Looked at from one angle, the detractors weren't entirely wrong, since many members of the industry did have left-wing sympathies that affected their work. Looked at from other angles, though, the case is shaky. Then as now, Hollywood was run by businessmen who cared more about making a buck than making a point, and they didn't want to fill theaters with pictures that would rub conservative moviegoers the wrong way. That argument is woven into David Helpern Jr.'s documentary Hollywood on Trial, released in 1976. Its subject is the Red Scare, its effects on the motion-picture industry, and the punishment it inflicted on conscientious writers, directors, and performers who were blacklisted from employment when they refused to cooperate with federal investigations that they saw as unconstitutional invasions of their privacy and intrusions on their political beliefs.
Although the dominant anti-communist warrior of this period was Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin who saw subversives almost everywhere he looked, he didn't take office until 1947 and played no part in the widely publicized hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee that also started in 1947. Hollywood on Trial gives a sample of his rhetoric in archival footage, but traces the attacks on the entertainment industry to the years before World War II, when the conservative Democratic Congressman Martin Dies led HUAC in efforts to curtail the Federal Theater Project - a Depression-era enterprise giving employment to stage artists - by accusing participants of expressing left-wing views. Other developments paving the way for anti-communist extremism included the labor struggles of the 1930s, some of them violent, and the support of many Americans for the anti-fascists fighting the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. These and other factors led to postwar friction between Americans happy with the status quo and others convinced that sociopolitical change was urgently needed.
There were two sets of HUAC hearings on Hollywood's alleged communist leanings. The first commenced in 1947, officiated by committee chair J. Parnell Thomas, and the second, chaired by John S. Wood, began in 1951. The most widely known catchphrase of the investigations was a question - "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" - repeatedly posed by Thomas during the first round of sessions. The committee's search for answers was complicated by its insistence that witnesses with communist associations not only implicate themselves but also state the names of others involved. This was naturally anathema for anyone unwilling to become an informer. As one figure in Hollywood on Trial remarks, it could be called "government by stool pigeon."
Critics of HUAC have long contended that its focus on Hollywood was motivated less by concern over left-wing propaganda than by hunger for the publicity that would accrue when iconic movie actors and other studio celebrities were hauled in for questioning with cameras and microphones capturing the proceedings for all the world to see. Some of the people summoned were so-called friendly witnesses - stars Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor were among them - who obliged the committee by condemning communist influences and in some cases denouncing colleagues.
Also in the mix were 19 "unfriendly witnesses" who refused to testify about their political beliefs or connections; some also lashed out at the committee with countercharges of un-American activity. The most notorious outcome of the 1947 hearings was the prosecution of the Hollywood Ten, uncooperative witnesses who were held in contempt of Congress for their refusal to testify as requested. They expected the US Supreme Court to overturn their convictions, but two justices died and were replaced by more conservative judges, tilting the court to the right. The ten convictions were upheld and prison terms followed.
One victim was the acclaimed screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., who told the committee, "I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but...I would hate myself in the morning." Another was Dalton Trumbo, an Academy Award nominee for the screenplay of Sam Wood's 1940 drama Kitty Foyle, which was also nominated for Best Picture and won Ginger Rogers the Oscar for Best Actress. Trumbo spent eleven months in a federal prison, and finding himself on a secretive but strict Hollywood blacklist afterward, continued to write under a pseudonym or under the name of a front. When his original story for Irving Rapper's The Brave One (1956) won an Oscar, credited writer Robert Rich wasn't present at the ceremony, for the excellent reason that no such person existed. Others on the blacklist went on to work in other countries, doing different types of writing, or to leave the entertainment field altogether. The blacklist was finally broken when Stanley Kubrick and Otto Preminger openly named Trumbo as the writer of their epic films Spartacus (1960) and Exodus (1960), respectively.
These and are other events of the Hollywood Red Scare are set forth clearly and dramatically in Hollywood on Trial, which includes a great deal of archival footage, interviews with blacklist victims conducted for the documentary, and a narration written by Arnie Reisman and read by John Huston in his uniquely mellifluous tones. Clips from Hollywood movies punctuate the film, including pro-Soviet pictures like Michael Curtiz's Mission to Moscow (1943) and Gregory Ratoff's Song of Russia (1944), made when the US and the USSR were wartime allies. And stargazers will spot a parade of Hollywood icons, from Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Zero Mostel to Gale Sondergaard, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan, taking various sides on the issues being discussed, debated, and fought over as hard-won reputations, celebrated careers, and even human lives stand in the balance. No single documentary could etch a complete portrait of the Red Scare and its consequences, but Hollywood on Trial gives a riveting and revealing account of a historical episode that must be remembered and learned from if it is not to happen again.
Director: David Helpern Jr.
Producer: James Gutman
Screenplay: Arnie Reisman
Cinematographer: Barry Abrams
Film Editing: Frank Galvin
With: John Huston (Narrator), Walter Bernstein, Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Howard Da Silva, Edward Dmytryk, Millard Lampell, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz, Ben Margolis, Zero Mostel, Otto Preminger, Ronald Reagan, Martin Ritt, Gale Sondergaard, Leo Townsend, Dalton Trumbo (themselves)
BW/Color-105m.
by David Sterritt
