Hollywood Exiles in Europe

Rebecca Prime

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780813562629
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813570860
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

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 River Kwai (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.

1

The Radical Community in Hollywood

Hollywood in the 1940s was still a relatively small community, with roughly 50,000 people employed by the film industry.1 During the tumultuous course of the 1930s—marked by the Depression, the struggles of the talent guilds for recognition, and the enthusiastic embrace of antifascist causes—it had also become a highly politicized community that supported a remarkable number of left-wing political organizations and charitable groups. Not surprisingly, considering Hollywood’s moderate size and politically oriented social life, left-leaning film industry professionals—a group that encompassed both radicals (communists and fellow travelers) and liberals (noncommunist antifascists)—tended to know each other. Connections made at professional schools such as the League of American Writers’ (LAW) School for Writers and political organizations such as the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP) were solidified at Schwab’s Drugstore and the Black Watch Delicatessen on Sunset Boulevard, as well as at private cocktail parties, which often doubled as fund-raisers or even Communist Party branch meetings.2

Social connections intersected with numerous professional associations and collaborations. A glance at the films written and produced by future targets of the blacklist shows a high degree of creative cross-pollination, with films such as The Prowler (directed by Joseph Losey from a script by Hugo Butler and Dalton Trumbo), He Ran All the Way (directed by John Berry, also from a script by Butler and Trumbo, and starring John Garfield), and The Boy with Green Hair (directed by Losey from a script by Ben Barzman) boasting impeccable left-wing pedigrees.3 William Morris agent and Communist Party organizer John Weber represented many left-wing writers and directors, including Ben Barzman, Bernard Gordon, Julian Zimet, Ring Lardner Jr., Joseph Losey, Vladimir Pozner, Jean Rouverol Butler, and Bernard Vorhaus. The Hollywood radical community was also bound by ties of sentiment. Hugo Butler was introduced to his wife, the actress and screenwriter Jean Rouverol, by his roommate, screenwriter Waldo Salt. Producer Dore Schary was the best man at their wedding. Aspiring novelist Michael Wilson was convinced to give Hollywood a try by his future brother-in-law, screenwriter Paul Jarrico. Norma Barzman met her husband Ben at a Russian War Relief party hosted by the writer and director Robert Rossen.4

The question of community merits particular consideration in relation to Hollywood in the 1940s on account of the focused attack to which the Hollywood Left was subjected as the decade wore on. The tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee were designed to fracture and divide the Hollywood community through the emphasis placed on informing, or naming names. In his investigation of the moral dimensions of the blacklist, Victor Navasky highlights the destructive effect of the investigations on the Hollywood community, noting that “the informer’s particular contribution was to pollute the public well, to poison social life in general, to destroy the very possibility of a community; for the informer operates on the principle of betrayal and a community survives on the principle of trust.”5 Screenwriter Howard Koch’s description of the noxious effect of the blacklist on Hollywood supports Navasky’s analysis: “Hollywood had changed. . . . It was like a pall that fell over. People began to be suspicious of each other. Should you go and see a Russian movie, or would they take your license plate and send it in to the FBI? Suddenly fear enveloped the atmosphere of Hollywood. . . . All the idealism had evaporated and, now, fear had taken its place.”6 A sense of loss pervades personal accounts of the blacklist: loss of income, loss of friendships, loss of community, and, perhaps most of all, loss of a remarkable moment in history, a time when faith in the possibility of changing society for the better brought people together in a shared sense of purpose. The radical movement invested Hollywood in the 1940s with a “ferment of ideas” that, in Koch’s opinion, rivaled the intellectual excitement of Greenwich Village of the 1910s and 1920s. For screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky, politics was the defining feature of postwar Hollywood. “You can’t write about it [the blacklist] unless you also represent the excitement, the political excitement, of the radical movement. . . . Because if you miss that, you don’t know what a great place this town was. . . . There was so much going on.”7

This chapter attempts to chart just what was going on in Hollywood in the 1940s in order to better understand the political perspectives, professional experiences, and social connections that shaped the exiles prior to their departure for Europe. Many of the exiles formed close friendships during this period, friendships that proved instrumental to the choices they made in the wake of the blacklist. These friendships were forged in the variety of contexts already mentioned: social gatherings, political organizations, the studios, professional schools, and, for a significant number, the radical New York theater scene of the 1930s. The common thread uniting the individuals in these different milieus was their shared commitment to a set of issues (labor rights, the fight against fascism, racism, and antisemitism) and values (social equity) for which membership in the Communist Party—or in one of the broad alliance of communist and liberal antifascist Popular Front organizations that formed during the late 1930s—provided the most direct means of expression. Whether as radical Communist Party members or sympathetic fellow travelers, the future exiles shared a general political orientation that gave shape not only to their lives in Hollywood but also, more fundamentally, to their sense of identity and their perspective on the world. The 1940s were also an important period of professional development for all the future exiles, many of whom arrived in Hollywood in the early 1940s and were hitting their stride professionally toward the end of the decade. Their work in Hollywood during this period would affect the course of their subsequent careers in Europe, in some cases providing a degree of professional recognition that would ease their entrée into the European film industry.

Mapping the network of relations between the future exiles allows a number of themes to emerge, the most significant of which is that of the radical community’s paradoxical relationship with Hollywood. With few exceptions, the relationship between the Hollywood Left and the studios was structurally antagonistic, with the conservative leanings of the studios pitted against the political and artistic impulses of their radical employees. This tense pas de deux would take center stage in the HUAC investigations; as a number of studio production heads noted, the committee’s central accusation—that radical directors and screenwriters were using motion pictures as vehicles for communist propaganda—implied that the studios were not fulfilling their self-ascribed function as gatekeepers and protectors of the public interest.8 My interest in the charged dynamic that existed between the studios and the blacklisted exiles has less to do with probing the veracity of the committee’s claim—which derives its bite from a misapprehension of what it meant to be a communist in Hollywood in the 1940s—than with understanding the complex, often contradictory relationship between the Hollywood Left and . . . Hollywood. To what degree did the Hollywood radicals identify with “Hollywood,” the capitalist dream factory? How did they reconcile their left-wing politics with Hollywood’s material excess? The radical community functioned as a bulwark against the sense of artistic frustration and spiritual compromise shared by many of its members, and shored up their self-image as Hollywood outsiders.

New York Social Theater

The New York social theater of the 1930s provides important background for understanding the Hollywood experience and political and artistic beliefs of many members of the radical community. Directors Jules Dassin, John Berry, Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, Elia Kazan, and Nicholas Ray; screenwriters John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, and George Sklar; and actor John Garfield, along with his Group Theatre colleagues Franchot Tone, J. Edward Bromberg, and Roman Bohnen, all got their start in the radical New York theater world. Jules Dassin worked with Elia Kazan on the Federal Theatre’s production of The Revolt of the Beavers, a children’s play labeled “Mother Goose Marx” by New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson.9 John Berry found work as an extra with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Joseph Losey directed a production of Hymn to the Rising Sun for the Theatre Union, a radical collective whose members included Albert Maltz, George Sklar, and John Howard Lawson. Losey also directed Kazan in an agit-prop play called Newsboy and worked with Nicholas Ray and Norman Lloyd on the Federal Theatre’s “Living Newspaper” productions; as he put it when asked about those members of the New York theater scene who would go on to make a name for themselves in Hollywood, “We all knew each other.”10

The New York social theater movement also sparked the political consciousness of those involved. Numerous workers’ theaters, including the Yiddish Artef and the Theatre of Action, staged agit-prop productions that addressed labor issues or unemployment and aimed to stimulate the audience to political action. As the decade progressed, the movement’s emphasis shifted toward social issues, with the Group Theatre depicting proletarian themes in a context of greater aesthetic realism. More politically engaged than the Group Theatre, the Federal Theatre staged a wide variety of plays, ranging from Shakespeare revivals to contemporary dramas by Eugene O’Neill, but its greatest success was the radically and theatrically innovative “Living Newspaper” plays. With audience participation encouraged through elements of agit-prop, the “Living Newspaper” plays were too subversive for the newly formed HUAC, whose criticism led to the withdrawal of federal funding in 1939.11

The closure of the Federal Theatre was followed by that of the Group Theatre the following year. Having never developed a strong financial base, the social theaters were particularly vulnerable to shifts in the political climate. The Left resisted the demise of the radical theaters, seeing their loss as emblematic of changing times. For Dassin, the Federal Theatre was “a magnificent promise for the cultural life of the country. . . . When that was assassinated—demolished—there was anger and protest. . . . We were just devastated when it was undercut.”12 With their hopes crushed and jobs gone, the talent fostered by the social theater movement began its reluctant westward migration.

The social and professional connections forged in New York in the 1930s provided a ready-made network of contacts in Hollywood in the 1940s. The Group Theatre was reborn in the form of the Actors’ Lab. John Berry got his first Hollywood job thanks to the recommendation of John Houseman, Orson Welles’s partner at the Mercury (the job was to replace former Group Theatre director Harold Clurman as the director of Miss Susie Slagle’s). In addition to a fledgling community, the Hollywood Left’s experiences in New York’s radical theater movement instilled in them a profound ambivalence toward Hollywood. Jules Dassin articulates the sense of artistic and political compromise that haunted the new arrivals: “When we all went to Hollywood—we went out there feeling that we were betraying the theater. We were ashamed. We were idiots.”13 Dassin’s strong feelings suggest the significance of New York’s social theater for his generation, for whom it provided a foundry for their political beliefs and hopes for social change.

Jules Dassin as Oakleaf (holding flag) in The Revolt of the Beavers (National Archives, Records of the Work Projects Administration)

A Hollywood Education

By 1945, Dassin and Losey were both under contract at MGM, both rather unhappily. Asked in an interview why a conservative studio like MGM would employ left-wing filmmakers like Losey and himself, Dassin responded with an anecdote: “I can’t remember if it was Mayer or Warner, but one of them said: ‘These kids, they’re Reds, communists. Why do we keep them around? Because they’re talented.’ That’s how cynical it was.” Dassin, who joined MGM in 1942 following the accidental success of his short film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, fought back at the studio by going “on strike” following a conflict over the reshoots he had been promised on The Canterville Ghost. For the next fourteen months, he spent his days reading at the beach and collected his paycheck once a week, until his desperation to work forced him back into the studio. During his time at MGM, Dassin was so miserable that he “wanted to go back to New York forever.”14

Losey found his experience at MGM similarly demoralizing. Although his contract was for features, Losey was coerced into doing a short with the threat of his contract being dropped. The film—made in three days “with a very bad script and a very bad cameraman”—was pronounced “uncuttable” by the head of the shorts department. Fearing for his job, Losey begged to be allowed to cut the film himself, becoming so emotional that he burst into tears. “I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself. The result of it, which was not at all calculated, was that I was allowed to cut it.” The short, A Gun in His Hand, went on to be nominated for an Academy Award. Describing the studio to a friend as “a great factory operating in a vacuum,” Losey left MGM as soon as he could, joining Dore Schary, a friend and fellow transplant from the New York theater world, at RKO in April 1947.15

Individual frustrations aside, the studios provided a site of contact for the left-wing community in Hollywood. Losey describes meeting “writers who were absolutely staggering (they included Donald Ogden Stewart and [William] Faulkner) and directors who were also beginning, like [Fred] Zinnemann, Dassin, and [Vincente] Minnelli” while at MGM. “We all had offices in the same buildings, so I saw them all the time.”16 Cy Endfield, who directed his first short films for MGM in 1942, remembers meeting Carl Foreman there.17 Abraham Polonsky overlapped wit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Radical Community in Hollywood: Production and Politics in Postwar Europe
• 2. Life on the Blacklist
• 3. The Blacklist and “Runaway” Production
• 4. The Blacklist, Exile, and the Transatlantic Noir
• 5. Cosmopolitan Visions, Cold War Fears
• 6. Blacklisted Directors, Art Cinema, and the Caprices of Film Criticism
• 7. The Legacy of the Blacklist
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author