Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions, their contributions ranging from crime film masterpieces like Du rififi chez les hommes (1955, Jules Dassin, director) to international blockbusters like The Bridge on the RiverKwai (1957, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters) and acclaimed art films like The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, director).
At once a lively portrait of a lesser-known American “lost generation” and an examination of an important transitional moment in European cinema, the book offers a compelling argument for the significance of the blacklisted émigrés to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations. Prime provides detailed accounts of the production and reception of their European films that clarify the ambivalence with which Hollywood was regarded within postwar European culture. Drawing upon extensive archival research, including previously classified material, Hollywood Exiles in Europe suggests the need to rethink our understanding of the Hollywood blacklist as a purely domestic phenomenon. By shedding new light on European cinema’s changing relationship with Hollywood, the book illuminates the postwar shift from national to transnational cinema.
More than sixty years ago, McCarthyism silenced Hollywood. In the pages of Tender Comrades, those who were suppressed, whose lives and careers were ruined, finally have their say. A unique collection of profiles in cinematic courage, this extraordinary oral history brings to light the voices of thirty-six blacklist survivors (including two members of the Hollywood Ten), seminal directors of film noir and other genres, starring actresses and memorable supporting players, top screenwriters, and many less known to the public, who are rescued from obscurity by the stories they offer here that, beyond politics, open a rich window into moviemaking during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
The concept of “un-Americanism,” so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today’s political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated.
“Un-American” Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry.
Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including The Robe, Christ in Concrete, The House I Live In, The Lawless, The Naked City, The Prowler, Body and Soul, and FTA.
Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era examines the experiences of seven prominent women of stage and screen whose lives and careers were damaged by the McCarthy-era “witch hunts” for Communists and Communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry: Judy Holliday, Anne Revere, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Margaret Webster, Mady Christians, and Kim Hunter.
The effects on women of the anti-Communist crusades that swept the nation between 1947 and 1962 have been largely overlooked by cultural critics and historians, who have instead focused their attention on the men of the period. Author Milly S. Barranger looks at the gender issues inherent in the investigations and at the destructive impact the investigations had on the lives and careers of these seven women—and on American film and theater and culture in general.
Issues of gender and politics surface in the women’s testimony before the committeemen, labeled “unfriendly” because the women refused to name names. Unfriendly Witnesses redresses the absence of women’s histories during this era of modern political history and identifies the enduring strains of McCarthyism in postmillennial America.
Barranger recreates the congressional and state hearings that addressed the alleged Communist influence in the entertainment industry and examines in detail the cases of these seven women, including the appearance of actress Judy Holliday before the committee of Senator Pat McCarran, who aimed to limit the immigration of Eastern Europeans; actress Anne Revere and playwright Lillian Hellman, appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, sought the protections of the Fifth Amendment with different outcomes; of writer Dorothy Parker, who testified before a New York state legislative committee investigating contributions to “front” groups; and of director Margaret Webster, before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee, whose aim was the indictment of Senator J. William Fulbright and the U.S. State Department. None escaped subsequent blacklisting, denial of employment, and notations in FBI files that they were threats to national security.
Unfriendly Witnesses is enhanced by nine illustrations and extensive excerpts from Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, originally published in 1950 at the height of the Red Scare, and which listed 151 allegedly subversive writers, directors, and performers. Barranger includes the complete entries from Red Channels for the seven women she discusses, which include the “subversive” affiliations that prompted the women’s interrogation by the government.
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