The Democrat Roosevelt was elected to theWhite House in 1932 to combat the disastrous effects of the Depression: widespread unemployment as a result of the Stock Exchange Crash of 1929. His electorate comprised both ordinary Americans looking desperately for someone able to return their country to its pristine prosperity and businessmen who, fearing a socialist solution, turned to a moderate ready to save capitalism from itself, while ushering in an age of welfare destined to alleviate the worst suffering (Fraser and Gerstle 1989). The name given to Roosevelt’s initiatives was ‘the New Deal’ and it was embraced by the majority...

The question of unions in general and Hollywood unions in particular is a vast and complex matter which we shall find recurring throughout these pages. It was the creation of a union that sowed the seeds of the antagonisms, conflicts and trench warfare that characterised the relations not only between studios and employees in Hollywood but also between unions. These relations were to lead by a tortuous route to the Hearings and the consequent blacklist. The protracted and bitter campaigns waged to form an independent writers’ union and the nature of the attempts to sabotage any such union will be...

When the US declared war on Japan on 8 December 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany had overrun Europe and been at war with Britain since September 1939. The controversy that raged in America between partisans and adversaries of the country’s participation in the war effort was rendered more complex by the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi–Soviet Pact and attitudes within America to Nazi Germany. If Americans were united from 1941 to 1945, films made in the period 1938–40 showed that anti-Fascism brought together film-makers of very different political opinions. Before discussing certain war films,...

The title of this chapter refers to the prolonged and violent strikes that shook Warner Brothers in 1945 and 1946 and the consequent right-wing backlash within the industry (and beyond). We have seen that HUAC had investigated Communism in Hollywood as early as 1940 and the union struggles throughout the 1930s had left indelible traces within the ranks of those opposed to unionisation within the fi lm industry. If the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) was the explicitly right-wing manifestation of anti-Communism in Hollywood, its creation in early 1944 was not a purely local phenomenon...

The implications of the events which took place in Washington in October 1947 and which were to usher in a period of fear, betrayal and a concerted attack on civil liberties cannot be fully grasped without a brief discussion of the activities of HUAC during the period 1938–44 when presided over by Martin Dies, a conservative Democrat from Texas.

Dies is notorious for his denunciation of Hollywood in 1938 as a den of ‘premature anti-fascists’, meaning that he was not opposed to Fascist regimes until they waged war on the US. Future blacklistee, writer Paul Jarrico, was proud of...

There was little cause for optimism in Hollywood in 1948, yet the events that came to pass within three years must have exceeded the worst fears. In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb and the Communists seized power in China. In February 1950 Senator McCarthy claimed the State Department was harbouring 205 Communists and four months later the Korean War erupted when the Communist North invaded the pro-American South.¹ When the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death in 1951, the judge stated in court that he held them personally responsible for the American deaths in Korea.² He received...

Of all the friendly witnesses, two in particular have taken on a special symbolic status because of the circumstances and the repercussions of their testimonies: director Edward Dmytryk of the Ten and writer-director Elia Kazan. Kazan’s case is of interest because of the film he made two years after his testimony, On the Waterfront (1954), and his ‘Life Achievement’ Academy Award in 1999. This latter event encountered an opposition in the form of public demonstrations on the part of former blacklistees who were not ready to forget the implications of Kazan’s testimony.¹ As blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein put it, ‘it...

In December 1950, just weeks before HUAC’s return to Hollywood, there opened a film that was one of the Left’s most remarkable and prescient criticisms of the way American society was going – and one of the last: The Sound of Fury, written by Jo Pagano and directed by Cyril Endfield whose previous film The Underworld Story was an extended allegory on witch hunting.¹ The left-wing themes of class, intolerance and the need for a scapegoat central to The Underworld Story are taken to their logical conclusion in the later film where two men – arrested for killing the wealthy man they...