Reel Publishing

Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), xxiv, 328 pp., ISBN: 1-4039-6684-2. £12.99 p/b.

C. McGivern and Fred Landesman, Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood Years (Bracknell: Sammon Publishing, 2005), 392 pp., ISBN: 0-9540031-9-5. £19.99 p/b.

In an earlier issue of Film International (2004: 3, pp.42-46), I reviewed Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner’s Radical Hollywood (2004), which examined the contributions of left-wing writers and directors to the American film industry up until 1950. I expressed the hope that these authors might write a companion book chronicling the input of Hollywood leftists after 1950, once the effects of the blacklist had begun to kick in. By the time my review appeared, Buhle and Wagner had already been on the case – and the sequel to Radical Hollywood first appeared in hardback in 2003.

This sequel, Hide in Plain Sight, is now available in paperback, and deserves to attract a wide readership. Unlike other authoritative histories of the blacklist, such as Stefan Kanfer’s A Journal of the Plague Years (1973) and Victor S. Navasky’s Naming Names (1980), which frequently foreground the victims and the tragedy of the Hollywood witch-hunts, Hide in Plain Sight focuses on the survivors of that dark period. So this is the chronicle of left-leaning writers and directors who weathered the storm, whether at the margins of the American film industry, in television, or in exile.

Buhle and Wagner launch into their Introduction with a fascinating dissection of a scene from Planet of the Apes (1968), co-scripted by long-time blacklist casualty Michael Wilson, who constructed his screenplay as an allegory of the conflict that had ripped the American film community apart during the 1940s and 1950s. From there, it’s a short step to a brief but stimulating discussion of the liberal Rod Serling, Wilson’s collaborator on the screenplay for Planet and creator of the celebrated TV series The Twilight Zone (1959-1965). The authors convincingly argue that the dividing line between leftist movie writers of the 1930s and 1940s and Serling was in large part circumstantial and generational rather than simply ideological:

‘The Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s had made its converts primarily by preaching antifascism and support for the Roosevelt administration as well as rallying the troops behind a global victory for the Allies, along with taking strong moral stands and vigorous action on such domestic issues as racism, anti-Semitism and the need for unionizing the film industry. Had he been ten years older, Serling might have moved within circles in sympathy with the patriotic wartime Communist Party or signed the kinds of petitions later considered proof of subversion. He certainly shared the blacklistees’ passions for depicting themes of race, empire and the threat of nuclear war, although no evidence has turned up that he asked blacklist survivors to write the relatively few scripts that he didn’t write himself for The Twilight Zone. He belonged to a different generation and a different crowd’ (p.xii).

The early chapters focus on key left-wing and liberal influences in American television shows from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Buhle and Wagner examine the phenomenon of the ‘front’, the means by which blacklisted writers earned a living by submitting scripts ‘under the table’. Martin Ritt’s movie The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen, featured characters based on a real-life blacklisted triumvirate – Walter Bernstein, Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff. Between 1953 and 1955, these three artists were primarily responsible for scripts for the ground-breaking series You Are There, which dramatized great episodes from history as if the television viewers were witnessing currently unfolding events:

‘Together, the three delivered 56 scripts that were actually produced. They included such challenging topics for the time as the Salem witch trials, the death of Socrates, the deafness of Beethoven, the trial of John Peter Zenger, the Scopes “Monkey Trial”, the execution of Joan of Arc and the trial of Susan B. Anthony – all of them by no accident legal or moral dramas with parallels in contemporary experiences of the writers themselves’ (p.20).

The left-wingers, not the liberals, are presented as the heroes here. The authors assert that You Are There ‘took part, with only slight effort at disguise, in the public struggle against Senator Joseph McCarthy at a moment when liberals as a group ran for cover and many former (or future) liberals embraced the idea of blacklisting, arguing only for an accurate identification of the guilty’ (p.19).

They note that You Are There was especially popular with liberals, but recall Abraham Polonsky’s quirky yet no doubt accurate observation that ‘several of the nation’s most famous liberals would have demanded the heads of those who wrote it if they had only known the truth’ (p.2).

Several key liberals who worked on You Are There built their careers during the ‘Golden Age’ of American television, and eventually became influential and celebrated film directors: Sidney Lumet, Robert Aldrich, John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn.

Ironically, Lumet, Penn and Frankenheimer were forced out of TV partly because of their own success. As television and audience tastes changed, by the late 1950s the powerful dramatic teleplays in which these men had specialized were no longer in vogue. Genre series were in the ascendancy, and no fewer than eight of the 1959 season’s top ten shows were Westerns. Yet even in that (ostensibly) most conservative and celebratory of genres, anti-Establishment heroes emerged in shows devised by the ex-Communist head of the Warner Brothers television unit, Roy Huggins. Cheyenne (1955-1963) featured a half-Indian, half-Anglo hero (Clint Walker) on the side of the underdog, while Maverick (1957-1962) starred James Garner as a cowardly card-sharp light years away from the classically heroic Westerner:

‘In contrast to the cop-like figures of most television Westerns, Cheyenne was already close to the “anti-western” that brought left-wing writers and directors back into mainstream film production a few years later. Although mostly downplaying the racial implications, the show hinted at the mood of America’s real underdogs. It was, Huggins later insisted, aimed at the young and alienated viewer…. ‘“In the traditional western story,” Huggins directed his writers, “the situation is always serious but never hopeless,” while in a Maverick plot, “the situation is always hopeless but never serious.” Late in life, he insisted that this twist was a projection of his Marxist view that the social system needed to be replaced, not merely fixed. Stuck in a flawed world, Garner played the ironic “disorganization man” … in a morally ambiguous world in which even the bad guys were not necessarily all that bad’ (p.39).

Social themes were, of course, even more evident in modern day urban, crime and legal dramas,

such as: Naked City (1958-1963), whose screenwriters included Gene Roddenberry, who later achieved global fame as the creator of Star Trek; East Side/West Side (1963-1964), starring George C. Scott and Cicely Tyson, a short-lived but powerful drama series about social workers in New York, doomed to an early demise partly because it was downbeat but largely because many Southern (and a good few other) network affiliates baulked at a show featuring a black actress as the co-lead; and The Defenders (1961-1965), which tackled risky socio-political topics like abortion, the death penalty, and even the blacklist itself – and which Buhle and Wagner describe here as ‘a civil liberties show par excellence’ (p.53). The authors’ engagement with the themes explored in these old American television shows is so fascinating that I would hope this book provides a springboard for other scholars to do extensive work on some all-but-forgotten classics of yesteryear. Is it too much to hope TV companies might release them on DVD?

The authors easily identify the political significance of M*A*S*H (1972-1983) and All in the Family (1971-1979); they dub AITF creator Norman Lear a ‘Clifford Odets of the small screen’ (p.xiv). But they deftly ferret out ideological subtexts from the unlikeliest of genres. We already know there are explicitly anti-Cold War undercurrents in sci-fi movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and This Island Earth (1955). We know that exiled American scriptwriters infused the British show The Adventures of Robin Hood (1956-1958) with their own leftist preoccupations. But the authors add to existing knowledge by throwing the spotlight on: The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-1957), which recast the Knights of the Round Table as the idealized precursor of the United Nations; eco-friendly kids’ shows such as Flipper (1964-1968) and Daktari (1966-1969); and the cartoon The Gerald McBoing Boing Show (1956-1958), of which Buhle and Wagner remark: ‘not until The Simpsons decades later would made-for-television animation again display this level of week-to-week, prime-time artistry’ (p.94).

Chapter Four, ‘The Neo-Realist Aesthetic’ begins with the affair between Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, which scandalized America in the late 1940s; progresses to leftist movies made in exile (Joseph Losey’s Stranger on the Prowl (1951), John Berry’s slave uprising saga Tamango (1958), starring Dorothy Dandridge, Martin Ritt’s 5 Branded Women (1960) and Joseph Strick’s The Balcony (1963); and ends by examining Westerns, which ‘succeeded film noir as the most concentrated popular expression of political ideas in the United States in the 1950s. … the vessel of forbidden ideas’ (p.111).

Of course, Buhle and Wagner are not concerned here with celebratory Westerns of the Wayne-Ford stripe, but with those ‘darker westerns, at first a snowmelt of resistance, … that, by the late 1960s,

swelled into tributaries of outright narrative opposition’ (p.112). They reveal that Michael Wilson was the first writer to work on a screenplay for George Stevens’s Shane (1953), a project initiated while the two men collaborated on A Place in the Sun; however, Wilson’s refusal to names names for HUAC put an end to his involvement. The other Westerns scrutinized here are a mixed bag, ranging from Nicholas Ray’s celebrated Johnny Guitar (1954) and Edgar Ulmer’s The Naked Dawn (1955), reputedly derived from a short story by Maxim Gorky (and which Truffaut claimed as an inspiration for Jules et Jim), to two superior Kirk Douglas films scripted by Dalton Trumbo, Robert Aldrich’s The Last Sunset (1961) and David Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave (1962). Buhle and Wagner credit Aldrich with laying the groundwork for the Eurowestern, chiefly due to his Vera Cruz (1954), featuring Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. This was also the forerunner of the great 1960s adventures of Americans in Mexico, such as John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966) and Sam Peckinpah’s apocalyptic The Wild Bunch (1969):

‘It was Aldrich’s influence … that would be felt as the Marxist western emerged under the hands of Italian filmmakers, with the additional influence of a former Communist, Akira Kurosawa[.]… By the early 1960s, the Italians had embraced Kurosawa’s success with samurai films and combined it with Aldrich’s dark western to create a new sub-genre, the “spaghetti western.” The Italians reworked the cinematic grammar of the western that had been perfected by Ford and reinvented by Aldrich into a new kind of filmmaking that became the generational equivalent of the cinematic Popular Front, now as part of the international movement against the Vietnam War and the global peasant struggle against neo- colonialism. It was a case of … the internationalization of a once strictly U.S. national genre that was virtually unprecedented in movie history…. The western would never be the same’ (pp.119-120).

Hide in Plain Sight is teeming with such riches. Dozens of films are intelligently yet succinctly contextualized, with pride of place given to Herbert J. Biberman’s pro-labour, pro-feminist cult classic Salt of the Earth (1954), which the authors fondly chronicle as the blacklistees’ ‘one grand film project

all their own’ (p.135). They look closely at films foregrounding themes of crime, class, gender, and (of course) race. There is a good discussion of Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), a rarely shown inter-racial crime drama directed by Robert Wise, scripted by Abraham Polonsky and starring Harry Belafonte, Ed Begley, Shelley Winters, and real-life liberal Robert Ryan again playing against personal conviction as a vehement racist. They also focus briefly on Carl Lerner’s Black Like Me (1964), which starred James Whitmore in the true story of John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who dyed his skin dark to pass as a Black man in the Deep South. If the intention of both journalist and subsequent film was to create a Gentleman’s Agreement for the Civil Rights era, it was doomed by inferior scripting and a shoestring budget. Yet Buhle and Wagner deem it ‘richly worth redemption’ (p.150) and again, one can only hope someone in the wonderful world of DVDs will read this and take the hint.

This is a fascinating and enlightening book, a commemoration of (often) forgotten artifacts, the creations of beleaguered men (and they were mostly men). The second half of the book is given over to in-depth scrutiny of the careers of some of the most prominent talents who fell victim to the blacklist: Carl Foreman, Jules Dassin, Dalton Trumbo and sitcom writer Frank Tarloff. They devote a chapter to Marxist director Joseph Losey, who fled to England and remained in exile for the rest of his life. They devote another to three left-wing artists who stayed, persevered and, each in their own way, triumphed: Martin Ritt, Lillian Hellman and Waldo Salt. (One blooper leaps out in their discussion of Hud (1963), when they declare that it lost out on the Best Picture Oscar to How the West Was Won. Sorry, guys; that makes two mistakes for the price of one. Hud wasn’t nominated for Best Film, but for Best Screenplay. It lost that to How the West Was Won – which was nominated for Best Film, but lost to Tom Jones.)

Ritt directed an impressive list of films with progressive themes, among them Edge of the City and No Down Payment (both 1957), The Long,Hot Summer (1958), Hombre and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (both in 1966), Sounder (1972), The Front (1976) and Norma Rae (1979). Hellman was the dramatist who once famously defied HUAC by declaring she would not cut her political conscience just to fit that year’s fashions. She was responsible for some of the 1960s most troubling and turbulent melodramas: author/scriptwriter of The Children’s Hour (1961), author of Toys in the Attic (1963) and scriptwriter for The Chase (1966). Waldo Salt was a blacklisted screenwriter who enjoyed a late-career resurrection, writing scripts for four key movies exploring the dark underbelly of the American Dream: John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), Schlesinger’s Day of the Locust (1975) and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978). They might be classed as magnificent survivors.

The penultimate paragraph of Hide in Plain Sight deplores the neo-conservative direction that America has taken these last few years, while infusing Hollywood’s past with near-romantic nostalgia:

‘The filmic tribute to the “Greatest Generation” of World War II also constitutes a tribute to the last idealistic war – and not the hypocritical one for a redefined “freedom” of open markets everywhere or for the invasion of an oil-rich former U.S. weapons client, transformed into an enemy of biblical proportions. The collective memories of Hollywood’s Golden Era, endlessly re-edited and replayed on American Movie Channel in film-clip documentaries, embodies a disappeared time when movies provided a transforming world of enormous creative energy and a rich social imagination. Never mind that stale narratives and predictable directing and acting, corruption and mob influence dominated Hollywood at its most golden. Something about those days and in those films remains more vital, more imaginative, more real and ultimately truer to the country, at its best, than what came afterward’ (pp.267-268).

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Buhle and Wagner have characterized the fortieth President of the United States as ‘a B-actor and FBI informer who seemed sincerely convinced that he had actually taken part in the history that he only played on the screen’ (pp.213-214). A recent poll, sponsored by the Discovery Channel and AOL, declared Ronald Reagan to be the greatest American of all time. So the publication of Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood Years by C. McGivern and Fred Landesman is in this respect particularly timely.

Unlike Buhle and Wagner, this collaboration between McGivern and Landesman has its roots in iconography rather than ideology. McGivern is an English author who has written an individualistic but authoritative biography of John Wayne, whereas the American Landesman had himself written The John Wayne Filmography (2004). This common interest led to the decision to collaborate on a project, so the idea for Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood Years was born. While this is not a movie history of the Right in the sense that Hide in Plain Sight is Hollywood history from a Leftist perspective, nonetheless, the choice of Reagan, following on from Wayne, should certainly tap into a residual right-wing market.

The rationale behind the book is that Reagan’s training in Hollywood was a crucial contributing factor to his later success in politics, so to grasp the essence of Reagan the beloved President, we must have a fuller understanding of Reagan the movie star. This is fair enough, and paths similar to this have been travelled before, most notably by Anne Edwards in Early Reagan (1987) and by Michael P. Rogin in his Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes of Political Demonology (1987), which identified Hollywood movies as a dominant trope in the formation and exposition of Reagan’s world-view. Here, McGivern and Landesman tackle Reagan’s years in Hollywood first as biography, then as filmography.

This is an ambitious book. The filmography, constituting over 60% of the text, is prodigiously researched and lavishly illustrated. The problem remains, however, that the great majority of Reagan’s films were, at best, mediocre fare. There were a few honourable exceptions – in particular Sam Wood’s superb Kings’ Row (1942). Yet I would argue that it’s not the films Reagan actually made which define him, but rather his own consciously mythic revision of his screen image that helped catapult him from second-string star of third-rate movies to first-rank American icon.

Probably most significant in this context was the Illinois-born Reagan’s self-reinvention as a leathery Westerner, based largely on his stint as host of the television show Death Valley Days. A mere half-dozen of the fifty-four films he made were Westerns, but he artfully cultivated the cowboy image, posing in Western garb and on horseback at his ranch, and above all via his rhetoric, fudging the divide between the actuality of American history and collective memory filtered through Hollywood. Liberal intellectuals meant to disparage Reagan by calling him a ‘cowboy actor’. If, say, Paul Newman had run for President, they wouldn’t have used that epithet, though Newman made more Westerns than Reagan did. In this respect, Reagan outflanked his detractors, perceiving in the image of the heroic Westerner a durable appeal to Main Street. Here he not only subjugated reality to a Hollywood-confected myth but, given his own relative dearth of experience in the Western genre, he artfully replaced his personal ‘mythic’ past with an alternative version which he preferred. Not only did he sacrifice history to the movies; he even supplanted movie history with the way he believed that should have been.

In 1982 cartoonist Jules Feiffer wrote, ‘Ronald Reagan presides over two countries: the United States, about which he is ignorant, and Movie America, about which he is expert.’ Or as McGivern and Landesman themselves so tellingly put it: ‘Often when he was given briefs to read for coming meetings he would be taken to task for his lack of enthusiasm, “Why haven’t you read that?” His reply would usually be mumbled along the lines, “Well, The Sound of Music was on last night …”’ (p.14).

The picture that emerges here is of a decent, amiable yet personally disengaged man, even with regard to his own children. Discussing Reagan’s political demeanour during the era of the witch-hunts, McGivern and Landesman write: ‘Reagan had been personally tolerant to a fault, finding it difficult to dislike anybody (possibly because he had no deep interest in any individual)’ (p.85). The important part of that sentence, I’d suggest, is the part in parentheses. Reagan appears to have been temperamentally similar to Thomas Jefferson – endowed with a deep faith in humanity as a general principle but largely indifferent to most people on an up-close, one-to-one basis. As such, despite the wealth of material on Reagan both as a Hollywood personality and later as President, it’s still difficult to get a handle on him.

Possibly Gore Vidal has come the closest. In his essay ‘Ronnie and Nancy: A Life In Pictures’, Vidal recalled conversing with a Californian journalist who provided a fascinating analysis of Reagan:

‘Here is a fairly handsome ordinary young man with a pleasant speaking voice who first gets to be what he wants to be and everybody else then wanted to be, a radio announcer. … Then he gets to be a movie star in the Golden Age of the movies. Then he gets credit for being in the Second World War while never leaving LA. Then he gets in at the start of television as an actor and host. Then he picks up a lot of rich friends who underwrite him politically and personally and get him elected governor twice of the biggest state in the union and then they get him elected president[.]… The point is that here is the only man I’ve ever heard of who got everything that he ever wanted.’ (Armageddon?, p.91).

A crucial addition is that that kind of luck is apt to breed a type of ignorance, if not arrogance. Reagan’s CV was full of dream jobs that don’t require breaking sweat: male model, sportscaster, movie star, TV personality, spokesman for General Electric, property speculator, Governor, President. Reagan knew he wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, but look at what he achieved! If he could do it, so could anyone; and if they didn’t, they must be bums, so he saw nothing wrong with cutting their welfare. This phenomenal luck, recast as a form of predestination, is one of the essential keys to comprehending both his relentless optimism and his sternly moralistic economic world-view. He succeeded in life primarily because he believed he deserved to. Life was as simple as that. In all likelihood, he never countenanced the possibility of a world in which millions worked damn hard every day of their lives – and still never got a break; after all, things always worked out in the movies. Might that be the key to Ronald Reagan?

This book ultimately shies away from providing its own key to the enigma of Reagan, but there is every good reason to expect McGivern and Landesman’s work will be well-received among admirers of the man. A leather-bound edition has been presented to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and it stands as one of the first substantial commemorations published since the fortieth President’s death.

Sadly, Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood Years must stand as another man’s monument, too. On 15th October 2004, suddenly and tragically, Fred Landesman died of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-five. The John Wayne Filmography, which was his first book, had led him to McGivern. Together, they had discussed other dream projects on which they might collaborate. To wish this book well in the face of such tragedy is not to evoke sentimentality, redolent of Reagan’s own ‘Win one for the Gipper.’ Those of us who write – whatever our subject – do so in the hope that we have something worth saying, and in the hope that others judge our efforts worth reading. If we are lucky enough to be published, we have the additional hope that our words might live on, long after we’ve gone. It’s our little glimmer of immortality – and I wouldn’t believe any writers who claimed that thought had never occurred to them. Ronald Reagan died just as McGivern and Landesman’s book was nearing completion, and the authors wrote ‘God speed, Mr. President.’ Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood Years is part of Fred Landesman’s glimmer of immortality. God speed, Fred Landesman.

Michael Coyne is the author of The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (I. B. Tauris, London) and American Political Films (forthcoming from Reaktion Books).