‘House on Carroll Street’ Is Just Off Memory Lane

The film is being billed and sold as a romantic thriller, and there are no references to the anti-communist fervor of the America of the 1950s that provide its setting and tone. But Peter Yates’ “The House on Carroll Street”--which as of last weekend had opened in only 31 theaters to modest box-office results--has been built by some very serious intentions.

“For me, the film is trying to say, ‘Remember,’ ” said actor Mandy Patinkin, a post-McCarthy era generation member of the cast.

Set in 1951, the film stars Kelly McGillis as a liberal-minded young woman and civil liberties activist who loses her job and becomes the target of government surveillance when she refuses to cooperate with a Senate investigative committee. She inadvertently uncovers a conspiracy to smuggle Nazi war criminals into this country that is led by a key figure in the Senate hearings, the character played by Patinkin. Also starring in the film is Jeff Daniels as an FBI investigator assigned to follow McGillis’ character.

The hearings held by Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s and the blacklist that swept through the entertainment industry as a result of the “Red scare” of the period are not identified by name in Yates’ film. In fact, Patinkin pointed out that the word communism does not appear in the screenplay. “I think this was a conscious decision, which means it’s a problem for our generation today,” said Patinkin. “It’s pretty scary to think that a word would cause such fear.”

It was the thriller aspect of the project that initially appealed to Robert Benton, the writer and director of such films as “Places in the Heart” and last summer’s “Nadine,” who brought the idea for “House on Carroll Street” to Yates and to one-time blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein. Benton and agent/producer Arlene Donovan eventually served as executive producers for the film. However, Benton and other principals associated with the final film acknowledged that the political landscape of recent American history very much fueled the film from the start.

“Being a victim of the blacklist, with a sense of isolation and aloneness, seemed to me the perfect situation for a character caught up in a thriller,” said Benton, recalling the stories recounted to him by a real-life blacklist victim, former union organizer and journalist Helen Scott, which he said sparked the idea for the film.

Benton said that Scott first suggested the idea for a story about a blacklisted woman who stumbled into a thriller, and that she met with Bernstein to discuss the idea. “Otherwise, this is not her story in any way,” Benton said.

Scott was blacklisted during the ‘50s, according to Benton, and embarked on an international film career that included working with the late Francois Truffaut and other French New Wave directors and serving as a European production representative for major Hollywood film studios. Scott died in Paris last fall at 72.

“I was interested in her life story, and I could personally identify with what it was like to be blacklisted,” said Bernstein, who said he was blacklisted by the film industry after collaborating on only one screenplay, 1948’s “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands.” After a decade of not being able to find work in films, he wrote screenplays for “Heller in Pink Tights,” “Paris Blues,” “Fail Safe” and “The Front,” another film about the blacklist, starring Woody Allen.

“But what interested me most was the thriller aspect . . . the idea that the people responsible for the blacklist were also involved in something shadowy,” said Bernstein. He said he invented the Nazi subplot of the film to make the point that the engineers of the blacklist were such “virulent anti- communists” that they were able to look past the Nazi war crimes to the common ground to be found in working with Nazis against the Soviet Union.

“It is very well documented that our government helped bring Nazis into this country to work in science and warfare, some under their own names, and others under the names of others, including Jews,” said Bernstein, referring to one of the film’s ironic twists that has “Jew-killers disguised as Jews” in order to gain entry into the United States.

Bernstein acknowledged that, although all the characters in his screenplay are fictitious, he modeled Patinkin’s character after Roy Cohn, the late, controversial lawyer who served as McCarthy’s chief counsel at the 1953-54 Senate hearings, “because whatever he might be accused of, I’d believe.

“Our whole political, cultural, and intellectual life has been perverted by anti-communism, which has provided us with a convenient stick to hit a lot of dogs with. This has hurt us very deeply, and continues to hurt us,” said Bernstein, quickly citing the recent Iran-Contra scandal as reminiscent of the McCarthy/blacklist era, in that “a lot of moral soundings hid a lot of shady dealings.”

Added Benton: “It’s not the (Iran-Contra congressional) hearings themselves so much, but what they showed of the way government operates on two levels: above board, such as the hearings themselves, and underground, in secret, so-called diplomacy.”

“I think that younger audiences, who may not know anything about the McCarthy period or what really was happening then would respond to this film, because they’re very quick to pick up on the contemporary resonances,” said Bernstein, who recounted a recent trip to Dartmouth College, to screen “The Front” and his latest film.

“I don’t remember anything about this period, but the passionate patriotism I’ve found in researching historical figures has shown me the similarities between people like Cohn and Oliver North,” said Patinkin. The actor, who first researched the politics of the ‘40s and ‘50s when he played Julius Rosenberg in “Daniel,” Sidney Lumet’s film about the trial and execution of a couple modeled on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, described Cohn and North as “ruthless, power-hungry people who would go to any lengths” to pursue their political ends.

Patinkin said he deliberately tried to put a Cohn-like, villainous presence into his character. “These are the sort of people I detest and despise.”