A Wide Angle on Hollywood : TAKE TWO: A Life in Movies and Politics, <i> By Philip Dunne (Limelight Editions: $17.95, paper; 405 pp.)</i>

Philip Dunne arrived in Hollywood in 1930, the depth of the Depression--not the best season for job hunting. There was, however, a promising aspect in his timing. The silent era was ending. The young men and women of his generation were the ones who would give Hollywood a voice. Unlike most of the others, Dunne had left behind a privileged background of boarding school, Harvard and Southampton summers.

His first job was as a reader at the old Fox studio on Western Avenue. Though he and Fox soon parted, he returned a few years later through the front door and spent his entire long career at the company that became 20th Century-Fox, writing or co-writing a long list of classic films of Hollywood’s golden age, including “Suez,” “Stanley and Livingston,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and many others. His career was a part of the Hollywood that shaped America and gave it its memory. “Take Two,” an updated edition of Dunne’s 1980 memoir, is a rich account of a Hollywood that is now gone, vanished forever, as well as the story of one American liberal in his battles with the windmills of war and peace over the last 60 years.

Dunne’s mother was a Yankee from Boston. His father, the Irish-American journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne, was the creator of “Mr. Dooley,” the Irish barkeep whose pithy, aphoristic remarks filled newspaper sketches and books. They have become part of the language--although they are often credited to others. “Trust everybody--but cut the cards” and “comforter of the afflicted and afflicter of the comfortable” are, sans dialect, good examples. The mix of Yankee and Irish genes created in Philip Dunne a man with a patrician sense of public service combined with a dancing mind and a sharp dramatic wit. It’s a very American blend.

20th Century-Fox, where Dunne wrote his scripts and later produced and directed, was very much the accomplishment of Darryl F. Zanuck, whom Dunne describes as the “quintessential studio boss in the great era of studio bosses. No foot of film ever left the studio without his imprimatur.” Zanuck is recalled here with a vivid affection and even awe as he strode “up and down that office nearly as large as an aircraft hangar, swinging a truncated polo mallet at invisible balls on the carpet.”

His studio didn’t have a roster of stars the way MGM did. Instead, Zanuck saw to it that they had scripts. Zanuck is usually remembered as a cigar-chewing, womanizing autocrat--all no doubt true. Dunne’s view is larger. In addition to delivering colorful “Zanuckdotes,” Dunne focuses on the man’s working techniques. For all that’s been written about the studios of that era, this is a rare insider’s account of what it was like day to day in the story conferences and on the sound stages.

Before he was 31, Dunne had become a prominent political figure in California, an officer of several liberal organizations and vice president of what was then known as the Screen Writers Guild, at a time when the Guild was fighting a company union for the very right to exist. To a studio boss like Zanuck, the Guild must have felt like a slap in the face from the hired help. Dunne managed to navigate those dangerous shoals, allowing his career and the Guild to flourish. Those early union battles--for the right to arbitrate credits, for instance--are at the heart of the huge organization that is now the WGA.

As a screen writer and a political presence, Dunne led a bachelor’s social life centered around polo, parties and attractive women--Margaret Sullavan among them. In 1938, a young actress, Amanda Duff, was visiting the studio. Enchanted, Dunne inquired about her and was told, “Santa Barbara society. Strictly no dice. Stay away.” Phil Dunne records several instances of his own failure to take advice; fortunately, this was one of them.

The following year, 1939, is generally regarded as Hollywood’s greatest. It wasn’t so bad for Phil and Amanda either, as they set out on the marriage that continues to sustain them both. Although he never declares it, it’s clear that the great influence and shaping forces in Philip Dunne’s life have been his father and his wife. The portrait of Amanda Dunne--actress, pianist, pilot, mother and politician--makes “Take Two” a tender and touching love story.

The War--as the men and women of Dunne’s generation usually refer to World War II--changed America. It certainly changed Hollywood. Philip Dunne, long a Navy buff, sought a naval commission. He was denied as a security risk. His loyalty was suspect. There was a file. When the Navy man told him the news, Dunne jumped up to leave. Where was he going? the officer wanted to know. “To Moscow, to enlist in the Red Army. Stick that in your goddamn file.” He left and “found my way to the nearest head and threw up.” It was a galling and scarring incident, and time has erased the pain only a little. “Apparently the only way citizens can be sure of remaining ‘clean’ in the eyes of their own government is to abstain from any political activity,” he writes.

Dunne found his wartime calling as head of production for the Motion Picture Bureau of the Office of War Information (OWI), making documentary films--American propaganda. From 1943 to 1945, in the foxholes of New York’s 45th Street, the OWI made more than 30 documentaries, notably a series called “The American Scene.” The list of Hollywood participants in the OWI’s efforts included Joseph Von Sternberg, Jean Renoir, Garson Kanin, John Houseman, Burgess Meredith, Frederick March and Ronald Reagan, among many others.

If there’s a bogeyman in Phil Dunne’s long and mostly joyous life, it is surely the President from Hollywood. (Tied for a collective second place are the drones who all but destroyed Fox after Zanuck left.) The 40th President pops up from time to time in these pages like a shmoo that won’t be kept down. At a lunch party in the early ‘60s, he turns up wearing a tie with “RONNIE” embroidered on it.

Postwar Hollywood was defined by one ghastly thing. It was “the blackest period in our history,” Dunne writes, when we “desecrated our democracy.” It’s the blacklist, of course. As a politically active liberal, Dunne was a possible target, but also a man with the political skills to try to intervene. His vehicle was the Committee for the First Amendment. In 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was starting to strut, Dunne, John Huston and William Wyler put together an “informal, ad hoc professional group . . . to protest the procedures of (HUAC) and to head off blacklisting and censorship.” The committee sponsored radio broadcasts and chartered a plane to go to Washington to protest HUAC’s abuses.

When Ring Lardner Jr., also a writer at Fox, was among the first to be fired, Dunne and others faced a dilemma: resign in protest and solidarity or remain employed and continue to fight. It is the sort of question that can have no happy answer. Part of Philip Dunne regrets not walking out. And yet, by staying, he was able to complain in the right places loudly enough to be privately offered the opportunity to “clear” anyone whose “innocence” he could prove. Another dilemma. To participate in such a scheme was to shake hands with the devil, to tacitly endorse the whole business. Yet to spurn the opportunity, no matter how tainted, would be to deny help to people who desperately needed it. Dunne was able to obtain clearances for 15, allowing them to go back to work. A black time indeed.

In 1956, Zanuck resigned. Although Dunne stayed on at Fox, without Zanuck the studio was just another countinghouse. Stuck in a rudderless boat, Fox and Dunne’s career drifted. Directing “Wild in the Country,” a strange Elvis Presley vehicle with a script by Clifford Odets, Dunne was there when they buried Fox.

It is a scene more reminiscent of Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” than of Elvis: “As we set up at the railroad station set for our last scene, a Sherman tank was charging about in the background, knocking down the old sets. . . . When we finished . . . about to leave, I looked back to see the tank wheel, accelerate, and smash its way through our own set. I stood and watched as it ran back and forth through the rubble until the old railroad station was ground down to powder.”

That back lot is now Century City and Dunne has become what historians call a primary source. There’s usually someone asking for his time and thoughts about Hollywood’s past. He gives generously, but his interests now are about today. He publishes essays about politics and the world--articulate reflections on the country he has been trying to figure out for much of this century.

The entirely proper rules of this newspaper require that I acknowledge what readers may have surmised: I have had the privilege of learning about the movies and politics and therefore about life and the world from Philip Dunne for a long time, although the years have been a greater portion of my life than of his. Of my time in the presence of the Duke of Malibu, of this I am certain: I always came away smarter.

His health is not the best now, but his wit and analytic powers are undiminished. With his telescope to look at the heavens and his own shrewd eye to look at the world, this is surely Prospero--a sort of American to whom decency, honor, patriotism, art and public service are not abstractions.

In our grudging age, America seems to have forgotten how to breed such men. The life and times of one of the last and best of them are all here in this enduring book.