CORRESPONDENCE

To the editor:

Richard Schickel, in reviewing “Radical Hollywood” by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner (Book Review, May 12), chooses to use the occasion for a diatribe against the history of communists in Hollywood. Since the issue of the role of dissent in a democratic society is very much on the front burner in our country today, I believe it is important to respond. My qualifications: I was one of the Hollywood communist screenwriters; I was blacklisted because I refused to become an informer for the House Un-American Activities Committee; and I was hounded for more than 26 years by the FBI because, as a communist, I was considered a threat to domestic security (along with more than 300 others from Hollywood).

I agree with Schickel that neither I nor any of the comrades I knew ever managed to sneak even a smidgen of communist propaganda into any of our films. Had we done so, we felt sure that 200% of American studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn and others would blue pencil us right out of a job. Nevertheless, we did manage to slip some goodies into the character of the local community. For example, Jean Lewin, a young woman who was a dear friend of mine and also a member of the Communist Party, was the executive secretary of the Hollywood Canteen, working with Bette Davis, who was the president, and Jules Stein, who was the treasurer. Literally thousands of servicemen bound for war in the Pacific were entertained in a number of shifts of 500 each night for more than three years. In those days there was strict segregation of blacks from whites in the services, and even the Musicians Union had separate black and white locals. But thanks to the efforts of Lewin, a 5-foot, 100-pound communist, there was, after quite a battle with the studio bosses, no discrimination or segregation at the Hollywood Canteen. As a result, hundreds of thousands of men were exposed for the first time to a social occasion where blacks and whites sat together, ate together, danced with whomever they pleased. Was this important? We thought so.

As president of the Readers Guild (later the Story Analysts), I negotiated the first contract for the group with the studios and was active with the Conference of Studio Unions, the only truly independent craft union movement seen in Hollywood to that time. The communists, as has been acknowledged by current leaders of the unions, were responsible for leading the battles that finally organized honest independent unions of writers, directors and actors. The first presidents of the Writers Guild were John Howard Lawson and Lester Cole, both communists.

In my first screenwriting job after having been fired from Paramount when I was named as a “communist sympathizer” during the infamous HUAC hearings in Washington in 1947, I tried to follow the “party line” and get a job, any job at all, for a black actor. I wrote in a taxi driver who was black. This was immediately crossed out by the producer, who also had “line” to follow. He said it would only make problems, exhibiting the film in the South.

Lawson wrote the script for “Sahara,” the only World War II film to feature a courageous and heroic black soldier, played by Rex Ingram. He also wrote “Action in the North Atlantic,” which was the first and only war film that emphasized the ordinary servicemen, working men, who were under attack by the German submarines, not the usual story focused on the officers. “Crossfire,” produced by a communist, Adrian Scott, was the first film to deal with anti-Semitism in the U.S. Army. I could go on with dozens of examples of films good and not so good, including some of mine, where communists wrote or directed or produced films that made an earnest effort to deal with serious social issues, not revolution.

All this is not to say, as Schickel so sneeringly insists, that the book under review insists that communists were the only ones aiming to get worthwhile social content into films. But communists were actively trying to use the medium to improve social conditions; they did succeed on and off the screen in winning some battles. We were not totally ineffectual, as Schickel would have it; nor were we subversive, as J. Edgar Hoover had it. Actually, whatever our mistakes and shortcomings, we were people who had a keen sense of what was wrong in the world in terms of racism, poverty and war. We quite naturally brought this kind of concern for the human condition to our writing and filmmaking. Of course, speaking up for the rights of the oppressed, for the right of workers to organize, against the evils of unnecessary poverty and for peace and for a world not organized solely in the interests of multinational corporations was considered then and is considered now a threat to domestic security (pace J. Edgar Hoover and John Ashcroft). This may be the role of troublemaking dissenters. Buhle and Wagner set out to prove that the communists in Hollywood made a contribution, not to list every worthwhile film ever made by anyone. I think they succeeded.

Bernard Gordon

Los Angeles

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To the editor:

Twenty-one years ago, in a book review published in Film Comment, Richard Schickel clearly stated his animosity against “the revisionist new left line in Cold War historiography” and the effort by young historians to accord “something close to heroic status” to blacklisted movie people. In his review of “Radical Hollywood,” he demonstrated fidelity to those two articles of his faith. But no such consistency is evident in Schickel’s style. Whereas in the Film Comment review he treated the author (who was not a new leftist) and his thesis with respect, in the recent review he filled eight of the 14 paragraphs with denigration, ridicule and polemics.

He refers to the authors’ thesis as a “central perversity,” to their book as a “huge lie.” His evidence? He lists eight social issue movies of the 1930s (seven of which were not products of the left and, hence, not within the authors’ purview), which the authors failed to discuss. The three paragraphs devoted to this list represent the sum total of the review’s substantive discussion of the authors’ thesis.

To set the record straight, Buhle and Wagner are asking their readers to take another look at pre-blacklist movies, through lenses crafted by an understanding of the Hollywood left’s commitment to melding popular culture, their politics and (for some of them) their Jewishness. The authors do not argue that social issues were the exclusive domain of the left. They do insist, and they present examples from hundreds of movies to prove it, that a significant number of films containing social commentary were written or directed by the left. Their conclusion that the left influenced movie-making in Hollywood, and that its members intended to do so, is factually well-grounded.

The nature of the left’s influence is, of course debatable, but Schickel sidesteps that debate. The role movies, or any form of popular culture, play in determining political or social consciousness is arguable, but Schickel avoids it with his anti-new left cant. The left might have been utterly wrongheaded in its theorizing, but Schickel refuses to engage the authors’ efforts to demonstrate otherwise.

Finally, the reviewer’s belief that “[t]he communist left produced almost nothing but gasbags” proves that no book offering any positive commentary on the Hollywood left can expect to receive fair treatment in a Schickel review.

Larry Ceplair

Co-author,

“The Inquisition in Hollywood”

Los Angeles

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Richard Schickel replies:

The book was titled “Radical Hollywood.” I was trying to say that there are many ways of being a radical, in Hollywood or anywhere else, that do not entail membership in totalitarian organizations and that a book so titled has an obligation to consider the socially conscientious work of people who had no allegiance whatsoever to any ideology. This book makes no such attempt (may I note, parenthetically, for Larry Ceplair’s sake, that the list I compiled of the movies Buhl and Wagner ignored was obviously intended to be exemplary, not exhaustive). Beyond that, the world is as assiduous as any of the reprehensible keepers of blacklists in sweeping “fellow travelers” into the Stalinist orbit (whether they belong there or not) and, worst of all, it falls for the biggest of the many communist lies (repeated by Bernard Gordon)--that they were mere “liberals” and “dissenters,” American “innocents,” taking the fall for the rest of the American left, who would inevitably be the next victims of native fascism. This, of course, was not true--though the communist tactic of silence about their political allegiance was as responsible for the evils of the blacklist as the HUAC hearings were.

Finally, this book and its defenders leave out of their account the fact that Hollywood communists were inevitably apologists for an appalling evil--Stalinism--the crimes of which far exceeded, in the sheer number of its victims, the crimes of Hitler. They also leave out of the account the kind of popular front crud John Howard Lawson perpetrated in the screenplays Gordon refers to. If his banal and essentially anti-humane writing won no converts to his cause, it did surely lower the tone of American political discussion in a crucial period. That would be true of almost everything written by the communists in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

There has always been in this country an anti-communist left. I have been an adherent of it all my adult life, during which time I have grown increasingly outraged by the unexamined piety which has raised Stalin’s old party hacks to heroic status in Hollywood history. It is communism’s only lasting victory in the court of public opinion, but it is one liberals, in particular, must begin to question.