Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film 9780755694624, 9781780766324

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For my parents, John Dibbern and Sharon Hilde Dibbern

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List of Illustrations 1.1 1.2 1.3

4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1

The brief glimpse of a race riot in No Way Out (1950), Twentieth Century Fox The potential for a lynching in Intruder in the Dust (1949), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) A mob attacks a printing press, the symbol of the First Amendment, in Sam Fuller’s Park Row (1952), Samuel Fuller Productions “Bloody Friday,” Warner Bros. Studios, 1945 The Conference of Studio Unions’ publication, The Hollywood Atom A publication of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Larry Wilder looks over the destroyed printing press. The Lawless (1950), Pine-Thomas Productions Jan Dawson holds up a headline from the Stockton Express. The Lawless (1950), Pine-Thomas Productions The angry mob overturns a car. The Lawless (1950), Pine-Thomas Productions The police spread tear gas to disperse the mob. The Sound of Fury (1950), Robert Still Productions The journalist Gil Stanton is victimized by his own creation. The Sound of Fury (1950), Robert Still Productions A headline from the Santa Sierra Journal. The Sound of Fury (1950), Robert Still Productions A gang of white boys chasing its black victims. The Well (1951), Cardinal Pictures

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A group of black men takes up arms to defend itself. The Well (1951), Cardinal Pictures The interracial crowd watching the rescue. The Well (1951), Cardinal Pictures

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General Editor’s Introduction One of the most shameful eras of Hollywood history was the period in the late 1940s and the 1950s when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), backed by a hysterical conservative press, initiated a witch-hunt against liberals, radicals and communists. Its baleful influence resulted in the hounding of many of the most creative people in Hollywood out of the film industry. Initially, however, progressives in the industry fought back and in this fascinating and revealing book Doug Dibbern rediscovers a cycle of films which combined social realism with the indictment of racial and class prejudice and the resultant violent persecution. Dibbern carefully establishes the contexts, political, social and economic, within which the films were produced and explains the tensions and anxieties besetting postwar American society which found their most extreme manifestations in race riots and lynchings. A propitious combination of circumstances created a favourable climate for the production of low-budget films on controversial themes. These circumstances included the perceived audience demand for serious adult pictures which had seen big-budget studio films about racial prejudice (Gentleman’s Agreement, Pinky, Crossfire) achieve financial and critical success, the vogue for semidocumentary location shooting, and the increase in independent film production facilitated by changes in the tax system and the compulsory separation by law of the big studios and their cinema circuits. In the second half of the book, Dibbern focuses his attention on four films which, as he rightly says, have been unjustly forgotten and deserve re-evaluation: Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950), Cy Endfield’s Underworld Story (1950) and The Sound of Fury (1950) and Russell Rouse and Leo Popkin’s The Well (1951). He traces the circumstances of production of each film and their critical and box office reception. He also provides superbly argued analyses of the style, content, messages and values of the films. He notes that they all share the same starting point (a false xiii

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accusation against a member of a minority group – Mexican, black, unemployed white working class) and thereafter the stoking up of rumour and prejudice by a sensationalizing popular press which leads ultimately to mob violence. The importance of these films as social commentaries is reinforced by the fact that they are all based on actual events: the anti-Mexican Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles in 1943, the 1933 San Jos´e lynching of two white men accused of murder and the media frenzy surrounding the attempts to rescue a little girl, Kathy Fiscus, trapped in a well in 1948. The press hysteria, the mob violence and the persecution of the innocent became a metaphor for what was happening in the film industry. The progressive moment in film-making was a brief one. The cycle was terminated by the disappointing box office returns of the four films examined by Dibbern, the decline in independent production and the final and draconian imposition of the black list terminating the Hollywood careers of many of those involved in the films. However, Doug Dibbern in his consistently absorbing, meticulously researched and vividly readable account has done film history a service by bring back into the light a film cycle which has long languished in the ranks of the forgotten. Jeffrey Richards

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Introduction: Political Filmmaking in the Shadow of the Blacklist At the end of the 1940s, Hollywood’s most tumultuous political era, a disparate group of liberal filmmakers, unaware of each other, produced a series of movies about the relationship between journalism and mob violence, a cycle of films that manifested the anxieties of the Hollywood left that felt besieged by the conservative politics that were coming to dominate Los Angeles, the film community, and the nation. During the Popular Front era in the 1930s, liberals and Communists had joined forces to fight for the New Deal and against the international spread of fascism; but with an emerging Cold War consensus that now saw communism as the nation’s primary enemy, liberals were turning on their erstwhile radical friends and the era of Popular Front collaboration was coming to an end. Unable to make movies about the issues most dear to them – such as the persecution of Communists and the labour struggles in the film industry – liberal filmmakers latched on to acceptable topics like racism and the economic plight of the postwar working class. These progressives were influenced chiefly by a series of political events in Los Angeles that were defined by mass conflict and mob violence. They thought that institutional forces such as the Hollywood studios and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) were acting illegally, and that Los Angeles’s rabidly conservative press was aiding their efforts by spreading lies and inciting violence.1 Their films thus portrayed minority and working class victims attacked by lawless mobs that were incited by yellow journalism. The movies about mob violence and the press were released at the tail end of perhaps the most important period in Hollywood’s political history, the years 1947 to 1951. Many leftists had been active – both politically and artistically – in the film industry since the 1930s, and politically-engaged movies with a realist aesthetic reached their efflorescence in the years immediately after the war, garnering acclaim with the critics and raking in profits at the box office. But the end of World War II 1

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ushered in an anti-communist Red Scare that found its locus in Hollywood. In 1940, Congress had passed the Smith Act, which made it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the government, and in October 1947, HUAC convened its first hearings on the influence of communism in the film industry, calling on groups of “friendly” and “unfriendly” witnesses to testify. When the first ten unfriendly witnesses refused to answer whether they were now or had ever been members of the Communist Party, Congress voted them contempt citations and they were sentenced to prison. In December, Hollywood executives signed an agreement at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York promising not to employ Communists, officially blacklisting the men who had become known as the Hollywood Ten. But this was just the beginning of the persecution of radicals in the film industry. There were hundreds of others in Hollywood who would have had to answer yes to the Committee’s most notorious question. The studios, however, didn’t initially fire anyone else for his or her political beliefs. Over the next four years, though, most people in Hollywood suspected that it was only a matter of time before Washington got around to investigating the film community’s remaining radicals and urging the studios to fire them. But over those years, many progressives were still making movies with a social message and a realist aesthetic. When HUAC did finally return to Hollywood in 1951, the studios acquiesced and agreed to fire any alleged Communist who refused to name names of other purported radicals – about two hundred more people – thus bringing an end to one of the most vibrant periods for progressive filmmaking in Hollywood’s history. Many historians have already written about the politics of Hollywood during the blacklist era, but most have written about politics proper rather than about political filmmaking.2 These writers have focused on the HUAC investigations and hearings, the Hollywood Ten, and the ideological debates in the talent guilds, which were also intimately connected to the issue of communism. These earlier histories stress the politics of Washington and HUAC’s investigations of the studios’ personnel. These books tend to make the testimony and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten their dramatic focus, which inevitably necessitates that they make moral judgments of the investigators, the Communists, and those who named names. Those who do write about political filmmaking, therefore, tend to study the Hollywood Ten – and to a lesser extent, other Communist screenwriters who were blacklisted later – and they tend to dismiss their work as disappointingly apolitical.3 Scholars such as Larry Ceplair, Steven Englund, and Thom Andersen altered the terms of this historical debate by arguing that Hollywood progressives had created an impressive body of work during the years that they were being persecuted. Andersen’s seminal essay “Red Hollywood” traces the shifting ideologies of blacklist historians, from those who were critical of Communist screenwriters in the 1950s to revisionist historians the early 1980s, who championed Hollywood Communists as the “shock troops” of progressive forces in the film industry.4 In defending the progressives’ artistic enterprise, Andersen defined a film genre

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INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL FILMMAKING IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLACKLIST

that he called film gris produced by Communists and their fellow travellers.5 He borrows the name from film noir, of course, but says that his cycle of films “may be distinguished from the earlier noir by its greater psychological and social realism” and that its specific adjective derives from the fact that “these films are often drab and depressing.”6 These movies aren’t about hardboiled detectives, but about working class characters trapped by society; and in their pessimistic endings, the filmmakers “were creating presumptive allegories of their own impending fates.”7 Though I don’t intend to write the history that Andersen had envisioned with this influential article, his approach remains the closest to my own. In this book, I designate a cycle of movies that I believe are the most significant body of political films released during this tumultuous period. I devote the second half of the book to in-depth analyses of four of the most significant films in the cycle: The Lawless (1950), The Underworld Story (1950), The Sound of Fury (1950) and The Well (1951). These movies, released at the tail end of the government’s investigation of Communists in the film industry, depict angry crowds attacking minority victims because this was how progressives saw the political culture in America at the time. It was a political era of mass organizations rather than of charismatic leaders. Virtually every political debate in Hollywood and in America during the 1940s was fought not between individuals, but between collective entities – groups like HUAC, the Screen Writer’s Guild, the Committee for the First Amendment, and the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee, to name just a few. And the movies that liberals made at the end of the decade portray right-wing newspapers and conservative rumormongers as the instigators of violence because liberals felt that Los Angeles’s reactionary daily newspapers had incited violence in almost every major political battle that they had been involved with. My focus on collaborative groups in the political arena may have influenced my understanding of the movies as well. The biggest difference between my approach and Andersen’s – and perhaps the reason that my list of significant progressive films is different from his – may be that he initiated his investigations from an auteurist perspective, whereas I began mine by studying the political content of the films.8 I don’t intend to lodge an attack on the auteur theory itself. Certainly, the majority of the most artistically significant films that Hollywood has produced have been the product of a strong director with a unique artistic vision. That being said, I approach each of the films that I write about in the second half of this book as a collaborative effort between directors and screenwriters – and in some cases, producers as well. The precise nature of each man’s contribution can only be gleaned by a careful study of the production history of the film in question as well as an aesthetic analysis of the final product in comparison with those artists’ other work. I think it’s especially important to determine each artist’s contribution when examining a film’s political content. It is the screenplay – not the quality of its execution – that is most often responsible for a film’s political attitudes in classical Hollywood. In most of the movies that I will be discussing, the screenplay

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was completed before the director was hired and the director did little to alter the script. Thus, in many respects, I believe that screenwriters like Daniel Mainwaring and Jo Pagano played a more important role in shaping the ideological vision of the movies I will discuss – such as The Lawless and The Sound of Fury – than did their more well-known directors, Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield. Because many of the existing histories of political filmmaking in the blacklist period have focused on the films of the Hollywood Ten, on conservative movies of the anti-communist cycle, and on the cycle of big-budget studio films that began to explore racial themes after the war, it’s no wonder that scholars have seen political filmmaking during this period as often compromised.9 But one does not have to assume that these topics are the only options worth considering. If one does examine political filmmaking during this period, but takes a different approach, looking at a different type of filmmaker, investigating different political subjects and different political geographies, one can discover a body of political filmmaking that had remained out of focus in previous histories. In this book, then, my ultimate interest is in movies themselves rather than in the political activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities or the machinations of the talent union boards. In addition, I study the works of progressive filmmakers other than just the Hollywood Ten. I use the word “progressive” throughout this book to refer to an array of figures on the left of the political spectrum, including hardline Fosterite Communists like John Howard Lawson, more moderate Browderite Communists like Abraham Polonsky, liberal non-communists like John Huston, and liberal anti-communists like Elia Kazan. But, because I have chosen films based on their political content rather than on the men who directed them, the majority of filmmakers I discuss were not particularly engaged in the political activities in Los Angeles at the time. On the one hand, I write about directors like Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield, men who had once been Party members but who had since drifted from their youthful allegiances. On the other hand, I write about politically inactive liberal men who had never considered becoming a Communist, screenwriters like Daniel Mainwaring, Lesser Samuels, and Jo Pagano – men who held liberal beliefs for the time and who made liberal films, but who did not participate much in the political life of Hollywood. It is this last group of filmmakers whose politics have been studied the least, but who, ironically, probably comprised the largest number of people on the progressive spectrum in Hollywood. It’s not a coincidence that these two groups of overlooked artists often collaborated: Joseph Losey and Daniel Mainwaring worked together on The Lawless, for instance, while Cy Endfield and Jo Pagano joined forces to make The Sound of Fury. While their political inactivity may initially seem a counterargument to my claim that their movies were influenced by political activity in Los Angeles during the 1940s, it is precisely their disengagement from politics proper that constitutes the major cause of the ideological disillusionment in their films. Both of these types of filmmakers shared a progressive outlook and a commitment

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INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL FILMMAKING IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLACKLIST

to political filmmaking, but had grown cynical about the political process. They were able to portray the ugliness of the contemporary political scene partly because of the new freedom that a burgeoning independent production model offered them at the time, producing movies that cast a more complex and jaundiced eye on the material conditions that created racial and social inequality than did the mainstream, big-budget studio pictures that garnered the attention of contemporaneous critics and later scholars as well. It is these types of disaffected directors and screenwriters – not coincidentally – who make up the vast majority of artists I will study in this book. Finally, apart from focusing on a different type of progressive filmmaker, I will also study a different set of historical events. Most historians have written about the battle between HUAC and the Hollywood Ten, with the Committee for the First Amendment, who initially defended the Ten in 1947, playing a supporting role. Others have written mostly about the debates concerning communism in the talent guilds. But progressives in Hollywood were fixated on other issues as well. Hollywood historians have often underemphasized many political events that animated liberals because they were local phenomenon important mostly to the residents of Los Angeles. Though the HUAC investigations remain to this day the most famous political events that affected Hollywood in the 1940s, there were many other issues that liberals were passionate about at the time. The movies I will discuss in Chapters Five, Six, and Seven, for instance, were inspired by local events such as the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in 1942 and 1943, an infamous San Jose lynching in 1933, and the failed rescue attempt of a girl who fell down a well in a Los Angeles suburb in 1948. And every film in the cycle was deeply influenced by a series of violent strikes and lockouts involving the film industry’s trade unions in 1945 and 1946. In those years, mobs of workers and studio henchmen often fought in the streets outside of various studio gates, overturning cars and attacking each other with broken bottles and wooden clubs. This violence eventually escalated into kidnappings and bombings. Many people in Hollywood felt that their very lives were threatened. It was at this time, for instance, that Ronald Reagan started carrying a gun to work at the studios.10 These conflagrations were important not just because of their visibility, but because they threatened the livelihood of the industry itself, and therefore the economic stability of every single person who worked in Hollywood. In both 1945 and 1946, production in the industry came to a halt for weeks on end. The HUAC investigations that took place just one year later, by comparison, never stopped production in the studios. In 1945 and 1946, it wasn’t just Communists, but the entire industry that felt threatened. Because of the importance that mass violence had played in Los Angeles throughout the 1940s, and because liberals thought that Los Angeles’s conservative daily press had helped instigate the violence that seemed inevitably to injure powerless, liberal victims, progressive filmmakers at decade’s end felt compelled to revisit and re-imagine many of these scenes of local

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violence. Many of the films in the cycle of mob violence, then, were intimately involved with reframing political events from California’s recent past, and in so doing, they were explicitly or implicitly challenging the way that these stories had been originally presented in the conservative local media. By taking this different approach – focusing on movies rather than on politics, on a different set of filmmakers along the progressive spectrum, and on a different set of political issues that those progressives faced – one no longer sees the period as complacent and ineffectual. Rather, one finds many movies produced by a group of largely overlooked filmmakers that deal with a central set of similar themes. This cycle of films was able to critique American society much more perceptively than any films produced by the Hollywood Ten or by the cycle of social message films about race that the major studios produced. On the other hand, these films were still compromised by the worldview of their creators, representing the limited outlook of liberal white men from southern California in the late 1940s. It’s useful to remember, for instance, that political radicals’ attitudes towards race, gender, and sexuality in 1950 were not necessarily radical by contemporary standards. The two trade unions whose struggle led to violent clashes in 1945 and 1946, for instance, were almost exclusively white and male, while the leadership of the Communist Party USA was entirely male. Many female Communists in Hollywood, for instance, recall Party gatherings where the expected gender roles must have been no different than at gatherings for their conservative counterparts.11 At the same time, the movies that these progressives made functioned – on multiple levels – as metaphors for political issues important to Hollywood liberals of the era, particularly the union struggles and racial conflicts specific to Los Angeles, and, inevitably, the investigation of Communists in Hollywood. Thus, ironically, in trying to uncover movies that dealt with issues different from the most famous political events of the day, one invariably circles back to those issues that have dominated previous histories, but which one can now be understood in a different light. In Part One, I will provide the historical context behind the cycle of films about mob violence. Chapter One provides an introduction to the recurring themes of the cycle released between 1949 and 1951. Chapter Two examines the economic factors that helped spur independent production in the film industry as well as the political factors that helped destroy the political left. Chapter Three covers the history and political ideologies of the newspaper industry in America and Los Angeles to explain why the figure of the journalist played such an important role as the instigator of violence in this cycle of films. Chapter Four examines the incidences of mob violence that were most important to artists in the film industry. Specifically, it argues that the violence surrounding the Conference of Studios Unions strike and lockout of 1945 and 1946 and the journalistic debates around the violence became the most influential signifier of mob violence for Hollywood’s progressive filmmakers. Further, it argues that incidences of mob

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INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL FILMMAKING IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLACKLIST

violence elsewhere in the country did not influence Hollywood’s filmmakers as much as local riots did. In Part Two, I study four of the most significant films of the cycle of mob violence in depth. In Chapter Five, I discuss the film The Lawless, about a progressive newspaperman, a group of falsely accused MexicanAmerican teenagers, and an angry white mob that attacks the offices of a newspaper. In Chapter Six, I discuss the films The Underworld Story, about a cynical reporter who defends a black maid falsely accused of murder, and The Sound of Fury, about a sensationalist newspaper reporter who inflames an angry mob that lynches two men who had kidnapped and killed a teenager. In Chapter Seven, I discuss the film The Well, about how ugly rumours make a small town erupt into a race riot when a black girl goes missing and is believed to have been molested by a white man.

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Chapter 1 Violent Crowds on American Screens: Reporters, Racism, and Riots

In MGM’s production of William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust (1949), an old woman sits in a rocking chair inside the front door of the county jail. Outside, a crowd of white men lingers in the afternoon sun, hesitant and curious, but itching at the possibility of a lynching. Rumours have spread through town; they know that they’re holding a black man in a cell upstairs who’s accused of shooting a white man in the back. The dead man’s brother, by rights the leader of the mob, steps up to the front door with a can of gasoline in his hands. “Get out of the way, Miss Habersham,” he says from the porch, but she barely lifts her eyes as she continues her sewing. “I’m very comfortable where I am,” she tells him. He opens the door, tips the can, and pours the gasoline so that it rolls across the floor to her feet. She eyes the liquid cautiously, then looks up as he pulls a match from his shirt pocket and lights it demonstratively. “Please step out of the light so I can thread my needle,” she tells him. He pauses, blows out the match, takes the can of gasoline, and retreats to the porch. From behind the screen door he tells her, “Miss Habersham, I ain’t gonna touch you now. You’re an old lady, but you’re in the wrong. You’re fightin’ the whole county. But you’re gonna get tired, and when you do get tired, we gonna go in.” Their idle banter belies the apprehension in the air. The accused’s lawyer told the woman that lynch mobs only form at night, but this is the South, after all. Outside the courthouse, the crowd of men seems resigned, but their hardened faces give the scene a sense of heightened realism that magnifies the tension. As the movie unfolds, the threat of mob violence hangs over every scene. The threat of mob violence in Intruder in the Dust was not unusual at the time. In the opening moments of the Warner Bros. picture Storm Warning (1951), Doris Day 11

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turns a street corner at night in a small Southern town to see a mob in Ku Klux Klan robes drag a man from the county jail, beat him, then shoot him in the back as he runs away. She discovers later that the victim was a reporter who was working on an article denouncing the Klan. In Republic Pictures’ anti-communist exploitation flick The Red Menace (1949), a Communist agitator working for the party newspaper watches a line of protestors picketing a corrupt housing company from the safety of her car. The narrator intones about the methods of “the worldwide Marxist racket intent on spreading dissension” as underground Party members hand out pamphlets to proselytize their dupes. As emotions rise, the Communists’ leader inflames the mob: “Quickly, boys!” she bellows at them through a loudspeaker. “Let’s see some action! Show ‘em what we’re here for! Come on! Tear down the place! Break it down! Go on! Throw that brick!” A man in the crowd then dutifully steps forward like a puppet and throws a brick through the company’s window. In Twentieth Century-Fox’s No Way Out (1950), a white man tells anyone who will listen that a black doctor has killed his brother. Rumours spread through the white part of town, and black people in town start spreading the news that a race riot is about to happen. Before too long, mobs of white men and mobs of black men converge on a junkyard, weapons in hand, intent on inflicting as much pain on their enemies as they can. In Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), Kirk Douglas plays an amoral newspaper reporter down on his luck who finds himself in a small New Mexico town. When he hears of a man trapped in a local cave, he smells a story. His articles become a sensation and curious onlookers arrive at the scene. Over the course of the next few days, the onlookers grow into a crowd. More newsmen flock to the scene. Douglas conspires with the man’s wife and the local sheriff to prolong the rescue so that they can all make money off the mob, which grows larger and ever uglier, turning into a carnival scene as they leave the man to die alone in the cave. That all of these films – and many others dealing with the issue of violent crowds – were all released between 1949 and 1951 is not a coincidence. In the last three years before the final imposition of the blacklist, Hollywood’s major distribution companies released a cycle of films that dealt with three interconnected issues: mob violence, race and class prejudice, and the conservative control of the media. In most of these movies, a reactionary newspaper instigates an angry crowd; occasionally, ugly rumours unchecked by a progressive newspaper help foster an ugly mob. In almost every one of these movies, the violent crowd attacks a minority victim: African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, or working class white men. These recurring themes came from real-world concerns. Progressives in the film industry had witnessed acts of mob violence and the persecution of racial, class, and ideological minorities in Los Angeles throughout the 1940s. In 1942, the federal government began the internment of Japanese-Americans, decimating the Little Tokyo neighbourhood in Los Angeles. In 1942 and 1943 the city was riveted by the mass trial of 22 young Mexican-American men falsely accused of murder in what came to be known as the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial;

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VIOLENT CROWDS ON AMERICAN SCREENS: REPORTERS, RACISM, AND RIOTS

in 1943 white servicemen attacked Mexican-American youths in what the local newspapers dubbed the Zoot Suit Riots; in 1945 and again in 1946 riots erupted in front of several Hollywood studios when workers in the film industry went on strike or were locked out and in 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities held its first hearings investigating Communists in the film community. In each of these incidents, progressives in the film industry believed that Los Angeles’s uniformly conservative daily newspapers had lodged false accusations against persecuted, defenseless minority groups, accusations which eventually led to mass violence or mass persecution. In most of these cases, liberals in Los Angeles banded together to fight these injustices, publishing their own pamphlets and newspapers to fight the conservative press and to publicize their side of the story. Some of the movies in this cycle – like Ace in the Hole, No Way Out, and Intruder in the Dust – are still well known today to scholars and cinephiles alike, partly because they were big budget studio projects made by directors who later came to be known as auteurs. But I examine, instead, four other movies in the cycle: The Lawless, written by Daniel Mainwaring, directed by Joseph Losey, and produced by the independents Pine & Thomas; The Underworld Story, written by Cy Endfield and Henry Blankfort, directed by Endfield, and produced by FilmCraft Productions; The Sound of Fury, written by Jo Pagano, directed by Cy Endfield, and produced by Stillman Productions; and The Well, written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, directed by Russell Rouse and Leo C. Popkin, and produced by Cardinal Pictures. These movies have been largely overlooked, partly because they were low-budget independent films made by directors whose names, apart from Losey’s, are not revered today. But their origins on the fringes of the Hollywood film industry gave them a degree of latitude that the studio pictures weren’t allowed. I have chosen to write about these movies not just because they have been forgotten, but because I think they were the most politically astute films made in the series about violent crowds and thus, about the political situation in America at the time. While the movies in this cycle do portray political and social issues considered controversial at the time, many of them do seem today as if they had skirted the heart of the matter. Thomas Cripps, for instance, writes admiringly about Intruder in the Dust and No Way Out, but even these films contain an occasionally stereotyped role, and like most mainstream studio fare, they still needed to demonstrate that the racial conflicts they raised were happily resolved by the story’s end.1 These movies’ political and racial timidity derived from two aspects of studio production that necessitated a compromised ideology: first, the films needed to earn a profit, and second, like most studio projects, the screenplays were written by committees. The production history of No Way Out serves as an example of how the studio system necessarily compromised the political subject matter it acquired. The screenplay was written by four men. Twentieth Century-Fox’s production head Darryl Zanuck purchased the original story from a little-known writer named Lesser

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Samuels. Zanuck then hired Philip Yordan, a liberal writer who often worked on topical material and who was later rumored to have served as a front for many blacklisted screenwriters, to revise Samuels’ story into the first draft of the screenplay. Zanuck brought in Joseph Mankiewicz as the director late in the preproduction phase and Mankiewicz, who also wrote and directed All About Eve that same year, rewrote the final draft of the screenplay. Darryl Zanuck played the leading role throughout entire process, as was usual at Fox, commenting on each draft and demanding changes as he saw fit. In his study of the development of the screenplay, Ryan DeRosa notes that Zanuck insisted that his screenwriters minimize the extent of the racial violence, partly because he was worried that possible censorship in Southern states and in Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit with recent histories of racial violence might hurt the movie’s box office. In one memo to Samuels, for instance, Zanuck stressed that he wanted the race riot, which functioned as the film’s narrative fulcrum, to be represented merely as a “‘bar-room brawl’ or corner street fight.”2 And indeed, while the final version does show organized gangs of white men and black men gathering clubs, breaking beer bottles, and testing out metal chains and whips, the film portrays the race riot itself only briefly – mostly with shots of armed black men sneaking through an alley. Mankiewicz doesn’t depict any actual attacks clearly, and only includes one extreme long shot of the riot that lasts for only a few seconds. But Zanuck’s interest in minimizing racial violence didn’t merely derive from a politically neutral accounting effort to maximize revenue; it also emerged from the politics of an emerging Cold War consensus that saw many postwar liberals abandoning the more radical politics of the 1930s that were now considered to be un-American. Efforts like these to minimize mass racial violence, DeRosa writes, “reveal that a consensus was developing among white liberals that stressed the racist individual as the cause of racial problems and imagined individualistic solutions, thus evading social and class hierarchies of race through a discourse of color-blind nationalism.”3 But not every film minimized mass violence. Other movies that dealt with the same themes but which were produced independently on the fringes of the Hollywood studio system often evinced a more complex understanding of the nature of mass violence, and hence, of ideological conflict in the United States at the time. I have chosen to write in detail about just these four paradigmatic movies because of all the movies in the cycle, they portray mass violence at its ugliest and because they are the movies that most emphatically draw the connection between the three issues that define the cycle: violent crowds, race and class prejudice, and the reactionary press. That is, these movies are the ones that present the most intense instances of mass violence precisely because they are the movies that most explicitly explain the interconnected reasons for the mass violence. Films like No Way Out efface mass violence because they efface the causes of violence. But those movies that do explain the causes of mass violence necessarily get to the heart of some of the central political issues in American and in Hollywood

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Figure 1.1. The brief glimpse of a race riot in No Way Out (1950), Twentieth Century Fox

at the time. By explaining the causes of race and class violence, these movies make a materialist argument about the nature of the divisions in American society based on race, class, and ideology. That is, most of them argue that right wing newspapers beholden to the profit motive were the main factor that incited the masses to attack minorities. And because the violent crowds in these films were metaphors for conservative forces in America, Hollywood liberals were also making a structural argument about their own condition: reactionary newspapers in league with reactionary institutions like HUAC made false accusations against progressives as a means of consolidating power to destroy the leftist coalition that had made possible the New Deal and which had been fighting for enhanced union power in the film industry. And, finally, because these movies delved into the nature of mass violence more than the major studio pictures did, they tended to present a much more pessimistic view of society. But, even when they did end with happy endings, their conclusions were much more complex because they showed that riots sometimes had unexpected positive consequences: these progressive films usually demonstrated that by forcing minority communities to come to their own defence in an aggressive way, they led to hopes of a brighter future precisely because liberal forces were strongest when they were united and when they were most militant. 15

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The major studios had released an earlier cycle of films between 1947 and 1949 that dealt with racial and religious prejudice. These films – including Crossfire, Gentleman’s Agreement, Home of the Brave, and Pinky – were successful both with critics and at the box office. Part of their success may have resulted from their anodyne representation of ethnic problems in America and their optimistic vision of a resolution. But at the end of the decade, the political outlook in the film community had soured. Beginning in 1949, this first cycle of social message movies morphed into a new cycle of movies that focused on violent mobs. This new cycle took the ameliorating vision of the immediately preceding years and turned it on its head. These films no longer portrayed progressives’ hopes of racial and political integration; now, with the more cynical attitude at the end of the decade, the theme of race and class violence became much more prominent, the villains became much more closely aligned with the issue of journalism and the dissemination of the news, and the most astute political films took on a much more despairing tone as they focused more aggressively on the relationship between right-wing newspapers and minority victims. The most fervently political films released in 1950 – the last year before Communists were finally kicked out of Hollywood – now looked on racial and class conflict not as an opportunity for the improvement of the body politic, but as a source of violent prejudice and persecution. Though the violence in these films usually took place in a small town, it was always a nebulous locale – when rioting erupted it was always meant to symbolize a larger, metaphorical rupture. The earlier incarnation of postwar message movies had occasionally hinted at the threat of mob violence. In Crossfire, for instance, one bigot by himself wouldn’t have had the courage to engage in violence alone: it was only when two drunken soldiers joined together that they could beat a man to death in an anti-Semitic attack. In Pinky, the protagonist is manhandled by two cops and later threatened by two white men in a car – in both cases because the white men discover that she is a negro. But it was only in the second wave of these films that mob violence became the dominant theme. Indeed, collective violence had never before – or ever since – played such an important role in American film. These three years mark the peak of America’s cinematic fascination with the issue of mob violence. The American Film Institute, for example, has maintained the broadest and most thorough collection of data on the movies that the nation has produced. An analysis of subject keywords in the AFI’s database reveals a remarkable spike from 1949 to 1951. In those three years, there were almost twice as many movies made about mob violence, race riots, and lynchings than in the classical period as a whole.4 The chart below shows the number of films with a subject keyword of “race riot,” “race riots,” “lynching,” “lynchings,” “mobs,” or “mob violence,” represented as a percentage of feature films released in America at the time.5

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Percentage of non-Western Films

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0

1931-1933 1934-1936 1937-1939 1940-1942 1943-1945 1946-1948 1949-1951 1952-1954 1955-1957 1958-1960 Years

The films that comprised this spike manifested a remarkably consistent set of plots and themes. In the table below, I’ve listed the 16 movies I’ve included in the cycle about violent crowds in this period, roughly in order of significance. That is, the most significant films are those in in which mass violence is paramount and in which the causes of the violence are explained by the power of reactionary newsmongers to incite angry mobs that persecute minority victims. Production Company

Distributor

Year

Daniel Mainwaring

Pine-Thomas

Paramount

1950

Cy Endfield

Jo Pagano

Stillman Productions

United Artists

1950

The Well

Russell Rouse and Leo Popkin

Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene

Cardinal Pictures

United Artists

1951

The Underworld Story

Cy Endfield

Henry Blankfort and Cy Endfield

FilmCraft Productions

United Artists

1950

No Way Out

Joseph Mankiewicz

Lesser Samuels, Philip Yordan, Joseph Mankiewicz

Twentieth Century-Fox

Twentieth Century-Fox

1950

Intruder in the Dust

Clarence Brown

Ben Maddow

MGM

MGM

1949

Storm Warning

Stuart Heisler

Richard Brooks Warner Bros. and Daniel Fuchs

Warner Bros.

1951

Red Menace

R.G. Springsteen Albert DeMond

Republic Pictures

1949

Title

Director

Screenwriter

The Lawless

Joseph Losey

The Sound of Fury

Republic Pictures

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Lynching(s), Mobs, Mob Violence, and Race Riot(s)

3.5

(continued)

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Production Company

Distributor

Year

Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman, Victor Desny

Paramount

Paramount

1951

Joseph Losey

Leo Katcher and Norman Reilly Raine

Superior Pictures

Columbia Pictures

1951

Reign of Terror

Anthony Mann

Philip Yordan

Walter Wanger Productions

Eagle-Lion

1949

Park Row

Sam Fuller

Sam Fuller

Sam Fuller Productions

United Artists

1951

Border Incident

Anthony Mann

John Higgins

MGM

MGM

1949

Broken Arrow

Delmer Daves

Albert Maltz

Twentieth Century-Fox

Twentieth Century-Fox

1950

Stars in My Crown

Jacque Tourneur

Joe David Brown and Margaret Fitts

MGM

MGM

1950

The Reformer and the Redhead

Norman Panama

Melvin Frank

MGM

MGM

1950

Title

Director

Screenwriter

Ace in the Hole

Billy Wilder

M

It might be helpful to conceive of this cycle not as a genre with a fixed set of plots, character types, and iconography, but to think of it instead in the same way that James Naremore describes film noir. Drawing on the work of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, Naremore argues that genre categories like film noir don’t have necessary and sufficient characteristics, but that they “form complex radial structures, with vague boundaries and a core of influential members at the center.”6 The four films I discuss in Part Two may be considered the core members of the cycle, which form “complex radial structures” with the other films I’ve listed. Finally, considering that these movies function as metaphors about the political situation in Los Angeles and America, it’s important to understand the ideological backgrounds of the men who made these movies. Even with a brief glance at the chart, it’s striking how many names – and which companies – appear repeatedly. For the most part, these movies were written and directed by progressives, especially by liberal non-communists. By my rough estimate, about 3/5 of the screenwriters and directors who created these movies were liberal Democrats, about 1/5 were former or current Communists, and about 1/5 were registered Republicans.7 That any Republicans at all appear among this group may initially 18

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seem confusing, but partisan politics and racial ideology had a markedly different relationship in the late 1940s than they do today. Back then, the one party that harboured overt racists was the Democrats; every single Southern senator was a Democrat in 1950, for instance. Meanwhile, though the Republican Party favored big business and was adamantly opposed to communism and militant unionism, the majority of Republicans in the country were in favour of civil rights, at least in the most general way. It may surprise people today, but when the Republicans took control of the House and Senate in 1947 – for the first time in 18 years – one of their most important legislative goals was to pass a federal anti-lynching bill, which was subsequently filibustered – as it had been for more than 20 years – by Southern Democrats.8 That being said, there is a much more pronounced radical element among the filmmakers who made the movies I discuss in the second half of this book. In those four films, I estimate that five of the eight screenwriters and directors were liberal Democrats and three others were current or former Communists who were later blacklisted. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the percentage of Communists who worked on these four films is higher than it is for the cycle as a whole. After all, while liberals were in favour of unions and opposed to racism and reactionary newspapers, they tended, as in No Way Out, to explain race and class prejudice as a moral problem that beset individuals; Communists, on the other hand, were much more likely to explain race and class prejudice with materialist arguments about the structure of society itself.

Recurring Themes on American Screens Like other groups of related movies – whether we call them “genres” or “cycles,” whether defined by the people who made them or by latter-day critics – the cycle of movies of mob violence consists of a recurring collection of plot structures, themes, and character types. And because cycles are so much more ephemeral than genres – emerging to address one of the culture’s anxieties of the moment – an examination of these elements should reveal something about the cultural milieu of the precise moment that inspired the cycle’s birth.

1. False Accusations In these films, the victim of the violence is almost always a member of an oppressed group who is falsely accused of a crime by a reactionary newspaper or by the spread of rumours through an inherently conservative mass public. In No Way Out, for instance, a white working class hothead named Ray Biddle (Richard Widmark) accuses a young black doctor Luther Brooks (Sidney Poitier, in his first of many roles as his generation’s noble young black man) of killing his brother with a spinal tap. Rumours spread through the poor white section of town about the black doctor who murdered a white victim and soon, the white and black 19

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Figure 1.2. The potential for a lynching in Intruder in the Dust (1949), MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

communities are arming themselves for battle in the streets. In Intruder in the Dust, a black landowner named Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez, an often overlooked older parallel to Sidney Poitier’s standard character of the period) is falsely accused of murdering a white lumberman. An angry crowd gathers at the jailhouse and lingers while an unlikely interracial and intergenerational trio rushes to clear his name. The threat of the angry racist mob ready to lynch an innocent black man lends a sense of doom to the remainder of the film until the final scenes when Beauchamp is finally vindicated and the mob disperses. The theme of unjust persecution came easily to Hollywood progressives, since they saw themselves as the victims of false accusations as well. Conservatives at the time commonly attacked almost any liberal organization as a front for Communists. People who had worked for seemingly innocuous groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which raised funds for refugees, or the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP), which usually endorsed Democratic candidates, often found themselves tarred by right-wing rumourmongers as closet Stalinists. Major stars who’d joined the Committee for the First Amendment to protest HUAC in Washington, for instance, often had to defend themselves from scurrilous attacks from the right wing press making false or exaggerated accusations. William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, 20

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for example, criticized the CFA as “that extremely peculiar group which also includes John Howard Lawson, identified as the holder of a Communist Party card, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall.”9 Two months later, Bogart felt the need to read a prepared statement to the press while changing trains in Chicago, telling them that he wasn’t a Communist or a sympathizer: “I have absolutely no use for communism nor for anyone who serves that philosophy,” he said.10 The next year he went even further, publishing an article in Photoplay magazine entitled “I’m No Communist,” in which he half-heartedly defended his work with the CFA: “We may not have been very smart. . . may have been dopes in some people’s eyes, but we were American dopes!”11 The anti-communist hysteria had become so widespread that even Ronald Reagan and his future wife Nancy had to clear their names from such accusations. The two met when then Nancy Davis approached Reagan, in his capacity as president of the Screen Actors Guild, to help her clear her name, since she’d been confused with another actress, Nancy Lee Davis, who had defended the Hollywood Ten.12 Conservatives didn’t reserve their false accusations only for above-the-line talent, though. They were equally concerned with the growing militancy in the film industry’s trade unions. In the first years after the war, two unions battled for dominance in Hollywood: the radical Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) led by the militant progressive (but non-communist) Herb Sorrell, and the more moderate International Alliance for Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE, or “the IA”) led by the liberal anti-communist Roy Brewer. Though studio executives, legislative committees, and Roy Brewer himself often accused Herb Sorrell of being a Communist, there was never any evidence that this was the case. Indeed, as Gerald Horne points out, all available evidence should have made it fairly obvious that Sorrell disliked Communists almost as much as his antagonists did. Sorrell, for instance, called a strike in 1945 when the official Communist position was to oppose strikes, he willingly signed the Taft-Hartley pledge that he was not a communist, and he attacked fellow CSU members for their membership in the Party. He told a congressional committee in 1948 that “I don’t think I would live very long in Russia,” suggesting that the authorities there would probably shoot him.13 Nevertheless, studio executives and leaders of IATSE continued to refer to Sorrell as a Communist and the CSU strikes as communist-led. The namecalling mania reached its peak with the 1950 publication of the anti-communist tract Red Channels, which named 151 people in the entertainment industry as part of a subversive effort to spread Communist propaganda to the American people.14 By naming such mainstream liberals as Edward G. Robinson and Orson Welles, publications such as these would have been laughable had the political atmosphere not become so poisoned. As it was, Red Channels and its ilk only stoked the Left’s anxieties about becoming the victims of false accusations. The psychologists Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites saw the falsely accused protagonist as a central figure in the American psyche of the period. In their

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1950 book, Movies: A Psychological Study, they drew upon the Freudian scholarship seen as cutting edge at the time to draw a portrait of the nation’s subconscious by studying the mass products of the film industry. They based their study on a thorough analysis of almost every ‘A’ picture released in New York City with a contemporary urban setting made between 1945 and 1949.15 So while their years are not exactly concurrent with the present study, their analysis nonetheless provides a useful overview of the dominant themes of the era’s most popular mass entertainment. Adopting a methodology that academic film theorists would pick up decades later, Wolfenstein and Leites compared Hollywood films to the realm of dreams: “Day-dreams,” they wrote, “contain clues to deeper-lying, less articulate aspirations, fears and wishes.” But understanding the function of dreams wasn’t important exclusively for the therapeutic benefits it might bring individual clients. Such a method could play a larger role; it might provide a hermeneutic tool for the analysis of popular art forms, and thus of society itself, since daydreams, they wrote, “provide the starting point for literary and dramatic productions.” The daydreams produced by Hollywood often came to play a larger role in the lives of average Americans than their own daydreams did, they argued, since “where a group of people share a common culture, they are likely to have certain day-dreams in common.”16 Thus, by studying the daydreams manufactured by the Hollywood studios, they might begin to understand the unconscious aspirations, fears and wishes of American society as a whole. If movies functioned as America’s dreams, Americans in general seemed to be undergoing an intense bout of persecution anxiety, since Wolfenstein and Leites saw false accusations as one of the fundamental aspects of American cinema in the late 1940s. But while their study is accurate about Hollywood in general, the progressive political films in the cycle that I’ve defined represent false accusations quite differently than do most studio films of the era, one more example that progressives felt alienated from the main concerns of Hollywood filmmaking. In American film as a whole, it was almost always the protagonist who was falsely accused in a detective or mystery story; in the progressives’ films from this period, though, it is only rarely that the protagonist is the one falsely accused. More often than not, the falsely accused is an outsider, usually a member of some oppressed minority group. In The Lawless, for example, a Mexican-American teenager is falsely accused of a crime and it is the protagonist, a progressive white newspaperman, who must come to his defence. In The Underworld Story, a black maid is falsely accused of murder and it is the protagonist, an amoral white reporter, who creates a defence fund in her honour. In The Well, it is a working class white drifter who’s falsely accused of kidnapping a young black girl. In a movie without a true protagonist, it is the white and black communities who must heal the breach themselves. In the rare case in which the protagonist is the one who’s falsely accused, it’s because the protagonist is an oppressed minority himself – a black man

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in No Way Out, for instance, or an unemployed white labourer in The Sound of Fury. Also, in American films as a whole, the falsely accused protagonist usually played an active role in clearing his name. In progressive films, though, the protagonist who plays an active role in uncovering the truth was not the falsely accused person; instead, the protagonist was the liberal who felt it necessary to become politically engaged to defend the falsely accused minority victim. Or, in some rare cases, the falsely accused protagonist struggles alone and is never cleared, or the truth emerges almost by chance, as if the individual protagonist in a politicized environment has no control over his fate when matched up against the larger ideological forces of history. Taking their cue from the detective, crime, and mystery movie, Wolfenstein and Leites wrote that “the murderer is apt to be an alien and unknown person, the suspicion for whose crimes falls unjustly on the hero.”17 But in the progressives’ films, the source of violence is rarely an alien, unknown person. Rather, the violence emanates from the core of society itself. The white mobs almost always represent the mass of allegedly civilized citizenry as a whole. Most films in Wolfenstein and Leites’s study focus on individual protagonists and individual antagonists, but progressives were more concerned with larger social forces; thus the violent antagonist in these films is not an alien; the violent antagonist is the community itself, a community that can usually be read metaphorically as Hollywood, Los Angeles, or the United States. More often than not, the victim is the outsider; the alien is usually the victim of the violence. Since Wolfenstein and Leites studied only ‘A’ films from 1945–1949, it’s no wonder that the films they discuss focus more on the criminal than the political. Big studio films needed the largest possible audience to recoup their production costs, so they tended to avoid politically controversial themes, whereas crime films had been a staple for decades. And the first years after the war were still a hopeful time for the left. Thus, Wolfenstein and Leites do see nuances in the portrayals of the falsely accused protagonist in this period of great expectations: The falsely accused rarely clears himself entirely by his own efforts. In a number of cases, the hero, while resourceful and active, with a strong punch and great powers of recuperation, still needs the emotional and practical support of a loving woman at a crucial moment. In other cases, at the opposite end of the scale, the falsely accused is powerless to do anything on his own behalf. The hero may then be the inquisitive reporter or the scrupulous prosecuting attorney who becomes convinced of the innocence of the accused and undertakes to win his acquittal.18

But the hero of the final sentence, who played only a minor role in the genre films of 1945 to 1949 came to play a major role in the progressive political films made from 1949 to 1951, which tended to be produced on lower budgets and thus less beholden to the positive vision that the mass audience demanded. 23

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2. The Dissemination of the News: Newspapers and Rumourmongering In each film, the cause of violence almost always revolves around issues of race or class, but in each case the violence is instigated by either an irresponsible conservative press or wild rumours that spread in the absence of a responsible liberal press. The progressives’ obsession with reactionary newspapers stems from the specific politics of the newspaper industry in Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent, the nation at large. Most people in America in the 1940s took it for granted that newspapers took the side of big business; and most people in Los Angeles understood that the papers in their hometown were more conservative than in the nation as a whole. Newspapers have been a common subject and reporters have been a common character type throughout the classical Hollywood period. In almost every newspaper movie, the star reporter is a cynical, hard-bitten character who vacillates between an amoral desire to sensationalize stories for the thrill of the scoop and a moral desire to bring about justice by revealing the truth. Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson, whether in The Front Page (1931) or His Girl Friday (1940), manifest this inner conflict perhaps better than any other cinematic journalists of the era. These hardboiled newspapermen evolved with the new genre of film noir to give the postwar reporter a somewhat more existential edge to his cynicism. Matthew Ehrlich identifies two basic roles for journalists in Hollywood movies of the postwar world: “In the first, they were outcasts caught in the darkness, unable or unwilling to conform to prescribed social roles. In the second, they were conscientious reporters who ventured into the darkness only to try to solve a mystery (as Thompson had in Citizen Kane) or right a wrong.”19 The journalists in the cycle of movies on mob violence most often conform to this second type of journalist – perhaps not coincidentally, given Orson Welles’s liberal politics. They tend to be men who were once progressives or who have liberal instincts that have been suppressed by the ugly politics of the present day; they are not so much cynical as they are defeated. They were suffused in nostalgia for an idealized past when a committed journalist could expose the truth and right wrongs. For progressives, though, that past era was not some idealized, imagined world, but was a very specific yearning for the type of political collaboration on the left that defined the Popular Front era of the late 1930s and the WWII years. Amidst the political turmoil of the postwar era, they needed someone to remind them of their own innate goodness to turn them on the liberal path again. The power of the press to incite riots undergirds the primary conflict in most films about newspapers and reporters made at the time. Sam Fuller’s Park Row, for instance, with its 1880s New York milieu, may initially seem irrelevant to movies with a contemporary setting, but it manifests the same preoccupations with the power of the press as do other movies from the period. In the beginning of the film, a group of reporters complains about a local paper that hounded the authorities

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Figure 1.3. A mob attacks a printing press, the symbol of the First Amendment, in Sam Fuller’s Park Row (1952), Samuel Fuller Productions

into executing an innocent man in order to increase its circulation. When one enterprising editor starts a populist, muckraking daily, tensions flare. In the ensuing battle between his paper and a nasty scandal sheet, someone yells out, “Be careful about what you print! You’re liable to start a riot!” Sure enough, the scandal sheet hires a mob of goons to destroy the printing press of its rival. In a period when many on the left saw forces like the House Committee on Un-American Activities as lawless mobs bent on destroying the First Amendment, it’s no coincidence that this is just one of three films released in this brief period in which an angry mob attacks a printing press – the others being The Lawless, which I discuss in Chapter Five and The Underworld Story, which I discuss in Chapter Six. Other films repeated this causal relationship between the press and mob violence. In Storm Warning, for instance, a woman witnesses the Ku Klux Klan lynching a reporter who had denounced the group in the local paper. The woman can’t decide whether or not she should tell others what she saw, struggling with the same issues as reporters in other films in the cycle. A crusading prosecuting attorney played by Ronald Reagan eventually does her work for her, breaking up a meeting of robed Klansmen at the end of the film before they can punish the woman. In The Reformer and the Redhead, a liberal reporter comes to the defence of a woman unfairly accused of inciting a riot when she dares to criticize a conservative 25

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and corrupt local administration. Even in the single right-wing entry in the cycle, the relationship between the press and mass violence is clear. In Red Menace, the members of a Communist Party newspaper – called The Toilers, in an obvious reference to The Daily Worker – incite a riot by egging on veterans protesting realestate shortages. In movies without newspapers, false stories spread rapidly by rumour, and despite these progressive filmmakers’ ostensible ideological position, they still retain many of the class and regional prejudices common at the time: in these films, rumours spread through the poorest elements of society, whether black or white, usually in rural towns, often in the South. In The Well, for instance, a black girl goes missing and rumours spread among the local black population that a white drifter may have abducted and possibly killed her. The white community, meanwhile, spreads false stories about impending black violence, and soon the town erupts in a string of racially motivated melees in the streets, with roving bands of black and white mobs racing across the screen. Similarly, in No Way Out, both the residents of the town’s poor white neighbourhood and the residents of the black neighbourhood that whites refer to as “Niggertown” move towards an inevitably violent showdown due to the power of unchecked rumour. The responsible white and black elites who work at the hospital are unable to tame the impending violence partly because they don’t seem to have access to any responsible newspaper to fight the rumours and spread the truth.

3. Minority Victims In most of the movies, the victims are members of an oppressed group defended by the left – Negroes, Mexicans, or working class whites. Occasionally, the victim isn’t a person, but an institution, such as a newspaper office. The cycle portrays two different targets of mob violence because the films were released at a time when the targets of actual mob violence in America were shifting. Beginning in the 1950s, with the rise of the civil rights movement and the decrease in union activism, the nature of rioting changed. Union membership peaked in 1945, with 36 per cent of all non-agricultural workers in a union, an increase from 12 per cent in 1930,20 and 1946 saw the most strikes in the history of the country, before or since, with 1.8 million workers on strike.21 But by 1950, unions were reeling. Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over Truman’s veto, which allowed states to create “right-to-work” laws and required union leaders to sign anti-communist pledges. Union strikes dropped dramatically in the 1950s, leading to an America in which labour violence was mostly a memory of the past. Racial violence also changed. Before World War II, race riots usually involved white people attacking black people or owners hiring cops and thugs to attack their workers; in the 1960s and 1970s, riots more often involved black people attacking 26

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property. “Instead of flailing out at each other and committing acts of physical brutality,” Paul Gilje writes of the late civil rights era, “rioters attacked property that symbolized their grievances. . . . Rioting became a form of ritualized rebellion that minimized violence against persons.”22 The movies about mob violence release between 1949 and 1951 capture this exact turning point between the two eras and the two styles of racial violence. The victims – or potential victims – of mob violence in these films were still usually individuals, but occasionally the victim of the attack was often a building or institution that symbolized some grievance on the American political scene. In most cases where the movies portray individual people as the victims of violence, the victims have many of the same characteristics as did the actual victims in Los Angeles’s own instances of mob violence. Often, for instance, the victims lack the money for a legal defence. In Cy Endfield’s The Underworld Story, a conservative newspaper magnate falsely accuses his black maid of murdering his daughter-in-law, and a local newspaper starts a campaign to raise money for her defence. In The Lawless, a court-appointed lawyer urges a group of falsely accused Mexican-American teenagers to plead guilty in order to save them the time and money of going to trial. A crusading newspaperman eventually leads a campaign to raise funds for one teenager’s defence. In The Sound of Fury, the wife of an unemployed man falsely accused of murder is unable to find the money to hire a lawyer to successfully defend him from the unfair attacks of a sensationalist reporter. The movie victims’ persecution at the hands of a legal system in a capitalist economy reflected progressives’ views on the legal system in Los Angeles and in America. This ambivalence towards the legal system came from their observations of the more well-known politicized trials in Los Angeles; in those cases, they saw that oppressed groups could rarely afford fair legal representation on their own and also that the government often reverted to the practice of collective punishment by staging mass arrests and mass trials. In the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, for instance, the Los Angeles District Attorney put 22 Mexican-American teenagers on trial for the murder of one man and seventeen were convicted and sent to prison, largely because their families could not afford a good lawyer.23 After the union strikes against the Hollywood studios in 1946, the Los Angeles police arrested hundreds of union members and the Los Angeles District Attorney held a series of mass trials, charging them with violating a court order against picketing.24 Even Life Magazine, which went out of its way to avoid partisan positions, ridiculed the mass trials, running a two-page photographic spread that showed hundreds of unionists packed into an auditorium with the headline “Justice, Hollywood Style,” and claiming that “mass picketing leads to a grade-B courtroom comedy.”25 Hollywood progressives charged in the mass trials of union members felt a natural kinship with black people unfairly accused of crimes in the South. Most

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of the well-known instances of mob violence in the postwar South resulted in mass trials, and in many cases, progressives felt that liberal newspapers helped win the acquittal of falsely accused minorities. In Columbia, Tennessee, for example, 25 black men were arrested for shooting at white police officers. That trial and others like it gave progressives hope that activist newspapers could help unfairly accused minority victims. The Washington Post, for instance, assigned two of its star reporters to the case. Agnes Meyer, the wife of the publisher and the mother of Katherine Graham, wrote a series of articles entitled “The Untold Story of the Columbia, Tennessee Riots” and Vincent Sheean compared the prosecutors at the trial to the Nazis during World War II, who used the theory of collective responsibility. The NAACP published pamphlets about the case written by the radical cartoonist Oliver Harrington. These efforts, progressives noticed, helped win the fight for civil rights. Eventually, all but two of the men were found innocent and the others were given a retrial.26 In movies in which the violent mob did not pursue an individual target, the victim was in most cases a symbol of the First Amendment, which Hollywood progressives associated with both a generalized desire for a free press and more specifically the Committee for the First Amendment. At the 1947 hearings, the Hollywood Ten had organized their defence around the novel legal theory that they shouldn’t have to answer HUAC’s questions based on their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Because the First Amendment had become a unifying issue between liberals and radicals, both liberals and Communists represented institutional victims in their films. There are three films in the cycle in which a mob attacks a printing press: The Underworld Story was written by two communists, The Lawless was written by a liberal non-communist who was an active supporter of the Committee for the First Amendment, and Park Row was written by a liberal anti-communist with a personal history working as a newspaper reporter. Finally, since the resolution of a narrative’s main conflict usually represents a film’s ideological judgment about that conflict, there is a correlation between a filmmaker’s ideological position and a film’s narrative closure. That is, given that Communists suspected that they were about to be purged and liberals assumed that they would survive, Communists tended to make movies in which the minority victims were killed or defeated and liberals tended to make movies in which the minority victims were saved and reconciled with their former antagonists. The two most despondent films in the cycle are The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury. The former was co-written and directed by men who were blacklisted; the latter was written by a liberal and directed by the same blacklisted Communist from the earlier film. The most hopeful movies in the cycle – such as No Way Out and The Well, which both see hope for racial reconciliation – were both written and directed by liberal non-communists who had not been as active in progressive politics in the film community.

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Every film in the cycle shares another trait in that the mobs that attack are always depersonalized; that is, they never include any of the film’s main characters. The films’ protagonists exist, for the most part, in a world entirely separate from the mobs – until, that is, the mob suddenly emerges from the shadows of the community and attacks. The characters’ conflict is usually based on ideology, not on physical violence. The mob itself is generally the physical manifestation of the protagonists’ philosophical antagonists. In Broken Arrow, for instance, a group of white townsmen, minor characters at best, accuses Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) of conspiring with the Apaches until one faceless voice cries out, “String him up! What are you waiting for,” and an ugly mob with no discernible characters drags him onto the street to lynch him. In Reign of Terror, the braying mobs of the French Revolution represent the corporeal menace that might be an inevitable byproduct of democracy while the protagonists of the film act out a generic romantic spy thriller. In Storm Warning, the Ku Klux Klan mob is literally faceless, since the men are wearing white robes and hoods. But curiously, the KKK does not victimize black people or Jews in this film; instead it attacks only a liberal newspaper reporter. And in M , the mob that seems bent on lynching the protagonist in the final scene consists of low life criminals never seen before, representing the conservative forces – like HUAC – who want to condemn people without a fair trial. These films did occasionally depict a mass of armed militants in a somewhat positive light: both No Way Out and The Well, for instance, show black people picking up arms to defend themselves against their white aggressors. Such instances are rare, though, and only exist when the black masses must defend themselves from a conservative white mob. Ironically, their repeated emphasis that crowds were inherently violent and conservative was just one of many ways in which progressive filmmakers revealed their own ideological blind spots. The desire to fight racism and segregation was, of course, one of the defining characteristics of liberalism in this period. Nevertheless, the very fact that they lived in a segregated society made these white liberals unaware of how racial minorities themselves conceived of the issue of race. Ironically, but along the same lines, Hollywood progressives most often expressed attitudes about crowds that had most often been espoused by reactionaries. The theoretical consensus that crowds are inherently irrational, primitive, and violent had been the dominant conception of crowds from the late nineteenth century through the time of the Hollywood blacklist, but such a conception says more about the historical positions and ideological assumptions of the theorists than it does about any essential nature of crowds. The notion that crowds are inherently unthinking mobs originated with the first internationally famous theorist on crowds, Gustave Le Bon, a French monarchist of the Third Republic, whose distaste for democracy and the masses – not any rigorous observation of actual phenomena – informed

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4. Angry Crowds

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his opinions on crowds. His book La psychologie des foules – first published in 1895 and translated into English the next year as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – became a best seller in France and was translated into more than a dozen languages.27 Le Bon’s importance as a thinker on crowds was firmly augmented in 1921 when Freud devoted the first chapter of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to an explanation – and an uncritical embrace – of what he called “Le Bon’s deservedly famous work.”28 This attitude, ironically, came to dominate intellectual thought on the masses in America during the first half of the twentieth century. The influence of Freud and the University of Chicago sociologists who popularized Le Bon’s work in America was so profound, in fact, that by 1954, psychologist Gordon Allport claimed that Le Bon’s book was the single most influential work in social psychology from the first half of the twentieth century.29 A writer with more progressive inclinations than Le Bon might have observed audiences at fairgrounds, neighbours milling at the scene of an accident, or oppressed minorities gathering to protest police violence, for instance, and found that though they each might have formed instantaneously, they might still be described as rational, non-violent, and productive. Given the arbitrariness of the dominant theoretical conception of crowds and given the anti-revolutionary bent of some of its authors, it’s ironic that Hollywood’s progressive filmmakers shared the conservative conception of crowds as innately ignorant and violent with other traditional crowd theorists like Le Bon, Freud, and Elias Canetti before them.30 It wasn’t until the 1960s that revisionist historians – such as the historian George Rud´e, the literary critic Nicolaus Mills, and the sociologist Clark McPhail – began to see the phenomenon of the crowd more complexly and more positively. Taking a more Marxist perspective, these revisionist historians most often see the crowd as an enabling voice for the oppressed masses. Significantly, though, both traditional and revisionist crowd theorists do share at least one important belief: theorists from both camps often emphasize the important role that the cultural elites who control the mass media can play in shaping the behaviour of the masses. Both traditionalists and revisionists see newspapers as having an almost hypnotic power to either incite or deter the potential violence in crowds. Part of the reason that Hollywood progressives didn’t display a more Marxist perspective on crowds was because the groups they saw fighting for liberal causes in Los Angeles were almost never successful in achieving their political goals. It’s important to keep in mind that one of the primary reasons leftists made movies about angry crowds was because virtually every political debate in Hollywood in the 1940s was fought not between individuals, but between collective entities. The political debate about communism in the film industry was fought between HUAC on one side with the Hollywood Ten and their allies, the Committee for the First Amendment, on the other side. The struggle over unionism in Hollywood was fought with physical altercations on the streets between the militant Conference of Studio Unions on the one side and the Hollywood studios with their paid

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henchmen, the Los Angeles Police Department, and their IATSE compatriots on the other. Arguments about race in Los Angeles were played out between roving mobs of white servicemen on the one hand and the Mexican Zoot Suiters they attacked on the other. It was not a period defined by individual leadership; people in Hollywood understood that there was strength in numbers. The leading ideological conflicts in Hollywood during the 1940s were fought between an alphabet soup of organizations: HICCASP, IATSE and the CSU, the MPA (the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals), and the SWG (the Screen Writers Guild), to name just a few. Significantly, these groups weren’t merely arguing over ideas; too often – as with the Mexican Zoot Suiters or the strikers with the Conference of Studio Unions – the ideological disagreements turned into physical confrontations on the streets. In the case of the CSU, they fought in front of the entrances of several of the major studios. When they weren’t beating their opponents on the streets, conservatives used the legal system to send their opponents to jail – as with the Sleepy Lagoon defendants in 1943 or the Hollywood Ten in 1950. Given their political climate, it’s not surprising that the movies of Hollywood progressives portrayed the traditionalist conception of crowds, unwittingly manifesting many aspects of the philosophy of Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, and Elias Canetti. The masses who gathered in the progressive films of the late 1940s and early 1950s were invariably brutish and conservative, but unlike the progressive conception of the actual political situation in America, the conservative mobs in these films didn’t always win; the progressives made these films in some part – consciously or unconsciously – to rally the left for other battles in a war they hoped had not yet been lost.

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Chapter 2 Independent Filmmaking and the Disintegration of the Popular Front

Postwar Filmmaking: Social Realism in Hollywood The fact that progressive filmmakers were able to make such acute political movies on controversial themes was only possible because of the changes to the economic structure of the film industry in the 1940s that both catalyzed independent film production and gave those independent producers more freedom than they had had in previous decades. This changing business model for independent filmmaking in Hollywood emerged from the confluence of a few important changes in postwar film culture. First, audience tastes had changed. After the ravages of war, people now wanted to see more serious, adult pictures. Second, due to a variety of economic factors beyond the control of the Hollywood studios – such as government tax policy and the change in bank lending practices – most people in the film industry in the immediate postwar era thought it was an especially auspicious time for independent production companies. These factors intensified and converged in such a way that the end of the decade was an especially propitious time for liberal filmmakers dealing with the issues of race and class. In 1949, three movies on negro prejudice – Home of the Brave, Pinky, and Lost Boundaries – did surprisingly well at the box office. Their success became one of the leading stories of the year, thus creating an economic incentive for other producers to exploit the suddenly profitable themes of race and class prejudice. At the same time, with the legal cases of the Hollywood Ten coming to a dispiriting conclusion in 1950, the mood among progressives in Hollywood had soured. The resolution of the case was not just a threat to the radicals in the film community who now suspected that they too would finally be blacklisted in the coming year, but also a threat to liberals, since it meant that the era of leftist collaboration of the Popular Front era was finally coming to a definitive end. 1950, it seemed, would see the beginning of 32

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a more conservative era defined by what later historians would call the Cold War Consensus, a tacit agreement between liberals and conservatives on the need to join forces to defeat communism, which had the consequence of eliminating the most progressive voices from the political sphere. These converging factors – the increasing demand for independent production, the audience’s fascination with movies about racial prejudice in 1949, and the seeming inevitability of a final imposition of the blacklist – all made the movies on political and social themes released in 1950 and 1951 much more incisive, but also more despairing than the political films of the preceding years. With its sudden birth and swift death brought on by the specific social concerns of its time, the movies about violent crowds released around 1950 followed the same evolution as do most movie cycles. In her book American Film Cycles, Amanda Ann Klein delineates the differences between a cycle and a genre. Whereas genres like westerns, the musical, and the gangster film remain popular for decades, evolving along with society’s changing mores, cycles are impermanent and ephemeral. They emerge suddenly – seemingly out of nowhere – when one “originary film” touches a chord related to some previously taboo social anxiety and is successful at the box office. This success inspires the production of several other films on the same theme, which producers, directors, and screenwriters approach suddenly, usually unaware that other filmmaking teams are exploring the same waters. These cycles then die out soon after when the most recent film in the cycle is unsuccessful at the box office, demonstrating that society’s curiosity about the previously unspeakable subject has now been sated and once again became taboo to protect society from having to deal with what is most likely an irresolvable problem. Not surprisingly, then, Klein finds that cycles – much more so than genres – tend to focus on people on the fringes of society, such as the so-called “dead end kids” of the 1930s, juvenile delinquents of the 1950s, and urban African-Americans in the 1990s. Because of their controversial subject matter and their transience, cycles often explore topics like sex, race and violence in the sensationalist style of the exploitation film.”1 The cycle of movies on violent crowds conforms to Klein’s analysis in every way, except that there is one significant difference: while the subject of race riots, mob violence, and lynchings did lend itself to sensationalist treatment, the issue of racial prejudice was also considered to be a subject that should be treated in a dignified manner in the public sphere. Thus, while these films do draw on the sensationalist tropes of low-budget independent cinema, they simultaneously draw on the dominant style of what critics at the time called “quality pictures” and what we now might call the “art film.” In the first years after the war, Hollywood filmmaking turned decisively towards pictures that dealt with serious, adult subject matter that were shot in a new, realistic style. The cinematographer John Alton described the overriding feeling in the postwar years: “during the war,” he wrote in his manual Painting with Light, “millions of soldiers were sent to various locations to shoot, but not motion

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pictures. These men knew a real London fog, were disappointed in the women of the jungle, and recognized Rio, Budapest, or Cairo when they saw them on the screen. No more will they buy Hollywood-made Africa.”2 People in the film industry interested in the history of cinematographic style also attributed a new emphasis on “documentary realism” to the effects of the war. In the magazine American Cinematographer, Joseph Noble wrote about the new realism that was infecting fiction feature filmmaking: In the late 1930s, new demands were being made on the cinema. The newsreel was becoming increasingly more popular. . . . The Second World War gave great impetus to this style of film making and the result has come to be known as the ‘documentary film. . . .’ These tendencies of documentary films are reflected in many present day feature productions similar to de Rochemont’s The House on 92nd Street.”3

Writers frequently credited Louis de Rochemont as the man most responsible for popularizing documentary realism in Hollywood. de Rochemont had produced The March of Time newsreels for years, and at the end of the war he began producing fiction features with The House on 92nd Street in 1945 and 13 Rue Madeleine and Boomerang! in 1947. The American Cinematographer’s leading critic, Herb Lightman, heralded these three films – all released by Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox – as a new form of motion picture that he called “news dramas,” writing that “the success of the three news dramas which have thus far applied the documentary style to feature films has inspired Twentieth Century-Fox to use the technique on strictly fictional themes as well. There are several such stories on the current schedule.”4 It’s no surprise that Darryl Zanuck, who’d been interested in making movies ripped from the headlines ever since he helped create the gangster cycle as head of production at Warners in the early 1930s, would be the one studio executive who worked hardest at marrying the new realist style with important political issues of the time. Zanuck was widely regarded among liberals in the film industry as the one studio executive who was most interested in making serious dramas about important contemporary issues; he was the only executive, for instance, invited to speak at the Writers Congress of 1943, a conference for intellectuals, writers, and film artists that convened in Los Angeles.5 In his talk, he summed up the attitude of the liberal community in Hollywood – and the policies of Twentieth Century-Fox in the immediate postwar era – when he asked rhetorically, “is it possible to make pictures which have purpose and significance and yet show a proper return at the box office? I believe it is.” He continued by congratulating himself for some of the films that his own company had produced, such as Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, and applauded himself for his upcoming Wilson, which he hoped would inspire a new international order that had failed when the United States 34

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Senate refused to ratify the Covenant of the League of Nations back in 1919. “This is why I call upon writers to lead the way,” he declaimed. “If you have something worth while to say, dress it in the glittering robes of entertainment and you will find a ready market. . . . No producer who is worthy of the name will reject entertainment, and without entertainment no propaganda film is worth a dime.”6 Zanuck was instrumental in popularizing movies that dealt with important social and political issues. In 1947, he produced Gentleman’s Agreement around the same time that RKO released Crossfire, produced by a team that included communists Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk and other leftists like John Paxton. These two films, the first major Hollywood productions to examine anti-Semitism, were successful with critics and at the box office: Gentleman’s Agreement, in fact, was Twentieth Century-Fox’s top grossing film in 1948.7 More than any other films, they convinced the industry that audiences were willing and eager to see pictures that dealt with more overtly political themes. While these two became the most celebrated examples of the new trend for socially-engaged realist films, the industry as a whole was dealing with social issues much more than it had in the previous decade. In her comprehensive study of the movies released during the late 1940s and early 1950s, for instance, Dorothy Jones found that films that dealt with social and psychological issues reached its all-time peak in the second half of 1947, when “28 per cent of the industry product was being devoted to social theme movies.”8 Not surprisingly, the progressive filmmakers who had wanted to tackle “real” issues for years were especially attracted to the new realistic style. Communist directors and screenwriters worked on a series of genre films that emphasized the location shooting and low-key lighting of the new stylistic trend, collaborating on movies such as Champion, The Naked City, Body and Soul, and Force of Evil throughout the late 1940s. Though the Academy Awards have never had much of a track record for honouring movies with lasting reputations, they do serve as a good barometer of how the film industry itself defined the “quality picture” at the time. In this sense, social realist films about race, ethnicity, and class were the one type of movie that the film industry championed the most enthusiastically in the immediate postwar era. More often than not in the late 1940s, the Academy awarded movies about contemporary political and social issues with Best Picture honors. The Best Years of Our Lives, an investigation into the troubles facing returning veterans, won in 1947; Gentleman’s Agreement beat out Crossfire in 1948; and All the King’s Men, loosely based on the life of populist politician Huey Long – written and directed by a former communist – won in 1950. Indeed, communists performed exceptionally well at the Academy Awards ceremony: Crossfire and Body and Soul, each produced by teams of communists, were both nominated for the Best Picture award. Other Party members such as Albert Maltz, Carl Foreman, and John Howard Lawson, the de facto boss of the communists in the film community, also received screenwriting nominations for their work on movies such as Pride of the Marines, The Men, and

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Smash Up: The Story of a Woman. Movies about racial prejudice were especially successful at the awards ceremony. A Medal for Benny, about Mexican-Americans; Broken Arrow, about Apaches; The Quiet One, an independent feature about an emotionally disturbed black child; Go for Broke!, about Japanese-American soldiers during the war; Pinky, about a black woman conflicted about passing for white; and No Way Out and The Well, which were both about a black-and-white race riot, all received nominations for writing awards. But the admiration for progressive films in the realist vein was so pervasive that Academy voters didn’t restrict themselves to native shores. In the years before the Academy offered an award for best foreign-language film, Italian Neo-Realist films received nominations for the same screenwriting awards as the American realist films almost every year in this period, including Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in 1947, de Sica’s Shoeshine in 1948, Rossellini’s Paisan and De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves in 1950, and Giuseppe de Santis’s Bitter Rice in 1951. Nevertheless, after the initial success of Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947, the Hollywood studios held off on producing any other movies about prejudice throughout most of 1948. This year-long interregnum was precipitated because of the coincidental timing of these movies’ release. RKO released Crossfire in July and Twentieth Century-Fox released Gentleman’s Agreement in November, just two weeks after the House Committee on Un-American Activities held its first hearings into the Communist influence in Hollywood. Those hearings had focused largely on the relationship between Communist activity in Hollywood and the political content of the industry’s screenplays. But at the end of 1947, it wasn’t clear how the investigations would play out. Many industry professionals assumed that the hearings would blow over. After all, the congressman Martin Dies – as the head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities – had been investigating communists in the film industry as early as 1937 and Jack Tenney – as head of the California Assembly’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities Committee – had been running similar investigations since 1941 without any lasting repercussions to the film industry. But in November, at the WaldorfAstoria Hotel in New York, the major studio executives announced that they would no longer hire communists. They fired the Hollywood Ten, but made no move to fire any of the other two or three hundred other people working in the film industry with ties to the communist party. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Ten were appealing their contempt citations in the courts, and many liberals were hopeful about the eventual outcome, which would probably take years to resolve. After all, Roosevelt had eventually overcome his conservative antagonists on the Supreme Court through attrition rather than through any court-packing scheme: by 1948, all nine members of the Supreme Court were Roosevelt appointees. This more liberal court, the thinking went, might eventually overrule the Hollywood Ten’s contempt citations and thus bring an end to the Red Scare in Hollywood.9 The studios waited out 1948 to see which way the political winds would blow. But

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President Truman’s re-election is making a decided difference in what American audiences will see on their theatre screens during the next four years. The election of last November has turned Hollywood production trends away from a steady diet of semi-documentary mellers, innocuous romance and music biogs towards inclusion in studio slates of pictures smacking of “social significance.”13

INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE POPULAR FRONT

the fact that Hollywood had backed off of its liberal agenda of 1947 was obvious to many. Thurgood Marshall told a meeting of the leftist Progressive Citizens of America soon after the Waldorf Agreement that “every movie script has been reexamined and every instance in which Negroes have appeared in a decent light or called Mr. or Mrs. have been struck out.”10 As the 1948 presidential election kicked off, most observers assumed that because Truman was being challenged by two candidates from within his own party – former Vice President Henry Wallace from the left and Senator Strom Thurmond representing the segregationist South for the Dixiecrats – the Republican nominee, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, was a shoe-in to win.11 Truman’s unexpected victory in the November 1948 election seems to have temporarily alleviated much of the political anxiety in Hollywood. Democrats had also regained control of the Senate and House of Representatives, and two of the three most active members of the HUAC subcommittee that conducted the October hearings were defeated for re-election.12 A front page Variety headline in January 1949 predicted that the election results augured a dramatic political and aesthetic shift: “Truman ‘Rewrites’ H’wood Scripting as Pix Lean to Social Significance,” the paper said. The opening paragraph explained the industry’s new thinking:

Variety proved to be right. Just two months after the election, the studios began planning the first films in the cycle of movies of mass violence. Darryl Zanuck outbid other studios for Lesser Samuel’s No Way Out script for the “virtually fabulous” price of $87,000. “Bert Bloch, 20th -Fox’s story editor,” Variety claimed, “declared flatly in New York this week that the yarn would not have been purchased by the company six months ago.”14 Zanuck would continue to purchase material about controversial themes more than any other executive, simultaneously putting into production films like The Snake Pit, about a woman suffering from mental illness, and Pinky, about racial passing in the South. The only other executive to explore serious topics in this period was Dore Schary, perhaps the only executive known for his liberal politics, who had approved the Crossfire project while at RKO and who greenlighted such films as Intruder in the Dust and Battleground after he moved to MGM. Nevertheless, the majority of the major studios were still wary of making any movie that might be deemed controversial. Because of this, the single most important factor that helped spur progressive political filmmaking in the late 37

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1940s was the dramatic increase in independent production outside of the studio system. The late 1940s provided more opportunities – and more freedom – for independent production than at any time since the consolidation of the studio system and the birth of the talkies. “During the immediate postwar period,” the historian Thomas Schatz says, “independents enjoyed tremendous success. Never had industry conditions been better suited to their interests, and never had so many filmmakers sought commercial and creative autonomy.”15

Postwar Independent Production

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Several interrelated economic factors created an incentive for the increase in independent production in the immediate postwar period. In the 1930s, the major studios had controlled the American film industry largely through a system of collusive business practices referred to as block-booking, blind-bidding, and the run-clearance system. With block-booking, the studios would rent their product only in large blocks of movies – such as an entire year’s output; independent theatre owners had to buy all or none of them. With the practice of blind-bidding, the studios forced theatres to rent these blocks of films before they were able to watch them. And with the run-clearance system, the studios would screen the movies they had produced during their initial run only in the theatres that they owned and would then allow independent theatres to play them later only on a schedule that they themselves determined. But, beginning with a Supreme Court consent decree in 1940 and continuing with other court cases in 1946 and 1947, the studios’ ability to use the practices of block-booking, blind-bidding, and the run-clearance system had been almost entirely eliminated.16 Thus, by 1948, the studios could no longer produce mediocre movies and force independent theatre owners to rent them sight unseen; now they had an economic incentive to make fewer and better pictures. The results were dramatic: while the major studios had released 379 films in 1941, they only released about 240 films a year between 1945 and 1949.17 But the box office demand for movies was just as high at the end of the decade as it was at the beginning. While the five biggest studios owned 15 per cent of the movie theatres in the country, 85 per cent of movie theatres in the United States were still independently owned, and these independent theatres still had a large demand for movies that the major studios were no longer supplying.18 Independent film production companies thus had an incentive to increase production to meet this demand. Another important economic factor that led to the increase in independent production in the postwar period was the changing tax code. The federal government modified the tax code in the early 1940s in order to raise revenue for the war effort, setting the top marginal tax rate on income at 80 per cent and the top tax rate on capital gains at only 25 per cent. Independent producers like Samuel Goldwyn and stars like James Cagney, Errol Flynn, and Bette Davis soon realized that they had an incentive to earn their money in the form of capital gains rather than in the form of wages, so they began to create what were called “collapsible corporations,”

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companies created for the sole purposes of making just one movie. Instead of paying themselves a salary, they earned their money through profits in that company, thus being able to tax their earnings at the capital gains rate of 25 per cent rather than the top income rate of 80 per cent.19 Though the Bureau of Internal Revenue tried throughout the late 1940s to clamp down on these collapsible corporations, they were only partially successful. In 1949, Variety reported that the government was proving to be incapable of making a legal case that threatened the existence of these so-called “collapsible corporations.”20 In 1950, the government eventually gave up trying to retroactively get back taxes on these earnings “because after four years of trying,” Variety reported, “the Bureau of Internal Revenue has not been able to find a way to take a single case into court and collect full income tax.”21 The government, in fact, was only able to completely eliminate this tax loophole for future productions when Congress passed changes to the tax code in 1950, which didn’t take effect until the following year.22 These changes in the tax code had a dramatic effect in Hollywood: between just 1945 and 1947, for instance, the number of independent production companies in Hollywood increased by 250 per cent.23 These independent production companies also flourished because the economic conditions in the industry at the time looked especially auspicious for their future existence. While some historians depict the late 1940s as the beginning of the end of classical Hollywood, the film industry itself in 1949 and 1950 was quite optimistic about its future. Many historians point to three major factors that led to the eventual demise of the classical studio system: the decline in box office revenues that had reached a peak in 1946 but which plummeted until 1968; the Paramount Decree of 1948, which forced the major film companies to sell their movie theatre chains, breaking up the vertical integration of the film industry; and the rising popularity of television. But in 1949, the industry was not worried about the divorcement of its theatre holdings, did not believe that the declining postwar box office marked a long-term trend, and was not concerned about the incursion of television. Though the industry was worried about falling attendance, by 1949 most experts believed that the box office decline was over and that revenues would increase in the future. The average audience for A pictures had fallen by almost 20 per cent in the three years since the peak of attendance in 1946, but box office revenues were still much higher than at any time in the 1930s.24 In a study of historical box office revenues conducted in 1950, for instance, Variety showed that 53 of the 70 alltime top-grossing films had been released between 1945 and 1949.25 Similarly, the major studios did not seem to think that the Paramount Decree would make much difference to their business. The Decree, after all, did not come out of nowhere: the Justice Department had been trying to break up the movie business oligopoly since the late 1930s, and a 1940 consent decree and a few other court cases throughout the decade had already reshaped the way the industry ran its affairs. Ironically, these cases had not hurt the industry. On the contrary, film executives couldn’t help but notice that business had improved dramatically after the 1940 consent decree: revenues for the eight major studios had increased

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80 per cent between 1940 and 1948 and profits had more than doubled over the same period.26 So when the Paramount Decree was announced in 1948, the studios were not that worried. A front-page article in Variety summarized the common view among executives: Consent decrees currently winding up the anti-trust actions against major companies are, in the opinion of many trade observers, anti-climactic. Final divorcement of theatres from the production-distribution end of the business is seen as of relatively minor importance to the overall changes that have resulted in the industry since the Dept. of Justice filed its monopoly suit 11 years ago.27

If anything, the industry emphasized the benefits that divorcement would bring, especially for independent production. Republic Pictures president Herbert Yates, for instance, told his company’s stockholders that he was “highly optimistic that divorcement spells better days for all indies” since it would give independent companies a greater chance to compete with the majors for screens in first run houses, giving them an economic incentive to make more expensive “quality pictures” for a more mature audience.28 In the same vein, the film industry wasn’t worried that television would cut into its revenues. Radio had come along two decades earlier and most people felt that it hadn’t hurt business, but had instead helped create new stars and new audiences. Some of the biggest stars of the 1940s, after all – Hope and Crosby, for instance, or Abbott and Costello – were just as popular on radio as they were on the big screen. In 1949, less than 5 per cent of American homes had a television set and it wasn’t yet clear that the majority of homes ever would own one.29 In 1949, in fact, George Gallup reported that television was cutting into the film theatre box office by only 1 per cent.30 The economic conditions of the late 1940s were promising for independent producers in general, but there were other factors involving the financing of independent films that, ironically, made those years especially auspicious for companies outside the studio system that wanted to make movies about controversial themes. Independent production had flourished in the early 1940s partly because banks had increased the number of loans they gave to independent producers, but with the decrease in attendance in 1947 and 1948, many banks stopped lending to the smaller production companies as freely as they had immediately after the war. Throughout the decade, most banks had been willing to advance about 60 per cent of the proposed production costs for most independent films, since they believed that they were assured of earning at least that much money back in the end. But with the postwar downturn, leading lenders to the film industry such as Bank of America in San Francisco and Chemical Bank in New York now insisted that producers guarantee 100 per cent of the production costs.31 Bank of America had always been the most active lender to the industry, and it increased its loans after the war, 40

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financing about 50 independent productions per year in 1947 and 1948. But by the middle of 1948, the bank began to cut back on its lending, and other banks followed suit.32 Bank of America’s retreat from independent financing in 1949, though, had unforeseen positive consequences – both political and aesthetic – for progressive filmmakers. Though most people assume that independent production companies had more artistic freedom than the major studios, the opposite may have been the case. Independents’ greater reliance on banks for financing necessarily made them more cautious. Though critics occasionally like to disparage the tastes of studio heads like Barney Balaban or Louis B. Mayer, given their background in exhibition, even men like these had a more intimate involvement with the art of the cinema than did most bankers. In 1948, for instance, George Yousling of Security First National Bank in Los Angeles explained the lending policies of most banks involved with the film industry. In order to provide money to an independent production, he said, the bank had to first approve both the story and the script. He suggested that the very first question that the bank should ask of any proposed script was, “Is it of an extremely controversial nature from the religious, racial, or ideological points of view?”33 This ideological rigidity was essential. Every bank insisted that the final screenplay had to be approved by the Production Code Administration before any money would be made available to a producer. In a 1949 article that articulated the economics of the film industry, Fortune magazine articulated the feeling within the industry: “Paradoxically,” the magazine observed, “it is not generally the independent who is in a position to experiment, but the old conservative major studios.”34 Changes in financing in 1949, though, broke the banks’ ideological control by breaking their economic dominance over lending to independents. By mid-1949, independent producers thought that they had solved their problems with bank financing by finding production money from outside the banking system. Stanley Kramer, for instance, emerged that year as one of the most important independent producers in the industry with two hits that dealt with social themes from a liberal perspective: Champion, starring Kirk Douglas, about a working class boxer, and Home of the Brave, one of the first big-budget films about anti-Negro prejudice. Significantly, Kramer raised money for both movies from outside the traditional system: in both cases from a wealthy department store owner named John Stillman. Stillman provided the money under only one stipulation: that Kramer hire his son Robert as his assistant producer. Another noted outside producer to emerge in the late 1940s was an exhibitor named Harry Popkin, who owned a small chain of theatres in southern California, many of which catered to a largely AfricanAmerican audience. He had produced a series of moderately successful race movies with his company Million Dollar Productions in the late 1930s, and in 1948 he formed a new company called Cardinal Pictures to finance a series of low-budget genre pictures – such as Impact (1948) and D.O.A. (1950) – that might appeal

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to a larger audience.35 The initial success of these outsiders – John Stillman and his son Robert, and Harry Popkin and his brother Leo – would prove to be enormously important for progressive filmmaker who wanted to make political movies on controversial themes: Robert Stillman, for instance, started his own production company, which eventually produced The Sound of Fury, and Harry Popkin went on to produce The Well, co-written and co-directed by his brother Leo. The most significant fact about outsider producers like Stillman and Popkin was that they understood instinctively that they needed to gamble. Like other more well-established outside producers like David Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, who didn’t have the regular revenues that a theatre chain provided, they knew that their best strategy was to strive for one huge box office success. Thus, a controversial subject matter gave them an exploitation angle that they hoped might make a bigger splash than any traditional genre fare. So, partly from eager audacity and partly out of naivet´e, producers like Stillman and Popkin were much more willing than the Bank of America to ignore the dictates of the PCA, one reason that the second wave of the cycle of movies on mass violence released in 1950 and 1951 was much more daring than the movies that had preceded it. While independents needed financing to produce a picture, it was equally important to find a company that was willing to distribute the final product, which is why United Artists – which distributed Stillman and Popkin productions like The Sound of Fury and The Well – was so important to progressive filmmakers in this period. United Artists had struggled throughout most of its existence, but significantly for political filmmakers in the postwar era, its fortunes had turned for the better suddenly in 1949. Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks had founded the company in 1919 to distribute their own independently-financed pictures. By the 1940s, UA was unique among the eight leading corporations that controlled the film industry in that it didn’t own production facilities or theatres; it was merely a distributor. Thus, it was dependent on independents to provide it with product. Its profitability had surged and waned over the years, but by early 1950, Variety was claiming that “United Artists [is] in the best production position of its 31-year history.”36 Perhaps the biggest reason that United Artists was doing so much better at the end of the decade was because of the box office success of socially conscious films that it distributed in 1949: Stanley Kramer’s Champion and Home of the Brave, each of which had been financed by John Stillman.37 The company was quick to take note; given the changes in the types of movies that postwar audiences were responding to, Variety observed that “the emphasis from here on in [for UA] will be on quality of product.”38 The emphasis on “quality product” is especially important because by 1949 the industry was increasingly associating quality films with adult topics. And at that time, most people still considered United Artists to be the Tiffany of the independent distributors, handling a better class of material than other small

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distributors like Republic, Film Classics, and Eagle-Lion, so it was able to attract the best “quality pictures” that independents were producing.39 Though the tax code, the consent decrees, and changes in banking policy all played an important role in the evolution of independent production in the immediate postwar years, the single most important factor that influenced the development of political films about violent crowds in 1950 was the enormous box office success in 1949 of three movies that dealt with racial themes: Home of the Brave, Pinky, and Lost Boundaries. One of the most important stories in the trade press in 1949 was the enormous and surprising success at the box office of what Variety dubbed simply “Negro Pix.” In 1949, Hollywood released four movies that dealt with racial prejudice: Twentieth Century-Fox’s Pinky; Stanley Kramer’s Home of the Brave, released through United Artists; Louis de Rochemont’s Lost Boundaries, released through Film Classics; and MGM’s Intruder in the Dust. Businessmen in Hollywood were struck by the wild success of these movies: the first three of these four films became the single biggest money-maker of the year for both the companies that produced and distributed the picture; and even though Intruder in the Dust was the only of these that failed to be a major hit, it too earned good revenues in its theatrical release.40 Throughout 1949, the trade press devoted an enormous amount of attention to this cycle of message movies about AfricanAmericans. Variety often ran updates about the surprising success of these films – with headlines like “‘Brave’s Boff Biz” or simply “Pinky Terrif” – following them much more carefully than it did most other movies that eventually outpaced them at the year-end box office.41 The movie companies themselves pumped up the story, taking out full-page or even two-page ads for Pinky and Home of the Brave in the trade press. At the end of the year, Variety summed up the new thinking in the film industry: “If the 1949 list of top-grossers points up anything, it is the fact that the old shibboleths and taboos that have predominated in the industry regarding subject matter have gone by the board. Two types of formerly dubious subjects are prominent on the list – they are Negro discrimination and tough war pix.”42 Though movies about racial prejudice received the most attention, it was clear that social message movies with a progressive agenda were doing extraordinarily well. Other surprising box office successes of the year included Stanley Kramer’s Champion and Twentieth Century-Fox’s Snake Pit, about the previously taboo subject of mental illness. And it was clear as well that message movies were much more successful at the box office when that message was a liberal one. Given the media sensation around the HUAC hearings in 1947, it’s not surprising that the studios released a cycle of anti-communist films from 1948 through 1950. But these movies – such as Twentieth Century-Fox’s Iron Curtain (William Wellman, 1948), Republic’s The Red Menace (R.G. Springsteen, 1949), and MGM’s The Red Danube (George Sidney, 1949) – did not do well with audiences, and no one was predicting that anyone would make any more of them. Even Howard Hughes at

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RKO could sense the way the wind was blowing, and changed the title of I Was Married to a Communist to the much less political The Woman on Pier 13. Despite the modest box office returns for Intruder in the Dust, the fourth of the so-called Negro Pix, the cycle didn’t seem entirely played out yet. Robert J. O’Donnell, the head of a large theatre circuit based mostly in Texas, argued that each of the Negro pix did surprisingly well even in the Deep South and that movie audiences wanted more serious, adult fare.43 Producers heeded advice like his, and more companies prepared to produce race problem pictures and social message movies with adult themes. Darryl Zanuck, for instance, was still working on No Way Out at Twentieth Century-Fox. Dore Schary at MGM started production on a movie about Japanese-American soldiers that would become Go for Broke! In 1949, agent-producer Charles Feldman had acquired the rights to the musical Finian’s Rainbow, a Broadway hit with a subplot about a racist Southern senator who is magically transformed into a black man, written by the noted liberal Yip Harburg. In early 1950, Feldman acquired the screen rights to another serious product, John Wexley’s 1934 play They Shall Not Die, about the Scottsboro case of 1931, in which nine black teenagers had been accused of raping a white woman. That same month, Eagle-Lion purchased the distribution rights for The Jackie Robinson Story, starring Jackie Robinson as himself, and two months later the Korda brothers signed Canada Lee to star in Cry the Beloved Country. The intense interest in social message movies about racial prejudice in 1949 replicated the enormous and surprising success of the two movies made about anti-Semitism released in 1947. If not for the success of movies like Pinky, Home of the Brave, and Lost Boundaries, movies like The Lawless, The Underworld Story, The Sound of Fury, and The Well that combined the style and serious moral purpose of quality pictures with the tendentious topicality of exploitation flicks most likely never would have been made.

Postwar Politics: The Death of the Popular Front and the Emergence of the Cold War Consensus While Hollywood’s economic system evolved over the 1940s so that independent production companies had much more power and freedom than they had at the beginning of the decade, the political culture of Hollywood changed in such a way that the conflicts that had plagued the progressive community for two decades were coming to a final and ugly conclusion. In this sense, the end of the 1940s marks the irrevocable terminus of the Popular Front era. It is for these reasons that the cycle of movies on violent crowds released in 1950 and 1951 had such an apocalyptic flare about them. More than other political films of the time, they seemed aware of the violent repercussions of the political purges that had dominated the progressive community in America and in Hollywood over the last few years. 44

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The political left in the 1930s and 1940s was defined by alternating periods of collaboration and antagonism between communists and liberal non-communists in both America and in Hollywood. The degree to which these two factions were willing to collaborate was driven to a large extent by the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Most historians date the beginning of leftist political culture in Hollywood to the founding of the Screen Writers Guild in 1933 at the tail end of what the Comintern itself called the “Third Period,” the years between 1927 and 1934 when communists refused to join with other liberal and leftist organizations in Europe or in the States. In America, for instance, the Communist Party of the USA initially denounced Roosevelt’s NRA and attacked Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party as “social fascists” no different from the Nazis. Then, from 1935 to 1939 with the Comintern’s encouragement, radicals and progressives joined forces in Europe and America to form the Popular Front, in which the Party softened its tone, and stopped attacking Roosevelt and the Socialists. The two factions split apart again between 1939 and 1941 after the vitriolic fallout from the MolotovRibbentrop Pact. Then, from 1941 to 1945, with the United States and the Soviet Union fighting as allies in the war, liberals and communists in America experienced perhaps their greatest period of collaboration and comity. Then, as the Cold War solidified quickly after 1945, the two factions split once more. In the first few years after the war, while it wasn’t necessarily clear that communists and liberals would never be able to join forces again, the left was subsumed by an anxiety that the Popular Front era was soon to come to a definitive conclusion.44 Leftists in Hollywood experienced the same chronology of break-ups and reconciliations. From 1933 on, communists and liberals repeatedly joined forces only to inevitably split apart. Donald Ogden Stewart, for instance, a communist who specialized in stories of the idle rich such as Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, helped form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936 only to see it torn apart from factional antagonisms after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. Screenwriter Philip Dunne, the archetypal liberal non-communist in Hollywood, formed the Motion Picture Democratic Committee at the same time only to see it fall apart for the same reason. The Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of Artists, Scientists, and Professionals, meanwhile, became a victim of the emerging Cold War antagonisms in 1946 when it broke apart because liberals and Communists couldn’t agree whether they should support Will Rogers, Jr. or Emmett Williams in the Democratic congressional primaries. These postwar ideological divisions hit the industry’s talent guilds especially hard. The internal divisions within the Hollywood left were exacerbated in the early years of the Cold War from an external, conservative attack. In June 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto. One of its provisions required that any union who sought recognition from the National Labor Relations Board must have its executive board sign affidavits affirming

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that they were not communists. The effects of the bill – as much as anything – catalyzed the split in Hollywood between the communist and non-communist left. Beginning just six weeks after the disastrous first HUAC hearings, each of the talent guilds’ executive boards began to institute these loyalty oaths and remove communist members from its boards. In December 1947, the Screen Directors Guild passed a resolution to comply with the law. In January 1948, the Screen Actors Guild followed suit. But the law affected the Screen Writers Guild the most. During World War II, communists had played a prominent role in the writers’ union. After its 1946 election, the SWG’s Executive Board included such radicals as Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., Harold Buchman, Hugo Butler, and Leo Townsend.45 Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund estimate that during the war, 15 per cent of the members of the SWG – and 25 per cent of its most regularly employed personnel – were members of the Party.46 But after the Taft-Hartley Act and the HUAC hearings, Guild President Emmet Lavery’s non-communist faction decisively won the board elections in November 1947 and immediately purged radical members from almost every administrative post in the Guild. The executive boards of journals important to screenwriters such The Hollywood Quarterly and the SWG’s house organ Screen Writer soon followed suit: with radical members like John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo replaced by liberal non-communists. The HUAC hearings of October 1947 catalyzed the Popular Front split in Hollywood. When the committee first issued subpoenas, the liberal non-communists Philip Dunne, John Huston, and William Wyler founded the Committee for the First Amendment, whose goal was not ostensibly to defend the communists themselves, but to defend the unfriendly witnesses’ constitutional right to free speech. “For obvious reasons,” Dunne wrote, “we consistently urged anyone who might have had damaging affiliations in the past to stay away from our organization.”47 They didn’t know it then, but this was to be the last time Hollywood’s liberals stood up and defended their erstwhile Communist friends, and it was, in part, the CFA’s failure to effectively counteract HUAC’s attack that ultimately abetted the studios’ eventual imposition of the blacklist. The country’s liberal intellectual elites faced the same quandaries as did the political left in Hollywood. Indeed, New York intellectuals and Hollywood progressives had been intimately involved for years. Literary intellectuals from New York and Berlin had been flocking to Los Angeles throughout the 1930s, so it’s not surprising that one of the most important gatherings of writers and intellectuals in America during the war was held in Los Angeles in 1943. Hosted by an organization called The Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization, the Writers’ Congress brought together an array of political and intellectual figures with a liberal bent. The organization’s editorial board, for instance, included both John Howard Lawson, the de facto Communist leader in Hollywood, and Emmet Lavery, who would emerge after the war as one of the leading liberal anti-communists in the film community. At the opening session, the organizers read a telegram from President

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Roosevelt, but they also read messages from Vice President Henry Wallace, the leading figure of the Democratic Party’s left wing, and from Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party’s nominee for President in 1940 and author of the recent bestseller One World, which advocated an internationalist vision for American foreign policy. The conference itself included figures such as Thomas Mann, the University of Chicago sociologist Robert Merton, California’s leading liberal intellectual Carey McWilliams, and NAACP president Walter White, but also film industry professionals like cinematographer James Wong Howe and Darryl Zanuck, and a preponderance of Hollywood Communists like Edward Dmytryk, Robert Rossen, Ben Maddow, Ben Barzman, John Howard Lawson, and Dalton Trumbo. Panelists and speakers reiterated the overriding theme of the conference at every opportunity over the next few days: writers and filmmakers, they claimed, had a moral responsibility to create art that addressed contemporary social and political issues. Not surprisingly, the issue of race played an important role in the proceedings, with an entire panel set aside for people like Carey McWilliams and Dalton Trumbo to opine on the subject. Nevertheless, despite the camaraderie of the event, the future ideological divisions could be seen through the cracks. While liberals like Walter White noted hopefully that “a mild change in the treatment of minorities in fiction and on the screen has begun to take place,”48 Trumbo, with his Marxist perspective, was less sanguine, criticizing recent all-black cast musicals Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather for falling into stereotyped portrayals of African-Americans.49 By the late 1940s, though, this kind of comity between liberals and communists – and its concomitant commitment to minority issues – had ceased to exist. When leftist writers and intellectuals gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York for the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in March 1949 – referred to by everyone simply as The Waldorf Conference – other liberals led mass picket lines in protest outside the event, accusing the gathering as being a front for Reds. This anti-communist posturing took on a special significance since the conference was held at the same time as the trial for 11 leaders of the American Communist Party under the terms of the Smith Act just a few miles downtown. Hollywood figures associated with the Party – in this case, Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman – were in attendance, as usual. Though the conference was not officially supported by the Communist Party, it did echo the same themes as the Soviet Union’s contemporaneous overtures for an international peace movement. Nevertheless, both HUAC and the State Department publicly labelled the conference a “communist front.” The long lines of picketers who marched outside carrying signs and banners were inspired chiefly by another mass organization founded by liberal non-communists. The philosopher Sidney Hook, who had once been a party member himself, founded a group called Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF) with support from other

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liberals like Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe. One of the AIF’s main goals, according to Macdonald, was “to keep up a running barrage in the press,” manipulating the newspapers in their attack against their communist and fellow-traveling antagonists.50 Newspapers throughout the country willingly followed suit, derisively referring to the conference as a front organization, as proSoviet, and often placing the terms “peace” in sneer quotes.51 But in a theme that recurred throughout these years, some commentators claimed that the newspapers making such accusations were, in fact, inciting mob violence. In The New Yorker, for instance, A.J. Liebling attacked the New York Herald-Tribune for claiming that there were 1,000 picketers when he had counted only 10, writing that “when a newspaper over-predicts a crowd by ninety-nine hundred per cent, it is quite flagrantly attempting to rally a mob.”52 In a sign of how much the politics of the left had shifted between 1943 and 1950, many of the intellectuals involved in the AIF later became leading figures in perhaps the most important mass organization for liberal anti-communists in the Cold War era, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which was founded in 1950, partly – as was discovered only decades later – with secret funding from the CIA.53 The most active members of the CCF were militant liberal anti-communists like Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and James T. Farrell, many of whom had at one time been communists themselves. And as always, at least one Hollywood figure – in this case, the actor Robert Montgomery, who had been president of the Screen Actors Guild 1946 and 1947 – was also intimately involved with the group. While the dissolution of the American left had political repercussions, it also had thematic repercussions as well. That is, the aims and goals of the liberal community changed. While race and class issues had been front and centre at the 1943 conference in Los Angeles, by 1950, the issue of communism itself had taken over. In 1950, neither the Waldorf Conference nor the CCF’s initial gathering devoted much attention to the issue of racial discrimination. With these new divisions among the political and intellectual left, progressive filmmakers began to see the world much differently than they had just a few years before. The movies I discuss in the second half of this book were often about the coming together and the breaking apart of mass organizations. In this way, these movies were metaphorical commentaries about the divorce that the political left was undergoing at the end of the 1940s. In making these movies with a leftist agenda that dealt with issues of race and class prejudice, these filmmakers were drawing on the language of the political left from the period when Popular Front collaboration was at its peak, the years during World War II and immediately after, before a new Cold War consensus had taken hold. In thinking about these years, progressives repeatedly reflected on a series of issues that had defined political activity in Hollywood during the 1940s. Those years had seen the leftist community

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come together to fight on behalf of minority victims in a series of violent conflicts that had spread through Los Angeles. In each of these instances, Hollywood progressives had fought the conservative Los Angeles press. It was the memory of these battles that ignited their imaginations – consciously or subconsciously – when they made their films at the end of the decade.

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Chapter 3 The Politics of the News

Hollywood leftists were upset about reactionary newspapers for the same reason that Americans in general were disillusioned with the press: they’d come to believe that most papers were Republican shills. The daily newspapers in Los Angeles were considered to be especially conservative, and like most other papers, they didn’t report much news from any part of the country other than their own. Hollywood progressives thus felt that they had to struggle to discover – and then spread – the truth by themselves, publishing their own papers and pamphlets to tell their side of the story. The movies that liberals eventually made about journalism and mob violence, then, were a natural outgrowth of this ingrained political and journalistic dynamic in Los Angeles in the 1940s. The idea that a free press could and should be the catalyst for the political liberation of oppressed groups most eloquently entered the nation’s political consciousness through the work of Swedish economist and politician Gunnar Myrdal in his groundbreaking study of American race relations, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Funded by the Carnegie Foundation and published in 1944, the book became surprisingly influential given its 1500-page length – so influential, in fact, that it sold more than 100,000 copies and was eventually quoted favourably in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision striking down segregated schooling in America in 1954.1 Writing at a time when freedom of the press was severely curtailed in his native Sweden because of fears of a Nazi invasion, Myrdal argued that though most white Americans held prejudiced opinions about Negroes, black people would eventually win equal civil rights because of the democratic nature of the “American Creed.” The free press in America, he felt, would eventually shine a light on the iniquities suffered by black Americans and thus bring those inequalities to an end. For Myrdal, the progressive newspaper of the future would play the single most important role in improving civil rights: “To get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people,” he wrote. “There is no doubt. . . that a great 53

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majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.”2 Myrdal became a darling of the postwar left, his views often analyzed and repeated by progressive magazines such as The Nation and The New Republic. Myrdal’s vision of a crusading liberal press fighting for civil rights, however, was still largely a dream when he published his book. The nation’s daily newspapers in the immediate postwar era were conservative and provincial, and most Americans had little access to – or interest in – news beyond their immediate locality. Progressives in Los Angeles were especially alarmed by the newspaper industry. But despite their best efforts to portray the political reality they thought that the local press was obscuring, these liberals were rarely able to move beyond the political framework that their daily newspapers had constructed for them. A leading sociologist of the period, Robert K. Merton, made a distinction between two classes of Americans that also defines the political milieu in the film industry. He called the largest group of Americans, comprising about 75 per cent of the population, “metropolitans.” They preferred local news and didn’t bother to investigate issues beyond what they read in their local papers. He called the remaining 25 per cent of the country “cosmopolitans.” They read local news in their city paper, but usually subscribed as well to a national monthly magazine such as The Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s. The progressive members of the literary and political intelligentsia also often read the two most respected leftist weeklies, The Nation and The New Republic.3 It was well known in Hollywood that the most radical members of the film community gravitated to these latter two publications in particular. The screenwriter Edward Eliscu, for instance, remembers his agent telling him that producers were worried that he was a Red based on three bits of evidence: “One, you were making speeches for the Screen Writer’s Guild; two, they know from your license plate that you go to foreign movies; third, they saw you buying a copy of The Nation.”4 The vast majority of daily newspapers at the time covered local news almost exclusively. Indeed, at a time when the civil rights movement was just beginning to grow, no major daily outside of the South had a news bureau in the region until the New York Times started a Southern bureau in Chattanooga in 1947.5 Most of the national news magazines at the time were either large circulation glossies like Life and Look that covered issues only on a surface level or more intellectual journals with a liberal slant like The Nation. At the time, there were still no major nationally circulated journals of the right. True, there were small journals such as Human Events and The Freeman, but their circulation was miniscule and their influence was slight; there wasn’t an influential organ of the conservative movement until William F. Buckley founded The National Review in 1955. There was, then, a correlation between progressive politics and a “cosmopolitan” interest in national issues on the one hand and conservative politics and a “metropolitan” interest in local issues on the other. Given the provincialism of Los Angeles’s daily

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newspapers, the distinction between progressive cosmopolitans and conservative metropolitans was one of the most significant divisions that structured Hollywood’s political and aesthetic vision. People in Los Angeles who read about racial and labour strife solely from local papers like the Times or the Examiner, for example, almost never learned about many highly politicized strikes and riots that occurred elsewhere in the country or even in Los Angeles itself. Even so, the sophisticates in Los Angeles who read national publications were still unaware of political issues outside of California, despite their best intentions. Ironically, African-Americans in Los Angeles probably had a more catholic vision than most white people. Many black newspapers – unlike mainstream “white” dailies like the Times or the Examiner – had circulation beyond their local urban area. And, since they knew that mainstream papers wouldn’t cover black issues anywhere, local negro papers were much more willing to write about racial strife in other cities. Papers like The Pittsburgh Courier, for instance, became a leading voice for black Americans not just in Pittsburgh but in the nation as a whole.6

Metropolitan Dailies The American public was increasingly sceptical of the parochial vision that dominated most daily newspapers. Already by the 1930s, most newspapers had become critics of, if not crusaders against, Roosevelt and The New Deal.7 Newspaper publishers became even more critical of labour politics after the war, partly because the labor strife in their own industry was worse than it had ever been before: approximately 7 per cent of all newspapers faced a strike from 1946 to 1948.8 The media’s antagonism towards labour was just one of many obvious issues that made the public question the press’s objectivity. Editor and Publisher International Yearbook, the leading organ of the newspaper industry, lamented in 1947 that newspapers were receiving “the most searching analysis and criticism in all their history.”9 Edwin Emery, the historian of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, concurred, releasing a withering report in 1949 in which he summed up the three biggest complaints about newspaper coverage at the time: first, papers didn’t serve the public interest; second, most newspapers were owned and operated by probusiness, pro-Republican interests; and third, newspaper monopolies threatened the functioning of democracy.10 Newspaper readers and various political interest groups claimed that the press was losing its honoured place as an arbiter of truth in American democracy. The widely reprinted image of Harry Truman holding aloft the Chicago Daily Tribune headline declaring Thomas Dewey the winner of the 1948 presidential election was just the most famous instance of newspapers’ failure at the time. The radical journalist George Seldes devoted an entire book to criticizing the reactionary politics of American newspapers, calling America “one of the most misinformed countries in the civilized world.”11 American newspapers, he claimed, were dominated by three organizations: Roy Howard’s United Press 55

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news service, William Randolph Hearst’s empire and the Medill Trust Press, run by Robert McCormick, which ran the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News among others. Seldes was voicing the opinion of many radicals when he compared these three press lords to Nazis; these papers, he wrote, “bear the imprint of [their] owner in the very same way the Nazi press from 1933 to 1945 bore the imprint of Dr. Goebbels.”12 In many ways, the beginning of the Cold War made newspapers even more conservative. Newspaper publishers and editors were caught up in the same anticommunist hysteria that was swirling through the Hollywood studios and many other industries. The Newspaper Guild, the industry’s largest union, had allied itself with the leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations since 1937, and during World War II many communists played a significant role in its leadership. The FBI noted that as many as 80 journalists in Los Angeles were either communists or Communist sympathizers during the war.13 But after World War II, the Newspaper Guild, like the talent guilds in Hollywood, worked to purge its leadership of leftists tainted by the communist smear. In November 1947, the Guild’s international executive board regrettably agreed to comply with the Taft-Hartley Act’s requirements to purge itself of communists, and by 1949, the Guild had adopted a resolution declaring that it had a “deep conviction that the fight against the proved Communist conspiracy at home must continue.” By 1950, the FBI reported that the Los Angeles chapter of the Guild no longer had any Communist members.14 The Los Angeles newspapers capitulated to the right at the same time that the Hollywood studio executives capitulated to the anti-communist elements in the House of Representatives, a fact not lost upon the left in the film community.

Cosmopolitan Monthlies and Weeklies But even those urbane progressives who picked up The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Nation or the New Republic in their mailbox often missed out on some of the most compelling events of the day. The Atlantic Monthly, for example, was typical of most liberal magazines geared toward an educated elite. It rarely wrote about the working class or racial issues. It generally took the liberal anticommunist position on national and international affairs, publishing editorials that criticized former Vice President Henry Wallace and “balanced” articles about labour strife that called for fewer strikes and more arbitration. Even when the magazine repudiated Congress’s investigations into communism in Hollywood, it made sure to insult radicals as well, referring to the “witch hunters” as “people whose motives are as un-American as those of the communists themselves.”15 The magazine was oblivious to progressive issues in Hollywood. In its first issue published after the initial Conference of Studio Unions strikes in 1945, for instance, it failed to mention the Hollywood labour violence, but it did publish an article by a Hollywood screenwriter about the film industry, Raymond Chandler’s 56

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famous “Writers in Hollywood.” Chandler’s attitudes about Hollywood echoed the dominant thinking of the East Coast literati. While he did chide people who thought that most screenwriters were rich, he made fun of “those pictures of deep social import in which everybody is thoughtful and grown-up and sincere and the more difficult problems of life are wordily resolved into a unanimous vote of confidence in the inviolability of the Constitution, the sanctity of the home and the paramount importance of the streamlined kitchen.”16 If such sentiments represented the opinions of most mainstream liberal anticommunists in Hollywood, The New Republic and The Nation had come to represent the voice of radical cosmopolitanism, and for many, even on the left, the voice of Soviet apologists. The Partisan Review, for instance, increasingly anti-Stalinist after the war, went so far as to attack those two magazines as a “liberal fifth column.”17 In the first years after the war, The Nation more than any other paper manifested the ideological divisions of the left, with the political arm of the magazine, under the editorship of Freda Kirchwey, veering to the left, publishing editorials in which she argued that “the Soviet government has tackled and begun to solve the strangling problems of modern economic life.”18 Meanwhile, the literary back of the magazine, under the leadership of Margaret Marshall, increasingly took an anticommunist position, often with Diana Trilling taking the lead.19 In the late 1940s, the New Republic also took a brief, radical turn. In the first few years after the war, the magazine was edited by Michael Straight, a man who repeatedly and predictably took a pro-Soviet line in the publication. Though this stance most likely emerged from an intensely held political vision as it did for many leftists who advocated a peaceful international agenda at the time, others assert that his stridency was a direct result of his alleged work as a paid KGB informant. Though Straight admitted to the FBI in 1962 that he had worked for the Soviets, he claimed that he had quit in 1942. Former KGB agents, however, told historian Roland Perry that Straight was still actively supplying information to his Soviet handlers throughout the postwar period.20 The New Republic named former Vice President Henry Wallace as its editor in October 1946, just one month after Harry Truman fired him as Secretary of Commerce for his increasingly liberal views. Wallace was the champion of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and he was positioning himself for an independent run for the White House in 1948. In the first year under his leadership, the circulation of the magazine exploded, from 40,000 to 100,000.21 And while Wallace didn’t have any inkling of his publisher’s personal Soviet ties, he adamantly and consistently editorialized against antagonizing the Soviets, condemning the Truman Doctrine as a “widening of the conflict against the Soviet Union” and as a prelude to an unnecessary war.22 During Wallace’s tenure, the magazine dramatically changed its focus to international affairs, publishing many articles championing the Soviet Union’s peace movement. But despite Wallace’s obvious progressive credentials, domestic issues receded while he was editor. Though the magazine did print occasional articles about race, it mostly ignored topics like

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residential segregation, lynching, labour strikes in Hollywood, and the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The Los Angeles Press In the late 1940s and early 1950s, three conservative daily newspapers dominated Los Angeles: the Times, Hearst’s Examiner (which published an afternoon edition called the Herald-Express), and the Daily News.23 Norman Chandler, the son of the paper’s notoriously conservative publisher Harry Chandler, ran the Times in the late 1940s. It was the most widely read newspaper in the city at the time, but it didn’t have much of a reputation among the city’s educated elite. In his history of the paper, Marshall Berges writes that “measured against the best newspapers of the East and Midwest. . . [the Times] was arguably a narrow, parochial paper, boosting its friends and denouncing its enemies. There was no fine-arts section, no Sunday opinion or business section, no wideopen window on Washington or the world. The best items were wire service stories and canned features bought from syndicates.”24 Indeed, in 1948 even the Times itself went so far as to bill itself as the “easiest-to-read” paper in the city.25 Chandler’s control over the paper also extended to an influence in the realm of politics. According Dennis MacDougal, the Times had used its power for years to sway members of the city council on their votes for the five-member police commission who, in turn, appointed the chief of police. From 1945 until 1951, MacDougal says, Norman Chandler had direct influence over at least three of the five members of the commission, thus enabling him to “handpick the chief of police despite objections from reform mayor Fletcher Bowron.”26 This control over the selection of the chief of police – even indirect – would prove to create an awkward, but unacknowledged conflict of interest in 1945 and 1946 when the Los Angeles police actively worked on the side of studio executives, attacking picketing strikers in front of the Hollywood studio gates. The Times, not surprisingly, tended to disparage the strikers and dismiss progressives’ accusations that the police force was helping the studios. During the 1945 strikes, for instance, the communistleaning People’s Daily World wrote about the “strikebreakers, goons, and county police” who were “armed with chains, bolts, hammers, six inch pipes, brass knuckles, wooden mallets and battery cables.”27 The Times, on the other hand, described the events by casting the Conference of Studio Union strikers as the villains, writing ominously about their “white-painted air-raid warden helmets that shone eerily in the pre-dawn gloom.”28 William Randolph Hearst founded the Los Angeles Examiner in 1903 as a populist paper, but by the 1940s he had turned it into a conservative mouthpiece. That the paper served as his personal voice was a given; his megalomaniacal control over his media kingdom was already the stuff of legend by the 1940s. In an article for the Screen Writers Guild’s house organ Screen Writer, Robert Shaw noted that

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movie critics for Hearst’s papers rarely had any background in film and that they slavishly followed the missives that Hearst sent down from San Simeon in bluishpurple ink that staff writers referred to mockingly as “the Daily Purple Passion.” The pressures to follow the ideological line of the business’s owners was strong on any paper, but “on Hearst papers, of course,” Shaw wrote, “these pressures are blatant and extreme.” When Lillian Hellman’s North Star – a film about the heroic struggles of Ukrainian villagers fighting oncoming German troops – opened, for instance, Shaw claimed that: a direct order went out to all Hearst movie critics, ordering them to say that this innocuous picture was ‘a vile piece of Bolshevik totalitarian Soviet Communist propaganda that could just as well have been written, directed, and produced by Joe Stalin himself. . . .’ A trained seal in New York wrote the authoritative Hearstian review, and it was piped through the service to be used instead of the work of local critics.29

Hearst had been hit by financial difficulties in the late 1930s, but he had reclaimed control of his newspaper empire by the end of World War II, and even though he was in his eighties at the time, he still controlled the tone and temperament of his media empire. In 1945, this empire included 17 daily newspapers, four radio stations, nine magazines in the United States, a wire service, a features service, and a Sunday supplement. Though he no longer wrote editorials under his own name, he still sent out instructions to his writers and personally approved every important editorial that appeared in his newspapers.30 The emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower seems to have hardened his politics after the war. Union politics at his papers also played a role in stiffening his conservative resolve. During the Hollywood lockout of 1946, many of Hearst’s own newspaper workers in Los Angeles were also out on strike, which gave him more of a reason to portray the Hollywood unionists as criminal lawbreakers.31 Together, the Times and the Examiner were Hollywood progressives’ bˆetes noires. Both papers were as consistently antagonistic towards racial minorities as they were towards union members. Both the Times and the Examiner, for instance, repeatedly published articles in 1942 advocating the relocation of Japanese Americans to camps for the duration of the war.32 The Examiner went further than the other Los Angeles dailies in its broadsides against the Japanese, writing editorials that vociferously attacked the government for even considering the return of interned Japanese once the war was over. “West Coast citizens, particularly Californians,” the paper opined in one editorial, “will not endure the proximity of Japanese, now or in the future, for reason of their treachery, their brutality, their incompatibility with our morals, manners, and standards of life, . . . [their] wanton cruelty, plans of conquest, subversive activities, doubtful when not repudiated ‘loyalty,’ and a total incapacity of assimilation into American ideals and institutions.”33 That disparaging attitude 59

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applied to all other non-white people as well. The Times’ attitude about minorities was obviously racist, even by the standards of the day. During the 1940s it wasn’t unusual to see a front-page story ridiculing racial minorities in the most egregiously offensive manner. One front-page headline during the war, for instance, reported the burning of a Chinese-operated laundry in a mock-Chinese dialect with the headline: “Quan Lee Laundry Washed Up; Shirtee Burn, Tickee No Good.”34 But even when they weren’t actively condemning minorities, their silence spoke as loud as their words. Kevin Allen Leonard, who examined every issue of all three of Los Angeles’s major daily newspapers from 1941 to 1946, notes that “The Times and Examiner rarely allowed African-Americans to speak for themselves in news articles.”35 Thus, most white residents of Los Angeles – even the most radical members of the film community – rarely heard about racial issues except through the lens of a conservative white press. The city’s third major paper, the Daily News, generally had the reputation as the liberal paper in town, but in most of the important local political issues of the late 1940s, Leonard points out, “the newspaper at times remained neutral, apparently to avoid alienating advertisers.”36 The paper’s liberal reputation wasn’t entirely senseless. The few Los Angeles newspapermen who were called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities did work for the Daily News.37 But, for the most part, the paper earned its reputation as the progressive voice in Los Angeles only by comparison to the reactionary Times and the Examiner. Most of the city’s newspapermen from that period saw the Daily News’s publisher Manchester Boddy as a conservative businessman just like the owners of the other major papers. Though many people assumed he was a Republican, he was actually a registered Democrat, though he seems to have been evolving politically in the same way as other anti-communists like Ronald Reagan in the first years of the Cold War.38 As far as most newspapermen were concerned, he published a paper that was liberal on the surface only in order to capture a piece of the market that the other stridently conservative papers had left behind. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Daily News appeared to support progressive causes only to undercut them in the end. The paper, for instance, initially seemed to support Upton Sinclair in his 1934 radical campaign for governor of California, but at the last moment, it endorsed his Republican opponent Frank Merriam.39 Robert E. Harris, one of the Daily News’s lead editorial writers in the late 1940s, claimed that Boddy was not a liberal, but a “political opportunist.”40 It is well known today that Richard Nixon kickstarted his career by tarring liberals for their alleged connections to communists: he criticized progressive screenwriters while a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and labelled his opponent in the 1950 Senate race, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, as “The Pink Lady.”41 But in 1950, it was Boddy, running for the Democratic nomination in that Senate race against Douglas, who laid the groundwork for Nixon’s false accusations. As Douglas appeared to take the lead in the primary campaign, Boddy attacked her, claiming

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that a “subversive clique of red hots” was trying to take over the Democratic Party and claimed that she harbored “communist sympathies.” Weeks later, the Daily News became the first paper to refer to Douglas derisively as “The Pink Lady” long before Nixon did.42 Even the Daily News failed to take a progressive stand on racial issues in the 1940s. In 1946, California voters placed a civil rights initiative on the ballot. Proposition 11 would have made it illegal for an employer to “refuse to hire or employ or to bar, or to discharge from employment any person because of the race, religion, color, national origin, or ancestry of such person.”43 While the African-American and Mexican-American press in Los Angeles all advocated the passage of Proposition 11, all three major dailies opposed the proposition in their editorials. Even the Daily News editorialized against the measure because, it said, “the danger is too great that we would surrender long-cherished rights and liberties without gaining anything in return that could compensate us for the loss.”44 The proposition was eventually rejected with 70 per cent of the vote.45 It was precisely this unrelentingly conservative attitude permeating the local political discourse that both intensified the left’s anxiety and focused that anxiety on the issues of race and their own political persecution. When even the most progressive voice in the city regularly took positions that liberals deemed odious, liberals responded by creating their own publications to fight for progressive causes as the need arose. In 1942 and 1943, for instance, Los Angeles progressives published pamphlets and broadcast appeals over the radio to defend a group of 22 Mexican-American youths who had been falsely accused of murder. In 1945 and 1946, Hollywood labour unionists and their liberal allies published an array of pamphlets and mimeographs to explain the reasons of the strike and lockout. And in 1947, liberals in Hollywood formed the Committee for the First Amendment to defend the Hollywood Ten, and they too published articles, broadcast radio pleas, and staged rallies. Nevertheless, despite their work on behalf of racial minorities, labour militants, and Communists, the Hollywood left was still somewhat provincial in its outlook, caught in the white, parochial worldview that the Los Angeles press had circumscribed for them. Like progressives throughout the country, for instance, the Hollywood left did virtually nothing to protest the internment of Japanese Americans, more than 20,000 of whom lived in Little Tokyo, just a few blocks from the movie palaces that lined Broadway downtown.46 In February 1942, after American forces had lost ground in the Pacific and a Japanese invasion of the mainland seemed a real threat, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the War Department the power to designate certain military areas in which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Over the next three months the government relocated almost every person of Japanese descent on the West Coast to an internment camp – about 120,000 in all, almost two thirds of whom were citizens. The response in Los Angeles was overwhelmingly positive. A Los

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Angeles Times editorial on the day the order was issued praised the government’s action. “Since Dec. 7 there has existed an obvious menace to the safety of this region,” the paper wrote. After referring to the notion of “civil rights” in sneer quotes, the editorial concluded that “the plan finally evolved, if put into immediate effect, appears to be a sensible one.”47 One week after Roosevelt issued the order, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron argued on his radio programme that the government should begin relocating California’s Japanese population.48 Bowron was not alone. Most of the country’s leading African-American and Jewish civil rights groups said nothing to protest the relocation. The Communist Party too remained silent. The Hollywood progressive community did not join forces to defend Los Angeles’s Japanese-American community as they would later that year to fight for the Mexican-American defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial.49 Alice McGrath, herself a member of the Communist Party and the Executive Secretary of the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee, said later that she didn’t remember “any opposition to it” among Party members and that “the only person who was openly opposed to that event when it happened was Carey McWilliams,” the liberal lawyer and writer who had been the national chairman of the SLDC.50 Despite his lone protest, progressive forces remained silent about the internment throughout the war. Even more than a year later, when the threat of a Japanese invasion had begun to seem farfetched, Bowron, like the editorialists at Hearst’s Examiner, still adamantly opposed letting interned Japanese return to Los Angeles.51 Even when white progressives in Los Angeles did fight the way that the daily press portrayed the city’s minorities, they were still somewhat myopic in their understanding of those groups’ major concerns. Rather than fighting for the issues that minority communities themselves were fighting for, they usually reacted against the issues that the mainstream white daily press had raised about those communities. Thus, they fought for the Sleepy Lagoon defendants because the daily papers had attacked them, and they challenged the papers account of the causes of the Zoot Suit Riots because the papers had made the riots front page news. But they did not engage in causes that the city’s African-American press raised on its own. If white progressives had paid attention to minority voices, they would have learned that the black press in Los Angeles had made housing one of its most important political issues throughout the decade. The leading African-American newspapers had repeatedly found that those who fought against residential segregation met with false accusations of communism and threats of mass violence. Almost immediately after the surrender of the Japanese, for instance, liberals on the Los Angeles City Council proposed the creation of an interracial relations committee. Similar committees had worked well elsewhere, especially in Detroit, which had suffered similar racial violence during the war.52 But as soon as the proposal was introduced, it met resistance. One city council member, Lloyd Davis, claimed that the creation of such a committee would, ironically, “create riots and more race

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discrimination.”53 Other opponents, many of whom were involved in real estate, claimed that the new committee might try to overturn restrictive covenants, the common contractual practice that required a homeowner to sell his property only to a Christian or a member of the white race. One opponent claimed that the “elimination of restrictive covenants would result in a 50 per cent reduction in real estate values and materially reduce the tourist trade.”54 Accusations of communism inevitably surfaced, with one city council member, Charles A. Allen, saying that he was “convinced that this is a Communistic setup and that the fine people who have been associated with the effort have been misled.”55 In the end, the city council decided against creating an interracial relations committee. But white progressives in Hollywood most likely would have been unaware of how African-Americans or Mexican-Americans felt about the issue. The Times and the Examiner, after all, rarely quoted racial minorities on any political decision of note.56 The city’s black newspapers, meanwhile, ran stories for years about the problems in available housing that were exacerbated by the legal practice of restrictive covenants. Hattie McDaniel’s legal fight to keep her home in the exclusive neighbourhood of Sugar Hill had been in the forefront of the local civil rights struggle for years. When the United States Supreme Court finally ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer in May 1948 that courts could not enforce racial covenants in real estate, the city’s black press made it the biggest story of the week. The city’s leading black paper, The Sentinel, wrote that the community was rejoicing: “telephones rang continuously from the moment the unanimous decision of the six Supreme Court Justices sitting in the case was flashed across the nation’s air-waves,” the paper reported, while it quoted Thurgood Marshall saying that “it is obvious that no greater blow to date has been made against the pattern of segregation existing within the United States.”57 The city’s white papers, meanwhile, covered the restrictive covenant case for a day or two and then moved on.58 Hollywood progressives in turn never made residential segregation one of their major concerns – despite that fact that actors like Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers had been central figures in the struggle for years – largely because the city’s daily white press hadn’t belaboured the issue. Similarly, when the California Supreme Court made interracial marriage legal in the state with its decision in Perez v. Sharp in October 1948, the black press again made it the biggest news story of the week, trumpeting that “this is the first time in more than a hundred years of litigation that a successful attack has been made upon this prohibition in the United States.”59 But Hollywood progressives never made a concerted effort to overturn the Breen office’s ban on miscegenation on screen partly because the city’s daily press had never made interracial relationships much of an issue. On the day after the Perez v. Sharp ruling, for instance, the Times didn’t mention the case at all.60 The one political issue that most enervated Hollywood liberals in the mid-1940s was the labor struggle in the film industry. The three major dailies published articles on the labour conflict on their front pages almost every day for weeks on end in

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both 1945 and 1946. But the black press seemed disinterested in labour strife in the film industry, partly because each of the two major trade unions was almost exclusively white.61 In October 1945, for instance, during the most violent peaks of the first Conference of Studio Unions strike, the Los Angeles Sentinel made no mention of the violence in the film industry. Instead, they covered topics like racial discrimination in the Los Angeles Fire Department, A. Philip Randolph’s campaign to pass a bill against racial discrimination in employment, and an attempted lynching in South Carolina that involved accusations against a black man attempting to rape a white girl.62 Hollywood liberals, not surprisingly, never formed any groups to attack discrimination in employment or housing, nor did they make movies about those subjects. They did make movies about mass violence and reactionary newspapers, though, because those topics had been central to their own experience throughout the decade. While Los Angeles’s dailies ran headlines about the HUAC hearings on Communists for a couple weeks in October and November of 1947, they covered the labour struggle in the film industry from the fall of 1945 through the end of 1946. It was unusual for a week to pass over that year without seeing a front-page article about the Conference of Studio Unions and their often violent dispute with the major Hollywood studios and their labor adversary, the International Alliance for Theatrical and Stage Employees. Liberals saw the film industry’s labour riots as merely the most flagrant manifestation of mass violence that had been plaguing Los Angeles for years, and also as a precursor to HUAC’s persecution of Communists in the film industry beginning in 1947, which they understood as merely the logical legal extension of the lawless violence that had plagued the city throughout the decade.

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Chapter 4 Mob Violence in Los Angeles and the United States

Part ONE: Mob Violence in Southern California The Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial and the Zoot Suit Riots Early in the morning of August 2, 1942, a young man named Jose Diaz died at Los Angeles General Hospital. The following January, 22 young MexicanAmerican men were put on trial on charges of murder; some were sentenced to only one year; three of them were sentenced to life in prison. The Los Angeles press ran lurid headlines about the threat of juvenile delinquency and Mexican gangs. Progressives in Hollywood saw a different picture. They saw a group of young men wrongly convicted, railroaded by a racist police department, a racist court system, and sensational journalism. In June 1943, the Los Angeles papers ran more stories about Mexican-American violence – this time about a series of violent incidents they dubbed the Zoot Suit Riots, named after the colorful suits some Mexican teenagers wore. Where the mainstream press saw bands of roving Mexican hoodlums, however, Communists and liberals in Hollywood saw racist servicemen beating up on innocent kids. In both cases, progressives fought what they saw as the prejudices of the conservative press. They published their own versions of events that emphasized issues that would later resurface in the films of the Hollywood left, especially the violence they thought had been influenced by a reactionary press that lodged false accusations against minority and liberal victims. All three Los Angeles dailies portrayed the defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial as guilty almost as soon as the story broke. The Times’ coverage of the murder trial, for instance, though more even-handed than the coverage in the Hearst papers, favoured the prosecution. The most prominent false accusation, as far as progressives were concerned, was that there had been a murder at all. While defence lawyers argued that the victim Jose Diaz may have been hit by a car, 65

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not murdered, The Times frequently referred to his death as “a murder,” wrote about the “slayers,” and wrote that “Diaz was fatally stabbed.”1 The paper referred to the prosecutors by name, but referred to the defendants only as “zoot-suiters.” The papers similarly slanted their stories by refusing to print any accusations that the Mexican-American defendants had made; they consistently ignored claims that the Mexican defendants made about police violence, while simultaneously running stories about white people who claimed to have been beaten up by police. During the Sleepy Lagoon trial, for instance, defendant Bennie Alvarez testified about his own treatment at the hands of the Los Angeles police: They knocked me over the chair so then I was on the floor. He knocked me out of the chair and he said sit down so we can hit you some more. . . . He say we ought to shoot every Mexican dog like you. . . . He busted my mouth. Then he hit me in the ribs. . . . He grabbed my hair and started to bang me up against the wall and then he started kicking me. Then he kicks me in the back and in the ribs and in the neck. . . . Then he says I’m gonna break your foot. . . and he took my shoe off and got my foot and started twisting it and I started screaming. . . Then he says if I didn’t talk he would keep on hitting me in the eye. So I talked. . . I said yes, yes to everything.2

In all, seven of the 22 defendants testified in court about violent treatment at the hands of the police.3 These accounts, however, were not reported in any of the major Los Angeles dailies. But on the same days that they ran stories about the Sleepy Lagoon trial, The Times ran front page headlines about a white citizen, Stanley H. Beebe, who had died after he told witnesses that he’d been beaten up by the police.4 When the Sleepy Lagoon defendants were eventually convicted, The Times ran an editorial showing where it stood: “The fact that the jury. . . made what seems to have been a careful discrimination in their degree of guilt, offers a strong presumption, if not proof, that there was neither prejudice nor persecution, and that the court and jury considered the case on its merits.” An accompanying editorial signed by Timothy C. Turner, a “writer who has had a lifetime of association with Mexicans, [and] can testify that they generally are a kindly, polite, and good hearted people,” similarly strove to quell the notion that the convictions were racially motivated, criticizing leftist complaints of racism, saying that “the Communists as usual are making trouble and confusing issues.”5 Hearst’s papers covered the trial more than any other paper, referring from the start to the “goons of Sleepy Lagoon.” One of the boys even testified that Herald-Express reporter Lloyd Emerson was present when he was beaten, though Emerson denied this, and none of the Los Angeles daily papers reported it.6 The newspapers’ handling of the Zoot Suit Riots was similarly one-sided. Most progressives at the time and most historians now agree that the riots were instigated by white servicemen who roamed through downtown and outlying 66

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neighbourhoods attacking Mexican teenagers. The first day the riots made the headlines, however, the local newspapers started in with what the left saw as false accusations about minority victims. The Times headline, for instance, read, “Zoot Suiters Learn Lesson in Fights with Servicemen,” and the first paragraph read, “Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights.”7 As the riots continued in the streets, The Times made conflicting statements about who was to blame, claiming in one article that “the rebellion was caused by zoot gangs molesting citizens,” while on the same day writing that it was “a war declared on them [zoot-suiters] by servicemen” as “thousands of servicemen joined by additional thousands of civilians last night surged along Main St. and Broadway hunting down zoot-suiters.”8 Even so, most stories of the riots told of zoot-suit assailants and white victims. And after the riots had subsided, the paper opined in an editorial that the riots “have had nothing to do with race persecution, although some elements have loudly raised the cry of this very thing.”9 Those elements that raised the cry were, of course, the progressive elements in Los Angeles – many of them coming from the Hollywood film community. Communists and liberals formed a committee to raise funds for the Sleepy Lagoon defence and to publicize its case. They originally called themselves the Citizens’ Committee for the Defence of Mexican-American Youth (CCDMAY) and later changed their name to the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee. The group’s national chairman was Carey McWilliams and its executive secretary was a 24-yearold woman named Alice McGrath. The group’s board included many Hollywood liberals like Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Canada Lee, and Rita Hayworth, but also a large contingent of Hollywood Communists, including Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, and Dorothy Comingore.10 The Hollywood contingent raised money by hosting events at the Mocambo and at Ira Gershwin’s home. Alice McGrath remembers that Orson Welles was especially active, emceeing at the Gershwin home and even writing letters on behalf of the defendants for their parole hearings; he was “prominent in the sense that he allowed his name to be used,” she said, “and he spoke about the case, he really did. He was active in more than just letting us use his name.”11 Throughout the process of the defendant’s appeal, the committee understood that its primary goal was to overturn the common perception about the case that had been presented by the Los Angeles press. One of their first actions was to broadcast a radio program, Our Daily Bread, in which they blamed the press coverage for the convictions in the trial and linked the papers to local Mexican fascists groups, known as Sinarquistas.12 But the committee eventually made greater inroads with the public with two pamphlets they released in 1943 and 1944. The first pamphlet, The Sleepy Lagoon Case, was credited to the Citizens’ Committee for the Defence of Mexican-American Youth and had an introduction by Orson Welles.13 The second pamphlet, Sleepy Lagoon Mystery, was written by Guy Endore, a Communist screenwriter who was later blacklisted. The first

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pamphlet had a print run of 20,000,14 but Alice McGrath noted that the Endore pamphlet was even more influential: “that pamphlet was enormously useful for us,” she said, “just incredibly useful. We sold thousands of copies of it.”15 Both pamphlets espoused themes that became prominent later in the films of Hollywood leftists about mob violence. They both see the cause of the injustice and resulting violence emanating from false accusations lodged against the defenceless Mexican-American teenagers by powerful conservative institutions. The CCDMAY pamphlet emphatically denies the most grandiose false accusations – the police department and the newspapers’ claim that the boys were murderers – but it goes on to list a litany of other minor false accusations that together highlight the omnipresence of the racist attitudes in the city. It criticizes the press, especially its use of the word “gang” in describing a loose group of friends from the neighbourhood around 38th Street and for its incorrect accounts of an increase in juvenile delinquency among Mexican-American youth, quoting a report by the Los Angeles Probation Department, which claimed that “there is no wave of lawlessness among Mexican children” and that the increase in delinquency among Mexicans was less than it was for other ethnic groups.16 Endore, too, criticizes the use of the word “gang,” saying that “there is absolutely no evidence of these boys and girls being in a criminal association and sharing the profits of their crimes. . . . These were nothing more than neighbourhood gangs of frolicsome kids.”17 The two pamphlets represent the range of thinking about racial discrimination on the left, from a liberal perspective that blamed racism on the bad intentions of a few individuals to a more paranoid vision that attributed discrimination to a conspiracy of native fascists. The Sleepy Lagoon Case devotes a large portion of its efforts attacking the testimony of one specific police lieutenant who spoke in court about the racially determining factors of violence among different ethnic groups, emphasizing that the troubles stemmed from the racist attitudes of a few individuals in power rather than from a systematic problem with American society or institutions as a whole. Endore, on the other hand, weaves a much more outlandish tale, emphasizing the conspiratorial machinations of institutional power. He begins his tale with a mysterious Teletype message that came from San Simeon, Hearst’s Xanadu-esque mansion hideaway. The entire Sleepy Lagoon case, Endore claims, was concocted by a conspiracy. Hearst’s reputed Teletype read: “Chief suggests L.A. editors make survey of crime reports – all types – with particular emphasis on numbers of police bookings of Mexican and Negro citizens – and or aliens.” Hearst, Endore says, had been an agent of the Germans for almost 50 years, from the days of the Kaiser to Hitler, and refers to Hitler as Hearst’s “old friend and employer.”18 Endore also writes more than six pages on the prejudices of the trial judge, Charles W. Fricke, whom the initial pamphlet doesn’t bother to mention. Endore calls Fricke “the side of Hitleristic racial prejudice” and “biased to a degree that challenges comparison with the courts of Naziland.”19

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Though Endore was more emphatic than the initial pamphlet in his denunciations of the Los Angeles press, each was committed to correcting the conservative biases and the outright lies in the local newspapers. With that in mind, it’s ironic that both pamphlets were just as biased as the prejudiced press they were contesting. Both the mainstream press and its progressive opponents used the events of 1943 as a political weapon. In his book Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A., Eduardo Obreg´on Pag´an uses the court transcripts to paint a much more complex picture than either the mainstream Los Angeles press or its progressive opposition was willing to present. The press portrayed the defendants as dangerous “gangsters” and “wolves” who were “outlandishly garbed” in “comical clothing.” Both pamphlets, meanwhile, portrayed the defendants as hard-working, patriotic Americans. They follow almost every mention of a defendant with a reference to his job history, his wife and children, or his military service. Pag´an’s account, on the other hand, is less rosy, far more complex, and far more interesting. The Sleepy Lagoon pamphlets argued that there was no proof that Jose Diaz had, in fact, been murdered. The first pamphlet emphasized in its initial paragraph that “it seems clear that Diaz was drinking heavily and fell into a roadway and was run over by a car.”20 Endore wrote that “he bore no knife wounds,” and that “according to the doctor, these injuries could be explained as due to repeated falls on rocky ground or blows from a blunt instrument.”21 The doctor who performed the autopsy, however, testified in court that Diaz had two stab wounds, skinned and swollen knuckles, a three-inch long fracture at the top of his head, and a contusion across his swollen lip – all of which suggested that he had been stabbed and “forcibly struck on his head several times with a blunt instrument by a right-handed assailant.”22 Endore wrote that there were no “witnesses who could definitely link any one of the accused boys with the death of Diaz,”23 but Pag´an stresses that four people testified that they had seen a kid named Chepe Ruiz beating Diaz’s body several times with a stick.24 Pag´an concludes that the boys were innocent of murder – he suggests two competing theories as to who may have killed Diaz that night25 – but his account paints the boys as violent and vengeful. Clearly, defence committee authors eliminated these facts from their account to serve their progressive agenda; they were more interested in counteracting the conservative dailies than they were in plumbing the complexities of the case. The work of the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee did help raise money for a successful appeal. In the case The People v. Zamora of 1944, the courts overturned the original convictions and ordered the release of the MexicanAmerican teenagers imprisoned the year before. The successful efforts of liberals and Communists to get out their side of the story would remain an inspiration for many Hollywood leftists throughout the decade, especially for the screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, whose script for The Lawless was heavily influenced by the political ideas presented by the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee.

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The Zoot Suit Riots, meanwhile, flared quickly, during the first week of June 1943. Hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand Mexican-Americans and others, were beaten by white servicemen.26 The attacks, though, didn’t lead to any prolonged legal defence, so there was no opportunity for Hollywood liberals to publish their own accounts of those events. Nevertheless, the ideological debates between the daily press and progressive journalists sounded similar themes. The smaller, left-leaning publications in the city were the only organs defending the Zoot Suit victims. Local papers like the The Eastside Journal, the African-American California Eagle, and the Communist-affiliated People’s Daily World were the only publications that painted the riots as the work of racist servicemen attacking minority victims.27 The California Eagle argued that white servicemen were the aggressors and Mexicans and Negroes the victims, and they ran editorials in the weeks after the riots with headlines like “The Papers are Responsible” and “Daily Press Made Zoot War.”28 Some national journals of the left took up their cause as well. The New York leftist newspaper P.M. published articles condemning the riots by Carey McWilliams, among others. Another columnist for the paper laid the blame, as usual, on yellow journalism. “Inflammatory stories in the Los Angeles newspapers were blamed today for aggravating the race clashes between Mexican youths and American sailors which culminated in the City Council’s action last night prohibiting anyone from wearing a zoot suit,” the author wrote. “The press here,” he claimed, “is at least 75 per cent responsible for the situation.”29 The Zoot Suit Riots became even more significant for Los Angeles progressives as the war dragged on, since race riots spread across the nation in the summer of 1943. By the end of the war, liberals looked back and saw that what had happened in Los Angeles had merely been the opening round of a national frenzy of mass violence. Just a couple weeks before the Zoot Suit Riots, a race riot erupted in the shipyards in Mobile, Alabama after rumours spread that a black worker had raped a white woman, leading a mob of five hundred white men to attack more than 2,000 black workers. On June 15, less than two weeks after the Zoot Suit Riots, a mob of thousands of white men crowded the town jail in Beaumont, Texas, demanding that a black man accused of raping a white woman be handed over; later, as many as 10,000 white men rampaged through the black district in town. Then, just a week later, the worst violence of the summer erupted in Detroit. After four days of riots, 30 people were dead and more than seven hundred were injured. Finally, in August 1943, black mobs in Harlem rioted after rumours spread that a white policeman had shot a black soldier, resulting in five deaths and 300 injuries. In each of these cases, liberals and racial minorities felt that the violence had been caused by the wild spread of false accusations. Luis Alvarez argues that “the riots were all fueled by wartime shifts in patterns of employment, demography, and xenophobia.” Racial tensions had been simmering because white men were resentful that they had to compete for jobs, housing, and public services with blacks and Mexicans; the violence was finally instigated by rumours of minority men raping white

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Union Violence in Hollywood As Los Angeles progressives saw things, the violent mobs that had first sprouted in their city in 1943 and spread across the country returned with a vengeance to southern California at the end of the war. For three Octobers in a row, from 1945 to 1947, Hollywood was inundated with conflicts between angry crowds representing the left and the right in the Hollywood film industry and the nation at large. In October 1945, a Conference of Studio Unions strike led to repeated riots in front of the gates of several studios that made local and national news: strikers overturned cars, policemen and hired studio henchmen beat picketers in the streets, and strikers responded by throwing glass bottles back at their antagonists behind the studio gates. In October 1946, the events played out almost exactly as they had one year earlier, with riots erupting repeatedly throughout the month in front of one studio after another. The players were the same: the Conference of Studio Unions was locked out (or went on strike, depending on who was explaining the situation), and the studios and local police worked together again to quell the picketers. Finally, in October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities convened in Washington to investigate Communist influence in the film industry. While these hearings did not lead to violence in the streets, they were – to both the left and the right – clearly a natural outgrowth of the labour unrest of the preceding two Octobers. Both sides painted the current hearings as the logical parallel of the violent strikes of 1945 and 1946. In all three years, Hollywood progressives saw themselves fighting two antagonists: their actual political opponents and the Los Angeles press. In each instance, radicals and liberals published their own newspapers, pamphlets, and mimeographs, making media activism a significant part of their cause. In March 1945, the Conference of Studio Unions went on strike after a year of wrangling over whether they or the International Alliance for Theatrical and Stage Employees would represent the film industry’s set decorators. The set decorators wanted to align themselves with the more radical CSU, but IATSE fought them through legal channels to become the group’s official representatives.32 Though conservatives and the mainstream press usually portrayed this conflict as merely a jurisdictional dispute, the battle to represent the set decorators was actually

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women.30 At the end of the year, leading liberal publications saw the riots as a manifestation of deeper socioeconomic problems in the country that needed to be addressed by an activist government. An editorial in The Nation, for instance, directly connected the recent riots in Harlem to those in Los Angeles and Detroit, arguing that the long term job of giving minorities “a fair share in the employment, education, health, and recreation facilities of the nation has not been met by city, state, or federal government. Until this is done, there will be constant danger of a repetition of last week’s tragedy.”31

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the fulcrum of a larger power struggle between the militant CSU and the more moderate IATSE over which would become the dominant union in the film industry. The power struggle of the late 1940s was the direct result of union corruption the previous decade. In the 1930s, the IA was the undisputed labour representative in the film industry. But the IA had been controlled by Willie Bioff and George Browne, two gangsters whom the studio bosses paid off in order to prevent labour disquiet. Bioff and Browne were eventually found guilty of tax evasion and racketeering, among other crimes, and sent to jail in 1943. Joseph Schenk, who was chairman of Twentieth Century-Fox at the time, was also dragged into the case for paying them off. He was eventually convicted of tax evasion as well and served a year in prison before returning to his executive position.33 In the years immediately after the war, then, trade union members in Hollywood felt that they had control over union decisions for the first time in the history of the industry, and many of the more militant unionists were still understandably skeptical of the IA leadership. The IA, they felt, hadn’t done much for them since the inception of the unions in Hollywood in the early 1930s. So, in the progressive imagination, the fight to represent the set decorators was not merely a jurisdictional dispute, but a fight over whether workers in the film industry could be represented by an activist union or would continue to be represented by a lacklustre company union in league with the studio bosses. Thus, when thousands of members of the Conference of Studio Unions went on strike in March of 1945, it wasn’t just a “jurisdictional dispute” for them, but a fight over the very legitimacy of unionization in the Hollywood film industry.34 To the chagrin of labour militants, the daily press almost never mentioned this most basic point, continually representing the ideological struggle between the CSU and IATSE as an arcane dispute that, as the Hollywood Citizen-News explained, was merely about whether or not to “permit the set decorators’ Local 1421 to retain its affiliation with the Painters Brotherhood.”35 Even the allegedly liberal Daily News failed to represent the CSU’s version of why they were going on strike. While it ran some editorials that argued in opaque terms that “the right of workers to choose their own unions is preliminary to true labor democracy,” it also editorialized that “pro-Russian, pro-Communist and fellow-traveler groups have also played into the hands of the reactionary bloc” by striking indiscriminately.36 And while the Daily News accounts of the riots strove to accurately represent the injury counts on each side, the paper never tried to explain the larger ideas that fueled the struggle. Most of the talent unions in the industry took their cues from the dailies and refused to take the CSU’s side. Both the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild overwhelmingly voted to cross the picket lines, the latter in a remarkable 3,298 to 96 vote.37 The Communist Party, most likely following the official Moscow line opposing strikes at the time, also disparaged the strike initially, thus creating an odd leftist-capitalist alliance opposing the CSU.38

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Figure 4.1. “Bloody Friday,” Warner Bros. Studios, 1945

Without the backing of other unions and militants, the CSU strike eventually disappeared from the news. By October, local newspapers had stopped paying attention. The CSU’s leader, Herb Sorrell, felt that if the union didn’t do anything dramatic, the strike might drag on forever. So on October 4, 1945, the CSU held a mass meeting in which they decided that they needed to take drastic action: they would picket in front of the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank the next morning. As soon as the picket lines appeared, studio executives knew that they had to make an equally dramatic gesture in turn. Violence finally erupted before the Warner Bros. gates a few days later on October 8, 1945. The Los Angeles press dubbed it “Bloody Friday.” Warner Bros. hired professional strike breakers – “goons” to their opponents – and Warners’ own chief of security, Blaney Matthews, led the charge, throwing tear gas bombs from within the safety of the studio gates and turning fire hoses on the crowd.39 In the aftermath, local police arrested protestors by the dozens – but they arrested the strikers exclusively; not a single strikebreaker was brought in. Progressives saw themselves as the unfair victims of mass arrests, much like the Mexican teenagers arrested en masse in the Sleepy Lagoon case. The daily newspaper coverage of the 1945 strike repeated the same themes again and again in all three major newspapers. The dailies’ antagonism towards the CSU was just part of a larger antagonism on the right towards labour organization in general and in Los Angeles in particular. Apart from the strikes that were sweeping many industries in America immediately after the war – including many newspapers such as the Examiner – Los Angeles was seeing strikes in other industries at the same 73

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time that the CSU was on the picket line. In October 1945, the Conference of Industrial Unions was on strike at oil refineries throughout Southern California, Greyhound bus drivers were striking in the city, and the telephone workers’ union also participated in wildcat strikes throughout the month. The Los Angeles Times took an anti-union position in each of these other cases, but was particularly livid about the conflict in Hollywood, writing that the CSU strike “raised over the question of who shall represent 77 set decorators takes the blue ribbon for asininity in wartime labor relations disputes.”40 The daily press didn’t just ignore the ideological arguments behind the strike; they tended to depict the strikers – in subtle and not-so-subtle ways – as the people who instigated and prolonged the violence itself. The Times’ headline after the very first day of riots read, “Film Strike Riot Ended by Police.” The Times argued that the strikers had incited the violence and that the police had calmly put it to an end: “The riot,” the paper said, “was precipitated by mass picketing by the striking Conference of Studio Unions led by Herbert Sorrell. . . [until] police reserves from three cities and the county could restore order.”41 Hearst’s Examiner went even further in its antagonism towards Sorrell, noting that even his secretary was caught spitting in the faces of a strikebreaker and a police office, and quoting him as shouting on the picket lines, “If they want it bloody, let’s make it bloody!”42 Throughout the remainder of the strike, the Times continued to repeat false accusations against Sorrell and blame him and the militant unionists for the violence. Almost every day, and in every article that covered the pickets, the Times made sure to emphasize that picketers were breaking court orders, pointing out that Sorrell had been “arrested with eight aides on suspicion of inciting a riot.”43 They also continually hinted that there were ties between the CSU and Communists, pointing out that strikers passed out leaflets produced by the North Hollywood Communist’s Club.44 And as violence continued later in the month, spreading to Columbia, Paramount, RKO, Republic, and MGM as well, the Times began referring to CSU picketers as “peaceful” with sarcastic quotation marks and referred to Sorrell as “director of the ‘mob scene.”’45 In making false accusations against Sorrell, the Los Angeles dailies were merely regurgitating the talking points of the conservative establishment in Hollywood. Roy Brewer, the virulently anti-Communist president of the IA, lobbed his first accusations in late April 1945, one month after the first strike began, in a series of leaflets that IATSE distributed around Hollywood. The strike, one of the first leaflets claimed, “must be a result of a long-range program instituted many years ago by a certain political party for one reason: To Take Over and Control Organized Labor in the Motion Picture Industry.”46 Progressive unionists were outraged at Brewer’s false accusations. Herb Sorrell maintained that he wasn’t a Party member, and indeed, the Communist Party had castigated him at the same time that Brewer was attacking him, claiming that he’d “fallen into a trap” by going out on strike

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in the first place.47 Nevertheless, the charges seemed to stick and Sorrell was never quite able to shake them off despite the evidence to the contrary. In both years’ riots, the national press followed the lead of the Los Angeles dailies. Life magazine, with the largest circulation of any publication in America, was perhaps the best representative of the mainstream national press. It portrayed the violence in a blandly “balanced” way. It covered the strikes only in the context of a wave of strikes that was spreading across the nation. In a one-page summary of labour unrest, the magazine noted that half a million people were on strike at the time, but “only in a few instances did it spark into violence.” Despite such protestations, they accompanied the story with only one photograph: violent unrest on a Hollywood picket line. The photograph itself is revealing. It shows a pair of overturned cars with a group of men slugging it out in the foreground while fire hoses blast in the background. By studying the picture alone, there is no way to distinguish who is fighting whom. The men in the picture could represent either side of the struggle. The caption as well makes the identities of the men unclear, saying only that “strikers and nonstrikers resort to violence.” As for the cause of the violence, the caption states merely that “the strike started with a union jurisdictional dispute.”48 The same photograph – with its hints that the violence had no particular causes, no particular antagonists, and no particular victims – ran in the New York Times, making it the most iconic image nationally of the 1945 strike.49 Left-wing publications, on the other hand, painted an entirely different story. As far as they were concerned, it was right-wing forces allied with the studios and the local police who instigated the violence. And according to these publications, the strike did not take place just because of some mere jurisdictional dispute; it was about the battle to create unions that would be more responsive to their workers. The Nation ran a long article two weeks after the violence in Burbank written by a man named Gates Ward who’d witnessed the events. Ward made clear in his first sentence what the strike was really about – “the right of employees to belong to unions of their own choice.”50 As to the reasons for the strike, Ward also had quite a different and more militant explanation than did the more mainstream reporters at the New York Times and Life. In his mind, the present strike is the climax of the all-out, ten-year-old effort of certain producers, a powerful minority in the A.M.P.P., to put all studio labor under the control of a company-dominated labor organization that was set up in Hollywood by two racketeers with the producers’ help.51

Unlike most other observers, he stressed that the picketers had been peaceful for months and that there had been no violence along the picket lines. In his version, on the morning of Monday 8 October, everything changed when two 75

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hundred “goons” hired by IATSE and led by Los Angeles Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz descended on the “peaceful line” of picketers “swinging chains, clubs, and other weapons. . . . The unarmed pickets fell bleeding in the street, but the line held until two hundred suburban police and deputy sheriffs rushed out from the studio and used their clubs recklessly.” The violence had begun the previous Friday 5 October, he explained, “when strike-breakers vainly tried to run down the pickets in automobiles, and company cops, aided by the Los Angeles and suburban police, sought to break up the line with fire hoses and tear-gas bombs thrown from the studio roofs.” Ward claimed that 70 pickets had been injured “in the two days of rioting instigated by the studio, I.A.T.S.E., and the law-enforcement agencies,” and he doesn’t mention police or studio employees or strikebreakers being injured.52 Strike leaders – including Herb Sorrell – were taken away in mass arrests, but no strikebreakers were arrested, even though Ward attested that “I saw all this and can state that there was no violence of any kind by the pickets.”53 Considering how conservative the Los Angeles dailies were and given that most Angelenos weren’t reading progressive journals like The Nation or P.M., Hollywood workers themselves saw the need to publish their own version of events. In both the 1945 and 1946 strikes, the striking unionists realized that they were losing the battle of public opinion to conservative forces and their sympathizers at the daily newspapers. If the three major dailies wouldn’t tell their side of the story, they figured, they would have to do it themselves. As one leftist publication put it, “With press, radio, and films dominated by big business, unionists must exploit to the full channels of communication yet possible.”54 An umbrella group of striking locals aligned with the CSU published the most prominent leftist newspaper, the Hollywood Atom. Another group of strikers in 1945 and 1946 produced a daily mimeographed paper called The Picket Line. One group of progressive IATSE non-conformists – the Local 683 – joined the fight against their parent union with their own mimeographed sheet. Yet another group of strikers, calling themselves the Patriotic Hall Defendants, printed a beautifully illustrated mimeographed paper called Order in the Court. Various branches of the Communist Party in southern California also put out their own mimeographed papers, which bore a striking similarity – in both style and substance – to the strikers’ publications. Progressives didn’t constrain themselves merely to the medium of print, though. One union local even produced its own movie: made for a slim budget of just $3,000, the film Conspiracy was “a dramatic portrayal of the Hollywood lockout and its tie-up with previous labor struggles in America against phony injunctions and fake conspiracy charges.”55 In every newspaper or mimeograph the left published, progressives reiterated the same ideas again and again: the conservative press made false accusations against leftists and by spreading these fictions, helped incite the violence against liberals, whom they eventually blamed for their own victimization. “As predicted by Herb

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Figure 4.2. The Conference of Studio Unions’ publication, The Hollywood Atom

Sorrell and others,” the Hollywood Atom claimed, “the press has laid down a barrage of phony, premature strike victory stories. . . . Such stories are deliberately designed to confuse the strikers and the public.”56 Their main mode of spreading confusion was by making false accusations. “Studio bosses and their stooges,” the Atom proclaimed, “have raised the cry of ‘Red,’ and bandied about the epithet ‘commie’ whenever the Conference of Studio Unions is mentioned. Any person interested in 77

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improving the condition of the working man and woman in Hollywood has been branded as a dangerous agitator.”57 Occasionally, the journalistic attacks against conservatives took to the streets. As The Picket Line reported in December 1946, “a large delegation from the CSU and local 683 yesterday picketed the front entrance of the Los Angeles Times to protest the manner in which the newspaper publishes stories about the Hollywood lockout. Picket signs carried by the delegation warned about the misrepresentation of facts which the Times publishes, and demanded that the paper tell the whole truth about Hollywood.”58 As violent as Hollywood’s labor dispute became in 1945, it only got worse one year later. Considering the intensity of the violence of 1945, many people assumed that all sides would do everything in their power to prevent violence from occurring again. Nevertheless, almost one year after the first strike commenced, union riots erupted once more in Hollywood. Many events of the 1946 lockout played out eerily like the strikes of 1945, but the breadth and depth of the violence in 1946 took on alarming dimensions. In 1946, the fear that one might be the victim of mob violence became a much more realistic possibility for many people working in the film community. Though it was not known at the time, it’s clear now that the 1946 lockout began because the studios and IATSE conspired to destroy the CSU. The truth about the collusion between the studios and the IA emerged a year later in testimony before a House committee headed by Representative Carroll Kearns that was investigating labour unrest in the film industry – ironically, at roughly the same time that the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened its hearings on Communists in Hollywood. A former executive named Pat Casey admitted in 1947 that studio executives and IATSE leaders had colluded to lock out CSU workers as part of a grand strategy to crush the militant union and turn the film industry back into a one-union town.59 The studios and IATSE chose to instigate a lockout by having IATSE take over the role of set erection, directly flouting a previous arbitrator’s decision. The lockout began on September 11, 1946, when, just as the studios and the IA had predicted, Herb Sorrell decided that CSU personnel would not work on any “hot sets.” The studios then asked union members who refused to work on hot sets to leave the studio premises. The lockout had begun. The studios and IATSE had not just planned the lockout, but they had also planned on turning the lockout into a violent confrontation, a confrontation that they were sure they’d win in the battle of public relations in the press, knowing that the Los Angeles dailies would instinctively take their side. And, knowing the influence that Norman Chandler and the Times had over the LAPD, they were sure that the police would not stop them if they resorted to violence. According to testimony before the House, in fact, Roy Brewer had told a meeting of IATSE Local 1421 that the members were told to “crack heads, turn over cars, get arrested.”60 CSU members began picketing to publicize the lockout, and according to plan, the picketers were met with armed resistance. On October 1, almost a

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year to the day since Bloody Friday, violence erupted dramatically again. The first riots began at MGM. CSU members and their opponents fought with clubs, stones and bottles. Unionists smashed windows and overturned cars. During the first two weeks of picketing this time around, IA members and the men they’d hired followed Brewer’s orders well. Even Variety, usually the font of balanced accounts, reported that the unions had 23 people hospitalized, 104 injured, and 55 arrested, without mentioning any injuries to the strikebreakers.61 The violence spread to Paramount, RKO, and the Technicolor labs. As with the year before, the lockout eventually came to an end with the mass arrests of strikers. Again, virtually no strikebreakers were charged, but the police arrested more than 1,700 picketers.62 Nevertheless, the violence intensified and spread, and as it did the accusations on both sides became increasingly ugly. Both CSU and IATSE members claimed that they’d been victims of violent attacks in their homes. Sorrell himself claimed that one day he was pulled off the street by a group of masked thugs, thrown into the back of a car, and dumped in the middle of the desert.63 The violence reached its peak when the CSU claimed that IATSE was responsible for a series of terrorist bombings targeting strikers’ homes and that the local press was ignoring it. “What about these bombings?” the CSU asked in one leaflet. “What was Roy Brewer’s purpose in visiting the Pinkerton Detective Agency two weeks ago?. . . Why aren’t these professionally administered sluggings in the headlines?. . . WHO HAS A MOTIVE FOR TERRORISM?. . . Is it coincidence that the bombings provide the excuse for which Mr. Brewer has been looking?”64 IATSE, meanwhile, published its own pamphlets, larger and glossier than those of the CSU. IATSE, too, saw newspapers as being intimately intertwined with mob violence in Los Angeles. The cover of its most important pamphlet featured a collage of newspaper headlines about the violence in Los Angeles superimposed with its own lurid headline: “This is the Record of TERRORISM against fellow unionists by the Conference of Studio Unions, Hollywood 1945–1946.” In the eight-page pamphlet, IATSE attacked the “un-American. . . Communist-inspired leaders” of “the Conference of Studio Unions [who] carried on its attacks against fellow members of the AFL.” The ensuing photographs fall into two categories. In the first, mobs of unidentifiable people fight on the streets. In the second, heavily bandaged victims stare morosely into space. In both cases, the photographs themselves cannot prove who was responsible for the violence. But, as with the famous photograph of the 1945 strike from Life magazine, the captions made the case. Next to one bandaged man, the caption read, “This A.F.L. member was one of the many who were beaten up by the pro-Communist C.S.U. gang.” The caption next to a picture of battling mobs explained: “Mob violence as C.S.U. terrorists slug and manhandle I.A.T.S.E. and other A.F.L. members.” The pamphlet turned the CSU’s claims of terrorist violence on its head, arguing that it was the CSU itself that was carrying out terrorist bombings. One page in

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Figure 4.3. A publication of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees

the pamphlet simply showed pictures of three homes that had been bombed – presumably by CSU members or their compatriots.65 The Los Angeles dailies blamed the CSU as they had one year before. The papers argued that CSU was at fault: they referred to arrested members of the 80

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CSU as “the mob’s ringleaders.”66 The rioting, they claimed, “resulted from the strikers trying to keep nonstrikers from going to work.” The police, they said, rescued the day: “Peace officers” put down the riot by arresting picketing unionists defying a Superior court order.” The Times echoed IATSE’s complaints about the CSU engaging in terrorist violence, reporting that CSU strikers threatened IATSE strike-breakers, “shouting, ‘Get that man’s name,’ ‘Get his car number,’ ‘We’ll see you at your home,’ and ‘We’ll take care of you later.”’67 In 1946, the issue of false accusations came up again. As they had a year earlier, the leading mainstream labour forces wasted no time in painting their adversaries as Communists, regardless of the truth. The vice president of the AFL, Matthew Woll, accused such obvious non-Communists as James Cagney, Myrna Loy, Edward G. Robinson, and Orson Welles of being party members. As usual, the progressive press was quick to point out what they saw as the real motivations for the attacks. “The genuine Reds are almost never attacked,” The New Republic declared. “They are too obscure to pay off in publicity value. So the witch-hunt victims are usually big name people who dare to use their prestige and money in behalf of causes not favored in the columns of the Los Angeles Examiner or Chicago Tribune.”68 The CSU was abandoned by the other unions in town. SAG president Robert Montgomery issued a press release in which he repeated the studios’ position that the real cause of the new strike had nothing to do with larger political considerations: “Strikers and non-strikers are not fighting over a question of wages and hours. They are fighting because two international presidents of AFL unions cannot agree on which union should have jurisdiction over 350 jobs.”69 Montgomery, though, made no comment as to which of the two competing union presidents had conspired with studio executives to break up a lawful strike using violent means. “The national press,” Mike Nielsen explained decades later,

lapped up Montgomery’s statement and spread it around the country as the ‘last word’ on the CSU strike/lockout. The strike had attracted national attention, but the story was cast in terms of the jurisdictional issues between AFL unions. . . . Time, Life, and Newsweek all failed to point out that Montgomery himself was a producer of his own movies. Also, the national press failed to mention that it was the solidarity of the CSU that had gotten all workers in the industry the long-awaited 25 per cent wage increase back in July. But most critically, the related issue of the producers’ stalling tactics and their encouragement of jurisdictional disputes were never given the attention they deserved. Industry and union people were well aware that the producers were out to break the CSU. The story was on the streets in Hollywood, but the magazines preferred to quote the actors and trivialize the desperation of the craft workers.70 81

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The HUAC Hearings of 1947 It was obvious in Hollywood that the union strikes of 1945 and 1946 and the HUAC hearings of 1947 were intimately related. As early as October 1945, during the first strike, one member of the House of Representatives from California, Ellis Patterson, attacked HUAC for its false accusations against the CSU strikers, claiming that noted Mississippi segregationist and HUAC member John Rankin “has blanketed my constituents with a smear, calling them subversive.”71 The Times’ coverage reinforced the idea that the hearings and the union strikes of the previous two Octobers were connected. On the first day of the HUAC hearings in October 1947, the paper’s front page featured two adjacent columns, one devoted to the HUAC hearings themselves, the other to the final negotiations still being conducted by Representative Carroll Kearns to officially end the 1946 lockout. Some of the witnesses made the connection explicit. After criticizing the influence of Communists on Hollywood generally, attacking organizations such as HICCASP for being “fronts,” and condemning films such as Mission to Moscow and North Star for rigidly following the Party line, Adolphe Menjou accused Herb Sorrell of being a Communist by pushing for the “disastrous strike” of the previous year.72 George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney, and Roy Brewer all joined in by accusing Sorrell of being a Communist, and of instigating the strikes.73 Local newspapers in Los Angeles, meanwhile, defended the Committee at every turn. Most of the Times’ articles opened with and devoted most of its space to friendly witnesses or to the committee members themselves, even on days when the committee was questioning unfriendly witnesses. A Times editorial on the day that the hearings commenced in 1947 stated its uncompromising position clearly. Assuming that the radicals who’d been called to testify would refuse to answer questions, the Times wrote:

The recent avowed reconstitution of the Comintern clearly places the Communists or their fellow travelers in the position of agents of a foreign government whose long-term purpose is the destruction by any means, of our government. . . . It is not a crime to be a Communist, although there are sane and influential citizens who argue that the Communist Party should be outlawed. And while communism is not a crime there is only one way to expose Communists: by legislative inquiry. . . . Until such time as Communists are defined by law as alien agents, the Un-American Activities Committee and similar bodies protect the country against them by tagging them conspicuously. . . . Rep. Parnell Thomas’s committee, acting properly and without legalistic obstruction, would do a lot for the film center by labeling the guilty and thus absolving the great majority of the innocent.74 82

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Just as they had with the strikes in 1945 and 1946, Hollywood progressives tried to counteract HUAC and their accomplices in the Los Angeles press by publishing their own propaganda. John Huston, William Wyler and Philip Dunne formed the Committee for the First Amendment as a liberal non-Communist group to fight HUAC. The decision to defend freedom of speech and freedom of association rather than to defend communism or Communists was obviously a public relations gambit, but it was also an honest account of the founders’ political attitudes; Huston, Wyler, and Dunne didn’t have much sympathy with radicals. None had participated in or countenanced the 1945 or 1946 picket lines. That being said, all three were genuinely concerned about freedom of the press. The committee’s major publication was titled simply Committee for the First Amendment. The 24page pamphlet boasted 350 signatories, including prominent liberals in Hollywood such as Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Groucho Marx and Orson Welles. Given the climate of false accusations, the CFA went out of its way to bar Communists from joining the organization.75 Nevertheless, the threat of such accusations influenced every decision the group made. In its first sentence, the pamphlet stated clearly that the organization’s members “espouse no political party.” Their goal was simply to defend “not only the freedom of the screen but also freedom of the press, radio, and publishing. . . even at the risk of being called ‘Reds.”’76 Significantly, the CFA made the power of newspapers the centrepoint of its appeal. The pamphlet doesn’t contain an essay or any sustained argument. Instead, it merely collects editorials from newspapers across the country condemning HUAC and waxing poetic about the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. It focused specifically on the most significant papers from the East Coast, the papers they thought represented the liberal-centre of the political spectrum, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Herald-Tribune, and the Detroit Free-Press as well as newspapers from Great Britain. Not surprisingly, the CFA didn’t mention any newspapers from Los Angeles. They were clearly making an appeal that sidestepped their provincial and conservative dailies in favor of more sophisticated and national voices. Nevertheless, the CFA was still hampered in its own form of white parochialism: its pamphlet failed to mention any ethnic press. Nevertheless, the CFA matched its political rhetoric with political action. It flew a contingent of celebrities to Washington to protest HUAC the weekend before the unfriendly 19 were to be called. Stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Danny Kaye staged protests in Washington. To complement their journalistic activism, they also produced a radio show called “Hollywood Fights Back.” The left’s response to HUAC may seem muted compared to its reaction to the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the union strikes. In these previous incidents, Communists and non-Communists had worked together to achieve the same goals. But now, because communism itself was the issue, the Communists, who had always been the most politically engaged activists on the left, felt that they couldn’t

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speak up without endangering themselves. The accusations that had spurred much of the debate in the previous years were no longer false in this case. Nonetheless, the HUAC hearings were a decisive moment for the Hollywood left. Every film that progressives made about mob violence at the end of the decade can be seen in some way as a commentary on the HUAC investigations.

Part TWO: Mob Violence in America Just as mass violence had erupted across America during the summer of 1943, another round of race riots plagued the nation immediately after the end of the war. And just as liberals had seen recurring patterns in the wartime conflict that mirrored their own situation, they saw similar patterns again in the postwar outbursts, and once again they saw the violence in their own community as emblematic of larger, national concerns. Nevertheless, there were important aspects of these other national riots that were different from the experience of Los Angeles, differences that political filmmakers usually overlooked. Though there were dozens of instances of mob violence that newspapers covered in the years immediately after the war, most fell into one of three categories: Southern riots, Northern riots, and ideological riots. Southern riots in places such as Athens, Alabama; Monroe, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; and Columbia, Tennessee tended to involve newly militant black veterans who took the Double V for Victory campaign to heart and fought back against Jim Crow laws when they returned home from the war.77 Columbia, Tennessee saw the South’s most prominent race riot in February 1946, and national liberal publications covered it around the same time that Orson Welles was devoting weeks of his radio broadcasts to demand justice for Isaac Woodard, a black veteran who’d been beaten and blinded in a racist attack in southern Carolina.78 The violence in Columbia, Tennessee began when a white man and a black veteran exchanged words and fought, which led bystanders in the street to get involved. Later that night, white policemen descended on Mink Slide, the black commercial neighbourhood in town. But as they approached, black residents fired from the darkness to defend themselves. The next day, local officials arrested more than one hundred African-Americans – almost every Negro man in town – and eventually, 25 of them were indicted for the shooting of four white policemen. As with every instance of mass violence in America during those years, the left blamed the prejudices of the press for instigating the violence. Not surprisingly, the Southern press refused to print anything that might explain why the defendants had defended themselves with arms. Leon Ransom, the chief counsel for the defendants, accused the press in the South of “aiding the prosecution by suppressing or distorting facts brought out thus far in the trial.”79 The Southern press and Southern law enforcement also made accusations about Communist influence 84

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another recurring theme. Shortly after the violence subsided, Columbia’s Sheriff Underwood, for instance, blamed the riot on Negro veterans and said of them simply that “they are Communists.”80 During the trial, the district attorney made vague references to Communist influence in the riots, denouncing “carpet-baggers, rabble-rousers and traitors who would crucify America to further their own ends of a well-organized scheme to uproot our Government.”81 Nevertheless, many progressive organizations like the NAACP felt that their publicity efforts – as with the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee years earlier – had led to the release of most of the defendants. Despite any prejudice among the all-white jury, 23 of the 25 defendants were eventually exonerated.82 In Northern riots like those in Chicago, meanwhile, violence erupted repeatedly over the issue of racial segregation in public housing. Chicago was teeming with racial tension at the end of the 1940s. More than 700,000 African-Americans had moved North during World War II,83 and initially, at least, the administration of mayor Edward Kelly tried to force racial integration in public housing. White people in Chicago, though, were not happy about it. The civil rights activist Homer Jack, who covered Chicago’s postwar racial tension in a series of articles for The Nation, claimed that violence against African-Americans at the time was endemic; he counted almost a hundred racial attacks in the city targeting black people in just two years.84 Most of these were small incidents, but three in particular received a great deal of attention in the national leftist press. In December 1946, a white mob threw stones at a black family trying to move into a housing project near the Chicago airport.85 Then in August 1947, a crowd of white people pelted Negro families with rocks when they tried to move into the Fernwood Park housing project.86 And in November 1949, a white mob threatened an interracial gathering at a local C.I.O. official’s home near the corner of Peoria and 57th Street.87 In all three cases, the racial violence began because white residents were outraged that black people were moving into their neighbourhood. Progressives were convinced that a rabidly racist press had inflamed the violence. In Homer Jack’s account, it was local newspapers with a racist bent – such as the Calumet Index – that played the most crucial role in instigating the violence.88 In the 1949 case at Peoria & 57th, Jack blamed the local Southtown Economist and argued that the police were complicit in the violence: they “not only refused to disperse the mobs,” he said, “but often openly sided with the racist hoodlums.”89 But the city’s largest paper, the Chicago Tribune, published by archconservative Colonel Robert McCormick, repeatedly egged on violence based on false accusations. On August 26, 1947, for instance, another race riot almost broke out when the Tribune ran an article warning about a Negro prowler who had broken into a woman’s home and killed her six-day old baby. The incident took place in a neighbourhood where a few black families had recently moved in, stoking racial tensions. As Chicago police kept vigil in the area to prevent violence, word eventually came out that

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the woman had fabricated the story; she had, in fact, strangled her own child. The most common type of false accusation in Chicago, like everywhere else, was that someone was a Communist. A writer in The New Republic reported an incident in which one policeman explained to a local newspaperman that “one group of persons were beaten up because they were Communists.” When asked how he knew they were Communists, the policeman replied, “Because they were Jews.”90 Finally, the most infamous anti-Communist riots took place in Peekskill, New York, in August and September of 1947. Though most people still think of them today as an ideological conflagration, progressives at the time considered the Peekskill riots to be race riots as well. “What happened in Peekskill yesterday,” Paul Robeson said the day after the first riot, “happens to the Negro people every day in the South.”91 Many commentators – black and white, liberal and conservative – noted a seemingly intrinsic connection at the time between Negroes and Communists, and many felt that an attack on one was an attack on the other. The roots of the Peekskill riots were planted when Paul Robeson announced that he would perform a concert outside of town on August 27, 1949.92 The concert was sponsored by an organization called the People’s Artists, Inc., to raise money for the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress, a recently formed organization that Robeson was involved with that had loose ties to the Communist Party and which Attorney General Tom Clark had included on his list of subversive organizations. At the first concert, a group calling itself The Joint Veterans Council of Westchester County protested outside the concert, at one point raising several burning crosses. Fistfights outside escalated into a larger melee. One man, a war veteran, was stabbed. No one was arrested, and the concert was postponed.93 Because they wanted to show that they would not be intimidated by violence, the People’s Artists planned a second concert just one week later, on September 4. This time, the worries of violence were so widespread that Governor Thomas Dewey called out 1,200 men to guard the rally. Leftists arrived at the concert with baseball bats and clubs fashioned out of broomsticks and soda bottles. The anti-Communist protestors, meanwhile, showed up with carbines. Despite the armaments, police officers managed to keep the peace during the concert. It was only afterwards, as the audience headed home, that the violence ensued. Right-wing protestors – who seemed to be mostly teenage boys at this point – hurled stones at cars. Most of the victims were progressives – four people were hurt seriously and 44 others suffered minor injuries – and the son of the Peekskill chief of police was eventually charged.94 Just as in Columbia and Chicago, leftists blamed the conservative press – especially the small-town Hudson Valley papers – for fanning the violence even before the first concert had started. Even the New York Times noted that “inflammatory statements” published by an un-named local Peekskill paper had played a crucial role in stoking racial anger among the locals.95 Best-selling novelist and thenparty member Howard Fast lumped the Hudson Valley press with Hearst’s yellow

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journalism from the beginning, blaming Hearst’s New York Journal-American and the Peekskill Evening Star, “a dirty little sheet, typical of our corrupt and rotten press,” for inciting the violence.96 As with every incident of mob violence in America at the time, people on the right were more than ready to toss the accusation of communism at their opponents. Governor Dewey himself defended the right to free speech, but he made clear where his sympathies lay, when he labelled the concert as “proCommunist.”97 The Town Supervisor of Cortland, next door to Peekskill, chimed in, claiming that the summer colonists included “several of the key figures in the Party and other known subversive organizations.” In this instance – unlike in most other riots – the accusations about communism may actually have been accurate. However, most people on the left were still incensed at what they saw as unfair redbaiting. Both The Nation and The New Republic covered the riots, but the Los Angeles press did not. The riots were made somewhat more significant to the Communists in Hollywood because of the presence of Communist screenwriters Howard Fast and Walter Bernstein.98 But for most liberals, it was still a distant event. Nevertheless, the issue of the conservative press that instigated mob violence struck a chord with liberals back in Los Angeles.

Conclusion: The Potentials of Race Riots In almost every riot across the country in the late 1940s, progressives felt persecuted by a reactionary press that falsely accused them of being Communists. But the direct causes of the riots in other parts of the country – the militancy of returning black veterans, the conflict over residential racial segregation, or the animosity toward Communists and radicals – never became major subjects in the films that Hollywood progressives made about mob violence at the end of the decade. Despite the fact that their films were more politically-engaged and incisive than most studio pictures, their political vision remained somewhat constrained. Their movies reflected the experience of mass violence in the film industry itself, emphasizing only those characteristics of other national riots that mirrored their own experience and downplaying those aspects that did not. Nevertheless, there was one important way in which the most progressive movies did reflect the more radical sentiments of the minority press. Because Hollywood liberals had so vociferously defended the militant tactics of the Conference of Studio Unions, they tended not to conceive of the mobs’ victims as hapless. In the liberal imagination, riots had some surprisingly positive effects in that they forced the progressive community to come together, to become more militant and to re-engage in political activity with renewed vigour. In this, they echoed sentiments that were almost never expressed at the time in the mainstream white papers, but which Hollywood unionists, screenwriters, and racial minorities in Los Angeles instinctively shared. Los Angeles’s leading black paper, The Sentinel, 87

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made this argument in a front page editorial when it quoted a pamphlet published by a group called the American Council on Race Relations in 1947. “There is a case to be made for a riot instead of a lynching,” the group said: The race riots of Detroit and Harlem, the Zoot-Suit disturbances of Los Angeles, would probably not have occurred in the South, or at the very least would have required circumstances more compelling than appear to have been present in Detroit, Harlem, or Los Angeles. But we must not be misled and think of a riot only as a high point in disorganization, an advanced degree of disintegration. For the Negro, Mexican or other oppressed minority it can symbolize resistance. As resistance, it frequently develops unanticipated organization and common action, a briefly realized capacity for collective expression. . . . It is the particular problem of lower-class groups and especially of Mexican and Negro lower-class groups that organization has seemed to be almost impossible without real or imagined threats to physical safety.99

The Council might as well have been speaking for the progressive filmmakers who began to make films about mass violence in the years after the war.

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Chapter 5 Nostalgia for the Popular Front in The Lawless

In the decisive scene of the 1950 production The Lawless, small town newspaperman Larry Wilder (Macdonald Carey) sits in a thin rectangle of light surrounded by darkness, contemplating a momentous decision. He can risk his safety and use his newspaper to save the life of a Mexican teenager railroaded by a reactionary local paper or he can do nothing and save himself. From the dark, he hears a voice: “Remember, you like this town, you like your place in it. Don’t let that heart of yours start bleeding.” The faceless, leading citizen exits and Wilder paces the room, from the blackness of the far corner to the brilliant swath of sunlight that falls across his typewriter in the foreground. The disembodied voice is the voice of the town itself, the voice of the anonymous mobs that will later be brought to life by yellow journalism. Wilder represents the committed progressive who’s given up on politics, but as he paces, he reaches a decision and dictates to his junior reporter – “A kid named Paul Rodriguez went to a dance last night in Sleepy Hollow where the streets aren’t paved and the people live in shacks” – then he sits down, now calm and completely illuminated, and types the conclusion of his missive to the people of Santa Marta, California: “as editor and publisher of The Union, I’m raising a fund to defend Paul Rodriguez. I’m putting my name on top of the list.” Wilder, a former progressive journalist who’d covered the war, faces the same predicament as did other politically engaged liberals in 1950. More than any other film in the cycle of movies on mass violence, The Lawless is a commentary on the death of the Popular Front. The Committee for the First Amendment had folded fairly quickly after the first hearings in 1947, and by the time The Lawless was going into production two years later, the era when Communists and liberals had worked together seemed a distant memory. By 1949, the House of Representatives had found the Hollywood Ten in contempt of Congress, the studio heads had declared 91

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they would no longer employ Communists, and each of the major unions in the film industry were about to meet Taft-Hartley requirements and instigate a loyalty oath. Further hearings – with the fear of a blacklist for hundreds more – seemed imminent, and the Committee for the First Amendment had no plans of forming again. With the most radical elements about to be banished from the film industry, the era of political activism in Hollywood seemed as if it were beginning to come to an end. At first glance, The Lawless may seem to be a simple liberal plea against racial intolerance, a story about a white newspaperman who defends a Mexican teenager who’s become the victim of sensationalized attacks in the press. But the film’s politics work on multiple levels. Like all the movies in the mob violence cycle, it channelled progressives’ anger about the recent union strikes in Hollywood. And besides its ostensible subject matter, the movie also reflects the internal struggle of politically active leftists dealing with the Communist investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In drawing comparisons between the subject of the film and the political culture of Los Angeles, the screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (credited as Geoffrey Homes) overtly resuscitated the arguments that progressives made during both the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots from 1942 and 1943. Larry Wilder’s choice between the darkness and the light, then, was much more than a decision about whether or not to help one Mexican-American kid in some tiny rural California town. Wilder’s dilemma was in many ways Daniel Mainwaring’s own; Mainwaring grew up in northern California, had been a progressive newspaperman himself, and had been one of the signatories of the Committee for the First Amendment pamphlet published back before the original hearings in October 1947.1 The decision that Wilder faced was a decision that Mainwaring and many other liberals faced in 1950, a decision about how politically engaged progressives might fight the growing conservative consensus of the emerging Cold War by teaming up again with their more radical brethren. In doing so, the film recapitulates the major themes of the cycle of films about mob violence: the conservative press’s false accusations against poor, minority victims spurs a racist mob that gathers to attack a symbol – in this case, a newspaper’s printing press – rather than the minority victims. And, in doing so, Mainwaring articulated the hopes on the left that the alliance between radicals and liberals that had flourished in the 1930s and 1940s might thrive once again.

Un-American Activities: Washington Investigates Hollywood The Committee for the First Amendment had been, perhaps, the most public example of Hollywood progressives fighting back against the conservative forces that were coming to dominate the political culture of the early Cold War years. 92

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NOSTALGIA FOR THE POPULAR FRONT IN THE LAWLESS

And though The Lawless doesn’t deal directly with that organization’s demise, its protagonist’s political evolution mirrors the development and eventual political disenchantment of many liberals in Hollywood who’d been active in the CFA before its dissolution. The CFA’s founders and a planeload of celebrities flew to Washington to protest the committee after the first week of testimony, but their hopes of defeating HUAC in the court of public opinion soon soured. They had planned to stage a rally just before MPAA president Eric Johnston was scheduled to defend the industry in his testimony, but at the last minute, chairman Parnell Thomas called John Howard Lawson instead. When the unfriendly witnesses were called, they refused to answer any questions directly, instead launching diatribes against the committee’s authority. They were gavelled into silence, one after another, and Lawson was dragged yelling from his seat. “It was a sorry performance,” John Huston wrote, summing up the sentiment of most liberals. “You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn.”2 On the flight back, Humphrey Bogart apparently lashed out at his CFA friends, yelling at Danny Kaye, “You fuckers sold me out!”3 After they returned to Hollywood, the mood had changed dramatically. “The reporting in Washington, with us until that moment,” Huston wrote, “was now against us.”4 Abraham Polonsky, blacklisted himself four years later, compared the atmosphere in Los Angeles to “a flu epidemic.”5 The next month, after the House voted – with about 95 per cent support – to cite the Ten for contempt of Congress, Bogart had changed his tune.6 He told the press “that the trip was ill-advised, even foolish, I am very ready to admit.”7 When the second HUAC hearings came around in 1951, he – like everyone else in the CFA – didn’t bother to fight the investigations. In November 1947, studio executives announced they would no longer employ Communists, and soon after, the three big talent unions acquiesced to the new laws that required their leaders to sign loyalty oaths. Huston recalls that in the Screen Directors Guild, everyone except him and Billy Wilder – even his CFA co-founder William Wyler – voted in favor of the loyalty oath.8 Emmet Lavery at the Screen Writers Guild orchestrated the removal of any suspected remaining Communists from its board. And under Ronald Reagan’s guidance, the Screen Actors Guild voted 1307 to 157 in favor of its own loyalty oath.9 Years later, Philip Dunne wrote that in 1948, “the entire industry became demoralized as almost everyone scrambled for cover.” When he tried to organize a further protest, most writers “offered tirades against the behavior of [Ring] Lardner [one of the Ten] and his colleagues on the witness stand, thus, to my mind at least, shifting elsewhere the blame for what was troubling their own consciences.” Though Dunne flew to Washington to testify as a character witness for Dalton Trumbo and helped raise money to support the families of the Ten, he said that by 1948 he had become a “tired liberal. . . . 1948 marked a sort of watershed in my political career. I never again became heavily involved in organizational politics.”10

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The Filmmakers The screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring had been one of the liberals who supported the CFA and he had signed a petition supporting Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson’s appeal of their contempt citations.11 The director Joseph Losey, meanwhile, had recently begun to distance himself from the Communist Party, which he’d been involved with, socially if not officially, ever since his arrival in Hollywood in 1943. The fact that that these two men were able to collaborate on a film that dealt – metaphorically, at least – with the political turmoil of the film community in 1950 was made possible, ironically, by two Hollywood producers who would have seemed very unlikely to take up their cause, if not for the unlikely box office success of the race message films of 1949. The producers William Pine and William Thomas, known in the industry as “The Dollar Bills,” had been churning out formula B movies for Paramount since 1941. They had earned a reputation in the business as some of the savviest producers of cheap entertainment, known for their economic efficiency and their avowed disinterest in the artistry of the cinema. They were such colourful characters that their reputation spread beyond the small confines of the low-budget end of the studio system; even mainstream national magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire published glowing profiles of them, “the leading makers of Class B pictures” in Hollywood.12 Paramount had become the most profitable studio in the 1940s under the leadership of Barney Balaban largely by producing anodyne entertainments like the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road movies. The studio was thus happy to promote Pine and Thomas by repeating the popular epigram that “a Pine-Thomas picture run backwards would entertain an audience as much as the same film shown in due order.”13 The producers were happy to join in painting themselves as gleefully crass businessmen. “We don’t want to make million-dollar epics,” they told one reporter. “We just want to make a million dollars.”14 Ronald Reagan spoke for many in the industry when said – admiringly – that “the thing I like best about these guys is that they’re not geniuses.”15 Their work before their second careers as producers included stints as newspaper reporters, as publicity men, and in exploitation, a combination of factors that may have contributed to their otherwise unexpected interest in Mainwaring’s controversial script about a small-town newspaper editor. Both Pine and Thomas had begun their careers as journalists. Thomas had majored in journalism at USC, where he was the sports editor at The Daily Trojan.16 Pine, meanwhile, started his career writing for Hearst’s New York American. Pine eventually did publicity for the Ringling Bros. Circus, then joined the Balaban & Katz theatre circuit before moving up to its parent company, Paramount Pictures, where he became the studio’s head of national exploitation and later director of publicity and advertising. Bill Thomas first met Pine when he became the older man’s assistant there. Pine then left to become the assistant to Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas moved on to

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work in publicity for the Pantages Theatre and then for Columbia Pictures.17 The two remained friends, though, and they often talked about how they could make movies better than the men they’d been working for. Then, one day, when they were meeting for lunch across the street from Paramount, they bumped into the actor Richard Arlen, whose career was on the downswing. Arlen, they discovered, owned several planes and ran a flight school to support his flagging career. Pine and Thomas liked the idea of making a cheap adventure yarn about pilots and they suggested that they could cast Arlen in the lead and cut down on costs by using his planes. The two men signed the actor, commissioned a quick script, and got Paramount – which was just then gearing up its distribution of B material – to agree to release the picture. With that combination of star, script, and distribution contract, the producers were able to procure a loan from a local bank. They made the movie quickly on an $86,000 budget and within two weeks of its release, Power Dive had earned back the bank’s investment.18 Over the next seven years, they perfected the business of making B movies. By 1948, they’d made themselves rich, producing 64 pictures, most of which cost about $120,000 to produce, but which earned back more than three times as much.19 But the economics of the film industry were changing. The major studios were releasing fewer movies after the war and were now focusing almost exclusively on A films. When Pine and Thomas first started producing in 1941, Paramount had released 45 movies, but in 1949 it released only 21.20 Clearly, they understood that they had to change their business model. In 1948, the two men produced their first film with a million-dollar budget.21 And in January 1949, they reported to the press that they had determined they could earn more money making A pictures; they could earn their best profits, they said, on movies with budgets of $750,000 to $1 million.22 Nevertheless, their decade-long indifference to quality left them with mixed feelings about big-budget pictures. “We’d rather get good notices in Ottumwa than please all the kibitzers in Chasen’s,” they liked to say.23 But now, to make A pictures, they would have to make films that catered to mature audiences, and even worse, the critics. They were unsure of themselves for the first time in their careers. Bill Thomas explained to one reporter in 1948 that “in the old days all we had to do was to get a guy blown up in an oil well explosion and go on from there, but now, when we want to kill someone, we’ve got to have a good reason.”24 Perhaps it was these conflicted feelings about A pictures that led them to take on the unusually political script for The Lawless. Like everyone else in the industry, they had noticed the remarkable success of the cycle of films on racial themes in 1949, including studio pictures like Pinky and Home of the Brave – but more importantly for them, the low-budget Lost Boundaries. The combination of serious themes mixed with the exploitation possibilities of a violent and controversial subject must have appealed to them more than the typical studio star vehicle. After all, they explained, they were looking for movies with both “values” and “hot exploitability.”25 They set the final budget for The Lawless at

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$450,000, much more than most of their previous movies, but still much less than the A pictures they claimed then to be working on, perhaps a sign that they were still nervously hedging their bets.26 Daniel Mainwaring had been working with Pine and Thomas since the beginning of their producing careers in 1941 and though he was used to their way of doing business, he yearned to write something with personal, literary, and political value. When Mainwaring had published his first novel in early 1932, some critics thought he had as much potential as the young John Steinbeck.27 He and Steinbeck shared an interest in rural California settings and New Deal politics. Mainwaring had grown up in a series of small towns throughout the state, but he was especially nostalgic for the farm where he was raised near Clovis.28 He explained to one critic years later that he had worked as a fruit picker on his own family farm as a kid and said that he “rubbed elbows with Wobblies” and that he’d “been a pseudo-anarchist ever since.”29 Later he graduated from Fresno State, then worked as a reporter for newspapers in New York and Los Angeles – including, ironically, Hearst’s Examiner – throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.30 Much of his early work foreshadowed the themes of his Lawless script. His first novel, One Against the Earth, was about a proletarian hero lynched by an angry mob after he was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.31 His short story “Fruit Tramp,” published in 1934, was about migrant workers in California’s Central Valley who go on strike rather than pick peaches for 15 cents an hour. The local farmers accuse their leader of being a red and the story ends when the farmers form a mob and attack the workers’ encampment, killing their leader.32 He continued to associate small towns with mob violence throughout his life. In a 1973 interview, he still bristled at the racism he saw in farming communities. “Small towns are miserable places,” he said. “Farmers I know up in the San Joaquin Valley have been trying to put out a contract on [Cesar] Chavez to get him knocked off for organizing the migrant workers. They’re sweet people.”33 Nevertheless, he continued to associate the Central Valley with his own yearning to be a serious novelist. The literary echoes of the landscape never left him. In a short story published in 1944, he described his protagonist Johnny Foster, a young writer who’s come to the San Joaquin Valley for the first time, as if he were writing about himself: “To Johnny it was Grapes of Wrath country, the Saroyan country, a sort of literary shrine a guy who was going to write had to see. . . . This was Highway 99 and the Joads had driven along it.”34 Mainwaring, though, never achieved the same level of fame as these fellow California novelists. His first novel wasn’t successful, so he worked for a while as a publicity agent in Hollywood and turned out a series of pulp mystery novels on the side. Even in his genre novels, though, he often wrote about the threats posed by extremist forces. In one series of books, for instance, his protagonist was the detective Jose Manuel Madero, a Zapotec from Mexico City, who often came up against conspiratorial fascist organizations in Mexico who were trying to derail that

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nation’s liberal democracy. In this, he was echoing some of the more radical voices during the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial who argued that the Los Angeles Police were conspiring with the Catholic fascist groups in Mexico known as Sinarquistas. In The Street of the Crying Woman, for instance, his leading characters include an American scholar who has written an admiring biography of Zapata and a former Communist who’d quit the Party but who still retained a passion for unionizing and the liberal struggle. At the end of a perhaps too-complicated plot, these men end up butting heads with a mysterious right-wing group known as The Sons of Cortez. In The Hill of the Terrified Monk, meanwhile, the villain is an American who wears an insignia of a white vulture, signifying his allegiance to yet another mysterious fascist group in Mexico.35 But during the war, Mainwaring recommitted himself to serious fiction; he dropped out of society for a while to work on a novel he hoped would be more challenging than anything he’d done in years. This book was Build My Gallows High, published in 1946, which he adapted for the screen the following year as Out of the Past.36 After this breakthrough, though, he was discouraged that he still had to write more pulp for Pine and Thomas. At the time of the book’s publication, the two producers had contracted him to write six scripts in one year, including titles such as Swamp Fire, in which Johnny Weismuller fought alligators along the banks of the Mississippi to win the hand of his Cajun bride.37 Mainwaring was unhappy with every one of the scripts he wrote for Pine and Thomas in that 12 month span except for one, Big Town,38 which Variety summarized as the story of “a crusading editor of Big Town’s illustrated Daily Press after getting burned by yellow journalism.”39 By the time he began to work on the screenplay for The Lawless, the political situation in Hollywood had lent Mainwaring’s lifelong concerns a more nuanced resonance. It’s not entirely clear how politically engaged Mainwaring had been during the crucial period of 1947 to 1951. He did sign the CFA’s most important pamphlet, but as a minor screenwriter, they wouldn’t have called on him for any of their public events. Tom Flinn mentions that he had “a brush with Hollywood’s witch hunters” but offers no further details.40 Losey said that Mainwaring “was very badly hurt by the black list. Because he took a left wing position and because he remained loyal to his friends and put his name on some of the scripts of blacklisted people and took no money for it.”41 Mainwaring’s widow, on the other hand, recalled differently. She claimed that Mainwaring fronted his name only once – for Paul Jarrico – and that the script was never produced.42 The blacklist didn’t damage his career permanently, though; his name appeared on almost two dozen credits between 1951 and 1960.43 In 1948, Mainwaring was serving as RKO’s Screen Writers Guild representative when he was fired by Howard Hughes for his leftist inclinations. Several people tell the same story of Hughes offering them the chance to work on a film called I Married a Communist. If someone rejected the offer, Hughes knew the he or she was politically suspect and fired the person

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on the spot. Mainwaring was one.44 Losey recalls Hughes offering him the script as well.45 His script for The Lawless was an attempt to continue the more serious work he had done in the early 1930s, setting the story once again in a farming town in California’s Central Valley and once again writing a story in which an ugly mob forms to brutalize its Mexican-American victims. Despite his passion for the new project – or perhaps because of it – he admitted that when he brought the new screenplay to his producers he wasn’t “too sanguine” about its prospects.46 “I took an idea for a picture about migratory workers to Bill Pine and Bill Thomas,” he recalled years later. “Home of the Brave had just been made by Robson and Kramer and was a success. I convinced Pine and Thomas we had a Home of the Brave with Mexican-Americans.”47 The Mexican angle would add a new twist to the message movies without being too controversial. In the postwar era, after all, a few filmmakers had begun to make movies with Mexican protagonists and settings – films such as John Ford’s The Fugitive, Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata!, and Budd Boetticher’s The Bullfighter and the Lady. And Mexican actors like Gilbert Roland, Ricardo Montalb´an, and Pedro Armend´ariz were getting better roles than at any time since the craze for “Latin lovers” back in the 1920s. To Mainwaring’s surprise, Pine and Thomas accepted his script. The final screenplay went through a few subtle revisions, but the end result was almost exclusively Mainwaring’s work. The producers hired Losey on the screenwriter’s suggestion,48 and the director deferred to Mainwaring on the final drafts of the screenplay. “We were very close friends and worked together,” Losey said years later, “but the script was really Dan’s.”49 The director had great respect for Mainwaring as a person and as a screenwriter, calling him “a much underrated writer and a really quite noble man.”50 The feeling was clearly mutual. The two men were still corresponding occasionally 25 years later.51 Inevitably, it seems, the producers ended up meddling with the script; Losey recalled that William Pine used to call story conferences while sitting on the toilet. The script “was corrupted by the producers,” he said. “I mean all that business of the rape of the girl and the police car going up in flames were stuck in by them.”52 Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration also inevitably suggested changes to the script. In a letter to Paramount Pictures, Breen wrote that “this whole undertaking seems to us to be fraught with very great danger” since the film would be “a very definite disservice to this country of ours, and to its institutions and ideals.” He admitted that the script had been unanimously approved by his office under the provisions of the Production Code, but he doggedly urged Paramount to reconsider going ahead with the picture anyway: The story itself is a shocking indictment of America and its people and, indeed, is a sad commentary on ‘democracy at work,’ which the enemies of our system

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Mainwaring did revise the script after hearing from Breen, sending the PCA more than 50 pages containing revisions.54 He claimed, ironically, that Breen’s comments had helped him improve on his initial drafts: “It was one-sided and loaded,” he said, “and we gave it perspective by introducing some decent, solid citizens besides the editor.”55 But Pine and Thomas went ahead with the picture and since the portrayal of certain newspapers and their reporters in the final film is still quite negative, it doesn’t appear that either Mainwaring or his producers made any significant changes to assuage the PCA’s concerns. Pine and Thomas were much more worried about their bosses at Paramount. A journalist at Ebony magazine reported that

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of government like to point to. The shocking manner in which the several gross injustices are heaped upon the confused, but innocent, young American of Mexican extraction, and the willingness of so many of the people in your story to be a part of, and to endorse, these injustices, is, we think, a damning portrayal of our American social system. The manner in which certain of the newspapers are portrayed in this story, with their eagerness to dishonestly present the news, and thus inflame their readers, is also, we think, a part of a pattern which is not good.53

Paramount did not know the Pine-Thomas plan for The Lawless until the script was ready for shooting and then fear gripped the studio bosses. They told the producers to forget about the whole thing. Especially anxious to kill the project was Paramount top man Y. Frank Freeman. When the producers insisted on continuing, he sniped at the story continually and caused the removal of one actor because ‘he looks too much like a Negro and we don’t want to get into that at all.’56

Mainwaring concurred with the assessment of Freeman, saying later that “half way through production, the head of Paramount decided Losey was too radical and ordered Pine and Thomas to fire him. The two Bills balked – not because they were liberals but because it would have cost them money. They let Joe finish it but they wouldn’t let him use any Negroes and only let him use thirty three percent Chicanos.”57 Like Mainwaring, Joseph Losey had also been interested throughout his career in mixing progressive politics and art. In the 1930s Losey had matched his pro-Soviet politics with a Brechtian aesthetics, but after the war he’d begun to drift from both the Communist Party and the radical formalism of his youth. He graduated from Dartmouth and traveled extensively throughout Europe in the early thirties – spending six months in Stalin’s Soviet Union admiring the stage productions of Nikolai Okhlopkov among others – before returning to New York in 1935. 99

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Though The Lawless is his second feature film, it has more in common with the theatre work of his youth than it does with the films he directed in the 1960s and 1970s for which he is most famous. In the theatre, he had matched an overt political engagement with an avant-garde style influenced by figures such as Bertolt Brecht and Vsevolod Meyerhold. “Certainly,” Losey recalled, “The Lawless belongs to a very early period for me. . . . I was still trying to get out of my system, I suppose, some things which were very much a part of me in the thirties and early forties.”58 With his second film, Losey wanted – indeed, needed – to abandon his experimental tendencies in order to produce a more commercially accessible work, while still maintaining his leftist vision, particularly because politics seemed more important than ever. His theatre work in the thirties was consistently political. Losey did some of his first work for the government-funded Federal Theatre Project, which produced plays “for the people” from 1935 until 1939, when Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats orchestrated its dissolution. The project organized a series of productions they called Living Newspapers as a way to educate the masses and to employ out-of-work reporters and theatre professionals. Losey’s first Living Newspaper play, Triple-A Plowed Under, opened in March 1936. The play consisted of 20 disparate tableaux with titles like “The Price of Milk,” “Farmers Organize,” and “The Supreme Court.” The propagandistic subject matter, matched with Losey’s radical staging, recalled Brecht’s theories on the Epic Theatre. The production presented each scene with masses of people instead of single characters, multicolored lights illuminating different parts of the stage, and an orchestra consisting of only percussion and trombones.59 The critic Albert Goldman commented on the production’s episodic treatment, mime and de-mystifying didacticism, and the thematic relationship of the involved groupings (farmers, consumers, middlemen, politicians) mediated by the stage company. . . . Patient, unembroidered explanations are required to show to farmers how the prices they receive for their produce are inflated by middlemen and passed on to consumers. . . . Government intervention, in the form of the New Deal Agricultural Administration Act (AAA or Triple-A) is soon exposed to vulnerable manipulation.60

Losey’s second Living Newspaper production, Injunction Granted, which opened just a few months later, was a similarly-episodic history of unionizing in the 1930s, in which he used – like Okhlopkov, whose radically decentred staging he admired – “a system of runways, platforms and hatches [which] provided the planes and areas which could be selected by complicated lights and which could overflow into the audience.”61 Like Brecht, Losey used projected headlines and cardboard signs to tell the story; a clown haunted the proceedings like a Greek chorus; and the 100

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orchestra this time consisted of 16 snare drums and 16 base drums. Losey’s interest in Brechtian aesthetics began to wane, ironically, just as he was chosen to direct Charles Laughton in the American premiere of The Life of Galileo in 1947. Losey had little to do with that production, though, since Brecht himself maintained almost complete control over the production. Losey had been intimately involved in communist circles throughout the 1940s. When he first arrived in Los Angeles in 1943 to take up work as an assistant director at MGM, he stayed with the composer Hanns Eisler – who would also later be blacklisted – just as Eisler was getting involved in working for the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee.62 From the beginning, Losey became good friends with many leading Hollywood Communists, including Dalton Trumbo, Adrian Scott, Sidney Buchman, Francis Faragoh, and John Howard Lawson. It was around this time that the FBI began to monitor his activities, believing that he may have been a contact for various Soviet agents. Though he had hosted party gatherings in his home almost as soon as he arrived in Hollywood, Losey claimed in later years that he had only become a member early in 1946 and had quit in either 1947 or 1948.63 Though he may have admitted that he was a member for only that brief period on the advice of his lawyer, it was clear that by the late 1940s he was vacillating in his political commitments. On the one hand, he was still active in many leftist causes. In October 1947, he helped stage a fundraiser for the Hollywood Nineteen (the leftist “unfriendly witnesses” subpoenaed by HUAC). In 1949, he was one of the sponsors of the Waldorf Peace Conference in New York, which had been attacked by many liberal anti-Communists as being a front group for the Soviet Union. And as late as 1950, he signed a letter urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of Lawson and Trumbo, though many other non-Communists also signed that letter, including John Huston, Burt Lancaster, Arthur Laurents, and even his Lawless collaborator Daniel Mainwaring.64 On the other hand, he was clearly distancing himself from other radical friends. Party activities in Hollywood, he recalled years later, had devolved into just “a lot of meaningless so-called Marxist classes which were a bore and which never had any practical result.”65 He initially argued against the mandatory loyalty oaths in the Screen Directors Guild in the fall of 1950, but eventually joined almost everyone else in signing a voluntary declaration that he was not a Communist. And that same year, Losey hired the lawyer Martin Gang, who was well-known in leftist circles for helping people named before the committee remove themselves from the blacklist. Gang would present the committee’s intermediaries with an affidavit his client had signed declaring that he or she was not a Communist and would be willing to provide names. Gang told Losey that he was to be named to the committee – by screenwriter Leo Townsend and his wife Pauline – and that he should prepare to testify himself. Losey instead flew to Italy to direct a picture with Paul Muni and never made a film in the United States again.66

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The Lawless and the Death of the Popular Front As Larry Wilder paces back and forth between the light and darkness in his small office, he might as well be Daniel Mainwaring, or Philip Dunne, the liberal nonCommunist founder of the Committee for the First Amendment. Santa Marta might as well be Hollywood. In 1948, Dunne announced that he was “a tired man,” gave up on political organizing, and gave up on the CFA. Wilder tells Sunny Garcia, the local Mexican newspaperwoman, “you’re looking at a tired man. So I’m not taking sides or picking fights or telling them [the racist townsfolk] what to do. Me? I’m for Mother’s Day.” But Wilder, like Dunne, was once a political firebrand. When he first starts wooing Sunny, he tells her, “I used to be like you – violent, impatient.” Surprisingly, she says she’s known him for years – she used to read his European dispatches over the Teletype – and she urges him at every step to take up the cause of the Sleepy Hollow boys. As the town’s two most important editors, she and Wilder are the living embodiment of the First Amendment, active and passive sides of the same coin. They’re also stand-ins for the liberal and radical wings of the progressive spectrum in Hollywood. Wilder, like Mainwaring himself, was a politically-engaged liberal, the type who might add his name to a CFA publication but who never would have joined the Party. Sunny Garcia is more activist and more radical, the type of person who was often tarred as a fellow traveller. The Lawless tells the story of Larry Wilder, Sunny Garcia, a young MexicanAmerican teenager named Pablo Rodriguez, and the town of Santa Marta and its Mexican neighbourhood across the tracks, Sleepy Hollow. The name of the neighbourhood itself was clearly intended to evoke memories of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1943.67 At a dance in Sleepy Hollow, some white and Latino kids get into a fight and Pablo accidentally slugs a cop. Afraid and confused, he steals a car to escape. As with almost every film in the cycle, the mob is initially egged on when a conservative newspaper makes a string of false accusations about a group of defenseless Mexican-Americans. The local papers stir up a scandal with headlines warning about “fruit tramp riots” and a young hoodlum on the loose. After Larry Wilder decides to use his paper to raise money for the boy’s defence, the local white townsfolk rampage through the streets. Initially the mob chases a group of Mexican teens, but just as in Endfield’s The Underworld Story and Sam Fuller’s Park Row, the rabid citizens inevitably end up attacking the newspaper office and the printing press itself, the very symbol of the First Amendment. The angry white mob, like the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was trampling on Americans’ essential liberties. And just like the men who initially founded the Committee for the First Amendment, Wilder initially gives in after the violence and announces that he’ll pack up and leave. But after Pablo comes to thank him for what he’s done, Wilder has a change of heart; once again he decides to commit himself to the political struggle, joining forces with Sunny to continue publishing a newspaper any way that he can.

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NOSTALGIA FOR THE POPULAR FRONT IN THE LAWLESS Figure 5.1. Larry Wilder looks over the destroyed printing press. The Lawless (1950), Pine-Thomas Productions

While The Lawless may have been a metaphorical commentary on the nation’s current politics, like many other films in the cycle, it did so by recasting recent historical events in California. In making a movie about Mexican fruit pickers, Mainwaring was resuscitating the most common themes that white progressives had emphasized when discussing Mexican-American civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s. Carey McWilliams, for instance, had written about the labour struggle of Mexican migrant workers in his 1939 book Factories in the Field and in his 1948 book North from Mexico.68 But Mainwaring drew his most significant connection to recent California history by making his screenplay re-articulate all the main arguments that progressives had made during the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots years earlier. The similarities between the events in The Lawless and the two events during the war are overwhelming. Instead of Sleepy Lagoon, Mainwaring calls his Mexican neighbourhood Sleepy Hollow. Instead of headlines about “Zoot Suit Riots,” the local papers ran headlines about “Fruit Tramp Riots.” The two pamphlets that the Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee had published back in 1943 both condemned the press’s use of the word “gang” in describing the Mexican kids who hung around 38th Street. Outside the Sleepy Hollow dance hall, Sunny Garcia tells Wilder about the origins of the term: every boy “had a gang. Eight boys in a block. In Sleepy Hollow, that’s a gang. Nothing much to do, so one gang fought another. Then the police would come and haul them off to jail. Pretty soon, 103

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people were saying we were all juvenile delinquents.” Racial tensions simmered for months before the Zoot Suit Riots because white servicemen and Mexican girls were trading sexual slurs on the streets of L.A. Many of the initial fights broke out when white servicemen picked fights at Mexican-American dances.69 The violence in Sleepy Hollow similarly begins when the white teenager Joe Ferguson and his buddies try to force some Mexican girls to dance with them at a “Good Fellowship Dance.” Larry Wilder covers the dance for his paper precisely because he expects that violence might break out. Throughout the riots of 1943, the L.A.P.D.’s unwritten policy on confrontations between Anglos and Mexicans was to arrest the Mexicans en-masse and let the white people go. After the brawl at the Good Fellowship Dance in the film, the Santa Marta police arrest 11 Mexican boys, but only one white boy. As with many of the films in the cycle, the unfairly accused minority victims can’t afford an adequate legal defence. Both Sleepy Lagoon pamphlets had lamented the inequalities the defendants faced because they couldn’t afford quality legal representation. In The Lawless, one public defender represents all 11 boys, urging them to plead guilty to a lesser offense to save everyone the time and money of a trial. Both Sleepy Lagoon pamphlets also made every effort they could to mention that a defendant had served in the armed forces. Mainwaring, too, points out that Lopo and Pablo’s older brother served in the army – Pablo’s brother, in fact, died on the Normandy beachhead. The most significant similarity between the film and the events of 1943, though, is on the discourse surrounding the press. The liberals and Communists of 1943 knew full well that the fight over Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots was as much a fight over the power of words as it was a fight about racial injustice. Mainwaring felt this, too. Indeed, the film plays out like a step-by-step primer on precisely how yellow journalism comes into existence. To set up his argument, Mainwaring invented three separate newspapers to represent three points along the political spectrum. Larry Wilder at The Union represents the liberal position; he tries initially to remain above the fray and report the news in a distanced, but balanced manner. Sunny Garcia, the editor of the Spanish weekly La Luz (“The Light”), stands in for the radical press. Recalling the Communist dictum to use art as a weapon, Sunny repeatedly urges Wilder to use his paper as a political tool. “You can do a lot of good with it,” she tells him. “You can tell the people over there to – well, to look across the tracks.” And later, after Pablo’s arrest, she implores, “Can’t you do anything? Tell the people he’s a poor scared kid. Tell them to let him go.” Jan Dawson, meanwhile, a reporter for the Stockton Express who comes to Santa Marta intrigued about salacious tales of Mexican violence, is clearly intended to represent the reactionary Los Angeles dailies. Her paper’s very name elicits comparisons with Hearst’s Examiner and Herald-Express back in Los Angeles.70 Wilder’s paper, then, still uncommitted in the town’s political landscape, could eventually tip to either the right or the left, it seems. The Union’s office, in

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NOSTALGIA FOR THE POPULAR FRONT IN THE LAWLESS Figure 5.2. Jan Dawson holds up a headline from the Stockton Express. The Lawless (1950), Pine-Thomas Productions

fact, is ideologically split. The first sensationalized stories do not come from Jan Dawson, but from within the staff of The Union itself. Wilder’s assistant, Jonas Creel, freelances for The Express, and though he wasn’t at the Good Fellowship dance, he has no compunction about painting the evening’s events as if he had, telling Dawson over the phone that “a gang of fruit tramps threw a dance for some other gangs over in Sleepy Hollow. . . . One of the kids – one of the ringleaders – a kid called Paul Rodriguez – slugged a cop.” When Jan Dawson arrives the next day, she explains to Larry Wilder that she took Creel at his word and shows him The Express’s headline – the words “FRUIT TRAMPS RIOTS” clearly evoke similar headlines that appeared in the Los Angeles dailies in 1943.71 Dawson’s disregard for the truth stems more from a politically na¨ıve desire to dramatize her story than it does from any right-wing agenda of her bosses. She and Wilder wax nostalgic about their newspaper days back in New York, but her fondness for the career doesn’t include any desire to actually investigate the truth. She seems much happier inventing her own melodramatic vision of the world. A young girl named Mildred Jensen stumbled upon Pablo hiding in her barn and then hurt herself by walking into a post, but when Dawson visits the girl for an interview, she feeds Mildred her lines. “Now, dear, try and remember just what happened,” she says. “You went down to the barn and he jumped out of the dark and grabbed you!” Sure enough, the next edition of The 105

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Express runs a headline that reads “Teen-Age Girl Charges Attack by Fugitive Youth.” Later, Dawson describes the arrest of Rodriguez in purple prose, though she didn’t witness the incident: “Rodriguez stood there, mud-covered, sullen, cruel, a trapped animal if ever I saw one. I moved closer to him, stared deep into his eyes, hoping to find some spark, some little ember of remorse, but all I could see was cruelty.” She reveals her biases more explicitly later when she says over the phone of the Mexican townspeople, “they all look the same to me.” In 1943, the press depicted the Zoot Suit Riots, for the most part, as Mexican attacks on white servicemen when, in fact, the servicemen had been the most vicious assailants; in Mainwaring’s script, a murderous band of white townspeople roam through the streets overturning cars and beating up innocent civilians, but The Stockton Express writes only of a “Fruit Tramp Riot” that never occurred. Mainwaring and Losey portray the violence in Santa Marta erupting from a complex interplay of racial, sexual, generational, and class conflicts. They take pains to emphasize the positive and negative characteristics of each side in these conflicts, and though at times they appear to argue for the culpability of individuals rather than of larger social forces, they ultimately emphasize the important role that money and institutional power play in shaping public opinion and eventually in legal justice. Mainwaring depicts his Mexican characters, for the most part, as noble, patriotic Americans; they are a touch more nuanced, though, than the ones that the progressive pamphleteers depicted in 1943. Pablo is carefree and easy, dreaming of one day owning his own orchards. Lopo, on the other hand, who fought the Nazis in Europe, is more cynical. When two white kids confront them after a car accident, Lopo throws the first punch. Pablo, like the real Sleepy Lagoon defendants and unlike the defendants portrayed in the pamphlets, actually does commit some crimes. He does punch a policeman – though accidentally – and later he steals both an ice cream truck and a car on his run from the law. And during the race riot at the end, Lopo takes a wrench to the white crowd with relish. Mainwaring doesn’t indict virtually every white person the way that the Communist writer Guy Endore did, either. Some members of the press – Larry Wilder, for instance – do have good intentions. Most of the policemen are decent men who castigate the white teens for picking fights and who chide their more violent fellow policemen. The defence lawyer is harried, but a reasonable man. There is no prejudiced judge, no discussions about the biologically determining factors of the races, and no references to fascism or Hitler. Indeed, one of the most sensitive and progressive characters in the entire film is Joe’s father, the wealthy white Mr. Ferguson. Pablo’s father had urged his son to stay away from Americans, but when Joe reacts angrily that he doesn’t have any friends across the tracks in Sleepy Hollow, Mr. Ferguson tells him, “It would be good if you did have.” Nevertheless, Ferguson’s honorable intentions subtly reinforce the idea that money inevitably plays a more important role than simple good feeling. When the boys from Sleepy Hollow are arrested after the dance, Mr. Ferguson pays their fines;

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without the money from this wealthy white benefactor, they most certainly would have spent time in jail. At the end of the film, after the mob has ransacked The Union offices and destroyed the printing press, Mr. Ferguson once again intervenes and offers to put up the money to get the press running again. Once again, Mainwaring points out that to develop a critique of institutional power one must nevertheless rely on the support of those within the institutional power structure. And, because Wilder must rely on the help from Sunny Garcia in the end, Mainwaring also argues that the left can only revive itself by once again forging bonds between races, cultures, and genders and by reuniting the liberal and radical halves of the progressive spectrum. Despite the outsized role that money may play in shaping the community’s political culture, the movie repeatedly emphasizes the shared human desires of each of its divided groups. Mainwaring and Losey, for instance, continually highlight the commonalities between the Anglo and Latino communities. The very first shot of the film shows Pablo Rodriguez and a white man loading a truck together in the foreground and a multicultural group of workers picking tomatoes in the background. Later, when the workers gather to collect their pay, the foreman calls out two names – Jackson and Lopez. Pablo complains that “There must be an easier way to make a living,” and Lopo says, “There is. For Anglos.” But at that very moment a white couple walks by – presumably the Jacksons whose name we’ve just heard – and Pablo says, “Some of them don’t do so good either. So quit your beefing.” In one of the most effective sequences of the film, Mainwaring designed a comparison of his young Mexican and Anglo protagonists through purely visual means.72 The sequence begins with Pablo and Joe primping themselves for Saturday night immediately after their initial altercation. Pablo runs into his backyard to take a shower, wearing nothing but a white towel. He hangs his suit on an old wooden ladder and picks some clothes drying on the line just as a train passes in the background – an elegant visual reminder that Pablo’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks. The shower itself consists of a wooden cubicle behind the house; the showerhead is a hose with an attached can filled with holes. Losey dissolves from Pablo in the shower to the shadow of Joe in his bathroom showering behind frosted glass. Joe steps out of his shower wearing nothing but a white towel – just like Pablo – but his bathroom is, not surprisingly, a bit more sophisticated. Still, while the trappings of wealth divide them, the visual parallels between the two teenagers confirm that their values and ambitions are the same. The boys also face similar inter-generational conflicts at home. Pablo’s father rankles when his son calls him “Pops.” “When my father spoke,” he says, “I listened. But you – you tell me how to speak.” Joe faces similar problems with his parents, ignoring his mother’s yelled queries when he steps out of the shower. His relationship with his father is equally strained. When his father chides him for getting into a fight, Joe says, “Okay. Take their side like you always do.” Later, at the Good Fellowship dance, Losey and Mainwaring again stress the similarities that bind the various communities in Santa

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Marta. The dance floor is filled with white couples and Mexican couples, young and old; any class divisions seem invisible. The music itself consists of a variety of styles intended to appeal to a variety of backgrounds – some Mexican music, a big band number, and a waltz that Lopo plays especially so that Larry Wilder and Sunny Garcia might feel comfortable enough to dance together. Mainwaring also draws parallels between political ideology and gender; his representation of women may, in fact, be the most progressive of any of the movies in the mob violence cycle. Sunny Garcia is the strongest character in the film; as her name and her paper’s name imply, she is the light that shows Wilder the way. But there is another strong woman competing for Wilder’s attention: Jan Dawson and Sunny Garcia represent opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but they also, obviously, represent the film’s two most prominent possibilities for the role that women might play both in the public sphere and in Larry Wilder’s life. Like most movies of the period, women could fit into two roles: the bad seductress or the good wife and mother. When women were good, they led men to discover their better selves. When women were bad, they led men to pursue the worst aspects of their personality. In The Lawless, though, the conflict that women represent is political rather than sexual: the bad woman represents the reactionary force of yellow journalism that Larry Wilder might unwittingly embrace if he doesn’t watch himself; the good woman represents the progressive potential of activist journalism. Mainwaring doesn’t completely upend the standard stereotypes, though: Sunny Garcia is still a fairly chaste good-wife figure but also a more sexually appealing character than Jan Dawson. But in a sign that the film’s central concern with the romance is ideological rather than sexual, Mainwaring suggests that Wilder and Garcia’s eventual union will produce a progressive newspaper rather than a child as its first offspring. Like most progressive filmmakers of the period, Joseph Losey emphasized a realist aesthetic, casting many non-actors and eliciting a naturalistic performance style, focusing on a working-class milieu, and making extensive use of actual locations. Though he’d formerly associated an avant-garde, Brechtian technique with a radical political commitment, in making a commercial picture for Pine and Thomas, he had no choice but to abandon his earlier formal experiments. But just as he was shifting his political allegiances at the time, the shift in aesthetics seemed to excite him. He and his crew shot The Lawless in Marysville and Grass Valley, California, in just 18 days, and the local detail is one of the film’s greatest strengths.73 At the Good Fellowship dance, for instance, Losey shows a Mexican band shaking maracas in time with a 78 record. Mexican girls chew gum and look bored in sweaters and skirts leaning against a wall decorated with dried cornstalks. The cinematographer Roy Hunt used new, lightweight cameras to give himself greater mobility. He and Losey often used tracking shots and camera pans to heighten the picture’s sense of realism, emphasizing that Santa Marta is an actual place, not just a studio set. They also shot much of the film with natural light and at night. As the

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NOSTALGIA FOR THE POPULAR FRONT IN THE LAWLESS Figure 5.3. The angry mob overturns a car. The Lawless (1950), Pine-Thomas Productions

camera follows Wilder and Garcia walking through town at dusk one evening, for instance, they happen upon a man burning leaves in the street, just one minor detail that reinforces the feeling that this small town might be like any other actual town in any other part of the country. Almost everyone who’s reviewed the film lauds its detail: “What gives it an edge of brilliance,” Tom Milne wrote, “is Losey’s eye for small-town locations: the shabby dance hall in the Mexican quarter, the sleepy high street, the one-horse newspaper office, the cosy front porches and the churchgoers, all swept away in sudden primitive starkness as the fugitive is relentlessly hunted over a fantastic wasteland of rocks and rubble.”74 Losey’s aesthetic choices are never completely naturalized, though. Even in the most quotidian details of the film, he delights in aesthetic flourishes to reinforce the film’s larger political themes. During pre-production, for instance, he studied photographs in the press about the Peekskill riots from the previous year, so that even his attention to realist details was imbued with an ideological tinge.75 He places almost all of these details and all the action inside the frame, rarely using offscreen space. There are no conspiratorial machinations going on unseen. The evils of the town – the angry mob, the right-wing ruminations of the press – are all on view just as the workings of HUAC were made public in the papers every day. In Wilder’s newspaper office, Losey sets the camera in the hall and tracks or pans from one room to another to follow Wilder’s agitated pacing, giving the audience a sense 109

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of the office’s layout, the desks covered with typewriters and stacks of papers, and the strange, hulking printing press in the back room. The moving camera provides the audience with an excellent sense of the physicality of the space, but it also shows that wherever Wilder goes, he can’t escape the presence of the enormous printing press in the back room, the very embodiment of the First Amendment that’s been plaguing his mind. And at two moments when Wilder’s actions have helped Pablo re-unite with his family, Losey sets up two rhyming deep-focus shots that show Wilder in the immediate foreground and Pablo embracing his mother and father in the extreme background, stressing – on a purely visual level – the profound effect that Wilder’s decisions about how to use his press will have on other people’s lives. Losey also uses texts to make political points that the characters themselves seem unable to articulate. In staging Galileo in Los Angeles, Brecht had made creative use of language that he splashed across the stage, and his assistant Losey seems to have been inspired by his choices.76 Foremost among the texts that Losey uses is the name of Wilder’s newspaper – The Union – stenciled on the paper’s front window. The name itself hints at Mainwaring’s yearning for a merging of the factions of the left, so it’s only appropriate that for most of the film the newspaper’s name is reflected backwards across the wall behind Larry Wilder. Throughout the movie, Losey shows us this word again and again; it flares up against the back wall of the newspaper office like a talisman. Finally, in the film’s climactic scene, the angry mob turns away from its Mexican victims and turns instead towards Wilder’s Union offices, to attack, like HUAC, the First Amendment itself. The mob hangs outside the offices below, still too nervous to actually run up the stairs to the second floor and demolish the paper. As Lopo Chavez stands at the top of steps, holding the mob at bay – “In the army, they paid me to kill people like you,” he yells as he wards them off with a wrench – Losey cuts back to the offices where Sunny Garcia stands with the words “The Union” splayed dramatically across the blank wall behind her, larger than ever before. Suddenly, someone in the crowd throws a rock and the words shatter with the broken glass. As Sunny cowers among the shards of letters, the crowd rushes up the steps and breaks open the door. But because of Mainwaring’s hope for a regeneration of the leftist collaboration of the Popular Front era, he made sure to follow this scene of destruction with Wilder’s decision to start publishing a newspaper once more. With his new partnership with Sunny Garcia, the union would be restored once again.

The Reception When the film was completed, producers Pine and Thomas knew they had made a picture unlike anything they had done before. The Lawless became the first film distributed by Paramount to open at “a small, so-called ‘art’ house” rather than at a big commercial theatre. The New York Herald Tribune argued that the film was 110

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a “radical departure” for Pine and Thomas and that the film “may revolutionize distribution methods at Paramount and perhaps other studios and may even effect story production in Hollywood.” Pine agreed, saying that “the story wasn’t made for the mass appeal that our other pictures have quite frankly been aimed at” and that before the premiere he was awaiting the reaction “with quiet concern.”77 His worries were soon dispelled. The reviews were uniformly glowing. Bosley Crowther began his New York Times review by saying, “Let’s have a real salute this morning to . . . an exciting picture on a good, solid social theme . . . , a forthright little picture with which everyone may be pleased and humbly proud.”78 The Variety reviewer wrote that “the footage [is] constantly on the march and alive with excitement, particularly in the mob scenes and the mass running to earth of the frightened young Mexican.”79 Howard Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that “mob violence has rarely been more vividly portrayed on the screen than it is in ‘The Lawless.”’80 Both The Daily Worker and The Daily People’s World gave the film positive reviews as well.81 The French – not surprisingly – were even more glowing. In Cahiers du Cin´ema, Marc Bernard wrote, “It is the most beautiful of films. I breathe easier after each viewing. . . . It has a youthful tone, it is irresistible, like a morning swim.” And in the same issue, Pierre Rissient, with a certain genre-bending flare, called it “the greatest western and even the only western ever made.”82 The response in Los Angeles was also uniformly positive. The Los Angeles Urban League honored the film for its “outstanding film achievement.”83 Every critic at a Los Angeles paper gave the movie a positive review. These reviewers, though, seemed disinclined to engage in any sort of ideological interpretation; though some writers noted a connection to films like Crossfire and Intruder in the Dust, no critic made any mention of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, the Zoot Suit Riots, the House Un-American Activities Committee, or the Committee for the First Amendment.84 Since then, the film has been largely overlooked. The movie was never available commercially on VHS and has only recently become available on DVD.85 A few archives do have prints of the movie.86 Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy devote a few pages to the film as an exemplary example of the social problem film in their book on the subject, but Losey scholars, it seems, are the people who most often bother to write about the film today.87 But, just as the movie itself pines for a form of intellectual regeneration, the pre-auteurist enthusiasm the movie received from Los Angeles to France may yet return again.

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Chapter 6 Cy Endfield’s Radical Despair: The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury

The decisive moment in the 1950 film The Sound of Fury, as in The Lawless, portrays a newspaperman who has an epiphany about the power of journalism and the role that he must play in fighting injustice. Gil Stanton, a respected syndicated columnist, has published a series of articles in a small-town California paper viciously condemning two men whom the police have accused in a string of robberies, a kidnapping, and a brutal murder. We’ve seen that one of the men, the protagonist Howard Tyler, is innocent of the charge of murder; he’s a decent man who fell into a world of petty crime because he was out of work and couldn’t support his pregnant wife and son. Late one night after Stanton’s articles have inflamed public opinion, Tyler’s wife comes to Stanton’s home. “You don’t know Howard,” she pleads. “He’s not a monster like you call him in the paper.” She takes a letter from her purse that her husband wrote from jail and begins to read it aloud: Dear Judy, I’m writing this so you’ll forget me. I’m guilty and I deserve to die. And I’ll die at peace if I know that you’ll forget me and forgive me for what I’ve done to you. . . . I went with Jerry and stuck up four or five places. I can’t remember how many now, I was too drunk. I’ve been having bad headaches and bad dreams. I keep thinking God is coming after me. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry for you and Tommy. I’m sorry for [the victim] Donald Miller and his mother and father.

But she breaks down in tears and can’t continue. Gil Stanton takes the letter from her hands and finishes reading it for her, speaking aloud the words that convince 112

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CY ENDFIELD’S RADICAL DESPAIR: THE UNDERWORLD STORY AND THE SOUND OF FURY

him of Tyler’s innocence: “I didn’t know Jerry was going to kill him. This is the truth and may God strike me dead. I am not saying this to save myself because it is no excuse. I’m glad it is all over. I want to die. There’s no use to live when you’re no good.” In Larry Wilder’s moment of indecision, torn between the faceless voice of the darkness and the bright sunlight that illuminated his typewriter, he decided to make the falsely accused Mexican-American teenager’s cause his own. Similarly, by literally making the falsely accused victim’s voice his own, Stanton, like Wilder, has come to realize that he must use his newspaper as a progressive force. The Sound of Fury tells the story of Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy), who reluctantly agrees to work as a getaway driver in a series of holdups. He and his partner, Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), eventually plan a kidnapping to make so much money that they can quit, but in a fit of pique, Jerry kills their victim by smashing his head in with a rock and dumps the body in a lake. The local newspaper publisher hires the star reporter Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson) to write a series of sensationalized stories about the crime spree, whipping up public sentiment against the two men after they’ve been arrested for the murder. But Stanton’s epiphany comes too late. His articles have inspired a mob that forms outside the courthouse, and in the final sequence, the mob breaks into the jail, pulls the two defendants from their cells, and kills them. Gil Stanton has a lot in common with The Lawless’s Larry Wilder. Like Wilder, he’s an admired newspaperman in a small, northern California town, an upstanding member of the community. Like Wilder, he’s connected to the film’s most passionate advocate for politically engaged journalism through his experiences in World War II. In The Lawless, it was Sunny Garcia, the publisher of the local Spanish-language newspaper, who’d followed Larry Wilder’s reports over the Teletype during the war. When he initially shies away from getting involved, she urges him on, recalling his former political fervour. In The Sound of Fury, it is the Italian intellectual, Dr. Vito Simone, who plays the same role. Gil Stanton had led a platoon that rescued Simone during the war. Now, visiting California, Simone is alarmed at the way Stanton attacks the two defendants before he knows the facts of the case. “As a journalist,” he reminds him, “you have great responsibilities.” As with The Lawless, The Sound of Fury tells a story about mob violence based on actual events from California’s recent history. But in doing so, it reveals as much about the politics of 1950 as it does about the past. The film’s ideology was simultaneously myopic and radical. Like most movies by progressive white filmmakers at the time, it purported to shed light on the current political situation in America, but it actually distorted the facts about lynching in America, at least as far as black civil rights groups saw them. At the same time, though, by framing its story as an explication of the socioeconomic factors that were responsible for generating lawlessness and mass hysteria, the film presented a far more radical critique of contemporary society than even the movies made by other progressive filmmakers. Like The Lawless, The Sound of Fury yearns nostalgically for a recent

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past when liberals and radicals joined forces to fight the obvious enemy of fascism. But The Sound of Fury is a much more pessimistic film than The Lawless. If the earlier film represented the liberal’s yearning for a resurgent Popular Front, The Sound of Fury represents a more defeatist – and realistic – assessment of what was about to happen to the left in the blacklist era: the falsely accused protagonist killed by a lynch mob metaphorically shared the fate of the progressive community itself.

The Filmmakers It’s no coincidence that The Sound of Fury echoed the themes of The Lawless, considering that the men who made the films shared remarkably similar political, professional, and aesthetic backgrounds. Like Mainwaring, Jo Pagano was a popular novelist who’d moved to Hollywood to work on mostly nondescript commercial genre pictures. Like Mainwaring, he was a liberal non-Communist who never became particularly active in the Hollywood political scene. Endfield, like Losey, had been an Ivy League radical in the early 1930s who became involved in the same circle of leftist theatre groups that sprouted in New York in the late 1930s. Like Losey, Endfield had become disillusioned with radical politics by the end of the 1940s. So, as with The Lawless, The Sound of Fury was the creative meeting of a disaffected radical director and a liberal screenwriter. Such pairings made it almost inevitable that both films would tell a story about a disillusioned liberal who struggled with a decision to re-engage with his progressive roots. The movie began to germinate after one of Stanley Kramer’s assistant producers, Robert Stillman, read Pagano’s novel The Condemned. Stillman had been floating around odd jobs in the film industry for 20 years, starting as an actor at the Paramount studio in Long Island, graduating to third assistant director in 1930, and working as assistant director for a number of producers beginning in the mid1930s.1 Stillman’s father, meanwhile, had made a fortune and was now retired in Florida. When his son wanted to move up in the movie business, the elder Stillman put up money to help finance two of Stanley Kramer’s earliest pictures, just at the time when independent producers were reaching out to financiers outside of Hollywood because the banks were backing away from independent production. Those movies, Champion (1949) and Home of the Brave (1949), would turn out to be two of the most significant pictures in the first wave of socially conscious films made after the war.2 Robert Stillman worked as assistant producer on those two films, but then decided to move on because he felt that he “was being relegated to a minor position in the company.”3 He used his profits from those two films and more of his father’s money to back his own initial foray as a producer. Like his mentor Kramer, he claimed he wanted to make films that were artistic, had a message, and made a profit: “art, by all means,” he said, “but not simply art for art’s sake.”4 With his experience working on two of the most commercially successful 114

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films in the then-popular social realist vein, Stillman was instinctively drawn – both aesthetically and economically – to Pagano’s book. Jo Pagano shared Stillman’s interest in creating socially conscious art, but like so many other progressive screenwriters in Hollywood, his political engagement was focused primarily on his own experience. He grew up in Denver to Italian immigrant parents and his family’s background seems to have inspired his first two books: both were autobiographical novels about the Italian-American, workingclass immigrant experience in the West.5 While both deal sympathetically with the travails of working-class outsiders, both blame their protagonists’ troubles on the prejudices of individuals rather than with a systematic critique of the nation’s current political or economic situation. He was never a Communist and doesn’t seem to have been involved with either the Screen Writer’s Guild or the Committee for the First Amendment. Nevertheless, he was one of the many progressive writers who met informally in the back of Stanley Rose’s bookshop in Hollywood, a group that included William Saroyan, John Fante, Horace McCoy, and Carey McWilliams, among others.6 Though he wasn’t particularly active politically himself, every one of his books deals with the struggles of the working class. His first book, Paesanos, is a short story collection about ItalianAmerican immigrants working coal-mining jobs in Colorado. His second, Golden Wedding, covers more than 50 years in the life of an Italian immigrant family, as its members struggle to make peace with both its Italian and America identities. The family travels from the coal mines of Colorado to Los Angeles, and the book culminates with the artistic youngest son’s decision to travel to Spain and fight for the Republicans in the Civil War.7 Alvah Bessie, who later became famous as one of the Hollywood Ten and who collaborated with Pagano frequently in the 1940s, described him as “a Continental gentleman . . . , and though our ideas about the socialist system did not gibe in many respects, he had the natural class consciousness (and hatred of bigotry) that Americans of working-class origin and foreign extraction suck in like mother’s milk.”8 Like Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield was blacklisted and worked throughout the 1950s and 1960s in England, and thus most commentators have assumed that he was a Communist, but his story is complicated: in later years he claimed to interviewers that he had never technically been a member of the party; nevertheless, his FBI file does include evidence of his party membership during the 1940s.9 Like Losey and many other artists of his generation, he embraced many of the ideals of communism as a young man in the early 1930s, but eventually drifted away from radicalism and the party after the war. Though many writers have repeated that he was born in South Africa, Endfield actually was born and raised in a middle-class family in Scranton, Pennsylvania.10 It was, in fact, this very American upbringing in the 1930s that decided his political convictions: his father’s furrier business had gone bankrupt during the Depression just as Endfield was going off to college. “And I had this great grievance against society,” Endfield explained, “for depriving me,

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at the beginning of my life, at the entrance to my young manhood.”11 Endfield joined the Young Communist League at Yale in the early 1930s.12 After college, he moved to New York and after seeing Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, and learning about “constructionist theatre, Stanislavsky’s theatre, and so forth,” he devoted himself to the world of small, leftist theatre groups that were sprouting up in the wake of the Group Theatre’s success.13 He worked primarily with the New Theatre League, where he even worked with and befriended Joseph Losey.14 Endfield eventually moved to Hollywood in 1940, but had a difficult time breaking into the movie business until he had a chance encounter with Orson Welles at a magic shop. He impressed the director with his facility at card tricks, which led to his first job in the movie industry, working for Welles’s Mercury Theatre.15 Despite his connections, launching his own career wasn’t easy. He managed to direct a few shorts during WWII while a member of the Signal Corps (including one, Inflation, which cast Edward Arnold as a satanic capitalist), then went on to direct a few features for Poverty Row studios immediately after the war, including two Joe Palooka films for Monogram and a movie for Comet Productions about a man who leads a tenant’s boycott with the help of an imaginary stork.16 It was during this period that his reputation as a Communist took hold in the film community. It was through the Young Communist League that he most likely befriended Paul Jarrico, who would be blacklisted himself in 1951. Because of his friendship with Party members like Jarrico and because he attended “a couple of dozen different [Communist] meetings” in Hollywood,17 many Party members naturally assumed that he was also a member. His second wife recalls that he “became involved with the Communist set in Los Angeles” because he often sat with other radicals and progressives at the “Red table” in the MGM studio commissary.18 Nevertheless, Endfield claims that because he never actually paid any dues, he was never officially a Communist. Though this might strike some as just the useful after-the-fact rationalization of a man who might merely have been cheap, Endfield explained his attitude about joining the Party decades later in an interview with Brian Neve: From time to time I was obviously a target for recruitment into the Communist Party. So I had people who I knew who were open or admitted Communists who said, ‘OK, you must come to a meeting.’ And so I went to the meeting with friendly attitudes. I just didn’t have the personal discipline, nor, most important, the desire to part with dues. So I never actually became what was called a card carrying Communist. I never signed up. I went to a number of meetings and I sympathized with what was said there.19

Both of Endfield’s main interviewers – Brian Neve and Jonathan Rosenbaum – have commented on his disillusionment with radical politics in the face of Stalinism, Rosenbaum writing that he had “abandoned his Marxist activism and repudiated 116

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Stalinism many years before he was asked to rat on colleagues.”20 With his interest in science, Endfield says that he was disgusted by the Soviet Unions’ knee-jerk adoption of Lysenkoism, its attacks on Eisenstein, and its persecution of Jewish doctors. He says that in the years immediately after the war he had turned against the Party so much so that “my friends and associates who came out of that world gave up on me and began to start accusing me of being a renegade.”21 As the leftist community in Hollywood splintered, Endfield withdrew from political activity. There’s no record of him protesting during the strikes of 1945 or 1946, and no record of him participating in the Screen Director’s Guild or working with the Committee for the First Amendment. His disillusionment was so deep that he even made a film, The Master Plan, years later while he was blacklisted in England, which Rosenbaum refers to as “pure anti-Red propaganda.”22 Whether or not he was ever an official member, other Communists assumed that he was; three people eventually named him as a party member before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951.23 His career parallels Losey’s yet again in that he initially convinced himself that he would agree to name names if called upon to do so. He asked himself why he should give up his career “for associations that I didn’t treasure, for people who I disagreed with, for a system that I disagreed with?”24 His decision not to testify eventually came down to personal and economic considerations as much as issues of principle. Endfield had recently divorced and fallen in love with another woman, and his new romance gave him the urge to start his life anew. When his contract dried up and with no more directing jobs looming on the horizon in Hollywood, he left for London in 1952, where he soon found directing jobs in the British film industry, and where he didn’t have to deal with the dilemma of whether or not he should testify before the committee to save his own skin.

The Underworld Story Though Endfield didn’t write the screenplay for The Sound of Fury, its subject matter dovetailed well with his own interests. Earlier that same year he had written and directed a film, The Underworld Story, which dealt with the same themes as many of the other leftist movies about mob violence made at the time.25 Though not as significant a film as The Sound of Fury, The Underworld Story sheds light on the later release by reinforcing the idea that Endfield had a particularly cynical attitude about the role that money played in determining his characters’ motivation. Officially, Endfield is credited only with adapting the screenplay from a story by Craig Rice, while the screenplay itself is credited to Henry Blankfort, a Communist Party member who was blacklisted in 1951 after he took the Fifth Amendment in a “shouting, gavel-thumping hearing.”26 But Endfield himself was emphatic that the screenplay was his. 117

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While the majority of films that liberals made at the time, like The Lawless, still ended on a hopeful note, Endfield’s films more than any others, emphasized a pessimistic resolution. The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury may, in fact, be the two most jaded films that the left produced during the blacklist period. These two movies share a conviction, more than any other in the cycle, that yellow journalism and mob violence are inspired almost solely by the corrupting power of money. This economic determinism is not a coincidence, given Endfield’s Communist past. The plot of The Underworld Story strikes many familiar themes. The reporter Mike Reese (Dan Duryea), an unprincipled big city newspaperman, loses his job after writing a story that ruined an investigation by the district attorney. When no other paper in the city will hire him, Reese remarks that he’s been “blacklisted.”27 On a whim, he withdraws his savings and invests in a small town newspaper in a town called Lakeville. Though the exact location is never mentioned, Lakeville has the look and feel of a Hudson River Valley town, the same sort of place where local papers had attacked Paul Robeson and his fellow radicals at Peekskill just one year earlier. The movie’s central subject is the power of the press, and Endfield emphasizes his point with some rather obvious symbolism. As with The Lawless and Park Row, a hulking printing press looms large in the background (and in some cases the foreground) of many scenes that take place at the Lakeville Sentinel. Like Larry Wilder and Gil Stanton, Reese has an epiphany about the power of the press almost as soon as he first enters the Sentinel’s offices. A young woman named Diane Stanton has been discovered dead.28 We, the viewers, later discover that she was murdered by her husband Clark, the son of E.J. Stanton, who is, it turns out, one of the most prominent newspaper publishers back in the city. In Endfield’s conception of the world, it’s no coincidence that the city’s most prominent newspaper publisher would immediately latch onto a racist ploy to protect his own family. When the younger Stanton confesses to his father, the elder Stanton immediately urges his son to pin the blame on their black maid Molly. “It’ll be the word of a nigger against ours,” he says. When Molly comes to the newspaper offices seeking its help, Reese originally wants to turn her in to earn the reward that the Stantons have posted. But Reese’s epiphany, unlike Larry Wilder’s or Gil Stanton’s, has more to do with the lure of cash than it does with the political power of the press. He quickly realizes that he can make more money defending Molly than he can by turning her in. Like Larry Wilder in his campaign for Pablo Rodriguez, Reese uses his paper to spearhead an effort to raise funds for “The Defence Committee for Molly Rankin.” But Endfield had a more jaundiced view of the progressive press than Daniel Mainwaring did. Instead of using the money to defend Molly Rankin, Reese agrees to split the funds with a corrupt lawyer who tells Reese that he’ll serve as Molly’s defence – only so long as it takes to lose her case. Reese and Stanton use their respective newspapers to fight for their cause, the Sentinel running headlines

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defending Molly and Stanton’s big city paper running headlines attacking her. But even while defending her in print, Reese urges Molly to plead guilty so that the Defence Committee won’t have to deplete its funds on a trial. But Molly refuses. In the end, Molly is found innocent and Reese at least ostensibly sees the light, but the muddled gangster-style shootout that closes the film leaves his epiphany wholly unconvincing. The Underworld Story shares with Park Row and The Lawless a fascination with the symbolic image of the printing press. And, just as in those two movies, the printing press is eventually destroyed by an angry mob. The sheer size of Stanton’s city paper eventually overpowers the meager Lakeville Sentinel, and through its influence, the local townsfolk eventually turn against Molly Rankin and the paper that’s been defending her. Angry at the Sentinel’s activism, a mob of townsfolk gathers and attacks the paper’s office, destroying the printing press itself. “Looks like they’re burning witches again,” someone says. But unlike The Lawless, The Underworld Story sees no hope for future journalism. Larry Wilder resolves at the end of The Lawless to rebuild the press and fight on; but Mike Reese in The Underworld Story doesn’t seem capable of rebuilding anything, and if he did, he’d most likely use the paper for further nefarious purposes. That The Underworld Story bore a remarkable similarity to the script for The Sound of Fury must have been one of the main reasons that producer Robert Stillman hired Endfield to direct his film. For Endfield, working on Pagano’s script must have felt somewhat like making the same movie for the second time in the same year. But the second time around, he was able to make a movie whose conclusion even more emphatically articulated his sense of despair.

Lynching and the Civil Rights Movement As with The Lawless and other movies in the cycle of films about mass violence, The Sound of Fury presented itself as an expos´e of current events. It had all the realistic formal signatures popular at the time: it was shot on location with plenty of night-for-night cinematography, had no major stars, and concerned itself with the lives of the working class. Nevertheless, like other movies in the cycle, it represented a somewhat provincial view of the political situation in America that it was allegedly revealing. Indeed, perhaps more than any film in the cycle, The Sound of Fury exemplifies the ways in which progressive white filmmakers ignored actual instances of racial violence in the country at the time. It’s the most prominent movie made about lynching in the immediate postwar era, for instance, but its victims were not black men accused of sexual advances towards white women; they were white men driven to crime by their economic plight. While the film was quite radical for the time in some respects, in terms of racial politics, it was oddly uninterested in the facts about lynching in America in the 1940s. This oversight is all the more perplexing considering that lynching became perhaps the 119

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single most prominent topic in the black civil rights movement by the end of the decade. Though statistics on lynchings are notoriously imprecise, the best estimates indicate that in the late nineteenth century there were more than a hundred lynchings per year in the United States. Almost every case took place in the South and in the vast majority of instances, the victims were black. By the 1920s and 1930s, there were still about 20 or 30 lynchings a year, almost all in the South, with the vast majority of victims black.29 After World War II, though, lynching faded dramatically. There was only one lynching in the entire country in 1948, three in 1949 and none in 1950, the year that The Sound of Fury was released. Even so, in each of these postwar cases the victim was African-American.30 Ironically, as the frequency of lynchings decreased, the furore they aroused in mainstream political discourse increased. In September 1946, after a spate of racial violence, a coalition of civil rights organizations came together to form the National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence, and the group soon met with President Truman in the White House. The new organization urged the president to create a national committee to investigate racial discrimination and racial violence and to propose remedies to such problems. Just three months later, Truman responded by creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights.31 The Committee eventually released a report, To Secure These Rights, in October 1947, the same month that the Hollywood Ten testified in Washington. Though its findings – that the government should “tolerate no restrictions” on any individual’s rights based on his or her race – seem tepid today, the report was widely heralded as a bold document for its time. Black newspapers were especially glowing in their coverage. The Chicago Defender lauded the report as “a new blueprint for freedom” and the Baltimore Afro-American called it “one of the most significant documents of all time.”32 To Secure These Rights is important in that it demonstrates how pervasive the fear of lynching was even in an era when lynching had almost disappeared. Despite the dramatic decrease in the frequency of lynchings, for instance, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights section told the President’s Committee on Civil Rights that it received more complaints about lynchings than about any other issue.33 The political significance of lynchings took on a more public role as Truman took the findings of his committee and pushed for yet another federal anti-lynching bill. Congress had been trying to pass such a bill for more than 20 years. Ever since the early 1920s, both the House and the Senate had large majorities supporting the effort, but previous bills had always died with the filibuster of Southern Democrats in the Senate.34 Truman’s backing of the bill in the 1947 and 1948 sessions, though, ensured that lynching became the most prominent civil rights issue in the national political discourse at the end of the decade. And by filibustering the bill in both sessions, Southern Democrats helped to keep the issues featured prominently in the nation’s newspapers for two years running.

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Not surprisingly, as with most issues involving racial justice, the Los Angeles press didn’t cover the release of the report with as much ink or with as much enthusiasm as did the ethnic and national progressive press. While AfricanAmerican newspapers wrote about the report thoroughly in the month after its publication, The Los Angeles Times ran just one front-page article blandly paraphrasing the committee’s report the day it was released, and in an editorial the next day, it graded the report a “mixture,” praising the committee’s willingness to expose Communists, but criticizing every one of its recommendations to ease racial inequality, including a federal anti-lynching law.35 The committee’s report was the single most prominent political document about lynchings published in the 1940s, but, since Los Angeles’s daily press didn’t make much of an issue of it, it doesn’t seem to have influenced the progressives who were making movies about lynchings at the time. Despite lynching’s prominence in the nation’s racial discourse, Pagano chose to write a novel based on one of the most famous lynchings in which the victims were white. The lynching of John Holmes and Thomas Thurmond in San Jose, California, in 1933 made national news at the time and became a case that was often touted as the last public lynching in California.36 Holmes and Thurmond had kidnapped a young man named Brooke Hart, whose father owned a prominent local department store. The two men killed Hart by smashing his head in with a concrete block and dumping his body in San Francisco Bay. Pagano didn’t deny that his novel was based on the Hart murder: he admitted, in fact, that his “inspiration came from the San Jose affair.”37 Robert Stillman made sure to exploit the lingering fame of the crime by highlighting it in the film’s publicity materials, and most newspaper accounts of the film dutifully repeated the fact.38 His novel followed the actual events quite faithfully. Just weeks after the murder, an angry mob in San Jose stormed the jail, dragged Holmes and Thurmond from their cells, and hanged them in the city’s central park in front of a crowd of thousands. The San Jose lynching became the biggest news story of its time in California, clearly making a great impression on young California novelists of the period like Jo Pagano and Daniel Mainwaring. Newspapers in San Francisco and Oakland covered the lynching with their biggest press runs since the armistice of World War I. The similarities between the actual events and the novel and film are striking. The Hart kidnapping took place in San Jose, the seat of Santa Clara County. Pagano set his story in a California town he called Santa Sierra. In the actual case, as in the movie, two men kidnapped the son of one of the town’s wealthiest men by hijacking his car; police later found their best lead when they recovered the boy’s car abandoned by the side of the road. In both the real events and in the movie, the two kidnappers started their crime spree with a string of holdups. In the movie, one of the criminals murders the young man by smashing his head in with a rock, just as the killer had done in real life. The San Jose

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criminals confessed to the crime but the populace became inflamed when local papers warned that they might get off on a technicality; in the movie, too, one of the men confesses, but it is the Santa Sierra Journal’s articles claiming that the men might escape justice that triggers the mob. In 1933, the mob was made up of a large contingent from Brooke Hart’s alma mater, Santa Clara University. In the movie, too, Endfield made sure to clad the young men who lead the mob in university T-shirts. In the actual lynching, the mob became enraged when the police threw tear gas at them; in retaliation, they took hold of a fire hose and turned it on the police, then used a battering ram to break down the door. In staging his mob scene, Endfield recreated the events of the tear gas, the fire hose and the battering ram as well. Many people in 1933 thought that the press had been responsible for instigating the violence in San Jose. Newspapers played an integral role from the moment the kidnapping investigation began. Both the San Jose Mercury Herald and Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner ignored the Hart family’s pleas not to publicize the fact of their son’s kidnapping. Once they broke the story, however, Hart’s father communicated with the criminals by issuing statements to the press, which dutifully published them on its front pages. The senior Hart later lambasted the Hearst press to competing news organizations, claiming that the Examiner had simply fabricated stories to sell papers. Logan Payne, the publisher of the San Jose Evening News, meanwhile, was the first newspaperman to actively campaign for a lynching. In one editorial, titled “Human Devils,” he wrote, If mob violence could ever be justified it would be in a case like this and we believe the general public will agree with us. . . . To read the confession [of] both of these criminals . . . makes one feel like he wanted to go out and be a part of that mob. If you could have been with the writer who called at the Hart home to offer our sympathy and assistance in this time of their greatest trial – it would have made you feel like going out and committing a lynching yourself.39

As with many other lynchings throughout the country in the first half of the century, radio stations in the Bay area and as far south as Los Angeles had broadcast that there would be a lynching in San Jose on November 26th .40 Journalists from across the state – including newsreel photographers – descended upon San Jose along with a crowd that was estimated at anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000. Local authorities called upon Governor John Rolph to deploy National Guard troops to defend the men from the lynch mob, but the governor refused. And, after the men were lynched, Rolph praised the actions of the mob: “They’ll learn they can’t kidnap in this state,” he told the press the day after the lynching. “If any one is arrested for the good job I’ll pardon them all.”41 After the lynching, leading liberal voices across the country condemned the mob and the local press. Partly because the Hart case took place not long after the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the story 122

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quickly became a national sensation. Liberal voices like Will Rogers, Heywood Broun, Clarence Darrow, and Roy Wilkins all condemned the lynching. Herbert Hoover, recently retired from the presidency and living in the hills above Stanford University, also spoke out against Governor Rolph’s handling of the case. Hoover went so far as to call Rolph “un-American,” and called his position “a subversion of the very spirit of organized society.”42 Though Pagano may have been politically parochial by ignoring the racial aspects of lynching, there was an aspect of the case that inspired liberals about the prospects for progressive journalism and political activism. The Hart case was covered extensively throughout the country and led to renewed efforts to pass an anti-lynching bill at the national level. The ACLU and the NAACP both called for a national campaign to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Senators Edward Costigan and Robert Wagner soon introduced legislation to do just that. Back in San Jose, however, the same papers that had urged on the mob attacked these efforts with accusations that would become much more common a decade later. Logan Payne railed against the ACLU’s campaign in an editorial for the News, linking the organization with “reds and Communists.”43 The Costigan-Wagner bill was eventually stymied by a Southern Democrat filibuster despite overwhelming support. The San Jose lynching, though, did spur California lawmakers to act on their own. In the 1934 election, California voters approved a constitutional amendment giving the state Attorney General the power to intervene in local cases. The amendment was widely seen as a means to prevent local mobs from lynching suspects before a state trial.44 While Pagano’s novel and script had a much more cynical tone than Mainwaring’s script for The Lawless, the two shared a fascination with retelling past events in which liberals had banded together to make progressive reforms. So though some aspects of Pagano’s story demonstrate how politically na¨ıve the Hollywood left may have been at the time, the eventual film still harbours the hope for a leftist resurgence, despite its despairing conclusion.

From Novel to Screen As with The Lawless, the script for The Sound of Fury was almost entirely the work of the screenwriter, and the director had little input into the story itself. Robert Stillman hired Endfield as a replacement for another director after the script had already been completed and just before the crew was about to begin shooting.45 The screenplay was based on Pagano’s novel The Condemned, which he wrote in 1946 and 1947 in the immediate aftermath of the mob violence at the Hollywood studios, and which was published the same month that the Hollywood Ten were first called to testify in Washington. His script follows the novel closely, and the film follows that script closely, but the subtle differences among the three are revealing.46 In the evolution from novel to script to screen, Pagano (and possibly 123

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Figure 6.1. The police spread tear gas to disperse the mob. The Sound of Fury (1950), Robert Still Productions

uncredited collaborators such as Stillman, Endfield, and even the Breen office) came to emphasize those issues that The Sound of Fury shares with other films in the cycle about mass violence. If one made a movie about mob violence in 1950, it seems, one had to – consciously or unconsciously – mirror the themes that appeared in every other movie about mob violence from the period. The final film, much more than the novel, blames capitalist society for turning the protagonist into a criminal and blames Gil Stanton’s yellow journalism as the exclusive cause of the mob violence. In the finished film, the power of newspapers and the influence of yellow journalism are much more explicit than they are in the novel. In the novel, Pagano blames the violence on several factors: he blames the initial kidnapping and murder largely on Jerry’s anti-Semitism, for instance, and he blames the local police for inciting the town to riot by brutally questioning – and perhaps forcing a confession from – Howard Tyler. Most importantly, though, Pagano blames the very existence of the lynch mob on the psychological traumas of its three leaders, who, he wants us to believe, seek the blood of their enemies because of childhood sexual pathology, working-class ennui, and alcoholism.47 The movie, though, eliminates Jerry’s anti-Semitism and the police’s brutal interrogation techniques; Howard confesses quickly and of his own accord. And the movie, unlike the novel, 124

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doesn’t provide any psychological explications for the individuals who lead the mob; the crowd, in fact, doesn’t have leaders or even any individual characters. As in The Lawless, the mob is merely a faceless metaphor for the conservative forces unleashed by reactionary newspapers. And the newspapers themselves are much more powerful in the film than they are in the book. In the novel, Stanton’s most vitriolic stories run with headlines like “Robert Wineburg Reported Missing.” The novel never provides examples of Stanton’s columns; Pagano simply informs us that “Gil Stanton, by his words, had at once judged and condemned Howard and Jerry – and this without having even seen them.”48 In the movie, however, we hear excerpts from Gil Stanton’s articles more than once, in which he claims that the town has been invaded by “a flood of expert gunmen,” though the audience knows that he has no evidence as to who has been committing the string of local holdups. Despite Pagano’s disinterest in the actual racial dynamics of lynching in America at the time, his script does deal with the issue of ethnicity. But, as with most white progressive screenwriters, he understands ethnic prejudice mostly in the way it reflects his own experience. To combat the typical negative portrayal of Italians as gangsters, Pagano makes the Italian intellectual, Dr. Vito Simone, the ethical conscience of the film. Simone does exist in the novel, but he doesn’t philosophize to Stanton about journalistic ethics; in the movie, though, he’s become a towering European intellectual. After Judy Tyler leaves Stanton’s home, Simone tells him ponderously, “That’s why I begged you this morning not to treat this tragic crime with thoughtless emotionalism. . . . Men don’t live in a vacuum. They live with one another. And if a man becomes a criminal, sometimes his environment is defective.” He urges Stanton to use his reason, not his emotions, and, as Sunny Garcia did with Larry Wilder, he seduces him with memories of their activist spirit during the war: “Only thus can we regain the moral center of our universe. Do you not remember how often we discussed these things in the old days?” Stanton nods: “Of course I remember, Vito. Of course you’re right.” Stanton then rushes to the newspaper offices to stop his publisher from running any more tendentious articles about Tyler and Slocum. And then, as in so many of the other films in the cycle, we see a shot of the printing press itself. But unlike the other films, this printing press is never destroyed. Ironically, when mobs attack the printing press in The Lawless, Park Row and The Underworld Story, the violence only leads to a renewed commitment to the cause of progressive, activist journalism. In The Sound of Fury, though, Stanton arrives too late to stop the presses. This movie, unlike the others, sees little hope for a renewal of the Popular Front era activism; in this movie, yellow journalism cannot be defeated. Stanton’s publisher cares only for money, not journalistic values, and there’s no indication that that will change. Stanton arrives too late to stop the presses from publishing his most recent article. And we see the logical result of this quite clearly: in the next sequence, the lynch mob forms outside the county jail where Tyler and Slocum are being held.

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Dr. Simone’s role was probably enhanced as a way to appease the censors at the Production Code Administration. Joseph Breen, of course, was not just a censor who wanted to remove incendiary material; he was a Catholic with what he saw as a progressive vision for the ameliorating power of the motion picture industry. Breen was thus instrumental in refining what scholars refer to as the theory of compensating moral values. That is, if a movie were to portray a crime – as many did – the criminal needed to be punished in the end.49 The script for The Sound of Fury, then, posed an existential problem for the Breen office, since it concluded with a violent lynch mob tearing two men from their prison cells and killing them. The PCA complained, obviously, that the lynch mob was in no way punished. But as an independent producing his own film for the first time, Robert Stillman was adamant about his team’s artistic vision and perhaps, naive about how much more the Breen office knew about state censor boards than he did. Stillman insisted that the movie must end with a lynching. Joseph Breen’s power had waned after the war due to the changing moral climate of the country and his own fading enthusiasm for the job. In the 1930s, most likely, he would have simply forbidden any producer to film such a script. But the rise of independent production had made it more difficult to police the movies than it had been when the studios had held more sway. By 1950, Hollywood’s censors had become more lenient than they had been in the past. In the face of Stillman’s truculence, Geoffrey Shurlock and Jack Vizzard of the PCA offered a compromise in which a “final speech before the mob closes in could be made into such a ‘voice for morality’ that the flavour the audience would carry away would be to the effect that law and order would eventually triumph.”50 Stillman took Shurlock’s advice against Endfield’s objections, and the script was eventually approved. Nevertheless, Joseph Breen still believed that the film might eventually face censorship problems in some states.51 And indeed, he was right. The final scene of the film, in which the lynching occurs, was excised or heavily censored in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and banned entirely in British Columbia and Alberta, and in India as well.52 Audiences in those localities, then, missed out on the PCA’s moralizing coda, in which Dr. Vito Simone repeated the exact words he had said to Gil Stanton earlier that afternoon: “Violence is a disease caused by moral and social breakdown. That is the real problem. And it must be solved by reason, not by emotions, with understanding, not hate.” Endfield was virulently opposed to Simone’s sermonizing, and rightly so: Simone’s incessant pontifications and Gil Stanton’s inexplicable naivet´e are the worst aspects of the film. As he had with The Underworld Story, Endfield wanted to make a film that was more radical than the typical Hollywood liberal fare. He acknowledged that he wouldn’t have been able to direct a film like The Sound of Fury without the box office success of the socially conscious films like Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement, but he dismissed those earlier, studio-produced message films as “not really radical.”53

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It’s difficult to determine exactly what role Endfield may have played in shaping the script. Considering that he was hired as a replacement director just about the time when Stillman started haggling with the PCA over a completed draft, it seems unlikely that he played a major role in fashioning the script.54 The only specific issue we know that Endfield, Pagano, and Stillman argued about – Simone’s culminating voice-over – is a debate that Endfield lost. Nevertheless, Endfield’s arguments against the script’s preachiness overall probably did influence Stillman somewhat, since several of the most pietistic moments from the script never made it to the screen. Endfield, though, maintained in later years that he “rewrote the first act of the script to include more quotidian details about his anti-hero’s desperate life,” but didn’t give any indication as to which exact details he might have added or changed.55 That being said, there are many significant changes between Pagano’s novel and the movie. One of the most important differences is that the movie makes money the driving force of the film, whereas the need for money did not play a role in the novel. Given Endfield’s Communist background and the emphasis on money in The Underworld Story, it seems likely that the movie’s Marxist themes originated with Endfield. While Endfield, unlike Joseph Losey and Daniel Mainwaring, didn’t use visual style to make ideological commentary, his handling of the crowd scenes provides The Sound of Fury with perhaps the most scathing resolution of any political film of the period. He shot the film in the realistic style that was popular among leftists

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Figure 6.2. The journalist Gil Stanton is victimized by his own creation. The Sound of Fury (1950), Robert Still Productions

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at the time. The picture had a small budget of $500,000.56 They shot it almost entirely on location in Phoenix with plenty of moody night-for-night shooting. But there are no visual metaphors, no tracking shots, and no hyperbolic montage sequences. Endfield’s great strength, as he himself admitted, was in handling the crowd scenes. They shot the final sequence at the city hall in Phoenix with a crowd of 400 extras dominated by students from nearby Arizona State Teachers College in Tempe.57 And the final moments, in which the mob overpowers the police, breaks into the courthouse, and rushes up the stairs is perhaps the most memorable sequence in the entire cycle of films about mass violence. In a film culture that demanded a happy ending, the conclusion to The Sound of Fury is one of the most violent that classical Hollywood ever produced.

Economic Determinism and The Sound of Fury In her analysis of painting and sculpture about lynchings in the 1930s, Marlene Park delineates the competing ideologies on the left about how artists should represent the subject.58 In 1935, just as Congress was debating the Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill, two competing organizations held group shows in New York galleries that displayed recent art on the subject of lynching. The doctrinal divisions between radicals and liberals during the Great Depression was often much more contentious than it was later during the war. Nevertheless, the arguments about art in these two shows help elucidate the differences between a liberal and radical sense of aesthetics that retained a hold on the political imagination after the war. The NAACP’s president Walter White organized the first show. White himself had been passionately engaged with the artistic representation of lynching for years. Though most famous today as a pioneering civil rights leader, he was also a fiction writer whose first novel, Fire in the Flint, was about a Negro doctor who was lynched in the South.59 The gallery that had initially planned to hold White’s exhibition backed out at the last minute due to threatened protests from the Communist-affiliated John Reed Club and a radical organization that called itself the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. In 1935, the Communist Party in America was still staunchly anti-New Deal.60 It opposed the CostiganWagner bill, claiming that it wasn’t radical enough, and threatened to boycott the gallery if it held the exhibition. White was finally able to open the exhibition at another gallery in early 1935. Instead of staging protests outside the gallery, though, the Communist-affiliated groups decided to protest through the medium of art, opening their own exhibit just one month later. The radical critic Stephen Alexander reviewed the two shows in New Masses, echoing the Communist Party line as he criticized the NAACP show: With a few notable exceptions . . . there is little attempt to explain lynching or attack the forces responsible for it. Most of it is chalked up against God or human 128

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He then praised the competing Communist-affiliated exhibition for its militancy, explaining what a work of lynching art must do: In order to fight effectively against the oppression of the Negro, it is not enough merely to arouse indignation or sympathy or horror. We must also explain lynching graphically and plastically. We must attack the social forces responsible for lynching.61

Thus, by the conception of the 1930s, at least, a radical art work didn’t merely depict the sanctified victims of lynchings; it explained the socio-economic factors that caused the lynching in the first place – presumably so that viewers could learn what actions they needed to take to bring an end to lynchings. For an artist like Endfield, who was steeped in the party ideology of 1930s New York, this made perfect sense. The script for The Sound of Fury has much more in common with the Communist aesthetic position towards lynchings than it does with the liberal non-Communist position, explaining step-by-step how the material conditions of capitalist society inspire some men to commit crimes and others to lynch them. Rather than merely lamenting mob violence as a universal human failing, the screenplay emphatically and repeatedly explains how social and economic factors are the driving force that first leads its protagonist to a life of crime and then encourages the local papers to whip up the hysteria that galvanizes a lynch mob. The moral of The Sound of Fury is relatively simple: the profit motive drives men to act against their conscience; money makes men criminals. In every major decision the characters ponder, money determines what they do. Money, in fact, seems to haunt Howard Tyler, shadowing his every move. At the beginning of the film, he hitches a ride home at a truck stop after looking unsuccessfully for a job. When he walks down the street towards his house, the neighbour’s wife pulls her husband aside and quietly asks him if Tyler’s paid his bill. But Tyler’s anxieties about money are just as bad inside his home as they are outside. As soon as he walks through his front door, his son asks him for 25 cents to see a baseball game. Tyler gives him 50. When his wife finds out that he hasn’t found a job, she says she can’t understand why he’d give his son 50 cents: “Not when we owe money for groceries,” she says. Then he gets angry with her: she’s pregnant, but she refuses to see a doctor because they can’t afford it. Money continues to torment him everywhere he goes. After another futile day of looking for work, he stops in a bowling alley and asks for a beer, but he’s a dime short. A well-dressed man at the top of the lane catches his eye. Jerry Slocum exudes confidence, sexuality and, most importantly, money. After he throws his last ball

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nature. Many of the works are so permeated by religious spirit as to be little more than prayers in graphic and plastic form.

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down the lane, he tosses a handful of coins down toward the pins for good luck: “I still have my money game,” he says. Endfield makes the connection between Jerry’s money and his power over Howard obvious: Jerry asks Howard to hand him his shoes and to hold his mirror for him while he combs his hair. Howard obeys obediently, almost desperately. Jerry tells him he has a friend who might need him for a job. Back at Jerry’s room, the connection between money, power, and sexuality intensifies: Jerry combs his hair while admiring himself shirtless in the mirror. Howard can’t quite bring himself to watch Jerry in the mirror, so he admires Jerry’s cufflinks instead. Jerry tells Howard that in Paris during the war he got women cheap: “they’re all partial to the same color – green,” and Howard nods his head in agreement. Then Jerry springs his plan on him: he wants Howard to drive his getaway car while he sticks up a gas station: there’d be about $200-$250 per week in it for him.62 When Howard initially declines, Jerry throws a $10 bill on the floor at him disdainfully: “Go ahead, pick it up,” he says. Howard isn’t too proud; he does what Jerry says. But just the touch of money seems to change him: he tells Jerry that he’ll do the job. The two men commit a string of robberies, and the money that Howard earns from these holdups changes him. He’s invigorated, brash and confident, but he’s also riddled with anxiety and starts drinking heavily. The money is important to him mostly to the extent that it impresses his wife. He comes home the night after the first holdup and flashes a handful of bills at her, a bag of groceries under his arm, the provider once again. “But it’s so expensive!” she cries, alarmed as she pulls some baked ham from the bag of groceries. The other protagonist, Gil Stanton, is equally dominated by money. When we first see him, he’s put his wealth on display for some dinner guests, roasting a leg of lamb on a spit beside a table with fine china. In the living room, a man plays a grand piano while other guests drink brandy from giant snifters. Stanton’s wife is as carefree as Tyler’s wife is worried: it’s easy to be carefree with a string of pearls around her neck. But just as Howard is beholden to Jerry Slocum for money, Gil is beholden to the newspaper publisher Hal Clendenning. Howard Tyler and Gil Stanton are the two protagonists whose conflicts mirror each other, but it is really the secondary characters of Jerry Slocum and Hal Clendenning who drive the plot forward. They’re the ones who dole out money, forcing Tyler and Stanton to do the things that they do. Stanton and Clendenning’s relationship is just as determined by money as Tyler and Slocum’s is. When Hal and Gil talk about journalism they’re “talking business.” When they get news at the dinner party about a recent holdup, Clendenning suggests that it could be part of some larger criminal conspiracy: “Our circulation could stand a little crime wave,” he says. He then tries to convince Gil to write a special series about the spreading gangsterism that he’s just concocted, but Gil initially demurs. “Maybe a bonus would interest you?” Clendenning asks suggestively. Stanton’s eyes open wide: “A bonus? You mean money? Hal, you know that makes a petty robbery very significant.” They share a knowing chuckle. “With your byline on a special series,” Hal says, “I could really sell some papers.”

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Figure 6.3. A headline from the Santa Sierra Journal. The Sound of Fury (1950), Robert Still Productions

With these two complementary plots – Jerry Slocum and Howard Tyler’s crime spree and Hal Clendenning and Gil Stanton’s sensational journalism – the tragic ending has become inevitable. The film reinforces the parallels between the two stories in suggesting that the newspapermen, just like the holdup men, are committing crimes for money. It would be one thing if the Santa Sierra Journal merely exaggerated its accounts of the spate of holdups. But Clendenning takes it one step further. In his quest to sell more papers, he intentionally withholds information from his reporter and knowingly lets his paper print untruths about the two accused men. While Stanton interviews Slocum and Tyler’s first victims at a gas station, the local sheriff tells Clendenning that “this looks like [the work of] some local roughnecks.” Clendenning fails to mention this bit of information to Gil Stanton however, and after the sheriff leaves, Clendenning tells Stanton, “The angle we’ll take is there’s probably some Eastern gang operating in the community. That always makes good copy.” Like the Hearst stand-in at the Stockton Express in The Lawless, Clendenning invents facts out of thin air to falsely accuse the movie’s protagonist. The movie wastes no time in articulating its message. As Stanton and Clendenning are about to leave the crime scene, Dr. Vito Simone asks them, “isn’t this destructive to the public health, this distortion of realistic values?” Stanton deftly passes on the issue: “How bout that, 131

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Hal? Where’s your sense of social responsibility?” “Oh, I’ve got my share,” Hal says, “but selling papers is my business. That’s the way I make my living.” The next morning, his business ethics are made explicit when we see the headline that he’s created: “Hoodlum’s Expert Gunmen; Sheriff ’s Opinion.” The byline is by Gil Stanton. Later that night, driving to another holdup, Jerry Slocum reads Stanton’s words aloud ruefully: “the work of a flood of expert gunmen,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. In the end, the movie makes it clear that it is the Santa Sierra Journal’s sensationalist reporting that is the direct cause of the formation of the mob. After the scene in which Gil Stanton has his epiphany while reading Howard Tyler’s letter, and after Vito Simone lectures him about his moral responsibilities as a journalist, Stanton runs to stop the presses. But it’s too late. We see the final headline: “BRUTAL KIDNAP MURDER MAY GO UNPUNISHED.” Unlike some of the other films in the cycle, The Sound of Fury does not allow the possibility that the paper might spearhead a defence fund for its falsely accused victim. Unlike The Lawless, The Sound of Fury understands that by 1950, there really was no realistic hope of reinvigorating the liberal-radical marriage of the Popular Front era. This headline – with its false suggestion that the accused men might get off on an insanity plea – is the direct cause of the mob that forms in the ensuing sequence. Later at the courthouse, the county sheriff echoes the sentiments of Dr. Vito Simone, telling Clendenning, “There’s liable to be a lynching in this town tonight and those two guys upstairs might get murdered, and you’ll be responsible for it. You and that yellow rag you call a newspaper.” Just a few minutes later, his prediction comes true: the mob rips the two men from their cells and we hear the cacophony from the street as they string the men up and Vito Simone pronounces his final judgment of the film: “Violence is a disease caused by moral and social breakdown. That is the real problem. And it must be solved by reason, not by emotions, with understanding, not hate.”

Reception Like the producers Pine and Thomas on The Lawless, Robert Stillman had been consciously trying to make and market a film that was “different.”63 And most reviewers in the trade and daily press agreed that the film was bold and daring and as with The Lawless, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. Film Daily called it a “brilliant achievement,” while Motion Picture Herald praised it for its “realism carried almost to perfection.”64 Edwin Schallert at the Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, commended the film for its “amazing vitality,” saying that it was “sinister, forceful, and runs a sensational course.”65 Despite the remarkable similarities between The Sound of Fury and The Lawless, the former did receive a few more negative reviews. The one issue that the movie’s few detractors focused on was its sense of political and existential despair. The Lawless had been brutal and violent, but it had offered 132

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a programme to escape the current ideological morass. The Sound of Fury, though, offered no such hope. It wasn’t just the emotional bleakness that critics had problems with: it was its political defeatism that rubbed the more intellectuallyinclined critics the wrong way. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times was perhaps the most influential critic in the country at the time, and he usually espoused the commonly held belief among liberals that artistic films were those with a realist aesthetic and a social conscience. But with its much more pessimistic ending compared to other political movies, The Sound of Fury left Crowther cold. The movie expressed laudable social criticism he wrote, “but unfortunately, the arguments are so doleful and negative in this film that they offer no demonstration of correction or even hope.”66 While Crowther’s criticism may initially seem merely the shallow echo of a plebeian desire for a happy ending, it also evokes some of the political critique about the situation of leftist collaboration in the emerging Cold War. Crowther had been a champion of socially-engaged art and a detractor of the apolitical entertainments that the major studios produced. His wish for a happy ending thus carries with it an ideological hue: he hopes that the mass violence that had been racking the nation might, ironically, serve as a catalyst to make alienated communities join forces once again to fight their common enemy. With its typical emphasis on box office rather than on politics, Variety was enthusiastic about the film but somewhat less sanguine about its business prospects. It called the movie “thoroughly effective” and “shocking, but gripping,” but admitted that while “critically, it is solid, box-office wise, its chances are unpredictable.”67 The anonymous reviewer proved to be perceptive. After just five test bookings, Stillman was disappointed that the grosses didn’t match the expectations he had based on the critics’ reviews. He gave the film a new title, Try and Get Me, and released it again later that year.68 The critics, it seemed, had much more sympathy for Pagano and Endfield’s despair than did the general population. Its poor initial release in turn prevented the film from gaining any larger critical reputation. And film historians have never revived it. Like The Lawless, the film has been largely overlooked. It’s been available commercially until recently only under its re-release title of Try and Get Me on a VHS cassette that’s been out-of-print for more than a decade.69 In the violent ending of their film, Pagano and Endfield were not only predicting the fate of progressives in Hollywood, they were predicting the fate of their own film as well.

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Chapter 7 Racial Harmony and The Well

Like The Lawless and The Sound of Fury, the 1951 independent production The Well includes a climactic scene in which one of the main characters has an epiphany about the power of the truth. The movie’s antagonist, Sam Packard, is one of the leading businessmen in a small town that initially seems to have no problems. But, after a young black girl goes missing, people accuse Packard’s nephew, a white man, of abducting the girl. Rumours spread quickly and racial tensions flare. As the threat of a riot increases, Packard organizes a mob of angry white men at his warehouse. He tells the sheriff that he helped build this town, but “I’d rather destroy it than let those dirty black devils destroy it. We’re gonna drive every last one of ‘em out of this town.” Suddenly, a man breaks into the room and shouts that they’ve found the kid. “Kid? What kid?” Sam Packard asks testily, and then leans back, struck by a revelation: in his racial fury, he’d forgotten that the missing girl was the very reason that tensions had escalated in the first place. As with Larry Wilder in The Lawless and Gil Stanton in The Sound of Fury, he’s confronted with the knowledge that his decisions have power, and like them, he makes a decision to use his influence for good rather than for evil. Once the leader of a violent white mob, Packard now becomes the leader of an interracial effort to save the girl trapped at the bottom of the well. Like Wilder and Stanton, he’s made the cause of a defenceless victim his own. The Well opens with a shot of a grassy meadow. A black girl, about five years old, skips playfully through the field, and then disappears. The girl’s family goes to the police, and Sheriff Ben Kellogg sends his deputies out looking for her, but when he learns that the girl was seen with a white stranger who bought her flowers, he worries: he knows that gossip about a white man abducting a black girl could lead to trouble. Soon, his fears come true as rumours spread through both the white and black parts of town, which leads to violence, as roving bands of whites and blacks lash out in a spate of racial attacks. The town looks as if it’s leading to an allout race war with a white mob and a black mob forming on opposite sides of the city when suddenly the miraculous occurs: a young boy has heard the girl calling 134

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from the bottom of an abandoned well. As quickly as violence escalated, the town’s animosities disperse, and black and white people converge on the field where the girl had disappeared and now join forces to save her life. As night deepens, a racially mixed team of men digs a shaft with a pile driver down to where the girl is trapped and a racially mixed crowd watches in anticipation. Finally, the same man who was accused of abducting the girl, Sam Packard’s nephew Claude, brings her body to the surface. Nervous, the crowd waits to hear from the doctor after they whisk the girl into a waiting ambulance. Finally, the doctor speaks to the sheriff and the sheriff picks up a microphone: the girl is alive! The men and women in town who just hours earlier had been on the verge of a race riot now celebrate the news. The Well offers an unusual perspective on the recurring themes of the cycle of mass violence in that the men who made the movie were much less politicallyengaged than were the men who made The Lawless or The Sound of Fury. The movie’s creative team – Leo Popkin, Russell Rouse, and Clarence Greene – had a liberal, rather than a radical, worldview; these were men who had never been active in Hollywood’s union struggles or in the debates about Communists in the film industry. It is precisely because of their lack of engagement in Hollywood’s political life that their movie is one of the few in the cycle that does not include a reporter as a major character. Since they themselves had never been engaged in the battles against the Hearst and Chandler press, they did not instinctively imagine their cinematic antagonists as newspapermen. Nevertheless, though its plot does not deal with newspapers, per se, The Well is just as concerned as the other films are with the political consequences of how information gets circulated – only in this film, as in No Way Out, news spreads through unchecked rumours in the absence of a responsible liberal press. At the same time, the film was also making a very obvious extratextual commentary on the news in that it reenacted the most famous instance of television journalism in America at the time. The Well, like other films in the cycle, retells a story from California’s recent past. In 1949, a girl named Kathy Fiscus fell down an abandoned well in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino. The coverage of the ensuing rescue efforts quickly became the first live television sensation in southern California, and subsequently, a major national and international news event. The most prominent aspect of the live coverage that people commented on at the time was television’s ability to bring people together, to create a sense of community. The rescue effort in The Well follows the actual events of the Kathy Fiscus case so closely that most people who saw the movie – even in other parts of the country – would have understood instantly that they were watching a recreation of the Fiscus affair. The movie’s political optimism was made possible by the only significant modification the filmmakers made to the actual events. In real life, Kathy Fiscus died. In the movie, though, the child survives. Thus, though the story has no characters who are print or television journalists, the movie itself embodies the hopes for the new medium’s potential to bring about racial and political unity.

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Because of the filmmakers’ lack of political engagement, The Well presents a fairly conventional liberal conception of the causes of mass violence. While movies like The Lawless – and even more so The Sound of Fury – argue that mob violence was a natural byproduct of the material conditions of society, The Well portrays racial animosity as stemming from the failures of particular individuals. But at the same time, the film is much more progressive than other films in the cycle in the degree to which it champions its minority community’s militancy: though its happy ending may initially seem to evade some of the most difficult questions about racial strife in America, the movie suggests that this kind of resolution can only be won when a victimized community empowers itself after it comes under attack. In Twentieth Century-Fox’s No Way Out, Darryl Zanuck and Joseph Mankiewicz also toyed with the idea of the black community defending itself with arms, but they played down scenes of racial stridency and the race riot itself. But because the Popkin brothers produced The Well outside of the studio system and were thus perhaps less worried – or less sophisticated – about how to maximize their profits, they made the black community’s righteous anger more pronounced. This emphasis on black characters defending themselves did not come from the kind of intense political engagement with communism or with the civil rights movement that one might expect. Instead, it came from a commercial interaction with the African-American community. The director Leo Popkin had managed black movie theatres in Los Angeles for years and had directed a half dozen race movies himself, precisely because he understood that his patrons weren’t getting the kind of movies they wanted from the major Hollywood studios.

The Filmmakers Though it’s often difficult to determine who was responsible for the specific artistic features of any movie, it’s especially difficult when that film is credited with two directors. According to its screen credits, The Well was directed by Leo C. Popkin and Russell Rouse, written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, produced by Leo C. Popkin and Clarence Greene, and presented by Harry M. Popkin. Rouse and Greene were a team who had already collaborated on three screenplays – including the critically acclaimed D.O.A. that the Popkin brothers had produced the year before – and who would go on to write seven more screenplays together over the next 25 years. Harry Popkin was not very involved in the making of the film. It makes sense, then, to think of the film not as a four-man effort, but as a collaboration between Leo Popkin and the Rouse-Greene team. The Popkin brothers came to filmmaking, like so many other producers, by way of exhibition. Harry owned and managed a chain of small theatres in the greater Los Angeles area, most notably the Million Dollar Theatre, one of the nation’s first movie palaces, originally built by Sid Grauman in 1918.1 By the thirties, though, the theatre had fallen on hard times and had begun to serve a largely black clientele.2 136

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Partly to satisfy the demand of their customers, Leo and Harry formed Million Dollar Productions in 1937 with the actor, writer, and director Ralph Cooper, who had starred in the first all-black gangster film earlier that same year.3 Over the next five years, the company produced 11 movies, earning a reputation for their relatively polished look. Thomas Cripps, in fact, calls Million Dollar Pictures “the best company” that made race movies, possibly because it was the only one that “retained control of the product from script to distribution.”4 Nevertheless, they were only able to survive for about five years. Leo Popkin got his first creative experience working for Million Dollar Productions. Though he is officially credited with directing six of their films between 1938 and 1940, he claims that he also directed, un-credited, three others around the same period.5 Politically, Leo was the more liberal of the two brothers: he was a Democrat while Harry was a Republican and in later years he would joke about his brother’s conservatism.6 Leo, though, was not especially mindful of the political situation in Los Angeles. He didn’t seem particularly aware of the Zoot Suit Riots, for instance: “I have a faint recollection of it,” he said years later, but “I don’t recall it affecting us, really, one way or the other.”7 In his oral history, he never mentions the Hearst press, the CSU strikes, or the Committee for the First Amendment. Nevertheless, he generally socialized with the liberal crowd in Hollywood. Two of his best friends in the film industry – Carl Foreman and Morris Carnovsky – were members of the Communist Party and he didn’t seem to think that there was anything particularly unethical about their political beliefs.8 Nevertheless, Leo Popkin’s worldview was in some ways more sophisticated than his more activist peers due to his everyday experiences running his business. His work with black audiences and black collaborators gave him an insight into African-American culture that filmmakers like Darryl Zanuck, Joseph Mankiewicz, or Clarence Brown didn’t have. From the beginning, Million Dollar Productions had been an interracial endeavour; the Popkin brothers were the only white people on staff.9 This is partly why the racial agenda in their films could be more complex than those produced by the major studios, who mainly took their cues from the NAACP leadership, which had been pressing Hollywood executives for years to present black characters in a more positive light.10 Sometimes that new positivity from the major studios, though, limited a new generation of black actors into roles of noble passivity. While films like Pinky and Lost Boundaries presented virtuous characters dealing with their shame about being black, the Popkins’ low-budget genre pictures generally treated their characters’ racial identity as a non-issue. Though most were fairly breezy tales about gangsters, they inevitably dealt with tendentious issues like prison reform and the racial inequalities of the justice system.11 We know more about Leo Popkin than we do about his collaborators. Russell Rouse grew up in Hollywood raised by his uncle, the former silent film actor William Russell.12 Greene came to Hollywood in 1941 under contract

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to Columbia Pictures after writing a well-received Broadway play.13 Neither one seems to have endorsed the Committee for the First Amendment or been particularly active in the Screen Writer’s Guild. And they evidently didn’t have much sympathy for communism, considering that their follow-up to The Well was an espionage thriller in which Ray Milland works as a spy for a foreign power (un-named, but obviously the Soviet Union) who’s eaten up by guilt and who eventually – courageously and patriotically, we’re led to believe – turns himself in to the FBI. Both Rouse and Greene were registered Democrats at the time the movie was made, but Leo Popkin said that despite The Well’s tendentious subject matter, “they didn’t impress me that they were trying to inject anything political.”14 Rouse and Greene were fascinated instead with the problems of producing efficient entertainment. Clarence Greene told a reporter that “the first thing we decided to do after signing with Harry Popkin was to make certain that what we wanted to do had audience appeal.”15 Their previous film D.O.A. – which the Popkins had produced – was a solid, but unexceptional thriller. Now they wanted to experiment with new ways of telling a story cinematically. They went about studying audience reactions scientifically. Before they began working on The Well, they watched a spate of recent films and “patiently recorded the reactions to the tensest moments and the laughs of every one of the 30 pictures they viewed.”16 Popkin and the Rouse-Greene team were able to combine their interests in an unusually efficient way. The three men had originally been working on a script that they were going to call Race Riot, but the project was going nowhere. Popkin agreed with Cy Endfield’s complaints about the postwar social message films, criticizing Home of the Brave and Lost Boundaries, for instance, for treating racial issues “too sensitively.”17 He wanted his black protagonists to fight their antagonists more aggressively, but at the same time, he didn’t want to make a movie that was completely despairing. Partly because of this, he and his collaborators were having difficulty coming up with an ending for their film. Then, when the Kathy Fiscus story broke, they were inspired to start working on a new script based on her tragedy. But that script, too, proved difficult because their story lacked character conflict and they couldn’t come up with a beginning. Then, finally, one day Popkin had an inspiration: why not combine the two stories into one?18 Despite the convoluted credits, everyone involved attests to the fact that it was a harmonious partnership. Popkin paints their collaboration as egalitarian and fruitful, saying that “Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene were like part of the company at the time.”19 Rouse and Greene concurred, saying that Harry Popkin as their financier gave them the kind of freedom they’d been unable to find at any of the big studios.20 Even so, tensions in the relationship did inevitably arise. Popkin does say, for instance, that he was “very active when it came to the screenplay,” but he describes his own participation in passive terms, saying that “I was always there” when the script was being written. He also occasionally refers to

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his partners as if they were working on the script without him, saying that “Rouse and Greene must have spent several months writing the script.”21 There may have been disagreements in postproduction as well. Unlike other writing teams, for instance, Rouse and Greene proudly maintained that they were involved in every aspect of the movie, consulting with composer Dimitri Tiomkin and even working in the dubbing room.22 But Popkin suggested that he was the one who collaborated with Tiomkin to coordinate the editing and the score. After Tiomkin saw the first complete cut, he urged Popkin to re-edit the rescue sequence with a more uniform, repetitive beat so that he could accompany the rhythmic pounding of the pile driver with some appropriately metrical music. Popkin claimed that he was responsible for the post production of the entire final sequence, managing the editor’s work to such an extent that the editor told him if he did win the Academy Award, he’d have to share it with Popkin.23 After the film was completed, the divisions between the two camps became more obvious, with Rouse and Green doing a publicity tour on their own and generally behaving as if they were the creative force behind the film. One article for The New York Post, for instance, ran a photograph of just Rouse and Greene in which the author refers to them as “the men who made ‘The Well”’ and fails to mention either of the Popkin brothers by name.24 But Rouse and Greene shared with Popkin a fascination with telling a story through purely cinematic means. Their next collaboration, The Thief, released in 1952, drew on many of the stylistic techniques first deployed in The Well. Aiming to be as bold as Hitchcock had been in Rope and Under Capricorn, Rouse and Greene declared that they would make a feature film entirely without dialogue. Rouse thought that the time was ripe for formal innovation, arguing that even teenagers had become too sophisticated for the traditional methods of cinematic storytelling. Rather than explaining characters’ motivations through dialogue, for instance, it was more effective, he said, to show scenes using “pantomime” and “fleeting impressions” so as not to be too obvious.25 These new storytelling methods that they aimed to use in The Thief were strategies that they had first developed in The Well. The Thief tells the story of an atomic scientist employed by the American government who’s secretly spying for a foreign power, and who, ravaged by guilt, turns himself in to the FBI in the end. Though the film’s lack of dialogue may be its most notable formal element, it’s their use of parallel editing that most reflects the style of their previous film. The Thief does not employ any hyperbolic montage sequences like The Well does in its rescue scenes, but it does, like its predecessor, use a series of rhyming three-to-five-shot sequences to draw comparisons between its characters. In The Thief, for instance, the protagonist Ray Milland picks up instructions from his handler three times, and each time he proceeds through an almost virtually identically series of shots; he also drops off his microfilm to his handler three times, filmed in almost exactly the same way each time. Each time

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he moves through this cycle of shots, both the danger of his situation and his selfhatred increases dramatically. But these formal tropes did not come from nowhere: Rouse and Greene first developed them one year earlier in The Well. The Thief also shares with The Well – and with most films made by progressives in the late 1940s and early 1950s – a commitment to a realist aesthetic. The Well goes further than The Thief in its realism, eschewing stars and casting non-actors in many secondary roles. But both films are shot in black-and-white, emphasizing working class characters and a quotidian American milieu made all the more believable because they’re shot on location. In a strange coincidence, in fact, Rouse and Greene spent weeks shooting The Well in the same two northern California towns – Marysville and Grass Valley – where Losey and company had shot The Lawless just months earlier.26

Based on an Actual Story: The Kathy Fiscus Case On April 8, 1949, a three-year-old girl named Kathy Fiscus fell down an abandoned well outside her home in San Marino, California. Two television stations from Los Angeles sent crews to report on the rescue efforts, and over the next 27 hours, their uninterrupted live coverage, seen primarily on KTLA, became the nation’s first live television phenomenon. One year later, the team of Popkin, Rouse, and Greene recreated her story as one half of The Well, their only alterations being that they made the girl black and they let her survive in the end. Though KTLA’s coverage of the Fiscus rescue attempt remains a significant touchstone for television historians, it’s important to understand that it was a multimedia affair. KTLA started broadcasting the rescue efforts about 24 hours after Fiscus fell down the well, followed soon after by KTTV, but because KTLA had a much better picture at the time, almost everyone saw the events unfold on that station.27 There were only about 20,000 television sets in Los Angeles in 1949, but the number of people who watched at least part of the coverage was much higher: KTLA broadcast to cities as far away as Santa Barbara and San Diego, and because of the new medium’s novelty and still expensive price tag, most people often watched television together at home in large groups or in public spaces like bars and showroom floors.28 That being said, the fame of the Fiscus affair and of KTLA’s coverage probably spread more quickly because of the print medium than it did because of television: many more people read about the rescue efforts in the newspaper than watched it for any considerable time on TV. The story became a sensation in cities across the country and as far away as Great Britain precisely because so many newspapers and magazines covered the story on their front pages.29 And the sense of communion that virtually every writer commented on after Fiscus’s death sprung as much from conversations between co-workers, neighbors, and friends as it did from the TV coverage. Thus, the coverage of the Fiscus rescue attempt embodied multiple aspects of how news was conveyed in 140

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America at the time: it captured the power of the press, the fascination with the new audiovisual medium, and the influence that rumours had in the absence of either of the other two. In that sense, by recreating the television coverage of the event, The Well was also recalling these other media networks as well. People at the time understood the significance of KTLA’s broadcast as being ethical and political more than technological. Though Kathy Fiscus died, most people in Los Angeles praised the rescue attempt as a major event that symbolically unified the city. A writer for the Los Angeles Mirror summarized the feeling of most people in southern California: “here the world united over the life of one child. That, perhaps, is the miracle of little Kathy Fiscus. No color, race, creed, union or non-union, rich or poor distinction arose to mar the united efforts of the men and women who fought to save her.”30 One of the reporters on the scene at the time, Bill Welsh, said that the newscast was important more for spiritual than for technological reasons: “The public was so moved by this event that they felt they wanted to share everything with me because I had been their surrogate at the scene of the rescue effort. From that time one, the public realized that television was much more than ‘home movies.’ It was a thing with a heart and a soul and it was going to have a tremendous impact on their lives.”31 This universalizing effect was felt well beyond Los Angeles as well. An editorial in The New York Times noted that “millions upon millions” of people had followed the story – both in America and abroad – and opined that “even Kathy’s father and mother must have felt that something like a miracle of human compassion had taken place. Their little daughter had suddenly become a symbol of something precious in all our lives. . . . Kathy came close to our hearts and made us one. A splendor of unselfish emotion lit her path as she went from this earth.”32 But liberal filmmakers may have felt that the political aspect of this sense of unity was just as important as the spiritual aspect. Just as with the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the San Jose lynching of 1933, traumatic events led directly to progressive political successes. Just two days after Fiscus died, the California State Assembly passed a bill to require people to cap abandoned wells. Governor Earl Warren signed the bill into law just one month later. Liberals felt that KTLA’s coverage, like the media frenzy around the San Jose lynching and the leftist pamphleteers protesting the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, had directly led to progressive political gains. Popkin, Rouse, and Greene followed the details of the actual rescue attempt so faithfully that anyone in Los Angeles who saw the film would have picked up on the similarities immediately. The movie replicated almost every detail of the actual rescue efforts. In both the real event and the film, the young girl fell into an abandoned well about 14-inches across that was overrun with grass and weeds. Rescue workers dropped a hose into the well to provide the girl with oxygen. Then they lowered a rope into the hole, but the girl wasn’t able to grasp it. When that failed, they decided to drill a parallel shaft, and then dig over to reach her. The rescue workers dropped a microphone into the well and played the audio

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over loudspeakers set up on the roofs of cars, but after a few initial whimpers, they heard only silence for hours on end. The rescue scene was illuminated by artificial lights (in the movie, the light came from a circle of cars; in real life, it came from a bank of kliegs provided by Twentieth Century-Fox). To speed the work of making a parallel shaft, workers brought in a crane with a pile driver, which KTLA reporter Stan Chambers described as a “derrick-like piece of heavy equipment . . . [that] pounds away on the top of a large cylinder casing, trying to drive it deeper into the ground.”33 Men descended into the shaft and dug across to the girl, but at one point they hit water and had to be pulled up just before they could reach her. All this time, an enormous crowd swelled around the rescue site, held back by rope.34 And, when the rescue workers finally brought the girl up from the bottom of the well, they initially refused to say whether she was dead or alive.35 There was one important fact about the real-life rescue efforts, though, that most reporters at the time didn’t bother to mention, and which most historians have thus ignored as well: the crowd that gathered to watch the Kathy Fiscus rescue efforts was divided into two racially segregated groups.36 Though the mainstream American historical narrative doesn’t dwell much on the specifics of racial segregation outside of the South, Los Angeles was an intensely segregated city in the late 1940s, though the unspoken rules of its divisions were complex and often unpredictable, even for the city’s black residents. It was virtually unheard of to see – as one did in the South – signs that read, “Whites Only,” for instance, but most people understood tacitly that there were many places where non-white people were simply not allowed. As the psychiatrist Price Cobbs remembers it, “segregation was still everywhere.” If he wandered through white neighbourhoods, he wrote, “I was bombarded by furtive glances, outright stares, or barely heard comments. These were times of early, uneasy integration, and walking in a strange neighbourhood . . . presented certain danger of the unknown.”37 The novelist Chester Himes, too, was alarmed by the racial tension in the city. He wrote two novels – If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade – about African-Americans in Los Angeles during the war that dealt with the interrelated topics of union politics, racism, communism, and violence.38 Himes’s protagonists, like Cobb, experienced a city that was fraught with racial tension. In almost every encounter they have with a white person, an implicit threat of violence hangs in the air. “Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known,” Himes wrote decades later, “much more than any city I remember from the South.”39 Popkin admitted that one of the filmmakers’ aims was to provide a sense of wish fulfillment for the Los Angeles audience that had been devastated by Fiscus’s death.40 But Popkin’s sense of wish fulfillment also had a political edge. On the one hand, his happy ending may have whitewashed the sense of physical danger that people like Cobb and Himes felt every day in Los Angeles. But on the other hand, as with The Lawless, the minority victims became stronger only because they were

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forced to defend themselves. By rewriting history to make the rescue efforts at the end of The Well an equal collaboration between black and white protagonists and to make the crowd that watched those rescue efforts racially integrated, Popkin and his collaborators not only fulfilled the wishes that Kathy Fiscus could be saved, but they also fulfilled the wishes of their black audience in particular that they might eventually achieve racial integration in Los Angeles and the nation.

Spreading the News: The Disintegration and Integration of Community The Well, like each of the films in the mass violence cycle, examines how the spread of false information about an innocent victim can lead to mob violence. But, just as the film presents a complex attitude toward violence, it also portrays both the negative and positive consequences of the spread of rumours. As the news spreads through town, the film repeatedly draws parallels between the white and black communities, and though rumours lead to threats of violence, they also lead to the organized defence of the town’s black residents. Like The Lawless, the film tends to draw these parallels mainly through visual style rather than through a more obvious use of dialogue. Throughout the film, even as the two races seem farthest apart, The Well consistently demonstrates the ways in which the black and white communities mirror each other, even as it eventually lays the majority of the blame for racial violence on the town’s white residents. And, to make these comparisons, the filmmakers developed specific montage strategies for each half of the film – the race riot section, and the rescue section – first showing the two groups breaking apart, then showing them working together. In the first half of the movie, the filmmakers depict the system by which rumours spread through the white and black communities. In the beginning, the town is peaceful and racially integrated, and the filmmakers demonstrate this, as Ellen Scott points out, mostly through visual means by showing white and black people in the same frame.41 The calm is broken after the police question the white man who’s passing through town and who was seen with the girl that morning. People begin to talk, and the more they talk, the less often black and white people appear in the same frame. After the troubles start, there is one scene in which a white waitress protects a black cook at a diner and another scene in which white and black men join together in the sheriff’s office to form a citizen’s committee, but for the most part the races drift apart. But at the same time that the races are distancing themselves, the film reveals them to have a great deal in common: almost every sequence involving white people is mirrored with a similar sequence involving black people. The film repeatedly shows rumours spreading through town as in the children’s game of Telephone: at the beginning of a sequence, one person relays a simple fact; by the end of the sequence that fact has been distorted into something much more 143

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Figure 7.1. A gang of white boys chasing its black victims. The Well (1951), Cardinal Pictures

outlandish and ugly. In most cases, one racial group spreads rumours in a threeto-five shot sequence, followed immediately with the other racial group spreading rumours in a rhyming three-to-five shot sequence. Occasionally, the film crosscuts back and forth between groups of black people spreading rumours with groups of white people spreading similar rumours. In almost every instance, these montage sequences contain no dialogue until the final shot in the sequence, when the extent of the rumourmongering is punctuated by one piece of dialogue that demonstrates how incredible the stories have become. Throughout the film, Rouse and Popkin comment on the action through subtle visual cues. In the first scene in which rumours begin to spread, for instance, Sheriff Ben Kellogg interviews a white florist where the suspect was seen with the girl that morning. When the shop owner corrects the sheriff ’s unspoken assumption about the man’s race – “Oh, he wasn’t colored; he was a white man” – Kellogg blanches. He understands instantly that this fact has the potential to create racial havoc. The florist’s black assistant overhears them. The shop owner pauses for a moment, silently debating whether he should tell his assistant not to say anything about this unfortunate fact, then his assistant turns, walks out the door, and continues on to the local barbershop. As always, Rouse insisted that scenes played more effectively when less was said. “Some people, even on the set,” he said, “contended we were 144

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in error by treating the situation so obliquely, that we should definitely register the fact that he listened to the conversation. [But] we refused.”42 The filmmakers continue to tell their story obliquely, cutting back and forth between white and black characters as they spread rumours. Rouse referred to this as a “skipping technique”: “incomplete incidents strung together repeatedly,” he said, “are much more effective than those completely exhausted before one goes forward.”43 The flower shop assistant talks to a group of men at the barbershop; one of those men talks to another man at a gas station; that man talks to a woman, who calls out to another woman doing laundry on a second floor balcony; then, finally, a black woman is talking to other women on the street and we hear only her most emphatic and shocking words: “a white man!” The film follows this sequence with a wordless sequence in which white officers spread across town, interviewing white residents. We see the results of these exchanges when a white man confronts the sheriff in a diner and announces to the customers that “a white man came after a colored girl. Talk going around he killed her.” The sheriff talks them down: “Bad talk can cause trouble,” he says, but by then it’s already too late. As the movie unfolds, the rumourmongering is punctuated by increasing levels of racial violence. After the family of the missing girl confronts Sam Packard on the street, Packard slips and falls; a white crowd gathers and one white man exclaims: “The niggers did it!” Word spreads quickly through the white community: one white person begins a sequence by telling another that “two of them jumped Sam Packard. Beat him up bad.” At the end of this sequence, another white woman tells her friends that “a whole pack of them attacked this poor old man.” Eventually, a group of white teenagers beats up a lone black teenager on the street. Then we see a black person initiating another sequence by explaining what happened: “a whole mob of ‘em nearly beat this man to death.” At the end of this sequence, the story has transmogrified into something darker, as we hear a black woman finish her story with “and killed a man on Parsons Street!” This sequence is the second punctuated with a racial attack, this time with a black mob attacking a white teenager on the street. Despite the film’s parallel structure, over time, the filmmakers make clear that white people are more responsible for the violence than black people, since a large majority of the attacks by the end of the film have been white-onblack.44 These rhyming parallel sequences between whites and blacks continue to escalate until the moment when Sam Packard tells the mob of white men at his warehouse: “We’re gonna drive every last one of ‘em out of this town.” This scene is followed closely with another in which one of the girl’s family members addresses a black mob: “This time we’re not running,” he says. “This time we’ll be waiting for them. For every one of us there’s gonna be two dead ofays. Two for one!” In the second half of the movie, when black and white crowds gather together to witness the rescue efforts, the filmmakers deploy a different editing strategy to demonstrate how the two communities work together to help save the missing girl.

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Figure 7.2. A group of black men takes up arms to defend itself. The Well (1951), Cardinal Pictures

The opening shots of the sequence show a racially mixed crowd that has gathered in the field and a racially mixed group of men digging and planning the rescue efforts. The visual metaphor augurs well: it’s the most impressive display of black and white faces together in a series of shots in the entire film. In this part of the movie, the filmmakers again organize their sequence around editing strategies, but now that white people and black people are working together rather than separately, there’s no need to use parallel montage. Instead, they emphasize the anxiety of the moment with hyperbolic montage sequences broken up with long, silent shots that escalate the tension. Whether in individual shots or in shots with multiple faces, the filmmakers portray the white and black members of the crowd and the white and black rescue workers with the same reactions and the same behaviours. The filmmakers similarly emphasize the connections between the two groups with their use of sound. The sequence begins with only the ambient sound of machinery. These moments without music are as important as those moments that Tiomkin underlines with his score. On a couple occasions, the men ask the crowd to turn off their car motors so that they can listen over the radio lines they’ve dropped into the well shaft to see if they can hear the young girl. In the first instance, the seconds drag on until we hear the girl’s tinny voice echo through the field over a set of loudpseakers. Later, when Claude Packard has descended the shaft to save her, the crowd waits just as nervously to hear his ghostly, disembodied voice describe 146

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the scene underground. With these sonic parallels, the filmmakers make their audience – and the crowd at the scene – worry just as much for the the girl as they now do for the man they had suspected of kidnapping her. Popkin and Tiomkin reserve their audiovisual collaboration for those moments when the machinery is doing its work. When the men put the pile driver in place, Popkin begins with a series of slow, roughly eight-second shots of the weight rising into the air, which Tiomkin accompanies with dizzying swirls of strings. Then the weight slams into the earth. The crane lifts the hammer slowly again, then slams it into the earth. Then the men speed the process up and as Popkin shows the pile driver smashing into the ground in a series of one-second shots, Tiomkin’s score matches the visuals, emphaszing the downbeat with cymbals and booming drums. This percussive theme gains in emotional resonance as Popkin cuts back to the sherriff ’s office where Claude Packard is being released. Though he vows that he won’t help the rescue effort and that he’ll get out of town as fast as he can, Tiomkin’s rythmical theme playing quietly but incessantly in the background reminds the audience of the men who are working together to save the girl back in the field. But, as if the non-diegetic music had tugged at his emotions, Claude Packard eventually does join the crowd and agrees to descend himself into the tunnel to save the girl. As the rescue efforts proceed, the film goes out of its way to show not just a racially mixed crowd but also a racially mixed rescue effort. In almost every activity undertaken, white and black men work as equals: the one white man and the one black man who were leaders of the mobs just hours earlier are now the two men who help position the pile driver’s weight. White and black men take turns descending into the shaft. And the mixed crowd doesn’t just watch; they become active participants in the rescue when the sheriff asks them to turn their car lights on to illuminate the scene. Even in their shared concern for the girl, the film demonstrates the equality of the races. As the men work, the girl’s family is comforted by their black doctor, the white woman from the diner and the white pastor who earlier had prevented a band of white teenagers from attacking a black teen. By the time they bring the girl out of the well and wait for the news from the doctors in a nearby ambulance, the visual metaphors have made the new racial dynamics clear: in the final moments after the sheriff punctuates the deathly silence to announce that the girl is alive, the crowd cheers and swarms the field in such a joyous frenzy it’s almost impossible to distinguish anymore who is white and who is black. The town itself seems cleansed of any racial divisions.

Racial Violence and Miscegenation The Well maintains that the black community can only solidify its equality with the white community after the threat of violence forces them to become unified and defend themselves. This threat of physical violence to the community is bound up 147

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with the simultaneous threat of a sexual attack on one of its children. But just as the threat of physical violence eventually leads to racial equality, the threat of interracial sex is also a double-edged sword, similarly manifesting the movie’s central concern with the dispersal and reunion of the races. Just as the movie exhibits both a sense of disgust and fascination with the thought of mass violence, it also expresses both a feeling of repugnance and curiosity with the idea of interracial sex. The threat and lure of miscegenation and of child molestation is precisely what inflames tensions so quickly throughout town. But the filmmakers flipped the traditional fears about racial mixing and mob violence: instead of a black man attacking a white woman, the movie presents the possibility that a white man molested a black girl. And, just as the movie portrays mass violence both as a threat and as the possible catalyst for a solution, it similarly depicts sexuality as manifesting both dangers and rewards. If the movie presents interracial sex as the spark that provokes violence, it also, ironically, hints at interracial sex as the metaphorical solution to the problem of violence and segregation. Even hinting at the idea of interracial sex and child molestation was touching on some of the nation’s strictest taboos. But the period immediately following the war was an era when many social proscriptions were beginning to lose their force. Interracial marriage, for instance, was still illegal in most states, but it was just becoming a topic that could be broached in the public sphere, particularly in California. The issue of marriage between white and black people was still so touchy, though, that in the 1948 Perez v. Sharp case that overturned antimiscegenation laws in California, civil rights lawyers strategically selected a case in which the plaintiffs were a black man and a Mexican woman – and even so, they still won the case by only a one-vote margin.45 Even the most famously frank study of human sexuality of the era wouldn’t dare broach the subject of interracial sex. The Kinsey Institute’s Sexuality in the Human Male, released in 1948, limited itself to the study of “American and Canadian whites.”46 But despite Kinsey’s trepidation on that subject, his rather unconventional attitudes about sex between children and adults helped incite a wave of panic about child molestation. The scholar Philip Jenkins argues that the years 1948–1950 marked one of three most prominent nationwide panics about the sexual abuse of children in the twentieth century.47 Fears about child abuse reached a fever pitch in Los Angeles in late 1949 and early 1950 when the lurid murder of six-year-old Linda Joyce Glucoft and the resulting trial of her abductor made headlines in the daily press for months.48 California Governor Earl Warren went so far as to convene a special conference on “Sex Crimes Against Children” to deal with the hysteria, leading the state legislature to pass five bills specifically aimed at child molesters. The legislature did so against the wishes of Alfred Kinsey, who testified before a subcommittee that penalties for having sex with children should be decreased, rather than increased.49

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RACIAL HARMONY AND THE WELL Figure 7.3. The interracial crowd watching the rescue. The Well (1951), Cardinal Pictures

It should be no surprise, then, that the threat of interracial child molestation was, in fact, the single topic that the censors at the Production Code Administration were most concerned about when they read the script for The Well. Geoffrey Shurlock spoke with screenwriter Clarence Greene over the phone, and as he noted later in a memo, “I explained the necessity of avoiding any possible inference that any of the characters of the script are talking about the child having been raped. We went through the script in detail, citing page and line.”50 Greene agreed to rewrite the pages in question, saying that the script would emphasize that people thought the child had been kidnapped and murdered. The issue was so fraught that Joseph Breen himself felt the need to intervene, dictating several more line-by-line corrections to the final script to emphasize the notion of a kidnapping rather than of molestation.51 Nonetheless, anyone who sees the film immediately understands that the prospect of an interracial child rape and murder is precisely what everyone in town is whispering about. When Claude Packard protests to the sheriff that “I’ve got a wife and kids” and Sam Packard complains that “a filthy thing like this could ruin a man,” it’s perfectly clear what the men are talking about. In fact, the word “filthy” was the one word that Joseph Breen had specifically urged the filmmakers to remove from the script, precisely because it hinted too pointedly at the idea 149

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of child molestation.52 The threat of interracial sex doesn’t apply just to Claude Packard and the missing girl, though. It is precisely the traditional fears about black men raping white women, in fact, that incite the first violent attack in the film. As rumours spread, a group of white teenage boys talks together. “You gotta know how to handle them, how to keep them in line,” one suggests to his friends. His talk seems mere bluster until two white girls walk by, obviously trying to draw the boys’ attention. When their flirtations fail, one girl teases the other that her love interest “seemed a lot more interested in talking about those niggers.” The second girl, insulted, walks back to the group of boys and tells them that “a nigger” on the street had just insulted her. “What do you expect us to do?” she says coquettishly. “After all, we’re just a couple of helpless girls.” The answer is simple: in the next scene, those same boys jump out from a car and attack a random black teenager on the sidewalk. It’s the first violent attack in town, but not the last. If the threat of interracial sexuality is the root cause of the mass violence, the movie proposes – metaphorically at least – that the lure of interracial sexuality might also be the one factor that can dispel violence and lead to racial reconciliation. In the final rescue sequence, the movie presents a spectacle of symbolic sexuality that directly results in the girl’s rescue, and in so doing, unites the races in a common, peaceful endeavor. To dig a parallel shaft to reach the girl, Sam Packard has his men bring a pile driver from his warehouse. Soon, a crane holding a giant steel cylinder aloft smashes that cylinder into the ground. The pile driver’s phallic associations are obvious. In a series of montage sequences, the white and black residents of town look on in awe as the long metal cylinder pounds relentlessly into the earth over and over again, the hypnotic power of the images enhanced by Dimitri Tiomkin’s pulsating score. The giant phallic symbol continues to push deeper and deeper into the earth, closer to where the girl lies. Finally, when the new shaft reaches her level, the metaphor is made complete. They need a man to descend into the earth to save her. Because of his experience as a miner, there’s only one man capable of doing the job: Claude Packard, the same man the town had suspected of molesting the girl earlier that very morning. As that white man brings the black girl up from the bottom of the well at the climax of the film, it is both the culmination of the girl’s symbolic deflowering as well as the logical birth produced by the pile driver’s efforts. Throughout the entire sequence, white and black residents are mesmerized by the symbolic presentation of the very act that had led them to the verge of a race riot just hours earlier. As with the actual Kathy Fiscus story, nobody in the crowd knows whether the girl is dead or alive when they bring her body to the surface. Up to this point, the rescue attempts have mirrored almost exactly the events that Angelenos had watched live on KTLA the previous year – or, more likely, read about in one of the daily newspapers. As the characters in the movie brought the girl to a waiting ambulance, the audience was reliving the moments when they discovered that

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Kathy Fiscus was dead. But here, by letting the girl survive, the filmmakers aptly reiterate the message of the film. By rewriting history, the movie has pointed towards a future of racial and political reconciliation. As with The Lawless, the filmmakers believe that they can revisit history to envision a better world. It was a message much more amenable to critics and audiences alike than the pessimism of The Sound of Fury.

As with The Lawless, critics generally raved about The Well. And the happy ending, with its dreams of a rosy political future, certainly had a great deal to do with this. Many reviewers – even out-of-town critics at the New Yorker and the New York Herald-Tribune – pointed out that the movie was a re-telling of the Kathy Fiscus story. Making a film about such a famous tragedy had benefits as well as drawbacks. Variety, for instance, thought that the movie’s “boxoffice chances appear limited due to its stronger-than-usual adult appeal,” but also called it “tense and gripping . . . [and] unusually well handled.”53 Most critics, less concerned with its box office chances, were even more effusive. Bosley Crowther at The New York Times thought that the movie had some minor flaws – the racial hatred in town was exaggerated and unmotivated, he thought, and the ending was idealized – but he praised the film, saying that it “throbs with legitimate excitement” and that “its message of brotherhood seems well intended and that rescue operation packs real thrills.”54 Edwin Schallert at the Los Angeles Times hailed it as one of the best movies of the year, calling it “a picture of sensational values and high intensity” with actors “who perform their tasks with amazing expertness.”55 And the New York Post called it “one of the best, most generally stimulating pictures of the year.”56 The movie went on to receive two Academy Award nominations – one for Best Film Editing and another for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – an unusual honour for an independently financed film. One of the only voices to criticize the movie was the film industry’s leading Communist, John Howard Lawson. Writing just a couple years after he was released from prison, Lawson criticized the film for providing a false analysis of the causes of black militancy and a false hope regarding its eventual gains. The militant black characters in the movie, he pointed out, were not fighting the current social structure, so their victory in the end merely returned society to its existing state before the start of the film, thus reinforcing a false conception that race relations were currently copacetic. “The just anger of the Negro people in resisting their tormentors is attributed to a ‘misunderstanding,”’ he wrote, “and their struggle for their rights is equated with the brutality of their oppressors.”57 Though this remains the most perceptive criticism of the film, Lawson may have let his Marxist principles blind him to some of the movie’s finer details, since he repeatedly makes 151

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factual mistakes about the plot that tend to make the movie seem more conservative than it actually is.58 Black intellectuals and moviegoers did not share Lawson’s concerns. They were, in fact, even more enthusiastic about the movie than were white crictics. Walter White, the president of the NAACP, heartily approved of the film. He had been informally advising the Hollywood studios since 1942, speaking to the studio chiefs as the unofficial representative of black America, entreating them to portray African-Americans in a more sensitive light.59 White thus saw The Well as a culmination of all his efforts, saying that the film would help audiences “gain a new concept of American democracy and of respect for the democratic process.”60 Ralph Bunche, who had become the first African-American to win the Nobel Peace Prize just one year earlier, went even further, wiring Harry Popkin personally to tell him that he thought it was “the finest motion picture ever made.”61 The publisher of the country’s most widely circulated black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, called it “one of the finest movies to ever come out of Hollywood.”62 And ordinary black moviegoers liked the film just as much as civil rights leaders did. The Pittsburgh Courier’s readers ranked it the best film of 1951 by a wide margin in an end-of-the-year poll.63 Yet, despite the raves, The Well, like The Lawless and The Sound of Fury, has been largely forgotten by movie fans and film historians alike. No scholar has yet published an essay on the film in the English language. Even African-American film scholars have paid it little heed: Thomas Cripps mentions the film in passing, and Donald Bogle doesn’t mention it at all in either of his two overviews of AfricanAmerican cinema. As with The Lawless, the movie’s optimism may, in the final analysis, have been misplaced: with the studios and the House Committee on Un-American Activities poised to blacklist the last remaining radicals in the film community the very year that the film was released, the tenor of Hollywood had changed. Political films like The Well rarely apeared on American screens over the next decade. The dream of racial cooperation in American cinema – not to mention in American life – was still decades away, if in fact, it has yet been achieved at all.

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Conclusion–Cyclical Decay: Shifting Independence and the Decline of Progressive Filmmaking in the 1950s The fashion for liberal message movies with a realist aesthetic began to wane after the second wave of HUAC hearings. The film analyst Dorothy Jones wrote that movies dealing with “social and psychological” themes declined dramatically after 1951. Though she had found that 28 per cent of Hollywood movies released in 1947 focused on social themes, by 1951, only 13 per cent of movies dealt with such issues, and by 1953 only 9 per cent did.1 Studio executives weren’t the only ones pushing this political evolution, though; the industry’s creative talent was changing its attitudes as well. In the late 1940s, liberal films like Gentleman’s Agreement, Crossfire, Pinky, No Way Out, and The Well figured prominently at the Academy Awards. But in the 1950s, the Academy voters lost their interest in engaged cinema; now they were more likely to honor mild entertainments like The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days, and when they did bestow the Best Picture award to a political film, they honored On the Waterfront, a movie that many understood to be Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan’s metaphorical defence of their decision to name names. By 1952, the cycle of films about journalism and mass violence had reached its inevitably quick demise. As Amanda Ann Klein observes, cycles form “in reaction to a particular social anxiety, problem, or crisis” and once that particular social or political crisis disappears – or once audiences come to realize that the particular problem cannot be solved – the need for the cycle similarly diminishes. In this sense, the final imposition of the blacklist, the victory of IATSE over the CSU in Hollywood, and the continuing decline of lynching in the South all helped to create 153

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a sense that the immediate dangers of the emerging Cold War had been papered over. This fluctuating social anxiety, Klein points out, typically manifests itself at the box office. Just as cycles are born after the box office success of one “originary” film, they die out when the later films fail to make money. The cycle of movies of mass violence came to its end because the second wave of message movies released in 1950 and 1951 – including The Lawless, The Sound of Fury, The Well, and also No Way Out – disappointed their producers. On the one hand, they ran into censorship troubles, which the Breen Office had warned them about, but which nevertheless proved to be more of a headache than they’d expected. After the New York state censor board threatened to excise the entire last reel of The Sound of Fury, Robert Stillman despaired for the movie’s success and eventually changed its name to Try and Get Me before he released it a second time. No Way Out ran into problems as well, especially in Chicago. Since racial violence had plagued the city in the late 1940s, the city’s police censor initially banned the movie. Even though that decision was eventually overturned and the movie earned top grosses in Chicago, it met with more resistance nationally and was in the end, a disillusioning process for Darryl Zanuck.2 More important than these censorship problems, though, was the simple fact that these movies did not do well at the box office. While Pinky, Home of the Brave, and Lost Boundaries had each appeared in Variety’s list of top 50 grossing films of 1949 and had each been the biggest money-maker for its company that year, none of these new films was able to make the list of top 50 grossing films in either 1950 or 1951 and none came close to being its company’s biggest earner for the year.3 No Way Out fared better than any of them, but it ranked only 87th on Variety’s list, trailing 16 other Twentieth Century-Fox releases.4 It was clear to film industry executives that the fad for social message pictures had now faded. While Variety had covered the improbable success of “Negro pix” obsessively in 1949, the industry organ treated these new message pictures of 1950 and 1951 with silence. Instead, the paper quoted executives and exhibitors throughout the year who claimed repeatedly that audiences – women, especially – were tired of violent pictures and controversial themes. After meeting with theatre owners and movie fans on a 28-city tour, for instance, the actor George Murphy told Hollywood leaders that moviegoers didn’t want “artistic” or “violent” films anymore; they wanted family entertainment, preferably shot in colour.5 The end of the cycle of movies on mass violence was just the beginning of a larger turn away from progressive filmmaking in the 1950s. Hollywood stopped producing as many political movies for a number of reasons, but one of the main factors was that the economic conditions that had helped independent filmmaking flourish in the first years after the war changed suddenly right around 1950. Studio heads had not shown much concern about television in 1949, but by 1950, they began to believe that the new medium might have permanent repercussions. Box office revenues had decreased 20 per cent from the 1946 peak in places not yet served by TV, but they were down 30 per cent where television had made inroads.6

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In the second half of 1950, the competition from television became one of the film bosses’ overriding concerns, and the changes they made in reaction to this threat made it much more difficult for independent producers to procure financing. In June 1950, Variety reported that “independent production, which has scraped through many a hard time in the past 30 years, appears to be facing the toughest period in its history. Prospects are that the quantity of indie filming may soon hit an all-time low.”7 In addition to the decline in movie attendance, executives felt that audiences were demanding higher quality fare, so the major studios began to shift from a central producer system to one that fostered semiautonomous in-house units, thus encroaching on territory that had long belonged to independents.8 At the same time, this increasing emphasis on A pictures – and the increasing competition from television – threatened the existence of many smaller, independently-owned movie theatres, which had long been the most common exhibition option for independent producers.9 But the most important factor contributing to independent producers’ problems in 1950 was, ironically, the troubles of independent distributors. United Artists’ success at the box office in 1949 seemed only to make the company’s inevitable dissolution more obvious to everyone in the film industry. All throughout 1950, various teams of investors – including Harry Popkin at one point – tried to buy the company. Meanwhile, the next two most important independent distributors, Eagle Lion and Film Classics, spent months discussing a possible merger, but these plans never came to fruition. During the spring and summer of 1950, then, it was unclear if these distributors would survive – or, if they did, how many movies and what type of product they’d be willing or able to release. The banks that had funded independent films throughout the 1940s had already cut back drastically on their lending in 1949. But the outside financiers who had stepped in to fill the gap – like Robert Stillman with The Sound of Fury and Harry Popkin with The Well – had failed to produce any box office successes. Thus, the banks were once again the only place where independents could turn. But now, with the instability of UA, Eagle Lion, and Film Classics, they were even more hesitant to lend money than they had been the year before. Almost every bank that had helped finance independent productions in the past had stopped doing so by the middle of 1950.10 The decrease in independent financing made it much more difficult for the remaining liberals in the film industry to make political films. But the progressive political community in Hollywood changed as well. The studios, after all, had blacklisted the most radical members of the film industry. Though this is the most obvious cause for the decline in political filmmaking in Hollywood, it may not be the most significant. Because studio executives had always policed their own radical screenwriters, the films that Communists made were often less political than those that their liberal colleagues produced. Dorothy Jones herself argued that Communists had never been successful at inserting their political ideas into their films. “The very nature of the film-making process,” she wrote, “which

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divides creative responsibility among a number of different people and which keeps ultimate control of content in the hands of top studio executives . . . prevented such propaganda from reaching the screen in all but possibly rare instances.”11 Besides the blacklist and the shifting fate of independent production, political filmmaking also decreased because Hollywood’s screenwriters and directors – like artists and intellectuals in other fields – were becoming less interested in political art than they had been in the 1930s and 1940s. Because so many progressives had come to reject the Marxist politics that had dominated political discourse on the left during the Depression, they consequently came to reject the Marxist aesthetics that had dominated artistic discourse of those days as well. A new generation of critics, spearheaded by figures like Clement Greenberg, was less interested in politically-engaged painters working in a realist vein like Ben Shahn and Thomas Hart Benton, and instead embraced apolitical artists like Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. In literary circles, as well, critics like Lionel Trilling and Leslie Fiedler turned away from political modernists working in a realist idiom like James T. Farrell and embraced more formally innovative modernists like William Faulkner and Marcel Proust. Richard Pells writes that in Lionel Trilling’s 1950 book, The Liberal Imagination, Trilling had become interested in “the idea that politics and literature were intimately connected, though not in the direct or propagandistic ways cherished by radicals in the 1930s.”12 Trilling did not crave more novels of social protest. Instead, he stressed the political relevance of those artists – particularly Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Kafka, and Gide – who most accurately portrayed the “variousness, possibilities, complexity, and difficulty” of human life.13 The best Hollywood filmmakers of the 1950s similarly began to be interested in psychological depths rather than in political certainties. The men who were most responsible for The Lawless, The Sound of Fury, and The Well also turned away from political filmmaking in the 1950s. Of these seven screenwriters and directors, two were blacklisted – or chose to leave the country rather than name names – and five remained. Both Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield moved to England, where they occasionally made movies that touched on political themes. Endfield’s Hell Drivers (1957), for instance, deals with working class truck drivers who try to expose the corruption of their bosses, and Zulu (1964) portrays an attack by the eponymous nation against the British during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, in which the Zulus’ fight is portrayed as a legitimate cause. Losey, on the other hand, struggled to gain a foothold in the British film industry until he began collaborating with Harold Pinter in the 1960s. Even his collaborations with fellow blacklist victim Ben Barzman, such as Time Without Pity, which couches some class issues and an argument against capital punishment within the framework of a thriller, are not as overtly political as anything he directed in America. Those who remained in Hollywood rarely returned to political filmmaking, for the most part. The men who made The Well were the least politically engaged of any of the filmmakers I’ve discussed, so it’s no surprise that they reverted to secular

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entertainment quicker and more decisively than the others. Director Leo Popkin’s political and aesthetic trajectory seems emblematic of the decade: he switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 1952 and never worked on another film.14 Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene never broached leftist topics again, writing and directing a series of nondescript genre pictures over the rest of the decade, culminating with their original story for the Rock Hudson-Doris Day picture Pillow Talk in 1959. Jo Pagano, whose liberal sentiments seemed to apply most fervently to the representation of Italian-Americans and a general sensitivity toward the working class, muddled through the 1950s, writing just four scripts, including titles like Jungle Moon Men, in which Johnny Weissmuller discovers a lost African civilization and Security Risk, about a Communist spy ring stealing secrets with the help of an American scientist’s assistant. Of all these men, Daniel Mainwaring had the most productive period – both politically and artistically – in the 1950s. He worked constantly throughout the decade, mostly on cheap genre productions, but two films stand out: Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson, 1955), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), both of which echo many of the themes that The Lawless shared with the cycle of movies about mob violence. Each film portrays a lone protagonist crusading for justice against an ugly mob (whether human or hatched from an alien pod). Invasion of the Body Snatchers has become one of the most famous examples of a film that critics interpret as a metaphor for the conformity of the post-blacklist fifties.15 Though it’s certainly a commentary on mainstream American culture, Mainwaring’s script might be understood more specifically as a pointed critique of his fellow liberal filmmakers in Hollywood. The story takes place in a small town where everyone is being replaced by alien duplicates that lack human feeling, much like Mainwaring’s formally progressive compatriots who’d turned away from engaged art and had committed themselves to innocuous genre pictures instead. Phenix City Story, which Mainwaring co-wrote with Crane Wilbur, is less well known, but is in many ways a more complex film. The movie is based on actual events in Phenix City, Alabama, which had been overrun by illegal gambling interests. The protagonist Albert Patterson, a crusading lawyer running for state district attorney, fights the town’s corrupt elements but is assassinated; his son John then takes up his father’s cause, winning the next election as district attorney so that he can prosecute his father’s killers. The movie portrays mobs of criminal gangs who violently attack innocent men and women as well as an ugly mob of righteous citizens who want to lynch the leaders of the criminal gang. The threat of mob violence hangs over the entire film. Only a respect for the law eventually holds the crowds back. The Patterson father and son, with their initial disinterest and eventual engagement with progressive action, are both mirror images of Larry Wilder from The Lawless. But there is one crucial aspect of Patterson’s political crusade that the movie fails to mention. In real life, the movie’s hero, John Patterson, was also one of the South’s most ardent segregationists. As attorney general, and later as

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governor, he worked tirelessly to keep the NAACP from organizing in his state and even advertised his endorsement by the Ku Klux Klan to defeat the more moderate George Wallace for the governor’s race in 1959. Mainwaring may not have been aware of the extent of Patterson’s racism at the time he wrote his script – or it may be that Crane Wilbur had been responsible for much of the screenplay – but the fact that a committed liberal who was so devoted to racial harmony in his previous work could have collaborated on a script that lauded such an ardent segregationist is further proof of how problematic political filmmaking had become by the middle of the 1950s.16 The issues that liberal films were able or willing to address also changed. Yellow journalism and crusading progressive newspaper reporters rarely appeared anymore on American screens. But the relationship between the masses, race, and potential violence did occasionally appear again. Two films released in 1955 – Trial (d. Mark Robson, sc. Donald Mankiewicz) and Salt of the Earth (d. Herbert Biberman, sc. Michael Wilson) – both deal with many of the same themes as did the earlier cycle, but the ideological positions available to filmmakers had shifted with the rupture among the left in the 1950s. Trial was produced by a team of seemingly liberal men working for MGM, and it proudly displayed the most caricatured form of anti-communism that many liberals had come to embrace in the Cold War era.17 Salt of the Earth, on the other hand, was produced by a team of blacklisted Communists working outside of the studio system, and it manifested instead the radicalism that never saw light in Hollywood. The 1950s, then, were a more complex period than many commentators have allowed. It’s true that many progressives had abandoned their political ambitions. A film like Trial, written and directed by people considered “liberal” within the film industry, was as reactionary as any of the cheap anti-Communist films released between 1948 and 1954. At the same time, though, the most radical filmmakers were finally able to produce the type of militant, Marxist film they had always yearned to make. Salt of the Earth was the first Communist film to deal with the issue of race and the masses without interference from Hollywood’s studio heads. It’s no coincidence that it was the first film related to the cycle of movies about mob violence that portrayed the masses as being capable of effecting progressive political change. The movie was produced by the Communist-leaning International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, and the story was based on its own strike in the New Mexico mines in 1951 and 1952. The union hired a group of blacklisted Communists – Paul Jarrico, Herbert Biberman, and Michael Wilson – to produce, write, and direct the film. Salt of the Earth deals with every topic covered in the films from 1949 to 1951 – race, gender, and the power of the masses – in a much more strident fashion. In terms of race, the movie’s Mexican-American protagonists are intelligent and defiant. Originally, Biberman had planned to cast his wife Gale Sondergaard (who had also been blacklisted) in the lead role, but after he had met and interviewed the miners involved in the strike, he realized that his disinclination

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CONCLUSION–CYCLICAL DECAY

to cast non-stars was based in part on his own racial assumptions; in the end, he cast most of the main roles with actual miners. The movie also had an unusually feminist stance for the time: the main protagonist was a strong-willed Mexican woman who leads other women out on strike when their men are no longer able to do so. This issue of gender also relates to the issue of the masses. In every other film in the cycle, the masses were always portrayed as inherently conservative and violent. Defenceless and falsely accused minorities were usually the lone victims. But Salt of the Earth was the first to demonstrate that the masses can be rational, progressive, and successful. And the most successful masses in this film are entirely female. That being said, the film’s radicalism was not able to have much of an effect in the nation’s political debates. The blacklist, after all, was not just an employment issue. The filmmakers weren’t able to get even the smallest of the Hollywood companies to agree to distribute it. Meanwhile, the American Legion called for a nationwide boycott of the film and IATSE’s projectionists refused to screen it. The filmmakers’ independence came with a price: scholars estimate that the movie may have been screened in only a dozen theatres nationwide.18 While Salt of the Earth is in many ways the most adventurous political film of the 1950s, Trial is in many ways a reactionary movie, despite the fact that the men who made it considered themselves to be liberal. The film functions as an unintentional conservative response to The Lawless. Its director, Mark Robson, was a man in the mold of Stanley Kramer, a liberal who wanted to make films on important social themes. The movies he directed – like Champion, Home of the Brave, and Bright Victory – remain some of the best examples of liberal filmmaking during the blacklist period in that they were earnest, but tame. Trial contains many of the same attributes as the other movies in the mob violence cycle, but its politics have shifted, becoming less hopeful about racial progress and much more pointedly anti-Communist. It tells the story of a liberal professor, David Blake, who agrees to assist another lawyer defending a Mexican-American teenager falsely accused of murder. But Blake discovers that the lead attorney handling the case, Barney Castle, is a Communist who’s manipulating the boy and his family to create a media sensation that will help raise funds for the party. At a Madison Square Garden rally, Castle works the crowd into a frenzy. Blake is disturbed. The crowd is as ugly and easily swayed as the violent mob from The Lawless, except that in this movie they’re rooting for a liberal cause. The role of the villainous demagogue has shifted as well in the intervening five years. The Communist attorney in this film has the same power over the masses that conservative newspapers once had in the cycle of movies about journalism and mob violence. The movie’s gender roles, too, are more conservative. In The Lawless, it was Sunny Garcia, the MexicanAmerican newspaper publisher who served as the conscience of the film, a voice for progressive political engagement. In Salt of the Earth, it was the MexicanAmerican women who won the strike. But in Trial, the female protagonist is weak and ashamed of her militant past. David Blake falls in love with Castle’s assistant,

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Abbe. As their romance blossoms, though, she confesses to David that she, too, was once a member of the party. David forgives her, but in doing so, he reveals the true ideology of the film: radicalism is a moral weakness that stems from the irrationality and emotionalism characteristic of women, while men, who have sensibly distanced themselves from such an overly intense commitment, must absolve them of their guilt. In the end, Blake discovers that Barney Castle is intentionally throwing the trial so that the falsely accused Mexican victim will become a martyr, helping him raise even more money for the Party to help fight racial discrimination in the future. In the final analysis, Trial has more in common with the anti-Communist hysterics of The Red Menace than it does with a film like The Lawless. By the end of the 1950s, the political factors that gave rise to the movies of mob violence had dissipated. The blacklist eventually came to an end, but its victims were no longer Party members. The anti-Communist International Alliance for Theatrical and Stage Employees had defeated the militant Conference of Studio Unions years earlier; it was now a one-union town. The Civil Rights movement was gaining steam: race riots and lynchings seemed like they might have become a thing of the past. Conservatives like William Randolph Hearst who had controlled a large part of the Los Angeles media for decades had passed on; Norman Chandler’s son Otis took over the Los Angeles Times in 1960 and began a dramatic makeover of the paper. The movies of mob violence themselves disappeared from the critical consciousness. In their 1955 book Panorama du Film Noir Americaine, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton had written a brief overview of the “social documentary series,” in which they discussed The Sound of Fury, Ace in the Hole, No Way Out, The Lawless and The Well together.19 But by 1972, when Paul Schrader published “Notes on Film Noir” he mentioned only one of these films in passing.20 In the 1960s and 1970s, when critics and scholars began to revisit classical Hollywood, these independently produced low budget films were difficult to find. The French, British, and American cinephiles of the auteurist generation mostly had access to big budget A pictures produced by the major studios and those movies have remained the core concern of scholars and critics ever since. Even if the movies of mob violence had been readily available, their concerns must have seemed dated in the era of the New Left. Today, decades later, these films are just as obscure as they were then. But history, like the film industry, operates in cycles; just as Larry Wilder in The Lawless, Gil Stanton in The Sound of Fury, and the townspeople in The Well felt a renewed sense of political engagement, film scholars too may try to revise this moment in history once again.

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Notes Introduction: Political Filmmaking in the Shadow of the Blacklist 1. Though often referred to as the House Un-American Activities Committee – perhaps because its acronym HUAC has such a euphonious ring – Congress’s most notorious organ was officially christened with the name as I’ve used it in the text. However, for the sake of convenience, familiarity, and auditory contentment, I will refer to it throughout this book by its inaccurate but popular acronym. 2. The best contemporary books on politics in the blacklist era include: Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930– 1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1979, 1983; Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, completed by Sheila Schwartz (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982); and Stephen Vaughn, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3. See, for example, Bernard Dick, Radical Innocence (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1989). 4. Andersen’s essay was initially published as Thom Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, eds. Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groseclose (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 141–196. It has since been reprinted and is now easier to find in Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, eds., “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 225–262. References to his essay in these footnotes will refer to the page numbers from the Krutnik book. For “shock troops,” see Ceplair, p. 51. 5. Though Andersen’s cycle of 13 films and my cycle of 16 share only two titles, it’s probably not a concidence that I’ve devoted one chapter each to those two films – The Lawless and The Sound of Fury – in the second half of this book. The 13 films that originally comprised Andersen’s film gris genre include: Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947); Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948); Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949); Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950); They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949);

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Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949); We Were Strangers (John Huston, 1949); The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950); The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950); The Lawless (Joseph Losey, 1950); The Prowler (Joseph Losey, 1950); Try and Get Me (aka The Sound of Fury) (Cy Endfield, 1950); and He Ran All the Way (John Berry, 1950). See Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” 257. In his later work, Andersen added four other films: Road House (Jean Negulesco, 1948); Not Wanted (Elmer Clifton, 1949), which Andersen claims is Ida Lupino’s directorial debut; Quicksand (Irving Pichel, 1950); and Shakedown (Joseph Pevney, 1950). See, Andersen, “Afterword,” “Un-American” Hollywood, 265. Also, the scholar Joshua Hirsch points out that in a later article, “Le Temps du Crapaud,” published only in French, Andersen also added the film From this Day Forward (John Berry, 1946). Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” 257. Ibid, 261. Though Andersen admittedly writes that “the concept of director as author is too simplistic for the kind of film history I want to propose,” his very selection of movies and his repeated references to them as the grammatical possession of their directors only reinforces his auteurist approach. I don’t intend this as a criticism of Anderson or of auteurist theory, but merely as an observation of his approach. See Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” 257. Michael Rogosin has written the best work on the anti-communist cycle. See Michael Rogosin, “Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,” Ronald Reagan: The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Thomas Cripps, meanwhile, has written the best account of the big-budget message films about race that emerged after WWII. See Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). After Reagan received an anonymous phone call during the 1946 Conference of Studio Unions lockout threatening that “a squad” would disfigure his face, he started carrying a .32 Smith and Wesson everywhere he went. See Vaughn, 140. Norma Barzman, for instance, was active in party affairs in Hollywood with her husband Ben Barzman. But Ben, she says, “expected to be waited on.” When his friend Adrian Scott, later of the Hollywood Ten, would come over, they “relegated me to the scullery. I would make dinner, we would eat, I would clean up, and they would talk.” See Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 7.

Chapter 1 Violent Crowds on American Screens: Reporters, Racism, and Riots 1. Cripps calls Intruder “a movie of striking acuity” and No Way Out “one of the best” of the cycle of postwar message films on racial issues. See Cripps, Making Movies Black, 241, 244. 2. Ryan DeRosa, “Historicizing the Shadows and the Acts: No Way Out and the Imagining of Black Activist Communities,” Cinema Journal, 51, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 54, fn 8.

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NOTES TO PP. 14–21

3. DeRosa, 54. 4. The other small increase in the mid- 1930s was most certainly a reaction to the Great Depression and the New Deal’s emphasis on collective action. 5. For this analysis I eliminated all westerns. The subject of lynching has been central to the western since its inception, but the ideological position on lynching has been fairly consistent throughout the decades. In virtually every western film made in every decade, lynchings are portrayed as the symbol of the lawlessness of nineteenth-century frontier life that needed to be defeated by the spread of civilization and democracy. Only in rare cases does a lynching in a western have a direct bearing on current events. I’ve included Broken Arrow as part of the cycle because it was written by the communist Albert Maltz after he had been found in contempt of Congress but before he was sentenced to prison, making it one of those rare westerns that comments as much about the current political situation as it does about the Old West. 6. James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, Updated and Expanded Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 2008), 6. 7. To determine a person’s party affiliation, I searched records in California, Voter Registrations, 1900–1968, a database online at Ancestry.com. See http://search.ancestrylibrary .com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1249. (accessed on 1 April 2013) 8. This is why the ideological pairings in some of the films in the cycle on mass violence may strike us as odd today. Intruder in the Dust, for instance, consists of perhaps the most unexpected set of collaborators. The producer Dore Schary was a liberal Democrat who had supported the Committee for the First Amendment, defending accused Communists investigated by HUAC. The screenwriter Ben Maddow was a Communist who would later be blacklisted. The director Clarence Brown was a Southerner who had helped found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the one group in Hollywood that most actively advocated for the persecution of Communists in the film industry. And William Faulkner’s racial politics were, of course, typical for a cosmopolitan Southerner, perhaps best represented by his character John Gavin Stevens, the sophisticated white lawyer who defends Lucas Beauchamp without ever questioning the racial system that defined Mississippi’s politics. 9. Most leftists in Hollywood would have seen this as a multi-faceted false accusation. It falsely tars Bogart and Bacall as being Communists; at the same time, it falsely claims that the Communist Lawson was a member of the CFA, which intentionally omitted Party members from its ranks. See George Dixon, “Washington Scene,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Oct 30, 1947. 10. A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax, Bogart (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 397. 11. Sperber and Lax, 405. 12. See Vaughn, 217; and Lally Weymouth, “The Biggest Role of Nancy’s Life,” The New York Times Magazine, October 26, 1980. 13. Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 19–20, 174–176. 14. Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (New York: Counterattack, 1950), 214.

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15. Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (New York: Athenaeum, 1950, 1970), 303. 16. Ibid, 11–13. 17. Ibid, 176. 18. Ibid, 186. 19. Matthew Ehrlich, Journalism in the Movies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 79. 20. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 40. 21. Robert Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 104. 22. Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 144. 23. Eduardo Obreg´on Pag´an, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 24. Horne, 215–216. 25. “Justice, Hollywood Style,” Life, Mar 17, 1947, 40–41. 26. See Agnes E. Meyer, “The Untold Story of the Columbia, Tenn., Riot,” The Washington Post, May 19, 1946, B1; Vincent Sheean, “Tennessee Race Riot Trial Like Lidice, Says Sheean,” The Washington Post, Sep 27, 1946, 1; and Oliver Harrington, Terror in Tennessee: The Truth About the Columbia Outrages (Columbia, TN: NAACP, 1947). 27. Le Bon witnessed the Paris Commune of 1871 and was appalled. Of his experiences then, he wrote that, “the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilization.” See Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 37. 28. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, tr. and ed. by James Strachey (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1967), 4. 29. The University of Chicago had the most influential school of sociology in the middle of the twentieth century. The men who popularized Le Bon’s work included figures such as Robert Park and his student Herbert Blumer. Many of their assumptions are criticized by later sociologists like Clark McPhail. See Clark McPhail, The Myth of the Madding Crowd (New York: Aldine de Gryter, 1991), 3. 30. Elias Canetti may be one of the most obscure writers to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though he was a liberal himself, his theoretical work draws heavily on Le Bon and Freud. See Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, tr. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1960). Some film scholars writing about crowds have drawn heavily – and uncritically – on his work. See Lesley Brill, Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006).

Chapter 2 Independent Filmmaking and the Disintegration of the Popular Front 1. Amanda Ann Klein, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).

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NOTES TO PP. 34–37

2. John Alton, Painting with Light, intr. Todd McCarthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 69. 3. Joseph V. Noble, “The Development of Cinematic Art,” American Cinematographer (January, 1947): 26–27. 4. Herb A. Lightman, “13 Rue Madeleine: Documentary Style in the Photoplay,” American Cinematographer (March 1947): 88, 110. 5. While Zanuck played an important role in producing many of the most liberal films of the late 1940s, his own politics are vague. There is no record, for instance, that he ever registered to vote in California. It should also be kept in mind that to be on the left of the political spectrum in the 1940s, one could be adamantly opposed to religious intolerance and racial segregation, but also adamantly opposed to communism. While Zanuck was instrumental in producing such liberal films as Gentleman’s Agreement, Pinky, and No Way Out, he also produced the anti-communist film The Iron Curtain (William Wellman, 1948). See California, Voter Registration, 1900– 1968 at Ancestry.com. 6. Darryl Zanuck, “The Responsibility of the Industry,” Writers’ Congress: The Proceedings of the Conference Held in October 1943 Under the Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944), 32, 35. 7. “Top Grossers of 1948,” Variety (January 5, 1949): 46. 8. Dorothy B. Jones, “Communism and the Movies: A Study of Film Content,” in John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting (New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1956), 218– 219. 9. Lester Cole, for instance, recalled that he and the other members of the Hollywood Ten thought that they could count on six of the nine justices to overturn their convictions. Unfortunately for him, the Court refused to hear their appeal in 1949 and all ten started serving their sentences in 1950. See Lester Cole, Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1981), 295. At the same time, Edward Dmytyrk concurs on the Ten’s optimism, writing that in 1948 they “basked in the bright spotlight of what they considered a victory.” See Edward Dmytryk, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 92. 10. “Says Hollywood Cuts Race Roles; Blames Red Probe,” Los Angeles Sentinel, December 25, 1947, 1. 11. Wallace and Thurmond eventually each won only 2.4 per cent of the national popular vote, though Thurmond did manage to win four Southern states. 12. While the permanent House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee generally consisted of eight men, divided evenly between Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, the October hearings were attended by a subcommittee that sometimes consisted of four members and sometimes only three. Richard Nixon, the fourth, only attended the first half of the hearings, when the “friendly” witnesses testified. He didn’t attend any sessions in which the so-called “Unfriendly Witnesses” testified. Of the three members who attended every day of testimony, two of

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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them – Richard Vail of Illinois and John McDowell of Pennsylvania, both Republicans – lost their re-election bids in the Democratic sweep of 1948. “Truman ‘Rewrites’ H’wood Scripting As Pix Lean to Social Significance,” Variety (January 19, 1949): 1. “Truman ‘Rewrites’ H’wood Scripting As Pix Lean to Social Significance,” Variety (January 19, 1949): 1. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s, vol. 6 of The History of the American Cinema (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), 341. For instance, a district court decision that effectively prohibited block booking went into effect in 1946. See Michael Conant, Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press), 113. From 1945 to 1949, the studios released between 234 and 252 films each year. See Schatz, 463. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (London: BFI Publishing, 2005), 74. Eric Hoyt, “Hollywood and the Income Tax, 1929–1955,” Film History, 22, no. 1 (2010), 11, and Schatz, p. 181. J. S. Seldman, “The Capital Gains Tax Turmoil,” Variety (April 13, 1949): 2. “1-Pic Companies Found Legal in Govt. Tax Snarl,” Variety (March 8, 1950): 22. See Hoyt, 14–15. In this case, I think that Thomas Schatz has glossed over the intricacies of the tax situation in Hollywood somewhat. While he reports that “in July 1946, the Internal Revenue Service closed the legal loophole which rendered the singlepicture corporation so attractive as an income-tax dodge,” the two articles from Variety mentioned above and Eric Hoyt’s analysis demonstrate that the government wasn’t able to effectively close this loophole until 1950. See Schatz, 343–344. Conant, 113. “Average ‘A’ Customers Down 3,000,000 Since 1946 It Says Here (Gallup),” Variety (February 23, 1949): 5. It’s important to keep in mind that inflation had been extremely low throughout the classical Hollywood period – $1.00 in 1920, for instance, was worth about $1.21 in 1950, according to the Consumer Price Index – which made comparisons of box office revenue across the decades a fairly meaningful endeavour. See “All-Time TopGrossers,” Variety (January 18, 1950): 54. This is based on an analysis from figures listed in Schatz, 464–465. “11-Yr. Gov’t Fight Reshapes Biz,” Variety (March 30, 1949): 7. “Herb Yates Sees Divorcement As Indies’ Panacea,” Variety (April 6, 1949): 4. Data extracted from Cold War America: 1946 to 1990 – Almanac of American Life, ed. Ross Gregory (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 467, 469. “TV Hurting Pix B.O. –1 per cent – Gallup,” Variety (March 9, 1949): 4. “Chemical Bank Stiffens Terms for Financing,” Variety (January 12, 1949) and “Bankers Still Cautious on Pix,” Variety (May 11, 1949): 3. Janet Wasko, Movies and Money: Financing the American Film Industry (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub., 1982), 135.

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NOTES TO PP. 41–54

33. Wasko, 114. 34. “Movies: End of an Era?” Fortune (April, 1949): 146. 35. “Indie Film Financing So Tough Producers Putting Up Own Coin,” Variety (February 16, 1949): 3. 36. “Six-Picture Justman Deal Puts UA In Best Product Position in Its History,” Variety (February 15, 1950): 6. 37. “UA Perks with New Bankroll,” Variety (October 5, 1949): 3. 38. “Six-Picture Justman Deal Puts UA In Best Product Position in Its History,” Variety (February 15, 1950): 6. 39. In 1949, for instance, United Artists had total rentals of $7.6 million, Republic $3.7 million, Film-Classics $2 million, and Eagle-Lion $1.6 million. See “Top Grossers by Companies,” Variety (January 4, 1950): 59. 40. “Top-Grossers of 1949,” Variety (January 4, 1950): 59. 41. “’Pinky Terrif,” Variety (October 5, 1949): 13, and “’Brave’ Boff Biz Surprises Deep in the Heart of Texas,” Variety (July 13, 1949): 7. 42. “Jolson, Pinky, Top B.O. For 49,” Variety (January 4, 1950): 59. 43. “O’Donnell Would Encourage More Provocative Pix,” Variety (November 2, 1949): 4. 44. For a detailed history of the Communist Party in America during these years – albeit from a leftist and stridently anti-communist perspective – see Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957) (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957). See also Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943– 1957 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). 45. Ceplair and Englund, 292. 46. Ceplair and Englund, 68. 47. Philip Dunne, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics (New York: Limelight Editions, 1980), 194. 48. Walter White, Writers’ Congress, 16. 49. Dalton Trumbo, “Minorities on the Screen,” Writers’ Congress, 498–499. 50. Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 30. 51. Robbie Lieberman, The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945–1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 58–73. 52. A.J. Liebling, “The Wayward Press,” The New Yorker (April 9, 1949): 68. 53. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 61–114.

Chapter 3 The Politics of the News 1. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 6. 2. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 48.

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3. James L. Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since 1941 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 11. 4. McGilligan and Buhle, 238. 5. Roberts and Klibanoff, 10, 34. 6. The Courier, for instance, was the paper that started the “Double V” campaign, calling for victory over the Axis powers abroad and over racial prejudice at home. Other influential African-American newspapers included The Baltimore Afro-American, The Chicago Defender, and The New York Amsterdam News. Los Angeles, meanwhile, had two African-American newspapers: The Los Angeles Sentinel and the less popular but more radical California Eagle. 7. Baughman, 9–30. 8. David R. Davies, The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945–1965 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 9. 9. Davies, 24. 10. Davies, 23. 11. George Seldes should not be confused with his younger brother Gilbert Seldes, who wrote several books about American movies and popular culture. See George Seldes, The People Don’t Know: The American Press and the Cold War (New York, NY: Gaer Associates, 1949), 2. 12. Seldes, 12. 13. Edward Alwood, Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 38. 14. Alwood, 53–54, 44. 15. Sumner T. Pike, “Witch-Hunting Then and Now,” The Atlantic Monthly (Nov, 1947): 93–94. 16. Raymond Chandler, “Writers in Hollywood,” The Atlantic Monthly (Nov, 1945): 51. 17. Though the editorial was unsigned, it was written by William Barrett. See “The ‘Liberal’ Fifth Column,” Partisan Review 13 (Summer, 1946): 279–293. 18. Freda Kirchwey, “Russia and the West,” The Nation, n. 160 (March 10, 1945): 265. 19. For more on The Nation, see Sara Alpern, Freda Kirchwey: A Woman of The Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 20. Roland Perry, Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, the Only American in Britain’s Cambridge Spy Ring (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), ix, x. 21. Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 65. 22. Henry Wallace, “The Fight for Peace Begins,” The New Republic (March 24, 1947): 12–13. 23. The Times is generally considered to have been the most popular of the three, but facts are difficult to come by. Kevin Allen Leonard claims that each had a circulation between 200,000 and 250,000. Dennis MacDougal, on the other hand, claims that the Times’ circulation was 400,000 in 1948. See Kevin Allen Leonard, The Battle

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39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

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for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 12–14; and Dennis MacDougal, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 179. Marshall Berges, The Life and Times of Los Angeles (New York, Atheneum, 1984), 73. MacDougal, 179. MacDougal, 195. People’s Daily World (Oct 9, 1945): 1. Los Angeles Times (Oct 10, 1945): 1. Robert Shaw, “Hearstian Criteria for Movie Critics,” Screen Writer, 1, n. 4 (Sep, 1945): 44–47. David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 580, 585. Horne, 197. Leonard, 68. “Jap Return Plans Condemned,” Los Angeles Examiner (Nov 2, 1943): 12. Los Angeles Times (January 9, 1943): 1. Leonard, 265. Leonard, 13. Alwood, 38, 57. Boddy was a registered Democrat in every election cycle for which records have been made public, from 1934 to 1954. See California, Voter Registrations, 1900–1968, Ancestry.com Library Edition. Rob Leicester Wagner, Red Ink, White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers, 1920–1962 ( Upland, CA: Dragonflyer Press, 2000), 88. Wagner, 89. Douglas, a former actress herself, was the wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, another politically active liberal non-communist. She had served in the House of Representatives since 1945. Greg Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas – Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 (New York: Random House, 1998), 4. Jean Simon, “FEPC Front: Proposition No. 11,” Los Angeles Sentinel (Sep 12, 1946): 3. “Daily News Urges: Vote ‘No’ on Propositions 2 and 11,” Daily News (Oct 25, 1946): 16, 33. Leonard, 283–293. Abraham Hoffman, “The Conscience of a Public Official: Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron and Japanese Removal,” Southern California Quarterly 92, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 249. “Action on Japs,” Los Angeles Times (February 19, 1942): A4. Hoffman, 254. Cheryl Greenberg, “Black and Jewish Responses to Japanese Internment,” Journal of American Ethnic History 14, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 3–37.

NOTES TO PP. 58–62

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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50. The Education of Alice McGrath. Oral History with Alice McGrath. Interviewed by Michael Balter. Oral History Programme, University of California Los Angeles Special Collections, 99–100. Even so, McWilliams didn’t publish his well-known pamphlet that criticized the internment until 1944, well after it had become clear that there would be no Japanese invasion of California. See Carey McWilliams, Prejudice: JapaneseAmericans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944). 51. Hoffman, 262. 52. The Detroit committee found that negro veterans were especially committed to social justice and that the most efficient way to prevent racial violence was to prevent the spread of false rumours. See Roy Ottley, “A ‘Barometer’ to Warn of Racial Tension,” New York Times (April 20, 1947): SM17. 53. Leonard, 259. 54. Ibid, 260. 55. Ibid, 262. 56. Ibid, 264–265. 57. Grace E. Simons, “’Sugar Hill,’ Other L.A. Areas Freed; Race Ban Outlawed,” Los Angeles Sentinel (May 6, 1948): 1, 2. 58. The Los Angeles Times emphasized that the case did not make it illegal for private individuals to agree to discriminate on the basis of race or colour; it also suggested that the ruling might not prevent people from discriminating against Jews. In an accompanying editorial, the paper soothed its readers’ fears by suggesting that the ruling would most likely not see any revolutionary change in residential patterns, since “racial groups almost everywhere have a tendency to cohere.” See “High Court Outlaws Realty Agreements Barring Negroes,” Los Angeles Times (May 4, 1948): 1, 8 and “Restrictive Covenants,” Los Angeles Times (May 5, 1948): A4. 59. Grace E. Simons, “California Sanctions Mixed Marriages,” Los Angeles Sentinel (Oct 7, 1948): 1. 60. Los Angeles Times (Oct 4, 1948). 61. Gerald Horne points out that even in the radical CSU, only 10 out of 9,635 members were African-American. See Horne, 52. 62. The Los Angeles Sentinel (October 9, 1947): 1.

Chapter 4 Mob Violence in Los Angeles and the United States 1. Los Angeles Times (January 7, 1942): 2; (January 8): 2; and (January 9): 16. 2. Guy Endore, Sleepy Lagoon Mystery (Los Angeles: Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee, 1944): 16. 3. Pag´an, 73. 4. The Los Angeles Times published dozens of articles about the Beebe case and the resulting investigation into police brutality from January to July, 1943. Nevertheless, the paper did not mention Beebe and the Sleepy Lagoon together in even a single article. 5. Both editorials, Los Angeles Times (January 13, 1943): 8. 6. Pag´an, 73. 7. Los Angeles Times (June 7, 1943): 1.

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8. Ibid, (June 8, 1943): A. 9. Ibid, (June 11, 1943): 8. 10. Alice Greenfield McGrath Papers, University of California at Los Angeles Special Collections, Box 1, Folder 2. 11. The Education of Alice McGrath, 216, 218–219. See also SLDC Press Release, March 1, 1943, Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 1, Reel 1. 12. See Our Daily Bread transcript, May 5, 1943, pp. 1–5, Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 1, Reel 1. 13. Though I had attributed the authorship of this pamphlet to Alice McGrath in a previous publication, I now believe that that was an error. In an e-mail exchange, Larry Ceplair told me that he believes Dalton Trumbo wrote the pamphlet. At this point, I suspect he is probably correct, but since the pamphlet itself was published without an author’s credit, I will refer to it simply by its title. See Doug Dibbern, “The Violent Poetry of the Times,” “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. ed. Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 14. The Appeal News, vol. II, no. 1, November 19, 1943. Alice Greenfield McGrath Papers, University of California at Los Angeles Special Collections, Box 1, Folder 6. The copy I have seen claims that the first printing of June, 1943 consisted of 10,000 copies. McGrath’s comment suggests that there was a second printing as well. 15. The Education of Alice McGrath, 378. 16. Citizens’ Committee for the Defence of Mexican-American Youth, The Sleepy Lagoon Case, int. Orson Welles. Los Angeles, CA, 1944. 17. Endore, 14. 18. Here, Endore was referring to a popular rumour at the time – often repeated as fact in Communist publications – that Hitler had bribed Hearst in order to get positive coverage in his newspapers. Hearst biographer David Nasaw argues that the rumours were ridiculous. Still, while Hearst papers did criticize Hitler’s authoritarianism and his anti-Semitism, up until Kristallnacht, Hearst often pushed his editors not to portray Hitler too negatively. See Nasaw, 488–499, 510–511, and 552–554. 19. Endore, 7, 18, 26. 20. The Sleepy Lagoon Case, 7. 21. Endore, 13. 22. While sympathetic to McGrath and Endore’s criticism of the local press, Eduardo Obreg´on Pag´an has argued convincingly that the falsely accused Mexican-American teenagers were not entirely innocent; at least one of them may have actually been involved in Diaz’s death. See Pag´an, 223. 23. Endore, 13. 24. Pag´an, 223. 25. Ibid, 221–227. 26. Luis Alvarez argues that the Mexicans were not the only victims, nor were Mexicans exclusively victims. See Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance

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27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 155–199. Alice McGrath, meanwhile, pointedly refers to the riots as the “Servicemen’s Riots.” The Education of Alice McGrath, 153. The Education of Alice McGrath, 157–158. The California Eagle (June 10 & 17, 1943). Peter Furst, “Press Blamed for Spread of Zoot Suit Riots,” P.M. (June 11, 1943), Alice Greenfield McGrath Papers, University of California Special Collections, Box 2, Folder 1. See also Carey McWilliams, “Hearst Press Incited Campaign Against Mexicans, Promoted Police Raids, Whipped Up Race Clashes,” P.M. (June 12, 1943). Alvarez, 200–234. “The Shape of Things,” The Nation 157, no. 7 (Aug 14, 1943), 171. That the set decorators themselves – whose militancy precipitated two years of violent conflict in the film industry – were widely understood to consist almost entirely of gay men was almost never alluded to at the time or by later historians. See William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (New York: Viking, 2001), 287–292. Browne was sentenced to eight years in prison, Bioff to ten. See Schatz, 33–34. The exact number of strikers is not clear. Gerald Horne writes that 10,000 workers went on strike (160–162), while Gene Mailes claims that only 7,000 workers went on strike (97). “Film Industry, Workers Study AFL Decisions,” Hollywood Citizen-News (Jan 3, 1946), Hollywood Strike of 1946 Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. See R.E.G.H., “Hollywood Fever Chart,” Los Angeles Daily News (Oct 8, 1945): 28; and R.E.G.H., “Liberalism’s Healing Disease,” Los Angeles Daily News (Sep 25, 1946): 36. Horne, 166. During WWII, the Communist Party in America had re-fashioned itself as The Communist Political Association of America. In 1945, after the end of the war, the Communist International became radicalized again and its leader Earl Browder was overthrown and expelled from the Party. Communists in America, then, followed the Party line and didn’t join with the 1945 strike immediately. Later in 1946, the Party encouraged its members to support the picketers, and many, like Dalton Trumbo, became enthusiastic figures on the picket lines and in the leftist press. Elaine Spiro, “Hollywood Strike – 1945,” Film History 10. no. 3 (1996): 415–418. “Marring Filmland’s War Record,” Los Angeles Times (March 23, 1945): A4. “Film Strike Riot Ended by Police,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 6, 1945): 1. Los Angeles Herald Examiner (Oct 19, 1945): 1; Los Angeles Examiner (Oct 15, 1945). “Unionists Defy Court on Film Picket Limit,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 7, 1945): 1. “Unionists Defy Court on Film Picket Limit,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 7, 1945): 2. “Scores Hurt in New Studio Riots,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 24, 1945): 1. John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, Vol. 1: Movies (New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1956), 63–64. Horne, 167.

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54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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“Strikes Stud U.S,” Life (Oct 8, 1945): 38. “Hollywood Riot Flares in Strike,” New York Times (Oct 6, 1945): 3. Gates Ward, “Rhapsody in Black and Blue,” The Nation (October 20, 1945): 395. Ward, 396. Ward, 395–6. Ward, 395–6. Ward wasn’t the only leftist covering the events. John T. McManus, a writer for the progressive New York daily P.M. portrayed the violence almost exactly as Ward had. See John T. McManus, “Hollywood Leads Attack on the Wagner Act,” PM (October 10, 1945): 20; and “U.S. Flag Signal to Attack Warner Pickets,” PM (October 11, 1945): 20. Order in the Court 1, n. 7 (Jan 13, 1947): 3. Sadly, it doesn’t seem as if the movie has survived. No major film archive has a copy, and even the American Film Institute database doesn’t have a record of its existence. See The Picket Line (Jan 22, 1947) and Order in the Court 1, n. 7 (Jan 13, 1947): 3, the Sonia Volochova Collection, C20, Museum of Modern Art Film Archives. Hollywood Atom 1, n. 26 (Sep 25, 1945): 1. Hollywood Atom 1, n. 14 (Aug 31, 1945): 4. The Picket Line (December 3, 1946), the Sonia Volochova Collection, C10 #19, Museum of Modern Art Film Archives. Horne, 200. United States House of Representatives, Jurisdictional Disputes in the Motion Picture Industry (Washington, DC, 1948): 914. Variety (October 9, 1946): 31. Mike Nielsen and Gene Mailes, Hollywood’s Other Blacklist: Union Struggles in the Studio System (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 158. Hollywood Atom (October 24, 1945): 4; and Horne, 207. “TERRORISM AND BOMBING,” Nov 14, 1946, CSU Leaflets, Sonia Volochova Collection, B30, Museum of Modern Art Film Archive. I.A.T.S.E. mimeograph, “This is the record of Terrorism against Fellow Unionists by the Conference of Studio Unions, Hollywood 1945–1946.” The Sonia Volochova Collection, C5, The Museum of Modern Art Film Archive. “38 Arrested in Renewed Studio Strike Violence,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 12, 1946): 1. “Fights Flare Along Studio Picket Line,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 1, 1946): 1. “Hollywood and Vine,” The New Republic (Oct 21, 1946): 515. Variety (October 9, 1946): 7. Though the book is credited to both men, each section was written separately. See Nielsen and Mailes, 152. “Patterson Continues Americanism Fight,” Hollywood Atom 1, no. 42 (October 24, 1945): 1. “Red Film Propaganda Blamed on Producers,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 22, 1947): 1–2. “Four Film Actors Hit at Reds in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 24, 1947): 2; “Disney Tells How Reds Tried to Take Over Studio,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 25,

NOTES TO PP. 75–82

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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1947): 3; “Three More Screen Writers Facing Contempt Actions,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 29, 1947): 1. “Hunting Hollywood’s Reds,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 21, 1947): A4. That being said, the pamphlet’s list of roughly 350 signatories does include the names of a few people who were targeted by HUAC, such as Abraham Polonsky, Howard Da Silva, Jules Dassin, and Canada Lee. Committee for the First Amendment (Beverly Hills, CA, 1947): 3. For information on the Athens, AL, riot, see New York Times (Aug 13, 1946): 16, or P.M. (Aug 12, 1946): 3; For information on the Greenville, SC, lynching, see Life 22, no. 22 (June 2, 1947): 27–29, or Rebecca West, “Opera in Greenville,” The New Yorker (June 14, 1947): 31–65. Simon Callow, Orson Welles, Vol. 2: Hello Americans (New York: Viking, 2006): 323– 342. “Court Biased in Riot Trial,” The Washington Post (Sep 23, 1946): 9. Agnes E. Meyer, “Columbia (Tenn.) Riot,” The Washington Post (May 20, 1946): 7. “Southern Justice Stands Up,” The New York Times (Oct 6, 1946): E8. For more information on the NAACP’s media campaign, see The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, “The Truth About Columbia Tennessee Cases,” Nashville, TN, 1946, and Oliver W. Harrington, “Terror in Tennessee,” Columbia, TN, 1946. Not coincidentally, Los Angeles experienced the same sort of racial migration during the war as Chicago did; David Kennedy claims that more than 100,000 black Southerners moved to Los Angeles in 1943 alone. See David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 768–9. Homer Jack, “Chicago Has One More Chance,” The Nation (Sep 13, 1947): 250. “Major Race Riot in Chicago Seen,” The New York Times (Dec 11, 1946): 35. “Chicago Police Put on Race Riot Duty,” The New York Times (Aug 17, 1947): 4. The Congress of Industrial Organizations was one of the more militant labour organizations in the country and was widely believed to harbour many Communists or fellow travellers. Homer Jack, “Chicago Has One More Chance,” 250. Homer Jack, “Chicago’s Violent Armistice,” The Nation (Dec 10, 1949): 571. William Peters, “Race War in Chicago,” The New Republic (Jan 9, 1950): 10. “Stoning Victims Tell of Violence,” The New York Times (Sep 6, 1949): 23. Though referred to as the “Peekskill Riots,” the first concert took place just north of the city and the second took place east of the city, in Cortlandt Manor. “Robeson Concert Balked by Melee,” The New York Times (Aug 28, 1949): 1. “48 Hurt In Clashes at Robeson Rally; Buses are Stoned,” The New York Times (Sep 5, 1949): 1. “Anti-Robeson Rally In Peekskill Decried,” The New York Times (Aug 27, 1949): 6. Howard Fast, “Peekskill,” Masses & Mainstream 2, no. 10 (Oct, 1949): 3–7. Alexander Feinberg, “1,200 Men Assigned to Bar Fight Today at Robeson Rally,” The New York Times (Sep 4, 1949): 1.

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NOTES TO PP. 87–95

98. Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000). 99. “Negroes’ Ability to Resist Seen Growing in North,” Los Angeles Sentinel (February 20, 1947): 1.

Chapter 5 Nostalgia for the Popular Front in The Lawless 1. Though Mainwaring was a signatory, Joseph Losey was not. As a former Communist, though, Losey would certainly have agreed with the group’s aims. See Committee for the First Amendment, 5. 2. John Huston, An Open Book (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980): 133. 3. Sperber and Lax, 386. 4. Huston, 133. 5. Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, 281. 6. The House voted 347–17 in Maltz’s case and 240–16 in Dalton Trumbo’s. The other eight were voted on in a voice vote. The near universal condemnation of the Ten is just one example that the anti-Communist crusade was not a purely conservative effort; liberals were just as eager as their alleged antagonists to condemn communism. See Ceplair and Englund, 343. 7. Sperber and Lax, 397. 8. Huston, 215. 9. With 90 per cent of the membership in favor of the resolution, the SAG vote was as consistently lopsided as were the House votes in favor of contempt of congress or the talent guilds’ votes to cross the CSU picket lines in 1945 and 1946. See David F. Prindle, The Politics of Glamour: Ideology and Democracy in the Screen Actors Guild (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 60. 10. Dunne, 212–214, 221. 11. Joseph Losey FBI File, Oct 19, 1949. 12. John Reddy, “Hollywood’s Dollar Bills,” Esquire (June 1945): 64. 13. Paramount News (Mar 19, 1951): 82, Pine & Thomas Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 14. Reddy, 64. 15. Richard English, “Gaudiest Producers in Hollywood,” Saturday Evening Post (Jan 3, 1953): 76. 16. English, 78. 17. Paramount Press Release, January 1950, Pine & Thomas Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library, 1–2. 18. Thomas Wood, “Ante Upped for Pine and Thomas,” New York Times (Oct 17, 1948), Pine & Thomas Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 19. The figures are somewhat inexact. A Paramount News item reported that their average B picture cost $125,000 and grossed $600,000. According to Billy Wilkerson’s totals, they had made 57 B pictures at an average cost of about $123,00. The Paramount News boasted that they each earned around $700,00 a year at the time, about $6 million

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

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per year in current dollars. See Paramount News and W.R. Wilkerson, “Tradeviews,” Hollywood Reporter (May 2, 1950), Pine & Thomas Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. Schatz, 463. Wood, “Ante Upped.” “The Two Bills Tell What Smokes ‘Em Out of Beehive,” Variety (Jan 27, 1949), Pine & Thomas Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. English, 22. Wood, “Ante Upped.” “$750,000-$1,000,000 Cost Class for Pix Held ‘Just Right’ by Pine-Thomas,” Variety (January 26, 1949): 7, 26. Wilkerson, “Tradeviews.” Mainwaring met Steinbeck in 1933 when a UCLA professor brought them out to talk to his class as two of the most important young California writers. See Richard Astro, “Steinbeck and Mainwaring: Two Californians for the Earth,” Steinbeck Quarterly III, no. 1 (Winter, 1970): 11, Daniel Mainwaring Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 15, Folder 9. Deborah Mainwaring, “A California Childhood,” Daniel Mainwaring Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 15, Folder 8. Astro, 3. William Boddy, “Daniel Mainwaring (Geoffrey Homes),” American Screenwriters. Second Series. ed. Randall Clark (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company, 1986): 209; and Tom Flinn, “Screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring Discusses ‘Out of the Past,”’ The Velvet Light Trap 10 (Fall, 1973): 44. Boddy, 209. Daniel Mainwaring, “Fruit Tramp.” Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories. ed. Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 128–140. The story was originally published in Harper’s Magazine, 1934. Flinn, 45. Geoffrey Homes, “Framed Money . . . Framed Murder,” Blue Book 79, no. 1 (May 1944): 102–144, Daniel Mainwaring Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 15, Folder 5. See, for instance, The Street of the Crying Woman (New York: William & Morrow, 1942), published later as The Case of the Mexican Knife (New York: Bantam Books, 1948); or Hill of the Terrified Monk (New York: William & Morrow, 1943), published later as Dead as a Dummy (New York: Bantam Books, 1949). Flinn, 44. Variety (May 15, 1946). Boddy, 209. Mainwaring wrote only one of the four screenplays in the Pine-Thomas Big Town series. Though the other three do touch on the power of the press to fight corruption and illegality, Mainwaring’s script is the most overtly political. As in The Lawless, he creates a possible love affair between two reporters who work for two competing

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44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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papers, and their romance parallels the ideological conflict between the two papers; the pair eventually accept their love for each other when the male reporter learns the danger of yellow journalism. Flinn, 44. Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey (New York: Methuen, 1985), 94. Pierre Rissient, “Daniel Mainwaring,” Film Dope 38 (December, 1987): 16. The filmography in American Screenwriter lists 20 films in that period; the American Film Index lists 21; and The Internet Movie Database lists 23. The three lists don’t entirely overlap. Flinn, 44 and Boddy, 211. Ciment, 79, 82. Geoffrey Homes, “New Study of Migratory Workers in California,” The New York Times (Mar 5, 1950), Daniel Mainwaring Clippings File, New York City Performing Arts Library. Typewritten Notes, Daniel Mainwaring speech to a writer’s group in Chicago headed by Stuart Kaminsky about 1973 or 1974, Daniel Mainwaring Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 15, Folder 8. Boddy, 211. Ciment, 93. Ibid, 94. The letter from Losey to Mainwaring seems to be the only piece of personal correspondence that Mainwaring kept in the collection of his papers that he donated to UCLA. See Joseph Losey to Daniel Mainwaring, March 27, 1975, Daniel Mainwaring Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 16, Folder 4. Ciment, 92. In the same vein, Mainwaring blamed the producers for muddling the ending, though the exact changes they made are unclear. See Boddy, 211. Joseph Breen to Luigi Luraschi, October 5, 1949, PCA File on The Lawless, Margaret Herrick Library. Joseph Breen to Luigi Luraschi, November 22, 1949, PCA File on The Lawless, Margaret Herrick Library. “Studio Bosses Attempted to Block Movie About Mexicans,” Ebony, 61, Daniel Mainwaring Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 15, Folder 5. The Ebony article goes on to recount an old tale about Frank Freeman: “Freeman, incidentally, is the subject of a Hollywood legend as the man who saw Kenny Washington in a Rose Bowl game and cracked: ‘Who does he think he is – running like a white man!’ See “Studio Bosses Attempted to Block Movie About Mexicans,” 61. Typewritten Notes, Daniel Mainwaring to Stuart Kaminsky. James Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1967), 35. Ciment, 52–54. David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 55. Caute, 56.

NOTES TO PP. 97–100

40. 41. 42. 43.

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62. See Letter to Director of FBI, January 1, 1944, Joseph Losey FBI Files. 63. Losey made this claim in a 1956 affidavit to the State Department in order to get his passport renewed, but even then, he refused to name names. Office Memorandum, From Legal Attache, London, to Director, FBI, May 17, 1956, Joseph Losey FBI File. 64. Joseph Losey FBI File, 100–23402, Oct 19, 1949. 65. Caute, 100. 66. Though Losey is sometimes portrayed as someone who courageously left the United States as an act of rebellion against political repression at home, the situation is somewhat more complicated than that. Like his fellow director Cy Endfield, he may have just been luckier than other former radicals to receive an overseas job offer when he did. Had he not been able to work in England, it’s not entirely clear that he would have refused to testify. The fact that he had consulted with Martin Gang indicates that he was at least considering naming names at the time. See Caute, 100–108. 67. That Sleepy Hollow also evokes Washington Irving’s stories of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman is most likely a mere coincidence. 68. See Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), and Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1948). 69. Pag´an, 167–187. 70. This overt comparison with the Hearst press came very late in the writing process – late enough, in fact, that it may have been one of the few suggestions made by Joseph Losey. In the movie’s final shooting script, dated October 18, 1949, the paper is still referred to as The Stockton Record. See The Lawless, Paramount Scripts Collection, Margaret Herrick Library. 71. “City, Navy Clamp Lid on Zoot Suit Warfare,” Los Angeles Times (June 9, 1943): 1, or “Police Coninue Roundup in Zoot War as Sailor Beaten,” Los Angeles Times (June 9, 1943): B. 72. Though the sequence makes its commentary almost exclusively through visual means, these visual comparisons were all laid out by Mainwaring in his final shooting script – before Losey got involved in working on the film. See final shooting script, Oct 18, 1949, The Lawless, Paramount Scripts Collection, Margaret Herrick Library. 73. AFI Catalogue for The Lawless. 74. Tom Milne, ed. Time Out Film Guide, 3rd ed (New York: Penguin Books, 1993): 393. 75. “Studio Bosses Attempted to Block Movie About Mexicans,” 61. 76. In that production, Brecht had projected the word “GALILEO” on a sheet at the back of the stage throughout the production. See James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 77. “Movie News,” New York Herald-Tribune (May 16, 1950). 78. Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (June 23, 1950). 79. Variety (April 12, 1950). 80. Howard Barnes, New York Herald-Tribune (June 23, 1950). 81. Caute, 102.

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NOTES TO PP. 111–115

82. Foster Hirsch, Joseph Losey (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980): 39. 83. Paramount News, March 18, 1951, Pine & Thomas Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 84. For the Los Angeles reaction, see Ezra Goodman, Los Angeles Daily News (undated); Hollywood Citizen-News (July 28, 1950); The Los Angeles Times (July 28, 1950); and Fortnight (Aug 4, 1950), The Lawless Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 85. It is now available on DVD through Olive Films. 86. The Library of Congress, for example, does have a 35mm print. Neither the MOMA film library nor the UCLA Film and Television Archive has a print. The 16mm print I was able to track down as part of the William K. Everson collection at the George Eastman House, meanwhile, had sprocket hole damage, proof that the film hadn’t been projected in years. The only print I have been able to see projected in a theatre had French subtitles. 87. See Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 253–256.

Chapter 6 Cy Endfield’s Radical Despair: The Underworld Story and The Sound of Fury 1. Ezra Goodman, an entertainment columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News, wrote about Stillman at the time that The Sound of Fury was about to be released. Presumably, he got his information from Stillman himself. In it, he suggests that Stillman had been assistant director for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur on Crime without Passion (1934) and for David Selznick on A Star is Born (1937), though the IMDB has no record of this. See Ezra Goodman, Los Angeles Daily News (April 20, 1950), Robert Stillman Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 2. Stanley Kramer and Robert Stillman disagree on many small details about their business relationship. Kramer claims that Stillman’s father made his money in the garment industry in New York; Stillman says that it was from a chain of department stores in the Midwest. Kramer claims that Stillman put up $600,000 to produce only his first film, So This is New York. Stillman, on the other hand, claims that Kramer produced his first film by himself, but that he put up $347,000 for Kramer’s second and third features, Champion and Home of the Brave. Considering that Stillman’s account is more detailed, contemporaneous, and less self-serving than Kramer’s, and considering that Stillman is not credited on So This is New York, I tend to believe his version of events. See Stanley Kramer with Thomas M. Coffey, A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1997), 13–14; and Robert Stillman, “No Complaints,” The New York Times (April 23, 1950), X6. 3. Ezra Goodman, Los Angeles Daily News (April 20, 1950). 4. Helen Gould, “The ‘Silent Partner’ Makes Noise on His Own.” The New York Times (April 22, 1951), 96.

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5. Kenneth Scambray, “Cultural Authority and the Western Italian American Experience in Jo Pagano’s Golden Wedding,” Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 33. 6. Pagano and his wife were also frequent dinner companions of William Faulkner’s at Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 226; and Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner: A Biography, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1974), 1134, 1159. 7. Jo Pagano, Paesanos (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937); Jo Pagano, Golden Wedding (New York: Random House, 1943); and Scambray, “Cultural Authority.” 8. Alvah Bessie, Inquisition in Eden (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 48. 9. The FBI claimed that he held 1943 Communist Party Book #24163. See Cy Endfield FBI File, June 6, 1944. FBI File 100–21872. 10. Ephraim Katz first popularized the notion that he was born in South Africa in his eponymous encyclopedia. See Brian Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” Film Studies no. 7 (Winter 2005), 116; Sheldon Hall, Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It – The Making of the Epic Movie (Tomahawk Press, 2005), 77. 11. Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 116. 12. For Endfield’s claims that he was never a member of the party, see Hall, 77; Neve, 118; Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Pages from the Endfield File,” Film Comment 29, no. 6 (Nov, 1993), 52. 13. Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 116. 14. For his associations with Losey during the 1930s, see Rosenbaum, “The Endfield File,” 50; Hall, 78; and Neve, 117. 15. A man of many interests, Endfield was known as one of the leading card magicians of his day (he even published a book on the subject in 1954: Cy Endfield’s Entertaining Card Magic). Welles’s friend and producer Jack Moss said that Endfield was the only person he’d ever seen fool Welles with a card trick. Moss was so impressed, he hired Endfield to work for the Mercury Theatre while they were editing The Magnificent Ambersons. See Brian Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 117; and Rosenbaum, “The Endfield File,” 50–51. 16. Endfield directed and wrote the script for Stork Bites Man, a movie that Variety called “generally trite and frequently silly.” But even in this quickie, Endfield vented his radical agenda: the protagonist organizes a group of apartment housing workers to strike against a landlord’s policy against tenants with children. See Variety (Aug 13, 1947): 15. 17. Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 119. 18. Hall, 80. 19. Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 118. 20. Rosenbaum, “The Endfield File,” 53. 21. Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 119. 22. Rosenbaum, “The Endfield File,” 53. The degree to which the film is expressly antiCommunist is debatable. The movie portrays a man who has been hypnotized by an

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24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

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“illegal organization,” which we might infer to be a Communist group, though the organization is never expressly referred to as Communist in the film itself. Hall notes that Endfield was named by Martin Berkeley, the man who named more people before HUAC than anyone else. See Hall, 78. Robert Vaughn lists Martin Berkeley, but also David Lang and Pauline Townsend. See Robert Vaughn, Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting (New York: Putnam, 1972), 275–292. Endfield himself seemed to believe that he had been named by Carl Foreman, though there is no documentary evidence to back this up. See Todd McCarthy, “Telluride pays homage to underappreciated Endfield,” Variety (September 11, 1992): 63, Cy Endfield Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 120. Endfield goes on to say that he had “contempt” for those who took the Fifth Amendment before HUAC, calling it an “immoral position” used only to cover up their past affiliations. The Underworld Story was originally titled The Whipped, and receieved its first several reviews in February and April 1950 under that title. It’s not clear to me whether or not it ever had a theatrical screening under that title. The title was officially changed to The Underworld Story in April. See Variety (April 21, 1950), The Underworld Story Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. New York Herald Tribune (Sep 19, 1951), the Henry Blankfort Clippings File, New York Public Library Performing Arts Library. The hardboiled novelist Craig Rice, meanwhile, was the pseudonym of Georgiana Ann Craig. The fact that the blacklisted protagonist is also amoral, unprincipled, and interested only in himself is one piece of evidence that Endfield, the lapsed Communist, may have played more of a role in writing the screenplay than Blankfort did. The fact that the Stanton family in The Underworld Story shares the same last name as Gil Stanton, the protagonist from The Sound of Fury, strikes me as being purely coincidental. Pagano had named his protagonist in his novel before The Underworld Story was released. Accurate statistics on lynchings before World War II are notoriously difficult to pin down. See Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 4, 6–7; Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 29–31; and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 8. Zangrando, for instance, claims that 75 per cent of lynching victims were black. Brundage estimates that 82 per cent of lynching victims were black between 1880 and 1930. Tolnay and Beck estimated that 86 per cent of lynching victims were black, though that ratio increased in the 1920s and 1930s. American Jewish Congress and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Civil Rights in the United States in 1950: A Balance Sheet of Group Relations (New York, 1950), 20. Steven F. Lawson, “Introduction: Setting the Agenda of the Civil Rights Movement,” To Secure These Rights: The Report of Harry S Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 12–14.

NOTES TO PP. 117–120

23.

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32. Steven Lawson, 31. 33. Ibid, 23. 34. As early as 1922, the House of Representatives passed the Dyer anti-lynching bill by a vote of 231 to 119. The Costigan-Wagner bill of 1935 was also supported in the House by a margin of 2 to 1. In 1948, the federal anti-lynching bill was backed by a margin of 2 to 1 in the House. All three bills, though, were filibustered successfully by Southern Democrats in the Senate. See Zangrando, 64. 35. “Laws Urged Against Race Bans in U.S.,” The Los Angeles Times (Oct 30, 1947): 1; and “A Mixture of Good and Bad Ideas,” The Los Angeles Times (Oct 31, 1947): A4. 36. Technically, this isn’t actually true. A man was lynched in Yreka, California, almost a year later. See “Act Recalls Mobs History,” Los Angeles Times (Aug 4, 1935): 15. 37. Elizabeth Pallette, “A Long, Sleepless Night,” New York Times (June 4, 1950): X3. 38. See the Sound of Fury press book, New York Public Library Performing Arts Library; and Pallette, X3. In her article on the shooting of the final scene of mob violence, for instance, Pallette mentioned the Hart murder in her first paragraph. 39. Harry Farrell, Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 139. 40. It was common in the first half of the twentieth century for the organizers of a lynch mob to advertise their lynching weeks in advance. Railroad companies would organize special trains to bring people from other states, companies would print postcards to commemorate the event; organizers would run ads in newspapers and radio. Using modern means of communication was a logical extension of the main goal of lynching: to intimidate the populace in a way that the law could not. Jonathan Markovitz argues that this use of modern communication and transportation systems “should be understood not as entirely separate entities from lynchings themselves but as key components of the power of the practice.” See Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xxvixxvii. 41. “Gov. Rolph Backs San Jose Lynching as Kidnap Warning,” The New York Times (Nov 28, 1933): 1. 42. “Hoover Declares Rolph Advocate of Lynch Law,” The Los Angeles Times (Dec 1, 1933): 1. 43. Farrell, 266. 44. “Twenty-Three Proposals on State-Wide Ballot,” The Los Angeles Times (Nov 4, 1934): 13 and “Mob Flayed by Merriam,” The Los Angeles Times (Aug 4, 1935): 1. 45. Rosenbaum, “The Endfield File,” 53. 46. See Frank Lovejoy’s copy of the script for The Sound of Fury, New York Public Library Performing Arts Library, Special Collections. Lovejoy’s copy has dated, colour-coded pages that provide excellent documentation on the chronological development of the script. 47. Jo Pagano, The Condemned (New York: Permabooks, 1947): 140–148. 48. Ibid, 124.

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NOTES TO PP. 126–133

49. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & The Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 359–360. 50. Geoffrey Shurlock to Stillman Productions, April 25, 1950, Production Code Administration Files, The Sound of Fury, Margaret Herrick Library. 51. Geoffrey Shurlock to Stillman Productions, July 24, 1950, Production Code Administration Files, The Sound of Fury, Margaret Herrick Library. 52. Production Code Administration Files, The Sound of Fury, Margaret Herrick Library; and Variety (Sep 27, 1950): 9–10. 53. Neve, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” 121. 54. See Stillman, “No Complaints,” April 23, 1950, in which he has already listed Cy Endfield as the director of the film. The first correspondence between the PCA and Stillman – in which they describe meetings that included Stillman and his assistants Irving Rubine and Seton Miller, but not Pagano or Endfield – is dated April 25, 1950. 55. McCarthy, “Telluride pays homage,” 63. He makes a similar claim in Rosenbaum, “The Endfield File,” 53. 56. Rosenbaum, “The Endfield File,” 53. 57. Pallette, X3. The Sound of Fury press book claims that the entire film was shot in Phoenix. Interestingly, Stillman most likely chose to shoot in Phoenix for an odd reason considering that he was purportedly producing a liberal, socially conscious film: since Phoenix lay outside of union jurisdiction, he could pay the extras half the union rate. 58. Marlene Park, “Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, 18 (1993): 311–365. 59. Walter White, Fire in the Flint (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926). 60. At the time, the party’s general secretary, Earl Browder, called the Roosevelt Administration “a government serving the interests of finance capital and moving toward the fascist suppression of the worker’s movement.” See Howe and Coser, 232. 61. Stephen Alexander, “Art,” New Masses 14 (March 19, 1935): 29. 62. Roughly equivalent to annual earnings of $100,000 in 2014 dollars – tax-free, of course. 63. Stillman, “No Complaints” and The Sound of Fury press book. He says that his goal was “to make a new and different kind of product which could be manufactured at a price which would turn a profit.” 64. Film Daily (Dec 6, 1950) and Motion Picture Herald (Dec 9, 1950), The Sound of Fury Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 65. Edwin Schallert, “Grim Story of Violence Well Told,” Los Angeles Times (March 29, 1951): B7. 66. Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (May 7, 1951): 22. He was reviewing the rerelease of the film under its second title, Try and Get Me. 67. Variety (Dec 6, 1950): 15, 20. 68. “Stillman Scraps ‘Sound of Fury’ Title After Five Test Booking,” Variety (March 27, 1951), The Sound of Fury Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 69. The film became available on Amazon Instant Video in 2013.

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Chapter 7 Racial Harmony and The Well 1. Ellen Christine Scott, Race and the Struggle for Cinematic Meaning: Film Production, Censorship, and African American Reception, 1940–1960. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2007, 552. 2. The Popkins owned the theatre in the 1930s and early 1940s. In a mark of Los Angeles’s ever-shifting demographics, the theatre was purchased in 1949 by Frank Fouce, who turned it into a Spanish-language music venue. See Leo C. Popkin Oral History, interviewed by Douglas Bell, Oral History Program, Margaret Herrick Library. 3. Mark A. Reid, “The Black Gangster Film,” Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003): 476. 4. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 329, 332. Another leading scholar on race movies, Henry Sampson, concurs, referring to the Million Dollar Productions’ films as “the most stylish black films” from the 1930s and 1940s. See Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995): 222–223. 5. In addition, to his offical credits, he claims that he also directed The Duke is Tops (1938) and Life Goes On (1938), which were credited to William Nolte, and Take My Life (1942), which was credited to his brother Harry. See Popkin Oral History, 4–5. 6. For their registration status, see California, Voter Registration, 1900–1968, Ancestry.com. For Leo’s comments on his brother, see Popkin Oral History, 127. 7. Popkin Oral History, 217. 8. Popkin Oral History, 262, 368. 9. Scott, 554. 10. Cripps, Making Movies Black, 35–63. 11. In Reform School (1939), for instance, a probation officer named Mother Barton (Louise Beavers) leads a campaign to reform the state’s juvenile detention system, trying to give wayward youth a second chance. In Life Goes On (1938), a single mother (also Louise Beavers) struggles working odd jobs in Harlem to try to make a better life for her two sons. 12. William Russell died when Rouse was 16, so it’s not clear how much of a role he played in raising him. Interestingly, Rouse had another uncle, Albert Russell, who directed films, and a cousin, Chester Schaeffer, who worked as an editor on both The Well and The Thief. See Marcy Elias, “2 Rebels From Hollywood,” The New York Post (Aug 19, 1951): 2M. 13. Elias, 2M. 14. For their party affiliation, see See California, Voter Registraion, 1900–1968, Ancestry.com. For Popkin’s observation, see Popkin Oral History, 269. 15. Howard McClay, “Writing Team Would Rather Skip a Stone,” Los Angeles Daily News (Nov 6, 1951), Rouse & Greene Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library. 16. McClay, “Writing Team.” 17. Popkin Oral History, 343.

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28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

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Popkin Oral History, 325. Popkin Oral History, 324. Elias, 2M. Popkin Oral History, 324. Elias, 2M. The film’s editor, Chester Schaeffer was nominated for Best Film Editing at the 1952 Academy Awards, but he lost to William Hornbeck for his work on A Place in the Sun. Popkin Oral History, 275, 255. Elias, 2M. “Actors’ Stage, Film Calls Pose Dilemma; Directors Go Subtle,” Los Angeles Times (June 24, 1951): D7. Popkin Oral History, 336; and “A Tense Day in the Life of an American Town,” New York Herald Tribune (Sep 23, 1951). KTLA, in fact, had nine of the top ten local broadcasts in 1949. Interestingly, since The Los Angeles Times co-owned KTTV and KTLA was owned by Paramount, the Times referred only to KTTV’s broadcasts and didn’t mention the KTLA broadcasts. See Terry Anzur, “Everyone’s Child: The Kathy Fiscus Story as a Defining Event in Local Television News,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2001, 126, 144. The Fiscus rescue is often credited with being the most significant event that spurred television sales in California. See Ray E. Barfield, A Word from Our Viewers: Reflections from Early Television Audiences (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 78; Anzur, 127. For KTLA’s broadacst range, see Anzur, 132. “Nation Saddened By Rescue Failure,” New York Times (April 11, 1949): 3. Elaine St. Johns, “Kathy Knew Not Horror, Nor Pain,” The Los Angeles Mirror (April 11, 1949): 3. Welsh, “Television Grows Up,” Preview Magazine 15 (Aug-Sep, 1985), KTLA Archives, quoted in Anzur, 143. “One Little Girl,” New York Times (April 11, 1949): 24. Stan Chambers, “The Kathy Fiscus Telecast Forty Years Ago This Weekend,” undated manuscript in KTLA archives, 4, Anzur, 134. Anzur, 139. While some writers claim that Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole was also inspired by the Kathy Fiscus affair, the similarities between that movie and the actual events seem tangential to me. While the rescuers’ attempt to drill a hole through the rock does bear a striking resemblance to the use of the pile driver in the Fiscus case, in almost every other respect, Ace in the Hole has much more similairities with the attempted rescue of Floyd Collins in 1925. Typically for a white newspaper, the fact of segregation was only alluded to in the final paragraph of an uncharacteristically long article for the Times. See “Kathy’s Body Taken From Shaft,” Los Angeles Times (April 11, 1949): 2. See Price M. Cobbs, M.D., My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement (New York: Atria Books, 2005). The black population of Los Angeles doubled between 1940 and

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

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1950 (from 4.2 per cent to 8.7 per cent) and the city struggled with the extent to which it should integrate the African-American community. In Los Angeles in the 1940s, most restaurants, music venues, hotels, and hospitals were still segregated, for instance, though public buses, most movie theatres, and baseball stadiums were not. The NAACP had pressured the city to end the legal segregation of beaches in 1926, but in the 1940s, most black people still only visited two small segregated beaches. Cobbs refers to San Marino as one of those wealthier towns where black people could fit in surprisingly easily, since many people assumed they were hired help. It was the working class white neighbourhoods that were most unsafe for black citizens. Nevertheless, someone like Cobb was able to attend mostly white grade schools and mostly white UCLA. The end of the 1940s was also a turning point in which uppercrust restaurants became willing to seat black customers for the first time without a fight. See also Bobby Short’s discussion about getting in to Ciro’s and the Mocambo in 1949 in Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005): 275–7. See Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1945); and Chester Himes, The Lonely Crusade (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years (New York: Paragon House, 1971, 1972), 73. Popkin Oral History, 328. Scott, 581–583. “Actors’ Stage, Film Calls Pose Dilemma; Directors Go Subtle.” Los Angeles Times (June 24, 1951): D7. “Actors’ Stage,” D7. It’s an indication of how reckless the violence becomes that it’s difficult to quantify exactly how many attacks there have been. Ellen Scott counts 11 instances of whiteon-black violence and four incidents of black-on-white violence. See Scott, 593. I, on the other hand, count six instances of white-on-black violence and two instances of black-on-white violence; however, I also count three instances of white-on-property violence and one instance of black-on-property violence. Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2001), 84–88. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1948, 1998), 76. Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 49–74. The girl’s abductor, Fred Stroble, was eventually put on trial and sentenced to death. For a summary of the coverage, see “Mexico-U.S. Hunt On for Girl’s Slayer,” Los Angeles Times (Nov 16, 1949): 1; “Captured in Bar, Stroble Admits Torture Murder,” Los Angeles Times (Nov 18, 1949): 1. See “Sharper Sex Laws Win Endorsement,” Los Angeles Times (Dec 15, 1949): 18; “Death Penalty Urged for Child Molesters,” Los Angeles Times (Dec 8, 1949): 1–2; “Five Sex Crime Bills Get Warren Signature,” Los Angeles Times (Jan 7, 1950): 5.

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50. Geoffrey Shurlock Memo, July 24, 1950, Production Code Administration Files, The Well, Margaret Herrick Library. 51. Joseph Breen to Clarence Greene, Sep 19, 1950, Production Code Administration Files, The Well, Margaret Herrick Library. 52. The fact that the filmmakers felt safe to so explicitly flout Joseph Breen’s request is a significant example of how much his influence had already waned. See Breen to Greene, Sep 19, 1950. 53. Variety (Sep 5, 1951). 54. Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” The New York Times (Sep 27, 1951). 55. Edwin Schallert, “Mob Violence and Rescue Stirring Feature of ‘Well.”’ Los Angeles Times (Oct 26, 1951): B9. 56. Winsten, New York Post. From Film Bulletin in The Well Clippings File, New York Public Library Performing Arts Library. 57. John Howard Lawson, Film in the Battle of Ideas (New York & London, Garland Publishing, 1985), 56. Originally published by Masses & Mainstream, New York, 1953. 58. He maintains, for instance, that a black mob commits the first act of violence, when the incident he’s referring to in the film makes clear that the black teenagers accused of an attack are actually innnocent of the charges. See John Howard Lawson, 56–57. 59. See Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 374–376, 387–388, and Cripps, Making Movies Black, 35–63. 60. Scott, 619. 61. “‘The Well’ Evokes Commendable Praise,” Baltimore Afro-American (Sep 22, 1951): 12. 62. “‘The Well’ is a Must.” Pittsburgh Courier (Dec 8, 1951): 1. 63. “The Winners of the Courier Theatrical Poll,” Pittsburgh Courier (April 5, 1952).

Conclusion–Cyclical Decay: Shifting Independence and the Decline of Progressive Filmmaking in the 1950s 1. Jones had worked as the chief of film reviewing for the Office of War Information during World War II. Later, working for an organization called the Fund for the Republic after the war, she studied 159 films credited to the Hollywood Ten to determine if they had been able to insert Communist “propaganda” into their films. She concluded that they had not. Jones calculated these percentages by studying Production Code Administration files from the period. See Dorothy B. Jones, “Communism and the Movies,” 219–220. 2. DeRosa, 53. For its success in Chicago, see “‘No Out’ Smash $18,000, Chi Leader,” Variety (Sep 27,1950): 11. 3. Pinky was the #2 top grosser of 1949, Home of the Brave #28, and Lost Boundaries #48, being the leading earners for Twentieth Century-Fox, United Artists, and Film Classics, respectively. See “Top Grossers of 1949,” Variety (Jan 4, 1950): 49. 4. “Top-Grosses of 1950,” Variety (Jan 3, 1951): 58.

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5. “Film Biz Needs More Family Yarns, Color Pix, Fervor – Geo. Murphy,” Variety (Nov 15, 1950): 1. 6. “Pix Biz Off an Eztra 10 per cent in Areas With Heaviest Video Concentration,” Variety (Dec 27, 1950): 3. 7. “Indie Producer’s Tough Haul,” Variety (June 21, 1950): 3, 16. 8. “Trend to Semi-Indie Units,” Variety (July 12, 1950): 5, 18. 9. “Majors Mull Prod. Cutbacks,” Variety (July 19, 1950): 5, 18. 10. The only exception to this rule was the Bankers Trust Co. of New York, which was lending small amounts to three producers with a succesful track record: Edward Small, Sidney Buchman, and Louis de Rochemont. See “$3,000,000 for Indie Prods,” Variety (July 12, 1950): 3, 15. 11. Jones, 197. 12. Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 137. 13. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: New York Review Books, 2008), xxi. 14. See California, Voter Registration, 1900–1968, Ancestry.com Library Edition. 15. See Al LaValley, “Introduction,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Don Siegel, Director (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Steven Sanders, “Picturing Paranoia: Interpreting Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, ed. Steven Sanders (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2008); Katrina Mann, “You’re Next!: Postwar Hegemony Besieged in Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004), 49–68. 16. The notes to the entry for the film in the American Film Institute Catalog do imply that the idea for the story originated with Crane Wilbur, who visited Phenix City to conduct interviews for the screenplay. Wilbur’s own politics are difficult to pin down, though he seems to be an anti-Communist – whether of the liberal or conservative variety it’s hard to say. Just four years earlier, he’d written the script for I Was a Communist for the FBI. 17. The screenwriter Donald Mankiewicz was Herman Mankiewicz’s son, and thus Joseph Mankiewicz’s nephew. The script was based on his novel of the same name. See Don M. Mankiewicz, Trial (New York: Harper, 1955). 18. See Herbert Biberman and Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965); James J. Lorence, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); and Ellen R. Baker, On Strike and On Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 19. Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941– 1953, tr. Paul Hammond, intr. James Naremore (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2002). 20. Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” Film Noir: A Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 53–64. Originally published in 1972.

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Bibliography Archival Collections Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library George Amberg Memorial Film Study Center, Cinema Studies Department, New York University Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Television, and Recorded Sound Division Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center New York Public Library Performing Arts Library The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University University of California at Los Angeles, Special Collections

Newspapers and Journals The Appeal News The Baltimore Afro-American The California Eagle The Chicago Defender Ebony Fortune The Hollywood Atom The Hollywood Citizen-News The Hollywood Reporter Life The Los Angeles Daily News The Los Angeles Examiner The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner The Los Angeles Mirror The Los Angeles Sentinel The Los Angeles Times

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The Nation The New Republic The New York Amsterdam News The New York Herald-Tribune The New York Times The New York Times Magazine The Partisan Review Order in the Court P.M. People’s Daily World The Picket Line The Pittsburgh Courier Preview Magazine Variety The Washington Post

Books Alpern, Sara. Freda Kirchwey: A Woman of The Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Alton, John. Painting with Light. intr. Todd McCarthy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Alwood, Edward. Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. American Jewish Congress and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Civil Rights in the United States in 1950: A Balance Sheet of Group Relations. New York, 1950. Baker, Ellen R. On Strike and On Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Barfield, Ray E. A Word from Our Viewers: Reflections from Early Television Audiences. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. Baughman, James L. The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since 1941. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Berges, Marshall. The Life and Times of Los Angeles. New York, Atheneum, 1984. Bernstein, Walter. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Bessie, Alva. Inquisition in Eden. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Biberman, Herbert and Michael Wilson. Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965. Blotner, Joseph. William Faulkner: A Biography. vol. 2. New York: Random House, 1974. Bogle, Donald. Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953. tr. Paul Hammond, intr. James Naremore. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2002. Brill, Lesley. Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Callow, Simon. Orson Welles, Vol. 2: Hello Americans. New York: Viking, 2006. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. tr. Carol Stewart. New York: Continuum, 1960. Caute, David. Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Ceplair, Larry and Steven Englund. Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, 1983. Ciment, Michel. Conversations with Losey. New York: Methuen, 1985. Citizens’ Committee for the Defence of Mexican-American Youth. The Sleepy Lagoon Case, int. Orson Welles. Los Angeles, CA: 1944. Cobbs, Price M. My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement. New York: Atria Books, 2005. Cogley, John. Report on Blacklisting, Vol. 1: Movies. New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1956. Cole, Lester. Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole. Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1981. Committee for the First Amendment. Beverly Hills, CA, 1947. Conant, Michael. Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. . Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Davies, David R. The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945–1965. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1997. Dick, Bernard. Radical Innocence. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1989. Dmytryk, Edward. Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Doherty, Thomas. Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & The Production Code Administration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Dunne, Philip. Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics. New York: Limelight Editions, 1980. Ehrlich, Matthew. Journalism in the Movies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Endore, Guy. Sleepy Lagoon Mystery. Los Angeles: Sleepy Lagoon Defence Committee, 1944. Farrell, Harry. Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. tr. and ed. by James Strachey. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1967.

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Gilje, Paul A. Rioting in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Gomery, Douglas. The Hollywood Studio System: A History. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. Gregory, Ross, ed. Cold War America: 1946 to 1990 – Almanac of American Life. New York: Facts on File, 2003. Hall, Sheldon. Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It – The Making of the Epic Movie. Tomahawk Press, 2005. Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1945. . The Lonely Crusade. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. . The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years. New York: Paragon House, 1971, 1972, 73. Hirsch, Foster. Joseph Losey. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980. Homes, Geoffrey. Dead as a Dummy. New York: Bantam Books, 1949. . Hill of the Terrified Monk. New York: William & Morrow, 1943. . The Case of the Mexican Knife. New York: Bantam Books, 1948. . The Street of the Crying Woman. New York: William & Morrow, 1942. Horne, Gerald. Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Howe, Irving and Lewis Coser. The American Communist Party: A Critical History 1919– 1957. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957. Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. Jenkins, Philip. Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Jumonville, Neil. Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929– 1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1948, 1998. Klein, Amanda Ann. American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Kramer, Stanley, with Thomas M. Coffey. A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1997. Krutnik, Frank, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, eds. “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Lasch, Christopher. The Agony of the American Left. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. LaValley, Al, ed. Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Don Siegel, Director. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Lawson, John Howard. Film in the Battle of Ideas. New York & London, Garland Publishing, 1985. Lawson, Steven F., ed. To Secure These Rights: The Report of Harry S Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995.

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Leahy, James. The Cinema of Joseph Losey. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1967. Leonard, Kevin Allen. The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Lieberman, Robbie. The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945–1963. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Lorence, James J. The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Lyon, James K. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. MacDougal, Dennis. Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001. Mankiewicz, Don M. Trial. New York: Harper, 1955. Mann, William J. Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969. New York: Viking, 2001. Markovitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. McPhail, Clark. The Myth of the Madding Crowd. New York: Aldine de Gryter, 1991. McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. . Prejudice: Japanese-Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944. . North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1948. Milne, Tom, ed. Time Out Film Guide. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Mitchell, Greg. Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas – Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. New York: Random House, 1998. Moran, Rachel F. Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2001. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944. Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Updated and Expanded Edition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 2008. Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Nielsen, Mike and Gene Mailes. Hollywood’s Other Blacklist: Union Struggles in the Studio System. London: British Film Institute, 1995. Pag´an, Eduardo Obreg´on, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pagano, Jo. Golden Wedding. New York: Random House, 1943. . Paesanos. Boston. Little, Brown, 1937. . The Condemned. New York: Permabooks, 1947.

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Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pells, Richard H. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Perry, Roland. Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, the Only American in Britain’s Cambridge Spy Ring. New York: Da Capo Press, 2005. Prindle, David F. The Politics of Glamour: Ideology and Democracy in the Screen Actors Guild. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. New York: Counterattack, 1950. Roberts, Gene and Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. Roffman, Peter and Jim Purdy. The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Rogosin, Michael. “Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,” Ronald Reagan: The Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987. Sampson, Henry T. Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s, vol. 6 of The History of the American Cinema. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997. Schwartz, Nancy Lynn. The Hollywood Writers’ Wars. completed by Sheila Schwartz. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982. Scott, Ellen Christine. Race and the Struggle for Cinematic Meaning: Film Production, Censorship, and African American Reception, 1940-1960. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2007. Seldes, George. The People Don’t Know: The American Press and the Cold War. New York, NY: Gaer Associates, 1949. Sperber, A.M. and Eric Lax. Bogart. New York: William Morrow, 1997. Starobin, Joseph R. American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. Tolnay, Stewart E. and E.M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: New York Review Books, 2008. United States House of Representatives. Jurisdictional Disputes in the Motion Picture Industry. Washington, DC, 1948. Vaughn, Robert. Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. New York: Putnam, 1972. Vaughn, Stephen. Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wagner, Rob Leicester. Red Ink, White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers, 1920–1962. Upland, CA: Dragonflyer Press, 2000.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wasko, Janet. Movies and Money: Financing the American Film Industry. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub., 1982. White, Walter. Fire in the Flint. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926. Wolfenstein, Martha and Nathan Leites. Movies: A Psychological Study. New York: Athenaeum, 1950, 1970. Writers’ Congress: The Proceedings of the Conference Held in October 1943 Under the Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944. Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Zieger, Robert. American Workers, American Unions, 1920–1985. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Articles Alexander, Stephen, “Art,” New Masses 14 (March 19, 1935). Andersen, Thom, “Red Hollywood,” Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, eds., “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). Anzur, Terry, “Everyone’s Child: The Kathy Fiscus Story as a Defining Event in Local Television News,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 2001. Astro, Richard, “Steinbeck and Mainwaring: Two Californians for the Earth,” Steinbeck Quarterly III, no. 1 (Winter, 1970). Barrett, William, “The ‘Liberal’ Fifth Column,” Partisan Review 13 (Summer, 1946). Boddy, William, “Daniel Mainwaring (Geoffrey Homes),” American Screenwriters. Second Series. ed. Randall Clark (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Company, 1986). Chandler, Raymond, “Writers in Hollywood,” The Atlantic Monthly (Nov, 1945). DeRosa, Ryan, “Historicizing the Shadows and the Acts: No Way Out and the Imagining of Black Activist Communities,” Cinema Journal, 51, no. 3 (Spring 2012). English, Richard, “Gaudiest Producers in Hollywood,” Saturday Evening Post (Jan 3, 1953). Fast, Howard, “Peekskill,” Masses & Mainstream 2, no. 10 (Oct, 1949). Flinn, Tom, “Screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring Discusses ‘Out of the Past,’” The Velvet Light Trap 10 (Fall, 1973). Greenberg, Cheryl, “Black and Jewish Responses to Japanese Internment,” Journal of American Ethnic History 14, no. 2 (Winter 1995). Hoffman, Abraham, “The Conscience of a Public Official: Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron and Japanese Removal,” Southern California Quarterly 92, no. 3 (Fall 2010). Hoyt, Eric, “Hollywood and the Income Tax, 1929–1955,” Film History, 22, no. 1 (2010). Jones, Dorothy B., “Communism and the Movies: A Study of Film Content,” in John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting (New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1956). Liebling, A.J., “The Wayward Press,” The New Yorker (April 9, 1949).

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Lightman, Herb A.,“13 Rue Madeleine: Documentary Style in the Photoplay,” American Cinematographer (March 1947). Mainwaring, Daniel, “Fruit Tramp.” Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories. ed. Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Mann, Katrina, “You’re Next!: Postwar Hegemony Besieged in Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004). Neve, Brian, “An Interview with Cy Endfield,” Film Studies no. 7 (Winter 2005). Noble, Joseph V., “The Development of Cinematic Art,” American Cinematographer (January, 1947). Park, Marlene, “Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, 18 (1993). Pike, Sumner T., “Witch-Hunting Then and Now,” The Atlantic Monthly (Nov, 1947). Reddy, John, “Hollywood’s Dollar Bills,” Esquire (June 1945): 64. Reid, Mark A., “The Black Gangster Film,” Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “Pages from the Endfield File,” Film Comment 29, no. 6 (Nov, 1993). Sanders, Steven, “Picturing Paranoia: Interpreting Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, ed. Steven Sanders (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2008). Scambray, Kenneth, “Cultural Authority and the Western Italian American Experience in Jo Pagano’s Golden Wedding,” Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel (Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007). Schrader, Paul, “Notes on Film Noir,” Film Noir: A Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996). Shaw, Robert, “Hearstian Criteria for Movie Critics,” Screen Writer, 1, n. 4 (Sep, 1945). Spiro, Elaine, “Hollywood Strike – 1945,” Film History 10. no. 3 (1996). Trumbo, Dalton, “Minorities on the Screen,” Writers’ Congress: The Proceedings of the Conference Held in October 1943 Under the Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944). West, Rebecca, “Opera in Greenville,” The New Yorker (June 14, 1947). Zanuck, Darryl, “The Responsibility of the Industry,” Writers’ Congress: The Proceedings of the Conference Held in October 1943 Under the Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944).

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Index 13 Rue Madeleine (1947), 34 Abbott and Costello, 40 Academy Awards, The, 35, 36, 139, 151, 153 Ace in the Hole (1951), 12, 13, 18, 160, 185n ACLU, 123 All the King’s Men (1949), 35 Alton, John, 33 Alvarez, Bennie, 66 American Cinematographer, 34 American Legion, 159 Americans for Intellectual Freedom, 47, 48 Arlen, Richard, 95 Armend´ariz, Pedro, 98 Arnold, Edward, 116 Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), 153 Athens, Alabama, Riots, 84 Atlantic Monthly, The, 54, 56 Bacall, Lauren, 21, 83, 163n Balaban, Barney, 41, 94 Baltimore Afro-American, 120 Bank of America, 40, 41, 42 Barnes, Howard, 111 Barzman, Ben, 47, 156, 162n Barzman, Norma, 162n Battleground (1949), 37

Beavers, Louise, 63, 184n Beebe, Stanley, 66, 170n Benton, Thomas Hart, 156 Bernard, Marc, 111 Bernstein, Walter, 87 Bessie, Alvah, 115 Best Years of Our Lives, The (1946), 35 Biberman, Herbert, 158 Bicycle Thieves (1948), 36 Bioff, Willie, 72 Biscailuz, Eugene, 76 Bitter Rice (1949), 36 Blankfort, Henry, 13, 17, 117 Bloch, Bert, 37 Boddy, Manchester, 60, 169n Body and Soul (1947), 35 Boetticher, Budd, 98 Bogart, Humphrey, 21, 83, 93, 163n Boomerang! (1947), 34 Border Incident (1949), 18 Bowron, Fletcher, 58, 62 Brecht, Bertolt, 99, 100, 101, 108, 110, 178n Breen, Joseph, 98, 99, 126, 127, 149, 187n Breen office, see The Production Code Administration Brewer, Roy, 21, 74, 78, 79, 82 Bridges, Lloyd, 113 Bright Victory (1951), 159

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Broken Arrow (1950), 18, 29, 36, 163n Brooks, Richard, 17 Broun, Heywood, 123 Brown v. Board of Education, 53 Brown, Clarence, 17, 137, 163n Brown, Joe David, 18 Browne, George, 72 Buchman, Harold, 46 Buchman, Sidney, 101 Buckley, William F., 54 Bullfighter and the Lady, The (1951), 98 Bunche, Ralph, 152 Bureau of Internal Revenue, 39 Butler, Hugo, 46 Cabin in the Sky (1943), 47 Cagney, James, 38, 81 Cahiers du Cinema, 111 California Eagle, The, 70 Canetti, Elias, 30, 31, 164n Cardinal Pictures, 13, 17, 41 Carey, Macdonald, 91 Carlson, Richard, 113 Carnovsky, Morris, 137 Casey, Pat, 78 CFA, see The Committee for the First Amendment Chambers, Stan, 142 Champion (1949), 35, 41, 42, 43, 114, 159 Chandler, Norman, 58, 78, 135, 160 Chandler, Otis, 58, 160 Chandler, Raymond, 56–57 Chaplin, Charlie, 42 Chemical Bank, 40 Chicago, postwar racial unrest, 85–86 Chicago Defender, 120 Chicago Tribune, The, 56, 81, 85 Citizen Kane (1941), 24 Citizens’ Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth (CCDMAY), 67, 68 Civil rights movement, 119–122 Clark, Tom, 86

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Cole, Lester, 46, 165n Collapsible corporations, 38 Columbia, Tennessee, 28, 84–85 Columbia Pictures, 18, 74, 95, 138 Comet Productions, 116 Comingore, Dorothy, 67 Comintern, 45, 82 Committee for the First Amendment, The, 3, 5, 20, 21, 28, 30, 46, 61, 82, 91, 92, 93, 102, 111, 114, 117, 137, 138, 163n Communist Party, The, 2, 6, 21, 26, 35, 36, 45, 46, 47, 62, 72, 74, 76, 82, 86, 87, 94, 97, 99, 101, 115, 116, 117, 128, 129, 137, 159, 160, 162n, 163n, 167n, 172n, 183n Condemned, The, 114–115, 123 Conference of Studio Unions, 21, 30, 31, 87, 153, 160, 162n Strikes, 1945 and 1946, 5, 6, 13, 27, 56, 58, 64, 71–81, 137, 175n Congress of Cultural Freedom, 48 Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO), 56, 74, 85, 174n Conspiracy (1947), 76 Cooper, Ralph, 137 Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill (1935), 123, 128, 182n Cotten, Joseph, 67 Crosby, Bing, 94 Crossfire (1947), 16, 35, 36, 37, 111, 127, 153 Crowther, Bosley, 111, 133, 151 Cry the Beloved Country (1951), 44 CSU, see The Conference of Studio Unions Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, 47, 101 Daily Worker, The, 26, 111 Darrow, Clarence, 123 Dassin, Jules, 174n Daves, Delmer, 18

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Eagle-Lion, 18, 43, 44, 155 Eisler, Hanns, 101 Eliscu, Edward, 54 Endfield, Cy, 4, 13, 17, 27, 102, 114, 115–117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 133, 138, 156, 178n, 180n, 181n, 183n Endore, Guy, 67, 68, 106, 171n Everson, William K., 179n Executive Order 9066, 61 Fairbanks, Douglas 42 Fante, John, 115 Faragoh, Francis, 101 Farrell, James T., 48, 156 Fast, Howard, 86, 87 Faulkner, William, 1, 156, 163n, 180n Federal Anti-Lynching bill of 1947 and 1948, 19, 120, 123, 182n34 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 57, 115, 138, 139 Federal Theater Project, 100 Feldman, Charles, 44

Fiedler, Leslie, 156 Film Classics, 43, 155, 187n FilmCraft Productions, 13, 17 film gris, 3, 161n Finian’s Rainbow, 44 Fire in the Flint (Walter White novel), 128 Fiscus, Kathy, 135, 138, 140, 141, 150, 151, 185n Fitts, Margaret, 18 Flynn, Errol, 38 Force of Evil (1948), 35 Ford, John, 98 Foreman, Carl, 35, 137, 181n Frank, Melvin, 18 Freeman, Frank, 99, 177n Freud, Sigmund, 22, 30, 31 Front Page, The (1931), 24 Fuchs, Daniel, 17 Fugitive, The (1947), 98 Fuller, Sam, 18, 24, 102

INDEX

Davis, Bette, 38 Davis, Nancy, see Nancy Reagan Day, Doris, 11, 157 DeMille Cecil B., 94 DeMond, Albert, 17 Desny, Victor, 18 Detroit Free Press, 83 Dewey, Thomas, 37, 55, 86, 87 Diaz, Jose, 65, 69 Dies, Martin, 36 Disney, Walt, 82 Dmytryk, Edward, 35, 47, 165n D.O.A. (1950), 41, 136, 138 Double V for Victory campaign, 84, 168n Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 60, 169n Douglas, Kirk, 12, 41 Dunne, Philip, 45, 46, 83, 93, 102 Duryea, Dan, 118 Dyer Anti-Lynching bill (1922), 182n

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Gallup, George, 40 Gang, Martin, 101, 178n Garland, Judy, 83 Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), 16, 35, 36, 127, 153 Gershwin, Ira, 67 Glucoft, Linda Joyce, 148 Go for Broke! (1951), 36, 44 Golden Wedding, 115 Goldwyn, Samuel, 38, 42 Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), 34, 96 Grass Valley, California, 108, 140 Grauman, Sid, 136 Greatest Show on Earth, The (1952), 153 Greenberg, Clement, 156 Greene, Clarence, 13, 17, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 149, 157 Greenville, South Carolina, Riots, 84 Griffith, D.W., 42 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 30 Group Theater, The, 116

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Harburg, Yip, 44 Harper’s, 54, 56 Harrington, Oliver, 28 Hart, Brooke, 121–122 Hayworth, Rita, 67 Hearst, William Randolph, 20, 56, 58, 59, 62, 65, 66, 68, 74, 86, 87, 94, 96, 104, 122, 131, 135, 137, 160, 171n, 178n Hecht, Ben, 179n Heisler Stuart, 17 Hell Drivers (1957), 156 Hellman, Lillian, 47, 59 Hernandez, Juano, 20 HICCASP, see the Hollywood Independent Citizens’ Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions Higgins, John, 18 Himes, Chester, 142 His Girl Friday (1940), 24 Hitchcock, Alfred, 139 Hitler, Adolf, 68, 106, 171n, Holiday (1938), 45 Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, 20, 45 Hollywood Atom, The, 76, 77 Hollywood Citizen-News, 72 Hollywood Independent Citizens’ Committee of Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP), 20, 31, 45, 82 Hollywood Quarterly, The, 46 Hollywood Ten, The, 2, 4, 5, 28, 30, 31, 32, 36, 61, 91, 93, 115, 120, 123, 162n, 165n, 175n, 187n Holmes, John, 121 Home of the Brave (1949), 16, 32, 41, 42, 43, 44, 95, 98, 114, 138, 154, 159, 187n Homes, Geoffrey, see Daniel Mainwaring Hook, Sidney, 47, 48 Hoover, Herbert, 123 Hope, Bob, 40, 94 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 20, 29, 36, 43, 46, 47, 60, 64, 71, 82–84, 93,

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101, 102, 109, 110, 111, 117, 153, 161n, 163n, 165n, 181n House on 92nd Street, The (1945), 34 How Green Was My Valley (1941), 34 Howard, Roy, 55 Howe, Irving, 48 Howe, James Wong, 47 HUAC, see House Committee on Un-American Activities Hudson, Rock, 157 Hughes, Howard, 43, 97–98 Hunt, Roy, 108 Huston, John, 4, 46, 83, 93, 101 I Was Married to a Communist, 44 IA, The, see the International Alliance for Theatrical Stage Employees IATSE, see the International Alliance for Theatrical Stage Employees Impact (1948), 41 Inflation (1942), 116 Injunction Granted, 100 International Alliance for Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), 21, 31, 64, 71–81, 153, 159, 160 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), see Bureau of Internal Revenue International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, 158 Intruder in the Dust (1949), 11, 13, 17, 20, 37, 43, 44, 111 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 157 Iron Curtain (1948), 43 Italian Neo-Realism, 36 Jackie Robinson Story, The (1950), 44 Japanese internment, 12, 61 Jarrico, Paul, 97, 116, 158 Johnston, Eric, 93 Jungle Moon Men (1955), 157 Katcher, Leo, 18

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Lancaster, Burt, 101 Lardner, Ring, Jr., 46, 93 Laughton, Charles, 101 Laurents, Arthur, 101 Lavery, Emmet, 46, 93 Lawless, The (1950), 3, 4, 7, 13, 17, 22, 25, 27, 28, 44, 91–111, 112, 118, 119, 123, 125, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 142, 143, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160 Lawson, John Howard, 4, 21, 35, 46, 47, 67, 93, 94, 101, 151, 163n League of Nations, The, 35 Le Bon, Gustave, 29, 30, 31, 164n Lee, Canada, 44, 67, 174n Life, 27, 54, 75, 81 Life of Galileo, The, 101, 110 Lindbergh kidnapping, 122 Living Newspaper, The, 100 Look, 54 Los Angeles Daily News, The, 58–64, 72 Los Angeles Examiner, The, 20, 55, 58–64, 73, 74, 81, 96, 104 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 31, 78, 104 Los Angeles Sentinel, The, 63, 64, 87–88

Los Angeles Times, The, 55, 58–64, 65, 66, 67, 74, 78, 81, 82, 121, 160, 170n, 185n Losey, Joseph, 4, 13, 17, 18, 94, 97, 98, 99–101, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114, 116, 117, 127, 140, 156, 177n, 178n Lost Boundaries (1949), 32, 43, 44, 95, 137, 138, 154, 187n Lovejoy, Frank, 113 Loy, Myrna, 81 Lynchings, 119–122

INDEX

Kaye, Danny, 83 Kazan, Elia, 4, 98, 153 Kearns, Carroll, 78, 82 Kelly, Edward, 85 Kelly, Gene, 83 KGB, 57 Kinsey, Alfred, 148 Kirchwey, Freda, 57 Koestler, Arthur, 48 Kramer, Stanley, 41, 42, 43, 98, 114, 159, 179n KTLA, 140, 141, 142, 150, 185n KTTV, 140, 185n Ku Klux Klan, 12, 25, 29, 158

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M (1951), 18, 29

MacArthur, Charles, 179n Macdonald, Dwight, 48 Maddow, Ben, 17, 47, 163n Mainwaring, Daniel, 4, 13, 17, 92, 94, 96–99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 114, 121, 123, 127, 157, 176n, 177n, 178n Maltz, Albert, 18, 35, 163n, 175n Mankiewicz, Donald, 158, 188n Mankiewicz, Joseph, 14, 17, 136, 137, 188n Mann, Anthony, 18 Mann, Thomas, 47 March of Time, The, 34 Marshall, Margaret, 57 Marshall, Thurgood, 37, 63 Marysville, California, 108, 140 Marx, Groucho, 83 Master Plan, The (1955), 117 Matthews, Blaney, 73 Mayer, Louis B., 41 McCarthy, Mary, 48 McCormick, Robert, 56, 85 McCoy, Horace, 115 McDaniel, Hattie, 63 McGrath, Alice, 62, 67, 68, 171n McWilliams, Carey, 47, 62, 67, 70, 103, 115, 170n Medal for Benny, A (1945), 36 Medill Trust Press, 56

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Men, The (1950), 35 Menjou, Adolphe, 82 Merriam, Frank, 60 Merton, Robert, 47, 54 Meyer, Agnes, 28 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 100 MGM, 11, 17, 18, 37, 43, 44, 74, 79, 116, 158 Milland, Ray, 138, 139 Million Dollar Productions, 41, 137, 184n Million Dollar Theater, 136 Mission to Moscow (1943), 82 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 45 Monogram Pictures, 116 Monroe, Georgia, Riots, 84 Montalb´an, Ricardo, 98 Montgomery, Robert, 48, 81 Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, 31, 163n Motion Picture Democratic Committee, 45 MPA, see the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals Muni, Paul, 101 Murphy, George, 82, 154 Musso & Frank’s, 180n Myrdal, Gunnar, 53 NAACP, 28, 47, 85, 123, 128, 137, 152, 158, 186n Naked City, The (1948), 35 Nation, The, 54, 56, 67, 71, 75, 76, 85, 87 National Emergency Committee against Mob Violence, 120 New Masses, 128 New Republic, The, 54, 56, 57, 81, 86, 87 New Theater League, The, 116 New York Daily News, The, 56 New York Herald-Tribune, The, 48, 83, 110, 111 New York Times, The, 54, 75, 83, 86, 111 New Yorker, The, 48

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Newman, Barnett, 156 Newman, Walter, 18 Newspaper Guild, The, 56 Newsweek, 81 Nixon, Richard, 60, 165n No Way Out (1950), 12, 13, 17, 19, 23, 26, 28, 29, 36, 37, 44, 135, 136, 153, 154, 160 North Star (1943), 59, 82 Odets, Clifford, 47, 116 O’Donnell, Robert, 44 Okhlopkov, Nikolai, 99, 100 On the Waterfront (1954), 153 Order in the Court, 76 Oscars, see The Academy Awards Our Daily Bread, 67 Out of the Past (1947), 97 P.M., 70, 76 Paesanos, 115 Pagano, Jo, 4, 13, 17, 114–115, 121, 123, 124, 125, 133, 157, 180n, 181n, 183n Paisan (1946), 36 Panama, Norman, 18 Paramount Pictures, 17, 18, 74, 79, 94–95, 98, 99, 110, 185n Park Row (1952), 18, 24, 28, 102, 118, 119, 125 Partisan Review, The, 57 Patterson, Albert, 157 Patterson, Ellis, 82 Patterson, John, 157 Paxton, John, 35 Payne, Logan, 122, 123 PCA, see the Production Code Administration, or see The Progressive Citizens of America Peekskill, New York, riots, 86–87, 109, 118, 174n People v. Zamora, The, 69 Perez v. Sharp, 63, 148 Phenix City Story (1955), 157

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Quiet One, The (1948), 36 Raine, Norman Reilly, 18 Randolph, A. Philip, 64 Rankin, John, 82 Reagan, Nancy, 21 Reagan, Ronald, 5, 21, 25, 60, 82, 93, 94, 162n Red Channels, 21 Red Danube (1949), 43 Red Menace, The (1949), 12, 17, 26, 43, 160 Red Scare, 2, 36

Reformer and the Redhead, The (1950), 18, 25 Reign of Terror (1949), 18, 29 Republic Pictures, 12, 17, 40, 43, 74 Rice, Craig, 117, 181n Rissient, Pierre, 111 RKO, 36, 37, 74, 79, 97 Robeson, Paul, 86, 118, Robinson, Edward G., 21, 81 Robson, Mark, 98, 158, 159 de Rochemont, Louis, 34, 43, 188n Rogers, Will, Jr., 45 Rogers, Will, Sr., 123 Roland, Gilbert, 98 Rolph, John, 122 Rome, Open City (1945), 36 Rope (1948), 139 Roosevelt, Franklin, 36, 45, 47, 55, 61, 62, 183n Rose, Stanley, bookshop, 115 Rossellini, Roberto, 36 Rossen, Robert, 47 Rouse, Russell, 13, 17, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 157 Russell, William, 137

INDEX

Philadelphia Story, The (1940), 45 Picket Line, The, 76, 78 Pickford, Mary, 42 Pillow Talk (1959), 157 Pine, William, see Pine & Thomas Pine & Thomas, 13, 17, 94–95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 108, 110, 111, 132, 176n Pinky (1949), 16, 32, 36, 37, 43, 44, 95, 137, 153, 154, 187n Pinter, Harold, 156 Pittsburgh Courier, The, 55, 152, 168n Poitier, Sidney, 19 Pollock, Jackson, 156 Polonsky, Abraham, 4, 93, 174n Popkin, Harry, 41, 42, 136, 137, 138, 152, 155, 184n Popkin, Leo C., 13, 17, 42, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 157, 184n Popular Front, The, 1, 24, 32, 44, 45, 46 Power Dive (1941), 95 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 120 Pride of the Marines (1945), 35 Production Code Administration, 41, 42, 63, 98, 124, 126, 127, 149, 154, 187n Progressive Citizens of America, The, 37 Proposition 11, 61 Proust, Marcel, 156

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Salt of the Earth (1955), 158, 159 Samuels, Lesser, 4, 14, 17, 18, 37 San Francisco Examiner, 122 San Jose Evening News, 122, 123 San Jose lynching of 1933, 121–123, 141 San Jose Mercury-Herald, 122 Santa Clara University, 122 de Santis, Giusseppe, 36 Saroyan, William, 96, 115 Schary, Dore, 37, 44, 163n Schenk, Joseph, 72 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 48 Schulberg, Budd, 153 Scott, Adrian, 35, 101, 162n Screen Actors’ Guild, The, 21, 46, 48, 72, 81, 93, 175n

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Screen Directors’ Guild, The, 46, 72, 93, 101, 117 Screen Writer, 46, 58 Screen Writers’ Guild, The, 3, 31, 45, 46, 54, 58, 93, 97, 114, 138 Security First National Bank, 41 Security Risk (1954), 157 Selznick, David, 42, 179n Sexuality in the Human Male, 148 Shahn, Ben, 156 Sheean, Vincent, 28 Shelley v. Kraemer, 63 Shoeshine (1946), 36 Shurlock, Geoffrey, 126, 127, 149 de Sica, Vittorio, 36 Sidney, George, 43 Sinclair, Upton, 60 Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, The, 3, 62, 67, 69, 85, 101, 103 Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial, 5, 12, 27, 31, 62, 65–69, 73, 83, 92, 97, 102, 103, 104, 106, 111, 141, 170n Smashup: The Story of a Woman (1947), 36 Smith Act, The, 2, 47 Snake Pit, The (1948), 37, 43 Sorrell, Herb, 21, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82 Sound of Fury, The (1950), 3, 4, 7, 13, 17, 23, 27, 28, 42, 44, 112–133, 134, 135, 136, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 160 Springsteen, R.G., 17, 43 Stanford University, 123 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 116 Stars in My Crown (1950), 18 Steinbeck, John, 96, 176n Stewart, Donald Ogden, 45 Stewart, James, 29 Stillman, John, 41, 42, 114 Stillman, Robert, 13, 17, 41, 42, 114–115, 121, 123, 124, 126, 132, 133, 154, 155, 179n, 183n Storm Warning (1951), 11, 17, 25, 29 Stormy Weather (1943), 47 Straight, Michael, 57

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Superior Pictures, 18 Supreme Court, The, 36, 63 Swamp Fire (1946), 97 Taft-Hartley Act, 21, 26, 45, 46, 56, 92 Technicolor, 79 Tempe, Arizona, 128 Tenney, Jack, 36 They Shall Not Die, 44 Thief, The (1952), 139, 140 Thomas, Norman, 45 Thomas, Parnell, 82, 93 Thomas, William, see Pine & Thomas Thurmond, Strom, 37, 165n Thurmond, Thomas, 121 Time, 81 Time Without Pity (1957), 156 Tiomkin, Dimitri, 139, 146, 147, 150 To Secure These Rights, 120 Tourneur, Jacques, 18 Townsend, Leo, 46, 101 Townsend, Pauline, 101, 181n Trial (1955), 158, 159, 160 Trilling, Diana, 57 Trilling, Lionel, 156 Triple-A Plowed Under, 100 Truman, Harry, 37, 55, 57, 120 Trumbo, Dalton, 46, 47, 67, 93, 94, 101, 171n, 172n, 175n Try and Get Me (1950), see Sound of Fury, 133, 154 Twentieth Century-Fox, 12, 13, 17, 18, 34, 35, 36, 43, 44, 72, 136, 142, 154, 187n Under Capricorn (1949), 139 Underworld Story, The 3, 7, 13, 17, 22, 25, 27, 28, 44, 102, 117–119, 125, 126, 181n United Artists, 17, 18, 42, 43, 155, 187n United Press International (UPI), 55 United States Supreme Court, see The Supreme Court

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Waiting for Lefty, 116 Waldorf Agreement, The, 2, 36, 37 Waldorf Peace Conference, see the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace Wallace, George, 158 Wallace, Henry, 37, 47, 57, 165n Wanger, Walter, 18 Warner Bros., 11, 34, 73 Warren, Earl, 141, 148 Washington Post, The, 28, 83 Weismuller, Johnny, 97, 157 Well, The (1951), 3, 7, 13, 17, 22, 26, 28, 29, 36, 42, 44, 134–152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160 Welles, Orson, 21, 24, 67, 81, 83, 84, 116, 180n Wellman, William, 43 Welsh, Bill, 141 Wexley, John, 44 Whipped, The (1950), see The Underworld Story

White, Walter, 47, 128, 152 Widmark, Richard, 19 Wilbur, Crane, 157, 158, 188n Wilder, Billy, 12, 18, 93, 185n Wilkins, Roy, 123 Williams, Emmett, 45 Willkie, Wendell, 47 Wilson (1944), 34 Wilson, Michael, 158 Woll, Matthew, 81 Woman on Pier 13, The (1949), 44 Woodard, Isaac, 84 Writers’ Congress, The, 34, 46 Wyler, William, 46, 83, 93

INDEX

Viva Zapata! (1952), 98 Vizzard, Jack, 126

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Yates, Herbert, 40 Yordan, Philip, 14, 17, 18 Yousling, George, 41 Zanuck, Darryl, 13, 14, 34, 37, 44, 47, 136, 137, 154, 165n Zoot Suit Riots, The, 5, 13, 31, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 88, 92, 103, 104, 106, 111, 137 Zulu (1964), 156

205

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