Hollywood Ten

ALVAH BESSIE, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Sam Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo became known in the late 1940s and 1950s as the Hollywood Ten. They were all politically committed to the left, had been members of the Communist Party for various periods, and were involved with the movie industry either as successful and highly paid directors or screenwriters. In the previous decades, their films, such as Hotel Berlin (1945), The Master Race (1941), Crossfire (1947), Sahara (1943), Pride of the Marines (1945), Destination Tokyo (1944), and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), had contributed to fight fascism. With their resilient behavior, they came to symbolize left-wing resistance to the McCarthyist paranoia that engineered investigations in 1947 and 1951 and the consequent blacklist.

These investigations were carried out by the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which charged that communists in Hollywood could use the film medium to place subversive messages in their movies and to discriminate against noncommunist colleagues. The HUAC also feared that left-wing artists could give negative images of the United States, which would have international resonance.

These concerns did not take into account the historical and production contexts in which some of the films targeted for their communist message were made. Mission to Moscow (1943), for example, the most pro-Russian film ever made, was not the result of Soviet diktats, but of orders from Franklin Roosevelt himself, who wanted to boost support for the Russian cause during World War II. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood producers firmly controlled their studios due to fear of censorship under the Hays Code and supervised every stage of production, particularly for those few films that had a political edge.

At the end of the 1940s, the vast coalition that had supported the New Deal and fought fascism became suspect. The right-wing Republican Congressman John Parnell Thomas, a staunch opponent of the New Deal, was the chair of the HUAC in 1947 when it was decided to launch an investigation into Hollywood's allegedly subversive activities. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood and who voluntarily attended, gaining the benevolent status of “friendly witnesses.

During the hearings, the names of 19 people accused of holding left-wing views surfaced. One of them was the émigré Jewish playwright Bertolt Brecht, who agreed to testify, but left for East Germany soon afterward. Ten others of the group, later known as the Hollywood Ten, refused to cooperate with the committee claiming that the First Amendment of the Constitution gave them the right not to name names. The House of Un-American Activities Committee and the courts during appeals disagreed; all were found guilty of contempt of Congress, and each was sentenced to between 6 and 12 months in prison.

[Page 219]All of the Hollywood Ten were also added to the blacklist and were prevented from working again for many years; many of them emigrated either to Europe or Mexico.

Some of the Hollywood Ten, however, managed to continue writing screenplays under front names. Dalton Trumbo, for example, worked on the screenplays of the Academy Award-winner Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave One (1956). Albert Maltz collaborated on the screenplay of The Robe (1953), while Adrian Scott wrote for TV series. The first of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten to write again using his proper name was Dalton Trumbo, who adapted the novel Spartacus by fellow blacklisted writer Howard Fast for the screen. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the movie used the Roman Empire as the setting to analyze the spirit of rebellion and nonconformity. At the end of the film, when the Romans finally succeed in crushing the slaves' revolt, they ask the surviving slaves to identify their leader, Spartacus, and they crucify all of them after their refusal to do so.

...