Credit Where Credit Is Due

Now, 40 years later, their films remain among the best this country has produced: “Inherit the Wind,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Defiant Ones,” “Roman Holiday.”

But the men and women who told those stories, who created the characters, were drummed out of the film business, blacklisted during the 1950s and often hounded out of this country--their country--as suspected communists.

The long shadow that McCarthyism cast over Congress and the movie studios ruined lives and made a mockery of the principle of free and open discourse to which both Washington and Hollywood claimed allegiance.

Last week, the Writers Guild of America granted these screenwriters a measure of redemption. The guild, which represents more than 7,500 screenwriters on the West Coast, disclosed that it has restored credits on 24 films to blacklisted writers who continued to produce scripts under pseudonyms. These films include “The Robe,” for which writer Albert Maltz will now share credit; “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” co-written by Hugo Butler; “Autumn Winds,” by Butler and his wife, Jean Rouveral Butler; “Hellcats of the Navy,” co-written by Bernard Gordon; “Inherit the Wind,” now credited to Nedrick Young along with another writer, and “Born Free,” for which Lester Cole will now get credit.

Because the guild has the final say in determining writer credits, the action means that studios will be asked to alter the screen credits on new prints and new video releases of these films. In recent years, the guild has restored credits to blacklisted writers or co-writers of 10 films, including Dalton Trumbo for “Roman Holiday,” “The Brave One” and “Deadly Is the Female” (“Gun Crazy”), Carl Foreman for “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and Maltz for “The Defiant Ones.” Film scholars estimate that blacklisted writers scripted as many as 100 films during the 1950s and ‘60s.

The studios barred dozens of talented men and women under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating communist influence in Hollywood. A few were convicted on charges of contempt of Congress for refusing to divulge their political affiliations. Most were fingered by former friends. Whispers killed promising careers, leaving these writers to work under pseudonyms or the aegis of a politically acceptable writer if they worked at all.

Many among this group--including Trumbo, Hugo Butler and Maltz--did not live to see vindication. But for those remaining, and for our national conscience, the guild has done a good thing.