria, Storm Center is less dated than Three Brave Men (1957), even though the latter was occasioned by the true story of Abraham Chasanow, who was dismissed from the Navy Department as a security risk, despite his exemplary record. The film is another semi-documentary, for which Twentieth Century-Fox was famous, with intermittent omniscient narration and a prologue stating, “[T]he story you are about to see is based on a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles by Anthony Lewis.” That much is true. Lewis’s account in the Washington Daily News of Chasanow’s travails, which won Lewis a 1955 Pulitzer, was instrumental in clearing Chasanow and forcing the navy to improve its screening methods. The prologue is careful to note that while Three Brave Men is “basically true,” characters and names are invented. Thus, the film is not really about Chasanow, but about a fictitious character, Bernie Goldsmith (Ernest Borgnine), who underwent a similar ordeal.
While Storm Center might strike post 9/11 audiences as a cross between horror and science fiction, Three Brave Men seems like a tempest in a thimble. Once the War on Terror replaced the Cold War, “security” took on a different meaning, particularly at airports and public events. Bernie’s “crimes” seem inconsequential compared to those of jihadists and suicide bombers. But this was the age of the great communist conspiracy, as the prologue reminds us. Bernie Goldsmith, like Alicia Hull, made the mistake of subscribing to magazines that were communist fronts. When Bernie discovered their nature, he let his subscriptions lapse, but never notified the publishers of his reason. Another mistake was participating in politically dubious discussion groups, which he stopped attending when the topics became pro-Soviet. Again, he never resigned in writing. Then there were Bernie’s critics, who accused him of radicalism because, as secretary of a housing cooperative, he insisted that no one should be excluded because of religion, race, or creed—which, as one of his detractors testified, was a well-known communist mantra. With the help of a crusading lawyer (Ray Milland) and the backing of some of the townspeople, Bernie is cleared by an appeals board, which rules that his actions were “clearly consistent with the interests of national security.” But that was not good enough for the secretary of the navy (Dean Jagger), who still harbored doubts but agreed to reopen the case, resulting in Bernie’s exoneration and an apology from the secretary. The film’s title is a misnomer; it should have been “Two Brave Men,” referring to Bernie and his lawyer. The third is allegedly the navy secretary, who only changes from inflexible to contrite. Had it not been for his lawyer and supporters, Bernie Goldsmith would have been another victim of a seriously flawed security program.
The liberal home front had a low demographic in the early 1950s, when the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was investigating organizations such as the Joint anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), the Spanish Refugee Appeal, the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, and the American Committee to Save Refugees, all of which were considered communist fronts—the recurring phrase applied to groups that supported the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and considered Franco’s Spain a totalitarian regime. Remaining anti-fascist after World War II had become a liability. The tag of choice was “anti-communist”—meaning anti-Soviet, anti-Red China, and anti-Soviet bloc. The attorney general had compiled a list of a vast number of organizations, many with star-spangled names implying noble ideals, such as the American League for Peace and Democracy, the American League against War and Fascism, the American Youth Congress, and American Youth for Democracy. That some of these organizations had gone out of existence—such as the League of American Writers, which included William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, and Nathanael West—did not matter. The league leaned too far to the left, and that was enough to condemn it.
By the end of the fifties, McCarthyism had entered plot limbo. When filmmakers decided to revisit the era decades later, they realized they would be making period pieces for audiences too young to remember what Lillian Hellman dubbed “scoundrel time.” a time of inquisitors—grand and otherwise—of informants, victims, penitents, and blacklisted writers who resorted to fronts and pseudonyms. By the 1970s, HUAC and PSI had receded into the misty past, which, if it were to be brought back, would have to be painstakingly recreated to ensure authenticity—a task more exacting and expensive than making a movie about contemporary life.
In 1950, Walter Bernstein, then a promising screenwriter, found himself blacklisted for, among other reasons, being a member of the Young Communist League when he was at Dartmouth and then joining the party after being discharged from the army at the end of World War II. Refusing to change professions, Bernstein had friends front for him. Even though his scripts bore their names, they still reached the big and small screens. A quarter of a century later, when the time of the toad was a memory, Bernstein decided to acquaint the baby boomers with the decade during which he was nameless. The Front (1975), directed by friend and fellow blacklistee Martin Ritt, starred Woody Allen as cashier-bookmaker Howard Prince, who agrees to front for a group of TV writers barred from working in the industry because of their communist pasts. Although the film lovingly recreates the golden age of live television, it also portrays the dilemma executives faced when they were forced to decide between remaining loyal to their actors and writers, and succumbing to pressure from HUAC and the FBI to purge their rosters of subversives. One of the subversives is Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel), the star of a children’s show, who attended communist meetings to date girls. Jim Carey gave the same reason in The Majestic (2001), although he was more explicit: “I was a horny young man.” Fired from his job and confronted with a bleak future, Hecky checks into a hotel and throws himself out the window.
The model for Hecky Brown was Philip Loeb, a highly respected actor who played opposite Gertrude Berg on Broadway in Me and Molly (1948), which was based on her popular radio show, The Goldbergs. After The Goldbergs moved to television in 1949, Loeb continued in his role as Molly’s husband, Jake, until 1951, when he was falsely accused of being a communist. When the sponsors and the network insisted Loeb be fired, Berg stood by him, but even she was powerless against the rising tide of anti-communist hysteria. On 1 September 1955, Loeb checked into the Hotel Taft, where he committed suicide with a drug overdose.
Hecky’s suicide transforms Howard from an apolitical schlemiel to a committed liberal. When it is his turn to be interrogated by HUAC, Howard balks at naming names. Informed that he could even give the name of a dead person like Hecky Brown as evidence of his good will, Howard looks at the men and says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t recognize this committee’s right to ask these kinds of questions. And you can all go fuck yourselves.” Howard is last seen on a train platform handcuffed to a McCarthy lookalike as he goes off to prison, sharing the same fate as the Hollywood Ten. The Front was humorous enough to swell the ranks of Woody Allen’s ever-growing fan base, while at the same time holding a dirt-streaked mirror up to a shameful period and accurately capturing its reflection.
Bernstein had not finished with the era that left him nameless. Sidney Lumet hired him to write the screenplay for That Kind of Woman (1959). When Bernstein learned that the FBI had recruited former Nazi war criminals and collaborators as informants to spy on communities with large émigré populations where there might be communist enclaves, he knew he had the making of screenplay. The FBI was especially interested in scientists and technicians who had found positions at aerospace corporations like Lockheed, and producers of construction materials like Martin Marietta. The FBI was not the only organization smuggling Nazis into the country. The CIA did likewise, bringing in Nazis as contract agents and “placing them on US payrolls oversees.” The reasoning was simple, if specious: “Nazis are regarded as anti-communist, so a Nazi background is not derogatory.” In 2014, the CIA’s recruitment of Nazis made front-page news: “In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.” Such was the historical background of The House on Carroll Street (1988).
Reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Saboteur, in which two ordinary people uncovered a colony of American fifth columnists, The House on Carroll Street, written by Bernstein and directed by Peter Yates, begins with a young progressive, Emily Crane (Kelly McGillis), an assistant picture editor for Life, refusing to release the files of Liberty Watch to HUAC. Bernstein may have been thinking of Helen Reid Bryan, JAFRC’s administrative secretary, who refused to surrender the “subversive” organization’s files to HUAC and was sentenced to three months in prison in 1950. Ironically, Bryan had never been a member of the Communist Party. But she was a strongly principled Quaker.
Emily does not go to jail, but she is fired, eventually finding a job reading to an elderly woman with failing eyesight (Jessica Tandy), who lives in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. Emily discovers a strange house in back of her employer’s, where she overhears people talking in German—except for the non-German speaking HUAC lawyer (Mandy Patinkin), who had been so unctuously condescending to her at the hearing. The Germans are former Nazis, given the names of dead Jews taken from tombstones.
In the Hitchcock tradition of potential lovers working in pairs (Saboteur, Notorious, North by Northwest), Emily is given a partner, Cochran (Jeff Daniels), an FBI agent assigned to keep tabs on her. At first he is doubtful of her story, but he becomes convinced after he sees Nazis arriving from Europe being welcomed like visiting royalty. Working as a team, they expose the recruitment of Jew-killers transformed into Jews, as Emily describes the loathsome practice. Since Cochran has acted on his own without the FBI’s approval (which is understandable in view of the organization’s complicity), he is transferred to Montana. And one assumes Emily will go her liberal way, circulating “Ban the Bomb” petitions and working for nuclear disarmament.
If The House on Carroll Street had limited public appeal, it is largely because the movie subverted the conventions of the Hitchcock thriller, while at the same time paying homage to them. Emily ascending the stairs of the house on Carroll Street recalls a similar ascent in Psycho, as Vera Miles explored the Bateses’ gothic house on the hill. When Mandy Patinkin comes crashing down from the dome of Grand Central Station, landing by the information booth, it was impossible not to think of Norman Lloyd falling to his death from the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur. In each case, the fall serves as a fitting death for a traitor.
The Hitchcock thriller is apolitical; The House on Caroll Street is not. Although we never learn about the wartime activities of the Nazis in Notorious, one of the FBI recruits in The House on Carroll Street was a doctor who experimented with inmates at Auschwitz to see how long it would take them to die in freezing water. The House on Carroll Street has a clearly defined political agenda that is unabashedly anti-fascist and pro-First Amendment. Set in 1951, the film reflects an age of anxiety with its concomitant neuroses, when belonging to an organization or subscribing to a journal on the attorney general’s list of suspect periodicals would make you unemployable and perhaps even a felon. But the greatest deviation from the genre is the ending. Although Emily and Cochran sleep together (once), their encounter is the equivalent of a one-night stand. They both realize they were only meant to share an adventure and expose a demonic scheme that left Cochran with his career in limbo and Emily with the stigma of “subversive.” “Oil and water,” Cochran says ruefully as he sums up their personalities. In Hitchcock, the couples are together at the fade out: Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane in Saboteur; Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious; Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Bernstein did not opt for a happy ending. He was only interested in showing how following your conscience in the 1950s could isolate you from the very people who should be defending your rights.
Guilty by Suspicion (1991), also set in 1951, was the first film to dramatize HUAC’s investigation into the movie industry. The film contained a mix of real and fictitious characters, with several of the latter based on real people. It was written and directed by Irwin Winkler, better known as a producer (Rocky, Raging Bull), who chose to make his protagonist a director, David Merrill (Robert De Niro). Merrill bore no resemblance to any director of the 1950s, so audiences would not be wondering about the identity of Darryl F. Zanuck’s favorite filmmaker, who had consorted with communists but had never been one. In 1951, there was no one at Twentieth Century-Fox who closely resembled Winkler’s David Merrill, a major director who, after shooting a film in Paris, returns to a fear-ridden Hollywood. Here, friends speak sotto voce about “what is going on” and dread a mail delivery that might include a subpoena. It was also a time of guilt by association; if there is any evidence that one had attended a few party gatherings, HUAC could demand a list of all those present, requiring the innocent attendee to supply names. In 1951, the only high-profile director called before HUAC was Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten, who served four and one-half months of a six-month sentence at Mill Point Prison Camp in West Virginia. After his release, he recanted so that he could return to his profession. While a writer could always use a pseudonym or a front, and an actor could work in the theater, a director had two choices: purge himself, to use HUAC’s phrase— as if confession had become an emetic that would restore peace to the soul and health to the body—or become an expatriate and work in Europe.
Merrill was a fictitious character; Zanuck, of course, was not. Played with corporate panache by Ben Piazza, Zanuck deplores HUAC’s slimy tactics (as did the historical Zanuck), but insists he is at the mercy of a board that wants the studio rid of Reds. Zanuck prized good screenwriting, regardless of the writer’s politics. He did not want to fire Ring Lardner Jr., one of the Hollywood Ten, who impressed him with his work on Forever Amber (1947). Lardner received screenplay co-credit for the film. Zanuck then assigned Lardner to Forbidden Street, which bore his name as sole writer when it was released in 1949. Less than a year later, Lardner was serving a one-year sentence at the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut, from which he was released after nine and one-half months.
When Winkler tries to forge parallels between his characters and their counterparts, though, the script becomes historically inaccurate, especially to moviegoers with a sense of chronology. In 1951, Merrill’s friend, Bunny Baxter (George Wendt), is doing rewrites for a Marilyn Monroe film, later revealed to be Gentleman Prefer Blondes, which did not come out until 1953. In 1951, Marilyn was playing supporting roles in such films as As Young as You Feel and Let’s Make It Legal (both 1951). While it may have seemed ingenious to have an actual director (Martin Scorsese) play communist director Joe Lesser, the similarities between Joe Lesser and the historical Joseph Losey are irritatingly tenuous. Lesser, who chooses exile in Europe to testifying, entrusts the editing of his last film to Merrill. The film is Losey’s The Boy with Green Hair (1948), which was not the director’s last Hollywood movie. He made four more: The Lawless (1950), The Prowler, M, and The Big Night (all 1951), the last being the one he was unable to edit. Knowing that he was about to be subpoenaed, Losey called the producer, Philip Waxman, “in the middle of the night” and explained how to cut the film. He then left for London.
But Winkler succeeded in capturing the desperation that prevailed in Hollywood to the point that Bunny Baxter asks Merrill’s permission to name him. Winkler clearly had in mind the scene in Arthur Miller’s drama, After the Fall (1964), between Mickey and Lou, friends and former party members, in which Mickey asks the same of Lou, who becomes morally indignant (“Because if everyone broke faith, there would be no civilization!”). But Merrill is so disillusioned that he does not care. In the final scene, Merrill faces the committee, ready to speak about himself but not about others, taking the same position that Sidney Buchman and Lillian Hellman did, the latter framing her statement as a letter with the famous declaration, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to suit this year’s fashion.” Furious at the committee’s coercive methods, Merrill shouts, “Shame on you!” as he leaves the room with his wife (the underutilized Annette Bening). Then an epilogue comes on the screen, calling the Merrills typical of HUAC’s victims, many of whom remained under the black cloud of anonymity for twenty years. Dalton Trumbo did not have to wait that long. He made front-page news in 1960 when Otto Preminger hired him to adapt Leon Uris’s Exodus. Kirk Douglas also hired Trumbo to adapt Howard Fast’s Spartacus for Bryna, the production company Douglas named after his mother. As for the Merrills, one would like to think they joined Joseph Losey and other Hollywood exiles, although Winkler deliberately left their future in doubt.